MODERN SELFISHNESS.
THE Spectator is often assailed, and that by its own friends, for doubting whether the reign of selfishness, as the strongest motive-power in human affairs, draws as yet very near to its end. It takes, we are often told, too cynical a view of the new day, and of those new governing impulses which distinguish the present from all previous days. It is not only unjust, it is said, but foolish, to hesitate in removing restraints, when the necessity for them has so dearly disappeared. Civilised men are now moved by the "law of love," and to expect that they will feel the impulses of wild beasts is not only to traduce them, but to resist the progress which would infallibly arise from mutual confidence. A strong Police is a great expense, and, if there are no thieves or murderers, a great impediment to large expenditure upon the improvement of city life. So strong is the benevolent impression, that it affects foreign policy and internal legislation. Those who urge the necessity of Fleets are accused of foolish suspicion of their neighbours; while those who defend the law of conspiracy as a needed precaution against malignity, are charged "with a social distrust fatal to all hope of rapid social advance." The world, it is alleged, is now governed by pity and feeling and consideration for the weak. We wish all those who believe these smooth things— and there are thousands of them, most of them quite honest— would study carefully the case of the 'Normannia's ' passengers, as reported in the telegrams published on Tuesday and Wed- nesday. The Normannia ' arrived in New York with cholera on board, and was placed in quarantine, that is, was compelled to remain in the harbour, without communication with the land, in complete isolation. After the healthy portion of the passengers had endured extreme misery, the Governor of New York, a humane and wide-minded man, proposed that Fire Island, an islet opposite Long 'bland, with a large hotel on it, should be purchased as a quarantine station, and the passengers be landed there, where they could have some comfort, the power of walking about, and im- munity from the danger of infection. He himself pur- chased the island and the hotel, the healthy passengers were transferred to a small coasting steamer, the Cepheus,' and it was supposed that their sufferings, from im- prisonment, at all events, would be happily terminated. Those who thought so, however, mistook their epoch. The reign of the "law of love" has only commenced for those whose sufferings disturb the comfort of the lookers.on. The inhabitants of the shore of Long Island, which is behind Fire Island, believed cholera contagious, and, though separated by water from the island about to be infected, rose in arms to prevent the landing of anybody from the Cepheus.' They threatened to drown Mr. Wall, the officer appointed by the Governor to look after the passengers, and when implored to allow the old women and children to land, sullenly refused. Mr. McPherson, Senator of the United States, elected by New Jersey, appealed to them in the name of God. "I appeal to you men in the name of God," urged the Senator, "not to be longer led on to heartless cruelty by this attorney, but to give your consent to the women and children being taken from the boat, where they have nothing to eat and no place to sleep in, where the common decencies of life can no longer be observed, and where the surroundings are foul from sea- sickness. Before you answer, think what will be done. Don't bring everlasting disgrace upon your names. Be men ! " The appeal, it will be observed, was made on behalf of women in a way which, in America, when no danger attends humanity, is
always supposed to be final, and of children, for whom the whole world is declared to be at present full of compassion and parental feeling ; but it produced no response whatever The crowd were assured by competent officers, whom they knew, that the passengers were all clean, and that there was nothing to fear ; but they preferred the sufferings of others which they fully realised, to the smallest modicum of risk to their own persons. They, to speak plainly, threatened the passengers with death if they debarked ; and it was not until the exasperated Governor called out twelve hundred militia, with four guns, and they had ascertained that the sol diers would act strongly, that they permitted the unfortunate women and children to land, and occupy the hotel purchased for them. Let the women and children die' was the inner resolve, 'so that we be but safe;' and plans, it is said, were even laid for burning the hotel, so that it should no longer be able to afford accommodation. Selfishness of the most absolute kind, the selfishness which prefers cruelty to others, however gross, rather than risk to oneself, however slight, reigned alone in the community, just as it does in savages or the semi- civilised. There was no pity for the feeble, while for the sick there was only an abhorrence such as, in many countries and at many periods, has proscribed lepers and the victims of strange diseases like goitre.
This selfishness is not confined to America. There is hardly a country of Southern Europe where sickness, if it be of an infectious character, is not regarded with angry loathing, leading often to active cruelty; while in Hungary the peasants openly declare that they will inflict death rather than incur the risk of it for their wives and children. Even in Germany, in many places the people absolutely refuse the sick admittance, and drive out crowds of Russian Jews to starve and perish of exposure beyond the frontier, because disease may be among them. Nor are we wholly exempt from the same selfishness even here. We do not refuse admittance to hospitals, but after moaning loudly in newspapers over the oppressions practised on Russian Jews, we, to avoid their competition as well as to avoid disease, take advantage of the first excuse to declare that they shall not enter our ports, and, in fact and truth, bludgeon crowds of supplicants, praying for permission to be our self-supporting guests, back into their misery. 'We pity their sufferings to any extent, even to the extent of writing poetry to bewail them, but will not to our own hurt give them the smallest relief. The "law of love" in our minds applies to any but the dangerously miserable. They are below the scope of Christian charity, and brotherhood with them is as impossible as with Cain. Precisely the same spirit reigns in all labour disputes. All over Europe the workmen are preaching altruism as the only gospel, demand- ing that society shall relieve its "disinherited" brethren from suffering, and pleading, in the name of the common rights of all mankind, that even crime, if committed to enforce equality in fraternity, must, in a good world, be condoned. Innocent men hurrah for Ravachol because that foul assassin died "for labour." The moment, however, wages are threatened, the "brothers" wake to fratricide. Dynamite is employed against masters, revolvers or clubs against competitors. There is not a city in Europe where hunger is held to be an excuse for a "blackleg," or a factory where the non-unionists who entered Homestead to work are not considered traitors worthy of death. The sole object is cash, just as it was with the robber- Barons of the Middle Ages; and for cash, workmen whose creed is fraternity rival them in cruelty and violence, or even in places like the Far West, where it is fairly safe, massacre undersellers wholesale. Fraternity is the law, but half the workmen of Europe regard the underbidder as Cain regarded Abel, and, if they could, would in the name of the gospel of social peace and love, wage civil war against capitalists, with all its ancient horrors. As for foreigners, they are, in the name of international amity, to be expelled at once, even though, as in the case of the unhappy Belgian miners recently driven by mobs out of France, they speak the same language, wear the same clothes, and are, in fact, indistinguishable save by a nationality which no Socialist recognises as a dir. qualification, and by a willingness, rather than starve, to accept a lower rate of wages. Their sufferings make no more difference to those who expel them than the sufferings of his victims make to the successful thief.
And yet the men are in no way conscious hypocrites, but only self-deluded. They, and still more, the superiors who sympathise with them, really believe they have accepted their lofty ideal, and only discover when the test moment comes, that they have misunderstood the circumstances of the world and their own power of self-restraint. The French workmen of the North- East believe, we do not doubt, in the "solidarity "of labour, and the kinship of all handicraftsmen, and only err in thinking that they can endure loss of money through the agency of kinsfolk. They fancy human nature extinguished by moral sentiments, and it is not extinguished, but as vigorous and as bad, when over- tempted, as it ever was. They forget that Cain did not question Abel's brotherhood, but only killed him, brother or none, when he grew jealous. They fancy, honestly fancy, that words, if sincerely spoken, are realities ; and because they hear equality defended by men who believe what they are saying, imagine that those men will never, when circumstances incline them, be either masters or servants. It is a kind of delusion as old as the world, and only to be wondered at be- cause they themselves make rules which establish inequality, and sanction enmity, and disallow fraternity as between men who like work in combination, and men who prefer to seek work unfettered by restrictions That their own hatred of blacklegs does not teach them that hatred still exists, is, we confess, odd ; but human nature is full of such contradictions, and ignorant or semi-ignorant men do not study much the working of their own minds.
The puzzle is, not the inconsistency of the uneducated, but the credulity of certain classes above them. There are thou- sands of cultivated persons in England who sincerely believe that the world is about to be governed by "sweet reasonable- ness ;" that it is no longer necessary to enforce laws strictly; and that, if London were left without police, London would be as habitable as ever. The general wish for good would keep the ill-conditioned in awe. These are the people who would do away with the law of conspiracy, would trust local cliques -with the power of expropriation, and would lighten the sanc- tions of the law as only antiquated and needless appeals to the passion of fear. What is the cause of their illusion ? We believe it to be due in part to an increase in their benevo- lence, produced by increased comfort, increased capacity to realise what suffering means, and increased selfishness of a certain kind,—the selfishness of sensitive natures which -cannot tolerate the spectacle, or indeed the knowledge of suffering, even when such suffering is for the general good. It irritates them, sometimes to a degree which displaces the judgment altogether, and produces the strangest toleration for cruelty in other forms, so that one hears suggestions for the punishment of offenders like Mrs. Montagu, such as, coming as they do from the merciful, make one doubt whether mankind is altogether sane. The grand cause, however, we are convinced, is the spread of Rousseauism as a kind of religion,—a substitute for Christianity. That creed requires as its datum a belief in human nature as essentially good, and requiring only to be relieved from restrictions to show how good it is or may become. Only place man in a vacuum, relieve him from the pressure of the atmosphere, and he will be strong,—that is the idea, and as it is essentially and per- manently false, it produces other ideas entirely at variance with all the facts of life. It is the restrictions which produce goodness in man, not the absence of them. The people of Mon- tenegro never steal, are as honest, in fact, as English servants, —perhaps, considering their temptations, the most honest class on earth; and the reason is, that in Montenegro, for generations past, theft has been the only crime visited with painful and degrading punishment. The law educates as well as coerces, and the people of Fire Island, who became humane under the coercion of soldiers, will for ever after regard their own inhumanity with a certain distaste as a tendency which they are bound to keep down. Their natural instinct was to shoot the weak rather than suffer danger, and it is only their educated instinct, educated by restrictions in the shape of rifles, which, after a time, will make them humane enough to perceive that, when disease is abroad, duty compels them to bear a little risk, rather than inflict a great deal of suffering. Human nature released from restrictions is mueh more like what it appeared to Calvin than what it appeared to Rousseau, and it is not without advantage that that truth should be learned again through an occasional object-lesson. Man in "a state a nature "—and it is towards reproducing the state of nature that the new Rousseau ism tends—is an exceedingly dangerous
brute, quite capable, if his father has got scarlet fever, of shooting him down "to prevent the spread of infection,"— that is, in fact, to keep it from himself.
Previous page
