THEUNSOLVED RIDDLEOFSOCIAL 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 ofa new conflict rises on our ears. All the world is filled withindustrial unrest. Strike follows upon strike. A world that has knownfive years of fighting has lost its taste for the honest drudgery ofwork. Cincinnatus will not back to his plow, or, at the best, standssullenly between his plow-handles arguing for a higher wage. 

The wheels of industry are threatening to stop. The laborer will notwork because the pay is too low and the hours are too long. The producercannot employ him because the wage is too high, and the hours are tooshort. If the high wage is paid and the short hours are granted, thenthe price of the thing made, so it seems, rises higher still. Even thehigh wages will not buy it. The process apparently moves in a circlewith no cessation to it. The increased wages seem only to aggravate theincreasing prices. Wages and prices, rising together, call perpetuallyfor more money, or at least more tokens and symbols, more paper creditin the form of checks and deposits, with a value that is no longer basedon the rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but that floats uponthe mere atmosphere of expectation. 

But the sheer quantity of the inflated currency and false money forcesprices higher still. The familiar landmarks of wages, salaries andprices are being obliterated. The "scrap of paper" with which the warbegan stays with us as its legacy. It lies upon the industrial landscapelike snow, covering up, as best it may, the bare poverty of a worlddesolated by war. 

Under such circumstances national finance seems turned into a delirium. Billions are voted where once a few poor millions were thoughtextravagant. The war debts of the Allied Nations, not yet fullycomputed, will run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars apiece. Butthe debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger asthe assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth oris it poverty? The world seems filled with money and short of goods, while even in this very scarcity a new luxury has broken out. Thecapitalist rides in his ten thousand dollar motor car. Theseven-dollar-a-day artisan plays merrily on his gramophone in the broaddaylight of his afternoon that is saved, like all else, by being"borrowed" from the morning. He calls the capitalist a "profiteer. " Thecapitalist retorts with calling him a "Bolshevik. "

Worse portents appear. Over the rim of the Russian horizon are seen thefierce eyes and the unshorn face of the real and undoubted Bolshevik, waving his red flag. Vast areas of what was a fertile populated worldare overwhelmed in chaos. Over Russia there lies a great darkness, spreading ominously westward into Central Europe. The criminal sitsamong his corpses. He feeds upon the wreck of a civilization that was. 

The infection spreads. All over the world the just claims of organizedlabor are intermingled with the underground conspiracy of socialrevolution. The public mind is confused. Something approaching to asocial panic appears. To some minds the demand for law and orderoverwhelms all other thoughts. To others the fierce desire for socialjustice obliterates all fear of a general catastrophe. They push nearerand nearer to the brink of the abyss. The warning cry of "back" ischallenged by the eager shout of "forward!" The older methods of socialprogress are abandoned as too slow. The older weapons of social defenseare thrown aside as too blunt. Parliamentary discussion is powerless. Itlimps in the wake of the popular movement. The "state", as we knew it, threatens to dissolve into labor unions, conventions, boards ofconciliation, and conferences. Society shaken to its base, hurls itselfinto the industrial suicide of the general strike, refusing to feeditself, denying its own wants. 

This is a time such as there never was before. It represents a vastsocial transformation in which there is at stake, and may be lost, allthat has been gained in the slow centuries of material progress and inwhich there may be achieved some part of all that has been dreamed inthe age-long passion for social justice. 

For the time being, the constituted governments of the world survive asbest they may and accomplish such things as they can, planless, orplanning 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 saneand serious thought. It is necessary to consider from the ground up thesocial organization in which we live and the means whereby it may bealtered and expanded to meet the needs of the time to come. We must dothis or perish. If we do not mend the machine, there are forces movingin the world that will break it. The blind Samson of labor will seizeupon the pillars of society and bring them down in a common destruction. 

 * * * * *

Few persons can attain to adult life without being profoundly impressedby the appalling inequalities of our human lot. Riches and povertyjostle one another upon our streets. The tattered outcast dozes on hisbench while the chariot of the wealthy is drawn by. The palace is theneighbor of the slum. We are, in modern life, so used to this that we nolonger see it. 

Inequality begins from the very cradle. Some are born into an easy andsheltered affluence. Others are the children of mean and sordid want. For some the long toil of life begins in the very bloom time ofchildhood and ends only when the broken and exhausted body sinks into apenurious old age. For others life is but a foolish leisure with mockactivities and mimic avocations to mask its uselessness. And as thecircumstances vary so too does the native endowment of the body and themind. Some born in poverty rise to wealth. An inborn energy and capacitybid defiance to the ill-will of fate. Others sink. The careless handlets fall the cradle gift of wealth. 

Thus all about us is the moving and shifting spectacle of riches andpoverty, side by side, inextricable. 

The human mind, lost in a maze of inequalities that it cannot explainand evils that it cannot, singly, remedy, must adapt itself as best itcan. An acquired indifference to the ills of others is the price atwhich we live. A certain dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personalrelief is the mere drop that any one of us alone can cast into the vastocean of human misery. Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we tooperish. We feed well while others starve. We make fast the doors of ourlighted 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 areourselves shelterless. 

But the contrast thus presented is one that has acquired a new meaningin the age in which we live. The poverty of earlier days was the outcomeof the insufficiency of human labor to meet the primal needs of humankind. It is not so now. We live in an age that is at best about acentury and a half old--the age of machinery and power. Our commonreading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with thepurple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Itsrecord is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure ofdiscovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long sincedismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simpleannals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what isthere to say? They were born; they lived; they died. They followed theirleaders, and their names are forgotten. 

But written thus our history has obscured the greatest fact that evercame into it--the colossal change that separates our little era of acentury and a half from all the preceding history of mankind--separatesit so completely that a great gulf lies between, across which comparisoncan 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 ora Pizarro. But what of that? The America that they annexed to Europe wasmerely a new domain added to a world already old. The "new world" wasreally found in the wonder-years of the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies. Mankind really entered upon it when the sudden progress ofliberated science bound the fierce energy of expanding stream and drewthe eager lightning from the cloud. 

Here began indeed, in the drab surroundings of the workshop, in thesilent mystery of the laboratory, the magic of the new age. 

But we do not commonly realize the vastness of the change. Much of ourlife and much of our thought still belongs to the old world. Oureducation is still largely framed on the old pattern. And our views ofpoverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, arestill largely conditioned by it. 

In the old world, poverty seemed, and poverty was, the natural andinevitable lot of the greater portion of mankind. It was difficult, withthe mean appliances of the time, to wring subsistence from the reluctantearth. For the simplest necessaries and comforts of life all, or nearlyall, must work hard. Many must perish for want of them. Poverty wasinevitable and perpetual. The poor must look to the brightness of afuture world for the consolation that they were denied in this. Seenthus poverty became rather a blessing than a curse, or at least adispensation prescribing the proper lot of man. Life itself was but apreparation and a trial--a threshing floor where, under the"tribulation" of want, the wheat was beaten from the straw. Of thisolder view much still survives, and much that is ennobling. Nor is thereany need to say goodby to it. Even if poverty were gone, the flailcould still beat hard enough upon the grain and chaff of humanity. 

But turn to consider the magnitude of the change that has come aboutwith the era of machinery and the indescribable increase which it hasbrought to man's power over his environment. There is no need to recitehere in detail the marvelous record of mechanical progress thatconstituted the "industrial revolution" of the eighteenth century. Theutilization of coal for the smelting of iron ore; the invention ofmachinery that could spin and weave; the application of the undreamedenergy of steam as a motive force, the building of canals and the makingof stone roads--these proved but the beginnings. Each stage of inventioncalled for a further advance. The quickening of one part of the processnecessitated the "speeding up" of all the others. It placed a premium--areward already in sight--upon the next advance. Mechanical spinningcalled forth the power loom. The increase in production called for newmeans of transport. The improvement of transport still further swelledthe volume of production. The steamboat of 1809 and the steam locomotiveof 1830 were the direct result of what had gone before. Most importantof all, the movement had become a conscious one. Invention was no longerthe fortuitous result of a happy chance. Mechanical progress, thecontinual increase of power and the continual surplus of product becamean essential part of the environment, and an unconscious element in thethought and outlook of the civilized world. 

No wonder that the first aspect of the age of machinery was one oftriumph. Man had vanquished nature. The elemental forces of wind andfire, of rushing water and driving storm before which the savage hadcowered low for shelter, these had become his servants. The forest thathad blocked his path became his field. The desert blossomed as hisgarden. 

The aspect of industrial life altered. The domestic industry of thecottage and the individual labor of the artisan gave place to thefactory with its regiment of workers and its steam-driven machinery. The economic isolation of the single worker, of the village, even of thedistrict and the nation, was lost in the general cohesion in which thewhole industrial world merged into one. 

The life of the individual changed accordingly. In the old world hislittle sphere was allotted to him and there he stayed. His village washis horizon. The son of the weaver wove and the smith reared hischildren to his trade. Each did his duty, or was adjured to do it, inthe "state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. " Migrationto distant occupations or to foreign lands was but for the adventurousfew. The ne'er-do-well blew, like seed before the wind, to distantplaces, but mankind at large stayed at home. Here and there exceptionalindustry or extraordinary capacity raised the artisan to wealth andturned the "man" into the "master. " But for the most part even industryand endowment were powerless against the inertia of custom and thedead-weight of environment. The universal ignorance of the working classbroke down the aspiring force of genius. Mute inglorious Miltons wereburied in country churchyards. 

In the new world all this changed. The individual became but a shiftingatom in the vast complex, moving from place to place, from occupation tooccupation 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 andtransporting it to the ends of the earth. Then as the nineteenth centurydrew towards its close, even the age of steam power was made commonplaceby achievements of the era of electricity. 

All this is familiar enough. The record of the age of machinery is knownto all. But the strange mystery, the secret that lies concealed withinits organization, is realized by but few. It offers, to those who see itaright, the most perplexing industrial paradox ever presented in thehistory of mankind. With all our wealth, we are still poor. After acentury and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard asever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature stillconquers us. And more than this. There are many senses in which themachine age seems to leave the great bulk of civilized humanity, theworking part of it, worse off instead of better. The nature of our workhas changed. No man now makes anything. He makes only a part ofsomething, feeding and tending a machine that moves with relentlessmonotony in the routine of which both the machine and its tender areonly a fractional part. 

For the great majority of the workers, the interest of work as such isgone. It is a task done consciously for a wage, one eye upon the clock. The brave independence of the keeper of the little shop contrastsfavorably with the mock dignity of a floor walker in an "establishment. "The varied craftsmanship of the artisan had in it something of thecreative element that was the parent motive of sustained industry. Thedull routine of the factory hand in a cotton mill has gone. The life ofa pioneer settler in America two hundred years ago, penurious anddangerous as it was, stands out brightly beside the dull and meaninglesstoil of his descendant. 

The picture must not be drawn in colors too sinister. In the dullestwork and in the meanest lives in the new world to-day there are elementsthat were lacking in the work of the old world. The universal spread ofelementary education, the universal access to the printed page, and theuniversal hope of better things, if not for oneself, at least for one'schildren, and even the universal restlessness that the industrialism ofto-day have brought are better things than the dull plodding passivityof the older world. Only a false mediævalism can paint the past incolors superior to the present. The haze of distance that dims themountains with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the past into thesoft glory of retrospect. Misled by these, the sentimentalist may oftensigh for an age that in a nearer view would be seen filled with crueltyand suffering. But even when we have made every allowance for the alltoo human tendency to soften down the past, it remains true that in manysenses the processes of industry for the worker have lost inattractiveness and power of absorption of the mind during the veryperiod when they have gained so enormously in effectiveness and in powerof production. 

The essential contrast lies between the vastly increased power ofproduction and its apparent inability to satisfy for all humanity themost elementary human wants; between the immeasurable saving of laboreffected by machinery and the brute fact of the continuance ofhard-driven, unceasing toil. 

Of the extent of this increased power of production we can only speak ingeneral terms. No one, as far as I am aware, has yet essayed to measureit. Nor have we any form of calculus or computation that can easily beapplied. If we wish to compare the gross total of production effectedto-day with that accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago, the means, the basis of calculation, is lacking. Vast numbers of the thingsproduced now were not then in existence. A great part of our productionof to-day culminates not in productive goods, but in services, as informs of motion, or in ability to talk across a distance. 

It is true that statistics that deal with the world's production ofcotton, or of oil, or of iron and steel present stupendous results. Buteven these do not go far enough. For the basic raw materials are workedinto finer and finer forms to supply new "wants" as they are called, andto represent a vast quantity of "satisfactions" not existing before. 

Nor is the money calculus of any avail. Comparison by prices breaks downentirely. A bushel of wheat stands about where it stood before and couldbe calculated. But the computation, let us say, in price-values of theSunday newspapers produced in one week in New York or the annual outputof photographic apparatus, would defy comparison. Of the enormousincrease in the gross total of human goods there is no doubt. We haveonly to look about us to see it. The endless miles of railways, thevast apparatus of the factories, the soaring structures of the citiesbear easy witness to it. Yet it would be difficult indeed to compute bywhat factor the effectiveness of human labor working with machinery hasbeen increased. 

But suppose we say, since one figure is as good as another, that it hasbeen increased a hundred times. This calculation must be well within thefacts and can be used as merely a more concrete way of saying that thepower of production has been vastly increased. During the period of thisincrease, the numbers of mankind in the industrial countries haveperhaps been multiplied by three to one. This again is inexact, sincethere are no precise figures of population that cover the period. Butall 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 sothat each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he didbefore, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty timesbetter 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 inthirty of what they were before. But they are not. How, then, are we toexplain this extraordinary discrepancy between human power and resultinghuman happiness?

The more we look at our mechanism of production the more perplexing itseems. Suppose an observer were to look down from the cold distance ofthe moon upon the seething ant-hill of human labor presented on thesurface of our globe; and suppose that such an observer knew nothing ofour system of individual property, of money payments and wages andcontracts, but viewed our labor as merely that of a mass of animatedbeings trying to supply their wants. The spectacle to his eyes would bestrange indeed. Mankind viewed in the mass would be seen to produce acertain amount of absolutely necessary things, such as food, and then tostop. 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 fromunder-nutrition, the production of food would stop at some point a gooddeal short of universal satisfaction. So, too, with the production ofclothing, shelter and other necessary things; never enough would seem tobe produced, and this apparently not by accident or miscalculation, butas if some peculiar social law were at work adjusting production to thepoint where there is just not enough, and leaving it there. Thecountless millions of workers would be seen to turn their untiredenergies and their all-powerful machinery away from the production ofnecessary things to the making of mere comforts; and from these, again, while still stopping short of a general satisfaction, to the making ofluxuries and superfluities. The wheels would never stop. The activitywould never tire. Mankind, mad with the energy of activity, would beseen to pursue the fleeing phantom of insatiable desire. Thus among thehuge mass of accumulated commodities the simplest wants would gounsatisfied. Half-fed men would dig for diamonds, and men sheltered bya crazy roof erect the marble walls of palaces. The observer might wellremain perplexed at the pathetic discord between human work and humanwants. Something, he would feel assured, must be at fault either withthe social instincts of man or with the social order under which helives. 

And herein lies the supreme problem that faces us in this openingcentury. The period of five years of war has shown it to us in a clearerlight than fifty years of peace. War is destruction--the annihilation ofhuman life, the destruction of things made with generations of labor, the misdirection of productive power from making what is useful tomaking what is useless. In the great war just over, some seven millionlives were sacrificed; eight million tons of shipping were sunk beneaththe sea; some fifty million adult males were drawn from productive laborto the lines of battle; behind them uncounted millions labored day andnight at making the weapons of destruction. One might well have thoughtthat such a gigantic misdirection of human energy would have broughtthe industrial world to a standstill within a year. So people did think. So thought a great number, perhaps the greater number, of the financiersand economists and industrial leaders trained in the world in which weused to live. The expectation was unfounded. Great as is the destructionof 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 oldconditions of industry--is infinitely wasteful of human energy. Not morethan one adult worker in ten--so at least it might with confidence beestimated--is employed on necessary things. The other nine performsuperfluous services. War turns them from making the glitteringsuperfluities of peace to making its grim engines of destruction. Butwhile the tenth man still labors, the machine, though creaking with itsdislocation, can still go on. The economics of war, therefore, hasthrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace. 

These I propose in the succeeding chapters to examine. But it might bewell before doing so to lay stress upon the fact that while admittingall the shortcomings and the injustices of the régime under which wehave lived, I am not one of those who are able to see a short and singleremedy. Many people when presented with the argument above, would settleit at once with the word "socialism. " Here, they say, is the immediateand natural remedy. I confess at the outset, and shall develop later, that I cannot view it so. Socialism is a mere beautiful dream, possibleonly for the angels. The attempt to establish it would hurl us over theabyss. Our present lot is sad, but the frying pan is at least betterthan the fire. 

_II. --Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness_

"ALL men, " wrote Thomas Jefferson in framing the Declaration ofIndependence, "have an inalienable right to life, liberty and thepursuit of happiness. " The words are more than a felicitous phrase. Theyexpress even more than the creed of a nation. They embody in themselvesthe uppermost thought of the era that was dawning when they werewritten. They stand for the same view of society which, in that veryyear of 1776, Adam Smith put before the world in his immortal "Wealth ofNations" as the "System of Natural Liberty. " In this system mankindplaced its hopes for over half a century and under it the industrialcivilization of the age of machinery rose to the plenitude of itspower. 

In the preceding chapter an examination has been made of the purelymechanical side of the era of machine production. It has been shown thatthe age of machinery has been in a certain sense one of triumph, of thetriumphant conquest of nature, but in another sense one of perplexingfailure. The new forces controlled by mankind have been powerless as yetto remove want and destitution, hard work and social discontent. In themidst of accumulated wealth social justice seems as far away as ever. 

It remains now to discuss the intellectual development of the modern ageof machinery and the way in which it has moulded the thoughts and theoutlook of mankind. 

Few men think for themselves. The thoughts of most of us are little morethan imitations and adaptations of the ideas of stronger minds. Theinfluence of environment conditions, if it does not control, the mind ofman. So it comes about that every age or generation has its dominant anduppermost thoughts, its peculiar way of looking at things and itspeculiar basis of opinion on which its collective action and its socialregulations rest. All this is largely unconscious. The average citizenof three generations ago was probably not aware that he was an extremeindividualist. The average citizen of to-day is not conscious of thefact that he has ceased to be one. The man of three generations ago hadcertain ideas which he held to be axiomatic, such as that his house washis castle, and that property was property and that what was his washis. But these were to him things so obvious that he could not conceiveany reasonable person doubting them. So, too, with the man of to-day. Hehas come to believe in such things as old age pensions and nationalinsurance. He submits to bachelor taxes and he pays for the education ofother people's children; he speculates much on the limits ofinheritance, and he even meditates profound alterations in the right ofproperty in land. His house is no longer his castle. He has taken downits fences, and "boulevarded" its grounds till it merges into those ofhis neighbors. Indeed he probably does not live in a house at all, butin a mere "apartment" or subdivision of a house which he shares with amultiplicity of people. Nor does he any longer draw water from his ownwell or go to bed by the light of his own candle: for such services asthese his life is so mixed up with "franchises" and "public utilities"and other things unheard of by his own great-grandfather, that it ishopelessly intertangled with that of his fellow citizens. In fine, thereis little left but his own conscience into which he can withdraw. 

Such a man is well aware that times have changed since hisgreat-grandfather's day. But he is not aware of the profound extent towhich his own opinions have been affected by the changing times. He isno longer an individualist. He has become by brute force ofcircumstances a sort of collectivist, puzzled only as to how much of acollectivist 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 ofto-day is to know how far we are to depart from its principles. Thereare those who tell us--and they number many millions--that we mustabandon them entirely. Industrial society, they say, must be reorganizedfrom top to bottom; private industry must cease. All must work for thestate; only in a socialist commonwealth can social justice be found. There are others, of whom the present writer is one, who see in such aprogramme nothing but disaster: yet who consider that the individualistprinciple of "every man for himself" while it makes for national wealthand accumulated power, favors overmuch the few at the expense of themany, puts an over-great premium upon capacity, assigns too harsh apunishment for easy indolence, and, what is worse, exposes theindividual human being too cruelly to the mere accidents of birth andfortune. Under such a system, in short, to those who have is given andfrom those who have not is taken away even that which they have. Thereare others again who still view individualism just as the vast majorityof our great-grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but just: asawarding to every man the fruit of his own labor and the punishment ofhis own idleness, and as visiting, in accordance with the stern butnecessary ordination of our existence, the sins of the father upon thechild. 

The proper starting point, then, for all discussion of the socialproblem is the consideration of the individualist theory of industrialsociety. This grew up, as all the world knows, along with the era ofmachinery itself. It had its counterpart on the political side in therise of representative democratic government. Machinery, industrialliberty, political democracy--these three things represent the basis ofthe progress of the nineteenth century. 

The chief exposition of the system is found in the work of the classicaleconomists--Adam Smith and his followers of half a century--who createdthe modern science of political economy. Beginning as controversialistsanxious to overset a particular system of trade regulation, they endedby becoming the exponents of a new social order. Modified and amended astheir system is in its practical application, it still largelyconditions our outlook to-day. It is to this system that we must turn. 

The general outline of the classical theory of political economy is soclear and so simple that it can be presented within the briefestcompass. It began with certain postulates, or assumptions, to a greatextent unconscious, of the conditions to which it applied. It assumedthe existence of the state and of contract. It took for granted theexistence of individual property, in consumption goods, in capitalgoods, and, with a certain hesitation, in land. The last assumption wasnot perhaps without misgivings: Adam Smith was disposed to look askanceat landlords as men who gathered where they had not sown. John StuartMill, as is well known, was more and more inclined, with advancingreflection, to question the sanctity of landed property as the basis ofsocial institutions. But for the most part property, contract and thecoercive state were fundamental assumptions with the classicists. 

With this there went, on the psychological side, the further assumptionof a general selfishness or self-seeking as the principal motive of theindividual in the economic sphere. Oddly enough this assumption--themost warrantable of the lot--was the earliest to fall under disrepute. The plain assertion that every man looks out for himself (or at best forhimself and his immediate family) touches the tender conscience ofhumanity. It is an unpalatable truth. None the less it is the mostnearly true of all the broad generalizations that can be attempted inregard to mankind. 

The essential problem then of the classicists was to ask what wouldhappen if an industrial community, possessed of the modern control overmachinery and power, were allowed to follow the promptings of"enlightened selfishness" in an environment based upon free contract andthe right of property in land and goods. The answer was of the mostcheering description. The result would be a progressive amelioration ofsociety, increasing in proportion to the completeness with which thefundamental principles involved were allowed to act, and tendingultimately towards something like a social millennium or perfection ofhuman society. One easily recalls the almost reverent attitude of AdamSmith towards this system of industrial liberty which he exalted into akind of natural theology: and the way in which Mill, a deist but not aChristian, was able to fit the whole apparatus of individual libertyinto its place in an ordered universe. The world "runs of itself, " saidthe economist. We have only to leave it alone. And the maxim of _laissezfaire_ became the last word of social wisdom. 

The argument of the classicists ran thus. If there is everywherecomplete economic freedom, then there will ensue in consequence a régimeof social justice. If every man is allowed to buy and sell goods, laborand property, just as suits his own interest, then the prices and wagesthat result are either in the exact measure of social justice or, atleast, are perpetually moving towards it. The price of any commodity atany moment is, it is true, a "market price, " the resultant of the demandand the supply; but behind this operates continually the inexorable lawof the cost of production. Sooner or later every price must representthe actual cost of producing the commodity concerned, or, at least, mustoscillate now above and now below that point which it is alwaysendeavoring to meet. For if temporary circumstances force the price wellabove the cost of producing the article in question, then the largeprofits to be made induce a greater and greater production. Theincreased volume of the supply thus produced inevitably forces down theprice till it sinks to the point of cost. If circumstances (such, forexample, as miscalculation and an over-great supply) depress the pricebelow the point of cost, then the discouragement of further productionpresently shortens the supply and brings the price up again. Price isthus like an oscillating pendulum seeking its point of rest, or like thewaves of the sea rising and falling about its level. By this samemechanism the quantity and direction of production, argued theeconomists, respond automatically to the needs of humanity, or, atleast, to the "effective demand, " which the classicist mistook for thesame thing. Just as much wheat or bricks or diamonds would be producedas the world called for; to produce too much of any one thing was toviolate a natural law; the falling price and the resulting temporaryloss sternly rebuked the producer. 

In the same way the technical form and mechanism of production werepresumed to respond to an automatic stimulus. Inventions and improvedprocesses met their own reward. Labor, so it was argued, was perpetuallybeing saved by the constant introduction of new uses of machinery. 

By a parity of reasoning, the shares received by all the participantsand claimants in the general process of production were seen to beregulated in accordance with natural law. Interest on capital wastreated merely as a particular case under the general theory of price. It was the purchase price needed to call forth the "saving" (a form, soto speak, of production) which brought the capital into the market. The"profits" of the employer represented the necessary price paid bysociety for his services, just enough and not more than enough to keephim and his fellows in operative activity, and always tending under thehappy operation of competition to fall to the minimum consistent withsocial progress. 

Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to the classicist a ratherpeculiar case. There was here a physical basis of surplus over cost. But, granted the operation of the factors and forces concerned, rentemerged as a differential payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. Itdid not in any way affect prices or wages, which were rendered neithergreater nor less thereby. The full implication of the rent doctrine andits relation to social justice remained obscured to the eye of theclassical economist; the fixed conviction that what a man owns is hisown created a mist through which the light could not pass. 

Wages, finally, were but a further case of value. There was a demand forlabor, represented by the capital waiting to remunerate it, and a supplyof labor represented by the existing and increasing working class. Hence wages, like all other shares and factors, corresponded, so it wasargued, to social justice. Whether wages were high or low, whether hourswere long or short, at least the laborer like everybody else "got whatwas coming to him. " All possibility of a general increase of wagesdepended on the relation of available capital to the numbers of theworking men. 

Thus the system as applied to society at large could be summed up in theconsoling doctrine that every man got what he was worth, and was worthwhat he got; that industry and energy brought their own reward; thatnational wealth and individual welfare were one and the same; that allthat was needed for social progress was hard work, more machinery, moresaving of labor and a prudent limitation of the numbers of thepopulation. 

The application of such a system to legislation and public policy wasobvious. It carried with it the principle of _laissez-faire_. Thedoctrine of international free trade, albeit the most conspicuous of itsapplications, was but one case under the general law. It taught thatthe mere organization of labor was powerless to raise wages; thatstrikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into thepocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wagesand prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a largeextent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle ofgerminating life against the environment that throttles part of it. Thepoor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets thesand of the desert. There could be no social remedy for poverty exceptthe almost impossible remedy of the limitation of life itself. Failingthis the economist could wash his hands of the poor. 

These are the days of relative judgments and the classical economy, likeall else, must be viewed in the light of time and circumstance. With allits fallacies, or rather its shortcomings, it served a magnificentpurpose. It opened a road never before trodden from social slaverytowards social freedom, from the mediæval autocratic régime of fixedcaste and hereditary status towards a régime of equal social justice. In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or ratherrepresented the final consciousness of a process that had been going onfor centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation ofthe serf. True, the goal has not been reached. The vision of theuniversal happiness seen by the economists has proved a mirage. The endof the road is not in sight. But it cannot be doubted that in the longpilgrimage of mankind towards social betterment the economists guided usin the right turning. If we turn again in a new direction, it will atany rate not be in the direction of a return to autocratic mediævalism. 

But when all is said in favor of its historic usefulness, the failuresand the fallacies of natural liberty have now become so manifest thatthe system is destined in the coming era to be revised from top tobottom. It is to these failures and fallacies that attention will bedrawn in the next chapter. 

_III. --The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty_

THE rewards and punishments of the economic world are singularlyunequal. One man earns as much in a week or even in a day as anotherdoes in a year. This man by hard, manual labor makes only enough to payfor humble shelter and plain food. This other by what seems a congenialactivity, fascinating as a game of chess, acquires uncounted millions. Athird stands idle in the market place asking in vain for work. A fourthlives upon rent, dozing in his chair, and neither toils nor spins. Afifth by the sheer hazard of a lucky "deal" acquires a fortune withoutwork at all. A sixth, scorning to work, earns nothing and gets nothing;in him survives a primitive dislike of labor not yet fully "evolutedout;" 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 andshivers when it is cold, migrating with the birds and reappearing withthe flowers of spring. 

Yet all are free. This is the distinguishing mark of them as children ofour era. They may work or stop. There is no compulsion from without. Noman 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 socialjustice?

This is the profound problem of the twentieth century. 

The economists and the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century werein no doubt about this question. It was their firm conviction that thesystem under which we live was, in its broad outline, a system of evenjustice. They held it true that every man under free competition andindividual liberty is awarded just what he is worth and is worthexactly what he gets: that the reason why a plain laborer is paid onlytwo or three dollars a day is because he only "produces" two or threedollars a day: and that why a skilled engineer is paid ten times as muchis because he "produces" ten times as much. His work is "worth" tentimes that of the plain laborer. By the same reasoning the salary of acorporation president who receives fifty thousand dollars a year merelyreflects the fact that the man produces--earns--brings in to thecorporation that amount or even more. The big salary corresponds to thebig efficiency. 

And there is much in the common experience of life and the commonconduct of business that seems to support this view. It is undoubtedlytrue if we look at any little portion of business activity taken as afragment by itself. On the most purely selfish grounds I may find thatit "pays" to hire an expert at a hundred dollars a day, and might findthat it spelled ruin to attempt to raise the wages of my workingmenbeyond four dollars a day. Everybody knows that in any particularbusiness at any particular place and time with prices at any particularpoint, there is a wage that can be paid and a wage that can not. Andeverybody, or nearly everybody, bases on these obvious facts a series ofentirely erroneous conclusions. Because we cannot change the part we areapt to think we cannot change the whole. Because one brick in the wallis immovable, we forget that the wall itself might be rebuilt. 

The single employer rightly knows that there is a wage higher than hecan pay and hours shorter than he can grant. But are the limits thatframe him in, real and necessary limits, resulting from the very natureof things, or are they mere products of particular circumstances? This, as a piece of pure economics, does not interest the individual employera particle. It belongs in the same category as the question of theimmortality of the soul and other profundities that have nothing to dowith business. But to society at large the question is of an infiniteimportance. 

Now the older economists taught, and the educated world for about acentury believed, that these limitations which hedged the particularemployer about were fixed and assigned by natural economic law. Theyrepresented, as has been explained, the operation of the system ofnatural liberty by which every man got what he is worth. And it is quitetrue that the particular employer can no more break away from theselimits than he can jump out of his own skin. He can only violate them atthe expense of ceasing to be an economic being at all and degeneratinginto a philanthropist. 

But consider for a moment the peculiar nature of the limitationsthemselves. 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 thesimilar 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 couldnot be sold at the present price. But why not sell the produce at ahigher price? Because at a higher price the consumer can't afford to buyit. But suppose that the consumer, for the things which he himselfmakes and sells, or for the work which he performs, receives more? Whatthen? The whole thing begins to have a jigsaw look, like a child's toyrack with wooden soldiers on it, expanding and contracting. One searchesin vain for the basis on which the relationship rests. And at the end ofthe 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 orthodoxeconomists. Every man, they said, gets what he actually makes, or, byexchange, those things which exactly correspond to it as regards thecost of making them--which have, to use the key-word of the theory, thesame value. Let us take a very simple example. If I go fishing with anet which I have myself constructed out of fibers and sticks, and if Icatch a fish and if I then roast the fish over a fire which I have madewithout so much as the intervention of a lucifer match, then it is Iand 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, orby buying worms as bait from some one who has dug them? Or what if I donot fish at all, but get my roast fish by paying for it a part of thewages I receive for working in a saw mill? Here are a new set ofrelationships. How much of the fish is "produced" by each of the peopleconcerned? And what part of my wages ought I to pay in return for thepart of the fish that I buy?

Here opens up, very evidently, a perfect labyrinth of complexity. But itwas 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 eachthing and everything is sold (or tends to be sold) under freecompetition for exactly its cost of production. There it was; as simpleas A. B. C. ; making the cost of everything proportional to the cost ofeverything else, and in itself natural and just; explaining andjustifying the variations of wages and salaries on what seems a sternbasis of fact. Here is your selling price as a starting point. Giventhat, you can see at once the reason for the wages paid and the fullmeasure of the payment. To pay more is impossible. To pay less is toinvite a competition that will force the payment of more. Or take, ifyou like, the wages as the starting point: there you areagain, --simplicity itself: the selling price will exactly and nicelycorrespond to cost. True, a part of the cost concerned will berepresented not by wages, but by cost of materials; but these, onanalysis, dissolve into past wages. Hence the whole process and itsexplanation revolves around this simple fundamental equation thatselling value equals the cost of production. 

This was the central part of the economic structure. It was the keystoneof the arch. If it holds, all holds. Knock it out and the whole edificefalls into fragments. 

A technical student of the schools would digress here, to the greatconfusion of the reader, into a discussion of the controversy in theeconomic cloister between the rival schools of economists as to whethercost governs value or value governs cost. The point needs no discussionhere, but just such fleeting passing mention as may indicate that thewriter is well and wearily conversant with it. 

The fundamental equation of the economist, then, is that the value ofeverything is proportionate to its cost. It requires no little hardihoodto 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 itmight as well lay one open to the charge of being an ornithologist. Iwill not, therefore, say that the proposition that the value ofeverything 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 astrue 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 thatwas not already said at the moment I defined two and defined four. Thenew statement that two and two make four adds nothing. So with themajestic equation of the cost of production. It means, as far as socialapplication goes, as far as any moral significance or bearing on socialreform and the social outlook goes, _absolutely nothing_. It is not initself fallacious; how could it be? But all the social inferences drawnfrom it are absolute, complete and malicious fallacies. 

Any socialist who says this, is quite right. Where he goes wrong is whenhe tries to build up as truth a set of inferences more fallacious andmore malicious still. 

But the central economic doctrine of cost can not be shaken by meredenunciation. Let us examine it and see what is the matter with it. Werestate the equation. 

_Under perfectly free competition the value or selling price ofeverything equals, or is perpetually tending to equal, the cost of itsproduction. _ This is the proposition itself, and the inferences derivedfrom it are that there is a "natural price" of everything, and that all"natural prices" are proportionate to cost and to one another; that allwages, apart from temporary fluctuations, are derived from, and limitedby, the natural prices paid for the things made: that all payments forthe use of capital (interest) are similarly derived and similarlylimited; and that consequently the whole economic arrangement, by givingto 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 sideof the equation is used as the measure of the other. In order to showwhat natural price is, we add up all the wages that have been paid, anddeclare that to be the cost and then say that the cost governs theprice. Then if we are asked why are wages what they are, we turn theargument backward and say that since the selling price is so and so thewages that can be paid out of it only amount to such and such. Thisexplains nothing. It is a mere argument in a circle. It is as if onetried to explain why one blade of a pair of scissors is four inches longby saying that it has to be the same length as the other. This is quitetrue 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 isworse than meaningless. 

This reasoning may seem to many persons mere casuistry, mere sophisticaljuggling with words. After all, they say, there is such a thing asrelative cost, relative difficulty of making things, a difference whichrests upon a physical basis. To make one thing requires a lot of laborand trouble and much skill: to make another thing requires very littlelabor 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 ina day: it takes him a fortnight to make a bark canoe. On that fact reststhe exchange value between the two. The relative quantity of laborembodied in each object is the basis of its value. 

This line of reasoning has a very convincing sound. It appears innearly every book on economic theory from Adam Smith and Ricardo tillto-day. "Labor alone, " wrote Smith, "never varying in its own value isabove the ultimate and real standard by which the value of allcommodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. "

But the idea that _quantity of labor governs_ value will not standexamination for a moment. What is _quantity_ of labor and how is itmeasured? As long as we draw our illustrations from primitive life whereone man's work is much the same as another's and where all operationsare simple, we seem easily able to measure and compare. One day is thesame as another and one man about as capable as his fellow. But in thecomplexity of modern industrial life such a calculation no longerapplies: the differences of skill, of native ingenuity, and technicalpreparation become enormous. The hour's work of a common laborer is notthe same thing as the hour's work of a watchmaker mending a watch, or ofan engineer directing the building of a bridge, or of an architectdrawing a plan. There is no way of reducing these hours to a commonbasis. We may think, if we like, that the quantity of labor _ought_ tobe the basis of value and exchange. Such is always the dream of thesocialist. 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 isand how it can be measured. We cannot measure it in terms of time. Wehave no calculus for comparing relative amounts of skill and energy. Wecan not measure it by the amount of its contribution to the product, forthat is the very matter that we want to discover. 

What the economist does is to slip out of the difficulty altogether bybegging the whole question. He deliberately measures the quantity oflabor _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 wagesand salaries paid we get something that seems to indicate the totalquantity of labor, measured not simply in time, but with an allowancefor skill and technical competency. By describing this allowance as acoefficient we can give our statement a false air of mathematicalcertainty and so muddle up the essential question that the truth is lostfrom 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. Theconjurer has slipped the phrase, "quantity of labor, " up his sleeve, andwhen it reappears it has turned into "the expense of hiring labor. " Thisis a quite different thing. But as both conceptions are related somehowto the idea of cost, the substitution is never discovered. 

On this false basis a vast structure is erected. All prices, providedthat competition is free, are made to appear as the necessary result ofnatural forces. They are "natural" or "normal" prices. All wages areexplained, and low wages are exonerated, on what seems to be anundeniable ground of fact. They are what they are. You may wish themotherwise, but they are not. As a philanthropist, you may feel sorrythat a humble laborer should work through a long day to receive twodollars, but as an economist you console yourself with the reflectionthat that is all he produces. You may at times, as a sentimentalist, wonder whether the vast sums drawn as interest on capital are consistentwith social fairness; but if it is shown that interest is simply the"natural price" of capital representing the actual "productive power" ofthe capital, there is nothing further to say. You may have similarqualms over rent and the rightness and wrongness of it. The enormous"unearned increment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of land whotoils not neither spins to obtain it, may seem difficult ofjustification. But after all, land is only one particular case ofownership under the one and the same system. The rent for which theowner can lease it, emerges simply as a consequence of the existingstate of wages and prices. High rent, says the economist, does not makebig prices: it merely follows as a consequence or result of them. Dearbread is not caused by the high rents paid by tenant farmers for theland: the train of cause and effect runs in the contrary direction. Andthe selling price of land is merely a consequence of its rental value, asimple case of capitalization of annual return into a present sum. Cityland, though it looks different from farm land, is seen in the light ofthis same analysis, to earn its rent in just the same way. The high rentof a Broadway store, says the economist, does not add a single cent tothe price of the things sold in it. It is because prices are what theyare that the rent is and can be paid. Hence on examination the samecanon of social justice that covers and explains prices, wages, andinterest 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 aRockefeller. For it does seem passing strange that one human beingshould control as property the mass of coin, goods, houses, factories, land and mines, represented by a billion dollars; stranger still that athis death he should write upon a piece of paper his commands as to whathis surviving fellow creatures are to do with it. But if it can beshown to be true that Mr. Rockefeller "made" his fortune in the samesense that a man makes a log house by felling trees and putting them oneupon another, then the fortune belongs to Mr. Rockefeller in the sameway as the log house belongs to the pioneer. And if the socialinferences that are drawn from the theory of natural liberty and naturalvalue are correct, the millionaire and the landlord, the plutocrat andthe pioneer, the wage earner and the capitalist, have each all the rightto do what he will with his own. For every man in this just world getswhat is coming to him. He gets what he is worth, and he is worth what hegets. 

But if one knocks out the keystone of the arch in the form of aproposition that natural value conforms to the cost of production, thenthe whole edifice collapses and must be set up again, upon another planand on another foundation, stone by stone. 

_IV. --Work and Wages_

WAGES and prices, then, if the argument recited in the preceding chapterof this series holds good, do not under free competition tend towardssocial justice. It is not true that every man gets what he produces. Itis not true that enormous salaries represent enormous productiveservices and that humble wages correspond to a humble contribution tothe welfare of society. Prices, wages, salaries, interest, rent andprofits do not, if left to themselves, follow the simple law of naturaljustice. To think so is an idle dream, the dream of the quietist who mayslumber 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 ofthe socialist, now threatening to walk abroad in his sleep, but both intheir degree are dreams and nothing more. 

The real truth is that prices and wages and all the various paymentsfrom hand to hand in industrial society, are the outcome of a complex ofcompeting forces that are not based upon justice but upon "economicstrength. " To elucidate this it is necessary to plunge into the jungleof pure economic theory. The way is arduous. There are no flowers uponthe path. And out of this thicket, alas, no two people ever emerge handin hand in concord. Yet it is a path that must be traversed. Let ustake, then, as a beginning the very simplest case of the making of aprice. It is the one which is sometimes called in books on economics thecase of an unique monopoly. Suppose that I offer for sale the manuscriptof the Pickwick Papers, or Shakespere's skull, or, for the matter ofthat, the skull of John Smith, what is the sum that I shall receive forit? It is the utmost that any one is willing to give for it. That is allone can say about it. There is no question here of cost or what I paidfor the article or of anything else except the amount of thewillingness to pay on the part of the highest bidder. It would bepossible, indeed, for a bidder to take the article from me by force. Butthis we presume to be prevented by the law, and for this reason wereferred above not to the physical strength, but to the "economicstrength" of the parties to a bargain. By this is meant the relationthat arises out of the condition of the supply and the demand, thewillingness or eagerness, or the sheer necessity, of the buyers and thesellers. People may offer much because the thing to be acquired is anabsolute necessity without which they perish; a drowning man would sellall that he had for a life belt. Or they may offer much through thesheer abundance of their other possessions. A millionaire might offermore for a life belt as a souvenir than a drowning man could pay for itto save his life. 

Yet out of any particular conjunction between desires on the one handand goods or services on the other arises a particular equation ofdemand and supply, represented by a particular price. All of this, ofcourse, 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 onesingle person owned all the food supply of a community isolated from theoutside world. The price which he could exact would be the full measureof all the possessions of his neighbors up to the point at least wherethey would commit suicide rather than pay. True, in such a case as this, "economic strength" would probably be broken down by the intrusion ofphysical violence. But in so far as it held good the price of food wouldbe based upon it. 

Prices such as are indicated here were dismissed by the earliereconomist as mere economic curiosities. John Stuart Mill has somethingto 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 ofproducing it, but might be vastly more or perhaps decidedly less. ButMill might have said the same thing about the price of a music box, provided it was properly patented, anywhere at all. For the music boxand Shakespere's skull and the corner in wheat are all merely differentkinds of examples of the things called a monopoly sale. 

Now let us change the example a little further. Suppose that themonopolist has for sale not simply a fixed and definite quantity of acertain article, but something which he can produce in larger quantitiesas desired. At what price will he now sell? If he offers the article ata very high price only a few people will take it: if he lowers the pricethere will be more and more purchasers. His interest seems divided. Hewill want to put the price as high as possible so that the profit oneach single article (over what it costs him to produce it) will be asgreat as possible. But he will also want to make as many sales as hepossibly can, which will induce him to set the price low enough to bringin new buyers. But, of course, if he puts the price so low that it onlycovers the cost of making the goods his profit is all gone and the meremultiplicity of sales is no good to him. He must try therefore to finda point of maximum profit where, having in view both the number of salesand 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 notedthat under modern conditions of production the cost of manufacture perarticle decreases to a great extent in proportion as a larger and largernumber is produced and thus the widening of the sale lowers theproportionate cost. In any particular case, therefore, it may turn outthat the price that suits the monopolist's own interest is quite a lowprice, one such as to allow for an enormous quantity of sales and a verylow cost of manufacture. This, we say, _may_ be the case. But it is notso of necessity. In and of itself the monopoly price corresponds to themonopolist's profit and not to cheapness of sale. The price _may_ be setfar above the cost. 

And now notice the peculiar relation that is set up between themonopolist's production and the satisfaction of human wants. Inproportion as the quantity produced is increased the lower must theprice be set in order to sell the whole output. If the monopolistinsisted on turning out more and more of his goods, the price thatpeople would give would fall until it barely covered the cost, then tillit was less than cost, then to a mere fraction of the cost and finallyto nothing at all. In other words, if one produces a large enoughquantity of anything it becomes worthless. It loses all its value justas soon as there is enough of it to satisfy, and over-satisfy the wantsof humanity. Thus if the world produces three and a half billion bushelsof wheat it can be sold, let us say, at two dollars a bushel; but if itproduced twice as much it might well be found that it would only sellfor fifty cents a bushel. The value of the bigger supply as a totalwould actually be less than that of the smaller. And if the supply werebig enough it would be worth, in the economic sense, just nothing atall. This peculiarity is spoken of in economic theory as the paradox ofvalue. It is referred to in the older books either as an economiccuriosity or as a mere illustration in extreme terms of the relation ofsupply to price. Thus in many books the story is related of how the EastIndia Companies used at times deliberately to destroy a large quantityof tea in order that by selling a lesser amount they might reap a largerprofit than by selling a greater. 

But in reality this paradox of value is the most fundamental propositionin economic science. Precisely here is found the key to the operation ofthe economic society in which we live. The world's production is aimedat producing "values, " not in producing plenty. If by some mad access ofmisdirected industry we produced enough and too much of everything, ourwhole machinery of buying and selling would break down. This indeed doeshappen constantly on a small scale in the familiar phenomenon ofover-production. But in the organization in which we liveover-production tends to check itself at once. If the world's machinerythreatens to produce a too great plenty of any particular thing, then itturns itself towards producing something else of which there is not yetenough. This is done quite unconsciously without any philanthropicintent on the part of the individual producer and without any generaldirection 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 firsthearing most admirable. But let it be noted that the "_enough_" here inquestion does not mean enough to satisfy human wants. In fact it meansprecisely the converse. It means enough _not_ to satisfy them, and toleave 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 allthings were produced under a monopoly. The objection might at once beraised that with competitive producers the price will also keep fallingdown towards cost and will not be based upon the point of maximumprofit. We shall turn to this objection in a moment. But one or twoother points must be considered before doing so. 

In the first place in following out such an argument as the present inregard to the peculiar shortcomings of the system under which we live, it is necessary again and again to warn the reader against a hastyconclusion to the possibilities of altering and amending it. Thesocialist 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 sohe begs the whole question at issue. The point is, _can_ we make abetter one or must we be content with patching up the old one? Take anillustration. Scientists tell us that from the point of view of opticsthe human eye is a clumsy instrument poorly contrived for its work. Acertain great authority once said that if he had made it he would havebeen ashamed of it. This may be true. But the eye unfortunately is allwe have to see by. If we destroy our eyes in the hope of making betterones we may go blind. The best that we can do is to improve our sight byadding 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 mayapply to it with advantage the spectacles of social reform, but what thesocialist offers us is total blindness. But of this presently. 

To return to the argument. Let us consider next what wages themonopolist in the cases described above will have to pay. We take forgranted that he will only pay as much as he has to. How much will thisbe? Clearly enough it will depend altogether on the number of availableworking men capable of doing the work in question and the situation inwhich they find themselves. It is again a case of relative "economicstrength. " The situation may be altogether in favor of the employer oraltogether in favor of the men, or may occupy a middle ground. If themen are so numerous that there are more of them than are needed for thework, and if there is no other occupation for them they must accept astarvation wage. If they are so few in number that they can _all_ beemployed, and if they are so well organized as to act together, they canin their turn exact any wage up to the point that leaves no profit forthe employer himself at all. Indeed for a short time wages might evenpass this point, the monopolist employer being willing (for variousreasons, all quite obvious) actually to pay more as wages than he getsas return and to carry on business at a loss for the sake of carrying iton at all. Clearly, then, wages, as Adam Smith said, "are the result ofa dispute" in which either party must be pushed to the wall. Theemployer may have to pay so much that there is nothing or practicallynothing left for himself, or so little that his workmen can just existand no more. These are the upward and downward limits of the wages inthe cases described. 

It is therefore obvious that if all the industries in the world werecarried on as a series of separate monopolies, there would be exactlythe kind of rivalry or competition of forces represented by the consumerinsisting on paying as little as possible, the producer charging themost profitable price and paying the lowest wage that he could, and thewage earner demanding the highest wage that he could get. Theequilibrium would be an unstable one. It would be constantly displacedand shifted by the movement of all sorts of social forces--by changes offashion, by abundance or scarcity of crops, by alterations in thetechnique of industry and by the cohesion or the slackening of theorganization of any group of workers. But the balanced forces oncedisplaced would be seen constantly to come to an equilibrium at a newpoint. 

All this has been said of industry under monopoly. But it will be seento apply in its essentials to what we call competitive industry. Hereindeed certain new features come in. Not one employer but many produceeach kind of article. And, as far as each employer can see by looking athis own horizon, what he does is merely to produce as much as he cansell at a price that pays him. Since all the other employers are doingthis, there will be, under competition, a constant tendency to cut theprices down to the lowest that is consistent with what the employer hasto pay as wages and interest. This point, which was called by theorthodox economists the "cost, " is not in any true and fundamental senseof the words the "cost" at all. It is merely a limit represented by whatthe other parties to the bargain are able to exact. The whole situationis in a condition of unstable equilibrium in which the conflictingforces represented by the interests of the various parties pull indifferent directions. The employers in any one line of industry and alltheir wage earners and salaried assistants have one and the sameinterest as against the consumer. They want the selling price to be ashigh 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 theemployers are against the wage earners in wanting to pay as low wages aspossible. If all the employers unite, the situation turns to a monopoly, and the price paid by the consumer is settled on the monopoly basisalready described. The employers can then dispute it out with theirworking men as to how much wages shall be. If the employers are notunited, then at each and every moment they are in conflict both withthe consumer and with their wage earners. Thus the whole scene ofindustry represents a vast and unending conflict, a fermentation inwhich the moving bubbles crowd for space, expanding and breaking oneagainst 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 ofpersons--worker or master, landlord or capitalist--is able to exactowing 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 ofskill or of any other measure physical or psychological of the effortinvolved. And there is nothing whatever in it which proportions to itsocial justice. It is the war of each against all. Its only mitigationis that it is carried on under the set of rules represented by the stateand the law. 

The tendencies involved may be best illustrated by taking one or twoextreme or exaggerated examples, not meant as facts but only to makeclear the nature of social and industrial forces among which we live. 

What, for example, will be the absolute maximum to which wages ingeneral could be forced? Conceivably and in the purest and thinnest oftheory, they could include the whole product of the labor of societywith just such a small fraction left over for the employers, the ownersof capital and the owners of land to induce them to continue acting aspart of the machine. That is to say, if all the laborers all over theworld, to the last one, were united under a single control they couldforce the other economic classes of society to something approaching astarvation living. In practice this is nonsense. In theory it is anexcellent 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 theylike; but of course with the proviso that the shorter the hours the lessthe total of things produced to be divided. It is true that up to acertain point shortening the hours of labor actually increases thetotal product. A ten-hour day, speaking in general terms and leaving outindividual exceptions, is probably more productive than a day of twelve. It may very well be that an eight-hour day will prove, presently if notimmediately, to be more productive than one of ten. But somewhere thelimit is reached and gross production falls. The supply of things ingeneral gets shorter. But note that this itself would not matter much, if somehow and in some way not yet found, the shortening of theproduction of goods cut out the luxuries and superfluities first. Mankind at large might well trade leisure for luxuries. The shorteningof hours with the corresponding changes in the direction of productionis really the central problem in social reform. I propose to return toit in the concluding chapter of these papers, but for the present it isonly noted in connection with the general scheme of industrialrelations. 

Now let us ask to what extent any particular section or part ofindustrial society can succeed in forcing up wages or prices as againstthe others. In pure theory they may do this almost to any extent, provided that the thing concerned is a necessity and is without asubstitute and provided that their organization is complete andunbreakable. If all the people concerned in producing coal, masters andmen, owners of mines and operators of machinery, could stand out fortheir price, there is no limit, short of putting all the rest of theworld on starvation rations, to what they might get. In practice and inreality a thousand things intervene--the impossibility of such completeunity, the organization of the other parties, the existing of nationaldivisions among industrial society, sentiment, decency, fear. Theproposition is only "pure theory. " But its use as such is to dispose ofany such idea as that there is a natural price of coal or of anythingelse. 

The above is true of any article of necessity. It is true though in aless degree of things of luxury. If all the makers of instruments ofmusic, masters and men, capitalists and workers, were banded together ina tight and unbreakable union, then the other economic classes musteither face the horrors of a world without pianolas and trombones, orhand over the price demanded. And what is true of coal and music is trueall through the whole mechanism of industry. 

Or take the supreme case of the owners of land. If all of them actedtogether, with their legal rights added into one, they could order therest of the world either to get off it or to work at starvation wages. 

Industrial society is therefore mobile, elastic, standing at any momentin a temporary and unstable equilibrium. But at any particular momentthe possibility of a huge and catastrophic shift such as those describedis out of the question except at the price of a general collapse. Even aminor dislocation breaks down a certain part of the machinery ofsociety. Particular groups of workers are thrown out of place. There isno other place where they can fit in, or at any rate not immediately. The machine labors heavily. Ominous mutterings are heard. The legalframework of the State and of obedience to the law in which industrialsociety is set threatens to break asunder. The attempt at social changethreatens a social revolution in which the whole elaborate mechanismwould burst into fragments. 

In any social movement, then, change and alteration in a new directionmust be balanced against the demands of social stability. Some thingsare possible and some are not; some are impossible to-day, and possibleor easy to-morrow. Others are forever out of the question. 

But this much at least ought to appear clear if the line of argumentindicated above is accepted, namely, that there is no great hope foruniversal betterment of society by the mere advance of technicalindustrial progress and by the unaided play of the motive of every manfor himself. 

The enormous increase in the productivity of industrial effort wouldnever 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 hoursthat went with it was due neither to the advance in mechanical powernor to the advance in diligence and industriousness, nor to the advance, if there was any, in general kindliness. It was due to the organizationof labor. Mechanical progress makes higher wages possible. It does not, of itself, advance them by a single farthing. Labor saving machinerydoes not of itself save the working world a single hour of toil: it onlyshifts it from one task to another. 

Against a system of unrestrained individualism, energy, industriousnessand honesty might shatter itself in vain. The thing is merely a race inwhich only one can be first no matter how great the speed of all; astruggle in which one, and not all, can stand upon the shoulders of theothers. It is the restriction of individualism by the force oforganization and by legislation that has brought to the world whateversocial 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 nolonger live in an age when down-trodden laborers meet by candlelightwith the ban of the law upon their meeting. These are the days when"labor" is triumphant, and when it ever threatens in the overweeningstrength of its own power to break industrial society in pieces in thefierce attempt to do in a day what can only be done in a generation. Buttruth is truth. And any one who writes of the history of the progress ofindustrial society owes it to the truth to acknowledge the vast socialachievement of organized labor in the past. 

And what of the future?

By what means and in what stages can social progress be furtheraccelerated? This I propose to treat in the succeeding chapters, dealingfirst with the proposals of the socialists and the revolutionaries, andfinally with the prospect for a sane, orderly and continuous socialreform. 

_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 theworld we live in, from the spectacle of its wasted energy, its wildfrenzy of work and its bitter inequality, to the land of dreams, to thepictured vision of the world as it might be?

Such a vision has haunted in all ages the brooding mind of mankind; andevery age has fashioned for itself the image of a "somewhere" or"nowhere"--a Utopia in which there should be equality and justice forall. The vision itself is an outcome of that divine discontent whichraises man above his environment. 

Every age has had its socialism, its communism, its dream of bread andwork for all. But the dream has varied always in the likeness of thethought of the time. In earlier days the dream was not one of socialwealth. It was rather a vision of the abnegation of riches, of humblepossessions shared in common after the manner of the unrealized ideal ofthe Christian faith. It remained for the age of machinery and power tobring forth another and a vastly more potent socialism. This was nolonger a plan whereby all might be poor together, but a proposal thatall should be rich together. The collectivist state advocated by thesocialist of to-day has scarcely anything in common with the communismof 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 andpoverty presented by the modern era, from the strange paradox that hasbeen described above between human power and its failure to satisfyhuman want. The nineteenth century brought with it the factory and thefactory slavery of the Lancashire children, the modern city and cityslum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strangediscrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the materialprogress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalismconcealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the newindustrial poverty that lay in the shadow behind it. 

The years that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 were inmany senses years of unexampled misery. The accumulated burden of thewar lay heavy upon Europe. The rise of the new machine power haddislocated the older system. A multitude of landless men clamored forbread and work. Pauperism spread like a plague. Each new invention threwthousands of hand-workers out of employment. The law still branded asconspiracy any united attempt of workingmen to raise wages or to shortenthe hours of work. At the very moment when the coming of steam power andthe use of modern machinery were piling up industrial fortunes undreamedof before, destitution, pauperism and unemployment seemed morewidespread and more ominous than ever. In this rank atmospheregerminated modern socialism. The writings of Marx and Engels and LouisBlanc were inspired by what they saw about them. 

From its very cradle socialism showed the double aspect which hasdistinguished it ever since. To the minds of some it was the faith ofthe insurrectionist, something to be achieved by force; "bourgeois"society must be overthrown by force of arms; if open and fair fightingwas not possible against such great odds, it must be blown skyhigh withgunpowder. Dynamite, by the good fortune of invention, came to therevolutionary at the very moment when it was most wanted. To the men ofviolence, socialism was the twin brother of anarchism, born at the sametime, 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, acreed of peace. It advocated the betterment of society not by violencebut by persuasion, by peaceful argument and the recognized rule of themajority. It is true that the earlier socialists almost to a manincluded, in the first passion of their denunciation, things notnecessarily within the compass of purely economic reform. As children ofmisery they cried out against all human institutions. The bond ofmarriage seemed an accursed thing, the mere slavery of women. Thefamily--the one institution in which the better side of human natureshines with an undimmed light--was to them but an engine of classoppression; the Christian churches merely the parasitic servants of thetyrannous power of a plutocratic state. The whole history of humancivilization was denounced as an unredeemed record of the spoliation ofthe weak by the strong. Even the domain of the philosopher wasneedlessly invaded and all forms of speculative belief were rudelythrown aside in favor of a wooden materialism as dogmatic as any of thecreeds 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 wasa thing to be stamped out, to be torn up by the roots. The very soil inwhich it grew must be burned out with the flame of avenging justice. 

Such it still appears to many people to-day. The unspeakable savagery ofbolshevism has made good the wildest threats of the partisans ofviolence and fulfilled the sternest warnings of the conservative. To-daymore than ever socialism is in danger of becoming a prescribed creed, its very name under the ban of the law, its literature burned by thehangman and a gag placed upon its mouth. 

But this is neither right nor wise. Socialism, like every otherimpassioned human effort, will flourish best under martyrdom. It willlanguish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion. 

For it must always be remembered in fairness that the creed of violencehas no necessary connection with socialism. In its essential naturesocialism is nothing but a proposal for certain kinds of economicreform. A man has just as much right to declare himself a socialist ashe has to call himself a Seventh Day Adventist or a Prohibitionist, or aPerpetual Motionist. It is, or should be, open to him to convert othersto his way of thinking. It is only time to restrain him when he proposesto convert others by means of a shotgun or by dynamite, and by forcibleinterference with their own rights. When he does this he ceases to be asocialist pure and simple and becomes a criminal as well. The law candeal with him as such. 

But with socialism itself the law, in a free country, should have nokind of quarrel. For in the whole program of peaceful socialism there isnothing wrong at all except one thing. Apart from this it is a high andennobling ideal truly fitted for a community of saints. And the onething 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, dependentupon some unknown and uninvented motive power, refuse to turn. Theunknown motive force in this case means a power of altruism, ofunselfishness, of willingness to labor for the good of others, such asthe human race has never known, nor is ever likely to know. But theworst public policy to pursue in reference to such a machine is to lockit up, to prohibit all examination of it and to allow it to become ahidden mystery, the whispered hope of its martyred advocates. Better farto 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 forall 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 socialismand the stages whereby it changed from the creed of a few theorists andrevolutionists to being the accepted platform of great politicalparties, counting its adherents by the million. All of this belongselsewhere. It suffices here to note that in the process of its rise ithas chafed away much of the superfluous growth that clung to it and hasbecome a purely economic doctrine. There is no longer any need todiscuss in connection with it the justification of marriage and thefamily, and the rightness or wrongness of Christianity: no need todecide whether the materialistic theory of history is true or false, since nine socialists out of ten to-day have forgotten, or have neverheard, what the materialistic theory of history is: no need to examinewhether human history is, or is not, a mere record of classexploitation, since the controversy has long shifted to other grounds. The essential thing to-day is not the past, but the future. The questionis, what does the socialist have to say about the conditions under whichwe live and the means that he advocates for the betterment of them?

His case stands thus. He begins his discussion with an indictment of themanifold weaknesses and the obvious injustices of the system under whichwe live. And in this the socialist is very largely right. He shows thatunder free individual competition there is a perpetual waste of energy. Competing rivals cover the same field. Even the simplest services areperformed with an almost ludicrous waste of energy. In every moderncity the milk supply is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip fromdoor to door and from street to street, covering the same ground, eachleaving his cans of milk here and there in a sporadic fashion ashaphazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, says the socialist, thewasted labors of the milkman with the orderly and systematic performanceof the postman, himself a little fragment of socialism. And the milkman, they tell us, is typical of modern industrial society. Competingrailways run trains on parallel tracks, with empty cars that might befilled and with vast executive organizations which do ten times over thework that might be done by one. Competing stores needlessly occupy thetime of hundreds of thousands of employees in a mixture of idleness andindustry. An inconceivable quantity of human effort is spent onadvertising, mere shouting and display, as unproductive in the socialsense as the beating of a drum. Competition breaks into a dozeninefficient 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 nothingbut waste and selfishness and inefficiency. He looks so long that a mistcomes before his eyes. He loses sight of the supreme fact that afterall, in its own poor, clumsy fashion, the machine does work. He losessight of the possibility of our falling into social chaos. He sees nolonger the brink of the abyss beside which the path of progress picksits 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 lookabout us at a peaceful landscape where men and women brightly clothedand abundantly fed and warmed, sing at their easy task. There is enoughfor all and more than enough. Poverty has vanished. Want is unknown. Thechildren play among the flowers. The youths and maidens are at school. There are no figures here bent with premature toil, no faces dulled andfurrowed with a life of hardship. The light of education and culture hasshone 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 ofpleasure and of recreation. Youth in such a Utopia is a very springtimeof hope: adult life a busy and cheery activity: and age itself, watchingfrom its shady bench beneath a spreading tree the labors of itschildren, is but a gentle retrospect from which material care has passedaway. 

It is a picture beautiful as the opalescent colors of a soap bubble. Itis the vision of a garden of Eden from which the demon has beenbanished. And the Demon in question is the Private Ownership of theMeans of Production. His name is less romantic than those of the wonteddemons of legend and folklore. But it is at least suitable for thematter-of-fact age of machinery which he is supposed to haunt and onwhich he casts his evil spell. Let him be once exorcised and the ills ofhumanity are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of the simplest. Let this demon once feel the contact of state ownership of the means ofproduction and his baneful influence will vanish into thin air as hismediæval predecessors did at the touch of a thimbleful of holy water. 

This, then, is the socialist's program. Let "the state" take over allthe means of production--all the farms, the mines, the factories, theworkshops, the ships, the railroads. Let it direct the workers towardstheir task in accordance with the needs of society. Let each labor forall in the measure of his strength and talent. Let each receive from allin the measure of his proper needs. No work is to be wasted: nothing isto be done twice that need only be done once. All must work and nonemust be idle: but the amount of work needed under these conditions willbe so small, the hours so short, and the effort so slight, that workitself will no longer be the grinding monotonous toil that we knowto-day, but a congenial activity pleasant in itself. 

A thousand times this picture has been presented. The visionary withuplifted eyes, his gaze bent on the bright colors of the floatingbubble, has voiced it from a thousand platforms. The earnest youthgrinding at the academic mill has dreamed it in the pauses of hisstudious labor. The impassioned pedant has written it in heavy prosesmothering its brightness in the dull web of his own thought. Thebrilliant imaginative mind has woven it into romance, making its colorsbrighter still with the sunlight of inspired phantasy. 

But never, I think, has the picture of socialism at work been so ablyand so dexterously presented as in a book that begins to be forgottennow, but which some thirty years ago took the continent by storm. Thiswas the volume in which Mr. Edward Bellamy "looked backward" from hissupposed point of vantage in the year 2000 A. D. And saw us as we areand as we shall be. No two plans of a socialist state are ever quitealike. But the scheme of society outlined in "Looking Backward" may beexamined as the most attractive and the most consistent outline of asocialist state that has, within the knowledge of the present writer, ever been put forward. It is worth while, in the succeeding chapter toexamine it in detail. No better starting point for the criticism ofcollectivist theories can be found than in a view of the basis on whichis supposed to rest the halcyon life of Mr. Bellamy's charmingcommonwealth. 

_VI. --How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward_

THE reading public is as wayward and as fickle as a bee among theflowers. It will not long pause anywhere, and it easily leaves eachblossom for a better. But like the bee, while impelled by an instinctthat makes it search for sugar, it sucks in therewith its solidsustenance. 

I am not quite certain that the bee does exactly do this; but it is justthe kind of thing that the bee is likely to do. And in any case it isprecisely the thing which the reading public does. It will not readunless 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 neverwill run smooth. For information the reader cares nothing. If he absorbsit, it must be by accident, and unawares. He passes over the heavy tomesfilled with valuable fact, and settles like the random bee upon thebright 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 mustbe disguised as a love story in which a young clergyman, sworn into holyorders, falls in love with an actress. The facts of history are impartedby a love story centering around the adventures of a hitherto unknownson of Louis the Fourteenth. And a discussion of the relations of laborand capital takes the form of a romance in which the daughter of amulti-millionaire steps voluntarily out of her Fifth Avenue home to workin a steam laundry. 

Such is the recognized method by which the great unthinking public istaught 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 taughtto the world for ever in the pages of "Bleak House. "

So it has been with socialism. No single influence ever brought itsideas and its propaganda so forcibly and clearly before the public mindas Mr. Edward Bellamy's brilliant novel, "Looking Backward, " publishedsome thirty years ago. The task was arduous. Social and economic theoryis heavy to the verge of being indigestible. There is no such thing as agay book on political economy for reading in a hammock. Yet Mr. Bellamysucceeded. His book is in cold reality nothing but a series ofconversations explaining how a socialist commonwealth is supposed towork. Yet he contrives to bring into it a hero and a heroine, andsomehow the warm beating of their hearts and the stolen glances in theireyes breathe into the dry dust of economic argument the breath of life. Nor was ever a better presentation made of the essential program ofsocialism. 

It is worth while then, as was said in the preceding chapter, toconsider Mr. Bellamy's commonwealth as the most typical and the mostcarefully constructed of all the ready-made socialisms that have beenput forward. 

The mere machinery of the story can be lightly passed over. It isintended simply as the sugar that lures the random bee. The hero, livingin Boston in 1887, is supposed to fall asleep in a deep, undergroundchamber which he has made for himself as a remedy against a harassinginsomnia. Unknown to the sleeper the house above his retreat is burneddown. He remains in a trance for a hundred and thirteen years and awakesto find himself in the Boston of the year 2000 A. D. Kind hands removehim from his sepulcher. He is revived. He finds himself under the careof a certain learned and genial Dr. Leete, whose house stands on thevery site where once the sleeper lived. The beautiful daughter of Dr. Leete looks upon the newcomer from the lost world with eyes in which, tothe mind of the sagacious reader, love is seen at once to dawn. Inreality she is the great-granddaughter of the fiancée whom the sleeperwas to have married in his former life; thus a faint suggestion of thetransmigration of souls illuminates their intercourse. Beyond that thereis 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, inhorror, with the ideal world of 2000 A. D. 

And what was this world? The sleeper's first vision of it was given himby Dr. Leete, who took him to the house top and let him see the Bostonof the future. Wide avenues replace the crowded, noisy streets. Thereare no shops but only here and there among the trees great marblebuildings, the emporiums from which the goods are delivered to thepurple public. 

And the goods are delivered indeed! Dr. Leete explains it all withintervals of grateful cigar smoking and of music and promenades with thebeautiful Edith, and meals in wonderful communistic restaurants withromantic waiters, who feel themselves, _mirabile dictu_, quiteindependent. 

And this is how the commonwealth operates. Everybody works or at leastworks until the age of forty, so that it may be truly said in thesehalcyon days everybody works but father. But the work of life does notbegin till education ends at the age of twenty-one. After that all theyoung men and women pass for three years into the general "IndustrialArmy, " much as the young men used to pass into the ranks ofconscription. Afterwards each person may select any trade that he likes. But the hours are made longer or shorter according to whether too manyor too few young people apply to come in. A gardener works for morehours than a scavenger. Yet all occupations are equally honorable. Thewages 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 suchand such a quantity at any of the emporiums. The cards are punched outas the goods are used. The goods are all valued according to the amountof time used in their making and each citizen draws out the same totalamount. But he may take it out in installments just as he likes, drawingmany things one month and few the next. He may even get goods in advanceif he has any special need. He may, within a certain time limit, save uphis cards, but it must be remembered that the one thing which no cardcan buy and which no citizens can own is the "means of production. "These belong collectively to all. Land, mines, machinery, factories andthe whole mechanism of transport, these things are public propertymanaged by the State. Its workers in their use of them are all directedby public authority as to what they shall make and when they shall makeit, and how much shall be made. On these terms all share alike; thecripple receives as much as the giant; the worker of exceptionaldexterity and energy the same as his slower and less gifted fellow. 

All the management, the control--and let this be noted, for there is noescape from it either by Mr. Bellamy or by anybody else--is exercised byboards of officials elected by the people. All the complex organizationby which production goes on by which the workers are supervised andshifted from trade to trade, by which their requests for a change ofwork or an extension of credit are heard and judged--all of this is doneby 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 ofanybody who constructs a socialist commonwealth. 

Mr. Bellamy has many ingenious arrangements to meet the needs of peoplewho want to be singers or actors or writers, --in other words, who do notwant to work. They may sing or act as much as they like, provided thatenough other people will hand over enough of their food cards to keepthem going. But if no one wants to hear them sing or see them act theymay starve, --just as they do now. Here the author harks backunconsciously to his nineteenth century individualism; he need not havedone so; other socialist writers would have it that one of theeverlasting boards would "sit on" every aspiring actor or author beforehe was allowed to begin. But we may take it either way. It is not themajor point. There is no need to discuss the question of how to dealwith the artist under socialism. If the rest of it were all right, noone need worry about the artist. Perhaps he would do better withoutbeing remunerated at all. It is doubtful whether the huge commercialpremium 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 thecommonwealth. Can such a thing, or anything conceived in its likeness, possibly work? The answer is, and must be, absolutely and emphaticallyno. 

Let anyone conversant with modern democracy as it is, --not as itsfounders dreamed of it, --picture to himself the operation of a systemwhereby anything and everything is controlled by elected officials, fromwhom there is no escape, outside of whom is no livelihood and to whomall men must bow! Democracy, let us grant it, is the best system ofgovernment as yet operative in this world of sin. Beside autocratickingship it shines with a white light; it is obviously the portal of thefuture. But we know it now too well to idealize its merits. 

A century and a half ago when the world was painfully struggling out ofthe tyranny of autocratic kingship, when English liberalism was in itscradle, when Thomas Jefferson was composing the immortal phrases of theDeclaration of Independence and unknown patriots dreamed of freedom inFrance, --at such an epoch it was but natural that the principle ofpopular election should be idealized as the sovereign remedy for thepolitical evils of mankind. It was natural and salutary that it shouldbe so. The force of such idealization helped to carry forward the humanrace to a new milestone on the path of progress. 

But when it is proposed to entrust to the method of elective control nota part but the whole of the fortunes of humanity, to commit to it notmerely the form of government and the necessary maintenance of law, order and public safety, but the whole operation of the production anddistribution of the world's goods, the case is altered. The time is ripethen for retrospect over the experience of the nineteenth century andfor a realization of what has proved in that experience the peculiardefects of elective democracy. 

Mr. Bellamy pictures his elected managers, --as every socialist has todo, --as a sagacious and paternal group, free from the interest of selfand the play of the baser passions and animated only by the thought ofthe public good. Gravely they deliberate; wisely and justly they decide. Their gray heads--for Bellamy prefers them old--are bowed in quietconfabulation over the nice adjustment of the national production, overthe petition of this or that citizen. The public care sits heavily ontheir breast. Their own peculiar fortune they have lightly passed by. They do not favor their relations or their friends. They do not counttheir hours of toil. They do not enumerate their gain. They work, inshort, as work the angels. 

Now let me ask in the name of sanity where are such officials to befound? Here and there, perhaps, one sees in the world of to-day in thestern virtue of an honorable public servant some approximation to such acivic ideal. But how much, too, has been seen of the rule of "cliques"and "interests" and "bosses;" of the election of genial incompetentspopular as spendthrifts; of crooked partisans warm to their friends andbitter to their enemies; of administration by a party for a party; andof the insidious poison of commercial greed defiling the wells of publichonesty. The unending conflict between business and politics, betweenthe private gain and the public good, has been for two generations thedespair of modern democracy. It turns this way and that in its vaineffort to escape corruption. It puts its faith now in representativelegislatures, and now in appointed boards and commissions; it appeals tothe vote of the whole people or it places an almost autocratic power anda supreme responsibility in the hands of a single man. And nowhere hasthe escape been found. The melancholy lesson is being learned that thepath of human progress is arduous and its forward movement slow and thatno mere form of government can aid unless it is inspired by a higherpublic spirit of the individual citizen than we have yet managed toachieve. 

And of the world of to-day, be it remembered, elective democraticcontrol covers only a part of the field. Under socialism it covers itall. To-day in our haphazard world a man is his own master; often indeedthe mastership is but a pitiful thing, little more than being master ofhis own failure and starvation; often indeed the dead weight ofcircumstance, the accident of birth, the want of education, may so presshim down that his freedom is only a mockery. Let us grant all that. Butunder socialism freedom is gone. There is nothing but the rule of theelected boss. The worker is commanded to his task and obey he must. Ifhe will not, there is, there can only be, the prison and the scourge, orto be cast out in the wilderness to starve. 

Consider what it would mean to be under a socialist state. Here forexample is a worker who is, who says he is, too ill to work. He begsthat 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 indeedill. Go and rest yourself under a shady tree while the others are busywith the harvest. " So speaks the ideal official dealing with the idealcitizen 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 brutewho prefers to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Orsuppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hatefulheart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then?How could one face a régime in which the everlasting taskmaster heldcontrol? There is nothing like it among us at the present day exceptwithin the melancholy precincts of the penitentiary. There and thereonly, the socialist system is in operation. 

Who can deny that under such a system the man with the glib tongue andthe persuasive manner, the babbling talker and the scheming organizer, would secure all the places of power and profit, while patient meritwent to the wall?

Or turn from the gray officials to the purple citizens of the soapbubble commonwealth of socialism. All work, we are told, and all receivetheir remuneration. We must not think of it as money-wages, but, allsaid and done, an allotted share of goods, marked out upon a card, comes pretty much to the same thing. The wages that the citizens receivemust either be equal or not equal. That at least is plain logic. Eithereverybody gets exactly the same wages irrespective of capability anddiligence, or else the wages or salaries or whatever one calls them, aregraded, so that one receives much and the other little. 

Now either of these alternatives spells disaster. If the wages aregraded according to capacity, then the grading is done by theeverlasting elective officials. They can, and they will, vote themselvesand their friends or adherents into the good jobs and the high places. The advancement of a bright and capable young man will depend, not uponwhat he does, but upon what the elected bosses are pleased to do withhim; not upon the strength of his own hands, but upon the strength ofthe "pull" that he has with the bosses who run the part of the industrythat he is in. Unequal wages under socialism would mean a fierce andcorrupt scramble for power, office and emolument, beside which theutmost aberrations of Tammany Hall would seem as innocuous as a SundaySchool picnic. 

"But, " objects Mr. Bellamy or any other socialist, "you forget. Pleaseremember that under socialism the scramble for wealth is limited; no mancan own capital, but only consumption goods. The most that any man mayacquire is merely the articles that he wants to consume, not the enginesand machinery of production itself. Hence even avarice dwindles anddies, when its wonted food of 'capitalism' is withdrawn. "

But surely this point of view is the very converse of the teachings ofcommon 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 queeracquisitiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the game for his ownsake. Undoubtedly he exists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product ofthe system, a pathological product, a kind of elephantiasis ofindividualism. But speaking broadly, consumption goods, present orfuture, are the end in sight of the industrial struggle. Give me thehouses and the gardens, the yachts, the motor cars and the champagne andI do not care who owns the gravel crusher and the steam plow. And ifunder a socialist commonwealth a man can vote to himself or gain by thevotes of his adherents, a vast income of consumption goods and leave tohis unhappy fellow a narrow minimum of subsistence, then the resultingevil 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 willfind as ill a resting place as an upright thistle. Let the wages, --aswith Mr. Bellamy, --all be equal. The managers then cannot votethemselves large emoluments if they try. But what about the purplecitizens? Will they work, or will they lie round in their purplegarments and loaf? Work? Why should they work, their pay is there "freshand fresh"? Why should they turn up on time for their task? Why shouldthey not dawdle at their labor sitting upon the fence in endlesscolloquy while the harvest rots upon the stalk? If among them is onewho cares to work with a fever of industry that even socialism cannotcalm, let him do it. We, his fellows, will take our time. Our pay isthere as certain and as sound as his. Not for us the eager industry andthe fond plans for the future, --for the home and competence--thatspurred on the strenuous youth of old days, --not for us the earnestplanning of the husband and wife thoughtful and anxious for the futureof 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 issunshine all the time in this lotus land of the loafer. And for thefuture, let the "State" provide; for the children's welfare let the"State" take thought; while we live it shall feed us, when we fall illit 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 theflowers. It is too hot to labor. Let us warm ourselves beside the publicstove. It is too cold to work. 

But what? Such conduct, you say, will not be allowed in thecommonwealth. Idleness and slovenly, careless work will be forbidden?Ah! then you must mean that beside the worker will be the overseer withthe whip; the time-clock will mark his energy upon its dial; the machinewill register his effort; and if he will not work there is lurking forhim in the background the shadowed door of the prison. Exactly andlogically so. Socialism, in other words, is slavery. 

But here the socialist and his school interpose at once with anobjection. Under the socialist commonwealth, they say, the people willwant to work; they will have acquired a new civic spirit; they will workeagerly and cheerfully for the sake of the public good and from theirlove of the system under which they live. The loafer will be extinct. The sponge and the parasite will have perished. Even crime itself, sothe socialist tells us, will diminish to the vanishing point, till thereis nothing of it except here and there a sort of pathological survival, an atavism, or a "throwing back" to the forgotten sins of thegrandfathers. Here and there, some poor fellow afflicted with thisdisease may break into my socialistic house and steal my pictures and mywine. 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 perfectcitizens any government is good. In a population of angels a socialisticcommonwealth would work to perfection. But until we have the angels wemust keep the commonwealth waiting. 

Nor is it necessary here to discuss the hundred and one modifications ofthe socialistic plan. Each and all fail for one and the same reason. Themunicipal socialist, despairing of the huge collective state, dreams ofhis little town as an organic unit in which all share alike; thesyndicalist in his fancy sees his trade united into a co-operative bodyin which all are equal; the gradualist, in whose mind lingers the leavenof doubt, frames for himself a hazy vision of a prolonged preparationfor the future, of socialism achieved little by little, the citizensbeing trained as it goes on till they are to reach somehow or somewherein cloud land the nirvana of the elimination of self; like indeed, theyare, to the horse in the ancient fable that was being trained to livewithout food but died, alas, just as the experiment was succeeding. 

There is no way out. Socialism is but a dream, a bubble floating in theair. In the light of its opalescent colors we may see many visions ofwhat we might be if we were better than we are, we may learn much thatis useful as to what we can be even as we are; but if we mistake thefloating bubble for the marble palaces of the city of desire, it willlead us forward in our pursuit till we fall over the edge of the abyssbeyond which is chaos. 

_VII. --What Is Possible and What Is Not_

SOCIALISM, then, will not work, and neither will individualism, or atleast the older individualism that we have hitherto made the basis ofthe social order. Here, therefore, stands humanity, in the middle of itsnarrow path in sheer perplexity, not knowing which way to turn. Oneither side is the brink of an abyss. On one hand is the yawning gulf ofsocial catastrophe represented by socialism. On the other, the slower, but no less inevitable disaster that would attend the continuation inits present form of the system under which we have lived. Either waylies destruction; the one swift and immediate as a fall from a greatheight; the other gradual, but equally dreadful, as the slowstrangulation in a morass. Somewhere between the two lies such narrowsafety as may be found. 

The Ancients were fond of the metaphor, taken from the vexed SicilianSeas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened theaffrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily castthe ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the positionthat has been reached at the present crisis in the course of humanprogress. When we view the shortcomings of the present individualism, its waste of energy, its fretful overwork, its cruel inequality and thebitter lot that it brings to the uncounted millions of the submerged, weare inclined to cry out against it, and to listen with a ready ear tothe easy promises of the idealist. But when we turn to the contrastedfallacies of socialism, its obvious impracticality and the dark gulf ofsocial chaos that yawns behind it, we are driven back shuddering tocherish 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 tomerge into the clearness of certain day. It is clear enough on the onehand that we can expect no sudden and complete transformation of theworld in which we live. Such a process is impossible. The industrialsystem is too complex, its roots are too deeply struck and its wholeorganism 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 fillsthe dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of selfishness that hasbeen the survival instinct of existence since life first crawled fromthe slime of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mitigated. Inthe long process of time some higher cosmic sense may take its place. Ithas 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 "everyman for himself, " as it used to be applied, is done with forever. Thetime has gone by when a man shall starve asking in vain for work; whenthe listless outcast shall draw his rags shivering about him unheeded ofhis fellows; when children shall be born in hunger and bred in want andbroken in toil with never a chance in life. If nothing else will endthese things, fear will do it. The hardest capitalist that ever grippedhis property with the iron clasp of legal right relaxes his grasp alittle when he thinks of the possibilities of a social conflagration. Inthis respect five years of war have taught us more than a century ofpeace. It has set in a clear light new forms of social obligation. Thewar brought with it conscription--not as we used to see it, as the lasthorror of military tyranny, but as the crowning pride of democracy. Aninconceivable revolution in the thought of the English speaking peopleshas taken place in respect to it. The obligation of every man, accordingto his age and circumstance, to take up arms for his country and, ifneed be, to die for it, is henceforth the recognized basis ofprogressive democracy. 

But conscription has its other side. The obligation to die must carrywith it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that hemust fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizenthe opportunity of a livelihood. "Unemployment, " in the case of thewilling and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democraticGovernment must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrialpolicy, 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 musteither 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 whoare otherwise unable to find occupation involves appalling difficulties. The opportunity will loom large for the prodigal waste of money, for theundertaking of public works of no real utility and for the subsidizingof an army of loafers. But the difficulties, great though they are, arenot insuperable. The payment for state labor of this kind can be keptlow enough to make it the last resort rather than the ultimate ambitionof the worker. Nor need the work be useless. In new countries, especially such as Canada and the United States and Australia, thedevelopment of latent natural assets could absorb the labor ofgenerations. There are still unredeemed empires in the west. Clearlyenough a certain modicum of public honesty and integrity is essentialfor such a task; more, undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able toenlist in the service of the commonwealth. But without it we perish. Social betterment must depend at every stage on the force of publicspirit and public morality that inspires it. 

So much for the case of those who are able and willing to work. Thereremain still the uncounted thousands who by accident or illness, age orinfirmity, are unable to maintain themselves. For these people, underthe older dispensation, there was nothing but the poorhouse, the jail orstarvation by the roadside. The narrow individualism of the nineteenthcentury refused to recognize the social duty of supporting somebodyelse's grandmother. Such charity began, and ended, at home. But evenwith the passing of the nineteenth century an awakened sense of thecollective responsibility of society towards its weaker members began toimpress itself upon public policy. Old age pension laws and nationalinsurance against illness and accident were already being built into thelegislative codes of the democratic countries. The experience of the warhas enormously increased this sense of social solidarity. It is clearnow that our fortunes are not in our individual keeping. We stand orfall as a nation. And the nation which neglects the aged and infirm, orwhich leaves a family to be shipwrecked as the result of a singleaccident to a breadwinner, cannot survive as against a nation in whichthe 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 canbest be carried out. It will vary with the circumstances of eachcommunity. The action of the municipality, or of the state or province, or of the central government itself may be called into play. But in oneform or another, the economic loss involved in illness and infirmitymust be shifted from the shoulders of the individual to those ofsociety at large. There was but little realization of this obligation inthe nineteenth century. Only in the sensational moments of famine, floodor pestilence was a general social effort called forth. But in theclearer view of the social bond which the war has given us we can seethat famine and pestilence are merely exaggerated forms of what ishappening every day in our midst. 

We spoke much during the war of "man power. " We suddenly realized thatafter all the greatness and strength of a nation is made up of the menand women who compose it. Its money, in the narrow sense, is nothing; aset of meaningless chips and counters piled upon a banker's table readyto fall at a touch. Even before the war we had begun to talk eagerly andanxiously of the conservation of national resources, of the need ofsafeguarding the forests and fisheries and the mines. These areimportant things. But the war has shown that the most important thing ofall is the conservation of men and women. 

The attitude of the nineteenth century upon this point was little shortof insane. The melancholy doctrine of Malthus had perverted the publicmind. Because it was difficult for a poor man to bring up a family, thehasty conclusion was reached that a family ought not to be brought up. But the war has entirely inverted and corrected this point of view. Thefather and mother who were able to send six sturdy, native-born sons tothe conflict were regarded as benefactors of the nation. But these sixsturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, six "puling infants, "viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor. If thestrength of the nation lies in its men and women there is only one wayto increase it. Before the war it was thought that a simpler and easiermethod of increase could be found in the wholesale import of Austrians, Bulgarians and Czecho-Slovaks. The newer nations boasted proudly oftheir immigration tables. The fallacy is apparent now. Those who reallycount in a nation and those who govern its destinies for good or ill arethose who are born in it. 

It is difficult to over-estimate the harm that has been done to publicpolicy by this same Malthusian theory. It has opposed to every proposalof social reform an obstacle that seemed insuperable, --the danger of arapid overincrease of population that would pauperize the community. Population, it was said, tends always to press upon the heels ofsubsistence. If the poor are pampered, they will breed fast: the timewill come when there will not be food for all and we shall perish in acommon destruction. Seen in this light, infant mortality and the cruelwastage of disease were viewed with complacence. It was "Nature's" ownprocess at work. The "unfit, " so called, were being winnowed out thatonly the best might survive. The biological doctrine of evolution wasmisinterpreted 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 lifemay "survive" and thrust aside the most beautiful. It is only by aconfusion of thought that the processes of organic nature which renderevery foot of fertile ground the scene of unending conflict can be usedto explain away the death of children of the slums. The whole theory ofsurvival is only a statement of what is, not of what ought to be. Themoment 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 haveperished. 

But it is time that the Malthusian doctrine, --the fear ofover-population as a hindrance to social reform, --was dismissed fromconsideration. It is at best but a worn-out scarecrow shaking its vainrags in the wind. Population, it is true, increases in a geometricalratio. The human race, if favored by environment, can easily doubleitself every twenty-five years. If it did this, the time must come, through sheer power of multiplication, when there would not be standingroom for it on the globe. All of this is undeniable, but it is quitewide of the mark. It is time enough to cross a bridge when we come toit. The "standing room" problem is still removed from us by suchuncounted generations that we need give no thought to it. The physicalresources of the globe are as yet only tapped, and not exhausted. Wehave done little more than scratch the surface. Because we are crowdedhere and there in the ant-hills of our cities, we dream that the worldis full. Because, under our present system, we do not raise enough foodfor all, we fear that the food supply is running short. All this is purefancy. Let any one consider in his mind's eye the enormous untouchedassets still remaining for mankind in the vast spaces filled with thetangled forests of South America, or the exuberant fertility ofequatorial Africa or the huge plains of Canada, Australia, SouthernSiberia and the United States, as yet only thinly dotted with humansettlement. There is no need to draw up an anxious balance sheet of ourassets. There is still an uncounted plenty. And every human being bornupon the world represents a power of work that, rightly directed, morethan supplies his wants. The fact that as an infant he does not maintainhimself has nothing to do with the case. This was true even in theGarden of Eden. 

The fundamental error of the Malthusian theory of population and povertyis to confound the difficulties of human organization with the questionof physical production. Our existing poverty is purely a problem in thedirection and distribution of human effort. It has no connection as yetwith the question of the total available means of subsistence. Some day, in a remote future, in which under an improved social system the numbersof mankind might increase to the full power of the natural capacity ofmultiplication, such a question might conceivably disturb the equanimityof mankind. But it need not now. It is only one of many disasters thatmust sooner or later overtake mankind. The sun, so the astronomer tellsus, is cooling down; the night is coming; an all-pervading cold willsome day chill into rigid death the last vestige of organic life. Ourpoor planet will be but a silent ghost whirling on its dark path in thestarlight. This ultimate disaster is, as far as our vision goes, inevitable. Yet no one concerns himself with it. So should it be withthe danger of the ultimate overcrowding of the globe. 

I lay stress upon this problem of the increase of population because, tomy thinking, it is in this connection that the main work and the besthope of social reform can be found. The children of the race should bethe very blossom of its fondest hopes. Under the present order and withthe present gloomy preconceptions they have been the least of itscollective cares. Yet here--and here more than anywhere--is the pointtowards which social effort and social legislation may be directedimmediately and successfully. The moment that we get away from the ideathat the child is a mere appendage of the parent, bound to share goodfortune and ill, wealth and starvation, according to the parent's lot, the moment we regard the child as itself a member of society--clothed insocial rights--a burden for the moment but an asset for the future--weturn over a new leaf in the book of human development, we pass a newmilestone on the upward path of progress. 

It should be recognized in the coming order of society, that every childof the nation has the right to be clothed and fed and trainedirrespective of its parents' lot. Our feeble beginnings in the directionof housing, sanitation, child welfare and education, should be expandedat whatever cost into something truly national and all embracing. Theancient grudging selfishness that would not feed other people's childrenshould be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and thespinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people'schildren should fight for them. The obligation must apply both ways. 

No society is properly organized until every child that is born into itshall have an opportunity in life. Success in life and capacity to livewe cannot give. But opportunity we can. We can at least see that thegifts that are laid in the child's cradle by nature are not obliteratedby the cruel fortune of the accident of birth: that its brain and bodyare not stunted by lack of food and air and by the heavy burden ofpremature toil. The playtime of childhood should be held sacred by thenation. 

This, as I see it, should be the first and the greatest effort of socialreform. For the adult generation of to-day many things are no longerpossible. The time has passed. We are, as viewed with a comprehensiveeye, a damaged race. Few of us in mind or body are what we might be; andmillions of us, the vast majority of industrial mankind known as theworking class, are distorted beyond repair from what they might havebeen. In older societies this was taken for granted: the poor and thehumble and the lowly reproduced from generation to generation, as theygrew to adult life, the starved brains and stunted outlook of theirforbears, --starved and stunted only by lack of opportunity. For natureknows of no such differences in original capacity between the childrenof the fortunate and the unfortunate. Yet on this inequality, made bycircumstance, was based the whole system of caste, the stratificationof the gentle and the simple on which society rested. In the past it mayhave been necessary. It is not so now. If, with all our vast apparatusof machinery and power, we cannot so arrange society that each child hasan opportunity in life, it would be better to break the machinery inpieces and return to the woods from which we came. 

Put into the plainest of prose, then, we are saying that the governmentof every country ought to supply work and pay for the unemployed, maintenance for the infirm and aged, and education and opportunity forthe children. These are vast tasks. And they involve, of course, afinancial burden not dreamed of before the war. But here again the warhas taught us many things. It would have seemed inconceivable before, that a man of great wealth should give one-half of his income to thestate. The financial burden of the war, as the full measure of it dawnedupon our minds, seemed to betoken a universal bankruptcy. But the sequelis going to show that the finance of the war will prove to be a lessonin the finance of peace. The new burden has come to stay. No modernstate can hope to survive unless it meets the kind of social claims onthe part of the unemployed, the destitute and the children that havebeen described above. And it cannot do this unless it continues to usethe terrific engine of taxation already fashioned in the war. Undoubtedly the progressive income tax and the tax on profits andtaxation of inheritance must be maintained to an extent never dreamed ofbefore. 

But the peace finance and the war finance will differ in one mostimportant respect. The war finance was purely destructive. From it camenational security and the triumph of right over wrong. No one wouldbelittle the worth of the sacrifice. But in the narrower sense ofproduction, of bread winning, there came nothing; or nothing except anew power of organization, a new technical skill and a new aspirationtowards better things. But the burden of peace finance directed towardssocial efforts will bring a direct return. Every cent that is spent uponthe betterment of the population will come back, sooner or later, astwo. 

But all of this deals as yet only with the field of industry and conductin which the state rules supreme. Governmental care of the unemployed, the infant and the infirm, sounds like a chapter in socialism. If thesame régime were extended over the whole area of production, we shouldhave socialism itself and a mere soap-bubble bursting into fragments. There is no need, however, to extend the régime of compulsion over thewhole field. The vast mass of human industrial effort must still lieoutside of the immediate control of the government. Every man will stillearn his own living and that of his family as best he can, relying firstand foremost upon his own efforts. 

One naturally asks, then, To what extent can social reform penetrateinto the ordinary operation of industry itself? Granted that it isimpossible for the state to take over the whole industry of the nation, does that mean that the present inequalities must continue? Theframework in which our industrial life is set cannot be readily brokenasunder. But we can to a great extent ease the rigidity of its outlines. A legislative code that starts from sounder principles than those whichhave obtained hitherto can do a great deal towards progressivebetterment. Each decade can be an improvement upon the last. Hitherto wehave been hampered at every turn by the supposed obstacle of immutableeconomic laws. The theory of "natural" wages and prices of a supposedeconomic order that could not be disturbed, set up a sort of legislativeparalysis. The first thing needed is to get away entirely from all suchpreconceptions, to recognize that the "natural" order of society, basedon the "natural" liberty, does not correspond with real justice and realliberty at all, but works injustice at every turn. And at every turnintrusive social legislation must seek to prevent such injustice. 

It is no part of the present essay to attempt to detail the particularsof a code of social legislation. That must depend in every case upon theparticular circumstances of the community concerned. But someindication may be given here of the kind of legislation that may serveto render the conditions of industry more in conformity with socialjustice. Let us take, as a conspicuous example, the case of the Minimumwage law. Here is a thing sternly condemned in the older thought as aneconomic impossibility. It was claimed, as we have seen, that under freecontract 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, inone fashion or another, a part of the code of every community. It may beapplied by specific legislation from a central power, or it may beapplied by the discretionary authority of district boards, or it may beregulated, --as it has been in some of the beginnings alreadymade, --within the compass of each industry or trade. But the principleinvolved is sound. The wage as paid becomes a part of the conditions ofindustry. Interest, profits and, later, the direction of consumption andthen of production, conform themselves to it. 

True it is, that in this as in all cases of social legislation, noapplication of the law can be made so sweeping and so immediate as todislocate the machine and bring industry to a stop. It is probable thatat any particular time and place the legislative minimum wage cannot bevery much in advance of the ordinary or average wage of the people inemployment. But its virtue lies in its progression. The modest increaseof to-day leads to the fuller increase of to-morrow. Properly applied, the capitalist and the employer of labor need have nothing to fear fromit. Its ultimate effect will not fall upon them, but will serve merelyto alter the direction of human effort. 

Precisely the same reasoning holds good of the shortening of the hoursof labor both by legislative enactment and by collective organization. Here again the first thing necessary is a clear vision of the goaltowards which we are to strive. The hours of labor are too long. Theworld has been caught in the wheels of its own machinery which will notstop. With each advance in invention and mechanical power it worksharder still. New and feverish desires for luxuries replace each olderwant as satisfied. The nerves of our industrial civilization are wornthin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world isrestless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furiousdiscontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest. Itshould be sent, as nerve patients are, to the seaside or the quiet ofthe hills. Failing this, it should at least slacken the pace of its workand shorten its working day. 

And for this the thing needed is an altered public opinion on thesubject of work in relation to human character and development. Thenineteenth century glorified work. The poet, sitting beneath a shadytree, sang of its glories. The working man was incited to contemplatethe beauty of the night's rest that followed on the exhaustion of theday. It was proved to him that if his day was dull at least his sleepwas sound. The ideal of society was the cheery artisan and the honestblacksmith, awake and singing with the lark and busy all day long atthe loom and the anvil, till the grateful night soothed them intowell-earned slumber. This, they were told, was better than thedistracted sleep of princes. 

The educated world repeated to itself these grotesque fallacies till itlost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning istoo early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory atthe call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is toolong: nine hours is too long: eight hours is too long. I am not raisinghere the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can beshortened, but only urging the primary need of recognizing that aworking day of eight hours is too long for the full and properdevelopment of human capacity and for the rational enjoyment of life. There is no need to quote here to the contrary the long and sustainedtoil of the pioneer, the eager labor of the student, unmindful of thesilent hours, or the fierce acquisitive activity of the money-maker thatknows no pause. Activities such as these differ with a whole sky fromthe wage-work of the modern industrial worker. The task in one case isdone for its own sake. It is life itself. The other is done only for thesake of the wage it brings. It is, or should be, a mere preliminary toliving. 

Let it be granted, of course, that a certain amount of work is anabsolute necessity for human character. There is no more patheticspectacle on our human stage than the figure of poor puppy in his beachsuit and his tuxedo jacket seeking in vain to amuse himself for ever. Aleisure class no sooner arises than the melancholy monotony of amusementforces it into mimic work and make-believe activities. It dare not facethe empty day. 

But when all is said about the horror of idleness the broad fact remainsthat the hours of work are too long. If we could in imaginationdisregard for a moment all question of how the hours of work are to beshortened and how production is to be maintained and ask only what wouldbe the ideal number of the daily hours of compulsory work, forcharacter'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 oncharacter at two. 

The shortening of the general hours of work, then, should be among theprimary aims of social reform. There need be no fear that with shortenedhours of labor the sum total of production would fall short of humanneeds. This, as has been shown from beginning to end of this essay, isout of the question. Human _desires_ would eat up the result of tentimes the work we now accomplish. Human _needs_ would be satisfied witha fraction of it. But the real difficulty in the shortening of hourslies elsewhere. Here, as in the parallel case of the minimum wage, thedanger is that the attempt to alter things too rapidly may dislocate theindustrial machine. We ought to attempt such a shortening as will strainthe machine to a breaking point, but never break it. This can be done, as with the minimum wage, partly by positive legislation and partlycollective action. Not much can be done at once. But the process can becontinuous. The short hours achieved with acclamation to-day will laterbe denounced as the long hours of to-morrow. The essential point tograsp, however, is that society at large has nothing to lose by theprocess. The shortened hours become a part of the framework ofproduction. It adapts itself to it. Hitherto we have been caught in therunning of our own machine: it is time that we altered the gearing ofit. 

The two cases selected, --the minimum wage and the legislative shorteningof hours, --have been chosen merely as illustrations and are notexhaustive of the things that can be done in the field of possible andpractical reform. It is plain enough that in many other directions thesame principles may be applied. The rectification of the ownership ofland so as to eliminate the haphazard gains of the speculator and theunearned increment of wealth created by the efforts of others, is anobvious case in point. The "single taxer" sees in this a cure-all forthe ills of society. But his vision is distorted. The private ownershipof land is one of the greatest incentives to human effort that theworld 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 theconditions of ownership so as to bring them more into keeping with acommon sense view of social justice. 

But the inordinate and fortuitous gains from land are really only oneexample from a general class. The war discovered the "profiteer. " Thelaw-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, restingon such things as monopoly, or trickery, or the mere hazards ofabundance and scarcity, complying with the letter of the law butviolating its spirit, are fit objects for appropriate taxation. The waysand means are difficult, but the social principle involved is clear. 

We may thus form some sort of vision of the social future into which weare passing. The details are indistinct. But the outline at least inwhich it is framed is clear enough. The safety of the future lies in aprogressive movement of social control alleviating the misery which itcannot obliterate and based upon the broad general principle of equalityof opportunity. The chief immediate direction of social effort should betowards the attempt to give to every human being in childhood adequatefood, clothing, education and an opportunity in life. This will prove tobe the beginning of many things. 

THE END

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Transcriber's Note: Page 67, "are" changed to "and" (wages and all)