CHAPTER I. The Sentiments of Individual Rights and Social Justice

THE SENTIMENTS OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

The dawning century will have to undertake a new education of mankind if we are not to relapse.... New inventions are less needed than new ethics.—Dr. MAX NORDAU.

Herbert Spencer tells us that: “Free institutions can only be properly worked by men, each of whom is jealous of his own rights and sympathetically jealous of the rights of others—who will neither himself aggress on his neighbour in small things or great, nor tolerate aggression on them by others.”

The state of mind or sentiment to which Mr. Spencer here points is complex. It comprises an egoism that is not anti-social, and an altruism that is broadly social. The genesis of this sentiment is intellectual, implying a recognition in some sort of the laws of nature, by virtue of which individual rights do not conflict with nature’s harmonies or its fundamental organic unity. It is possible, therefore, only to a race comparatively advanced, i.e. intellectually endowed; but the children and children’s children of that race may possess the sentiment of individual rights as an instinct with no apprehension whatever of its source or its justification. Its alliance with, and perfect conformity to, natural law are certainly not understood, and confusion is increased in the public mind by the unscientific teaching of the daily press. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from a middle-class journal. “Law is command, control. Nature is instinctive force, and can neither give nor receive laws. There are no laws of nature, and there are no rights of man. We are using meaningless phrases when we speak of either. Man has no natural rights any more than the wolf and the bear. All rights are conventional.”

Now, before man had made a direct study of nature, and, marking the invariability of sequence in the precision of its phenomena, had attached to that invariability the term “laws of nature,” the word “law” denoted a lawgiver issuing arbitrary commands. It is in this primitive sense that our journalist uses the word “law.” He entirely ignores its appropriation by science and the modern acceptation of the term “laws of nature.” Nature has no arbitrary commands, he says, and therefore infers no laws. We admit the premise while denying the inference. The laws of health are invariable, although they do not necessarily dominate, since other and opposing laws of disorganization may at any moment get the upper hand. Man is competent to disregard the laws of life; but if he so acts, another course of natural order is initiated, and he becomes subject to pathological laws which conduct him steadily to the grave. Necessity without arbitrary command rules in the cosmos; and if happiness, which all humanity desires, is attained, it will be by conforming to all the laws of nature that favour that end. Within, there are the laws of human organization, without, the laws of circumstance or environment. The humanity that has intellect and scientific knowledge may, by union and co-operation, take a firm advantage of these laws or uniformities of nature and march steadily forward, controlling the forces of nature by a willing obedience to natural law.

No sooner, observe, does this control become possible than natural rights come into existence. Man rises in the scale of being to a sphere of self-direction and comparative liberty. The wolf and bear and all wild animals are on the lower level, and have no natural rights. They are controlled by forces external to themselves, and the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is the law of destiny to them. It is not so, however, with the horse, dog, cat, etc., for man has lifted all domesticated animals from under the rule of genetic forces, and placed them under the rule of reasoned forces. He controls their breeding, limits their numbers, and gives them a happy life consistent with his own. Further, he claims for them and concedes to them natural rights; and note this point, the last phrase of our journalist’s misleading paragraph is strictly true: “All rights are conventional.” Convention means by tacit agreement, and it is by tacit agreement on the part of civilized men that rights of men and rights of animals exist and are respected. An impulse of the higher life, viz., a law of sympathy, impels civilized man to seek happiness for other beings as well as himself, and intelligence shows him that individual happiness promotes general happiness, and further that no individual happiness is possible without a certain amount of personal liberty.

Individual rights, then, are a claim for a certain amount of personal liberty, and the sentiment of individual rights is an unconscious inward preparedness to defend that claim. It lies at the very foundation of modern ethics, since from it there springs the outward equipoise of egoistic and altruistic forces, the inward, subtle, delicate sense of equitable relations, in other words, justice—the moral backbone of the modern conscience.

Let us see how we treat, in our nurseries, this foundation of ethics, this sentiment of individual rights. We enter a middle-class nursery where a baby and his sister Jessie, a child of three years of age, are side by side on the floor. An impulse seizes baby to clutch the doll, which Jessie holds firmly. Baby screams and nurse turns round and lifts him in her arms. “See, Jessie,” she says, “he wants your doll, surely you will be kind to baby brother?” She takes the doll from Jessie and gives it to the infant. Jessie throws herself on the ground and kicks and screams. A paroxysm of emotion sweeps over her, and until the wave has spent itself tranquillity in nerve or muscle is simply impossible. But the nurse, ignorant of the fact that the child is for the moment bereft of any power of self-control, commands her to be still, and when not obeyed, she scolds her severely. Finally she puts her in a corner, and there poor Jessie sobs and weeps till pure exhaustion brings her to passivity and an abject state of mind which nurse calls “being good again.” She signifies her approval of it by a kiss of forgiveness as unmerited as the previous anger.

Now here we have an emotion supremely important to the welfare of humanity rudely desecrated in infancy. There was nothing base, sordid, exclusive or even selfish in the tempest of feeling that swept away the placidity of Jessie’s little soul. Mingled together there was an impulse to defend her personal rights and a hot indignation that any infringement of these rights should occur. And the whole was a wave of the complex forces destined to weld society into an organic whole, capable of maintaining free institutions. When the nurse through ignorance punished the child for the involuntary expression of a virtuous social-emotion, she was opposing the very order of nature that genetic evolution is striving to attain; she was checking the progress of modern civilization.

Later in the day Jessie with her doll restored to her arms is happy again. Baby plays with his rattle on nurse’s knee; but Jessie thinks, “My dolly is a baby too and wants a rattle.” She takes the rattle out of baby’s hands to give to dolly. Baby shouts and kicks, and nurse is furious. She slaps Jessie and calls her a “naughty child.” There is no ebullition of anger this time, although the tender little fingers ache from the rude blow. Jessie shrinks aside with a subdued air. Had her former rebellion been an impulse of pure vindictiveness it would have repeated itself now. It had no such feature. It revealed the fact that Jessie was the offspring of a self-dependent, self-protective race preparing for a new stage of social evolution, and her aspect at the present crisis reveals the same. She did not know she was in the wrong; but vaguely she felt it. She had trespassed on baby’s rights, and conscience dumbly stirred in her infant bosom. If intelligence is strong the child questions silently, “Why may baby take my doll when I may not take his rattle?” The nurse will give no answer. Her province is to feed and cleanse and clothe her charges, and, if need be, punish action. But the motive springs of action lie quite beyond her range, and what is the consequence? If Jessie’s intellect predominates over her emotional quality, her conscience may develop, although under adverse conditions; but if the balance tends the other way the position is fatal. The child gathers her ideas of right and wrong from the frowns and smiles, the slaps or kisses of an ignorant woman who is ruling the nursery with an authority purely barbaric, and the budding conscience of a modern civilization adapts itself to the archaic environment and reverts or lapses backward.

Further, observe, the nurse strove to create—in this case, at least—sympathy towards a baby brother. Was this wise? It was not wise, although well-intentioned. Sympathy never develops under command, and to order a child to be kind at the moment when an aggression has been made on his or her rights is like commanding a steam-engine to move forward without turning on the steam! Moreover, baby, young as he was, suffered mentally and morally by the event. He learned an evil lesson, viz., that if he cried he would probably get what he wanted. Vigorously, though unconsciously, he will pursue that vicious course and act up to the principle.

Does my reader inquire “What should the nurse have done?” She should have instantly removed the baby, saying gently to Jessie, “Children must never take things from one another. Not even a baby can be permitted to do that, and we must teach him better. But see he is so young, he does not know the doll is yours, not his. Would you like to lend it to him for a little? No? Ah, well he cannot have it then, but come and help me to amuse him that he may forget the doll.” The older child puts down her treasure to fondle her baby brother, and there are ten chances to one that by-and-bye her sympathy—called out naturally and not by command—carries her a step further, and she says: “Nurse, baby may hold my doll for a little now.” Later, when the brilliant idea occurs that dolly would enjoy the rattle, Jessie understands—she does not blindly, vaguely feel, she knows—that she must not trespass on baby’s rights. She restrains her impulse therefore to snatch the rattle, and in this self-control she is exercising the noblest faculty of her nature under the dominion of a moral conscience—a sense of justice or equivalence of rights.

And now we pass from an upper middle-class nursery to any British boys’ school or playground. We find that quarrels there arise not so much from the simple barbarous impulses of cruelty, hatred, revenge, fear, as from a different source—an effective sense of personal rights unbalanced by an equally effective sense of sympathy with the rights of others. The phenomenon here is justice in embryo, self-conscious, but lacking development on the altruistic side. “It isn’t” or “it wasn’t fair” is a phrase frequently upon a schoolboy’s lips, and it is remarkable with what courage and dignity an urchin of ten or twelve will criticize a master’s treatment of him, and perhaps tell the man of fifty to his face that this or that “wasn’t fair.”

Were every boy as eager that all human beings—schoolmasters included—should be as fairly treated as he himself, the only further regulation of conduct necessary would be a clear intelligence to discern truth from falsehood in every case of misdemeanour. Instructed intelligence is however a minus quantity, and the sympathetic jealousy for the rights of others that exists here and there amongst boys in minor quantity, gets deflected from its true course. It links boys of one age together in a mutual fellowship that excludes masters and all others. Nor is this difficult to understand. Mutual interests is the soil in which sympathy grows; but with arbitrary authority in the field, also conflicting desires, and no distinct teaching on the subject, the deeper relations of life, I mean the mutual interests of teacher and taught and of the whole school as a social unity, are often ignored. To shield a companion from punishment, at all hazards, becomes virtue in a schoolboy’s eyes, and antagonisms spring up with confused notions of right and wrong, and a general impulse to falsehood and deceit in special directions. These are menacing features of character for the social life of the future. Men of introspection have recognized in themselves the baneful after-effects of the clannishness engendered at school. Robert Louis Stevenson bewailed the extreme difficulty he had in forcing himself to perform a distinct public duty. It involved some exposure dishonourable to a former schoolmate! “I felt,” he said, “like a cad!”

From middle-class nurseries where authority is chiefly barbaric and the budding conscience is hurt, children destined to become the élite of a future society and its rulers, pass into schools where there is no clear and definite training for the emotional nature, no scientific development of the social, and repression of the anti-social impulses. From school the student passes to college or university, and is emancipated more or less from outward control. When he enters upon the duties and pleasures of adult life he presents, in many ways, an element of social danger, for this simple reason, his native bumptiousness, his sense of individual rights is not held in check by an intelligent understanding of, and feeling of sympathy with, the equal rights of others. The groundwork of the modern conscience has been tampered with while authority—propelled by genetic forces of evolution—has gradually relaxed and fallen back before the free-born British schoolboy. By our present system of education we destroy infant virtue in the nursery and in the school. We dwarf that sympathy which should grow and expand till it bursts forth in manhood into deeds of rectitude, justice, love, manifesting the threefold quality of human nature which alone is competent to lift the whole area of man’s existence into line with cosmic order. Our schools are yearly pouring into the busy world a rich harvest of human aptitudes that are quickly absorbed in activities mercantile, professional, legislative, but the outcome of these activities is not tuning life into social harmony, it is merely increasing national wealth, and that without any marked increase of plenty and pleasure to the nation at large. The picture presented is one of perpetual warfare—an outward struggle in money-making for oneself and family, an inward contentious spirit that reveals itself abroad in our blatant imperialism, at home in class antagonisms—the whole re-acting fatally on individual character and lowering the general standard of civilized life. Generous enthusiasms die down, the emotional nature hardens, till intelligence itself is dimmed and becomes incapable of any wide outlook that entails unselfish effort.

As a rule—though with honourable exceptions—our compatriots advanced in life do not fulfil the promise of their youth; and with forces of nature amenable to man’s will, if wisely directed, real progress in this scientific age is wofully sluggish. We focus attention on environments that press on adults only, and in seeking reform overlook the environments that vitally effect our infant population, therefore the adult life of the future.

How different is our action in other directions. In horticultural nurseries, for instance, progress is not sluggish. Scientific discovery and methods of practice are applied and promptly produce definite results. The composite plants are distinguished from simple plants, and while all are secured in necessary conditions of healthy life—good soil, air, light, etc.—those receive from the gardener a special fostering care. He studies the laws of differentiation, the peculiarities of each organism with its hidden possibilities of varied efflorescence, and by fitting environment to wider issues, watching them day by day, nourishing every tendency favourable, checking every tendency unfavourable, he induces an outburst of blossom as varied in colour and form as it is marvellous in beauty or grace, and that in spite of the fact that unaided by natural forces he is utterly powerless to make a blade of grass grow.

That human plants give promise of blossoming into a moral beauty as yet undreamed of by the British public is patent to any wise observer of the confused social life of to-day. Our greatest realists in fiction note the point. We have George Meredith putting into the mouth of his hero, Matthew Weyburn, these significant words: “Eminent station among men doesn’t give a larger outlook ... I have come now and then across people we call common, slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of facts and ready to learn and logical. They were at the bottom of wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice upon which wisdom is founded ... that is what their rulers lack. Unless we have the sense of justice abroad like a common air there’s no peace and no steady advance. But these humble people had it. I felt them to be my superiors. On the other hand, I have not felt the same with our senators, rulers and lawgivers. They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.” (Lord Ormont and his Aminta.)

As regards physical health, I have shown the necessity for stirpiculture and the birth of the fit; as regards mental and moral health, i.e. Humanity’s efflorescence on higher planes—the need of the times is less eugenics than education and training. Germs of truth, justice, love, lie latent in the basic structure of our half-civilized race, and so long as we neglect or destroy these germs it were folly to desire material of finer quality. “Our raw material is of the very best,” said the headmistress of a London Board School, “our children are full of generous impulses and fearless spontaneity. I sometimes think the no-rule in the homes of the masses a better preparation for life than the factitious training given in homes of the classes. But our teachers are so few and so seldom scientifically enlightened that we spoil very much of the good material.” On behalf of the classes my reader might argue that susceptibility to beauty or the aesthetic sentiment with its creative expression in art belongs almost exclusively to the upper section of society, and is deemed by some social reformers the very foundation of moral life, the basis of the ethical temper.

It is not my purpose to provoke comparison between the classes and the masses, and I fully recognize the value of the fine arts as factors in the general elevation of life and character, but I submit that evolution does not pursue the same line of development in the various races of mankind, and in the British race an advanced ethical temper is in process of formation quite irrespective of the fine arts and the aesthetic sentiment.

Dr. Le Bon laid before the French Geographical Society an account of a primitive group of people, numbering several hundred thousand, who inhabit a remote region high up among the Carpathian mountains. Of this people, the Podhalians, he says, “they are born improvisatori, poets and musicians, singing their own songs, set to music of their own composition. Their poetry is tender and artless in sentiment, generous and elevated in style.” He attributes these qualities to the wealth of spontaneous resources possessed by natures which neither know violent passions nor unnatural excitements. The British race, moulded by different conditions—geographical and historical—has developed differently. Great masses of our population are wholly insensitive to the influences of art. The picture drawn by Wordsworth of his Peter Bell comes nearer to our native uncultured type—

A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more. The soft blue sky did never melt Into his heart, he never felt The witchery of the soft blue sky.

Nevertheless, through another channel he was touched to the quick. Thrilled into sudden sweetness and pathos by the sight of a widow’s tears—

In agony of silent grief From his own thoughts did Peter start; He longs to press her to his heart From love that cannot find relief.

The hard life of our workers has undoubtedly deprived them, as yet, of any widespread aesthetic development, but the chords of their vital part, if played upon, produce a sentient state far removed from the rudimentary stage. It is a product of centuries of evolution.

This humanity will move forward to higher planes of existence, and a spiritual plenitude—of which aestheticism is by no means the crown and glory, but only an imperfect foretaste—by two convergent paths trodden concurrently. These are a steady growth in social qualities and the happiness that flows from these qualities, the creation, in short, of organic socialism; and the opening up outwardly of channels of sympathy and community of interests throughout the whole nation, causing the banishment of class distinctions, the establishment of an organized socialism. Perfection in art is not the appropriate ideal for this age, but perfection in social life, and it is not from a love of art to a love of mankind and the practices of moral rectitude that our masses will advance. It is by the practice of all the humanities on ever broader, deeper lines, until the nation, vibrating with harmonized life, frames new visions of art, and strengthens all the well-springs of art’s creation.

The aestheticism that belongs exclusively to one social class neither elevates general morals nor produces the noblest art. Its narrowing influences are exemplified in Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son: “If you love music, go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a contemptible light; ... few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing a part in a concert with a fiddle under your chin.” Lord Chesterfield belonged to a past century, but the spirit of his thought is not dead; it manifests prominently to-day. In my own experience a lady novelist was invited to a London At Home, and accepted conditionally. If evening costume were necessary she must decline, but if less ceremonious dress were permissible she would gladly appear, and the hostess consenting, she did so. Now I heard a large group of middle-class ladies passionately condemning this action, on the ground that aestheticism had been outraged and the rules of society set at nought by a blot in rooms otherwise beautiful. Yet the novelist had been tastefully attired, that was freely admitted. She had sinned merely in nonconformity to fashion and in covering her neck and arms. Can we seriously believe that the type of humanity to which these ladies belong is developing the liberal mind which alone may create and support the highest morality, the noblest art? Are we not compelled to recognize the truth of Mr. J. H. Levy’s profound remark: “In the present stage of human progress the aesthetic and the moral are conterminate at neither end. Aesthetic emotion may be roused in us by that which is ethically odious, and moral feeling may be called up by that which is artistically ugly.” (The National Reformer.)

The true ethical temper is engendered by a complexity of social attractions issuing in an inward sense of justice and the delicate equipoise of natural rights between meum and tuum. The task before us is to unite the half-conscious, instinctive justice already existent with an intellectual apprehension and clear understanding of right and wrong, in other words, to complete the modern conscience; and in view of this task we must distinctly realize that the sentiment of what is proper and improper in conventional society has no ethical value, and is a false guide to conduct.