211. We have now considered the ground of the right to free life,
and what is the justification, if any, for the apparent disregard of
that right, _(a)_ in war, __(b)__ in the infliction of punishment. We
have also dealt with the question of the general office of the state
in regard to the development of that capacity in individuals which
is the foundation of the right, pointing out on the one hand the
necessary limitation of its office in this respect, on the other hand
the directions in which it may remove obstacles to that development.
We have next to consider the rationale of the rights of property.
In discussions on the 'origin of property' two questions are apt
to be mixed up which, though connected, ought to be kept distinct.
One is the question how men have come to appropriate; the other
the question how the idea of right has come to be associated with
their appropriations. As the term 'property' not only implies a
permanent possession of something, or a possession which can only be
given up with the good will of the possessor, but also a possession
recognised as a right, an inquiry into the origin of property must
involve both these questions, but it is not the less important that
the distinction between them should be observed. Each of them again
has both its analytical and its historical side. In regard to the
first question it is important to learn all that can be learnt as
to the kind of things that were first, and afterwards at successive
periods, appropriated; as to the mode in which, and the sort of
persons or societies by whom, they were appropriated. This is an
historical inquiry. But it cannot take the place of a metaphysical
or psychological analysis of the conditions on the part of the
appropriating subject implied in the fact that he does such a thing
as appropriate. So, too, in regard to the second question, it is
important to investigate historically the forms in which the right
of men in their appropriations has been recognised; the parties,
whether individuals or societies, to whom the right has been allowed;
and the sort of objects, capable of appropriation, to which it has
been considered to extend. But neither can these inquiries help us
to understand, in the absence of a metaphysical or moral analysis,
either what is implied in the ascription of a right to certain
appropriations, or why there should be a right to them.
212. We have then two questions, as above stated, each requiring
two different methods of treatment. But neither have the questions
themselves, nor the different methods of dealing with them, been duly
distinguished.
It is owing to confusion between them that the right of property
in things has been supposed to originate in the first occupancy of
them. This supposition, in truth, merely disguises the identical
proposition that in order to property there must to begin with
have been some appropriation. The truism that there could be no
property in anything which had not been at some time and in some
manner appropriated, tells us nothing as to how or why the property
in it, as a right, came to be recognised, or why that right should
be recognised. But owing to the confusion between the origin of
appropriation and the origin of property as a right, an identical
proposition as to the beginning of appropriation seemed to be an
instructive statement as to the basis of the rights of property. Of
late, in a revulsion from theories founded on identical propositions,
'historical' inquiries into the 'origin of property' have come into
vogue. The right method of dealing with the question has been taken
to lie in an investigation of the earliest forms in which property
has existed. But such investigation, however valuable in itself,
leaves untouched the questions, (1) what it is in the nature of men
that makes it possible for them, and moves them, to appropriate; (2)
why it is that they conceive of themselves and each other as having a
right in their appropriations; (3) on what ground this conception is
treated as a moral authority,--as one that should be acted on.
213. (1) Appropriation is an expression of will; of the individual's
effort to give reality to a conception of his own good; of his
consciousness of a possible self-satisfaction as an object to be
attained. It is different from mere provision to supply a future
want. Such provision appears to be made by certain animals, e.g.
ants. It can scarcely be made under the influence of the imagination
of pain incidental to future want derived from previous experience,
for the ant lays up for the winter though it has not previously
lived through the winter. It may be suggested that it does so from
inherited habit, but that this habit has originally arisen from an
experience of pain on the part of ants in the past. Whether this is
the true account of the matter we have not, I think,--perhaps from
the nature of the case we cannot have--the means of deciding. We
conceal our ignorance by saying that the ant acts instinctively,
which is in effect a merely negative statement, that the ant is not
moved to make provision for winter either by imagination of the
pain which will be felt in winter if it does not, or by knowledge
(conception of the fact) that such pain will be felt. In fact,
we know nothing of the action of the ant from the inside, or as
an expression of consciousness. If we are not entitled to deny
dogmatically that it expresses consciousness at all, neither are
we entitled to say that it does express consciousness, still less
what consciousness it expresses. On the other hand we are able to
interpret the acts of ourselves, and of those with whom we can
communicate by means of signs to which we and they attach the same
meaning, as expressions of consciousness of a certain kind, and thus
by reflective analysis to assure ourselves that acts of appropriation
in particular express a will of the kind stated; that they are not
merely a passing employment of such materials as can be laid hands on
to satisfy this or that want, present or future, felt or imagined,
but reflect the consciousness of a subject which distinguishes itself
from its wants; which presents itself to itself as still there and
demanding satisfaction when this or that want, or any number of
wants, have been satisfied; which thus not merely uses a thing to
fill a want, and in so doing at once destroys the thing and for the
time removes the want, but says to itself, 'This shall be mine to do
as I like with, to satisfy my wants and express my emotions as they
arise.'
214. One condition of the existence of property, then, is
appropriation, and that implies the conception of himself on the
part of the appropriator as a permanent subject for whose use, as
instruments of satisfaction and expression, he takes and fashions
certain external things, certain things external to his bodily
members. These things, so taken and fashioned, cease to be external
as they were before. They become a sort of extension of the man's
organs, the constant apparatus through which he gives reality to
his ideas and wishes. But another condition must be fulfilled in
order to constitute property, even of the most simple and primitive
sort. This is the recognition by others of a man's appropriations as
something which they will treat as his, not theirs, and the guarantee
to him of his appropriations by means of that recognition. What then
is the ground of the recognition? The writers of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, who discussed the basis of the rights of
property, took it for granted, and in so doing begged the question.
Grotius makes the right of property rest on contract, but clearly
until there is a recognised 'meum' and 'tuum' there can be no
contract. Contract presupposes property. The property in a particular
thing may be derived from a contract through which it has been
obtained in exchange for another thing or for some service rendered,
but that implies that it was previously the property of another,
and that the person obtaining it had a property in something else,
if only in the labour of his hands, which he could exchange for it.
[1] Hobbes is so far more logical that he does not derive property
from contract, but treats property and 'the validity of covenants'
as co-ordinately dependent on the existence of a sovereign power
of compulsion. [2] But his account of this, as of all other forms
of right, is open to the objection (before dwelt on) that if the
sovereign power is merely a strongest force it cannot be a source of
rights; and that if it is other than this, if it is a representative
and maintainer of rights, its existence presupposes rights, which
remain to be accounted for. As previously shown, Hobbes, while
professing to make all rights dependent on the sovereign power,
presupposes rights in his account of the institution of this power.
The validity of contracts 'begins not but with its institution,'
yet its own right is derived from an irrevocable contract of all
with all in which each devolves his 'persona,' the body of his
rights, upon it. Without pressing his particular forms of expression
unfairly against him, it is clear that he could not really succeed
in thinking of rights as derived simply from supreme force; that he
could not associate the idea of absolute right with the sovereign
without supposing prior rights which it was made the business of the
sovereign to enforce, and in particular such a recognised distinction
between 'meum' and 'tuum' as is necessary to a covenant. Nor when we
have dropped Hobbes' notion of government or law-making power, as
having originated in a covenant of all with all, shall we succeed any
better in deriving rights of property, any more than other rights,
from law or a sovereign which makes law, unless we regard the law or
sovereign as the organ or sustainer of a general social recognition
of certain powers, as powers which should be exercised.
[1] Grotius, _De Jure, etc_. Book II, chap. ii. Sect. 5. 'Simul
discimus quomodo res in proprietatem iverint ... pacto quodam aut
expresso, ut per divisionem, aut tacito, ut per occupationem: simul
atque enim communio displicuit, nec instituta est divisio, censeri
debet inter omnes convenisse ut, quod quisque occupasset, id proprium
haberet.' But he supposes a previous process by which things had been
appropriated (Sect. 4), owing to the necessity of spending labour on
them in order to satisfy desire for a more refined kind of living
than could be supplied by spontaneous products of the earth. 'Hinc
discimus quae fuerit causa, ob quam a primaeva communione rerum
primo mobilium, deinde et immobilium discessum est: nimirum quod non
contenti homines vesci sponte natis, antra habitare ... vitae genus
exquisitius delegissent, industria opus fuit, quam singuli rebus
singulis adhiberent.' ... The 'communio rerum,' thus departed from
when labour came to be expended on things, Grotius had previously
described (Sect. 1) as a state of things in which everyone had a
right to whatever he could lay hands on. 'Erant omnia communia et
indivisa omnibus, veluti unum cunctis patrimonium esset. Hinc factum
ut statim quisque hominum ad suos usus arripere posset quod vellet,
et quae consumi poterant consumere, ac talis usus universalis juris
erat tum vice proprietatis. Nam quod quisque sic arripuerat, id ei
eripere alter nisi per injuriam non poterat.' Here then a virtual
right of property, though not so called, seems to be supposed in
two forms previous to the establishment of what Grotius calls the
right of property by contract. There is (1) a right of property in
what each can 'take to his use and consume' out of the raw material
supplied by nature; (2) a further right of each man in that on which
he has expended labour. Grotius does not indeed expressly call this
a right, but if there is a right, as he says there is, on the part
of each man to that which he is able 'ad suos arripere usus,' much
more must there be a right to that which he has not only taken but
fashioned by his labour. On the nature and rationale of this right
Grotius throws no light, but it is clearly presupposed by that right
of property which he supposes to be derived from contract, and must
be recognised before any such contract could be possible.
[2] 'There is annexed to the sovereignty the whole power of
prescribing the rules whereby every man may know what goods he may
enjoy and what actions he may do without being molested by any of
his fellow-subjects: and this is it men call propriety. For before
constitution of sovereign power all men had right to all things,
which necessarily causeth war; and therefore this propriety, being
necessary to peace, and depending on sovereign power, is the act
of that power in order to the public peace.' (_Leviathan_, pt. II,
chap. xviii.) 'The nature of justice consisteth in keeping of valid
covenants, but the validity of covenants begins not but with the
constitution of a civil power, sufficient to compel men to keep them;
and then it is also that propriety begins.' (_Ibid_. chap, xv.)
215. Locke [1] treats property--fairly enough so long as only its
simplest forms are in question--as derived from labour. By the same
law of nature and reason by which a man has 'a property in his
own person,' 'the labour of his body and the work of his hand are
properly his' too. Now that the right to free life, which we have
already dwelt on, carries with it a certain right to property, to
a certain permanent apparatus beyond the bodily organs, for the
maintenance and expression of that life, is quite true. But apart
from the difficulty of tracing some kinds of property, in which men
are in fact held to have a right, to the labour of anyone, even of
someone from whom it has been derived by inheritance or bequest (a
difficulty to be considered presently), to say that it is a 'law of
nature and reason' that a man should have a property in the work
of his hands is no more than saying that that on which a man has
impressed his labour is recognised by others as something which
should be his, just as he himself is recognised by them as one that
should be his own master. The ground of the recognition is the same
in both cases, and it is Locke's merit to have pointed this out; but
what the ground is he does not consider, shelving the question by
appealing to a law of nature and reason.
[1] _Civil Government_, chap. v. The most important passages are
quoted in Fox Bourne's _Life of Locke_, vol. ii. pp. 171 and 172.
216. The ground of the right to free life, the reason why a man is
secured in the free exercise of his powers through recognition of
that exercise by others as something that should be, lay, as we saw,
in the conception on the part of everyone who concedes the right to
others and to whom it is conceded, of an identity of good for himself
and others. It is only as within a society, as a relation between
its members, though the society be that of all men, that there can
be such a thing as a right; and the right to free life rests on the
common will of the society, in the sense that each member of the
society within which the right subsists contributes to satisfy the
others in seeking to satisfy himself, and that each is aware that the
other does so; whence there results a common interest in the free
play of the powers of all. And just as the recognised interest of a
society constitutes for each member of it the right to free life,
just as it makes each conceive of such life on the part of himself
and his neighbour as what should be, and thus forms the basis of
a restraining custom which secures it for each, so it constitutes
the right to the instruments of such life, making each regard the
possession of them by the other as for the common good, and thus
through the medium first of custom, then of law, securing them to
each.
217. Thus the doctrine that the foundation of the right of property
lies in the will, that property is 'realised will,' is true enough
if we attach a certain meaning to 'will'; if we understand by it,
not the momentary spring of any and every spontaneous action, but a
constant principle, operative in all men qualified for any form of
society, however frequently overborne by passing impulses, in virtue
of which each seeks to give reality to the conception of a well-being
which he necessarily regards as common to himself with others. A
will of this kind explains at once the effort to appropriate, and
the restraint placed on each in his appropriations by a customary
recognition of the interest which each has in the success of the
like effort on the part of the other members of a society with which
he shares a common well-being. This customary recognition, founded
on a moral or rational will, requires indeed to be represented by
some adequate force before it can result in a real maintenance of
the rights of property. The wild beast in man will not otherwise
yield obedience to the rational will. And from the operation of
this compulsive force, very imperfectly controlled by the moral
tendencies which need its co-operation,--in other words from the
historical incidents of conquest and government, --there result
many characteristics of the institution of property, as it actually
exists, which cannot be derived from the spiritual principle which
we have assigned as its foundation. Still, without that principle
it could not have come into existence, nor would it have any moral
justification at all.
218. It accords with the account given of this principle that the
right of property, like every other form of right, should first
appear within societies founded on kinship, these being naturally
the societies within which the restraining conception of a common
well-being is first operative. We are apt indeed to think of the
state of things in which the members of a family or clan hold land
and stock in common, as the antithesis of one in which rights
of property exist. In truth it is the earliest stage of their
existence, because the most primitive form of society in which the
fruit of his labour is secured to the individual by the society,
under the influence of the conception of a common well-being. The
characteristic of primitive communities is not the absence of
distinction between 'meum' and 'tuum,' without which no society of
intelligent as opposed to instinctive agents would be possible at
all, but the common possession of certain materials, in particular
land, on which labour may be expended. It is the same common interest
which prevents the separate appropriation of these materials, and
which secures the individual in the enjoyment and use of that which
his labour can extract from them.
219. From the moral joint of view, however, the clan-system is
defective, because under it the restraint imposed upon the individual
by his membership of a society is not, and has not the opportunity
of becoming, a self-imposed restraint, a free obedience, to which,
though the alternative course is left open to him, the individual
submits, because he conceives it as his true good. The area within
which he can shape his own circumstances is not sufficient to allow
of the opposite possibilities of right and wrong being presented to
him, and thus of his learning to love right for its own sake. And the
other side of this moral tutelage of the individual, this withholding
from him of the opportunity of being freely determined by recognition
of his moral relations, is the confinement of those relations
themselves, which under the clan-system have no actual existence
except as between members of the same clan. A necessary condition
at once of the growth of a free morality, i.e. a certain behaviour
of men determined by an understanding of moral relations and by the
value which they set on them as understood, and of the conception
of those relations as relations between all men, is that free play
should be given to every man's powers of appropriation. Moral freedom
is not the same thing as a control over the outward circumstances
and appliances of life. It is the end to which such control is a
generally necessary means, and which gives it its value. In order to
obtain this control, men must cease to be limited in their activities
by the customs of the clan. The range of their appropriations must
be extended; they must include more of the permanent material on
which labour may be expended, and not merely the passing products of
labour spent on unappropriated material; and they must be at once
secured and controlled in it by the good-will, by the sense of common
interest, of a wider society, of a society to which any and every
one may belong who will observe its conditions, and not merely those
of a particular parentage; in other words by the law, written or
unwritten, of a free state.
220. It is too long a business here to attempt an account of the
process by which the organisation of rights in the state has
superseded that of the clan, and at the same time the restriction of
the powers of appropriation implied in the latter has been removed.
It is important to observe, however, that this process has by no
means contributed unmixedly to the end to which, from the moral
point of view, it should have contributed. That end is at once the
emancipation of the individual from all restrictions upon the free
moral life, and his provision with means for it. But the actual
result of the development of rights of property in Europe, as part of
its general political development, has so far been a state of things
in which all indeed _may_ have property, but great numbers in fact
cannot have it in that sense in which alone it is of value, viz. as a
permanent apparatus for carrying out a plan of life, for expressing
ideas of what is beautiful, or giving effect to benevolent wishes.
In the eye of the law they have rights of appropriation, but in fact
they have not the chance of providing means for a free moral life,
of developing and giving reality or expression to a good will, an
interest in social well-being. A man who possesses nothing but his
powers of labour and who has to sell these to a capitalist for bare
daily maintenance, might as well, in respect of the ethical purposes
which the possession of property should serve, be denied rights
of property altogether. Is the existence of so many men in this
position, and the apparent liability of many more to be brought to
it by a general fall of wages, if increase of population goes along
with decrease in the productiveness of the earth, a necessary result
of the emancipation of the individual and the free play given to
powers of appropriation? or is it an evil incident, which may yet be
remedied, of that historical process by which the development of the
rights of property has been brought about, but in which the agents
have for the most part had no moral objects in view at all?
221. Let us first be clear about the points in which the conditions
of property, as it actually exists, are at variance with property
according to its idea or as it should be. The rationale of property,
as we have seen, is that everyone should be secured by society in the
power of getting and keeping the means of realising a will, which
in possibility is a will directed to social good. Whether anyone's
will is actually and positively so directed, does not affect his
claim to the power. This power should be secured to the individual
irrespectively of the use which he actually makes of it, so long as
he does not use it in a way that interferes with the exercise of
like power by another, on the ground that its uncontrolled exercise
is the condition of attainment by man of that free morality which is
his highest good. It is not then a valid objection to the manner in
which property is possessed among us, that its holders constantly
use it in a way demoralising to themselves and others, any more than
such misuse of any other liberties is an objection to securing men in
their possession. Only then is property held in a way inconsistent
with its idea, and which should, if possible, be got rid of, when the
possession of property by one man interferes with the possession of
property by another; when one set of men are secured in the power of
getting and keeping the means of realising their will, in such a way
that others are practically denied the power. In that case it may
truly be said that 'property is theft.' The rationale of property,
in short, requires that everyone who will conform to the positive
condition of possessing it, viz. labour, and the negative condition,
viz. respect for it as possessed by others, should, so far as social
arrangements can make him so, be a possessor of property himself,
and of such property as will at least enable him to develope a sense
of responsibility, as distinct from mere property in the immediate
necessaries of life.
222. But then the question arises, whether the rationale of property,
as thus stated, is not inconsistent with the unchecked freedom of
appropriation, or freedom of appropriation checked only by the
requirement that the thing appropriated shall not have previously
been appropriated by another. Is the requirement that every honest
man should be a proprietor to the extent stated, compatible with
any great inequalities of possession? In order to give effect to
it, must we not remove those two great sources of the inequality of
fortunes, (1) freedom of bequest, and the other arrangements by which
the profits of the labour of several generations are accumulated
on persons who do not labour at all; (2) freedom of trade, of
buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest, by which
accumulated profits of labour become suddenly multiplied in the
hands of a particular proprietor? Now clearly, if an inequality of
fortunes, of the kind which naturally arises from the admission of
these two forms of freedom, necessarily results in the existence of a
proletariate, practically excluded from such ownership as is needed
to moralise a man, there would be a contradiction between our theory
of the right of property and the actual consequence of admitting the
right according to the theory; for the theory logically necessitates
freedom both in trading and in the disposition of his property by the
owner, so long as he does not interfere with the like freedom on the
part of others; and in other ways as well its realisation implies
inequality.
223. Once admit as the idea of property that nature should be
progressively adapted to the service of man by a process in which
each, while working freely or for himself, i.e. as determined by
a conception of his own good, at the same time contributes to the
social good, and it will follow that property must be unequal. If we
leave a man free to realise the conception of a possible well-being,
it is impossible to limit the effect upon him of his desire to
provide for his future well-being, as including that of the persons
in whom he is interested, or the success with which at the prompting
of that desire he turns resources of nature to account. Considered
as representing the conquest of nature by the effort of free and
variously gifted individuals, property must be unequal; and no less
must it be so if considered as a means by which individuals fulfil
social functions. As we may learn from Aristotle, those functions
are various and the means required for their fulfilment are various.
The artist and man of letters require different equipment and
apparatus from the tiller of land and the smith. Either then the
various apparatus needed for various functions must be provided for
individuals by society, which would imply a complete regulation of
life incompatible with that highest object of human attainment, a
free morality; or we must trust for its provision to individual
effort, which will imply inequality between the property of different
persons.
224. The admission of freedom of trade follows from the same
principle. It is a condition of the more complete adaptation of
nature to the service of man by the free effort of individuals. 'To
buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market' is a phrase which
may no doubt be used to cover objectionable transactions, in which
advantage is taken of the position of sellers who from circumstances
are not properly free to make a bargain. It is so employed when the
cheapness of buying arises from the presence of labourers who have
no alternative but to work for 'starvation wages.' But in itself it
merely describes transactions in which commodities are bought where
they are of least use and sold where they are of most use. The trader
who profits by the transaction is profiting by what is at the same
time a contribution to social well-being.
In regard to the freedom which a man should be allowed in disposing
of his property by will or gift, the question is not so simple. The
same principle which forbids us to limit the degree to which a man
may provide for his future, forbids us to limit the degree to which
he may provide for his children, these being included in his forecast
of his future. It follows that the amount which children may inherit
may not rightly be limited; and in this way inequalities of property,
and accumulations of it to which possessors have contributed
nothing by their own labour, must arise. Of course the possessor
of an estate, who has contributed nothing by his own labour to its
acquisition, may yet by his labour contribute largely to the social
good, and a well-organised state will in various ways elicit such
labour from possessors of inherited wealth. Nor will it trust merely
to encouraging the voluntary fulfilment of social functions, but
will by taxation make sure of some positive return for the security
which it gives to inherited wealth. But while the mere permission
of inheritance, which seems implied in the permission to a man to
provide unlimitedly for his future, will lead to accumulations of
wealth, on the other hand, if the inheritance is to be equal among
all children, and, failing children, is to pass to the next of kin,
the accumulation will be checked. It is not therefore the right of
inheritance, but the right of bequest, that is most likely to lead to
accumulation of wealth, and that has most seriously been questioned
by those who hold that universal ownership is a condition of moral
well-being. Is a proprietor to be allowed to dispose of his property
as he likes among his children (or, if he has none, among others),
making one very rich as compared with the others, or is he to be
checked by a law requiring approximately equal inheritance?
225. As to this, consider that on the same principle on which we
hold that a man should be allowed to accumulate as he best can for
his children, he should have discretion in distributing among his
children. He should be allowed to accumulate, because in so doing he
at once expresses and developes the sense of family responsibility,
which naturally breeds a recognition of duties in many other
directions. But if the sense of family responsibility is to have
free play, the man must have due control over his family, and this
he can scarcely have if all his children as a matter of necessity
inherit equally, however undutiful or idle or extravagant they may
be. For this reason the true theory of property would seem to favour
freedom of bequest, at any rate in regard to wealth generally. There
may be special reasons, to be considered presently, for limiting it
in regard to land. But as a general rule, the father of a family, if
left to himself and not biassed by any special institutions of his
country, is most likely to make that distribution among his children
which is most for the public good. If family pride moves him to endow
one son more largely than the rest, in order to maintain the honour
of his name, family affection will keep this tendency within limits
in the interest of the other children, unless the institutions of his
country favour the one tendency as against the other. And this they
will do if they maintain great dignities, e.g. peerages, of which the
possession of large hereditary wealth is virtually the condition, and
if they make it easy, when the other sons have been impoverished for
the sake of endowing the eldest, to maintain the former at the public
expense by means of appointments in the church or state.
It must be borne in mind, further, that the freedom of bequest which
is to be justified on the above principles must not be one which
limits that freedom in a subsequent generation, It must therefore be
distinguished from the power of settlement allowed by English law and
constantly exercised in dealing with landed estate; for this power,
as exercised by the landowning head of a family in one generation,
prevents the succeeding head of the family from being free to make
what disposition he thinks best among his children and ties up
the succession to the estate to his eldest son. The practice of
settlement in England, in short, as applied to landed estate, cancels
the freedom of bequest in the case of most landowners and neutralises
all the dispersive tendency of family affection, while it maintains
in full force all the accumulative tendency of family pride. This,
however, is no essential incident of a system in which the rights of
individual ownership are fully developed, but just the contrary.
226. The question then remains, whether the full development of
those rights, as including that of unlimited accumulation of wealth
by the individual and of complete freedom of bequest on his part,
necessarily carries with it the existence of a proletariate, nominal
owners of their powers of labour, but in fact obliged to sell
these on such terms that they are owners of nothing beyond what is
necessary from day to day for the support of life, and may at any
time lose even that, so that, as regards the moral functions of
property, they may be held to be not proprietors at all; or whether
the existence of such a class is due to causes only accidentally
connected with the development of rights of individual property.
We must bear in mind (1) that the increased wealth of one man does
not naturally mean the diminished wealth of another. We must not
think of wealth as a given stock of commodities of which a larger
share cannot fall to one without taking from the share that falls
to another. The wealth of the world is constantly increasing in
proportion as the constant production of new wealth by labour exceeds
the constant consumption of what is already produced, There is no
natural limit to its increase except such as arises from the fact
that the supply of the food necessary to sustain labour becomes more
difficult as more comes to be required owing to the increase in the
number of labourers, and from the possible ultimate exhaustion of the
raw materials of labour in the world. Therefore in the accumulation
of wealth, so far as it arises from the saving by anyone of the
products of his labour, from his bequest of this capital to another
who farther adds to it by saving some of the profit which the capital
yields, as employed in the payment for labour or in trade either by
the capitalist himself or someone to whom he lends it, and from the
continuation of this process through generations, there is nothing
which tends to lessen for anyone else the possibilities of ownership.
On the contrary, supposing trade and labour to be free, wealth
must be constantly distributed throughout the process in the shape
of wages to labourers and of profits to those who mediate in the
business of exchange.
227. It is true that the accumulation of capital naturally leads
to the employment of large masses of hired labourers. But there
is nothing in the nature of the case to keep these labourers in
the condition of living from hand to mouth, to exclude them from
that education of the sense of responsibility which depends on the
possibility of permanent ownership. There is nothing in the fact
that their labour is hired in great masses by great capitalists to
prevent them from being on a small scale capitalists themselves. In
their position they have not indeed the same stimulus to saving, or
the same constant opening for the investment of savings, as a man
who is αὐτουργός; [1] but their combination in work gives them every
opportunity, if they have the needful education and self-discipline,
for forming societies for the investment of savings. In fact, as
we know, in the well-paid industries of England the better sort
of labourers do become capitalists, to the extent often of owning
their houses and a good deal of furniture, of having an interest in
stores, and of belonging to benefit-societies through which they
make provision for the future. It is not then to the accumulation
of capital, but to the condition, due to antecedent circumstances
unconnected with that accumulation, of the men with whom the
capitalist deals and whose labour he buys on the cheapest terms, that
we must ascribe the multiplication in recent times of an impoverished
and reckless proletariate.
[1] [Greek αὐτουργός (autourgos) = yeoman farmer, literally one who
works for himself Tr.]
228. It is difficult to summarise the influences to which is due
the fact that in all the chief seats of population in Europe the
labour-market is constantly thronged with men who are too badly
reared and fed to be efficient labourers; who for this reason, and
from the competition for employment with each other, have to sell
their labour very cheap; who have thus seldom the means to save, and
whose standard of living and social expectation is so low that, if
they have the opportunity of saving, they do not use it, and keep
bringing children into the world at a rate which perpetuates the
evil. It is certain, however, that these influences have no necessary
connection with the maintenance of the right of individual property
and consequent unlimited accumulation of capital, though they no
doubt are connected with that régime of force and conquest by which
existing governments have been established,--governments which do not
indeed create the rights of individual property, any more than other
rights, but which serve to maintain them. It must always be borne
in mind that the appropriation of land by individuals has in most
countries--probably in all where it approaches completeness--been
originally effected, not by the expenditure of labour or the results
of labour on the land, but by force. The original landlords have been
conquerors.
229. This has affected the condition of the industrial classes in at
least two ways: (1) When the application of accumulated capital to
any work in the way of mining or manufacture has created a demand for
labour, the supply has been forthcoming from men whose ancestors, if
not themselves, were trained in habits of serfdom; men whose life has
been one of virtually forced labour, relieved by church--charities
or the poor law (which in part took the place of these charities);
who were thus in no condition to contract freely for the sale of
their labour, and had nothing of that sense of family--responsibility
which might have made them insist on having the chance of saving.
Landless countrymen, whose ancestors were serfs, are the parents of
the proletariate of great towns. (2) Rights have been allowed to
landlords, incompatible with the true principle on which rights of
property rest, and tending to interfere with the development of the
proprietorial capacity in others. The right to freedom in unlimited
acquisition of wealth, by means of labour and by means of the saving
and successful application of the results of labour, does not imply
the right of anyone to do as he likes with those gifts of nature,
without which there would be nothing to spend labour upon. The earth
is just as much an original natural material necessary to productive
industry, as are air, light, and water, but while the latter from
the nature of the case cannot be appropriated, the earth can be and
has been. The only justification for this appropriation, as for any
other, is that it contributes on the whole to social well-being; that
the earth as appropriated by individuals under certain conditions
becomes more serviceable to society as a whole, including those who
are not proprietors of the soil, than if it were held in common. The
justification disappears if these conditions are not observed; and
from government having been chiefly in the hands of appropriators
of the soil, they have not been duly observed. Landlords have been
allowed to 'do what they would with their own,' as if land were
merely like so much capital, admitting of indefinite extension.
The capital gained by one is not taken from another, but one man
cannot acquire more land without others having less; and though a
growing reduction in the number of landlords is not necessarily
a social evil, if it is compensated by the acquisition of other
wealth on the part of those extruded from the soil, it is only not
an evil if the landlord is prevented from so using his land as to
make it unserviceable to the wants of men (e.g. by turning fertile
land into a forest), and from taking liberties with it incompatible
with the conditions of general freedom and health; e.g. by clearing
out a village and leaving the people to pick up house-room as they
can elsewhere (a practice common under the old poor-law, when the
distinction between close and open villages grew up), or, on the
other hand, by building houses in unhealthy places or of unhealthy
structure, by stopping up means of communication, or forbidding
the erection of dissenting chapels. In fact the restraints which
the public interest requires to be placed on the use of land if
individual property in it is to be allowed at all, have been pretty
much ignored, while on the other hand, that full development of its
resources, which individual ownership would naturally favour, has
been interfered with by laws or customs which, in securing estates to
certain families, have taken away the interest, and tied the hands,
of the nominal owner--the tenant for life--in making the most of his
property.
230. Thus the whole history of the ownership of land in Europe has
been of a kind to lead to the agglomeration of a proletariate,
neither holding nor seeking property, wherever a sudden demand has
arisen for labour in mines or manufactures. This at any rate was the
case down to the epoch of the French Revolution; and this, which
brought to other countries deliverance from feudalism, left England,
where feudalism had previously passed into unrestrained landlordism,
almost untouched. And while those influences of feudalism and
landlordism which tend to throw a shiftless population upon the
centres of industry have been left unchecked, nothing till quite
lately was done to give such a population a chance of bettering
itself, when it had been brought together. Their health, housing,
and schooling were unprovided for. They were left to be freely
victimised by deleterious employments, foul air, and consequent
craving for deleterious drinks. When we consider all this, we shall
see the unfairness of laying on capitalism or the free development
of individual wealth the blame which is really due to the arbitrary
and violent manner in which rights over land have been acquired and
exercised, and to the failure of the state to fulfil those functions
which under a system of unlimited private ownership are necessary to
maintain the conditions of a free life.
231. Whether, when those functions have been more fully recognised
and executed, and when the needful control has been established in
the public interest over the liberties which landlords may take in
the use of their land, it would still be advisable to limit the right
of bequest in regard to land, and establish a system of something
like equal inheritance, is a question which cannot be answered on
any absolute principle. It depends on circumstances. Probably the
question should be answered differently in a country like France or
Ireland, where the most important industries are connected directly
with the soil, and in one like England where they are not so. The
reasons must be cogent which could justify that interference with
the control of the parent over his family, which seems to be implied
in the limitation of the power of bequeathing land when the parent's
wealth lies solely in land, and which arises, be it remembered,
in a still more mischievous way from the present English practice
of settling estates. But it is important to bear in mind that the
question in regard to land stands on a different footing from that
in regard to wealth generally, owing to the fact that land is a
particular commodity limited in extent, from which alone can be
derived the materials necessary to any industry whatever, on which
men must find house-room if they are to find it at all, and over
which they must pass in communicating with each other, however much
water or even air may be used for that purpose. These are indeed not
reasons for preventing private property in land or even free bequest
of land, but they necessitate a special control over the exercise of
rights of property in land, and it remains to be seen whether that
control can be sufficiently established in a country where the power
of great estates has not first been broken, as in France, by a law of
equal inheritance.
232. To the proposal that 'unearned increment' in the value of the
soil, as distinct from value produced by expenditure of labour and
capital, should be appropriated by the state, though fair enough in
itself, the great objection is that the relation between earned and
unearned increment is so complicated, that a system of appropriating
the latter to the state could scarcely be established without
lessening the stimulus to the individual to make the most of the
land, and thus ultimately lessening its serviceableness to society.