ARISTOCRACY AND EVOLUTION

The gist of Mr. Mallock's new book, "Aristocracy and Evolution," is to justify the present order of society by showing how the great man is himself a vera causa of progress and not merely the instrument of his society, that unless the great man is rewarded and encouraged his stimulus to progress will be lost, and that collectivism or socialism by attempting to eliminate the great man is suicidal or impossible. Of course we have at the beginning to clear our minds of any notion of the great man as popularly conceived. Though Carlyle has made one of his most widely-known books out of a series of lectures on Heroes, it is not any such persons who form the humbler Valhalla of Mr. Mallock's aristocracy. There King Hudson may be enthroned, but not Dante, Mohammed, Shakespeare. Emerson, like his friend, has created a gallery of eminent men; he calls them Representative Men, and with Plato, Napoleon, Goethe, Montaigne, and the others they do indeed bulk large in the historical memory.  All those personages are expressly excluded from Mr. Mallock's pages ; he has nothing to do with them. Those who have read Mr. Bryce's book on the American Commonwealth will not he likely to forget the introductory paragraph to his chapter on creative intellectual power, where he describes the little street in the city of Florence where on either side are the statues of glorious Florentines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Dante, Giotto, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Ghiberti, Michael Angelo. They are great men, and ever must be, but they are not the kind of great men which, according to the new student, it is the function of our social order to nourish.

What is this vital and vitalising product of society ? Let Mr. Mallock describe him :—"What we here mean by a great man is merely a man who is superior to the majority in his power of producing some given class of result, whereas the average man and the stupid are not superior to the majority in their powers of producing any." Again :—" The greatest poets will be classed as ordinary men, whilst the inventor of machinery for making good boots cheaply will be classed as a great man."  So we go on to learn that this greatness which is the theme of Mr. Mallock's book, this greatness to which he applies the name of aristocracy, is or may be independent of social charm or cultivation, of private goodness or wisdom, of altruistic or romantic passion. The great man may be a boor in manners, a Bœotian in everything save the faculty of business, but if he is great there he is great indeed. In short, Mr. Mallock's aristocrat is merely a man who employs other men in large numbers and concerted undertakings to his own enrichment. He may be a Sir Henry Bessemer who revolutionises the steel manufacture, or the inventor of machinery for making good boots cheaply. He is equally the cause of true social progress, and the order of society rests upon the perpetual succession of such great men. If ever under the mischievous influence of collectivist ideas these great men are denied those rewards which inspire them to exercise their mission then society would perish. The ultimate rewards are rather more lofty than would be expected from the heroes here described. Wealth is the concrete object of the great man's existence, but the reasons why wealth is sought are not the pleasures of the senses, but the pleasures of the mind and imagination, of power, of self realisation, and of social honour. All that conflicts with this harmony of society in which the great man leads masses of ordinary or stupid men into enterprises which provide them with subsistence and himself with these refined pleasures, all that disturbs this harmony is accordingly anathema. Therefore equalised education is dangerous ; it develops wants in the average man which could never be generally satisfied under any social arrangements, and it developes the talents of a certain class of exceptional men who are naturally incomplete, and who the more fully they were developed would only become more mischievous both to their possessors and to society. Likewise the socialistic agitator is mischievous. Socialism is defined by Mr. Mallock as "the embodiment of the results of indiscriminate education on talents which are exceptional, but at the same time inefficient."

Such are the outlines of the new counterblast to Socialism. It is, after all, an academic piece of reasoning, because to argue against popular education, the self-organisation of labour, and other facts of the present social system is to waste time. There they are, the fruit of vast and long-continued effort ; there they will remain. So, to pick out the industrial and commercial survivors of the struggle for the spoils of life, and elevate them into the last precious residuum of our social organism, is to make the argument ludicrous. They are described best in Carlyle's phrase, captains of industry, valuable, indispensable perhaps in a mercantile sense, but not the great men who mould the ideas, the aspirations of men, and by their personal influence make history—are history. No one can underrate the work of a great contractor like Thomas Brassey, a great inventor like Edison, a great systematiser like Lipton, a great speculator like Hooley. Undoubtedly these men are an integral part of the social machinery of our time : their influence is enormous, they marshal armies of labour in all parts of the world, and they enrich the comfort of human life in the same measure that they reward themselves with monumental fortunes. But so for a time do the failed great men of that order, the Jabez Balfours or the Italian nobles who came so badly to grief over the reconstruction of Rome in the present decade. To say that these men represent all that there is of progress in its material sense is to ignore the mass of humanity who consume their goods, perform their labours, occupy their building suburbs, and give them the stimulus and the reward of their enterprise. Mr. Mallock does not deny this interaction, but he insists that there would be no progress if these men could not see before them the rewards expressed in terms of wealth which they at present command. So far as socialism threatens these rewards Socialism threatens the appearance of great men and their beneficent material activities.

Such is his contention, but here he is arguing against the non-existent. Bellamy, who died the other day, imagined a civilisation in which all these incentives to individual exertion were taken away, and he convinced himself that such a civilisation might some day come about. But that is all in the dark. We have the order of social life from which Mr. Mallock derives all his desirable great men, and the complex of their energies and rewards, but who believes that our present stage of social evolution is either the best or the final one ?

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW ), 4 June 1898, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article14131775