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motive power for the will than the theorist had anticipated, if the inconveniently numerous laggards cannot be kept up to concertpitch without repeated recourse to the slave-whip, what is to become of industrial production? With the State responsible for the maintenance of all new arrivals, and with voluntary associations in lieu of marriage, the population is likely to increase merrily. What if production be all the while on the decrease from lack of energy and lack of motive? Will any conceivable plan of distribution be a success if a constant increase of claimants be accompanied by a continuous decrease in the sum of things which have to be distributed?

Even however if the rift within the lute prove slow in making its music mute, on what principle are we to suppose that distribution is to take place in the meantime? Is each worker's share of the industrial pool to be determined by the time which his work has taken him? If, indeed, all labour were manual labour, and if commodities or services derived the whole of their value to the community from the manual labour devoted to their production, then labour-time might be a sort of rough and ready common measure. But economic facts make short work of these crude postulates. Manual labour is one element in the production of wealth, but it is only one out of many. There is the capital which, in whatever shape or form, made the labour possible. There is the demand for the products of the labour, there is the sagacity that anticipated such demand, there is the inventive genius that is represented in the machinery, the organisation and administration, the insight and sound judgment which economise labour and make it effective, the settled conditions of property and credit which are to all industry as the very breath of its life. And to maintain that these elements can all be brought under a common measure of labour-time is to talk nonsense. James Watt, for example, was a labourer. Can his work be valued by setting it side by side with the work of an engine-stoker and just counting up their hours? Newton was a labourer. Are we to value the Principia by a labour schedule, and generally to estimate all inventive, artistic, scientific, and literary genius by the simple mechanism of a time-table? It is not by the manual labour of the masses that the world has been made illustrious and prosperous, but by the intellectual labour of its most highly gifted sons.

Looked at as a scheme of industrial production and distribution, we are unable to understand how the Socialistic State can be imagined to work equitably, or how it could even get its wheels to go round at all. Neither can we discover how human ingenuity could define with any precision the fair share in the entirety of products to which particular individuals were entitled, or how the competent and the incompetent should be made to participate alike as admitted equals in the ultimate control of the community's business. Indeed, the more we look at it the more hopelessly irreconcilable does Socialism

appear to us to be, either with ordinary common sense or with elementary morality.

For what, to begin with, is this 'State'? For purposes of direction and management it can only mean the government instituted by the electorate, or some committee formed out of it, while to this government, or to this committee, it would appear that despotic powers and duties of infinite difficulty and complexity are to be entrusted. In the State-that is to say, in the bureaucracy and in its innumerable staff of officials-are to be concentrated duties which for their efficient discharge under our present system of society require the training of a lifetime. The State is to act as universal parent, landlord, farmer, merchant, carrier, manufacturer, educator, and everything else. How is supply to be kept commensurate with demand? Individual tastes are of every variety. The demand of to-day is not the demand of to-morrow. A State which is the sole producer must also be the sole judge of what shall be produced. No labour certificates can command what the State does not think fit to stock. With the State, moreover, as sole employer, and in despotic control of the Press, no one can either go on strike, or challenge its distribution of work, or its awards in respect of work done. To fulfil its endless functions the Government should collectively possess all the justice of an Aristides, all the incorruptibility of a Rhadamanthus, all the infallibility of the Holy See. On what grounds are the members to be credited beforehand with such superlative endowments? What is there in the nature of things to qualify even the picked men of the Co-operative Commonwealth for playing the part of an omniscient earthly Providence? Why should they suddenly become so infinitely wiser than the individuals from whom they have been selected? Is it not far more likely that this phenomenal' Jack of all trades' will turn out to be master of none? And what will happen to trade and commerce if the Government blunder? What will secure the stability of the State if its awards give dissatisfaction, and the citizens decline to accept them? Or, to look a little further afield, is the Socialistic State to have an isolated political existence, or is it to have relations with the unconverted capitalistic States? If so, how are those relations to be harmoniously adjusted?` If not, by what magic is it to be brought about that the conversion of the nations shall be simultaneous, that all the Socialist time-pieces shall strike the fateful hour together, and the red flag be run up in every country of importance on the self-same day?

But if in these and many other respects the new Republic seems to offend our common sense, it offends in an even greater degree our elementary ideas of right and wrong. Respect for property and contracts, respect for the spirit of independence, respect for the observance of good faith between man and man, these things are the bed-rock on which for generations we have been building up the edifice of our

ordered liberties, of our public credit, and of our national honour. To preach doctrines which treat contractual obligations of every kind as so much waste-paper, is to poison the moral sense of the community. To invoke the aid of law in order to universalise confiscation is to make of law not the embodiment of passionless reason but the embodiment of irrational malignity. A propaganda which sweeps contemptuously aside all the influences of religion, of patriotism, of the sense of historic continuity and of a common national heritage, of family affections and of home-ties, can only serve to demoralise our social and political life, to degrade its ideals, and to materialise it into something inexpressibly repugnant to the hearts and consciences of ordinary men, and women.

These, then, are some of the considerations which make it evident to our mind that we must look elsewhere than to Socialism for the amelioration of the evils which, be it gratefully acknowledged, it has at any rate done a great deal to force us to recognise, evils which are a standing disgrace and menace to us, evils which we all deplore. But it can never be too clearly understood that Socialism, as expounded in its authoritative publications, raises questions which cannot be narrowed into a class struggle between the 'haves' and the 'havenots.' The real issues at stake lie deeper down. They are not economic only, but moral and spiritual, and in fighting Socialism we are doing battle for the cause of the national life as a whole, and for the manysided humanity which all citizens of the State possess in common.

Judged by the mouth of its prophets, be they 'major' or 'minor,' Socialism is based not on justice between man and man, but on injustice. Professing to befriend human nature it stands revealed as its worst enemy. It has no lever wherewith to raise the soul. The spirit which it breathes is not the spirit of a common citizenship, but the spirit of class-hatred, the spirit of envy, of malice, and of all uncharitableness. Blind to the fact that life develops from within, it supposes moral regeneration to be attainable through the instrumentality of a purely external organisation. It would make the State the mainspring of character whereas it is character that must always be the mainspring of the State. Idealising man into something far better than he is, it leaves him with no restraint of discipline for those private passions whose centrifugal energies have so often perturbed society. Far from encouraging in us all that is manly and brave and self-reliant, it panders to slackness, to moral cowardice, and to infirmity of will and purpose.

It does not lie within the compass of our present subject to plead the cause of social reform. Our business has not been with what reform may be able to do, but with the impotence of Socialism to bring the State salvation. But it is none the less our conviction that the industrial problem is the great and urgent problem of the day. On our industrial efficiency depend both the well-being of society and

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the stability of the State. Housed, for example, as the poor are now, it is practically impossible to ameliorate their lot. And, furthermore, it is our conviction that in well-considered social reform lies our best hope. But it is not mainly to the State that we ought to look if we desire to raise the level of our national life. It is to ourselves. It is our individual lives which in their sum make up the life of society at large, and it is by trying to strengthen the physical, moral, and intellectual energies of the units that we shall best serve the welfare of the whole. Our material progress, as the least observant among us cannot fail to realise, has for generations been rapid and continuous. Whether we have made any equivalent moral progress is another matter. Moral progress is a very complicated thing. A fair comparison of the moral level of our age with the moral level of the civilisations of Greece and Rome might probably show that in some ways we were better and in some worse, and he would be a sagacious judge who could equitably strike the balance. But however this may be, there is in the age in which we are living ample room among those classes to whom fortune has been relatively kind for a nobler art and a loftier ideal of life. To have a good time' is not everything, unless indeed duty, and moral responsibility, and citizenship, be empty and meaningless words. And if men are to accept life as a moral trust they need to breathe a bracing atmosphere. Socialism appears to us to offer them an atmosphere of secularism, of animal licence, and of monotonous slavishness. The social reformer will look for something more invigorating and stimulating, and will prefer an atmosphere of religion, morality, and freedom. 'Das Gesetz,' as Goethe says so well, 'nur kann uns Freiheit geben.' When we reflect that it has taken Europe nearly two thousand years to shake off slavery, we ought not to give way to impatience. The man who is honestly desirous to serve the cause of gradual reform will pin his faith to no nostrums, whether of State or of private manufacture. He will study as deeply as he can the causes and conditions of the evils with which he has to grapple, and he will welcome help from any quarter, provided only that he can be satisfied that in accepting it he is not undermining those virile qualities in the community which it is essential to preserve and to encourage. He will refuse the offer of any Socialist blinkers, and instead of confining his vision to the present, he will compare it with the past, that he may learn how best to pilot it towards the future. He will repudiate the claim of any one portion of the community to say to the others' Stand aside, I am the State.' He will do all that in him lies to quicken around him a sense of justice, of social duty, corporate membership, and moral responsibility. He will preach the old gospel of liberty through service, and he will not sell his soul for a dream.

H. W. HOARE.

CRIMINALS AND CRIME

A REJOINDER

MR H. J. B. MONTGOMERY'S Criminals and Crime' article in these pages last month may be regarded either as a protest from the prison or as a manifesto from the camp of the 'humanitarians.' The frankness with which he avows himself an 'ex-prisoner' and the manliness with which he speaks of his unfortunate experiences are deserving of respect, and were he to write in a different spirit he would command sympathetic attention. But the tone of his article is deplorable. His purpose in writing is to reply to Sir Alfred Wills' article which appeared in the December number of this Review. And in his prefatory paragraph he says, 'As the writer of that article aspires to learn in the matter of the undoubtedly difficult problem of dealing with criminals and crime, I propose, in all modesty, to attempt the educational process.' He then proceeds to state his qualifications for the task he thus undertakes. They depend on the fact that he is an ex-prisoner and 'an observant and truthful man.' And upon these grounds he claims that his opinions upon criminals and the punishment of crime are worth more than all the wisdom of all the philosophers and all the knowledge and judgment of all the judges and of all the police and prison officials that exist or have existed in this country.'

It is doing the writer no more than justice to say that this sort of rodomontade is unworthy of him. And we may expect to find that in the sequel we are not listening to the suggestions of a thoughtful ex-prisoner, who desires in all modesty' to instruct us, but to the lucubrations of the professional humanitarians with whom he has lately identified himself. Hence a display of ignorant dogmatism and intolerable conceit, so unlike his previous contribution to this Review.

He begins by inveighing against Sir Alfred Wills for dealing only with crimes against property, ignoring Sir Alfred's explanation of that limitation, namely, that his article is based upon my book entitled Criminals and Crime, the special subject of which is organised and

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