By M.
NO. IV.—SOCIALISM AND ANARCHY.
It can hardly be doubted that the raison d'etre of Socialism is the longing which exists in a certain class of philanthropic minds to relieve the chronic distress prevailing, especially in congested populations. In so far, consequently, as the theory is prompted by this cause it does not altogether repel our sympathy. But what Socialists apparently fail to perceive is that, without the least intention to do injustice to any section of the community, they may advocate a cure for social distress which is worse than the disease. There is a species of " practical " politicians who would convert the State into an Earthly Providence, and invest it with absolute power to set right what ever may go wrong in the individual and domestic, as well as the social, life of the citizens. The unhappy experience of certain countries in past generations, from the ubiquity and persistence of State interference, is lost upon such men for want of historic intelligence, They are quite content with the proximate results of a quasi-State Socialism, which they have reason to believe is at least immediately beneficial. They never stop to consider the remote effects of the political momentum they are setting up, and what type of social structure the line of action they are taking will ultimately establish. "With more emotion than philosophy they meet us with the exclamation, " Surely, you would not have this suffering continue ! " But State Socialism takes for granted, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has said, "first that all suffering ought to be prevented, which is not true ; much suffering is curative, and prevention of it is prevention of a remedy. In the second place, it takes for granted that every evil can be removed, the truth being that with the existing defects of human nature many evils can only be thrust out of one place or form into another place, often being increased by the change. There is also implied the unhesitating belief that evils of all kinds should be dealt with by the State. There does not occur the inquiry whether there are at work other agencies capable of dealing with evils, and whether the evils in question may not be among those which are best dealt with by these other agencies. Obviously, the more numerous Governmental interventions become the more confirmed does this habit of thought grow, and the more loud and perpetual the demands for intervention."
History exhibits instances of political slavery having insidiously crept into States, and assumed the detestable forms of despotism as really under the guise of a benevolent democracy as under that of a benevolent autocracy. There is no meritorious statesmanship in desiring to sweep away institutions or influences hostile to the public well-being. The true test of political wisdom in rulers lies rather in their ability to discern what barriers to social progress can best be removed by individual or collective enterprise outside the domain of State administration, even though their removal maybe more slowly effected than under the operation of Governmental force. Socialism being by its very nature a highly centralised system directly controlled by State officialism, there is grave danger of the power with which its official organisation is invested becoming sooner or later absolute. If Socialism should ever triumph, the State will become entrusted with the proprietorship of all dwellings and factories, the enforcement of rigid sanitary laws, the regulation of morals, the determination of what literature shall he permitted, and what shall be relegated to a State Index Expurgatorius, what periodicals shall be allowed to be conveyed through the post office and what shall be stopped in transit ; at what rate of expenditure the citizens shall live, what description of food and drink shall be legal, what size of house they shall occupy, and what shall be the quality and shape of their garments. Let the thin end of the wedge be introduced, and the sequel of universal State interference is ultimately inevitable. The tentacala of the tyrannical Octopus may take generations to coil round all the personal and social interests of the population, but that every citizen will in the end find himself more or less in its folds is certain.
It is a leading tenet of Socialism that private property and the incentives to individual exertion which it sets in motion are an unmitigated curse to society. In a Socialistic community the power and influence which money and land command would cease ; but not so the passion of talented and ambitious minds to wield authority over their fellows. In the absence of property, then, as a passport to the gratification of this undying aspiration of strong natures, an outlet for it would be found in the only other possible channel. Office under Government would be eagerly sought after as a ladder of social promotion, "and so vast and importunate would be the number of eligible candidates that we should have enacted — only on a more gigantic scale— the state of affairs a Russian play quoted by Mr. Mackenzie Wallace describes as existing under the rule of the Czar: "All men, even shopkeepers and cobblers, aim at becoming officers, and the man who has passed his whole life without official rank seems to be not a human being." Once the enslaving régime of Socialism is inaugurated, and the organisation of officialism has passed a certain stage of development, it first grows less and less resistible, and then become positively attractive to the superior order of people in the community as affording a great multiplication of respectable bureaucratic careers for their families. If an opponent of an established Socialistic Government should eventually arise and plead for a relaxation of the chains of State tyranny he would be promptly silenced by a host of precedents being quoted against him. As Mr. Herbert Spencer truly observes : "Increasing power of a growing administrative organisation is accompanied by a decreasing power of the rest of society to resist its further growth and control. The numerous socialistic changes made by Act of Parliament, joined with numerous others presently to be made, will by-and-by be all merged in State Socialism — swallowed in the vast wave which they have, little by little, raised." It was its elaborately centralised system of State officialism that brought the Roman Empire to ruin. According to Lactantius, " so numerous were the receivers in Gaul (during the decline of the Empire) in comparison with the payers, and so enormous the weight of taxation, that the laborer broke down. The plains became deserts, and woods grow where the plough had been."
State ownership and appropriation of a given class of public works often, doubtless, contribute to public convenience within certain limits. But the area of Government control must be carefully restricted, lest it should answer to the metaphorical description of fire, which, although a good servant, may easily become a bad master. It is obvious that under the proposed arrangements of Socialism, the liberties of the population must be surrendered in proportion as its physical welfare is cared for. It was this fact which the Bishop of Peterborough had in view when he startled the religious world some years ago with the suggestive paradox in reference to the proposed local option scheme for closing public houses, that "he would rather see England free than England sober." To refer to a modern case we have in France, coincidently with a Republican Government, an arbitrary disregard of legitimate liberty, trampling on the rights of citizens to an extent which is a disgrace to a nation glorying in popular self government. Pure socialism would, in the end, prove immeasurably more despotic, carrying the repression of individualism even to the utter paralysation of distinctive personal characteristics. Socialists, while intense admirers of the bright side of their scheme, for which they are mainly indebted to their own imaginations, are generally indisposed to consider the obverse of the picture. The system would be hopelessly fatal to family life. The hon. Auberon Herbert has with justice said, " This system would create men without affections, without home feelings and without virtues. But they would have the fiercest passions burning round the centre of power. There is not a single man in the whole nation who would be able to use the elements of production except under the regulations laid down by the control authority." In short, Socialism is the baseless fabric of a delusive vision. As with each of the other methods of government I have presented, Socialism, viewed as a mere instrument of government, is impotent to keep the defective natures of average citizens under complete restraint. A great philosopher has wisely remarked, "There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts."
Passing to the consideration of anarchy, it may be stated that while that theory, in common with Socialism, aims at planting society on a new basis, it may fairly be regarded as the antithesis of the latter. Socialism, as we have seen, is a system founded on the principle of co-operation for the equal good of all, and regulated by a central government, in which everyone is rewarded according to his labor. Anarchy, on the other hand, is a negation of government, or a reducing of government to nil, which accounts for the term Nihilism, and the family likeness which that bears to Anarchy. In Socialism we have perfect organisation ; in anarchy or Nihilism we have a complete abandonment of organisation. The Nihilists maintain that organised society, though theoretically existing for the good of the individuals composing it, is perverted into a weapon for oppression, hence they insist that society must be reconstructed, and government annihilated. The Hon. Auberon Herbert, although sternly opposed to Socialism, refuses to be called an Anarchist or a Nihilist ; preferring to be regarded as an "individualist." He professes respect for the reasonable as distinguished from the violent section of Anarchists, and goes with them hand in hand up to a certain point. Like them, he detests great systems of authority and control, and contends that nothing should be done for the people, but that everything should be done by the people. With the Anarchists, he believes in the power of voluntary association, but parts company with them when they insist on destroying as mischievous the whole machinery of State government ; he, as an individualist, being in favor of keeping the State for the one simple purpose of self-defence. Mr. John A. Henry, one of the Chicago Anarchists, who have recently come in collision with the law, lecturing recently at Boston, propounded the following version of Anarchy: — "The man without property has no use for law, and the law is his enemy. The man who first suggested law was a robber, for he felt the need of something being secured to himself by general consent. The law has grown to be a devil. It is the only support that private property has. By means of it one man controls the work of many men. The reservation of private property makes thieves. Anarchy means the wish and the intention to wipe out laws made by man, for there is not one of them that is not a contradiction and a hindrance to natural law. If, however, it should be found that any statute law is for the good of all the people, an Anarchist would be the last person who could desire its repeal. Anarchists see force coming more intense than ever before, and the resistance is not of any man's choice. It is the necessity of self-defence ; it is the impulse of humanity. People look at the bomb explosion and call it murder. They do not see what compelled the bomb. What is capital but a process of killing." Speaking of his confrères in Chicago doomed to the gallows, he adds, "They never thirsted for blood. They saw that labor was prostrate under the heel of capital, and they told the slave to rise. Anarchists are not bringing on the revolt ; capital is doing that. It has its claws upon the life of society, and it is the duty of society to rebel."
It has been falsely supposed that anarchy is altogether incompatible with communism, and certainly some exponents of the creed do so express themselves. But Prince Krapotkin declares himself to be an adherent of "the School of Anarchist Communism," and although anarchists would combine to resist co-operative organisations, worked chiefly in the interests of capital, they would in no case object to co-operate when they think the general good can be promoted. They would protest, however, against all co-operation associated with compulsion, and would even oppose voluntary co-operation which in any way infringed upon individual rights. Perhaps the most determined anarchist of the Russian type is Michael Bakounine, who, in his work, God and the State, writes : " We reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them. Such is the sense in which we are really anarchists."
As a demonstration against reckless law making, which has not the concurrence or appreciation of the bulk of the Parliamentary electors, but is, nevertheless, believed in by crude legislators as an agency of social reformation, I am willing to acknowledge that the anarchist theory has some show of plausibility. It is, in fact, a national reaction from undue Government interference, and in that light it has its useful lessons. But when it is seriously affirmed that society, as a whole, will never reach high intellectual, moral and social elevation and satisfaction until law and Government are entirely abolished, it is impossible to view such an idea otherwise than as an utterly visionary conception. So long as crime originates from malformed brains, and is fostered by evil associations, the lives and property of private citizens require common protection from murderers, thieves and swindlers. How far civilised mankind could dispense with the apparatus of Government if their external surroundings were thoroughly ameliorated, and present adverse influences had become inoperative, is a matter of conjecture. We have to take society as we find it, and however voluntary associations for good and useful objects may be commended, I unhesitatingly assert that there is at present no such indication of the perfectibility of humanity as would lead us to believe that law and Government can ever be dispensed with, every citizen being permitted to be a law to himself. That the tendency of parliaments and governments is increasingly to over-legislate and place private citizens in mischievous leading strings cannot for a moment be doubted, But there ought to be readily found a via media between that extreme and anarchy. Is it not the most rational course for society to aim at limiting the function and scope of legislation and government ? It is barely 200 years since the English nation were obliged to protest by force of the headsman's axe against the occupant of the throne exercising authority of too paternal a character. It is by no means impossible that the time may come when the growing extension of legislative and governmental authority, under limited monarchies and republics, may call for the imposition of a check equally emphatic if less severe. Anarchy only furnishes another illustration of the vain idolatry of a governmental form. The part of wisdom is to rely upon no form of government whatever for social regeneration, but to make the best of the system it is our lot to live under, and seek to reform it, not so much through Parliamentary efforts as by intelligent appeals to the reason and sentiment of the public.
Leader (Melbourne, Vic. : 1862 - 1918, 1935), Saturday 29 January 1887, page 16
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