one may see who studies the psychology of the matter. The pleasure-hunting life fails for the reason that it leaves large parts of the nature unexercised: it neglects the satisfactions gained by successful activity, and there is missing from it the serene consciousness of services rendered to others. Egoistic enjoyments continuously pursued, pall because the appetites for them are satiated in times much shorter than our waking lives give us: leaving times that are either empty or spent in efforts to get enjoyment after desire has ceased. They pall also from the want of that broad contrast which arises when a moiety of life is actively occupied. These negative causes of dissatisfaction are joined with the positive cause indicated — the absence of that content gained by successful achievement. One of the most massive and enduring gratifications is the sense of personal worth, ever afresh demonstrating itself to consciousness by effectual action; and an idle life is balked of its hopes partly because it lacks this. Lastly, the implied neglect of altruistic activities, or of activities felt to be in some way serviceable to others, brings kindred evils — a deficiency of certain positive pleasures of a high order, not easily ex hausted, and a further falling-back on egoistic pleasures, again 236 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
tending towards satiety. And all this, with its resulting1 wear iness and discontent, we may trace to a social organization under which there comes to the regulating classes a share of produce great enough to make possible large accumulations that support useless descendants.
The bias of the wealthy in favour of arrangements appar ently so conducive to their comforts and pleasures, while it shuts out the perception of these indirect penalties brought round on them by their seeming advantages, also shuts out the perception that there is anything mean in being a useless consumer of things which others produce. Contrariwise, there still survives, though much weakened, the belief that it is honourable to do nothing but seek enjoyment, and relatively dishonourable to pass life in supplying others with the means to enjoyment. In this, as in other things, our temporary state brings a temporary standard of honour appropriate to it; and the accompanying sentiments and ideas exclude the concep tion of a state in which what is now thought admirable will be thought disgraceful. Yet it needs only, as before, to aid imagination by studying other times and other societies, remote in nature from our own, to see at least the possibility of this. When we contrast the feeling of the Fijians, among whom a man has a restless ambition to be acknowledged as a murderer, with the feeling among civilized races, who shrink with horror from a murderer, we get undeniable proof that men in one social state pride themselves in characters and deeds elsewhere held in the greatest detestation. Seeing which, we may infer that just as the Fijians, believing in the honourableness of murder, are regarded by us with astonish ment; so those of our own day who pride themselves in con suming much and producing nothing, and who care little for the well-being of their society so long as it supplies them good dinners, soft beds, and pleasant lounging-places, may be regarded with astonishment by men of times to come, living under higher social forms. Nay, we may see not merely the possibility of such a change in sentiment, but the prob ability. Observe, first, the feeling still extant in China, where the honourableness of doing nothing, more strongly held than here, makes the wealthy wear their nails so long that they have to be tied back out of the way, and makes the ladies THE CLASS-BIAS. 237 THE CLASS-BIAS. 237 submit to prolonged tortures that their crushed feet may show their incapacity for work. Next, remember that in genera tions gone by, both here and on the Continent, the disgrace- fulness of trade was an article of faith among the upper classes, maintained very strenuously. Now mark how mem bers of the landed class are going into business, and even sons of peers becoming professional men and merchants; and observe among the wealthy the feeling that men of their order have public duties to perform, and that the absolutely- idle among them are blameworthy. Clearly, then, we have grounds for inferring that, along with the progress to a regu lative organization higher than the present, there will be a change of the kind indicated in the conception of honour. It will become a matter of wonder that there should ever have existed those who thought it admirable to enjoy with out working, at the expense of others who worked without enjoying.
But the temporarily-adapted mental state of the ruling and employing classes, keeps out, more or less effectually, thoughts and feelings of these kinds. Habituated from childhood to the forms of subordination at present existing — regarding these as parts of a natural and permanent order — finding satis faction in supremacy, and conveniences in the possession of authority; the regulators of all kinds remain unconscious that this system, made necessary as it is by the defects of ex isting human nature, brings round penalties on themselves as well as on those subordinate to them, and that its pervading theory of life is as mistaken as it is ignoble.
Enough has been said to show that from the class-bias arise further obstacles to right thinking in Sociology. As a part of some general division of his community, and again as a part of some special sub-division, the citizen acquires adapted feel ings and ideas which inevitably influence his conclusions about public affairs. They affect alike his conceptions of the past, his interpretations of the present, his anticipations of the future.
Members of the regulated classes, kept in relations more or less antagonistic with the classes regulating them, are thereby hindered from seeing the need for, and the benefits of, this 238 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.
organization which seems the cause of their grievances; they are at the same time hindered from seeing the need for, and the benefits of, those harsher forms of industrial regulation that existed during past times; and they are also hindered from seeing that the improved industrial organizations of the future, can come only through improvements in their own natures. On the other hand, members of the regulating classes, while partially blinded to the facts that the defects of the working-classes are the defects of natures like their own placed under different conditions, and that the existing sys tem is defensible, not for its convenience to themselves, but as being the best now practicable for the community at large; are also partially blinded to the vices of past social arrange ments, and to the badness of those who in past social systems; used class-power less mercifully than it is used now; while they have difficulty in seeing that the present social order, like past social orders, is but transitory, and that the regulating classes of the future may have, with diminished power, in creased happiness.
Unfortunately for the Social Science, the class-bias, like the bias of patriotism, is, in a degree, needful for social pres ervation. It is like in this, too, that escape from its influ ence is often only effected by an effort that carries belief to an opposite extreme— changing approval into a disapproval that is entire instead of partial. Hence in the one case, as in the other, we must infer that the resulting obstacle to well- balanced conclusions, can become less only as social evolution becomes greater.
CHAPTER XI.
THE POLITICAL BIAS.
EVERY day brings events that show the politician what the events of the next day are likely to be, while they serve also as materials for the student of Social Science. Scarcely a journal can be read, that does not supply a fact which, be yond the proximate implication seized by the party-tactician, has an ultimate implication of value to the sociologist. Thus a propos of political bias, I am, while writing, furnished by an Irish paper with an extreme instance. Speaking of the late Ministerial defeat, the Nation says: — " Mr. Gladstone and his administration are hurled from power, and the iniquitous attempt to sow broadcast the seed of irreligion and in fidelity in Ireland has recoiled with the impact of a thunderbolt upon its authors. The men who so long beguiled the ear of Ireland with specious promises, who mocked us with sham reforms and insulted us with barren concessions, who traded on the grievances of this country only to aggravate them, and who, with smooth professions on their lips, trampled out the last traces of liberty in the land, are to-day a beaten and outcast party."
Which exhibition of feeling we may either consider specially, as showing how the "Nationalists" are likely to behave in the immediate future; or may consider more generally, as giving us a trait of Irish nature tending to justify Mr. Froude's harsh verdict on Irish conduct in the past; or may consider most generally, after the manner here appropriate, as a strik ing example of the distortions which the political bias works in men's judgments.
When we remember that all are thus affected more or less, in estimating antagonists, their acts, and their views, we are reminded what an immense obstacle political partlzanship is 24:0 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.
in the way of Social Science. I do not mean simply that, as all know, it often determines opinions about pending1 ques tions; as shown by cases in which a measure reprobated by Conservatives when brought forward by Liberals, is approved when brought forward by their own party. I refer to the far wider effect it has on men's interpretations of the past and of the future; and therefore 011 their sociological conceptions in general. The political sympathies and antipathies fostered by the conflicts of parties, respectively upholding this or that kind of institution, become sympathies and antipathies drawn out towards allied institutions of other nations, extinct or sur viving. These sympathies and antipathies inevitably cause tendencies to accept or reject favourable or unfavorable evi dence respecting such institutions. The well-known contrast between the pictures which the Tory Mitford and the Radical Grote have given of the Athenian democracy, serves as an in stance to which many parallels may be found. In proof of the perverting effects of the political bias, I cannot do better than quote some sentences from Mr. Froude's lecture on '' The Scientific Method applied to History.''
" Thucydides wrote to expose the vices of democracy; Tacitus, the historian of the Caesars, to exhibit the hatefulness of Imperialism." l " Read Macaulay on the condition of the English poor before the last century or two, and you wonder how they lived at all. Read Cobbett, and I may even say Hallam, and you wonder how they en dure the contrast between their past prosperity and their present misery." 2 " An Irish Catholic prelate once told me that to his certain knowl edge two millions of men, women, and children had died in the great famine of 1846. I asked him if he was not including those who had emigrated. He repeated that over and above the emigration two mill ions had actually died; and added, ' we might assert that every one of these deaths lay at the door of the English Government.' I men tioned this to a distinguished lawyer in Dublin, a Protestant. His grey eyes lighted up. He replied: ' Did he say two millions now — did he? Why there were not a thousand died — there were not five hundred.' The true number, so far as can be gathered from a com parison of the census of 1841 with the census of 1851, from the emi gration returns, which were carefully made, and from an allowance for the natural rate of increase, was about two hundred thousand." 3 Further insistance on this point is needless. That the ver- THE POLITICAL BIAS. 241 diets which will be given by different party-journals upon each ministerial act may be predicted, and that the opposite opinions uttered by speakers and applauded by meetings con cerning the same measure, may be foreseen if the political bias is known; are facts from which any one may infer that the party politician must have his feelings greatly moderated before he can interpret, with even approximate truth, the events of the past, and draw correct inferences respecting the future.
Here, instead of dilating on this truth, I will call attention to kindred truths that are less conspicuous. Beyond those kinds of political bias indicated by the names of political parties, there are certain kinds of political bias transcending party-limits. Already in the chapter on "Subjective Diffi culties — Emotional," I have commented on the feeling which originates them — the feeling drawn out towards the govern ing agency. In addition to what was there said respecting the general effects of this feeling 011 sociological inquiry, something must be said about its special effects. And first, let us contemplate a common fallacy in men's opinions about human affairs, which pervades the several fallacies fostered by the political bias.
Results are proportionate to appliances — see here the tacit assumption underlying many errors in the conduct of life, private and public. In private life everyone discovers the un truth of this assumption, and yet continues to act as though he had not discovered its untruth. Reconsider a moment, under this fresh aspect, a familiar experience lately dwelt upon.
"How happy I shall be," thinks the child, "when I am as old as my big brother, and own all the many things he will not let me have." "How happy," the big brother thinks, " shall I be when, like my father. I have got a house of my own and can do as I like." " How happy I shall be," thinks the father, " when, achieving the success in prospect, I have got a large income, a country house, carriages, horses, and a higher social position." And yet at each stage the possession of the much-desired aids to satisfaction does not bring all the happiness expected, and brings many annoyances. 17 242 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
A good example of the fallacy that results are proportion ate to appliances, is furnished by domestic service. It is an inference naturally drawn that if one servant does so much, two servants will do twice as much; and so on. But when this common-sense theory is tested by practice, the results are quite at variance with it. Not simply does the amount of serv ice performed fail to increase in proportion to the number of servants, but frequently it decreases: fewer servants do more wrork and do it better.
Take, again, the relation of books to knowledge. The nat ural assumption is that one who has stores of information at hand will become well-informed. And yet, very generally, when a man begins to accumulate books he ceases to make much use of them. The filling of his shelves with volumes and the filling of his brain with facts, are processes apt to go on with inverse rapidities. It is a trite remark that those who have become distinguished for their learning, have often been those who had great difficulties in getting books. Here, too, the results are quite out of proportion to the appliances.
Similarly if wTe go a step further in the same direction — not thinking of books as aids to information, but thinking of in formation as an aid to guidance. Do we find that the quan tity of acquirement measures the quantity of insight? Is the amount of cardinal truth reached to be inferred from the mass of collected facts that serve as appliances for reaching it? By no means. Wisdom and information do not vary together. Though there must be data before there can be generalization, yet ungeneralized data acctimulated in excess, are impedi ments to generalization. When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion of thought. When facts are not organized into faculty, the greater the mass of them the more will the mind stagger along under its burden, hampered instead of helped by its acquisitions. A student may become a very Daniel Lambert of learning, and remain utterly useless to himself and all others. Neither in this case, then, are results proportionate to appliances.
It is so, too, with discipline, and with the agencies estab lished for discipline. Take, as an instance, the use of lan guage. From his early days the boy whose father can afford THE POLITICAL BIAS. 243 to give him the fashionable education, is drilled in grammar, practised in parsing1, tested in detecting errors of speech. After his public-school career, during which words, their meanings, and their right applications, almost exclusively occupy him, he passes through a University where a large, and often the larger, part of his attention is still given to literary culture — models of style in prose and poetry being daily before him. So much for the preparation; now for the performance. It is notorious that commentators on the classics are among the most slovenly writers of English. Readers of Punch will re member how, years ago, the Provost and Head-Master of Eton were made to furnish food for laughter by quotations from a letter they had published. Recently the Head-Master of Winchester has given us, in entire unconsciousness of its gross defects, a sample of the English which long study of language produces. If from these teachers, who are literally the select of the select, we turn to men otherwise selected, mostly out of the same highly-disciplined class — men who are distilled into the House of Commons, and then re-distilled into the Ministry, we are again disappointed. Just as in the last generation, Royal Speeches drawn up by those so laboriously trained in the right use of words, furnished for an English grammar examples of blunders to be avoided; so in the pres ent generation, a work on style might fitly take from these documents which our Government annually lays before all the world, warning instances of confusions, and illogicalities, and pleonasms. And then on looking at the performances of men not thus elaborately prepared, we are still more struck by the seeming anomaly. How great the anomaly is, we may best see by supposing some of our undisciplined authors to use expressions like those used by the disciplined. Imagine the self-made Cobbett deliberately saying, as is said in the last Royal Speech, that— "I have kept in view the double object of an equitable regard to existing circumstances, and of securing a general provision more permanent in its character, and resting on a reciprocal and equal basis, for the commercial and maritime transactions of the two countries."4 Imagine the poet who had " little Latin and less Greek," giv ing the order that — " No such address shall be delivered in any place where the assem- 244 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
blage of persons to hear the same may cause obstruction to the use of any road or walk by the public." 6 — an order which occurs, along with half-a-dozen lax and su perfluous phrases, in the eighteen lines announcing the minis terial retreat from the Hyde-Park contest. Imagine the ploughman Burns, like one of our scholars who has heen chosen to direct the education of gentlemen's sons, expressing himself in print thus — " I should not have troubled you with this detail (which was, in deed, needless in my former letter) if it was not that I may appear to have laid a stress upon the dates which the boy's accident has pre vented rne from being able to claim to do."6 Imagine Bunyan, the tinker, publishing such a sentence as this, written by one of our bishops: — " If the 546 gentlemen who signed the protest on the subject of deaconesses had thought proper to object to my having formally licensed a deaconess in the parish of Dilton's Marsh, or to what they speak of when they say that ' recognition had been made ' (I presume on a report of which no part or portion was adopted by resolution of the Synod) 'as to sisters living together in a more conventual manner and under stricter rule,' I should not have thought it necessary to do more than receive with silent respect the expression of their opinion;" Or, to cite for comparison modern self-educated writers, im agine such a sentence coming from Hugh Miller, or Alexander Smith, or Gerald Massey, or "the Norwich weaver-boy" (W. J. Fox), or " the Journeyman Engineer." Shall we then say that in the case of literary culture, results are proportionate to appliances? or shall we not rather say that, as in other cases, the relation is by no means so simple a one.
Nowhere, then, do we find verified this assumption which we are so prone to make. Quantity of effect does not vary as quantity of means. From a mechanical apparatus up to an educational system or a social institution, the same truth holds. Take a rustic to see a new machine, and his admiration of it will be in proportion to the multiplicity of its parts. Listen to the criticism of a skilled engineer, and you find that from all this complication he infers probable failure. Not elaboration but simplification is his aim: knowing, as he does, that every additional wheel or lever implies inertia and THE POLITICAL BIAS. 245 friction to be overcome, and occasional derangement to be recti fied. It is thus everywhere. Up to a certain point appliances are needful for results; but beyond that point, results decrease as appliances increase.
This undue belief in appliances, joined with the general bias citizens inevitably have in favour of governmental agen cies, prompts the multiplication of laws. It fosters the notion that a society will be the better the more its actions are every where regulated by artificial instrumentalities. And the effect produced on sociological speculation is, that the benefits achieved by laws are exaggerated, while the evils they entail are overlooked.
Brought to bear on so immensely-complicated an aggregate as a society, a law rarely, if ever, produces as much direct effect as was expected, and invariably produces indirect effects, many in their kinds and great in their sum, that were not ex pected. It is so even with fundamental changes: witness tbe two we have seen in the constitution of our House of Com mons. Both advocates and opponents of the first Reform Bill anticipated that the middle classes would select as representa tives many of their own body. But both were wrong. The class-quality of the House of Commons remained very much what it was before. While, however, the immediate and spe cial result looked for did not appear, there were vast remote and general results foreseen by no one. So, too, with the re cent change. We had eloquently-uttered warnings that dele gates from the working-classes would swamp the House of Commons; and nearly everyone expected that, at any rate, a sprinkling of working-class members would be chosen. Again all were wrong. The conspicuous alteration looked for has not occurred; but, nevertheless, governmental actions have already been much modified by the raised sense of responsi bility. It is thus always. No prophecy is safer than that the results anticipated from a law will be greatly exceeded in amount by results not anticipated. Even simple physical ac tions might suggest to us this conclusion. Let us contem plate one.
You see that this wrought-iron plate is not quite flat: it sticks up a little here towards the left — " cockles," as we say.
24:6 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
How shall we flatten it? Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that is prominent. Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow as you advise. Harder, you say. Still no effect. Another stroke? Well, there is one, and an other, and another. The prominence remains, you see: the evil is as great as ever — greater, indeed. But this is not all. Look at the warp which the plate has got near the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it. Instead of curing the original defect, we have produced a second. Had we asked an artizaii practised in " planishing," as it is called, he would have told us that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting part. He would have taught us how to give variously-directed and specially-adjusted blows with a hammer elsewhere: so attacking the evil not by direct but by indirect actions. The required process is less simple than you thought. Even a sheet of metal is not to be successfully dealt with after those common-sense methods in which you have so much confidence. What, then, shall we say about a society? " Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? '' asks Hamlet. Is humanity more readily straightened than an iron plate?
Many, I doubt not. failing to recognize the truth that in proportion as an aggregate is complex, the effects wrought by an incident force becomes more multitudinous, confused, and incalculable, and that therefore a society is of all kinds of ag gregates the kind most difficult to affect in an intended way and not in unintended ways — many such wall ask evidence of the difficulty. Eesponse would perhaps be easier were the evidence less abundant. It is so familiar as seemingly to have lost its significance; just as perpetually-repeated saluta tions and prayers have done. The preamble to nearly every Act of Parliament supplies it; in the report of every commis sion it is presented in various forms: and for anyone asking instances, the direction might be— Hansard passim. Here I will give but a single example which might teach certain rash enthusiasts of our day, were they teachable. I refer to meas ures for the suppression of drunkenness.
Not to dwell on the results of the Maine Law, which, as I know from one whose personal experience verified current THE POLITICAL BIAS. 247 statements, prevents the obtainment of stimulants by travel lers in urgent need of them, but does not prevent secret drink ing by residents— not to dwell, either, upon the rigorous measures taken in Scotland in 1617, ''for the restraint of the vile and detestable vice of drunkenness daily increasing," but which evidently did not produce the hoped-for effect; I will limit myself to the case of the Licensing Act, 9 Geo. II., ch. 23, for arresting the sale of spirituous liquors (chiefly gin) by prohibitory licences.
" Within a few months after it passed, Tindal tells us, the commis sioners of excise themselves became sensible of the impossibility or unadvisableness of carrying it rigorously into execution. * * * Smollett, who has drawn so dark a picture of the state of things the act was designed to put down, has painted in colours equally strong the mischiefs which it produced:— ' The populace,' he writes, ' soon broke through all restraint. Though no licence was obtained and no duty paid, the liquor continued to be sold in all corners of the streets; informers were intimidated by the threats of the people; and the jus tices of the peace, either from indolence or corruption, neglected to put the law in execution.' In fact, in course of time, ' it appeared,' he adds, ' that the consumption of gin had considerably increased every year since those heavy duties were imposed.' "8 When, in 1743, this Act was repealed, it was shown during the debates that — " The quantity of gin distilled in England, which, in 1C84, when the business was introduced into this country, had been 527,000 gal lons, had risen to 948,000 in 1G94. to 1.375,000 in 1704, to 2,000,000 in 1714. to 3,520.000 in 1724, to 4.947.000 in 1734, and to not less than 7.100,000 in 1742. * * * ' Retailers were deterred from vending them [spirituous liquors] by the utmost encouragement that could be given to informers. * * * The prospect of raising money by de tecting their [unlicensed retailers'] practices incited many to turn information into a trade; and the facility with which the crime was to be proved encouraged some to gratify their malice by perjury, and others their avarice; so that the multitude of informations became a public grievance, and the magistrates themselves complained that the law was not to be executed. The perjuries of informers were now so flagrant and common, that the people thought all informations ma licious; or, at least, thinking themselves oppressed by the law, they looked upon every man that promoted its execution as their enemy; and therefore now began to declare war against informers, many of 248 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.