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the hands of some kind of laborer. They have been eaten up once; they cannot be eaten up again. All that they can hereafter be made to contribute is that which their assistance adds to the annual product. This is every year divided between rent, labor, and capital, in such portions as demand and supply determine; but the part which goes to rent and capital nearly all, as we have already seen, goes. (through the hands of the landlords and capitalists) to labor.

What, then, can be annually divided among the members of a community is the annual product of commodities; and that nation is the wealthiest which can give to each of its members the largest amount of the "necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries of life." This dividend bears no necessary proportion to the visible accumulated property, which is the result of the savings of many years, and which may have much, or may have very little, influence upon the annual product.

The repeated references of Mr. George to the magnitude of these accumulations, as showing what ought to be, or could possibly be, the annual reward of labor,

of much that is misleading in his book.

these are at the bottom

Mr. John Stuart Mill, as every one knows, was a person of the highest integrity, a great logician, as much interested in the future fate of the poorer classes as any man who has lived in our times. His positions, as quoted in the beginning of this chapter, seem not to have been shaken by Mr. George in the slightest degree.

We have now gone through the first two books of "Progress and Poverty," and have found what appear to be good reasons for dissenting from every one of his distinctive doctrines.

It appears that wages do not tend to decrease as wealth (in the sense of the gross annual product as compared with population) increases, but that, on the contrary, wages increase pari passu with wealth. It appears that although productive labor, when employed, adds generally, by the assistance of capital, a value which is greater than its wages, still this value is not available until the product is finished and put upon the market and sold, so as to give a general purchasing power. It seems, therefore, that wages are certainly advanced by capital, without which the

greater portion of the work of industrial communities could not be carried on. It appears that under favorable circumstances population does increase as rapidly as Malthus and Mr. Mill declared; and although, with increasing skill and capital to the very extraordinary extent that has been seen in our days, the annual product in the United States has increased much more rapidly, and so led to an equal advance in wages, still it is by no means certain that improvements can continue indefinitely at the same rate.

We see that the same causes have not produced an equal advance in wealth and wages in older communities, and we see that in California there has been a very marked decline. It seems probable, then, that in the course of another century, or half a century, population with us will press upon the means of subsistence. It is the hope of protectionists that the high scale of living which has been established in the meanwhile will prevent the descent of any large class of the people to transatlantic poverty. Mr. George sneers at protection as being contrived and intended to favor monopolies; but this is as untrue, as offensive, and as unjust as it would be to stigmatize him as a selfish communist and demagogue, whose only aim was notoriety. This is not true; neither is that.

IV.

How to deal with the remaining chapters of "Progress and Poverty" without wearying the reader is "the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts" to the reviewer, and which not to answer not to be read! The fallacies are so numerous that to reply to each in full would be to exceed reasonable limits. All that can be done is to take the principal ones seriatim, and get rid of each as speedily as possible.

is

He says that one thousand men working together will do much more than one thousand times the work of one man.

This is true when they have unlimited subject-matter to work upon. Double the population of the United States, and all might be better off. Would they be better off if multiplied by a thousand? Up to a certain point the mutual helpfulness of men outweighs the relative but not absolute scarcity of materials, such as land, mines, etc.; but only up to a certain point. He makes the old error of arguing "a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter." This is all that there is in his argument, that the joint product of labor and capital continually increases faster than population increases, and that therefore the laborer must be robbed if in a densely peopled country he earns less than the wages usual where lands, mines, forests, etc., are more abundant.

He repeats that capital does not employ labor, but that labor employs capital, and adduces in proof the fact that capital was originally formed by labor; but when the first capital was being formed few could exist upon a given space, and society bore no analogy to present communities in which, according to his own dictum, nine tenths of the product is due to the assistance of capital.

RENT AND CAPITAL.

He asserts that "rent is the price of monopoly, arising from the reduction to individual ownership of natural elements which human exertion can neither produce nor increase." But human agency has already vastly increased their capacity and can increase it still farther; ten acres with sufficient capital will yield as much as fifty without. Rent, then, is kept in check by capital. Moreover, he would have us believe that rent has actually swallowed up much that belonged to labor in the United States, and that to this cause we must trace the panic of 1873. Now, with respect to Economic Ground Rent, there seems reason to doubt whether it has begun to exist in the United States, as far as the great mass of farms and plantations are concerned; there seems, indeed, reason to believe that the farms do not yield a full interest upon the mere improvements existing upon them. The formation of this particular kind of instruments of production has been over-stimulated by our homestead laws, and by the action of that very common desire of men to acquire an absolute right to a portion of land and to be each his own master, with a certainty, as nearly complete as possible, of never being in want of food and seldom in want of a moderate amount of conveniences and luxuries.

The competition of seven millions of individual farmers ought surely to be a sufficient guarantee against monopoly; they will not even obtain a fair return for the labor they have spent in improvements, until increasing population and the action of the protective system build up a sufficient market for their products. Free trade, by forcing them to offer a greatly increased quantity of raw products to the outer world, would infallibly, under existing conditions, reduce very much the exchangeable value of their produce, and impoverish them for several generations.

It appears evident, then, that the panic of 1873 could not have been brought about by a scarcity of raw products. Many millions of farmers each with more land than he habitually used, each eager to raise more when prices warranted cient guarantee against any such catastrophe.

were a suffi

But it may be said, "There are the rents of houses and stores in the cities; these become exorbitant and make the production of something or other too expensive, and so something or other is not made, and hence we have a diminution in the aggregate demand."

But this idea is contradicted by the facts, well known to practical men, that during a period of excitement real estate is one of the last things to rise, and that when a period of depression comes it is one of the last to fall. The facts are empirical, and so may be questioned until we discover a reason for them. This is not far to seek. People do not enlarge their quarters until they have experienced high wages and high profits for some time, — until, in fact, they have got used to them, and have come to consider them as practically permanent. The individual takes a larger house or more rooms because he feels he can afford it, and he takes more space for the accommodation of his business because he feels that an increasing business demands more, and that, after paying more rent, he will have a larger sum left at the end of the year. High rents in the cities appear to be a consequence of the fuller occupation of the population; and even if, towards the end of a period of excitement, they become so high as to materially affect the profits and consequent expenditure of a portion of the dealers, they can only transfer to the owners of houses and lands the very same sums that are taken from the dealers, and the recipients must in their turn either spend them or save them; and in saving they spend only upon different people. It is only when it begins to be seen that saving has been overdone, — that more instruments of production and convenience cannot be formed with a chance of their yielding the rate of profit usual in the community, it is only then that the industrial movement begins to decrease. Then laborers are thrown out of employment, and with this comes a diminished demand for commodities and a necessity for dismissing still more laborers, and so on in a widening circle.

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RENT NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PANICS AND POVERTY.

In a country depending largely upon the export of manufactured goods, like Great Britain, a panic may be brought

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