M}' answer is that this bsst knowledge of the time with which legislators are said to come prepared for their duties, is a know- ledge of which the greater part is obviously irrelevant, and that they are blameworthy for not seeing what is the relevant know- ledge. No amount of the linguistic acquirements by which many of them are distinguished will help their judgments in the least; nor will they be appreciably helped by the literatures these acquire- ments 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 jD^rpetual tutelage, can yield them but small aid 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 inter- national 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 lOom, 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 Avith the savage a simple mechanical cause is not conceived as such — though even among the Greeks the flight of a spear was thought of as guided by a god — THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 61 fcliough iroTTi tlieir times clown almost to our own, epidemics iifive 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 days, the existence of such causal relations has become clear enough to force on all who think, the inference that before meddling Avith them they should be diligently studied. The mere facts, now familiar, that there is a connexion between the numbers of births, <leaths, and marriages, and the price of corn, and that in the same /society during the same generation, the ratio of crime to popula- tion 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 eifects. 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 sway it irresislibly under all circumstances; and unhappily the beliefs of law-makers 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 deliberate 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 prize-fighter, every proposed reward for virtue or punishment for vice, implies 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, accord- ing to demand.
There is the fact, also in its broader manifestations universally recognized, that modifications of Nature 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 condi- tions; so that a climate which is fatal to other races is innocuous to 62 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.
the adapted race. No one denies that peoples who belong to the same original stock but have spread into ditfnrcnt habitats where they have led different lives, have acquired in course of time different aptitudes and different tendencies. No one denies that under new conditions new national characters are even now being moulded; as witness the Americans. And if no one denies a process of adaptation everywhere and always going on, it is a manifest implication that 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 action — compelling, or restrain- ing, or aiding, in new ways — so affects them as to cause in course of time adjustments of their natures. Beyond any immediate effect wrought, there is the remote effect, wholly ignored by most — a re-moulding of the average character: a re-moulding 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, aie 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 severally seeking satisfactions, and ordinarily pursuing the ways which, with their pre-existing habits and thoughts, seem the easiest — following 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 interpre- tation of social phenomena is to be found in the co-operation of these factors from generation to generation, follows inevitably.
Such an interpretation soon brings ns to the inference that of the aggregate results of men's desires seeking their gratifications, those which have prompted their private activities and their spon- taneous co-operations, 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 sr.tis- factions through many centuries. The progress from wigwams to good houses has resulted from wishes to inciease personal welfare; THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 63 and towns have arisen under the like promptings. Beginning with traflBc at gatherings on occasions of religious festivals, the trading organization, now so extensive and complex, has been produced 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 men and things from place to place, and for ministering in a thousand ways to our comforts. The world-wide transactions conducted in merchant's offices, the rush of traffic filling our streets, the retail distribating system 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 aids 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 nn instrument not in the remotest degree due to the legislator; but is one which has unawares grown up during men's inter- course while pursuing their personal satisfactions.
And then a truth to which the foregoing one introduces us, is that this spontaneously-formed social organization 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 paralyzing certain manufacturing districts and then affecting the doings of wholesale and retail distributors throughout the kingdom, as well as the people they supply, goes on to affect the makers and distributors, as well as the wearers, of other fabrics — • woollen, linen, &c. Or we see it when a rise in the price of 64 Tin: MA.s" VEnsu6' the state.
coal, brsic^es influencing domestic life everywhere, In'ndcrs tlie greater part of our industries, raises the prices of the commodities produced, alters the consumjDtion of them, and changes the habits of consumers. What we see cle<arljin these marked cases happens in every case, in sensible or in insensible ways. And manifestly, Acts of Parliament are among those factors which, beyond the elrects directly produced, have countless other effects of multi- tudinous kinds. As I heardremarkedby a distinguished professor, whose studies give ample means of judging — " When once you bosrin to interfere with the order of Nature there is no knowinf? v.'here the results will end." And if this is true of that sub- human order of Nature to which he referred, still more is it true of that order of Nature existing in the social arrangements pro- duced by aggregated human beings.
And now to carry home the conclusion that the legislator should bring to his business a vivid consciousness of these and other sucn broad truths concerning the human society with which he proposes to deal, let me present somewhat more fully one of them not yot mentioned.
The continuance of every higher species of creature depends on conformity, now to one, now to the other, of two radicall^'-opposed principles. The early lives of its members, and the adult lives of its members, have to be dealt with in contrary ways. We will contemplate them in their natural order.
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; and it is obvious that maintenance of the sp?cies can be secured only by a parental care adjusted to the need consequent on imperfection. It requires no proving that the blind uniiedged 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 parental aid must be great in propor- tion as the young one is of little worth, either to itself or to others; and it may di-minish as fast as, by increasing development, the young one acquires worth, at first for self-sustentation, and by-and- by for suiitcntution of others. That is to say, during immaturity, THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 65 benefits received must be inversely as the power or ability o£ tlie receiver. Clearly if during this first part of life benefits were proportioned to merits, or rewards to deserts, the species would -disappear in a generation.
From this regime of the family-group, let us turn to ihc regime of that larger group formed by the 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. ]Sow there comes into play a principle just the reverse of that nbove described. Throughout the rest of its 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 fulfil all the requirements of life — to get food, to secure shelter, to escape enemies. Placed in competition 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 an opposite regime, could it be maintained, would, in course of time, be fatal to the species. If the benefits received by each individual were proportionate to its inferiority — if, as a consequence, multiplica- tion of the inferior was furthered and multiplication of the supe- rior 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 fatal to the species either immediately or remotely.
Does ftny one 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 proportion benefits to merits. Can he assert that outside the family, among adults, there should not be a proportioning of benefits to merits? Will he con- tend 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 litei.'ally, as a vax-iety of a species; and it must be true of it as of otner species or varieties, that it "•ivill be anab?e 9 66 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.
to hold its own in the struii^G^'c with other societies, if it disad- vantages its superior units tl'.'it 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 desert was small, fatal results to the society would quickly follow; and if so, then even a partial intrusion of the family rejinw into the regime of the State, will be slowly fol- lowed by fatal results. Society in its corporate capacity, cannot without immediate or remoter 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 niaint-tins that fitness.
I say advisedly — society in its corporate capacity: not intending to exclude or condemn 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 gene- rally 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 un- worthy: 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 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 t^'uths, which should strike every one who leaves his lexicons, and his law- deeds, 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 socially injurious, is more and more demanded as the only efficient means to social benefit. So far has this delusion now gone, THE SIXS OF LEGTSLATOKS. 67 tliat it vitiates tlie beliefs of those who might, more than all others, be thought safe from it. In the essay to which the Cobden Club rewarded its prize in 1880, there occurs the assertion that " the t ruth of Free Trade is clouded over by the laissez-faire fallacy;" find we are told that " wc need a great deal more paternal govern- ment— 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 by here- quoting certain passages contained in a work I published in 1851: ])remising, 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 enemies 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 v.^ell as by the fighting so universal in the- pairing season, all vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples is prevented; and the maintenance of a constitution com- pletely adapted to surrounding conditions, and therefore most productive- of happiness, is ensured.
" The development of the higher creation is a progress towards a form. of being capable of a happiness undiminished by these drawbacks. It is in the human race that the consummation is to be accomplished. Civili- zation 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 beneficient, though severe discipline, to which the animate creation at larg(' is subject: a discipline which is pitiless in the working out of good: a felicily-pursuing law which never swerves for the avoidance of partial and temporary suf- fering. 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 saviigeness, * On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind. 'Bj A. N. Gumming, 68 THE MAN VEP^US THE STATE.
but he Laa to acquire the capacities needful for civilized life. Powor o! 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. Misery inevitably results from incongruity between constitution and conditions. All these evils which afflict us, and seem to the uninitiated the obvious consequences of this or that removable cause, are unavoidable attendants on the adaptation now in progress. Humanity is being pressea against the inexorable necessities of its new position — is being moulded into harmony with them, and has to bear the resulting unhappiness as ^est it can. The process must be undergone, and the sufferings must bo •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 inten- .sification, the philanthropic will find ample scope for exertion. But there is bound up with the change a normal amount of suffering, which cannot lit: lessened without altering the very laws of life."
" Of course, in so far 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 harm done when sympathy u shown, without any regard to ultimate results. But the drawbacks hence .arising are nothing like commensurate with the benefits otherwise con- ferred. 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 pure evil. Theu, however, it defeats its own end. Instead of diminishing eufi'ering, it eventually increases it. It favours the multiplication of those worst fitted for existence, and, by consequence, hinders the multiplication of those best fitted for existence — leaving, as it does, less room for them. It tends to fill the w orld with those to whom life will bring most pain, and tends to keep out of it those to whom life will bring most pleasure. It inflicts positive misery, and prevents positive happiness." — Social SiaticSy pp. 322-5 and pp. 380-1 (edition of 1851).
The lapse of a third of a century since these passages were pub- lished, has brought me no reason for retreating from the position taken up in them. Contrariwise, it has brought a vast amount of evidence strengthening that position. The beneficial results of the Bnrvival of the fittest, prove to be immeasurably greater than those cbovG indicated. The process of "natural selection," as Mr. Darwin HIE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 69 called it, co-operating with a tendency to variation and to inheri- tance of variations, he has shown to be a chief canse (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 trath 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 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 prove to be extremely wide of the mark.* " Yes truly; your principle is derived from the lives of brutei?,- 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 * The saying of Emerson that most people can understand a principle only when its light falls on a fact, induces me here to cite a fact Avhich may carry home the above principle to those on whom, in its abstract form, it will produce no effect. It rarely happens that the amount of evil caused by fostering the vicious and good-for-nothing can be estimated. But in America, at a meeting of the States Charities Aid Association, held on December 18, 1874, a starthng instance was given in detail by Dr. Harris. It was furnished by a county on the Upper Hudson, remarkable for the ratio of crime and poverty to population. G-ene- rations ago there had existei a certain " gutter-child," as she would be here called^ known as " Margaret," who proved to be the prolific niotlier of a prolific race. Besides great numbers of idiots, imbeciles, drunkards, lunatics, paupers, and pros- titutes, " the county records show two hundred of her descendants who have been criminals." Was it kindness or cruelty which, generation after generation,, enabled these to rauliply and become an increasing curse to the society around them? [For particulars see The Juices: a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Bin' fuse and Rereaifij. By R. L. Dugdale. New York: Putnams.l 70 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.
sympathy in him must feel that hunger and pain and squalor must be prevented;.ind 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 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, wc may, how- ever, be somewhat sceptical. Persons who, now in this case and now in that, are angry if, to maintain our supposed national "in- terests " or national '^jjvcstvje,'' those in authority do not promptly send out some thousands of men to be partially destroyed while destroying other thousands of men whose intentions we suspect, or whose institutions we think dangerous to us, or whose territory our colonis!s want, cannot after all be so tender in feeling that contem- plating the hardships of the poor is intolerable to them. Little admiration need be felt for the professed sympathies of people who urge on a jDolicy 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. Those who, when Boers asserting their independence successfully resisted us, were angry because British "honour "was not maintained by fight-