Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays

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That (even apart from etymology) cattle are typical examples of
capital cannot be denied ("Progress and Poverty," p. 25); and if we
seek for that particular quality of cattle which makes them "capital,"
neither has the author of "Progress and Poverty" supplied, nor is any
one else very likely to supply, a better account of the matter than
Adam Smith has done. Cattle are "capital" because they are "stock
which yields revenue." That is to say, they afford to their owner a
supply of that which he desires to possess. And, in this particular
case, the "revenue" is not only desirable, but of supreme importance,
inasmuch as it is capable of maintaining human life. The herd yields a
revenue of food-stuffs as milk and meat; a revenue of skins; a revenue
of manure; a revenue of labour; a revenue of exchangeable commodities
in the shape of these things, as well as in that of live cattle. In
each and all of these capacities cattle are capital; and, conversely,
things which possess any or all of these capacities are capital.

Therefore what we find at page 25 of "Progress and Poverty" must be
regarded as a welcome lapse into clearness of apprehension:--

"A fertile field, a rich vein of ore, a falling stream which supplies
power, may give the possessor advantages [176] equivalent to the
possession of capital; but to class such things as capital would be to
put an end to the distinction between land and capital."

Just so. But the fatal truth is that these things are capital; and
that there really is no fundamental distinction between land and
capital. Is it denied that a fertile field, a rich vein of ore, or a
falling stream, may form part of a man's stock, and that, if they do,
they are capable of yielding revenue? Will not somebody pay a share of
the produce in kind, or in money, for the privilege of cultivating the
first royalties for that of working the second; and a like equivalent
for that of erecting a mill on the third? In what sense, then, are
these things less "capital" than the buildings and tools which on page
27 of "Progress and Poverty" are admitted to be capital? Is it not
plain that if these things confer "advantages equivalent to the
possession of capital," and if the "advantage" of capital is nothing
but the yielding of revenue, then the denial that they are capital is
merely a roundabout way of self-contradiction?

All this confused talk about capital, however, is lucidity itself
compared with the exposition of the remarkable thesis, "Wages not
drawn from capital, but produced by labour," which occupies the third
chapter of "Progress and Poverty."

"If, for instance, I devote my labour to gathering birds' eggs or
picking wild berries, the eggs or berries I thus [177] get are my
wages. Surely no one will contend that, in such a case, wages are
drawn from capital. There is no capital in the case" (p. 34).

Nevertheless, those who have followed what has been said in the first
part of this essay surely neither will, nor can, have any hesitation
about substantially adopting the challenged contention, though they
may possibly have qualms as to the propriety of the use of the term
"wages."* They will have no difficulty in apprehending the fact that
birds' eggs and berries are stores of foodstuffs, or vital capital;
that the man who devotes his labour to getting them does so at the
expense of his personal vital capital; and that, if the eggs and the
berries are "wages" for his work, they are so because they enable him
to restore to his organism the vital capital which he has consumed in
doing the work of collection. So that there is really a great deal of
"capital in the case."

* Not merely on the grounds stated below, but on the strength
of Mr. George's own definition. Does the gatherer of eggs, or
berries, produce them by his labour? If so, what do the hens
and the bushes do?

Our author proceeds:--

"An absolutely naked man, thrown on an island where no human being has
before trod, may gather birds' eggs or pick berries" (p. 34).

No doubt. But those who have followed my argument thus far will be
aware that a man's vital capital does not reside in his clothes; and,
therefore, [178] they will probably fail, as completely as I do, to
discover the relevancy of the statement.

Again:--

. . . Or, if I take a piece of leather and work it up into a
pair of shoes, the shoes are my wages--the reward of my
exertion. Surely they are not drawn from capital--either
my capital or anybody else's capital--but are brought
into existence by the labour of which they became the
wages; and, in obtaining this pair of shoes as the wages
of my labour, capital is not even momentarily lessened
one iota. For if we call in the idea of capital, my
capital at the beginning consists of the piece of
leather, the thread, &c. (p. 34).

It takes away one's breath to have such a concatenation of fallacies
administered in the space of half a paragraph. It does not seem to
have occurred to our economical reformer to imagine whence his
"capital at the beginning," the "leather, thread, &c." came. I venture
to suppose that leather to have been originally cattle-skin; and since
calves and oxen are not flayed alive, the existence of the leather
implies the lessening of that form of capital by a very considerable
iota. It is, therefore, as sure as anything can be that, in the long
run, the shoes are drawn from that which is capital par excellence; to
wit, cattle. It is further beyond doubt that the operation of tanning
must involve loss of capital in the shape of bark, to say nothing of
other losses; and that the use of the awls and knives of the shoemaker
involves loss of capital in the shape of the store of [179] iron;
further, the shoemaker has been enabled to do his work not only by the
vital capital expended during the time occupied in making the pair of
shoes, but by that expended from the time of his birth, up to the time
that he earned wages that would keep him alive.

"Progress and Poverty" continues:--

. . . As my labour goes on, value is steadily added until,
when my labour results in the finished shoes, I have my
capital plus the difference in value between the
material and the shoes. In obtaining this additional
value--my wages--how is capital, at any time, drawn
upon? (p, 34).

In return we may inquire, how can any one propound such a question?
Capital is drawn upon all the time. Not only when the shoes are
commenced, but while they are being made, and until they are either
used by the shoemaker himself or are purchased by somebody else; that
is, exchanged for a portion of another man's capital. In fact
(supposing that the shoemaker does not want shoes himself), it is the
existence of vital capital in the possession of another person and the
willingness of that person to part with more or less of it in exchange
for the shoes--it is these two conditions, alone, which prevent the
shoemaker from having consumed his capital unproductively, just as
much as if he had spent his time in chopping up the leather into
minute fragments.

Thus, the examination of the very case selected [180] by the advocate
of the doctrine that labour bestowed upon manufacture, without any
intervention of capital, can produce wages, proves to be a delusion of
the first magnitude; even though it be supported by the dictum of Adam
Smith which is quoted in its favour (p. 34)--

. . . "The produce of labour constitutes the natural recompense
or wages of labour. In that original state of things which
precedes both the appropriation of land and the
accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs
to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to
share with him" ("Wealth of Nations," ch. viii).

But the whole of this passage exhibits the influence of the French
Physiocrats by whom Adam Smith was inspired, at their worst; that is to
say, when they most completely forsook the ground of experience for a
priori speculation. The confident reference to "that original state of
things" is quite in the manner of the Essai sur l'Inegalie. Now, the
state of men before the "appropriation of land" and the "accumulation
of stock" must surely have been that of purely savage hunters. As, by
the supposition, nobody would have possessed land, certainly no man
could have had a landlord; and, if there was no accumulation of stock
in a transferable form, as surely there could be no master, in the
sense of hirer. But hirer and hire (that is, wages) are correlative
terms, like mother and child. As "child" implies "mother," so does
"hire" or "wages" imply a [181] "hirer" or "wage-giver." Therefore,
when a man in "the original state of things" gathered fruit or killed
game for his own sustenance, the fruit or the game could be called his
"wages" only in a figurative sense; as one sees if the term "hire,"
which has a more limited connotation, is substituted for "wage." If
not, it must be assumed that the savage hired himself to get his own
dinner; whereby we are led to the tolerably absurd conclusion that, as
in the "state of nature" he was his own employer, the "master" and the
labourer, in that model age, appropriated the produce in equal shares!
And if this should be not enough, it has already been seen that, in
the hunting state, man is not even an accessory of production of vital
capital; he merely consumes what nature produces.

According to the author of "Progress and Poverty" political economists
have been deluded by a "fallacy which has entangled some of the most
acute minds in a web of their own spinning."

"It is in the use of the term capital in two senses. In the primary
proposition that capital is necessary to the exertion of productive
labour, the term "capital" is understood as including all food,
clothing, shelter, &c.; whereas in the deductions finally drawn from
it, the term is used in its common and legitimate meaning of wealth
devoted, not to the immediate gratification of desire, but to the
procurement of more wealth--of wealth in the hands of employers as
distinguished from labourers" (p. 40).

[182] I am by no means concerned to defend the political economists who
are thus charged with blundering; but I shall be surprised to learn
that any have carried the art of self-entanglement to the degree of
perfection exhibited by this passage. Who has ever imagined that
wealth which, in the hands of an employer, is capital, ceases to be
capital if it is in the hands of a labourer? Suppose a workman to be
paid thirty shillings on Saturday evening for six days' labour, that
thirty shillings comes out of the employer's capital, and receives the
name of "wages" simply because it is exchanged for labour. In the
workman's pocket, as he goes home, it is a part of his capital, in
exactly the same sense as, half an hour before, it was part of the
employer's capital; he is a capitalist just as much as if he were a
Rothschild. Suppose him to be a single man, whose cooking and
household matters are attended to by the people of the house in which
he has a room; then the rent which he pays them out of this capital
is, in part, wages for their labour, and he is, so far, an employer.
If he saves one shilling out of his thirty, he has, to that extent,
added to his capital when the next Saturday comes round. And if he
puts his saved shillings week by week into the Savings Bank, the
difference between him and the most bloated of bankers is simply one
of degree.

At page 42, we are confidently told that [183] "labourers by receiving
wages" cannot lessen "even temporarily" the "capital of the employer,"
while at page 44 it is admitted that in certain cases the capitalist
"pays out capital in wages." One would think that the "paying out" of
capital is hardly possible without at least a "temporary" diminution
of the capital from which payment is made. But "Progress and Poverty"
changes all that by a little verbal legerdemain:--

. . . "For where wages are paid before the object of the labour
is obtained, or is finished--as in agriculture, where
ploughing and sowing must precede by several months the
harvesting of the crop; as in the erection of buildings,
the construction of ships, railroads, canals, &c.--it is
clear that the owners of the capital paid in wages cannot
expect an immediate return, but, as the phrase is, must
"outlay it" or "lie out of it" for a time which sometimes
amounts to many years. And hence, if first principles are
not kept in mind, it is easy to jump to the conclusion
that wages are advanced by capital" (p. 44).

Those who have paid attention to the argument of former parts of this
paper may not be able to understand how, if sound "first principles
are kept in mind," any other conclusion can be reached, whether by
jumping, or by any other mode of logical progression. But the first
principle which our author "keeps in mind" possesses just that amount
of ambiguity which enables him to play hocus-pocus with it. It is
this; that "the creation of value does not depend upon the finishing
of the product" (p. 44).

[184] There is no doubt that, under certain limitations, this
proposition is correct. It is not true that "labour always adds to
capital by its exertion before it takes from capital its wages" (p.
44), but it is true that it may, and often does, produce that effect.

To take one of the examples given, the construction of a ship. The
shaping of the timbers undoubtedly gives them a value (for a
shipbuilder) which they did not possess before. When they are put
together to constitute the framework of the ship, there is a still
further addition of value (for a shipbuilder); and when the outside
planking is added, there is another addition (for a shipbuilder).
Suppose everything else about the hull is finished, except the one
little item of caulking the seams, there is no doubt that it has still
more value for a shipbuilder. But for whom else has it any value,
except perhaps for a fire-wood merchant? What price will any one who
wants a ship--that is to say, something that will carry a cargo from
one port to another--give for the unfinished vessel which would take
water in at every seam and go down in half an hour, if she were
launched? Suppose the shipbuilder's capital to fail before the vessel
is caulked, and that he cannot find another shipbuilder who cares to
buy and finish it, what sort of proportion does the value created by
the labour, for which he has paid out of his capital, stand to that of
his advances?

[185] Surely no one will give him one-tenth of the capital disbursed
in wages, perhaps not so much even as the prime cost of the raw
materials. Therefore, though the assertion that "the creation of
value does not depend on the finishing of the product" may be strictly
true under certain circumstances, it need not be and is not always
true. And, if it is meant to imply or suggest that the creation of
value in a manufactured article does not depend upon the finishing of
that article, a more serious error could hardly be propounded.

Is there not a prodigious difference in the value of an uncaulked and
in that of a finished ship; between the value of a house in which only
the tiles of the roof are wanting and a finished house; between that
of a clock which only lacks the escapement and a finished clock?

As ships, house, and clock, the unfinished articles have no value
whatever--that is to say, no person who wanted to purchase one of
these things, for immediate use, would give a farthing for either. The
only value they can have, apart from that of the materials they
contain, is that which they possess for some one who can finish them,
or for some one who can make use of parts of them for the construction
of other things. A man might buy an unfinished house for the sake of
the bricks; or he might buy an incomplete clock to use the works for
some other piece of machinery.

Thus, though every stage of the labour [186] bestowed on raw material,
for the purpose of giving rise to a certain product, confers some
additional value on that material in the estimation of those who are
engaged in manufacturing that product, the ratio of that accumulated
value, at any stage of the process, to the value of the finished
product is extremely inconstant, and often small; while, to other
persons, the value of the unfinished product may be nothing, or even a
minus quantity. A house-timber merchant, for example, might consider
that wood which had been worked into the ribs of a ship was
spoiled--that is, had less value than it had as a log.

According to "Progress and Poverty," there was, really, no advance of
capital while the great St. Gothard tunnel was cut. Suppose that, as
the Swiss and the Italian halves of the tunnel approached to within
half a kilometre, that half-kilometre had turned out to be composed of
practically impenetrable rock--would anybody have given a centime for
the unfinished tunnel? And if not, how comes it that "the creation of
value does not depend on the finishing of the product"?

I think it may be not too much to say that, of all the political
delusions which are current in this queer world, the very stupidest
are those which assume that labour and capital are necessarily
antagonistic; that all capital is produced by labour and therefore, by
natural right, is the property of [187] the labourer; that the
possessor of capital is a robber who preys on the workman and
appropriates to himself that which he has had no share in producing.

On the contrary, capital and labour are, necessarily, close allies;
capital is never a product of human labour alone; it exists apart from
human labour; it is the necessary antecedent of labour; and it
furnishes the materials on which labour is employed. The only
indispensable form of capital--vital capital--cannot be produced by
human labour. All that man can do is to favour its formation by the
real producers. There is no intrinsic relation between the amount of
labour bestowed on an article and its value in exchange. The claim of
labour to the total result of operations which are rendered possible
only by capital is simply an a priori iniquity.

[188]

V.

SOCIAL DISEASES AND WORSE REMEDIES

LETTERS TO THE "TIMES" ON MR. BOOTH'S SCHEME.
WITH A PREFACE AND INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

[1891]

PREFACE

The letters which are here collected together were published in the
"Times" in the course of the months of December, 1890, and January,
1891.

The circumstances which led me to write the first letter are
sufficiently set forth in its opening sentences; and the materials on
which I based my criticisms of Mr. Booth's scheme, in this and in the
second letter, were wholly derived from Mr. Booth's book. I had some
reason to know, however, that when anybody allows his sense of duty so
far to prevail over his sense of the blessedness of peace as to write
a letter to the "Times," on any subject of public interest, his
reflections, before he has done with the business, will be very like
[189] those of Johnny Gilpin, "who little thought, when he set out, of
running such a rig." Such undoubtedly are mine when I contemplate
these twelve documents, and call to mind the distinct addition to the
revenue of the Post Office which must have accrued from the mass of
letters and pamphlets which have been delivered at my door; to say
nothing of the unexpected light upon my character, motives, and
doctrines, which has been thrown by some of the "Times'"
correspondents, and by no end of comments elsewhere.

If self-knowledge is the highest aim of man, I ought by this time to
have little to learn. And yet, if I am awake, some of my
teachers--unable, perhaps, to control the divine fire of the poetic
imagination which is so closely akin to, if not a part of, the
mythopoeic faculty--have surely dreamed dreams. So far as my humbler
and essentially prosaic faculties of observation and comparison go,
plain facts are against them. But, as I may be mistaken, I have
thought it well to prefix to the letters (by way of "Prolegomena") an
essay which appeared in the "Nineteenth Century" for January, 1888, in
which the principles that, to my mind, lie at the bottom of the
"social question" are stated. So far as Individualism and Regimental
Socialism are concerned, this paper simply emphasizes and expands the
opinions expressed in an address to the members of the Midland
Institute, delivered seventeen years earlier, [190] and still more
fully developed in several essays published in the "Nineteenth
Century" in 1889, which I hope, before long, to republish.*

* See Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 290 to end; and this volume,
p. 147.

The fundamental proposition which runs through the writings, which
thus extend over a. of twenty years, is, that the common a priori
doctrines and methods of reasoning about political and social
questions are essentially vicious; and that argumentation on this
basis leads, with equal logical force, to two contradictory and
extremely mischievous systems, the one that of Anarchaic
Individualism, the other that of despotic or Regimental Socialism.
Whether I am right or wrong, I am at least consistent in opposing both
to the best of my ability. Mr. Booth's system appears to me, and, as I
have shown, is regarded by Socialists themselves, to be mere
autocratic Socialism, masked by its theological exterior. That the
"fantastic" religious skin will wear away, and the Socialistic reality
it covers will show its real nature, is the expressed hope of one
candid Socialist, and may be fairly conceived to be the unexpressed
belief of the despotic leader of the new Trades Union, who has shown
his zeal, if not his discretion, in championing Mr. Booth's projects.
[See Letter VIII.]

Yet another word to commentators upon my letters. There are some who
rather chuckle, and [191] some who sneer, at what they seem to
consider the dexterity of an "old controversial hand," exhibited by
the contrast which I have drawn between the methods of conversion
depicted in the New Testament and those pursued by fanatics of the
Salvationist type, whether they be such as are now exploited by Mr.
Booth, or such as those who, from the time of the Anabaptists, to go
no further back, have worked upon similar lines.

Whether such observations were intended to be flattering or sarcastic,
I must respectfully decline to accept the compliment, or to apply the
sarcasm to myself. I object to obliquity of procedure and ambiguity of
speech in all shapes. And I confess that I find it difficult to
understand the state of mind which leads any one to suppose, that deep
respect for single-minded devotion to high aims is incompatible with
the unhesitating conviction that those aims include the propagation of
doctrines which are devoid of foundation--perhaps even mischievous.

The most degrading feature of the narrower forms of Christianity (of
which that professed by Mr. Booth is a notable example) is their
insistence that the noblest virtues, if displayed by those who reject
their pitiable formulae, are, as their pet phrase goes, "splendid
sins." But there is, perhaps, one step lower; and that is that men,
who profess freedom of thought, should fail to see and [192]
appreciate that large soul of goodness which often animates even the
fanatical adherents of such tenets. I am sorry for any man who can
read the epistles to the Galatians and the Corinthians without
yielding a large meed of admiration to the fervent humanity of Paul of
Tarsus; who can study the lives of Francis of Assisi, or of Catherine
of Siena, without wishing that, for the furtherance of his own ideals,
he might be even as they; or who can contemplate unmoved the steadfast
veracity and true heroism which loom through the fogs of mystical
utterance in George Fox. In all these great men and women there lay
the root of the matter; a burning desire to amend the condition of
their fellow-men, and to put aside all other things for that end. If,
in spite of all the dogmatic helps or hindrances in which they were
entangled, these people are not to be held in high honour, who are?

I have never expressed a doubt--for I have none--that, when Mr. Booth
left the Methodist connection, and started that organisation of the
Salvation Army upon which, comparatively recently, such ambitious
schemes of social reform have been grafted, he may have deserved some
share of such honour. I do not say that, so far as his personal
desires and intentions go, he may not still deserve it. But the
correlate of despotic authority is unlimited responsibility. If Mr.
Booth is to take [193] credit for any good that the Army system has
effected, he must be prepared to bear blame for its inherent evils. As
it seems to me, that has happened to him which sooner or later happens
to all despots: he has become the slave of his own creation--the
prosperity and glory of the soul-saving machine have become the end,
instead of a means, of soul-saving; and to maintain these at the
proper pitch, the "General" is led to do things which the Mr. Booth of
twenty years ago would probably have scorned.

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