◆¹ So much, then, being admitted, we shall make our calculations best by starting with the family as our unit, and coming to the individual afterwards. The average family consists of four and a half persons; and the families in the United Kingdom number eight and a half millions. Twelve hundred millions—the sum we have to divide—would give each family an income of a hundred and forty pounds. From this, however, we should have to deduct taxes; and, since if all classes were equal, all would have to be taxed equally,—the amount due from each family would be considerable. Public expenditure, if the State directed everything, would of necessity be larger than it is at present; but even if we assume that it would remain at its present figure, each family would have to contribute at least sixteen pounds.[6] Therefore sixteen pounds must be deducted from the hundred and forty pounds. Accordingly we have for four and a half persons a net income of a hundred and twenty-six pounds. Now these persons would be found to consist on an average of a man and his wife, a youth, a girl, and a half of a baby,—for when we deal with averages we must execute many judgments like Solomon’s,—and if we distribute the income among them in the proportion I just now indicated, the result we shall arrive at will, in round numbers, be this. ◆² The man will have fifty pounds, the woman thirty-six pounds, the youth twenty-five pounds, the girl twenty-four pounds, and the half of the infant five pounds. And now let us scrutinise the result a little further, and see how it looks in various familiar lights. An equal distribution of the whole wealth of the country would give every adult male about nineteen shillings and sixpence a week, and every adult female about fourteen shillings. These sums would, however, be free of taxes; so in order to compare them with the wages paid at present, we must add to them two shillings and sixpence and two shillings respectively, which will raise them respectively to twenty-two shillings, and to sixteen shillings: ◆³ but a bachelor who is earning the former sum now, or an unmarried woman who is now earning the latter, would neither of them, under any scheme of equal distribution conceivable, come in for a penny of the plunder taken from the rich. They already are receiving all that, on principles of equality, they could claim.
The smallness of this result is likely to startle anybody; but none the less is it true: and it is well to consider it carefully, because the reason why it startles us requires to be particularly noticed. Of the female population of the country that is above fifteen years old, the portion that works for wages is not so much as a half;[7] and of the married women that do so, the portion is much smaller. The remainder work, no doubt, quite as hard as the rest; but they work as wives and mothers; and whatever money they have comes to them through their husbands. Thus when the ordinary man considers the question of income, he regards income as something which belongs exclusively to the man, his wife and his children being things which the man maintains as he pleases. But the moment the principle of equality of distribution is accepted, all such ideas as these have to be rudely changed: for if all of us have a claim to an equal share of wealth, just as the common man’s claim is as good as that of the uncommon man, so the woman’s claim is as good as the claim of either; and whatever her income might be under such conditions, it would be hers in her own right, not in that of anybody else. Accordingly it happens that an equal distribution of wealth, though it would increase the present income of the ordinary working man’s family, might actually, so far as the head of the family was concerned, have the paradoxical result of making him feel that personally he was poorer than before—not richer.[8]
◆1 The highest possible standard of living would be represented by a man and wife without children.
◆¹ The man’s personal share, then, would be twenty-two shillings a week, and the woman’s sixteen shillings; and they could increase their income in no way except by marrying. As many of their expenses would be greatly diminished by being shared, they would by this arrangement both be substantial gainers: but if the principle of equality were properly carried out, they would gain very little further by the appearance of children; for though we must assume that a certain suitable sum would be paid them by the State for the maintenance of each child, that would have to be spent for the child’s benefit. We may, therefore, say that the utmost results which could possibly be secured to the individual by a general confiscation and a general redistribution of wealth, would be represented by the condition of a childless man and wife, with thirty-eight shillings a week, which they could spend entirely on themselves: for all the wealth of the nation that was not absorbed in supplying such incomes to men and women who were childless, would be absorbed in supporting the children of those who had them; thus merely equalising the conditions of large and of small families, and enabling the couple with ten or a dozen children to be personally as well off as the couple with none. Could such a condition of wellbeing be made universal, many of the darkest evils of civilisation would no doubt disappear: but it is well for a man who imagines that the masses of this country are kept by unjust laws out of the possession of some enormous heritage, to see how limited would be the result, if the laws were to give them everything; and to reflect that the largest income that would thus be assigned to any woman, would be less than the income enjoyed at the present moment by multitudes of unmarried girls who work in our Midland mills—girls whose wages amount to seventeen shillings a week, who pay their parents a shilling a day for board, and who spend the remainder, with a most charming taste, on dress.
He will have to reflect also that such a result as has been just described could be produced only by an equality that would be absolutely grotesque in its completeness—by every male being treated as equal to every other male of the same age, and by every female being treated similarly. The prime minister, the commander-in-chief, the most important State official, would thus, if they were unmarried, be poorer than many a factory-girl is at present; whilst if they were married, they and their wives together would have but four shillings a week more than is at present earned by a mason, and six shillings a week less than is earned by an overlooker in a cotton-mill.
◆1 Absolute pecuniary equality, however, is not thought possible by anybody;
◆2 As the salaries asked for Members of Parliament by the Labour Party show.
◆¹ But an equality of this kind, from a practical point of view, is worth considering only as a means of reducing it to an absurdity. Even were it established to-morrow, it could not be maintained for a month, owing to the difficulty that would arise in connection with the question of children: as unless a State official checked the weekly bills of every parent, parents inevitably would save out of their children’s allowances; and those with many children would be very soon founding fortunes. And again it is obvious that different kinds of occupation require from those engaged in them unequal expenditures; so that the inevitable inequality of needs would make pecuniary equality impossible. Indeed every practical man in our own country owns this, however extreme his views; ◆² as is evidenced by the amounts which have been suggested by the leaders of the Labour Party as a fit salary for a paid Member of Parliament. These amounts vary from three hundred pounds a year to four hundred pounds; so that the unmarried Member of Parliament, in the opinion of our most thoroughgoing democrats, deserves an income from six to eight times as great as the utmost income possible for the ordinary unmarried man. And there are many occupations which will, if this be admitted, deserve to be paid on the same or on even a higher scale. We may therefore take it for granted that the most levelling politicians in the country, with whom it is worth while to reason as practical and influential men, would spare those incomes not exceeding four hundred pounds a year, and would probably increase the number of those between that amount and a hundred and fifty pounds. Now the total amount of the incomes between these limits is not far from two hundred million pounds: so if this be deducted from the twelve hundred million pounds which we just now took as the sum to be divided equally, the incomes of the people at large will be less by sixteen per cent than the sums at which they were just now estimated; and the standard of average comfort will be represented by a childless man and wife having thirty-one shillings and eightpence instead of thirty-eight shillings a week.
◆1 General redistribution, then, is not thought possible by any English party;
◆2 But it is still instructive to consider the theoretical results of it.