“Just think of it!” said Irv. “Suppose that every man in our little town of two or three thousand people had to do everything for himself! He would have to raise sheep for wool, card, spin, and weave it, and fashion it into clothes. He would have to raise cotton and linen in the same way, and cattle too, and keep a tannery and be a shoemaker and a farmer and a mason and a carpenter and all the rest of it. And then he would have to mine his own iron and coal, and make his own tools and—well, he wouldn’t do it, because he couldn’t. He’d just wander off into the woods hunting for something that he could kill and eat, and he’d try to kill anybody else that did the same thing, for fear that the somebody else would get some of the game that he wanted for himself. He’d be simply a savage!”
“Well, but even savages go in tribes and hunt together and live together,” said Will.
“Of course they do,” answered Ed, “and that’s their first step up toward civilization. When they do that they have learned in a small way the advantage of working together, each for all and all for each. The better they learn that lesson, the more civilized they become.”
“Then the theorists are right who want the state to own everything and everybody to work for the state and be supported by it?” asked Phil.
“Not a little bit of it,” said Ed. “That would be simply to go back to the tribal plan that savages adopt when they first realize the advantages of working together, and abandon when they grow civilized. We have worked out of that and into something better. With us, every man works for all the rest by working for himself in the way that best serves his own welfare. Under our system every man is urged and stimulated by self-interest to do the very best and most work that he can. Under a communistic or socialistic or tribal system, every man would be as lazy as the rest would let him be, because he would be sure of a share in all that the others might make by their labor. It is sharp competition that makes men do their best. It is in the ‘struggle for existence’ that men advance most rapidly.”
“Wonder if that wasn’t what Humboldt meant,” said Irv, “when he called the banana ‘the curse of the tropics,’ adding that when a man planted one banana tree he provided food enough for himself and his descendants to the tenth generation, in a climate where there is no real necessity for clothes.”
“Exactly,” said Ed. “Somebody once said that ‘every man is as lazy as he dares to be.’”
“Well, I am, anyhow,” yawned Irv, “and so I’m going up on deck under the awning to make up some of that sleep I lost last night.”