WEBVTT

NOTE The Sins of Legislators

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000
The Man vs. the State by Herbert Spencer

2
00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:08.000
The Sins of Legislators

3
00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:20.000
Be it or be it not true that man is shaped in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that government is begotten of aggression and bi-aggression.

4
00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:35.000
In small, undeveloped societies, where for ages complete peace has continued, there exists nothing like what we call government. No coercive agency, but mere honorary headship, if any headship at all.

5
00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:40.840
In these exceptional communities, unaggressive and from special causes unaggressed upon,

6
00:00:40.840 --> 00:00:47.000
there is so little deviation from the virtues of truthfulness, honesty, justice and generosity,

7
00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:54.600
that nothing beyond an occasional expression of public opinion by informally assembled elders is needful.

8
00:00:54.600 --> 00:01:00.680
Conversely, we find proofs that, at first recognized but temporarily during leadership in war,

9
00:01:00.680 --> 00:01:06.520
For the authority of a chief is permanently established by continuity of war, and grows

10
00:01:06.520 --> 00:01:12.360
strong where successful war ends in subjection of neighbouring tribes.

11
00:01:12.360 --> 00:01:17.560
And thence onwards, examples furnished by all races put beyond doubt the truth that

12
00:01:17.560 --> 00:01:23.120
the coercive power of the chief, developing into king, and king of kings, a frequent title

13
00:01:23.120 --> 00:01:28.620
in the Ancient East, becomes great in proportion as conquest becomes habitual and the union

14
00:01:28.620 --> 00:01:35.260
of Subdued Nations Extensive. Comparisons disclose a further truth which should be ever

15
00:01:35.260 --> 00:01:42.180
present to us, the truth that the aggressiveness of the ruling power inside a society increases

16
00:01:42.180 --> 00:01:48.620
with its aggressiveness outside the society, as to make an efficient army the soldiers

17
00:01:48.620 --> 00:01:54.420
must be subordinate to their commander, so to make an efficient fighting community must

18
00:01:54.420 --> 00:02:01.420
An obvious implication is that political ethics, originally identical with the ethics of war, must long remain akin to them, and can diverge from them only as warlike activities and preparations become less.

19
00:02:01.420 --> 00:02:06.500
and yield up whatever property is required.

20
00:02:06.500 --> 00:02:12.740
An obvious implication is that political ethics, originally identical with the ethics of war,

21
00:02:12.740 --> 00:02:19.220
must long remain akin to them, and can diverge from them only as warlike activities and preparations

22
00:02:19.220 --> 00:02:21.300
become less.

23
00:02:21.300 --> 00:02:23.780
Current evidence shows this.

24
00:02:23.780 --> 00:02:28.860
At present on the continent, the citizen is free only when his services as a soldier is

25
00:02:28.860 --> 00:02:33.820
is not demanded, and during the rest of his life he is largely enslaved in supporting

26
00:02:33.820 --> 00:02:41.620
the military organization. Even among ourselves a serious war would, by the necessitated conscription,

27
00:02:41.620 --> 00:02:47.060
suspend the liberties of large numbers and trench on the liberties of the rest by taking

28
00:02:47.060 --> 00:02:52.780
from them through taxes whatever supplies were needed, that is, forcing them to labor

29
00:02:52.780 --> 00:03:11.420
I am not, under the title of this article, about to treat of the trespassers and the

30
00:03:11.420 --> 00:03:17.340
revenges for trespasses accounts of which mainly constitute history, nor to trace the

31
00:03:17.340 --> 00:03:22.420
The Internal Inequities Which Have Ever Accompanied the External Inequities

32
00:03:22.420 --> 00:03:27.900
I do not propose here to catalogue the crimes of irresponsible legislators, beginning with

33
00:03:27.900 --> 00:03:33.460
that of King Khufu, the stones of whose vast tombs were laid in the bloody sweat of a

34
00:03:33.460 --> 00:03:39.860
hundred thousand slaves toiling through long years under the lash, going on to those committed

35
00:03:39.860 --> 00:03:45.780
by conquerors, Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman and the rest, and ending

36
00:03:45.780 --> 00:03:51.420
with those of Napoleon whose ambition to set his foot on the neck of the civilized world

37
00:03:51.420 --> 00:03:55.780
cost not less than two million lives.

38
00:03:55.780 --> 00:04:01.700
Nor do I propose here to enumerate those sins of responsible legislators seen in the long

39
00:04:01.700 --> 00:04:07.700
list of laws made in the interests of dominant classes, a list coming down in our own history

40
00:04:07.700 --> 00:04:12.860
to those under which they were long maintained slavery and the slave trade.

41
00:04:12.860 --> 00:04:17.140
torturing nearly forty thousand negroes annually by close packing during a

42
00:04:17.140 --> 00:04:21.900
tropical voyage and killing a large percentage of them and ending with the

43
00:04:21.900 --> 00:04:25.140
Corn Laws which says, Sir Erskine May,

44
00:04:25.140 --> 00:04:30.800
to ensure high rents it had been decreed that multitudes should hunger.

45
00:04:30.800 --> 00:04:35.940
Not indeed that a presentation of the conspicuous misdeeds of legislators

46
00:04:35.940 --> 00:04:39.440
responsible and irresponsible would be useless.

47
00:04:39.440 --> 00:04:44.960
It would have several uses, one of them relevant to the truth above pointed out.

48
00:04:44.960 --> 00:04:49.680
Such a presentation would make clear how that identity of political ethics with

49
00:04:49.680 --> 00:04:54.440
military ethics, which necessarily exists during primitive times,

50
00:04:54.440 --> 00:04:59.960
when the army is simply the mobilized society and the society is the quiescent army,

51
00:04:59.960 --> 00:05:04.680
continues through long stages and even now affects in great degrees our law

52
00:05:04.680 --> 00:05:07.840
proceedings and our daily lives.

53
00:05:07.840 --> 00:05:12.880
Having, for instance, shown that in numerous savage times the judicial function of the

54
00:05:12.880 --> 00:05:19.320
chief does not exist, or is nominal, and that, very generally, during early stages of European

55
00:05:19.320 --> 00:05:25.240
civilisation, each man had to defend himself and rectify his private wrongs as best he

56
00:05:25.240 --> 00:05:30.880
might. Having shown that in medieval times the right of private war among members of

57
00:05:30.880 --> 00:05:35.400
the military order was brought to an end, not because the head ruler thought it his

58
00:06:05.400 --> 00:06:12.040
by Battle under Another Form, Council Being the Champions and Purses the Weapons.

59
00:06:12.040 --> 00:06:17.940
In civil cases, the ruling agency cares scarcely more than of old about rectifying the wrongs

60
00:06:17.940 --> 00:06:23.640
of the injured, but practically its deputy does little less than enforce the rules of

61
00:06:23.640 --> 00:06:29.800
the fight, the result being less a question of equity than a question of pecuniary ability

62
00:06:29.800 --> 00:06:31.720
and forensic skill.

63
00:06:31.720 --> 00:06:37.400
Nay, so little concern for the administration of justice is shown by the ruling agency that

64
00:06:37.400 --> 00:06:42.880
when, by legal conflict carried on in the presence of its deputy, the combatants have

65
00:06:42.880 --> 00:06:49.600
been peculiarly bled, even to the extent of producing prostration, and when, an appeal

66
00:06:49.600 --> 00:06:54.400
being made by one of them, the decision is reversed, the beaten combatant is made to

67
00:06:54.400 --> 00:07:00.200
pay for the blunders of the deputy, or of a preceding deputy, and not unfrequently the

68
00:07:00.200 --> 00:07:08.760
The wronged man, who sought protection or restitution, is taken out of court, pecuniarily dead.

69
00:07:08.760 --> 00:07:14.600
Adequately done, such a portrayal of government misdeeds of commission and omission, proving

70
00:07:14.600 --> 00:07:20.220
that the partially surviving code of ethics arising in and proper to a state of war still

71
00:07:20.220 --> 00:07:25.400
vitiates government action, might greatly moderate the hopes of those who are anxious

72
00:07:25.400 --> 00:07:29.120
to extend governmental control.

73
00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:33.720
We are observing that along with the still manifest traits of that primitive political

74
00:07:33.720 --> 00:07:40.080
structure which chronic militancy produces, there goes a still manifest survival of its

75
00:07:40.080 --> 00:07:42.080
primitive principles.

76
00:07:42.080 --> 00:07:47.200
The reformer and the philanthropist might be less sanguine in their anticipations of

77
00:07:47.200 --> 00:07:54.680
good from its all-pervading agency, and might be more inclined to trust agencies of a non-governmental

78
00:07:54.680 --> 00:07:57.120
kind.

79
00:07:57.120 --> 00:08:01.440
Without leaving out the greater part of the large topic comprehended under the title of

80
00:08:01.440 --> 00:08:08.000
this article, I propose here to deal only with a comparatively small remaining part,

81
00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:14.800
those sins of legislators which are not generated by their personal ambitions or class interests,

82
00:08:14.800 --> 00:08:22.160
but result from lack of the study by which they are morally bound to prepare themselves.

83
00:08:22.160 --> 00:08:27.520
A drugist's assistant who, after listening to the description of pains which he mistakes

84
00:08:27.520 --> 00:08:33.740
for those of colic, but which are really caused by inflammation of the cheekum, prescribes

85
00:08:33.740 --> 00:08:39.920
a sharp purgative and kills the patient, is found guilty of manslaughter. He is not allowed

86
00:08:39.920 --> 00:08:45.960
to excuse himself on the ground that he did not intend harm, but hoped for good. The plea

87
00:08:45.960 --> 00:08:51.680
that he simply made a mistake in his diagnosis is not entertained. He is told that he had

88
00:08:51.680 --> 00:08:57.040
have no right to risk disastrous consequences by meddling in a matter concerning which

89
00:08:57.040 --> 00:08:59.960
his knowledge was so inadequate.

90
00:08:59.960 --> 00:09:07.080
The fact that he was ignorant, how great was his ignorance, is not accepted in bar of judgment.

91
00:09:07.080 --> 00:09:11.920
It is tacitly assumed that the experience common to all should have taught him that

92
00:09:11.920 --> 00:09:18.240
even the skilled and much more the unskilled make mistakes in the identification of disorders

93
00:09:18.240 --> 00:09:23.560
and in the appropriate treatment, and that having disregarded the warning derivable from

94
00:09:23.560 --> 00:09:29.160
common experience, he was answerable for the consequences.

95
00:09:29.160 --> 00:09:34.980
We measure the responsibilities of legislators for mischiefs they may do in a much more lenient

96
00:09:34.980 --> 00:09:40.660
fashion. In most cases, so far from thinking of them as deserving punishment for causing

97
00:09:40.660 --> 00:09:47.880
disasters by laws ignorantly enacted, we scarcely think of them as deserving reprobation. It

98
00:09:47.880 --> 00:09:52.480
It is held that common experience should have taught the druggist's assistant, untrained

99
00:09:52.480 --> 00:09:57.720
as he is, not to interfere, but it is not held that common experience should have taught

100
00:09:57.720 --> 00:10:03.040
the legislator not to interfere till he has trained himself.

101
00:10:03.040 --> 00:10:07.640
Though multitudinous facts are before him in the recorded legislation of our own country

102
00:10:07.640 --> 00:10:14.580
and of other countries which should impress on him the immense evils caused by wrong treatment,

103
00:10:14.580 --> 00:10:19.620
He is not condemned for disregarding these warnings against rash meddling.

104
00:10:19.620 --> 00:10:25.780
Contrary wise, it is thought meretricious to him when, perhaps lately from college,

105
00:10:25.780 --> 00:10:30.220
perhaps fresh from keeping a pack of hounds which made him popular in his county, perhaps

106
00:10:30.220 --> 00:10:35.460
emerging from a provincial town where he acquired a fortune, perhaps rising from the bar at

107
00:10:35.460 --> 00:10:41.300
which he has gained a name as an advocate, he enters Parliament, and forthwith, in quite

108
00:10:41.300 --> 00:10:47.700
a light-hearted way begins to aid or hinder this or that means of operating on the body

109
00:10:47.700 --> 00:10:53.380
politic. In this case there is no occasion even to make for him the excuse that he does

110
00:10:53.380 --> 00:10:59.420
not know how little he knows, for the public at large agrees with him in thinking it needless

111
00:10:59.420 --> 00:11:03.940
that he should know anything more than what the debates on the proposed measures tell

112
00:11:03.940 --> 00:11:11.160
him. And yet the mischiefs wrought by uninstructed law-making enormous in their amount as compared

113
00:11:11.160 --> 00:11:17.040
with those caused by uninstructed medical treatment are conspicuous to all who but glance

114
00:11:17.040 --> 00:11:25.040
over its history. The reader must pardon me while I recall a few familiar instances.

115
00:11:25.040 --> 00:11:30.640
Century after century, statesmen went on enacting usury laws which made worse the condition

116
00:11:30.640 --> 00:11:36.760
of the debtor, raising the rates of interest from five to six when intending to reduce

117
00:11:36.760 --> 00:11:43.480
to reduce it to four, as under Louis XV, and indirectly producing undreamt of evils of

118
00:11:43.480 --> 00:11:49.960
many kind, such as preventing the reproductive use of spare capital, and burdening the small

119
00:11:49.960 --> 00:11:57.880
proprietors with multitude of perpetual services. So too the endeavours which in England continued

120
00:11:57.880 --> 00:12:03.880
through five hundred years to stop forestalling, and which in France, as Arthur Young witnessed,

121
00:12:03.880 --> 00:12:33.880
It prevented anyone from buying more than two bushels of wheat at market, went on, generation after generation, increasing the miseries and mortalities due to death, for, as everybody now knows, the wholesale dealer, who was in the statue De Pistoribus, vituperated as an open oppressor of poor people, is simply one whose function it is to equalize the supply of a commodity by checking unduly rapid consumption.

122
00:12:33.880 --> 00:12:58.880
The standard nature was a measure which, in 1315, to diminish the pressure of famine, prescribed the prices of foods, but which was hastily repealed after it had caused entire disappearance of various foods from the markets, and also such measures more continuously operating as those which settled by magisterial order the reasonable gains of vituers.

123
00:12:58.880 --> 00:13:04.880
of like spirit and followed by allied mischiefs have been the many endeavours to fix wages,

124
00:13:04.880 --> 00:13:10.160
which began with the statute of labourers under Edward II and ceased only sixty years

125
00:13:10.160 --> 00:13:15.760
ago when, having long galvanised in spittle fields a decaying industry and fostered there

126
00:13:15.760 --> 00:13:21.520
a miserable population, lords and commons finally gave up fixing silk weavers' earnings

127
00:13:21.520 --> 00:13:25.480
by decisions of magistrates.

128
00:13:25.480 --> 00:13:31.560
Here I imagine an impatient interruption. We all know that the story is stale, the misgifts

129
00:13:31.560 --> 00:13:36.600
of interfering with trade have been dinned in our ears till we are weary, and no one

130
00:13:36.600 --> 00:13:43.640
needs to be taught the lesson afresh. My first reply is that by the great majority

131
00:13:43.640 --> 00:13:48.340
the lesson was never properly learnt at all, and that many of those who did learn it have

132
00:13:48.340 --> 00:13:54.180
forgotten it. For just the same pleas which of old were put in for these dictations are

133
00:13:54.180 --> 00:14:00.680
are again put in. In the Statute 35 of Edward II, which aimed to keep down the price of

134
00:14:00.680 --> 00:14:06.840
herrings, but was soon repealed because it raised the price, it was complained that people

135
00:14:06.840 --> 00:14:12.860
coming to the fair do bargain for herring, and every of them, by malice and envy, increase

136
00:14:12.860 --> 00:14:18.740
upon another, and if one proffer forty shilling, another will proffer ten shilling more, and

137
00:14:18.740 --> 00:14:24.540
and the third sixty shilling, and so everyone so mounteth other in the bargain.

138
00:14:24.540 --> 00:14:31.300
And now the higgling of the market, here condemned and ascribed to malice and envy, is again

139
00:14:31.300 --> 00:14:33.620
being condemned.

140
00:14:33.620 --> 00:14:39.340
The evils of competition have all along been the stock cry of the socialists, and the Council

141
00:14:39.340 --> 00:14:45.880
of Democratic Federation denounces the carrying on of exchange under the control of individual

142
00:14:45.880 --> 00:15:12.880
My second reply is that interferences with the law of supply and demand, which a generation ago were admitted to be habitually mischievous, are now being daily made by Acts of Parliament in new fields, and that, as I shall presently show, they are in these new fields increasing the evils to be cured and producing fresh ones as of old they did in fields no longer intruded upon.

143
00:15:12.880 --> 00:15:42.880
Returning from this parenthesis, I go on to explain that the above acts are named to remind the reader that uninstructed legislators have in past times continually increased human suffering in their endeavours to mitigate it, and I have now to add that if these evils, shown to be legislatively intensified or produced, be multiplied by ten or more, a conception will be formed of the aggregate evils caused by lawmaking unguided.

144
00:15:42.880 --> 00:15:45.680
by Social Science.

145
00:15:45.680 --> 00:15:52.560
In a paper read to the Statistical Society in May 1873, Mr Janssen, Vice President of

146
00:15:52.560 --> 00:16:01.200
the Law Society, stated that from the Statute of Merton, 20, Henry III, to the end of 1872,

147
00:16:01.200 --> 00:16:08.200
there had been passed 18,110 public acts, of which he estimated that four-fifths had

148
00:16:08.200 --> 00:16:11.280
been wholly or partially repealed.

149
00:16:11.280 --> 00:16:16.960
He also stated that the number of public acts repealed wholly or in part or amended during

150
00:16:16.960 --> 00:16:30.520
the three years 1870, 1871 and 1872 had been 3,532, of which 2,579 had been totally repealed.

151
00:16:30.520 --> 00:16:36.140
To see whether this state of repeal has continued, I have referred to the annually issued volumes

152
00:16:36.140 --> 00:16:41.100
of the Public General Statutes for the last three sessions.

153
00:16:41.100 --> 00:16:46.120
Saying nothing of the numerous amended Acts, the result is that in the last three sessions

154
00:16:46.120 --> 00:16:52.540
there have been totally repealed, separately or in groups, six hundred and fifty Acts belonging

155
00:16:52.540 --> 00:16:57.960
to the present reign, besides many of preceding reigns.

156
00:16:57.960 --> 00:17:02.860
This of course is greatly above the average rate, for there has been of late an active

157
00:17:02.860 --> 00:17:05.720
purgation of the Statute Book.

158
00:17:05.720 --> 00:17:11.100
In making every allowance, we must infer that within our own times, repeals have mounted

159
00:17:11.100 --> 00:17:16.700
some distance into the thousands. Doubtless, a number of them have been of laws that were

160
00:17:16.700 --> 00:17:22.420
obsolete. Others have been demanded by changes of circumstances, though seeing how many of

161
00:17:22.420 --> 00:17:29.160
them are quite recent acts, this has not been a large cause. Others, simply because they

162
00:17:29.160 --> 00:17:34.340
were inoperative, and others have been consequent on the consolidations of numerous acts into

163
00:17:34.340 --> 00:17:41.380
to single acts. But, unquestionably, in multitudinous cases, repeals came because the acts had proved

164
00:17:41.380 --> 00:17:48.380
injurious. We talk glibly of such changes. We think of cancelled legislation with indifference.

165
00:17:49.180 --> 00:17:53.740
We forget that before laws are abolished, they have generally been inflicting evils

166
00:17:53.740 --> 00:18:00.740
more or less serious, some for a few years, some for tens of years, some for centuries.

167
00:18:00.740 --> 00:18:13.740
Change your vague idea of a bad law into a definite idea of it as an agency operating on people's lives and you see that it means so much of pain, so much of illness, so much of mortality.

168
00:18:13.740 --> 00:18:23.740
A vicious form of legal procedure, for example, either enacted or tolerated, entails on suitors, costs or delays or defeats.

169
00:18:23.740 --> 00:18:43.740
What do these imply? Loss of money, often ill-spared, great and prolonged anxiety, frequently consequent bad health, unhappiness of family independence, children stinted in food and clothing, all of them miseries which bring after them multiplied remota miseries.

170
00:18:43.740 --> 00:18:58.740
Add to which the far more numerous cases of those who, lacking the means or the courage to enter on lawsuits and therefore submitting to frauds, are impoverished, and have similarly to bear the pains of body and mind which ensue.

171
00:18:58.740 --> 00:19:07.740
Even to say that a law has been simply a hindrance is to say that it has caused needless loss of time, extra trouble and additional worry.

172
00:19:07.740 --> 00:19:19.740
And among overburdened people, extra trouble and worry imply, here and there, physical and mental prostrations, with their entailed direct and indirect sufferings.

173
00:19:19.740 --> 00:19:33.740
Seeing, then, that bad legislation means injury to men's lives, judge what must be the total amount of mental distress, physical pain, and raised mortality which these thousands of repealed Acts of Parliament represent,

174
00:19:33.740 --> 00:19:45.740
Fully to bring home the truth that lawmaking unguided by adequate knowledge brings enormous evils, let me take an instance which a question of the day recalls.

175
00:19:45.740 --> 00:19:59.740
Already I have hinted that interferences with the connection between supply and demand, giving up in certain fields after immense mischiefs had been done during many centuries, are now taking place in other fields.

176
00:19:59.740 --> 00:20:09.740
This connection is supposed to be hold only where it has been proved to hold by the evils of disregarding it, so feeble is men's belief in it.

177
00:20:09.740 --> 00:20:19.740
There appears no suspicion that in cases where it seems to fail, natural causation has been traversed by artificial hindrances.

178
00:20:19.740 --> 00:20:25.820
And yet, in the case to which I now refer, that of the supply of houses for the poor,

179
00:20:25.820 --> 00:20:31.380
it needs but to ask what laws have been doing for a long time past to see that the terrible

180
00:20:31.380 --> 00:20:35.860
evils complained of are mostly law-made.

181
00:20:35.860 --> 00:20:41.820
A generation ago, discussion was taking place concerning the inadequacy and badness of industrial

182
00:20:41.820 --> 00:20:46.300
dwellings, and I had occasion to deal with the question.

183
00:20:46.300 --> 00:20:50.180
Here is a passage then written.

184
00:20:50.180 --> 00:20:55.460
An architect and surveyor described it, the Building Act, as having worked after the following

185
00:20:55.460 --> 00:20:56.540
manner.

186
00:20:56.540 --> 00:21:01.200
In those districts of London consisting of inferior houses built in that unsubstantial

187
00:21:01.200 --> 00:21:06.580
fashion which the new Building Act was to mend, there obtains an average rent, sufficiently

188
00:21:06.580 --> 00:21:11.020
remunerative to landlords whose houses were run up economically before the new Building

189
00:21:11.020 --> 00:21:13.120
Act passed.

190
00:21:13.120 --> 00:21:17.360
This existing average rent fixes the rent that must be charged in these districts for

191
00:21:17.360 --> 00:21:22.720
new houses of the same accommodation, that is, the same number of rooms, for the people

192
00:21:22.720 --> 00:21:27.380
they are built for do not appreciate the extra safety of living within walls strengthened

193
00:21:27.380 --> 00:21:33.760
with Hoopi and Bond. Now, it turns out upon trial that houses built in accordance with

194
00:21:33.760 --> 00:21:38.780
the present regulations, and let, at this established rate, bring in nothing like a

195
00:21:38.780 --> 00:21:44.420
for a reasonable return. Builders have consequently confined themselves to erecting houses in

196
00:21:44.420 --> 00:21:48.900
better districts, where the possibility of a profitable competition with pre-existing

197
00:21:48.900 --> 00:21:55.060
houses shows that those pre-existing houses were tolerably substantial, and have ceased

198
00:21:55.060 --> 00:22:00.100
to erect dwellings for the masses, except in the suburbs where no pressing sanitary

199
00:22:00.100 --> 00:22:06.580
evils exist. Meanwhile, in the inferior districts above described, has resulted an increase

200
00:22:06.580 --> 00:22:12.860
of Overcrowding. Half a dozen families in a house, a score lodgers to a room, nay, more

201
00:22:12.860 --> 00:22:18.660
than this has resulted. That state of miserable dilapidation into which these abodes of the

202
00:22:18.660 --> 00:22:25.020
poor are allowed to fall is due to the absence of competition from new houses. Landlords

203
00:22:25.020 --> 00:22:30.460
do not find their tenants tempted away by the offer of better accommodation. Repairs,

204
00:22:30.460 --> 00:22:36.060
being unnecessary for securing the largest amount of profit, are not made. In fact, for

205
00:22:36.060 --> 00:22:40.660
For a large percentage of the very horrors which our sanitary agitators are trying to

206
00:22:40.660 --> 00:22:46.780
cure by law, we have to thank previous agitators of the same school.

207
00:22:46.780 --> 00:22:51.660
Social Statics, page 384

208
00:22:51.660 --> 00:22:56.580
These were not the only law-made causes of such evils, as shown in the following further

209
00:22:56.580 --> 00:22:57.580
passage.

210
00:22:57.580 --> 00:23:00.420
Sundry others were recognized.

211
00:23:00.420 --> 00:23:04.940
Writing before the repeal of the brick duty, the builder says,

212
00:23:04.940 --> 00:23:09.420
It is supposed that one-fourth of the cost of a dwelling, which lets for two and six or

213
00:23:09.420 --> 00:23:14.880
three shillings a week, is caused by the expense of the title deeds and the tax on wood and

214
00:23:14.880 --> 00:23:20.980
bricks used in its construction. Of course, the owner of such property must be remunerated,

215
00:23:20.980 --> 00:23:27.260
and he therefore charges seven-and-a-half pennies or nine pennies a week to cover these burdens.

216
00:23:27.260 --> 00:23:33.100
Mr. C. Gatliff, secretary to the Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Working Classes,

217
00:23:33.100 --> 00:23:38.260
Prohibiting the effect of the window tax says they are now paying upon their institution

218
00:23:38.260 --> 00:23:47.260
in St. Pancras the sum of £162.16 in window duties, or 1% per annum upon the original

219
00:23:47.260 --> 00:23:53.800
outlay. The average rental paid by the society's tenants is £5.06 per week, and the window

220
00:23:53.800 --> 00:23:58.500
duty deducts from this £7.25 per week.

221
00:23:58.500 --> 00:24:07.060
The Times, 31st January 1850 Social Statics, page 385

222
00:24:07.060 --> 00:24:11.780
Neither is this all the evidence which the press of those days afforded.

223
00:24:11.780 --> 00:24:17.780
There was published in The Times of 7th December 1850, too late to be used in the above-named

224
00:24:17.780 --> 00:24:24.180
work which I issued in the last week of 1850, a letter dated from the Reform Club and signed

225
00:24:24.180 --> 00:24:29.580
and Architect, which contained the following passages.

226
00:24:29.580 --> 00:24:33.600
Lord Kinnaird recommends in your paper of yesterday the construction of model lodging

227
00:24:33.600 --> 00:24:39.560
houses by throwing two or three houses into one. Allow me to suggest to his Lordship and

228
00:24:39.560 --> 00:24:45.820
to his friend, Lord Ashley, to whom he refers, that if 1. the window tacks were repealed,

229
00:24:45.820 --> 00:24:50.700
2. the Building Act repealed, accepting the clauses in acting that party and external

230
00:24:50.700 --> 00:24:56.980
The walls shall be fireproof. 3. The timber duties are either equalized or repealed.

231
00:24:56.980 --> 00:25:02.740
And 4. An act passed to facilitate the transfer of property, there would be no more necessity

232
00:25:02.740 --> 00:25:07.160
for model lodging houses than there is for model ships, model cotton mills, or model

233
00:25:07.160 --> 00:25:13.740
steam engines. The first limits the poor man's house to seven windows. The second limits

234
00:25:13.740 --> 00:25:19.380
the size of the poor man's house to twenty-five feet by eighteen, about the size of a gentleman's

235
00:25:19.380 --> 00:25:46.380
The Third Induces the Builder to erect the poor man's house of timber unfit for building purposes, the duty on the good material, Baltic, being fifteen times more than the duty on the bad or injurious article, Canadian. The government, even, exclude the latter from all their contracts.

236
00:25:46.380 --> 00:25:52.380
The fourth would have considerable influence upon the present miserable state of the dwellings of the poor.

237
00:25:52.380 --> 00:25:56.380
Small freeholds might then be transferred as easily as leaseholds.

238
00:25:56.380 --> 00:26:02.380
The effect of building leases has been a direct inducement to bad building.

239
00:26:02.380 --> 00:26:12.380
To guard against misstatements or overstatements, I have taken the precaution to consult a large East End builder and contractor of forty years' experience,

240
00:26:12.380 --> 00:26:27.380
Mr. C. Forrest, Museum Works, 17 Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, who, being churchwarden, member of the vestry and of the Board of Guardians, adds extensive knowledge of local public affairs to his extensive knowledge of the building business.

241
00:26:27.380 --> 00:26:36.380
Mr. Forrest, who authorizes me to give his name, verifies the foregoing statements, with the exception of one which he strengthens.

242
00:26:36.380 --> 00:26:44.220
He says that architect underestimates the evil entailed by the definition of a fourth-rate

243
00:26:44.220 --> 00:26:49.820
house, since the dimensions are much less than those he gives, perhaps in conformity

244
00:26:49.820 --> 00:26:53.860
with the provisions of a more recent building act.

245
00:26:53.860 --> 00:26:58.900
Mr. Forrest has done more than this, besides illustrating the bad effects of the great

246
00:26:58.900 --> 00:27:04.540
increase in ground rents in sixty years from one pound to eight pounds ten shillings for

247
00:27:04.540 --> 00:27:10.300
for a fourth-rate house, which, joined with other causes, had obliged him to abandon plans

248
00:27:10.300 --> 00:27:15.860
for industrial dwellings he had intended to build. Besides agreeing with architect that

249
00:27:15.860 --> 00:27:20.220
this evil has been greatly increased by the difficulties of land transfer due to the

250
00:27:20.220 --> 00:27:25.700
law-established system of trusts and entails, he pointed out that a further penalty on the

251
00:27:25.700 --> 00:27:32.300
building of small houses is inflicted by additions to local burdens, prohibitory imposts, he

252
00:27:32.300 --> 00:27:39.300
One of the instances he named being that, to the cost of each new house has to be added the cost of pavement, roadway and sewerage, which is charged according to the length of the frontage, and which consequently bears a far larger ratio to the value of a small house than to the value of a large one.

253
00:27:53.580 --> 00:28:00.580
From these law-produced mischiefs, which were great a generation ago and have since been increasing, let us pass to more recent law-produced mischiefs.

254
00:28:02.300 --> 00:28:09.200
The misery, the disease, the mortality in rookeries made continually worse by artificial

255
00:28:09.200 --> 00:28:14.820
impediments to the increase of fourth-rate houses, and by the necessitated greater crowding

256
00:28:14.820 --> 00:28:21.860
of those which existed having become a scandal, government was invoked to remove the evil.

257
00:28:21.860 --> 00:28:28.220
It responded by Artisans' Dwellings Act, giving to local authorities powers to pull

258
00:28:28.220 --> 00:28:41.660
A summary of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, dated 21st September 1883,

259
00:28:41.660 --> 00:28:46.060
shows that up to last September it had, at a cost of a million and a quarter to rate

260
00:28:46.060 --> 00:28:54.060
payers, unhoused 21,000 persons and provided houses for 12,000, the remaining 9,000 to

261
00:28:54.060 --> 00:28:59.300
to be hereafter provided for, being, meanwhile, left houseless.

262
00:28:59.300 --> 00:29:00.820
This is not all.

263
00:29:00.820 --> 00:29:05.820
Another local lieutenant of the government, the Commission of Sewers for the City, working

264
00:29:05.820 --> 00:29:11.160
on the same lines, has, under legislative compulsion, pulled down in Golden Lane and

265
00:29:11.160 --> 00:29:18.300
Petticoat Square masses of condemned small houses, which together accommodated 1734 poor

266
00:29:18.300 --> 00:29:19.800
people.

267
00:29:19.800 --> 00:29:25.360
Out of the spaces thus cleared five years ago, one has, by state authority, been sold

268
00:29:25.360 --> 00:29:30.540
for a railway station, and the other is only now being covered with industrial dwellings

269
00:29:30.540 --> 00:29:36.040
which will eventually accommodate one-half of the expelled population. The result up

270
00:29:36.040 --> 00:29:42.240
to the present time being that, added to those displaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works,

271
00:29:42.240 --> 00:29:49.320
these 1734 displaced five years ago, form a total of nearly 11,000 artificially made

272
00:29:49.320 --> 00:29:56.320
See then what legislation has done. By ill-imposed taxes, raising the prices of bricks and timber,

273
00:30:03.360 --> 00:30:08.360
it added to the cost of houses and promoted for economy's sake the use of bad materials

274
00:30:08.360 --> 00:30:14.320
in scanty quantities. To check the consequent production of wretched dwellings, it established

275
00:30:14.320 --> 00:30:20.320
and Regulations which, in medieval fashion, dictated the quality of the commodity produced,

276
00:30:20.320 --> 00:30:25.400
there being no perception that by insisting on a higher quality and therefore higher price,

277
00:30:25.400 --> 00:30:29.440
it would limit the demand and eventually diminish the supply.

278
00:30:29.440 --> 00:30:34.360
By additional local burdens, legislation has of late still further hindered the building

279
00:30:34.360 --> 00:30:36.040
of small houses.

280
00:30:36.040 --> 00:30:41.080
Finally, having by successive measures produced first bad houses and then a deficiency of

281
00:30:41.080 --> 00:30:48.080
The German anthropologist Bastien tells us that a sick native of Guinea who causes the fetish to lie by not recovering his fetish is the cause of a disaster.

282
00:31:11.080 --> 00:31:17.440
is strangled, and we may reasonably suppose that among the Guinean people, anyone audacious

283
00:31:17.440 --> 00:31:23.080
enough to call in question the power of the fetish would be promptly sacrificed. In days

284
00:31:23.080 --> 00:31:27.760
when governmental authority was enforced by strong measures, there was a kindred danger

285
00:31:27.760 --> 00:31:34.380
in saying anything disrespectful of the political fetish. Nowadays, however, the worst punishment

286
00:31:34.380 --> 00:31:39.080
to be looked for by one who questions its omnipotence is that he will be reviled as

287
00:31:39.080 --> 00:31:45.400
As a reactionary he talks laissez-faire. But any facts he may bring forward will appreciably

288
00:31:45.400 --> 00:31:50.520
decrease the established faith is not to be expected, for we are daily shown that this

289
00:31:50.520 --> 00:31:57.120
faith is proof against all adverse evidence. Let us contemplate a small part of that vast

290
00:31:57.120 --> 00:32:05.460
mass of it which passes unheeded. A government office is like an inverted filter.

291
00:32:05.460 --> 00:32:11.160
You send in accounts clear and they come out muddy. Such was the comparison I heard made

292
00:32:11.160 --> 00:32:17.100
many years ago by the late Sir Charles Fox, who, in conduct of his business, had considerable

293
00:32:17.100 --> 00:32:23.020
experience of public departments. That his opinion was not a singular one, though his

294
00:32:23.020 --> 00:32:29.320
comparison was, all men knew. Exposures by the press and criticisms in Parliament neve

295
00:32:29.320 --> 00:32:35.840
no one in ignorance of the vices of red tape routine. Its delay is perpetually complained

296
00:32:35.840 --> 00:32:42.400
of and which in the time of Mr. Fox more went to the extent that the commissions of officers

297
00:32:42.400 --> 00:32:48.800
in the army were generally about two year in a rear, is a fresh illustrated by the issue

298
00:32:48.800 --> 00:32:54.560
of the first volume of the detailed census of 1881, more than two years after the information

299
00:32:54.560 --> 00:33:01.180
was collected. If we seek explanations for such delays, we find one origin to be a scarcely

300
00:33:01.180 --> 00:33:07.340
credible confusion. In the case of the census returns, the Registrar General tells us that

301
00:33:07.340 --> 00:33:12.420
the difficulty consists not merely in the vast multitude of different areas that have

302
00:33:12.420 --> 00:33:18.220
to be taken into account, but still more in the bewildering complexity of their boundaries.

303
00:33:18.220 --> 00:33:25.020
There being 39,000 administrative areas of 22 different kinds which overlap one another

304
00:33:25.020 --> 00:33:30.420
– hundreds, parishes, boroughs, wards, petty sessional divisions, lieutenancy divisions,

305
00:33:30.420 --> 00:33:37.420
urban and rural sanitary districts, dioceses, registration districts, etc.

306
00:33:37.420 --> 00:33:43.980
And then, as Mr Rathburn, MP, points out, there may be superposed sets of areas with

307
00:33:43.980 --> 00:33:49.240
and Intersecting Boundaries have their respective governing bodies with authorities running

308
00:33:49.240 --> 00:33:54.800
into one another's districts. Does anyone ask why for each additional administration

309
00:33:54.800 --> 00:34:00.320
Parliament has established a fresh set of divisions? The reply which suggests itself

310
00:34:00.320 --> 00:34:06.960
is to preserve consistency of method, for this organized confusion corresponds completely

311
00:34:06.960 --> 00:34:12.060
with that organized confusion which Parliament each year increases by throwing onto the heap

312
00:34:12.060 --> 00:34:42.060
and the ownership of its old acts, a hundred new acts, the provisions of which traverse and qualify in all kinds of ways the provisions of multitudinous acts onto which they are thrown, the onus of settling what is the law being left to private persons who lose their property in getting judges' interpretations, and again, this system of putting networks of districts over other networks with their conflicting authorities is quite consistent with the method under which the reader of the public health

313
00:34:42.060 --> 00:34:49.560
of 1872, who wishes to know what are the powers exercised over him, is referred to 26 preceding

314
00:34:49.560 --> 00:34:57.300
acts of several classes and numerous dates. So too with administrative inertia. Continually,

315
00:34:57.300 --> 00:35:02.820
there occur cases showing the resistance of officialism to improvements, as by the Admiralty

316
00:35:02.820 --> 00:35:08.940
when use of the electric telegraph was proposed, and the reply was, We have a very good semaphore

317
00:35:08.940 --> 00:35:16.340
Or, as by the Post Office, which the late Sir Charles Siemens years ago said had obstructed

318
00:35:16.340 --> 00:35:21.620
the employment of improved methods of telegraphing, and which since then has impeded the use of

319
00:35:21.620 --> 00:35:28.460
the telephone. Other cases, akin to the case of industrial dwellings, now and then show

320
00:35:28.460 --> 00:35:34.580
how the State with one hand increases evils, which with the other hand it tries to diminish,

321
00:35:34.580 --> 00:35:39.420
is when it puts a duty on fire insurances and then makes regulations for the better

322
00:35:39.420 --> 00:35:45.420
putting out of fires, dictating to certain modes of construction which, as Captain Shaw

323
00:35:45.420 --> 00:35:52.420
shows, entail additional dangers. Again, the absurdities of official routine, rigid where

324
00:35:53.040 --> 00:35:57.980
it need not be and lax where it should be rigid, occasionally become glaring enough

325
00:35:57.980 --> 00:36:03.800
to cause scandals, as when a recent secret state document of importance put into the

326
00:36:03.800 --> 00:36:08.720
in the hands of an ill-paid copying clerk who was not even in permanent government employ

327
00:36:08.720 --> 00:36:15.160
was made public by him, or as when the mode of making the Mawson fuse, which was kept

328
00:36:15.160 --> 00:36:20.720
secret even from our highest artillery officers, was taught to them by the Russians, who had

329
00:36:20.720 --> 00:36:26.720
been allowed to learn it, or as when a diagram showing the distances at which British and

330
00:36:26.720 --> 00:36:32.480
foreign iron clouds could be perforated by our large guns, communicated by an enterprising

331
00:36:32.480 --> 00:36:36.040
In other words, a person who had been attached to his own government then became known to

332
00:36:36.040 --> 00:36:42.160
all the governments of Europe, while English officers remained ignorant of the facts.

333
00:36:42.160 --> 00:36:47.640
So too with state supervision. Guaranteeing of quality by inspection has been shown in

334
00:36:47.640 --> 00:36:52.320
the hallmarking of silver to be superfluous, while the silver trade has been decreased

335
00:36:52.320 --> 00:36:57.720
by it, and in other cases it has lowered the quality by establishing a standard which it

336
00:36:57.720 --> 00:37:03.760
is useless to exceed, instance the case of the cork butter market, where the higher kinds

337
00:37:03.760 --> 00:37:09.480
are disadvantaged in not adequately profiting by their better repute, or instance the case

338
00:37:09.480 --> 00:37:15.380
of herring branding, now optional, the effect of which is to put the many inferior curers

339
00:37:15.380 --> 00:37:19.940
who just reach the level of official approval on a par with the few better ones who rise

340
00:37:19.940 --> 00:37:26.820
above it, and so to discourage these. But such lessons pass unlearned, even when the

341
00:37:26.820 --> 00:37:32.380
The failure of inspection is most glaring, no notice is taken of it, as instance the

342
00:37:32.380 --> 00:37:36.380
terrible catastrophe by which a train full of people was destroyed along with the Tay

343
00:37:36.380 --> 00:37:44.100
Bridge. Countless denunciations, loud and unsparing, were vented against engineer and contractor,

344
00:37:44.100 --> 00:37:48.420
but little if anything was said about the government officer from whom the bridge received

345
00:37:48.420 --> 00:37:55.700
state approval. So too with prevention of disease. It matters not that under the management

346
00:37:55.700 --> 00:38:01.180
or dictation of State agents some of the worst evils occur, as when the lives of eighty-seven

347
00:38:01.180 --> 00:38:06.740
wives and children of soldiers are sacrificed in the ship Akrington, or as when typhoid

348
00:38:06.740 --> 00:38:12.900
fever and diphtheria are diffused by a State-ordered drainage system as in Edinburgh, or as when

349
00:38:12.900 --> 00:38:18.380
officially enforced sanitary appliances, ever getting out of order, increase the evils they

350
00:38:18.380 --> 00:38:21.700
were to decrease.

351
00:38:21.700 --> 00:38:25.860
Studies of such evidence leave unabated the confidence with which sanitary inspection

352
00:38:25.860 --> 00:38:31.100
is invoked, invoked indeed more than ever, as is shown in the recent suggestion that

353
00:38:31.100 --> 00:38:35.020
all public schools should be under the supervision of health officers.

354
00:38:35.020 --> 00:38:40.940
Nay, even when the State has manifestly caused the mischief complained of, faith in its beneficent

355
00:38:40.940 --> 00:38:46.300
agency is not at all diminished, as we see in the fact that, having a generation ago

356
00:38:46.300 --> 00:38:53.300
And now, as the only remedy, there follows the demand that the State, by its local property,

357
00:39:16.300 --> 00:39:23.300
The State's misdoings become, as in the case of industrial dwellings, reasons for praying it to do more.

358
00:39:23.300 --> 00:39:32.300
This worship of the legislature is, in one respect indeed, less excusable than the fetish worship to which I have tacitly compared it.

359
00:39:32.300 --> 00:39:39.300
The savage has the defense that his fetish is silent, does not confess its inability.

360
00:39:39.300 --> 00:39:41.300
The Theory of Money and Credit

361
00:40:09.300 --> 00:40:15.580
Neither do I refer only to such quasi-governmental confessions as that contained in the report

362
00:40:15.580 --> 00:40:21.660
of the poor law commissioners, who said that, we find on the one hand that there is scarcely

363
00:40:21.660 --> 00:40:26.940
one statute connected with the administration of public relief which has produced the effect

364
00:40:26.940 --> 00:40:31.920
designed by the legislature, and that the majority of them have created new evils and

365
00:40:31.920 --> 00:40:35.980
aggravated those which they were intended to prevent.

366
00:40:35.980 --> 00:40:42.860
I refer rather to confessions made by statesmen and by state departments. Here, for example,

367
00:40:42.860 --> 00:40:48.220
in a memorial addressed to Mr. Gladstone and adopted by a highly influential meeting held

368
00:40:48.220 --> 00:40:52.220
under the chairmanship of the late Lord Littleton, I read,

369
00:40:52.220 --> 00:40:57.500
We, the undersigned, peers, members of the House of Commons, ratepayers and inhabitants

370
00:40:57.500 --> 00:41:02.380
of the metropolis, feeling strongly the truth and force of your statement made in the House

371
00:41:02.380 --> 00:41:26.500
Here again is an example furnished by a recent

372
00:41:26.500 --> 00:41:33.540
Minute of the Board of Trade, November 1883, in which it is said that since the Shipwreck

373
00:41:33.540 --> 00:41:39.440
Committee of 1836 scarcely a session has passed without some act being passed or some step

374
00:41:39.440 --> 00:41:45.640
being taken by the legislature or the government with this object, prevention of shipwrecks,

375
00:41:45.640 --> 00:41:51.780
and that the multiplicity of statutes, which were all consolidated into one act in 1854,

376
00:41:51.780 --> 00:41:55.220
has again become a scandal and a reproach.

377
00:41:55.220 --> 00:41:59.760
The

378
00:41:59.760 --> 00:42:01.820
presently the confession that

379
00:42:01.820 --> 00:42:08.320
the loss of life and of ships has been greater since 1876 than it was before.

380
00:42:08.320 --> 00:42:13.360
Meanwhile the cost of administration has been raised from 17,000 pounds a year

381
00:42:13.360 --> 00:42:17.800
to 73,000 pounds a year.

382
00:42:17.800 --> 00:42:20.820
It is surprising how, spite of better knowledge,

383
00:42:20.820 --> 00:42:27.280
The imagination is excited by artificial appliances used in particular ways. We see it all through

384
00:42:27.280 --> 00:42:32.880
human history, from the war paint with which the savage frightens his adversary, down through

385
00:42:32.880 --> 00:42:37.400
religious ceremonies and regal processions, to the robes of a speaker and the wand of

386
00:42:37.400 --> 00:42:43.720
an officially dressed usher. I remember a child who, able to look with horrible composure

387
00:42:43.720 --> 00:42:49.060
on a horrible cadaverous mask while it was held in the hand, ran away shrieking when

388
00:42:49.060 --> 00:43:19.060
A kindred change of feeling comes over constituencies when, from boroughs and counties, their members pass to the legislative chamber, while before them as candidates they are, by one or other party, jeered at, lampooned, heckled, and in all ways treated with utter disrespect, but as soon as they assemble at Westminster, those against whom taunts and invectives, charges of incompetence and folly had been showered from press and platform,

389
00:43:19.060 --> 00:43:22.060
Excite Unlimited Faith

390
00:43:22.060 --> 00:43:29.060
Judging from the prayers made to them, there is nothing which their wisdom and their power cannot compass.

391
00:43:29.060 --> 00:43:36.060
The reply to all this will doubtless be that nothing better than guidance by collective wisdom can be had,

392
00:43:36.060 --> 00:43:47.060
that the select men of the nation, led by a reselected few, bring their best powers enlightened by all the knowledge of the time to bear on the matters before them.

393
00:43:47.060 --> 00:43:52.060
What more would you have? will be the question asked by most.

394
00:43:52.060 --> 00:43:59.060
My answer is that this best knowledge of the time with which legislators are said to come prepared for their duties

395
00:43:59.060 --> 00:44:03.060
is a knowledge of which the greater part is obviously irrelevant

396
00:44:03.060 --> 00:44:08.060
and that they are blameworthy for not seeing what is the relevant knowledge.

397
00:44:08.060 --> 00:44:15.060
No amount of linguistic acquirements by which many of them are distinguished will help their judgments in the least,

398
00:44:15.060 --> 00:44:22.180
Nor will they be appreciably helped by the literature as these acquirements open to them.

399
00:44:22.180 --> 00:44:27.380
Political experiences and speculations coming from small ancient societies through philosophers

400
00:44:27.380 --> 00:44:32.620
who assume that war is the normal state, that slavery is alike, needful and just, and that

401
00:44:32.620 --> 00:44:38.900
women must remain in perpetual tutelage can yield them but small age in judging how acts

402
00:44:38.900 --> 00:44:43.340
of parliament will work in great nations of modern types.

403
00:44:43.340 --> 00:44:50.020
They may ponder on the doings of all the great men by whom, according to the Carlylean Theory,

404
00:44:50.020 --> 00:44:54.680
society is framed, and they may spend years over those accounts of international conflicts

405
00:44:54.680 --> 00:44:59.660
and treacheries and intrigues and treaties which fill historical works without being

406
00:44:59.660 --> 00:45:04.700
much nearer understanding the how and the why of social structures and actions and the

407
00:45:04.700 --> 00:45:11.340
ways in which laws affect them. Nor does such information, as is picked up at the factory

408
00:45:11.340 --> 00:45:18.340
on Change or in the Justice Room go far towards the required preparation.

409
00:45:21.500 --> 00:45:26.340
That which is really needed is a systematic study of natural causation as displayed among

410
00:45:26.340 --> 00:45:32.140
human beings socially aggregated, though a distinct consciousness of causation is the

411
00:45:32.140 --> 00:45:38.580
last trait which intellectual progress brings, though with the savage even a simple mechanical

412
00:45:38.580 --> 00:46:08.580
The physical cause is not conceived as such, though even among the Greeks the flight of a spear was thought of as guided by a god, though from their times down almost to our own epidemics have been habitually regarded as of supernatural origin, and though among social phenomena the most complex of all causal relations may be expected to continue longest unrecognized, yet in our day the existence of such causal relations has become clear enough to force on all who think

413
00:46:08.580 --> 00:46:14.580
The inference that before meddling with them, they should be diligently studied.

414
00:46:14.580 --> 00:46:19.020
The mere facts now familiar that there is a connection between the number of marriages

415
00:46:19.020 --> 00:46:24.140
and the price of corn, and that in the same society during the same generation the ratio

416
00:46:24.140 --> 00:46:29.460
of crime to population varies within narrow limits, should be sufficient to make all see

417
00:46:29.460 --> 00:46:36.060
that human desires, using as guide such intellect as is joined with them, act with approximate

418
00:46:36.060 --> 00:46:37.780
uniformity.

419
00:46:37.780 --> 00:46:43.580
It should be inferred that among social causes, those initiated by legislation, similarly

420
00:46:43.580 --> 00:46:49.980
operating with an average regularity, must not only change men's actions but, by consequence,

421
00:46:49.980 --> 00:46:55.940
change their natures, probably in ways not intended. There should be recognition of the

422
00:46:55.940 --> 00:47:02.060
fact that social causation, more than all other causation, is a fructifying causation,

423
00:47:02.060 --> 00:47:07.220
and it should be seen that indirect and remote effects are no less inevitable than proximate

424
00:47:07.220 --> 00:47:13.820
I do not mean that there is denial of these statements and inferences, but there are beliefs

425
00:47:13.820 --> 00:47:20.180
and beliefs, some which are held nominally, some which influence conduct in small degrees,

426
00:47:20.180 --> 00:47:25.420
some which may sway it irresistibly under all circumstances, and unhappily the beliefs

427
00:47:25.420 --> 00:47:33.260
of lawmakers respecting causation in social affairs are of the superficial sort.

428
00:47:33.260 --> 00:47:38.780
Let us look at some of the truths which all tacitly admit, but which scarcely any take

429
00:47:38.780 --> 00:47:42.900
account of in legislation.

430
00:47:42.900 --> 00:47:48.060
There is the indisputable fact that each human being is in a certain degree modifiable both

431
00:47:48.060 --> 00:47:50.580
physically and mentally.

432
00:47:50.580 --> 00:47:55.420
Every theory of education, every discipline, from that of the arithmetician to that of

433
00:47:55.420 --> 00:48:01.140
the prizefighter, every proposed reward for virtue or punishment for vice, implies that

434
00:48:01.140 --> 00:48:06.980
There is the belief, embodied in sundry proverbs, that the use or disuse of each faculty, bodily

435
00:48:06.980 --> 00:48:12.820
or mental, is followed by an adaptive change in it, loss of power or gain of power according

436
00:48:12.820 --> 00:48:15.100
to demand.

437
00:48:15.100 --> 00:48:21.320
There is the fact, also in its broader manifestations universally recognized, that modifications

438
00:48:21.320 --> 00:48:26.060
of structure, in one way or other produced, are inheritable.

439
00:48:26.060 --> 00:48:31.660
No one denies that by the accumulation of small changes, generation after generation,

440
00:48:31.660 --> 00:48:37.300
constitution fits itself to conditions, so that a climate which is fatal to other races

441
00:48:37.300 --> 00:48:40.460
is innocuous to the adapted race.

442
00:48:40.460 --> 00:48:44.940
No one denies that peoples who belong to the same original stock, but have spread into

443
00:48:44.940 --> 00:48:50.140
different habitats, where they have led different lives, have acquired in the course of time

444
00:48:50.140 --> 00:48:53.460
different aptitudes and different tendencies.

445
00:48:53.460 --> 00:48:58.800
No one denies that under new conditions new national characters are even now being moulded,

446
00:48:58.800 --> 00:49:01.120
as witnessed the Americans.

447
00:49:01.120 --> 00:49:06.560
And if adaptation is everywhere and always going on, then adaptive modifications must

448
00:49:06.560 --> 00:49:11.740
be set up by every change of social conditions.

449
00:49:11.740 --> 00:49:17.020
To which there comes the undeniable corollary that every law which serves to alter men's

450
00:49:17.020 --> 00:49:23.220
modes of actions, compelling or restraining or aiding in new ways, so affects them as

451
00:49:23.220 --> 00:49:28.660
is to cause, in course of time, fresh adjustments of their natures.

452
00:49:28.660 --> 00:49:34.340
Beyond any immediate effect wrought, there is the remote effect, wholly ignored by most,

453
00:49:34.340 --> 00:49:39.940
a remoulding of the average character, a remoulding which may be of a desirable kind or of an

454
00:49:39.940 --> 00:49:47.020
undesirable kind, but which in any case is the most important of the results to be considered.

455
00:49:47.020 --> 00:49:51.740
Other general truths which the citizen and still more the legislator ought to contemplate

456
00:49:51.740 --> 00:49:57.320
until they become wrought into his intellectual fabric are disclosed when we ask how social

457
00:49:57.320 --> 00:50:02.780
activities are produced, and when we recognize the obvious answer that they are the aggregate

458
00:50:02.780 --> 00:50:08.520
results of the desires of individuals who are severely seeking satisfactions and ordinarily

459
00:50:08.520 --> 00:50:14.680
pursuing the ways which, with their pre-existing habits and thoughts, seem the easiest, following

460
00:50:14.680 --> 00:50:22.200
in the lines of least resistance, the truths of political economy being so many sequences.

461
00:50:22.200 --> 00:50:27.040
It needs no proving that social structures and social actions must in some way or other

462
00:50:27.040 --> 00:50:32.480
be the outcome of human emotions guided by ideas, either those of ancestors or those

463
00:50:32.480 --> 00:50:38.200
of living men, and that the right interpretation of social phenomena is to be found in the

464
00:50:38.200 --> 00:50:45.640
Their cooperation of these factors from generation to generation follows inevitably.

465
00:50:45.640 --> 00:50:50.240
Such an interpretation soon brings us to the inference that among men's desires seeking

466
00:50:50.240 --> 00:50:55.400
gratifications, those which have prompted their private activities and their spontaneous

467
00:50:55.400 --> 00:51:01.080
cooperations have done much more towards social development than those which have worked through

468
00:51:01.080 --> 00:51:03.680
governmental agencies.

469
00:51:03.680 --> 00:51:08.680
That abundant crops now grow where once only wild berries could be gathered is due to the

470
00:51:08.680 --> 00:51:14.320
pursuit of individual satisfactions through many centuries. The progress from wigwams

471
00:51:14.320 --> 00:51:19.920
to good houses has resulted from wishes to increase personal welfare, and towns have

472
00:51:19.920 --> 00:51:25.720
arisen under the like promptings. Beginning with traffic at gatherings on occasions of

473
00:51:25.720 --> 00:51:31.760
religious festivals, the trading organization now so extensive and complex has been produced

474
00:51:31.760 --> 00:51:35.760
is entirely by men's efforts to achieve their private ends.

475
00:51:35.760 --> 00:51:41.760
Perpetually, governments have thwarted and deranged the growth, but have in no way furthered it,

476
00:51:41.760 --> 00:51:47.760
save by partially discharging their proper function and maintaining social order.

477
00:51:47.760 --> 00:51:53.760
So too, with those advances of knowledge and those improvements of appliances by which these structural changes

478
00:51:53.760 --> 00:51:57.760
and these increasing activities have been made possible.

479
00:51:57.760 --> 00:52:04.200
It is not to the State that we owe the multitudinous useful inventions from the spade to the telephone.

480
00:52:04.200 --> 00:52:09.600
It was not the State which made possible extended navigation by a developed astronomy.

481
00:52:09.600 --> 00:52:13.980
It was not the State which made the discoveries in physics, chemistry and the rest, which

482
00:52:13.980 --> 00:52:16.720
guide modern manufacturers.

483
00:52:16.720 --> 00:52:22.600
It was not the State which devised the machinery for producing fabrics of every kind, for transferring

484
00:52:22.600 --> 00:52:29.060
Man and Things from Place to Place and for Ministering in a Thousand Ways to our Comforts.

485
00:52:29.060 --> 00:52:34.940
The worldwide transactions conducted in merchant's offices, the rush of traffic filling our streets,

486
00:52:34.940 --> 00:52:39.900
the retail distributing systems which brings everything within easy reach and delivers

487
00:52:39.900 --> 00:52:46.040
the necessaries of life daily at our doors are not of governmental origin. All these

488
00:52:46.040 --> 00:52:52.400
are results of the spontaneous activities of citizens, separate or grouped. Nay, to

489
00:52:52.400 --> 00:52:58.160
These spontaneous activities governments owe the very means of performing their duties.

490
00:52:58.160 --> 00:53:03.760
Divest the political machinery of all those aides which science and art have yielded it,

491
00:53:03.760 --> 00:53:09.720
leave it with those only which state officials have invented, and its functions would cease.

492
00:53:09.720 --> 00:53:15.060
The very language in which its laws are registered and the orders of its agents daily given is

493
00:53:15.060 --> 00:53:21.000
an instrument not in the remotest degree due to the legislator, but is one which has unawares

494
00:53:21.000 --> 00:53:28.000
The truth to which the foregoing ones introduce us is that this spontaneously formed social organisation is so bound together that you cannot act on one part without acting more or less on all parts.

495
00:53:41.560 --> 00:53:48.560
We see this unmistakably when a cotton famine, first paralysing certain manufacturing districts, and then affecting the doings of wholesale and retail distributors,

496
00:54:21.000 --> 00:54:27.320
in insensible or insensible ways, and manifestly, acts of parliaments are among those factors

497
00:54:27.320 --> 00:54:32.660
which, beyond the effects directly produced, have countless other effects of multitudinous

498
00:54:32.660 --> 00:54:38.800
kinds. As I heard remarked by a distinguished professor, whose studies give ample means

499
00:54:38.800 --> 00:54:44.580
of judging, when once you begin to interfere with the order of nature, there is no knowing

500
00:54:44.580 --> 00:54:50.940
where the results will end. And if this is true of that subhuman order of nature to which

501
00:54:50.940 --> 00:54:57.940
And now, to carry home the conclusion that the legislator should bring to his business a vivid consciousness of these and other such broad truths concerning the society which he proposes to deal, let me present somewhat more fully one of them not yet mentioned.

502
00:54:57.940 --> 00:55:15.940
And now to carry home the conclusion that the legislator should bring to his business a vivid consciousness of these and other such broad truths concerning the society which he proposes to deal, let me present somewhat more fully one of them not yet mentioned.

503
00:55:15.940 --> 00:55:25.940
The continuance of every higher species of creature depends on conformity, now to one and now to the other, of two radically opposed principles.

504
00:55:25.940 --> 00:55:32.940
One of the most familiar facts is that animals of superior types, comparatively slow in reaching maturity, are enabled when they have reached it, to give more aid to their offspring than animals of inferior types.

505
00:55:32.940 --> 00:55:51.940
One of the most familiar facts is that animals of superior types, comparatively slow in reaching maturity, are enabled when they have reached it, to give more aid to their offspring than animals of inferior types.

506
00:55:51.940 --> 00:55:59.940
The adults foster their young during periods more or less prolonged, while yet the young are unable to provide for themselves.

507
00:55:59.940 --> 00:56:05.620
for themselves. And it is obvious that maintenance of the species can be secured only by this

508
00:56:05.620 --> 00:56:12.700
parental care. It requires no proving that the blind, un-fledged hedge-bird or the young

509
00:56:12.700 --> 00:56:18.580
puppy even after it has acquired sight would forthwith die if it had to keep itself warm

510
00:56:18.580 --> 00:56:24.760
and obtain its own food. The gratuitous aid must be great in proportion as the young one

511
00:56:24.760 --> 00:56:30.160
Money is of little worth either to itself or to others, and it may diminish as fast

512
00:56:30.160 --> 00:56:37.360
as, by increasing development, the young acquires worth at first for self-sustentation and by

513
00:56:37.360 --> 00:56:44.080
and by for sustentation of others. That is to say, during immaturity, benefits received

514
00:56:44.080 --> 00:56:50.400
must vary inversely as the power or ability of the receiver. Clearly, if during the first

515
00:56:50.400 --> 00:56:57.400
If the first part of life benefits were proportioned to merits, or rewards to desserts, the species would disappear in a generation.

516
00:56:57.400 --> 00:57:06.400
From this regime of the family group, let us turn to the regime of that larger group formed by adult members of the species.

517
00:57:06.400 --> 00:57:15.400
Ask what happens when the new individual, acquiring complete use of its powers and ceasing to have parental aid, is left to itself.

518
00:57:15.400 --> 00:57:21.560
Now, there comes into play a principle just the reverse to that above described. Throughout

519
00:57:21.560 --> 00:57:27.640
the rest of his life, each adult gets benefit in proportion to merit, reward in proportion

520
00:57:27.640 --> 00:57:33.960
to desert, merit and desert in each case being understood as ability to fulfill all the requirements

521
00:57:33.960 --> 00:57:40.560
of life, to get food, to find shelter, to escape enemies. Placed in competition with

522
00:57:40.560 --> 00:57:46.200
With members of its own species, and in antagonism with members of other species, it dwindles

523
00:57:46.200 --> 00:57:52.200
and gets killed off, or thrives and propagates, according as it is ill-endowed or well-endowed.

524
00:57:52.200 --> 00:58:00.200
Manifestly, the opposite regime, could it be maintained, would, in course of time, be

525
00:58:00.200 --> 00:58:01.200
fatal.

526
00:58:01.200 --> 00:58:06.880
If the benefits received by each individual were proportionate to its inferiority, if,

527
00:58:06.880 --> 00:58:12.600
As a consequence, multiplication of the inferior was furthered, and multiplication of the superior

528
00:58:12.600 --> 00:58:18.000
hindered, progressive degradation would result, and eventually the degenerate species would

529
00:58:18.000 --> 00:58:24.420
fail to hold its ground in presence of antagonistic species and competing species.

530
00:58:24.420 --> 00:58:29.980
The broad fact, then, here to be noted, is that Nature's modes of treatment, inside the

531
00:58:29.980 --> 00:58:35.120
family group and outside the family group, are diametrically opposed to one another,

532
00:58:35.120 --> 00:58:39.680
and that the intrusion of either mode into the sphere of the other would be destructive

533
00:58:39.680 --> 00:58:43.160
either immediately or remotely.

534
00:58:43.160 --> 00:58:47.720
Does anyone think that the like does not hold of the human species?

535
00:58:47.720 --> 00:58:52.620
He cannot deny that within the human family as within any inferior family, it would be

536
00:58:52.620 --> 00:58:57.000
fatal to proportions benefit to merits.

537
00:58:57.000 --> 00:59:02.280
Can he assert that outside the family among adults there should not be, as throughout

538
00:59:02.280 --> 00:59:09.280
Will he contend that no mischief will result if the lowly endowed are enabled to thrive and multiply as much as, or more than, the highly endowed?

539
00:59:09.280 --> 00:59:20.280
A society of men, standing towards other societies in relations of either antagonism or competition, may be considered as a species, or, more literally, as a variety of a species, and it must be true of it as of other species or varieties.

540
00:59:20.280 --> 00:59:26.520
and relations of either antagonism or competition may be considered as a species or more literally

541
00:59:26.520 --> 00:59:33.000
as a variety of a species, and it must be true of it as of other species or varieties

542
00:59:33.000 --> 00:59:38.540
that it will be unable to hold its own in the struggle with other societies if it disadvantages

543
00:59:38.540 --> 00:59:45.360
its superior units that it may advantage its inferior units. Surely none can fail to see

544
00:59:45.360 --> 00:59:49.920
that were the principle of family life to be adopted and fully carried out in social

545
00:59:49.920 --> 00:59:56.000
life, were reward always great in proportion as dessert was small, fatal results to the

546
00:59:56.000 --> 01:00:02.520
society would quickly follow. And if so, then even a partial intrusion of the family regime

547
01:00:02.520 --> 01:00:09.520
into the regime of the state will be slowly followed by fatal results. Society in its

548
01:00:09.520 --> 01:00:15.200
Its corporate capacity cannot without immediate or remote a disaster interfere with the play

549
01:00:15.200 --> 01:00:21.160
of these opposed principles, under which every species has reached such fitness for its mode

550
01:00:21.160 --> 01:00:27.320
of life as it possesses, and under which it maintains that fitness.

551
01:00:27.320 --> 01:00:33.960
I say advisedly, society in its corporate capacity, not intending to exclude or condemn

552
01:00:33.960 --> 01:00:39.860
Some aid given to the inferior by the superior in their individual capacities, though when

553
01:00:39.860 --> 01:00:47.120
given so indiscriminately as to enable the inferior to multiply, such aid entails mischief.

554
01:00:47.120 --> 01:00:52.680
Yet in the absence of aid given by society, individual aid, more generally demanded than

555
01:00:52.680 --> 01:00:58.400
now, and associated with a greater sense of responsibility, would on the average be given

556
01:00:58.400 --> 01:01:04.800
with the effect of fostering the unfortunate worthy rather than the innately unworthy,

557
01:01:04.800 --> 01:01:11.800
there being always too the concomitant social benefit arising from culture of the sympathies.

558
01:01:11.800 --> 01:01:16.080
But all this may be admitted while asserting that the radical distinction between family

559
01:01:16.080 --> 01:01:22.720
ethics and state ethics must be maintained, and that while generosity must be the essential

560
01:01:22.720 --> 01:01:27.760
The essential principle of the one, justice must be the essential principle of the other.

561
01:01:27.760 --> 01:01:33.560
A rigorous maintenance of those normal relations among citizens, under which each gets in return

562
01:01:33.560 --> 01:01:39.520
for his labour, skilled or unskilled, bodily or mental, as much as is proved to be its

563
01:01:39.520 --> 01:01:46.120
value by the demand for it, such return therefore as will enable him to thrive and rear offspring

564
01:01:46.120 --> 01:01:52.400
in proportion to the superiorities which make him valuable to himself and others.

565
01:01:52.400 --> 01:01:57.840
And yet, notwithstanding the conspicuousness of these truths, which should strike everyone

566
01:01:57.840 --> 01:02:02.920
who leaves his lexicons and his lawdeeds and his ledgers and looks abroad into that

567
01:02:02.920 --> 01:02:09.920
natural order of things under which we exist and to which we must conform, there is continual

568
01:02:09.920 --> 01:02:12.980
advocacy of paternal government.

569
01:02:12.980 --> 01:02:18.000
The intrusion of family ethics into the ethics of the State, instead of being regarded as

570
01:02:18.000 --> 01:02:41.280
In the essay to which the Cobden Club awarded its prize in 1880, there occurs the assertion

571
01:02:41.280 --> 01:02:47.960
The Truth of Free Trade is clouded over by the laissez-faire fallacy, and we were told

572
01:02:47.960 --> 01:02:56.560
that we need a great deal more parental government, that bugbear of the old economists.

573
01:02:56.560 --> 01:03:02.360
Vitally important, as is the truth above insisted upon, since acceptance or rejection of it

574
01:03:02.360 --> 01:03:08.680
affects the entire fabric of political conclusions formed, I may be excused if I emphasize it

575
01:03:08.680 --> 01:03:15.120
here by quoting certain passages contained in a work I published in 1851,

576
01:03:15.120 --> 01:03:22.680
premising only that the reader must not hold me committed to such teleological implications as they contain.

577
01:03:22.680 --> 01:03:29.400
After describing that state of universal warfare maintained throughout the lower creation,

578
01:03:29.400 --> 01:03:35.960
and showing that an average of benefit results from it, I have continued thus.

579
01:03:35.960 --> 01:03:48.960
Note further that their carnivorous anomalies not only remove from herbivorous herds individuals past their prime, but also weed out the sickly, the malformed and the least fleet or powerful.

580
01:03:48.960 --> 01:04:00.960
By the aid of which purifying process, as well as by the fighting so universal in the pairing season, all viciation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior sample is prevented,

581
01:04:00.960 --> 01:04:09.960
and the maintenance of a constitution completely adapted to surrounding conditions and therefore most productive of happiness is ensured.

582
01:04:09.960 --> 01:04:18.960
The development of the higher creation is a progress towards the form of being capable of a happiness undiminished by these drawbacks.

583
01:04:18.960 --> 01:04:26.960
It is in the human race that the consummation is to be accomplished, civilization is the last stage of its accomplishment,

584
01:04:26.960 --> 01:04:32.960
and the ideal man is the man in whom all the conditions of that accomplishment are fulfilled.

585
01:04:32.960 --> 01:04:39.960
Meanwhile, the well-being of existing humanity and the unfolding of it into this ultimate perfection

586
01:04:39.960 --> 01:04:47.960
are both secured by that same beneficent though severe discipline to which the animate creation at large is subject.

587
01:04:47.960 --> 01:04:51.960
A discipline which is pitiless in the working out of good,

588
01:04:51.960 --> 01:04:57.520
A Felicity Pursuing Law Which Never Swerves for the Avoidance of Partial and Temporary

589
01:04:57.520 --> 01:04:59.240
Suffering.

590
01:04:59.240 --> 01:05:04.120
The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation

591
01:05:04.120 --> 01:05:09.120
of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so

592
01:05:09.120 --> 01:05:17.300
many in shallows and in miseries, are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.

593
01:05:17.300 --> 01:05:22.740
To become fit for the social state, man has not only to lose his savageness, but he has

594
01:05:22.740 --> 01:05:27.020
to acquire the capacities needful for civilized life.

595
01:05:27.020 --> 01:05:29.180
Power of application must be developed.

596
01:05:29.180 --> 01:05:35.100
Such modification of the intellect as shall qualify it for its new tasks must take place.

597
01:05:35.100 --> 01:05:40.280
And above all, there must be gained the ability to sacrifice a small immediate gratification

598
01:05:40.280 --> 01:05:42.820
for a future great one.

599
01:05:42.820 --> 01:05:47.060
The state of transition will of course be an unhappy state.

600
01:05:47.060 --> 01:05:52.460
The theory inevitably results from incongruity between constitution and conditions.

601
01:05:52.460 --> 01:05:57.560
All these evils which afflict us and seem to the uninitiated the obvious consequence

602
01:05:57.560 --> 01:06:05.420
of this or that removable cause are unavoidable attendants on the adaptation now in progress.

603
01:06:05.420 --> 01:06:10.420
Humanity is being pressed against the inexorable necessities of its new position, is being

604
01:06:10.420 --> 01:06:16.840
molded into harmony with them and has to bear the resulting unhappiness as best it can.

605
01:06:16.840 --> 01:06:23.520
The process must be undergone, and the sufferings must be endured. No power on earth, no cunningly

606
01:06:23.520 --> 01:06:30.700
devised laws of statesmen, no world-rectifying schemes of the humane, no communist panaceas,

607
01:06:30.700 --> 01:06:37.240
no reforms that men ever did broach or ever will broach can diminish them one jot. Intensified

608
01:06:37.240 --> 01:06:42.840
they may be and are, and in preventing their intensification, the philanthropic will find

609
01:06:42.840 --> 01:06:49.000
and ample scope for exertion, but there is bound up with the change a normal amount of

610
01:06:49.000 --> 01:06:55.740
suffering which cannot be lessened without altering the very laws of life.

611
01:06:55.740 --> 01:07:01.440
Of course, insofar as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy

612
01:07:01.440 --> 01:07:07.800
of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated, albeit there is unquestionably

613
01:07:07.800 --> 01:07:13.580
Only harm done when sympathy is shown without any regard to ultimate results.

614
01:07:13.580 --> 01:07:18.360
But the drawbacks hence arising are nothing like commensurate with the benefits otherwise

615
01:07:18.360 --> 01:07:20.180
conferred.

616
01:07:20.180 --> 01:07:25.780
Only when this sympathy prompts to a breach of equity, only when it originates an interference

617
01:07:25.780 --> 01:07:31.200
forbidden by the law of equal freedom, only when by so doing it suspends in some particular

618
01:07:31.200 --> 01:07:36.600
department of life the relationship between constitution and conditions, does it work

619
01:07:36.600 --> 01:08:06.600
The Theory of Money and Credit

620
01:08:06.600 --> 01:08:12.600
Inflicts Positive Misery and Prevents Positive Happiness

621
01:08:12.600 --> 01:08:23.600
Social Statics, pages 322 to 325, and pages 380 and 381.

622
01:08:23.600 --> 01:08:27.600
The lapse of a third of a century since these passages were published

623
01:08:27.600 --> 01:08:32.600
has brought me no reason for retreating from the position taken up in them.

624
01:08:32.600 --> 01:08:37.920
In theory-wise, it has brought a vast amount of evidence strengthening that position.

625
01:08:37.920 --> 01:08:43.000
The beneficial results of the survival of the fittest prove to be immeasurably greater

626
01:08:43.000 --> 01:08:45.400
than those above indicated.

627
01:08:45.400 --> 01:08:51.480
The process of natural selection, as Mr. Darwin called it, cooperating with a tendency to

628
01:08:51.480 --> 01:08:57.600
variation and to inheritance of variations, he has shown to be a chief cause, though not,

629
01:08:57.600 --> 01:09:02.680
I believe the sole cause of that evolution through which all living things, beginning

630
01:09:02.680 --> 01:09:08.320
with the lowest and diverging and re-diverging as they evolved, have reached their present

631
01:09:08.320 --> 01:09:13.000
degrees of organization and adaptation to their modes of life.

632
01:09:13.000 --> 01:09:18.060
So familiar has this truth become that some apology seems needed for naming it.

633
01:09:18.060 --> 01:09:24.440
And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people, now

634
01:09:24.440 --> 01:09:29.080
Now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them

635
01:09:29.080 --> 01:09:34.880
that much more than people in past times they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing

636
01:09:34.880 --> 01:09:40.800
its action, now more than ever before in the history of the world are they doing all they

637
01:09:40.800 --> 01:09:45.440
can to further survival of the unfittest.

638
01:09:45.440 --> 01:09:51.320
But the postulate that men are rational beings continually leads one to draw inferences which

639
01:09:51.320 --> 01:09:54.400
which proved to be extremely wide of the mark.

640
01:09:54.400 --> 01:10:00.840
Yes, truly, your principle is derived from the lives of brutes and is a brutal principle.

641
01:10:00.840 --> 01:10:05.580
You will not persuade me that men are to be under the discipline which animals are under.

642
01:10:05.580 --> 01:10:08.600
I care nothing for your natural history arguments.

643
01:10:08.600 --> 01:10:13.500
My conscience shows me that the feeble and the suffering must be helped, and if selfish

644
01:10:13.500 --> 01:10:17.880
people won't help them, they must be forced by law to help them.

645
01:10:17.880 --> 01:10:22.180
Don't tell me that the milk of human kindness is to be reserved for the relations between

646
01:10:22.180 --> 01:10:28.140
individuals and that governments must be the administrators of nothing but hard justice.

647
01:10:28.140 --> 01:10:33.380
Every man with sympathy in him must feel that hunger and pain and squalor must be prevented

648
01:10:33.380 --> 01:10:40.040
and that if private agencies do not suffice then public agencies must be established.

649
01:10:40.040 --> 01:10:45.280
Such is the kind of response which I expect to be made by nine out of ten. In some of

650
01:10:45.280 --> 01:10:50.020
For them it will doubtless result from a fellow feeling so acute that they cannot contemplate

651
01:10:50.020 --> 01:10:56.400
human misery without an impatience which excludes all thought of remote results. Concerning

652
01:10:56.400 --> 01:11:02.720
the susceptibilities of the rest, we may, however, be somewhat skeptical. Persons who are angry

653
01:11:02.720 --> 01:11:08.840
if, to maintain our supposed national interests or national prestige, those in authority do

654
01:11:08.840 --> 01:11:13.960
not send out thousands of men to be partially destroyed, while destroying other thousands

655
01:11:13.960 --> 01:11:20.960
Little admiration need be felt for the professed sympathies of people who urge on a policy which breaks up progressing societies, and who then look on with cynical indifference at the weltering confusion left behind with all its entailed suffering and death.

656
01:11:43.960 --> 01:12:08.960
And those who, when Boers, asserting their independence, successfully resisted us, were angry because British honour was not maintained by fighting to avenge a defeat at the cost of more mortality and misery to our own soldiers and their antagonists, cannot have so much enthusiasm of humanity as the protests like that indicated above would lead one to expect.

657
01:12:08.960 --> 01:12:15.560
Indeed, along with this sensitiveness, which it seems will not let them look with patience

658
01:12:15.560 --> 01:12:21.440
on the pains of the battles of life as it quietly goes on around, they appear to have

659
01:12:21.440 --> 01:12:26.880
a callousness which not only tolerates but enjoys contemplating the pains of battles

660
01:12:26.880 --> 01:12:32.880
of the literal kind. As one sees in the demand for illustrated papers containing scenes of

661
01:12:32.880 --> 01:12:38.200
of Carnage, and in the greediness with which detailed accounts of bloody engagements are

662
01:12:38.200 --> 01:12:44.640
read. We may reasonably have our doubts about men whose feelings are such that they cannot

663
01:12:44.640 --> 01:12:50.800
bear the thought of hardships borne, mostly by the idle and the improvident, and who nevertheless

664
01:12:50.800 --> 01:12:56.800
have demanded thirty-one editions of the fifteen decisive battles of the world, in which they

665
01:12:56.800 --> 01:13:01.800
The Theory of Money and Credit

666
01:13:26.800 --> 01:13:32.120
It is well that the inferior races should be exterminated, and their place is occupied

667
01:13:32.120 --> 01:13:35.120
by the superior races.

668
01:13:35.120 --> 01:13:39.940
So that, marvellous to relate, though they cannot bear to think of the evils accompanying

669
01:13:39.940 --> 01:13:44.560
the struggle for existence as it is carried on without violence among individuals in their

670
01:13:44.560 --> 01:13:50.060
own society, they contemplate with equanimity such evils in their intense and wholesale

671
01:13:50.060 --> 01:13:55.900
forms when inflicted by fire and sword on entire communities.

672
01:13:55.900 --> 01:14:01.100
Not worthy of much respect, then, as it seems to me, is this generous consideration of the

673
01:14:01.100 --> 01:14:08.460
inferior at home, which is accompanied by unscrupulous sacrifice of the inferior abroad.

674
01:14:08.460 --> 01:14:13.160
Still less respectable appears this extreme concern for those of our own blood, which

675
01:14:13.160 --> 01:14:19.500
goes along with utter unconcern for those of other blood when we observe its methods.

676
01:14:19.500 --> 01:14:24.580
Did it prompt personal effort to relieve the suffering, it would rightly receive approving

677
01:14:24.580 --> 01:14:30.540
recognition. Were the many who express this cheap pity, like the few who devote large

678
01:14:30.540 --> 01:14:36.540
parts of their time to aiding and encouraging, and occasionally amusing those who, by ill-fortune

679
01:14:36.540 --> 01:14:43.540
or incapacity, are brought to lives of hardship, they would be worthy of unqualified admiration.

680
01:14:44.100 --> 01:14:48.860
The more there are of men and women who help the poor to help themselves, the more there

681
01:14:48.860 --> 01:14:54.300
There are of those whose sympathy is exhibited directly and not by proxy, the more we may

682
01:14:54.300 --> 01:15:00.980
rejoice. But the immense majority of the persons who wish to mitigate by law the miseries of

683
01:15:00.980 --> 01:15:06.580
the unsuccessful and the reckless propose to do this in small measure at their own cost

684
01:15:06.580 --> 01:15:13.740
and mainly at the cost of others, sometimes with their assent, but mostly without. More

685
01:15:13.740 --> 01:15:18.740
More than this is true, for those who are to be forced to do so much for the distressed

686
01:15:18.740 --> 01:15:22.980
often equally or more require something done for them.

687
01:15:22.980 --> 01:15:28.400
The deserving poor are among those who are taxed to support the undeserving poor, as

688
01:15:28.400 --> 01:15:33.980
under the old poor law the diligent and provident labourer had to pay that the good-for-nothings

689
01:15:33.980 --> 01:15:40.440
might not suffer, until frequently under this extra burden he broke down and himself took

690
01:15:40.440 --> 01:15:43.800
Work Refuge in the Workhouse.

691
01:15:43.800 --> 01:15:49.140
As at present the total rates levied in large towns for all public purposes have reached

692
01:15:49.140 --> 01:15:54.440
such a height that they cannot be exceeded without inflicting great hardship on the small

693
01:15:54.440 --> 01:15:59.460
shopkeepers and artisans who already find it difficult enough to keep themselves free

694
01:15:59.460 --> 01:16:01.640
from the poor pertained.

695
01:16:01.640 --> 01:16:08.640
So in all cases the policy is one which intensifies the pain of those most deserving of pity that

696
01:16:08.640 --> 01:16:13.320
The pains of those least deserving of pity may be mitigated.

697
01:16:13.320 --> 01:16:18.240
Men who are so sympathetic that they cannot let the struggle for existence bring on the

698
01:16:18.240 --> 01:16:24.460
unworthy the sufferings consequent on their incapacity or misconduct are unsympathetic

699
01:16:24.460 --> 01:16:30.300
that they can deliberately make the struggle for existence harder for the worthy and inflict

700
01:16:30.300 --> 01:16:35.000
on them and their children artificial evils in addition to the natural evils they have

701
01:16:35.000 --> 01:16:37.600
to bear.

702
01:16:37.600 --> 01:16:44.000
And here we are brought round to our original topic, the sins of legislators. Here there

703
01:16:44.000 --> 01:16:49.360
comes clearly before us the commonest of the transgressions which rulers commit, a transgression

704
01:16:49.360 --> 01:16:56.280
so common and so sanctified by custom that no one imagines it to be a transgression.

705
01:16:56.280 --> 01:17:02.360
Here we see that, as indicated at the outset, government, begotten of aggression and by

706
01:17:02.360 --> 01:17:08.040
Man ever continues to betray its original nature by its aggressiveness, and that even

707
01:17:08.040 --> 01:17:14.200
what on its nearer face seems beneficence only, shows on its remoter face not a little

708
01:17:14.200 --> 01:17:18.360
maleficence, kindness at the cost of cruelty.

709
01:17:18.360 --> 01:17:23.040
For is it not cruel to increase the sufferings of the better that the sufferings of the worse

710
01:17:23.040 --> 01:17:25.400
may be decreased?

711
01:17:25.400 --> 01:17:30.680
It is, indeed, marvellous how readily we let ourselves be deceived by words and phrases

712
01:17:30.680 --> 01:17:36.240
which suggests one aspect of the facts, while leaving the opposite aspects unsuggested.

713
01:17:36.240 --> 01:17:42.140
A good illustration of this, and one germane to the immediate question, is seen in the

714
01:17:42.140 --> 01:17:48.160
use of words protection and protectionists by the antagonists of free trade, and in the

715
01:17:48.160 --> 01:17:55.460
tacit admission of its propriety by free traders. While the one party has habitually ignored,

716
01:17:55.460 --> 01:18:01.500
The other party has habitually failed to emphasize the truth that this so-called protection always

717
01:18:01.500 --> 01:18:09.340
involves aggression, and that the name aggressionist ought to be substituted for the name protectionist.

718
01:18:09.340 --> 01:18:14.880
For nothing can be more certain than that if, to maintain A's profit, B is forbidden

719
01:18:14.880 --> 01:18:21.340
to buy of C, or is fined to the extent of the duty if he buys of C, then B is aggressed

720
01:18:21.340 --> 01:18:28.340
Now, just like confusion of ideas, caused by looking at one face only of the transaction, may be traced throughout all the legislation which forcibly takes the property of this man for the purpose of protecting him.

721
01:18:51.340 --> 01:18:54.620
The purpose of giving gratis benefits to that man.

722
01:18:54.620 --> 01:18:59.460
Habitually, when one of the numerous measures thus characterized is discussed, the dominant

723
01:18:59.460 --> 01:19:05.020
thought is concerning the pitiable Jones, who is to be protected against some evil,

724
01:19:05.020 --> 01:19:10.020
while no thought is given to the hard-working Brown who is aggressed upon, often much more

725
01:19:10.020 --> 01:19:12.220
to be pitied.

726
01:19:12.220 --> 01:19:18.140
Money is exacted either directly or through raised rent, from the huckster who only by

727
01:19:18.140 --> 01:19:48.140
from the mason thrown out of work by a strike, from the mechanic whose savings are melted away during an illness, from the widow who washes or sows from dawn to dark to feed her fatherless little ones, and all that the dissolute may be saved from hunger, that the children of less impoverished neighbours may have cheap lessons, and that various people mostly better off may read newspapers and novels for nothing,

728
01:19:48.140 --> 01:19:53.140
One respects more misleading than that which allows aggressionists to be called protectionists.

729
01:19:53.140 --> 01:20:00.140
For, as just shown, protection of the vicious poor involves aggression on the virtuous poor.

730
01:20:00.140 --> 01:20:04.420
Doubtless it is true that the greater part of the money exacted comes from those who

731
01:20:04.420 --> 01:20:11.140
are relatively well off, but this is no consolation to the ill off from whom the rest is exacted.

732
01:20:11.140 --> 01:20:17.340
Nay, if the comparison be made between the pressures borne by the two classes respectively,

733
01:20:17.340 --> 01:20:22.460
It becomes manifest that the case is even worse than it first appears.

734
01:20:22.460 --> 01:20:28.100
For while to the well-off the exaction means loss of luxuries, to the ill-off it means

735
01:20:28.100 --> 01:20:31.700
loss of necessaries.

736
01:20:31.700 --> 01:20:37.180
And now see the nemesis which is threatening to follow this chronic sin of legislators.

737
01:20:37.180 --> 01:20:42.100
They and their class, in common with all owners of property, are in danger of suffering from

738
01:20:42.100 --> 01:20:46.700
from a sweeping application of that general principle practically asserted by each of

739
01:20:46.700 --> 01:20:49.860
these confiscating Acts of Parliament.

740
01:20:49.860 --> 01:20:54.260
For what is the tacit assumption on which such Acts proceed?

741
01:20:54.260 --> 01:20:59.380
It is the assumption that no man has any claim to his property, not even to that which he

742
01:20:59.380 --> 01:21:04.700
has earned by the sweat of his brow, save by permission of the community, and that the

743
01:21:04.700 --> 01:21:09.500
community may cancel the claim to any extent it thinks fit.

744
01:21:09.500 --> 01:21:15.060
No defense can be made for this appropriation of A's possessions for the benefit of B, save

745
01:21:15.060 --> 01:21:20.100
one which sets out with the postulate that society as a whole has an absolute right over

746
01:21:20.100 --> 01:21:25.840
the possessions of each member. And now this doctrine, which has been tacitly assumed is

747
01:21:25.840 --> 01:21:31.900
being openly proclaimed. Mr. George and his friends, Mr. Hindman and his supporters are

748
01:21:31.900 --> 01:21:38.500
pushing the theory to its logical issue. They have been instructed by examples, yearly increasing

749
01:21:38.500 --> 01:21:45.500
Legislative misdeeds of the classes above indicated are in large measure explained and reprobation of them mitigated when we look at the matter from afar off. They have their root in the error that society is a man-made society.

750
01:22:08.500 --> 01:22:14.980
Manufacture, whereas it is a growth. Neither the culture of past times nor the culture

751
01:22:14.980 --> 01:22:20.780
of the present time has given to any considerable number of people a scientific conception of

752
01:22:20.780 --> 01:22:26.740
a society, a conception of it as having a natural structure in which all its institutions

753
01:22:26.740 --> 01:22:34.020
– governmental, religious, industrial, commercial, etc. – are interdependently bound, a structure

754
01:22:34.020 --> 01:22:37.100
which is in a sense organic.

755
01:22:37.100 --> 01:22:45.180
Or if such a conception is nominally entertained, it is not entertained in such a way as to be operative on conduct.

756
01:22:45.180 --> 01:22:51.780
Contrarywise, incorporated humanity is very commonly thought of as though it were like so much dough

757
01:22:51.780 --> 01:22:57.260
which the cook can mold as she pleases into pie crust or puff or tartlet.

758
01:22:57.260 --> 01:23:15.660
The Communist shows us, unmistakably, that he thinks of the body politic as admitting of being shaped thus or thus at will, and the tacit implication of many Acts of Parliament is that aggregated men, twisted into this or that arrangement, will remain as intended.

759
01:23:15.660 --> 01:23:25.380
It may indeed be said that, even irrespective of this erroneous conception of a society as a plastic mass instead of as an organized body,

760
01:23:25.380 --> 01:23:36.700
facts forced on his attention hour by hour should make everyone skeptical as to the success of this or that proposed way of changing a people's actions.

761
01:23:36.700 --> 01:23:39.500
Alike to the citizen and to the legislator,

762
01:23:39.500 --> 01:23:46.000
Home experiences daily supply proofs that the conduct of human beings balks calculation.

763
01:23:46.000 --> 01:23:50.700
He has given up the thought of managing his wife and lets her manage him.

764
01:23:50.700 --> 01:23:56.100
Children on whom he has tried, now reprimand, now punishment, now suasion, now reward,

765
01:23:56.100 --> 01:23:59.700
do not respond satisfactorily to any method.

766
01:23:59.700 --> 01:24:06.000
And no expostulation prevents their mother from treating them in ways he thinks mischievous.

767
01:24:06.000 --> 01:24:11.720
So, too, his dealings with his servants, whether by reasoning or by scolding, rarely succeed

768
01:24:11.720 --> 01:24:17.420
for long. The falling short of attention, the punctuality or cleanliness or sobriety

769
01:24:17.420 --> 01:24:24.280
leads to constant changes. Yet, difficult as he finds it to deal with humanity in detail,

770
01:24:24.280 --> 01:24:30.800
he is confident of his ability to deal with embodied humanity. Citizens, not one thousandth

771
01:24:30.800 --> 01:24:37.800
One might have expected that, whether they observed the implications of these domestic failures, or whether they contemplated in every aspect of their life,

772
01:24:37.800 --> 01:24:44.800
they would have been able to understand that the great mass of whom belong to classes having habits and modes of thought of which he has but dim notions,

773
01:24:44.800 --> 01:24:49.800
he feels sure will act in ways he foresees and fulfil ends he wishes.

774
01:24:49.800 --> 01:24:55.800
Is there not a marvellous incongruity between premises and conclusion?

775
01:24:55.800 --> 01:25:00.360
Whether they observed the implications of these domestic failures or whether they contemplated

776
01:25:00.360 --> 01:25:06.920
in every newspaper the indications of a social life so vast, too varied, too involved, to

777
01:25:06.920 --> 01:25:11.800
be even vaguely pictured in thought, men would have entered on the business of law-making

778
01:25:11.800 --> 01:25:18.480
with the greatest hesitation. Yet in this more than anything else do they show a confident

779
01:25:18.480 --> 01:25:23.920
readiness. Nowhere is there so astounding a contrast between the difficulty of the task

780
01:25:23.920 --> 01:25:42.920
Unquestionably among monstrous beliefs, one of the most monstrous is that while, for a simple handicraft such as shoemaking, a long apprenticeship is needful, the sole thing which needs no apprenticeship is making a nation's laws.

781
01:25:42.920 --> 01:26:10.920
Summing up the results of the discussion, may we not reasonably say that there lie before the legislator several open secrets, which are yet so open that they ought not to remain secret to one who undertakes the vast and terrible responsibility of dealing with millions upon millions of human beings by measures which, if they do not conduce to their happiness, will increase their miseries and accelerate their deaths?

782
01:26:10.920 --> 01:26:28.920
There is, first of all, the undeniable truth conspicuous and let absolutely ignored that there is no phenomena which a society presents, but what have their origins in the phenomena of individual human life, which again have their roots in vital phenomena at large.

783
01:26:28.920 --> 01:26:36.120
And there is the inevitable implication that unless these vital phenomena, bodily and mental,

784
01:26:36.120 --> 01:26:42.020
are chaotic in their relations, a supposition excluded by the very maintenance of life,

785
01:26:42.020 --> 01:26:48.600
the resulting phenomena cannot be wholly chaotic. There must be some kind of order in the phenomena

786
01:26:48.600 --> 01:26:55.680
which grew out of them when associated human beings have to cooperate. Evidently then,

787
01:26:55.680 --> 01:27:00.840
When one who has not studied such resulting phenomena of social order undertakes to regulate

788
01:27:00.840 --> 01:27:06.080
society, he is pretty certain to work mischiefs.

789
01:27:06.080 --> 01:27:12.640
In the second place, apart from a priori reasoning, this conclusion should be forced on the legislator

790
01:27:12.640 --> 01:27:15.440
by comparison of societies.

791
01:27:15.440 --> 01:27:20.160
It ought to be sufficiently manifest that before meddling with the details of social

792
01:27:20.160 --> 01:27:25.240
Social Organization inquiry should be made whether social organization has a natural

793
01:27:25.240 --> 01:27:30.980
history and that to answer this inquiry it would be well setting out with the simplest

794
01:27:30.980 --> 01:27:37.980
societies to see in what respects social structures agree. Such comparative sociology pursued to

795
01:27:39.240 --> 01:27:46.240
a very small extent shows a substantial uniformity of genesis, the habitual existence of chieftainship

796
01:27:46.240 --> 01:28:16.240
and the establishment of chiefly authority by war, the rise everywhere of the medicine man and priest, the presence of a cult having in all places the same fundamental traits, the traces of division of labour early displayed which gradually become more marked, and the various complications political, ecclesiastical, industrial, which arise as groups are compounded and re-compounded by war, prove to any who compare them that, apart from all their specialities,

797
01:28:16.240 --> 01:28:22.240
Social differences, societies have general resemblances in their modes of origin and development.

798
01:28:22.240 --> 01:28:28.200
They present traits of structure showing that social organization has laws which override

799
01:28:28.200 --> 01:28:35.480
individual wills, and laws the disregard of which must be fraught with disaster.

800
01:28:35.480 --> 01:28:41.400
And then, in the third place, there is that mass of guiding information, yielded by the

801
01:28:41.400 --> 01:28:46.560
the records of legislation in our own country and in other countries which still more obviously

802
01:28:46.560 --> 01:28:53.560
demands attention. Here and elsewhere attempts of multitudinous kinds made by kings and statesmen

803
01:28:53.880 --> 01:28:59.480
have failed to do the good intended and have worked unexpected evils.

804
01:28:59.480 --> 01:29:04.240
Century after century new measures like the old ones and other measures akin in principle

805
01:29:04.240 --> 01:29:10.200
have again disappointed hopes and again brought disaster. And yet it is thought neither by

806
01:29:10.200 --> 01:29:15.280
By electors, nor by those they elect, that there is any need for systematic study of

807
01:29:15.280 --> 01:29:20.480
that law-making which in bygone ages went on working the ill-being of the people when

808
01:29:20.480 --> 01:29:27.480
it tried to achieve their well-being. Surely there can be no fitness for legislative functions

809
01:29:27.480 --> 01:29:35.000
without wide knowledge of those legislative experiences which the past has bequeathed.

810
01:29:35.000 --> 01:29:40.720
Reverting then to the analogy drawn at the outset, we must say that the legislator is

811
01:29:40.720 --> 01:29:46.080
morally blameless or morally blameworthy according as he has or has not acquainted himself with

812
01:29:46.080 --> 01:29:48.960
these several classes of facts.

813
01:29:48.960 --> 01:29:54.160
A physician who, after years of study, has gained a competent knowledge of physiology,

814
01:29:54.160 --> 01:30:00.540
pathology and therapeutics, is not held criminally responsible if a man dies under his treatment.

815
01:30:00.540 --> 01:30:06.500
He has prepared himself as well as he can, and has acted to the best of his judgment.

816
01:30:06.500 --> 01:30:12.700
Similarly, the legislator, whose measures produce evil instead of good, notwithstanding

817
01:30:12.700 --> 01:30:18.380
the extensive and methodic inquiries which helped him to decide, cannot be held to have

818
01:30:18.380 --> 01:30:21.700
committed more than an error of reasoning.

819
01:30:21.700 --> 01:30:27.180
Contrarywise, the legislator who is wholly or in great part uninformed concerning the

820
01:30:27.180 --> 01:30:32.900
The masses of facts which he must examine before his opinion on a proposed law can be

821
01:30:32.900 --> 01:30:39.020
of any value, and who nevertheless helps to pass that law, can no more be absolved if

822
01:30:39.020 --> 01:30:45.660
misery or mortality result than the journeyman-druggist can be absolved when death is caused by the

823
01:30:45.660 --> 01:30:48.380
medicine he ignorantly prescribes.