Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 9B4 of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane, The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
344
4. POLITICAL ECONOMY
(From the Lombardic League of Cities to Robert Owen, the Founder of Co-operation).
CO-OPERATION
AND MONOPOLY
A few pages back I quoted a remark of a well-known social economist,
to the effect that it is “almost hopeless“ to try to understand the economic
conditions of past centuries. I do not require to repeat what I said there.
But the very feeling of the kaleidoscopic complexity and the ephemeral
nature of these conditions has forced upon me the question, whether after
all there is not a uniform element of life, I mean an ever constant principle
of life that might be discovered in the most various forms of our ever-changing
economic conditions. I have not found such a principle in the writings
of an Adam Smith, a Proudhon, a Karl Marx, a John Stuart Mill, a Carey,
a Stanley Jevons, a Böhm-Bawerk, and others; for these authorities
speak (and rightly from their standpoint) of capital and work, value, demand,
&c., in the
345 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
same way as the
jurists of old spoke of natural law and divine law, as if these things
were independent, superhuman entities which rule over us all, while to
me the important thing seems to be, “who“ possesses the capital, “who“
does the work, and “who“ has to estimate a value. Luther teaches us that
it is not the works that make the man, but the man that makes the works;
if he is right, we shall, even within the manifoldly changing economic
life, contribute most to the clearing up of past and present, if we succeed
in proving in this connection the existence of a fundamental Teutonic feature
of character; for works change according to circumstances, but man remains
the same, and the history of a race enlightens, not when divisions into
so-called epochs are made — always an external matter — but when strict
continuity is proved. As soon as my essential similarity to my ancestors
is demonstrated to me, I understand their actions from my own, and mine
again receive quite a new colouring, for they lose the alarming appearance
of something which has never yet existed and which is subject to the resolutions
of caprice, and can now be investigated with philosophic calm as well-known,
ever-recurring phenomena. Now and now only do we reach a really scientific
standpoint: morally the autonomy of individuality is emphasised in contrast
to the general delusion regarding humanity, and necessity, that is to say,
the inevitable mode of action of definite men, is recognised historically
as a supreme power of nature.
Now if we look at the Teutons from the very beginning, we shall find in
them two contrary and yet supplementary features strongly marked: in the
first place, the violent impulse of the individual to stand masterfully
upon his own feet, and secondly, his inclination to unite loyally with
others, to pave the way for undertakings that can only be accomplished
by common action. In our life to-day, this twofold phenomenon is ever-present,
and
346 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
the threads that
are woven this way and that form a strangely ingenious, firmly plaited
woof. Monopoly and co-operation: these are beyond doubt the two opposite
poles of the economic situation to-day, and no one will deny that they
have dominated the whole nineteenth century. What I now assert is that
this relation, this definite polarity, * has dominated our economic conditions
and their development from the first. By recognising this fact we shall,
in spite of the succession of never recurring forms of life, be enabled
to gain a profound understanding of the past, and thereby also of the present;
it will certainly not be the scientific understanding of the political
economist that we must leave to the specialist — but such a one as will
prove useful to the ordinary man in forming a right conception of the age
in which he lives.
One simple, ever constant, concrete fact must be regarded as essential:
the changing form which economic conditions take under definite men is
a direct result of their character; and the character of the Teutonic races,
whose most general features I have sketched in the sixth chapter, leads
necessarily to definite though changing forms of economic life, and to
conflicts and phases of development that are ever repeating themselves.
Let it not be supposed that this is something universally human; on the
contrary, history offers us nothing similar, or at least only superficial
similarities. For what distinguishes and differentiates us from others
is the simultaneous sway of the two impulses — to separate and to unite.
When Cato asks what Dante is seeking on his toilsome path, he receives
the answer:
-
Libertà va
cercando!
To this seeking for
freedom both those manifestations of our character are equally due. To
be economically
* So Goethe would have called it; see the Erläuterung zu
dem aphoristischen Aufsatz, die Natur.
347 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
free, we unite
with others; to be economically free, we leave the union and stake our
single head against the world. Consequently, the Indo-Europeans have quite
a different economic life from the Semitic peoples, the Chinese, &c.
* But as I pointed out on p.
542 f. (vol. i.), the Teutonic character and especially the Teutonic
idea of freedom differ considerably from those of his nearest Indo-European
relations. We saw how in Rome the great “co-operative“ strength of the
people crushed out all autonomous development of the intellectual and moral
personality; when later the enormous wealth of single individuals introduced
the system of monopoly, this only served to ruin the State, so that nothing
remained but a featureless human chaos; for the idiosyncrasies of the Romans
were such that they could only achieve great things when united — they
could develop no economic life from monopoly. In Greece we certainly find
greater harmony of qualities, but here, in contrast to the Romans, there
is a regrettable lack of uniting power: the pre-eminently energetic individuals
look to themselves alone, and do not understand that a man isolated from
his racial surroundings is no longer a man; they betray the hereditary
union and thereby ruin themselves and their country. In trade, the Roman
consequently lacked initiative, that torch that lights the path of the
individual pioneer, while the Hellene lacked honesty, that is to say, that
public, all-uniting, all-binding conscience which later found ever memorable
expression in the “honest wares“ of budding German industry. Here, moreover,
in the “honest wares“ we have already an excellent example of the reciprocal
influences of Teutonic character upon economic forms.
* See, for example, Mommsen on Carthage, above, vol. i. p. 117
f.
348
POLITICAL
ECONOMY
GUILDS
AND CAPITALISTS
The reader will find innumerable accounts of the activity of the guilds
between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries (approximately); it
is the finest example of united effort: one for all, all for one. When
we see how in these corporations everything is exactly determined and supervised
by the council of the guild, as also by specially appointed committees
of control, the town magistracy and so forth, so that not only the nature
of the execution of every single piece of work in all its details, but
also the maximum of daily work is fixed and must not be exceeded, we are
inclined, with most authors, to exclaim in horror: the individual had not
a jot of initiative, not a trace of freedom left! And yet this judgment
is so one-sided as to be a direct misconception of the historical truth.
For it was precisely by the union of many individuals to form a solid,
united corporation that the Teuton won back the freedom which he had lost
through contact with the Roman Empire. But for the innate instinct which
led the Teutons to co-operate, they would have remained just as much slaves
as the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Byzantines or the subjects of the Khalif.
The isolated individual is to be compared to a chemical atom with little
cohesive power; it is absorbed, destroyed. By adopting, of his own free
will, a law and submitting unconditionally to it, the individual assured
to himself a secure and decent livelihood — in fact a higher livelihood
than that of our workmen to-day, and in addition the all-important possibility
of intellectual freedom which in many cases was soon realised. * That is
the one side of the matter.
* Leber, in his Essai sur l'appréciation de la fortune privée
au moyen-age, 1847, shows that the workman of the thirteenth, fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries was on the average better off than to-day; by proving
that “the money of the poor was then worth comparatively more than
349 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
But the spirit
of enterprise of our race is too strong in the individual to be checked
even by the strictest rules, and so we find even here, in spite of the
authority of the guilds, that energetic individuals amassed huge fortunes.
For example, in the year 1367, a poor journeyman weaver, named Hans Fugger,
came to Augsburg; a hundred years later his heirs were in a position to
advance 150,000 Gulden to Archduke Siegmund of the Tyrol. It is true that
Fugger, in addition to his business, engaged in trade, and so successfully
that his son became an owner of mines; but how was it possible, when the
rules of the guilds were so strict in forbidding one artisan to work more
than another, for Fugger to make enough money to engage to such an extent
in trade? I do not know; no one does; concerning the beginnings of the
prosperity of the Fuggers nothing definite is known. * But we see that
it was possible. And though the Fugger family is unique both in point of
wealth and because of the rôle which it played in the history
of Europe, there was no lack of rich citizens in every city, and we need
only look up Ehrenberg's Zeitalter der Fugger (Jena, 1896) or Van
der Kindere's Le siècle des Artevelde (Brussels, 1879) to
see how men of the people, in spite of the constraint of the guilds, everywhere
attained to independence and wealth. But for the guilds, and that means
but for co-operation, we should never have had an industrial life at all
— that is self-evident; but co-operation did not fetter the individual,
it served him as a spring-board. But whenever the individual had attained
a strong independent position, he behaved in exactly the same way as the
Kings of that time acted towards the princes
that
of the wealthy, since luxuries were exorbitantly dear and impossible for
all but those of very great wealth, whereas everything indispensable, such
as the simple means of sustenance, housing, clothing, &c., was extremely
cheap.“ (Quoted from Van der Kindere: Le siècle des Artevelde,
Bruxelles, 1879, page 132.)
* Aloys Geiger: Jakob Fugger, Regensburg, 1895.
350 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
and the people;
he knew only one aim: monopoly. To be rich is not enough, to be free does
not satisfy:
-
Die wenigen Bäume,
nicht mein eigen,
-
Verderben mir den
Weltbesitz! *
Who will deny that
this Teutonic longing for the Infinite is in many respects pernicious,
that on the one hand it leads to crime, on the other to misery? Never is
the history of a great private fortune a chronicle of spotless honour.
In South Germany the word fuggern is still used to denote an over-crafty,
all but fraudulent system of business. † And in fact, scarcely had the
Fuggers become wealthy than they began to form trusts with other rich merchants
to control the market prices of the world, exactly as we see it to-day,
and such syndicates signified then, as now, systematic robbery above and
below: the workman has his wages arbitrarily curtailed and the customer
pays more than the article is worth. ‡ It is almost comical, though revolting,
to find that the Fuggers were financially interested in the sale of indulgences.
The Archbishop of Mayence had rented from the Pope for 10,000 ducats paid
in advance the sale of the Jubilee indulgences for certain parts of Germany;
but he already owed the Fuggers 20,000 ducats (out of the 30,000 he had
had to pay the Curia for his appointment), and thus in reality the archbishop
was only a man of straw, and the real farmer of the indulgences was the
firm of Fugger! Thus Tetzel, who has been immortalised by Luther, could
only travel and preach when accompanied by the firm's commercial agent,
who drew in all the receipts and alone had a key
* The few trees that are not my own spoil my possession of the world.
† According to Schoenhof: A History of Money and Prices, New York,
1897, p. 24.
‡ See Ehrenberg, loc. cit. i, p. 90. They aimed especially
at the control of the copper market; but the Fuggers were so eager for
absolute monopoly that the syndicate soon broke up.
351 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
to the “indulgence-box.“
* Now if it is not particularly edifying to see how such a fortune is amassed,
it is simply appalling to learn what outrageous use was made of it. When
the individual tears himself away from the salutary union of common interests,
he gives rein to unbridled despotism. The slow-witted calculation of private
interests, on the part of a miserable weaver's son, determines who is to
be Emperor; only by the help of the Fuggers and Welsers was Charles V.
chosen, only by their assistance was he enabled to wage the baneful Smalcaldic
war, and in the following war of the Habsburgs against German conscience
and German freedom these unscrupulous capitalists again played a decisive
part; they took the side of Rome and opposed the Reformation, not from
religious conviction, but simply because they had extensive dealings with
the Curia, and were afraid of losing considerable sums if the Curia eventually
should suffer defeat. †
And yet, after all, we must admit that this unscrupulous individual ambition,
that stopped at no crime, has been an important and indispensable factor
in our whole civilising and economic development. I named the Kings a moment
ago and I wish once more to adduce a comparison from the closely related
sphere of politics. Who can read the history of Europe from the fifteenth
century to the French Revolution without almost constantly feeling his
blood boil with indignation? All liberties are taken away, all rights trodden
under foot; Erasmus already exclaims with anger: “The people build the
cities, the princes destroy them.“ And he
* Ludwig Keller: Die Anfänge der Reformation und die Ketzerschulen,
p. 15; and Ehrenberg, loc. cit. i. 99.
† All details are proved by material from archives, quoted in Ehrenberg's
book. It will give Platonic consolation to many a feeling heart to learn
that the Fuggers and the other Catholic capitalists of that time were all
ruined by the Habsburgs, since these princes always borrowed and never
paid back. They owed the Fuggers eight million Gulden.
352
POLITICAL
ECONOMY
did not live to
see the worst by any means. And what was the object of it all! To give
a handful of families the monopoly of all Europe. History does not reveal
a worse band of common criminals than our princes; from the legal point
of view, almost all of them were gaol-birds. And yet what calm and sensible
man will not now see in this development a real blessing? By the concentration
of political power round a few central points have arisen great strong
nations — a greatness and a strength in which every individual shares.
Then when these few monarchs had broken every other power, they stood alone;
henceforth, the great community of the people was able to demand its rights
and the result is that we possess more far-reaching individual freedom
than any previous age knew. The autocrat became (though unconsciously)
the forger of freedom; the immeasurable ambition of the one has proved
a benefit to all; political monopoly has paved the way for political co-operation.
We see this development — which is yet far from its culmination — in all
its peculiar significance, when we contrast it with the course taken by
Imperial Rome. There we saw how all rights, all privileges, all liberties
were gradually wrested from the people which had made the nation, and vested
in one single man; * the Teutons took the opposite course; out of chaos
they welded themselves into nations, by uniting for the time being all
power in a few hands; but after this the community demanded back its own
— law and justice, freedom and a maximum of independence for the individual
citizen. In many States to-day the monarch is already little more than
a geometrical point, a centre from which to draw the circle. In the economic
domain, of course, things are much more complicated, and, moreover, they
are by no means so far advanced as in politics, yet I believe that the
analogy between the two is very great.
* See vol. i. p. 125.
353 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
The same national
character in fact is at work in both spheres. Among the Phoenicians capitalism
had brought absolute slavery in its train; but not among us; on the contrary:
it causes hardships, just as the growth of the kingship did, but everywhere
it is the forerunner of great and successful co-operative movements. In
the communistic State of the Chinese bestial uniformity predominates; with
us, as we see, strong individuals always arise out of powerful combinations.
Whoever takes the trouble to study the history of our industry, our manufactures
and trade, will find these two powers everywhere at work. He will find
that co-operation is everywhere the basis, from the memorable league of
the Lombard cities (followed soon by the Rhenish city-league, the German
Hansa, the London Hansa) to that visionary but brilliant genius, Robert
Owen, who at the dawn of the nineteenth century sowed the seed of the great
idea of co-operation, which is just beginning to take strong root. He will,
however, see just as clearly at all times and in all spheres the influence
of the initiative of the individual in freeing himself from the constraint
of communism, and this he will perceive to be the really creative, progressive
element. It was as merchants, not as scholars, that the Polos made their
voyages of discovery; in the search for gold Columbus discovered America;
the opening-up of India was (like that of Africa to-day) solely the work
of capitalists; almost everywhere the working of mines has been made possible
by the conferring of a monopoly upon enterprising individuals; in the great
industrial inventions of the end of the eighteenth century, the individual
had invariably to contend all his life against the masses, and would have
succumbed but for the help of independent, mercenary capital. The concatenation
is infinitely complex, because the two motive powers are always
354 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
simultaneously
at work and do not merely relieve each other. Thus we saw Fugger, after
freeing himself from the restrictions of the guilds, voluntarily enter
into new connections with others. Again and again, in every century in
which great capitalists are numerous (as in the second half of the nineteenth)
we see syndicates being formed, that is, therefore, a special form of co-operation;
thereby, however, capitalist robs capitalist of all individual freedom;
the power of the individual personality wanes, and then it breaks out elsewhere.
On the other hand, real co-operation frequently reveals from the first
the qualities and aims of a definite individuality: that is particularly
clear in the case of the Hansa at the period of its greatness, and wherever
a nation adopts political measures to safeguard its economic interests.
I had collected material to prove in detail what is here sketched, but
space fails me, and I shall only call the reader's attention to a particularly
instructive example. One glance, in fact, at the hitherto undiscussed subject
of agriculture suffices to reveal with particular clearness the working
of the above-mentioned essential principles of our economic developments.
FARMER
AND LANDLORD
In the thirteenth century, when the Teutonic races began to build up their
new world, the agriculturist over nearly the whole of Europe was a freer
man, with a more assured existence, than he is to-day; copyhold was the
rule, so that England, for example — to-day a seat of landlordism — was
even in the fifteenth century almost entirely in the hands of hundreds
of thousands of farmers, who were not only legal owners of their land,
but possessed in addition far-reaching free rights to
355
POLITICAL ECONOMY
common pastures
and woodlands. * Since then, all these farmers have been robbed, simply
robbed, of their property. Any means of achieving this was good enough.
If war did not afford an opportunity for driving them away, existing laws
were falsified and new laws were issued by those in authority, to confiscate
the estates of the small holders in favour of the great. But not only the
farmers, the small landlords had also to be destroyed: that was achieved
by a roundabout method: they were ruined by the competition of the greater
landlords, and then their estates were bought up. † The hardships hereby
entailed may be illustrated by a single example: in the year 1495, the
English farm labourer, who worked for wages, earned exactly three times
as much (in marketable value) as he did a hundred years later! Hence many
a hardworking son could, in spite of all his diligence, only earn a third
of what his father did. So sudden a fall, affecting precisely the productive
class of the people, is simply alarming; it is hardly comprehensible that
such an economic catastrophe should not have led to the disruption of the
whole State. In the course of this one century, almost all agriculturists
were reduced to the position of day-labourers. And in the first half of
the eighteenth century the agricultural class, which was independent a
few centuries before, had sunk so low that its members could not have made
ends meet but for the generosity of the “lords“ or the contributions from
the treasury of the community, since the maximum profit of the whole year
did not suffice
* Gibbins: Industrial History of England, 5th ed. p. 40 f. and 108
f. We find copyhold still in Eastern Europe, where under Turkish
rule everything has remained unchanged since the fifteenth century; in
the domains of the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin it was reintroduced
in 1867.
† A process particularly easy to trace in England, where the political
development was unbroken and the interior of the country has not been ravaged
by war since the fifteenth century; the famous book of Rogers, Six Centuries
of Work and Wages, is an excellent guide
356 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
to buy the minimum
of the necessaries of life. * Now in all these things — and in fact in
every discussion of this kind — we must not allow either abstract theorising
or mere feeling to influence our judgment. Jevons, the famous social economist,
writes: “The first step towards understanding consists in once and for
all discarding the notion that in social matters there are abstract 'rights'.“
† And as for moral feeling, I may point out that nature is always cruel.
The indignation which we felt against criminal Kings and thieving nobles
is nothing to the indignation which any biological study arouses. Morality
is in fact altogether a subjective, that is, a transcendent intuition;
the words: “Father, forgive them,“ have no application outside the human
here.
But in all the countries of Central Europe practically the same thing happened;
the great estates which we see to-day have all without exception been won
by robbery and fraud, since they were subject to the lords of the land
as juristical property (Eigentum), but were the actual, rightful
possession (Besitz) of the copyholders. (Consult any legal handbook
under the heading “Emphyteusis.“)
* Rogers, loc. cit. chap. xvii. This unworthy position of
the farm-labourer was still unchanged in the middle of the nineteenth century,
at least in England: this is fully proved by Herbert Spencer in The
Man Versus the State, chap. ii. Such facts, and there are hundreds
of them — I shall only mention the one fact that the labourer was never
in so wretched a position as at about the middle of the nineteenth century
— prove the total invalidity of that idea of a constant “progress.“ For
the great majority of the inhabitants of Europe the development of the
last four centuries has been a “progress“ to greater and greater misery.
At the end of the nineteenth century the labourer's position is indeed
improved, but he is still about 33 per cent. worse off than in the middle
of the fifteenth (according to the comparative calculations of Vicomte
d'Avenel in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1898). The Socialist
writer, Karl Kautzky, quoted a short time ago in the Neue Zeit a
“decree“ of the Saxon Dukes Ernst and Albert, 1482, which bade the workmen
and mowers be content, if, in addition to their wages, they received twice
daily, at midday and in the evening, four dishes, soup, two courses of
meat, and one vegetable, and on holidays five dishes, soup, two kinds of
fish, with vegetables to each. Kautzky remarks: “Where is there a workman,
not excluding the very aristocracy of the class, who could afford such
a diet twice daily? And yet the ordinary labourers of Saxony were not always
satisfied with it in the fifteenth century.“
† The State in Relation to Labour (quoted from Herbert Spencer).
357 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
heart; hence the
absurdity of every empirical, inductive, anti-religious system of ethics.
But if we disregard moral considerations, as we ought to here, and confine
ourselves to the influence of this economic development upon life, all
we require to do is to take up any authority on the subject, e.g.,
Fraas' Geschichte der Landbauwissenschaft, to recognise at once
that a complete revolution was necessary in agriculture. But for that we
should long ago have had so little to eat in Europe that we should have
been forced to consume each other. But these small farmers, who were, so
to speak, spreading a net of co-operation over the country, would never
have carried through the necessary reform of agriculture; capital, knowledge,
initiative, hope of great profit were necessary. None but men who do not
live from hand to mouth can undertake such great reforms; dictatorial power
over great districts and numerous workmen was also indispensable. * The
landed nobility arrogated this rôle and made good use of it.
They were spurred on by the sudden rise of the merchant classes, who seriously
threatened their own special position. They applied themselves to the work
with such industry and success that the produce of the cornfields at the
end of the eighteenth century was estimated to be four times as great as
at the end of the thirteenth! The fat ox had grown three times as heavy
and the sheep bore four times as much wool! That was the result of monopoly;
a result which sooner or later was bound to benefit the community. For
in the long run we Teutons never tolerate Carthaginian exploitation.
* This can be proved from history. Pietro Crescenzi of Bologna published
his book on rational agriculture in the beginning of the fourteenth century:
he was soon followed by Robert Grossetête, Walter Henley, and others,
who discuss in detail the value of farmyard manure, but with almost no
result, as the peasants were too uneducated to be able to learn anything
about the matter. There is instructive information on the small produce
of the soil under primitive agriculture in André Réville's
book: Les Paysans au Moyen-Age, 1896, p. 9.
358 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
And while the
large landlords pocketed everything, both the legitimate wages of their
workmen and the profit which formerly had been a modest competence to the
families of thousands and thousands of well-to-do yeomen, these powers
sought new ways of obtaining a worthy independence. The inventors in the
textile industries at the end of the eighteenth century are nearly all
peasants, who took to weaving because otherwise they could not earn enough
for their sustenance; others emigrated to the colonies and laid great stretches
of land out in corn, which began to compete with the home supply; others
again became sailors and merchant princes. In short, the value of the land
monopoly sank gradually and is still sinking — just like the value of money
* — so that we are now clearly feeling the wave of reaction and are nearing
the day when the masses will assert their rights once more, and demand
back from the large landlords the possessions entrusted to them — just
as they demanded back their rights from the King. The French of the Revolution
showed the way; a more sensible example was given thirty years ago by a
generous German prince, the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
SYNDICATES
AND SOCIALISM
In spite of radical changes in universal economic conditions, any one reading
Ehrenberg's frequently mentioned book will be astonished at the resemblance
between the financial status of four centuries ago and that of to-day.
There were companies promoted even in the thirteenth century (e.g.,
the Cologne ship-mills †); bills of exchange were also common and were
in currency from one end of Europe to the other; there were insurance companies
in Flanders even at the beginning of the four-
* In the year 1694 the English Government paid 8½ per cent. for
money, in the year 1894 scarcely 2 per cent.
† Lamprecht: Deutsches Städteleben, p. 30.
359 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
teenth century;
* syndicates, artificial raising and lowering of prices, bankruptcy ...
all these things flourished then as now. † The Jew — that important economic
factor — of course also flourished. Van der Kindere (pp. 222-223) says
laconically of the fourteenth century in Flanders: decent money-lenders
took up to 6½ per cent., Jews between 60 per cent. and 200 per cent.;
even the short period of the Ghettos, of which so much has been made —
it was between 1500 and 1800 — made little or no change in the prosperity
and business practices of this shrewd people.
The insight we have got, on the one hand, into the predominance of fundamental,
unchanging qualities of character, on the other into the relative constancy
of our economic conditions (in spite of all painful swinging to and fro
of the pendulum) will, I think, prove very useful when we proceed to form
a judgment of the nineteenth century; it teaches us to look more calmly
at phenomena, which to-day present themselves as something absolutely new,
but which are in reality only old things in new garb, merely the natural,
inevitable products of our character. Some point to-day to the formation
of great syndicates, others on the contrary to Socialism, and fancy they
see
* Van der Kindere, loc. cit. p. 216.
† Martin Luther refers in various passages to the capricious “raising“
of the price of corn by the farmers and calls these latter “murderers and
thieves“ in consequence (see his Tischgespräche); and
his work on Kaufhandlung und Wucher gives a delightful description
of the syndicates that flourished even then: “Who is so dull as not to
see that the companies are downright monopolia? ... They have all
the wares in their hands and use them as they will, they raise or lower
the price according to their pleasure and oppress and ruin all smaller
merchants, as the pike devours the small fishes in the water, just as if
they were lords over God's creatures and above all laws of faith and love
... by this all the world must be sucked dry and all the gold be deposited
in their gourd ... all others must trade with risk and loss, gain this
year, lose the next, but they (the capitalists) win always and make up
any loss with increase of gain, and so it is little wonder that they soon
seize hold of everybody's property.“ These words were written in 1524;
they might really be written to-day.
360 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
the end of the
world approaching; both movements certainly involve danger whenever anti-Teutonic
powers gain the upper hand in them. * But in themselves they are altogether
normal phenomena, in which the pulse of our economic life is felt. Even
before the exchange of natural products was replaced by circulation of
money, we see similar economic currents at work; for example, the period
of bondage and serfdom denotes the necessary transition from ancient slavery
to universal freedom — beyond doubt one of the greatest achievements of
Teutonic civilisation; here, as elsewhere, the egotistical interest of
individuals, or, it may be, of individual classes, have paved the way for
the good of all, in other words, monopoly prepared the way for co-operation.
† But as soon as the circulation of money is introduced (it begins in the
tenth century, has already made great progress in the north by the thirteenth,
and in the fifteenth is fully established), economic conditions run practically
parallel to those of to-day, ‡ except that new political combinations and
new industrial achievements have naturally dressed the old Adam in a new
garb, and that the energy with which contrasts clash — what in physics
is called the “Amplitude of the oscillations“ — now decreases and now increases.
According to Schmoller, for instance, this “amplitude“ was at least as
great in the thirteenth century as in the nineteenth, while in the sixteenth
it had considerably decreased. § We have already seen capitalism at
work in the case of the Fuggers; but Socialism
* See pp. 176 and 177.
† This becomes especially clear from the investigations of Michael: Kulturzustände
des deutschen Volkes während des 13. Jahrhunderts, 1897, i., Division
on Landwirtschaft und Bauern.
‡ The widespread belief held by the ignorant that paper-money is one of
“the proud achievements of modern times“ is refuted by the fact that this
institution is not a Teutonic idea, but had been common in ancient Carthage
and in the late Roman Empire, though not exactly in this form (since there
was no paper).
§ See Strassburg's Blüte, quoted by Michael, as
above.
361 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
has been an important
element of life long before their time; for almost five hundred years it
plays an important part in the politics of Europe, from the rising of the
Lombardic cities against their counts and Kings to the numerous organisations
and risings of peasants in all the countries of Europe. As Lamprecht somewhere
points out, the organisation of agriculture was with us from the first
“communistic and socialistic.“ Genuine communism must always have its root
in agriculture, for it is only here, in the production of the indispensable
means of sustenance, that co-operation attains wide, and possibly State-moulding,
importance. For that reason the centuries up to the sixteenth were more
socialistic than the nineteenth, in spite of the socialistic talk and theorising
to which we are treated. But even this theorising is anything but new;
to give only one older example, the Roman de la Rose (of the thirteenth
century, the century of awakening), for a long time the most popular book
in Europe, attacked all private property; and even in the first years of
the sixteenth century (1516) theoretic socialism was so well and thoughtfully
expressed in Sir Thomas More's Utopia, that all that has been added
since is only the theoretical extension and completion of the sphere clearly
marked out by More. * In fact the completion was undertaken
* Even the Socialist leader Kautzky admits this (Die Geschichte des
Sozialismus, 1895, i. p. 468) when he expresses the opinion that More's
view was the standard one among Socialists till 1847, that is, till Marx.
Now it is clear that there can be little in common between the thoughts
of this highly gifted Jew, who tried to transplant many of the best ideas
of his people from Asia to Europe and to suit them to modern conditions
of life, and those of one of the most exquisite scholars ever produced
by a Teutonic people, an absolutely aristocratic, infinitely refined nature,
a mind whose inexhaustible humour inspired his bosom friend Erasmus' Praise
of Folly, a man who in public posts — finally as Speaker of the House
of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer — had acquired great experience
of life, and now frankly and ironically (and with justice) lashes the society
of his age as “a conspiracy of the rich against the poor,“ and looks forward
to a future State built upon genuinely Teutonic and Christian foundations.
His use of the word Utopia, i.e., Nowhere, for his State of the
future is again a humorous
362 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
at once. Not only
do we possess a long series of social theorists before the year 1800, among
whom the famous philosopher Locke is pre-eminent with all his clear and
very socialistically coloured discussions on work and property, * but the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced perhaps as large
a number of attempts at ideal, communistic reforms of State as the nineteenth.
The Dutchman, Peter Cornelius, for example, as early as the seventeenth
century, suggests the abolition of all nationalities and the formation
of a “central administration“ which shall undertake the control of the
common business of the various groups united into numerous “companies“
[sic], † and Winstanley constructs in his Law of Freedom
(1651) so complete a communistic system with the abolition of all personal
property, abolition (on penalty of death) of all buying and selling, abolition
of all spiritualistic religion, yearly election of all officials by the
people, &c., that he really left very little for his successors to
suggest. ‡
feature;
for in reality he takes a perfectly practical view of the social problem,
much more so than many doctrinaires of the present day. He demands rational
cultivation of the soil, hygiene in regard to the body of dwellings, reform
of the penal system, lessening of work-hours, education and recreation
for all .... many of these things we have introduced: in the other points,
More, as blood of our blood, felt so accurately what we needed that his
book, four hundred years old, is still valuable and not out of date. More
opposes with all the force of ancient Teutonic conviction the monarchical
absolutism then just beginning to be developed: yet he is no republican,
Utopia is to have a King. In his State there is to be absolute religious
freedom of conscience: but he is not, like our pseudo-mosaical Socialists
of to-day, an anti-religious, ethical doctrinaire, on the contrary, whoever
has not in his heart the feeling of the Godhead, is excluded from all posts
in Utopia. The gulf separating More from Marx and his followers is not
therefore the progress of time, but the contrast between Teuton and Jew.
The English workmen of the present day, and especially such leading spirits
as William Morris, are evidently much nearer to More than to Marx: the
same will be seen in the case of the German Socialists, whenever with firm
politeness they have requested their Jewish leaders to mind the business
of their own people.
* See especially the Second Essay on Civil Government, p.
27.
† Cf. Gooch: The History of English Democratic Ideas, 1898,
p. 209 f.
‡ Pretty full details of Winstanley in the Geschichte des Sozialismus
in Einzeldarstellungen, i. 594. E. Bernstein, the author of this
section,
363
POLITICAL
ECONOMY
THE
MACHINE
I think that these considerations — extended of course, and pondered —
will enable many to understand our age better. Certainly in the nineteenth
century a new element has been introduced with revolutionary effect, the
machine, that machine of which the good and thoughtful socialist William
Morris says: “We have become the slaves of the monsters to which our own
invention has given birth.“ * The amount of misery caused by the machine
of the nineteenth century cannot be represented by figures; it is absolutely
beyond conception. I think it is probable that the nineteenth century was
the most “pain-ful“ of all known ages, and that chiefly because of the
sudden advent of the machine. In the year 1835, shortly after the introduction
of the machine into India, the Viceroy wrote: “The misery is scarcely paralleled
in the history of trade. The bones of the cotton weavers whiten the plains
of India.“ † That was on a larger scale a repetition of the same inexpressible
misery caused everywhere by the introduction of the machine. Worse still
— for death by starvation affects only the one generation — is the reduction
of thousands and millions of human beings from relative prosperity and
independence to continuous slavery, and their removal from the healthy
life of the country to a miserable, light-
is
the re-discoverer of Winstanley; but Bernstein confines himself to the
one book and shows moreover so very little insight into the Teutonic character
that we shall find more about Winstanley in the little book of Gooch, p.
214 f. and 224 f. We find probably the most decisive rejection of
all communistic ideas at that time in Oliver Cromwell who — although a
man of the people — flatly refused to entertain the proposal to introduce
universal suffrage, as it “would inevitably lead to anarchy.“
* Signs of Change, p. 33.
† Quoted from May: Wirtschafts- und Handelspolitische Rundschau für
das Jahr 1897, p. 13. Harriet Martineau tells with delightful simplicity
in her much-read book, British Rule in India, p. 297, how the poor
English officials had to abandon their usual drive in the evenings because
of the frightful stench of the corpses.
364 POLITICAL
ECONOMY
less and airless
existence in large cities. * And yet we may doubt whether this revolution
(apart from the fact that it affected a greater number) caused greater
hardships and a more intense general crisis than the transition in the
case of trade from exchange in kind to the use of money, or in the case
of agriculture from natural to artificial methods. The very fact of the
extraordinary rapidity with which large factories have been established,
and at the same time the unparalleled facilities given to emigrants have
tended to some extent to mitigate the cruelties inevitably ensuing from
this development.
We have seen how completely this economic change was determined by the
individual character of the Teutonic peoples. As soon as baleful politics
allowed men to draw breath for a moment in peace, we saw Roger Bacon in
the thirteenth century and Leonardo de Vinci in the fifteenth anticipate
the work of invention, the execution of which was to be hindered for centuries
by external circumstances alone. And no more than the telescope and locomotive
are absolutely new, the fruit, say, of an intellectual development, is
there anything fundamentally new in our economic condition to-day, however
much it may differ, as a phenomenon, from the conditions of former times.
It is only when we have learned to recognise the essential features of
our own character at work everywhere in the past, that we shall be able
to judge correctly the economic condition of our present age; for the same
character is the moulding influence now as before.
* The textile workers almost all lived in the country till towards the
end of the eighteenth century, and engaged also in work in the fields.
They were incomparably better off thus than to-day (see Gibbins,
as above, p. 154, and read also the eighth chapter of the first book of
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations). To get an idea of the condition
of many industrial workers to-day, in that country of Europe where they
are best paid, namely, England, the reader should consult R. H. Sherard's
The
White Slaves of England, 1897.
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of page. Last update: April 4th, 2004.
