Chapter II: Inequality of Income

We believe that, apart from the poverty of the poor, so gross a disparity between the income of one citizen and another as is inherent in the present advanced stage of the capitalist organization of industry, is in itself injurious to the commonwealth. The extremes of inequality are known to all men. In every newspaper, capitalist or labor, we find now and again sensational paragraphs drawing attention to the gross disparity in the incomes of selected individuals—between the few shillings or dollars a week of the laboring man or woman, and the hundreds of thousands of pounds or millions of dollars a year credited to the super-capitalists of Great Britain and the United States. But a more significant fact is the inequality in the way in which the national income is shared between one class of society and another.¹ To take, as a leading instance, the United Kingdom at its wealthiest period—the years immediately preceding the Great War. The inhabitants of this country were then producing, in the aggregate, each year, commodities and services priced at a total, in round numbers, of two thousand million pounds, besides drawing a couple of hundred millions of pounds a year from investments in other countries. One-half of this aggregate of commodities and services, out of which the whole people had to live, was taken by the one-ninth of the community which was at that date liable to income tax, comprising, therefore, all the families that had as much as £160 a year income. Nearly one-third of the remaining half (say, three hundred millions sterling) fell to the share of that nouvelle couche sociale, the black-coated proletariat of humble clerks and teachers and minor officials, along with the smallest shopkeepers and traders—comprising, with their families, the two-ninths of the population who were not manual working wage-earners, but who nevertheless did not get for their work as much as £160 a year per family. There remained, out of the aggregate product, for the two-thirds of the population who were manual working wage-earners and their families, somewhere about eight hundred millions, which, after making the necessary deductions for sickness and other spells of unemployment, worked out, for the adult male worker, at an average weekly income throughout the year of something like twenty-five shillings on which to maintain his family. And this glaring inequality in the distribution of the national income was not peculiar to the United Kingdom, or to those particular years. It is characteristic of every capitalist society. The statistics for France, so far as they can be ascertained, were no less extreme in their inequality. Those for the German Empire were apparently much the same. Even in the United States, with all the boundless resources of North America, there stood revealed, so far as the statistics extend, a parallel inequality in the way the national income was shared. To put it another way: in 1890 the total income of that country was so divided that 40 per cent was received as the reward of owning, and 60 per cent as the reward of doing.²

The Nation "Chooses Inequality"

It is therefore clear that a nation, in deciding to establish or to continue the private ownership of land and capital as the basis of the industrial organization of its people, deliberately chooses inequality. We must face this now with our eyes open. The outrageous disparity in capitalist countries between one man and another, and between one class and another, independently of their merits, and often in the inverse ratio of their industry and social utility, is not produced by any defect in the working of capitalism, but is inherent in its very nature. It is not a transient phenomenon, but a permanent feature. By leaving in almost unrestrained private ownership practically all the differential factors in wealth production—such portions of its land and capital as are for the time being more advantageous than the worst in economic use—we cause the resultant "rent" or surplus value, to the extent, as the statistics indicate, of at least a third of the aggregate product, to fall into the lap of the more fortunately situated members of the property-owning class, irrespective of their rendering any service whatsoever to the community. "The widow," says Carlyle, "is gathering nettles for her children's dinner: a perfumed seigneur, delicately lounging in the Œil de bœuf, has an alchemy whereby he will extract from her the third nettle, and name it Rent and Law." A similar "surplus value" over and above the maintenance conceded to the workers concerned is being produced, year in, year out, throughout all capitalist industry down to the marginal cultivation in each case. This statement does not imply that "all wealth is created by labor," meaning manual labor. The mining engineer, the captain of the merchant ship, the passenger superintendent of the railway, the bank manager, the literary or scientific writer or teacher, the inventor, the designer, the organizer, and those who under various names actually spend their lives in initiating and directing enterprises of social utility, together with the innumerable other "brain-working" participants, may all be assumed to be coöperating in the making of the product, and to be legitimately earning a maintenance for their families and themselves. How far their several incomes bear any relation to the social values of their respective services is a disputable question, to which no convincing answer has been found. But, apart from all these incomes, there is normally a surplus accruing to the class of legal owners of the instruments of production, merely as a consequence of this ownership, irrespective of whether or not they are the organizers or directors, or are otherwise coöperating in production in any way whatsoever. This surplus goes, in fact, in all capitalist societies, very largely, and as it seems, even increasingly, to persons who are not, in respect of this income, producing anything. It will be obvious that this incident of the individual ownership of the differential factors in wealth production—of the soils, sites, mines, factories, and shops superior in productivity to the worst in economic use, or, where agreements or amalgamations among most of the separate proprietors have led to monopoly, of the tribute on the consumers that this monopoly permits—is not dependent on the lowness of wages: it remains unaffected by the remedial expedient of raising every member of the community to a prescribed national minimum. In so far as any such mitigation of the poverty of the poor increases their efficiency in wealth production, and thereby the aggregate output, the total of "rent" may even be increased. If the widow is enabled to gather seven nettles instead of three, the seigneur lounging in the Œil de bœuf may find himself extracting from her more nettles than before.

The Law of Inheritance

And the effect of this diversion of a large part of the national product to the mere payment for ownership is cumulative. The small rentier may consume all his dividends in supporting himself and his family, but the larger the rent-roll or dividends the greater is normally the balance over personal expenditure, a balance automatically invested, through the highly organized banking and financial system, in additional instruments of production, yielding still further dividends. The possessor of what may be deemed a moderate fortune may lose it or dissipate it; but nearly all the super-capitalists know how to secure themselves and their heirs against any such calamity. Hence it is now axiomatic that, under the reign of capitalism, those who own the most, not those who work the most, get, in fact, the largest incomes; and those who own the least get, in fact, the smallest incomes, however hard they work. And the gulf is always widening. It is this automatic heaping up of individual fortunes—by the older economists termed, apparently with unconscious irony, "the reward of abstinence"—that accounts for that ever-multiplying monstrosity of capitalist civilization—the millionaire. Moreover, under the laws of inheritance that all capitalist nations have devised or developed, the payment for ownership not only intensifies the inequality of income between contemporaries, but also creates an hereditary class of property owners, the members of which find themselves legally entitled to levy, generation after generation, to the end of time, a tribute upon the toil of their contemporary fellow citizens. It is necessary to emphasize this point. The ownership of land and capital by private individuals, coupled with the legal institution of inheritance, is bound to result, however much it may be humanized by philanthropy and restrained from the worst excesses by a systematic application of the Policy of the National Minimum, in a division of the community into two permanent and largely hereditary castes—a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor.

The evil effects of this gross inequality between the incomes of individuals and of classes are manifold, They may be summarized under four main heads: an altogether inefficient consumption of the commodities and services annually available for the nation's maintenance; the encouragement of parasitic idleness; and, consequent on these, a widespread lack of good manners and a constantly operating dysgenic influence on the race.

The Inefficient Consumption of Wealth

"For anything I know," wrote the second President of the United States to Jefferson, "this globe may be the Bedlam, le Bicêtre, of the universe."³ The events of the last hundred years almost seem to strengthen the suggestion that, in a universe of transmigrating souls, our particular planet may have been assigned to be the lunatic asylum for the solar system. At least, the way in which the most civilized communities upon our globe consume or use the commodities and services produced by the arduous daily toil of their millions of men and women, appears to be consistent with this hypothesis. We are not referring to the delirium of social lunacy of the four years of the Great War of 1914-18, during which nearly all capitalist governments of the world used up the entire product of the labor of their respective nations, devastated fertile land, burnt innumerable buildings, and deliberately destroyed plant and machinery, in order to kill and maim some thirty millions of the youngest and strongest of their male adults. Let us think, rather, of the normal consumption of the annual product in peace time—a consumption which is taken for granted, and accepted by the well-to-do citizen with the same sort of self-complacency as is the illusion of being God Almighty by the peaceful lunatic.

The Report of the Cosmic Inspector

Imagine the report of the Spirit Expert in Scientific Consumption deputed by the government of the ALL GOOD to investigate the progress towards sanity of the inmates of the planetary lunatic asylum. "I cannot agree," he writes, "with my colleague, the Inspector of Scientific Production, that the inhabitants of the Earth are showing any approach to sanity. I need not discuss what is sanity. It will be remembered that we are forbidden, by our instructions, to inquire into the ultimate aims or ideals of the Earthians, seeing that the rightness of ends as distinguished from means has always been a matter of controversy even in the Court Circle of the ALL GOOD. I take as the test of the sanity of individuals or races, sanctioned by the law of the universe, the capacity of selecting the appropriate means to a given end, as verified by the subsequent event. The end or ideal of the Earthians is not in dispute. They are never tired of asserting to each other, with fatuous smiles, that the end they have in view is the health and happiness of the whole community. They admit that, in the earthly state, this depends, in the first place, on the effective application of the necessary commodities and services. My colleague tells me that, in the production of most commodities and of some services, they are showing signs of increasing intelligence in the use of materials and the organization of manual labor and brain-work. In the consumption of wealth they seem to me to be going from bad to worse. Former generations produced less, but what they did produce they seem to me to have consumed more intelligently. Take the three primary necessities of earthly life—food, shelter and clothing. I first made it my business to review the consumption of clothing. In the Idle Quarter, there were a number of women, each of whom prided herself on consuming in the manufacture of her garments the whole year's toil of from one hundred to two hundred garment workers. I overheard one of them say, in a debate on possible economies, that the whole annual product of one worker would barely suffice to supply her 'with a hat and a nightgown.' A younger woman, about to be married, had provided herself, for her exclusive use, of no fewer than seventy-nine nightgowns, besides other garments on which many hundreds of persons had worked for more than a year. In order to consume the toil of one or two hundred persons on the garments of one woman, labor had to be wasted in barbaric decoration, in using materials which would not last long in wear, and in providing separate suits for each occasion (I observed one woman, closely attended by a worker, changing her clothes five times in the day); and, most idiotic of all, in discarding whole wardrobes of garments once or twice a year in order to introduce a new fashion. As Earthians are apparently valued according to their capacity to consume without producing, this inefficient consumption of the garment workers' toil was imitated by women of more limited means, so that the clothing of the whole population reflected the fantastic and unhygienic habits of the wealthy members. Passing from the Idle Quarter to the homes of the garment workers themselves, I found these persons living day and night in the same clothes—ugly, badly fitting, scanty and foul. Their children were attending school in leaky boots; and, in hot weather and cold alike, were wearing rags of the same thickness and texture. The explanation was simple. These makers of garments were each of them restricted, for the whole year, to what could be produced by a single person working for one, two, or three weeks, as against the hundred or two hundred persons working for fifty - two weeks to equip each woman of the Idle Quarter. This example is typical. Hence, as a means to attain the end of the health and happiness of the whole community, the consumption of clothing on Earth cannot but be considered as a symptom of insanity.

"Then as to the shelter which the climate of these parts of the Earth makes essential. The homes in the Idle Quarters are often so large, and contain so many empty rooms, that the constant labor of from five to twenty-five persons is required merely to keep them clean, and to serve the daily needs of the so-called occupiers, who might or might not have wives and children to share them. Meantime, even in the wealthiest cities, 20 per cent of the total population are herded together in one- or two-roomed tenements. I actually discovered a number of cases of two or more families working and living in a single room, the resulting indecency and disease being unfit for publication.

"Even in the matter of food—the one absolute necessary for continued existence on Earth, the consumption is madly inefficient. It is noteworthy that the Earthians have now discovered the facts with regard to the consumption of food. They know, within a narrow margin, exactly the quantity and quality of food required for healthy, human existence; they know that less than this means starvation and more than this means disease. And yet, if we compare the normal consumption of food-values of the bulk of the inhabitants with the normal consumption of food-values in the Idle Quarters, measured in the labor required for their production, we find it ranging in the proportion of something like one to twenty, with the result that the mass of the people, and those who are working hardest, are habitually undernourished, whilst a select few, who are very often absolutely unproductive, are not only wasting food, but are actually making themselves inert and deformed in consuming it."

So far the imaginary report of the Spirit Inspector on Earthian Consumption. The mundane economist not merely confirms this criticism but even pushes it further. The present inequality of income conspicuously leads, not only to inefficient consumption, but also to the production of wrong commodities. The power of commanding from the world just what commodities and services the several owners of the unequal incomes elect to enjoy, vitiates, at a blow, all the assumptions of the earlier economists that production would, on the whole, be automatically directed to the satisfaction of human needs, in the order of their urgency. It gives us the state of things in which a vast amount of labor is lavished on the most futile luxuries, whilst tens of thousands of infants are perishing from lack of milk, innumerable children are growing up without adequate nurture, millions of men and women find themselves condemned to starved and joyless lives, and the most urgent requirements of the community as a whole—to say nothing of the essentials to the well-being of future generations—remain unprovided for. Under a system of private property in the means of production, the "effective demand" of individuals affords no sort of assurance of the fulfillment of the most indisputable national needs.

The Vitiation of Effective Demand

Unfortunately this is as true of the one-third or the two-fifths of the total income which makes up the expenditure of the toiling masses, as of the vastly larger incomes dispensed by the middle and upper classes. To quote the words of an American writer: "Under present conditions the bad example of the rich is a greater evil than their indulgence, because it spreads inefficiency so widely. The effort to imitate or keep pace with the idle rich is infectious and demoralizes even the poor. It breeds luxurious habits, not only among those who can afford them, but among those who cannot. Obviously this has a very depressing effect on consumptive efficiency throughout the community."⁴

The Wastefulness of Consumption

It is, indeed, amazing that there should have been so much study of the means of increasing the aggregate production of commodities and services, and so little attention to the manner in which they are consumed or used. Yet the very utility of any commodity depends on the way in which it passes into consumption. It is obvious that a given aggregate of commodities and services may result in much more if it is consumed and used in one way than in another. This is plain, so far as the organization of an industry is concerned, to every administrator. The "captain of industry," applying to his enterprise what he calls "scientific management," is keenly aware that his task is so to direct motive and stimulus in the whole staff, and so to apply to his processes all the resources of science, as to secure that the raw material, the various components, the sources of power, and the available labor-force shall be employed in such a way that the greatest possible total result is produced from a given supply. But he will return after his day's work to his "well-appointed" home—the "appointment" of which probably consists essentially in avoiding all labor-saving appliances and making necessary a whole group of domestic servants—to eat an unwholesome dinner on which ten times as much labor has been expended as on the meal by which his laborers maintain their health; and to encourage his wife to crowd his house with indiscriminate articles of furniture and ornamentation which have no merit beyond the amount of labor that has been wasted on them. In "good times," he will respond to every caprice of his wife and children, "Get it, it only costs money." The contrast between the economical "routing" towards maximum production of every item in his factory, and the thoughtless application of the products themselves, when they come before him as, within the limits of his own income, a check-writing director of consumption, can only be characterized as extraordinary. To any observer of the operations of a factory, it will be obvious that five tons of coal wastefully consumed do not constitute so large an item in the national wealth as three tons used in such a way as to produce a larger product. What is true of the consumption of fuel in a factory is equally true of the consumption of individual consumers of the factory's products. Thus, even with regard to national wealth, it is quite incorrect to say that its amount depends wholly on national production. The aggregate wealth of the nation can be as much augmented by an improvement in consumption as by a mere increase in production. The introduction of "summer time"—to give only one instance—is roughly estimated to have represented to the United Kingdom the equivalent of twenty million pounds annually; or as much as the whole product of one of its coalfields.

The Effect of "Rationing"

That the great inequality of incomes, which is an inevitable result of private ownership in the means of production, leads, in itself, to a flagrantly wasteful consumption of the aggregate product, has now been recognized by the modern economist. Quite apart from the fact that it destroys all possibility of "marshaling the assets," in such a way that all the most urgent needs of the community may be supplied before the less urgent, the very glorification of expenditure as expenditure leads to the purchase and consumption of commodities merely because they are costly. What is even of greater permanent importance is that there is practically no inducement to discover in what way the available production can be employed to greatest advantage. Hence, until the stress of the Great War drove our statesmen temporarily to think, there was, in Britain as in the United States, neither research nor education in the question of efficient consumption. In Britain, the temporary system of rationing the rich and poor alike, so far as regards some essential foodstuffs, had as one of its great advantages, that persons with leisure, training and opportunity devoted themselves to discovering, not only the obviously useful facts as to food values and food preparation, but also labor-saving appliances in homes, and a more economical and hygienic fashion in clothes. It is suggested that an equally stringent "rationing," not of meat and sugar, but of family incomes, would have had even more useful results. All the ingenuity and devotion of the wealthy women housekeepers might then have been diverted from a rivalry in conspicuous expenditure to an emulation in discovery of how to maintain the most charming home on the prescribed equal incomes! We suggest, indeed, to those to whom art is foremost, that an entirely new aspect would be given to design and workmanship, and to the construction and furnishing of homes, if every consumer, the most gifted and fastidious as well as the most reckless in expenditure, could escape the temptations of lavish cost and transient fashion, and found himself confronted with the problem of how to get the necessary utility and the greatest beauty out of the expenditure of the socially prescribed income available for every family.

The Encouragement of Parasitic Idleness

In times of unemployment and increasing vagrancy the wage-earners are perpetually reminded that "it is a law of nature and morality that if a man does not work neither shall he eat." To enforce this law of nature and morality we see the country studded with such brutalizing institutions as the Able-bodied Test Workhouse, the Casual Ward, and, in the last resort, the jail. With characteristic modesty the spokesmen of the insurgent unemployed have hitherto replied that the obligation to work on the part of an individual citizen must necessarily depend on his being granted the opportunity; and, greatly daring, the Labor Party has introduced into the British Parliament a "Right to Work Bill." The socialist declares that a more correct answer to the middle-class criticism would be the enactment of an "Obligation to Work Law," providing that any adult able-bodied person who was discovered not actively engaged in work of national importance should be—not cruelly punished by imprisonment in an Able-bodied Test Workhouse, a Casual Ward, or a jail—but, with all courtesy, deprived of the income which enables him to live in idleness. The socialist believes that the establishment by law of a class legally enabled to live idly on rent and dividends amounts to the establishment in the community of a set of persons who are privileged, and thereby almost irresistibly tempted, to place themselves habitually above "the law of nature and morality that if a man does not work neither shall he eat." The loss to the community which such social parasitism entails is serious enough, but the effect on the parasites themselves is even more disastrous. Those who are "above the law" do not, as we have already seen, escape an extraordinary callousness and insolence, none the less injurious because they are usually themselves unaware of it, which makes the sufferings of those who do not belong to their own class seem as unreal and as unsubstantial as if they were the sufferings of another species. The crippled conscience of the propertied class is blind to the truism that the man or woman who consumes without personally contributing to the world in the production of services or commodities is a social parasite for whose very presence the world is the poorer. Consciously or unconsciously such a person, not being infirm or superannuated, is, as Ruskin vainly taught, a thief; and a thief whose depredations are none the less real, and nowadays none the less resented, in that they are made with the sanction of the law. Even the intellect of the parasitic class is affected. This may be seen, not merely in the fact that it is not the families which have inherited millions that usually produce either scientific discoverers or geniuses in art or literature. Only by a subtle deadening of intellect can it be explained why it is almost impossible to make the average wealthy person even understand, still less believe, the obvious economic truth that the world is actually the poorer, not merely by the amount of the food and clothes that he consumes without equivalent personal production, but also by all that he spends on his personal desires and caprices; that, in his case, "spending money" is not only not "good for trade," but actually represents the abstraction from the world's stock of the services and commodities maintaining all those whom, by his purchases, he "commandeers" to his behests, which might otherwise have been devoted to the improvement of the narrow circumstances of the average citizen or to the advancement of science and the cultivation of the arts. It needed all the shock of the Great War to open the intellects of a small proportion of the wealthy to this truth; and they, it is to be feared, have now let it pass out of their minds.

The Life of Unconscious Theft

This life of unconscious theft, of which the idle members of the propertied class have an uneasy suspicion, together with the callousness and insolence that it breeds, as regards the sufferings of any but those who belong to their own class—subtly degrading as it is to the rich, has its obverse in its effect on the minds and characters of those who have not been able, in the same way, to place themselves above the world's law. The resulting servility, on the one hand, and on the other, the envy, or even the simple - minded admiration for a life which is essentially contrary to all principles of morality, is as demoralizing to the poor as it is to the rich. The bounties of the rich to the poor actually make matters worse for both of them. All charity—apart from personal friendship—is demoralizing to giver and receiver alike; and gifts among those who feel themselves socially unequal carry with them, however well-intentioned and well-devised, the poisons of patronage and parasitism. The habitual respect and deference given to men and women who are wealthy, merely because of their wealth - irrespective of goodwill, personal charm, or artistic or intellectual achievements—is as damaging to those who are thus respected and deferred to, as it is to those who pay this homage to riches. Not the least of its evils is that it falsifies social values, and actually obstructs the recognition, and therefore the imitation, of the qualities of character and intellect that are in themselves admirable. It is not too much to say that, in the Britain or the United States of to-day, the very existence, in any neighborhood, of a non-producing rich family, even if it is what it calls well conducted, is by its evil example a blight on the whole district, lowering the standards, corrupting the morality, and to that extent counteracting the work alike of the churches and the schools.

"Above the Law"

If the man himself works for a living, in business or finance, law or administration, but receives for his services an income which places him among the wealthy, he may, by the daily service that he renders, be saved from some of the personal demoralization; though the exaggerated respect which he is paid by reason of his large income brings its own perils. But his wife and children can hardly escape the various results of their own habitual over-consumption and under-employment. The occupation of the wife will almost certainly be socially unproductive, whilst the climate of servility which she meets in household and shop is dangerously enervating. The children grow up in a corrupting atmosphere of material luxury. They cannot escape the feeling, though it may never actually come into their intellectual consciousness, that they are, in the sense already explained, "above the law." The formal schooling that they receive is itself perverted by the class atmosphere. Such of them as are not quite exceptionally gifted with ambition, with a passion for self-sacrifice, or with that intellectual curiosity which is the well-spring of science, almost inevitably content themselves, if they take up any occupation at all, with "walking through the part" which the family position has obtained for them; achieving with a demoralizing mediocrity of effort only mediocre results; and practicing, in fact, throughout life, a policy of "ca' canny " of which a craftsman would be ashamed. Nor are matters improved by the makeshift occupations—philanthropic, artistic or merely social—which untrained and undisciplined men and women of leisure miscall their work. What is required for intellectual and moral hygiene, as well as for equity, is that, in return for all the "orders" on the world that any person gives by the expenditure of his income in a particular way, he should set himself, by his own personal service, to fulfill the "orders" that other members of the community give, or would give if they had at their own disposal their reasonably fair shares of the national income. If he prefers to "live his own life," not obeying other people's orders, let him at least refrain from giving orders; that is, from consuming more than he himself produces. Other economic relations between one man and another mean a self-deception and a self-complacency which is nauseous.⁵ It is extraordinary that the individualist philosophers who are always dilating on the bracing effects of competition for a livelihood, as tested by market values, should accept with equanimity the demoralization and degradation which, on their own showing, a life of parasitism imposes upon the offspring of those whom these same philosophers regard as having proved themselves to belong to the finest stocks. It is not easy to see how such reasoners escape the inference that the progress of the community and of the race imperatively demands the abolition, as regards dividend - producing wealth, of the right of inheritance, and with it the opportunity of living without work; if only in order that the young people of each generation—even their own children—may not be deprived of the beneficent results of the competitive struggle.

The Lack of Good Manners

But there is another and quite opposite justification for inequalities in income and personal freedom, which is nowadays more often pertinaciously held than openly expressed. It is very widely felt that good manners, a high standard of refinement, personal charm and even human dignity, are dependent on the existence of a set of families, all the better if hereditary, who are "above the law" of nature and morality that he who does not work shall not eat. The very hallmark of the "gentleman" and the "lady" of to-day is the absence in their daily lives of any need for personal drudgery, for obedience to the commands of others, and for incessant regard to pecuniary considerations; the whole resulting in a freedom to develop new faculties of social advantage, though not productive of exchangeable commodities or services. Combined with this is the attraction, as an individual quality, of an easy habit of command, a form of personal dignity often accompanying the habitual utilization, virtually coercive, of other people's services.

The Corollary of Bad Manners

We note in passing that those who advertise the social benefit of an aristocracy of good manners, to be based, as an indispensable foundation, on wealth and freedom from any enforceable obligation of service, seem to regard as of no consequence the deterioration of manners brought about by the combination, in the daily lives of the vast majority of the race, of poverty and servility. In the modern industrial state, whether of the Old World or of the New, we see the obverse of the "gentleman" and the "lady" in the typical denizens of the urban slum. The brutality, the coarseness, the inconsiderate noises, the mean backbiting and quarrelsomeness that characterize no small proportion of all the residential quarters open to the wage-earning population compel the more "respectable" of their inhabitants, as they say, to "keep themselves to themselves," because they find social intercourse impossible. It is a pathetic incident of the "bad manners" that—far more than selfishness, cruelty or failure of mutual help—characterize the slums that every one insists on being termed a "gentleman" or "lady"; whilst the honorable appellation of man or woman is used only, with an adjectival swear - word, as a term of abuse!

But the fact we want to emphasize is not the brutalization of the poor but the vulgarization of the rich. We deny that the leisure class of the modern industrial state supplies any standard of good manners. On the contrary, as the elder aristocrats themselves deplore, one of the specific evils of the modern capitalist community, with its apotheosis of profit-making, on the one hand, and of luxurious idleness on the other, is a degradation of manners, more pernicious because more exemplary, than the coarse brutalities of the slum.

The Effect of Loss of Function

It is interesting to notice that, in the history of the world, the class of persons who were, by the coercive utilization of other people's labor, themselves relieved from industrial toil, had originally their own distinctive social function, other than that of "existing beautifully." They hunted for the food of the tribe; they fought in its defense; they performed the priestly offices on which its well - being seemed to depend; in Greece they were the philosophers and artists, in Republican Rome the statesmen and the jurists, and often the conquerors or administrators of subject-peoples. It has been reserved for the century of capitalism to produce an extensive class of persons, absolved from productive work, of whom a large proportion of the men, and nearly all the women, have no specific function, and disclaim the obligation of any social service whatever. We have already commented on the degradation of manners and morals, and the subtle corruption of other people's manners and morals, which is involved in the existence of a function-less rich class. But there is another cause for the deterioration, among the wealthy families in our modern societies of advanced capitalism, of what used to be counted as the social graces of a leisure class. These social graces went best, it will be admitted, with such aristocracies as those of the Court of Louis the Fourteenth, the old landed families of Carolina or Virginia, or the Samurai of Japan, the very essence of whose lives was a personal abstention from the conscious pursuit of pecuniary gain, and the maintenance of a rigidly defined caste system. It is evident, however, that such a division of activities cannot endure, because it has no root in nature. If the capitalist class would breed true to feudalism by producing only statesmen or soldiers, sportsmen or dilettanti, a stable medieval inequality might be maintained. But Nature takes no notice of capitalism. Statesmen and dilettanti are as rare among its scions as they are in the class which produced Wolsey and Richelieu. Its energetic spirits have for the most part vulgar ambitions, vulgar capacities, and vulgar tastes in excitement. They are competitive rather than coöperative: they like success, which means money-making and the personal power and prestige that money-making leads to; and the gambling element in big business flavors it attractively for them. The specially active men arising in the old families nowadays vie with the crowd of the newly enriched in the making of profit by the organization and administration of the instruments of production. This influence becomes, even in the richest circles, all-pervasive. The "leisure class." of to-day, in Britain and France, no less than in America and Australia—far from being above and beyond the pursuit of pecuniary gain—is dominated by the desire for amassing more wealth, without any very nice discrimination between the different forms of production and the various kinds of profit-making that the law permits. There is no longer an aristocracy, a bourgeoisie, and a working class. There is a plutocracy and a proletariat; and it is in the proletariat that the old distinctions survive as ideals, and are miserably aped in practice; whilst in the plutocracy the big shopkeeper dines with the viscount, and all are rich tradesmen together.

The outcome of the attempt to combine the aristocratic ideal of a leisured class with the bourgeois pursuit of pecuniary gain is a state of manners which—at least to our taste - is unlovely to the last degree.⁶ The ostentation of leisure, the choice of conspicuous and futile expenditure, the estimation of everything by its price, the measured appreciation of every person according, not to his quality or his achievements, but to his wealth, the consequent uncertainty as to everybody's "social position," the sycophancy towards millionaires, the almost irresistible arrogance given by the consciousness of possessions, and the subtle insolence that is involved in the conception that other persons with whom you habitually consort are social inferiors—all these characteristics of the society of all capitalist countries appear to us to reduce to an absurdity the claim that, in the present capitalist civilization, it is upon the existence of a leisured class that good manners depend.

The Emergence of Really Good Manners

The socialist does not restrict himself to this negative criticism. He believes that a new conception of what is "good manners" is emerging in the modern democratic state, as an outcome of its democracy. When a definite system of social castes ceases to be maintainable, and social intercourse necessarily becomes general and promiscuous—as in the common membership of democratically elected bodies, or in the common use by all classes of the omnibus, the tramway, the American railway car, and now the British "third class" compartment—there is only one alternative to bad manners, and that is the common standard of mutual courtesy. This, in fact, constitutes the good manners of the remoter parts of contemporary Japan, where the nobleman or the millionaire uses the same ceremonious politeness to the porters as these do to him, and the great landlord to every one of his hundreds of peasant cultivators of rice and radishes, as his tenants themselves employ to the superior that they recognize. A similar extension of the conception of mutuality in a humane courtesy lies at the root of the typical "civilization" or urbanity in which modern France, owing to the traditions of the Revolution, is seen to excel, let us say, the Prussia of 1871-1918. It will be remembered that, already in 1879, Matthew Arnold took, for the text of his criticism of both the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of wealth of the Britain of his time, "a striking maxim, not alien certainly to the language of the Christian religion, but which has not passed into our copybooks: 'Choose equality and flee greed.'"⁷ With Matthew Arnold, socialists believe in "choosing equality" as the essential element in good manners.

This fundamental condition of good manners was accepted by those who have, from time to time, been recognized as exemplars in the matter; but only as regards such as were admitted to membership of their own particular social caste. At all times, in well-mannered sets, all who were in the set have been expected, in social intercourse, to treat each other as equals. Already we extend this conception of social equality to the dinner table. We do not, when there is only just enough of anything to go round, seek to take for ourselves more than an equal share. We do not, nowadays, think it compatible with the manners of a gentleman to give the governess a cheaper wine than is served to the other persons at table, nor even to put off the servants ' hall with inferior meat. But towards the great unknown mass of our fellow-citizens, who are really sitting down with us to eat at the world's table, this principle of good manners is observed only by a tiny minority, even among those who think themselves well - bred. And this again is inevitable, because Nature still obstinately refuses to coöperate by making the rich people innately superior to the poor people. It is quite easy for the natural aristocrat to be exquisitely courteous to poorer mortals. His privilege is not challenged: the common man is touched by his condescension and eager to show that he knows how to respect genuine worth—that, as he phrases it, he knows a gentleman when he sees one. But the rich are not born with this natural superiority: they are in the lump as other men are; and their upbringing in comparative luxury tends to make them petulant, and expect a precedence to which their characters do not entitle them. Having no natural superiority, they are forced to assert their artificial privilege by insolence, and to demonstrate their power by expenditure. Without such insolence and such expenditure, they might as well be their own parlor-maids and butlers, who are often better looking and better mannered, and indeed could hardly obtain good situations if they were not.

Under such conditions it is useless to preach good manners and reasonable economy to people who combine average character with exceptional riches, not to mention those who are below the average, and are born mean, loutish, selfish, stupid, as happens just as often to those who count their incomes in thousands as in shillings. Bad manners become, if not literally compulsory, at least practically inevitable; and as in each class the accepted standard of manners is simply what everybody habitually does in that class, the great majority of people come to think it no more a breach of good manners to be insolent and extravagant than to spend and consume, by themselves and their families, and thus to abstract from the world, just whatever income the accident of fortune gives them, irrespective of whether or not the consumption is necessary for the fullest performance of their duty to the community.

What stands in the way of the universal adoption of the democratic conception of good manners in the United States as well as in the Britain of to-day is, in fact, the inequality of material circumstances and personal freedom among the families, which are, in our modern promiscuity of intercourse, driven into personal contact. It is for this reason that the best manners are to be observed—we venture to record what is our own opinion—not in the "Upper Ten Thousand" of Britain or the "Four Hundred" of New York, but in certain strata of society where a practical equality of material circumstances happens to prevail, and where social position depends on quite other circumstances than relative possessions. We may instance the academic families resident in university centers, the still surviving skilled handicraftsmen of old-fashioned vocations, and the ministers of religion in denominations which have remained poor and lowly. The socialist contention is that, if we are to be gentlemen, not only must we intuitively refrain from taking more than our equal share of the good things of life, but we must also embody, in our social institutions, and especially in the way in which we collectively allocate among the whole of our fellow-countrymen the means of civilized life, that fundamental maxim, "choose equality and flee greed."

The Dysgenic Influence

There remains yet another indictment of the social stratification resulting from the inequality of personal riches, and the dominance given to it in capitalist society. Mr. Bernard Shaw, who more than any other socialist has brought into prominence both the evils resulting from disparity of personal riches and the ideal of equality of income as a fundamental part of the socialist creed, has given expression to this indictment in a characteristically challenging form. "I do not believe," he says, that "you will ever have any improvement in the human race until you greatly widen the area of possible sexual selection; until you make it as wide as the numbers of the community make it. Just consider what occurs at the present time. I walk down Oxford Street, let me say, as a young man. I see a woman who takes my fancy. I fall in love with her. It would seem very sensible, in an intelligent community, that I should take off my hat and say to this lady: 'Will you excuse me; but you attract me very strongly, and if you are not already engaged, would you mind taking my name and address and considering whether you would care to marry me?' Now I have no such chance at present. Probably when I meet that woman, she is either a charwoman, and I cannot marry her, or else she is a duchess, and she will not marry me. I have purposely taken the charwoman and the duchess; but we cut matters much finer than that. We cut our little class distinctions, all founded upon inequality of income, so narrow and so small that I have time and again said in English audiences of all classes throughout the kingdom 'You know perfectly well that when it came to your turn to be married, you had not, as a young man or a young woman, the choice practically of all the unmarried young people of your own age in our forty million population to choose from. You had at the outside a choice of two or three; and you did not like any of them very particularly as compared to the one you might have chosen, if you had had a larger choice.' That is a fact which you gentlemen with your knowledge of life cannot deny. The result is that you have, instead of a natural evolutionary sexual selection, a class selection which is really a money selection. Is it to be wondered at that you have an inferior and miserable breed under such circumstances? I believe that this goes home more to the people than any other argument I can bring forward. I have impressed audiences with that argument who were entirely unable to grasp the economic argument in the way you are able to grasp it, and who were indifferent to the political arguments. I say, therefore, that if all the other arguments did not exist, the fact that equality of income would have the effect of making the entire community inter-marriageable from one end to the other, and would practically give a young man and young woman his or her own choice right through the population—I say that that argument only, with the results which would be likely to accrue in the improvement of the race, would carry the day."⁸

We may perhaps differ in the present state of our knowledge of eugenics as to the weight to be given to this plea for perfect freedom of sexual selection according to momentary impulse. But we must remember that, a generation before Mr. Bernard Shaw, it had been pretty conclusively demonstrated by Francis Galton that the introduction of the motive of pecuniary gain—what Mr. Bernard Shaw calls "money selection"—resulted in the progressive sterilization of the most promising stocks.

"Money Selection"

To Francis Galton's statistical demonstration of the socially disadvantageous consequences of the preference for heiresses of the most successful men of each generation, we may now add the adverse influence upon the birth-rate of the selection by the French peasantry, and generally by the petite bourgeoisie, of an only daughter as the wife for an only son, in order to accumulate the petty inheritances. In Britain and the United States we see this as the tendency to "marrying in," among wealthy families, in order to "keep the money in the family." Akin to this is the very common preference by parents who are keenly alive to their daughters' pecuniary advantage for sons-in-law of superior means, even with the drawbacks of age, weak health, lack of will-power, or deficiency in mental attainments. We see this deflection of sexual selection in its gravest form when the search for a husband or a wife endowed with the desired fortune leads, in circles high and low, to the acceptance of some one who is physically disqualified for healthy marriage, and even the morally degenerate, or the feeble-minded. The obverse of this "money selection," in all its forms, which no one can believe to be other than eugenically disadvantageous, is the intensification, among the least provident and most casual of all classes, notably in the poorest stratum of irregularly employed laborers of our great cities (who are to a large extent condemned to a perpetual interbreeding), of a reckless propagation that may well be eugenically as adverse in its consequences to the community as the exceptional restriction of the birth-rate among the provident and the prudent.

The reaction of money selection on politics must be treated separately; but we may quote here the epigram made by Stuart Glennie at the expense of a gentleman who obtained the means of entering parliament by marrying the daughter of a rich manufacturer. He described him as "M.P. by sexual selection." The gentleman, as it happened, justified his success at the poll; but that entirely accidental fact does not diminish the intensity of the flashlight thrown by the sarcasm on the power of inequality of income to corrupt the House of Commons, which contains not a few "members by sexual selection," and in like manner the whole system of representative government.

Notes

1. "Inequality" of income may, of course, be understood in several ways (as to which see Some Aspects of the Inequality of Incomes in Modern Communities, by Hugh Dalton, 1920). As to the statistics, see the estimates of various authorities quoted in Fabian Tract No. 5, Facts for Socialists; Riches and Poverty, by Sir Leo Chiozza-Money, 1905; British Incomes and Property, second edition, 1921, and Wealth and Taxable Capacity, 1922, both by Sir Josiah Stamp; and Changes in the Distribution of Income, 1880-1913, 1918, and The Division of the Product of Industry, 1919, both by A. L. Bowley. ↩
2. Americanised Socialism, by James Mackaye, 1918. ↩
3. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814; in The Works of John Adams, by C. E. Adams, 1851-6, vol. x, p. 101. ↩
4. Americanised Socialism, by James Mackaye, 1918. ↩
5. The ablest monograph on this subject has been produced in the United States (The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, 1899), tracing the origin of a leisure class from ancient civilizations based on a double method of acquiring wealth, viz., the "honorable method of seizure and conversion," i.e. hunting, war, predatory raids on and oppression of inferior races; and the "dishonorable method" of personal toil (agriculture and manufacture) enforced on women and on slaves. This tradition was carried on, with modifications, through feudal civilization, the wives and daughters of the nobles (themselves still engaged in the honorable method of seizure and conversion) being exempt from all useful occupations, and becoming "ladies." "From this point on, the characteristic feature of leisure-class life is a conspicuous exemption from all useful employment. Abstention from labor is the conventional mark of social wealth, and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing; and this insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on leisure. . . Prescription ends by making labor not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy life" (ibid., pp. 40-41). In modern capitalism the male pursues gain, not by manual labor, which remains dishonorable, but by direction, organization, bargaining, and speculation—all expressions of the conqueror or exploiter—but he insists on the vicarious leisure of his women-kind, and sometimes of his sons, as the hallmark of his social position. The utility of conspicuous leisure, and consumption for the purpose of establishing social status lies in the element of waste—the ability to bear pecuniary loss. "Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness" (ibid., p. 43). Το this was added luxurious expenditure. "Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments" (ibid., p. 75). The chapters on "Conspicuous Leisure," "Conspicuous Consumption," "The Pecuniary Standard of Living," "Pecuniary Canons of Taste," "Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture," "The Conservation of Archaic Traits," and "Modern Survivals of Prowess" are full of significance as illustrating the culture of a leisure class in a capitalist state. ↩
6. As has been pointed out by Veblen, the aristocratic or barbarian idea of a governing class depended on complete abstinence, not only from manual labor, but more especially from the brain-working process of profit-making, whether in manufactures, commerce or speculation. If the aristocrat was idle and luxurious, he was at least free from the active pursuit of gain. On the other hand, Werner Sombart shows that the old bourgeois ideal of a governing class is seen at its best in the early stages of capitalism when idleness and extravagance are the two deadly sins, and personal industry and personal thrift are exalted as the holiest of moral virtues. "'Take as your model the ants,' wrote the father of Leonardo da Vinci (1339)—the most eminent bourgeois of his time—' who to-day already have a care for the needs of the morrow. Be thrifty and moderate " (The Quintessence of Capitalism, by Werner Sombart, 1915, р. 111). Benjamin Franklin—the founder of the American bourgeois ideal—writes: "'In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid the appearance to the contrary. I dressed plain, and was seen at no places of idle diversion: I never went out a-fishing or shooting'" (ibid., pp. 123-4). The leisure class of modern capitalism has lost the good and retained the bad features of both the aristocratic and the bourgeois ideals. ↩
7. "Equality," by Matthew Arnold, in Mixed Essays, 1879. ↩
8. "The Case for Equality," a lecture delivered at the National Liberal Club, London; reported in The Metropolitan (New York), December, 1913, and also published in London in pamphlet form. ↩