Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 10 The Social Renaissance -- Utilitarianism
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AS WE have seen, the orthodox economic doctrine was very simple-take away all restrictions, and that production will take place in any community which is most economical, which is most productive. Each community will produce that which it can produce better than others can. If it undertakes to produce that which others can produce better, it will destroy its own industries. The theory comes down to this: simply remove all restrictions, and trade will follow the most' helpful channels. But in the actual processes of the various countries themselves, it was found gradually to be a more complex problem than it had been thought to be. The economic doctrine, as such, in its simplicity broke down. It could not be said that any other definite, clear-cut theory took its place. This was one of those times when people were feeling their way. The assumedly fixed situation that grew out of the Manchester doctrine was seen not to be in accord with the facts. As a result, it was practically abandoned.
It is in such a situation that opportunism arises. This is true even in the most rigid form of the socialist doctrine, which, with utilitarianism, we are about to consider. just because people could not tell what the so-called "fixed laws" of economic and social processes were, they wanted to go ahead and bring about results which they could see were really advantageous. They wished to improve the conditions of the working man, to see that he lived under proper conditions, to get rid of the slums. They initiated movements toward minimum wages, toward dealing, through insurance systems, with those conditions with which the laborer himself could not deal. These are all movements which go with the pressure of labor itself in its organiza-
(200) -tion. The result was that, if you look over the statistics of the nineteenth century, you will find a gradual increase in wage, an actually effective wage which does not answer to the economic doctrine at all. You find also in various countries a falling-off in actual increase of population, and a tendency toward a decrease in the proportionate increase in population which seemed to answer to the intelligence of the community itself.
That is the situation, then, which really led to a feeling of the way in socialistic and other economic views toward improvement at various points, with an attempt to set up a program of what the order of society ought to be. There was, in other words, a sense of progress without a definite conception of an ideal order. People felt that they did not know where they were going; but they were sure they were on their way; and that changes which were advantageous could be brought about.
An economic law was presented by the Manchester school which called for free trade as that which was most satisfactory for economic production. But England was practically the only country that adopted it. England, of course, was in a very favorable position for the operation of free trade. She had the raw materials for building factories, she had coal and iron. But she was in great need of other raw materials for the manufacture of articles that she needed. She also needed, as she found very soon, more food than could be produced in England. There had to be, then, large importations, and, of course, large exportations. But England not only exported goods. With the increase in capital, she exported capital itself as well. She needed to have the channels open so that there should be freedom of movement within and without. The other countries in Europe and America adopted tariff laws of various) types, and there were very varied influences and motives behind these laws. Of course, they all had to do with industries which they were supposed to protect. They all protected the price of goods, but the reasons for this protection varied. The customs union, for example, was very important in bringing about the national organization of
(201) Germany. It brought together the different German countries under a customs arrangement and opened the door to the political union that took place later. An organization of its industries with reference to the various policies of the government which could in a manner control the direction of production and of trade was made possible through the tariff laws. That is, the government in the manipulation of its tariff laws could open up doors in various directions and close them in others. Particularly within the country itself, it could give remissions from certain types of tariff taxation. The control which a government exercises over its railroads, for example, enables it to help the development of its industries. In Germany there gradually grew up a governmentally controlled industry which was organized with reference to its foreign trade and which became a definite part of the foreign policy of the government itself. And, for this a tariff system was necessary. In other countries there were, of course, different interests which gathered about the different trades that were affected by the tariff. In our own country there was a real tariff policy which undertook, in the mind of the greater part of the community, to protect the laborer against the starvation wages of Europe. It gave the industries that were so protected the advantage of higher prices. Under these conditions there grew up, however, in America itself a type of organization of trade not directed by government but arising simply out of the economic situation, the building-up of prices. I will not go into a discussion of this except to point out that the tariff situation proved to be far more complex than it was then presented in the orthodox economic doctrine.
Along with socialism we find the beginning of another social theory which had as its objective the control of the social situations which were arising as a result of the complex changes that followed from various economic practices, particularly as these affected the living conditions of the great mass of workers. Bentham was the originator of this latter movement. He was a man, who approached the needs of English society from the standpoint of administrative reform, particularly of criminal reform.
(202) What he wanted in a philosophy was such a statement of the motives and ends of men as could be easily used in terms of government and also in other processes with which government had to do. He found such a statement in utilitarianism, a position which was already extant in the philosophy of Hume, and which goes over, in one way or another, to Bishop Butler, at least in connection with his theory of desire. These men found the motive of all conduct in a desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. That was the statement that Bentham took up.
You can see how that fitted into a program for the reform of criminal law. The sanction of the law is punishment; the motive which operates is presumably the suffering which punishment brings, or the relief from the fear of punishment which comes from avoiding crime. Those motives are the sort to which this type of philosophy would naturally turn. The suffering inflicted upon the criminal was to be in proportion to the crime. The more heinous the crime, the greater the suffering. And in so far as punishment is supposed to be a preventive, the more heavy the punishment the less likely the individual is to commit crime. If you can state motives in terms of pains and penalties, you seem to have hold of the springs of human conduct. It is an overly simple, a superficial statement of human conduct; but it is one which fits in perfectly well with a program of criminal reform.
I would not imply that this is the only interest which Bentham had in his utilitarian doctrine. He regarded it as a means of presenting the whole field of human nature. In its simplest form it was a way of getting over from those interests which were the dominant characteristics in earlier societies back into what became a more democratic society. That is, what was demanded in an English society was the preservation of the old order, with the values which the old order conserved. But, however much one may recognize the importance of keeping these old values, one realizes also that they cannot all be kept and that some have to change. Then the question arises as to which of these values ought to be kept and which ones changed. How
(203) much change can one actually bring into the fixed order of society?
To illustrate this, let me mention the problem of the importance which the preservation of game took in men's minds. In itself seemingly a trivial matter, it carried with it a sense of prestige as well as of the enjoyment of sport on the part of the privileged, the landed, classes. On the other hand, along with the desire for satisfaction of a certain sort of sport, there was the desire for getting food on the part of the poacher. This does not seem to be anything that strikes very deep; and yet you find it standing as a symbol for the old order and having, therefore, a value way beyond anything that seems to be socially assessable.
In the face of such a conflict, what was the community to do? It wants to preserve what is valuable in the old social order. Here is a practice that the upper classes cling to, especially those who have rights over the preservation of game. They demand it as fiercely as anything else. Now the problem is to determine what these values are, so that it can be seen which of them are important and which are of less importance. What system of evaluation can be introduced into a community which has to change, to shift, to reform, many of its old practices, to abandon many of its old institutions? That was the need which the most intelligent in the community felt. They wanted some way of assessing these values to find out what was worth while.
The simplest statement that could well be made, however inadequate it was, was the utilitarian. When it came to such an illustration as that which I have just given of poaching, they would say that you must consider the relative values simply in terms of the pleasure that those who exercise the sport get out of it as over against the pains and penalties involved in poaching. On this basis it can be said that one has greater value than the other. Furthermore, you can go ahead on this basis and set up a system, a quantitative system, which is the easiest sort of a system to manage. When you put colors over against each other in a color scheme, you find it very difficult to assess directly. You can say that red and yellow have movement and life, while blue
(204) and violet are cold, and green is calm. But it is very difficult to arrange these qualities so that they have a different, a definite, meaning in a scale. You can get a vague scale, if you like, all the way from the vividness of red and yellow around through the calmness of green to the deadness of blue. But there is no such satisfactory basis for a schematism as can be found in a statement of colors in terms of waves. Then you find that colors are represented by waves of different lengths and that there are long waves at one end of the spectrum and short waves at the other end and that all the different colors can be arranged in terms of amplitude of waves.
Now, in the same way, when you come to a statement of certain experiences as over against each other, some seem intensely important, others trifling, and you try to arrange them with reference to each other-some fine, some vulgar. But what is the way in which these experiences should be-may be-assessed? If you take them in qualitative form, you find that it is difficult, if not impossible, to arrange them on any satisfactory scale. But, supposing you say we will consider simply the amount of pain and pleasure a person gets out of each. Then you have something that, at least on the face of it , can be quantitatively ordered. One gives a greater amount of pleasure than the other. Then you can add them up, make an algebraic sum of the pleasures and pains-the pleasure positive, the pain negative-and determine what the action ought to be. And, more important, you can go into the community at large and say: "Here is the experience of a single individual, but it is one of great importance to him. What does it mean to the community?" For that purpose the thing you want to get at is the pleasure this man gets as over against the privation of the whole community. Here is. a man who holds rights for the shooting of game. It means everything to him-his prestige in the community, his connection with an old line. It is of enormous importance to him. What is that compared to need in the community, perhaps starvation? What right is there in taking the amount of pleasure of this man and saying that it is more important than
(205) the suffering of the rest of the community? If stated in terms of pleasure and pain, you have a way of assessing situations) especially of dealing with old privileges such as those which, in some sense, marked the structure of English society of that time but which needed to be reconstructed.
From that standpoint the utilitarian doctrine that stated every case in terms of pleasure and pain was a very valuable doctrine. The greatest good of the greatest number could be set up over and against the good of the individual, and the greatest good could be stated in terms of satisfactions and of discomforts and pains. You see that, from that standpoint, we also have a leveling doctrine. The advantage that the landlord gets out of his position is something that belongs to him as a privilege from the community. Is his enjoyment of more value than that of others? How can we find this out? He is a privileged person and should have certain satisfactions. Well, why should he have them rather than somebody else, no matter how low on the social scale the other may be? The hedonistic statement is a leveling statement. Each man counts for one and only one. One man enjoys a picture; another, a game of football. How determine which is more valuable? It is the pleasure that the person gets out of it that counts. The only thing to consider is the pleasure of the one and the pleasure of the other. As Bentham stated it, the pleasures of poetry and of pushpin, as pleasures, are on the same level, even though pushpin is on the same level as tiddlywinks. It is pleasure that is of importance.
Such a doctrine was a theory of great value in enabling people to approach a situation which called for the reconstruction of an old order. In this you can put Bentham and his followers over against Carlyle. Carlyle wanted to keep the privileges of the old order; lie wanted to keep the values that attached to the old order, to keep the old interests. But he recognized that in order to do this he must substitute, for the old feudal captain, the new captain of industry. He tried to deal with the situation as though it were a new feudalism, and he failed in this attempt. He felt the same problem as the utilitarians, that of the neces-
(206) -sity of reconstructing society. What both of them needed was some sort of theory on the basis of which such reconstructing could take place. But the utilitarians certainly offered the more workable theory. They set up a way of assessing the ends, the values of life which could be satisfactorily used in a program of reform.
I have already referred to Carlyle as giving in England a reflection of the German Romantic movement, the philosophical movement which we have already discussed. Carlyle's own attitude was a feudal attitude. The value of that order was staring him in the face. What he tried to bring to the attention of England was that conditions had so changed that, if the older order were to be preserved, it had to be in the form of a new type of feudalism. A phrase was introduced that Carlyle made current, a phrase which has a very different significance now-the "captain of industry." He was a leader; one who led his laborers; one who was the head of the new economic community as the squire was the head of the feudal community. Carlyle looked for such a change to take place, for such leadership to be set up. What he did not realize was that the economic situation was one which had shaken loose the feudal figure, for the individual laborer, no longer connected with the soil, could not be made to have the same dependence upon an economic overlord that the peasant had felt under his feudal overlord on the soil. The same sort of personal relationship between the so-called "captain of industry" and the laborer as had existed in the earlier order could not be set up in the new situation.
While Carlyle was reactionary in the sense of wanting a new feudal order, he was responsive and sympathetic to the condition of the laborer. When labor was brought into the factory centers, there sprang up great cities in which men and women lived in almost impossible conditions. And there sprang up factories built around the machine in which men, women, and children worked under ever so hideous conditions. This was not because people were heartless. It was due to the fact that conditions changed so rapidly, because the factories had come into
(207) existence so quickly, because the machine brought its own social conditions with it; and men did not anticipate all this. They could not foresee its meaning. The community regarded industry as that which provided the morale of a laborer community. It was assumed that no greater blessing could be given to the child than to have this work. The important thing was to get the child started in the right habits and to maintain him in them. To give the child a job as early as possible and to keep him at it as long as possible was an act of kindness to the child. He was getting habits of industry which would make him a successful laborer. So the captain of industry would go into an orphan asylum and place children from there in slavery in the factory, drive them to work with whips, keep them at it until the children could not keep their eyes open. Women and children were taken into industry under abominable conditions, dragging as beasts of burden, the cars that carried the ore and coal. The machine itself was allowed to determine the human conditions of labor. I said this was done not because men were heartless but because they had no idea of what this situation, this industrial development, would mean-because they carried over the standards of an entirely different economic situation into the new one.
Well, these conditions of an inadequate wage and wretched living conditions were reflected in Carlyle's writings. He responded to them; he saw something of what they meant. He recognized that there was springing up an organization among the laborers themselves. He wanted that organization headed by the new feudal economic lord who took the place of the feudal lord of the past. I have already referred to the characteristic in our Western society of voluntary organization which played so large a role in the development of the Western community. We meet it again in this industrial situation. The labor union was organized and composed of laborers themselves in their effort to protect themselves economically in any way they could under these new conditions. Help did not come to them from the more enlightened part of the community, the com-
(208) -munity that could be so sympathetic toward the tenant. The great people, those that gathered about the manor and about the curate's house, and about the vicar, could care for the sick among those on the land, and those in distressed condition; they felt the responsibility for the tenantry. But in the city there were no persons to take their place, and the community itself did not respond to the conditions. It was left to the laborer to assert himself, and he did so through voluntary organization as in the past. The labor union sprang up. It expressed itself as an organization of that type which appears when it is more or less necessary to fight with violence. And it called forth the most rigorous legislation which tried to crush it out. But the Western world never succeeded in crushing it out. It grew in strength; and finally England, through its Parliament, consented to consider what these conditions were which sprang up about the factory town. Then came that group of highly intelligent men who gathered about Jeremy Bentham. The two most forceful figures of this group were James Mill and John Stuart Mill, father and son.
To see what these men were working against, it is necessary to go back to conditions such as those indicated by the so-called Industrial Revolution, in which children were taken into factories, driven to work, forced to remain at work twelve and fourteen hours a day, under most unhealthful conditions and with low wages. You have to go back to such conditions and to the utter ignorance of the masses, and even beyond that to conditions that existed in these great industrial centers. If you want a vivid picture of the life in these centers, take the group of books by Arnold Bennett, in which he tells the tales of The Five Towns, in which he gives an account of his grandfather's life as a child, the way in which he had worked. There is the most vivid statement I know of in literature of the suffering of a child in industry in such a period, and you can multiply that many thousand times and get a realization of the amount of misery there was.
The champion of feudalism, Carlyle, could do nothing but at-
(209) -tack utilitarianism, terming it a scheme to take a world of knaves and make a world of men out of them by an appeal to their worst motives. But he himself realized the conditions in industry and assessed past and present and presented a picture of conditions which must be changed. It is that sort of a picture that we must get in our minds -- a need for reconstruction on the political side. We know all about the rotten boroughs, the system of parliamentary representation that could not be considered representative by any stretch of the imagination, in which the monarch and the ministers bid for the vote of each member of Parliament by emoluments they had to offer. You have a seemingly utterly rotten system which had been held too long in its place by the fears of the French Revolution, sanctified by the rhetoric of Burke. The reformation was long overdue in this situation.
But how was this needed reform to be carried out? How could people determine what was to be kept and what scrapped? These are problems to which utilitarianism certainly offered the best answer at the time. As 1 said, it set up the individual as its final element. It was, in that sense, democratic in character. And it found a statement, "the greatest number," which was very satisfactory for dealing with the evils and misery of society. On the other hand, when it tried to state the great experiences of life in terms of pleasure, it failed. The ends which we pursue are not subjective ends. The great things of life are objective. We may have a most vivid, most private inner experience; but the things that are worth while are not pleasures and pains that we have suffered. The greatest things are those for which we sacrifice ourselves and thus realize ourselves. That phase of human endeavor the utilitarians could not present. For them the end was always the pleasure that one got out of what he did. It was not food one wanted, it was the pleasure one got from eating it; it was not music from great artists one enjoys, but the pleasure that one got out of music; it was not friends, not children, not the person to whom one surrendered one's self, not the issue to which one gave himself, that was the end of effort, but the
(210) satisfaction that one got out of working for others, out of giving himself to a cause, out of devoting one's self to one's home and children. It was the pleasure they got out of these things which was the end for the utilitarians. This is a poor picture of human nature; it is an unjust one. On the credit side of the balance the utilitarian presents an utterly inadequate statement of the ends of human endeavor. But if you turn to the debit side, and see the miseries there, you realize that to appreciate them you have to add them up. One must put himself into an actual sympathetic suffering of the pains of others. It is pain itself that we must get rid of. After all, all great religions gather about the mitigation of suffering, and what the utilitarian doctrine gave was a vivid statement of the amount of suffering going on that ought to be got rid of. Over against that it presented the peaceful sum of pleasure of the few privileged individuals. The doctrine was, however, individualistic in England. It came back to the pleasure and pain of the individual.
James Mill, Bentham's immediate successor, was a Scotchman with great force of character and an enormous capacity for work. He came to England as many Scotchmen did at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries to make his way. He had had training in Scottish religion, and he became attached to Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was a peculiar character; himself a squire, an owner of considerable property, he was, nonetheless, a person who had a very vivid interest in the change which was taking place in England, the change from the feudal order over to the new order which we have been discussing. His immediate interest gathered about the administrative changes, especially those taking place in criminal law. Criminal law, of course, had been administered first of all by the feudal lord, and in feudal fashion. It had been inadequately generalized for each community from the Renaissance on. What Bentham saw was that it did not meet its own purpose. He saw the repression that went with its application, and that this repression did not succeed in keeping down crime, that the penalty was out of proportion to the crime. It was assumed that a heavy
(211) penalty stopped crime. Bentham saw rather that this frequently increased crime. The whole situation called loudly for some intelligent study, and Jeremy Bentham turned his attention to these old feudal conditions. If you want a picture of the criminal conditions of England at that time, take Meredith's Egoist, which was written at the peak of his career. Here is a picture of the squire in his autocratic situation, and of the radical under these new economic situations. What you realize is that the whole governmental control in any district was lodged in the squire. He was the one who exercised all police power, who in a certain sense represented national government at that point; and, not only that, but he was father of his people about him. He had both positions. For him, at that time, game laws seemed more important than any others. They were important not at all because he was interested in his hunting and fishing but because they represented his position from the time of the beginnings of the feudal order. The right to hunt, to preserve game, was the sign of the man who was in power, and so it remained, so that the poacher was a person who was undermining the order of society. It seems to be a very trifling affair, but it was magnified because it represented an attack on the center, on the power of the administrator, upon the police power in the community. The part which fox-hunting played in that period is brought out here, and in Trollope's novels, as well as in Bentham's career. What we find difficult to realize is the symbolism of this simple sport. It represented a right, a sort of social right around which the meaning of the order of society gathered.
The political and social revolution was in a certain sense directed against the feudal lord, most of whose rights and powers gathered about the social situation. It is for this reason that Carlyle became so interesting as an interpreter of the situation. He wanted to preserve this feudal order. As I have already said, in that sense he was a conservative. He wanted the social arrangement adjusted so that the old order could pass over into the economic situation. His book Heroes and Hero Worship gives a picture of his social philosophy. The mass of the com-
(212) -munity were to follow their leader, and there must be leaders there. And the fierce gospel that Carlyle preached to England was a gospel that was to call out these leaders who were to realize their responsibility, who were to carry over into industry that sense of responsibility for laborers that the feudal lords had felt for their tenantry. But the laborer himself was still to be in the hands of this economic overlord. He must be recognized, his rights recognized, his hates and fears listened to; but he himself was to continue to be in the feudal situation of the older world. For this, of course, it was necessary that strong and sympathetic men should be brought up to undertake this sort of work in the community. And Carlyle, in true romantic fashion, went to history to find his appeal. His Heroes and Hero Worship was followed by The Life and Letters of Cromwell, by his History of Frederick the Great and other studies, in which he was looking for strong men who should be leaders in the community and who should carry over the order of things from the earlier situation into this later situation.
In this hurried fashion I have again gone over the different features of the Industrial Revolution. I have done this in order to show how the utilitarian doctrine-and particularly that of Jeremy Bentham-played such a large part in it. The interest in this philosophy was part of the shift from the feudal to the industrial order. We have seen how this same interest is found in Carlyle, who was also an important factor in England at this time. Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, the third significant member of the Utilitarian school, may be set over against each other as two characteristic figures of this period, at least up to the middle of the nineteenth century.
The best, rather the simplest, statement of the utilitarian doctrine is one many of you are familiar with -- Mill's Utilitarianism. It is a short statement but very desirable in its way. What it does not reveal is the enthusiasm this doctrine aroused. As Mill states it, it is more or less convincing. But you cannot really think of the youth of the community being inspired by it. In order to realize the inspiration that it gathered
(213) about it, we have to realize that it did present a workable doctrine in social reform, that it was democratic in its implications, that it allowed one man to count for one and only one, and, particularly, that it set up a very simple statement of what the end of all social institutions should be-the good of the community. And when one asked what the good of the community is, it could be said that it is an algebraic sum of pleasures and pains of the community which should show how much pleasure there is, and particularly how much misery there is. When you come to set this doctrine over in terms of pleasures, it loses its effectiveness. As someone said, it seemed to express the idea of the Englishman waking up in the morning and smacking his lips over a breakfast of ham and eggs. That seems to present a pretty ignoble end for society to seek. But on the other side that of the getting rid of misery-it becomes a doctrine which can have behind it all the enthusiasm of social reform. The starving of children, the suffering of men and women in factories under trying conditions, could be brought out and simply stated by it. They were sufferings which were not to be glossed over because they belonged to lower orders, because the world was such that there had to be suffering in it, because all would be right in the world to come. You could not push things aside for such reasons when distress could be stated in terms of the actual summing-up of the amount of suffering that people endured in the midst of long periods of strikes, of penury, of business depressions. If this is brought out and added to all the suffering together, you have something which would appeal to what was finest in human nature at that time. So, while utilitarianism put its stress on getting rid of pain, it could be an idealistic doctrine, if it tried to.
What John Stuart Mill does is to present as highest those pleasures which we commonly regard as most admirable, especially those connected with social ways of life-friendship, organization of family life, and particularly the pleasures that come from the enjoyment of literature, of science, of satisfaction of all our multiform curiosities. Mill assumed that we have an
(214) indefinite appetite for these. He was, of course, of a highly intellectual nature himself. And he recognized in the beginning of popular education in England the possibility of changing the attitude and interests of men. He had been, one might say, a victim of a theory of education on the part of his father. He was taught Greek almost before he was taught English. He studied ancient languages as a very little child. He was trained by his father, who was a very effective pedagogue. His father hit on the scheme, since John Stuart was the oldest in the family, of giving him lessons and then having him give the same lessons to his younger brothers and sisters. He would then examine the younger brothers and sisters to see how well Mill knew the lesson. It was a time-saving and very effective method. There was a system of education in England at that time which made use of very much this same principle. When England faced the possibility of popular education, people were frightened by the bill which would be presented. It did not seem possible to hire enough teachers and to pay for them to give a common-school education to every child, so that the first systems of education were such systems as this. A certain number of children were taught, and then they were allowed to teach so many more. It was a system which at least aroused a demand for public education, although it was thoroughly poor in its results.
