In the strict sense of the word "nature," it denotes the sum of the
phenomenal world, of that which has been, and is, and will be; and society, like art, is
therefore a part of nature. But it is convenient to distinguish those parts of nature in
which man plays the part of immediate cause, as something apart; and, therefore, society,
like art, is usefully to be considered as distinct from nature. It is the more desirable,
and even necessary, to make this distinction, since society differs from nature in having
a definite moral object; whence it comes about that the course shaped by the ethical
man---the member of society or citizen---necessarily runs counter to that which the
nonethical man---the primitive savage, or man as a mere member of the animal
kingdom---tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter
end, like any other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of setting
limits to the struggle.
In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of man, the animal, no more moral end
is discernible than in that presented by the lives of the wolf and of the deer. However
imperfect the relics of prehistoric men may be, the evidence which they afford clearly
tends to the conclusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, before the origin of
the oldest known civilizations, men were savages of a very low type. They strove with
their enemies and their competitors; they preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than
themselves; they were born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of
generations, alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyena, whose lives were
spent in the same way; and they were no more to be praised or blamed on moral grounds than
their less erect and more hairy compatriots.
As among these, so among primitive men, the weakest and stupidest went to the wall,
while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their
circumstances, but not the best in any other sense, survived. Life was a continual free
fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of
each against all was the normal state of existence. The human species, like others,
plashed and floundered amid the general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water
as it best might, and thinking neither of whence nor whither.
The history of civilization---that is, of society---on the other hand, is the record of
the attempts which the human race has made to escape from his position. The first men who
substituted the state of mutual peace for that of mutual war, whatever the motive which
impelled them to take that step, created society. But, in establishing peace, they
obviously put a limit upon the struggle for existence. Between the members of that
society, at any rate, it was not to be pursued a outrance. And of all the
successive shapes which society has taken, that most nearly approaches perfection in which
the war of individual against individual is most strictly limited. The primitive savage,
tutored by Istar, appropriated whatever took his fancy, and killed whomsoever opposed him,
if he could. On the contrary, the ideal of the ethical man is to limit his freedom of
action to a sphere in which he does not interfere with the freedom of others; he seeks the
common weal as much as his own; and, indeed, as an essential part of his own welfare.
Peace is both end and means with him; and he founds his life on a more or less complete
self-restraint, which is the negation of the unlimited struggle for existence. He tries to
escape from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free development of the
principle of nonmoral evolution, and to establish a kingdom of man, governed upon the
principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral end, but in its perfection,
social life, is embodied morality.
But the effort of ethical man to work toward a moral end by no means abolished, perhaps
has hardly modified, the deep-seated organic impulses which impel the natural man to
follow his non-moral course. One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief cause,
of the struggle for existence, is the tendency to multiply without limit, which man shares
with all living things. It is notable that "increase and multiply" is a
commandment traditionally much older than the ten; and that it is, perhaps, the only one
which has been spontaneously and ex animo obeyed by the great majority of the human
race. But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience is the
re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence---the war of each
against all---the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social
organization....
Historians point to the greed and ambition of rulers, to the reckless turbulence of the
ruled, to the debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the devastating wars which
have formed a great part of the occupation of mankind, as the causes of the decay of
states and the foundering of old civilizations, and thereby point their story with a
moral. No doubt immoral motives of all sorts have figured largely among the minor causes
of these events. But beneath all this superficial turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse
given by unlimited multiplication....
In the ancient world, and in a large part of that in which we live, the practice of
infanticide was, or is, a regular and legal custom; famine, pestilence, and war were and
are normal factors in the struggle for existence, and they have served, in a gross and
brutal fashion, to mitigate the intensity of the effects of its chief cause.
But, in the more advanced civilizations, the progress of private and public morality
has steadily tended to remove all these checks. We declare infanticide murder and punish
it as such; we decree, not quite so successfully, that no one shall die of hunger; we
regard death from preventible causes of other kinds as a sort of constructive murder, and
eliminate pestilence to the best of our ability; we declaim against the curse of war, and
the wickedness of the military spirit, and we are never weary of dilating on the
blessedness of peace and the innocent beneficence of industry. In their moments of
expansion, even statesmen and men of business go thus far. The finer spirits look to an
ideal civitas Dei; a state when, every man having reached the point of absolute
self-negation and having nothing but moral perfection to strive after, peace will truly
reign, not merely among nations but among men, and the struggle for existence will be at
an end.
Whether human nature is competent, under any circumstances, to reach, or even seriously
advance toward, this ideal condition, is a question which need not be discussed. It will
be admitted that mankind has not yet reached this stage by a very long way, and my
business is with the present. And that which I wish to point out is that, so long as the
natural man increases and multiplies without restraint, so long will peace and industry
not only permit, but they will necessitate, a struggle for existence as sharp as any that
ever went on under the regime of war....
There are now 36,000,000 of people in our British islands, and every year considerably
more than 300,000 are added to our numbers. That is to say, about every hundred seconds,
or so, a new claimant to a share in the common stock of maintenance presents him or
herself among us. At the present time, the produce of the soil does not suffice to feed
half its population. The other moiety has to be supplied with food which must be bought
from the people of food-producing countries. That is to say, we have to offer them the
things which they want in exchange for the things we want. And the things they want and
which we can produce better than they can are mainly manufactures---industrial products.
The insolent reproach of the first Napoleon had a very solid foundation. We not only
are, but, under penalty of starvation, we are bound to be, a nation of shopkeepers. But
other nations also lie under the same necessity of keeping shop, and some of them deal in
the same goods as ourselves. Our customers naturally seek to get the most and the best in
exchange for their produce. If our goods are inferior to those of our competitors, there
is no ground, compatible with the sanity of the buyers, which can be alleged why they
should not prefer the latter. And, if that result should ever take place on a large and
general scale, five or six millions of us would soon have nothing to eat....
Judged by an ethical standard, nothing can be less satisfactory than the position in
which we find ourselves. In a real, though incomplete, degree we have attained the
condition of peace which is the main object of social organization; and, for argument's
sake, it may be assumed that we desire nothing but that which is in itself innocent and
praiseworthy---namely, the enjoyment of the fruits of honest industry. And lo! in spite of
ourselves, we are in reality engaged in an internecine struggle for existence with our
presumably no less peaceful and well-meaning neighbors. We seek peace and we do not ensue
it. The moral nature in us asks for no more than is compatible with the general good; the
nonmoral nature proclaims and acts upon that fine old Scottish family motto, "Thou
shalt starve ere I want." Let us be under no illusions, then. So long as unlimited
multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, or is likely
to be devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society
from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself, in its intensest
form, of that struggle for existence the limitation of which is the object of society. And
however shocking to the moral sense this eternal competition of man against man and of
nation against nation may be; however revolting may be the accumuladon of misery at the
negative pole of society, in contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole;
this state of things must abide, and grow continually worse, so long as Ishtar holds her
way unchecked. It is the true riddle of the Sphinx; and every nation which does not solve
it will sooner or later be devoured by the monster itself has generated.
To this end, it is well to look into the necessary condidons of our salvation by works.
They are two, one plain to all the world and hardly needing insistence; the other
seeming1y not so plain, since too often it has been theoretically and practically left out
of sight. The obvious condition is that our produce shall be better than that of others.
There is only one reason why our goods should be preferred to those of our rivals---our
customers must find them better at the price. That means that we must use more knowledge,
skill, and industry in producing them, without a proportionate increase in the cost of
production; and, as the price of labor constitutes a large element in that cost the rate
of wages must be restricted within certain limits. It is perfectly true that cheap
production and cheap labor are by no means synonymous; but it is also true that wages
cannot increase beyond a certain proportion without destroying cheapness. Cheapness, then,
with, as part and parcel of cheapness a moderate price of labor, is essential to our
success as competitors in the markets of the world.
The second condition is really quite as plainly indispensable as the first, if one
thinks seriously about the matter. It is social stability. Society is stable, when the
wants of its members obtain as much satisfaction as, life being what it is, common sense
and experience show may be reasonably expected. Mankind, in general, care very little for
forms of government or ideal considerations of any sort; and nothing really stirs the
great muldtude to break with custom and incur the manifest perils of revolt except the
belief that misery in this world, or damnation in the next, or both, are threatened by the
continuance of the state of things in which they have been brought up. But when they do
attain that conviction, society becomes as unstable as a package of dynamite, and a very
small matter will produce the explosion which sends it back to the chaos of savagery.
It needs no argument to prove that when the price of labor sinks below a certain point,
the worker infallibly falls into that condition which the French emphatically call la
misere---a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is
a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere
maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in
which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished
and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in
which the pleasures within reach are reduced to bestiality and drunkenness in which the
pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, diease, stunted
development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest
industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave.
That a certain proportion of the members of every great aggregation of mankind should
constantly tend to establish and populate such a slough of despond as this is inevitable,
so long as some people are by nature idle and vicious, which others are disabled by
sickness or accident, or thrown upon the world by the death of their breadwinner. So long
as that proportion is restricted within tolerable limits, it can be dealt with; and, so
far as it arises only from such causes, its existence may and must be patiently borne.
But, when the organization of society, instead of mitigating this tendency, tends to
continue and intensify it; when a given social order plainly makes for evil and not for
good, men naturally enough begin to think it high time to try an experiment. The animal
man, finding that the ethical man has landed him in such a slough, resumes his ancient
sovereignty, and preaches anarchy; which is, substantially, a proposal to reduce the
social cosmos to chaos, and begin the brute strugg1e for existence once again.
Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial
centers, whether in this or other countries, is aware that, amidst a large and increasing
body of that population, la misere reigns supreme. I have no pretensions to the
character of a philanthropist and I have a special honor of all sorts of sentimental
rhetoric; I am merely trying to deal with facts, to some extent within my own knowledge,
and further evidenced by abundant testimony, as a naturalist, and I take it to be a mere
plain truth that throughout industial Europe, there is not a single large manufacturing
city which is free from a vast mass of people whose condition is exactly that described;
and from a still greater mass who, living just on the edge of the social swamp, are liable
to be precipitated into it by any lack of demand for their produce. And, with every
addition to the population, the multitude already sunk in the pit and the number of the
host sliding toward it continually increase.
Argumentation can hardly be needful to make it clear that no society in which the
elements of decomposition are thus swiftly and surely accumulating can hope to win
in the race of industries. Intelligence, knowledge, and skill are undoubtedly conditions
of success; but of what avail are they likely to be unless they are backed up by honesty,
energy, good will, and all the physical and moral faculties that go to the making of
manhood, and unless they are stimulated by hope of such reward as men may fairly look to?
And what dweller in the slough of want, dwarfed in body and soul, demoralized, hopeless,
can reasonably be expected to possess these qualities?
Any full and permanent development of the productive powers of an industrial
population, then, must be compatible with and, indeed, based upon a social organization
which will secure a fair amount of physical and moral welfare to that population; which
will make for good and not for evil. Natural science and religious enthusiasm rarely go
hand in hand, but on this matter their concord is complete; and the least sympathetic of
naturalists can but admire the insight and the devotion of such social reformers as the
late Lord Shaftesbury, whose recently published Life and Letters gives a vivid
picture of the condition of the working classes fifty years ago, and of the pit which our
industry, ignoring these plain truths, was then digging under its own feet.
There is, perhaps, no more hopeful sign of progress among us, in the last half-century,
than the steadily increasing devotion which has been and is directed to measures for
promoting physical and moral welfare among the poorer classes. Sanitary reformers, like
most other reformers whom I have had the advantage of knowing, seem to need a good dose of
fanaticism, as a sort of moral coca, to keep them up to the mark, and, doubtless, they
have made many mistakes; but that the endeavor to improve the condition under which our
industrial population live, to amend the drainage of densely peopled streets, to provide
baths, washhouses, and gymnasia, to facilitate habits of thrift, to furnish some provision
for instruction and amusement in public libraries and the like, is not only desirable from
a philanthropic point of view, but an essential condition of safe industrial development,
appears to me to be indisputable. It is by such means alone, so far as I can see, that we
can hope to check the constant gravitation of industrial society toward la misere,
until the general progress of intelligence and morality leads men to grapple with the
sources of that tendency. If it is said that the carrying out of such arrangements as
those indicated must enhance the cost of production, and thus handicap the producer in the
race of competition, I venture, in the first place, to doubt the fact; but if it be so, it
results that industrial society has to face a dilemma, either alternative of which
threatens destruction.
Source:
From: Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, and Other Essays, (London, 1894),
pp. 202-218.
Scanned by Jerome S. Arkenberg, Cal. State Fullerton.
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© Paul Halsall, November 1998
