James Leslie Mitchell (1901-1935) packed a great deal of both writing and left-wing activism into a short life. From an Aberdeenshire farming background, he worked in journalism, wrote fiction admired by H. G. Wells, and helped set up the Aberdeen Soviet. His trilogy, A Scots Quair, is still read in Scotland. He joined the military for pragmatic rather than patriotic reasons, and wrote novels and short stories under a nom de plume, Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

Gay Hunter was one of several of his forays into science fiction. The book’s eponymous heroine is a historian who, through a magical dream, is thrown thousands of years into the English future in the company of two caricature fascists. They arrive in a hunter-gatherer society that evolved millennia after some unspecified apocalypse. Men and women live naked in the neo-wilderness, friends with wolves and other once-enemy animals, with only the dimmest idea that the world was once utterly different. 

That past can still be heard, thanks to voice recordings that can be accessed but are fast fading from comprehensibility. Clipped accents from ancient times list achievements laid low by “the revolt of the Sub-Men,” and only Gay understands what they mean. Lions pad across the former Home Counties; even the stars are different. 

Gay adapts to this Edenic state with alacrity. But the fascists have brought both bourgeois mores and a desire to revive the old-New Order of technology and tyranny. They take some of the newfound tribe to search for civilization in the ruins of London. This London of the far future is powerfully visualized as a stark forest of metal monoliths that have outlasted even stone, with deep valleys of darkness at their feet, hunted over by horse-sized rats. The fascists institute a dictatorship and reactivate some of the doomsday weapons that had wiped out the old world. Gay sets out to stop them.

Like most futuristic fiction, Gay Hunter is really about the writer’s present, and has dated poorly. A romantic yearning for “noble savagery” was already centuries old in 1934, and even shared by many right-wing nationalists, who could see that the vaunted Soviet Union was at least as ugly as anything in the West. 

It is, however, partly redeemed by inventive imagery and language. It also possesses some historical interest as an example of a 1930s default morality tale, a souvenir of a period when most intellectuals were foolishly bewitched by socialism, and promoted it by any genre necessary.

—Derek Turner

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The short answer to the title of this 1883 book is, “Nothing more than a commitment of the individuals in each class to be responsible for their own livelihoods and to refuse parasitism on the productivity of others.” 

Sumner was sometimes brutal in his way of describing the consequences of that responsibility. “The drunkard in the gutter,” he unflinchingly wrote, “is just where he ought to be.” Poverty is an inevitable feature of nature. The best we can do is ensure it does not fall on industrious men, whose pockets are picked routinely by progressive politicians to fund the drunkard in the gutter.

But this libertarian defense of economic self-reliance is but a part of Sumner’s case. Late in the book, in a chapter titled “Wherefore We Should Love One Another,” we find him distinguishing between the language of the scientific analyst of the laws of society and that concerning the proper behavior of the morally sane human creature. 

Social theories that endeavor to eliminate the consequences of inevitable human failings are doomed because they are inconsistent with nature. Accurate description and explanation of the world are what social science has as its charge, and political policies should be firmly based in the realities it uncovers.

But social theory does not have an unlimited purview. When, as moral beings, we confront the considerable suffering which frequently arrives by chance rather than by laziness or depravity, we obey a moral rule separate from the theories of the social scientists. Misfortunes befall everyone, and Sumner reminds us that no man can be sure he’ll never need assistance. “Men, therefore, owe to men, in the chances and perils of this life, aid and sympathy, on account of the common participation in human frailty and folly.”

This sympathy and aid have their proper place in “the field of private and personal relations, under the regulation of reason and conscience,” he wrote. It’s not possible to sufficiently condemn a wealthy and powerful elite that uses the tax code to take from the Forgotten Man of the productive middle class to reward the indigence of others. But the millionaire who sits in his estate surrounded by luxury and haughtily ignores the plight of less fortunate fellows merits equal reprobation. 

The upshot of Sumner’s work, like that of Adam Smith, is that economic freedom, important as it is, does not guarantee a morally sound society. That requires morally sound individuals informed by a basic Christian ethic.

—Alexander Riley