Produced by Al Haines
THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY
BY
R. H. TAWNEY
FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD; LATE MEMBER
OF THE COAL INDUSTRY COMMISSION
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I INTRODUCTORY
II RIGHTS AND FUNCTIONS
III THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY
IV THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM
V PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK
VI THE FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY
VII INDUSTRY AS A PROFESSION
VIII THE "VICIOUS CIRCLE"
IX THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY
X THE POSITION OF THE BRAIN WORKER
XI PORRO UNUM NECESSARIUM
_The author desires to express his acknowledgments to the Editor of
the_ Hibbert Journal _for permission to reprint an article which
appeared in it_.
{1}
THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY
I
INTRODUCTORY
It is a commonplace that the characteristic virtue of Englishmen is
their power of sustained practical activity, and their characteristic
vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to
principles. They are incurious as to theory, take fundamentals for
granted, and are more interested in the state of the roads than in
their place on the map. And it might fairly be argued that in ordinary
times that combination of intellectual tameness with practical energy
is sufficiently serviceable to explain, if not to justify, the
equanimity with which its possessors bear the criticism of more
mentally adventurous nations. It is the mood of those who have made
their bargain with fate and are content to take what it offers without
re-opening the deal. It leaves the mind free to concentrate
undisturbed upon profitable activities, because it is not distracted by
a taste for unprofitable speculations. Most generations, it might be
said, walk in a path which they neither make, nor discover, but accept;
the main thing is that they should march. The blinkers worn by
Englishmen enable them to trot all the more steadily along the beaten
{2} road, without being disturbed by curiosity as to their destination.
But if the medicine of the constitution ought not to be made its daily
food, neither can its daily food be made its medicine. There are times
which are not ordinary, and in such times it is not enough to follow
the road. It is necessary to know where it leads, and, if it leads
nowhere, to follow another. The search for another involves
reflection, which is uncongenial to the bustling people who describe
themselves as practical, because they take things as they are and leave
them as they are. But the practical thing for a traveler who is
uncertain of his path is not to proceed with the utmost rapidity in the
wrong direction: it is to consider how to find the right one. And the
practical thing for a nation which has stumbled upon one of the
turning-points of history is not to behave as though nothing very
important were involved, as if it did not matter whether it turned to
the right or to the left, went up hill or down dale, provided that it
continued doing with a little more energy what it has done hitherto;
but to consider whether what it has done hitherto is wise, and, if it
is not wise, to alter it. When the broken ends of its industry, its
politics, its social organization, have to be pieced together after a
catastrophe, it must make a decision; for it makes a decision even if
it refuses to decide. If it is to make a decision which will wear, it
must travel beyond the philosophy momentarily in favor with the
proprietors of its newspapers. Unless it is to move with the energetic
futility of a squirrel in a revolving cage, it must have a clear
apprehension both of the {3} deficiency of what is, and of the
character of what ought to be. And to obtain this apprehension it must
appeal to some standard more stable than the momentary exigencies of
its commerce or industry or social life, and judge them by it. It
must, in short, have recourse to Principles.
Such considerations are, perhaps, not altogether irrelevant at a time
when facts have forced upon Englishmen the reconsideration of their
social institutions which no appeal to theory could induce them to
undertake. An appeal to principles is the condition of any
considerable reconstruction of society, because social institutions are
the visible expression of the scale of moral values which rules the
minds of individuals, and it is impossible to alter institutions
without altering that moral valuation. Parliament, industrial
organizations, the whole complex machinery through which society
expresses itself, is a mill which grinds only what is put into it, and
when nothing is put into it grinds air. There are many, of course, who
desire no alteration, and who, when it is attempted, will oppose it.
They have found the existing economic order profitable in the past.
They desire only such changes as will insure that it is equally
profitable in the future. _Quand le Roi avait bu, la Pologne etait
ivre_. They are genuinely unable to understand why their countrymen
cannot bask happily by the fire which warms themselves, and ask, like
the French farmer-general:--"When everything goes so happily, why
trouble to change it?" Such persons are to be pitied, for they lack
the social quality which is {4} proper to man. But they do not need
argument; for Heaven has denied them one of the faculties required to
apprehend it.
There are others, however, who are conscious of the desire for a new
social order, but who yet do not grasp the implications of their own
desire. Men may genuinely sympathize with the demand for a radical
change. They may be conscious of social evils and sincerely anxious to
remove them. They may set up a new department, and appoint new
officials, and invent a new name to express their resolution to effect
something more drastic than reform, and less disturbing than
revolution. But unless they will take the pains, not only to act, but
to reflect, they end by effecting nothing. For they deliver themselves
bound to those who think they are practical, because they take their
philosophy so much for granted as to be unconscious of its
implications, and directly they try to act, that philosophy re-asserts
itself, and serves as an overruling force which presses their action
more deeply into the old channels. "Unhappy man that I am; who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?" When they desire to place
their economic life on a better foundation, they repeat, like parrots,
the word "Productivity," because that is the word that rises first in
their minds; regardless of the fact that productivity is the foundation
on which it is based already, that increased productivity is the one
characteristic achievement of the age before the war, as religion was
of the Middle Ages or art of classical Athens, and that it is precisely
in the century which has seen the greatest increase in {5} productivity
since the fall of the Roman Empire that economic discontent has been
most acute. When they are touched by social compunction, they can
think of nothing more original than the diminution of poverty, because
poverty, being the opposite of the riches which they value most, seems
to them the most terrible of human afflictions. They do not understand
that poverty is a symptom and a consequence of social disorder, while
the disorder itself is something at once more fundamental and more
incorrigible, and that the quality in their social life which causes it
to demoralize a few by excessive riches, is also the quality which
causes it to demoralize many by excessive poverty.
"But increased production is important." Of course it is! That plenty
is good and scarcity evil--it needs no ghost from the graves of the
past five years to tell us that. But plenty depends upon co-operative
effort, and co-operation upon moral principles. And moral principles
are what the prophets of this dispensation despise. So the world
"continues in scarcity," because it is too grasping and too
short-sighted to seek that "which maketh men to be of one mind in a
house." The well-intentioned schemes for social reorganization put
forward by its commercial teachers are abortive, because they endeavor
to combine incompatibles, and, if they disturb everything, settle
nothing. They are like a man who, when he finds that his shoddy boots
wear badly, orders a pair two sizes larger instead of a pair of good
leather, or who makes up for putting a bad sixpence in the plate on
Sunday by putting in a bad shilling the next. And when their fit of
feverish energy {6} has spent itself, and there is nothing to show for
it except disillusionment, they cry that reform is impracticable, and
blame human nature, when what they ought to blame is themselves.
Yet all the time the principles upon which industry should be based are
simple, however difficult it may be to apply them; and if they are
overlooked it is not because they are difficult, but because they are
elementary. They are simple because industry is simple. An industry,
when all is said, is, in its essence, nothing more mysterious than a
body of men associated, in various degrees of competition and
co-operation, to win their living by providing the community with some
service which it requires. Organize it as you will, let it be a group
of craftsmen laboring with hammer and chisel, or peasants plowing their
own fields, or armies of mechanics of a hundred different trades
constructing ships which are miracles of complexity with machines which
are the climax of centuries of invention, its function is service, its
method is association. Because its function is service, an industry as
a whole has rights and duties towards the community, the abrogation of
which involves privilege. Because its method is association, the
different parties within it have rights and duties towards each other;
and the neglect or perversion of these involves oppression.
The conditions of a right organization of industry are, therefore,
permanent, unchanging, and capable of being apprehended by the most
elementary intelligence, provided it will read the nature of its
countrymen in the large outlines of history, not in the bloodless {7}
abstractions of experts. The first is that it should be subordinated
to the community in such a way as to render the best service
technically possible, that those who render no service should not be
paid at all, because it is of the essence of a function that it should
find its meaning in the satisfaction, not of itself, but of the end
which it serves. The second is that its direction and government
should be in the hands of persons who are responsible to those who are
directed and governed, because it is the condition of economic freedom
that men should not be ruled by an authority which they cannot control.
The industrial problem, in fact, is a problem of right, not merely of
material misery, and because it is a problem of right it is most acute
among those sections of the working classes whose material misery is
least. It is a question, first of Function, and secondly of Freedom.
{8}
II
RIGHTS AND FUNCTIONS
A function may be defined as an activity which embodies and expresses
the idea of social purpose. The essence of it is that the agent does
not perform it merely for personal gain or to gratify himself, but
recognizes that he is responsible for its discharge to some higher
authority. The purpose of industry is obvious. It is to supply man
with things which are necessary, useful or beautiful, and thus to bring
life to body or spirit. In so far as it is governed by this end, it is
among the most important of human activities. In so far as it is
diverted from it, it may be harmless, amusing, or even exhilarating to
those who carry it on, but it possesses no more social significance
than the orderly business of ants and bees, the strutting of peacocks,
or the struggles of carnivorous animals over carrion.
Men have normally appreciated this fact, however unwilling or unable
they may have been to act upon it; and therefore from time to time, in
so far as they have been able to control the forces of violence and
greed, they have adopted various expedients for emphasizing the social
quality of economic activity. It is not easy, however, to emphasize it
effectively, because to do so requires a constant effort of will,
against which egotistical instincts are in rebellion, and because, if
that will is to prevail, it must be embodied in some social {9} and
political organization, which may itself become so arbitrary,
tyrannical and corrupt as to thwart the performance of function instead
of promoting it. When this process of degeneration has gone far, as in
most European countries it had by the middle of the eighteenth century,
the indispensable thing is to break the dead organization up and to
clear the ground. In the course of doing so, the individual is
emancipated and his rights are enlarged; but the idea of social purpose
is discredited by the discredit justly attaching to the obsolete order
in which it is embodied.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in the new industrial societies
which arose on the ruins of the old regime the dominant note should
have been the insistence upon individual rights, irrespective of any
social purpose to which their exercise contributed. The economic
expansion which concentrated population on the coal-measures was, in
essence, an immense movement of colonization drifting from the south
and east to the north and west; and it was natural that in those
regions of England, as in the American settlements, the characteristic
philosophy should be that of the pioneer and the mining camp. The
change of social quality was profound. But in England, at least, it
was gradual, and the "industrial revolution," though catastrophic in
its effects, was only the visible climax of generations of subtle moral
change. The rise of modern economic relations, which may be dated in
England from the latter half of the seventeenth century, was coincident
with the growth of a political theory which replaced the conception of
purpose by that of mechanism. During a great part of history men had
{10} found the significance of their social order in its relation to
the universal purposes of religion. It stood as one rung in a ladder
which stretched from hell to Paradise, and the classes who composed it
were the hands, the feet, the head of a corporate body which was itself
a microcosm imperfectly reflecting a larger universe. When the
Reformation made the Church a department of the secular government, it
undermined the already enfeebled spiritual forces which had erected
that sublime, but too much elaborated, synthesis. But its influence
remained for nearly a century after the roots which fed it had been
severed. It was the atmosphere into which men were born, and from
which, however practical, or even Machiavellian, they could not easily
disengage their spirits. Nor was it inconvenient for the new
statecraft to see the weight of a traditional religious sanction added
to its own concern in the subordination of all classes and interests to
the common end, of which it conceived itself, and during the greater
part of the sixteenth century was commonly conceived, to be the
guardian. The lines of the social structure were no longer supposed to
reproduce in miniature the plan of a universal order. But common
habits, common traditions and beliefs, common pressure from above gave
them a unity of direction, which restrained the forces of individual
variation and lateral expansion; and the center towards which they
converged, formerly a Church possessing some of the characteristics of
a State, was now a State that had clothed itself with many of the
attributes of a Church.
The difference between the England of Shakespeare, {11} still visited
by the ghosts of the Middle Ages, and the England which merged in 1700
from the fierce polemics of the last two generations, was a difference
of social and political theory even more than of constitutional and
political arrangements. Not only the facts, but the minds which
appraised them, were profoundly modified. The essence of the change
was the disappearance of the idea that social institutions and economic
activities were related to common ends, which gave them their
significance and which served as their criterion. In the eighteenth
century both the State and the Church had abdicated that part of the
sphere which had consisted in the maintenance of a common body of
social ethics; what was left of it was repression of a class, not the
discipline of a nation. Opinion ceased to regard social institutions
and economic activity as amenable, like personal conduct, to moral
criteria, because it was no longer influenced by the spectacle of
institutions which, arbitrary, capricious, and often corrupt in their
practical operation, had been the outward symbol and expression of the
subordination of life to purposes transcending private interests. That
part of government which had been concerned with social administration,
if it did not end, became at least obsolescent. For such democracy as
had existed in the Middle Ages was dead, and the democracy of the
Revolution was not yet born, so that government passed into the
lethargic hand of classes who wielded the power of the State in the
interests of an irresponsible aristocracy. And the Church was even
more remote from the daily life of mankind than the State.
Philanthropy abounded; but religion, {12} once the greatest social
force, had become a thing as private and individual as the estate of
the squire or the working clothes of the laborer. There were special
dispensations and occasional interventions, like the acts of a monarch
who reprieved a criminal or signed an order for his execution. But
what was familiar, and human and lovable--what was Christian in
Christianity had largely disappeared. God had been thrust into the
frigid altitudes of infinite space. There was a limited monarchy in
Heaven, as well as upon earth. Providence was the spectator of the
curious machine which it had constructed and set in motion, but the
operation of which it was neither able nor willing to control. Like
the occasional intervention of the Crown in the proceedings of
Parliament, its wisdom was revealed in the infrequency of its
interference.
The natural consequence of the abdication of authorities which had
stood, however imperfectly, for a common purpose in social
organization, was the gradual disappearance from social thought of the
idea of purpose itself. Its place in the eighteenth century was taken
by the idea of mechanism. The conception of men as united to each
other, and of all mankind as united to God, by mutual obligations
arising from their relation to a common end, which vaguely conceived
and imperfectly realized, had been the keystone holding together the
social fabric, ceased to be impressed upon men's minds, when Church and
State withdrew from the center of social life to its circumference.
What remained when the keystone of the arch was removed, was private
rights and private interests, the materials of a society rather {13}
than a society itself. These rights and interests were the natural
order which had been distorted by the ambitions of kings and priests,
and which emerged when the artificial super-structure disappeared,
because they were the creation, not of man, but of Nature herself.
They had been regarded in the past as relative to some public end,
whether religion or national welfare. Henceforward they were thought
to be absolute and indefeasible, and to stand by their own virtue.
They were the ultimate political and social reality; and since they
were the ultimate reality, they were not subordinate to other aspects
of society, but other aspects of society were subordinate to them.
The State could not encroach upon these rights, for the State existed
for their maintenance. They determined the relation of classes, for
the most obvious and fundamental of all rights was property--property
absolute and unconditioned--and those who possessed it were regarded as
the natural governors of those who did not. Society arose from their
exercise, through the contracts of individual with individual. It
fulfilled its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom,
it secured full scope for their unfettered exercise. It failed in so
far as, like the French monarchy, it overrode them by the use of an
arbitrary authority. Thus conceived, society assumed something of the
appearance of a great joint-stock company, in which political power and
the receipt of dividends were justly assigned to those who held the
most numerous shares. The currents of social activity did not converge
upon common ends, but were dispersed through a multitude of channels,
{14} created by the private interests of the individuals who composed
society. But in their very variety and spontaneity, in the very
absence of any attempt to relate them to a larger purpose than that of
the individual, lay the best security of its attainment. There is a
mysticism of reason as well as of emotion, and the eighteenth century
found, in the beneficence of natural instincts, a substitute for the
God whom it had expelled from contact with society, and did not
hesitate to identify them.
"Thus God and nature planned the general frame
And bade self-love and social be the same."
The result of such ideas in the world of practice was a society which
was ruled by law, not by the caprice of Governments, but which
recognized no moral limitation on the pursuit by individuals of their
economic self-interest. In the world of thought, it was a political
philosophy which made rights the foundation of the social order, and
which considered the discharge of obligations, when it considered it at
all, as emerging by an inevitable process from their free exercise.
The first famous exponent of this philosophy was Locke, in whom the
dominant conception is the indefeasibility of private rights, not the
pre-ordained harmony between private rights and public welfare. In the
great French writers who prepared the way for the Revolution, while
believing that they were the servants of an enlightened absolutism,
there is an almost equal emphasis upon the sanctity of rights and upon
the infallibility of the {15} alchemy by which the pursuit of private
ends is transmuted into the attainment of public good. Though their
writings reveal the influence of the conception of society as a
self-adjusting mechanism, which afterwards became the most
characteristic note of the English individualism, what the French
Revolution burned into the mind of Europe was the former not the
latter. In England the idea of right had been negative and defensive,
a barrier to the encroachment of Governments. The French leapt to the
attack from trenches which the English had been content to defend, and
in France the idea became affirmative and militant, not a weapon of
defense, but a principle of social organization. The attempt to
refound society upon rights, and rights springing not from musty
charters, but from the very nature of man himself, was at once the
triumph and the limitation of the Revolution. It gave it the
enthusiasm and infectious power of religion.
What happened in England might seem at first sight to have been
precisely the reverse. English practical men, whose thoughts were
pitched in a lower key, were a little shocked by the pomp and
brilliance of that tremendous creed. They had scanty sympathy with the
absolute affirmations of France. What captured their imagination was
not the right to liberty, which made no appeal to their commercial
instincts, but the expediency of liberty, which did; and when the
Revolution had revealed the explosive power of the idea of natural
right, they sought some less menacing formula. It had been offered
them first by Adam Smith and his precursors, who showed how the
mechanism of economic life {16} converted "as with an invisible hand,"
the exercise of individual rights into the instrument of public good.
Bentham, who despised metaphysical subtleties, and thought the
Declaration of the Rights of Man as absurd as any other dogmatic
religion, completed the new orientation by supplying the final
criterion of political institutions in the principle of Utility.
Henceforward emphasis was transferred from the right of the individual
to exercise his freedom as he pleased to the expediency of an
undisturbed exercise of freedom to society.
The change is significant. It is the difference between the universal
and equal citizenship of France, with its five million peasant
proprietors, and the organized inequality of England established
solidly upon class traditions and class institutions; the descent from
hope to resignation, from the fire and passion of an age of illimitable
vistas to the monotonous beat of the factory engine, from Turgot and
Condorcet to the melancholy mathematical creed of Bentham and Ricardo
and James Mill. Mankind has, at least, this superiority over its
philosophers, that great movements spring from the heart and embody a
faith; not the nice adjustments of the hedonistic calculus. So in the
name of the rights of property France abolished in three years a great
mass of property rights which, under the old regime had robbed the
peasant of part of the produce of his labor, and the social
transformation survived a whole world of political changes. In England
the glad tidings of democracy were broken too discreetly to reach the
ears of the hind in the furrow or the shepherd on the hill; {17} there
were political changes without a social transformation. The doctrine
of Utility, though trenchant in the sphere of politics, involved no
considerable interference with the fundamentals of the social fabric.
Its exponents were principally concerned with the removal of political
abuses and legal anomalies. They attacked sinecures and pensions and
the criminal code and the procedure of the law courts. But they
touched only the surface of social institutions. They thought it a
monstrous injustice that the citizen should pay one-tenth of his income
in taxation to an idle Government, but quite reasonable that he should
pay one-fifth of it in rent to an idle landlord.
The difference, neverthelesss, was one of emphasis and expression, not
of principle. It mattered very little in practice whether private
property and unfettered economic freedom were stated, as in France, to
be natural rights, or whether, as in England, they were merely assumed
once for all to be expedient. In either case they were taken for
granted as the fundamentals upon which social organization was to be
based, and about which no further argument was admissible. Though
Bentham argued that rights were derived from utility, not from nature,
he did not push his analysis so far as to argue that any particular
right was relative to any particular function, and thus endorsed
indiscriminately rights which were not accompanied by service as well
as rights which were. While eschewing, in short, the phraseology of
natural rights, the English Utilitarians retained something not unlike
the substance of them. For they assumed that private property in {18}
land, and the private ownership of capital, were natural institutions,
and gave them, indeed, a new lease of life, by proving to their own
satisfaction that social well-being must result from their continued
exercise. Their negative was as important as their positive teaching.
It was a conductor which diverted the lightning. Behind their
political theory, behind the practical conduct, which as always,
continues to express theory long after it has been discredited in the
world of thought, lay the acceptance of absolute rights to property and
to economic freedom as the unquestioned center of social organization.
The result of that attitude was momentous. The motive and inspiration
of the Liberal Movement of the eighteenth century had been the attack
on Privilege. But the creed which had exorcised the specter of
agrarian feudalism haunting village and _chateau_ in France, was
impotent to disarm the new ogre of industrialism which was stretching
its limbs in the north of England. When, shorn of its splendors and
illusions, liberalism triumphed in England in 1832, it carried without
criticism into the new world of capitalist industry categories of
private property and freedom of contract which had been forged in the
simpler economic environment of the pre-industrial era. In England
these categories are being bent and twisted till they are no longer
recognizable, and will, in time, be made harmless. In America, where
necessity compelled the crystallization of principles in a
constitution, they have the rigidity of an iron jacket. The
magnificent formulae in which a society of farmers {19} and master
craftsmen enshrined its philosophy of freedom are in danger of becoming
fetters used by an Anglo-Saxon business aristocracy to bind insurgent
movements on the part of an immigrant and semi-servile proletariat.
{20}
III
THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY
This doctrine has been qualified in practice by particular limitations
to avert particular evils and to meet exceptional emergencies. But it
is limited in special cases precisely because its general validity is
regarded as beyond controversy, and, up to the eve of the present war,
it was the working faith of modern economic civilization. What it
implies is, that the foundation of society is found, not in functions,
but in rights; that rights are not deducible from the discharge of
functions, so that the acquisition of wealth and the enjoyment of
property are contingent upon the performances of services, but that the
individual enters the world equipped with rights to the free disposal
of his property and the pursuit of his economic self-interest, and that
these rights are anterior to, and independent of, any service which he
may render. True, the service of society will, in fact, it is assumed,
result from their exercise. But it is not the primary motive and
criterion of industry, but a secondary consequence, which emerges
incidentally through the exercise of rights, a consequence which is
attained, indeed, in practice, but which is attained without being
sought. It is not the end at which economic activity aims, or the
standard by which it is judged, but a by-product, as coal-tar is a
by-product of the {21} manufacture of gas; whether that by-product
appears or not, it is not proposed that the rights themselves should be
abdicated. For they are regarded, not as a conditional trust, but as a
property, which may, indeed, give way to the special exigencies of
extraordinary emergencies, but which resumes its sway when the
emergency is over, and in normal times is above discussion.
That conception is written large over the history of the nineteenth
century, both in England and in America. The doctrine which it
inherited was that property was held by an absolute right on an
individual basis, and to this fundamental it added another, which can
be traced in principle far back into history, but which grew to its
full stature only after the rise of capitalist industry, that societies
act both unfairly and unwisely when they limit opportunities of
economic enterprise. Hence every attempt to impose obligations as a
condition of the tenure of property or of the exercise of economic
activity has been met by uncompromising resistance. The story of the
struggle between humanitarian sentiment and the theory of property
transmitted from the eighteenth century is familiar. No one has
forgotten the opposition offered in the name of the rights of property
to factory legislation, to housing reform, to interference with the
adulteration of goods, even to the compulsory sanitation of private
houses. "May I not do what I like with my own?" was the answer to the
proposal to require a minimum standard of safety and sanitation from
the owners of mills and houses. Even to {22} this day, while an
English urban landlord can cramp or distort the development of a whole
city by withholding land except at fancy prices, English municipalities
are without adequate powers of compulsory purchase, and must either pay
through the nose or see thousands of their members overcrowded. The
whole body of procedure by which they may acquire land, or indeed new
powers of any kind, has been carefully designed by lawyers to protect
owners of property against the possibility that their private rights
may be subordinated to the public interest, because their rights are
thought to be primary and absolute and public interests secondary and
contingent.
No one needs to be reminded, again, of the influence of the same
doctrine in the sphere of taxation. Thus the income tax was excused as
a temporary measure, because the normal society was conceived to be one
in which the individual spent his whole income for himself and owed no
obligations to society on account of it. The death duties were
denounced as robbery, because they implied that the right to benefit by
inheritance was conditional upon a social sanction. The Budget of 1909
created a storm, not because the taxation of land was heavy--in amount
the land-taxes were trifling--but because it was felt to involve the
doctrine that property is not an absolute right, but that it may
properly be accompanied by special obligations, a doctrine which, if
carried to its logical conclusion, would destroy its sanctity by making
ownership no longer absolute but conditional.
{23}
Such an implication seems intolerable to an influential body of public
opinion, because it has been accustomed to regard the free disposal of
property and the unlimited exploitation of economic opportunities, as
rights which are absolute and unconditioned. On the whole, until
recently, this opinion had few antagonists who could not be ignored.
As a consequence the maintenance of property rights has not been
seriously threatened even in those cases in which it is evident that no
service is discharged, directly or indirectly, by their exercise. No
one supposes, that the owner of urban land, performs _qua_ owner, any
function. He has a right of private taxation; that is all. But the
private ownership of urban land is as secure to-day as it was a century
ago; and Lord Hugh Cecil, in his interesting little book on
Conservatism, declares that whether private property is mischievous or
not, society cannot interfere with it, because to interfere with it is
theft, and theft is wicked. No one supposes that it is for the public
good that large areas of land should be used for parks and game. But
our country gentlemen are still settled heavily upon their villages and
still slay their thousands. No one can argue that a monopolist is
impelled by "an invisible hand" to serve the public interest. But over
a considerable field of industry competition, as the recent Report on
Trusts shows, has been replaced by combination, and combinations are
allowed the same unfettered freedom as individuals in the exploitation
of economic opportunities. No one really believes that the production
of coal depends upon the payment of {24} mining royalties or that ships
will not go to and fro unless ship-owners can earn fifty per cent. upon
their capital. But coal mines, or rather the coal miner, still pay
royalties, and ship-owners still make fortunes and are made Peers.
At the very moment when everybody is talking about the importance of
increasing the output of wealth, the last question, apparently, which
it occurs to any statesman to ask is why wealth should be squandered on
futile activities, and in expenditure which is either disproportionate
to service or made for no service at all. So inveterate, indeed, has
become the practice of payment in virtue of property rights, without
even the pretense of any service being rendered, that when, in a
national emergency, it is proposed to extract oil from the ground, the
Government actually proposes that every gallon shall pay a tax to
landowners who never even suspected its existence, and the ingenuous
proprietors are full of pained astonishment at any one questioning
whether the nation is under moral obligation to endow them further.
Such rights are, strictly speaking, privileges. For the definition of
a privilege is a right to which no corresponding function is attached.
The enjoyment of property and the direction of industry are considered,
in short, to require no social justification, because they are regarded
as rights which stand by their own virtue, not functions to be judged
by the success with which they contribute to a social purpose. To-day
that doctrine, if intellectually discredited, is still the practical
foundation of social {25} organization. How slowly it yields even to
the most insistent demonstration of its inadequacy is shown by the
attitude which the heads of the business world have adopted to the
restrictions imposed on economic activity during the war. The control
of railways, mines and shipping, the distribution of raw materials
through a public department instead of through competing merchants, the
regulation of prices, the attempts to check "profiteering"--the
detailed application of these measures may have been effective or
ineffective, wise or injudicious. It is evident, indeed, that some of
them have been foolish, like the restriction of imports when the world
has five years' destruction to repair, and that others, if sound in
conception, have been questionable in their execution. If they were
attacked on the ground that they obstruct the efficient performance of
function--if the leaders of industry came forward and said generally,
as some, to their honor, have:--"We accept your policy, but we will
improve its execution; we desire payment for service and service only
and will help the state to see that it pays for nothing else"--there
might be controversy as to the facts, but there could be none as to the
principle.
In reality, however, the gravamen of the charges brought against these
restrictions appears generally to be precisely the opposite. They are
denounced by most of their critics not because they limit the
opportunity of service, but because they diminish the opportunity for
gain, not because they prevent the trader enriching the community, but
because they make it {26} more difficult for him to enrich himself;
not, in short, because they have failed to convert economic activity
into a social function, but because they have come too near succeeding.
If the financial adviser to the Coal Controller may be trusted, the
shareholders in coal mines would appear to have done fairly well during
the war. But the proposal to limit their profits to 1/2 per ton is
described by Lord Gainford as "sheer robbery and confiscation." With
some honorable exceptions, what is demanded is that in the future as in
the past the directors of industry should be free to handle it as an
enterprise conducted for their own convenience or advancement, instead
of being compelled, as they have been partially compelled during the
war, to subordinate it to a social purpose. For to admit that the
criterion of commerce and industry is its success in discharging a
social purpose is at once to turn property and economic activity from
rights which are absolute into rights which are contingent and
derivative, because it is to affirm that they are relative to functions
and that they may justly be revoked when the functions are not
performed. It is, in short, to imply that property and economic
activity exist to promote the ends of society, whereas hitherto society
has been regarded in the world of business as existing to promote them.
To those who hold their position, not as functionaries, but by virtue
of their success in making industry contribute to their own wealth and
social influence, such a reversal of means and ends appears little less
than a revolution. For it means that they must justify before a social
tribunal {27} rights which they have hitherto taken for granted as part
of an order which is above criticism.
During the greater part of the nineteenth century the significance of
the opposition between the two principles of individual rights and
social functions was masked by the doctrine of the inevitable harmony
between private interests and public good. Competition, it was argued,
was an effective substitute for honesty. To-day that subsidiary
doctrine has fallen to pieces under criticism; few now would profess
adherence to the compound of economic optimism and moral bankruptcy
which led a nineteenth century economist to say: "Greed is held in
check by greed, and the desire for gain sets limits to itself." The
disposition to regard individual rights as the center and pivot of
society is still, however, the most powerful element in political
thought and the practical foundation of industrial organization. The
laborious refutation of the doctrine that private and public interests
are co-incident, and that man's self-love is God's Providence, which
was the excuse of the last century for its worship of economic egotism,
has achieved, in fact, surprisingly small results. Economic egotism is
still worshiped; and it is worshiped because that doctrine was not
really the center of the position. It was an outwork, not the citadel,
and now that the outwork has been captured, the citadel is still to win.
What gives its special quality and character, its toughness and
cohesion, to the industrial system built up in the last century and a
half, is not its exploded theory of economic harmonies. It is the
doctrine that {28} economic rights are anterior to, and independent of
economic functions, that they stand by their own virtue, and need
adduce no higher credentials. The practical result of it is that
economic rights remain, whether economic functions are performed or
not. They remain to-day in a more menacing form than in the age of
early industrialism. For those who control industry no longer compete
but combine, and the rivalry between property in capital and property
in land has long since ended. The basis of the New Conservatism
appears to be a determination so to organize society, both by political
and economic action, as to make it secure against every attempt to
extinguish payments which are made, not for service, but because the
owners possess a right to extract income without it. Hence the fusion
of the two traditional parties, the proposed "strengthening" of the
second chamber, the return to protection, the swift conversion of rival
industrialists to the advantages of monopoly, and the attempts to buy
off with concessions the more influential section of the working
classes. Revolutions, as a long and bitter experience reveals, are apt
to take their color from the regime which they overthrow. Is it any
wonder that the creed which affirms the absolute rights of property
should sometimes be met with a counter-affirmation of the absolute
rights of labor, less anti-social, indeed, and inhuman, but almost as
dogmatic, almost as intolerant and thoughtless as itself?
A society which aimed at making the acquisition of wealth contingent
upon the discharge of social {29} obligations, which sought to
proportion remuneration to service and denied it to those by whom no
service was performed, which inquired first not what men possess but
what they can make or create or achieve, might be called a Functional
Society, because in such a society the main subject of social emphasis
would be the performance of functions. But such a society does not
exist, even as a remote ideal, in the modern world, though something
like it has hung, an unrealized theory, before men's minds in the past.
Modern societies aim at protecting economic rights, while leaving
economic functions, except in moments of abnormal emergency, to fulfil
themselves. The motive which gives color and quality to their public
institutions, to their policy and political thought, is not the attempt
to secure the fulfilment of tasks undertaken for the public service,
but to increase the opportunities open to individuals of attaining the
objects which they conceive to be advantageous to themselves. If asked
the end or criterion of social organization, they would give an answer
reminiscent of the formula the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. But to say that the end of social institutions is happiness,
is to say that they have no common end at all. For happiness is
individual, and to make happiness the object of society is to resolve
society itself into the ambitions of numberless individuals, each
directed towards the attainment of some personal purpose.
Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole
tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition
of wealth. The {30} appeal of this conception must be powerful, for it
has laid the whole modern world under its spell. Since England first
revealed the possibilities of industrialism, it has gone from strength
to strength, and as industrial civilization invades countries hitherto
remote from it, as Russia and Japan and India and China are drawn into
its orbit, each decade sees a fresh extension of its influence. The
secret of its triumph is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use
the powers with which they have been endowed by nature or society, by
skill or energy or relentless egotism or mere good fortune, without
inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should
be limited. It assumes the social organization which determines the
opportunities which different classes shall in fact possess, and
concentrates attention upon the right of those who possess or can
acquire power to make the fullest use of it for their own
self-advancement. By fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of
social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines
the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the
right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for
the acquisition of riches, and therefore gives free play to one of the
most powerful of human instincts. To the strong it promises unfettered
freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that
they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a
golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive,
the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there
are no ends other {31} than their ends, no law other than their
desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it
makes the individual the center of his own universe, and dissolves
moral principles into a choice of expediences. And it immensely
simplifies the problems of social life in complex communities. For it
relieves them of the necessity of discriminating between different
types of economic activity and different sources of wealth, between
enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which
is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the
fruits of labor and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune, because it
treats all economic activities as standing upon the same level, and
suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no
conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected
almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces.