Socialism: Critical and Constructive

CHAPTER I

ORDER AND PROGRESS

HABIT AND REASON

WO great forces are ever in conflict in the breast

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of Society-habit the force of stagnation, and reason the force of change. The former is commonly misinterpreted and miscalled the conservative force, whereas it is the force which resists life and ultimately ends in decay. The true conservative forces are not static, but are those which carry on life, adapting it to new conditions, producing new organs when new functions have to be performed, substituting new vitalities for spent ones, revolutionary in the sense that they see in the life of Society both the capacity for, and the promise of, fundamental change, but anti-revolutionary in the sense that they strive to bring about these changes by a never-ending organic adaptation. The movement that fulfils is the only true movement of conservation.

In abnormal times-times when the errors of years and perhaps of generations have accumulated and can accumulate no more-this conflict breaks out in violence. Order has become bonds which must be broken, a containing vessel which must be burst;

but when violence has done its work, and the life that has been liberated like a flood is gathered again into channels, the two forces return to their eternal task. The running waters lap and fret against the sides of their beds, and the beds resist their impatience; the life of Society swells in its institutions and its fixed order, whether political or economic, and the fixed order, whilst yielding, yet controls, whilst responding, yet turns away.

Habit blinds us so that we may be its most unquestioning servants and it is only by an effort of will that we understand how great is this conflict between it and ideas. The mass of people are indifferent or are merely agitated. They dream in spurts and with the morning no remnant of the dream remains. Their interests are too much like a tide flowing hither and thither, obedient to every attractive moon. They are responsive to suggestion, and primitive in their impulses. The masses retain the love of primitive man for gaudy ornament and sparkling plaything. The childhood of the race is far behind in years, but nigh at hand in mood. Put it on its defence and the crowd is brutal, put it at its ease and it is prodigal in its magnanimity. Play on its fears and it gives an immediate response, for fear still lies upon it as the shadow of the unknown and the unfamiliar within whose bounds dwell superstition and credulity.

On the other extreme there is the section which has grown beyond the crowd psychology, which is sceptical in belief, which has placed reason as a guard to challenge everything seeking to pass into creeds, which reflects upon problems, which is for ever constructing new things out of old and perfect things out of imperfect. Its danger is that

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it may be too rational. It forgets habit and tradition; it forgets its historical inheritance; it forgets that the material upon which change and reason have to work is that of the society into which men were born; it forgets that no generation can build save on the foundations left for it, or modify save upon the structures which it inherited. This is the section that wishes us to believe that life can be changed by revolution and that idealism is something absolute. But it is the part of practical reason not to seek the absolute nor a vacuum. its dreaming it never forgets life. Into all wise forecasting and anticipating the experience of the past enters as largely as the reason of the future. In the walls of every City of God which the practical reason builds are the stones of the cities of men from which it would flee. It is troubled by contradictions in thought and action, in precept and conduct, in obvious improvements and in stubborn faults, and it labours to reconcile and transform. The sections thus moved are they who would conserve by change-conserve life by fashioning anew the ways in which life expresses itself. From time to time, they appear in different movements as the life of Society surges through this interest and that, sometimes when the life of the spirit is in flood they are religious reformers, sometimes when it is political life that is agitated, they are politicians, sometimes when it is industrial and economic things that are alive, they are social reformers. So, in history, they are known under many names. To-day, they include the leaders, and their thoughts are the substance, of the Socialist movement.

These last people are an offence to the numerous class which does not relate its life to its thought,

its conduct to its ideas, its work and effort to its principles. This class is blind to the contradictions between the two great departments of human activity-the day-to-day activity of living men in their economic and class relationships, and the activity of mind and spirit. It does not think of consequences, of harmonies, of unities. It lives in different and unreconciled states, and passes from one to the other as a man passes from his own house to a theatre, or from his business to his dinner. "Now that's done; let me turn to something else." Its Sunday is different not only in time and occupation from its Monday, but belongs to a different order of being and of life. Its interests and obligations are in watertight compartments. It is sure that, if, on the day of judgment evidence on purely secular conduct is to be held in order, it can stand on a plea of economic necessity, as Germany thought that military necessity justified its invasion of Belgium. And yet there can be no dual standard in morality and reason. This section, with the indifferent or impulsive mass to which I have first referred, is that which is ruled by habit, which would remain quiescent, which always threatens to become the dead wood of the tree. When it is too powerful in the community it brings revolution, because it makes ineffective the means provided for ordered change. The purely rational section which grows in spite of it must always be a small one. growing cells of a plant are always tiny as a group. But when in Society the resistance of habit becomes too great, the insistence of growth, finding no outlet, becomes too strong, and at the moment of its apparent greatest power, habit is overwhelmed.

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The discrepancy between reason and habit is very much greater than most people without thinking about it generally suppose. Were someone to come upon this earth with a totally fresh mind, he would see it. If he took an interest in our religion, he would find that we had a gospel which means nothing if not that in life the Kingdom of God must be sought above all else, and that absorbing material pursuits make men gross and lead them far astray in their search after that which satisfies and elevates man. He would find that we believe that, but that whilst we believe we deny and enter heartily into the aims and ambitions of a civilization as frankly materialist as any that the world has ever known, or that the laws of righteousness have ever brought to ruin. He would be told that the whole of our processes of production, exchange and consumption are kept going by men's freedom of initiative and by the security that men have in acquiring wealth by labour, but on inquiry into the facts he would find that initiative is confined to a very few, that economic organization limits that initiative more and more, that to the vast majority of the people there is no such thing as property beyond what may satisfy needs from week to week, and enable them to have a Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath three times a year, or an annual rout of a week at Blackpool or the Isle of Man. He would be told that our nation and our people's morality were built up on the family, and, when he visited this precious unit of the social spirit and of communal organization, he would find that for generations it had no place wherein it could grow and no economic basis upon which to rest. He would hear us talk of ourselves as an Imperial people, and would find