William Graham Sumner

“ It is a chance for the man to maintain the struggle for existence if he is strong enough to conquer obstacles; if not, then he may lie down and die of despair on the face of the boon and not a breeze, or a leaflet, or a sunbeam will vary its due course to help or pity him. This is the only attitude in which we find nature when we come face to face with her in her original attitude toward mankind; it is only when we come to meet her, armed with knowledge, science, and capital, that we force back her limitations and win some wider and easier chances of existence for ourselves. ”

“ It consists in care and worry; in police regulation and all the compromises of civilization; in co-operation to sustain institutions, and in voluntary submission to law. The instruments of the new servitude are the means which served to emancipate us from the old one; the rich man, if he gets more of the emancipation, gets also more of the new servitude. Liberty has not been found yet. We are like men mired in a swamp, who, in pulling out one leg or one arm, only plunge others more deeply in—so long as we follow this chimæra of liberty here on earth to do as we please. ”

“ We look in vain for any physical or metaphysical endowment with which men started the life of the race on earth. We look in vain for any facts to sustain the notion of a state of primitive simplicity and blessedness, or natural rights, or a boon of material goods. All the facts open to us show that man has won on earth everything which he has here by toil, sacrifice, and blood; all the civilization we possess has been wrought out by work and pain. ”

“ Robinson Crusoe enjoyed the boon of nature. He climbed to the top of his island and looked about, "monarch of all he surveyed," not a human soul to divide or dispute it with him; but he sank down in despair, thinking himself the most miserable of living creatures, just because he had the boon all to himself and because the maintenance of his existence was such a crushing task. How many men in the United States to-day could maintain their existence each on a square mile of land, in its natural condition, in the temperate zone, if they were cut off from society and civilization? ”

“ Yet we are gravely told now, and, in one breath, that capital never was as strong as it is now, and, in the next, that the most puerile devices are about to fetter capital and deprive it of its power.
Property is dear to men, not only for the sensual pleasure which it can afford, but also because it is the bulwark of all which they hold dearest on earth—above all else because it is the safeguard of those they love most against misery and all physical distress. ”

“ Tell the young man not to worry about learning, to sneer at culture, to spend his nights on the street and his Sundays reading dime novels and the Police Gazette, and, when election day comes, to throw his vote so as to make a political job for himself or his friend; tell him that this is what is meant by the doctrine that the people ought to rule, and that in doing all this he will be uttering the oracles of political wisdom—then the great doctrine has turned into one of the most grotesque and mischievous falsehoods ever imagined. ”

“ A slave could never be a vagabond or a pauper; he could not starve to death unless there was a general collapse of the entire social order, so that his master could neither feed him nor find a purchaser for him. The most ingenious apologies for slavery ever made in this country consisted in developing this fact into an argument that slavery was the only cure for socialism, the only sound organization of society in which there could be no poverty, and that free society was destined to destruction by the war of competition and unchecked struggle for existence within itself. ”

“ Indeed, we seem destined speedily to discover that democracy, instead of being a single and homogeneous system, is a thing of such various phases and forms that it is scarcely possible to compare two cases of it, or that such a definition can be made that two commentators can understand each other.
Democracy is atomistic. It breaks the society up into individuals who are political units. The peril of such a system is that it is at the mercy of any organization formed inside of it which gives coherence and order to its disintegrated elements. Such an organization will begin to move the whole. ”

“ A century ago two men might have worked side by side at a loom; one might have been a man of the highest industrial talent, and the other lazy and inefficient; but the utmost difference of position to which they could attain, aside from vice or crime, was measured by the distance between a good and a bad hand-weaver. To-day the first would probably become a master of industry, a capitalist, and a millionaire, while the second might not be as well off now as then. ”

“ It is as impossible to find the origin of property as it is to find the origin of marriage, and for exactly the same reason—namely, that no society could exist without each. Marriage means reproduction and property means nutrition, and no society could exist without both. If a man took a plant or an animal out of nature for his own support, he had to appropriate it into private and exclusive property. Therefore, it is plain that, if property is an "institution," so is marriage an institution in exactly the same sense and in exactly the same degree. ”

“ Now comes the question: how is any one to destroy or reconstruct the doctrine of property, and the conception of the right of property, on any a priori or "ethical" grounds? Every one whom it is intended thus to affect will respond that you threaten the interests for which he works and lives. You tell him that he is strong by virtue of his property and that you propose to rob him of it. Why will he not use his strength to defend his interest? ”

“ This is what makes that passion and that philosophy so irresistible, whether for the weal or the woe of the human race. For each man to have a wide area at his disposal, whether actually or only by economic effect spreading through the industrial organization, means that he has the conditions of existence within his control, that he is not ground down by poverty, that he is forced to seek no man's protection, that he is cowed by no fear, that he is independent and "free," that he can provide for his family without care and can accumulate capital too. ”

“ It is not strange that the growth has been so slow, especially in its earlier stages, when we see how hard the struggle has been, and how much it has been at war with human nature. It is only when we have gained some conception of the painful and toilsome effort by which every step has been won, that we can estimate at its full value the civilization which we have inherited; but then, too, we are driven to believe that we never can gain anything more except by the same means. The great reason why the advance of civilization has been so slow is that it has never gone forward steadily. ”

“ They want somebody to come and help them to be free. It has always been so. Men have failed of freedom not because kings, nobles, or priests enslaved them, but because liberty was too high and great for them. They would not rise to it; they would submit to any servitude rather; therefore they get servitude.
The strain of liberty is in the demand which it makes on the whole mass of the people for perpetual activity of reason and conscience to re-examine rights and duties, and to readjust their equilibrium. Civil liberty is not a scientific fact. It is not in the order of nature. ”

“ Where is there any liberty, in the sense of unrestrained self-will, for the civilized man? The declaimers about the ills of civilization are not astray in their facts; the civilized man is the slave of the industrial organization, of contracts, of the market, of supply and demand—call it what you will, it is, after all, only the weight of existence, and liberty means for us just what it did for the savage ”

“ The century which has seen slavery as an institution cease to exist almost throughout the whole human race, has easily come to believe in an ideal state of things in which existence should cost no pain or self-denial at all. Emancipation provided that a man should work only for himself. It is very evident that many are enraged, and declare liberty all a delusion, because they had persuaded themselves that liberty meant emancipation from the need of working at all, or emancipation from all the hardships of the struggle for existence. Hence the denunciations of "wages slavery." ”

“ Perhaps the most fundamental fact which makes this world a world of toil and self-denial is that two men cannot eat the same loaf of bread. This pitiless and hopeless monopoly is, in the last analysis, the reason for capital and rent, for property and rights, for law and the state, for poverty and inequality. ”

“ Labor remains just what it always was—a pitiless fact, an inevitable necessity. A man who has capital on which he can live without work is living on past labor accumulated and reapplied. There is no way in which one of the sons of men can live without labor except by enslaving some of his fellowmen to work for him. Therefore the essence of personal and civil liberty must be found in a state of things in which each one labors for himself, is secured against laboring for any one else, and is assured the enjoyment of the fruits of his own labor. ”

“ If we can abolish poverty by a device or contrivance introduced into the social organization, then we can divorce poverty from its correlation with ignorance, vice, and misfortune. We can let those things stand, and yet escape their consequences.
It is plain, however, upon a moment's reflection, that poverty and wealth are only relative terms, like heat and cold. If there were no difference in the command we have over the material comforts of life, there would be no poverty and wealth. As we go down in the scale of civilization we find the contrast less and less ”

“ The serf, in his turn, thought it immeasurable gain to get his servitudes made definite, although a free man would have thought it slavery to be reduced to villainage. A villain could not go if he wanted to, but he could not be evicted if any one wanted to send him away. A free man can go if he wants to, and may be evicted if the other party chooses. At what point does the servitude of the villain, who must stay and work and pay feudal dues, turn into the blessing of the free tenant, who has fixity of tenure, but works and enjoys subject to taxes? ”

“ It remains to be proved that democracy possesses any stability and that it can guarantee rights.
We think that justice is a simple idea, comprehensible by the light of nature, when justice is really one of the most refined and delicate notions which we have to use, and one which requires the most perfect training for its comprehension. We think that it is a thing which we need only demand of our political institutions, in order to get it, when in fact the best institutions ever yet invented owe their greatest glory to the fact that they have succeeded in but remotely approximating to it. ”

“ If now, we build houses several stories high, so that several men can, in effect, stand on the same square feet of the earth's surface, or if we make the same number of square feet bear two loaves of bread instead of one, we break the monopoly of nature, but we do it by capital and the arts of civilization. Whatever we have, therefore, which is worth having is not a boon of nature, but a conquest of civilization from nature. ”

“ Responsibility rises up by the side of liberty, correlative, commensurate, and inevitable. Responsibility to nature is enforced by disease, poverty, misery, and death; responsibility to society is enforced by discord, revolution, national decay, conquest, and enslavement. Within the narrow limits of human institutions, liberty and responsibility are made equal and co-ordinate whenever the institutions are sound. If they are not equal and co-ordinate, then he who has liberty without responsibility incurs a corresponding loss of liberty, or servitude. ”

“ We could not make a greater mistake than to suppose that we could throw down all social institutions and guarantees, and still keep all the peace, order, security, and freedom from political anxiety, which we now enjoy. Time and again in history men have sacrificed liberty rather than incur anarchy. When anarchy comes and every one tries to realize the liberty to do as he likes, the man who has anything knows that he will not be able to do as he likes, because it will take all his energies and more to protect his property. ”

“ Thus we come to this: that there is no liberty for the intelligent man as an individual, or in voluntary co-operation with others, except in intelligent obedience to the laws of right living. His first task is to know the world in which he finds himself. He must work and he must study. He is not turned out to riot in self-indulgence because he is free; he must conform to the conditions in which he finds himself. He must obey. When he has broken all the bonds of old institutions, of superstition and human tyranny, he wakes to find that he can have no liberty unless he subdues himself ”

“ Every violation of security of property and of such rights as are recognized in society has the same effect. All mistakes in legislation, whether sincere and innocent or dictated by selfish ambition and sordid greed, have the same effect. They rob the people of goods that were fairly theirs upon the stage of civilization on which they stood. All abuses of political power, all perversion of institutions, all party combinations for anti-social ends have the same effect. ”

“ The Crusades were an attempt to realize a great phantasm. Chivalry and the devotion to women were phantasms. The societal system was unreal; it assumed that men were originally in a state of slavery and that all rights which they had were due to gift from some sovereign. It resulted that only two men in the world, the Pope and the Emperor, had original and independent rights. The relation of classes, parties, and corporations in the society was therefore both loose and complicated. It is amazing to notice the effect of all this attention to unrealities on all the products of the Middle Ages. ”

“ For myself, I am convinced that much is yet to be gained by better appreciation of the element of organization. But organization is only the mode under which the work of life goes on. It is not a force—it never can force anything. It has to do with the smoothness and harmony of the operations. In human society, in its lower forms, organization has always produced itself spontaneously and automatically and has, therefore, just suited itself to the case. ”

“ This instinctive and childlike howling with which they greeted a new day of misery is the most pathetic, and, at the same time, most rational and fit manifestation which we should expect to find among such people. Why are any of us today better off than the Fuegans? Why are we not sunk in misery and squalor, and destitute of all things fitted to serve human need and raise men out of slavery to nature? ”