CHAPTER X
ADULTERATION, BRIBERY, AND GAMBLING
After the terrible national crime of deadly employments it is almost an anti-climax to enumerate the vast mass of dishonesty and falsehood that pervades our commercial system in every department. Almost every fabric, whether of cotton, linen, wool, or silk, is so widely and ingeniously adulterated by the intermixture of cheaper materials that the pure article as supplied to our grandparents is hardly to be obtained. Of this one example only must serve. Calicoes have been successively dressed with such substances as paste and tallow; then with the still cheaper china clay and size; and in some cases from 50 to 90 per cent. of these latter materials have been sold as calico for exportation to countries inhabited by what we term savages. These people only found out the deception when the need for washing or exposure to tropical rains reduced the material to a flimsy and worthless rag, as I have myself witnessed in some parts of the Malay Archipelago.5
Even worse is the adulteration of almost every kind of prepared food—including the showy sweetmeats which tempt our children—with various chemicals, which are often injurious to health, and sometimes fatal; while even the drugs we take in the endeavour to cure our various ailments are frequently so treated as to be useless or even hurtful. Along with this form of dishonesty is what may be termed simple cheating in the description of goods sold, especially as to quantity. Threads and fabrics are generally shorter or narrower than stated, giving a larger profit when sold in enormous quantities in our great retail shops.
Then, again, there is a widespread system of bribery of servants or other employees in order to obtain more customers or to secure contracts; and though these are all criminal offences, and a great host of inspectors and official analysts are employed to discover and convict the offenders, yet so few people are willing to take the trouble and lose the time and money involved in putting the law into motion, that a very large percentage of these offences go undiscovered and unpunished.
Yet another and more serious form of plunder of the public is carried on by means of Joint Stock Companies, of which there are now more than 50,000 in England and Wales. In the year 1911 the number of new companies was 5,959, while 4,353 ceased to exist, giving an increase of 1,606 in the year. The Limited Liability Act was passed in 1855, in order that the public might invest their savings in companies, and thus share in the profits of our industry and commerce. It was supposed to be quite proper that anyone should benefit by the enterprise and industry of others; but to do so is essentially immoral, and has resulted in a vast system of swindling and terrible losses to the innocent investors. The promoters, directors, secretaries and bankers of these companies always gain; those that take up the shares often lose; and the amount of misery and absolute ruin of those who fondly hoped to add to their scanty incomes, and have been deluded by the names of well-known public men among the directors, is incalculable.
Our Stock Exchanges, too, are used largely for pure gambling which, owing to its vast extent and being carried on under business forms, is perhaps more ruinous than any other. But this form of gambling goes on unchecked, and is generally accepted as quite honest business. Yet ordinary betting on races and other forms of direct gambling are hypocritically condemned as immoral and criminal.
The vast fabric of our Foreign Trade in food, or the raw materials of our manufactures, is also used to support perhaps the greatest system of gambling the world has ever seen. The fluctuating prices of corn or cotton, of coal or mineral oil, of iron and other metals, in the great markets of the world, are used in two ways by a large community of gamblers, who not only do not require the goods they buy, but who never see nor possess them. The ordinary speculator who buys when prices are low, to sell again at a profit, without himself being able to influence the rise or fall of price, is a pure gambler who thinks he can foresee the changes of the market price in the immediate future. But the great capitalists who, either singly or by means of what are called rings or combines, purchase such vast quantities of the special product as to create a scarcity in the market, leading to a large rise of price, are ingenious robbers rather than gamblers, because, by clever dealings with such a monopoly, often aided by false rumours widely circulated in newspapers owned or bribed by them, they are able to make enormous profits at the expense of those who are obliged to purchase for actual business purposes or for daily use. This is one of the methods by which the great millionaires and multi-millionaires of the world accumulate their wealth, every penny of which is at the cost of the consuming public.
This is certainly as immoral as any of the petty forms of swindling with marked cards, loaded dice, or the wilful losing of a race; yet the possessors of such wealth are usually held to be clever business men, whose morality is not questioned.
All these inconsistencies as regards the moral status of various kinds of gambling or dishonest speculation arise from our inveterate habit of dealing with limited cases, each judged on its supposed merits as to consequences, instead of looking to fundamental principles. Why is gambling immoral? Not because it is a game of chance, entered into for mere amusement, even when played for small money stakes which are of no importance to any of the players. The fundamental wrong arises whenever it is used for obtaining wealth or any part of the player's income; and the reason is, that whatever one wins, someone else loses; while its evil nature, socially, depends upon the fact that whoever acquires wealth by such means contributes nothing useful to the social organism of which he forms a part. If it were taught to every child, and in every school and college, that it is morally wrong for anyone to live upon the combined labour of his fellow-men without contributing an approximately equal amount of useful labour, whether physical or mental, in return, all kinds of gambling, as well as many other kinds of useless occupation, would be seen to be of the same nature as direct dishonesty or fraud, and, therefore, would soon come to be considered disgraceful as well as immoral.
We see, then, that the whole commercial fabric of our country—our immense mills and factories, our vast exports and imports, our home trade, wholesale and retail, and innumerable transactions in our Stock Exchanges—is permeated with various forms of dishonesty, gambling, and direct robbery of individuals or of the public. No class is wholly free from it, and it increases in volume from decade to decade, just as our boasted commerce and accumulated wealth increases.
I have here called attention to these various forms of immoral practices because they are so often ignored. Yet they are all officially admitted by the enormous mass of the various Royal Commissions, Parliamentary and other Reports, as well as by the hundreds of "Acts" by which successive Parliaments have endeavoured to deal with them, but which have, one and all, proved to be either wholly or partially ineffective. The reason of this failure is that in every case symptoms and isolated results only have been considered, while the underlying causes of the whole vast mass of social corruption have never been sought for, or, if known, have never influenced legislation.
CHAPTER XI
OUR ADMINISTRATION OF "JUSTICE" IS IMMORAL
When we read about the Turkish or other Eastern law courts, in which direct bribery of every official up to the judge himself is a regular feature, we are horrified, and are apt to proclaim the fact that our judges never take bribes. But, practically, it comes to very nearly the same thing in England. No single step can be made for the purpose of getting justice without paying fees; while the whole process of bringing or defending an action-at-law is so absurdly complex as to be almost incredible. Jeremy Bentham satirised this by supposing a father of a large family to adopt the same method of settling a dispute between two of his sons. He would not hear either of them himself, but each must tell his story to a stranger (a solicitor), who wrote it down and then instructed another stranger (a barrister) to explain it to the father (as judge) and twelve neighbours (the jury). Then the stranger (barrister) on each side asked questions of all the family who knew anything about it; and the barristers, who had only third-hand knowledge of the facts, tried to make each witness contradict himself, or to acknowledge having done something as bad another time; till the jury became quite puzzled, and often decided as the cleverest of the barristers told them.
That is really the system of law courts to this day; and it is grossly unfair, because the party who can pay the highest fees for the services of the most experienced counsel is most likely, through the lawyer's skill and eloquence, to secure a verdict in his favour. Yet there is no effective protest against this unjust and absurd system, which absolutely denies all redress of wrongs to the poor man when oppressed by a rich one. One would think it self-evident that justice ceases to be justice when it has to be paid for. But the system is so time-hallowed, the profession of a barrister so honoured, and its rewards so great, that it will never be abolished till there comes about in our social system that fundamental change which will cut at the very root-cause of almost all our existing law-suits, immorality and crime.
In our criminal as well as our civil law and procedure there is equal injustice. When the poor man is accused of the slightest offence and brought before a magistrate by the police, he is, even though perfectly honest and respectable, treated from the very first as if he were guilty, often refused communication with his friends; and, when the accusation is serious, he is remanded to prison again and again till evidence has been hunted up, or even manufactured, against him. Experience shows that the latter is often done and a quite innocent man not infrequently punished. The dictum of the law, that an Englishman should be held to be innocent till he is proved to be guilty, is absolutely reversed, and he is treated as if he were guilty till, against overwhelming odds, he is able to prove himself innocent. There is no possible excuse for this now, and at the very least every man who has a home or a permanent employment should be at once discharged on his own recognizances.
Equally unjust and barbarous is the system of money-fines, often for merely nominal offences, with the alternative of imprisonment. To the well-off, or to the habitual criminal, the fine is a trifle; but to the poor man charged with being drunk, with begging, or with sleeping under a haystack, or any such act which is no real offence, the common punishment of 10s. or a week's imprisonment, leaving perhaps wife and children to starve or be sent to the workhouse, is really far more immoral than the alleged offence.
Again, our Poor Law itself, as usually administered, is utterly immoral. This is what a competent authority—Mr. Sidney Webb—says of it:
"Underneath the feet of the whole wage-earning class is the abyss of the Poor Law. I see before me a respectable family applying for relief. What do we do to them? We, the Government of England, break up the family. We strip each individual of what makes life worth living. When the man enters the workhouse he is stripped of his citizenship—branded as too infamous to vote for a member of Parliament. Once in the workhouse, we put him to toil or to loiter under conditions that are so demoralising that we turn him into a wastrel. And we strip the wife of her children. We send her to the wash-tub or the sewing-room, where she associates with prostitutes and imbeciles. The little children, if they are under five, are taken to the workhouse nursery, where they also are tended by prostitutes and imbeciles. There they remain, day after day, without ever going down the workhouse steps until they are old enough to go to the Poor Law school, or until they are taken down in their coffins, owing to the terrible mortality among the workhouse babies."
Of course, all workhouses are not so bad as this, but many are, and have been during the three-quarters of a century of their existence. Can we, therefore, wonder that week by week some poor and honest parents commit suicide rather than see their children starve, or be separated from them in the workhouse! The people we thus drive to death are many of them as good as we ourselves are; yet the "Guardians of the Poor"—well-to-do gentlemen and ladies—go on administering it week after week and year after year without protest or apparent compunction. Such is the deadening effect of long-continued custom.
CHAPTER XII
INDICATIONS OF INCREASING MORAL DEGRADATION
There are in the Reports of the Registrar-General a few statistics of special importance because they clearly point to certain kinds of moral degradation which have been increasing for the last half-century, thus coinciding with our exceptionally rapid increase in wealth; and also, as I have shown in preceding chapters, with various forms of national, economic, and social deterioration.
The first of these is the continuous increase in deaths from alcoholism, in proportion to population, since the year 1861. Most persons will be amazed to find that this is the case, because the drinking habit has certainly diminished; but when the habit becomes so powerful and lasts so long as to be the direct cause of death, we are able to see the dimensions of the most exaggerated form of the drink evil. The following figures are taken from the successive Reports referred to:—
There are some irregularities, the ratio being nearly equal for the first twenty years, after which there is such a continuous large increase that from 1876-80 to 1896-1900 the mortality is doubled, but for the last ten years there has been a decrease, which in the last five years is very marked.
But a still worse and more disquieting feature is the recent large increase of mortality from alcoholism in women. Figures for the separate sexes were not given till 1876, and the following table shows the comparison up to 1910:—
These figures, however deplorable and startling in themselves, are as nothing in comparison with what they imply. Death from drink, more than in the case of any other disease, is the ultimate and rarely attained result of the vice of habitual intoxication. Men and women may greatly injure their health, ruin their families, and be disgraceful drunkards, and yet not die of it, or make any near approach to doing so. What is the proportion of those who are morally and physically injured by drink to those who kill themselves by it, is, I suppose, unknown, but I imagine that one in a thousand is, probably, too high an estimate, and that one death among ten thousand moderate drinkers who also occasionally or frequently become intoxicated, would be nearer the mark. This would imply an increase in the consumption of alcoholic drinks, instead of which there has been an actual diminution. The fact probably is that a very large number of moderate drinkers have ceased to consume alcohol in any form, and this would account for a much larger reduction in the total than has actually occurred.
On the other hand, owing to the increase of those who are only casually employed in our great cities, and whose one luxury is the excitement of drink, a larger quantity of cheap, and injuriously adulterated spirits and other liquors is consumed, which, combined with a deficiency of wholesome food, leads more frequently to a fatal result.
Increase of Suicide
The increase has been long known and generally admitted. It is supposed to be largely due to the ever-increasing struggle for subsistence in our great cities, the consequent increase of unemployment, and the dread of the workhouse as the only alternative to starvation. The following are the figures for the last forty-five years for which official data have been published:—
Such a table as this, occurring in a country which boasts of its enormous wealth, of its ever-increasing commercial prosperity, of its marvellous advance in science and the arts, and command of natural forces, should, surely, give us pause, and force upon us the conviction that there is something radically wrong in a social system which brings about such terrible evils.
And this should be the more certainly seen to be the case because the same increase is taking place in all those countries which approach us in their wealth and their commercial prosperity.
There is a group of diseases which are fatal to infants soon after birth. They have been steadily increasing during the last half-century, and call for special notice here, as they seem to indicate physical degeneration as well as personal immorality of a dangerous and perhaps even a criminal nature.
The large increase during the last forty-five years of very early infantile deaths, involving abnormalities of mother or child, seems very significant. The first may be connected with the increasing dislike of child-bearing, and unsuccessful attempts to avoid it. The second indicates some injurious condition of life of the mother, such as working at unhealthy or even deadly trades, which has certainly been largely increasing during the same period. Such work for young married women should be impossible in a civilised community.
On the vast subject of prostitution, of which the present movement for the suppression of what is called "The White Slave Traffic" is but one of the aspects, I do not propose to dwell, because I can find no statistics to show whether it has increased or decreased during the last century. But as the conditions have all been favourable for it, I have little doubt that it has increased in proportion to population. Such conditions are, the enormous growth of great cities; an increasing number of unmarried and wealthy young men; with an enormous number of girls and young women whose wages are insufficient to provide them with the rational enjoyments of life.
The proceedings of the Divorce Courts show other aspects of the result of wealth and leisure; while a friend who had been a good deal in London Society assured me that both in country houses and in London various kinds of orgies were occasionally to be met with which could hardly have been surpassed in the Rome of the most dissolute emperors.
Of war, too, I need say nothing. It has always been more or less chronic since the rise of the Roman Empire, but there is now undoubtedly a disinclination for war among all civilised peoples. Yet the vast burden of armaments, taken together with the most pious declarations in favour of peace, must be held to show an almost total absence of morality as a guiding principle among the governing classes. In this respect, the increasing power of Labour-parties all over the world seems to afford the only hope of a real moral advance.
PART II.—THEORETICAL
CHAPTER XIII
NATURAL SELECTION AMONG ANIMALS
While writing the present volume I was led to refer to it during some of the numerous interviews on the occasion of my recent birthday. This led to some misrepresentation of my views, and showed me how few popular press-writers have any real knowledge of the nature and extent of "natural selection," more especially as it affects the human race. There is also the same ignorance as regards "heredity"; and this latter has become almost a word to conjure with, and is thought by most writers to explain many things to which it is quite inapplicable, and as the present work is a very condensed argument founded to a considerable extent upon these great natural laws, I propose devoting two chapters to explaining and demonstrating the effect of natural selection in the case of the lower animals and of man respectively.
That such an explanation is necessary may be seen from the following extract from one of our most influential and well-written daily papers, the Pall Mall Gazette. After referring to the view of the utter rottenness of our present civilisation, it quotes me as saying: "And the average of mankind will remain the same until natural selection steps in to save it." (What I actually said to the interviewer was "until some form of selection improves it.") The writer then goes on:
"These words must have struck the interviewer like the crack of doom. For, stated popularly, the theory of natural selection is the doctrine of 'Devil take the hindmost.' If natural selection had fair play there would be no Children's Care Committees; there would be no Poor Law, no Hospitals; there would be no Old Age Pensions. All the humanitarian effort to care for the weak and to help them along the path of life, every effort to bind up the broken-hearted, every combination of labour to secure equality among the members of a trade, stand condemned as futile or worse by the doctrine which Dr. Russel Wallace thinks can alone raise the average of man. His own remedies for the ills of society—the levelling up which he believes to be impossible without levelling down, the disinheriting of the unborn heir, the 'striking' which he applauds, the universal education which he favours—all these are directly antagonistic to the workings of natural selection."
Now, as I am credited by all my scientific friends with having discovered the theory of natural selection more than fifty years ago, and as the whole reading public have had this hammered into them with needless repetition during the whole of that period, it is rather amusing to be told now that I do not know what natural selection is, nor what it implies. It is also a striking proof that the whole subject is now held to be so old and commonplace as not to be worth studying by a popular teacher before writing about it so strongly and dogmatically. If he had done so he would not deliberately assert that I hold opinions in regard to the matter which in several of my books I have shown the fallacy of.
I propose, therefore, to give here a short account of the essential features of the theory of natural selection; how it has operated in bringing about the evolution of the almost infinitely varied forms of plants and of the lower animals; and also to explain as clearly as I can why, and to what extent, it has acted differently in the case of man.
Lamarckism and Darwinism—How they Differ
The first great naturalist who put forward a detailed explanation of how he supposed the varied forms of animal life to have been produced was Lamarck, a contemporary of Buffon and Goethe, both of whom believed in evolution but offered no explanation of how it could have been brought about. Lamarck, however, suggested that the various organs of animals were modified by voluntary effort producing increased development, as when an antelope escapes from a lion by its swiftness, which swiftness is increased by the straining of its limbs in flight; while the long neck and fore-limbs of the giraffe were explained by the continual stretching of these parts of the body to obtain foliage for food during severe droughts. In addition to this other causes are at work, as described in the following passage, translated or paraphrased by Sir Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology:
"Every considerable alteration in the local conditions under which each race of animals exists causes a change in their wants, and these new wants excite them to new actions and habits. These actions require the more frequent employment of some parts before but slightly exercised, and then greater development follows as a consequence of their more frequent use. Other organs, no longer in use, are impoverished and diminished in size; nay, are sometimes entirely annihilated, while in their place new parts are insensibly produced for the discharge of new functions."
Again, he says:
"Thus otters, beavers, water-fowl, turtles, and frogs were not made web-footed in order that they might swim; but their wants having attracted them to the water in search of prey, they stretched out the toes of their feet to strike the water and move rapidly along its surface. By the repeated stretching of their toes the skin which united them at the base acquired a habit of extension, until, in the course of time, the broad membranes which now connect their extremities were formed."
In the case of plants, where no voluntary movements occur, the cause of modification was said to be due almost exclusively to the change of local conditions, as the various kinds of plants became dispersed over the earth's surface. The influence of soil, of temperature, of light and shade, are supposed to produce definite changes which are gradually increased; just as plants long cultivated in our gardens have become so changed that the wild progenitors cannot now be recognised.
Sir Charles Lyell, who made a careful study of Lamarck's great work, notes especially that the whole of the argument is vague and general, and that no cases are given in which is shown how the alleged causes can be supposed to have acted so as to bring about the innumerable changes that must have occurred. What is more important, however, is the failure to explain how the numerous minute adaptations of each species to its environment could have arisen by the direct action of that environment—in plants, the infinitely varied forms of leaves, flowers, and fruits; in animals, the forms and sizes of the teeth of mammalia and of the beaks, wings and feet of birds to the food they obtain; while the enormous range of colour and marking in most groups of animals are such as no amount of desire or exertion on the one hand, or direct action of external causes on the other, could possibly have brought about. It is not, therefore, surprising that, although a vast amount of evidence was adduced to show that changes had taken place leading to the evolution of species from pre-existing species, yet causes adequate to bring about the changes, and especially those necessary to produce the marvellous adaptations continually being discovered, had not been shown to exist.
It is necessary to point this out, because the difference between the almost universal rejection of Lamarck's attempted solution of the problem of evolution, and the almost immediate and universal acceptance of that adduced by Darwin, is otherwise unexplained. The belief in the doctrine of evolution as the only rational explanation of the gradual development of the innumerable forms of living things became more and more general. The great body of arguments in its favour were admirably set forth by Robert Chambers in his Vestiges of Creation, published anonymously in 1844; while Herbert Spencer's masterly exposition of the argument for universal evolution convinced a large number of naturalists and men of science. But still the nature of the laws and forces by which the evolution of the organic world in all its variety and beauty, could have been brought about remained not only unknown but unimagined, so that even so great a thinker as Sir John Herschel termed it "the mystery of mysteries." I will now state as briefly as possible the essential features of Darwin's solution of the mystery in his epoch-making work, The Origin of Species.
Natural Selection as the Essential Factor in the Origin of Species
There are two great, universal, and very conspicuous characteristics of the whole organic world which, because they are so very common, were almost ignored before Darwin showed their importance. These are (1) the great variability in all common and widespread species, and (2) their enormous powers of increase.
The facts of variability are recorded in every book on Darwinism or on organic evolution, and it is only necessary here to appeal to the reader's own observation or to state a few illustrative facts. Everybody sees that among a hundred or a thousand people he knows or frequently meets no two are alike. This is variability. He also knows that the amount of the differences between them is often very large, and always, if you have any two of them side by side, easily perceptible and capable of being described. He also knows that they differ in every part and organ that can be seen: the height, the bulk of body; the shape of the hands, feet, head, ears, nose, and mouth; the proportions of the legs, arms, and body to each other; the abundance and character of the hair—coarse or fine, straight or curly, and of all colours between flaxen and intense black. To declare that variability among men and women, even of the same race and in the same country, is a rare phenomenon, and that in amount it is infinitesimal, would be a ludicrous misstatement of the facts or a wilful perversion of the truth. But, as regards animals or plants in a state of nature, this misstatement has been made and has been used as an argument against the Darwinian theory. It is, however, now well known, as a matter of direct observation and measurement, that when a few scores or hundreds of individuals are compared, even in the same district and at the same season, they differ in their proportions to about the same amount, and to some extent in every visible part or organ, as do human beings.
This, however, was not well known when Darwin collected the materials for his various works, and he even sometimes makes the proviso—"if they vary, for without variation selection can do nothing"; and this has been taken as an admission that variation is a rare instead of being a universal phenomenon. He also often spoke of the accumulation of small or minute variations, and this has led to the statement that variations are infinitesimal in amount, and therefore could, at first, be of no use to the possessor in the struggle for existence.