[Footnote 1: A paper read to the Fabian Society by G. Bernard Shaw, on
16th October, 1891.]
[Footnote 2: This is an inference from the following paragraph in Mr.
Tucker's article:
"Second in importance comes the land monopoly, the evil effects of
which are seen principally in exclusively agricultural countries, like
Ireland. This monopoly consists in the enforcement by government of
land titles which do not rest on personal occupancy and cultivation.
It was obvious to Warren and Proudhon that as soon as individuals
should no longer be protected by their fellows in anything but personal
occupation and cultivation of land, ground rent would disappear, and so
usury have one less leg to stand on."
See also Mr. Tucker's article entitled "A Singular Misunderstanding,"
in _Liberty_ of the 10th September, 1892. "Regarding land," writes
Mr. Tucker, "it has been steadily maintained in these columns that
protection should be withdrawn from all land titles except those based
on personal occupancy and use."]
[Footnote 3: "Nor does the Anarchistic scheme furnish any code of
morals to be imposed on the individual. 'Mind your own business,' is
its only moral law."]
[Footnote 4: This would of course be largely practicable under a
Collectivist system.]
[Footnote 5: English readers need not baulk themselves here because
of the late fall of agricultural rents in this country. Rent, in the
economic sense, covers payment for the use of land for any purpose,
agricultural or otherwise; and town rents have risen oppressively.
A much more puzzling discrepancy between the facts and the theory
is presented by the apparent absence of any upward tendency in the
prices of general commodities. However, an article may be apparently
no less cheap or even much cheaper than it was twenty years ago; and
yet its price may have risen enormously relatively to its average cost
of production, owing to the average cost of production having been
reduced by machinery, higher organization of the labor of producing
it, cheapened traffic with other countries, etc. Thus, in the cotton
industry, machinery has multiplied each man's power of production
eleven hundred times; and Sir Joseph Whitworth was quoted by the
President of the Iron and Steel Institute some years ago as having
declared that a Nottingham lace machine can do the work formerly done
by 8,000 lacemakers. The articles entitled "Great Manufacture of Little
Things," in Cassell's _Technical Educator_, may be consulted for
examples of this sort in the production of pins, pens, etc. Suppose,
then, that an article which cost, on the average, fivepence to make in
1850, was then sold for sixpence. If it be now selling for threepence,
it is apparently twice as cheap as it was. But if the cost of
production has also fallen to three-halfpence, which is by no means an
extravagant supposition, then the price, considered relatively to the
cost of production, has evidently risen prodigiously, since it is now
twice the cost, whereas the cost was formerly five-sixths of the price.
In other words, the surplus, or rent, per article, has risen from
16 2/3 per cent. to 100 per cent., in spite of the apparent cheapening.
This is the explanation of the fact that though the workers were
probably never before so monstrously robbed as they are at present, it
is quite possible for statisticians to prove that on the whole wages
have risen and prices fallen. The worker, pleased at having only to pay
threepence where he formerly paid sixpence, forgets that the share of
his threepence that goes to an idler may be much larger than that which
went out of each of the two threepences he paid formerly.]
[Footnote 6: Written in the 1887-92 period, during which Trafalgar
Square was forcibly closed against public meetings by the Salisbury
administration.]
[Footnote 7: The evil is decidedly _less_ if the calculation proceeds
by the popular method of always estimating an evil suffered by a
hundred persons as a hundred times as great as the same evil suffered
by only one. This, however, is absurd. A hundred starving men are not
a hundred times as hungry as one starving man, any more than a hundred
five-foot-eight men are each five hundred and sixty-six feet eight
inches high. But they are a hundred times as strong a political force.
Though the evil may not be cumulative, the power to resist it is.]
* * * * *
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| Transcriber Notes: |
| |
| P.17. 'antonomy' changed to 'autonomy' |
| P.22. 'Tuc er's' changed to 'Tucker's' |
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