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 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 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