The economics of Herbert Spencer

Part I. Page

Chapter I. THE LAND.— The right to use the earth— ' The illegitimacy of existing titles— The impossibility of wrong becoming right by lapse of time — The indefensibility of private property in land — What system of land tenure can take the place of that now prevailing — The law of equal freedom, - - 7

Chapter II. WOULD IT WORK?— Progress and Poverty — The Government Real Estate Exchange and the Proletarian — Land not the only tool — Free rent and diminished wages— The exploitation of labor by charity — The New York Tax Reform Association — Free Trade and the rise of the Capitalist to power, .... j^

Chapter III. ADDITIONAL OBJECTIONS.— Our joint inheritance — The application of the funds — Falling between two stools — The necessity for radical agitation — Herbert Spencer and Utopian Socialism — His ignorance of the development of Evolutionary Socialism — Division impossible — Supply and demand as regulating wages — Socialism the natural outcome of Democracy — Edward Bellamy and William Morris— Communism and Socialism — Competition and Monopoly, - 27

Chapter IV. COMPENSATION.— Intricacies no excuse for postponement of the question — Mr. Spencer's positions in 1850 and 1884 compared— Henry George on compensation, - 44

Index

Chapter V. GROWTH. — The disintegrating influences of laissez faire — The net result of Henry Georgeism — Socialism in England — Socialism's debt to Evolution — The economic mold — The growth of institutions — Individualist and Collectivist influences — The coming change — The order of the mental processes — Destruction and construction — Our present stage — The necessity for ... solidarity — The class struggle — Wherein those who differ can cooperate, - .

Part II

Chapter I. CONDUCT.— The Data of Ethics— Conduct- Self-preservation and race-maintenance — Perfect conduct and industrial cooperation — Materialism, - 65

Chapter II. UTILITARIANISM.— The basis of Utilitarianism — That life is worth living — What constitutes morality and immorality — Static and dynamic theories of right and wrong — Natural rights — Causation, - 77

Chapter III.— EVOLUTIONARY PROOFS.— The physical point of view — The biological — The psychological — The sociological— The limit of evolution in conduct, 91

Chapter IV. THE HIGHEST TYPE. —Justice and happiness — A model community — Conflicting theories reconciled— Pain and pleasure— The highest type, - 107

Chapter V. EGOISM. — The supremacy of egoism over altruism — The survival of the fittest — Free will — Administrative nihilism — Comparative death-rates of workers and non-workers — Increase of suicide, insanity and prostitution— Parasites, - - - - 116

INDEX.

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Chapter VI. ALTRUISM. — Dependence of egoism on altruism — Family altruism the necessary precedent to social altruism — Superiority of monogamy over polygamy — Necessity of cooperation — Contracts — Increase of mutual interdependence — Failure of unqualified egoism — Extended pleasures of the altruistic nature — Internationalism, ._-_-. I2 9

Chapter VII. STRIKING THE BALANCE.— Need for a compromise between egoism and altruism — Signs of progress — The militant type — Social discipline and gradual evolution— The German Emperor — The coming

Chapter VIII. EXFOLIATION.— Progress— The Essential beneficence of things — The human will counts for something — One-sided treatment of evolution — Exfoliation and the survival of the fittest — Carlyle and Spencer — The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children — Class laws — Gestation and birth, - - - 147

Part III

Chapter I. THE COMING SLAVERY. — The Communistic manifesto— Voluntary contracts — The undeserving poor — The wage-fund theory — Capitalist exploitation of reforms — The practical politician — The Factory Acts — Why revolutionary Anarchists oppose them — Ship-owners and the load-line — Recent steps toward Socialism in England, Australia and America — The Pope's Encyclical, - - - - - 157 v i INDEX.

PAGE.

Chapter II. THE SLAVERY THAT HAS COME.— Why Socialistic legislation is condemned — Self-help — The Democratic evolution — The abolition of class-rule — That suffering is curative — Condition of the proletariat — The defects of human nature — The colossal directorate required — The case of the transition. — Slavery defined — Paternal and Fraternal Socialism — Wherein we are agreed — Benthamism — The pre-requisites for individual welfare — Is Herbert Spencer an Anarchist? — The economic mold — Modern marriages — The industrial divorce— Self-preservation, - - 176

Chapter I. The Land

HERBERT SPENCER has been generally regarded as one of the leading apostles of "Individualism." By those, however, whose conception of ' ' Individulism ' ' is that it has attained its culmination in our existing order, it is found apparently convenient to forget that he pre-supposes Land Nationalization as the necessary condition precedent of an Individualist community. I commence this inquiry, therefore, with a well-known quotation from Social Statics, for which I bespeak a careful perusal : —

"Given a race of beings having like claims to pursue the objects of their desires — given a world adapted to the gratification of those desires — a world into which such beings are similarly born, and it unavoidably follows that they have equal rights to the use of this world. For if each of them 'has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other,' then each of them is free to use the earth for the satisfaction of his wants, provided he allows all others the same liberty. And conversely, it is manifest that no one, or part of them may use the earth in such a way as to prevent the rest from similarly using it ; seeing that to do this is to assume greater freedom than the rest, and consequently to break the law.

"Equity, therefore, does not permit property in land. For if one portion of the earth's surface may justly become the possession of an individual, and may be held by him for his sole use and benefit, as a thing to which he has an exclusive right, then other portions of the earth's surface may be so held ; and our planet may thus lapse altogether into private hands. Observe now the dilemma to which this leads. Supposing the entire habitable globe to be so enclosed, it follows that if the landowners have a valid right to its surface, all who are not landowners have no right at all to its surface. Hence, such can exist on the earth by sufferance only. They are all trespassers. Save by the permission of the lords of the soil, they can have no room for the soles of their feet. Nay, should the others think fit to deny them a resting-place, these landless men might equitably be expelled from the earth altogether. If, then, the assumption that land can be held as property, involves that the whole globe may become the private domain of a part of its inhabitants ; and if, by consequence, the rest of its inhabitants can then exercise their faculties — can then exist even — only by consent of the land-owners ; it is manifest that an exclusive possession of the soil necessitates an infringement of the law of equal freedom. For men who cannot 'live and move and have their being' without the leave of others, cannot be equally free with those others.

THE LAND.

1 * Passing from the consideration of the possible, to that of the actual, we find yet further reason to deny the rectitude of property in land. It can never be pretended that the existing titles to such property are legitimate. Should any one think so, let him look in the chronicles. Violence, fraud, the prerogative of force, the claims of superior cunning — these are the sources to which those titles may be traced. The original deeds were written with the sword, rather than with the pen : not lawyers, but soldiers, were the conveyancers: blows were the current coin given in payment ; and for seals, blood was used in preference to wax. Could valid claims be thus constituted? Hardly. And if not, what becomes of the pretensions of all subsequent holders of estates so obtained ? Does sale or bequest generate a right where it did not previously exist? Would the original claimants be nonsuited at the bar of reason, because the thing stolen from them had changed hands? Certainly not. And if one act of transfer can give no title, can many? No: though nothing be multiplied for ever, it will not produce one. Even the law recognizes this principle. An existing holder must, if called upon, substantiate the claims of those from whom he purchased or inherited his property ; and any flaw in the original parchment, even though the property should have had a score of intermediate owners, quashes his right.

' ' • But time, ' say some, ' is a great legalizer. Immemorial possession must be taken to constitute a legitimate claim. That which has been held from age to age as private property, and has been bought and sold as such, must now be considered as irrevocably belonging to individuals.' To do this, however, they must find satisfactory answers to such questions as — How long does it take for what was originally a wrong to grow into a right} At what rate per

IO ECONOMICS OF HERBERT SPENCER.

annum do invalid claims become valid? If a tide gets perfect in a thousand years, how much more than perfect will it be in two thousand years? and so forth. For the solution of which they will require the calculus.

"Whether it may be expedient to admit claims of_a certain standing is not the point. We have here nothing to do with considerations of conventional privilege or legislative convenience. We have simply to inquire what is the verdict given by pure equity in the matter, And this verdict enjoins a protest against every existing pretension to the individual possession of the soil : and dictates the assertion that the right of mankind at large to the earth's surface is still valid ; all deeds, customs and laws notwithstanding.

"Not only have present land tenures an indefensible origin, but it is impossible to discover any mode in which land can become private property. Cultivation is commonly considered to give a legitimate title. He who has reclaimed a tract of ground from its primitive wildness is supposed to have thereby made it his own. But if his right is disputed, by what system of logic can he vindicate it ? "

The significance of the foregoing will be readily appreciated ; and, although it is charged that Mr. Spencer has been for years endeavoring to shift from the position he took in the rashness of generous youth, the revolutionary doctrine here advocated has long since passed into current thought, having formed the basis of Henry George's Progress and Poverty. The moral results of that work, which traces its pedigree direct to the propositions in Social Statics, are pithily expressed by Mr. G. Bernard Shaw in the Fabian Essays* — "Ever since," he says, "Mr.

* New York : Humboldt Pub. Co.

THE LAND. TI

Henry George's book reached the English Radicals, there has been a growing disposition to impose a tax of twenty shillings in the pound on obviously unearned incomes : that is, to dump four hundred and fifty millions a year down on the Exchequer counter, and then retire with three cheers for the restoration of the land to the people. ' '

Social Statics was published in 1850, and, in a pamphlet entitled The Classification of the Sciences, Mr. Spencer tells us that the ideas which he developed in Social Statics were first embodied in a series of letters on The Proper Sphere of Government, published in the Non- conformist during the latter part of 1842. In the preface to the American edition of Social Statics (1865) he gives no sign of having modified his views as to the injustice of private property in land.

To obtain a complete view of Mr. Spencer's position on the land question his answers to two other interrogatories must be ascertained ; the first being as to the system that is to take the place of that now prevailing, the second being as to how the claims of existing owners should be dealt with. The answer to the first is given in the following words in Social Statics :

' ' But to what does this doctrine, that men are equally entitled to the use of the earth, lead ? Must we return to the times of unenclosed wilds, and subsist on roots, berries, and game ? Or are we to be left to the management of Messrs. Fourier, Owen, Louis Blanc and Co. ?

1 'Neither. Such a doctrine is consistent with the highest state of civilization ; may be carried out without involving a community of goods ; and need cause no very serious revolution in existing arrangements. The change required would simply be a change of landlords. Separate ownerships would merge into the joint-stock ownership of the public. Instead of being in the possession of individuals, the country would be held by the great corporate body — Society. Instead of leasing his acres from an isolated proprietor, the farmer would lease them from the nation. Instead of paying his rent to the agent of Sir John or his Grace, he would pay it to an agent or deputy agent of the community. Stewards would be public officials instead of private ones ; and tenancy the only land tenure.

' ' A state of things so ordered would be in perfect harmony with the moral law. Under it all men would be equally landlords ; all men would be alike free to become tenants. A, B, C, and the rest, might compete for a vacant farm as now, and one of them might take that farm, without in any way violating the principles of pure equity. All would be equally free to bid ; all would be equally free to refrain. And when the farm had been let to A, B, or C, all parties would have done that which they willed — the one in choosing to pay a given sum to his fellow- men for the use of certain lands — the others in refusing to pay that sum. Clearly, therefore, on such a system, the earth might be enclosed, occupied, and cultivated, in entire subordination to the law of equal freedom. ' '

It is here necessary to explain what is meant by ' ( the law of equal freedom. ' ' Speaking of the letters upon The Proper Sphere of Government, previously mentioned, Mr. Spencer says : "In these letters will be found, along with many crude ideas, the same belief in the conformity of social phenomena to unvariable laws ; the same belief in human progression as determined by such laws ; the same belief in the moral modification of men as caused by social discipline ; the same belief in the tendency of social arrange-

THE LAND. 13 ments 'of themselves to assume a condition of stable equilibrium ; ' the same repudiation of State-control over various departments of social life ; the same limitation of State-action to the maintenance of equitable relations among citizens." Social Statics was written to prove that there is a law, the observance of which would bring about equilibrium, and render the cumbersome state arrangements now in vogue superfluous. The law is thus stated : Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes ?iot the equal freedom of otlier men.

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Chapter II. Would It Work?

MY readers are now in a position to understand that, in the first place, Herbert Spencer regards social prosperity as varying with the degree in which the law given at the close of the last chapter is observed ; and that, in the second place, he has laid down a specific system of land-tenure as the one absolute, necessary and essential condition precedent, without which this law cannot possibly be observed.

As already remarked, the publication of Henry George's Progress and Poverty ; the political and social agitation which followed, and attained their zenith — upon this particular point of land-tenure — in America, in 1886, when Mr. George ran for Mayor in New York; the growing Socialist movement which, in every country, has always placed "land nationalization" in the front rank of its specific demands ; and the numerous other factors, such as the Irish question, which have served to stimulate the search for economic truth, have resulted in a thorough examination of this specific proposition. It will be convenient here to point out the flaws that have been found, or that are thought to have been found, by numerous critics who certainly have not objected to Mr. Spencer's propositions upon the ground of their revolutionary character.

To bring the first flaw out in all its clearness I must

WOULD IT WORK?

refer back to Mr. Spencer's own statement, already quoted, that private pfoperty in land may result in this, "that our planet may thus lapse altogether into private hands," and that all outside the owners' ring may be merely "trespassers. ' ' For the sake of emphasizing this I quote again from one of Mr. G. Bernard Shaw's articles in the collection of Fabian Essays which has immediately preceded this as the July (1891) number of the Humboldt Publishing Company's "Social Science Series." Speaking of the landless proletarian, he says: "The board is at the door, inscribed ' Only standing room left ; ' and it might well bear the more poetic legend, Lasciate ogni speranza, vox cli entrate. This man, born a proletarian, must die a proletarian, and leave his destitution as an only inheritance to his son. It is not yet clear that there is ten days life in him ; for whence is his subsistence to come if he cannot get at the land? Food he must have, and clothing ; and both promptly. There is food in the market, and clothing also ; but not for nothing : hard money must be paid for it, and paid on the nail too ; for he who has no property gets no credit. Money then is a necessity of life ; and money can only be procured by selling commodities. This presents no difficulty to the cultivators of the land, who can raise commodities by their labor ; but the proletarian, being landless, has neither commodities nor means of producing them. Sell something he must. Yet he has nothing to sell — except himself. The idea seems a desperate one ; but it proves quite easy to carry out. The tenant cultivators of the land have not strength enough or time enough to exhaust the productive capacity of their holdings. If they could buy men in the market for less than these men's labor would add to the produce, then the purchase of such men would be a sheer gain. It would indeed be only a purchase in form : the men would literally cost nothing, since they would produce their own price, with a surplus for the buyer. Never in the history of buying and selling was there so splendid a bargain for buyers as this. Aladdin's uncle's offer of new lamps for old ones was in comparison a catchpenny."

Now the conditions, so vividly here described by Mr. Shaw, are not a new development. They have existed, in a more or less modified form ; since time immemorial, through the influence of a thousand and one monopolies, varying with the shifting times, incalculable inequalities of wealth have arisen. In the vast Real Estate Exchange, therefore, to be conducted by the State, all obviously will not bid at first on equal terms, and many indeed will not be able to bid at all. The cry of the proletarian will still be therefore — "Where do I come in?" and the answer will be as heretofore — "Wherever the plutocrat has not chosen to pre-empt."

It is, however, urged that, by the extra toll which the plutocracy must pay into the public till as the proportionate rent of the special advantages which it would immediately bid in, and through the equal distribution of such toll among all citizens, the poorest would quickly find himself in funds, and equality would gradually be established. To this it is readily replied that a system of government leaseholds, working under the supervision of such officials as plutocracy has cursed us with, would be corruption incarnate ; that the plutocracy, starting at a confessedly great advantage, would see to it that such advantage should be, at least, maintained, and that prices would be "fixed" till chaos grew worse confounded.

Attention is further called to the obvious fact that land, though unquestionably a primal, essential tool, is not the

WOULD IT WORK? I7

all-essential tool. As Karl Marx has put it."* "Just as a man requires lungs to breathe with, so he requires something that is work of man's hand in order to consume physical forces productively. A water-wheel is necessary to exploit the force of water, and a steam-engine to exploit the elasticity of steam. Once discovered, the law of the deviation of the magnetic needle in the field of an electric current, or the law of the magnetization of iron around which an electric current circulates, cost never a penny. But the exploitation of these laws for the purposes of telegraphy, etc. , necessitates a costly and extensive apparatus. ' ' Not only does the monopoly of these essential tools give our plutocracy an enormous and most unequal advantage at the start, which advantage would, in any event, be certain to continue long after the adoption of land nationalization ; but without access to these essentials to production it would be impossible for the proletariat to get any start at all. If proof of this is required it is furnished in abundance by the bitter experience through which the small farmer is now passing; and he, having some capital, is a plutocrat as compared with the proletarian.

As will be hereafter shown at length, equality of opportunity, is, in Mr. Spencer's opinion, synonymous with justice, and is therefore the one thing toward which we should aspire, and that it behooves the State to enforce. I have endeavored to show that the system of land-tenure, which is his leading, direct contribution to economic literature, does not, by itself, satisfy the requirements of the case, and there is reason to suppose that it might even augment the inequality which is admitted to be the crying evil of modern times. For, unable to employ himself — since the posses-

* Capital, p. 235. (Humboldt Publishing Co., 1890).

sion of a bare piece of land does not guarantee a living — the proletarian would still have to work for an employer, and the reduction of his rent to zero would but enable him to work for a diminished wage. What is shown upon a small scale in the following extract from a recent pamphlet by- Miss Ida M. Van Etten, entitled The Condition of Women Workers under the Present Industrial System, would hold good throughout, for it will be seen that the free rent which a system of land nationalization might supposedly offer, is, so far as the reduction of wages is concerned, entirely on all fours with the free lodging supplied to-day by numerous charitable institutions. On page 12 of the above mentioned pamphlet, published by the American Federation of Labor, Miss Van Etten says :

' ' We find charity everywhere supplementing the present industrial system, bolstering it up and making its operations possible ; accepting its horrible results as a normal state of things ; and instead of bitterly and relentlessly attacking the root of the evil, attempting to plaster up and palliate its consequences.

1 ' Chanty has only succeeded in making it easier for the unscrupulous employers of women to exploit them safely and respectably. By the side of the huge factory, whose owner is growing enormously rich, upon the spoliation of his women workers, it builds the Lodging House or Christian Home, and this enables the manufacturer to pay wages below the living point.

' ' The ' sweating ' system would in many cases be almost impossible, were it not for the thoughtless charity of innumerable Church Relief, St. Vincent de Paul Societies, etc., etc.

1 ' If these societies would look carefully into the histories

WOULD IT WORK?

of their pensioners, they would find in almost every case that they are the underpaid employees of some manufacturer of slop-work goods or his ' contractor ' who counts upon the dole of charity to supplement the wages of his miserable workers.

' ' But while thus, indirectly, charity is one of the many causes which tend to depress the condition of working women by making possible many of the exactions and oppressions under which they suffer, the rapid increase of great charitable institutions, supported by. the municipal or State treasury, within whose walls are often housed hundreds of women and girls, has become a direct means of lowering wages, by entering directly into competition with the sewing women, already the most numerous and oppressed of women workers. And what an unequal competition ! With all living expenses paid by the city or State, augmented by the voluntary offerings of the charitable, the managers of those institutions are able and do sell the labor of their inmates far below the rate of wages prevailing outside — miserably low as that is.

" Sometimes this is done from ignorance of conditions existing among working women in the world, as the directors of many of these large institutions for women are sisters, whose vows incapacitate them from acquiring such knowledge by personal contact or intercourse.

"It is, of course, claimed that the institutions do so small a percentage of the work done that it does not affect wages. But under the present industrial system, it is well known that a reduction of wages, even in a fraction of the trade, has an immediate effect upon the wages of the whole trade. In the Catholic Protectory, sheltering about 1,000 girls, shirts, gloves, men's and boys' clothing are made at prices that it would be impossible for a woman to live upon outside. Scores of sewing women have told me that, upon protesting against a reduction in wages, they have been met with the answer, 'We can get work done by the sisters at these prices.'

"In the House of the Good Shepherd, an institution founded for the reclamation of fallen women and supported by the city, the women, to the number of several hundreds, under the supervision of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, are employed in making children's waists, clothing, and underwear at any prices the manufacturer chooses to offer.

"It is to be hoped that the gentle, pious sisters, who, unfortunately for the work they have undertaken, know so little of outside conditions, do not fully realize the crime they are every day committing against working-women.

"I wonder if they have ever considered the economic causes that creates one of their inmates. The gradual stages from want and misery to vice and shame, the horrible depressing poverty ever growing greater and grimmer, the ceaseless grind and oppression of heartless employers. And when at last a bitter protest has been wrung from her by a threatened reduction in wages, to be met by the information that the Sisters are willing to do her work at these prices, is it any wonder that she returns to her miserable tenement with a bitter feeling in her heart against religion, whose representatives have been unconsciously, but nevertheless as truly her oppressors as the most cruel employer. And when, despairing, she is driven to eke out her miserable wages by the wages of sin, she is brought, by a strange irony of fate, to the House of the Good Shepherd to be reformed. Thus, in a vicious circle, this, and similar institutions for women, create the very class they are founded to reclaim.

' ' One of the largest manufacturers of white underwear in New York, not long ago, advertised in the leading newspapers of New York State for inmates of charitable institutions to do his work at ' good prices. '

"The officer of an institution for women in Syracuse answered the advertisement, asking for the prices, etc. She found they were much less than those paid to outside workers. Still this manufacturer succeeded in obtaining a large number of charitable institutions throughout New York and the adjoining States to do his work."

As will be pointed out when considering The Coming Slavery this is the very argument which Mr. Spencer himself there uses with crushing force, showing us that the effect of the old English poor-law was actually to reduce the wages of agricultural laborers, who, being partly supported by the "rates," were thereby enabled to work for so much less. Neither the Socialist, nor the bulk of the organized labor movement in America, have been as yet able to convince themselves that a social reconstruction limited to land nationalization, the wage-system being left untouched, would not operate in a precisely similar manner. Should it so operate history would again repeat itself, and the workingman would again have been used as a cat's-paw to rake the capitalist chestnuts out of the fire. For the history of the last hundred years has been the gradual elbowing of the landlords out of the seat of power to make room for the capitalist class, whose little finger has already proved heavier than the loins of the feudal landed aristocracy. It is certainly, therefore, not for the increase of capitalist power that the workers agitate.

I have said that there is reason to suppose that such a system of land tenure, if put into operation side by side with the retention of our competitive system as now in vogue, might result, not in freeing the workers, but in augmenting incalculably the capitalist's power. Prophecy is a dangerous amusement, but current events do, now and again, prove trustworthy guides. I submit, therefore, a summary of the organization of "The New York Tax Reform Association," as reported in the New York papers of June 6th, 1891. The prime mover in this matter is said to have been one Bolton Hall, a lawyer ; other active agents being Spencer Aldrich, also a lawyer ; George R. Read, president of the Real Estate Exchange, and the Record and Guide — a paper devoted to real estate. The report, which I take from the New York Recorder, further informs us that "a number of prominent business men, some of them large real estate owners, are interested in it. The subject has been quietly canvassed and the conclusion reached that the times are ripe for reform. It is stated that Gen. Francis A. Walker, ex-superintendent of the national census, was the only political economist who declined to indorse the movement, and only two business men out of about one hundred approached refused their support." The following is their declaration of principles :