Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
retained by the sufferance of the garrison of the citadel. The
Revolution came when the people saw that they must either take the
citadel or evacuate the outworks.[788]
The significance of the title of Bellamy’s supplementary volume
should now be clear. The problem of democracy always and everywhere
is the problem of achieving economic equality. Without that all talk
of liberty and fraternity, all equality before the law, is empty and
sinister mockery. How can a man call himself citizen who must beg a
fellow citizen to become his master? How shall the wage-taker treat
his boss as a brother? Of what worth is equality before the law to
one without a job? Democracy and servitude cannot lie down together.
Wage-slavery debases the dignity of man; it puts upon him the greatest
of indignities, servitude to things; it cheats him of his right to
life, liberty, and happiness; it is the evil thing which degrades human
society to the level of the pigsty, and puts a premium upon the hoggish
instincts of men. It sows suspicion and hate between equals, changes
the unsuccessful into cringing sycophants, sets its heel upon the weak
and the helpless. The thing were too monstrous to be conceivable were
it not the everyday fact of life--more than that, were it not the ideal
of a supposedly democratic society, apologized for by our plutocratic
culture, defended by all that accounts itself respectable, buttressed
by the formidable turrets of the law, written down as a major premise
in our treatises on political science: and all in the sacred name of
individual enterprise. It is familiarity that blinds us to its evils,
and makes its victims only callous or sullen. And it endures because
men are deceived by its half-truths, seduced by its specious freedoms,
led astray by its fatuous promises. Being taught to set the privilege
of fighting above the privilege of helping, how should they not account
their egoism more sacred than their altruism?
When men shall leave off bounding their democratic horizons by the
old political economy and the old law, Bellamy was persuaded, they
will see more clearly. The political science of private property
conceived of government as a police power to safeguard the stake
of the individual in society. Very well, democracy needs only to
redefine the terms “stake-in-society” and “police power” to arrive at
a competent philosophy. The definition of the former is ready to hand
in the familiar words of the Declaration of Independence--the stake
of every man in society is no less than his life, his liberty, and
his happiness. To secure him in this stake is the primary function
of government. The property interpretation of the stake-in-society
principle was sound in its assumption of the economic as the
determining basis; we need only to democratize the interpretation to
arrive at our end.
“The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of
the individual. That dignity, consisting in the quality of human
nature, is essentially the same in all individuals, and therefore
equality is the vital principle of democracy. To this intrinsic
and equal dignity of the individual all material conditions
must be made subservient, and personal accidents and attributes
subordinated. The raising up of the human being without respect of
persons is the constant and only rational motive of the democratic
policy. Contrast with this conception that precious notion of your
contemporaries as to restricting suffrage. Recognizing the material
disparities in the circumstances of individuals, they proposed to
conform the rights and dignities of the individual to his material
circumstances instead of conforming the material circumstances to
the essential and equal dignity of man.”
“In short ... while under our system we conformed men to things,
you think it more reasonable to conform things to men?”
“That is, indeed,” replied the doctor, “the vital difference
between the old and the new orders.”[789]
As a preliminary to this necessary end of conforming things to men
there must be a reinterpretation of the functions of the state. Here
again Bellamy’s political economy gives a surprising twist to the
current police theory of government.
“In my day ... it was considered that the proper functions of
government, strictly speaking, were limited to keeping the peace
and defending the people against the public enemy, that is to the
military and police powers.”
“And in heaven’s name, who are the public enemies?” exclaimed Dr.
Leete. “Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and
nakedness?”[790]
The plutocratic interpretation of the police power signifies no other
than the protection of the individual in the enjoyment of the fruits
of his exploitation--that his right to keep and use what he has got
must be held more sacred than the welfare of society; that the law,
the military, the police, shall defend him in his right to do with his
winnings as he will. The democratic interpretation of the police power,
on the other hand, holds that the state must intervene to the end that
property shall serve a social and not a private interest; that the weak
shall not be exploited by individual enterprise; that all shall be
protected in their right to life, liberty, and happiness. It demands an
ethical basis for the social economy. The legal maxim that a man may do
as he will with his own, is open to question. The matter of ownership
ceases to be a legal question of title, and becomes a moral question
of right and justice. Land, the machinery of production, the profits
of organized industry, coal, ores, oil, lumber--are such things justly
subject to private preëmption? Shall the complex structure of society
be bottomed on the law of contract, or on the ethics of social justice?
Substitute one for the other and a revolution is accomplished.
Our ethics of wealth is ... extremely simple. It consists merely in
the law of self-preservation, asserted in the name of all against
the encroachments of any. It rests upon a principle which a child
can understand as well as a philosopher, and which no philosopher
ever attempted to refute--namely, the supreme right of all to live,
and consequently to insist that society shall be so organized as to
secure that right.[791]
Thus in the political science of democracy the old police theory of
government merges in an all-embracing trustee theory. To a paternal
state is entrusted the protection of the interests of society. That the
welfare of all shall be faithfully served, it is essential that the
common will control and direct the machinery for the production and
distribution of wealth. The anarchy of individualism must give place
to an ordered regimentation, under a centralized authority. The social
meaning of property must be probed to the bottom and the exact line
between public and private rights be marked off. This brings Bellamy to
his fundamental principle--the collectivistic organization of industry
as the _sine qua non_ of a democratic society. How effectively such a
centralized state must wage war upon poverty, how adequately it must
protect the citizen against the common enemies of cold, hunger, and
nakedness, it was the purpose of _Looking Backward_ and _Equality_ to
picture. “A horrible cockney dream,” William Morris called _Looking
Backward_; and by way of answer sketched his _News from Nowhere_,
loveliest of Utopias with its anarchistic freedom set in country
fields. Morris was an artist with an ample share of Ruskinian prejudice
against the machinery that Bellamy so greatly developed; nevertheless
Bellamy was far more modern and realistic in his understanding of the
part the machine will play in the society of the future. To socialize
the machine--to put upon it the slave-work of society, surely means
much to human freedom.
_Looking Backward_ is a brief for no particular school of socialism,
although it inclines somewhat to Fabianism. Not through strikes,
boycotts and lockouts, was the great change brought about, but in
consequence of the spread of social intelligence and social ethics.
Unionism was not the father of the Revolution, nor agrarianism its
mother. Direct action and violence in any form rather hindered than
helped. Class propaganda was too narrow and too selfish. The anarchists
with their “red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing
people up,” retarded the Revolution by frightening the timid and making
“a thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend.” “The labor
parties, as such, never could have accomplished anything on a large or
permanent scale.”
It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system
on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production
of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but
equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant,
old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any
prospect that it would be achieved. Then the national party arose
to carry it out by political methods.[792]
To wait for the consent of all would seem to the impatient a long
postponement of the millennium; yet the postponement, Bellamy argued,
need not be long. The overreaching greed of private capitalism was
daily hastening it. The new order must come about speedily as a
necessary consequence of two forces; the compulsion of economic
fact, and the stimulus of ideas. As the monopolistic tendencies of
private capitalism open the eyes of the dullest to the growth of a
plutocratic power beyond the control of the majority, a quick fear of
the impending tyranny must lead men to question the larger scope and
ultimate significance of the whole system. Under the lash of this fear
their minds will open to ideas which have long been knocking in vain
for admission. The sources of monopolistic power will be examined,
and the successive steps by which the few have gained control of the
machinery of production will become clear. Already the fertile idea of
the unearned increment which the land-taxers have got hold of and are
spreading widely, has prepared the way for the revolutionary doctrine
of the social fund. Let the common man once understand how small a
portion of wealth is produced by his private effort, and how large
a portion by the agency of social organization with its heritage of
experience and invention, and he will understand how unjustly private
capitalism appropriates what it has not earned. The conclusion that
wealth should belong to him who produces it, is a deduction of the
most elementary ethics; and since the production of wealth in quantity
is a consequence of the social organization and social heritage, the
conviction becomes irresistible that such wealth belongs to society
and cannot justly be appropriated by the individual.[793] Let such
an idea spread widely and the way is prepared for the taking over
by the state of the machinery of production, and the assumption by
it of the obligation of universal trusteeship. Then will come the
Revolution. Coöperation will take the place of competition; production
and distribution for the common well-being will destroy the malevolent
trinity of rent, interest, and profit, which have so long held the
world in poverty; the intelligent strength of all will stand between
the individual and cold, hunger, and nakedness. The noble words of
the Declaration of Independence will no longer be a catch-vote and
a mockery to the exploited multitude, but a reality. The democratic
ideal, with its social philosophy summarized in the phrase, “the only
wealth is life,” will destroy the last vestiges of ancient tyranny
and men will be free. Rooted in economic equality the fine flower