Machine-capital, then—or capital in its typical modern form—consists of productive forces which are usable by, and which indeed exist for, the human race at large, because, and only because, they have been captured and imprisoned in implements by the efforts of exceptional men, whose energy thus exercised is perpetuated, and can be lent to others; and what these men receive as interest from those by whom their energy is borrowed, is a something ultimately due to the energy of the lenders themselves—nor is this fact in any way altered by lapse of time. Thus, so far as these special men are concerned, the alleged difference between earned income and unearned altogether disappears; and if one man lives in luxury for sixty years on the interest of an invention which it took him but a month to perfect, while another man every day has to toil for his daily bread, the difference between the two consists not in the fact that the one man works for his bread and the other man does nothing for it, but in the fact that the work of one produces more in a day than that of the other would do in a hundred lifetimes.
Here, however, we shall be met with two important objections. In the first place, it will no doubt have occurred to many readers that throughout the foregoing discussion we have assumed that the persons who receive interest on machinery are in all cases the persons by whom the machinery was invented and produced. To the actual inventors and producers it may, indeed, be conceded that the interest which they themselves receive has been earned by their own exertions; but no such concession, it will be said, can be made to these men's heirs. An Edison or a Bessemer may have produced whatever income has come to him in his latest years from the inventive efforts of his earliest; but if such a man has a son to whom this income descends—a half-witted degenerate who squanders it on wine and women, who will not work with his hands and who cannot work with his head—no one can pretend that, in any sense of the word, a fool like this produces any fraction of the thousands that he consumes. And though all of those who live on the interest of inherited capital are not foolish nor vicious, yet in this respect they are all of them in the same position—they have not produced their incomes, and so have no moral right to them.
In the second place, the following argument, which was discussed in an earlier chapter, will also be brought forward, refurbished for the present occasion. Let us grant, it will be said, that the inventions which have enriched the world were originally due to the talents of exceptional men, and that without these exceptional men the world would never have possessed them; but when once they have been made, and their powers seen in operation, the human race at large can, if left to itself, take over these powers from the inventors just as the inventors took them over from nature. Indeed, this constantly happens. Any boy with a turning-lathe can to-day make a model steam-engine, and no one will contend that such a model was not made by himself, on the ground that it could not have been made either by him or by anybody unless Watt, with his exceptional genius, had invented steam as a motive-power. One might as well contend that a savage does not really light his own fire, on the ground that the art of kindling wood was found out by Prometheus, and that no one, except for him, would have had any fires at all. The truth is, it will be said, that in such cases as these the powers of the exceptional man, originally confined to himself, are, when his invention is once in practical operation, naturally shared by his fellows, who can only be restrained from using them by artificial devices such as patents—these devices being at best, from a moral point of view, devices by which one man who has given a cheque to another man steals back half the money as soon as the cheque is cashed.
Now, both these arguments, so far as they go, are true; but neither has any bearing on the problem which is now before us. That problem arises—let me observe once more—out of the assumption that, as a matter of justice, every man has a right to the products of all such forces as are his own; whence it follows that nobody has a right to the products of any forces which are not definitely in himself. Let us take, then, the latter of the above arguments first. It would doubtless be absurd to contend, were Prometheus alive to-day, that because he invented the art of striking fire from flints he ought to be paid a tribute by every savage who boiled a kettle; for the savage can strike a flint as well as Prometheus himself could. But if fire could be kindled only by a particular sort of match which Prometheus alone could make, the fact that he was really the lighter of all fires would be obvious, and his claim to a payment in respect of the lighting of every one of them would be as sound as the claim of the lighter of street-lamps to his wages. If "Man and Superman" were not a play, but a hoot, which Mr. Shaw had invented in order to call attention to himself, and which any street boy could imitate with the same results, it would be idle for Mr. Shaw to claim a right to royalties from the street boys; but it would be idle only because it would not be possible to collect them. He is able to collect them on his play because, and only because, his play exists in a form which is susceptible of legal protection. If in justice he has a right to these, as he no doubt has, he would, if abstract justice were the sole determining factor, have an equal right to royalties on the use of his peculiar hoot. He fails to have any such right because, as a matter of fact, the principle of abstract justice with which we are here concerned—that every one has a right to everything that he himself produces—has, in common with all abstract moral principles whatsoever, no application to cases in which, from the nature of things, it is wholly impossible to enforce it.
And the same criticism is applicable to the other argument before us, which admits that a man who invents a productive machine, or who writes a remunerative play, is, so long as he lives, entitled, because he is the true producer of them, to certain profits arising from the use of either; but adds that his rights to such profits end with his own life, and lose all sanction in justice the moment they are transferred to an heir. In the heir's hands, it is urged, they entirely change their character, and, instead of enabling a man to secure what is honestly his own, become means by which he is enabled to steal what morally belongs to others.
Now, if it is seriously contended that nobody has a right to anything which at some time or other he has not personally produced, the interest on machinery, as soon as the inventor dies, not only ought not to belong to the inventor's heir, but it ought not to belong to anybody; for if this interest is not produced by the heir, it is certainly not produced by any of the heir's contemporaries. A contention like this is absurd; there must therefore be something amiss with the premises which lead up to it. Socialists who admit that an inventor during his lifetime has a right to the interest resulting from the use of his own inventions, endeavour to solve the difficulty by maintaining that after his death both invention and interest should pass into the hands of the state; but this doctrine, on whatever grounds it may be defended, cannot be defended as based on the principle now in question, that the sole valid title to possession is personal production. It must, if it is based on any abstract moral principle at all, be based on one of a much more general kind, according to which the ultimate standard of justice is not the deeds of the individual, but the general welfare of society.
Here it is true that the appeal is still to abstract justice, but it is not an appeal to abstract justice only. In order to condemn interest on any such ground as this, it is necessary to assume or prove that to make interest illegal, or to confiscate it by taxation when it arises, or by any other means to render its enjoyment impossible, will as a matter of fact have the result desired—namely, a permanent rise in the general level of prosperity. It is only by means of an assumption of this purely practical kind that the abstract moral principle can be applied to the case at all; and thus let us approach the problem from whatever side we will, we are brought from the region of theory down into that of practice, not, indeed, by an abrupt leap, but by a gradual and necessary transition. We are not abandoning our considerations of what, in abstract justice, ought to be; but we are compelled to interpret what ought to be by considerations of what, as the result of such and such arrangements, will be.
To sum up, then, the conclusions which we have reached thus far—if we confine our attention to those recipients of interest who have themselves produced the capital from which the interest is derived, and compare such incomes with those which renew themselves only as the result of continued effort, it is absolutely impossible, on any general theory of justice, to sanction the latter as earned, and condemn the former as unearned. If, on the other hand, we turn to those whose incomes consist of interest on capital produced by, and inherited from, their fathers, and if we argue that here at all events we come to a class of interest on which its living recipients can have no justifiable claim, since we start with admitting that it originates in the efforts of the dead, our argument, though plausible in its premises, is stultified by its logical consequence; since the same principle on which we are urged as a sacred duty to take the income in question away from its present possessors, would forbid our allowing it to pass into the possession of anybody else. In short, if continued daily labour, or else the exercise of invention, or some other form of ability, at some period of their lives by persons actually living, constitutes in justice the sole right to possession, the human race as a whole has no right to profit by any productive effort on the part of past generations; but each generation ought, so far as is practicable, to start afresh in the position of naked savages. The fact that nobody would maintain a fantastic proposition like this is sufficient to show that, on the tacit admission of everybody, it is impossible to attack interest by insisting on any abstract distinction between incomes that are earned and unearned, and treating the latter as felonious, while holding the former sacred. It is equally true, however, that on such grounds alone it is no less impossible to defend interest than to attack it; and here we arrive at what is the real truth of the matter—namely, that in cases like the present the principles of ideal justice do not, indeed, give us false guidance, but give us no guidance at all, unless we take them in connection with the concrete facts of society, and estimate social arrangements as being either right or wrong by reference to the practical consequences which do, or which would result from them.
The practical aspects of the question we will discuss in the following chapter.