The
Militarists were as enthusiastic as the Humanitarians, the Socialists as
the Capitalists. The Socialists were specially encouraged by Darwin's
insistence on the influence of environment. Perhaps the strongest moral
bulwark of Capitalism is the belief in the efficacy of individual
righteousness. Robert Owen made desperate efforts to convince England
that her criminals, her drunkards, her ignorant and stupid masses, were
the victims of circumstance: that if we would only establish his new
moral world we should find that the masses born into an educated and
moralized community would be themselves educated and moralized. The
stock reply to this is to be found in Lewes's Life of Goethe. Lewes
scorned the notion that circumstances govern character. He pointed
to the variety of character in the governing rich class to prove the
contrary. Similarity of circumstance can hardly be carried to a more
desolating dead level than in the case of the individuals who are born
and bred in English country houses, and sent first to Eton or Harrow,
and then to Oxford or Cambridge, to have their minds and habits formed.
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