Endnotes
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Which? for where investigation is necessary, teaching is impossible. ↩
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“Principles of Political Economy.” By J. S. Mill. Preliminary remarks, p. 2. ↩
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“The effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is not that of his corporation, but of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds, and corrects his negligence” (Wealth of Nations, Book I chap. 10). ↩
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It will probably be inquired by nearsighted persons, out of what funds such schools could be supported. The expedient modes of direct provision for them I will examine hereafter; indirectly, they would be far more than self-supporting. The economy in crime alone (quite one of the most costly articles of luxury in the modern European market), which such schools would induce, would suffice to support them ten times over. Their economy of labour would be pure gain, and that too large to be presently calculable. ↩
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“The Political Economy of Art:” Addenda, p. 93. ↩
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“P. Valerius, omnium consensu princeps belli pacisque artibus, anno post moritur; gloriâ ingenti, copiis familiaribus adeo exiguis, ut funeri sumtus deesset: de publico est elatus. Luxêre matronæ ut Brutum.” —Lib. II c. xvi ↩
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The difference between the two modes of treatment, and between their effective material results, may be seen very accurately by a comparison of the relations of Esther and Charlie in Bleak House, with those of Miss Brass and the Marchioness in Master Humphrey’s Clock.
The essential value and truth of Dickens’s writings have been unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons, merely because he presents his truth with some colour of caricature. Unwisely, because Dickens’s caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken. Allowing for his manner of telling them, the things he tells us are always true. I wish that he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public amusement; and when he takes up a subject of high national importance, such as that which he handled in Hard Times, that he would use severer and more accurate analysis. The usefulness of that work (to my mind, in several respects, the greatest he has written) is with many persons seriously diminished because Mr. Bounderby is a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose the use of Dickens’s wit and insight, because he chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard Times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial, and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine all the evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, it will appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the finally right one, grossly and sharply told. ↩
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I have been naturally asked several times, with respect to the sentence in the first of these papers, “the bad workmen unemployed,” “But what are you to do with your bad unemployed workmen?” Well, it seems to me the question might have occurred to you before. Your housemaid’s place is vacant—you give twenty pounds a year—two girls come for it, one neatly dressed, the other dirtily; one with good recommendations, the other with none. You do not, under these circumstances, usually ask the dirty one if she will come for fifteen pounds, or twelve; and, on her consenting, take her instead of the well-recommended one. Still less do you try to beat both down by making them bid against each other, till you can hire both, one at twelve pounds a year, and the other at eight. You simply take the one fittest for the place, and send away the other, not perhaps concerning yourself quite as much as you should with the question which you now impatiently put to me, “What is to become of her?” For all that I advise you to do, is to deal with workmen as with servants; and verily the question is of weight: “Your bad workman, idler, and rogue—what are you to do with him?”
We will consider of this presently: remember that the administration of a complete system of national commerce and industry cannot be explained in full detail within the space of twelve pages. Meantime, consider whether, there being confessedly some difficulty in dealing with rogues and idlers, it may not be advisable to produce as few of them as possible. If you examine into the history of rogues, you will find they are as truly manufactured articles as anything else, and it is just because our present system of political economy gives so large a stimulus to that manufacture that you may know it to be a false one. We had better seek for a system which will develop honest men, than for one which will deal cunningly with vagabonds. Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons. ↩
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The disputes which exist respecting the real nature of money arise more from the disputants examining its functions on different sides, than from any real dissent in their opinions. All money, properly so called, is an acknowledgment of debt; but as such, it may either be considered to represent the labour and property of the creditor, or the idleness and penury of the debtor. The intricacy of the question has been much increased by the (hitherto necessary) use of marketable commodities, such as gold, silver, salt, shells, etc., to give intrinsic value or security to currency; but the final and best definition of money is that it is a documentary promise ratified and guaranteed by the nation to give or find a certain quantity of labour on demand. A man’s labour for a day is a better standard of value than a measure of any produce, because no produce ever maintains a consistent rate of productibility. ↩
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More accurately, Sun of Justness; but, instead of the harsh word “Justness,” the old English “Righteousness” being commonly employed, has, by getting confused with “godliness,” or attracting about it various vague and broken meanings, prevented most persons from receiving the force of the passages in which it occurs. The word “righteousness” properly refers to the justice of rule, or right, as distinguished from “equity,” which refers to the justice of balance. More broadly, Righteousness is King’s justice; and Equity, Judge’s justice; the King guiding or ruling all, the Judge dividing or discerning between opposites (therefore, the double question, “Man, who made me a ruler—δικαστὴς—or a divider—μεριστὴς—over you?”) Thus, with respect to the Justice of Choice (selection, the feebler and passive justice), we have from lego—lex, legal, loi, and loyal; and with respect to the Justice of Rule (direction, the stronger and active justice), we have from rego—rex, regal, roi, and royal. ↩
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In another place written with the same meaning, “Just, and having salvation.” ↩
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“Length of days in her right hand; in her left, riches and honour.” ↩
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I hear that several of our lawyers have been greatly amused by the statement in the first of these papers that a lawyer’s function was to do justice. I did not intend it for a jest; nevertheless it will be seen that in the above passage neither the determination nor doing of justice are contemplated as functions wholly peculiar to the lawyer. Possibly, the more our standing armies, whether of soldiers, pastors, or legislators (the generic term “pastor” including all teachers, and the generic term “lawyer” including makers as well as interpreters of law), can be superseded by the force of national heroism, wisdom, and honesty, the better it may be for the nation. ↩
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It being the privilege of the fishes, as it is of rats and wolves, to live by the laws of demand and supply; but the distinction of humanity, to live by those of right. ↩
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It might appear at first that the market price of labour expressed such an exchange: but this is a fallacy, for the market price is the momentary price of the kind of labour required, but the just price is its equivalent of the productive labour of mankind. This difference will be analysed in its place. It must be noted also that I speak here only of the exchangeable value of labour, not of that of commodities. The exchangeable value of a commodity is that of the labour required to produce it, multiplied into the force of the demand for it. If the value of the labour = x and the force of demand = y, the exchangeable value of the commodity is xy, in which if either x = 0, or y = 0, xy = 0. ↩
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Under the term “skill” I mean to include the united force of experience, intellect, and passion in their operation on manual labour: and under the term “passion,” to include the entire range and agency of the moral feelings; from the simple patience and gentleness of mind which will give continuity and fineness to the touch, or enable one person to work without fatigue, and with good effect, twice as long as another, up to the qualities of character which render science possible—(the retardation of science by envy is one of the most tremendous losses in the economy of the present century)—and to the incommunicable emotion and imagination which are the first and mightiest sources of all value in art.
It is highly singular that political economists should not yet have perceived, if not the moral, at least the passionate element, to be an inextricable quantity in every calculation. I cannot conceive, for instance, how it was possible that Mr. Mill should have followed the true clue so far as to write—“No limit can be set to the importance—even in a purely productive and material point of view—of mere thought,” without seeing that it was logically necessary to add also, “and of mere feeling.” And this the more, because in his first definition of labour he includes in the idea of it “all feelings of a disagreeable kind connected with the employment of one’s thoughts in a particular occupation.” True; but why not also, “feelings of an agreeable kind?” It can hardly be supposed that the feelings which retard labour are more essentially a part of the labour than those which accelerate it. The first are paid for as pain, the second as power. The workman is merely indemnified for the first; but the second both produce a part of the exchangeable value of the work, and materially increase its actual quantity.
“Fritz is with us. He is worth fifty thousand men.” Truly, a large addition to the material force;—consisting, however, be it observed, not more in operations carried on in Fritz’s head, than in operations carried on in his armies’ heart. “No limit can be set to the importance of mere thought.” Perhaps not! Nay, suppose some day it should turn out that “mere” thought was in itself a recommendable object of production, and that all Material production was only a step towards this more precious Immaterial one? ↩
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I am sorry to lose time by answering, however curtly, the equivocations of the writers who sought to obscure the instances given of regulated labour in the first of these papers, by confusing kinds, ranks, and quantities of labour with its qualities. I never said that a colonel should have the same pay as a private, nor a bishop the same pay as a curate. Neither did I say that more work ought to be paid as less work (so that the curate of a parish of two thousand souls should have no more than the curate of a parish of five hundred). But I said that, so far as you employ it at all, bad work should be paid no less than good work; as a bad clergyman yet takes his tithes, a bad physician takes his fee, and a bad lawyer his costs. And this, as will be farther shown in the conclusion, I said, and say, partly because the best work never was, nor ever will be, done for money at all; but chiefly because, the moment people know they have to pay the bad and good alike, they will try to discern the one from the other, and not use the bad. A sagacious writer in the Scotsman asks me if I should like any common scribbler to be paid by Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co. [the original publishers of this work] as their good authors are. I should, if they employed him—but would seriously recommend them, for the scribbler’s sake, as well as their own, not to employ him. The quantity of its money which the country at present invests in scribbling is not, in the outcome of it, economically spent; and even the highly ingenious person to whom this question occurred, might perhaps have been more beneficially employed than in printing it. ↩
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I have to acknowledge an interesting communication on the subject of free trade from Paisley (for a short letter from “A Well-wisher” at ⸻, my thanks are yet more due). But the Scottish writer will, I fear, be disagreeably surprised to hear, that I am, and always have been, an utterly fearless and unscrupulous free trader. Seven years ago, speaking of the various signs of infancy in the European mind (Stones of Venice, vol. iii p. 168), I wrote: “The first principles of commerce were acknowledged by the English parliament only a few months ago, in its free trade measures, and are still so little understood by the million, that no nation dares to abolish its customhouses.”
It will be observed that I do not admit even the idea of reciprocity. Let other nations, if they like, keep their ports shut; every wise nation will throw its own open. It is not the opening them, but a sudden, inconsiderate, and blunderingly experimental manner of opening them, which does harm. If you have been protecting a manufacture for a long series of years, you must not take the protection off in a moment, so as to throw every one of its operatives at once out of employ, any more than you must take all its wrappings off a feeble child at once in cold weather, though the cumber of them may have been radically injuring its health. Little by little, you must restore it to freedom and to air.
Most people’s minds are in curious confusion on the subject of free trade, because they suppose it to imply enlarged competition. On the contrary, free trade puts an end to all competition. “Protection” (among various other mischievous functions) endeavours to enable one country to compete with another in the production of an article at a disadvantage. When trade is entirely free, no country can be competed with in the articles for the production of which it is naturally calculated; nor can it compete with any other, in the production of articles for which it is not naturally calculated. Tuscany, for instance, cannot compete with England in steel, nor England with Tuscany in oil. They must exchange their steel and oil. Which exchange should be as frank and free as honesty and the sea-winds can make it. Competition, indeed, arises at first, and sharply, in order to prove which is strongest in any given manufacture possible to both: this point once ascertained, competition is at an end. ↩
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I should be glad if the reader would first clear the ground for himself so far as to determine whether the difficulty lies in getting the work or getting the pay for it. Does he consider occupation itself to be an expensive luxury, difficult of attainment, of which too little is to be found in the world? or is it rather that, while in the enjoyment even of the most athletic delight, men must nevertheless be maintained, and this maintenance is not always forthcoming? We must be clear on this head before going farther, as most people are loosely in the habit of talking of the difficulty of “finding employment.” Is it employment that we want to find, or support during employment? Is it idleness we wish to put an end to, or hunger? We have to take up both questions in succession, only not both at the same time. No doubt that work is a luxury, and a very great one. It is, indeed, at once a luxury and a necessity; no man can retain either health of mind or body without it. So profoundly do I feel this, that, as will be seen in the sequel, one of the principal objects I would recommend to benevolent and practical persons, is to induce rich people to seek for a larger quantity of this luxury than they at present possess. Nevertheless, it appears by experience that even this healthiest of pleasures may be indulged in to excess, and that human beings are just as liable to surfeit of labour as to surfeit of meat; so that, as on the one hand, it may be charitable to provide, for some people, lighter dinner, and more work—for others, it may be equally expedient to provide lighter work, and more dinner. ↩
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Book I chap. iv s. 1. To save space, my future references to Mr. Mill’s work will be by numerals only, as in this instance, I iv 1. Ed. in 2 vols. 8vo, Parker, 1848. ↩
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If Mr. Mill had wished to show the difference in result between consumption and sale, he should have represented the hardware merchant as consuming his own goods instead of selling them; similarly, the silver merchant as consuming his own goods instead of selling them. Had he done this, he would have made his position clearer, though less tenable; and perhaps this was the position he really intended to take, tacitly involving his theory, elsewhere stated, and shown in the sequel of this paper to be false, that demand for commodities is not demand for labour. But by the most diligent scrutiny of the paragraph now under examination, I cannot determine whether it is a fallacy pure and simple, or the half of one fallacy supported by the whole of a greater one; so that I treat it here on the kinder assumption that it is one fallacy only. ↩
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I take Mr. [afterwards Sir A.] Helps’ estimate in his essay on War. ↩
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Also when the wrought silver vases of Spain were dashed to fragments by our customhouse officers, because bullion might be imported free of duty, but not brains, was the axe that broke them productive?—the artist who wrought them unproductive? Or again. If the woodman’s axe is productive, is the executioner’s? as also, if the hemp of a cable be productive, does not the productiveness of hemp in a halter depend on its moral more than on its material application? ↩
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Filigree: that is to say, generally, ornament dependent on complexity, not on art. ↩
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These statements sound crude in their brevity; but will be found of the utmost importance when they are developed. Thus, in the above instance, economists have never perceived that disposition to buy is a wholly moral element in demand: that is to say, when you give a man half-a-crown, it depends on his disposition whether he is rich or poor with it—whether he will buy disease, ruin, and hatred, or buy health, advancement, and domestic love. And thus the agreeableness or exchange value of every offered commodity depends on production, not merely of the commodity, but of buyers of it; therefore on the education of buyers, and on all the moral elements by which their disposition to buy this, or that, is formed. I will illustrate and expand into final consequences every one of these definitions in its place: at present they can only be given with extremest brevity; for in order to put the subject at once in a connected form before the reader, I have thrown into one, the opening definitions of four chapters; namely, of that on Value (“Ad Valorem”); on Price (“Thirty Pieces”); on Production (“Demeter”); and on Economy (“The Law of the House”). ↩
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Perhaps it may be said, in farther support of Mr. Ricardo, that he meant, “when the utility is constant or given, the price varies as the quantity of labour.” If he meant this, he should have said it; but, had he meant it, he could have hardly missed the necessary result, that utility would be one measure of price (which he expressly denies it to be); and that, to prove saleableness, he had to prove a given quantity of utility, as well as a given quantity of labour: to wit, in his own instance, that the deer and fish would each feed the same number of men, for the same number of days, with equal pleasure to their palates. The fact is, he did not know what he meant himself. The general idea which he had derived from commercial experience, without being able to analyse it, was, that when the demand is constant, the price varies as the quantity of labour required for production; or—using the formula I gave in last paper—when y is constant, xy varies as x. But demand never is, nor can be, ultimately constant, if x varies distinctly; for, as price rises, consumers fall away; and as soon as there is a monopoly (and all scarcity is a form of monopoly; so that every commodity is affected occasionally by some colour of monopoly), y becomes the most influential condition of the price. Thus the price of a painting depends less on its merit than on the interest taken in it by the public; the price of singing less on the labour of the singer than the number of persons who desire to hear him; and the price of gold less on the scarcity which affects it in common with cerium or iridium, than on the sunlight colour and unalterable purity by which it attracts the admiration and answers the trust of mankind.
It must be kept in mind, however, that I use the word “demand” in a somewhat different sense from economists usually. They mean by it “the quantity of a thing sold.” I mean by it “the force of the buyer’s capable intention to buy.” In good English, a person’s “demand” signifies, not what he gets, but what he asks for.
Economists also do not notice that objects are not valued by absolute bulk or weight, but by such bulk and weight as is necessary to bring them into use. They say, for instance, that water bears no price in the market. It is true that a cupful does not, but a lake does; just as a handful of dust does not, but an acre does. And were it possible to make even the possession of the cupful or handful permanent (i.e., to find a place for them), the earth and sea would be bought up by handfuls and cupfuls. ↩
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Compare George Herbert, The Church Porch, Stanza 28. ↩
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“ὁ Ζεὺς δήπου πένεται.”—Arist. Plut. 582. It would but weaken the grand words to lean on the preceding ones:“ὅτι τοῦ Πλούτου παρέχω βελτίονας ἄνδρας, καὶ τὴν γνώμην, καὶ τὴν ἰδέαν.” ↩
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Zech. 5:11. See note on the passage, at pp. 191–2. ↩
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Labour which is entirely good of its kind, that is to say, effective, or efficient, the Greeks called “weighable,” or ἄξιος, translated usually “worthy,” and because thus substantial and true, they called its price τιμή, the “honourable estimate” of it (honorarium): this word being founded on their conception of true labour as a divine thing, to be honoured with the kind of honour given to the gods; whereas the price of false labour, or of that which led away from life, was to be, not honour, but vengeance; for which they reserved another word, attributing the exaction of such price to a peculiar goddess called Tisiphone, the “requiter (or quittance-taker) of death;” a person versed in the highest branches of arithmetic, and punctual in her habits; with whom accounts current have been opened also in modern days. ↩
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The most accurately nugatory labour is, perhaps, that of which not enough is given to answer a purpose effectually, and which, therefore, has all to be done over again. Also, labour which fails of effect through non-cooperation. The curé of a little village near Bellinzona, to whom I had expressed wonder that the peasants allowed the Ticino to flood their fields, told me that they would not join to build an effectual embankment high up the valley, because everybody said “that would help his neighbours as much as himself.” So every proprietor built a bit of low embankment about his own field; and the Ticino, as soon as it had a mind, swept away and swallowed all up together. ↩
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Observe, I say, “rearing,” not “begetting.” The praise is in the seventh season, not in σπορητός, nor in φυταλιὰ, but in ὀπώρα. It is strange that men always praise enthusiastically any person who, by a momentary exertion, saves a life; but praise very hesitatingly a person who, by exertion and self-denial prolonged through years, creates one. We give the crown “ob civem servatum,”—why not “ob civem natum”? Born, I mean, to the full, in soul as well as body. England has oak enough, I think, for both chaplets. ↩
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When Mr. Mill speaks of productive consumption, he only means consumption which results in increase of capital, or material wealth. See I iii 4, and I iii 5. ↩
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So also in the vision of the women bearing the ephah, before quoted, “the wind was in their wings,” not wings “of a stork,” as in our version; but “milvi,” of a kite, in the Vulgate, or perhaps more accurately still in the Septuagint, “hoopoe,” a bird connected typically with the power of riches by many traditions, of which that of its petition for a crest of gold is perhaps the most interesting. The “Birds” of Aristophanes, in which its part is principal, is full of them; note especially the “fortification of the air with baked bricks, like Babylon,” l. 550; and, again, compare the Plutus of Dante, who (to show the influence of riches in destroying the reason) is the only one of the powers of the Inferno who cannot speak intelligibly; and also the cowardliest; he is not merely quelled or restrained, but literally “collapses” at a word; the sudden and helpless operation of mercantile panic being all told in the brief metaphor, “as the sails, swollen with the wind, fall, when the mast breaks.” ↩
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The value of raw material, which has, indeed, to be deducted from the price of the labour, is not contemplated in the passages referred to, Mr. Mill having fallen into the mistake solely by pursuing the collateral results of the payment of wages to middlemen. He says:—“The consumer does not, with his own funds, pay the weaver for his day’s work.” Pardon me; the consumer of the velvet pays the weaver with his own funds as much as he pays the gardener. He pays, probably, an intermediate shipowner, velvet merchant, and shopman; pays carriage money, shop rent, damage money, time money, and care money; all these are above and beside the velvet price (just as the wages of a head gardener would be above the grass price); but the velvet is as much produced by the consumer’s capital, though he does not pay for it till six months after production, as the grass is produced by his capital, though he does not pay the man who mowed and rolled it on Monday, till Saturday afternoon. I do not know if Mr. Mill’s conclusion—“the capital cannot be dispensed with, the purchasers can”—has yet been reduced to practice in the City on any large scale. ↩
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Which, observe, is the precise opposite of the one under examination. The hardware theory required us to discharge our gardeners and engage manufacturers; the velvet theory requires us to discharge our manufacturers and engage gardeners. ↩
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It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in Europe that it is entirely capitalists’ wealth which supports unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money to support them; for most of the men who wage such, wage them gratis; but for an unjust war, men’s bodies and souls have both to be bought; and the best tools of war for them besides; which makes such war costly to the maximum; not to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations which have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to buy an hour’s peace of mind with: as, at present, France and England, purchasing of each other ten millions sterling worth of consternation annually (a remarkably light crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves—sown, reaped, and granaried by “the science” of the modern political economist, teaching covetousness instead of truth). And all unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid by subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to have no will in the matter, the capitalists’ will being the primary root of the war; but its real root is the covetousness of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his own separate loss and punishment to each person. ↩
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“In all reasoning about prices, the proviso must be understood, ‘supposing all parties to take care of their own interest.’ ” —Mill, III i 5 ↩
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James 5:4. Observe, in these statements I am not taking up, nor countenancing one whit, the common socialist idea of division of property; division of property is its destruction; and with it the destruction of all hope, all industry, and all justice: it is simply chaos—a chaos towards which the believers in modern political economy are fast tending, and from which I am striving to save them. The rich man does not keep back meat from the poor by retaining his riches; but by basely using them. Riches are a form of strength; and a strong man does not injure others by keeping his strength, but by using it injuriously. The socialist, seeing a strong man oppress a weak one, cries out—“Break the strong man’s arms”; but I say, “Teach him to use them to better purpose.” The fortitude and intelligence which acquire riches are intended, by the Giver of both, not to scatter, nor to give away, but to employ those riches in the service of mankind; in other words, in the redemption of the erring and aid of the weak—that is to say, there is first to be the work to gain money; then the Sabbath of use for it—the Sabbath, whose law is, not to lose life, but to save. It is continually the fault or the folly of the poor that they are poor, as it is usually a child’s fault if it falls into a pond, and a cripple’s weakness that slips at a crossing; nevertheless, most passersby would pull the child out, or help up the cripple. Put it at the worst, that all the poor of the world are but disobedient children, or careless cripples, and that all rich people are wise and strong, and you will see at once that neither is the socialist right in desiring to make everybody poor, powerless, and foolish as he is himself, nor the rich man right in leaving the children in the mire. ↩
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The quantity of life is the same in both cases; but it is differently allotted. ↩
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The proper offices of middlemen, namely, overseers (or authoritative workmen), conveyancers (merchants, sailors, retail dealers, etc.), and order-takers (persons employed to receive directions from the consumer), must, of course, be examined before I can enter farther into the question of just payment of the first producer. But I have not spoken of them in these introductory papers, because the evils attendant on the abuse of such intermediate functions result not from any alleged principle of modern political economy, but from private carelessness or iniquity. ↩