p. 76My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
I consider your fifteenth letter, in a sense, the most important of the series. It deals with a subject that lies at the root of the whole question. The chief objection to Socialism, turns on what we might call, the nature of human nature. You have one view of this; your opponents have another. Which is right? Prove you wrong here, and the whole of your beautiful fabric disappears as completely as the rainbow when the sun goes down. To prove you wrong here will not be difficult.
You recognise the argument of your objectors. They say, human nature is not good enough for Socialism. You say, in effect, in reply to this, that human nature, while not good enough at present, would become so, under right conditions. You say it is bad because it has for a long time been exposed to conditions that are not right. You say that men “instinctively prefer light to darkness, love to hatred, good to evil.” This view you try to establish by, what I might call a piece of military strategy; you bring your whole force to bear on what you consider the weakest position; unfortunately for your effort, it is a non-essential position—a mere earthwork, thrown up by an irresponsible volunteer, the capture of which leaves the main position as it was.
No man of discernment would seriously maintain that “greed is the motive power of humanity.” Human motives are complex. The question is, what is their leading drift, when left to evolve themselves, under the power of nature’s bias?
Yet you fix on this one item—avarice; and you work it to death with much eloquent writing. You quote or paraphrase the argument of someone to this effect; “Socialism is impossible because it would destroy the incentive of gain.” You fix on the word p. 77 gain with almost a glare in your eye. You seize it, you toss it, you turn it over and over, like a dog worrying a rat, and you succeed in killing it of course: but this is not the enemy that is attacking you; when you have killed the rat, you have lions, tigers and crocodiles waiting, not to speak of British linesmen and blue jackets.
You are able, of course, to show triumphantly, that many human beings are not animated by mercenary motives, but you cannot show that they are not impelled by “incentive.” There are various kinds of incentive. All men require incentive of some kind. Apart from it, human nature stagnates. The objection to Socialism is, that it would arrest the motive to exertion, by insuring the supply of every man’s wants independently of his own effort. The native tendency to inaction would certainly be fostered by a system which secured a man’s well-being apart from his individual exertion. You will pooh, pooh, this idea of course; but the laws of nature work themselves out, whatever we may say. The majority of men would lie in bed all day, if the necessity of providing daily bread did not compel them to get up. Others would lounge in the fields, if they did not know they would starve if they did not work. The necessity of providing food is a constant whip on human sloth, and keeps all men busy. Socialism would arrest this whip. It would try to keep it going in some way of course; but it would be powerless against the enervating effect of the conviction in all men’s minds, that they would be provided for by the community. You may say you would compel men to work; how? By withholding food or wages? By flogging them? This would not be Socialism. What sort of an ism it would be, it might be hard to say. It would certainly be a very unsocial “ism.” It would not only be coercion with a vengeance; but it would involve an amount of espionage on private life that would be utterly alien to all ideas hitherto in vogue in England. We should get to a deeper depth than on the Continent; for how are you to know that men are skulking, unless you put officers over them to watch? (And by the way, the officers might skulk.)
You accuse your opponents of the densest ignorance of human nature. This must be a false charge, Mr. Blatchford. It is impossible that men of average intelligence, dealing with human nature every day, can be ignorant of it. It does not require a very great amount of study, or much depth of penetration, to become acquainted with human nature. It is not a thing in a corner, and p. 78 does not require seeking out. It is before us and within us all day long; very ordinary men can scarcely miss a tolerably thorough acquaintance with it.
How can you expect to make an impression on intelligent readers, when you rail against men of capacity in various walks of life, as victims of the densest ignorance on this matter of every-day knowledge? Such extravagance is useful in one way: it shows the wide gulf lying between the commonsense of the community, and the principles on which Socialism is founded, and it suggests a very strong suspicion that principles must be wrong, that go so directly in the teeth of the ordinary experience of men. The most charitable treatment of such principles is to set them down to generous imagination.
This, in your own case, is evidently the origin of them. You say, you look to “Poets, Novelists, and Artists,” as the Authorities on human nature. Why, Mr. Blatchford, these are the last men in the world I should have thought of regarding as authorities on human nature. The knowledge of human nature is an affair of accurate discernment and very practical fact. “Poets, Novelists, and Artists,” are men of imagination, who see the world through the chromosphere of their own ardent temperaments. I should say that the business men, and educational men, whom you dismiss so cavalierly, would be much more likely to be “authorities,” as to human nature, than dreamers and idealists.
But, in fact, the subject is not one requiring “authorities” at all. It does not require any special gift to know human nature. Very average intelligence has only to open its eyes in the daily walks of life (and it cannot well close them), to obtain a tolerably accurate knowledge of the “complex and awful thing” in question.
You rightly deny that avarice is the strongest motive in human nature; but you seem to fail to grasp human nature’s fundamental characteristics, and therefore miss the force of the real objection to Socialism arising out of these characteristics. You give us a series of graphically drawn men and women of various kinds and characters, and you finish each graphic sketch with the telling remark, “And that is human nature.” But this is not a scientific elaboration of the subject. Human nature, for the purposes of Scientific analysis, is that which human nature is, when left to evolve p. 79 itself by its own force and bias—free from all external constraints and illuminations.
The lady nurse at the seat of war, is not a spontaneous evolution of human nature at all. She is the product of influences and principles, which are no part of human nature. There never would have been such a lady, apart from the ideals of the Christian religion operating through generations, and acting powerfully on her individual self in the various activities of family and educational life.
Similarly, it is not “human nature” that we see in the best ranks of European society, but human nature modified and elevated by influences extraneous to human nature, traceable for their source to the Semitic cradle of civilization.
There is a history in the case which cannot be ignored, in a scientific treatment of the subject. The work and influence of Christ, in the course of centuries, have affected the types of human life all through Europe.
Human nature is not the same thing in nations and countries where there has been no modification from external sources. You apparently recognise this in “the Mongolian, Turanian, and other inferior races,” which you expressly exclude from your argument. You should not exclude them. You cannot exclude them in a just treatment of the subject. You are formulating a theory of human nature; and if your theory is a true one, it will account for all its types. It does not do this. It does not account for the condition of the vast mass of mankind. The “inferior races” are the bulk of the race. The Caucasian type is a small minority. How comes it that the majority are “bad” if the natural tendency of human nature is in the direction of good?
You are misled by special samples. You must look at human nature as it unfolds itself by its unaided resources, to see what it is in itself. A peach, a potato, a rose, a cabbage, will all develop their several qualities, quite irrespective of soil or treatment. Granted that they will thrive best and come to the finest maturity under the best conditions of soil and sunlight; but culture or no culture, meagrely or bountifully, they will develop rose nature, cabbage nature, peach nature, and not the nature of anything else. Their qualities are inherent. Is it so with human nature? Yes, as to certain qualities but not as to others. Bad qualities are inherent like the cabbage qualities in a cabbage: good qualities do not p. 80 come of themselves. This is notorious. Knowledge, kindness, honesty, and good manners are good qualities. A child when it is born has no knowledge: and it will never get any if it is not put in. If it is left to itself it will not seek it, but will run wild in the streets and the fields, and grow up a pest to society. But though it does not bring knowledge into the world, it brings instincts of various kinds, which it does not require to learn. It brings appetite, desire, resentment, cupidity. It has to learn to be kind. It does not know what honesty is till it is taught. As for good manners, consideration for others, they are a matter of painful acquisition.
Therefore, when you see a refined, intelligent, self-sacrificing man or woman, you do not see a specimen of human nature as it is in itself, but human nature with extraneous grafts. The qualities that constitute moral excellence are not inherent. No man left to himself would develop into an intelligent, self-controlling, disinterested man. Left to himself, he would grow up an ignorant and brutal savage. Human nature is the material that can be shaped into the image of the divine; but it will not of itself yield that image. The image has to be superimposed from without. Human nature is but the quarry marble that requires the artist’s chisel to form it into a statue. The chiselling operation comes with agencies that have been divinely introduced into the world for the purpose. You cannot dissociate them from the name and work of Christ. It is only where this is influential that you see the work in its perfect form. There are many blotches: the models are all directly related to Christ.
I see you refer to phrenology. There is no doubt that phrenologists are right in their theory of the native capacities of human nature, and that the recognition of the truth which they teach would simplify the problem of human nature, where it has been hopelessly perplexed by the artificial philosophy of the Greeks. The human brain—the seat of the human mind—is a bundle of blind impulses which are in themselves the raw material of mentality. Out of this raw material, education of the right sort can form a noble being; but what is the right education is a question. One thing is certain, that no education is complete that leaves out any of the faculties. Another thing is certain, that the finest faculties are in the crown of the brain, and embrace those which give us reverence for the eternal, and affinities in spiritual directions; p. 81 and that, therefore, a Socialistic education that would leave out God and religion would leave out the education of the best part of man, and give us a poor and arid result in the kind of men it would breed.
You disagree with the Bible in holding that human nature is not innately bad, and you disagree with the notorious lessons of experience to which I have referred. Mr. Blatchford, this appears to me like disagreeing with all truth, natural and revealed. The facts are all against you. If human nature were not innately bad, it would not develop badly, as it does, in every case where it is left to itself in an individual or a nation. Bring up a child to manhood with a dumb nurse, cut off from contact from all other human beings, and you would have a speechless imbecile, a beast of prey, nothing but evil. Nations having had no contact with instruction exterior to themselves are nations of savages.
It is a world-wide lesson. If the innate tendency of human nature were good, human beings would be good wherever we found them, whereas they are the reverse, without exception. The necessity for education is the standing proof of the fact. You don’t require to educate dogs and monkeys and lions and tigers. They grow into proper lions and tigers, dogs and monkeys, of their own natural growth. Their dog and monkey qualities are inherent, and they develop spontaneously. But man, in his proper human qualities, does not develop spontaneously. They have to be engrafted from without. Of himself, he turns to evil. Why it should be so is another question. At the present, we are only concerned with the fact. It is a fact that I just find recognised in an unexpected quarter: by no less an authority (as people reckon) than a Parliamentary document. So recently as Tuesday, April 23, the Departmental Committee on Prisons issued its report. In this report, (as quoted by the Daily News, of the following day), the committee quote with approval the evidence given before them by Mr. Michael Davitt. They say: “Mr. Davitt told us that he was speaking to an educated habitual criminal in Dartmoor, and was pointing out how foolish it was, apart from the immorality of the thing, to risk getting seven years’ penal servitude for £10 or £20 of stolen goods. The man replied, ‘Well, yes, that is all right coming from you, but put yourself in my position. I never knew my father or my mother. My first recollection is being turned out of a workhouse. I fell among thieves. I got educated in crime. p. 82 I learned to read and write in prison. Unlike you, I have had no moral training. Now, I hold that man is naturally a thief. Take, for instance, a child in its mother’s arms; anything that excites its fancy it wants to get, and if that natural feeling is not corrected by parental training and moral influence and education, it gets stronger as the child grows older. Now, I am such a product of your civilisation. You allowed me to grow up with these animal instincts uncorrected.’”
Mr. Blatchford, facts govern the conclusions and theories of wise men; you write like a wise man. Perhaps you may yet show that you are really so, by yielding to the lesson of all experience, and abjuring the faith you have professed before all the world in Merrie England, that man is inherently good.
You say human nature “only becomes bad when it is poisoned and perverted and defiled.” Mr. Blatchford, the truth is just the other way round—that human nature only becomes elevated when it becomes anti-doted, harmonised and cleansed by a process from without. The poison, the perversion, and the defilement are all within. This view may be unacceptable, but if it is true, what a stupendous and disastrous mistake it is to ignore it in the attempt to construct a new social system. You are committing the very blunder which you lay at the door of your opponents—building your economic science upon a false estimate of human nature, and therefore rearing a structure that is bound to come down in ruins. God avert “England’s Ruin.”
JOHN SMITH.