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The Science Of Political Economy E-Book

Henry George

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Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Henry George died fighting one of the most corrupt political organizations of the civilized world — a sufficient epitaph for any worthy man. But he has larger claims to respect and consideration. He made a creditable attempt to solve the root-problem of material life — poverty, — and his just-published posthumous book, " The Science Of Political Economy," excites that pathetic interest which attaches to the memory of one who tried to aid his fellowman. He was eloquent, but he was free from the hysteria of demagogy. His sympathies, born of bitter vicissitude, were acute, but they were tempered with reason. He believed in the equality of opportunity ; but he believed also (as an American and an individualist) in the natural inequality of capacity. When he saw the industrial evils of the Old World reappear in one of the richest and fairest parts of the New — commercial depression, involuntary idleness, wasting capital, pecuniary distress, want, suffering, anxiety, — he was startled, and he set about to discover the cause. We value him for what he tried to do. "Progress and Poverty " was an immensely interesting and attractive book on a seemingly sapless science. It struck fire from flint, and lifted the author from obscurity to world-wide celebrity. Emerson says that every man is eloquent in that which he understands. It would be, perhaps, truer to say that every man is eloquent in that in which he fervently believes, and George believed that he had given a message. To quote his own words: " On the night on which I finished the final chapter of 'Progress and Poverty,' I felt that the talent entrusted to me had been accounted for — was more fully satisfied, more deeply grateful, than if all the Kingdoms of the earth had been laid at my feet." No one doubts his sincerity, his intellectual integrity, the cleanliness of his soul. His expectations were infinite, his faith simple. The poverty of the world lay not in Nature but in a vicious economic system ; and he thought that he had found a "sovereign remedy" which would "raise wages, increase the earnings of capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give remunerative employment to whoever wishes it, afford free scope to human powers, lessen crime, elevate morals and taste and intelligence, purify government, and carry civilization to yet nobler heights."

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Leseprobe

The Science Of Political Economy

HENRY GEORGE

The Science of Political Economy, Henry George

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849658069

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

FOREWORD

But let none expect any great promotion of the sciences, especially in their effective part, unless natural philosophy he drawn out to particular sciences; and again unless these particular sciences he brought hack again to natural philosophy. From this defect it is that astronomy, optics, music, many mechanical arts, and what seems stranger, even moral and civil philosophy and logic, rise but little above their foundations, and only skim over the varieties and surface of things, viz., because after these particular sciences are formed and divided off they are no longer nourished by natural philosophy, which might give them strength and increase; and therefore no wonder if the sciences thrive not when separated from their roots.— Bacon, Novum Organum.

PREFATORY NOTE.

THIS work, begun in 1891, after returning from a lecturing tour through Australia and a trip around the world, grew out of the author’s long-cherished purpose to write a small text-book, which should present in brief the principles of a true political economy. This “ Primer of Political Economy ” was to set forth in direct, didactic form the main principles of what he conceived to be an exact and indisputable science, leaving controversy for a later and larger work.

Before proceeding far, however, the author realized the difficulty of making a simple statement of principles while there existed so much confusion as to the meaning of terms. He therefore felt impelled to change his plan, and first to present the larger work, which should recast political economy and examine and explicate terminology as well as principles; and which, beginning at the beginning, should trace the rise and partial development of the science in the hands of its founders a century ago, and then show its gradual emasculation and at last abandonment by its professed teachers—accompanying this with an account of the extension of the science outside and independently of the schools, in the philosophy of the natural order now spreading over the world under the name of the single tax.

Soon after this work had got well under way the author laid it aside to write a brochure in reply to a papal encyclical (“ The Condition of Labor,” 1891), and again later to write a book exposing Mr. Herbert Spencer’s recantation of principles on the land question (“A Perplexed Philosopher,” 1892). Save for these interruptions, and occasional newspaper and magazine writing, and lecturing and political speaking, he devoted himself continuously to his great undertaking until he entered the mayoralty campaign, toward the close of which death came, October 29, 1897.

“ The Science of Political Economy,” if entirely finished as planned by the author, would have shown Book V., on Money, extended, and the nature and function of the laws of Wages, Interest and Rent fully considered in Book IV.; but the work as left was, in the opinion of its author, in its main essentials completed, the broken parts, to quote his own words a few days before his death, “ indicating the direction in which my [his] thought was tending.”

The author’s preface is fragmentary. It bears in the manuscript a penciled date, “March 7, 1894,” and is here transcribed from a condensed writing used by him in his preliminary “ roughing-out ” work.

Aside from the filling in of summaries in four chapter headings (indicated by foot-notes), the addition of an index, and the correction of a few obvious clerical errors, the work is here presented exactly as it was left by the author—the desire of those closest to him being that it should be given to the world untouched by any other hand.

Henry George, Jr.

New York, February 1, 1898.

PREFACE.

IN “Progress and Poverty” I recast political economy in what were at the time the points which most needed recasting. Criticism has but shown the soundness of the views there expressed.

But “ Progress and Poverty ” did not cover the whole field of political economy, and was necessarily in large measure of a controversial rather than of a constructive nature. To do more than this was at the time beyond the leisure at my command. Nor did I see fully the necessity. For while I realized the greatness of the forces which would throw themselves against the simple truth which I endeavored to make clear, I did think that should “Progress and Poverty” succeed in commanding anything like wide attention there would be at least some of the professed teachers of political economy who, recognizing the ignored truths which I had endeavored to make clear, would fit them in with what of truth was already understood and taught.

The years which have elapsed since the publication of “ Progress and Poverty ” have been on my part devoted to the propagation of the truths taught in “ Progress and Poverty” by books, pamphlets, magazine articles, newspaper work, lectures and speeches, and have been so greatly successful as not only far to exceed what fifteen years ago I could have dared to look forward to in this time, but to have given me reason to feel that of all the men of whom I have ever heard who have attempted anything like so great a work against anything like so great odds, I have been in the result of the endeavor to arouse thought most favored.

Not merely wherever the English tongue is spoken, but in all parts of the world, men are arising who will carry forward to final triumph the great movement which “ Progress and Poverty ” began. The great work is not done, but it is commenced, and can never go back.

On the night on which I finished the final chapter of “Progress and Poverty” I felt that the talent entrusted to me had been accounted for—felt more fully satisfied, more deeply grateful than if all the kingdoms of the earth had been laid at my feet; and though the years have justified, not dimmed, my faith, there is still left for me something to do.

But this reconstruction of political economy has not been done. So I have thought it the most useful thing I could do to drop as far as I could the work of propaganda and the practical carrying forward of the movement to do this.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

REASON OF THIS WORK.

I SHALL try in this work to put in clear and systematic form the main principles of political economy.

The place I would take is not that of a teacher, who states what is to he believed, but rather that of a guide, who points out what by looking is to be seen. So far from asking the reader blindly to follow me, I would urge him to accept no statement that he himself can doubt, and to adopt no conclusion untested by his own reason.

This I say, not in unfelt deprecation of myself nor in idle compliment to the reader, but because of the nature and present condition of political economy.

Of all the sciences, political economy is that which to civilized men of to-day is of most practical importance. For it is the science which treats of the nature of wealth and the laws of its production and distribution; that is to say, of matters which absorb the larger part of the thought and effort of the vast majority of us—the getting of a living. It includes in its domain the greater part of those vexed questions which lie at the bottom of our politics and legislation, of our social and governmental theories, and even, in larger measure than may at first be supposed, of our philosophies and religions. It is the science to which must belong the solving of problems that at the close of a century of the greatest material and scientific development the world has yet seen, are in all civilized countries clouding the horizon of the future—the only science that can enable our civilization to escape already threatening catastrophe.

Yet, surpassing in its practical importance as political economy is, he who to-day would form clear and sure ideas of what it really teaches must form them for himself. For there is no body of accepted truth, no consensus of recognized authority, that he may without question accept. In all other branches of knowledge properly called science the inquirer may find certain fundamentals recognized by all and disputed by none who profess it, which he may safely take to embody the information and experience of his time. But, despite its long cultivation and the multitude of its professors, he cannot yet find this in political economy. If he accepts the teaching of one writer or one school, it will be to find it denied by other writers and other schools. This is not merely true of the more complex and delicate questions, but of primary questions. Even on matters such as in other sciences have long since been settled, he who to-day looks for the guidance of general acceptance in political economy will find a chaos of discordant opinions. So far indeed are first principles from being agreed on, that it is still a matter of hot dispute whether protection or free trade is most conducive to prosperity—a question that in political economy ought to be capable of as certain an answer as in hydrodynamics the question whether a ship ought to be broader than she is long, or longer than she is broad.

This is not for want of what passes for systematic study. Not only are no subjects so widely and frequently discussed as those that come within the province of political economy, but every university and college has now its professor of the science, whose special business it is to study and to teach it. But nowhere are inadequacy and confusion more apparent than in the writings of these men; nor is anything so likely to give the impression that there is not and cannot be a real science of political economy.

But while this discordance shows that he who would really acquaint himself with political economy cannot rely upon authority, there is in it nothing to discourage the hope that he who will use his own reason in the honest search for truth may attain firm and clear conclusions.

For in the supreme practical importance of political economy we may see the reason that has kept and still keeps it in dispute, and that has prevented the growth of any body of accepted and assured opinion.

Under existing conditions in the civilized world, the great struggle among men is for the possession of wealth. Would it not then be irrational to expect that the science which treats of the production and distribution of wealth should be exempt from the influence of that struggle? Macaulay has well said that if any large pecuniary interest were concerned in disputing the attraction of gravitation, that most obvious of all facts would not yet be accepted. What, then, can we look for in the teaching of a science which directly concerns the most powerful of “vested rights”—which deals with rent and wages and interest, with taxes and tariffs, with privileges and franchises and subsidies, with currencies and land-tenures and public debts, with the ideas on which trade-unions are based and the pleas by which combinations of capitalists are defended? Economic truth, under existing conditions, has not merely to overcome the inertia of indolence or habit; it is in its very nature subject to suppressions and distortions from the influence of the most powerful and vigilant interests. It has not merely to make its way; it must constantly stand on guard. It cannot safely be trusted to any selected body of men, for the same reasons that the power of making laws and administering public affairs cannot be so trusted.

It is especially true to-day that all large political questions are at bottom economic questions. There is thus introduced into the study of political economy the same disturbing element that setting men by the ears over the study of theology has written in blood a long page in the world’s history, and that at one time, at least, so affected even the study of astronomy as to prevent the authoritative recognition of the earth’s movement around the sun long after its demonstration. The organization of political parties, the pride of place and power that they arouse and the strong prejudices they kindle, are always inimical to the search for truth and to the acceptance of truth.

And while colleges and universities and similar institutions, though ostensibly organized for careful investigation and the honest promulgation of truth, are not and cannot be exempt from the influences that disturb the study of political economy, they are especially precluded under present conditions from faithful and adequate treatment of that science. For in the present social conditions of the civilized world nothing is clearer than that there is some deep and wide-spread wrong in the distribution, if not in the production, of wealth. This it is the office of political economy to disclose, and a really faithful and honest explication of the science must disclose it.

But no matter what that injustice may be, colleges and universities, as at present constituted, are by the very law of their being precluded from discovering or revealing it. For no matter what be the nature of this injustice, the wealthy class must, relatively at least, profit by it, and this is the class whose views and wishes dominate in colleges and universities. As, while slavery was yet strong, we might have looked in vain to the colleges and universities and accredited organs of education and opinion in our Southern States, and indeed for that matter in the North, for any admission of its injustice, so under present conditions must we look in vain to such sources for any faithful treatment of political economy. Whoever accepts from them a chair of political economy must do so under the implied stipulation that he shall not really find what it is his professional business to look for.

In these extraneous difficulties, and not in any difficulty inherent in political economy itself, lies the reason why, to-day, after all the effort that since Adam Smith wrote has been devoted to its investigation, or presumed investigation, he who would really know what it teaches can find no consistent body of undisputed doctrine that he may safely accept; and can turn to the colleges and universities only with the certainty that, wherever else he may find the truth, he cannot find it there.

1 et, if political economy be the one science that cannot safely be left to specialists, the one science of which it is needful for all to know something, it is also the science which the ordinary man may most easily study. It requires no tools, no apparatus, no special learning. The phenomena which it investigates need not be sought for in laboratories or libraries; they lie about us, and are constantly thrust upon us. The principles on which it builds are truths of which we all are conscious, and on which in every-day matters we constantly base our reasoning and our actions. And its processes, which consist mainly in analysis, require only care in distinguishing what is essential from what is merely accidental.

In proposing to my readers to go with me in an attempt to work out the main principles of political economy, I am not asking them to think of matters they have never thought of before, but merely to think of them in a careful and systematic way. For we all have some sort of political economy. Men may honestly confess an ignorance of astronomy, of chemistry, of geology, of philology, and really feel their ignorance. But few men honestly confess an ignorance of political economy. Though they may admit or even proclaim ignorance, they do not really feel it. There are many who say that they know nothing of political economy—many indeed who do not know what the term means. Yet these very men hold at the same time and with the utmost confidence opinions upon matters that belong to political economy, such as the causes which affect wages and prices and profits, the effects of tariffs, the influence of labor-saving machinery, the function and proper substance of money, the reason of “ hard times ” or “ good times,” and so on. For men living in society, which is the natural way for men to live, must have some sort of politico-economic theories—good or bad, right or wrong. The way to make sure that these theories are correct, or if they are not correct, to supplant them by true theories, is by such systematic and careful investigation as in this work I propose.

But to such an investigation there is one thing so necessary, one thing of such primary and constant importance, that I cannot too soon and too strongly urge it upon the reader. It is, that in attempting the study of political economy we should first of all, and at every step, make sure of the meaning of the words that we use as its terms, so that when we use them they shall always have for us the same meaning.

Words are the signs or tokens by which in speech or writing we communicate our thoughts to one another. It is only as we attach a common meaning to words that we can communicate with one another by speech. And to understand one another with precision, it is necessary that each attach precisely the same meaning to the same word. Thus, two men may look on the ocean from the same place, and one honestly insist that there are three ships in sight, while the other as honestly insists that there are only two, if the one uses the word ship in its general meaning of navigable vessel, and the other uses it in its technical meaning of a vessel carrying three square-rigged masts. Such use of words in somewhat different senses is peculiarly dangerous in philosophic discussion.

But words are more than the means by which we communicate our thoughts. They are also signs or tokens in which we ourselves think—the labels of the thought-drawers or pigeonholes in which we stow away the various ideas that we often mentally deal with by label. Thus, we cannot think with precision unless in our own minds we use words with precision. Failure to do this is a great cause of the generation and persistence of economic fallacies.

In all studies it is important that we should attach definite meanings to the terms we use. But this is especially important in political economy. For in other studies most of the words used as terms are peculiar to that study. The terms used in chemistry, for instance, are used only in chemistry. This makes the study of chemistry harder in beginning, for the student has to familiarize himself with new words. But it avoids subsequent difficulties, for these words being used only in chemistry, their meaning is not likely to be warped by other use from the one definite sense they properly bear in chemistry.

Now the terms used in political economy are not words reserved to it. They are words in every-day use, which the necessities of daily life constantly require us to give to, and accept for, a different than the economic meaning. In studying political economy, in thinking out any of its problems, it is absolutely necessary to give to such terms as wealth, value, capital, land, labor, rent, interest, wages, money, and so on, a precise meaning; and to use them only in this—a meaning which always differs, and in some cases differs widely, from the common meaning. But not only have we all been accustomed in the first place to use these words in their common meanings; but even after we have given them as politico-economic terms a definite meaning, we must, in ordinary talk and reading continue to use and accept them in their ordinary sense.

Hence arises in political economy a liability to confusion in thought from lack of definiteness in the use of terms. The careless as to terms cannot take a step without falling into this confusion, and even the usually careful are liable to fall into confusion if at any moment they relax their vigilance. The most eminent writers on political economy have given examples of this, confusing themselves as well as their readers by the vague use of a term. To guard against this danger it is necessary to be careful in beginning, and continuously to be careful. I shall therefore in this work try to define each term as it arises, and thereafter, when using it as an economic term, try to use it in that precise sense, and in no other.

To define a word is to mark off what it includes from what it does not include—to make it in our minds, as it were, clear and sharp on its edges—so that it will always stand for the same thing or things, not at one time mean more and at another time less.

Thus, beginning at the beginnings, let us consider the nature and scope of political economy, that we may see its origin and meaning, what it includes and what it does not include. If in this I ask the reader to go with me deeper than writers on political economy usually do, let him not think me wandering from the subject. He who would build a towering structure of brick and stone, that in stress and strain will stand firm and plumb, digs for its foundation to solid rock.

Should we grudge such pains in laying the foundations of a great science, on which in its superstructure so much must rest?

In nothing more than in philosophy is it wise that we should be “ like a man which built a house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock.”

BOOK I. THE MEANING OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

INTRODUCTION TO BOOK I.

THE earliest, and as I think sufficient, definition of Political Economy, is, the science that treats of the nature of wealth, and of the laws of its production and distribution. But as this definition seems never to have been fully understood and adhered to by the accepted teachers of political economy, and has during late years been abandoned by those who occupy the position of official teachers in all our leading colleges and universities, let us, beginning at the beginnings, endeavor to see for ourselves just what political economy is.

CHAPTER I. THE THREE FACTORS OF THE WORLD.

SHOWING THE CONSTITUENTS OF ALL WE PERCEIVE.

THE word factor, in commercial use, means one who acts as agent for another. In mathematical use, it means one of the quantities which multiplied together form a product. Hence in philosophy, which may be defined as the search for the nature and relations of things, the word factor affords a fit term for the elements which bring about a result, or the categories into which analysis enables us to classify these elements.

In the world—I use the term in its philosophic sense of the aggregate or system of things of which we are cognizant and of which we ourselves are part—we are enabled by analysis to distinguish three elements or factors:

1. That which feels, perceives, thinks, wills; which to distinguish, we call mind or soul or spirit.

2. That which has a mass or weight, and extension or form; which to distinguish, we call matter.

3. That which acting on matter produces movement; which to distinguish, we call motion or force or energy.

We cannot, in truth, directly recognize energy apart from matter; nor matter without some manifestation of energy; nor mind or spirit unconjoined with matter and motion. For though our own consciousness may testify to our own essentially spiritual nature, or even at times to what we take to be direct evidence of pure spiritual existence, yet consciousness itself begins with us only after bodily life has already begun, and memory by which alone we can recall past consciousness is later still in appearing. It may be that what we call matter is but a form of energy; and it may perhaps be that what we call energy is but a manifestation of what we call mind or soul or spirit; and some have even held that from matter and its inherent powers all else originates. Yet though they may not be in fact separable by us, and though it may be that at bottom they are one, we are compelled in thought to distinguish these three as independent, separable elements, which in their actions and reactions make up the world as it is presented to our perception.

Of these from our standpoint, that which feels, perceives, thinks, wills, comes first in order of priority, for it is this which is first in our own consciousness, and it is only through this that we have consciousness of any other existence. In this, as our own consciousness testifies, is the initiative of all our own motions and movements, so far as consciousness and memory shed light; and in all cases in which we can trace the genesis of anything to its beginning we find that beginning in thought and 'will. So clear, so indisputable is the priority of this spiritual element that wherever and whenever men have sought to account for the origin of the world they have always been driven to assume a great spirit or God. For though there be atheistic theories, they always avoid the question of origin, and assume the world always to have been.

CHAPTER II. MAN, HIS PLACE AND POWERS.

SHOWING OUR RELATIONS TO THE GLOBE, AND THE QUALITIES THAT ENABLE US TO EXTEND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF IT AND OUR POWERS ON IT.

WE awake to consciousness to find ourselves, clothed in flesh, and in company with other like beings, resting on what seems to us a plane surface. Above us, when the clouds do not conceal them, the sun shines by day and the moon and stars by night. Of what this place is, and of our relations to it, the first men probably knew little more than is presented to us in direct consciousness, little more in fact than the animals know; and, individually, we ourselves could know little more. But the observations and reflections of many succeeding men, garnered and systematized, enable us of the modern civilization to know, and with the eyes of the mind almost to see, things to which the senses untaught by reason are blind.

By the light of this gathered knowledge we behold ourselves, the constantly changing tenants of the exterior of a revolving sphere, circling around a larger and luminous sphere, the sun, and beset on all sides by depths of space, to which we can neither find nor conceive of limits.

Through this immeasurable space revolve myriads of luminous bodies of the nature of our sun, surrounded, it is confidently inferred from the fact that we know it to be the case with our sun, by lesser, non-luminous bodies that have in them their centers of revolution.

Our sun, but one, and far from one of the largest, of countless similar orbs, is the center of light and heat and revolution to eight principal satellites (having in their turn satellites of their own), as well as to an indefinite number of more minute bodies known to us as asteroids and of more erratic bodies called comets. Of the principal satellites of the sun, the third in point of distance from it, and the fourth in point of size, is our earth. It is in constant movement around the sun, and in constant revolution on its own axis, while its satellite, the moon, also revolving on its own axis, is in constant movement around it. The sun itself, revolving too on its own axis, is, with all its attendant bodies, in constant movement around some, probably moving, point in the universe which astronomers have not yet been able to determine.

Thus we find ourselves, on the surface of a globe seemingly fixed, but really in constant motion of so many different kinds that it would be impossible with our present knowledge to make a diagram indicating its real movement through space at any point—a globe large to us, yet only as a grain of sand on the sea-shore compared with the bodies and spaces of the universe of which it is a part. We find ourselves on the surface of this ceaselessly moving globe, as passengers, brought there in utter insensibility, they know not how or whence, might find themselves on the deck of a ship, moving they know not where, and who see in the distance similar ships, whether tenanted or how tenanted they can only infer and guess. The immeasurably great lies beyond us, and about and beneath us the immeasurably small. The microscope reveals infinitudes no less startling to our minds than does the telescope.

Here we are, depth upon depth about us, confined to the bottom of that sea of air which envelops the surface of this moving globe. In it we live and breathe and are constantly immersed. Were our lungs to cease taking in and pumping out this air, or our bodies relieved of its pressure, we should die.

Small as our globe seems in the light of astronomy, it is not really of the whole globe that we are tenants, but only of a part of its surface. Above this mean surface, men have found it possible only with the utmost effort and fortitude to ascend something less than seven miles; below it our deepest mining shafts do not pierce a mile. Thus the extreme limits in depth and height to which man may occasionally adventure, though not permanently live, are hardly eight miles. In round numbers the globe is 8000 miles in diameter. Thus the skin of the thinnest-skinned apple gives no idea of the relative thinness of the zone of perpendicular distance to which man is confined. And three fourths of the surface of the globe at its junction with the air is covered by water, on which, though man may pass, he cannot dwell; while considerable parts of what remain are made inaccessible by ice. Like a bridge of hair is the line of temperature that we must keep. Investigators tell us of the existence of temperatures thousands of degrees above zero and thousands of degrees below zero. But man’s body must maintain the constant level of a fraction over 98 degrees above zero. A rise or fall of seven degrees either way from this level and he dies. With the permanent rise or fall of a few more degrees in the mean temperature of the surface of the globe it would become uninhabitable by us.

And while all about us, even what seems firmest, is in constant change and motion, so is it with ourselves. These bodies of ours are in reality like the flame of a gas-burner, which has continuous and defined form, but only as the manifestation of changes in a stream of succeeding particles, and which disappears the moment that stream is cut off. What there is real and distinctive in us is that to which we may give a name but cannot explain nor easily define—that which gives to changing matter and passing motion the phase and form of man. But our bodies and our physical powers themselves, like the form and power of the gas-flame, are only passing manifestations of that indestructible matter and eternally pulsing energy of which the universe so far as it is tangible to us is made up. Stop the air that every instant is drawn through our lungs and we cease to live. Stop the food and drink that serve to us the same purpose as coal and water to the steam-engine, and, as certainly, if more slowly, the same result follows.

In all this, man resembles the other animals that with him tenant the superficies of the same earth. Physically he is merely such an animal, in form and structure and primary needs closely allied to the mammalia, with whose species he is zoologically classified. Were man only an animal he would be but an inferior animal. Nature has not given him the powers and weapons which enable other animals readily to secure their food. Nor yet has she given him the covering which protects them. Had he like them no power of providing himself with artificial clothing, man could not exist in many of the regions he now inhabits. He could live only in the most genial and equable parts of the globe.

But man is more than an animal. Though in physical equipment he may in nothing surpass, and in some things fall below other animals, in mental equipment he is so vastly superior as to take him out of their class, and to make him the lord and master of them all—to make him veritably, of all that we may see, “ the roof and crown of things.” And what more clearly perhaps than all else indicates the deep gulf which separates him from all other animals is that he alone of all animals is the producer, or bringer forth, and in that sense a maker. In this is a difference which renders the distinction between the highest animal and the lowest man one not of degree but of kind, and which, linked with the animals though he be, justifies the declaration of the Hebrew Scripture, that man is created in the likeness of the All-Maker.

Consider this distinction: We know of no race of men so low that they do not raise fruits or vegetables, or domesticate and breed animals; that do not cook food; that do not fashion weapons; that do not construct habitations; that do not make for themselves garments; that do not adorn themselves or their belongings with ornamentation; that do not show at least the rude beginnings of drawing and painting and sculpture and music. In all the tribes of animated nature below man there is not the slightest indication of the power thus shown. No animal save man ever kindled a fire or cooked a meal, or made a tool or fashioned a weapon.

It is true that the squirrel hides nuts; that birds build nests; that the beaver dams streams; that bees construct combs, in which they store the honey they extract from flowers; that spiders weave webs; that one species of ants are said to milk insects of another kind. All this is true, just as it is also true that there are birds whose melody far surpasses the best music of the savage, and that on tribes below man nature lavishes an adornment of attire that in taste as well as brilliancy surpasses the meretricious adornments of primitive man.

But in all this there is nothing akin to the faculties which in these things man displays. What man does, he does by taking thought, by consciously adjusting means to ends. He does it by adapting and contriving and experimenting and copying; by effort after effort and trial after trial. What he does, and his ways of doing it, vary with the individual, with social development, with time and place and surroundings, and with what he sees others do.

But the squirrel hides its nuts; the birds after their orders build their nests, and in due time force their young to fly; the beaver constructs its dam; the bees store their honey; the spiders weave, and the ants do the work of their societies, without taking thought, without toilsomely scheming for the adapting of means to ends, without experimenting or copying or improving. What they do of such things, they do not as originators who have discovered how to do it; nor yet as learners or imitators or copyists. They do it, first as well as last, unfalteringly and unalteringly, forgetting nothing and improving in nothing. They do it, not by reason but by instinct; by an impulse inhering in their nature which prompts them without perplexity or trial on their part to go so far, but gives them no power to go farther. They do it as the bird sings or the dog barks, as the hen sits on her eggs or the chick picks its way from the shell to scratch the ground.

Nature provides for all living things beneath man by implanting in them blind, strong impulses which at proper times and seasons prompt them to do what it is necessary they should do. But to man she grants only such impellings of instinct as that which prompts the mother to press the new-born babe to her breast and the babe to suckle. With exceptions such as these, she withdraws from man her guiding power and leaves him to himself. For in him a higher power has arisen and looks out on the world—a power that separates him from the brute as clearly and as widely as the brute is separated from the clod; a power that has in it the potency of producing, of making, of causing things to be; a power that seeks to look back into a past ere the globe was, and to peer into a future when it will cease to exist; a power that looks on Nature’s show with curiosity like that with which an apprentice might scan a master’s work, and will ask why tides run and winds blow, and how suns and stars have been put together; a power that in its beginnings lacks the certainty and promptness of instinct, but which, though infinitely lower in degree, must yet in some sort be akin to that from which all things proceed.

As this power, which we call reason, rises in man, nature withdraws the light of instinct and leaves him to his own devices—to rise or fall, to soar above the brute or to sink lower. For as the Hebrew Scriptures have phrased it, his eyes are opened and before him are good and evil. The ability to fall, no less than the ability to rise—the very failures and mistakes and perversities of man—show his place and powers. There is among the brutes no drunkenness, no unnatural vice, no waste of effort in accomplishing injurious results, no wanton slaughter of their own kind, no want amid plenty. We may conceive of beings in the form of man, who, like these animals, should be ruled by such clear and strong instincts that among them also there would be no liability to such perversions, let such beings would not be men. They would lack the essential character and highest powers of man. Fitted perfectly to their environment they might be happy in a way. But it would be as the full-fed hog is happy. The pleasure of making, the joy of overcoming, the glory of rising, how could they exist for such beings? That man is not fitted for his environment shows his higher quality. In him is that which aspires—and still aspires.

Endowed with reason, and deprived, or all but deprived, of instinct, man differs from other animals in being the producer. Like them, for instance, he requires food. But while the animals get their food by taking what they find, and are thus limited by what they find already in existence, man has the power of getting his food by bringing it into existence. He is thus enabled to obtain food in greater variety and in larger quantity. The amount of grass limits the number of wild cattle, the amount of their prey limits the number of the carnivora; but man causes grasses and grains and fruits to grow where they did not grow before; he breeds animals on which he feeds. And so it is with the fulfilment of all his wants; the satisfaction of all his desires. By the use of his animal powers, man can cover perhaps as much ground in a day as can a horse or a dog; he can cross perhaps about as wide a stream. But by virtue of the power that makes him the producer he is already spanning continents and oceans with a speed, a certainty and an ease that not even the birds of most powerful wing and swiftest flight can rival.

CHAPTER III. HOW MAN’S POWERS ARE EXTENDED.

SHOWING THAT THEIR USE OF REASON WELDS MEN INTO THE SOCIAL ORGANISM OR ECONOMIC BODY.

MAN, as we have any knowledge of him, either in the present or in the past, is always man; differing from other animals in the same way, feeling the same essential needs, moved by the same essential desires, and possessed of the same essential powers.

Yet between man in the lowest savagery and man in the highest civilization how vast the difference in the ability of satisfying these needs and desires by the use of these powers. In food, in raiment, in shelter; in tools and weapons; in ease of movement and of transportation; in medicine and surgery; in music and the representative arts; in the width of his horizon; in the extent and precision of the knowledge at his service—the man who is free to the advantages of the civilization of to-day is as a being of higher order compared to the man who was clothed in skins or leaves, whose habitation was a cave or rude but, whose best tool a chipped flint, whose boat a hollowed log, whose weapons the bow and arrows, and whose horizon was bounded, as to the past, by tribal tradition, and as to the present by the mountains or sea-shore of his immediate home and the arched dome which seemed to him to shut it in.

But if we analyze the way in which these extensions of man’s power of getting and making and knowing and doing are gained, we shall see that they come, not from changes in the individual man, but from the union of individual powers. Consider one of those steamships now crossing the Atlantic at a rate of over five hundred miles a day. Consider the cooperation of men in gathering knowledge, in acquiring skill, in bringing together materials, in fashioning and managing the whole great structure; consider the docks, the storehouses, the branching channels of trade, the correlation of desires reaching over Europe and America and extending to the very ends of the earth, which the regular crossing of the ocean by such a steamship involves. Without this cooperation such a steamship would not be possible.

There is nothing whatever to show that the men who to-day build and navigate and use such ships are one whit superior in any physical or mental quality to their ancestors, whose best vessel was a coracle of wicker and hide. The enormous improvement which these ships show is not an improvement of human nature; it is an improvement of society it is due to a wider, fuller union of individual efforts in the accomplishment of common ends.

To consider in like manner any one of the many and great advances which civilized man in our time has made over the power of the savage, is to see that it has been gained, and could only have been gained, by the widening cooperation of individual effort.

The powers of the individual man do not indeed reach their full limit when maturity is once attained, as do those of the animal; but, the highest of them at least, are capable of increasing development up to the physical decay that comes with age, if not up to the verge of the grave. Yet, at best, man’s individual powers are small and his life is short. What advances would be possible if men were isolated from each other and one generation separated from the next as are the generations of the seventeen-year locusts? The little such individuals might gain during their own lives would be lost with them. Each generation would have to begin from the starting-place of its predecessor.

But man is more than an individual. He is also a social animal, formed and adapted to live and to cooperate with his fellows. It is in this line of social development that the great increase of man’s knowledge and powers takes place.

The slowness with which we attain the ability to care for ourselves and the qualities incident to our higher gifts involve an overlapping of individuals that continues and extends the family relation beyond the limits which obtain among other mammalia. And, beyond this relation, common needs, similar perceptions and like desires, acting among creatures endowed with reason and developing speech, lead to a cooperation of effort that even in its crudest forms gives to man powers that place him far above the beasts and that tends to weld individual men into a social body, a larger entity, which has a life and character of its own, and continues its existence while its components change, just as the life and characteristics of our bodily frame continue, though the atoms of which it is composed are constantly passing away from it and as constantly being replaced.

It is in this social body, this larger entity, of which individuals are the atoms, that the extensions of human power which mark the advance of civilization are secured. The rise of civilization is the growth of this cooperation and the increase of the body of knowledge thus obtained and garnered.

Perhaps I can better point out what I mean by an illustration:

The famous treatise in which the English philosopher Hobbes, during the revolt against the tyranny of the Stuarts in the seventeenth century, sought to give the sanction of reason to the doctrine of the absolute authority of kings, is entitled “ Leviathan.” It thus begins:

Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. . . . For by art is created that great Leviathan called a commonwealth or state, in Latin civitas, which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment, by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty every joint and member is moved to perform his duty, are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members, are the strength; stilus populi, the people’s safety, its business; counselors by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the “Let us make man,” pronounced by God in the creation.

Without stopping now to comment further on Hobbes’s suggestive analogy, there is, it seems to me, in the system or arrangement into which men are brought in social life, by the effort to satisfy their material desires—an integration which goes on as civilization advances—something which even more strongly and more clearly suggests the idea of a gigantic man, formed by the union of individual men, than any merely political integration.

This Greater Leviathan is to the political structure or conscious commonwealth what the unconscious functions of the body are to the conscious activities. It is not made by pact and covenant, it grows; as the tree grows, as the man himself grows, by virtue of natural laws inherent in human nature and in the constitution of things; and the laws which it in turn obeys, though their manifestations may be retarded or prevented by political action are themselves utterly independent of it, and take no note whatever of political divisions.

It is this natural system or arrangement, this adjustment of means to ends, of the parts to the whole and the whole to the parts, in the satisfaction of the material desires of men living in society, which, in the same sense as that in which we speak of the economy of the solar system, is the economy of human society, or what in English we call political economy. It is as human units, individuals or families, take their place as integers of this higher man, this Greater Leviathan, that what we call civilization begins and advances.

But in this as in other things, the capacity for good is also capacity for evil, and prejudices, superstitions, erroneous beliefs and injurious customs may in the same way be so perpetuated as to turn what is the greatest potency of advance into its greatest obstacle, and to engender degradation out of the very possibilities of elevation. And it is well to remember that the possibilities of degradation and deterioration seem as clear as the possibilities of advance. In no race and at no place has the advance of man been continuous. At the present time, 'while European civilization is advancing, the majority of mankind seem stationary or retrogressive. And while even the lowest peoples of whom we have knowledge show in some things advances over what we infer must have been man’s primitive condition, yet it is at the same time true that in other things they also show deteriorations, and that even the most highly advanced peoples seem in some things below what we best imagine to have been as the original state of man.

CHAPTER IV. CIVILIZATION—WHAT IT MEANS.

SHOWING THAT CIVILIZATION CONSISTS IN THE WELDING OF MEN INTO THE SOCIAL ORGANISM OR ECONOMIC BODY.

THE word civilization is in common use. But it is I used with vague and varying meanings, which refer to the qualities or results that we attribute to the thing, rather than to the thing itself the existence or possibility of which we thus assume.

Sometimes our expressed or implied test of civilization is in the methods of industry and control of natural forces. Sometimes it is in the extent and diffusion of knowledge. Sometimes in the kindliness of manners and justice and benignity of laws and institutions. Sometimes it may be suspected that we use the word as do the Chinese when they class as barbarians all humanity outside of the “ Central Flowery Kingdom.” And there is point in the satire which tells how men who had lost their way in the wilderness, exclaimed at length when they reached a prison: “ Thank God, we are at last in civilization! ”

This difficulty in determining just what civilization is, does not pertain to common speech alone, but is felt by the best writers on the subject. Thus Buckle, in the two great volumes of the general introduction to his “ History of Civilization in England,” which was all his untimely death permitted him to complete, gives us his view of what civilization depends on, what influences it, what promotes or retards it; but does not venture to say what civilization is. And thus Guizot, in his “ General History of Civilization in Modern Europe,” says of civilization itself:

It is so general in its nature that it can scarcely be seized; so complicated that it can scarcely be unraveled; so hidden as scarcely to be discernible. The difficulty of describing it, or recounting its history, is apparent and acknowledged; but its existence, its worthiness to be described and to be recounted, is not less certain and manifest.

1 et, surely, it ought to be possible to fix the meaning of a word so common and so important; to determine the thing from which the qualities we attribute to civilization proceed. This I shall attempt, not only because I shall have future occasion to use the word, but because of the light the effort may throw on the matter now in hand, the nature of political economy.

The word civilization comes from the Latin civis, a citizen. Its original meaning is the manner or condition in which men live together as citizens. Now the relations of the citizen to other citizens, which are in their conception peaceable and friendly, involving mutual obligations, mutual rights and mutual services, spring from the relation of each citizen to a whole of which each is an integral part. That whole, from membership in which proceeds the relationship of citizens to each other, is the body politic, or political community, which we name the state, and which, struck by the analogy between it and the human body, Hobbes likened to a larger and stronger man made up by the integration of individual men, and called Leviathan.

Yet it is not this political relation, but a relation like it, that is suggested in this word civilization—a relation deeper, wider and closer than the relation of the citizen to the State, and prior to it.

There is a relation between what we call a civilization and what we call a state, but in this the civilization is the antecedent and the state the subsequent. The appearance and development of the body politic, the organized state, the Leviathan of Hobbes, is the mark of civilization already in existence. Not in itself civilization, it involves and presupposes civilization.

And in the same way the character of the state, the nature of the laws and institutions which it enacts and enforces, indicate the character of the underlying civilization. For while civilization is a general condition, and we speak of mankind as civilized, half civilized or uncivilized, yet we recognize individual differences in the characteristics of a civilization, as we recognize differences in the characteristics of a state or in the characteristics of a man. We speak of ancient civilization and modern civilization; of Asiatic civilization and European civilization; of the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Chinese, the Indian, the Aztec, the Peruvian, the Roman and the Greek civilizations, as separate things, having such general likeness to each other as men have to men, but each marked by such individual characteristics as distinguish one man from other men. And whether we consider them in their grand divisions or in their minor divisions, the line between what we call civilizations is not the line of separation between bodies politic. The United States and Canada, or the United States and Great Britain, are separate bodies politic, yet their civilization is the same. The making of the Queen of Great Britain Empress of India does not substitute the English civilization for the Indian civilization in Bengal, nor the Indian civilization for the English civilization in Yorkshire or Kent. Change in allegiance involves change in citizenship, but in itself involves no change in the civilization. Civilization is evidently a relation which underlies the relations of the body politic as the unconscious motions of the body underlie the conscious motions.

Now, as the relations of the citizen proceed essentially from the relation of each citizen to a -whole—the body politic, or Leviathan, of which he is a part—is it not clear, when we consider it, that the relations of the civilized man proceed from his relations to what I have called the body economic, or Greater Leviathan? It is this body economic, or body industrial, which grows up in the cooperation of men to supply their wants and satisfy their desires, that is the real thing constituting what we call civilization. Of this the qualities by which we try to distinguish what we mean by civilization are the attributes. It does indeed, I think, best present itself to our apprehension in the likeness of a larger and greater man, arising out of and from the cooperation of individual men to satisfy their desires, and constituting, after the evolution which finds its crown in the appearance of man himself, a new and seemingly illimitable field of progress.

This body economic, or Greater Leviathan, always precedes and always underlies the body politic or Leviathan. The body politic or state is really an outgrowth of the body economic, in fact one of its organs, the need for which and appearance of which arises from and with its own appearance and growth. And from this relation of dependence upon the body economic, the body politic can never become exempt.

Why, then, it may be asked, is it that we take for the greater and precedent a word drawn from the lesser and subsequent, and find in the word civilization, which expresses an analogy to the body politic, the word that serves us as a name for the body economic? The reason of this is worth noting, as it flows from an important principle in the growth of human knowledge. Things that come first in the natural order are not always first apprehended. As the human eye looks out, but not in, so the human mind as it scans the world is apt to observe what is of the superstructure of things before it observes what is of the foundation.

The body politic is more obvious to our eyes, and, so to speak, makes more noise in our ears, than the unseen and silent body economic, from which it proceeds and on which it depends. Thus, in the intellectual development of mankind, it and its relations are noticed sooner and receive names earlier than the body economic. And the words so made part of our mental furniture, afterwards by their analogies furnish us with words needed to express the body economic and its relations when later in intellectual growth we come to recognize it. Thus it is that while the thing civilization must in the natural order precede the body politic or state, yet when in the development of human knowledge we come to recognize this thing, we take to express it and its relations words already in use as expressive of the body politic and its relations.

But without at present pursuing further that record of the history of thought that lies in the meaning of words, let us endeavor to see whence conies the integration of men into a body economic and how it grows.

CHAPTER V. THE ORIGIN AND GENESIS OF CIVILIZATION.

SHOWING THE NATURE OF REASON; AND HOW IT IMPELS TO EXCHANGE, BY WHICH CIVILIZATION DEVELOPS.

MAN is an animal; but an animal plus something more —the divine spark differentiating him from all other animals, which enables him to become a maker, and which we call reason. To style it a divine spark is to use a fit figure of speech, for it seems analogous to, if not indeed a lower form of, the power to which we must attribute the origin of the world; and like light and heat radiates and enkindles.

The essential quality of reason seems to lie in the power of tracing the relationship of cause and effect. This power, in one of its aspects, that which proceeds from effect to cause, thus, as it were, taking things apart, so as to see how they have been put together, we call analysis. In another of its aspects, that which proceeds from cause to effect, thus, as it were, putting things together, so as to see in what they result, we call synthesis. In both of these aspects, reason, I think, involves the power of picturing things in the mind, and thus making what we may call mental experiments.

Whoever will take the trouble (and if he has the time, he will find in it pleasure) to get on friendly and intimate terms with a dog, a cat, a horse, or a pig, or, still better,— since these animals, though they have four limbs like ours, lack hands,—with an intelligent monkey, will find many things in which our “poor relations” resemble us, or perhaps rather, we resemble them.