As for the contractors who are obliged to accept the tariffs imposed by the municipalities, they have got out of the difficulty in a similar fashion, by employing none but the most capable workmen, that is to say, precisely those who have no need of airy protection, since their capacity insures their receiving the highest salaries everywhere. The obligatory tariffs have merely compelled the contractors to eliminate the mediocre workers, whom they formerly employed in work of secondary importance, ill-paid, no doubt, but still paid. In short, the very measures which were designed to protect those workers who by reason of their inferior capacities required protection have turned against them, and have had the sole result of rendering their situation far more difficult than before.
The great lesson to be learnt from all this is that which is indicated by M. des Rouziers in his remarks on the sweating system: “No one can dispense with the workman of intrinsic value.”
This, in fact, is the clearest result of the competition set up by the modern economic necessities. Everywhere it makes the most capable triumph, and eliminates the less capable. This formula is precisely the law of selection, whence derives the perfection of species in the whole series of living creatures, and from which man has as yet been unable to escape.
The capable have everything to gain from this competition; the incapable can only lose by it. We can thus readily imagine that the Socialists wish for its suppression; but even supposing that they could destroy it in the countries in Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 267
which they had gained the mastery, how could they destroy it in the countries where they had no influence, the countries whose products, despite all protective duties, would immediately invade the market?
We saw, while considering the commercial struggles between the East and the West, and between the Western nations themselves, that competition is an inevitable law of the present age. It exists absolutely everywhere, and all the checks that one attempts to impose on it only make matters worse for its victims. It enforces itself whenever there is a question of ameliorating any branch of labour whatever, whether scientific or industrial, whether of private or public interest. The following example, which occurred under my own eyes, shows at once the necessity of competition and the results.
A friend of mine, an engineer, was appointed to the head of an important enterprise, supported by the Government, which consisted in remaking, with great precision, the map of a country. He was left perfectly free to choose his employés, and to pay their what he willed, on the sole condition that he was not to exceed the annual sum which was allowed him for that purpose. The sum being little enough, and the employés many, the engineer started by dividing the sum equally between them. Finding that the wont was being done slowly and indifferently, he decided to pay his employés solely by the piece, by devising means of automatic control which allowed him to verify the value of the work executed. Each capable employé soon began to do three or four times as much work as the work of three or four ordinary employés, and earned more than twice his previous salary. The incapable or semi-capable employés, being unable to make enough to live on, eliminated themselves, and in less than two years the allowance made by the State, which at fist was hardly sufficient, exceed the expenses by 30 per cent. Thus the State, by this operation, obtained better work at a less expense, and the capable employés saw their salaries doubled. Every one was satisfied, except of course the incapable workers mho had been eliminated by their incapacity. This result, which was a very happy one both for the progress of the work and for the public finances, was evidently a very unhappy one for the inefficient employés.
However great may be our sympathy for the latter, can we say that the general interest should have been sacrified to them?
The reader who enters into this question will quickly perceive the difficulty of one of the most important social problems, and the impotence of the means Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 268
proposed by the Socialists to solve it.
2. The Unadapted Through Degeneracy.
To the class of outcasts produced by competition we must add the hosts of degenerates of all kinds-alcoholic, tuberculous, &c. — who are preserved by modern medical science. It is precisely these individuals that form almost the only class that abandons itself without check to the most disturbing fecundity, confirming the law I have expounded, that in the present period societies perpetuate themselves above all by their lowest elements.
We are aware of the progress of alcoholism through all Europe. Drink-shops are rapidly multiplying themselves everywhere, as much in France as in other countries.1 I can by no means interest myself in the lamentations of the doctors and statisticians on this point firstly, because their lamentations are evidently useless; and, secondly, because the public-house is absolutely the only distraction of millions and millions of poor devils; it is their sole means of illusion, and the only centre of sociability at which many and many a gloomy life is illumined for a moment. They have been forbidden the church; what would be left them if they were deprived of the public-house? The consumption of alcohol is first of all an effect; then it becomes a cause. And it is only in excess that alcohol is hurtful. If the mischief caused by the excessive drinking of alcohol is serious, it is because it compromises the future by the hereditary degeneracy which it causes.
The danger of all these degenerates — rickety, epileptic, insane, &c, — lies in the tact that they multiply in excess, and produce a crowd of individuals who are too inferior to adapt themselves to civilisation, and who are consequently its inevitable enemies.
“We give life to-day,” writes M. Schera, “to a host of creatures that Nature has condemned; sickly, lingering, half-dying infants; and we regard it as a great victory that we have thus been able to prolong their days, and this altogether modern preoccupation of society on the subject we regard as a great progress.... But this is the irony of the matter. These devoted and ingenious cares which give so many human beings to society do not present them to society sane, healthy, and vigorous, but infected with vices of blood which they contracted at birth; and as neither our customs nor our laws can prevent these people from marrying, they still inevitably transmit the poison. Hence Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 269
there must evidently arise an alteration of the general health, a contamination of the race.”
Dr. Salomon has cited a very striking example of the kind of case that is met with every day. It is that of the offspring of the union of a drunkard with an epileptic. There were twelve children, every one of them either consumptive or epileptic.
“What is to be done with such lamentable creatures?” asks Dr. Salomon, “and would it not have been a thousand times better if none of them had ever seen the light? And what an expense such families are to society, to the budget of public assistance, and even the budget of the criminal courts! Hospital inmate or gaol-bird; the child of the drunkard can hardly aspire to be anything else.
Multiply the hospitals and the police; this, it seems, must be the future of civilised societies, which will finally perish through this state of thins, if fecundity becomes the special characteristic of those for whom sterility is an absolute duty.”
Many other writers, and among them the most eminent, have been preoccupied with this difficult problem. This is what Darwin has to say on the subject: —
“With savages the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws, and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox.
Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of men. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”
We cannot deny that if a benevolent deity were to suppress in every generation the increasing army of the degenerates which we so carefully protect he would be rendering an immense service to civilisation and to the degenerates themselves; but since our humanitarian sentiments demand that we Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 270
should preserve them and favour their reproduction we can but suffer the consequences of these sentiments. At all events we know that all these degenerates, as John Fiske justly remarks, constitute an element of inferior vitality, comparable to a cancer implanted in healthy tissues, and all their efforts tend to abolish a civilisation which inevitably results in their own misery. They are, in fact, certain recruits for Socialism. As we advance in our study of the question we see of what varied and dangerous elements the multitude of the disciples of the new faith is composed.
3. The Artificial Production of the Unadapted.
To the host of the unfit created by competition and degeneration must be added, as regards the Latin nations, the degenerates produced by artificial incapacity. These artificial failures are made at great expense by our colleges and universities. The host of graduates, licentiates, instructors, and professors without employment will one day, perhaps, constitute one of the most serious dangers against which society will have to defend itself.
This class of artificial outcasts is of quite modern formation. Its origin is psychological; it is the consequence of the modern ideas.
The men of each period live by a certain number of political, religious, or social ideas, which are regarded as indisputable dogmas, of which they must necessarily suffer the effects. One of the most powerful of such ideas to-day is that of the superiority to be derived from the theoretical instruction given in our colleges. The schoolmaster and the university professor, rather looked down upon of old, have suddenly become the great modern fetiches. It is they who are to remedy the inequalities of nature, efface the distinctions of class, and win our battles for us.
Instruction thus becoming the universal panacea, it was indispensable to stuff the heads of the young citizens with Greek, Latin, history, and scientific formulae. No sacrifice, no expense, was too great. The fabrication of schoolmasters, bachelors, and licentiates became the most important of the Latin industries. It is almost the only one in fact, that remains prosperous.
When studying, in another chapter, the Latin conception of education, we saw the results produced by the French method of instruction. We saw that it permanently warps the judgment, stuffs the brain with phrases and formulae Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 271
which are quickly forgotten, in no way prepares the pupil for the necessities of modern life, and, in short, only creates an immense army of men who are incapable, useless, and, consequently, rebels.
But how is it that our system of education, instead of merely being useless, as of old, is to-day manufacturing outcasts and rebels?
The reason is very clear. Our theoretical education, instilled from our text-books, prepares the pupil for absolutely nothing but public functions, and makes the pupil absolutely unfitted for any other career, so that he is obliged, in order to live, to make a furious rush toward the State-paid employments. But as the number of candidates is immense, and the number of places very small, the great majority fail, and find themselves without any means of existence-outcasts, in fact, and naturally insurgents.
The figures on which these remarks of mine are based will show the extent of this evil.
The University of France creates about 1,200 graduates every year, and has 200 professional chairs at her disposal. It thus leaves a thousand on the pavement. They naturally turn to other professions. But everywhere they find the dense army of graduates of every faculty, seeking for every kind of employment, even the most indifferent. For 40 situations as copyist open every year at the Prefecture of the Seine there are 2,000 or 3,000 candidates. For 150
situations as schoolmasters in the schools of Paris there are 15,000 candidates.
Those who fail gradually lower their pretensions, and are often glad enough to take refuse in addressing envelopes, by which means they can earn 1s. 8d.
a day by working twelve hours without ceasing. It is not very difficult to divine the sentiments that fill the hearts of these wretched labourers.
As for the successful candidates, it must not be supposed that their lot is very enviable. As Government clerks at £60, magistrates at £72, engineers of the Ecole Centrale at £50 — as draughtsmen in a railway office or chemists in a factory, they are not nearly so well off as a working man of average capacity, and are also far less independent.
But why this obstinate pursuit of official employment? Why do not the army of unemployed graduates fall back on industry, agriculture, commerce, or the manual trades?
For two reasons. Firstly, because they are totally incapable, on account of Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 272
their theoretical education, of performing any but the easy duties of bureaucrats, magistrates, or professors. But even then they might recommence their education by apprenticing themselves. They do not do so — and this is the second reason — on account of the insurmountable prejudice against manual labour, industry, and agriculture, which is to be met with in all the Latin nations and nowhere else.
The Latin nations, in fact, in spite of deceptive appearances, possess a temperament so little democratic that manual labour, which is very highly esteemed by the English aristocracy, is by them regarded as humiliating or even dishonourable. The humblest Government clerk, the smallest professor, the humblest of copyists, regards himself as a personage by the side of a mechanic, a foreman, a fitter, a farmer, who none the less will often bring infinitely more intelligence, reason, and initiative to bear in his calling than does the clerk or the professor in his. I have never been able to discover, anti I am certain that no one will ever discover, in what a Latin master, a clerk, a professor of grammar or of history could be considered the intellectual superior of a good cabinet-maker, a capable fitter, or an intelligent foreman.
If after comparing them from an intellectual point of view we do the same from a utilitarian point of view we shall quickly admit that the clerk and the professor are greatly inferior to the good working man, and it is for this reason that the latter is as a general thing far better paid.
The only visible superiority that one can recognise in the former is the fact that they usually wear a “redingote” — as a rule threadbare enough, but still preserving the appearance of a “redingote” while the foreman and the artisan work in a blouse, an article of wear which is a little in disfavour with the fashionable public. If we could analyse the psychologic influence exercised in France by these two garments we should find that it is absolutely enormous-certainly far greater than the influence of all the constitutions fabricated in the last hundred years by the host of unemployed lawyers. If, by means of any magic ring, we could be brought to believe that the blouse was as seemly and becoming as the “redingote,” all our conditions of existence would be transformed in a single day. We should see a revolution in manners and thoughts of which the effects would be far greater than all those of the past. But we have not advanced so far yet, and the Latin races will suffer the weight of their prejudices and errors for a long time yet.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 273
The consequences of the Latin disdain of manual work will be still graver in the future. It is on account of this sentiment that we see the immense army of the unadapted created by our system of education increasing more and more.
Observing the lack of consideration from which manual labour suffers, feeling that they are despised by the middle class and the university, the peasant and the workman finally get it into their heads that they belong to an inferior caste, from which they must at any price escape. Then their one dream is to thrust their sons, by dint of privation, into the caste of graduates. They succeed only in making outcasts of their sons; incapable of rising to the ranks of the bourgeois through lack of money, and incapable on account of their education of following the trade of their father. These outcasts will all their lives bear the weight of the lamentable errors of which their parents have made them the victims. They will be certain recruits for the Socialists.
Not only by reason of the instruction it affords, but also on account of its highly undemocratic spirit, the present university will have played the most disastrous part in France. In affixing its contempt to all manual work, and all that is not theory, words, or phrases, and in making its pupils believe that their diplomas confer on them a kind of intellectual nobility, which will place them in a superior caste, and give them access to wealth, or at least to comfort, the university has played a lamentable part. After long and costly studies the graduate is forced to recognise that he has acquired no elevation of mind, that he has by no means escaped from his caste, and that his life is to begin again.
In the face of the time lost, of their faculties blunted for all useful work, of the perspective of the humiliating poverty which awaits them, how should they not become insurgents?2
Of course our university authorities see nothing of all this. Their work inspires them-like all the apostles with the keenest enthusiasm, and they lose no occasion to intone a chant of triumph.
“One must read,” writes M. H. “the books of M. Liard and Lavisse, the two architects-in-chief of our secondary education, in order to comprehend the kind of enthusiasm that has seized them before the result of their works. Do they hear the low but formidable murmur of all those that have been deceived by the university, who have been raised only to fall into greater misery, who are everywhere beginning to be known as the intellectual proletariat?” Alas! no, they do not hear it; and if they did they would hardly understand.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 274
They have performed a bad work-a work far worse than that of Marat and Robespierre, who at least were not guilty of corrupting the mind; but can we say that the work is truly theirs? When the minds of men are possessed by certain powerful illusions, how can we blame the obscure agents, the blind puppets, who have merely obeyed the general tendencies of their times!
The hour has yet to sound when our terrible illusions on the worth of the Latin system of education shall have vanished. At present they are making themselves felt more than ever. Every day a laborious youth, more and more numerous, goes up to the university to demand of it the realisation of its dreams and hopes. The number of students, which was 10,900 in 1878, and 17,600 in 1888, is now 27,000. What an army of outcasts, of rebels, of partisans for the Socialism of the future!
And as though the number of these future outcasts were not yet great enough, there are those who would demand of the State the means to increase their number. A few clear-sighted people see the danger, and point it out. In vain; their voices sound idly, unechoed in a desert.
“The millions that these bursaries cost the Budget,” said M. Bouge recently, before the Chamber of Deputies, “are a small matter beside the social problem of preventing them from becoming a means of turning out outcasts. Too many such are being formed already, without the State assisting the process by the distribution of bursaries.”3
Notes.
1. There were 350,000 in 1850, 364,000 in 1870, 372,000 in 1881, 430,000
in 1891, of which 31,000 were in Paris.
2. One may form some idea of the increasing progress of socialism among the French university youth by reading the manifesto, full of hatred and fury against society, recently published by the “ Collectivist Students.” 3. As our superior classical instruction is a matter of luxury, which can be of use only to those that possess a certain amount of leisure, there is not a single serious reason for giving it gratuitously. This is perfectly understood by the Americans. A young man who should feel the need of it, and who should manifest an aptitude for it, should first of all find some means of earning his living, and this would he an excellent preparation for life. This is what the Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 275
students -poor students-to in a truly democratic country, such as America. In an article on the University of Chicago, which he has visited, one of the most illustrious French savants, M. Moissan, expresses himself as follows: —
“In most of the American universities you will find young men without means, who, in order to pay the fees, which at Chicago amount to about £7 a term, undertake some manual labour out of college hours. One student will be a lamp-lighter; another will offer his services at an hotel in the evening.
Another will earn his living by becoming cook or major-domo to his comrades.
Another will have saved money out of a modest salary for several years in order to come up to the university and take his degree.” We may be sure that young men possessed of sufficient energy to make such efforts as these will never be outcasts, and will succeed in any career.
Chapter 6: The Struggle With the Unadapted.
1. The Future Attack of the Unadapted.
We have just seen how the special conditions of the age have immensely multiplied the crowd of the unadapted. This multitude of incapable, disinherited, or degenerate persons is a grave danger to civilisation. United in a common hatred of the society in which they can find no place, they demand nothing but to fight against it. They form an army ready for all revolutions, having nothing to lose and everything to gain — at least, in appearance. Above all, this army is ready for all works of destruction. Nothing is more natural than the sentiment of hatred which these outcasts entertain for a civilisation that is too complicated for them, and to which they are perfectly sensible that they can never adapt themselves. They only wait for the occasion to rise to the assault.
The dangers which threaten Europe threaten the United States still more immediately. The War of Secession was the prelude to the bloody conflict which will presently take place between the various classes living on American soil. All the unadapted of the universe direct themselves to the New World.
Despite these invasions, the danger of which no American statesman has hitherto understood, the English race is still in the majority in the United States; but the other races — Irish, Slavs, Germans, Italians, negroes, and so forth — are for ever increasing. For example, there are now 7,600,000 negroes Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 276
in the United States. An annual immigration of 400,000 strangers is always increasing this dangerous population. These foreigners form veritable colonies, perfectly indifferent, and more often than not hostile to their country of adoption. Unconnected with her by ties of blood, tradition, or language, they care nothing for her general interests. They only seek to live on her.
But their existence is all the harder, their misery all the more profound, in that they are in competition with the most energetic race in the world. They are scarcely able to exist save on condition of contenting themselves with the lowest and most degraded tasks, and therefore the worst paid.
These strangers form at present only about 75 per cent of the total population of the United States, but in certain districts they are very nearly in the majority.
The state of North Dakotah already counts 44 per cent of foreigners.
Nine-tenths of the negroes are concentrated in the fifteen Southern States, where they form a third of the population, iii South Carolina they are now in the majority, the proportion of negroes being 60 per cent. They equal the whites in number in Louisiana. We know how the negroes are treated on American soil, where their liberation from slavery is generally regarded as a stupendous error. Theoretically they enjoy all the rights known to the other citizens, but in practice they are shot or hung without any formality at the first offence. Treated everywhere as pariahs, as a species of animal intermediate between the apes and man, they will be perfectly ready to join the first army that shall undertake to attack the great Republic.
“The whites of the North,” writes M. de Mandat-Grancy, “spent many millions of dollars and many lives of men, thirty years ago, to break the chains of the worthy negroes of the South. And now these worthy negroes, whom they have enfranchised, and made electors, have reached the number of 8,000,000, for they breed like rabbits. They are already in the majority in several States, and as soon as they form the majority in any State life is no longer tolerable there. The negro’s idea of civilisation is that which existed recently in Dahomey, or that which the blacks have established in San Domingo, where nobody works and everybody lives on the exchequer, which is filled by despoiling such whites as are foolish enough to work. This is the ideal order of things, which they hasten to realise as soon as they become the masters; and they have become the masters in several of the Southern States. The latter are beginning to show signs of anger... Those who are acquainted with the Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 277
expeditious procedures to which the Americans have recourse when they wish to remedy a state of things that is contrary to their ideas of what should be, would be by no means astonished if some fine day they were to find some means of ridding themselves of the negroes as they have rid themselves of the Chinese.”
Very likely; but 7,500,000 men are too great a host to get rid of easily, and there are too many conflicting interests in question to permit of the re-establishment of slavery. The Americans got rid of the Chinese by forbidding them to enter the country; of the Indians by enclosing them in territories surrounded by vigilant guards armed with repeating rifles, having orders to slaughter them as soon as the pangs of hunger drove them to leave these enclosures. By this summary means they were able to destroy nearly all the Indians in a very few years. But this method would seem difficult of application to the millions of negroes, and quite impossible of application to the immense stock of white foreigners of all kinds scattered through the towns; especially as these whites are electors, able to send their representatives to the Chambers, and to exercise public powers. In the last strike at Chicago the Governor of the State was on the side of the insurgents.
I do not doubt, having regard to the energetic character of the Anglo-Saxons of America, that they will succeed in surmounting the dangers with which they are threatened; but they will do so only at the cost of a more destructive conflict than any history has ever recorded.
But we need not here concern ourselves with the destinies of America. Her intestine dissensions are of little importance to Europe, who has scarcely been treated with tenderness by her rulers. Europe has nothing to lose by the struggle, and many useful lessons to gain.
Our European outcasts are happily neither so numerous nor so dangerous as those of America, but they are none the less very formidable, and the time will come when they will be marshalled under the banner of Socialism, and when we shall have to deliver battle to them. But these acute crises will of necessity be ephemeral. Whatever may be their issue, the problem of the utilisation of the unadapted will present itself for a long period with the same difficulties.
The search after the solution of the problem will weigh heavily on the destinies of the peoples of the future, and it is as yet impossible to foresee what means they will find to resolve it. We shall see why.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 278
2. The Utilisation of the Unadapted.
The only methods that have hitherto been proposed for the benefit of the unadapted have been private charity and State aid. But long experience has taught us that these are insufficient methods at the outset, and afterwards highly dangerous. Even supposing that the State or the individuals composing the State were rich enough to support the multitude of the unadapted, this support would merely end in the rapid increase of their number. The true unadapted would promptly be joined by the semi-unadapted, and all those who, preferring idleness to labour, work to-day only because they are driven to work by hunger.
Although relatively limited, charity, whether public or private, has hitherto done little but considerably increase the crowd of the unadapted. As soon as a State-Aid office is opened anywhere the number of poor increases i