The Unpopular Review Vol. I / January-June 1914

by Various

All this is now accepted doctrine among those entitled to opinions, but as already intimated, the ignorance of it among even people of good general intelligence is astounding, while the laboring classes and their leaders shut their eyes to it. No man of inferior fortune likes to admit, as this principle asks him to, that the inferiority is in himself. And small blame to him for his reluctance.

Yet to state what is usually and normally the source of wealth, is not to claim that individual wealth never has any other source, or to deny that it is often increased by taking an undue advantage of inferior capacity, and by monopoly and sundry other forms of disguised robbery. But that wealth is generally the result of pillage, and not of invention, good management and other good forces, is probably the worst and most destructive fallacy ever preached.

This destructive fallacy has seriously exaggerated the estimates of the injustices and robberies on the part of employers; and in the attempt to curb them, it has been busy for many years in impeding good management, and has cost Labor terribly in unjustifiable strikes. This, however, is by no means saying that there are no justifiable strikes. They are inevitably a part of the present irrepressible conflict, but its bitterness and cruelties are largely fed by a general feeling that wealth generally has been accumulated at the expense of the poor, when the truth is that generally, though not always, it has been accumulated to their profit.

Yet it is far from plain how the man who tugs and sweats should justly have little, while the man who does not tug and sweat should justly have much. The man who tugs and sweats saw his own hands make, or extract from the earth or the forests or the fields, or transport or exchange what the other man has, and no one saw the hands of the man who has it, do anything. Naturally, then, the man who has it not, thinks that the man who has it, stole it—that it belongs to the man who handled it. And he is going to take it.

But he is not going to take it by force: robbery he feels to be wrong. He is going to take it "by due process of law"—by his vote: the law has given him a vote, and the law is justice itself. As he is in various ways permitted to vote away other people's possessions to his own use, he takes it for granted that he has a moral as well as a legal right to do so to any extent, and is full of schemes to that end. But the law has also given the other man the property and the means of holding onto it. Here is another outcrop of the Irrepressible Conflict: the law is in conflict with itself. The conflict must be reconciled: the man who wants the property must elect legislators and judges who will change the law so the other man cannot get the property away from the man who makes it with his own hands, and cannot hold on to what he has already got of it.

At the outset, and to a certain extent, he is right: for to a certain extent the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number is unquestionably in conflict with the principle suum cuique. The problem in each case is to draw the line between these opposing forces.

Most of the expenses for public education, museums, parks, public concerts, and even making, lighting and policing streets, and of the courts and jails, have long been paid by taxpayers mainly for the benefit of non-taxpayers, and no one wishes these expenses stopped. To the education in the common schools are now being added medical supervision, care of the eyes, dentistry, lunches, transportation to and fro. These things are not done for the children of the people who pay most of the money for them.

In still other ways, however, the poor man is increasing through law his facilities for using the accumulations of the rich man. As already indicated, we are just entering upon a system of income taxation where there is not a pretence of making the poor man pay, or even the man of moderately comfortable means; the poor man has had numerous statutes passed relieving from the penalties of the common law, his conspiracies to cripple the rich man's business if the poor man's demands are not granted; and he has lately had wage-earners and farmers exempted from the prosecutions under a fund for punishing conspiracies in restraint of trade. How far can we continue along the same road before we shall find legislation exempting the man in need, or even fancied need, from any constraint against taking what he wants wherever he can find it? That legislation has now entered upon that road seems obvious. Where is it going to stop, and what is going to stop it?

Are wage-earners and farmers going to be more definitely arrayed against the rest of the community? We incline to think not, because the farmer, as a rule, has property to protect, and although this legislation is in favor of his annual income, it cannot go much farther—especially in distributing favors elsewhere—without attacking his accumulations. Moreover it seems impossible that there should be a long continuance of the present degree of oblivion to the desirability of having every man feel his interest in government, through some degree of the pinch of taxation.