The Anarchism.net editors are proud to present Stephen Pearl Andrews’ The Science of Society. Thanks to Kenneth R Gregg for generously letting Anarchism.net re-publish the book from his blog: CLASSical Liberalism..
No. 1: The True Constitution of Government
in the Sovereignty of the Individual as the Final Development of Protestantism, Democracy and Socialism
Explanatory
This book was first printed nearly forty years ago in 1848. Its seed, for the
most part, fell upon stony ground. In consequence of this cold reception, this
lack of demand, the work passed through but a few small editions and then
disappeared from the market. The author’s keen broad, and untiring mind leading
him into new fields of thought, he never reprinted it. Thus, for more than a
quarter of a century, it has been practically out of sight, out of mind.
Nevertheless, its work has never stopped. Here and there the seed did fall
upon oases, and in fertile spots it always took deep root and reproduced its
kind. Its children and grand-children and great-grandchildren have seldom been
conscious of their ancestry, but today the family is so numerous that the
branches of its genealogical tree pervade with a growing, and often a
controlling, influence every department of what Mr. Andrews happily calls
“Man’s social habitat” It can be only helpful to this family to be
made acquainted with its origin, especially when the power of the printing-press
enables it to revive and freshly scatter the parent-seed upon a more receptive
soil.
Such is the purpose of this new edition of “The Science of Society”; The
social problem is pressing more closely upon our heels than it was in 1851, and
a book expounding as lucidly as this the basic principles in which alone its
solution is to be found is greatly needed. The author himself, in the closing
years of his life, earnestly desired its republication, and the publisher takes
pleasure in the thought that the enterprise would meet his approbation. And not
only his, but that of Josiah Warren as well, who was never tired of praising Mr.
Andrew’s work as in his opinion the soundest exposition that ever had been made
or ever could be made of the two principles which he (Mr. Warren) had introduced
to the world in his less pretentious work, “True Civilization.”
But even if this double incentive of satisfying a public demand and honoring
a master’s memory were altogether lacking, the publisher might sill find
abundant justification and encouragement in Robert Browning’s lines:
To shoot a beam into the dark, assists;
To make that beam do fuller service,
spread
And utilize such bounty to the height,
That assists also,--and that
work is mine.
March, 1888.
 
Introduction
This little treatise on the True Constitution of Government was delivered as
one of the regular course of lectures before the New York Merchants’ Institute
for the present winter. It is now published as the introductory number of a
contemplated series of publications, presenting certain new principles of
society, which it is the belief of the author are eminently adapted to supply
the felt want of the present day for an adequate solution of the existing social
disturbances. For the principles in question, either as original discoveries, or
else as presented in a new light, as solvents of the knotty questions which are
now puzzling the most capacious minds and afflicting the most benevolent hearts
of Christendom, the author confesses his very great indebtedness, and he
believes the world will yet gladly confess its indebtedness, to the genius of
Josiah Warren, of Indiana, who has been engaged for more than twenty years in
testing, almost in solitude, the practical operation, in the education of
children, in the sphere of commerce, and otherwise, of the principles which we
are now for the first time presenting prominently to the public.
It has been the belief of the author that there are, in the ranks of those
who are denominated Conservatives, many who sympathize deeply with the objects
of radical reform, but who have never identified themselves with the movements
in that direction, either because they have not seen that the practical measures
proposed by the advocates of reform contained the elements of success, or else
because they have distinctly perceived or intuitively felt that they did not.
They may have been repelled, too, by the want of completeness in the program,
the want of scientific exactness in the principles announced, or, finally, by
the want of a lucid conception of the real nature of the remedy which is needed
for the manifold social evils of which all confess the existence in the actual
condition of society. If there are minds in this position, minds more rigid than
others in their demands for precise and philosophical principles preliminary to
action, it is from such that the author anticipates the most cordial reception
of the elements propounded by Mr. Warren, so soon as they are seen in their
connections and interrelations with each other.
Believing that these principles will justify the assumption, I have ventured
to place at the head of this series of publications, as a general title, “The Science of Society.”
The propriety of the use of the term “Science” in such a connnection may be
questioned by some whom habit has accustomed to apply that term to a much lower
range of investigations. If researches into the habits of beetles and tadpoles,
and their localities and conditions of existence, are entitled to the dignified
appellation of Science, certainly similar researches into the nature, the wants,
the adaptations, and, so to speak, into the true or requisite moral and social
habitat of the spiritual animal called Man must be, if conducted according to
the rigid methods of scientific induction from observed facts, equally entitled
to that distinction.
The series of works, of which this is the first in order, will deal in no
vague aspirations after “the good time coming.” They will propound definite
principles which demand to be regarded as having all the validity of scientific
truths, and which, taken in their co-relations with each other, are adequate to
the solution of the social problem. If this pretension be made good, the
importance of the subject will not be denied. If not well founded, the
definiteness of the propositions will be favorable to a speedy and successful
refutation.
S.P.A.
New York, January 1851.
The True Constitution of Government: A Lecture
Ladies and Gentlemen:
The subject which I propose to consider this evening is the true constitution
of human government.
Every age is a remarkable one, no doubt, for those who live in it. When
immobility reigns most in human affairs, there is still enough of movement to
fix the attention, and even to excite the wonder of those who are immediately in
proximity with it. This natural bias in favour of the period with which we have
most to do is by no means sufficient, however, to account for the growing
conviction, on all minds, that the present epoch is a market transition from an
old to a new order of things. The scattered rays of the gray dawn of the new era
date back, indeed, beyond the lifetime of the present generation. The first
streak of light that streamed through the dense darkness of the old
régime was the declaration by Martin Luther of the right of private
judgment in matters of conscience. The next, which shed terror upon the old
world, as a new portent of impending revolutions, was the denial by Hampden,
Sidney, Cromwell, and others of the divine right of kings, and the assertion of
inherent political rights in the people themselves. This was followed by the
American Declaration of Independence, the establishment of a powerful Democratic
Republic in the western world upon the basis of that principle, followed by the
French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, the Reaction, and the apparent death in
Europe of the Democratic idea. Finally, in our day, comes the red glare of
French Socialism, at which the world is still gazing with uncertainly whether it
be some lurid and meteoric omen of fearful events, or whether it be not the
actual rising of the Sun of Righteousness, with healing in His wings; for there
are those who profoundly and religiously believe that the solution of the social
problem will be the virtual descent of the New Jerusalem,--the installation of
the kingdom of heaven upon earth.
First in the religious, then in the political, and finally in the social
relations of men new doctrines have thus been broached, which are full of
promise to the hopeful, and full of alarm and dismay to the timid and
conservative. This distinction marks the broadest division in the ranks of
mankind. In Church and State and social life, the real parties are the
Progressionists and the Retrogressionists,--those whose most brilliant
imaginings are linked with the future, and those whose sweetest remembrances
bind them in tender associations to the past. Catholic and Protestant, Whig and
Democrat, Anti-Socialist and Socialist, are terms which, in their origin,
correspond to this generic division; but no sooner does a new classification
take place than the parties thus formed are again subdivided, on either hand, by
the ever-permeating tendency, on the one side toward freedom, emancipation, and
progress, and toward law and order and immobility on the other.
Hitherto the struggle between conservatism and progress has seemed doubtful.
Victory has kissed the banner, alternately, of either host. At length the
serried ranks of conservatism alter. Reform, so called, is becoming confessedly
more potent than its antagonist. The admission is reluctantly forced from pallid
lips that revolutions—political, social, and religious—constitute the programme
of the coming age. Reform, so called, for weal or woe, but yet Reform, must rule
the hour. The older constitutions of society have outlived their day. No truth
commends itself more universally to the minds of men now than that thus set
forty by Carlyle: “There must be a new world, if there is to be any world at
all. That human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine,
and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there,--this small hope is not
now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal new
birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is a time to make the
dullest man consider, and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound? A
veritable “New Era” to the foolish as well as to the wise.” Nor is this state of
things confined to Europe. The agitations in America may be more peaceful, but
they are not less profound. The foundations of old beliefs and habits of thought
are breaking up. The old guarantees of order are fast falling away. A veritable
“new era” with us, too, is alike impending and inevitable.
What remains to be done, then, for wise men, is clearly this: to attempt to
penetrate the future by investigating the past and the present to ascertain
whether there be no elements of calculation capable of fixing with tolerable
certainty the precise point in the sidereal heavens of human destiny toward
which our whole system is confessedly verging with accelerated velocity. To
penetrate the gloom which encircles the orbit of our future progression might,
at least, end the torture of suspense, even to those who may be least content
with the nature of the solution. “If,” says Carlyle again, “the accused
nightmare that is crushing out the life of us and ours would take a shape,
approach us like the Hyrcanian tiger, the Behemoth of Caos, or the Archfiend
himself,--in any shape that we could see and fasten on,--a man can have himself
shot with cheerfulness, but it needs that he shall clearly see for what.”
It is, then, neither unbecoming nor inappropriate, at this time, to attempt
to prognosticate, by philosophical deductions from operative principles the
characteristics of the new society which is to be constructed out of the
fragments of the old. It is, perhaps, only right that I should begin by
declaring the general nature of the results to which my own mind is conducted by
the speculations I have made upon the subject, and toward which I shall, so far
as I may, endeavour, this evening to sway your convictions.
I avow that, for one, I take the hopeful, the expectant, even the exulting
view of the prospects of humanity, under the influence of causes which, to the
minds of many,m re pregnant with evil. I hail the progress of that unsparing
criticism of old institutions which is the characteristic of the present age. I
hail with still higher enthusiasm a dim outline which begins to be perceived by
the keenest vision, through th twilight mists which yet hang upon the
surrounding hilltops of a social fabric, whose foundations are equity, whose
ceiling is security, whose pillars are cooperation and fraternity, and whose
capitals and cornices are carved into the graceful forms of mutual urbanity and
politeness. It is just to you that I should announce this faith, that you may
receive the vaticinations of the prophet with the due allowance for the
inebriation of the prophetic rhapsody. I proclaim myself in some sense a
visionary; but in all ages there have been visionaries whose visions of today
have proved the substantial realities of tomorrow.
I shall make no apology for the rashness of the attempt to trace, with a
distinct outline, some of the gigantic changes which will occur in the social
organization of the world as the necessary outgrowth of principles now at work,
and which are becoming every day more potential, in proportion as forces, which
have hitherto been deemed antagonistic, converge and cooperate.
I affirm, then, firstly, that there is at this day a marked convergence and a
prospective cooperation of principles which have hitherto resisted each other,
or, more properly, a development of one common principle in spheres of life so
diverse from each other that they have hitherto been regarded as unrelated, if
not positively antagonistic. I assert, and shall endeavour to make good the
assertion, that the essential spirit, the vital and fundamental principle of the
three great modern movements to which I have already alluded,--namely, the
Protestant Reformation, the Democratic Revolution, still progressing, and
finally, the Socialist Agitation, which is spreading in multiform varieties of
reproduction over the whole civilized world,--is one and the same, and that this
common affinity is beginning in various ways to be recognized or felt. If this
assertion be true, it is one of immense significance. If Protestantism,
Democracy, and Socialism are merely different expressions of the same idea,
then, undoubtedly, the confluent force of these three movements will expand
tremendously the sweep of their results, in the direction toward which they
collectively tend.
What, then, if this be so, is this common element? In what great feature are
Protestantism, Democracy, and Socialism identical? I will answer this
interrogatory first, and demonstrate the answer afterward. Protestantism,
Democracy, and Socialism are identical in the assertion of the Supremacy of the
Individual,--a dogma essentially contumacious, revolutionary, and antagonistic
to the basic principles of all the older institutions of society, which make the
Individual subordinate and subject to the Church, to the State, and to Society
respectively. Not only is this supremacy or SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL, a
common element of all three of these great modern movements, but I will make the
still more sweeping assertion that it is substantially the whole of those
movements. It is not merely a feature, as I have just denominated it, but the
living soul itself, the vital energy, the integral essence or being of them
all.
Protestants and Protestant churches may differ in relation to every other
article of their creed, and do so differ, without ceasing to be Protestants, so
long as they assert the paramount right of private or individual judgment in
matters of conscience. It is that, and that only, which makes them Protestants,
and distinguishes them from the Catholic world, which asserts, on the contrary,
the supreme authority of the church, of the priesthood, or some dignitary or
institution other than the Individual whose judgment and whose conscience is in
question. In like manner, Democrats and Democratic governments and institutions
may differ from each other, and may vary indefinitely at different periods or
time, and still remain Democratic, so long as they maintain the one essential
principle and condition of Democracy,--namely, that all governmental powers
reside in, are only delegated by, and can be, at any moment, resumed by the
people,--that is, by the individuals, who are first Individuals, and who
then, by virtue only of the act of delegating such powers, become a
people,--that is, a combined mass of Individuals. It is this dogma, and this
alone, which makes the Democrat, and which distinguishes him from the Despotist,
or the defender of the divine right of kings.
Again, Socialism assumes every shade and variety of opinion respecting the
modes of realizing its own aspirations, and, indeed, upon every other point,
except one, which, when investigated, will be found to be the paramount rights
of the Individual over social institutions, and the consequent demand that all
existing social institutions shall be so modified that the Individual shall be
in no manner subjected to them. This, then, is the identical principle of
Protestantism and Democracy carried into its application in another sphere. The
celebrated formula of Fourier that “destinies are proportioned to attractions,”
means, when translated into less technical phraseology, that society must be so
reorganized that every Individual shall be empowered to choose and vary his own
destiny or condition and pursuits in life, untrammeled by social restrictions;
in other words, so that every man may be a law unto himself, paramount to all
other human laws, and the sole judge for himself of the divine law and of the
requisitions of his own individual nature and organization. This is equally the
fundamental principle of all the social theories, except in the case of the
Shakers, the Rappites, etc., which are based upon religious whims, demanding
submission, as a matter of duty, to a despotic rule, and which embody, in
another form, the readoption of the popish or conservative principle. They,
therefore, while they live in a form of society similar in some respects to
those which have been proposed by the various schools of Socialists, are, in
fact, neither Protestants nor Democrats, and, consequently, not Socialists in
the sense in which I am now defining Socialism. The forms of society proposed by
Socialism are the mere shell of the doctrine,--means to the end,--a platform
upon which to place the Individual, in order that he may be enabled freely to
exercise his own Individuality, which is the end and aim of all. We have seen
that the shell is one which may be inhabited by despotism. Possibly it is unfit
for the habitation of any thing else than despotism, which the Socialist hopes,
by ensconcing himself therein, to escape. It is possible, even, that Socialism
may have mistaken its measures altogether, and that the whole system of
Association and combined interests and combined responsibilities proposed by it
may be essentially antagonistic to the very ends proposed. All this, however, if
it be so, is merely incidental. It belongs to the shell, and not to the
substance,--to the means, and not to the end. The whole programme of Socialism
may yet be abandoned or reversed, and yet Socialism remain in substance the same
thing. What Socialism demands is the emancipation of the Individual from social
bondage, by whatsoever means will effect that design, in the same manner as
Protestantism demands the emancipation of the Individual from ecclesiastical
bondage, and Democracy from political. Whosoever makes that demand, or labours
to that end, is a Socialist. Any particular views he may entertain,
distinguishing him from other Socialists, regarding practical measures, or the
ultimate forms of society, are the mere specific differences, like those which
divide the Protestant sects of Christendom.
This definition of Socialism may surprise some into the discovery of the fact
that they have been Socialists all along, unawares. Some, on the other hand, who
have called themselves Socialists may not at once be inclined to accept the
definition. They may not perceive clearly that it is the emancipation of the
Individual for which they are laboring, and affirm that it is, on the other
hand, the freedom and happiness of the race. They will not, however, deny that
it is both; and a very little reflection will show that the freedom and
happiness of each individual will be the freedom and happiness of the race, and
that the freedom and happiness of the race cannot exist so long as there is any
individual of the race who is not happy and free. So the Protestant and the
Democrat may not always have a clear intellectual perception of the distinctive
principle of their creeds. He may be attached to it from an instinctive
sentiment, which he has never thoroughly analyzed, or even from the mere
accidents of education and birth.
Protestantism proclaims that the individual has an inalienable right to judge
for himself in all matters of conscience. Democracy proclaims that the
Individual has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. Socialism proclaims that the Individual has an inalienable right to
that social position which his powers and natural organization qualify him, and
which his tastes incline him to fill, and, consequently, to that constitution or
arrangement of the property relations, and other relations of society,
whatsoever that may be, which will enable him to enjoy and exercise that
right,--the adaptation of social conditions to the wants of each Individual,
with all his peculiarities and fluctuations of tasted, instead of the moulding
of the Individual into conformity with the rigid requirements of a preconcerted
social organization.
If this be a correct statement of the essential nature of Protestantism,
Democracy, and Socialism, then Protestantism, Democracy, and Socialism are not
actuated by three distinct principles at all. They are simply three partial
announcements of one generic principle, which lies beneath all these movements,
and of which they are the legitimate outgrowths or developments, modified only
by the fact of a different application of the same principle. This great generic
principle, which underlies every manifestation of that universal unrest and
revolution which is known technically in this age as “Progress,” is nothing more
nor less than “THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL.” It is that which is the
central idea and vital principle of Democracy; and it is that which is the
central idea and vital principle of Socialism.
This being so, it is high time that the mutual affinity of these movements
should be intelligently perceived and recognized both by the friends and the
enemies of the movements themselves. It is high time that the scene of the
battle-field should be shifted from the right or wrong of any or all of the
partial developments of the principle to the essential right or wrong of the
principle itself. The true issue is not whether Protestantism be good or evil,
whether Democracy be good or evil, nor whether Socialism be good or evil, but
whether the naked, bald, unlimited principle of the Sovereignty of the
Individual, in human government and the administration of human affairs, be
essentially good and true or essentially pernicious and false. This is the issue
now up for trial before the world, and the definitive decision of which must be
had before the final destiny of mankind upon earth can be even rough-hewn by the
most vivid imagination, and certainly before any thing approximating scientific
deduction respecting it can be had.
You will please to consider yourselves, Ladies and Gentlemen, as a jury
empaneled to try this issue. I take my position before you as the advocate of
the Sovereignty of the Individual, and the defender of the spirit of the present
age. If this principle be essentially good and true, then it may be trusted
wherever it leads, and the general drift of what the world calls “Progress” is
in the right direction, whatever mistakes may be made in matters of detail. If
it is a false principle, the sooner we understand that fact the better; but let
it be also understood, in that case, that we have much to undo which has been
already done, and which has been supposed to be well done, in these modern
times. In that case, Protestantism is all wrong, and Democracy is all wrong; the
Whateleys, the Wisemans, the Bronsons, the Windischgratzes, and the Haynaus are
philosophers and philanthropists of the right school; and the Luthers, the
Channings, the Jeffersons, the Washingtons, and the Kossuths are the world’s
worst foes,--the betrayers and scourgers which the wrath of an offended Heaven
has let loose upon earth, first to delude and then to punish mankind for their
sins.
I will first endeavor to set before you a clearer view of the doctrine of the
Sovereignty of the Individual, as based upon the principle of the infinite
Individuality of things. I will then show that this Sovereignty of the
Individual furnishes the law of the development of human society, as illustrated
in the progressive movements of modern times. Finally, I shall endeavor to trace
the development which is hereafter to result from the further operation of this
principle and to fix, so nearly as may be, the condition of human affairs
towards which it conducts, especially in that particular department of human
affairs which constitutes the subject of investigation this evening,--namely,
the government of mankind.
The doctrine of the Sovereignty of the Individual—-in one sense itself a
principle—-grows out of the still more fundamental principle of “INDIVIDUALITY,”
which pervades universal nature. Individuality is positively the most
fundamental and universal principle which the finite mind seems capable of
discovering, and the best image of the Infinite. There are no two objects in the
universe which are precisely alike. Each has its own constitution and
peculiarities, which distinguish it from every other. Infinite diversity is the
universal law. In the multitude of human countenances, for example, there are no
two alike, and in the multitude of human characters there is the same variety.
The hour which your courtesy has assigned to me would be entirely consumed, if I
were to attempt to adduce a thousandth part of the illustrations of this subtle
principle of Individuality, which lie patent upon the face of nature, all around
me. It applies equally to persons, to things, and to events. There have been no
two occurrences which were precisely alike during all the cycling periods of
time. No action, transaction, or set of circumstances whatsoever corresponded
precisely to any other action, transaction, or set of circumstances. Had I a
precise knowledge of all the occurrences which have ever taken place up to this
hour, it would not suffice to enable me to make a law which would be applicable
in all respects to the very next occurrence which shall take place, nor to any
one of the infinite millions of events which shall hereafter occur. This
diversity reigns throughout every kingdom of nature, and mocks at all human
attempts to make laws, or constitutions, or regulations, or governmental
institutions of any sort, which shall work justly and harmoniously amidst the
unforeseen contingencies of the future.
The individualities of objects are least, or, at all events, they are less
apparent when the objects are inorganic or of a low grade of organization. The
individualities of the grains of sand which compose the beach, for example, are
less marked than those of vegetables, and those of vegetables are less than
those of animals, and, finally, those of animals are less than those of man. In
proportion as an object is more complex, it embodies a greater number of
elements, and each element has its own individualities, or diversities, in every
new combination into which it enters. Consequently these diversities are
multiplied into each other, in the infinite augmentation of geometrical
progression. Man, standing, then, at the head of the created universe, is
consequently the most complex creature in existence,--every individual man or
woman being a little world in him or herself, an image or reflection of God, and
epitome of the Infinite. Hence the individualities of such a being are utterly
immeasurable, and every attempt to adjust the capacities, the adaptations, the
wants, or the responsibilities of one human being by the capacities, the
adaptations, the wants or the responsibilities of another human being, except in
the very broadest generalities, is unqualifiedly futile and hopeless. Hence
every ecclesiastical, government, or social institution which is based on the
idea of demanding conformity or likeness in any thing, has ever been, and ever
will be, frustrated by the operation of this subtle, all-pervading principle of
Individuality. Hence human society has ever been and is still in the turmoil of
revolution. The only alternative known has been between revolution and
despotism. Revolutions violently burst the bonds, and explode the foundations of
existing institutions. The institution falls before the Individual. Despotism
only succeeds by denaturalizing mankind. It extinguishes their individualities
only by extinguishing them. The Individual falls before the institution. Judge
ye which is best, the man-made or the God-made world.
In the next place this Individuality is inherent and unconquerable, except,
as I have just said, by extinguishing the man himself. The man himself has no
power over it. He can not divest himself of his organic peculiarities of
character, any more than he can divest himself of his features. It attends him
even in the effort he makes, if he makes any, to divest himself of it. He may as
well attempt to flee his own shadow as to rid himself of the indefeasible,
God-given inheritance of his own Individuality.
Finally, this indestructible and all-pervading Individuality furnishes,
itself, the law, and the only true law, or order and harmony. Governments have
hitherto been established, and have apologized for the unseemly fact of their
existence, from the necessity of establishing and maintaining order; but order
has never yet been maintained, revolutions and violent outbreaks have never yet
been ended, public peace and harmony have never yet been secured, for the
precise reason that the organic, essential, and indestructible natures of the
objects which it was attempted to reduce to order have always been constricted
and infringed by every such attempt. Just in proportion as the effort is less
and less made to reduce men to order, just in that proportion they become more
orderly, as witness the difference in the state of society in Austria and the
United States. Plant an army of one hundred thousand soldiers in New York, as at
Paris, to preserve the peace, and we should have a bloody revolution in a week;
and be assured that the only remedy for what little of turbulence remains among
us, as compared with European societies, will be found to be more liberty. When
there remain positively no external restrictions, there will be positively no
disturbance, provided always certain regulating principles of justice, to which
I will advert presently, are accepted and enter into the public mind, serving as
substitutes for every species of repressive laws.
I was saying that Individuality is the essential law of order. This is true
throughout the universe. When every individual particle of matter obeys the law
of its own attraction, and comes into that precise position, and moves in that
precise direction, which its own inherent individualities demand, the harmony of
the spheres is evolved. By that means only natural classification, natural
order, natural organization, natural harmony and agreement are attained. Every
scheme or arrangement which is based upon the principle of thwarting the
inherent affinities of the individual monads which compose any system or
organism is essentially vicious, and the organization is false,--a mere bundle
of revolutionary and antagonistic atoms. It is time that human system builders
should begin to discover this universal truth. The principle is self-evident.
Objects bound together contrary to their nature must and will seek to rectify
themselves by breaking the bonds which confine them, while those which come
together by their own affinities remain quiescent and content. Let human system
makers of all sorts, then, admit the principle of an infinite Individuality
among men, which cannot be suppressed, and which must be indulged and fostered,
at all events, as one element in the solution of the problem they have before
them. If they are unable to see clearly how all external restrictions can be
removed with safety to the well-being of society, let them, nevertheless, not
abandon a principle, which is self-evident, but let them modestly suspect that
there may be some other elements in the solution of the same problem, which
their sagacity has not yet enabled them to discover. In all events, and at all
hazards, this Individuality of every member of the human family must be
recognized and indulged, because first, we have seen it is infinite, and cannot
be measured or prescribed for, then because it is inherent, and cannot be
conquered; and, finally, because it is the essential element of order, and
cannot consequently, be infringed without engendering infinite confusion, such
as has hitherto universally reigned, in the administration of human affairs.
If, now, Individuality is a universal law which must be obeyed if we would
have order and harmony in any sphere, and, consequently, if we would have a true
constitution of human government, then the absolute Sovereignty of the
Individual necessarily results. The monads or atoms of which human society is
composed are the individual men and women in it. They must be so disposed of, as
we have seen, in order that society may be harmonic, that the destiny of each
shall be controlled by his or her own individualities of taste, conscience,
intellect, capacities, and will. But man is a being endowed with consciousness.
He, and no one else, knows the determining force of his own attractions. No one
else can therefore decide for him, and hence Individuality can only become the
law of human action by securing to each individual the sovereign determination
of his own judgment and of his own conduct, in all things, with no right
reserved either of punishment or censure on the part of any body else
whomsoever; and this is what is meant be the Sovereignty of the Individual,
limited only by the ever-accompanying condition, resulting from the equal
Sovereignty of all others, that the onerous consequences of his actions be
assumed by himself.
If my audience were composed chiefly of Catholics, or Monarchists, or
Anti-Progressionists of any sort, I should develop this argument more at length,
for, as I have said, it is the real issue, and the only real issue, between the
reformatory and the conservative portions of mankind; but I supposed that I may,
with propriety, assume that I am before an auditory who are in the main
Protestant and Democratic, and, assuming that, I shall then be authorized to
assume, in accordance with the principles I have endeavored to develop, that
they are likewise substantially Socialist, according to the definition I have
given to Socialism, whether they have hitherto accepted or repudiated the name.
It is enough, however, if I address you as Protestants and Democrats, or as
either of these. I shall therefore assume, without further dwelling upon the
fundamental statement of those principles, that you are ready to admit so much
of Individuality and of the Sovereignty of the Individual as is necessarily
involved in the propositions of Protestantism or Democracy. I shall assume that
I am before an assembly of men and women who sympathize with ecclesiastical and
political enfranchisement,--who believe that what the world calls Progress, in
these modern times, is in the main real and not sham progress, a genuine and
legitimate development of the race. Instead, therefore, of pursuing the main
argument further, I will return to, and endeavor more fully to establish, a
position which I have already assumed,--namely, that, by virtue of the fact of
being either a Protestant or a Democrat, you have admitted away the whole case,
and that you are fully committed to the whole doctrine of Individuality and the
Sovereignty of the Individual, wherever that may lead.
I assert, then, the doctrine of Individuality, in its broadest and most
unlimited sense. I assert that the law of genuine progress in human affairs is
identical with the tendency to individualize. In ecclesiastical affairs it is
the breaking up of the Church into sects, the breaking up of the larger sects
into minor sects, the breaking up of the minor sects, by continual schism, into
still minuter fragments of sects, and, finally, a complete disintegration of the
whole mass into individuals, at which point every human being becomes his
own sect and his own church. Does it require any demonstration that his is the
natural tendency and the legitimate development of Protestantism, that it is in
fact the necessary and inevitable outgrowth of its own fundamental principle.
The History of all Religions in Protestant Christendom is becoming already too
voluminous to be written. With the multiplication of sects grows the spirit of
toleration, which is nothing else but the recognition of the sovereignty of
others. A glance at the actual condition of the Protestant Church demonstrates
the tendency to the obliteration of Sectarianism by the very superabundance of
sects.
In the political sphere the individualizing tendency of Democracy is
exhibited in the distribution of the department of government into the hands of
different depositories of power, the discrimination of the chief functions of
government into the Legislature, the Executive, and the Judiciary, in the
division of the Legislature into distinct branches, in the representative system
which recognizes the Individuality of different confederated states, and of
different portions of the same state, in the divorce of the Church and State,
and yet more strikingly than all in the successive surrender to the Individual
of one branch after another of what was formerly regarded as the legitimate
business of government.
Under the old order of things, government interfered to determine the trade
or occupation of the Individual, to settle his religious faith, to regulate his
locomotion, to prescribe his hours of relaxation and retirement, the length of
his beard, the cut of his apparel, his relative rank, the mode of his social
intercourse, and so on, continuously, until government was in fact everything,
and the Individual nothing. Democracy, working somewhat blindly, it is true, but
yet guided by a true instinct, begotten by its own great indwelling vital
principle, the Sovereignty of the Individual, has already substantially
revolutionized all that. It has swept away, for the most part, in America at
least, the impertinent interference of government with the pursuits, the
religious opinions and ceremonies, the travel, the amusements, the dress, and
the manners of the citizen. One whole third of the field heretofore occupied by
government has thus been surrendered to the Individual. To this point we have
already attained, practically, at the precise stage at which we now are in the
transition from the past to the future model of the organization of society.
But the principle of Democracy does not stop here. Government still
interferes, even in these United States, in some instances, with the social and
political status of the Individual, as in the case of slavery, with
commerce, with the title to the soil, with the validity of private obligations,
with the treatment of crime, and, finally, with the marriage and parental
relationships of the citizen; and it is obviously an incongruous fact that it
interferes with all these, in many instances at least, to the great annoyance of
the citizen, who, according to our political theory, is himself the sovereign,
and consequently the voluntary fabricator of that which annoys him. To the
philosophical mind there is that in this incongruity alone which predicts the
ultimate emancipation of the citizen from the restrictions of legislation and
jurisprudence, in every aspect of his existence. Accordingly, there is another
whole third of the domain hitherto occupied by Government which is at this
moment in dispute between it and the Individual. The whole of that legislation
which establishes or tolerates that form of human bondage which is called
slavery is at this moment undergoing the most determined and vigorous onset of
public opinion which any false and tyrannical institution of Government was ever
called upon to endure. The full and final abolition of slavery cannot but be
regarded, by every reflecting mind, as prospectively certain. Such is the fiat
of Democracy; such is the inevitable sequitur from the Democratic premise
of inherent political rights. Government interferes, again, to regulate
commerce; but what is the demand of Democracy in relation to that? Nothing short
of free trade. Democracy says to Government, Hands off! Let the Individual
determine for himself when, and where, and how he will buy and sell. Does any
one doubt that Democracy will, in the long run, have its own way in relation to
this matter as well, and that tariffs, and custom houses, and collectorships,
and the whole lumbering paraphernalia of indirect taxation, which fences out the
intercourse of nations, will be looked back upon, in a generation or two, in a
light akin to that in which the police system of Fouché, the passport system of
the despotic countries of Europe, and the censorship of the press are now
regarded by us? Government still interferes to control the public domain; but
already an organized and rapidly augmenting political organization is demanding
in this country a surrender of this whole subject to the Individual Sovereigns
who make the Government, and who need the land. Nor are the modest pretensions
of Land Reform, which as yet touch only the public domain, likely to end at
that. The very foundation principles of the ownership of land, as vested in
individuals and protected by law, cannot escape much longer from a searching and
radical investigation; and when that comes, the arbitrary legislation of
Government will have to give place to such natural and scientific principles
regulating the subject as may be evolved. Land Reform, in its present aspect, is
merely the prologue to a thorough and unsparing, but philosophical and equitable
agrarianism, by means of which either the land itself, or an equal participation
in the benefits of the land, shall be secured to the whole people. Science, not
human legislation, must finally govern the distribution of the soil Government,
again, interferes with contracts and private obligations. But already the demand
is growing loud for the abolition of the usury laws, and a distant murmuring is
overheard of the question whether good faith and the maintenance of credit would
not be promoted by dispensing with all laws for the collection of debts. Both
the statesman and the citizens have observed, not without profound
consideration, the significant fact that the fear of the law is less potential
for the enforcement of obligations than commercial honor; that the protest of a
notary, or even a whisper of suspicion on Change, is fraught with a cogency
which neither a bench warrant nor a capias ad satisfaciendum ever
possessed. Government still deals with criminals by the old-fashioned process of
punishment, but both science and philanthropy concur in pronouncing that the
grand remedial agency for crime is prevention, and not cure. The whole theory of
vindictive punishment is rapidly obsolescent. That theory once dead, all that
remains of punishment is simply defensive. Imprisonment melts into the
euphemism, detention; and, while detained, the prisoner is treated tenderly, as
a diseased or unfortunate person. Nor does Democracy stop at that. Democracy
declares that liberty is an inalienable right, the inherent prerogative of the
Individual Sovereign, of which there is no possible defeasance, even by his own
act. Democracy therefore claims, or will claim, when it better understands the
universality of its own pretension, either such conditions of society that
criminals shall no longer be made, or else that some more delicate method of
guardianship shall be devised which shall respect the dignity with which
Democracy invests the Individual man.
When the battles which are thus already waged in these various departments of
human affairs between Government and the Individual shall have been finally
fought and won, the domain of Government will have shrunk to the merest fragment
of its old dimensions. Hardly any sphere of legislation, worthy of the name,
will remain, save that of the marriage and parental relations. These are
subjects of great delicacy, and form, ordinarily, an insuperable barrier to the
freedom of investigation in this direction. It is in connection with these
subjects that men shrink with dismay from what they understand to be the program
of Socialism. A brief consideration of the subject, conducted with the boldness
and impartiality of science, will demonstrate, however, that the most extreme
proposition of Socialism does not transcend, in the least, the legitimate
operation of the fundamental principle of either Protestantism or Democracy.
There is that, both in one and the other, which, carried simply out to its
logical and inevitable conclusion, covers the whole case of marriage and the
love relations, and completely emancipates them from the impertinent
interference of human legislation. First, what says protestantism? Why, that the
right of private judgment in matters of conscience is paramount to all other
authority whatsoever. But marriage has been, in all ages, a subject eminently
under the dominion of conscience and the religious sense. Besides, it is one of
the best recognized principles of high-toned religionism that every action of
the life is appropriately made matter of conscience, inasmuch as the
responsibility of the Individual towards God is held to extend to every, even
the minutest thing, which the Individual does. No man, we are told, can answer
for his brother. This, then, settles the whole question. It abandons the whole
subject to the conscience of the Individual. It implies the charge of a
spiritual despotism, wholly unwarranted, for any man to interfere with the
conscientious determination of any other with regard to it. Nor can it be
objected, with any effect, that this role only applies when the determination of
the Individual accords with, and is based upon, his own conscientious
conviction, for who shall determine whether it be so or not? Clearly no one but
the Individual himself. Any tribunal assuming to do it for him would be the
Inquisition over again, which is the special abhorrence of Protestantism. Such,
then, is the Protestant faith. But what, let us inquire, is the Protestant
practice? Precisely what it should be, in strict accordance with the fundamental
axiom of Protestantism. Every variety of conscience and every variety of
deportment in reference to this precise subject of love is already tolerated
among us. At one extreme of the scale stand the Shakers, who abjure the
connection of the sexes altogether. At the other extremity stands the
association of the Perfectionists at Oneida, who hold and practice, and justify
by the Scriptures, as a religious dogma, what they denominate complex marriage
or the freedom of love. We have, in this State, stringent laws against adultery
and fornication; but laws of that sort fall powerless, in America, before the
all-pervading sentiment of Protestantism, which vindicates the freedom of
conscience to all persons and in all things, provided the consequences fall upon
the parties themselves. Hence the Oneida Perfectionists live undisturbed and
respected, in the heart of the State of New York, and in the face of the world;
and the civil government, true to the Democratic principle, which is only the
same principle in another application, is little anxious to interfere with this
breach of its own ordinances, so long as they cast none of the consequences of
their conduct upon those who do not consent to bear them.
Such, then, is the unlimited sweep of the fundamental axiom of Protestantism.
Such its unhesitating endorsements, both theoretically and practically, of the
whole doctrine of the absolute Sovereignty of the Individual. It does not help
the matter to assert that it is an irreligious or a very immoral act to do this,
or that, or the other thing. Protestantism neither asserts or denies that. It merely asserts that there is no power
to determine that question higher than the Individual himself. It does not help
the matter to affirm that the Scriptures, or the law of God, delivered in any
form, have determined the nature and limits of marriage. Protestantism, again,
neither denies that proposition nor affirms it. It merely affirms, again, that
the Individual himself must decide for himself what the law of God is, and that
there is no authority higher than himself to whose decision he can be required
to submit. It is arrogance, self-righteousness and spiritual despotism for me to
assume that you have not a conscience as well as I, and that, if you regulate
your own conduct in the light of that conscience, it will not be as well
regulated in the sight of God as it would be if I were to impose the decisions
of my conscience upon you.
In general, however, Government still interferes with the marriage and
parental relations. Democracy in America has always proceeded with due deference
to the prudential motto, festina lente.
In France, at the time of the first Revolution, Democracy rushed with the
explosive force of escapement from centuries of compression, point blank to the
bull’s eye of its final destiny, from which it recoiled with such force that the
stupid world has dreamed, for half a century, that the vital principle of
Democracy was dead. As a logical sequence from Democratic principle, the legal
obligation of marriage was sundered, and the Sovereignty of the Individual above
the institution was vindicated. That the principle of Democracy is, potentially,
still the same, will appear upon slight examination. Democracy denies all power
to Government in matters of religion. No Democratic Government does, therefore,
or can base its interference with marriage upon the religious ground. It defines
marriage to be, and regards it as being, a mere civil contract. It justifies its
own interference with it upon the same ground that it justifies its interference
with other contracts,--namely, to enforce the civil obligations connected with
it, and to insure the maintenance of children. But here, as in the case of
ordinary obligations, if the conviction obtains that different conditions of
society will render the present relations of property between husband and wife
unnecessary, and secure, by the equitable distribution and general abundance of
wealth, a universal deference on the part of parents to the dictates of nature
in behalf of children. Democracy will cease to make this subject an exception to
her dominant principles. A tendency to change these conditions is already shown
in the passage of laws to secure to the wife an independent or individual
enjoyment of property. Already the observation is made, too, that children are
never abandoned among the wealthy classes, and hence the natural inference that
the scientific production, the equitable distribution, and the economical
employment of wealth would render human laws unnecessary to enforce the first
mandate of nature,--hospitality and kindness toward offspring. The doctrine is
already considerably diffused that the union of the sexes would be, not only
more pure, but more permanent, in the absence, under favorable circumstances, of
all legal interference. But whether that be so or not is not now the question. I
am merely asserting that the inevitable tendency of Democracy, like that of
Protestantism, is toward abandoning this subject to the sovereign determination
of the Individual, and that Democracy in this country will attain, only more
leisurely, the same point to which it went at a single leap, and from which it
rebounded, in France.
It is far less obvious, judging from the practical exhibition what it has
hitherto made of itself, that the essential principle of Socialism is, equally
with that of Protestantism and Democracy, the Individual Sovereignty. Indeed,
Socialism has been attacked and resisted more vigorously than from any other
cause in consequence of an instinctive perception that the measures hitherto
proposed by it sap the freedom of the Individual. The connected interests and
complicated artificial organization proposed by Fourier, and the renunciation of
independent ownership contemplated by Communism, have been severely criticized
and denounced, and the most so, perhaps, by those who are the most thoroughly
imbued with the Protestant and Democratic idea of Individuality. To understand
this apparent discrepancy we must distinguish the leading idea of
Socialism from the methods proposed by its advocates. The two are quite
distinct from each other, and it may be that Socialism has mistaken its
measures, as every human enterprise is liable to do.
Socialism demands the proper, legitimate, and just reward of labor It demands
that the interests of all shall be so arranged that they shall cooperate,
instead of clashing with and counteracting each other. It demands economy in the
production and uses of wealth, and the consequent abolition of wretchedness and
poverty. To what end does it make these demands? Clearly it is in order that
every human being shall be in the full possession, control, and enjoyment of his
own person and modes of seeking happiness, without foreign interference from any
quarter whatsoever. This, then, is the spirit of Socialism, and it is neither
more nor less than a still broader and more comprehensive assertion of the
doctrine of the inherent Sovereignty of the Individual. The Socialist proposes
association and combined interests merely as a means of securing that which he
aims at,--justice, cooperation, and the economies of the large scale. Hence it
follows that the Democrat resists and the Socialist advocates
Association and Communism for precisely the same reason. It is because both want
identically the same thing. The Democrat sees in connected interests a fatal
stroke at his personal liberty,--the unlimited sovereignty over his own
conduct,--and dreads the subjection of himself to domestic legislation, manifold
committees, and continual and authorized espionage and criticism. The Socialist
sees, in these same arrangements, abundance of wealth, fairly distributed among
all, and a thousand beneficent results which he knows to be essential conditions
to the possession or exercise of that very Sovereignty of the Individual. Each
has arrived at one half the truth. The Socialist is right in asserting that all
the conditions which he demands are absolutely essential to the development of
the individual selfhood. He is wrong in proposing such a fatal surrender of
Individual liberty for their attainment as every form of amalgamated interests
inevitably involves. The Democrat is negatively wrong in omitting from his
program the absolute necessity for harmonic social relations,--wrong in
supposing that there can always be a safe and legitimate exercise of those
rights which he declares to be inalienable, short of those superior domestic
arrangements which the Socialist demands. It is futile, for example, to talk of
removing the restraints of law from marriage, thus guaranteeing freedom in “the
pursuit of happiness” in that relation, before the just reward of labor and the
consequent prevalence of general wealth shall have created a positive security
of condition for women and children. Hence the blunder of Democracy in the old
French Revolution, and hence the absolute dependence of Democracy, for the
working out of its own principles, upon the happy solution of all the problems
of Socialism. Hence, again, the natural affinity of Democracy and Socialism, and
the reason why, despite their mutual misunderstanding, they have recently fallen
into each other’s embrace, in France, resounding in the ears of terrified Europe
the ominous cry Vive la Republique Démocratique et Sociale.
The blunder of Socialism is not in its end, but in its means. It consists in
propounding a combination of interests which is opposed by the individualities
of all nature, which is consequently a restriction of liberty, and which is,
therefore, especially antagonistic to the very objects which Socialism proposes
to attain. It is this which prevents the harmony of Democracy and Socialism,
even in France, from becoming complete, and which renders inevitable the
disruption of every attempted social organization which does not end
disastrously in despotism,--the inverse mode in which nature vindicates her
irresistible determination toward Individuality. Let that feature of the
Socialist movement be retrenched, and a method of securing its great ends
discovered which shall not be self-defeating in its operation, and from that
point Socialism and Democracy will blend into one and, uniting with
Protestantism, lose their distinctive appellations in the generic term of
Individual Sovereignty.
Such a principle is already discovered. It is capable of satifactory
demonstration that out of the adoption of a simple change in the commercial
system of the world, by which cost and not value shall be
recognized as the limit of price, will grow, legitimately, all the
wealth-producing, equitable, cooperating, and harmonizing results which
Socialism has hitherto sought to realize through the combination or amalgamation
of interests, while, at the same time, it will leave intact, the individualities
of existing society, and even promote them to an extent not hitherto conceived
of. It is not now, however, the appropriate time to trace out the results of
such a principle. We are concerned at present with Individuality and the spirit
of the age as connected with governmental affairs.
It is already the axiom of Democracy that that is the best government which
governs least,--that, in other words, which leaves the largest domain to the
Individual sovereign. It may sound strange, and yet it is rigidly true, that
nothing is more foreign to the essential nature of Democracy than the rule of
majorities. Democracy asserts that all men are born free and equal,--that is,
that every individual is of right free from the governing control of every other
and of all others. Democracy asserts also, that this right is inalienable,--that
it can neither be surrendered nor forfeited to another Individual, nor to a
majority of other Individuals. But the practical application of this principle
has been, and will always be found to be, incompatible with our existing social
order. It presupposes, as I have said, the preliminary attainment of the
conditions demanded by Socialism. The rule of majorities is, therefore, a
compromise enforced by temporary expediency,--a sort of half-way station-house,
between Despotism, which is Individuality in the concrete, and the Sovereignty
of every Individual, which is Individuality in the discrete form.
Genuine Democracy is identical with the no-government doctrine. The motto to
which I have alluded looks directly to that end. Finding obstacles in the
present social organization to the realization of its theory, Democracy has
called a halt for the present, and consented to a truce. The no-government men
of our day are practically not so wise, while they are theoretically more
consistent. They are, in fact, the genuine Democrats. It is they who are fairly
entitled to the sobriquet of “The unterrified Democracy.” They fearlessly face
all consequences, and push their doctrine quite out to its logical conclusions.
In so doing, they repeat the blunder which was committed in France. They insist
upon no government higher than that of the Individual, while they leave in
existence those causes which imperatively demand, and will always demand so long
as they exist, the intervention of just such restrictive governments as we now
have.
It results from all that has been said that the essential principle of
Protestantism, of Democracy, and of Socialism, is one and the same; that it is
identical with what is called the spirit of the present age; and that all of
them are summed up in the idea of the absolute supremacy of the Individual above
all human institutions.
What, then, the question returns, is to be the upshot of this movement? If
every department of modern reform is imbued with one and the same animating
principle; if there be already an obvious convergence, and, prospectively, an
inevitable conjunction and cooperation of the three great modern revolutionary
forces, Protestantism, Democracy, and Socialism; if, even now, in their
disjointed and semi-antagonistic relations, they prove more than a match for
hoary conservatism; if, in addition, material inventions and reforms of all
sorts concur in the same direction; if, in fine, the spirit of the age, or, more
properly, of modern times, and which we recognize also as the spirit of human
improvement, tends continually and with accelerated velocity toward the absolute
Individualization of human affairs,--what is the inevitable goal to be
ultimately reached? I have said that in religious affairs the end must be that
for every man shall be his own sect. This is the simple meaning of
Protestantism, interpreted in the light of its own principles. If the occasion
were appropriate, it would be a glorious contemplation to dwell upon that more
perfect harmony which will then reign among mankind in the religious sphere,--a
unity growing out of infinite diversity, and universal deference for the
slightest Individualities of opinion in others, transcending in glory that
hitherto sought by the Church in artificial organizations and arbitrary creeds,
as far as the new heavens and the new earth will excel the old.
Socialism demands, and will end by achieving, the untrammeled selfhood of the
Individual in the private relations of life, but out of that universal selfhood
shall grow the highest harmonies of social relationship. It is not these
subjects, however, that are now especially appropriate. Let us restrict our
specific inquiry to the remaining one of the three spheres of human affairs
which we have in the general view considered conjointly,--namely, that which
relates to human government.
Is it within the bounds of possibility, and, if so, is it within the limits
of rational anticipation, that all human governments, in the sense in which
government is now spoken of, shall pass away, and be reckoned among the useless
lumber of an experimental age,--that forcible government of all sorts shall, at
some future day, perhaps not far distant, be looked upon by the whole world, as
we in America now look back upon the maintenance of a religious establishment,
supposed in other times, and in many countries still, to be essential to the
existence of religion among men; and as we look back upon the ten thousand other
impertinent interferences of government, as government is practiced in those
countries where it is an institution of far more validity and consistency than
it has among us? Is it possible, and, if so, is it rationally probable, that the
time shall ever come when every man shall be, in fine, his own nation as well as
his own sect? Will this tendency to universal enfranchisement—indications of
which present themselves, as we have seen, in exuberant abundance on all hands
in this age—ultimate itself, by placing the Individual above all political
institutions, the man above all subordination to municipal law?
To put ourselves in a condition to answer this inquiry with some satisfactory
decree of certainty, we must first obtain a clear conception of the necessities
out of which government grows; then of the functions which government performs;
then of the specific tendencies of society in relation to those functions; and,
finally, of the legitimate successorship for the existing governmental
institutions of mankind.
I must apologize as well for the incompleteness as for the apparent dogmatism
of any brief exposition of this subject. I assert that it is not only possible
and rationally probable, but that it is rigidly consequential upon the right
understanding of the constitution of man, that all government, in the sense of
involuntary restraint upon the Individual, or substantially all, must finally
cease, and along with it the whole complicated paraphernalia and trumpery of
Kings, Emperors, Presidents, Legislatures, and Judiciary. I assert that the
indications of this result abound in existing society, and that it is the
instinctive or intelligent perception of that fact by those who have not
bargained for so much which gives origin and vital energy to the reaction in
Church and State and social life. I assert that the distance is less today
forward from the theory and practice of Government as it is in these United
States, to the total abrogation of all Government above that of the Individual,
than it is backward to the theory and practice of Government as Government now
is in the despotic countries of the old world.
The reason why apology is demanded is this: So radical a change in
governmental affairs involves the concurrence of other equally radical changes
in social habits, commerce, finance, and elsewhere. I have shown already, I
think, that Democracy would have ended in that, had it not been obstructed by
the want of certain conditions which nothing but the solution of the problems of
Socialism can afford. To discuss the changes which must occur in every
department of life, in order to render this revolution in Government
practicable, and to provide that those changes now exist in embryo, would be to
embrace the whole field of human concerns. That is clearly impossible in the
compass of a lecture. But it is equally impossible to adjust the radical changes
which I foretell in Government to the notion of the permanency of all other
institutions in their present forms. What, then, can be done in this dilemma? I
am reduced to a method of treating the subject which demands apology, both for
incompleteness and apparent dogmatism. I perceive no possible method open to me
but that of segregating the subject of Government from its connection with other
departments of life, and deducting from principles and rational grounds of
conjecture the changes which it is destined to undergo; and when those changes
involve the necessity of other and corresponding changes elsewhere, to assert,
as it were, dogmatically, without stopping to adduce the proofs, that these
latter changes are also existing in embryo, or actually progressing.
I return now to the necessities out of which Government grows. These are in
the broadest generalization: 1. to restrain encroachments, and 2. to manage the
combined interests of mankind.
First, with regard to restraining encroachments and enforcing equity. Is
there no better method of accomplishing this end than force, such as existing
Governments are organized to apply? I affirm that there is. I affirm that a
clear scientific perception of the point at which encroachment begins, in all
our manifold pecuniary and moral relations with each other, an exact idea of the
requirements of equity, accepted into the public mind, and felt to be capable of
a precise application in action, would go tenfold further than arbitrary laws
and the sanctions of laws can go, in obtaining the desired results. In saying
this, I mean something definite and specific. I have already adverted to the
discovery of an exact, scientific principle, capable of regulating the
distribution of wealth, and introducing universal equity in pecuniary
transactions,--an exact mathematical gauge of honesty,--which, when it shall
have imbued the public mind, and formed the public sentiment, and come to
regulate the public conduct, will secure the products of labor with impartial
justice to all, and tend to remove alike the temptations and the provocations to
crime. What that principle does in the sphere of commerce is done in the social
and ethical spheres by the doctrine of the Sovereignty of the Individual. Both
give to each his own, for it must be continually remembered that the doctrine of
Sovereignty of the Individual demands that I should sedulously and religiously
respect your Individuality, while I vindicate my own. These two ground
principles, with a few others incident thereto, once accepted and indwelling in
the minds of men, and controlling their action, will dispense with force and
forcible Government. The change which I contemplate in governmental affairs
rests, therefore, upon these prior or concurrent changes in the commercial,
ethical, and social spheres. Statesmen and jurists have hitherto dealt with
effects instead of causes. They have looked upon crime and encroachment of all
sorts as a fact to be remedied, but never as a phenomenon to be accounted for.
They have never gone back to inquire what conditions of existence manufactured
the criminal, or provoked or induced the encroachment. A change in this respect
is beginning to be observed, for the first time, in the present generation. The
superiority of prevention over cure is barely beginning to be admitted,--a
reform in the methods of thought which is an incipient stage of the revolution
in question. The highest type of human society in the existing social order is
found in the parlor. In the elegant and refined reunions of the aristocratic
classes there is none of the impertinent interference of legislation. The
Individuality of each is fully admitted. Intercourse, therefore, is perfectly
free. Conversation is continuous, brilliant, and varied. Groups are formed
according to attraction. They are continuously broken up, and re-formed through
the operation of the same subtle and all-pervading influence. Mutual deference
pervades all classes, and the most perfect harmony, ever yet attained, in
complex human relations, prevails under precisely those circumstances which
Legislators and Statesmen dread as the conditions of inevitable anarchy and
confusion. If there are laws of etiquette at all, there are mere suggestions of
principles admitted into and judged of for himself or herself, by each
individual mind.
Is it conceivable that in all the future progress of humanity, with all the
innumerable elements of development which the present age is unfolding, society
generally, and in all its relations, will not attain as high a grade of
perfection as certain portions of society, in certain special relations, have
already attained?
Suppose the intercourse of the parlor to be regulated by specific
legislation. Let the time which each gentlemen shall be allowed to speak to each
lady be fixed by law; the position in which they should sit or stand be
precisely regulated; the subjects which they shall be allowed to speak of, and
the tone of voice and accompanying gestures with which each may be treated,
carefully defined, all under pretext of preventing disorder and encroachment
upon each other’s privileges and rights, then can any thing be conceived better
calculated or more certain to convert social intercourse into intolerable
slavery and hopeless confusion?
It is precisely in this manner that municipal legislation interferes with and
prevents the natural organization of society. Mankind legislate themselves into
confusion by their effort to escape it. Still, a state of society may perhaps be
conceived, so low in social development that even the intercourse of the parlor
could not be prudently indulged without a rigid code of deportment and the
presence of half a dozen bailiffs to preserve order. I will not deny, therefore,
that Government in municipal affairs is, in like manner, a temporary necessity
of undeveloped society. What I affirm is that along with, and precisely in
proportion to, the social advancement of a people, that necessity ceases, so far
as concerns the first of the causes of Government referred to,--the necessity
for restraining encroachments.
The second demand for Government is to manage the combined interests of
society. But combined or amalgamated interests of all sorts are opposed to
Individuality. The Individuality of interests should be as absolute as that of
persons. Hence the number and extent of combined interests will be reduced with
every step in the genuine progress of mankind. The cost principle will furnish
in its operation the means of conducting the largest human enterprises, under
Individual guidance and control. It strips capital of its iniquitous privilege
of oppressing labor by earning an income of its own, in the form of interest,
and places it freely at the disposal of those who will preserve and administer
it best, upon the sole conditions of returning it unimpaired, but without
augmentation, at the appropriate time, to its legitimate owners.
A glance at the functions which Government actually performs, and the
specific tendencies which society now exhibits in relation to those functions,
will confirm the statement that all, or most of, the combined interests of
society will be finally disintegrated and committed to individual hands. It is
one of the acknowledged functions of Government, until now, to regulate
commerce. But, as we have already seen, the spirit of the age demands that
Government shall let commerce alone. In this country, an important Bureau of the
Executive Department of Government is the Land Office. But the public domain is,
we have seen, already demanded by the people, and the Land Office will have to
be dispensed with. The Army and Navy refer to a state of international relations
of which every thing begins to prognosticate the final extinction. The universal
extension of commerce and intercommunication, by means of steam navigation,
railroads, and the magnetic telegraph, together with the general progress of
enlightenment, are rapidly obliterating natural boundaries, and blending the
human family into one. The cessation of war is becoming a familiar idea, and,
with the cessation of war, armies and navies will cease, of course, to be
required. It is probable that even the existing languages of the earth will
melt, within another century or two, into one common and universal tongue, from
the same causes, operating upon a more extended scale, as those which have
blended the dialects of the different countries of England, of the different
departments of France, and of the kingdoms of Spain into the English, the French
and the Spanish languages, respectively. We have premonitions of the final
disbanding of the armies and navies of the world in the substitution of a
citizen militia, in the growing unpopularity of even that ridiculous shadow of
an army, the militia itself, and in the substitution of the merchant steamship
with merely an incidental warlike equipment instead of the regular man-of-war.
The Navy and War Departments of Government will thus be dispensed with. The
State Department now takes charge of the intercourse of the nation with foreign
nations. But with the cessation of war there will be no foreign nations, and
consequently the State or Foreign Department may in turn take itself away.
Patriotism will expand into philanthrophy. Nations, like sects, will dissolve
into the individuals who compose them. Every man will be his own nation, and,
preserving his own sovereignty and respecting the sovereignty of others, he will
be a nation at peace with all others. The term, “a man of the world,” reveals
the fact that it is the cosmopolite in manners and sentiments whom the world
already recognizes as the true gentleman,--the type and leader of civilization.
The Home Department of Government is a common receptacle of odds and ends, every
one of whose functions would be better managed by Individual enterprise, and
might take itself away with advantage any day. The Treasury Department is merely
a kind of secretory gland, to provide the means of carrying on the machinery of
the other Departments. When they are removed, it will of course have no apology
left for continuing to exist. Finances for administering Government will no
longer be wanted when there is no longer any Government to administer. The
Judiciary is, in fact, a branch of the Executive, and falls of course, as we
have seen, with the introduction of principles which will put an end to
aggression and crime. The Legislature enacts what the Executive and Judiciary
execute. If the execution itself is unnecessary, the enactment of course is no
less so. Thus, piece by piece, we dispose of the whole complicated fabric of
Government, which looms up in such gloomy grandeur, overshadowing the freedom of
the Individual, impressing the minds of men with a false conviction of its
necessity, as if it were, like the blessed light of day, indispensable to life
and happiness.
There is abundant evidence to the man of reflection that what we have thus
performed in imagination is destined to be rapidly accomplished in fact. There
is, perhaps, no one consideration which looks more directly to that consummation
than the growing unpopularity of politics, in every phase of the subject. In
America this fact is probably obvious than anywhere else. The pursuit of
politics is almost entirely abandoned to lawyers, and generally it is the career
of those who are least successful in that profession. The general repugnance of
the masses of mankind for that class of the community, by which they testify an
instinctive appreciation of the outrage upon humanity committed by the attempt
to reduce the impertinent interference of legislation to a science, and to
practice it as a learned profession, is intensified, in the case of the
politician, by the element of contempt. In the sham Democracies, wherein
majorities govern, the condition of the office-seeker and of the office-holder
is alike and peculiarly unfortunate. Defeated, he is consigned unceremoniously,
by popular opinion, to the category of the “poor devil.” Successful, he is
denounced as a political hack. His position is preeminently precarious. Whatever
veneration attaches still to the manufacturers and executors of law among us is
mostly traditionary. So much of the popular estimation of the men whose business
is governing the fellow-men as is the indigenous growth of our institutions is
essentially disrespectful. The politician, in a republic, is a man whose
business it is to please everybody, and who, consequently, has no personality of
his own, and this, here and now, in a country and age in which distinctive
personality is becoming the type and model of society. It is regarded today as a
misfortune, in the families of respectable tradespeople, if a son of any promise
has an unlucky turn for political preferment. Those who execute the laws are in
little better plight than those who make them. Recently, throughout most of the
States, when changes have been made in the fundamental law, the tenure of office
of judges of all ranks has been reduced to a short period of from two to four
years, and the office rendered elective. Such is the fearful descent upon which
the dignity of powered wigs is fairly launched in Republican America. Judges,
Chancellors and Chief Justices entering the canvass, at short intervals, for
returns to the Bench, and shaking hands with greasy citizens as the price of
judicial authority. It is said that familiarity breeds contempt, or that no man
is great to his valet de chambre. When the inhabitants of a heathen
country begin to treat their priests and their wooden divinities with
contemptuous familiarity, wise men see that the power of Paganism is broken, and
the Medicine-man, the Fetish, or the Juggernaut must soon give place to some
more rational conception of the religious idea. At the ratio of depreciation
actually progressing, office-holding of all sorts, in these United States, from
the president down to the constable, will, in a few years more, be ranked in the
public mind as positively disreputable. In the higher condition of society,
toward which mankind is unconsciously advancing, men will shun all
responsibility for and arbitrary control over the conduct of others as
sedulously as during past ages they have sought them as the chief good.
Washington declined to be made king, and the whole world has not ceased to make
the welkin ring with laudations of the disinterested act. The time will come yet
when the declinature, on all hands, of every species of governmental authority
over others will not even be deemed a virtue, but simply the plain dictate of
enlightened self-interest. The sentiment of the poet will then be recognized as
an axiom of philosophy.
Whoever mounts the throne,--King, Priest, or Prophet,--Man alike shall
groan.
Carlyle complains, in the bitterness of his heart, that the true kings and
governors of mankind have retired in disgust from the task of governing the
world, and betaken themselves to the altogether private business of governing
themselves. Whenever the world at large shall become as wise as they, when all
men shall be content to govern themselves. Whenever the world at large shall
become as wise as they, when all men shall be content to govern themselves
merely, then, and not till then, will “The True Constitution of Government”
begin to be installed. Carlyle has but discovered the fact that good men are
withdrawing from politics, without penetrating the rationale of the
phenomenon. He may call upon them in vain till he is hoarse to return to the
arena of a contest which has been waged for some six thousand years or so, with
continuous defeat, at a time when they are beginning to discover that the whole
series of bloody conflicts has been fought with windmills instead of giants, and
that what the world wants, in the way of government, is letting alone.
But what then? Have we arrived at the upshot of the whole matter when we
have, in imagination, swept all the actual forms of Government out of existence?
Is human society, in its mature and normal condition, to be a mere aggregation
of men and women, standing upon the unrelieved dead level of universal equality?
Is there to be no homage, no rank, no honors, no transcendent influence, no
power, in fine, exerted by one man over his fellow-men? Will there be nothing
substantially corresponding to, and specifically substituted for, what is now
known among men as Human Government?
This is the question to which we are finally conducted by the current of our
investigations, and to this question I conceive the answer to be properly
affirmative. Had I not believed so, there would have been no propriety in the
title, “The True Constitution of Government,” under which I announced this
discourse. It might be thought by some a sufficient answer to the question that
might be thought by some a sufficient answer to the question that principles,
and not men, will then constitute the Government of mankind. So vague a
statement, however, does not give complete satisfaction to the inquisitive mind,
nor does it meet the interrogatory in all its varying forms. We wish to know
what will be the positions, relatively to each other, into which men will be
naturally thrown by the operation of that perfect liberty which will result from
the prevalence and toleration of universal Individuality. We desire to know this
especially, now, with reference to that class of the mutual relations of men
which will correspond most exactly to the relations of the governors and the
governed.
Negatively, it is certain that in such a state of society as that which we
are now contemplating no influence will be tolerated, in the place of
Government, which is maintained or exerted by force in any, even the subtlest,
forms of involuntary compulsion. But there is still a sense in which men are
said to exert power,--a sense in which the wills of the governor and the
governed concur, and blend, and harmonize with each other. It is in such a sense
as this that the great orator is said to control the minds of his audience, or
that some matchless queen of song sways an irresistible influence over the ears
of men. When mankind graduate out of the period of brute force, that man will be
the greatest hero and conqueror who levies the heaviest tribute of homage by
excellence of achievement in any department of human performance. The avenues to
distinction will not be then, as now, open only to the few. Each individual will
truly govern the minds, and ears, and conduct of others. Those who have the most
power to impress themselves upon the community in which they live will govern in
larger, and those who have less will govern in smaller spheres. All will be
priests and kings, serving at the innumerable altars and sitting upon the
thrones of that manifold hierarchy, the foundations of which God himself has
laid in the constitution of man. Genius, talent, industry, discovery, the power
to please, every development of Individuality, in fine, which meets the
approbation of another, will be freely recognized as the divine anointing which
constitutes him a sovereign over others,--a sovereign having sovereigns for his
subjects,--subjects whose loyalty is proved and known, because they are ever
free to transfer their fealty to other lords. With the growing development of
Individuality even in this age, new spheres of honorable distinction are
continually evolved. The accredited heroes of our times are neither politicians
nor warriors. It is the discoverers of great principles, the projectors of
beneficent designs, and the executors of magnificent undertakings of all sorts
who, even now, command the homage of mankind. While politics are falling into
desuetude and contempt, while war, from being the admiration of the world, is
rapidly becoming its abhorrence, the artist and the artisan are rising into
relative importance and estimation. Even the undistinguished workers, as they
have hitherto been, shall hereafter hold seats as Cabinet Ministers in the new
hierarchical government, which shall shadow, in those days, with its
overspreading magnificence, the dwellings of regenerated humanity. In that
stupendous administration, extending from the greatest down to the least things
of human discernment, there shall be no lack of functionaries and no limit upon
patronage. Of that social state, which opens the avenues of all honorable
pursuits to all, upon terms of equity and mutual cooperation, it may be truly
said, as was said by the Great Teacher, when speaking of another kingdom,--if
indeed it be another,--”In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” The
laudable ambition of all will then be fully gratified. There will be no defeated
candidates in the political campaigns of that day. Where the interests of all
are identical, even the superiority of another is success, and the glory of
another is a personal triumph.
A superficial observer might judge that there was more prosperity and power
in a petty principality of Germany than there is in the United States of
America, because he sees more pomp and magnificence surrounding the court of a
puppet prince, whom men call the ruler of that people. No one but an equally
superficial observer will mistake the phantom, called Government, which resides
in the Halls and Departments at Washington—the mere ghost of what such a
Government once was, in its palmy days of despotism—for a nearer approximation
to the true organization of Government than that natural arrangement of society
which divides and distributes the functions of governing into ten thousand
Departments and Bureaus at the homes, in the workshops, and at the universities
of the people.
If that trumpery Government be called such, because it performs important
public functions, then have we distinguished private individuals among us who
are already preeminently more truly Governors than they. If the concern at
Washington is legitimately denominated a Government of the people, because it
controls and regulates a Post Office Department, for example, then are the
Harndens and Adamses Governors too, for they control and regulate a Package
Express Department, which is a greater and more difficult thing. They carry
bigger bundles, and carry them farther, and deliver them with more regularity
and dispatch. It is stated, upon authority which I presume to be reliable, that
Adams & Co.’s Express is the most extensive organization of any sort in the
world,--that it is, in fact, absolutely world-wide; and yet it is strictly an
individual concern. As an instance of the superiority of administration in the
private enterprise of the national combination, I was myself at Washington
during the last winter, when the mails were interrupted by the breaking up of a
railroad bridge between Baltimore and Philadelphia, and when, for nearly two
weeks, the newspapers of the Commercial Metropolis were regularly delayed, one
whole day, on their way to the Political metropolis of the country, while the
same papers came regularly and promptly through every day by the private
expresses. The President, Members of Congress, and Cabinet Ministers, even the
Postmaster-General himself was regularly served with the news by the enterprise
of a private individual, who performed one of the functions of the Government,
in opposition to the Government, and better than the Government, levying tribute
upon the very functionary of the Government who was elected, consecrated, and
anointed for the performance of that identical function. Who, then, was the true
Governor and Cabinet Minister, the Postmaster General, who was daily dispatching
messengers to rectify the irregularity, and issuing bulletins to explain and
apologize for it, or the Adams Express man, who conquered the difficulty, and
served the public, when the so-called Government failed to do it? The fault is
that the Government goes by rule, preordained in the form of law, and
consequently has no capacity for adapting itself to the Individuality of an
unforeseen contingency. It has not the Individual deciding power and promptitude
of action which are absolutely necessary for such occasions.
It is the actual performance of the function which is all that there is good
in the idea of Government. All that there is besides that is mere restriction,
and consequent annoyance and oppression of the public, as when our Government
undertook to suppress those private expresses, which serve the public better
than it. The point, then, is thus: I affirm that every useful function, or
nearly every one which is now performed by Government, and the use of which will
remain in the more advanced conditions of mankind, toward which the present
tendencies of society converge, can be better performed by the Individual,
self-elected and self-authorized, than by any constituted Government whatsoever;
and further, since it is the performance of the function, and the influence
which the performance of the function exerts over the conduct, and to the
advantage of men, which makes the true Governor, it follows, I affirm, that the
Adams Express man was, in the case I have mentioned, the true Governor, and that
the Postmaster General, and the whole innumerable gang of Legislators and
Executors of the law at his back, were the sham Governors, such as the world is
getting ready to discharge on perpetual furlough.
It is possible that there may be a few comparatively unimportant interests of
mankind which are so essentially combined in their nature that some species of
artificial organization will always be necessary for their management. I do not,
for example, see how the public highways can be properly laid out and
administered by the private individual. Let us resort, then, to science for the
solution of this anomaly, for every subject has its science, the true social
relations of mankind as well as all others. The inexorable natural law which
governs this subject is this: that nature demands everywhere an individual lead.
Every combined interest must therefore come ultimately to be governed by an
individual mind, to be entrusted, in other words, to a despotism. It is the
recognition of this law which is embodied in the political axiom that “power is
constantly stealing from the hands of the many into the hands of the few,” It is
this scientific principle, lying down in the very nature of things, which
constitutes both the rationale of monarchy and its appropriate apology. The
lesson of wisdom to be deduced from this principle is not, however, as our
political leaders have preached to us, that “the price of liberty is eternal
vigilance,”--a liberty which is not worth possession if it cannot be enjoyed in
security, and a vigilance which is only required to be exercised in order to
defeat the legitimate operation of the most universal and fundamental law of
nature. The true lesson of political wisdom is simply this: that no interests
should ever be entrusted to a combination which are too important to be
surrendered understandingly and voluntarily to the guidance of a despotism.
Government, therefore, in the present sense of the term, can never, from the
very essential nature of the case, be compatible with the safety of the
liberties of the people, until the sphere of its authority is reduced to the
very narrowest dimensions,--never until the mere commission,--a board of
overseers of roads and canals, and such other unimportant interests as
experience shall prove can not be so readily managed by irresponsible individual
action.
It is this latter alone which will then truly merit the imposing title of
Government. There is a sense, as I have said, in which that term is fairly
applicable to the natural organization of the interrelations of men. If Genin,
or Leary, or Knox devises a new fashion for hats, and manufactures hats in the
style so devised, and the style pleases you and me, and we buy the hats and wear
them, therein is an example, a humble example, perhaps you will think, but still
a genuine example, of true Government. The individual hatter is self-elected to
his function. I, in giving him the preference over another, express my
conviction of his fitness for that function, of his superiority over others. I
vote for him. I give him my suffrage. I confirm his election. The abstract
statement of the true order of Government, then, is this: it is that Government
in which the rulers elect themselves, and are voted for afterward.
The uncouth and unscrupulous despot proclaims that he governs mankind in his
own right,--the right of the strongest. The modernized and somewhat civilized
despot announces that he governs by divine right; that he is the God-appointed
ruler of the people, by virtue of the fact that he finds himself a ruler at all.
The more modern Democratic Governor claims to rule by virtue of the will of a
majority. The true Governor rules by virtue of all these authorizations
combined. He rules in his own right, because he is self-elected, and exercises
his function in accordance with his own choice. He rules by authorization of the
majority, because it is he who receives the suffrages of the largest number who
governs most extensively, and finally, he, of all men, can be appropriately said
to rule by divine right. His own judgment of his own fitness for his function,
confirmed by the approval of those whom he desires to govern, are the highest
possible evidence of the divinity of his claim, of the fact, in other words,
that he was created and designed by God himself for the most perfect performance
of that particular function.
What, then, society has to do is to remove the obstructions to this universal
self-election, by every Individual, of himself, to that function which his own
consciousness of his own adaptation prompts him to believe to be his peculiar
God-intended office in life. Throw open the polls, make the pulpit, the
school-room, the workshop, the manufactory, the shipyard, and the storehouse the
universal ballot-boxes of the people. Make every day an election day, and every
human being both a candidate and a voter, exercising each day and hour his full
and unlimited franchise.
In order to this consummation, two conditions are indispensably necessary:
the first is the cordial and universal acceptance of this very principle of the
absolute Sovereignty of the Individual,--each claiming his own Sovereignty, and
each religiously respecting that of all others. The second is the equitable
interchange of the products of labor, measured by the scientific law relating to
that subject to which I have referred, and the consequent security to each of
the full enjoyment and unlimited control of just that portion of wealth which he
or she produces, the effect of which will be the introduction of general comfort
and security, the moderation of avarice, and the supply of a definite knowledge
of the limits of rights and encroachments.
The instrumentalities necessary for hastening the adoption of these
principles are likewise, chiefly, two: these are, first, a more intense longing
for true and harmonic relations; and, secondly, a clear intellectual conception
of the principles themselves, and of the consequences which would flow from
their adoption. The first is a highly religious aspiration, the second is a
process of scientific induction. One is the soul and the other the sensible
body, the spiritual substance and the corporeal form, of social harmony. The
teachings of Christianity have inspired the one, the illumination of science
must provide the other. Intellectual resources brought to the aid of Desire
constitute the marriage of Wisdom with Love, whose progeny is Happiness.
When from the lips of truth one mighty breath
Shall, like a
whirlwind, scatter in its breeze
The whole dark pile of human
mockeries,
Then shall the race of mind commence on earth,
And, starting
fresh, as from a second birth,
Man, in the sunshine of the world’s new
spring,
Shall walk transparent, like some holy thing.
It would, perhaps, be injudicious to conclude this exhibit of the doctrine of
the Individual Sovereignty, without a more formal statement of the scientific
limit upon the exercise of that Sovereignty which the principle itself supplies.
If the principle were predicated of one Individual alone, the assertion of his
Sovereignty, or, in other words, of his absolute right to do as he pleases, or
to pursue his own happiness in his own way, would be confessedly to invest him
with the attributes of despotism over others. But the doctrine which I have
endeavored to set forth is not that. It is the assertion of the concurrent
Sovereignty of all men, and of all women, and, within the limits I am about to
state, of all children. This concurrence of Sovereignty necessarily and
appropriately limits the Sovereignty of each. Each is Sovereign only within his
own dominions, because he cannot extend the exercise of his Sovereignty beyond
those limits without trenching upon, and interfering with, the prerogatives of
others, whose Sovereignty the doctrine equally affirms. What, then, constitutes
the boundaries of one’s own dominion? This is a pregnant question for the
happiness of mankind, and one which has never, until now, been specifically and
scientifically asked, or answered. The answer, if correctly given, will fix the
precise point at which Sovereignty ceases and encroachment begins, and that
knowledge, as I have said, accepted into the public mind, will do more than
laws, and the sanctions of laws, to regulate individual conduct and intercourse.
The limitation is this: every Individual is the rightful Sovereign over his own
conduct in all things, whenever, and just so far as, the consequences of his
conduct can be assumed by himself; or, rather, inasmuch as no one objects to
assuming agreeable consequences, whenever, and as far as, this is true of the
disagreeable consequences. For disagreeable consequences, endurance, or burden
of all sorts, the term “Cost” is elected as a scientific technicality. Hence,
the exact formula of the doctrine, with its inherent limitation, may be stated
thus: “The Sovereignty of the Individual, to be exercised at his own
cost.”
This limitation of the doctrine, being inherent, and necessarily involved in
the idea of the Sovereignty of all, may possibly be left with safety, after the
limitation is understood, to implication, and the simple Sovereignty of the
Individual be asserted as the inclusive formula. The limitation has never been
distinctly and clearly set forth in the announcements which have been made
either of the Protestant or the Democratic creed. Protestantism promulgates the
one single, bald, unmodified proposition that in all matters of conscience the
Individual judgment is the sole tribunal, from there is no appeal. As against
this there is merely the implied right in others to resist when the conscience
of the Individual leads him to attack or encroach upon them. It is the same with
the Democratic prerogative of the “pursuit of happiness.” The limitation has
been felt rather than distinctly and scientifically propounded.
It results from this analysis that, wherever such circumstances exist that a
person cannot exercise his own Individuality and Sovereignty without throwing
the “cost”, or burden, of his actions upon others, the principle has so far to
be compromised. Such circumstances arise out of connected or amalgamated
interests, and the sole remedy is disconnection. The exercise of Sovereignty is
the exercise of the deciding power. Whoever has to bear the cost should have the
deciding power in every case. If one has to bear the cost of another’s conduct,
and just so far as he has to do so, he should have the deciding power over the
conduct of the other. Hence dependence and close connections of interest demand
continual concessions and compromises. Hence, too, close connection and mutual
dependence is the legitimate and scientific root of Despotism, as disconnection
or Individualization of interests is the root of freedom and emancipation.
If the close combination, which demands the surrender of our will to another,
is one instituted by nature, as in the case of the mother and the infant, then
the relation is a true one, notwithstanding. The surrender is based upon the
fact that the child is not yet strictly an Individual. The unfolding of its
Individuality is gradual, and its growing development is precisely marked, by
the increase of its ability to assume the consequences of its own acts. If the
close combination of interests is artificial or forced, then the parties exist
toward each other in false relations, and to false relations no true principle
can apply. Consequently, in such relations, the Sovereignty of the Individual
must be abandoned. The law of such relations is collision and conflict, to
escape which, while remaining in the relations there is no other means but
mutual concessions and surrenders of the selfhood. Hence, inasmuch as the
interests of mankind have never yet been scientifically individualized by the
operations of an equitable commerce, and the limits of encroachment never
scientifically defined, the axioms of morality, and even the provisions of
positive legislation, have been doubtless appropriate adaptations to the ages of
false social relations to which they have been applied, as the cataplasm or
sinapism may be for disordered conditions of the human system. We must not,
however, reason, in either case, from that temporary adaptation in a state of
disease to the healthy condition of society or the Individual. Much that is
relatively good is only good as a necessity growing out of evil. The greater
good is the removal of the evil altogether. The almshouse and the foundling
hospital may be necessary and laudable charities, but they can only be regarded
by the enlightened philanthropist as the stinking apothecary’s salve, or the
dead flies, applied to the bruises and sores of the body politic. Admitted
temporary necessities, they are offensive to the nostrils of good taste. The
same reflection is applicable to every species of charity. The oppressed classes
do not want charity, but justice, and with simple justice the necessity for
charity will disappear or be reduced to a minimum. So in the matter before us.
The disposition to forgo one’s own pleasures to secure the happiness of others
is a positive virtue in all those close connections of interest which render
such a sacrifice necessary, and inasmuch as such have hitherto always been the
circumstances of the Individual in society, this abnegation of selfhood is the
highest virtue which the world has hitherto conceived. But these close
connections of interest are themselves wrong, for the very reason that they
demand this sacrifice and surrender of what ought to be enjoyed and developed to
the highest extent. The truest and the highest virtue, in the true relations of
men, will be the fullest unfolding of all the Individualities of each, not only
without collision or injury to any, but with mutual advantage to all,--the
reconciliation of the Individual and the interests of the Individual with
society and the interests of society,--that composite harmony, or, if you will,
unity, of the whole, which results from the discrete unity and distinctive
Individuality of each particular monad in the complex natural organization of
society.
The doctrine of Individuality, and the Sovereignty of the Individual,
involves, then, at this point, two of the most important scientific
consequences, the one serving as a guiding principle to the true solution of
existing evils in society, and to the exodus out of the prevailing confusion,
and the other as a guiding principle of deportment in existing society, while
those evils remain. The first is that the Sovereignty of the Individual, or, in
other words, absolute personal liberty, can only be enjoyed along with the
entire disintegration of combined or amalgamated interests; and here the “cost
principle” comes in to point out how that disintegration can and must take
place, not as isolation, but along with, and absolutely productive of the utmost
conceivable harmony and cooperation. The second is that, while people are
forced, by the existing conditions of society, to remain in the close
connections resulting from amalgamated interests, there is no alternative but
compromise and mutual concession, or an absolute surrender upon one side or the
other. The innate Individualities of persons are such that every calculation
based upon the identity of tastes, or opinions, or beliefs, or judgments, of
even so many as two persons, is absolutely certain to be defeated, and as Nature
demands an Individuality of lead, one must necessarily surrender to the other
whenever the relation demands an identity of action. To quarrel with that
necessity is a folly. To deny its existence is a delusion. To enter such
combinations with the expectation that liberty and Individuality can be enjoyed
in them is a sore aggravation of the evil. Mutual recrimination is added to the
inevitable annoyance of mutual restriction. Hence a right understanding of the
scientific conditions under which alone Individuality can be indulged, a clear
and intelligent perception of the fact that the collisions and mutual
contraventions of the combined relation result from nothing wrong in the
associated Individuals, but from the wrong of the relation itself, goes far to
introduce the spirit of mutual forbearance and toleration, and thus to soften
the acrimony and alleviate the burden of the present imperfect and unscientific
institutions of society.
Hence, again, as self-sacrifice and denial to one’s self of one’s own
abstract rights is an absolute necessity of the existing order of things, there
is a mutual necessity that we claim that of each other, and, if need be, that we
enforce the claim. Herein lies the apology for our existing Governments, and for
force as a temporary necessity, and hence the doctrine of Individuality, and the
Sovereignty of the Individual, while the most ultra-radical doctrine in theory
and final purpose ever promulgated in the world, is at the same time eminently
conservative in immediate practice. While it teaches, in principle, the
prospective disruption of nearly every existing institution, it teaches
concurrently, as matter of expediency, a patient and philosophical endurance of
the evils around us, while we labor assiduously for their removal. So far from
quarreling with existing Government, when it is put upon the footing of
temporary expediency, as distinguished from the abstract principle and final
purpose, it sanctions and confirms it. It has no sympathies with aimless and
fruitless struggles, the recrimination of different classes in society, nor with
merely anarchical and destructive onslaughts upon existing institutions. It
proposes no chaotic, abrupt and sudden shock to existing society. It points to a
scientific, gradual, and perfectly peaceable substitution of new and harmonious
relations for those which are confessedly beset, to use the mildest expression,
by the most distressing embarrassments.
I will conclude by warning you against one other misconception, which is very
liable to be entertained by those to whom Individuality is for the first time
presented as the great remedy for the prevalent evils of the social state. I
mean the conception that Individuality has something in common with isolation,
or the severance of all personal relations with one’s fellow-men. Those who
entertain this idea will object to it, because they desire, as they will say,
cooperation and brotherhood. That objection is conclusive proof that they have
not rightly comprehended the nature of Individuality, or else they would have
seen that it is through the Individualization of interests alone that harmonic
cooperation and universal brotherhood can be attained. It is not the disruption
of relationships, but the creation of distinct and independent personalities
between whom relations can exist. The more distinct the personalities, and the
more cautiously they are guarded and preserved, the more intimate the relations
may be, without collision or disturbance. Persons may be completely
individualized in their interests who are in the most immediate personal
contact, as in the case of the lodgers at an hotel, or they may have combined or
amalgamated interests, and be remote from each other, as in the case of partners
residing in different countries. The players at shuttlecock cooperate in
friendly competition with each other, while facing and opposing each other, each
fully directing his own movements, which they could not do if their arms and
legs were tied together, nor even if they stood side by side. The game of life
is one which demands the same freedom of movement on the part of every player,
and every attempt to procure harmonious cooperation by fastening different
individuals in the same position will defeat its own object.
In opposing combinations or amalgamated interests, Individuality does not
oppose, but favors and conducts toward cooperation. But, on the other hand,
Individuality alone is not sufficient to insure cooperation. It is an essential
element of cooperative harmony, but not the only one. It is one principle in the
science of society, but it is not the whole of that science. Other elements are
indispensable to the right working of the system, one of which has been adverted
to. The error has been in suppressing that, because the Individuality which is
already realized in society has not ultimated in harmony, that Individuality
itself is in fault. Instead of destroying this one true element of order, and
returning to a worse condition from which we have emerged, the scientific method
is to investigate further, and find what other or complementary principles are
necessary to complete the well-working of the social machinery.
Regretting that the whole circle of the new principles of society, of which
the Sovereignty of the Individual is one, cannot be presented at once. I invite
you, Ladies and Gentlemen, as occasion may offer, to inform yourselves of what
they are, that you may see the subject in its entire connection of parts. In the
meantime I submit to your criticism, and the criticism of the world, what I have
now offered, with the undoubting conviction that it will endure the ordeal of
the most searching investigation, and with the hope that, however it may shock
the prejudices of earlier education, you will in the end sanction and approve
it, and aid, by your devoted exertions, the inauguration of the True
Constitution of Government, with its foundations laid in the Sovereignty of the
Individual.
No. 2: Cost the Limit of Price. A Scientific Measure of Honesty in Trade as one of the
Fundamental Principles in the Solution of the Social Problem
Preface
The preface of a book is always the last thing written, and generally the last thing read. The author is safe, therefore, in assuming that he is addressing, in what he says in this part of his work, hose who are already familiar with the book itself. Availing myself of this presumption, I have a few observations to make of a somewhat practical nature in relation to the effects upon the conduct of the Individual which the acceptance of the principle herein inculcated should appropriately have.
At the first blush, it seems as if the Cost Principle presented the most stringent and inexorable law, binding upon the conscience, which was ever announced,--as if no man desiring to be honest could continue for a day in the ordinary intercourse of trade and pursuit of profit. The degree to which this impression will remain with different persons, upon a thorough understanding of the whole subject, will be different according to their organizations. There are powerful considerations, however, to deter any one from making a martyr of himself in a fruitless effort to act upon the true principle wile living in the atmosphere, and surrounded by the conditions, of the old and false system.
In the first place, it is impossible, in the nature of things, to apply a principle, the essence of which is to regulate the terms of reciprocity, where no reciprocity exists. The Equitist who should attempt to act upon the Cost Principle in the midst of the prevailing system, and should sell his own products with scrupulous conscientiousness at cost, would be wholly unable to obtain the products of others at cost in return; and hence his conduct would not procure Equity. He would at most obtain the wretched gratification of cheating himself knowingly and continuously. There is not space in the few pages of a preface to enter into a fundamental statement of the ethical principles involved in the temporary continuance in relations of injustice forced upon us by those upon whom whatever of injustice we commit is inflicted. The question involved is the same as that of War and Peace. A nation desirous of being at peace with all mankind, and tendering such relations to the world, may, nevertheless, be forced into war by the wanton acts of unscrupulous neighbors. Notwithstanding the over-strained nicety of the sect called Friends, and of non-resistants in such behalf, the common sentiment of enlightened humanity is yet in favor of resistance against unprovoked aggression, while it is at the same time in favor of Universal Peace,--the entire cessation of all War. In like manner, the friends of Equity, the acceptors of the cost principle, do not in any case, so far as I am aware, propose beggaring themselves, or abandoning any positions which give them the pecuniary advantage in the existing disharmonic relations of society, from any silly or overweening deference even for their own principles.
They entertain rational and well-considered views in relation to the appropriate
means of inaugurating the reign of Equity. They propose the organization of
villages, or settlements of persons who understand the principle, and desire to
act upon it mutually. They will tender intercourse with “outsiders” upon the
same terms, but, if the tender is not accepted, they will then treat with them
upon their own terms, so far as it is necessary, or in their judgment best, to
treat with them at all. They will hold Equity in one hand and “fight” in the
other,--Equity for those who will accept Equity and reciprocate it, and the
conflict of wits for those who force that issue. It is not their design to
become either martyrs or dupes; martyrdom being, in their opinion, unnecessary,
and the other alternative adverse to their tastes.
Still any view of the practical methods of working out the principle which
may be here intimated is of course binding upon no one. I state the spirit in
which the principle is at present entertained, so far as I know, by those who
have accepted it. Every individual must be left free, whether as an inhabitant
of the world at large, or of an equitable village, to act under the dictates of
his own conscience, his own views of expediency, his own sense of what he can
afford to sacrifice in order to abide by the principle rather than sacrifice the
principle instead; or, in fine, of whatever other regulating influence he is in
the habit of submitting his conduct to. He must be left absolutely free, then,
to commit every conceivable breach of the principles of harmonic society. He who
is in no freedom to do wrong can never, by any possibility, demonstrate the
disposition to do right; besides, whether the absolute or theoretical right is
always the practical or relative right, is at least a doubtful question in
morals, which each individual must be allowed to judge of solely for
himself,--as of every other question of morals and personal conduct
whatsoever,--assuming the Cost. Hence, even in the act of infringing
one of our circle of principles, the individual is vindicating another,--THE
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL,--and in the fact of his differing from another,
from the majority, or from all others, in the moral character of an act, he is
merely illustrating another of the same circle of principles,--namely,
INDIVIDUALITY.
It is found to be the most puzzling of all things to those who commence to
examine these principles, beset as they are by the fogs of old ideas, that a
social reorganization should be proposed without any social compact, the
necessity of which has been alike and universally conceded both by Conservatives
and Reformers. An illustration may render the matter clear. We do not bring
forward a System, a Plan, or a Constitution, to be voted on, adopted, or agreed
to, by mankind at large, or by any set of men whatsoever. Nothing of the sort!
We point out certain principles in the nature of things which relate to the
order of human society; in conforming to which mankind will find their affairs
harmonically adjusted, and in departing from which they will run into confusion.
The knowledge of these principles is science. It is the same with them as
with the principles of Physiology. We teach them as science. We do not ask
that they shall be voted upon or applied under pledges. Men cannot make or
unmake them. So far as he knows them, and cordially accepts them as truths, he
will be disposed to realize them in act. The human mind has a natural appetite
for truth. If there are obstacles in the way of their realization, those
obstacles will differ with the circumstances of each individual, and the
Individual can alone judge of them. Those circumstances may change tomorrow, and
then his capacity to act will change. His own appreciation of the subject may
change likewise. There is Individuality, therefore, in his own different states
at different periods. The man must be bound by no pledges which imply even so
much as that he will be himself the same, in any given respect, at any future
moment of time. It is the evil of compacts that the compact becomes sacred and
the individual profane,--that man is held to be made for the Sabbath and not the
Sabbath for man.
Hereupon there is based the claim that these principles constitute in the
appropriate and rigid sense THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY. It is the property of
science that it does not say “By your leave.” It exists whether you will or no.
It requires neither compacts, constitutions, nor ballot-boxes. It is objectively
true. It exists in principles and truths. If you understand and conform, well;
if not, woe be unto you. The consequences will fall upon you and scourge you.
Hence the government of consequences is itself scientific, which no man-made
government is. Men have sought for ages to discover the science of government;
and lo! Here it is, that men cease totally to attempt to govern each other at
all! That they learn to know the consequences of their own acts, and that they
arrange their relations with each other upon such a basis of science that the
disagreeable consequences shall be assumed by the agent himself.
Chapter I: Preliminary--the Nature and Necessity of a Social Science
1. The question of the proper, legitimate, and just reward of labor, and
other kindred questions, are becoming confessedly of immense importance to the
welfare of mankind. They demand radical, thorough, and scientific investigation.
Political Economy, which has held its position for the last half century as one
of the accredited sciences, is found in our day to have but a partial and
imperfect application to matters really involved in the production and
distribution of wealth. Its failure is in the fact that it treats wealth as if
it were an abstract thing having interests of its own, apart from the well-being
of the laborers who produce it. In other words, human beings, their interests
and happiness, are regarded by Political Economy in no other point of view than
as mere instruments in the production or service of this abstract Wealth. It
does not inquire in what manner and upon what principles the accumulation and
dispensation of wealth should be conducted in order to eventuate in the
greatest amount of human comfort and happiness, and the most complete
development of the individual man and woman. It simply concerns itself with the
manner in which, and the principles in accordance with which, men and women
are now employed, in producing and exchanging wealth. It is as if the
whole purposes, arrangements, and order of a vast palace were viewed as mere
appendages to the kitchen, or contrivances for the convenience of the servants,
instead of viewing both kitchen and servants as subordinate parts of the system
of life, gayety, luxury, and happiness which should appropriately inhabit the
edifice, according to the design of its projectors.
2. Hence Political Economy is beginning to fall into disrepute as a science
(for want of a more extended scope and a more humanitarian purpose), and
is liable even to lose credit for the good it has done. The questions with which
it deals can no longer be regarded as an integral statement of the subject to
which they relate. They are coming to be justly estimated as a part only of a
broader field or scientific investigation which has but recently been entered
upon; and as being incapable of a true solution apart from their legitimate
connections with the whole system of the social affairs of mankind. The
subject-matter of Political Economy will, therefore, be hereafter embraced in a
more comprehensive Social Science, which will treat of all the interests of man
growing out of their interrelations with each other.
3. A criticism somewhat similar to that here bestowed upon Political Economy
is applicable to Ethics. It has been the function of writers and preachers upon
Morals, hitherto, to inculcate the duty of submitting to the exigencies of false
social relations. The Science of Society teaches, on the other hand, the
rectification of those relations themselves. So long as men find themselves
embarrassed by complicated connections of interest, so that the consequences of
their acts inevitably devolve upon others, the highest virtue consists in mutual
concessions and abnegation of selfhood. Hence the necessity for Ethics, in that
stage of progress, to enforce the reluctant sacrifice, by stringent appeals to
the conscience. The truest condition of society, however, is that in which each
individual is enabled and constrained to assume, to the greatest extent
possible, the Cost or disagreeable consequences of his own acts. That condition
of society can only arise from a general disintegration of interests,--from
rendering the interests of all as completely individual as their persons. The
Science of Society teaches the means of that individualization of interests,
coupled, however, with cooperation. Hence it graduates the individual, so to
speak, out of the sphere of Ethics into that of Personality,--out of the sphere
of duty or submission to the wants of others, into the sphere of integral
development and freedom. Hence the Science of Society may be said to absorb the
Science of Ethics as it does that of Political Economy, while it teaches far
more exactly the limits of right by defining the true relations of men.
4. The Science of Society labors indeed under a serious embarrassment from
the fact of its comprehensiveness. The changes which the realization of the
principles it unfolds would bring about in the circumstances of society make it
differ from matters of ordinary science, in the fact of its immediate and
complicated effects upon what may be termed the vested interests of the
community. It is difficult for men to regard that as purely a question of
science which they foresee is a radical reform and revolution as well. Still
there are few persons who do not recognize the fact that there is some subtle
and undiscovered cause of manifold evils, lying hid down in the very foundations
of our existing social fabric, and which it is extremely desirable should be
eradicated by some means, however much they may differ with reference to the
instrumentalities through which the amelioration is to be sought for. The demand
for a thorough investigation of the subject, and a settlement upon true
principles of the relations of labor and capital especially, has come up during
the last few years with more prominence than ever before, both in Europe and
America, and has given rise to the various forms of Socialism which are now
agitating the whole world. The real significance and tendency of Socialism are
stated in No. I of this series of publications, entitled, “The True Constitution
of Government, in the Sovereignty of the Individual, as the Final Development of
Protestantism, Democracy, and Socialism.
5. Indeed, the inquiry into social evils and remedies has not been generally
viewed in the light of a science at all, and Reform of all sorts has become
distasteful to many among the more intellectual portion of the community, for
the reason that it has not hitherto assumed a more strictly scientific aspect.
Neither querulous complaints of the present condition of things, nor brilliant
picturing of the imagination, nor vague aspirations after change or perfection,
satisfy those whose mental constitution demands definite and tangible
propositions, and inevitable logical deductions from premises first admitted or
established.
6. There is another portion of the community who object to the investigation
of all social questions upon nearly opposite grounds. They assume that the moral
and social regeneration of mankind is not the sphere of science, but exclusively
that of religion,--that the only admissible method of societary advancement is
by the infusion of the religious sentiment into the hearts of men, and the
rectification thereby of the affections of the individual, and through
individuals of mankind at large.
7. If this proposition be reduced to this statement,--that, if the spirit of
every individual n a community is right, the spirit of that community, as an
aggregate, must be right likewise,--the assertion is a simple truism; but
society demands a form as well as a substance, a body no less than a soul; and
if that form or body be not a true outgrowth and exponent of the spirit dwelling
within, it is affirming too much to say that such a society is rightly
constituted. It is the province of science or the intellect to provide the form
in which any desire is to be actualized. What Substance is to Form, the Love or
Desire is to the intellectual conception of the modes of its realization.
Religion deals with the heart or affections; in other words, with the love or
desire, which makes up the substance or inherent constituent quality of actions.
Science which is born of Wisdom deals with the Forms of action, and teaches that
such and such only accord with a given Desire and will eventuate in its
realization. The development of the Love or Desire is first in order and first
in rank; that of the corresponding Wisdom is nevertheless equally indispensable
to the completeness of all that is good and true, in every department of
rational being.
8. To illustrate, let us suppose a nation overrun by foreign armies, and its
very existence as an independent people threatened, while merely a feeble,
heartless, and unorganized resistance is offered. A few patriotic and wise men
assemble to consult upon the prospects and the necessities of their country.
Immediately a dissension divides them in regard to the cause of their repeated
failures to arrest the progress of the enemy. One party asserts that it is a
want of military skill, that their country is entirely destitute of the
knowledge of tactics and castrametation, which if understood, would be amply
sufficient to enable them to display their whole strength, and to make the most
desperate successful defense. The other party assumes opposite ground. They
affirm that the fault is a want of patriotism among the people. They cite
abundant instances to prove that the inhabitants care very little by whom they
are governed; that they are, in fine, destitute of that spirit of devotion which
is the essence or substance of warlike prowess. Thus divided in views, and
jealous upon either side, they waste their time and grow mutually embittered
toward each other. At length, after tedious discussions and a long series of
acrimonious recriminations, they arrive at the solution in the fact that both
parties are right. The people are both destitute of patriotic devotion and of
military science. Which, then, is the first want, in order, to be supplied?
Clearly the former. Still both are equally essential to the organization of a
complete defense. Having accorded in this view, they first disperse themselves
as missionaries over the whole country, preaching patriotism. By exciting
appeals they arouse the dormant affections of the people for their fatherland,
and alarm them for the safety of their wives and little ones. Their efforts are
crowned with success. They witness the rising spirit of indignation against the
invaders, and of martial heroism on all hands. It spreads from heart to heart,,
and throbs in the bosoms of the men, and even of the women and children. At this
point, a new evil displays itself. Fathers, husbands, and sons desert their
ripening crops and their unprotected families, and rush together, a tumultuous,
unarmed mob, clamorous for war. Confusion and distress succeed to apathy. The
danger is increased rather than lessened. Famine and pestilence threaten now to
be added to the fury of conquerors incensed by irritating demonstrations of a
resistance powerless for defense. Then arises the demand for military science.
At this point it is the part of the wise men who control the destinies of the
people to abandon their missionary labor and assume the character of commanders
and military engineers. Preaching is no longer in order. The men who from
over-zeal persists in inflaming the minds of the populace, however
well-intentioned, may prove the most deadly enemy of his country. Organization,
the forming of companies, the drilling of squads, and the construction of forts
are now in demand. Desire, the substance, subsists, demanding of Science the
true Form of its manifestation.
9. What Patriotism is to the Science of War for the purpose of defense, the
religious sentiment of Love is to the true Science of Society. The hearty
recognition of human brotherhood, and the aspiration after true relations with
God and man, are, at this day, widely diffused in the ranks of society.
Christianity has produced its fruit in the development of right affection far
beyond what the religious teachers among us are themselves disposed to credit it
for. The demand is not now for more eloquence, and touching appeals, and fervent
prayers to swell the heart to bursting with painful sympathies for suffering
humanity. The time has come when preaching must give away to action, aspiration
to realization, and amiable but fruitless sympathetic affections to fundamental
investigation and scientific methods. The true preachers of the next age will be
the scientific discoverers and the practical organizers of true social relations
among men. The religious objection to Social Science is unphilosophical.
10. There is another form in which this objection is sometimes urged by those
who claim to understand somewhat the philosophy of progress. They affirm that,
if the disposition to do right exist in the Individual or in the community, that
disposition will inevitably conduct to the knowledge of the right way; in other
words, that Wisdom is a necessary outgrowth of Love; and hence they deduce the
conclusion that we need not concern ourselves in the least about discovering the
laws of a true social order. The premise of this statement is true, while the
conclusion is false. Taken together, it is as if one should assert that the
sense of hunger naturally impels men to find the means of subsistence, and hence
that no man need trouble himself about food. Let him sit down, quietly relying
upon the potency of mere hunger to provide the means of the gratification of his
appetite.
11. The very fact of the Socialist agitation of our day, and the continued
repetitions in every quarter of the attempt to work out the problem of universal
justice and harmony, are the very outgrowth in question of the indwelling desire
for truer social relations, and never could have arisen but for the previous
existence of that desire. The religionist who denies or ignores this inevitable
sequitur from the spirit of his own teachings, is like the insane head
that first wills and then disowns the hand that performs.
Science—the rigid, exact, thorough, and inclusive Science of Society—is the
only reliable guide to harmonic relations among men. Neither the ardor of piety,
nor the sentiment of brotherhood, nor the desperate devotion of generous
enthusiasm, nor the repressive force of a rigid morality, offers any adequate
remedy for the existing evils of humanity. All these may be necessary,
indispensable, nay, infinitely higher in rank or sanctity, if you will, than the
other. But love must have its complement in Wisdom. To divorce them is to be
guilty of “partialism,” just where it is of the utmost importance that
the movement shall be integral and complete.
12. Possibly this statement may enlighten some minds in relation to the
existing misunderstanding between the religionists and the Socialists. The
former insist upon the spiritual element, the whole of what is requisite to a
true development of society. Abstractly, the religionist may be said to be the
nearest right, inasmuch as substance is prior to form; but practically, and with
reference to the present wants of society, the Socialist is nearer the truth.
The spiritual element exists already, at least in embryo. The aspiration after
better and truer relations is swelling daily, bursting the bands of existing
institutions, and demanding knowledge of the true way,--an organized body of the
Christian idea of human brotherhood which the living soul may enter, and wherein
it may dwell. But neither without the other is complete.
13. So powerful is becoming the sentiment of right that, unless the demand so
created be followed by a complete discovery of the methods of its gratification,
there is abundant danger that justice as a blind instinct may prove more
destructive than organized oppression. As in the case of the misdirected or
ill-directed patriotism in the illustration above, so every right sentiment and
affection, without its complement of wisdom, is liable to become pernicious
instead of beneficent in its action. If the love the mother bears her child
leads her to feed it to excess on candies and comfits, to confine it in close,
warm rooms, and guard it from contact with whatever may test and develop its
powers of endurance, far better that she loved it less. She needs, in addition
to love, a knowledge of Physiology. The Science of Society is to the Community
what Physiology is to the Individual; or, rather, it is to the relations of the
Individual with others what Physiology is to the relations of the Individual,so
to speak, with himself.
14. In the same manner the knowledge on the part of the laboring classes or
their friends that they are under an oppressive and exhausting system of the
relations of capital and labor does not amount to a knowledge of the true
system, into which, when known, it should be their object to bring themselves as
rapidly as possible. To discover that true system, by any other means than by
long years, perhaps long generations, of fallacious and exhausting experiments,
must be the work of genius, of true science, profound fundamental
investigations, or any other name you choose to bestow upon that faculty and
that process by which elementary truths are evolved by contemplating the nature
of a subject.
15. The Socialist agitations of the present day are, therefore, eminently
dangerous, as much so as the most violent reactionist ever imagined them, unless
Science intervenes to point the way to the solution. Religion, nor the dictates
of a stringent morality, will ever reconcile men who have once appreciated their
inherent, God-given rights, to the permanency of an unjust system by which they
are deprived of them. Mere make-shifts and patched-up contrivances will not
answer. False methods, such as Strikes, Trades’ Unions, Combinations of
Interests, and arbitrary regulations of all sorts, are but temporary palliations
ending uniformly in disappointment, and often in aggravation of the evils sought
to be alleviated. A distinguished writer upon these subjects says truly:
“Establish tomorrow an ample and fair Scale of Prices in every employment under
the sun, and two years of quiet and the ordinary mutations of Business would
suffice to undermine and efface nearly the whole. No reform under the present
system, but a decided step out of and above that system, is the fit and
enduring remedy for the wrongs and oppressions of Labor by Capital. And this
must inevitably be a work of time, of patience, of genius, of
self-sacrifice, and true heroism.” In other words, it is the province of Science
to discover the true principles of trade as much as it is to discover the laws
of every other department of human concerns, and that discovery is an important
part of the still more comprehensive Science of Society.
16. If, then, some profound philosopher, whose high authority could command
universal belief, were to step forward and announce the discovery of a simple
principle, which—-adopted in trade or business—-would determine with
arithmetical certainty the equitable price to be charged for every hour of time
bestowed upon its production and distribution, so that labor in every department
should get precisely its due reward, and the existing inequalities in the
distribution of wealth, and the consequent poverty and wretchedness of the
masses, be speedily alleviated and finally removed; and if, in addition, the
principle were such that its adoption and practical consequences did not depend
upon convincing the intellects or appealing to the benevolence of the wealthy
classes, but lay within the compass of the powers of the laboring men
themselves; if, still further than this, the principle did not demand, as a
preliminary, the extensive cooperation, the mutual and implicit confidence, the
complicated arrangements, the extensive knowledge of administration, and the
violent change in domestic habits, some one or other of which is involved in
nearly every proposition of Socialism, and for which the laboring classes are
specially disqualified; if, in one word, this simple principle furnished
demonstrably, unequivocally, immediately, and practically, the means
whereby the laboring classes might step out from under the present
system, and place themselves in a condition of independence above that
system,--would not this announcement come in good time; would it not be a supply
eminently adapted to the present demand of the laboring masses in this country
and elsewhere?
With some misgivings as to the prudence of asserting such a faith, in
limine, I state my conviction that such a principle has been discovered and
is now in the possession of a small number of persons who have been engaged in
practically testing it, until its regulating and wealth-producing effects have
been sufficiently, though not abundantly, demonstrated.
17. JOSIAH WARREN, formerly of Cincinnati, more recently a resident of
Indiana, is, I believe, justly entitled to be considered the discoverer of the
principle to which I refer, along with several others which he deems essential
to the rectification of the social evils of the existing state of society.
The principle itself is one which will not probably strike the reader, when
first stated, as either very profound, very practicable in its application, very
important in its consequences, and perhaps not even as equitable in itself. It
requires thought to be bestowed on each of these points. You will find, however,
as you subject it to analysis, as you trace it into its ten thousand different
application, to ownership, to rent, to wages, etc., that it places all human
transactions, relating to property upon a new basis of exact justice,--that is,
it has the perfect, simple, but all-prevailing character of a UNIVERSAL
PRINCIPLE.
The question as to the method of commencing to put the principle in operation
is a distinct one, and only needs to be considered after the principle itself is
understood. I have already observed that it has been and is now being
practically tested with entire success.
18. This principle, put into a formula, is thus stated: “COST IS THE LIMIT OF
PRICE.”
The counter principle upon which all ownership is now maintained and all
commerce transacted in the world is that “Value is the limit of price,” or, as
the principle is generally stated in the cant language of trade, “A thing is
worth what it will bring.” Between these two principles, so similar that the
difference in the statement would hardly attract a moment’s attention unless it
were specially insisted upon, lies the essential difference between the whole
system of civilized cannibalism by which the masses of human beings are
mercilessly ground to powder for the accumulation of the wealth of the few, on
the one hand, and on the other, the reign of equity, the just remuneration of
labor, and the independence and elevation of all mankind.
19. There is nothing apparently more innocent, harmless, and equitable in the
world than the statement that a “thing should bring what it is worth,” and yet
even that statement covers the most subtle fallacy which it has ever been given
to human genius to detect and expose,--a fallacy more fruitful of evil than any
other which the human intellect has ever been beclouded by. (130)
20. Value has nothing whatever to do, upon scientific principles, as
demonstrated by Mr. Warren, with settling the price at which any article should
be sold. Cost is the only equitable limit, and by cost is meant the
amount of labor bestowed on its production, that measure being again
measured by the painfulness or repugnance of the labor itself.
Value is a consideration for the purchaser alone, and determines him whether
he will give the amount of the cost or not. (132)
21. This statement is calculated to raise a host of objections and inquiries.
If one purchaser values an article more highly than another, by what principle
will he be prevented from offering a higher price? How is it possible to measure
the relative painfulness or repugnance of labor? What allowance is to be made
for superior skill or natural capacity? How is that to be settled? How does this
principle settle the questions of interest, rent, machinery, etc.? What is the
nature of the practical experiments which have already been made? Etc., etc.
22. These several questions will be specifically answered in this treatise
upon “The Cost Principle,” except the last, which will be more satisfactorily
replied by a work embodying the “Practical Details” of twenty-four years of
continuous experiment upon the workings of this and the other principles related
to it, and announced by Mr. Warren, which work Mr. Warren is now engaged himself
in preparing for the press. These “Practical Details” will relate to the
operations of two mercantile establishments conducted at different points, upon
the Cost Principle, to the education of children, to social intercourse,
and, finally, to the complex affairs of a village or town which has grown up
during the last four years, under the system of “Equitable Commerce,” of which
the Cost Principle is the basis. This work upon “Practical Details” will
contain, I may venture to affirm, from a personal knowledge of its characters, a
body of facts profoundly interesting to the philanthropic and philosophic
student of human affairs. It must suffice for the present allusion to assert
that there is no one of the circle of principles embraced by Mr. Warren under
the general name of “Equitable Commerce,” or by myself under the name of “The
Science of Society,” which has not been patiently, repeatedly, and successfully
applied in practice, in a variety of modes, long before it was announced in
theory,--a point in which it is thought that these principles differ materially
from all the numerous speculations upon social subjects to which the attention
of the public has been heretofore solicited.
23. The village to which I have referred is situated in the State of Ohio. It
contains as yet only about twenty families, or one hundred inhabitants, having a
present prospect of a pretty rapid increase of numbers. I will call it, for the
sake of a name by which to refer to it, TRIALVILLE, stating at the same time
that this is not the real name of the village, which I do not venture to give,
as it might be disagreeable to some of the inhabitants to have the glare of
public notoriety at so early a day upon their modest experiment. It might also
subject them to visits of mere curiosity, or to letters of inquiry, which,
without their consent, I have not the right to impose upon them. Another village
upon the same principles is being organized in the vicinity of New York.
Under the sobriquet of TRIALVILLE I shall have occasion, however, to
refer to the operations at the former of these villages, which have so far
proved successful in a practical point of view that it is deemed, on the part of
those most interested in this movement, to be a fitting time, now, to call the
public attention more generally to the results. The publication of these
treatises is in fact the beginning of that effort, which, if the intentions of
those of us who are engaged in the enterprise do not fail of realization, will
be more and more continuously and urgently put forth from this time forward. We
believe that we have a great mission to fulfill,--a gospel of glad tidings to
proclaim,--a practical and immediate solution of the whole problem of human
rights and their full fruition to expound. While, therefore, we cannot and would
not entirely conceal the enthusiastic feelings by which we are prompted in this
effort, still, lest it may be thought that such sentiments may have usurped the
province of reason, we invite the most cautious investigation and the most rigid
scrutiny, not only of the principles we propound, but also of the facts of their
practical working. While, therefore, I do not give the real name or exact
location of our trial villages to the public at large, for the reasons I have
stated, still we are anxious that all the facts relating to them shall be known,
and the fullest opportunity for thorough investigation be given to all who may
become in any especial degree interested in the subject. The author of this work
will be gratified to communicate with all such, and to reply to such inquiries
as they may desire to have answered, upon a simple statement of their interest
in the subject and their wish to know more of it. The real name and location of
our trial towns will be communicated to such, and every facility given for
investigation.
Arrangements are contemplated for organizing other villages upon the same
principles, and establishing an equitable exchange of products between them. It
is not the object of the present work, however, to enter into the history or
general plan of the movement, but simply to elucidate a single principle of a
new science embracing the field of Ethics and Political Economy.
24. It will be appropriate, in this preliminary statement of the subject, to
guard against one or two misapprehensions which may naturally enough arise from
the nature of the terms employed, or from the apparently disproportionate
importance attached to a simple principle of trade.
The term “Equitable Commerce” does not signify merely a new adjustment of the
method of buying and selling. The term is employed, by Mr. Warren, to signify
the whole of what I have preferred to denominate the Science of Society,
including Ethics, Political Economy, and all else that concerns the outer
relations of mankind. At the same time the mutual interchange of products is, as
it were, the continent or basis upon which all other intercourse rests. Society
reclines upon Industry. Without it man cannot exist. Other things may be of
higher import, but it is of primary necessity. Solitary industry does not supply
the wants of the individual. Hence trade or the exchange of products. With trade
intercourse begins. It is the first in order of the long train of benefits which
mankind mutually minister to each other. The term “commerce” is sometimes
synonymous with trade or traffic, and at other times it is used in a more
comprehensive sense. For that reason it has a double appropriateness to the
subjects under consideration. It is employed therefore in the phrase “Equitable
Commerce,” to signify, first, Commerce in the minor sense, as synonymous
with “trade,” and secondly, Commerce in the major sense, as synonymous
with the old English signification of the word, “conversation,”--i.e.,
human intercourse of all sorts,--the concrete, or tout ensemble, of human
relations.
25. I will here show that these investigations take in the whole scope of
Commerce in the major sense, after which I will return to the particular
consideration and elucidation of the single principle, “COST IS THE LIMIT OF
PRICE,” which does, indeed, chiefly or primarily relate to Commerce in the minor
sense, although the modes in which it affects Commerce in the major sense are
almost infinite.
26. According to Mr. Warren, the following is THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED in all
its several branches:
1. “The proper, legitimate, and just reward of labor.”
2.
“Security of person and property.”
3. “The greatest practicable amount of
freedom to each individual.”
4. “Economy in the production and uses of
wealth.”
5. “To open the way to each individual for the possession of land
and all other natural wealth.”
6. “To make the interests of all to cooperate
with and assist each other, instead of clashing with and counteracting each
other.”
7. “To withdraw the elements of discord, of war, of distrust and
repulsion, and to establish a prevailing spirit of peace, order, and social
sympathy.”
27. And according to him, also the following PRINCIPLES are the means of the
solution:
I. “INDIVIDUALITY.”
II. “THE SOVEREIGNTY OF EACH
INDIVIDUAL.”
III. “COST THE LIMIT OF PRICE.”
IV. “A CIRCULATING MEDIUM,
FOUNDED ON THE COST OF LABOR.”
V. “ADAPTATION OF THE SUPPLY TO THE
DEMAND.”
28. The mere reading of this program will suggest the immensity of the scope
to which the subject extends. In the present volume I have selected a single
principle,--the third among those above name,--and shall adhere to a pretty
thorough exposition of it, rather than overload the mind of the reader by
bringing into view the whole of a system, covering all possible human relations.
A few minds may, from the mere statement of these principles, begin to perceive
the rounded outlines of what is, as I do not hesitate to affirm, the most
complete scientific statement of the problem of human society, and of the
fundamental principles of social science which has ever been presented to
the world. Most, however, will hardly begin to understand the universal and
all-pervading potency of these few simple principles, until they find them
elaborately displayed and elucidated. At present I must take the broad license
of asserting that they are UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES, and referring the reader, for
what I mean by a universal principle, to what I have to say of the one which I
have selected for a particular explanation,--”COST THE LIMIT OF PRICE.”
29. As a mere hint, however, in relation to the others, let us take the last,
“ADAPTATION OF THE SUPPLY TO THE DEMAND.” This seems to be a formula relating
merely, as, in fact, it does relate mainly, to ordinary
commerce,--trade,--commerce in the minor sense. In that sense, it expresses an
immense want of civilized society,--nothing less, as Carlyle has it, than a
knowledge of the way of getting the supernumerary shirts into contact with the
backs of the men who have none. But this same principle introduced into the
parlor becomes likewise the regulator of politeness and good manners, and
pertains therefore to commerce in the major sense as well. I am, for example,
overflowing with immoderate zeal for the principles which I am now discussing. I
broach them on every occasion. I seize every man by the button-hole, and inflict
on him a lecture on the beauties of Equitable Commerce; in fine, I make myself a
universal bore, as every reformer is like to be more or less. But at the moment
some urbane and conservative old gentleman politely observes to me, “Sir, I
perceive one of your principles is, “The Adaptation of the Supply to the
Demand.” I take the hint immediately. My mouth is closed. I perceive that my
lecture is not wanted,--that he does not care to interest himself in the
subject. There is no demand, and I stop the supply.
But you are ready to say, Would not the same hint given in some other form
stop the impertinence of over-zealous advocacy in any case? Let those answer who
have been bored. But suppose it did, could it be done so gracefully, in any way,
as by referring the offender to one of the very principles he is advocating, or
which he professes? Again: grant that it have the effect to stop that annoyance,
the hint itself is taken as an offence, and the offended man, instead of
continuing the conversation upon some other subject that might be agreeable,
goes off in a huff, and most probably you have made him an enemy for life. But,
in my case, it will not even be necessary for the conservative old gentleman to
remind me,--I shall at once recollect that another of my principles is, “THE
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL.” One of the highest exercises of that sovereignty
is the choice of the subjects about which one will converse and upon which he
will bestow his time; hence I recognize cordially his right to exclude my
subject, and immediately, gracefully, and good-humoredly I glide off upon some
other topic. Then, by a law of the human mind, which it is extremely important
to understand, and practically to observe, if it be possible that there should
ever arise a demand with him to hear any thing about that subject, my uniform
deference for even his prejudices will hasten the time. Indeed, all conservative
old gentlemen, who hate reform of all sorts as they do ratsbane, would do well
to make themselves at once familiar with these principles, and to disseminate
them as they means of defending themselves. Do you begin to perceive that such a
mere tradesman-like formula, at first blush as “THE ADAPTATION OF THE SUPPLY TO
THE DEMAND,” becomes one of the highest regulators of good manners—a part of
the ethics of conversation,--of the “Equitable Commerce” of gentlemanly
intercourse,--as well as what it seems to be, an important element of trade; and
do you catch a glimpse of what I mean, when I say that it is a universal
principle of commerce in the major sense?
30. The doctrine of INDIVIDUALITY is equally universal. I have only to say
here that it means the next thing to every thing, when you come to its
applications. It means, as applied to persons, that every human being has a
distinct character or individuality of his own, so that any attempt to
classify him with others, or to measure him by others, is a breach of his
natural liberty; and, as applied to facts, that no two cases ever occurred
precisely similar, and hence that no arbitrary general rule can possibly be
applied to cases not yet arisen. It follows, therefore, that all laws, systems,
and constitutions whatsoever must yield to the individual, or else that liberty
must be infringed; or, in other words, that the Individual is above
Institutions, and that no social system can claim to be the true one, which
requires for its harmonious operation that the Individual shall be subjected to
the system, or to any institutions whatsoever.
We are taught by it that all combinations of interest whatsoever are
limitations upon the exercise of the individuality of the parties, or
restrictions upon natural liberty. Hence also, by Individuality, the true
practical movement begins with a complete disintegration of all amalgamated
interests, such as partnerships, in a manner peculiar to itself. Hence, again,
to the casual observer, this movement seems to be in exact antagonism to
Association, and the views of Socialism of all the various schools. A more
thorough acquaintance with the subject will show, however, that this
individualizing of all interests is the analysis of society, preliminary
to association as the synthesis,--as much association as is demanded by
the economies, being a growth of that cooperation of interests—not
combination or amalgamation—which results form the operation of the Cost
Principle. (3, 37.)
31. THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL grows out of the more fundamental
principle of INDIVIDUALITY, as stated in No. I of this series. A special
occasion called for that treatise, and limited it to a particular application.
The extensive nature of the subject in its numerous ramifications will demand a
separate work upon Individuality and the Sovereignty of the Individual, which,
while they are distinguishable as principles, stand, nevertheless, closely
related to each other.
32. A CIRCULATING MEDIUM FOUNDED ON THE COST OF LABOR is, perhaps, not so
properly a principle as an indispensable instrument for carrying the Cost
principle into practical operation. It is a monetary system, holding to the true
or equitable system of Commerce a relation quite similar to that which specie
and bank notes now hold to the present false and dishonest system. The subject
of equitable money will be treated of more at large in the subsequent chapters,
and does not require any further explanation at this point. As such a
circulating medium is one of the necessary conditions of working out the true
societary results, it is classed with principles, along with the means of the
solution. (69, 245.)
33. It is claimed that within the circle of these five principles or
efficient powers is found every condition of the complex development of a true
social order, or, in other words, a full and perfect solution of the social
problem stated above. Is that statement of the problem sufficiently
comprehensive? Does it include, either directly or consequentially, all which
has ever been aimed at by social reformers of any school, and all which is
requisite to the full harmony and beauty of human relations? If that be so, and
if the assumption just stated be made good, both by exposition and practical
results, then have we at length a theory of society strictly entitled to the
appellation of a Science,--a movement, precise, definite, and consequential,
adequate, on the one hand, to meet the demands of the most exacting intellect,
and sufficiently beneficent, on the other, to gratify the desires of the most
expansive philanthropy, while in its remoter results it promises to satiate the
refined cravings of the most fastidious taste.
34. This volume treats professedly upon the Cost Principle. Still each
of the principles above stated will necessarily be referred to from time to
time. It will perhaps be well, therefore, that the particular discussion of the
principle, which I have selected for present consideration should be prefaced by
a brief statement of the interrelations and mutual dependence of these several
principles upon each other.
It is especially appropriate that something should be shown which will bridge
over the seeming gap between so metaphysical a statement as that of the
Sovereignty of the Individual, as set forth in the preceding Number, and the
merely commercial consideration of an appropriate limit of price. An integral
view of the connections of the different parts of this system of principles can
only be a final result of a thorough familiarity with their detailed
applications and practical effects. At the same time the fact that they are
connected and mutually dependent will appear upon slight examination. For the
rest, I must take the license to assert, with great emphasis, the existence of
so intimate a relation between them that, if any one of them is omitted, it is
totally impossible to work out the proposed results. The others will remain
true, but any one of them, or any four of them, are wholly inadequate to the
solution. This connection may be established by beginning almost indifferently
at any point in the circle. Let us assume, as a starting point, THE ADAPTATION
OF THE SUPPLY TO THE DEMAND.
35. By ADAPTATION OF THE SUPPLY TO THE DEMAND is meant a sufficiency of
any variety of product, present at every time and place, to meet the want for
that particular product which may be felt at the same time and place. It is
wholly from the defect of such arrangements, in the existing commercial system,
as would secure such an adaptation of supply to demand, that society is
afflicted with periodical famine or scarcity, or, on the other hand, with gluts
of the market, and consequent sacrifice and general bankruptcy, and, far more
important than all, because more continuous, with what is called an excess of
labor in the various labor markets of the world, by which thousands of men and
women able to work and willing to work are deprived of the opportunity to do so.
There is no reason in the nature of the case why there should not be as accurate
a knowledge in the community of the statistics of supply and demand as there is
of the rise and fall of the tides, nor why that knowledge should not be applied
to secure a minute, accurate, and punctual distribution of products over the
face of the earth, according to the wants of various countries, neighborhoods,
and individuals. The supposed excess of labor is no more an excess than
congestion is an excess of blood in the human system. The scarcity of the
circulating medium which is now in use, and which is requisite for the
interchange of commodities, is regarded by those who have studied this subject
profoundly as the principal difficulty in the way of such an adjustment, but
that scarcity itself is only a specific form and instance of the general want of
adaptation of supply to demand, which extends far beyond all questions of
currency,--the supply of circulating medium being unequal to the demand for it,
owing to the expensiveness of the substances selected for such medium, and their
consequent total unfitness for the purpose.
36. It follows from what has been said that appropriate arrangements for the
adaptation of supply to demand are a sine qua non of a true social order. But
the existence of such arrangements is an impossibility in the midst of the
prevalence of speculation. But speculation has always existed, and is inherent
in the present commercial system, and consequently no adequate adjustment of
supply to demand has ever been had, or can ever be had, while that system
remains in operation. It is the business of speculation, and hence of the whole
mercantile profession, to confuse and becloud the knowledge of the community
upon this very vital point of their interests, and to derange such natural
adjustment as might otherwise grow up, even in the absence of full knowledge on
the subject,--to create the belief that there is excess or deficiency when there
is none, and to cause such excess or deficiency in fact when there would
otherwise be none, in order to buy cheap and sell dear. Speculation is not only
the vital element of the existing system of Commerce, but it will always exist
upon any basis of exchange short of the Cost Principle. The Cost Principle
extinguishes speculation, as will be shown in the sequel, Herein, then, is the
connection between these two of the five conditions of social order. (158.)
37. Let us return now to THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL. This has been
shown in the previous work to be also a sine qua non of true human
relations. The Sovereignty of the Individual, which is merely the complete
enjoyment of personal liberty, the unimpeded pursuit by every individual, of his
own happiness in his own way, and the development of his own inherent selfhood,
is, in fact, the apex, or culminating point, of the true harmony of society. It
was also demonstrated that this Sovereignty cannot possibly be indulged, without
continual encroachments upon the equal Sovereignty of others, in any other mode
than by a complete disintegration of interests,--a total abandonment of every
species of combined or amalgamated ownership, or administration of property.
Individuality of Character teaches, in this manner, that, in order to the
harmonious exercise of the Sovereignty of the Individual, a disconnection of
interests must be had, which is in turn nothing else than another application of
the same all-pervading principle of Individuality. Such, then, is the intimate
connection between Individuality and Sovereignty of the Individual. (3, 30)
38. But again: what is to be the consequence of this general
individualization of interests? Such is, to a very great extent, the order of
the actual condition of ownership and administration in our existing society,
which is, nevertheless, replete with social evils. Indeed, hitherto those evils
have been attributed by Social Reformers, to the prevalent individualization of
interests among men, more than to any other cause. Hence they have made war upon
it, and proposed combined or amalgamated interests, or extensive partnership
arrangements, as the only possible means of securing attractive industry, and
cooperation, and economy in the production and uses of wealth. We now
assert that, in order to secure what is more important than all else, the
possibility of the free exercise of Individual Sovereignty, an indispensable
condition is a still greater amount than now exists of Individuality, or
disconnection in the property relations of men. We affirm that nearly all that
there is good in existing society results from that element. What then follows?
Do we abandon the high aims of other Socialists in other respects? Is all
thought of cooperation and the economies surrendered by us? Clearly they are,
unless some new and hitherto undiscovered element is brought in. To go back from
the present field of effort of the Social Reformers to so much of Individuality
as can exist in the present order of society, and stop at that alone, is
evidently to return to the present social disorder, in which it is sufficiently
demonstrated by experience that the exercise of the Sovereignty of the
Individual—the point we aim to secure—is itself just as impossible as the other
conditions desired. But why is it impossible? For the reason that Individuality
of interests, upon which that exercise rests, is itself only partially possible
in a social state in which there is a general denial of equity in the
distribution of wealth,--equity being what the Cost Principle alone can
supply. If the woman, or the youth under age, is denied the means of acquiring
an independent subsistence, by the fact that they receive less than equivalents
for their industry, they are necessarily thrown into a state of dependence upon
others. The exercise of their own Sovereignty, then, is obviously an
impossibility for them. There are thousands of women, for example, in the higher
ranks of society, who never felt the luxury in their lives of spending a
shilling that they knew to be actually their own, and never applied to their
fathers or husbands for money without the degrading sense of beggary. On the
other hand, the husbands and fathers are involved, by the same false pecuniary
relations, in an unnecessary and harassing responsibility for the conduct and
expenditure of every member of their families, which is equally destructive of
their own freedom, or the exercise of their own Sovereignty over themselves. It
is the same in the existing relations of the poor and the rich, the hireling and
the employer, the master and the slave, and in nearly all the ten thousand
ramified connections of men in existing society. By refusing equity in the
distribution of wealth; by reducing the earnings of women, and youths, and hired
men, and slaves below equivalents; by thus grasping power over others, through
the medium of an undue absorption of the products of their industry,--the
members of community are brought into the relation of oppressors and oppressed,
and both are together and alike involved in a common destiny of mutual
restrictions, espionage, suspicions, heartburnings, open destructive collisions,
and secret hostility, and each is thereby shorn of the possibility of exercising
his prerogative of sovereign control over his own actions.
39. Government of all sorts is adverse to freedom. It destroys the freedom of
the subject, directly, by virtue of the fact that he is a subject; and destroys
equally the freedom of the governor, indirectly, by devolving on him the
necessity of overlooking and attempting, hopelessly, to regulate the conduct of
others,--a task never yet accomplished, and the attempt at which is sufficiently
harassing to wear the life out of the most zealous advocate of order. With the
greater development of the individuals to be governed the task becomes
proportionally the more onerous, until, in our day, the business of governing
grows vulgar from its excessive laboriousness.
40. All combinations of interest imply and involve the necessity of
government, because nature demands and will have an individual lead. The denial
of equity implies and involves the necessity of combination of interest, by
throwing one part of the community into a state of dependence upon the other,
authorizing mutual supervision and criticism, and creating mutual restriction
and hostility.
41. A man of wealth is said, among us, to be a “man in independent
circumstances”; but in truth the man of wealth of our day has not begun to
conceive the genuine luxury of perfect freedom,--a freedom which, by immutable
laws, can never be realized otherwise than by a prior performance of exact
justice.
42. The principles here asserted are universal. The same causes that are
upheaving the thrones of Europe are disturbing the domestic tranquility of
thousands of families among us. Red Republicanism in France, African Slavery in
America, and the mooted question of the rights of women are one and the same
problem. It is the sole question of human liberty, or the Sovereignty of the
Individual; and the sole basis upon which the exercise of that Sovereignty can
rest is Equity,--the rendering to each of that which is his. The Cost
Principle furnishes the law of that rendering. That, and that alone,
administers Equity. Hence it places all in a condition of independence. It
dissolves the relation of protectors and protected by rendering protection
unnecessary. It takes away the necessity resulting from dependence for
combinations of interest and government, and hence for mutual responsibility
for, and interference with, each other’s deportment, by devolving the
Cost, or disagreeable effects, of the conduct of each upon
himself,--submitting him to the government of natural consequences,--the only
legitimate government. In fine, the Cost Principle in operation renders
possible, harmless, and purely beneficent the universal exercise of Individual
Sovereignty.
43. Hence it follows that the Cost Principle underlies
Individuality, or the disconnection of interests, in the same manner as
Individuality itself underlies and sustains the Sovereignty of the
Individual. Hence, again the Cost Principle is the basis principle or
foundation upon which the whole fabric of social harmony rests, as the
Sovereignty of the Individual is, as has been said, the apex, or culminating
point of the same fabric,--the end and purpose of a true social order. Herein,
then, is their intimate and necessary relation to each other.
44. Without Equity as a basis on which to rest, the Sovereignty of the
Individual is true still as an abstract principle, but wholly incapable of
realization. The Individual Sovereign is so de jure, but not de
facto. He is a Sovereign without dominion, treated as a pretender, and his
claims ridiculed by the actual incumbent. The assertion of Sovereignty is a
phantom and a delusion until the Sovereign comes to his own. The Cost
Principle, as the essential element of Equity, gives to each his own, while
nothing else can. Hence, again, the intimate and necessary relation between
these two principles.
45. The doctrine of the Sovereignty of the Individual is already beginning to
develop itself, originally in an abstract form, in various quarters, and to take
a well-defined shape in many minds. It has been announced in substance,
recently, by several able writers, not accompanied, however, by the
indispensable scientific limitation,--”To be exercised at his own
cost,”--without which it is a principle of anarchy and confusion, instead of
order. To preach the doctrine, even with the limitation, apart from its basis in
equity, is disturbing. It is the announcement to slaves of their inherent right
to be free, at the same time that you leave them hopeless of the realization of
freedom. It is to unfit men for their present relations while offering them no
means of inaugurating truer relations. It is “to curse men’s stars, and give
them no sun.” As a preliminary work to the impending reconstruction, the
unsettling of men’s minds may be a necessity, but “transitions are painful,” and
humanity demands that the interval should be shortened between inspiring a want
and actualizing the conditions of its gratification.
46. The essential condition of freedom is
disconnection—individualization—disintegration of interests. The essential
condition of disconnection is that that be given to each which belongs to each.
All harmonic unity is a result or growth from the prior society, of fealty and
protection, and consequent mutual amalgamation or combinations of interests, is
a species of amorphous conglomerate, of which the past progress of Reform has
been the gradual dissolution. Reform and consequent individualization is the
tendency of this age. The process thus commenced must go on to completion, until
every man and every woman and, to an appropriate extent, every child, is a
perfect Individual, with an interest, an administration, and a destiny solely
and emphatically under his or her own control. Out of that condition of things,
and concurrently with it, and just in proportion to its completeness, will grow
a more intimate harmony, or, if you will, unity of sentiment, and human
affections, and mutual regard, begotten purely of attraction, than can be
conceived of in the midst of the mutual embarrassment and constraint of our day,
and of our order of life. It is only when each individual atom of the dusky
mineral is disintegrated from every other, held in complete solution, and
allowed to obey, without let or hindrance, the law of its own interior impulse,
that each shoots spontaneously to its own place, and that all concur in
voluntary union to constitute the pellucid crystal or the sparkling diamond of
the mines. So in human affairs, what is feared by the timid conservative as the
dissolution of order is, in fact, merely the preliminary stage of the true
harmonic Constitution of Society,--the necessary analysis to its genuine and
legitimate synthesis.
47. The connection of the Cost Principle with the Adaptation of the
Supply to the Demand has been already pointed out. The nature and necessity
of an Equitable Money, as the instrument of working the Cost
Principle, will be demonstrated, as previously stated, in a subsequent
chapter. In this manner the interrelations of this circle of principles are
established, not so fully as the nature of the subject demands, but as much so
as the incidental character of the present notice will permit.
48. But, although it may be admitted that we gain something of freedom in the
action of the Individual by avoiding combinations of interest, do we not lose,
by that means, the benefits of cooperation and the economies of the large scale?
This question is important, and demands a satisfactory and conclusive answer.
That answer is given in the whole treatise which follows. It is admitted that
heretofore no other means for securing those ends have been known. It is
asserted, however, that principles are now known by which all the higher results
of social harmony can be achieved without that fatal feature of combination,
which has promised, but failed, to realize them. Hence we draw a new and
technical distinction between Combination and Cooperation, and insist on that
distinction with great rigor. We assert that the true principles of Social
Science are totally averse to combinations of interest. At the same time we
admit freely that any principles which should not secure the greatest
conceivable amount of Cooperation would fail entirely of solving the problem in
question.
49. By Combinations are meant partnership interests and community of property
or administration, such as confuse, in any degree, or obliterate the lines of
Individuality in the ownership or use of property.
50. By Cooperation, or cooperative relations, is meant such an arrangement of
the property and industrial interests of the different Individuals of the
community that each, in pursuing his own pleasure or benefit, contributes
incidentally to the pleasure or benefit of the others.
51. We assume the burden of proof. We admit the obligation resting upon us to
establish the position that extreme Individuality or disconnection of interests
is compatible—-contrary to all previous opinion—-with as thorough and extended
Cooperation as can exist in any system of Combinations whatsoever.
52. It must not be understood that disconnection of interests implies, in the
slightest degree, an isolation of persons. A hundred or a thousand men may be
engaged in the same shop, and still their interests be entirely individualized.
Such is the case now under the present wages system. The laborers in a
manufacturing establishment, for example, have no common interest, no
partnership, no combined responsibilities. Their interests are completely
individualized, and yet they work together. This is all right. It is not at this
point that the evil lurks which the Socialist seeks, or should seek, to remedy.
Besides this, these men and women now cooperate completely in their labor. They
all work at distinct functions to a common end, which is Cooperation. The evil
to be remedied is neither in their individuality of interests nor in any want of
cooperation. It is solely in the want of mutuality in the results of that
Cooperation,--in other words, in the want of Equity,--in the want of a
regulating principle which would secure to each the full, legitimate results of
his own labor. The difficulty is that the whole hundred, or the whole thousand
men now labor and cooperate, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of
one,--the employer. Under the operation of the Cost Principle their interests
will be individual as they are now; they will cooperate as they do now, or,
rather, more perfectly but they will cooperate for all others, merely the
equivalent and reward of his own labor.
53. I feel painfully that by attempting such a condensation of these matters
I am liable to render myself woefully obscure. I will take a special occasion to
show that “Equitable Commerce” is not the antagonist of any other of the great
Reforms proposed, but that it comes in as the harmonizer of the whole. If it be
claimed by his admirers that Fourier has shown “the what” of harmonic social
relations, Warren shows “the how” to realize such relations, in which last
respect Social Reformers generally have been lamentably deficient.
54. I will conclude by stating how the Cost Principle, in its operation, will
address itself to the different classes of community, so that those who feel no
demand need not be overburdened by the supply.
The whole community may be divided, under this system,--not according to the
old classification of Political Economy into producers and non-producers,--but
into those who receive more than equivalents for their labor and those who
receive less than equivalents,--those who perform no productive labor and
receive a living or more than that being included in the former class.
Of these classes, the latter-—all those who receive less than equivalents,
including the great mass of simple operatives who have not the aid of
capital—-have an immediate and pecuniary interest in at once adopting the
principle.
The remaining class—-those who receive more than equivalents—-have no
such interest, but contrariwise. Of these only such as are moved by
consideration of benevolence or justice, or the love of order and harmony in
human relations, or by the sense of insecurity even for the rich in the existing
order of society, or by an appreciation of the higher gratifications of taste
through the general prevalence of refinement, luxury, and wealth, have any
demand for this new principle of commerce; and so soon as those with whom such
considerations are not potential have read enough to know how equivalents can be
measured, and that they are now on the gaining side, they will need no further
supply of this reform, and the reform must go on without them, as it best may.
There are only distant advantages to offer them, and as they have the immediate
advantages in their own hands, they must be expected to do the best they can to
retain them. The peculiarity of the movement is, however, that it does not
proceed by their leave.
Chapter II: Equity and the Labor Note
55. HUMAN beings are subject to various wants. Some of these wants have to be
supplied to sustain life at all; others to render life comfortable and happy. If
an individual produced, with no aid from others, all the numerous things
requisite to supply his wants, the things which he produced—-his products—-would
belong to himself. He would have no occasion to exchange with others, and they
would have no equitable claims upon him for any thing which was his.
56. But such is not the case. We all want continually for our own support or
comfort those things which are produced by others. Hence we exchange products.
Hence comes trade,--buying and selling,--Commerce, including the hiring of the
labor of others. Trade is, therefore, a necessity of human society, and consists
of the exchange of the labor, or the products of the labor, of one person, for
the labor, or the products of the labor, of another person.
57. It is clear, if this exchange is not equal, if one party gives more of
his own labor—either in the form of labor or product—than he gets of the
labor of the other,--either in the form of labor or product,--that he is
oppressed, and becomes, so far as this inequality goes, the slave or subject of
the other. He has, just so far, to expend his labor, not for his own benefit,
but for the benefit of another. To produce good or beneficent results from
trade, therefore, the exchanges should be equal. Hence it follows that the
essential element of beneficent Commerce is EQUITY, or that which is
just and equal between man and man.
58. The fundamental inquiry, therefore, upon the answer to which, alone, a
Science of Commerce can be erected, is the true measure of Equity, or,
what is the same thing, the measure of price in the exchange of labor and
commodities. This question is one of immense importance, and, strange to
say, it is one which has never received the slightest consideration, which has
never, indeed, been raised either by Political Economists, Legislators, or
Moralists. The only question discussed has been, what it is which now regulates
price,--never what should regulate it. It is admitted, nevertheless, that the
present system of Commerce distributes wealth most unjustly. Why, then, should
we not ask the question, What principle or system of Commerce would distribute
it justly? Why not apply our philosophy to discovering the true system, rather
than apply it to the investigation of the laws according to which the false
system works out its deleterious results.
59. Simple Equity is this, that so much of YOUR labor as I take and
apply to MY benefit, so much of MY labor ought I to give you to be
applied to YOUR benefit; and, consequently, if I take a product of your
labor instead of the labor itself, and pay you in a product of my labor, the
commodity which I give you ought to be one in which there is JUST AS MUCH
LABOR as there is in the product which I receive.
The same idea may be differently presented in this manner. It is Equity that
every individual should sustain just as much of the common burden of life as
has to be sustained BY ANY BODY on his account. Such would be
the result if each produced for himself all that he consumed, as in the first
case supposed above; and the fact that it is found convenient to exchange labor
and the products of labor does not vary the definition of Equity in the
least.
60. To a well-regulated mind the preceding propositions present an obvious
and self-evident truth, like the proposition that two and two make four,
demanding no other proof than the statement itself. Yet simple and undeniable as
they appear, with thus distinctly propounded, the consequences which inevitably
follow from the principle which they affirm are ultra-radical and revolutionary
of all our existing commercial relations, as will be shown in the subsequent
chapters of this work. They contain merely, however, a statement of the
Principle of Equity. They leave the question of the Method of
making an application of the principle still open. They do not furnish the means
of arriving at the measure of Equity. This, then, is the next step in the
investigation.
61. If I exchange my labor against yours, the first measure that suggests
itself for the relative amount of labor performed by each is the length of time
that each is employed. If all pursuits were equally laborious, or, in other
words, if all labor were equally repugnant or toilsome,--if it cost equal
amounts of human suffering or endurance for each hour of time employed in every
different pursuit, then it would be exact Equity to exchange one hour of labor
for one other hour of labor, or a product which has in it one hour of labor for
another product which has in it one hour of labor the world over. Such, however,
is not the case. Some kinds of labor are exceedingly repugnant, while others are
less so, and others still more pleasing and attractive. There are differences of
this sort which are agreed upon by all the world. For example, sweeping the
filth from the streets, or standing in the cold water and dredging the bottom of
a stream, would be, by general consent, regarded as more repugnant, or, in the
common language on the subject, harder work, than laying out a garden, or
measuring goods.
But besides this general difference in the hardness or
repugnance of work, there are individual differences in the feeling
toward different kinds of labor which make the repugnance or
attraction of one person for a particular kind of labor quite different
from that of another. Labor is repugnant or otherwise, therefore, more or less,
according to the individualities and opportunities of persons.
If you inquire among a dozen men what each would prefer to do, you will find
the greatest diversity of choice, and you will be surprised to find some
choosing such occupations as are the least attractive to you. It is the same
among women as respects the labors which they pursue.
62. It follows from these facts that Equity in the exchange of labor, or the
products of labor, cannot be arrived at by measuring the labor of different
persons by the hour merely. Equity is the equality of burdens according to the
requirements of each person, or, in other words, the assumption of as much
burden by each person as has to be assumed by somebody, on his account, so that
no one shall be living by imposing burdens on others. Time is one element in the
measurement of the burdens of labor, but the different degrees of repugnance in
the different kinds of labor prevent it from being the only one. Hence it
follows that there must be some means of measuring this repugnance
itself,--in other words, of determining the relative hardness of
different kinds of work,--before we can arrive at an equitable system of
exchanging labor and the products of labor. If we could measure the general
average of repugnance,--that is, if we could determine how people generally
regard the different kinds of labor as to their agreeableness or
disagreeableness,--still that would not insure Equity in the exchange between
individuals, on account of those individualities of character and taste
which have been adverted to. It is an equality of burden between the two
individuals who exchange which must be arrived at, and that must be
according to the estimate which each honestly forms of the repugnance to
him or her of the particular labor which he or she performs, and
which, or the products of which, are to be exchanged.
63. It is important for reasons of practical utility to arrive at a general
or average estimate of the relative repugnance of different kinds of labor,
especially of the most common kinds, and that is done under the operation of the
Cost Principle, as hereafter pointed out (195); but, as we have seen, if we had
already arrived at it, it would not be a sufficiently accurate measure of Equity
to be applied between individuals; while, on the other hand, this average
itself can only be based upon individual estimates. The average which now exists
in the public mind, by which it is understood that field labor, in cultivating
grain, for example, is neither the hardest nor the easiest kind of work, and
that sewing or knitting is not so repugnant as washing or scrubbing, rests upon
the general observation of individual preferences.
64. It follows, therefore, in order to arrive at a satisfactory measure of
Equity, and the adoption of a scientific system of commerce: 1. That some method
must be devised for comparing the relative repugnance of different kinds of
labor. 2. That, in making the comparison, each individual must make his
or her own estimate of the repugnance to him or her of the labor which he or she
performs, and 3. That there should be a sufficient motive in the results or
consequences to insure an honest exercise of the judgment, and an honest
expression of the real feelings of each, in making the comparison.
65. I.--That some method should be devised for comparing the relative
repugnance of different kinds of labor. This is extremely simple. All that
is necessary is to agree upon some particular kind of labor, the average
repugnance of which is most easily ascertained, or the most nearly fixed, and
use it as a standard of comparison, a sort of yard-stick for
measuring the relative repugnance of other kinds of labor. For example,
in the Western American States it is found that the most appropriate kind of
labor to be assumed as a standard with which to compare all other kinds of labor
is corn-raising. It is also found, upon extensive investigation, that the
average product of that kind of labor, in that region, is twenty pounds of
corn to the hour. If, then, blacksmithing is reckoned as one half harder
work than corn-raising, it will be rated (by the blacksmith himself) at
thirty pounds of corn to the hour. If shoe-making be reckoned as one
quarter less onerous than corn-raising, it will be rated at fifteen pounds of
corn to the hour. In this manner the idea of corn-raising is used to measure
the relative repugnance of all kinds of labor.
66. II.--That, in making the comparison, each individual must make his or
her own estimate of the repugnance to him or her of the particular labor which
he or she performs. This condition must be secured, both for the reasons
already stated, and because another equally important principle in the true
science of society is the Sovereignty of the Individual. The Individual must be
kept absolutely above all institutions. He must be left free even to abandon the
principles whenever he chooses. The only constraint must be in the attractive
nature and results of true principles.
67. III.--That there should be a sufficient motive in the results or
consequences of compliance with these principles to insure an honest exercise of
the judgment, and an honest expression of the real feeling of each in making his
estimate of the relative repugnance of his labor. The existence of such a
motive can only be shown by a view of the general results of this entire system
of principles upon the condition of society, and upon the particular interests
of the individual. These results must be gathered from a thorough study of the
whole subject, in order to establish this point conclusively to the philosophic
mind. The force of a public sentiment rectified by the knowledge of true
principles will not be lost sight of by such a mind. (229.) The particular
remedial results of deviations from the principle of Equity upon the interests
of the individual will be specifically pointed out in the subsequent pates.
(72-76.)
68. If an exchange could be always made and completed on the spot, each party
giving and receiving an equivalent,--that is, an amount of labor, or a product
of labor, which had in it an amount of repugnance or cost just equal to that in
the labor or product for which it was given or received,--the whole problem of
exchanges would be solved by the simple method just stated. There would in that
case be no necessity for a circulating medium, or for anything to perform the
part which is performed by money in our existing commerce. But such is not the
case. Articles are not always at hand which have in them the same amount of
cost; indeed, it is the rare exception that exact equivalents can be made upon
the spot in commodities which are mutually wanted. Besides, it may frequently
happen that I want something from you, either labor or the products of labor,
when you, at the time, want nothing of me. In such a case the exchange is only
partially completed on the spot, the remaining part waiting to be completed
at some future time, by the performance of an equivalent amount of labor, or
the delivery of products or commodities having in them an equivalent amount of
labor.
69. In such a case as that just stated, it is proper that the party who does
not make his part of the exchange on the spot should give an evidence of his
obligation to do so at some future time, whenever called upon,--and this the
origin of what is called the Labor Note, which is the form assumed by “Equitable
Money,” the fourth among the elements of the solution of the Problem of Society.
The party who remains indebted to the other gives his own note, provided the
other consents to receive it, for an equivalent amount of his own labor, or
else of the standard commodity,--say so many pounds of corn, specifying in the
note the kind of labor, and the alternative. As it may happen that the party
receiving the Labor Note may not require the labor itself, or that it may be
inconvenient for the party promising to perform it when it is wanted, it is
provided that the obligation may be discharged, at the option of the party
giving the note, in the standard commodity instead. In the other hand, although
the party receiving the note may not want the labor himself, yet some person
with whom he deals may want it, and hence he can pass the note to a third party
who is willing to receive it for an equivalent amount of labor, or products,
received from him. In this manner the Labor Note begins to circulate from one to
another, and the aggregate of labor Notes in circulation in a neighborhood
constitutes the neighborhood circulating medium, dispensing, so far as this
Equitable Commerce extends, with money altogether, or, rather, introducing a
new species of paper money, based solely upon individual
responsibility.
70. The use of the Labor Note is not, as has been already observed, strictly
a principle of Equity, and partakes more of the nature of a contrivance
than any other feature of the system of Equitable Commerce; but yet it seems to
be a necessary instrument to be employed in the practical working of the system.
The Theory of Equity is complete without it, but the necessity for its
use arises from the practical fact that exchanges cannot in every case be
completed on the spot. Hence a circulating medium of some sort is indispensable,
and in order that the system may remain throughout an equitable one, in practice
as well as in theory, the circulating medium must be based on equivalents of
labor or cost between individuals.
The features of the Labor Note are peculiar, and the points of difference
between it and ordinary money are numerous and far more important than at first
appears. They are as follows:
71. I.--Its cheapness and abundance. As it costs nothing but the paper
upon which it is written, printed, or engraved, and the labor executing and
signing it, it may be said, for practical purposes, to cost nothing. The great
fault of our existing currency is its expensiveness and scarcity. It is upon
these properties that the whole system of interest or rent on money is founded,
a tribute to which the rich as well as the poor have to submit, whenever they
want a portion of the circulating medium to use. To show that this is a real and
frightful evil in gold and silver currency, and consequently in all money of
which gold and silver are the basis, demands a distinct treatise on money. Under
the Labor Note system, every man who has in his possession his ability to work,
or his character, or in these elements variously combined, the assurance of
responsibility or the basis of credit, has always by him as much money as he
needs. He has only to take his pen from his pocket and make it at will. There
can be no such cases as happen now, of responsible men worth their tens or
hundreds of thousands of dollars in property, but absolutely destitute of money,
and forced to submit to the shaving process of bankers, brokers, and Jews.
72. II.--Being based on individual credit, it makes every man his own
banker. This feature of the Labor Note system is substantially contained in
the preceding statement, but the more important consequences of his fact remain
to be pointed out. Bankers are proverbial for their anxiety to maintain their
credit unimpaired and unsuspected. With them distrust is synonymous with the
ruin of their business. Under this system every man, woman, boy, and girl,
assuming the character of a banker, becomes equally solicitous about the
maintenance of his or her credit. Upon the goodness of their reputation for
punctuality of redemption depends the fact of their always having change in
their pockets. Honesty comes then to a good market, and finds at once a
pecuniary reward. If one’s credit is suffered to fall into disrepute among this
neighbors, he is left positively without money or the means of obtaining it, and
reduced to the necessity of making all his exchanges on the spot. He is put
pecuniarily into Coventry. Both the superior advantages of possessing credit,
and the greater inconvenience of losing it, conspire, therefore, to install the
reign of commercial honor and common honesty in the most minute and ordinary
transactions of life among the whole people. The moralist who is wise will
perceive herein an engine of reform immensely important to subserve his ends.
This result is already satisfactorily proven in practice at one point, where
this system of exchanges has been introduced, in the fact that every person is
anxious to obtain the Labor Notes of others for use and to abstain, so far as he
can, from issuing his own; as well as in the general solicitude for the
preservation of credit, and the general promptitude in redeeming the notes that
are issued. Notwithstanding the fact that, in now small a circle, it is only a
part of the pecuniary transactions of the community which can be carried on upon
the Cost Principle,--ordinary money having to be used in all transactions
with the world outside, and even within the community, for those things which
were purchased outside and which cost money,--still these results have been
strikingly exhibited in practice.
73. III.--It combines the properties of a circulating medium and a means
of credit. These qualities have been substantially stated above as separate
attributes of the Labor Note system; but the advantage of their combination in
one and the same instrumentality of Commerce is worth of a distinct observation.
At the end of the third year from the commencement of the settlement above
referred to, there were eighteen families having two lots of ground, each with
houses-—nine brick and nine wooden ones—-and gardens of their own, nearly the
whole of which capital was created by them during that period. The families,
without exception, came there quite destitute of worldly accumulations. Thirty
dollars in money was probably the largest sum possessed by any of them. Others
ladened there with five dollars and ten as the whole of their fortune. They were
nearly all families who had been exhausted in means as well as broken down and
discouraged in spirit by successive failures of community, or association
attempts at reform. The success they have thus achieved, in so short a time, has
resulted entirely from their own labor, exchanged so far as requisite and
practicable upon the Cost or Equitable Principle, facilitated by the
instrumentality of the Labor Note.
74. A family arriving without means at the location of a village operating on
the Equitable Principle, if their appearance or known character inspires
sufficient confidence in the minds of the previous settlers, can immediately
commence operations, not upon charity, but upon their own credit, issuing their
Labor Notes—-men, women, and youths—-so far as their several kinds of labor
are in demand, procuring thereby the labor of the whole village in all the
various trades necessary to construct them an edifice, and supply them with the
necessaries of life, so far as the size of the circle renders it possible to
produce them on the spot. Labor, even prospective labor, thus becomes
immediate capital. Interest and profits being discarded, the amount of capital
thus existing in labor is greatly augmented. The fact that the labor of the
women and children is equally remunerated with that of the men again adds to the
amount of combined capital in the family. By the operation of these several
causes, a family which has been struggling for years, in the midst of the
competition of ordinary Commerce and the oppressions of capital, with no success
beyond barely holding on to life, may become in a short time independent and
well provided. Such are the legitimate workings of the true system of Commerce,
and so far as it has been tested by practical operations the results have
entirely corroborated the theory.
75. [The settlers at Trialville, however, would not wish any thing said upon
this subject to be construed into any pledge on their part to supply any
advantages to individuals coming among them. There is no community or society
there in the corporate sense of the term. Every individual judges for
himself upon what terms he will treat with others, how far he will receive their
Labor Notes, or whether he will receive them at all. Persons going there must
make up their own opinion whether there is a sufficient demand for the kinds of
labor which they can perform, whether their own uprightness of character and
punctuality in the discharge of obligations are such as to inspire and maintain
confidence, and, indeed, upon every point relating to the subject. No guarantees
whatever are given, except such as the Individual finds n the principles
themselves, while it is left entirely to the decision of the Individual himself,
on every occasion, whether even he will act on the principles or not. There
is no compact or constitution,--no laws, by-law, rules, or regulations of any
sort. The Individual is kept above all institutions, our of deference to the
principle of Individuality and the Sovereignty of the Individual, which belong
just as much to the fundamental basis of true society as the Cost Principle
itself. There must, therefore, be no reliance on express or implied pledges,
nor upon any species of cooperation which is contracted for, and binding by
agreement. Besides, the extent to which the advantages of the Labor Note can
be rendered available is limited in the beginning by the smallness of the
circle, by the prevalence of pursuits unfavorable to the mutual exchange of
labor or products, and by numerous other considerations, all of which must be
judged of by the Individual upon his own responsibility, and at his own
risk.]
76. When credit is raised upon the issue of Labor Notes, it has the advantage
of being based upon that which the party has it in his power to give. He has in
his own vaults the means of redemption. If a laboring man promises money, his
ability to pay the money depends upon the precarious change of his finding a
demand for his labor. If he gives a Labor Note, finding a demand for his labor,
he secures the means of paying by the act of entering into the obligation. Even
if the payment is demanded in the alternative, and is discharged in the standard
commodity itself (corn), or, what is more likely, in other commodities,
measured by corn, or in the Labor Notes of the others, still all of these
are procured by the exchange of his own labor, and it will appear, upon a full
exposition of the system, that under the operation of these principles labor
will always be in demand, so that no laborer need ever be out of employment.
(161.) As a result of this fact every man can know positively, beforehand, to
precisely what extent he can, with safety, issue his Labor Notes, the
contingencies of sickness and death alone excepted. Hence dishonesty finds no
subterfuges. In the case of death the heirs possess the property, if there be
property, for which the notes were given. To refuse to redeem them is a palpable
ascertained fraud, and the same powerful motives which have been shown as
operating on the original debt to insure honesty and punctuality operate also
upon them. If they evade the obligation, they, too, are placed in Coventry, and
cut off from all the advantages and privileges which such an association
affords. The influence thus brought to bear upon them is ten-fold more potent
than laws, and the sanctions of laws, in existing society. In the event of
sickness, if the invalid has accumulated property, it serves to maintain him,
and redeem his outstanding obligations, precisely as now. Such is the main
purpose of accumulation. If a person has no property at the time his Labor Notes
are given, then his credit is based solely on his future labor, and the
liability to sickness and death enters into the transaction and limits the
issue. The risk is incurred by the party who receives them. As the amount of
these notes in the hands of any single individual is generally small, the risk
is a mere trifle, and has never been found, practically, to be enough to make it
worth while to take it into account at all. For the contingency of the loss of
property by fire or other accidents, between the time when obligations are
incurred and their redemption as well as at all other times, insurance can be
resorted to, as is done in existing society. Thus the Labor Note, while it is a
circulating medium, is at the same time the instrument of a system of credit,
having all the advantages, with none of the frightful results of insecurity and
bankruptcy, which grow out of, or accompany, the credit system actually
prevailing in the commercial world.
77. IV.--The Labor Note represents an ascertained and definite amount of
labor or property, which ordinary money does not. We have examples of this
feature of currency in the railroad and opera ticket, and other similar
representations of a positive thing. A railroad ticket represents a ride of a
definite length today, tomorrow, and next day, but a dollar does not represent
any thing definite. It will buy one amount of sugar or flour today, another
amount tomorrow, and still a different amount the next day. The importance of
this feature of the two different systems is immense. It can, however, only be
exhibited in its consequence by an extended treatise on the subject. What is
shown in this chapter is a mere glimpse at the system of “Equitable Commerce” in
operation. A thousand objections will occur which it is impossible to remove at
the time of stating the general outline. It will be perceived by the acute
intellect that a principle is here broached which is absolutely revolutionary of
all existing commerce. Perhaps a few minds may follow it out at once into its
consequences far enough to perceive that it promises the most magnificent
results in the equal distribution of wealth proportioned to industry, the
abolition of pauperism, general security of condition instead of continual
bankruptcy, poverty, universal cooperation, the general prevalence of commercial
honor and honesty, and in ten thousand harmonizing and beneficent effects,
morally and religiously. The larger class of persons, however, will require that
each particular detail shall be tract out and defined, and the mass of mankind
will only understand the subject upon the basis of practical illustration. Hence
the necessity that the practice go along with the theory, a method which has
been generally adopted and pursued, and of the results of which the public will
be from time to time sufficiently advised.
It would be inappropriate at this early point, and before a better
understanding of the results which flow from the fountain of Equity has been
obtained, to trace the operation of the Labor Note more into detail. In a
subsequent chapter it will be considered in the light of a universal or
world-wide system of currency. (245.)
Chapter III: Cost, Price, Labor, Natural Wage
78. The position was established in the preceding chapter that Equity in any
exchange of labor or commodities—-the products of labor-—consists of the exact
equality of burdens assumed by the parties to the transaction The amount of
burden involved in rendering a given amount of labor, or a given commodity, is
technically denominated the “COST” of that labor or commodity, and the
labor or commodity which is received in return for that which is rendered is
denominated the “PRICE” of it. Hence, inasmuch as it is simple Equity
that these two should be the equivalents of each other, or exactly equal
in the amount of burden imposed, the scientific formula is that “COST IS
THE LIMIT (OR SCIENTIFIC MEASURE) OF PRICE.”
79. Cost is, then, the amount of repugnance overcome. Hence, according
to this principle, the equitable price of any repugnance or endurance which it
has cost to perform the labor or produce the commodity. This, again, is
the same thing as labor for labor, burden for burden, or equality of
burdens in exchange. Hence it implies that there is no other basis of
price, no other ground for a demand for remuneration costing human
endurance, than the fact of human endurance itself.
80. This proposition,--Cost the Limit of Price,--so simple, so seemingly
unimportant to the casual reader, and yet so obviously true when properly
apprehended, so perfectly consonant with the natural sentiment of right in every
mind, will appear by its results as previously stated to be one of the most
radical propositions ever made. A rigid adhesion to it in commercial relations
will revolutionize nearly every species of transaction among men. It will do so
beneficently, however, for all classes, so that no alarm need be felt by any. We
shall begin, in this chapter, to trace out some of these results, through the
various operations of the principle upon the interests of society, and to
contrast them with the effects of those principles which are now efficient in
the same sphere.
81. The first grand consequence resulting from the simple principle of
Equity—-Cost the Limit of Price-—is, as already intimated, that whatever we
possess which has cost NO human labor, which has imposed NO BURDEN
in its production, which has COST nothing, although it is susceptible
of being property, is, nevertheless, not a rightful subject of PRICE. All
property of this kind,--whether it is equally open to the enjoyment of all
mankind,--the property of the race, like air and water,--or whether it attaches
more particularly to some Individual, like genius or skill, is denominated
NATURAL WEALTH. The formula relating to this subject is, then, that NATURAL
WEALTH BEARS NO PRICE—that is, that it cannot, of itself, be made the subject of
price upon any equitable grounds whatsoever,--although the resignation of so
much of it as required for one’s own convenience may be the basis of price on
the ground of a sacrifice endured, as will be explained in speaking of the
comprehensiveness of the term Cost. (114.) Every thing valuable which is
bestowed by nature without any provision on the part of mankind or the
Individual is Natural Wealth, such as fire and water,
light and heat, the earth, the air, the
principles of science and mechanism, personal beauty, health, natural genius,
talent, etc.
82. The principle stated in the preceding Number settles, scientifically and
beautifully, the vexed question of the ownership of the soil. Land, in
its natural state, is natural wealth, equally belonging to all the
inhabitants of the earth. It stands upon the same footing as the ocean and the
atmosphere. But so soon as labor is bestowed upon any portion of it, which adds
to it a positive value, the labor so bestowed is the rightful subject of price,
to be measured like every other species of labor, by the cost or burden assumed
in performing it. Thus the equitable price for lands upon which no labor has
been performed is zero; the equitable price for wild lands which have merely
been surveyed and bounded is the cost of surveying and bounding them; if they
have been cleared and fenced, then the equitable price is the cost of clearing
and fencing in addition to that of surveying and bounding; and if, still
further, they have been sloughed, cultivated, and improved, then the equitable
price is the cost of as much labor as, rightly applied, would take the same
lands in the natural state and bring them into the state of improvement in which
they are found The reason of this latter modification is this,--that lands may
have been in cultivation for hundreds of years, and labor have been bestowed
upon them each year, while the cost of such labor has been annually repaid by
the successive crops, except so much of the same as remains on the land in the
form of permanent artificial improvement. The cost which has been already repaid
ought not to be paid again, while that which remains invested, and is to be
repaid out of the future crops, or other use, may be equitably demanded from the
purchaser who is to receive such future benefit. If the lands have been so badly
cultivated as to have deteriorated instead of improved, it would be equitable
that the seller should pay to the purchaser a sum equal to the cost of bring
them up to their natural state. Such cultivation is robbing the land, and
incurring a debt to humanity, as if one were to find some means of training or
exhausting in the atmosphere, or fouling a stream from which others must draw
their supplies.
83. It is the same with the other natural elements. Water as it flows
past in the stream is natural wealth, and not the subject of price. The
man who should seize upon a stream of water and fence it up or turn it aside,
for the purpose of levying a tribute upon those who lived below him upon the
same stream, in the form of a price for their necessary supplies, would commit
an obvious breach of natural law. But although water, in its natural condition,
is not equitably susceptible of price, yet so soon as human labor is bestowed
upon it by any person for the benefit of another, a price may be rightfully
affixed to the water, to be precisely measured by the cost or burden of the
labor so bestowed. Every individual has a right to appropriate so much of the
common natural wealth as is requisite to the supply of his wants. So soon as I
have dipped up a pitcher full of water from the spring or stream, it is no
longer mere natural wealth; it is a product of my labor as well. It is thus my
individual property. No one has a right to take it from me without my consent,
and in case I do consent, I have an equitable and just right to demand a price
equal to the burden I have assumed, which consists of the labor, the risk, or
whatever else made it a burden. If I have merely dipped it up, the equitable
price is a trifle probably not worth considering; but if I have carried it two
miles over a burning plain, it may be considerable; and if I have run the risk
of carrying it for the sake of another through the brisk fire from an enemy’s
battery, the risk will enter equitably into the estimate of the price. (121.) In
all these cases it is not really the natural wealth itself, the land or the
water, which acquires a price, but the human labor and other elements which are
bestowed upon it. Nothing is properly the rightful subject of price but
repugnance overcome. But as the portions of natural wealth to which human
labor has thus been added are the objects which are wanted by the purchaser, and
which are delivered to him when the price is paid, it is natural to speak of
them as bearing the price.
84. It is obvious from this application of the principle of cost, which we
have seen is nothing but the scientific measure of equity, that simple equity
cuts up by the roots every species of speculation in lands. It will be seen, in
the next place, that it cuts up equally another species of speculation, which
the world hardly suspects of being, although it is, both in principle and in its
oppressive results, equally iniquitous,--that is, speculation in talent,
natural skill, or genius. The definitions and principles above stated render
it obvious that no man has any just or equitable right to charge a price for
that which it cost nothing of human labor to create. “Freely ye have received,
freely give.”
85. A superior natural tact for the performance of any function or labor
renders it easier instead of harder to perform the function or labor. It makes
the burden ordinarily lighter instead of heavier, and consequently, upon the
Cost Principle, reduces instead of augmenting the price. I say,
“ordinarily,” because the case may happen of a person having a high degree of
natural ability for a particular kind of industry, and having at the same time,
from some special cause, an unusual repugnance to its performance, and it must
be constantly remembered that it is the degree of personal repugnance overcome
which measures the price. As the rule, however, the taste or attraction for a
given pursuit accompanies and corresponds to the degree of excellence in it, and
in that case the remarkable result above stated flows from the principle.
86. Naturally enough, a conclusion so strikingly dissimilar to all that is
now seen in practice or entertained in idea will be received at first blush with
some suspicions of its soundness. It will be found, however, upon examination,
that the consequences of admitting it are all beneficent and harmonious. They
are, in fact, indispensable to the solution of the problem of true social
relations.
87. Talent, natural skill, or genius, distinguished from each ability as
is the result of labor or acquisition, is one species of natural wealth. It
is not, like earth, air, and water, equally distributed by nature to all men,
and cannot, therefore, be equally enjoyed by all. Those on whom it has been
conferred in a high degree have a kind of enjoyment of it in the fact of its
possession, which cannot be participated with others. It is the same with health
or personal beauty, or a naturally graceful deportment. In this particular way,
although it is natural wealth, it is individual wealth also. There are other
ways, however, in which it is not individual or exclusive, but in which it may
be partaken of by all around, as when we experience the pleasure of looking upon
a beautiful countenance or a graceful figure, or when we enjoy the creations of
another’s genius, or the productions of another’s natural endowments. This kind
of enjoyment is bestowed by nature gratuitously, and is not confined to the
individual who produces it. It is the common patrimony of mankind as much as
air, earth, and water.
88. It follows from these considerations that neither the forensic talents
bestowed by nature upon a Daniel Webster, nor the musical endowments of a Jenny
Lind, nor the natural agility of the mountebanks, constitute any legitimate or
equitable basis of price, for the simple reason that they have cost their
possessors nothing, and it has already been settled that cost is the only
legitimate ground of price.
89. Observe, in the first place, that I do not say that the labor which it
may require on their part to exercise these natural talents is not a legitimate
basis of price. On the contrary, I affirm that it is so, and that such labor is
the only basis of price in the performance, and hence that the price of the
performance is equitably limited by the precise amount of the labor in it,
estimated according to its repugnance to the individual, relatively to other
kinds of labor,--not augmented one iota on account of the extraordinary
natural abilities which the performance demands. There is in that
element no labor, no repugnance overcome, no cost, and consequently no basis
of price.
90. Observe, in the next place, that labor expended prior to the performance,
in cultivating the natural talent and fitting it for the performance, is
an element of cost, a due proportion of which may be equitably charged upon each
specific exhibition of the talent. This point will be more fully considered
presently in treating of the constituents of cost. (121.)
91. It will be objected that under this system talent and skill receive no
protection. Talent and skill are intellectual strength, and it is not strength
but weakness which demands protection. Talent and skill now enable their
possessors to subject the world as effectually, though its industrial relations,
as prowess and physical manhood formerly enabled their possessors to do
so upon the battle-fields of past history. The dominion of physical conquest is
now partially becoming extinct. We are in the midst of the reign of intellectual
superiority, which is far more subtle and intricate in the modes of its
tyrannical action. The discovery of the true laws of social order will not be,
therefore, the discovery of increased facilities for talent or intellectual
power to exert itself for its own immediate and selfish aggrandizement, but the
precise contrary.
92. At the same time talent and skill will always command, like physical
manhood, a certain degree of homage, and secure, indirectly, more refined and
yet more substantial rewards than direct appropriation would confer. In
discussing the subject of price we are by no means discussing all the possible
effects of performance, but only that one which forms the basis of a demand for
a direct equivalent or compensation.
93.Price is that which a party may properly demand AS HIS RIGHT, in
consideration of services rendered. It relates, therefore, to exact justice
between the parties, and justice has in it no touch of mercy, or gratitude, or
benevolence,--no tribute of admiration, no homage. It does not exclude
the exercise of those sentiments after its own demands are satisfied, but, for
itself, it know nothing of that sort. Justice demands Equity, exact Equivalents,
Burden for Burden; and will be satisfied with nothing else. To understand the
appropriate sphere of these various affections we must individualize
their functions. It is essential not only to the security of rights, but equally
in order that benevolence or homage be felt and accepted as such,
that the limits of each should be exactly defined. The rendition of justice is
the basis, or platform, or prior condition,upon which benevolence must rest. The
slave feels little or no gratitude toward his master for any act of kindness
which the master may do, because he is conscious that the master is living in an
unjust relation toward him, and that he owes him as matter of justice more than
he grants as an indulgence. This apparent destitution of the sentiment of
gratitude reacts upon the master, and he despises and depreciates the moral
constitution of the slave. The fault is in the absence of the prior condition of
Justice, which alone authorizes benevolence, which then inspires
gratitude, and all conspire to institute and maintain friendly and harmonious
relations. A charity bestowed while justice is withheld is always an insult.
94. Again, according to a law of the human mind, injustice persisted in
begets aversion or hatred on the part of the perpetrator as well, toward the
object of it. But justice cannot be rendered while one is ignorant of what
justice is; and since no one how does not know that Cost is the Limit of Price
knows what the limits of justice are, it follows that every one has been living
in relations of injustice toward all around him. A partial consciousness of this
truth tends still farther to inspire ill-will on the part of the governors
toward the governed, of the employers toward the employed, and of masters toward
slaves. Hence, it will be perceived that a denial of justice operates through
two channels to prevent the natural flow of benevolence, by hindering its
bestowal, at the same time that it enfeebles or destroys the appreciation of it
by the recipient.
95. Still again, from ignorance of the landmarks of justice or Equity, acts
are continually done under the supposition that justice demands them, and with
no sentiment of benevolence, which should fall within the province of
benevolence, while the same ignorance on the other hand hinders their
acknowledgment as benevolent acts, and prevents, consequently, the appropriate
sentiment of gratitude or reciprocal benevolence, which should be the
result.
96. The magnificent testimonial bestowed by the English people upon Rowland
Hill for his conception of the idea of cheap postage and his exertions in behalf
of the reform had in it nothing discordant with true principles, because it was
bestowed as a gratuitous homage and accepted as such. Whenever all obstructions
to the natural exuberance of benevolence toward those who confer benefits upon
us are removed by the establishment of equitable relations, such voluntary
tributes repeated on all hands will furnish a richer inheritance for genius than
the beggarly and precarious subsistence which now inures from pensions and
patent-laws. The testimonial to Rowland Hill was not the price of his
services, any more than a bridal present is the price of affection. Had
he opened an account of debtor and creditor with the nation, and charged them a
hundred thousand pounds as the price of his services, gratitude would have been
extinguished by the preposterous pretension, and benevolence have been converted
into aversion and disgust. The people, ignorant of the law of equivalents as
a principle, would have felt it as an instinct, and have been
repelled unwittingly by the reach of it. To make the higher class of services a
matter of price at all somewhat depreciates their estimate. The artist and the
inventor is apt to fee something akin to degradation, when forced to prefer a
pecuniary demand in return for the fruits of his genius. Every genuine artist
has an instinct for being an amateur performer solely. There is an intimation in
this fact that in the true social order the rewards of genius will either cease
to be pecuniary altogether, or, if not, that they will be wholly abandoned to
the voluntary largesse of mankind. (174.)
97. The Cost principle deals wholly with price,--that is, with that to which
the party rendering the service should limit his demand, if fixed by
himself, not to what it is proper, or becoming, or natural that others
should bestow as a gratuity, which latter is a matter solely for their
consideration. This last is not his affair.
98. It is in this rigid sense that it is affirmed that Jenny Lind has no
equitable right to charge more for an hour expended in singing than any other
person should receive for an hour of labor equally repugnant, and which has
involved equal contingencies of prior labor and the like. Even that price is
then divisible among all who hear her. The refining results of this operation of
the principle in diffusing the benefits of superior endowments in every sphere
among the whole people will be traced out into infinite ramifications by the
reader for himself.
99. The objection that men of genius, inventors, and those who exercise
callings which are purely attractive, are not provided by this principle with
the means of obtaining a livelihood will be answered under another head.
100. There is another subtle and plausible objection which may be urged to
his position, in relation to natural genius, talent, or skill, and which demands
no little rigor of attention to detect its fallacy. It may be said that
Nature deals with man liberally, in proportion to his endowments; that
is, that she crowns with greater exuberance of results the exertions of the
strong man and the wise man than she does those of the weak and the
simple-minded, and hence that there can be no essential injustice in doing
precisely what Nature herself does,--that is, in maintaining so much inequality
as results from giving to each an equivalent in the products of others to
the products of his own powers. If, on the contrary, a man who can
produce more largely and less abundant and inferior commodities, solely
according to the intrinsic hardship or cost of the labor to each,--no
reference whatever being had to the amount or quality of the
products,--it is clear that the man of the highest capacity loses the
advantage in the transaction which Nature has conferred upon him, and which
seems, therefore, to be justified by the ordinances of Nature. It is clear that,
if he gets in the exchange only so much of the products of the other as would
have been the result of his own superior ability applied in that direction,
he only gets what Nature would have given him if he had dealt directly with
her. Why, then, is it not right that he should have as much advantage in the
bargain as he has in the direct production?
101. The objection is here strongly put in order that it may be completely
disposed of. It is answered as follows:
It is the destiny of man to rise into higher relations than those which he
holds with Nature. When man deals with Nature, he is dealing with an abject
servant or slave. There is no equality nor reciprocity between the
parties. Man is a Sovereign and Nature his minister. He extorts from her
rightfully whatever she can be made to yield. The legitimate business of man is
the conquest and subjugation of Nature, and the law of superior force is the
legitimate law of conquest and subjugation. But so soon as man comes into
relations with his fellow-man the disproportion ceases. He is then dealing with
his peers. The legitimate object of the intercourse is no longer the same. It is
not now conquest and subjugation, but equipoise and the freedom of all. A higher
relationship intervenes, and the balance of concurrent Sovereignties can only be
established and maintained by acknowledging the law of that relationship. For
the strong man, physically or intellectually, to avail himself, to his private
advantage, of his superior strength, as the method of his intercourse with his
fellow-men, is finally to accumulate all power in the hands of the few, and in
the meantime to inaugurate the reign of discord, collision and war.
102. This subtle but most important distinction is already practically
acknowledged in a large circle of human affairs. The world is already
sufficiently progressed, in civilized countries at least, to act upon this
distinction between inanimate nature and rational beings, so far as relates to
the immediate exertion of physical strength,--the simple force of bone and
muscle directly applied. The strong man is not now justified by the common sense
of right in seizing and appropriating the wealth of the weak simply because he
can, while at the same time, when dealing with Nature, he is never reproved for
compelling her to the utmost of his power over her. Right is
distinguished from might with reference to men, a distinction which, as
respects Nature, does not exist.
103. As relates to intellectual superiority, the same distinction is likewise
already acknowledged to an indefinite and fluctuating extent. The sharper is
restrained from availing himself of his quickness of wit by the intervention of
stringent laws and exemplary penalties. Upon what principle is that? It is the
admission that man ought not,--that it is unjust or inequitable that man
should use his superior mental endowments to his own private advantage,
in dealing with men, while no such restriction lies upon him when dealing
with Nature. He is bound to deal with them, contrary to the fact,
precisely as if they had the same amount of strength and mental power as
he has himself, or, rather, as if it were not a question of strength but of
right; in the same manner as, according to the canons of international law, the
large and powerful State recognizes the equal sovereignty of the smallest
independent community. The law of intercourse between Individual Sovereigns is
the same as between the concrete Sovereignties of existing States. To commit a
breach of this higher law of Sovereign peerage is to secure to the stronger
party an immediate and apparent advantage, to the destruction of the less
obvious but more substantial benefits resulting to both from the existence of a
true social equilibrium. Such is the policy of the brigand and the pirate, who
pounce upon their booty for the supply of their immediate wants,--because they
can,--regardless of the fact that their practices will prove the disruption of
society and end in the destruction of the very commerce upon which they
prey.
104. In the intellectual sphere, the admission of this higher law has
hitherto been made only up to an unascertained line. Superior talent or skill,
naturally bestowed, have always been, and are still, practically recognized as
giving superior right, except in the few extreme cases in which the enormity of
the principle is too obvious to be overlooked, and in which the exercise of that
superiority is defined by Fraud, Gambling, Swindling, or some other of the
euphonious epithets by which society stigmatizes, in its ultimates, a rule of
conduct which, in its more general and pervading applications, it sanctions and
approves. Whenever the perception of this true law shall have been thoroughly
awakened; when the public mind shall be wholly penetrated by the conviction that
the employment of either physical or intellectual power, had by natural
endowment, in any transaction between men, in such a manner as to gain an
immediate and selfish advantage to the stronger party, is of the essential
nature of fraud, swindling, and robbery,--society will rise to a new plane, and
will then find a development as superior to our present civilization as that is
to the savage state,--a development in which those who surrender most will as
truly find their highest emolument as those who surrender least. Thus
true science conducts us back, in some sense, to the sublime precept of
religion: “He that would be greatest among you let him serve.”
105. So far, then, as the individual consumes directly products of his own
labor, he enjoys the immediate advantage of his own talent or skill, as the
strong man enjoys his strength or the beautiful woman her beauty. But the moment
he proposed to exchange his labor with other human beings, it is the harmonic
law that he shall renounce that advantage entirely, recognizing the full
equality of the inferior party. To claim it is to introduce an element into the
social relations as disturbing in its nature as it would be if the handsome
woman were to claim of right superior rank by virtue of her beauty, or the
strong man impunity from the law by virtue of his strength.
106. It is characteristic of the most progressed or humanized society that
the strong recognizes the equality of the weak. Hence the constant advancement
of woman in the relative scale of position,--the sinking of physical superiority
before intellectual, and finally of intellectual before the spiritual,
affectionate, and aesthetic. That sublime characteristic of the highest type of
humanity is wholly wanting in the demand of the superior worker that the
inferior shall make up the difference in excess of labor. It is preeminently
exhibited, on the contrary, and the highest attainment of civilization achieved,
when the basis of the exchange is shifted from the equality of products to the
equality of burdens. The strong says to the weak, labor is painful and imposes a
burden. It is not just between beings who hold human relations that you, who are
weak, shall be required to endure a greater burden than I, who am strong. Hence
we will exchange labor for labor, not according to its fruitfulness, but
according to the repugnance which has to be overcome.
107. Take an illustration as between nations. A small but industrious and
civilized people inhabit a country lying between the dominions of a powerful
empire on one side, and hordes of treacherous savages on the other, who threaten
to invade and lay waste the country. The feeble nation applies to the powerful
one to extend a degree of protection over them by establishing forts upon the
frontier and adding the weight of their influence in overawing the savage
tribes. Assume that the cost of the aid thus rendered is equal to one million of
dollars per annum, and that by estimate it saves the whole property of the
weaker nation from destruction, the income upon which amounts to a hundred
million of dollars. What tribute in the nature of payment shall the weaker
nation render to the stronger? According to one rule, it will be an amount equal
to the expenditure by the stronger. According to the other, it will be an amount
equal to the whole products of the land. Is it not clear which is the
humanitarian, courteous, or civilized basis of the transaction and which the
barbarous one? According to the latter, the choice of the people whose safety is
endangered lies between two sets of savages, each of whom will rob them equally
of all they possess. Is it not clear, then, that the humanitarian basis of
remuneration is not measured by the extent of the benefit conferred,--the
Value,--but by the extent of the burden assumed,--the Cost. And is it
not clear, again, in the case supposed, if the strong nation were still more
powerful, so that the use of its name merely were a terror to its savage
neighbors, and would suffice, with less extensive fortifications, as a mere
demonstration of the animus to resist, or with no fortifications at all, to
restrain them, that the cost of the defense would be decreased by such
superiority of strength and weight of name, and that consequently the
price of it should be diminished likewise, instead of being
augmented thereby.
Carry out the analogy of this illustration to the case of the way in which
natural talent and skill are made the basis of price in private transactions,
and it will be perceived that the principle now acted on is the barbarous
principle,--the principle of conquest and rapine,--the principle of an equality
of benefits demanded between parties, one of whom is capable of
conferring great benefits at slight cost, and the other only capable of
conferring small ones at an equal or greater amount of cost,--a principle
destructive of equality, equipoise, and harmony, and under the operation of
which the weaker are inevitably crushed and devoured by the stronger, to the
utter annihilation of all hope of realizing the higher and more beautiful phases
of possible human society.
108. To illustrate still further. When a robust and hearty youth rises and
stands, yielding his seat to a woman, an old man, or an invalid, he does so
because, in consequence of his strength, it costs him less to stand,--it
is less repugnant for him to do so than for the other. The superior
power reduces the cost, and all refined and well-developed manhood
admires the vindication of the principle involved, even while not understanding
it as such. In this transaction there is no price demanded, but, if there were,
it is obvious that the price to the robust man for yielding his advantage should
be less than to the feeble, while upon the value principle it would be more. In
this species of intercourse we already, then, draw the line between cultivated
and advanced humanity, and barbarous or boorish humanity, precisely where these
two principles diverge. With a more complete efflorescence of Humanitarian
Ethics, true principle will supersede the false throughout the whole range of
personal transactions. The adoption of the Cost Principle in commerce
will not only insure the equitable distribution of wealth, and disperse the
manifold evils which grow out of the pervading injustice of the existing system,
but it will do more,--it will crown the common honors of life with a halo of
mutual urbanity, and render the daily interchange of labor and of ordinary
commodities a perpetual sacrament of fraternal affection.
109. It results, then, that the natural and necessary effect of the Cost
Principle is to limit the relative power and advantage of the intellectually
strong over the intellectually weak in the same manner as Law, Morality,
Religion, Machinery, and the other appliances of civilization have already, in
civilized countries, partially limited the power and neutralized the advantage
of the physically strong over the physically weak, and to complete, even in the
physical sphere, what Law, Morality, Religion, Machinery, technology and the
other appliances of civilization have hitherto failed to accomplish, for the
want of the more definite science of the subject.
110. But, in order to the general adoption of this regulating principle, is
not the consent of the strong man indispensable as well as that of the weak? By
what means shall he be persuaded to make the sacrifice of his superior
advantage? Is not the appeal solely to his benevolence, and has not past
experience demonstrated that all such appeals are nearly powerless against the
controlling current of personal interests?
111. Certainly the concurrence of both the powerful and the feeble is alike
requisite to the complete and general adoption of the Cost Principle, but that
cannot be said to be necessary to commence its application. It has already been
stated that the Cost Principle affords the means to the laboring classes, who
are kept now in comparative weakness and ignorance, of stepping out from under
the oppressions of capital and leaving it with no foundation on which to rest in
its usurped superiority over labor. Hence the weak are enabled by it to cope
with the strong, while the strong themselves will not long resist the
innovation, for the reason that their own positive strength is also increased by
the same means. It is only their relative superiority which is reduced by it. In
other words, all classes will have their condition positively improved, the rich
only a little less than the poor, so that the frightful inequalities of the
present system will be obliterated and extinguished. An analogue of this effect
is found in the material sphere, in the invention of gunpowder and firearms, for
example. A pistol puts a small man and a large man upon the same footing of
strength, or perhaps rather reverses it a little, as the large man presents a
broader surface to the deadly aim. Still either party is a more powerful man
with than without it. It serves to establish a balance of power, while at the
same time it augments the power of both. It is the same with larger arms and
larger bodies of men. Hence the pistol, the blunderbuss, and the cannonade have
been among the greatest civilizers of mankind. It is the same, again, with laws
and the civil state which have been instituted to equalize the diversities of
strength among men by substituting arbitrary rules for physical force. Like
firearms and gunpowder, they are a barbarous remedy for a more barbarous evil,
and will give place, in turn, with the progress of man, to the government of
mere principles, accepted into and proving operative upon the individual
mind.
112. In this manner the Cost Principle has in it the means of first
compelling and then reconciling to its adoption those to whom the possession of
superior intellectual powers or cunning, with the accumulations of capital, give
now the ascendancy. This, however, only so far as such compulsion shall prove
necessary. It is a grand mistake to assume, as the inclusive rule, that those
who have the best end of the bargain in our present iniquitous social relations
are averse to a reorganization upon the basis of justice. The ignorant and
selfish among them are so, but it is among this superior class that the best and
most devoted friends of the rights of man are likely to be found. The progress
of the race has always been officered by leaders from among the Patricians. It
is among those who gain the advantage, and are thrown to the surface and exposed
to the blessed air and light of Heaven by the fluctuations of the turbulent
ocean of human affairs, that the greatest development occurs; and along with
development comes the sentiment of humanity and human brotherhood. The masses of
men have seldom been indebted solely to themselves for what they have at any
time gained. The most unbounded benevolence is often coupled with the possession
of great wealth. But how often has the sentiment been repelled and made to
recoil upon itself with disappointment and disgust at the results of its own
efforts to benefit mankind! How often has the harsh lesson been taught to the
rich and the good that the sentiment is powerless without the science,--that
Love, without its complement in Wisdom, is blind and destructive of its own
ends!
113. Hence, whenever a true science of society shall have been demonstrably
discovered, when the means of permanent benefit to the race shall be
unquestionable at hand, benevolent capitalists will assuredly be found in the
first ranks of those who will concur to realize the higher results of human
society, to which such knowledge is competent to conduct. The advanced and
highly developed among men are always ready to sacrifice their relative
superiority for the greater good of all, for no other reason than simply because
they are men. Hence, again, although the Cost Principle is fully adequate
to enable the poor, feeble, and oppressed classes to emancipate themselves from
the oppressions of capital, it will, in practice, be put to no such strain. The
future will show that the rich and poor will freely cooperate with hearty
sincerity in the work of social regeneration, upon scientific and truly
constructive principles.
114. It is proper at this point to show more explicitly the extension and
comprehensiveness of the term Cost. It has been spoken of in the preceding pages
chiefly as human repugnance overcome in the performance of labor. It is
more accurate to define it, however, simply as human repugnance overcome in any
transaction. It has both an active or positive, and a passive or negative,
aspect, to which last a slight reference has already been had. (81.) The
repugnance overcome in the actual performance of labor is the active phase of
the subject, but there is also repugnance overcome in the mere sacrifice of
surrender of any thing which we possess, and which we require at the time for
our own convenience or happiness. This last is the passive aspect of Cost. Thus,
for example, if I plant pictures of manufacture watches for sale, the cost, and
consequently the price at which I must sell them, to deal upon the equitable
principle, is the amount of labor contained in them; but, if I have in my
possession—not as an article of merchandise, but for my own pleasure and
convenience,--a watch or a favorite painting,--say, for example, it is a present
from a friend, for which reason I attach to it a particular value,--and you,
taking a fancy to it, wish to induce me to part with it, then the legitimate
measure of price is the amount of sacrifice which it is to me,--in other words,
the degree of repugnance which I feel to surrendering it, how much so ever that
may exceed the positive Cost of the article, and whatever relation it may hold
to its positive Value.
115. It is the same, as already observed, even with reference to natural
wealth, in which there is no positive Cost, and so of everything which we
require, in kind, for our own use. (81.) Thus, for example, although land in its
wild state is not rightfully the subject of price, and although, when simply
enclosed, its positive Cost is the labor of enclosing it, yet, if I have
selected pleasant situation for my own habitation and culture, and am induced to
part with it for the accommodation of another, the price in that case is
legitimately augmented by whatever amount of repugnance I may feel to making the
surrender.
116. The exact thinker will readily perceive the distinction between objects
of all sorts which are required for personal convenience at the time, and
surplus property or capital not needed for present use, or needed only as the
means of procuring other conveniences by means of exchange,--between things
properly in commerce, and things taken out of commerce by special appropriation.
In the latter case the labor contained in or bestowed upon the property is the
whole of its equitable price. In the former it is augmented by the amount of
sacrifice experienced in parting with it, occasioned by the present need.
117. In the case of passive or negative Cost,--the mere repugnance to the
surrender of what is at the time serving a personal purpose,--none but the party
making the surrender can know the real extent of the sacrifice, or can judge
with accuracy of the equity of the price charged. Hence, with reference to
things not properly in commerce, a common average of estimate cannot be attained
as in the ordinary case of exchanges. (195.) But even here the operation of the
principle is quite distinct from that of value as the limit of price. The party
making the surrender will satisfy his own conscience by estimating the degree of
sacrifice to him, and not as under the value standard by estimating the degree
of the want of the other party. In other words, whenever he has arrived at a
price which he would prefer to take rather than not sell, he is restrained from
going farther, without inquiring whether he has reached the highest point to
which the purchaser would go. This distinction between the active Cost of the
labor of production and the passive Cost of surrender is important in various
ways, and especially, as we shall see, in settling the question of interest or
rent on capital. (226.)
118. As it is the positive Cost of the labor of production, alone, which
relates to things properly in commerce, it is that which is usually meant by
Cost, unless the repugnance of surrender is especially mentioned in
addition.
119. There is still another observation in relation to the comprehensiveness
of the term Cost. Although it refers back, in its rigid technical sense, to the
original labor of production, measured by its repugnance, and fixes the price in
labor, still it holds good as the equitable measure of price with reference to
all articles purchased with money, under the present system, and not traced back
to their component, labor. Thus an article purchased for a given price in money,
and sold again for the same amount of money, plus the labor of the transaction,
is sold for Cost. The Cost Principle is, therefore, merely the entire
abandonment of profit making, whether it relates to labor production or
dealings in money. The method of keeping a shop and selling goods upon the Cost
Principle, during the transition period,--that is, while the community is too
small to supply all its own wants,--is to charge for each article its original
money Cost with all the money charges and contingencies, in money, and the labor
of buying, handling, and selling, in labor, the time occupied in the transaction
being measured, by the clock and charged according to the estimated repugnance
of that kind of labor. A yard of cloth is, therefore, so many cents in money and
so many minutes in labor. The particulars of the management of such stores, and
the immense power which they exert over the commercial habits of large districts
of country within their influence, will be shown in Mr. Warren’s work on
Practical Details.
120. The comprehensiveness of the term Labor needs also to be defined.
By Labor is meant, in the first place, not merely manual, but intellectual and
oral labor as well,--whatever is done or performed by the hand, head, or tongue,
and which involves repugnance or painfulness overcome,--the measure of price
being based upon the well-known principle that man naturally seeks the agreeable
and shuns that which is disagreeable or painful.
121. In the second place, the Labor by which price is measured is not always
merely the particular performance done at the time. Whatever has required an
especial skill obtained by previous labor, unproductive at the time, has its
price augmented by its own due proportion of such loss, from previous necessary
unproductive labor. For example, the surgeon may equitably charge for each
surgical operation not only the time occupied in it, measured by its repugnance,
but an aliquot portion of the time necessarily expended in acquiring the
knowledge to enable him to do it in a skillful manner, according to the
repugnance to him of that preliminary labor. So of every other necessary
contingency,--all necessary contingencies, such as prior preparatory labor,
risk incurred, etc., entering into and constituting a portion of Cost.
122. It results from what has been said that the basis of vendible property
is human labor, and that the measure of such property is the amount of labor
which there is, so to speak, laid up in the article owned. The article is the
product of labor, and is therefore the representative of labor. Price is that
which is given either for labor directly, or for property, which is the product
of labor, that is, for labor indirectly, and it should therefore be a precise
equivalent for that labor. The only proper ground of difference, then, between
the price of side-saddle and the price of a house is the differenced in the
amount of human labor which has been bestowed upon the one and upon the other.
It follows, again, that the mode of arriving at the legitimate price of any
article whatever is to reduce it first to labor. For example: if we take a house
to pieces, we trace it back to trees growing in the woods, to clay, and sand,
and lime, and iron, etc., lying in the earth. All that makes it a house, and
entitles it to a price, as property, is the human labor that there is in it.
That house over the way is, then, so many hours of labor at brick-making, so
many hours of carpenter’s work, so many of lime-burning, so many of iron-work,
nail-cutting, so many at glass-blowing, so many at hauling, so many at planning,
drafting, etc., etc., etc. The whole house is nothing but human labor, dried,
preserved, laid away. Each of these hours of labor in different occupations may
have a different degree of repugnance, so that to estimate the gross amount of
labor in the house it is necessary to bring them all to a common denomination.
This is done by reducing them to the standard degree of repugnance in the
standard labor,--corn-raising,--which is then expressed in the standard product
of that kind of labor,--namely, so many pounds of corn. Hence the price of a
house, or of any other object, is said to be so many pounds, or so many
hours, meaning so many pounds of corn, or so many hours of labor at
corn-raising, in the same manner as we now say so many dollars and cents. By
this means all price is constantly referred to labor, and rendered definite,
instead of being referred to a standard which is itself continually expanding
and contracting by all the contingencies of speculation or trade. (77.)
123. The first point is to obtain a standard for a single locality, after
which it is quite easy to adjust the standard of other localities to it.
Agricultural labor is first selected, because it is the great staple branch of
human industry. The most staple article of agricultural product is then taken,
which for this country and especially for the great valley of the Mississippi,
is Indian corn. In another country it may be wheat or something else, although
Indian corn, wherever it is produced, will be found to have more of the
appropriate qualities for a standard than any other article whatsoever, being
more invariable in quality, more uniform in the amount produced by the same
amount of labor in a given locality, and more uniform in the extent of the
demand than any other article. At a given locality, or, as I have stated, at a
great variety of localities in the Western States, the standard product of
Indian corn is twenty pounds to the hour’s labor,--the measurement by pounds
being also more inflexible or less variant than that by bulk. If, then, in some
other locality,--as, for example, New England,--the product of an hour’s labor
devoted to raising corn is only ten pounds of corn, the equivalent of the
standard hour’s labor there will be ten pounds of corn, while in the West
it will be twenty pounds. It is the hour’s labor in that species of agriculture
which is therefore the actual unit of comparison, of which the product, whatever
it may be, is the local representative. And in the same manner, in another
country wheat may be the standard,--as, for example, in England,--and may be
reckoned at ten pounds to the hour, or whatever is found by trial to be the
fact. The reduction of the standard of one locality to that of another will then
be no more difficult than the reduction of different currencies to one value, as
now practiced.
124. There is an absolute necessity for some standard of cost, and it is not
a question of principle, but of expediency, what article is adopted. It is the
same necessity which is recognized at present for a standard of value,
which is sought for, and by some persons erroneously supposed to be found, in
money. The question may still be asked: Why not employ money as the standard
with which to compare other things, and as a circulating medium, as is done now?
The answer is found in the uncertain and fluctuating nature of money,--in the
fact that it represents nothing definite.
125. Money has professedly two uses: (1) as a standard of value, and (2) as a
circulating medium.
First, then, as a standard of value, or a measure with which to compare other
values. It does not even profess to be a standard of cost. It has no relation
whatever to the cost, or, in other words, to the labor which there is in the
different commodities for which it is given as price, because there is no
question about cost in existing commerce, the value alone being
taken into account. But value is incapable of a scientific estimate, as will be
more specifically shown in the next chapter. (134.) Hence it is fluctuating
because it relates to nothing definite. But what are the capacities of the
yard-stick itself? Is it fixed or elastic? The theory is that gold and silver
are selected as standards of value because the quantity of those commodities in
the world is more uniform than that of most other articles. If the fact be
granted, then gold and silver have one of the fitting properties of a standard.
But gold and silver are not convenient as a circulating medium. Hence paper
money is assumed as a representative of specie. So far very well again. There
was a time when bank-paper was an exact representation of specie, if it
represented nothing else. The old bank of Amsterdam, the mother of the banking
system, issued only dollar for dollar. Her bills were merely certificates of
deposit for so much specie. So far, then, the yard-stick did not stretch nor
contract, while the paper money was more convenient as a medium of circulation
than the specie. But with the development of the banking system two, three,
five, or more dollars of paper money are issued for one dollar of specie on
deposit. The amount is then expanded and contracted, according to the
fluctuations of trade and the judgments or speculating interests of perhaps five
hundred different boards of bank directors. How is it, then, with the
inflexibility of your standard? Your yard-stick is one year, one foot long, and
the next year, five feet long. The problem with existing finance, then, is to
measure values which are in their nature positively, incapable of measurement,
by money, which is in its nature positively incapable of measuring any thing. It
is therefore uncertainty x fluctuation = price.
126. There is no such thing, therefore, in money as a standard of value. As a
circulating medium merely, considering no other properties nor the reasons why
we should have a circulating medium at all, nothing better can be devised than
paper money. It is thin, light, pliant, and convenient in all respects.
127. To make gold the standard of cost, instead of value, would be to
take as much gold as is ordinarily dug in an hour in those countries where it is
procured-—say California-—as the price of an hour’s labor in other branches of
industry equally troublesome and repugnant. This may perhaps be one dollar,
which would make the price of labor a dollar an hour, and the difference between
that price in this article and the usual price of labor in the same
article-—which is rendered necessary now, as the means of acquiring all other
commodities—-is some indication of the degree to which labor is robbed by
adopting the value standard instead of the cost standard of price. But the fact
is that no average of the product of gold-digging can be made. It is
proverbially uncertain. The product of gold, therefore, regarded as a standard
of any thing, is as nearly worthless as the product of any article can be. The
demand for it in the arts is also exceptional and uncertain. Apart from the
factitious demand resulting from the fact that it is made a nominal standard and
a medium, it is not in any sense a staple article. It would be just as
philosophical to measure all other industry by the product of the mackerel
fishery, or the manufacture of rock candy or Castor oil, as it would be to
measure it by gold. The result of all this investigation is therefore this: That
the product of gold, and, for the same reason, that of silver, is quite unfit
for the first purpose we have in view, which is to select a staple species of
labor with which to compare other labor, while corn or wheat does fulfill those
conditions and (2) that paper is just what is wanted as a circulating medium,
provided it can be made to rest upon a proper basis, and represent what ought to
be represented by a circulating medium.
128. Now, what is it which ought to be represented by a circulating medium?
Clearly it is price,--the price of commodities. The pledge or promise
should be exactly equivalent to, as it stands in the place of, the commodity or
commodities to be given hereafter. These commodities, which the paper stands in
the place of, are the price of what was received. The equitable limit of
price is, we have seen, the cost of the articles received. The promise is
therefore rightly the equivalent of, or goes to the extent of, the cost of the
articles received. But the cost of an article is, we have seen, the labor
there is in it, rightly measured. Every issue of the circulating medium
should therefore be a representative of, or pledge for, a certain amount of
human labor, or for some commodity which has in it an equal amount of human
labor, and, to avoid all question about what commodity shall be substituted, it
is proper that a staple or standard article, the cost of which all agree upon,
should be selected.
We return, then, to the Labor Note as the legitimate germ of a circulating
medium.
Chapter IV: Value Distinguished from Cost
129. The second grand result from the principle of Equity—Cost the Limit of
Price—is that the value of labor or of a commodity has nothing whatever
legitimately with fixing the PRICE of the labor or commodity. This
proposition would be deduced partially form what has been already shown; it
requires, however, to be more explicitly stated and more conclusively
demonstrated. It is, as well as the result considered in the last chapter in
relation to natural skill or talent, quite new, and therefore surprising.
130. There is certainly nothing more reasonable, according to existing ideas,
than that “a thing ought to bring what it is worth.” No proposition could
be more seemingly innocent upon the face of it than that. (19.) There is no
statement upon any subject upon which mankind would more generally concur, and
yet that statement covers a fallacy which lies at the basis of the prevalent
system of exploitation or civilized cannibalism. It is precisely at this
point that the whole world has committed its most fatal blunder. It will be the
purpose of this chapter to expose that error so obviously that it can no longer
lurk in obscurity even in the least enlightened mind. To that end I beg the
especial attention of the reader to the technical distinction between Value
and Cost,--a point of great importance to this whole discussion.
131. “What a thing is worth” is another expression for the Value of a
commodity or labor. The Value of a commodity or labor is the degree of
benefit which it confers upon the person who receives it, or to whose use it is
applied. The Cost of it is, on the other hand, as already explained,
the degree of burden which the production of the commodity or the performance
of the labor imposed upon the person who produced or performed it. They are
therefore by no means the same. No two things can possibly be more distinct. The
burden or cost may be very great and the benefit or value very little, or
vice versa. In the case of an exchange or transfer of an article from one
person to another, the Cost relates to the party who makes the transfer, the
burden of the production falling on him, and the Value to the party to whom the
transfer is made, the article going to his benefit. It is the same if the object
exchanged is labor directly. It follows, therefore, that to say that a “thing
should bring what it is worth,” which is the same as to say that its price
should be measured by its value, is quite the opposite of affirming that it
should bring as much as it cost the producer to produce it. Hence, both
rules cannot be true, for they conflict with and destroy each other. But we have
already seen that it is exactly equitable that Cost be adopted as the universal
limit of price,--in other words, that as much burden shall be assumed by each
party to the exchange as is imposed upon the opposite party. Consequently the
accepted axiom of trade that “a thing should bring what it is worth” provides,
when tested by simply balancing the scales of Equity, to be not only erroneous,
but, so to speak, the antipodes of the true principle. Such is the result when
we recur to fundamental investigation. It will be rendered equally obvious in
the sequel, by a comparison of the consequences of the two principles in
operation. That Cost is the true and Value the false measure of
price.
132. But although Value is not the legitimate limit of Price nor even an
element in the price, it is, nevertheless,, an element in the bargain. It is
the Value of the thing to be acquired which determines the purchaser to
purchase. It belongs to the man who labors or produces an article,
estimating for himself, as we have seen, the amount of burden he has assumed, to
fix the price, measured by that burden or Cost. He alone knows it, and he alone,
therefore, can determine it. It belongs, on the other hand, to the purchaser to
estimate for himself the Value of the labor or commodity to him. He alone can do
so in fact, for he alone knows the nature of his own wants. By the settlement
for the first point—-the Cost to the producer-—the Price becomes a fixed sum. If
the Value then exceeds that sum in the estimation of the other party, he will
purchase; otherwise, not. Hence the Value, though not an element in the Price,
is an element in the bargain. The Price is a consideration wholly for the
vendor, and the Value a consideration wholly for the purchaser.
133. As this is also a point of great importance, let us state it again. If
you require and desire to obtain one hour or one year of my services, or the
results of those services in commodities, which is the same thing, it is a
matter which does not concern me,--it is impertinence on my part to concern
myself with the question of the degree of benefit you will derive from such
services. That is purely a question for your own consideration, and determines
you whether the value to you equals the cost to me,--that is, it determines
the demand. Your estimate of that value or benefit to you may be based on
considerations obvious to others, or upon a mere whim or caprice to the
gratification of which others would attach no importance. But it belongs to the
Sovereignty of the Individual to gratify even one’s whims or caprices without
hindrance or interference from others, at his own cost, which is, when the
services of others are required to that end, by paying to them the cost to them
of such services.
134. On the other hand, it is equally an impertinence for you, in the case
supposed, to attempt to settle for me the degree of attraction or repugnance
which there is to me in the performance of the services which you
require. No one else but myself can possibly know that. No one else can
therefore fix a just price upon my labor. Hence it follows that both
value and cost enter into a bargain, even when legitimately made.
But value goes solely to determine the demand, and is solely
cognizable by the purchaser or consumer,--by him who
receives, while cost (or burden) goes to determine the
price, and is solely cognizable by the seller or
producer,--by him who renders. By this means the cost of one’s
acts is made to fall on himself, which is the essential condition to the
rightful exercise of the Sovereignty of the Individual. If you overestimate the
value to you of my services, you endure the cost or disagreeable consequences of
your mistake or want of judgment. If I, on the other hand, underestimate the
cost or endurance of the performance to me, the cost of that error falls on me,
submitting each of us to the government of consequences, the only legitimate
corrective. If, again, I overestimate the cost to me and ask a price greater
than your estimate of the value to you, there is no bargain, and I have lost the
opportunity of earning a price measured by the real cost of the performance, so
that the cost of my mistake falls again on me; while-—the market being open, and
a thorough adjustment of supply to demand being established—-others will make a
juster estimate, whose services you will procure, and you will suffer no
inconvenience. Competition will regulate any disposition on my part to
overcharge. (160.)
135. All this is reversed in our existing commerce. The vendor adjusts his
price to what he supposes to be its value to the purchaser,--that is, to the
degree of want in which the purchaser is found,--never to what the commodity
cost himself; thus interfering with what cannot concern him, except as a means
of taking an undue advantage. The purchaser, on the other hand, offers a price
based upon his knowledge or surmise of what the degree of want of the vendor may
force him to consent to take. Hence the cannibalism of trade.
136. But it is objected that in the case supposed above, while nominally
adjusting my price to the degree of repugnance to myself, I may in fact take
into account the degree of your want, and charge you as much as I think you will
endure. This objection, otherwise stated, is simply this,--that the Individual,
in the exercise of his sovereign freedom, may abandon the Cost Principle, or, in
other words, the true principle, and return to the value, or false principle.
This is, in other words, again, simply to affirm that there is nothing in the
true principle to force the Individual to comply with it, to the extent of
depriving him of his freedom to do otherwise. This is granted. Any such
compulsion would infringe upon the principle of the Sovereignty of the
Individual, which is, if possible, still more important than the Cost
Principle itself. Once for all let it be distinctly understood that the
principles of Equitable Commerce do not serve directly and mainly to coerce men
into true or harmonic relations when destitute of the desire for such relations.
Their first office is, on the other hand, to inform those who do desire such
relations, how they may be attained. If it is assumed that there are no such
persons, then, certainly, the supply of true principles, of any sort, is a
supply without a demand,--but not otherwise.
137. The secondary or indirect effect of true commercial principles in
operation will be, however, correctional, and in one sense coercive, but
coercive in a sense entirely compatible with freedom. It will be to throw the
consequences of each one’s deviation from right practice upon himself, leaving
him free to exercise his own Sovereignty, but free to do so, as he ought, at his
own cost, while they will surround him with a public sentiment in favor of
honesty more potent than laws, at the same time that they will remove the
temptations now existing to infringe the rights of others. It will be seen at
another point that competition, which is now the tyrant that forces men to be
dishonest, will, under these principles, operate with equal power to induce them
to be honest. (160, 206.)
138. An illustration of the entire disconnection between Price and the Value
to the purchaser is found in the one-price store, in existing commerce. Upon
this plan of trade the prices are fixed by the merchant-vendor of the goods, and
each article is labeled at a fixed and invariable amount. The customer has
nothing whatever to do with fixing those prices. On the other hand, it is the
purchaser alone who determines whether the Value of an article to him is
sufficient to induce him to purchase at the price fixed. In these particulars
the operation is the same as that of Equitable Commerce. It differs,
however, in the essential particular that the merchant, in fixing his prices, is
governed by no scientific principle. The prices are not adjusted by any
equitable standard. They rest upon an uncertain and fluctuating basis, partly
Cost, partly the necessities or cupidity of the vendor, and partly the supply
and demand or the supposed Value to the purchaser. Value is thus made actually
an element of the price in a general way, though not in the particular case. The
vendor refuses to vary his price according to the particular Value to the
particular purchaser, but he has previously taken into the account the general
value to purchasers at large. The case is only good, therefore, to illustrate
the single point for which it was adduced,--namely, the separability of Price
and Value to the purchaser,--the fact that they are not necessarily commingled
with each other. The ticket at the theater, the public lecture, the railroad,
etc., furnishes another illustration of the same fact. The price is invariable,
and the purchaser is left to determine for himself whether the Value
equals the Cost; if so in his opinion, there is a bargain, otherwise
not.
139. As respects the propriety of measuring Price by Value, in the first
place, it is essentially impossible to measure Value EXACTLY, or, in
other words, to ascertain the precise WORTH of labor of
commodities.
Cost is a thing which looks to the past, and is therefore certain.
Value is a thing which looks to the future, and is therefore contingent
and uncertain. A bushel of potatoes lies before us. It is possible to estimate
with accuracy how much human labor it ordinarily takes to produce that amount of
that article, and how disagreeable the labor is as compared with other kinds,
and then we have the standard cost of the article, but who will undertake to say
what the value of that bushel of potatoes is as it stands in the market? Value,
remember, is the degree of benefit it will confer upon the person or persons who
are to consume it. That value, it is obvious, will vary with every one of the
fifty thousand persons in the city who may chance to purchase it, and will vary
with the extremes of saving twenty human lives (as it may do on shipboard, for
example) and nothing at all, for the potatoes may stock a larder already
overstocked and be permitted to decay, appropriated to no beneficial purpose
whatsoever. As every one of the twenty starving persons would gladly have given
at least ten thousand dollars for his share of the potatoes rather not have had
them, the value of the bushel of potatoes is anything between cipher and two
hundred thousand dollars.
Take a more complicated case. It is possible to calculate how much it costs,
down to the fraction of a cent (or, more properly, of an hour’s labor), to
convey a man from New York to Albany on a first-class steamboat,--the Isaac
Newton or the Hendrick Hudson for example,--taking into account the cost of
construction, the cost of running, the number of persons regularly traveling
among whom the expense is to be divided, etc. But who will undertake to
calculate the different values of a trip up the Hudson to the eight hundred or a
thousand persons who gather at the wharf at the departure of one of those
magnificent boats? One is neglecting his business at home and going on a
speculation in which he will lose a thousand dollars. How much is the trip worth
to him? There is a bridegroom and bride going off to enjoy the honeymoon. How
much in hard money is the trip worth to them? There stands a poor invalid who
hopes to recover a little health by the cool breezes on the quiet river. There
is a young man fresh from school, just starting out to see the world and gratify
his curiosity. There is a sharper who will cheat somebody out of a few hundreds
before he gets back, and so on. What is the Value to each of these of a
trip up the Hudson? Value is the benefit to be done to each. How big is a piece
of chalk? How much is considerable? How far is a good way? And yet all the
political economy, all the calculations of finance, all the banking, all the
trading and commercial transactions in the world, are based upon the idea of the
measurement and comparison of Values. Even Mr. Kellogg, Mr. Gray, and
others who write as financial reformers, and whose labors in demonstrating the
oppressive operation of interest or rent on many are invaluable, fall into the
same error. Mr. Kellogg has a chapter “On the Power of Money to Measure Value,”
and assert without question that this is one of the legitimate functions of a
circulating medium.
140. It is possible, it is true, for parties to form an estimate of
relative values, based upon their present knowledge of all future contingencies,
and thus to prefer one thing to another in a certain ratio; but the very next
event which occurs may show the calculation of chances to have been entirely
different from what was anticipated. Hence, every change, based upon the
comparison of values, is a speculation upon the probabilities of the future, and
not a scientific measurement of that which already exists. All trade under the
existing system is therefore speculation, in kind, the uncertainty differing in
degree, and all speculation, in kind, the uncertainty differing in degree, and
all speculation is gambling or the staking of risks against risks. The
instrument of measurement is equally defective, as has been already shown in
discussing the nature of money. (77, 215.)
141. In the next place, if it were possible to measure Values
precisely, the exchange of commodities according to Value would still be a
system of mutual conquest and oppression,--not a beneficent reciprocation of
equivalents. This will appear by one or two simple illustrations.
142. I.--Suppose I am a wheelwright in a small village, and the only one of
my trade. You are traveling with certain valuables in your carriage, which
breaks down opposite my shop. It will take an hour of my time to mend the
carriage. You can get no other means of conveyance, and the loss to you, if you
fail to arrive at the neighboring town in season for the sailing of a certain
vessel, will be five hundred dollars, which fact you mention to me, in good
faith, in order to quicken my exertions. I give one hour or my work and mend the
carriage. What am I in equity entitled to charge—-what should be the limit of
price upon my labor?
Let us apply the different measures, and see how they will operate. If Value
is the limit of price, then the price of the hours labor should be five hundred
dollars That is the equivalent of the value of the labor to you. If cost is the
limit of price, then you should pay me a commodity, or commodities, or a
representative in currency which will procure me commodities, having in them one
hour’s labor equally as hard as the mending of the carriage without the
slightest reference to the degree of benefit which that labor has bestowed on
you; or, putting the illustration in money, thus; assuming the twenty-five cents
to be an equivalent for an hour’s labor of an artisan in that particular trade,
then according to the Cost Principle I should be justified in asking only
twenty-five cents, but according to the Value Principle I should be
justified in asking five hundred dollars.
143. The Value Principle, in some form of expression, is, as I have
said, the only recognized principle of trade throughout the world. “A
thing is worth what it will bring in the market.” Still if I were to charge you
five hundred dollars, or a fourth part of that sum, and, taking advantage of
your necessities, force you to pay it, everybody would denounce me, the poor
wheelwright, as an extortioner and a scoundrel. Why? Simply because this is an
unusual application of the principle. Wheelwrights seldom have a chance to make
such a “speculation,” and therefore it is not according to the “established
usages of trade.” Hence its manifest injustice shocks, in such a case, the
common sense of right. Meanwhile you, a wealthy merchant, are daily rolling up
an enormous fortune by doing business upon the same principle which you condemn
in the wheelwright, and nobody finds fault. At every scarcity in the market you
immediately raise the price of every article you hold. It is your
business to take advantage of the necessities of those with whom you
deal, by selling to them according to the Value to them, and not
according to the Cost to you. You go further. You, by every means in your
power, create those necessities by buying up particular articles and holding
them out of the market until the demand becomes pressing, by circulating false
reports of short crops, and by other similar tricks known to the trade. This is
the same in principle as if the wheelwright had first dug the rut in which your
carriage upset and then charged you the five hundred dollars.
Yet hitherto no one has thought of seriously questioning the
principle,--namely, that “Value is the limit of Price,” or, in other
words, that it is right to take for a thing what it is worth. It is upon
this principle or maximum that all honorable trade professes now to be
conducted, until instances arise in which its oppressive operation is so glaring
and repugnant to the moral sense of mankind that those who carry it out are
denounced as rogues and cheats. In this manner a sort of conventional limit is
placed upon the application of a principle which is equally the principle of
every swindling transaction, and of what is called legitimate commerce. The
discovery has not hitherto been made that the principle itself is essentially
vicious, and that in its infinite and all-pervading variety of applications this
various principle is the source of the injustice, inequality of condition, and
frightful pauperism and wretchedness which characterize the existing state of
our so-called civilization. Still less has the discovery been made that there is
another simple principle of traffic which, once understood and applied in
practice, will effectually rectify all those monstrous evils, and introduce into
human society the reign of absolute equity in all property relations, while it
will lay the foundations of universal harmony in the social and moral relations
as well.
144. II.--Suppose it costs me ten minutes’ labor to concoct a pill which will
save your life when nothing else will; and suppose, at the same time, to render
the case simple, that the knowledge of the ingredients came to me by accident,
without labor or cost. It is clear that your life is worth to you more
than your fortune. Am I, then, entitled to demand of you for the nostrum the
whole of your property, more or less? Clearly so, if it is right to take for
a thing what it is worth, which is theoretically the highest ethics of
trade.
145. Forced, on the one hand, by the impossibility, existing in the nature of
things, of ascertaining and measuring positive values, or of determining, in
other words, what a thing is really worth, and rendered partially
conscious by the obvious hardship and injustice of every unusual or extreme
application of the principle that it is either no rule or a bad one, and not
guided by the knowledge of any true principle out of the labyrinth of
conflicting rights into which the false principle conducts, the world has
practically abandoned the attempt to combine Equity with Commerce, and lowered
its standard of morality to the inverse statement of the formula,--namely that
“A thing is worth what it will bring,” or, in other words, that it is
fitting and proper to take for a thing when sold whatever can be got for it.
This, then, is what is denominated the Market Value of an article, as
distinguished from its actual value. Without being more equitable as a measure
of price, it certainly has a great practical advantage over the more decent
theoretical statement, in the fact that it is possible to ascertain by
experiment how much you can force people, through their necessities, to give.
The principle, in this form, measures the price by the degree of want on the
part of the purchaser,--that is, by the degree of want on the part of the
purchaser,--that is, by what he supposes will provide to be the value or benefit
to him of the commodity purchased, in comparison with that of the one with which
he parts in the transaction. Hence it becomes immediately and continually the
interest of the seller to place the purchaser in a condition of as much want as
possible, to “corner” him, as the phrase is in Wall Street, and force him to buy
at the dearest rate. If he is unable to increase his actual necessity, the
resorts to every means of creating an imaginary want by false praises bestowed
upon the qualities and uses of his goods. Hence the usages of forestalling the
market, of confusing the public knowledge of Supply and Demand, of advertising
and puffing worthless commodities, and the like, which constitute the existing
commercial system,--a system which in our age, is ripening into putrefaction,
and coming to offend the nostrils of good taste no less than the innate sense of
right, which, dreadfully vitiating as it is, has failed wholly to
extinguish.
146. The Value Principle in this form, as in the other, is therefore
felt, without being distinctly understood, to be essentially diabolical,
and hence it undergoes again a kind of sentimental modification wherever the
sentiment for honesty is most potent. This last and highest expression of
the doctrine of honesty, as now known in the world, may be stated in the form of
the hortatory precept, “Don’t be too bad,” or “Don’t gouge too
deep.” No Political Economist, Financier, Moralist or Religionist has any more
definite standard of right in commercial transactions than that. It is not too
much to affirm that neither Political Economist, Financier, Moralist, nor
Religionist knows at this day, nor ever has known, what it is to be
honest. The religious teacher, who exhorts his hearers from Sabbath to Sabbath
to be fair in their dealings with each other and with the outside world,
does not know, and could not for his life tell, how much he is, in fair dealing
or equity, bound to pay his washerwoman or his housekeeper for any service
whatever which they may render. The sentiment of honesty exists, but the
science of honesty is wanting. The sentiment is first in order. The science must
be an outgrowth, a consequential development, of the sentiment. The precepts of
Christian Morality deal properly with that which is the soul of the other,
leaving to intellectual investigation the discovery of its scientific
complement.
147. It follows from what has been said that the Value Principle is the
commercial embodiment of the essential element of conquest and war,--war
transferred from the battlefield to the counter,--none the less opposed,
however, to the spirit of Christian Morality or the sentiment of human
brotherhood. In bodily conflict the physically strong conquer and subject the
physically weak. In the conflict of trade the intellectually astute and powerful
conquer and subject those who are intellectually feeble, or whose intellectual
development is not of the precise kind to fit them for the conflict of wits in
the matter of trade. With the progress of civilization and development we have
ceased to think that superior physical strength gives the right of
conquest and subjugation. We have graduated, in idea, out of the period of
physical dominion. We remain, however, as yet in the period of intellectual
conquest or plunder. It has not been questioned hitherto, as a general
proposition, that the man who has superior intellectual endowments to others has
a right resulting therefrom to profit thereby at the cost of others. In the
extreme applications of the admission only is the conclusion ever denied. In the
whole field of what are denominated the legitimate operations of trade there is
no other law recognized than the relative “smartness” or shrewdness of the
parties, modified at most by the sentimental precept stated above.
148. The intrinsic wrongfulness of the principal axioms and practice of
existing commerce will appear to every reflecting mind from the preceding
analysis. It will be proper, however, before dismissing the consideration of the
Value Principle, to trace out a little more in detail some of its specific
results.
The principle itself being essentially iniquitous, all the fruits of the
principle are necessarily pernicious.
149. I.--It renders falsehood and hypocrisy a necessary concomitant of
trade. Where the object is to by cheap and sell dear, the parties find their
interest in mutual deception. It is taught, in theory, that “honesty is the best
policy,” in the long run, but in practice the merchant discovers speedily that
he must starve if he acts upon the precept—-in the short run. Honesty-—even as
much honesty as can be arrived at—-is not the best policy under the present
unscientific system of commerce, if by the best policy is meant that which tends
to success in business. Professional merchants know the fact well, and
conscientious merchants deplore it; but they see no remedy. The theory of trade
taught to innocent youths in the retired family, or the Sunday school, would
ruin any clerk, if adhered to behind the counter, in a fortnight. Hence it is
uniformly abandoned and a new system of morality acquired the moment a practical
application is to be made of the instruction. A frank disclosure, by the
merchant, of all the secret advantages in his possession would destroy his
reputation for sagacity as effectually as it would that of the gambler among
this associates. Both commerce and gambling, as professions, are systems of
strategy. It is the business of both parties to a trade to overreach each
other,--a fact which finds its unblushing announcement in the maxim of the
Common Law, Caveat emptor (let the purchaser take care).
150. II—It makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer. Trade being,
under this system, the intellectual correspondence to the occupation of the
cut-throat or conqueror under the reign of physical force, the stronger
consequently accumulating more than his share at the cost of the destruction of
the weaker,--the consequence of the principle is that the occupation of trade,
for those who possess intellectual superiority, with other favorable conditions,
enables them to accumulate more than their share of wealth, while it reduces
those whose intellectual development—of the precise kind requisite for this
species of contest—and whose material conditions are less favorable, to
wretchedness and poverty.
151. III.--It creates trade for trade’s sake, and augments the number of
non-producers, whose support is chargeable upon labor. As trade, under the
operation of this principle, offers the temptation of illicit gains and rapid
wealth at the expense of others, it creates trade where there is no necessity
for trade,--not as a beneficent interchange of commodities between producers and
consumers, but as a means of speculation. Hence thousands are withdrawn from
actual production and thrust unnecessarily into the business of exchanging,
mutually devouring each other by competition, and drawing their subsistence and
their wealth from the producing classes, without rendering any equivalent
service. Hence the interminable range of intermediates between the producer and
consumer, the total defeat of organization and economy in the distribution of
products, and the intolerable burden of the unproductive classes upon labor,
together with a host of the frightful results of pauperism and crime.
152. IV.--It degrades the dignity of labor. Inasmuch as trade, under
the operation of this principle, is more profitable or at any rate is liable to
be, promises to be, and in a portion of cases is more profitable than productive
labor, it follows that the road to wealth and social distinction lies in that
direction. Hence “Commerce is King.” Hence, again, productive labor is
depreciated and condemned. It holds the same relation to commerce in this
age-—under the reign of intellectual superiority—-that commerce itself held a
few generations since—-under the reign of physical force—-to military
achievement, personal or hereditary. Thus the degradation of labor, and all the
innumerable evils which follow in its train, in our existing civilization, find
their efficient cause in this same false principle of exchanging products. The
next stage of progress will be the inauguration of Equity,--equality in the
results of every species of industry according to burdens and the consequent
accession of labor to the highest rank of human estimation. Commerce will then
sink to a mere brokerage, paid, like any other species of labor, according to
its repugnance, as the army is now sinking to a mere police force. It will be
reduced to the simplest and most direct methods of exchange, and made to be the
merest servant of production, which will come, in its turn, to be regarded as
conferring the only true patents of nobility.
153. V.--It prevents the possibility of a scientific Adjustment of Supply
to Demand. It has been already shown that speculation is the cause why there
has never been, and cannot now be, any scientific Adaptation of Supply to
Demand. (35, 36.) It has also been partially shown, at various points, that
speculation, or trading in chances and fluctuations in the market, has its root
in the Value Principle, and that the Cost Principle extinguishes speculation. It
will be proper, however, in this connection to define exactly the limits of
speculation, and to point out more specifically how the Value Principle creates
it, and how the Cost Principle extinguishes it.
154. By speculation is meant, in the ordinary language of trade, risky and
unusual enterprises entered upon for the sake of more than ordinary profits, and
in that sense there is attached to it, among merchants, a slight shade of
imputation of dishonesty or disreputable conduct. As we are seeking now,
however, to employ language in an exact and scientific way, we must find a more
precise definition of the term. The line between ordinary and more than ordinary
profits is too vague for a scientific treatise. At one extremity of the long
succession of chance-dealing and advantage-taking transactions stands gambling,
which is denounced by the common verdict of mankind as merely a more specious
form of robbery. It holds the same relation to robbery itself that dueling holds
to murder. Where is the other end of succession? At what point does a man begin
to take an undue advantage of his fellow-man in a commercial transaction? It
clearly appears, from all that has been shown, that he does so from the moment
that he receives from him more than an exact equivalent of cost. But it is the
constant endeavor of every trader, upon any other than the Cost Principle, to do
that. The business of the merchant is profit-making. Profit signifies,
etymologically, something made over and above,--that is, something beyond
an equivalent, or, in its simplest expression, something for
nothing.
155. It is clear, then, that there is no difference between profit-making in
its mildest form, speculation in its opprobrious sense as the middle term, and
gambling as the ultimate, except in degree. There is simply the bad gradation of
rank which there is between the slaveholder, the driver on the slave plantation,
and the slave dealer, or between the man of pleasure, the harlot, and the
pimp.
156. The philanthropy of the age is moving heaven and earth to the overthrow
of the institution of slavery. But slavery has no scientific definition. It is
thought to consist in the feature of chattelism, but an ingenious lawyer would
run his pen through every statute upon slavery in existence, and expunge that
fiction of the law, and yet leave slavery, for all practical purposes, precisely
what it is now. It needs only to appropriate the services of the man by
operation of law, instead of the man himself. The only distinction, then, left
between his condition and that of the laborer who is robbed by the operation of
a false commercial principle would be in the fact of the oppression being more
tangible and undisguisedly degrading to his manhood.
157. If, in any transaction, I get from you some portion of your earnings
without an equivalent, I begin to make you my slave,--to confiscate you in my
uses; if I get a larger portion of your services without an equivalent, I make
you still further my slave; and, finally, I obtain the whole of your services
without an equivalent,--except the means of keeping you in working condition for
my sake,--I make you completely my slave. Slavery is merely one development of a
general system of human oppression, for which we have no comprehensive term in
English, but which the French Socialists denominate exploitation,--the
abstraction, directly or indirectly, from the working classes of the fruits of
their labor. In the case of the slave the instrument of that abstraction is
force and legal enactment. In the case of the laborer, generally, it is
speculation in the large sense, or profit-making. The slaveholder will be
found, therefore, upon a scientific analysis, to hold the same relation to the
trader, which the freebooter holds to the blackleg. It is a question of taste
which to admire most, the dare-devil boldness of the one, or the oily and
intriguing propensities and performances of the other.
158. But, you exclaim, why should I sell at cost? How am I to live as a
merchant without profits? Never you mind. That is not the question now up.
Perhaps the world has no particular use for you as a merchant. We will take care
of all that by and by. Just now all that we are doing is to settle the nature of
certain principles. We shall want some merchants after all, and will pay them
just what they are equitably entitled to. Do you want more? I shall now be
understood when I say that the Cost Principle is merely the mutual
abandonment, on all hands, of every species of PROFIT-MAKING,--each
contenting himself with simple EQUIVALENTS OF COST in every exchange.
It will be perceived, too, that the term speculation is used as
synonymous with profit-making, when it is affirmed that that has
hitherto defeated the Adaptation of Supply to Demand. With the cessation of
profit-making there is no longer any temptation to conceal from each other any
species of knowledge bearing upon that subject. At that point gazetteers,
catalogs, and statistical publications of all sorts spring into existence,
giving exact information upon every point connected with the demand and supply
of labor and commodities and the production and distribution of wealth.
159. VI.--The Value Principle renders Competition destructive and
desperate. The general subject of Competition will be more fully considered
under another head. (202.) The consequence here stated follows in part as a
necessary result of the preceding one, the want of Adaptation of Supply to
Demand, and in part from the robbery of labor by the system now in operation. In
the existing state of things there is an apparent surplus of both commodities
and laborers, and the result is that men and women who are able to work, and
willing to work, are not able to find employment. Hence, to be thrown out of
occupation by competition is a frightful calamity, always implying distress,
frequently destitution and wretchedness, and sometimes absolute starvation,
while the fear of such a catastrophe is a demon which haunts continually the
imagination of the workingman, afflicting him with a misery hardly less real
than the occurrence of the calamity itself. It is the tendency and direct effect
of competition to throw out the inferior workman from every occupation, and to
supply his place by the superior workman in that particular branch of industry.
This tendency, direful as its consequences are in the existing state of things,
is nevertheless a right tendency, and society ought to be organized upon such
principles that it should have full pay-—to an extent far beyond what it now
has—-with no other than beneficent results to all. It is perfectly right that
the inferior workman should be thrown out of any employment to make room for the
superior workman in that employment. To retain the inferior workman in any
occupation, while there is in the whole world a superior workman for that
occupation, who can do the same work at less cost, and therefore upon the Cost
Principle at a less price, is bad economy of means,--as base as it is to
employ an inferior machine or process after a superior machine or process has
been discovered,--and any system or set of relations which works out bad results
from such appropriate substitution of the superior for the inferior instrument
must be itself essentially bad.
160. It is now calamitous for any person to be thrown out of his particular
occupation for several reasons, all of which either relate directly to the
operations of the Value Principle, or indirectly to it, through the general want
of the Adaptation of Supply to Demand, which is occasioned by it.
161. The principal of these are: I. Because when one avenue to industry is
closed another is not opened; as would be the case if supply and demand were
accurately adjusted; and hence apparently there is not enough labor for
all. In the existing order, or rather disorder of commerce, there is what is
called over-production. More of a given article seems to be produced than is
wanted, which is shown by the fact that it cannot be disposed of in the market
at any price. With all the irregularities of existing commerce this seldom
happens. The evil does not generally go beyond the reduction of price. When it
does, it is because there is now no provisory means of adjusting supply and
demand. The producer cannot know beforehand, for example, precisely how many
persons are engaged in rearing the particular kind of fruit which he cultivates,
what number of trees they have, the amount of fruit annually consumed in the
city where they find their market, etc. But although the workings of the law of
supply and demand are not pointed out to him beforehand, the law is sure to work
nevertheless. It is inflexible as the law of the Medes and Persians. It will
punish the error, although it did not prevent it. The over-supply may happen one
year, but it will not happen the second and the third years. The persons
employed in that kind of production will find their way into other pursuits. In
a country which should prohibit all change of pursuits, that remedy would not
exist. The evil would have to go on, or be remedied by the starvation of the
producer of the given article. In America, where the avenues to every pursuit
are more open than elsewhere, the remedy is more speedy than elsewhere. Under
the reign of Equity, the evil would not exist, because there would be a
provisory adjustment of the supply to the demand, and, if it did occur, the
remedy would be immediate, because ALL avenues to ALL pursuits
would be open to ALL by means of that adjustment, and the general
preparedness of all to change rapidly their pursuits, together with the general
prevalence of cooperation. (163.)
Still there is, in the nature of things, and apart from the workings of any
particular system, a limit to the demand for every article. When that demand is
supplied, must not the demand for labor cease? Certainly, for the production of
more of that particular article. We have seen, however, that that labor will go
into different avenues,--that is, into the production of other articles. If the
question is, whether all the wants of all mankind will not be so completely
supplied that there will be no occasion for further labor, the answer is
three-fold. First, so soon as the labor ceased, consumption would reproduce the
wants and the demand. Secondly, if this were partially so, it would only give
additional leisure for mental improvement and other means of enjoyment to all
mankind by emancipating them so far from the necessity of labor. Thirdly, the
wants of human beings are infinite. As the lower wants are supplied higher wants
are developed. As soon as men and women have ordinary food, clothing, and
shelter, they demand luxuries, and these of a higher and still higher class. The
gratification of every taste creates a new demand. It is impossible, therefore,
that the demand for human labor, and for all the labor which can be
given, should ever cease. Hence there is no such thing possible as a real
overstocking of the world with labor, or the products of labor. There is no such
thing possible as a real dearth of labor to be performed. With all the avenues
continually open, there will then always be a demand for all the labor that any
body is ready to perform, even down to the inferior and lowest grades of skill.
It will be still more clearly shown, in treating of the remaining results of the
Cost Principle, how, under the true system, the avenues to every pursuit will be
open to every individual at all times without artificial obstacles, and how
there will be at all times labor enough for all. (213.)
162. 2. Because, when avenues are open to new pursuits, men and women are
not now prepared to avail themselves of them. This unpreparedness results
from their wretchedly cramped and insufficient industrial education. This
results again from speculation. Men now strive, on all hands, to monopolize
those occupations which are most profitable, and hence to exclude others
from acquiring the necessary knowledge to enable them to enter them. Hence there
results from the value or profit-making principle a general embargo on
knowledge, and the reduction of all classes to narrowness of information and
general ignorance. Information in any trade or pursuit is made a means of
speculation. Hence the barbarous system of 7 years’ apprenticeship, and other
similar absurdities. Hence, when men and women are thrown out of any particular
occupation to which they have been bred and molded, they are fitted for nothing
but pauperism. Under the operation of the Cost Principle all this will be
reversed. Every member of the community will be a MAN or a WOMAN, competent to
do various things,--not a mere appendage to a trade, carrying from the
cradle to the grave the badge of servitude in the degrading appellation of
tailor, weaver, shoemaker, joiner, and the like. Now, shops are fenced in,
locked and bolted, to keep out intruders and shut up the information contained
in them. Trades are hedged in by the absurd and barbarous system based on Value.
Men who have knowledge of any kind hoard it. They look, unnaturally, upon those
who would learn of them as if they were enemies. As the result, the avenues to
different occupations are everywhere obstructed by artificial obstacles. Then
information of all sorts will be freely given to all. Suggestions will be made
on all hands, aiding every one to enter that career in which he can most
benefit, not himself only, but the whole public. In a word, all the avenues to
every occupation will be thrown completely open to all, and all knowledge be
freely furnished to all at the mere cost of the labor of communicating it,
measured, like any labor, by its repugnance only.
163. VII.--The Value Principle renders the invention of new machinery a
widespread calamity, instead of a universal blessing. The hostility so
generally felt by laboring men to new inventions is not without reason. It is
certainly true that machinery is a great benefit to mankind at large, and that
in the aggregate and in the long run it improves the condition even of laboring
men as a class. But it is equally true, on the other hand, that every invention
of a labor-saving process is, under the present arrangements of society, an
immediate individual misfortune, and frequently nothing less than ruin and
starvation to a large number of individuals of that class. This result comes
from the causes stated above, stated above, which render it impossible for the
laborer to pass rapidly and harmoniously from one occupation to another, and
from the monopoly of the immediate benefits of the saving secured by the
machine, by capital, and all these again from profit-making or the operation of
the Value Principle. It is the same with competition and machinery. Competition,
even in the present order of things, is productive of far more good than evil,
looking to the aggregate and the long run, while it is ruinous and destructive
immediately and individually. Under the new order both will become purely
harmonic and beneficent. (208, 243.)
164. This catalog of the deleterious results of the false principle of trade
might and should be extended, and the details expanded beyond what the limits of
this work will allow. The reader will add, for himself, the monopolizing of
natural wealth, the perversion of skill to the shamming or adulteration of every
species of commodity, the waste of time and exertion in detecting and defeating
frauds and cheats, the general want of economy in the production of wealth, the
cost of convicting and punishing criminals, constructing poor-houses and
prisons, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
It must suffice here to affirm that out of these several consequences of the
operation of the Value Principle results that complicated systems of injustice,
discord, distrust, and repulsion which harmony, and which characterizes, in the
most eminent degree, in the midst of their success, the most commercial and
prosperous nations. The comparison of the present is not to be instituted,
however, mainly, with any condition of society prior to the commercial age,
since different manifestations of the want of equity have characterized them
also. The exhibition of relations of truth in human intercourse could not
precede the discovery of the principles according to which such relations must
be adjusted.
165. The operation of the Cost Principle reverses every one of the
consequences which I have pointed out or intimated as the legitimate fruits of
the principle which now governs the property relations of mankind. In the next
chapter we shall return to the consideration of the results of the true
principle.
Chapter V: Menial Labor Raised in Price
166. The next result of the Cost Principle is one which is not less diverse
from the operation of existing commerce or society, although its essential
justice may to many minds be more obvious,--namely, that according to it the
more ordinary and menial kinds of labor will be usually paid best. This
result follows from the fact that all pursuits are paid according to their
repugnance, and there is less in the inferior grades of labor to commend them to
the taste and render them attractive. This result is qualified by the statement
that such labor is usually paid best, because it is not always so. Severe
mental labor may be more toilsome, painful, and repugnant than any corporeal
labor whatever, and consequently cost more. This point will be more fully stated
hereafter, in referring to the tax of different occupations upon different
faculties. Besides, very little judgment can be formed from the present ideas
upon the subject as to what kinds of labor will be regarded, under the operation
of true principles. As inferior to, or more menial than others.
167. It is certain that every species of industry will be relatively very
much elevated by the mere fact of being appropriately rewarded, and still more
so by the consequent prevalence of more rational notions in relation to the
dignity of labor. The principle here asserted merely amounts to this,--that
whatever kinds of labor actually have in them the greatest amount of drudgery,
from any cause, even from the whims and prejudices of society against them, and
which are therefore more repugnant, will be best paid. The contrary is true now.
Such labors are the most scantily paid. Consequently the more work or burden
there is in any occupation, the less pay. There is such an obvious want of
equity in this that the mere statement of the fact condemns it. Yet the common
associations and habits of thought are so completely overturned by the idea of
boot-blacking, street-cleaning, washing, scrubbing, etc., being paid higher
prices than painting, sculpture, forensic oratory, and the largest commercial
transactions, as they might, and probably would be, under the application of
repugnance or cost as the measure of price, that the mind hesitates to admit the
conclusion that such is the dictate of simple Equity. The principle of Equity
is, nevertheless, clear and self-evident; and while the principle is admitted,
the conclusion is inevitable.
168. The first resort of an illogical and determined opposition to this
conclusion is to fly off from the principle to the consequences of the
conclusion upon the condition and interests of society. These, as they address
themselves to the mind of a superficial observer are repugnant, and even
disastrous to the general good. A closer inspection, however, and especially a
more comprehensive conception of all the changed conditions of society
which will grow out of the operation of the Cost Principle, will reverse that
opinion, and furnish an illustration of the fact that a true principle may
always be trusted to work out true and harmonious results. The objections
deduced from these supposed consequences require, however, to be noticed.
169. These objections are chiefly the following: It is objected, in the first
place, that the effect of this system of remuneration would be to banish
refinement, by placing those persons having less elevated tastes in the
possession of the greater wealth, and those having more elevated tastes in the
possession of less.
This is substantially the same objection which is urged by aristocracies
generally against educating and improving the condition of the common people. It
makes the assumption that the whole people are not susceptible of refinement,
which is assuming too much. The objection draws its force chiefly from the
existing state of society, the prevailing great inequalities in the distribution
of wealth, and the general degrading of the masses consequent thereon. The
result of the operation of the Cost Principle, or of the reign of Equity, will
be an immense augmentation of the aggregate of wealth, and a far greater
approach to equality in its distribution. It will be, in fact, the abolition of
poverty, and the installation of general abundance and security of conditions.
The particular modes in which these results will be attained will be referred to
under other heads.
170. Consequently, in the state of society growing legitimately out of the
operation of Equity, refinement, so far as that depends on the possession of
wealth, will be, so to speak, the inheritance of all, and any objection, to be
valid, should be taken within the circle of the new principles--not drawn from a system of society quite alien to them.
171. Various calculations, and some actual experiments, go to establish the
position that, if the laborer enjoyed the full results of his own labor in
immediate products or equivalents of cost, two hours of labor a day would
be ample to supply the ordinary wants of the individual,--that is, to bring his
condition up to the average standard of comfort,--even without the benefits of
labor-saving machinery or the economies of the large scale. With those
extraordinary benefits the time necessary for such a result will be very much
reduced; if it would not seem extravagant, I should say to one half hour’s labor
a day,--such being the nearest result at which calculation can arrive from such
data as can now be obtained. The remaining time of the Individual would
then be at his disposition for providing a higher grade of luxury, for mental
improvement and amusement, and for laying up accumulations of wealth as a
provision for sickness, old age, the indulgence of benevolence, taste, etc. Of
course all calculations of this sort must be merely approximate. The terms used
are too indefinite to render them more than that, even if the degree of saving,
by a true arrangement of the production and distribution of wealth, could be
rendered definite, comfort, luxury, etc., being always, in a great measure,
relative to the individual. The estimate here stated, however, is the result of
extensive investigations, made by different individuals, and in different
countries, and of considerable actual experiment, the particulars of which will
be stated elsewhere, and, as an approximation, it is believed that it is not
very far from correct. The reason why this two hours of labor is now augmented
to ten, twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen hours for those who labor, and even
then without resulting in ordinary comfort, is of the same kind as those which
have already been stated why others cannot procure labor at all and such as have
been shown to be the legitimate results of the Value Principle. It is, in one
word, because the state of society begotten of that principle is, as has been
affirmed, a state of latent but universal war, and because all war is an
exhausting drain upon peaceful industry. The men and women who work have now to
support, ordinarily, now one individual each, but many, including the wealthy
and speculating classes, the paupers, those who are thrown temporarily out of
labor, the armies and navies, the officials, and, worse than all, those whose
labor is now misapplied and wasted through the general antagonism and conflict
of interests. Let any thinking person take passage, for example, upon a
steamboat, and find himself plied by a dozen or twenty newsboys, each urging him
to the purchase of the same newspapers; let him reflect that all the passengers
present might have been as well served by one boy, and that this waste of human
exertion is merely one sample out of thousands of a general or pervading system
of the bestowal of labor to no useful purpose.
172. Again, the possession of wealth is only one means of refinement, or
rather of the true development of the human being. Labor in itself is just as
essential to that development as wealth. Labor without wealth, as its legitimate
end and consequence, terminates in coarseness, vulgarity, and degradation.
Wealth without labor, as the legitimate necessity and condition of its
attainment, ends, on the other hand, in luxuriousness and effeminacy. The first
is the condition of the ever-toiling and poverty-stricken masses in our actual
civilization; the last is the hardly more fortunate condition of the rich. Labor
is first degraded by being deprived of its reward, and, being degraded, the
wealthy, who are enabled by their riches to avoid it, are repelled, even when
their tastes would incline them to its performance. The rich suffer, therefore,
from ennui, gout, and dyspepsia, while the poor suffer from fatigue, deformity,
and starvation. The refinement toward which wealth conduces in existing society
is not, then, genuine development. The dandy is no more refined, in any
commendable sense of the term, than the boor. Wealth may coexist with inbred and
excessive vulgarity. The fact is patent to all, but the proof of it could
nowhere be more obvious than in the very objection I am answering. The absence
of true refinement and gentility is in no manner so completely demonstrated as
by selfish and wanton encroachments upon the rights of others, and no
encroachment can be conceived more selfish and wanton than that of demanding
that others shall work without compensation to maintain our gentility.
173. Refinement sits most gracefully upon those who have the most thorough
physical development and training. The highest exhibit of the real gentleman can
no more be produced without labor than that of the scholar without study. There
is no more a royal road to true refinement than there is to mathematics. The
experiment has been tried in either case a thousand times, of jumping the
primary and intermediate steps, and the product has been in one event the fop,
and in the other the pedant.
Refinement is, so to speak, a luxury to be indulged in after the necessaries
of life are provided. Those necessaries consist of stamina of body and mind,
which are only wrought out of mental and corporeal exercise. Mere refinement
sought from the beginning, with no admixture of hardship, emasculates the man,
and ends disastrously for the individual and the race. It is indispensable,
therefore, to the true education and integral development of both the individual
and the race that every person shall take upon himself or herself a due
proportion of the common burden of mankind. If it were possible for any one
individual to labor, for his whole life, at pursuits which were purely
attractive and delightful, it is questionable whether even that would not
mollify his character to the point of effeminacy,--whether absolute difficulties
and repugnances to be overcome are not essential to a right education of a human
being in every condition of his existence. The Cost Principle forces a
compliance with what philosophy thus demonstrates to be the unavoidable
condition of human development and genuine refinement. It removes the
possibility of one person’s living in indolence off the exertions of others. It
administers labor as the inevitable prior condition of indulging in refinement,
for which it furnishes the means and prepares the way. This objection, drawn
from the consequences of the principle upon the well-being of society, is
therefore destitute of validity. The balance of advantage predominates immensely
in the opposite scale. The result which the principle works out is the elevation
and genuine refinement of the whole race, instead of brutalizing the vast
majority of mankind and emasculating the rest.
174. The second objection is that this method of remuneration depresses the
condition of genius, and affords no means of obtaining a livelihood, and of
making accumulations, to those who pursue purely attractive occupations.
(99.)
This objection is, in part, answered in the same manner as the preceding.
Genius, as well as refinement, has its basis in healthful physical conditions,
such as result form a due amount of labor and struggle with mental and corporeal
difficulties. Complete relief from all necessity for exertion is by no means a
favorable state for the development of genius, or its maintenance in activity.
The poet who works three hours a day at some occupation which is actual work
will be a better poet than the same man if he should devote himself exclusively
to his favorite literary pursuit. With the knowledge of physiological laws now
prevalent, it cannot be necessary to enlarge upon a statement so well
authenticated, both by science and experience. Less than that amount of labor,
in true industrial relations, will furnish the means of existence and comfort.
Hence, under the operation of these principle, genius has its own destiny in its
own hands.
175. The man of genius who should devote himself exclusively, except so are
as he must labor to provide himself the means of living, to that which to him
was purely attractive and delightful, would of course not accumulate, as the
price of his exertions, that kind of reward which appropriately belongs to
the production of wealth. If he seeks his own gratification solely in this
pursuit, he finds its reward in the pursuit itself. Probably, however, there is
no species of occupation which, when continuously followed, is purely
delightful. If the artist disposes of the products of his genius at all, he is
entitled to demand a price for them according to the degree of cost or sacrifice
they have occasioned him,--less in proportion to the degree to which he has
pursued the occupation from pure delight. The correctness of this principle is
now tacitly admitted in the case of the amateur, who does not charge for his
works, because he performed them for his own gratification. So soon, however, as
the artist, in any department of art, becomes professional, and exercises his
profession for the pleasure and gratification of the public, he is forced to
subordinate his own gratification, more or less, to that of those whom he
attempts to propitiate, which, with the temperament usually belonging to that
class of persons, is extremely irksome. In proportion to this irksomeness comes
an augmentation of price. To be obliged to perform at stated times, to conform
his own tastes to the demands of his employers or patrons, and the like,--all
the sacrifice thus imposed enters legitimately into the estimate of price. It
may be, therefore, that art pursued as a profession may be as lucrative, in a
mere commercial point of view, as any other pursuit.
176. Ordinarily, however, there is a repugnance with the genuine artist to
pursuing art as a profession at all. He desires ardently to pay his devotions at
the shrine of his favorite divinity solely for her own sake. He feels that there
is something like degradation in intermingling with his worship any mercenary
motive whatever. For the gratification of this refined sentiment, how superior
would his condition be, if, by expending a few hours of his time at some
productive industry, which the arrangements of society placed always at his
disposal, he could procure an assured subsistence, and that grade of comfort and
elegance to which his tastes might incline him! There can be nothing in the
vagrant and precarious condition of the devotees of art, in our existing
society, to be viewed as a model, which it would be dangerous to deviate
from.
177. The objection which we are now considering has been, however, already
answered in a manner more satisfactory, perhaps, to those whose aspirations for
the artist are more luxurious, in the chapter on Natural Wealth, under which
head talent, natural skill, or genius is included. (87.) It was there shown that
the subject treated of in this whole work is merely price, in its rigid
sense as a remuneration for burden assumed, the only remuneration which the
performer of any labor can be with propriety receive. If more is rendered as a
free tribute for pleasure conferred, of which the party served must be the sole
judge. (93.) Hence, as the business of the artist and the genius is to confer
the purer and more elevated kinds of pleasure, the whole field is open to him to
compel by pure attraction as liberal a tribute as he may, provided always no
other force is employed. The point of honor would concur with equity in limiting
him in his demand to the mere amount of burden assumed, as if he were the most
menial laborer,--an amount which delicacy and politeness toward those whom he
served would lead him rather to under than over estimate. On the other hand, the
same point of honor would leave to them the estimate of the pleasure conferred,
while delicacy and politeness on their part would in turn prompt them to magnify
rather than diminish the obligation, and bespeak from them an appreciative and
indulgent spirit. In this manner the intercourse of the artist, the genius, the
discoverer, or other super-eminent public benefactor with the public would be
raised to a natural and refined interchange of courtesies, instead of a
disgraceful scramble about priority of rights, or the price of tickets.
178. In like manner there is nothing in the Cost Principle to prevent the
most liberal contributions, on all hands, toward aiding inventors in carrying on
their experiments before success has crowned their exertions, and the most
liberal testimonials of the public appreciation of those exertions after success
is achieved.
179. The third objection to the Cost Principle, drawn from its consequences
upon the interests and conditions of society, is that it does not provide for
the performance of every useful function in the community. More specifically
stated, the objection is this: Labor is paid according to its repugnance; there
are some kinds of labor which are not repugnant at all, but which, on the other
hand, are purely pleasurable, and which consequently would bear no price, or
receive no remuneration; but the performance of these kinds of labor is
necessary to the well-being of society, and in order that they be performed,
those who perform them must be sustained; consequently they must have a price
for their labor The Cost Principle denies a price, therefore, at the same time
that the well-being of society demands one.
180. This objection assumes that the labor in question will not be performed
unless it bears a price, while it assumes at the same time that it is a pure
pleasure to perform it. It assigns as the reason why it will not be performed,
that the laborers performing it must be maintained while engaged in its
performance. To assume this is in effect to assume that in the state of society
which will result from these principles people will not have leisure to pursue
their pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and that they will be obliged to devote the
whole of their time to occupations going towards furnishing them the means of
subsistence. This is again assuming too much. Such assumptions are based upon
the existing state of things, and not upon any such as could exist under the
reign of Universal Equity. The very end and purpose of all radical social reform
is a state of society which shall relieve every individual from subjugation to
the necessity of continuous and repugnant labor, and furnish him the leisure and
ability to pursue his own pleasurable occupations at his own option. It is
claimed for the Cost Principle that, taken in conjunction with the doctrine of
Individuality and the Sovereignty of the Individual, it works out a state of
society in which that leisure and ability would exist. The real question, then,
is whether it does so or not. If it does, then the objection falls. It is
answered by the statements that all purely pleasurable occupations will be
filled by such persons as have leisure, or by all persons at such times as they
have leisure. Being pleasurable, they require no inducement in the form of
price. Whether the operation of the Cost Principle is adequate to the production
of general wealth, and the consequent prevalence of leisure and freedom of
choice in regard to occupation, depends upon the correctness of the whole train
of propositions which have been, and which are to be made upon the subject.
181. The next objection drawn from the operation of the Cost Principle is
that it makes no provision for the maintenance of the poor and
unfortunate,--that, although it secures exact justice, it has in it no
provisions for benevolence.
It has been shown that, in order that benevolence be rightly appreciated and
accepted as such, and beget benevolence in turn, it is essential that equity
should first have been done. Mutual benevolence can only exist after all the
requirements of equity have been complied with, and that can only be by first
knowing what the requirements of equity really are; where, in other words, the
relations of equity or justice cease, and those of benevolence begin.
182. It is the essential element of benevolence that it be perfectly
voluntary. If it is exercised in obedience to a demand, it is no longer
benevolence. Apply these principles to the question of public or private
charity. If justice were done to all classes and all individuals in society; if,
in other words, the whole products of the labor of each were secured to him for
his own enjoyment,--the occasion for charity, as it is now administered, would
be almost wholly removed. Pauperism, in any broad sense, would be extinguished.
Poverty would, so to speak, be abolished, except in the very rare instances of
absolute disability, from disease or accident overtaking persons for whom no
prior provision had been made either by their own accumulations or those of
their ancestors or deceased friends. Pauperism, with such rare exceptions, is
purely the growth of the existing system of commercial exchanges, tending
continually, as has been shown, to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
183. With regard, then, to the few cases of disability, coupled with
destitution, which may always continue to occur, it is obvious that the
principle of science which intervenes to regulate the equitable exchange of
products has no application whatever where there are no products to exchange.
Equity is then out of the question. Equivalents cannot be rendered because there
is nothing on the one side to render. Benevolence comes then fairly in play. In
the same manner as the sentiment of justice is offended by the pretense of
giving as charity what is felt to be due as a right, so, on the other hand, the
sentiment of benevolence is offended by a claim as a matter of right to that
which should be voluntarily bestowed, if at all. I have observed elsewhere the
Rowland Hill would never have received the magnificent testimonial bestowed upon
him by the English people, if he had seen fit to prefer a claim to it as the
price of his services. Benevolence is conciliated, therefore, the moment that
all claim is abandoned, and claims having no basis in right are abandoned
immediately whenever there is an exact knowledge of the limits of equity. In
this manner the Cost Principle, while it does not profess to be benevolent,
serves, nevertheless, as an inspirer and regulator of benevolence itself. While
justice is not benevolence, therefore, the foundations of benevolence are still
laid in justice.
184. In a condition of society, then, in which Equity shall first have been
secured to all, benevolence, whenever the occasion shall arise, will flow forth
from every heart with unmeasured abundance. The disabled and unfortunate will be
the pets and spoiled children of the community. It is a mistake in the
philosophy of mind to suppose that there is naturally any sense of degradation
from being the object of real charity. There never is any repugnance on the part
of any one to being the recipient of genuine benevolence. The tenant of the
poor-house in our pauper-ridden civilization is degraded and made sensible of
his degradation by the malevolence, never by the benevolent sentiment, of
society toward him. He is first hated because injustice has been done him, and
then hated because he is a burden to society.
185. This is the true solution of the question of charity. So long as persons
exist who are unable to support themselves from the products of their own labor,
they must be maintained by the labor of other persons, without rendering any
equivalent, and to be so maintained is to depend upon charity. There is no
escaping from this necessity. Partnership or associate arrangements, or the
theory of Communism, may disguise the fact, but the fact continues to exist,
nevertheless. The remedy for the disagreeable features of charity is not to be
sought by the impossible means of removing the fact, but by improving the
general condition of society to the point where the demands for charity shall be
so rare, and the general abundance of means so great, that there will be strife
for the enjoyment of opportunities to gratify the benevolent sentiment. The
relation of donor and beneficiary will then be alike agreeable and honorable to
both. There is nothing, however, in the Cost Principle to prevent, but
everything to encourage and require, the extension of the principle of insurance
to everything to which it is applicable. Risk tables of longevity and the like,
reduce that element to measurement, and render it as easy of calculation as any
other element. Hence, parties who earn a surplus at any period of their lives
can always insure permanent provision for the future. With reference to the very
small number of those who, from the causes mentioned, may never be able to do
that, the observations made above hold good. They must be objects of the
benevolent regards of the community, and not rely upon any law regulating
equivalents of which they have none to give. Benevolence, being purely voluntary
and illimitable, cannot be measured nor prescribed for. Any attempt to organize
it, or dictate its action, is, therefore, as much out of place as it would be to
regulate politeness by legislation. First do justice and extinguish the
pauperism, crime, and disease which grow out of relations of injustice, and
cease to fear that the spontaneous benevolence of humanity will not be amply
adequate to provide for the sparsely scattered instances of misfortune which may
ever remain as an incentive to the healthy action of that affection.
186. There is a subtle objection sometimes urged against the whole doctrine
of attractive industry, or, in other words, against the propriety of every
individual being employed in that way in which his tastes incline him to act,
and for which his natural gifts particularly qualify him. It is said that genius
or superior natural endowment in any direction is always, in some sense, a
diseased or abnormal condition of the man; that the true type of humanity is the
exact equilibrium of all the faculties; and a consequent equal capacity for
every species of performance; that the exercise of any faculty augments its
power, and hence that, if those faculties which are in excess are chiefly
exercised, the deflection from the true direction of integral individual
development is continually rendered greater and greater. Hence the curious
result, in reasoning, is arrived at that every individual should be constantly
or chiefly engaged at those occupations for which he has least natural
endowment, and which are least agreeable, or, in other words, the most
repugnant, to him.
187. This is an extreme and erroneous presentation of principle of psychology
and physiology; but, having a coloring truth, it requires to be carefully
considered and distinguished. The assumption here made is that there is
one given standard of perfection for universal manhood, which is the
exact equilibrium of all the faculties. It is obvious that, according to this
theory, the perfection of the race would be the reduction of all men to the
common standard, until every individual would be merely the monotonous
repetition of every other. It is not so clear, under this hypothesis, why the
Almighty should not have created one big man instead of so many little ones.
Since economy of means is one of His striking characteristics, as exhibited
everywhere in nature, the probabilities would certainly be in favor of such a
policy. Slight reflection, however, will show that this "Simplistic Unity” is no part of the scheme of creation. “Universal Variety in Unity”
is the law of universe. The theoretical perfection of an exact equilibrium of
faculties has no example in nature. It is an ideal point around which all
individual organizations rotate in orbits more or less eccentric, all of them,
however, when not arbitrarily interfered with, unapproachably distinct from
every other, and hence positively incapable of collision. Individuality is
infinite and universal. It cannot be extinguished, and, if it could, the result
would be to reduce the universe to zero.
188. On the other hand it is undoubtedly true that, where some single faculty
shows itself in any extraordinary degree of activity and power, there is a
certain derangement of the whole system, growing out of, or conducing to, what
may be regarded as disease. Genius verges upon insanity. Too great a departure
from the ideal equilibrium of powers is unwholesome and dangerous to the
physical, intellectual, and moral nature. Hence the arbitrary, and infinitesimal
division of labor without variety, of which our existing civilization boasts, is
a wretched perversion of the powers of the individual. It pushes out and
develops some one faculty to the neglect and destruction of all others, sinking
the manhood of the man in the skill of the artisan. Every other faculty is
suffered to wither and die. The individual, instead of being integrally
developed, is distorted. Men and women are sacrificed and subordinated by this
means to Skill, as they are through Political Economy to Wealth, through
political organizations to Government, and through the church to ritual
observances. Thus Utility, Enjoyment, Social Order, and Religion are overlaid
and smothered by the vary arrangements which are instituted professedly to
secure those ends. A person who has been forced into the performance of some one
function only during life is necessarily the helpless plaything of
circumstances. He is rendered wholly imbecile for all else. All the higher
purposes of his being are defeated by an insane and incessant devotion to some
isolated fag-end of human affairs.
189. Hence it follows that true development is not to be found in either
extreme. In medio tutissimus ibis. That man may be said to be best
educated who has a general acquaintance with the largest scope of subjects,
could with a particular and specific knowledge of some one, two, three, or more
pursuits to which he chiefly dedicates his labors. In the beginning of a reform
movement, while the circle is small, the most useful men of all are those who
are spoken of disparagingly, in existing society, as “Jacks-at-all trades,”--those who can turn
themselves the most readily from one occupation to another. In this respect the
American character is superior to that of all other people. The largest
development of the Individual tends in that direction. With the increase of the
circle, and greater general security of condition, a more exclusive or one-sided
class of talent will find its position, and a greater perfection of details
?a higher composite perfection of
Society--will then be achieved. The highest development of society
demands the existence and cooperation of both classes. The true equilibrium is
that the versatile man shall not go to the extreme of having neither preferences
nor excellences in his performance, nor the devotee to a particular function to
that of having no tastes or qualifications for any other. The point now to be
observed is that Nature rarely, if ever, pushes things to either one or the
other of these extremes. There is no man who is by nature totally indifferent as
to what he will do, nor any so born to a single attraction that he never
develops tastes for any other, while some have greater diversity, and some
greater particularity of tastes, by natural organization. Hence all that is
necessary in order to secure the right distribution of functions is that Nature
be left wholly unembarrassed,--that no individual be driven or induced by the
arrangements of poverty, into, or detained in, occupations discordant with his
individual preferences or desires; on the one hand, and that those natural
preferences or desires be not overstimulated by the same or a different class of
influences, on the other. To secure that condition of things there must be an
equilibrium between attractions and rewards. This is precisely what is
effected by the adoption of cost as the limit of price. The greater the
attraction for a particular occupation the less the price; consequently, while
it is placed within the power of every one to follow his attractions so far as
he may choose to do so at his own cost,--that is, by sacrificing the larger
gains of more repugnant industry,--still, on the other hand, he is constantly
appealed to by his cupidity,--that is, by another class of wants,--to compete
with others in various kinds of labor more burdensome to him, and thereby to
develop and keep in healthy exercise those faculties with which he is less
liberally endowed by nature.
190. Again, if any individual is imbued with the theory that to indulge in
the exercise of his best developed faculties is injurious to his health, moral
attributes, or reasoning powers, by throwing him out of the ideal perfection of
his nature, then that supposed injury to his nature becomes immediately, with
him, an item of cost, raises the price of his labor in that function, throws him
out of it by the competition of others having similar abilities with a different
appreciation of the wear and tear of employing them, and places him in the
performance of something which will call into play those faculties which he
deems deficient and wishes to cultivate. The principle is adequate, therefore,
to every emergency. But as we have seen already that the theory itself is only
rational as a protest against an extreme use of the superior faculties, there is
no doubt that the balance of natural attractions will, in the great majority of
cases, determines the general direction of industry, and the more so as the
increased abundance of wealth renders price a less important consideration. The
true equilibrium will then be preserved, however, by an augmented scope of
attractions, which we have seen is the type of individual development. That the
conditions of attractive industry are supplied by the Cost Principle will be
more fully shown in the following chapter, in which results will be partially
sketched which are more directly in harmony with the flattering anticipations of
those reformers who are most advanced, ideally.
Chapter VI: Attractive Industry, Cooperation, and the Economies
191. We have now arrived at a point from which we are prepared to discover
and appreciate the higher results of the Cost Principle. The view, however,
which I shall but slightly open, of the grand and enchanting prospects
foreshadowed for the race by so simple a means as the mere enactment of justice
in the daily transactions of man with man will be left intentionally incomplete.
The mass of mankind have but little toleration for Utopias. Those who are ready
to believe in them, and who simply demand, as the basis of their faith, a more
solid foundation than airy fancies, will trace, it is hoped, for themselves, the
outlines of the future, upon slight hints drawn from the more obvious operations
of fundamental principles. Those who are still more credulous will feel still
less need for elaborate demonstrations. The great mass of those who have some
aspirations after reform have no ideal beyond the first stage of the results of
true principles. Their present conception will be filled by relations of
justice,--the extinction of crime, frauds, pauperism, and the generally
discordant features of our existing social arrangements. They have little
thought of the positive construction of harmonic society. There is danger that
such persons would be repelled, rather than attracted, by any high-wrought
pictures of the future. They can best be left to work out a higher conception by
their own intuitions and reflections while laboring for the realization of what
they now perceive. There are others, especially among the admirers of Robert
Owen, Saint Simon, and Fourier, whose mental vision is accustomed to the
contemplation of brilliant pictures, and who will be not unlikely to complain of
the Science of Society, as here presented, on the ground that it does not begin
by dealing with palatial structures, magnificent ornamental grounds, operate
performances, sculpture, and abundant luxury of all sorts. To those among this
latter class who trace effects back to their causes, and causes forward to their
effects, who can listen with pleasure to the dry preliminary details of rigid
science, the Cost Principle will, on examination, become a mine rich in
treasures of the kind they are seeking. They will discover that by means of it
we are planting the roots from which will inevitably grow all the higher
harmonic results in society which they have ever contemplated. They will
perceive that true society is a growth from true principles, not an
artificial formation,--a growth from seeds implanted in the soil of such
society as now exists,--the only soil we have. They will perceive that while
their ends and purposes are true, and their aspirations prophetic, their methods
have not been scientific; and such, perhaps few in number, will return with
renewed zeal to the work of reform, through the more modest and unpretending
instrumentalities of the Labor Note and the formation of Equitable
Villages. Others, who have been too long dazzled by the splendor of that
brilliant future in which they make their ideal habitation to be able to look
with complacency upon any practical adaptation to the present wants of mankind,
must bide their time.
192. My present labor is to commend the Cost Principle, as far as
practicable, to each of these several classes without offending the prejudices
of any. I shall therefore, as I have intimated, sketch merely in outline the
tendencies of this principle to accomplish, in social relations, the highest
results that have ever been dreamed of by any class of reformers, leaving at the
same time intact, at every stage of progress, the freedom of the Individual. It
is not those ulterior results with which the reformers of this day will have
chiefly to employ themselves. Those who require to perceive them to find in the
principles a sufficient stimulus to work for their realization, and with whom
the beatific vision would serve rather as a stimulant than as a sedative, will
be precisely those who can fill up the picture without foreign aid.
193. The principal among the higher results growing directly out of the
operations of the Cost Principle may be generalized under the heads of: 1.
Attractive Industry, 2. Cooperation Instead of Antagonism, and 3. The Economies
of Cooperation and the Large Scale.
194. The main features of Attractive Industry are, as already shown, that
each individual have, at all times, the choice of his own pursuits, with the
opportunity to vary them ad libitum. This last, the opportunity to vary
one’s industry, results from the fact that all avenues are equally open to all
by the extinction of speculation, and the adoption of Cost as the Limit of
Price, whereby it becomes the interest of all that each should perfect himself
in various occupations, thereby discovering those at which he can be most
effective, and avoiding the liability to be employed at those for which he has
no attraction or capacity. The freedom to vary involves the original freedom to
choose, which stands upon the same basis. The variety of individual taste leads
to a continual deviation on the part of single individuals from the common
standards of estimate, according to which every article tends constantly to
acquire, under the operation of the Cost Principle, a settled and determinate
price. The ideas here suggested require, however, to be separately and more
specifically considered.
195. How is there any equality established in the price asked by different
people for the same kinds of labor, when the price is based upon the estimate
which each one makes of the repugnance of that labor to himself or herself
personally,--when, too, it is well known that there exists such variety of
tastes, or attractions and repulsions in different individuals for various kinds
of industry?
The answer is first practical: During the three years and upward of practice
at TRIALVILLE, and during two previous experiments, one at Cincinnati, and one
at New Harmony, Indiana, extending to six or seven years of the practice of the
Cost Principle, and of the use of the Labor Note in connection
with it, by several thousand people in all, the variation in all the different
species of male and female industry has not been more than about one-third above
and one-third below the standard occupation of corn-raising, each person putting
his or her own estimate upon their labor. To explain: The standard labor being
reckoned at twenty pounds of corn to the hour, as the yard-stick, or measure of
comparison, no other labor performed either by man or woman--and it must be remembered that under the Cost Principle,
men and women are remunerated equally has been estimated at more than
thirty pounds of corn to the hour, nor at less than twelve pounds to the
hours.
196. The further practical result is that every ordinary commodity, though
liable to fluctuate in price with every change of circumstances, like a
difference of locality, extraordinary difference in the productiveness of
different seasons, etc., soon finds a general level, and has a known or fixed
price in the community, which is never disturbed except for some obvious cause.
Thus, for example, wheat has in this manner settled down by the common suffrage
at TRIALVILLE to cost six hours of labor to the bushel, or to yield ten pounds
to the hour. Milk is ten minutes labor to the quart,--the elements of the
calculation including the whole cost of rearing a cow from the calf, the average
length of a cow’s usefulness for milking purposes, the cost of feeding, milking,
and distributing the milk to the customers, etc. Eggs are twenty minutes to the
dozen. Potatoes are an hour and a quarter to the bushel when cultivated by the
plow exclusively, and three or four hours to the bushel when cultivated by the
hoe. The manufacture of shoes, apart from the material, is from three hours to
nine hours to the pair, according to the quality; boots eighteen hours, etc.
197. Another practical effect, as already observed, is that the principle of
exact equity, when it enters into the mind, operates with such force that
persons on all hands become over-anxious to ascertain the precise truth with
regard to the relative cost of every article, while the general improvement of
condition renders them less anxious about trifling individual advantage.
198. Although commodities thus settle naturally and rapidly to a standard
price according to what is the average time bestowed upon their
production, and the average estimate of the relative repugnance of each kind of
labor,--in other words, the average of cost,--there are, or may be, individual
differences in the estimate of repugnance, which will rise far above or sin
below the average. These individualities of preference for one species of
industry over another will probably become more marked in proportion as men and
women can better afford to indulge their tastes and preferences, in consequence
of a general improvement of their pecuniary condition. Again, those tastes
themselves will become more developed with the increase of culture. The
opportunity for their indulgence will be afforded also in proportion to the
augmentation of the circle in which these principles are practices. Hence it
follows that whatever is more exceptional or recondite in the subject must as
yet be settled by recurring to the principles themselves, the circle in which
they have hitherto been applied being too small to realize all the results.
199. The theoretical answer, then, deduced from the principle, in addition to
the practical answer just given, is this: Whenever an individual estimates labor
in any particular branch of industry as less onerous or repugnant than
the standard or average estimate, he will present himself as a candidate for
that kind of labor at a less price per hour than others, and will, in
consequence, be selected in preference to others, unless the inferior
price is more than counterbalanced by want of skill or capacity for that kind of
labor. But preference for a particular kind of industry--especially when there are facilities for trying one’s
self at various kinds generally accompanies and often results
from superior skill or facility in the performance of that kind of labor. Hence a taste or “attraction” for a particular branch of industry, by lowering the price at which a person is ready
to undertake it, tends to throw that branch of industry, or rather that
particular labor, into the hands of the individual who has that attraction.
200. In the next place, as these two properties --namely, a marked attraction and eminent ability for
a particular kind of labor--accompany each other, it follows that the
best talent is procured at the lowest instead of the highest price, apart from
the case of an acquired skill, which has required a separate and unproductive
labor for its acquisition, and which is, therefore, as we have seen, an element
of cost and price. In other words, contrary to what is now the
case, the man or woman who can do the most work of any given kind in a given
time and do it best, will work at the cheapest rate, so that,
both on account of the more and better work and of the less price,
he or she will have the advantage in bidding for his or her favorite occupation,
competition intervening to bring down the average of price to the lowest point
for every article, but with none but beneficial results to any one, as
will be presently more distinctly shown. (208.)
201. Such are the necessary workings of the COST PRINCIPLE, and hence follow
certain extremely important results. I. Herein is the chief element of “Attractive Industry,” the grand desideratum of human conditions,
first distinctly propounded by Fourier, and now extensively appreciated by
reformers,--the choice by each individual of his own function or occupation,
according to his natural bias or genius, and the consequent employment of all
human powers to the best advantage of all.
202. II. By this means competition is directed to, and made to work at,
precisely the right point. Competition is spoken of by those who live in and
breathe the atmosphere of the existing social order, as “the life of business”,--the grand stimulant, without which the world would sink into
stagnation. It is spoken, of, on the other hand, by the reformers of the
Socialist school, who loathe the existing order, and long earnestly for the
reign of harmony in human relations, as a cruel and monstrous principle, kept in
operation only at the sacrifice of the blood and tears of the groaning millions
of mankind. In point of fact it is both; or, more properly, it is either one or
the other, according to the direction in which it is allowed to operate.
Competition is a motive power, like steam or electricity, and is either
destructive or genial, according to its application. In the existing social
order it is chiefly destructive, because it operates upon the point of
insuring security of condition, or the means of existence. It is, therefore,
desperate, unrelenting, and consequently destructive. Under the reign of equity
it will operate at the point of superiority of performance in the
respective functions of each member of society, and will, therefore, be purely
beneficent in its results. In the scramble between wrecked and struggling
seafarers for places in the life-boat, we have an illustration of competition
for security of condition. In the generous emulation between those safely
seated in a pleasure-boat, who think themselves most competent to pull at the
oar, you have an illustration of genial or beneficent competition--?competition
for superiority of performance--under such circumstances that, whoever
carries off the palm, the interests of the whole are equally promoted. In either
case it is the same motive power, the same energy-giving principle, working
merely at a different point, or with a different application, and with a
different stimulus. (159.)
203. Competition in the existing social order is, therefore, chiefly
destructive, because there is now no security of condition for any class
of society. Among the less fortunate classes, competition bears more upon the
point of getting the chance to labor at all, at any occupation, which,
inequitably paid, as the labor of those classes is, will afford the bare means
of existence. Among the more fortunate classes, increased accumulation is
the only means now known of approximating security of condition; hence
competition bears upon that point. Among all classes, therefore, the competition
is chiefly for security of condition, and therefore merciless and destructive.
It is only occasionally and by way of exception, wherever a little temporary
security is obtained, that examples are found at the natural and beneficent
competition for superiority of performance. That, however, springs up
with such spontaneous alacrity, so soon as the smallest chance is given it, as
abundantly to prove that it is the true spirit, the indigenous growth of the
human soul, when uncontrolled by adverse circumstances and condition.
204. Under the operations of the COST PRINCIPLE, which will be the reign of
equity, the primary wants of each will be supplied by the employment of a very
small portion of their time, and the ease and certainty with which they can be
supplied will place each above the motives now existing to invade the property
of others. This condition of things, together with the substitution of general
cooperation and abundance for general antagonism and poverty, will furnish a
security of person and property which nothing else can produce. To this
will be added such accumulations as each may, without the stimulus of
desperation, choose to acquire.
205. In this condition of security, natural and beneficent competition
will spring up; that is, such as bears upon the point of superiority of
performance,--not only for such reasons as exist and occasionally develop
themselves in the existing society, but also because, under the operation of the
COST PRINCIPLE, every person is, as we have seen, necessarily gratified with the
pursuit of his favorite occupation, in proportion as his superiority of
performance renders him the more successful competitor for employment in that
line,--not hindered by asking a higher price for his greater excellence, as now,
but aided, on the other hand, by his readiness to perform it at a lower price,
consequent upon his greater attraction or his want of repugnance for that kind
of industry, according to what has been already explained. This, then, is the
second grand result of the varying tastes for different occupations, under the
operation of the COST PRINCIPLE,--namely that competition is directed to, and
made to work at, the right point,--superiority of performance, not
security of condition.
206. Under the operation of Cost as the Limit of Price, things will be so
completely revolutionized that, strange as it may seem, it will be to the
positive interest of every workman to be thrown out of his own business by the
competition of any one who can do the same labor better and cheaper. In the
nature of the case it is an advantage for every body that the prices of every
product should become less and less, until, if that be possible, they cease,
through the general abundance, to have price altogether. Under the present false
arrangements of commerce we have seen that it is not for the benefit, but for
the injury of many, that such reduction of price should occur, either through
competition, the invention of new machines, or otherwise. (160.) Some of the
reasons of that unnatural result have been pointed out. (161, 162.) It is, in
fine, because the workingmen are reduced below the ability of availing
themselves of what should be, in the nature of things, a blessing to all
mankind. When the market is said to be overstocked with coats and hats made than
there are backs and heads to wear them. Not at all. It is only that there are
more than there is ability to buy. Those who have earned the means to pay for
them do not possess the means. They have been robbed of the means by
receiving less than equivalents for their labor. Hence, though they want,
they cannot buy, and hence, again, those who produce must stop producing.
They are therefore thrown out of employment, and it is falsely said that there
is over-production in that branch of industry. In the reign of equity, where all
receive equivalents for their labor, this cause of what is called
over-production will not exist.
207. The point here asserted will be rendered still more clear under the
following head. (208.) Along with the extinction of speculation, by Cost as the
Limit of Price, competition will cease to be a desperate game played for
desperate stakes. It will not relate to procuring the opportunity to labor, as
that will be the common and assured inheritance of all. It will not relate to
securing an augmentation of Price, because Price will be adjusted by Science and
guarded by Good Morals, public opinion and private interest concurring to keep
it at what science awards. It will relate solely, in fine, to excellence of
performance,--to the giving to each individual of that position in life to which
his tastes incline him, and for which his powers of mind and body adapt him,
even the selfishness that might otherwise embitter such a strife being tempered,
or neutralized, by the equilibrium of a greater price for more repugnant
labor.
208. III. Competition is rendered cooperative instead of antagonistic.
This may not at first seem to be a distinct point, but it is really so. It was
shown before that competition is made to work at the right point,--namely
excellence of performance. But that excellence or superiority might still ensure
exclusively or chiefly to the benefit of the individual who possess it. Such is
now the case, to a fearful extent, with machinery, which has the first of these
properties,--namely, that it competes with labor at the right point, excellence
of performance,--but has not the second; that is, it is not cooperative with
unaided human labor, but antagonistic to it, turning out thousands of laborers
to starve, on account of its own superiority.
The point to be shown now is, that under the operation of the COST PRINCIPLE,
excellence of performance--the point competed for, whether by individuals or
machinery--enures equally to the benefit of all, and hence that competition,
rightly directed, and working under the true law of price, is cooperative and
not antagonistic; although, as respects machinery, the demonstration will be
rendered more perfect when we come to consider the legitimate use of
capital. (243.)
209. Illustrations of practical operation will be better understood if drawn
from the affairs of the small village than if taken from the more extended and
complex business of the large town.
Suppose, then, that in such a village A is extraordinarily adept with the
axe. He can chop three cords of wood a day, C and D are the next in facility at
this labor to A, and can chop two cords and a half a day. Now, under the
operation of this principle, as shown previously, if they are employed at all in
chopping, they will all be paid at the same rate per hour. If there is
any difference, it will probably be that A, along with this superior
ability, will have an extraordinary fondness for the kind of labor as compared
with other kinds, or, what is the same thing, he will have less repugnance for
it, and that he will, if thoroughly imbued with the principle, place his labor
at a less price than the established average price for wood-chopping. The
consequence will be that the services of A will be first called into requisition
for all the wood-chopping in the village, so long as there is no more than he
can or is willing to do. It will only be when the quantity of labor is greater
than he can or will perform that the services of C and D will be required, then
those of the next grade of capacity, and so on. The point now to be illustrated
is that it is the whole village that is benefited by the superior excellence of
A, and then of B and C, etc., in this business, and not those individuals alone.
While A can chop all the wood for the village, the price of wood-chopping is
less or, in other words, wood-chopping is cheaper to the whole village than it
is when the inferior grades of talent will have to be brought in; because he
does more work in the hour, and is paid no more in any event, and perhaps less
for it. Consequently, again, the cost and hence the price of cooking, and hence
again of board, is all less to every consumer. So of heating rooms. So of the
blacksmith’s work, the shoemaker’s work, and, in fine, of every article of
consumption produced in the village; because the manufacturers of all these
articles, while engaged in the manufacture, consume wood, which wood has to be
chopped, and the cost of which enters into the cost of their products; and
inasmuch as these products are again sold at cost, it follows that the price of
every article manufactured and consumed is reduced by the superior excellence of
A as a wood-chopper. In this general advantage A is merely a common participant
with the other inhabitants; but then, in turn, the same principle is operating
to place each of those others in that occupation in which he excels, and their
excellence in each of these occupations, respectively, is operating in the same
manner to reduce the price of every other article which A, as well as others,
has to purchase. Hence it follows that the very competition which crowds a man
out of one occupation and fills it with another, on account of his superior
performance, turns just as much to the benefit of the man who is put out of his
place, as it does to that of the man who is installed in it, all avenues being
open to him to enter other pursuits, and there being labor enough at some
pursuit for all. Hence it follows that under the operation of the COST PRINCIPLE
competition is rendered cooperative, and that cooperation becomes universal
instead of the now prevailing antagonism of interests.
210. Let us take an additional illustration. In wood-chopping the chief point
of superiority is in the rapidity of performance. In other occupations it is
different. Take the case of a clerk or copyist. Here there are three or four
points of excellence,--speed, elegance, legibility and accuracy. All this does
not in the least affect the principle. The competition may be for the
combination of the greatest excellence in each of these properties, or it may
be, in case there is enough of the business to divide itself into branches, for
the particular kind of excellence which is wanted in the particular branch.
There is some copying in which speed is of far more importance than elegance,
and vice versa. It is still, in the same manner, to the mutual advantage of all
that those persons shall be employed in writing, and in each branch of writing,
who are most expert in it, because that reduces to everybody the price of making
out titles to property, keeping records, and the like, and, as these expenses
enter again into the Cost, and consequently into price of houses
and rent they enter again into the price of board, and so of every article,
rendering the competition again cooperative and not antagonistic.
211. It has now, I think, been sufficiently shown that competition, under
this system of principles, is really cooperative, and therefore purely
beneficent, provided the two conditions above-stated are sufficiently secure:
first, that the avenues be open to every individual to enter any pursuit
according to his tastes without artificial obstacles; and, secondly, that
there be at all times labor enough for all.
Every body will, therefore, be naturally and continually aided, from the
common interest, by every body around him, in placing himself in that position
where he has most capacity to act, which, as has been stated, will, in the end,
be that also, if he has the opportunity to try himself at different occupations,
for which he will have the greatest fondness or appetency. The avenues to
employment must therefore be all open to all persons. It will be as much
to the interest of all that they should be so, as it is now their interest to
prevent it. Now men wish to monopolize certain occupations which are profitable,
because it is to their pecuniary advantage to do so. Then men can have no other
motive for doing so than their preference for exercising these occupations
themselves, which preference must be indulged, if indulged at all, by keeping
out better qualified men, adversely to their own pecuniary interests and the
interests of the whole community around them.
212. But when antagonistic competition is out of the way, similar industrial
tastes form one of the strongest bonds of friendship. In a community constituted
upon these principles, to keep any person out of his true industrial position,
by conspiracy of any sort, would be both a dishonest and a dishonorable act.
Hence it follows that pecuniary interest, natural sympathy with those of similar
tastes, morality, and the sense of honor would all conspire to overcome any
personal preference for a particular occupation such as would otherwise exclude
better qualified men. This combination of motives will be sufficient to keep a
fair and open field for the contest of merit in every department of industry. In
the existing social disorder men are, for the most part, thrust by chance into
the positions which they occupy and the pursuits which they follow. Nobody but
the man himself feels the slightest interest in his being in that place in which
he can make the best use of his powers. If his position happens to be a
fortunate adaptation to his capacities, the gain is his own. It is monopolized
by him through the operation of the value principle, or the benefit, if felt at
all by the public, is so remotely felt that there is no general interest
manifested in the matter, and it is accordingly left entirely to chance.
Consequently, men, considered merely as instruments of production,
are now employed as much at random as the implements of a farm would be, if a
savage, smitten with a taste for agriculture, had installed himself in the
farm-house, and begun by using the barrow for a hetchel, the hand-saw for an
axe, the sickle for a pruning-hook, the rake for a hoe, and so on. Hence, under
the operation of the COST PRINCIPLE, the superior excellence of each
individual in that occupation in which he excels secures his employment in it,
both because that is the point upon which competition bears, and because the
advantage of his being employed in it inures directly to the benefit of every
member of society by lowering the price of the article which he produces
rendering every one anxious to see him so placed and ready to aid him by every
means to place himself there.
213. It has been stated, and partially demonstrated, that the idea of the
liability to an excess of human labor is on a par with the obsolete notion of an
excess of blood in the human system. (161.) With the prevalence of a thorough
and varied industrial education on the part of the whole people, such as is
rendered possible by the Cost Principle, but the details of which do not belong
to this volume; with the removal of all artificial obstacles to the free
entrance by all upon all industrial pursuits; with adequate arrangements for
knowing the wants of all,and for distributing the products of all, so as
skillfully to subserve those wants through a scientific adjustment of supply
to demand; with that complete removal of the hindrances to the free
interchange of commodities now occasioned by the scarcity and expensiveness of
the circulating medium, which will result from the Labor Note as a currency,
converting all labor at once into cash, and the means of commanding the results
of all other labor the world over,--with all these conditions, and various
others of less moment, operated by these principles, the infinitely varying
wants of humanity, perpetually expanding under culture, together with the
tendency to rest and simply enjoy, on the part of those who can, fostered by
conscious security of condition, may be implicitly relied upon to call into use
every degree and quality of human labor which any body will be found willing to
render, even down to the lowest grades of skill, notwithstanding the fact that
those who thus come in, as it were, last will be best paid.
214. IV.--This brings us to the next point,--namely, the Economies of
Cooperation and of the Large Scale. Of the first branch of this subject, the
economies of cooperation, including attraction, it cannot be necessary that much
should be said. Illustrations have already been given of the waste of human
exertion consequent upon antagonism, and the want of adaptation between the man
and his pursuit. (151, 212.) The genius of any reader is adequate to filling up
the hideous catalog to repletion. Equity destroys antagonism, and opens the way
to the performance of every function in the most economical way.
215. The economy resulting upon the performance of labor upon the large
instead of the small scale is well understood and highly appreciated in our
present stage of civilization, just so far as the application of the principle
chances to have been made. It is known, for example, that a thousand persons can
be profitably transported at a trip, upon a magnificent steamboat, from New York
to Albany, a distance of one hundred and sixty miles, at fifty cents for each
person, while to run the same boat, or any boat with like elegance and
conveniences, ten miles, for the accommodation of one individual, would cost
several hundred dollars. It is not yet generally understood that the same
principle applied on land may, and will yet, house the whole population in
palaces, and cause the masses of mankind to enjoy an immunity from want
heretofore enjoyed by the privileged classes only. The glorious truth is not yet
generally understood that every man, woman, and child may, by a scientific
arrangement of the appliances for the production and distribution of wealth, be
rendered infinitely richer than any, even the most privileged individual, is
now. After having seen that lucifer matches can be manufactured and sold at a
penny a bunch by carrying on the manufacture as a business upon the large scale,
the absurdity would immediately appear-?-the waste of human exertion would be
too obvious to escape attention--if every housekeeper in a large city were to
rise each successive morning, go out and purchase a few splinters of pine, with
a little pot of sulfur, and manufacture, by the expenditure of half an hour’s
time from one to a half dozen matches with which to kindle her fire the
following day. It is not so readily perceived, however, as it will be at a
future day, that the absurdity is of the same sort when seventy-five thousand
women are engaged daily, in the city of New York, and twice a day, in boiling
three quarters of water each in a tea-kettle. The benefits of labor-saving
machinery are derived from the operation of this principle, the essential
economy of the large scale. In the isolated household those benefits can never
be applied to cooking, washing, ironing, house-cleaning, and the like. Hence, in
the isolated household, the drudgery to which woman is now condemned can never
be materially alleviated. The facility with which these tiresome labors are now
performed in the large American hotels, in some of our charitable institutions,
and even in prisons, is a standing irony upon the wretched and poverty-stricken
arrangements of our domestic establishments. Any system of social reorganization
which should involve the necessity of individual or family isolation would be,
therefore, essentially faulty, while, on the other hand, every individual must
be left entirely free to seek and enjoy as much solitude or privacy as he or she
may choose, assuming for themselves the additional cost of such indulgence.
216. While the public at large have not pushed their investigations into the
wonderful results which are yet to come from new applications of this principle
of economy,--in the immense augmentation of wealth, leisure, luxury, and
refinement to be participated in by the whole people,--Social Reformers have not
failed to do so. Many of them have reveled in their brilliant imaginings of the
future until they have become maddened at the stupidity of the world, and
denounce with a vehemence, which seems insanity to their less appreciative
fellow-men, the folly and absurdity of our existing social arrangements. The
folly is, however, by no means confined to the Conservative. The Socialist has
proposed no method of realizing the splendid social revolution which he
advocates, other than combinations, industrial associations or extensive
partnership interests. The Conservative has rightly seen in such arrangements
insuperable difficulties of administration, and ruinous surrender of the freedom
of the individual. The demand is now urgent for a solution of this
imbroglio. The Cost Principle furnishes that solution in that method of
its operation which I am about to specify. Herein, then, is the conciliation of
the seemingly conflicting truths of Socialism and Conservatism.
217. It has been already stated that the individualization or disconnection
of interests insisted upon by us has in it none of the features of
isolation,--that there is, in fine, in these principles, nothing adverse to the
largest enterprises, and the most thorough organization in every department of
business. The disconnection relates to the methods of ownership and
administration, not to the aggregation of persons. It is adverse alone to
sinking the distinction or blending the lines of individual property, but in no
manner to the closest association, the most intimate relations, and the most
effective cooperation between the owners of the interests thus sharply defined.
We affirm, indeed, that it is only out of this prior and continuous rigid
ascertainment of rights that mutual harmony and beneficial cooperation can ever
accrue. To obliterate the lines of individual property and administration is
always and everywhere to plunge into utter and hopeless confusion. Such is the
sin of Communism. To interlock and combine the several interests of a community
so that the will of one party, in the management of his own, can be overborne by
the will of another individual, or any majority of individuals in the world, or
his conduct in the administration of that which is his subjected to the
authorized criticism of others, is a species of multiplication in which
confusion and despotism are the factors, and the natural and inevitable product,
in all delicately constituted and well-developed minds, abhorrence and disgust.
Such is the sin of all partnerships. Trades’ Associations, and Fourieristic
Phalansterian joint-stock arrangements whatsoever.
218. Let it be observed distinctly, however, that in none of these proposed
reorganizations of society is the fallacy to be found in the magnificent
amplitude of dimensions, the complex variety of development, the intimate
societary life, the general prevalence of wealth, luxury, and refinement, nor in
the indispensable postulatum of universal cooperation. All this, and
more, lies hid in the womb of time, and the hour of parturition is at hand. The
futility of all these schemes of social regeneration is to be found alone in the
want of individualization as the starting point, the perpetual accompaniment,
and the final development of the movement, and the failure to discover that in
harmonious juxtaposition with the complete severance and apparent opposition of
individual interests lies the most liberal, perfect, and all-pervading system of
mutual cooperation, developed through a process almost ridiculously simple,--the
mere cessation of mutual robbery by the erection and observance of a scientific
measure of price and standard of equivalents.
219. A single illustration will render clear the way in which, out of the
limitation of all price to the mere cost of performance and production, grows
the tendency to aggregation, and the doing of all work upon the large, and
thereby upon the economical scale,--but without partnership interest or
Combination in the technical sense of that term, as differing from
Cooperation. (49, 50.) Take the case of an Eating-House conducted upon the
Cost Principle. If fifty, one hundred, or five hundred persons eat at the same
establishment, the economy is immense over providing the same number of people
with the same style of living in ten, twenty, or one hundred separate
establishments. Hence the large and elegant eating saloon, with cleanliness,
order, artistic skill, and abundance, in the preparation of food, is a cheaper
arrangement than the meager and ill-conditioned private table. The general facts
in this respect are too well known to require to be specifically established. In
the Eating-House, as it now exists in large cities, the economy here spoken of
is actually secured,--that is, each boarder is fed at less actual cost than he
could be in the isolated household; but the saving thus effected does not go
into the pocket of the boarder, nor accrue in any manner to his benefit. On the
contrary, he is ordinarily compelled to pay more than it would cost him to
supply himself at home. Hence, there is no general and controlling influence of
the eating house system to call the population out of their private
establishments and induce them to live upon the large scale, at public saloons.
There are conveniences and agreeable features in that mode of life which address
themselves to certain classes of persons, bachelors with ample means, merchants
whose business is at a distance from their homes, travelers, temporary citizens,
etc., which overbalance the repulsion of enhanced price, and supply these
establishments with a given amount of custom. They fail, however, on account of
that enhanced price, to break up, as they would inevitably do if the price were
much less instead of greater, the isolated household system of cookery, which is
now one of the primary causes of the unmitigated drudgery and underdevelopment
of the female sex.
220. As stated, then, the saving from the large scale now actually takes
places, as it would do under the true system of administration; but, instead of
going to the benefit of the boarders of the establishment, it does first in the
form of profits to the keeper of the house, then in the form of rent from him to
the party who owns the house, and, finally, it is probable, in the form of
interest from the owner of the premises to the money-lender, who has loaned the
capital to construct it, while at the same time the operation of the principle
is restricted, and the amount of the saving diminished, by the cause which
prevent the population generally from resorting to such establishments. Under
the operation of the Cost Principle, all this is reversed. Nobody stands between
the boarder and the saving which grows naturally out of the economical tendency
of the large scale. Nobody receives the benefit but himself. The keeper of the
house makes no profit, but is paid simply an equivalent for his labor, according
to its degree of burdensomeness or repugnance,--less, if it is less repugnant,
than an attendant on the tables, or a cook in the kitchen. The owner of the
house receives no rent, in the nature of profit, but merely the wear and
tear of the premises,--the cost of maintaining them in an equally good
condition (241.); and, finally, there is no money-lender, levying an additional
contribution for the supply of a circulating medium so scarce and expensive as
to be capable of being monopolized. Hence, whoever lives at an Eating-House
managed upon the Cost Principle lives either at a much cheaper rate than he can
live in a private way, or else in a much better style, or else with both of
these elements of attraction combined. Hence, again, there is a potent influence
under that principle, operating upon the whole community to draw them out of
their present solitary and poverty-stricken household arrangements into a larger
sphere of elegance, comfort, and refinement, while at the same time their full
freedom is preserved to remain as they are, at their own cost. The seeds of a
great social revolution are planted, while no prejudice is shocked. There is no
pledge demanded, no premeditated concert of action, no sudden overturn or
derangement of social habits, no enforced conformity, no authorized espionage
and criticism. The change is effected gently, gradually, unobtrusively, and
considerately toward all existing habits and feelings.
221. Nor is the social revolution thus foreshadowed less radical and entire
than that which is aspired after by the most advanced of Social Reformers. It
differs in the fact that it is a natural growth from simple roots implanted in
the common understanding, in the form of principles or mere suggestions of
honesty,--not a splendid and complicated a priori arrangement of details
as a great work of art. The same principle here illustrated with reference to
the Eating-House applies, of course, to the Public Wash-House, to the Infant
School, or Common Nursery for the professional rearing, training, and
development of children, and to every other advantageous arrangement of
societary life. Relieved of the burden of cooking, washing, and nursing, except
as her tastes lead her to participate in one or other of these pursuits
professionally, it becomes competent to woman to elect and vary her career in
life with as much freedom as a man. Then, and never until then, can woman become
an Individual herself, instead of a mere hanger-on upon the destinies of
another. Then, and not until then, can the intellect of the woman be developed
so as to form the appropriate counterpoise to her affectionate nature. There is
not, in our existing society, one woman in a hundred who knows as much at the
age of forty as she knew at twenty. Confined, for the most part, to the same
narrow circle of household affairs, with children, nurses, and housemaids as her
associates, she shrinks mentally instead of expanding, and comes finally to
nauseate, and to object with sickly fastidiousness to those changes in her
condition which are essential to her emancipation. Hence it is only in the rare
case of highly endowed and well-developed womanhood that the Social Reformer
meets the hearty sympathy of the sex in those plans of domestic amelioration
which are indispensable to the assumption by her of that rank in the social
hierarchy for which nature has disposed her, and which, despite of herself, as
it were, she is destined to attain.
222. Again, when these several domestic functions are performed severally
upon the large scale, additional conveniences will be found to arise from
combining the Eating-House, the Laundry, the Nursery, the Lying-in Department,
etc., etc., in one unitary edifice, and conducting the whole upon a plan not
inferior, perhaps, in magnificence and extent to the Phalansterian order of
Fourier. It is not my purpose to trace out these ulterior developments of the
principle. The social philosopher will, from this point, do that for himself.
However magnificent may be the scale upon which the social order, growing out of
these principles, shall finally adjust itself, there will be in it always the
marked distinction from every Social Reform heretofore proposed,--that every
grand public undertaking, whether it be an Eating Establishment to accommodate
several hundred persons or families, a Hospital, a Public Laundry, a Hotel for
the accommodation of travelers, a Factory, a huge Workshop, a Plantation, the
complicated arrangements of transportation and navigation, or, finally, the
Phalanstery itself, combining every convenience and all the functions of social
life on the most extended scale, will still be a strictly individual enterprise,
the out-birth of the genius and activity of a single mind. Hundreds of men and
women may be engaged in the administration, some of whom will be at the head of
the various departments, but all of them rigidly subordinate to the grand design
of the project, or, who will be the despot of his own dominions, exercising,
nevertheless, a beneficent despotism, wherein the highest and best expression of
himself, wrought out in his work, redounds equally to the good of all others who
are related in any manner to the transaction,--a self-elected governor of
mankind, by the divine right of genius or super eminent ability to excogitate
and perform. At the same time, whoever evinces the higher grades of inventive
and organizing talent will have the command freely of the requisite capital to
aid the execution of his designs, limited only by the aggregate amount of
surplus capital in the community as compared with the number of such beneficent
enterprises on foot. This effect will result from the fact that, under the
operation of the Cost Principle, capital of itself earns nothing, and hence that
all persons in the community who have surplus accumulations of wealth will
prefer that such accumulations shall be entrusted to, and be administered by,
those persons who demonstrate the greatest capacity for doing so, in that way
which will contribute most to the public welfare; a benefit in which the owners
of such capital will participate along with the whole public,--in addition to
their right to withdraw their investments in such installments as they may
require for their own use. The ideas involved in this paragraph will be further
developed in the next chapter, in treating of Capital and the “Wages System.”
(230, 249.)
223. It follows, then, that by the simple operation of Equity attractive
industry is secured, cooperation is rendered beneficent instead of destructive,
all the economies are effected, and this still with a complete preservation, on
all hands, of Individuality and the Sovereignty of the Individual. Cooperation
is rendered universal by the same means, speculation is banished, antagonisms of
all sorts are neutralized, a complete Adaptation of Supply to Demand is, for the
first time in the world, rendered practicable, and mankind enter upon a career
of harmony, development and happiness which the experience of all past ages has
been but a painful preparation to enjoy by strong contrast, as dark shadows
relieve the lights upon the canvas of the painter. Let the man or the woman who
desires to participate in the work of installing the Reign of Harmony put his or
her hand to the work.
Chapter VII: Capital, Rent, Interest, Wages, Machinery, Etc.
224. It remains to point out more specifically the operation of the Cost
Principle upon Capital, Rent, Interest, Wages, and Machinery, with the true
relations of these matters to labor Serious questions have been raised, in the
recent discussions upon reform, upon all of these arriving at any satisfactory
adjustment of the points at issue. It has been seen that capital or wealth
already accumulated is one element in the accumulation of additional wealth, and
hence it has appeared to be equitable that such capital, or rather the parties
to whom such accumulated wealth pertained, should have some share in the new
accumulations, in the production of which their capital has been instrumental.
In other words, it has been seen that wealth loaned to and employed by another
in a real benefit to that other, and the question is forcibly asked, why, then,
should not the borrower, in justice, remunerate the lender to the extent of the
benefit received, or, at least, to the extent of some part of that benefit? This
question has never been satisfactorily answered, and can never be answered so
long as value or benefit conferred, is recognized as a basis for
remuneration or price. But we have seen that price rests, according to the true
principles of science, wholly upon a different basis, and that benefit conferred
is no ground of claim whatsoever.
225. As this distinction between the true and the false basis of price is one
of the great importance to the solution of the question now about to be treated
of, I shall be pardoned for stating it again, and , if possible, rendering it
still more obvious. All commerce has heretofore been conducted upon the idea of
an exchange of equivalent benefits. This is what has been denominated the
Value Principle, which has been shown, as well by an analysis of the principle
itself as by the pernicious consequences resulting from its operation, to be
essentially erroneous. The basis principle of true commerce is, on the contrary,
an exchange of equivalent burdens. No amount of benefit conferred by one
human being upon another gives the slightest title to remuneration, provided the
conferring of such benefit has cost nothing to the party conferring it.
To impart pleasure, and to shed an atmosphere of happiness in every direction,
is the true life of all refined and well-developed humanity. To levy tribute as
a consideration for the exercise of one’s own higher nature is to profane the
most sacred things. It is true that the conferring of benefits does, by a
natural effect, quicken the tendency to confer benefits in return, and in this
manner to produce reciprocity; but that tendency is stronger in proportion to
the absence of all claim to such reciprocity. Price, relating solely to what
can be appropriately claimed, has, then, no basis in benefit conferred. Hence,
there is no justification whatever for interest or rent on capital in the fact
that the loan of capital confers a benefit upon the borrower which he would not
otherwise enjoy. Whatever basis there may be,--and we shall see, presently, that
there is a basis for a price, in some cases, for the use of capital,--it
is not the benefit conferred, and the price must not be measured in any manner
whatsoever by the amount of that benefit.
226. Another argument is used on behalf of those who defend the participation
of capital in the results of labor, with no clear distinction, apparently,
between it and the one above stated, in the minds of those who employ it. It is
said that, if I have property which I have accumulated by my labor, and you
desire the use of it to enable you to accumulate property for yourself more
rapidly than you could otherwise do, and I forgo the use of it for your sake,
and to my own deprivation, that I ought to be repaid for the sacrifice that I
make. This position is rigidly correct. It is merely one form of statement of
the Cost Principle itself. It is a statement that the sacrifice made, the burden
endured, or the repugnance overcome on the part of the party making the loan, is
a basis of price. It should be said, to make the statement complete, that such
is the basis, and the only basis of price, so as to exclude the mixed
benefit conferred upon the other. All just price is in the nature of
indemnification for damages. If no damage is incurred, no matter how
enormous the benefit conferred, there can be no just price, and, if the damage
be ten times the amount of the benefit, the extent of the damage is nevertheless
the measure of price. Hence, the Cost Principle does not arbitrarily decide that
there shall be no price for the use of capital, or even that the price shall be
extremely low. It simply determines when a price is allowable, and
furnishes the standard by which the legitimate amount of the price may be
ascertained. It sides with neither of the combatants upon the question, as the
question has heretofore been discussed, but comes in between them and points out
a new line of demarcation between the right and the wrong of the matter.
227. This new line of demarcation runs with the amount of sacrifice which the
owner and lender of capital undergoes in depriving himself temporarily of the
use of it, no regard whatever being had to the amount of the benefit which the
borrower may derive from it. Hence it follows that all surplus
capital--capital which the present convenience of the owner does not require
for use or consumption, and which can be entrusted to the administration of
another without more risk that would be incurred by retaining it in the custody
of the owner (230.)--will be open to loan, without price in the form of interest
or rent. The element of risk is another ground upon which interest is defended.
Just so far as augmented risk is actually incurred by loan, it is, in fact, a
legitimate element of price, being part of the cost or burden imposed upon the
lender. It will be shown, however, presently, that by the operation of these
principles risk will be reduced to a minimum,--to those inevitable, possible
contingencies which may attach to the existence of wealth as well in the hands
of the owner as anywhere else. Hence all capital which is positive surplus over
present necessities will be loaned,--the moral and pecuniary security being
ample,--without price. (230.)
228. But then the objection arises that the real sacrifice made by the lender
in depriving himself of the use of capital, as of money, for example, under the
existing régime, is precisely measured by the amount of interest which
can be obtained for it in the market; since by lending it without interest he is
surrendering the opportunity to accumulate that amount, and hence that the new
rule comes back practically to the same thing as the old one. The fallacy of
this objection would be quite obvious except for the perversion of the moral
sense induced by the corrupting influence of the system in which we live. As it
is, it may be necessary to probe it and expose it. It can be no sacrifice, it is
no burden, it costs nothing, to the honest man, to surrender the
opportunity which the wants of others confer upon him to force them to give to
him what he is not entitled to receive. It has been shown that his is entitled
to receive nothing upon the ground of their wants, or the consequent benefit of
relief which the loan will confer. The argument is this: I recognize that, in a
transaction which I am about to have with you, the limits of my just demand
against you are the same as those of the amounts and claims which I am about to
surrender; but then I find that among other things I am about to surrender an
opportunity which circumstance have placed in my power to cheat you out of a
thousand pounds, and I wish thereupon to augment my demand by that amount. Do
you not perceive that I immediately forfeit all title to the appellation of an
honest man?
229. Risk is stated by all writers on the subject as one of the grounds on
which Interest or Rent on Capital rests, and I have admitted that it is a good
ground of price just so far as the risk is augmented by the loan. Even in the
existing order of society, however, it frequently happens that capital invested
in the hands of another party is rendered quite as secure as it would be in the
custody of the owner. It is possible, by bond and mortgage on real estate, for
example, with an ample margin of value, to render the risk positively less than
would be incurred by the owner in hoarding his wealth in his own strong box, or
entrusting it to his banker. The risks of losing property are in some respects
the same whether the owner retains it himself or permits it to go out of his
hands; in other respects the risk is greatly enhanced, in the present state of
things, by ceasing to guard it personally. Some risks, from the accidents of
nature, are perhaps such that they can never be foreseen and guarded against by
any arrangements whatever, let the property be where it may. These, if there are
such, make no basis of interest or rent on the capital when loaned, as it is a
cost which the owner of the property must endure in any event. Other risks,
dependent on the accidents of nature, are capable of being estimated with
sufficient precision to be covered by insurance. Those risks again furnish no
basis of interest or rent to be charged on the borrower, unless the property is
going to be employed in a more hazardous way. If so, the augmented rate of
insurance falls equitably upon the borrower, and marks precisely the extent to
which this element is the basis of price. Finally, risks are incurred, now, by
the chances of speculation which attend nearly every use of capital, and by the
prevailing habits of dishonesty which grow out of speculation, the want of any
known standard of honesty, the general prevalence of poverty, distress, and
commercial revulsions, together with the consequent want of security of
condition,--in other words, out of the want of any knowledge in the public mind
of what honesty is, and the want of such conditions of the individual as render
honesty possible. Under the operation of the Cost Principle speculation is
extinguished, and the dishonesty which grows out of that root is extinguished
along with it. Poverty, pecuniary distress, and commercial evulsions will cease,
and a general security of condition will be achieved; and along with these
changes will cease the temptations and constraint of circumstances, which force
men now into dishonest practices, against the protest of their consciences, and
to the absolute loathing of the real man within. An exact standard of honesty
will exist in the mind of everyone. Public sentiment will become as stringent in
relation to the right and wrong of every commercial transaction as it is now in
regard to bribe-taking and perjury; and, finally, every man, woman, and child
will be a banker, with a reputation to preserve untarnished, as the sole
condition of enjoying merely commercial advantages and facilities, worth more
than the most unlimited credit in the existing order of commercial affairs.
Dishonesty, therefore, will cease along with the cessation of speculation or
profit-making, and with the inauguration of these new principles of society. It
is fruit which grows upon the tree which is now cultivated, not upon that which
we are proposing to plant.
230. It follows from these considerations that all that class of risks,--now
by far the most considerable,--which arise out of the contingencies of
speculative commerce and the prevalent dishonestly of commercial nations appear
as soon as true principles are in operation. Hence they cease to be taken into
account as a basis of interest or rent of capital. The lender lends with entire
confidence, resting upon the security of the property loaned,--which will remain
in some form always on hand to meet his demand,--the actual risks from the
accidents of nature being covered, so far as practicable, by insurance. He
recognizes in principle that his capital earns nothing: hence, if it is surplus
with him,--that is, if he desires to make no other present use of it than merely
to preserve it,--it becomes at first immaterial to him whether it remains in his
own custody or in the custody of a friend, while, in the second place, it is a
relief to him to be freed from its administration in the intermediate time; and,
finally, he will be, along with all the rest of the community, a participant in
the benefits which will result to the whole public from having it occupied in
any enterprise conducted upon the Cost Principle, Hence again it follows, as
stated in the preceding chapter (222.), that “whoever evinces the highest grades
of inventing and organizing talent will have the command, freely, of the
requisite capital to aid the execution of his designs, limited only by the
aggregate amount of surplus capital in the community, as compared with the
number of such beneficent enterprises on foot.”
231. It is nevertheless true that under the operation of these principles
there are circumstances in which the use of capital is fairly a matter of price.
Such is the case whenever the capital loaned is not a surplus above present
needs, and when, consequently, to make the loan at all is to postpone one’s own
present enjoyment, and hence to endure a sacrifice,--to assume cost. It is the
same with labor done for another at a time when it is an inconvenience to
perform it. To render this distinction, and also the difference between the
operation of true principles and of the present false principles, more obvious,
let us assume an illustrative case.
Suppose twenty families of emigrants landing in Oregon. All need houses
forthwith. But houses for all cannot be built at once. It is assumed, now, that
it is morally and economically right that those who are willing to give the
largest amount of their present wealth or future labor for the assistance of the
others should have their houses built first, that the enhancement of price in
consideration of credit is in the nature of interest, and hence that interest is
right.
The answer is this: Cost has its positive and negative aspect. It includes,
1. Active performance of painful labor; 2. Passive suffering, sacrifice,
deprivation, or endurance. Under this second head I legitimately charge a price
for the surrender of the use of capital (my labor being also capital), at any
time when it would be really advantageous to me to use it for myself; but the
exact measure of the price of such surrender is the amount of that
sacrifice,--not the amount of the benefit which I shall confer on another by
making it. It is legitimate that the party who postpones building at a sacrifice
to himself for the accommodation of another shall charge an enhanced price. So
far we seem to go toward admitting the basis of interest, which is assumed. This
enhancement of price is entirely different, however, from interest on money, as
now in use. Such as it is, it is not only entirely harmonious with, but is
absolutely demanded by, the Cost Principle, the foundation of the charge being
the cost of pain endured.
232. You are right in assuming that, in the case put, an enhanced price
should be charged. You are wrong in assuming that the measure of that
enhanced price is the amount of present wealth or future labor
which the several parties are respectively willing to give to obtain the
accommodation. Those parties will be willing to give most who stand in want of
shelter; in other words, those who suffer most from being unhoused; in other
words, again, the weak and feeble, the invalid, the unprotected women and
children. They are willing to give or promise most, because their wants are
greatest; in other words, because the value to them of comfortable shelter is
greater than it is to the robust and enduring. This, then, is the value
principle, or the supply-and-demand principle, as it is sometimes
called,--the false principle of commerce which now prevails,--the antipodes of
the Cost Principle,--the true principle of commerce, which will prevail under
the reign of Equity.
233. Let us see now the application of the Cost Principle to the case in
hand. An enhanced price is to be charged by those who postpone their own
accommodation, but that enhancement is measured by the amount of
sacrifice or inconvenience suffered. Consequently the stronger, the healthy, and
those most accustomed to hardships, will postpone their own accommodation for
less augmentation of price than others, and the weak and suffering will be
housed first, as they out to be morally, and at the cheapest
rate, as the ought to be economically. A false principle always puts
on the guise of a true principle. Hence, both the Value Principle and the
Cost Principle promise the same thing, and will begin by building the
houses of those who are in the greatest want first; but the Value Principle robs
the weak for whom it builds, during the process, and then builds more
magnificently for the strong, making hewers of wood and drawers of water of
water of the weak for ever afterward. It is again seen, therefore, that the
Value, or Supply-and-Demand Principle is the essential element of
the civilized cannibalism which now prevails, and the Cost Principle the
essential element of true or harmonic relations among men.
234. There is still another ground upon which a defense of interest is set
up. It is said that trees grow, or, in other words, that property has a natural
tendency to increase, and hence that a smaller amount of property in hand now
is, upon natural principles, worth as much as a larger amount to come into
possession one, two, or three years hence, and hence, again, that I ought to
receive more in payment of a debt which is postponed, which is again in the
nature of interest.
It has been stated that, in the case of a real inconvenience occasioned by a
delay, a price is equitably paid. That admission does not, however, affect the
case now put. Cases must be distinguished. It is not true that all wealth
increases naturally by time. Some does so, while other kinds deteriorate. Let us
apply the principle, however, to the case of an actual increase. It is a
consequence of the Cost Principle that natural wealth bears no price;
consequently the increase of natural wealth bears no increased price. For
example: if cattle increase naturally upon the open prairie, and no human labor
is bestowed upon their care, they are the common wealth of all mankind. If a
given amount of labor is bestowed upon the care of a drove of one hundred, that
amount of labor, or its equivalent, is the legitimate price of the drove. If,
then, a drove of one hundred and fifty can be cared for just as well by the same
labor, the legitimate price of the larger drove will be precisely the same as
that of the smaller, for not value but cost is the limit of price.
Hence, under the operation of the Cost Principle, there is no sacrifice
to me in postponing the receipt of property due to me on the ground of its
prospective natural increase, for, if there is no human labor added to produce
the increase, the price remains the same, and I can at the future day purchase
the larger quantity at the same rate as I should now give for the smaller. And
again, if human labor contributes to the increase, then it is not natural or
spontaneous increase, and there will be an augmentation of price; but in that
case the augmentation will be merely a precise equivalent of human labor so
bestowed, so that it becomes entirely indifferent with me whether I have the
property now in possession and bestow upon it the necessary labor myself, or
whether it remains in the possession of another, who bestows the labor, and to
whom, at the expiration of the term, I give merely an equivalent,--that is, an
equal amount of labor in some other form. Hence, while there is, under the
auspices of the Value Principle, which now governs property relations and
apparent sacrifice from the postponement of payment on the ground of natural
increase, there is no ground of sacrifice, and consequently no basis for
interest, under the Cost Principle.
235. I anticipate an objection like this. What is said here of natural wealth
supposes an abundance of that species of wealth. What is said of the cattle on
the prairie may be all right if there are enough cattle for all. But so soon as
a scarcity occurs, will anyone who has possession of a drove divide with others
for a due proportion of the labor he has bestowed upon it?
This is a mere question as to what men will do under the pressure of
temptation to do wrong. It is clear that the only right the individual has to
the drove more than others results from the labor he has bestowed upon it. That
makes it his property. He can refuse to dispose of it if he requires it for his
own use. If he does dispose of it, the just measure of price is the amount of
labor bestowed. As he cannot augment that price, if he acts justly, by retaining
it while pressed by the wants of others to dispose of it, the temptation to
retain more than he requires for his own wants is removed. There is no motive
left to act against his humanity, and, as humanity is an element in the nature
of every man, it will of course act to induce him to dispose of what he can
spare.
236. Still the objection is not fully answered without this additional
statement. It is easy to act upon the true principle,--that is, there is less
temptation to deviate from it,--just in proportion to the prevalence of general
abundance and the complete adaptation of supply to demand; but, on the other
hand, the greater prevalence of abundance and a more perfect adaptation of
supply to demand grow directly out of the adoption of the principle. The
exercise of the principle will create the atmosphere in which it can itself live
with a more and more perfect life. A false principle now prevents the
development and proper distribution of wealth. It is no impeachment of the true
principle that, under the pressure of want created by the false one, there is a
strong temptation to act in turn upon the false instead of the true one.
237. It will be seen, then, that although the Cost Principle allows sometimes
of an augmentation of price on the ground of delay of payment, such augmentation
is quite different from interest on money, as now understood. It is,
nevertheless, the spice of truth contained in the proposition that delay is a
sacrifice which gives plausibility to this argument for interest.
238. Interest differs from any such augmentation of price: 1. Because it
relates to the value of benefit of the accommodation to the receiver, and not to
the sacrifice or cost to the grantor. 2. Because it goes by rule, and, even when
it professes to be based on cost, does not individualize the cases of real
sacrifice, apparent sacrifice, and no sacrifice. 3. Because it claims to be
based, in part, on the natural increase of wealth, whereas all natural wealth,
and consequently the increase of natural wealth, is no legitimate basis of price
whatsoever.
Everyone must admit the essential justice of the Cost Principle in its
primary statement,--namely, that as much burden as you take for my sake so much
am I bound to take for your sake. The logical consequences of that admission
sweep all interest out of existence, so far as interest is an admission of the
right of capital to accumulate more capital, and vindicate the claim of all
mankind to the equal enjoyment of every species of natural wealth.
239. The reader must distinguish well between capital itself, and the
capacity of capital of itself to make additional accumulations. The Cost
Principle makes no attack upon capital. It recognizes capital as the legitimate
accumulations of labor It simply denies that capital itself has any legitimate
power, when not used by the owner, to accumulate more capital for him. But what,
cries the fat citizen who lives on his rents and whose ideas are steeped in the
actual routine of commerce, what is the use of capital which produces no income?
It is of use, my good friend, simply for the purpose of being used. It is of use
in the same manner, and for the same purpose, as honey accumulated in the hive
is of use to the bees. Honey is made for the purpose of being consumed. From the
time the bees cease to work, their store of wealth, ceasing to augment, begins
to decrease. No contrivance has ever been hit upon among them by which the honey
itself should go on making more honey after the bees retire from business.
Hence, among bees, the rich do not become richer, nor the poor poorer, except in
proportion as they work and eat. Under the operation of the true principles of
industry and commerce the same will be true of mankind. Accumulations of wealth
will be an object of ambition then, as now, because, so long as they last, they
will exempt the owner from toil, if he chooses to be exempt. The man who has
wealth will be in the condition of a man who has done his work. He can acquire
wealth through his own labor, or through donations, bequests, or inheritance
from friends. His capital will be invested in houses, shops, machinery,
improvements upon lands, the Labor Notes of others, in everything, in fact,
which is legitimately property, precisely as now; but such investments will
bring him no rents, profits, or interest, as an augmentation of his capital.
Whatever he withdraws, converts into a consumable shape, and consumes, will be
so far a diminution of his capital stock, as it will be obvious to every candid
mind that it should.
240. Let us look a little more specifically into this operation of the
principle, as relates to the rent of lands and houses, the use of machinery, and
the like. We have already noticed the effect as relates to the price of land
when sold. (82.) On the same grounds there stated, and elsewhere illustrated,
the rent of lands is nothing, provided they are maintained in as good a
condition, in all respects, as that in which they were when received by him who
hires them. If the owner maintains them in that condition, manuring them,
fencing them, etc., then the rent is the equivalent of the cost of doing so. If
the hirer puts the lands in a better condition than they were in when he
received them, the price is due from the owner and renter of the lands to him,
inverting the present order of payment, and is measured by the cost of such
augmentation of value. So, if the owner sells the lands, it will be remembered
that the price is the cost of the successive augmentations of value upon the
soil since the land was in its natural state, and which still remain with it.
Hence it follows that not only is all speculation on land extinguished, but
along with it all temptation to monopolize the soil. There is no advantage in
owning land which one does not want for his present uses, except this,--that one
my foresee the probability of his requiring a particular lot for his subsequent
private occupation, and may, for that reason, desire to retain the control of
it, or rather the right which ownership confers to resume the control of it at a
future time. The ownership of the disposable improvements or augmented value
upon the soil may also be as convenient an investment for one’s surplus wealth
as any other, since that can at any time be converted, by sale, into consumable
property, to supply his wants. On the other hand, there is no advantage on the
part of him who cultivates land in owning the land over hiring it of another,
except in the permanency of his tenure. As a mere tenant, he may be required to
remove at the expiration of his term for the convenience of another, but, so far
as the profitableness of his occupancy is concerned, it is precisely the same
whether he owns or hires.
241. As relates to the hiring of houses and structures of all sorts, the
operation of the principle is the same. The rent is a mere equivalent of cost to
the wear and tear of the premises. If the tenant keeps them in thorough repair,
so that there is no depreciation of value, the rent is zero. If on the other
hand, the deterioration is suffered to go on, the annual amount of that
deterioration, as averaged upon the term which the property may last, is the
annual rent, so that when the property is worn out the owner will have received
a full equivalent for it, and have kept his capital good by other investments,
or have consumed it by supply his own wants. Suppose, for example, a house upon
a money calculation (all such calculations will be finally resolved into hours
of labor or pounds of corn) costs ten thousand dollars, and is estimated to be
capable of lasting two hundred years; the annual rent of it will then be fifty
dollars per annum. The owner of such a building will then have an annual income
of fifty dollars per annum in addition to his earnings from his own labor, which
he will consume if he chooses, and at the expiration of the term of two hundred
years the whole will be exhausted. If he owns such a property, and wishes to
consume it more rapidly, he can sell it to such persons as wish to preserve
their capital, and use up the proceeds. It follows that the more permanent the
structure the less the rent, so that buildings capable of defying the inroads of
time,--stone structures and the like, for example,--will command no rent at all.
Still this is perfectly harmonious, since such edifices are a safe means of
investing capital, which really earns nothing let it be invested where it may,
and which can be reconverted at any time into consumable property by sale. Where
capital earns nothing, selling is just as advantageous as renting, since renting
is really selling piecemeal instead of in the gross. Hence, under those
circumstances, it is no objection to the purchaser who has capital to invest
that the stone house will bring no rent.
242. But it may be objected that, if persons were able to hire stone houses
free of rent, they would not hire others of more perishable material. Clearly
not, if there were enough of the more permanent ones to supply the demand. If
there were nearly enough, the less permanent and consequently more expensive
ones would be less rentable and less salable, and would therefore offer a less
secure investment for the capitalist. Hence, again, the tendency of this
operation of the principle is to force the capitalist to build indestructible
edifices, and, finally, to house the whole population free of rent? Is that
consummation to be deplored? But at that point, urges the objector, houses cease
to be salable; hence they cease to be property convertible into consumable
products, and there will no longer be any motive with the possessor of surplus
wealth to construct houses at all. Precisely so. But that point is just the
point at which all the houses that are required by the whole people have been
already built. Is there any calamity in ceasing to provide a supply when there
is no longer any demand? It will be high time, then, that surplus capital shall
be invested in other provisions for human wants, in loans to genius for the
working out of new designs, and the like. There need be no fear, with the
ever-rising scale of luxury and refinement, that there will occur any glut of
the aggregate demand for such surplus accumulations.
243. The operation of the principle is again the same with reverence to
machinery, and hence the Cost Principle settles triumphantly, as nothing else
can, this, the most vexatious question perhaps of modern economical science. The
machine earns nothing. The capital invested in it is merely kept good for the
owner. The dividend due to the machine is solely the wear and tear of the
machine. Hence machinery ceases to work against the laborer, and begins to work
exclusively for him. Every member of community comes at once to participate
equally in all the advantages of every labor-saving process. Wealth has no
longer any monopoly of those advantages. Cost being the limit of price, the
price of every product is reduced to every purchaser by just as much as the cost
of its production is diminished by the aid of machinery. Hence machinery, like
competition, now the enemy of the laborer, will be converted into his
co-operating servant and most efficient benefactor.(159,163,208.)
244. I must not omit, before closing this chapter, to notice the remaining
ground upon which the habit of paying interest on money, and consequently rent
on capital, now rests, and along with it the power of capital over
labor,--namely, the scarcity and expensiveness of the circulating medium
hitherto in use. There is not enough of the so-called precious metals to serve
the purposes of commerce as a proper medium of exchange, there intrinsic value
and insufficient supply making them the subjects of monopoly in the hands of the
money-dealers. This point has been already adverted to, and the remedy shown to
be the substitution of the Labor Note.(77.)
245. It will be appropriate now also to say a few words in relation to the
capacity of the individual Labor Note to expand into a general system of
currency. As that capacity depends somewhat upon the prevalence of confidence
consequent upon a general habit of honesty in the community, it could not be so
favorably presented until the power of the Cost Principle in operation, to
engender that habit, had been previously shown.
246. In every small community in which the Labor Note is used, there will be
very soon some one individual whose notes will come more into use than those of
others,--the storekeeper, for example, in the village. It will be safe for him
to issue Labor Notes to any extent which he can redeem in his own labor, in
goods from his shelves, or in the Labor Notes of others. His business will bring
him continually into possession of the Labor Notes of all his customers,--at
first only in payment for his own labor in serving them,--the cash cost of the
goods being paid in cash,--but, finally, with the extension of the system which
we are now supposing, for the original cost of the goods as well. Having these
notes in possession, it will be the same thing whether he puts them in
circulation, or whether he puts his own notes in circulation for an equal amount
and retains those of his customers as the means of redemption. Convenience will
be in favor of the latter method, so far as it shall be found in practice to be
safe; which will be in proportion to the growth of the general habit of honesty;
which will be again in exact proportion to the general adoption of the Cost
Principle as the governing principle of commerce. Wherever the honesty of the
storekeeper can be entirely relied upon, guarded as it will be by the usage of
keeping his books entirely open at all times to the inspection of the public,
the practice may grow up of each inhabitant of the village exchanging Labor
Notes with him for as much currency as he requires for his own use, and issuing
the notes of the storekeeper instead of his own. In this manner the storekeeper
becomes the village banker, and makes out and signs all the currency in use in
his neighborhood, and, as the doing so becomes a burden, charges the cost upon
every issue. By this means the detail of each person’s signing and issuing his
own notes will be finally avoided, and the banking of the village surrendered
into the hands of one person. Every movement should begin, however, for safety,
in general individual banking, much in the same manner as it will be found
expedient and cheaper in practice, in the early stages of experiment under the
Cost Principle, to go back to the manufacture by hand of many articles which are
manufactured outside by the aid of machinery, and intrinsically, of course, at a
much cheaper rate.
247. The system of banking in Labor Notes by the wholesale, or by one
individual for a village, neighborhood or other community, thus begun, may be
extended to the larger towns, and finally to the cities. In the large towns and
cities, instead of the business being a mere appendage to the store or post
office, it will become an independent branch of business by itself,--the banker
issuing his own notes against those of smaller country bankers held in deposit,
as theirs in turn are issued against those of a still smaller class deposited
with them, and these again finally against the primary notes of the citizens
generally. The notes of the metropolitan bankers will then become a national
currency, issued without interest, to the whole community, and at no expanse
beyond the cost of the mere labor involved in each exchange or issue.
248. It is obvious that such a system of banking is only adapted to a state
of society in which there is a high state of confidence in individual good
faith. It will be equally obvious, however, to every reader who has rightly
apprehended the drift of this treatise, that such a condition of society will be
the legitimate result of the application of right principles. It will be alike
obvious to everyone who reflects that no true order of society can
exist,--the problem to be worked out,--while bad faith and general dishonesty
remains. The system of currency here slightly developed is adapted to society
expurgated of those elements. Its benefits are immense. The fact that we cannot
participate in them now may serve to remind us of the sacrifice we incur by
adhering to principles which beget mutual overreaching and bad faith as their
legitimate progeny.
249. We come, finally, to the consideration of the much-abused “Wages
System.” To escape which Social Reformers of all schools have proposed rushing
into combinations of interest of some sort, to the destruction, as we have seen,
of individual sovereignty and freedom. The concrete of our existing labor and
commercial arrangements is felt to be disharmonic and oppressive; hence every
feature of it is liable to be denounced in turn, in the absence of corrective
scientific discrimination between what is fundamentally right and wrong in the
system. It is in consequence of this liability that Individuality has fallen
into disrepute among Reformers, as if in it were the essential element of
discord, whereas it has been shown that Individuality is the sole basis of all
harmonic adjustment. In like manner the relation of employer and employed is
stigmatized daily as vicious in itself, and the ideal is entertained of each
individual being so employed as to be his own “boss,” to use the language of the
trades, and to work solely for himself. No such arrangement is either desirable
or feasible. It is not all men who are made for designers, contrivers, and
directors. That is perhaps one of the most exact generalizations of mankind into
classes by which they are divided into Originators, Organizers, and Executors.
The first are least numerous, the second more numerous, and the last most
numerous. It is right that those who originate should impress themselves on the
execution of their designs, either directly, or through the intervention of the
organizing class. Naturally each is content with the performance of his own
function, according to this organization. The few only will desire to lead; the
mass of mankind will prefer to follow, so soon as an equality of rewards renders
it alike honorable either to follow or lead.
250. It is, then, a natural relation that one man should employ another to
aid him in actualizing his design; that he who has a design to execute should
adjoin to himself the labor of him who has none, or no other one than that of
securing the means of his own subsistence in circumstances of personal comfort.
For that purpose,--the execution of the design,--they two enter into a
combination, while in interest they are still individual and
distinct,--the interest of one being in his design, and that of the other in the
wages he is to earn. But every combined movement demands an individual lead.
Hence, in the execution of the design, the one must guide and the other follow,
and the more absolute the submission of the one mind to the other, the more
harmonious the movement. Hence, it is proper and right that one man should hire
another, and, if he hires him, it is proper and right that he should remunerate
him for his labor, and such remuneration is wages. Hence, it follows that
the “Wages System” is essentially proper and right. It is right that one man
employ another, it is right that he pay him wages, and it is right that he
direct him absolutely, arbitrarily, if you will, in the performance of his
labor, while, on the other hand, it is the business of him who is employed
implicitly to obey,--that is, to surrender all will of his own in relation to a
design not his own, and to conceive and execute the will of the other.
251. The wrong of our existing system is not, then, to be sought in
Individualism, it is not to be sought in the want of Co-operation, except as
that grows to some extent out of the want of Equity, nor is it to be sought in
the relation of employer and employed. It is right that the great manufacturer
should plan, and either alone, or through the aid of assistants under his
direction, organize his mammoth establishment. It is right that he should employ
and direct his hundred or his five hundred men. It is not true that those men do
not even now co-operate with each other and with him, as it is right and proper
that they should. (52.) It is right that he should pay them wages for their
work. It is not in any, nor in all of these features combined, that the wrong of
our present system is to be sought for and found. It is in the simple failure
to do Equity. It is not that men are employed and paid, but that they are
not paid justly, and that no measure of Justice or Equity has ever heretofore
been known among men.
252. When all avenues are alike open to you and me, there is no hardship in
the fact that I, having no genius for great enterprises, or preferring to avoid
the responsible charge of them, choose freely to labor under your direction for
the execution of your designs. It is great hardship, however, if I am first
forced into that position by a system of labor and wealth which leaves me no
election, and then robbed, by the operation of the same system, of one-half or
two-thirds of my earnings, for your benefit. In the large establishment, such as
we are now contemplating, conducted on the Cost Principle, the proprietor will
realize no more in the form of pecuniary results from the undertaking than the
humblest laborer employed by him, unless he works harder, and not so much if he
does not work so hard,--taking into account all the elements of labor or
repugnance, both physical and mental.
253. But who, if the temptations of profit-making were removed, would assume
the responsibility and burden of devising, organizing, and conducting an
extensive and complicated business concern? The question is thoughtlessly asked,
and dictated by the control which old associations have over the mind. In the
first place, the burden and responsibility, precisely such as they are, more or
less, to the individual who thus assumes a leading position, as compared with
the disagreeableness of other occupations as estimated by himself solely, are
the limit of the reward of his function. The greater the burden the greater the
price. The Cost Principle does not pronounce, arbitrarily, that the conductor of
the large and complicated business shall be paid a very low price for his labor
It merely decides that he shall be paid according to the relative degree of
repugnance of that kind of occupation, as judged of by himself,--subject to no
other checks than those which are supplied by his own conscience, and the
competition of others who may deem it less repugnant than he. Hence, if that
kind of occupation actually imposes an intrinsic burden ten times or one hundred
times a great as mere executive labor, then the principle accompanies us quite
out to that point, and gives to him who serves in that capacity ten or one
hundred times as much price as to the ordinary laborer The principle hold good
wherever it conducts; but the result will be, in fact, far otherwise. There are
men who are organized for the lead of large and complicated enterprises, to whom
positions demanding great powers of mental combination, and devolving heavy
responsibilities, are the most attractive. By such, such positions will be
filled at a pecuniary price less rather than more than will be awarded to labors
less flattering to the tastes and to the ambition for leading and responsible
posts.
254. There is a class of Communist Reformers to whom this whole discussion
relating to price will be distasteful. They wish to be rid of price altogether.
They aspire to arrive, by a short cut, at a condition of society in which labor
shall be solely according to attractions, and supply only measured by the wants
of the individual. That ideal has in it, doubtless, a partial prophecy of the
truth. It is, however, like the point of no friction in machinery,--a point
always to be aimed at, and continually approximated, but never absolutely
attained. The tendency to a modified practical communism will develop itself in
proportion to the relaxation of the hold of the individual upon private property
or possession, which will be again in proportion to the prevalence of general
abundance. The effect of the Cost Principle will be to augment the general
wealth by means of the Economies, Attractive Industry, and a more perfect
Co-operation; hence the tendency of the Cost Principle, in operation, will be
toward the extinguishing of all price. Price being according to repugnance, it
will constantly decrease with the more attractive conditions of industry until,
if the point be ever attained at which all labor shall be done from pure
attraction, price will cease altogether. Hence, in so far as the Communist has
faith in the possibility of attaining the conditions, may he have faith in that
result. The Cost Principle begins with us, then, in the midst of repugnant labor
as it now is, and does Equity there. It accompanies us with the decrease of
repugnance and renders the price less, and finally it attends us quite out to
the ideal point of pure attraction and the cessation of all price. It is the
mistake of the Communist to assume that the goal has been attained, or that it
is possible to attain it by any sudden leap, avoiding the intermediate steps.
255. Still it is important to observe that the absence of price is not the
absence of ownership, which last in confusion. Hence, the Cost Principle never
lands in Communism in that sense. All property will still belong to individual
owners, who will exercise absolute rights over it,--as an essential condition of
order,--even though a price be not demanded. Take an illustration. A drink of
water, a pin, or a wafer is not now ordinarily a subject of price, as articles
of more considerable value will not be with greater abundance, and still they
belong to individual owners. You will take a wafer from my desk without even
consulting me. It is not worth my while to assert my ownership. But if on doing
so repeatedly you render yourself offensive by puffing tobacco smoke in my face,
or otherwise, I fall back upon my right of property, and refuse you the
accommodation.
256. In conclusion, it will strike the judicious reader that the Cost
Principle is wonderfully searching, subtle, and exact; that it marks the line
with precision between what is right and what is wrong in the present system,
and between what is right and what is wrong in all the proposed systems of
Social Reform; that it is eclectic and discriminating; that it combines, in
fine, the simplicity of fundamental truth in its primary statement with that
minuteness of application to the most ramified details which entitle it to the
appellation of a Universal Principle.
Appendix
I. A Review: Reply to the Tribunew by Mr. [Stephen Pearl] Andrews
To the Editor of the New York Tribune:
You recently bestowed three columns and a half upon a notice of “Equitable
Commerce: a New Development of Principles Proposed as Elements of New
Society,” by Josiah Warren, with an incidental notice of “The True
Constitution of Government” and “Cost the Limit of Price”--works upon
the same general subject--”The Science of Society”--by myself. The
criticism may be regarded as relating to the circle of principles advocated by
Mr. Warren and myself rather than to either of us simply as writers, and hence I
feel authorized to step aside from usage so far as to reply to the criticism,
the conclusion arrived at, which I cannot but think an unfortunate one for you,
being that Mr. Warren’s theory of “Equitable Commerce” is a failure.
The books in question are not of the kind that can be profitably reviewed
without being attentively read. The hurry and clatter of newspaper machinery are
not, I am aware, favorable to the weighty consideration of those profound
philosophical truths which lie much below the surface. If a critic under such
circumstances, should fail, therefore, fully to grasp the significance of a
circle of principles so revolutionary, and yet so simple, so perfectly
harmonious in their relations to each other, so absolutely indispensable each to
the working out of the other, and so thoroughly responsive to every demand of
exalted human aspiration after Social Order and Freedom and Harmony, it should
not be charged on him as a defect of acumen, or of sympathetic affinity for
truth, but merely to the want of opportunity.
You accept and adopt the first of this circle of principles, “The Sovereignty
of Individual,” but simply put in a caveat against the claim of exclusive
originality on the part of Mr. Warren. This question of originality is one of
little importance, and one to which no man would attach less consequence than
Mr. Warren himself. The important question is, “Is it true?” and on this we
agree. Nevertheless, it is, after all, likewise simply true that Mr. Warren is
the first man in the world clearly to define this idea as a Principle,
instead of a vague aspiration, to fix it in a Formula, to settle its
Legitimate Limitation, to propound it as one of the Grand Practical
Solutions of the Social Problem, and to connect it with its
Correlated Principles in this solution. It is true that the idea, simply as
such, as “more or less distinctly” pervaded the writings of nearly every modern
reformer, that it swells and palpitates in every aspiration after a better
future, and inspires even the blindest exertion after human emancipation. It is
true that it is implicated remotely and prophetically in Fourier’s formula of
“Destinies proportional to Attractions,” as it is in the American Declaration of
Independence, which affirms that all men are entitled to “Liberty and the
Pursuit of Happiness”; but all this is a very different thing from the distinct
announcement of the “Sovereignty of each individual to be exercised at his own
Cost”, propounded as a scientific substitute for all Laws and Governments, and
as one of the immediate working instrumentalities of Social Reform. So at least
it seems to me. If it be not so, and Social Reformers of other schools accept
and even claim the priority in the announcement of this Principle, as we accept
and state it, why, so much the better; only don’t let them get frightened when
they discover the whole meaning of all they are committed to.
But in the next place you come upon the next of our principles in the
circle,--namely, that “Cost is the Equitable Limit of Price.” From this you
dissent, on grounds which show that have not fully grasped the idea of the
manner in which Principles are appropriately put forth after all notion of
authority or enforcement is abandoned. The gist of your objection is contained
in the following statements:
We have said that the possession of property is essential to the Sovereignty
of the Individual. In this statement we find the refutation of Mr. Warren’s
second principle, that “Cost is the Limit of Price.” According to this theory,
equal amounts of [equally repugnant] labor are made to balance each other,
without regard to the value of the product. Equitable Commerce, it maintains, is
the exchange of the results of equal labor as virtual equivalents. A commodity
which has cost you the labor of an hour is to be exchanged on equal terms for
one that has cost me labor to the same amount of time, irrespective of the
utility of the product to either party.
Again:
Individual property is based on the right of the Individual to the products
of his own labor. But if the product of my labor is my own, no one can decide
the terms on which I shall part with it but myself. The right of exchanging it
at pleasure is involved in the right of ownership. The attempt to establish a
compulsory law for this purpose is a gross violation of my acknowledged
Sovereignty. This view, we think, is fatal to the theory in question, apart from
the practical inconveniences that would arise from its application.
This indictment seems to consist of three counts, stated or implied. 1. That
we deny that the Individual is entitled to the product of his own labor. 2. That
we repudiate, in some sense not specified, the possession of property, and the
right of exchanging it at pleasure. And 3. That we attempt to establish a
compulsory law to regulate price in gross violation of our own other fundamental
principle, “The Sovereignty of the Individual.” To all of these counts we simply
plead not guilty, and put ourselves upon the country. Indeed, we are utterly
unable to account for the fact that any man, having looked into our books, could
have made them otherwise than by recurring to another of our principles.
“Infinite Individuality,” which embraces and accounts for every conceivable
diversity in the understanding of language.
The proposition that “the Individual is entitled too the products of his own
labor”, cannot, it is true, be accepted without limitation and modification. If
I have employed my labor in hunting, catching, and handcuffing you, and reducing
you to submission, it can hardly be assumed as an axiom of Social Science that I
become entitled to the ownership of you thereby. So, if I employ my superior
wit, or skill, or accumulative labor, which is power, in reducing you by more
subtle means to a condition of servitude, the axiom in question cannot be
adduced in justification. In order to entitle me to the products of my own
labor, my labor must have been justly bestowed; that is, it must have
been exerted at my own cost; that is again, I must not throw the
burdensome consequences of my conduct on others. Cost enters, therefore, in the
final analysis, into the question of ownership. But let that pass. The question
more immediately up now relates to the exchange of products confessedly
belonging to the parties. We admit, under the modifications stated, that every
man is entitled to the product of his own labor. Even this basis, chosen by our
critic, excludes natural wealth, including uncultured or natural skill, from any
claim for remuneration, and carries him headlong in our direction, as he will
find when he has leisure to follow out his principle into its logical
consequences
As to the second count, that we repudiate property and the right of
accumulating and exchanging at will, we simply deny. We only repudiate the right
of accumulating other peoples’s property; and as for exchanges, they are
the burden of our whole doctrine.
As to the third, the attempt to establish a compulsory law to regulate
price. This you regard as a gross violation of the Sovereignty of the
Individual. Verily, so do we; and if we attempted anything of the kind,
undoubtedly “Equitable Commerce” would be a failure. It is simply for the reason
that we do nothing of the sort that it is not a failure, and is not, saving the
judgment of the “Tribune”, like to be. It is precisely for the reason that we
hold the doctrine of the Sovereignty of the Individual that we are forever
prohibited form establishing not only this, but any other compulsory law. But
this does not, we apprehend, prohibit us from discovering, accepting,
announcing, and acting upon Principles. It is precisely this difference
between a compulsory law and a Principle which our critic has
failed to apprehend, and which the world sadly needs to appreciate. It is this
misapprehension which lies at the bottom of the hasty decision he has rendered
upon the System of Principles brought to his attention, which being rectified,
the decision itself goes to the ground as destitute of any support or validity.
As this is the hinge of the whole matter at issue, therefore, let us endeavor to
make it a little clear.
We do not deny your right to the product, and the full product of your labor.
We allow you to retain the possession of it as long as you choose. Nay, further,
if you determine to dispose of it, we do not require nor insist in any manner
upon your disposing of it otherwise than upon any terms that you choose, if you
can find a purchaser. We do not oppose a feather’s weight to your entire
freedom. We commit no encroachment upon the fullest exercise of your Individual
Sovereignty. We cannot do so consistently with ourselves. We admit your full
title to the freedom, first, of not selling at all, and then of selling for any
price, no matter how great the hardship to the purchaser. In other words, you
are entitled to the freedom of doing right or wrong, for the better or the
worse, with what is clearly your own. This leaves the question, however, of
what it is right or wrong for you to do, entirely upon to be settled,
further on, by other principles—but to be settled still solely by and for
yourself, with no foreign interference whatsoever. It is not possible that
being thus entirely freed from compulsion, and thrown entirely upon yourself for
a decision, you may wish to know for yourself which is the right and
which the wrong principle upon which to carry on your exchanges—which will place
you in harmonious, equitable, and the most truly advantageous relations with
your fellow-men, which will bring you into antagonism with all the world,
confusion, general insecurity of condition, and prevalent wretchedness. Will the
man who shall communicate that knowledge to you thereby commit any breach of
your Individual Sovereignty, provided he “adapts the supply to the demand”? If
you are desirous of knowing the laws of health, and I make you aware of the
Principle of Physiology which demands the ventilation of houses, is that “a
gross violation of the Sovereignty of the Individual”? If I undertook to compel
you to construct your habitation upon a given plan, even for your benefit, I
admit that it would be so; but, is simply communicating the knowledge to such as
want it any encroachment? If a dozen individuals, operated upon by such
knowledge, voluntarily, in concert or separately, enlarge their windows or
otherwise modify their residences to insure this desirable end, is there any
surrender on their part of their Individual Sovereignty? Yet to assert this
would be precisely equivalent to the fault found with our circle of Principles,
by the “Tribune.”
It does not follow, because I have the right, and every other man has the
right to the products of his labor and to the liberty of retaining them forever
in his own hands, that it is, therefore, either right or best that all men
should retain all their own products, and that there should be no commerce
whatsoever. Neither does it follow, because any man has the right to the freedom
to sell his products in any manner that he pleases, that it is, therefore,
either right or best that he should sell them upon the very worst principle that
can be conceived of. It cannot be rightly said that any man has a right to do
wrong; but every man has the right to the freedom to do wrong. In other
words, he has the right not to be interfered with in the exercise of his own
judgment of right, although it may lead him to do what all the world pronounce
wrong, provided only that he acts at his own cost, that is, that he do not throw
the burdensome consequences of his acts on others.
Having thus completely disposed of the charge that the “Cost Principle” is
per se an infraction of the other Principle--”The Sovereignty of the
Individual”--the question returns, what is the right Principle to
regulate the exchange of products between man and man? I ask this question, not
for the purpose of enforcing that Principle compulsorily upon you, but for the
purpose of satisfying the intellectual and moral attributes of my nature. You
ask it, if at all, in the same manner, for yourself. In reply, we have placed
before us two different Principles; one, that of the exchange of equivalent
Values or Benefits; the other, that of the exchange of equivalent Costs or
Burdens. One is the Value Principle, the other is the Cost
Principle. The one now prevails in the world, the other we contend for—not,
be it remembered, to enforce it upon any body, but as the true or right thing. I
have found no less than two hundred and fourteen pates absolutely requisite to
set forth, in the most condensed manner, the parallel between the two. I cannot
repeat (in a newspaper article) what I have thus said. I cannot conceive how,
having read the book, you could simply repeat the old theory, the wrong, the
outrage, the civilized cannibalism of which are too patent to be either
disguised or palliated. It is equally inconceivable how, having rad the book,
you could reject the simplicity, the obvious truth, and the high harmonic
results of the Cost Principle. We may, perhaps, seek for the solution in the
radical misconception into which you had been betrayed by haste, and which I
have endeavored to rectify.
Not having time or space here, then, to expound or defend the Cost Principle,
permit me to conclude, dogmatically and prophetically, by affirming somewhat in
relation thereto. It is nothing less than the grand reformatory idea in
commerce, corresponding to the Protestant idea in the religious world, and to
the idea of Self-Government in the political; and inasmuch as “Commerce is
King,” pre-eminently so, in this age, it is the Grand Idea of the Age. It is now
in its infancy. Many a man who will cast his eye over this discussion will
hardly know what the words mean. “Cost the Limit of Price”, will be to him a
jargon of terms. Nevertheless in those words is contained the Most Fundamental,
the Most Potent, and the Most Revolutionary Idea of the nineteenth century; a
watchword of Reform which comes not humbly, saying, “By your leave”, but with
power, saying to the capitalist, “You must.” By means of it, the rendering of
justice to labor is no longer to be a matter of Grace, but of Necessity. It is
an idea, too, which is to permeate the public mind without bluster, without
agitation. Already the organization of Equity Villages is going on with a
quietness which leaves them to be sought for by those who have a demand for
truer relations among men, and with a real success which will dispense with all
criticism at an early day. The time is not distant when the fact that a leading
Social reformer and reviewer pronounced the Cost Principle a failure, will be
quoted among the Curiosities of Literature.
|
Anarchism.net editors and authors.
