CHAPTER LARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY

(Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and the part which selfishness and unselfishness play in the development of social life.)

Pondering the subject of this chapter, I went for a stroll in the country, and seating myself in a lonely place, became lost in thought; when suddenly my eye was caught by something moving. On the bare, hot, gray sand lay a creature that I could see when it moved and could not see when it was still, for it was exactly the color of the ground, and fitted the ground tightly, being flat, and having its edges scalloped so that they mingled with the dust. It was a lizard, covered with heavy scales, and with sharp horns to make it unattractive eating. At the slightest motion from me it vanished into a heap of stones, so quickly that my eye could scarcely follow it.

This creature, you perceive, is in its actions and its very form an expression of terror; terror of devouring enemies, of jackals that pounce and hawks that swoop, and also of the hot desert air that seeks to dry out its few precious drops of moisture. Practically all the energies of this creature are concentrated upon the securing of its own individual survival. To be sure, it will mate, but the process will be quick, and the eggs will be left for the sun to hatch out, and the baby lizards will shift for themselves—that is to say, they will be incarnations of terror from the moment they open their eyes to the light.

The jackal seeks to pounce upon the lizard, and so inspires terror in the lizard; but when you watch the jackal you find that it exhibits terror toward more powerful foes. You find that the hawk, which swoops upon the lizard, is equally quick to swoop away when it comes upon a man with a gun. This preying and being preyed upon, this mixture of cruelty and terror, is a conspicuous fact of nature; if you go into any orthodox school or college in America today, you will be taught that it is nature's most fundamental law, and governs all living things. If you should take a course in politicaleconomy under a respectable professor, you would find him explaining that such cruelty-terror applies equally in human affairs; it is the basis of all economic science, and the effort to escape from it is like the effort to lift yourself by your boot-straps.

The professor calls this cruelty-terror by the name "competition"; and he creates for his own purposes an abstract being whom he names "the economic man," a creature who acts according to this law, and exists under these conditions. One of the professor's formulas is the so-called "Malthusian law," that population presses always upon the limits of subsistence. Another is "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture," that you can get only so much product out of a certain piece of land, no matter how much labor and capital you put into it. Another is Ricardo's "iron law of wages," that wages cannot rise above the cost of living. Another is embodied in the formula of Adam Smith, that "Competition is the life of trade." The professor enunciates these "laws," coldly and impersonally, as becomes the scientist; but if you go into the world of business, you find them set forth cynically, in scores of maxims and witticisms: "Dog eat dog," "the devil take the hindmost," "business is business," "do others or they will do you."

Evidently, however, there is something in man which rebels against these "natural" laws. In our present society man has set aside six days in the week in which to live under them, and one day in the week in which to preach an entirely different and contradictory code—that of Christian ethics, which bids you "love your neighbor," and "do unto others as you would they should do unto you." Between these Sunday teachings and the week-day teachings there is eternal conflict, and one who takes pleasure in ridiculing his fellow men can find endless opportunity here. The Sunday preachers are forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the other six days; that is called "dragging politics into the pulpit." On the other hand, incredible as it may seem, there are professors of the week-day doctrine who call themselves Christians, and believe in the Sunday doctrine, too. They manage this by putting the Sunday doctrine off into a future world; that is, we are to pounce upon one another and devour one another under the "iron laws" of economics so long as we live on earth, but in the next world we shall play on golden harps and havenothing to do but love one another. If anybody is so foolish as to apply the Sermon on the Mount to present-day affairs, we regard him as a harmless crank; if he persists, and sets out to teach others, we call him a Communist or a Pacifist, and put him in jail for ten or twenty years.

In the Book of the Mind, I have referred to Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution," which I regard as one of the epoch-making books of our time. Kropotkin clearly proves that competition is not the only law of nature, it is everywhere modified by co-operation, and in the great majority of cases co-operation plays a larger part in the relations of living creatures than competition. There is no creature in existence which is entirely selfish; in the nature of the case such a creature could not exist—save in the imaginations of teachers of special privilege. If a species is to survive, some portion of the energies of the individual must go into reproduction; and steadily, as life advances, we find the amount of this sacrifice increasing. The higher the type of the creature, the longer is the period of infancy, and the greater the sacrifice of the parent for the young. Likewise, most creatures make the discovery that by staying together in herds or groups, and learning to co-operate instead of competing among themselves, they increase their chances of survival. You find birds that live in flocks, and other birds, like hawks and owls and eagles, that are solitary; and you find the co-operating birds a thousand times as numerous—that is to say, a thousand times as successful in the struggle for survival. You find that all man's brain power has been a social product; the supremacy he has won over nature has depended upon one thing and one alone—the fact that he has managed to become different from the "economic man," that product of the imagination of the defenders of privilege.

It is evident that both competition and co-operation are necessary to every individual, and the health of the individual and of the race lies in the proper combination of the two. If a creature were wholly unselfish—if it made no effort to look after its own individual welfare—it would be exterminated before it had a chance to reproduce. If, on the other hand, it cannot learn to co-operate, its progeny stand less chance of survival against creatures which have learned this important lesson. We have a nation of a 110,000,000 people, who have learned to co-operate to a certain limited extent.Some of us realize how vastly the happiness of these millions might be increased by a further extension of co-operation; but we find ourselves opposed by the professors of privilege—and we wish that these gentlemen would go out and join the lizards of the desert sands or the sharks of the sea, creatures which really practice the system of "laissez faire" which the professors teach.

The plain truth is that we cannot make a formula out of either competition or co-operation. We cannot settle any problem of economics, of business or legislation, by proclaiming, for example, that "Competition is the life of trade." Competition may just as well turn out to be the death of trade; it depends entirely upon the kind of competition, and the stage of trade development to which it is applied. In the early eighteenth century, when that formula of Adam Smith was written, competition was observed to keep down prices and provide stimulus to enterprise, and so to further abundant production. But the time came when the machinery for producing goods was in excess, not merely of the needs of the country, but of the available foreign markets, and then suddenly the large-scale manufacturers made the discovery that competition was the death of trade to them. They proceeded, as a matter of practical common sense, and without consulting their college professors, to abolish competition by forming trusts. We passed laws forbidding them to do this, but they simply refused to obey the laws. In the United States they have made good their refusal for thirty-five years, and in the end have secured the blessing of the Supreme Court upon their course.

So now we have co-operation in large-scale production and marketing. It is known by various names, "pools," "syndicates," "price-fixing," "gentlemen's agreements." It is a blessing for those who co-operate, but it proves to be the death of those who labor, and also of those who consume, and we see these also compelled to combine, forming labor unions and consumers' societies. Each side to the quarrel insists that the other side is committing a crime in refusing to compete, and our whole social life is rent with dissensions over this issue. Manifestly, we need to clear our minds of dead doctrines; to think out clearly just what we mean by competition, and what by co-operation, and what is the proper balance between the two.

I have been at pains in this book to provide a basis for the deciding of such questions. It is a practical problem, the fostering of human life and the furthering of its development. We cannot lay down any fixed rule; we have to study the facts of each case separately. We shall say, this kind of competition is right, because it helps to protect human life and to develop its powers. We shall say, this other kind of competition is wrong because it has the opposite effect. We shall say, perhaps, that some kind was right fifty years ago, or even ten years ago, because it then had certain effects; but meantime some factor has changed, and it is now having a different effect, and therefore ought to be abolished.

There has never been any kind of human competition which men did not judge and modify in that way; there is no field of human activity in which ethical codes do not condemn certain practices as unfair. The average Englishman considers it proper that two men who get into a dispute shall pull off their coats, and settle the question at issue by pummeling each other's noses. But let one of these men strike his opponent in the groin, or let him kick his shins, and instantly there will be a howl of execration. Likewise, an Anglo-Saxon man who fights with the fists has a loathing for a Sicilian or Greek or other Mediterranean man who will pull a knife. That kind of competition is barred among our breeds; and also the kind which consists of using poisons, or of starting slanders against your opponent.

If you look back through history, you find many forms of competition which were once eminently respectable, but now have been outlawed. There was a time, for example, when the distinction we draw between piracy and sea-war was wholly unknown. The ships of the Vikings would go out and raid the ships and seaports of other peoples, and carry off booty and captives, and the men who did that were sung as heroes of the nation. The British sea-captains of the time of Queen Elizabeth—Drake, Frobisher, and the rest of them—are portrayed in our school books as valiant and hardy men, and the British colonies were built on the basis of their activities; yet, according to the sea laws in force today, they were pirates. We regard a cannibal race with abhorrence; yet there was a time when all the vigorous races of men were cannibals, and the habit of eating your enemies inbattle may well have given an advantage to the races which practiced it.

On the other hand, you find sentimental people who reject all competition on principle, and would like to abolish every trace of it from society, and especially from education. But stop and consider for a moment what that would mean. Would you abolish, for example, the competition of love, the right of a man to win the girl he wants? You could not do it, of course; but if you could, you would abolish one of the principal methods by which our race has been improved. Of course, what you really want is, not to abolish competition in love, but to raise it to a higher form. There is an old saying, "All's fair in love and war," but no one ever meant that. You would not admit that a man might compete in love by threatening to kill the girl if she preferred a rival. You would not admit that he might compete by poisoning the other man. You would not admit that he might compete by telling falsehoods about the other man. On the other hand, if you are sensible, you admit that he has a right to compete by making his character known to the girl, and if the other man is a rascal, by telling the girl that.

Would you abolish the competition of art, the effort of men to produce work more beautiful and inspiring than has ever been known before? Would you abolish the effort of scientists to overthrow theories which have hitherto been accepted? Obviously not. You make these forms of competition seem better by calling them "emulation," but you do not in the least modify the fact that they involve the right of one person to outdo other persons, to supplant them and take away something from them, whether it be property or position or love or fame or power. In that sense, competition is indeed the law of life, and you might as well reconcile yourself to it, and learn to play your part with spirit and good humor.

Also, you might as well train your children to it. You will find you cannot develop their powers to the fullest without competition; in fact, you will be forced to go back and utilize forms of competition which are now out of date among adults. I have told in the Book of the Body how I myself tried for ten years or more to live without physical competition, and discovered that I could not; I have had to take up some form of sport, and hundreds of thousands of other menhave had the same experience. What is sport? It is a deliberate going back, under carefully devised rules, to the savage struggles of our ancestors. The very essence of real sport is that the contestants shall, within the rules laid down, compete with each other to the limit of their powers. With what contempt would a player of tennis or baseball or whist regard the proposition that his opponent should be merciful to him, and let him win now and then! Obviously, these things have no place in the game, and to be a "good sport" is to conform to the rules, and take with enjoyment whatever issue of the struggle may come.

But then again, suppose you are competing with a child; obviously, the conditions are different. You no longer play the best you can, you let the child win a part of the time; but you do not let the child know this, or it would spoil the fun for the child. You pretend to try as hard as you know how, and you cry out in grief when you are beaten, and the child crows with delight. And yet, that does not keep you from loving the child, or the child from loving you.

The purpose of this elaborate exposition is to make clear the very vital point that a certain set of social acts may be right under some conditions, and desperately wrong under other conditions. They may be right in play, and not in serious things; they may be right in youth, and not in maturity; they may be right at one period of the world's development, while at another period they are destructive of social existence. If, therefore, we wish to know what are right and wrong actions in the affairs of men, if we wish to judge any particular law or political platform or program of business readjustment, the first thing we have to do is to acquire a mass of facts concerning the society to which the law or platform or program, is to be applied. We need to ask ourselves, exactly what will be the effect of that change, applied in that particular way at that particular time. In order to decide accurately, we need to know the previous stages through which that society has passed, the forces which have been operating in it, and the ways in which they have worked.

But also we must realize that the lessons of history cannot ever be accepted blindly. The "principles of the founders" apply to us only in modified form; for the world in which we live today is different from any world which has ever been before, and the world tomorrow will be different yet. Weare the makers of it, and the masters of it, and what it will be depends to some extent upon our choice. In fact, that is the most important lesson of all for us to learn; the final purpose of all our thought about the world is to enable us to make it a happier and a better world for ourselves and our posterity to live in.

(Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and whether there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.)

In the letters of Thomas Jefferson is found the following passage:

"All eyes are open or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."

This, which Jefferson, over a hundred years ago, described as a "palpable truth," is still a long way from prevailing in the world. We are trying in this book not to take anything for granted, so we do not assume this truth, but investigate it; and we begin by admitting that there are many facts which seem to contradict it, and which make it more difficult of proof than Jefferson realized. It is not enough to point out the lack of saddles on the backs, and of boots and spurs on the feet of newly born infants; for the fact is that men are not exploited because of saddles, nor is the exploiting accomplished by means of boots and spurs. It is done by means of gold and steel, banks and credit systems, railroads, machine-guns and battleships. And while it is not true that certain races and classes are born with these things on them, they are born to the possession of them, and the vast majority of mankind are without them all their lives, and without the ability to use them even if they had them.

The doctrine that "all men are created equal," or that they ought to be equal, we shall describe for convenience as the democratic doctrine. It first came to general attention through Christianity, which proclaimed the brotherhood of all mankind in a common fatherhood of God. But even as taught by the Christians, the doctrine had startling limitations. It was several centuries before a church council summoned the courage to decide that women were human beings,and had souls; and today many devout Christians are still uncertain whether Japanese and Chinese and Filipinos and Negroes are human beings, and have souls. I have heard old gentlemen in the South gravely maintain that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a different species of animal. I have heard learned men in the South set forth that the sutures in the Negro skull close at some very early age, and thus make moral responsibility impossible for the black race. And you will find the same ideas maintained, not merely as to differences of race and color, but as to differences of economic condition. You will find the average aristocratic Englishman quite convinced that the "lower orders" are permanently inferior to himself, and this though they are of the same Anglo-Saxon stock.

For convenience I will refer to the doctrine that there is some natural and irremovable inferiority of certain races or classes, as the aristocratic doctrine. I will probably startle some of my readers by making the admission that if there is any such natural or irremovable inferiority, then a belief in political or economic equality is a blunder. If there are certain classes or races which cannot think, or cannot learn to think as well as other classes and races, those mentally inferior classes and races will obey, and they will be made to obey, and neither you nor I, nor all the preachers and agitators in the world, will ever be able to arrange it otherwise. Suppose we could do it, we should be committing a crime against life; we should be holding down the race and aborting its best development.

Is there any such natural and irremovable inferiority in human beings? When we come to study the question we find it complicated by a different phenomenon, that of racial immaturity, which we have to face frankly and get clear in our minds. One of the most obvious facts of nature is that of infancy and childhood. We have just pointed out that if you are competing with a child, you do it in an entirely different way and under an entirely different set of rules, and if you fail to do this, you are unfair and even cruel to the child. And it is a fact of our world that there are some races more backward in the scale of development than other races. You may not like this fact, but it is silly to try to evade it. People who live in savage huts and beat on tom-toms and fight with bows and arrows and cannot count beyonda dozen—such people are not the mental or moral equals of our highly civilized races, and to treat them as equals, and compete with them on that basis, means simply to exterminate them. And we should either exterminate them at once and be done with it, or else make up our minds that they are in a childhood stage of our race, and that we have to guide them and teach them as we do our children.

There is no more useful person than the wise and kind teacher. But suppose we saw some one pretending to be a teacher to our children, while in reality enslaving and exploiting them, or secretly robbing and corrupting them—what would we say about that kind of teacher? The name of that teacher is capitalist commercialism, and his profession is known as "the white man's burden"; his abuse of power is the cause of our present racial wars and revolts of subject peoples. A fair-minded man, desirous of facing all the facts of life, hardly knows what stand to take in such a controversy; that is, hardly knows from which cause the colored races suffer more—the white man's exploitation, or their own native immaturity.

To say that certain races are in a childhood stage, and need instruction and discipline, is an entirely different thing from saying they are permanently inferior and incapable of self-government. Whether they are permanently inferior is a problem for the man of science, to be determined by psychological tests, continued possibly over more than one generation. We have not as yet made a beginning; in fact, we have not even acquired the scientific impartiality necessary to such an inquiry.

In the meantime, all that we can do is to look about us and pick up hints where we can. In places like Massachusetts, where Negroes are allowed to go to college and are given a chance to show what they can do, they have not ousted the white man, but many of them have certainly won his respect, and one finds charming and cultured men among them, who show no signs of prematurely closed up skulls. And one after another we see the races which have been held down as being inferior, developing leadership and organization and power of moral resistance. The Irish are showing themselves today one of the most vigorous and high-spirited of all races. The Hindus are developing a movement which in the long run may prove more powerful than the white man's gold andsteel. The Egyptians, the Persians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, are all devising ways to break the power of capitalist newspaper censorship. How sad that the subject races of the world have to get their education through hatred of their teachers, instead of through love!

Of course, these rebel leaders are men who have absorbed the white man's culture, at least in part; practically always they are of the younger generation, which has been to the white man's schools. But this is the very answer we have been seeking—as to whether the race is permanently inferior, or merely immature and in need of training. It is not only among the brown and black and yellow races that progress depends upon the young generations; that is a universal fact of life.

In the course of this argument we shall assume that the Christian or democratic theory has the weight of probability on its side, and that nature has not created any permanently and necessarily inferior race or class. We shall assume that the heritage of culture is a common heritage, open to all our species. We shall not go so far as the statement which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created free and equal"; but we shall assert that they are created "with certain inalienable rights," and that among these is the right to maintain their lives and to strive for liberty and happiness. Also, we shall say that there will never be peace or order in the world until they have found liberty, and recognition of their right to happiness.

(Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, and what sanction it can claim.)

It is possible to conceive an order of nature in which all individuals were born and developed exactly alike and with exactly equal powers. Such is apparently the case with lower animals, for example the ants and the bees. But among human beings there are great differences; some are born idiots and some are born geniuses. Even supposing that we are able to do away with blindness and idiocy, it is not likely that we can ever make a race of uniform genius. There will always be some more capable minds, who will discover new powers of life, and will compel the others to learn from them. It is to the interest of the race that this learning should be done as quickly as possible. In other words, the great problem of society is how to recognize superior minds and put them in authority.

We look back over history, and discover a few wise men, and many rulers; but very, very rarely does it happen that the ruler is a wise man, or a friend of wise men. Far more often we find the ruler occupied in suppressing the wise man and his wisdom. There was a ruler who allowed the mob to crucify Jesus, and another who ordered Socrates to drink the hemlock, and another who tortured Galileo, and another who chopped off the head of Sir Walter Raleigh—and so on through a long and tragic chronicle. And even when the accident of a wise ruler occurs he is apt to be surrounded by a class of parasites and corrupt officials who are busy to thwart his will.

The general run of history is this: some group seizes power by force, and holds it by the same means, and seeks to augment and perpetuate it. Those who win the power are frequently men of energy and practical sense, and do fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand on their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality and self-indulgence, and the subject classes are plundered and driven to revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the courseof time it succeeds, and there is a new dynasty, or a new ruling class, sometimes a little better than the old, sometimes worse.

How shall one judge whether the new régime is better or worse? Obviously, this is a most important question; it has to do, not merely with history, but with our daily affairs, our voting. As one who has read some tens of thousands of pages of history, and has pondered its lessons with heart-sickness and despair, I lay down this general law by which revolts and changes of power may be judged: If the change results in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is a reaction; but if the change results in distributing the power among a larger group of the community, then that community has made a step in advance.

I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American country—Guatemala, I think—which showed 130 revolutions in less than a hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much, some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang. Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace" revolutions.

But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling class to give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today, reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then move backward nearly as far.

We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that change does not necessarily mean progress fromany rational or moral point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge, and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the population than before the change took place?

You will note the words "actual, effective power." Nothing is more familiar in human life than for forms to survive after the spirit which created them is dead; and nothing is more familiar than the use of these forms as masks to deceive the populace. There have been many times in history when people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased to count for anything; there have been many times when people have gone through the motions of freedom long after they have been slaves. Mexico under Diaz had one of the most perfect of constitutions, and was in reality one of the most perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are sadly familiar with political democracies which do not work.

Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that history is a blind struggle for useless power, and that the notion of progress is a delusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, I think it is easily to be demonstrated that there has been a steady increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge among the whole population. I think that through most of the period of written history we can trace a real development in human society. I think we can analyze the laws of this development, and explain its methods; and I think this knowledge is precious to us, because it enables us to accelerate the process and to make the end more certain. This task, the analysis of social evolution, is the task we have next to undertake.

(Discusses the series of changes through which human society has passed.)

We have now to consider, briefly, the history of man as a social being, the groups he has formed, and the changes in his group systems. Everything in life grows, and human societies are no exception to the rule. They have undergone a long process of evolution, which we can trace in detail, and which we find conforms exactly to the law laid down by Herbert Spencer; a process whereby a number of single and similar things become different parts of one complex thing. In the case of human societies the units are men and women, and social evolution is a process whereby a small and simple group, in which the individuals are practically alike, grows into a large and complex group, in which the individuals are widely different, and their relations one to another are complicated and subtle.

There are two powerful forces pressing upon human beings, and compelling them to struggle and grow. The first of these forces is fear, the need of protection against enemies; the second is hunger, the need of food and the means of producing and storing food. The first causes the individual to combine with his fellows and establish some form of government, and this is the origin of political evolution. The second causes him to accumulate wealth, and to combine industrially, and this is the origin of economic evolution. Because the first force is a little more urgent, we observe in the history of human society that evolution in government precedes evolution in industry.

I made this statement some twenty years ago, in an article in "Collier's Weekly." I wrote to the effect that man's first care was to secure himself against his enemies, and that when he had done this he set out to secure his food supply. "Collier's" called upon the late Professor Sumner of Yale University, a prize reactionary and Tory of the old school, to answer me; and Professor Sumner made merry over my statement, declaringthat man sought for food long before he was safe from his enemies. Some years later, when Sumner died, one of his admirers wrote in the New York "Evening Post" that he had completely overwhelmed me, and I had acknowledged my defeat by failing to reply—something which struck me as very funny. It was, of course, possible that Sumner had overwhelmed me, but to say that I had considered myself overwhelmed was to attribute to me a degree of modesty of which I was wholly incapable. As a matter of fact, I had had my usual experience with capitalist magazines; "Collier's Weekly" had promised to publish my rejoinder to Sumner, but failed to keep the promise, and finally, when I worried them, they tucked the answer away in the back part of the paper, among the advertisements of cigars and toilet soaps.

Professor Sumner is gone, but he has left behind him an army of pupils, and I will protect myself against them by phrasing my statement with extreme care. I do not mean to say that man first secures himself completely against his enemies, and then goes out to hunt for a meal. Of course he has to eat while he is countering the moves of his enemies; he has to eat while he is on the march to battle, or in flight from it. But ask yourself this question: which would you choose, if you had to choose—to go a couple of days with nothing to eat, or to have your throat cut by bandits and your wife and children carried away into slavery? Certainly you would do your fighting first, and meantime you would scratch together any food you could. While you were devoting your energies to putting down civil war, or to making a treaty with other tribes, or to preparing for a military campaign, you would continue to get food in the way your ancestors had got it; in other words, your economic evolution would wait, while your political evolution proceeded. But when you had succeeded in putting down your enemies, and had a long period of peace before you, then you would plant some fields, and domesticate some animals, or perhaps discover some new way of weaving cloth—and so your industrial life would make progress.

It is easy to see why Professor Sumner wished to confuse this issue. He could not deny political evolution, because it had happened. He despised and feared political democracy, but it was here, and he had to speak politely to it, as to a tiger that had got into his house. But industrial democracywas a thing that had not yet happened in the world; it was only a hope and a prophecy, and therefore a prize old Tory was free to ridicule it. I remember reading somewhere his statement—the notion that democracy had anything to do with industry, or could in any way be applied to industry, was a piece of silliness. So, of course, he sought to demolish my idea that there was a process of evolution in economic affairs, paralleling the process of political evolution which had already culminated in democracy.

Let us consider the process of political evolution, briefly and in its broad outlines. Take any savage tribe; you find it composed of individuals who are very much alike. Some are a little stronger than others, a little more clever, more powerful in battle; but the difference is slight, and when the tribe chooses someone to lead them, they might as well choose one man as another. They all have a say in the tribe councils, both men and women; their "rights" in the tribe are the same. They are, of course, slaves to ignorance, to degrading superstition and absurd taboos; but these things apply to everyone alike, there is no privileged caste, no hereditary inequality.

But little by little, as the tribe grows in numbers, and in power and intelligence, as it comes to capture slaves in battle, and to unite with other tribes, there comes to be an hereditary chieftain and a group of his leading supporters, his courtiers and henchmen. When the society has evolved into the stage which we call barbarism, there is a permanent superior caste; there are hereditary priests, who have in their keeping the favor of the gods; and there is a subject population of slaves.

The society moves on into the feudal stage, in which the various grades and classes are precisely marked off, each with its different functions, its different privileges and rights and duties. The feudal principalities and duchies war and struggle among themselves; they are united by marriage or by conquest, and presently some stronger ruler brings a great territory under his power, and we have what is called a kingdom; a society still larger, still more complex in its organization, and still more rigid in its class distinctions. Take France, under the ancient régime, and compare a courtier or noble gentleman with a serf; they are not only different before the law, they are different in the language they use, in the clothes they wear, in the ideas they hold; they aredifferent even in their bodies, so that the gentleman regards the serf as an inferior species of creature.

The kings warred among themselves and emperors arose. The ultimate ideal in Europe was a political society which should include the whole continent, and this ideal was several times almost attained. But it is the rule of history that wherever a large society is built upon the basis of privilege and enslavement, the ruling classes prove morally and intellectually unequal to the burden put upon them; they become corrupted, and their rule becomes intolerable. This happened in Europe, and there came political revolutions—first in England, which accomplished it by gradual stages, and then in the French monarchy, and quite recently in a dozen monarchies and empires, large and small.

What precisely is this political revolution? Let us consider the case of France, where the change was sudden, and the issues precisely drawn. King Louis XIV had said, "I am the state." To a person of our time that might seem like boasting, but it was merely an assertion of the existing political fact. King Louis was the state by universal consent, and by divine authority, as all men believed. The army was his army, the navy was his navy, and wars, when he made them, were his wars. Everyone in the state was his subject, and all the property of the state was his personal, private property, to dispose of as he pleased. The government officials carried out his will, and members of the nobility held the land and ruled in his name.

But now suddenly the people of France overthrew the king, and put him to death, and drove the nobles into exile; they seized the power of the French state, and proclaimed themselves equal citizens in the state, with equal voices in its government and equal rights before the law. So we call France a republic, and describe this form of society as political democracy. It is the completion of the process of political evolution, and you will see that it moves in a sort of spiral; having completed a circle and got back where it was before, but upon a higher plane. The citizens of a modern republic are equal before the law, just as were the members of the savage tribe; but the political organization is vastly larger, and infinitely more complicated, and every individual lives his life upon a higher level, because he shares in the benefits of this more highly organized and more powerful state..

(Examines the process of evolution in industry and the stage which it has so far reached.)

And now let us consider the process of industrial evolution. We shall find it to be exactly the same thing, reproducing the changes in another field of activity. You may picture two gigantic waves sweeping over the ocean. In some places the waves are far apart, and in other places they are closer together; for a time they may mingle, and perhaps their bases always mingle. It would be easy for a critic to point out how political affairs play a leading part in industrial evolution, and vice versa; it would be easy to argue that property rules the political state, or again, that the main function of the political state is to protect property. As I have said, man has to fight his enemies, and he has to seek food, and often he has to do the two things at the same time; but nevertheless, broadly speaking, we observe two great waves, sweeping over human society, and most of the time these waves are clearly separated and easily distinguished.

Industry in a savage tribe is, like government, simple and uniform; all the members of the tribe get their living in the same way. One may be a little more expert as a fisherman, another as a gatherer of cocoanuts, but the fisherman gathers cocoanuts and the cocoanut-gatherer fishes. In the days of primitive communism there is little economic strife and little change; but as slavery comes in, and the private property system, there begins industrial war—the members of the tribe trade with one another, and argue over prices, and gradually some get the better of others, they accumulate slaves and goods, and later on they appropriate the land to their private use. Of course, the men who do this are often the rulers of the tribe, and so politics and industry are mixed; but even assuming that the state never interfered, assuming that the government allowed business affairs to work themselves out in their own way, the tendency of competition is always to end in monopoly. The big fish eat the little fish, the strong gain advantage over the weak, the rich grow richer, and the poorgrow relatively poorer. As the amount of trading increases, and men specialize in the arts of bargaining, we see again and again how money concentrates in the hands of a few. It does this, even when the political state tries to prevent it; as, for example, when the princes and dukes of the Middle Ages would torture the Jewish money-lenders and take away their treasure, but the Jews never failed to grow rich again.

It is when political evolution has completed itself, and a republic has been set up, that a free field is given to economic forces to work themselves out to their logical end. We have seen this in the United States, where we all started pretty much on the same economic level, and where political tyranny has had little hold. Our civilization is a civilization of the trader—the business man, as we call him; and we see how big business absorbs little business, and grows constantly larger and more powerful. We are familiar with what we call "graft," the use by business men of the powers of government to get trade advantage for themselves, and we have a school of old-time thinkers, calling themselves "Jeffersonian Democrats," who insist that if only there had never been any government favors, economic equality and democracy would have endured forever in our country. But it is my opinion that government has done far more to prevent monopoly and special privilege in business than to favor it; and nevertheless, monopoly has grown.

In other words, the tendency toward concentration in business, the absorption of the small business by the big business, is an irresistible natural process, which neither can be nor should be hindered. The condition of competition, whether in politics or in industry, is never a permanent one, and can never be made permanent; it is a struggle which automatically brings itself to an end. Large-scale production and distribution is more economical than small-scale, and big business has irresistible advantages of credit and permanence over little business. As we shall presently show, the blind and indiscriminate production of goods under the competitive system leads to the glutting of markets and to industrial crises. At such times the weaker concerns are weeded out and the strong ones take their trade; and as a result, we have the modern great corporation, the most powerful machine of production yet devised by man, and which corresponds in every aspect to the monarchy in political society.

We are accustomed to speak of our "captains of industry," our "coal kings," and "beef barons" and "lords of steel," and we think we are using metaphors; but the universality of these metaphors points to a fundamental truth in them. As a matter of fact, our modern captain of industry fills in the economic world exactly the same functions as were filled in ancient days by the head of a feudal state. He has won his power in a similar struggle, and he holds it by similar methods. He rules over an organization of human beings, arranged, economically speaking, in grades and classes, with their authorities and privileges and duties precisely determined, as under the "ancient régime." And just as King Louis said, "I am the state," so Mr. Armour considers that he is Armour & Co., and Mr. Morgan considers that he is the house of Morgan, and that the business exists for him and is controlled by him under divine authority.

If I am correct in my analysis of the situation, this process of industrial evolution is destined to complete itself, as in the case of the political state. The subject populations of industry are becoming more and more discontented with their servitude, more and more resentful of that authority which compels them to labor while others reap the benefit. They are organizing themselves, and preparing for a social transformation which will parallel in every detail the revolution by which our ancestors overthrew the authority of King George III over the American colonies, and made inhabitants of those colonies no longer subjects of a king, but free and equal citizens of a republic. I expect to see a change throughout the world, which will take the great instruments of production which we call corporations and trusts, out of the hands of their present private owners, and make them the property, either of the entire community, or of those who do the work in them. This change is the "social revolution," and when it has completed itself, we shall have in that society an Industrial Republic, a form of business management which constitutes economic democracy.

The history of the world's political revolutions has been written almost exclusively by aristocratic or bourgeois historians; that is to say, by men who, whatever their attitude toward political democracy, have no conception of industrial democracy, and believe that industrial strife and enslavement are the normal conditions of life. If, however, you will readKropotkin's "Great French Revolution," you will be interested to discover how important a part was played in this revolution by economic forces. Underneath the political discontent of the merchants and middle classes lay a vast mass of social discontent of the peasants and workers. It was the masses of the people who made the revolution, but it was the middle classes who seized it and turned it to their own ends, putting down attempts toward economic equality, and confining the changes, so far as possible, to the political field.

And everywhere throughout history, if you study revolutions, you find that same thing happening. You find, for example, Martin Luther fighting for the right to preach the word of God without consulting the Pope; but when the peasants of Germany rose and sought to set themselves free from feudal landlords, Luther turned against them, and called upon the princes to shoot them down. "The ass needs to be beaten, and the populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand." The landlords and propertied classes of England were willing to restrict the power of the king, and to give the vote to the educated and well-to-do; but from the time of Jack Cade to our own they shoot down the poor.

But meantime, the industrial process continues; the modern factory system brings the workers together in larger and larger groups, and teaches them the lesson of class consciousness. So the time of the workers draws near. The first attempt in modern times to accomplish the social revolution and set up industrial democracy was in the Paris Commune. When the French empire collapsed, after the war with Germany in 1871, the workers of Paris seized control. They were massacred, some 50,000 of them, and the propertied classes of France established the present bourgeois republic, which has now become the bulwark of reaction throughout the Continent of Europe.

Next came the Russian revolution of 1905, and this was an interesting illustration of the relation between the two waves of social progress. Russia was a backward country industrially, and according to theory not at all prepared for the social revolution. But nowadays the thoughts of men circulate all over the world, and the exiles from Russia had absorbed Marxian ideas, and were not prepared to accept a purely political freedom. So in 1905, after the Japanese war, when the people rose and forced the Czar to grant a parliament,the extremists made an effort to accomplish the social revolution at the same time. The peasants began to demand the land, and the workers the factories; whereupon the capitalists and middle classes, who wanted a parliament, but did not want Socialism, went over to the side of reaction, and both the political and social revolutions were crushed.

But then came the great war, for which Russia with her incompetent government and her undeveloped industry was unprepared. The strain of it broke her down long before the other Allies, and in the universal suffering and ruin the Russian people were again forced to rise. The political revolution was accomplished, the Czar was imprisoned, and the Douma reigned supreme. Middle class liberalism throughout the world gave its blessings to this revolution, and hastened to welcome a new political democracy to the society of nations. But then occurred what to orthodox democratic opinion has been the most terrifying spectacle in human history. The Russian people had been driven too far towards starvation and despair; the masses had been too embittered, and they rose again, overthrowing not only their Czar and their grand dukes, but their capitalists and land-owners. For the first time in history the social revolution established itself, and the workers were in control of a great state. Ever since then we have seen exactly what we saw in Europe from 1789 onward, when the first political republic was established, and all the monarchies and empires of the world banded themselves together to stamp it out. We have witnessed a campaign of war, blockade, intrigue and propaganda against the Soviet government of Russia, all pretending to be carried on in the name of the Russian people, and for the purpose of saving them from suffering—but all obviously based upon one consideration and one alone, the fear that an effort at industrial self-government might possibly prove to be a success.

Whether or not the Soviets will prove permanent, no one can say. But this much is certain; just as the French revolution sent a thrill around the world, and planted in the hearts of the common people the wonderful dream of freedom from kings and ruling classes, just so the Russian revolution has brought to the working masses the dream of freedom from masters and landlords. Everywhere in capitalist society this ferment is working, and in one country after another wesee the first pangs of the new birth. Also we see capitalists and landlords, who once found "democracy," "free speech" and "equality before the law" useful formulas to break down the power of kings and aristocrats, now repudiating their old-time beliefs, and going back to the frankest reaction. We see, in our own "land of the free," the government refusing to reprint the Declaration of Independence during the war, and arresting men for quoting from it and circulating it; we even see the Department of Justice refusing to allow people to reprint the Sermon on the Mount!

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