Individualism and Collectivism.

It is not easy, at the present day, to be quite fair to the opinions of the little knot of noble-minded enthusiasts who broke for us the chains of the oligarchic tyranny of the eighteenth century. Their work was essentially destructive, and this is not the place in which to estimate how ably they carried on their statical analysis, or how completely they misunderstood the social results of the industrial revolution which was falsifying all their predictions almost before they were uttered. But we may, perhaps, not unfairly sum up as follows the principles which guided them in dealing with the difficulties of social life: that the best government is that which governs least; that the utmost possible scope should be allowed to untrammelled individual enterprise; that open competition and complete freedom from legal restrictions furnish the best guarantees of a healthy industrial community; that the desired end of "equality of opportunity" can be ultimately reached by allowing to each person the complete ownership of any riches he may become possessed of; and that the best possible social state will result from each individual pursuing his own interest in the way he thinks best.

Fifty years' further social experience have destroyed the faith of the world in the validity of these principles as the basis of even a decent social order, and Mr. John Morley himself has told us that "the answer of modern statesmanship is that unfettered individual competition is not a principle to which the regulation of industry may be intrusted."

"It is indeed certain," sums up Dr. Ingram, at the end of his comprehensive survey of all the economic tendencies, "that industrial society will not permanently remain without a systematic organization. The mere conflict of private interests will never produce a well-ordered commonwealth of labor."t

Modern Socialism is, accordingly, not a faith in an artificial Utopia, but a rapidly-spreading conviction, as yet only partly conscious of itself, that social health and consequently human happiness is something apart from and above the separate interests of individuals, requiring to be consciously pursued as an end in itself; that the lesson of evolution in social development is the substitution of consciously regulated co-ordination among the units of each organism for their internecine competition ; that the production and distribution of wealth, like any other public function, cannot safely be intrusted to the unfettered freedom of individuals, but needs to be organized and controlled for the benefit of the whole community; that this can be imperfectly done by means of legislative restriction and taxation, but is eventually more advantageously accomplished through the collective enterprise of the appropriate administrative

Life of Cobsen, vol. i., ch. xilí., pp. 298, 303.

Article "Political Economy," in Ency. Britt., ninth edition, vol. xix., 1886, p. 382; republished as History of Political Economy.

See Professor Huxley's pregnant declaration to this effect in the Nineteenth Century, February, 1888. Compare D. G. Ritchie's Darwinism and Politics.

which can safely and successfully administer most.

The New Pressure for Social Reform.

But although the principles of Individualism have long been tacitly abandoned by our public men, they have remained, until quite recently, enshrined in the imagination of the middle class citizen and the journalist. Their rapid supersession in these days, by principles essentially Socialist, is due to the prominence now given to "social problems," and to the failure of Individualism to offer any practicable solution of these. The problems are not in themselves new; they are not even more acute or pressing than of yore; but the present generation is less disposed than its predecessors to acquiesce in their insolubility. This increasing social compunction in the presence of industrial disease and social misery is the inevitable result of the advent of political democracy. The power to initiate reforms is now rapidly passing into the hands of those who themselves directly suffer from the evils to be removed; and it is therefore not to be wondered at that social re-organization is a subject of much more vital interest to the proletarian politicians of to-day than it can ever have been to the University professors or Whig proprietors of the past.

Now the main "difficulties" of the existing social order, with which Individualist principles fail to deal, are those immediately connected with the administration of industry and the distribution of wealth. To summarize these difficulties before examining them we may say that the Socialist asserts that the system of private property in the means of production permits and even promotes an extreme inequality in the distribution of the annual product of the united labors of the community. This distribution results in excess in the hands of a small class, balanced by positive privation at the other end of the social scale. An inevitable corollary of this unequal distribution is wrong production, both of commodities and of human beings; the preparation of senseless luxuries whilst there is need for more bread, and the breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized residuum" unfit for social life. This evil inequality and disastrous malproduction are enabled to continue through the individual ownership of the instruments of industry, one inevitable accompaniment of which is the continuance, in the commercial world, of that personal rule which is rapidly being expelled from political administration; The increasing integration of the Great Industry is, indeed, creating -except in so far as it is counteracted by the adoption of Socialist principles—a kind of new feudalism, based upon tenure, not of land, but of capital employed in the world-commerce, a financial autocracy against which the democracy sullenly revolts. In the interests of this oligarchy, the real interests of each community tend to be ignored, to the detriment of its capacity to hold its own in the race struggle that competition between communities rather than between individuals in a community which is perhaps now becoming the main field of natural selection.

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In examining each of these difficulties in greater detail, it will be fair to consider, not only how far they can be solved by the existing order and in what way they are actually being dealt with by the application of Socialist principles, but also what hope might, on the other hand, be found in the greatest possible development of Individualism. For to-day it is the Individualist who is offering us, as a solution of social difficulties, an untried and nebulous Utopia; whilst the Socialist occupies the superior position of calling only for the conscious and explicit adoption and extension of principles of social organization to which the stern logic of facts has already driven the practical man. History and experiment have indeed changed sides, and rank now among the allies of the practical Socialist reformer. Factory Acts and municipal gas-works we know, but the voice of Mr. Auberon Herbert, advocating "voluntary taxation," is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

Inequality of Income.

Inequality in wealth distribution is, of course, no new thing, and it is unnecessary to contend that the inequality of the present age is more flagrant than that of its predecessors. The extreme depth of poverty of those who actually die of starvation is, indeed, obviously no less than before; and when 30 per cent. of the five million inhabitants of London are found to be inadequately supplied with the bare necessaries of life, and probably a fourth of the entire community become paupers at 65, it would profit us little to enquire whether this percentage is greater or less than that during the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the wealth production of the community advances by leaps and bounds, being now far greater than ever it was, and greater than that of any other country of the Old World. The riches of a comparatively small number of the owners of our land and capital are colossal and increasing.

Nor is there any doubt or dispute as to the causes of this inequality. The supersession of the Small by the Great Industry has given the main fruits of invention and the new power over Nature to a comparatively small proprietary class, upon whom the mass of the people are dependent for leave to earn their living. When it suits any person having the use of land and capital to employ the worker, this is only done on condition that two important deductions, rent and interest, can be made from his product, for the benefit of two, in this capacity, absolutely unproductive classes those exercising the bare ownership of land and capital. The reward of labor being thus reduced, on an average, by about one-third, the remaining eightpence out of the shilling is then shared between the ous classes who have co-operated in the production—including inventor, the managing employer, and the mere wage-workershared in the competitive struggle in such a way that at least urpence goes to a favored set of educated workers, numbering less han one-fifth of the whole, leaving four-fifths to divide less than fourpence out of the shilling between them. The consequence is the social condition we see around us. A fortunate few, owing to

their legal power over the instruments of wealth-production, command the services of thousands of industrial slaves wrose faces they have never seen, without rendering any service to them or to society in exchange. A larger body of persons contribute some labor, but are able, from their cultivated ability or special education, to choose occupations for which the competition wage is still high, owing to the small number of possible competitors. These two classes together number only one-fifth of the whole. On the other hand is the great mass of the people, the weekly wage-earners, four out of five of the whole population, toiling perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate product of labor, at an annual wage averaging at most £40 per adult, hurried into unnecessarily early graves by the severity of their lives, and dying, as regards at least one-third of them, destitute or actually in receipt of poor-law relief.

Few can doubt the fundamental causes of this inequality of condition. The abstraction from the total of over one-third of the product necessarily makes a serious inroad in that which the "niggardliness of Nature" allows us, and the distribution of the remaining two-thirds is, of course, itself fatally affected by the secondary results of the division into "two nations" which the private appropriation of rent and interest creates.

Can we Dodge the Law of Rent?

Individualists may tell us of the good things that the worker could get for himself by thrift and sobriety, prudence and saving, but no economist will for a moment suggest that any conceivable advance in these virtues would remove the fundamental inequality arising from the phenomenon of rent. The mere worker, quâ worker, is necessarily working, as far as its own remuneration is concerned, on the very worst land in economic use, with the very minimum advantage of industrial capital. Every development towards a freer Individualism must, indeed, inevitably emphasize the power of the owner of the superior instruments of wealth-production to obtain for himself all the advantages of their superiority. Individualists may prefer to blink this fact, and to leave it to be implied that, somehow or other, the virtuous artizan can dodge the law of rent. But against this complacent delusion of the philanthropist political economy emphatically protests. So long as the instruments of production are in unrestrained private ownership, so long must the tribute of the workers to the drones continue: so long will the toilers' reward inevitably be reduced by their exactions. No tinkering with the land laws can abolish or even diminish economic rent, however much it may result in the redistribution of this tribute. The whole equivalent of every source of fertility or advantage of st land over and above the worst in economic use is under free ccd, petition necessarily abstracted from the mere worker on it. So Icy as Lady Matheson can "own" the island of Lewis, and (as she say do what she likes with her own-so long as the Earls of Derby ca appropriate at their ease the unearned increment of Bootle or Bury it is the very emphatic teaching of political economy that the

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earth may be the Lord's, but the fulness thereof must inevitably be the landlord's.

There is an interesting episode in English history among James I.'s disputes with the Corporation of London, then the protector of popular liberties. James, in his wrath, threatened to remove the Court to Oxford. "Provided only your Majesty leave us the Thames," cleverly replied the Lord Mayor. But economic dominion is more subtle than kingcraft-our landlords steal from us even the Thames. No Londoner who is not a landlord could, under completely free Individualism, obtain one farthing's worth of economic benefit from the existence of London's ocean highway; the whole equivalent of its industrial advantage would necessarily go to swell the compulsory tribute of London's annual rental.

It has often been vaguely hoped that this iron law was true only of land, and that, in some unexplained way, the worker did get the advantage of other forms of industrial capital. But further economic analysis shows, as Whately long ago hinted, that rent is a genus of which land rent is only one species. The worker in the factory is now seen to work no shorter hours or gain no higher wages merely because the product of his labor is multiplied a hundred-fold by machinery which he does not own.

Whatever may be the effect of invention on the wages of one generation as compared with the last, it has now become more than doubtful to economists whether the worker can count on getting any more of the product of the machine, in a state of "complete personal liberty," than his colleague contemporaneously laboring at the very margin of cultivation with the very minimum of capital. The artizan producing boots by the hundred in the modern machine works of Southwark or Northampton gets no higher wages than the surviving hand cobbler in the by-street. The whole differential advantage of all but the worst industrial capital, like the whole differential advantage of all but the worst land, necessarily goes to him who legally owns it. The mere worker can have none of them. "The remuneration of labor, as such," wrote Cairnes in 1874,* pist "skilled or unskilled, can never rise much above its present level."

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The "Population Question."

Neither can we say that it is the increase of population which effects this result. During the present century, indeed, in spite of ent, an unparalleled increase in numbers, the wealth annually produced ite. England per head has nearly doubled. If population became stationary to-morrow, and complete personal liberty prevailed, with any amount of temperance, prudence, and sympathy, the present rent and interest would not be affected; our numbers determine, * Some Leading Principles, p. 348.

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+ Hence the remarkable suppression of "Malthusianism" in all recent economic iterature, notably the handbooks of Symes, Cannan, Ely, and Gonner; and its ignificantly narrow subordination in Prof. Marshall's Principles of Economics. The irth-rate of Great Britain is now apparently lower than it has ever been during the hole of the past century, and it seems tending steadily downwards.