W. H. Mallock

“ But the true moral of all that has been just insisted on is, that in denying to the masses of mankind those special powers which actively initiate and actively promote progress, and actively sustain the fabric of advanced civilisation, we are not denying to the masses of mankind great moral and great intellectual qualities generally. We are not asserting that the normal, the average, the ordinary man is incapable of being developed into a creature endowed with beliefs, thoughts, and feelings which are not only noble and correct, but which expand and improve as civilisation advances. ”

“ And what is true of fixed capital is true of wage capital also; for fixed capital, such as machines, buildings, or railways, is the result of wage capital, as employed to direct labour, and is therefore wage-capital externalised in the objective results of its employment. But fixed capital, or a man’s productive power externalised, differs from his productive power when exercised by himself through wage capital. It is a part of his power which he can separate from his own personality, and which he can make over to others, just as a slave-owner might make over a body of slaves ”

“ Now it is no doubt theoretically possible that a society might exist, composed of a mass of undifferentiated and undirected manual labourers on the one hand, and on the other of a few passive monopolists who extracted from them most of what they produced, as the price of allowing them the opportunity of producing anything; but it is perfectly certain that a society of this kind would exhibit none of the increasing productive power which, as even Marx and his school admit, is one of the most distinctive features of industry under the capitalistic wage-system. ”

“ Spencer, and all our modern sociologists with him, conceive of the fittest as a man, or a man and his family, who fight for their food in isolation, like a lion and lioness with their cubs, and who affect their contemporaries only by being better fed than they, or as a race-horse affects its competitors only by being first at the winning post.
But the great man, as an agent of progress, shows his greatness in a way precisely opposite to that in which the fittest man shows his fitness. This it is that our contemporary sociologists all fail to perceive, and endless error is the consequence. ”

“ Now if those who make this assertion attribute to it any serious meaning, they must mean that men like honour much better than they like wealth—that they covet it more keenly, that they will struggle more desperately to win it, and are more exasperated at not possessing it. If, however, great wealth is possible for the few only, and if the majority of mankind are for ever destined to be without it, such, with regard to honour, is the case even more evidently. For honour is more essentially confined to the few than wealth is. ”

“ If, therefore, inequality in the possession of external goods, for which many men struggle, and which only a minority can secure, necessarily means unhappiness for the larger part of the community, this evil at all events is not due to the existing structure of society, but is, on the contrary, so rooted in the constitution of human nature, that even the wildest and completest schemes of social reform are unable to offer us so much as a mitigation of it. ”

“ When we speak of greatness, then, in the sense here attributed to the word—when we speak of great men as agents of social progress—we do not mean that the world is divided into ordinary men and heroes. The members of that minority whom we group together as great men, though some of them are, no doubt, of noble and heroic proportions, are for the most part great in relation to special results only; even in relation to these special results they are great in very various degrees, and many of them in other relations may be ordinary, or even less than ordinary. ”

“ This is specially true of the domain of economic production; for it is mainly on account of its connection with the production and distribution of wealth that political government excites so much popular interest and forms the subject of so much vehement controversy. And in every other domain of human activity equally, we shall find that the interests, the endeavours, and the disputes of men have an economic process as their basis, or economic progress as their object. The processes of production and commerce are, in fact, the central processes of every nation’s life. ”

“ As for the men whose artistic powers are true, but qualify them only for decorative not for creative work—the men, for example, who design beautiful stuffs and furniture—though the exercise of their power may be doubtless itself a pleasure to them, they are certainly as a class not given to exercising them without the expectation of some proportionate pecuniary reward. Indeed, in exact proportion as artistic creation assimilates itself to the processes by which wealth in general is produced, the mere pleasure of the work itself ceases to be a sufficient motive for it. ”

“ Greatness, then, is simply the possession and exercise by such and such a person, in an exceptional degree, of some faculty or assortment of faculties, the rudiments of which are possessed by all. And the reason why it is necessary to insist on this fact here is that, as a consequence of it, the use which the great man makes of his exceptional powers—or, in other words, their whole efficient existence—depends on certain causes which are relatively, though not absolutely, similar to those on which depends the use which the ordinary man makes of his. ”

“ Socialism is said by some to be the protest of increasing poverty against increasing wealth; by some to be the natural voice of highly organised labour, which has come at last to be capable of self-government; and by some to be an embodiment of the esoteric philosophy of Hegel. In reality it is the embodiment of the results of indiscriminate education on talents which are exceptional, but at the same time inefficient. The avowed object of socialism is a redistribution of wealth ”

“ If a man who has perfect taste, and a few thousands a year, is buying furniture for his house, and is anxious that every room shall be as beautiful as it is in his power to make it, we all of us know with what eagerness day after day he will stare into the windows of the dealers in old furniture and bric-à-brac, and how quickly he will take note of any object that his taste approves. Now if such a man, having admired a cabinet or a piece of tapestry, finds that the price of it is a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds, he will feel perhaps that it is a little beyond his means ”

“ Greatness, in short, as an agent of social progress, is in most cases not a single quality, but a peculiar combination of many; its composition varies according to the character of the results in the production of which the great men are severally more efficient than the majority; and it often depends less on the extent to which any special faculty is developed, in comparison with the same faculty as possessed by ordinary men, than it does on the degree to which each faculty is developed as compared with the others possessed by the great man himself. ”

“ What are the most beautiful love-poems that have made their writers immortal but an expression of what is felt by millions, though it can be expressed only by a few? Why is there life still in the two marriage songs of Catullus, if it were not for the living strings in the normal human heart which the magic of his hand still touches? ”

“ Some of the greatest poets the world has ever known—it is enough to instance the cases of Burns and Shakespeare—have been men of no wealth and of very imperfect education. Obviously, therefore, in poetry one man has as good a chance as another. It is no doubt often argued—and this argument has already been examined—that great poets, of whom Shakespeare is a favourite example, owe part of their greatness not to themselves, but to their age. ”

“ Capitalism, in its essence, is merely {174} the realised process of the more efficient members of the human race controlling and guiding the less efficient; capitalistic competition is the means by which, out of these more efficient members, society itself selects those who serve it best; and no society which intends to remain civilised, and is not prepared to return to the direct coercion of slavery, can escape from competition and the wage-system, under some form or other, any more than it can stand in its own shadow. ”

“ It is a great mistake to suppose that even the most false and foolish opinions which have influenced multitudes to their own detriment have been originated and promulgated by men who were altogether weak and inferior. On the contrary, most of the follies which have disturbed or retarded civilisation have been due to the influence of men who, though morally or intellectually contemptible, have possessed a vigour of character far beyond what is ordinary. ”

“ It must be remembered that the strength of a man’s will, though depending as a potentiality on the character with which he happens to be born, depends as an actual force on his desire for certain objects or results, coupled with the belief that he can attain these by action. Now, when a man’s powers of action are capable of realising his desires—as when a man who desires to be wealthy has the talents that produce wealth, or when the man who desires to be Prime Minister has the talents of a great statesman—his career satisfies himself, and is presumably serviceable to his country. ”

“ It is perfectly true that if all other circumstances were always equal—the demand for the commodities in question, the ability with which average labour is directed, and the assistance which the genius of the great inventors gives to it—it is perfectly true that then the amount of average labour embodied in various commodities would be the measure of their value; for labour in that case would be the only variant. But, in reality, the important variants are not average labour, but the ability by which labour is directed. The efficiency of labour itself is practically constant ”

“ But just as this struggle for work or for existence—this struggle of one worker against another—is not essential to the capitalistic wage-system, and certainly did not originate with it, and just as that system would not necessarily be abolished by its overthrow, so it is not the kind of competition against which the socialists direct their main attacks. Their main attacks are directed against the struggle between the wage-payers, not the wage-earners—that is to say, against the struggle not for existence, but for domination ”

“ It will indeed require very little reflection to show us that if the great men in the industrial world would only develop and use their faculties, without any motive of ambition or self-interest to stimulate them,—as indeed at the present moment we are assuming that they do,—they could use the wage-system for the purpose of directing industry merely by monopolising the control of capital without monopolising, and even without sharing in, its possession. ”

“ Karl Marx conceives of the capitalists as a body of men who, so far as production is concerned, are absolutely inert and passive. Owing to a variety of causes, he says, during the past four hundred years all the means of production have come under their control, and access can be had to them only, as it were, through gates, of which these tyrants hold the key. Outside are the manual labourers, who are the sole producers of wealth, but who, without the means of production, naturally can produce nothing—not even enough to live on ”

“ They show us, on the contrary, that the struggle which produces social progress, though it resembles the Darwinian struggle in one point, is in all other points contrasted with it. The struggle of one employer against another to direct labour in the most advantageous way, or the struggle of one politician or religious teacher against another to secure for his own views the largest number of adherents, is so far like the Darwinian struggle for existence, that it is a struggle in which individual is pitted against individual, and the gain of the successful is the loss of the unsuccessful. ”

“ On the contrary, we have assumed that his contributions to the national wealth find their way into the pockets of those around him, and that for him nothing is left but the bare means of subsistence. It has indeed been shown that he must necessarily have the control of capital, and be free to use it in the way that he thinks best; but this is only because the control of capital affords the sole means by which, amongst free men, industrial discipline can be enforced and the productive genius of the few be communicated to the muscles of the many. ”

“ The philosopher, the soldier, the inventor, the statesman, the great merchant or manufacturer, achieve success only by prolonged and intense effort, by study, by concentrated thought, by action, by rude experience. Genius, indeed, has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking trouble; and the definition, though very incomplete, is, so far as it goes, true. ”

“ For wealth as such, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, is wealth regarded as a means of personal self-indulgence. It stands for the finest wines, the richest food, the softest beds, the most luxurious furniture—for everything that can caress the senses and enervate the mind and body. And no doubt its power of securing all these things to its possessors is one of the qualities which render it an object of desire. ”

“ Now, though it is quite conceivable that a painter might paint a Madonna solely because the realisation of his own ideas delighted him, it is hardly to be expected that other men will rack their brains to devise blocks, presses, and preparations by which copies of it may be made and multiplied, solely for the pleasure of reproducing ideas which are not their own. It must further be added that delight in creation for its own sake can be attributed as a sufficient motive to the highest class of artists only. ”

“ One of the great errors of which our modern sociologists are guilty consists in their failure to perceive that social progress is not a single movement but the joint result of two, which differ from each other—to repeat what was said just now—quite as much as do the two movements of the earth. The difference between them will become instantly clear to us if we will turn our attention merely to the single obvious fact that the two take place at different rates of speed, the one set of changes being slow, like the succession of years ”

“ That all progress is due to the efforts of the superior minority is a truth which, taken by itself, and apart from other truths allied to it, we can merely recognise and assent to. We can do nothing to alter it; nor will the fact of our recognising it, if taken by itself, tend to alter or guide our conduct. We are not even able to settle the number of males and females which shall be produced in each family. Still less can we settle or increase the number of individuals who shall bring into the world with them talents more than ordinary. ”