Chapter II: Part 2

As to the general programme of work in which the members are supposed more or less to take part, I may quote from the printed advice given to members as to what they can do. First of all, “the need of study” is insisted on. It is assumed that the member will read all the society’s publications; and his next duty, it is urged, should be to read the criticisms on the other side, after the manner of Cicero, who was always careful to get up his opponent’s case. If a member cannot read or study alone, he is recommended to set on foot a local reading circle, and apply to the secretary for literature for the circle. No public work should be done until this self-education has been accomplished, and the member is really able to speak with authority and to deal effectively with an opponent. The opponents of Socialism in England are usually persons sent out by a body called the Liberty and Property Defence League, of which the American millionnaire, Mr. Astor, now a London Tory newspaper proprietor, is a member. These persons have, as a rule, a remarkable capacity for making fools of themselves; nevertheless, it is always a tactical blunder to underestimate the ability of your opponent, and Fabian lecturers are advised to assume that these Liberty and Property defenders are acquainted with economics, even though there is good reason to suspect they are not. There is nothing that kills like ridicule; to gibbet an ignorant and presumptuous debater, and make him look like a fool before a large audience, is a source of pleasure to every rightly constituted mind. Members of the society are also urged to correspond with their Parliamentary or municipal representative on all vital points, to worry his life out of him if he is obstinate or wrong-headed or dishonest, and to make him yearn like the poet for a lodge in some vast wilderness where he might never receive another letter or vote of censure as long as he lived. This is a good way to combat what Walt Whitman calls “the never-ending audacity of elected persons.” The member should always attend the local caucus meeting, and do what he can there; and if he has the time to spare, he should be a candidate for any public post, such as member of Parliament, of county or municipal council, of school board, guardian of the poor, or member of the parish council yet to be constituted. The great difficulty in the way of this is that these public persons are not paid in England, and few of the busy and impecunious members of the Fabian Society can afford the time for these things.

Having thus described the constitution, work, and general character of the Fabian Society, let me speak on the general intellectual forces which have been operating in England to bring about this new political growth among active young men; for it is quite new. My first acquaintance with anything that could properly be called Socialism in England was in London in 1879, when I went one evening to hear a young Jewish gentleman, since deceased, Mr. Montefiore, read a paper on German Socialism, before the London Dialectical Society. Mr. Montefiore had but a slender knowledge of his subject, and we had to wait for speeches by a German friend of Marx, resident in London, and from a young, dreamy-looking man with long, thick, tousled hair, whom I learned was Mr. Ernest Belfort Bax, since better known as a prolific writer on Socialism from the revolutionary, Marxite point of view. At that time there was not a single young man in London interested in or in favor of anything like Socialism, excepting Mr. Bax. Now there are hundreds. What are the reasons for the change?

(1) The exhaustion of the older Liberalism and the obviously unsatisfactory character of mere republicanism. And here American readers must permit me to be plain by saying that the United States seemed to furnish an object lesson to the world as to the failure of mere republicanism to solve a single one of our social questions. A quarter of a century ago the American Republic was the guiding star of advanced English political thought. It is not so now: candor compels me to say that. It is not merely a question of machine politics, of political corruption, of the omnipotent party boss; though supine Americans who do nothing to overthrow those purely political evils should be reminded that Europe as well as America is involved in and has to pay for their cowardice and indifference. But over and beyond this is the great fact of the division between rich and poor, millionnaires at one end, tramps at the other, a growth of monopolies unparalleled, crises producing abject poverty just as in Europe. These facts proved to men clearly that new institutions were of no use along with the old forms of property; that a mere theoretic democracy, unaccompanied by any social changes, was a delusion and a snare. The result of this is that the old enthusiasm for mere republicanism has died away, and that, though twenty-five years ago there was a good sprinkling of republican clubs in England, there is not a single one of them left now.

(2) The second cause I take to be a new spirit in literature. The genteel, the conventional, the thinner kind of romantic literature began to die out; and the powerful realistic school began to attract men’s minds. There was a desire to know things as they are, to sound the plummet in the sea of social misery, to have done with make-believe and get at realities. The Russian writers, with their intense Socialistic feeling, attracted great numbers of readers, who seemed to find in them something entirely new and immensely powerful. I should name among individual writers who have powerfully aided the growth, I do not say of Socialism itself, but of the feeling in the soil of which Socialism is easily developed, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, Whitman, Ruskin, Tolstoi, Zola and Arnold. A curious and medley list, you may say, and so it is; but I am certain that each of these great writers has contributed a distinct element to the expansion and liberation of the minds that have been formed, say, during the last twenty years. For among all these writers, varied as they are, it is the social feeling which is the most powerful impulse.

(3) Along with the new literature has grown a new art feeling, an intense hatred of the smug and respectable, and a love to be surrounded by attractive objects. Ruskin, Morris, and Walter Crane have shown why it is that the true artist is at war with commercialism, with the notion that things are to be produced for a profit, no matter what abominations you may turn out. The conception that no person has any right to inflict an ugly object of any sort on the world, especially for the sake of making gain out of it, has taken hold on the imaginative mind of the younger people of our cultivated classes.

(4) In the fourth place, the old political economy is absolutely dead in England, although you might not perhaps guess it from some of the English economic writers. The influence of German thought in this, as in other departments, has affected men’s minds. Take a series of books like the Social Science Series, published by Sonnenschein; half those books are Socialistic,--and that would have been an impossibility twenty years ago. Of the “Fabian Essays in Socialism,” it may be said that the publisher, as well as the Society, reaped large profits from it. I mention such works as these, rather than romances like Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” or Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” The charm of Morris’s style and the ingenuity of Bellamy’s narrative would be sufficient to account for their success; but the popularity of these other works represents a body of serious interest in advanced economics, which may well be considered startling when the old hidebound prejudices of orthodox English economics are taken into consideration.

(5) _Laissez-faire_ individualist political philosophy is dead. In vain does poor Mr. Herbert Spencer endeavor to stem the torrent. His political ideas are already as antiquated as Noah’s ark. I do not know a single one of the younger men in England who is influenced by them in the slightest degree, though one hears of one occasionally, just as one hears of a freak in a dime museum. For all practical purposes, philosophic Radicalism, as it was called, is as extinct as the dodo.

(6) There is another cause which cannot be ignored, though I speak upon it with some hesitation, as I purposely avoid, as far as possible, the difficult questions of religion and the deeper ethics. I mean that the old dualism, with its creed of other-worldliness, has gone by the board. Whatever men’s theoretical views are upon many transcendental matters, there is a general feeling now that the world is one, and that actual life here is just as sacred, normal, good, as it ever was or ever will be in any hypothetical past or future; that if there is any heaven for us we have to make it, and that such heaven is a state of the mind, of human relationships, and not a place to be reached at a definite period of time. Perhaps I may quote the eloquent words of William Morris in his “Dream of John Ball”: “Fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellowship is hell.” This idea is, I say, a powerful factor in leading the minds of the younger men to the views of which I am speaking. But men are not altogether influenced by their theoretical or even spiritual ideas; they are also moved, and so long as they have material bodies to be fed and clothed they will continue to be moved, by purely self-regarding and economic considerations. Let us never be deluded into supposing that altruistic feelings alone will induce men to make great social changes; egotistic considerations will prompt them as well, the desire of self-preservation working along with the desire for a better and more harmonious social order than exists. It is not only upon the working classes that capitalist monopoly tells; it tells also upon the educated middle classes who are not in the monopoly. They find the avenues of livelihood and preferment one after another closed to them; and just as education spreads, this will become more and more the case. When a small number of persons in a large community are highly educated, they have what economists call a monopoly value; they can get a good price for their services, because they possess something which few people have. Spread this higher education and the monopoly is broken down. Now, this is roughly what is going on in society; democracy is levelling all up to a common level, however gradual may be the process; and consequently highly educated men with their special gifts find their rates of remuneration becoming lower and lower, unless they possess some rare gift of genius, as a Sara Bernhardt in acting, a Paderewski in playing, a Stevenson in story-telling, a Mascagni as a composer. These rare people still command their monopoly value; but for the rest it has disappeared. Thus even more than the workingmen, perhaps, it has been the educated young men of the middle class (and the young women, too) who have been hardest hit by the modern development. Fifty years ago you could have gathered all the press writers of London into a single moderate-sized room. To-day all told they number nearly ten thousand. Everybody with a pen, ink and paper and any capacity for turning out “copy” is a journalist; and you see at once that it is impossible for all these men to earn a living. They don’t, and can’t. There are scores of highly educated people who work every day in the British Museum for eight or nine hours a day and earn less than a mechanic in constant occupation. It is the same in all the professions. Only fifteen per cent of London advocates ever get briefs at all; the other eighty-five per cent get nothing. In the medical profession it is the same. The prizes go to about five per cent of the profession; as for the average medical man in the London suburbs, the rates are so cut that I am credibly informed by one of them who studied at Cambridge and Heidelberg, and on whose education hundreds of pounds were spent, the fee for attendance and prescription in his suburban district has been brought down to twenty-five cents. It will be seen that it is not a question of making money or of the disgusting progress towards smug respectability, which is known as “getting on,”--it is positively a question of a bare living. Now, while a workingman who has never known comfort, whose father has never known it before him, can often stand a frightful amount of poverty without getting desperate, the well-bred young man cannot; and the result is that the keenest and most dangerous discontent comes from the educated classes, who are leading the Socialist masses all over Europe. Some superficial people think the remedy is to be found in inducing young men of the better classes to abandon the so-called “respectable” occupations and go in for manual labor. Let them cease, by all means, to be “respectable,” but let not any one lay the flattering unction to his soul that this, under existing economic conditions, is any solution. For what is the difficulty about manual labor now? Why, that thousands of those already engaged in it are not wanted; it is the difficulty of the unemployed, the difficulty of over-production. In 1886, according to the Report of the Washington Bureau of Statistics, there were at least one and one-half million of unemployed men in the United States; and this state of things has been almost if not quite paralleled in 1893. In London lack of employment is chronic, and is growing to such huge proportions that our cowardly, blind, public men dare not grapple with it. In Australia the unemployed have been walking the streets of Melbourne by the thousand. How absurd then it is to propose to add to the numbers of workingmen when those already in the ranks cannot find means of living! There is one method, alas, open to men, as there is always one method open to tempted, poverty-stricken women,--the method of what I may call intellectual prostitution; and many there be that go in at that gate. Sick and weary of the penury and struggle that go with honesty, young men of ability will deliberately sell themselves to the capitalist who has cornered our intellectual as he has cornered our material production, and will serve him for a good living. What numbers I have known choose this path!--and I cannot blame them, for they are forced into it by the conditions of modern life. It is useless preaching fine morals to them; the conditions of life must be adapted to human nature as it is, for human nature will not, you may be quite sure, suddenly transform itself to suit the conditions. These, then, are the economic motives which, combined with the moral and intellectual motives to which I have previously given expression, are forcing young men of education and good breeding into the ranks of the Socialists, and which especially operate in the case of a body like the Fabian Society.

Readers will be asking by this time whether I am not going to set forth the actual political programme or “platform,” as it is called in America, of the Fabian Society. Yes, that is just what I am going to do. As the Fabian Society holds that social transformation must be gradual, unless there is to be a general smash-up, it proposes a series of reforms for effecting the gradual change of society into a really social democratic state. But these reforms, it will be understood, are adopted with a distinct end in view, which fact makes all the difference between people of principle and mere opportunists who have no end in view other than the personal end of lining their own pockets. The following, then, are the planks of the Fabian political platform: Adult suffrage, Parliamentary and municipal, one vote for each man and each woman of twenty-one and upwards who are not in prison or in a lunatic asylum. The second ballot, as in France, Germany and Switzerland, so that whoever is elected will have an absolute majority of the votes polled. Payment of members by the state and of election expenses by the district (it must be remembered that at present representatives are not paid in England). Taxation of unearned incomes by such means as a land tax, heavy death duties to go to municipalities, and a progressive income tax. Municipalization of land and local industries, so that free and honorable municipal employment may be substituted for private charity, which, to vary a well-known line of Shakespeare, is twice cursed,--it curseth him who gives and him who takes. All education to be at the public cost for all classes, including manual as well as book training. Nationalization of all canals and railways, so that the public highways may belong to the public, as they always did until the new era of steam, when they got into the hands of capitalists. It is as ridiculous to pay Mr. Vanderbilt if you happen to want to go from New York to Chicago as it would be to pay him if you desired to take a walk down Fifth Avenue. The eight hours day for wage-workers in all government and municipal offices, in all monopolies like coal mines and railways, and in all industries where the workers want it. Parish councils for the laborers, with compulsory power to acquire land to build dwellings, to administer schools and charities, and to engage in co-operative farming.

Such is the programme through the adoption of which the Fabian Society believes that the country once called “merry England,” but the greater portion of which is now dreary and sordid and cursed with poverty, might again be really happy and be converted into a land of real and not of sham freedom. And now a word, in conclusion, on an important point,--the relation of the intellectual proletariat, as it has been called, to the masses, of the educated young men to the bulk of the working classes. Most of the members of the Fabian Society are educated, middle-class people, though there are workingmen connected with it also. What is to be the relation of these educated middle-class people to the swarming multitudes of workers? This is a vital social question, the most vital we have immediately before us. One remembers what Matthew Arnold said in America,--that the salvation of modern society lay in the hands of a remnant. I should be inclined to put it rather differently, and to say that, if the social evolution is to be peaceful and rational, it must be effected by the union of a cultivated remnant with the masses of the toiling people. American optimism may chafe at the little word “if.” Can there be any doubt, you may ask, that we shall go on prosperously and peacefully? I reply, yes, there is quite good enough ground for doubting this. As Mr. Pearson, the author of that remarkable book on “National Life and Character,” which has impressed us in England very deeply, has said, ancient civilization in the times of the Antonines seemed as firm and strong as does ours, nay, stronger, for it had, in the main, lasted as many centuries as ours has lasted decades.

Stout was its arm, each nerve and bone
Seemed puissant and alive.

Had you predicted then to a Roman senator that the splendid Greco-Roman cities would be given to the flames, and that the Roman Senate and legions would be trampled down by ignorant hordes of barbarians, he would have smiled, offered you another cup of Falernian wine, and changed the subject. Yet we know this happened; and I confess I can see nothing in our mushroom civilization which we have any particular right to regard as inherently more enduring than the elaborate and stately organism of Roman jurisprudence. But there are no barbarians! Yes, there are; but they are not outside us,--they are in our midst. Do you suppose that the grim victim of crushing poverty in a London attic or a Berlin cellar cares one pin’s head for all the heritage of the world’s thought which appeals to the highly educated? How are these huge masses of poor people to be welded into a great phalanx, to be induced to subordinate their passions to the demands of reason, to look not merely at the needs of the moment, but at those of next year, to realize that the world cannot be remade in a day, but yet that it can be so reconstituted as to give all opportunities to live as human beings should? Silly people are always talking nonsense about the danger of “agitators.” I know all about agitators. I know nearly every prominent agitator in Great Britain; and I can say confidently that it is the agitators who have to hold back, to restrain the people from rash and even mad action. The record of every English strike would show that this was the case. If all the labor leaders and agitators were silenced, it would be the very worst thing that could befall the capitalist class. The masses are at present, at the very best, an army of privates without officers. This is not their fault; it is their misfortune. They have not had the training, the culture, which enables them to meet rich men and their agents on equal ground. An English statesman, whose name is known the world over, said privately to me not long ago: “The labor men here in the House of Commons are all good fellows, but they are no use as leaders; the principal men of either party can twist them round their fingers with the greatest ease. If the labor movement is to be a success, it must be led by educated men.” I believe that verdict of one of the ablest and best-informed public men now living to be true. To what does it point? To the union of culture with labor, to reform this badly-jointed system. Only, be it observed, it must be union on equal terms. There must be no lofty condescension on the part of culture any more than base truckling on the part of labor. It must be an equal copartnership, where each partner recognizes that the other has something which he needs. And let me say, as one who knows workmen, that, in a certain and very real way, culture has as much to learn from labor as labor from culture. Let the cultured man approach the laboring man on perfectly equal terms, in a cordial and open way; and let both unite to deliver a groaning world from the bondage of riches. English experience shows that this can be done; and this idea is to a very great degree the _idée mère_ of the Fabian Society, whose members have no higher ambition than to mingle freely with the workmen and share in the common life. By this means the hatred and suspicion felt by the French and German workmen towards any one who wears a black coat is eliminated, and both labor and culture gain in breadth, knowledge and sympathy, and the cause of rational progress is rendered more secure. Walt Whitman has told us, in “Leaves of Grass,” how he went “freely with powerful, uneducated persons,”--a gospel which Mr. John Addington Symonds, in his essay on Whitman, tells us, saved him from being a prig. And this gospel of free intercourse with the so-called “common people,” who are neither saints nor great sinners, but real men, more real than the conventional middle-class man can ever afford to be, is the healthiest, best advice which I can give to cultivated men.

THE FABIAN ESSAYS.

PREFACE.

The essays in this volume were prepared last year as a course of lectures for delivery before mixed audiences in London and the provinces. They have been revised for publication, but not recast. The matter is put, not as an author would put it to a student, but as a speaker with only an hour at his disposal has to put it to an audience. Country readers may accept the book as a sample of the propaganda carried on by volunteer lecturers in the workmen’s clubs and political associations of London.[1] Metropolitan readers will have the advantage of making themselves independent of the press critic by getting face to face with the writers, stripping the veil of print from their personality, cross-examining, criticising, calling them to account amid surroundings which inspire no awe, and before the most patient of audiences. For any Sunday paper which contains a lecture list will shew where some, if not all, of the seven essayists may be heard for nothing; and on all such occasions questions and discussion form part of the procedure.

The projection and co-ordination of these lectures is not the work of any individual. The nominal editor is only the member told off to arrange for the publication of the papers, and see them through the press with whatever editorial ceremony might be necessary. Everything that is usually implied by the authorship and editing of a book has in this case been done by the seven essayists, associated as the Executive Council of the Fabian Society; and not one of the essays could be what it is had the writer been a stranger to his six colleagues and to the Society. But there has been no sacrifice of individuality--no attempt to cut out every phrase and opinion the responsibility for which would not be accepted by every one of the seven. Had the sections been differently allotted, they would have been differently treated, though the net result would probably have been the same. The writers are all Social Democrats, with a common conviction of the necessity of vesting the organization of industry and the material of production in a State identified with the whole people by complete Democracy. But that conviction is peculiar to no individual bias: it is a Capitol to which all roads lead; and at least seven of them are represented in these Fabian Essays; so that the reader need not fear oppression here, any more than in the socialized State of the future, by the ascendancy of one particular cast of mind.

There are at present no authoritative teachers of Socialism. The essayists make no claim to be more than communicative learners.

LONDON, December, 1889.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the year ending April, 1889, the number of lectures delivered by members of the Fabian Society alone was upwards of 700.

THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

ECONOMIC.

BY G. BERNARD SHAW.

All economic analyses begin with the cultivation of the earth. To the mind’s eye of the astronomer, the earth is a ball spinning in space without ulterior motives. To the bodily eye of the primitive cultivator it is a vast green plain, from which, by sticking a spade into it, wheat and other edible matters can be made to spring. To the eye of the sophisticated city man, this vast green plain appears rather as a great gaming-table, your chances in the game depending chiefly on the place where you deposit your stakes. To the economist, again, the green plain is a sort of burial-place of hidden treasure, where all the forethought and industry of man are set at naught by the caprice of the power which hid the treasure. The wise and patient workman strikes his spade in here, and with heavy toil can discover nothing but a poor quality of barley, some potatoes and plentiful nettles, with a few dock leaves to cure his stings. The foolish spendthrift on the other side of the hedge, gazing idly at the sand glittering in the sun, suddenly realizes that the earth is offering him gold--is dancing it before his listless eyes lest it should escape him. Another man, searching for some more of this tempting gold, comes upon a great hoard of coal, or taps a jet of petroleum. Thus is Man mocked by Earth, his step-mother, and never knows as he tugs at her closed hand whether it contains diamonds or flints, good red wheat or a few clayey and blighted cabbages. Thus, too, he becomes a gambler, and scoffs at the theorists who prate of industry and honesty and equality. Yet against this fate he eternally rebels. For since in gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win; since dishonesty is mere shadow-grasping where every one is dishonest; and since inequality is bitter to all except the highest, and miserably lonely for him, men come greatly to desire that these capricious gifts of Nature might be intercepted by some agency having the power and the goodwill to distribute them justly according to the labor done by each in the collective search for them. This desire is Socialism; and, as a means to its fulfilment, Socialists have devised communes, kingdoms, principalities, churches, manors, and finally, when all these had succumbed to the old gambling spirit, the Social Democratic State, which yet remains to be tried. As against Socialism, the gambling spirit urges man to allow no rival to come between his private individual powers and Step-mother Earth, but rather to secure some acres of her and take his chance of getting diamonds instead of cabbages. This is Private Property, or Unsocialism. Our own choice is shewn by our continual aspiration to possess property, our common hailing of it as sacred, our setting apart of the word Respectable for those who have attained it, our ascription of pre-eminent religiousness to commandments forbidding its violation, and our identification of law and order among men with its protection. Therefore is it vital to a living knowledge of our society that Private Property should be known in every step of its progress from its source in cupidity to its end in confusion.

Let us, in the manner of the Political Economist, trace the effects of settling a country by private property with undisturbed law and order. Figure to yourself the vast green plain of a country virgin to the spade, awaiting the advent of man. Imagine then the arrival of the first colonist, the original Adam, developed by centuries of civilization into an Adam Smith, prospecting for an suitable patch of Private Property. Adam is, as Political Economy fundamentally assumes him to be, “on the make”; therefore he drives his spade into, and sets up his stockade around, the most fertile and favorably situated patch he can find. When he has tilled it, Political Economy inspired to prophesy by the spectacle, metaphorically exhibits Adam’s little patch of cultivation as a pool that will yet rise and submerge the whole land. Let us not forget this trope: it is the key to the ever-recurring phrase, “margin of cultivation,” in which, as may now be perceived, there lurks a little unsuspected poetry. And truly the pool soon spreads. Other Adams come, all on the make, and therefore all sure to pre-empt patches as near as may be to that of the first Adam’s, partly because he has chosen the best situation, partly for the pleasure of his society and conversation, and partly because where two men are assembled together there is a two-man power that is far more than double one-man power, being indeed in some instances a quite new force, totally destructive of the idiotic general hypothesis that society is no more than the sum of the units which compose it. These Adams, too, bring their Cains and Abels, who do not murder one another, but merely pre-empt adjacent patches. And so the pool rises, and the margin spreads more and more remote from the centre, until the pool becomes a lake, and the lake an inland sea.

RENT.

But in the course of this inundation the caprices of Nature begin to operate. That specially fertile region upon which Adam pitched is sooner or later all pre-empted; and there is nothing for the new-comer to pre-empt save soil of the second quality. Again, division of labor sets in among Adam’s neighbors; and with it, of course, comes the establishment of a market for the exchange of the products of their divided labor. Now it is not well to be far afield from that market, because distance from it involves extra cost for roads, beasts of burden, time consumed in travelling thither and back again. All this will be saved to Adam at the centre of cultivation, and incurred by the new-comer at the margin of cultivation. Let us estimate the annual value of Adam’s produce at £1,000, and the annual produce of the new-comer’s land on the margin of cultivation at £500, assuming that Adam and the new-comer are equally industrious. Here is a clear advantage of £500 a year to the first comer. This £500 is economic rent. It matters not at all that it is merely a difference of income, and not an overt payment from a tenant to a landlord. The two men labor equally; and yet one gets £500 a year more than the other through the superior fertility of his land and convenience of its situation. The excess due to that fertility is rent; and before long we shall find it recognized as such and paid in the fashion with which we are familiar. For why should not Adam let his patch to the new-comer at a rent of £500 a year? Since the produce will be £1,000, the new-comer will have £500 left for himself, or as much as he could obtain by cultivating a patch of his own at the margin; and it is pleasanter, besides, to be in the centre of society than on the outskirts of it. The new-comer will himself propose the arrangement; and Adam may retire as an idle landlord with a perpetual pension of £500 rent. The excess of fertility in Adam’s land is thenceforth recognized as rent and paid, as it is to-day, regularly by a worker to a drone. A few samples of the way in which this simple and intelligible transaction is stated by our economists may now, I hope, be quoted without any danger of their proving so difficult as they appear in the text-books from which I have copied them.

Stuart Mill[2] says that “the rent of land consists of the excess of its return above the return to the worst land in cultivation.” Fawcett[3] says that “the rent of land represents the pecuniary value of the advantages which such land possesses over the worst land in cultivation.” Professor Marshall[4] says that “the rent of a piece of land is the excess of its produce over the produce of an adjacent piece of land which would not be cultivated at all if rent were paid for it.” Professor Sidgwick[5] cautiously puts it that “the normal rent _per acre_ of any piece” [of land] “is the surplus of the value of its produce over the value of the net produce per acre of the least advantageous land that it is profitable to cultivate.” General Walker[6] declares that “specifically, the rent of any piece of land is determined by the difference between its annual yield and that of the least productive land actually cultivated for the supply of the same market, it being assumed that the quality of the land as a productive agent is, in neither case, impaired or improved by such cultivation.” All these definitions are offered by the authors as elaborations of that given by their master Ricardo,[7] who says, “Rent is that portion of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.”

THE COUNTY FAMILY.

Let us return to our ideal country. Adam is retiring from productive industry on £500 a year; and his neighbors are hastening to imitate him as fresh tenants present themselves. The first result is the beginning of a tradition that the oldest families in the country enjoy a superior position to the rest, and that the main advantage of their superior position is that they enjoy incomes without working. Nevertheless, since they still depend on their tenants’ labor for their subsistence, they continue to pay Labor, with a capital L, a certain meed of mouth honor; and the resultant association of prosperity with idleness, and praise with industry, practically destroys morality by setting up that incompatibility between conduct and principle which is the secret of the ingrained cynicism of our own time, and which produces the curious Ricardian phenomenon of the man of business who goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the following week.

According to our hypothesis, the inland sea of cultivation has now spread into the wilderness so far that at its margin the return to a man’s labor for a year is only £500. But as there is always a flood-tide in that sea, caused by the incessant increase of population, the margin will not stop there; it will at last encroach upon every acre of cultivable land, rising to the snow line on the mountains and falling to the coast of the actual salt water sea, but always reaching the barrenest places last of all, because the cultivators are still, as ever, on the make, and will not break bad land when better is to be had. But suppose that now, at last, the uttermost belt of free land is reached, and that upon it the yield to a man’s year’s labor is only £100. Clearly now the rent of Adam’s primeval patch has risen to £900, since that is the excess of its produce over what is by this time all that is to be had rent free. But Adam has yielded up his land for £500 a year to a tenant. It is this tenant accordingly who now lets Adam’s patch for £900 a year to the new-comer, who of course loses nothing by the bargain, since it leaves him the £100 a year with which he must be content anyhow. Accordingly he labors on Adam’s land; raises £1,000 a year from it; keeps £100 and pays £900 to Adam’s tenant, who pays £500 to Adam, keeping £400 for himself, and thus also becoming an idle gentleman, though with a somewhat smaller income than the man of older family. It has, in fact, come to this, that the private property in Adam’s land is divided between three men, the first doing none of the work and getting half the produce; the second doing none of the work and getting two-fifths of the produce; and the third doing all the work and getting only one-tenth of the produce. Incidentally also, the moralist who is sure to have been prating somewhere about private property leading to the encouragement of industry, the establishment of a healthy incentive, and the distribution of wealth according to exertion, is exposed as a futile purblind person, starting _a priori_ from blank ignorance, and proceeding deductively to mere contradiction and patent folly.

All this, however, is a mere trifle compared to the sequel. When the inland sea has risen to its confines--when there is nothing but a strip of sand round the coast between the furrow and the wave--when the very waves themselves are cultivated by fisherfolk--when the pastures and timber forests have touched the snow line--when, in short, the land is all private property, yet every man is a proprietor, though it may be only of a tenant right. He enjoys fixity of tenure at what is called a fair rent; that is, he fares as well as he could on land wholly his own. All the rent is economic rent; the landlord cannot raise it nor the tenant lower it; it is fixed naturally by the difference between the fertility of the land for which it is paid and that of the worst land in the country. Compared with the world as we know it, such a state of things is freedom and happiness.

THE PROLETARIAT.

But at this point there appears in the land a man in a strange plight--one who wanders from snow line to sea coast in search of land, and finds none that is not the property of some one else. Private property had forgotten this man. On the roads he is a vagrant; off them he is a trespasser; he is the first disinherited son of Adam, the first proletarian, one in whose seed all the generations of the earth shall yet be blest, but who is himself for the present foodless, homeless, shiftless, superfluous, and everything that turns a man into a tramp or a thrall. Yet he is still a man with brain and muscle, able to devise and execute, able to deal puissantly with land if he only could get access to it. But how to get that access! Necessity is the mother of Invention. It may be that this second Adam, the first father of the great proletariat, has one of those scarce brains which are not the least of Nature’s capricious gifts. If the fertile field yields rent, why not the fertile brain? Here is the first Adam’s patch still yielding its £1,000 a year to the labor of the tenant who, as we have seen, has to pay £900 away in rent. How if the proletarian were boldly to bid £1,000 a year to that man for the property? Apparently the result would be the starvation of the proletarian, since he would have to part with all the produce. But what if the proletarian can contrive--invent--anticipate a new want--turn the land to some hitherto undreamt-of use--wrest £1,500 a year from the soil and site that only yielded £1,000 before? If he can do this, he can pay the full £1,000 rent, and have an income of £500 left for himself. This is his profit--the rent of his ability--the excess of its produce over that of ordinary stupidity. Here then is the opportunity of the cunning proletarian, the hero of that modern Plutarch, Mr. Samuel Smiles. Truly, as Napoleon said, the career is open to the talented. But alas! the social question is no more a question of the fate of the talented than of the idiotic. In due replenishment of the earth there comes another proletarian who is no cleverer than other men, and can do as much, but not more than they. For him there is no rent of ability. How then is he to get a tenant right? Let us see. It is certain that by this time not only will the new devices of the renter of ability have been copied by people incapable of inventing them; but division of labor, the use of tools and money, and the economies of civilization will have greatly increased man’s power of extracting wealth from Nature. All this increase will be so much gain to the holder of a tenant right, since his rent is a fixed payment out of the produce of his holding, and the balance is his own. Therefore an addition to the produce not foreseen by the landlord enriches the tenant. So that it may well be that the produce of land on the margin of cultivation, which, as we have seen, fixes the produce left to the cultivators throughout the whole area, may rise considerably. Suppose the yield to have doubled; then our old friends who paid £900 rent, and kept £100 for themselves, have now, though they still pay £900 rent, £1,100 for themselves, the total produce having risen to £2,000. Now here is an opportunity for our proletarian who is not clever. He can very well offer to cultivate the land subject to a payment of, for instance, £1,600 a year, leaving himself £400 a year. This will enable the last holder of the tenant right to retire as an idle gentleman receiving a net income of £700 a year, and a gross income of £1,600, out of which he pays £900 a year rent to a landlord who again pays to the head landlord £500. But it is to be marked that this £700 a year net is not economic rent. It is not the difference between the best and the worst land. It has nothing to do with the margin of cultivation. It is a payment for the privilege of using land at all--for access to that which is now a close monopoly; and its amount is regulated, not by what the purchaser could do for himself on land of his own at the margin, but simply by the landholder’s eagerness to be idle on the one hand, and the proletarian’s need of subsistence on the other. In current economic terms the price is regulated by supply and demand. As the demand for land intensifies by the advent of fresh proletarians, the price goes up; and the bargains are made more stringent. Tenant rights, instead of being granted in perpetuity, and so securing for ever to the tenant the increase due to unforeseen improvements in production, are granted on leases for finite terms, at the expiration of which the landlord can revise the terms or eject the tenant. The payments rise until the original head rents and quit rents appear insignificant in comparison with the incomes reaped by the intermediate tenant right holders or middlemen. Sooner or later the price of tenant right will rise so high that the actual cultivator will get no more of the produce than suffices him for subsistence. At that point there is an end of sub-letting tenant rights. The land’s absorption of the proletarians as tenants paying more than the economic rent stops.

And now what is the next proletarian to do? For all his forerunners we have found a way of escape: for him there seems none. The board is at the door, inscribed “Only standing room left”; and it might well bear the more poetic legend, _Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate_. This man, born a proletarian, must die a proletarian, and leave his destitution as an only inheritance to his son. It is not yet clear that there is ten days’ life in him; for whence is his subsistence to come if he cannot get at the land? Food he must have, and clothing; and both promptly. There is food in the market, and clothing also; but not for nothing: hard money must be paid for it, and paid on the nail too; for he who has no property gets no credit. Money then is a necessity of life; and money can only be procured by selling commodities. This presents no difficulty to the cultivators of the land, who can raise commodities by their labor; but the proletarian, being landless, has neither commodities nor means of producing them. Sell something he must. Yet he has nothing to sell--except himself. The idea seems a desperate one; but it proves quite easy to carry out. The tenant cultivators of the land have not strength enough or time enough to exhaust the productive capacity of their holdings. If they could buy men in the market for less than these men’s labor would add to the produce, then the purchase of such men would be a sheer gain. It would indeed be only a purchase in form: the men would literally cost nothing, since they would produce their own price, with a surplus for the buyer. Never in the history of buying and selling was there so splendid a bargain for buyers as this. Aladdin’s uncle’s offer of new lamps for old ones, was in comparison a catch-penny. Accordingly, the proletarian no sooner offers himself for sale than he finds a rush of bidders for him, each striving to get the better of the others by offering to give him more and more of the produce of his labor, and to content themselves with less and less surplus. But even the highest bidder must have some surplus, or he will not buy. The proletarian, in accepting the highest bid, sells himself openly into bondage. He is not the first man who has done so; for it is evident that his forerunners, the purchasers of tenant right, had been enslaved by the proprietors who lived on the rents paid by them. But now all the disguise falls off; the proletarian renounces not only the fruit of his labor, but also his right to think for himself and to direct his industry as he pleases. The economic change is merely formal; the moral change is enormous. Soon the new direct traffic in men overspreads the whole market, and takes the place formerly held by the traffic in tenant rights. In order to understand the consequences, it is necessary to undertake an analysis of the exchange of commodities in general, since labor power is now in the market on the same footing as any other ware exposed there for sale.

EXCHANGE VALUE.

It is evident that the custom of exchange will arise in the first instance as soon as men give up providing each for his own needs by his own labor. A man who makes his own tables and chairs, his own poker and kettle, his own bread and butter, and his own house and clothes, is jack-of-all-trades and master of none. He finds that he would get on much faster if he stuck to making tables and chairs, and exchanged them with the smith for a poker and kettle, with bakers and dairymen for bread and butter, and with builders and tailors for a house and clothes. In doing this, he finds that his tables and chairs are worth so much--that they have an exchange value, as it is called. As a matter of general convenience, some suitable commodity is set up to measure this value. We set up gold, which in this particular use of it, is called money. The chairmaker finds how much money his chairs are worth, and exchanges them for it. The blacksmith finds out how much money his pokers are worth, and exchanges them for it. Thus, by employing money as a go-between, chairmakers can get pokers in exchange for their chairs, and blacksmiths chairs for their pokers. This is the mechanism of exchange; and once the values of the commodities are ascertained it works simply enough. But it is a mere mechanism, and does not fix the values or explain them. And the attempt to discover what does fix them is beset with apparent contradictions which block up the right path, and with seductive coincidences which make the wrong seem the more promising.