On Interference with the Environment
Steven T. Byington
[Reprinted from The New Freewoman,
October-December, 1913]
I. THE PRESUPPOSITIONS I START FROM
I WANT to start a discussion which may be of some length, especially
if I get replies from those who disagree with me, as I hope I may, and
I think it will pay if first I lay down, like Euclid, a few of the
axioms and postulates with which I begin.
I observe that men universally hold that certain types of action are
to be approved and certain others are to be disapproved. They differ
as to what actions should be put in either class: Herodotus noted this
in the case of the nation where it was a disgrace to eat one's father,
and the other nation where it was a disgrace not to eat one's father.
They differ as to what names should be used for the classes: most
people say right and wrong or good and bad, but some object most
strenuously to these terms and prefer to say high and low, noble and
base, fine and sordid, and I know not what. But everybody has some
name for some sorts of actions that he thinks well of, and another
name for those of which he thinks ill. The question whether it is well
to speak of "right" or "wrong" is a very dry
dispute about words; but the question whether a given action belongs
in the black class or in the white class is a question of intense
interest wherever there is a difference of opinion about it. Look at
any book that has been written to prove that there is no such thing as
moral good or evil, and see with what a relish the author will
stigmatise the moralist's attitude by the names of such vices as he
recognises to be vices, such as owardice or laziness. Well, I will try
to avoid using terms that are objected to -- I am entirely willing, in
order to gel neutral terminology, to revive the Stoic's names of
proegmena and apoproegmena, and to use these names in
a way directly opposite to the Stoic use -- but I want leave to talk
approvingly of some actions and disapprovingly of others, as everyone
else does; and if I carelessly let a bit of moralistic language slip
in, I hope those who believe that there is no crime will allow that I
have committed none.
Similarly, I observe a general consensus that society will be best
ordered by letting a man feel secure that certain things shall not be
done against him. Once more we have the dispute over names, some
objecting strongly to the words "right" and "ought"
because of the moralistic associations of these words. But, though
they do not offer such a flood of substitute names as in the other
case, I do not see that they are any less disposed to claim for
themselves or their clients some of the things commonly called rights,
and to use strong objurgatory language in expressing their
disagreement with those who will not acknowledge some of these claims.
I am interested in some such claims myself; if in discussing them I
ever say that a man " ought " to have a "right" to
something, I shall not intend those words to prejudice the case in my
favour, and I shall not think well of one who tries to make those
words prejudice the case against me.
I believe in debate, not because I ordinarily expect either debater
to convince his adversary, but because bystanders are occasionally
convinced, and more especially because one's understanding of his own
ideas and of his opponent's ideas is mightily clarified by seeing what
explanations of those ideas have to be given in meeting the objections
of the unappreciative. I love clear-cut ideas, and would get myself a
complete set of them in two weeks if I could.
For this reason I like best to talk about things concrete and
definable. I would rather publish two paragraphs in favour of making
coins octagonal, so that they should not annoy us by rolling, than two
pages on the grandeur of the individual as the true inspiration of
vital art. I am afraid that my fondness for formulas may get me into
trouble in a paper which appears to have declared war on formulas; but
I have for some time had too much peace to suit me. So far as I see,
the most effective fight against worn-out formulas has always been
made by those who were ready to offer counter-formulas at once, such
as Jesus Christ. Arnold Toynbee said " Languor can only be
conquered by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be kindled by two
things: an ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and a definite
intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice. " The
words ought to be printed in italics in all text-books of rhetoric and
psychology, with the title " Toynbee's Law. " Observe, it is
not denied that a striking presentation of the ideal without the
definite intelligible plan may win a vast deal of applause,
particularly from that part of the population that objects to hard
thinking; but in the morning there is nothing left of that applause
except a reputation for eloquence. The action which ought to follow
(was not this what Demosthenes meant by naming action as the first,
second, and third consideration for an orator?) does not come. This is
the reason why there can be such a flood of supposedly effective
speaking and writing, with great audiences of idlers, and so little
done in consequence of it.
The reason why definite plans of social reform are so often
ridiculous is not that the demagogue with a plan is at all a shallower
thinker than the demagogue without a plan, but that the man who makes
a definite proposal makes it possible to prove the wisdom or folly of
his ideas. For this reason the man who seeks applause, and who does
not care to have this applause take the form of practical
discipleship, does well to avoid definiteness; but the man who seeks
for truth, and who wants to be corrected if he is making a fool of
himself, does well to put his propositions in definite shape for
convenience of proof or disproof.
As a fundamental principle of social order, I believe in letting
every man have the constructing of his own life, with voluntary
co-operation but without compulsory co-operation. We commonly call
this liberty, and formulate our demand as Herbert Spencer's law of
equal freedom. It strikes me that there is a bit of a fallacy here.
Just as some of our friends, in their rage for simplification, reduce
all human motives to the one impulse towards pleasure, not only
setting aside all moral motives but setting aside the fact that the
impulse away from pain is not an impulse toward pleasure -- that
nature gives them different functions, assigning the pain motive to
things that our safety requires us to do at once, and the pleasure
motive to things about which we may take our time -- that the effort
to escape pain as far as possible is not practically compatible with
the effort to secure as much pleasure as possible -- that the two are
so disparate that you cannot add the pleasures and the negative of the
pains together into a total which we should try to raise to a maximum,
any more than you can add together a girl's beauty and her
intelligence and select as bride the girl who has the largest total-÷just
so the same fondness for simplification leads us to say that a man
infringes my liberty when he slaps me on my right cheek, and that our
objection to this action is based on our loyalty to liberty. He does
indeed infringe my liberty in so far as he compels me to pay attention
to a matter not of my choosing; but that is no more than is done by
any man who accosts me by my name. Jesus' well-known advice to turn
the other cheek is meant simply as a way of insisting on the maximum
of liberty: I am presumed to be concerning myself with something that
is more to me than a slap on my cheek, and I am not to let myself be
so far enslaved by the aggressor as to be jostled out of my
self-determined line of thought and action into a line determined by
him. Which is very sensible in the case of a single slap; and it is
mere reasonableness, not sophistry, to note that Jesus says nothing
about a series of slaps wherefrom there results more interruption to
one's work in the continuance of the outrage than in stopping to knock
the impudence out of the fellow. Yet, whatever course of action may be
recommended to the sufferer from his personal standpoint, I hardly
expect anyone to contradict the proposition that as between man and
man the merits of a slap in the face are identical with those of a
violation of liberty. That is, a man equally insists on having the
control of his own personal life whether liberty is involved or not.
In a sense this is fundamental to what I am starting to say: in
another sense, nothing depends on it; if a man insists on classifying
the slap as an invasion of liberty, all I need ask of him is that he
will impartially give the idea of liberty the same breadth of
application in considering the points that follow.
Call it liberty or not, one corollary follows from this principle: we
must not let the acknowledgment of any right, claim, or whatever you
may call it, be determined by counting noses. Otherwise I am not aware
that a way has been found to prevent my life from being altogether
dependent on my neighbours' preference. One may, to be sure, divide
liberty into water-tight compartments, and allow freedom of religious
creed without allowing freedom of international trade; but in regard
to each individual point the alternative still holds -- either I must
be free to attempt to cure diseases without satisfying the majority
that I am on the right track, or the freedom of attempting to cure
diseases does not exist except for those who agree with the majority.
I hold that when one person injures another by aggressive disregard
of these principles, the injured party may justifiably use a
reasonable amount of violence in repelling the aggression. The word "justifiably"
need not, for the purposes of my argument, mean more than that you can
get a workable social equilibrium by counting on this as a thing that
he is likely to do and is to be permitted to do, while you cannot get
a workable equilibrium by undertaking consistently to negate such use
of violence. What amount of violence is reasonable, is a question
fortunately irrelevant to my present purpose.
I have frequently called people's attention to some of the
revolutionary conclusions which follow from these premises; and
sometimes the people have replied by challenging me to produce a list
of the applications of my principles to all the most fundamentally
important things which men may do to each other. I thought I saw how
such a list could be made useful, and a while ago I tried to compile
it Much of my work went swimmingly, for it was nothing but writing
down propositions already familiar. But I found also a number of
points in which I could not conceive of a practical social order
getting satisfactory results from what I had accepted as the orthodox
views of my school of thought. After worrying a while over this state
of things, I found that my points of special trouble seemed to be
related to each other. And at length I concluded that we -- I and my
allies -- had been failing to apprehend the application of our
principle to a very important part of life.
The thesis to which I was thus led is this:
If one person injures another by making the material environment
unfit for that other's use, the injury should be regarded as on the
same level with a direct assault on another's person or on the
products of his labour. I say "material environment,"
meaning such things as the air, the water, the hosts of birds and
beetles and bacteria; not the social environment.
I do not claim the honours of a first discoverer. Herbert Spencer
made this a chapter in the new edition of Social Statics. But,
as the insertion of that chapter seemed to be part of the process of
cutting the radicalism out of Social Statics, he got very
little hearing from radicals; and I never appreciated the value of the
idea until I re-discovered it for myself.
It will be apparent why I expect contradiction. In assenting to the
use of violence for the repression of this kind of injuries, I am in
danger of upholding the enforcement of a whole series of laws on which
we friends of liberty have always looked with the greatest contempt:
game laws, public health regulations, Berlin police restrictions of
piano-playing, and the like. However, if have regard for consistency I
shall not uphold indiscriminately so inconsistent a mess as these laws
now are; and if I have no regard for consistency, logic cannot drive
me to uphold anything whatever; so I advise my angry friends to wait a
fortnight or two and see what particular applications I make of my
principle, before they decide at which part of my body to aim their
shots.
II. THE CLASSES OF INTERFERENCE
The New Freewoman, 1 October, 1913
MY thesis is that if one interferes with another's opportunity to
utilize the resources of the world the injury is of the same class as
an assault on the person or property.
My reason for wanting to classify actions at all is the need of
co-operation. I want to make what I can of my own life. For this it is
essential that I should not run blindly into antagonism to my
neighbours and exhaust my time and strength in such antagonism. So far
as I can come to a friendly agreement with them by which I shall know
which acts of mine they will resist and which they will not, it is an
essential economy of strength that I should form such an agreement --
which involves a classification of acts. So far as I wish to insist on
doing any things which several of my neighbours wish to insist on
resisting, it is still more essential that I should reinforce my
strength by co-operation to such an extent as will enable me to beat
my enemies. But for such co-operation a classification of acts is in
the highest degree essential: if any set of men proposed to stand by
me whatever I did, I should expect them to take their pay by more or
less enslaving me to their league. To list the acts that I am willing
to back and that I ask to be backed in, and see what sort of agreement
I can make with those whose list is nearly the same as mine, seems
more practicable.
One of the greatest advantages of the defenders of the existing order
over its upsetters is that the defenders have a workable agreement as
to what they will defend. I desire to be one of the upsetters; but I
do not see that I shall upset anything unless I can get the
co-operation of enough others to constitute an upsetting force. And
this won't work unless we can set down in black and white what we will
co-operate in: if we depend merely on all being inspired by the same
spirit of liberty, we shall find m the middle of our first undertaking
that each of us is knocking out the wedges that his neighbour is
driving in. i am attempting, therefore, to supply the indispensable
prerequisite of any revolutionary movement by defining the objects to
be attained. Of course experience will be the best teacher: but, as
natural scientists know, in order to be taught by experience you need
an antecedent theory on which you can inscribe experience's
corrections -- somewhat as Francis Bacon says that a council will make
more progress by starting with a written proposal even it they are
destined ultimately to reject every point of that proposal. Besides, m
those matters for which co-operation is necessary we shall never get
so far as to have any experience if we do not first have enough of an
agreed programme to carry us through the preliminary stages.
It is an ordinary experience of humanity -- and the most learned need
not be so snobbish as to claim exemption -- that a definition in
abstract or general terms fails to convey so clear an impression as
the citation of specific examples. Also, I am as much interested in
seeing what particular things my principle will carry me to as in
defining the principle itself. For both reasons I ask attention to a
sample case and a bill of particulars.
New York City begins to complain of Albany and Troy for sending
sewage down the Hudson. New York is right. John Doe of New York, if he
wants to bathe in the river that runs under his windows, or to sit by
its side and smell fresh air, or to wash his floor with a bucket of
its water, has a just claim to find that water free from artificial
depravation. The fact that Richard Roe of Poughkeepsie has long-been
dumping his slops in that water does not affect the fact that every
fresh dumping of those slops is a fresh assault on John Doe -- no more
than the antiquity of the Russian government establishes the
rightfulness of the traditional methods of that government. The
justice of Doe's claim is not dependent on the fact that there are a
great many of his neighbours making the same claim, or that they are
organised into a municipality, or that they hope to get a statute
enacted in their favour. The
importance of his claim is indeed greatly affected by the fact
that the land where he lives is so crowded with neighbours as to leave
hardly any place except the water for the satisfaction of that part of
his personality which demands open-air life and nature; but even if he
had at his back the primeval woods of Manhattan, or the farms of old
New Amsterdam, the condition of his water-front would still be no
negligible matter to him.
So in any other case where natural resource is, in the absence of
artificial restriction, free to all, any person who desires to use it
is injured by anyone who bars him from its use, or impairs the
resource or annexes an inconvenience to its use. By saying "free
to all" I intend to side-step the land question: in an
unappropriated country a garden-plot or mill-site is not free to all
in the plural, but to anyone; it cannot be utilised by one and remain
open to others at the same time. The land question calls for separate
consideration. Since in many cases a man's convenience is greatly
served by disregarding this principle, and in some cases the gain in
convenience will amount to more than the injury it would seem
desirable that the penalty should consist in a payment of actual
damages to the injured; then a man would have the option of stopping
his nuisance or paying for it. I think, however, that the men who say
" The little damage this may do to anybody is of no importance
compared to its usefulness in our business " would in most cases
suddenly decide to stop the nuisance if they were presented with such
a bill of damages as could be practically brought in if even half the
aggrieved were associated to take joint action in the matter.
The main particulars under this head, I think, would be pure air;
pure water; right of way over such lines of travel as are indicated
either by custom or by special intrinsic convenience; along such
rights of way, light (the cutting off of natural light can in general
be made up by artificial light, providing it is thoroughly done), the
absence of such artificial glares as demonstrably cripple the eyesight
either momentarily or permanently, and under some circumstances
unscreened freedom of view; freedom from the artificial breeding of
pernicious or annoying animal or vegetable life, such as flies,
mosquitoes, hens that run in a neighbour's garden, weeds, disease
germs. If it is shown that by keeping an unscreened manure-heap Roe
breeds flies that are an annoyance to Doe, the question whether the
flies carry disease is not relevant to the fact that here is invasion;
it is only relevant to the size of the damages that may be claimed.
The size of Doe's damages would be found by seeing how much of a
nuisance the flies were to him (if it is agreed that they really are
disease-carriers, then the fact of thus threatening him with disease
is an injury whether actual disease results or not) and how large a
part of his flies Roe contributed. If Doe, having first cleaned up his
own premises, chose to claim damages from all fly-breeders in the
neighbourhood at once, then the burden of apportioning the particular
shares of his damage to the individual breeders ought to fall on the
breeders and not on him; how far it could in practice be made to fall
on them, I am not sure. If it is shown that the known prevalence of
tetanus germs in the earth of some special localities, such as
Brooklyn, is a result of the burial of persons who died of that
disease, then it is an injury to everybody in the neighbourhood to
bury a victim of tetanus anywhere without either cremating or
embalming.
Another and a less clear application of this principle is to those
acts which offend one of the physical senses. As to these, offences to
touch and taste may be set aside because, so far as they can attach to
the use of a natural opportunity open to all, they will follow the
analogy of smell, sight, and hearing. The public generally regards a
bad smell as a sign of unwholesomeness in air for breathing; this
judgment is so commonly correct that it is neither practicable nor
desirable to get the public in general to look at it otherwise;
besides, the creation of a bad smell about (for instance) a highway,
even if the smell is concededly harmless to health, bars everybody
from using that highway except under penalty of a physical pain; the
passer cannot escape this penalty by turning his nose another way as
he passes. For these reasons an offence to smell should be treated on
the same principles as a poisoning of the air, though of course the
two injuries are not equal in seriousness. The last reason given under
smell applies almost equally to objectionable sounds, except that the
pain is commonly psychical rather than physical; and a nuisance of
sound is apt to affect matters more important (according to current
standards of importance; I do not know what other standards we can
use) than mere comfort; so let hearing be treated like smell. There
remains sight. I would say (setting aside actual dazzling as something
else than a mere offence) that an offence to the sight should not be
regarded as an assault on a man's right to a chance to enjoy the
world. For, in the first place, an offence to the sense of sight is
never (unless in the case of obscenity; of this later) an injury to
anything but mere comfort; in the second place, it is more thoroughly
impossible to define offence to the sense of sight than to define
offences to any other sense; in the third place, the person who is
offended by any sight has very often the option of shutting his eyes
or looking elsewhere; in the fourth place, a requirement that one
should not offend a neighbour's eyes would shackle a man's life quite
intolerably if he had to look out for all the tastes that there are.
Doubtless much of the above is not yet clear of the inconvenience of
generalised language. Also, at many points in the list obvious
difficulties suggest themselves. Hence in my next I will step further
into details.
III. CERTAIN CONFLICTS OF INTERSTS
The New Freewoman, 15 October, 1913
I HAVE stated my belief that in order to get a workable and tolerably
satisfactory social order we must recognize every man's claim to enjoy
in unimpaired form those resources which the material world naturally
offers him, and that where one is not allowed such enjoyment it is
reasonable that one should make the interferer pay. To complete my
statement I ought to add that it is equally necessary to recognize
every man's claim to the liberty of removing such unfriendly
manifestations of nature as he may meet with -- destroying pestilent
living things, removing obstructions in pathways, protecting his house
and crops against floods, and, probably, clearing away such
accumulations of inflammable matter as make the ground ready for the
rapid spread of a forest fire.
This opens an immediate prospect of conflict with my first statement.
The most obvious conflict, perhaps, is in the matter of living things.
Of course nobody but a Buddhist or a Hindu would object if by some
inconceivable invention we could make a sudden end of all insects that
suck human blood; but the British poultry-raiser wants liberty to
exterminate the foxes from England as the wolves were exterminated,
while the sportsman insists on preserving the breed of foxes as a
resource for sport; the American forester feels the need of preventing
beavers from multiplying lest they injure his forest, while the
fur-trader and the admirer of nature's wonderful works would like to
see a beaver-dam on every stream; above all, the general preservation
of bird life is urgently necessary for the prosperity of agriculture,
while most birds, especially of the most numerous species, are
injurious to the agriculture of one or another individual. Nobody
doubts that the bobolink is a blessing to the farmers of his summer
home in New England, even leaving out of account his aesthetic value
for a combination of strikingly beautiful plumage and supremely
beautiful song; nobody doubts that he is a curse to the rice-fields of
South Carolina at a season when he has neither fine feathers nor song.
The South Carolina man's liberty to protect his rice-fields is
exercised to the serious detriment of New England.
Yet I do not see but that South Carolina must have this liberty. If
New England wants to preserve the bobolinks, New England must find a
way to make South Carolina willing not to shoot them. Since it is
rather Utopian to expect that the population of South Carolina will in
a body refrain from shooting out of motives of courtesy and
neighbourliness, New England must devise some plan by which New
England's interest shall be South Carolina's interests.
It is unlucky that in this matter the most urgent problem is the most
difficult. The far less important question of the preservation of
quadrupedal wild life is much easier: let the man who wants to
preserve deer have deer on his own estate -- how he gets that estate,
and on what terms he holds it, are questions aside from my present
purpose -- and let him put around his estate such fences as he is
impelled to erect by the knowledge that if the deer trespass on his
neighbour's farm the neighbour may shoot them or claim payment for the
damage they have caused or both. Of course the field is easily open
for thirty sportsmen to buy adjoining farms and treat all their homes
as a single deer-preserve, or to pay a neighbour a hundred dollars a
year for acting as a member of the preserving association if the
neighbour does not on his own account care to; and I do not see why
such an association should not even be allowed to put gates across
public roads unless the deer's horns become a serious danger to the
lives of people traversing those roads. As to beasts too small to be
easily fenced in, they will usually keep up at least a moderate number
where part of the population are friendly to them. Only, while the
friend of squirrels certainly cannot be required to kill off the
squirrels from his place, if he interferes with his neighbours killing
them off he ought in reason to pay for such damage to the neighbours'
corn as this interference may cause. So he will if he interferes with
his neighbours breaking up their breeding-places, even though by
breaking them up the neighbour would have made himself responsible for
much damage to the works of the man who helped the squirrels. This
last point becomes one of great importance in the case of mosquitoes.
The only practical way to make war on mosquitoes is to destroy or
poison all their breeding-places over a considerable area of country:
to do so may be a hardship to the individual whose special line of
agriculture or enjoyment of nature is interfered with, but if on that
account he bars people from doing it there is no reason why he should
not be made to pay a reasonable valuation of the damage caused to
other individuals by the mosquitoes that would have been destroyed but
for his protection. And this will surely bankrupt him.
Of course, where human life is threatened -- where the stag or boar
of the game-preserve is of murderous temper and is not kept under
restraint, or where the mosquitoes are habitual carriers of a deadly
disease÷ anyone who can suppress the threatening beast may be
expected to do so, and to reject any offered pecuniary substitute as
insufficient. At least, if anyone chooses to do so it will be hard to
make out that his action is unreasonable.
Now how if instead of mosquitoes we have microbes, and if their
breeding-place is in the human person? A is dangerous to those whom he
meets because he has in his person the germs of a disease (call it
scarlet fever) which may pass to these others. B undisputably has in
his person a natural breeding-place for the germs of another disease
(call it small-pox); if the germs get into his person and breed there,
they may infect C; C believes that the chance of the germ's breeding
in B's person can be greatly lessened by giving B a certain treatment;
but B is unwilling to undergo this treatment, because it is
distasteful to him, perhaps also because he fears bad incidental
consequences from it, and perhaps also because he does not believe in
its efficacy. C wants to defend himself against the germs that A and B
might bring; A and B reply that if they are not to have control of
their own persons, in the narrowest sense of the term, they do not see
where liberty is to begin.
We can doubtless agree that the reckless disposal of the germs after
they are separated from the body may be an aggression, the act of one
who scatters tuberculosis germs on a sidewalk does not differ
essentially, it would seem, from the act of one who drops arsenic into
a spring from which drinking-water may be drawn, if the two are
equally conscious of the probable consequences. Then I think it might
be agreed that it is aggression for one to walk on a public street
while he is involuntarily throwing off germs which will float in the
air till they infect another, or while it is certain that flies which
light on his skin will pick up germs suitable to infect the next
person on whom the fly lights. But I do not think it is an aggression
for one to run a risk of becoming a breeding-place of germs. The
interference with my health if my neighbour goes unvaccinated is in
any case highly problematical; the interference with his person if I
vaccinate him against his will is not problematical at all. We shall
never get aggression minimized by using force in resistance to the
threat that a threat may sometime be made. It may be added that
nothing is more desirable than the accumulation of unquestionable
evidence on every aspect of the vaccination question, and that
compulsory vaccination interferes with this by giving many people a
motive to conceal the fact of non-vaccination and thus vitiate the
statistics. And, while I am willing to agree that the statistics are
already adequate to prove the efficiency of vaccination substantially
as claimed by its friends, and that the allegation of bad incidental
results from vaccination has not yet been sufficiently sustained, I
think on the other hand that this matter of the incidental results of
vaccination deserves more study than it has yet received. Also, while
there are some people whom no evidence could convince, it is easily
supposable that a larger percentage of the public would be convinced
of the merits of vaccination if the evidence, which I am acknowledging
to be adequate, were more obviously free from suspicion. For such
reasons I wish it might become possible to collect statistics on
vaccination free from the distorting influence of compulsory
vaccination laws.
The application to venereal disease seems clear enough. If one who
knows that he bears the contagion exposes another person to it without
warning that other person, it is an assault. Likewise, if the bearer
of the contagion has reason to suspect its presence and wilfully
neglects to obtain assurance. But this is no sufficient ground for
precautionary interference with those who have no reason to suspect
themselves.
Another obvious conflict between the claim to retain natural
resources and the claim to do away with natural disadvantages is in
the case of land and water routes of travel. One wants a navigable
channel from east to west, another wants a road from north to south
uninterrupted by water. It will doubtless be undisputed, as it has
been undisputed, that the maker of the new route should provide the
necessary bridge for keeping open the old.
IV. THOROUGHFARES; AND PISCICULTURE
The New Freewoman, 1 November, 1913
The mere demand to use a route may involve a conflict of claims,
apart from the question of barring one route by opening another; but
there seems to be nothing puzzling about most of the conflicts so
arising. Where two people are using the same right of way, each must
facilitate the other's passage as much as possible; fortunately men
are already as familiar with caring for their neighbours' rights in
this respect as in any. In the comparatively rare case where two
railroads require to go through a pass too narrow for two tracks, any
railroad man can arrange for both to use the road if once he is
assured that his own line cannot monopolize it.
A tide-mill is a form of industry which cannot be carried on anywhere
without putting a dam in the way of navigation; there must be some
truth in the counter-claim that the tide-mill also helps navigation by
slackening the current, but I do not know how much; on a stream that
carried almost exclusively export cargoes however this might even be
an additional evil. The tide-mill problem can be better solved when
the rising price of coal has led to the building of more tide-mills
than are now legally permitted. In the absence of the experience to be
thus gained, we can at least say that the builder of a tide-mill must
provide his dam with all necessary weirs and locks and operate these
gratuitously, putting himself to an expense which I suppose might
become prohibitive on a river carrying a great deal of commerce -- on
such a river as the Thames I take it that his dam would be nothing but
locks, all going at once. Also, that the dam must be high enough up
the stream to allow all possible use of the mouth as a harbour --
there could rarely be a motive for putting it lower anyhow. Under
these conditions it seems to me, till I have such information as few
men are to-day competent to give, that the building of tide-mills
should be a free industry. The higher coal goes, the more we shall
want all sources of power; and a single lock on a river is no such
great obstruction to commerce at best.
Another question of thoroughfares is that of roadways artificially
built for general free use. We profess to be speaking of natural
opportunities, but in practice we shall hardly find it possible to
separate this problem altogether from that of opportunities
artificially created with the intent that they be open to the public
in a fashion more or less analogous to that of natural opportunities.
Of such things the most obvious example is a paved public road.
Of such artificial opportunities that is true whatever is true of
private property in general, so far as the special conditions of the
case do not require specific exceptions. The reason for having such an
institution as private property at all is that I sometimes work with
the intention of producing a particular result, that the satisfaction
of my work is spoiled if somebody steps in and starts his own work on
the same thing in such a way as to prevent my work from producing its
result, and hence that if the boys insist on stealing my melons I
shall positively get a hive of the most irascible bees I can hear of
and set it in my melon-patch. Also, of course, that I can raise more
melons for myself than I could trust these boys to raise for me if we
were supposed to be all working selflessly for each other; but I am
not sure that this last, which is the motive oftenest spoken of, is in
fact the strongest. Now the men who paved a road for the public to
ride on wanted their work to come out in a certain way; and if
somebody interferes with its coming out in that way, they will have
the same motive for complaint that I have when my melons are stolen.
If the creators of such a public utility have not got in the public's
way, there is no reason why they should not, if they choose, keep the
same absolute control as in the case of their other property. If they
choose to build a free public library and refuse to let red-haired
people use it, well and good: the red-haired suffer no wrong, for they
would have had no library there if these fools had not built it. But
if they refuse to let a red-haired man walk on the road they pave,
they cut him off from a walk which he could have taken with some
satisfaction if the ground had been uncared-for, and he has a
grievance. On the other hand, if they have built a good road for
horses and it will be torn to pieces by motors, they have a grievance
against any motor that runs on their road unless the motorist will do
an amount of repairing that corresponds to his damage.
Our friends the game laws come up again under this head. The American
lobster is considered such a dainty that it is in danger of
extermination. Here step in a number of men who go into the business
of raising infant lobsters and stocking the coast with them to keep up
the breed. (It happens just now to be the United States government;
but it might, and at some better future day it will, be a
piscicultural association which gets its money honestly. ) Their work
is not thought to have a hopeful prospect unless the young lobsters
are allowed to grow to the age at which they reproduce their kind. The
fishermen are grateful for all new stock, but are not disposed to show
their gratitude by sparing the lives of the half-grown lobsters,
especially as their customers like these best of all.
As a general thing, if one man finds a form of wild life most useful
in life and another finds it most useful in death, I do not see how
the first man is to inhibit the second man's ravages except by merely
permitting his preferences to override the other man's; if we are to
plan a human society with the least possible overriding, the birds and
blossoms will have to suffer till there is found some other method of
protecting them than a direct prohibition of destruction. But when the
life is no longer wild in the sense of being the spontaneous growth of
the non-human world, but is the universally-welcome product of human
industry directed to the manufacture of such wild life, then the
industrious producers have the same grievance against one who cuts off
the fruit of their work, exactly the same, as if they had not intended
that this fruit should at its maturity be for the free gathering of
everybody. We have not quite yet, probably, come to the point where
the lobsters of the New England coast can as a mass be considered to
be the product of the pisciculturists' labours; there are a
considerable percentage of aboriginal wild ones left. But we are
approaching that point; and when we get to it, it will doubtless not
be beyond the power of science to demonstrate the fact. When it is
demonstrated, I think the pisciculturists can claim to be merely
defending their own labours if they enforce any restrictions on
lobster-catching that may be necessary to the preservation of the
breed in its desired numbers. If there were two piscicultural
associations both working in the same field, but not agreeing on the
amount of restriction to be enforced, it would be the business of the
more rigorous restricters to prove that the stock was dependent on
their cultural activities and would go to the dogs if no more young
were put in than their rivals furnished. If any persons who want
short-lobster fishing to continue will show that they are providing
sufficiently for the upkeep of lobsterdom, then nobody else can
reasonably claim to stop this fishing on the ground of the work he is
doing in the same cause.
If (as will hardly happen in the case of pisciculture, but might
easily happen in the case of the roadway if there were freedom of
competition) there are two claimants for the privilege of maintaining
the public convenience, and both cannot
maintain it at once, I do not see but that the one which was first in
the field must have the preference. I am not fully satisfied to leave
the game-law question in this shape. The trailing arbutus, New
England's most admired spring flower, is in danger of being
exterminated by its popularity, and nobody has yet discovered a way to
propagate or cultivate it. But I do not see how to provide protection
for the arbutus without giving up the rule of acting as if one man's
wishes were as good as a dozen's; and when I see the present
consequences of not insisting on that rule, I think leaving the
arbutus to its fate is the lesser evil. Perhaps we can persuade the
public to regard the purchase of arbutus bouquets as unpopular.
V. MAINLY ON OFFENSES TO THE EYE
The New Freewoman, 15 November, 1913
UNDER the head of pure water, it appears to me that bathing in a
river or lake, if it is not receiving such special care as belongs to
a water-supply reservoir, cannot be reckoned as a pollution, because
an open river cannot be supposed to be in such a state of purity as
bathing would impair. One does, indeed, hear of the pollution of the
Ganges water by the bathing at Benares; but, until I see the testimony
of a competent specialist observer, I am inclined to doubt whether --
even if the running of sewage into the river had first been stopped --
the abolition of this bathing would make the Ganges below Benares a
perceptibly better river to live by. Of course what I said earlier
about the isolation of persons carrying known disease-germs applies to
the bathing of such persons.
As to offenses to the sense of hearing, we must not regard as
invasive any noises which, by their use as public warnings, are
practically necessary for the protection of life and property.
Of the points that I had intended to speak of, I think there remains
only that of offenses to the sense of sight. Doubtless some other
things may seem to others to require special attention. For instance,
if I were a tobacco-smoker I might find difficulty in my assertion
that the creation of an offensive smell in a public place is an
assault on those who happen to dislike the smell. Not being a smoker
nor any friend of the weed, I find myself incompetent to present the
argument on that side with sufficient appreciation to develop the
force which it may doubtless possess; I must therefore leave it to
smokers to make their own argument in favour of stenches, and I will
read that argument with as much open-mindedness as I am able to bring
to it. As to sight, we are continually hearing of the crime committed
by those who offend sight in this or that way, and of proposed
legislation to stop such offenses. A little patience with some of
these crimes may be recommended. A few years ago we heard much of the
atrocious artistic crime of spoiling the sky-line of New York by
sky-scraper buildings. To-day, after the public has taken a very short
time to change its mind, we always hear that this square-toothed
sky-line is New York's greatest artistic merit. I take credit to
myself for having thought that skyline a good thing while the opinion
voiced by critics was most loudly condemnatory. At present there is a
movement for the restriction of further skyscraper building on the
ground that the supply has got ahead of the demand and that they cut
off their neighbours' light. But if this movement is successful -- as
it well may be, since it has behind it the money of those who already
own buildings and feel that they have too much competition -- it will
not mean that critical opinion is on the side of those who once wanted
to suppress them for beauty's sake.
At the present moment a large section of the public is saying that if
any offense to the bodily senses constitutes an assault it is the
exhibition of advertisements. We have for some time had a vigorous
campaign against open-air advertising. Advertisers seem more inclined
to satisfy the clamour by gradually improving the artistic ð
quality of the customary advertisement than by giving up the practice.
I think they have the right solution. I agree with H. G. Wells that it
is no calamity at all to have urban walls variegated by these "splashes
of colour"; and even as to suburban scenery, I prefer to make the
best of the blossoming of these remarkable flowers rather than to
undertake their extermination. Flowers, it must be remembered, are the
advertising of Nature; all their colouring is for this purpose
exclusively. Give the new species time to evolve, breed it
intelligently with a view to its improvement, and, considering the
progress it has already made, I do not see why we should not have a
real adornment in the end. It is partly a matter of what you have made
up your mind to dislike. To me a wayside stone painted with "A's
Liver Pills " or " B's Tobacco " or " C's 27
Stores " is the same as if it bore any other yellow-and-black
lichens, and does not suggest the liver or tobacco or stores at all; I
disregard these over-familiar words as a thing that does not concern
me. If I fail to take the same attitude toward whisky signs, which
generally stir me to some hostility, it may be partly because I have
devoted less time and energy to opposing patent medicines and tobacco
than to opposing whisky, but I think it is mainly because I was born
and bred in a prohibition State where whisky dared not show its head,
so that I did not in childhood acquire this happy indifference to
signs of that sort. Do not mistake me as thinking that the
advertisement-flower should flourish without restraint; I know it is a
weed that needs to be kept in check; but I do not think we need to go
and hoe it up on the land of a man who chooses to cultivate it.
There remains a single point, doubtless the most difficult of all if
we are seriously trying to formulate a scheme of social order that
could be made to work amongst men now living. It relates to the
offense of obscenity -- or alleged obscenity, for part of the
difficulty is that we are not near to having unanimity on the question
of what constitutes obscenity. I think its difficulty deserves to have
a chapter to itself.
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