But the practical absurdity of the whole set of arguments urged in a contrary sense by Herbert Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the speculative sociologists generally, is brought to its climax by those modern exponents of socialism who attempt to invest them with a moral as well as an industrial significance. Thus Mr. Webb, who himself frankly recognises that the monopolists of business ability are industrially more efficient than the great mass of their fellows, and that man for man they produce incomparably more wealth, endeavours, by means of the arguments which we have been just considering, to show that though they produce it they have no moral right to keep it. The proposal, he says, that, though men are vastly unequal in productivity, they should all of them be awarded an equal share of the product—that if one man produces only one shilling, while another man produces ninety-nine, the resulting hundred should be halved and each of the men take fifty—this proposal "has," he says, "an abstract justification, as the special energy and ability with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to society as the unearned increment of rent."
Now, if this argument has any practical meaning at all, it can only mean that the men who have been born with such special powers will, as soon as they recognise what the origin of these powers is, realise that they have, as individuals, no special claims on the results of them, and will consequently become more willing than they are at the present time to continue to produce the results, though they will not be allowed to keep them. We will not insist, as we might do, on the curious want of knowledge of human nature which the argument thus put forward by Mr. Webb and other socialists betrays. It will be enough to point out that, if it applies to the monopolists of business ability, it applies with equal force to all other sorts of men whatever. If it is to society as a whole that the able man owes his energy, his talents, and the products of them, it is to society as a whole that the idle man owes his idleness, the stupid man his stupidity, and the dishonest man his dishonesty; and if the able man, who produces an exceptional amount of wealth, can with justice claim no more than the average man who produces little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing anything may with equal justice claim as much wealth as either. His constitutional fault, and his constitutional disinclination to mend it, are both of them due to society, and society, not he, must suffer.
If we attempted to organise a community in accordance with such a conclusion as this, we should be getting rid of all connection between conduct and the natural results of it, and divorcing action from motive altogether. Such is the conclusion to which Mr. Webb's argument would lead us; and the absurdity of the argument, as applied by him to moral claims and merits, though more self-evident, is not any more complete than the absurdity of similar arguments as applied to the individual generally in respect of his productive powers, and the amount of produce produced by them. The whole conception, in short, of the individual as merged in the aggregate has no relation to practical life whatever. For the practical man the individual is always a unit; and it is only as a unit that it is possible practically to deal with him. We may change him in some respects by changing his general conditions, as we hope to do by legislation which aims at the diminution of drunkenness; but a change in general conditions, if it diminished drunkenness generally, would do so only because it affected at the same time the isolated minds and organisms of a number of individual drunkards.
And to do Mr. Webb and his brother socialists justice, they unconsciously admit all this themselves; for, as soon as they set themselves to discuss the motives of the able man in detail, they altogether abandon the irrelevancies of speculative sociology with which they manage at other times to bemuse themselves. That such is the case we shall see in the following chapter. I will, however, anticipate what we shall see there by mentioning that among the motives which are in the socialistic future to replace, among able men, the desire of economic gain, one of the chief is to be the desire of moral approbation. Unless a man's actions, whether industrial or moral, are to be treated as his own, instead of being attributed to his conditions, he would have as little right to the praise which it is proposed to give him as he would have to the dollars which it is proposed to take away.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] I first made this criticism of Spencer in my work Aristocracy and Evolution. On that occasion Mr. Spencer wrote to me, complaining with much vehemence that I had misrepresented him; and he repeated the substance of his letter in a subsequent published essay. My criticism dealt, and could have dealt only, not with what he meant, but what he said; and certainly in his language—and, as I think, in his own mind—there was a constant confusion between the two truths in question. Apart, however, from what he considered to be my own misrepresentation of himself, he declared that he entirely agreed with me; and that "great men" must, for practical purposes, be regarded as the true causes of such changes as they initiate.
CHAPTER IX
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED.
ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE
The fact that the speculative arguments which we have just now been discussing are not only irrelevant to the problem of the able man and his motives, but are tacitly abandoned as being so by the very men who have urged them, when they come to deal specifically with that problem themselves, may suggest to some readers that so long a discussion of them was superfluous. But though the socialists abandon them at the very moment when, if ever, they ought to be susceptible of some definite application, they abandon them quite unconsciously, and still continue to attach to them some solemn importance. Such being the case, then, the more futile these arguments are the stronger is the light thrown by them on the peculiar intellectual weakness which distinguishes even the most capable of those who think it worth their while to employ them. For this reason, therefore, if for no other, our examination of them will have proved useful, for it will have prepared us to encounter a weakness of precisely the same kind in the reasonings of the socialists when they deal with motive directly.