p. 97My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
It may seem to be making a long descent from the ground taken in my last letter to discuss with you the question of human motives as affected by “Pay.” But this is the question you deal with in your 18th letter; and as it has some bearing on the scheme of Socialism, I must follow you.
And first I must point out to you that you make a mistake in narrowing the consideration of pay to the mere question of possessing money. “This paltry plea about pay” (as you express it) involves much larger elements. Money is of no value except as a means of accomplishing desire. The man who desires to possess money apart from this, is the poor mean creature you make him out to be. It is not so with the man who desires it for what it will enable him to do. To such a man, it represents what he wishes to be done; and you must realise that what a man wishes to be done—whether good or not very good—represents the very strongest incentive that could possibly be brought to bear upon him. What stronger incentive could a man possess than the prospect of being able to accomplish what he wishes to be accomplished—whether it be the benefit of his family, the gratification of his friends, or the advantage of some class in society? I leave out of account all base desires. You would do such a man a gross injustice if you disconnected such a prospect from the incentive he derives from the prospect of obtaining money. It savours of vulgar claptrap to set down this incentive to “greed,” “avarice,” the “love of pelf,” &c. You might just as well attribute the appeal for funds put out by various philanthropic and other societies to avarice.
Because, therefore, it appeals to a man’s most powerful motive to hold out to him the prospect of enabling him to gratify his dearest desire, whatever that may be—(the culture of the arts, the practice of music, the growing of flowers, the study of literature, or, p. 98 on a larger scale, the endowment of friends, the relief of the needy, the development of one’s own town, &c., &c.)—the prospect of obtaining money acts as a powerful incentive without exposing any man to the imputation of the lower motives represented by the terms “greed, cupidity, avarice,” &c. It is not, therefore, according to true enlightenment, Mr. Blatchford, for you to talk, as you do in your 18th letter, against the bestowal of money as an incentive. It is an incentive that appeals to all men.
The very admissions you are compelled to make ought to suggest to you that there is something wrong with your theory. You exclaim, concerning Mr. Bradlaugh, for example, that his attitude in the matter was “a marvellous thing.” Mr. Bradlaugh opposed Socialism on the ground that in abolishing high wages for high work, it would remove the incentives that have produced the clever men of society. You cannot understand this; you say it comes curiously from his mouth. You turn round upon him and exclaim: “Was gain your incentive?” Oh, Mr. Blatchford, this is not the issue. You are putting it on too low a ground. “Gain” is but a subordinate phase of the greater subject of incentive. By itself, it has the low sense you attach to it; but in the discussion you have tabled, it cannot be considered by itself. It is not scientific to consider it by itself. The gain of money is only the gain of power to accomplish one’s desires; and in this sense, gain is not a low motive, but may be said to be all men’s incentive, including Mr. Blatchford’s, I am quite sure. You think well of Mr. Bradlaugh, evidently. Well, Mr. Bradlaugh knew his own mind, and he confesses that the taking away of the possibility of making money would be taking away the incentive of human action. You must either suppose he was a low fellow, or that his view was conformable with that high opinion you entertain of him. It could only be the latter if he took the large and only reasonable view of the subject that I have presented—namely, that money is an incentive to all classes of men, because it is the key that opens the door to all incentives. If this was his view—and, Mr. Blatchford, it is bound to be your view on calm consideration, for you cannot deny that money is a power with all men, good and evil—if this was Mr. Bradlaugh’s view, it ought not to be “marvellous” to you—unless you are in that verdant state of mind to which everything is “wonderful” and “prodigious”!—or unless (which is the likelier view) a false theory compels you to regard as marvellous p. 99 that which is not marvellous at all when the true theory is recognised.
So, when you contemplate “practical statesmen” who endorse Mr. Bradlaugh’s view, you exclaim, “With how little wisdom is the world governed!” And you ask me to realise the low morality, intelligence, and knowledge of those who advocate such a view. Mr. Blatchford, do you really think Mr. Morley and the class you lash so severely are foolish, immoral, unintelligent, or ignorant? or do you not think it more likely that the fault lies with the theory that compels you to think they are?
You do not dispose of Mr. Morley’s objection that “the genius of the people would die out under Socialism.” You do not state his objection fairly, though, no doubt, you intend to do so. He does not say that existence requires to be a sordid struggle for money in order for the genius of the people to keep alive. He maintains, what every man of observation and thought must acknowledge, that genius is a thing of development under stimulus. Mentality is not a fixed quality or quantity. It is the delicate result of brain activity, and brain activity is the result of the stimulus of external circumstances. Without external stimulus, the brain would sink into an inactive and fallow state. A human being is all the time in a state of flux with the circulation of the blood, which deposits its energies according to the consumption going on in the various tissues under the special activities set up by the stimulus of circumstances. Any state of circumstances that would end stimulus would end activity, and the ending of the activity would end development, slightly at first, but profoundly as time went on. The result would certainly be what Mr. Morley says:—Mind would sink to a stagnation level if men were provided with all they need, and nothing depended upon individual exertion.
This does not mean, as you offensively put it, “that the noblest of the race are actuated by avarice.” It means that all men are acted on by circumstances, and that where circumstances do not call for exertion, no exertion will be made.
You think the argument implies a contention on the part of your opponents that under the system of competition the people are in the enjoyment of civilization and refinement. This is a mistake on your part. Under the system of competition, the race, as a race, are in the enjoyment of a large measure of these things. That p. 100 measure is unquestionably due to the stimulus arising from the necessity of individual exertion. As Carlyle expresses it, there is a black ring of necessity all round every man’s horizon threatening to narrow in upon him to his extinction unless he exert himself. Socialism would destroy this condition of existence, and, altering the condition of existence, it would alter the nature of existence itself, and entail woes and confusions not dreamt of by those who make the mistake of reasoning from what the few accomplish under rivalry to what the many might realise in its total absence.
Self-preservation is a powerful instinct which is not to be confounded with avarice. Your arguments are all directed against the imputation of universal avarice. This is a mistake. The contention you are opposing is not disproved by the apparent inconsistency of the man who in the same breath maintains that the incentive of self-advantage is essential for individual exertion, and that men in Parliament serve the nation better for honour than for money. Men who serve for honour in Parliament serve for that which they value, and which to them therefore is an incentive. Honour is an incentive. The influence that belongs to an official position is an incentive. These incentives are more powerful than money; and men actuated by them might feel that the offer of money for the services for which they are otherwise so richly rewarded would be a degradation. Yet this would not be inconsistent with the fact that at another time, under other circumstances, the acquisition of money would be a powerful motive to these very same men. The control of money has, with other things, enabled them to obtain Parliamentary honours and influence. They knew in the first instance that without this control, they could not obtain those advantages. Therefore, before they got into Parliament, the desire to get into Parliament was a motive for obtaining money, which ceased to operate when the possession of money had enabled them to get there.
There is no inconsistency in these men now saying that the desire to get money was essential to the individual efforts which they put forth in trade, but that any such desire in connection with service in Parliament would degrade that service. And as for the suggestion of “avarice,” it is beside the question. Money is perceived to be a means to an end. Desiring the end, men strive to p. 101 obtain the means, but disconnect the end from the means, and the motive to strive for the means is taken away.
All this must be plain to impartial commonsense. The clever point you make out of it is only badinage. You should not ignore the facts for the sake of making a point. What money cannot do is no disproof of what it can do. That it can do much no reasonable man will deny. The opportunity of getting it by individual exertion, therefore, brings tremendous motives to bear, and leads to powerful individual exertion for which there would be no motive under Socialism.
Under the Socialist system, you would level the artist down to the workman. You object to paying the artist or clever man more than the common workman. You ask, “If the workman has enough for his wants, why should the artist have more?” In this you assume that the wants of the artist and the wants of the workman are the same. This is a fundamental mistake. Different men are differently organised, and have very different needs above and beyond the mere physical wants of food and sleep. A man of expansive intellect requires more scope for his mind in the materials and conveniences under his control than a man whose faculties are only equal to manual labour, and whose needs do not go beyond food and shelter. In ignoring this you would ignore a law of nature, and establish a tyranny that would crush out the noblest flowering of manhood.
But you say, “The artist’s talent is a boundless source of pleasure to him, and its pleasure its own reward.” How can it be a source of pleasure to him if he have not the adequate means of its gratification? and how can he obtain these unless he have more than is allowed to the common workman, whose needs are so much less?
The true hero, you say, works for service and not for pay. This is “book-learning,” Mr. Blatchford. There are many false platitudes for which an artificial literature is responsible. Let us get back to truth. “Heroes” are pretty much creations of popular imagination. They are getting scarce, as you say. In truth they never existed in the clean-cut form of legend. They have always been flesh and blood, inclined like other men to have things comfortable if they could, and to have some result from labour put forth. The popular idea is a myth. This is why you “cannot explain why the supply has failed.” There has been no failure in the supply; p. 102 the trouble is that the article supplied has been misrepresented by fictitious sample.
If you are going to build your new system on the assumption of a large, or even a tolerable, or even a small supply of men who will delight in serving the State without any advantage to themselves, you will find you are building without bricks or foundations.
You do not dispose of the objection as to the enormous number of officials that a Socialist management of the community would involve. You retort that we have already “an enormous number of officials” in the army of clerks, travellers, canvassers, &c., employed by commerce. But, Mr. Blatchford, these are not the same thing. “Clerks, travellers, &c.,” are mere servants to both their employers and the public. An official is not a servant, but a master. A factory inspector coming into a place is a very different person to deal with from a traveller calling to show you his samples. Under Socialism we should be overrun with an army of officials, to the intolerable vexation of life.
Notwithstanding all these reservations, Mr. Blatchford, I admire your protest against the brutality of the “economic conditions of society.” You truly contend that the present system of commercialism is not conducive to the survival of the noblest, but to the survival of the baser intellects and the most brutal physiques. This is all an argument in favour of an ideal system; but then where is it to come from? You cannot construct it out of present materials. When you ask, “Is there any natural obstacle to the establishment of a community on just terms,” you touch the kernel of the problem, and you ask a question that requires the answer indicated in my last letter. There is a natural obstacle at present to its establishment, and that obstacle is the natural incapacity of man to carry on such a system. Man is not fit to govern himself in the sense of educing ideal results. All his attempts are failures. They have been so from immemorial history; and you will not persuade intelligent men that what has failed under every form of experiment in all ages and countries is going to be a success now when the conditions are so much more arduous and unmanageable.
Pardon me if I seem
Your hopelessly obtuse though highly sympathetic friend,
JOHN SMITH.