CHAPTER II

PROGRESS THE RESULT OF A STRUGGLE NOT FOR SURVIVAL, BUT FOR DOMINATION

It has already been explained that the _great man_, as here understood, does not in any way correspond with the _fittest man_ in the Darwinian struggle for existence. The fittest man in the Darwinian sense merely promotes progress by the physiological process of reproducing his slight superiorities in his children, and thus raising in the slow course of ages the general level of capacity throughout subsequent generations of his race. The great man, on the contrary, promotes progress, not because he raises the capacity of the generations that come after him, but because he rises individually above the general level of his own. This, however, is only one of the differences by which the great man is distinguished from the fittest. There are two others, of which the first that we must consider is as follows.

The fittest man, or the survivor in the Darwinian struggle for existence, is, so far as his own contemporaries are concerned, greater than his inferiors only in respect of what he accomplishes for {131} himself, or for those immediately dependent on him. He is the man who lives and thrives whilst others die or languish, because whilst they can secure for themselves but little of what is requisite for life and health, he, by his superior gifts, is able to secure much. “_Families_,” says Mr. Spencer, “_whom the increasing difficulty of obtaining a living does not stimulate to improvement in production are on the high road to extinction, and must ultimately be supplanted by those whom the difficulty does so stimulate_.” That is to say, Mr. 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. The great man, unlike the strongest lion, promotes progress by increasing the food-supply not of himself, but of others; or if he increase his own, as he no doubt generally does, he does so only by showing others how to increase theirs. He is like a lion who should be better fed than the rest of the lions in his region, not because he took a carcase from them for which they all were fighting, {132} but because he showed them how to find others which they never would have found unaided, and took for himself in payment a small portion of each. The great man, in fact, as an agent of social progress, is great not in virtue of any completed results which he produces directly, by the action of his own hands or brains, or which he exhibits in his own person, but in virtue of the completed results which, by some simultaneous influence which he exercises over the brains or hands of others, he enables others to exhibit in themselves, or produce or do in the form of products or social services.

In order to realise this great truth, let us begin with considering that form of greatness which promotes social progress by supplying it with its first materials, and from which all other kinds of greatness draw some portion of their nourishment. It so happens that one of the most remarkable thinkers of this century, who, though he preceded Mr. Spencer, belongs to the same school, is able to assist us here by a very apt and remarkable passage.

John Stuart Mill, in that section of his _System of Logic_ to which he gives the title of “_The Logic of the Moral Sciences_,” writes thus. “_In the difficult process of observation and comparison which is required (for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of the laws of empirical sociology, and especially of social progress) it would evidently be a great assistance if it should happen to be the fact that one element in the complex existence of social man is pre-eminent over all the others, as the prime agent {133} of the social movement. For we could then take the progress of that one element as the central chain, to each successive link of which, the corresponding links of all the other progressions being appended, the succession of facts would by this alone be presented in a kind of spontaneous order, far more approaching to the real order of their filiation than could be obtained by any other merely empirical process. Now the evidence of history and that of human nature combine, by a striking instance of consilience, to show that there really is one social element which is predominant and almost paramount amongst the agents of social progression. This is the state of the speculative faculties, including the nature of the beliefs which by any means they have arrived at, concerning themselves and the world by which they are surrounded. Thus_,” Mill continues, “_to take the most obvious case, the impelling force to most of the improvements effected in the arts of life is the desire for increased material comfort; but as we can only act on external objects in proportion to our knowledge of them, the state of knowledge at any given time is the limit of the industrial improvement possible at that time, and therefore the progress of industry must follow and depend upon the progress of that knowledge_.”

Any one who was inclined to be hypercritical might object, and object with justice, that the practical application of knowledge often lags behind the speculative attainment, and that material progress therefore, at certain times, depends on {134} some new state of the practical rather than of the speculative faculties; but apart from this not very important inaccuracy of expression, Mill’s way of putting the case is admirable for its lucidity and for its truth; and we may, for our present purpose, be content to take it as it stands. All civilisation depends on the accumulation of speculative knowledge, and all progress in civilisation depends on an increase in speculative knowledge.

Speculative knowledge, however, does not increase of itself. It is not acquired without considerable effort; and people acquire it only because they strongly desire to do so. Such being the case, let us turn to another passage, taken likewise from the writings of Mill, and occurring in the very same chapter as that which has just been quoted. “_It would be a great error_,” says Mill, “_and one very little likely to be committed, to assert that speculation, intellectual activity, the pursuit of truth, is amongst the more powerful propensities of human nature, or holds a predominating place in the lives of any save decidedly exceptional individuals. But notwithstanding the relative weakness of this principle among other sociological agents, its influence is the main determining cause of social progress, all the other dispositions of our nature which contribute to that progress being dependent on it for accomplishing their share of the work_.”

Now what does this passage mean? About its meaning, and the truth of its meaning, there can be no possible doubt; but it will be well to observe {135} the extraordinary confusion in which Mill involves what he means by his perverse manner of expressing it. In the first sentence of this last passage he tells us as clearly as possible that with regard to the pursuit of truth, and the power of discovering and understanding it, mankind are divided broadly into two classes—the great majority with whom the “_pursuit of truth_” and “_intellectual activity_” are “_slight propensities_,” and “_the decidedly exceptional individuals_” with whom these propensities are overmastering. But he has no sooner drawn this clear and all-important distinction between the two classes than he proceeds to undo his own work and mixes them together again in one unmeaning blur. He converts his statement that only “_the decidedly exceptional individuals_” desire truth with any great intensity, and have the faculties requisite for discovering it, into the statement that if we take “_the decidedly exceptional individuals_” and the majority together, and regard them as one body, which he calls “_mankind_,” we shall find that the average desire for truth is lukewarm, and the faculties for discovering it insufficient. He might just as well group Shakespeare with a hundred ordinary men; tell us that Shakespeare could write the greatest poetry the world has ever known, and that the hundred other men could write no poetry at all, and then convert these statements into the following—that the one hundred and one men, Shakespeare included, could only write poetry of a very moderate quality. {136}

This confusion of statement, however, on the part of Mill, is merely mentioned here in passing, as one more example of the nature of that inveterate error—namely the ignoring of the differences between one class of men and another—which has made modern sociology so useless for practical purposes. The sole point which really now concerns us is this. In spite of the verbal, and indeed the mental confusion into which Mill lapses, the truth which he was struggling to express, and which no one, he says, would be likely to contradict, is not that, as he nonsensically puts it, the speculative faculties are weak in mankind generally, but that amongst the larger part of mankind they have hardly any efficiency at all, whilst “_in decidedly exceptional individuals_” they are intense, active, and conquering; and that consequently it is these “_decidedly exceptional individuals_” who practically constitute “_the one social element which is predominant, and almost paramount, amongst the agents of social progression_.”

Now such being the case, let us resume our present inquiry, and ask how do these individuals who alone strongly desire truth, and have the faculties for discovering it, perform the practical part which Mill so rightly assigns to them? By what kind of conduct do they become “_agents of social progression_” so as to raise communities from the level of helpless savagery and gradually endow them with all the resources of civilisation? One thing is perfectly clear. They do not so by the mere act {137} of acquiring knowledge, by laying up this treasure in a napkin, or by showing it secretly to one another. They do so only by diffusing it, in such measure as is practicable, amongst a circle of men much wider than themselves. They do so, that is to say, by influencing the minds of others, by guiding their attention to this and to that fact, by providing, as it were, a go-cart for their weaker intellectual faculties, and compelling them to confront and assent to such and such propositions. All that mass of developing knowledge and expanding ideas which forms not only the basis but a part of all progressive civilisation, and is commonly called by the general name of enlightenment, is produced solely by the influence on average minds of the minds that are “_decidedly exceptional_.” It is not produced by the fact that the “_decidedly exceptional_” minds are stocked with such ideas and with such knowledge themselves, but by the fact that they communicate such a measure of these to average minds as average minds are severally able to receive.

To realise the truth of this we need do no more than consider for a moment the ordinary process of education. The schoolmaster and the college tutor, by the State or some other authority, are compelled to give their pupils instruction in certain subjects. But there is another kind of compulsion involved in the matter also; and this has to do not with the selection of the subjects that are to be taught, but with what is to be taught about them. The general progress of a community depends {138} primarily upon this; and what is to be taught about them is determined not by the State, or by any other legally constituted body, but by the masters of speculative knowledge, by contemporary men of science, scholars, historians, and philosophers. Knowledge advances because these men are not only adding to it, but because they are perpetually assimilating the new discoveries with the old; and these men, by means of their comments on previous writers, or by new works of their own, often reproduced in the form of text-books, put the word into the teachers’ mouths; and the teachers, like the prophet Balaam, are compelled to speak it. In other words, great speculative thinkers are great as agents of mental civilisation and enlightenment only because, and only in so far as, they settle for others what these others shall believe and think.

And now let us pass from mental progress to material—that is to say, from speculative knowledge to applied knowledge; and the truth that is being here insisted on will become clearer still. The master of knowledge, as applied to production, is the inventor. Now the most perfect and important machines ever devised by man—let us say the steam-engine and the printing press—had they been planned by their original inventors in all their present completeness, but kept by the inventors to themselves in the form of working models, made by their own hands and shut up in their own rooms, would have left the arts of life totally unaffected; our fastest means of travelling would still be the stage-coach; {139} our few books would be produced by the methods of the mediæval scriptorium. These machines are instruments of social progress only because, and in so far as, they are multiplied and brought into use; and they could not be multiplied—as efficient implements, they could not be even made—without the co-operation of an enormous number of workers. It is probable indeed that in constructing the very model itself an inventor will have to employ some labour besides his own. Thus this first and preliminary step towards rendering his apparatus a factor in social progress he can take only by influencing one or two other men, at all events—artisans whose technical action he directs in such a way that it produces something specifically different from anything which it had produced before; and as the apparatus is reproduced on a larger scale, put on the market, multiplied so as to meet a growing demand, and thus actually produces an effect on the arts of life, this practical result takes place only because, and in so far as, the number of artisans whose action is influenced by the inventor increases. The inventor, in other words, is an agent of “_social progression_” only because the particularised knowledge of which his invention consists is embodied either in models, or drawings, or written or spoken orders, and thus affects the technical action of whole classes of other men, just as Mr. Spencer affects, by means of his manuscript, the technical actions of the compositors who put his treatises into type. {140}

Material progress, however, depends not only on the inventor and his machine. It depends also on the uses to which his machine is to be put. Here we shall find a new kind of greatness to be necessary—that which is called business ability; and we shall find that this operates precisely like the greatness of the inventor, through the influence which its possessor exercises over other men.

All progress or development in commerce and in the arts of production is in proportion to the correspondence in every place and season of the goods brought into the market with the contemporary wants of the buyers. If it were not for this correspondence of the economic supply with the demand, progress in production would not be social progress at all; for just as a community does not become materially civilised by the mere act of wanting what it cannot get, so it does not become materially civilised by being presented with what it does not want—clothes, for example, which it could not possibly wear, and books in an unknown language, which it could not possibly read, or diminutive houses and furniture fit only for dolls. Now in any progressive community the wants of the buyers are in constant process not only of development but fluctuation, and are rarely quite the same in any two localities simultaneously. In order, therefore, that what is supplied may be in correspondence with what is wanted, it is necessary that in each industry the nature of the commodities produced be continually modified by men with a {141} special sort of knowledge of the world; and also, since want, in the sense of efficient demand, depends on the price at which these commodities can be supplied, it is necessary, just as it is in the case of the manufacture of machinery, that the army of men whose labour is involved in producing them shall be subject to men who, by their powers of industrial generalship, will be able to reduce the cost of reproduction to a minimum. Every business, in fact, and every industrial enterprise, succeeds or fails, not according to the amount of average labour involved in it, but according to the talents and energy by which this labour is directed. Thus in the economic domain, even more than in the intellectual, the great man is seen to be an agent of “_social progression_,” in virtue not of the results which he himself produces by the direct action of his own hands or brain, but of the results which, being what he is, he causes to be produced by others.

And now having dealt with the great man as an agent of speculative progress which, as Mill says, is at the bottom of progress of all other kinds, and having dealt with him also as an agent of that manufacturing, commercial, economic or material progress which Mill cites as the chief example of what practical progress is, and having shown how the essence of his greatness is his power of influencing others, let us illustrate this truth finally by a brief reference to three other kinds of human and social activity which exhibit it {142} in a light so obvious that it requires no explanation. These three kinds of activity are the military, the political, and the religious. The great soldier, as has been said already, is essentially the great commander—the man who makes others act and group themselves in a specific way. The statesman not only aims at benefiting his countrymen generally, but he achieves his aim by the same means as the soldier, namely, by influencing the actions of others in certain specific respects; whilst the man who is socially great in the domain of morals and religion is the man whose teaching and example affect the actions, and even the inmost feelings, of multitudes, or gives precision to their faith.

But here, having reduced to a truism this important truth that the great man, as an agent of social progress, is great only because he is able to exercise a specific influence over others, it is necessary to turn our attention to a different order of facts altogether. Greatness, as we have seen already, is of very many kinds. It is a varying compound of various and variously developed qualities; and its degree is measured by its efficiency in producing this or that result by which society is benefited. But greatness, in the sense of exceptional power of so influencing others that some given result shall be produced by them, has other varieties besides those that have been already mentioned. Each domain of progress has not only its own leaders, but it has leaders who desire to lead men in very different directions. There are scientists {143} with conflicting theories, inventors with rival inventions, statesmen with rival policies. It follows accordingly that though all these men may be possessed of talents indefinitely above the average, they would not all of them, were their influence over other men equal, affect society in an equally advantageous way. Some men, indeed, whose talents are “_decidedly exceptional_” would, on account of some flaw or defect in their character, not promote, but, on the contrary, retard true progress, in exact proportion as they made their views prevail. Thus, though all progress is due to great men, all great men would not promote progress; or they would, at all events, not promote it equally. Progress, therefore, as resulting from the actions of great men, depends on the degree to which certain of them make their own views prevail, and secure the rejection of others which are directly or indirectly opposed to them. It depends, that is to say, on a keen competitive struggle which is continually taking place within the limits of the exceptional minority.

And here we come to that further point of difference, which still remains to be noticed, between the part played in social progress by the great man, and the part in it played by the fittest according to the Darwinian theory. Two points of difference between them have been noted and explained already, one being that the fittest man promotes progress only because he raises, by a physiological process, the average capacities of his successors, whereas the great man promotes {144} progress because he is himself more capable than his contemporaries; the other being that the fittest fulfils his social function by fighting for his own hand, without any reference to others, whereas the great man fulfils his solely by influencing others. We are now coming to a third point, which is, for practical purposes, even more important than the preceding.

The great-man theory, just like the theory of Darwin, involves a competitive struggle. This struggle is a struggle between great men; and its existence is a fact of too obvious a character to have escaped the notice of even the most inaccurate of our social evolutionists. But they one and all of them have completely misunderstood its nature. They have hastened to identify it with the Darwinian struggle for existence, from which it differs in the most vital manner conceivable; and, obscuring it thus by a loose and misleading analogy, they have managed to blind themselves to its entire practical significance. The Darwinian struggle for existence no doubt has its counterpart in the contemporary competition of labourers to find remunerative employment, and in the fact that those who are least successful in finding it would, if left to themselves, be continually dying off. In a progressive country there is, or there always tends to be, a larger number of would-be labourers than there is of tasks which at the moment can be profitably assigned to them. A struggle therefore is involved in obtaining work of any kind; and for the higher kinds of work the struggle is very keen. But this is not the {145} struggle to which modern progress is due. Progress, in the sense of the rapid and appreciable movement which alone concerns us here, is—to confine ourselves for a moment to the domain of industry—not the result of a struggle to execute work in the best way, but is the result of a struggle to give the best orders for its execution. It presupposes the existence of a certain amount of skill; but it does not, except in its very earliest stages, depend on the struggle of so many thousand men, each to become individually a more skilful worker than his fellows. It is, on the contrary, when its earliest stages have been passed, so independent of any further increase of skill in the individual worker, that it continues its course whilst skill remains stationary.

This is shown by the fact that some of the greatest advances ever made in material civilisation have been made during the active lifetime, and with the aid of the hands and muscles, of a single generation of workers, and has implied no improvement at all either in their acquired faculties or their inherited. Let us take, for instance, the introduction of the electric light, and the way in which it is superseding gas. The mechanics first employed to make the appliances for its production were none of them asked to perform any task which required on their part any new knowledge or dexterity. All they were asked to do, and all they did, was to submit their existing faculties to some new external guidance: and the electric light, in so far as it has superseded {146} gas, has superseded it not because it is the product of more skilful labour, but because it is the product of manual labour directed by a set of inventors and employers, who, so far as regards certain social requirements, direct it more successfully than another set. The struggle which it represents is a struggle between employers only. It does not, except by accident, represent any struggle between the employed.

And what is true of the struggle which produces industrial progress, is true of that which produces progress of all other kinds. Scientific knowledge increases in proportion as those exceptional individuals whose studies have brought them most near to the truth are able to fight down the opinions of the exceptional individuals who differ from them, and to impress their own undisputed upon the world. Such knowledge does not increase on account of any struggle amongst the learners, which causes some of them to become more and more apt in learning. It grows on account of a struggle between philosophers, each of whom aims at settling what the learners shall learn. And with regard to religion and politics the case is just the same. The progressive struggle is primarily between rival prophets and politicians. The spread of Christianity, for instance, was not brought about by Christian races exterminating those that were not Christians. It was brought about by Christian thinkers and teachers discrediting the doctrines taught by thinkers and teachers who were opposed to them. Free-trade, {147} again, in this country has not triumphed over protectionism, because the mass of free-traders have exterminated the mass of protectionists. It has triumphed simply because, in the eyes of the majority, one school of theorists has succeeded in discrediting another.

Now these facts, which, when once stated, are so obvious, not only throw the Darwinian struggle for existence altogether into the background as an agent in social progress, but they show that it presents us with no true analogy to that kind of struggle from which progress principally results. 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. But the limits within which this struggle is confined are very narrow indeed; and the mass of the community takes no part in it whatsoever.

In order to show this with the utmost clearness possible, let us turn again to the domain of economic progress, which generally supplies the sociologist with his simplest and most luminous illustrations. {148} The success of the strongest and ablest employers—that is to say, the heads of the most successful businesses—may involve, and does involve their selection for survival as employers, and does involve the extinction, as employers, though not necessarily as men and parents, of their weaker and less able rivals; but it involves no struggle for existence with the men employed by them—that is to say, with the great masses of the community. Two men, we will say, start rival hotels, and each begins with a staff of a hundred persons. One of the two understands his business far better than the other. His hotel is always full, whilst his rival’s is half empty. The latter at last becomes bankrupt; the former buys his business, and together with his premises takes over his staff. He employs two hundred persons, instead of a hundred as at first; the hotel of the bankrupt, which the bankrupt ran at a loss, now yields the same profit as the other; and the aggregate takings of the two are thus increased largely. Here we have a community of two hundred and two persons offering a marked example of great material progress; and this progress has been the result of a genuine struggle for existence. But the struggle for existence has been between two persons only—that is to say, between the two hotel-keepers. As _hotel-keepers_ existence is the very thing they have been struggling for, and the survival of the one has meant the disappearance of the other; but between them and the two hundred persons employed by them there has been no struggle at all. The achievement {149} by the successful hotel-keeper of a fortune double that with which he started has not involved any diminution in the wages of his staff. It will, on the contrary, if we are to take the case now in question as typical of the survival of the fittest employers generally, have not only not diminished their wages, but very largely increased them. For here there is one further truth which naturally introduces itself to our observation. Whatever allowance it may be necessary to make for the lowest class or residuum of our modern populations, it is the most clearly proved and prominent fact in modern industrial history—and one which even socialists are now ceasing to deny—that along with the vast increase in wealth which the ablest employers have, by their struggle with rivals, secured for their own enjoyment, there has been not a corresponding diminution, but a corresponding increase in the means of subsistence that have gone to the population generally. The average income per head in this country of that class—composed mainly of wage-earners—which does not pay income tax has, in terms of money, nearly trebled itself during the present century; its purchasing power has increased in a yet larger ratio, and its increase will be found to have been most rapid and striking at periods when the struggle amongst the employing class has been keenest.

It will thus be seen that the struggle which produces economic progress—and progress of every kind is produced in the same way—is not a general {150} struggle which pervades the community as a whole; neither is it a struggle between the majority and an exceptionally able minority, in which both classes are struggling for what only one can win, and in which the gain of the one involves the loss of the other; but it is a struggle which is confined to the members of the minority alone, and in which the majority play no part as antagonists whatsoever. It is not a struggle amongst the community generally to live, but a struggle amongst a small section of the community to lead, to direct, to employ, the majority in the best way; and this struggle is an agent of progress because it tends to result, not in the survival of the fittest man, but in the domination of the greatest man.

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