p. 45My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
In your ninth chapter, you seem to be getting worse and worse. You not only object to the landlord having his rent, but you object to the tradesman having his profit. You object to the profits of those who take part in the process of distributing food among the people; and even in this you are not consistent, for while you would allow the coster to make a profit on the fish he buys in the market and takes round to the public, you would not allow the man who brings the fish from the seaside to the market to have his profit. Why? You call him a “middleman;” this does not settle the question, it is merely calling names. He performs a service, and you refuse him his wages. You say he “does nothing but sign cheques.” This is not true. He effects a very important arrangement between the fisherman who catches the fish and the coster who sells them to the public, without which the fisherman’s fish would rot on the beach, and the coster would be unable to make his living. He pays the fisherman at once for the fish that the fisherman brings to the shore, taking the risk upon himself of their going bad or not being sold, and he arranges with the railway company to have them conveyed to the various markets, where the coster can procure them to supply the public with; why is he not to have a profit and a good profit for all this risky service?
I could understand your objection if you refused to allow the fisherman to have anything for taking the fish out of the sea, and the coster for taking the fish round to the public; but to allow these two their recompense for their part of the labour, and deny it to the merchant, who carries the fish over the great distance lying between the thwarts of the boat and the cart of the coster, is absurd and monstrous. Do remember the middle monkey, Mr. Blatchford; he p. 46 is a most important link in the chain of supply. Do not call him a “snatcher of profits, taking from the producer on the one hand and the consumer on the other.” There would neither be producer nor consumer but for him. The consumer could not get the fish to consume, and the producer could have no object in catching fish he could not sell. Be fair and level, Mr. Blatchford.
To speak of “the idle capitalist who pays men to work for him, and pays managers to direct them, but never works himself,” is not to represent the matter candidly, or to speak reasonably. It is to speak “rumbustically,” which can never serve any just cause in the long run, though it may please partisans. You might just as well speak of the captain of a ship as an idle mariner who gets other men to handle the ropes and steer the ship; or of a general as an idle soldier who gets other men to do the fighting; or of the editor of a weekly paper as an idle printer who gets other men to set the types. A man is not necessarily idle who does not use his hands. The brain worker may be the busiest man in the place and the most essential too. Of fifty hands in a factory you might spare any one or two of them without interfering with the place going on; but remove the man who does the finance and gets orders, and where would the work be? Where the wages on Saturday? The whole thing would come to a stand and the workpeople starve for want of the man you call “the idle capitalist.”
You should speak with more discrimination, Mr. Blatchford, and give your thoughts a wider range. Cleverness is pretty, but to be useful, it must be solid as to facts. There is such a thing as being too clever by half, and this seems to me to be the case with much of the Socialist argument.
I am bound to admire your remarks on the indebtedness of every man to the rest of the community for what he is able to do. But it strikes me that a just application of these remarks would do more than anything to destroy the fallacious canon of “right” which is at the bottom of Socialism—the notion, I mean, that a man has a right only to that which his own unaided faculties enable him to create. According to your own exhibition of the endless ramifications of individual indebtedness, it is evident that no man’s faculties are unaided. The inventor is indebted to his predecessors for the elementary ideas of levers and cogs on which he works. The gift to write a successful book is the result of various activities, which preceded and developed the writer. The subjects are p. 47 supplied by fellow-creatures. The circumstances that give readers and buyers are totally independent of the author.
This is all most true; but see how it affects your principle of right. As no man produces anything by his own unaided faculties, no man according to your principle has a right to anything! The money earned by your successful book is not yours, because others contributed the principal elements involved in its production. What are you going to do then? Are you going to divide it up? You say you must pay back to all men what they have lent to you. This is pretty. But can you do it? How are you going to find out your particular creditors? And will you keep back nothing for yourself? No clothes, no body, no life? for you are indebted to some or to all men for all of these.
Mr. Blatchford, you are a forcible writer, but you should not be absurd. You cannot pay back to all men what they have lent to you. Nobody asks you to do it. It is an amiable conceit you have invented in support of the Socialistic theory; but the theory is wrong. Consistently carried out, it would render the society of human life impossible—which is its condemnation. Human life is a fact, and before it can, it all its appetites, desires, and impulses, exist as a society, it must be put under laws and rules regulating the relation of man to man. These laws must recognise the rights of individual possession in some shape or form as the basis of all other rules, otherwise we sink to the level of a herd of cattle. Society has evolved itself in a rough sort of way on this basis. There are many blots and inequalities in the arrangement, but it is better than the barbarism that would result from the principle that a man is only to be entitled to what he produces with his own hands, and not even to that if it can be shown that others have contributed to its “creation.”
If our civilisation is defective, it is better than chaos. You don’t want chaos—you are not aiming at it—but it is what your principles would end in. They would set free the baser elements, and bring up a flood of ignoble life that would submerge the beautiful tracts of country that have been reclaimed from the bog. The beauty of British culture would disappear under an inundation of liquid mud, and the intellectual conquests of ages would be lost in the tide of ignorance and brutality that could not be kept within bounds when once the fountains of the great deep were opened up.
p. 48 It is at the end of this chapter that you give us your amusing and telling illustration of the three monkeys hanging one upon the other in order to get the apple out of the river. I have already made frequent allusion to this; I have already pointed out that it tells against the purpose for which you have introduced it. The third monkey, who dips his hand into the water and picks up the apple, stands for the man who “by his own unaided faculties” produces the result of his labours. He alone handles the apple; therefore according to your argument about the workmen, he alone ought to have the apple—that is, the whole apple belongs to him. You say because the workmen alone handle the bricks and timbers, the house is the property of the workmen, and that the capitalist steals what belongs to them in taking the rent. You are more just to monkeys than to men. You allow all the monkeys to have a bite, though only one of them takes the apple out of the water, but you don’t allow all the men to have a share in the property because only one set of them actually handles the materials of which it is made. Is it fair, Mr. Blatchford? The right system is to divide. This is what is done now. The working men get the wages; the capitalists get the profit.
But you object. I don’t understand this. Perhaps it is because I am stupid. It cannot be that, though, when I think. You tell me I am shrewd. It must be so, for as I scratch my head and ponder, I see through what you say. I have a good notion of yourself, but not of your doctrines. You mean well, but you have picked up wrong notions somewhere. These notions knock their heads against each other in the most wonderful way. You tell me I have no right to myself because I did not make myself. Very well; but then you tell me that other people have a right to me, and that I must pay them the debt I owe to them. Mr. Blatchford, how can they have a right to me if I have no right to myself? If I did not make myself, certainly they did not make me; and if my not making myself prevents me from having a right to myself, it must work the same way as regards them. To get out of this, you say I have been “made by other men,” because men have been made what they are by “heredity and environment.” According to this, I owe nothing to those who have not contributed anything to my “heredity and environment.” Well, these are the vast majority. Nearly all the millions now on earth have had nothing to do with my heredity and environment, and among all p. 49 these millions, how am I to find out the few who have? And then, suppose I could find them out, why am I to allow their share of right to me and to deny my own? If they or their ancestors have contributed something to my development, have I contributed nothing myself? Is there no such thing as self-made men? What about Mr. Blatchford? And if I have contributed something to my own making (by my industry, my self-restraint, my study, my perseverance, and what not), am I not justified on your principle in claiming in that degree a right to myself? Come, Mr. Blatchford, you say Socialism is “terribly just; implacably honest.” So let it be: justice is even-handed. She distributes rights equally. Let her give me my share of right in myself. Your principle concedes it, but your words deny it. You say “there is no such thing as personal independence in human affairs,” and that no man has a right to himself because he did not make himself. Ah, Mr. Blatchford, if you laid down this axiom for the purpose of establishing the rights of “Glory,” who did make us, to our service, reason might prepare to bow; but to lay it down for the purpose of establishing the claims of men, who no more made us than the dogs of France have made the dogs of England, does nothing but excite reason’s utmost resentment. It is not common sense, Mr. Blatchford. There is just a glimmer of right meaning in your words, but you do not express it rightly. When it is rightly expressed, I think it is of no use to Socialism, and in fact convicts Socialism of something just the reverse of terrible justice. If you ask me what would be the right expression of this thing, I would say the Bible has been before you in the matter: “None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself; for whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether, therefore, we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end, Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be the Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom. xiv. 7).
I am not going outside the subject in quoting this. You have told me over and over again to stick to “facts”; the Bible is one of them. It cannot be got out of the way. It stands before us with a claim that no other book makes; and until this claim is exploded, it would be madness to leave it out of account. What it says in this case is in strict harmony with the axiom you have laid down—that a man belongs only to the power that has made him—with which in the abstract I agree. But, whereas you apply the p. 50 axiom illogically, the verse I have quoted applies it logically. God made man; therefore, God has a right to him. This is correct reasoning if your principle is right, that the power only that makes has a title to possess. When you make such an extraordinary application of the axiom as to say that fellow mortals have a right to me because fellow mortals have made me, you give us a specimen of something worse than incorrect reasoning. It is a specimen of outrageous absurdity. The absurdity is perhaps not the result of reasoning, but of the false statement at the bottom of it. The false statement is that we have been created by fellowmen. You have been caught by the fine phrases of speculative anthropology, “heredity and environment.” Read Argyle as well as Darwin. You will find there is a making long before heredity or environment can act. We are not made by heredity and environment. Heredity and environment may have modified us; we could no more be made by them than a well-manured field could make potatoes without potatoes being first planted in the field. Now if the rights go with the “making,” as you say, they go a long way back and very high up, even to the “Glory” of which you speak, and the “Lord” of which the New Testament speaks.
But where, then, is Socialism, with its “root principle,” as you call it, thus annihilated? This root principle, you say, is that “the man owes all that he possesses to other men.” If you are right in saying this is the root principle of Socialism, then Socialism will never grow, for there is no such root for it to grow from. Man does not owe all that he possesses to other men; he owes a little, but his being, his life, his faculties, he owes to God. If you are going to build Socialism on the negation of God, you are going to build on a volcano. God has not surrendered His rights in the planet, though He has appeared for a long time to take no notice.
There are some other things in your letter that I intended to notice, but I am afraid I have said as much as you will be able to read with patience this time. I intended to say that your doctrine comes to this, that the thing valuable in human labour is the action of the muscles—mere brute strength; that the action of the brain in directing the muscles is to go for nothing. You will never get the world to act on this doctrine. It is not a true doctrine. It goes directly in the teeth of what everybody can see to be common sense. Idea is of more value than labour everywhere. Idea has given us the steam engine, which a million brawny blacksmiths p. 51 could not have made without the idea; and this steam engine, which an idea has given us, can perform more labour than all the blacksmiths in the world put together. An idea can win a battle where 10,000 soldiers are of no use. The idea of the architect enables the builder to put up a beautiful edifice, where a thousand of them without the idea would only work confusion. To go one tremendous step higher, an idea preceded creation before the cosmic forces could work out heaven and earth.
It really seems as if the issue you raise were “mind versus body.” You do not treat the subject skilfully at all—pardon me for saying so, Mr. Blatchford. You make everything of mere labour, and nothing of the intellect that directs the labour. This is making war on nature. You ought to give everything its place. Granted that labour ought to be properly remunerated, but so also ought thought. They are both forms of industry, and both contribute to the process of production. Thought is often a more arduous form of industry than labour. Let the labourer try and see if it is not so. Therefore let the industry of mind have its reward as well as the industry of labour. You seem to exalt the one to the exclusion of the other. I cannot think you mean it. I think I show myself to be,
Your “fairly-honest” friend,
JOHN SMITH.