Labour and the Popular Welfare

by W. H. Mallock

The fact then that the normal forces of distribution must, if things continue their present course, increase the income of the labourer, even without any action on their own part, though it is calculated to change the temper in which the labourers approach politics, is, instead of being calculated to damp their political activity, calculated to animate it with far more hope and interest than the wild denunciations and theories of the contemporary agitator, which those who applaud them do but half believe. It will to the labourer be far more encouraging to feel that the problem before him is not how to undermine a vast system which is hostile to him, and which, though often attacked, has never yet been subverted, but merely to accommodate more completely to his needs a system which has been, and is, constantly working in his favour.

◆1 Whilst as to mere wages, if the labourers will judge of the possible near future from the actual near past, the prospects before them must exceed their wildest dreams hitherto.

◆¹ Let him consider the situation well. Let him realise what that system has already done for him. In spite of the sufferings which, owing to various causes, were inflicted on the labouring classes during the earlier years of the century,—many of them of a kind whose recurrence improved policy may obviate,—the income of Labour has, on the aggregate, continued to rise steadily. Let him consider how much. I have stated this once, let me state it now again. During the first sixty years of this century the income of the labouring classes rose to such an extent that in the year 1860 it was equal (all deductions for the increase of population being made) to the income of all classes in the year 1800. But there is another fact, far more extraordinary, to follow; and that is, that a result precisely similar has been accomplished since in one-half of the time. In 1880 the income of the labouring classes was (all deductions for the increase of population being made) more than equal to the income of all classes in the year 1850. Thus the labouring classes in 1860 were in precisely the same pecuniary position as the working classes in 1800 would have been had the entire wealth of the kingdom been in their hands; and the working classes of to-day are in a better pecuniary position than their fathers would have been could they have plundered and divided between them the wealth of every rich and middle-class man at the time of the building of the first Great Exhibition. I repeat what I have said before—that this represents a progress, which the wildest Socialist would never have dreamed of promising.

And now comes what is practically the important deduction from these facts. What has happened in the near past, will, other things being equal, happen in the near future. If the same forces that have been at work since the year 1850 continue to be at work, and if, although regulated, they are not checked, the labourers of this country will in another thirty years have nearly doubled the income which they enjoy at present. Their income will have risen from something under seven hundred millions to something over thirteen hundred millions. The labourers, in fact, will, so far as money goes, be in precisely the same position as they would be to-day if, by some unheard-of miracle, the entire present income of the country were suddenly made over to them in the form of wages, and the whole of the richer classes were left starving and penniless. This is no fanciful calculation. It is simply a plain statement of what must happen, and will happen, if only the forces of production continue to operate for another thirty years as they have been operating steadily for the past hundred. Is not this enough to stimulate the labourer’s hopes, and convince him that for him the true industrial policy is one that will adjust his own relations with the existing system better, and regulate better the flow of the wealth which it promises to bring him, rather than a policy whose aim is to subvert that system altogether, and in especial to paralyse the force from which it derives its efficacy?

◆1 But the one point to remember is that all their prosperity depends on the continued action of Ability, and the best conditions being secured for its operation,

◆¹ And this brings me back to that main, that fundamental truth which it is the special object of this volume to elucidate. The force which has been at the bottom of all the labourers’ progress during the past, and on the continued action of which depends all these hopes for their future—that force is not Labour but Ability; it is a force possessed and exercised not by the many but by the few. The income which Labour receives already is largely in excess of what Labour itself produces. Were Ability crippled, or discouraged from exerting itself, the entire income of the nation would dwindle down to an amount which would not yield Labour so much as it takes now; whilst any advance, no matter how small, on what Labour takes now must come from an increasing product, which Ability only can produce.

◆1 Labour must remember that Ability is a living force which cannot be appropriated as Capital might be; but that it must be encouraged and propitiated.

◆¹ Hitherto this truth, though more or less apparent to economic writers and thoughtful persons generally, has been apparent to them only by fits and starts, and has never been assigned any definite or logical place in their theories of production, or has ever been expressed clearly; and, owing to this cause, not only has it been entirely absent from the theories of the public generally, but its place has been usurped by a meaningless and absurd falsehood. In place of the living force Ability, residing in living men, popular thought, misled by a singular oversight of the economists, has substituted Capital—a thing which, apart from Ability, assists production as little as a dead or unborn donkey; and hence has arisen that dangerous and ridiculous illusion—sometimes plainly expressed, often only half-conscious—to the effect that if the labourers could only seize upon Capital they would be masters of the entire productive power of the country. The defenders of the existing system have been as guilty of this error as its antagonists; and the attack and defence have been conducted on equally false grounds. Thus in a recent strike, the final threat of the employers—men who had created almost the whole of their enormous business—was that, if the strikers insisted upon certain demands, the Capital involved in the business would be removed to another country; and a well-known journal, professing to be devoted to the interest of Labour, conceived that it had disposed of this threat triumphantly by saying that, of the Capital a large part was not portable, and that the employers might go if they chose, and leave this behind. A great musician, who conceived himself to have been ill-treated in London, might just as well have threatened that he would remove his concert-room to St. Petersburg, when the principal meaning of his threat would be that he would remove himself; and the journal referred to might just as well have said, had the business in question been the production of a great picture, “The painter may go if he likes—what matter? We can keep his brushes.”

The real parties, then, to the industrial disputes of the modern world are not active labourers on one side, and idle, perhaps idiotic owners of so much dead material on the other side: but they are, on the one side, the vast majority of men, possessed of average powers of production, and able to produce by them a comparatively small amount; and, on the other, a minority whose powers of production are exceptional, who, if we take the product of the average labourer as a unit, are able to multiply this to an almost indefinite extent, and who thus create an increasing store of Capital to be used by themselves, or transmitted to their representatives, and an increasing income to be divided between these and the labourers. In other words, the dispute is between the many who desire to increase their incomes, and the few by whose exceptional powers it is alone possible to increase them. Such has been the situation hitherto; it is such at the present moment; and the whole tendency of industrial progress is not to change, but to accentuate it. As the productivity of Human Exertion increases, the part played by Ability becomes more and more important. More and more do the average men become dependent on the exceptional men. So long as the nation at large remembers this, no reforms need be dreaded. If the nation forgets this, it will be in danger every day of increasing, by its reforms, the very evils it wishes to obviate, and postponing or making impossible the advantages it wishes to secure.

◆1 In this view there is nothing derogatory to Labour.