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2. CHAPTER II
THE ETHICAL EMBELLISHMENT OF SOCIAL STRUGGLES.

No one seriously engaged in historical studies can have failed to perceive that all classes which have ever attained to dominion have earnestly endeavoured to transmit to their descendants such political power as they have been able to acquire. The hereditary transmission of political power has always been the most efficacious means of maintaining class rule. Thus there is displayed in this field the same historical process which in the domain of the sexual life has given rise to the bourgeois family-order and its accessories, the indissolubility of marriage, the severe penalties inflicted upon the adulterous wife, and the right of primogeniture. In so far as we can draw sound conclusions from the scanty prehistoric data that are available, it seems that the bourgeois family owes its genesis to the innate tendency of man, as soon as he has attained a certain degree of economic well-being, to transmit his possessions by inheritance to the legitimate son whom he can with reasonable certainty regard as his own. The same tendency prevails in the field of politics, where it is kept active by all the peculiar and inherent instincts of mankind, and where it is vigourously nourished by an economic order based upon private property in the means of production, and in which therefore, by a natural and psychological analogy, political power comes also to be considered as an object of private hereditary ownership. In the political field, as everywhere else, the paternal instinct to transmit this species of property to the son has been always strongly manifest throughout historic time. This has been one of the principal causes of the replacement of elective monarchy by hereditary monarchy. The desire to maintain a position acquired by the family in society has at all times been so intense that, as Gaetano Mosca has aptly noted, whenever certain members of the dominant class have not been able to have sons of their own (as, for example, was the case with the prelates of the Roman Church), there has arisen with spontaneous and dynamic force the institution of nepotism, as an extreme manifestation of the impulse to self-maintenance and to hereditary transmission. [10]

In a twofold manner aristocracy has introduced itself quite automatically in those states also from which it seemed to be excluded by constitutional principles, by historical considerations, or by reason of the peculiarities of national psychology — alike by way of a revived tradition and by way of the birth of new economic forces. The North Americans, democrats, living under a republican regime and knowing nothing of titles of nobility, by no means delivered themselves from aristocracy when they shook off the power of the English crown. This phenomenon is in part the simple effect of causes that have come into existence quite recently, such as capitalist concentration (with its associated heaping-up of the social power in the hands of the few and consequent formation of privileged minorities), and the progressive reconciliation of the old and rigid republican spirit with the ideas, the prejudices, and the ambitions of ancient Europe. The existence of an aristocracy of millionaires, railway kings, oil kings, cattle kings, etc., is now indisputable. But even at a time when the youthful democracy and the freedom of America had only just been sealed with the blood of its citizens, it was, difficult (so we learn from Alexis de Tocqueville) to find a single American who did not plume himself with an idle vanity upon belonging to one of the first families which had colonized American soil. [11] So lively was “aristocratic prejudice” among these primitive republicans! Even at the present day the old families which are Dutch by name and origin constitute in the State of New York a stratum whose aristocratic preeminence is uncontested, a class of patricians lacking the outward attributes of nobility.

When, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the French bourgeoisie was vigourously pressing upward, it knew no better how to adapt itself to its changed environment than by aping the usages, the mode of life, the tastes, and even the mentality of the feudal nobility. In 1670 Molière wrote his splendid comedy, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. The Abbé de Choisy, who belonged to the noblesse de robe, and whose ancestors had filled the distinguished offices of Maître des Requêtes and Conseiller d'Etat, relates that his mother had given him as a maxim of conduct that he should be careful to frequent none but aristocratic salons. [12] With the fervor of the novice, the new arrivals assimilated the spirit and the principles of the class hitherto dominant, and the distinguished members of the bourgeoisie who had entered the service of the state, which was still predominantly feudal, hastened to take new names. The Fouquets, the Le Telliers, the Colberts, the Phélippeaux, and the Desmarets, became the Belle-Isles, the de Louvois, the Seignelays, the de Maurepas, the de Lavrillières, and the de Maillebois. [13] In modern Germany, under our very eyes, there has for the last forty years been proceeding an absorption of the young industrial bourgeoisie into the old aristocracy of birth and the process has of late been enormously accelerated. [14] The German bourgeoisie is becoming feudalized. Here the only result of the emancipation of the roturier has been to reinvigourate his old enemy the noble by the provision of new blood and new economic energy. The enriched bourgeois have no higher ambition than to fuse with the nobility, in order to derive from this fusion a kind of legitimate title for their connection with the dominant class, a title which can then be represented, not as acquired, but as existing by hereditary right. Thus we see that the hereditary principle (even when purely fictitious) greatly accelerates the process of social “training,” accelerates, that is to say, the adaption of the new social forces to the old aristocratic environment.

In the violent struggle between the new class of those who are rising and the old stratum of those who are undergoing a decadence partly apparent and partly real—a struggle at times waged with dramatic greatness, but often proceeding obscurely, so as hardly to attract attention—moral considerations are drawn into the dance, and pulled this way and that by the various contending parties, who use them in order to mask their true aims. In an era of democracy, ethics constitute a weapon which everyone can employ. In the old regime, the members of the ruling class and those who desired to become rulers continually spoke of their own personal rights. Democracy adopts a more diplomatic, a more prudent course. It has rejected such claims as unethical. Today, all the factors of public life speak and struggle in the name of the people, of. the community at large. The government and rebels against the government, kings and the party-leaders, tyrants by the grace of God and usurpers, rabid idealists and calculating self-seekers, all are “the people,” and all declare that in their actions they merely fulfil the will of the nation.

Thus, in the modern life of the classes and of the nations, moral considerations have become an accessory, a necessary fiction. Every government endeavours to support its power by a general ethical principle. The political forms in which the various social movements become crystallized also assume a philanthropic mask. There is not a single one among the young class-parties which fails, before starting on its march for the conquest of power, to declare solemnly to the world that its aim is to redeem, not so much itself as the whole of humanity, from the yoke of tyrannical minority, and to substitute for the old and inequitable regime a new reign of justice. Democracies are always glib talkers. Their terminology is often comparable to a tissue of metaphors. The demagogue, that spontaneous fruit of democratic soil, overflows with sentimentality, and is profoundly moved by the sorrows of the people. “Les victimes soignent leurs mots, les bourreaux sont ivres de philosophie larmoyante,” [15] writes Alphonse Daudet in this connection. Every new social class, when it gives the signal for an attack upon the privileges of a class already in possession of economic and political power, inscribes upon its banners the motto: “The Liberation of the entire Human Race!” When the young French bourgeoisie was girding its loins for the great struggle against the nobles and the clergy, it began with the solemn Déclaration des Droits de I'Homme, and hurled itself into the fray with the war-cry Liberté Egalité, Fraternité! Today we can ourselves hear the spokesmen of another great class-movement, that of the wage-earners, announce that they undertake the class-struggle from no egoistic motives, but on the contrary in order to exclude such motives for ever from the social process. For the refrain of its Hymn of Progress modern socialism ever reiterates the proud words: “Creation of a humane and fraternal society in which class will be unknown!”

The victorious bourgeoisie of the Droits de I'Homme did, indeed, realize the republic, but not the democracy. The words Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité may be read to this day over the portals of all French prisons. The Commune was the first attempt, crowned by a transient success, at a proletarian-socialist government; and despite its communistic principles, and under the pressure of extreme financial stringency, the Commune respected the Bank of France as faithfully as could have done any syndicate of inexorable capitalists. There have been revolutions, but the world has never witnessed the establishment of logical democracy.

Political parties, however much they may be founded upon narrow class interests and however evidently they may work against the interests of the majority, love to identify themselves with the universe, or at least to present themselves as cooperating with all the citizens of the state, and to proclaim that they are fighting in the name of all and for the good of all. It is only the socialist orators who are sometimes found to proclaim that their party is specifically a class party. But they tone down this assertion by adding that in ultimate analysis the interests of their party coincide with those of the entire people. It is, indeed, true that in protesting that it enters the lists in the interests of the whole of humanity the socialist party, representing the most numerous class of the population, is nearer to the truth than are the bourgeois parties when these make the same claim, for they by their very nature are parties of the minority. But the socialist claim is also far from the truth, seeing that the two terms humanity and party are far from being identical in extension, even if the party under consideration should embrace, or believe itself to embrace, the great majority of humanity. When for opportunist reason the socialist party declares to the electors that socialism proposes to give to all, but to take nothing from any, it suffices to point out that the enormous differences of wealth which exist in society render it impossible to keep any such promise. The giving presupposes a taking away, and if the proletarians wish to bring about an equality of economic status between themselves on the one hand and the Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers on the other, which could be done only by socializing the means of production and exchange to-day owned by these various millionaires, it is obvious that the wealth and power of these great bourgeois princes would be considerably diminished. To the same opportunist party tendency we must ascribe the formulation of the socialist theory which, in apparent accordance with the fundamental principle of the Marxist political economy, divides the population into owners of the means of production and non-owners dependent upon these, proceeding to the contention that all the owners must be capitalist in sentiment while all the dependents must be socialists, that is to say, must desire the triumph of socialism. This view is utterly fallacious, for it regards as the unique or most certain criterion for determining the class to which an individual belongs the amount of his income, which is a purely external characteristic, and then proceeds (in a manner which is perhaps effective in political life, but which is eminently contestable on theoretical grounds) to enlarge the concept of the proletariat so that all employees, governmental or private, may be claimed for the party of labour. According to this theory the directors of Krupp or the Minister-Presidents of Prussia, since as such they are nonowners and employees, are dependents upon the means of production, ought to espouse with enthusiasm the cause of Socialism—ought to do so, at least, in so far as they understand their true position in society, in so far as they have become what the socialists term “class-conscious.”

The ideal impetuosity of youthful movements aiming at emancipation is depicted by anti-democratic writers as a pious illusion, as the pursuit of a will-o'-wisp, arising from the need to make the particular good assume the aspect of the general good. In the world of hard fact, every class-movement which professes to aim at the good of the entire community is stamped inevitably as self-contradictory. Humanity cannot dispense with “political classes,” but from their very nature these classes are but fractions of society.