Small holdings, evidently, are not very productive, but at least they feed those who cultivate them. The latter, it is true, earn less than if they were working for others; but to work for oneself is a very different thing from working for a master.
The situation of the large proprietors is most precarious in France as well as in England, and this, as I have said above, is why they are tending to disappear.
Their lands are condemned to subdivision in the near future. Unable to cultivate them themselves, seeing them bring in less and less, on account of foreign competition, while at the same time the demands of their labourers are increasing, they are gradually obliged to give up exploiting their, for the expenses of cultivation are often greater than the returns,4 so that they or their heirs will be forced to sell their lands at low prices, and in fragments, to small proprietors who will cultivate them themselves. The latter have practically no expenses, neither have they capital to remunerate, taking into account the low price of their purchases. Large property will soon be only an object of useless luxury. Already it is no longer a source, but a sign of wealth.
The facts we have just been considering are to be observed on every hand, and more especially in countries where there are many large properties, as in England. They result, as I have said, from the increasing demands of the working population, together with the fall in the value of the products of the soil, due to the competition of countries in which the land is without value, as America, or in which labour is without value, as the Indies. This competition has in a few years brought down the price of wheat in France to 75 per cent.
of its former value, in spite of a protective tariff of 2s. per bushel, a tariff which is of course paid by all the consumers of bread.
In England, the land of liberty, where there are no protective duties against foreign competition, the crisis is to be observed in all its intensity. The English ports are full of foreign corn, as well as foreign meats. Refrigerator vessels are Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 230
continually making the passage between Sydney, Melbourne, and London.
They carry beef and mutton ready for the shops at a penny or three halfpence a pound, to say nothing of butter, of which certain of these boats bring over as many as 600 tons in a single voyage. Although the proprietors have reduced their rents by more than 30 per cent they make next to nothing from their property, for their tenants profit by their embarrassments to pay less and less or nothing at all. M. de Mandat-Grancy, in his remarkable work on the subject, mentions proprietors whose books he has examined, whose property brought in from £20,000 to £30,000 a few years ago, and now brings in no more than
£400 or £500; and this on account of the non-payment of tenants. It was impossible to evict the farmers who did not pay, for the simple reason that none could be found who would be able to pay, and that even if they did not pay, they did at least perform the service of keeping the land in condition, and preventing it from going out of cultivation. The proprietors will be obliged to split up their properties and to sell them at very low prices to small cultivators, who will work on them directly, and at a profit, since the price of purchase will be insignificant.
It is perhaps a matter for regret that the large proprietors should everywhere be destined to become, in the near future, the victims of the evolution of economic laws; but as a matter of fact I think it will be very considerably in the interests of the societies of the future that landed property should be divided to such an extent that every one should possess only as much as he could cultivate. The result of such a State of things would be a very great political stability, and in such a society Socialism would have no chance of success.
In conclusion: what we have said of the repartition of capital is also true of the repartition of the soil. Large properties are doomed to disappear by the action of economic laws. Before the Socialists have finished discussing the matter the object of their discussions will have vanished, by reason of the imperturbable progress of those natural laws that work now according to our doctrines and now in a contrary sense, but always unheeding them.
3. Labour.
The figures I have given show the progressive increase of the profits of labour, and the no less progressive decrease of the profits of capital. For a long time capital, on account of its incontestable necessity, has been able to enforce Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 231
its demands on the workers; but to-day their respective roles have changed.
The relations of capital and labour, which were at first those of master and servant, are to-day like to become inverted. Now it is capital that is descending to the rank of a servant. The progress of humanitarian ideas, the increasing indifference on the part of directors and administrators for the interests of shareholders whom they do not know, and above all the enormous extension of trades-unions, have little by little brought about this effacement of capital.
Despite the noisy demands of the Socialists, it is evident that the situation of the working classes has never been as prosperous as it is at present, and, taking into consideration the economic necessities which rule the world, it is very probable that the workers are passing through a golden age that they will never see again. Never has such justice been done to their claims as to-day, and never has capital been as little oppressive and at the same time so little exacting.
As Mr. Mallock has justly remarked, the income of the modern working classes is far greater than the income of all classes taken together sixty years ago. They possess, in fact, at present, far more than they would have possessed if the whole of the public fortune had then passed into their hands, according to the dreams of certain Socialists.
Since 1813, according to M. de Foville, salaries in France have more than doubled, while money has only lost a third of its value.
In Paris, nearly 60 per cent of working men earn a daily wage of 4s. 2d. to 6s.
8d., and according to the figures published by the Office die travail, the salaries of the better class of workmen are very much higher. The daily wage of a fitter varies from 6s. 3d. to 7s. 1d., and that of a turner from 7s. 6d. to 8s.
4d. Fine stone-cutters can earn as much as its. 6d. a day; electricians from 5s.
to 8s. 4d.; brassfounders, from 7s. 5d. to 10s. 5d.; sheetiron workers, from 7s.
6d. to 9s.; an ordinary foreman earns 8s. 4d. a day, and a really capable one as much as £380 per annum. These are such salaries as an officer, a magistrate, an engineer, or a Government clerk will often serve for years and years to obtain, if he does attain them at all. We may say with M. Leroy-Beaulieu The manual worker is the great beneficiary of our civilisation.5 All situations around him are falling, and his is rising.”
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 232
4. The Relations Between Capital and Labour: Employers and Men.
Notwithstanding the very satisfying position of the modern workman, we may say that the relations between masters and men, that is to say, between capital and labour, have never been more strained. The workman is becoming more and more exacting in proportion as his desires are more fully satisfied.
The more he obtains from his employer the greater grows his hostility towards him. He accustoms himself to see in his master only an enemy, and the master, not unnaturally, tends to regard his men as adversaries, whom it is his duty to mistrust, and finally he no longer dissimulates his antipathy for them.
But although we admit the wants and the evident wrongs of the workers, we must not deny those of the masters. The direction of a staff of working men is a matter of subtle and delicate psychology, demanding a conscientious study of men. The modern employer, who controls an anonymous crowd from a distance, knows nothing or nest to nothing about his men. With a little skill he could often succeed in re-establishing an understanding with them, as is proved by the prosperity of certain co-operative workshops, in which the employers and men form a veritable happy family.
But at present the master does not know his men, and controls them by intermediaries, and yet he is always astonished at meeting with nothing but hostility and antipathy, notwithstanding all the aid societies, savings banks,6
and so forth, to say nothing of the elevation of wages. The fact is that the personal relations of the past have been replaced by an anonymous and strictly rigid discipline. The employer will often make himself feared, but he no longer makes himself liked or respected, and he has lost all his prestige. Mistrustful of his men, he allows them no initiative, and is always wanting to interfere in their affairs (of course I am speaking for the Latin nations). He will found co-operative societies or providential societies, but he will never suffer them to be managed by the men themselves, so that the latter regard them as speculations, or instruments of bondage, or at the best as a disdainful charity.
They imagine they are being exploited or humiliated, and the result is irritation. For the rest, it argues a poor understanding of the psychology of crowds to believe that benefits of a collective kind are received with gratitude.
More often than not they merely provoke irritation, ingratitude, and contempt for the weakness of those who yield so readily to all their exactions.7 In this case the manner of giving is truly of greater importance than the gift. The Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 233
trades-unions, which, on account of their anonymity are able to exercise, and do exercise, a tyranny far more severe than that of the most inflexible employer, are religiously respected. They have prestige, and the workman always obeys them, even when he loses his wages by his obedience.
Again, the employer himself, in our great modern concerns, is tending steadily to become a mere subaltern in the pay of a company, and consequently has no motive in interesting himself in his staff. He does not know how to speak to a workman. A small employer who has himself been a workman will very often be a much harder master, but he will understand perfectly how to manage his men, rate them at their true worth, and save their amour-propre. At the present time the managers of workshops are more often than not young engineers from one of our great colleges, with any amount of theoretical instruction, and a profound ignorance of life and of men. They could not possibly know less than they do about their profession, and they will not admit that any customs of men or things can be superior to their abstract science.
They are all the more unsuited to their duties in that they profess the deepest scorn for the class from which the greater number of them are sprung.8
No one despises the peasant like the son of a peasant, nor the workman like the son of a workman, when he has succeeded in raising himself a little above his caste. Here again is one of those psychological verities which, like the greater number of psychological verities, for that matter, are disagreeable to state, but which must none the less be submitted to. Far more instructed than truly intelligent, the young engineer is totally unable to represent to himself-for that matter he does not try-the ideas and trains of reasoning of the ,men he is called upon to direct. Moreover, he does not preoccupy himself with the true means of influencing them. These matters are not taught in the schools, and therefore do not exist for him. His entire knowledge of psychology is confined to two or three ready-made ideas, which he has heard repeated by those about him, concerning the grossness and drunkenness of the artisan, and the necessity of keeping a tight rein on him, and so on. He catches only distorted glimpses of the ideas and conceptions of the workman. He will touch the delicate wheels of the human machine wrongly and clumsily. He will be weak or unreasonably despotic, according to his temperament, but in any case he will have no prestige and no real authority.
More than all else it is the insurmountable lack of comprehension which Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 234
exists between the masters and the men that renders their present relations so strained.
The conceptions which the masters and men form respectively of their respective ideas and sentiments possess one thing in common. Each party being unable to assimilate the thoughts, cravings, and tastes of the other party, they interpret what they know nothing about according to then- respective mentalities. The idea that the proletariat has of the bourgeois, that is to say, of the man who does not work with his hand, is simple in the extreme; he is a hard and rapacious being who makes the workman work only to get money out of him, who eats and drinks a great deal, and amuses himself with all kinds of excesses. His luxuries — however modest they may be, though they consist only of decent clothes and a fairly tidy house — are only a monstrous waste.
His literary or scientific labours are sheer foolery, the whims of an idler. He has so much money that he does not know what to do with it, while the workman has none. Nothing would be easier than to remedy this injustice, since a few wholesome laws would suffice to reconstitute society between nightfall and sunrise. Force the rich to give the people what belongs to them; it would merely be to repair a crying injustice. If the proletariat were able to doubt his own logic there would be no lack of orators, more servile before him than the courtiers of an Oriental despot before their master, ready to remind him incessantly of his imaginary rights. Unless, as I have already shown, certain notions had been firmly implanted in the popular subconsciousness by heredity, the Socialists must have triumphed long ago.
The conception which the bourgeois forms of the working man is quite as inexact. For the master, the man is a rude, drunken boor. Incapable of thrift, he squanders his wages, without counting them, at the wineshop, instead of spending the evening soberly in his room. Ought he not to be thankful for his lot, and does he not earn far more than he deserves? He is given libraries, he is allowed conferences, and cheap dwellings are built for him. What more can he want? Is he not incapable of looking after his own affairs? He must be controlled by a grip of iron, and if anything is done for his benefit it must always be done without his interference; he must he treated somewhat as a dog to which one throws a bone from time to time when it growls a little too loudly. Can we attempt to perfect such an imperfectible being? Besides, has not the world long ago assumed its final form, as regards political economy, Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 235
morality, and even religion? What is the use of all this hankering after change?
To sum up: among the Latin peoples at least, masters and men form to-day two absolutely inimical classes, and as both classes feel themselves to be absolutely incapable of overcoming the difficulties of their daily relations by themselves, they invariably appeal to the State, thus once again to prove the irresistible need of the French people to be governed, and its inability to conceive of society otherwise than as a hierarchy of castes under the all-powerful control of a master. Free competition, spontaneous association, and personal initiative are conceptions which are inaccessible to our national spirit. Its ideal is always the salaried functionary in his every manifestation, under the laws of a chief. This ideal no doubt reduces the cost of the individual to the lowest level, but it also demands a minimum of character and action.
The workman who cries out against his master could not do without him.
“Where should we get our bread then?“ one of them asked me one day. And thus we return once more to this fundamental — fact that the destinies of a nation are controlled by its character, not by its institutions.
Notes.
1. And sometimes a still higher profit. According to a document which has appeared in several papers the price of necessaries is often quadrupled by small retailers. To give only one example a consignment of salad is sold to the public in Paris for about 45 francs; of this the grower receives rather less than 10 francs. “We may say” says the writer of the article, “that in the provision market of the Halles de Paris the Parisian consumer pays 5 francs for what the provincial producer sells at 1 franc.” It is easy to see how much the public would gain if large capitalists would undertake the sale of provisions as they have already undertaken the sale of clothing.
2. But we must not forget that as the same person may have several titles to property, these figures have no absolute value. According to information received from the Minister of Finance, the number of entries, nominative or au porteur, were, at the end of 1896,4,522,449, and not 5,000,000 as in the report I have been quoting. Of course, we do not know among how many these entries really represent, despite the conclusions of the statistician in question.
3. This, it is true, is only the material side of the question, and there is also a psychological side which we must not neglect. What constitutes the scandal of Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 236
great fortunes, and provokes so many recriminations, is firstly their origin, which is only too often to be found in veritable financial depredations; secondly, the enormous power which they give to their possessors, allowing them to buy anything and everything, down to the title of member of the most learned academies; thirdly, the scandalous life led by the heirs of those who have founded these fortunes.
It is evident that a manufacturer who enriches himself by selling cheaply a commodity which was formerly dear, or by creating a new industry, such as the transformation of steel in the furnace, a new method of heating, &c., renders a service to the public in enriching himself. It is quite otherwise with the financiers of foreign extraction whose fortunes are made by lending the public money in a whole series of loans to rotten countries, or in placing on the market shares of dubious companies, from which operations they often derive a profit of 25 per cent. Their colossal fortunes are practically composed of the adding up of unpunished thefts, and every State must sooner or later find some means or other, whether it be by enormous death duties or by crushing taxation, to protect the public fortune from their thefts, and to prevent them from founding a State within the State. This necessity has already preoccupied several eminent philosophers.
4. In Aisne, a district of large farms, it is said that a few years ago there were coo important farms deserted; but we never hear of a single small property being abandoned by its proprietor.
5. One would gather from reading the speeches delivered in Parliament that the working class is the only class in society to be considered. It is certainly considered more than any other. The peasants, at once more numerous, and, I should imagine, quite as interesting, attract little enough attention. Pensions, banks, aid and assurance societies, economic dwellings, co-operative societies, abatements of taxes, and so forth. are all intended to benefit the working man and. both public and private authorities are always excusing themselves for not doing enough for him. The great manufacturers follow suit, and the workman is to-day surrounded with all kinds of solicitude.
6. Ninety-seven per cent. of our mining companies give their men pensions, and, according to M. Leroy-Beaulieu, more than half their earnings are turned over to the miners’ aid societies. All our directors of industrial companies are engaged in this course, which is a very easy one for them, for all this Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 237
generosity is at the expense of the shareholders, who, as every one knows, may be taxed and imposed upon at will. The Paris-Lyon railway spends £500,000
annually in this manner, and the other railway companies do the same.
7. This was curiously exemplified by the celebrated strike at Carmaux. The director found by experience what excessive benevolence and want of firmness may cost. He used to pay his men far more than they would have received elsewhere, and organised stores at which everything necessary for the consumption of the men was retailed to them at wholesale prices. Here is an extract from an interview with this director published in the Journal of August 13, 1895: “The Carmaux glassworks have always paid higher wages than any others. I paid such high wages because I wanted to make sure of tranquillity.
Every year, in fact, I have paid the men £400 more than they would have earned in another glassworks. And what has been the result of this enormous sacrifice? To create the very troubles I wished at all costs to avoid.” With a somewhat clearer knowledge of psychology the director would have foreseen that such concessions must necessarily provoke fresh demands. All primitive beings have always despised weakness and good-nature. The man who possesses these qualities has no prestige in their eyes; power is the only thing they venerate. Those tyrants who have been noted fur their prestige were seldom noted for their benevolence. It was sufficient it they coloured their tyranny with a somewhat remote and haughty benevolence to be adored.
8. The candidates for our great Government colleges ( l’École polytechnique, l’École centrale, &c.) are to-day recruited principally from the lowest classes of society. The entrance and final examinations demand efforts of memory and an amount of work almost impossible save for those who are spurred on by poverty. Although the fees of the École polytechnique are very low, the families of more than half of the pupils are unable to pay them. They are the sons of small tradesmen, domestic servants, workmen, or small clerks, and have for the most part already obtained a bursary from their lycée. According to an article by M. Cheysson in the Annales des Ponts et Chausées, for November, 1882, the number of bursars at the École polytechnique was about 30 per cent in 1850, and over 50 per cent in 1880. Since then the proportion has been increasing. According to a personal inquiry of my own, there were in 1897, 249 pupils out of 447 who paid no fees.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 238
Chapter 3: The Conflict of Peoples and Classes.
1. The Natural Conflict of Individuals and of Species.
The only process that Nature has been able to discover for the amelioration of species is to bring into the world far more creatures than she is able to nourish, and to establish between them a perpetual struggle in which only the strongest and the best adapted can survive. This conflict takes place not only between the different species, but also between the individuals of the same species, and it is often between the latter that it is most violent.
By this process of selection all creatures have been slowly perfected since the beginning of the world; by this process man has been evolved from the primitive types of the geological periods and our savage ancestors have slowly raised themselves to civilisation. From a sentimental point of view this struggle for existence with the survival of the fittest may appear to be extremely barbarous. But we must remember that were it not for this conflict we should still be miserably disputing an uncertain prey with all the animals we have finally subjected.
The struggle that Nature enforces on her creatures is universal and constant.
Wherever there is no conflict there is not only no progress, but a tendency towards rapid degeneration.
After showing us the conflict prevailing among all living creatures, the naturalists have shown us that the same conflict prevails in our own bodies.
“Far from lending themselves to a mutual harmony,” writes M. J. Kunstler,
“the different parts of the bodies of living creatures seem, on the contrary, to be in perpetual conflict with one another. Any development of one part has, as its correlative consequence, a diminution of the importance of the other parts.
In other words, any part that increases itself does so at the expense of other parts.
“Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire has already given a rough sketch of this phenomenon in establishing his ‘principle of the equilibrium of the organs.’ The modern theory of phagocytosis does not add very much to this principle, but it determines with greater clearness the process by which the phenomenon is produced.
“Not only do the organs struggle with one another, but all the parts of the body, no matter what they may be. For example, this conflict is to be observed Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 239
in the tissues, between the various elements of the same tissue. The evolution of the weaker elements is diminished or arrested, it may be ruthlessly sacrificed for the benefit of the stronger elements, which thereby become more flourishing. “Events would seem to denote that living organisms have only a determined quantity of evolutive power to expend. If, by means of any artifice or accident, this evolutionary force is directed to any one organ or process, the other organs are rendered more or less stationary, or may even recede. These facts, taken together, naturally lead one to compare them with the observed results of the law of primogeniture. When one of the children of a family is favoured in the division of the paternal goods, the share of the other children is by that fact diminished.”
Nature exhibits an absolute intolerance for weakness. All that is weak is promptly doomed to perish. She respects only physical or intellectual strength.
As intelligence is in strict relation to the amount of cerebral matter the individual possesses, we see that the rights of a living creature, in the eyes of Nature, are in close relation to the capacity of its skull. By this alone has man been able to arrogate to himself the right to kill the lower animals. If the latter could be consulted they would doubtless remark that the laws of Nature are very afflicting. The only consolation to be offered them is that Nature is full of other fatalities quite as afflicting. With a more highly developed nervous system the edible animals would perhaps form a sort of trades-union, in order to escape the butcher’s knife; but they would not gain much by that. Left to themselves, no longer able to rely on the interested and even very attentive cares of their breeders, what would be their fate? In countries still virgin they might pick up a miserable livelihood in the prairies, but there they would encounter the teeth of the carnivora, and if they escaped them it would be only for a slow death by hunger as soon as they became too old to seek out and dispute their food with their fellows.
To the weak, however, Nature has given a certain means of perpetuating themselves through the ages, in spite of all their enemies, by endowing them with a fecundity capable of tiring the appetite of all these enemies. For instance, a female herring deposits more than 60,000 eggs every year, so that a sufficient number of herring always escape to assure the continuation of the species. It would even appear that Nature has brought as much vigilance to bear to assure the perpetuity of the lowest species, the most obscure parasites, Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 240
as to assure the existence of the highest organisms. The life of the greatest genius is not of more importance to her than the existence of the most miserable microbe. Nature is neither cruel nor kind. She thinks only of the species, and remains indifferent — formidably indifferent — to the individual.
Our ideas of justice are unknown to her. We may protest against her laws, but we have to put up with her.
2. The Conflict of Peoples.
Has man succeeded in evading for his own part the hard laws of nature to which all creatures must submit? Have the relations between one people and another been a little softened by civilisation? Has the struggle become less bitter in the midst of humanity than between the species?
History teaches us the contrary. It tells us that the nations have always been struggling, have always continued to struggle, and that since the beginning of the world the right of the strongest has always been the arbiter of their destinies.
This was the law of the past, and it is the law of the present. Nothing denotes that it will not be the law of the future also.
Not that there is to-day any lack of theologians and philanthropists to protest against it. To them we owe the numberless volumes in which they appeal, in eloquent phrases, to right and to justice, a kind of sovereign divinities who direct the world from the depths of the skies. But the facts have always given the lie to their vain phraseology. These facts tell us that right exists only when it possesses the necessary strength to make itself respected. We cannot say that might is greater than right, for might and right are identical. No right can enforce itself without might. No one, I imagine, will doubt that a country which should confide in right and justice, and disband its army, would be immediately invaded, pillaged, and enslaved by its neighbours. If weak states such as Turkey, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and China are still able to subsist, it is only on account of the rivalry of the stronger states that wish to take possession of them. Obliged to consider the sensibilities of states as strong as themselves, the powerful states can despoil the weaker only with prudence, and can assimilate their provinces only by f