doing anything for himself when he is deprived of guidance. They are familiar also with the terrible effect of a system of education which despoils the growing mind of the few vestiges of independence and will which have been left it by heredity, casts them into the midst of life without any knowledge other than words, and perverts their judgment for ever.
And to show to what extent the strength of the Germans consists in our own weakness, it will suffice to point out the fact that it is precisely our manufacturers and our merchants and our shopkeepers who are the pioneers of German products in France. This escapes the statistician, but it reveals a state of mind which I believe to be far more serious than the apathy, the suspicious and petty dispositions, and the lack of initiative with which our consuls reproach our commercial men. Not only are they steadily renouncing all effort and all idea of opposition, but they have begun to furnish our rivals with arms, by selling more and more exclusively the products of those rivals.
In many industries we find that our some-time manufacturers have become simple commission agents, confining themselves to selling, at a large profit, articles which they have imported from Germany, and on which they have put their own names. It is thus that in less than twenty years the industries in which France was formerly in the first rank, such as the manufacture of photographic apparatus, chemical products, instruments of precision, and even articles de Paris, have passed almost entirely into the hands of foreigners. To get the simplest scientific instrument made in Paris is to-day a matter of considerable difficulty. The difficulty will be insurmountable when the few old makers who are still alive have disappeared.
Evidently it appears far simpler to sell a made article than to make it oneself.
It is perhaps a less simple matter to foresee the consequences of this operation.
Yet they are sufficiently obvious.
The German maker, who delivers to his Parisian competitor an article which the latter is the reputed maker, and on which he often realises a considerable profit, presently sees that it is to his advantage to sell the same article directly to the Parisian public in his own name. He commences first of all by selling, to several commission agents, the same article, but with his name engraved on it. This makes it impossible for the Frenchman to sell it under his own name, and at the same time suppresses his profit. Encouraged by his success, the German maker presently decides to open a shop in Paris, at which his Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 192
manufactures shall be sold under his own name.3
Unhappily the manufactures of photographic necessities, instruments of precision, and chemical products are not the only ones that have passed into foreign hands. The articles de Paris sold by our great tailors and dressmakers are more and more German. Stuffs for men’s clothes come in increasing proportions from England and Germany, and are more and more frequently made up by foreign tailors, who are now setting up their shops in every quarter of Paris. Foreigners are setting up in Paris as booksellers, art dealers, jewellers, and so on, and are now beginning to undertake trade in silks and ladies’
clothing. If the jury had advised the elimination from the forthcoming Exhibition of 1900 all articles of foreign origin sold under a French name, our part in the Exhibition would have been a very poor one.4
It would, perhaps, be unjust to throw too many stones at our manufacturers, and to attribute exclusively to their incapacity and idleness what is in some part the effect of other causes. It is, indeed, very evident that the increasing demands of the workers, which are favoured by the bounty of the public authorities, together with the enormous taxes which are crushing our industries, contribute as much as the imperfection and insufficiency of our tools and the increase in the cost of production to the impossibility of struggling against our competitors. It is easy to understand that the manufacturer, harassed and annoyed, should finish by giving up the manufacture of articles that he can buy cheaper than he can make. He accordingly closes his workshop and descends to the rôle of simple retailer. If he had different hereditary aptitudes he would doubtless do as his English and American brothers, who are also affected by the demands of their workers and by competition, but who, thanks to their energy, and the daily increasing perfection of their plant, are able to compete without too great disadvantage with their German rivals. Unfortunately for our manufacturers, they have none of the qualities which make for success in such a conflict. At the bottom of all our social questions lies always this dominant question of race, which is indeed the supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations. All the facts enumerated in this chapter are contemporary, but how remote are their causes!
The system of centralisation to which the Germans have been subjected for some time past will one day, doubtless, as I have elsewhere remarked, conduct them to the pass in which we find ourselves to-day; but in the meantime they Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 193
are benefiting by qualities created by their past, qualities which, though not brilliant, are solid, and are in entire agreement with the new conditions and new necessities created by the evolution of the sciences, industry, and commerce.
What has been said in the preceding paragraph of their industrial and commercial success will already enable us to foresee the causes of this success.
We shall understand them still better by considering their national qualities, and what they gain by them.
The principal qualities of the Germans are patience, perseverance, the habits of observation and reflection, and a great aptitude for co-operation. All these qualities are very highly developed by a marvellous technical education.5
These are the most general and at once the most fundamental causes of their success. Commercially and industrially they result in the constant perfection of industrial implements and products,6 the manufacture of goods in accordance with the taste of the customer, and constant modifications according to his requirements, extreme punctuality in delivery, and the sending out into the entire world of intelligent representatives acquainted with the language and the customs of the various countries they visit, and the means and cost of carriage. A number of commercial societies constantly furnish their associates, by means of numerous agents sent to all quarters of the globe, with the most precise information. The Export Verein of Dresden spent between 1885 and 1895 nearly £20,000 in sending out travelling correspondents. The German Colonial Society possesses an annual revenue of £4,800, furnished by the subscriptions of its members, and has 1,051 representatives abroad. The union of commercial employés which has its headquarters at Hamburg, has 42,000 members, and places a thousand employés a year.
Most of the merchandise destined for exportation leaves by the port of Hamburg, whose commerce has increased tenfold since 1871, and which now surpasses Liverpool in the matter of tonnage, while Havre and Marseilles are declining from year to year. In Hamburg there are numbers of export agents who represent the interests of the manufacturers, and put them in relation with buyers. They have in their warehouses samples of every kind of goods, of which the form and nature are incessantly being modified by the makers, in accordance with information received from the most distant quarters of the globe.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 194
The results obtained by these associations are prompt and valuable. In a report for 1894 an American consul, Mr. Monaghan, gave as an example the business done in Bosnia by the Sofia branch of one of the societies I have been speaking of. After taking the trouble to get up a catalogue in Bulgarian, and sending out nearly 200,000 letters or prospectuses, besides spending nearly
£4,000 on commercial travellers, it received orders, after the first year, to the amount of £400,000, and at the same time immensely reduced the trade of all its competitors.
Such results cannot be obtained without trouble; but the German never shrinks from exertion. Unlike the French manufacturer, he studies with the greatest care the tastes, habits, manners, and, in a word, the psychology of his clients, and the information published annually by the societies I have mentioned contains the most precise information on these subjects. M. Delines, reviewing a report of Professor Yanjoul, has shown how minutely the German investigators study the psychology of the nations with whom their merchants are about to do business. Speaking of the Russians, for example, the German indicates their tastes, speaks of the necessity of taking tea with them before discussing business, then mentions the goods it is possible to sell them, and specifies the most useful of these, from a commercial point of view, with the words “sale absolutely good.” In the Extort-Hand-Addressbuch, which is in the hands of every German merchant, we find characteristic notes of the following kind.
“The Chinese usually prepare their food in very thin iron utensils; the rice is quickly cooked, but the saucepan is soon burnt and has to be frequently renewed. An English house, wishing to beat all its competitors, sent out a consignment of iron pots which were thicker, more durable, and were sold at a lower price. The Chinese at first took the bait, and the pots began to sell like wildfire. But this did not last long. At the end of a few days the sale suddenly stopped. The reason was a logical one; fuel is very dear in China, the English saucepans were very thick, the rice cooked very slowly, and, in short, the new pots turned out to be far less economical than the old ones, in which the rice was cooked in no time. The Chinese returned to their accustomed and more economical utensils.”
The same publication cites a still more amusing fact:
“A European merchant had the brilliant idea of exporting to China a Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 195
consignment of horseshoes bearing for trademark a most effective and irresistible dragon. What was his stupefaction to learn that the Chinese turned from his goods with anger! He had not reflected that a dragon figures on the national escutcheon of the Celestial Empire, and that the Celestials would consider it sacrilege to allow a horse to defile this august emblem with his hoofs.”
There is another story of an English merchantwho put some excellent needles on the Chinese market, needles which ought to have defied all competition, and then fell to vainly racking his brains to explain to himself why they did not sell. He did not know that in China black is a symbol of sorrow, and always carries ill-luck; and these excellent English needles were done up in sheaths of black paper, so that the Chinese preferred inferior needles from other quarters, which were done up in red or green.
If I enter into such details as these it is to show what elements go to the making of the success of a nation to-day. Taken separately, these details seem infinitesimal. It is the sum of them that makes their importance, and that importance is immense. The turn of mind which allows a German seriously to preoccupy himself with the way in which a Chinaman cooks his rice may seem very contemptible to a Frenchman, whose mind is taken up with such high matters as the revision of the constitution, the separation of Church and State, the utility of learning Greek, and so forth; but nevertheless the Latins have got to understand that their part in the world will soon be terminated, and that they will utterly disappear from history, if they do not become resigned to abandon their useless theoretical discussions, their futile and sentimental phraseology, in order to busy themselves about these petty practical questions on which the lives of nations to-day depend. No Government can give them what they lack.
They must seek help in themselves, not from outside.
Is it to be thought that the application of Socialistic doctrines would remedy the state of things set forth in this chapter? Would a Socialist society, even more formalistic than ours, be the one to develop that spirit of enterprise and that energy which are so necessary to-day, and which the Latins lack so greatly? When the Collectivist State directs everything, makes everything, dill products be better and less costly, their exportation easier, and foreign competition less to be feared? To believe it one would have to ignore the universal laws of industry and commerce. If decadence is far advanced among Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 196
the Latin nations, it is precisely because State Socialism has for a long time been making immense progress among them, and because they are incapable of undertaking anything whatever without continual assistance from the Government. We have only to make the Socialist conquest more complete still further to accentuate this decadence.
Notes.
1. In a catalogue of articles de voyage of the Louvre stores published in June 1898, of the four kinds of photographic objectives offered for sale three are German and only one French, and this only in connection with a cheap outfit.
The French objective is almost unsaleable to-day, while thirty years ago it was the German objective that was unsaleable.
2. The young intellectuels to whom I have alluded in a previous chapter, apropos of a quotation from Lemaître referring to their utter lack of patriotism, would do well to meditate seriously on the last few lines of this quotation.
With a little more intellectuality they would eventually understand that they call only conserve the faculty of cultivating in peace the ego that is so dear to them by scorning their country a little less, and respecting the army which alone can defend it a great deal more.
3. And often a factory as well. There are at present three German houses in Paris selling objectives. One of them has installed in the heart of Paris a workshop for the manufacture of these objectives, which employs 150 men, all of them, naturally, from Germany, and which can hardly keep up with the orders of its French customers. When our men of business and our manufacturers complain of suffering from foreign competition, should they not be told that it is from their incapacity and their apathy that they are really suffering? The Germans will soon regard Paris as the most productive of their colonies.
4. As a member of the jury of admission for scientific instruments I had thought of proposing this elimination, till I had to abandon the idea, as it would have aroused too much protest on the part of the exhibitors.
5. A manufacturer was recently speaking to me of the astonishment which he had felt on visiting a large electrical shop in Germany at the number of foremen and simple workmen whom he heard addressed as Doctor or Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 197
Engineer. The Germans do not suffer as we do from a plethora of unemployed graduates, for the reason that, their technical education being extremely thorough, they are easily able to avail themselves of it in industry, while the purely theoretical education of the Latins fits them only to become professors, magistrates, or officials.
6. Certain German factories have been cited as possessing as many as twenty-four chemists, of whom several are employed only in theoretical research, which is immediately put into practice by others, who try to extract therefrom a new industrial application. The German manufacturers are up to date in respect of all new inventions, and immediately try to perfect them. A few days after the publication of details of wireless telegraphy, a Berlin house was making the complete apparatus, the Morse recorder included, for £10. I had the instrument under my hands, and I can vouch that the extreme difficulties of adjustment had been admirably surmounted.
Chapter 4: Economic Necessities and the Growth of Populations 1. The Present Development of the Population of the Various Nations and its Causes.
Social phenomena are always deceptive; they always appear very simple, and are in reality of an excessive complexity. The remedies for all the ills eve setter seem to be extremely easy of application, but when we seek to apply them we immediately discover that the invisible necessities which hedge us round very narrowly limit the sphere of our action. The collective life of a people is formed of innumerable particles; if we touch one of them the action set up is speedily communicated to all the others. It is only by taking separately, one by one, all the little problems which go to make up the great social problem, that we come to comprehend the formidable complexity of the latter, and to see how chimerical are the remedies which simple-minded people are proposing every day.
We shall find fresh proof of the complexity of social problems if we examine a question which is more than others narrowly connected with the progress of Socialism. I mean the question of the relations which exist between the development of the population and the economic necessities which we see growing up every day.
I have tried in the last chapters to present two fundamental points: the first, Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 198
that the industrial and economic evolution of the world is assuming a character which is entirely different from that it assumed in bygone centuries; the second, that peoples in possession of certain special aptitudes, which may in the past have been useless enough, must, when these aptitudes become applicable, rise to a high rank.
Now this economic evolution of the world, of which we now perceive but the dawning, has coincided with various circumstances which have in the greater number of the nations provoked a rapid increase of their population.
In the presence of modern economic necessities are we to say that this increase of population presents advantages or inconveniences? The reply must vary according to the state of the peoples in whom the phenomenon is observed.
When a country possesses a great extent of territory which is sparsely populated, such as Russia, the United States, or England with her colonies, the increase of her population presents evident advantages, or at least for a certain time. Is it the same with countries which are sufficiently populated, possess no colonies, or have no reason to send their inhabitants to those that they have, which are well off in the matter of agriculture, and very badly off in matters of industries and external commerce? I think not; on the contrary, it seems to me that such a country will do very wisely in not seeking to increase its population. Given the phase of economic evolution which I have described, such abstention is its only means of avoiding the deepest misery.
Such is not, as we know, the opinion of the statisticians. Having discovered that the population of most of the European countries is progressing very rapidly, while that of France remains stationary, and even tends to decrease, so that the births were 33 per thousand in 1800, 27 in 1840, 25 in 1880, and 20
in 1895, we find them filling the journals with their lamentations, and complaining no less at the meetings of the learned societies. The State —
always the State-must, according to them, intervene at once. There are no extravagant measures — such as a tax on all celibates and bounties to the fathers of large families-that they will not propose, to remedy what they regard as a disaster, and what we should-being given the present state of our country
— consider as a blessing, and in any case as a necessity resulting from causes beside which all the measures proposed are patently puerile and ineffective.
For the rest, the only inconvenience that the statisticians have been able to Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 199
discover in this stationary condition of our population is that the Germans having far more children, will very soon have more conscripts, and will then be able to invade France with ease. Even if we consider the matter only from this restricted point of view, we need not hesitate to say that the danger which is supposed to be hanging over our heads is slight enough. The Germans threaten us far more with their industries and their commerce than with their rifles, and we must not forget that on the day when they shall be sufficiently numerous to make a successful attempt at invasion, they will be threatened in their turn by the 130,000,000 of Russia at their backs, since the statisticians admit by hypothesis that the most numerous peoples must invade the less numerous.
It is very probable that by the time the Germans are able to gather together such multitudes as will enable them to invade a nation whose warlike aptitudes history will not allow us to miscalculate, Europe will have recovered from the illusion that the strength of armies depends on their numbers. Experience will by then have proved, conformably with the judicious predictions of the German general, Von der Goltz, that the hordes of half-disciplined men, without real military education, and without any possible power of resistance, of which the armies of to-day are composed, will be quickly destroyed by a small army of veteran professional soldiers, as of old the millions of Xerxes and Darius were annihilated by a handful of Greeks, disciplined and inured to all exercises and all fatigues.
When we examine the causes of this progressive diminution of our population we see that it is partly the consequence, almost universal in all ages, of the increased sense of prudence which is born of comfort. Only those that have possessions think of preserving them, and of assuring resources to their descendants, whose number they intentionally limit. To this determining cause, the effects of which have been observed at every period, and notably at the apogee of the Roman civilisation, we must add causes that are special to the present day, of which the chief ones are the evolution of industry, which, on account of the perfection of machinery, is reducing the number of utilisable workers, and the absence of the colonising spirit, which restricts the extent of our outlets, and would leave us overburdened by a surplus of population.
These data are not particular to France, but are to be observed in countries inhabited by very different races. The United States may assuredly be ranked Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 200
with the most prosperous of countries, and yet the statisticians, not without stupefaction, have observed in them the same decreasing increase of population as they deplore in France. The present birth-rate for the States is 26
per thousand, hardly higher than ours. In ten counties of the States it is even lower than our own, since it varies from 16 to 22 per thousand. There one can blame neither the obligatory military service, which does not exist; nor the sale of alcohol, which is interdicted; nor the law, for the testator enjoys the completest liberty; that is to say, the father has only to restrict the number of his children in order to avoid the too great division of his fortune.
A similar depression of the birth-rate is to be observed in Australia, where it has fallen from 40 per thousand to 20 in the last twenty years. All these facts clearly demonstrate the weakness of the arguments of the statisticians in explaining what they call the danger of our depopulation.
The same decreasing increase of population is to be seen almost everywhere, even in countries where the birthrate has been momentarily highest.
In Germany the birth rate was 42 in 1875, and had fallen to 36 twenty years later. In England it fell from 36 to 29 in the same time. These losses are greater than those of France, since in the latter country the rate has only fallen from 26 to 23 in the same time. The two nations are thus gradually losing their advance of us, and they will very probably end by losing it altogether.
2. The Consequences of the Increase or Decrease of the Population in Various Countries.
We see by the preceding that an abatement in the increase of the population is tending to manifest itself in all countries, and that our rivals will not in the future threaten us by the mere fact of their numbers.
Let us suppose, however, that they will not lose their present advantage over us, and consider- whether the increase of their population may prove to be a serious danger for us.
It would certainly appear, to hear the lamentations of the statisticians, whom the Economiste français justly qualifies as “harebrained,” and whose minds, in truth, seem singularly limited, that the superiority of a nation is made by its numbers. Now a rapid bird’s-eye view of history will show us, for example, in the persons of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, that numbers played a very Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 201
small part in ancient times. Must it be repeated that it was with 100,000
well-trained men that the Greeks triumphed over the 3,000,000 of Xerxes, and that the Romans never had more than 400,000 soldiers scattered over an empire which, from the Ocean to the Euphrates, was 3,000 miles long and 1,500 broad?
And without referring to these remote epochs, can we say that number has played any larger a part in modern times than it did in antiquity? Nothing authorises us to think so. Without speaking of the Chinese, who do not, despite their 400 millions of men, seem to be very formidable front a military point of view, we know that the English are able to keep 250 millions of Hindoos under the yoke with an army of 65,000 men, and that Holland rules her 40 millions of Asiatic subjects with a far smaller army. Does Germany consider herself to be seriously threatened because she has at her doors an immense civilised empire with a population three times greater than her own?
Let us leave these puerile fears aside, then, and remember that what does in reality menace us is not the number of our rivals, but their industrial and commercial capacity and enterprise. The three real sources of national strength are agriculture, industry, and commerce; not armies.
It is, happily, not to be supposed that all the lamentations of the statisticians have resulted in increasing by a single individual the number of the inhabitants of our country. Let its congratulate ourselves on the complete futility of their discourses. For suppose that an offended Deity wished to heap upon France the most horrible of calamities, of what would He make His choice? War, plague, or cholera? None of these, for these are but ephemeral ills. He would only have to double the figure of our population. This, given the present economic conditions of the world, and the needs and psychology of the French people, would be an irremediable disaster. After a brief delay we should witness bloody revolution, hopeless misery, the assured triumph of Socialism, followed by permanent unending wars and no less incessant invasions.
But why has not the excess of population such inconvenience in other countries, such as England and Germany? Simply, on the one hand, because these countries possess colonies into which their surplus population is poured; and, on the other hand, because emigration, so completely antipathetic to the French, is “with them regarded as a highly desirable thing, even when it does not constitute an absolute necessity.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 202
It is the taste for emigration, and the possibility of satisfying it, that allows a nation to increase the figure of its population to any considerable extent. A consequence at first of excessive population, the tendency to emigrate becomes a cause in its turn, and contributes yet more to increase this excess. The celebrated explorer Stanley has presented this point very well in a letter recently published by a journal in reply to a question which had been addressed to him. He called attention to the fact that emigration begins only when the population begins to exceed a certain number to the square mile. Great Britain had 130 inhabitants to the square mile in 1801; as soon as this figure rose to 224, which was in 1841, a movement of emigration began which rapidly increased. When the population of Germany attained the same density of 224
to the square mile, she in turn was obliged to look about for colonies.1 Italy, on account of the extreme sobriety of her inhabitants, was able to wait a little longer, but when finally her population reached the figure of 253 to the square mile, she, too, had to submit to the common law, and seek for outlets. She has succeeded but ill in the attempt (always so difficult to the Latin races), and has expended £8,000,000 in Africa, only to end in humiliating defeat. But on pain of inevitable ruin, towards which she is rapidly marching, she will have to recommence her attempts. The real danger that menaces Italy, and threatens her with approaching revolution and Socialism, is that she is far too densely populated; with her, as everywhere, misery has been too fruitful.2
France, says Stanley, is far less densely populated, and has no need of emigration, and it is deplorable that she should spend the strength of her young men in Tonkin, Madagascar, and Dahomey — to which places no one ever emigrates, save some very expensive officials; above all when she has Algeria and Tunis at her doors, and yet is unable to populate them. These countries, indeed, have only 25 inhabitants to the square mile, and only a very small proportion of those are French.
Stanley is perfectly right, and has very clearly pointed out the very essence of the problem. His conclusions are analogous to those which were formerly indicated by one of leis compatriots, Malthus. The latter clearly demonstrated that there is a close relation between the population of a country and the means of subsistence, and that, when the equilibrium is deranged, famine, war, and all kinds of pestilence fall upon the overcrowded country, and so set up a mortality which