[22] A letter was sent me by a friend in America, from a writer who, commenting on my late addresses in that country, said that in the main he entirely agreed with my arguments, as against socialism; but that he could not divest himself of the belief that labour as a whole got less than it produced, and was thus as a whole suffering a chronic wrong. He suggested, however, a method, fundamentally analogous to that set forth in the text, of computing what labour, as such, does produce in reality. He gave his own opinion as to actual facts, as an impression merely; but how misleading impressions may be can be seen from his statements "that all very great fortunes, at all events, must be derived from the underpayment of labour." Had he only considered the case in detail, he would have seen that labour received the highest wages from some of the richest employers. According to his theory the wages of labour, in such cases, would touch the minimum.
CHAPTER XIII
INTEREST AND ABSTRACT JUSTICE
The essential feature of interest, as distinct from the income due to active ability, is that while the latter ceases as soon as the able man ceases to exert himself, the former continues to replenish the recipient's pockets, though for his part he does nothing, or need do nothing, in return for it. Since, then, the possession of this particular form of income is admittedly unconnected with any concurrent exertion on the part of those possessing it (such is the argument of the objectors) the whole portion of the national wealth which, in the form of interest, is at present appropriated by the presumably or the possibly idle, might obviously be appropriated by the state, and applied to public purposes, without lessening in any way even the highest of those rewards which are due to, and are needed to stimulate any active ability whatsoever, and hence without lessening the efficiency of the wealth-producing process as a whole. If we adopt the programme which this argument suggests, it will be possible, so its advocates say, to satisfy the demands of labour by a shorter and more direct method than that of committing ourselves to an estimate of what labour actually produces, and endeavouring to secure that the total which is paid to labour shall accord with it.
Now, this programme raises two separate questions. One question is whether the proposed confiscation of interest is in reality, as its advocates maintain it to be, practicable in the sense that the disturbances which it would necessarily cause would not interfere with the production of the fund which it is desired to distribute, and so perhaps leave all classes poorer and not richer than they are. The other question is whether such a confiscation would be just. To some people this second question will possibly seem superfluous. If it can be shown, they will say, that a policy, the avowed object of which is the enrichment of the many at the expense of the relatively few, could be really carried out successfully, and if the many had the power of insisting on it, an inquiry into its abstract justice is merely a waste of time; for whenever the wolf is face to face with the lamb, it will eat up the lamb first and justify its conduct afterwards. And in this argument there is a certain amount of truth; but those who take it for the whole truth allow their own cynicism to overreach them. The fact remains that even the wolves of the human world are obliged to assume, as a kind of necessary armour, and often as their principal weapon, a semblance of justice, however they may despise the reality. The brigand chief justifies his war on society by declaring that society has unjustly made war on him. The wildest demagogues, in their appeals to popular passion, as the history of the French Revolution and of all revolutions shows us, have always been obliged to exhibit the demands of mere self-interest as based on some general theory of what is morally just or right; and however much the theory may accommodate itself to the hope of private advantage, there are few demands made for any great social change which do not derive a large part of their force from persons with whom a belief in the justice of the demands stands first, while—so far at least as their own consciousness is concerned—the prospect of personal advantage stands second or nowhere. This is certainly so in the case which we are now considering. We will, therefore, begin with the question of abstract justice.
Let us begin, then, with reminding ourselves that when interest is attacked as such, on the ground that its recipients have themselves done nothing to produce it, whereas other incomes, no matter how large, are presumably the equivalents of some personal effort which corresponds to them, it is assumed that every man has, in natural justice, a right to such wealth as he actually himself produces; and what he produces, as we saw in the last chapter, is that amount of wealth which would not have been produced at all had his efforts not been made, or been other or less intense than they have been.
Thus far, then, for the purposes of the present discussion, all parties are agreed; but the moment the assailants of interest take the next step in their argument, we shall find that their errors begin—errors resulting, as we shall see, from an imperfect analysis of facts. For them the two types of correspondence between productive effort and product are, firstly, the manual labourer, who performs some daily task such as riveting plates or bricklaying, and receives an equivalent in wages at the end of each day or week; and, secondly, the manager of some great industrial enterprise, who spends each day so many hours in his office, issuing minute directions with regard to the conduct of his subordinates, and sending his receipts to the bank as they come in from his customers. But these types, though accurate so far as they go, do but cover a part of the actual field of fact. Practically, though of course not absolutely, they ignore the element of time. They represent effort and product as being always so nearly simultaneous that, although the former must literally precede the latter, yet, if we estimate life in terms of years, or even months, or weeks, a man has ceased to produce as soon as he has ceased to work.
Now, of certain forms of effort this may be true enough. A bricklayer, for example, as soon as he ceases to lay bricks, ceases to produce anything. His wall-building closes its effects with the walls which he himself has built. It does nothing to facilitate the building of other walls in the future. Similarly such ability as consists in a gift for personal management often ends its effects, and leaves no trace behind it, as soon as the manager possessing these gifts retires.
But with many forms of ability the case is precisely opposite. The products of their exercise do not even begin to appear till after—often till long after—the exercise of the ability itself has altogether come to an end. Let us, for example, take the case of a play; and since socialists are still included among the objectors whom we have in view, let us take one of the popular plays written by Mr. Bernard Shaw. Such a play, as Mr. Shaw has publicly boasted—for otherwise I should not mention, and should know nothing of his private affairs—brings to its author wealth in the form of amazing royalties; but until it is acted it brings him no royalties at all, and the actors begin with it only when his own efforts are ended. Moreover, not only do these royalties only begin then, but having once begun, they have no tendency to exhaust themselves. On the contrary the chances are that they will go on increasing till the time arrives, if it ever does, when Mr. Shaw is no longer appreciated. Mr. Shaw, in fact, if he had written one of his most successful plays at twenty, might, so far as that play is concerned, be idle for ever afterwards, even if he lived to the age of Methuselah, and still be enjoying in royalties the product of his own exertions, though he had not exerted himself productively for some seven or eight hundred years.