it used to be, for several reasons. Industrialism has made work more
wearisome and intense, less capable of affording pleasure and interest
by the way to the man who has undertaken it for the sake of money. The
power of limiting families has opened a new field for the operation
of thrift. The general increase in education and self-discipline has
made men more capable of pursuing a purpose consistently in spite of
temptations, and when the purpose is against life it becomes more
destructive with every increase of tenacity in those who adopt it. The
greater productivity resulting from industrialism has enabled us to
devote more labor and capital to armies and navies for the protection
of our wealth from envious neighbors, and for the exploitation of
inferior races, which are ruthlessly wasted by the capitalist régime.
Through the fear of losing money, forethought and anxiety eat away
men’s power of happiness, and the dread of misfortune becomes a greater
misfortune than the one which is dreaded. The happiest men and women,
as we can all testify from our own experience, are those who are
indifferent to money because they have some positive purpose which
shuts it out. And yet all our political thought, whether imperialist,
radical, or socialist, continues to occupy itself almost exclusively
with men’s economic desires, as though they alone had real importance.
In judging of an industrial system, whether the one under which we
live or one proposed by reformers, there are four main tests which
may be applied. We may consider whether the system secures (1) the
maximum of production, or (2) justice in distribution, or (3) a
tolerable existence for producers, or (4) the greatest possible
freedom and stimulus to vitality and progress. We may say, broadly,
that the present system aims only at the first of these objects, while
socialism aims at the second and third. Some defenders of the present
system contend that technical progress is better promoted by private
enterprise than it would be if industry were in the hands of the
State; to this extent they recognize the fourth of the objects we have
enumerated. But they recognize it only on the side of the goods and
the capitalist, not on the side of the wage-earner. I believe that the
fourth is much the most important of the objects to be aimed at, that
the present system is fatal to it, and that orthodox socialism might
well prove equally fatal.
One of the least questioned assumptions of the capitalist system is,
that production ought to be increased in amount by every possible
means: by new kinds of machinery, by employment of women and boys, by
making hours of labor as long as is compatible with efficiency. Central
African natives, accustomed to living on raw fruits of the earth and
defeating Manchester by dispensing with clothes, are compelled to
work by a hut tax which they can only pay by taking employment under
European capitalists. It is admitted that they are perfectly happy
while they remain free from European influences, and that industrialism
brings upon them, not only the unwonted misery of confinement, but
also death from diseases to which white men have become partially
immune. It is admitted that the best negro workers are the “raw
natives,” fresh from the bush, uncontaminated by previous experience of
wage-earning. Nevertheless, no one effectively contends that they ought
to be preserved from the deterioration which we bring, since no one
effectively doubts that it is good to increase the world’s production
at no matter what cost.
The belief in the importance of production has a fanatical
irrationality and ruthlessness. So long as something is produced, what
it is that is produced seems to be thought a matter of no account. Our
whole economic system encourages this view, since fear of unemployment
makes any kind of work a boon to wage-earners. The mania for increasing
production has turned men’s thoughts away from much more important
problems, and has prevented the world from getting the benefits it
might have got out of the increased productivity of labor.
When we are fed and clothed and housed, further material goods are
needed only for ostentation.[12] With modern methods, a certain
proportion of the population, without working long hours, could do all
the work that is really necessary in the way of producing commodities.
The time which is now spent in producing luxuries could be spent partly
in enjoyment and country holidays, partly in better education, partly
in work that is not manual or subserving manual work. We could, if we
wished, have far more science and art, more diffused knowledge and
mental cultivation, more leisure for wage-earners, and more capacity
for intelligent pleasures. At present not only wages, but almost all
earned incomes, can only be obtained by working much longer hours than
men ought to work. A man who earns £800 a year by hard work could not,
as a rule, earn £400 a year by half as much work. Often he could not
earn anything if he were not willing to work practically all day and
every day. Because of the excessive belief in the value of production,
it is thought right and proper for men to work long hours, and the
good that might result from shorter hours is not realized. And all the
cruelties of the industrial system, not only in Europe but even more
in the tropics, arouse only an occasional feeble protest from a few
philanthropists. This is because, owing to the distortion produced by
our present economic methods, men’s conscious desires, in such matters,
cover only a very small part, and that not the most important part, of
the real needs affected by industrial work. If this is to be remedied,
it can only be by a different economic system, in which the relation of
activity to needs will be less concealed and more direct.
The purpose of maximizing production will not be achieved in the long
run if our present industrial system continues. Our present system is
wasteful of human material, partly through damage to the health and
efficiency of industrial workers, especially when women and children
are employed, partly through the fact that the best workers tend to
have small families and that the more civilized races are in danger of
gradual extinction. Every great city is a center of race-deterioration.
For the case of London this has been argued with a wealth of
statistical detail by Sir H. Llewelyn Smith;[13] and it cannot easily
be doubted that it is equally true in other cases. The same is true of
material resources: the minerals, the virgin forests, and the newly
developed wheatfields of the world are being exhausted with a reckless
prodigality which entails almost a certainty of hardship for future
generations.
Socialists see the remedy in State ownership of land and capital,
combined with a more just system of distribution. It cannot be denied
that our present system of distribution is indefensible from every
point of view, including the point of view of justice. Our system of
distribution is regulated by law, and is capable of being changed
in many respects which familiarity makes us regard as natural and
inevitable. We may distinguish four chief sources of recognized legal
rights to private property: (1) a man’s right to what he has made
himself; (2) the right to interest on capital which has been lent;
(3) the ownership of land; (4) inheritance. These form a crescendo of
respectability: capital is more respectable than labor, land is more
respectable than capital, and any form of wealth is more respectable
when it is inherited than when it has been acquired by our own
exertions.
A man’s right to the produce of his own labor has never, in fact,
had more than a very limited recognition from the law. The early
socialists, especially the English forerunners of Marx, used to insist
upon this right as the basis of a just system of distribution, but in
the complication of modern industrial processes it is impossible to
say what a man has produced. What proportion of the goods carried by a
railway should belong to the goods porters concerned in their journey?
When a surgeon saves a man’s life by an operation, what proportion of
the commodities which the man subsequently produces can the surgeon
justly claim? Such problems are insoluble. And there is no special
justice, even if they were soluble, in allowing to each man what he
himself produces. Some men are stronger, healthier, cleverer, than
others, but there is no reason for increasing these natural injustices
by the artificial injustices of the law. The principle recommends
itself partly as a way of abolishing the very rich, partly as a way of
stimulating people to work hard. But the first of these objects can be
better obtained in other ways, and the second ceases to be obviously
desirable as soon as we cease to worship money.
Interest arises naturally in any community in which private property is
unrestricted and theft is punished, because some of the most economical
processes of production are slow, and those who have the skill to
perform them may not have the means of living while they are being
completed. But the power of lending money gives such great wealth
and influence to private capitalists that unless strictly controlled
it is not compatible with any real freedom for the rest of the
population. Its effects at present, both in the industrial world and in
international politics, are so bad that it seems imperatively necessary
to devise some means of curbing its power.
Private property in land has no justification except historically
through power of the sword. In the beginning of feudal times, certain
men had enough military strength to be able to force those whom they
disliked not to live in a certain area. Those whom they chose to leave
on the land became their serfs, and were forced to work for them in
return for the gracious permission to stay. In order to establish law
in place of private force, it was necessary, in the main, to leave
undisturbed the rights which had been acquired by the sword. The land
became the property of those who had conquered it, and the serfs were
allowed to give rent instead of service. There is no justification for
private property in land, except the historical necessity to conciliate
turbulent robbers who would not otherwise have obeyed the law. This
necessity arose in Europe many centuries ago, but in Africa the
whole process is often quite recent. It is by this process, slightly
disguised, that the Kimberley diamond mines and the Rand gold mines
were acquired in spite of prior native rights. It is a singular example
of human inertia that men should have continued until now to endure
the tyranny and extortion which a small minority are able to inflict
by their possession of the land. No good to the community, of any
sort or kind, results from the private ownership of land. If men were
reasonable, they would decree that it should cease to-morrow, with no
compensation beyond a moderate life income to the present holders.
The mere abolition of rent would not remove injustice, since it would
confer a capricious advantage upon the occupiers of the best sites and
the most fertile land. It is necessary that there should be rent, but
it should be paid to the State or to some body which performs public
services; or, if the total rental were more than is required for such
purposes, it might be paid into a common fund and divided equally among
the population. Such a method would be just, and would not only help to
relieve poverty, but would prevent wasteful employment of land and the
tyranny of local magnates. Much that appears as the power of capital
is really the power of the landowner—for example, the power of railway
companies and mine-owners. The evil and injustice of the present system
are glaring, but men’s patience of preventable evils to which they are
accustomed is so great that it is impossible to guess when they will
put an end to this strange absurdity.
Inheritance, which is the source of the greater part of the unearned
income in the world, is regarded by most men as a natural right.
Sometimes, as in England, the right is inherent in the owner of
property, who may dispose of it in any way that seems good to him.
Sometimes, as in France, his right is limited by the right of his
family to inherit at least a portion of what he has to leave. But
neither the right to dispose of property by will nor the right of
children to inherit from parents has any basis outside the instincts of
possession and family pride.
There may be reasons for allowing a man whose work is exceptionally
fruitful—for instance, an inventor—to enjoy a larger income than is
enjoyed by the average citizen, but there can be no good reason for
allowing this privilege to descend to his children and grandchildren
and so on for ever. The effect is to produce an idle and exceptionally
fortunate class, who are influential through their money, and opposed
to reform for fear it should be directed against themselves. Their
whole habit of thought becomes timid, since they dread being forced
to acknowledge that their position is indefensible; yet snobbery and
the wish to secure their favor leads almost the whole middle-class to
ape their manners and adopt their opinions. In this way they become a
poison infecting the outlook of almost all educated people.
It is sometimes said that without the incentive of inheritance men
would not work so well. The great captains of industry, we are assured,
are actuated by the desire to found a family, and would not devote
their lives to unremitting toil without the hope of gratifying this
desire. I do not believe that any large proportion of really useful
work is done from this motive. Ordinary work is done for the sake of
a living, and the very best work is done for the interest of the work
itself. Even the captains of industry, who are thought (perhaps by
themselves as well as by others) to be aiming at founding a family,
are probably more actuated by love of power and by the adventurous
pleasure of great enterprises. And if there were some slight diminution
in the amount of work done, it would be well worth while in order
to get rid of the idle rich, with the oppression, feebleness, and
corruption which they inevitably introduce.
The present system of distribution is not based upon any principle.
Starting from a system imposed by conquest, the arrangements made by
the conquerors for their own benefit were stereotyped by the law, and
have never been fundamentally reconstructed. On what principles ought
the reconstruction to be based?
Socialism, which is the most widely advocated scheme of reconstruction,
aims chiefly at _justice_: the present inequalities of wealth are
unjust, and socialism would abolish them. It is not essential to
socialism that all men should have the same income, but it is essential
that inequalities should be justified, in each case, by inequality
of need or of service performed. There can be no disputing that the
present system is grossly unjust, and that almost all that is unjust
in it is harmful. But I do not think justice alone is a sufficient
principle upon which to base an economic reconstruction. Justice would
be secured if all were equally unhappy, as well as if all were equally
happy. Justice, by itself, when once realized, contains no source of
new life. The old type of Marxian revolutionary socialist never dwelt,
in imagination, upon the life of communities after the establishment
of the millennium. He imagined that, like the Prince and Princess in
a fairy story, they would live happily ever after. But that is not a
condition possible to human nature. Desire, activity, purpose, are
essential to a tolerable life, and a millennium, though it may be a joy
in prospect, would be intolerable if it were actually achieved.
The more modern socialists, it is true, have lost most of the religious
fervor which characterized the pioneers, and view socialism as a
tendency rather than a definite goal. But they still retain the view
that what is of most political importance to a man is his income,
and that the principal aim of a democratic politician ought to be
to increase the wages of labor. I believe this involves too passive
a conception of what constitutes happiness. It is true that, in the
industrial world, large sections of the population are too poor to
have any possibility of a good life; but it is not true that a good
life will come of itself with a diminution of poverty. Very few of the
well-to-do classes have a good life at present, and perhaps socialism
would only substitute the evils which now afflict the more prosperous
in place of the evils resulting from destitution.
In the existing labor movement, although it is one of the most vital
sources of change, there are certain tendencies against which reformers
ought to be on their guard. The labor movement is in essence a movement
in favor of justice, based upon the belief that the sacrifice of the
many to the few is not necessary now, whatever may have been the case
in the past. When labor was less productive and education was less
widespread, an aristocratic civilization may have been the only one
possible: it may have been necessary that the many should contribute
to the life of the few, if the few were to transmit and increase the
world’s possessions in art and thought and civilized existence. But
this necessity is past or rapidly passing, and there is no longer any
valid objection to the claims of justice. The labor movement is morally
irresistible, and is not now seriously opposed except by prejudice
and simple self-assertion. All living thought is on its side; what is
against it is traditional and dead. But although it itself is living,
it is not by any means certain that it will make for life.
Labor is led by current political thought in certain directions which
would become repressive and dangerous if they were to remain strong
after labor had triumphed. The aspirations of the labor movement are,
on the whole, opposed by the great majority of the educated classes,
who feel a menace, not only or chiefly to their personal comfort,
but to the civilized life in which they have their part, which
they profoundly believe to be important to the world. Owing to the
opposition of the educated classes, labor, when it is revolutionary and
vigorous, tends to despise all that the educated classes represent.
When it is more respectful, as its leaders tend to be in England, the
subtle and almost unconscious influence of educated men is apt to sap
revolutionary ardor, producing doubt and uncertainty instead of the
swift, simple assurance by which victory might have been won. The very
sympathy which the best men in the well-to-do classes extend to labor,
their very readiness to admit the justice of its claims, may have the
effect of softening the opposition of labor leaders to the _status
quo_, and of opening their minds to the suggestion that no fundamental
change is possible. Since these influences affect leaders much more
than the rank and file, they tend to produce in the rank and file a
distrust of leaders, and a desire to seek out new leaders who will be
less ready to concede the claims of the more fortunate classes. The
result may be in the end a labor movement as hostile to the life of the
mind as some terrified property-owners believe it to be at present.
The claims of justice, narrowly interpreted, may reinforce this
tendency. It may be thought unjust that some men should have larger
incomes or shorter hours of work than other men. But efficiency in
mental work, including the work of education, certainly requires more
comfort and longer periods of rest than are required for efficiency
in physical work, if only because mental work is not physiologically
wholesome. If this is not recognized, the life of the mind may suffer
through short-sightedness even more than through deliberate hostility.
Education suffers at present, and may long continue to suffer, through
the desire of parents that their children should earn money as soon
as possible. Every one knows that the half-time system, for example,
is bad; but the power of organized labor keeps it in existence. It is
clear that the cure for this evil, as for those that are concerned with
the population question, is to relieve parents of the expense of their
children’s education, and at the same time to take away their right to
appropriate their children’s earnings.
The way to prevent any dangerous opposition of labor to the life of
the mind is not to oppose the labor movement, which is too strong to
be opposed with justice. The right way is, to show by actual practice
that thought is useful to labor, that without thought its positive aims
cannot be achieved, and that there are men in the world of thought who
are willing to devote their energies to helping labor in its struggle.
Such men, if they are wise and sincere, can prevent labor from becoming
destructive of what is living in the intellectual world.
Another danger in the aims of organized labor is the danger of
conservatism as to methods of production. Improvements of machinery
or organization bring great advantages to employers, but involve
temporary and sometimes permanent loss to the wage-earners. For this
reason, and also from mere instinctive dislike of any change of habits,
strong labor organizations are often obstacles to technical progress.
The ultimate basis of all social progress must be increased technical
efficiency, a greater result from a given amount of labor. If labor
were to offer an effective opposition to this kind of progress, it
would in the long run paralyze all other progress. The way to overcome
the opposition of labor is not by hostility or moral homilies, but by
giving to labor the direct interest in economical processes which now
belongs to the employers. Here, as elsewhere, the unprogressive part of
a movement which is essentially progressive is to be eliminated, not
by decrying the whole movement but by giving it a wider sweep, making
it more progressive, and leading it to demand an even greater change
in the structure of society than any that it had contemplated in its
inception.
The most important purpose that political institutions can achieve is
to keep alive in individuals creativeness, vigor, vitality, and the
joy of life. These things existed, for example, in Elizabethan England
in a way in which they do not exist now. They stimulated adventure,
poetry, music, fine architecture, and set going the whole movement out
of which England’s greatness has sprung in every direction in which
England has been great. These things coexisted with injustice, but
outweighed it, and made a national life more admirable than any that is
likely to exist under socialism.
What is wanted in order to keep men full of vitality is opportunity,
not security. Security is merely a refuge from fear; opportunity is the
source of hope. The chief test of an economic system is not whether
it makes men prosperous, or whether it secures distributive justice
(though these are both very desirable), but whether it leaves men’s
instinctive growth unimpeded. To achieve this purpose, there are two
main conditions which it should fulfil: it should not cramp men’s
private affections, and it should give the greatest possible outlet
to the impulse of creation. There is in most men, until it becomes
atrophied by disuse, an instinct of constructiveness, a wish to make
something. The men who achieve most are, as a rule, those in whom
this instinct is strongest: such men become artists, men of science,
statesmen, empire-builders, or captains of industry, according to the
accidents of temperament and opportunity. The most beneficent and the
most harmful careers are inspired by this impulse. Without it, the
world would sink to the level of Tibet: it would subsist, as it is
always prone to do, on the wisdom of its ancestors, and each generation
would sink more deeply into a lifeless traditionalism.