THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW. T HAT Stevenson wrote an essay on
the future of Socialism will be news to many readers of to-day who are moderately familiar with his writings from "Travels with a Donkey" to the Vailima Letters. Those who are fortunate enough to possess the Edinburgh edition may have made acquaintance with it; but for a wider circle, familiarity with R.L.S.'s expressed views on the subject has probably been delayed until the publication this year of a volume of essays entitled "Lay Morals, &c.," in the familiar six shillings edition issued by Messrs. Chatto and Windua. And here is the essay, which be calls " The Day After To-morrow," and which, read the first time a quarter of a century, perhaps, after it was written, can still stir the blood, in his own flashing phrase, " like Burgundy or daybreak." From internal evidence, since he writes of " President Cleveland's letter," and makes certain references to Mr. H. M. Hyndman, " The Day After To-morrow " should have been written about the middle eighties ; but it could not fit any political outlook of those years more closely and with keener emphasis than it suits the situation as we see it, or as some of us see it, to-day. The " To-morrow " of the eighties has come, and we are waiting, many of us without much elation, for the day after, which is our own to-morrow. Mean- while how could the condition of affairs brought about by recent legislation be summed up better than in a phrase or two twenty-five years old already P " Our legislation grows authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin, notebook in hand, to darken the face of England. It may be right or wrong, we are not trying that ; but one thing it is beyond doubt : it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is that we scarcely know it." Though, to be sure, in this year of grace we are getting to know it very plainly indeed.
" There are great truths in Socialism," writes Stevenson, " or no one, not even Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it."
But if it is to come, we may as well have some notion of what it will be like, and "the first thing to grasp is that our new polity will be designed and administered (to put it courteously) with something short of inspiration. It will be made, or will grow, in a human parliament; and the one thing that will not very hugely change is human nature." What changes, then, may we look for P " Well, this golden age of which we are speaking will be the golden age of officials. In all our concerns it will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, with what obliging words, analogy will aid us to imagine.. . . The laws they will have to administer will be no clearer than those we know to-day, and the body which is to regulate their administration no wiser than the British Parliament." And then follows this striking passage :— " And if the Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall have lost a thing, in most respects not much-to be regretted, but as a moderator of oppression, a thing nearly invaluable—the newspaper. For the independent journal is a creature of capital and competition; it stands and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses and glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private property, the days of the independent journal are numbered. State railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials."
Next, these officials would have no sinecure. We may con- sider the effect of increased legislation upon human nature. The more laws to be broken, the more sins spring up. " The number of new contraventions will be out of all proportion multiplied." If we take the case of work alone, and recognize that man is an idle animal, we shall find that men are spurred to work by hope and by fear. " But in unloved toils, even under the prick of necessity, no man is continuously sedulous. Once eliminate the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound the hope of riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and malingering." Well, then, how are the officials to treat the malingerers P "To dock the skulker's food is not enough; many will rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferinga than put their shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily. For such as these, then, the whip will be in the overseer's hand ; and his own sense of justice and the superintendence of a chaotic popular assembly will be the only checks on its employment. Now, you may be an industrious man and a good citizen, and yet not love, nor yet be loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector. It is admitted by private soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil not to be combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a brief while you will either be disgraced or have deserted. And the sergeant can no longer appeal to the lash. But if these things go on, we shall see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an inspector."
It is presumed, under such a state of society, that the level of comfort will be high. Not necessarily. Man is "supposed to love comfort ; it is not a love that he is faithful to," Rather he wants excitement :— " Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to man than regular meals. He does not think so when he is hungry
but he thinks so again as soon as he is fed ; and on the hypothesis of a successful ant-heap, he would never go hungry. It would be always after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the Lotos- eaters, it was always afternoon ; and food, which, when we have it not, seems all-important, drops in our esteem, as soon as we have it, to a mere prerequisite of living."
A man wants, in short, to be able to choose; to work as he pleases, to idle when he wishes, to drink what he likes. That is why he always prefers money to things; money gives him more freedom of choice, a wider field of action. And he chooses where he pleases, even if his choice means danger, or, rather, because it means danger :- "Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the shock of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles : these are the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they seek alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic dissipations. When they are taken in some pinch closer than the common, they cry, ' Catch me here again and sure enough you catch them there again— perhaps before the week is out. It is as old as Robinson Crusoe ; as old as man."
There is such a thing, in fact, as a " tedium of safety." The bourgeois already, in our society as it exists, "is too much cottoned about for any zest in living : he sits in his parlour, out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitudes, but one of health ; and there he yawns." Life is safe, but immeasurably dull. What is wanted is
the spice of excitement. " The aleatory, whether it touches life, or fortune, or renown—whether we explore Africa or only toss for halfpence—that is what I conceive men to love best "—and that is what we are seeking to exclude from men's existences."
" Of all forms of the aleatory, that which most commonly attends our working men—the danger of misery from want of work—is the least inspiriting : it does not whip the blood, it does not evoke the glory of contest ; it is tragic, but it is passive ; and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly touching them, it does truly season the men's lives. Of those who fail, I do not speak—despair should be sacred; but to those who even modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring interest : a job found, a shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is not from these but from the villa-dweller that we hear complaints of the un- worthiness of life."
And for how long will the unchanging dulness of the new order of life be borne with P
" Soon there would be a looking back : there would be tales of the old world humming in young men's ears, tales of the tramp and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant. And in the stall-fed life of the successful ant-heap—with its regular meals, regular duties, regular pleasures, an even course of life, and fear excluded —the vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day will seem of epic breadth."
After bread, in short, will be demanded the circus. "Bread we suppose to be given amply; the cry for circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our descendants be such as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleasures on which they will be likely to fall back : the pleasures of intrigue and sedition." But that leads to another consideration. In what way will intrigue and sedition find an outlet P You are introducing inevitably an era of communal independence :- " But the rise of communes is none the less the end of economic equality, just when we were told it was beginning. Communes will not be all equal in extent, nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population; nor will the surplus produce of all be equally marketable. It will be the old story of competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears to me, a new, inevitable danger. For the merchant and the manufacturer, in this new world, will be a sovereign commune ; it is a sovereign power that will see its crops undersold, and its manufactures worsted in the market. And all the more dangerous that the sovereign power should be small. Great powers are slow to stir; national affronts, even with the aid of newspapers, filter slowly into popular con- sciousness; national losses are so unequally shared, that one part of the population will be counting its gains while another sits by a cold hearth. But in the sovereign commune all will be cen- tralized and sensitive."
To what end, then, do you come P Inevitably, again, to a period of flux and reflux, to competition in a new form with old instincts behind it ; in the last end, contradictorily but naturally enough, because of the very neglect of the nature of mankind, to the harshest and fiercest competition in the world, which is war. On that note, of war because of the satiety of order, the essay ends :-
" When jealousy springs up, when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the commune of Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the body politic; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in his diet and his dress ; even the secretary, who drafts the official correspondence, will sit down to his .task embittered, as a man who has dined ill and ma: expect to dine worse; and thus a business difference between com- munes will take on much the same colour as a dispute between diggers in the lawless West, and will lead as directly to the arbitrament of blows. So that the establishment of the communal system will not only reintroduce all the injustices and heart- burning,s of economic inequality, but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate a world of hedgerow warfare. Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on Dorchester, Wimborne on both ; the wagons will be fired on as they follow the highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will go armed into the field of tillage ; and if we have not a return of ballad literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the victory of Conte Abbas or the reverse of Toiler Porcorum. At least this will not be dull ; when I was younger, I could have welcomed such a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a vengeance, and irresistibly suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation of new empires."
Previous page
