“And then if I go a step further, and ask how these ideas and usages react on the characters and capacities of citizens, there is forced upon me the conclusion that they work towards industrial inefficiency and national decay. This equalizing, so far as may be, the results of merit and demerit, slowly produces in a large community effects that are not easy to trace and identify; but in small corporate bodies the effects are quickly and clearly shown. A typical instance is furnished by the history of the Chamounix guides. Some twenty years ago things stood on their proper footing. Climbers of the high peaks chose guides whose skill and trustworthiness had been well proved; while guides of characters not so well established, received smaller pay for less difficult expeditions. As the same time there was a free choice of mules, and travelers naturally picked out the best. Afterwards arose an incorporation of guides which put a check on this liberty of selection; and their system was further developed on the annexation of Savoy to France: with French annexation came French officialism. Guides had to pass an examination; and, when certified, were placed on a list from which travelers had to accept them in rotation. The mules, too, had to be taken in turn. That is, differences of efficiency were, as much as possible, prevented from producing their normal effects. And now what has happened? Mr. Wills, a late president of the Alpine Club, writes (and his statement is confirmed by another late president, Professor Tyndall): – ‘I have been a resident in Savoy during a part of every year since the annexation, as well as having known it very well before, and I have seen with pain and sorrow the rapid deterioration brought about by a system so fearfully and wonderfully perfect in all the arts and means by which public spirit, independence, and self-respect can be crushed out of the national life. Now the influences here seen operating in a special way, on a small scale, and in a short time, inevitably operate in a general way on a large scale, and in a long time, throughout a nation which divorces individual worth from individual prosperity. When funds raised from all citizens, are turned into advantages are to that extent reduced to the same level; and the more multitudinous the ways in which this is done, the more are the lives of the efficient and prudent made like the lives of the inefficient and imprudent. Inevitably, therefore, societies which pursue this policy which impedes the multiplication of the better which while aiding the multiplication of the worse, must so deteriorate in average nature that in the struggle for existence they must go to the wall before societies which allow the worthy to reap their rewards and the unworthy to suffer their penalties.
“Thus when I consider what steps I ought to take in furtherance of social evolution, there rise before me so many probabilities of evils likely to be entailed by this or the other measure proposed, that I think it safer to remain passive.”
But now, admitting in full these arguments, which reinforce arguments set forth in sundry of the foregoing chapters, it may be contended that, so far from justifying passivity, they render all the more imperative a special kind of activity. For if the outcome of them is that evil arises from divorcing cause and consequence in conduct, then the implication is that good arises from making the connexion between cause and consequence more definite and certain. And in improving the means to this end there is ample scope for effort. Contemplate a moment the obverse of the proposition above set forth.
Though in low societies, formed of unadapted men held together by coercion, no better arrangement is practicable than that under which the relation between effort and benefit is traversed by force, so that those who work enjoy but little of that which they produce, while that which they produce is largely appropriated by others who have not worked; yet we recognize this régime as one not consistent with the greatest individual welfare or greatest sum of happiness. Along with advance to a higher social state, in which life is carried on not by compulsory cooperation but by voluntary cooperation, there has grown the moral perception of what we call equity. Continued through many generations, the discipline of industrialism (implying in every transaction fulfillment of contract, which involves respect for the claims of others and assertion of the claims of self) has developed the consciousness that each ought to get neither more nor less than an equivalent for his services, of what kind soever they may be: the amount of such equivalent being in every case determined by the agreement to give it. And, considered in their ensemble, the progressive improvements of laws, and all those political ameliorations which bring after them improvements of laws, have as their general effect the better maintenance of this normal relation between effort and benefit.