CHAPTER II. Rapacity, Pride, Love of Property

RAPACITY, PRIDE, LOVE OF PROPERTY

The facts which it is at once most important and most difficult to appreciate are what may be called the facts of feeling.—LECKY.

The area of man’s emotional life is one of vast magnitude. It lies behind the scenes of his outward existence, yet it interpenetrates the social structure throughout, and stretches beyond it to distances we know not whence or whither. Mysterious as this region is, no sooner does man aspire to control the social forces of collective life, as he already largely controls the natural forces of physical life, than he is compelled to apply his reason scientifically to the phenomena of human emotions, and to contemplate, trace out and master there the general features of the process of evolution.

In the case of personal development the task is comparatively easy. A child’s feelings are simple, not compound. For the most part they seem vague and indefinite, always fleeting and evanescent; but as the child grows his powers of feeling grow likewise and alter in character. Their childish simplicity passes away; they augment in mass, they become complex, more permanent and coherent in their nature, and far more delicate in susceptibility. Consequently the breadth of range, the depth and richness of emotion possible in an adult, as compared with the emotions of a child, are as the music of an organ to the sweet notes that lie within the compass of a penny whistle.

In racial development evolution of feeling has not pursued one invariable course. Distinctive sentiments and modes of feeling characterize the different races of mankind as well as distinctive outward features, and the impressing on a plastic race of these divergent states of feeling is mainly, though not entirely, due to external conditions—not climatic and geographical conditions only, but also the form of civilization that had taken root and moulded the habits and customs of the race. Greek civilization, for instance, tended to develop largely the aesthetic group of feelings, while in Scotland these feelings, through outward influences I must not pause to consider, have been stunted in growth, and moral sentiments have had a deeper and firmer development.

Amongst barbarous tribes of men the violent emotions—anger, fear, jealousy, revenge—generally speaking, hold sway; but there are also in various parts of the world uncivilized communities where these fierce passions are little known, and where, in consequence of the absence of warlike surroundings, the gentle, tender sentiments that have for their foundation family ties and peaceful social life, prevail, and are considerably developed.

The conditions of emotional evolution in a given race, then, are complex. We have to bear in mind a threefold environment—cosmic, planetary, social—pressing upon individual life and powerfully swaying the emotional part of it. Social environment is pre-eminently potent in modifying emotional characteristics; yet the prime factor of change in social environment springs from this region of feeling, and this factor may, under rational guidance, take a path of direct and rapid progression.

British civilization is the product of a turbulent, militant stage of evolution, an epoch of military glory, followed by a long period of industrial development and commercial activity. We inherit a survival of virtues and vices from each of these evolutional stages. To the first we attribute our courage, independence and proper pride, both national and individual; and we are apt to suppose that without the experience of military glory our manly John Bull would have been a milk-sop. That may or may not be true; but when we infer that the above characteristics depend fundamentally and absolutely upon a military environment we are vastly mistaken. Observe what is said by travellers and missionaries of certain unwarlike tribes found in India and the Malay Peninsula. The Jakuns are inclined, we are told, to gratitude and beneficence, their tendency being not to ask favours, but to confer them. The Arifuras have a very excusable ambition to gain the name of rich men by paying the debts of their poorer fellow-villagers! One gentle Arifura, who had hoped to be chosen chief of his village and was not, met his disappointment with the spirit of a philosopher and philanthropist, saying: “What reason have I to grieve? I still have it in my power to assist my fellow-villagers.” When brought into contact with men of an opposite type—hardy, fierce and turbulent, they have no tendency to show the white feather. The amiable Dhimal is independent and courageous, and resists “with dogged obstinacy” injunctions that are urged injudiciously. The Jakun is extremely proud—his pride showing itself in refusals to be domesticated and made useful to men of a different race and therefore alien to himself. The simple-minded Santal has a “strong natural sense of justice, and should any attempt be made to coerce him, he flies the country. The Santal is courteous and hospitable, whilst at the same time he is free from cringing.” Dalton writes of the Hos—a tribe belonging to the same group as the Santals—“a reflection on a man’s honesty or veracity may be sufficient to send him to self-destruction”; and of the Lepchas, Hooker says, “In all my dealings with them they have proved scrupulously honest.... They cheer on the traveller by their unostentatious zeal in his service, and when a present is given to them, it is divided equally among many without a syllable of discontent or a grudging look or word.”

Footnote 4:

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. 2, pp. 628, 630, 631.

From these facts we gather that a number of virtues associated in our minds with Western civilization are present amid barbarous tribes, and that the vices associated by us with barbarism—cruelty, dishonesty, treachery, selfishness—are in some cases glaringly absent. Human nature is not dependent on culture or Christianity to humanize and make it lovable. There is that in the very groundwork of its nature which renders it capable of developing, under favourable conditions, into what is admirable, pure and gracious. The traits given us of these peoples show virtue, truth, generosity, moral courage and justice, and what nobler, more elevated sentiments have as yet been found in civilized man?

The favourable conditions are an entire absence of warlike surroundings and warlike training, hence an absence also of any inheritance of warlike proclivities. These tribes “have remained unmolested for generation after generation; they have inflicted no injuries on others.” Their social or unselfish feelings have been fostered and nourished by the sympathetic intercourse of a peaceful life.

In a purely military state unselfish feelings are necessarily repressed, whilst the bold, keen, hard and cruel side of human nature is liberally developed. To hate an enemy and avenge an injury are manly virtues. The predatory instincts are useful and approved. Treachery is not discredited, and the man clever enough to take advantage of an enemy and successfully intrigue against him may be ranked among the gods! The plunderer who falters not in keen pursuit of prey and in the hour of victory shows relentless cruelty is deemed heroic. No thought of happiness or misery to others gives him pause; military glory is his absorbing aim, and in the intervals of peace his callous nature manifests in ruling with tyrannic power slavish subordinates, who bend and cringe before him.

Now let us glance at two of these militant characteristics, viz. rapacity and personal pride, with a view to observe how their survival into our industrial epoch has vitiated the national life.

The purely militant stage of British development has passed, and the outward form of our collective life is industrial, not military. A sanguinary path of glory has no intrinsic fascination for our people, and there is no national desire to conquer and rule over races established on other parts of the earth’s surface, however superior to ours may be their climate and quarters. Nevertheless, within the last half century we have fought battles and shed blood copiously in China, Persia, Afghanistan, Abyssinia, Egypt, South Africa and elsewhere. Seldom, however, has the nation itself clamoured for war. In the year 1854 a relapse into militant mood occurred, and, in spite of unwillingness on the part of individual rulers, the Government yielded to a sinister wave of barbaric feeling in the nation—a martial frenzy that impelled to the Crimean War. Since that period wars have originated from other causes than the will of the nation. Our people, immersed in a painful struggle for livelihood at home, are indifferent to the rights and wrongs of the many squabbles into which we flounder abroad. General malevolence has no part in this matter; our real collective attitude towards foreigners is one of friendliness, combined with an impulse to the peaceful exchange of commodities, kind words and gentle arts—the whole provocative of love, not hatred.

The fundamental causes of war, then, have been: first, the commercial interests of a capitalist class, or, if expressed in terms of feeling, the desire in that class for increased wealth—a desire partly the product of inherited rapacity, a sentiment descended to us from our militant epoch; second, national pride—a pride which has kindled animosities, embroiled us in disputes and dragged us into wars, the pettiness of whose small beginnings is only matched by the pettiness of British conduct throughout their whole extent. But both this rapacity and this national pride belong almost exclusively to our ruling classes. Their existence is explained by the action of outward conditions on special sections of the community. The British passed suddenly out of a period of constant fighting and feud into a period of frantic industrial activity. Feudal chiefs and their descendants became grasping landlords. There also sprang up a class of sharp-witted, keen-sighted men, whose native rapacity strengthened in the genial hot-bed of our brilliant commercial success. A tremendous start in the international race after wealth was secured to Great Britain by her possession of iron, coal, etc. She absorbed riches from every quarter of the globe, and mercantile triumph swelled the pride already deeply implanted in our industrial organizers, our politicians and plenipotentiaries. The great mass of the people were differently affected by industrial conditions. Workers of every description, packed together in towns and factories, rapidly developed the qualities of intimate social life, and out-grew, in the main, the savage instincts of militancy. Our commercial wars and Imperialistic policy are fruits—not of the nation’s brutality, its greed, or its pride, but of its simple ignorance and its blind trust in individuals peculiarly unfitted by inheritance and personal bias to guide it aright in relations with other, and especially with weaker, nations. All the wars of recent times—a record of cruel bloodshed causing needless sorrow and suffering to the innocent—have been instigated by the ruling classes under the dominion of rapacity and pride. When these ruling classes are dispossessed of supreme power, and civilized democracies assume public responsibility with political supremacy, the day of disarming of nations will dawn. The world’s workers who, apart from their rulers, have no tendency to undue accumulation or national pride, but whose bias, on the contrary, is towards sympathetic co-operation in industry, will strenuously seek the joys and blessings of universal peace.

But although the war-spirit of the ancient Briton dies out and general brutality declines, individual brutality, practised privately, is common enough. Class tyranny, sex tyranny, and much of domestic tyranny are rampant; and the co-relative feelings, viz. abject fear giving rise to hatred, anger, malice, cunning and despicable meanness of soul, are all strongly in evidence.

The industrial system that succeeded our military system is of no genuinely social type. It is distinctly contentious, and when we consider how it has pressed for about a century upon a plastic race inwardly prone to every vice engendered by militancy, the matter for surprise perhaps is that we are as good as we are.

In classifying emotional states there is a sentiment which, if not begotten, has at least been bred, nourished and widely diffused during our industrial epoch—I mean the sentiment, love of property. On no subject are opposite opinions more strongly and disputatiously held than on the question of the nature and value of this sentiment. It is claimed by some as not only the chief support of present-day society, but the prime evolutional factor of our entire civilization. A savage only cares to secure the things he is in immediate need of. He lacks imagination to picture what he may want to-morrow, also intelligence to provide for future contingencies and sympathetic desire to provide for the wants of others.

No sooner, however, does an established government give safe protection to individual property than prudence and forethought appear. The man who acquires property soon surrounds himself with comforts, and inspires in others the desire to follow his example. Social wealth accumulates, and energies are set free for further development. Some social units become complex, intellectual tastes and love of travel arise, and works of art—the treasure-trove of earlier civilizations—are impounded to lay the foundation of artistic life in the later civilization. Aesthetic culture now grows rapidly. Painting, poetry, music abound, and men may be lifted above the meaner cares of existence to an inward freedom, where sympathy expands through the exercise of elevated thought and feeling. Is not love of property, then, a sentiment to honour and conserve? Its genesis and history certainly command respect; but the already quoted case of the Podhalians proves that by no means is it an essential in human evolution. To that primitive people, as Dr. Le Bon has shown, riches have no charms; they are poor, living principally upon oats made into cakes and goat’s milk. They enjoy perfect health and live long. They are quick in apprehension, fond of dancing, singing, music and poetry. There is clearly no development here of the property-sense, yet the Podhalians have a very considerable development of that group of emotions we term aesthetic and regard as an evidence of high refinement and culture. We are not therefore logically entitled to claim that were British love of property and British cupidity greatly diminished, art as a consequence must needs decay and the race revert into barbarism.

Herbert Spencer tells us “that in some established societies there has been a constant exercise of the feeling which is satisfied by a provision for the future, and a growth of this feeling so great that it now prompts accumulation to an extent beyond what is needful.” (1st vol. of Essays, 2nd series, p. 132.)

That point has been overpassed by the British. What we have now to struggle against are varied evils arising from a glut of national wealth (but I do not mean by this term commodities of intrinsic value, only wealth representing an acknowledged claim on the labour of others) and a frightful inflation of the sentiments allied with wealth, which at one time were useful, but for generations have been producing outward vice and inward misery and corruption.

The British merchant goes on accumulating long after he has amply provided for himself and family, and many a poor man feels towards that other’s wealth precisely as a savage feels towards his fetish. He is filled with reverence, admiration, desire and a sense of distance from the golden calf that makes him hopeless, abject, despairing.

The American millionaire, as depicted by Mr. Howells, will, “on a hot day, when the mortal glare of the sun blazes in upon heart and brain, plot and plan in his New York office till he swoons at the desk.” Such a man is as much a victim to over-development of acquisitiveness as the drunkard is victim to an undue development of the love of stimulants, and in each case the depraved taste carries ruin to the individual and havoc into society. Social unity is rent in twain. A life of exuberant wealth and extravagant expenditure runs parallel with one of constant, inescapable poverty, and so long as the nation continues to heap up riches in private possession, just so long must we reap an emotional harvest of envy, malice, private animosities, class hatreds and a subtle estrangement of heart throughout the length and breadth of the land. Yet even the great poet Tennyson in his writings exalts into a worthy motive for holy wedlock this sentiment—love of property. An affectionate father, in the poem, “The Sisters,” exhorts his daughters thus: “One should marry, or ... all the broad lands will pass collaterally”!

The small accumulator whose petty hoard of gold was gloated over piece by piece has long been labelled miser. He is publicly condemned, and in literature derided. But the merchant-prince who, already wealthy, devotes days and years and his whole mind and heart to business; the proprietor of broad lands who adds acre to acre, and anxiously meditates on their passing collaterally; the rich capitalist who craftily seeks to lower wages in the interests of employers; the gambler on the Stock Exchange; the market manipulator whose predatory instincts are so pleasurably excited by risks and gains that he will hazard in the game all that nobler men hold precious—these beings, I say, are as worthy of scorn and infinitely more baneful than the miser. They must take their true place by his side in public estimation. They are social deformities, morally diseased. In other words, these men are incapable of moral duty, which consists in “the observance of those rules of conduct that contribute to the welfare of society—the end of society being peace and mutual protection, so that the individual may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man.” (Huxley’s Life, vol. ii. p. 305.)

In the preceding chapter I have shown that the self-regarding sentiment exercised with due consideration for the welfare of others is a social virtue. It promotes national prosperity and personal improvement. But self-regarding actions, induced by this master-passion over-acquisitiveness, invariably issue in automatic selfishness and general deterioration.

In regard to aesthetic emotions also the cleavage between rich and poor has a fatal significance. A luxurious, idle, for the most part, inane, life led by the rich, profoundly influences the poor; not by creating anti-social feeling only, but by checking aesthetic development. In the city of many slums there is also a west-end of gay shops filled with objects de luxe, of showily dressed women, profligate men, theatre, music-hall and ball-room entrances, at which to stand gazing as into a fairy peep-show. Suggestion here plays a mischievous part. Poverty hinders the purchase of all commodities that possess any real artistic value, but commercial enterprise has flooded the markets with meretricious imitations. East-end shops reflect the glitter and glow of west-end attractions, and the ignorant, spell-bound by suggestion, become possessors of that which degrades and vulgarizes taste or the sense of the beautiful. Now that science partially dominates thought, our eyes have been opened to the fact of essential unity in human groups. We may trace the cause of a social evil to a special section or class, but the effects of that cause radiate forth till they touch every section or class. Dwellers in the west-end cannot escape disease propagated by the vilely unwholesome conditions of life at the east-end. Micro-organisms of disease are wafted from hither to thither, and on the physical plane social unity is recognized. A like continuity exists on the non-physical side. Minds are as closely united by psychical law as bodies by physical law. The experienced facts of hypnotism make this clear, and the logical inference is that in Western civilization the vices of wealthy classes infect and corrupt the masses.

That the imagination of the great mass of our people should be snared and their evolutional progress thwarted by mental suggestion from a banal, vicious life led by a comparatively small portion of the nation, is an outrage on civilization. It renders it imperative that the cause of this evil, viz., our contentious, i.e. our competitive system of industry, should be fundamentally changed.

For every group of human beings the steady growth of those social qualities which create happiness and the steady advance in intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual life, depend on a close community of interests and the constant opening up of fresh channels of sympathy throughout the group. But the British racial group has lost this community of interests—this primary condition of steady growth. It is split up into, first, a class of property possessors made effeminate by ill-spent leisure, often inflated by pride, and at all times demanding the artificial pleasures of a luxurious life; second, a class striving to amass property, a class whose thoughts and desires circle round and centre in property, and who to acquire it often sacrifice serenity of mind, health of body, and even life itself; and third, the mass of the people who, having no property, are yet enslaved by it, and who on the emotional side of their human nature are debased and corrupted by the mental state of the classes.

As evolution approaches the era of manhood of human reason it becomes conscious, and demands a national effort to improve. That effort first appears in the strenuous, scientific study of life as it is, in attempts at social reconstruction, and at improvement in public and private education. It is seen to be necessary to stamp out all the militant and predatory instincts of mankind by ethical nurture and training, while all the gentle, gracious qualities of mankind must be carefully guarded and nourished, until, in every social unit the effort to improve is habitual, i.e. has become “the essential mode of its being.” (J. McGavin Sloan.)