As in all proposals for change there are two elements to be
considered--that which is to be changed, and that which it is to be
changed to--so in Socialism considered generally, and in each of its
varieties taken separately, there are two parts to be distinguished,
the one negative and critical, the other constructive. There is,
first, the judgment of Socialism on existing institutions and
practices and on their results; and secondly, the various plans which
it has propounded for doing better. In the former all the different
schools of Socialism are at one. They agree almost to identity in the
faults which they find with the economical order of existing society.
Up to a certain point also they entertain the same general conception
of the remedy to be provided for those faults; but in the details,
notwithstanding this general agreement, there is a wide disparity. It
will be both natural and convenient, in attempting an estimate of
their doctrines, to begin with the negative portion which is common to
them all, and to postpone all mention of their differences until we
arrive at that second part of their undertaking, in which alone they
seriously differ.
This first part of our task is by no means difficult; since it
consists only in an enumeration of existing evils. Of these there is
no scarcity, and most of them are by no means obscure or mysterious.
Many of them are the veriest commonplaces of moralists, though the
roots even of these lie deeper than moralists usually attempt to
penetrate. So various are they that the only difficulty is to make any
approach to an exhaustive catalogue. We shall content ourselves for
the present with mentioning a few of the principal. And let one thing
be remembered by the reader. When item after item of the enumeration
passes before him, and he finds one fact after another which he has
been accustomed to include among the necessities of nature urged as
an accusation against social institutions, he is not entitled to cry
unfairness, and to protest that the evils complained of are inherent
in Man and Society, and are such as no arrangements can remedy. To
assert this would be to beg the very question at issue. No one is more
ready than Socialists to admit--they affirm it indeed much more
decidedly than truth warrants--that the evils they complain of are
irremediable in the present constitution of society. They propose to
consider whether some other form of society may be devised which would
not be liable to those evils, or would be liable to them in a much
less degree. Those who object to the present order of society,
considered as a whole and who accept as an alternative the possibility
of a total change, have a right to set down all the evils which at
present exist in society as part of their case, whether these are
apparently attributable to social arrangements or not, provided they
do not flow from physical laws which human power is not adequate, or
human knowledge has not yet learned, to counteract. Moral evils and
such physical evils as would be remedied if all persons did as they
ought, are fairly chargeable against the state of society which admits
of them; and are valid as arguments until it is shown that any other
state of society would involve an equal or greater amount of such
evils. In the opinion of Socialists, the present arrangements of
society in respect to Property and the Production and Distribution of
Wealth, are as means to the general good, a total failure. They say
that there is an enormous mass of evil which these arrangements do not
succeed in preventing; that the good, either moral or physical, which
they realize is wretchedly small compared with the amount of exertion
employed, and that even this small amount of good is brought about by
means which are full of pernicious consequences, moral and physical.
First among existing social evils may be mentioned the evil of
Poverty. The institution of Property is upheld and commended
principally as being the means by which labor and frugality are
insured their reward, and mankind enabled to emerge from indigence.
It may be so; most Socialists allow that it has been so in earlier
periods of history. But if the institution can do nothing more or
better in this respect than it has hitherto done, its capabilities,
they affirm, are very insignificant. What proportion of the
population, in the most civilized countries of Europe, enjoy in their
own persons anything worth naming of the benefits of property? It may
be said, that but for property in the hands of their employers they
would be without daily bread; but, though this be conceded, at least
their daily bread is all that they have; and that often in
insufficient quantity; almost always of inferior quality; and with no
assurance of continuing to have it at all; an immense proportion of
the industrious classes being at some period or other of their lives
(and all being liable to become) dependent, at least temporarily, on
legal or voluntary charity. Any attempt to depict the miseries of
indigence, or to estimate the proportion of mankind who in the most
advanced countries are habitually given up during their whole
existence to its physical and moral sufferings, would be superfluous
here. This may be left to philanthropists, who have painted these
miseries in colors sufficiently strong. Suffice it to say that the
condition of numbers in civilized Europe, and even in England and
France, is more wretched than that of most tribes of savages who are
known to us.
It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to
complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others,
from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true,
would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or
Domitian was to require a hundred persons to run a race for their
lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost
should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the
injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some
untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime
would be that they were put to death at all. So in the economy of
society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral
degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or
satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content
with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is _pro
tanto_ a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a
mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker
members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to
misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? Is it not, on
the contrary, an irresistible claim upon every human being for
protection against suffering? If the minds and feelings of the
prosperous were in a right state, would they accept their prosperity
if for the sake of it even one person near them was, for any other
cause than voluntary fault, excluded from obtaining a desirable
existence?
One thing there is, which if it could be affirmed truly, would relieve
social institutions from any share in the responsibility of these
evils. Since the human race has no means of enjoyable existence, or of
existence at all, but what it derives from its own labor and
abstinence, there would be no ground for complaint against society if
every one who was willing to undergo a fair share of this labor and
abstinence could attain a fair share of the fruits. But is this the
fact? Is it not the reverse of the fact? The reward, instead of being
proportioned to the labor and abstinence of the individual, is almost
in an inverse ratio to it: those who receive the least, labor and
abstain the most. Even the idle, reckless, and ill-conducted poor,
those who are said with most justice to have themselves to blame for
their condition, often undergo much more and severer labor, not only
than those who are born to pecuniary independence, but than almost any
of the more highly remunerated of those who earn their subsistence;
and even the inadequate self-control exercised by the industrious poor
costs them more sacrifice and more effort than is almost ever required
from the more favored members of society. The very idea of
distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and
merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of
society so manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of
romance. It is true that the lot of individuals is not wholly
independent of their virtue and intelligence; these do really tell in
their favor, but far less than many other things in which there is no
merit at all. The most powerful of all the determining circumstances
is birth. The great majority are what they were born to be. Some are
born rich without work, others are born to a position in which they
can become rich _by_ work, the great majority are born to hard work
and poverty throughout life, numbers to indigence. Next to birth the
chief cause of success in life is accident and opportunity. When a
person not born to riches succeeds in acquiring them, his own industry
and dexterity have generally contributed to the result; but industry
and dexterity would not have sufficed unless there had been also a
concurrence of occasions and chances which falls to the lot of only a
small number. If persons are helped in their worldly career by their
virtues, so are they, and perhaps quite as often, by their vices: by
servility and sycophancy, by hard-hearted and close-fisted
selfishness, by the permitted lies and tricks of trade, by gambling
speculations, not seldom by downright knavery. Energies and talents
are of much more avail for success in life than virtues; but if one
man succeeds by employing energy and talent in something generally
useful, another thrives by exercising the same qualities in
out-generalling and ruining a rival. It is as much as any moralist
ventures to assert, that, other circumstances being given, honesty is
the best policy, and that with parity of advantages an honest person
has a better chance than a rogue. Even this in many stations and
circumstances of life is questionable; anything more than this is out
of the question. It cannot be pretended that honesty, as a means of
success, tells for as much as a difference of one single step on the
social ladder. The connection between fortune and conduct is mainly
this, that there is a degree of bad conduct, or rather of some kinds
of bad conduct, which suffices to ruin any amount of good fortune; but
the converse is not true: in the situation of most people no degree
whatever of good conduct can be counted upon for raising them in the
world, without the aid of fortunate accidents.
These evils, then--great poverty, and that poverty very little
connected with desert--are the first grand failure of the existing
arrangements of society. The second is human misconduct; crime, vice,
and folly, with all the sufferings which follow in their train. For,
nearly all the forms of misconduct, whether committed towards ourselves
or towards others, may be traced to one of three causes: Poverty and
its temptations in the many; Idleness and _desoeuvrement_ in the few
whose circumstances do not compel them to work; bad education, or want
of education, in both. The first two must be allowed to be at least
failures in the social arrangements, the last is now almost universally
admitted to be the fault of those arrangements--it may almost be said
the crime. I am speaking loosely and in the rough, for a minuter
analysis of the sources of faults of character and errors of conduct
would establish far more conclusively the filiation which connects them
with a defective organization of society, though it would also show the
reciprocal dependence of that faulty state of society on a backward
state of the human mind.
At this point, in the enumeration of the evils of society, the mere
levellers of former times usually stopped; but their more far-sighted
successors, the present Socialists, go farther. In their eyes the very
foundation of human life as at present constituted, the very principle
on which the production and repartition of all material products is now
carried on, is essentially vicious and anti-social. It is the principle
of individualism, competition, each one for himself and against all the
rest. It is grounded on opposition of interests, not harmony of
interests, and under it every one is required to find his place by a
struggle, by pushing others back or being pushed back by them.
Socialists consider this system of private war (as it may be termed)
between every one and every one, especially fatal in an economical
point of view and in a moral. Morally considered, its evils are
obvious. It is the parent of envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness; it
makes every one the natural enemy of all others who cross his path, and
every one's path is constantly liable to be crossed. Under the present
system hardly any one can gain except by the loss or disappointment of
one or of many others. In a well-constituted community every one would
be a gainer by every other person's successful exertions; while now we
gain by each other's loss and lose by each other's gain, and our
greatest gains come from the worst source of all, from death, the death
of those who are nearest and should be dearest to us. In its purely
economical operation the principle of individual competition receives
as unqualified condemnation from the social reformers as in its moral.
In the competition of laborers they see the cause of low wages; in the
competition of producers the cause of ruin and bankruptcy; and both
evils, they affirm, tend constantly to increase as population and
wealth make progress; no person (they conceive) being benefited except
the great proprietors of land, the holders of fixed money incomes, and
a few great capitalists, whose wealth is gradually enabling them to
undersell all other producers, to absorb the whole of the operations of
industry into their own sphere, to drive from the market all employers
of labor except themselves, and to convert the laborers into a kind of
slaves or serfs, dependent on them for the means of support, and
compelled to accept these on such terms as they choose to offer.
Society, in short, is travelling onward, according to these
speculators, towards a new feudality, that of the great capitalists.
As I shall have ample opportunity in future chapters to state my own
opinion on these topics, and on many others connected with and
subordinate to them, I shall now, without further preamble, exhibit
the opinions of distinguished Socialists on the present arrangements
of society, in a selection of passages from their published writings.
For the present I desire to be considered as a mere reporter of the
opinions of others. Hereafter it will appear how much of what I cite
agrees or differs with my own sentiments.
The clearest, the most compact, and the most precise and specific
statement of the case of the Socialists generally against the existing
order of society in the economical department of human affairs, is to
be found in the little work of M. Louis Blanc, _Organisation du
Travail_. My first extracts, therefore, on this part of the subject,
shall be taken from that treatise.
"Competition is for the people a system of extermination. Is the
poor man a member of society, or an enemy to it? We ask for an
answer.
"All around him he finds the soil preoccupied. Can he cultivate
the earth for himself? No; for the right of the first occupant
has become a right of property. Can he gather the fruits which
the hand of God ripens on the path of man? No; for, like the
soil, the fruits have been _appropriated_. Can he hunt or fish?
No; for that is a right which is dependent upon the government.
Can he draw water from a spring enclosed in a field? No; for the
proprietor of the field is, in virtue of his right to the
field, proprietor of the fountain. Can he, dying of hunger and
thirst, stretch out his hands for the charity of his
fellow-creatures? No; for there are laws against begging. Can
he, exhausted by fatigue and without a refuge, lie down to sleep
upon the pavement of the streets? No; for there are laws against
vagabondage. Can he, dying from the cruel native land where
everything is denied him, seek the means of living far from the
place where life was given him? No; for it is not permitted to
change your country except on certain conditions which the poor
man cannot fulfil.
"What, then, can the unhappy man do? He will say, 'I have hands
to work with, I have intelligence, I have youth, I have
strength; take all this, and in return give me a morsel of
bread.' This is what the working-men do say. But even here the
poor man may be answered, 'I have no work to give you.' What is
he to do then?"
* * * * *
"What is competition from the point of view of the workman? It
is work put up to auction. A contractor wants a workman: three
present themselves.--How much for your work?--Half-a-crown; I
have a wife and children.--Well; and how much for yours?--Two
shillings: I have no children, but I have a wife.--Very well;
and now how much for you?--One and eightpence are enough for me;
I am single. Then you shall have the work. It is done; the
bargain is struck. And what are the other two workmen to do? It
is to be hoped they will die quietly of hunger. But what if they
take to thieving? Never fear; we have the police. To murder? We
have got the hangman. As for the lucky one, his triumph is only
temporary. Let a fourth workman make his appearance, strong
enough to fast every other day, and his price will run down
still lower; then there will be a new outcast, a new recruit for
the prison perhaps!
"Will it be said that these melancholy results are exaggerated;
that at all events they are only possible when there is not work
enough for the hands that seek employment? But I ask, in answer,
Does the principle of competition contain, by chance, within
itself any method by which this murderous disproportion is to be
avoided? If one branch of industry is in want of hands, who can
answer for it that, in the confusion created by universal
competition, another is not overstocked? And if, out of
thirty-four millions of men, twenty are really reduced to theft
for a living, this would suffice to condemn the principle.
"But who is so blind as not to see that under the system of
unlimited competition, the continual fall of wages is no
exceptional circumstance, but a necessary and general fact? Has
the population a limit which it cannot exceed? Is it possible
for us to say to industry--industry given up to the accidents of
individual egotism and fertile in ruin--can we say, 'Thus far
shalt thou go, and no farther?' The population increases
constantly: tell the poor mother to become sterile, and
blaspheme the God who made her fruitful, for if you do not, the
lists will soon become too narrow for the combatants. A machine
is invented: command it to be broken, and anathematize science,
for if you do not, the thousand workmen whom the new machine
deprives of work will knock at the door of the neighboring
workshop, and lower the wages of their companions. Thus
systematic lowering of wages, ending in the driving out of a
certain number of workmen, is the inevitable effect of unlimited
competition. It is an industrial system by means of which the
working-classes are forced to exterminate one another."
* * * * *
"If there is an undoubted fact, it is that the increase of
population is much more rapid among the poor than among the
rich. According to the _Statistics of European Population_, the
births at Paris are only one-thirty-second of the population in
the rich quarters, while in the others they rise to
one-twenty-sixth. This disproportion is a general fact, and M.
de Sismondi, in his work on Political Economy, has explained it
by the impossibility for the workmen of hopeful prudence. Those
only who feel themselves assured of the morrow can regulate the
number of their children according to their income; he who lives
from day to day is under the yoke of a mysterious fatality, to
which he sacrifices his children as he was sacrificed to it
himself. It is true the workhouses exist, menacing society with
an inundation of beggars--what way is there of escaping from the
cause?... It is clear that any society where the means of
subsistence increase less rapidly than the numbers of the
population, is a society on the brink of an abyss....
Competition produces destitution; this is a fact shown by
statistics. Destitution is fearfully prolific; this is shown by
statistics. The fruitfulness of the poor throws upon society
unhappy creatures who have need of work and cannot find it; this
is shown by statistics. At this point society is reduced to a
choice between killing the poor or maintaining them
gratuitously--between atrocity or folly."[1]
So much for the poor. We now pass to the middle classes.
"According to the political economists of the school of Adam
Smith and Leon Say, _cheapness_ is the word in which may be
summed up the advantages of unlimited competition. But why
persist in considering the effect of cheapness with a view only
to the momentary advantage of the consumer? Cheapness is
advantageous to the consumer at the cost of introducing the
seeds of ruinous anarchy among the producers. Cheapness is, so
to speak, the hammer with which the rich among the producers
crush their poorer rivals. Cheapness is the trap into which the
daring speculators entice the hard-workers. Cheapness is the
sentence of death to the producer on a small scale who has no
money to invest in the purchase of machinery that his rich
rivals can easily procure. Cheapness is the great instrument in
the hands of monopoly; it absorbs the small manufacturer, the
small shopkeeper, the small proprietor; it is, in one word, the
destruction of the middle classes for the advantage of a few
industrial oligarchs.
"Ought we, then, to consider cheapness as a curse? No one would
attempt to maintain such an absurdity. But it is the specialty
of wrong principles to turn good into evil and to corrupt all
things. Under the system of competition cheapness is only a
provisional and fallacious advantage. It is maintained only so
long as there is a struggle; no sooner have the rich competitors
driven out their poorer rivals than prices rise. Competition
leads to monopoly, for the same reason cheapness leads to high
prices. Thus, what has been made use of as a weapon in the
contest between the producers, sooner or later becomes a cause
of impoverishment among the consumers. And if to this cause we
add the others we have already enumerated, first among which
must be ranked the inordinate increase of the population, we
shall be compelled to recognize the impoverishment of the mass
of the consumers as a direct consequence of competition.
"But, on the other hand, this very competition which tends to
dry up the sources of demand, urges production to over-supply.
The confusion produced by the universal struggle prevents each
producer from knowing the state of the market. He must work in
the dark, and trust to chance for a sale. Why should he check
the supply, especially as he can throw any loss on the workman
whose wages are so pre-eminently liable to rise and fall? Even
when production is carried on at a loss the manufacturers still
often carry it on, because they will not let their machinery,
&c., stand idle, or risk the loss of raw material, or lose their
customers; and because productive industry as carried on under
the competitive system being nothing else than a game of chance,
the gambler will not lose his chance of a lucky stroke.
"Thus, and we cannot too often insist upon it, competition
necessarily tends to increase supply and to diminish
consumption; its tendency therefore is precisely the opposite
of what is sought by economic science; hence it is not merely
oppressive but foolish as well."
* * * * *
"And in all this, in order to avoid dwelling on truths which
have become commonplaces, and sound declamatory from their very
truth, we have said nothing of the frightful moral corruption
which industry, organized, or more properly speaking,
disorganized, as it is at the present day, has introduced among
the middle classes. Everything has become venal, and competition
invades even the domain of thought.
"The factory crushing the workshop; the showy establishment
absorbing the humble shop; the artisan who is his own master
replaced by the day-laborer; cultivation by the plow superseding
that by the spade, and bringing the poor man's field under
disgraceful homage to the money-lender; bankruptcies multiplied;
manufacturing industry transformed by the ill-regulated
extension of credit into a system of gambling where no one, not
even the rogue, can be sure of winning; in short a vast
confusion calculated to arouse jealousy, mistrust, and hatred,
and to stifle, little by little, all generous aspirations, all
faith, self-sacrifice, and poetry--such is the hideous but only
too faithful picture of the results obtained by the application
of the principle of competition."[2]
The Fourierists, through their principal organ, M. Considerant,
enumerate the evils of the existing civilisation in the following
order:--
1. It employs an enormous quantity of labor and of human power
unproductively, or in the work of destruction.
"In the first place there is the army, which in France, as in
all other countries, absorbs the healthiest and strongest men, a
large number of the most talented and intelligent, and a
considerable part of the public revenue.... The existing state
of society develops in its impure atmosphere innumerable
outcasts, whose labor is not merely unproductive, but actually
destructive: adventurers, prostitutes, people with no
acknowledged means of living, beggars, convicts, swindlers,
thieves, and others whose numbers tend rather to increase than
to diminish....
"To the list of unproductive labor fostered by our state of
Society must be added that of the judicature and of the bar, of
the courts of law and magistrates, the police, jailers,
executioners, &c.,--functions indispensable to the state of
society as it is.
"Also people of what is called 'good society'; those who pass
their lives in doing nothing; idlers of all ranks.
"Also the numberless custom-house officials, tax-gatherers,
bailiffs, excise-men; in short, all that army of men which
overlooks, brings to account, takes, but produces nothing.
"Also the labors of sophists, philosophers, metaphysicians,
political men, working in mistaken directions, who do nothing to
advance science, and produce nothing but disturbance and sterile
discussions; the verbiage of advocates, pleaders, witnesses, &c.
"And finally all the operations of commerce, from those of the
bankers and brokers, down to those of the grocer behind his
counter."[3]
Secondly, they assert that even the industry and powers which in the
present system are devoted to production, do not produce more than a
small portion of what they might produce if better employed and
directed:--
"Who with any good-will and reflection will not see how much the
want of coherence--the disorder, the want of combination, the
parcelling out of labor and leaving it wholly to individual
action without any organization, without any large or general
views--are causes which limit the possibilities of production,
and destroy, or at least waste, our means of action? Does not
disorder give birth to poverty, as order and good management
give birth to riches? Is not want of combination a source of
weakness, as combination is a source of strength? And who can
say that industry, whether agricultural, domestic,
manufacturing, scientific, artistic, or commercial, is organized
at the present day either in the state or in municipalities? Who
can say that all the work which is carried on in any of these
departments is executed in subordination to any general views,
or with foresight, economy, and order? Or, again, who can say
that it is possible in our present state of society to develop,
by a good education, all the faculties bestowed by nature on
each of its members; to employ each one in functions which he
would like, which he would be the most capable of, and which,
therefore, he could carry on with the greatest advantage to
himself and to others? Has it even been so much as attempted to
solve the problems presented by varieties of character so as to
regulate and harmonize the varieties of employments in
accordance with natural aptitudes? Alas! The Utopia of the most
ardent philanthropists is to teach reading and writing to
twenty-five millions of the French people! And in the present
state of things we may defy them to succeed even in that!
"And is it not a strange spectacle, too, and one which cries out
in condemnation of us, to see this state of society where the
soil is badly cultivated, and sometimes not cultivated at all;
where man is ill lodged, ill clothed, and yet where whole masses
are continually in need of work and pining in misery because
they cannot find it? Of a truth we are forced to acknowledge
that if the nations are poor and starving it is not because
nature has denied the means of producing wealth, but because of
the anarchy and disorder in our employment of those means; in
other words, it is because society is wretchedly constituted and
labor unorganized.
"But this is not all, and you will have but a faint conception
of the evil if you do not consider that to all these vices of
society, which dry up the sources of wealth and prosperity, must
be added the struggle, the discord, the war, in short under many
names and many forms which society cherishes and cultivates
between the individuals that compose it. These struggles and
discords correspond to radical oppositions--deep-seated
antinomies between the various interests. Exactly in so far as
you are able to establish classes and categories within the
nation; in so far, also, you will have opposition of interests
and internal warfare either avowed or secret, even if you take
into consideration the industrial system only."[4]
One of the leading ideas of this school is the wastefulness and at the
same time the immorality of the existing arrangements for distributing
the produce of the country among the various consumers, the enormous
superfluity in point of number of the agents of distribution, the
merchants, dealers, shopkeepers and their innumerable, employes, and
the depraving character of such a distribution of occupations.
"It is evident that the interest of the trader is opposed to
that of the consumer and of the producer. Has he not bought
cheap and under-valued as much as possible in all his dealings
with the producer, the very same article which, vaunting its
excellence, he sells to you as dear as he can? Thus the interest
of the commercial body, collectively and individually, is
contrary to that of the producer and of the consumer--that is to
say, to the interest of the whole body of society.
* * * * *
"The trader is a go-between, who profits by the general anarchy
and the non-organization of industry. The trader buys up
products, he buys up everything; he owns and detains everything,
in such sort that:--
"1stly. He holds both Production and Consumption _under his
yoke_, because both must come to him either finally for the
products to be consumed, or at first for the raw materials to be
worked up. Commerce with all its methods of buying, and of
raising and lowering prices, its innumerable devices, and its
holding everything in the hands of _middle-men_, levies toll
right and left; it despotically gives the law to Production and
Consumption, of which it ought to be only the subordinate.
"2ndly. It robs society by its _enormous profits_--profits
levied upon the consumer and the producer, and altogether out of
proportion to the services rendered, for which a twentieth of
the persons actually employed would be sufficient.
"3rdly. It robs society by the subtraction of its productive
forces; taking off from productive labor nineteen-twentieths of
the agents of trade who are mere parasites. Thus, not only does
commerce rob society by appropriating an exorbitant share of the
common wealth, but also by considerably diminishing the
productive energy of the human beehive. The great majority of
traders would return to productive work if a rational system of
commercial organization were substituted for the inextricable
chaos of the present state of things.
"4thly. It robs society by the _adulteration_ of products,
pushed at the present day beyond all bounds. And in fact, if a
hundred grocers establish themselves in a town where before
there were only twenty, it is plain that people will not begin
to consume five times as many groceries. Hereupon the hundred
virtuous grocers have to dispute between them the profits which
before were honestly made by the twenty; competition obliges
them to make it up at the expense of the consumer, either by
raising the prices as sometimes happens, or by adulterating the
goods as always happens. In such a state of things there is an
end to good faith. Inferior or adulterated goods are sold for
articles of good quality whenever the credulous customer is not
too experienced to be deceived. And when the customer has been
thoroughly imposed upon, the trading conscience consoles itself
by saying, 'I state my price; people can take or leave; no one
is obliged to buy.' The losses imposed on the consumers by the
bad quality or the adulteration of goods are incalculable.
"5thly. It robs society by _accumulations_, artificial or not,
in consequence of which vast quantities of goods, collected in
one place, are damaged and destroyed for want of a sale. Fourier
(Th. des Quat. Mouv., p. 334, 1st ed.) says: 'The fundamental
principle of the commercial systems, that of _leaving full
liberty to the merchants_, gives them absolute right of property
over the goods in which they deal: they have the right to
withdraw them altogether, to withhold or even to burn them, as
happened more than once with the Oriental Company of Amsterdam,
which publicly burnt stores of cinnamon in order to raise the
price. What it did with cinnamon it would have done with corn;
but for the fear of being stoned by the populace, it would have
burnt some corn in order to sell the rest at four times its
value. Indeed, it actually is of daily occurrence in ports, for
provisions of grains to be thrown into the sea because the
merchants have allowed them to rot while waiting for a rise. I
myself, when I was a clerk, have had to superintend these
infamous proceedings, and in one day caused to be thrown into
the sea some forty thousand bushels of rice, which might have
been sold at a fair profit had the withholder been less greedy
of gain. It is society that bears the cost of this waste, which
takes place daily under shelter of the philosophical maxim of
_full liberty for the merchants_.'
"6thly. Commerce robs society, moreover, by all the loss,
damage, and waste that follows from the extreme scattering of
products in millions of shops, and by the multiplication and
complication of carriage.
"7thly. It robs society by shameless and unlimited
_usury_--usury absolutely appalling. The trader carries on
operations with fictitious capital, much higher in amount than
his real capital. A trader with a capital of twelve hundred
pounds will carry on operations, by means of bills and credit,
on a scale of four, eight, or twelve thousand pounds. Thus he
draws from capital _which he does not possess_, usurious
interest, out of all proportion with the capital he actually
owns.
"8thly. It robs society by innumerable _bankruptcies_, for the
daily accidents of our commercial system, political events, and
any kind of disturbance, must usher in a day when the trader,
having incurred obligations beyond his means, is no longer able
to meet them; his failure, whether fraudulent or not, must be a
severe blow to his creditors. The bankruptcy of some entails
that of others, so that bankruptcies follow one upon another,
causing widespread ruin. And it is always the producer and the
consumer who suffer; for commerce, considered as a whole, does
not produce wealth, and invests very little in proportion to the
wealth which passes through its hands. How many are the
manufactures crushed by these blows! how many fertile sources of
wealth dried up by these devices, with all their disastrous
consequences!
"The producer furnishes the goods, the consumer the money. Trade
furnishes credit, founded on little or no actual capital, and
the different members of the commercial body are in no way
responsible for one another. This, in a few words, is the whole
theory of the thing.
"9thly. Commerce robs society by the _independence_ and
_irresponsibility_ which permits it to buy at the epochs when
the producers are forced to sell and compete with one another,
in order to procure money for their rent and necessary expenses
of production. When the markets are overstocked and goods cheap,
trade purchases. Then it creates a rise, and by this simple
manoeuvre despoils both producer and consumer.
"10thly. It robs society by a considerable _drawing off_ of
_capital_, which will return to productive industry when
commerce plays its proper subordinate part, and is only an
agency carrying on transactions between the producers (more or
less distant) and the great centres of consumption--the
communistic societies. Thus the capital engaged in the
speculations of commerce (which, small as it is, compared to the
immense wealth which passes through its hands, consists
nevertheless of sums enormous in themselves), would return to
stimulate production if commerce was deprived of the
intermediate property in goods, and their distribution became a
matter of administrative organization. Stock-jobbing is the most
odious form of this vice of commerce.
"11thly. It robs society by the _monopolising_ or buying up of
raw materials. 'For' (says Fourier, Th. des Quat. Mouv., p. 359,
1st ed.), 'the rise in price on articles that are bought up, is
borne ultimately by the consumer, although in the first place by
the manufacturers, who, being obliged to keep up their
establishments, must make pecuniary sacrifices, and manufacture
at small profits in the hope of better days; and it is often
long before they can repay themselves the rise in prices which
the monopoliser has compelled them to support in the first
instance...."
"In short, all these vices, besides many others which I omit,
are multiplied by the extreme complication of mercantile
affairs; for products do not pass once only through the greedy
clutches of commerce; there are some which pass and repass
twenty or thirty times before reaching the consumer. In the
first place, the raw material passes through the grasp of
commerce before reaching the manufacturer who first works it up;
then it returns to commerce to be sent out again to be worked up
in a second form; and so on until it receives its final shape.
Then it passes into the hands of merchants, who sell to the
wholesale dealers, and these to the great retail dealers of
towns, and these again to the little dealers and to the country
shops; and each time that it changes hands, it leaves something
behind it.
"... One of my friends who was lately exploring the Jura, where
much working in metal is done, had occasion to enter the house
of a peasant who was a manufacturer of shovels. He asked the
price. 'Let us come to an understanding,' answered the poor
laborer, not an economist at all, but a man of common sense; 'I
sell them for 8_d._ to the trade, which retails them at 1_s._
8_d._ in the towns. If you could find a means of opening a
direct communication between the workman and the consumer, you
might have them for 1_s._ 2_d._, and we should each gain 6_d._
by the transaction.'"[5]
To a similar effect Owen, in the _Book of the New Moral World_, part
2, chap. iii.
"The principle now in practice is to induce a large portion of
society to devote their lives to distribute wealth upon a large,
a medium, and a small scale, and to have it conveyed from place
to place in larger or smaller quantities, to meet the means and
wants of various divisions of society and individuals, as they
are now situated in cities, towns, villages, and country places.
This principle of distribution makes a class in society whose
business is to _buy from_ some parties and to _sell to_ others.
By this proceeding they are placed under circumstances which
induce them to endeavor to buy at what appears at the time a low
price in the market, and to sell again at the greatest permanent
profit which they can obtain. Their real object being to get as
much profit as gain between the seller to, and the buyer from
them, as can be effected in their transactions.
"There are innumerable errors in principle and evils in practice
which necessarily proceed from this mode of distributing the
wealth of society.
"1st. A general class of distributers is formed, whose interest
is separated from, and apparently opposed to, that of the
individual from whom they buy and to whom they sell.
"2nd. Three classes of distributers are made, the small, the
medium, and the large buyers and sellers; or the retailers, the
wholesale dealers, and the extensive merchants.
"3rd. Three classes of buyers thus created constitute the small,
the medium, and the large purchasers.
"By this arrangement into various classes of buyers and sellers,
the parties are easily trained to learn that they have separate
and opposing interests, and different ranks and stations in
society. An inequality of feeling and condition is thus created
and maintained, with all the servility and pride which these
unequal arrangements are sure to produce. The parties are
regularly trained in a general system of deception, in order
that they may be the more successful in buying cheap and selling
dear.
"The smaller sellers acquire habits of injurious idleness,
waiting often for hours for customers. And this evil is
experienced to a considerable extent even amongst the class of
wholesale dealers.
"There are, also, by this arrangement, many more establishments
for selling than are necessary in the villages, towns, and
cities; and a very large capital is thus wasted without benefit
to society. And from their number opposed to each other all over
the country to obtain customers, they endeavor to undersell each
other, and are therefore continually endeavoring to injure the
producer by the establishment of what are called cheap shops and
warehouses; and to support their character the master or his
servants must be continually on the watch to buy bargains, that
is, to procure wealth for less than the cost of its production.
"The distributers, small, medium, and large, have all to be
supported by the producers, and the greater the number of the
former compared with the latter, the greater will be the burden
which the producer has to sustain; for as the number of
distributers increases, the accumulation of wealth must
decrease, and more must be required from the producer.
"The distributers of wealth, under the present system, are a
dead weight upon the producers, and are most active demoralisers
of society. Their dependent condition, at the commencement of
their task, teaches or induces them to be servile to their
customers, and to continue to be so as long as they are
accumulating wealth by their cheap buying and dear selling. But
when they have secured sufficient to be what they imagine to be
an independence--to live without business--they are too often
filled with a most ignorant pride, and become insolent to their
dependents.
"The arrangement is altogether a most improvident one for
society, whose interest it is to produce the greatest amount of
wealth of the best qualities; while the existing system of
distribution is not only to withdraw great numbers from
producing to become distributers, but to add to the cost of the
consumer all the expense of a most wasteful and extravagant
distribution; the distribution costing to the consumer many
times the price of the original cost of the wealth purchased.
"Then, by the position in which the seller is placed by his
created desire for gain on the one hand, and the competition he
meets with from opponents selling similar productions on the
other, he is strongly tempted to deteriorate the articles which
he has for sale; and when these are provisions, either of home
production or of foreign importation, the effects upon the
health, and consequent comfort and happiness of the consumers,
are often most injurious, and productive of much premature
death, especially among the working classes, who, in this
respect, are perhaps made to be the greatest sufferers, by
purchasing the inferior or low-priced articles.
* * * * *
"The expense of thus distributing wealth in Great Britain and
Ireland, including transit from place to place, and all the
agents directly and indirectly engaged in this department, is,
perhaps, little short of one hundred millions annually, without
taking into consideration the deterioration of the quality of
many of the articles constituting this wealth, by carriage, and
by being divided into small quantities, and kept in improper
stores and places, in which the atmosphere is unfavorable to the
keeping of such articles in a tolerably good, and much less in
the best, condition for use."
In further illustration of the contrariety of interests between person
and person, class and class, which pervades the present constitution
of society, M. Considerant adds:--
"If the wine-growers wish for free trade, this freedom ruins the
producer of corn, the manufacturers of iron, of cloth, of
cotton, and--we are compelled to add--the smuggler and the
customs' officer. If it is the interest of the consumer that
machines should be invented which lower prices by rendering
production less costly, these same machines throw out of work
thousands of workmen who do not know how to, and cannot at once,
find other work. Here, then, again is one of the innumerable
_vicious circles_ of civilisation ... for there are a thousand
facts which prove cumulatively that in our existing social
system the introduction of any good brings always along with it
some evil.
"In short, if we go lower down and come to vulgar details, we
find that it is the interest of the tailor, the shoemaker, and
the hatter that coats, shoes, and hats should be soon worn out;
that the glazier profits by the hail-storms which break windows;
that the mason and the architect profit by fires; the lawyer is
enriched by law-suits; the doctor by disease; the wine-seller by
drunkenness; the prostitute by debauchery. And what a disaster
it would be for the judges, the police, and the jailers, as well
as for the barristers and the solicitors, and all the lawyers'
clerks, if crimes, offences, and law-suits were all at once to
come to an end!"[6]