Never have the maledictions of their leaders been so furious; never has any people whose gods and thresholds were threatened by a pitiless enemy given vent to such imprecations. The more pacific of the Socialists confine themselves to demanding the expropriation of the upper classes. The more ardent wish for their utter annihilation. According to a sentiment expressed by one of them at a meeting, and cited by M. Boilley, “the skins of the infamous bourgeois will at least do to make gloves of.”
As far as they can, these ringleaders suit the action to the word. The list of crimes committed in Europe by the advance-guard of Socialism during the last fifteen years is very significant. Three sovereigns assassinated, one of them an Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 247
empress, and two others wounded; six prefects of police killed, and a considerable number of deaths caused by explosions in palaces, theatres, dwelling-houses, and railway stations. One of these explosions, that at the Liceo Theatre at Barcelona, had eighty-three victims; that at the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg killed eight persons, and wounded forty-five. The number of journals in Europe that egg on the movement is reckoned at forty. We may judge, from the violence of these skirmishes, what a savage ferocity will animate the struggle when it has become general.
Doubtless the past has seen struggles as violent, but the conditions of the opposing forces were very different, and the defence of society a much easier matter. Then the crowd had no political power. It had not yet learned how to associate itself and thus to form armies which blindly obeyed the orders of absolute chiefs. What association may do we learn from the last strike in Chicago. It ended in the strike of all the railway men in the United States, and had as its further results the burning of the palaces of the Exposition and the immense workshops of the Pulman Company. The Government assumed the upper hand only by suspending civil rights, proclaiming martial law, and delivering veritable battle to the insurgents. The strikers were shot down without pity, and defeated; but we can imagine the hatred that must fill the hearts of the survivors, among both the vanquished workmen and the successful masters, whose ruin the former had provoked by arson, pillage, and massacre.
The United States would seem fated to furnish the Old World with the first examples of the struggles which will take place between intelligence, capacity, capital, and the terrible army of the unfit of which I shall presently speak, the social sediment which has been so greatly increased by the modern development of industry.
The issue of the struggle in the United States will doubtless be their division into a number of rival republics. Their fate does not concern us; it interests us only as an example. This example will perhaps save Europe from the complete triumph of Socialism; that is to say, from a return to the most shameful barbarism.
The social question will be singularly complicated in the United States by the fact that the great republic is divided into regions whose interests are very different, and consequently conflicting. M. de Varigny has very well presented Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 248
this fact in the following lines —
“Washington continues to be the neutral ground on which political questions are decided, but it is not the place in which these questions arise and affect American life. The life of the nation is to be found elsewhere; its unity is not established, and it has no homogeneity. Under the apparent union of a great people — and union is not unity — there are profound divergencies, diverse interests, and conflicting tendencies. They are only emphasised by time; they grow more evident as history unrolls itself; and they assert themselves in such facts as the War of Secession, which brought the Union within air inch of destruction.
“If we examine closely this vast republic, which Russia and China alone surpass in extent of territory, and which already ranks fifth in the world in respect of population, we shall first of all be struck by this fact-that the United States are divided into three sections by a geographical and commercial grouping; the Southern States, those of the North and West, and those of the Pacific; and already there are germs of division between the North and the West. The various interests of these groups result in incompatible demands, and for fifteen years the politicians have been seeking, without discovering, the means of making industries live and prosper under a common tariff which in reality call for a special régime. The South produces raw material, such as sugar and cotton, the North is manufacturing, the West agricultural, and the Pacific agricultural and mining. The system of protection now in vogue is ruining the South, embarrassing the West, and making the fortune of the North, to which free trade would deliver a terrible blow.” But we must not too closely forecast the fate of any nation on a few general indications. Our destiny is still concealed by the impenetrable mists of the future. It is often possible to foresee the direction of the forces which lead us, but it is futile to seek to define their effects or discern their course. All that we can say is, that the defence of the old societies will become very difficult. The evolution of things has sapped the foundation of the edifice of the past ages.
The army, the last pillar of the edifice, the only one that might yet sustain it, has entered on a process of disintegration, and its worst enemies are now to be found in the educated classes. Our ignorance of certain incontestable evidences of psychology, an ignorance which will strike the historians of the future with amazement, lids led the greater number of the European states almost entirely Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 249
to renounce their means of defence, by replacing the professional army, such as England so rightly contents herself with, and with which she dominates the world, by undisciplined crowds, who are supposed to learn one of the most difficult of professions in a few months. You have not made soldiers of millions of men simply because you have taught them drill. You have merely produced mobs without discipline, resistance, or courage, more dangerous for those who try to handle them than to their enemies.2
The danger of these multitudes, from the point of view of social defence, resides not only in their military insufficiency, but in the spirit which animates them. The professional armies formed a special caste, with sentiments apart, strangers to everything that did not interest them directly, and having nothing to look for from outside. But these crowds who only pass sufficient time in the army to suffer the tediousness of military life, and to regard it with horror, what sentiments of caste are they likely to have? Taken from the workshop, the factory, the dockyard, where they will promptly return, of what value will they be in the defence of a social order that they disdain, and incessantly hear attacked? This is the danger that the Governments do not yet see, and on which it would consequently be quite useless to insist. I doubt, however, if a single European State can exist long without a permanent army, relying only on universal compulsory service. Doubtless the latter satisfies our eager craving for a low equality, but is it really admissible that the satisfaction of such a craving should endanger the very existence of a race?
The future will inform both nations and Governments on this point.
Experience is the only book that nations can learn from. Unfortunately the reading of this book has always cost them terribly dear.
Notes.
1. This is very evident, since competition is scarcely possible except between individuals of the same class: and on account of the increasing number of the competitors, the competition is becoming fiercer. The competitors put up with uric another because they cannot do otherwise, but the tenderest sentiment they entertain for one another is a ferocious jealousy. The following description of the salle de garde of medical students, recently published in a medical journal, clearly shows the nature of the sentiments that the necessities of civilisation are steadily propagating in all classes:
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 250
“To-day the salle de garde has become orderly, but frigid and taciturn. The medical student is no more the jolly companion of old, ready to chum up with everybody; he is frozen in his own dignity, and imagines that the eyes of the world are on him. Each student keeps guard over himself, and keeps his ideas to himself, when he has any, for fear lest his neighbour should profit by them.
Thanks to the formidable prospect of the examinations, lie shuts himself jealously within himself. The comrade of to-day will be the rival of to-morrow, and in the race for diplomas friendship must be forgotten.” 2. I hope one day to enter more fully into these questions in a study of the psychology of war. It is plain that we cannot, for reasons of a purely moral order, suppress the universal compulsory service, which has the advantage of giving a little discipline to men who are all but destitute of that quality; but we might arrive at a very simple compromise: reduce compulsory service to one year, and maintain a permanent army et 200,000 to 300,000 men formed as in England of enlisted volunteers, who would make a military career their profession.
Chapter 4: The Social Solidarity.
1. Social Solidarity and Charity.
The struggle which, as we have just seen, is taking place in the heart of society, brings together adversaries who are very unequally endowed. We shall see how the weaker have been able, by associating their forces, to render the warfare less unequal.
For many people the term “social solidarity” always recalls, to some extent, the idea of charity. Its true sense, however, is very different. The societies of the present day are approaching solidarity of interests and relinquishing charity. It is even very probable that the societies of the future will regard charity as a low and barbarous conception, altruistic in nothing but appearance, thoroughly egoistic in essence, and generally noxious.
The term solidarity signifies merely association, and by no means charity or altruism. Charity is a noxious and anti-social sentiment; altruism is an artificial and impotent sentiment. When we examine the most useful works of solidarity
— insurance and mutual aid societies, societies for granting pensions, co-operative societies, &c. — we find that they are never based on charity or Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 251
altruism, but simply on the combined interests of a number of people who more often than not have never seen one another. Having paid a certain annual subscription, the subscriber receives a pension in proportion to this subscription in the event of sickness or age. It is a matter of privilege without benevolence, just as the man who insures his property against fire has a right, in case of fire, to the amount for which he has insured it. Of course he profits by the collective subscriptions, since the sum lie receives is far greater than the sum he has paid, but all the members of the collectivity may profit in the same way, and he owes nothing to any man. He profits by a privilege which he has bought, not by a favour, and it is important to mark clearly the profound difference between associations of interests which are based on financial combinations guided by the calculation of probabilities and the works of charity which are based on the hypothetical good wishes and uncertain altruism of a small number of individuals. Works of charity have no real social value, and are very justly rejected by a large number of Socialists, who on this point are at one with the most eminent thinkers. That there are such institutions as hospitals and assistance bureaux, conducted by the State at, the public expense, we can only be thankful; but charity on the whole is more harmful in practice than useful. In default of an impossible amount of supervision it serves more often than not to support a whole class of individuals who merely exploit pity in order to live in idleness. The obvious result is to prevent a number of destitute people from working, as they find the resources of charity more convenient and even more productive, and to increase professional mendicity to an enormous extent. The countless charitable associations for the assistance of the unemployed, or young consumptives, or widows without resources, or deserted Chinese infants, &c., &c., are at most only of use to afford occupation for unemployed old ladies, or to idle men of the world, who wish to obtain salvation at a cheap rate, and are glad to occupy their leisure by becoming presidents, secretaries, committee members, treasurers, &c., of something or other. Thus they procure the illusion that they have been of some use here below. And herein they are very greatly mistaken.1
The movement in favour of solidarity, that is to say, the association of similar interests, which is so generally evident, is perhaps the most definite of the new social tendencies, and is probably one of those that will have the greatest effect on our evolution. To-day the word solidarity is heard far oftener than the old Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 252
shibboleths of equality and fraternity, and is tending to supplant them. It is by no means synonymous. As the final object of the association of interests is to struggle against other interests, it is evident that solidarity is only a particular form of the universal conflict of classes and individuals. Understood as it is to-day, solidarity reduces our old dreams of fraternity to the very closely circumscribed limits of associations.
This tendency towards solidarity in the shape of associations, a tendency which we see extending itself every day, has various causes. The most important of these is the abatement of individual will and initiative, and the frequent uselessness of these qualities under the conditions which have arisen from the modern developments of economics. The need of isolated action is becoming rarer and rarer. It is almost impossible for individual efforts to exert themselves to-day except through the agency of associations, that is to say, by the aid of collectivities.
A still profounder cause is impelling the modern man to association. He has lost his gods, he sees his home threatened, he no longer has faith in the future, and he feels more and more the need of something to lean on. Association replaces the impotent egoism of the individual by a collective and powerful and collective egoism by which every one profits. In default of classification by the ties of religion, the ties of blood, the ties of politics, and all the different ties which are every day growing weaker, the solidarity of interests is able to unite men with sufficient strength. This kind of solidarity is almost the only means remaining to the weak, that is to say, to the greater number, by which they may struggle against the powerful, and be not too greatly oppressed by them.
In the universal struggle whose laws we have already traced the weaker are always defenceless before the stronger, and the stronger do not hesitate to crush them. Lords, feudal, financial, or industrial, have hitherto never troubled much about those whom circumstances have placed below them.
To this universal oppression, that neither religions nor laws have hitherto been able to combat with stronger weapons than empty words, the modern man has hitherto found nothing to oppose bait the principle of association, which consolidates all the individuals of the same group. Solidarity is the best arm that the weak possess in order to efface to some extent the consequences of social inequalities, and to render them a little less hard. Far from being Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 253
contradicted by natural laws, it has the merit of being based on them. Science knows nothing of liberty, or at least does not accept it in her own domain, since she discovers everywhere phenomena ruled by an inflexible determinism.
Still less does she believe in equality, for modern biology sees in the inequalities of creatures the fundamental condition of their progress. Neither will she accept fraternity, since merciless war has been a constant phenomenon since the remotest geologic periods. Solidarity, on the contrary, is not contradicted by any known fact. Certain animals, and above all the weakest, are only able to exist by a rigid solidarity, which alone makes it possible for them to defend themselves against their enemies.
The association of the similar interests of the various members of human societies is assuredly very ancient, since it is to be found in our earliest records of history, but in all ages it was always more or less hampered and limited. It was barely possible on the narrow region of economic and religious interests.
The Revolution thought to do a useful work in suppressing the corporations.
No measure could have been more disastrous to the democratic cause that the men of the Revolution thought they were defending. To-day these abolished corporations are everywhere reappearing under new names and new forms. In the modern developments of industry, which have considerably increased the division of labour, this renaissance was inevitable.
2. The Modern Forms of Solidarity.
Now that we have clearly marked the difference between those solidarities which are based on combined interests and those which repose on charity, let us take a rapid glance at the various forms of modern solidarity.
It is at once evident that a solidarity between individuals does not exist simply because they are engaged in a common work, the success of which depends on the association of their efforts; indeed, we very often find the contrary. The director of a factory, his men, and his shareholders, have theoretically a common interest in working for the success of the concern on which their existence or fortune depends. In reality this far-fetched solidarity only covers very conflicting interests, and the parties in contact are by no means actuated by reciprocal sentiments of benevolence. The workman wants his salary to be raised, which can be done only by reducing the shareholders’
profits. The shareholders, on the contrary, represented by the director, have Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 254
every reason to reduce the profits of the workmen in order to increase their oxen; so that the solidarity which theoretically ought to exist between workmen, directors, and shareholders has no real existence.
True solidarity is possible only between persons who have the same immediate interests. Such are the interest that have called into being the modern institution of the trades-union, which we shall presently examine.
There are, however, certain forms of association which are able to consolidate interests that are naturally conflicting. They associate the contrary interests of producers and consumers by offering them reciprocal advantages.
The producer voluntarily contents himself with a reduced profit on each article sold if the sale of a large number of articles is assured to him, and this sale is rendered certain by the association of a considerable number of purchasers.
In the great English co-operative societies there are only identical interests associated, as the consumer is at the same time the producer, these societies producing almost everything that they consume, and even owning farms producing wheat, sheep and cattle, milk, vegetables, and so forth. They present this very great advantage that the weaker and less capable members benefit by the intelligence of the most capable, who are placed at the head of these enterprises, which could not prosper without them. The Latin countries have not arrived at this yet.
I have elsewhere shown that it is by themselves administrating their various associations, and notably their cooperative societies, that the Anglo-Saxon workers have learned to manage their own affairs. The French workman is too deeply imbued with the Latin concepts of his race to permit of his possession of the initiative necessary to found and administer societies which would allow him to ameliorate his lot. If, thanks to a few intelligent leaders, he does sometimes found such a society, he immediately confides its administration to second-rate men of business, whom he treats with suspicion, and the affair soon comes to grief.
These Latin societies, which are administered by intermediaries indifferent to their success, are conducted with the meticulous and complicated procedure peculiar to our national temperament, and vegetate miserably. An additional cause of their ill success is that the Latin workman, having little foresight, will buy his provisions from day to day at retail, from small shopkeepers, with whom he gossips, and who very willingly give him credit, for which he has to Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 255
pay dearly, rather than of the large stores at which he must pay ready money, and where he cannot talk half the day over a purchase. It would, however, be greatly to his interest to rid himself of intermediaries by means of co-operative societies. The sum paid in one year in France to the middlemen, who separate the producer from the consumer, has been reckoned at more than
£280,000,000, or twice the amount we pay in taxes. The exactions of the middleman are far more severe than those of the capitalist, but the workman does not see them, and in consequence supports them without a murmur.
The most widespread of modern forms of association, and at the same time most anonymous, is the public company. As M. Leroy-Beaulieu says very truly, it is “the ruling trait of the economic organisation of the modern world....
Industry, finance, commerce, and even agriculture, and colonial enterprises-it extends to everything. It is already in almost every nation the habitual instrument of the mechanical production and the exploitation of the forces of nature.... The anonymous company seems to be called on to become the ruler of the world; it is the true heir of the old feudal system and the fallen aristocracy. It will be the emperor of the world; for the hour is approaching when the world will be issued in shares.” It is, as out author says further, a product not of wealth, but of the democracy, and the dissemination of capital in many hands.
Exploitation by shares is, in fact, the only form of association possible to small capitalists. It constitutes Collectivism in appearance, but only in appearance, for it is a Collectivism which one may enter freely, and leave freely, and the profit is strictly proportioned to the effort, that is to say, to the sum of little economies which each individual brings to it. On the day when the workman becomes the proprietor, anonymous but interested, of the shop in which he works, by means of the system of shares, an immense advance will have been accomplished. It is perhaps only by this method that the economic emancipation of the workman will ever take place — if it ever does take place
— and by which the natural and social inequalities of man may be to some extent effaced.
Hitherto the public company has not penetrated so far as the popular classes.
The only mode of association approaching to the public company (though in reality very unlike it) known to the people, is the system of profit-sharing.:Many societies founded on this principle have succeeded very Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 256
well. If there are not very many such societies it is because the proper organisation of such enterprises demands very superior and therefore always rare capacities.
I may mention as the oldest and most remarkable of these associations the association of painters founded in 1829 by Leclaire, and continued by Redculy et Cie of Paris; the factory of Guise in Aisne; that of Laecken in Belgium, &c.
The first divides 25 per cent. of the profits among its members, who are all workmen, and after a certain number of years gives them a pension of £60.
There are now 920 of these pensions.
The Guise factory is a kind of community, in which the association of capital anal labour have produced excellent results. In 1894 it did business to the extent of more than £200,000, and made a profit of nearly £30,000.
There are now more than 300 establishments of this kind in France and abroad. The most celebrated of these societies in England is that of the Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale, which was founded in 1844 by an association of twenty-eight workmen who possessed a little capital. In 1891 it counted 12,000 associates and a capital of £360,000. It does business to the extent of about £300,000, and yields an annual profit of £52,000.
Associations of this kind have had as great a success in Belgium; notably the Woruit at Ghent. There are also many very prosperous concerns of the same kind in Germany. A certain number have been founded in northern Italy in the last few years, but there, as in France, they will perish for want of proper management. Their organisation is altogether Latin in character, which means that their fate will depend entirely on the individuals placed at their head, as the members have neither the capacity nor, so far as that goes, the intention to administer them themselves as the Anglo-Saxon workmen do.
The great danger of these societies is that the sharing of profits necessarily implies the sharing of losses, which are and must be frequent in industry. As long as there is a profit the associates are perfectly at one, but as soon as there is a loss the harmony, as a general thing, is quickly broken. America has recently furnished us with a very striking proof of this. The destruction by fire of the gigantic establishment of the Pulman Company, and the acts of savage vandalism and pillage which followed, shows us plainly what becomes of these great enterprises when they are no longer attended with success.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 257
The Pulman Company had built enormous factories occupying 6,000 men, and a charming town for the latter and their families. This town counted 13,000 inhabitants, and was provided with every modern comfort, a large park, theatre, library, &c. The houses could be acquired only by the workmen, who became proprietors by paying a small annual sure.
As long as affairs were in full swing peace and abundance reigned. The men had deposited nearly £160,000 in the savings banks in a few years.
But the orders lessened on account of the reduced profits of the railway companies, the customers of the company, so that the latter, in order not to work at a loss by employing all their men, were obliged to cut down their wages from 9s. 2d. a day to 6s. 3d. A veritable revolution followed. The workshops were pillaged and burnt, and the workers determined on a strike which spread to the railways and led to such scenes of violence that President Cleveland was obliged to proclaim martial law. The revolt was finally brought to an end by firing on the strikers.
I have little faith in these profit-sharing societies, which place the man too much at the mercy of his master, and bind him to that master for too long a time. The master has no real interest in sharing his profits with the men, since it is certain that they will always refuse to share in the losses also, and will revolt as soon difficulties appear. Moreover, it is only out of sheer philanthropy that a master consents to share his profits with his men. Nothing can force him to do so. It is possible to found a durable institution on interest, which is a solid and unchanging sentiment, but not on philanthropy, which is a fluctuating and always ephemeral sentiment. Philanthropy, too, is too like pity to inspire any gratitude in its objects. I imagine that Mr. Pulman, before his burning factories, must have acquired those valuable ideas of the value of philanthropy which are not to be learned from books, and yet the ignorance of which often costs so dear.
The only possible form of profit-sharing which absolutely respects the interests of both master and man, and which makes them independent of one another, is profit-sharing by means of shares, which implies participation in the losses as well as in the gains, and is the only equitable and therefore acceptable arrangement. The £1 share is within the reach of every purse, and I am amazed that no factories have yet been started in which the shareholders will be solely workmen. When once the workman shall be thus transformed into a capitalist Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 258
interested in the success of his business, his present demands will have no raison d’être, since he will be working solely for himself. The workman who should wish for any reason to change his workshop would merely sell his shares like any other shareholder in order to regain his liberty. The only difficulty would arise in finding the men capable of directing the factory, but experience would soon teach the workers the value of these capable men, and the necessity of securing them by paying them at a suitable rate.
I gave a few hints on this subject a long time ago in one of my books. This book recently falling into the hands of a Belgian engineer, M. Bourson, who is occupied in industrial matters, he was struck with the practical utility of my idea, and wrote to me that he was going to attempt to realise it. I sincerely hope he will succeed. The great difficulty, evidently, resides in the subscription of the necessary capital, which cannot be demanded from men without any money. The only method that I can see is to sell in part or in totality an already existing factory to the workmen employed in it, as it might be sold to ordinary shareholders, but so that the workmen might acquire it gradually, Let us, for example, suppose that the proprietor of a factory wished to convert his business into a company, as many do nowadays. Hitherto, we will say, he has always paid his men 5s. 6d. a day. He will now pay them only 4s. 9d. or 4s. 6d.
a day, and the