Part 7 (1/2)

Let us, then, repeat the question which we asked just now. Where has this addition to the income of labour come from? That part of it is attributable to ability--the ability of the Watts, the Stephensons, the Arkwrights, the Bessemers, the Edisons, and so forth--n.o.body in his senses will deny. Can it be said that any of it is attributable to labour? The period now under consideration is so brief that this question is not hard to answer. It can easily be shown that man, as a labourer skilled or unskilled, has acquired individually no new efficiencies since--to say the least of it--the days of the Greeks and Romans. An ancient gem-engraver would to-day be eminent among modern craftsmen. The implements of the Roman surgeons, the proportional compa.s.ses used by the Roman architects, the force-pumps and taps used in the Roman houses--all things that could be produced by a man directing his own muscles--were produced in the Rome of Nero as perfectly as they could be produced to-day. To this fact our museums bear ample and minute witness; while the Colosseum and the Parthenon are quite enough to show that the masons of the ancient world were at least the equals of our own. If no advance, then, in the quality of manual labour as such has taken place in the course of two thousand years, it is idle to contend that its powers have increased in the course of eighty. But a still more remarkable proof that they actually have not done so, and that no such increase has contributed to the increase of modern wealth, is supplied by events belonging to these eighty years themselves. I refer to the policy pursued by the trade-unions of reducing the practical efficiency of all their members alike to the level which can be reached by those of them who are least active and dexterous. Bricklayers, for example, are forbidden by the English unions to lay, in a given time, more than a certain number of bricks, though by many of them this number could be doubled, and by some trebled, with ease. Now, although, from the point of view of those bodies who adopt it, such a policy has many advantages, and is perhaps a tactical necessity, this levelling down of labour to the minimum of individual efficiency is denounced by many critics as a prelude to industrial suicide, and the alarm which these persons feel is doubtless intelligible enough. It is, however, largely superfluous. The levelling process in question must of course involve a certain amount of waste; but its effect on production as a whole is under most circ.u.mstances inappreciable. Building as a whole is not checked by the fact that the best bricklayers may do no more than the worst. All kinds of commodities are multiplied, improved, and cheapened, while thousands of the operatives whose labour is involved in their production are allowed to attend to but one machine, when they might easily attend to three. In a word, while the unions have been doing their effective best to keep labour, as a productive agent, stationary, or even to diminish its efficiency, the product of industry as a whole exhibits an unchecked increase. And what is the explanation of this? Little as the trade-unions realise the fact themselves, their own policy is an object-lesson which supplies us with the simple answer. The answer is that the increase of modern wealth--certainly its increase during the past eighty years--has not been due to any change in the efficiency of labour at all; that labour is merely a unit which directive ability multiplies; that if in the year 1800 labour produced everything, and its total products then be expressed by the number five, the products of the industrial population would be five per head still, if ability, as a multiplying number, successively expressible by two and three and four, had not increased the quotient to ten, fifteen, and twenty; ability thus being the producer, not indeed of the five with which we start, but of all the increasing differences between this and the larger numbers.

To return then to definite facts, since in the year 1800 an equal division of all the wealth of Great Britain would have yielded to each family an income of eighty pounds, and since eighty years later an equal division of the total which was actually appropriated as wages by wage-paid labour alone, would have yielded to each labourer's family some twenty-five pounds in addition, the labouring cla.s.s as a whole in Great Britain to-day, instead of receiving less than its labour produces, receives on the lowest computation from thirty to thirty-three per cent. more. Or, to put the matter otherwise, more than a fourth of its present income is drawn from a fund which would cease to have any existence if it were not for the continued activity of a specially gifted cla.s.s, by whose brains the data of science are being constantly remastered and re-a.s.similated, and by whose energy they are applied to the minds and muscles of the many from the earliest hour of each working day to the latest. And what is true labour, its products, and receipts in Great Britain, is broadly true of them in America and all other countries also, where modern capitalism has arrived at the same stage of development.

We are, let me say once more, not here contemplating individual cases.

Of the total wage-fund divided among the labourers in any given country, too much may be given to some men, and too little to others; but of every million pounds which a million of such men receive, some two hundred and fifty thousand are distributed well or ill, which have not been produced by the efforts of these men themselves, but are due to the efforts of a cla.s.s which is definitely outside their own.[21] If, then, it is contended that the just reward of labour is that total of wealth which labour itself produces, the idea that labour, in respect of its pecuniary remuneration, is, under present conditions, the victim of any general wrong, is so far from having any justification in fact that it only touches fact at all by representing a direct inversion of it.

Labour, as a whole, does not, under existing conditions, get less than it produces.[22] It gets a very great deal more. If, therefore, the claims of labour are based on, and limited to, the amount of wealth which is produced by labour itself--that is to say, the total which it would now produce were the faculties of the directing and organising minority paralysed--what labour, thus appropriating the entire product, would receive, would be far less, not more, than what it actually receives to-day. Instead of defrauding it of any part of its due, the existing system is treating it with an extreme and even wanton generosity.

Is it, then, here contended, many readers will ask, that if matters are determined by ideal justice, or anything like practical wisdom, the remuneration of labour in general ought henceforth to be lessened, or at all events precluded from any possibility of increase? Is it contended that the employing and directing cla.s.s should attempt or even desire to take back from those directed by it every increment of wealth possessed by them which is not produced by themselves? If any one thinks that such is the conclusion which is here suggested, let him suspend his opinion until, as we shall do in another chapter, we return to the subject and deal with it in a more comprehensive way. Our conclusion, as for the moment we must now be content to leave it, is not that the labourers have not a claim, practically valid, to the only portion of their income which has any tendency to grow, but merely that they should understand the source from which this portion is drawn--a source which consists of the efforts of other men, not of their own.

And now, before we return to this particular question, we will go on to deal with another which to a certain extent overlaps it, but is narrower in its compa.s.s, and seems, for that very reason, to many minds of greater practical moment. I mean the question of interest, or the income which comes to its recipients without any necessary effort on their own part to correspond to it.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] I met an interesting embodiment of this mood of mind in America, in the person of a slim young man, well-dressed, well-educated, refined in his speech and manners, who worked as a clerk or accountant in some large financial house. To my great astonishment he introduced himself to me as a socialist. ”I don't believe like Marx,” he said, ”that labour produces everything, but I maintain that the task-work of the employed and directed labourer, of whatever grade--whether he uses a pen or a chisel--is always worth more than the wages which the employers pay him for performing it. I feel this myself with regard to my own firm. Month by month I am worth to it more than the sums it gives me. This,” he went on, with an odd gleam in his eyes, ”is what I may not endure to think of--that others should be always appropriating values which I have produced myself; and nine out of ten of the men who become socialists, do so because they feel as I do about this particular point.”

[19] General Walker also seeks to a.s.similate the product of ability to rent; and my criticism of Mr. Webb in this respect applies to him also.

General Walker's book was mentioned frequently in connection with my late addresses in America; and it was said by one or two critics that I had borrowed from, and ought to have acknowledged my debt to, him. As a matter of fact, I never saw his book till after my return to England, when I read it with interest and admiration. His doctrines with regard to the _entrepreneur_ is, so far as it goes, fundamentally identical with the main argument of this volume. My criticism of him would be that he does not give to this particular part of his doctrine the foremost place which logically belongs to it; and that though attributing to the _entrepreneur_ some special productive faculty distinct from labour, he starts his work with re-enumerating the old doctrine that labour, capital, and law are the only factors in production.

[20] For example, the silk factory at Derby, erected by Lombe, in the reign of George II., the machinery of which comprised 26,000 wheels.

[21] These figures represent less than the truth. They are merely given in order to indicate the general character of the situation to-day, as compared with that of an earlier, but still comparatively recent period.

To go into details minutely would involve extensive and here needless discussion.

[22] A letter was sent me by a friend in America, from a writer who, commenting on my late addresses in that country, said that in the main he entirely agreed with my arguments, as against socialism; but that he could not divest himself of the belief that labour as a whole got less than it produced, and was thus as a whole suffering a chronic wrong. He suggested, however, a method, fundamentally a.n.a.logous to that set forth in the text, of computing what labour, as such, does produce in reality.

He gave his own opinion as to actual facts, as an impression merely; but how misleading impressions may be can be seen from his statements ”that all _very great_ fortunes, at all events, must be derived from the underpayment of labour.” Had he only considered the case in detail, he would have seen that labour received the highest wages from some of the richest employers. According to his theory the wages of labour, in such cases, would touch the minimum.

CHAPTER XIII

INTEREST AND ABSTRACT JUSTICE

The essential feature of interest, as distinct from the income due to active ability, is that while the latter ceases as soon as the able man ceases to exert himself, the former continues to replenish the recipient's pockets, though for his part he does nothing, or need do nothing, in return for it. Since, then, the possession of this particular form of income is admittedly unconnected with any concurrent exertion on the part of those possessing it (such is the argument of the objectors) the whole portion of the national wealth which, in the form of interest, is at present appropriated by the presumably or the possibly idle, might obviously be appropriated by the state, and applied to public purposes, without lessening in any way even the highest of those rewards which are due to, and are needed to stimulate any active ability whatsoever, and hence without lessening the efficiency of the wealth-producing process as a whole. If we adopt the programme which this argument suggests, it will be possible, so its advocates say, to satisfy the demands of labour by a shorter and more direct method than that of committing ourselves to an estimate of what labour actually produces, and endeavouring to secure that the total which is paid to labour shall accord with it.

Now, this programme raises two separate questions. One question is whether the proposed confiscation of interest is in reality, as its advocates maintain it to be, practicable in the sense that the disturbances which it would necessarily cause would not interfere with the production of the fund which it is desired to distribute, and so perhaps leave all cla.s.ses poorer and not richer than they are. The other question is whether such a confiscation would be just. To some people this second question will possibly seem superfluous. If it can be shown, they will say, that a policy, the avowed object of which is the enrichment of the many at the expense of the relatively few, could be really carried out successfully, and if the many had the power of insisting on it, an inquiry into its abstract justice is merely a waste of time; for whenever the wolf is face to face with the lamb, it will eat up the lamb first and justify its conduct afterwards. And in this argument there is a certain amount of truth; but those who take it for the whole truth allow their own cynicism to overreach them. The fact remains that even the wolves of the human world are obliged to a.s.sume, as a kind of necessary armour, and often as their princ.i.p.al weapon, a semblance of justice, however they may despise the reality. The brigand chief justifies his war on society by declaring that society has unjustly made war on him. The wildest demagogues, in their appeals to popular pa.s.sion, as the history of the French Revolution and of all revolutions shows us, have always been obliged to exhibit the demands of mere self-interest as based on some general theory of what is morally just or right; and however much the theory may accommodate itself to the hope of private advantage, there are few demands made for any great social change which do not derive a large part of their force from persons with whom a belief in the justice of the demands stands first, while--so far at least as their own consciousness is concerned--the prospect of personal advantage stands second or nowhere. This is certainly so in the case which we are now considering. We will, therefore, begin with the question of abstract justice.

Let us begin, then, with reminding ourselves that when interest is attacked as such, on the ground that its recipients have themselves done nothing to produce it, whereas other incomes, no matter how large, are presumably the equivalents of some personal effort which corresponds to them, it is a.s.sumed that every man has, in natural justice, a right to such wealth as he actually himself produces; and what he produces, as we saw in the last chapter, is that amount of wealth which would not have been produced at all had his efforts not been made, or been other or less intense than they have been.

Thus far, then, for the purposes of the present discussion, all parties are agreed; but the moment the a.s.sailants of interest take the next step in their argument, we shall find that their errors begin--errors resulting, as we shall see, from an imperfect a.n.a.lysis of facts. For them the two types of correspondence between productive effort and product are, firstly, the manual labourer, who performs some daily task such as riveting plates or bricklaying, and receives an equivalent in wages at the end of each day or week; and, secondly, the manager of some great industrial enterprise, who spends each day so many hours in his office, issuing minute directions with regard to the conduct of his subordinates, and sending his receipts to the bank as they come in from his customers. But these types, though accurate so far as they go, do but cover a part of the actual field of fact. Practically, though of course not absolutely, they ignore the element of time. They represent effort and product as being always so nearly simultaneous that, although the former must literally precede the latter, yet, if we estimate life in terms of years, or even months, or weeks, a man has ceased to produce as soon as he has ceased to work.

Now, of certain forms of effort this may be true enough. A bricklayer, for example, as soon as he ceases to lay bricks, ceases to produce anything. His wall-building closes its effects with the walls which he himself has built. It does nothing to facilitate the building of other walls in the future. Similarly such ability as consists in a gift for personal management often ends its effects, and leaves no trace behind it, as soon as the manager possessing these gifts retires.

But with many forms of ability the case is precisely opposite. The products of their exercise do not even begin to appear till after--often till long after--the exercise of the ability itself has altogether come to an end. Let us, for example, take the case of a play; and since socialists are still included among the objectors whom we have in view, let us take one of the popular plays written by Mr. Bernard Shaw. Such a play, as Mr. Shaw has publicly boasted--for otherwise I should not mention, and should know nothing of his private affairs--brings to its author wealth in the form of amazing royalties; but until it is acted it brings him no royalties at all, and the actors begin with it only when his own efforts are ended. Moreover, not only do these royalties only begin then, but having once begun, they have no tendency to exhaust themselves. On the contrary the chances are that they will go on increasing till the time arrives, if it ever does, when Mr. Shaw is no longer appreciated. Mr. Shaw, in fact, if he had written one of his most successful plays at twenty, might, so far as that play is concerned, be idle for ever afterwards, even if he lived to the age of Methuselah, and still be enjoying in royalties the product of his own exertions, though he had not exerted himself productively for some seven or eight hundred years.

There is no question here of whether, under these conditions, a person like Mr. Shaw might not feel himself constrained on some ground or other to surrender his copyright at some period prior to his own demise. The one point here insisted on is that he could not renounce it on the ground that the wealth protected by it was no longer produced by himself. If he is ent.i.tled to the royalties resulting from the performance of his play at any time, on the ground that every man has a right to the products of his own exertions, his right to the royalties resulting from its ten-thousandth performance is, on this ground, as good as his right to the royalties resulting from the first. The royalties on a play, in short, show how certain forms of effort, though not all, continue to yield a product for an indefinite period, though the original effort itself may be never again repeated; and herein these royalties are typical of modern interest generally. They do not, however, const.i.tute in themselves more than a small part of it. We will therefore turn to interest of other kinds, the details of whose genesis are indeed widely different, but which consist similarly of a constant repet.i.tion of values, without any corresponding repet.i.tion of the effort in which the series originated.

Those which we will consider first are the products of organic nature, which have been dwelt upon by a well-known writer as showing us the ultimate source of industrial interest generally, and also at the same time its natural and essential justice. It may be a surprise to some to learn who this writer is. He is Henry George, who is best known to the public as the advocate of a measure of confiscation so crude and so arbitrary, that even socialists have condemned it as impracticable without serious modifications. Henry George, however, although he outdid most socialists in his attack on private wealth of one particular kind--that is to say, the rent of land--was equally vehement in his defence of the interest of industrial capital. Socialists say--and the aphorism is constantly repeated--”A man can get an income only by working or stealing; there is no third way.” In answer to this, it was pointed out by George that one kind of wealth, at all events--and we may add that here we have wealth in its oldest form--consists of possessions yielding a natural increase, which has been neither made by the possessors, nor yet stolen by them from anybody else. That is to say, it consists of flocks and herds. A shepherd or herdsman starts with a single pair of animals, from which parents there arises a large progeny.

This living increment has not been produced by the man, but it is still more obvious that it has not been produced by his neighbours, and it therefore belongs in justice to the man who owns the parents. George pointed out also that whole cla.s.ses of possessions besides are, for by far the larger part of their value, equally independent either of corresponding work or of theft. Among such possessions are wines, whose quality improves with time, and which, if sold to-day, may be worth tenpence a bottle, but which four years hence may be worth perhaps half-a-crown. In all such cases--this was George's contention--we have some possession originally small to start with, which year by year is increased in amount or at least in value, not by the efforts of the possessor, but by the secret operations of nature. Here, he argued, we have capital in its typical form; and interest is the gift of nature to the man by whom the capital is owned.