SOCIALISM.

SOCIALISM is the latest effort to deal with a problem which is as old as the human race, and which will last as long as the race. Human beings tend to multiply beyond the power of a limited area of land to support life, under a given stage of the arts, and a given standard of living. While the population is meager in proportion to the amount of land at its disposal the struggle for existence is easy, the average status high, the population nearly all on the average and nearly all equal; the competition of man with man is lax, the penalties of individual error and vice are light and uncertain, and the rewards of painstaking exertion are not proportionate to those of less careful effort; there is little poverty and misery and no "social problem." When the population is dense the struggle for self-preservation becomes intense for each one, the competition of life becomes severe, every advantage weighs heavily, the average status is low, but it is made up of wide extremes and great inequality of condition, the penalties of vice and error are heavy and certain and the rewards of peculiar talent, skill and energy are very high. In this state of society there are great poverty and misery and the social problem is presented. Classes are more distinctly marked off and more widely separated from each other. Hereditary virtue and vice have far higher importance, for it is far more difficult to pass from one social condition to another, and the starting-point, as regards health, mental vigor, talent, early training, traditions and capital, which the father fixes for the son, becomes a matter of far higher importance. If, then, there be complete liberty, that is, if every individual head of a family be left to employ his energies for the preservation and development of himself and his children, and be secured the exclusive use of his products for that purpose, it follows that each finds just that position of superiority or inferiority, relatively to others, to which his comparative energy, talent, industry and self-denial assign him. The notions of property, liberty and justice here involved are those to which the human race has been led as the highest results, so far, of its experience on earth.

The human race has also moved forward through numberless experiments, to monogamy and the family nurture of children as the institutions, for the relation of the sexes and generations, which are most conducive to the welfare of the race as a whole in its effort to expand and develop human life against the obstacles of nature. It is by the devotion and sacrifice of parents to children that the race moves forward from generation to generation in the conquest of nature, and it is by force of the same sentiment, more than anything else, that each generation is held up to the virtues of industry, temperance and self-denial which conduce to the physical and moral welfare of man. The institutions of property and the family together give rise to the institutions of bequest and inheritance.

It follows then that, in an advancing society, in which population is becoming more and more dense, the virtues of industry and self-denial are becoming more and more influential, and that, in the competition of life, poverty and misery are made the more direct and inevitable penalties of shiftlessness, laziness, extravagance, intemperance and imprudence. Poverty and misery will, therefore, exist in human society just so long as the industrial vices exist in human nature; and it is fixed in the order of nature, not by any decree of governments, congresses, or academies, that the man of industry and self-denial shall possess great advantages over the man of idleness and improvidence, which shall increase as time goes on. The instrument of this advantage is capital. All this holds true, whatever doctrine of final causes one may adopt.

There is no possibility of understanding human life without observing this connection of penalties and rewards for time ill spent or time well spent, but when the time is gone and it only remains to deal with the consequences, it is of little use to expose the true relations of things to those who are under the penalties, if they see any means of relieving themselves at the expense of those who have been wiser. Here comes in the function of government, that is, of society, with its coercive force and its conceptions of right and justice, to secure liberty and property.

The facts which have thus far been enumerated are by some considered harsh and cruel, and there have never been wanting sentimental philosophers to preach the cheap virtues of pity, sympathy, humanity and love, and to decry industry and self-denial. The sentimental philosophy starts from the grand doctrine that nothing is true which is disagreeable, and if it is honest and well-informed enough to appreciate the impregnable evidence of facts, it has recourse to imagination, cuts loose from this world which is, and builds itself another to its fancy in the realms of fiction where all things disagreeable may he eliminated. It would no doubt be pleasant to live in a world where two and two could make five, for there we could feed two men and three women with four loaves of bread, or keep five men employed with two shovels and two pickaxes. It might be pleasant to live in a world where action and reaction were not equal, for then we could invent a perpetual motion and do away with labor, or a nation could get rich by taxing itself. These speculations may be entertaining; they are not profitable.

The various organizations of society which have existed-slavery, serfage, villanage, feudalism, castes – are all traceable to an instinctive effort of mankind to adjust itself to the conditions of human life. At various times old institutions have outlasted their usefulness, or a revolution in trade and industry has produced a social crisis, or some new combination of forces has violently burst through old traditions, or population has increased beyond the resources of the land at disposal on the existing stage of the arts. Down to the last century the struggles and changes which have resulted have all tended, under countless wars, errors and reactions, toward greater success in the struggle with nature, and they have issued in individualism, liberty, property, monogamy, protection for women, family nurture of children, and inheritance. Socialism is an outgrowth of a new effort, the effort to control-not the struggle of man with nature, but the competition of life, or the rivalry of man with man. It springs from an observation of the fact already mentioned that some men succeed better than others in the struggle with nature. Its root principle is envy. The state of things which exists is declared to be wrong and unjust, and it is so considered because it is unequal. The aim of socialism is to create a state of things in which all shall be equal in effort and enjoyment, to break up the inequality of ability which exists in nature, and to distribute arbitrarily an equality of enjoyment. As no man, nor all men, can add one grain to the productive ability of any one (save by education or other form of labor) the equality sought can be reached only by reducing the ability of all to the ability of the one least efficient and energetic. As the criteria of enjoyment lie in personal taste and choice, there cannot possibly be any equality of enjoyment. The idea of it does not exist; it is only a hollow phrase. The effort to realize the socialistic idea, therefore, involves the destruction, first, of natural differences of ability by destroying all abilities above the lowest, and thus securing universal poverty; second, the destruction of love for wife and children, or the strongest passions of human nature; third, the removal of all differences of taste in the estimate of what brings happiness. ...