The Camel and the Needle's Eye

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby

The case would not be quite so bad as it is if it were only “the requisites of a refined and cultured life” that they were made to provide. But this point must be considered later.

In order to appreciate fully the responsibility which the possession of riches entails, let us translate an income into terms of actual sustenance for human beings. By this means it is possible to arrive at a more or less positive measure. There is so much that is relative in most human requirements that they cannot serve as a standard or as a reliable quantity to be used in calculating any equation. But the requirements of a human being can be measured in terms of actual sustenance, because they can be estimated with something approaching precision.

Take a man with £20,000 a year, and say we deduct even as much as £3000 for himself and his family. With his remaining £17,000 he has the power of furnishing 170 people with £100 a year apiece. It is not for a moment suggested that he should do any such thing, as he would be quite unable to select 170 worthy people, and even if he could make the choice the 170 people, on the reception of this private dole, would soon become unworthy. This calculation is only taken to serve as a measure of his power. What might be the income or, more correctly speaking, the means of existence of 170 lives, is vested in one man, who is under the impression—and no one attempts to dispute it—that he is capable of disposing of this sum in a way that is generally beneficial.

Now let us state the case fairly from the point of view of the rich man, taking a reasonable and more or less representative type. He may have £10,000, £50,000, or £100,000 a year—that only alters his activities in scope, not in quality. Let us say he has two or three country houses and a house in London. His “position” requires him to keep up a certain establishment, and this means the employment of some forty or fifty servants, grooms, gardeners, chauffeurs, etc., who, he readily tells you, will be thrown out of employment should any of his money be taken from him. If we take the case of a landlord, he will also have tenants, bailiffs, farm labourers, and gamekeepers dependent on him. He keeps the home farm and lets out the other farms on his estate to tenant farmers. Part of his land is built over and brings him in substantial returns in the shape of rent. His villages are in good order and the cottages kept in proper repair. Some thousands of acres or so he keeps for shooting. He may have a deer forest on one of his estates, and perhaps also a grouse moor or a river. Whether he keeps a racing stable, a pack of hounds, or a yacht depends on his particular fancy. He will acknowledge that he spends a certain amount on luxuries, but that “is good for trade,” as great numbers of people have to be employed in the manufacture of these luxuries. He is kind to his poor relations, whom he entertains and helps; and his subscription list to hospitals, charities, and philanthropic works is a large one. He enjoys himself in an unostentatious but suitably expensive way, and his various responsibilities allow him to lead a life consisting of occasional rushes of activity and prolonged intervals of leisure. He most probably finds he can spare a certain amount of money for speculation, with a view to adding more to the sum total of his income. He looks forward to handing down to his children sufficient means to make each of them independent, and meanwhile has his boys educated in the large public schools, where they can associate with boys who are similarly situated.

What possible harm can there be in all this? So far from being parasitic, he counts himself as a beneficent agent in the general industrial activity, at the same time appearing as a credit to his society and a notably refined product of the class of which he is a member. Above all, he is popular, and gains ostensibly the respect and regard of his friends, his neighbours, and his dependents. A favourable case has purposely been made for him, because if we accuse him of self-indulgence and greed, and describe him as a gambler, spending his substance on objects which are generally admitted to be pernicious and unworthy, the case could not be defended at all.

The fundamental theory which makes this man’s position untenable has already been explained—namely, that after he has satisfied his legitimate requirements all the surplus money he keeps is being held back from serving urgent needs; and, moreover, the method in which he spends the surplus is directly or indirectly harmful to himself and others.

We call the money his as if by some miracle he had made it. Often enough he has not helped even by the smallest exertion to create it. The wealth has been and is being daily and hourly produced by the exertion of numberless people who are either employed by him or employed in furthering enterprises in which he has invested his money. It will be said that his share as the wise dispenser of capital, without which labour and enterprise could not be set in motion, is an all-important part of the general process of business. But he invests not to promote enterprise, but to get high dividends; and an elaborate system has been set up in order to tempt him to put his money into concerns that are by no means always sound or of the smallest public utility. Capital would exist and flow far more freely without the large capitalist. He acts as a dam to the stream; a certain amount escapes back into the main channel, but much more is checked and diverted into stagnant and putrefying pools of his own creation. The free flow of blood is life-giving; the clotting or coagulation of blood produces disease.

Let us take the various points raised by his case seriatim. Many acutely controversial problems are opened, and it will be difficult to detach the particular actions of the rich man without generalising, to some extent, on the problems themselves. It is no argument against our main contention to say that people with costly tastes have, while gratifying them, been able to exercise powers of a high order, for, obviously, it is in spite of their shortcomings in this respect that they have succeeded, and not because of them. If some men with means have done valuable public service and performed admirable work in many different spheres of life, this they have done as men naturally gifted with high accomplishments, not as rich men. Here we are only concerned with their works and deeds in their latter capacity.

It does not affect our argument whether our typical example has been brought up to regard this way of living as natural and necessary for a man of what is called his “position” (that is to say, the purely artificial place which a rich man is able to take up in the community solely on account of his riches), or whether he has made the money for himself and is simply aping the habits and customs of those who already possess it. The distinction between the vieux riches and the nouveaux riches is one they can fight out between themselves. The former scoffs at the latter while all the time he is setting him, and consciously setting him, the example he is to follow. It is not the gaining, but the spending of the money that must occupy our attention here.

Our friend’s houses are only a detail in the upkeep of his position. They may be historic castles, sham “ancestral halls,” modern “palatial country residences,” or “fashionable mansions” in town. Does it ever strike the owner as, let us say, a curious arrangement that he should have several houses of fifty to a hundred rooms apiece while some millions of his fellow-men do not own one room? Does he know that in England and Wales alone 507,763 people occupy one-room tenements, 48.4% of which are classified as overcrowded, while 12,458,150 are occupying tenements of two, three, or four rooms?[4] In any case, he would indignantly refuse to admit that there was any remote connection between these two sets of circumstances.