Property and Progress.

 "Property and Progress ; or, a Brief Inquiry into Contemporary Social Agitation in England." By W. H. Mallock, Published by Mr. John Murray, Albemarle Street. In this volume Mr. Mallock deals vigorously with the pernicious principles enunciated by Mr. George, and points out in the plainest possible language the various ways in which the American revolutionist seeks to lead the public astray. In the first place Mr. George urges the wholesale and indiscriminate plunder of all landed proprietors. Mr. Mallock shows conclusively that this theory is not only wrong in itself, but that it has often been put to the test and has always resulted in misery to the people. He also analyses the Socialistic theory of the relation of wealth to labor, with special reference to the Socialistic view of capital, and the effects of machinery on value. He then alludes to the growth of wealth since 1843, the constantly increasing amount that has gone to the poor, and the immense growth of classes with moderate means. The only course for the philanthropist is to look at every side of the question, and to recognise that the worst way in which to set about reforming social abuses is to exaggerate their magnitude. In conclusion Mr. Mallock points out with much force that Conservatism is the best and, indeed, the only hope for the English people. The history of the past forty years shows us that the Constitution is not superannuated, corrupt, or incapable of doing its work ; that it is not dividing this country into two hostile nations of millionaires and paupers, and likely to produce a fierce social revolution ; but that under this very constitution, wealth has been diffusing itself in a way unparalleled in any other country ; that, whilst rich and poor have been gaining, the poor have gained the most, and that England, with her monarchical and aristocratic institutions, allows to the people a measure of freedom that is not tolerated for an instant in the lands of universal suffrage. —Review.

Logan Witness (Beenleigh, Qld. : 1878 - 1893), Saturday 31 May 1884, page 3

Educating our Masters.

 ON the principle of " educating our masters," a subscription is being raised to place in every Free Library in the colony a copy of a book by Mr. W. H. Mallock, entitled "Labour, and the popular welfare." Judging by a review of the book which appeared in last Saturday's Age it contains or sets out with two enormous fallacies, which the Age reviewer did not detect, as he evidently fell a victim to Mr. Mallock's rhetoric. These fallacies are that Labour is a quality or factor by itself—a species of mineral, in fact, like iron; and the other that the national wage fund or total income under the present system of individualistic-competitive-industrial waste is the exact measure of what it would be under State Socialism. This reasoning of Mr. Mallock's is analogous to that frequently met with in a 6-yr old boy who thinks it incontestable that in two years time he will be as old as his 8-yr-old brother. Mr. Mallock's whole conception of Civilisation and of Humanity partakes of that misconception that present types, conditions, and methods are permanent factors, just as the ingredients of sea water are. His logical goal is Anarchy, as we have often taken occasion to assert. That is the reward of " individual cupidity" minus slavery; but what Mr. Mallock and his sympathisers really want is veiled slavery. They wish to segregate Labour into a commodity—a chattel— subject to the laws of supply and demand, just as a horse is, or an American slave used to be. Mallock's book is, in fact, a repetition of pro-slavery reasoning and literature. The Indian caste system is another variety of it. And this cant about Ability and Capital being so enormously superior to Labour will not bear examination. Ability mostly shows itself in this connection (which is chiefly industrial) in labour saving inventions, or discoveries of new adaptations of mechanical forces or natural products, and these have their origin very frequently from the ranks of Labour of a very humble degree, yet Mr. Mallock in the most supercilious manner appropriates them all to his Ability class, or to Capitalists. Moreover, he ignores the immense value or rights of Labour as the creator of all wealth and not the mere manipulator of products. That is to say, what would be the value of Ability and Capital minus population to utilise the exercise of both ? What have been rightly termed "the Classes" seek to use "the Masses" as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and Mr. Mallock's book is designed to show how much indebted the latter are to the Classes for being guided by them, and paid for their labour their full share per head when the whole earnings of humanity are divided pro rata, but under Mr. Mallock's system they are not so divided, and never would be, yet he assumes that social conditions are now upon the best possible basis. In so far as he argues against Communism he is on sound ground, but he sees the highest Altruistic ideal in Capitalism or Cupidity, and that is simply the law of the tiger. It was supposed to have been set aside by the Christian dispensation, hence the hold which Christian Socialism has had and still has upon many of the best minds of the last century or two, but Capitalism and its baneful off-shoot, joint-stock financing, have killed Christian Socialism and all phlilanthropic effort as a practical force, and the only hope for humanity lies in State Socialism. Such books as Mr. Mallock's will hasten that consummation when its fallacies are at length detected by Conservatives who know that they cannot create a new heavens and a new earth and a new humanity, nor destroy those they have, but can guide the latter through the ballot box and an ever widening franchise. In other words, the only alternative to Anarchy is true Parliamentary government ever developing more and more State Socialism. This would not destroy any social or class interests or organisation, but would regulate the whole for the good of the whole. This is the true meaning and the only adequate creation of "the greatest good for the greatest number."

Bacchus Marsh Express (Vic. : 1866 - 1943), Saturday 19 January 1895, page 2

Men of Ability.

 There is in England a society that is called " The Fabian." It professes to represent the Socialists, who are doubtless to be found here and there in Great Britain, and now and then it advocates socialism in magazine articles and pamphlets. A few months ago it issued a more or less intelligible document, which was said to be the preliminary of a manifesto, that has never since been heard of in the politics of the United Kingdom or of any other country. Of its members little is known. Some may be young men who are filled with an enthusiasm for humanity, and who have not learned that they can best serve their country and their fellows by doing some honest manual or intellectual work that is required at the present time ; others may be middle-aged men, who have failed to achieve the extravagant ambitions of their youth, and who still hope that under a system of state socialism they might acquire an influence which is refused to them at the present time by the constituencies. But nothing is to be gained by discussing the merits or the demerits, the occasional wisdom or the many literary follies and logical blunders, of the Fabian Society. It has nothing to say that is new; it has not shown the slightest desire to test the socialist theories by experiments. It repeats theories that are stale to Englishman, who in their practical and matter-of-fact way have tried socialist schemes and found them wanting ; and it has not the courage shown by the promoters of the New Australia movement, who have honestly, though it may be unsuccessfully, attempted to translate their ideas into deeds.

The Fabian Society in itself is not worth a minute's thought by the people in the colonies, who know perfectly well that, even if a grant is given by the Government, the mining industry and the agricultural industry must be carried on by private enterprise, and who bear no grudge against any man who has worked and lived in the colony because he may have happened to make a bigger profit than someone else. Since the first rush to Ballarat and Bendigo there was never a time in the history of Victoria when hard work in the way of prospecting for gold or of cultivating the soil, when as a matter of fact the labour and skill and capital and courage of the individual settler were more required than at the present moment. But the Fabian Society has achieved one triumph. It has given Mr. W. H. MALLOCK the opportunity of dilating on a fact that we have often referred to in our own columns. That fact is that the wealth of the industrial world in modern times has been made by the ability of the few, by the intellectual genius of a small minority. It is claimed by the Socialists that wealth is simply the result of labour. What truth is there in this proposition ? The working man is paid a certain amount for the building of a house, or for the making of a railway, or for any other project. When the job is over his work comes to an end. He has done his duty, but he is not able to make even a suggestion as to how employment can be made both permanent and productive. The same remark may be applied to all the professions. The clergyman, the medical man, the barrister, the engineer, the architect—all of these people simply undertake to do a certain amount of work for the current rate of remuneration. When that is done they have no further hint to give to the community; they themselves have to trust to chance or nature or the law of averages or something else for their next opportunity of employment.

But now and then there appears the able man, the man of ability and originality, who is able to give employment to thousands of people. He may be a great inventor, or he may be a man of exceptionally good judgment in matters of commerce, or he may be a pioneer in new countries, or he may have a practical geological knowledge and become a discoverer of new mining fields. The inventions, however, and the expansion of commerce and the discovery of new mines are all due to the enterprise and the ingenuity and the ability of a few men. It is not capital or labour that provides work. The capitalist, unless he be grievously misled, only embarks upon an enterprise from which he expects a moderate rate of interest. The labourer, whether professional or manual, must be content with the work that is offered to him. At this hour it may be said, in spite of the depression, that a certain number of investors will draw dividends and that a certain number of workmen will receive wages in this colony of Victoria throughout the year. But this fact, however satisfactory it may be, does not increase employment. England, without its inventions and without its commercial enterprise, would only maintain about a fifth of its present population. What would have been the position if GEORGE STEPHENSON had not built a little railway ? What would the country have been if the steam blast had never been heard of in the working of iron ? What would have occurred if BESSEMER had not discovered a cheap process of making steel, and turned the latter end of the nineteenth century into the age of steel? What would happen if manufacturers and merchants were suddenly bereft of all stimulus to find out foreign markets, and in this way make work for their fellow-countrymen? The matter may be put in this way. As a rule, we work for a certain object that only gives employment to a small number of people for a time. The great inventor or the great man of business comes, and, indirectly through his individual energy, he gives an opportunity of employment to thousands. And, as the Socialists admit, the men of intellect are few and far between.

In a country like Great Britain, which possesses the savings of three centuries, and in which there has been both the greatest individual and public enterprise in commercial and industrial affairs, it might be possible for a socialist Government to find work for everybody during a few years. But, as Mr. MALLOCK points out, this would be simply ruinous. What is wanted, what by an inexorable law of nature is essential, is productive industry. It is easy to squander the savings of the past, but the real problem is to make savings for the future. There is no guarantee that this problem can be solved by the state. It is the men of ability, not the capitalists or the labourers, who provide employment and make a general prosperity. This minority is the more entitled to consideration because, as Mr. MALLOCK shows, the great bulk of the people are not anxious for any industrial change, even though it may benefit them in the long run. They are content to go on from day to day and week to week and year to year. It is only a few men who ever feel a desire to make innovations in the industrial methods. Some of those few have made fortunes ; some have been shamefully paid. But would any one of them—and this is the question that affects all socialist theories—sweat out his brains if he knew that he could easily obtain a maximum Government salary of £800, and that he could by no possibility get another penny ? Experience gives answer.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Monday 19 March 1894, page 4

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