Part 8

(3.) “That though in their early, undeveloped states, there exists in them scarcely any mutual dependence of parts, their parts gradually acquire a mutual dependence; which becomes at last so great, that the activity and life of each part is made possible only by the activity and life of the rest.”

(4.) “That the life of a society is independent of, and far more prolonged than the lives of any of its component units; who are severally born, grow, work, reproduce, and die, while the body politic composed of them survives generation after generation, increasing in mass, in completeness of structure, and in functional activity.”

The four points of difference are:

(1.) “That societies have no specific external forms.”

(2.) “That though the living tissue whereof an individual organism consists, forms a continuous mass, the living elements of a society do not form a continuous mass; but are more or less widely dispersed over some portion of the earth’s surface.”

(3.) “That while the ultimate living elements of an individual organism are mostly fixed in their relative positions, those of the social organism are capable of moving from place to place.”

(4.) “The last and perhaps the most important distinction is, that while in the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with feeling, in a society all the members are endowed with feeling.”

It is worthy of note that, while Spencer finds the parallelisms to increase in significance the more they are examined, the differences tend to break down when they are worked out in detail.

The advantage which Spencer had over Plato and Hobbes is very clearly seen in the first and fourth parallelisms, neither of which could have been made until twenty-one years before, when in 1839, Theodore Schwann developed his great theory that the body is an organized society of interconnected cells. “The importance of this theory,” says Professor Thatcher, “can hardly be estimated. It gave an entirely new view to animal and vegetable life.” At any rate, it served Spencer greatly in this essay.

The next ten pages are devoted to organic development from the protozoa, the lowest tiny animal forms, to crustacea--crabs etc.,--which are materially higher in the animal scale. This development is marked by increasing mutual dependence of parts and a growing division of labor. It is compared to the development of society from primitive Bushmen to the early Anglo-Saxons, during which corresponding phenomena are traced.

He escapes Haeckel’s blunder at least to the extent of calling the two divisions of labor by their proper names. Among animals it is the “physiological” division of labor; in society, the “economical” division of labor. Whether he would have been able to still perceive that distinction in dealing with those ant and bee communities where Haeckel got lost, there is nothing to show.

Spencer’s middle-class predilections come out strongly, and a very pretty physiological justification is provided for that wholly admirable section of the community.

The first step in the development of an embryo is its division into two main layers of cells--the mucous layer and the serous layer. The mucous layer, that fine inside skin of the body so to speak, absorbs nutriment. But that nutriment must be transferred to the serous layer which builds up the nerves and muscles. Presently there arises between these two a third--the vascular layer. Out of this third layer the chief blood vessels are developed and these vessels serve to transport the nutriment from the inner or mucous layer, which gathers it, to the outer or serous layer, which uses it for the whole organization’s upbuilding.

“Well,” says Spencer, “may we not trace a parallel step in social progress? Between the governing and the governed, there at first exists no intermediate class; and even in some societies that have reached considerable size, there are scarcely any but the nobles and their kindred on the one hand, and their serfs on the other; the social structure being such that transfer of commodities takes place directly from slaves to their masters. But in societies of a higher type, there grows up, between these two primitive classes, another--the trading or middle class. Equally at first as now, we may see that, speaking generally, this middle class is the analogue of the middle layer in the embryo.”

It is a pity to disturb this serene complacency, by pointing out that the real transporters of commodities are not the members of the middle class who, as a rule, do little and live well, but that section of the working class which mans freight trains, drives teams and shoves trucks. As for that “higher” class of cells which receives these commodities and consumes them while usefully engaged in building up the nervous and muscular system; such comparison could only apply to society’s brain workers, and it contains no justification for the useless parasitic type represented by such charming persons as Harry Thaw and Reggie Vanderbilt.

Another very interesting point is Spencer’s physiological vindication of profit. The limbs, glands, or other members of an animal are developed by exercise. But in order “that any organ in a living being may grow by exercise, there needs to be a due supply of blood.” All action implies waste; blood brings the materials for repair; and before there can be growth, the quantity of blood supplied must be more than is requisite for repair.

“In a society it is the same. If to some district which elaborates for the community particular commodities--say the woolens of Yorkshire--there comes an augmented demand; and if in fulfillment of this demand, a certain expenditure and wear and tear of the manufacturing organization are incurred; and if, in payment for the extra quantity of woolens sent away there comes back only such quantity of commodities as replaces the expenditure, and makes good the waste of life and machinery; there can clearly be no growth. That there may be growth, the commodities obtained in return must be more than sufficient for these ends; and just in proportion as the surplus is great will the growth be rapid. Whence it is manifest that what in commercial affairs we call profit, answers to the excess of nutrition over waste in a living body.”

This is “physiological” political economy with a vengeance and shows to what straits bourgeois apologists are reduced to find a justification of that exploitation of labor which is the only source of profit. In concluding this point Spencer seems to satirize his own position and at the same time gives something that looks very much like a socialist explanation of panics. He says: “And if in the body politic some part has been stimulated into great productivity, and afterwards can not get paid for all its produce, certain of its members become bankrupt, and it decreases in size.”

The truth of the whole matter is that Spencer is wholly at sea the moment he touches political economy, and in place of some elementary knowledge on that subject, we have the obsolete theories of the Manchester School proclaimed in the name of physiology.

Then follows a series of very ingenious comparisons. Following Liebig, he compares coins to blood corpuscles calling the later blood-discs to enhance the analogy and concludes: “throughout extensive divisions of the lower animals, the blood contains no corpuscles; and in societies of low civilization, there is no money.”

Then the development of blood vessels in lower animals is compared to the development of roads in primitive societies; their greater perfection in higher animals comparing with the railroads which more effectively convey food stuffs to the centers of population. Amid much that is fantastic and tedious, he says: “And in railways we also see, for the first time in the social organism, a system of double channels conveying currents in opposite directions as do the arteries and veins of a well-developed animal.”

“We come at length,” says Spencer, “to the nervous system.” This is by far the most interesting item in Spencer’s catalogue, because it is here that the evolutionary philosopher and the Manchester School politician come into open contradiction.

“We have now to compare the appliances by which a society as a whole, is regulated, with those by which the movements of an individual creature are regulated.”

Beginning with the nervous systems of lower animals he discovers their inferiority to lie in the absence of a controlling center. The lower Annulosa is composed of a series of ring-like segments. Each ring has its own nerve ganglia linked by connecting nerves, but “very incompletely dependent on any general controlling power. Hence it results that when the body is cut in two, the hinder part continues to move forward under the propulsion of its numerous legs; and that when the chain of ganglia has been divided without severing the body, the hind limbs may be seen trying to propel the body in one direction, while the fore limbs are trying to propel it in another.”

As we move up in the animal world the nervous system culminates in a centralized brain, and similarly as society becomes more complex, government appears.

And now the great apostle of the non-interference of government with the life of society is driven into the glaring contradiction of contending that the highest animal organization is that in which the brain, which he compares to government in society, interferes and controls most effectively.

“Strange as the assertion will be thought,” he says, “our Houses of Parliament discharge, in the social economy, functions which are in sundry respects comparable to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal.” Strange indeed! Especially to Mr. Spencer’s disciples.

Then Mr. Spencer discovers that the kind of brain activity displayed by the highest animals best compares with that form of government called “representative.”

He says: “It is the nature of those great and latest-developed ganglia which distinguish the higher animals, to interpret and combine the multiplied and varied impressions conveyed to them from all parts of the system, and to regulate the actions in such a way as duly to regard them all; so it is in the nature of those great and latest-developed legislative bodies which distinguish the most advanced societies, to interpret and combine the wishes of all classes and localities and to make laws in harmony with the general wants.”

It would seem from this that, a society whose government represents only the interests of a handful of the community while the great majority are uncared for, is suffering from social paralysis.

Before we pass to the next chapter where we shall examine the position presented in “The Man Versus The State” we will observe one break in Spencer’s analogy which he fails to notice.

When the brain of an animal is wrecked the animal dies; it has no choice. But when the brain of a society fails to represent the interests of the mass of the people who compose that society, or when the social brain runs amuck and invites disaster, society may take its choice, it may elect to die or--it may get a new brain.

IX.

SPENCER’S INDIVIDUALISM.

Individualism is dead.

As a theory, it has gone with Stahl’s “Phlogiston,” Cuvier’s “Cataclysms,” and Goethe’s “Theory of Colors” to the museum of history. The revolution in philosophy, which covers the nineteenth century and reaches back into the closing decades of the eighteenth, has met and overthrown it at every point. Today it lingers in the world of thought a reminiscence of a prior stage of social development, as the imperfect remnant of the “third eyelid” remains in our bodies a surviving rudiment, a legacy that links us with our extinct ancestors of the silurian age.

The greatest name ever thrown into the scales for Individualism and against Socialism is that of Herbert Spencer. He has the reputation of having been the greatest Individualist of all times.

Many people, including Socialists, who are not familiar with the works of Spencer wonder how it comes to pass that the great evolutionary philosopher could defend a theory so obsolete and anti-evolutionary as Individualism. With this problem solved, Individualism is practically disposed of--at least, its greatest prop is gone.

All careful students of the works of the “Synthetic” philosopher, eventually recognize the dual personality of Mr. Spencer; the “Dr. Jekyll” of evolution, and the “Mr. Hyde” of Individualism.

The last chapter dealt mainly with the former; this chapter will treat chiefly of the latter.

Mr. Spencer’s chief utterances against what he conceived to be Socialism and in favor of Individualism are to be found in a volume of four essays entitled, “The Man Versus the State.” In this book Mr. Spencer complains bitterly of the rapid extension of government interference in the England of his day. He declares these “Acts of Parliament” to be a greater and greater restriction of the individual rights of the citizen.

Here are a few of the Acts which Spencer denounced: An Act directing the Board of Trade to record the draught of sea-going vessels leaving port, and another to fix the number of life-boats and the life-saving appliances such vessels should carry. An Act making illegal a mine with a single shaft: The inspection of white lead works to compel the owners to provide overalls, respirators, baths, acidulated drinks, etc., for the workmen: Providing for the inspection of gas works: Making compulsory regulations for extinguishing fires in London; Taxing the locality for local drainage; That bake-houses should have a periodical lime washing, and a cleaning with soap and hot water at least once in six months; To secure decent lodgings for persons picking fruit and vegetables for public consumption; To provide free compulsory education and public schools; The Public Libraries Act; All the Factory Acts limiting child labor or enforcing the protection of dangerous machinery; The Preservation of Seabirds Act; The establishment of state telegraphy; Proposals to feed children; Government endowment of scientific research; etc.

All these measures, and many others of similar nature, excited the indignation of the greatest prophet of Individualism because, forsooth, they modified somebody’s right to do as he pleased about something. Luckily for England, Mr. Spencer and a handful of his individualist disciples stood alone, while the electorate carried these laws through their highest tribunals.

One can imagine the “joy of living” in an individualist arcadia fashioned after Mr. Spencer’s own heart. A working man would be able to take up the occupation of a sailor. He could embark on the rotten old tub of some greedy shipowner, insured for many times its value, loaded to the gunwales and sure to sink when it got out of sight of land to where the water was a little rougher than plate glass. Of course he would be living under a system of “voluntary co-operation” and “freedom of contract” and if he didn’t wish to go to sea he could stay at home and--starve. There would be very little work in port unloading ships, as so many of them would never return to be unloaded. When the insurance money was paid the shipowner could give a banquet and hold forth on the individual right of the sailor to get drowned in the interests of commerce without the government meddling about life boats and other expensive and nonsensical appliances.

If he preferred to work on “terra firma” he might get a job in a mine with only one shaft which in case of firedamp would be converted into a furnace. Then as there would be no way to get out, no socialistically inclined person would be able to dispute his individual right to stay in. If he preferred the white lead industry he might “get in” there, and there being no respirators, baths, or acidulated drinks he could be a physical wreck in a year and a corpse in two. Or he might try the gasworks and, there being no inspectors, there would be nothing to interfere with his individual right to be asphyxiated in an oven or roasted in a retort.

As wages would be small, unions not being individualist institutions, he might get a cheap room in the top of an hotel without fire escapes, in a town with no fire engines. He could live cheaply on bread from bakehouses that never knew lime washings and had not seen hot water or soap for over six months, and eat fruit and vegetables handled by people who were not troubled with decent, let alone sanitary, lodgings.

He would have the liberty to stay at manual labor as there would be no public schools or libraries to assist him to qualify for any profession such as, for instance, journalism. This would, no doubt, be a blessing in disguise, for if he became a writer, instead of following the brilliant example of Mr. Spencer, he might misuse his powers to the detriment of the race by advocating the limitation, or even the abolition, of child labor. If he married he might be at liberty to sew on his own buttons, his wife having left her fingers among the cogs of uncovered machinery.

Such would be the social heaven, operated on the principles of the “Manchester” school of politics, which mark the high-water of Individualism, and of which Herbert Spencer was the chief apostle.

Compare this attitude of mind with that of the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, over whom Spencer had the advantage of the lapse of a period of seventy years. In 1815 Owen convened a large number of cotton manufacturers at Glasgow, Scotland, to consider the state of the cotton trade which was then in great distress. To that conference he presented two proposals; one to help the masters, the other to benefit the workers. The first was that they should petition parliament for the repeal of the tariff on raw cotton; the second that they should request parliament to shorten the working hours, and otherwise improve the conditions of workers in the mills. The first proposal carried unanimously, but the one on which Owen’s heart was set, was not even seconded.

Knowing as he did the terrible condition of the English working class of that period, the callous brutality of these rapacious masters roused him to irony and defiance. He delivered an address to the conference which he had printed and spread broadcast in every corner of the country.

This is how the lion turned on the jackals:

“True indeed it is that the main pillar and prop of the political greatness and prosperity of our country is manufacture, which, as now carried on, is destructive of the health, morals, and social comfort of the mass of people engaged in it. It is only since the introduction of the cotton trade that children, at an age before they have acquired strength or mental instruction, have been forced into the cotton mills--those receptacles, in too many instances, for living, human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect, where, as the business is often now conducted, they linger out a few years of miserable existence, acquiring every bad habit which they may disseminate throughout society. It is only since the introduction of this trade that children and even grown people were required to labor more than twelve hours in a day, not including the time allotted for meals. It is only since the introduction of this trade that the sole recreation of the laborer is to be found in the pothouse or ginshop, it is only since the introduction of this baneful trade that poverty, crime, and misery have made rapid and fearful strides throughout the community.

“Shall we then go unblushingly, and ask the legislators of our country to pass legislative acts to sanction and increase this trade--to sign the death warrants of the strength, morals, and happiness of our fellow-creatures, and not attempt to propose corrections for the evils which it creates? If such be your determination, I, for one, will not join in the application--no, I will, with all the faculties I possess, oppose every attempt made to extend the trade that, except in name, is more injurious to those employed in it than is the slavery of the poor negroes in the West Indies, for deeply as I am interested in the cotton manufacture, highly as I value the extended political power of my country, yet knowing as I do, from long experience both here and in England, the miseries which this trade, as it is now conducted, inflicts on those to whom it gives employment, I do not hesitate to say: Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of our country, if it depends on the cotton trade, rather than that they shall be upheld by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life.”

Compare these noble utterances of the great-souled utopian Socialist with the sneers at the most unfortunate element of the working class which disfigure the pages of “The Man Versus the State” and let the Individualist take whatever satisfaction he can get from the contrast.

But Spencer’s reactionary views did not stop with opposition to every attempt to alleviate the condition of the wealth producers of his day.

As an individualist, he would tolerate no “government interference” with the rights of individuals who wished to shoot sea-birds which they could not get, but which usually flew out to sea, and died floating, with a broken wing. Why should these lofty minded people be interfered with? Were they not the prototypes of our own Roosevelt, who is always ready to manifest his love of nature by killing everything in sight?

What a pity these individualists were not allowed to have the British telegraph system managed by a gang of financial pirates like the owners of the “Western Union” and the “Postal” of this country.

State repression of knowledge having proved such a bad thing in the middle ages, state encouragement of learning must of course, needs be equally bad in the nineteenth century. “Government endowment of research,” indeed! Not for the individualist champion. And yet England holds the world’s honors in biology, because of Darwin, whose opportunity came through the government exploration of “The Beagle,” and Huxley, who began his brilliant career with the government expedition of the “Rattlesnake.” As England led the world in the middle of the century so France had held first place during its first quarter, and that because the French government sent out scientific expeditions to the tropics, which, on their return loaded down the shelves of the “Jardin des Plantes” with specimens which made possible those greatest of her thinkers, Lamarck, Cuvier and Geoffrey St. Hilaire.

When the feeding of school children is thrown as a charge against Socialism, we are proud to plead guilty. It is our glory that the only cities in the world that have no starving children behind school benches are those cities such as Lille, Ivry, Montlucon, etc., with a Socialist majority in the town councils, which removed the disgrace.

Such then were the arguments of this flag bearer of Individualism, who has supplied the opponents of Socialism with objections these thirty years. His individualist philosophy is now so thoroughly discredited as to call for no answer were it not for the fact pointed out by Huxley, that erroneous ideas do not die just simply because they have been killed.

It is not necessary to wheel into position the heavy artillery of Marx to overthrow this house of cards. Spencer is a sufficient reply to Spencer.

Here is the great contradiction. Spencer, the great biologist, says the brain is to the animal what the Government is to a society. (1) The more effectively and completely the brain controls the members composing the animal body, the higher its place in the organic scale. (2) The less effectively and completely the Government controls the members of the body politic the better will be the society.