Outspoken Essays | Page 7

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 f��tiche, 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 the Roman Empire.
We may have a faint hope that some of these fallacies will be abandoned by the workmen when their destructive results can no longer be concealed. But sentimentalism seems to be incurable. It erects irrationality into an act of religious faith, gives free rein to the emotion of pity, and thinks that it is imitating the Good Samaritan by robbing