Current Economic Affairs/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
THE LAWS OF NATURE
There are certain great laws of nature that are immutable and inevitable. Such are the law of gravitation, the law of the conservation of energy and the law of the indestructibility of matter. Science, having learned those laws, does not do aught but recognize them, for science is the interpretation of nature. These laws are the fundamentals of physics and chemistry. They are laws pertaining to energy and matter. There are also great natural laws relating directly to life and human affairs.
In economics there is the great natural law of supply and demand. A few years ago, amid the madness of the war, fools alleged that the law of supply and demand was an archaic thought, which should, could and would be dismissed. They might as well have chattered that the law of gravitation is a myth and that apples may be made to drop from a tree on a slant instead of perpendicularly; or that the law of the conservation of energy can be so annulled that an aeroplane may soar forever, refuting both this law and the law of gravitation.
In both economics and biology there is the great natural law of the survival of the fittest. In the production of goods competition is bound to bring into play the operation of this law and extinguish the unfit. So also in life itself. We may artificially delay the operation of this law and often with great advantage. An efficient agency of production may temporarily fall into difficulty. Laissez faire would say “‘let it fail,” but rather do we nurse it back to economic health. A genius among men falls sick. Laissez faire would say “let him die’ but instead of that we send him to a hospital and try to preserve his usefulness to the world. These things are manifestly desirable. We may even use such powers to preserve the unfit for long times.
Nevertheless we are not nullifying the natural law, which in the end is going to show that it operates immutably and inevitably. Nature is not safely to be flouted. Science tells us simply what it is and what are its laws. Sociologists in trying to abolish the woes of man are commonly ignorant or disregardful of his nature. His nature is subject to the great natural law of heredity. Why it should be so we know no more than the wherefore of the law of gravitation. Simply it is. Ignorance of this law, which has been learned in but recent times, has been the source of immeasurable damage to the human race and its civilization.
The biologists tell us convincingly that the mental capacity of men is a function of heredity, not of environment, and that there are great differences among them. No improvement in surroundings and no process of training can convert a moron into a genius. Intellect of the order of genius is inconceivably rare and is an endowment of nature. The psychologists tell us that tests of the recruits for the army, a large sampling of American youth, showed a relatively low degree of mentality on the whole. The majority did not possess the capacity to pass successfully through the course of the standard high school. These much discussed results have excited the ire of indignant philanthropologists, who have seen in them an attack upon the principles of democracy and an intention of creating a system of caste. Nothing could be more misconceived than such ideas of these flouters of science.
“In the average American city not more than 40 per cent of the pupils who enter the first grade remain to enter high school, and ordinarily not more than 10 per cent graduate from high school,’”’ says Terman.[1] who continues “A nation falls short of the true ideals of democracy which refuses to furnish suitable training to a third of its children merely because their endowment does not enable them to complete a course of study which will satisfy the requirements for college entrance.[2]” And “instead of being undemocratic differentiation of courses and enlargment of opportunities for vocational training of the humbler sort is a necessary corollary of the truly democratic ideal.[3]
The examination of human intelligence is no mere fad of academic theorists but is a science that has long been developed and applied by educators. They have formulated scales of mental development according to age, these scales being the result of testing many thousands of subjects. They measure intellect, not education. Let me illustrate by citing a specimen inquiry. The examiner tells the subject that he is going to read a series of statements containing something nonsensical, which the subject is required to spot. The examiner reads “A man went from his home downhill to the village and then walked back downhill to his home.” That is among the tests for children of 10 years. A 10-year old child should recognize immediately the foolishness in that statement even if he had never been to school. An 11-year old child who does not perceive it is mentally deficient. A nine-year old child who does is mentally above the average. Ask that question of a bright eight-year old boy and even without the warning of something nonsensical to be expected a quizzical grin will form itself on his face and he will interrupt contemptuously with “What are you giving me?” If a man walks down hill it’ll be up hill for him on the way back.” If an eight-year old answers the other 10-year interrogatories in the same way he will have an intelligence quotient of 125.
To me the most illuminating thing that came out of the army intelligence tests was not the exhibition that the majority of American people are inferior to high school capacity, but the comparison between degrees of intelligence and previous occupations. The men who had come into the service from engineering proved in the intelligence tests to rate far above all others. Next stood those who had been in the other professions. Much lower were the mechanics. Lower still were the barbers and servants. Lowest of all were the diggers.[4] In other words there was exhibited the evidences of a natural tendency for men to fall into occupations according to their mental fitness.
The word democracy has become a fetish, but in truth there has never been any such thing as democracy in modern times outside of the direction of local affairs in New England town meetings; and in practice the idea of it is impossible, as Mallock so ably demonstrated in “The Limits of Pure Democracy.” “We are permitted to do the utmost violence to democracy in our actions as long as we extol it with our words,” said Dr. George Barton Cutten in an address upon his induction as president of Colgate University. “The idea of democracy is not only founded on a mistaken theory that all men are born free and equal, but upon another theory equally unsound, that the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
People of whom not more than 10 per cent have the mental capacity to graduate from college are not fitted to pass upon abstruse economic questions; and most of the great questions that affect the public welfare are of that nature. The founders of the American republic recognized that, although they knew nothing of scientific biology and psychology, and did not expect the people so to act. They contemplated rather that the people could and would select men of superior intelligence to represent them and that they, their representatives, would be able to act reasonably for them, the people. Early bewitched by the fetish of a false and impossible democracy politicians threw all that to the winds and bowed to the will of the people as they tried to interpret it.
Even now, let the ex-soldiers be asked if they do not want a bonus and in great majority they will shout “aye.” Let the voters be asked what they think about it and they in great majority will reply that the boys ought to be given what they want. Therefore Congress by great majority votes it. There is no serious consideration of it as an economic crime, that if enacted is likely to bring great disaster upon us. The people want it, wherefore according to the principles of democracy they ought to have it and will have it. Those who ought to be the students of economics and the enacters of wise laws conform servilely to the will of the ignorant mob. It is largely owing to this perversion that we are now entangled with the many economic restrictions, to which I have referred in an earlier chapter. We have come to the point, however, where we must make up our minds to conduct ourselves differently if we want to preserve our civilization.
On this subject, President Nicholas Murray Butler in his address at the opening of Columbia University, Sept, 28, 1922, said some wise and discerning things, including the following:
Unless I greatly mistake, the world is suffering from too much politics and too little statesmanship. There are too many holders of public office who are far more anxious about their continuance in place than concerned for the public welfare. If present conditions are permitted indefinitely to continue, no one dare foretell what will happen to our boasted civilization and its economic basis.
The restoration of the consuming power of the 300 millions and more made destitute by the war, the restoration of the world’s power of production in agriculture and in manufacture, the gradual lifting of the heavy burden of public debt, the reduction of taxation, the restoration to normal of the international exchanges, and the extension of international credits, are all subjects for study and recommendation by trained economists and experienced men of affairs. Let the politicians hold aloof for a bit, and let the trained brains of the nations work at what has become a capital problem for the nations jointly and severally.
Obsequiousness to the fetish of democracy has caused us to fly in the face of the natural laws of heredity and inherent inequality in the capacity of men. It has led Moreover to dangerous counteraction against the law of the survival of the fittest. Among primitive mankind the fittest, i.e., those best able to survive, were generally the strongest physically. Science and invention have tended to erase physical inequalities, however, and bring into play mental capacity, exhibited through knowledge and skill. A little man with a six-shooter became superior to the giant with only his fists. A great brain in a weak body may survive in the contests of modern civilization where many strong bodies with little brains die. In our pity and sentimentality, which are emotions that it is painful to decry, we aim constantly to protect the weak, whether weak mentally or physically. There is m this, perhaps, considerable thought of protection of the strong against the harm that the weak may do. But let us consider what results are produced and whither they lead.
“America is rushing madly on to race suicide because of the destructive influence of the melting pot,” said Dr. George B. Cutten, in another recent address. “The great fallacy of the melting pot was that we thought environment played so much larger part in life than heredity and if we could only get people here and surround them with proper environment—it mattered not who they were—they would become intellectual, cultured and moral according to our standards. Experience has proved the falsity of such a supposition. In these days mistaken ideas of altruism, philanthrophy and sentimentalism have interfered with nature’s penalizing the victims of reckless breeding. Persons who know that children brought into the world will have difficulty in getting along do not give that a thought. Not only philanthropy, but modern medicine is deteriorating the stock, for by this means inferior stock is kept alive.”
Albert Edward Wiggam in “An Open Letter from the Biologist to the Statesman” in the Century for March, 1922, offered the admonishment of the biologist, to which the philosopher, historian, economist and engineer, each looking at things from their own viewpoint, will pronounce assent. Mr. Wiggam formulated these warnings.
The first warning that biology gives to statesmanship is that mankind is going backward; that the civilized nations of the world are biologically plunging downward;…that your vast efforts to improve man’s lot, instead of improving man, are hastening the hour of his destruction…You defy nature with your civilization. Evolution is a bloody business, but civilization tries to make it a pink tea… When you take man out of the bloody, brutal, but beneficient, hand of natural selection, you place him in the soft, perfumed, daintily gloved, but far more dangerous, hand of artificial selection.
The second warning of biology is brief and simple: that heredity, and not environment, is the maker of men;…that the differences among men are due to the differences in the germ-cells from which they are born; that social classes, which you seek to abolish, are ordained by nature; that it is not the slums that make slum-people, but slum-people that make the slums.
The third warning of biology is that your philanthropy and your noble-hearted, soft-headed, schemes for ameliorating the conditions of life have failed and will fail to improve the race, and are, in fact, hastening its deterioration. You fondly believe that you can speed up evolution with cakes and cream for the unfit. Nature has progressed by letting the devil take the hindmost. But your method is to increase the number of the hindmost.
The fourth warning of biology is that medicine, hygiene, sanitation, and your efforts to call mental and physical soundness out of the vacuum of nowhere, instead of upbuilding by selection the boundless health, energy, and sanity that are already in the stream of human protoplasm, are weakening and will weaken the human breed…Vice and disease purify the race because they kill the weak and vicious…Your intentions are good, but in the end nature herself will damn your judgment.
The fifth warning of biology is that morals, education, art, and religion will not directly improve the inborn righteousness, educability, or artistic and religious capacity of the human race…The more you “improve” the environment of plants, animals, or men without selection, the more do they deteriorate…Stupidity begets stupidity, and intelligence begets brains; but a thousand years of educating or improving the parents will never “improve” the children. In short, “Wooden legs are not inherited, but wooden heads are.”
Politicians deferring to the wishes of an ignorant populace, philanthropologists carried away by their sentimental emotions, and socialists infatuated with idealistic dreams unite in defying nature itself. Economists will agree that the processes of recent years, and especially the last 10 years, have been levelling, being against the interests of the classes and in favor of those of the masses. This is exemplified in our own economic policy of “soaking the rich,’’ which makes things harder for the intelligent and well-to-do (the two things going very much together); and of increasing the share of the masses in the division of the produce of industry, which makes things easier for them. Consequently the families of the classes contract and those of the masses increase. It is not grasped generally that this is a process of drying up the brain of the country while all the time it is promoting the growth of the body, which by itself is helpless. It is appreciated, however, that something must be done to take care of the growing body, wherefore frantic demands are made upon the engineer. His task is like that of Sisyphus. The easier are made the conditions of life the more rapid is the breeding of people, as the Malthusian doctrine teaches. The dream of the socialist would only be realizable by a state regulation of population, which would be absurd in view of the proved inability of the state to regulate successfully anything at all if it be of economic and industrial nature. The numerous ideas of idealists, philanthropologists and socialists resolve themselves into the conception that the mind of man can manage things better than nature, which is God, and their very conception is therefore irreverent and impious, although many of them will be shocked to hear this said.
Society may wisely enact laws and promote reforms for its own protection, such as laws to prevent murder and robbery and means to elevate public morals and keep people from becoming murderers and robbers. It may charitably do everything in its power to give all human beings a chance. It may even with reason prohibit the use of alcoholic drink, for although the deduction from natural law would be to let drunkards drink themselves to death they may do too much economic and social damage in the process. But Society may not with safety propagate or preserve the unfit. Nor let them have a hand in the management of things under the guise of democracy. Nor may it safely try to nullify the human motive of self interest, which springs from the law of the survival of the fittest, no matter how repugnant to the spirit of idealism that may be. The Earl of Birkenhead in a powerful address before the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, Aug. 25, 1923, pointed out how idealism had failed to solve the economic and social problems resulting from the Great War. In the following trenchant words he summarized much of what I have been feebly trying to say:
For the real truth is that while the whole world requires the encouragement and the light of idealism, the whole world would probably not survive if idealism were given a completely free rein. The same simple illuminating if cynical truth applies to that hideous competition in the world by which every individual who does not inherit a fortune is confronted. The great Bentham long since pointed out that the motive spring, and the necessary motive spring, of human endeavor, is self-interest; and he equally pointed out that the consequences would certainly be obscure, and in his judgment would be unfortunate, if every individual began to regulate his or her life not upon his or her own interests but upon some supposed interest of others. And, indeed, a very cautious mind might stagger before such a possibility. No creature in the world—human, animal, or, it might also be added, vegetable—has ever regulated his, her or its life upon a basis such as that under consideration. And when it is considered that the world has already lasted for some millions (or billions) of years, and that countless billions of billions of breathing creatures have inhabited this world in that period, an experience so unanimous and so entirely unaffected, either by Christianity or by civilization, at least affords to a scientific observer the material for an irresistible generalization.
And long ago, Lord Macaulay said much the same thing in the following words:
‘Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties; by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment; by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of state.
Thus we see biologists, psychologists, historians, philosophers, statesmen, economists and engineers giving the same kind of advice, each from their own angle. The people of the world can not settle their great problems by popular vote, for the reason that they can not understand them. Statesmen ought to act for them and the statesmen themselves ought to obtain the advice of scientists. They must lead the people, not assume to let the people lead them, for the leading would then be in too many directions and all of it blind. Intelligent people of all kinds should aid in the leadership, as indeed they are now trying patriotically to do, as perhaps never before, owing to their appreciation of the gravity of the outlook into the future. The masses of people themselves are praying for such leadership. We are all in the same boat. If it sinks, both rich and poor, strong and weak, will be drowned. Consideration of courses must be with the head. Emotional appeals to the heart may induce a people to unite in a decision to go to war, or to make peace, but they can not solve economic problems. They are most apt to stimulate erroneous, misguiding thoughts. The relatively few communists that we have among us are dangerous persons, but we know them to be such, although we may not always know just what mischief they are doing. Even more dangerous, owing to their not being recognized as such, are our emotional idealists, philanthropologists and sociologists, who take the part of what they are pleased to regard as the underman in ways that do credit to their hearts but not to their heads.
The relation among capital, labor, and management or brains, has been compared to that of the supports of a three leg stool. If any one of the legs be missing the stool can not stand. This is indeed a good illustration, but I am going to offer another one as more aptly describing things at the present time as they look to me.
The people of this country are all in the same boat. Imagine one like a galley of old, with a gangway down the center and the rowers on benches on either side. Capitalists row on one side and laborers on the other. Once they pulled in unison and the boat was kept on fairly even keel. There has been a great storm, during which the captain—the principle of authority—has been washed overboard. The laborers, rowing on one side, have acquired more weight and have tipped the boat toward their side, so that the gunwale is nearly awash and the craft is in danger of sinking, the weather being still foul and the sea running high. Management, as coxswain in the stern, has great difficulty in steering the boat and keeping it afloat. A passenger, a socialist, jostles his elbow on one side, loudly voicing his superior ability to run things and trying persistently to take the helm from the experienced hands. Another passenger, a philanthropologist, pokes the coxswain’s elbow from the other side, while he emotionally begs him to spare the poor laborers, urging that they are sweating profusely, that they are being made to row too hard.
Indeed, those rowers are disposed to be mutinous. So also are some on the capitalist side, who have the appearance of farmers. The overseers—with the mien of politicians—with whips in hand walk up and down the gangway, listening to the disgruntled ones and themselves assuming a threatening attitude toward the coxswain. The other capitalist rowers, long since whipped into submission for their misdeeds, real or fancied, are dispirited and silent. Under the foredeck a communist, to whom no one is giving attention, is boring with an auger through the plank of the boat, covertly planning to rob everybody during their confusion as the boat sinks. Will the communist be apprehended and checked? Will a new principle of authority arrive to take command? Will management be able to keep the boat afloat? These are questions that the future alone will answer.