Outspoken Essays | Page 7

reject all
legislation, all authority, and all influence, even when it has proceeded
from universal suffrage.' These powerful movements, opposed as they
are to each other, agree in spurning the very idea of democracy, which
Lord Morley defines as government by public opinion, and which may
be defined with more precision as direct government by the votes of the
majority among the adult members of a nation. Even a political
philosopher like Mr. Lowes Dickinson says, 'For my part, I am no
democrat.'
Who then are the friends of this curieux fétiche, as Quinet called
democracy? It appears to have none, though it has been the subject of
fatuous laudation ever since the time of Rousseau. The Americans burn
incense before it, but they are themselves ruled by the Boss and the
Trust.
The attempt to justify the labour movement as a legitimate
development of the old democratic Liberalism is futile. Freedom to
form combinations is no doubt a logical application of laisser faire; and
the anarchic possibilities latent in laisser faire have been made plain in
the anti-democratic movements of labour. But Liberalism rested on a
too favourable estimate of human nature and on a belief in the law of
progress. As there is no law of progress, and as civilised society is
being destroyed by the evil passions of men, Liberalism is, for the time,
quite discredited. It would also be true to say that there is a
fundamental contradiction between the two dogmas of Liberalism.

These were, that unlimited competition is stimulating to the
competitors and good for the country, and that every individual is an
end, not a means. Both are anarchical; but the first logically issues in
individualistic anarchy, the last in communistic anarchy. The economic
and the ethical theory of Liberalism cannot be harmonised. The
result--cruel competition tempered by an artificial process of
counter-selection in favour of the unfittest--was by no means
satisfactory. But it was better than what we are now threatened with.
That the labour movement is economically rotten it is easy to prove. In
the words of Professor Hearnshaw, 'the government has ceased to
govern in the world of labour, and has been compelled, instead of
governing, to bribe, to cajole, to beg, to grovel. It has purchased brief
truces at the cost of increasing levies of Danegeld drawn from the
diminishing resources of the patient community. It has embarked on a
course of payment of blackmail which must end either in national
bankruptcy or in the social revolution which the anarchists seek.' The
powerful trade-unions are now plundering both the owners of their
'plant,' and the general public. It is easy to show that their members
already get much more than their share of the national wealth.
Professor Bowley[6] has estimated that an equal division of the
national income would give about £160 a year to each family, free of
taxes. But even this estimate, discouraging as it is, seems not to allow
sufficiently for the fact that under the present system much of the
income of the richer classes is counted twice or three times over.
Abolish large incomes, and jewels, pictures, wines, furs, special and
rare skill like that of the operating surgeon and fashionable portrait
painter, lose all or most of their money value. All the large professional
incomes, except those of the low comedian and his like, are made out
of the rich, and are counted at least twice for income-tax. It is certain
that a large part of the national income could not be 'redistributed,' and
that in the attempt to do so credit would be destroyed and wealth would
melt like a snow man. The miners, therefore, are not seeking justice;
they are blackmailing rich and poor alike by their monopoly of one of
the necessaries of life. And now they strike against paying income-tax!
It is not necessary or just to bring railing accusations against any class

as a body. Power is always abused, and in this case there is much
honest ignorance, stimulated by agitators who are seldom honest. In a
recent number of the Edinburgh Review Sir Lynden Macassey speaks
of the widespread, almost universal, fallacies to which the hand-worker
has fallen a victim. They believe that all their aspirations can be
satisfied out of present-day profits and production. They believe that in
restricting output they are performing a moral duty to their class. They
do not believe that the prosperity of the country depends upon its
production, and are opposed to all labour-saving devices. They refuse
co-operation because they desire the continuance of the class-war. Such
perversity would seem hardly credible if it were not attested by
overwhelming evidence. The Government remedy is first to create
unemployment and then to endow it--the shortest and maddest road to
ruin since the downfall of