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the English method, since the provision compulsorily made extends to labourers
generally, whereas the English system only provides for the destitute: on the other
hand, the method of compulsory insurance is, from another point of view, less
anti-individualistic, so far as the burden of the provision is thrown on the persons
who receive the benefit of it. (EP –)
Sidgwick goes on to suggest that a “careful combination” of all three
systems – regulated private almsgiving, public relief, and compulsory
insurance – would probably yield the “practically best plan” for deal-
ing with poverty, but at the same time he admits that just how to combine
them, and in what degree, are problems to which there is no general the-
oretical solution. Consequently, he is only willing to conclude that “the
proper nature and limits of governmental action for the relief of indigence
must largely depend upon () the actual extent of effectiveness of volun-
tary association among the citizens, and () on the amount of philanthropic
effort and sacrifice habitually devoted by private persons to the supply of
social needs, and the wisdom with which these efforts and sacrifices are
directed.” These lessons are similar to those drawn in other departments –
thus, “we actually find that the promotion of education and culture, and
the cure of diseases, have been largely provided for in modern civilised
communities . . . by the donations and bequests of individuals. So far as
these needs can be adequately met in this way, there is an advantage in
avoiding the necessity for additional taxation.” (EP ) Should the state
start intervening in an area where private beneficence had been effective,
“there is a serious danger of the latter withdrawing from it, unless the
spheres of action appropriate to the two agencies respectively are well and
clearly defined.”
These general remarks do not actually convey Sidgwick’s more detailed
convictions, the result of his work with the Cambridge Charity Organiza-
tion Society. For example, in an unpublished lecture on the “Poor Law,”
delivered to the London COS, he explained that he did not think that the
English system, workhouses and all, was fundamentally misguided, de-
spite the attacks on it as “hard-hearted” by sentimental socialists, trades
union congresses, and so on. Moreover, he opposed transferring to the
government the tasks of discriminating desert and dealing with specially
deserving cases – which was the “the semi-official work of experts” such as
the COS. At most, he favored an intermediate course of reform: “keeping
the work-house system as at present, we might supplement it – so far as
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out-door relief is concerned – by something like the French system – some
cooperation with local governments which should yet keep the financial
and administrative basis of the work mainly voluntary.” Presumably, this
is where he hoped for the involvement of minds of “nobler stamp,” as he
had put it in the Principles. His fear was that
an astute socialistic leader, taking advantage of popular sentiment, might easily
construct a series of apparently moderate steps by which our existing system
of poor-relief might be transformed into a system securing a fairly comfortable
provision for old-age and industrial emergencies, for the manual labour classes;
so that it might serve as a valuable military basis enabling them to conduct their
industrial wars with more staying-power than at present. (CWC)
Now, such sentiments and affiliations were hardly likely to win Sidgwick
a reputation for radicalism. Again, the Charity Organisation Societies were
generally regarded as bastions of the laissez-faire thinking that went into
the Poor Law reforms of , the first result of the reformed Parliament,
which did away with the Speenhamland system that had sheltered rural
England against the first ravages of capitalism. As Polanyi put it in his
classic work, The Great Transformation,
To the bewilderment of thinking minds, unheard-of wealth turned out to be
inseparable from unheard-of poverty. Scholars proclaimed in unison that a science
had been discovered which put the laws governing man’s world beyond any doubt.
It was at the behest of these laws that compassion was removed from the hearts,
and a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name of the greatest
happiness of the greatest number gained the dignity of secular religion.
Altruistic rightness of heart was being subordinated to utilitarian hardness
of heart, a focus on consequences as calculated by experts.
What is missing from such an imputation of want of human feeling
and solidarity is, at least in the case of Sidgwick, any recognition of how
he simply sought to combine altruistic feeling with effective giving, and
how he held out the hope that human nature would change and that a far
more socialistic system would prove possible. Moreover, he did think the
English system too purely deterrent. After all, he himself had effectively
undermined most of the orthodox attempts to legitimate the economic
system, and his brief was against industrial war, not creeping socialism.
It was this curious combination of countenancing too many of the com-
placencies of orthodox political economy with respect to the present, while
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recognizing the empirical, debatable nature of the issues and keeping an
open and hopeful mind about the future obsolescence of libertarian theory
and practice, that made Sidgwick such an elusive, easily misunderstood
figure. A revealing case in point involved the famous socialist playwright
George Bernard Shaw, who used to enjoy recounting how Sidgwick had
stormed out of one of his socialist speeches, while loudly objecting that
he would have no truck with anyone advocating the theft of property.
Sidgwick’s journal, however, leaves a different impression:
The Committee had invited a live Socialist, redhot ‘from the Streets,’ as he told
us, who sketched in a really brilliant address the rapid series of steps by which
modern society is to pass peacefully into social democracy. The node of the transition was supplied by urban ground-rents (it is interesting to observe that the
old picture of the agricultural landlord-drone, battening on social prosperity to
which he contributes nothing, is withdrawn for the present as too ludicrously
out of accordance with the facts). It is now urban ground-rent that the municipal governments will have to seize, to meet the ever-growing necessity of providing
<
br /> work and wages for the unemployed. How exactly this seizure of urban rents was
to develop into a complete nationalisation of industry I could not remember af-
terwards, but it seemed to go very naturally at the time. There was a peroration
rhetorically effective as well as daring, in which he explained that the bliss of
perfected socialism would only come by slow degrees, with lingering steps and
long delays, and claimed our sympathy for the noble-hearted men whose ardent
philanthropy had led them to desire to cut these delays short by immediate rev-
olution and spoliation. It was, indeed, a mistake on their part; the laws of social
development did not admit of it; but if we were not quite lost in complacent self-
ishness we should join him in regretting that this shorter way with property was
impossible.
Altogether a noteworthy performance: – the man’s name is Bernard Shaw:
Myers says he has written books worth reading. (M )
This encounter at the British Association was in September of ,
well after the publication of Sidgwick’s Principles and his own quasi-
Millian sketch of the possible transition to socialism through the increasing
success of public industries. According to legend, when Shaw was finally
confronted with this passage from the Memoir, he was rendered quite
speechless.
One of the primary reasons why Sidgwick’s views on gradual socialism
and the growth of government interference were so cautious in the case
of such matters as poor relief has to do with his more general fears about
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the corruption of the political process. Thus, he concludes his chapter
on “Socialistic Interference,” with its discussion of poor relief, with an
expression of concern about the disadvantages of governmental action.
These disadavantages involve:
() the danger of overburdening the governmental machinery with work, () the
danger of increasing the power capable of being used by governing persons op-
pressively or corruptly, () the danger that the delicate economic functions of
government will be hampered by the desire to gratify certain specially influential
sections of the community: – for instance, when legislation is in the hands of a
representative assembly, the more the functions of Government are extended in
a socialistic direction, the greater becomes the risk that contested elections will
exhibit an immoral competition between candidates promising to procure public
money for the benefit of particular classes and districts. (EP )
Along with these dangers, he warns that the work of government is apt
to be done by persons lacking some of the drive of persons in the private
sector, and that it is therefore a mistake to conclude “that governmental in-
terference is always expedient, even where laisser faire leads to a manifestly unsatisfactory result; its expediency has to be decided in any particular
case by a careful estimate of advantages and drawbacks, requiring data
obtained from special experience.”
Clearly, Sidgwick feared that government, too, was under the going
conditions insufficiently high-minded, and that the evolution of public
spirit had some ways to go. Indeed, with the increasing democratization
coming with the reforms of and , he was inclined to think that
short-sighted party strife was becoming even more of a danger. When,
in Part II of the book, he finally comes around to an extended discus-
sion of democracy, he makes it abundantly plain that his conception of
democracy – quite like Mill’s – would not harbor any excessively generous
view of the capabilities of the plain man. Thus,
There seem to be two competing principles, one or other of which is more or
less definitely assumed in current arguments for democratic institutions. One of
these, – which I myself accept, with important qualifications, – is ‘that government
should rest on the active consent of the governed’; the other is ‘that any one honest and self-supporting citizen is, on the average, as well qualified as another for the
work of government.’ This latter proposition I in the main reject; but I admit
that, in one view of the proof of the first proposition, the second is to some extent implied, and that where democracy – as defined by the first proposition – is fully
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developed, there is likely to be a tendency to accept and act upon the second to
some extent. (EP )
The qualifications have to do especially with the legislative side of gov-
ernment (Sidgwick accepts the familiar threefold division of executive,
judicial, and legislative), and on many counts they follow Mill’s Consid-
erations on Representative Government. Yet he is, if anything, even pickier
about expertise than Mill, and often sounds very like a precursor to Walter
Lippmann, with his scathing assault on the myth of the “omnicompetent
citizen” in Public Opinion. Thus, the
ideal legislator ought to know law as well as the lawyer, but he ought to know much
more than law. He must have an insight . . . into the actual relation of the laws to the social life of the community regulated; the manner in which they modify the
conduct of the individuals whom they affect; the consequences, proximate and
remote, that are likely to result from any change in them.
But getting a body of legislators who, in addition to general knowledge,
“combine special experience in different departments of social life” is
only one part of the problem. Harder still is to secure “in legislators a
keen concern for the interests of the various elements of the community for
which they legislate.” This requires the familiar solution of a “system of
popular election for a limited time,” which even when it yields bad laws, at
least makes the legislation more acceptable to the governed. (EP –)
Needless to say, Sidgwick has little patience for the claims of direct
democracy, or for a natural right to self-governance. The latter he treats
as akin to the individualistic principle, as something that may be justified
on utilitarian grounds, but only with important exceptions and qualifi-
cations. On the former, he insists that legislation is “a difficult art, the
mastery of which requires such an expenditure of time and energy as the
citizens at large – even if otherwise qualified – cannot ordinarily afford.”
Although he allows that under certain conditions, it could be justifiable
to rely more rather than less heavily on such direct democratic means as
the referendum, this does not translate into any sympathy for the idea of
doing away with representation. Against the claim that the incompetence
into an incompetent choice of legislators, he thinks it sufficient
to reply that, in the division of labour which civilisation has brought, ordinary
members of a community organised on an individualistic basis have continually
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to choose experts for skilled work of which the chooser does not understand the
methods: and the result is commonly accepted as tolerably satisfactory. Thus . . .
most men value highly the control that they acquire, by the free choice of their
physician, over the operation of applying drugs to the cure of their diseases;
though they know themselves to be wholly unable to prescribe medicines for
themselves.
If this cannot be exactly imitated in the case of government’s coercive
power, nonetheless “we imitate it as far as we can by giving the individuals
coerced a share in the appointment of the supreme organ of legislation.”
(EP –)
Yet it must be said that Sidgwick was awfully sensitive to the inade-
quacies of the people. All of Mill’s fears – or Tocqueville’s – about the
potential tyranny of the majority loom large for him, in the context of
the s, though in somewhat altered form. He is not one to suffer any
confusion about the multiple meanings of “freedom”:
When a writer speaks of ‘Free’ institutions he sometimes means to imply that the
government leaves the individual alone to look after his own affairs; sometimes that
the private members of the community collectively exercise an effective control
over the government: sometimes he seems to imply both together, apparently as-
suming a necessary connection between the two facts, which we may conveniently
distinguish as ‘civil’ and ‘constitution’ freedom respectively.
But there is no such necessary connection; alluding to a favorite example
of Mill’s, he notes “that Government does nothing to prevent a man from
getting as drunk as he likes in Russia: whereas the vigorous democracy
of North America has established in several States severely restrictive