When we come to the subject of Distribution, we are facing what may be called the main field of our social disorders. Under this head, and that of the next chapter, Consumption, come all questions of property rights, with the vast structures of the civil law ensuing; the whole money question—laboriously complex; the demands of the labour movement; the protests of the “leisure class”—we are on the great battlefield of modern thought.

Let us approach it simply and naturally along the lines laid down in preceding chapters.

Distribution is a natural corollary of production. Society produces through its individual members in ever-growing surplus, and must distribute that surplus among its members to the best social advantage. What that advantage is needs no abstruse exposition; it is simply to have all the members of society supplied with what they need in order that they may so continue to serve society.

As social functions develop, the rate of production increases, as well as the relative distance of the consumers; and with them increases the necessity for an ever wider, swifter, and easier distribution of product. The circulation of our social supplies is as essential to social growth as the circulation of blood is to the growth of the body. This is seen plainly in the course of history. In the earliest times the young civilisations depend on great waterways for their life and prosperity as the easiest means of transportation; and water transportation remains one of our most important avenues of distribution. But seacoast and river bank were not enough for us, land transportation must develop too, and it has done so, wonderfully.

At first the mother-of-all-industries, the savage woman, was the only beast of burden. Then stronger animals were pressed into the service, and reached their height of usefulness in the age of caravan traffic. The drag, the sled, and final triumph—the wheel, were invented, and the world rolled on more and more swiftly. With the wheel grew the road, and civilisation leaped forward. The road became a railroad, tireless mechanical forces superseded the quadruped, and the distribution of social products to-day is truly marvellous.

The goods of the round world are gathered into local distributing centres, carried across continent and ocean, and scattered in tiny parcels to the millions upon millions of remote consumers. Each section contributes its particular wealth. The ice goes south, the oranges go north, the coffee goes west, the tobacco goes east, the manufactures go everywhere.

If we could watch a little globe in action and see the coal pouring slowly up out of little holes, and flowing off in black streaks across land and sea; the oil going with it, but farther and faster; the wheat yellowing whole provinces, heaped up in golden mountains, carried off in thick yellow streams in train-loads and shiploads; the gloves of France on the hands of Americans, the tools of Americans in the hands of Russians; the whole flux and swing of our social circulation wherein one man’s life is fed and strengthened by the fruit of thousands of far-born foreigners,—if we could get this clearly in mind, the organic relation of society would be plainer.

On what line of race-advantage has this tremendous evolution come to pass? Why distribute so widely? Why is it not better to produce and consume locally, each man for himself, as Tolstoi would have us?

The advantage is easily demonstrated if we accept the working plan of organic evolution. If the development of Society is in the universal line of march; if it is, if not an “object,” at least an observed tendency, for the loose scarce-human proto-social stuff to move on steadily toward an always-increasing degree of common intelligence, common activity, common enjoyment, common peace, and power, and love,—then every process which promotes this movement is advantageous.

Since the development of a society requires common service, and that common service requires for its wise direction a common consciousness, therefore every modification of human activity which develops common consciousness is advantageous. Since the line of advance in socialisation is from a state of self-supporting individualism toward a state of collectively supporting socialism, therefore every extension of our economic processes along that line is advantageous. Self-support develops only egoism. Mutual support develops mutualism. The more general the base of our maintenance, the more general our advance toward omniism—toward that degree of common consciousness which shall best protect, supply, and develop everyone.

When each man took care of himself, he had no interest in, or love for his neighbour; when their small “spheres of influence” touched, there was a combat. In such conditions no Society was possible. When small communities or large are self-supporting, they have no interest in, or love for each other; this stage of development is the stage of war. Their “spheres of influence” touch, and there is combat. When the economic processes of the world are in common—and they are already beginning to be so—we have the sure basis for common consciousness, for international peace, and all high development; only hindered by the preserved ghosts of previous national, local, and personal “states of mind.”

That mutual love which Tolstoi and his kind would see established depends primarily on the widest extension of our common interest, the widest distribution of our specialised production. The law of organic advantage in such relation is clear. Self-support is a very short range of life. Any trifling accident may break the circuit, and the individual is lost. The wider the circuit of distribution the safer the component individual. With the universal insurance of Society’s whole working base, there is the largest wealth possible; the largest safety, the smallest risk from any source. There is also, still more importantly, a gain in development.

In a large well-running organism there is room for rest, for the accumulating of energy to apply to special needs. Too prolonged disuse will ultimately eliminate the neglected part, to be sure; but for the time being, a well-organised society can support in idleness those whose service is no less valuable for being intermittent and irregular. The basic “vital organs” work all the time. The later “special organs” not only may but must rest. Our “special senses,” our delicate nervous system, the dominating brain, are easily injured by use which is perfectly normal to heart or lung. By wide distribution society is enabled to support all its parts, whether active or passive, and so preserve a greater sum of usefulness. We approximate the same idea in any mutual benefit or insurance society.

It is to broaden the base of supplies and extend the time of payment—a sort of physical credit system. A society where the widest possible range of productivity is maintained, with the largest margin for emergencies, is richer and stronger than one which has “all its eggs in one basket.” So the underlying laws of social advantage have worked upon the human race, developing transportation facilities, physical, mechanical, and psychical (meaning here those purely mental agreements and hypotheses by which we facilitate commerce), until we have a system of distribution which would seem, at first sight, quite equal to the needs of the world.

But well we know that it is not! Bitterly and deeply we know that it is not. Some malign force is working at cross-purposes to clog and check and divert this social circulation, and produce the morbid conditions we know so well—the congestion of supplies in some quarters, with the ensuing train of social diseases, and the lack of supplies in other quarters, with another train of diseases consequent.

If there is one conspicuous fact in social economics, it is this peculiar perversion of our distribution system. Those streams of coal and wheat and oil are mysteriously checked at various points, they accumulate where they are not wanted, they filter, slow and scant, in insufficient driblets where there is most need. They are violently pumped out in sudden jerks, they sullenly retreat and coagulate for long, slow periods. What is it that ails our all-important processes of distribution? Merely the human mind. Only our superstitions. Simply the action of false concepts upon conduct again, our old enemies, the Ego concept and the Want theory, gaining headway in these vast currents of modern industry, and doing in large conspicuous ways the same evil they always did, less visibly. From the very beginning, the men through whom these great processes must needs be carried on, have been labouring under a delusion. They supposed that all this commerce and exchange was due to their individual exertions, and that the purpose of it all was to pay them. Better proof of the elastic capacity of the human brain could hardly be asked.

That a man carrying a pack on his back should say, “I do it,” is natural; that he should still say, “I do it,” when he puts the pack upon a mule and drives the beast unwillingly along, is still natural. But that this “I” should swell and swell from mule train to train of cars, from canoe to Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, is marvellous. Now that such a myriad “we” do all this work for such a myriad “us,” it would seem as if the various component “I’s” might have been lost in the shuffle before now. Not a bit.

Acting under the Ego concept, with a sense of justice and of ownership dating from the Ego period, we have arduously bent our minds to the development of a system of laws more elaborately ramified than the twigs of a tree; to follow and preserve the individual rights along every broadening branch of social growth. Governed by the Want theory and its derivatives, we have planted an arbitrary system of inter-individual exchange, like a set of interlocking toll-gates, along every inch of these great roads of progress.

Let us analyse again this group of allied errors, the Want theory. “Work is an expenditure of energy by an individual man whereby to obtain something for the gratification of his wants.” This rests on the assumption that what the man needs to gratify his wants is to be had only by his working. As we know that he does not himself manufacture the articles needed to gratify his wants, but that these articles all and several are made by other people; we assume further that each man owns what he makes, and will not give it up to another without value received—“If a man will not work, neither shall he eat.” And as the supplies of the world are assumed to belong to the existing inhabitants in private ownership, each newcomer, unless inheriting a share in the privately owned world, is expected to “work” before he receives anything.

Confronted by the glaring fact that a new human creature cannot work before he receives anything, but must be supplied with many social products for many years before he can produce in return, we then fall back on the parent and say, “the new human being shall receive nothing from Society except so much as his father is able to earn,” i. e., pay for in work. That system of supplying the young by the unaided activities of the parent, which we find among animals, we assume to be the best for the human race, and so the final distribution of social products is filtered through, not the consuming capacity, but the “earning” capacity of individuals.

If the man with ten children is but a low-grade workman, his earning capacity being but $1.50 a day at our rating, his children receive from Society less than fifteen cents’ worth of supplies each. Their consuming capacity is naturally much greater, but under our assumption that the father represents the family as an economic unit, and that the family shall be restricted in consumption within his power of production, the children are thus supplied with the equivalent of one-tenth an individual’s output.

In some ways we have recognised the mischievous results of this method of distribution, and have begun to supply some of the necessities of life on a wiser plan, as in our system of public education, where we frankly reverse the position. We therein say: “Children are members of Society. The maintenance and progress of Society require that its members be educated to some degree. This degree of common education the individual earning power of the parent cannot provide, but the collective funds of the community can.” So we publicly distribute education, and even enforce it—or try to—on the clear ground that the output of the future citizen depends on his income in youth, and that Society cannot afford to leave that income to be measured by a fraction of a low-grade worker’s output.

Some strictly logical and scientific-minded thinkers do indeed object to this free public education, maintaining that since effort is only made to satisfy wants, therefore, if you satisfy any of man’s wants, you decrease by so much his efforts, you lower the output of Society.

The advocates of free public education, though still clinging to their idols in other departments of life, maintain that education is a different matter, and point with honest pride to the results, showing that a publicly educated community does produce more and behave better than one wherein each man must provide as he can for his children. But in spite of this patent proof they still refuse to fairly admit the new principle involved, and to fairly give up their fallacious old one.

The Want theory assumes that a man has a supply of energy which he may or may not discharge, but that he will not discharge it unless forced to by necessity. If you supply his needs he will discharge no energy whatever, he will not work. This does apply, fairly enough, to an animal’s effort to take things, but does not apply to man’s effort to make things. The fact is that a man has energy according to (a) his physical well-being, and (b) his access to social stimulus; and that, having it, he must discharge it or suffer in the forced retention. The practical question before existing Society is how to supply the most energy to its members and direct it to the most use.

In free education we do supply the young social factor with both energy and direction, so that he grows up better able to work and to work rightly than if left to the degrading influence of this pitiful theory, that the way to make a man work is not to give him anything until he does.

The real process of distribution is to circulate our stores of social nourishment as widely and freely as possible, that we may be always more and more able to work. We are quite consistent in this Pay theory of ours. We carry it out even in regulating the amount of our payment. We hold that not only shall a man have nothing unless he works, but that he shall in no case have more than the equivalent of his work, that no person shall receive anything unless he has “earned” it, given a full equivalent. We are forced to admit that in the life about us this principle is a conspicuous failure; we see those who work the most getting the least; we see those who have the most working the least; and we seek to explain this anomaly by a modification of the Pay concept to this effect: that a man should be paid not only in regard to the amount, but to the value of his work.

With this idea we thought we had reached the height of justice, yet we are forced to admit that this does not serve, either: that the men who do the most valuable work for Society are precisely those least paid, sometimes most punished, and that the men receiving the largest rewards are often the most ordinary functionaries and sometimes rascals. Does anyone presume to claim that selling kerosene oil is so precious a service to Society that the head pedlar should have more money than anybody on earth? Is the maker of steel rails or huge cannon a nobler servant than the maker of bread or the teacher of children? All these are forms of social service truly, but are they fairly paid? The facts do not bear out our theory at all, and we only attribute it to other malign influences, never dreaming that our basic idea is wrong. In sociological law there is no relation whatever, either in amount or quality, between normal human work and any possible “pay,” any more than there is between the work of an eye and a leg and the amount of blood they get. Normal human work is organic action. It is a result of previous good received, not an effort to obtain goods withheld.

That under the system of slave labour a man will work under fear of pain is true. That under the system of wage labour a man will work under hope of a reward is true. But both these systems are transient, superficial, soon outgrown by any live society; neither of them affects in the least the underlying organic law of human work. Our conscious minds have not kept pace with social growth. We are trying to administer the processes of an advanced society on lines of pre-social theories. If anyone seeks to point out these great sociological facts, we cry, “These are Utopian dreams, millennial visions; you are a thousand years ahead of your times!”

Whereas it is we—we, the general public, with all these hereditary heirlooms in our heads in place of facts—that are ten thousand years behind them! We try to explain and assist the highly developed and absolutely interdependent social processes by arguments from a long-outgrown era of individualism. Theories of individual effort, incentive, reward, competition, and “survival of the fittest,” we apply to our own organic functions. If they do not fit, so much the worse for the functions!

If we were individuals, like the beasts, it would all hang together well enough, thus: Here is a Bear. His business is the same old series, maintenance, reproduction, and improvement; to be, to re-be, and to be better. All of these ends he serves by the exercise of his own personal abilities. These abilities, being purely personal, are only called into exercise by personal wants or impulses. If the Bear found his food on a plate before his cave every day he would indeed suffer from fatty degeneration; his powers would decay, he would become less and less Bear because he did less and less Bear-ing.

And conversely, if suitable difficulties (not too great) intervene between him and his food, he develops the faculties to meet the difficulties, and improves. If he is not a smart or strong Bear, and cannot get much for himself and the little Bears, why, let them die; better Bears will survive them, and the race improve by their absence. If too much survival of the fittest left too much food for the survivors, so that they became less fit, why up would pop others less fit also to compete for the food, and thus a beautiful level of Bearishness is maintained. This method of evolution we see plainly and admire, perhaps unduly, as a “natural law.” All laws are natural. If not natural—they are not laws; we only thought they were.

The essential difference between us and the Bears is in our organic relation. The Bears have no common interests, common functions, common good; we have. A perfect balance of highly superior Humans, muscular and ferocious, with just food supply enough to keep up the fighting, and just fighting enough to keep down the food supply, is scarcely a social ideal. The social organism alters the matter completely. The human race improves through production and exchange of products—Work. The work of the human race improves under laws of organic evolution, of increasing specialisation and interdependence. As society advances a man profits less and less by what he does for himself, more and more by what others do for him.

The improvement of a human being is not in his own hands, but in the hands of other human beings. Our line of racial advance is in serving one another, like any other group of organs. This common profit in a common product leads us to wish to improve that product. The product of human beings is improved by supplying the needed energy, stimulus, direction; by putting into the individual in order that we may get out of him the pay first, the work afterwards.

This reverses the whole proposition. It is no longer a matter of the individual workman seeking to satisfy his wants À la Bear. It is Society seeking to raise the productive value of its integers by carefully supplying those forces which produce more and better work. Quite without knowing it Society does this to a considerable extent, hence the working value of a member of an advanced society is greater than that of a member of a low society; but because we have not known the real laws of human production, we have continued to interpret the whole field of social activity in terms of individual competition.

The supply of a man’s needs we have tried to limit strictly to his earning power, refusing to observe that there was no ratio whatever between what a man needs and what he can do—unless, indeed, an inverse one. The fact that a man, well started in lines of work suited to him, will produce continuously long after all his needs are supplied we have tried to account for by assuming new needs as the necessary incentives. Nothing could be clearer—to our view. If a man works only in order to supply his needs, then a given man who does work worth a thousand times as much as another man’s must of course need a thousand times as much. He must, because there is no other reason for his working. And if the working power of the average man shows large and general increase, it is only to be accounted for by shining ranks of hitherto undreamed-of needs, which were evolved to lead him on!

So the missionary, acting on this theory, tries to rouse the contented savage to want things, holding that attitude to be a productive one; and the economist, satisfied with his theory, never looks to see if there is any observable connection between want and work, in race, class, or individual. In reductio ad absurdum the Want theory comes to this. Man works to supply wants. As the act of working does not supply wants, this involves another clause; man works to get wealth to supply wants. And this, if a real law of nature, involves some inevitable connection between the clauses: work must produce wealth and wealth must supply want. Also, if a real law, there must be some proportion between these clauses, the less the want the less the work, the greater the want the greater the work, with the same proportion in the “wealth” which is the intermediate factor understood.

This would make the proposition: A given amount of want urges to an equal amount of work which secures the desired wealth; or, Want equals Work and Work equals Wealth.

If this be so we shall find in society those who want the most do the most work, and those who do the most work have the most wealth. Poverty would be a healthy state, inevitably developing into wealth. Is this the fact? Hardly. What is the fact? This: that man does the most work who is best able to do it, and likes it most.

The way to make people work is to make them able and willing, strong, skilful, ambitious, enthusiastic. When we wish to develop horses to work more and better than previous horses, we do not seek to attain that end by cutting off their oats. The power to work comes from the energy already supplied, not the hypothetic energy of a future reward.

The “pay” comes first; not as payment, but as investment. A man’s work is his payment to Society for value received, and he has to receive it before he can return it. The conscious attitude of the worker should be that of gratitude, of a proud and lavish return for the rich supply received from infancy; his unconscious attitude one of irresistible pressure, discharge of energy. Each of us owes the world our best, because to it we are indebted for all we are and have. In personal intercourse we all know the difference between services done for love, or from a sense of honourable obligation, and services done merely for pay. We know the dignity and honour of the first attitude, the meanness of the second. And yet we prefer to have the whole world’s vital processes degraded and minimised to the level of that hireling service, rather than elevated and multiplied as the limitless outpouring of richly developed members of society.

To which the Want theorist replies: “It is not what we prefer, but what is,” to which again I answer—It is not. The facts of sociology do not bear out the Want theory. The true place of that theory is in the stage next to primitive slavery. The first compulsion to co-ordinate effort was force and fear and pain. Only the slave in danger of death could be made to work. The next compulsion to the still unsocialised ego was that of hireling self-restraint, of withheld food. Observe that this is a purely arbitrary and social condition, involving the ownership of that food by someone else. Primitive man ate without working for many thousands of years, and does yet in many a favoured isle.

He simply picks his food off trees, or hunts and fishes for it, even fights for it. But he does not work for it at that stage of social evolution, much preferring starvation. Later on, being no longer a free agent, the food being forcibly detained until he worked, why, work he did, under the action of such pressure as he could then feel. In that period of evolution when only cruel slavery made men work, the thought that they would ever work in the comparative freedom of the contract system would have been scouted as wildly visionary and Utopian. We can see something of this among our own freedmen, members of a much earlier social status, forcibly incorporated with our advanced body and failing to respond at once to the same stimuli.

Under compulsion they worked. Free, and under no compulsion save self-interest, they do not work as industriously as further advanced races. This does not prove that self-interest is less powerful than compulsion, or that slave labour is better than wage labour, but merely that the negro race is less socialised than the Anglo-Saxon. And we, in order to aid in his social development, are learning to supply him with the social stimuli he needs. Wage labour was a useful stage in economic evolution, just as slave labour was, but the incentive of self-interest is no more final than that of compulsion.

A man will work if you make him, but also, being further developed, he will work if you do not make him, but merely pay him. A man will work if you pay him, but also, being further developed, he will work if you do not pay him; that is, if he is not “paid” individually, through personal advantage, but collectively, through social advantage. We must remember that in the way of relating effort to result collective man must “work for his living” as actually as individual. But it is their living which they work for; the effort and the result are in common, and to the individual is supplied the great organic energy to work with. The normal goal to labour for, in a highly socialised race, is the common interest, a far stronger attraction than the personal interest.

See how our misbeliefs affect the course of a single industrial process. Here is the wheat crop, for instance, one of the world’s most important products. The human race, collectively, produces an enormous amount of wheat. The same number of workers, without the support of a large organised society, could not produce that crop, or in any way distribute it. This amount of wheat, produced collectively, is for our collective consumption. The individual producer raises a large surplus beyond his own needs for the social needs. The line of economic advantage is plain: To produce the most wheat with the least expense of social energy, and to distribute the most wheat with the least expense of social energy to the largest number of consumers. The social advantage lies in the food-value of the wheat, in the ensuing increase in the productivity of the race.

Now see how our wrong ideas work against this advantage. The individual producer, shutting his eyes to the collectivity of the process, considers that he “owns” the wheat, and that he “raised it himself.” Therefore, instead of facilitating its distribution with the least expense of social energy, he seeks to obstruct it by demanding as much social energy as he can get,—i. e., the price,—the first step in the exchange. Of course, being largely isolated, he does not succeed in getting much, and, equally of course, he is at present not supplied with his fair share of social energy beforehand; but admitting these facts, it remains true that his mental attitude is the same as that of the larger dealer: he looks on the world’s wheat as a source of profit to him to any extent that he can reach.

Then come the great army of transporters. Thanks to the high organisation of this social function, the distribution of the wheat goes on with great facility and dispatch as far as mechanical convenience is concerned, and, by the concentration of the business in a few hands, much of the dribbling man-to-man subtraction is saved; but alas—the little subtractions of many small private carriers are only exchanged for the enormous subtractions of the few great public carriers.

Even at this extremely developed stage of evolution in the social process, even in a business so public as to require public grants of land and privilege, and designated as “a common carrier,” in the very face of these flaring facts, this weird survival of a remote past, this prehistoric Ego, with its Want theory, sits gobbling in the stream of social distribution, like some dinotherium mysteriously preserved to do mischief. This Common Carrier, managed by a few men, seriously believes the distribution of the world’s wheat to be intended for the private aggrandisement of the Carrier, and sucks from that life-giving stream as large a supply of racial nourishment as “the traffic will bear”—sometimes more! Of course the Carrier must be provided with his share of social nutrition in order that he may carry, but why he should claim this vastly disproportionate amount is not so clear. It is not clear, that is, in the light of social laws to-day, but it is clear enough as a logical deduction from the antique premisses so devoutly believed in.

The stream of wheat, robbed of much of its value, pours on and reaches the final stationary points of distribution, and there again the dealers, wholesale and retail, imagine that this mass of food was brought across the world for their benefit, and proceed to extract from it as much as they are able. Thus the food reaches fewer people in smaller quantities, and those who get it are obliged to give back a large proportion of its nourishing power in payment. The circulation of the world is very seriously interfered with by this morbid action.

Conceive now for a moment of wheat as a means of promoting the social good. Of a Bureau of Agriculture carefully posting from year to year the amount needed in different localities. Of a Bureau of Transportation carefully arranging from year to year for the most prompt and easy transfer to those localities. And of a Bureau of Local Distribution seeing to it that the wheat was as promptly and easily spread among the consumers.

That would mean the greatest gain and the least waste and expense. That would be business sense on the part of the world. To reduce the outlay of effort and increase the income of nourishment, with a commensurate increase in social productivity,—that is the line of economic advantage for the Society of our time, as it was in the physical economy of the Individual of the PalÆolithic Past.

But this PalÆolithic Individual with his pre-PalÆolithic ideas is a great nuisance to-day.