The Social and Political Views
of Alfred R. Wallace

James Marchant

[Excerpted from Part V of The Project Gutenberg E-Book, Alfred Russel Wallace:
Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2), 2005; edited by James Marchant]

"When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honour are things to be ashamed of."-- CONFUCIUS.

In the above sentences, written long before the dawn of Christian civilisation, we have an apt summary of the social and political views of Alfred Russel Wallace.

It was during his short stay in London as a boy, when he was led to study the writings and methods of Robert Owen, of New Lanark, that his mind first opened to the consideration of the inequalities of our social life.

During the six years which he spent in land-surveying he obtained a more practical knowledge of the laws pertaining to public and private property as they affected the lives and habits of both squire and peasant.

The village inn, or public-house, was then the only place where men could meet to discuss topics of mutual interest, and it was there that young Wallace and his brother spent some of their own leisure hours listening to and conversing with the village rustics. The conversation was not ordinarily of an educational character, but occasionally experienced farmers would discuss agricultural and land problems which were beginning to interest Wallace.

In reading his books and essays written more than seventy years later, we are struck with the exceptional opportunities which he had of comparing social conditions, and commercial and individual prosperity during that long period, and of witnessing the introduction of many inventions. He used to enjoy recalling many of the discussions between intelligent mechanics which he heard of in his early days regarding the introduction of the steam-engine. One and another declared that the grip of the engine on the rails would not be sufficient to draw heavy trucks or carriages; that the wheels, in fact, would whiz round instead of going on, and that it would be necessary to sprinkle sand in front of the wheels, or make the tyres rough like files. About this time, too, there arose a keen debate upon the relative merits of the new railroads and the old canals. Many thought that the former could never compete with the latter in carrying heavy goods; but facts soon proved otherwise, for in one district alone the traffic of the canal, within two years of the coming of the railway, decreased by 1,000,000 tons.

It was during these years, and when he and his brother were making a survey for the enclosure of some common lands near Llandrindod Wells, that Wallace finally became aware of the injustice towards the labouring classes of the General Enclosure Act.

In this particular locality the land to be enclosed consisted of a large extent of moor, and mountain which, with other common rights, had for many years enabled the occupants of the scattered cottages around to keep a horse, cow, or a few sheep, and thus make a fairly comfortable living. Under the Act, the whole of this open land was divided among the adjacent landowners of the parish or manor, in proportion to the size or value of their estates. Thus, to those who actually possessed much, much was given; whilst to those who only nominally owned a little land, even that was taken away in return for a small compensation which was by no means as valuable to them as the right to graze their cattle. In spite of the statement set forth in the General Enclosure Act -- "Whereas it is expedient to facilitate the enclosure and improvement of common and other lands now subject to the rights of property which obstruct cultivation and the productive employment of labour," Wallace ascertained many years later that no single part of the land so enclosed had been cultivated by those to whom it was given, though certain portions had been let or sold at fabulous prices for building purposes, to accommodate summer visitors to the neighbourhood. Thus the unfortunate people who had formerly enjoyed home, health, and comparative prosperity in the cottages scattered over this common land had been obliged to migrate to the large towns, seeking for fresh employment and means of subsistence, or had become "law-created paupers"; whilst to crown all, the piece of common originally "reserved" for the benefit of the inhabitants had been turned into golf-links!

Again and again Wallace drew attention to the fundamental duties of landownership, maintaining that the public, as a whole, had become so blinded by custom that no effectual social reform would ever be established unless some strenuous and unremitting effort was made to recover the land by law from those who had made the land laws and who had niched the common heritage of humanity for their own private aggrandisement.

With regard to the actual value of land, Wallace pointed out that the last valuation was made in the year 1692, and therefore, with the increase of value through minerals and other products since then, the arrears of land tax due up to 1905 would amount to more than the value of all the agricultural land of our country at the present time; therefore existing landlords, in clamouring for their alleged rights of property, might find out that those "rights" no longer exist.

Yet another point on which he insisted was the right of way through fields or woodlands, and especially beside the sea. With the advent of the motor-car and other swift means of locomotion, the public roads are no longer safe and pleasurable for pedestrians; besides the iniquitous fact that hundreds are kept from enjoying the beauties of nature by the utterly selfish and useless reservations of such by-paths by the landowner.

"This all-embracing system of land-robbery," again he writes, "for which nothing is too great or too small; which has absorbed meadow and forest, moor and mountain, which has appropriated most of our rivers and lakes and the fish that live in them; making the agriculturist pay for his seaweed manure and the fisherman for his bait of shell-fish; which has desolated whole counties to replace men by sheep or cattle, and has destroyed fields and cottages to make a wilderness for deer and grouse; which has stolen the commons and filched the roadside wastes; which has driven the labouring poor into the cities, and thus been the chief cause of the misery, disease, and early death of thousands ... it is the advocates of this inhuman system who, when a partial restitution of their unholy gains is proposed, are the loudest in their cries of 'robbery'!

"But all the robbery, all the spoliation, all the legal and illegal filching, has been on their side. ...They made the laws to legalise their actions, and, some day, we, the people, will make laws which will not only legalise but justify our process of restitution. It will justify it, because, unlike their laws, which always took from the poor to give to the rich -- to the very class which made the laws -- ours will only take from the superfluity of the rich, not to give to the poor or to any individuals, but to so administer as to enable every man to live by honest work, to restore to the whole people their birthright in their native soil, and to relieve all alike from a heavy burden of unnecessary and unjust taxation. This will be the true statesmanship of the future, and it will be justified alike by equity, by ethics, and by religion."

These, then, are the facts and reasons upon which Dr. Wallace based his strenuous advocacy of Land Nationalisation. It was only by slow degrees that he arrived at some of the conclusions propounded in his later years, but once having grasped their full importance to the social and moral well-being of the community, he held them to the last.

The first book which tended to fasten his attention upon these matters was Social Statics, by Herbert Spencer, but in 1870 the publication of his Malay Archipelago brought him into personal contact with John Stuart Mill, through whose invitation he became a member of the General Committee of the Land Tenure Reform Association. On the formation of the Land Nationalisation Society in 1880 he retired from the Association, and devoted himself to the larger issues which the new Society embraced.

Soon after the latter Society was started, Henry George, the American author of Progress and Poverty, came to England, and Wallace had many opportunities of hearing him speak in public and of discussing matters of common interest in private. In spite of the ridicule poured upon Henry George's book by many eminent social reformers, Wallace consistently upheld its general principles.

His second work on these various subjects was a small book entitled Bad Times, issued in 1885, in which he went deeply into the root causes of the depression in trade which had lasted since 1874. The facts there given were enlarged upon and continually brought up to date in his later writings. Articles which had appeared in various magazines were gathered together and included, with those on other subjects, in Studies, Scientific and Social. His last three books, which include his ideas on social diseases and the best method of preventing them, were The Wonderful Century, Social Environment and Moral Progress, and The Revolt of Democracy; the two last being issued, as we have seen, in 1913, the year of his death.

In Social Environment and Moral Progress the conclusion of his vehement survey of our moral and social conditions was startling: "It is not too much to say that our whole system of Society is rotten from top to bottom, and that the social environment as a whole in relation to our possibilities and our claims is the worst that the world has ever seen."

That terrible indictment was doubly underscored in his MS.

What, in his mature judgment, were the causes and remedies? He set them out in this order:

1. The evils are due, broadly and generally, to our living under a system of universal competition for the means of existence, the remedy for which is equally universal co-operation.

2. It may also be defined as a system of economic antagonism, as of enemies, the remedy being a system of economic brotherhood, as of a great family, or of friends.

3. Our system is also one of monopoly by a few of all the means of existence--the land, without access to which no life is possible; and capital, or the results of stored-up labour, which is now in the possession of a limited number of capitalists, and therefore is also a monopoly. The remedy is freedom of access to land and capital for all.

4. Also, it may be defined as social injustice, inasmuch as the few in each generation are allowed to inherit the stored-up wealth of all preceding generations, while the many inherit nothing. The remedy is to adopt the principle of equality of opportunity for all, or of universal inheritance by the State in trust for the whole community.

"We have," he finally concluded, "ourselves created an immoral or unmoral social environment. To undo its inevitable results we must reverse our course. We must see that all our economic legislation, all our social reforms, are in the very opposite direction to those hitherto adopted, and that they tend in the direction of one or other of the four fundamental remedies I have suggested. In this way only can we hope to change our existing immoral environment into a moral one, and initiate a new era of Moral Progress." The Revolt of Democracy was addressed directly to the Labour Party. And once again he drew a vivid picture of how, during the whole of the nineteenth century, there was a continuous advance in the application of scientific discovery to the arts, especially to the invention and application of labour-saving machinery; and how our wealth had increased to an equally marvellous extent.

He pointed out that various estimates which had been made of the increase in our wealth-producing capacity showed that, roughly speaking, the use of mechanical power had increased it more than a hundredfold during the century; yet the result had been to create a limited upper class, living in unexampled luxury, while about one-fourth of the whole population existed in a state of fluctuating penury, often sinking below the margin of poverty. Many thousands were annually drawn into this gulf of destitution, and died from direct starvation and premature exhaustion or from diseases produced by unhealthy employment.

During this long period, however, although wealth and want had alike increased side by side, public opinion had not been sufficiently educated to permit of any effectual remedy being applied. The workers themselves had failed to visualise its fundamental causes, land monopoly and the competitive system of industry giving rise to an ever-increasing private capitalism which, to a very large extent, had controlled the Legislature. All through the last century this rapid accumulation of wealth due to extensive manufacturing industries led to a still greater increase of middlemen engaged in the distribution of the products, from the wealthy merchant to the various grades of tradesmen and small shop-keepers who supplied the daily wants of the community.

To those who lived in the midst of this vast industrial system, or were a part of it, it seemed natural and inevitable that there should be rich and poor; and this belief was enforced on the one hand by the clergy, and on the other by political economists, so that religion and science agreed in upholding the competitive and capitalistic system of society as the only rational and possible one. Hence it came to be believed that the true sphere of governmental action did not include the abolition of poverty. It was even declared that poverty was due to economic causes over which governments had no power; that wages were kept down by the "iron law" of supply and demand; and that any attempt to find a remedy by Acts of Parliament only aggravated the disease. During the Premiership of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman this attitude was, for the first time, changed. On numerous occasions Sir Henry declared that he held it to be the duty of a government to deal with problems of unemployment and poverty.

In 1908 three great strikes, coming in rapid succession--those of the Railway and other Transport Unions, the Miners, and the London Dock Labourers -- brought home to the middle and upper classes, and to the Government, how completely all are dependent on the "working classes." This and similar experiences showed us that when the organisation of the trade unions was more complete, and the accumulated funds of several years were devoted to this purpose, the bulk of the inhabitants of London, and of other great cities, could be made to suffer a degree of famine comparable with that of Paris when besieged by the German army in 1870.

Wallace's watchword throughout these social agitations was "Equality of Opportunity for All," and the ideal method by which he hoped to achieve this end was a system of industrial colonisation in our own country whereby all would have a fair, if not an absolutely equal, share in the benefits arising from the production of their own labour, whether physical or mental.

With regard to the education of the people, especially as a stepping-stone to moral and intellectual reform, Wallace believed in the training of individual natural talent, rather than the present system of general education thrust upon every boy or girl regardless of their varying mental capacities. He also urged that the building-up of the mind should be alternated with physical training in one or more useful trades, so that there might be, not only at the outset, but also in later life, a choice of occupation in order to avoid the excess of unemployment in any one direction.

In his opinion, one of the injurious results of our competitive system, having its roots, however, in the valuable "guilds" of a past epoch, was the almost universal restriction of our workers to only one kind of labour. The result was a dreadful monotony in almost all spheres of work, the extreme unhealthiness of many, and a much larger amount of unemployment than if each man or woman were regularly trained in two or more occupations. In addition to two of what are commonly called trades, every youth should be trained for one day a week or one week in a month, according to the demand for labour, in some of the various operations of farming or gardening. Not only would this improve the general health of the workers, but it would also add much to the interest and enjoyment of their lives.

"There is one point," he wrote, "in connection with this problem which I do not think has ever been much considered or discussed. It is the undoubted benefit to all the members of a society of the greatest possible diversity of character, as a means both towards the greatest enjoyment and interest of association, and to the highest ultimate development of the race. If we are to suppose that man might have been created or developed with none of those extremes of character which now often result in what we call wickedness, vice, or crime, there would certainly have been a greater monotony in human nature, which would, perhaps, have led to less beneficial results than the variety which actually exists may lead to. We are more and more getting to see that very much, perhaps all, the vice, crime, and misery that exists in the world is the result, not of the wickedness of individuals, but of the entire absence of sympathetic training from infancy onwards. So far as I have heard, the only example of the effects of such a training on a large scale was that initiated by Robert Owen at New Lanark, which, with most unpromising materials, produced such marvellous results on the character and conduct of the children as to seem almost incredible to the numerous persons who came to see and often critically to examine them. There must have been all kinds of characters in his schools, yet none were found to be incorrigible, none beyond control, none who did not respond to the love and sympathetic instruction of their teachers. It is therefore quite possible that all the evil in the world is directly due to man, not to God, and that when we once realise this to its full extent we shall be able, not only to eliminate almost completely what we now term evil, but shall then clearly perceive that all those propensities and passions that under bad conditions of society inevitably led to it, will under good conditions add to the variety and the capacities of human nature, the enjoyment of life by all, and at the same time greatly increase the possibilities of development of the whole race. I myself feel confident that this is really the case, and that such considerations, when followed out to their ultimate issues, afford a complete solution of the great problem of the ages--the origin of evil."

Closely allied with the welfare of the child is another "reform" with which Wallace's name will long be associated. That is his strong denunciation of Vaccination. For seven years he laboured to show medical and scientific men that statistics proved beyond doubt the futility of this measure to prevent disease. A few were converted, but public opinion is hard to move.

In his ideal of the future, Dr. Wallace gave a large and honoured sphere to women. He considered that it was in the highest degree presumptuous and irrational to attempt to deal by compulsory enactments with the most vital and most sacred of all human relationships, regardless of the fact that our present phase of social development is not only extremely imperfect, but, as already shown, vicious and rotten to the core. How could it be possible to determine by legislation those relations of the sexes which shall be best alike for individuals and for the race in a society in which a large proportion of our women are forced to work long hours daily for the barest subsistence, with an almost total absence of the rational pleasures of life, for the want of which thousands are driven into uncongenial marriages in order to secure some amount of personal independence or physical well-being. He believed that when men and women are, for the first time in the course of civilisation, equally free to follow their best impulses; when idleness and vicious and hurtful luxury on the one hand, and oppressive labour and the dread of starvation on the other, are alike unknown; when all receive the best and broadest education that the state of civilisation and knowledge will admit; when the standard of public opinion is set by the wisest and the best among us, and that standard is systematically inculcated in the young -- then we shall find that a system of truly "Natural Selection" (a term that Wallace preferred to "Eugenics," which he utterly disliked) will come spontaneously into action which will tend steadily to eliminate the lower, the less developed, or in any way defective types of men, and will thus continuously raise the physical, moral, and intellectual standard of the race.

He further held that "although many women now remain unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there are always considerable numbers who feel no strong impulse to marriage, and accept husbands to secure subsistence and a home of their own rather than from personal affection or sexual emotion. In a state of society in which all women were economically independent, where all were fully occupied with public duties and social or intellectual pleasures, and had nothing to gain by marriage as regards material well-being or social position, it is highly probable that the numbers of unmarried from choice would increase. It would probably come to be considered a degradation for any woman to marry a man whom she could not love and esteem, and this reason would tend at least to delay marriage till a worthy and sympathetic partner was encountered." But this choice, he considered, would be further strengthened by the fact that, with the ever-increasing approach to equality of opportunity for every child born in our country, that terrible excess of male deaths, in boyhood and early manhood especially, due to various preventable causes, would disappear, and change the present majority of women to a majority of men. This would lead to a greater rivalry for wives, and give to women the power of rejecting all the lower types of character among their suitors.

"It will be their special duty so to mould public opinion, through home training and social influence, as to render the women of the future the regenerators of the entire human race." He fully hoped and believed that they would prove equal to the high and responsible position which, in accordance with natural laws, they will be called upon to fulfil.