For what is the object of production? It is the satisfaction of human

wants, which begin as needs, and gradually develop into tastes. The

multiplication of these needs, together with the satisfaction of

them, is what civilisation means; and though material wealth may

increase, as it does in many new countries, without any concurrent

development of civilisation in its higher forms, civilisation in its

higher forms cannot increase, and certainly cannot diffuse itself

throughout the community at large, without a development in the means

of material production. Books, for example, though they are vehicles

of mental culture, are themselves economic commodities, and depend

for their accessibility to the public on the same kind of industrial

agencies as do cotton, sugar, tobacco, and that comforter of the

nations—alcohol. Refinement of taste and feeling, again, is largely

diffused by pictures; but the accessibility of any great picture to

the vast majority of any nation depends on the industrial processes

by which it can be cheaply and faithfully {239} reproduced—processes

which have only of late years reached any sort of perfection.

But all the industrial ingenuity that great men have ever possessed

would be absolutely futile unless the commodities they were employed

in producing, or the services they were employed in rendering,

satisfied tastes and wants existing in various sections of the

community. The eliciting of these wants, or the development of these

tastes, depends often on the previous supply of the products or

services that minister to them. Thus the introduction of railways,

of the electric telegraph, of the telephone, of the electric light,

preceded any popular demand for them; and many a great writer,

according to the well-known saying, has to create the taste by

which he is to be appreciated. But he could not create the taste,

or, in other words, make it actual, unless it existed already in

human nature as a potentiality, any more than the producers of

electric light could make the general public anxious to have it in

their houses if mankind at large entertained no wish whatever to do

anything but sleep between the hours of sunset and sunrise. The wants

and tastes, then, to which all production ministers, whether common

to all men, like the desire for food, or developed by influences from

without, like the desire for telegraphic accommodation, are, when

once they are in existence, essentially democratic in their nature.

They are not like the movements of a mason, who constructs under an

architect’s order a cathedral with the design of which he has nothing

at {240} all to do. They represent the uncontrolled promptings of

the individual’s own nature, and they affect production, and dictate

to the producers what they shall produce, because they represent a

spontaneous similarity of taste amongst a multitude of individuals

living under similar circumstances. Here we have the reconciliation

of the seemingly contradictory facts, that the power of the many over

production is at once paramount and small.

Economic demand, though it owes most of its development to the

few, is yet, when its development has taken place, fundamentally

democratic in its nature. But, on the other hand, economic supply,

which not only ministers to existing wants, but elicits new ones,

tends ever more and more as civilisation advances to depend on the

action of the few. For as wants increase there is required, in

order to satisfy them, a growing elaboration in the methods and

organisation of supply; and in proportion as supply becomes more and

more elaborately organised, it becomes, from the necessities of the

case, less and less democratic. In the Middle Ages, for instance,

the only rich _supplying_ class consisted of merchants, because

the exchange of commodities, and the bringing them in the required

quantities to the proper markets, was a process more complicated than

the orginal processes of producing them. Production has now become

quite as complicated as commerce; and a manufacturing aristocracy has

developed itself equal in wealth to the commercial. {241}

But though supply thus depends on the domination of the few, and

rises and falls with the ability with which that domination is

exercised, it is itself at the same time under the domination of the

many. Some industrial genius may make a colossal fortune by directing

the labour of some thousands of men to the production (let us say) of

a new species of beer; but his enterprise will succeed only because

millions of men like the beer, and demand it under the direction of

their own taste alone. The tastes of the many, of course, exhibit

many varieties. Where a million men demand beer, another million

will demand whisky; and there are many commodities, such as guns,

golf balls, and cricket bats, the demand for which is confined to

comparatively small classes. But the point here insisted on is, not

that every member of the community demands the same commodities, but

that whatever commodities are demanded, are demanded in each case

in accordance with the spontaneous wishes of individuals, and that

the total force of the demand is the cumulative result of a number

of actions and desires which happen to be spontaneously similar. The

commodities supplied to them have, in other words, to be accommodated

to a genuinely democratic order; and if the consuming democracy does

not consider them suitable, it virtually, by refusing to buy them,

condemns them to be destroyed. Thus if we direct our attention to

consumption, the few—the directors of industry—are the servants

of the many; though if we direct {242} our attention, as we did

previously, to production, the many, in the capacity of workers, are

the servants or subjects of the few.

And now let us turn back to the domain of politics. We shall find

that we do so possessed of a new clue to the true nature and extent

of the powers of the many there. For we shall find that in civil

government, just as in economic production, the process involved is

a process of supply and demand; and that whilst there is a certain

kind of political demand in respect of which the many are paramount,

and act as a true democracy, their power in the business of supply is

never more than partial, and is in most cases illusory.

The first point of which we must here take notice is this—that though

the analogy between economic production and civil government is a

genuine one, it is not to be found in the phenomena in which we

should naturally be tempted to look for it. What we should naturally

be inclined to do would be to take the demand for laws and policies

as the counterpart to the demand for commodities, and the framing

of such laws and the carrying out of policies as the counterpart to

economic supply; the first of these, like the demand for commodities,

being simple and spontaneous; the second difficult, like the

manufacture of them. But in arguing thus we should be wrong.

The demand for laws and policies is, as we have seen already, by no

means a simple thing, like the demand, let us say, for a particular

kind {243} of beer; nor is it the true counterpart to such a demand;

for the beer is demanded for its own sake, but laws and policies are

not. They are demanded for the sake of certain results on social life

which, by various processes of reasoning, those who demand them have

been led to believe that they will produce; and it is the results of

laws and policies, not the laws and policies themselves, which are

in the political sphere what commodities are in the economic, and

for which alone the demand is purely and genuinely democratic. The

multitudes of men who were led to demand the abolition of the corn

laws were not led to do so because the actual process of abolishing

them was profitable or pleasurable in itself, but because they

believed it would mean a larger loaf on their breakfast-tables. It

was in the demand for the loaf that the many were spontaneously

unanimous, and expressed their own views, not those of anybody

else. Their unanimity in demanding the measure was produced by the

arguments of an intellectual oligarchy, and could not have been

produced without them. Thus whilst the demand for the larger loaf

was equivalent to a demand for a particular kind of beer, the demand

for the law was equivalent to a demand that the brewer should employ

some novel appliances for brewing, with the merits of which they were

acquainted only through the puffs and explanations of the patentee.

There is therefore a great difference between political demand

and economic. Economic demand {244} is single; political demand

is double; and whilst one part of political demand—namely, the

demand for social results—corresponds with economic demand, or the

demand of the consumer for commodities, the other part of political

demand—namely, the demand for particular measures—does not correspond

with economic demand at all, but is, on the contrary, in contrast

to it. For when workmen’s wives buy some particular make of calico

for their husband’s shirts, or when cyclists buy some particular

kind of tyre for their bicycles, they do so because they approve of

the qualities which those goods manifest when in use; not because

they approve of the machinery by which the goods were made. But in

politics, although there is likewise a demand for political goods,

as such,—for social security, personal prosperity, and so forth,—of

which each man is naturally his own judge, just as those who use them

are of the tyres or calico, and although statesmen and governments

are frequently supported by the nation, not because they have carried

this measure or that, but because the political goods supplied by

them are on the whole satisfactory, yet the political demand which

is supposed to be the special characteristic of democracies is not a

demand for the completed goods, but a demand that this or that patent

shall be used in the hope of producing them.

Now political patents are most of them highly complicated devices;

the action of all of them is dependent on a complication of

circumstances; and they {245} are always the work of a special class

of inventors. They never represent the spontaneously similar ideas

of the mass of ordinary men, any more than the machinery used in a

great brewery represents the spontaneously similar ideas of the happy

and united customers whom a spontaneously similar taste leads to

the same tied house. All that the many can do with regard to these

political patents is to listen to the accounts of them given by the

patentees, their agents, and their travellers, and to make the best

choice they can between a number of different contrivances which

they have had no share in devising, and which they only partially

understand. They are, indeed, in much the same position in which

that portion of the public would be placed which travels habitually

between London and Glasgow, if it were asked to decide by its votes

which of five kinds of reversing gear should be made use of on the

London and North-Western engines. If this question had really to be

decided by vote, the public might so far instruct itself by lectures

from the competing inventors as to give votes for this contrivance

or for that; but the very grounds on which its choice was formed

would be obviously supplied to it by others; its choice would be

limited by the number of the contrivances before it, and the part

spontaneously played by it in the whole transaction would be small.

And yet, as has just been said, it is the making of a choice of this

kind that is regarded as being, in the domain of politics, typically,

if not exclusively, the exercise of {246} the power of the many.

The result is that, whilst the many do in reality exert, through

their spontaneously similar demand for certain social results, an

influence on legislation which in certain respects is paramount, the

political theorist, neglecting this fact altogether, confines himself

to asserting their power in the demand for political means—the kind

of demand in respect of which they are most influenced by others.

Now what, let us ask, is the explanation of this fact? How does it

come that in government a power is attributed to the many which

is, even by recent socialists, not attributed to them in economic

production? The reason is that over the processes of economic

production the many can exercise no control at all, but that over

the devising of governmental measures they can exercise some, which,

though absolutely small, is yet, by comparison, large.

Thus, for instance, though the structure and manufacture of watches

is in one sense determined by the many, because the manufacture of

those watches only can be continued permanently which satisfy the

many, and which the many will consent to buy, it would be impossible

for any watchmaker to produce good watches at all if his workmen were

constantly required to be altering or readjusting the escapements in

order to introduce some “dodge” devised by any man in the street.

But in politics this is not the case. The influence of the men in

the street, though it can exert itself through {247} exceptional

men only, and is consequently not wholly their own, does continually

make itself felt in law-making as it does not make itself felt in

watchmaking; and yet the conduct of government is not rendered

impossible, whereas the making of the watches would be. Indeed, in

very many cases it is not even rendered unsatisfactory.

For this peculiarity in politics there are three reasons. One is

that the connection between measures and the general welfare of the

community is by no means so close or immediate as the connection

between a watchmaker’s tool and the wheel or pinion to which he

applies it. Social effects follow on measures slowly, and the

tendencies of bad measures are neutralised by other causes. The

second reason is that, as Mr. Spencer rightly insists—agreeing

in this judgment with the wisdom of Dr. Johnson—the social ills

which governments “can cause or cure” are far less numerous than

many thinkers imagine; and the third reason is one with which we

are already familiar, that the power of the many in determining

what measures shall be adopted is, although not an illusion, less

considerable than it appears to be. But whatever their power in

this respect, the great point to remember is that it cannot exert

itself or exist for any practical purpose unless the few provide

it with the means of doing so, any more than a rudder has power to

guide a ship unless some other power shall have set the ship in

motion. The popular demand for measures, or the popular {248} choice

between them, alike presupposes the few who will make the supply a

possibility.

And if the power of the many over supply is thus limited even in

the domain of politics, in the domain of economic production it is

more limited still, and in the domain of intellectual progress it

is absolutely non-existent. Their true power is in their demand for

completed results—for knowledge which they can assimilate, for dogmas

logically stated, which reveal to them clearly what they already

believe dimly, for food they can enjoy, for clothes that please their

eyes, for commodities and appliances that minister to their comfort

and convenience, for social security, for freedom, and for personal

and national prosperity. In other words, the truth, when properly

understood, is a truism. The many are all powerful in determining

the quality of progress and civilisation because it is their own

tastes and wants to which civilisation must minister, and their

own qualities which civilisation must draw out; but of initiating

civilisation, of advancing it, or even maintaining it, the many are

absolutely incapable unless they have the few to guide them. They

contain within themselves the things that have to be developed, but

they cannot themselves provide themselves with the conditions of

their own development. Without the few to assist them they could no

more progress than a train of railway carriages could progress in the

absence of the locomotive.

It is impossible, however, to state these {249} conclusions plainly

without realising that in some quarters violent objections will

be taken to them; nor is it difficult to see on what grounds the

objections will rest. These shall accordingly be discussed in the

next chapter; and it shall be shown that the conclusions to which

our inquiry has brought us thus far really contain in them nothing

inconsistent with the sentiments, or incompatible with the objects,

of even those extreme reformers who will certainly feel impelled to

attack them.

{250}

CHAPTER III

THE QUALITIES OF THE ORDINARY, AS OPPOSED TO THE GREAT, MAN

The objections which will be taken to the conclusion arrived at in

the preceding chapter resolve themselves into two groups, one of

which rests on general and more or less sentimental considerations,

the other on practical. We will deal with the former first.

This group of objections will, by those persons who entertain them,

be probably first expressed in an outburst of fine indignation at

the wrong which the conclusions just epitomised do to the average

man; for such persons will at once take them as implying that the

average man is a miserable and helpless creature, with only enough

intelligence to carry out blindly the orders which his betters are

condescending enough to give him; and this implication will strike

them as a wanton insult. They will think over various men in private

and humble life who were never thought by themselves or others to be

above the average level, but who yet were gifted with intelligence,

{251} taste, and skill equal to any possessed by the men who are

called great. They will reflect that these men represent not the few,

but the many; and they will angrily reject a theory which frankly

denies to the many any of those forces which specifically make for

progress.

But this class of objections, which was already briefly glanced at

when we were considering the precise points by which the great man is

distinguished from the average man, will disappear altogether when we

take the matter conversely and consider the precise points in which

the average man differs from the great man.

In any discussion that aims at scientific precision it is necessary

to give to the principal terms used a far more definite meaning than

is given to them when they are used ordinarily; for most words when

used ordinarily have several meanings, but when used technically

they must have only one. Any term, then, when used technically will

of necessity specifically exclude a number of ideas—and it may be

very important ones—which are frequently attached to it when it is

used in conversation or general literature. This observation, as the

reader will readily perceive, has a special application to our use

of the term _great man_. The greatness of the great man, regarded as

an agent of progress, is a quality, as has been said, which is to be

measured by its overt results; and its overt results consist of, and

are brought about by, not what he does in his own person, but what

he makes others do. It is needless to insist {252} upon this truth

again, as it has been explained at great length already, and it is

impossible that any reader can misunderstand it. What it is necessary

for us here to explain and insist upon is its converse—namely,

that if the essence of technical greatness is so to influence the

actions or thoughts of other men that the productivity of human

labour is increased or the scope of human thought enlarged, no man is

technically great who is not in this way influential.

When we come to reflect closely on this definition, some of the

results will strike us as not a little curious; for if we exclude

from the class of great men and relegate to the class of ordinary men

all those whose greatness begins and ends with themselves, and does

not tend to communicate itself to any one beside themselves, so as to

make others think or act more efficiently than they would unaided,

ordinary men, or the many, in our present technical sense of the

words, will include a number of men of the most brilliant capacities

and accomplishments.

The greatest poets, for instance, will in this way be classed as

ordinary men, whilst the inventor of machinery for making good boots

cheaply will be classed as a great man. And the reason is as follows.

A great inventor is great as an agent of progress because when the

apparatus invented by him is in process of being manufactured, and a

thousand workmen are shaping or multiplying its separate parts, or

again, when ten thousand other workmen are using the machines when

completed, he makes each workman do precisely what he would {253}

do himself if he were performing their several tasks actually with

his own hands. But a great poet—let us say Shakespeare—could not in

a similar way so influence a thousand ordinary writers that they

should all of them be producing plays like _Macbeth_ or _Hamlet_.

Indeed, the greater the poet is, the more absolutely incommunicable

is his gift. Shakespeare may have so far contributed to progress as

to have aided in the development of literary English generally, but

he has not, in the course of some three hundred years, brought into

existence one dramatist comparable to himself.† In art, in fact,

after a certain point has been passed, it can hardly be said that

there is any progress at all.

† Of course the great poet, like the great religious teacher, may

have an effect on the thoughts and imaginations of his readers, and

he may be a great man or an agent of progress in this way. But he is

not, in the technical sense of the word, a great man in reference to

his own art. He does not promote progress amongst other poets.

It is still more important to observe that what is true of the

arts is also true of the crafts, or, in other words, those kinds

of manual work whose special characteristic is rare personal

skill. Manual skill, though essential to material progress no less

than unskilled labour is, does not, except during the earlier

stages of civilisation, itself constitute an actively progressive

principle. That is to say, at a very early stage in the development

of productive industry manual skill reaches its utmost limits,

and thenceforward remains stationary, whilst industry continues

to progress. Thus the skill which is evidenced by the {254}

gem-engraving of the Greeks and Romans has rarely been equalled

since, and has certainly never been surpassed. But we need not

stop short at the antiquity of the Greeks and Romans. Many of the

implements made by the prehistoric lake-dwellers could not, so far as

mere manual workmanship is concerned, be better made by any workman

or mechanic of to-day. Indeed, so far is the progress of material

civilisation from depending on or coinciding with any progress in

manual skill, that it actually depends on a getting rid of the

necessity, not certainly of all skill, but of skill of the rarer

kinds. If any machine, for example, depended for its successful

operation on an accurate finish in certain essential parts which

only one workman in half a million could give, such a machine would

be practically almost worthless. A productive machine is of use in

the service of society generally in proportion as the machines or

processes by which it is itself manufactured obviate the necessity

for any skill in manufacturing it beyond such as can be obtained with

considerable ease and constancy.

Many sentimentalists—and it is difficult not to sympathise with

them—regret the manner in which manufacture is thus superseding

craftsmanship, or that kind of production in which the beauty or

excellence of the product is the direct result and expression of

the skill of one producer. But this natural regret, though most

frequently expressed by socialists, is defensible only on grounds of

the narrowest social exclusiveness. That the {255} artist-craftsman

who gives his talents directly to each particular commodity in

the production of which he is concerned—a silver cup, or a lamp,

or a curiously-designed carpet, or a printed volume—will produce

objects having a charm which is wanting in similar objects produced

by the methods of the manufacturer is, no doubt, true. But great

artist-craftsmen being few in number, the beautiful objects they

make by the craftsman’s methods are few in number also, and are

consequently obtainable by a few persons only; whilst the objects

inferior, but approximately similar to them, which the great

manufacturer multiplies in indefinite quantities, are accessible to

the many, who, under any social system, must either have these or

have nothing of the kind at all. An artist-craftsman, for example,

such as the late Mr. William Morris, or a transcriber and illuminator

in a mediæval monastery, could produce a volume indefinitely more

beautiful than any product of the steam printing-press; but a book

which the methods of the manufacturer would admit of being sold for

sixpence might cost, if produced by the craftsman, twice that number

of pounds; and it is easy to see that, supposing a study of the

Bible to be desirable, a village comprising four hundred and eighty

families would be benefited more by each family having a sixpenny

Bible of its own than it would by the existence of one sumptuous copy

chained to a desk in the village church or reading-room.

Rare manual skill, in short, does not promote progress, or help

to maintain civilisation at any {256} given level, unless it can

metamorphose itself—as in many cases it can do by means of patterns

or otherwise—into a series of orders which men who have less

skill can execute, and thus affects commodities not directly, but

indirectly. So long as it resides in exertions of the craftsman’s

hand, applied directly to each commodity produced, it has on the

progress of the arts generally no effect at all. The man or men who

invented the slide rest communicated a new power to every one of

the innumerable artisans now using it; but an artisan who should

produce exceptionally accurate work owing to the exceptional accuracy

and steadiness of his own hand, could no more add anything to the

faculties of even one of his fellows than a beautiful woman can,

by means of her own beauty, improve the eyes, nose, or hair of her

plainer sisters. Material progress, then, as has just been said,

is so far from being dependent on the growth of rare manual skill

that it takes place in proportion as the necessity for such skill is

eliminated.

And now let us turn from the consideration of human capacities, as

applied to and expressing themselves in the production of particular

commodities or results, and consider them as they reveal themselves

in ordinary life and conversation. We shall find ourselves confronted

by a similar set of facts here. We shall see that many of the talents

and qualities which, when possessed by our friends or by ourselves,

elicit our strongest admiration, and give an interest to human

nature, do nothing to {257} advance or to maintain civilisation

at all. No one, for example, who knows anything of English society

will deny that conversational wit is one of the rarest faculties to

be met with in it, and earns for its possessor the reputation of an

exceptionally brilliant man; but its possession by one man does not

cause its existence in others. The wit leaves the rest of society

precisely where he found it. The same is the case with private

goodness and wisdom. They may indeed affect an exceedingly small

circle, but there is in their influence nothing certain or lasting.

The most highly moral parents have often the most dissipated sons;

it requires almost as much wisdom to take sound advice as to give

it; even if the sensible and the excellent exert a good influence on

their own friends, they have no tendency to inaugurate any general

moral advance; and a man whose life is rendered interesting by an

exceptionally romantic passion may illustrate the capacities of human

nature, but he does nothing to expand them.

It will thus be seen that when we describe the majority of mankind

as being so far passive with regard to the production of progress

that unless there were a minority of men with faculties which the

majority do not possess, no progress or civilisation would take

place at all, we are not declaring that the larger part of mankind

are stupid, foolish, unskilful, or void of resource, or that human

nature as exemplified in the normal man or woman is not often noble

and beautiful, and is not always interesting. On the contrary, the

very reverse is the {258} case. What is really interesting in human

life and in human nature is the universal and typical elements in

it, not the exceptional; and we can show ourselves the truth of this

in a very convincing way by looking into the mirror that is held up

to nature by art. The most famous and interesting characters to be

found in fiction or in the drama, though they may have been invested

by their creators with exceptional circumstances and endowed with

exceptional gifts, have interested and appealed both to the world and

their creators through the qualities and experiences which they share

with human beings generally, not through those which may incidentally

make them peculiar. Very few men, for example, are as intellectual

as Hamlet; but Hamlet has interested the world because, as has been

well said of him, he is not “a man,” but “man.” If a great dramatist

or novelist makes his heroes exceptional, he does so only because

he can, by this device, more easily give a magnified representation

of what is universal; and the universal elements which he magnifies

excite universal interest, not because they are exhibited on more

than a common scale, but because they are thus exhibited with a more

than common clearness. What are the most beautiful love-poems that

have made their writers immortal but an expression of what is felt by

millions, though it can be expressed only by a few? Why is there life

still in the two marriage songs of Catullus, if it were not for the

living strings in the normal human heart which the magic of his hand

still touches? {259}

But not only is the normal man the type of what is interesting and

important in humanity. He is also the type of wise conduct in life,

and secures amongst men in general a conformity to this conduct, not

by means of advice given by exceptionally excellent individuals, but

by the purely democratic pressure of cumulative class opinion. The

force which this opinion exercises is commonly called “The World.”

The details of its injunctions and prohibitions are different in

different classes; and when it is called “The World,” reference is

usually being made to the pressure exercised by it in the highest

classes only. But this limitation of meaning is altogether arbitrary.

Every class is “The World,” so far as regards itself. It has its own

standards of manners, honour, prudence, dress, and also of moral

judgment as applied to social conduct; and it is in respect of all of

them incalculably wiser than most individuals who differ from it. In

social life even the greatest genius is ridiculous, in so far as he

is unusual in anything except his greatness.

It is, moreover, the same cumulative common sense, the same

spontaneous identity of perception on the part of ordinary men, that

forms, as Aristotle says, the fundamental test of what is real. The

world of reality is distinguished from the world of dreams because

the former is the same for all men. It is ὁ παᾶι δοκεῖ. The same

fact is the foundation and the justification of trial by jury—an

institution in which, as Sir Henry Maine has observed, we {260}

have the very abstract and essence of all practicable democratic

government.

It is true that even here we are brought sharply back again to those

limitations by which the powers of the normal man are surrounded.

The jury, who represent the normal man’s intelligence, require, as

Sir Henry Maine points out, to have the facts on which they are to

base their judgment, in exact proportion as these are obscure or

complicated, reduced to order for them by advocates whose powers are

more than normal. It is also true that, though it is the identity

of ordinary men’s perceptions which shows the reality and the

qualities of external objects, ordinary men’s perceptions would

never have sufficed to show us that the earth was not the centre of

the universe, and that the sun did not move round it. But the true

moral of all that has been just insisted on is, that in denying to

the masses of mankind those special powers which actively initiate

and actively promote progress, and actively sustain the fabric of

advanced civilisation, we are not denying to the masses of mankind

great moral and great intellectual qualities generally. We are

not asserting that the normal, the average, the ordinary man is

incapable of being developed into a creature endowed with beliefs,

thoughts, and feelings which are not only noble and correct, but

which expand and improve as civilisation advances. We are merely

asserting that the ordinary man, or the masses of mankind, which

are simply the ordinary man multiplied, cannot provide themselves

{261} with the conditions of their own progressive development; or,

to put the matter in a still more comprehensive way, we are merely

asserting that that particular form of greatness which improves

those conditions or sustains them, by influencing, or compelling, or

enabling masses of men to act or think as they would not act or think

otherwise, constitutes a very small portion of human activity, and a

still smaller portion of human life.

This truth has been lost sight of because modern social philosophers,

led astray by political and other passions, have confused two

distinct things—man as a moral being, moving in a circle of

prescribed duties, and man as a being capable of public or social

initiative; and the more we study the ordinary man, and the more

fully we appreciate the varied possibilities of his nature, the more

clearly shall we see, and the more ungrudgingly shall we recognise,

how absolutely he is, so far as civilisation is concerned, dependent

on the exceptional man for even those very powers in virtue of which

the action of the exceptional man is controlled by him.

The general or the sentimental objections, then, which might not

unnaturally arise in the minds of many when the claims of the great

man to be the sole agent of progress are first broadly asserted, are

found to disappear altogether when the meaning of these claims is

more fully considered. But sentimental objections, as has been said

already, are by no means the only objections which these claims have

{262} to encounter. Objections will be raised against them which

are economic rather than sentimental, and which, moreover,—this is a

still more important fact—rest solely upon a practical, and have no

theoretical basis.

In order to see what these objections are it will be well to consider

them in their extremest and most uncompromising form. We will

accordingly consider them as put forward by the socialists. That the

objections of the socialists to the claims made for the great man

are not grounded in any theory that consistently disallows them, is

sufficiently shown by the fact that even the most extreme socialists,

no less than the members of every other militant party, are always

extolling the exceptional qualities of their own leaders. Agitators,

thinkers, and writers like Karl Marx, Lassalle, and Engels have

been extolled by their followers as though in their own way equal

to Cæsar and Napoleon, to Aristotle, Galileo, and Bacon; and their

works are continually called “marvels of reasoning,” and described as

evincing “such powers of thought as are given to only a few men in

the course of five hundred years.” The arguments, therefore, which

are employed by socialistic thinkers to convince them that the great

man is not essential to social progress, and plays no real part in

it—those arguments to the examination of which the first chapters of

this work were devoted, do not really convince even those who lay

most stress on them, so far as they are applicable to social progress

generally. For the {263} socialists in practice are forced to limit

the application of them to two kinds of social action only; and these

are social activity in the domains of political government and of

wealth-production. They are, moreover, applied to the latter of these

with so much more strictness than to the former, that the objections

to the special claims of the great man as a wealth-producer are the

only ones that here require our attention.

Now even here we shall find that the objections in question are

originated not by theoretical, but by practical considerations only;

for one of the most curious features in the history of socialistic

thought, from the time when socialists claim that it first began

to be scientific till to-day, has been the unwilling replacement,

in their theory of production and progress, of that factor or

element—and this factor is the great man—which Karl Marx, with his

doctrine of labour as the sole creator of value, had eliminated.

Under one disguise or another the great or exceptional man, as

distinct from the average labourer whose productivity is measured

by time, has been put back in the place from which the theory of

Marx had ousted him; and the inventors, the men of enterprise, the

organisers and capitalists of to-day—or, as Mr. Sidney Webb calls

them, “_the monopolists of business ability_”—are given back to us

in the guise of officials of the bureaucratic State, armed by the

State with the industrial powers of slave-owners. It is true that

socialistic theorists still do their utmost to hide from themselves

and their followers the nature {264} of this change, by means of

those curious arguments which find their chief exponent in Mr.

Spencer, and which have rendered sociology thus far so useless as a

practical science. But the change is but partly hidden, nevertheless,

even from themselves.

Why, then, should they endeavour to hide it at all? Why should

they shrink from a perfectly frank avowal—an avowal which they are

constantly compelled to make by implication—that the great man’s

power in wealth-production is what has been described, and that every

increase in the wealth of civilised communities is due to him? They

shrink from making this avowal for one reason only. This reason is

that their main practical object is to represent the possessions of

the great man, or of the few, as a treasure to which the few have no

theoretical right, and which can be, and ought to be, divided amongst

the many. They are therefore compelled, by the necessities of popular

agitation, to obscure the part that the few have played in producing

it, and to pretend, so far as possible, that it is produced by the

undifferentiated many. If it were not for its promise to the many of

some indefinite pecuniary gain, it may safely be said that socialism

would have been never heard of; and if this pecuniary promise were

made good, the demands of the socialists, as a practical party, would

be satisfied.

And now having considered this, let the reader look back at the

claims that have, in our present argument, been advanced for the

great man thus far. It will be seen that not a single claim has

been {265} advanced on his behalf to which, on practical grounds,

any socialist could object. We have not assumed that out of all the

wealth he produces he shall take a larger, or even so large a share,

as the least efficient of his workmen. On the contrary, we have

assumed that his contributions to the national wealth find their

way into the pockets of those around him, and that for him nothing

is left but the bare means of subsistence. It has indeed been shown

that he must necessarily have the control of capital, and be free to

use it in the way that he thinks best; but this is only because the

control of capital affords the sole means by which, amongst free men,

industrial discipline can be enforced and the productive genius of

the few be communicated to the muscles of the many. For all that has

been said thus far to the contrary, the great man himself may derive

from his control of it no advantage whatsoever. We have assumed only

that by his use of it he shall concentrate his exceptional faculties

on the practical business of wealth-production with as much intensity

and devotion as he would do if the whole of what he produced were to

go into his own coffers. We have, in fact, been regarding the great

man as being socially the servant of the ordinary men, though in

technical matters he is their master.

So far, then, as our argument has up to this point proceeded, we

have merely in our theory assigned to the great man functions which

are implicitly assigned to him in the reasonings of the more recent

socialists themselves, whilst in practice we have {266} assumed

the realisation of the very conditions at which socialism aims. For

let us consider very briefly what these conditions are. The more

carefully the theoretical admissions and the practical promises of

the more recent socialists are examined, the more clear does it

become that the sole essential change which socialism would introduce

into the existing economic _régime_ would consist not in getting

rid of the great man, but in securing his activity on totally new

terms. The socialists aim, in fact, at securing the best industrial

masters and treating them like the worst servants. This, as social

reformers, is their fundamental peculiarity. For whilst they propose

to secure an equal distribution of products, they implicitly admit

that the producers may be divided into three classes—the men of

exceptional ability who produce an exceptional amount of wealth;

the mass of average men who produce a normal amount; and the idle,

the refractory, and the worthless, who produce less than the normal

amount; and they propose accordingly to apportion the products

as follows. To the average man they would give twice as much as

he produces; to the idle and the worthless man they would give a

hundred times as much as he produces; and to the great man, on whose

talents the fortunes of all the others depend, they would give from a

hundredth to a thousandth part of what he produces.

Now, whatever the reader may think of this economic programme,

there is nothing in the present work, thus far, to show that it is

impossible; and if {267} the object of socialists is to level social

conditions, to abolish all differences of rank, and to confiscate

all exceptional incomes, this book up to the present point might be

accepted as a handbook of socialism. For the reader will recollect

that when it was said that the great man’s activity involved the

existence of motives which would lead him to develop his faculties,

and that without such motives these faculties would be practically

non-existent, the question of what these motives were was for the

time altogether waived, and we assumed the development and the

subsequent exercise of his abilities as something that would take

place no matter under what conditions. The question, however, which

we then put on one side must now be taken up and submitted to a

careful examination. It being granted that the activity of the great

man is necessary, on what conditions can his activity be secured? Can

it be secured on the conditions that are proposed by socialism, or on

any others that even remotely resemble them?

{269}

BOOK IV

{271}

CHAPTER I

THE DEPENDENCE OF EXCEPTIONAL ACTION ON THE ATTAINABILITY OF

EXCEPTIONAL REWARD, OR THE NECESSARY CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE

MOTIVES TO ACTION AND ITS RESULTS.

In entering on the inquiry which now lies before us it is necessary

to recall to the reader, and to insist with renewed emphasis on a

fact which has been explained with the utmost fulness already. This

is the fact that those exceptional efficiencies of the few on which

the initiation, the progress, and the maintenance of civilisation

depend, and which in a technical sense we have here described as

_greatness_, do not consist of qualities which are unique in kind,

or which are not possessed in some measure by the masses of ordinary

men; but that they are made up of ordinary faculties magnified or

mixed together in unusual proportions. For although, as George Eliot

observes in a striking passage, the faculties of all men are the

same in kind, they manifest themselves in different men in such very

different degrees that a faculty or feeling which in one man has the

power and dimensions of a tiger, may never in another man outgrow

those of {272} a weasel. _Greatness_, then, is simply the possession

and exercise by such and such a person, in an exceptional degree,

of some faculty or assortment of faculties, the rudiments of which

are possessed by all. And the reason why it is necessary to insist

on this fact here is that, as a consequence of it, the use which

the great man makes of his exceptional powers—or, in other words,

their whole efficient existence—depends on certain causes which are

relatively, though not absolutely, similar to those on which depends

the use which the ordinary man makes of his.

Let us, then, consider the powers of the ordinary man first, and let

us take as examples of them those powers or faculties which are most

universally distributed amongst the human race—namely, the powers

by which the rudest populations obtain enough food to live upon.

Now such faculties, practically universal as they are, would be

potential only, not actual, if it were not for two things. These are

certain appetites or desires, having a physiological origin, on the

one hand, and the external conditions on the other, which make the

satisfaction of those appetites, or the fulfilment of those desires,

a possibility. Thus if men could live without eating, and had no

desire for food, those special faculties would be dormant which are

now exercised in agriculture; and this means that for all practical

purposes they would not exist at all. These faculties would also not

exist at all, no matter what men’s desire for food might be, if the

whole of the earth’s crust had {273} happened to be cast-iron, and

if tillage were consequently impossible, and there were no seeds to

sow. In other words, the very commonest and very simplest faculties

which human beings possess have a practical and a universal existence

in those beings, only because, in the first place, they minister

to universal wants, and because, in the second place, the earth is

so constituted as to supply the materials on which these faculties

can operate. Or, to put the matter in more general terms, the very

commonest and simplest faculties are not practically self-existent,

except as mere barren potentialities; and as practical forces they

exist only in the degree to which they are evoked by external things

and circumstances—by some external object, such as food, which

excites and will satisfy desire, and by external circumstances which

make the object obtainable.

Now if this be true of those faculties of the commonest kind,

ministering to the needs which all men inevitably feel alike, and

which they always must feel so long as they remain alive, it is yet

more obviously true of those higher and rarer faculties ministering

to needs which are so far from being inevitable, that whole races

have existed and do exist without any conscious knowledge of them.

The great inventor, the great director of industry, will not develop

or use his exceptional latent faculties unless by the use of them he

can achieve some object which he desires; and this must be something

which the community has to give, or the possession of which it will

secure to him if it be something which he himself {274} produces.

Columbus, for instance, as the records of his life show us, would

never have braved the Atlantic if the society of his time, though in

the end it rewarded him ill, had not rendered an enormous reward both

in money and rank possible—a reward which he specifically bargained

for in the event of his enterprise being successful. And similarly in

the case of great men in general, unless society is so constituted

as to render some reward or other the natural or possible result of

the exercise of certain exceptional faculties, and unless this reward

shall be one which the great men shall think worth working for, their

exceptional faculties will remain potential only. That is to say,

their faculties will be practically non-existent, and the community

will be as helpless as it would be if it had no great men at all.

Now here we have what is virtually a genuine social contract. It is

not, indeed, such a contract as Rousseau dreamed of. It was never

made deliberately at any period of history by two independent parties

coming together for the purpose. It was the result of a gradual and

quite unconscious process. Ordinary men, having experienced the

advantages of being directed by great men, submitted instinctively

to such conditions as the great men demanded, and instinctively

offered them, or allowed them to retain possession of, such rewards

as were necessary to stimulate them to further action. But these

proceedings were a bargain, a social contract none the less, although

they were not recognised as such; and they constitute a bargain

still—a bargain which is {275} continually being renewed, and the

terms of which reformers are continually trying to alter. Thus the

socialists’ proposal to take from the founder of a new industry all

the wealth that his exceptional faculties have created, and pay him,

as they propose to do, with the paper money of honour, is merely an

attempt to make a new bargain with the great man, which shall secure

his services on cheaper terms for the little men. Similarly, all

encouragement offered to art and science by the State is a bargain

offered to a number of unknown persons, who are presumed to be the

possessors potentially of artistic and scientific faculties; the

State engaging to give them certain opportunities and rewards, if

they on their part will make their potential faculties actual.

Now with regard to this bargain or contract which the community has

not only made, but is always remaking and revising with its great

men, we must observe that it is a bargain which, from the necessities

of the case, is made by the community solely with individual great

men who are living. It is not a bargain offered to the great men

of the past, no matter how much of his greatness the living great

man may owe to them. It is impossible to bargain with the dead,

and therefore to the present question the claims of the dead are

as irrelevant as the claims of protoplasm. The present question

is how shall such and such living people be induced to develop

certain superiorities which are latent in them, or to use to the

best advantage superiorities which have been developed already. And

{276} the answer depends on these men themselves. It depends on the

characters which they personally possess, and not on the parents

or ancestors from whom their characters have been derived. We can

no more go behind the personality of the great man in bargaining

with him, than we can go behind the personality of the dipsomaniac

in attempting to cure him. We may excuse the failing of the latter

as something which he has inherited from his ancestors; we can

cure it only as something for which he is himself responsible. If

civilisation, therefore, depends on the great man, no community can

become or remain civilised which does not so arrange itself as to

accord to its living great men such rewards as they themselves feel

to be a sufficient inducement firstly to develop their faculties, and

secondly to employ them to the utmost.

Here, then, we have a new and final verification of that truth

which has already been established against the arguments of Mr.

Spencer—namely, that the great man is a _vera causa_ of progress,

and that no explanation of progress has any practical value which

does not base itself on an examination of the great man’s character.

And that such is the case will become yet more apparent when we take

into consideration the following additional facts, which are quite

distinct from any we have yet touched upon, and which practically

have an equal, or perhaps even a superior, importance.

If the exceptional faculties of the great man were so far like

the faculties possessed by all men, {277} that by looking at him

we could tell that he was a potential inventor, or organiser of

industry, or philosopher, as easily as by looking at a common man

we can tell that he can trundle a wheelbarrow, the entire force of

the foregoing argument would be lost. The community would then know

what each great man could do for it, and could force him to do it by

flogging or starving him if he refused. The ordinary faculties—the

faculties of manual labour—can be made to exert themselves precisely

in this way. A large number of the great works of antiquity were due

to labour successfully stimulated by the whip. But it is only a man’s

commonest faculties that can be called into action thus; and they can

be called into action thus only for this reason—that those who coerce

him know that these faculties are possessed by him, and they also

know the task which they wish to make him accomplish. But in the case

of the great man both these conditions are wanting. It is impossible

to tell that he possesses any exceptional faculties till he himself

chooses to show them; and until circumstances supply him with some

motive for exercising them, he will probably be hardly aware that

he possesses such faculties himself. Moreover, even if he gives the

world some reason to suspect their existence, the world will still

not know what he can do with them, and will consequently not be able

to impose on him any task until he himself chooses to show of what he

is capable. Any farmer by looking at Burns could have told that he

had the makings of a ploughman in him, and have forced {278} him,

under certain circumstances, to do so much ploughing daily; but no

one could have told that he was a poet if he had not of his own free

will revealed the fact to the public; and even when the public were

aware of it, no one could have forced him to compose _The Cotter’s

Saturday Night_. A press-gang could have turned Columbus into a

common sailor, but not all the sovereigns of Europe could have forced

him to discover a new hemisphere. On the contrary, it was he who had

to force sovereigns into the reluctant belief that possibly there

was a new hemisphere to discover. The great man, therefore, is lord

of his exceptional faculties in a way in which the common man is not

lord of his common faculties. The existence of the latter faculties

cannot be concealed; the kind of work that can be accomplished by

them is known to everybody; and therefore the community by the

exercise of mere force can command the average man, and make him

work like an animal. But over the exceptional faculties of the great

man it has no command whatever, except what the great man gives it;

for it neither knows that the faculties exist, nor what things the

faculties can do, until the great man elects to reveal the secret.

He cannot be made to reveal it, he can only be induced to do so;

and he can be induced to do so only by a community which offers to

exceptional faculties some assured and exceptional reward, just as a

reward is offered for evidence against an unknown murderer. Moreover,

just as in the latter case it very often happens that the {279}

reward originally offered has to be raised several times before a

sum is reached which will induce the witness to come forward, so

must any community, as the condition of becoming civilised, raise

the rewards of greatness to such a figure that the possessors of

latent superiorities will be induced to develop and use them. And

hence the great man not only causes progress by what he does, but he

influences also the entire structure of society, by his character,

which regulates the terms on which he will consent to do it.

This is the point at which the science of sociology primarily comes

in contact with the practical problems of to-day. That all progress

is due to the efforts of the superior minority is a truth which,

taken by itself, and apart from other truths allied to it, we can

merely recognise and assent to. We can do nothing to alter it; nor

will the fact of our recognising it, if taken by itself, tend to

alter or guide our conduct. We are not even able to settle the number

of males and females which shall be produced in each family. Still

less can we settle or increase the number of individuals who shall

bring into the world with them talents more than ordinary. But though

no community can do anything to settle or alter the percentage of

potential greatness that will be born into it from generation to

generation, it can settle or alter the social conditions and rewards

by means of which this potential greatness shall be developed and

enabled to use itself; and a very large part, though not the whole,

of political wisdom {280} will thus consist in arranging these

conditions and rewards, so that from each potentially great man,

whatever degree or kind of potentiality may be his, the community

may elicit the highest and most far-reaching efforts of which he is

capable. It will, of course, be to the interest of the community to

secure this result by offering the great man the smallest and least

costly reward, the desire of which will induce him to develop and

exert himself to the utmost; but the ultimate fixer of the great

man’s price—let it once again be said—is not the community, but the

great man himself.

It is this sociological and psychological truth that even the

clearest-headed amongst the socialists are continually forgetting.

They perceive it at one moment, at the next moment they entirely

forget it, and solemnly proceed to build up their visionary polity

on foundations which their own arguments had previously condemned.

A curious example of this “_inability_,” as Mr. Spencer calls it,

“_to comprehend assembled propositions in their totality_” is to be

found in a remarkable passage by Mr. Sidney Webb. Having observed

that “_socialists would nationalise both rent and interest by the

State becoming the sole landowner and capitalist_,” he goes on to

acknowledge that great fundamental fact which it is the main object

of the present work to elucidate. “_Such an arrangement, however_,”

he says, “_would leave untouched the third monopoly—the largest of

them all—the monopoly of business ability_.” In these last words he

appears to be like a Daniel {281} come to judgment. He recognises

in the fact that the few have a natural monopoly of faculties, the

exercise of which is required for the progressive well-being of all,

a genuine and a formidable difficulty in the way of the realisation

of socialism; but now comes the passage for the sake of which these

others have been quoted. Great as this difficulty is, he tells us,

“_the more recent socialists_” have devised a way for getting over

it. And what does the reader think this way is? It has at all events

the merit of being very simple. “_The more recent socialists_,” says

Mr. Webb, “_attack this third monopoly also by allotting to every

worker an equal wage, whatever may be the nature of his work_.”

It has been thought worth while to quote Mr. Sidney Webb because he

is an exceptionally favourable specimen of the modern socialistic

theoriser. It is therefore interesting to notice the hiatus that

here yawns in his argument. The entire question which is really at

issue is begged by him. His allies, he tells us, though they cannot

destroy the monopoly which the few possess of exceptional business

powers, will destroy the effects of this monopoly by taking away

from the few nearly all the wealth that their exceptional powers

produce. It never seems to occur to him to ask whether, under these

circumstances, the few would develop or exercise their exceptional

powers at all. And yet the whole problem for him, as a socialist,

lies here, and lies nowhere else. For from the very fact that these

powers are admittedly a monopoly of the few, it is {282} evident

that their existence cannot be assumed in anybody unless he exerts

himself to give some sign of their presence. External authority,

therefore, can compel nobody to employ them who does not put himself

at the mercy of the authorities by letting them know he has them;

and thus “_the more recent socialists_,” in attacking “_the third

and greatest monopoly_,” are really themselves at the mercy of the

very monopolists whom they propose to attack. It is true that if a

socialistic revolution could be brought about suddenly, existing

great men known to have certain talents, which had been already

developed and exercised under conditions which the revolution

destroyed, might be seized on by the State, in its capacity of

universal employer, and forced to continue something of their former

voluntary activity by threats of torture or some similar method of

coercion. But even granting this to be possible, it would only solve

the problem for a moment; for as these men died—and some of them

would be dying daily—new talent would be wanted to take the place of

the old; and though the State might coerce such talent as was already

developed, it could not by coercion secure the services of the new,

because threats of coercion would never tempt new talent to discover

itself, but would, on the contrary, drive it yet deeper beneath the

surface.

Exceptional potentialities can be called out and realised only by

a kind of action which is the very antithesis of coercion, and

which is analogous to that of sunshine on buds, or flowers or {283}

fruits—namely, the penetrating, the warming, the stimulating

action of the hope of certain personal advantages on the mind of

the exceptional man, which advantages he will not only covet as

advantageous, but will recognise as the natural result of the

exercise of his exceptional faculties, and as a result attainable by

the exercise of these faculties only. What these personal advantages

are, the desire of which, coupled with their attainability,

is necessary to stimulate men who have more than ordinary

potentialities, to do greater things by developing them than are done

by ordinary men, must be determined by reference to the actual facts

of life, the records of which are ample, and the details of which,

though numerous, can by careful analysis be easily reduced to order.

{284}

CHAPTER II

THE MOTIVES OF THE EXCEPTIONAL WEALTH-PRODUCER

In spite of their frequent forgetfulness of the fact just insisted

on, that the development and exercise of exceptional faculties can

be secured only through the influence of some exceptional motive,

this is not a fact which socialists theoretically deny. On the

contrary, often as they forget it, with curious consequences to

their reasoning, yet just as often, when they happen to be directly

confronted with it, they are loud in declaring that they recognise it

quite as clearly as their opponents; and a considerable portion of

their more modern writings consists of a setting forth of the various

exceptional rewards which will, according to them, in the socialistic

State, elicit from exceptional men the exercise of their utmost

powers. Moreover, the rewards on which the socialists principally

insist are rewards, the desire of which is admitted by all parties to

be an actual force in society as at present constituted, and in fact

to have been, ever since the dawn of history, the motive to which

much activity of the highest kind {285} has been due. These rewards

have been defined in a recent _Handbook of Socialism_ as the pleasure

of “_excelling_,” “_the joy in creative work_,” the satisfaction

which work for others brings to “_the instincts of benevolence_,”

and, lastly, “_social approval_,” or the homage which is called

“_honour_.”

If the socialists, however, confined themselves to maintaining

that the desire of such rewards as these constitutes a sufficient

motive to exceptional activity of certain kinds, they would not

only be asserting what nobody else would deny, but they would be

putting forward nothing which, as socialists, it is their interest

to assert. The ultimate proposition which, as socialists, they aim

at establishing is not that certain kinds of exceptional men do

certain kinds of exceptional things, in obedience to the motives in

question; but that because some exceptional men, endowed with certain

temperaments, are motived by them to activities of certain specific

kinds, other exceptional men will be motived by them with equal

certainty to other activities of a kind totally different—and more

especially to the activities which result in the production of wealth.

Here is the fundamental point on which the socialists join issues

with their opponents. Their opponents, they say, assume that the

sole reward or advantage, the desire of which will stimulate the

monopolists of “business ability” to exert that ability in the

production and augmentation of wealth, is a share of wealth for

themselves proportionate to the amount produced by them—an {286}

amount which will separate their lot from that of the majority

of their fellows. Now if this should be really the case, as the

socialists are coming to perceive, the fact would be fatal to the

entire ideal of socialism. They are consequently now directing the

best of their ingenuity to showing that the desire of possessing

exceptional wealth is altogether superfluous as a motive for

producing it, and that the great producers of it, when all chance of

possessing it is taken from them, will find in the pleasures of the

strain which the productive process necessitates—especially if these

are supplemented by the inexpensive thanks of the community—a more

powerful inducement to exertion than is the prospect of the largest

fortune.

Now in endeavouring to make this peculiar position good, it is

evident that the burden of proof lies with the socialists themselves;

for although the doctrine that all exceptional exertions in

wealth-production are motived solely by an avidity for exceptional

wealth as such—and this is the doctrine which the socialists set

themselves to controvert—is a very imperfect rendering of what their

opponents actually maintain, it embodies an assertion which the

socialists themselves declare to have been true of all exceptional

exertion in wealth-production hitherto. No one declares this more

passionately and more persistently than they. For what, as political

agitators, has been their chief moral indictment against the typical

great men of industry—the organisers of labour, the introducers of

new {287} machinery, the pioneers of commerce? Their chief moral

indictment has been this: that these men, instead of labouring for

their fellows, or for the sake of any of those rewards which the

socialists declare to be so satisfying, have been motived solely by

the passion of selfish “greed.” Its hideous influence, they say, is

as old as civilisation itself, and the “_monopolists of business

ability_” in Tyre and Sidon were as much its creatures as are their

modern representatives in Chicago. And this assertion, unlike many

made by the socialists, has the merit of being, so far as it goes,

true. Greed, of course, is a word which, in addition to its direct

meaning, carries with it an accretion of moral insult; but putting

aside this, it means in the present connection merely a desire on

the part of the great wealth-producer to enjoy an amount of wealth

proportionate to the amount produced by him: and from the dawn of

civilisation up to the present time all great wealth-producers,

whether merchants, manufacturers, or inventors, have had the desire

of enjoying such wealth as their motive. The desire has been

connected with the activity just as universally and closely as the

desire of water is connected with the act of drinking it, or the

desire of winning a woman with the act of making love to her. If

the socialists, then, would persuade us that a motive so universal

as this can be now superseded by others of an entirely opposite

character, they can do so only by adducing the clearest evidence

that, on the one hand, this motive itself is losing its old power,

and {288} that other motives, on the other hand, are actually

acquiring and exercising it.

Let us first, then, consider the passion of greed itself, and ask

whether there is anything in its connection with wealth-production

hitherto which may lead us to think that in spite of its universality

in the past, it is merely a transitory propensity from which

exceptional men will free themselves, instead of being a propensity

rooted in the very constitution of human nature.

And here again the socialists will be amongst our most important

witnesses; for just as they, of all writers and thinkers, have done

most to call attention to the fact that up to the present time greed

has been the main motive by which the exceptional wealth-producers

have been actuated, so they, of all writers and thinkers, have done

most to call attention to another fact as well, which shows the

motive in question to be as permanent as it is universal. For that

very desire of the producer to possess what he himself produces,

which, when found in the exceptional man, they denounce as greed,

and which they tell us that the exceptional man will get rid of in

the course of a year or two, is the very desire which, as existing

in the common man, they have assumed to be the foundation of his

whole industrial character; and to it have all their most fervid

and powerful appeals been made. The socialists, in their attempts

to excite the masses against the existing order, have relied less

on rhetorical declarations that the labouring man gets {289} very

little, than on the quasi-scientific assertion that he gets less

than he produces, and that consequently the wealth of his employers

is merely his own wealth stolen from him. “_All wealth is due to

labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is due_” has formed from

the first, and still forms the text from which the socialists always

preach when addressing the labouring classes; and the use of this

text as the watchword of popular agitation is obviously an admission

that, as a producing agent, man is motived so exclusively by the

desire to possess what he produces, or else its fair equivalent,

that he naturally resents the idea of producing anything merely in

order that others may take it away from him. Indeed, this doctrine

that the desire for the product, and the producer’s sense that he

has a right to it, form the only motive for production possible for

a free man, formed the unquestioned basis of the entire socialistic

psychology so long as the theory of Marx was held by the socialists

to be unassailable, according to which wealth was the product of

average labour, and the common or average labourer was the sole

true producer. It was only as time went on, and the socialists were

slowly compelled to recognise the few to be producers of wealth just

as truly as the many, that the socialists began their attempts to

get rid of the doctrine which a very little while ago they regarded

as axiomatic—the doctrine that each producer has a right to his own

products, and that his hope of possessing it is his principal motive

for its {290} production. In making these attempts, however, they

have, with a judicious eclecticism, been content to apply them to the

exceptional man only; and the common man and his motives they leave

undisturbed, except when they venture on the doctrine that the common

man’s motive for production will in the future be the desire of

possessing, not only all that he produces, but all that he produces

and a great deal else besides.

If, then, it is unlikely that this desire to possess the product

will cease to be operative as the motive to production amongst the

masses, that it will cease to be operative amongst the few is more

unlikely still; for the man who is possessed of average powers only,

cannot hope to produce more than the average man requires, and his

object in producing tends to represent itself to his mind in terms

of the comfort which he hopes to experience, rather than in terms of

the value of products which he hopes to possess. But the exceptional

man, whose peculiarity as a producer is this, that he produces not

only as much as the average man requires, but an indefinite amount

in addition to it, is constantly balancing his products not with his

immediate wants, but with the amount of intellectual effort which he

has expended in the process of production. Indeed, the more closely

we consider the matter, the more strongly we shall be convinced that

the desire of possessing wealth proportionate to the amount produced

by them becomes as a motive to production stronger in men, not {291}

weaker, in exact proportion as their productive powers are great,

and the amount produced by them appeals to their intellects rather

than to their necessities.

So far, then, as a study of this motive itself can inform us, the

socialistic idea that it will ever cease to be paramount has no

foundation whatever, and is contradicted even by the socialists

themselves. The only fact connected with this motive directly which

wears so much as a semblance of serious evidence in their favour is

the fact often dwelt on by emotional writers like Mr. Kidd, that many

men who have made enormous fortunes have given away a large part of

them for what he calls “altruistic” purposes; and writers of the kind

in question take this fact for evidence that the desire of possessing

great wealth is ceasing to be the motive for producing it. But those

who allow themselves to argue thus, show a curious carelessness in

their examination of human action; for the fact referred to, so far

as it proves anything, negatives rather than supports the conclusion

they seek to draw from it. It is perfectly true that many men of

great industrial ability have produced large fortunes and given them

away afterwards. But in order to give, a man must first possess; and

it is in the act of giving magnificently for some specified purpose

that many men most fully realise the power with which wealth endows

them. Thus the fact that many men will produce in order that they

may have the delight of giving is no more a proof that they would

produce under the _régime_ of {292} socialism, which would aim at

depriving them of anything that they might possibly give, than the

fact that a man would with pleasure give five shillings to a beggar

is a proof that he would be equally pleased if the beggar were to

pick his pocket. Even the men who produce wealth—and no doubt there

are such—without any conscious sense that they produce it because of

their desire to possess it, would show that such was their motive by

their instinctive and indignant refusal to go on producing it, if

they knew that it would be forcibly taken from them.

And now, since we have seen that “greed” as a motive to

wealth-production shows no internal tendency to lose its old

efficiency, let us turn to those other motives which the socialists

tell us are to supersede it, and ask whether there is anything in

their known operations hitherto which indicates that in the domain of

wealth-production they will acquire an efficiency similar to it. This

is not an inquiry which is very difficult to pursue, for the motives

in question are of a very familiar kind, and the kinds of activity

which they have produced hitherto are notorious.

What these motives are has been sufficiently shown already in

language borrowed from the socialistic writers themselves—the

pleasure of “_excelling_,” the “_joy in creative work_,” the

pleasure of doing good to others, and, lastly, the enjoyment of the

approbation of others, or of the yet more flattering tribute commonly

called “_honour_.” Now these motives, it will be seen, are of two

distinct kinds, the first three {293} being based exclusively on

some pleasurable condition of mind, which is independent of anybody

except the individual who actually experiences it; the two last being

based on a pleasurable condition of mind, which is directly dependent

on the actions or the attitude of other people. We may therefore

reduce these motives to two—namely, self-realisation, in the first

place, and recognition by others, in the second. This classification

will be not only shorter, but more comprehensive than the other; for

self-realisation will include not only the joys of self-improvement

and artistic creation, but those of the pursuit of truth and the

performance of religious duty, and will distinguish the pleasure of

doing good to others from the pleasure of being thanked or praised

for it.

And now let us consider what those kinds of exceptional activity are,

in the production of which one or other of these motives, or both of

them, have played, hitherto, any considerable part. We shall find

them to be as follows: heroic conduct in battle, or in the face of

any exceptional danger; artistic creation; the pursuit of speculative

truth; what theologians call works of mercy; and, lastly, the

propagation of religion. This list, if understood in its full sense,

is exhaustive.

Now of these five kinds of action we may dismiss the last from our

consideration, not because it has not a most important influence on

civilisation, but because it has no direct connection with any of

the processes of wealth-production, except in so far as it {294}

tends to divert men’s attention from them. And with regard to the

works of mercy something similar must be said also; for though they

undoubtedly have a close connection with wealth, they do not aid

at its production, still less at its increase, but merely at the

distribution of portions of it, which have been produced already,

amongst persons whom it would otherwise not reach. The love for

others, for example, by which works of mercy are motived, may prompt

a man to send London children for a holiday into the country by

train, but it would never have prompted him to invent the locomotive

engine. It may prompt him to secure for a youth an education in

modern science, but it would never have prompted him to write the

treatises of Professor Huxley. All activity of this kind, then,

whatever form it may take, is, in a sociological sense, essentially

parasitic. It implies the previous exercise of another set of

faculties totally distinct from those directly implied in itself,

and, together with other faculties, other motives belonging to them.

It has, then, with the actual process of wealth-production as little

to do as has religious propagandism itself; and, like religious

propagandism, we may dismiss it from our consideration here. The only

forms of activity with which we are called on to deal with here will

thus be artistic creation, the pursuit of speculative truth, and

military or quasi-military feats of heroism.

As to artistic creation, it is, no doubt, perfectly true, as is

proved by the efforts of countless devoted amateurs, that men with

artistic powers will {295} often do their utmost to develop them,

merely for the sake of the pleasure which the exercise of these

powers brings with it; whilst literature is even more obviously

than painting cultivated by men who devote themselves to it solely

as a means of self-expression. Indeed, it might reasonably be

contended that finer books and paintings would be produced if it were

impossible for painters and writers to make money by producing them,

than are now produced with a view to captivating the public purchaser.

So, too, the pursuit of scientific and philosophic truth—arduous

though it is—is generally undertaken by men whose principal motive is

the pleasure their work brings them.

A watcher of the skies,

When some new planet swims into his ken,

may well be supposed to find in that thrilling moment a reward

sufficient to compensate him for all his pains in arriving at it;

and most branches of science would yield us similar illustrations.

Indeed, the career characteristic of scientists and philosophers

generally is a conclusive proof that the principal motive of their

activity is not the desire of any extrinsic reward, the amount of

which they will balance against the amount or the quality of their

efforts, but a passion for truth as truth, which they indulge in for

its own sake only.

Now granting all this, what will its bearing be on the question

of whether the pleasures of pure self-realisation will suffice to

stimulate those {296} exceptional faculties whose function it is

to maintain and increase the production of wealth? With regard to

artistic creation, we are certainly bound to admit that great works

of art are wealth of a highly important kind, and when a good picture

is produced, as it often is, solely in obedience to the painter’s

artistic impulse, we have a genuine example of wealth produced in

obedience to that kind of motive whose efficiency the socialists

desire to establish. Further, with regard to the pursuit of truth, as

Mill points out in a passage that has been already quoted, progress

in speculative knowledge is the basis of all other progress, and

notably of progress in the arts and processes of wealth-production.

It must, accordingly, be admitted that in a certain sense all

progress in wealth-production has for its basis a kind of

disinterested activity with which the desire of possessing wealth

has nothing at all to do. And yet in spite of this, neither the case

of the artist nor of the philosopher warrants the inference that the

motives which are sufficient for them will ever have a similar effect

on the faculties of the great wealth-producers. The evidence, in

fact, as soon as we have fully examined it, will be found to point in

a direction precisely opposite.

For, to begin with the case of the artist, it must be remembered,

in the first place, that works of art, such as pictures painted by

the artist’s hand, form a very small, though an important part of

wealth, and that they are hardly wealth at all from the {297} point

of view of the many, unless they are reproduced and multiplied by

adequate mechanical processes. Now, though it is quite conceivable

that a painter might paint a Madonna solely because the realisation

of his own ideas delighted him, it is hardly to be expected that

other men will rack their brains to devise blocks, presses, and

preparations by which copies of it may be made and multiplied, solely

for the pleasure of reproducing ideas which are not their own. It

must further be added that delight in creation for its own sake can

be attributed as a sufficient motive to the highest class of artists

only. As for the men whose artistic powers are true, but qualify them

only for decorative not for creative work—the men, for example, who

design beautiful stuffs and furniture—though the exercise of their

power may be doubtless itself a pleasure to them, they are certainly

as a class not given to exercising them without the expectation of

some proportionate pecuniary reward. Indeed, in exact proportion as

artistic creation assimilates itself to the processes by which wealth

in general is produced, the mere pleasure of the work itself ceases

to be a sufficient motive for it.

Next, with regard to the pursuit of speculative knowledge, though

this, and more especially pure scientific discovery, may form the

basis of all productive effort, it is very far from being a form

of productive effort itself. It has, on the contrary, no necessary

connection with it. It does not even belong to the region in which

such effort operates. {298} Scientific truths, as apprehended by the

mere seeker after speculative knowledge, are like powerful spirits

secluded in some distant star; and, for any effect which they have on

the processes of economic production, they might just as well have

never been discovered at all. Before they can be applied to practical

purposes they have to be mastered and digested by a new class of

men altogether, who value them not for themselves, but solely for

the use they can be put to. Thus, in order that speculative truths

may be connected with productive effort, they must pass out of the

hands of the men who first discovered them, and be made over to men

whose motive in acquiring them will emphatically not be desire of

the mere pleasure of intellectual acquisition, but the desire of

some marketable products with a calculable pecuniary value, in the

production of which a knowledge of the truths in question will help

them. Thus speculative activity, just like artistic creation, in

exact proportion as it connects itself with the ordinary processes

of wealth-production, ceases to find its motive in the desire of

self-realisation, and claims to be rewarded by the possession of the

objective results produced by it.

And now let us turn from the motives which consist in the desire

of self-realisation to those which consist in the desire of the

approbation or the homage of others. This desire, which exercises a

great influence on the artist, and often also on the seeker after

speculative truth, concurrently with the {299} desire of pure

self-realisation, exhibits its force most signally when it is the

motive of military heroism; and the readiness with which a soldier

will risk his life for honour—honour which brings with it nothing

besides itself, excepting perhaps a medal and a scrap of ribbon—has

been said by socialistic writers to afford a conclusive proof that

any practical work, no matter how laborious, and more particularly

the work of the great wealth-producer, will be willingly undertaken

for the sake of the same reward. “_The soldier’s subsistence is

certain_,” writes a well-known contemporary enthusiast. “_It does not

depend upon his exertions. At once he becomes susceptible to appeals

to his patriotism. He will dare anything for glory, and value a bit

of bronze which is ‘the reward of valour’ far more than a hundred

times its weight in gold._” The implication, of course, is that

what men will do in war they will do in peaceful industry; and the

writer adds, in order to point this moral, “_yet many of the private

soldiers come from the worst of the population_.” This passage is

quoted with rapture by another socialistic theorist, who exclaims,

“_Let those especially notice this last point who fancy we must wait

till men are angels before socialism be practical_.” And even so

well-trained a thinker as Mr. Frederic Harrison has argued, from the

readiness with which men die in battle for their country, that they

will be equally willing to deny themselves or suffer martyrdom for

universal humanity.

To all these ideas and arguments there is one {300} answer to be

made. They are all founded on a failure to perceive the fact that

military activity is in many respects a thing apart, and depends

on psychological, and indeed on physiological processes which have

no counterpart in the domain of ordinary effort. That such is the

case can be seen very easily by following out the train of argument

suggested by Mr. Harrison. Mr. Harrison sees that in ordinary life

a man will not deliberately run the risk of being killed except for

the sake of a cause or person to which or whom he is profoundly

and indescribably attached. Indeed his attachment is presumably in

proportion to the risk he is prepared to run. And such being the case

in the field of ordinary life, Mr. Harrison assumes it must be the

case on the field of battle also, and that the soldier’s willingness

to risk death in fighting for a cause or country proves that this

cause or country is inexpressibly dear to him. And in certain

cases—when a country is in desperate straits, and everything hangs on

the issue of a single battle—this inference would be doubtless just;

but that it is not so generally is shown by the notorious fact that

some of the bravest and most reckless soldiers ever known to history

have been mercenaries who would fight as willingly for one country as

for another. Thus until Mr. Harrison can show us that men in ordinary

life will wear themselves out for either of two opposed objects

indifferently, or that they will risk death as willingly for a plain

woman as for a pretty one, it is obvious that men’s willingness to

risk death in war implies no corresponding {301} willingness to risk

it cutting trousers, and is for certain reasons a phenomenon standing

by itself.

That this is so is shown even more strikingly by the fact to which

the two other writers just quoted point with so much complacency.

This fact is the soldier’s undoubted willingness to pursue his

calling for pay which seems strikingly incommensurate with his risks.

His conduct in this respect is, no doubt, remarkable, especially

when compared with that of men in the domain of peaceful industry.

When any industrial occupation is in question a workman will expect

special wages if it is one which presents a likelihood of his often

hurting his thumb; but soldiers will risk the probability of being

tortured and blown to pieces for wages which would hardly induce a

peasant to hoe a turnip-field. This is no indication of any abnormal

poverty amongst the classes from whom the army is mainly recruited,

for the same phenomenon is constantly observable amongst men who are

not under the necessity of working for their living at all. Amongst

such men are numbers who in time of actual war will eagerly give

up a life of leisure and luxury for the certainty of hardship and

the probability of death—men who for the sake of anything else but

fighting would hardly, without a struggle, run the risk of a bad

dinner. But what these facts really suggest to us is not the insane

conclusion that because soldiers act differently from other men,

other men may be counted on to act like soldiers. On the contrary,

what they suggest is the question {302} why men will do as soldiers

what no one will do in any other capacity, and what soldiers

themselves will cease to do as soon as they become commissionaires.

For this peculiarity in the soldier’s conduct there are three

separate reasons. One is the strictness of military discipline,

which socialistic reformers would hardly find popular if they tried

to introduce it into factories and contractors’ yards. A second is

the peculiar character of the circumstances in which the soldier is

placed when his courage is most severely taxed—circumstances which

render the attempt to evade peril almost as difficult, and often

more perilous than facing it, and which in ordinary life would

be intolerable if they did not happen to be impossible. But the

most important reason is this—and the others without it would be

non-existent—that the instinct of fighting is inherent in the very

nature of the dominant races, and it will always prompt numbers to

do for the smallest reward what they could hardly, in its absence,

be induced to do for the largest. This immemorial instinct has been

wrought into our blood and nerves by the innumerable thousands of

years that have made us what we are; and all the battles of their

fathers are pulsing in men’s veins to-day. These instincts, no doubt,

are more controlled than formerly, and not so frequently roused; but

they are still there. They are ready to quicken at the mere sound of

military music; and the sight of a regiment marching draws cheers

from the most democratic crowd. Here is the {303} reason why the

soldier, though he submits himself to the most direct coercion, never

considers himself, and never is considered a slave; and military

activity will always be a thing apart, and for purposes of argument

will never be comparable to industrial, till human nature undergoes

so radical a change that men will as eagerly risk being killed by

unfenced machinery in a cotton-mill as they will being killed by a

bullet or a bayonet on the field of battle. Here again the facts for

which the socialists reason are indubitable; but the inference which

the socialists draw from them is altogether illusory.

It remains, however, to add that the desire of mere honour—of honour

unaccompanied by any extrinsic advantages—has an efficiency which is

strictly limited in the domain even of military activity itself. It

may move men, in the act of fighting, to the highest and most heroic

actions; but history shows us that it has not been found sufficient

to elicit the sustained intellectual efforts of the General, bent on

achieving some great and monumental conquest—efforts in which all

the excitement of the actual fighter is wanting, and in which the

coolest calculation plays as large a part as courage. The Cæsars and

Napoleons of the world have certainly not, as a rule, been content,

when they have crushed their enemies and augmented the magnificence

of their country, with the gift of a medal or two, and the privilege

of ending their days in the modest uniform of commissionaires

opening {304} shop doors. If, then, the mere honour of being a

great conqueror is insufficient to stimulate the activities by which

great conquests are achieved, a man is hardly likely to consecrate

his entire faculties to wealth-production merely that he may enjoy

the honour of being known as the proud producer of so many miles of

calico, or millions of pots of jam.

There is, therefore, in the present operations of those motives, for

which the socialists attempt to claim a universal efficiency, as

little to suggest that as motives to exceptional wealth-production

they will ever supersede the desire of exceptional possession, as

there is in the present operations of the desire of exceptional

wealth-possession to show that it is losing its power, or is at all

likely to be superseded. The final demonstration of this truth,

however, yet remains to be given.

The socialists, in dealing with this question of motive, have been

led into the curious blunders which have just now been exposed by

their singularly childish conception of what men’s actual motives

are. They divide motives into various well-known classes, and, so

far as it goes, their procedure is here correct. Their error is

that they conceive of man as a being on whom these motives, as a

rule, act separately; whereas in reality the very reverse is the

case. Acts which are due to any single motive are not the rule, but

the exception. For instance, even though artistic creation and the

pursuit of truth are motived in the case of many men by the pleasure

which the work brings them, some of the greatest {305} artists

and thinkers, with whom this motive was certainly powerful, have

been motived by the desire of pecuniary reward also. It is enough

to mention the names of Bacon and Shakespeare, Rubens, Turner, and

Scott. And with the desire of honour the desire of pecuniary reward

is found to mix itself yet more often and readily than it does with

the mere passion for artistic or for speculative work itself. The

psychological fact, however, which we must here notice is this—that

the pecuniary reward, though it seems theoretically to be in

contrast to any genuine desire for other men’s approbation, or for

the pleasure brought to the worker by the work itself, instead of

destroying the force of those other motives, increases it, just as

the admixture of a certain amount of alloy makes gold and silver more

valuable for artistic purposes. And now, having observed this, let us

turn back to the consideration of the desire of pecuniary reward as

the principal motive of wealth-production, and endeavour to make our

analysis of it more complete.

As the reader will recollect, the doctrine that all exceptional

exertions in wealth-production are motived solely by the desire of

exceptional wealth as such, although it is the doctrine imputed by

the socialists to their opponents, has been said already to be a

very imperfect rendering of any doctrine as to the subject which

their opponents would actually maintain; and the reason why it is

imperfect is simply that wealth as such is not the object for which

wealth is really sought by most of those men whom the {306} desire

of it most powerfully influences. For wealth as such, in the ordinary

sense of the phrase, is wealth regarded as a means of personal

self-indulgence. It stands for the finest wines, the richest food,

the softest beds, the most luxurious furniture—for everything that

can caress the senses and enervate the mind and body. And no doubt

its power of securing all these things to its possessors is one of

the qualities which render it an object of desire. But it is only

one; and though it is the most obvious of them, it is not the chief.

The subordinate place which it occupies is conclusively shown by the

fact that a very few thousands a year would suffice to provide a man

with every pleasure or luxury that his own senses could appreciate;

and yet men are often more eager, after these few thousands have been

secured by them, to pass this point of opulence than they ever were

in reaching it. Many men, moreover, who have surrounded themselves

with pomp and splendour are indifferent to the gratification of their

own senses altogether. Though their luncheon tables may groan under

every imaginable delicacy, they will themselves eat a slice or two of

cold ham, no better or worse than would have been secured them for a

shilling in a cheap restaurant. Their own beds will be no softer than

those of prosperous clerks; and, surrounded by cushioned sofas, they

will sit upon straight-backed chairs.

The principal reasons for which wealth is sought are not pleasures

of the senses, but pleasures of the mind and the imagination; and of

these pleasures {307} there are three principal kinds. One of them

is the pleasure of power, which in their analysis of human motives

the socialists conveniently overlook; and the two others happen to be

the very pleasures by the desire of which the socialists themselves

declare the exceptional wealth-producers are to be principally marked

in the future—namely, the pleasures of self-realisation and the

pleasures of social honour. Wealth is coveted by all really great

wealth-producers, not in preference to these, but as a means to all

or one of them. To many of our great wealth-producers, with their

strong practical faculties, wealth would be nothing if it brought to

them no accession of influence; to many it would be nothing if it

did not bring them the means of indulging their tastes, as distinct

from their physical appetites; to nearly all it would be nothing if

they did not, or if they did not hope it would, secure for them the

approbation and the respectful homage of others.

The only alternatives, then, which we have before us are as

follows:—If the great wealth-producer is a man of such coarse fibre

that none of those desires just mentioned are really his—neither the

desire of power, nor the desire of social honour, nor the desire

for that larger development of taste and moral activities which is

rendered possible by the possession of exceptional wealth—then it

is obvious that the sole motive left to him will be the gross or

unreasoning desire for the possession of wealth as such; and we are

brought back to the original {308} proposition which the socialists

set themselves to annihilate. But if, on the other hand, the great

wealth-producer is really capable of those higher desires which the

socialists assure us will shortly become so strong in him, the desire

of exceptional wealth, instead of being superseded by these, will be

stronger beyond calculation than it ever could be without them.

And it is, as a rule, the latter of these two suppositions which

practically represents the truth. Exceptional wealth is desired by

the men who produce it not for itself, but for its results; and in

proportion as the man who desires it possesses a lofty character, his

desire for it, being merged in the thought of the uses to which he

desires to put it, will itself become equally lofty also. But none

the less will the desire of the material wealth form the physical

basis in which his loftier desires inhere, just as the impulse of

sex remains the physical basis of the deepest and tenderest love

which a man feels for a woman, or as the brain is the physical basis

of every thought that a man can think. Thus the arguments of the

socialists recoil upon their own heads; and instead of tending to

show that the desire of possessing exceptional wealth will ever cease

to be indispensable as a motive to exceptional production of it, they

have merely succeeded in calling attention to the facts on which the

indispensable character of this motive depends.

We have not, however, finished with this question yet. There is a

further set of objections still {309} remaining to be considered

which, whilst based on an admission that wealth-production is motived

by the desire of wealth, aims at showing that this fact does not

necessarily result in more than a fraction of the consequences which

have up to this time flowed from it, but merely shows in reality

that those consequences are unalterable, and adds new force to the

arguments that have just been urged with regard to them.

The objections referred to are those embodied in the well-known

contention that though the possession of exceptional wealth must be

allowed to the exceptional men who are actually engaged in producing

it, and the exercise of whose business ability is just as essential

to the country’s prosperity as to their own, yet this possession of

wealth should be limited to themselves personally, and should not

be allowed to distribute itself amongst their idle and inefficient

families. In other words, it is urged that whilst the founders and

conductors of businesses are entitled to the incomes, no matter

how large, that are due to the exercise of their own powers, these

incomes should cease with the cessation of the powers that caused

them, and should not be allowed to perpetuate themselves, as they

do now, in the shape of interest paid to the passive owners of

capital. Such an arrangement, it is maintained by those who advocate

it, would at once coincide with the dictates of abstract justice,

and whilst securing to the exceptional wealth-producer, whose

services society requires, the full reward and motive necessary to

ensure his activity, would enrich the community at {310} large by

distributing amongst it an enormous income, which at present, instead

of stimulating anybody to any useful exertion, merely keeps a number

of men in idleness. And this contention at first sight does not lack

plausibility either in respect of the question of abstract justice

which it raises, or of the practical consequences which, according

to it, the arrangement in question would produce. When we examine it

closely, however, the plausibility vanishes, and abstract justice

and practical reason alike condemn the appeals thus made to them as

founded entirely on misconception.

Let us deal with the question of abstract justice first. Those who

denounce interest or unearned income as unjust, invariably state

their case in the following simple form. There are only two ways,

they say, in which a man can become possessed of wealth—either by

producing such and such an amount himself, or by appropriating such

and such an amount that has been produced by another person; or,

as they frequently put it, with an air of solemn sententiousness,

“_A man can get an income only by working or by stealing: there is

no third way!_” Now one conclusive answer to this puerile, though

popular, sophism has, strangely enough, been given by Mr. Henry

George, who, though eager to adopt any argument that could be used to

assail the rich, was, nevertheless, not taken in by this. Mr. George

pointed out that one kind of wealth, at all events,—and we may add

that in this we have wealth in its oldest form—consists of {311}

possessions which have been neither made by the possessors nor yet

stolen by them. That is to say, it consists of flocks and herds. Mr.

George pointed out also that whole classes of possessions besides

are, for by far the larger part of their value, equally independent

of either work or theft. Such possessions are wines, whose quality

improves with time, and whose value, consequently, whether in

exchange or use, is increased from year to year by the secret

operations of nature. But Mr. George, though his arguments were

true so far as they went, did little more than touch the hem of the

question; for flocks and herds, and commodities that grow valuable

as they mature themselves, form but a small, though they do form a

typical, portion of wealth that may come to a man without his having

produced it himself, and without his stealing it from any other

human producer. And this is the wealth which is actually produced by

capital.

In order to show the reader that capital is an actual producer, in

as true a sense as labour is, or the ability by which labour is

directed, let us begin by considering fixed capital as distinct from

wage capital, and by considering it in its simplest forms. By fixed

capital is meant any tools, machines, or materials by which man’s

efficiency as a producer of wealth is increased; and we will take as

examples of these the three following things—a dart or missile by

which game may be killed; a heap of manure by which a peasant’s field

may be fertilised; and a horse which a peasant uses for ploughing and

{312} kindred purposes. Now let us imagine a race of savages who use

no missiles at all, but catch their game merely by sleight of hand.

If a man is entitled to such game as he catches, the exceptionally

dexterous hunter who catches most will be necessarily the rightful

possessor of more game than his fellows. This will be granted by

those who admit that work constitutes a true, and the only true title

to possession.