Twentieth Century Socialism: What It Is Not. What It Is. How It May Come

INTRODUCTION

I

No one whose intellectual parts are in working order believes that the industrial world will go back to an unorganized individualistic production and distribution of wealth. No one whose moral sense is awake desires to see the chief means of production owned and controlled by a small number of monstrously wealthy men, however great their ability or good their intentions. Nevertheless, most persons of moral sense and normal mentality are disturbed when one suggests in so many words that if industry cannot henceforth be individualistic and should not be owned and controlled by the Big Few, it will, apparently, have to be owned and controlled by the Many. This paradoxical psychology possibly indicates that we queer human beings do our real thinking and perform our occasional feats of moral self-examination in lucid intervals, alternating with states of mind—and conscience—which were better not described in non-technical language.

Edmond Kelly was a man whose lucidity was not interrupted. It was a necessity of his nature to think clearly and coherently. Not less necessary was it for him to think comprehensively, for his sympathy was 

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boundless. Every phase of life interested him. He found nothing but meanness contemptible; and nothing but injustice moved him to hate. To such a mind the partial view is intolerable. A fact must be seen from every side and its relations to other facts must be traced out. From his earliest manhood Mr. Kelly looked upon the struggle for existence as both evolution and effort. Accepting the Darwinian explanation of life, he yet could not admit that man is powerless to control his fate. Physical evolution shades into physiological, and physiological evolution into psychological. Effort, foresight, and directed effort are products of evolution, but having been produced, they become forces in further evolution. In the higher evolution of man, they have become principal forces. From the moment that Mr. Kelly grasped this thought his mind was busy with it through all the years of his exceedingly active life, mastering its implications, examining it in its social or collective, no less than in its individual aspect, and forecasting the chief lines of constructive effort by an enlightened mankind industrially and politically organized for the most effective coöperation.

Yet it was not until a few years before his death that Mr. Kelly became a declared Socialist. The slow advance to his ultimate conclusions was characteristic. Though his mind moved swiftly, his intellectual integrity compelled him to examine every position as he went on. Because of these qualities his books form a series, consecutive in premisses and argument; a logical sequence corresponding to their chronological order. Thus, in his early work, "Evolution and Effort," Mr. Kelly was content to do thoroughly one particular thing, namely, to demonstrate that the Spencerian philosophy of evolution could be accepted without committing mankind to 

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the practical programme of laissez faire, upon which Mr. Spencer himself so strongly insisted. This work Mr. Kelly did so well that there is no need for anyone to do it over, and it provided a firm foundation for his further constructive efforts. The Popular Science Monthly, which was then, under the editorship of Professor Edward L. Youmans, unreservedly committed to Spencerian views, acknowledged that it was the most telling attack upon what Professor Huxley had called "administrative nihilism" that had been made in any quarter. The main ideas of "Evolution and Effort" were elaborated and clinched in the two large volumes on "Government or Human Evolution," and were concretely applied to pressing practical questions in the unsigned book, "A Programme for Workingmen."

Each of the two volumes on "Government" was devoted, as "Evolution and Effort" had been, to establishing firmly a specific proposition. When Mr. Kelly began writing the first volume, which bore the sub-title "Justice," he was a lecturer in the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University and was intensely interested in the movement for the reform of municipal politics in New York city. Believing that adequate organization was the chief need, he had founded the City Club and the subsidiary Good Government Clubs. In the discussions which this movement called forth, he says: "One fact stood out with startling conspicuousness. Not one out of a thousand was able to formulate a clear idea as to the principles upon which he stood; upon one measure he was an Individualist; upon another, a Collectivist; one day he was for strong governmental action; the next for liberty of contract; and of those who presented the claims of expediency and justice respectively, no one was able to say what justice was."

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It seemed, therefore, to Mr. Kelly that on the theoretical side we needed first, and above all else, a clear conception of justice as an end to be attained. For conclusions already arrived at in "Evolution and Effort" made it impossible for him to believe that justice is satisfied by merely "rewarding every man according to his performance." Seeing in evolution possibilities beyond present attainment, he believed that a way should be found to enable every man to achieve his potential performance. Thus his notion of justice, derived from the principle of evolution, became substantially identical with that which had been set forth two thousand years ago by Plato in The Republic. To quote Mr. Kelly's own words: "Justice may, then, be described as the effort to eliminate from our social conditions the effects of the inequalities of Nature upon the happiness and advancement of man, and particularly to create an artificial environment which shall serve the individual as well as the race, and tend to perpetuate noble types rather than those which are base."

It was inevitable that with such a conception of justice in mind, a thinker scientifically so remorseless as Mr. Kelly was, should find individualistic prejudices shaken before he completed his task. "Beginning with a strong bias against Socialism of every kind," he was forced before he reached the end of his first volume to "a reluctant recognition that by collective action only could the uncorrupted many be rescued from the corrupt few, and could successful effort be made to diminish the misery of poverty and crime."

Having arrived at this conclusion, Mr. Kelly was able to make his second volume on the respective claims of Individualism and Collectivism an exposition which, for clearness of insight, acuteness of philosophical 

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observation, wealth of historical knowledge, and sanity of judgment, has few equals in the modern literature of social problems. He demonstrated the inevitable failure of individualism as an adequate working programme for a complex civilization. He showed that collectivism must be accepted, whether we like it or not, if we desire justice; and, more than this, he showed, not speculatively, but from concrete and experimental data, that a civilized mankind may be expected to like a reasonable collectivism when it begins to understand and to adopt it, far better than it has liked individualism, and for the adequate reason that collectivism will diminish misery and increase happiness.

Not even upon the completion of this remarkable volume, however, was Mr. Kelly quite ready to take the final step of identifying himself with the Socialist party. So strong was that nature within him which, without theological implications, we may call the spiritual or religious, that he would have been glad if he could have seen the possibility of attaining the ends which Socialism contemplates through a movement essentially subjective, that is to say, through developments of the intellectual and moral nature of man which would impel all human beings, irrespective of class distinctions, to work together spontaneously and unselfishly, for the creation of a wholesome environment and essential justice in social relations. It was this feeling that led him to write the anonymously published, "Practical Programme for Workingmen," in which essentially socialistic measures are advocated, but with strong emphasis upon the vital importance of character and sympathy.

When a strong-minded man of strict intellectual honesty has thus advanced, step by step, from one position to another, at every stage of his progress 

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surveying the whole field of human struggle; observing it dispassionately, as a scientific evolutionist; observing it sympathetically, "as one who loves his fellowmen," comes at last to the socialistic conclusion, and devotes the last weeks of his life to the preparation of a new statement of socialistic doctrine, the fact is more significant, as an indication of the way mankind is going, than are all the cries of "lo here, lo there" that arise from the din of party discussion. In Mr. Kelly's case the significance was deepened by all the circumstances of taste and association. Intensely democratic in his relations to men, Mr. Kelly was in breeding, in culture, in delicacy of feeling an aristocrat of the purest type. Educated at Columbia and at Cambridge, his university acquaintance and his political and professional activities in New York and in Paris had kept him continually in touch with what the socialist calls "the capitalist class." In joining the Socialist party he jeopardized friendships and associations that meant more to him than anything else save the approval of his own conscience.

The book now given to the public, written when he knew that his days were numbered, is, all in all, the most remarkable of his works. All writers of experience know that it is far easier to write a first statement of a newly discovered truth, than to restate the chief principles of a system already partly formulated; a system more or less vague where it is most vital, more or less unscientific and impossible where it is most specific. No one knew better than Mr. Kelly did that while the larger-minded leaders of the Socialist movement would generously welcome any thought which he had to give, there would be some of the rank and file who would feel that, in differing from the accredited writers, he was revealing himself as a convert not yet quite informed 

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on all tenets of the creed—perhaps not even quite sound in the faith. A less enthusiastic nature, or one less resolutely determined to complete his life work as best he could, would have shrunk from such an undertaking as this book was. That under the circumstances he could put into it the vigor of thought and of style, the incisive criticism, the wealth of fact and illustration; above all, the freshness of view, the practical good sense and the strong constructive treatment which we find in these pages, is indeed remarkable.

How clearly he saw what sort of a book was needed, is best indicated in his own account of what he desired to do. It should be first of all, he thought, comprehensive. Socialism has been presented from the economic standpoint, from the scientific, from the ethical and from the idealistic. As Mr. Kelly saw it, Socialism is not merely an economic system, nor merely an idealistic vision. It is a consequence and product of evolution. "Science has made it constructive," he says, "and the trusts have made it practical." It is ethical because "the competitive system must ultimately break upon the solidarity of mankind," because the survival of the fit is not the whole result of evolution. The result still to be attained is "the improvement of all." And Socialism is idealistic because it not only contemplates, but gives reasonable promise of "a community from which exploitation, unemployment, poverty and prostitution shall be eliminated."

But besides making an exposition of Socialism as a whole and in all its parts, Mr. Kelly aimed to make a book "for non-socialists." With this purpose in view he has kept closely to concrete statement and above all has tried to avoid vagueness and loose generalization. He has described possibilities in terms that all know and 

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understand. With the precision of the trained legal mind, he seizes the essential point when he says: "It is not enough to be told that there are a thousand ways through which Socialism can be attained. We want to see clearly one way." With the last strength that he had to spend Mr. Kelly showed one way; and no bewildered wayfarer through our baffling civilization, however he may hesitate to set his feet upon it, will venture to say that it is not clear.

Franklin H. Giddings.