[785] “The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them.… It is not so with the distribution of wealth. This is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like.” (Principles, Book II, chap. 1, § 1.) Karl Marx, a little later than this, claimed that distribution is wholly determined by production.
[786] See Chatelain’s introduction to Rodbertus’s Kapital.
[787] See Autobiography, p. 133 (“Popular” edition).
[788] “If the improvement which even triumphant military despotism has only retarded, not stopped, shall continue its course there can be little doubt that the status of hired labourers will gradually tend to confine itself to the description of workpeople whose low moral qualities render them unfit for anything more independent, and that the relation of masters and workpeople will be gradually superseded by partnership in one of two forms: in some cases, association of the labourers with the capitalist; in others, and perhaps finally in all, association of labourers among themselves.” (Principles, Book IV, chap. 7, § 4.)
“In this or some such mode, the existing accumulations of capital might honestly and by a kind of spontaneous process become in the end the joint property of all who participate in their productive employment—a transformation which, thus effected, would be the nearest approach to social justice and the most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs for the universal good which it is possible at present to foresee.” (Ibid., Book IV, chap. 7, § 6.)
[789] The co-operative movement probably suggested this idea to him. He several times expresses the opinion that middlemen’s profits exceed those of the capitalists, and that the working class would gain more by the removal of the former than they would by the extinction of the latter.
[790] But Young remained a champion of grande culture, while Mill was a complete convert to peasant proprietorship. But peasant proprietorship is proposed simply as a step towards association.
“The opinion expressed in a former part of this treatise respecting small landed properties and peasant proprietors may have made the reader anticipate that a wide diffusion of property in land is the resource on which I rely for exempting at least the agricultural labourers from exclusive dependence on labour for hire. Such, however, is not my opinion. I indeed deem that form of agricultural economy to be most groundlessly cried down, and to be greatly preferable in its aggregate effects on human happiness to hired labour in any form in which it exists at present. But the aim of improvement should be not solely to place human beings in a condition in which they will be able to do without one another, but to enable them to work with or for one another in relations not involving dependence.” (Principles, Book IV, chap. 7, § 4.)
Mill was not the only one who looked to peasant proprietorship partly to solve the social problem. Not to mention Sismondi, who was very much taken up with the idea, we have Thornton in England in his Plea for Peasant Proprietors (1848) and Hippolyte Passy in France in his excellent little volume Des Systèmes de Culture (1852) strongly advocating it. The Classical economists for the most part took the opposite point of view, especially Lavergne in his Essai sur l’Économie rurale de l’Angleterre.
[791] “Were I framing a code of laws according to what seems to me best in itself, without regard to existing opinions and sentiments, I should prefer to restrict, not what anyone might bequeath, but what anyone should be permitted to acquire by bequest or inheritance. Each person should have power to dispose by will of his or her whole property; but not to lavish it in enriching some one individual beyond a certain maximum.” (Principles, Book II, chap. 2, § 4.)