Part 16

Therefore pray do not count my aspiration for a solvent social order as an adhesion to any cut and dried theory of the State owning and administering all social resources. For that sort of Socialism is—like science—bankrupt, even before it begins. It fails, not merely because it would substitute an external arrangement for a change of heart—and Socialism will either be a religion or will not be—but because no external arrangement is possible. The collective ownership of land and capital is feasible in Juan Fernandez so long as Robinson Crusoe and Friday continue exiled from civilisation, but impossible in our world of international finance, where private ownership extends to countries which the property holder will never even visit. Unless, therefore, every country in the world simultaneously adopted Socialism, there would be an inextricable tangle of Socialism and Individualism. Not to mention that capital—as every shareholder knows—means men as much as money. But even in Juan Fernandez, as soon as it became thickly populated, Socialism would be unmanageable, because the stock of concentrable human consciousness is insufficient to arrange a social order from a central bureau. Omniscience alone would be equal to the task, not to mention All Goodness and All Wisdom. Despite the vast loss by friction and absence of organisation, despite the vast suffering, the struggle for existence is the only agency capable of fitting the pegs into the holes. Shall the State, for example, select which man shall write poetry? And still more vital, which poetry the State Press shall print? We have already had experience of the State as a selector of Laureates and a censor of drama, and Milton knew it as a censor of literature. Our most brilliant Socialists, an they had their way, would be reduced to pasting pasquinades on the pedestals of our street statues.

But in a looser connotation, “we are all Socialists now,” if indeed we ever were anything else. From the day of the first human grouping for co-operation and common defence, Socialism has been the rule of life, and the question of how the common work and the common products are to be apportioned is a mere question of organised distribution. That we have hitherto left this cumbrous and infinitely complex problem of distribution to solve itself by natural selection does not make society less socialistic. Nor would the discovery of a more excellent way of dividing up the labour and its results make society more socialistic. For compared with the assets of civilisation in which we share equally—the museums, picture galleries, libraries, parks, roads, schools, life-boat and fire-engine services, armies, navies, light-houses, weather-bureaus, asylums, hospitals, observatories—the assets in which we share unequally are relatively unimportant, and without sacrificing to a machine the zest and stimulus of liberty, and the fine flavour of individuality, it is a comparatively simple matter to minimise the waste and suffering produced by the struggle for existence, and to arrange that talent shall rise to the top, not for its sake but our own. It is no evil that one man should live in a palace and another in a cottage; these differences even add to the colour and joy of life. The evil is solely that any man willing to work should lack a cottage, or that the cottage should be a malarious hovel. Levelling up is the only reform necessary, as it is the only reform possible. For if the gradual consolidation of railways, land, mines, and a few leading industries in the hands of the State is not beyond practical politics, this would still be very far from “Socialism,” and it is vastly amusing to witness the agony of apprehension with which respectable society looks forward to the advent of a social order which cannot possibly materialise, and which menaces us less than the flaming tail of a comet. Only less amusing is the awe with which society regards Property as something sacrosanct in quality and immutable in quantity. Why, even the King’s shilling is as nimble and elusive as mercury, will buy you mutton to-day and only tripe to-morrow, and scarcely run to dog-sausage in a siege. Property is a Proteus, a shadow, a transient and generally embarrassed phantom. Property merely means a potential call upon human service—past or future—and if human service is unwilling or absent, Property shrinks or collapses, like the bag of pearls found by the thirsting Arab in the desert. Finance—like all other branches of science—has been treated as though its subject-matter had absolute existence. But the assets of the world’s bankers incalculably outrun the world’s power of service, and Property is merely a promissory note which can only be redeemed if there is not too great a run upon the labour bank at which it is presented. Still more elastic is the service that produces this right to call upon the service of others. A hundred thousand readers buy this book—instead of borrowing it—and I am a Crœsus; a hundred, and I am free of income tax. Motor cars are invented, and my house in Ascot falls to half its former value because the smart set need no longer stay overnight during the Ascot week. My unknown aunt remembers me in her will and I am a thousand pounds the richer. The Seine rises and my Paris flat is a ruin. I die and my land dwindles to six feet. Where in this foolish flux is room for holiness? And why may not society—the only source of values—mould Property as it will for society’s ends? Why—among the many vicissitudes with which Property must reckon—should not social reform count equally with bad harvests, wars of conquest and Stock Exchange manœuvres?

To say that Property is sacred is to confuse the means with the end, like the miser who hoards his gold and forgets its uses. Society is sacred, not Property, and whatever sanctitude or stability has been attached to Property has been attached entirely for socialistic purposes; not that the individual may be enriched, but that he may not lose the spur that drives him to enrich society. Individual property is merely a by-product of labour for society. He who demands overmuch for his labour is under-moralised. The true citizen is anxious to be taxed for the general good, provided his taxes are used for social service. He is anxious that some form of distribution of the common products shall be organised to supplement natural selection and correct its over-harshness. Experience might prove that interference with natural selection saps the stamina and initiative of society more than it benefits the “submerged tenth,” in which case we should reluctantly return to the present form of Socialism.

As for land, it is the one thing that I can conceive nationalised even under our present form of Socialism, nay, which is already nationalised to the extent that the private owners of British land may not sell it to Germany or Japan, as they may sell anything else of theirs. Every new State should doubtless begin by trying to nationalise its land. I say “trying,” because it is by no means certain that it would succeed, since so far from the increment in land values being unearned, it is the very possibility of earning it that induces the pioneer to suffer peril, privation and isolation. Were Canada, for example, not to give away its land, the many adventurers who have flowed in from the United States would probably have remained at home, and all this Canadian territory have been still empty. And once you have made land quasi-private property, it cannot justly be subjected to any peculiar tax, since colossal as is the rise of land values in growing towns, the value of land is controlled by the same factors of luck and judgment as rule all other property values, and may be depreciated as well as enhanced by the operation of social forces beyond the owner’s control or prevision. Wherefore all increments in value—in stocks and shares, copyrights, patents, &c. &c.—should be treated as potential matter for taxation equally with the so-called “unearned increment” on land.

One would imagine from the war cries in our latest political campaign that Socialism was already upon us, and that the only refuge from it lay in Tariff Reform. But it is precisely Tariff Reform which is Socialism; a taxation of the entire community in the interests of this or that industry. Nor should the entire community be averse from taxation for any provably good object; a moralised community would even be always looking round for fresh methods of self-taxation. Budget Day would be a national festival, a day of solemn joy, tense with the hope that new ways would be found of making England the Kingdom of God. Alas! it is a day of sick anxiety, with a sequel of farcical unfailingness, in which every section taxed sends a deputation to show that it is the one section that should have been left unburdened, while from the bloated gluttons and swillers at the great hotels arises the cry of “Red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” And the poor philanthropist we have always with us—he who threatens to stop his charity contributions. As if the abolition of charity was not the very object of social reform! Every benevolent activity means a sore in the social system, and charity covers indeed a multitude of our sins.

Strange that these sordid questions of money should so fever this mighty England of Shakespeare and Milton. Ship-money cost Charles the First his head, and a petty land tax changes the House of Peers. Poor humanity, so deluded as to the essential values of life, so peculiarly demented in all that concerns Property! But I bid you cast away your fears. I repeat to you my good tidings of great joy. Socialism is impossible. A perfect and just distribution of the goods and labours of life—“to each according to his needs, from each according to his powers”—is Utopian. Moreover envy, hatred and all uncharitableness prevent it: stupidity, sloth, selfishness, treachery and tyranny preclude it. Rejoice, therefore, and let us cry Hosanna!

Nor are these evil qualities confined to the capitalist, they are found in even uglier forms in the working man, who is merely a capitalist without means, and through his Trade Unions talks equally of rights and even less of duties and ideals.

But if Socialism is impossible, and Socialist parties consequently deficient in constructive potency, they yet perform in every country a critical and regulative function of the first importance. Our own Labour members are the only gentlemen in British politics. To all questions, national or international, they bring a broad spirit and a quixotic ideal, and while our Howards and our Percys cower in craven terror of Germany, or make prudent alliance with Holy Russia, or handle with correlative despotism India, Ireland or the woman question, our men from the pits and the factories sit free and fearless, the sole guardians of England’s ancient glory.

THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS: OR THE HYPOCRISY OF POLITICS

Arrestive was it in an aisle of Santa Croce—the Florentine Church of the Holy Cross—to come upon a monument to Niccolò Machiavelli, anathema alike for Catholicism and Protestantism, the “Old Nick” of the Hudibras rhyme. ’Twas as if Mephisto had managed not only to slip into the Cathedral, but to achieve canonisation. But even a devil is not given his due at the hands of his own countrymen: it was reserved for an English earl, more than two and a half centuries after Mephisto’s passing, to provide his works with a splendid setting and his remains with a massive monument. And so, in the dim religious light, I pondered over the stately inscription:

“Tanto Nomini nullum par Elogium.”

How, indeed, equate eulogy to so great a name? Machiavelli was our first modern—the first to exhibit the reign of law in human affairs, to read history as the play of human forces and not as the caprice of a cloudy Providence, modified by the stars. What an epic sweep in the opening sentences of his “History of Florence”—Gibbon in a nutshell, the whole “Decline and Fall,” summarised as the economic emigration southward of the surplus population of the Goths into an Italy weakened by the removal of the seat of Empire to Constantinople. Vagarious chance, indeed, he admits, as a complication (to be minimised by prudence), but Providence is mentioned in “The Prince,” only to be dropped, and astrology is not even mentioned. Machiavelli would have agreed that “the fault’s in ourselves, not in our stars, that we are underlings,” and for those who wished to prince it, he was prepared to point the conditions of success. And this indifference to the stars—to quadrangles and hexagons, sigils, conjunctions, and configurations—is not his least amazing merit.

Pico della Mirandola had, indeed, refuted astrology before him, but it was in the interests of that conventional theory of Providence and free-will which leaves the chaos of history irreducible to order. Machiavelli not only ignores astrology, but substitutes causation for the chaos.

’Tis true Comte suggested that astrology was, likewise, an attempt to reduce to law the chaos of human phenomena, but the remark is over-ingenious. Where there is no rational connection between causes and effects there is no science. The planetary conjuncture one was born under might, indeed, not impossibly affect temperament or internal destiny, just as the climate one was born under, but the notion that it could shape external destiny belongs to the mediæval megalomania. Galileo’s discovery of new stars must have shaken it, falsifying as it did all previous horoscopes—indeed, Sir Henry Wotton, our ambassador to Venice, was more impressed by Galileo’s injuriousness to astrology than to theology. “For the virtue of these new planets must needs vary the judicial part, and why may there not yet be more?” But Machiavelli belongs to the pre-telescope period; he wrote a whole century before Galileo, and thirty years ere Copernicus unsettled the ancient heavens by his Nuremberg treatise. True, even in the twelfth century, Maimonides had denounced astrology as “a disease, not a science,” and the great Jew’s letter “to the Men of Marseilles” had evoked papal applause. But not even Popes could arrest the disease. A century before Machiavelli was born Petrarch poured scorn on the astrologers. But the mockeries of this pioneer of humanism did not save a prince of the Renaissance like Lodovico from employing an astrologer advisory, under whose calculations he went from disaster to disaster. There were even Professors of Astrology at the Universities. Bodin, the next great political philosopher after Machiavelli, though half a century later, still dallies with astrology, still coquets with the theory of a connection between the planetary motions and the world’s history, while Copernicus he regards as a fantast unworthy of serious refutation.

Earlier in the sixteenth century Luther had denounced astrology as “framed by the devil,” and in his Table Talk had challenged the astrologers to answer him why Esau and Jacob, who were “born together of one father and one mother, at one time and under equal planets” were yet “wholly of contrary natures, kinds and morals.” Nevertheless in the next century, Milton in “Paradise Regained” makes Satan predict truly to Jesus on the strength of

“What the stars, Voluminous or single characters, In their conjunction met,”

give him to spell, and throughout the whole seventeenth century, as “Guy Mannering” reminds us, nativities continued to be cast. The child’s horoscope in some parts of Europe hung side by side with his baptismal certificate. Even to-day such phrases as “Thank your lucky stars,” conserve a shadow of the ancient belief, and the sidereal influence survives even more subtly in the word “consider.” Through such banks of fog pierces the searchlight of the great Florentine, it turns its powerful beam even upon Church history. The Princes of ecclesiastical principalities, he remarks drily, are the only ones who can possess States and subjects without governing and defending them, but it would be presumptuous in him to discuss these matters, as they are under the superintendence and direction of an Almighty Being, whose dispensations are beyond our weak understandings. But the Church has likewise attained temporal power, and here Mephisto may intrude without blasphemy. Secular triumphs demand secular explanations. One is reminded of the dialogue on Julius II attributed to Erasmus. Our Mephisto notes grimly that no prophet has ever succeeded unless backed by an armed force. Hence the collapse of “brother Jerome Savonarola when the multitude ceased to have faith in him.” In short, in the making of history Might and Right are partners.

Not in the exposition of this commonplace lay Machiavelli’s offensiveness for his contemporaries. Had he remained the passionless observer of the pitiful human breed, the explicator of the tangled threads of history, he would have been acclaimed as a moralist, unveiling with ruthless hand the hypocrisies of princes. What changed angel to devil was that instead of fulminating against the partnership of Might and Right, he found that only by this firm could history be made. He wrote not science but art—the _ars usurpandi_. Not only had the Princes of the past combined Might with Right, guile with goodness, but whoso wished now to be a Prince must needs go and do likewise. The ethics springing from the social relations of citizen to citizen no longer holds in the relation of ruler to subjects.

It is true “The Prince” might also be regarded as an elaborate Swiftian irony—a negative Pulcinellian advice to those about to usurp—an exposition of Princedom as the service of the devil. “A New Prince cannot with impunity exercise all the virtues, because his own self-preservation will often compel him to violate the laws of charity, religion and humanity.” But this Swiftian supposition does not tally with the dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici and his overt encouragement to the Most Magnificent to seize the reins. Machiavelli plainly believes in the sense he alleges hidden by the ancients in the myth of Chiron the Centaur, who was the educator of rulers because he had the double qualification of the brute and the man. In high politics crimes are only crimes when they are blunders. Unsuccessful cruelty is unpardonable. Wickedness should be pursued with an economy of means to end: like the causes in Occam’s canon, crimes should not be multiplied _præter necessitatem_. Politics is a sort of bee-keeping, and the master of the hive will use the instincts and ethics of the little creatures for his own purposes, his kindness will be as cold-blooded as his cruelty. Thus, some three and a half centuries before Nietzsche, was expounded the doctrine of the Superman, the splendid blonde beast who had passed _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_. “The despised virtues of patience and humility have abased the spirits of men, which Pagan principles exalted.” It is in such precisely Nietzschean terms that Sir Thomas Browne sums up, albeit unapplausively, “the judgment of Machiavel.” But as a treatise on apiculture, “The Prince” is not rigidly scientific. The Superman, alone upon his dizzy height, Diabolists and neo-Dionysians as yet unborn to cheer him, has his moments of human weakness. Before the crimes of Agathocles he falters, and remarks with delicious gravity, “Still it must not be called virtue to murder one’s fellow-citizens or to sacrifice one’s friends, or be insensible to the voice of faith, pity or religion. These qualities may lead to sovereignty but not to glory.” And there is a more general apologia in the concession that the times are out of joint—in the grim Tacitean explanation that “he who deviates from the common course of practice, and endeavours to act as duty dictates, necessarily ensures his own destruction.” Super-morality lapses here into morality.

Moreover, Machiavelli did not himself play the Superman. He wrote the part—or founded it on Cæsar Borgia—but he did not act it. The Rubicon ’twixt thought and action he never crossed. His own morals appear to have been conventionally excellent. Like Helvetius, who traced virtue to the lowest roots of self-interest, he was of a rare magnanimity. As a scientific observer he advises the Tyrant, if he cannot live in the Republic he has conquered, to destroy it root and branch, but as a man he bore torture and imprisonment for the cause of liberty. Indeed, in his later years something of the _sæva indignatio_ of Swift seems to have possessed his breast. It was Napoleon who was destined to incarnate the maxims of Machiavelli, though on a far grander stage than even Cæsar Borgia ever dreamed of: it was Napoleon who gave the greatest performance of “The Prince.” And by a hitherto unnoted coincidence Napoleon was born exactly three centuries after Machiavelli. Exactly three hundred years (1469-1769) divided the nativities of the Superman of Letters and the Superman of Action—’tis almost enough to revive faith in the potency of planetary conjunctures. True, Nietzsche regards Napoleon as but “half-Superman,” the other half being beast, but we have seen that the bestial portion is a necessary factor of the Machiavellian Superman, who is nothing if not super-dominant. What Nietzsche’s Superman was to be, Nietzsche did not precisely know, though we may well suspect that the direction in which he strained his vision for him was not the horizon but the looking glass. Nietzsche has not even the credit of inventing the Superman, for when Nietzsche was six years old, Tennyson published “In Memoriam,” with its prophetic peroration:

“A closer link Between us and the crowning race. . . .

No longer half akin to brute, For all we thought and loved and did, And hoped, and suffered, is but seed Of what in them is flower and fruit.”

Tennyson pressed home this idea of the further evolution of our race in his very last volume, in a poem called “The Making of Man.”

“Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, Shall not æon after æon pass and touch him into shape?”

And again in “The Dawn.”

“Ah, what will _our_ children be, The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?”