than a mere optimistic suspicion? The economic historian answers, yes. Granting all the disadvantages of town life, the high rents, bad air, congestion, even slums, it is superior to country life as now organized; largely because of superior opportunities for self-improvement, imaginative stimulus, and satisfaction of social and intellectual aspirations. The difference in mental caliber between a town-bred artisan and an agricultural laborer in either England or America may be taken not unfairly as the gauge of progress in intellect and culture which has paralleled in time and area the industrial revolution. The correlation here between economic and educational advance if not mathematically proven is at least highly probable.1

The same process of adjustment between education and industry may be observed in the Orient. Confucianism set the mold for centuries of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean thought. Why? Because, we are assured, the economic system to which this education comported did not change. It is suggested that Confucius personally had more sympathy with power than with weakness, and would overlook wickedness and oppression in authority rather than resentment and revenge in men who were suffering from them. He could conceive of nothing so worthy of condemnation as to be insubordinate. Because he was thus the spokesman of a ruling class with its mores and economic policies he was frequently partial in his judgments on what happened to rulers, and unjust in his estimates of the conduct of their subjects.2 Deliverance came not through a new religion or a new philosophy, but through

1 Cf. Thorold Rogers, Industrial and Commercial History of England, 40; Cunningham and McArthur, Outlines of English Industrial History, 229, 234; H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, 79; Theodore Roosevelt, Special Message as Preface to Report of the Country Life Commission, 1909.

2 Cf. Legge, Prolegomena on the Chun Chin, p. 50; Lewis, Educational Conquest of the Far East, p. 21.

new trade relations. Merchants from Holland introduced Western learning into Japan about 1630. These merchantteachers were resorted to by young Japanese at Nagasaki. Sakuma embodied the new zeal for Occidental institutions and was assassinated for his pains in 1864. Perry, Harris, and Lord Elgin on their commercial missions opened the way for the new education. As we shall see later the process completed itself by reacting on the economic system and produced a real industrial revolution from which Japan has not yet emerged, and which China is just entering.

According, then, to the economic theory of social life, social progress in its sum and in its most important elements is the product of the play of economic forces. Moral codes, ideals, the family, education, religion, and social structure in general, all alike hark back to some form of the foodquest. According to this view the first arts were economic, and these primal arts have never ceded place to any others. The social question is and always has been primarily a question of nutrition, and particularly the methods of producing and distributing food. Progress means in the last analysis an enlargement of the sources of subsistence, and history in its highest significance is the story of this material conquest.

CHAPTER XV

THE ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY

(Continued)

CRITICISM

I

ANY just criticism of the economic interpretation of history must be prefaced by two qualifications. In the first place we must credit many adherents to this view with more moderation than they are usually believed to possess. For they freely admit that the economic condition is only the basis of history not the sole element in shaping it. That is, to take a mechanical analogy, while other motives or institutions may serve as governors to the social engine, the economic interest is the steam that really makes it go, that makes it a machine rather than a heap of junk. Some economic determinists, loyal socialists, and even leaders of the socialist party, make still greater concessions. For example, Benoit Maloin frankly declares: "Les facteurs de l'évolution sont non seulement économiques, mais encore religieux, philosophiques, politiques, sentimentaux, esthétiques." And even so ardent a believer as Mr. Ghent does not require us to believe that men's motives and ideals are consciously economic. Indeed he expressly says that men give themselves up to wounds and death in the struggle for foreign markets, under the belief that they are impelled by patriotism or religion. He tilts with 1 Mass and Class, 12-14.

apparent vigor at those who exaggerate the influence of the economic factor: for not every historic episode is reducible to mere economics. An unfortunate attempt of this kind, he points out, is the ascription of an ulterior economic motive to the agitation in the United States for the Cuban War. Yet he hedges with the suggestion that it happened there was no adverse economic motive prevalent at the time sufficiently strong to obstruct the exercise of this altruistic motive.1

Even Mr. Rubinow, polemic Marxianist that he is, admits that "in the very nature of things, the doctrine of economic interpretation of history does not admit of proof. It is a Weltanschauung . . . and we cannot conceive a Weltanschauung that can be proven." 2

It is obvious that such concessions destroy absolutely the characteristic marks of the economic view of history and social evolution; for they open the door to all manner of interpretations, and even to the overbalancing of the economic by a massing of other factors. This is particularly disturbing to those who have been led to pin their faith to this view as to a religious dogma. For the very essence of dogmatic religion is its uncompromising adherence to a principle which is the all-sufficient explanation of human life and its manifold problems, and which if accepted without qualification or reserve offers a complete plan of salvation. The inference here is that since socialists. have begun to qualify the dogma of economic determinism, they no longer consider it an indispensable element in socialism considered either as a religion or as a body of economic and political theory.

1 Ibid., p. 24. The cloven hoof reappears in the statement farther along (p. 29) that "though the Cuban war began and was prosecuted in an outburst of humane sentiment, it is probable that in its continuation, for the holding of the Philippines, economic considerations dominated the administration." 2 Was Marx Wrong, p. 15.

In the second place, we may with equal frankness admit that the economic activities still consume the largest share of our time and energies. Even Emerson confessed that his belly was his master. We are still in the flesh. And much as we should like to consider the lilies how they grow, and to imitate them in their apparently joyous, care-free, vegetative career, few of us yet have the faith to try their methods.

The protagonists of economic determinism, drunk as with new wine, have been fascinated by the brutal directness and novelty of the theory. Their opponents have been terrified and all but paralyzed also by its utter disregard and contempt for well-consecrated tradition. The Marxians never weary of describing how modern economic thought has dislodged an almost incurably idealistic concept of history. Scientific Socialism is supposed to have driven idealism from its last refuge, the philosophy of history. But the materialistic concept of history and human life is not really new. It is essentially primitive, because it is the most obvious. Any ethnographer knows that it covers the easiest element to grasp in the life of savages. Their world of feelings and ideas is incomparably more difficult to enter. I do not mean to intimate that the materialistic interpretation is a savage philosophy and therefore ipso facto untrue. I mean merely that it is not at all new (for as we have already seen, savages think largely in terms of material satisfactions); and therefore by virtue of its newness alone it cannot claim superior truth or accuracy.

When we come to examine this doctrine critically and in detail, four serious defects crop out. They are: (1) faulty historical perspective; (2) neglect of the biological or racial factors; (3) an almost complete overlooking of the psychological elements in the social process; (4) incomplete sociological analysis.