said in the essay on "The Coming Slavery" about the law of nature, "that a creature not energetic enough to maintain itself must die."1 Government interferes with that process of evolution which Mr. Spencer would wish to contemplate with the calm curiosity of an epicurean god, but with a full, though somewhat inexplicable, faith in the beneficent issue of the long misery which the process causes to individual men, women, and children in the interest of the species. How this can be reconciled with his eager defence of individual rights I fail to see, but shall not inquire further. At present I wish to ask how it is compatible with his assertion that the remark of Mackintosh, "Constitutions are not made, but grow," has become a truism. Nay, in this very paragraph which I have now before me, I find "governmental institutions" included in the "scientific conception of society" as an organic structure. If Governments. "grow" very big and strong and fierce, why blame. them? "For 'tis their nature to." They cannot help it, when they growl and fight and take to legislating in excess. You need not blame the legislators 1 The Man versus the State, p. 19. nor the constitution-makers, because on your own thesis they cannot make constitutions, however much they try. All is a growth. You might as well say to a man, "You must really make your head smaller; it is far too big for the rest of your body." I might reply to Mr. Spencer in the words which he himself quotes in First Principles (at the end of Part I.)—— "Nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes." Here then is the dilemma: (1) If the Government is a part of the organic structure of society, and if the social organism is altogether an organism, and strictly grows, and cannot be made, Governments, like everything else, must, by necessity, be left to fight it out. The fittest will survive. If the Government is fittest, it will get the better of the individual (to assume for the moment Mr. Spencer's antithesis between them); if the individual is fittest, he will get the better of Government. Societies with much developed Governments must fight it out with societies with stunted Governments. The fittest will survive. Whatever is, is right; and the legislator can have no sins, because he is only a part of the great movement which Mr. Spencer contemplates from those serene heights of the system of synthetic philosophy which are illumined by the beneficent radiance of the Unknowable. If any one thinks this accusation of fatalism unwarranted, let him turn to p. 64 of The Man versus the State: "As I heard remarked by a distinguished professor, whose studies give ample means of judging-'When once you begin to interfere with the order of Nature, there is no knowing where 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 produced by aggregated human beings." The obvious conclusion being, Laissez faire-with a vengeance. But even in these words notice how interference is spoken of, as if Government was something outside the natural structure. (2) If, then, Government is outside the process of evolution, how can we avoid the suspicion that there is some flaw in Mr. Spencer's scientific conception of society, and that it breaks down at Government? So that, after all, there was some need for Mackintosh to say, "Constitutions are not made, but grow"; since to Mr. Spencer the proposition does not appear true. A dilemma is apt to suffer from an incomplete disjunction in the premisses. One suspects therefore that the choice does not lie solely between "making and "growing," and that social organisms differ from other organisms in having the remarkable property of making themselves; and the more developed they are, the more consciously do they make themselves.1 But if so, an appeal to the fact that society is an organism is no argument either for or against government interference in any given case. 1 The truth is, that society (or the State) is not an organism, because we may compare it to a beast or a man; but because it cannot be understood by the help of any lower-i.e. less complex-conceptions than that of organism. In it, as in an organism, every part is conditioned by the whole. In a mere aggregate, or heap, the units are prior to the whole; in an organism the whole is prior to the parts—i.e. they can only be understood in reference to the whole. But because the conception of an organism is more adequate to society than the conception of an artificial compound, it does not follow that it is fully adequate. We have just seen that a one-sided 1 Cp. Fouillée, La Science Sociale Contemporaine, p. 114: "Plus un organisme est contractuel, plus il est vraiment organisé." On p. 115 he defines human society as "un organisme qui se réalise en se concevant et en se voulant lui-même.” S. I. E application of the conception of organic growth leads to difficulties, as well as the conception of artificial making. These we can only escape by recognising a truth which includes them both. We must pass from "organism" to "consciousness," from Nature to the spirit of man. The history of progress is the record of a gradual diminution of waste. The lower the stage the greater is the waste involved in the attainment of any end. In the lower organisms nature is reckless in her expenditure of life. The higher animals, more able to defend themselves, have the fewest young. When we come to human beings in society, the State is the chief instrument by which waste is prevented. The mere struggle for existence between individuals means waste unchecked. The State, by its action, can in many cases consciously and deliberately diminish this fearful loss; in many cases by freeing the individual from the necessity of a perpetual struggle for the mere conditions of life, it can set free individuality and so make culture possible. An ideal State would be one in which there was no waste at all of the lives, and intellects, and souls of individual men and women. |