A Critical Examination of Socialism Part 6

There are cases, no doubt, in which the practical talents necessary for realising an invention and the faculty of invention itself coexist in the same man; but the inventor, when this happens, is not an inventor only. He is not only a master of ideas; he is a master of things and men. Such a combination is, however, far from common. As a rule, if his inventions are to be of any use to the world, the inventor must ally himself with men of another type, and these are the very men whom the author of "The Gospel for To-day" conceives of as simply monopolising and "working for all they are worth" contrivances which would otherwise have been given to the world gratis. He does not see that, if men such as the steel kings and the oil kings did not work inventions for all they are worth, the inventions themselves would be practically worth nothing.

Let the reader reflect on the astounding ignorance of the world, and especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much navete by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely a means of monopolising knives, bridges, rails, and locomotive-engines, which the citizens of America would otherwise be able to take at will, like a bevy of school-children helping themselves from a heap of apples.

He imagines that inventions, as they form themselves in the head of the inventor, leap direct into use, without any intervening process; while the inventor himself is a being so superior to the world he works in, that the rapture of being allowed to work for it is the only reward he covets, that he has never dreamed of such selfish things as profits, and does not even know the meaning of a patent or a founder's share; and that the oil kings and the steel kings and all other able men, will save society by following in the footsteps of this chimera.

Such are the wild, childish, and disconnected ideas entertained by our clerical author of the world which he proposes to reform; and he is in this respect not peculiar. On the contrary he is a most favourable type of Christian socialists generally; and Christian socialists, in respect of their mental and moral equipment, are simply secular socialists of the more modern and educated type, with their ignorances and credulities accentuated, but not otherwise altered, by the solemnities of religious language, and a vague religious sentiment which achieves a facile intensity because it is never restrained by fact.

Socialists, in short, of all schools, are socialists because they are ignorant of, or fail to apprehend, certain facts or principles of nature and of human nature which are essential to the complicated process of modern productive industry; or it is perhaps a truer way of putting the case to say that they could not be socialists unless they were thus ignorant. In this they resemble the devisers of perpetual motions, or scientific and infallible systems for breaking the bank at a roulette-table. In so far as they are socialists--that is to say, in so far as they differ from other reformers--they are men aiming at something which is in its nature impracticable; and in order to represent it to themselves and others as practicable, they must necessarily ignore or fail to understand something which, in actual life, stands in the way of its being so. The perpetual-motionist believes that a perpetual motion is practicable, because he fails to see that out of no machine whatever is it possible to get more force than is put into it, and that one pound-weight will not wind up another. The system-monger sees that if a succession of similar stakes are placed on red or black, or any one of the thirty-six numbers, the bank always has zero in its favour; but by placing a number of stakes simultaneously in intricate combinations, or by graduating them according to results, he imagines that he can invert the situation, when all he can do is to disguise it. He often disguises it most effectually; but in the long run he does no more. Like a protuberance in an air cus.h.i.+on, which if pushed down in one place reappears in another, the original advantage of the bank infallibly ends in rea.s.serting itself. The system-monger fails to see this for one reason only--that, having disguised, he thinks that he has eliminated, a fundamental fact of the situation. Socialists, in so far as they are socialists, reason in the same way. Though most of them now recognise, like the author of "The Gospel for To-day," that the economic efficiencies of men are in the highest degree unequal, they propose out of an inequality of functions to produce an equality of conditions. The details of the changes by which they propose to effect this result, or the grounds on which they seek to represent this result as possible, vary like the details of the systems of ingenious gamblers.

But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some fundamental fact--or, rather, of one protean fact--by which socialistic thinkers are often honestly confused, because it a.s.sumes, as they s.h.i.+ft their positions, any number of different aspects. This is the fact that out of unequal men it is absolutely impossible to construct a society of equals.

Two ill.u.s.trations, taken from the history of socialistic thought, will show how socialists hide this fact from themselves, first by a fallacy of one kind, then by a fallacy of another kind; and how, wherever it is located, it is the essential factor in their argument.

In their endeavour to prove the possibility of an equalisation, absolute or approximate, of economic conditions, Karl Marx and the earlier socialists started with two main doctrines. The one was a moral doctrine; the other was an economic. The moral doctrine was that, as a matter of eternal justice, every man has a right to the whole of what is produced by him. The economic doctrine was that, as a matter of fact, the only producers of wealth are the ma.s.s of manual labourers, and that, with certain unimportant exceptions, the economic values produced by all labourers are equal. Hence he argued that all wealth ought to go to the labourers, and that all labourers were ent.i.tled to approximately equal shares of it. The later socialists aim at reaching the same conclusion, and they start with two doctrines, a moral and an economic, likewise. Having arrived, however, at a truer theory of production--having recognised that labour is not the sole producer, and that some men produce incalculably more than others--they have, in order to support their demand for an equality of possession, been obliged to supplement their repudiation of the economic theory of their predecessors, by repudiating their theory of eternal justice also, and introducing another of a wholly opposite character. While Karl Marx contended that, in justice, production and possession were inseparable, the later socialists contend that there is no connection between them, and that it is perfectly easy to convert to this moral view every human being who is likely to suffer by its adoption. Thus the difference between the earlier and the later socialists is as follows: The earlier socialists started with a theory of justice which is in harmony with common-sense and the general instincts of mankind; and this theory was pressed into the service of socialism only by being a.s.sociated with a false theory of production. The later socialists start with a truer theory of production; and they reconcile this with their own practical programme, only by a.s.sociating it with a false moral psychology. In each case a fallacy is the basis of the socialistic conclusion; and without a fallacy somewhere--a fallacy which is pushed about, like a mouse under a table-cloth--no socialistic conclusion even tends to develop itself from the premises.

And what is true of the main arguments of the later, as of the earlier socialists, is equally true of their subsidiary arguments also, from those which refer to the generalisations of the sociologists of the nineteenth century, and base themselves on the confusion between speculative truth and practical, down to those which are drawn from the absurd psychological supposition that all motives are interchangeable, and that those which actuate the artist, the anchorite, and the soldier can be made to replace by means of a vote or a sermon those which at present actuate the masters of industrial enterprise. On whatever argumentative point the socialists, as socialists, lay stress, there, under one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears. In short, their arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them.

And in this there is nothing wonderful. The more logically and ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to rea.s.sert itself as the logical basis of that which they desire to prove.

The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a cla.s.s no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which dispa.s.sionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the whole human race refutes? In the case of some preachers of socialism the answer lies on the surface. Socialism is of all creeds that which it is easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like "patriotism"

in the days of Dr. Johnson, it is often "the last refuge of a scoundrel," or of a desperate and ambitious fool. But I here put such cases altogether aside. What I here have in view are men who are morally and intellectually honest, and many of whom, indeed, are intellectually above the average. How is the affinity for one common error, and the pa.s.sionate promulgation of it in forms, many of which are conflicting, to be accounted for in the case of men like these?

The answer to this is to be found, not in their intellect, but in their temperament. It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of mathematics. With the men who become socialists the case is closely similar. Just as certain men are incapable of dealing with the abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of their const.i.tutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with regard to their condition or quality.

To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive of those possessing it. Such persons are all distinguished, though naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow a phrase of President Roosevelt's, we may aptly call an _inflammation_ of the social sympathies. This makes such persons magnify into intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men accept as part of the "rough and tumble" of life; and it thus renders them abnormally impatient of the actual, and abnormally preoccupied with the ideal. The ideal vision which they see arising out of the actual is for them so illuminated, as though by a kind of limelight, that the details of the actual, thrown into comparative obscurity, either cannot be minutely distinguished by them, or, like the words of an unwelcome talker, cannot fix their attention. Without habitual concentration of the attention on the subject-matter with which reason deals, no reasoning can deal with it to any practical purpose; and men of that cla.s.s from which socialists of the higher kind are recruited, are men who fail to understand the modern industrial process, because they are hindered by their temperament from giving a sufficient attention to its details. They derive from them vivid impressions, but no practical knowledge, like Turner when he painted a train swathed in its own vapour, and flus.h.i.+ng the wet air with the fires of its lamps and furnace. From a study of Turner's picture of "Rain, Steam, and Speed,"

it would be impossible for any human being to conjecture how a locomotive was constructed. It would be still more impossible to form any judgment as to how its slide-valves, or its blast, or the tubes of its boiler might be improved. It is similarly impossible for men of the socialistic temperament to understand the general process of industry, or to judge how it can and how it can not be altered, from the purely spectacular impressions which its intricate parts produce on them.

But the ingrained inability of such men to understand that which they would revolutionise does not reveal itself in their errors of theory only. It reveals itself still more strikingly in their own relations to life. If we allow for exceptional cases, such as that of Robert Owen, who was in his earlier days a competent man of business, we shall find that the theorists who desire to socialise wealth are generically deficient in the higher energies that produce it. Though they doubtless could, like most men who are not cripples or idiots, make a living by some form of manual labour, they have none of them done anything to enlarge the powers of industry, or even to sustain them at their present pitch of efficiency. They have never made two blades of gra.s.s grow where one blade grew before. They have never applied chemistry to the commercial manufacture of chemicals. They have never organised the systems or improved the s.h.i.+ps and engines by which food finds its way from the prairies to the cities which would else be starving. If in some city or district an old industry declines they demand with tears that the thousands thus thrown out of employment shall be set by the state to do or produce something, even though this be a something which is not wanted by anybody. They never set themselves to devise, as was done in the English Midlands, some new commodity, such as the modern bicycle, which was not only a means of providing the labourers with a maintenance, but was also a notable addition to the wealth of the world at large. They fail to do these things for the simple reason that they cannot do them; and they cannot do them because they are deficient alike in the interest requisite for understanding how they are done, and in the concentrated practical energy which is no less requisite for the doing of them.

At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own studies and observations--the fact, namely, that the social leaders of men are divided into two cla.s.ses, _those who dream about reforming the industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone advance and accomplish it_. Here we have the conclusion of the whole matter. These two cla.s.ses are contrasted, not because in mere intellect one is inferior to the other, but because when they are dealing with the industrial affairs of life these affairs appeal to them in two contrasted ways. One of these cla.s.ses takes men and nature as they are.

With the utmost minuteness it masters the secrets of the latter, with the utmost minuteness it directs the actions of the former; and in seeking wealth for itself it brings about those conditions which alone can make added wealth a practical possibility for all. The other cla.s.s, occupied not with what is but what ought to be, fails to understand what can be, because it does not understand what is. The men of whom this cla.s.s is composed--the men whose temperamental deficiency now finds its fullest expression in socialism, as it did formerly in theories of ultra-democratic individualism, are like amateur architects, and amateur sanitary engineers, who, thinking in pictures, and having no knowledge of structure, condemn existing houses and existing systems of drainage, and would replace them with palaces which no builder could build, with arches which would collapse from the weight of their own materials, and magnificent cloacae the waters in which would have to run uphill.

The theory, then, of socialism, let it take what form it will--the theory which represents as practicable by one device or another the social equalisation of economically unequal men--is a theory which, in minds which are intellectually honest, can develop itself only in proportion as these minds are incapable of grasping in their connected completeness the actual facts of life; and that such is the case has been ill.u.s.trated in the preceding chapters by a systematic a.n.a.lysis of all the crucial arguments on which socialists have rested their case from the earliest day of socialistic thought to the latest.

The reader, however, must observe the manner in which this statement is qualified. In speaking of the arguments of the socialists, I speak of those that are crucial only--that is to say, of those arguments used by socialistic thinkers in support of their programme in so far as that programme is peculiar. It is necessary to note this because, as a matter of fact, with such of their arguments as are proper to socialism only, the philosophers of socialism and their disciples frequently a.s.sociate others which are not peculiar to the socialistic scheme at all, but which nevertheless mult.i.tudes of men who call themselves socialists regard as being at once the most important and practicable parts of it; and these I have in consequence reserved for separate treatment. They are three in number, and are as follows:

The first relates to the remuneration of the ordinary manual labourer, and deals with the question of what his just remuneration is. According to Marx this question is easily settled. Of every thousand labourers a.s.sociated in any given industry, each produces, with few and unimportant exceptions, a thousandth part of the whole exchangeable product; and his just remuneration is a thousandth part of the value of it. The intellectual socialists of to-day, while repudiating as we have seen the doctrine that the labourer's claim to remuneration is limited to the values produced by him, and contending that he has a further right to the product of the ability of others, constantly declare that, even according to the moral standard of Marx, he is usually defrauded at present of a large part of his due; or that, in most if not all industries, his wages represent but a part of the full value produced by him. Whether this is so or not is a question not of theory but of fact, and one which can only be answered by discovering some intelligible basis on which the values produced by labour in a general way may be estimated, as distinct from those produced by effort of other kinds.

With this question I shall deal in the following chapter.

The second relates to those forms of individual income which are covered by the word interest, when used in a comprehensive sense. It being admitted by the later socialists, in opposition to the earlier, that the directive ability of the few is, in the modern world, a productive agency no less truly than labour is, many of these socialists are now anxious to concede that the man of ability is ent.i.tled to such values, no matter how large, as are due to the active exercise of his own exceptional powers; but they contend that, as soon as his personal activity ceases, his claim to any influx of further wealth should therewith cease also. Let him spend his acc.u.mulations, they say, on his own gratifications as he will; but neither he nor his descendants can be suffered in moral justice to hold or apply them in such a manner that they will renew themselves, and yield an income to recipients who do nothing to make them fructify. To numbers of people who repudiate most of the socialistic programme, this doctrine as to interest appeals as at once just and practicable. If the state could appropriate all incomes due to interest, as distinct from those which represent the product of active ability, an enormous fund would, they think, be available for general distribution, and the ideals of socialism, in so far as they are practicable or desirable, might thus be realised by other than socialistic means. This argument, likewise, will have its own chapter--or rather two chapters--allotted to it.

The third of these arguments or proposals which, though not in themselves socialistic, are popularly a.s.sociated with socialism, relates to equality of opportunity. To this also I will devote a separate chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] While these pages were being corrected for the press, a number of utterances have been made by English clerics--Episcopalian and Nonconformist--precisely similar in purpose and spirit to those of the author here quoted.

CHAPTER XII

THE JUST REWARD OF LABOUR AS ESTIMATED BY ITS ACTUAL PRODUCTS

Since the educated socialists of to-day admit that in the modern world wealth is produced by two functionally different cla.s.ses--a majority who labour and a minority by whom this labour is directed; or by two different faculties--namely, labour and directive ability--the question of how much of the total product or its value is produced by one cla.s.s or agency, and how much by the other, is, for all social reformers, and not for socialists only, a question of the first importance; for in the minds of numbers, who care little about ideal transfigurations of society, the doctrines of socialism leave one vivid conviction, which is this--that, though the labourers in the modern world do not produce everything, though the ability of those directing them is a productive agent also, and though part of the wealth of modern nations is undoubtedly produced by this, yet the men of ability produce much less than they manage to keep, while the labourers produce much more than is represented by the wages which they get; that labour in this way, even if in no other, is suffering at present a general and intolerable wrong; and that socialism is simply a system by which this wrong will be righted.[18]

Now, this alleged wrong is essentially an affair of quant.i.ty. If the products of any typical firm--one, let us say, which produces chemicals--are represented by the number a hundred, and if fifty represents the amount which at present is the share of labour, the rest being taken by men of directive ability--a picked body of organisers, chemists, and inventors--labour, it is contended, produces more than the fifty, which is all that it at present gets. Yes; but how much more? It is not contended that it produces the entire hundred. Does it produce, then, sixty, or sixty-five, or seventy, or eighty-three, or what? Unless such a wrong as this can have some extent a.s.signed to it--unless it can be measured approximately by reference to some intelligible standard--it is not only difficult to deal with it; it is impossible to be sure that it exists. Of course we are here not contemplating individual cases.

That some employes may, under existing conditions, get less than their work is worth, is possible and likely enough. It is equally likely or possible that others may get more. We must confine ourselves to what happens generally. We must take labour as a whole, on the one hand, and directive ability on the other, and ask how we may estimate, with rough but substantial accuracy, the proportion of the joint product respectively produced by each.

At first sight it may seem that this problem is incapable of any definite solution; and some socialistic writers have done their best to obscure it. The efficiency of labour, they say, is in the modern world largely due, no doubt, to the action of directive ability; but ability could produce nothing unless it had labour to direct; whence it is inferred that the claim of labour on the product may in justice be almost anything short of the absolute total. To this abstract argument we will presently come back; but we will first examine another urged by a celebrated thinker, which, though less extreme in its implications, would, were it only sound, be even more fatal to our chances of arriving at the conclusion sought for. The thinker to whom I refer is Mill, who a.s.signs to this argument a very prominent place in the opening chapter of his _Principles of Political Economy_.

Certain economists have, so he says, debated "whether nature gives more a.s.sistance to labour in one kind of industry than in another"; and he endeavours to show that the question is in its very essence unanswerable. "When two conditions," he proceeds, "are equally necessary for producing the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say that so much is produced by one, and so much by the other. It is like attempting to decide which of the factors five and six contributes most to the production of thirty." And if this argument is true of nature and labour, it is equally true of labour and the ability by which labour is directed. Thus a great ocean liner which, in Mill's language, would be "the effect," could not be produced at all without the labour of several thousand labourers; and it is equally true that it could not be produced at all unless the masters of various sciences, designers, inventors, and organisers, directed the labour of the labourers in certain specific ways. Both conditions, then, being "necessary for producing the effect at all," the portions of it due to each would, according to Mill's argument, be indeterminable. Let us consider, therefore, if Mill's argument is sound. We shall find that it is vitiated by a fallacy which will, as soon as we have perceived it, show us the way to the truth of which we are now in search. Let us begin with taking the argument as he himself applies it.

He brings it forward with special reference to agriculture, and aims it at the contention of a certain school of economists that nature in agriculture did more than in other industries. To urge this, says Mill, is nonsense, for the simple reason that though nature in agriculture does something, it is impossible to determine whether the something is relatively much or little. Let us, he says in effect, take the products of any farm, which we may for convenience' sake symbolise as so many loaves; and it is obviously absurd to inquire which produces most of them--the soil or the farm labourers. The soil without the labourers would produce no loaves at all. The labourers would produce no loaves if they had not the soil to work upon.

Now, if there were only one farm in the world, and one grade of labour, and if every acre of this farm, when the same labour was applied to it, would always yield the same amount of produce--let us say one loaf--Mill's argument would be true. The actual state of the case is, however, very different. Acres vary very greatly in quality; and if we take four acres of varying degrees of fertility, to all of which is applied the same amount of labour, then, while from the worst of the acres this labour will elicit one loaf, it will elicit from the others, let us say, according to their degrees of fertility, two loaves, three loaves, and four loaves respectively. Here the labour being in each of the four cases the same, and the additional loaves resulting in three cases only, it is obvious that the difference between the larger products and the less is not due to the labour, but to certain additional qualities present, in the three superior acres and not present in the worst one. In other words, although in producing loaves--or, as Mill describes it, "the effect"--the parts played by labour and nature are indefinite and incommensurable so long as the land, the labour, and the effect remain all three the same, the parts become immediately measurable when the effect begins to vary, and one of the causes, and only one of them, at the same time varies also.

This truth can be yet further elucidated by the very ill.u.s.tration which Mill cities in disproof of it. It is absurd to ask, he says, whether the number five or six does most, when they are multiplied together, to produce "the effect" thirty. This is true so long as "the effect" thirty is constant; but if on occasions the thirty is increased to forty, and if whenever this happens the six has increased to eight, we know that the extra ten which our multiplication yields us is not due to the five, the number which remains unchanged, but to an extra two now present in the number that was once six. Or again let us take as "the effect" the speed of a motor-car which is raced over a mile of road. Unless two conditions were present--the engine and some ground to run upon--the car could not run at all; and if there were only one road and one car in the world, it would be absurd to inquire how much of the speed was due to the merits of the engine, and how much to the character of the road's surface. But if, the car remaining unchanged, the surface of the road was improved, and a speed was thereupon developed of thirty miles an hour instead of twenty, we should, with regard to the increment, at once be able to say that it was due to the surface of the road, and was not due to the engine. Conversely, if the road were unchanged, but the car had a new engine, and the speed under these conditions increased in the same way, the increment would be evidently attributable to the engine and not the road.

And the same observations apply to labour and directive ability, whenever the operations of both are essential to a given product. If the ability and the labour were always inevitably constant, and the product as to quality and amount were similarly constant also, we could not say that so much or so little of the effect was due to one cause, and so much or so little to the other. If there were in the world only a thousand s.h.i.+pwrights, and these men, working always under the same director, always produced in a year one s.h.i.+p of an unchanging kind, we could not say which of its parts or how much of its value were due to the man directing, and which or how much were due to the men directed.

But if for one year this director were to retire and another was to take his place, and, the same labourers being directed by this new master, the result was the production not of one s.h.i.+p but of two; and if, when the year was ended, and the old master came back again, the annual product once more was not the two s.h.i.+ps but one, we could then say, as a matter of common-sense with regard to the year during which the two vessels were built, that the second vessel, whatever might be the case with the first, was due wholly to the ability of the master, and not to the labour of the men. In other words, the ability of the director of labour produces so much of the product, or of that product's value as exceeds what was produced by the labourers before their labour was directed by him, and would cease to be produced any longer as soon as his direction was withdrawn.

That in the case of any result which requires separable causes for its production, this method of allocating to these causes respectively so much of the result and so much of it only, is a method always adopted in all practical reasoning, may be seen by taking a result which is not beneficial but criminal. Twenty Russian labourers, all loyal to the Czar, are, let us say, employed to dig out a cellar under a certain street, and to fill it with cases which ostensibly contain wine.

Subsequently, as the Czar is pa.s.sing, he is killed by a huge explosion.

It then becomes apparent that the so-called cellar was a mine, and the harmless-looking cases had really been filled with dynamite. Now, if all those concerned in the consummation of this catastrophe were tried, it is perfectly evident that the part played by the labourers would be sharply discriminated from that played by the man employing them; and, although they contributed something which was necessary to the production of the result, it would certainly have been admitted by General Trepoff himself that they had contributed nothing to its essential and criminal elements. It is equally evident that the increment of wealth which results from the obedience of labourers to injunctions which do not emanate from themselves, is produced by the man who gives the injunctions, and not by the men who obey them.

But here we must return to the argument, already mentioned in pa.s.sing, which may be restated thus: A thousand labourers, directed by their own intelligence only, produce a product whose amount we will call a thousand. The same labourers are directed by a man of ability, and the product rises from one thousand to two. But if the production of this second thousand is to be credited to the man of ability on the ground that, were the ability absent, no second thousand would be produced, we may reach by the same reasoning a conclusion precisely opposite, and credit not only the first, but both the thousands to labour, on the ground that, if the labour were absent, nothing would be produced at all. The argument is plausible; and in order to understand its fallacy we must give our attention to a fact, not generally realised, which is involved in all practical reasoning about all causes whatsoever.

If we use the word "cause" in its strict speculative sense, the number of causes involved in the simplest effect is infinite. Let us take, for example, the speed of a horse which wins a race. Why does the speed of this horse exceed that of the others? We may in answer point to qualities of its individual organism. But these will carry us back to all its recorded ancestors--sires and dams for a large number of generations: and even so we shall have been taken but a small part of our way. The remotest of these ancestors--why were they horses at all?

For our answer we must travel through the stages of organic evolution, till we reach the point at which animal and vegetable life were one. Had any of these antecedents been missing, the winning race-horse would not have won the race. Nor is this all. We have to include in our causes air, gravitation, and the fact that the earth is solid. No horse could win on turf which was based on vapour. But by all the thousands who witness a great race this whole ma.s.s of ulterior, though necessary, causes is ignored. The only causes which for them have any practical interest are those comprised in the organism of the winning horse itself. Who would contend that this horse had not won its own victory, on the ground that part of its own speed--a part which could not be calculated--was contributed by the crust of the earth, or the general const.i.tution of the universe? Any one arguing thus would be howled down as a madman. Now, why is this? Why would the common-sense of mankind, in a practical matter like a race, instinctively exercise this kind of eclecticism, concentrating itself on certain causes and absolutely ignoring others? Such behaviour is not arbitrary. It depends on a principle inherent in all practical reasoning whatsoever. Let us see what this principle is.

When, with any practical purpose in view, we insist that anything is the cause of anything else, or produces anything else, we are always selecting, out of an incalculable number of causes, one cause or agency which, under the circ.u.mstances in view, may or may not be present; which a careless person may neglect to introduce; which an ignorant person may be persuaded to take away; or a recognition of which will influence human conduct somehow; while all other causes, which no one proposes to take away, or which no one is able to take away, are a.s.sumed by all parties, but they are not considered by anybody. Why should they be considered? Not only are they so numerous that no intellect could deal with them, but they have, since with regard to them there is no difference of opinion, no place in any practical discussion at all. If a ton of stone is to be placed on a piece of framework, men may reasonably discuss whether the framework is strong enough to bear it, or whether material is not being wasted in making it stronger than necessary. What will happen without an additional girder? Or what will happen if we take two girders away? Will the stone fall or not? These questions belong to the domain of practical reasoning because to take a girder away, or else introduce fresh ones, lies within the power of the disputants. But no practical men would think of complicating the discussion by calculating what would happen if they suspended the action of gravitation, in which case the stone would need no support whatever; for to suspend the action of gravitation is within the power of n.o.body. If two men are debating in the middle of the night at midsummer whether there is enough oil in the lamp to keep it alight till sunrise, they are debating a question of a strictly practical kind: for it rests with them to put in more oil or not. What will happen if they do not? That is the point at issue. But they neither of them would debate what would happen if the movement of the earth were r.e.t.a.r.ded, and the midsummer morning were delayed till the hour at which it dawns in winter. They do not discuss this contingency, for they rightly a.s.sume it to be impossible, and consequently the discussion of it would have no practical meaning.

And now let us go back to the question of labour and ability; and we shall see, in the case of products to the production of which both are essential, that, while ability is the practical cause of all such amounts or values as exceed what would have been produced by labour if there were no ability to direct it, it cannot be claimed in any similar sense that all amounts and values are conversely produced by labour, which exceed what would have been produced by the action of directive ability, if no labour existed for such ability to direct.

The reason why labour, in this respect, differs from ability is as follows: Whether directive ability shall or shall not exert itself depends upon human volitions which, according to circ.u.mstances, are alterable, just as it depends upon alterable human volitions whether a framework of steel be constructed in this way or in that; or whether a lamp be replenished with oil or no. But whether ordinary manual labour shall or shall not exert itself, is not similarly dependent on human volition at all. Let a nation be organised, no matter on what principles, the majority of the citizens will have to labour in any case. The supposition of their labouring is bound up with the supposition of their existence. To suppose that the labourers as a whole could permanently cease to labour, is like supposing that they could exist and yet permanently cease to breathe. They can cease to labour for moments, just as for moments a man can hold his breath, as they do on the occasion of a strike; but they can do so for moments only. Except in a region where climatic conditions are exceptional, what makes men labour is not an employing cla.s.s, but nature. Directive ability does not _make_ them labour; it finds them labouring. It finds them like wheels which are driven by an eternal stream, and which must turn and turn for ever, until they fall to pieces. To inquire, then, what would happen if labour ceased to exert itself is like inquiring what would happen if the earth were to r.e.t.a.r.d its diurnal motion, or if some natural force--for example, that of gravitation--were to strike work for the sake of intimidating the cause of all things. Such suppositions are for practical purposes meaningless. But with the directive ability of the few, as opposed to the directed labour of the many, the case is dramatically different. For while there never can be any question of the directive faculties of the few being left alone in a world where there is no labour--for in the case of the majority, nature, the eternal taskmaster, will always make labour compulsory, so long as stomachs want food and naked backs want clothing--there constantly has been, and there may be again, a question of whether this ma.s.s of ordinary human labour shall find any exceptional ability so developed and so organised as to direct it. In the earlier states of society no such ability was operative. In savage communities it is not operative now; and there is constantly a question, among modern civilised nations, whenever the security of social inst.i.tutions is threatened, of the action of this faculty being temporarily suspended altogether, either because those persons possessing it are deprived of the motives without which they will not exert it, or else because the labourers individually, on one ground or another, are impatient of submitting themselves to the direction of any intelligences but their own.

In other words, when we are seeking to measure the products due respectively to directive ability and to labour, by computing what would happen if either of these agencies were withdrawn, the withdrawal of one of them--that is to say, of ability--can alone be taken as possible by any practical reasoner. We have before us practically two alternatives only. One is a condition of things under which the exceptional ability of the few directs and co-ordinates the labour of the average many. The other is a condition of things under which the labour of the average many has to exert itself with the same severe continuity, but is guided, co-ordinated, and stimulated by none of those special faculties which raise a few men above the general level of efficiency. When these special faculties are applied to the direction of average labour, the output of wealth increases. When their application is interfered with or ceases, the output of wealth declines; and in the only practical sense of the words "cause" or "producer," these faculties of direction, or the exceptional persons who exercise them, are the true causes or producers of the whole of that portion of wealth which comes into being with their activity, and disappears or dwindles with their inaction.

The practical validity of this method of computation has been formally recognised, though not completely understood, by some of the later socialists themselves. Mr. Webb, for example, and his a.s.sociates, have admitted that, of the wealth of the modern world a considerable part consists of "the rent of business ability."[19] This way of expressing the matter is true so far as it goes. It expresses, however, one-half of the truth only. Mr. Webb and his friends mean that, if we take the world as it is, the products due to ability in any given industry consist of the quant.i.ty by which the products of one firm, because it is managed by a man of superior talent, exceed the products of another firm which differs from the first only in the fact that it is managed by another man whose talent is not so great. They a.s.sume as their starting-point, in every case, the presence of directive ability sufficient to organise the labourers in such a way that the products of the entire group shall provide the labourers with wages which are up to a certain standard, and a minimum of profit or of surplus values besides. This lowest grade of ability is one of the postulates of their argument, just as in calculating agricultural rent the first postulate of our argument is a lowest grade of land.

Now, in connection with many questions of a more or less limited kind, this a.s.similation of the products of superior ability to rent, and of ability of a lower grade to land which is practically rentless, will serve our purpose well enough. Between the two cases, however, there is a vast and underlying difference; and when we consider our present problem under its widest and most vital aspect, it is the difference, not the likeness, between them, which const.i.tutes our main concern. The nature of this difference has been pointed out already. When we are discussing rent and agriculture, land is a necessary a.s.sumption, for unless there were land, there could be no agriculture at all; but there can be, has been, and still is in the world, abundance of labour without directive ability; and while it would be meaningless to ask what would happen to rent if all land disappeared, the question of what would happen to labour if all ability were in abeyance is precisely the question raised by all schemes of economic revolution, and one which has been constantly ill.u.s.trated by the facts of economic history.

Of such facts we may take the following, picturesque example: In the eighteenth century the Jesuit Fathers in Uruguay succeeded in teaching the natives a variety of Western arts, among others that of watch-making, and so long as the Jesuits were on the spot to direct them the natives exhibited much manual skill. But when, owing to political causes, the Jesuits were driven from the country, the natives sank back into their previous industrial helplessness. The temporary efficiency of their labour had been due to the ability that directed it; and as soon as that ability was withdrawn, the labour, left to itself, shrank again to its old relative inefficiency. Now, here we have a case precisely a.n.a.logous to that which we have to deal with when considering at the present day how much of the products of any civilised nation is produced by the labour of the average units of the population, and how much by the ability of the exceptional men directing them. It is not a question of how much this or that group of labourers, which is directed by a man of the highest grade of ability, produces in excess of the products of some similar group which is directed by another man whose ability is somewhat inferior; it is a question of how much the same nation would produce, if every director of other men's labour were withdrawn, and the present labouring units left to their own devices.

These two questions, though not mutually exclusive, differ as much as the question of why one of two balloons rises above the earth to a height of three miles and a furlong, while a second balloon reaches the height of three miles only, differs from the question of why either of them rises in the air at all. Mr. Webb and his friends, with their theory of the rent of ability, confine themselves to the first of these--namely, the question of why one balloon rises a furlong higher than the other. The real question which we have to deal with here is why both balloons lift their aeronauts at least three miles into the clouds, while other men who have no balloon to lift them can get no higher than the top of the church steeple. Or to come back to literal fact, our problem must be expressed thus: Let us take the present population of Great Britain or America, and, having noted the wealth at present annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with, every man, who, in virtue of his a.s.similated scientific knowledge, his inventive gifts, his constructive and practical imagination, his energy, his initiative, and his natural powers of leaders.h.i.+p, was better able to direct others than the other nine were to direct themselves?

We cannot make this experiment in precisely the way described; but history will provide us with equivalents which are sufficiently accurate for our purpose. There are, for example, in the case of Great Britain, data which have enabled statisticians with a considerable degree of unanimity to estimate the values produced per head of the industrial population at various periods from the reign of Charles II. till to-day, and to reduce these values to comparable terms of money. Now, we need not insist too much on the accuracy of the figures in question; but one broad fact is unmistakably shown by them--that the product per head towards the close of the nineteenth century was, to say the least of it, from four to five times as great as it was towards the close of the sixteenth. To what, then, was this increase in industrial productivity due? It was not due to any change in the spontaneous workings of nature.

It can only have been due to some change in the character of human effort--either in that of the effort of each separate manual labourer, or else in that of the men by whom the labour of others is directed. The average labourer, however, at the close of the nineteenth century did not differ, as an isolated labouring unit, from the average labourer as he was at the time of the fire of London. The increase in industrial productivity must therefore be necessarily due to a change in the ability of those by whom the labourers are organised and directed. And here _a priori_ reasoning is confirmed by actual facts, for the change which has taken place in the cla.s.s which directs the labour of others has been, during the period in question, of the most notorious and astonis.h.i.+ng kind. That cla.s.s had been progressively absorbing into itself, and concentrating on the conduct of industry, ambitions, intelligences, and strong practical wills, which formerly found their outlets in very different channels--ecclesiastical, political, and more especially military. Man for man, then, industry became more productive, because to an increasing degree the ablest men of the nation concentrated their exceptional powers on directing the business of production; and any one who wished to push things to an extreme conclusion might contend that the entire amount--some four or five hundred per cent.--by which the product per head in the year 1880 exceeded the product per head some two hundred years before, was due to directive ability, and directive ability only; and that the labourers, in their capacity of labourers, had no claim whatsoever to it. We will, however, put the case in a much more moderate form. We will, for argument's sake, concede to self-directed labour all that increase in the values produced per head, which took place between the time of Charles II. and the general establishment in Great Britain of the modern industrial system, with its huge mills and factories, and its concomitant differentiation of the directing cla.s.s from the directed--an event which had been securely accomplished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In making this concession, we shall, indeed, be defying fact, and ignoring the improvements, alike in manufacture and agriculture, which had taken place during the hundred years preceding, especially during the last fifty of them, and which were solely due to a minority of exceptionally able men.[20] We shall thus be conceding to the labourer far more than his due. Certainly no one can contend that we concede too little.

Let us take, then, the beginning of the nineteenth century as our standing-point; and, a.s.suming that labour was the sole producer then, compare its productivity per head with the productivity of industrial effort--of labour and ability combined--some eight or nine decades later. The labourers of Great Britain as a body, to the exclusion of all other cla.s.ses, actually divided among themselves, about the year 1880, more wealth per head--something like forty-five per cent.--than would have been theirs if they had lived in the days of their own grandfathers, and been able to appropriate as wages the income of the entire country.