The compensation to workmen for accident seems at first sight a righteous charge upon capital for the benefit of those who are injured in their business. The immediate effect upon character is to save the careless, thoughtless, and incompetent from the results of their faults; this at once reduces largely the weeding and educational effects of the bad qualities. No man would ever have become careful if he did not find the necessity of being so. Even if a tendency to malingering can be avoided, yet the teaching effect is done away. It may be thought that it is better to save the individual from his indiscretions rather than cure the race. Like most sentimentalism it causes more misery in the long run. Another, and entirely separate, effect is to prevent the employment of those who by age or bodily defect are the more liable to accident; the immediate hardship of loss of employment to these classes is, in the total, probably greater than the hardship of loss of employment by accidents which it is sought to compensate. We injure the individual as well as the race by such grandmothering. A severe law demanding full and adequate protection of workers, where they can be mechanically protected, is the utmost that could be beneficially enforced.
The provision of old age pensions is another pleasing scheme. In the first place it will diminish the need of foresight and of self-restraint; it will thus weaken character by removing the great driving force of self-interest. The burden will have to be borne by all, including those who are already at the last gasp, and will tend to push such over the border line. It will not discriminate between those who have borne a large share in the cost of national renewal by bringing up a family, and those who have selfishly squandered all they received. And like outdoor poor relief, it will be discounted in wages, and tend to lower the wage rate if no savings are to be expected. A sounder plan would be to revert to the kind of communal system of our forefathers, and make a legal demand for a pension of, say, £2 a year from every child, and 10s. a year from every grown up nephew or grandchild. Thus those who have done most for the State by renewal would receive most in return, and the greatest inducement would be given to bring up children to active and capable lives. The idea of a right to maintenance would be the knell of any State which undertook it. The endowment of wastrels, the taxing of all the capable for the propagation of the incapable, and the wholesale deterioration of character, would be utter ruin to a nation. Nature knows of no right to maintenance, but only the necessity of getting rid of those who need it by mending or ending them.
There is another movement which seems most desirable and humane at first sight, and irreproachable in its economic aspect: the saving of infant life by greater care. A huge waste of life is going on, and it has been proved that it is preventable. But however much we must sympathise with it, we cannot shut our eyes to its meaning. England produces over 300,000 excess of births over deaths yearly, and perhaps a tenth more might be added to that by care of infant life. But would that tenth be of the best stock or the worst? We must agree that it would be of the lower, or lowest type of careless, thriftless, dirty, and incapable families that the increase would be obtained. Is it worth while to dilute our increase of population by 10 per cent. more of the most inferior kind? Will England be stronger for having one thirtieth more, and that of the worst stock, added to the population every year? This movement is doing away with one of the few remains of natural weeding out of the unfit that our civilisation has left to us. And it will certainly cause more misery than happiness in the course of a century.
Lastly, let us look to the general question of the results of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of different classes. Roughly we may divide three classes of money-earners: the lower, who receive weekly pay, and are tempted to spend it all by the certainty of poor relief when needed; the middle, who receive yearly pay, and must save if they are to avoid losing caste in late life; the upper, who make large but uncertain profits by organising work, or by financial manipulation, regular or irregular. During the last century we have seen a great growth of wealth in England. At first it spread to workmen and manufacturers, then to the middle classes generally, and latterly much has accumulated in the hands of large operators with trusts and financial dealings. What has been the result of the wealth in the hands of each class, to that class, and to the whole community? The rise of workmen's pay has mainly been used up; there has been a great benefit by improving the conditions of life, but perhaps half of the increase has been lost in mere waste; very little has gone toward lifting families to a higher class, and but a very small proportion has been saved. The whole property of the poor is estimated now at nearly a year's income, the result of savings in a century, or less than 1 per cent. saved. When we turn to the middle classes there is a worse spectacle. There was, broadly speaking, but little need to raise the standard of expenditure among the middle classes. They were fairly comfortable, and need not have spent more on themselves; their gains might have been spent on profitable enterprises, or given for endowments to public purposes. On the contrary, but a small part of their gains have been saved or remuneratively spent, and far the greater part has disappeared in ever-increasing ostentation. It has been turned into a curse by creating an absurdly artificial standard of living and of sociality, so burdensome that every man is ashamed to ask a friend to the leg of mutton dinners of his grandfather's standard. It is thought mean to spend less per head on a single dinner than the amount which ought to keep a man in comfort for a couple of weeks. Real, genial sociality has been uprooted and killed in the senseless race of ostentation. And practically nothing has been done for public benefits by endowments. As a manufacturer in a park, with a motor, remarked, "you cannot expect anyone not to spend up to his income." The idea of using what is really requisite for successful living, and not squandering money beyond that, is entirely forgotten. The simplicity of having nothing that is unnecessary, the pleasure of having a large balance to use beyond the needs of life, and the comfort of never needing to worry about money, are all unknown to those who spend up to the hilt, and who turn their money into a grinding curse of life. The distribution of surplus wealth among the middle classes has proved an entire failure in national economics.
Now, lastly, the surplus is passing into a new class, the large business speculator, the financier, and trust-man. So far as we can yet see, this class is justifying itself far more than the middle class. In fifty years the middle classes have not given as much to endow education as the millionaires have given in five years. A man with a gigantic income cannot spend more than a few per cent. of it on himself. He must use it for large public enterprises which benefit mankind. To put it in another form, a great dealer has organised a method for taxing the community in such a way that they do not notice it. And if he spends the tax on public improvements or endowments—railways, new inventions, or universities—he is an active benefactor to the whole community. He sponges up the surplus which would otherwise be frittered away in ostentation or luxury, and drops it out where it is a permanent benefit. As a principle we may hate the trust-man and multi-millionaire, but he may be a lesser curse than the extravagant middle or lower-class man. War is hateful, but it may be a lesser curse than rotting in peace. So long as the average man shows by his selfish luxury that he is incapable of managing wealth, so long the private taxer—who prevents some of the waste—will be a positive blessing to the community. The evolution of the great money-manager type now going on is a distinct step forward in the prevention of waste, and the growth of a better system of expenditure. A million pounds a year scattered over a hundred thousand men will be all eaten up in luxuries or lost in folly; spread among a thousand men it will only swell their wasteful pride of life; but put it in the hands of ten men who have worked for it, and they will spend most of it in useful work that will bear fruit. Until the education, moral and intellectual, of the average man is on a higher plane, it will be well for the surplus wealth to be in the safer hands of those who have proved their capacity for avoiding waste. The evolution of society is not fitted at present for a wealthy middle-class, or a proletariat domination.
We have now seen in many directions how great are the changes in the constitution of society, which are brought about by a succession of small movements, each of which imperceptibly bears its share in the change. We see thus how carefully small tendencies should be watched; and we learn how needless and often how futile is a violent uprooting of institutions instead of a gradual growth.
Another lesson to note is that every attempt to interfere by legislation in the natural working of causes is more likely to do harm than good. The long lesson, which it took all the middle ages to teach, was that legislative interference with trade always did harm; we have come to believe that in a half-hearted way, but we are still perpetually longing to tinker society by interfering with natural cause and effect.