CHAPTER LV.

THE SOCIALIST OBJECTIONS TO THE PRESENT ORDER OF

SOCIETY EXAMINED.

INCREASE OF POPULATION AND THE GROWING PRESSURE UPON THE MEANS OF

SUBSISTENCE.—EDUCATION AND MORAL IMPROVEMENT THE TRUE REMEDY FOR

EXISTING OR THREATENED EVILS.—ERRORS OF COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM.—HOW

SOCIALISTIC LEADERS AND PHILOSOPHERS RECOGNIZE THE TRUTH.—GROWTH OF

POPULATION DOES NOT MEAN POVERTY.

Mr. Mill says: “It is impossible to deny that the considerations brought

to notice in the preceding chapter make out a frightful case either

against the existing order of society or against the position of man

himself in this world.” How much of the evils should be referred to the

one, and how much to the other, is the principal theoretic question

which has to be resolved. But the strongest case is susceptible of

exaggeration; and it will be evident to many readers, even from the

passages I have quoted, that such exaggeration is not wanting in the

representations of the ablest and most candid Socialists. Though much of

their allegations is unanswerable, not a little is the result of errors

in political economy; by which, let me say once for all, I do not mean

the rejection of any practical rules of policy which have been laid down

by political economists—I mean ignorance of economic facts, and of the

causes by which the economic phenomena of society as it is are actually

determined.

In the first place, it is unhappily true that the wages of ordinary

labor, in all the countries of Europe, are wretchedly insufficient to

supply the physical and moral necessities of the population in any

tolerable measure. But, when it is further alleged that even this

insufficient remuneration has a tendency to diminish; that there is, in

the words of M. Louis Blanc, _une basse continue des salaires_ (a

continual decline of wages); the assertion is in opposition to all

accurate information, and to many notorious facts. It has yet to be

proven that there is any country in the civilized world where the

ordinary wages of labor, estimated either in money or in articles of

consumption, are declining; while in many they are, on the whole, on the

increase—and an increase which is becoming, not slower, but more rapid.

There are, occasionally, branches of industry which are being gradually

superseded by something else, and in those, until production

accommodates itself to demand, wages are depressed; which is an evil,

but a temporary one, and would admit of great alleviation even in the

present system of social economy. A diminution thus produced of the

reward of labor in some particular employment is the effect and the

evidence of increased remuneration, or of a new source of remuneration,

in some other; the total and the average remuneration being

undiminished, or even increased. To make out an appearance of diminution

in the rate of wages in any leading branch of industry, it is always

found necessary to compare some month or year of special and temporary

depression at the present time, with the average rate, or even some

exceptionally high rate, at an earlier time. The vicissitudes are no

doubt a great evil, but they were as frequent and as severe in their

former periods of economical history as now. The greater scale of the

transactions, and the greater number of persons involved in each

fluctuation, may make the change appear greater, but though a large

population affords more sufferers, the evil does not weigh heavier on

each of them individually. There is much evidence of improvement, and

none that is at all trustworthy, of deterioration, in the mode of living

of the laboring population of the countries of Europe. When there is any

appearance to the contrary it is local or partial, and can always be

traced either to the pressure of some temporary calamity, or to some bad

law or unwise act of government which admits of being corrected, while

the permanent causes all operate in the direction of improvement.

M. Louis Blanc, therefore, while showing himself much more enlightened

than the old school of levellers and democrats—inasmuch as he recognizes

the connection between low wages and the over-rapid increase of

population—appears to have fallen into the same error which was at first

committed by Malthus and his followers, that of supposing that because

population has a greater power of increase than subsistence, its

pressure upon subsistence must be always growing more severe. The

difference is that the early Malthusians thought this an irrepressible

tendency, while M. Louis Blanc thinks that it can be repressed, but only

through a system of Communism. It is a great point gained for truth when

it is recognized that the tendency to over-population is a fact which

Communism, as well as the existing order of society, would have to deal

with. And it is encouraging that this necessity is admitted by the more

considerable chiefs of all existing schools of Socialism. Owen and

Fourier, as well as M. Louis Blanc, admitted it, and claimed for their

respective systems a pre-eminent power of dealing with this difficulty.

However this may be, experience shows that in the existing state of

society the pressure of population on subsistence, which is the

principal cause of low wages, though a great is not an increasing evil;

on the contrary, the progress of all that is called civilization has a

tendency to diminish it, partly by the more rapid increase of the means

of employing and maintaining labor, partly by the increased facilities

opened to labor for transporting itself to new countries and unoccupied

fields of employment, and partly by a general improvement in the

intelligence and prudence of the population. This progress, no doubt, is

slow; but it is much that such progress should take place at all, while

we are still only in the first stage of that public movement for the

education of the whole people which, when more advanced, must add

greatly to the force of the two causes of improvement specified above.

It is, of course, open to discussion what form of society has the

greatest power of dealing successfully with the pressure of population

on subsistence, and on this question there is much to be said for

Socialism; what was long thought to be its weakest point will, perhaps,

prove to be one of its strongest. But it has no just claim to be

considered as the sole means of preventing the general and growing

degradation of the mass of mankind through the peculiar tendency of

poverty to produce over-population. Society as at present constituted is

not descending into that abyss, but gradually, though slowly, rising out

of it, and this improvement is likely to be progressive if bad laws do

not interfere with it.

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