“Wilfully;” note this grave word in my second proposition; and invest a shilling in the purchase of ‘Bishop Berkeley on Money,’ being extracts from his ‘Querist,’ by James Harvey, Liverpool.[4] At the bottom of the twenty-first page you will find this query, “Whether the continuous efforts on the part of the ‘Times,’ the ‘Telegraph,’[5] the ‘Economist,’ the ‘Daily News,’ and the daily newspaper press, and also of monied men generally, to confound money and capital, be the result of ignorance or design.”
Of ignorance in great part, doubtless, for “monied men, generally,” are ignorant enough to believe and assert anything; but it is noticeable that their ignorance always tells on their own side;[6] and the ‘Times’ and ‘Economist’ are now nothing more than passive instruments in their hands. But neither they, nor their organs, would long be able to assert untruths in Political Economy, if the nominal professors of the science would do their duty in investigation of it. Of whom I now choose, for direct personal challenge, the Professor at Cambridge; and, being a Doctor of Laws of his own University, and a Fellow of two colleges in mine, I charge him with having insufficiently investigated the principles of the science he is appointed to teach. I charge him with having advanced in defence of the theory of Interest on Money, four arguments, every one of them false, and false with such fallacy as a child ought to have been able to detect. I have exposed one of these fallacies at page 19 of the first letter, and the three others at page 15 to 18 of the eighteenth letter, in this book, and I now publicly call on Professor Fawcett either to defend, or retract, the statements so impugned. And this open challenge cannot be ignored by Professor Fawcett, on the plea that Political Economy is his province, and not mine. If any man holding definite position as a scholar in either University, challenged me publicly and gravely with having falsely defined an elementary principle of Art, I should hold myself bound to answer him, and I think public opinion would ratify my decision.
Proposition III. (I. 6).—Your redemption from the distress into which you have fallen is in your own hands, and in nowise depends on forms of government or modes of election.
But you must make the most of what forms of government you have got, by choosing honest men to work them (if you choose at all), and preparatorily, by honestly obeying them, and in all possible ways, making honest men of yourselves; and if it be indeed, now impossible—as I heard the clergyman declare at Matlock—(IX. 16) for any honest man to live by trade in England, amending the methods of English trade in the necessary particulars, until it becomes possible for honest men to live by it again. In the meantime resolving that you, for your part, will do good work, whether you live by it or die—(II. 21).
Proposition IV. (I. 10–13).—Of present parliaments and governments you have mainly to enquire what they want with your money when they demand it. And that you may do this intelligently, you are to remember that only a certain quantity of money exists at any given time, and that your first business must be to ascertain the available amount of it, and what it is available for. Because you do not put more money into rich people’s hands, when you succeed in putting into rich people’s heads that they want something to-day which they had no occasion for yesterday. What they pay you for one thing, they cannot for another; and if they now spend their incomes, they can spend no more. Which you will find they do, and always have done, and can, in fact, neither spend more, nor less—this income being indeed the quantity of food their land produces, by which all art and all manufacture must be supported, and of which no art or manufacture, except such as are directly and wisely employed on the land, can produce a morsel.
Proposition V. (II. 4).—You had better take care of your squires. Their land, indeed, only belongs to them, or is said to belong, because they seized it long since by force of hand, (compare the quotation from Professor Fawcett at p. xix. of the preface to ‘Munera Pulveris,’) and you may think you have precisely the same right to seize it now, for yourselves, if you can. So you have,—precisely the same right,—that is to say, none. As they had no right to seize it then, neither have you now. The land, by divine right, can be neither theirs nor yours, except under conditions which you will not ascertain by fighting. In the meantime, by the law of England, the land is theirs; and your first duty as Englishmen is to obey the law of England, be it just or unjust, until it is by due and peaceful deliberation altered, if alteration of it be needful; and to be sure that you are able and willing to obey good laws, before you seek to alter unjust ones (II. 21). For you cannot know whether they are unjust or not until you are just yourselves. Also, your race of squires, considered merely as an animal one, is very precious; and you had better see what use you can make of it, before you let it fall extinct, like the Dodo’s. For none other such exists in any part of this round little world; and, once destroyed, it will be long before it develops itself again from Mr. Darwin’s germ-cells.
Proposition VI. (V. 21).—But, if you can, honestly, you had better become minute squires yourselves. The law of England nowise forbids your buying any land which the squires are willing to part with, for such savings as you may have ready. And the main proposal made to you in this book is that you should so economize till you can indeed become diminutive squires, and develope accordingly into some proportionate fineness of race.
Proposition VII. (II. 5).—But it is perhaps not equally necessary to take care of your capitalists, or so-called ‘Employers.’ For your real employer is the public; and the so-called employer is only a mediator between the public and you, whose mediation is perhaps more costly than need be, to you both. So that it will be well for you to consider how far, without such intervention, you may succeed in employing yourselves; and my seventh proposition is accordingly that some of you, and all, in some proportion, should be diminutive capitalists, as well as diminutive squires, yet under a novel condition, as follows:—
Proposition VIII.—Observe, first, that in the ancient and hitherto existent condition of things, the squire is essentially an idle person who has possession of land, and lends it, but does not use it; and the capitalist is essentially an idle person, who has possession of tools, and lends them, but does not use them; while the labourer, by definition, is a laborious person, and by presumption, a penniless one, who is obliged to borrow both land and tools; and paying, for rent on the one, and profit on the other, what will maintain the squire and capitalist, digs finally a remnant of roots, wherewith to maintain himself.
These may, in so brief form, sound to you very radical and international definitions. I am glad, therefore, that (though entirely accurate) they are not mine, but Professor Fawcett’s. You will find them quoted from his ‘Manual of Political Economy’ at the eleventh page of my eleventh letter. He does not, indeed, in the passage there quoted, define the capitalist as the possessor of tools, but he does so quite clearly at the end of the fable quoted in I. 18,—“The plane is the symbol of all capital,” and the paragraph given in XI. 11, is, indeed, a most faithful statement of the present condition of things, which is, practically, that rich people are paid for being rich, and idle people are paid for being idle, and busy people taxed for being busy. Which does not appear to me a state of matters much longer tenable; but rather, and this is my 8th Proposition (XI. 13), that land should belong to those who can use it, and tools to those who can use them; or, as a less revolutionary, and instantly practicable, proposal, that those who have land and tools—should use them.