Readings.—Ar., Pol., II., v., nn. 1-16; De Lugo, De just. et jure, vi., nn. 2-6; ib., xxi,, nn. 143, 144; Locke, Of Civil Government, c.v.; id., Of Government, nn. 88, 89.
SECTION II.—Of Private Capital.
1. Reverting to a former section (c. v., s. v., nn. 1-5, p. 255) we lay down this distinction: Goods held for their use value are consumer's wealth: goods held for their market value are producer's wealth, otherwise called capital. Capital then is that wealth which a man holds for the purpose of gaining further wealth by means of commercial exchange. It is represented by the razors that are made, not to mow the manly beard, or youthful moustache, of the maker, but, as the Yorkshire vendor put it, "to sell."
2. Those economists who would allow no private ownership of capital, but would have all capital to be State property, are called Socialists. They stand distinctly apart from the Communists, whom we have been labouring to refute in the last section. The Communist forbids all private property: the Socialist allows private property, but in the shape of consumer's wealth alone. The Communist ignores the necessity of labour: the Socialist schemes to make all men work. The Communist contemplates a hand-to-mouth dispensation of all things: the Socialist locks all things up, wages in private coffers, capital in government stores. The Communist is a madman: the speculations of the Socialist are sometimes deep.
3. To what are we to attribute the rise of Socialism, and its growth and propagation so fast and vigorous, that, its supporters say with some colour of evidence, it is a theory destined within a measurable space of time to pass into actual practice, whether men will or no? The cause is not far to seek. There has lighted a plague upon all civilized countries, an outbreak fearful and severe: only by the great blessing of Providence, joined to drastic remedial measures on our part, can we cope with the evil. The plague is a cancerous formation of luxury growing out of a root of pauperism. It is a disease old as the world, but the increase of commerce and intercommunication has occasioned its bursting upon our generation in a peculiarly virulent form. And what is more, ours being a talking age, the disease is made the staple of speeches infinite, and the masses are clamouring for a remedy. The remedy proposed is Socialism.
4. Socialism in its essence is an attempt to transfer to the State, governed by universal suffrage, the wealth, and with the wealth the social duties, of what have hitherto been the wealthy and governing classes. It is not enough for the multitude that they are getting the political power out of the hands of the landlord and the capitalist: they envy the one his broad acres, and the other his investments. All must be theirs, sovereignty and wealth alike. If wealth has its duties, the people collectively with cheerful acceptance will undertake those duties. "It shall be ours, not only to be king, but to be employer, patron, landlord, educator. We will assign to the workman his wages, just and ample and perennial: we will adjust production to demand: we will be the restorers of agriculture: we will monopolise the carrying-trade: we alone will sell whatever shall be sold: we will wash the workman in public baths: his taste shall be elevated by our statues and pictures, our theatres, our music-halls, and our churches; we will gratify his curiosity with our news-agencies, feed his thought with our popular philosophy, educate his children as our own in our primary and secondary schools. Furthermore, we will provide the long desiderated career open to talents. The stupid boy, though his father was our Prime Minister, shall be made a cabin-boy, or a scavenger's assistant, an awful example to young gentlemen who fail to pass the Government examinations: while we will pick up, not the gutter child, for there shall be no more children in gutters, but the son of the woman at the mill, and testing him and assigning his career, first by school examinations, and then by his official performances, we will make him in time Poet Laureate or President of the Board of Trade, according to the bent of his genius." The astonished workman turns round upon the exhibitors of this fairy vision: "And pray who are You?" "Oh, you, we, the people, all of us together. Come put your shoulder to the wheel, and up goes our enterprise. Or rather our first motion is downwards: down with landlords and cotton-lords and lords of parliament, down with contractors and stock-jobbers and all who live on the interest of their money, and then our honourable multitude will possess and administer and govern."
5. If angels are to hold the collective ownership of capital and the government of men in the Socialist Commonwealth; or if every citizen, retaining in his private capacity all the follies and vices that human flesh is heir to, shall still be vested in angelic attributes, whenever he sits as legislator or judge, or acts on the executive of a Socialist commission,—then this new Commonwealth is likely to prove a blessed substitute for the rule of the higher classes, which in one way or another has hitherto obtained in civilized society. But till angelic attributes descend on earth, we shall not find a cure for the evils of cities and countries in simply doubling the functions of government, and placing all sovereign rights, and all the most important of proprietory rights and duties, in the hands of a numerical majority.
6. Capital, as we have seen, is a collection of market or exchange values in view of further exchange. If we call supply S and demand D, market value is a social estimate of the fraction D/S. Another definition has been given: Market value is a social estimate of the amount of socially useful labour which a given article contains. This second definition contains this much of truth in it, that directly as the demand for an article, and inversely as the supply of the same, is the amount of labour which men find it worth their while to spend upon that article for commercial purposes. Otherwise the definition is unsatisfactory and involved, and leads to endless discussion. Without entering into these discussions, we will remark an ambiguity in the term on which they all roll, the term labour, which ambiguity is at the bottom of three fourths of the sophistries of popular Socialism.
7. There were two pillars put at the entrance of Solomon's temple, one on the right hand and the other on the left: that which was on the right hand he called, according to the Septuagint, Direction, [Greek: katorthosis], and that on the left hand, Strength, [Greek: ischus]. (2 Par. iii. 17.) Further we are told that Solomon set seventy thousand men to carry burdens on their shoulders, and eighty thousand to hew stones in the mountains, and three thousand six hundred to be overseers of the work of the people. (2 Par. ii. 18.) The history is manifest. Strength and Direction build the Temple: Strength, or Manual Labour, represented by the hodmen and quarrymen, and the rest of the "hands:" Direction, or Mental Labour, represented by the overseers. Yet not by them alone: surely we must count in as doers of mental labour the designer of the Temple, or at least of its decorations, that "most wise and skilful man, my father Hiram;" and still more King Solomon himself and David, the two royal minds that originated and perfected the idea; and David's generals, Joab and Banaias, who secured the peace that was necessary as a condition of the building; and innumerable other men of place and power in the nation, but for whose thought and prudence the strength of the workman would have been thrown away like a river poured out in the Libyan desert. From this example, eked out with a little thought of his own, the reader may estimate the wisdom and credit of those who tell factory hands that it is their labour which produces all the wealth of their employer, and that, in the day when every man shall receive his due, the employer shall be made a workmen like themselves, and his wealth shall go to the increase of their common wages.
8. Certainly, it will be said, the employer should be paid for his mental labour, but why at so enormously higher a rate than the manual labourers? If we say, "because his labour is more valuable," some Socialists would join issue on the score that labour is valuable according to the time that it takes, and the employer works shorter hours than his men. But this taking account of quantity alone in labour is an ignoring of the distinction which we have drawn of two qualities or orders of labour, mental and manual; one more valuable than the other as being scarcer and in greater demand, so that a short time of one may be set against a long time of another, like a little gold against a heap of brass. Any man accustomed to both orders of labour must have observed, that while he can work with his hands at almost any time when he is well, the highest labour of his intellect can be done only at rare intervals, and that in one happy hour he will sometimes accomplish more than in a day. As the same man differs from himself at different times, so does one man from another in the average value of his mental efforts: this value is not measured by time.