CHAPTER II THE MOTIVES OF THE EXCEPTIONAL WEALTH-PRODUCER
In spite of their frequent forgetfulness of the fact just insisted on, that the development and exercise of exceptional faculties can be secured only through the influence of some exceptional motive, this is not a fact which socialists theoretically deny. On the contrary, often as they forget it, with curious consequences to their reasoning, yet just as often, when they happen to be directly confronted with it, they are loud in declaring that they recognise it quite as clearly as their opponents; and a considerable portion of their more modern writings consists of a setting forth of the various exceptional rewards which will, according to them, in the socialistic State, elicit from exceptional men the exercise of their utmost powers. Moreover, the rewards on which the socialists principally insist are rewards, the desire of which is admitted by all parties to be an actual force in society as at present constituted, and in fact to have been, ever since the dawn of history, the motive to which much activity of the highest kind {285} has been due. These rewards have been defined in a recent Handbook of Socialism as the pleasure of “excelling,” “the joy in creative work,” the satisfaction which work for others brings to “the instincts of benevolence,” and, lastly, “social approval,” or the homage which is called “honour.”
If the socialists, however, confined themselves to maintaining that the desire of such rewards as these constitutes a sufficient motive to exceptional activity of certain kinds, they would not only be asserting what nobody else would deny, but they would be putting forward nothing which, as socialists, it is their interest to assert. The ultimate proposition which, as socialists, they aim at establishing is not that certain kinds of exceptional men do certain kinds of exceptional things, in obedience to the motives in question; but that because some exceptional men, endowed with certain temperaments, are motived by them to activities of certain specific kinds, other exceptional men will be motived by them with equal certainty to other activities of a kind totally different—and more especially to the activities which result in the production of wealth.
Here is the fundamental point on which the socialists join issues with their opponents. Their opponents, they say, assume that the sole reward or advantage, the desire of which will stimulate the monopolists of “business ability” to exert that ability in the production and augmentation of wealth, is a share of wealth for themselves proportionate to the amount produced by them—an {286} amount which will separate their lot from that of the majority of their fellows. Now if this should be really the case, as the socialists are coming to perceive, the fact would be fatal to the entire ideal of socialism. They are consequently now directing the best of their ingenuity to showing that the desire of possessing exceptional wealth is altogether superfluous as a motive for producing it, and that the great producers of it, when all chance of possessing it is taken from them, will find in the pleasures of the strain which the productive process necessitates—especially if these are supplemented by the inexpensive thanks of the community—a more powerful inducement to exertion than is the prospect of the largest fortune.
Now in endeavouring to make this peculiar position good, it is evident that the burden of proof lies with the socialists themselves; for although the doctrine that all exceptional exertions in wealth-production are motived solely by an avidity for exceptional wealth as such—and this is the doctrine which the socialists set themselves to controvert—is a very imperfect rendering of what their opponents actually maintain, it embodies an assertion which the socialists themselves declare to have been true of all exceptional exertion in wealth-production hitherto. No one declares this more passionately and more persistently than they. For what, as political agitators, has been their chief moral indictment against the typical great men of industry—the organisers of labour, the introducers of new {287} machinery, the pioneers of commerce? Their chief moral indictment has been this: that these men, instead of labouring for their fellows, or for the sake of any of those rewards which the socialists declare to be so satisfying, have been motived solely by the passion of selfish “greed.” Its hideous influence, they say, is as old as civilisation itself, and the “monopolists of business ability” in Tyre and Sidon were as much its creatures as are their modern representatives in Chicago. And this assertion, unlike many made by the socialists, has the merit of being, so far as it goes, true. Greed, of course, is a word which, in addition to its direct meaning, carries with it an accretion of moral insult; but putting aside this, it means in the present connection merely a desire on the part of the great wealth-producer to enjoy an amount of wealth proportionate to the amount produced by him: and from the dawn of civilisation up to the present time all great wealth-producers, whether merchants, manufacturers, or inventors, have had the desire of enjoying such wealth as their motive. The desire has been connected with the activity just as universally and closely as the desire of water is connected with the act of drinking it, or the desire of winning a woman with the act of making love to her. If the socialists, then, would persuade us that a motive so universal as this can be now superseded by others of an entirely opposite character, they can do so only by adducing the clearest evidence that, on the one hand, this motive itself is losing its old power, and {288} that other motives, on the other hand, are actually acquiring and exercising it.
Let us first, then, consider the passion of greed itself, and ask whether there is anything in its connection with wealth-production hitherto which may lead us to think that in spite of its universality in the past, it is merely a transitory propensity from which exceptional men will free themselves, instead of being a propensity rooted in the very constitution of human nature.
And here again the socialists will be amongst our most important witnesses; for just as they, of all writers and thinkers, have done most to call attention to the fact that up to the present time greed has been the main motive by which the exceptional wealth-producers have been actuated, so they, of all writers and thinkers, have done most to call attention to another fact as well, which shows the motive in question to be as permanent as it is universal. For that very desire of the producer to possess what he himself produces, which, when found in the exceptional man, they denounce as greed, and which they tell us that the exceptional man will get rid of in the course of a year or two, is the very desire which, as existing in the common man, they have assumed to be the foundation of his whole industrial character; and to it have all their most fervid and powerful appeals been made. The socialists, in their attempts to excite the masses against the existing order, have relied less on rhetorical declarations that the labouring man gets {289} very little, than on the quasi-scientific assertion that he gets less than he produces, and that consequently the wealth of his employers is merely his own wealth stolen from him. “All wealth is due to labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is due” has formed from the first, and still forms the text from which the socialists always preach when addressing the labouring classes; and the use of this text as the watchword of popular agitation is obviously an admission that, as a producing agent, man is motived so exclusively by the desire to possess what he produces, or else its fair equivalent, that he naturally resents the idea of producing anything merely in order that others may take it away from him. Indeed, this doctrine that the desire for the product, and the producer’s sense that he has a right to it, form the only motive for production possible for a free man, formed the unquestioned basis of the entire socialistic psychology so long as the theory of Marx was held by the socialists to be unassailable, according to which wealth was the product of average labour, and the common or average labourer was the sole true producer. It was only as time went on, and the socialists were slowly compelled to recognise the few to be producers of wealth just as truly as the many, that the socialists began their attempts to get rid of the doctrine which a very little while ago they regarded as axiomatic—the doctrine that each producer has a right to his own products, and that his hope of possessing it is his principal motive for its {290} production. In making these attempts, however, they have, with a judicious eclecticism, been content to apply them to the exceptional man only; and the common man and his motives they leave undisturbed, except when they venture on the doctrine that the common man’s motive for production will in the future be the desire of possessing, not only all that he produces, but all that he produces and a great deal else besides.
If, then, it is unlikely that this desire to possess the product will cease to be operative as the motive to production amongst the masses, that it will cease to be operative amongst the few is more unlikely still; for the man who is possessed of average powers only, cannot hope to produce more than the average man requires, and his object in producing tends to represent itself to his mind in terms of the comfort which he hopes to experience, rather than in terms of the value of products which he hopes to possess. But the exceptional man, whose peculiarity as a producer is this, that he produces not only as much as the average man requires, but an indefinite amount in addition to it, is constantly balancing his products not with his immediate wants, but with the amount of intellectual effort which he has expended in the process of production. Indeed, the more closely we consider the matter, the more strongly we shall be convinced that the desire of possessing wealth proportionate to the amount produced by them becomes as a motive to production stronger in men, not {291} weaker, in exact proportion as their productive powers are great, and the amount produced by them appeals to their intellects rather than to their necessities.
So far, then, as a study of this motive itself can inform us, the socialistic idea that it will ever cease to be paramount has no foundation whatever, and is contradicted even by the socialists themselves. The only fact connected with this motive directly which wears so much as a semblance of serious evidence in their favour is the fact often dwelt on by emotional writers like Mr. Kidd, that many men who have made enormous fortunes have given away a large part of them for what he calls “altruistic” purposes; and writers of the kind in question take this fact for evidence that the desire of possessing great wealth is ceasing to be the motive for producing it. But those who allow themselves to argue thus, show a curious carelessness in their examination of human action; for the fact referred to, so far as it proves anything, negatives rather than supports the conclusion they seek to draw from it. It is perfectly true that many men of great industrial ability have produced large fortunes and given them away afterwards. But in order to give, a man must first possess; and it is in the act of giving magnificently for some specified purpose that many men most fully realise the power with which wealth endows them. Thus the fact that many men will produce in order that they may have the delight of giving is no more a proof that they would produce under the régime of {292} socialism, which would aim at depriving them of anything that they might possibly give, than the fact that a man would with pleasure give five shillings to a beggar is a proof that he would be equally pleased if the beggar were to pick his pocket. Even the men who produce wealth—and no doubt there are such—without any conscious sense that they produce it because of their desire to possess it, would show that such was their motive by their instinctive and indignant refusal to go on producing it, if they knew that it would be forcibly taken from them.
And now, since we have seen that “greed” as a motive to wealth-production shows no internal tendency to lose its old efficiency, let us turn to those other motives which the socialists tell us are to supersede it, and ask whether there is anything in their known operations hitherto which indicates that in the domain of wealth-production they will acquire an efficiency similar to it. This is not an inquiry which is very difficult to pursue, for the motives in question are of a very familiar kind, and the kinds of activity which they have produced hitherto are notorious.