Over his pipe in the village ale-house, the labourer says very positively what Parliament should do about the “foot and mouth disease.” At the farmer’s market-table, his master makes the glasses jingle as, with his fist, he emphasizes the assertion that he did not get half enough compensation for his slaughtered beasts during the cattle-plague. These are not hesitating opinions. On a matter affecting the agricultural interest, statements are still as dogmatic as they were during the Anti-Corn-Law agitation, when, in every rural circle, you heard that the nation would be ruined if the lightly-taxed foreigner was allowed to compete in our markets with the heavily-taxed Englishman: a proposition held to be so self-evident that dissent from it implied either stupidity or knavery.
Now, as then, may be daily heard among other classes, opinions just as decided and just as unwarranted. By men called educated, the old plea for extravagant expenditure, that “it is good for trade,” is still continually urged with full belief in its sufficiency. Scarcely any decrease is observable in the fallacy that whatever gives employment is beneficial: no regard being had to the value for ulterior purposes of that which the labour produces; no question being asked what would have resulted had the capital which paid for the labour taken some other channel and paid for some other labour. Neither criticism nor explanation appreciably modifies these beliefs. When there is again an opening for them they are expressed with undiminished confidence. Along with delusions of this kind go whole families of others. People who think that the relations between expenditure and production are so simple, naturally assume simplicity in other relations among social phenomena. Is there distress somewhere? They suppose nothing more is required than to subscribe money for relieving it. On the one hand, they never trace the reactive effects which charitable donations work on bank accounts, on the surplus-capital bankers have to lend, on the productive activity which the capital now abstracted would have set up, on the number of labourers who would have received wages and who now go without wages – they do not perceive that certain necessaries of life have been withheld from one man who would have exchanged useful work for them, and given to another who perhaps persistently evades working. Nor, on the other hand, do they look beyond the immediate mitigation of misery. They deliberately shut their eyes to the fact that as fast as they increase the provision for those who live without labour, so fast do they increase the number of those who live without labour; and that with an ever-increasing distribution of alms, there comes an ever-increasing outcry for more alms. Similarly throughout all their political thinking. Proximate causes and proximate results are alone contemplated. There is scarcely any consciousness that the original causes are often numerous and widely different from the apparent cause; and that beyond each immediate result there will be multitudinous remote results, most of them quite incalculable.
Minds in which the conceptions of social actions are thus rudimentary, are also minds ready to harbour wild hopes of benefits to be achieved by administrative agencies. In each such mind there seems to be the unexpressed postulate that every evil in a society admits of cure; and that the cure lies within the reach of law. “Why is not there a better inspection of the mercantile marine?” asked a correspondent of the Times the other day: apparently forgetting that within the preceding twelve months the power he invoked had lost two of its own vessels, and barely saved a third. “Ugly buildings are eyesores, and should not be allowed,” urges one who is anxious for aesthetic culture. Meanwhile, from the agent which is to foster good taste, there have come monuments and public buildings of which the less said the better; and its chosen design for the Law-Courts meets with almost universal condemnation. “Why did those in authority allow such defective sanitary arrangements?” was everywhere asked, after the fevers at Lord Londesborough’s; and this question you heard repeated, regardless of the fact that sanitary arrangements having such results in this and other cases, were themselves the outcome of appointed sanitary administrations – regardless of the fact that the authorized system had itself been the means of introducing foul gases into houses.1 “The State should purchase the railways,” is confidently asserted by those who, every morning, read of chaos at the Admiralty, or cross-purposes in the dockyards, or wretched army-organization, or diplomatic bungling that endangers peace, or frustration of justice by technicalities and costs and delays, – all without having their confidence in officialism shaken. “Building Acts should insure better ventilation in small houses,” says one who either never knew or has forgotten that, after Messrs. Reid and Barry had spent ￡200,000 in failing to ventilate the Houses of Parliament, the First Commissioner of Works proposed that, “the House should get some competent engineer, above suspicion of partiality, to let them see what ought to be done.”2 And similarly there are continually cropping out in the press, and at meetings, and in conversations, such notions as that the State might provide “cheap capital” by some financial sleight of hand; that “there ought to be bread-overseers appointed by Government:”3 that “it is the duty of Government to provide a suitable national asylum for the reception of all illegitimate children.” And here it is doubtless thought by some, as it is in France by M. de Lagevenais, that Government, by supplying good music, should exclude the bad, such as that of Offenbach. We smile on reading of that French princess, celebrated for her innocent wonder that people should starve when there was so simple a remedy. But why should we smile? A great part of the current political thought evinces notions of practicability not much more rational.