The Man vs. the State by Herbert Spencer
The Sins of Legislators
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.
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.
In these exceptional communities, unaggressive and from special causes unaggressed upon,
there is so little deviation from the virtues of truthfulness, honesty, justice and generosity,
that nothing beyond an occasional expression of public opinion by informally assembled elders is needful.
Conversely, we find proofs that, at first recognized but temporarily during leadership in war,
For the authority of a chief is permanently established by continuity of war, and grows
strong where successful war ends in subjection of neighbouring tribes.
And thence onwards, examples furnished by all races put beyond doubt the truth that
the coercive power of the chief, developing into king, and king of kings, a frequent title
in the Ancient East, becomes great in proportion as conquest becomes habitual and the union
of Subdued Nations Extensive. Comparisons disclose a further truth which should be ever
present to us, the truth that the aggressiveness of the ruling power inside a society increases
with its aggressiveness outside the society, as to make an efficient army the soldiers
must be subordinate to their commander, so to make an efficient fighting community must
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.
and yield up whatever property is required.
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.
Current evidence shows this.
At present on the continent, the citizen is free only when his services as a soldier is
is not demanded, and during the rest of his life he is largely enslaved in supporting
the military organization. Even among ourselves a serious war would, by the necessitated conscription,
suspend the liberties of large numbers and trench on the liberties of the rest by taking
from them through taxes whatever supplies were needed, that is, forcing them to labor
I am not, under the title of this article, about to treat of the trespassers and the
revenges for trespasses accounts of which mainly constitute history, nor to trace the
The Internal Inequities Which Have Ever Accompanied the External Inequities
I do not propose here to catalogue the crimes of irresponsible legislators, beginning with
that of King Khufu, the stones of whose vast tombs were laid in the bloody sweat of a
hundred thousand slaves toiling through long years under the lash, going on to those committed
by conquerors, Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman and the rest, and ending
with those of Napoleon whose ambition to set his foot on the neck of the civilized world
cost not less than two million lives.
Nor do I propose here to enumerate those sins of responsible legislators seen in the long
list of laws made in the interests of dominant classes, a list coming down in our own history
to those under which they were long maintained slavery and the slave trade.
torturing nearly forty thousand negroes annually by close packing during a
tropical voyage and killing a large percentage of them and ending with the
Corn Laws which says, Sir Erskine May,
to ensure high rents it had been decreed that multitudes should hunger.
Not indeed that a presentation of the conspicuous misdeeds of legislators
responsible and irresponsible would be useless.
It would have several uses, one of them relevant to the truth above pointed out.
Such a presentation would make clear how that identity of political ethics with
military ethics, which necessarily exists during primitive times,
when the army is simply the mobilized society and the society is the quiescent army,
continues through long stages and even now affects in great degrees our law
proceedings and our daily lives.
Having, for instance, shown that in numerous savage times the judicial function of the
chief does not exist, or is nominal, and that, very generally, during early stages of European
civilisation, each man had to defend himself and rectify his private wrongs as best he
might. Having shown that in medieval times the right of private war among members of
the military order was brought to an end, not because the head ruler thought it his
by Battle under Another Form, Council Being the Champions and Purses the Weapons.
In civil cases, the ruling agency cares scarcely more than of old about rectifying the wrongs
of the injured, but practically its deputy does little less than enforce the rules of
the fight, the result being less a question of equity than a question of pecuniary ability
and forensic skill.
Nay, so little concern for the administration of justice is shown by the ruling agency that
when, by legal conflict carried on in the presence of its deputy, the combatants have
been peculiarly bled, even to the extent of producing prostration, and when, an appeal
being made by one of them, the decision is reversed, the beaten combatant is made to
pay for the blunders of the deputy, or of a preceding deputy, and not unfrequently the
The wronged man, who sought protection or restitution, is taken out of court, pecuniarily dead.
Adequately done, such a portrayal of government misdeeds of commission and omission, proving
that the partially surviving code of ethics arising in and proper to a state of war still
vitiates government action, might greatly moderate the hopes of those who are anxious
to extend governmental control.
We are observing that along with the still manifest traits of that primitive political
structure which chronic militancy produces, there goes a still manifest survival of its
primitive principles.
The reformer and the philanthropist might be less sanguine in their anticipations of
good from its all-pervading agency, and might be more inclined to trust agencies of a non-governmental
kind.
Without leaving out the greater part of the large topic comprehended under the title of
this article, I propose here to deal only with a comparatively small remaining part,
those sins of legislators which are not generated by their personal ambitions or class interests,
but result from lack of the study by which they are morally bound to prepare themselves.
A drugist's assistant who, after listening to the description of pains which he mistakes
for those of colic, but which are really caused by inflammation of the cheekum, prescribes
a sharp purgative and kills the patient, is found guilty of manslaughter. He is not allowed
to excuse himself on the ground that he did not intend harm, but hoped for good. The plea
that he simply made a mistake in his diagnosis is not entertained. He is told that he had
have no right to risk disastrous consequences by meddling in a matter concerning which
his knowledge was so inadequate.
The fact that he was ignorant, how great was his ignorance, is not accepted in bar of judgment.
It is tacitly assumed that the experience common to all should have taught him that
even the skilled and much more the unskilled make mistakes in the identification of disorders
and in the appropriate treatment, and that having disregarded the warning derivable from
common experience, he was answerable for the consequences.
We measure the responsibilities of legislators for mischiefs they may do in a much more lenient
fashion. In most cases, so far from thinking of them as deserving punishment for causing
disasters by laws ignorantly enacted, we scarcely think of them as deserving reprobation. It
It is held that common experience should have taught the druggist's assistant, untrained
as he is, not to interfere, but it is not held that common experience should have taught
the legislator not to interfere till he has trained himself.
Though multitudinous facts are before him in the recorded legislation of our own country
and of other countries which should impress on him the immense evils caused by wrong treatment,
He is not condemned for disregarding these warnings against rash meddling.
Contrary wise, it is thought meretricious to him when, perhaps lately from college,
perhaps fresh from keeping a pack of hounds which made him popular in his county, perhaps
emerging from a provincial town where he acquired a fortune, perhaps rising from the bar at
which he has gained a name as an advocate, he enters Parliament, and forthwith, in quite
a light-hearted way begins to aid or hinder this or that means of operating on the body
politic. In this case there is no occasion even to make for him the excuse that he does
not know how little he knows, for the public at large agrees with him in thinking it needless
that he should know anything more than what the debates on the proposed measures tell
him. And yet the mischiefs wrought by uninstructed law-making enormous in their amount as compared
with those caused by uninstructed medical treatment are conspicuous to all who but glance
over its history. The reader must pardon me while I recall a few familiar instances.
Century after century, statesmen went on enacting usury laws which made worse the condition
of the debtor, raising the rates of interest from five to six when intending to reduce
to reduce it to four, as under Louis XV, and indirectly producing undreamt of evils of
many kind, such as preventing the reproductive use of spare capital, and burdening the small
proprietors with multitude of perpetual services. So too the endeavours which in England continued
through five hundred years to stop forestalling, and which in France, as Arthur Young witnessed,
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.
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.
of like spirit and followed by allied mischiefs have been the many endeavours to fix wages,
which began with the statute of labourers under Edward II and ceased only sixty years
ago when, having long galvanised in spittle fields a decaying industry and fostered there
a miserable population, lords and commons finally gave up fixing silk weavers' earnings
by decisions of magistrates.
Here I imagine an impatient interruption. We all know that the story is stale, the misgifts
of interfering with trade have been dinned in our ears till we are weary, and no one
needs to be taught the lesson afresh. My first reply is that by the great majority
the lesson was never properly learnt at all, and that many of those who did learn it have
forgotten it. For just the same pleas which of old were put in for these dictations are
are again put in. In the Statute 35 of Edward II, which aimed to keep down the price of
herrings, but was soon repealed because it raised the price, it was complained that people
coming to the fair do bargain for herring, and every of them, by malice and envy, increase
upon another, and if one proffer forty shilling, another will proffer ten shilling more, and
and the third sixty shilling, and so everyone so mounteth other in the bargain.
And now the higgling of the market, here condemned and ascribed to malice and envy, is again
being condemned.
The evils of competition have all along been the stock cry of the socialists, and the Council
of Democratic Federation denounces the carrying on of exchange under the control of individual
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.
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.
by Social Science.
In a paper read to the Statistical Society in May 1873, Mr Janssen, Vice President of
the Law Society, stated that from the Statute of Merton, 20, Henry III, to the end of 1872,
there had been passed 18,110 public acts, of which he estimated that four-fifths had
been wholly or partially repealed.
He also stated that the number of public acts repealed wholly or in part or amended during
the three years 1870, 1871 and 1872 had been 3,532, of which 2,579 had been totally repealed.
To see whether this state of repeal has continued, I have referred to the annually issued volumes
of the Public General Statutes for the last three sessions.
Saying nothing of the numerous amended Acts, the result is that in the last three sessions
there have been totally repealed, separately or in groups, six hundred and fifty Acts belonging
to the present reign, besides many of preceding reigns.
This of course is greatly above the average rate, for there has been of late an active
purgation of the Statute Book.
In making every allowance, we must infer that within our own times, repeals have mounted
some distance into the thousands. Doubtless, a number of them have been of laws that were
obsolete. Others have been demanded by changes of circumstances, though seeing how many of
them are quite recent acts, this has not been a large cause. Others, simply because they
were inoperative, and others have been consequent on the consolidations of numerous acts into
to single acts. But, unquestionably, in multitudinous cases, repeals came because the acts had proved
injurious. We talk glibly of such changes. We think of cancelled legislation with indifference.
We forget that before laws are abolished, they have generally been inflicting evils
more or less serious, some for a few years, some for tens of years, some for centuries.
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.
A vicious form of legal procedure, for example, either enacted or tolerated, entails on suitors, costs or delays or defeats.
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.
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.
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.
And among overburdened people, extra trouble and worry imply, here and there, physical and mental prostrations, with their entailed direct and indirect sufferings.
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,
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.
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.
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.
There appears no suspicion that in cases where it seems to fail, natural causation has been traversed by artificial hindrances.
And yet, in the case to which I now refer, that of the supply of houses for the poor,
it needs but to ask what laws have been doing for a long time past to see that the terrible
evils complained of are mostly law-made.
A generation ago, discussion was taking place concerning the inadequacy and badness of industrial
dwellings, and I had occasion to deal with the question.
Here is a passage then written.
An architect and surveyor described it, the Building Act, as having worked after the following
manner.
In those districts of London consisting of inferior houses built in that unsubstantial
fashion which the new Building Act was to mend, there obtains an average rent, sufficiently
remunerative to landlords whose houses were run up economically before the new Building
Act passed.
This existing average rent fixes the rent that must be charged in these districts for
new houses of the same accommodation, that is, the same number of rooms, for the people
they are built for do not appreciate the extra safety of living within walls strengthened
with Hoopi and Bond. Now, it turns out upon trial that houses built in accordance with
the present regulations, and let, at this established rate, bring in nothing like a
for a reasonable return. Builders have consequently confined themselves to erecting houses in
better districts, where the possibility of a profitable competition with pre-existing
houses shows that those pre-existing houses were tolerably substantial, and have ceased
to erect dwellings for the masses, except in the suburbs where no pressing sanitary
evils exist. Meanwhile, in the inferior districts above described, has resulted an increase
of Overcrowding. Half a dozen families in a house, a score lodgers to a room, nay, more
than this has resulted. That state of miserable dilapidation into which these abodes of the
poor are allowed to fall is due to the absence of competition from new houses. Landlords
do not find their tenants tempted away by the offer of better accommodation. Repairs,
being unnecessary for securing the largest amount of profit, are not made. In fact, for
For a large percentage of the very horrors which our sanitary agitators are trying to
cure by law, we have to thank previous agitators of the same school.
Social Statics, page 384
These were not the only law-made causes of such evils, as shown in the following further
passage.
Sundry others were recognized.
Writing before the repeal of the brick duty, the builder says,
It is supposed that one-fourth of the cost of a dwelling, which lets for two and six or
three shillings a week, is caused by the expense of the title deeds and the tax on wood and
bricks used in its construction. Of course, the owner of such property must be remunerated,
and he therefore charges seven-and-a-half pennies or nine pennies a week to cover these burdens.
Mr. C. Gatliff, secretary to the Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Working Classes,
Prohibiting the effect of the window tax says they are now paying upon their institution
in St. Pancras the sum of £162.16 in window duties, or 1% per annum upon the original
outlay. The average rental paid by the society's tenants is £5.06 per week, and the window
duty deducts from this £7.25 per week.
The Times, 31st January 1850 Social Statics, page 385
Neither is this all the evidence which the press of those days afforded.
There was published in The Times of 7th December 1850, too late to be used in the above-named
work which I issued in the last week of 1850, a letter dated from the Reform Club and signed
and Architect, which contained the following passages.
Lord Kinnaird recommends in your paper of yesterday the construction of model lodging
houses by throwing two or three houses into one. Allow me to suggest to his Lordship and
to his friend, Lord Ashley, to whom he refers, that if 1. the window tacks were repealed,
2. the Building Act repealed, accepting the clauses in acting that party and external
The walls shall be fireproof. 3. The timber duties are either equalized or repealed.
And 4. An act passed to facilitate the transfer of property, there would be no more necessity
for model lodging houses than there is for model ships, model cotton mills, or model
steam engines. The first limits the poor man's house to seven windows. The second limits
the size of the poor man's house to twenty-five feet by eighteen, about the size of a gentleman's
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.
The fourth would have considerable influence upon the present miserable state of the dwellings of the poor.
Small freeholds might then be transferred as easily as leaseholds.
The effect of building leases has been a direct inducement to bad building.
To guard against misstatements or overstatements, I have taken the precaution to consult a large East End builder and contractor of forty years' experience,
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.
Mr. Forrest, who authorizes me to give his name, verifies the foregoing statements, with the exception of one which he strengthens.
He says that architect underestimates the evil entailed by the definition of a fourth-rate
house, since the dimensions are much less than those he gives, perhaps in conformity
with the provisions of a more recent building act.
Mr. Forrest has done more than this, besides illustrating the bad effects of the great
increase in ground rents in sixty years from one pound to eight pounds ten shillings for
for a fourth-rate house, which, joined with other causes, had obliged him to abandon plans
for industrial dwellings he had intended to build. Besides agreeing with architect that
this evil has been greatly increased by the difficulties of land transfer due to the
law-established system of trusts and entails, he pointed out that a further penalty on the
building of small houses is inflicted by additions to local burdens, prohibitory imposts, he
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.
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.
The misery, the disease, the mortality in rookeries made continually worse by artificial
impediments to the increase of fourth-rate houses, and by the necessitated greater crowding
of those which existed having become a scandal, government was invoked to remove the evil.
It responded by Artisans' Dwellings Act, giving to local authorities powers to pull
A summary of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, dated 21st September 1883,
shows that up to last September it had, at a cost of a million and a quarter to rate
payers, unhoused 21,000 persons and provided houses for 12,000, the remaining 9,000 to
to be hereafter provided for, being, meanwhile, left houseless.
This is not all.
Another local lieutenant of the government, the Commission of Sewers for the City, working
on the same lines, has, under legislative compulsion, pulled down in Golden Lane and
Petticoat Square masses of condemned small houses, which together accommodated 1734 poor
people.
Out of the spaces thus cleared five years ago, one has, by state authority, been sold
for a railway station, and the other is only now being covered with industrial dwellings
which will eventually accommodate one-half of the expelled population. The result up
to the present time being that, added to those displaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works,
these 1734 displaced five years ago, form a total of nearly 11,000 artificially made
See then what legislation has done. By ill-imposed taxes, raising the prices of bricks and timber,
it added to the cost of houses and promoted for economy's sake the use of bad materials
in scanty quantities. To check the consequent production of wretched dwellings, it established
and Regulations which, in medieval fashion, dictated the quality of the commodity produced,
there being no perception that by insisting on a higher quality and therefore higher price,
it would limit the demand and eventually diminish the supply.
By additional local burdens, legislation has of late still further hindered the building
of small houses.
Finally, having by successive measures produced first bad houses and then a deficiency of
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.
is strangled, and we may reasonably suppose that among the Guinean people, anyone audacious
enough to call in question the power of the fetish would be promptly sacrificed. In days
when governmental authority was enforced by strong measures, there was a kindred danger
in saying anything disrespectful of the political fetish. Nowadays, however, the worst punishment
to be looked for by one who questions its omnipotence is that he will be reviled as
As a reactionary he talks laissez-faire. But any facts he may bring forward will appreciably
decrease the established faith is not to be expected, for we are daily shown that this
faith is proof against all adverse evidence. Let us contemplate a small part of that vast
mass of it which passes unheeded. A government office is like an inverted filter.
You send in accounts clear and they come out muddy. Such was the comparison I heard made
many years ago by the late Sir Charles Fox, who, in conduct of his business, had considerable
experience of public departments. That his opinion was not a singular one, though his
comparison was, all men knew. Exposures by the press and criticisms in Parliament neve
no one in ignorance of the vices of red tape routine. Its delay is perpetually complained
of and which in the time of Mr. Fox more went to the extent that the commissions of officers
in the army were generally about two year in a rear, is a fresh illustrated by the issue
of the first volume of the detailed census of 1881, more than two years after the information
was collected. If we seek explanations for such delays, we find one origin to be a scarcely
credible confusion. In the case of the census returns, the Registrar General tells us that
the difficulty consists not merely in the vast multitude of different areas that have
to be taken into account, but still more in the bewildering complexity of their boundaries.
There being 39,000 administrative areas of 22 different kinds which overlap one another
– hundreds, parishes, boroughs, wards, petty sessional divisions, lieutenancy divisions,
urban and rural sanitary districts, dioceses, registration districts, etc.
And then, as Mr Rathburn, MP, points out, there may be superposed sets of areas with
and Intersecting Boundaries have their respective governing bodies with authorities running
into one another's districts. Does anyone ask why for each additional administration
Parliament has established a fresh set of divisions? The reply which suggests itself
is to preserve consistency of method, for this organized confusion corresponds completely
with that organized confusion which Parliament each year increases by throwing onto the heap
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
of 1872, who wishes to know what are the powers exercised over him, is referred to 26 preceding
acts of several classes and numerous dates. So too with administrative inertia. Continually,
there occur cases showing the resistance of officialism to improvements, as by the Admiralty
when use of the electric telegraph was proposed, and the reply was, We have a very good semaphore
Or, as by the Post Office, which the late Sir Charles Siemens years ago said had obstructed
the employment of improved methods of telegraphing, and which since then has impeded the use of
the telephone. Other cases, akin to the case of industrial dwellings, now and then show
how the State with one hand increases evils, which with the other hand it tries to diminish,
is when it puts a duty on fire insurances and then makes regulations for the better
putting out of fires, dictating to certain modes of construction which, as Captain Shaw
shows, entail additional dangers. Again, the absurdities of official routine, rigid where
it need not be and lax where it should be rigid, occasionally become glaring enough
to cause scandals, as when a recent secret state document of importance put into the
in the hands of an ill-paid copying clerk who was not even in permanent government employ
was made public by him, or as when the mode of making the Mawson fuse, which was kept
secret even from our highest artillery officers, was taught to them by the Russians, who had
been allowed to learn it, or as when a diagram showing the distances at which British and
foreign iron clouds could be perforated by our large guns, communicated by an enterprising
In other words, a person who had been attached to his own government then became known to
all the governments of Europe, while English officers remained ignorant of the facts.
So too with state supervision. Guaranteeing of quality by inspection has been shown in
the hallmarking of silver to be superfluous, while the silver trade has been decreased
by it, and in other cases it has lowered the quality by establishing a standard which it
is useless to exceed, instance the case of the cork butter market, where the higher kinds
are disadvantaged in not adequately profiting by their better repute, or instance the case
of herring branding, now optional, the effect of which is to put the many inferior curers
who just reach the level of official approval on a par with the few better ones who rise
above it, and so to discourage these. But such lessons pass unlearned, even when the
The failure of inspection is most glaring, no notice is taken of it, as instance the
terrible catastrophe by which a train full of people was destroyed along with the Tay
Bridge. Countless denunciations, loud and unsparing, were vented against engineer and contractor,
but little if anything was said about the government officer from whom the bridge received
state approval. So too with prevention of disease. It matters not that under the management
or dictation of State agents some of the worst evils occur, as when the lives of eighty-seven
wives and children of soldiers are sacrificed in the ship Akrington, or as when typhoid
fever and diphtheria are diffused by a State-ordered drainage system as in Edinburgh, or as when
officially enforced sanitary appliances, ever getting out of order, increase the evils they
were to decrease.
Studies of such evidence leave unabated the confidence with which sanitary inspection
is invoked, invoked indeed more than ever, as is shown in the recent suggestion that
all public schools should be under the supervision of health officers.
Nay, even when the State has manifestly caused the mischief complained of, faith in its beneficent
agency is not at all diminished, as we see in the fact that, having a generation ago
And now, as the only remedy, there follows the demand that the State, by its local property,
The State's misdoings become, as in the case of industrial dwellings, reasons for praying it to do more.
This worship of the legislature is, in one respect indeed, less excusable than the fetish worship to which I have tacitly compared it.
The savage has the defense that his fetish is silent, does not confess its inability.
The Theory of Money and Credit
Neither do I refer only to such quasi-governmental confessions as that contained in the report
of the poor law commissioners, who said that, we find on the one hand that there is scarcely
one statute connected with the administration of public relief which has produced the effect
designed by the legislature, and that the majority of them have created new evils and
aggravated those which they were intended to prevent.
I refer rather to confessions made by statesmen and by state departments. Here, for example,
in a memorial addressed to Mr. Gladstone and adopted by a highly influential meeting held
under the chairmanship of the late Lord Littleton, I read,
We, the undersigned, peers, members of the House of Commons, ratepayers and inhabitants
of the metropolis, feeling strongly the truth and force of your statement made in the House
Here again is an example furnished by a recent
Minute of the Board of Trade, November 1883, in which it is said that since the Shipwreck
Committee of 1836 scarcely a session has passed without some act being passed or some step
being taken by the legislature or the government with this object, prevention of shipwrecks,
and that the multiplicity of statutes, which were all consolidated into one act in 1854,
has again become a scandal and a reproach.
The
presently the confession that
the loss of life and of ships has been greater since 1876 than it was before.
Meanwhile the cost of administration has been raised from 17,000 pounds a year
to 73,000 pounds a year.
It is surprising how, spite of better knowledge,
The imagination is excited by artificial appliances used in particular ways. We see it all through
human history, from the war paint with which the savage frightens his adversary, down through
religious ceremonies and regal processions, to the robes of a speaker and the wand of
an officially dressed usher. I remember a child who, able to look with horrible composure
on a horrible cadaverous mask while it was held in the hand, ran away shrieking when
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,
Excite Unlimited Faith
Judging from the prayers made to them, there is nothing which their wisdom and their power cannot compass.
The reply to all this will doubtless be that nothing better than guidance by collective wisdom can be had,
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.
What more would you have? will be the question asked by most.
My answer is that this best knowledge of the time with which legislators are said to come prepared for their duties
is a knowledge of which the greater part is obviously irrelevant
and that they are blameworthy for not seeing what is the relevant knowledge.
No amount of linguistic acquirements by which many of them are distinguished will help their judgments in the least,
Nor will they be appreciably helped by the literature as these acquirements open to them.
Political experiences and speculations coming from small ancient societies through philosophers
who assume that war is the normal state, that slavery is alike, needful and just, and that
women must remain in perpetual tutelage can yield them but small age in judging how acts
of parliament will work in great nations of modern types.
They may ponder on the doings of all the great men by whom, according to the Carlylean Theory,
society is framed, and they may spend years over those accounts of international conflicts
and treacheries and intrigues and treaties which fill historical works without being
much nearer understanding the how and the why of social structures and actions and the
ways in which laws affect them. Nor does such information, as is picked up at the factory
on Change or in the Justice Room go far towards the required preparation.
That which is really needed is a systematic study of natural causation as displayed among
human beings socially aggregated, though a distinct consciousness of causation is the
last trait which intellectual progress brings, though with the savage even a simple mechanical
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
The inference that before meddling with them, they should be diligently studied.
The mere facts now familiar that there is a connection between the number of marriages
and the price of corn, and that in the same society during the same generation the ratio
of crime to population varies within narrow limits, should be sufficient to make all see
that human desires, using as guide such intellect as is joined with them, act with approximate
uniformity.
It should be inferred that among social causes, those initiated by legislation, similarly
operating with an average regularity, must not only change men's actions but, by consequence,
change their natures, probably in ways not intended. There should be recognition of the
fact that social causation, more than all other causation, is a fructifying causation,
and it should be seen that indirect and remote effects are no less inevitable than proximate
I do not mean that there is denial of these statements and inferences, but there are beliefs
and beliefs, some which are held nominally, some which influence conduct in small degrees,
some which may sway it irresistibly under all circumstances, and unhappily the beliefs
of lawmakers respecting causation in social affairs are of the superficial sort.
Let us look at some of the truths which all tacitly admit, but which scarcely any take
account of in legislation.
There is the indisputable fact that each human being is in a certain degree modifiable both
physically and mentally.
Every theory of education, every discipline, from that of the arithmetician to that of
the prizefighter, every proposed reward for virtue or punishment for vice, implies that
There is the belief, embodied in sundry proverbs, that the use or disuse of each faculty, bodily
or mental, is followed by an adaptive change in it, loss of power or gain of power according
to demand.
There is the fact, also in its broader manifestations universally recognized, that modifications
of structure, in one way or other produced, are inheritable.
No one denies that by the accumulation of small changes, generation after generation,
constitution fits itself to conditions, so that a climate which is fatal to other races
is innocuous to the adapted race.
No one denies that peoples who belong to the same original stock, but have spread into
different habitats, where they have led different lives, have acquired in the course of time
different aptitudes and different tendencies.
No one denies that under new conditions new national characters are even now being moulded,
as witnessed the Americans.
And if adaptation is everywhere and always going on, then adaptive modifications must
be set up by every change of social conditions.
To which there comes the undeniable corollary that every law which serves to alter men's
modes of actions, compelling or restraining or aiding in new ways, so affects them as
is to cause, in course of time, fresh adjustments of their natures.
Beyond any immediate effect wrought, there is the remote effect, wholly ignored by most,
a remoulding of the average character, a remoulding which may be of a desirable kind or of an
undesirable kind, but which in any case is the most important of the results to be considered.
Other general truths which the citizen and still more the legislator ought to contemplate
until they become wrought into his intellectual fabric are disclosed when we ask how social
activities are produced, and when we recognize the obvious answer that they are the aggregate
results of the desires of individuals who are severely seeking satisfactions and ordinarily
pursuing the ways which, with their pre-existing habits and thoughts, seem the easiest, following
in the lines of least resistance, the truths of political economy being so many sequences.
It needs no proving that social structures and social actions must in some way or other
be the outcome of human emotions guided by ideas, either those of ancestors or those
of living men, and that the right interpretation of social phenomena is to be found in the
Their cooperation of these factors from generation to generation follows inevitably.
Such an interpretation soon brings us to the inference that among men's desires seeking
gratifications, those which have prompted their private activities and their spontaneous
cooperations have done much more towards social development than those which have worked through
governmental agencies.
That abundant crops now grow where once only wild berries could be gathered is due to the
pursuit of individual satisfactions through many centuries. The progress from wigwams
to good houses has resulted from wishes to increase personal welfare, and towns have
arisen under the like promptings. Beginning with traffic at gatherings on occasions of
religious festivals, the trading organization now so extensive and complex has been produced
is entirely by men's efforts to achieve their private ends.
Perpetually, governments have thwarted and deranged the growth, but have in no way furthered it,
save by partially discharging their proper function and maintaining social order.
So too, with those advances of knowledge and those improvements of appliances by which these structural changes
and these increasing activities have been made possible.
It is not to the State that we owe the multitudinous useful inventions from the spade to the telephone.
It was not the State which made possible extended navigation by a developed astronomy.
It was not the State which made the discoveries in physics, chemistry and the rest, which
guide modern manufacturers.
It was not the State which devised the machinery for producing fabrics of every kind, for transferring
Man and Things from Place to Place and for Ministering in a Thousand Ways to our Comforts.
The worldwide transactions conducted in merchant's offices, the rush of traffic filling our streets,
the retail distributing systems which brings everything within easy reach and delivers
the necessaries of life daily at our doors are not of governmental origin. All these
are results of the spontaneous activities of citizens, separate or grouped. Nay, to
These spontaneous activities governments owe the very means of performing their duties.
Divest the political machinery of all those aides which science and art have yielded it,
leave it with those only which state officials have invented, and its functions would cease.
The very language in which its laws are registered and the orders of its agents daily given is
an instrument not in the remotest degree due to the legislator, but is one which has unawares
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.
We see this unmistakably when a cotton famine, first paralysing certain manufacturing districts, and then affecting the doings of wholesale and retail distributors,
in insensible or insensible ways, and manifestly, acts of parliaments are among those factors
which, beyond the effects directly produced, have countless other effects of multitudinous
kinds. As I heard remarked by a distinguished professor, whose studies give ample means
of judging, when once you begin to interfere with the order of nature, there is no knowing
where the results will end. And if this is true of that subhuman order of nature to which
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.
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.
The continuance of every higher species of creature depends on conformity, now to one and now to the other, of two radically opposed principles.
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.
The adults foster their young during periods more or less prolonged, while yet the young are unable to provide for themselves.
for themselves. And it is obvious that maintenance of the species can be secured only by this
parental care. It requires no proving that the blind, un-fledged hedge-bird or the young
puppy even after it has acquired sight would forthwith die if it had to keep itself warm
and obtain its own food. The gratuitous aid must be great in proportion as the young one
Money is of little worth either to itself or to others, and it may diminish as fast
as, by increasing development, the young acquires worth at first for self-sustentation and by
and by for sustentation of others. That is to say, during immaturity, benefits received
must vary inversely as the power or ability of the receiver. Clearly, if during the first
If the first part of life benefits were proportioned to merits, or rewards to desserts, the species would disappear in a generation.
From this regime of the family group, let us turn to the regime of that larger group formed by adult members of the species.
Ask what happens when the new individual, acquiring complete use of its powers and ceasing to have parental aid, is left to itself.
Now, there comes into play a principle just the reverse to that above described. Throughout
the rest of his life, each adult gets benefit in proportion to merit, reward in proportion
to desert, merit and desert in each case being understood as ability to fulfill all the requirements
of life, to get food, to find shelter, to escape enemies. Placed in competition with
With members of its own species, and in antagonism with members of other species, it dwindles
and gets killed off, or thrives and propagates, according as it is ill-endowed or well-endowed.
Manifestly, the opposite regime, could it be maintained, would, in course of time, be
fatal.
If the benefits received by each individual were proportionate to its inferiority, if,
As a consequence, multiplication of the inferior was furthered, and multiplication of the superior
hindered, progressive degradation would result, and eventually the degenerate species would
fail to hold its ground in presence of antagonistic species and competing species.
The broad fact, then, here to be noted, is that Nature's modes of treatment, inside the
family group and outside the family group, are diametrically opposed to one another,
and that the intrusion of either mode into the sphere of the other would be destructive
either immediately or remotely.
Does anyone think that the like does not hold of the human species?
He cannot deny that within the human family as within any inferior family, it would be
fatal to proportions benefit to merits.
Can he assert that outside the family among adults there should not be, as throughout
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?
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.
and 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
that it will be unable to hold its own in the struggle with other societies if it disadvantages
its superior units that it may advantage its inferior units. Surely none can fail to see
that were the principle of family life to be adopted and fully carried out in social
life, were reward always great in proportion as dessert was small, fatal results to the
society would quickly follow. And if so, then even a partial intrusion of the family regime
into the regime of the state will be slowly followed by fatal results. Society in its
Its corporate capacity cannot without immediate or remote a disaster interfere with the play
of these opposed principles, under which every species has reached such fitness for its mode
of life as it possesses, and under which it maintains that fitness.
I say advisedly, society in its corporate capacity, not intending to exclude or condemn
Some aid given to the inferior by the superior in their individual capacities, though when
given so indiscriminately as to enable the inferior to multiply, such aid entails mischief.
Yet in the absence of aid given by society, individual aid, more generally demanded than
now, and associated with a greater sense of responsibility, would on the average be given
with the effect of fostering the unfortunate worthy rather than the innately unworthy,
there being always too the concomitant social benefit arising from culture of the sympathies.
But all this may be admitted while asserting that the radical distinction between family
ethics and state ethics must be maintained, and that while generosity must be the essential
The essential principle of the one, justice must be the essential principle of the other.
A rigorous maintenance of those normal relations among citizens, under which each gets in return
for his labour, skilled or unskilled, bodily or mental, as much as is proved to be its
value by the demand for it, such return therefore as will enable him to thrive and rear offspring
in proportion to the superiorities which make him valuable to himself and others.
And yet, notwithstanding the conspicuousness of these truths, which should strike everyone
who leaves his lexicons and his lawdeeds and his ledgers and looks abroad into that
natural order of things under which we exist and to which we must conform, there is continual
advocacy of paternal government.
The intrusion of family ethics into the ethics of the State, instead of being regarded as
In the essay to which the Cobden Club awarded its prize in 1880, there occurs the assertion
The Truth of Free Trade is clouded over by the laissez-faire fallacy, and we were told
that we need a great deal more parental government, that bugbear of the old economists.
Vitally important, as is the truth above insisted upon, since acceptance or rejection of it
affects the entire fabric of political conclusions formed, I may be excused if I emphasize it
here by quoting certain passages contained in a work I published in 1851,
premising only that the reader must not hold me committed to such teleological implications as they contain.
After describing that state of universal warfare maintained throughout the lower creation,
and showing that an average of benefit results from it, I have continued thus.
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.
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,
and the maintenance of a constitution completely adapted to surrounding conditions and therefore most productive of happiness is ensured.
The development of the higher creation is a progress towards the form of being capable of a happiness undiminished by these drawbacks.
It is in the human race that the consummation is to be accomplished, civilization is the last stage of its accomplishment,
and the ideal man is the man in whom all the conditions of that accomplishment are fulfilled.
Meanwhile, the well-being of existing humanity and the unfolding of it into this ultimate perfection
are both secured by that same beneficent though severe discipline to which the animate creation at large is subject.
A discipline which is pitiless in the working out of good,
A Felicity Pursuing Law Which Never Swerves for the Avoidance of Partial and Temporary
Suffering.
The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation
of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so
many in shallows and in miseries, are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.
To become fit for the social state, man has not only to lose his savageness, but he has
to acquire the capacities needful for civilized life.
Power of application must be developed.
Such modification of the intellect as shall qualify it for its new tasks must take place.
And above all, there must be gained the ability to sacrifice a small immediate gratification
for a future great one.
The state of transition will of course be an unhappy state.
The theory inevitably results from incongruity between constitution and conditions.
All these evils which afflict us and seem to the uninitiated the obvious consequence
of this or that removable cause are unavoidable attendants on the adaptation now in progress.
Humanity is being pressed against the inexorable necessities of its new position, is being
molded into harmony with them and has to bear the resulting unhappiness as best it can.
The process must be undergone, and the sufferings must be endured. No power on earth, no cunningly
devised laws of statesmen, no world-rectifying schemes of the humane, no communist panaceas,
no reforms that men ever did broach or ever will broach can diminish them one jot. Intensified
they may be and are, and in preventing their intensification, the philanthropic will find
and ample scope for exertion, but there is bound up with the change a normal amount of
suffering which cannot be lessened without altering the very laws of life.
Of course, insofar as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy
of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated, albeit there is unquestionably
Only harm done when sympathy is shown without any regard to ultimate results.
But the drawbacks hence arising are nothing like commensurate with the benefits otherwise
conferred.
Only when this sympathy prompts to a breach of equity, only when it originates an interference
forbidden by the law of equal freedom, only when by so doing it suspends in some particular
department of life the relationship between constitution and conditions, does it work
The Theory of Money and Credit
Inflicts Positive Misery and Prevents Positive Happiness
Social Statics, pages 322 to 325, and pages 380 and 381.
The lapse of a third of a century since these passages were published
has brought me no reason for retreating from the position taken up in them.
In theory-wise, it has brought a vast amount of evidence strengthening that position.
The beneficial results of the survival of the fittest prove to be immeasurably greater
than those above indicated.
The process of natural selection, as Mr. Darwin called it, cooperating with a tendency to
variation and to inheritance of variations, he has shown to be a chief cause, though not,
I believe the sole cause of that evolution through which all living things, beginning
with the lowest and diverging and re-diverging as they evolved, have reached their present
degrees of organization and adaptation to their modes of life.
So familiar has this truth become that some apology seems needed for naming it.
And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people, now
Now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them
that much more than people in past times they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing
its action, now more than ever before in the history of the world are they doing all they
can to further survival of the unfittest.
But the postulate that men are rational beings continually leads one to draw inferences which
which proved to be extremely wide of the mark.
Yes, truly, your principle is derived from the lives of brutes and is a brutal principle.
You will not persuade me that men are to be under the discipline which animals are under.
I care nothing for your natural history arguments.
My conscience shows me that the feeble and the suffering must be helped, and if selfish
people won't help them, they must be forced by law to help them.
Don't tell me that the milk of human kindness is to be reserved for the relations between
individuals and that governments must be the administrators of nothing but hard justice.
Every man with sympathy in him must feel that hunger and pain and squalor must be prevented
and that if private agencies do not suffice then public agencies must be established.
Such is the kind of response which I expect to be made by nine out of ten. In some of
For them it will doubtless result from a fellow feeling so acute that they cannot contemplate
human misery without an impatience which excludes all thought of remote results. Concerning
the susceptibilities of the rest, we may, however, be somewhat skeptical. Persons who are angry
if, to maintain our supposed national interests or national prestige, those in authority do
not send out thousands of men to be partially destroyed, while destroying other thousands
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.
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.
Indeed, along with this sensitiveness, which it seems will not let them look with patience
on the pains of the battles of life as it quietly goes on around, they appear to have
a callousness which not only tolerates but enjoys contemplating the pains of battles
of the literal kind. As one sees in the demand for illustrated papers containing scenes of
of Carnage, and in the greediness with which detailed accounts of bloody engagements are
read. We may reasonably have our doubts about men whose feelings are such that they cannot
bear the thought of hardships borne, mostly by the idle and the improvident, and who nevertheless
have demanded thirty-one editions of the fifteen decisive battles of the world, in which they
The Theory of Money and Credit
It is well that the inferior races should be exterminated, and their place is occupied
by the superior races.
So that, marvellous to relate, though they cannot bear to think of the evils accompanying
the struggle for existence as it is carried on without violence among individuals in their
own society, they contemplate with equanimity such evils in their intense and wholesale
forms when inflicted by fire and sword on entire communities.
Not worthy of much respect, then, as it seems to me, is this generous consideration of the
inferior at home, which is accompanied by unscrupulous sacrifice of the inferior abroad.
Still less respectable appears this extreme concern for those of our own blood, which
goes along with utter unconcern for those of other blood when we observe its methods.
Did it prompt personal effort to relieve the suffering, it would rightly receive approving
recognition. Were the many who express this cheap pity, like the few who devote large
parts of their time to aiding and encouraging, and occasionally amusing those who, by ill-fortune
or incapacity, are brought to lives of hardship, they would be worthy of unqualified admiration.
The more there are of men and women who help the poor to help themselves, the more there
There are of those whose sympathy is exhibited directly and not by proxy, the more we may
rejoice. But the immense majority of the persons who wish to mitigate by law the miseries of
the unsuccessful and the reckless propose to do this in small measure at their own cost
and mainly at the cost of others, sometimes with their assent, but mostly without. More
More than this is true, for those who are to be forced to do so much for the distressed
often equally or more require something done for them.
The deserving poor are among those who are taxed to support the undeserving poor, as
under the old poor law the diligent and provident labourer had to pay that the good-for-nothings
might not suffer, until frequently under this extra burden he broke down and himself took
Work Refuge in the Workhouse.
As at present the total rates levied in large towns for all public purposes have reached
such a height that they cannot be exceeded without inflicting great hardship on the small
shopkeepers and artisans who already find it difficult enough to keep themselves free
from the poor pertained.
So in all cases the policy is one which intensifies the pain of those most deserving of pity that
The pains of those least deserving of pity may be mitigated.
Men who are so sympathetic that they cannot let the struggle for existence bring on the
unworthy the sufferings consequent on their incapacity or misconduct are unsympathetic
that they can deliberately make the struggle for existence harder for the worthy and inflict
on them and their children artificial evils in addition to the natural evils they have
to bear.
And here we are brought round to our original topic, the sins of legislators. Here there
comes clearly before us the commonest of the transgressions which rulers commit, a transgression
so common and so sanctified by custom that no one imagines it to be a transgression.
Here we see that, as indicated at the outset, government, begotten of aggression and by
Man ever continues to betray its original nature by its aggressiveness, and that even
what on its nearer face seems beneficence only, shows on its remoter face not a little
maleficence, kindness at the cost of cruelty.
For is it not cruel to increase the sufferings of the better that the sufferings of the worse
may be decreased?
It is, indeed, marvellous how readily we let ourselves be deceived by words and phrases
which suggests one aspect of the facts, while leaving the opposite aspects unsuggested.
A good illustration of this, and one germane to the immediate question, is seen in the
use of words protection and protectionists by the antagonists of free trade, and in the
tacit admission of its propriety by free traders. While the one party has habitually ignored,
The other party has habitually failed to emphasize the truth that this so-called protection always
involves aggression, and that the name aggressionist ought to be substituted for the name protectionist.
For nothing can be more certain than that if, to maintain A's profit, B is forbidden
to buy of C, or is fined to the extent of the duty if he buys of C, then B is aggressed
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.
The purpose of giving gratis benefits to that man.
Habitually, when one of the numerous measures thus characterized is discussed, the dominant
thought is concerning the pitiable Jones, who is to be protected against some evil,
while no thought is given to the hard-working Brown who is aggressed upon, often much more
to be pitied.
Money is exacted either directly or through raised rent, from the huckster who only by
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,
One respects more misleading than that which allows aggressionists to be called protectionists.
For, as just shown, protection of the vicious poor involves aggression on the virtuous poor.
Doubtless it is true that the greater part of the money exacted comes from those who
are relatively well off, but this is no consolation to the ill off from whom the rest is exacted.
Nay, if the comparison be made between the pressures borne by the two classes respectively,
It becomes manifest that the case is even worse than it first appears.
For while to the well-off the exaction means loss of luxuries, to the ill-off it means
loss of necessaries.
And now see the nemesis which is threatening to follow this chronic sin of legislators.
They and their class, in common with all owners of property, are in danger of suffering from
from a sweeping application of that general principle practically asserted by each of
these confiscating Acts of Parliament.
For what is the tacit assumption on which such Acts proceed?
It is the assumption that no man has any claim to his property, not even to that which he
has earned by the sweat of his brow, save by permission of the community, and that the
community may cancel the claim to any extent it thinks fit.
No defense can be made for this appropriation of A's possessions for the benefit of B, save
one which sets out with the postulate that society as a whole has an absolute right over
the possessions of each member. And now this doctrine, which has been tacitly assumed is
being openly proclaimed. Mr. George and his friends, Mr. Hindman and his supporters are
pushing the theory to its logical issue. They have been instructed by examples, yearly increasing
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.
Manufacture, whereas it is a growth. Neither the culture of past times nor the culture
of the present time has given to any considerable number of people a scientific conception of
a society, a conception of it as having a natural structure in which all its institutions
– governmental, religious, industrial, commercial, etc. – are interdependently bound, a structure
which is in a sense organic.
Or if such a conception is nominally entertained, it is not entertained in such a way as to be operative on conduct.
Contrarywise, incorporated humanity is very commonly thought of as though it were like so much dough
which the cook can mold as she pleases into pie crust or puff or tartlet.
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.
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,
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.
Alike to the citizen and to the legislator,
Home experiences daily supply proofs that the conduct of human beings balks calculation.
He has given up the thought of managing his wife and lets her manage him.
Children on whom he has tried, now reprimand, now punishment, now suasion, now reward,
do not respond satisfactorily to any method.
And no expostulation prevents their mother from treating them in ways he thinks mischievous.
So, too, his dealings with his servants, whether by reasoning or by scolding, rarely succeed
for long. The falling short of attention, the punctuality or cleanliness or sobriety
leads to constant changes. Yet, difficult as he finds it to deal with humanity in detail,
he is confident of his ability to deal with embodied humanity. Citizens, not one thousandth
One might have expected that, whether they observed the implications of these domestic failures, or whether they contemplated in every aspect of their life,
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,
he feels sure will act in ways he foresees and fulfil ends he wishes.
Is there not a marvellous incongruity between premises and conclusion?
Whether they observed the implications of these domestic failures or whether they contemplated
in every newspaper the indications of a social life so vast, too varied, too involved, to
be even vaguely pictured in thought, men would have entered on the business of law-making
with the greatest hesitation. Yet in this more than anything else do they show a confident
readiness. Nowhere is there so astounding a contrast between the difficulty of the task
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.
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?
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.
And there is the inevitable implication that unless these vital phenomena, bodily and mental,
are chaotic in their relations, a supposition excluded by the very maintenance of life,
the resulting phenomena cannot be wholly chaotic. There must be some kind of order in the phenomena
which grew out of them when associated human beings have to cooperate. Evidently then,
When one who has not studied such resulting phenomena of social order undertakes to regulate
society, he is pretty certain to work mischiefs.
In the second place, apart from a priori reasoning, this conclusion should be forced on the legislator
by comparison of societies.
It ought to be sufficiently manifest that before meddling with the details of social
Social Organization inquiry should be made whether social organization has a natural
history and that to answer this inquiry it would be well setting out with the simplest
societies to see in what respects social structures agree. Such comparative sociology pursued to
a very small extent shows a substantial uniformity of genesis, the habitual existence of chieftainship
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,
Social differences, societies have general resemblances in their modes of origin and development.
They present traits of structure showing that social organization has laws which override
individual wills, and laws the disregard of which must be fraught with disaster.
And then, in the third place, there is that mass of guiding information, yielded by the
the records of legislation in our own country and in other countries which still more obviously
demands attention. Here and elsewhere attempts of multitudinous kinds made by kings and statesmen
have failed to do the good intended and have worked unexpected evils.
Century after century new measures like the old ones and other measures akin in principle
have again disappointed hopes and again brought disaster. And yet it is thought neither by
By electors, nor by those they elect, that there is any need for systematic study of
that law-making which in bygone ages went on working the ill-being of the people when
it tried to achieve their well-being. Surely there can be no fitness for legislative functions
without wide knowledge of those legislative experiences which the past has bequeathed.
Reverting then to the analogy drawn at the outset, we must say that the legislator is
morally blameless or morally blameworthy according as he has or has not acquainted himself with
these several classes of facts.
A physician who, after years of study, has gained a competent knowledge of physiology,
pathology and therapeutics, is not held criminally responsible if a man dies under his treatment.
He has prepared himself as well as he can, and has acted to the best of his judgment.
Similarly, the legislator, whose measures produce evil instead of good, notwithstanding
the extensive and methodic inquiries which helped him to decide, cannot be held to have
committed more than an error of reasoning.
Contrarywise, the legislator who is wholly or in great part uninformed concerning the
The masses of facts which he must examine before his opinion on a proposed law can be
of any value, and who nevertheless helps to pass that law, can no more be absolved if
misery or mortality result than the journeyman-druggist can be absolved when death is caused by the
medicine he ignorantly prescribes.