Sumner was a prominent American social Darwinist. He spent some time in the ministry
before becoming a teacher in sociology and anthropology at Yale. Here he mixes social
Darwinism with aspects of a Calvinistic work ethic. He provides a Darwinist explantion of
the family, and attacks Socialism.
Socialism is no new thing. In one form or another it is to be found throughout all
history. It arises front all observation of certain harsh facts in the lot of man on
earth, the concrete expression of which is poverty and misery. These facts challenge us.
It is folly to try to shut our eyes to them. We have first to notice what they are, and
then to face them squarely.
Man is born under the necessity of sustaining the existence he has received by all
onerous struggle against nature, both to win what is essential to his life and to ward off
what is prejudicial to it. He is born under a burden and a necessity. Nature holds what is
essential to him, but site offers nothing gratuitously. He may win for his use what she
holds, if he can. Only the most meager and inadequate supply for human needs can be
obtained directly from nature. There are trees which may be used for fuel and for
dwellings, but labor is required to fit them for this use. There are ores in the ground,
but labor is necessary to get out the metals and make tools or weapons. For any real
satisfaction, labor is necessary to fit the products of nature for human use. In this
struggle every individual is under the pressure of the necessities for food, clothing,
shelter, fuel, and every individual brings with him more or less energy for the conflict
necessary to supply his needs. The relation, therefore, between each man's needs and each
mail's energy, or "individualism," is the first fact of human life.
The next great fact we have to notice in regard to the struggle of human life is that
labor which is spent in a direct struggle with nature is severe in the extreme and is but
slightly productive. To subjugate nature, man needs weapons and tools. These, however,
cannot be won unless the food and clothing and other prime and direct necessities are
supplied in such amounts that they call be consumed while tools and weapons are being made
for the tools and weapons themselves satisfy no needs directly. A man who tills the ground
with his fingers or with a pointed stick picked up without labor will get a small crop. To
fashion even rudest spade or hoe will cost time during which the laborer must still eat
and drink and wear, but the tool when obtained, will multiply immensely the power to
produce. Such products of labor, used to assist production, have a function so peculiar in
the nature of things that we need to distinguish them. We call them capital. A lever is
capital, and the advantage of lifting a weight with a lever over lifting it by direct
exertion is only a feeble illustration of the power of capital in production. The origin
of capital lies in the darkness before history, and it is probably impossible for us to
imagine the slow and painful steps by which the race began the formation of it. Since then
it has gone on rising to higher and higher powers by a ceaseless involution, if I may use
a mathematical expression. Capital is labor raised to a higher power by being constantly
multiplied into Itself. Nature has been more and more subjugated by the human race through the power of
capital, and every human being now living shares the improved status of the race to a
degree which neither he nor any one else call measure, and for which he pays nothing.
Let us understand this point, because our subject will require future reference to it.
It is the most short-sighted ignorance not to see that, in a civilized community, all the
advantage of capital except a small fraction is gratuitously enjoyed by the community. For
instance, suppose the case of a man utterly destitute of tools, who ys trying to till the
ground with a pointed stick. He could get something out of it. If now he should obtain a
spade with which to till the ground, let us suppose, for illustration, that he could get
twenty times its great a produce. Could, then, the owner of a spade in a civilized state
demand, as its price, from the man who had no spade, nineteen-twentieths of the produce
which could be produced by the use of it? Certainly not. The price of a spade is fixed by
the supply and demand of products in the community. A spade is bought for a dollar and the
gain front the use of it is an inheritance of knowledge, experience, and skill which every
man who lives in a civilized state gets for nothing. What we pay for steam transportation
is no trifle, but imagine, if you can eastern Massachusetts cut off from steam connection
with the rest of the world, turnpikes and sailing vessels remaining. The cost of food
would rise so high that a quarter of the population would starve to death and another
quarter would have to emigrate. To-day every man here gets all enormous advantage front
the status of a society oil a level of steam transportation, telegraph, and machiners, for
which he pays nothing.
So far as I have yet spoken, we have before us the struggle of man with nature, but the
social problems, strictly speaking, arise at the next step. Each man carries oil the
Struggle to win his support for himself, but there are others by his side engaged ill the
same struggle. If the stores of nature were unlimited, or if the fast unit of the supply
she offers could be won as easily as the first, there would be no social problem. If a
square mile of land could support an Indefinite number of human beings, or if it cost only
twice as much labor to get forty bushels of wheat from an acre as to get twenty, we should
have no social problem. If a square mile of land could support millions, no one would ever
emigrate and there would be no trade or commerce. If it cost only twice as much labor to
get forty bushels as twenty, there would be no advance in the arts. The fact is far
otherwise. So long as the population is low in proportion to the amount of land, on a
given stage of the arts, life is easy and the competition man with man is weak. When more
persons are trying to live on a square mile than it can support, on the existing stage of
the arts, life is hard and the competition of man with man is intense. In the former case,
industry, and prudence may be on a low grade; the penalties are not severe, or certain or
speedy. In the latter case, each individual needs to exert on his own behalf every force,
original or acquired, which he can command. In the former case, the average condition will
be one of comfort and the population will be all nearly on the average. In the latter
case, the average condition will not be one of comfort, but the population will cover wide
extremes of comfort and misery. Each will find his place according to his ability and his
effort. The former society will be democratic; the latter will be aristocratic.
The constant tendency of population to outstrip the means of subsistence is the force
which has distributed population over the world, and produced all advance in civilization.
To this day the two means of escape for an overpopulated country are emigration and an
advance in the arts. The former wins more land for the same people; the latter makes the
same land support more persons. If, however, either of these means opens a chance for an
increase of population, it is evident that the advantage so won may be speedily exhausted
if the increase takes place. The social difficulty has only undergone a temporary
amelioration, and when the conditions of pressure and competition are renewed, misery and
poverty reappear. The victims of them are those who have inherited disease and depraved
appetites, or have been brought up in vice and ignorance, or have themselves yielded to
vice, extravagance, idleness, and imprudence. In the last analysis, therefore, we come
back to vice, in its original and hereditary forms, as the correlative of misery and
poverty.
The condition for the complete and regular action of the force of competition is
liberty. Liberty means the security given to each man that, if he employs his energies to
sustain the struggle on behalf of himself and those he cares for, he shall dispose of the
produce exclusively as he chooses. It is impossible to know whence any definition or
criterion of justice can be derived, if it is not deduced from this view of things; or if
it is not the definition of justice that each shall enjoy the fruit of his own labor and
self-denial, and of injustice that the idle and the industrious, the self-indulgent and
the self-denying, shall share equally in the product. Aside from the a priori speculations
of philosophers who have tried to make equality an essential element in justice, the human
race has recognized, from the earliest times, the above conception of justice as the true
one, and has founded upon it the right of property. The right of property, with marriage
and the family, gives the right of bequest.
Monogamic marriage, however, is the most exclusive of social institutions. It contains,
as essential principles, preference, superiority, selection, devotion. It would not be at
all what it is if it were not for these characteristic traits, and it always degenerates
when these traits are not present. For instance, if a man should not have a distinct
preference for the woman he married, and if he did not select her as superior to others,
the marriage would be an imperfect one according to the standard of true monogamic
marriage. The family under monogamy, also, is a closed group, having special interests and
estimating privacy and reserve as valuable advantages for family development. We grant
high prerogatives, in our society, to parents, although our observation teaches us that
thousands of human beings are unfit to be parents or to be entrusted with the care of
children. It follows, therefore, from the organization of marriage and the family, under
monogamy, that great inequalities must exist in a society based on those institutions. The
son of wise parents cannot start on a level with the son of foolish ones, and the man who
has had no home discipline cannot be equal to the man who has had home discipline. If the
contrary were true, we could rid ourselves at once of the wearing labor of inculcating
sound morals and manners in our children.
Private property, also, which we have seen to be a feature of society organized in
accordance with the natural conditions of the struggle For existence produces inequalities
between men. The struggle for existence is aimed against nature. It is from her niggardly
hand that we have to wrest the satisfaction for our needs, but our fellow-men are our
competitors for the meager supply. Competition, therefore, is a law of nature. Nature is
entirely neutral; she submits to him who most energetically and resolutely assails her.
She grants her rewards to the fittest, therefore, without regard to other considerations
of any kind. If, then, there be liberty, men get from her just in proportion to their
works, and their having and enjoying are just in proportion to their being and their
doing. Such is the system of nature. If we do not like it, and if we try to amend it,
there is only one way in which we can do it. We can take from the better and give to the
worse. We can deflect the penalties of those who have done ill and throw them on those who
have done better. We can take the rewards from those who have done better and give them to
those who have done worse. We shall thus lessen the inequalities. We shall favor the
survival of the unfittest, and we shall accomplish this by destroying liberty. Let it be
understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative; liberty, inequality, survival of
the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society
forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors
all its worst members.
For three hundred years now men have been trying to understand and realize liberty.
Liberty is not the right or chance to do what we choose; there is no such liberty as that
on earth. No man can do as he chooses: the autocrat of Russia or the King of Dahomey has
limits to his arbitrary will; the savage in the wilderness, whom some people think free,
is the slave of routine, tradition, and superstitious fears; the civilized man must earn
his living, or take care of his property, or concede his own will to the rights and claims
of his parents, his wife, his children, and all the persons with whom he is connected by
the ties and contracts of civilized life.
What we mean by liberty is civil liberty, or liberty under law; and this means the
guarantees of law that a man shall not be interfered with while using his own powers for
his own welfare. It is, therefore, a civil and political status; and that nation has the
freest institutions in which the guarantees of peace for the laborer and security for the
capitalist are the highest. Liberty, therefore, (toes not by any means do away with the
struggle for existence. We might as well try to do away with the need of eating, for that
would, in effect, be the same thing. What civil liberty does is to turn the competition of
man with man from violence and brute force into an industrial competition under which men
vie with one another for the acquisition of material goods by industry, energy, skill,
frugality, prudence, temperance, and other industrial virtues. Under this changed order of
things the inequalities are not done away with. Nature still grants her rewards of having
and enjoying, according to our being and doing, but it is now the man of the highest
training and not the man of the heaviest fist who gains the highest reward. It is
impossible that the man with capital and the man without capital should be equal. To
affirm that they are equal would be to say that a man who has no tool can get as much food
out of the ground as the man who has a spade or a plough; or that the man who has no
weapon can defend himself as well against hostile beasts or hostile men as the man who has
a weapon. If that were so, none of us would work any more. We work and deny ourselves to
get capital just because, other things being equal, the man who has it is superior, for
attaining all the ends of life, to the man who has it not. Considering the eagerness with
which we all seek capital and the estimate we put upon it, either in cherishing if it we
have it, or envying others who have it while we have it not, it is very strange what
platitudes pass current about it in our society so soon as we begin to generalize about
it. If our young people really believed some of the teachings they hear, it would not be
amiss to preach them a sermon once in a while to reassure them, setting forth that it is
not wicked to be rich, nay even, that it is not wicked to be richer than your neighbor.
It follows from what we have observed that it is the utmost folly to denounce capital.
To do so is to undermine civilization, for capital is the first requisite of every social
gain, educational, ecclesiastical, political, aesthetic, or other.
It must also be noticed that the popular antithesis between persons and capital is very
fallacious. Every law or institution which protects persons at the expense of capital
makes it easier for persons to live and to increase the number of consumers of capital
while lowering all the motives to prudence and frugality by which capital is created.
Hence every such law or institution tends to produce a large population, sunk in misery.
All poor laws and all eleemosynary institutions and expenditures have this tendency. On
the contrary, all laws and institutions which give security to capital against the
interests of other persons than its owners, restrict numbers while preserving the means of
subsistence. Hence every such law or institution tends to produce a small society on a
high stage of comfort and well-being. It follows that the antithesis commonly thought to
exist between the protection of persons and the protection ofproperty is in reality only
an antithesis between numbers and quality.
****
We have now before us the facts of human life out of which the social problem spring.
s. These facts are in many respects and and stern. It is by strenuous exertion only that
each one of us can sustain himself against the destructive forces and the ever recurring
needs of life; and the higher the degree to which we seek to carry our development the
greater is the proportionate cost of every step. For help in the struggle we can only look
back to those in the previous generation who are responsible for our existence. In the
competition of life the son of wise and prudent ancestors has immense advantages over the
Son of vicious and imprudent ones. The man who has capital possesses immeasurable
advantages for the struggle of life over him who has none. The more we break down
privileges of class, or industry, and establish liberty, the greater will be the
inequalities and the more exclusively will the vicious bear the penalties. Poverty and
misery will exist in society just so long as vice exists in human nature.
I now go on to notice some modes of trying to deal with this problem. There is a modern
philosophy which has never been taught systematically, but which has won the faith of vast
masses of people in the modern civilized world. For want of a better name it may be called
the sentimental philosophy. It has colored all modern ideas and institutions in politics,
religion, education, charity, and industry, and is widely taught in popular literature,
novels, and poetry, and in the pulpit. The first proposition of this sentimental
philosophy is that nothing is true which is disagreeable. If , therefore, any facts of
observation show that life is grim or hard, the sentimental philosophy steps over Such
facts with a genial platitude, a consoling commonplace, or a gratifying dogma. The effect
is to spread an easy optimism, under the influence of which people spare themselves labor
and trouble, reflection and forethought, pains and caution-all of which are hard things,
and to admit the necessity for which would be to admit that the world is not all made
smooth and easy, for us to pass through it surrounded by love, music, and flowers.
Under this philosophy, "progress" has been represented as a steadily
increasing and unmixed good; as if the good steadily encroached on the evil without
involving any new and other forms of evil; and its if we could plan great steps in
progress in our academies and lyceums, and then realize them by resolution. To minds
trained to this way of looking at things, any evil which exists is a reproach. We have
only to consider it, hold some discussions about it, pass resolutions, and have done with
it. Every moment of delay is, therefore, a social crime. It is monstrous to say that
misery and poverty are as constant as vice and evil passions of men! People suffer so
under misery and poverty! Assuming, therefore, that we can solve all these problems and
eradicate all these evils by expending out- Ingenuity Upon them, of course we cannot
hasten too soon to do it.
A social philosophy, consonant with this, has also been taught for a century. It could
not fail to be popular, for it teaches that ignorance is as good as knowledge, vulgarity
as good as refinement, shiftlessness as good as painstaking, shirking as good as faithful
striving, poverty as good as wealth, filth as good as cleanliness-in short, that quality
goes for nothing in the measurement of men, but only numbers. Culture, knowledge,
refinement, skill, and taste cost labor, but we have been taught that they have only
individual, not social value, and that socially they are rather drawbacks than otherwise.
In public life we are taught to admire roughness, illiteracy, and rowdyism. The ignorant,
idle, and shiftless have been taught that they are "the people," that the
generalities inculcated at the same time about the dignity, wisdom, and virtue of
"the people" are true of them, that they have nothing to learn to be wise, but
that, as they stand, they possess a kind of infallibility, and that to their
"opinion" the wise must bow. It is not cause for wonder if whole sections of
these classes have begun to use the powers and wisdom attributed to them for their
interests, as they construe them, and to trample on all the excellence, which marks
civilization as an obsolete supersitition.
Another development of the same philosophy is the doctrine that men come into the world
endowed with "natural rights," or as joint inheritors of the "rights of
man," which have been "declared" times without number during the last
century. The divine rights of man have succeeded to the obsolete divine right of kings. If
it is true, then, that a man is born with rights, he comes into the world with claims on
somebody besides his parents. Against whom does he hold such rights? There can be no
rights against nature or against God. A man may curse his fate because he is born of an
inferior race, or with an hereditary disease, or blind, or, as some members of the race
seem to do, because they are born females; but they get no answer to their imprecations.
But, now, if men have rights by birth, these rights must hold against their fellow-men and
must mean that somebody else is to spend his energy to sustain the existence of the
persons so born. What then becomes of the natural rights of the one whose energies are to
be diverted from his own interests? If it be said that we should all help each other, that
means simply that the race as a whole should advance and expand as much and as fast as it
can in its career on earth; and the experience on which we are now acting has shown that
we shall do this best under liberty and under the organization which we are now
developing, by leaving each to exert his energies for his own success. The notion of
natural rights is destitute of sense, but it is captivating, and it is the more available
on account of its vagueness. It lends itself to the most vicious kind of social dogmatism,
for if a man has natural rights, then the reasoning is clear up to the finished
socialistic doctrine that a man has a natural right to whatever he needs, and that the
measure of his claims is the wishes which he wants fulfilled. If, then, he has need, who
is bound to satisfy it for him? Who holds the obligation corresponding to his right? It
must be the one who possesses what will satisfy that need, or else the state which can
take the possession from those who have earned and saved it, and give it to him who needs
it and who, by the hypothesis, has not earned and saved it.
It is with the next step, however, that we come to the complete and ruinous absurdity
of this view. If a man may demand from those who have a share of what he needs and has
not, may he demand the same also for his wife and for his children, and for how many
children. The industrious and prudent man who takes the course of labor and self-denial to
secure capital, finds that he must defer marriage, both in order to save and to devote his
life to the education of fewer children. The man who can claim a share in another's
product has no such restraint. The consequence would be that the industrious and prudent
would labor and save, without families, to support the idle and improvident who would
increase and multiply, until universal destitution forced a return to the principles of
liberty and property; and the man who started with the notion that the world owed him a
living would once more find, as he does now, that the world pays him its debt in the state prison.
The most specious application of the dogma of rights is to labor. It is said that every
man has a right to work. The world is full of work to be done. Those who are willing to
work find that they have three days' work to do in every day that comes. Work is the
necessity to which we are born. It is not a right, but an irksome necessity, and men
escape It wheriever they can get the fruits of labor without it. What they want is the
fruits, or wages, not work. But wages are capital which some one has earned and saved. If
he and the workman can agree on the terms on which he will part with his capital, there is
no more to be said. If not, then the right must be set up in a new form. It is now not a
right to work, nor even a right to wages, but a right to a certain rate of wages, and we
have simply returned to the old doctrine of spoliation again. It is immaterial whether the
demand for wages be addressed to an individual capitalist or to a civil body, for the
latter can give no wages which it does not collect by taxes out of the capital of those
who have labored and saved.
Another application is in the attempt to fix the hours of labor per diem by law.
If a man is forbidden to labor over eight hours per day (and the law has no sense or
utility for the purposes of those who want it until it takes this form), he is forbidden
to exercise so much industry as he may be willing to expend in order to accumulate capital
for the improvement of his circumstances.
A century ago there were very few wealthy men except owners of land. The extension of
commerce, manufactures, and mining, the introduction of the factory system and machinery,
the opening of new countries, and the great discoveries and inventions have created a new
middle class, based on wealth, and developed out of the peasants, artisans, unskilled
laborers, and small shopkeepers of a century ago. The consequence has been that the chance
of acquiring capital and all which depends on capital has opened before classes which
formerly passed their lives in a dull round of ignorance and drudgery. This chance has
brought with it the same alternative which accompanies every other opportunity offered to
mortals. Those who were wise and able to profit by the chance succeeded grandly; those who
were negligent or unable to profit by it suffered proportionately. The result has been
wide inequalities of wealth within the industrial classes. The net result, however, for
all, has been the cheapening of luxuries and a vast extension of physical enjoyment. The
appetite for enjoyment has been awakened and nourished in classes which formerly never
missed what they never thought of, and it has produced eagerness for material good,
discontent, and impatient ambition. This is the reverse side of that eager uprising of the
industrial classes which is such a great force in modern life. The chance is opened to
advance, by industry, prudence, economy, and emigration, to the possession of capital; but
the way is long and tedious. The impatience for enjoyment and the thirst for luxury which
we have mentioned are the greatest foes to the accumulation of capital; and there is a
still darker side of the picture when we come to notice that those who yield to the
impatience to enjoy, but who see others outstrip them, are led to malic and envy. Mobs
arise which manifest the most savage and senseless disposition to burn and destroy what
they cannot enjoy. We have already had evidence, in more than one country, that such a
wild disposition exists and needs only opportunity to burst into activity.
The origin of socialism, which is the extreme development of the sentimental
philosophy, lies in the undisputed facts which I described at the outset. The socialist
regards this misery as the fault of society. He thinks that we can organize society as we
like and that an organization can be devised in which poverty and misery shall disappear.
He goes further even than this. He assumes that men have artificially organized society as
it now exists. Hence if anything is disagreeable or hard in the present state of society,
it follows, on that view, that the task of organizing society has been imperfectly and
badly: performed, and that it needs to be clone over again. These are the assumptions with
which the socialist starts, and many socialists seem also to believe that if they can
destroy belief in an Almighty, God who is supposed to have made the world such as it is,
they will then have overthrown the belief that there is a fixed order in human nature and
human life which man can scarcely alter at all, and, if at all, only infinitesimally.
The truth is that the social order is fixed by laws of nature precisely analogous to
those of the physical order. The most that man can do is by, ignorance and self-conceit to
mar the operation of social laws. The evils of society are to a great extent the result of
the dogmatism and self-interest of statesmen, philosophers, and ecclesiastics who in past
time have done just what the socialists now want to do. Instead of studying the natural
laws of the social order, they assumed that they could organize society as they chose,
they, made up their minds what kind of a society they wanted to make, and they planned
their little measures for the ends they had resolved upon. It will take centuries of
scientific study, of the facts of nature to eliminate from human society the mischievous
institutions and traditions which the said statesmen, philosophers, and ecclesiastics have
introduced into It. Let us not, however, even then delude ourselves with any impossible
hopes. The hardships of life would not be eliminated if the laws of nature acted directly
and without interference. The task of right living forever changes its form, but let us
not imagine that the task will ever reach a final solution or that any race of men on this
earth can ever be emancipated from the necessity of industry, prudence, continence, and
temperance if they are to pass their lives prosperously. If you believe the contrary you
must suppose that some men can come to exist who shall know nothing of old age, disease,
and death.
****
Socialists find it necessary to alter the definition of capital in order to maintain
their attacks upon it. Karl Marx, for instance, regards capital as an accumulation of the
differences which a merchant makes between his buying price and his selling price. It is,
according to him, an accumulation of the differences which the employer gains between what
he pays to the employees for making the thing and what he obtains for it from the
consumer. In this view of the matter the capitalist employer is a pure parasite, who has
fastened on the wage-receiving employee without need or reason and is levying toll on
industry. All socialistic writers follow, in different degrees, this conception of
capital. If it is true, why do not I levy on some workers somewhere and steal this
difference in the product of their labor? Is it because I am more honest or magnanimous
than those who are capitalist-employers? I should not trust myself to resist the chance if
I had it. Or again, let us ask why, if this conception of the origin of capital is
correct, the workmen submit to a pure and unnecessary imposition. If this notion were
true, co-operation in production would not need any effort to bring it about; it would
take an army to keep it down. The reason why it is not possible for the first corner to
start out as an employer of labor is that capital Is a prerequisite to all industry. So
soon as men pass beyond the stage of life in which they live, like beasts, on the
spontaneous fruits of the earth, capital must precede every productive enterprise. It
would lead me too far away from my present subject to elaborate this statement as it
deserves and perhaps as it needs, but I may say that there is no sound political economy
and especially no correct conception of wages which is not based on a complete recognition
of the character of capital as necessarily going before every industrial operation. The
reason why co-operation in production is exceedingly difficult, and indeed is not possible except in the highest and rarest conditions of education and culture amongst artisans, is
that workmen cannot undertake an enterprise without capital, and that capital always means
the fruits of prudence and self-denial already accomplished. The capitalist's profits,
therefore, are only the reward for the contribution he has made to a joint enterprises
which could not go on without him, and his share is as legitimate as that of the
handworker.
The socialist assails particularly the institution of bequest or hereditary property,
by which some men come into life with special protection and advantage. The right of
bequest rests on no other grounds than those of expediency. The love of children is the
strongest motive to frugality and to the accumulation of capital. The state guarantees the
power of bequest only because it thereby encourages the accumulation of capital on which
the welfare of society depends. It is true enough that inherited capital often proves a
curse. Wealth is like health, physical strength, education, or anything else which
entrances the power of the individual; it is only a chance; its moral character depends
entirely upon the use which is made of it. Any force which, when well used, is capable of
elevating a man, will, if abused, debase him in the same proportion. This is true of
education, which is often and incorrectly vaunted as a positive and purely beneficent
Instrumentality. An education ill used makes a man only a more mischievous scoundrel, just
as an education well used makes him it more efficient, good citizen and producer. So it is
with wealth; it is a means to all the higher developments of intellectual and moral
culture. A man of inherited wealth can gain in youth all the advantages which are
essential to high culture, and which a man who must first earn the capital cannot attain
until lie is almost past the time of life for profiting by them. If one should believe the
newspapers, one would be driven to a philosophy something like this: it is extremely
praiseworthy for a man born In poverty to accumulate a fortune; the reason why lie wants
to secure a fortune is that he wants to secure the position of his children and start them
with better advantages than he enjoyed himself; this is a noble desire on his part, but
lie really ought to doubt and hesitate about so doing because the chances are that lie
would (to far better for his children to leave them poor. The children who inherit his
wealth are put under suspicion by it; it creates a presumption against them in all the
activities of citizenship.
Now it is no doubt true that the struggle to win a fortune gives strength of character
and a practical judgment and efficiency which a man who inherits wealth rarely gets, but
hereditary wealth transmitted from generation to generation is the strongest instrument by
which we keep up a steadily advancing civilization. In the absence of laws of entail and
perpetuity it is inevitable that capital should speedily slip from the hold of the man who
is not fit to possess it, back into the great stream of capital, and so find its way into
the hands of those who can use it for the benefit of society.
The love of children is an instinct which, its I have said before, grows stronger with
advancing civilization. All attacks on capital have, up to this time, been shipwrecked on
this instinct. Consequently the most rigorous and logical socialists have always been led
sooner or later to attack the family. For, if bequest should be abolished, parents would
give their property to their children in their own life-time; and so it becomes a logical
necessity to substitute some sort of communistic or socialistic life for family life, and
to educate children in masses without the tie of parentage. Every socialistic theory which
has been pursued energetically has led out to this consequence. I will not follow up this
topic, but it is plain to see that the only equality which could be reached on this course
would be that men should be all equal to each other when they were all equal to swine.
Socialists are filled with the enthusiasm of equality. Every scheme of theirs for
securing equality has destroyed liberty. The student of political philosophy has the
antagonism of equality and liberty constantly forced upon him. Equality of possession or
of rights and equality before the law are diametrically opposed to each other. The object
of equality before the law is to make the state entirely neutral. The state, under that
theory, takes no cognizance of persons. It surrounds all, without distinctions, with the
same conditions and guarantees. If it educates one, it educates all-black, white, red, or
yellow; Jew or Gentile; native or alien. If it taxes one, it taxes all, by the same system
and under the same conditions. If it exempts one from police regulations in home, church,
and occupation, it exempts all. From this statement it is at once evident that pure
equality before the law is impossible. Some occupations must be subjected to police
regulation. Not all can be made subject to militia duty even for the same limited period.
The exceptions and special cases furnish the chance for abuse. Equality before the law,
however, is one of the cardinal principles of civil liberty, because it leaves each man to
run the race of life for himself as best he can. The state stands neutral but benevolent.
It does not undertake to aid some and handicap others at the outset in order to offset
hereditary advantages and disadvantages, or to make them start equally. Such a notion
would belong to the false and spurious theory of equality which is socialistic. If the
state should attempt this It would make itself the servant of envy. I am entitled to make
the most I can of myself without hindrance from anybody, but I am not entitled to any
guarantee that I shall make as much of myself as somebody else makes of himself.
***
The newest socialism is, in its method, political. The essential feature of its latest
phases is the attempt to use the power of the state to realize its plans and to secure its
objects. These objects are to do away with poverty and misery, and there are no
socialistic schemes yet proposed, of any sort, which do not, upon analysis, turn out to be
projects for curing poverty and misery by making those who have share with those who have
not. Whether they are paper money schemes, tariff schemes, subsidy schemes, internal
improvement schemes, or usury laws, they all have this in common with the most vulgar of
the communistic projects, and the errors of this sort in the past which have been
committed in the interest of the capitalist class now furnish precedents, illustration,
and encouragement for the new category of demands. The latest socialism divides into two
phases: one which aims at centralization and despotism-believing that political form more
available for its purposes; the other, the anarchical, which prefers to split up the state
into townships, or "communes," to the same end. The latter furnishes the true
etymology and meaning of- "communism" in its present use, but all socialism, in
its second stage, merges into a division of property according to the old sense of
communism.
It is impossible to notice socialism as it presents itself at the present moment
without pointing out the immense mischief which has been done by sentimental economists
and social philosophers who have thought it their professional duty, not to investigate
and teach the truth, but to dabble in philanthropy. It is in Germany that this development
has been most marked, and as a consequence of it the judgment and sense of the whole
people in regard to political and social questions have been corrupted. It is remarkable
that the country whose learned men have wrought so much for every other science,
especially by virtue of their scientific method and rigorous critical processes, should
have furnished a body of social philosophers without method, discipline, or severity of
scholarship, who have led the nation in pursuit of whims and dreams and impossible
desires. Amongst us there has been less of it, for our people still possess enough
sterling sense to reject sentimental rubbish in its grosser forms, but we have had and
still have abundance of the more subtle forms of socialistic doctrine, and these open the
way to the others. We may already see the two developments forming a congenial alliance.
We have also our writers and teachers who seem to think that "the weak" and
"the poor" are terms of exact definition; that government exists, in some
especial sense, for the sake of the classes so designated; and that the same classes
(whoever they are) have some especial claim on the interest and attention of the economist
and social philosopher. It may be believed that, in the opinion of these persons, the
training of men is the only branch of human effort in which the labor and care should be
spent, not on the best specimen but on the poorest.
It is a matter of course that a reactionary party should arise to declare that
universal suffrage, popular education, machinery, free trade, and all the other
innovations of the last hundred years are all a mistake. If any one ever believed that
these innovations were so many clear strides towards the millennium, that they involve no
evils or abuses of their own, that they tend to emancipate mankind from the need for
prudence, caution, forethought, vigilance-in short, from the eternal struggle against
evil-it is not strange that he should be disappointed. If any one ever believed that some
"form of government" could be found which would run itself and turn out the pure
results of abstract peace, justice, and righteousness without any trouble to anybody, he
may well be dissatisfied. 16 talk of turning back, however, Is only to enhance still
further the confusion and danger of our position. The world cannot go back. Its destiny is
to go forward and to meet the new problems which are continually arising. Under our
so-called progress evil only alters its forms, and we must esteem it a grand advance if we
can believe that, on the whole, and over a wide view of human affairs, good has gained a
hair's breadth over evil in a century. Popular institutions have their own abuses and
dangers just as much as monarchical or aristocratic institutions. We are only just finding
out what they are. And the institutions which we have inherited were invented to guard
liberty against the encroachments of a powerful monarch or aristocracy, when these classes
possessed land and the possession of land was the greatest social power. Institutions must
now be devised to guard civil liberty against popular majorities, and this necessity
arises first in regard to the protection of property, the first and greatest function of
government and element in civil liberty. There is no escape from any dangers involved in
this or any other social struggle save 1 n going forward and working out the development.
It will cost a struggle and will demand the highest wisdom of this and the next
generation. It is very probable that some nations-those, namely, which come up to this
problem with the least preparation, with the least intelligent comprehension of the
problem, and under the most inefficient leadership-will suffer a severe check in their
development and prosperity; it is very probable that in some nations the development may
lead through revolution and bloodshed; it is very probable that in some nations the
consequence may be a reaction towards arbitrary power. In every view we take of it, it is
clear that the general abolition of slavery has only cleared the way for a new social
problem of far wider scope and far greater difficulty. It seems to me, in fact, that this
must always be the case. The conquest of one difficulty will only open the way to another;
the solution of one problem will only bring man face to face with another. Man wins by the
fight, not by the victory, and therefore the possibilities of growth are unlimited, for
the fight has no end.
The progress which men have made in developing the possibilities of human existence has
never been made by jumps and strides. It has never resulted from the schemes of
philosophers and reformers. It has never been guided through a set program by the wisdom
of any sages, statesmen, or philanthropists. The progress which has been made has been won
in minute stages by men who had a definite task before them, and who have dealt with it in
detail, as it presented itself, without referring to general principles, or attempting to
bring it into logical relations to an a priori system. In most cases the agents are
unknown and cannot be found. New and better arrangements have grown up imperceptibly by
the natural effort of all to make the best of actual circumstances. In this way, no doubt,
the new problems arising in our modern society must be solved or must solve themselves.
The chief safeguard and hope of such a development is in the sound instincts and strong
sense of the people, which, although it may not reason closely, can react instinctively.
If there are laws-and there certainly are such-which permit the acquisition of property
without industry, by cunning, force, gambling, swindling, favoritism, or corruption, such
laws transfer property from those who have earned it to those who have not. Such laws
contain the radical vice of socialism. They demand correction and offer an open field for
reform because reform would lie in the direction of greater purity and security of the
right of property. Whatever assails that right, or goes in the direction of making it
still more uncertain whether the industrious man can dispose of the fruits of his industry
for his own interests exclusively, tends directly towards violence, bloodshed, poverty,
and misery. If any large section of modern society should rise against the rest for the
purpose of attempting any such spoliation, either by violence or through the forms of law,
it would destroy civilization as it was destroyed by the irruption of the barbarians into
the Roman Empire.
The sound student of sociology can hold out to mankind, as individuals or as a race,
only one hope of better and happier living. That hope lies in an enhancement of the
industrial virtues and of the moral forces which thence arise. Industry, self-denial, and
temperance are the laws of prosperity for men and states; without them advance in the arts
and in wealth means only corruption and decay through luxury and vice. With them progress
in the arts and increasing wealth are the prime conditions of an advancing civilization
which is sound enough to endure. The power of the human race to-day over the conditions of
prosperous and happy living are sufficient to banish poverty and misery if it were not for
folly and vice. The earth does not begin to be populated up to its power to support
population on the present stage of the arts; if the United States were as densely
populated as the British Islands, we should have one billion people here. If, therefore,
men were willing to set to work with energy and courage to subdue the outlying parts of
the earth, all might live in plenty and prosperity. But if they insist on remaining in the
slums of great cities or on the borders of an old society, and on a comparatively
exhausted soil, there is no device of economist or statesman which can prevent them from
falling victims to poverty and misery or from succumbing in the competition of life to
those who have greater command of capital. The socialist or philanthropist who nourishes
them in their situation and saves them from the distress of it is only cultivating the
distress which he pretends to cure.
Source:
William Graham Sumner (1840-1910): The Challenge of Facts, pub 1914 (written
earlier)
This text is part of the Internet
Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and
copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.
