W. H. Mallock

In entering on the inquiry which now lies before us it is necessary to recall to the reader, and to insist with renewed emphasis on a fact which has been explained with the utmost fulness already. This is the fact that those exceptional efficiencies of the few on which the initiation, the progress, and the maintenance of civilisation depend, and which in a technical sense we have here described as greatness, do not consist of qualities which are unique in kind, or which are not possessed in some measure by the masses of ordinary men; but that they are made up of ordinary faculties magnified or mixed together in unusual proportions. For although, as George Eliot observes in a striking passage, the faculties of all men are the same in kind, they manifest themselves in different men in such very different degrees that a faculty or feeling which in one man has the power and dimensions of a tiger, may never in another man outgrow those of {272} a weasel. Greatness, then, is simply the possession and exercise by such and such a person, in an exceptional degree, of some faculty or assortment of faculties, the rudiments of which are possessed by all. And the reason why it is necessary to insist on this fact here is that, as a consequence of it, the use which the great man makes of his exceptional powers—or, in other words, their whole efficient existence—depends on certain causes which are relatively, though not absolutely, similar to those on which depends the use which the ordinary man makes of his.

Let us, then, consider the powers of the ordinary man first, and let us take as examples of them those powers or faculties which are most universally distributed amongst the human race—namely, the powers by which the rudest populations obtain enough food to live upon. Now such faculties, practically universal as they are, would be potential only, not actual, if it were not for two things. These are certain appetites or desires, having a physiological origin, on the one hand, and the external conditions on the other, which make the satisfaction of those appetites, or the fulfilment of those desires, a possibility. Thus if men could live without eating, and had no desire for food, those special faculties would be dormant which are now exercised in agriculture; and this means that for all practical purposes they would not exist at all. These faculties would also not exist at all, no matter what men’s desire for food might be, if the whole of the earth’s crust had {273} happened to be cast-iron, and if tillage were consequently impossible, and there were no seeds to sow. In other words, the very commonest and very simplest faculties which human beings possess have a practical and a universal existence in those beings, only because, in the first place, they minister to universal wants, and because, in the second place, the earth is so constituted as to supply the materials on which these faculties can operate. Or, to put the matter in more general terms, the very commonest and simplest faculties are not practically self-existent, except as mere barren potentialities; and as practical forces they exist only in the degree to which they are evoked by external things and circumstances—by some external object, such as food, which excites and will satisfy desire, and by external circumstances which make the object obtainable.

Now if this be true of those faculties of the commonest kind, ministering to the needs which all men inevitably feel alike, and which they always must feel so long as they remain alive, it is yet more obviously true of those higher and rarer faculties ministering to needs which are so far from being inevitable, that whole races have existed and do exist without any conscious knowledge of them. The great inventor, the great director of industry, will not develop or use his exceptional latent faculties unless by the use of them he can achieve some object which he desires; and this must be something which the community has to give, or the possession of which it will secure to him if it be something which he himself {274} produces. Columbus, for instance, as the records of his life show us, would never have braved the Atlantic if the society of his time, though in the end it rewarded him ill, had not rendered an enormous reward both in money and rank possible—a reward which he specifically bargained for in the event of his enterprise being successful. And similarly in the case of great men in general, unless society is so constituted as to render some reward or other the natural or possible result of the exercise of certain exceptional faculties, and unless this reward shall be one which the great men shall think worth working for, their exceptional faculties will remain potential only. That is to say, their faculties will be practically non-existent, and the community will be as helpless as it would be if it had no great men at all.

Now here we have what is virtually a genuine social contract. It is not, indeed, such a contract as Rousseau dreamed of. It was never made deliberately at any period of history by two independent parties coming together for the purpose. It was the result of a gradual and quite unconscious process. Ordinary men, having experienced the advantages of being directed by great men, submitted instinctively to such conditions as the great men demanded, and instinctively offered them, or allowed them to retain possession of, such rewards as were necessary to stimulate them to further action. But these proceedings were a bargain, a social contract none the less, although they were not recognised as such; and they constitute a bargain still—a bargain which is {275} continually being renewed, and the terms of which reformers are continually trying to alter. Thus the socialists’ proposal to take from the founder of a new industry all the wealth that his exceptional faculties have created, and pay him, as they propose to do, with the paper money of honour, is merely an attempt to make a new bargain with the great man, which shall secure his services on cheaper terms for the little men. Similarly, all encouragement offered to art and science by the State is a bargain offered to a number of unknown persons, who are presumed to be the possessors potentially of artistic and scientific faculties; the State engaging to give them certain opportunities and rewards, if they on their part will make their potential faculties actual.

Now with regard to this bargain or contract which the community has not only made, but is always remaking and revising with its great men, we must observe that it is a bargain which, from the necessities of the case, is made by the community solely with individual great men who are living. It is not a bargain offered to the great men of the past, no matter how much of his greatness the living great man may owe to them. It is impossible to bargain with the dead, and therefore to the present question the claims of the dead are as irrelevant as the claims of protoplasm. The present question is how shall such and such living people be induced to develop certain superiorities which are latent in them, or to use to the best advantage superiorities which have been developed already. And {276} the answer depends on these men themselves. It depends on the characters which they personally possess, and not on the parents or ancestors from whom their characters have been derived. We can no more go behind the personality of the great man in bargaining with him, than we can go behind the personality of the dipsomaniac in attempting to cure him. We may excuse the failing of the latter as something which he has inherited from his ancestors; we can cure it only as something for which he is himself responsible. If civilisation, therefore, depends on the great man, no community can become or remain civilised which does not so arrange itself as to accord to its living great men such rewards as they themselves feel to be a sufficient inducement firstly to develop their faculties, and secondly to employ them to the utmost.

Here, then, we have a new and final verification of that truth which has already been established against the arguments of Mr. Spencer—namely, that the great man is a vera causa of progress, and that no explanation of progress has any practical value which does not base itself on an examination of the great man’s character. And that such is the case will become yet more apparent when we take into consideration the following additional facts, which are quite distinct from any we have yet touched upon, and which practically have an equal, or perhaps even a superior, importance.

If the exceptional faculties of the great man were so far like the faculties possessed by all men, {277} that by looking at him we could tell that he was a potential inventor, or organiser of industry, or philosopher, as easily as by looking at a common man we can tell that he can trundle a wheelbarrow, the entire force of the foregoing argument would be lost. The community would then know what each great man could do for it, and could force him to do it by flogging or starving him if he refused. The ordinary faculties—the faculties of manual labour—can be made to exert themselves precisely in this way. A large number of the great works of antiquity were due to labour successfully stimulated by the whip. But it is only a man’s commonest faculties that can be called into action thus; and they can be called into action thus only for this reason—that those who coerce him know that these faculties are possessed by him, and they also know the task which they wish to make him accomplish. But in the case of the great man both these conditions are wanting. It is impossible to tell that he possesses any exceptional faculties till he himself chooses to show them; and until circumstances supply him with some motive for exercising them, he will probably be hardly aware that he possesses such faculties himself. Moreover, even if he gives the world some reason to suspect their existence, the world will still not know what he can do with them, and will consequently not be able to impose on him any task until he himself chooses to show of what he is capable. Any farmer by looking at Burns could have told that he had the makings of a ploughman in him, and have forced {278} him, under certain circumstances, to do so much ploughing daily; but no one could have told that he was a poet if he had not of his own free will revealed the fact to the public; and even when the public were aware of it, no one could have forced him to compose The Cotter’s Saturday Night. A press-gang could have turned Columbus into a common sailor, but not all the sovereigns of Europe could have forced him to discover a new hemisphere. On the contrary, it was he who had to force sovereigns into the reluctant belief that possibly there was a new hemisphere to discover. The great man, therefore, is lord of his exceptional faculties in a way in which the common man is not lord of his common faculties. The existence of the latter faculties cannot be concealed; the kind of work that can be accomplished by them is known to everybody; and therefore the community by the exercise of mere force can command the average man, and make him work like an animal. But over the exceptional faculties of the great man it has no command whatever, except what the great man gives it; for it neither knows that the faculties exist, nor what things the faculties can do, until the great man elects to reveal the secret. He cannot be made to reveal it, he can only be induced to do so; and he can be induced to do so only by a community which offers to exceptional faculties some assured and exceptional reward, just as a reward is offered for evidence against an unknown murderer. Moreover, just as in the latter case it very often happens that the {279} reward originally offered has to be raised several times before a sum is reached which will induce the witness to come forward, so must any community, as the condition of becoming civilised, raise the rewards of greatness to such a figure that the possessors of latent superiorities will be induced to develop and use them. And hence the great man not only causes progress by what he does, but he influences also the entire structure of society, by his character, which regulates the terms on which he will consent to do it.

This is the point at which the science of sociology primarily comes in contact with the practical problems of to-day. That all progress is due to the efforts of the superior minority is a truth which, taken by itself, and apart from other truths allied to it, we can merely recognise and assent to. We can do nothing to alter it; nor will the fact of our recognising it, if taken by itself, tend to alter or guide our conduct. We are not even able to settle the number of males and females which shall be produced in each family. Still less can we settle or increase the number of individuals who shall bring into the world with them talents more than ordinary. But though no community can do anything to settle or alter the percentage of potential greatness that will be born into it from generation to generation, it can settle or alter the social conditions and rewards by means of which this potential greatness shall be developed and enabled to use itself; and a very large part, though not the whole, of political wisdom {280} will thus consist in arranging these conditions and rewards, so that from each potentially great man, whatever degree or kind of potentiality may be his, the community may elicit the highest and most far-reaching efforts of which he is capable. It will, of course, be to the interest of the community to secure this result by offering the great man the smallest and least costly reward, the desire of which will induce him to develop and exert himself to the utmost; but the ultimate fixer of the great man’s price—let it once again be said—is not the community, but the great man himself.

It is this sociological and psychological truth that even the clearest-headed amongst the socialists are continually forgetting. They perceive it at one moment, at the next moment they entirely forget it, and solemnly proceed to build up their visionary polity on foundations which their own arguments had previously condemned. A curious example of this “inability,” as Mr. Spencer calls it, “to comprehend assembled propositions in their totality” is to be found in a remarkable passage by Mr. Sidney Webb. Having observed that “socialists would nationalise both rent and interest by the State becoming the sole landowner and capitalist,” he goes on to acknowledge that great fundamental fact which it is the main object of the present work to elucidate. “Such an arrangement, however,” he says, “would leave untouched the third monopoly—the largest of them all—the monopoly of business ability.” In these last words he appears to be like a Daniel {281} come to judgment. He recognises in the fact that the few have a natural monopoly of faculties, the exercise of which is required for the progressive well-being of all, a genuine and a formidable difficulty in the way of the realisation of socialism; but now comes the passage for the sake of which these others have been quoted. Great as this difficulty is, he tells us, “the more recent socialists” have devised a way for getting over it. And what does the reader think this way is? It has at all events the merit of being very simple. “The more recent socialists,” says Mr. Webb, “attack this third monopoly also by allotting to every worker an equal wage, whatever may be the nature of his work.”

It has been thought worth while to quote Mr. Sidney Webb because he is an exceptionally favourable specimen of the modern socialistic theoriser. It is therefore interesting to notice the hiatus that here yawns in his argument. The entire question which is really at issue is begged by him. His allies, he tells us, though they cannot destroy the monopoly which the few possess of exceptional business powers, will destroy the effects of this monopoly by taking away from the few nearly all the wealth that their exceptional powers produce. It never seems to occur to him to ask whether, under these circumstances, the few would develop or exercise their exceptional powers at all. And yet the whole problem for him, as a socialist, lies here, and lies nowhere else. For from the very fact that these powers are admittedly a monopoly of the few, it is {282} evident that their existence cannot be assumed in anybody unless he exerts himself to give some sign of their presence. External authority, therefore, can compel nobody to employ them who does not put himself at the mercy of the authorities by letting them know he has them; and thus “the more recent socialists,” in attacking “the third and greatest monopoly,” are really themselves at the mercy of the very monopolists whom they propose to attack. It is true that if a socialistic revolution could be brought about suddenly, existing great men known to have certain talents, which had been already developed and exercised under conditions which the revolution destroyed, might be seized on by the State, in its capacity of universal employer, and forced to continue something of their former voluntary activity by threats of torture or some similar method of coercion. But even granting this to be possible, it would only solve the problem for a moment; for as these men died—and some of them would be dying daily—new talent would be wanted to take the place of the old; and though the State might coerce such talent as was already developed, it could not by coercion secure the services of the new, because threats of coercion would never tempt new talent to discover itself, but would, on the contrary, drive it yet deeper beneath the surface.

Exceptional potentialities can be called out and realised only by a kind of action which is the very antithesis of coercion, and which is analogous to that of sunshine on buds, or flowers or {283} fruits—namely, the penetrating, the warming, the stimulating action of the hope of certain personal advantages on the mind of the exceptional man, which advantages he will not only covet as advantageous, but will recognise as the natural result of the exercise of his exceptional faculties, and as a result attainable by the exercise of these faculties only. What these personal advantages are, the desire of which, coupled with their attainability, is necessary to stimulate men who have more than ordinary potentialities, to do greater things by developing them than are done by ordinary men, must be determined by reference to the actual facts of life, the records of which are ample, and the details of which, though numerous, can by careful analysis be easily reduced to order.

In spite of their frequent forgetfulness of the fact just insisted on, that the development and exercise of exceptional faculties can be secured only through the influence of some exceptional motive, this is not a fact which socialists theoretically deny. On the contrary, often as they forget it, with curious consequences to their reasoning, yet just as often, when they happen to be directly confronted with it, they are loud in declaring that they recognise it quite as clearly as their opponents; and a considerable portion of their more modern writings consists of a setting forth of the various exceptional rewards which will, according to them, in the socialistic State, elicit from exceptional men the exercise of their utmost powers. Moreover, the rewards on which the socialists principally insist are rewards, the desire of which is admitted by all parties to be an actual force in society as at present constituted, and in fact to have been, ever since the dawn of history, the motive to which much activity of the highest kind {285} has been due. These rewards have been defined in a recent Handbook of Socialism as the pleasure of “excelling,” “the joy in creative work,” the satisfaction which work for others brings to “the instincts of benevolence,” and, lastly, “social approval,” or the homage which is called “honour.”

If the socialists, however, confined themselves to maintaining that the desire of such rewards as these constitutes a sufficient motive to exceptional activity of certain kinds, they would not only be asserting what nobody else would deny, but they would be putting forward nothing which, as socialists, it is their interest to assert. The ultimate proposition which, as socialists, they aim at establishing is not that certain kinds of exceptional men do certain kinds of exceptional things, in obedience to the motives in question; but that because some exceptional men, endowed with certain temperaments, are motived by them to activities of certain specific kinds, other exceptional men will be motived by them with equal certainty to other activities of a kind totally different—and more especially to the activities which result in the production of wealth.

Here is the fundamental point on which the socialists join issues with their opponents. Their opponents, they say, assume that the sole reward or advantage, the desire of which will stimulate the monopolists of “business ability” to exert that ability in the production and augmentation of wealth, is a share of wealth for themselves proportionate to the amount produced by them—an {286} amount which will separate their lot from that of the majority of their fellows. Now if this should be really the case, as the socialists are coming to perceive, the fact would be fatal to the entire ideal of socialism. They are consequently now directing the best of their ingenuity to showing that the desire of possessing exceptional wealth is altogether superfluous as a motive for producing it, and that the great producers of it, when all chance of possessing it is taken from them, will find in the pleasures of the strain which the productive process necessitates—especially if these are supplemented by the inexpensive thanks of the community—a more powerful inducement to exertion than is the prospect of the largest fortune.

Now in endeavouring to make this peculiar position good, it is evident that the burden of proof lies with the socialists themselves; for although the doctrine that all exceptional exertions in wealth-production are motived solely by an avidity for exceptional wealth as such—and this is the doctrine which the socialists set themselves to controvert—is a very imperfect rendering of what their opponents actually maintain, it embodies an assertion which the socialists themselves declare to have been true of all exceptional exertion in wealth-production hitherto. No one declares this more passionately and more persistently than they. For what, as political agitators, has been their chief moral indictment against the typical great men of industry—the organisers of labour, the introducers of new {287} machinery, the pioneers of commerce? Their chief moral indictment has been this: that these men, instead of labouring for their fellows, or for the sake of any of those rewards which the socialists declare to be so satisfying, have been motived solely by the passion of selfish “greed.” Its hideous influence, they say, is as old as civilisation itself, and the “monopolists of business ability” in Tyre and Sidon were as much its creatures as are their modern representatives in Chicago. And this assertion, unlike many made by the socialists, has the merit of being, so far as it goes, true. Greed, of course, is a word which, in addition to its direct meaning, carries with it an accretion of moral insult; but putting aside this, it means in the present connection merely a desire on the part of the great wealth-producer to enjoy an amount of wealth proportionate to the amount produced by him: and from the dawn of civilisation up to the present time all great wealth-producers, whether merchants, manufacturers, or inventors, have had the desire of enjoying such wealth as their motive. The desire has been connected with the activity just as universally and closely as the desire of water is connected with the act of drinking it, or the desire of winning a woman with the act of making love to her. If the socialists, then, would persuade us that a motive so universal as this can be now superseded by others of an entirely opposite character, they can do so only by adducing the clearest evidence that, on the one hand, this motive itself is losing its old power, and {288} that other motives, on the other hand, are actually acquiring and exercising it.

Let us first, then, consider the passion of greed itself, and ask whether there is anything in its connection with wealth-production hitherto which may lead us to think that in spite of its universality in the past, it is merely a transitory propensity from which exceptional men will free themselves, instead of being a propensity rooted in the very constitution of human nature.

And here again the socialists will be amongst our most important witnesses; for just as they, of all writers and thinkers, have done most to call attention to the fact that up to the present time greed has been the main motive by which the exceptional wealth-producers have been actuated, so they, of all writers and thinkers, have done most to call attention to another fact as well, which shows the motive in question to be as permanent as it is universal. For that very desire of the producer to possess what he himself produces, which, when found in the exceptional man, they denounce as greed, and which they tell us that the exceptional man will get rid of in the course of a year or two, is the very desire which, as existing in the common man, they have assumed to be the foundation of his whole industrial character; and to it have all their most fervid and powerful appeals been made. The socialists, in their attempts to excite the masses against the existing order, have relied less on rhetorical declarations that the labouring man gets {289} very little, than on the quasi-scientific assertion that he gets less than he produces, and that consequently the wealth of his employers is merely his own wealth stolen from him. “All wealth is due to labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is due” has formed from the first, and still forms the text from which the socialists always preach when addressing the labouring classes; and the use of this text as the watchword of popular agitation is obviously an admission that, as a producing agent, man is motived so exclusively by the desire to possess what he produces, or else its fair equivalent, that he naturally resents the idea of producing anything merely in order that others may take it away from him. Indeed, this doctrine that the desire for the product, and the producer’s sense that he has a right to it, form the only motive for production possible for a free man, formed the unquestioned basis of the entire socialistic psychology so long as the theory of Marx was held by the socialists to be unassailable, according to which wealth was the product of average labour, and the common or average labourer was the sole true producer. It was only as time went on, and the socialists were slowly compelled to recognise the few to be producers of wealth just as truly as the many, that the socialists began their attempts to get rid of the doctrine which a very little while ago they regarded as axiomatic—the doctrine that each producer has a right to his own products, and that his hope of possessing it is his principal motive for its {290} production. In making these attempts, however, they have, with a judicious eclecticism, been content to apply them to the exceptional man only; and the common man and his motives they leave undisturbed, except when they venture on the doctrine that the common man’s motive for production will in the future be the desire of possessing, not only all that he produces, but all that he produces and a great deal else besides.

If, then, it is unlikely that this desire to possess the product will cease to be operative as the motive to production amongst the masses, that it will cease to be operative amongst the few is more unlikely still; for the man who is possessed of average powers only, cannot hope to produce more than the average man requires, and his object in producing tends to represent itself to his mind in terms of the comfort which he hopes to experience, rather than in terms of the value of products which he hopes to possess. But the exceptional man, whose peculiarity as a producer is this, that he produces not only as much as the average man requires, but an indefinite amount in addition to it, is constantly balancing his products not with his immediate wants, but with the amount of intellectual effort which he has expended in the process of production. Indeed, the more closely we consider the matter, the more strongly we shall be convinced that the desire of possessing wealth proportionate to the amount produced by them becomes as a motive to production stronger in men, not {291} weaker, in exact proportion as their productive powers are great, and the amount produced by them appeals to their intellects rather than to their necessities.

So far, then, as a study of this motive itself can inform us, the socialistic idea that it will ever cease to be paramount has no foundation whatever, and is contradicted even by the socialists themselves. The only fact connected with this motive directly which wears so much as a semblance of serious evidence in their favour is the fact often dwelt on by emotional writers like Mr. Kidd, that many men who have made enormous fortunes have given away a large part of them for what he calls “altruistic” purposes; and writers of the kind in question take this fact for evidence that the desire of possessing great wealth is ceasing to be the motive for producing it. But those who allow themselves to argue thus, show a curious carelessness in their examination of human action; for the fact referred to, so far as it proves anything, negatives rather than supports the conclusion they seek to draw from it. It is perfectly true that many men of great industrial ability have produced large fortunes and given them away afterwards. But in order to give, a man must first possess; and it is in the act of giving magnificently for some specified purpose that many men most fully realise the power with which wealth endows them. Thus the fact that many men will produce in order that they may have the delight of giving is no more a proof that they would produce under the rÉgime of {292} socialism, which would aim at depriving them of anything that they might possibly give, than the fact that a man would with pleasure give five shillings to a beggar is a proof that he would be equally pleased if the beggar were to pick his pocket. Even the men who produce wealth—and no doubt there are such—without any conscious sense that they produce it because of their desire to possess it, would show that such was their motive by their instinctive and indignant refusal to go on producing it, if they knew that it would be forcibly taken from them.

And now, since we have seen that “greed” as a motive to wealth-production shows no internal tendency to lose its old efficiency, let us turn to those other motives which the socialists tell us are to supersede it, and ask whether there is anything in their known operations hitherto which indicates that in the domain of wealth-production they will acquire an efficiency similar to it. This is not an inquiry which is very difficult to pursue, for the motives in question are of a very familiar kind, and the kinds of activity which they have produced hitherto are notorious.

What these motives are has been sufficiently shown already in language borrowed from the socialistic writers themselves—the pleasure of “excelling,” the “joy in creative work,” the pleasure of doing good to others, and, lastly, the enjoyment of the approbation of others, or of the yet more flattering tribute commonly called “honour.” Now these motives, it will be seen, are of two distinct kinds, the first three {293} being based exclusively on some pleasurable condition of mind, which is independent of anybody except the individual who actually experiences it; the two last being based on a pleasurable condition of mind, which is directly dependent on the actions or the attitude of other people. We may therefore reduce these motives to two—namely, self-realisation, in the first place, and recognition by others, in the second. This classification will be not only shorter, but more comprehensive than the other; for self-realisation will include not only the joys of self-improvement and artistic creation, but those of the pursuit of truth and the performance of religious duty, and will distinguish the pleasure of doing good to others from the pleasure of being thanked or praised for it.

And now let us consider what those kinds of exceptional activity are, in the production of which one or other of these motives, or both of them, have played, hitherto, any considerable part. We shall find them to be as follows: heroic conduct in battle, or in the face of any exceptional danger; artistic creation; the pursuit of speculative truth; what theologians call works of mercy; and, lastly, the propagation of religion. This list, if understood in its full sense, is exhaustive.

Now of these five kinds of action we may dismiss the last from our consideration, not because it has not a most important influence on civilisation, but because it has no direct connection with any of the processes of wealth-production, except in so far as it {294} tends to divert men’s attention from them. And with regard to the works of mercy something similar must be said also; for though they undoubtedly have a close connection with wealth, they do not aid at its production, still less at its increase, but merely at the distribution of portions of it, which have been produced already, amongst persons whom it would otherwise not reach. The love for others, for example, by which works of mercy are motived, may prompt a man to send London children for a holiday into the country by train, but it would never have prompted him to invent the locomotive engine. It may prompt him to secure for a youth an education in modern science, but it would never have prompted him to write the treatises of Professor Huxley. All activity of this kind, then, whatever form it may take, is, in a sociological sense, essentially parasitic. It implies the previous exercise of another set of faculties totally distinct from those directly implied in itself, and, together with other faculties, other motives belonging to them. It has, then, with the actual process of wealth-production as little to do as has religious propagandism itself; and, like religious propagandism, we may dismiss it from our consideration here. The only forms of activity with which we are called on to deal with here will thus be artistic creation, the pursuit of speculative truth, and military or quasi-military feats of heroism.

As to artistic creation, it is, no doubt, perfectly true, as is proved by the efforts of countless devoted amateurs, that men with artistic powers will {295} often do their utmost to develop them, merely for the sake of the pleasure which the exercise of these powers brings with it; whilst literature is even more obviously than painting cultivated by men who devote themselves to it solely as a means of self-expression. Indeed, it might reasonably be contended that finer books and paintings would be produced if it were impossible for painters and writers to make money by producing them, than are now produced with a view to captivating the public purchaser.

So, too, the pursuit of scientific and philosophic truth—arduous though it is—is generally undertaken by men whose principal motive is the pleasure their work brings them.

may well be supposed to find in that thrilling moment a reward sufficient to compensate him for all his pains in arriving at it; and most branches of science would yield us similar illustrations. Indeed, the career characteristic of scientists and philosophers generally is a conclusive proof that the principal motive of their activity is not the desire of any extrinsic reward, the amount of which they will balance against the amount or the quality of their efforts, but a passion for truth as truth, which they indulge in for its own sake only.

Now granting all this, what will its bearing be on the question of whether the pleasures of pure self-realisation will suffice to stimulate those {296} exceptional faculties whose function it is to maintain and increase the production of wealth? With regard to artistic creation, we are certainly bound to admit that great works of art are wealth of a highly important kind, and when a good picture is produced, as it often is, solely in obedience to the painter’s artistic impulse, we have a genuine example of wealth produced in obedience to that kind of motive whose efficiency the socialists desire to establish. Further, with regard to the pursuit of truth, as Mill points out in a passage that has been already quoted, progress in speculative knowledge is the basis of all other progress, and notably of progress in the arts and processes of wealth-production. It must, accordingly, be admitted that in a certain sense all progress in wealth-production has for its basis a kind of disinterested activity with which the desire of possessing wealth has nothing at all to do. And yet in spite of this, neither the case of the artist nor of the philosopher warrants the inference that the motives which are sufficient for them will ever have a similar effect on the faculties of the great wealth-producers. The evidence, in fact, as soon as we have fully examined it, will be found to point in a direction precisely opposite.

For, to begin with the case of the artist, it must be remembered, in the first place, that works of art, such as pictures painted by the artist’s hand, form a very small, though an important part of wealth, and that they are hardly wealth at all from the {297} point of view of the many, unless they are reproduced and multiplied by adequate mechanical processes. Now, though it is quite conceivable that a painter might paint a Madonna solely because the realisation of his own ideas delighted him, it is hardly to be expected that other men will rack their brains to devise blocks, presses, and preparations by which copies of it may be made and multiplied, solely for the pleasure of reproducing ideas which are not their own. It must further be added that delight in creation for its own sake can be attributed as a sufficient motive to the highest class of artists only. As for the men whose artistic powers are true, but qualify them only for decorative not for creative work—the men, for example, who design beautiful stuffs and furniture—though the exercise of their power may be doubtless itself a pleasure to them, they are certainly as a class not given to exercising them without the expectation of some proportionate pecuniary reward. Indeed, in exact proportion as artistic creation assimilates itself to the processes by which wealth in general is produced, the mere pleasure of the work itself ceases to be a sufficient motive for it.

Next, with regard to the pursuit of speculative knowledge, though this, and more especially pure scientific discovery, may form the basis of all productive effort, it is very far from being a form of productive effort itself. It has, on the contrary, no necessary connection with it. It does not even belong to the region in which such effort operates. {298} Scientific truths, as apprehended by the mere seeker after speculative knowledge, are like powerful spirits secluded in some distant star; and, for any effect which they have on the processes of economic production, they might just as well have never been discovered at all. Before they can be applied to practical purposes they have to be mastered and digested by a new class of men altogether, who value them not for themselves, but solely for the use they can be put to. Thus, in order that speculative truths may be connected with productive effort, they must pass out of the hands of the men who first discovered them, and be made over to men whose motive in acquiring them will emphatically not be desire of the mere pleasure of intellectual acquisition, but the desire of some marketable products with a calculable pecuniary value, in the production of which a knowledge of the truths in question will help them. Thus speculative activity, just like artistic creation, in exact proportion as it connects itself with the ordinary processes of wealth-production, ceases to find its motive in the desire of self-realisation, and claims to be rewarded by the possession of the objective results produced by it.

And now let us turn from the motives which consist in the desire of self-realisation to those which consist in the desire of the approbation or the homage of others. This desire, which exercises a great influence on the artist, and often also on the seeker after speculative truth, concurrently with the {299} desire of pure self-realisation, exhibits its force most signally when it is the motive of military heroism; and the readiness with which a soldier will risk his life for honour—honour which brings with it nothing besides itself, excepting perhaps a medal and a scrap of ribbon—has been said by socialistic writers to afford a conclusive proof that any practical work, no matter how laborious, and more particularly the work of the great wealth-producer, will be willingly undertaken for the sake of the same reward. “The soldier’s subsistence is certain,” writes a well-known contemporary enthusiast. “It does not depend upon his exertions. At once he becomes susceptible to appeals to his patriotism. He will dare anything for glory, and value a bit of bronze which is ‘the reward of valour’ far more than a hundred times its weight in gold.” The implication, of course, is that what men will do in war they will do in peaceful industry; and the writer adds, in order to point this moral, “yet many of the private soldiers come from the worst of the population.” This passage is quoted with rapture by another socialistic theorist, who exclaims, “Let those especially notice this last point who fancy we must wait till men are angels before socialism be practical.” And even so well-trained a thinker as Mr. Frederic Harrison has argued, from the readiness with which men die in battle for their country, that they will be equally willing to deny themselves or suffer martyrdom for universal humanity.

To all these ideas and arguments there is one {300} answer to be made. They are all founded on a failure to perceive the fact that military activity is in many respects a thing apart, and depends on psychological, and indeed on physiological processes which have no counterpart in the domain of ordinary effort. That such is the case can be seen very easily by following out the train of argument suggested by Mr. Harrison. Mr. Harrison sees that in ordinary life a man will not deliberately run the risk of being killed except for the sake of a cause or person to which or whom he is profoundly and indescribably attached. Indeed his attachment is presumably in proportion to the risk he is prepared to run. And such being the case in the field of ordinary life, Mr. Harrison assumes it must be the case on the field of battle also, and that the soldier’s willingness to risk death in fighting for a cause or country proves that this cause or country is inexpressibly dear to him. And in certain cases—when a country is in desperate straits, and everything hangs on the issue of a single battle—this inference would be doubtless just; but that it is not so generally is shown by the notorious fact that some of the bravest and most reckless soldiers ever known to history have been mercenaries who would fight as willingly for one country as for another. Thus until Mr. Harrison can show us that men in ordinary life will wear themselves out for either of two opposed objects indifferently, or that they will risk death as willingly for a plain woman as for a pretty one, it is obvious that men’s willingness to risk death in war implies no corresponding {301} willingness to risk it cutting trousers, and is for certain reasons a phenomenon standing by itself.

That this is so is shown even more strikingly by the fact to which the two other writers just quoted point with so much complacency. This fact is the soldier’s undoubted willingness to pursue his calling for pay which seems strikingly incommensurate with his risks. His conduct in this respect is, no doubt, remarkable, especially when compared with that of men in the domain of peaceful industry. When any industrial occupation is in question a workman will expect special wages if it is one which presents a likelihood of his often hurting his thumb; but soldiers will risk the probability of being tortured and blown to pieces for wages which would hardly induce a peasant to hoe a turnip-field. This is no indication of any abnormal poverty amongst the classes from whom the army is mainly recruited, for the same phenomenon is constantly observable amongst men who are not under the necessity of working for their living at all. Amongst such men are numbers who in time of actual war will eagerly give up a life of leisure and luxury for the certainty of hardship and the probability of death—men who for the sake of anything else but fighting would hardly, without a struggle, run the risk of a bad dinner. But what these facts really suggest to us is not the insane conclusion that because soldiers act differently from other men, other men may be counted on to act like soldiers. On the contrary, what they suggest is the question {302} why men will do as soldiers what no one will do in any other capacity, and what soldiers themselves will cease to do as soon as they become commissionaires.

For this peculiarity in the soldier’s conduct there are three separate reasons. One is the strictness of military discipline, which socialistic reformers would hardly find popular if they tried to introduce it into factories and contractors’ yards. A second is the peculiar character of the circumstances in which the soldier is placed when his courage is most severely taxed—circumstances which render the attempt to evade peril almost as difficult, and often more perilous than facing it, and which in ordinary life would be intolerable if they did not happen to be impossible. But the most important reason is this—and the others without it would be non-existent—that the instinct of fighting is inherent in the very nature of the dominant races, and it will always prompt numbers to do for the smallest reward what they could hardly, in its absence, be induced to do for the largest. This immemorial instinct has been wrought into our blood and nerves by the innumerable thousands of years that have made us what we are; and all the battles of their fathers are pulsing in men’s veins to-day. These instincts, no doubt, are more controlled than formerly, and not so frequently roused; but they are still there. They are ready to quicken at the mere sound of military music; and the sight of a regiment marching draws cheers from the most democratic crowd. Here is the {303} reason why the soldier, though he submits himself to the most direct coercion, never considers himself, and never is considered a slave; and military activity will always be a thing apart, and for purposes of argument will never be comparable to industrial, till human nature undergoes so radical a change that men will as eagerly risk being killed by unfenced machinery in a cotton-mill as they will being killed by a bullet or a bayonet on the field of battle. Here again the facts for which the socialists reason are indubitable; but the inference which the socialists draw from them is altogether illusory.

It remains, however, to add that the desire of mere honour—of honour unaccompanied by any extrinsic advantages—has an efficiency which is strictly limited in the domain even of military activity itself. It may move men, in the act of fighting, to the highest and most heroic actions; but history shows us that it has not been found sufficient to elicit the sustained intellectual efforts of the General, bent on achieving some great and monumental conquest—efforts in which all the excitement of the actual fighter is wanting, and in which the coolest calculation plays as large a part as courage. The CÆsars and Napoleons of the world have certainly not, as a rule, been content, when they have crushed their enemies and augmented the magnificence of their country, with the gift of a medal or two, and the privilege of ending their days in the modest uniform of commissionaires opening {304} shop doors. If, then, the mere honour of being a great conqueror is insufficient to stimulate the activities by which great conquests are achieved, a man is hardly likely to consecrate his entire faculties to wealth-production merely that he may enjoy the honour of being known as the proud producer of so many miles of calico, or millions of pots of jam.

There is, therefore, in the present operations of those motives, for which the socialists attempt to claim a universal efficiency, as little to suggest that as motives to exceptional wealth-production they will ever supersede the desire of exceptional possession, as there is in the present operations of the desire of exceptional wealth-possession to show that it is losing its power, or is at all likely to be superseded. The final demonstration of this truth, however, yet remains to be given.

The socialists, in dealing with this question of motive, have been led into the curious blunders which have just now been exposed by their singularly childish conception of what men’s actual motives are. They divide motives into various well-known classes, and, so far as it goes, their procedure is here correct. Their error is that they conceive of man as a being on whom these motives, as a rule, act separately; whereas in reality the very reverse is the case. Acts which are due to any single motive are not the rule, but the exception. For instance, even though artistic creation and the pursuit of truth are motived in the case of many men by the pleasure which the work brings them, some of the greatest {305} artists and thinkers, with whom this motive was certainly powerful, have been motived by the desire of pecuniary reward also. It is enough to mention the names of Bacon and Shakespeare, Rubens, Turner, and Scott. And with the desire of honour the desire of pecuniary reward is found to mix itself yet more often and readily than it does with the mere passion for artistic or for speculative work itself. The psychological fact, however, which we must here notice is this—that the pecuniary reward, though it seems theoretically to be in contrast to any genuine desire for other men’s approbation, or for the pleasure brought to the worker by the work itself, instead of destroying the force of those other motives, increases it, just as the admixture of a certain amount of alloy makes gold and silver more valuable for artistic purposes. And now, having observed this, let us turn back to the consideration of the desire of pecuniary reward as the principal motive of wealth-production, and endeavour to make our analysis of it more complete.

As the reader will recollect, the doctrine that all exceptional exertions in wealth-production are motived solely by the desire of exceptional wealth as such, although it is the doctrine imputed by the socialists to their opponents, has been said already to be a very imperfect rendering of any doctrine as to the subject which their opponents would actually maintain; and the reason why it is imperfect is simply that wealth as such is not the object for which wealth is really sought by most of those men whom the {306} desire of it most powerfully influences. For wealth as such, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, is wealth regarded as a means of personal self-indulgence. It stands for the finest wines, the richest food, the softest beds, the most luxurious furniture—for everything that can caress the senses and enervate the mind and body. And no doubt its power of securing all these things to its possessors is one of the qualities which render it an object of desire. But it is only one; and though it is the most obvious of them, it is not the chief. The subordinate place which it occupies is conclusively shown by the fact that a very few thousands a year would suffice to provide a man with every pleasure or luxury that his own senses could appreciate; and yet men are often more eager, after these few thousands have been secured by them, to pass this point of opulence than they ever were in reaching it. Many men, moreover, who have surrounded themselves with pomp and splendour are indifferent to the gratification of their own senses altogether. Though their luncheon tables may groan under every imaginable delicacy, they will themselves eat a slice or two of cold ham, no better or worse than would have been secured them for a shilling in a cheap restaurant. Their own beds will be no softer than those of prosperous clerks; and, surrounded by cushioned sofas, they will sit upon straight-backed chairs.

The principal reasons for which wealth is sought are not pleasures of the senses, but pleasures of the mind and the imagination; and of these pleasures {307} there are three principal kinds. One of them is the pleasure of power, which in their analysis of human motives the socialists conveniently overlook; and the two others happen to be the very pleasures by the desire of which the socialists themselves declare the exceptional wealth-producers are to be principally marked in the future—namely, the pleasures of self-realisation and the pleasures of social honour. Wealth is coveted by all really great wealth-producers, not in preference to these, but as a means to all or one of them. To many of our great wealth-producers, with their strong practical faculties, wealth would be nothing if it brought to them no accession of influence; to many it would be nothing if it did not bring them the means of indulging their tastes, as distinct from their physical appetites; to nearly all it would be nothing if they did not, or if they did not hope it would, secure for them the approbation and the respectful homage of others.

The only alternatives, then, which we have before us are as follows:—If the great wealth-producer is a man of such coarse fibre that none of those desires just mentioned are really his—neither the desire of power, nor the desire of social honour, nor the desire for that larger development of taste and moral activities which is rendered possible by the possession of exceptional wealth—then it is obvious that the sole motive left to him will be the gross or unreasoning desire for the possession of wealth as such; and we are brought back to the original {308} proposition which the socialists set themselves to annihilate. But if, on the other hand, the great wealth-producer is really capable of those higher desires which the socialists assure us will shortly become so strong in him, the desire of exceptional wealth, instead of being superseded by these, will be stronger beyond calculation than it ever could be without them.

And it is, as a rule, the latter of these two suppositions which practically represents the truth. Exceptional wealth is desired by the men who produce it not for itself, but for its results; and in proportion as the man who desires it possesses a lofty character, his desire for it, being merged in the thought of the uses to which he desires to put it, will itself become equally lofty also. But none the less will the desire of the material wealth form the physical basis in which his loftier desires inhere, just as the impulse of sex remains the physical basis of the deepest and tenderest love which a man feels for a woman, or as the brain is the physical basis of every thought that a man can think. Thus the arguments of the socialists recoil upon their own heads; and instead of tending to show that the desire of possessing exceptional wealth will ever cease to be indispensable as a motive to exceptional production of it, they have merely succeeded in calling attention to the facts on which the indispensable character of this motive depends.

We have not, however, finished with this question yet. There is a further set of objections still {309} remaining to be considered which, whilst based on an admission that wealth-production is motived by the desire of wealth, aims at showing that this fact does not necessarily result in more than a fraction of the consequences which have up to this time flowed from it, but merely shows in reality that those consequences are unalterable, and adds new force to the arguments that have just been urged with regard to them.

The objections referred to are those embodied in the well-known contention that though the possession of exceptional wealth must be allowed to the exceptional men who are actually engaged in producing it, and the exercise of whose business ability is just as essential to the country’s prosperity as to their own, yet this possession of wealth should be limited to themselves personally, and should not be allowed to distribute itself amongst their idle and inefficient families. In other words, it is urged that whilst the founders and conductors of businesses are entitled to the incomes, no matter how large, that are due to the exercise of their own powers, these incomes should cease with the cessation of the powers that caused them, and should not be allowed to perpetuate themselves, as they do now, in the shape of interest paid to the passive owners of capital. Such an arrangement, it is maintained by those who advocate it, would at once coincide with the dictates of abstract justice, and whilst securing to the exceptional wealth-producer, whose services society requires, the full reward and motive necessary to ensure his activity, would enrich the community at {310} large by distributing amongst it an enormous income, which at present, instead of stimulating anybody to any useful exertion, merely keeps a number of men in idleness. And this contention at first sight does not lack plausibility either in respect of the question of abstract justice which it raises, or of the practical consequences which, according to it, the arrangement in question would produce. When we examine it closely, however, the plausibility vanishes, and abstract justice and practical reason alike condemn the appeals thus made to them as founded entirely on misconception.

Let us deal with the question of abstract justice first. Those who denounce interest or unearned income as unjust, invariably state their case in the following simple form. There are only two ways, they say, in which a man can become possessed of wealth—either by producing such and such an amount himself, or by appropriating such and such an amount that has been produced by another person; or, as they frequently put it, with an air of solemn sententiousness, “A man can get an income only by working or by stealing: there is no third way!” Now one conclusive answer to this puerile, though popular, sophism has, strangely enough, been given by Mr. Henry George, who, though eager to adopt any argument that could be used to assail the rich, was, nevertheless, not taken in by this. Mr. George pointed out that one kind of wealth, at all events,—and we may add that in this we have wealth in its oldest form—consists of {311} possessions which have been neither made by the possessors nor yet stolen by them. That is to say, it consists of flocks and herds. Mr. George pointed out also that whole classes of possessions besides are, for by far the larger part of their value, equally independent of either work or theft. Such possessions are wines, whose quality improves with time, and whose value, consequently, whether in exchange or use, is increased from year to year by the secret operations of nature. But Mr. George, though his arguments were true so far as they went, did little more than touch the hem of the question; for flocks and herds, and commodities that grow valuable as they mature themselves, form but a small, though they do form a typical, portion of wealth that may come to a man without his having produced it himself, and without his stealing it from any other human producer. And this is the wealth which is actually produced by capital.

In order to show the reader that capital is an actual producer, in as true a sense as labour is, or the ability by which labour is directed, let us begin by considering fixed capital as distinct from wage capital, and by considering it in its simplest forms. By fixed capital is meant any tools, machines, or materials by which man’s efficiency as a producer of wealth is increased; and we will take as examples of these the three following things—a dart or missile by which game may be killed; a heap of manure by which a peasant’s field may be fertilised; and a horse which a peasant uses for ploughing and {312} kindred purposes. Now let us imagine a race of savages who use no missiles at all, but catch their game merely by sleight of hand. If a man is entitled to such game as he catches, the exceptionally dexterous hunter who catches most will be necessarily the rightful possessor of more game than his fellows. This will be granted by those who admit that work constitutes a true, and the only true title to possession.

Such being the case, then, let us alter our supposition somewhat, and suppose that the hunters, instead of catching the game with their hands, kill it with wooden darts; and that the amount of game which each hunter will secure in a day depends not on the skill with which the darts are thrown, but on the skill with which the darts are made. Under these circumstances, the hunter who secures most will not be the man who is quickest in seizing the quarry with his hands, but the man who makes the darts that will reach their mark most certainly; and yet no one would say that he was less entitled to what he took, because his exceptional skill, before it could become effectual, was obliged to become embodied in some object external to himself.

In the same way, if two peasants are cultivating similar fields, and one, by sheer hard work, raises a larger crop than the other, his right to his larger crop would not be denied by anybody. Let us suppose, then, that instead of working harder than his neighbour he works more intelligently, that he saves and stores up as manure materials which his {313} neighbour wastes; and that every year, through the powers accumulated in his manure heap, he can raise a larger crop than his neighbour, though he actually works less. Would any one affirm that the man lost his right to his extra produce because he produced it indirectly by the external agency of his manure, and not directly by overstraining his muscles? Or again, if one of the peasants raised a larger crop than his neighbour because, whilst his neighbour spent all his money in drinking, he himself saved it and bought a horse, would any one maintain that the extra crop due to the work which the horse performed for its owner did not belong to the owner, but was stolen by him from the other man?

No one would put forward an argument so absurd as this. And yet the wooden darts of the savage and the manure heap and the horse of the peasant are neither more nor less than portions of fixed capital, just as a steam engine is, or a cotton mill with all its plant. Fixed capital is merely productive ability which, instead of acting directly in the production of goods for the consumer, stores itself up in externalised means of production, so that it may, with accumulated force, produce such goods indirectly; and the additional wealth which a man produces by a new machine is just as much produced by himself as is the additional crop which he raises from a patch of land by the employment of a horse which he has bought, or manure which he has himself concocted. Indeed, fixed capital may be compared to a breed of artificial horses, or if we like the simile better, to {314} a race of iron slaves. The amount of wealth which the employment of a machine adds to the amount that would be produced without it by a given number of labourers, is produced by the machine itself just as truly as it would be if the machine, instead of a structure of wheels and framework, took the form of a gang of artificial negroes, who only betrayed the fact that they were not human by the heat of their breath, an occasional unearthly whistle, and the different language in which they required to have their orders given them. The machine produces this increment, but certain men produced the machine; and therefore the increment is in reality produced by the men, just as truly as when a murdered man has been killed by a bullet from a rifle, his death has been caused by the murderer who aimed and discharged the weapon.

And what is true of fixed capital is true of wage capital also; for fixed capital, such as machines, buildings, or railways, is the result of wage capital, as employed to direct labour, and is therefore wage-capital externalised in the objective results of its employment. But fixed capital, or a man’s productive power externalised, differs from his productive power when exercised by himself through wage capital. It is a part of his power which he can separate from his own personality, and which he can make over to others, just as a slave-owner might make over a body of slaves; only these are slaves whose enslavement does them no wrong, and who belong {315} by right to the men whose enterprise and whose intellect created them.

Capital, then, as such, is as true a producer of wealth as the men were who in the first instance produced it; and when one of them passes a portion of it on to his son, and with it the income that results from it, this income is nothing that is stolen from other men, but is simply a part of the product produced by the artificial slaves, the use of whom other men for their own advantage borrow, and who rightly belong to the lender because he has received them from his fathers, who created them. And should any socialist quarrel with this reasoning, it will be sufficient to point out to him that it is neither more nor less than the reasoning which, till only a few years ago, the leaders of socialism themselves were never weary of employing. Capital, said Lassalle, is merely labour fossilised: and so long as labour was held to be the only wealth-producer, the socialists urged that capital belonged to the labourers, because it represented the labour of their fathers, whose heirs they were. But with the gradual disappearance of the doctrine that labour is the sole producer, it is becoming more and more evident that capital is not what Lassalle thought it was—that it is not fossilised labour, but fossilised business ability. In other words, it does not, except in its earliest stages, represent on the part of producers a process of exceptional saving. What it does represent is a process of exceptional production. Since then the labourers, as labourers, {316} would have been the rightful heirs to all capital, if all capital had been produced by the common labour of their parents, those who have actually inherited it must be its rightful owners in fact, because in fact it has been produced by the ability of the exceptional men who left it to them.

But the whole of this argument, based on the claims of abstract justice, would avail very little to defend the income of the mere owner of capital if his position rested upon its abstract justice only, and if his right to his income did not form a part of the very conditions that render the production of wealth possible. The part which the right to income from capital plays when the ownership of the capital is divorced from any active employment of it, depends on the fact that the right to income of this kind is what gives to wealth the larger part of its value, and renders the desire of it efficient as a social motive.

The ways in which it does this are many and various; and because it is impossible to indicate them in any simple or single formula, certain people may imagine that they have no importance. Such people might as well argue that no complicated process is an important process, or that no results are necessary when many causes combine to produce them.

The most obvious of the reasons why the right to income from capital forms in the eyes of the exceptional wealth-producer a principal element in the desirability of the wealth produced by him has {317} its root in the facts of family affection. In spite of the selfishness which distinguishes so much of human action, a man’s desire to secure for his family such wealth as he can is one of the strongest motives of human activity known; and the fact that it operates in the case of many who are otherwise selfish shows how deeply it is engrained in the human character. It may, indeed, be regarded as a kind of selfishness itself; and the vigorous and practical men who have exceptional faculties for wealth-production are precisely those in whom it is strongest and most persistent. Men like these would never for a moment tolerate an arrangement which permitted the head of the family to keep his wife and children in luxury so long as he lived, but would condemn all of them, the moment he happened to die, to be turned by the butler and footmen into the street as beggars.

It has been said that this family feeling on the part of the great wealth-producer may be regarded as a species of selfishness; and there is nothing very recondite in the process by which it comes to be so. Such a man, no matter how selfish, values his family because it happens to be his own. His own importance is enhanced by the success and brilliancy of its members; and the possession of a fashionable wife, and a popular and well-bred son, reflects almost as much credit on him as the possession of a gentleman for his grandfather. For this reason, if for no others, he will do for them everything that exceptional wealth will enable him to do. Wealth, {318} however, depends for its effects on those who enjoy it, not merely on its present enjoyment, but on the prospect of its continued possession; and unless the man who is making a fortune by his ability may bequeath to one of his children, at all events, a position similar to his own, and something exceptional in the way of wealth to all, the money which he spends on them during his own lifetime will be wasted. The whole social importance which wealth might have given them would be gone. The tastes and the peculiar cultivation which wealth is capable of securing for those who are from their earliest years surrounded with it, they would under such circumstances neglect to acquire at all; or, if they did acquire them, they would be living in a fool’s paradise, for when their father died, and their wealth consequently vanished, they would be infinitely worse off than those who had never possessed it. They would resemble nothing so much as plants that had been grown in a conservatory, merely that, when on the point of flowering, they might be bedded out in the frost.

If, then, for the selfish, or even the heartless parent, wealth would in most cases lose the larger part of its attractions unless it could be accumulated and bequeathed to others in the shape of income-yielding property, for the normally affectionate parent its attractions would be reduced yet further.

But the full part which heritable incomes play, in rendering wealth desirable in the eyes of exceptional men, is not to be understood by considering such a {319} man and his family singly. For the life and the ambitions of a family are not self-contained. They imply and depend upon relations with other families; and these other families will be valued, and intercourse with them will be rendered possible, not by the bare fact that they are the possessors of so much money, but by the fact that they have the habits and interests which result, and result only, in the social atmosphere created by a number of assured incomes, wholly independent of any daily struggle to make them. It is easy to see that no rich society would be endurable if the only men in it were men who had just made their fortunes, and if, on their deaths, their families disappeared from it in the gulfs of destitution. Anything more exquisitely ludicrous than the socialistic proposal that great wealth-producers should be allowed large incomes to spend, but that they must not on any account be allowed to invest any part of them, or use it in a way by which more income may result from it—anything more ludicrous than this it is not possible to conceive. It is—to recur to an illustration used already—like proposing that a peasant who is more industrious than his neighbours shall be allowed all the money which the sale of his extra produce brings him, provided only that he spends it on brandy, or beer, or absinthe; but that if he save it up and buys a useful horse with it, his purchase shall be confiscated by the State, because a horse is productive capital. This proposal, however, is not only ludicrous in theory, but it would, if put into practice, result in a sort of {320} society more vile and bestial than anything which the world has ever known. For the sole advantage which in that case wealth would bring to its producer would consist in the meat and drink and other means of physical pleasure which he and his family could consume or enjoy during his lifetime—before he retired to the grave, and his wife and children to the workhouse.

The main value of wealth in the eyes of the great wealth-producer does not consist in its ministering to brief spasms of self-indulgence, but in the fact of its being the foundation of an equable and sustained life, in which the physical pleasures are refined rather than intensified, and the time employed by the majority in producing the necessaries of existence is given not to sloth, but to other kinds of exertion. A life of this kind is impossible except in a society of which a large section not only possesses wealth, but is accustomed to its possession, and is characterised by accomplishments, tastes, principles, and kinds of knowledge, which can be developed and acquired only when the continuance of its possession is assured. In other words, those men on whose exceptional business ability the productive processes of the entire community depend, and who are the cause of growth in the incomes of the mass of the community, just as truly as they are the producers of their own fortunes, are motived to activity less by the desire of the wealth which comes to them day by day through their own direct exertions, and which would cease instantly {321} when these exertions were suspended, than they are by the desire of wealth that shall come to them indirectly, not as the product of their exceptional exertions in the present, but as the product of the accumulated product of their exceptional exertions in the past—the product of those stored-up forces with which they have enriched the world, and which, whilst rendering help to thousands of men besides, will continue to render a tribute to their creators and their creators’ children.

Thus, to express the matter in brief and familiar language, the sustained development and exercise of exceptional ability in wealth-production implies the possession by those who monopolise this ability, not merely of that portion of those products which are called the wages of superintendence, but also to that portion which is called interest on capital. For just as the control of capital affords the only means by which, under free institutions, the great man can apply his faculties so as to increase the production of wealth, so does the right to interest, or to the products of the capital accumulated by him, constitute the chief reward by the desire of which the exercise of his faculties is stimulated.

There is a further point, however, which now remains to be noticed. When it is said that the great wealth-producer is motived mainly by the desire to enjoy an amount of wealth proportionate to what is produced by him, it is not asserted that in order to gratify this desire it is necessary that he should be able to appropriate the whole of what {322} is produced by him. On the contrary, of that constantly growing product which is added by the great man’s faculties to the product of ordinary labour, and out of which the income of the great man comes, a portion is capable of being appropriated by the ordinary labourers themselves. Indeed, the masses of the community are partakers in material progress, and have an interest in material progress solely because, as an actual fact, a considerable percentage of this added product goes to them; and though few of our so-called “labour leaders” recognise this truth, all the hopes of enrichment which they hold out to their followers imply nothing whatever beyond the securing a larger amount of an increment which is produced not by themselves but others. An important question, therefore, arises in this way as to how far the product of the great men can be taxed and handed over as a bonus to average labour without weakening the motives which prompt the great men to produce it. This is a question to which, by À priori reasoning, it is absolutely impossible to give any definite answer. It is a question that can be solved only by cautious practical experiment; and the answer will vary constantly with times, places, and circumstances. All that can be asserted here, and it is all that requires to be insisted on, is that the amount of wealth which the exceptional wealth-producer can secure must be proportionate to what is produced by him, however far short of the whole of it; and that it must not be diminished to such an extent as {323} will render it less exceptional as the object of an ambitious and strenuous man’s desire.

In other words, that graduation of social circumstances, those differences in ways of living, in habits, manners, accomplishments, and social functions, which have their physical basis in varying degrees of wealth, and give to civilised society what is its present, as it has been its past character—these graduations of social circumstances, which it is the cherished dream of the socialists to do away with, are indestructible so long as civilisation lasts. If they perish, civilisation will perish also; when civilisation is restored they will reappear along with it; and however they may be modified or adjusted, they can never be even approximately effaced.

It is the facts briefly indicated in the present chapter which the socialists of to-day are principally distinguished by ignoring; and it is these facts which render socialism for ever impossible.

This truth, when once generally recognised, will lead to many practical consequences, of which the most immediately important will be dealt with in the following chapter.