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TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIALISM




TWENTIETH CENTURY
SOCIALISM

_WHAT IT IS NOT; WHAT IT IS:
HOW IT MAY COME_


BY
EDMOND KELLY, M.A., F.G.S.

Late Lecturer on Municipal Government at Columbia University,
in the City of New York

Author of "Government or Human Evolution,"
"Evolution and Effort," etc., etc.




LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1911




Copyright, 1910

BY

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.


First Edition, May, 1910
Reprinted, November, 1910
May, 1911


THE SCIENTIFIC PRESS
ROBERT DRUMMOND AND COMPANY
BROOKLYN, N.Y.




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 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 cooperation.

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 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."

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 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