IRLF 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Gl FT OF 
 
 Class 
 
SOCIALISM 
 
 BY 
 
 W. H. MALLOCK, M.A. 
 
 of England 
 
 A SERIES OF 
 LECTURES DELIVERED AT 
 
 Columbia University 
 Harvard University 
 Johns Hopkins University 
 Univenity of Pennsyh 
 University of Chicago 
 
 UNDER THE AUSPICES OF 
 The Public Lecture Bureau of 
 
 The National Civic Federation 
 
 February, 1907 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
SOCIALISM 
 
 BY 
 
 W. H. MALLOCK, M.A., 
 
 OF ENGLAND 
 
 Or THE 
 
 Or T 
 
 UNIVERSITY )) 
 
 THE N^criONAi Cfvic FEDERATION 
 
 281 Fourth Avenue 
 
 New York 
 


\V. H. MALLOCK, M.A. 
 
- 
 
 Or THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 [AL'f ', 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 The invitation with which I have been honored by 
 The National Civic Federation of New York to de- 
 liver a short series of addresses on those modern eco- 
 nomic theories which, under the name of socialism, are 
 enjoying so considerable a vogue both in this country 
 and in Europe, is an invitation which I have accepted 
 with a pleasure proportionate to the interest of the 
 subject. 
 
 What socialism really means, in so far as it means 
 anything distinctive, definite, and coherent, is a question 
 I will discuss presently. But whatever it means, it 
 stands, on its practical side, for some scheme for bet- 
 tering the condition of the majority of the human race, 
 by reorganizing society on a basis substantially different 
 from that on which it rests now, and on which it has 
 rested always, from the beginnings of civilization till 
 to-day. 
 
 Now, any scheme of this kind which aims at the prac- 
 tical introduction of some radically novel principle, 
 however practical may be its object, and however 
 strongly it may appeal to the practical and concrete 
 passions, necessarily implies and rests upon certain 
 intellectual judgments or theories with regard to the 
 facts and forces of society and of human nature. One 
 of the greatest groups of changes that have taken place 
 in modern times are those which rest on the introduction 
 and the perfecting of the steam engine. The steam 
 engine and the steam printing press may be called the 
 physical basis of that diffused knowledge and that force 
 of public opinion which in many minds arouse such un- 
 bounded enthusiasm. But on what rested the possibility 
 of the introduction of the steam engine and the steam 
 printing press? It rested on the fact that by a course 
 
 3 
 
 159345 
 
of dispassionate study, certain men arrived at a series 
 of dispassionate conclusions which proved to be in 
 minute harmony with the powers and processes of na- 
 ture. The same is the case with socialism. Whatever 
 its ultimate objects, even those who are most enamored 
 of them must admit that their practical value depends 
 on whether the means by which socialists propose to 
 achieve them are in harmony with the character, the 
 faculties, and the limitations of human beings generally ; 
 and here we have a question, not of feeling, but of dry 
 scientific fact. 
 
 It is this aspect of our subject to which I wish to 
 direct your attention. I will ask you, for the moment, 
 to lay mere feeling aside; and, admitting that in the 
 world as it is there are many evils which we all desire 
 to mitigate, to consider in a sober and scientific spirit, 
 whether the class of remedies which go by the name 
 of socialism would produce I do not say merely a 
 preferable but even a practicable, a working alterna- 
 tive. 
 
 I think I may venture to say that a large number 
 of highly educated persons who, actuated no doubt by 
 generous and unselfish sympathies, are anxious to claim 
 for themselves the name of socialists, have never sub- 
 mitted themselves to this discipline of preliminary scien- 
 tific inquiry. They see that under the existing order 
 of things many evils exist. They are persuaded that 
 these evils are due to the general constitution of so- 
 ciety, and that the evils would disappear were that 
 general constitution altered. Such being the case, they 
 leap to the curious conclusion that the only alternative 
 to the existing state of things is socialism, and that, 
 by leaping into the fire, we shall free ourselves from 
 all the evils of the frying pan. They are like men 
 traveling on a road rough, hilly and dangerous, which 
 interposes many difficulties between them and the point 
 which they desire to reach, and who, impatient of these 
 difficulties, propose, instead of improving the road, to 
 
take a short cut toward the point desired across a quick- 
 sand. The quicksand is level and would not wound 
 their feet. They never pause to inquire whether it 
 would not engulf the pedestrian. It is not the road, 
 therefore it must be better than the road. Such is 
 their simple logic. What socialism is in detail, as a 
 constructive scheme, they make no attempt to investi- 
 gate. They allow it to impress their imaginations like 
 a building seen in a dream; but they never inquire, as prac- 
 tical builders are bound to do, whether such a building 
 is a structural possibility or no. They never consider 
 in detail the principles of its structure at all. 
 
 Persons whose minds are in a condition so vague as 
 this may be admirable in respect of their sympathies, 
 but their opinions with regard to socialism as a prac- 
 tical programme are valueless. Nor is there any legiti- 
 mate excuse for this vagueness. If socialism represents no 
 social principles definitely and identifiably different from 
 those in operation now, it is idle to talk of the progress 
 which socialistic opinion has made, or the practical con- 
 sequences which may arise from it; but practically this 
 is not the case. Whatever may be the fallacies involved 
 in the socialistic gospel, it at all events represents prin- 
 ciples which, so far as they go, are definite. What we 
 have is no question of mere verbal definition. It is a 
 question of historical fact. Any body of opinion which 
 tends to have a practical influence is as a fact those 
 distinctive principles and promises in virtue of which it 
 enlists the mass of its believers and adherents, and bands 
 them together as a party distinct from and opposed to 
 others. And what socialism is, when estimated in this 
 way, it is very easy to ascertain, finding that, in the 
 modern world no less than in the ancient the few are 
 possessed of more wealth than the many, it proposes 
 to alter this arrangement by a definite reorganization 
 of society, by means of which the many, without any 
 additional exertion, will find their position revolution- 
 ized and their wealth indefinitely increased. So far, 
 
the promises of socialism merely concide with a dream 
 which has haunted the imagination of multitudes ever 
 since civilization began. They may have sighed for 
 Utopia as a plain woman may sigh for beauty, but .they 
 have never, except on passing occasions, and on a re- 
 stricted scale, organized their aspirations into anything 
 Kke a practical demand, and the reason is that, though 
 the prospect of Utopia was pleasing, they secretly re- 
 garded it as inaccessible. It affected them as little as 
 the promises of a quack doctor would, who offered to 
 sell them a pill which would make them all immortal. 
 It is, indeed, a universal truth that no desire for any 
 desirable object becomes practical unless the condi- 
 tions of knowledge prevalent amongst those desiring it 
 are such as to enable them to believe that the desired 
 object it attainable. Nothing illustrates this fact more 
 clearly than the history of socialism. Socialism in its 
 earlier stages, as socialists now admit, was Utopian; 
 and, being Utopian, it was ineffective. It first became 
 an organized movement when a great thinker arose who 
 supplied it with a foundation in science. Then the 
 multitudes began, for the first time, to feel that knowl- 
 edge was on their side, and that the desirable was also 
 in sober truth the obtainable. The thinker I refer to 
 was the celebrated Karl Marx, whose work on Capital, 
 published about the middle of the ipth century, has 
 been acclaimed throughout Europe and America as the 
 scientific bible of socialism. 
 
 The practical outcome of the scientific economics of 
 Marx is summed up in the formula which is the watch- 
 word of popular socialism. "All wealth is due to labor ; 
 therefore all wealth ought to go to the laborer" a doc- 
 trine in itself not novel, but presented by Marx as 
 the outcome of an elaborate system of economics. 
 
 This formula, whatever may be its intrinsic truth or 
 falsehood, illustrates by its success as an instrument 
 of popular agitation the fact on which I have been just 
 now insisting, that desire becomes practically active 
 
only when accompanied by a belief that its object is 
 capable of attainment. But it does more than illustrate 
 this general fact. It crystallizes and gives prominence 
 to a most important economic truth. The truth to 
 which I refer is this that the possibility of redistribu- 
 ting wealth depends on the causes by which 
 wealth is produced. Wealth, says Marx, not 
 only ought to be, but actually can be distributed 
 amongst a certain class of persons, namely, the labor- 
 ers, and why can it be? Because these laborers 
 comprise in the acts of labor everything that is in- 
 volved in the production of it. In other words, wealth 
 is like water pumped up into a reservoir, and' thence 
 conducted by pipes into innumerable private houses. If 
 the men who draw it off at the taps have nothing to do 
 with the quantity that is pumped up if, for example, 
 the whole is pumped up by angels, who can pump up as 
 much or as little as they please it is evident that the 
 amount which the men consume, and the manner in 
 which they apportion it, will depend in the last resort 
 not on the men, but on the angels ; for if the angels dis- 
 approve of the men's use of the water they will sim- 
 ply cut off the supply. If the men themselves are to 
 determine the distribution, without reference to the will 
 of anyone else, they can do so only because, as a matter 
 of fact, they do all the pumping themselves without 
 external assistance. Such, in an expanded form, being 
 the application which Marx makes of his doctrine that 
 labor alone produces all economic wealth, let us con- 
 sider this doctrine itself, which remains the fulcrum 
 of the socialistic lever. In view of this fact you will 
 not, I hope, find it uninteresting if I give you a brief 
 account of the general argument of Marx. 
 
 The doctrine that labor is the source of all wealth is ! 
 apt to strike many people at first sight as obviously J 
 incomplete. Capital generally, and in especial machin- 
 ery, must, they will say, contribute something; but to 
 such objections Marx has a most ingenious answer. He 
 
 7 
 
starts with the fact that in the modern world, where 
 labor is minutely divided, each producer or group of 
 laborers, produces only one commodity, of which the 
 producer himself consumes little, and very often nothing. 
 A man, for example, may not himself smoke, and yet his 
 whole industrial business may be to produce cigars. 
 The products of his industry are, therefore, to himself 
 valueless. They possess value for him, or are in other 
 words wealth only in so far as he can exchange them 
 for other commodities which he personally requires 
 and can enjoy. His wealth, therefore, is measured by 
 the quantity of assorted products which he can get in 
 exchange for the total of the product which he himself 
 produces. What, then, is the measure of value which 
 regulates the quantity of assorted commodities which 
 the possessor of a given stock of one commodity, such 
 as cigars, is able to get in exchange for it? And for 
 his answer to this question Marx goes to Ricardo and 
 the orthodox economists generally and declares that 
 this measure of value by which the exchange of various 
 commodities is regulated, is the amount of labor which 
 is normally embodied in each of them, the labor in 
 question being the labor of the average man, measured 
 in terms of time. The meaning of this doctrine is very 
 vividly illustrated by the proposal to substitute for or- 
 dinary money what the socialists call labor-certificates, 
 by means of which the product of an hour of any one 
 kind of labor say, whiskey making, will exchange for 
 the product of an hour of any other kind of labor say 
 a hundred copies of a tract which demands that whiskey 
 making should be prohibited 
 
 Having thus settled that average labor, the measure 
 of which is time, is the sole source and measure of 
 wealth or economic values, Marx goes on to point out 
 that by the improvement of industrial processes, and 
 more especially by the development of machinery, labor 
 in recent times has been growing more and more produc- 
 tive, so that each labor hour results in an increased out- 
 
 8 
 
put of commodities. Thus a man who, a hundred and 
 fifty years ago could have only just kept himself alive 
 by an expenditure of his entire labor day, can now keep 
 himself alive by an expenditure of no more than half 
 of it. The remainder goes to produce what Marx called 
 a surplus value, by which he meant all that output of 
 wealth which is beyond what is practically necessary to 
 keep the laborers alive. But what becomes of it? Does 
 it go to the laborers who have produced it ? No, replies 
 Marx. On the contrary, as fast as it is produced, it is 
 abstracted from the laborers in a manner which he goes 
 on to analyze, by the capitalists. 
 
 Here Marx advances to the second stage of his argu- 
 ment. His general conception of capital is the instru- 
 ments of production especially those vast aggregates of 
 modern machinery, by the use of which labor has so 
 vastly increased its output. Now here, says Marx, the 
 capitalist will hasten to object that the increased output 
 is due not to labor, but to the machinery ; and to such 
 an objection the answer, he says, is this: That the ma- 
 chinery itself is nothing but past labor in disguise. It is 
 past labor fossilized, or embodied in a permanent form, 
 and used by present labor to assist it in its own 
 operations. Labor, therefore common, average labor, 
 remains the sole agent in production after all. Capital, 
 however, possesses this peculiarity that, being labor in 
 a fossil state, it is capable of being detached from the 
 laborers, and is thus capable of being appropriated by 
 other people ; and the meaning, he says, of capitalism 
 in the modern world is the appropriation of the imple- 
 ments of production by a minority who are non-pro- 
 ducers. This process, says Marx, had its first begin- 
 nings in the downfall of the feudal system, but it did 
 not assume great proportions till the introduction of 
 steam power, and the development of great factories, 
 in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when, for 
 the old implements owned by the individuals who 
 worked them were gradually substituted machines for 
 
the use of each of which hundreds or even thousands of 
 men were necessary, and these huge implements of pro- 
 duction, unlike the small ones which they superseded, 
 fell into the hands of a limited and non-laboring class, 
 the actual workers being left with no implements at 
 all. The people at large, in fact, became like a single 
 body of mill hands, who must either be given employ- 
 ment in a particular mill or starve, and the possessing 
 class as a whole became like the owner of such a mill, 
 who, practically holding the keys of life and death, is 
 able to impose on the hands almost any terms he 
 pleases as the price of admission to his premises and 
 to the privilege of using his machinery. And this price 
 which the owner under these circumstances will exact 
 such was the contention of Marx inevitably must 
 come, and historically came to this namely, the entire 
 amount of the goods which the hands produce, except 
 that minimum which is absolutely necessary to keep the 
 hands alive. Thus all capital, all profits, and all inter- 
 est on capital, are fundamentally neither more nor 
 less than an abstraction from labor of commodities 
 which manual labor produces, and manual labor alone. 
 The argument of Marx is not, however, finished yet. 
 There remains a third part which we still have to con- 
 sider. Writing as he did in the middle of the nineteenth 
 century, he said that the process of capitalistic appropria- 
 tion had not yet completed itself. A remnant of the 
 old class of producers and a middle class connected 
 with them still survived. But, he continued, in all 
 capitalistic countries a new movement, inevitable from 
 the first, had already set in, and its pace was daily 
 accelerating. Just as the earlier capitalists had swal- 
 lowed up most of the small producers, so were greater 
 capitalists now swallowing up the smaller, and the 
 other classes were becoming to an increasing degree 
 the victims. Wages, he said, were regulated by an 
 iron law. Under the system of capitalism it was an 
 absolute impossibility that they could rise, the result be- 
 
 10 
 
ing, he said, in language that became proverbial, that the 
 rich are getting richer and fewer. The poor more nu- 
 merous and poorer, and the middle classes are being 
 crushed out; and a time, he continued, was already in 
 sight a time before the end of the nineteenth century 
 when nothing would be left but a handful of very rich 
 men on the one hand and a level mass of men on the 
 other, having only enough food to keep their muscles 
 capable of labor and only enough of rags to save them 
 from being naked or frozen. Then, said Marx, the 
 situation will be no longer tolerable. Then the knell 
 of the capitalistic system will have sounded. The work- 
 ers will assert themselves under pressure of an irresis- 
 tible impulse; they will repossess themselves of the im- 
 plements of production that have been taken from them. 
 The expropriators will in their turn be expropriated, and 
 the laborers will divide amongst themselves for the 
 future the entire product produced by them. 
 
 I have given you this outline of the theory of Karl 
 Marx, because, though a certain class even of later so- 
 cialists themselves have felt themselves forced to reject 
 parts of it as untenable, it still remains, so far as its 
 primary doctrines go, the basis of popular socialism up 
 to the present day. I mean the doctrine that all wealth 
 is due to the labor of the average majority to that 
 ordinary manual exertion which in all cases is so 
 equal in kind that an hour of it on the part of any 
 one man is approximately as efficacious as an hour 
 of it on the part of any other. This doctrine has been, 
 and still is, the basis of socialism as a working appeal 
 to the majority. It enables the preachers of socialism 
 to say to the manual workers, who in all communities 
 must constitute the vast majority of the population, 
 "You, and you alone, produce all the wealth of the 
 world. Each of you, hour for hour, contributes an 
 equal share to it; and each of you is, consequently, 
 entitled to an equal share of the dividend." And, 
 however, since the days of Marx, the more intellectual 
 
 ii 
 
socialists may have shifted their intellectual ground, 
 they still preach to the masses the gospel that Marx 
 preached to them. Here, for example, is the declara- 
 tion of Mr. Sidney Webb, the most prominent represen- 
 tative of thoughtful socialism in England: "The only 
 scheme of society which can be described as 'truly so- 
 cialistic' is one which will secure to every citizen equal 
 means of subsistence, and prevent the slightest inequali- 
 ties in wealth from ever again arising." 
 
 I say again, then, that in the minds of the masses the 
 attraction of socialism is its promise of an equal dis- 
 tribution of wealth ; and what makes them regard such 
 an equal distribution as possible is that theory of pro- 
 duction which the genius of Karl Marx invested with 
 a semblance, at all events, of sober scientific truth, and 
 which ascribes all wealth to that ordinary manual labor 
 which brings the sweat to the brow of the ordinary 
 laboring man. 
 
 This theory of production, then, being the basis of 
 popular socialism. I propose to take it as my starting 
 point, and to examine it, not now, but on the occasion 
 when I next address you. I then hope to show you 
 that, in spite of the plausibility with which the ingenuity 
 of Marx invested it, this basic doctrine of so-called 
 scientific socialism is the greatest intellectual mare's nest 
 of the century that has lately ended ; and, not confining 
 myself to any merely negative criticism, I shall endeavor 
 to put before you what the human factors in production 
 really are. We shall then see that the analysis of Karl 
 Marx bears as little relation to the actual facts of the 
 case as the old analysis of matter into fire, water, earth 
 and air bears to the actual facts of chemistry as modern 
 science has revealed them to us. 
 
 But before I begin this examination, there are cer- 
 tain other points which I would press on your atten- 
 tion, as a preface to it. To a considerable number of 
 people, without any formal examination of it at all, this 
 doctrine that labor is the sole producer of wealth will 
 
 12 
 
suggest many obvious difficulties. If all labor, hour for 
 hour, produce commodities of equal economic value, it 
 will occur to many of us to ask how any enterprise which 
 sets labor in motion can fail. An English disciple of 
 Karl Marx, Mr. Hyndman, has pushed the doctrine of 
 Marx to its full logical consequences. In a manual of 
 socialism published by him he takes the case of a man 
 who finds himself in the possession of fifty thousand 
 dollars, and says that, if he wants to live permanently 
 by robbing other men of the products of their labor, 
 his course is, under the present system, simple. He 
 buys a mill of some kind, hires a manager and opera- 
 tives, and year by year robs them of the surplus values 
 which they produce. He himself, says Mr. Hyndman, 
 with delightful naivete, "has nothing to do but sit still 
 and watch the mill go." Does this conclusion coincide 
 with the facts of life? All practical men will at once 
 dismiss it with derision. If it were true, any one em- 
 ployment of capital would be just as successful as any 
 other. Every enterprise would meet with equal success 
 which found employment for an equal amount of labor. 
 A ship which sailed indifferently would be just as good 
 as a ship which sailed well, if only the same amount of 
 labor had been expended on the construction of both. 
 If two yachts were built for a race between America 
 and England, the trouble of an actual race might be 
 spared. We could discover which was the most valuable 
 boat beforehand, by discovering which had taken the 
 longest time to make. Or, if the merit of the crews 
 were in question, we could tell which was the most 
 efficient by discovering which had worked itself into a 
 state of the most violent perspiration. These objec- 
 tions, and others of the same rough and ready kind will 
 suggest themselves to the doctrine that the wealth repre- 
 sented by a product depends on the amount of manual 
 labor that is embodied in it. And yet in spite of all 
 this we are confronted by a very curious fact. This doc- 
 trine with regard to labor has been- adopted, and is con- 
 
 13 
 
stantly enunciated, not by socialists only, or by persons 
 of defective education; but we find it explicitly or im- 
 plicitly dominating the thought of others of highly- 
 placed politicians, and celebrated philosophical thinkers, 
 who look upon socialism as a practical programme with 
 abhorrence. Ruskin, for example, who repudiated all 
 sympathy with socialism, is never weary of declaring 
 that nothing produces wealth but labor. Mr. Lloyd 
 George, a member of the present liberal British govern- 
 ment, wrote some months since to the Times, declaring 
 that he was no socialist, but that he did desire to see 
 more of the wealth of the country finding its way to 
 the laboring classes, who alone produced the whole of 
 it. Again, let us take Count Tolstoy, who, whatever 
 we may think of his eccentricities, is at all events a 
 man of genius. Count Tolstoy begins one of his recent 
 publications thus : "There are a thousand millions of 
 laboring men in the world. All the bread, all the goods 
 of the whole world, all wherewith people live and are 
 rich all this is produced by these laboring men." And 
 if we wish to be perfectly certain what Count Tolstoy 
 means by laborers, he tells us that there is one sure 
 test. Are the palms of their hands hardened by manual 
 toil? 
 
 Seeing, then, how many are the objections which or- 
 dinary common sense suggests to the doctrine that all 
 wealth is produced solely, and measured solely by 
 labor, we are naturally led to ask how it is that so 
 many eminent men can still accept and enunciate this 
 doctrine as an axiom. Why, if it is really so absurd as, 
 from some of its consequences, it would seem to be, 
 has it not been formally so exposed and exploded that 
 no serious thinker can any longer give harbor to it? 
 To this question there are several answers which I 
 shall point out hereafter; but there is one, and per- 
 haps the most important one, to which I must call your 
 attention now. This consists in the fact that the doc- 
 trine in question is embodied, and is every day repeated, 
 
 14 
 
in the language of what is called the orthodox science of 
 economics ; and the teaching of the orthodox economists 
 has, in this special respect, never been rendered definitely 
 obsolete by any definite, authoritative and popularly 
 accepted correction of it. It was the boast of Karl 
 Marx that all his most revolutionary conclusions, which 
 threatened the whole system of capitalism, was de- 
 duced from the doctrines of thinkers who regarded that 
 system as unalterable, and who, so far as intentions 
 went, were its chief intellectual supporters. And in 
 this Marx was absolutely right. Let me show you in 
 detail how. 
 
 Let us open any text-book of orthodox economics we 
 please, and what will it tell us as to the agencies by 
 which wealth is produced? It will tell us that these 
 agencies are three land, capital and labor. Now by 
 land is meant all the forces and spontaneous gifts of 
 nature. As to these there is no dispute. Dispute arises 
 only in connection with the agencies supplied by man. 
 Of these capital is one ; but capital, whatever may be 
 its nature, represents human agencies that are past, not 
 agencies that are actually operating in the present; and 
 would be absolutely sterile unless living human effort 
 made use of it. It is therefore on the nature of the 
 living industrial effort involved in the production of 
 wealth that the whole discussion turns ; and this living 
 industrial effort is, by the orthodox economists, com- 
 prised under the single name, and the single category 
 of labor. 
 
 Now nobody must think that I am going to follow the 
 example of Ruskin and Carlyle, and other distinguished 
 writers, and attack the science of the orthodox econom- 
 ists as a no-science, whose conclusions to quote 
 Ruskin's language, are practically valueless and nugatory. 
 My sole contention is that this science is incomplete, 
 and that instead of denying itself it must complete 
 itself; and that the point at which its extension must 
 begin is this point which we are now considering 
 
 15 
 
namely, its present comprehension of all the varieties 
 of living industrial effort under the common name and 
 common idea of labor. All varieties of such effort 
 have doubtless certain features in common, and for 
 certain purposes it is sufficient to group them all to- 
 gether. Thus chemistry assumed at one time that atoms 
 were the ultimate particles of matter; and for the solu- 
 tion of certain problems this assumption sufficed and 
 suffices still. But new problems have dawned on the 
 scientific world, and chemistry, in order to solve them, 
 has to push its analysis farther, and has now reduced 
 atoms to aggregates of minuter elements. Similarly, 
 political economy is asked to solve problems now which, 
 in the days of Adam Smith and Ricardo, had never so 
 much as been mooted in any definite and coherent way. 
 When the orthodox economists declared that labor was 
 the only living human agency involved in the production 
 of wealth, and that the value of commodities were 
 measured by the amount of labor embodied in them, no 
 one had thought of isolating the labor of the average 
 man, of contrasting it with other effort of a more ex- 
 ceptional kind, and claiming for the former that it 
 alone was productive; or that all effort, hour for hour, 
 was of equal productive value. These economists in- 
 deed admitted from time to time that the labor of some 
 men produced much more than that of others. Thus 
 Mill refers to the productive power of mere thought. 
 But, having paid these casual tributes to common sense, 
 they made no attempt to give their admissions any 
 definite form, or provide for them in their system any 
 definite form, or provide for them in their system 
 any definite place. They were content, since in their 
 day, no practical issue was involved, to leave all forms 
 of living industrial effort, from those of a Watt or an 
 Edison down to those of a man who tars a fence, 
 grouped together under the common name of labor. 
 
 But if this crude analysis was sufficient for yester- 
 day, it is quite insufficient for to-day. If labor be taken 
 
 16 
 
to include industrial effort of all kinds, to say that 
 labor is the source of all wealth is a platitude; and to 
 say that all wealth ought to go to the laborers is like 
 saying that all wealth ought to go to the human race. 
 We have no foundation here for any of the distinctive 
 doctrines of socialism. Socialism becomes a definite 
 and distinctive doctrine only when the word labor is 
 taken in an exclusive sense and stands exclusively for 
 those ordinary manual efforts by which, as Count Tol- 
 stoy says, the palms of the hands are hardened ; all other 
 forms of effort, and the claims based on them, being 
 ignored. So soon as labor becomes definitely under- 
 stood in this sense, and is in this sense appropriated by 
 socialism as a militant school of thought, it is impos- 
 sible to argue with them, and ask whether their theory 
 be true or false, so long as we persist in using the same 
 name, and considering under the same category the kind 
 of effort which the socialists mean by the word, and 
 which they recognize, and those other kinds of effort 
 which they definitely ignore and exclude. The truth 
 of the matter is, as I shall point out when I next ad- 
 dress you, that the varieties of human effort involved in! 
 the production of modern wealth are not one, but two; 
 and that these differ not only in degree of productivity, 
 but in kind in the very nature of their operation ; and 
 that economists who attempt to explain the production 
 of wealth to-day, whilst giving a single name to two 
 different kinds of effort, are like a man who insists on 
 putting his hands into boxing-gloves as a preparation 
 for taking to pieces the delicate works of a chronometer. 
 The first thing, then, for us to do, under the pressure 
 of novel circumstances, is to take up the problem 
 where the orthodox economists leave it to go on where 
 they leave off. It is to take this mass of unanalyzed 
 industrial effort which is involved in the production 
 of wealth in modern civilized communities and see of 
 what different kinds of effort the great total con- 
 
 17 
 
1 
 
 sists, and how one kind is connected and co-operates 
 with the other. 
 
 This question the question of how wealth is pro- 
 duced is the first question, in point of logic, with 
 which it is necessary to deal, in considering the social- 
 istic theory as to the manner in which it ought to be 
 distributed. It should also be dealt with first as a 
 mere matter of argumentative tactics, for in this way 
 the question on which we first enter is a question not 
 of what ought to be, but of what is. It does not in- 
 volve us in any dispute with socialists as to who ought 
 to get, and who ought not to get, such and so much 
 of such and such of the world's goods. We have merely 
 a question of what are the different kinds of human 
 action and faculties which are actually . involved in the 
 bringing of these goods into existence. 
 
 This, then, is the question which we may call the 
 statics of production, with regard to which I hope at 
 our next meeting to address you. At present the 
 orthodox economists and the socialistic economists 
 alike give us all human effort tied up, as it were, in a 
 sack, and ticketed "human labor." I propose to open 
 the sack, to spread out its contents before you, and 
 ask you to examine them with your own eyes; and 
 the result will be to exhibit not labor only, but capital 
 also, and the forces which capital represents, in a light 
 very different from that in which they at present ap- 
 pear to the prophets and apostles of socialism, and to 
 the multitudes who, more or less vaguely, are allowing 
 themselves to be influenced by their theories. 
 
 18 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 I pointed out last Tuesday that when we speak of 
 Socialism, its rise, its spread, and so forth, we are 
 not speaking of any realized system; but merely of 
 a belief or theory that such a system is possible, and 
 a consequent demand that it should be established. 
 I pointed out also that the main promise of socialism 
 namely that all wealth should be distributed with 
 substantial equality amongst the manual laborers, 
 rested on a theory with regard to the human agencies , 
 by which the wealth in question is produced this 
 theory being that the only human agency involved is 
 average manual labor, in respect of which one man 
 is practically so equal to another that the amount 
 of wealth produced by him is measurable by the hours 
 for which he labors. I propose to-day, taking this 
 theory for a text, to inquire how far it is an adequate 
 explanation of the facts. We shall find that, whilst 
 it is adequate, if applied to societies in a very low 
 state of development, it progressively fails to be ade- 
 quate, and becomes more and more ridiculous, in 
 proportion as the societies in question rise in the 
 scale of civilization, and the amount of wealth which 
 the socialists desire to redistribute increases. 
 
 To begin, then the doctrine that labor is the sole 
 producer of wealth is at all events so far true that 
 no wealth could be produced without it. Moreover, 
 we can find many examples, not in primitive societies 
 only, but amongst certain populations still existing in 
 the countries of the modern world, in which practi- 
 cally it operates alone. 
 
 By .turning to examples of these, we can see what 
 manual labor, taken by itself, produces. Such exam- 
 
 19 
 
pies are furnished us in abundance by the lowest sav- 
 ages, who work without co-operation, and who just 
 manage to produce a bare minimum of subsistence. 
 But even such savages use certain rude implements 
 which may be called the germ of what economists call 
 fixed capital ; and these implements, which are such 
 as can be made by anybody, may be rightly, in the 
 language of Marx, called ordinary labor fossilized, 
 But we need not go back to savages to find examples 
 of populations amongst which ordinary labor is the 
 sole productive agent. There still exist, in civilized 
 countries, peasant families who own their land and 
 till it, who build their own houses and weave their 
 own clothes, without any aid or guidance except their 
 own. 
 
 Now what kind, and what amount of wealth, do 
 populations such as these produce? Let me read you 
 a few passages descriptive of a population of this 
 kind, which are taken from a very celebrated book. 
 "They labor busily, early and late. They carry their 
 manure to their lands whilst the frost is still on them. 
 They earn their firewood with a labor so intense that 
 the common English people would be astonished. They 
 plod on from day .to day, and from year to year, the 
 most untirable of human animals." You might think 
 that this was a description by some indignant social- 
 ist of the misery of labor when enslaved by capital. 
 As a matter of fact it is a description by a German 
 writer, which John Stuart Mill quotes in his treatise 
 on Political Economy, as illustrating the admirable 
 position of German peasant proprietors, who own their 
 land, and the instruments of production which they 
 use, and have no masters except themselves. And 
 what reward do these men gain by their labor? These 
 untirable animals gain, according to their German 
 eulogist, just enough to keep themselves above the 
 level of actual want. And both this author and Mill 
 hold them up to our inspection, not as victims of op- 
 
 20 
 
pression, but as shining examples of the magic effects 
 of ownership in intensifying human labor. 
 
 And now let us compare the wealth which is pro- 
 duced under these conditions with the wealth produced 
 under the system which the socialists denounce as 
 Capitalism. The contrast between the two amounts is 
 emphasized by nobody more strongly than it is by the 
 socialists themselves. A given population under mod- 
 ern conditions will, to say nothing of the earlier stages 
 of society, produce two, three, four, or five times the 
 amount of wealth that a similar population produced 
 even a hundred and fifty years ago. This is, indeed, 
 one of the practical reasons why the socialists demand 
 that this huge output should be redivided. 
 
 The great question, then, which is inevitably forced 
 upon us is, to what cause is this astonishing change 
 clue? If, as the socialists say, the only agency in the 
 production of wealth is ordinary manual labor, why 
 do a thousand laborers working in the year 1907 pro- 
 duce so incomparably more than they produced work- 
 ing in the year 1760? 
 
 The socialists answer that knowledge has increased, 
 that the methods of production have improved, and 
 that average labor has thus become indefinitely more 
 productive. But to say this is only begging the ques- 
 tion. To what are this increase of knowledge, and these 
 improvements of method due? Are they due to av- 
 erage manual labor itself? Are they due to manual 
 labor in any sense? This is a question which has 
 suggested itself to many thinkers who start with the 
 doctrine that labor is the sole human agency by which 
 wealth is produced; and two classes of answers have 
 been offered, which I will give as set forth by two 
 distinguished thinkers. 
 
 Ruskin explains the advance of labor from its lowest 
 to its highest efficiencies by the gradual development 
 of skill ; and his definition of skill is admirable. All 
 labor, even the lowest, requires, he said, a mind of 
 
 21 
 
some kind to direct the operation of the muscles; and 
 amongst the majority of mankind, minds like hands 
 and muscles approximate to a normal standard ; but 
 amongst a considerable minority we find that the men- 
 tal faculties rise above this standard to a great va- 
 riety of degrees, which the manual faculties do not 
 and thus impart to the manual faculties an efficiency 
 not their own. Exceptional quickness of mind, he says, 
 will enable one bricklayer to lay in a given time more 
 bricks than another; and similarly mental qualities of 
 a kind higher and rarer will enable the hands of a 
 Michael Angelo to paint his picture of the "Last Judg- 
 ment," whilst the hands of another man can only 
 whitewash a. fence. Skill, in fact, is some exceptional 
 mental quality applied by its possessor to the labor 
 of his own hands. It belongs to him personally; and 
 is, as Ruskin rightly says, incommunicable. 
 
 Now in skill as thus defined we have no doubt a 
 correct explanation of how labor in some cases pro- 
 duces products whose value is great, whilst in others 
 it produces products whose value is relatively infinitesi- 
 mal. But these products whose value is due to ex- 
 ceptional skill, though they form a portion of the wealth 
 of the modern world, are not typical of it. The pro- 
 ducts due to exceptional skill or craftsmanship such 
 as an illuminated missal for example are always few 
 in number, and can be possessed by the few only, and 
 from the nature of the case are costly. The distinctive 
 feature of modern wealth-production, on the contrary, 
 is the multiplication of goods relatively to the time 
 spent in producing them, and the consequent cheapen- 
 ing of each article individually. Skill, therefore, af- 
 fords us no explanation of how manual labor as a 
 whole can ever become more productive in one period 
 than it is in another. 
 
 The second answer which I have referred to, is 
 far more to the point. It is ithat given in a classical 
 passage by Adam Smith, which forms ithe opening of 
 
 22 
 
his great work, "The Wealth of Nations." The chief 
 cause, he says, which in all progressive communities 
 enhances the productive power of the individual laborer, 
 is not the development amongst some of faculties that 
 are above the average, but a more effective development 
 of powers common to all, by the fact that labor is 
 divided, so that a man by devoting his life to the per- 
 formance of one operation acquires a manual dexterity 
 otherwise beyond his reach. Here we have labor di- 
 vided in its application, but not requiring different 
 degrees of capacity. We have the average labor of the 
 average man still. 
 
 But this simple division of labor, though a true 
 explanation so far as it goes, takes us but a very 
 little way in the history of industrial progress. It 
 does not, indeed, explain all progress up to the time 
 of Adam Smith; and the modern industrial system, 
 when Adam Smith wrote in the middle of the eigh- 
 teenth century, was, as Karl Marx insists, only just 
 beginning. The world's great increase in productivity 
 has been all made since that time. Even then two 
 factors were at work, other than the division of labor, 
 which have ever since been growing in importance 
 and magnitude ; and the secret of modern production 
 resides, we shall find, in these. One of these is the 
 development of machinery. The other is the increas- 
 ing application of exceptional intelligence, knowledge, 
 and energy, not to the manual labor of those who 
 possess these exceptional qualifications, but to the di- 
 rection and co-ordination of the variety of individual 
 operations into which the manual labor of others, on 
 an increasing scale, divides itself. It is to this latter 
 factor that the development of modern machinery is 
 itself due. I will speak about this first. 
 
 The economic, functions of a man's intelligence and 
 knowledge, as directing the labor, not of his own 
 hands, but of the hands of others, finds perhaps the 
 simplest illustration in the case of a printed book. Let 
 
 23 
 
us take an edition of ten thousand copies of any book 
 we please, printed well, and on good paper. The la- 
 bor of the printers and the paper-makers is the same 
 in kind and quality, whether the book be a work of 
 genius, or a mere compilation of unreadable nonsense 
 whether thousands of people want to read it, or no- 
 body whether each copy is an article of wealth, or 
 whether it is so much rubbish. What makes the edition 
 valuable, when it is so, is the directions under which 
 the printers work ; but the directions do not come 
 from die man by whose manual dexterity the types are 
 arranged in a given order, and the words impressed 
 on so many reams of paper. They come from the 
 author conveying them to the compositors by means 
 of his manuscript. This manuscript, considered under 
 its industrial aspect, is a series of minute orders, every 
 one of which modifies firstly the movements of the 
 compositors hands, and secondly the results of every 
 impress of the type on paper; one mind thus imparting 
 the quality of wealth or value to every one of the ten 
 thousand copies simultaneously. 
 
 Similarly, when any great mass of modern machinery 
 is constructed, which involves the co-operation of thou- 
 sands of manual laborers, the same situation repeats 
 itself. The machinery is an agent of production, and 
 increases the world's wealth, not because the parts are 
 made with sufficient manual skill for the highest skill 
 may be employed in the production of mechanisms that 
 are futile but because each of its parts is fashioned in 
 accordance with the orders of some master mind, 
 which directs and co-ordinates each minutest movement 
 made by the arms and hands of every one of the 
 manual laborers. 
 
 And with the direction of labor generally, whether in 
 the production of manufacturing machinery, or the use 
 of this machinery in the production of such and such 
 kinds of goods, from books down to ribbons and neck- 
 ties of such and such a price and color, the case is the 
 
 24 
 

 same again. We --have mati'ual labor of a given kind 
 and quality, which assists in producing what is wanted 
 or is not wanted which constitute wealth or merely a 
 pile of refuse according to the manner in which all 
 this labor is directed by faculties specifically different 
 from those involved in the manual labor itself. 
 
 Nothing can bring out the nature of this difference 
 more brilliantly than Ruskin's definition, which I have 
 just now quoted, of skill. Labor rises in quality, says 
 Ruskin, and acquires the character of skill, in propor- 
 tion as the mind of the laborer himself, directing his 
 own hands, evinces qualities which rise above the nor- 
 mal minimum ; and these qualities, as Ruskin says, are 
 incommunicable. Their action ends with the task on 
 which the man possessing them is engaged. Skill, in 
 short, is the mind of one man affecting his own labor. 
 The directive faculty is the mind of one man simul- 
 taneously affecting the labor of any number of others. 
 It is to this direction of labor, on the part of excep- 
 tional men, and not to labor itself, that all the aug- 
 mented wealth of the modern world is due. The 
 progress of modern wealth-production consists vitally 
 and fundamentally in an increasing concentration of the 
 most active and powerful minds on the direction of 
 manual effort, which is without a parallel in the past 
 history of the world. 
 
 The human faculties, then, which are involved in the 
 production of modern wealth are not, as the orthodox 
 economists persist in saying, and as the socialists who 
 follow Marx say, of one kind namely those embodied 
 in the individual task-work of the average individual, 
 or, as it is called, labor. They are of two kinds ; and 
 it is impossible to reason intelligibly about the pro- 
 ductive process so long as we persist in calling both 
 by the same name. We might as well call the French / 
 and the Germans by the common name of soldiers, and i 
 then try to write an intelligible history of the Franco- 
 Prussian war. 
 
 25 
 
For these directive faculties, so essentially distinct 
 from labor, it is difficult to find an entirely satisfactory 
 name. In default of a better I have, on former occa- 
 sions, applied to them the name of Ability and this will 
 serve our purpose now especially as the name of 
 Ability has, of late years, been accepted by many of the 
 more thoughtful socialists themselves as representing 
 certain talents which, though they have never properly 
 analyzed them, they are beginning to recognize as dif- 
 ferent from ordinary labor. 
 
 And now having come thus far now that we have 
 seen that modern wealth is due not to labor alone, but 
 also to the action of the Ability by which labor is 
 directed, a new question arises, which will carry us 
 onward from the consideration of labor to the con- 
 sideration of capital. The question to which I refer is 
 the question of the practical means by which the con- 
 trol of Ability over average labor is exercised; and it 
 is in a consideration of the nature of capital that we 
 shall find the answer. Here again we shall find that 
 the orthodox economists are defective, and that their 
 analysis of capital is just as incomplete as their analysis 
 of human effort. 
 
 Capital is divided traditionally into two kinds, fixed, 
 and circulating. By fixed capital is meant machinery; 
 by circulating capital is meant, as Adam Smith says, 
 the stock of consumable commodities which the manu- 
 facturer produces, or which the storekeeper or the 
 merchant buys, in order to sell them at a profit, where- 
 upon they are replaced by new ones. Now fixed capital, 
 or the machinery of the modern world, is itself the 
 result of Ability directing labor. It offers us no clue 
 to the means by which the direction is accomplished. 
 Nor does circulating capital, as Adam Smith under- 
 stands it, throw any more light upon the subject. The 
 capital which concerns us here is capital of a third 
 kind, which resembles circulating capital, or stocks of 
 goods sold to the public customer, in some ways; but 
 
 26 
 
in one way is essentially different. It consists of goods 
 which are the general necessaries of life ; but instead 
 of being sold to the outside public at a profit, they are 
 virtually distributed by the manufacturer to a special 
 group of laborers on conditions. 
 
 So long as labor is undivided, or divided only in such 
 a rudimentary way that each family can practically 
 supply all its own wants, the necessaries of life come 
 to the laborer directly. The kind of capital with which 
 we are here concerned, and which we may call wage- 
 capital, makes its first appearance when the division of 
 labor so advances that each laborer or laboring family 
 makes only one of the dozen commodities which it re- 
 quires to support existence. Under these conditions, 
 the products of labor, which enable the laborer to live, 
 no longer come to any one laborer directly. They have 
 to come to him in the form of assorted commodities, 
 which are portions of the direct products of a variety 
 of other laborers. His own products must pass out of 
 his own hands, and come back to him in the form of 
 equivalents, through the hands of some distributor. 
 For this distributor, who at first is no more than a 
 merchant, the commodities which thus pass through his 
 hands are circulating capital in the exact sense which 
 Adam Smith gives to the phrase; but they are not 
 wage-capital. They become wage-capital only when the 
 distributor, instead of merely exchanging them, begins 
 to turn his attention to the manner in which they are 
 produced. So long as he is merely a merchant, he 
 says to the producer of so many yards of cloth, "I 
 will give you so many boots, or stockings, or so much 
 tea or sugar, in exchange for them." But when he 
 turns his attention from the exchange to the actual 
 process of production, what he says to the cloth-maker 
 is this, "I will give you an even larger measure of the 
 various commodities which you require, on condition 
 that you produce your cloth in a manner which I my- 
 selt will prescribe to you." 
 
 27 
 
Here we see, in its essence, the function of wage- 
 capital. The possession of it means the control by one 
 man of the necessaries required by many; and it en- 
 ables such a man by thus making the distribution of 
 these necessaries conditional, to impose the industrial 
 guidance of his own knowledge and intellect on the 
 manual operations of those amongst whom he distri- 
 butes them. 
 
 And here we see that Marx was at once right and 
 wrong, when he said that the essence of modern capital- 
 ism was monopoly. It is a monopoly a monopoly 
 which enables the few to impose their own directions 
 on the manual activities of the many; but it is not 
 primarily, as Marx thought, a passive monopoly of the 
 modern implements of production, which only arises 
 from it as a consequence. It is primarily a monopoly 
 of the products which are essential to daily life. We 
 can see that this is so by turning to the account 
 which Marx gives of the historical beginnings 
 of capitalism about the beginning of the fifteenth 
 century, when the implements of production began, 
 he says, to fall into the hands of the few. If, for 
 instance, to take one trade that of weaving capi- 
 talism means nothing but the mere act of acquisi- 
 tion, the capitalists in the reign of Henry VIII would 
 have got into their possession nothing but a number 
 of the hand-looms then in use; they would have im- 
 posed their own terms on those who desired to use 
 them; and there the matter would have ended. If 
 capitalism meant no more than this the looms of to-day 
 would be the looms of four hundred years ago. The 
 passive ownership of machines does nothing to improve 
 their construction. But the salient feature of production 
 since the rise of the capitalistic system has been the 
 fact that since then the means of production have 
 been revolutionized that the old looms, in proportion 
 as they have been monopolized, have disappeared, and 
 their place has been taken by others, whose efficiency, 
 
 28 
 
as compared with theirs, is that of monstrous Titans as 
 compared with the efficiency of pigmies. The monopol- 
 ists, in short, in the weaving industry, have not said 
 to the laborers, "You shall either give us most of the 
 cloth you weave, or you shall not have access to the 
 hand-looms with which you weave it." They have 
 said, "You shall weave no cloth unless, under our direc- 
 tions, you first construct looms of a type as yet un- 
 known to you, which will enable you to weave fifty 
 yards in the time which it now takes you to weave 
 only one." 
 
 Modern capital, I repeat, is primarily wage-capitaV - 
 such capital as machinery being the direct result of 
 its application; and wage-capital is productive not in 
 virtue of any quality inherent in itself, but because it is 
 the reins by which the exceptional ability of the few 
 guides the labor, skilled or unskilled, of the many. 
 And here, to show you how imperfectly this fact has 
 beer apprehended by the orthodox economists, I may 
 mention that some of them, groping after the truth, 
 have proposed to take cognizance of talent under the 
 name of personal capital. This is an attempt to express 
 the truth, but it is an attempt which merely confuses 
 it. To speak of Ability as personal capital is neither 
 more nor less than to identify the coachman with the ^ 
 reins; the fact being that the latter are useful or use- 
 less only in accordance with the manner in which the 
 coachman handles them. 
 
 The enormous augmentation of wealth, then, which^. v 
 is characteristic of modern times, is not due to average 
 labor, though average labor is essential to it. It is due, 
 in its distinctive magnitude, to the increasing concen- 
 tration of intellect, knowledge, and other rare mental 
 faculties, on the process of directing this labor in an 
 increasingly efficacious way; and capitalism is prim- 
 arily the means by which this direction is effected. No 
 intelligent socialist, when the matter is thus put plainly, 
 can possibly deny this. Let anyone consider, for ex- 
 
 29 
 
ample, one of the great steel bridges which now cast 
 their single spans over enormous estuaries of water. 
 These structures are fossil labor, doubtless; but they 
 are, in their distinctive features, not fossil labor as 
 such. They are fossil science, fossil chemistry, fossil 
 mathematics, fossil mechanics in short, fossil knowl- 
 edge and intellect of a degree and kind which we shall 
 not find existing in one mind out of a thousand ; and 
 labor conduces to the production of these structures 
 only because it submits itself to the guidance of these 
 intellectual leaders. And now let me call your attention 
 to this point. Although the condition of things is 
 obviously what I have just described, we have here 
 the precise condition of .things against which socialism, 
 as a popular creed, protests. Concurrently with their 
 demands for a larger share in the world's products, the 
 socialists demand a radical change in the whole organi- 
 zation of production. They demand what they call the 
 emancipation of labor ; and by the emancipation of 
 labor they mean emancipation from what they have 
 been taught to call wagedom. What this cry means 
 we are now able to see clearly. It means, if it means 
 anything, the emancipation of the average mind from the 
 guidance of any mind that is in any way superior 
 to itself, or is able to enhance the productivity of an 
 average pair of hands. 
 
 Such being the case, the curious thing is this that 
 these very socialists, who are so loud in demanding 
 that labor should be thus emancipated, show us, when- 
 ever they are asked for any constructive policy, that 
 they too admit the necessity of direction and control 
 themselves. They do not propose that men shall re- 
 lapse into the primitive condition in which each man 
 works with his hands, as best he can, in isolation. If 
 they are asked for an illustration of the kind of system 
 which they would introduce if they got their way, they 
 invariably refer us to a State institution like the post- 
 office. The intellectual simplicity of the men who argue 
 
 30 ./ 
 
thus is astonishing. If all production were Organized 
 like a State post-office, there would, it is true, be no 
 private capitalist ; but would the laborer have achieved 
 the economic freedom, the emancipation, which socialists 
 at present take so much pleasure in talking about? The 
 laborers would, on the contrary, be unfree and un- 
 emancipated in precisely the same sense in which they 
 are unfree and unemancipated now; and to an even 
 greater degree. Let us take the case of a postman, or 
 a sorter in the State post-office. Each of these has his 
 special task allotted to him, which he is bound to per- 
 form. The most ardent socialist in the world would 
 very soon join in denouncing the principles of economic 
 emancipation if a postman, who happened not to ap- 
 prove of socialism, threw the socialists' letters into the 
 river instead of putting them into his letter-box. In 
 what conceivable way, then, has a postman employed 
 by the State any more economic freedom than the mes- 
 sengers of a private firm? 
 
 Nor again does the manner in which the labor of the 
 State employee is remunerated, and by which the per- 
 formance of his duty is secured, differ in any way 
 from the wage-system which prevails in a private firm. 
 Conformity to the directions given him by some or- 
 ganizing authority is the condition on which this re- 
 muneration is awarded him; and though Marx and his 
 disciples propose to substitute labor-checks for dollars, 
 this is merely the wage-system called by another name. 
 
 Many thoughtful socialists, though they have not 
 been anxious to proclaim the fact too loudly, have 
 perceived this fact themselves, and have consequently 
 been endeavoring to formulate another scheme, by 
 which the requisite industrial conformity to an organ- 
 izing authority may be secured, and which yet will 
 eliminate the wage-system, not only in name, but in 
 fact. Now if we look back into the past history of 
 mankind we shall find that there actually are two 
 alternative systems by which such conformity may be, 
 
and has been, secured. One of these is the corvee 
 system, prevalent in the middle ages; the other sys- 
 tem is that of slavery. Under the corvee system the 
 peasants, who were the most numerous laboring class, 
 owned the lands on which they lived, and were thus 
 able to maintain themselves by working at their own 
 discretion; but they were compelled by their tenure to 
 place a certain part of their time at the discretion of 
 this or that superior, and to work according to his 
 orders. The public roads in France were once made 
 and kept in order thus. If only a number of indepen- 
 dent peasant proprietors could be forced to give half 
 their time to the proprietor of a neighboring factory 
 now, the entire use and necessity of wage-capital would, 
 in theory at least, be gone. The same thing is true of 
 slavery. Like the peasant proprietor who gives part of 
 his time to his overload, the slave is provided with the 
 necessaries of life independently of his obedience to the 
 detailed orders of his master. His master feeds him 
 just as he would feed a horse; and industrial obedience 
 is ensured by the application of force. 
 
 These two coercive systems the corvee system and 
 the slave system, are the only alternatives to the wage- 
 system that have been found workable in the whole 
 past history of the world. Let us now turn to the alter- 
 native which the latest school of socialists is now pro- 
 posing as an alternative in the dreamed-of socialistic 
 future. 
 
 I will turn to a work called Fabian Essays, the writ- 
 ers of which include the best known and best educated 
 socialists in England, amongst them being Mr. Sidney 
 Webb, favorably known as the author of a History of 
 Trade Unionism, and Mr. Bernard Shaw. This volume 
 has been republished in America, and to the American 
 edition was prefixed a special preface. In this preface 
 it is stated, with regard to the apportionment of the 
 means of subsistence generally, that the truly social- 
 istic scheme is one which would absolutely abolish "all 
 
 32 
 
economic distinctions and prevent the possibility of their 
 ever arising again" and would abolish them how? 
 "By making," says this writer, "an equal provision for 
 all an indefeasible condition of citizenship, without any 
 regard whatever to the relative specific services of dif- 
 ferent citizens. The rendering of such services, on the 
 other hand," the writer goes on, "instead of being left 
 to the option of the citizen, with the alternative of star- 
 vation, would be secured under one uniform law, pre- 
 cisely like other forms of taxation of military service." 
 
 Such, then, is the alternative to the wage-system put 
 forward as the last word of the most intelligent social- 
 ists of to-day ; and an escape from the wage-system, 
 beyond a doubt, it is; but an escape into what? It is 
 neither more nor less* than an escape into one of these 
 ystems which I have just mentioned. That is to say, 
 it is an escape into economic slavery. For the very 
 essence of the position of the slave, as contrasted with 
 the wage-paid laborer, in so far as the direction of his 
 industrial actions is concerned, is that he has not to 
 work as he is bidden in order to gain a livelihood; but 
 that his livelihood being assured to him, no matter how 
 he behaves himself, he is obliged to work as he is 
 bidden in order to avoid the lash, or some similar form 
 of punishment. 
 
 I have touched upon this question, not for the purpose 
 of criticising in an adverse sense the methods by which 
 the masses are to be coerced into the performance of 
 their duties, but merely for the purpose of illustrating 
 what I have already said with regard to the productive 
 functions of capitalism, as it exists to-day. Capitalism, 
 regarded under its productive aspect, is essentially a 
 device for imposing, by means of wages given or with- 
 held in accordance to the industrial obedience of the 
 wage-earner, the intellect and the knowledge resident in 
 an exceptionally gifted minority, on the manual opera- 
 tions of the average majority of mankind; and when 
 socialists talk about emancipation and economic free- 
 
 33 
 
dom, the only meaning which their language can really 
 bear is the emancipation of the average man from the 
 aid and guidance of any intellect that is in any way 
 superior to his own. Further, when we ask the social- 
 ists to explain their constructive programme, we find 
 that this talk about freedom is privately repudiated by 
 themselves, and that they propose either to continue 
 the wage-system under a thin verbal disguise, or else 
 to abolish the wage-system, and put universal slavery in 
 its stead. 
 
 34 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 The cardinal fact on which I insisted in my last 
 Address was this, namely, that popular socialism which 
 seeks to realize itself by an exclusive appeal to the 
 majority, bases itself on a theory of production accord- 
 ing to which all wealth is the product of those faculties 
 which the majority must always exercise in order to 
 sustain life, in respect of which all normal men are 
 substantially, if not absolutely, equal, and which in all ) 
 socialistic discussions are indicated by the common 
 name of labor the labor of an average pair of hands, 
 directed by an average mind the mind of the laborer 
 himself. And this doctrine is emphasized by the further 
 more detailed contention that the value of every com- 
 modity is determined by the number of hours of aver- 
 age labor embodied in it, one hour of the labor of any 
 one man being equal in economic productivity to one 
 hour of the labor of any other man. I pointed out, 
 further, that this doctrine, in spite of many objections 
 to it which ordinary common sense suggests, has con- 
 tinued to be accepted by thoughtful people, who other- 
 wise might have been expected to reject it, because it 
 really is, as Karl Marx claimed tliat it was, deducible 
 from the analysis of production which still finds its 
 place in the text-books of the orthodox economists. 
 The economists recognize land, or the powers of nature, 
 and also capital, or the nonhuman implements of pro- 
 duction, as factors in the productive process; but the 
 only human agency which they recognize in living 
 operation, they, like the socialists, indicate by the name 
 of labor. 
 
 Such being the case, what I endeavored to make evi- 
 dent was that this mass of human effort which the 
 orthodox economists, and the socialists following them, 
 
 35 
 
grouped together under the common name of labor, is 
 in reality not one sort of effort, but two ; that these two 
 differ from one another not only in degree but in kind 
 in the essential method of their operation; and that if 
 we apply the name of labor, as the socialists do, to one 
 namely, to average manual industry it is absolutely 
 necessary for the purposes of any thought and argu- 
 ment, to apply some other and contradistinguishing 
 name to the other. To the other I proposed, in a special 
 and technical sense, to apply the name Ability; and the 
 essential difference between the two I pointed out was 
 this, that whereas labor meant the faculties of the 
 individual applied to his own labor, Ability consists of 
 the intellectual faculty of direction, applied by one man 
 simultaneously to the direction of the manual labor of 
 any number of other people. 
 
 This was the substance of what I urged when I spoke 
 last; and for the sake of clearness I have thought it 
 well to repeat it. I will now proceed to a further point 
 a point singularly interesting and instructive, and one 
 which to many people will very possibly be surprising. 
 When I began with discussing what definite socialism 
 really is what it is as a scheme of society radically 
 different from that now existing I identified it with 
 the economic theory of Karl Marx, who is called by 
 the socialists still the father of scientific socialism, and 
 whose theory is still the basis of all popular socialistic 
 agitation. During the last fifteen years, however, so- 
 cialists of the more thoughtful kind have been com- 
 pelled in intellectual honesty, and also by the force of 
 facts, to recognize and admit that the so-called science 
 of Marx was by no means so complete and invulnerable 
 as it was supposed to be at first. His doctrine that 
 ordinary labor is the sole productive agency has, of 
 late, in a cautious and not too definite way been aban- 
 doned by them; and they have actually come to admit 
 as a true, though unanalyzed, generality, the truth on 
 which I am myself insisting namely, that in the pro- 
 
 36 
 
duction of modern wealth a second factor is involved, 
 which is other than manual labor, and which, somehow 
 or other, must be placed in a different category. They 
 have come to admit, further, that, whereas labor is the 
 faculty of the many, this other faculty of production is 
 essentially the faculty of the few ; and, lastly, the more 
 thoughtful socialists who have expressed themselves in 
 the English language have agreed with me in calling 
 this faculty Ability. 
 
 Among the socialists of to-day who have taken this 
 new departure it will be enough for me to mention Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw and his close ally in the dissemination 
 of socialistic literature, Mr. Sidney Webb. Thus, of 
 two men dealing with the same labor and capital, one, 
 says Mr. Shaw, will, in accordance with his ability, in- 
 sure the production of five times as much wealth as the 
 other. Indeed, he adds in a sentence singularly incon- 
 sistent with his formal gospel as a socialist, but singu- 
 larly consistent with his success as an individual play- 
 wright, "Socialism will be the paradise of Ability." Here 
 again is a statement by Mr. Sidney Webb, to which I 
 shall have occasion to refer more particularly hereafter. 
 When socialism has disposed, he says, of the monopoly 
 of capital, there still remains to be dealt with one 
 monopoly more the monopoly of "business ability." 
 How business ability operates he makes no attempt to 
 inquire; but he recognizes its importance, all the same, 
 as an element distinct from the labor which is alone 
 recognized by Marx. 
 
 I propose, then, to call the socialists of the school 
 of Mr. Sidney Webb, which represents a distinct ad- 
 vance on the crude socialism of Karl Marx, by the 
 name of the New Socialists. It must, however, be 
 observed that, though they have to a great extent modi- 
 fied the basis on which the socialism of Marx rested, 
 they insist that they have in view the same practical 
 end namely, a complete redistribution of wealth in 
 such a way that every man shall receive an absolutely 
 
 37 
 
equal portion. I have already quoted a passage in 
 which Mr. Webb insists on this. No scheme, he says, 
 of society is truly socialistic which does not abolish 
 all economic inequalities, and which will not do away 
 with the possibility of their ever arising again. 
 
 Now such being the case, the New Socialists the 
 more thoughtful socialists of to-day, have come to per- 
 ceive that they have a new task before them. The 
 original argument of socialism and it still remains the 
 only popular argument was that the majority, or the 
 manual laborers, ought to possess all wealth, and pos- 
 sess it in equal quantities, because they alone produce 
 it, and each laborer produces the same amount. Pop- 
 ular socialism, in short, is an appeal to the general 
 principle of justice, which is assumed as self-evident, 
 that each man is entitled to enjoy whatever he himself 
 produces. But now that the New f Socialists, such as 
 Mr. Webb, have been forced to make the admission 
 that the ability of the few is a productive agent, no 
 less than the labor of the many, and that consequently 
 some men contribute more to the productive process 
 than others, their main preoccupation of late has been 
 to formulate a line of argument by which the practical 
 effect of their recognition of ability may be minimized, 
 and the able few, though they produce more than the 
 many, may be shut out from any unequal claim on the 
 products. I am, therefore, going to ask you to con- 
 sider the kind of reasoning to which the New Social- 
 ists, for this purpose, betake themselves. In certain 
 respects it forms a very interesting study; for it mainly 
 consists of arguments which they found already pre- 
 pared for them by a variety of distinguished thinkers 
 who had nothing to do with socialism. 
 
 These arguments divide themselves into four classes. 
 They all turn on the nature and the effects of those 
 superior efficiencies which distinguish the few from 
 the many, and to which, in the economic sphere, we 
 are giving the name of Ability. 
 
 38 
 
One class of arguments consists in the contention 
 that, though all the advances made in man's pro- 
 ductive powers may have originated in discoveries 
 made originally by exceptional men, yet each discov- 
 ery, when made, really becomes common property, and 
 the increment due to it would, apart from artificial re- 
 strictions, pass over to the human race at large. 
 
 A second class of arguments insists that the superior- 
 ities in question are really much smaller than their ef- 
 fects would seem to indicate, that they are also much 
 more numerous, and that were opportunity equalized, 
 the supply of them would be greater than the demand. 
 
 A third class of arguments, while admitting that the 
 inequalities between man and man are really great, and 
 that men of the highest efficiency are not any commoner 
 than they appear to be, insists on the fact that they 
 are effective only through their environment, which it- 
 self is what it is only through the ages that have pre- 
 ceded it. 
 
 A fourth class of argument, which is a variant of 
 this last, deals with the nature of the individual supe- 
 riorities themselves, and insists on the fact that they 
 are due to the development of the community in the 
 past, and should therefore be at the disposition of the 
 whole community in the present. 
 
 I will now take these four classes of argument in 
 order: and we shall see that though they all of them 
 contain an element of truth they are ajTalike vitiated V* 
 by imperfections and curious confusions of thought 
 which, in their present application, render them prac- 
 tically valueless. 
 
 Let us begin with the argument, so constantly urged 
 by socialists, that inventions and discoveries once made 
 become common property. In certain cases this is true. 
 The best example of such a case is the discovery of 
 fire. Even if we suppose that the first man who dis- 
 covered how to light a fire was incomparably cleverer 
 than his fellows ; yet as soon as the method of lighting 
 
 39 
 
a fire was made known to them the fool could light a 
 fire just as well as the genius. But the inventions, the 
 discoveries, and the knowledge which thus become com- 
 mon property are only those of the simplest, and of a 
 very limited kind. In proportion as knowledge ad- 
 vances, and its application to industry becomes more 
 various, complex, and efficacious, industrial inventions 
 and discoveries no more become common property 
 than assimilated and encyclopedic knowledge about all 
 conceivable subjects becomes the property of everybody 
 who buys an encyclopedia; or than Newton's mastery 
 of mathematics communicates itself to every urchin 
 who can do an addition sum. It is perfectly true that 
 the acquirement of new knowledge by one discoverer 
 enables other men to acquire it who might never have 
 acquired it otherwise; but as the acquisition of the de- 
 tails of knowledge increases, the number of details in- 
 volved in the processes of progressive industry increases 
 likewise, is accompanied by an increased difficulty in 
 acquiring and assimilating all; and, that this is so, is 
 illustrated by the notorious fact that so many of those 
 preeminent as mere speculative inventors and discov- 
 erers are notoriously helpless in giving their inventions 
 and discoveries effect in the world of actual industry. 
 Or to turn to the case of men of ordinary intelligence, 
 any mechanic could, after half an hour's attention to 
 the subject, comprehend the general principles involved 
 in a cantilever bridge; but to construct one of the steel 
 bridges of enormous span, which now throw their arms 
 across our great rivers and estuaries, demands an as- 
 similation of multitudinous knowledge which taxes the 
 genius of the greatest engineers of the day. For the 
 practical man, no less than the philosopher, living 
 knowledge lives only in the individual mind; and it 
 exists there only in proportion as the living mind com- 
 bines a multiplicity of facts into an organic and opera- 
 tive whole. In other words, the kingdom of knowledge 
 is like the kingdom of Heaven. From generation to 
 
 40 
 
generation the violent take it by force; and it is only 
 the violent or the men of exceptional capacity who 
 are able, in any comprehensive way, to take possession 
 of it at all. 
 
 And now let us come to the second class of argu- 
 ments, which seeks to eliminate the difference between 
 the exceptional mind and the ordinary, not by insist- 
 ing that the latter appropriates the triumphs of the 
 former as soon as these have been accomplished, but 
 by representing the difference between the two as be- 
 ing, in its nature, slight, and as due to the accidents 
 of opportunity rather than to natural differences. I 
 will take this contention as expressed in a philosophical 
 form by two eminent thinkers outside of the social- 
 istic camp. The first of these shall be Mr. Benjamin 
 Kidd, whose work "Social Evolution" has probably 
 enjoyed a wider circulation than any work of the 
 kind that has been published during recent times. 
 Mr. Kidd says that the smallness of the differences 
 between one man and another is proved by the fact 
 that, whenever any great discovery or invention has 
 been made, it has nearly always been made simul- 
 taneously by several persons working independently of 
 one another, the man who gets the honor of the dis- 
 covery or the rewards arising from the invention owing 
 his fortunate position to luck at the last moment. 
 Thus, says Mr. Kidd, "the differential calculus, the in- 
 vention of the steam engine, the methods of spectrum 
 analysis, the telegraph, the telephone, as well as many 
 other discoveries," have all been arrived at in this way. 
 The name of one man is popularly associated with each 
 of them, but in each case there have been so many 
 others whose achievement has been the same as his. 
 The class of fact to which Mr. Kidd alludes is notori- 
 ous; but how does it tend to substantiate the proposi- 
 tion which he aims at proving that the differences 
 between exceptional men and the mass of their con- 
 temporaries is slight? The fact of his thinking that it 
 
 41 
 
does so is a most curious and instructive illustration 
 of the carelessness with which many of the most honest 
 and serious thinkers will allow themselves to reason 
 when they deal with social subjects. The fact that half 
 a dozen, or even twenty or thirty men should arrive 
 at the same time at the same discoveries independently 
 no more goes to show that all men are approximately 
 equal in intelligence than the fact that half a dozen 
 race horses pass the winning post within a few seconds 
 of one another proves that every cart horse or donkey 
 that moves upon four legs has an equal chance of win- 
 ning the Derby or the Grand Prix. That more men 
 than one should reach at the same time the same dis- 
 covery independently is precisely what we should be 
 led to expect when we consider what that discovery is. 
 The facts of nature which form the subject matter of 
 the discoverer are in themselves as independent of those 
 who discover them as an Alpine peak is of those who 
 attempt to climb it; and the fact that a number of men 
 reach the same discovery at once does no more to 
 suggest that the mass of their contemporaries could 
 have reached it than the fact that half a dozen of the 
 most intrepid cragsmen in the world reach during the 
 same year some hitherto unascended summit proves 
 that the same feat could have been accomplished by 
 any man or boy in the street who would be made sick 
 and giddy by a precipice of twenty yards. 
 
 We will now take another exposition of the same 
 doctrine, and this shall be from a writer whose advocacy 
 of it is far more surprising than Mr. Kidd's. I refer to 
 Lord Macaulay. In Macaulay's criticisms of the Eng- 
 lish poet Dryden there occurs the following passage: 
 "It is the age that makes the man, not the man that 
 makes the age. The inequalities of the intellect, like 
 the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so 
 small a proportion to the mass that in calculating its 
 great revolutions they may safely be neglected." No 
 doubt for those who study the revolutions of our planet 
 
 42 
 
as astronomers the inequalities of its surface are small 
 and practically negligible; but because they are noth- 
 ing to the astronomer it does not follow that they are 
 nothing to the engineer and the geographer. And a 
 similar observation holds good with regard to the in- 
 equalities of individual efficiencies, when considered in 
 connection with practical economic problems. The 
 practical economist, and more especially the socialist, 
 does not look at the human race from the remote and 
 detached standpoint of the social astronomer. They 
 look at it from the near standpoint of the social geog- 
 rapher and engineer. They and especially the social- 
 ists are not content to concern themselves with the 
 human race as a whole. They are concerned with ad- 
 vancing certain claims on behalf of one portion of it as 
 contrasted with another portion. To the astronomer 
 the Alps may be a mere meaningless excrescence; but 
 they were not so to Hannibal, or to the makers of 
 the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer are 
 all the dikes of Holland? But they are everything to 
 the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one. 
 
 So much, then, for the philosophic or speculative 
 attempts at minimizing the degrees and importance of 
 the intellectual inequalities of mankind. In the purely 
 speculative sphere they may have some meaning; but 
 in the practical sphere they have none. 
 
 There still remains, however, an argument, urged 
 with the same purpose, which is very frequently used, 
 and which bases itself not on theories, but on assumed 
 facts. I mean the argument that, no matter how con- 
 siderable the interval may be between the congenital 
 powers of the exceptional man and the average man, 
 the former are really much commoner than they seem 
 to be, and that with an extension of opportunity the 
 supply of them would be indefinitely increased. Now 
 the first thing to note is that, even were this conten- 
 tion true, it would not point to the possibility of ever 
 establishing the economic democracy essential to the 
 
 43 
 
Utopia of the socialists. It would merely point to the 
 possibility of establishing a more numerous economic 
 oligarchy. 
 
 The question, however, which I here will ask you to 
 consider is not the consequences of this contention, if 
 we admit it, but the question of how far it receives any 
 countenance from facts. Accident and opportunity may 
 do much in individual cases to make one man of talent 
 succeed, and another, whose gifts were congenitally 
 equal, fail. But what here concerns us is not the ex- 
 ceptions, but the rule. In a broad and general way, 
 does the equalizing of opportunity result in an increased 
 development of the higher forms of talent? In connec- 
 tion with this question we have abundant experience to 
 appeal to. Let us take any college of music. The 
 opportunities of all pupils, when once admitted to it, 
 are equal ; but out of every thousand aspirants who 
 profit by the same instructors, does every year pro- 
 vide us with a hundred Melbas or Paderewskis? An 
 even better example, perhaps, is provided us by the 
 French army, in which, since the days of Napoleon, 
 every private has carried the field marshal's baton in 
 his knapsack. Has the past century in France pro- 
 duced a crop of Napoleons? Look at the career of 
 Boulanger. If ever opportunity was offered a man, 
 opportunity was offered to him. He had everything 
 in his favor except the power to make use of any- 
 thing. No doubt the extension of opportunities of a 
 certain kind may enable all to acquire powers which 
 were once the monopoly of the few. Thus to-day al- 
 most everybody possesses the power of writing; but 
 we have not produced millions of great writers think- 
 ers like Kant or Bacon, poets like Goethe, or novelists 
 like Dickens or Balzac. 
 
 Let us now pass on to that further class of arguments 
 which aim at minimizing the importance of exceptional 
 talents by contending that they would be wholly inef- 
 fectual apart from their social environment. And here 
 
 44 
 
again we are not dealing with socialistic thinkers only. 
 Indeed, the writer who has expressed this argument 
 with most force and precision was, so far as his per- 
 sonal intentions went, one of the most bitter opponents 
 of the entire programme of socialism. I refer to Her- 
 bert Spencer. And yet, curiously enough, no one has 
 done more to give currency to the particular argument 
 now in question than he. Let me give you one of the 
 most remarkable passages in vrhich he puts this argu- 
 ment forward. The illustration which he takes is not 
 strictly an economic one, but literary. But it applies to 
 economic production no less than to literature. Let us, 
 say.s Herbert Spencer, take the case of Shakespeare. 
 "Given a Shakespeare," he says, "and what dramas 
 could he have written without the multitudinous condi- 
 tions of civilized life around him the various tradi- 
 tions descending to him from the past, without the 
 language which a hundred generations had developed 
 and enriched by use? A Laplace," he adds, "could not 
 have got very far with his 'Mechanique Celeste' unless 
 he had been aided by the slowly developed system of 
 mathematics, which we trace back to its beginnings 
 among the ancient Egyptians." Herbert Spencer could 
 not have put the socialistic view of the matter more 
 clearly; and the answer to the question which he raises 
 is not only obvious, but contains the solution of the 
 entire problem which we are discussing. It takes the 
 form of a counterquestion. Given the conditions of 
 civilized life, the traditions of England and its language 
 as they were at the time of Queen Elizabeth, how could 
 all these have produced dramas like "King Lear" or 
 "Hamlet," unless England had happened to possess that 
 unique phenomenon, a Shakespeare? All of Shake- 
 speare's contemporaries possessed the same environment 
 that he did, the same language, the same past; but out 
 of these conditions one man alone was capable of elicit- 
 ing the results elicited by Shakespeare. And the case 
 with Laplace and his great work is similar. The real 
 
 45 
 
explanation of the whole difficulty is this. Everyone 
 living at the same time, and in the same society, is an 
 inheritor of the past and an absorber of the surround- 
 ing present; but they inherit the past and they absorb 
 the present in very different degrees. They inherit the 
 knowledge of the past only according to the degree in 
 which they acquire and vitalize it; the language of the 
 past only in accordance with their own power of ma- 
 nipulating it; the whole gifts of the past and present 
 only in accordance with their power of making these 
 gifts their own. If we want to compare one age with 
 another, then Mr. Spencer's philosophizing is at once 
 just and significant. If we want to compare one man 
 of the same age with another, it is wholly beside the 
 mark, and has no significance whatsoever. 
 
 And now it remains for us to consider one argument 
 more, which, taking the existence of exceptional talent 
 for granted, aims at eliminating any exceptional claims 
 that may be founded on it. I will give it to you as 
 formulated, in all solemnity, by Mr. Sidney Webb 
 and I could not take a more favorable example of 
 socialism throwing down an intellectual gantlet to the 
 world. Mr. Webb is one of those who, though they 
 reject the doctrine of Marx that all productive effort 
 is absolutely equal in productivity, and admit, on the 
 contrary, as we have seen already, that behind all mo- 
 nopolies of capital or the means of production there 
 remains the personal monopoly of what he calls business 
 ability, maintains nevertheless no less stoutly than Marx 
 did that nothing is socialism which does not reward all 
 men equally, though it must be conceded that some men 
 produce incomparably more than others. In other 
 words, in proportion as a man is talented he is to get 
 less than he produces ; and in proportion as he is stupid 
 he is to get more. Mr. Webb admits that this looks 
 like a moral paradox, and that it requires some intel- 
 lectual justification; and the justification put forward 
 by himself and the New Socialists he sums up as fol- 
 
 46 
 
lows: Exceptional productive ability has no right to 
 any exceptional share of the products, because and 
 here I am giving you Mr. Webb's own words "the 
 special ability or energy with which some persons are 
 born is an unearned increment due to the effect of the 
 struggle for existence on their ancestors, and conse- 
 quently, having been produced by society, is as much 
 due to society as the unearned increment of rent." 
 
 Now here we have one of the most advanced utter- 
 ances of the New School of socialists, which claims to 
 have raised socialistic doctrine to its highest intellectual 
 level ; and we will pay it the compliment of examining 
 it with as much care as it is stated. The idea involved 
 in it is very easy to grasp. The superiority of the man 
 of ability is an inheritance from his superior ancestors ; 
 but his ancestors would not have had the superiority 
 which they have handed on to him if it had not been 
 developed in a struggle with contemporaries inferior to 
 themselves. The inferiors were a strop or hone on 
 which the faculties of the superiors were sharpened. 
 The inferiors, therefore, may claim, in virtue of their 
 very inferiority, to have been the joint authors of the 
 superiority of the superiors; and the whole body of 
 society, and not the superiors alone, may claim an equal 
 share in the products of these contemporary men of 
 ability who thus owe their powers to the whole of 
 society in the past. Now to this argument, just as to 
 that of Herbert Spencer and of Macaulay, we may con- 
 cede a certain speculative truth. We may accept it, in- 
 deed, as a speculative platitude ; but it has no more 
 application to the facts of practical life than has Ma- 
 caulay's argument that, because the inequalities of the 
 earth's surface have no significance for the astronomer 
 who is dealing with the earth's revolutions, mountains 
 and seas and valleys have no effect on the life of nations. 
 In order to see this we need merely follow Mr. Webb's 
 example and carry his own logic a little further than 
 he has done himself. If the inferior competitors who 
 
 47 
 
have been beaten by the Ability of the superior are to 
 be credited with having helped to produce the efficien- 
 cies by which they were themselves defeated, the French 
 might have said to the Germans at the end of the 
 Franco-Prussian war, "You acquired by fighting us the 
 experience which has enabled you to conquer us. 
 Your strength, therefore, in reality belongs to us, not 
 you; and hence justice requires of you that you give 
 us back Alsace." 
 
 And other absurdities follow more fantastic even 
 than this. If the able man of to-day owes his excep- 
 tional productivity to society as a whole, it is to society 
 as a whole that the idle man owes his idleness, and the 
 stupid man his stupidity, and the dishonest man his dis- 
 honesty ; and if the man who produces much is able to 
 claim with justice no more than the man who produces 
 little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing 
 anything, may with equal justice claim as much wealth 
 as either. 
 
 Mr. Webb's argument, indeed, is a concentration of 
 that radical error by which all the other arguments, 
 which we have just been considering, are vitiated 
 namely, the confusion between what is true for the 
 philosopher, who is considering humanity in the mass, 
 and what is true for the practical man, whose sole 
 practical concern is with the different individuals and 
 classes of which the mass is composed; and Mr. Webb's 
 argument is here the most valuable of all of them as 
 showing the desperate absurdities into which intellec- 
 tual socialism is being driven to-day, in order to hide 
 from itself the consequence of these productive inequal- 
 ities between men, which in common sense and honesty 
 it can no longer deny. 
 
 In spite, then, of all that socialistic logic can do, the 
 hard fact remains that the monopolists of business Abil- 
 ity do, as a practical fact, in a personal and individual 
 sense, that which marks them off from the majority as 
 a practically separate class. But even if we suppose 
 
 48 
 
all this to be admitted the arguments open to the social- 
 ists are not ended yet. There are others which, if not 
 exactly enabling them to contend that the able minority 
 are to be credited with the production of no more 
 wealth than the majority, yet enable them to obscure 
 the question of what the relative productivity of the two 
 classes is; and these arguments are specially deserv- 
 ing of examination, firstly, because they have the au- 
 thority of the most celebrated of the orthodox econo- 
 mists namely, Mill; and secondly, because, by a con- 
 sideration of the fallacy involved in them, we shall best 
 arrive at a realization of the hard practical truth. 
 These arguments, reduced to their simplest form, come 
 to this that even if we admit that labor, if undirected 
 by Ability, would produce no more than a fraction of 
 the wealth which is produced now, yet Ability in the 
 absence of labor would produce absolutely nothing. 
 And Mill, in the opening chapter of his treatise on 
 political economy, deals with a situation of this kind 
 in a way which is eminently applicable to the exi- 
 gencies of socialistic theory. "Some thinkers," says 
 Mill, "have debated whether nature or land gives more 
 assistance to labor in one kind of industry than in an- 
 other; and he goes on to contend that this question is 
 useless and unanswerable. When two conditions," he 
 says and this is the classical passage to which I would 
 specially direct your attention "are equally necessary 
 for producing the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say 
 that so much of it is produced by one and so much by 
 another. It is like attempting to decide which of the 
 factors, five or six, has most to do in the production 
 of thirty." And if this contention is applicable to na- 
 ture and human industry as a whole, it would appear 
 to be applicable to labor and the faculties by which 
 labor is directed, in order to produce wealth of a given 
 amount and quality or what Mill would speak of as 
 "the effect." 
 Mill himself brings it forward with special reference 
 
 49 
 
to agriculture. Let us, he says in substance, take the 
 products of any farm symbolizing these, for conven- 
 ience' sake, as one loaf of bread per acre; and it will 
 be obviously unmeaning to inquire which produces 
 most of each loaf the field or the farm laborers. Now 
 if there were only one farm in the world, and every 
 acre of this, when the same amount of labor was ap- 
 plied to it, would always yield precisely the same prod- 
 uce that is to say, one loaf Mill's assertion would be 
 true. The actual state of the case, however, though Mill 
 failed to see this, is different in one essential particular. 
 Acres vary very greatly in quality; and if we take four 
 acres of differing degrees of fertility, and suppose them 
 all to be cultivated by an equal amount of labor, we 
 shall find if the poorest yield a product per acre of one 
 loaf, the others, according to their superiority, will 
 yield a product of two loaves, of three, of four. Here, 
 the labor being in each of the four cases the same, and 
 the additional loaves resulting in three cases only, it is 
 obvious that the differences between the smaller output 
 and the larger cannot be due to the labor, and yet it 
 must be due to something. It must, therefore, be due 
 to certain qualities present in the three superior acres, 
 and not present in the inferior. In other words, al- 
 though, in producing the loaves, the parts played re- 
 spectively by land and labor are indefinite and incom- 
 mensurable, precisely as Mill says they are, so long as 
 the land labor and the product or the effect remain 
 the same, these parts become measurable immediately 
 that the effect begins to vary, and one of the causes, 
 and only one of them, varies also. 
 
 And the same criticism is applicable to the produc- 
 tion of wealth generally, and the quantities of it which 
 are referable to manual labor on the one hand, and the 
 various forms of Ability by which labor is directed on 
 the other. If man for man the industrial population 
 of a country always produced the same total output of 
 wealth, if relatively to its population the country never 
 
 50 
 
got richer, and future laborers and the directors of 
 labor followed always the same routine, the two causes 
 being unvarying, and the effect unvarying also, it would 
 be, as Mill contends, at once impossible and unmean- 
 ing, to say that one of the necessary causes contrib- 
 uted more to the total effect than the other. But the 
 principal feature of the modern world which the econo- 
 mist has to consider, is not what Mill calls the effect, 
 or a product which annually repeats itself, but is a 
 series of different effects, or outputs of wealth, which, 
 relatively to the amount of average labor involved in 
 them, has, decade by decade, been increasing for the 
 last hundred and fifty years. Now the capacities of the 
 human being, in point of manual strength and dexter- 
 ity, have hardly increased since the days of the Greeks 
 and Romans. The handicrafts of the ancient world 
 as we see by the work of the masons who built the 
 Parthenon and the Coliseum were not inferior to the 
 handicrafts of the best manual workers of to-day. The 
 average labor, therefore, of any thousand men has cer- 
 tainly not changed its quality in the course of the past 
 five generations. But within that time, in the civilized 
 countries of the world, the output of wealth per thou- 
 sand of the men engaged in industry is from three to 
 five times as great as it was at the beginning of the 
 period in question. Now, however this augmented 
 effect it produced, even the New Socialists, such as Mr. 
 Sidney Webb, admit that it has two causes namely, 
 Ability and average labor; and that it is not due, as 
 Marx said, to average labor alone. But, since the aver- 
 age manual power of the average man's hands has un- 
 dergone no change during the short period in question 
 since the mere manual labor of a thousand men to- 
 day is not different from the labor of a thousand men 
 in the days of our great-grandfathers, and since, on the 
 other hand, it is no less obvious that the Ability by 
 which labor is directed has undergone changes of a 
 very important kind among these being its increased 
 
 51 
 
concentration on the processes of productive industry 
 it is obvious that the excess of wealth produced per 
 head of the industrial population now over that pro- 
 duced some five generations ago, is due to the cause 
 that has undergone a marked variation, and not to the 
 cause which has practically remained unaltered. Let 
 us turn back to the illustration given by Mill. It is 
 meaningless to inquire which of the two factors, five 
 and six, does most to produce the result thirty. What 
 Mill overlooked was that the kind of result we are con- 
 cerned is not a result which can be represented by one 
 number, such as thirty, but a result which was thirty 
 yesterday, and to-day has risen to sixty, and will be 
 before long eighty, ninety, or a hundred. The ques- 
 tion, therefore, is not whether five or six does most to 
 produce thirty, but whether, when the result is raised 
 from thirty to sixty, the increase is due to five, or the 
 stationary number multiplied, or the change in the mul- 
 tiplying number, which will have risen from six to 
 twelve. When the question is put thus, the answer is 
 unmistakable. Labor, or the number five, is in short the 
 industrial unit, and directing Ability is the number by 
 which its efficiency is increasingly multiplied the in- 
 crement being due to the multiplying number which 
 increases, not to the number multiplied, which remains 
 virtually the same. 
 
 Let me give you a simple illustration. If there were 
 only one shipyard in the world, and this always con- 
 tained one thousand workmen, always working under 
 the direction of the same master, and if it always took 
 these men one year to build a vessel of a given size 
 and class, we could not divide the vessel into so many 
 separate parts, and say that so many were produced by 
 the laborers, and so many by the men directing them. 
 But if a new master builder for one year took the place 
 of the old, and if the same workmen, working under 
 the new master, produced in that year not one vessel, 
 but two; and further, if in the year following the new 
 
 52 
 
master disappeared, and the old master came back 
 again, and the year's work once more resulted in the 
 production, not of two vessels, but of only one as be- 
 fore, then we should be able to say as a matter of 
 common sense with regard to the year during which 
 the two vessels were built, that the second vessel, what- 
 ever might be the case with the first, was due wholly 
 to the Ability of the master by whom the labor of the 
 workmen was directed. In other words, the Ability of 
 the director of labor produces as much of the product, 
 or of that product's value, as exceeds what was pro- 
 duced by the laborers before their labor was directed 
 by him, and ceases to be produced by them any longer 
 as soon as his direction is withdrawn. 
 
 That this increment of excess cannot, in any practical 
 sense, be ascribed to average labor will be yet more 
 apparent if we suppose that the production of it was not 
 beneficial, but criminal. I can explain my meaning best 
 by taking an illustration from the sphere of political 
 rather than of economic activity. A hundred Russian 
 workmen, all of them loyal to the Czar, are, we will 
 suppose, employed by a citizen of Moscow to enlarge 
 a subterranean cellar, and another hundred are em- 
 ployed to fill this cellar with wine cases. A week after 
 the work is completed the Czar is driving by outside, 
 and as he passes the citizen's house is killed by an ex- 
 plosion from below. It is then apparent that the so- 
 called cellar was a mine, and that the so-called wine 
 cases were really filled with dynamite. Now if all those 
 concerned in the consummation of this catastrophe were 
 tried, it is perfectly evident that the part played by the 
 workmen would be sharply separated from that played 
 by the man employing them, and that, although no 
 doubt they contributed something to the result, they 
 contributed nothing to its essential and criminal ele- 
 ments. It is equally evident that the increment of 
 wealth resulting from the obedience of laborers to in- 
 junctions which do not emanate from themselves is 
 
 53 
 
produced by the man who gives the injunctions, and 
 not by the men who obey them. 
 
 The absolute practical validity of this method of 
 argument and calculation will be yet more apparent if 
 we consider the nature of practical reasoning generally 
 when it takes the form of a discussion as to causes and 
 effects of any kind. In the strict sense of the word 
 "causes," it would plainly be quite impossible to specify 
 fully the causes of any effect even the simplest. The 
 motion, for instance, of a cricket ball when it leaves 
 the bowler's hand would, in f any discussion of the game, 
 be said to have been caused by the action of the bowler's 
 muscles ; but the entire antecedents and conditions 
 which have rendered this effect possible comprise not 
 only the action of his muscles on this special occasion, 
 but his whole past training as a cricketer, the history 
 of cricket itself, his progenitors from whom he derived 
 his constitution, the law of gravitation, and, indeed, we 
 may say the whole history of the physical universe. It 
 would be impossible and absolutely useless to take cog- 
 nizance of all these. When we say, with regard to any 
 practical matter whatsoever, that any one thing is the 
 cause of anything else, we are always selecting that 
 cause out of an infinite number on which, for the pur- 
 pose in hand, it is practically necessary that we should 
 insist; and the cause on which it is necessary to insist 
 is always distinguished from the others by the fact 
 that, under the circumstances in view, it is a cause or 
 condition which may or may not be present which we 
 ourselves may introduce or fail to introduce by our own 
 action, or which, if present already, our own action may 
 eliminate; or the presence or continuance of which is 
 for some reason doubtful to us ; while those other causes 
 whose presence is assumed by all parties to the discus- 
 sion, and which no one proposes to take away, and 
 which no one is able to take away, are passed over in 
 silence, for there is no need to take account of them. 
 Thus we all know that when a house is burned to the 
 
 54 
 
ground, the causes of the occurrence comprise the in- 
 flammable nature of timber, and, indeed, the whole 
 chemistry of combustion; but if an insurance office is 
 disputing the owner's claim to compensation on the 
 ground that the owner set a light to it purposely, while 
 the owner maintains that a housemaid set it alight by 
 accident, the only causes that will be put forward by 
 the litigants will be, let us say, a lamp, alleged by the 
 owner to have been upset accidentally in the basement, 
 and a match, on the other hand, which is alleged by the 
 agent of the insurance office to have been applied by 
 the owner intentionally to the drawing-room curtains. 
 Here, again, is another case. A man is hanging by a 
 rope, which is fastened to a spike of rock, and he is 
 looking for sea birds' eggs on the face of a sheer cliff. 
 It is suddenly perceived by some of his friends on the 
 summit that the rope is frayed a yard or two above his 
 head. They are anxious for his safety; and if anybody 
 asked them why, they would answer, "Because his life 
 depends on the rope's not breaking." Let us suppose, 
 however, that the rope is perfectly sound, but that the 
 spike of rock to which it is attached shows signs of 
 being about to fall. The man's friends, in that case, 
 will explain their anxiety by saying that his life de- 
 pends not on the rope, but on the rock. In either case 
 it would literally depend on both, and on a thousand 
 other things as well ; but in either case one cause only 
 is mentioned or calls for mention, and that is the cause 
 or factor whose continuance or cessation is alone open, 
 under the circumstances, to any practical question. 
 
 For similar reasons, and in a similar sense, the able 
 minority of men who direct the labor of the majority 
 are the true producers of that amount of wealth by 
 which the total annual output, in any given community, 
 exceeds what would have been produced by the laborers 
 if left to their own devices, whether working as isolated 
 units or in small self-organized groups. The action of the 
 average laborers is no doubt as essential to the produc- 
 
 55 
 
tion of the increment, as it is to the production of a 
 minimum product such as this ; but it is not the cause of 
 the increment., or of the DIFFERENCE between the two 
 products, in any practical sense ; for while the product 
 changes the labor remains the same, and there is no ques- 
 tion of its ceasing unless the laborers cease to exist. 
 There never can be a question of the directing faculties of 
 the few being left alone in a world where there is no 
 compulsory labor for nature, our eternal taskmaster, is 
 always present with her unrelenting lash; but there is 
 constantly a question, when the security of social in- 
 stitutions is threatened, of labor's being withdrawn from 
 the efficient guidance of ability; or, in other words, of 
 the action of ability being temporarily suspended alto- 
 gether. The application or the nonap plication of the 
 directing faculties to the labor of the majority, which 
 labor is bound to continue in any case these are the 
 sole alternatives. When these faculties are thus applied, 
 the output of wealth increases ; when their application is 
 interfered with or ceases, the output of wealth declines ; 
 and in the only practical sense of the words, cause or 
 producer, these faculties, or the persons who exercise 
 them, are the true causes or producers of the whole of 
 that portion of the wealth of any community which 
 comes into being with their activity, and disappears or 
 dwindles with their inaction. 
 
 Let me give you two examples of this reasoning, as 
 applied to actual facts. One of the commonest occur- 
 rences in the world of business is that a great pro- 
 ductive industry is developed and prospers under the 
 direction of some talented founder. He dies, and the 
 business passes into other hands, and though it may 
 continue to succeed for some time after his death, 
 owing to the momentum which his talents had imparted 
 to it, it gradually declines, and is superseded by com- 
 petitors, whose ability is superior to those of the men 
 who in his own business have succeeded him. Let me 
 now give you an example, on a larger scale, of the 
 
 56 
 
converse process that in which the ability of the men 
 by whom labor is directed, in spite of individual fail- 
 ures, is on the whole maintained. In Great Britain, 
 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the aver- 
 age income that would have come to each family, if the 
 entire wealth of the country had been pooled and di- 
 vided equally, would have been, statisticians estimate, 
 about four hundred dollars, or eighty English pounds. 
 Eighty years later, the total actually paid in wages to 
 manual labor, would, if equally divided, have given 
 each family an income of about four hundred and eighty 
 dollars. Thus wage earners of England as a whole, 
 though they worked for shorter hours, actually divided 
 among themselves more wealth per head than would 
 have been theirs if the entire possessions of every capi- 
 talist and landowner had been made over to them in 
 perpetuity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
 Here we have, from the laborers' point of view, a 
 most remarkable object lesson as to the effects of the 
 increasing concentration of Ability on the operations 
 of labor itself. To return to a simile I made use of on 
 a former occasion, the higher the quality, and the more 
 intense the action of the exceptional Ability to whose 
 guidance labor submits itself, the larger is the volume 
 of water pumped up into the reservoir from which 
 wealth is distributed to the various members of the 
 community; and so far is Ability to-day from stealing 
 the water pumped up by itself, that it is by this time 
 appropriating an increasing quantity of the water 
 the supply of which is due wholly to Ability. In other 
 words, though in a great variety of details the existing 
 order of things requires detailed improvement, the 
 whole material source or fund from which material im- 
 provements can be drawn, consists in those additions to 
 the national wealth, and the continued sustentation of 
 additions achieved already, which are due to the activ- 
 ity of that minority, operating by means of capital, 
 whose powers and functions are ignored by the popu- 
 
 57 
 
lar socialism of Karl Marx, and whose means of oper- 
 ation would be taken from them by the socialism of Mr. 
 Sidney Webb. 
 
 To this latter question to the socialism of the new 
 socialists I shall refer again in greater detail, when I 
 next have the privilege of addressing you. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 As I have already pointed out, the original teaching 
 of the socialists, when socialism began to assume the 
 character of a reasoned system, as it did under the in- 
 fluence of Marx, and thus acquired the watchwords 
 which first made it widely popular, was that wealth 
 belongs, as a matter of natural justice, to those persons 
 who produce it; that anyone who appropriates what he 
 has not produced is a robber ; and that, since labor, or 
 the ordinary manual efforts of the great masses of man- 
 kind, alone produces all the wealth that exists, all 
 wealth ought in justice to go to the great masses of 
 mankind. And this remains at this moment the really 
 popular gospel of socialism the teaching on which its 
 propagandists still rely when they seek adherents among 
 the wage-earning classes generally. You will have seen, 
 however, from certain of the arguments of the more 
 recent socialistic thinkers, which we were considering 
 when I last addressed you notably from those of Mr. 
 Sidney Webb that the more thoughtful socialists have 
 been gradually growing conscious of the fallacy of that 
 primary economic doctrine which they once accepted as 
 an axiom namely, that the sole producer of wealth is 
 the labor of the average man. They are beginning to 
 see that labor does not only not produce all wealth, but 
 that, under certain circumstances, it does not even pro- 
 duce most of it; and being still determined to pro- 
 claim that the laborers have a right to the possession of 
 it, they are beginning to shift their ground, and are 
 seeking to place this doctrine on some totally new foun- 
 dation. So long as it was possible for them to pro- 
 claim, without fear of contradiction, that no one pro- 
 duced wealth except the manual laborer, it was all very 
 well to argue that, because the laborer, A, has produced 
 wealth to the value of one hundred dollars, therefore 
 
 59 
 
this hundred dollars is in justice A's absolute prop- 
 erty; but now, when they are gradually perceiving that 
 the monopolists of business ability to use Mr. Webb's 
 own phrase again are man for man producers on an 
 incomparably greater scale, and that any one of them, 
 B, may produce one thousand dollars in a far less time 
 than it takes A to produce one hundred, they are be- 
 ginning to fight shy of the principle of justice with 
 which they started the sacred principle that the prod- 
 uct belongs to the producer; for if A, because he pro- 
 duced them, has a right to his one hundred dollars, B, 
 because he has produced them, would have the same 
 right to his thousand dollars, and this is the precise 
 conclusion against which the socialists are at war. 
 They are, therefore, though they have not yet openly 
 admitted the fact, trying to found their demand for an 
 equal distribution of wealth, not on the rights of the 
 laborer, in his economic capacity, as the personal pro- 
 ducer of the wealth which it is proposed to give him, 
 but on his moral rights as a man as one human being 
 among many, who together constitute a community. 
 Men, it is argued, whatever their congenital inequali- 
 ties, resemble each other, in virtue of their common 
 humanity, far more than they differ from each other in 
 virtue of their unequal efficiencies. Let their efficiencies 
 be great or small, they are not themselves the authors of 
 them. Their efficiencies, be they great or small, depend 
 alike on conditions, past and present, which are beyond 
 their individual control, and which they all of them 
 share in common ; and, though the absolute results of 
 the efforts of individuals will vary, the efforts of each, 
 relatively to his powers, will be equal. Thus, for the 
 formula of Marx To each man according to his 
 products, and the products of all laborers are equal 
 the socialists of to-day are endeavoring to substitute 
 this Let each man produce according to his economic 
 capacity, and enjoy the products according to his human 
 needs. This is the practical outcome of the arguments 
 
 60 
 
of such persons as Mr. Webb, when they endeavor to 
 exhibit ability as a species of unearned increment 
 arguments which, taken by themselves, are, as we have 
 seen, ridiculous, but which acquire a sort of plausibil- 
 ity when they lose their details, and merge themselves 
 in an appeal to some general moral sentiment. This 
 new position of the socialists this alternative string 
 to their bow for, when addressing the vulgar, they 
 still keep to the old one differs from the old position 
 the position of Karl Marx in the following fundamen- 
 tal way. Marx based the ethics of distribution on what 
 purported to be an analysis of production. Socialists 
 like Mr. Webb are endeavoring to separate the two. 
 Mr. Webb tries to represent it as a matter of complete 
 indifference whether the directors of labor produce 
 more than the laborers themselves or not. Indeed he 
 allows, in his recent explicit admissions, as important 
 a role to the employers as they could possibly claim for 
 themselves, and throws the old socialistic analysis of 
 production overboard altogether. He substantially agrees 
 with the monopolists of business Ability that they have 
 made the wealth which they possess. He differs from 
 them only in contending that they have no right to 
 keep it; that their present possession of it is merely an 
 accident of the situation; and that the majority have 
 not only the right and also the power to appropriate it, 
 but to redivide it, on grounds of general though not of 
 economic justice. 
 
 To declare, however, that this revolutionary redivi- 
 sion is justifiable on moral grounds is, it need hardly 
 be said, a perfectly useless proceeding unless, besides 
 being just, the redivision is also practicable. We may 
 leave, therefore, the question of its justice altogether 
 on one side, until we have considered how, as practical 
 men, the socialists propose to bring the redivision about ; 
 and what are the views taken by them of society and 
 of human nature which lead them to look on their 
 programme as really susceptU>le==e=aeesniplishment. 
 
 -BB^J 
 
 I fT OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 tt 
 
This brings us back to a question at which, under 
 one of its aspects, we have had occasion to glance be- 
 fore. When I was dealing with capital as a factor in 
 modern production, I pointed out that the distinctive 
 and fundamental function performed by it in the mod- 
 ern world was that of supplying the directors of labor 
 with the means of securing the technical obedience of 
 the laborers, such obedience constituting the condition 
 on which they received their wages. And I pointed 
 out, as you may remember, at the same time, that 
 socialists, in their constructive schemes, though not in 
 their popular rhetoric, recognized that the same kind 
 of obedience would be equally necessary under so- 
 cialism; only they propose to enforce this obedience 
 in a wholly different way. The only "truly socialistic 
 scheme" so says Mr. Webb in words which I have 
 already quoted "is to make an equal provision for the 
 maintenance of all an incident and indefeasible condi- 
 tion of citizenship, without any regard whatever to the 
 relative specific services of different citizens; and, in- 
 stead of leaving the rendering of the requisite services 
 to the option of the citizen (as the wage system does) 
 with the alternative of starvation, to require each citi- 
 zen to perform the part allotted to him, under one uni- 
 form law or civic duty," just, says Mr. Webb, as mil- 
 itary service is to-day exacted from soldiers. 
 
 Now if we assume that the socialistic state can, by 
 some means or other, secure all the ablest men as the 
 official directors of the labor of the citizens generally, 
 there is, as I said before, nothing inherently imprac- 
 ticable in the proposal to guarantee to each laborer 
 all his necessaries and his comforts in any case, and 
 secure his industrial obedience by methods the same as 
 those by which military obedience is secured in the case 
 of soldiers. On the contrary, as I said before, this 
 method is one which was practiced in the earliest civ- 
 ilizations known to us, and was in practical operation 
 
 62 
 
for thousands upon thousands of years. It built the 
 walls of Babylon. It built the pyramids of Egypt. It 
 raised the monstrous stones of Baalbec. It was the 
 method of slavery. It did not receive its deathblow 
 in the civilized world till this country inflicted it within 
 the lifetime of living men. It is this method of securing 
 and controlling ordinary labor that, on Mr. Sidney 
 Webb's admission, any system which is "truly social- 
 istic " would reintroduce. If every citizen, whether 
 he is willing to work or no, has an indefeasible right 
 to board, lodging, fuel, and clothing, equal to those en- 
 joyed by the most industrious members of the com- 
 munity, the idle and the disobedient can be made in- 
 dustrious and obedient by one means only the appli- 
 cation of the lash, or by the fear of it; or, if Mr. 
 Webb and his friends prefer a strictly military disci- 
 pline, by the fear of irons, or the bullets of a dozen 
 rifles. Whether this would be preferable in the eyes 
 of a free population to the existing wage system, either 
 in point of efficiency or otherwise, we need not for the 
 moment discuss. It is at all events a method of ob- 
 taining and controlling labor which experience shows 
 us to be possible, and within limits effective. But to 
 secure and control the requisite manual labor is, on 
 Mr. Webb's admission, only half of the task whjch 
 would lie before the socialistic state. The other half 
 of the task, which he recognizes as still more impor- 
 tant, is to secure the services of the men by whom all 
 this labor is to be directed the men of science, the 
 chemists, the mathematicians, the inventors, the men 
 of constructive imagination, on whose talents and gen- 
 ius the productivity of ordinary labor will depend. By 
 what means will socialism secure the services of such 
 men as these? 
 
 Here we have to deal with a problem which, for one 
 reason at all events, if for no other, is entirely different 
 from the problem of ordinary labor itself. To secure 
 from men the exertion of their ordinary faculties espe- 
 
 63 
 
cially those of common manual labor by positive coer- 
 cion, instead of the inducement of wages, is, let me 
 repeat, possible: but it is possible for this reason only. 
 In respect of the faculties embodied in ordinary labor, 
 anyone by looking at another man can tell how far he is 
 possessed of them whether he can trundle a wheel- 
 barrow, carry a hod of bricks, file a casting, hit a nail 
 on the head, and so forth; and any director of such 
 labor knows exactly the individual task which he wishes 
 each laborer to perform; but in respect of the faculties 
 not ordinary but exceptional which are essential for 
 the men by whom labor is to be successfully directed, 
 both these conditions are wanting. It is impossible to 
 tell that any man of exceptional ability possesses any 
 exceptional faculties till he himself chooses to show 
 them; and until circumstances supply him with some 
 motive for exerting them, he will probably be unaware 
 that he possesses such faculties himself. Moreover, even 
 if he gives the world some reason to suspect their ex- 
 istence, the world will not know what he can do with 
 them, and consequently will not be able to impose on 
 him any definite task, until he chooses himself to show 
 of what tasks he is capable. Any Scotch farmer could, 
 by looking at Burns, have told that he had the makings 
 in him of a sufficiently good plowman, and have forced 
 him, under certain circumstances, to do so much plow- 
 ing daily. Anyone could have told that Shakespeare was 
 capable of holding horses at the theater door, and com- 
 pelled him to hold them as the condition of his getting 
 his daily bread: but no one could have compelled 
 Burns or Shakespeare to write "Auld Lang Syne" or 
 "Hamlet." A press gang could have forced Columbus 
 to labor as a common seaman: but not the whole popu- 
 lation of Europe could have forced him to discover a 
 new hemisphere; for the mass of his contemporaries, 
 until his enterprise proved successful, obstinately refused 
 to believe that there was a new hemisphere to discover. 
 The exceptionally able men, therefore, by whom labor 
 64 
 
is successfully directed, and on whose ability the wealth 
 of the world depends, would stand, with regard to the 
 socialistic state, in a position fundamentally different 
 from that of the ordinary laborer. His distinctive facul- 
 ties cannot be guessed at by looking at him, by feeling 
 his muscles, or by watching his natural movements. 
 Nothing as to his exceptional faculties can be known 
 until he himself chooses to reveal them. He is there- 
 fore 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 cannot be concealed. The 
 kind of work that can be accomplished by these facul- 
 ties is known to everybody; and the community can, 
 by the exercise of mere force, command the average 
 man and make him work like an animal; but over the 
 exceptional faculties of the exceptional man the state 
 or the community has no command whatever, except 
 what the exceptional man voluntarily elects to give it; 
 for the state neither knows that the faculties exist, nor 
 what things the faculties can accomplish, till their pos- 
 sessor reveals the secret. He cannot be made to reveal 
 it. He can only be induced to do so; and he can only 
 be induced to do so by a society which for an excep- 
 tional deed offers some exceptional reward, just as a 
 reward is offered for evidence against some unknown 
 murderer. 
 
 Now if & socialistic revolution could be brought about 
 suddenly, there would no doubt be a large number of 
 men whose exceptional abilities were already well 
 known; and the state might, no doubt, pick out these 
 particular men, and compel them with some effect to 
 place their knowledge and their talents at its service; 
 but this situation would last for a few years only. These 
 men would die, and their places would have to be taken 
 by a number of other men who at present are children, 
 or who have not yet been born, and whose exceptional 
 talents are in any case altogether unknown and latent. 
 How shall these seeds of efficiency be induced to sprout 
 
 65 
 
and bloom by a society whose cardinal principle is that 
 no one man shall be allowed to receive a remuneration 
 greater than that which is the indefeasible right of the 
 most worthless? 
 
 It is only fair to the socialists of the new school to 
 say that this question has suggested itself even to them; 
 and attempts have been made by them during the last 
 ten years to answer it. The exceptional man, it is said, 
 will be motived to exceptional exertion, in the absence 
 of exceptional remuneration, in one or other, or in all, 
 of the four following ways: By the rnere pleasure of 
 "excelling," or by "the joy in creative work"; by the 
 satisfaction which work for others brings to "the in- 
 stincts of benevolence"; and lastly by the desire for "so- 
 cial approval," or the homage which is called "honor." 
 
 Now if socialists confined themselves to maintaining 
 that the desire of such rewards as these constitutes a 
 sufficient motive to exceptional activity of certain kinds 
 in certain cases, they would not only be asserting what 
 nobody else would deny, but they would be asserting 
 nothing on which, as socialists, it is to their own inter- 
 est to insist. The special proposition which, as social- 
 ists, 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, such as artists, 
 philanthropists, and soldiers, 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 namely, the 
 activities which result in the production of ordinary 
 commercial wealth, such as boots, staylaces, trouser 
 buttons, and frying pans. The motives on which the 
 socialists rely as incentives to business ability, inde- 
 pendently of the prospect of any business reward, are 
 fairly summed up by the socialistic writer whose phrases 
 I have just been quoting, as the joy of excelling, the 
 joy in creative work, the desire to benefit others, and 
 66 
 
the desire of approbation and of honor. That these 
 motives are motives of extraordinary power all history 
 shows us. The most impressive things accomplished by 
 human nature have been due to them. But let us con- 
 sider what these things are. They are not only impres- 
 sive. They are limited in number, and they have no 
 connection whatever with the production of ordinary 
 wealth. We shall find that they are referable to one or 
 other of five kinds of activity heroism in battle, or in 
 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. Such 
 being the case, then, the argument of the socialists is as 
 follows that because a soldier in action will eagerly 
 face death; because a Fra Angelico will paint a Christ 
 or a Virgin; because a Kant will immolate all his years 
 to philosophy; because a monk or a sister of mercy will 
 give themselves to the victims of a pestilence; because 
 a missionary will face martyrdom all without any 
 thought of a proportionate pecuniary reward the direc- 
 tors of industrial labor, if only such rewards are made 
 impossible for them, will at once become amenable to 
 the motives of the soldier, the artist, the philosopher, 
 the inspired philanthropist, and the apostle. This is the 
 assertion which underlies the socialistic argument; and 
 what we have to do is to ask calmly and dispassionately 
 whether or no this assertion is true. Is there anything 
 in any evidence accessible to us which may lead us, even 
 for a moment, to think it true? 
 
 Here I will ask you to observe how economics, in 
 the discussions of to-day, is compelled to extend its 
 scope; for this question belongs to the domains of 
 psychology, and also of physiology. There are like- 
 nesses between men as there are between dogs and 
 horses, and there are also differences. Are the dif- 
 ferences in temperament and talent between different 
 types of men interchangeable like the parts of an auto- 
 
 6? 
 
mobile made by the same maker? Does the fact that 
 a man with the temperament of a Fra Angelico will 
 paint a Madonna for the mere love of painting her, 
 prove that a man, in his own way equally exceptional, 
 will start a factory for the production of cheap frill- 
 ing for petticoats, without hopes of a profit propor- 
 tionate to his prospective sales? Can we argue from 
 the motives of the soldier, the thinker, the monk, or 
 the missionary, to the motives of the bootmaker, 
 the maker of patent saucepans, or the constructor of 
 big hotels? Anyone who has studied human nature 
 historically, or observed it in the life around him, will 
 dismiss the idea, on reflection, as at once groundless 
 and ridiculous. 
 
 Let us take the motives supplied by religious fervor 
 and by benevolence. These have led, among masses 
 of men, to conduct of the most exceptional kind. They 
 led the great St. Francis, and his more immediate 
 followers, to a life of effort whose object was not only 
 not wealth, but was on the contrary their union with 
 poverty, as their sacred sister. But even in the days 
 when Christian piety was at its height, the rule of 
 St. Francis was found practicable by a minority only. 
 One might as well argue that, because there have 
 been multitudes of monks, the celibate and the clois- 
 tered life will one day be made universal, as one 
 may argue that because some classes of exceptional 
 men will do, for the mere love of the thing, cer- 
 tain kinds of exceptional work, other classes of men 
 will, for the same reason, do exceptional work of a 
 totally different character that they will produce ex- 
 ceptional wealth, and not expect a reward of the same 
 order as their products. Even the most ascetic of 
 the monastic orders, when they set themselves to 
 produce articles of commerce as for instance the Car- 
 thusians when they produce their celebrated liqueur 
 take care to receive for each bottle the highest ex- 
 change value procurable. 
 
 68 
 
But the fanciful and foolish character of the entire 
 reasoning of the socialists, in this connection, is most 
 luminously illustrated by the example on which they 
 themselves lay the greatest stress. This is the con- 
 duct of the soldier, who is, as they say, not only will- 
 ing but eager to perform duties of the most painful 
 and dangerous character without any thought of re- 
 ceiving for it higher pay than his fellows. The same 
 moral has been drawn from the soldier's case, not 
 by socialists only, but by other distinguished thinkers, 
 for whom formal socialism was an absurdity. Thus 
 Ruskin says that his whole scheme of political economy 
 was based on the moral assimilation of industrial work 
 to military. "Soldiers of the plowshare," he said, "as 
 well as soldiers of the sword. All my political economy 
 is comprehended in that phrase." Mr. Frederic Har- 
 rison, again, the prophet of English positivism who, 
 apart from his positivism, is a shrewd as well as a 
 prosperous busineess man has declared that the readi- 
 ness with which soldiers will die in battle, is a type 
 of man's readiness to spend himself in the peaceful 
 service of humanity. Again, in a similar sense, an- 
 other English writer observes, "The soldiers' subsis- 
 tence is certain. It does not depend on his exer- 
 tions. 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 valor, 
 far more than a hundred times its weight in gold." 
 To this passage one the English socialists calls special 
 attention, and exclaims triumphantly, "Let those no- 
 tice this last point who fancy we must wait till men 
 are angels before socialism be practical." 
 
 Now to all these ideas and arguments there is one 
 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 physiological conditions which have no analogies 
 in the domain of ordinary economic effort. That such 
 69 
 
is the case can be very easily seen by following out 
 the train of reasoning suggested by Mr. Frederic Har- 
 rison. Mr. Harrison sees that in ordinary life a man 
 will not deliberately run the risk of being killed or mu- 
 tiliated, unless for the sake of some object the achieve- 
 ment of which is profoundly desired by him; and Mr. 
 Harrison, and the other writers just quoted, assume 
 that this must be the case on the field of battle also 
 in other words that the willingness of the soldier to 
 face death results from, and is a measure of, his at- 
 tachment to the country for which he fights. And in 
 certain cases when a country is in desperate straits^ 
 and everything hangs on the issue of a single battle 
 this inference is doubtless just; but that it is not so 
 universally, and that the willingness of the soldier to 
 confront death must have some other origin than an 
 attachment to the cause he fights for, is shown by the 
 notorious fact that some of the bravest and most reck- 
 less soldiers ever known to history have been mer- 
 cenaries who would fight as willingly for one country 
 as for another. 
 
 For this peculiarity in the soldier's conduct there are 
 two reasons. One is the peculiar character of the cir- 
 cumstances in which the soldier is placed on those 
 occasions when his courage is most highly tried cir- 
 cumtances 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 im- 
 portant and the fundamental reason is this that the in- 
 stinct of fighting is inherent in the very nature of the 
 dominant races, and 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 in- 
 stinct the result of incalculable years of struggle 
 which has made the human race what it is is no doubt 
 more controlled than formerly, and is not so frequently 
 roused. But it is still there. It is ready to quicken at 
 
 70 
 
the mere sound of military music; and the sight of 
 regiments marching stirs the most apathetic crowd. 
 Take again the case of schools. High-spirited boys 
 will take the chance of having their noses broken for 
 the mere pleasure of fighting, when they will not risk 
 a headache for the sake of learning their lessons. 
 Here is the reason why the soldier, though he submits 
 himself to the most direct coercion, never considers 
 himself, and is never considered a slave; and military 
 activity will never, as the socialists vainly fancy, throw 
 any light on, or present us with any analogy to, the 
 kind of inducements essential to activity in the field 
 of industry, till human nature undergoes so radical a 
 change that men would as eagerly rush to build a 
 house, while bricks were falling all about them like 
 snowflakes, and killing every tenth man, as the Japa- 
 nese risked death by a bullet or a bayonet on the 
 field of battle. 
 
 I have dwelt on this particular point, partly because 
 it is one to which socialists attach such extreme im- 
 portance; partly because it affords us an exceptionally 
 striking illustration of the reckless, the superficial, 
 and unscientific manner in which they are accustomed 
 to reason. One of the principal grounds on which 
 they attack what they call the economics of the capi- 
 talist classes, is that it deals solely with the actions of 
 what is called the economic man, or the man whose 
 one motive is the personal acquisition of wealth. Such 
 a man, they say, is an abstraction. He does not exist 
 in reality. The actual man is a complex being, whose 
 selfish and acquisitive motives are traversed by many 
 others ; and if economics is to have any scientific value, 
 it must deal with man as a whole, in all his living com- 
 plexity. The argument in itself is true as a criticism of 
 the orthodox economists ; but when the socialists at- 
 tempt to act in accordance with their own professed 
 principles, and take the whole of human nature into 
 account, they do nothing but travesty the precise class 
 
of errors which they condemn. The one-motived man 
 who cares only for personal gain is no doubt an ab- 
 straction, which has no actual concrete counterpart; 
 but the motive ascribed to him is a motive which has a 
 real existence, and by considering its effects in isola- 
 tion we can reach many true conclusions. But the 
 other motives with which the socialists attempt to sup- 
 plement this are so vague, so indefinite, so fantastic, 
 that they correspond to nothing. Instead of being any 
 true addition to the data of economic science, they are 
 like images belonging to a nebulous and sentimental 
 dream, which have only the effect of obscuring, not 
 of completing, the facts of human nature to which the 
 orthodox economists confine themselves, and which 
 though imperfect, are so far as they go actual. The 
 psychology of the socialists makes no attempt whatever 
 to define the scope and the operations of the motives 
 with which it affects to deal ; and throws no more 
 light on the real facts of human nature than a child's 
 painting of a mountain would throw on its geological 
 formation. 
 
 Now, however, without getting out of touch with the 
 socialists, let us get back to firmer ground; and hav- 
 ing seen the futility of their efforts to provide, on a 
 socialistic basis, any motive which shall stimulate the 
 higher industrial efficiencies, other than that supplied 
 at the present time by the prospect of possessing wealth 
 in proportion to the amount produced, let us consider 
 this motive itself, as history and experience reveal it to 
 us. And here in presence of facts which no one seeks 
 to deny, we shall find that the socialists are among our 
 most important witnesses. The motive in question on 
 the part of the exceptional wealth producer, the capi- 
 talist employer, the man of enterprise and business 
 ability namely, the desire of wealth proportionate to 
 his exceptional production of it commonly receives 
 from the socialists the vituperative name of greed. 
 We will not be squeamish over a name, and, to avoid 
 
 72 
 
quarreling over trifles, we will, for the moment, adopt 
 this name ourselves. It will show that we and the 
 socialists, are talking about the same thing. The so- 
 cialists maintain that greed will be superfluous as a 
 motive in the future ; but what have they got to tell 
 us about its operaion in the present and the past? 
 They tell us a great deal. For what, as moral and 
 political agitators, has been their chief moral indict- 
 ment against the typical man of ability, the director of 
 labor, the introducer of new machinery and new meth- 
 ods, the pioneer of commerce? Their chief indictment 
 against men such as this has been that, instead of work- 
 ing for the mere pleasure of benefiting their fellows, 
 or for the sake of any other of those rewards which 
 the socialists declare to be so satisfying, their one 
 motive has been greed and selfish greed alone. Its 
 hideous influence, they say, is as old as civilization 
 itself, and the monopolists of business ability in Tyre 
 and Sidon were as much its creatures as are their mod- 
 ern representatives in Berlin, London, or Pittsburg. 
 Here we get to something like solid rock; for this as- 
 sertion, unlike so many made by the socialists, has the 
 refreshing advantage of being substantially true. Just 
 as the desire of winning a woman is associated with 
 the act of making love to her, so is the desire of pos- 
 sessing wealth associated with the act of producing it. 
 The only defect of this assertion is a defect of the 
 last kind that one would naturally look for in those 
 who denounce the narrowness of the orthodox econo- 
 mists on the ground that they confine themselves to 
 a consideration of the one-motived economic man. 
 For not even Mill or Ricardo would have maintained 
 that actual human beings had no other desires in life 
 than to make as much money as possible. They would 
 have granted them, in theory at all events, some benevo- 
 lent and unselfish feelings. But when we turn to the 
 analysis invariably given by the socialists of the char- 
 acters of all the men of business ability who have ex- 
 
 73 
 
erted themselves in the world hitherto, we find that 
 even on occasions when these men have given most 
 remarkable signs of apparent sympathy with others, 
 the socialists have been ready to denounce them as 
 nothing better than hypocrites, and declare that greed 
 was their motive unadulterated greed only. Thus, when 
 the liberal manufacturers of Great Britain, about sixty 
 years ago, advocated and aided in securing the aboli- 
 tion of the corn laws, declaring themselves desirous 
 thereby to ameliorate the lot of the people, and pro- 
 vide cheap bread for the thousands who were famish- 
 ing for the want of it, Karl Marx, who was then in 
 England, declared that the sole motive by which these 
 men were really actuated was the desire to reduce 
 wages, and thus add to their own profits. 
 
 Now this assertion of the socialists does contain an 
 element of truth; but the truth to which it bears wit- 
 ness, when shorn of its exaggerations, is this not that 
 men of business ability, and the great directors of in- 
 dustry, either are at present, or ever have been in the 
 past, motived, as concrete human beings, by no other 
 desire than greed; but that this motive is, as a matter 
 of fact, essential to, and psychologically inseparable 
 from, their activity as men of business; just as, on the 
 socialists' own admission, joy in creation is insepara- 
 ble from highest art of the painter or the love of some 
 woman from the lover's efforts to win her, though no 
 artist or lover ever lived who had not many motives 
 unconnected with his paint box or his sonnets to his 
 mistress's eyebrow. 
 
 When we are considering men as persons who can 
 render some specific service, we have to consider their 
 characters with reference to that specific service only. 
 The specific service here in question is the exceptional 
 production of wealth on the part of exceptional men; 
 and the whole question we are now debating is merely 
 how a society which was organized on socialistic prin- 
 ciples, and whose distinctive aim was to deny to these 
 
 74 
 
exceptional men any wealth proportionate to the excep- 
 tional amount produced by them, will be able to secure 
 their services, which the socialists admit to be essen- 
 tial. That they will not give their services, that they 
 will not even develop their special faculties, without a 
 motive of some sort, is admitted by the socialists them- 
 selves. What is that motive to be? And the socialists 
 themselves declare more vehemently than^anybody that, 
 so far as our knowledge of the past and our experience 
 of the present can inform us, the class of men in ques- 
 tion, in respect of their economic activities, are amen- 
 able to one motive only namely, a desire for a share of 
 wealth proportionate to the amount produced by them; 
 and this is the precise desire that socialism would refuse 
 to satisfy. In supposing, then, as they do, and as they 
 are obliged to do, that some other motive in the future 
 will take the place of this, they are supposing that hu- 
 man nature will, in some comparatively short time, 
 undergo a change to which history, on their own ex- 
 press admission, affords no parallel, and that certain 
 traits will disappear from certain types of character, 
 which all the revolutions and movements of human life 
 have, on their own admission, done absolutely nothing 
 to modify, from the earliest dawn of civilization up to 
 the present day. 
 
 It is a very curious fact that those enthusiasts who are 
 most eloquent in declaring that this change will be 
 easy, are the vj^ persons who are most vehement in 
 proclaiming^^^hiju^r there has never been a single 
 sign of it. ^J^Bfvequoted the declaration of Marx, 
 made in England about sixty-five years ago, to the 
 effect that the men whose ability was at that time in 
 England increasing the production of wealth as it had 
 never been increased before, not only had greed for 
 their sole industrial motive, but were susceptible of no 
 other. I will now give you one of the latest utterances 
 of a distinguished living thinker, who, though differing 
 from most socialists in many of his moral ideals, is en- 
 
 75 
 
tirely at one with them in their distinctive economic 
 principles. I refer to Count Tolstoy, whose name I 
 mentioned in one of my previous lectures. He, too, 
 like socialists of the school of Marx, declares that ordi- 
 nary manual labor is the source of all wealth. At the 
 same time he, too, like socialists such as Mr. Sidney 
 Webb, recognizes that some men are much more effi- 
 cient than others; and, with regard to these men, he 
 says that so long as they continue to do what they do 
 now, and have always done in the past namely, to 
 expect that their exceptional efficiencies shall be re- 
 warded with exceptional possessions " then inevitably 
 whatever organization may be introduced, society will 
 form a cone, and the most efficient men will be at the 
 top of it." "Therefore," he says, "all that is now neces- 
 sary for the deliverance of men from their sufferings is 
 that they should emancipate themselves" from their 
 present motives, and that each man, instead of seeking 
 to possess in proportion to what he produces, should 
 obey that "eternal law which gives the highest possible 
 social welfare" indiscriminately to "all everywhere." 
 
 This is all that is required, he says; and he speaks of 
 it as a trifling change. It is a change, however, which 
 unintentionally he invests with a very different aspect, 
 when, in another passage remarkable for its shrewdness 
 and candor, he explains his meaning further. For the 
 motives, he says, which are at present operative among 
 the capitalist on a large scale are ^^>resent univer- 
 sally operative among the masspf men on a small 
 scale. "Any laborer," he procefB^"*^H^er educated 
 or quite illiterate, is ready to express his indignation 
 with the capitalist, and denounce the whole existing 
 organization of society as wrong ; and yet," says Count 
 Tolstoy, "give this laborer, be he educated or unedu- 
 cated, the opportunity of bettering his position by pro- 
 ducing certain articles cheaper than others, or of buying 
 land, or of organizing a business with wage-paid labor 
 himself, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out 
 
 76 
 
of a thousand he will do it without scruple and defend 
 his possession of the land, or his privileges as an em- 
 ployer, often more strenuously than the born landlords 
 and capitalists." 
 
 What Count Tolstoy says here is no more than the 
 truth. The exceptional man's motive namely, his de- 
 sire for exceptional possessions is merely the devel- 
 oped form of a motive common to all men; namely, the 
 desire of receiving, as the result of personal effort, an 
 amount of wealth which is, to say the least of it, not 
 so small as to be grossly disproportionate to the 
 amount of wealth which the personal effort has pro- 
 duced. In other words, this motive, which Count 
 Tolstoy proposes to abolish, is, on his own admis- 
 sion, indigenous to the vast majority of mankind. If 
 we confined ourselves to the language of socialists like 
 Mr. Sidney Webb, the change in motive essential to 
 the socialistic state would seem to be a change in 
 motives which were peculiar to the exceptionally effi- 
 cient minority; but Count Tolstoy corrects this view 
 by his penetrating and twofold assertion that the 
 motive requiring change in the minority is a motive 
 equally ingrained in the character of the majority also, 
 and that, in order to make a socialistic state possible, 
 the whole human race must be remodeled, and not 
 merely a class. 
 
 If only such a change in human nature could be 
 accomplished, a socialistic state of some sort would 
 follow as a natural result. In just the same way, ii 
 human nature could be so changed that men wanted 
 neither food or clothing, or that they came into the 
 world without any cooperation of the sexes, social 
 changes would follow of a still more revolutionary 
 kind. The economic constitution of society is, in its 
 fundamentals, an image or projection of human char- 
 acter in its fundamentals; and the one can never be 
 changed fundamentally until the other is changed 
 fundamentally. * 
 
 77 
 
Is there, then, let us ask once more, any sign in the 
 past history of the human race, or in the conduct 
 of the men around us, which may lead us to think 
 that the change now specially in question is likely 
 to accomplish itself among human beings in general, 
 and more particularly among those exceptional men 
 on whose services socialistic labor would depend for 
 its productivity no less than does labor under the 
 conditions that. prevail to-day? And to this question, 
 as we may now see on reflection, thoughtful socialists 
 give three answers. One consists of those false and 
 foolish analogies which they draw between kinds of 
 activity, such as the artistic and the military, and 
 those involved in economic production, which stand 
 on a footing in many was wholly different. Another 
 answer, to which I have not previously referred, is 
 based on a mood of mind undoubtedly prevalent among 
 many of those to whom the socialists mainly address 
 themselves that is to say, men who, conscious of 
 producing little, and quite willing to produce less, 
 would be only too glad, to the utmost extent pos- 
 sible, to profit by the activities of those who produce 
 more. Such men are ready enough to affirm, and 
 may possibly believe, that if they were capable of ex- 
 ceptional production personally, they would be per- 
 fectly willing to distribute their exceptional products 
 among their fellows; and they thus develop a volume 
 of unreal sentiment, founded on mere fancies as to 
 what they would do themselves if placed in positions 
 for which all qualifications are wanting to them. Sen- 
 timent such as this, which can rarely be put to the 
 test, is altogether delusive. As Count Tolstoy ob- 
 serves, and as experience amply shows, the very men 
 who are foremost in denouncing as immoral and need- 
 less all desire for exceptional gain on the part of the 
 employer and capitalist, are the very men who, when- 
 ever an opportunity offers, are notoriously foremost 
 in exhibiting this desire themselves. The third answer 
 78 
 
is Count Tolstoy's own. Oddly enough he lays very 
 little emphasis on it; but it is the only answer he 
 gives us, and it is not without its value. Though nine 
 hundred and ninety-nine men out of every thousand, 
 be they rich or poor, laborers or employers of labor, 
 are wholly untouched at heart by the motives which 
 are one day to be universal, there is a minority of one 
 in a thousand, who already have found salvation, and 
 who actually are prepared to exert their productive 
 faculties without any desire of special or exclusive 
 gain for themselves. Count Tolstoy is undoubtedly 
 right here. He knows from experience that minds of 
 a certain class do genuinely respond to the kind of 
 doctrine that he preaches; and he probably feels that 
 if this is possible among some, the obstacle must be 
 trifling and removable which prevents its being pos- 
 sible among all. But if he thinks this, he has read 
 history to very little purpose. Appeals, similar in 
 spirit, though differing in form from his own, have 
 been made to it any time during the past two thousand 
 years; and men, in response to them all over the world 
 have renounced both wealth and marriage. But the 
 reality, and the permanence of a class willing to act 
 thus, shows us how small it is relatively, and how 
 incapable of extension, though absolutely it may com- 
 prise a multitude. The economic asceticism which 
 Count Tolstoy preaches, which he himself recognizes 
 as a condition of socialism, and which other socialists, 
 without recognizing this, demand, is simply the eco- 
 nomic counterpart of asceticism of the Christian or 
 the Buddhistic cloister. As such it may, and indeed 
 occasionally has, realized itself to some degree in small 
 and detached communities. But the success of most 
 of these has been due to the presence of some master 
 mind, to which, on its disappearance, no adequate suc- 
 cessor has been found; and the success has not been 
 long, and has certainly not been considerable. 
 The socialistic principle has again, to some extent, 
 
 79 
 
achieved .a practical expression in Great Britain in a 
 somewhat different way not in secluded communi- 
 ties (but in industrial associations which go by the 
 name of cooperative. The ideals which such associa- 
 tions aim at may be said to be completely socialistic. 
 The ideal of the cooperator is a business firm in which 
 the workers own the capital in absolutely equal shares, 
 have an equal voice in the management, and draw each 
 an equal share of the total profits in lieu of wages. 
 In practice, however, this ideal has never been com- 
 pletely realized; still a sufficiently near approach has 
 been made to it to render the fortunes of industrial 
 cooperation instructive. Cooperative enterprises have 
 been of two contrasted kinds those whose business 
 was distribution, and those whose business was pro- 
 duction; and between the fortunes of these two there 
 has been a most signal and instructive difference. The 
 distributive enterprises, which have merely been large 
 shops, open to members only, and supplying these 
 customers with goods at prices below the ordinary, 
 because the profit of the middleman was eliminated 
 enterprises of this kind have met with considerable 
 success; but cooperative attempts to produce the 
 goods thus sold exhibit a notorious contrast to the 
 success that has attended their distribution, and the 
 reason is evident. In the process of producing a cheap 
 watch, or lamp, or screwdriver, or colored and pat- 
 terned fabric, far more special ability, far more me- 
 chanical, chemical, inventive, and coordinating talent 
 is required than in the process of, selling them; and 
 the higher kinds of ability the main requisites of 
 production are precisely what cooperators, in pro- 
 portion as they are really cooperative, find it difficult, 
 and generally impossible, to obtain. We need not go 
 into particulars. The general result is written on the 
 face of history. The capitalistic system began to as- 
 sume its modern form, as the socialists are constantly 
 telling us, about a hundred and fifty years ago. Co- 
 80 
 
operative production was first attempted about seventy 
 years ago. In seventy years the capitalistic system 
 was dominant throughout Great Britain, and was rap- 
 idly spreading itself through Europe, while since that 
 time it has become coextensive with civilization. In 
 seventy years the system of cooperative production has 
 met only with success sufficient to be the index of 
 its comparative insignificance. It shows besides cap- 
 italism as a tortoise shows besides an express train, 
 or a plant of asparagus shows besides a towering oak. 
 In Great Britain, for example, all the productive busi- 
 nesses which are cooperative in any socialistic or semi- 
 socialistic sense, might be suddenly extinguished to- 
 day without any appreciable effect on the national 
 welfare as a whole. If a similar fate overtook cap- 
 italistic production, the emtire nation would, in a very 
 few days, be starving. 
 
 Thus, if we look ba'ck over the path which we have 
 thus far traversed, we shall see that socialism has made 
 two attempts to justify itself attempts beginning at 
 opposite ends of the scale, (i) One is the attempt 
 of Marx and his school, which represents ordinary 
 manual labor as the sole producer of wealth. (2) The 
 other is that of the more thoughtful socialists of to- 
 day, who more or less clearly recognize, though they 
 do not openly say so, that the Marxian analysis or 
 production is no better than nonsense. These men, 
 so far as the machinery of production is concerned, are 
 coming round to a view which is, in many respects, 
 not to be distinguished from that of their most un- 
 compromising opponents. They are coming to recog- 
 nize that in the modern process of production the 
 few play a part even greater than that played by the 
 many that the labor of the many is the unit which 
 the ability of the few multiplies; and the only radical 
 change which these modern socialists would intro- 
 duce is a change in the character of the motives by 
 which this ability is first to be elicited, and then tfept 
 81 
 
in a state of sustained activity. With the doctrine of 
 Marx, that all wealth is due to ordinary manual labor 
 and that capital represents mere passive monopoly, 
 used as an instrument of plunder a doctrine which is 
 still the foundation of socialism as a popular creed 
 I dealt fully at starting, exposing its fallacies in detail. 
 
 Then the neo-socialistic doctrine, which recognizes 
 the functions of ability, but maintains that the mo- 
 nopoly of ability can be practically broken down by 
 simply depriving ability of its present motives to ex- 
 ertion, has been occupying our attention to-day; and 
 we have seen that it is just as unscientific, just as 
 visionary, just as puerile as the other. 
 
 I will now sum up, in general terms, the positive 
 conclusions to which our negative criticism as to this 
 special point leads us. 
 
 Economic production depends, alike for its advance 
 and its sustenation, on a fact by which the civilization 
 of to-day is distinguished from all civilizations preced- 
 ing it. This fact is the concentration on the productive 
 process of the mental and volitional activities of excep- 
 tionally able men, to a degree in which such activities 
 were never concentrated before. Such being the case, 
 those countries or races have advanced fastest which, 
 besides being prolific in men of exceptional powers such 
 as these, offer them the greatest inducements to develop 
 their powers, and the greatest facilities for applying 
 them in the widest and most efficient way. And what 
 are these inducements? 
 
 I have no reluctance to adopt once more, for the mo- 
 ment, the word used by socialists as a term of con- 
 temptuous invective, and say that they consist of the 
 prospect, secured by the constitution of society, of satis- 
 fying the exceptional man's economic greed in propor- 
 tion to his economic productivity. In speaking of the 
 desire here in question as greed, we do in reality no 
 more to discredit it than we do by speaking of a man 
 whom we happen to dislike, as this fellow. The vitu- 
 
 82 
 
perative meaning of the word is due to its derivation 
 from greedy, which implies an inordinate desire for the 
 sensual gratifications of eating; and the common opin- 
 ion of men unable to produce great wealth, as to men 
 who, because they produce it, desire also to possess 
 it, is that they desire to possess it first and foremost 
 in order that they may constantly gorge themselves with 
 the richest and most unwholesome food, or revel to 
 excess in luxuries of a like kind. When a caricaturist 
 desires to deride a plutocrat, he invariably draws him 
 with a swollen face and a waistcoat bulging like a bal- 
 loon. The bloated capitalist is a phrase that has be- 
 come proverbial; and a similar phrase, belonging to an 
 earlier period, "As drunk as a lord," still survives in 
 England the supposition being that a lord was a rich 
 man, and that, being a rich man, he would drink as 
 much wine as he could hold. And no doubt many of 
 the men. who make great fortunes may be taxed with 
 greed in this and kindred senses. But so may men in 
 all ranks of life. One man may be as greedy over a 
 sausage as another man is over an ortolan. A man may 
 be as slothful in a cheap bed as in a dear one. He may 
 luxuriate as idly in a rocking chair that cost a couple of 
 dollars as he may in a gilded fauteuil which belonged 
 to Marie Antoinette, and which cost perhaps ten 
 thousand. 
 
 The fact is that greed, if we take the word as mean- 
 ing a mere physiological desire for the direct indulgence 
 of the senses, forms a very small part of the motive 
 which induces the most selfish men to the prolonged 
 efforts in virtue of which they produce and augment 
 great fortunes. Of this fact there are many incontro- 
 vertible proofs. One is that many of the greatest wealth 
 producers have been men who, in their personal ex- 
 penditure, have been exceptionally penurious. Another 
 is that, when wealth is possessed on a great scale, the 
 amount which the utmost ingenuity could expend on 
 the satisfaction of personal greediness is comparatively 
 
 83 
 
small; and, in the ca*se of the men who produce their 
 tens of millions, is left far behind at a very early stage 
 in their career. 
 
 The desire, therefore, of mere sensual satisfaction 
 cannot be the main motive that prompts men to the 
 production of great wealth. A key to the general 
 question of what the main motive is by which men on 
 the whole are prompted to the production of great 
 wealth is to be found in an observation of Ruskin's, 
 remarkable for its penetration, and for the terse apti- 
 tude of its language. We must, he says, in consider- 
 ing human motives, draw a sharp line between men's 
 "needs" and their "wishes." Their needs are bounded 
 by the constitution of the human body, and the prompt- 
 ings of the common affections. Their wishes, which 
 make up three fourths of their desires, are, on the other 
 hand, what he calls "ROMANTIC." They depend on 
 imagination, thought, and all kinds of indeterminate 
 emotion. Thus the physical enjoyment derived from the 
 scenery of a beautiful park is the same for the owner, 
 and any stranger who happens to wander in it. The 
 additional enjoyment which comes to the owner from 
 his ownership is altogether mental, imaginative, or, as 
 Ruskin says, romantic. In the same way the posses- 
 sion of wealth generally, and the desire to increase it, 
 mean an enlargement of the general consciousness far 
 more than any titillation of the nerves, or the pamper- 
 ing of any physical appetite. What are the forms of 
 expenditure most characteristic of the very rich men 
 who have arisen in the world to-day? One is cer- 
 tainly the collection of works of art. Another, spe- 
 cially noticeable in this country, is the giving of great 
 sums to educational and other public purposes. 
 
 It is impossible here to go into this interesting sub- 
 ject minutely a subject closely connected with the 
 economics of the modern world; but the facts of the 
 case may be generally summed up in saying that the 
 motive which stimulates the producers of great wealth 
 
 84 
 
to demand a proportionate amount of their great prod- 
 ucts for themselves, is not a desire for pleasure, but 
 a desire for the realization of power; and when this 
 fact is understood, the psychology of the question be- 
 comes perfectly intelligible. The monopolists of busi- 
 ness ability to return Mr. Webb's phrase are men 
 conscious of powers which are at first latent and in- 
 ternal. When applied to the production of wealth, 
 these powers become externalized, developed, and re- 
 embodied in the wealth produced by them ; and when 
 thus reembodied, they are at their possessor's service, 
 ready to subserve his purposes in an indefinite variety 
 of ways. Because very rich men will so often give 
 vast portions of their riches to public purposes it may 
 seem to some that they would still go on producing, it, 
 instead of being given away by them, these sums were 
 taken from them by the state. Here we have another 
 example of the puerility of socialistic psychology. If 
 the sums in question were taken instead of given, the 
 producer would lose the one thing which he primarily 
 values in the transaction. He would himself lose all 
 share in it. It would cease to be an expression of 
 himself. Let anyone who thinks that, because a man 
 is willing to give money away, he necessarily sets no 
 value on being recognized as the rightful possessor of 
 it, ask himself if, because he is willing to give a dol- 
 lar to a poor man in the street, he would be equally 
 willing that the stranger should steal it out of his 
 coat pocket. 
 
 In any case the great truth remains that, in propor- 
 tion as men of ability are essential to the progress and 
 the sustentation of wealth in modern society, society 
 as a whole, if it is to secure and retain their services, 
 must concede to them by its constitution the terms 
 that these men desire; and what these terms shall be, 
 must practically be decided not by society as a whole, 
 but by the exceptional men themselves. Society as 
 a whole can no more determine that such and such a 
 
 85 
 
motive shall be sufficient to stimulate certain people 
 than all the fishermen in the world can determine, by 
 taking counsel together, that fish shall rise to flies 
 which happen not to attract them. 
 
 Here we come to another aspect of our subject to 
 this question of the limitations of the powers of soci- 
 ety a question as to which even many highly edu- 
 cated thinkers think as loosely, and with as profound 
 an inaccuracy, as they do with regard to the part 
 which ordinary manual labor plays in the production 
 of wealth. This question I must deal with when I 
 next address you. 
 
 86 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 The belief that socialism represents a practicable form 
 of society this is what I ended with pointing out to 
 you in my last address rests, in the minds of those per- 
 sons who hold it, and is defended by them, on two 
 grounds. One of these is a doctrine relating to the labor 
 of ordinary men ; the other is a doctrine relating to the 
 motives which will secure for society the services of 
 exceptional men. 
 
 (1) Popular socialism socialism as expounded to the 
 masses says, "The many do everything, and the few 
 nothing. We need not, therefore, trouble ourselves with 
 considering the position of the latter. We have nothing 
 to do but to dispossess them, and their whole inheritance 
 will be ours." 
 
 (2) Socialism of the more thoughtful kind is now 
 obliged to say, "We by no means deny that the excep- 
 tional few do something. We recognize that their serv- 
 ices are essential, and we will get them to exert them- 
 selves precisely as they do now ; but they shall work 
 for us on our own terms, and the whole of their present 
 inheritance shall be appropriated by us just the same." 
 
 Now what I want to point out to you as to these two 
 theories of socialism is this that, widely different and 
 indeed contradictory as they are in their details, they 
 rest alike on a fallacy which is in both cases funda- 
 mentally the same. This fallacy consists in an ascrip- 
 tion to society as a whole, or rather to an overwhelming 
 majority in any society, of powers which it does not 
 possess no matter how completely democratic its po- 
 litical organization may be. 
 
 I will give you an example of this error, taken from 
 a quarter which renders it exceptionally striking. About 
 eight or nine months ago there appeared in the North 
 
 87 
 
American Review an article dealing with the growth, 
 not of ample, but of colossal fortunes, which the 
 writer earnestly deplores, and which he desires to see 
 checked. He hides his personality under the initial X; 
 but the editor of the North American Review states in 
 a note that he is one of the foremost philosophical think- 
 ers living in the United States. He is obviously, more- 
 over, a man of moderate, not of extreme opinions. I 
 will, with your permission, read to you certain sentences 
 from his article. "It is," he says, "to the true interest 
 of the multimillionaires themselves to join those who 
 are free from envy in trying to remove the rapidly grow- 
 ing dissatisfaction with their continued possession of 
 these vast sums of money." That these men are not 
 mere idlers, that on the whole they render exceptionally 
 economic services to the country, X does not deny ; and 
 he admits that it is necessary to stimulate them by al- 
 lowing them some exceptional reward; but he contends 
 that the rewards which they are at present permitted to 
 appropriate are excessive, and ought, therefore, to be 
 limited. But limited by what means? The means, he 
 says, are ready to hand, and can be applied with the 
 utmost ease. They are provided by the existing po- 
 litical constitution of the United States. And here 
 comes the passage to which I would particularly call 
 your attention. "No one can doubt," he says, "that, if 
 the majority of the voters chose to elect a Governor of 
 their own way of thinking, they could readily enact a 
 progressive taxation of incomes which would limit every 
 citizen of New York State to such incomes as the ma- 
 jority of the voters considers sufficient for him. And 
 it would be particularly easy," he proceeds, "to alienate 
 the property of every man at death, for it is only neces- 
 sary to repeal the statutes now authorizing the descent 
 of such property to the heirs and the legatees of the 
 decedent." It is difficult to imagine a more vivid illus- 
 tration than this of the error to which I am now re- 
 ferring the error of ascribing to majorities in demo- 
 
cratic communities not only more power than they 
 possess, but a kind of power which they do not possess 
 at all, and which no kind of Government ever has or 
 ever can possess, whether it be the most diffused de- 
 mocracy or the most arbitrary and concentrated abso- 
 lutism. That a unanimous and overwhelming majority 
 in any democratic country can effect any legislative 
 changes they please at any given moment, and perhaps 
 enforce them for a moment, is no doubt true. But life 
 does not consist of isolated moments or periods. It is 
 a continuous process, in which each moment is affected 
 by the moments that have gone before, and the pro- 
 spective character of the moments that are to come after. 
 If it were not for this fact the majority of voters of 
 New York State, by electing a Governor of their own 
 way of thinking, might not only limit the amount which 
 any citizen might possess ; it might do a great deal 
 more besides. If the principles of X are correct, he is 
 a great deal too modest in his estimate of what a Gov- 
 ernment might do with the majority of the voters at 
 the back of it. Besides enacting a law which limited 
 what any citizen might accumulate, it might also enact 
 a law, with the same delightful ease, limiting the 
 amount of food which any citizen might eat. It might 
 limit everybody to two ounces a day. It might enact 
 that nobody should wear a greatcoat in winter, or that 
 grown men should array themselves in the clothes of 
 babies. It might decree an eternal holiday, and forbid 
 any citizen to perform any kind of labor. Besides 
 enacting that no father should bequeath his wealth to 
 his children, it might enact just as readily that no father 
 should have the custody of his children. Or again, by 
 electing a Governor of its own way of thinking, it 
 might enact that no remedy should be applied to any 
 disease, other than some quack medicine advertised to 
 cure everything. There is nothing in the principles so 
 solemnly laid down by X which would render any one 
 
 89 
 
of these enactments more impossible than those which 
 he himself contemplates. 
 
 No one can doubt that the majority of voters could 
 enact them all through their Governor, if the enact- 
 ments happened to coincide with what X calls "their 
 way of thinking" at the moment. But if such enact- 
 ments were made by the so-called all-powerful majority, 
 what would be the result? If a law forbade the citizens 
 to eat enough to keep themselves alive, either the law 
 would be disregarded in which case it would not be 
 a real law at all; or else, if it were obeyed, the entire 
 population would die. If a law forbade any citizen to 
 labor, the majority of the citizens might be delighted 
 with it on Monday, but on Tuesday they would disre- 
 gard it, or all of them would die likewise. If a law 
 was passed which deprived fathers of their children, 
 the parchment on which it was written would shrivel 
 in the common fires of humanity. If a law forbade 
 the sick to take anything but a single quack remedy, a 
 week's obedience to the law would render it a dead 
 letter. In short, if any one of these ridiculous laws 
 were enacted, the citizens themselves would refuse to 
 pay the least attention to them as soon as they realized 
 their consequences ; and the work which they did as 
 legislators they would tear to pieces as men. 
 
 And why? By what power would their legislation 
 be rendered nugatory by what power which is still 
 more sovereign than the sovereign democracy itself? 
 The power is a double power, and voters contend in vaia 
 with it. It is the power of nature and of human nature. 
 Just as the laws of nature must determine all legisla- 
 tion as to building, limiting the powers of the most 
 democratic government more stringently than any king 
 or Kaiser to laws which are in conformity to the nature 
 of the materials used, so do the constitution and pro- 
 pensities of the common human character limit legisla- 
 tion generally, and confine it within certain channels. 
 
 All this X and similar thinkers forget. X fortifies, 
 90 
 
himself in his doctrine of the unlimited power of ma- 
 jorities by a quotation from Lord Coleridge, the Eng- 
 lish judge and lawyer. "The same power," says Lord 
 Coleridge, "which prescribes rules for the possession of 
 property can of course alter them" the power to which 
 Lord Coleridge refers being the will of the majority at 
 whatever moment may be in question. Lord Coleridge 
 may have been a clever lawyer, but he was a very child- 
 ish philosopher. Because, in any country, the formula- 
 tion and enforcement of laws have for their proximate 
 cause the will of the governing body, to thinkers likt 
 Lord Coleridge, and to X who appeals to him as a 
 master, it seems that the laws have in this their ulti- 
 mate cause also. What Lord Coleridge calls "the rules 
 of possession" are, according to him, the arbitrary crea- 
 tion of the body which prescribes them in formal words, 
 and provides punishment for such persons as transgress 
 them. But this is a secondary process, not a primary 
 process at all. Lord Coleridge is simply inverting the 
 real order of things. Half the existing rules prescribed 
 as to the possession of property in any civilized country 
 to-day have for their ultimate object the protection of 
 family life, the privacy of the private home, and the 
 provision made by parents for their children. But 
 family life is not primarily the creation of law, or of 
 prescribed rules. It is the creation of instincts and 
 affections which have developed themselves in the 
 course of ages. Instead of the law creating family life, 
 it is family life which has dictated, and called into be- 
 ing, the prescribed rules which protect it. X, as a 
 disciple of Lord Coleridge, appears to be under the 
 impression that the practice of bequest in this country 
 has nothing behind it but the statutes which now au- 
 thorize it in the various States of the Union. What is 
 really behind it is a universal propensity of human na- 
 ture, a powerful and inveterate affection, which prompts 
 the father to work for his children no less than for 
 himself, and desire to pass on to them the advantages 
 
which his own efforts have obtained. Law merely sanc- 
 tions and gives precision to conduct which has a deeper 
 origin than legislation. Property is not primarily the 
 creation of law Law is called into being by men's 
 practice of acquiring property, just as the legal rights 
 and the legal duties of parents owe their being to the 
 unalterable facts of parentage. Laws, or prescribed 
 rules, as Lord Coleridge calls them, are like clothes. 
 Clothes can be varied indefinitely, within limits, by 
 majorities from time to time; but the clothes must all 
 be such as will adapt themselves to the human body 
 and its movements. The will of the majority may pre- 
 scribe the rule that trousers shall be tight or loose, 
 that they shall be black or brown or bright green or 
 vermilion; but no majority can prescribe that they 
 shall be only three inches round the waist, or that both 
 legs shall be put into a single trouser, or that sleeves 
 shall start not from the shoulder, but from the pockets 
 in the coat tails. To say, therefore, that majorities can 
 enact any laws they please which are in accordance, as 
 X puts it, with their own way of thinking (if we mean 
 by laws laws that can be carried into effect), is non- 
 sense. The power of the voters is hampered in every 
 direction by the physical constitution of the beings for 
 whom the laws are made, and the prevalent traits of 
 their moral and intellectual character. 
 
 The curious thing with regard to X is that he recog- 
 nizes this himself; though he utterly fails, in spite 
 of his philosophic eminence, to put two and two to- 
 gether and see how this fact conflicts with the omnipo- 
 tence which he ascribes to- legislation. Let us go back 
 to his assertion which I just now quoted, to the effect 
 that the majority of the voters in New York State could 
 easily limit incomes in any way they pleased, and could, 
 with even greater ease, prohibit all bequest and alienate 
 the property of every man at death ; and let us see what 
 he hastens to say the moment after. The powers of the 
 voters, which he is apparently so anxious to invoke, 
 
 92 
 
would, he says, be practically less formidable in their 
 action than timid persons might anticipate. And why 
 would they be less formidable? Because, says X (and 
 I give you his own words), although "each man, by 
 reason of his manhood alone, has an equal voice with 
 every other man in making the laws governing their 
 common country, and regulating the distribution of the 
 common property . . . (yet) immense and incalculable 
 differences exist in men's natural capacities for render- 
 ing honest service to society. Encouragement should be 
 given to every man to use all the gifts which he pos- 
 sesses to the fullest extent possible; and, accordingly, 
 reasonable accumulations and the descent of these 
 should be respected." They should, says X, be re- 
 spected. Yes but for what reason? Because, he says, 
 they encourage exceptional men, whose services are 
 essential to society, to develop and use their capacities 
 to the utmost extent possible; and this is merely an- 
 other way of saying that, without the encouragement 
 provided by the possibility of accumulation and bequest, 
 the exceptional capacities would not be developed or used 
 at all. Moreover, the amounts which may be accumu- 
 lated and bequeathed, although they will be limited, 
 must, says X, be considerable. Here again we pause 
 to ask the question why? And the answer is obvious. 
 It lies on the face of the entire reasoning of X. It is 
 an answer referable to the character of the particular 
 class of men in question of the men whose capacities 
 are greater and in especial of those whose capacities 
 are, as X expresses it, "immensely and incalculably 
 greater" than those of the mass of their fellow-citizens. 
 These men will not do what is wanted of them unless 
 they are stimulated by a reward which is felt by them- 
 selves to be adequate ; and what is adequate is decided 
 by their own characters and temperaments, not by any 
 ways of thinking prevalent among other people. 
 
 X proposes that they shall be allowed to accumulate 
 and bequeath up to a million dollars. Why does he put 
 
 93 
 
the amount at a million dollars, and not cut it down 
 to a thousand? Because he evidently recognizes that 
 the men whose capacities are immensely and incalculably 
 above the ordinary would not be tempted by a reward 
 which, reduced to its smallest proportions, was not com- 
 paratively at all events large. X says, in his formal 
 statement of his case, that the amount of the reward is 
 to be determined by what the citizens think sufficient; 
 and he suggests his million dollars as the sum on which 
 most probably they would fix. And it is, of course, 
 imaginable that the citizens, in making such an esti- 
 mate, might be right. But what X fails to see is this, 
 that if they were right, the sum would not be sufficient 
 because the citizens themselves thought it was. It would 
 be sufficient because it was thought sufficient by the 
 men of exceptional capacity, at whose thoughts the citi- 
 zens would have made a shrewd or a lucky guess. The 
 fisherman may make a hundred different kinds of fancy 
 flies, thinking each sufficient at the time; but it lies 
 with the trout to determine whether or no he will rise 
 to them. It is a question not of what the fisherman 
 thinks, but of what the trout thinks; and the fisher- 
 man's thoughts are effective only when they coincide 
 with the trout's. 
 
 With what intellectual carelessness, and yet with what 
 a solemn self-confidence, thinkers like X, with socialistic 
 or quasi-socialistic sympathies, approach such questions 
 as the present, may be seen still more clearly by going 
 a little further into the details of the arguments and 
 the proposals of X. He represents the relative positions 
 of the exceptional man, such as the great inventor or 
 organizer, and the masses, by means of the following 
 dialogue between the two : "I have," says the inventor, 
 "discovered something which will be greatly to your 
 advantage. What compensation ought I fairly to re- 
 ceive for it?" And the chosen representatives of the 
 people, speaking for them, answer, "It is for the general 
 advantage to encourage useful inventions; therefore, if 
 
 94 
 
we find your invention useful, we will give you the ex- 
 clusive right to the profits of it for fourteen years" 
 it being of course understood, as before laid down by 
 X, that these profits shall not exceed an average of 
 fifty thousand dollars a year. Similarly, "the manager 
 and initiator of a great industrial enterprise says to the 
 American people, "I wish to devote myself to your 
 service. What will you allow me to withdraw from 
 the common property for such service?" The American 
 people in their generosity answer, "We will give you 
 as much as we give the President of the United States ; 
 and while we give him the compensation for eight years 
 only, we will give it to you for the active years of your 
 life." "It is difficult to see," X adds with amusing 
 naivete, ''how any undue restraint would be placed 
 upon any energy or ability of a beneficent character," 
 if the law were to limit the possible gains of such abil- 
 ity to an income of something like fifty thousand dol- 
 lars a year, and to place a corresponding limit on the 
 amount of capital which could be bequeathed. 
 
 Now let us suppose that the American people to-day 
 strike some such bargain with the inventor of some 
 new means of traction, which will increase the speed 
 of trains, while diminishing their expense and danger. 
 The invention works well, and the inventor for four- 
 teen years draws the maximum profit allowed, namely, 
 fifty thousand dollars a year. But meanwhile he has 
 seen his way to making his invention still better, or to 
 producing another of quite a different kind, and even 
 more generally beneficial, if only the community will 
 offer him the required inducement, or, as X says, the 
 requisite encouragement, to do so. But if matters are 
 conducted according to the principles of X, the com- 
 munity is able to offer him no inducement whatever; 
 for he already enjoys the maximum which his country, 
 its its generosity, will allow him; and though his fur- 
 ther exertions might enrich it with untold millions, his 
 country will be obliged to tell him that he shall not , 
 
 95 
 
keep a cent of these for himself. What then will hap- 
 pen? If the original compensation was necessary, as 
 X assumes it was, in order to encourage the man to 
 achieve his first great success, the impossibility of his 
 receiving any such encouragement again will be equally 
 operative in discouraging him from pushing his success 
 further. In short, if the principle of which X so glibly 
 says that it is hard to see how it could check the de- 
 velopment of ability, were really applied to ability in 
 actual life, its most obvious effect would be to render 
 able men sterile at a period of their industrial life, 
 which was early and premature in proportion as their 
 ability was productive ; for in proportion as their ability 
 was productive, the earlier would the time be reached 
 by them at which their efforts would have gained for 
 them the utmost number of dollars which the State, by 
 way of encouragement, would allow them either to en- 
 joy or to bequeath. 
 
 Let X, then, and the socialists say what they please, 
 the formal legislation of majorities, beyond certain lim- 
 its, is impotent. Just as the power of no democracy 
 could make the ordinary man thrive and labor on less 
 food than would nourish his body adequately, so can 
 no power of democracy make exceptional men develop 
 and use the exceptional powers latent in them, under 
 the stimulus of motives which these men themselves do 
 not feel to be sufficient. 
 
 Society, in short, may be compared to an electro- 
 magnetic engine which works by tke pull of magnets 
 or, in other words, their needs and their ambitions. 
 Men are pulled into their primary activities by their 
 more or less equal needs. In proportion to their capaci- 
 ties they are pulled into their supplementary activities 
 by the magnetic attraction of a multitude of attainable 
 objects, which vary in accordance with what Ruskin 
 calls the indefinitely varied romance of their desires ; 
 and, in an economic sense, that society becomes richest 
 which offers, in the shape of prizes to exceptional eco- 
 
 96 
 
nomic efficiency, the most powerful magnets by which 
 such efficiency may be actuated. And here let me call 
 your attention to an extreme, but not impossible, case. 
 Let us suppose that the main desire which moved 
 exceptional men to devote their capacities to the aug- 
 mentation of their country's wealth was the desire, by 
 retaining at least a considerable proportion of their own 
 products, to retire from the business of production at 
 a certain period of their careers as possible, and to 
 join a class which, whether idle or active otherwise 
 whether devoted to mere pleasure, or to philanthropy, 
 or an enlightened patronage of the arts, or to specula- 
 tive thought and study was itself in an economic sense 
 altogether unproductive. Now, in order to join such 
 a class, and to work with a view of joining it, society 
 must be so organized that such a class can exist; and 
 the fact of its existence would constitute the main 
 moral magnet which, on our present hypothesis, would 
 be essential to the development of the highest kinds of 
 economic power. Such being the case, the following 
 conclusion reveals itself, which, though at first sight it 
 may seem a paradox, will be found on reflection to be 
 self-evident the conclusion, namely, that a class which, 
 if considered by itself, is absolutely nonproductive, may, 
 when taken in connection with the social system as a 
 whole, be an essential and cardinal factor in the work- 
 ing machinery of production, supplying, as it would do, 
 by the mere fact of its existence, the magnetic or attrac- 
 tive power by which the machinery was kept in motion. 
 The case is, as I have put it, an extreme one ; but, 
 with qualifications differing in different countries, it has 
 its counterpart in fact. If men do not work in order 
 to secure leisure for themselves, they work in order to 
 secure leisure for their women. And here I may men- 
 tion in passing (for I cannot go into the subject now) 
 that one of the most interesting and most important 
 inquiries for the economist would be an inquiry into 
 the influence of women in the sphere of economic action, 
 
 97 
 
I do not refer to women as the competitors of men 
 in the labor market. I refer to them as affecting the 
 quality of men's ambition. There are populations to- 
 day I might almost say nations which live on wom- 
 an's desire for feathers and furs and diamonds ; and 
 here we have merely the fringes of woman's influence 
 the narrow fringes, noticeable because they gleam and 
 glitter. What would X or Lord Coleridge say as to 
 facts like these? Would they say that a woman's appe- 
 tite for wearing diamonds in her hair owed its origin 
 to the rules prescribed by legislators, which punished 
 one woman as a thief if she took away the diamonds 
 of another? Legislation can regularize or regulate the 
 operation of tastes and motives, just as by locks and 
 dams men can regulate the flowing of a river; but if 
 a given amount of efficiency is to be got out of certain 
 men by applying to them the magnetic power of mo- 
 tive, no majority of other men can make a motive suffi- 
 cient by agreeing to think that it is so, any more than 
 they can determine the amount and the fall of water 
 required to get a given amount of work from a water- 
 wheel, merely by declaring that as much water as they 
 wish to spare ought to be sufficient to supply as much 
 power as they demand. A group of Hottentots might 
 as well expect an American or a Frenchman to fall in 
 love with a Hottentot, because in their opinion her 
 charms are sufficient to intoxicate everybody. 
 
 So long, then, as society desires to get the best work out 
 of its citizens, and so long as some men are, in the words 
 of X, "immensely and incalculably" more efficient than 
 the great mass of their fellows, and so long as their 
 efficiency requires, as X admits it does, some adequate 
 motive or stimulus to induce these men to develop it, 
 these men themselves, in virtue of their inherent char- 
 acters, must primarily determine what the motive shall 
 be; and not all the majorities in the world, however 
 unanimous, could make an inducement sufficient if the 
 particular minority in question did not feel it to be so. 
 
 98 
 
The minority, then, whose efficiency is immensely and 
 incalculably above the average, must, if the majority 
 desires to retain and to profit by its services, necessarily 
 remain in this respect the masters of the economic situa- 
 tion, nor could any conceivable form of socialistic legis- 
 lation alter the fact. 
 
 It is no doubt quite possible that the inducements at 
 present offered to industrial ability may be, in some 
 cases, excessive, and could be diminished to a certain 
 extent without rendering the ability any the less active. 
 But, should this prove to be the case, and should the 
 majority pass measures on the assumption that it was 
 so, it would not be the case because the majority made 
 the assumption, but because the assumption happened 
 to coincide with the psychological traits of the minority. 
 
 All this that I have been urging may be suspected 
 as an exaggerated attack on the principles associated 
 with all conceptions of democracy; and not only so- 
 cialists, but others, on this account may be inclined to 
 reject it with impatience. I think I shall be able to 
 show you that such objectors are very much mistaken, 
 and that the exceptional powers of dictation possessed 
 in some respects by the minority are so far from being 
 inconsistent with the real powers of the majority, that 
 the powers of the majority, when properly understood, 
 do but illustrate the nature of the former, and are, in- 
 deed, their counterpart. For though socialism ascribes 
 to majorities powers which they do not possess, we 
 shall find that majorities do actually possess others, in 
 some ways very much greater, of which socialistic 
 thought has thus far taken no cognizance at all. The 
 nature of these powers has been implied in what I 
 have said already; but I now propose to deal with them 
 in a more direct and more explicit way. I have said 
 that minorities are able to dictate their own terms to 
 any body of legislators which desires to secure their 
 services, because they alone can determine what treat- 
 ment will supply them with a motive to exert them- 
 
 99 
 
selves. What holds good of the minority as opposed 
 to the majority, holds good in essentials, though in a 
 somewhat different form, of the majority as opposed 
 to the minority. 
 
 Let me begin with an example from a sphere other 
 than that of economics I mean the sphere of religion. 
 In no other sphere has the influence of great individuals 
 been so vast, so far-reaching, so conspicuous, so noto- 
 rious as in this. The mere mention of such personali- 
 ties as Buddha, Zoroaster, Mahomet, and another 
 greater than all of them, will show us that such is the 
 case; and to these we may add the apostles, philos- 
 ophers, and theologians who have spread and explained 
 the respective gospels intrusted to them, and given by 
 their saintly lives examples of the value of their teach- 
 ing. But while nowhere is the power of the few more 
 conspicuous than in the domain of religion, nowhere is 
 the power of the many more conspicuous also. No re- 
 ligion has ever become established, and influenced the 
 lives of men, unless its doctrines and its spirit have 
 appealed to those spiritual wants which have been shared 
 to a degree approximately equal by all the multitudes 
 among whom the religion in question has been estab- 
 lished. Thus the Christian doctrine of the Atonement 
 would never have been accepted by men, it would never, 
 indeed, have conveyed any meaning to them, if there 
 had not been something in their nature corresponding 
 to a sense of sin ; and the universal effect which this 
 doctrine had on all classes alike throughout the Chris- 
 tian world shows that this something which corre- 
 sponded with a sense of sin was one of those charac- 
 teristics in respect of which there was a general equality, 
 and that the acceptance of the doctrine was therefore 
 a true act of democracy. For true democratic action is, 
 in its essence, this an action arising from a spontaneous 
 coincidence of a multitude of thoughts and feelings, 
 which happen to be identical not because those who 
 entertain them have' allowed their thoughts and feelings 
 
 100 
 
to be determined for them by the same leaders, but 
 because with regard to the points in question they 
 naturally themselves think and feel identically. 
 
 Let us now turn again to a matter to which I have 
 referred already namely, the family life of the citizens 
 of any race or nation. This results from propensities 
 in a vast number of men which, although they are 
 similar, are in each case independent. These propensi- 
 ties of the many give rise to legislation the object of 
 which is, as Lord Coleridge says, to prescribe rules by 
 which their satisfaction may be regulated and made 
 secure. But the propensities are so far from originat- 
 ing in the legislation that no legislation which ran 
 counter to them would be tolerated. Socialists them- 
 selves have continually admitted this, and many of them 
 have deplored the fact, declaring that nothing consti- 
 tutes so formidable an obstacle to socialism as the 
 obstinate affection with which men cling to family life. 
 The Italian socialist, Giovanni Bossi, who attempted 
 about fifteen years ago to found a socialistic colony in 
 Brazil an attempt which completely failed attributes 
 its failure largely to this particular cause. "If I had 
 the power," he writes, "to banish the greatest afflictions 
 of this world, such as wars, plagues, and famines, I 
 would renounce it, if, instead, I could suppress the 
 family." 
 
 Here we have an example of pure practical democracy 
 rendering what affected to be democratic legislation 
 powerless. We have the cumulative power of similar 
 human characters compelling legislation to limit itself 
 in accordance with what these characters demanded. 
 And now let us go a step a very short step farther. 
 The family propensities in question show their dicta- 
 torial power not only in the limitations which they im- 
 pose, but also, and even more openly, in the material 
 surroundings of existence especially in the structure 
 of the dwellings of all classes except the lowest. The 
 detached cottage, as well as the large mansion, and 
 
 101 
 
the tenement of three rooms, are in one respect all 
 alike. They are constructed with a view to keeping the 
 family group united, and each family group separate 
 from all others. Nor do matters end here. For if the 
 spontaneous propensities which result in family life 
 affect the structure of the dwelling, other propensities, 
 more various in detail, but in each case equally sponta- 
 neous, determine what commodities shall be put into it. 
 And this brings us back to our own particular sub- 
 ject namely, the power of the few and the many in 
 the sphere of economic production. The man of ex- 
 ceptional industrial capacity becomes rich in the modern 
 world by producing goods or by rendering services, 
 which the many consume or profit by, and for which 
 they render him a return. But in order that they may 
 take his goods, and render him a return for his services, 
 the goods and the services must be such that the many 
 desire to have them. All the productive powers that 
 have ever been possessed by men of the highest eco- 
 nomic ability would be absolutely futile, unless the 
 commodities which they cheapened and multiplied, or 
 the services which they were employed in rendering, 
 satisfied tastes or wants existing in various sections of 
 the community. The eliciting of these wants or tastes 
 depends very often, and in progressive communities 
 usually, on a previous supply of the commodities or 
 services that minister to them. Thus the introduction 
 of railways, of the telegraph, of the telephone or the 
 electric light, preceded any popular demand for them; 
 just as many a great writer, according to the well- 
 known saying, has to create the taste by which he is to 
 be appreciated. But the writer could not create this 
 taste or, in other words, make it actual unless it 
 existed already in human nature as a potentiality: nor 
 could the inventors and introducers of the electric light 
 have made the general public anxious to have it in 
 their houses if mankind at large entertained no wish 
 
 102 
 
whatever to do anything but sleep in darkness between 
 the hours of sunset and sunrise. 
 
 The wants and tastes, then, to which the ability of 
 the few ministers, whether common to all men, like 
 the desire for food, or developed by influences from 
 without, like the desire for electric lighting or tele- 
 graphic communication, 'are, when once they are in ex- 
 istence, essentially democratic in their nature. Each 
 customer is like a voter, who practically gives his vote 
 for the kind of goods which he desires should be pro- 
 duced and supplied to him. He gives his vote under 
 no compulsion except that which arises from his own 
 internal character; and those men whose ability multi- 
 plies and cheapens the goods are unable to alter his 
 character, and are imperatively obliged to be guided 
 by it. 
 
 Thus while, so long as the productivity of labor is 
 sustained and augmented by the ability of the few who 
 direct it, the ordinary man can never be free as a la- 
 borer, he is free, and must always remain free, in re- 
 spect of his tastes as a consumer. A man employed 
 in a brewery may be ordered about by an employer in 
 respect of his technical actions ; but no employer could 
 make him like or buy the beer if his palate found it 
 nauseous, and if he preferred whisky. In other words, 
 demand is essentially democratic, while supply, in pro- 
 portion to its sustained and enhanced abundance, is 
 essentially oligarchic. Now, that demand is essentially 
 democratic, and depends on the tastes and characters 
 of those by whom the demands are made, nobody will 
 be inclined to deny. But if, turning our attention from 
 society, taken as a whole, to the exceptionally able 
 minority on whom the business of supply depends, we 
 shall find that they, as suppliers, make their own de- 
 mand also a demand for a recompense, not indeed 
 equal to the value of the whole of the goods produced 
 by them, but bearing a proportion to it which is, in 
 their estimation, sufficient; and this demand rests on 
 
 103 
 
precisely the same basis as does that of the public cus- 
 tomer. It rests on the tastes and the characters of'the 
 men who make it; and it is just as impossible for the 
 many to decide by legislation that the few shall put 
 forth the whole of their exceptional powers for a maxi- 
 mum of fifty thousand dollars, if what they want is a 
 hundred thousand, as it is for the few to make the 
 many buy bad beer when they want good, or green coats 
 when they want black. 
 
 That is to say, so long as the wealth of any country 
 depends, firstly, on the average labor of a multitude of 
 average men, and, secondly, on the ability of exceptional 
 men by which the products of average labor are mul- 
 tiplied, the demands of these few are coordinate with 
 the demands of the many; and unless the fructifying 
 power of ability is to be dispensed with altogether, they 
 are bound to impress themselves equally on the eco- 
 nomic structure of society. Just as the character of 
 the many dictates terms to the few, so does the char- 
 acter of the few dictate terms to the many. So long as 
 production depends on men of vastly unequal capaci- 
 ties, legislation can no more reduce the positions of all 
 men to a level than we can create a solid tableland by 
 throwing a blanket over the hills and valleys. 
 
 A question, however, still remains to be answered. 
 If the power of the majority is in reality limited, as we 
 have seen it to be, both in the domain of production 
 and politics if instead of producing all wealth by its 
 labor, it produces only a fraction of it; and if, instead 
 of being able by its votes to enforce any laws it pleases, 
 it is limited on all sides by the complexities of human 
 character, I repeat a question which I referred to 
 in a former lecture, and ask how contrary opinions 
 have arisen not only among uneducated, but among 
 many educated men, that the labor of the many is the 
 sole power in production, and that the votes of the 
 many are potentially the supreme power in legislation. 
 Why is one or other of these opinions, or both of 
 
 104 
 
them, asserted over and over again, as though it or 
 they were indubitable, by so many distinguished men, 
 such as Ruskin, Carlyle, Tolstoy, the philosophic X. 
 and nonsocialistic members of the existing British Gov- 
 ernment? For so general a fact the reasons must be 
 equally general. I have already dealt with one of them 
 namely, certain errors which have been popularized 
 by imperfect economic science ; but there are others. The 
 opinions in question are due partly to optical delusions. 
 They are partly what, in Ruskin's phrase, we may de- 
 scribe as "pathetic fallacies," and the latter reenforce 
 the former. 
 
 What I mean by saying that they are partly optical 
 delusions is this : that to anyone who considers the sur- 
 face of things and we can none of us escape its influ- 
 ence the many, the people, the average men, the la- 
 borers have the appearance of doing everything. This 
 is the impression which, spectacularly, they produce on 
 all of us. If, for example, we watch a great ship being 
 built, or crude iron being converted into steel, we see 
 laborers everywhere. We see muscular arms moving. 
 We see adroit hands wielding hammers, which fill the 
 air with ceaseless sounds of riveting. But the forces 
 which direct all this multitudinous labor the minds 
 which have mastered the secrets of metallic chemistry, 
 or the subtle lines and subtly balanced proportions 
 which will enable the great ship to walk the waters like 
 a thing of life these are hidden away in secluded 
 offices, or remote studies or laboratories ; and even 
 when we have identified them, they are to ordinary ears 
 silent. Further, on the impression produced by this 
 spectacular contrast, supervenes the reflection that the 
 work performed by ability, even if important, is per- 
 formed with ease, while the labor of the many involves 
 visible strain ; and sympathy with those who seem to 
 bear the harder burden inclines us to exaggerate their 
 share in the productive process, representing it as pro- 
 portionate to what they undergo, rather than to what 
 
 105 
 
they really produce. When the laborers suffer, or are 
 thought to suffer, any real injustice, this sort of exag- 
 geration both in thought and statement is, for those 
 who sympathize with them, irresistible. 
 
 Then again there is generated a similar optical de- 
 lusion, accompanied by an analogous, though a different 
 kind of emotional delusion, by the spectacle, in demo- 
 cratic countries, of the many as a force in politics. The 
 various ways in which the power of the many is limited 
 are hidden, and escape our vision. All we see is cer- 
 tain given candidates, or given policies, prepared like 
 scales of a balance, into one or other of which the voters 
 cast their votes like so many equal weights; and into 
 whichever scale the majority of these weights is cast, 
 the majority that cast them is bound to win the day. 
 That the voters can, except on very rare occasions, do 
 nothing but choose between courses which have been 
 formulated and submitted to them by a minority that 
 the chosen course itself can only be followed out in 
 practice on condition that it is consonant with the needs 
 and the working principles of human nature these 
 facts do not appear on the surface. We see nothing 
 but the multitude of voting units, whose votes, given 
 or withheld, make or mar the statesman, no less abso- 
 lutely than the favor of a French king once made or 
 marred a courtier statesman at Versailles. For this 
 reason the democratic statesman of to-day is constantly 
 impelled, no less than was the courtier, to flatter and 
 cringe to the sovereign who can bestow on them, or 
 withhold from them, the power and the position which 
 they covet. Louis the Fourteenth said, "I am the 
 State" ; and the courtiers who competed for his favor 
 bowed their periwigs in acquiesence till they touched 
 the sovereign's boots. The democratic politicians of 
 to-day say the same thing to the voters "You are the 
 State. You are the fountain of power and honor. You 
 are able to do everything" ; and they accompany these 
 acts of homage by obeisances yet more profound. In 
 
 1 06 
 
what they say there is an undoubted element of truth, 
 but they exaggerate it till it becomes nonsense ; and by 
 repeating their exaggerations they come at last to be- 
 lieve in them. Their phrases become part of the gen- 
 eral language of to-day : and what their phrases express 
 becomes part of the general thought. 
 
 Then again a similar kind of flattery is bestowed on 
 the people for reasons of a higher kind. If we believe 
 that there is anything sacred in man as man, then any 
 one man in respect of this is the equal of every other, 
 and the numerical majority, which must always be the 
 manual laborers, becomes morally synonymous, whether 
 as voting or laboring, with humanity itself in its moral 
 needs and struggles. The claims of the majority, when 
 they are thus regarded, seem so paramount that many 
 generous enthusiasts cannot conceive that they have 
 any limits; and spiritual values become, alike in their 
 language and their thoughts, convertible terms with po- 
 litical omnipotence, and with industrial or economic 
 efficiency. 
 
 There remains, however, yet another reason for the 
 current exaggerations as to the position which the ma- 
 jority the average men, as distinct from the excep- 
 tional men hold ; and this reason is more potent than 
 any of those just mentioned. Masses of ordinary men, 
 or even men inferior to the average, possess, when 
 circumstances cause them to act in concert, powers 
 which, as related to their immediate objects, are really 
 so great that it is hardly possible to exaggerate them ; 
 and they are not only great, but they are formidable. 
 Of these powers, that most familiar to the modern 
 world is the strike. A gifted employer may be ready 
 to endow the world with inventions or products which 
 would not onjy enrich himself, but would also cheapen 
 and improve the food, or minister to the comfort of 
 millions ; but if the mass of laborers required to give 
 effect to his designs refused his wages, and unanimously 
 declined to work, this one man confronted by several 
 
 107 
 
thousand would be practically impotent so long as they 
 maintained their attitude. Still more impressive in their 
 exercise are those further and fiercer powers which, 
 as history shows us, reside in mere numbers also. I 
 mean those of riot and terrorism and physical force gen- 
 erally. Paris is sufficiently familiar with manifestations 
 of power of this kind with shattered palaces, with bar- 
 ricades and streets running with blood; and a similar 
 familiarity has been lately acquired by Russia. If we 
 look back into the remote past, we encounter the same 
 phenomena. The physical power of numbers was often 
 felt in Rome, notably in connection with the agrarian 
 laws. There have been peasant risings in Germany, 
 Bohemia, and mediaeval England. All this is not only 
 true but obvious. The power of the many as against 
 the few is, in certain respects, invincible. No wonder, 
 then, that in the presence of facts like these an im- 
 pression is produced that the many can do everything. 
 But if we consider all the many deeds, of the kind now 
 in question, which the many in such moments of tri- 
 umph have ever actually accomplished, or from the 
 nature of the case can accomplish, we shall find that 
 they all of them fall into the same category that they 
 are not positive, but negative ; that they are obstructive, 
 (/not productive; that they are destructive, not construc- 
 tive. In many cases even an individual can do as much 
 as a crowd. It took a crowd to demolish the Bastille: 
 but the temple of Diana at Ephesus renowned as one 
 of the wonders of the world was burned down by an 
 individual, who became immortal as the arch-fool of 
 antiquity. But because the fool could destroy the tem- 
 ple, does it follow that the fool could rebuild it? Any 
 mischievous boy, with a bit of iron or a log, could 
 upset the most powerful locomotive ever built by hu- 
 man ingenuity. But the boy could not build the engine, 
 any more than Sir Isaac Newton's dog Diamond could 
 himself do over again the elaborate calculations he had 
 destroyed. And multitudes are, in the most formidabl 
 
 108 
 
display of their powers, nothing more than Newton' 
 dog multiplied. They may sometimes destroy what is 
 injurious along with what is useful and necessary. But 
 the force which enables them to destroy gives them no 
 capacity to reconstruct. A monarchy having been de- 
 stroyed by the power of a mere multitude, and another 
 government having been formed which successfully 
 takes its place, the latter may be the work of men who 
 were members of the destructive multitude yesterday ; 
 but it would not be the work of the miscellaneous and 
 destructive multitude itself. It would be the work of 
 individuals isolated from their former companions and 
 superior to them. A mob, with a few painters included 
 in it, may destroy the contents of a picture gallery : 
 but if any new pictures are to take the place of the old, 
 it will be the few painters, and not the mob, that will 
 paint them. 
 
 The same fact is illustrated in a less sensational, but 
 a more direct, way by the power of the many, as em- 
 bodied in the modern strike. The strike being essen- 
 tially an economic or industrial movement, it is held 
 to exemplify the power of labor in the sphere of eco- 
 nomic production. In reality it does nothing of the 
 kind. I am not for a moment saying that strikes are 
 not often to be justified; but, however justifiable they 
 be, or however unjustifiable, no single power is exerted 
 in them or represented by them which tends to produce 
 anything so much as a blade of grass. Still less do 
 strikes represent those higher forms of mind and en- 
 ergy on which the larger part of the productivity of 
 modern labor depends. They represent not labor, but 
 the power to abstain from laboring. Such being the 
 case, they are limited not only in their scope, but also 
 in respect of the time for which they are able to exert 
 themselves. The more extended a strike is, the more 
 inevitable is its early end an end caused not by the 
 surrender of labor to capital or of capital to labor, but 
 of labor to the necessities of nature, which decrees that 
 
 109 
 
the majority must work, unless one and all are to starve, 
 The many laborers, in striking against the few di- 
 rectors of labor, can avoid ruin to themselves and se- 
 cure advantages only by hampering the latter, not by 
 paralyzing them. If the men, for instance, employed 
 in some great chemical works, could permanently para- 
 lyze the employer who was the brain of the industry, 
 the business would fall to pieces : and the men, instead 
 of securing a higher wage, would destroy the source 
 from which the wages flow. But by harassing the 
 employer by making his business difficult without mak- 
 ing it impossible strikes, or the menace of strikes, are 
 doubtless a powerful weapon in securing for the 
 laborers wages and general conditions superior to those 
 which they would probably have obtained otherwise. 
 The harassing, however, as experience shows, cannot 
 be carried beyond a certain point without reacting on 
 the men themselves. Injudicious strikes have over and 
 over again killed the industries on which the strikers 
 depended or at all events killed them so far as their 
 original localities were concerned. 
 
 Now to many people it will seem that the great fact 
 here revealed is the extraordinary weakness of the posi- 
 tion of the capitalistic director of labor. If a strike in 
 one industry, or at all events a succession of strikes, 
 can thus paralyze the employer and render his capital 
 useless, what may not a strike do which is national or 
 international in its proportions? The directing class, 
 when its position is thus considered, appears like a 
 hare quaking at the footsteps of a giant, and ready to 
 disappear on his approach. But let us only consider 
 the life of any nation, not as it may be for a few ex- 
 ceptional days or weeks, but as it must be when taken 
 as a whole the normal life which must be soon re- 
 sumed, let the interruptions of it be never so violent 
 and we shall see that this weakness of the directing 
 class is really the main element of its strength; and 
 that the circumstances which give labor its maximum 
 
 no 
 
of antagonistic force are really the main elements of 
 its weakness. The smallest body of soldiers that ever 
 took the field could kill the greatest general that ever 
 led them to victory. If a ship's crew mutinied in mid- 
 ocean, any cabin boy could smash the ship's chronom- 
 eters, throw the sextants overboard, and put a match 
 to the charts. But with these frail implements gone, 
 what would the mutineers do? They would be as lost 
 and helpless on the ocean as a bewildered child lost on 
 a prairie of endless snow. The case is similar with 
 the great mass of mankind who exercise the average 
 manual faculties of which the average man as a pro- 
 ductive agent is capable, and the minority of leading 
 minds by whom their labor is guided and coordinated, 
 and made indefinitely prolific, instead of comparatively 
 sterile. During the French Revolution a chemist was 
 condemned to death on the ground that he was an 
 aristocrat. Attempts we're made to induce the revolu- 
 tionary tribunal to spare him on the ground of his 
 scientific eminence; and the answer of the tribunal was 
 this "The Republic has no need of chemists." Noth- 
 ing could better express the state of mind prevalent 
 among those who are so heedlessly proclaiming to-day 
 the economic omnipotence of labor as opposed to the 
 forces and classes by whom labor is directed; and the 
 insensate folly of the view which is thus so confidently 
 promulgated has, since the days of the French Revolu- 
 tion, been illustrated in the most striking and dramatic 
 manner by some of the most striking facts of subsequent 
 economic history. Not only has France itself since then 
 been obliged to restore conditions which make the life 
 of the chemist secure, but the great rival of France, 
 and the industrial rival of Great Britain namely, Ger- 
 many has, solely by the genius of its chemists, as ap- 
 plied to economic processes, established industries 
 notably those connected with dyeing which are the 
 source of livelihood to thousands and tens of thousands 
 of laborers, who would, were the talents of a few hun- 
 
 ni 
 
dred chemists paralyzed, not know to-morrow where to 
 turn for a crust of bread. Henry George said, not very 
 consistently with a certain portion of his arguments 
 those in which he so strenuously defends the rights of 
 the private capitalist that to place the control of the 
 many in the hands of the few was to stand a pyramid 
 on its apex. To him this seemed an absurdity; and, 
 if we take a spectacular view of things if we view 
 things from the outside only no doubt it is so. But 
 the dynamic truth is the exact reverse of the spectacular 
 truth. Dynamically it is precisely the apex or the head 
 on which the social pyramid actually does stand. Sol- 
 diers realize this when they guard the life of their 
 general. His life, they recognize, is as important to 
 them as it is to himself. And I believe I am right in 
 saying that the more practical and hard-headed repre- 
 sentatives of labor realize that, given the possibility on 
 their part of making a reasonable bargain with em- 
 ployers, their own prospects are good, bad, or indif- 
 ferent, according as their labor is directed by the intel- 
 lect, the knowledge, and the strenuous and keen sagacity 
 of the picked men of the day. In all production there 
 are two partners the laborers and the director of labor ; 
 and those laborers have the most ample opportunity of 
 securing and increasing their own welfare whose labor 
 is coordinated and directed to the best productive ad- 
 vantage, just as the crew of a racing yacht have the 
 best chance of securing the honorarium due to them 
 in the event of victory, who sail under the best captain, 
 and who man the boat designed by the most accom- 
 plished naval architect. 
 
 112 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 Delivered before The League for Political Education, 
 New York City 
 
 I have received suggestions from many quarters, 
 whilst I have been engaged speaking about socialism 
 generally that I should say something about the form 
 of it which is specialized by the name of Christian. 
 Now the phrase of Christian Socialism has a long his- 
 tory behind it. It was used first in England, by Maurice 
 and Charles Kingsley; but in their later lives I believe 
 myself to be right in saying that they quietly dropped it 
 as inapplicable to their own more matured views. At 
 all events it is a phrase which has had many meanings ; 
 and when I was asked to discuss it as an actual creed, 
 or doctrine, held and preached to-day, it seemed to me 
 to be too indeterminate to admit of being discussed to 
 any purpose. For all I knew to the contrary Christian 
 Socialism as a doctrine preached to-day in America 
 might be as different from ordinary socialism as Chris- 
 tian Science is from science as understood generally 
 as different as the science of Mrs. Eddy is from the 
 science of Mr. Edison. I knew indeed from my ex- 
 perience both of this country and of England that the 
 clergy, as representatives of Christianity, have fre- 
 quently of late years been entering on the domain of 
 economic discussion, and had been seeking to apply in 
 one way or another the precepts of their religion to the 
 industrial problems of to-day and not, as it seemed to 
 me, with very signal success. The late Bishop of Dur- 
 ham, for instance, who I think actually called himself 
 a socialist, once proposed that, as an instalment of the 
 new industrial millennium, the British navy should be 
 constructed by a group of co-operative laborers. The 
 only impression which this suggestion produced on my 
 own mind was that the enemies of England would re- 
 ceive with unbounded delight the news that the Bishop's 
 
suggestion was really being carried into effect. But, 
 as I said, my knowledge of what Christian Socialism 
 means to-day in America was far too vague to enable 
 me to make it the subject of any definite criticism. 
 
 I have, however, received lately a more or less elab- 
 orate article by one of its recognized exponents and 
 this has been sufficient to invest with some definite form 
 opinions the nature of which I could previously but 
 shrewdly conjecture. I propose, therefore, presently 
 to deal with this article as a text. But first, with your 
 permission before dealing with socialism in its Chris- 
 tian form, I will, for clearness' sake, say a few words 
 about socialism of the secular and more ordinary type. 
 In doing this I shall necessarily have to repeat, but only 
 in a summary way, the main criticisms I have been 
 making in other places on ordinary socialism already. I 
 shall now, however, be able to add to these one new 
 feature namely, an examination of the best counter- 
 criticisms with which the more educated socialists in 
 this country have been able to urge in reply to me: 
 and I hope to show you that, instead of disposing of 
 what I have said, these counter-criticisms really do 
 nothing but establish and illustrate the validity of the 
 main points on which I myself have insisted. 
 
 Let me begin then with my criticism of secular so- 
 cialism in general : and then, having seen what secular 
 socialism is, we shall be able to consider how Christian 
 socialism differs from it. 
 
 I begin by dividing secular socialism, as a definite eco- 
 nomic creed, into two kinds that, namely, which is 
 preached to the multitudes, and to the ordinary passing 
 workman : and that which is enunciated to a public com- 
 paratively small, by socialists who bring to their sub- 
 ject a good deal of education, and also of intellectual 
 acuteness, and are anxious to vindicate socialism in 
 the face of other thinking men. -I said, moreover, that, 
 for practical purposes, by far the most important ques- 
 tion was that of what socialism is as expounded to 
 
 114 
 
the general multitude. Its more intellectualized forms 
 having an importance which is at present secondary. 
 
 Such being the case, I pointed out that, as an instru- 
 ment of popular agitation, socialism was based on the 
 doctrine which Karl Marx managed to invest with a 
 semblance of scientific truth, to the effect that all wealth 
 is produced by ordinary manual labor, and that all 
 wealth ought consequently to go to the laborers. This 
 doctrine I examined with the utmost care, and I think 
 I may say that I stated it with the most elaborate fair- 
 ness. I especially showed that, in some respects, it was 
 not so crude as it seemed to be. Thus I mentioned that 
 the Marxian doctrine, though insisting that manual 
 labor is the sole producer of wealth, naturally implies 
 a human jnind directing the laborer's muscles ; and I 
 pointed out further that, though Marx, as a general 
 fact, maintained that the labor of all laborers was so 
 equal that the amount of wealth produced by it might 
 be measured in terms of time, yet he. in {his, precisely 
 resembling Ruskin, recognized the existence of excep- 
 tional manual skill, and that his principles would justify 
 an hour of skilled labor receiving a reward beyond that 
 of labor of the ordinary kind. .The meaning of Marx 
 with regard to skill has been well and elaborately eluci- 
 dated by his follower, Laurence Gronlund, who explains 
 skilled labor as a faculty which has taken a long time 
 to acquire, so that every hour employed in its perfected 
 exercise represents not that hour only, but also the pre- 
 vious hours which were spent in bringing it to perfec- 
 tion. Thus if we divided a skilled man's working life 
 into two halves, of which one was spent in acquiring his 
 skill and the other half in exercising it, each hour dur- 
 ing which he exercised it would in justice count as two. 
 
 But even if we give to Marx, and those who reason 
 about labor as he did, the full credit due them for this 
 recognition of skill, I pointed out that their doctrine 
 was just as important to explain the productivity of 
 industry as it exists to-day, as it would have been had 
 
 "5 
 
they taken no account of skilled labor at all. The doc- 
 trine of Marx, as to the all-productivity of labor is, so 
 I pointed out, virtually quite adequate to explain the 
 production of wealth in very early communities, and 
 even in certain remote and primitive groups to-day; 
 but the amount of wealth per head of the industrial 
 population in such communities is proverbially small in 
 amount, and very meager in kind. It affords a contrast, 
 and not a parallel to, the amount and kind of wealth 
 produced under the modern system. What is produced 
 per head in the latter case is indefinitely higher in 
 quality, and more than ten times greater in quantity, 
 than what is produced in the former: and the question 
 is, therefore, what is the cause of the difference the 
 small output and the great? No reference to skill or the 
 exceptional craftsmanship of individuals will provide 
 us with any answer : for mere exceptional skill, as we 
 see in the case of an illuminated missal, or a cup by 
 Benvenuto Cellini, whilst it will produce individual 
 commodities of almost priceless value, will produce only 
 a few of them, and the cost of these will be extrava- 
 gant, whilst the kind of commodities which are typical 
 of modern production is a kind which is distinctively 
 cheap and susceptible of indefinite multiplication. In- 
 deed, in the production" of any article of modern wealth, 
 the necessity for rare skill is a drawback, and makes 
 the supply of the supply at once costly and uncertain. 
 The great factor which differentiates modern produc- 
 tion from production of all other kinds has nothing to 
 do with the operation of ordinary or even skilled labor, 
 but consists in the mental faculties by which labor is 
 directed : and to these faculties I give the name of 
 ability a name which has this advantage that it has, 
 of recent years, been adopted by a considerable number 
 of the thoughtful socialists themselves, as indicating 
 certain powers residing in the minds of the few, on 
 which it is admitted by them that the efficiency of ordi- 
 nary labor depends. I further pointed out that between 
 
 116 
 
labor and directive ability the difference was one not 
 of degree but of kind, and that labor, whether skilled or 
 unskilled, stood for the mind of a man directing the op- 
 erations of his own private pair of hands, these oper- 
 ations ending with the handiwork on which the man is 
 engaged, and not affecting the handiwork of any man 
 except himself. Ability, I said, on the other hand, 
 stands for the mind of some one man, not affecting any 
 labor of his own hands at all, but influencing simul- 
 taneously the labor of any number of other men. 
 And of this fact I took as an illustration the 
 case of a printed book. Whether ten thousand copies 
 of a printed book have, in an economic sense, any 
 value at all whether or no they are exchangeable 
 for anything else whether anyone is willing to buy 
 them, or whether they are so much refuse encumber- 
 ing the publisher's warehouse, does not depend on the 
 labor of the compositors, which may be equally skillful 
 in the one sense or the other, but it depends on certain 
 qualities resident in the author's manuscript, this manu- 
 script constituting a series of minute directions, which 
 from second to second the hands of the compositors 
 conform to; and in this way labor of precisely the same 
 amount and grade imparts to so many tons of printed 
 paper the quality of much wealth, or little wealth, or 
 perhaps no wealth at all, in accordance solely with 
 the manner in which this labor of arranging the type is 
 directed by a mind altogether external to the minds of 
 the compositors themselves. And the same reasoning 
 applies, I said, to all modern industries whatsoever to 
 the building of a great ship, to the production of com- 
 plicated machinery, or to the use of such machinery 
 in producing goods which correspond with the tastes 
 and the needs of the public customer. The productiv- 
 ity, in short, of the labor of the many in the modern 
 world depends altogether on the directive faculties of 
 the few. The many do little more than supply a mini- 
 mum, or a unit, which the ability of the few multiplies. 
 
 117 
 
That is to say, whilst the many, in modern as well as in 
 primitive societies produce a minimum of wealth, with- 
 out which there would be no wealth to increase, the in- 
 crement, by which modern production is differentiated 
 from primitive, is due to the direction of the few, and 
 not to the labor of the many. 
 
 This is the substance of my criticism of the Marxim 
 doctrine of labor, which I have lately been engaged in 
 putting forward in this country, and what have the 
 socialists of this country said in reply to this definite 
 contention? Of the many replies which I have seen, the 
 outcome of all is similar namely that, with regard to 
 the functions which I have ascribed to directive ability, 
 as a productive force distinct from labor, I am right, 
 and that socialists to-day are themselves quite aware of 
 the fact, without wanting me to inform them of it. My 
 critics, as might naturally be expected, vary greatly in 
 education and intelligence, and consequently in the 
 clearness and the fullness with which this admission is 
 made by them, and to deal with them all in detail would 
 be at once impossible and useless. The only practicable 
 and the only course is to look out for some one critic 
 amongst them, who is recognized alike by his own party 
 and by others, as a man representative, in virtue of his 
 culture and intelligence, of the best that his party can 
 say on its own behalf, and such a man amongst my 
 critics has been pointed out to me by various people, 
 and in various parts of this country, and I have been 
 told that if I would test the real intellectual strength of 
 socialism to go straight to him. And fortunately the 
 gentleman in question has rendered the following of 
 this advice easy for me, for he has devoted a succession 
 of column? in a paper called the "Worker" to an attack 
 on those particular arguments of mine which I have 
 just now summarized. This gentleman is Mr. Hillquit, 
 who is, I am told, a lawyer, and because he is looked 
 upon by his friends as their intellectual Ajax, an 
 
 118 
 
examination of what he has to say is particularly in- 
 teresting and instructive. 
 
 Well, out of the four columns which Mr. Hillquit 
 devotes to me, the whole with the exception of some 
 twenty lines at the utmost, is devoted to nothing but the 
 kind of irrelevant talk with which lawyers so often aim 
 at confusing the minds of jurymen. For example, he de- 
 votes a large part of his space to declaring that I have 
 never read a line of Karl Marx myself; that my erron- 
 eous knowledge of his teachings is derived at second 
 |iand from reviews of him; that I say that his work 
 on Capital was published about the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century, when it was really published in 1867, and 
 he goes on to inform me that the first English trans- 
 lation of him was not published till a good many years 
 later. As a matter of fact, I know Marx much better 
 probably than Mr. Hillquit himself does, and of the 
 English translation as to the date of which Mr. Hill- 
 quit instructs me, I was I believe one of the first people 
 in England to have a copy sent to him. Further Mr. 
 Hillquit occupies still more space in asserting that all 
 I know with regard to the socialistic doctrines actually 
 put forward to-day I have derived from "popular 
 pamphlets." Now, what has all this to do with any 
 serious argument? In especial let me ask where 
 could I have found better or clearer evidence as 
 to what socialism is as actually preached to the people 
 than in the popular pamphlets which from day to day 
 are addressed to them? What is Mr. Hillquit's criticism 
 of myself but a popular pamphlet? Then, having 
 wasted his space over mere verbal gesticulations such as 
 these, he proceeds to demonstrate how little I under- 
 stand Marx, by giving an account of his own of what 
 Marx really teaches and, excepting in one particular, to 
 which I will refer presently and as to which Mr. Hill- 
 quit is fundamentally wrong, Mr. Hillquit's account of 
 the teachings of Marx is exactly the same as my own. 
 There are only three short fragments out of his whole 
 
 119 
 
four columns in which he ventures on anything like in- 
 telligible argument and with these I will now deal. 
 
 The first definite criticism on which Mr. Hillquit ven- 
 tures is as follows: "It requires no special genius," he 
 says, "to demonstrate that all labor is not alike and 
 equally productive. It is still more obvious that com- 
 mon manual labor alone is important to produce the 
 wealth of modern nations that organization, direction, 
 control, are essential to productive work in the field of 
 economic production, and that mental labor is just as 
 much a factor in the production, of wealth as mere 
 physical effort." In other words, Air. Hillquit is voci- 
 ferous in accepting what I have said as to the functions 
 of directive ability, or the productive powers of the few, 
 and declares that for socialists my insistence on these is 
 a platitude. Having done this, the next article in his 
 argument consists of the assertion that this recognition 
 of ability finds a prominent place in the theory of Marx 
 himself, and he proceeds to quote a passage which he 
 adorns with many capital letters with a view to demon- 
 strating that this assertion is correct. My statement, he 
 says, that Marx considers nothing but manual labor, i? 
 triumphantly refuted by these words of Marx himself: 
 "By labor power or capacity for labor is to be under- 
 stood the aggregate of those mental and physical capac- 
 ities existing in a human being which he exercises 
 whenever he produces a use-value of any description." 
 Precisely. But what Marx is here describing is the 
 mental qualities of the laborer as affecting that labor- 
 er's own hands, and means neither more nor less than 
 the skill of one individual as described by myself. It 
 has no reference to the mental faculties which I spoke 
 of under the name of ability, and the functions of which 
 Mr. Hillquit says that socialists recognize as fully as 
 anybody, and which consist of the mental faculties of 
 one man directing and organizing the labor, skilled or 
 unskilled, of any number of other men. This champion 
 of intellectual socialism, if he is not in a state of com- 
 
 120 
 
OF THE 
 
 f UNIVERSITY 
 
 
 
 plete muddle himself, is merely endeavoring, like a law- 
 yer, to confuse the minds of his jury, by pretending 
 that he is continuing to speak about one thing, namely, 
 the direction of the many by the few, when he has in 
 reality gone back to quite another, namely, the labor of 
 the many men themselves. 
 
 But the true character of Mr. Hillquit's whole argu- 
 ment is best exhibited when he really does at last come 
 to close quarters with myself, and proposes to take as a 
 test case the illustration which I myself have chosen. 
 This is the illustration taken, as I explained just now, 
 from the case of a printed book, the value of which as 
 an economic commodity depends, I said, not on the 
 labor of the compositors, but on the manner in which 
 this labor is directed by the author, issuing his direc- 
 tions through his manuscript. And what has Mr. Hill- 
 quit got to say about this? "Whether a book," says 
 Mr. Hillquit, "is a work of genius or mere rubbish, will 
 largely affect its literary or artistic value, but it will 
 have very little bearing on its economic or commercial 
 value. Its market price will be fixed by the work of the 
 compositors, and the paper makers." And Mr. Hillquit 
 then goes on to say, the market price of a wretched 
 detective story, of the same length as Hamlet and 
 printed in the same way, will be precisely the same as 
 that of a copy of Hamlet itself. It is difficult to imag- 
 ine a confusion of thought more complete than this. 
 We need not talk about the absolute genius of the 
 author. It will be quite sufficient to talk about his 
 power of gaining popularity; for this power will be a 
 power embodied in his manuscript just as well as genius 
 would, and he will be none the less a director of the 
 manual labor of the compositors. Now, what Mr. Hill- 
 quit is doing, or perhaps pretending to do, is to confuse 
 the minimum price at which an edition, say, of ten thou- 
 sand copies of a book can be produced, with the com- 
 mercial value of the ten thousand copies when com- 
 pleted. The cost of production, and consequently the 
 
 121 
 
lowest price at which the copies .can be sold at a profit 
 or without loss, is no doubt determined by the cost of 
 the labor of the compositors ; but whether ten thousand 
 persons, or five thousand, or only five, will be willing to 
 pay this price, depends not on the compositors, but on 
 the author, who according to his genius or merely some 
 peculiar knack, hits or fails to hit the taste of the pur- 
 chasing public. If the book is priced at a dollar, and the 
 public will buy the whole ten thousand copies, the com- 
 mercial value of the edition will be ten thousand dollars. 
 If the public man provide five purchasers only, the com- 
 mercial value of the edition will be five dollars only, 
 plus what the rest of the edition can be sold for as so 
 much dirtied paper. And what determines whether the 
 edition shall commercially have a value of ten thousand 
 dollars or five, depends, as any child can see, not on the 
 labor of the compositors but on the directing mind of 
 the author, or to speak of it from the economic point 
 of view the author's directive ability. And this ludi- 
 crous assertion that books are commercially valuable 
 only in proportion to the labor of typesetting and paper- 
 making embodied in them is the final flower of this criti- 
 cism of Mr. Hillquit's which he puts forward as being 
 at once a defense and an exposition of socialism in 
 the most reasonable form with which the intellect of 
 this country can endow it, and is a crushing rejoinder 
 to the criticisms which I have urged against it. It is 
 difficult to believe that a man of Mr. Hillquit's reputa- 
 tion can really be the victim of an abject absurdity such 
 as this. I should rather gather that the theory which 
 he has taken up is like some mechanism to which he 
 has bound his mental limbs, and which contorts him 
 as a reasoner into all sorts of ridiculous attitudes; but 
 his arguments, for this very reason, are singularly full 
 of instruction ; for this conclusion of his, as :to com- 
 positors and the commercial value of books, with which 
 he winds up his attack on me, is nothing more than a 
 reversion to the doctrine that manual labor alone pro- 
 
 122 
 
duces all commercial values, which doctrine he starts 
 as rejecting as a fallacy which is too obvious for any 
 socialist to hold, and in the exposure of which he says 
 I am only wasting my pains. That Mr. Hillquit does 
 not really entertain this opinion himself I take to be 
 more than probable, and the explanation of his ending 
 with reassuring what he sets out with repudiating, is 
 this that," if once the functions of the directive ability 
 of the few are clea'rly recognized and asserted, and if 
 labor in the modern world is exhibited as practically 
 helpless without it, socialism, as an instrument of popu- 
 lar agitation would be paralyzed. He is, therefore, like 
 other socialists, bound to speak with two voices. He is 
 eager to admit the productive functions of ability, when 
 he is addressing himself to educated men; but all the 
 while, by a series of verbal substitutions and quibbles, 
 he is preparing to reassert that nothing produces wealth 
 but labor, as soon as he finds himself in the presence of 
 any knot of laborers around the corner. 
 
 Here, then, we have a specimen of the arguments of 
 secular socialists, who as thinkers admit that the princi- 
 pal producers of modern wealth are the few; and as 
 agitators persist in asserting that everything is produced 
 by the many. 
 
 And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have done with 
 secular socialism, and will turn to that which distin- 
 guishes itself by the name of Christian. And I think 
 you will soon see why, in order to deal with this, I have 
 offered you all these observations about secular social- 
 ism as a preface. The exposition of Christian social- 
 ism, on which I shall base the following remarks, is 
 taken from a paper called The Christian Socialist, and 
 from an article in that paper which is called ''The Gos- 
 pel for To-day." It has been specially recommended to 
 my attention as explaining and representing the Chris- 
 tian socialist attitude, and it struck me at once as giving 
 in definite form the temper and opinions by which I had 
 imagined that Christian socialism was distinguished. 
 
 123 
 
Let me begin, then, with saying that Christian social- 
 ism, if we may judge it from "The Gospel for To-day," 
 whilst resembling secular socialism of the more thought- 
 ful kind, in acknowledging that the efficiency of the few, 
 or men of economic ability, is an incomparably greater 
 producer than the manual labor of the many, makes no 
 attempt to obscure or to minimize this admission. Thus 
 the writer from whom I am quoting declares that one 
 j cardinal error underlies all the principles of the indi- 
 vidualistic democracy of to-day ; and this error, he says, 
 is "the, assumption that all men are born equal in abil- 
 ity." Men, he proceeds, are not equal in ability. In the 
 economic sense, as in all others, some men are incom- 
 parably more able than the great majority of their fel- 
 lows ; and even amongst the exceptionally able men 
 some are more able than others are. Consequently, if 
 the principles of modern individualistic democracy, and 
 modern individualistic economics, are right, according to 
 which the main motive of each is to do .'the best for 
 himself with his own powers that he can "if it is duty 
 to compete, if competition is the life of trade, then the 
 battle for self must ever go grimly on, the strong must 
 subdue the weak, the rich the poor, the able the unable. 
 Upon this basis the millionaires and the multi-million- 
 aires have a perfect right to roll up their untold mil- 
 lions even as the workingman has a right to seek" what- 
 ever wages he can get. "All in different ways are seek- 
 ing their own ; and the keenest competitors are the best 
 men. The prizes must go to the strongest and shrewd- 
 est competitors. It is the survival of the fittest." 
 
 Such being the case, then, asks the writer, what does 
 Christian socialism aim at? It does not aim at making 
 men equal in respect of their ability, for to do this 
 would be quite impossible, but it aims at producing an 
 equality of a practical kind, by inducing the men whose 
 ability is most efficient and greatest to forego all per- 
 sonal claims which are founded on their exceptional 
 powers. It aims at substituting what he calls co-opera- 
 
 124 
 
tion for competition. This, he says, is the economic 
 teaching of Christ, whose passion and death are 
 described in a poem in the same paper, as having for 
 their main object the economic freedom of labor. 
 
 The reckless sentiment which embodies itself in this 
 poem not the work of the author of "The Gospel for 
 To-day" pervades in a curious way the reasoning of 
 this author himself. He sees certain broad facts of the 
 situation clearly enough, and expresses them with per- 
 fect candor; but he submits nothing which he sees to 
 any close inspection or analysis. He sees economic 
 problems, and the entire process of modern production, 
 as a man sees a mountain from a distance, at once 
 illuminated and obscured by atmospheric conditions, and 
 who fancies that to get to its summit will be a short 
 and simple task, whereas countless fissures intervene 
 across which there is no bridge, and precipices which 
 yield no foothold he having, indeed, no grasp whatever 
 of the mountain's real conformation. 
 
 For example, to begin with this question of competi- 
 tion, the writer seems never to have considered in any 
 detailed way, what economic competition in the modern 
 world really is. Thus, he says that competition might 
 work very well and be "fair" if all men were really equal. 
 "The play of equal forces might bring about the good 
 of the greatest number." But if they were really equal, 
 in what way could there be any competition at all? If 
 all men were equally able and energetic, or equally 
 stupid and indolent, the services performed by no one 
 man would be appreciably better than those performed 
 by any other. This, however, is a minor matter ; though 
 it shows how easily sentiment may conduce to slovenli- 
 ness of thought. A far more important point is that our 
 Christian socialist keeps in his mind no consistent idea 
 of what competition is as a factor in productive indus- 
 try. He apparently starts with recognizing that it is, 
 in its fundamental form, a competition in the produc- 
 tion and multiplication of economic commodities ; but He 
 125 
 
constantly lapses into a conception of it as a mere suc- 
 cessful grabbing of an output of commodities which 
 keep on being produced spontaneously. Viewed thus, 
 he says, the principles of competition and individualism 
 justify every man in grabbing as much as he can; and 
 the man who grabs much has just as good a right to his 
 much as the man who can grab only little has to that 
 little. 
 
 Now, some forms of wealth-getting do really conform 
 to this conception; but these are not the forms which 
 are fundamentally involved in competition. There are 
 three ways in which great wealth may be acquired in 
 the modern world. One is by speculation ; one is by 
 cheating; but the primary way, on which the other two 
 depend, is by production on a great scale, which can only 
 be accomplished by ability at successfully directing labor. 
 Thus a dozen rich men may bring a million dollars 
 each to a gaming table ; and the end may be that the 
 twelfth man acquires half of the money of each of the 
 eleven ; or, on the other hand some adroit swindler may 
 plunder the whole twelve. But the gambling and the 
 swindling do nothing to produce these riches. The 
 riches must owe their origin to some previous produc- 
 tive process. The wealth produced by the modern com- 
 petitive system has, therefore, its origin in a constant 
 process of production, and if no great wealth were pro- 
 duced there would be no wealth to grab. 
 
 This it is that our Christian socialist, though he some- 
 times imagines it, constantly quite forgets ; and how 
 feeble his grasp is of the actual facts of the situation 
 is shown by his allusion to two of the great modern 
 industries of America the oil industry and the steel. 
 With regard to these he observes that "our steel kings 
 did not invent steel, and our oil kings did not invent 
 oil." He speaks of both refined oil and steel as two 
 natural products, which only waited some chance dis- 
 covery, and which naturally, as articles of consumption, 
 would have been the common property of everybody, 
 
 126 
 
if it had not happened that the strong men, in virtue of 
 their strength, had seized upon these natural products, 
 actuated by the love of monev. "and worked them for 
 what they were worth." It is curiously illustrative of 
 the extraordinary remoteness of our Christian socialist's 
 mind from the kind of things with which he is dealing, 
 thnt he evidently considers steel as a natural product, 
 and is not aware that steel, and even iron melted by 
 coal, are, the one a product of the most elaborate scien- 
 tific genius, and the other only became a practical reality 
 after the heroic labors of a few individuals in England, 
 who after a century of endeavor, in the face of opposi- 
 tion and disappointment, discovered how to make coal, 
 in iron smelting, a workable substitute for wood. But 
 even if we waive this point, and suppose steel and iron 
 both to be purely natural products so long as they are in 
 their raw state, does our Christian socialist suppose 
 that they are still natural products when they are 
 worked up into rails, or rolled as armor plating, or 
 fashioned into a thousand and one shapes in which our 
 Christian socialist uses them whenever he cuts his 
 bread, or turns a tap in his bathroom to let the water 
 into his bath? He will find more intense thought, 
 more concentrated practical knowledge, grouped to- 
 gether in a knot of exceptional men, in the steel works 
 at Pittsburg, than he will find in all the sermons and 
 articles on Christian socialism that have ever been deliv- 
 ered or excogitated. And the same may be said of the 
 oil industry of this country. If it was only necessary 
 to find out that certain oil wells existed, in order to 
 give every Christian socialist a nice lamp in his parlor, 
 our friend's view of the case might be correct. But 
 what good is an oil well in some one particular place, 
 until the oil is refined by the most delicate chemical 
 processes, and distributed to consumers all over the 
 world by a system so elaborate that the world has never 
 seen its like? Again, the price at which such oil can 
 be sold depends largely for its cheapness on the fact 
 
 127 
 
that science has discovered how to utilize its by-prod- 
 ucts, the profits arising from these enabling the oil to 
 be sold at a price that would be otherwise impossible. 
 In cases like these we have no mere case of acquisition ; 
 the essential process at work is one of elaborate cre- 
 ation. 
 
 And now let us turn to what our author has to say 
 with regard to invention. Inventions, he says, are the 
 products of the mere love of invention. No inventor is 
 ever motived by any thought of making money by them. 
 It is the love of money that buys these inventions up ; 
 and inventions having been bought up, according to our 
 Christian socialist, the whole trick is accomplished, and 
 the profits begin to pour at once into the pockets of the 
 covetous man. A person who can speak in this way 
 knows very little about real inventors. In the first 
 place, inventors, as anyone who has had dealings with 
 them knows, are constantly distinguished by an insane 
 expectation of money; and in the second place inventors 
 are otherwise of two well-marked classes those who 
 can merely invent, in the sense that they can conceive 
 an idea, and those who possess also the practical and 
 business qualities, which will enable them to produce 
 their invention in some practical and marketable form. 
 So long as invention remains an invention only, 
 whether resident in the author's brain, or exhibited as an 
 experimental model, the inventor has contributed noth- 
 ing to the wealth or the welfare of the world. In the 
 one case his invention is a dream ; in the other case it is 
 a toy. In order that it may become operative, and con- 
 fer any benefit on anybody it has to be translated into 
 a form which will necessitate all sorts of knowledge and 
 calculations with regard to the strength of metals, or 
 other kinds of materials, the practical shaping of a 
 thousand separate parts, the designing of tools by which 
 these parts shall be made, and the direction and the 
 co-ordination of possibly some thousands of laborers, 
 every one of whose separate products must ultimately 
 
 128 
 
form parts of one. Some inventors have been industrial 
 organizers also; most of them as organizers have been 
 utterly and absurdly helpless; but whenever any great 
 invention has assumed a practical form this realiza- 
 tion of it has not been a mere agreeable exercise per- 
 formed for the love of inventing, or from a sentimental 
 love of humanity. 
 
 This aloofness from actual facts, and a consequent 
 inability to deal with them, displays itself still more 
 notably in what our Christian socialist says about co- 
 operation as a substitute for competition. In one sense, 
 when a number of men are associated for a given object 
 on any terms, they exhibit co-operation. Cheops, his 
 architects, and the thousands of slaves who obeyed 
 them, in one sense co-operated when in the construction 
 of the great pyramid, but if co-operation is used to 
 mean anything distinctive, it can only mean co-operation 
 on equal terms; but since, on the admission of our 
 Christian socialist himself, the productive capacities of 
 men are in the highest degree unequal, the men who 
 produced most even if they surrendered nearly all their 
 products, would still, in the act of production, be acting 
 in an unequal way, and in a way not only unequal to 
 that of most of their fellows, but in a way that was 
 different in kind. For our Christian socialist, if he 
 will examine the matter carefully, will perceive the fact 
 which even socialists are now coming to acknowledge 
 namely, that the exceptionally able men exert their pro- 
 ductive ability not by laboring themselves, but by direct- 
 the fact that in the actual business of production the 
 ing the labor of others. Nothing, therefore, can alter 
 minority produce by giving orders, whilst the majority 
 produce by obeying them. If we choose to speak of this 
 state of things as co-operation we may of course do so ; 
 but it is not co-operation in any distinctive sense. It is 
 merely the kind of co-operation that exists in any fac- 
 tory to-day. If a child who draws very badly has its 
 hand held by a drawing master, and produces, when , 
 
 129 
 
thus directed, a really beautiful drawing, and if it were 
 to exhibit this masterpiece, saying, "I and so-and-so 
 drew it together," any one would describe such a child 
 as a wretched little boastful liar. In the same way the 
 least intelligent of Mr. Edison's workmen might say he 
 and Mr. Edison were the joint or co-operative producers 
 of some new marvel of Mr. Edison's ingenuity, but if 
 what the man meant by this was anything more than a 
 platitude, and if he said it to some other employer in 
 order to recommend himself as a man of exceptional 
 talent, the character which he thus gave himself would 
 be nothing short of fraudulent. 
 
 How, then, would co-operation, as dreamed of by 
 Christian socialists, alter the situation which actually 
 exists to-day? It would leave existing inequalities of 
 productive power untouched, and would alter these only 
 by introducing one inequality more and one of a kind 
 very much more profound. The contemplated alteration 
 would consist in a radical alteration of the motives by 
 which men are stimulated to do their utmost in indus- 
 trial work ; but this alteration would be confined to one 
 class only that is to say, the men whose efforts were 
 most productive. This minority, and the less efficient 
 majority, would be placed, from the nature of the case, 
 on a totally different footing; for amongst the men who 
 produced little no change at all would be required. 
 They would not be asked to give up any single thing. 
 On the contrary, they would be taught to expect not 
 only the full result of their own labor, but also an 
 indefinite bonus abstracted from the products of other 
 men ; and it requires no revolution in human nature to 
 respond to a teaching which suggests such promises as 
 these. The moral revolution is to be confined to the 
 great producers only. There is not only to be one law 
 for the poor and another law for the rich; but there is 
 to be one kind of Christianity for the poor and another 
 for the rich as well ; and the former are to be taught to 
 accept with instinctive enthusiasm principles which the 
 
 130 
 
latter meanwhile are being virtually taught to repudiate. 
 Whilst the majority of men are invited to took forward 
 to more than they produce, the able men are ih.'Hed to 
 welcome with equal avidity the prospect of fee ng 
 allowed to retain only a hundredth part of what they 
 produce. 
 
 The able men, however, would still remain the source 
 to which the wealth in question is due; and it would 
 have to be got out of them, or through them, no matter 
 by what process it was taken. 
 
 Now, if we may judge from the moral programme of 
 Christian socialism, it would be got out of the able men 
 by some curious process of spiritual conversion a sort 
 of conversion de luxe, applicable to and required by the 
 able men only; but though Christian socialists profess 
 to have confidence in the practicability of this pro- 
 cedure, it is evident from the utterances of the writer 
 with whom we are now dealing that they are not quite 
 so confident as they seem ; and that what they really 
 rely upon is not conversion but coercion ; for our author 
 elsewhere indicates that in order to get the products of 
 the great producers away from them, it will be neces- 
 sary to abolish all ownership of private capital by law 
 and make the state the sole employer in all branches of 
 productive industry; and that the able men would give 
 their services to state production as effectively as they 
 give it now to production under the individualistic sys- 
 tem, is shown, he says, by the success of such enter- 
 prises as the state postoffice, the state fire-brigade, and 
 we may add as many secular socialists add, who make 
 use of the same arguments the life-boat service. 
 
 Now here again we see the singular looseness of 
 thought which Christian socialists bring to the compli- 
 cated problems with which they deal, in the first place 
 to repeat what I have had occasion to observe else- 
 where, the postoffice is not a productive business at all. 
 It is a purely distributive enterprise; it distributes com- 
 modities, namely letters; and if any product is the off- 
 
spring of pure- Individualism, it is a letter. As to the 
 fire-brigade^ and the life-boat system, I will not dwell 
 on the puvious fact that these are not productive either. 
 I YJ."I' only observe that we do find in both these serv- 
 770s the most strenuous and devoted effort, without 
 thought of exceptional gain; but both these deal with 
 circumstances happily and necessarily exceptional. If 
 all life were a continuous conflagration or shipwreck, 
 in which everyone alike had to battle for bare exist- 
 ence, everyone would do his utmost without thought of 
 personal wealth ; only under circumstances such as they 
 there would be no wealth to be gained by anybody. 
 There is no analogy between cases in which all are 
 struggling for life and the case of the industrial pro- 
 cess distinctive of the modern world, nine-tenths of 
 whose efficiency is devoted to the multiplication of 
 superfluities. A strong swimmer will risk his life in 
 order to help a weak one ; but it does not follow that an 
 able producer will concentrate all his powers on improv- 
 ing some textile industry merely in order that another 
 man may wear a satin necktie instead of a cotton one. 
 He will cheapen the satin neckties, and will gratify 
 thousands by doing so ; but we may safely say that from 
 each one of these gratified thousands he will expect and 
 will naturally demand some small remuneration for 
 himself. 
 
 The question is, then, is it likely that this natural 
 demand, which Christian socialism really assumes will 
 remain unchanged and will be even accentuated amongst 
 those who produce least, will be eradicated or rather 
 inverted by Christian socialist preaching, amongst the 
 peculiar type of men hard-headed, and concentrated on 
 the minutest details of industry, who produce most? 
 Are they likely to become suddenly indifferent to the 
 natural reward of their talents, or be willing to serve a 
 state whose sole distinctive function would be to take 
 this reward away from them? 
 
 To suppose that they would be is quite of a piece with 
 132 
 
the supposition that steel is a natural product, with 
 which invention has nothing to do/ ,ind that all tne 
 machinery at Pittsburg, and all the steel ^products pro- 
 duced there, belong to the Steel Trust only because the 
 heads of the Trust and their officials, being a gocJ deal 
 stronger than the mass of men around them, manaV'd 
 to pick these things up as though they were a heap or 
 apples. 
 
 The fact, however, still remains though our author 
 does not allude to it that the principles which he advo- 
 cates are, as we know from history, actually susceptible 
 of adoption by a certain number of persons. Robert 
 Owen, for example, in connection with whose schemes 
 and theories the word socialism first came into exist- 
 ence, was a very able business man. Again, in many 
 places and notably in this country countless attempts 
 have been made to establish productive communities on 
 precisely the principles which Christian socialism advo- 
 cates ; and some of these communities have met with 
 some measure of success. But in so far as they have 
 succeeded the secret of their success has been this 
 that they have consisted of picked men, of men with 
 exceptional temperaments, which no more represent the 
 temperaments of men. at large than the Catholic monks 
 do, whose lives are vowed to celibacy. Moreover, even 
 with this fact in their favor, that they have been made up 
 of picked men, the majority of these communities are 
 said by those who have studied the question not to have 
 lasted on an average for more than two years. Fur- 
 ther, as I saw pointed out only the other day, one of 
 longest lived of these, which was not dissolved till after 
 more than forty years of existence, divided, when it 
 broke up, equally amongst all its members all the capi- 
 tal which accumulated during something like half a cen- 
 tury, and what each man got was only $1,300. Atay 
 skilled mechanic at Pittsburg might save twice this in 
 half a dozen years. Again, there was a community 
 called Fraternal Community No. I of the practical 
 
 133 
 
Christian Republic. This satisfied for a time the wants 
 of its members, Itit these never, at its most flourishing 
 time, amounted to more than two hundred ; and even 
 the two hundred at last had to admit that their enter- 
 prise was a failure. And what has happened at the 
 spc; where these two hundred persons failed to support 
 tnemselves by production organized on Christian social- 
 ist principles? An answer was given lately to this 
 question in one of the New York papers. "The habita- 
 tion of this community," it said, "has been supplanted 
 by a model village erected by a cotton manufacturer for 
 three thousand of his own workmen." 
 
 The moral of this is that, though the principles of 
 Christian socialism, as applied to production, may keep 
 quasi-monastic knots of picked and peculiar men in a 
 kind of penurious comfort so long as the first enthusi- 
 asm lasts, yet these principles are workable amongst 
 small knots of men only; and that these men, instead of 
 dividing among themselves any of that superfluous 
 wealth which Christian socialism wishes to appropriate, 
 are powerless to produce such wealth and consequently 
 have none of it to divide. 
 
 If Christian socialists, however, think differently, it 
 is perfectly open to them to try any number of experi- 
 ments. Why do not the socialist clergy come down 
 from their pulpits and found productive communities, 
 instead of merely talking about them? They do not do 
 this, because they cannot. They are absolutely deficient 
 in productive ability themselves; and they can offer no 
 inducement which will appeal to the men who possess it. 
 
 And now let me turn to a question which I have not 
 yet touched upon, and ask in what sense Christian 
 socialism is really Christian. I alluded to some verses in 
 our Christian socialist newspaper, in which the writer 
 asserts that Christ wore the thorny crown that holy 
 labor might be free. Now, when Christ lived slavery 
 was prevalent throughout the Roman Empire; and yet 
 Christ said nothing about the emancipation of slaves. 
 
 134 
 
Can we believe, then, that His teaching in the Gospels 
 was a kind of prophetic cryptogram, dealing with the 
 economics of society nineteen hundred years later? 
 Again, when Christian socialists talk about getting the 
 great producers to renounce their wealth voluntarily, 
 or else to abstract it from them by the nationalization 
 of capital, the larger part of the wealth which they 
 desire to see redistributed consists, as I said just now, 
 for the most part of superfluities. Was it part of the 
 teaching of Christ that the happiness and the blessed- 
 ness of a man is proportionate to the number of super- 
 fluities which he possesses without either inheriting or 
 producing them? 
 
 It seems to me, and I hope I shall be forgiven for 
 saying this, that the underlying reason which is prompt- 
 ing so many of the clergy, to adopt these incoherent 
 principles to which they give the name of Christian 
 socialism, is to be found in a remarkable passage in the 
 article which we have been taking for our text. "If we 
 Churchmen," says the writer, "would build hospitals, 
 erect churches, possess parish houses, support missions, 
 we must go to the trust magnates and kneel." Now, 
 what he means is not that he has to kneel literally, but 
 that he and his brother churchmen have to go to the 
 men, by whom, as they admit themselves, the surplus 
 wealth of the modern world is produced, and ask them 
 to give some of it for such and such good purposes; 
 and that a man like a clergyman, who economically pro- 
 duces nothing, and who fancies that the production of 
 steel has nothing to do with invention, to have to ask 
 a man who produces much to give him a portion of his 
 products, and actually to have to say "Thank you"- 
 this is what seems to rankle most deeply in the breast 
 of this humble follower of Christ. Indeed, Christian 
 socialism, viewed in the light of this passage, exhibits 
 itself as a scheme by which the socialistic clergy may 
 acquire wealth which they cannot produce, and may yet 
 avoid the degradation of having to say thank you for it 
 
 135 
 
and may be able to offer to the Lord that which has cost 
 them nothing. 
 
 An unworthier attitude of mind it seems to me impos- 
 sible to imagine, or one more practically helpless. If 
 there is any Christianity about it, it is Christianity in 
 its most degenerate form. It is the attitude of a man 
 who will go about sighing and weeping because the peo- 
 ple have no water, and then will feel it a degradation 
 to acknowledge the practical superiority of the able man 
 who sinks an artesian well. 
 
 But I will not wind up with words which may be cal- 
 culated to pain some. I will give to my criticism of the 
 principles of Christian socialism a form which can 
 offend nobody by indicating a contrast and an alterna- 
 tive to them. Of all the Christian bodies who have done 
 work on a large scale amongst the poor, few can com- 
 pare and certainly not the Christian socialists with 
 the Salvation Army. And yet the leaders of the Salva- 
 tion Army have never been tinged by socialism. For 
 example, General B. Booth says : "It would be the 
 merest folly to predict that material inequality will not 
 exist to a degree, and that the power of the rich will 
 not exist, as it has always existed." The great 
 thing, he says, is that the richer and the poorer classes 
 should understand each other; and that the complaints 
 of the poor should show, and the minds of the rich 
 realize, the thousand and one causes of particular social 
 evils, and the thousand and one ways in which they may 
 be severally alleviated. For example, some of the worst 
 evils from which a large portion of the laboring class 
 in our modern cities suffer are evils which require 
 architectural and sanitary remedies; and for each kind 
 of evil there is some special remedy corresponding to it. 
 Take, for example, child labor in England. The worst evils 
 attendant on this system in England found their remedy 
 through the efforts of one of the most conservative of 
 old-fashioned Englishmen, namely, the celebrated Lord 
 Shaftsbury. Lord Shaftsbury did not waste his time in 
 
 136 
 
making eyes at the moon, and moaning that before any- 
 thing worth doing could be done the whole of society 
 would have to be turned upside down. He did not want 
 to disturb society as a whole at all. He simply set 
 himself to deal with the particular problem before him; 
 and in consequence of his initiative what he aimed at 
 was accomplished. 
 
 In short, there are and always will be a number of 
 social questions, which must from time to time be dealt 
 with as they arise; but there neither is nor will be any 
 social question. That is to say, there never has been 
 or will be any one panacea by which all social evils will 
 be cured, any more than there ever will be a patent pill 
 which will at once be a remedy for a cough and a broken 
 leg, or which will make men, as a whole, either immune 
 from all disease or immortal. And Christian socialism, 
 so far as I understand it, simply represents faith in 
 some patent pill, the very composition of which is hardly 
 understood by the vendors, and is offered by them as a 
 cure for evils of whose origin they understand nothing. 
 
 In other words, Christian socialism, so far as I under- 
 stand it, aims at altering the existing situation, and by 
 seeking either to spoliate the great producer against his 
 will, by treating him as an irreclaimable criminal, or 
 inducing him to submit to spoliation by turning him into 
 an impossible saint, the rest of the community suffer- 
 ing no change at all, except that of being taught to 
 keep their mouths constantly open in order to catch the 
 viands which fall from the great producer's table. 
 
 It seems to me that the temper of mind thus indi- 
 cated is based, not only in a complete ignorance both 
 of human nature and the endless complicated details of 
 modern industry, but is also eminently unchristian. It 
 resembles the temper of men who, in their eagerness 
 to suppress vice, would condemn and eliminate from 
 humanity all sexual instinct, in which case humanity, 
 with its virtues as well as its vices, would soon come to 
 an end. 
 
 137 
 
The Christian method, cm the contrary, so far as I 
 understand it, is not to revolutionize, still less to eradi- 
 cate, any one of man's natural propensities, but to 
 guide, elevate and ennoble them; and thus the true 
 Christian message to the great producers of the world 
 would be this: "Do not be ashamed of your riches; do 
 not discard the control of them; but since they have 
 endowed you with the means of living and acting on a 
 larger scale than can ever be possible for the great 
 majority of men, let your lives on this large scale be a 
 wholesome pattern to others ; partly in the way in which 
 you, like all other men, seek your own daily enjoyment 
 amongst your friends and families ; partly in the way in 
 which, by means of your ample resources you are able 
 to assist and show your sympathy for your neighbors, 
 and partly in the integrity which you exhibit in dealing 
 with the great material interests entrusted to you. 
 
 Let those who have only a few things in respect of 
 which they can be faithful, find a good example in you 
 who have the opportunity of being faithful in many 
 things. 
 
.... l( ,,tfor>i 
 
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