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+Project Gutenberg's The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, by Stephen Leacock
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice
+
+Author: Stephen Leacock
+
+Release Date: September 17, 2007 [EBook #22651]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNSOLVED RIDDLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Emille and the Booksmiths
+at http://www.eBookForge.net
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+UNSOLVED RIDDLE
+OF
+SOCIAL JUSTICE
+
+
+BY STEPHEN LEACOCK
+
+=B. A., Ph. D., Litt. D., F. R. S. C.=
+
+_Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal_
+
+Author of "Essays and Literary Studies," Etc.
+
+
+
+ NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+ LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+ TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY: MCMXX
+
+
+
+
+
+BY STEPHEN LEACOCK
+
+
+
+
+  FRENZIED FICTION
+  FURTHER FOOLISHNESS
+  BEHIND THE BEYOND
+  NONSENSE NOVELS
+  LITERARY LAPSES
+  SUNSHINE SKETCHES
+  ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH
+  ESSAYS AND LITERARY STUDIES
+  MOONBEAMS FROM THE LARGER LUNACY
+  THE HOHENZOLLERNS IN AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1920,
+
+By John Lane Company
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                PAGE
+    I. The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour           9
+   II. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness        33
+  III. The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty     48
+   IV. Work and Wages                                    66
+    V. The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist   88
+   VI. How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward                  103
+  VII. What Is Possible and What Is Not                 124
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE UNSOLVED RIDDLEOF SOCIAL JUSTICE
+
+
+
+
+_I.--The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour_
+
+
+THESE are troubled times. As the echoes of the war die away the sound of
+a new conflict rises on our ears. All the world is filled with
+industrial unrest. Strike follows upon strike. A world that has known
+five years of fighting has lost its taste for the honest drudgery of
+work. Cincinnatus will not back to his plow, or, at the best, stands
+sullenly between his plow-handles arguing for a higher wage.
+
+The wheels of industry are threatening to stop. The laborer will not
+work because the pay is too low and the hours are too long. The producer
+cannot employ him because the wage is too high, and the hours are too
+short. If the high wage is paid and the short hours are granted, then
+the price of the thing made, so it seems, rises higher still. Even the
+high wages will not buy it. The process apparently moves in a circle
+with no cessation to it. The increased wages seem only to aggravate the
+increasing prices. Wages and prices, rising together, call perpetually
+for more money, or at least more tokens and symbols, more paper credit
+in the form of checks and deposits, with a value that is no longer based
+on the rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but that floats upon
+the mere atmosphere of expectation.
+
+But the sheer quantity of the inflated currency and false money forces
+prices higher still. The familiar landmarks of wages, salaries and
+prices are being obliterated. The "scrap of paper" with which the war
+began stays with us as its legacy. It lies upon the industrial landscape
+like snow, covering up, as best it may, the bare poverty of a world
+desolated by war.
+
+Under such circumstances national finance seems turned into a delirium.
+Billions are voted where once a few poor millions were thought
+extravagant. The war debts of the Allied Nations, not yet fully
+computed, will run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars apiece. But
+the debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger as
+the assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth or
+is it poverty? The world seems filled with money and short of goods,
+while even in this very scarcity a new luxury has broken out. The
+capitalist rides in his ten thousand dollar motor car. The
+seven-dollar-a-day artisan plays merrily on his gramophone in the broad
+daylight of his afternoon that is saved, like all else, by being
+"borrowed" from the morning. He calls the capitalist a "profiteer." The
+capitalist retorts with calling him a "Bolshevik."
+
+Worse portents appear. Over the rim of the Russian horizon are seen the
+fierce eyes and the unshorn face of the real and undoubted Bolshevik,
+waving his red flag. Vast areas of what was a fertile populated world
+are overwhelmed in chaos. Over Russia there lies a great darkness,
+spreading ominously westward into Central Europe. The criminal sits
+among his corpses. He feeds upon the wreck of a civilization that was.
+
+The infection spreads. All over the world the just claims of organized
+labor are intermingled with the underground conspiracy of social
+revolution. The public mind is confused. Something approaching to a
+social panic appears. To some minds the demand for law and order
+overwhelms all other thoughts. To others the fierce desire for social
+justice obliterates all fear of a general catastrophe. They push nearer
+and nearer to the brink of the abyss. The warning cry of "back" is
+challenged by the eager shout of "forward!" The older methods of social
+progress are abandoned as too slow. The older weapons of social defense
+are thrown aside as too blunt. Parliamentary discussion is powerless. It
+limps in the wake of the popular movement. The "state", as we knew it,
+threatens to dissolve into labor unions, conventions, boards of
+conciliation, and conferences. Society shaken to its base, hurls itself
+into the industrial suicide of the general strike, refusing to feed
+itself, denying its own wants.
+
+This is a time such as there never was before. It represents a vast
+social transformation in which there is at stake, and may be lost, all
+that has been gained in the slow centuries of material progress and in
+which there may be achieved some part of all that has been dreamed in
+the age-long passion for social justice.
+
+For the time being, the constituted governments of the world survive as
+best they may and accomplish such things as they can, planless, or
+planning at best only for the day. Sufficient, and more than sufficient,
+for the day is the evil thereof.
+
+Never then was there a moment in which there was greater need for sane
+and serious thought. It is necessary to consider from the ground up the
+social organization in which we live and the means whereby it may be
+altered and expanded to meet the needs of the time to come. We must do
+this or perish. If we do not mend the machine, there are forces moving
+in the world that will break it. The blind Samson of labor will seize
+upon the pillars of society and bring them down in a common destruction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Few persons can attain to adult life without being profoundly impressed
+by the appalling inequalities of our human lot. Riches and poverty
+jostle one another upon our streets. The tattered outcast dozes on his
+bench while the chariot of the wealthy is drawn by. The palace is the
+neighbor of the slum. We are, in modern life, so used to this that we no
+longer see it.
+
+Inequality begins from the very cradle. Some are born into an easy and
+sheltered affluence. Others are the children of mean and sordid want.
+For some the long toil of life begins in the very bloom time of
+childhood and ends only when the broken and exhausted body sinks into a
+penurious old age. For others life is but a foolish leisure with mock
+activities and mimic avocations to mask its uselessness. And as the
+circumstances vary so too does the native endowment of the body and the
+mind. Some born in poverty rise to wealth. An inborn energy and capacity
+bid defiance to the ill-will of fate. Others sink. The careless hand
+lets fall the cradle gift of wealth.
+
+Thus all about us is the moving and shifting spectacle of riches and
+poverty, side by side, inextricable.
+
+The human mind, lost in a maze of inequalities that it cannot explain
+and evils that it cannot, singly, remedy, must adapt itself as best it
+can. An acquired indifference to the ills of others is the price at
+which we live. A certain dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personal
+relief is the mere drop that any one of us alone can cast into the vast
+ocean of human misery. Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we too
+perish. We feed well while others starve. We make fast the doors of our
+lighted houses against the indigent and the hungry. What else can we do?
+If we shelter _one_ what is that? And if we try to shelter all, we are
+ourselves shelterless.
+
+But the contrast thus presented is one that has acquired a new meaning
+in the age in which we live. The poverty of earlier days was the outcome
+of the insufficiency of human labor to meet the primal needs of human
+kind. It is not so now. We live in an age that is at best about a
+century and a half old--the age of machinery and power. Our common
+reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the
+purple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its
+record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure of
+discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since
+dismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simple
+annals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what is
+there to say? They were born; they lived; they died. They followed their
+leaders, and their names are forgotten.
+
+But written thus our history has obscured the greatest fact that ever
+came into it--the colossal change that separates our little era of a
+century and a half from all the preceding history of mankind--separates
+it so completely that a great gulf lies between, across which comparison
+can scarcely pass, and on the other side of which a new world begins.
+
+It has been the custom of our history to use the phrase the "new world"
+to mark the discoveries of Columbus and the treasure-hunt of a Cortes or
+a Pizarro. But what of that? The America that they annexed to Europe was
+merely a new domain added to a world already old. The "new world" was
+really found in the wonder-years of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
+centuries. Mankind really entered upon it when the sudden progress of
+liberated science bound the fierce energy of expanding stream and drew
+the eager lightning from the cloud.
+
+Here began indeed, in the drab surroundings of the workshop, in the
+silent mystery of the laboratory, the magic of the new age.
+
+But we do not commonly realize the vastness of the change. Much of our
+life and much of our thought still belongs to the old world. Our
+education is still largely framed on the old pattern. And our views of
+poverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, are
+still largely conditioned by it.
+
+In the old world, poverty seemed, and poverty was, the natural and
+inevitable lot of the greater portion of mankind. It was difficult, with
+the mean appliances of the time, to wring subsistence from the reluctant
+earth. For the simplest necessaries and comforts of life all, or nearly
+all, must work hard. Many must perish for want of them. Poverty was
+inevitable and perpetual. The poor must look to the brightness of a
+future world for the consolation that they were denied in this. Seen
+thus poverty became rather a blessing than a curse, or at least a
+dispensation prescribing the proper lot of man. Life itself was but a
+preparation and a trial--a threshing floor where, under the
+"tribulation" of want, the wheat was beaten from the straw. Of this
+older view much still survives, and much that is ennobling. Nor is there
+any need to say goodby to it. Even if poverty were gone, the flail
+could still beat hard enough upon the grain and chaff of humanity.
+
+But turn to consider the magnitude of the change that has come about
+with the era of machinery and the indescribable increase which it has
+brought to man's power over his environment. There is no need to recite
+here in detail the marvelous record of mechanical progress that
+constituted the "industrial revolution" of the eighteenth century. The
+utilization of coal for the smelting of iron ore; the invention of
+machinery that could spin and weave; the application of the undreamed
+energy of steam as a motive force, the building of canals and the making
+of stone roads--these proved but the beginnings. Each stage of invention
+called for a further advance. The quickening of one part of the process
+necessitated the "speeding up" of all the others. It placed a premium--a
+reward already in sight--upon the next advance. Mechanical spinning
+called forth the power loom. The increase in production called for new
+means of transport. The improvement of transport still further swelled
+the volume of production. The steamboat of 1809 and the steam locomotive
+of 1830 were the direct result of what had gone before. Most important
+of all, the movement had become a conscious one. Invention was no longer
+the fortuitous result of a happy chance. Mechanical progress, the
+continual increase of power and the continual surplus of product became
+an essential part of the environment, and an unconscious element in the
+thought and outlook of the civilized world.
+
+No wonder that the first aspect of the age of machinery was one of
+triumph. Man had vanquished nature. The elemental forces of wind and
+fire, of rushing water and driving storm before which the savage had
+cowered low for shelter, these had become his servants. The forest that
+had blocked his path became his field. The desert blossomed as his
+garden.
+
+The aspect of industrial life altered. The domestic industry of the
+cottage and the individual labor of the artisan gave place to the
+factory with its regiment of workers and its steam-driven machinery.
+The economic isolation of the single worker, of the village, even of the
+district and the nation, was lost in the general cohesion in which the
+whole industrial world merged into one.
+
+The life of the individual changed accordingly. In the old world his
+little sphere was allotted to him and there he stayed. His village was
+his horizon. The son of the weaver wove and the smith reared his
+children to his trade. Each did his duty, or was adjured to do it, in
+the "state of life to which it had pleased God to call him." Migration
+to distant occupations or to foreign lands was but for the adventurous
+few. The ne'er-do-well blew, like seed before the wind, to distant
+places, but mankind at large stayed at home. Here and there exceptional
+industry or extraordinary capacity raised the artisan to wealth and
+turned the "man" into the "master." But for the most part even industry
+and endowment were powerless against the inertia of custom and the
+dead-weight of environment. The universal ignorance of the working class
+broke down the aspiring force of genius. Mute inglorious Miltons were
+buried in country churchyards.
+
+In the new world all this changed. The individual became but a shifting
+atom in the vast complex, moving from place to place, from occupation to
+occupation and from gradation to gradation of material fortune.
+
+The process went further and further. The machine penetrated everywhere,
+thrusting aside with its gigantic arm the feeble efforts of handicraft.
+It laid its hold upon agriculture, sowing and reaping the grain and
+transporting it to the ends of the earth. Then as the nineteenth century
+drew towards its close, even the age of steam power was made commonplace
+by achievements of the era of electricity.
+
+All this is familiar enough. The record of the age of machinery is known
+to all. But the strange mystery, the secret that lies concealed within
+its organization, is realized by but few. It offers, to those who see it
+aright, the most perplexing industrial paradox ever presented in the
+history of mankind. With all our wealth, we are still poor. After a
+century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as
+ever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature still
+conquers us. And more than this. There are many senses in which the
+machine age seems to leave the great bulk of civilized humanity, the
+working part of it, worse off instead of better. The nature of our work
+has changed. No man now makes anything. He makes only a part of
+something, feeding and tending a machine that moves with relentless
+monotony in the routine of which both the machine and its tender are
+only a fractional part.
+
+For the great majority of the workers, the interest of work as such is
+gone. It is a task done consciously for a wage, one eye upon the clock.
+The brave independence of the keeper of the little shop contrasts
+favorably with the mock dignity of a floor walker in an "establishment."
+The varied craftsmanship of the artisan had in it something of the
+creative element that was the parent motive of sustained industry. The
+dull routine of the factory hand in a cotton mill has gone. The life of
+a pioneer settler in America two hundred years ago, penurious and
+dangerous as it was, stands out brightly beside the dull and meaningless
+toil of his descendant.
+
+The picture must not be drawn in colors too sinister. In the dullest
+work and in the meanest lives in the new world to-day there are elements
+that were lacking in the work of the old world. The universal spread of
+elementary education, the universal access to the printed page, and the
+universal hope of better things, if not for oneself, at least for one's
+children, and even the universal restlessness that the industrialism of
+to-day have brought are better things than the dull plodding passivity
+of the older world. Only a false mediaevalism can paint the past in
+colors superior to the present. The haze of distance that dims the
+mountains with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the past into the
+soft glory of retrospect. Misled by these, the sentimentalist may often
+sigh for an age that in a nearer view would be seen filled with cruelty
+and suffering. But even when we have made every allowance for the all
+too human tendency to soften down the past, it remains true that in many
+senses the processes of industry for the worker have lost in
+attractiveness and power of absorption of the mind during the very
+period when they have gained so enormously in effectiveness and in power
+of production.
+
+The essential contrast lies between the vastly increased power of
+production and its apparent inability to satisfy for all humanity the
+most elementary human wants; between the immeasurable saving of labor
+effected by machinery and the brute fact of the continuance of
+hard-driven, unceasing toil.
+
+Of the extent of this increased power of production we can only speak in
+general terms. No one, as far as I am aware, has yet essayed to measure
+it. Nor have we any form of calculus or computation that can easily be
+applied. If we wish to compare the gross total of production effected
+to-day with that accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago, the means,
+the basis of calculation, is lacking. Vast numbers of the things
+produced now were not then in existence. A great part of our production
+of to-day culminates not in productive goods, but in services, as in
+forms of motion, or in ability to talk across a distance.
+
+It is true that statistics that deal with the world's production of
+cotton, or of oil, or of iron and steel present stupendous results. But
+even these do not go far enough. For the basic raw materials are worked
+into finer and finer forms to supply new "wants" as they are called, and
+to represent a vast quantity of "satisfactions" not existing before.
+
+Nor is the money calculus of any avail. Comparison by prices breaks down
+entirely. A bushel of wheat stands about where it stood before and could
+be calculated. But the computation, let us say, in price-values of the
+Sunday newspapers produced in one week in New York or the annual output
+of photographic apparatus, would defy comparison. Of the enormous
+increase in the gross total of human goods there is no doubt. We have
+only to look about us to see it. The endless miles of railways, the
+vast apparatus of the factories, the soaring structures of the cities
+bear easy witness to it. Yet it would be difficult indeed to compute by
+what factor the effectiveness of human labor working with machinery has
+been increased.
+
+But suppose we say, since one figure is as good as another, that it has
+been increased a hundred times. This calculation must be well within the
+facts and can be used as merely a more concrete way of saying that the
+power of production has been vastly increased. During the period of this
+increase, the numbers of mankind in the industrial countries have
+perhaps been multiplied by three to one. This again is inexact, since
+there are no precise figures of population that cover the period. But
+all that is meant is that the increase in one case is, quite obviously,
+colossal, and in the other case is evidently not very much.
+
+Here then is the paradox.
+
+If the ability to produce goods to meet human wants has multiplied so
+that each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he did
+before, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty times
+better off. But it is not. Or else, as the other possible alternative,
+the working hours of the world should have been cut down to about one in
+thirty of what they were before. But they are not. How, then, are we to
+explain this extraordinary discrepancy between human power and resulting
+human happiness?
+
+The more we look at our mechanism of production the more perplexing it
+seems. Suppose an observer were to look down from the cold distance of
+the moon upon the seething ant-hill of human labor presented on the
+surface of our globe; and suppose that such an observer knew nothing of
+our system of individual property, of money payments and wages and
+contracts, but viewed our labor as merely that of a mass of animated
+beings trying to supply their wants. The spectacle to his eyes would be
+strange indeed. Mankind viewed in the mass would be seen to produce a
+certain amount of absolutely necessary things, such as food, and then to
+stop. In spite of the fact that there was not food enough to go round,
+and that large numbers must die of starvation or perish slowly from
+under-nutrition, the production of food would stop at some point a good
+deal short of universal satisfaction. So, too, with the production of
+clothing, shelter and other necessary things; never enough would seem to
+be produced, and this apparently not by accident or miscalculation, but
+as if some peculiar social law were at work adjusting production to the
+point where there is just not enough, and leaving it there. The
+countless millions of workers would be seen to turn their untired
+energies and their all-powerful machinery away from the production of
+necessary things to the making of mere comforts; and from these, again,
+while still stopping short of a general satisfaction, to the making of
+luxuries and superfluities. The wheels would never stop. The activity
+would never tire. Mankind, mad with the energy of activity, would be
+seen to pursue the fleeing phantom of insatiable desire. Thus among the
+huge mass of accumulated commodities the simplest wants would go
+unsatisfied. Half-fed men would dig for diamonds, and men sheltered by
+a crazy roof erect the marble walls of palaces. The observer might well
+remain perplexed at the pathetic discord between human work and human
+wants. Something, he would feel assured, must be at fault either with
+the social instincts of man or with the social order under which he
+lives.
+
+And herein lies the supreme problem that faces us in this opening
+century. The period of five years of war has shown it to us in a clearer
+light than fifty years of peace. War is destruction--the annihilation of
+human life, the destruction of things made with generations of labor,
+the misdirection of productive power from making what is useful to
+making what is useless. In the great war just over, some seven million
+lives were sacrificed; eight million tons of shipping were sunk beneath
+the sea; some fifty million adult males were drawn from productive labor
+to the lines of battle; behind them uncounted millions labored day and
+night at making the weapons of destruction. One might well have thought
+that such a gigantic misdirection of human energy would have brought
+the industrial world to a standstill within a year. So people did think.
+So thought a great number, perhaps the greater number, of the financiers
+and economists and industrial leaders trained in the world in which we
+used to live. The expectation was unfounded. Great as is the destruction
+of war, not even five years of it have broken the productive machine.
+And the reason is now plain enough. Peace, also--or peace under the old
+conditions of industry--is infinitely wasteful of human energy. Not more
+than one adult worker in ten--so at least it might with confidence be
+estimated--is employed on necessary things. The other nine perform
+superfluous services. War turns them from making the glittering
+superfluities of peace to making its grim engines of destruction. But
+while the tenth man still labors, the machine, though creaking with its
+dislocation, can still go on. The economics of war, therefore, has
+thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace.
+
+These I propose in the succeeding chapters to examine. But it might be
+well before doing so to lay stress upon the fact that while admitting
+all the shortcomings and the injustices of the regime under which we
+have lived, I am not one of those who are able to see a short and single
+remedy. Many people when presented with the argument above, would settle
+it at once with the word "socialism." Here, they say, is the immediate
+and natural remedy. I confess at the outset, and shall develop later,
+that I cannot view it so. Socialism is a mere beautiful dream, possible
+only for the angels. The attempt to establish it would hurl us over the
+abyss. Our present lot is sad, but the frying pan is at least better
+than the fire.
+
+
+
+
+_II.--Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness_
+
+
+"ALL men," wrote Thomas Jefferson in framing the Declaration of
+Independence, "have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the
+pursuit of happiness." The words are more than a felicitous phrase. They
+express even more than the creed of a nation. They embody in themselves
+the uppermost thought of the era that was dawning when they were
+written. They stand for the same view of society which, in that very
+year of 1776, Adam Smith put before the world in his immortal "Wealth of
+Nations" as the "System of Natural Liberty." In this system mankind
+placed its hopes for over half a century and under it the industrial
+civilization of the age of machinery rose to the plenitude of its
+power.
+
+In the preceding chapter an examination has been made of the purely
+mechanical side of the era of machine production. It has been shown that
+the age of machinery has been in a certain sense one of triumph, of the
+triumphant conquest of nature, but in another sense one of perplexing
+failure. The new forces controlled by mankind have been powerless as yet
+to remove want and destitution, hard work and social discontent. In the
+midst of accumulated wealth social justice seems as far away as ever.
+
+It remains now to discuss the intellectual development of the modern age
+of machinery and the way in which it has moulded the thoughts and the
+outlook of mankind.
+
+Few men think for themselves. The thoughts of most of us are little more
+than imitations and adaptations of the ideas of stronger minds. The
+influence of environment conditions, if it does not control, the mind of
+man. So it comes about that every age or generation has its dominant and
+uppermost thoughts, its peculiar way of looking at things and its
+peculiar basis of opinion on which its collective action and its social
+regulations rest. All this is largely unconscious. The average citizen
+of three generations ago was probably not aware that he was an extreme
+individualist. The average citizen of to-day is not conscious of the
+fact that he has ceased to be one. The man of three generations ago had
+certain ideas which he held to be axiomatic, such as that his house was
+his castle, and that property was property and that what was his was
+his. But these were to him things so obvious that he could not conceive
+any reasonable person doubting them. So, too, with the man of to-day. He
+has come to believe in such things as old age pensions and national
+insurance. He submits to bachelor taxes and he pays for the education of
+other people's children; he speculates much on the limits of
+inheritance, and he even meditates profound alterations in the right of
+property in land. His house is no longer his castle. He has taken down
+its fences, and "boulevarded" its grounds till it merges into those of
+his neighbors. Indeed he probably does not live in a house at all, but
+in a mere "apartment" or subdivision of a house which he shares with a
+multiplicity of people. Nor does he any longer draw water from his own
+well or go to bed by the light of his own candle: for such services as
+these his life is so mixed up with "franchises" and "public utilities"
+and other things unheard of by his own great-grandfather, that it is
+hopelessly intertangled with that of his fellow citizens. In fine, there
+is little left but his own conscience into which he can withdraw.
+
+Such a man is well aware that times have changed since his
+great-grandfather's day. But he is not aware of the profound extent to
+which his own opinions have been affected by the changing times. He is
+no longer an individualist. He has become by brute force of
+circumstances a sort of collectivist, puzzled only as to how much of a
+collectivist to be.
+
+Individualism of the extreme type is, therefore, long since out of date.
+To attack it is merely to kick a dead dog. But the essential problem of
+to-day is to know how far we are to depart from its principles. There
+are those who tell us--and they number many millions--that we must
+abandon them entirely. Industrial society, they say, must be reorganized
+from top to bottom; private industry must cease. All must work for the
+state; only in a socialist commonwealth can social justice be found.
+There are others, of whom the present writer is one, who see in such a
+programme nothing but disaster: yet who consider that the individualist
+principle of "every man for himself" while it makes for national wealth
+and accumulated power, favors overmuch the few at the expense of the
+many, puts an over-great premium upon capacity, assigns too harsh a
+punishment for easy indolence, and, what is worse, exposes the
+individual human being too cruelly to the mere accidents of birth and
+fortune. Under such a system, in short, to those who have is given and
+from those who have not is taken away even that which they have. There
+are others again who still view individualism just as the vast majority
+of our great-grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but just: as
+awarding to every man the fruit of his own labor and the punishment of
+his own idleness, and as visiting, in accordance with the stern but
+necessary ordination of our existence, the sins of the father upon the
+child.
+
+The proper starting point, then, for all discussion of the social
+problem is the consideration of the individualist theory of industrial
+society. This grew up, as all the world knows, along with the era of
+machinery itself. It had its counterpart on the political side in the
+rise of representative democratic government. Machinery, industrial
+liberty, political democracy--these three things represent the basis of
+the progress of the nineteenth century.
+
+The chief exposition of the system is found in the work of the classical
+economists--Adam Smith and his followers of half a century--who created
+the modern science of political economy. Beginning as controversialists
+anxious to overset a particular system of trade regulation, they ended
+by becoming the exponents of a new social order. Modified and amended as
+their system is in its practical application, it still largely
+conditions our outlook to-day. It is to this system that we must turn.
+
+The general outline of the classical theory of political economy is so
+clear and so simple that it can be presented within the briefest
+compass. It began with certain postulates, or assumptions, to a great
+extent unconscious, of the conditions to which it applied. It assumed
+the existence of the state and of contract. It took for granted the
+existence of individual property, in consumption goods, in capital
+goods, and, with a certain hesitation, in land. The last assumption was
+not perhaps without misgivings: Adam Smith was disposed to look askance
+at landlords as men who gathered where they had not sown. John Stuart
+Mill, as is well known, was more and more inclined, with advancing
+reflection, to question the sanctity of landed property as the basis of
+social institutions. But for the most part property, contract and the
+coercive state were fundamental assumptions with the classicists.
+
+With this there went, on the psychological side, the further assumption
+of a general selfishness or self-seeking as the principal motive of the
+individual in the economic sphere. Oddly enough this assumption--the
+most warrantable of the lot--was the earliest to fall under disrepute.
+The plain assertion that every man looks out for himself (or at best for
+himself and his immediate family) touches the tender conscience of
+humanity. It is an unpalatable truth. None the less it is the most
+nearly true of all the broad generalizations that can be attempted in
+regard to mankind.
+
+The essential problem then of the classicists was to ask what would
+happen if an industrial community, possessed of the modern control over
+machinery and power, were allowed to follow the promptings of
+"enlightened selfishness" in an environment based upon free contract and
+the right of property in land and goods. The answer was of the most
+cheering description. The result would be a progressive amelioration of
+society, increasing in proportion to the completeness with which the
+fundamental principles involved were allowed to act, and tending
+ultimately towards something like a social millennium or perfection of
+human society. One easily recalls the almost reverent attitude of Adam
+Smith towards this system of industrial liberty which he exalted into a
+kind of natural theology: and the way in which Mill, a deist but not a
+Christian, was able to fit the whole apparatus of individual liberty
+into its place in an ordered universe. The world "runs of itself," said
+the economist. We have only to leave it alone. And the maxim of _laissez
+faire_ became the last word of social wisdom.
+
+The argument of the classicists ran thus. If there is everywhere
+complete economic freedom, then there will ensue in consequence a regime
+of social justice. If every man is allowed to buy and sell goods, labor
+and property, just as suits his own interest, then the prices and wages
+that result are either in the exact measure of social justice or, at
+least, are perpetually moving towards it. The price of any commodity at
+any moment is, it is true, a "market price," the resultant of the demand
+and the supply; but behind this operates continually the inexorable law
+of the cost of production. Sooner or later every price must represent
+the actual cost of producing the commodity concerned, or, at least, must
+oscillate now above and now below that point which it is always
+endeavoring to meet. For if temporary circumstances force the price well
+above the cost of producing the article in question, then the large
+profits to be made induce a greater and greater production. The
+increased volume of the supply thus produced inevitably forces down the
+price till it sinks to the point of cost. If circumstances (such, for
+example, as miscalculation and an over-great supply) depress the price
+below the point of cost, then the discouragement of further production
+presently shortens the supply and brings the price up again. Price is
+thus like an oscillating pendulum seeking its point of rest, or like the
+waves of the sea rising and falling about its level. By this same
+mechanism the quantity and direction of production, argued the
+economists, respond automatically to the needs of humanity, or, at
+least, to the "effective demand," which the classicist mistook for the
+same thing. Just as much wheat or bricks or diamonds would be produced
+as the world called for; to produce too much of any one thing was to
+violate a natural law; the falling price and the resulting temporary
+loss sternly rebuked the producer.
+
+In the same way the technical form and mechanism of production were
+presumed to respond to an automatic stimulus. Inventions and improved
+processes met their own reward. Labor, so it was argued, was perpetually
+being saved by the constant introduction of new uses of machinery.
+
+By a parity of reasoning, the shares received by all the participants
+and claimants in the general process of production were seen to be
+regulated in accordance with natural law. Interest on capital was
+treated merely as a particular case under the general theory of price.
+It was the purchase price needed to call forth the "saving" (a form, so
+to speak, of production) which brought the capital into the market. The
+"profits" of the employer represented the necessary price paid by
+society for his services, just enough and not more than enough to keep
+him and his fellows in operative activity, and always tending under the
+happy operation of competition to fall to the minimum consistent with
+social progress.
+
+Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to the classicist a rather
+peculiar case. There was here a physical basis of surplus over cost.
+But, granted the operation of the factors and forces concerned, rent
+emerged as a differential payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. It
+did not in any way affect prices or wages, which were rendered neither
+greater nor less thereby. The full implication of the rent doctrine and
+its relation to social justice remained obscured to the eye of the
+classical economist; the fixed conviction that what a man owns is his
+own created a mist through which the light could not pass.
+
+Wages, finally, were but a further case of value. There was a demand for
+labor, represented by the capital waiting to remunerate it, and a supply
+of labor represented by the existing and increasing working class.
+Hence wages, like all other shares and factors, corresponded, so it was
+argued, to social justice. Whether wages were high or low, whether hours
+were long or short, at least the laborer like everybody else "got what
+was coming to him." All possibility of a general increase of wages
+depended on the relation of available capital to the numbers of the
+working men.
+
+Thus the system as applied to society at large could be summed up in the
+consoling doctrine that every man got what he was worth, and was worth
+what he got; that industry and energy brought their own reward; that
+national wealth and individual welfare were one and the same; that all
+that was needed for social progress was hard work, more machinery, more
+saving of labor and a prudent limitation of the numbers of the
+population.
+
+The application of such a system to legislation and public policy was
+obvious. It carried with it the principle of _laissez-faire_. The
+doctrine of international free trade, albeit the most conspicuous of its
+applications, was but one case under the general law. It taught that
+the mere organization of labor was powerless to raise wages; that
+strikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into the
+pocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wages
+and prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a large
+extent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle of
+germinating life against the environment that throttles part of it. The
+poor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets the
+sand of the desert. There could be no social remedy for poverty except
+the almost impossible remedy of the limitation of life itself. Failing
+this the economist could wash his hands of the poor.
+
+These are the days of relative judgments and the classical economy, like
+all else, must be viewed in the light of time and circumstance. With all
+its fallacies, or rather its shortcomings, it served a magnificent
+purpose. It opened a road never before trodden from social slavery
+towards social freedom, from the mediaeval autocratic regime of fixed
+caste and hereditary status towards a regime of equal social justice.
+In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or rather
+represented the final consciousness of a process that had been going on
+for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of
+the serf. True, the goal has not been reached. The vision of the
+universal happiness seen by the economists has proved a mirage. The end
+of the road is not in sight. But it cannot be doubted that in the long
+pilgrimage of mankind towards social betterment the economists guided us
+in the right turning. If we turn again in a new direction, it will at
+any rate not be in the direction of a return to autocratic mediaevalism.
+
+But when all is said in favor of its historic usefulness, the failures
+and the fallacies of natural liberty have now become so manifest that
+the system is destined in the coming era to be revised from top to
+bottom. It is to these failures and fallacies that attention will be
+drawn in the next chapter.
+
+
+
+
+_III.--The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty_
+
+
+THE rewards and punishments of the economic world are singularly
+unequal. One man earns as much in a week or even in a day as another
+does in a year. This man by hard, manual labor makes only enough to pay
+for humble shelter and plain food. This other by what seems a congenial
+activity, fascinating as a game of chess, acquires uncounted millions. A
+third stands idle in the market place asking in vain for work. A fourth
+lives upon rent, dozing in his chair, and neither toils nor spins. A
+fifth by the sheer hazard of a lucky "deal" acquires a fortune without
+work at all. A sixth, scorning to work, earns nothing and gets nothing;
+in him survives a primitive dislike of labor not yet fully "evoluted
+out;" he slips through the meshes of civilization to become a "tramp,"
+cadges his food where he can, suns his tattered rags when it is warm and
+shivers when it is cold, migrating with the birds and reappearing with
+the flowers of spring.
+
+Yet all are free. This is the distinguishing mark of them as children of
+our era. They may work or stop. There is no compulsion from without. No
+man is a slave. Each has his "natural liberty," and each in his degree,
+great or small, receives his allotted reward.
+
+But is the allotment correct and the reward proportioned by his efforts?
+Is it fair or unfair, and does it stand for the true measure of social
+justice?
+
+This is the profound problem of the twentieth century.
+
+The economists and the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century were
+in no doubt about this question. It was their firm conviction that the
+system under which we live was, in its broad outline, a system of even
+justice. They held it true that every man under free competition and
+individual liberty is awarded just what he is worth and is worth
+exactly what he gets: that the reason why a plain laborer is paid only
+two or three dollars a day is because he only "produces" two or three
+dollars a day: and that why a skilled engineer is paid ten times as much
+is because he "produces" ten times as much. His work is "worth" ten
+times that of the plain laborer. By the same reasoning the salary of a
+corporation president who receives fifty thousand dollars a year merely
+reflects the fact that the man produces--earns--brings in to the
+corporation that amount or even more. The big salary corresponds to the
+big efficiency.
+
+And there is much in the common experience of life and the common
+conduct of business that seems to support this view. It is undoubtedly
+true if we look at any little portion of business activity taken as a
+fragment by itself. On the most purely selfish grounds I may find that
+it "pays" to hire an expert at a hundred dollars a day, and might find
+that it spelled ruin to attempt to raise the wages of my workingmen
+beyond four dollars a day. Everybody knows that in any particular
+business at any particular place and time with prices at any particular
+point, there is a wage that can be paid and a wage that can not. And
+everybody, or nearly everybody, bases on these obvious facts a series of
+entirely erroneous conclusions. Because we cannot change the part we are
+apt to think we cannot change the whole. Because one brick in the wall
+is immovable, we forget that the wall itself might be rebuilt.
+
+The single employer rightly knows that there is a wage higher than he
+can pay and hours shorter than he can grant. But are the limits that
+frame him in, real and necessary limits, resulting from the very nature
+of things, or are they mere products of particular circumstances? This,
+as a piece of pure economics, does not interest the individual employer
+a particle. It belongs in the same category as the question of the
+immortality of the soul and other profundities that have nothing to do
+with business. But to society at large the question is of an infinite
+importance.
+
+Now the older economists taught, and the educated world for about a
+century believed, that these limitations which hedged the particular
+employer about were fixed and assigned by natural economic law. They
+represented, as has been explained, the operation of the system of
+natural liberty by which every man got what he is worth. And it is quite
+true that the particular employer can no more break away from these
+limits than he can jump out of his own skin. He can only violate them at
+the expense of ceasing to be an economic being at all and degenerating
+into a philanthropist.
+
+But consider for a moment the peculiar nature of the limitations
+themselves. Every man's limit of what he can pay and what he can take,
+of how much he can offer and how much he will receive, is based on the
+similar limitations of other people. They are reciprocal to one another.
+Why should one factory owner not pay ten dollars a day to his hands?
+Because the others don't. But suppose they all do? Then the output could
+not be sold at the present price. But why not sell the produce at a
+higher price? Because at a higher price the consumer can't afford to buy
+it. But suppose that the consumer, for the things which he himself
+makes and sells, or for the work which he performs, receives more? What
+then? The whole thing begins to have a jigsaw look, like a child's toy
+rack with wooden soldiers on it, expanding and contracting. One searches
+in vain for the basis on which the relationship rests. And at the end of
+the analysis one finds nothing but a mere anarchical play of forces,
+nothing but a give-and-take resting on relative bargaining strength.
+Every man gets what he can and gives what he has to.
+
+Observe that this is not in the slightest the conclusion of the orthodox
+economists. Every man, they said, gets what he actually makes, or, by
+exchange, those things which exactly correspond to it as regards the
+cost of making them--which have, to use the key-word of the theory, the
+same value. Let us take a very simple example. If I go fishing with a
+net which I have myself constructed out of fibers and sticks, and if I
+catch a fish and if I then roast the fish over a fire which I have made
+without so much as the intervention of a lucifer match, then it is I
+and I alone who have "produced" the roast fish. That is plain enough.
+But what if I catch the fish by using a hired boat and a hired net, or
+by buying worms as bait from some one who has dug them? Or what if I do
+not fish at all, but get my roast fish by paying for it a part of the
+wages I receive for working in a saw mill? Here are a new set of
+relationships. How much of the fish is "produced" by each of the people
+concerned? And what part of my wages ought I to pay in return for the
+part of the fish that I buy?
+
+Here opens up, very evidently, a perfect labyrinth of complexity. But it
+was the labyrinth for which the earlier economist held, so he thought,
+the thread. No matter how dark the passage, he still clung tight to it.
+And his thread was his "fundamental equation of value" whereby each
+thing and everything is sold (or tends to be sold) under free
+competition for exactly its cost of production. There it was; as simple
+as A. B. C.; making the cost of everything proportional to the cost of
+everything else, and in itself natural and just; explaining and
+justifying the variations of wages and salaries on what seems a stern
+basis of fact. Here is your selling price as a starting point. Given
+that, you can see at once the reason for the wages paid and the full
+measure of the payment. To pay more is impossible. To pay less is to
+invite a competition that will force the payment of more. Or take, if
+you like, the wages as the starting point: there you are
+again,--simplicity itself: the selling price will exactly and nicely
+correspond to cost. True, a part of the cost concerned will be
+represented not by wages, but by cost of materials; but these, on
+analysis, dissolve into past wages. Hence the whole process and its
+explanation revolves around this simple fundamental equation that
+selling value equals the cost of production.
+
+This was the central part of the economic structure. It was the keystone
+of the arch. If it holds, all holds. Knock it out and the whole edifice
+falls into fragments.
+
+A technical student of the schools would digress here, to the great
+confusion of the reader, into a discussion of the controversy in the
+economic cloister between the rival schools of economists as to whether
+cost governs value or value governs cost. The point needs no discussion
+here, but just such fleeting passing mention as may indicate that the
+writer is well and wearily conversant with it.
+
+The fundamental equation of the economist, then, is that the value of
+everything is proportionate to its cost. It requires no little hardihood
+to say that this proposition is a fallacy. It lays one open at once,
+most illogically, to the charge of being a socialist. In sober truth it
+might as well lay one open to the charge of being an ornithologist. I
+will not, therefore, say that the proposition that the value of
+everything equals the cost of production is false. I will say that it is
+_true_; in fact, that is just as true as that two and two make four:
+exactly as true as that, but let it be noted most profoundly, _only as
+true as that_. In other words, it is a truism, mere equation in terms,
+telling nothing whatever. When I say that two and two make four I find,
+after deep thought, that I have really said _nothing_, or nothing that
+was not already said at the moment I defined two and defined four. The
+new statement that two and two make four adds nothing. So with the
+majestic equation of the cost of production. It means, as far as social
+application goes, as far as any moral significance or bearing on social
+reform and the social outlook goes, _absolutely nothing_. It is not in
+itself fallacious; how could it be? But all the social inferences drawn
+from it are absolute, complete and malicious fallacies.
+
+Any socialist who says this, is quite right. Where he goes wrong is when
+he tries to build up as truth a set of inferences more fallacious and
+more malicious still.
+
+But the central economic doctrine of cost can not be shaken by mere
+denunciation. Let us examine it and see what is the matter with it. We
+restate the equation.
+
+_Under perfectly free competition the value or selling price of
+everything equals, or is perpetually tending to equal, the cost of its
+production._ This is the proposition itself, and the inferences derived
+from it are that there is a "natural price" of everything, and that all
+"natural prices" are proportionate to cost and to one another; that all
+wages, apart from temporary fluctuations, are derived from, and limited
+by, the natural prices paid for the things made: that all payments for
+the use of capital (interest) are similarly derived and similarly
+limited; and that consequently the whole economic arrangement, by giving
+to each person exactly and precisely the fruit of his own labor,
+conforms exactly to social justice.
+
+Now the trouble with the main proposition just quoted is that each side
+of the equation is used as the measure of the other. In order to show
+what natural price is, we add up all the wages that have been paid, and
+declare that to be the cost and then say that the cost governs the
+price. Then if we are asked why are wages what they are, we turn the
+argument backward and say that since the selling price is so and so the
+wages that can be paid out of it only amount to such and such. This
+explains nothing. It is a mere argument in a circle. It is as if one
+tried to explain why one blade of a pair of scissors is four inches long
+by saying that it has to be the same length as the other. This is quite
+true of either blade if one takes the length of the other for granted,
+but as applied to the explanation of the length of the scissors it is
+worse than meaningless.
+
+This reasoning may seem to many persons mere casuistry, mere sophistical
+juggling with words. After all, they say, there is such a thing as
+relative cost, relative difficulty of making things, a difference which
+rests upon a physical basis. To make one thing requires a lot of labor
+and trouble and much skill: to make another thing requires very little
+labor and no skill out of the common. Here then is your basis of value,
+obvious and beyond argument. A primitive savage makes a bow and arrow in
+a day: it takes him a fortnight to make a bark canoe. On that fact rests
+the exchange value between the two. The relative quantity of labor
+embodied in each object is the basis of its value.
+
+This line of reasoning has a very convincing sound. It appears in
+nearly every book on economic theory from Adam Smith and Ricardo till
+to-day. "Labor alone," wrote Smith, "never varying in its own value is
+above the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all
+commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared."
+
+But the idea that _quantity of labor governs_ value will not stand
+examination for a moment. What is _quantity_ of labor and how is it
+measured? As long as we draw our illustrations from primitive life where
+one man's work is much the same as another's and where all operations
+are simple, we seem easily able to measure and compare. One day is the
+same as another and one man about as capable as his fellow. But in the
+complexity of modern industrial life such a calculation no longer
+applies: the differences of skill, of native ingenuity, and technical
+preparation become enormous. The hour's work of a common laborer is not
+the same thing as the hour's work of a watchmaker mending a watch, or of
+an engineer directing the building of a bridge, or of an architect
+drawing a plan. There is no way of reducing these hours to a common
+basis. We may think, if we like, that the quantity of labor _ought_ to
+be the basis of value and exchange. Such is always the dream of the
+socialist. But on a closer view it is shattered like any other dream.
+For we have, alas, no means of finding out what the quantity of labor is
+and how it can be measured. We cannot measure it in terms of time. We
+have no calculus for comparing relative amounts of skill and energy. We
+can not measure it by the amount of its contribution to the product, for
+that is the very matter that we want to discover.
+
+What the economist does is to slip out of the difficulty altogether by
+begging the whole question. He deliberately measures the quantity of
+labor _by what is paid for it_. Skilled labor is worth, let us say,
+three times as much as common labor; and brain work, speaking broadly,
+is worth several times as much again. Hence by adding up all the wages
+and salaries paid we get something that seems to indicate the total
+quantity of labor, measured not simply in time, but with an allowance
+for skill and technical competency. By describing this allowance as a
+coefficient we can give our statement a false air of mathematical
+certainty and so muddle up the essential question that the truth is lost
+from sight like a pea under a thimble. Now you see it and now you don't.
+The thing is, in fact, a mere piece of intellectual conjuring. The
+conjurer has slipped the phrase, "quantity of labor," up his sleeve, and
+when it reappears it has turned into "the expense of hiring labor." This
+is a quite different thing. But as both conceptions are related somehow
+to the idea of cost, the substitution is never discovered.
+
+On this false basis a vast structure is erected. All prices, provided
+that competition is free, are made to appear as the necessary result of
+natural forces. They are "natural" or "normal" prices. All wages are
+explained, and low wages are exonerated, on what seems to be an
+undeniable ground of fact. They are what they are. You may wish them
+otherwise, but they are not. As a philanthropist, you may feel sorry
+that a humble laborer should work through a long day to receive two
+dollars, but as an economist you console yourself with the reflection
+that that is all he produces. You may at times, as a sentimentalist,
+wonder whether the vast sums drawn as interest on capital are consistent
+with social fairness; but if it is shown that interest is simply the
+"natural price" of capital representing the actual "productive power" of
+the capital, there is nothing further to say. You may have similar
+qualms over rent and the rightness and wrongness of it. The enormous
+"unearned increment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of land who
+toils not neither spins to obtain it, may seem difficult of
+justification. But after all, land is only one particular case of
+ownership under the one and the same system. The rent for which the
+owner can lease it, emerges simply as a consequence of the existing
+state of wages and prices. High rent, says the economist, does not make
+big prices: it merely follows as a consequence or result of them. Dear
+bread is not caused by the high rents paid by tenant farmers for the
+land: the train of cause and effect runs in the contrary direction. And
+the selling price of land is merely a consequence of its rental value, a
+simple case of capitalization of annual return into a present sum. City
+land, though it looks different from farm land, is seen in the light of
+this same analysis, to earn its rent in just the same way. The high rent
+of a Broadway store, says the economist, does not add a single cent to
+the price of the things sold in it. It is because prices are what they
+are that the rent is and can be paid. Hence on examination the same
+canon of social justice that covers and explains prices, wages, and
+interest applies with perfect propriety to rent.
+
+Or finally, to take the strongest case of all, one may, as a citizen,
+feel apprehension at times at the colossal fortune of a Carnegie or a
+Rockefeller. For it does seem passing strange that one human being
+should control as property the mass of coin, goods, houses, factories,
+land and mines, represented by a billion dollars; stranger still that at
+his death he should write upon a piece of paper his commands as to what
+his surviving fellow creatures are to do with it. But if it can be
+shown to be true that Mr. Rockefeller "made" his fortune in the same
+sense that a man makes a log house by felling trees and putting them one
+upon another, then the fortune belongs to Mr. Rockefeller in the same
+way as the log house belongs to the pioneer. And if the social
+inferences that are drawn from the theory of natural liberty and natural
+value are correct, the millionaire and the landlord, the plutocrat and
+the pioneer, the wage earner and the capitalist, have each all the right
+to do what he will with his own. For every man in this just world gets
+what is coming to him. He gets what he is worth, and he is worth what he
+gets.
+
+But if one knocks out the keystone of the arch in the form of a
+proposition that natural value conforms to the cost of production, then
+the whole edifice collapses and must be set up again, upon another plan
+and on another foundation, stone by stone.
+
+
+
+
+_IV.--Work and Wages_
+
+
+WAGES and prices, then, if the argument recited in the preceding chapter
+of this series holds good, do not under free competition tend towards
+social justice. It is not true that every man gets what he produces. It
+is not true that enormous salaries represent enormous productive
+services and that humble wages correspond to a humble contribution to
+the welfare of society. Prices, wages, salaries, interest, rent and
+profits do not, if left to themselves, follow the simple law of natural
+justice. To think so is an idle dream, the dream of the quietist who may
+slumber too long and be roused to a rude awakening or perish, perhaps,
+in his sleep. His dream is not so dangerous as the contrasted dream of
+the socialist, now threatening to walk abroad in his sleep, but both in
+their degree are dreams and nothing more.
+
+The real truth is that prices and wages and all the various payments
+from hand to hand in industrial society, are the outcome of a complex of
+competing forces that are not based upon justice but upon "economic
+strength." To elucidate this it is necessary to plunge into the jungle
+of pure economic theory. The way is arduous. There are no flowers upon
+the path. And out of this thicket, alas, no two people ever emerge hand
+in hand in concord. Yet it is a path that must be traversed. Let us
+take, then, as a beginning the very simplest case of the making of a
+price. It is the one which is sometimes called in books on economics the
+case of an unique monopoly. Suppose that I offer for sale the manuscript
+of the Pickwick Papers, or Shakespere's skull, or, for the matter of
+that, the skull of John Smith, what is the sum that I shall receive for
+it? It is the utmost that any one is willing to give for it. That is all
+one can say about it. There is no question here of cost or what I paid
+for the article or of anything else except the amount of the
+willingness to pay on the part of the highest bidder. It would be
+possible, indeed, for a bidder to take the article from me by force. But
+this we presume to be prevented by the law, and for this reason we
+referred above not to the physical strength, but to the "economic
+strength" of the parties to a bargain. By this is meant the relation
+that arises out of the condition of the supply and the demand, the
+willingness or eagerness, or the sheer necessity, of the buyers and the
+sellers. People may offer much because the thing to be acquired is an
+absolute necessity without which they perish; a drowning man would sell
+all that he had for a life belt. Or they may offer much through the
+sheer abundance of their other possessions. A millionaire might offer
+more for a life belt as a souvenir than a drowning man could pay for it
+to save his life.
+
+Yet out of any particular conjunction between desires on the one hand
+and goods or services on the other arises a particular equation of
+demand and supply, represented by a particular price. All of this, of
+course, is A. B. C., and I am not aware that anybody doubts it.
+
+Now let us make the example a little more elaborate. Suppose that one
+single person owned all the food supply of a community isolated from the
+outside world. The price which he could exact would be the full measure
+of all the possessions of his neighbors up to the point at least where
+they would commit suicide rather than pay. True, in such a case as this,
+"economic strength" would probably be broken down by the intrusion of
+physical violence. But in so far as it held good the price of food would
+be based upon it.
+
+Prices such as are indicated here were dismissed by the earlier
+economist as mere economic curiosities. John Stuart Mill has something
+to say about the price of a "music box in the wilds of Lake Superior,"
+which, as he perceived, would not be connected with the expense of
+producing it, but might be vastly more or perhaps decidedly less. But
+Mill might have said the same thing about the price of a music box,
+provided it was properly patented, anywhere at all. For the music box
+and Shakespere's skull and the corner in wheat are all merely different
+kinds of examples of the things called a monopoly sale.
+
+Now let us change the example a little further. Suppose that the
+monopolist has for sale not simply a fixed and definite quantity of a
+certain article, but something which he can produce in larger quantities
+as desired. At what price will he now sell? If he offers the article at
+a very high price only a few people will take it: if he lowers the price
+there will be more and more purchasers. His interest seems divided. He
+will want to put the price as high as possible so that the profit on
+each single article (over what it costs him to produce it) will be as
+great as possible. But he will also want to make as many sales as he
+possibly can, which will induce him to set the price low enough to bring
+in new buyers. But, of course, if he puts the price so low that it only
+covers the cost of making the goods his profit is all gone and the mere
+multiplicity of sales is no good to him. He must try therefore to find
+a point of maximum profit where, having in view both the number of sales
+and the profit over cost on each sale the net profit is at its greatest.
+This gives us the fundamental law of monopoly price. It is to be noted
+that under modern conditions of production the cost of manufacture per
+article decreases to a great extent in proportion as a larger and larger
+number is produced and thus the widening of the sale lowers the
+proportionate cost. In any particular case, therefore, it may turn out
+that the price that suits the monopolist's own interest is quite a low
+price, one such as to allow for an enormous quantity of sales and a very
+low cost of manufacture. This, we say, _may_ be the case. But it is not
+so of necessity. In and of itself the monopoly price corresponds to the
+monopolist's profit and not to cheapness of sale. The price _may_ be set
+far above the cost.
+
+And now notice the peculiar relation that is set up between the
+monopolist's production and the satisfaction of human wants. In
+proportion as the quantity produced is increased the lower must the
+price be set in order to sell the whole output. If the monopolist
+insisted on turning out more and more of his goods, the price that
+people would give would fall until it barely covered the cost, then till
+it was less than cost, then to a mere fraction of the cost and finally
+to nothing at all. In other words, if one produces a large enough
+quantity of anything it becomes worthless. It loses all its value just
+as soon as there is enough of it to satisfy, and over-satisfy the wants
+of humanity. Thus if the world produces three and a half billion bushels
+of wheat it can be sold, let us say, at two dollars a bushel; but if it
+produced twice as much it might well be found that it would only sell
+for fifty cents a bushel. The value of the bigger supply as a total
+would actually be less than that of the smaller. And if the supply were
+big enough it would be worth, in the economic sense, just nothing at
+all. This peculiarity is spoken of in economic theory as the paradox of
+value. It is referred to in the older books either as an economic
+curiosity or as a mere illustration in extreme terms of the relation of
+supply to price. Thus in many books the story is related of how the East
+India Companies used at times deliberately to destroy a large quantity
+of tea in order that by selling a lesser amount they might reap a larger
+profit than by selling a greater.
+
+But in reality this paradox of value is the most fundamental proposition
+in economic science. Precisely here is found the key to the operation of
+the economic society in which we live. The world's production is aimed
+at producing "values," not in producing plenty. If by some mad access of
+misdirected industry we produced enough and too much of everything, our
+whole machinery of buying and selling would break down. This indeed does
+happen constantly on a small scale in the familiar phenomenon of
+over-production. But in the organization in which we live
+over-production tends to check itself at once. If the world's machinery
+threatens to produce a too great plenty of any particular thing, then it
+turns itself towards producing something else of which there is not yet
+enough. This is done quite unconsciously without any philanthropic
+intent on the part of the individual producer and without any general
+direction in the way of a social command. The machine does it of itself.
+When there is _enough_ the wheels slacken and stop. This sounds at first
+hearing most admirable. But let it be noted that the "_enough_" here in
+question does not mean enough to satisfy human wants. In fact it means
+precisely the converse. It means enough _not_ to satisfy them, and to
+leave the selling price of the things made at the point of profit.
+
+Let it be observed also that we have hitherto been speaking as if all
+things were produced under a monopoly. The objection might at once be
+raised that with competitive producers the price will also keep falling
+down towards cost and will not be based upon the point of maximum
+profit. We shall turn to this objection in a moment. But one or two
+other points must be considered before doing so.
+
+In the first place in following out such an argument as the present in
+regard to the peculiar shortcomings of the system under which we live,
+it is necessary again and again to warn the reader against a hasty
+conclusion to the possibilities of altering and amending it. The
+socialist reads such criticism as the above with impatient approval.
+"Very well," he says, "the whole organization is wrong and works badly.
+Now let us abolish it altogether and make a better one." But in doing so
+he begs the whole question at issue. The point is, _can_ we make a
+better one or must we be content with patching up the old one? Take an
+illustration. Scientists tell us that from the point of view of optics
+the human eye is a clumsy instrument poorly contrived for its work. A
+certain great authority once said that if he had made it he would have
+been ashamed of it. This may be true. But the eye unfortunately is all
+we have to see by. If we destroy our eyes in the hope of making better
+ones we may go blind. The best that we can do is to improve our sight by
+adding a pair of spectacles. So it is with the organization of society.
+Faulty though it is, it does the work after a certain fashion. We may
+apply to it with advantage the spectacles of social reform, but what the
+socialist offers us is total blindness. But of this presently.
+
+To return to the argument. Let us consider next what wages the
+monopolist in the cases described above will have to pay. We take for
+granted that he will only pay as much as he has to. How much will this
+be? Clearly enough it will depend altogether on the number of available
+working men capable of doing the work in question and the situation in
+which they find themselves. It is again a case of relative "economic
+strength." The situation may be altogether in favor of the employer or
+altogether in favor of the men, or may occupy a middle ground. If the
+men are so numerous that there are more of them than are needed for the
+work, and if there is no other occupation for them they must accept a
+starvation wage. If they are so few in number that they can _all_ be
+employed, and if they are so well organized as to act together, they can
+in their turn exact any wage up to the point that leaves no profit for
+the employer himself at all. Indeed for a short time wages might even
+pass this point, the monopolist employer being willing (for various
+reasons, all quite obvious) actually to pay more as wages than he gets
+as return and to carry on business at a loss for the sake of carrying it
+on at all. Clearly, then, wages, as Adam Smith said, "are the result of
+a dispute" in which either party must be pushed to the wall. The
+employer may have to pay so much that there is nothing or practically
+nothing left for himself, or so little that his workmen can just exist
+and no more. These are the upward and downward limits of the wages in
+the cases described.
+
+It is therefore obvious that if all the industries in the world were
+carried on as a series of separate monopolies, there would be exactly
+the kind of rivalry or competition of forces represented by the consumer
+insisting on paying as little as possible, the producer charging the
+most profitable price and paying the lowest wage that he could, and the
+wage earner demanding the highest wage that he could get. The
+equilibrium would be an unstable one. It would be constantly displaced
+and shifted by the movement of all sorts of social forces--by changes of
+fashion, by abundance or scarcity of crops, by alterations in the
+technique of industry and by the cohesion or the slackening of the
+organization of any group of workers. But the balanced forces once
+displaced would be seen constantly to come to an equilibrium at a new
+point.
+
+All this has been said of industry under monopoly. But it will be seen
+to apply in its essentials to what we call competitive industry. Here
+indeed certain new features come in. Not one employer but many produce
+each kind of article. And, as far as each employer can see by looking at
+his own horizon, what he does is merely to produce as much as he can
+sell at a price that pays him. Since all the other employers are doing
+this, there will be, under competition, a constant tendency to cut the
+prices down to the lowest that is consistent with what the employer has
+to pay as wages and interest. This point, which was called by the
+orthodox economists the "cost," is not in any true and fundamental sense
+of the words the "cost" at all. It is merely a limit represented by what
+the other parties to the bargain are able to exact. The whole situation
+is in a condition of unstable equilibrium in which the conflicting
+forces represented by the interests of the various parties pull in
+different directions. The employers in any one line of industry and all
+their wage earners and salaried assistants have one and the same
+interest as against the consumer. They want the selling price to be as
+high as possible. But the employers are against one another as wanting,
+each of them, to make as many sales as possible, and each and all the
+employers are against the wage earners in wanting to pay as low wages as
+possible. If all the employers unite, the situation turns to a monopoly,
+and the price paid by the consumer is settled on the monopoly basis
+already described. The employers can then dispute it out with their
+working men as to how much wages shall be. If the employers are not
+united, then at each and every moment they are in conflict both with
+the consumer and with their wage earners. Thus the whole scene of
+industry represents a vast and unending conflict, a fermentation in
+which the moving bubbles crowd for space, expanding and breaking one
+against the other. There is no point of rest. There is no real fixed
+"cost" acting as a basis. Anything that any one person or group of
+persons--worker or master, landlord or capitalist--is able to exact
+owing to the existing conditions of demand or supply, becomes a "cost"
+from the point of view of all the others. There is nothing in this
+"cost" which proportions to it the quantity of labor, or of time, or of
+skill or of any other measure physical or psychological of the effort
+involved. And there is nothing whatever in it which proportions to it
+social justice. It is the war of each against all. Its only mitigation
+is that it is carried on under the set of rules represented by the state
+and the law.
+
+The tendencies involved may be best illustrated by taking one or two
+extreme or exaggerated examples, not meant as facts but only to make
+clear the nature of social and industrial forces among which we live.
+
+What, for example, will be the absolute maximum to which wages in
+general could be forced? Conceivably and in the purest and thinnest of
+theory, they could include the whole product of the labor of society
+with just such a small fraction left over for the employers, the owners
+of capital and the owners of land to induce them to continue acting as
+part of the machine. That is to say, if all the laborers all over the
+world, to the last one, were united under a single control they could
+force the other economic classes of society to something approaching a
+starvation living. In practice this is nonsense. In theory it is an
+excellent starting point for thought.
+
+And how short could the hours of the universal united workers be made?
+As short as ever they liked: An hour a day: ten minutes, anything they
+like; but of course with the proviso that the shorter the hours the less
+the total of things produced to be divided. It is true that up to a
+certain point shortening the hours of labor actually increases the
+total product. A ten-hour day, speaking in general terms and leaving out
+individual exceptions, is probably more productive than a day of twelve.
+It may very well be that an eight-hour day will prove, presently if not
+immediately, to be more productive than one of ten. But somewhere the
+limit is reached and gross production falls. The supply of things in
+general gets shorter. But note that this itself would not matter much,
+if somehow and in some way not yet found, the shortening of the
+production of goods cut out the luxuries and superfluities first.
+Mankind at large might well trade leisure for luxuries. The shortening
+of hours with the corresponding changes in the direction of production
+is really the central problem in social reform. I propose to return to
+it in the concluding chapter of these papers, but for the present it is
+only noted in connection with the general scheme of industrial
+relations.
+
+Now let us ask to what extent any particular section or part of
+industrial society can succeed in forcing up wages or prices as against
+the others. In pure theory they may do this almost to any extent,
+provided that the thing concerned is a necessity and is without a
+substitute and provided that their organization is complete and
+unbreakable. If all the people concerned in producing coal, masters and
+men, owners of mines and operators of machinery, could stand out for
+their price, there is no limit, short of putting all the rest of the
+world on starvation rations, to what they might get. In practice and in
+reality a thousand things intervene--the impossibility of such complete
+unity, the organization of the other parties, the existing of national
+divisions among industrial society, sentiment, decency, fear. The
+proposition is only "pure theory." But its use as such is to dispose of
+any such idea as that there is a natural price of coal or of anything
+else.
+
+The above is true of any article of necessity. It is true though in a
+less degree of things of luxury. If all the makers of instruments of
+music, masters and men, capitalists and workers, were banded together in
+a tight and unbreakable union, then the other economic classes must
+either face the horrors of a world without pianolas and trombones, or
+hand over the price demanded. And what is true of coal and music is true
+all through the whole mechanism of industry.
+
+Or take the supreme case of the owners of land. If all of them acted
+together, with their legal rights added into one, they could order the
+rest of the world either to get off it or to work at starvation wages.
+
+Industrial society is therefore mobile, elastic, standing at any moment
+in a temporary and unstable equilibrium. But at any particular moment
+the possibility of a huge and catastrophic shift such as those described
+is out of the question except at the price of a general collapse. Even a
+minor dislocation breaks down a certain part of the machinery of
+society. Particular groups of workers are thrown out of place. There is
+no other place where they can fit in, or at any rate not immediately.
+The machine labors heavily. Ominous mutterings are heard. The legal
+framework of the State and of obedience to the law in which industrial
+society is set threatens to break asunder. The attempt at social change
+threatens a social revolution in which the whole elaborate mechanism
+would burst into fragments.
+
+In any social movement, then, change and alteration in a new direction
+must be balanced against the demands of social stability. Some things
+are possible and some are not; some are impossible to-day, and possible
+or easy to-morrow. Others are forever out of the question.
+
+But this much at least ought to appear clear if the line of argument
+indicated above is accepted, namely, that there is no great hope for
+universal betterment of society by the mere advance of technical
+industrial progress and by the unaided play of the motive of every man
+for himself.
+
+The enormous increase in the productivity of industrial effort would
+never of itself have elevated by one inch the lot of the working class.
+The rise of wages in the nineteenth century and the shortening of hours
+that went with it was due neither to the advance in mechanical power
+nor to the advance in diligence and industriousness, nor to the advance,
+if there was any, in general kindliness. It was due to the organization
+of labor. Mechanical progress makes higher wages possible. It does not,
+of itself, advance them by a single farthing. Labor saving machinery
+does not of itself save the working world a single hour of toil: it only
+shifts it from one task to another.
+
+Against a system of unrestrained individualism, energy, industriousness
+and honesty might shatter itself in vain. The thing is merely a race in
+which only one can be first no matter how great the speed of all; a
+struggle in which one, and not all, can stand upon the shoulders of the
+others. It is the restriction of individualism by the force of
+organization and by legislation that has brought to the world whatever
+social advance has been achieved by the great mass of the people.
+
+The present moment is in a sense the wrong time to say this. We no
+longer live in an age when down-trodden laborers meet by candlelight
+with the ban of the law upon their meeting. These are the days when
+"labor" is triumphant, and when it ever threatens in the overweening
+strength of its own power to break industrial society in pieces in the
+fierce attempt to do in a day what can only be done in a generation. But
+truth is truth. And any one who writes of the history of the progress of
+industrial society owes it to the truth to acknowledge the vast social
+achievement of organized labor in the past.
+
+And what of the future?
+
+By what means and in what stages can social progress be further
+accelerated? This I propose to treat in the succeeding chapters, dealing
+first with the proposals of the socialists and the revolutionaries, and
+finally with the prospect for a sane, orderly and continuous social
+reform.
+
+
+
+
+_V.--The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist_
+
+
+WHO is there that has not turned at times from the fever and fret of the
+world we live in, from the spectacle of its wasted energy, its wild
+frenzy of work and its bitter inequality, to the land of dreams, to the
+pictured vision of the world as it might be?
+
+Such a vision has haunted in all ages the brooding mind of mankind; and
+every age has fashioned for itself the image of a "somewhere" or
+"nowhere"--a Utopia in which there should be equality and justice for
+all. The vision itself is an outcome of that divine discontent which
+raises man above his environment.
+
+Every age has had its socialism, its communism, its dream of bread and
+work for all. But the dream has varied always in the likeness of the
+thought of the time. In earlier days the dream was not one of social
+wealth. It was rather a vision of the abnegation of riches, of humble
+possessions shared in common after the manner of the unrealized ideal of
+the Christian faith. It remained for the age of machinery and power to
+bring forth another and a vastly more potent socialism. This was no
+longer a plan whereby all might be poor together, but a proposal that
+all should be rich together. The collectivist state advocated by the
+socialist of to-day has scarcely anything in common with the communism
+of the middle ages.
+
+Modern socialism is the direct outcome of the age of machine production.
+It takes its first inspiration from glaring contrasts between riches and
+poverty presented by the modern era, from the strange paradox that has
+been described above between human power and its failure to satisfy
+human want. The nineteenth century brought with it the factory and the
+factory slavery of the Lancashire children, the modern city and city
+slum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strange
+discrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the material
+progress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalism
+concealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the new
+industrial poverty that lay in the shadow behind it.
+
+The years that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 were in
+many senses years of unexampled misery. The accumulated burden of the
+war lay heavy upon Europe. The rise of the new machine power had
+dislocated the older system. A multitude of landless men clamored for
+bread and work. Pauperism spread like a plague. Each new invention threw
+thousands of hand-workers out of employment. The law still branded as
+conspiracy any united attempt of workingmen to raise wages or to shorten
+the hours of work. At the very moment when the coming of steam power and
+the use of modern machinery were piling up industrial fortunes undreamed
+of before, destitution, pauperism and unemployment seemed more
+widespread and more ominous than ever. In this rank atmosphere
+germinated modern socialism. The writings of Marx and Engels and Louis
+Blanc were inspired by what they saw about them.
+
+From its very cradle socialism showed the double aspect which has
+distinguished it ever since. To the minds of some it was the faith of
+the insurrectionist, something to be achieved by force; "bourgeois"
+society must be overthrown by force of arms; if open and fair fighting
+was not possible against such great odds, it must be blown skyhigh with
+gunpowder. Dynamite, by the good fortune of invention, came to the
+revolutionary at the very moment when it was most wanted. To the men of
+violence, socialism was the twin brother of anarchism, born at the same
+time, advocating the same means and differing only as to the final end.
+
+But to others, socialism was from the beginning, as it is to-day, a
+creed of peace. It advocated the betterment of society not by violence
+but by persuasion, by peaceful argument and the recognized rule of the
+majority. It is true that the earlier socialists almost to a man
+included, in the first passion of their denunciation, things not
+necessarily within the compass of purely economic reform. As children of
+misery they cried out against all human institutions. The bond of
+marriage seemed an accursed thing, the mere slavery of women. The
+family--the one institution in which the better side of human nature
+shines with an undimmed light--was to them but an engine of class
+oppression; the Christian churches merely the parasitic servants of the
+tyrannous power of a plutocratic state. The whole history of human
+civilization was denounced as an unredeemed record of the spoliation of
+the weak by the strong. Even the domain of the philosopher was
+needlessly invaded and all forms of speculative belief were rudely
+thrown aside in favor of a wooden materialism as dogmatic as any of the
+creeds or theories which it proposed to replace.
+
+Thus seen, socialism appeared as the very antithesis of law and order,
+of love and chastity, and of religion itself. It was a tainted creed.
+There was blood upon its hands and bloody menace in its thoughts. It was
+a thing to be stamped out, to be torn up by the roots. The very soil in
+which it grew must be burned out with the flame of avenging justice.
+
+Such it still appears to many people to-day. The unspeakable savagery of
+bolshevism has made good the wildest threats of the partisans of
+violence and fulfilled the sternest warnings of the conservative. To-day
+more than ever socialism is in danger of becoming a proscribed creed,
+its very name under the ban of the law, its literature burned by the
+hangman and a gag placed upon its mouth.
+
+But this is neither right nor wise. Socialism, like every other
+impassioned human effort, will flourish best under martyrdom. It will
+languish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion.
+
+For it must always be remembered in fairness that the creed of violence
+has no necessary connection with socialism. In its essential nature
+socialism is nothing but a proposal for certain kinds of economic
+reform. A man has just as much right to declare himself a socialist as
+he has to call himself a Seventh Day Adventist or a Prohibitionist, or a
+Perpetual Motionist. It is, or should be, open to him to convert others
+to his way of thinking. It is only time to restrain him when he proposes
+to convert others by means of a shotgun or by dynamite, and by forcible
+interference with their own rights. When he does this he ceases to be a
+socialist pure and simple and becomes a criminal as well. The law can
+deal with him as such.
+
+But with socialism itself the law, in a free country, should have no
+kind of quarrel. For in the whole program of peaceful socialism there is
+nothing wrong at all except one thing. Apart from this it is a high and
+ennobling ideal truly fitted for a community of saints. And the one
+thing that is wrong with socialism is that it won't work. That is all.
+It is, as it were, a beautiful machine of which the wheels, dependent
+upon some unknown and uninvented motive power, refuse to turn. The
+unknown motive force in this case means a power of altruism, of
+unselfishness, of willingness to labor for the good of others, such as
+the human race has never known, nor is ever likely to know. But the
+worst public policy to pursue in reference to such a machine is to lock
+it up, to prohibit all examination of it and to allow it to become a
+hidden mystery, the whispered hope of its martyred advocates. Better far
+to stand it out into the open daylight, to let all who will inspect it,
+and to prove even to the simplest that such a contrivance once and for
+all and for ever cannot be made to run.
+
+Let us turn to examine the machine.
+
+We may omit here all discussion of the historical progress of socialism
+and the stages whereby it changed from the creed of a few theorists and
+revolutionists to being the accepted platform of great political
+parties, counting its adherents by the million. All of this belongs
+elsewhere. It suffices here to note that in the process of its rise it
+has chafed away much of the superfluous growth that clung to it and has
+become a purely economic doctrine. There is no longer any need to
+discuss in connection with it the justification of marriage and the
+family, and the rightness or wrongness of Christianity: no need to
+decide whether the materialistic theory of history is true or false,
+since nine socialists out of ten to-day have forgotten, or have never
+heard, what the materialistic theory of history is: no need to examine
+whether human history is, or is not, a mere record of class
+exploitation, since the controversy has long shifted to other grounds.
+The essential thing to-day is not the past, but the future. The question
+is, what does the socialist have to say about the conditions under which
+we live and the means that he advocates for the betterment of them?
+
+His case stands thus. He begins his discussion with an indictment of the
+manifold weaknesses and the obvious injustices of the system under which
+we live. And in this the socialist is very largely right. He shows that
+under free individual competition there is a perpetual waste of energy.
+Competing rivals cover the same field. Even the simplest services are
+performed with an almost ludicrous waste of energy. In every modern
+city the milk supply is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip from
+door to door and from street to street, covering the same ground, each
+leaving his cans of milk here and there in a sporadic fashion as
+haphazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, says the socialist, the
+wasted labors of the milkman with the orderly and systematic performance
+of the postman, himself a little fragment of socialism. And the milkman,
+they tell us, is typical of modern industrial society. Competing
+railways run trains on parallel tracks, with empty cars that might be
+filled and with vast executive organizations which do ten times over the
+work that might be done by one. Competing stores needlessly occupy the
+time of hundreds of thousands of employees in a mixture of idleness and
+industry. An inconceivable quantity of human effort is spent on
+advertising, mere shouting and display, as unproductive in the social
+sense as the beating of a drum. Competition breaks into a dozen
+inefficient parts the process that might conceivably be carried out,
+with an infinite saving of effort, by a single guiding hand.
+
+The socialist looking thus at the world we live in sees in it nothing
+but waste and selfishness and inefficiency. He looks so long that a mist
+comes before his eyes. He loses sight of the supreme fact that after
+all, in its own poor, clumsy fashion, the machine does work. He loses
+sight of the possibility of our falling into social chaos. He sees no
+longer the brink of the abyss beside which the path of progress picks
+its painful way. He leaps with a shout of exultation over the cliff.
+
+And he lands, at least in imagination, in his ideal state, his Utopia.
+Here the noise and clamor of competitive industry is stilled. We look
+about us at a peaceful landscape where men and women brightly clothed
+and abundantly fed and warmed, sing at their easy task. There is enough
+for all and more than enough. Poverty has vanished. Want is unknown. The
+children play among the flowers. The youths and maidens are at school.
+There are no figures here bent with premature toil, no faces dulled and
+furrowed with a life of hardship. The light of education and culture has
+shone full on every face and illuminated it into all that it might be.
+The cheerful hours of easy labor vary but do not destroy the pursuit of
+pleasure and of recreation. Youth in such a Utopia is a very springtime
+of hope: adult life a busy and cheery activity: and age itself, watching
+from its shady bench beneath a spreading tree the labors of its
+children, is but a gentle retrospect from which material care has passed
+away.
+
+It is a picture beautiful as the opalescent colors of a soap bubble. It
+is the vision of a garden of Eden from which the demon has been
+banished. And the Demon in question is the Private Ownership of the
+Means of Production. His name is less romantic than those of the wonted
+demons of legend and folklore. But it is at least suitable for the
+matter-of-fact age of machinery which he is supposed to haunt and on
+which he casts his evil spell. Let him be once exorcised and the ills of
+humanity are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of the simplest.
+Let this demon once feel the contact of state ownership of the means of
+production and his baneful influence will vanish into thin air as his
+mediaeval predecessors did at the touch of a thimbleful of holy water.
+
+This, then, is the socialist's program. Let "the state" take over all
+the means of production--all the farms, the mines, the factories, the
+workshops, the ships, the railroads. Let it direct the workers towards
+their task in accordance with the needs of society. Let each labor for
+all in the measure of his strength and talent. Let each receive from all
+in the measure of his proper needs. No work is to be wasted: nothing is
+to be done twice that need only be done once. All must work and none
+must be idle: but the amount of work needed under these conditions will
+be so small, the hours so short, and the effort so slight, that work
+itself will no longer be the grinding monotonous toil that we know
+to-day, but a congenial activity pleasant in itself.
+
+A thousand times this picture has been presented. The visionary with
+uplifted eyes, his gaze bent on the bright colors of the floating
+bubble, has voiced it from a thousand platforms. The earnest youth
+grinding at the academic mill has dreamed it in the pauses of his
+studious labor. The impassioned pedant has written it in heavy prose
+smothering its brightness in the dull web of his own thought. The
+brilliant imaginative mind has woven it into romance, making its colors
+brighter still with the sunlight of inspired phantasy.
+
+But never, I think, has the picture of socialism at work been so ably
+and so dexterously presented as in a book that begins to be forgotten
+now, but which some thirty years ago took the continent by storm. This
+was the volume in which Mr. Edward Bellamy "looked backward" from his
+supposed point of vantage in the year 2000 A. D. and saw us as we are
+and as we shall be. No two plans of a socialist state are ever quite
+alike. But the scheme of society outlined in "Looking Backward" may be
+examined as the most attractive and the most consistent outline of a
+socialist state that has, within the knowledge of the present writer,
+ever been put forward. It is worth while, in the succeeding chapter to
+examine it in detail. No better starting point for the criticism of
+collectivist theories can be found than in a view of the basis on which
+is supposed to rest the halcyon life of Mr. Bellamy's charming
+commonwealth.
+
+
+
+
+_VI.--How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward_
+
+
+THE reading public is as wayward and as fickle as a bee among the
+flowers. It will not long pause anywhere, and it easily leaves each
+blossom for a better. But like the bee, while impelled by an instinct
+that makes it search for sugar, it sucks in therewith its solid
+sustenance.
+
+I am not quite certain that the bee does exactly do this; but it is just
+the kind of thing that the bee is likely to do. And in any case it is
+precisely the thing which the reading public does. It will not read
+unless it is tempted by the sugary sweetness of the romantic interest.
+It must have its hero and its heroine and its course of love that never
+will run smooth. For information the reader cares nothing. If he absorbs
+it, it must be by accident, and unawares. He passes over the heavy tomes
+filled with valuable fact, and settles like the random bee upon the
+bright flowers of contemporary romance.
+
+Hence if the reader is to be ensnared into absorbing something useful,
+it must be hidden somehow among the flowers. A treatise on religion must
+be disguised as a love story in which a young clergyman, sworn into holy
+orders, falls in love with an actress. The facts of history are imparted
+by a love story centering around the adventures of a hitherto unknown
+son of Louis the Fourteenth. And a discussion of the relations of labor
+and capital takes the form of a romance in which the daughter of a
+multi-millionaire steps voluntarily out of her Fifth Avenue home to work
+in a steam laundry.
+
+Such is the recognized method by which the great unthinking public is
+taught to think. Slavery was not fully known till Mrs. Stowe wrote
+"Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the slow tyranny of the law's delay was taught
+to the world for ever in the pages of "Bleak House."
+
+So it has been with socialism. No single influence ever brought its
+ideas and its propaganda so forcibly and clearly before the public mind
+as Mr. Edward Bellamy's brilliant novel, "Looking Backward," published
+some thirty years ago. The task was arduous. Social and economic theory
+is heavy to the verge of being indigestible. There is no such thing as a
+gay book on political economy for reading in a hammock. Yet Mr. Bellamy
+succeeded. His book is in cold reality nothing but a series of
+conversations explaining how a socialist commonwealth is supposed to
+work. Yet he contrives to bring into it a hero and a heroine, and
+somehow the warm beating of their hearts and the stolen glances in their
+eyes breathe into the dry dust of economic argument the breath of life.
+Nor was ever a better presentation made of the essential program of
+socialism.
+
+It is worth while then, as was said in the preceding chapter, to
+consider Mr. Bellamy's commonwealth as the most typical and the most
+carefully constructed of all the ready-made socialisms that have been
+put forward.
+
+The mere machinery of the story can be lightly passed over. It is
+intended simply as the sugar that lures the random bee. The hero, living
+in Boston in 1887, is supposed to fall asleep in a deep, underground
+chamber which he has made for himself as a remedy against a harassing
+insomnia. Unknown to the sleeper the house above his retreat is burned
+down. He remains in a trance for a hundred and thirteen years and awakes
+to find himself in the Boston of the year 2000 A. D. Kind hands remove
+him from his sepulcher. He is revived. He finds himself under the care
+of a certain learned and genial Dr. Leete, whose house stands on the
+very site where once the sleeper lived. The beautiful daughter of Dr.
+Leete looks upon the newcomer from the lost world with eyes in which, to
+the mind of the sagacious reader, love is seen at once to dawn. In
+reality she is the great-granddaughter of the fiancee whom the sleeper
+was to have married in his former life; thus a faint suggestion of the
+transmigration of souls illuminates their intercourse. Beyond that there
+is no story and at the end of the book the sleeper, in another dream,
+is conveniently transported back to 1887 which he can now contrast, in
+horror, with the ideal world of 2000 A. D.
+
+And what was this world? The sleeper's first vision of it was given him
+by Dr. Leete, who took him to the house top and let him see the Boston
+of the future. Wide avenues replace the crowded, noisy streets. There
+are no shops but only here and there among the trees great marble
+buildings, the emporiums from which the goods are delivered to the
+purple public.
+
+And the goods are delivered indeed! Dr. Leete explains it all with
+intervals of grateful cigar smoking and of music and promenades with the
+beautiful Edith, and meals in wonderful communistic restaurants with
+romantic waiters, who feel themselves, _mirabile dictu_, quite
+independent.
+
+And this is how the commonwealth operates. Everybody works or at least
+works until the age of forty, so that it may be truly said in these
+halcyon days everybody works but father. But the work of life does not
+begin till education ends at the age of twenty-one. After that all the
+young men and women pass for three years into the general "Industrial
+Army," much as the young men used to pass into the ranks of
+conscription. Afterwards each person may select any trade that he likes.
+But the hours are made longer or shorter according to whether too many
+or too few young people apply to come in. A gardener works for more
+hours than a scavenger. Yet all occupations are equally honorable. The
+wages of all the people are equal; or rather there are no wages at all,
+as the workers merely receive cards, which entitle them to goods of such
+and such a quantity at any of the emporiums. The cards are punched out
+as the goods are used. The goods are all valued according to the amount
+of time used in their making and each citizen draws out the same total
+amount. But he may take it out in installments just as he likes, drawing
+many things one month and few the next. He may even get goods in advance
+if he has any special need. He may, within a certain time limit, save up
+his cards, but it must be remembered that the one thing which no card
+can buy and which no citizens can own is the "means of production."
+These belong collectively to all. Land, mines, machinery, factories and
+the whole mechanism of transport, these things are public property
+managed by the State. Its workers in their use of them are all directed
+by public authority as to what they shall make and when they shall make
+it, and how much shall be made. On these terms all share alike; the
+cripple receives as much as the giant; the worker of exceptional
+dexterity and energy the same as his slower and less gifted fellow.
+
+All the management, the control--and let this be noted, for there is no
+escape from it either by Mr. Bellamy or by anybody else--is exercised by
+boards of officials elected by the people. All the complex organization
+by which production goes on by which the workers are supervised and
+shifted from trade to trade, by which their requests for a change of
+work or an extension of credit are heard and judged--all of this is done
+by the elected "bosses." One lays stress on this not because it is Mr.
+Bellamy's plan, but because it is, and it _has to be_, the plan of
+anybody who constructs a socialist commonwealth.
+
+Mr. Bellamy has many ingenious arrangements to meet the needs of people
+who want to be singers or actors or writers,--in other words, who do not
+want to work. They may sing or act as much as they like, provided that
+enough other people will hand over enough of their food cards to keep
+them going. But if no one wants to hear them sing or see them act they
+may starve,--just as they do now. Here the author harks back
+unconsciously to his nineteenth century individualism; he need not have
+done so; other socialist writers would have it that one of the
+everlasting boards would "sit on" every aspiring actor or author before
+he was allowed to begin. But we may take it either way. It is not the
+major point. There is no need to discuss the question of how to deal
+with the artist under socialism. If the rest of it were all right, no
+one need worry about the artist. Perhaps he would do better without
+being remunerated at all. It is doubtful whether the huge commercial
+premium that greets success to-day does good or harm. But let it pass.
+It is immaterial to the present matter.
+
+One comes back to the essential question of the structure of the
+commonwealth. Can such a thing, or anything conceived in its likeness,
+possibly work? The answer is, and must be, absolutely and emphatically
+no.
+
+Let anyone conversant with modern democracy as it is,--not as its
+founders dreamed of it,--picture to himself the operation of a system
+whereby anything and everything is controlled by elected officials, from
+whom there is no escape, outside of whom is no livelihood and to whom
+all men must bow! Democracy, let us grant it, is the best system of
+government as yet operative in this world of sin. Beside autocratic
+kingship it shines with a white light; it is obviously the portal of the
+future. But we know it now too well to idealize its merits.
+
+A century and a half ago when the world was painfully struggling out of
+the tyranny of autocratic kingship, when English liberalism was in its
+cradle, when Thomas Jefferson was composing the immortal phrases of the
+Declaration of Independence and unknown patriots dreamed of freedom in
+France,--at such an epoch it was but natural that the principle of
+popular election should be idealized as the sovereign remedy for the
+political evils of mankind. It was natural and salutary that it should
+be so. The force of such idealization helped to carry forward the human
+race to a new milestone on the path of progress.
+
+But when it is proposed to entrust to the method of elective control not
+a part but the whole of the fortunes of humanity, to commit to it not
+merely the form of government and the necessary maintenance of law,
+order and public safety, but the whole operation of the production and
+distribution of the world's goods, the case is altered. The time is ripe
+then for retrospect over the experience of the nineteenth century and
+for a realization of what has proved in that experience the peculiar
+defects of elective democracy.
+
+Mr. Bellamy pictures his elected managers,--as every socialist has to
+do,--as a sagacious and paternal group, free from the interest of self
+and the play of the baser passions and animated only by the thought of
+the public good. Gravely they deliberate; wisely and justly they decide.
+Their gray heads--for Bellamy prefers them old--are bowed in quiet
+confabulation over the nice adjustment of the national production, over
+the petition of this or that citizen. The public care sits heavily on
+their breast. Their own peculiar fortune they have lightly passed by.
+They do not favor their relations or their friends. They do not count
+their hours of toil. They do not enumerate their gain. They work, in
+short, as work the angels.
+
+Now let me ask in the name of sanity where are such officials to be
+found? Here and there, perhaps, one sees in the world of to-day in the
+stern virtue of an honorable public servant some approximation to such a
+civic ideal. But how much, too, has been seen of the rule of "cliques"
+and "interests" and "bosses;" of the election of genial incompetents
+popular as spendthrifts; of crooked partisans warm to their friends and
+bitter to their enemies; of administration by a party for a party; and
+of the insidious poison of commercial greed defiling the wells of public
+honesty. The unending conflict between business and politics, between
+the private gain and the public good, has been for two generations the
+despair of modern democracy. It turns this way and that in its vain
+effort to escape corruption. It puts its faith now in representative
+legislatures, and now in appointed boards and commissions; it appeals to
+the vote of the whole people or it places an almost autocratic power and
+a supreme responsibility in the hands of a single man. And nowhere has
+the escape been found. The melancholy lesson is being learned that the
+path of human progress is arduous and its forward movement slow and that
+no mere form of government can aid unless it is inspired by a higher
+public spirit of the individual citizen than we have yet managed to
+achieve.
+
+And of the world of to-day, be it remembered, elective democratic
+control covers only a part of the field. Under socialism it covers it
+all. To-day in our haphazard world a man is his own master; often indeed
+the mastership is but a pitiful thing, little more than being master of
+his own failure and starvation; often indeed the dead weight of
+circumstance, the accident of birth, the want of education, may so press
+him down that his freedom is only a mockery. Let us grant all that. But
+under socialism freedom is gone. There is nothing but the rule of the
+elected boss. The worker is commanded to his task and obey he must. If
+he will not, there is, there can only be, the prison and the scourge, or
+to be cast out in the wilderness to starve.
+
+Consider what it would mean to be under a socialist state. Here for
+example is a worker who is, who says he is, too ill to work. He begs
+that he may be set free. The grave official, as Mr. Bellamy sees him,
+looks at the worker's tongue. "My poor fellow," says he, "you are indeed
+ill. Go and rest yourself under a shady tree while the others are busy
+with the harvest." So speaks the ideal official dealing with the ideal
+citizen in the dream life among the angels. But suppose that the worker,
+being not an angel but a human being, is but a mere hulking, lazy brute
+who prefers to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Or
+suppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hateful
+heart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then?
+How could one face a regime in which the everlasting taskmaster held
+control? There is nothing like it among us at the present day except
+within the melancholy precincts of the penitentiary. There and there
+only, the socialist system is in operation.
+
+Who can deny that under such a system the man with the glib tongue and
+the persuasive manner, the babbling talker and the scheming organizer,
+would secure all the places of power and profit, while patient merit
+went to the wall?
+
+Or turn from the gray officials to the purple citizens of the soap
+bubble commonwealth of socialism. All work, we are told, and all receive
+their remuneration. We must not think of it as money-wages, but, all
+said and done, an allotted share of goods, marked out upon a card,
+comes pretty much to the same thing. The wages that the citizens receive
+must either be equal or not equal. That at least is plain logic. Either
+everybody gets exactly the same wages irrespective of capability and
+diligence, or else the wages or salaries or whatever one calls them, are
+graded, so that one receives much and the other little.
+
+Now either of these alternatives spells disaster. If the wages are
+graded according to capacity, then the grading is done by the
+everlasting elective officials. They can, and they will, vote themselves
+and their friends or adherents into the good jobs and the high places.
+The advancement of a bright and capable young man will depend, not upon
+what he does, but upon what the elected bosses are pleased to do with
+him; not upon the strength of his own hands, but upon the strength of
+the "pull" that he has with the bosses who run the part of the industry
+that he is in. Unequal wages under socialism would mean a fierce and
+corrupt scramble for power, office and emolument, beside which the
+utmost aberrations of Tammany Hall would seem as innocuous as a Sunday
+School picnic.
+
+"But," objects Mr. Bellamy or any other socialist, "you forget. Please
+remember that under socialism the scramble for wealth is limited; no man
+can own capital, but only consumption goods. The most that any man may
+acquire is merely the articles that he wants to consume, not the engines
+and machinery of production itself. Hence even avarice dwindles and
+dies, when its wonted food of 'capitalism' is withdrawn."
+
+But surely this point of view is the very converse of the teachings of
+common sense. "Consumption goods" are the very things that we _do_ want.
+All else is but a means to them. One admits, as per exception, the queer
+acquisitiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the game for his own
+sake. Undoubtedly he exists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product of
+the system, a pathological product, a kind of elephantiasis of
+individualism. But speaking broadly, consumption goods, present or
+future, are the end in sight of the industrial struggle. Give me the
+houses and the gardens, the yachts, the motor cars and the champagne and
+I do not care who owns the gravel crusher and the steam plow. And if
+under a socialist commonwealth a man can vote to himself or gain by the
+votes of his adherents, a vast income of consumption goods and leave to
+his unhappy fellow a narrow minimum of subsistence, then the resulting
+evil of inequality is worse, far worse than it could even be to-day.
+
+Or try, if one will, the other horn of the dilemma. That, too, one will
+find as ill a resting place as an upright thistle. Let the wages,--as
+with Mr. Bellamy,--all be equal. The managers then cannot vote
+themselves large emoluments if they try. But what about the purple
+citizens? Will they work, or will they lie round in their purple
+garments and loaf? Work? Why should they work, their pay is there "fresh
+and fresh"? Why should they turn up on time for their task? Why should
+they not dawdle at their labor sitting upon the fence in endless
+colloquy while the harvest rots upon the stalk? If among them is one
+who cares to work with a fever of industry that even socialism cannot
+calm, let him do it. We, his fellows, will take our time. Our pay is
+there as certain and as sound as his. Not for us the eager industry and
+the fond plans for the future,--for the home and competence--that
+spurred on the strenuous youth of old days,--not for us the earnest
+planning of the husband and wife thoughtful and anxious for the future
+of their little ones. Not for us the honest penny saved for a rainy day.
+Here in the dreamland of socialism there are no rainy days. It is
+sunshine all the time in this lotus land of the loafer. And for the
+future, let the "State" provide; for the children's welfare let the
+"State" take thought; while we live it shall feed us, when we fall ill
+it shall tend us and when we die it shall bury us. Meantime let us eat,
+drink and be merry and work as little as we may. Let us sit among the
+flowers. It is too hot to labor. Let us warm ourselves beside the public
+stove. It is too cold to work.
+
+But what? Such conduct, you say, will not be allowed in the
+commonwealth. Idleness and slovenly, careless work will be forbidden?
+Ah! then you must mean that beside the worker will be the overseer with
+the whip; the time-clock will mark his energy upon its dial; the machine
+will register his effort; and if he will not work there is lurking for
+him in the background the shadowed door of the prison. Exactly and
+logically so. Socialism, in other words, is slavery.
+
+But here the socialist and his school interpose at once with an
+objection. Under the socialist commonwealth, they say, the people will
+want to work; they will have acquired a new civic spirit; they will work
+eagerly and cheerfully for the sake of the public good and from their
+love of the system under which they live. The loafer will be extinct.
+The sponge and the parasite will have perished. Even crime itself, so
+the socialist tells us, will diminish to the vanishing point, till there
+is nothing of it except here and there a sort of pathological survival,
+an atavism, or a "throwing back" to the forgotten sins of the
+grandfathers. Here and there, some poor fellow afflicted with this
+disease may break into my socialistic house and steal my pictures and my
+wine. Poor chap! Deal with him very gently. He is not wicked. He is ill.
+
+This last argument, in a word, begs the whole question. With perfect
+citizens any government is good. In a population of angels a socialistic
+commonwealth would work to perfection. But until we have the angels we
+must keep the commonwealth waiting.
+
+Nor is it necessary here to discuss the hundred and one modifications of
+the socialistic plan. Each and all fail for one and the same reason. The
+municipal socialist, despairing of the huge collective state, dreams of
+his little town as an organic unit in which all share alike; the
+syndicalist in his fancy sees his trade united into a co-operative body
+in which all are equal; the gradualist, in whose mind lingers the leaven
+of doubt, frames for himself a hazy vision of a prolonged preparation
+for the future, of socialism achieved little by little, the citizens
+being trained as it goes on till they are to reach somehow or somewhere
+in cloud land the nirvana of the elimination of self; like indeed, they
+are, to the horse in the ancient fable that was being trained to live
+without food but died, alas, just as the experiment was succeeding.
+
+There is no way out. Socialism is but a dream, a bubble floating in the
+air. In the light of its opalescent colors we may see many visions of
+what we might be if we were better than we are, we may learn much that
+is useful as to what we can be even as we are; but if we mistake the
+floating bubble for the marble palaces of the city of desire, it will
+lead us forward in our pursuit till we fall over the edge of the abyss
+beyond which is chaos.
+
+
+
+
+_VII.--What Is Possible and What Is Not_
+
+
+SOCIALISM, then, will not work, and neither will individualism, or at
+least the older individualism that we have hitherto made the basis of
+the social order. Here, therefore, stands humanity, in the middle of its
+narrow path in sheer perplexity, not knowing which way to turn. On
+either side is the brink of an abyss. On one hand is the yawning gulf of
+social catastrophe represented by socialism. On the other, the slower,
+but no less inevitable disaster that would attend the continuation in
+its present form of the system under which we have lived. Either way
+lies destruction; the one swift and immediate as a fall from a great
+height; the other gradual, but equally dreadful, as the slow
+strangulation in a morass. Somewhere between the two lies such narrow
+safety as may be found.
+
+The Ancients were fond of the metaphor, taken from the vexed Sicilian
+Seas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened the
+affrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily cast
+the ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the position
+that has been reached at the present crisis in the course of human
+progress. When we view the shortcomings of the present individualism,
+its waste of energy, its fretful overwork, its cruel inequality and the
+bitter lot that it brings to the uncounted millions of the submerged, we
+are inclined to cry out against it, and to listen with a ready ear to
+the easy promises of the idealist. But when we turn to the contrasted
+fallacies of socialism, its obvious impracticality and the dark gulf of
+social chaos that yawns behind it, we are driven back shuddering to
+cherish rather the ills we have than fly to others we know not of.
+
+Yet out of the whole discussion of the matter some few things begin to
+merge into the clearness of certain day. It is clear enough on the one
+hand that we can expect no sudden and complete transformation of the
+world in which we live. Such a process is impossible. The industrial
+system is too complex, its roots are too deeply struck and its whole
+organism of too delicate a growth to permit us to tear it from the soil.
+Nor is humanity itself fitted for the kind of transformation which fills
+the dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of selfishness that has
+been the survival instinct of existence since life first crawled from
+the slime of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mitigated. In
+the long process of time some higher cosmic sense may take its place. It
+has not done so yet. If the kingdom of socialism were opened to-morrow,
+there are but few fitted to enter.
+
+But on the other hand it is equally clear that the doctrine of "every
+man for himself," as it used to be applied, is done with forever. The
+time has gone by when a man shall starve asking in vain for work; when
+the listless outcast shall draw his rags shivering about him unheeded of
+his fellows; when children shall be born in hunger and bred in want and
+broken in toil with never a chance in life. If nothing else will end
+these things, fear will do it. The hardest capitalist that ever gripped
+his property with the iron clasp of legal right relaxes his grasp a
+little when he thinks of the possibilities of a social conflagration. In
+this respect five years of war have taught us more than a century of
+peace. It has set in a clear light new forms of social obligation. The
+war brought with it conscription--not as we used to see it, as the last
+horror of military tyranny, but as the crowning pride of democracy. An
+inconceivable revolution in the thought of the English speaking peoples
+has taken place in respect to it. The obligation of every man, according
+to his age and circumstance, to take up arms for his country and, if
+need be, to die for it, is henceforth the recognized basis of
+progressive democracy.
+
+But conscription has its other side. The obligation to die must carry
+with it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that he
+must fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizen
+the opportunity of a livelihood. "Unemployment," in the case of the
+willing and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democratic
+Government must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrial
+policy, that there shall be no such thing as able bodied men and women
+"out of work," looking for occupation and unable to find it. Work must
+either be found or must be provided by the State itself.
+
+Yet it is clear that a policy of state work and state pay for all who
+are otherwise unable to find occupation involves appalling difficulties.
+The opportunity will loom large for the prodigal waste of money, for the
+undertaking of public works of no real utility and for the subsidizing
+of an army of loafers. But the difficulties, great though they are, are
+not insuperable. The payment for state labor of this kind can be kept
+low enough to make it the last resort rather than the ultimate ambition
+of the worker. Nor need the work be useless. In new countries,
+especially such as Canada and the United States and Australia, the
+development of latent natural assets could absorb the labor of
+generations. There are still unredeemed empires in the west. Clearly
+enough a certain modicum of public honesty and integrity is essential
+for such a task; more, undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able to
+enlist in the service of the commonwealth. But without it we perish.
+Social betterment must depend at every stage on the force of public
+spirit and public morality that inspires it.
+
+So much for the case of those who are able and willing to work. There
+remain still the uncounted thousands who by accident or illness, age or
+infirmity, are unable to maintain themselves. For these people, under
+the older dispensation, there was nothing but the poorhouse, the jail or
+starvation by the roadside. The narrow individualism of the nineteenth
+century refused to recognize the social duty of supporting somebody
+else's grandmother. Such charity began, and ended, at home. But even
+with the passing of the nineteenth century an awakened sense of the
+collective responsibility of society towards its weaker members began to
+impress itself upon public policy. Old age pension laws and national
+insurance against illness and accident were already being built into the
+legislative codes of the democratic countries. The experience of the war
+has enormously increased this sense of social solidarity. It is clear
+now that our fortunes are not in our individual keeping. We stand or
+fall as a nation. And the nation which neglects the aged and infirm, or
+which leaves a family to be shipwrecked as the result of a single
+accident to a breadwinner, cannot survive as against a nation in which
+the welfare of each is regarded as contributory to the safety of all.
+Even the purest selfishness would dictate a policy of social insurance.
+
+There is no need to discuss the particular way in which this policy can
+best be carried out. It will vary with the circumstances of each
+community. The action of the municipality, or of the state or province,
+or of the central government itself may be called into play. But in one
+form or another, the economic loss involved in illness and infirmity
+must be shifted from the shoulders of the individual to those of
+society at large. There was but little realization of this obligation in
+the nineteenth century. Only in the sensational moments of famine, flood
+or pestilence was a general social effort called forth. But in the
+clearer view of the social bond which the war has given us we can see
+that famine and pestilence are merely exaggerated forms of what is
+happening every day in our midst.
+
+We spoke much during the war of "man power." We suddenly realized that
+after all the greatness and strength of a nation is made up of the men
+and women who compose it. Its money, in the narrow sense, is nothing; a
+set of meaningless chips and counters piled upon a banker's table ready
+to fall at a touch. Even before the war we had begun to talk eagerly and
+anxiously of the conservation of national resources, of the need of
+safeguarding the forests and fisheries and the mines. These are
+important things. But the war has shown that the most important thing of
+all is the conservation of men and women.
+
+The attitude of the nineteenth century upon this point was little short
+of insane. The melancholy doctrine of Malthus had perverted the public
+mind. Because it was difficult for a poor man to bring up a family, the
+hasty conclusion was reached that a family ought not to be brought up.
+But the war has entirely inverted and corrected this point of view. The
+father and mother who were able to send six sturdy, native-born sons to
+the conflict were regarded as benefactors of the nation. But these six
+sturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, six "puling infants,"
+viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor. If the
+strength of the nation lies in its men and women there is only one way
+to increase it. Before the war it was thought that a simpler and easier
+method of increase could be found in the wholesale import of Austrians,
+Bulgarians and Czecho-Slovaks. The newer nations boasted proudly of
+their immigration tables. The fallacy is apparent now. Those who really
+count in a nation and those who govern its destinies for good or ill are
+those who are born in it.
+
+It is difficult to over-estimate the harm that has been done to public
+policy by this same Malthusian theory. It has opposed to every proposal
+of social reform an obstacle that seemed insuperable,--the danger of a
+rapid overincrease of population that would pauperize the community.
+Population, it was said, tends always to press upon the heels of
+subsistence. If the poor are pampered, they will breed fast: the time
+will come when there will not be food for all and we shall perish in a
+common destruction. Seen in this light, infant mortality and the cruel
+wastage of disease were viewed with complacence. It was "Nature's" own
+process at work. The "unfit," so called, were being winnowed out that
+only the best might survive. The biological doctrine of evolution was
+misinterpreted and misapplied to social policy.
+
+But in the organic world there is no such thing as the "fit" or the
+"unfit," in any higher or moral sense. The most hideous forms of life
+may "survive" and thrust aside the most beautiful. It is only by a
+confusion of thought that the processes of organic nature which render
+every foot of fertile ground the scene of unending conflict can be used
+to explain away the death of children of the slums. The whole theory of
+survival is only a statement of what is, not of what ought to be. The
+moment that we introduce the operation of human volition and activity,
+that, too, becomes one of the factors of "survival." The dog, the cat,
+and the cow live by man's will, where the wolf and the hyena have
+perished.
+
+But it is time that the Malthusian doctrine,--the fear of
+over-population as a hindrance to social reform,--was dismissed from
+consideration. It is at best but a worn-out scarecrow shaking its vain
+rags in the wind. Population, it is true, increases in a geometrical
+ratio. The human race, if favored by environment, can easily double
+itself every twenty-five years. If it did this, the time must come,
+through sheer power of multiplication, when there would not be standing
+room for it on the globe. All of this is undeniable, but it is quite
+wide of the mark. It is time enough to cross a bridge when we come to
+it. The "standing room" problem is still removed from us by such
+uncounted generations that we need give no thought to it. The physical
+resources of the globe are as yet only tapped, and not exhausted. We
+have done little more than scratch the surface. Because we are crowded
+here and there in the ant-hills of our cities, we dream that the world
+is full. Because, under our present system, we do not raise enough food
+for all, we fear that the food supply is running short. All this is pure
+fancy. Let any one consider in his mind's eye the enormous untouched
+assets still remaining for mankind in the vast spaces filled with the
+tangled forests of South America, or the exuberant fertility of
+equatorial Africa or the huge plains of Canada, Australia, Southern
+Siberia and the United States, as yet only thinly dotted with human
+settlement. There is no need to draw up an anxious balance sheet of our
+assets. There is still an uncounted plenty. And every human being born
+upon the world represents a power of work that, rightly directed, more
+than supplies his wants. The fact that as an infant he does not maintain
+himself has nothing to do with the case. This was true even in the
+Garden of Eden.
+
+The fundamental error of the Malthusian theory of population and poverty
+is to confound the difficulties of human organization with the question
+of physical production. Our existing poverty is purely a problem in the
+direction and distribution of human effort. It has no connection as yet
+with the question of the total available means of subsistence. Some day,
+in a remote future, in which under an improved social system the numbers
+of mankind might increase to the full power of the natural capacity of
+multiplication, such a question might conceivably disturb the equanimity
+of mankind. But it need not now. It is only one of many disasters that
+must sooner or later overtake mankind. The sun, so the astronomer tells
+us, is cooling down; the night is coming; an all-pervading cold will
+some day chill into rigid death the last vestige of organic life. Our
+poor planet will be but a silent ghost whirling on its dark path in the
+starlight. This ultimate disaster is, as far as our vision goes,
+inevitable. Yet no one concerns himself with it. So should it be with
+the danger of the ultimate overcrowding of the globe.
+
+I lay stress upon this problem of the increase of population because, to
+my thinking, it is in this connection that the main work and the best
+hope of social reform can be found. The children of the race should be
+the very blossom of its fondest hopes. Under the present order and with
+the present gloomy preconceptions they have been the least of its
+collective cares. Yet here--and here more than anywhere--is the point
+towards which social effort and social legislation may be directed
+immediately and successfully. The moment that we get away from the idea
+that the child is a mere appendage of the parent, bound to share good
+fortune and ill, wealth and starvation, according to the parent's lot,
+the moment we regard the child as itself a member of society--clothed in
+social rights--a burden for the moment but an asset for the future--we
+turn over a new leaf in the book of human development, we pass a new
+milestone on the upward path of progress.
+
+It should be recognized in the coming order of society, that every child
+of the nation has the right to be clothed and fed and trained
+irrespective of its parents' lot. Our feeble beginnings in the direction
+of housing, sanitation, child welfare and education, should be expanded
+at whatever cost into something truly national and all embracing. The
+ancient grudging selfishness that would not feed other people's children
+should be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and the
+spinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people's
+children should fight for them. The obligation must apply both ways.
+
+No society is properly organized until every child that is born into it
+shall have an opportunity in life. Success in life and capacity to live
+we cannot give. But opportunity we can. We can at least see that the
+gifts that are laid in the child's cradle by nature are not obliterated
+by the cruel fortune of the accident of birth: that its brain and body
+are not stunted by lack of food and air and by the heavy burden of
+premature toil. The playtime of childhood should be held sacred by the
+nation.
+
+This, as I see it, should be the first and the greatest effort of social
+reform. For the adult generation of to-day many things are no longer
+possible. The time has passed. We are, as viewed with a comprehensive
+eye, a damaged race. Few of us in mind or body are what we might be; and
+millions of us, the vast majority of industrial mankind known as the
+working class, are distorted beyond repair from what they might have
+been. In older societies this was taken for granted: the poor and the
+humble and the lowly reproduced from generation to generation, as they
+grew to adult life, the starved brains and stunted outlook of their
+forbears,--starved and stunted only by lack of opportunity. For nature
+knows of no such differences in original capacity between the children
+of the fortunate and the unfortunate. Yet on this inequality, made by
+circumstance, was based the whole system of caste, the stratification
+of the gentle and the simple on which society rested. In the past it may
+have been necessary. It is not so now. If, with all our vast apparatus
+of machinery and power, we cannot so arrange society that each child has
+an opportunity in life, it would be better to break the machinery in
+pieces and return to the woods from which we came.
+
+Put into the plainest of prose, then, we are saying that the government
+of every country ought to supply work and pay for the unemployed,
+maintenance for the infirm and aged, and education and opportunity for
+the children. These are vast tasks. And they involve, of course, a
+financial burden not dreamed of before the war. But here again the war
+has taught us many things. It would have seemed inconceivable before,
+that a man of great wealth should give one-half of his income to the
+state. The financial burden of the war, as the full measure of it dawned
+upon our minds, seemed to betoken a universal bankruptcy. But the sequel
+is going to show that the finance of the war will prove to be a lesson
+in the finance of peace. The new burden has come to stay. No modern
+state can hope to survive unless it meets the kind of social claims on
+the part of the unemployed, the destitute and the children that have
+been described above. And it cannot do this unless it continues to use
+the terrific engine of taxation already fashioned in the war.
+Undoubtedly the progressive income tax and the tax on profits and
+taxation of inheritance must be maintained to an extent never dreamed of
+before.
+
+But the peace finance and the war finance will differ in one most
+important respect. The war finance was purely destructive. From it came
+national security and the triumph of right over wrong. No one would
+belittle the worth of the sacrifice. But in the narrower sense of
+production, of bread winning, there came nothing; or nothing except a
+new power of organization, a new technical skill and a new aspiration
+towards better things. But the burden of peace finance directed towards
+social efforts will bring a direct return. Every cent that is spent upon
+the betterment of the population will come back, sooner or later, as
+two.
+
+But all of this deals as yet only with the field of industry and conduct
+in which the state rules supreme. Governmental care of the unemployed,
+the infant and the infirm, sounds like a chapter in socialism. If the
+same regime were extended over the whole area of production, we should
+have socialism itself and a mere soap-bubble bursting into fragments.
+There is no need, however, to extend the regime of compulsion over the
+whole field. The vast mass of human industrial effort must still lie
+outside of the immediate control of the government. Every man will still
+earn his own living and that of his family as best he can, relying first
+and foremost upon his own efforts.
+
+One naturally asks, then, To what extent can social reform penetrate
+into the ordinary operation of industry itself? Granted that it is
+impossible for the state to take over the whole industry of the nation,
+does that mean that the present inequalities must continue? The
+framework in which our industrial life is set cannot be readily broken
+asunder. But we can to a great extent ease the rigidity of its outlines.
+A legislative code that starts from sounder principles than those which
+have obtained hitherto can do a great deal towards progressive
+betterment. Each decade can be an improvement upon the last. Hitherto we
+have been hampered at every turn by the supposed obstacle of immutable
+economic laws. The theory of "natural" wages and prices of a supposed
+economic order that could not be disturbed, set up a sort of legislative
+paralysis. The first thing needed is to get away entirely from all such
+preconceptions, to recognize that the "natural" order of society, based
+on the "natural" liberty, does not correspond with real justice and real
+liberty at all, but works injustice at every turn. And at every turn
+intrusive social legislation must seek to prevent such injustice.
+
+It is no part of the present essay to attempt to detail the particulars
+of a code of social legislation. That must depend in every case upon the
+particular circumstances of the community concerned. But some
+indication may be given here of the kind of legislation that may serve
+to render the conditions of industry more in conformity with social
+justice. Let us take, as a conspicuous example, the case of the Minimum
+wage law. Here is a thing sternly condemned in the older thought as an
+economic impossibility. It was claimed, as we have seen, that under free
+contract a man was paid what he earned and no law could make it more.
+But the older theory was wrong. The minimum wage law ought to form, in
+one fashion or another, a part of the code of every community. It may be
+applied by specific legislation from a central power, or it may be
+applied by the discretionary authority of district boards, or it may be
+regulated,--as it has been in some of the beginnings already
+made,--within the compass of each industry or trade. But the principle
+involved is sound. The wage as paid becomes a part of the conditions of
+industry. Interest, profits and, later, the direction of consumption and
+then of production, conform themselves to it.
+
+True it is, that in this as in all cases of social legislation, no
+application of the law can be made so sweeping and so immediate as to
+dislocate the machine and bring industry to a stop. It is probable that
+at any particular time and place the legislative minimum wage cannot be
+very much in advance of the ordinary or average wage of the people in
+employment. But its virtue lies in its progression. The modest increase
+of to-day leads to the fuller increase of to-morrow. Properly applied,
+the capitalist and the employer of labor need have nothing to fear from
+it. Its ultimate effect will not fall upon them, but will serve merely
+to alter the direction of human effort.
+
+Precisely the same reasoning holds good of the shortening of the hours
+of labor both by legislative enactment and by collective organization.
+Here again the first thing necessary is a clear vision of the goal
+towards which we are to strive. The hours of labor are too long. The
+world has been caught in the wheels of its own machinery which will not
+stop. With each advance in invention and mechanical power it works
+harder still. New and feverish desires for luxuries replace each older
+want as satisfied. The nerves of our industrial civilization are worn
+thin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world is
+restless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious
+discontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest. It
+should be sent, as nerve patients are, to the seaside or the quiet of
+the hills. Failing this, it should at least slacken the pace of its work
+and shorten its working day.
+
+And for this the thing needed is an altered public opinion on the
+subject of work in relation to human character and development. The
+nineteenth century glorified work. The poet, sitting beneath a shady
+tree, sang of its glories. The working man was incited to contemplate
+the beauty of the night's rest that followed on the exhaustion of the
+day. It was proved to him that if his day was dull at least his sleep
+was sound. The ideal of society was the cheery artisan and the honest
+blacksmith, awake and singing with the lark and busy all day long at
+the loom and the anvil, till the grateful night soothed them into
+well-earned slumber. This, they were told, was better than the
+distracted sleep of princes.
+
+The educated world repeated to itself these grotesque fallacies till it
+lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is
+too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at
+the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too
+long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is too long. I am not raising
+here the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can be
+shortened, but only urging the primary need of recognizing that a
+working day of eight hours is too long for the full and proper
+development of human capacity and for the rational enjoyment of life.
+There is no need to quote here to the contrary the long and sustained
+toil of the pioneer, the eager labor of the student, unmindful of the
+silent hours, or the fierce acquisitive activity of the money-maker that
+knows no pause. Activities such as these differ with a whole sky from
+the wage-work of the modern industrial worker. The task in one case is
+done for its own sake. It is life itself. The other is done only for the
+sake of the wage it brings. It is, or should be, a mere preliminary to
+living.
+
+Let it be granted, of course, that a certain amount of work is an
+absolute necessity for human character. There is no more pathetic
+spectacle on our human stage than the figure of poor puppy in his beach
+suit and his tuxedo jacket seeking in vain to amuse himself for ever. A
+leisure class no sooner arises than the melancholy monotony of amusement
+forces it into mimic work and make-believe activities. It dare not face
+the empty day.
+
+But when all is said about the horror of idleness the broad fact remains
+that the hours of work are too long. If we could in imagination
+disregard for a moment all question of how the hours of work are to be
+shortened and how production is to be maintained and ask only what would
+be the ideal number of the daily hours of compulsory work, for
+character's sake, few of us would put them at more than four or five.
+Many of us, as applied to ourselves, at least, would take a chance on
+character at two.
+
+The shortening of the general hours of work, then, should be among the
+primary aims of social reform. There need be no fear that with shortened
+hours of labor the sum total of production would fall short of human
+needs. This, as has been shown from beginning to end of this essay, is
+out of the question. Human _desires_ would eat up the result of ten
+times the work we now accomplish. Human _needs_ would be satisfied with
+a fraction of it. But the real difficulty in the shortening of hours
+lies elsewhere. Here, as in the parallel case of the minimum wage, the
+danger is that the attempt to alter things too rapidly may dislocate the
+industrial machine. We ought to attempt such a shortening as will strain
+the machine to a breaking point, but never break it. This can be done,
+as with the minimum wage, partly by positive legislation and partly
+collective action. Not much can be done at once. But the process can be
+continuous. The short hours achieved with acclamation to-day will later
+be denounced as the long hours of to-morrow. The essential point to
+grasp, however, is that society at large has nothing to lose by the
+process. The shortened hours become a part of the framework of
+production. It adapts itself to it. Hitherto we have been caught in the
+running of our own machine: it is time that we altered the gearing of
+it.
+
+The two cases selected,--the minimum wage and the legislative shortening
+of hours,--have been chosen merely as illustrations and are not
+exhaustive of the things that can be done in the field of possible and
+practical reform. It is plain enough that in many other directions the
+same principles may be applied. The rectification of the ownership of
+land so as to eliminate the haphazard gains of the speculator and the
+unearned increment of wealth created by the efforts of others, is an
+obvious case in point. The "single taxer" sees in this a cure-all for
+the ills of society. But his vision is distorted. The private ownership
+of land is one of the greatest incentives to human effort that the
+world has ever known. It would be folly to abolish it, even if we could.
+But here as elsewhere we can seek to re-define and regulate the
+conditions of ownership so as to bring them more into keeping with a
+common sense view of social justice.
+
+But the inordinate and fortuitous gains from land are really only one
+example from a general class. The war discovered the "profiteer." The
+law-makers of the world are busy now with smoking him out from his lair.
+But he was there all the time. Inordinate and fortuitous gain, resting
+on such things as monopoly, or trickery, or the mere hazards of
+abundance and scarcity, complying with the letter of the law but
+violating its spirit, are fit objects for appropriate taxation. The ways
+and means are difficult, but the social principle involved is clear.
+
+We may thus form some sort of vision of the social future into which we
+are passing. The details are indistinct. But the outline at least in
+which it is framed is clear enough. The safety of the future lies in a
+progressive movement of social control alleviating the misery which it
+cannot obliterate and based upon the broad general principle of equality
+of opportunity. The chief immediate direction of social effort should be
+towards the attempt to give to every human being in childhood adequate
+food, clothing, education and an opportunity in life. This will prove to
+be the beginning of many things.
+
+
+THE END
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Note: Page 67, "are" changed to "and" (wages and all)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, by
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