In my youth I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into
the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as
now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of
legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on
these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was
possible to go further than this in removing the injustice---for injustice it is, whether
admitting of a complete remedy or not---involved in the fact that some are born to riches
and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by
universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor
might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a
socialist.
We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues
to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and
brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond democracy,
and would class us decidedly under the general designation of socialists. While we
repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most
socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society
will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who
do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all;
when the division of the produce of labor, instead of depending, as in so great a degree
it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged
principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be,
impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which
are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to.
The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest
individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe,
and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labor. We had not the
presumption to suppose that we could already foresee by what precise form of institutions
these objects could most effectually be attained, or at how near or how distant a period
they would become practicable. We saw clearly that to render any such social
transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take
place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the laboring masses, and in the
immense majority of their employers. Both these classes must learn by practice to labor
and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social purposes, and not, as
hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. But the capacity to do this has always
existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and
the cultivation of the sentiments, will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as
readily as fight for his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, and a system of
culture prolonged through successive generations, that men in general can be brought up to
this point. But the hindrance is not in the essential constitution of human nature.
Interest in the common good is at present so weak a motive in the generality, not
because it can never be otherwise, but because the mind is not accustomed to dwell on it
as it dwells from morning till night on things which tend only to personal advantage. When
called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the daily course of life, and
spurred from behind by the love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable of
producing, even in common men, the most strenuous exertions as well as the most heroic
sacrifices. The deep-rooted selfishness, which forms the general character of the existing
state of society, is so deeply rooted only because the whole course of existing
institutions tends to foster it; and modern institutions in some respects more than
ancient, since the occasions on which the individual is called on to do anything for the
public without receiving its pay, are far less frequent in modern life than in the smaller
commonwealths of antiquity.
These considerations did not make us overlook the folly of premature attempts to
dispense with the inducements of private interest in social affairs, while no substitute
for them has been or can be provided: but we regarded all existing institutions and social
arrangements as being (in a phrase I once heard from Austin) "merely
provisional," and we welcomed with the greatest pleasure and interest all socialistic
experiments by select individuals (such as the cooperative societies), which, whether they
succeeded or failed, could not but operate as a most useful education of those who took
part in them, but cultivating their capacity of acting upon motives pointing directly to
the defects which render them and others incapable of doing so.
