^^ ,^^^ -0' X ;^^^^ co^ '*/'^<.' ^x>^ -v'^c <-^' o^ ^^' ' ^^. THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY BY R. H. TAWNEY FELLOW OP BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD; LATE MEMBER OP THE COAL INDUSTRY COMMISSION m NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 1920 r\ y, ^ *^ .c^°^ COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HARCOURT, BRACK AND HOWE, INC. V \ tions of what individualism is within them. It has similar origins and tendencies, similar triumphs and defects. For nationalism, like individualism, lays its emphasis on the rights of separate units, not on their subordination to common obligations, though its units are races or nations, not individual men. Like individ- ualism it appeals to the self-assertive instincts, to which it promises opportunities of unlimited expansion. Like individualism it is a force of immense explosive power, the just claims of which must be conceded before it is possible to invoke any alternative principle to con- trol its operations. For one cannot impose a super- national authority upon irritated or discontented or oppressed nationalities any more than one can subor- dinate economic motives to the control of society, until society has recognized that there is a sphere which they may legitimately occupy. And, like individual- ism, if pushed to its logical conclusion, it is self-destruc- tive. For as nationalism^ in its brilliant youth, be- gins as a claim that nations, because they are spiritual beings, shall determine themselves, and passes too often into a claim that they shall dominate others, so in- dividualism begins by asserting the right of men to THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 49 make of their own lives what they can, and ends by condoning the subjection of the majority of men to the few whom good fortune or special opportunity or privilege have enabled most successfully to use their rights. They rose together. It is probable that, if ever they decline, they wiU decline together. For life cannot be cut in corapartments. In the long run the world reaps in war what it sows in peace. And to expect that international rivalry can be exercised as long as the industrial order within each nation is such as to give success to those whose existence is a strug- gle for self-aggrandizement is a dream which has not even the merit of being beautiful. So the perversion of nationalism is imperialism, as the perversion of individualism is industrialism. And the perversion comes, not through any flaw or vice in human nature, but by the force of the idea, because the principle is defective and reveals its defects as it reveals its power. For it asserts that the rights of nations and individuals are absolute, which is false, instead of asserting that they are absolute in their own sphere, l^ut that their sphere itself is contingent upon the part which they play in the community of nations and individuals, which is true. Thus it con- strains them to a career of indefinite expansion, in which they devour continents and oceans, law, mo- rality and religion, and last of all their own souls, in an attempt to attain infinity by the addition to them- selves of all that is finite. In the meantime their rivals, and their subjects, and they themselves are conscious of the danger of opposing forces, and seek to pur- 50 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY /chase security and to avoid a collision by organizing a balance of power. But the balance, whether in inter- national politics or in industry, is unstable, because it reposes not on the common recognition of a prin- ciple by which the claims of nations and individuals are limited, but on an attempt to find an equipoise which may avoid a conflict without adjuring the as- sertion of unlimited claims. No such equipoise can be found, because, in a world where the possibilities of increasing military or industrial power are illimitable, no such equipoise can exist. Thus, as long as men move on this plane, there is no solution. They can obtain peace only by surren- dering the claim to the unlettered exercise of their rights, which is the cause of war. What we have been witnessing, in short, during the past five years, both in international affairs and in industry, is the break- down of the organization of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations. Sooner or later the collapse was inevitable, because the basis was too nar- row. Eor a right is simply a power which is secured < by legal sanctions, " a capacity,'' as the lawyers de- » fine it, " residing in one man, of controlling, with the assistance of the State, the action of others," and a right should not be absolute for the same reason that a power should not be absolute. No doubt it is better that individuals should have absolute rights than that the State or the Government should have them; and it was the reaction against the abuses of absolute power by the State which led in the eighteenth century to the declaration of the absolute rights of individuals. THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM 51 The most obvious defense against the assertion of one extreme was the assertion of the other. Because Gov- ernments and the relics of feudalism had encroached upon the property of individuals it was affirmed that the right of property was absolute; because they had strangled enterprise, it was affirmed that every man ; had a natural right to conduct his business as he pleased. But, in reality, both the one assertion and the other are false, and, if applied to practice, must lead to. disaster. The State has no absolute rights; they are limited by its commission. The individual has no absolute rights ; they are relative to the function which he performs in the community of which he is a mem- ber, because, unless they are so limited, the conse- quences must be something in the nature of private war. All rights, in short, are conditional and deriva- tive, because all power should be conditional and de- rivative. They are derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist. They are condi- tional on being used to contribute to the attainment of that end, not to thwart it. And this means in practice that, if society is to b e healthy , men must regard themselves not as the owners of rights, but as trustees for the discharge of functions and the instru- ^ ments of a social purpose. V PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK The application of the principle that society should be organized upon the basis of functions, is not recon- dite, but simple and direct. It offers in the first place, a standard for discriminating between those types of private property which are legitimate and those which are not. During the last century and a half, political thought has oscillated between two conceptions of prop- erty, both of which, in their different ways, are ex-, travagant. On the one hand, the practical founda- tion of social organization has been the doctrine that the particular forms of private property which exist at any moment are a thing sacred and inviolable, that anything may properly become the object of prop- erty rights, and that, when it does, the title to it is absolute and unconditioned. The modern industrial system took shape in an age when this theory of prop- erty was triumphant. The American Constitution and the French Declaration of the Eights of Man both treated property as one of the fundamental rights which Governments exist to protect. The English Kev- olution of 1688, undogmatic and reticent though it was, had in effect done the same. The great individ- ualists from Locke to Turgot, Adam Smith and Ben- tham all repeated, in different language, a similar con- ception. Though what gave the Revolution its dia- 52 PEOPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 53 bolical character in the eyes of the English upper classes was its treatment of property, th-e dogma of the sanctity of private property was maintained as tena- ciously by French Jacobins as by English Tories; and the theory that property is an absolute, which is held by many modern Conservatives, is identical, if only they knew it, with that not only of the men of 1789, but of the Convention itself. On the other hand, the attack has been almost as undiscriminating as the defense. ^' Private property " has been the central position against which the social movement of the last hundred years has directed its forces. The criticism of it has ranged from an im- aginative communism in the most elementary and per- sonal of necessaries, to prosaic and partially realized proposals to transfer certain kinds of property from private to public ownership, or to limit their exploita- tion by restrictions . imposed by the State. But, how- ever varying in emphasis and in method, the general note of what may conveniently be called the Socialist criticism of property is what the word Socialism itself implies. Its essence is the statement that the economic evils of society are primarily due to the unregulated operation, under modern conditions of industrial organ- ization, of the institution of private property. The divergence of opinion is natural, since in most discussions of property the opposing theorists have usu- ally been discussing different things. Property is the most ambiguous of categories. It covers a multitude of rights which have nothing in common except that they are exercised by persons and enforced by the State. 54 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY Apart from these formal characteristics, they vary in- definitely in economic character, in social effect, and in moral justification. They may be conditional like the grant of patent rights, or absolute like the own- ership of ground rents, terminable like copyright, or permanent like a freehold, as comprehensive as sov- ereignty or as restricted as an easement, as intimate and personal as the ov^nership of clothes and books, or as remote and intangible as shares in a gold mine or rubber plantation. It is idle, therefore, to present a case for or against private property without specify- ing the particular forms of property to which refer-/ ence is made, and the journalist who says that "pri-i vate property is the foundation of civilization " agrees with Proudhon, who said it was theft, in this respect at least that, without further definition, the words of both are meaningless. Arguments which support or demolish certain kinds of property may have no appli- cation to others; considerations which are conclusive in one stage of economic organization may be almost irrelevant in the next. The course of wisdom is neither j to attack private property in general nor to defend it in general; for things are not similar in quality, merely because they are identical in name. It is to discriminate between the various concrete embodiments of what, in itself, is, after all, little more than an ab- straction. The origin and development of different kinds of proprietary rights is not material to this discussion. Whatever may have been the historical process by which they have been established and recognized, the PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 55 rationale of private property traditional in England is that which sees in it the security that each man will reap where he has sown. ^' If I despair of enjoying the fruits of labor," said Bentham, repeating what were in all essentials the arguments of Locke, ^' I shall only live from day to day; I shall not undertake labors which will only benefit my enemies." Property, it is argued, is a moral right, and not merely a legal right, because it insures that the producer will not be de- prived by violence of the result of his efforts. The period from which that doctrine was inherited differed from our own in three obvious, but significant, respects. Property in land and in the simple capital used in most industries was widely distributed. Before the rise of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, the ownership, or at any rate the secure and effective occu- pation, of land and tools by those who used them, was a condition precedent to effective work in the field or in the workshop. The forces which threatened prop- erty were the fiscal policy of Governments and in some countries, for example France, the decaying relics of feudalism. The interference both of the one and of the other involved the sacrifice of those who carried on useful labor to those who did not. To resist them was to protect not only property but industry, which was indissolubly connected with it. Too often, indeed, resistance was ineffective. Accustomed to the misery of the rural proprietor in Prance, Voltaire remarked with astonishment that in England the peasant may be rich, and " does not fear to increase the number of his beasts or to cover his roof with tiles." And 56 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY the English Parliamentarians and the French phi- losophers who made the inviolability of property rights the center of their political theory, when they defended those who owned, were incidentally^ if sometimes unin- tentionally, defending those who labored. They were protecting the yeoman or the master craftsman or the merchant from seeing the fruits of his toil squandered by the hangers-on at St. James or the courtly parasites of Versailles. In such circumstances the doctrine which found the justification of private property in the fact that it enabled the industrious man to reap where he had sown, was not a paradox, but, as far as the mass of the population was concerned, almost a truism. Prop- erty was defended as the most sacred of rights. But it was defended as a right which was not only widely exercised, but which was indispensable to the per- formance of the active function of providing food and clothing. Eor it consisted predominantly of one of two types, land or tools which were used by the owner for the purpose of production, and personal posses- sions which were the necessities or amenities of civil- ized existence. The former had its rationale in the fact that the land of the peasant or the tools of the craftsman were the condition of his rendering the eco- nomic services which society required; the latter be- cause furniture and clothes are indispensable to a life of decency and comfort. The proprietary ri ghts — and, of course, they were numerous — which had their source, not in work, but in _.pr edator y foipe, were protected from criticism by the wide distribution of some kind PROPEETY AND CREATIVE WORK 57 of property among the mass of the population, and in England, at least, the cruder of them were grad- ually whittled down. When property in land and what simple capital existed were generally diffused among all classes of society, when, in raost parts of England, the typical workman was not a laborer but a peasant or small master, who could point to the strips which he had plowed or the cloth which he had woven, when the greater part of the wealth passing at death consisted of land, household furniture and a stock in trade which was hardly distinguishable from it, the moral justification of the title to property was self- evident. It was obviously, what theorists said, that it was, and plain men knew it to be, the labor spent in producing, acquiring and administering it. Such property was not a burden upon society, but a condition of its health and efficiency, and indeed, of its continued existence. To protect it was to main- tain the organization through which public necessi- ties were supplied. If, as in Tudor England, the peas- ant was evicted from his holding to make room for sheep, or crushed, as in eighteenth century France, by arbitrary taxation and seignurial dues, land went out of cultivation and the whole community was short of food. If the tools of the carpenter or smith were seized, plows were not repaired or horses shod. Hence, before the rise of a commercial civilization, it was the mark of statesmanship, alike in the England of the Tudors and in the France of Henry IV, to cherish the small property-owner even to the point of offending the great. Popular sentiment idealized the 58 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY yeoman — " the Joseph of the country who keeps the poor from starving '' — not merely because he owned property, but because he worked on it, denounced that '^ bringing of the livings of many into the hands of one," which capitalist societies regard with equanimity as an inevitable, and, apparently, a laudable result of eco- ■ nomic development, cursed the usurer who took advan- i tage of his neighbor's necessities to live without labor, was shocked by the callous indifference to public wel- fare shown by those who " not having before their eyes either God or the profit and advantage of the realm, have enclosed with hedges and dykes towns and hamlets," and was sufficiently powerful to compel Gov- ernments to intervene to prevent the laying of field to field, and the engrossing of looms — to set limits, in short, to the scale to which property might grow. When Bacon, who commended Henry VII for pro- tecting the tenant right of the small farmer, and pleaded , in the House of Commons for more drastic land legis- j lation, wrote '' Wealth is like muck. It is not good \ but if it be spread," he was expressing in an epigram what was the commonplace of every writer on politics from Fortescue at the end of the fifteenth century to Harrington in the middle of the seventeenth. The modern conservative, who is inclined to take au pied de la lettre the vigorous argument in which Lord Hugh Cecil denounces the doctrine that the maintenance of proprietary rights ought to be contingent upon the use to which they are put, may be reminded that Lord Hugh's own theory is of a kind to make his ancestors turn in their graves. Of the two members of the PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 59 family who achieved distinction before the nineteenth century, the elder advised the Crown to prevent land- lords evicting tenants, and actually proposed to fix a pecuniary maximum to the property which different classes might possess, while the younger attacked en- closing in Parliament, and carried legislation compel- ling landlords to build cottages, to let them with small holdings, and to plow up pasture. William and Robert Cecil were sagacious and re- sponsible men, and their view that the protection of property should be accompanied by the enforcement of obligations upon its owners was shared by most of their contemporaries. The idea that the institution of pri- vate property involves the right of the owner to use it, or refrain from using it, in such a way as he may please, and that its principal significance is to supply him with an income, irrespective of any duties which he may dis- charge, would not have been understood by most public men of that age, and, if understood, would have been repudiated with indignation by the more reputable among them. They found the meaning of property in the public purposes to which it contributed, whether they were the production of food, as among the peas- antry, or the management of public affairs, as among the gentry, and hesitated neither to maintain those kinds of property which met these obligations nor to repress those uses of it which appeared likely to conflict with them. Property was to be an aid to creative work, not an alternative to it. The patentee was secured pro- tection for a new invention, in order to secure him the fruits of his own brain, but the monopolist who grew I ed THE ACQriSnTTE SOCIETT &T cai the industrv of oiLers ^£s to be pm down. The lav of tbe TiHsige bcmnd ibe pe£5;£i:i to ii>e Id? land, nol as }>e himself mishi ^cd mosi prrdi^rlr, "bni lo grow the com the viH^gt rieeded. Lcoig afrer priiiieal changes kftd mjide direet inreTiepene^ impraeiic-alur, eren the ki^»sr rtfiks of Engji^li Ijindoviiss contiiiiied to dis- ckaige. l»veTer cftpikioii^ and trraimieally, dniies ^v^k^ were vstgiiebr fdt to be the eontrihntioii which Tht J made to Ae pdblie serviee in Tirtoe of their esiates. "When as in Fianoe, the obiigaticaQs of ownership were i^podiated almoet as compkt^ as they hame hesi l^ the owner of to-dav, nsn^is came in an cmslaii^t upon the pcsmon of a wiMesst vhidi had retained its r:rr:s and ahdieated its fimeti^ms. PropeHy repceed, in i ' not BicKiy iq«cm ccHrroiience, or the appetite f oi _ bat «i a BKaal principle- It ^as proieeted not onlv for tie sake of those who owtaed. tut for il tkose -mho woAsd aud of those for wLcm -. pvorided. It was prcteeted, because. ~:-h "- fr::ir:rr ftsr pwiperrr, Treahh could not be 7 zhe cf socieST carried cm. Vh ai e t^T tbe fatnre nunr coptain, the past has sbnvn 1 -XD^leDt soeial order than Aat in which the i^ It people wea^ tbe masters of the holdings -^ _ ^-r^T-^ and of Ae tods with whidi tber - : - i boK^ with the EngKsh frediQlder, •khhTi • i: ?? to a man's mind to lire upaa r- - — -hi? heir certain." With this eoo- ~ 5Li>6 7"!? ?T*rtir?I ^"s^aies^oKk in social 1^ - - sbcnld be \ PEOPEETT ASl) CEEATIYE WORK 61 ized on the basis of function Lave no q^iarreL It is in agreement with their own dcotrine. =inoe it jnstines property bj re feren ce to the ^^rrices which it enables its owner to perfomL All that thev neeii ask is that \ it should be carried to its logical conclusion- For the argnment has evidently more than one edge. If it justifies certain types of property, it condemns others ; and in the conditions of modem indtLstrial ciTi- Uzation^ what it justifies is less than what it ct:ndemns. The truth is, indeed, that this theory of property and the institutions in which it is embodied have survived into an age in which the whole structure ' ' 'j is radically different from that in which it : rmtt- lated, and which made it a valid aiOTment, if not for all, at least for the most common and characteristic kinds of property. It is not merely that the ownership of any substantial share in the national wealth is con- centrated to-day in the hands of a few hunletariat wc^rking under the agents and for the profit of thjse who own. The characteristic fact, which differentiates most J G2 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY modern property from that of the pre-industrial age, and which turns against it the very reasoning by which formerly it was supported, is that in modern economic conditions ownership is not active, but passive, that to most of those who own property to-day it is not a means of work but an instrument for the acquisition of gain or the exercise of power, and that there is no guarantee that gain bears any relation to service, or power to responsibility. For property which can be regarded as 1 a condition of the performance of function, like the tools I of the craftsman, or the holding of the peasant, or the I personal possessions which contribute to a life of health * and efficiency, forms an insignificant proportion, as far as its value is concerned, of the property rights exist- ing at present. In modern industrial societies the great mass of property consists, as the annual review of wealth passing at death reveals, neither of personal acquisitions such as household furniture, nor of the owner's stock- in-trade, but of rights of various kinds, such as royal- ties, ground-rents, and, above all, of course shares in industrial undertakings which yield an income irre- spective of any personal service rendered by their owners. Ownership and use are normally divorced. The greater part of modern property has been atten- uated to a pecuniary lien or bond on the product of industry which carries with it a right to payment, but which is normally valued precisely because it relieves the owner from any obligation to perform a positive or constructive function. Such property may be called passive property, or property for acquisition, for exploitation, or for power, PROPEETY AND CEEATIVE WORK 63 to distinguish it from the property which is actively used by its owner for the conduct of his profession or the upkeep of his household. To the lawyer the first is, of course,' as fully property as the second. It is questionable, however, whether economists shall call it I " Property " at all, and not rather, as Mr. Hobson has Suggested, " Improperty,'' since it is not identical with the rights which secure the owner the produce of his toil, but is opposite of them. A classification of pro- prietary rights based upon this difference would be in- structive. If they were arranged according to the close- ness with which they approximate to one or other of these two extremes, it would be found that they were spread along a line stretching from property which is obviously the payment for, and condition of, personal services, to property which is merely a right to pay- ment from the services rendered by others, in fact a private tax. The rough order which would emerge, if all details and qualification were omitted, might be something as follows: — 1. Property in payments made for personal services. 2. Property in personal possessions necessary to health and comfort. 3. Property in land and tools used by their owners. 4. Property in copyright and patent rights owned by authors and inventors. 5. Property in pure interest, including much agri- cultural rent. 6. Property in profits of luck and good fortune; *' quasi-rents." 7. Property in monopoly profits. 64 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY 8. Property in urban ground rents. . 9. Property in royalties. • The first four kinds of property obviously accompany, and in some sense condition, the performance of work. The last four obviously do not. Pure interest has some affinities with both. It represents a necessary economic cost, the equivalent of which must be born, whatever the legal arrangements under which property is held, and is thus unlike the property representd by profits (other than the equivalent of salaries and payment for neces- sary risk), urban ground-rents and royalties. It re- lieves the recipient from personal services, and thus resembles them. I The crucial question for any society is, under which each of these two broad groups of categories the greater part (measured in value) of the proprietary rights; which it maintains are at any given moment to be found. ; If they fall in the first group creative work will bej' encouraged and idleness will be depressed; if they fall in the second, the result will be the reverse. The facts vary widely from age to age and from country to coun- try. E'or have they ever been fully revealed; for the lords of the jungle do not hunt by daylight. It is probable, at least, that in the England of 1550 to 1750, a larger proportion of the existing property consisted of land and tools used by their owners than either in con- temporary France, where feudal dues absorbed a con- siderable proportion of the peasants' income, or than in the England of 1800 to 1850, where the new capitalist manufacturers made hundreds per cent, while manual workers were goaded by starvation into ineffectu^ re- PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 65 volt. It is probable that in the nineteenth century, thanks to the Kevolution, France and England changed places, and that in this respect not only Ireland but the British Dominions resemble the former rather than the latter. The transformation can be studied best of all in the United States, in parts of which the population of peasant proprietors and small masters of the early nine- teenth century were replaced in three generations by a propertyless proletariat and a capitalist plutocracy. The abolition of the economic privileges of agrarian feudalism, which, under the name of equality, was the driving force of the Trench Revolution, and which has taken place, in one form or another, in all countries touched by its influence, has been largely counter- balanced since 1800 by the growth of the inequalities springing from Industrialism. In England the general effect of recent economic development has been to swell proprietary rights which entitle the owners to payment without work, and to diminish those which can properly be described as functional. The expansion of the former, and the process by which the simpler forms of property have been merged in them, are movements the significance of which it is hardly possible to over-estimate. There is, of course, a considerable body of property which is still of the older type. But though working landlords, and capitalists who manage their own businesses, are still in the aggregate a numerous body, the organization for which they stand is not that which is most representa- tive of the modern economic world. The general tend- ency for the ownership and administration of prop- G6 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY erty to be separated, the general refinement of property into a claim on goods produced by an unknown worker, is as unmistakable as the growth of capitalist industry and urban civilization themselves. Villages are turned into towns and property in land changes from the hold- ing worked by a farmer or the estate administered by a landlord into ^' rents," which are advertised and bought and sold like any other investment. Mines are opened and the rights of the landowner are converted into a tribute for every ton of coal which is brought to the surface. As joint-stock companies take the place of the individual enterprise which was typical of the earlier years of the factory system, organization passes from the employer who both owns and manages his business, into the hands of salaried officials, and again the mass of property-owners is swollen by the multiplication of rentiers who put their wealth at the disposal of indus- try, but who have no other connection with it. The change is taking place in our day most conspicuously, perhaps, through the displacement in retail trade of the small shopkeeper by the multiple store, and the substi- tution in manufacturing industry of combines and amal- gamations for separate businesses conducted by compet- ing employers. And, of course, it is not only by eco- nomic development that such claims are created. " Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness." It is probable that war, which in barbarous ages used to be blamed as destructive of property, has recently created more titles to property than almost all other causes put together. Infinitely diverse as are these proprietary rights, they PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK G7 have the common characteristic of being so entirely sepa- rated from the actual objects over which thej are exer- cised, so rarified and generalized, as to be analogous almost to a form of currency rather than to the property which is so closely united to its owner as to seem a part of him. Their isolation from the rough environ- ment of economic life, where the material objects of which they are the symbol are shaped and handled, is their charm. It is also their danger. The hold which a class has upon the future depends on the function which it performs. What nature demands is work : few work- ing aristocracies, however tyrannical, have fallen; few functionless aristocracies have survived. In society, as in the world of organic life, atrophy is but one stage removed from death. In proportion as the landowner becomes a mere rentier and industry is conducted, not by the rude energy of the competing employers who dominated its infancy, but by the salaried servants of shareholders, the argument for private property which reposes on the impossibility of finding any organization to supersede them loses its application, for they are already superseded. Whatever may be the justification of these types of property, it cannot be that which was given for the property of the peasant or the craftsman. It cannot be that they are necessary in order to secure to each man the fruits of his own labor. For if a legal right which gives $200,000 a year to a mineral owner in the ISTorth of England and to a gi'ound landlord in London '^ se- cures the fruits of labor " at all, the fruits are the pro- prietor's and the labor that of some one else. Property 68 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY has no more insidious enemies than those well-meaning anarchists who, by defending all forms of it as equally valid, involve the institution in the discredit attaching to its extravagances. In reality, whatever conclusion may be drawn from the fact, the greater part of modern property, whether, like mineral rights and urban ground-rents, it is merely a form of private taxation which the law allows certain persons to levy on the industry of others, or whether, like property in capital, it consists of rights to payment for instruments which the capitalist cannot himself use but puts at the disposal of those who can, has as its essential feature that it confers upon its owners income unaccompanied by per- sonal service. In this respect the ownership of land and the ownership of capital are normally similar, though from other points of view their differences are important. To the economist rent and interest are dis- tinguished by the fact that the latter, though it is often accompanied by surplus elements which are merged with it in dividends, is the price of an instrument of pro- duction which would not be forthcoming for industry if the price were not paid, while the former is a differ- ential surplus which does not affect the supply. To the business community and the solicitor land and capital are equally investments, between which, since they pos- sess the common characteristic of yielding income with- out labor, it is inequitable to dii3criminate ; and though their significance as economic categories may be dif- ferent, their effect as social institutions is the same. It is to separate property from creative ability, and to .divide society into two classes^ of which one hag its PROPEETY AND CREATIVE WORK 69 primary interest in passive ownership, while the other is mainly dependent upon active work. Hence the real analogy to many kinds of modern property is not the simple property of the small land- owner or the craftsman, still less the household goods and dear domestic amenities, which is what the word suggests to the guileless minds of clerks and shopkeepers, and which stampede them into displaying the ferocity of terrified sheep when the cry is raised that ^' Prop- erty " is threatened. It is the feudal dues which robbed the French peasant of part of his produce till the Kevo- lution abolished them. How do royalties differ from quintaines and lods et ventesf They are similar in their • origin and similar in being a tax levied on each incre- ment of wealth which labor produces. How do urban ground-rents differ from the payments which were made to English sinecurists before the Eeform Bill of 1832 ? They are equally tribute paid by those who work to those V who do not. If the monopoly profits of the owner of hanalites, whose tenant must grind corn at his mill and make wine at his press, were an intolerable oppression, what is the sanctity attaching to the monopoly profits of the capitalists, who, as the Keport of the Government Committee on trusts tells us, " in soap, tobacco, wall- paper, salt, cement and in the textile trades . . . are in a position to control output and prices " or, in other words, can compel the consumer to buy from them, at the figure they fix, on pain of not buying at all ? All these rights — royalties, ground-rents, monopoly profits — are " Property." The criticism most fatal to them is not that of Socialists. It is contained in the 70 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY arguments by whicli property is usually defended. Eor if the meaning of the institution is to encourage indus- ry by securing that the worker shall receive the produce of his toil, then precisely in proportion as it is important to preserve the property which a man has in the results of his own efforts, is it important to abolish that which he has in the results of the efforts of some one else. The considerations which justify ownership as a function are those which condemn it as a tax. Property is not theft, but a good deal of theft becomes property. The owner of royalties who, when asked why he should be paid £50,000 a year from minerals which he has neither discovered nor developed nor worked but only owned, replies ^^ But it's Property ! " may feel all the awe which his language suggests. But in reality he is be- having like the snake which sinks into its background by pretending that it is the dead branch of a tree, or the lunatic who tried to catch rabbits by sitting behind a hedge and making a noise like a turnip. He is prac- tising protective — and sometimes aggressive — mimicry. His sentiments about property are those of the simple toiler who fears that what he has sown another may reap. His claim is to be allowed to continue to reap what another has sown. It is sometimes suggested that the less attractive char- acteristics of our industrial civilization, its combination of luxury and squalor, its class divisions and class warfare, are accidental maladjustments which are not rooted in the center of its being, but are excrescences which economic progress itself may in time be expected to correct. That agreeable optimism will not survive an PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 71 examination of the operation of the institution of pri- vate property in land and capital in industrialized com- munities. In countries where land is widely distributed, in France or in Ireland, its effect may be to produce a general diffusion of wealth among a rural middle class who at once work and own. In countries where the development of industrial organization has sepa- rated the ownership of property and the performance of work, the normal effect of private property is to trans- fer to functionless owners the surplus arising from the more fertile sites, the better machinery, the more elabo- rate organization. 'No clearer exemplifications of this " law of rent " has been given than the figures supplied to the Coal Industry Commission by Sir Arthur Lowes Dickenson, which showed that in a given quarter the costs per ton of producing coal varied from $3.12 to $12 per ton, and the profits from nil to $4.12. The dis- tribution in dividends to shareholders of the surplus accruing from the working of richer and more acces- sible seams, from special opportunities and access to markets, from superior machinery, management and or- ganization, involves the establishment of Privilege as a national institution, as much as the most arbitrary exac- tions of a feudal seigneur. It is the foundation of an inequality which is not accidental or temporary, but necessary and permanent. And on this inequality is erected the whole apparatus of class institutions, which make not only the income, but the housing, education, health and manners, indeed the very physical appear- ance of different classes of Englishmen almost as dif- ferent from each other as though the minority were 72 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY alien settlers established amid the rude civilization of a race of impoverished aborigines. So the justification of private property traditional in England, which saw in it the security that each man would enjoy the fruits of his own labor, though largely applicable to the age in which it was formulated, has undergone the fate of most political theories. It has / been refuted not by the doctrines of rival philosophers, but by the prosaic course of economic development As far as the mass of mankind are concerned, the need which private property other than personal possessions does still often satisfy, though imperfectly and precari- ously, is the need for security. To the small investors, who are the majority of property-owners, though owning only an insigTiificant fraction of the property in exist- ence, its meaning is simple. It is not wealth or power, or even leisure from work. It is safety. They work hard. They save a little money for old age, or for sick- ness, or for their children. They invest it, and the interest stands between them and all that they dread most. Their savings are of convenience to industry, the income from them is convenient to themselves. " Why,'' they ask, " should we not reap in old age the advantage of energy and thrift in youth ? " And this hunger for security is so imperious that those who suffer most from the abuses of property, as well as those who, if they could profit by them, would be least inclined to do so, will tolerate and even defend them, for fear lest the knife which trims dead matter should out into the quick. They have seen too many men drown to be criti- PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 73 cal of dry land, though it be an inhospitable rock. They are haunted by the nightmare of the future, and, if a burglar broke it, would welcome a burglar. This need for security is fundamental, and almost the gravest indictment of our civilization is that the mass of mankind are without it. Property is one way of organizing it. It is quite comprehensible therefore, that the instrument should be confused with the end, and that any proposal to modify it should create dismay. In the past, human beings, roads, bridges and ferries, civil, judicial and clerical offices, and commissions in the army have all been private property. Whenever it was proposed to abolish the rights exercised over them, it was protested that their removal would involve the destruction of an institution in which thrifty men had invested their savings, and on which they depended for protection amid the chances of life and for comfort in old age. In fact, however, property is not the only method of assuring the future, nor, when it is the way selected, is security dependent upon the maintenance of all the rights which are at present normally involved in ownership. In so far as its psychological foundation is the necessity for securing an income which is stable and certain, which is forthcoming when its recipient cannot work, and which can be used to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, what is really demanded is not the command over the fluctuating proceeds of some particular undertaking, which accompanies the owner- ship of capital, but the security which is offered by an annuity. Property is the instrument, security is the object, and when some alternative way is forthcoming 74 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY of providing the latter, it does not appear in practice that any loss of confidence, or freedom or independence is caused by the absence of the former. Hence not only the manual workers, who since the rise of capitalism, have rarely in England been able to accumulate property sufficient to act as a guarantee of income when their period of active earning is past, but also the middle and professional classes, increas- ingly seek security to-day, not in investment, but in insurance against sickness and death, in the purchase of annuities, or in what is in effect the same thing, the accumulation of part of their salary towards a pension which is paid when their salary ceases. The profes- sional man may buy shares in the hope of making a profit on the transaction. But when what he desires to buy is security, the form which his investment takes is usually one kind or another of insurance. The teacher, or nurse, or government servant looks forward to a pen- sion. Women, who fifty years ago would have been re- garded as dependent almost as completely as if femi- ninity were an incurable disease with which they had been born, and whose fathers, unless rich men, would have been tormented with anxiety for fear lest they should not save sufficient to provide for them, now re- ceive an education, support themselves in professions, and save in the same way. It is still only in compara- tively few cases that this type of provision is made; almost all wage-earners outside government employ- ment, and many in it, as well as large numbers of professional men, have nothing to fall back upon in sickness or old age. But that does not alter the fact PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 75 that, when it is made, it meets the need for security, which, apart, of course, from personal possessions and household furniture, is the principal meaning of prop- erty to by far the largest element in the population, and that it meets it more completely and certainly than property itself. ISTor, indeed, even when property is the instrument used to provide for the future, is such provision de- pendent upon the maintenance in its entirety of the whole body of rights which accompany ownership to-day. Property is not simple but complex. That of a man who has invested his savings as an ordinary shareholder comprises at least three rights, the right to interest, the right to profits, the right to control. In so far as what is desired is the guarantee for the maintenance of a stable income, not the acquisition of additional wealth without labor — in so far as his motive is not gain but security — the need is met by interest on capital. It has no necessary connection either with the right to resid- uary profits or the right to control the management of the undertaking from which the profits are derived, both of which are vested to-day in the shareholder. If all that were desired were to use property as an instrument for purchasing security, the obvious course — from the point of view of the investor desiring to insure his future the safest course — would be to assimilate his position as far as possible to that of a debenture holder or mortgagee, who obtains the stable income which is his motive for investment, but who neither incurs the risks nor receives the profits of the speculator. To insist that the elaborate apparatus of proprietary rights which dis- 76 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY tributes dividends of thirty per cent to the shareholders in Coats, and several thousands a year to the ov^mer of mineral royalties and ground-rents, and then allows them to transmit the bulk of gains which they have not earned to descendants who in their turn will thus be relieved from the necessity of earning, must be main- tained for the sake of the widow and the orphan, the vast majority of whom have neither and would gladly part with them all for a safe annuity if they had, is, to say the least of it, extravagantly mal-d-propos. It is like pitching a man into the water because he expresses a wish for a bath, or presenting a tiger cub to a house- holder who is plagued with mice, on the ground that tigers and cats both? belong to the genus felis. The tiger hunts for itself not for its masters, and when game is scarce will hunt them. The classes who own little or no property may reverence it because it is security. But the classes who own much prize it for quite different reasons, and laugh in their sleeve at the innocence which supposes that anything as vulgar as the saving of the petite bourgeoisie have, except at elections, any interest for them. They prize it because it is the order which quarters them on the community and which provides for the maintenance of a leisure class at the public expense. " Possession," said the Egoist, '^ without obligation to the object possessed, approaches felicity." Functionless property appears natural to those who believe that so- ciety should be organized for the acquisition of private wealth, and attacks upon it perverse or malicious, be- cause the question which they ask of any institution is, " What does it yield ? " And such property yields much PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 77 to those who own it. Those, however, who hold that social unity and effective work are possible only if society is organized and wealth distributed on the basis of function, will ask of an institution, not, " What dividends does it pay ? '' but " What service does it per- form ? " To them the fact that much property yields income irrespective of any service which is performed or obligation which is recognized by its owners will appear not a quality but a vice. They will see in the social confusion which it produces, payments dispropor- tionate to service here, and payments without any serv- ice at all there, and dissatisfaction everywhere, a con- vincing confirmation of their argument that to build on a foundation of rights and of rights alone is to build on a quicksand. From the portentous exaggeration into an absolute of what once was, and still might be, a sane and social in- stitution most other social evils follow the power of those who do not work over those who do, the alternate subservience and rebelliousness of those who work to- wards those who do not, the starving of science and thought and creative effort for fear that expenditure upon them should impinge on the comfort of the slug- gard and the faineant, and the arrangement of society in most of its subsidiary activities to suit the conven- ience not of those who work usefully but of those who spend gaily, so that the most hideous, desolate and par- simonious places in the country are those in which the greatest wealth is produced, the Clyde valley, or the cotton towns of Lancashire, or the mining villages of Scotland and Wales, and the gayest and most luxurious 78 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY those in whicli it is consumed. From the point of view of social health and economic efficiency, society should obtain its material equipment at the cheapest price pos- sible, and after providing for depreciation and expan- sion should distribute the whole product to its working members and their dependents. What happens at pres- ent, however, is that its workers are hired at the cheap- est price which the market (as modified by organization) allows, and that the surplus, somewhat diminished by taxation, is distributed to the owners of property. Profits may vary in a given year from a loss to 100 per cent. But wages are fixed at a level which will enable the marginal firm to continue producing one year with another; and the surplus, even when due partly to\ efficient management, goes neither to managers nor manual workers, but to shareholders. The meaning of ' the process becomes startlingly apparent when, as in Lancashire to-day, large blocks of capital change hands at a period of abnormal activity. The existing share- holders receive the equivalent of the capitalized expecta- tion of future profits. The workers, as workers, do not participate in the immense increment in value; and when, in the future, they demand an advance in wages, they will be met by the answer that profits, which before the transaction would have been reckoned large, yield shareholders after it only a low rate of interest on their investment. The truth is that whereas in earlier ages the pro- tection of property was normally the protection of work, the relationship between them has come in the course of the economic development of the last two centuries to PEOPEETY AND CEEATIVE WOEK 79 be very nearly reversed. The two elements which com- pose civilization are active effort and passive property, the labor of human things are the tools which human beings use. Of these two elements those who supply the first maintain and improve it, those who own the second normally dictate its character, its development and its administration. Hence, though politically free, the mass of mankind live in effect under rules imposed to protect the interests of the small section among them whose primary concern is ownership. From this sub- ordination of creative activity to passive property, the worker who depends upon his brains, the organizer, in- ventor, teacher or doctor suffers almost as much embar- rassment as the craftsman. The real economic cleavage is not, as is often said, between employers and employed, but between all who do constructive work, from scientist to laborer, on the one hand, and all whose main interest is the preservation of existing proprietary rights upon the other, irrespective of whether they contribute to con- structive work or not. If, therefore, under the modern conditions which have concentrated any substantial share of property in the hands of a small minority of the population, the world is to be governed for the advantages of those who own, it is only incidentally and by accident that the results will be agreeable to those who work. In practice there is a constant collision between them. Turned into an- other channel, half the wealth distributed in dividends to functionless shareholders, could secure every child a good education up to 18, could re-endow English Uni- versities, and (since more efficient production is im- 80 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY portant) could equip English industries for more ef- ficient production. Half tlie ingenuity now applied to the protection of property could have made most indus- trial diseases as rare as smallpox, and most English cities into places of health and even of beauty. What stands in the way is the doctrine that the rights of prop- * erty are absolute, irrespective of any social function \ which its owners may perform. So the laws which are most stringently enforced are still the laws which pro- tect property, though the protection of property is no longer likely to be equivalent to th e protection of w ork, aiid~lhemterests which govern industry and predomi- nate in public affairs are proprietary interests. A mill- owner may poison or mangle a generation of operatives ; but his brother magistrates will let him off with a cau- tion or a nominal fine to poison and mangle the next. For he is an owner of property. A landowner may draw rents from slums in which young children die at the rate of 200 per 1000 ; but he will be none tlie less welcome in polite society. Eor property has no obliga- tions and therefore can do no wrong. Urban land may . be held from the market on the outskirts of cities in which human beings are living three to a room, and rural land "may be used for sport when villagers are leaving it to overcrowd them still more. 'No public authority intervenes, for both are property. To those who believe that institutions which repudiate all moral significance must sooner or later collapse, a society which confuses the protection of property with the pres- ervation of its functionless perversions will appear as precarious as that which has left the memorials of its PEOPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 81 tasteless frivolity and more tasteless ostentation in the gardens of Versailles. Do men love peace ? They will see the greatest enemy of social unity in rights which involve no obligation to co-operate for the service of society. Do they value equality ? Property rights which dispense their owners from the common human necessity of labor make in- equality an institution permeating every corner of society, from the distribution of material wealth to the training of intellect itself. Do they desire greater in- dustrial efficiency? There is no more fatal obstacle to efficiency than the revelation that idleness has the same privileges as industry, and that for every additional blow with the pick or hammer an additional profit will be distributed among shareholders who wield ' neither. In deed, f unctionles SijQroperty is the g:reatest enemy of \ legitimate property itself. It is the parasite which kills \ the organism that produced it. Bad money drives out ] good, and, as the history of the last two hundred years / shows, when property for acquisition or power and prop- / erty for service or for use jostle each other freely in the market, without restrictions such as some legal sys- tems have imposed on alienation and inheritance, the latter tends normally to be absorbed by the former, be- cause it has less resisting power. Thus functionless property grows, and as it grows it undermines the crea- tive energy which produced property and which in earlier ages it protected. It cannot unite men, for what unites them is the bond of service to a common purpose, and that bond it repudiates, since its very / 82 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY essence is the maintenance of rights irrespective of service. It cannot create; it can only spend, so that the number of scientists, inventors, artists or men of letters who have sprung in the course of the last cen- tury from hereditary riches can be numbered on one hand. It values neither culture nor beauty, but only the power which belongs to wealth and the ostentation which is the symbol of it. So those who dread these qualities, energy and thought and the creative spirit — and they are many — will not discriminate, as we have tried to discriminate,, between different types and kinds of property, in order f that they may preserve those which are legitimate and abolish those which are not. They will endeavor to pre-' serve all private property, even in its most degenerate forms. And those who value those things will try to promote them by relieving property of its perversions, and thus enabling it to return to its true nature. They will not desire to establish any visionary communism, for they will realize that the free disposal of a sufficiency of personal possessions is the condition of a healthy and self-respecting life, and will seek to distribute more widely the property rights which make them to-day the privilege of a minority. But they will refuse to submit to the naive philosophy which would treat all proprie- tary rights as equal in sanctity merely because they are identical in name. They will distinguish sharply be- tween property which is used by its owner for the con- duct of his profession or the upkeep of his household, and property which, is merely a claim on wealth pro- duced by another's labor. They will insist that prop- PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK 83 erty is moral and healthy only when it is used as a con- dition not of idleness but of activity, and when it in- volves the discharge of definite personal obligations. They will endeavor, in short, to base it upon the prin- ciple of function. VI THE FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY The application to property and industry of the prin- ciple of function is compatible with several different types of social organization, and is as unlikely as more important revelations to be the secret of those who cry ^' Lo here ! '' and '^ Lo there ! " The essential thing is that men should ^x their minds upon the idea of pur- pose, and give that idea pre-eminence over all subsidiary issues. If, as is patent, the purpose of industry is to provide the material foundation of a good social life, then any measure which makes that provision more ef- fective, so long as it does not conflict with some still more important purpose, is wise, and any institution ^ which thwarts or encumbers it is foolish. It is foolish, for example, to cripple education, as it is crippled in England for the sake of industry ; for one of the uses of industry is to provide the wealth which may make pos- sible better education. It is foolish to maintain prop- erty rights for which no service is performed, for pay- ment without service is waste; and if it is true, as statisticians affirm, that, even were income equally di- vided, income per head would be small, then it is all the more foolish, for sailors in a boat have no room for first-class passengers, and it is all the more important that none of the small national income should be mis- applied. It is foolish to leave the direction of industry 84 THE FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY 85 in the hands of servants of private property-owners who themselves know nothing about it but its balance sheets, because this is to divert it from the performance of service to the acquisition of gain, and to subordinate those who do creative work to those who do not. The course of wisdom in the affairs of industry is, after all, what it is in any other department of organ- ized life. It is to consider the end for which economic activity is carried on and then to adapt economic or- ganization to it. It is to pay for service and for service only, and when capital is hired to make sure that it is hired at the cheapest possible price. It is to place the responsibility for organizing industry on the shoulders of those who work and use, not of those who own, because production is the business of the pro- ducer and the proper person to see that he discharges his business is the consumer for whom, and not for the owner of property, it ought to be carried on. Above all it is to insist that all industries shall be conducted in complete publicity as to costs and profits, because pub- licity ought to be the antiseptic both of economic and political abuses, and no man can have confidence in his neighbor unless both work in the light. As far as property is concerned, such a policy would possess two edges. On the one hand, it would aim at abolishing those forms of property in which ownership is divorced from obligations. On the other hand, it would seek to encourage those forms of economic organi- zation under which the worker, whether owner or not, is free to carry on his work without sharing its control or its profits with the mere rentier. Thus, if in certain 86 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY spheres it involved an extension of public ownership, it would in others foster an extension of private prop- erty. For it is not private ownership, but private owner- ship divorced from work, which is corrupting to thei principle of industry 5 and the idea of some socialists' that private property in land or capital is necessarily mischievous is a piece of scholastic pedantry as absurd as that of those conservatives who would invest all prop- erty with some kind of mysterious sanctity. It all de- pends what sort of property it is and for what purpose it is used. Provided that the State retains its emi- nent domain, and controls alienation, as it does under the Homestead laws of the Dominions, with sufficient stringency to prevent the creation of a class of func- tionless property-owners, there is no inconsistency be- tween encouraging simultaneously a multiplication of peasant farmers and small masters who own their own farms or shops, and the abolition of private ownership in those industries, unfortunately to-day the most con- spicuous, in which the private owner is an absentee shareholder. Indeed, the second reform would help the first. In so far as the community tolerates functionless property it makes difficult, if not impossible, the restoration of the small master in agriculture or in industry, who cannot easily hold his own in a world dominated by great estates or capitalist finance. In so far as it abolishes those kinds of property which are merely parasitic, it facilitates the restoration of the small property-owner in those kinds of industry for which small ownership is adapted. A socialistic policy towards the former is not THE FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY 87 antagonistic to the '^ distributive state," but, in modern economic conditions, a necessary preliminary to it, and if by '^ Property " is meant the personal possessions which the word suggests to nine-tenths of the popula- tion, the object of socialists is not to undermine prop- erty but to protect and increase it. The boundary be- tween large scale and small scale production will always be uncertain and fluctuating, depending, as it does, on technical conditions which cannot be foreseen : a cheap- ening of electrical power, for example, might result in the decentralization of manufactures, as steam resulted in their concentration. The fundamental issue, how- ever, is not between different scales of ovmership, but between ownership of different kinds, not between the large farmer or master and the small, but between prop- erty which is used for work and property which yields income without it. The Irish landlord was abolished, not because he owned a large scale, but because he was an owner and nothing more; if, and when English land- ownership has been equally attenuated, as in towns it already has been, it will deserve to meet the same fate, Once the issue of the character of ownership hgs been settled, the question of the size of the economic unit can be left to settle itself. The first step, then, towards the organization of ecD- nomic life for the performance of function is to abolish those types of private property in return for which no function is performed. The man who lives by crwning without working is necessarily supported by the indus- try of some one else, and is, therefore, too expensi\se a luxury to be encouraged. Though he deserves to be SS THE ACQUISmTE SOCIETY tivatod \rith tlie lenieiioT Trhioh ought to be. and usually is not, sbo\m to those who have been brought up from infaucT to any other disreputable trade, indulgence to individuals must not condone the institution of which both they and their neighbors are the victims. Judgt"ii by this standard, certain kinds of property are obviously anti-social. The rights in virtue of whicb the owner of the surface is entitled to levy a tax, called a royalty, on every ton of coal which the miner brings to the surface, to levy another tax, called a way-leave, on every ton of coal transported under the surface of his land though its amenity and value may be quite unaffectini, to distort, if he pleases, the development of a whole district by refusing access to the minerals except upon bis own terms, and to cause some 3,500 to 4.000 million tons to be wasted in barriers between different proper- ties, while he in the meantime contributes to a chorus of lamentation over the wickedness of the miners in not producing more tons of coal for the public and inciden- tally more private taxes for himself — all this adds an agreeable touch of humor to the drab quality of our in- dustrial civilization for which mineral owners deserve perhaps some recognition, though not the $400,000 odd a year which is paid to each of the four leading players, or the $24,000,000 a year which is distributed among the crowd. The alchemy by which a gentleman who has never seen a coal mine distills the contents of that place of gloom into elegant chambers in London and a place in the country is not the monopoly of royalty owners. A similar feat of presdigitation is performed by the THE FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY 89 owner of urban ground-rents. In rural districts some landlords, perhaps many landlords, are partners in the hazardous and difficult business of agriculture, and, though they may often exercise a power which is socially excessive, the position which they hold and the income which they receive are, in part at last, a return for the functions which they perform. The ownership of urban land has been refined till of that crude ore only the pure gold is left. It is the perfect sinecure, for the only function it involves is that of collecting its profits, and in an age when the struggle of Liberalism against sinecures was still sufficiently recent to stir some chords of memory, the last and greatest of liberal thinkers drew the obvious deduction. ^' The reasons which form the justification ... of property in land," wrote Mill in 1848, '' are valid only in so far as the proprietor of land is its improver. . . . In no sound theory of private property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered on it." Urban ground-rents and royalties are, in fact, as the Prime Minister in his unregenerate days suggested, a tax which some persons are permitted by the law to levy upon the industry of others. They differ from public taxation only in that their amount increases in propor- tion not to the nation's need of revenue but to its need of the coal and space on which they are levied, that their growth inures to private gain not to public benefit, and that if the proceeds are wasted on frivolous expenditure no one has any right to complain, because the arrange- ment by which Lord Smith spends wealth produced by Mr. Brown on objects which do no good to either is part 90 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY of the system which^ under the name of private prop- erty, Mr. Brown as well as Lord Smith have learned to regard as essential to the higher welfare of mankind. But if we accept the principle of function we shall ask what is the 'purpose of this arrangement, and for what end the inhabitants of, for example, London pay $64,000,000 a year to their ground landlords. And if we find that it is for no purpose and no end, but that these things are like the horseshoes and nails which the City of London presents to the Crown on account of land in the Parish of St. Clement Danes, then we shall not deal harshly with a quaint historical survival, but neither shall we allow it to distract us from the busi- ness of the present, as though there had been history but there were not history any longer. We shall close these channels through which wealth leaks away by re- suming the ownership of minerals and of urban land, as some communities in the British Dominions and on the Continent of Europe have resumed it already. We shall secure that such large accumulations as remain change hands at least once in every generation, by in- creasing our taxes on inheritance till what passes to the heir is little more than personal possessions, not the right to a tribute from industry which, though quali- fied by death-duties, is what the son of a rich man in- herits to-day. We shall treat mineral owners and land- owners, in short, as Plato would have treated the poets, whom in their ability to make something out of noth- ing and to bewitch mankind with words they a little resemble, and crown them with flowers and usher them politely out of the State. VII INDUSTRY AS A PROFESSION Rights without functions are like the shades in Homer "which drank blood but scattered trembling at the voice of a man. To extinguish royakies and urban ground- rents is merely to explode a superstition. It needs as little — and as much — resolution as to put one's hand through any other ghost. In all industries except the diminishing number in which the capitalist is himself the manager, property in capital is almost equally pas- sive. Almost, but not quite. For, though the majority of its owners do not themselves exercise any positive function, they appoint those who do. It is true, of course, that the question of how capital is to be owned is distinct from the question of how it is to be admin- istered, and that the former can be settled without prejudice to the latter. To infer, because shareholders own capital which is indispensable to industry, that therefore industry is dependent upon the maintenance of capital in the hands of shareholders, to write, with some economists, as though, if private property in capi- tal were further attenuated or abolished altogether, the constructive energy of the managers who may own capi- tal or may not, but rarely, in the more important indus- tries, own more than a small fraction of it, must neces- sarily be impaired, is to be guilty of a robust non-sequitur and to ignore the most obvious facts of 91 92 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY contemporary industry. The less the mere capitalist talks about the necessity of the consumer of an efficient organization of industry, the better; for, whatever the future of industry may be, an efficient organization is likely to have no room for Mm. But though share- holders do not govern, they reign, at least to the extent of saying once a year ^^ le roy le veult/' If their rights are pared down or extinguished, the necessity for some organ to exercise them will still remain. And the ques- tion of the ownership of capital has this much in com- mon with the question of industrial organization, that the problem of the constitution under which industry is to be conducted is common to both. That constitution must be sought by considering how industry can be organized to express most perfectly the principle of purpose. The application to industry of the principle of purpose is simple, however difficult it , may be to give effect to it. It is to turn it into a Pro- ; fession. A Profession may be defined most simply as a trade which is organized, incompletely, no doubt, but / genuinely, for the performance of function. It is not ^ simply a collection of individuals who get a living for themselves by the same kind of work. Nor is it merely a group which is organized exclusively for the economic protection of its members, though that is normaEy among its purposes. It is a body of men who carry on their work in accordance with rules designed to enforce certain standards both for the better protection of its members and for the better service of the public. The standards which it maintains may be high or low: all professions have some rules which protect the interests INDUSTRY AS A PROFESSION 93 of the community and others which are an imposition on it. Its essence is that it assumes certain responsibilities for the competence of its members or the quality of its wares, and that it deliberately prohibits certain kinds of conduct on the ground that, though they may be profitable to the individual, they are calculated to bring into disrepute the organization to which he belongs. While some of its rules are trade union regulations de- signed primarily to prevent the economic standards of the profession being lowered by unscrupulous competi- tion, others have as their main object to secure that no member of the profession shall have any but a purely professional interest in his work, by excluding the in- centive of speculative profit. The conception implied in the words " unprofessional conduct " is, therefore, the exact opposite of the theory and practice which assume that the service of the public is best secured by the unrestricted pursuit on the part of rival traders of their pecuniary self-interest, within such limits as the law allows. It is significant that at the time when the professional classes had deified free competition as the arbiter of commerce and industry, they did not dream of applying it to the occupations in which they themselves were primarily interested, but maintained, and indeed, elaborate, machinery through which a professional conscience might find expression. The rules themselves may sometimes appear to the lay- man arbitrary and ill-conceived. But their object is clear. It is to impose on the profession itself the obliga- tion of maintaining the quality of the service, and to prevent its common purpose being frustrated through 94 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY the undue influence of the motive of pecuniary gain upon the necessities or cupidity of the individual. The difference between industry as it exists to-day and a profession is, then, simple and unmistakable'. The essence of the former is that its only criterion is the financial return which it offers to its shareholders. The essence of the latter, is that, though men enter it| for the sake of livelihood, the measure of their success is the service which they perform, not the gains which, they amass. They may, as in the case of a successful doctor, grow rich; but the meaning of their profession, both for themselves and for the public, is not that they make money but that they make health, or safety, or knowledge, or good government or good law. They depend on it for their income, but they do not consider that any conduct which increases their income is on that account good. And while a boot-manufacturer who retires with half a million is counted to have achieved success, whether the boots which he made were of leather or brown paper, a civil servant who did the same would be impeached. So, if they are doctors, they recognize that there are certain kinds of conduct which cannot be practised, however large the fee offered for them, because they are unprofessional; if scholars and teachers, that it is wrong to make money by deliberately deceiving the public, as is done by makers of patent medicines, how- ever much the public may clamor to be deceived; if judges or public servants, that they must not increase their incomes by selling justice for money ; if soldiers, that the service comes first, and their private inclina- INDUSTRY AS A PROFESSION 95 tions, even the reasonable preference of life to death, second. Every country has its traitors, every army its deserters, and every profession its blacklegs. To idealize the professional spirit would be very absurd; it has its sordid side, and, if it is to be fostered in industry, safe- guards will be needed to check its excesses. But there is all the difference between maintaining a standard which is occasionally abandoned, and affirming as the central truth of existence that there is no standard to maintain. The meaning of a profession is that it makes the traitors the exception, not as they are in industry, the rule. It makes them the exception by upholding as the criterion of success the end for which the profession, whatever it may be, is carried on, and subordinating the inclination, appetites and ambitions of individuals to the rules of an organization which has as its object to promote the performance of function. There is no sharp line between the professions and the industries. A hundred years ago the trade of teach- ing, which to-day is on the whole an honorable public service, was rather a vulgar speculation upon public credulity; if Mr. Squeers was a caricature, the Oxford of Gibbon and Adam Smith was a solid port-fed reality; no local authority could have performed one-tenth of the duties which are carried out by a modern municipal corporation every day, because there was no body of public servants to perform them, and such as there were took bribes. It is conceivable, at least, that some branches of medicine might have developed on the lines of industrial capitalism, with hospitals as factories, 96 THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY doctors hired at competitive wages as their " hands/' large dividends paid to shareholders by catering for the rich, and the poor, who do not offer a profitable market, supplied with an inferior service or with no service at all. The idea that there is some mysterious difference between making munitions of war and firing them, be- tween building schools and teaching in them when built, between providing food and providing health, which makes it at once inevitable and laudable that the former should be carried on with a single eye to pecuniary gain, while the latter are conducted by professional men who expect to be paid for service but who neither watch for windfalls nor raise their fees merely because there are ,,^^^^/%iore sick to be cured, more children to be taught, or rK*''^^^* more enemies to be resisted, is an illusion only less astonishing than that the leaders of industry should ''/^ welcome the insult as an honor and wear their humilia- '^^