I
There have been many periods when men did not think it possible to make life in the community reach much higher levels than it had attained, without working a change upon human nature. The working of this change has been one of the chief preoccupations of religion; but no one can pretend that it has met, during the historic period, with any overwhelming success. In the eighteenth century men became impatient with the ministrations of institutional religion, and sought to effect an improvement in the common life by a different method—by improving the political, economic, and social mechanisms of society.
Up to this time the only method that had seemed feasible for improving the technique of social organization was the mandate of law. Although Aristotle, for instance, predicted that slavery would come to an end on the condition that the shuttle should weave by itself and the lyre play without human hand, no one in the Greek community of his time saw very much likelihood of improvement through mechanical inventions or wholesale innovations in agriculture; and no one, apparently, concerned himself seriously with the mechanical side of affairs.
It was the same during the Middle Age. If the men of that time were not exuberantly happy over their civilization, they had the dogmatic conviction that nothing very satisfactory could come of a race that had inherited the curse of Adam—a race whose only salvation could come when its individuals were purged one by one of sin, and delivered, by the intercession of the saints and the grace of God, into a more benignly constituted afterworld. One might relieve the pressure a little if the shoe pinched, perhaps, but scarcely anyone dreamed of travelling in seven-league boots, or of establishing an Arcadia in which boots could be dispensed with. It was foolish to look for a more perfect society in a world that was rife with imperfect men.
The Renaissance, as we have seen, changed all this. Presently a school of philosophers followed on the heels of the utopians who devoted themselves to preparing fairly minute plans and specifications for the social order. In the beginning, these plans were devoted to politics and criminal reform, like those of Rousseau, Beccaria, Bentham, Jefferson, Godwin, and the eighteenth century reformers generally; in the nineteenth century the main accent was economic, and a number of movements arose which could be traced back to the semi-scientific investigations of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Proudhon, Malthus, Marx, and perhaps half a dozen other thinkers of outstanding importance, among whom we should perhaps include such latter day figures as Mill, Spencer, and Henry George.
All of these thinkers have in one way or another influenced our thoughts and deflected our actions; and if one adds to this galaxy the reforming elements which remained in the churches and the missionary brotherhoods and the philanthropic organizations, we can observe, growing up in the nineteenth century, a multitude of partisan organizations and movements, each of which is strenuously bent on realizing its private and partisan utopia. It is these private and partisan utopias that I purpose to make a slight reckoning with in the present chapter; but the field is such a huge and formidable one that I shall limit my criticism in the main to those that attempted to effect a change in the economic order.