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terance of law, to err on the side of natural equality than on the side of ideal justice. We can do something to control the power of cunning and rapacity, and to make the distribution of material advantages fall more in conformity with superiority of character and culture. We can go a little way, and very slowly, in the endeavor to equalize conditions by the regulation of property; but the elements of danger are always near at hand and insidious; and undoubtedly any legislation that deliberately releases, labor from the obligations of contract, and permits it to make war on property with impunity, must be regarded as running counter to the first demands of society. It is an ugly fact that, under cover of the natural inequality of property, evil and greedy men will act in a way that can only be characterized as legal robbery. The state should prevent such action so far as it safely can. Yet even here, in view of the magnitude of the interests involved, it is better that legal robbery should exist along with the maintenance of law, than that legal robbery should be suppressed at the expense of law.

You may to a certain extent control property and make it subservient to the ideal nature of man; but the moment you deny its rights, or undertake to legislate in defiance of them, you may for a time unsettle the very foundations of society, you will certainly in the end render property your despot and so produce a materialized and debased civilization. Manifestly, the mind will be free to enlarge itself in immaterial interests only when the material basis is secure, and without a certain degree of such security a man must be anxious over material things and preponderantly concerned with them. And, manifestly, if this security is dependent upon the right of property, and these rights are denied or belittled in the name of some impossible ideal, it follows that the demands of intellectual leisure will be regarded as abnormal and anti-social.

No doubt the ideal society would be that in which every man should be filled with noble aspirations. But I am not here concerned with utopian visions. My desire is to confirm in the dic tates of their own reason those who believe that the private ownership of property is, with very limited reservations, essential to the material stability and progress of society. We who have this conviction need to remind ourselves that laws which would render capital insecure, and, by a heavy income tax or other discrimination in favor of labor, would deprive property of its power of easy selfperpetuation, though they speak loudly in the name of humanity, will in the end be subversive of those conditions under which alone any true value of human life can be realized.

This, I take it, is the reason that the church and the university have almost invariably stood as strongly reactionary against any innovation which threatened the entrenched rights of property. It is not at bottom the greed of possession that moves them, nor are we justified in casting into their teeth the reproach that they who profess to stand for spiritual things are in their corporate capacity the most tenacious upholders of worldly privilege. They are guided by an instinctive feeling that in this mixed and mortal state of our existence, the safety and usefulness of the institutions they control are finally bound up with the inviolability of property which has been devoted to unworldly ends. For if property is secure it may be a means to an end, whereas if it is insecure it will be the end itself.

324. Mine-Property and Rights

BY DAVID M. PARRY

1. Man must work for a living. He would have no intelligence if he lived in a Garden of Eden, because if Nature provided all his needs ready to hand for his use there would be no reason for him to do any thinking, and the result would be that he wouldn't think. Therefore it is in order to make him develop his intelligence that man is compelled to wrestle with nature for his livelihood.

2. Each man is entitled to the results of his own exertions. To say otherwise would be to assert that some men have the right to live on the fruits of the toil of others without working themselves, which would be contrary to our first proposition. Hence personal ownership of property is a necessary deduction from the law that man must work for a living.

3. Each individual is entitled to freedom of action. Being assured that what he produces is his own he is constantly spurred on to develop his capacity to produce. Being assured also that he cannot profit by another's exertions he realizes that he is responsible to himself alone for what he makes out of himself. Therefore each man has an undeniable right to dispose of his own time and labor as he sees fit, or in other words to work out his own destiny. The effect of this is to develop strong, self-reliant and intelligent men. It brings into play the creative faculty of man, his highest faculty, and the faculty that constitutes him a free agent in so far as he is such an agent.

4. It is right and just that one man should obtain more of this world's goods than another. Since personal ownership of property and individual freedom are both valid deductions from the first

Adapted from To Organized Labor, 16-18 (1903).

premise that all men shall work, then no complaint can honestly be made because one man by superior exertion or ability manages to produce more than another and consequently has more to show for his labor than another. The fact that one man succeeds in making himself a better living than others is itself a spur to other men to try all the harder. This is what causes progress and the evolution of the race.

5. Capital arises by reason of the fact that one man can produce and own more than another. Some men find that they can produce more than they absolutely need for themselves, and therefore they store up some of their labor in making a machine, and this machine is capital. Here is your frightful "bugbear," capital, coming into existence as the direct and legitimate result of the so-called primal curse that man must labor. It is born as the result of the industry, thrift, self-sacrifice, and intelligence of the few as compared to the many.

6. Industrial ownership of capital is not only the direct deduction from the right of every man to that which he possesses, but it is also necessary for its creation. Men will waste their property in fast living or they will work only part of the time if they find that there is no profit in saving. If a man employs men to make a machine and pays them out of his savings, certainly these men have no valid title to the machine, for they have received for their toil as much, if not a little more, than they would have received for any other labor they could have performed. Neither have the men who are subsequently employed to run the machine any title of ownership in it, for they certainly cannot claim to have made it. The ownership correctly lies in the man who paid for the making of it, and the fact that men can convert their savings into a productive machine that will grind out more savings is the incentive that causes men to have machinery made.

7. Capital, despite individual ownership, benefits the many much more than it does the few. It is in fact emancipating man from drudgery and poverty. Capital brings to the assistance of man the forces of nature in producing commodities. It not only enables him to produce the things he needs or desires with the expenditure of less labor than formerly, but it constantly tends to lift him up from lower to higher pursuits.

8. Wages are dependent upon the aggregate production. If a nation produces but little there is but little to divide. The opposite is true if it produces a great deal. Now the utilization of capital is the only method of greatly increasing the production per capita. Strikes, organized idleness, boycotts, etc., cannot fail in reducing

instead of increasing the general rate of wages, and that because they decrease the aggregate production instead of increasing it. Since they cause less to be made than would have been made, it is a clear mathematical proposition that some are going to suffer when it comes to casting up the balance sheet.

9. The law of supply and demand is the great law regulating industry under this individualistic or capitalistic régime. It operates (1) to direct the energies of the nation along channels that will be the most profitable to all; (2) it makes on the whole the highest possible use of every individual according to his capability and the need that exists for various kinds of services he can perform; (3) it regulates the accumulation of capital, tending to increase its accumulation more at one time than at another, dependent upon the urgency of the need for it; (4) it increases nominal wages and decreases the prices of commodities as it becomes more utilized, thus automatically giving to labor the benefits of capital as fast as it is to the interest of labor that it should be done.

325. My Apology

BY P. PROPERTY

What have I to say why judgment should not be passed against me? why I should not be banished from human society? why, with creatures of darkness, I should not be cast into the outer void? I have little to say. But my long and effective services to society speak eloquently for themselves, and I may as usual content myself with few words. I need only enumerate in briefest form the record of my accomplishments, and I feel that my defense is complete. I mention my achievements not boastfully, being as modest as my first name Private signifies, but only as earnests of what society may expect from me in the future.

For society, and in furtherance of civilization, I, Private Property, assert that I have performed these services, to-wit:

First, I have rendered the fundamental conditions of social and industrial life safe and secure. Before I came into my own, the power to seize and hold summed up the ethics of ownership. Energies that might have gone into more productive employments were used in defending one's own or in appropriating one's neighbor's. But I established and secured social sanction and universal respect for the right of possession.

Second, the security thus afforded had caused the energies of men to be diverted from the acquisition to the production of wealth. It has led to the utilization of natural resources, and has provided

opportunity for the use of long-continued and consistent industrial policies which have caused material goods to increase verily a hundred fold.

Third, such security has furnished an incentive to man as a worker to utilize his productive capacities to the full. It has caused him to sow, because it has promised that he, and not another, should reap. It has led him to sacrifice immediate gain in establishing new processes and in devising new instruments of production to the end that the earth might be crowned with abundance.

Fourth, I plead innocent of the charge of having favored a privileged "leisure class," upon whom I have showered plenty that has been wasted in riotous living. It is true that I have conferred wealth upon a few. But these few I have not particularly favored. I have chosen them for highly important and extremely dangerous social service. I have assigned to them the task of experimentation in consumption. Whatever bad they have found they have discarded. The good that they have discovered has in time been made the property of the masses. They are the vanguard of my army which is engaged in raising the standard of living. The goods supplied to them are not rewards; they consist only of the laboratory materials necessary to the work which they are doing. Witness their suffering, their costs, and you can appreciate the heroism which makes them willing to serve society in so dangerous and important an undertaking. The extent to which, through their pioneer service, the formerly rigid boundaries of consumption have been extended attests my wisdom.

Fifth, I have greatly increased the product of industry by the use of vast stores of capital. The economic inequality which I have perpetuated has been the cause of the existence of so fruitful a fund. For its bulk has come from the very large incomes whose source I am. The savings which become the capital that turns the wheels of our mills, runs our machines, and speeds our trains across the continent on their missions of service are possible only because of me. And, but for the security which I offer, the investment of these savings would be impossible.

Sixth, I supply the people with abundance and contribute to the fullness of their lives. The security which I have brought about has almost eliminated risks. The result is decreased costs, which I generously offer to the public in decreased prices. The long-time productive operations, the improvements in technique, and the cumulative investment of capital, which I have brought about, confer the favors of plenty, variety, and cheapness upon all sorts and conditions of men. My aristocratic methods have been mere devices for

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