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 foG
 
 THE UNSOLVED RIDDLE 
 OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
 
 BY STEPHEN LEACOCK 
 
 FRENZIED FICTION 
 
 FURTHER FOOLISHNESS 
 
 BEHIND THE BEYOND 
 
 NONSENSE NOVELS 
 
 LITERARY LAPSES 
 
 SUNSHINE SKETCHES 
 
 ARCADIAN ADVENTURES 
 
 WITH THE IDLE RICH 
 
 ESSAYS AND LITERARY 
 
 STUDIES 
 MOONBEAMS FROM THE 
 
 LARGER LUNACY 
 
 THE HOHENZOLLERNS 
 
 IN AMERICA
 
 THE 
 
 UNSOLVED RIDDLE 
 
 OF 
 
 SOCIAL JUSTICE 
 
 BY STEPHEN J,EACOCK 
 
 B. A., PH. D., LITT. D M F. R. S. C. 
 Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, 
 
 Montreal 
 AUTHOR OF "ESSAYS AND LITERARY STUDIES," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 
 LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY: MCMXX
 
 Copyright, 1920, 
 BY JOHN LANE COMPANY
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE TROUBLED OUTLOOK OF THE 
 
 PRESENT HOUR 9 
 
 II. LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF 
 
 HAPPINESS 33 
 
 III. THE FAILURES AND FALLACIES OF 
 
 NATURAL LIBERTY 48 
 
 IV. WORK AND WAGES 66 
 
 V. THE LAND OF DREAMS: THE UTOPIA 
 
 OF THE SOCIALIST . . . . . 88 
 VI. How MR. BELLAMY LOOKED BACK- 
 WARD 103 
 
 VII. WHAT Is POSSIBLE AND WHAT Is NOT 124
 
 *
 
 THE UNSOLVED RIDDLE 
 OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
 
 I. The Troubled Outlook of the Present 
 Hour 
 
 THESE are troubled times. As the 
 echoes of the war die away the sound 
 of a new conflict rises on our 
 ears. All the world is filled with in- 
 dustrial unrest. Strike follows upon strike. 
 A world that has known five years of fighting 
 has lost its taste for the honest drudgery of 
 work. Cincinnatus will not back to his plow, 
 or, at the best, stands sullenly between his 
 plow-handles arguing for a higher wage. 
 
 The wheels of industry are threatening to 
 stop. The laborer will not work because the 
 pay is too low and the hours are too long. 
 The producer cannot employ him because the 
 wage is too high, and the hours are too short. 
 If the high wage is paid and the short hours 
 are granted, then the price of the thing made, 
 
 9
 
 10 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 so it seems, rises higher still. Even the high 
 wages will not buy it. The process apparently 
 moves in a circle with no cessation to it. The 
 increased wages seem only to aggravate the 
 increasing prices. Wages and prices, rising 
 together, call perpetually for more money, or 
 at least more tokens and symbols, more paper 
 credit in the form of checks and deposits, 
 with a value that is no longer based on the 
 rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but 
 that floats upon the mere atmosphere of ex- 
 pectation. 
 
 But the sheer quantity of the inflated cur- 
 rency and false money forces prices higher still. 
 The familiar landmarks of wages, salaries and 
 prices are being obliterated. The "scrap of 
 paper" with which the war began stays with 
 us as its legacy. It lies upon the industrial 
 landscape like snow, covering up, as best it 
 may, the bare poverty of a world desolated by 
 war. 
 
 Under such circumstances national finance 
 seems turned into a delirium. Billions are 
 voted where once a few poor millions were
 
 of Social Justice 11 
 
 thought extravagant. The war debts of the 
 Allied Nations, not yet fully computed, will 
 run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars 
 apiece. But the debts of the governments ap- 
 pear on the other side of the ledger as the 
 assets of the citizens. What is the meaning 
 of it? Is it wealth or is it poverty? The 
 world seems filled with money and short of 
 goods, while even in this very scarcity a new 
 luxury has broken out. The capitalist rides 
 in his ten thousand dollar motor car. The 
 seven-dollar-a-day artisan plays merrily on his 
 gramophone in the broad daylight of his aft- 
 ernoon that is saved, like all else, by being 
 "borrowed" from the morning. He calls the 
 capitalist a "profiteer." The capitalist retorts 
 with calling him a "Bolshevik." 
 
 Worse portents appear. Over the rim of 
 the Russian horizon are seen the fierce eyes and 
 the unshorn face of the real and undoubted 
 Bolshevik, waving his red flag. Vast areas of 
 what was a fertile populated world are over- 
 whelmed in chaos. Over Russia there lies a 
 great darkness, spreading ominously westward
 
 12 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 into Central Europe. The criminal sits among 
 his corpses. He feeds upon the wreck of a 
 civilization that was. 
 
 The infection spreads. All over the world 
 the just claims of organized labor are inter- 
 mingled with the underground conspiracy of 
 social revolution. The public mind is con- 
 fused. Something approaching to a social 
 panic appears. To some minds the demand 
 for law and order overwhelms all other 
 thoughts. To others the fierce desire for so- 
 cial justice obliterates all fear of a general 
 catastrophe. They push nearer and nearer to 
 the brink of the abyss. The warning cry of 
 "back" is challenged by the eager shout of 
 "forward!" The older methods of social 
 progress are abandoned as too slow. The 
 older weapons of social defense are thrown 
 aside as too blunt. Parliamentary discussion 
 is powerless. It limps in the wake of the pop- 
 ular movement. The "state", as we knew it, 
 threatens to dissolve into labor unions, con- 
 ventions, boards of conciliation, and confer- 
 ences. Society shaken to its base, hurls itself
 
 of Social Justice 18 
 
 into the Industrial suicide of the general strike, 
 refusing to feed itself, denying its own wants. 
 
 This is a time such as there never was be- 
 fore. It represents a vast social transforma- 
 tion in which there is at stake, and may be lost, 
 all that has been gained in the slow centuries 
 of material progress and in which there may 
 be achieved some part of all that has been 
 dreamed in the age-long passion for social 
 justice. 
 
 For the time being, the constituted govern- 
 ments of the world survive as best they may 
 and accomplish such things as they can, plan- 
 less, or planning at best only for the day. 
 Sufficient, and more than sufficient, for the day 
 is the evil thereof. 
 
 Never then was there a moment in which 
 there was greater need for sane and serious 
 thought. It is necessary to consider from the 
 ground up the social organization in which we 
 live and the means whereby it may be altered 
 and expanded to meet the needs of the time 
 to come. We must do this or perish. Jf we 
 do not mend the machine, there are forces
 
 14 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 moving in the world that will break it. The 
 blind Samson of labor will seize upon the pil- 
 lars of society and bring them down in a com- 
 mon destruction. 
 
 
 
 Few persons can attain to adult life without 
 being profoundly impressed by the appalling 
 inequalities of our human lot. Riches and 
 poverty jostle one another upon our streets. 
 The tattered outcast dozes on his bench while 
 the chariot of the wealthy is drawn by. The 
 palace is the neighbor of the slum. We are, 
 in modern life, so used to this that we no 
 longer see it. 
 
 Inequality begins from the very cradle. 
 Some are born into an easy and sheltered af- 
 fluence. Others are the children of mean and 
 sordid want. For some the long toil of life 
 begins in the very bloom time of childhood 
 and ends only when the broken and exhausted 
 body sinks into a penurious old age. For 
 others life is but a foolish leisure with mock 
 activities and mimic avocations to mask its use- 
 lessness. And as the circumstances vary so
 
 of Social Justice 15 
 
 too does the native endowment of the body and 
 the mind. Some born in poverty rise to 
 wealth. An inborn energy and capacity bid 
 defiance to the ill-will of fate. Others sink. 
 The careless hand lets fall the cradle gift of 
 wealth. 
 
 Thus all about us is the moving and shifting 
 spectacle of riches and poverty, side by side, 
 inextricable. 
 
 The human mind, lost in a maze of inequal- 
 ities that it cannot explain and evils that it can- 
 not, singly, remedy, must adapt itself as best 
 it can. An acquired indifference to the ills of 
 others is the price at which we live. A certain 
 dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personal re- 
 lief is the mere drop that any one of us alone 
 can cast into the vast ocean of human misery. 
 Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we 
 too perish. We feed well while others starve. 
 We make fast the doors of our lighted houses 
 against the indigent and the hungry. What 
 else can we do? If we shelter one what is 
 that? And if we try to shelter all, we are 
 ourselves shelterless.
 
 16 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 But the contrast thus presented is one that 
 has acquired a new meaning in the age in which 
 we live. The poverty of earlier days was the 
 outcome of the insufficiency of human labor to 
 meet the primal needs of human kind. It is 
 not so now. We live in an age that is at best 
 about a century and a half old the age of 
 machinery and power. Our common reading 
 of history has obscured this fact. Its pages 
 are filled with the purple gowns of kings and 
 the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its rec- 
 ord is largely that of battles and sieges, of the 
 brave adventure of discovery and the vexed 
 slaughter of the nations. It has long since dis- 
 missed as too short and simple for its pages, 
 the short and simple annals of the poor. And 
 the record is right enough. Of the poor what 
 is there to say? They were born; they lived; 
 they died. They followed their leaders, and 
 their names are forgotten. 
 
 But written thus our history has obscured the 
 greatest fact that ever came into it the colos- 
 sal change that separates our little era of a cen- 
 tury and a half from all the preceding history
 
 of Social Justice 17 
 
 of mankind separates it so completely that a 
 great gulf lies between, across which compar- 
 ison can scarcely pass, and on the other side 
 of which a new world begins. 
 
 It has been the custom of our history to use 
 the phrase the "new world" to mark the dis- 
 coveries of Columbus and the treasure-hunt of 
 a Cortes or a Pizarro. But what of that? 
 The America that they annexed to Europe was 
 merely a new domain added to a world already 
 old. The "new world" was really found in 
 the wonder-years of the eighteenth and early 
 nineteenth centuries. Mankind really entered 
 upon it when the sudden progress of liberated 
 science bound the fierce energy of expanding 
 stream and drew the eager lightning from the 
 cloud. 
 
 Here began indeed, in the drab surroundings 
 of the workshop, in the silent mystery of the 
 laboratory, the magic of the new age. 
 
 But we do not commonly realize the vastness 
 of the change. Much of our life and much of 
 our thought still belongs to the old world. 
 Our education is still largely framed on the old
 
 18 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 pattern. And our views of poverty and social 
 betterment, or what is possible and what is not, 
 are still largely conditioned by it. 
 
 In the old world, poverty seemed, and pov- 
 erty was, the natural and inevitable lot of the 
 greater portion of mankind. It was difficult, 
 with the mean appliances of the time, to wring 
 subsistence from the reluctant earth. For the 
 simplest necessaries and comforts of life all, 
 or nearly all, must work hard. Many must 
 perish for want of them. Poverty was inev- 
 itable and perpetual. The poor must look to 
 the brightness of a future world for the con- 
 solation that they were denied in this. Seen 
 thus poverty became rather a blessing than 
 a curse, or at least a dispensation prescribing 
 the proper lot of man. Life itself was but a 
 preparation and a trial a threshing floor 
 where, under the "tribulation" of want, the 
 wheat was beaten from the straw. Of this 
 older view much still survives, ' nd much that is 
 ennobling. Nor is there any need to say good- 
 by to it. Even if poverty were gone, the flail
 
 of Social Justice 19 
 
 could still beat hard enough upon the grain and 
 chaff of humanity. 
 
 But turn to consider the magnitude of the 
 change that has come about with the era of 
 machinery and the indescribable Increase which 
 it has brought to man's power over his envi- 
 ronment. There is no need to recite here in 
 detail the marvelous record of mechanical prog- 
 ress that constituted the "industrial revolution" 
 of the eighteenth century. The utilization of 
 coal for the smelting of iron ore; the invention 
 of machinery that could spin and weave; the 
 application of the undreamed energy of steam 
 as a motive force, the building of canals and 
 the making of stone roads these proved but 
 the beginnings. Each stage of invention called 
 for a further advance. The quickening of one 
 part of the process necessitated the "speeding 
 up" of all the others. It placed a premium 
 a reward already in sight upon the next ad- 
 vance. Mechanical spinning called forth the 
 power loom. The increase in production called 
 for new means of transport. The improve-
 
 20 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 ment of transport still further swelled the vol- 
 ume of production. The steamboat of 1809 
 and the steam locomotive of 1830 were the 
 direct result of what had gone before. Most 
 important of all, the movement had become a 
 conscious one. Invention was no longer the 
 fortuitous result of a happy chance. Mechani- 
 cal progress, the continual increase of power 
 and the continual surplus of product became an 
 essential part of the environment, and an un- 
 conscious element in the thought and outlook 
 of the civilized world. 
 
 No wonder that the first aspect of the age 
 of machinery was one of triumph. Man had 
 vanquished nature. The elemental forces of 
 wind and fire, of rushing water and driving 
 storm before which the savage had cowered 
 low for shelter, these had become his servants. 
 The. forest that had blocked his path became 
 his field. The desert blossomed as his garden. 
 
 The aspect of industrial life altered. The 
 domestic industry of the cottage and the indi- 
 vidual labor of the artisan gave place to the 
 factory with its regiment of workers and its
 
 of Social Justice 21 
 
 steam-driven machinery. The economic isola- 
 tion of the single worker, of the village, even 
 of the district and the nation, was lost in the 
 general cohesion in which the whole industrial 
 world merged into one. 
 
 The life of the individual changed accord- 
 ingly. In the old world his little sphere was 
 allotted to him and there he stayed. His vil- 
 lage was his horizon. The son of the weaver 
 wove and the smith reared his children to his 
 trade. Each did his duty, or was adjured to 
 do it, in the "state of life to which it had 
 pleased God to call him." Migration to dis- 
 tant occupations or to foreign lands was but for 
 the adventurous few. The ne'er-do-well blew, 
 like seed before the wind, to distant places, but 
 mankind at large stayed at home. Here and 
 there exceptional industry or extraordinary ca- 
 pacity raised the artisan to wealth and turned 
 the "man" into the "master." But for the 
 most part even industry and endowment were 
 powerless against the inertia of custom and the 
 dead-weight of environment. The universal 
 ignorance of the working class broke down the
 
 22 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 aspiring force of genius. Mute inglorious 
 Miltons were buried in country churchyards. 
 
 In the new world all this changed. The in- 
 dividual became but a shifting atom in the vast 
 complex, moving from place to place, from oc- 
 cupation to occupation and from gradation to 
 gradation of material fortune. 
 
 The process went further and further. The 
 machine penetrated everywhere, thrusting aside 
 with its gigantic arm the feeble efforts of handi- 
 craft. It laid its hold upon agriculture, sow- 
 ing and reaping the grain and transporting it 
 to the ends of the earth. Then as the nine- 
 teenth century drew towards its close, even the 
 age of steam power was made commonplace 
 by achievements of the era of electricity. 
 
 All this is familiar enough. The record of 
 the age of machinery is known to all. But the 
 strange mystery, the secret that lies concealed 
 within its organization, is realized by but few. 
 It offers, to those who see it aright, the most 
 perplexing industrial paradox ever presented hi 
 the history of mankind. With all our wealth, 
 we are still poor. After a century and a half
 
 of Social Justice 23 
 
 of labor-saving machinery, we work about 
 as hard as ever. With a power over na- 
 ture multiplied a hundred fold, nature still 
 conquers us. And more than this. There 
 are many senses in which the machine age 
 seems to leave the great bulk of civilized hu- 
 manity, the working part of it, worse off in- 
 stead of better. The nature of our work has 
 changed. No man now makes anything. He 
 makes only a part of something, feeding and 
 tending a machine that moves with relentless 
 monotony in the routine of which both the 
 machine and its tender are only a fractional 
 part. 
 
 For the great majority of the workers, the 
 interest of work as such is gone. It is a task 
 done consciously for a wage, one eye upon the 
 clock. The brave independence of the keeper 
 of the little shop contrasts favorably with the 
 mock dignity of a floor walker in an "establish- 
 ment." The varied craftsmanship of the arti- 
 san had in it something of the creative element 
 that was the parent motive of sustained indus- 
 try. The dull routine of the factory hand in
 
 24 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 a cotton mill has gone. The life of a pioneer 
 settler in America two hundred years ago, pe- 
 nurious and dangerous as it was, stands out 
 brightly beside the dull and meaningless toil of 
 his descendant. 
 
 The picture must not be drawn in colors too 
 sinister. In the dullest work and in the mean- 
 est lives in the new world to-day there are ele- 
 ments that were lacking in the work of the old 
 world. The universal spread of elementary 
 education, the universal access to the printed 
 page, and the universal hope of better things, 
 if not for oneself, at least for one's children, 
 and even the universal restlessness that the in- 
 dustrialism of to-day have brought are better 
 things than the dull plodding passivity of the 
 older world. Only a false medievalism can 
 paint the past in colors superior to the present. 
 The haze of distance that dims the mountains 
 with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the 
 past into the soft glory of retrospect. Misled 
 by these, the sentimentalist may often sigh for 
 an age that in a nearer view would be seen filled 
 with cruelty and suffering. But even when we
 
 of Social Justice 25 
 
 have made every allowance for the all too hu- 
 man tendency to soften down the past, it re- 
 mains true that in many senses the processes 
 of industry for the worker have lost in attrac- 
 tiveness and power of absorption of the mind 
 during the very period when they have gained 
 so enormously in effectiveness and in power 
 of production. 
 
 The essential contrast lies between the vastly 
 increased power of production and its appar- 
 ent inability to satisfy for all humanity the most 
 elementary human wants; between the immeas- 
 urable saving of labor effected by machinery 
 and the brute fact of the continuance of hard- 
 driven, unceasing toil. 
 
 Of the extent of this increased power of pro- 
 duction we can only speak in general terms. 
 No one, as far as I am aware, has yet essayed 
 to measure it. Nor have we any form of cal- 
 culus or computation that can easily be applied. 
 If we wish to compare the gross total of pro- 
 duction effected to-day with that accomplished 
 a hundred and fifty years ago, the means, the 
 basis of calculation, is lacking. Vast numbers
 
 26 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 of the things produced now were not then in 
 existence. A great part of our production of 
 to-day culminates not in productive goods, but 
 in services, as in forms of motion, or in ability 
 to talk across a distance. 
 
 It is true that statistics that deal with the 
 world's production of cotton, or of oil, or of 
 iron and steel present stupendous results. But 
 even these do not go far enough. For the 
 basic raw materials are worked into finer and 
 finer forms to supply new "wants" as they are 
 called, and to represent a vast quantity of "sat- 
 isfactions" not existing before. 
 
 Nor is the money calculus of any avail. 
 Comparison by prices breaks down entirely. A 
 bushel of wheat stands about where it stood 
 before and could be calculated. But the com- 
 putation, let us say, in price-values of the Sun- 
 day newspapers produced in one week in New 
 York or the annual output of photographic ap- 
 paratus, would defy comparison. Of the enor- 
 mous increase in the gross total of human goods 
 there is no doubt. We have only to look about 
 us to see it. The endless miles of railways,
 
 of Social Justice 27 
 
 the vast apparatus of the factories, the soaring 
 structures of the cities bear easy witness to it. 
 Yet it would be difficult indeed to compute by 
 what factor the effectiveness of human labor 
 working with machinery has been increased. 
 
 But suppose we say, since one figure is as 
 good as another, that it has been increased a 
 hundred times. This calculation must be well 
 within the facts and can be used as merely a 
 more concrete way of saying that the power of 
 production has been vastly increased. During 
 the period of this increase, the numbers of man- 
 kind in the industrial countries have perhaps 
 been multiplied by three to one. This again is 
 inexact, since there are no precise figures of 
 population that cover the period. But all that 
 is meant is that the increase in one case is, quite 
 obviously, colossal, and in the other case is evi- 
 dently not very much. 
 
 Here then is the paradox. 
 
 If the ability to produce goods to meet hu- 
 man wants has multiplied so that each man 
 accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what 
 he did before, then the world at large ought
 
 28 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 to be about thirty or fifty times better off. But 
 it is not. Or else, as the other possible alter- 
 native, the working hours of the world should 
 have been cut down to about one in thirty of 
 what they were before. But they are not. 
 How, then, are we to explain this extraordinary 
 discrepancy between human power and result- 
 ing human happiness? 
 
 The more we look at our mechanism of pro- 
 duction the more perplexing it seems. Suppose 
 an observer were to look down from the cold 
 distance of the moon upon the seething ant-hill 
 of human labor presented on the surface of our 
 globe; and suppose that such an observer knew 
 nothing of our system of individual property, 
 of money payments and wages and contracts, 
 but viewed our labor as merely that of a mass 
 of animated beings trying to supply their wants. 
 The spectacle to his eyes would be strange in- 
 deed. Mankind viewed in the mass would be 
 seen to produce a certain amount of absolutely 
 necessary things, such as food, and then to 
 stop. In spite of the fact that there was not 
 food enough to go round, and that large num-
 
 of Social Justice 29 
 
 bers must die of starvation or perish slowly 
 from under-nutrition, the production of food 
 would stop at some point a good deal short of 
 universal satisfaction. So, too, with the pro- 
 duction of clothing, shelter and other necessary 
 things; never enough would seem to be pro- 
 duced, and this apparently not by accident or 
 miscalculation, but as if some peculiar social 
 law were at work adjusting production to the 
 point where there is just not enough, and leav- 
 ing it there. The countless millions of workers 
 would be seen to turn their untired energies 
 and their all-powerful machinery away from the 
 production of necessary things to the making 
 of mere comforts; and from these, again, while 
 still stopping short of a general satisfaction, to 
 the making of luxuries and superfluities. The 
 wheels would never stop. The activity would 
 never tire. Mankind, mad with the energy of 
 activity, would be seen to pursue the fleeing 
 phantom of insatiable desire. Thus among the 
 huge mass of accumulated commodities the sim- 
 plest wants would go unsatisfied. Half-fed 
 men would dig for diamonds, and men shel-
 
 30 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 tered by a crazy roof erect the marble walls 
 of palaces. The observer might well remain 
 perplexed at the pathetic discord between hu- 
 man work and human wants. Something, he 
 would feel assured, must be at fault either with 
 the social instincts of man or with the social 
 order under which he lives. 
 
 And herein lies the supreme problem that 
 faces us in this opening century. The period 
 of five years of war has shown it to us in a 
 clearer light than fifty years of peace. War 
 is destruction the annihilation of human life, 
 the destruction of things made with generations 
 of labor, the misdirection of productive power 
 from making what is useful to making what 
 is useless. In the great war just over, some 
 seven million lives were sacrificed; eight million 
 tons of shipping were sunk beneath the sea; 
 some fifty million adult males were drawn from 
 productive labor to the lines of battle; behind 
 them uncounted millions labored day and night 
 at making the weapons of destruction. One 
 might well have thought that such a gigantic 
 misdirection of human energy would have
 
 of Social Justice 31 
 
 brought the industrial world to a standstill 
 within a year. So people did think. So 
 thought a great number, perhaps the greater 
 number, of the financiers and economists and 
 industrial leaders trained in the world in which 
 we used to live. The expectation was un- 
 founded. Great as is the destruction of war, 
 not even five years of it have broken the pro- 
 ductive machine. And the reason is now plain 
 enough. Peace, also or peace under the old 
 conditions of industry is infinitely wasteful of 
 human energy. Not more than one adult 
 worker in ten so a leading American econo- 
 mist has declared is employed on necessary 
 things. The other nine perform superfluous 
 services. War turns them from making the 
 glittering superfluities of peace to making its 
 grim engines of destruction. But while the 
 tenth man still labors, the machine, though 
 creaking with its dislocation, can still go on. 
 The economics of war, therefore, has thrown 
 its lurid light upon the economics of peace. 
 
 These I propose in the succeeding chapters 
 to examine. But it might be well before doing
 
 32 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 so to lay stress upon the fact that while admit- 
 ting all the shortcomings and the injustices of 
 the regime under which we have lived, I am 
 not one of those who are able to see a short 
 and single remedy. Many people when pre- 
 sented with the argument above, would settle 
 it at once with the word "socialism." Here, 
 they say, is the immediate and natural remedy. 
 I confess at the outset, and shall develop later, 
 that I cannot view it so. Socialism is a mere 
 beautiful dream, possible only for the angels. 
 The attempt to establish it would hurl us over 
 the abyss. Our present lot is sad, but the fry- 
 ing pan is at least better than the fire.
 
 II* Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Hap- 
 piness 
 
 A' 
 
 LL men," wrote Thomas Jefferson 
 in framing the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, "have an inalienable right 
 to life, liberty and the pursuit of 
 happiness." The words are more than a fe- 
 licitous phrase. They express even more than 
 the creed of a nation. They embody in them- 
 selves the uppermost thought of the era that 
 was dawning when they were written. They 
 stand for the same view of society which, in 
 that very year of 1776, Adam Smith put be- 
 fore the world in his immortal "Wealth of 
 Nations" as the "System of Natural Liberty." 
 In this system mankind placed its hopes for 
 over half a century and under it the industrial 
 civilization of the age of machinery rose to the 
 plenitude of its power. 
 
 33
 
 34 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 In the preceding chapter an examination has 
 been made of the purely mechanical side of the 
 era of machine production. It has been shown 
 that the age of machinery has been in a certain 
 sense one of triumph, of the triumphant con- 
 quest of nature, but in another sense one of 
 perplexing failure. The new forces controlled 
 by mankind have been powerless as yet to re- 
 move want and destitution, hard work and so- 
 cial discontent. In the midst of accumulated 
 wealth social justice seems as far away as ever. 
 
 It remains now to discuss the intellectual de- 
 velopment of the modern age of machinery and 
 the way in which it has moulded the thoughts 
 and the outlook of mankind. 
 
 Few men think for themselves. The 
 thoughts of most of us are little more than 
 imitations and adaptations of the ideas of 
 stronger minds. The influence of environment 
 conditions, if it does not control, the mind of 
 man. So it comes about that every age or 
 generation has its dominant and uppermost 
 thoughts, its peculiar way of looking at things 
 and its peculiar basis of opinion on which its
 
 of Social Justice 35 
 
 collective action and its social regulations rest. 
 All this is largely unconscious. The average 
 citizen of three generations ago was probably 
 not aware that he was an extreme individualist. 
 The average citizen of to-day is not conscious 
 of the fact that he has ceased to be one. The 
 man of three generations ago had certain ideas 
 which he held to be axiomatic, such as that his 
 house was his castle, and that property was 
 property and that what was his was his. But 
 these were to him things so obvious that he 
 could not conceive any reasonable person doubt- 
 ing them. So, too, with the man of to-day. He 
 has come to believe in such things as old age 
 pensions and national insurance. He submits 
 to bachelor taxes and he pays for the education 
 of other people's children; he speculates much 
 on the limits of inheritance, and he even med- 
 itates profound alterations in the right of prop- 
 erty in land. His house is no longer his castle. 
 He has taken down its fences, and "boule- 
 varded" its grounds till it merges into those of 
 his neighbors. Indeed he probably does not 
 live in a house at all, but in a mere "apartment"
 
 36 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 or subdivision of a house which he shares with 
 a multiplicity of people. Nor does he any 
 longer draw water from his own well or go to 
 bed by the light of his own candle: for such 
 services as these his life is so mixed up with 
 "franchises" and "public utilities" and other 
 things unheard of by his own great-grandfather, 
 that it is hopelessly intertangled with that of 
 his fellow citizens. In fine, there is little left 
 but his own conscience into which he can with- 
 draw. 
 
 Such a man is well aware that times have 
 changed since his great-grandfather's day. But 
 he is not aware of the profound extent to which 
 his own opinions have been affected by the 
 changing times. He is no longer an individ- 
 ualist. He has become by brute force of cir- 
 cumstances a sort of collectivist, puzzled only 
 as to how much of a collectivist to be. 
 
 Individualism of the extreme type is, there- 
 fore, long since out of date. To attack it is 
 merely to kick a dead dog. But the essential 
 problem of to-day is to know how far we are 
 to depart from its principles. There are those
 
 of Social Justice 37 
 
 who tell us and they number many millions 
 that we must abandon them entirely. Indus- 
 trial society, they say, must be reorganized 
 from top to bottom; private industry must 
 cease. All must work for the state; only in a 
 socialist commonwealth can social justice be 
 found. There are others, of whom the pres- 
 ent writer is one, who see in such a programme 
 nothing but disaster : yet who consider that the 
 individualist principle of "every man for him- 
 self" while it makes for national wealth and 
 accumulated power, favors overmuch the few 
 at the expense of the many, puts an over-great 
 premium upon capacity, assigns too harsh a 
 punishment for easy indolence, and, what is 
 worse, exposes the individual human being too 
 cruelly to the mere accidents of birth and for- 
 tune. Under such a system, in short, to those 
 who have is given and from those who have not 
 is taken away even that which they have. 
 There are others again who still view individ- 
 ualism just as the vast majority of our great- 
 grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but 
 just: as awarding to every man the fruit of his
 
 38 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 own labor and the punishment of his own idle- 
 ness, and as visiting, in accordance with the 
 stern but necessary ordination of our existence, 
 the sins of the father upon the child. 
 
 The proper starting point, then, for all dis- 
 cussion of the social problem is the considera- 
 tion of the individualist theory of industrial 
 society. This grew up, as all the world knows, 
 along with the era of machinery itself. It had 
 its counterpart on the political side in the 
 rise of representative democratic government. 
 Machinery, industrial liberty, political democ- 
 racy these three things represent the basis of 
 the progress of the nineteenth century. 
 
 The chief exposition of the system is found 
 in the work of the classical economists Adam 
 Smith and his followers of half a century who 
 created the modern science of political econ- 
 omy. Beginning as controversialists anxious to 
 overset a particular system of trade regulation, 
 they ended by becoming the exponents of a new 
 social order. Modified and amended as their 
 system is in its practical application, it still
 
 of Social Justice 39 
 
 largely conditions our outlook to-day. It is to 
 this system that we must turn. 
 
 The general outline of the classical theory 
 of political economy is so clear and so simple 
 that it can be presented within the briefest 
 compass. It began with certain postulates, or 
 assumptions, to a great extent unconscious, of 
 the conditions to which it applied. It assumed 
 the existence of the state and of contract. It 
 took for granted the existence of individual 
 property, in consumption goods, in capital 
 goods, and, with a certain hesitation, in land. 
 The last assumption was not perhaps without 
 misgivings : Adam Smith was disposed to look 
 askance at landlords as men who gathered 
 where they had not sown. John Stuart Mill, 
 as is well known, was more and more in- 
 clined, with advancing reflection, to question the 
 sanctity of landed property as the basis of social 
 institutions. But for the most part property, 
 contract and the coercive state were funda- 
 mental assumptions with the classicists. 
 
 With this there went, on the psychological
 
 40 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 side, the further assumption of a general sel- 
 fishness or self-seeking as the principal motive 
 of the individual in the economic sphere. 
 Oddly enough this assumption the most war- 
 rantable of the lot was the earliest to fall un- 
 der disrepute. The plain assertion that every 
 man looks out for himself (or at best for him- 
 self and his immediate family) touches the ten- 
 der conscience of humanity. It is an unpala- 
 table truth. None the less it is the most nearly 
 true of all the broad generalizations that can 
 be attempted in regard to mankind. 
 
 The essential problem then of the classicists 
 was to ask what would happen if an industrial 
 community, possessed of the modern control 
 over machinery and power, were allowed to fol- 
 low the promptings of "enlightened selfishness" 
 in an environment based upon free contract and 
 the right of property in land and goods. The 
 answer was of the most cheering description. 
 The result would be a progressive amelioration 
 of society, increasing in proportion to the com- 
 pleteness w r ith which the fundamental principles 
 involved were allowed to act, and tending ulti-
 
 of Social Justice 41 
 
 mately towards something like a social millen- 
 nium or perfection of human society. One eas- 
 ily recalls the almost reverent attitude of Adam 
 Smith towards this system of industrial liberty 
 which he exalted into a kind of natural theol- 
 ogy: and the way in which Mill, a deist but 
 not a Christian, was able to fit the whole appa- 
 ratus of individual liberty into its place in an 
 ordered universe. The world "runs of itself," 
 said the economist. We have only to leave it 
 alone. And the maxim of laissez faire became 
 the last word of social wisdom. 
 
 The argument of the classicists ran thus. If 
 there is everywhere complete economic free- 
 dom, then there will ensue in consequence a 
 regime of social justice. If every man is al- 
 lowed to buy and sell goods, labor and prop- 
 erty, just as suits his own interest, then the 
 prices and wages that result are either in the 
 exact measure of social justice or, at least, are 
 perpetually moving towards it. The price of 
 any commodity at any moment is, it is true, a 
 "market price," the resultant of the demand 
 and the supply; but behind this operates con-
 
 42 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 tinually the inexorable law of the cost of pro- 
 duction. Sooner or later every price must 
 represent the actual cost of producing the com- 
 modity concerned, or, at least, must oscillate 
 now above and now below that point which it 
 is always endeavoring to meet. For if tem- 
 porary circumstances force the price well above 
 the cost of producing the article in question, 
 then the large profits to be made induce a 
 greater and greater production. The in- 
 creased volume of the supply thus produced 
 inevitably forces down the price till it sinks 
 to the point of cost. If circumstances (such, 
 for example, as miscalculation and an over- 
 great supply) depress the price below the point 
 of cost, then the discouragement of further pro- 
 duction presently shortens the supply and brings 
 the price up again. Price is thus like an 
 oscillating pendulum seeking its point of rest, 
 or like the waves of the sea rising and falling 
 about its level. By this same mechanism the 
 quantity and direction of production, argued 
 the economists, respond automatically to the 
 needs of humanity, or, at least, to the "effec-
 
 of Social Justice 43 
 
 tive demand," which the classicist mistook for 
 the same thing. Just as much wheat or bricks 
 or diamonds would be produced as the world 
 called for; to produce too much of any one 
 thing was to violate a natural law; the falling 
 price and the resulting temporary loss sternly 
 rebuked the producer. 
 
 In the same way the technical form and 
 mechanism of production were presumed to re- 
 spond to an automatic stimulus. Inventions 
 and improved processes met their own reward. 
 Labor, so it was argued, was perpetually be- 
 ing saved by the constant introduction of new 
 uses of machinery. 
 
 By a parity of reasoning, the shares received 
 by all the participants and claimants in the 
 general process of production were seen to 
 be regulated in accordance with natural law. 
 Interest on capital was treated merely as a 
 particular case under the general theory of 
 price. It was the purchase price needed to 
 call forth the "saving" (a form, so to speak, 
 of production) which brought the capital into 
 the market. The "profits" of the employer
 
 44 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 represented the necessary price paid by society 
 for his services, just enough and not more 
 than enough to keep him and his fellows in 
 operative activity, and always tending under 
 the happy operation of competition to fall to 
 the minimum consistent with social progress. 
 
 Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to 
 the classicist a rather peculiar case. There 
 was here a physical basis of surplus over cost. 
 But, granted the operation of the factors and 
 forces concerned, rent emerged as a differential 
 payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. It 
 did not in any way affect prices or wages, 
 which were rendered neither greater nor less 
 thereby. The full implication of the rent doc- 
 trine and its relation to social justice remained 
 obscured to the eye of the classical economist; 
 the fixed conviction that what a man owns is 
 his own created a mist through which the light 
 could not pass. 
 
 Wages, finally, were but a further case of 
 value. There was a demand for labor, rep- 
 resented by the capital waiting to remunerate 
 it, and a supply of labor represented by the
 
 of Social Justice 45 
 
 existing and increasing working class. Hence 
 wages, like all other shares and factors, cor- 
 responded, so it was argued, to social justice. 
 Whether wages were high or low, whether 
 hours were long or short, at least the laborer 
 like everybody else "got what was coming to 
 him." All possibility of a general increase of 
 wages depended on the relation of available 
 capital to the numbers of the working men. 
 
 Thus the system as applied to society at 
 large could be summed up in the consoling 
 doctrine that every man got what he was worth, 
 and was worth what he got; that industry and 
 energy brought their own reward; that national 
 wealth and individual welfare were one and 
 the same; that all that was needed for social 
 progress was hard work, more machinery, more 
 saving of labor and a prudent limitation of 
 the numbers of the population. 
 
 The application of such a system to legis- 
 lation and public policy was obvious. It car- 
 ried with it the principle of laissez-faire. The 
 doctrine of international free trade, albeit the 
 most conspicuous of its applications, was but
 
 46 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 one case under the general law. It taught that 
 the mere organization of labor was powerless 
 to raise wages; that strikes were of no avail, 
 or could at best put a shilling into the pocket 
 of one artisan by taking it out of that of an- 
 other; that wages and prices could not be regu- 
 lated by law; that poverty was to a large ex- 
 tent a biological phenomenon representing the 
 fierce struggle of germinating life against the 
 environment that throttles part of it. The 
 poor were like the fringe of grass that fades 
 or dies where it meets the sand of the desert. 
 There could be no social remedy for poverty 
 except the almost impossible remedy of the 
 limitation of life itself. Failing this the econo- 
 mist could wash his hands of the poor. 
 
 These are the days of relative judgments 
 and the classical economy, like all else, must 
 be viewed in the light of time and circum- 
 stance. With all its fallacies, or rather its 
 shortcomings, it served a magnificent purpose. 
 It opened a road never before trodden from 
 social slavery towards social freedom, from 
 the mediaeval autocratic regime of fixed caste
 
 of Social Justice 47 
 
 and hereditary status towards a regime of equal 
 social justice. In this sense the classical econ- 
 omy was but the fruition, or rather represented 
 the final consciousness of a process that had 
 been going on for centuries, since the break- 
 down of feudalism and the emancipation of 
 the serf. True, the goal has not been reached. 
 The vision of the universal happiness seen by 
 the economists has proved a mirage. The end 
 of the road is not in sight. But it cannot be 
 doubted that in the long pilgrimage of man- 
 kind towards social betterment the economists 
 guided us in the right turning. If we turn 
 again in a new direction, it will at any rate not 
 be in the direction of a return to autocratic 
 medievalism. 
 
 But when all is said in favor of its historic 
 usefulness, the failures and the fallacies of nat- 
 ural liberty have now become so manifest that 
 the system is destined in the coming era to be 
 revised from top to bottom. It is to these 
 failures and fallacies that attention will be 
 drawn in the next chapter.
 
 III. The Failures and Fallacies of 
 Natural Liberty 
 
 THE rewards and punishments of the 
 economic world are singularly unequal. 
 One man earns as much in a week or 
 even in a day as another does in a year. 
 This man by hard, manual labor makes only 
 enough to pay for humble shelter and plain 
 food. This other by what seems a congenial 
 activity, fascinating as a game of chess, acquires 
 uncounted millions. A third stands idle in the 
 market place asking in vain for work. A fourth 
 lives upon rent, dozing in his chair, and neither 
 toils nor spins. A fifth by the sheer hazard of 
 a lucky "deal" acquires a fortune without work 
 at all. A sixth, scorning to work, earns noth- 
 ing and gets nothing; in him survives a prim- 
 itive dislike of labor not yet fully "evoluted 
 out;" he slips through the meshes of civiliza- 
 
 48
 
 The Unsolved Riddle 49 
 
 tion to become a "tramp," cadges his food 
 where he can, suns his tattered rags when it 
 is warm and shivers when it is cold, migrating 
 with the birds and reappearing with the flowers 
 of spring. 
 
 Yet all are free. This is the distinguishing 
 mark of them as children of our era. They 
 may work or stop. There is no compulsion 
 from without. No man is a slave. Each has 
 his "natural liberty," and each in his degree, 
 great or small, receives his allotted reward. 
 
 But is the allotment correct and the reward 
 proportioned by his efforts? Is it fair or un- 
 fair, and does it stand for the true measure of 
 social justice? 
 
 This is the profound problem of the twen- 
 tieth century. 
 
 The economists and the leading thinkers of 
 the nineteenth century were in no doubt about 
 this question. It was their firm conviction that 
 the system under which we live was, in its broad 
 outline, a system of even justice. They held it 
 true that every man under free competition and 
 individual liberty is awarded just what he is
 
 50 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 worth and is worth exactly what he gets: that 
 the reason why a plain laborer is paid only two 
 or three dollars a day is because he only "pro- 
 duces" two or three dollars a day: and that 
 why a skilled engineer is paid ten times as much 
 is because he "produces" ten times as much. 
 His work is "worth" ten times that of the plain 
 laborer. By the same reasoning the salary of 
 a corporation president who receives fifty thou- 
 sand dollars a year merely reflects the fact that 
 the man produces earns brings in to the cor- 
 poration that amount or even more. The big 
 salary corresponds to the big efficiency. 
 
 And there is much in the common experience 
 of life and the common conduct of business that 
 seems to support this view. It is undoubtedly 
 true if we look at any little portion of busi- 
 ness activity taken as a fragment by itself. On 
 the most purely selfish grounds I may find that 
 it "pays" to hire an expert at a hundred dol- 
 lars a day, and might find that it spelled ruin 
 to attempt to raise the wages of my working- 
 men beyond four dollars a day. Everybody 
 knows that in any particular business at any
 
 of Social Justice 51 
 
 particular place and time with prices at any 
 particular point, there is a wage that can be 
 paid and a wage that can not. And every- 
 body, or nearly everybody, bases on these ob- 
 vious facts a series of entirely erroneous con- 
 clusions. Because we cannot change the part 
 we are apt to think we cannot change the whole. 
 Because one brick in the wall is immovable, 
 we forget that the wall itself might be rebuilt. 
 
 The single employer rightly knows that 
 there is a wage higher than he can pay and 
 hours shorter than he can grant. But are the 
 limits that frame him in, real and necessary 
 limits, resulting from the very nature of things, 
 or are they mere products of particular circum- 
 stances? This, as a piece of pure economics, 
 does not interest the individual employer a par- 
 ticle. It belongs in the same category as the 
 question of the immortality of the soul and 
 other profundities that have nothing to do with 
 business. But to society at large the question 
 is of an infinite importance. 
 
 Now the older economists taught, and the 
 educated world for about a century believed,
 
 52 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 that these limitations which hedged the partic- 
 ular employer about were fixed and assigned by 
 natural economic law. They represented, as 
 has been explained, the operation of the system 
 of natural liberty by which every man got what 
 he is worth. And it is quite true that the par- 
 ticular employer can no more break away from 
 these limits than he can jump out of his own 
 skin. He can only violate them at the ex- 
 pense of ceasing to be an economic being at all 
 and degenerating into a philanthropist. 
 
 But consider for a moment the peculiar na- 
 ture of the limitations themselves. Every 
 man's limit of what he can pay and what he 
 can take, of how much he can offer and how 
 much he will 'receive, is based on the similar 
 limitations of other people. They are recip- 
 rocal to one another. Why should one factory 
 owner not pay ten dollars a day to his hands? 
 Because the others don't. But suppose they all 
 do? Then the output could not be sold at the 
 present price. But why not sell the produce 
 at a higher price? Because at a higher price 
 the consumer can't afford to buy it. But sup-
 
 of Social Justice 53 
 
 pose that the consumer, for the things which 
 he himself makes and sells, or for the work 
 which he performs, receives more? What 
 then? The whole thing begins to have a jig- 
 saw look, like a child's toy rack with wooden 
 soldiers on it, expanding and contracting. One 
 searches in vain for the basis on which the re- 
 lationship rests. And at the end of the anal- 
 ysis one finds nothing but a mere anarchical 
 play of forces, nothing but a give-and-take rest- 
 ing on relative bargaining strength. Every 
 man gets what he can and gives what he has to. 
 Observe that this is not in the slightest the 
 conclusion of the orthodox economists. Every 
 man, they said, gets what he actually makes, 
 or, by exchange, those things which exactly cor- 
 respond to it as regards the cost of making 
 them which have, to use the key-word of the 
 theory, the same value. Let us take a very 
 simple example. If I go fishing with a net 
 which I have myself constructed out of fibers 
 and sticks, and if I catch a fish and if I then 
 roast the fish over a fire which I have made 
 without so much as the intervention of a lucifer
 
 54 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 match, then it is I and I alone who have "pro- 
 duced" the roast fish. That is plain enough. 
 But what if I catch the fish by using a hired 
 boat and a hired net, or by buying worms as 
 bait from some one who has dug them? Or 
 what if I do not fish at all, but get my roast 
 fish by paying for it a part of the wages I re- 
 ceive for working in a saw mill? Here are a 
 new set of relationships. How much of the 
 fish is "produced" by each of the people con- 
 cerned? And what part of my wages ought I 
 to pay in return for the part of the fish that 
 I buy? 
 
 Here opens up, very evidently, a perfect 
 labyrinth of complexity. But it was the laby- 
 rinth for which the earlier economist held, so 
 he thought, the thread. No matter how dark 
 the passage, he still clung tight to it. And his 
 thread was his "fundamental equation of value" 
 whereby each thing and everything is sold (or 
 tends to be sold) under free competition for 
 exactly its cost of production. There it was; 
 as simple as A. B. C. ; making the cost of every- 
 thing proportional to the cost of everything
 
 of Social Justice 55 
 
 else, and in itself natural and just; explaining 
 and justifying the variations of wages and sal- 
 aries on what seems a stern basis of fact. Here 
 is your selling price as a starting point. Given 
 that, you can see at once the reason for the 
 wages paid and the full measure of the pay- 
 ment. To pay more is impossible. To pay 
 less is to invite a competition that will force 
 the payment of more. Or take, if you like, the 
 wages as the starting point : there you are again, 
 simplicity itself : the selling price will exactly 
 and nicely correspond to cost. True, a part of 
 the cost concerned will be represented not by 
 wages, but by cost of materials; but these, on 
 analysis, dissolve into past wages. Hence the 
 whole process and its explanation revolves 
 around this simple fundamental equation that 
 selling value equals the cost of production. 
 
 This was the central part of the economic 
 structure. It was the keystone of the arch. 
 If it holds, all holds. Knock it out and the 
 whole edifice falls into fragments. 
 
 A technical student of the schools would di- 
 gress here, to the great confusion of the reader,
 
 56 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 into a discussion of the controversy in the eco- 
 nomic cloister between the rival schools of econ- 
 omists as to whether cost governs value or 
 value governs cost. The point needs no dis- 
 cussion here, but just such fleeting passing men- 
 tion as may indicate that the writer is well and 
 wearily conversant with it. 
 
 The fundamental equation of the economist, 
 then, is that the value of everything is propor- 
 tionate to its cost. It requires no little hardi- 
 hood to say that this proposition is a fallacy. 
 It lays one open at once, most illogically, to the 
 charge of being a socialist. In sober truth it 
 might as well lay one open to the charge of 
 being an ornithologist. I will not, therefore, 
 say that the proposition that the value of every- 
 thing equals the cost of production is false. I 
 will say that it is true; in fact, that is just as true 
 as that two and two make four : exactly as true 
 as that, but let it be noted most profoundly, 
 only as true as that. In other words, it is a 
 truism, mere equation in terms, telling nothing 
 whatever. When I say that two and two make 
 four I find, after deep thought, that I have
 
 of Social Justice 57 
 
 really said nothing, or nothing that was not al- 
 ready said at the moment I defined two and 
 defined four. The new statement that two and 
 two make four adds nothing. So with the ma- 
 jestic equation of the cost of production. It 
 means, as far as social application goes, as far 
 as any moral significance or bearing on social 
 reform and the social outlook goes, absolutely 
 nothing. It is not in itself fallacious; how 
 could it be? But all the social inferences 
 drawn from it are absolute, complete and mali- 
 cious fallacies. 
 
 Any socialist who says this, is quite right. 
 Where he goes wrong is when he tries to build 
 up as truth a set of inferences more fallacious 
 and more malicious still. 
 
 But the central economic doctrine of cost can 
 not be shaken by mere denunciation. Let us 
 examine it and see what is the matter with it. 
 We restate the equation. 
 
 Under perfectly free competition the value 
 or selling price of everything equals, or is per- 
 petually tending to equal, the cost of Its pro- 
 duction. This is the proposition itself, and the
 
 58 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 inferences derived from it are that there is a 
 "natural price" of everything, and that all "nat- 
 ural prices" are proportionate to cost and to 
 one another; that all wages, apart from tem- 
 porary fluctuations, are derived from, and lim- 
 ited by, the natural prices paid for the things 
 made : that all payments for the use of capital 
 (interest) are similarly derived and similarly 
 limited; and that consequently the whole eco- 
 nomic arrangement, by giving to each person 
 exactly and precisely the fruit of his own labor, 
 conforms exactly to social justice. 
 
 Now the trouble with the main proposition 
 just quoted is that each side of the equation is 
 used as the measure of the other. In order to 
 show what natural price is, we add up all the 
 wages that have been paid, and declare that 
 to be the cost and then say that the cost gov- 
 erns the price. Then if we are asked why are 
 wages what they are, we turn the argument 
 backward and say that since the selling price 
 is so and so the wages that can be paid out of 
 it only amount to such and such. This ex- 
 plains nothing. It is a mere argument in a cir-
 
 of Social Justice 59 
 
 cle. It is as if one tried to explain why one 
 blade of a pair of scissors is four inches long 
 by saying that it has to be the same length as 
 the other. This is quite true of either blade 
 if one takes the length of the other for granted, 
 but as applied to the explanation of the length 
 of the scissors it is worse than meaningless. 
 
 This reasoning may seem to many persons 
 mere casuistry, mere sophistical juggling with 
 Words. After all, they say, there is such a 
 thing as relative cost, relative difficulty of mak- 
 ing things, a difference which rests upon a phys- 
 ical basis. To make one thing requires a lot 
 of labor and trouble and much skill: to make 
 another thing requires very little labor and no 
 skill out of the common. Here then is your 
 basis of value, obvious and beyond argument. 
 A primitive savage makes a bow and arrow in 
 a day: it takes him a fortnight to make a bark 
 canoe. On that fact rests the exchange value 
 between the two. The relative quantity of la- 
 bor embodied in each object is the basis of its 
 value. 
 
 This line of reasoning has a very convmcfhg
 
 60 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 sound. It appears in nearly every book on eco- 
 nomic theory from Adam Smith and Ricardo 
 till to-day. "Labor alone," wrote Smith, 
 "never varying in its own value is above the 
 ultimate and real standard by which the value 
 of all commodities can at all times and places 
 be estimated and compared." 
 
 But the idea that quantity of labor governs 
 value will not stand examination for a moment. 
 What is quantity of labor and how is it meas- 
 ured? As long as we draw our illustrations 
 from primitive life where one man's work is 
 much the same as another's and where all oper- 
 ations are simple, we seem easily able to meas- 
 ure and compare. One day is the same as an- 
 other and one man about as capable as his fel- 
 low. But in the complexity of modern indus- 
 trial life such a calculation no longer applies: 
 the differences of skill, of native ingenuity, and 
 technical preparation become enormous. The 
 hour's work of a common laborer is not the 
 same thing as the hour's work of a watchmaker 
 mending a watch, or of an engineer directing 
 the building of a bridge, or of an architect
 
 of Social Justice 61 
 
 drawing a plan. There is no way of reducing 
 these hours to a common basis. We may think, 
 if we like, that the quantity of labor ought to 
 be the basis of value and exchange. Such is 
 always the dream of the socialist. But on a 
 closer view it is shattered like any other dream. 
 For we have, alas, no means of finding out 
 what the quantity of labor is and how it can 
 be measured. We cannot measure it in terms 
 of time. We have no calculus for comparing 
 relative amounts of skill and energy. We can 
 not measure it by the amount of its contribution 
 to the product, for that is the very matter that 
 we want to discover. 
 
 What the economist does is to slip out of 
 the difficulty altogether by begging the whole 
 question. He deliberately measures the quan- 
 tity of labor by what is paid for it. Skilled 
 labor is worth, let us say, three times as much 
 as common labor; and brain work, speaking 
 broadly, is worth several times as much again. 
 Hence by adding up all the wages and salaries 
 paid we get something that seems to indicate 
 the total quantity of labor, measured not sim-
 
 62 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 ply in time, but with an allowance for skill and 
 technical competency. By describing this al- 
 lowance as a coefficient we can give our state- 
 ment a false air of mathematical certainty and 
 so muddle up the essential question that the 
 truth is lost from sight like a pea under a thim- 
 ble. Now you see it and now you don't. The 
 thing is, in fact, a mere piece of intellectual con- 
 juring. The conjurer has slipped the phrase, 
 "quantity of labor," up his sleeve, and when it 
 reappears it has turned into "the expense of 
 hiring labor." This is a quite different thing. 
 But as both conceptions are related somehow to 
 the idea of cost, the substitution is never dis- 
 covered. 
 
 On this false basis a vast structure is erected. 
 All prices, provided that competition is free, 
 are made to appear as the necessary result of 
 natural forces. They are "natural" or "nor- 
 mal" prices. All wages are explained, and low 
 wages are exonerated, on what seems to be an 
 undeniable ground of fact. They are what 
 they are. You may wish them otherwise, but 
 they are not. As a philanthropist, you may
 
 of Social Justice 63 
 
 feel sorry that a humble laborer should work 
 through a long day to receive two dollars, but 
 as an economist you console yourself with the 
 reflection that that is all he produces. You 
 may at times, as a sentimentalist, wonder 
 whether the vast sums drawn as interest on 
 capital are consistent with social fairness; but 
 if it is shown that interest is simply the "nat- 
 ural price" of capital representing the actual 
 "productive power" of the capital, there is 
 nothing further to say. You may have similar 
 qualms over rent and the Tightness and wrong- 
 ness of it. The enormous "unearned incre- 
 ment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of 
 land who toils not neither spins to obtain it, 
 may seem difficult of justification. But after 
 all, land is only one particular case of owner- 
 ship under the one and the same system. The 
 rent for which the owner can lease it, emerges 
 simply as a consequence of the existing state of 
 wages and prices. High rent, says the econo- 
 mist, does not make big prices: it merely fol- 
 lows as a consequence or result of them. Dear 
 bread is not caused by the high rents paid by
 
 64 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 tenant farmers for the land: the train of cause 
 and effect runs in the contrary direction. And 
 the selling price of land is merely a consequence 
 of its rental value, a simple case of capitaliza- 
 tion of annual return into a present sum. City 
 land, though it looks different from farm land, 
 is seen in the light of this same analysis, to earn 
 its rent in just the same way. The high rent 
 of a Broadway store, says the economist, does 
 not add a single cent to the price of the things 
 sold in it. It is because prices are what they 
 are that the rent is and can be paid. Hence 
 on examination the same canon of social justice 
 that covers and explains prices, wages, and in- 
 terest applies with perfect propriety to rent. 
 
 Or finally, to take the strongest case of all, 
 one may, as a citizen, feel apprehension at times 
 at the colossal fortune of a Carnegie or a Rock- 
 efeller. For it does seem passing strange that 
 one human being should control as property the 
 mass of coin, goods, houses, factories, land and 
 mines, represented by a billion dollars ; stranger 
 still that at his death he should write upon a 
 piece of paper his commands as to what his sur-
 
 of Social Justice 65 
 
 viving fellow creatures are to do with it. But 
 if it can be shown to be true that Mr. Rocke- 
 feller "made" his fortune in the same sense that 
 a man makes a log house by felling trees and 
 putting them one upon another, then the for- 
 tune belongs to Mr. Rockefeller in the same 
 way as the log house belongs to the pioneer. 
 And if the social inferences that are drawn 
 from the theory of natural liberty and natural 
 value are correct, the millionaire and the land- 
 lord, the plutocrat and the pioneer, the wage 
 earner and the capitalist, have each all the right 
 to do what he will with his own. For every 
 man in this just world gets what is coming to 
 him. He gets what he is worth, and he is 
 worth what he gets. 
 
 But if one knocks out the keystone of the 
 arch in the form of a proposition that natural 
 value conforms to the cost of production, then 
 the whole edifice collapses and must be set up 
 again, upon another plan and on another foun- 
 dation, stone by stone.
 
 IV. Work and Wages 
 
 WAGES and prices, then, if the ar- 
 gument recited in the preceding 
 chapter of this series holds good, 
 do not under free competition tend 
 towards social justice. It is not true that every 
 man gets what he produces. It is not true that 
 enormous salaries represent enormous produc- 
 tive services and that humble wages correspond 
 to a humble contribution to the welfare of so- 
 ciety. Prices, wages, salaries, interest, rent 
 and profits do not, if left to themselves, follow 
 the simple law of natural justice. To think 
 so is an idle dream, the dream of the quietist 
 who may slumber too long and be roused to a 
 rude awakening or perish, perhaps, in his sleep. 
 His dream is not so dangerous as the contrasted 
 dream of the socialist, now threatening to walk 
 
 66
 
 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 abroad in his sleep, but both in their degree are 
 dreams and nothing more. 
 
 The real truth is that prices and wages are 
 all the various payments from hand to hand in 
 industrial society, are the outcome of a com- 
 plex of competing forces that are not based 
 upon justice but upon "economic strength." 
 To elucidate this it is necessary to plunge into 
 the jungle of pure economic theory. The way 
 is arduous. There are no flowers upon the 
 path. And out of this thicket, alas, no two 
 people ever emerge hand in hand in concord. 
 Yet it is a path that must be traversed. Let 
 us take, then, as a beginning the very simplest 
 case of the making of a price. It is the one 
 which is sometimes called In books on economics 
 the case of an unique monopoly. Suppose that 
 I offer for sale the manuscript of the Pickwick 
 Papers, or Shakespere's skull, or, for the mat- 
 ter of that, the skull of John Smith, what is 
 the sum that I shall receive for it? It is the 
 utmost that any one is willing to give for it. 
 That is all one can say about it. There is no 
 question here of cost or what I paid for the
 
 68 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 article or of anything else except the amount 
 of the willingness to pay on the part of the 
 highest bidder. It would be possible, indeed, 
 for a bidder to take the article from me by 
 force. But this we presume to be prevented 
 by the law, and for this reason we referred 
 above not to the physical strength, but to the 
 "economic strength" of the parties to a bargain. 
 By this is meant the relation that arises out of 
 the condition of the supply and the demand, 
 the willingness or eagerness, or the sheer neces- 
 sity, of the buyers and the sellers. People may 
 offer much because the thing to be acquired is 
 an absolute necessity without which they per- 
 ish; a drowning man would sell all that he had 
 for a life belt. Or they may offer much 
 through the sheer abundance of their other 
 possessions. A millionaire might offer more 
 for a life belt as a souvenir than a drowning 
 man could pay for it to save his life. 
 
 Yet out of any particular conjunction be- 
 tween desires on the one hand and goods or 
 services on the other arises a particular equa- 
 tion of demand and supply, represented by a
 
 of Social Justice 69 
 
 particular price. All of this, of course, is 
 A. B. C., and I am not aware that anybody 
 doubts it. 
 
 Now let us make the example a little more 
 elaborate. Suppose that one single person 
 owned all the food supply of a community iso- 
 lated from the outside world. The price which 
 he could exact would be the full measure of all 
 the possessions of his neighbors up to the point 
 at least where they would commit suicide rather 
 than pay. True, in such a case as this, "eco- 
 nomic strength" would probably be broken 
 down by the intrusion of physical violence. 
 But in so far as it held good the price of food 
 would be based upon it. 
 
 Prices such as are indicated here were dis- 
 missed by the earlier economist as mere eco- 
 nomic curiosities. John Stuart Mill has some- 
 thing to say about the price of a "music box 
 in the wilds of Lake Superior," which, as he 
 perceived, would not be connected with the ex- 
 pense of producing it, but might be vastly more 
 or perhaps decidedly less. But Mill might 
 have said the same thing about the price of a
 
 70 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 music box, provided it was properly patented, 
 anywhere at all. For the music box and 
 Shakespere's skull and the corner in wheat are 
 all merely different kinds of examples of the 
 things called a monopoly sale. 
 
 Now let us change the example a little fur- 
 ther. Suppose that the monopolist has for sale 
 not simply a fixed and definite quantity of a cer- 
 tain article, but something which he can pro- 
 duce in larger quantities as desired. At what 
 price will he now sell? If he offers the article 
 at a very high price only a few people will take 
 it: if he lowers the price there will be more 
 and more purchasers. His interest seems di- 
 vided. He will want to put the price as high 
 as possible so that the profit on each single 
 article (over what it costs him to produce it) 
 will be as great as possible. But he will also 
 want to make as many sales as he possibly can, 
 which will induce him to set the price low 
 enough to bring in new buyers. But, of course, 
 if he puts the price so low that it only covers 
 the cost of making the goods his profit is all 
 gone and the mere multiplicity of sales is no
 
 of Social Justice 71 
 
 good to him. He must try therefore to find 
 a point of maximum profit where, having in 
 view both the number of sales and the profit 
 over cost on each sale the net profit is at its 
 greatest. This gives us the fundamental law 
 of monopoly price. It is to be noted that un- 
 der modern conditions of production the cost 
 of manufacture per article decreases to a great 
 extent in proportion as a larger and larger 
 number is produced and thus the widening of 
 the sale lowers the proportionate cost. In any 
 particular case, therefore, it may turn out that 
 the price that suits the monopolist's own inter- 
 est is quite a low price, one such as to allow for 
 an enormous quantity of sales and a very low 
 cost of manufacture. This, we say, may be the 
 case. But it is not so of necessity. In and of 
 itself the monopoly price corresponds to the 
 monopolist's profit and not to cheapness of sale. 
 The price may be set far above the cost. 
 
 And now notice the peculiar relation that is 
 set up between the monopolist's production and 
 the satisfaction of human wants. In propor- 
 tion as the quantity produced is increased the
 
 72 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 lower must the price be set in order to sell the 
 whole output. If the monopolist insisted on 
 turning out more and more of his goods, the 
 price that people would give would fall until 
 it barely covered the cost, then till it was less 
 than cost, then to a mere fraction of the cost 
 and finally to nothing at all. In other words, 
 if one produces a large enough quantity of any- 
 thing it becomes worthless. It loses all its 
 value just as soon as there is enough of it to 
 satisfy, and over-satisfy the wants of humanity. 
 Thus if the world produces three and a half 
 billion bushels of wheat it can be sold, let us 
 say, at two dollars a bushel; but if it produced 
 twice as much it might well be found that it 
 would only sell for fifty cents a bushel. The 
 value of the bigger supply as a total would 
 actually be less than that of the smaller. And 
 if the supply were big enough it would be 
 worth, in the economic sense, just nothing at 
 all. This peculiarity is spoken of in economic 
 theory as the paradox of value. It is referred 
 to in the older books either as an economic cu- 
 riosity or as a mere illustration in extreme
 
 of Social Justice 73 
 
 terms of the relation of supply to price. Thus 
 in many books the story is related of how the 
 East India Companies used at times deliber- 
 ately to destroy a large quantity of tea in order 
 that by selling a lesser amount they might reap 
 a larger profit than by selling a greater. 
 
 But in reality this paradox of value is the 
 most fundamental proposition in economic sci- 
 ence. Precisely here is found the key to the 
 operation of the economic society in which we 
 live. The world's production is aimed at pro- 
 ducing "values," not in producing plenty. If 
 by some mad access of misdirected industry we 
 produced enough and too much of everything, 
 our whole machinery of buying and selling 
 would break down. This indeed does happen 
 constantly on a small scale in the familiar phe- 
 nomenon of over-production. But in the or- 
 ganization In which we live over-production 
 tends to check itself at once. If the world's 
 machinery threatens to produce a too great 
 plenty of any particular thing, then it turns it- 
 self towards producing something else of which 
 there is not yet enough. This is done quite
 
 74s The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 unconsciously without any philanthropic intent 
 on the part of the individual producer and with- 
 out any general direction in the way of a social 
 command. The machine does it of itself. 
 When there is enough the wheels slacken and 
 stop. This sounds at first hearing most ad- 
 mirable. But let it be noted that the "enough" 
 here in question does not mean enough to sat- 
 isfy human wants. In fact it means precisely 
 the converse. It means enough not to satisfy 
 them, and to leave the selling price of the things 
 made at the point of profit. 
 
 Let it be observed also that we have hith- 
 erto been speaking as if all things were pro- 
 duced under a monopoly. The objection might 
 at once be raised that with competitive pro- 
 ducers the price will also keep falling down 
 towards cost and will not be based upon the 
 point of maximum profit. We shall turn to 
 this objection in a moment. But one or two 
 other points must be considered before do- 
 ing so. 
 
 In the first place in following out such an 
 argument as the present in regard to the pecu-
 
 of Social Justice 75 
 
 liar shortcomings of the system under which 
 we live, it is necessary again and again to warn 
 the reader against a hasty conclusion to the 
 possibilities of altering and amending it. The 
 socialist reads such criticism as the above with 
 impatient approval. "Very well," he says, 
 "the whole organization is wrong and works 
 badly. Now let us abolish it altogether and 
 make a better one." But in doing so he begs 
 the whole question at issue. The point is, can 
 we make a better one or must we be content 
 with patching up the old one? Take an illus- 
 tration. Scientists tell us that from the point 
 of view of optics the human eye is a clumsy 
 instrument poorly contrived for its work. A 
 certain great authority once said that if he had 
 made it he would have been ashamed of it. 
 This may be true. But the eye unfortunately 
 is all we have to see by. If we destroy our 
 eyes in the hope of making better ones we may 
 go blind. The best that we can do is to im- 
 prove our sight by adding a pair of spectacles. 
 So it is with the organization of society. Faulty 
 though it is, it does the work after a certain
 
 76 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 fashion. We may apply to it with advantage 
 the spectacles of social reform, but what the 
 socialist offers us is total blindness. But of 
 this presently. 
 
 To return to the argument. Let us consider 
 next what wages the monopolist in the cases 
 described above will have to pay. We take for 
 granted that he will only pay as much as he has 
 to. How much will this be? Clearly enough 
 it will depend altogether on the number of 
 available working men capable of doing the 
 work in question and the situation in which they 
 find themselves. It is again a case of relative 
 "economic strength." The situation may be 
 altogether in favor of the employer or alto- 
 gether in favor of the men, or may occupy a 
 middle ground. If the men arc so numerous 
 that there are more of them than are needed 
 for the work, and if there is no other occupa- 
 tion for them they must accept a starvation 
 wage. If they are so few in number that they 
 can all be employed, and if they are so well 
 organized as to act together, they can in their 
 turn exact any wage up to the point that leaves
 
 of Social Justice 77 
 
 no profit for the employer himself at all. In- 
 deed for a short time wages might even pass 
 this point, the monopolist employer being will- 
 ing (for various reasons, all quite obvious) ac- 
 tually to pay more as wages than he gets as re- 
 turn and to carry on business at a loss for the 
 sake of carrying it on at all. Clearly, then, 
 wages, as Adam Smith said, "are the result of 
 a dispute" in which either party must be pushed 
 to the wall. The employer may have to pay 
 so much that there is nothing or practically 
 nothing left for himself, or so little that his 
 workmen can just exist and no more. These 
 are the upward and downward limits of the 
 wages in the cases described. 
 
 It is therefore obvious that if all the indus- 
 tries in the world were carried on as a series 
 of separate monopolies, there would be exactly 
 the kind of rivalry or competition of forces rep- 
 resented by the consumer insisting on paying as 
 little as possible, the producer charging the 
 most profitable price and paying the lowest 
 wage that he could, and the wage earner de- 
 manding the highest wage that he could get.
 
 78 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 The equilibrium would be an unstable one. It 
 would be constantly displaced and shifted by 
 the movement of all sorts of social forces by 
 changes of fashion, by abundance or scarcity of 
 crops, by alterations in the technique of indus- 
 try and by the cohesion or the slackening of the 
 organization of any group of workers. But 
 the balanced forces once displaced would be 
 seen constantly to come to an equilibrium at a 
 new point. 
 
 All this has been said of industry under 
 monopoly. But it will be seen to apply in its 
 essentials to what we call competitive industry. 
 Here indeed certain new features come in. 
 Not one employer but many produce each kind 
 of article. And, as far as each employer can 
 see by looking at his own horizon, what he 
 does is merely to produce as much as he can 
 sell at a price that pays him. Since all the 
 other employers are doing this, there will be, 
 under competition, a constant tendency to cut 
 the prices down to the lowest that is consistent 
 with what the employer has to pay as wages 
 and interest. This point, which was called by
 
 of Social Justice 
 
 the orthodox economists the "cost," is not in 
 any true and fundamental sense of the words 
 the "cost" at all. It is merely a limit repre- 
 sented by what the other parties to the bargain 
 are able to exact. The whole situation is in a 
 condition of unstable equilibrium in which the 
 conflicting forces represented by the interests 
 of the various parties pull in different direc- 
 tions. The employers in any one line of in- 
 dustry and all their wage earners and salaried 
 assistants have one and the same interest as 
 against the consumer. They want the selling 
 price to be as high as possible. But the em- 
 ployers are against one another as wanting, 
 each of them, to make as many sales as possible, 
 and each and all the employers are against the 
 wage earners in wanting to pay as low wages 
 as possible. If all the employers unite, the sit- 
 uation turns to a monopoly, and the price paid 
 by the consumer is settled on the monopoly ba- 
 sis already described. The employers can then 
 dispute it out with their working men as to how 
 much wages shall be. If the employers are not 
 united, then at each and every moment they are
 
 80 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 in conflict both with the consumer and with 
 their wage earners. Thus the whole scene of 
 industry represents a vast and unending con- 
 flict, a fermentation in which the moving bub- 
 bles crowd for space, expanding and breaking 
 one against the other. There is no point of 
 rest. There Is no real fixed "cost" acting as a 
 basis. Anything that any one person or group 
 of persons worker or master, landlord or cap- 
 italist is able to exact owing to the existing 
 conditions of demand or supply, becomes a 
 "cost" from the point of view of all the others. 
 There is nothing in this "cost" which propor- 
 tions to it the quantity of labor, or of time, or 
 of skill or of any other measure physical or psy- 
 chological of the effort involved. And there is 
 nothing whatever in it which proportions to it 
 social justice. It is the war of each against all. 
 Its only mitigation is that it is carried on under 
 the set of rules represented by the state and 
 the law. 
 
 The tendencies involved may be best illus- 
 trated by taking one or two extreme or exag- 
 gerated examples, not meant as facts but only
 
 of Social Justice 81 
 
 to make clear the nature of social and industrial 
 forces among which we live. 
 
 What, for example, will be the absolute 
 maximum to which wages in general could be 
 forced? Conceivably and in the purest and 
 thinnest of theory, they could include the whole 
 product of the labor of society with just such 
 a small fraction left over for the employers, 
 the owners of capital and the owners of land 
 to induce them to continue acting as part of 
 the machine. That is to say, if all the labor- 
 ers all over the world, to the last one, were 
 united under a single control they could force 
 the other economic classes of society to some- 
 thing approaching a starvation living. In prac- 
 tice this is nonsense. In theory it is an excel- 
 lent starting point for thought. 
 
 And how short could the hours of the uni- 
 versal united workers be made? As short as 
 ever they liked : An hour a day : ten minutes, 
 anything they like; but of course with the pro- 
 viso that the shorter the hours the less the to- 
 tal of things produced to be divided. It is true 
 that up to a certain point shortening the hours
 
 82 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 of labor actually increases the total product. 
 A ten-hour day, speaking in general terms and 
 leaving out individual exceptions, is probably 
 more productive than a day of twelve. It may 
 very well be that an eight-hour day will prove, 
 presently if not immediately, to be more pro- 
 ductive than one of ten. But somewhere the 
 limit is reached and gross production falls. The 
 supply of things in general gets shorter. But 
 note that this itself would not matter much, if 
 somehow and in some way not yet found, the 
 shortening of the production of goods cut out 
 the luxuries and superfluities first. Mankind 
 at large might well trade leisure for luxuries. 
 The shortening of hours with the correspond- 
 ing changes in the direction of production is 
 really the central problem in social reform. 
 I propose to return to it in the concluding 
 chapter of these papers, but for the present 
 it is only noted in connection with the general 
 scheme of industrial relations. 
 
 Now let us ask to what extent any particular 
 section or part of industrial society can suc- 
 ceed in forcing up wages or prices as against
 
 of Social Justice 83 
 
 the others. In pure theory they may do this 
 almost to any extent, provided that the thing 
 concerned is a necessity and is without a sub- 
 stitute and provided that their' organization is 
 complete and unbreakable. If all the people 
 concerned in producing coal, masters and men, 
 owners of mines and operators of machinery, 
 could stand out for their price, there is no 
 limit, short of purting all the rest of the world 
 on starvation rations, to what they might get. 
 In practice and in reality a thousand things 
 intervene the impossibility of such complete 
 unity, the organization of the other parties, the 
 existing of national divisions among industrial 
 society, sentiment, decency, fear. The propo- 
 sition is only "pure theory." But its use as 
 such is to dispose of any such idea as that there 
 is a natural price of coal or of anything else. 
 The above is true of any article of necessity. 
 It is true though in a less degree of things of 
 luxury. If all the makers of instruments of 
 music, masters and men, capitalists and work- 
 ers, were banded together in a tight and un- 
 breakable union, then the other economic
 
 84 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 classes must either face the horrors of a world 
 without pianolas and trombones, or hand over 
 the price demanded. And what is true of coal 
 and music is true all through the whole mech- 
 anism of industry. 
 
 Or take the supreme case of the owners of 
 land. If all of them acted together, with their 
 legal rights added into one, they could order 
 the rest of the world either to get off it or to 
 work at starvation wages. 
 
 Industrial society is therefore mobile, elastic, 
 standing at any moment in a temporary and 
 unstable equilibrium. But at any particular 
 moment the possibility of a huge and catastro- 
 phic shift such as those described is out of the 
 question except at the price of a general col- 
 lapse. Even a minor dislocation breaks down 
 a certain part of the machinery of society. 
 Particular groups of workers ? r; e thrown out 
 of place. There is no other place where they 
 can fit in, or at any rate not immediately. The 
 machine labors heavily. Ominous mutterings 
 are heard. The legal framework of the State 
 and of obedience to the law in which indus-
 
 of Social Justice 85 
 
 trial society is set threatens to break asunder. 
 The attempt at social change threatens a social 
 revolution in which the whole elaborate mech- 
 anism would burst into fragments. 
 
 In any social movement, then, change and 
 alteration in a new direction must be balanced 
 against the demands of social stability. Some 
 things are possible and some are not; some are 
 impossible to-day, and possible or easy to- 
 morrow. Others are forever out of the ques- 
 tion. 
 
 But this much at least ought to appear clear 
 if the line of argument indicated above is ac- 
 cepted, namely, that there is no great hope for 
 universal betterment of society by the mere ad- 
 vance of technical industrial progress and by 
 the unaided play of the motive of every man 
 for himself. 
 
 The enormo- i increase in the productivity 
 of industrial effort would never of itself have 
 elevated by one inch the lot of the working 
 class. The rise of wages in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury and the shortening of hours that went 
 with it was due neither to the advance in me-
 
 86 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 chanical power nor to the advance in diligence 
 and industriousness, nor to the advance, if 
 there was any, in general kindliness. It was 
 due to the organization of labor. Mechanical 
 progress makes higher wages possible. It does 
 not, of itself, advance them by a single farthing. 
 Labor saving machinery does not of itself save 
 the working world a single hour of toil : it only 
 shifts it from one task to another. 
 
 Against a system of unrestrained individual- 
 ism, energy, industriousness and honesty might 
 shatter itself in vain. The thing is merely a 
 race in which only one can be first no matter 
 how great the speed of all; a struggle in which 
 one, and not all, can stand upon the shoulders 
 of the others. It is the restriction of individ- 
 ualism by the force of organization and by leg- 
 islation that has brought to the world what- 
 ever social advance has been achieved by the 
 great mass of the people. 
 
 The present moment is in a sense the wrong 
 time to say this. We no longer live in an age 
 when down-trodden laborers meet by candle- 
 light with the ban of the law upon their meet-
 
 of Social Justice 87 
 
 ing. These are the days when "labor" is tri- 
 umphant, and when it ever threatens in the 
 overweening strength of its own power to 
 break industrial society in pieces in the fierce 
 attempt to do in a day what can only be done 
 in a generation. But truth is truth. And any 
 one who writes of the history of the progress 
 of industrial society owes it to the truth to 
 acknowledge the vast social achievement of or- 
 ganized labor in the past. 
 
 And what of the future? 
 
 By what means and in what stages can social 
 progress be further accelerated? This I pro- 
 pose to treat in the succeeding chapters, dealing 
 first with the proposals of the socialists and the 
 revolutionaries, and finally with the prospect 
 for a sane, orderly and continuous social re- 
 form.
 
 V. The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of 
 the Socialist 
 
 WHO is there that has not turned 
 at times from the fever and fret 
 of the world we live in, from the 
 spectacle of its wasted energy, its 
 Wild frenzy of work and its bitter inequality, 
 to the land of dreams, to the pictured vision 
 of the world as it might be? 
 
 Such a vision has haunted in all ages the 
 brooding mind of mankind; and every age has 
 fashioned for itself the image of a "some- 
 where" or "nowhere" a Utopia in which 
 there should be equality and justice for all. 
 The vision itself is an outcome of that divine 
 discontent which raises man above his envi- 
 ronment. 
 
 Every age has had its socialism, its commu- 
 nism, its dream of bread and work for all.
 
 The Unsolved Riddle 89 
 
 But the dream has varied always in the like- 
 ness of the thought of the time. In earlier 
 days the dream was not one of social wealth. 
 It was rather a vision of the abnegation of 
 riches, of humble possessions shared in common 
 after the manner of the unrealized ideal of the 
 Christian faith. It remained for the age of 
 machinery and power to bring forth another 
 and a vastly more potent socialism. This was 
 no longer a plan whereby all might be poor 
 together, but a proposal that all should be rich 
 together. The collectivist state advocated by 
 the socialist of to-day has scarcely anything in 
 common with the communism of the middle 
 ages. 
 
 Modern socialism is the direct outcome of 
 the age of machine production. It takes its 
 first inspiration from glaring contrasts between 
 riches and poverty presented by the modern 
 era, from the strange paradox that has been 
 described above between human power and its 
 failure to satisfy human want. The nineteenth 
 century brought with it the factory and the 
 factory slavery of the Lancashire children, the
 
 90 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 modern city and city slum, the plutocracy and 
 the proletariat, and all the strange discrepancy 
 between wealth and want that has disfigured 
 the material progress of the last hundred years. 
 The rising splendor of capitalism concealed 
 from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle 
 of the new industrial poverty that lay in the 
 shadow behind it. 
 
 The years that followed the close of the 
 Napoleonic wars in 1815 were in many senses 
 years of unexampled misery. The accumu- 
 lated burden of the war lay heavy upon Europe. 
 The rise of the new machine power had dis- 
 locaced the older system. A multitude of land- 
 less men clamored for bread and work. Pau- 
 perism spread like a plague. Each new inven- 
 tion threw thousands of hand-workers out of 
 employment. The law still branded as con- 
 spiracy any united attempt of workingmen to 
 raise wages or to shorten the hours of work. 
 At the very moment when the coming of steam 
 power and the use of modern machinery were 
 piling up industrial fortunes undreamed of be- 
 fore, destitution, pauperism and unemployment
 
 of Social Justice k 91 
 
 seemed more widespread and more ominous 
 than ever. In this rank atmosphere germi- 
 nated modern socialism. The writings of 
 Marx and Engels and Louis Blanc were in- 
 spired by what they saw about them. 
 
 From its very cradle socialism showed the 
 double aspect which has distinguished it ever 
 since. To the minds of some it was the faith 
 of the insurrectionist, something to be achieved 
 by force; "bourgeois" society must be over- 
 thrown by force of arms; if open and fair fight- 
 ing was not possible against such great odds, 
 it must be blown skyhigh with gunpowder. 
 Dynamite, by the good fortune of invention, 
 came to the revolutionary at the very moment 
 when it was most wanted. To the men of vio- 
 lence, socialism was the twin brother of an- 
 archism, born at the same time, advocating the 
 same means and differing only as to the final 
 end. 
 
 But to others, socialism was from the begin- 
 ning, as it is to-day, a creed of peace. It advo- 
 cated the betterment of society not by violence 
 but by persuasion, by peaceful argument and
 
 92 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 the recognized rule of the majority. It is true 
 that the earlier socialists almost to a man in- 
 cluded, in the first passion of their denunciation, 
 things not necessarily within the compass of 
 purely economic reform. As children of mis- 
 ery they cried out against all human institu- 
 tions. The bond of marriage seemed an ac- 
 cursed thing, the mere slavery of women. The 
 family the one institution in which the better 
 side of human nature shines with an undimmed 
 light was to them but an engine of class op- 
 pression; the Christian churches merely the par- 
 asitic servants of the tyrannous power of a 
 plutocratic state. The whole history of human 
 civilization was denounced as an unredeemed 
 record of the spoliation of the weak by the 
 strong. Even the domain of the philosopher 
 was needlessly invaded and all forms of spec- 
 ulative belief were rudely thrown aside in favor 
 of a wooden materialism as dogmatic as any 
 of the creeds or theories which it proposed to 
 replace. 
 
 Thus seen, socialism appeared as the very 
 antithesis of law and order, of love and chas-
 
 of Social Justice 93 
 
 tity, and of religion itself. It was a tainted 
 creed. There was blood upon its hands and 
 bloody menace in its thoughts. It was a thing 
 to be stamped out, to be torn up by the roots. 
 The very soil in which it grew must be burned 
 out with the flame of avenging justice. 
 
 Such it still appears to many people to-day. 
 The unspeakable savagery of bolshevism has 
 made good the wildest threats of the partisans 
 of violence and fulfilled the sternest warnings 
 of the conservative. To-day more than ever 
 socialism is in danger of becoming a prescribed 
 creed, its very name under the ban of the law, 
 its literature burned by the hangman and a gag 
 placed upon its mouth. 
 
 But this is neither right nor wise. Socialism, 
 like every other impassioned human effort, will 
 flourish best under martyrdom. It will lan- 
 guish and perish in the dry sunlight of open 
 discussion. 
 
 For it must always be remembered in fair- 
 ness that the creed of violence has no necessary 
 connection with socialism. In its essential na- 
 ture socialism is nothing but a proposal for cer-
 
 94 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 tain kinds of economic reform. A man has 
 just as much right to declare himself a socialist 
 as he has to call himself a Seventh Day Advent- 
 ist or a Prohibitionist, or a Perpetual Motion- 
 ist. It is, or should be, open to him to convert 
 others to his way of thinking. It is only time 
 to restrain him when he proposes to convert 
 others by means of a shotgun or by dynamite, 
 and by forcible interference with their own 
 rights. When he does this he ceases to be a 
 socialist pure and simple and becomes a crim- 
 inal as well. The law can deal with him as 
 such. 
 
 But with socialism itself the law, in a free 
 country, should have no kind of quarrel. For 
 in the whole program of peaceful socialism 
 there is nothing wrong at all except one thing. 
 Apart from this it is a high and ennobling ideal 
 truly fitted for a community of saints. And 
 the one thing that is wrong with socialism is 
 that it won't work. That is all. It is, as it 
 were, a beautiful machine of which the wheels, 
 dependent upon some unknown and uninvented 
 motive power, refuse to turn. The unknown
 
 of Social Justice 95 
 
 motive force in this case means a power of 
 altruism, of unselfishness, of willingness to 
 labor for the good of others, such as the human 
 race has never known, nor is ever likely to 
 know. But the worst public policy to pursue 
 in reference to such a machine is to lock it up, 
 to prohibit all examination of it and to allow 
 it to become a hidden mystery, the whispered 
 hope of its martyred advocates. Better far to 
 stand it out into the open daylight, to let all 
 who will inspect it, and to prove even to the 
 simplest that such a contrivance once and for 
 all and for ever cannot be made to run. 
 
 Let us turn to examine the machine. 
 
 We may omit here all discussion of the his- 
 torical progress of socialism and the stages 
 whereby it changed from the creed of a few 
 theorists and revolutionists to being the ac- 
 cepted platform of great political parties, 
 counting its adherents by the million. All of 
 this belongs elsewhere. It suffices here to note 
 that in the process of its rise it has chafed away 
 much of the superfluous growth that clung to 
 it and has become a purely economic doctrine.
 
 96 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 There is no longer any need to discuss in con- 
 nection with it the justification of marriage and 
 the family, and the Tightness or wrongness of 
 Christianity: no need to decide whether the 
 materialistic theory of history is true or false, 
 since nine socialists out of ten to-day have for- 
 gotten, or have never heard, what the mate- 
 
 i -- 
 
 rialistic theory of history is: no need to exam- 
 ine whether human history is, or is not, a mere 
 record of class exploitation, since the contro- 
 versy has long shifted to other grounds. The 
 essential thing to-day is not the past, but the 
 future. The question is, what does the social- 
 ist have to say about the conditions under which 
 we live and the means that he advocates for 
 the betterment of them? 
 
 His case stands thus. He begins his discus- 
 sion with an indictment of the manifold weak- 
 nesses and the obvious injustices of the system 
 under which we live. And in this the socialist 
 is very largely right. He shows that under 
 free individual competition there is a perpetual 
 waste of energy. Competing rivals cover the 
 same field. Even the simplest services are per-
 
 of Social Justice 97 
 
 formed with an almost ludicrous waste of en- 
 ergy. In every modern city the milk supply 
 is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip from 
 door to door and from street to street, covering 
 the same ground, each leaving his cans of milk 
 here and there in a sporadic fashion as hap- 
 hazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, 
 says the socialist, the wasted labors of the milk- 
 man with the orderly and systematic perform- 
 ance of the postman, himself a little fragment 
 of socialism. And the milkman, they tell us, 
 is typical of modern industrial society. Com- 
 peting railways run trains on parallel tracks, 
 with empty cars that might be filled and with 
 vast executive organizations which do ten times 
 over the work that might be done by one. 
 Competing stores needlessly occupy the time of 
 hundreds of thousands of employees in a mix- 
 ture of idleness and industry. An inconceiv- 
 able quantity of human effort is spent on adver- 
 tising, mere shouting and display, as unproduc- 
 tive in the social sense as the beating of a drum. 
 Competition breaks into a dozen inefficient 
 parts the process that might conceivably be
 
 98 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 carried out, with an infinite saving of effort, 
 by a single guiding hand. 
 
 The socialist looking thus at the world we 
 live in sees in it nothing but waste and selfish- 
 ness and inefficiency. He looks so long that a 
 mist comes before his eyes. He loses sight of 
 the supreme fact that after all, in its own poor, 
 clumsy fashion, the machine does work. He 
 loses sight of the possibility of our falling into 
 social chaos. He sees no longer the brink of 
 the abyss beside which the path of progress 
 picks its painful way. He leaps with a shout 
 of exultation over the cliff. 
 
 And he lands, at least in imagination, in his 
 ideal state, his Utopia. Here the noise and 
 clamor of competitive industry is stilled. We 
 look about us at a peaceful landscape where 
 men and women brightly clothed and abun- 
 dantly fed and warmed, sing at their easy task. 
 There is enough for all and more than enough. 
 Poverty has vanished. Want is unknown. 
 The children play among the flowers. The 
 youths and maidens are at school. There are 
 no figures here bent with premature toil, no
 
 of Social Justice 99 
 
 > 
 
 faces dulled and furrowed with a life of hard- 
 ship. The light of education and culture has 
 shone full on every face and illuminated it into 
 all that it might be. The cheerful hours of 
 easy labor vary but do not destroy the pursuit 
 of pleasure and of recreation. Youth in such 
 a Utopia is a very springtime of hope: adult 
 life a busy and cheery activity: and age itself, 
 watching from its shady bench beneath a 
 spreading tree the labors of its children, is but: 
 a gentle retrospect from which material care 
 has passed away. 
 
 It is a picture beautiful as the opalescent col- 
 ors of a soap bubble. It is the vision of a 
 garden of Eden from which the demon has 
 been banished. And the Demon in question 
 is the Private Ownership of the Means of Pro- 
 duction. His name is less romantic than those 
 of the wonted demons of legend and folklore. 
 But it is at least suitable for the matter-of-fact 
 age of machinery which he is supposed to 
 haunt and on which he casts his evil spell. Let 
 him be once exorcised and the ills of humanity 
 are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of
 
 100 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 the simplest. Let this demon once feel the con- 
 tact of state ownership of the means of produc- 
 tion and his baneful influence will vanish into 
 thin air as his mediaeval predecessors did at the 
 touch of a thimbleful of holy water. 
 
 This, then, is the socialist's program. 
 Let "the state" take over all the means of pro- 
 duction all the farms, the mines, the factories, 
 the workshops, the ships, the railroads. Let it 
 direct the workers towards their task in accord- 
 ance with the needs of society. Let each labor 
 for all in the measure of his strength and talent. 
 Let each receive from all in the measure of 
 his proper needs. No work is to be wasted: 
 nothing is to be done twice that need only be 
 done once. All must work and none must be 
 idle : but the amount of work needed under 
 these conditions will be so small, the hours so 
 short, and the effort so slight, that work itself 
 will no longer be the grinding monotonous toil 
 that we know to-day, but a congenial activity 
 pleasant in itself. 
 
 A thousand times this picture has been pre- 
 sented. The visionary with uplifted eyes, his
 
 of Social Justice 101 
 
 gaze bent on the bright colors of the floating 
 bubble, has voiced it from a thousand plat- 
 forms. The earnest youth grinding at the aca- 
 demic mill has dreamed it in the pauses of his 
 studious labor. The impassioned pedant has 
 written it in heavy prose smothering its bright- 
 ness in the dull web of his own thought. The 
 brilliant imaginative mind has woven it into 
 romance, making its colors brighter still with 
 the sunlight of inspired phantasy. 
 
 But never, I think, has the picture of social- 
 ism at work been so ably and so dexterously 
 presented as in a book that begins to be for- 
 gotten now, but which some thirty years ago 
 took the continent by storm. This was the vol- 
 ume in which Mr. Edward Bellamy "looked 
 backward" from his supposed point of vantage 
 in the year 2000 A. D. and saw us as we are 
 and as we shall be. No two plans of a social- 
 ist state are ever quite alike. But the scheme 
 of society outlined in "Looking Backward" may 
 be examined as the most attractive and the most 
 consistent outline of a socialist state that has, 
 within the knowledge of the present writer, ever
 
 102 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 been put forward. It is worth while, in the 
 succeeding chapter to examine it in detail. No 
 better starting point for the criticism of collec- 
 tivist theories can be found than in a view of 
 the basis on which is supposed to rest the hal- 
 cyon life of Mr. Bellamy's charming common- 
 wealth.
 
 VI. How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward 
 
 THE reading public is as wayward and 
 as fickle as a bee among the flowers. 
 It will not long pause anywhere, and 
 it easily leaves each blossom for a bet- 
 ter. But like the bee, while impelled by an 
 instinct that makes it search for sugar, it sucks 
 in therewith its solid sustenance. 
 
 I am not quite certain that the bee does ex- 
 actly do this; but it is just the kind of thing 
 that the bee is likely to do. And in any case 
 it is precisely the thing which the reading pub- 
 lic does. It will not read unless it is tempted 
 by the sugary sweetness of the romantic inter- 
 est. It must have its hero and its heroine and 
 its course of love that never will run smooth. 
 For information the reader cares nothing. If 
 he absorbs it, it must be by accident, and un- 
 awares. He passes over the heavy tomes filled 
 103
 
 104 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 with valuable fact, and settles like the random 
 bee upon the bright flowers of contemporary 
 romance. 
 
 Hence if the reader is to be ensnared into 
 absorbing something useful, it must be hidden 
 somehow among the flowers. A treatise on 
 religion must be disguised as a love story in 
 which a young clergyman, sworn into holy 
 orders, falls in love with an actress. The 
 facts of history are imparted by a love story 
 centering around the adventures of a hitherto 
 unknown son of Louis the Fourteenth. And 
 a discussion of the relations of labor and cap- 
 ital takes the form of a romance in which the 
 daughter of a multi-millionaire steps volunta- 
 rily out of her Fifth Avenue home to work in 
 a steam laundry. 
 
 Such is the recognized method by which the 
 great unthinking public is taught to think. 
 Slavery was not fully known till Mrs. Stowe 
 wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the slow 
 tyranny of the law's delay was taught to the 
 world for ever in the pages of "Bleak House." 
 
 So it has been with socialism. No single
 
 of Social Justice 105 
 
 influence ever brought its ideas and its propa- 
 ganda so forcibly and clearly before the public 
 mind as Mr. Edward Bellamy's brilliant novel, 
 "Looking Backward," published some thirty 
 years ago. The task was arduous. Social and 
 economic theory is heavy to the verge of being 
 indigestible. There is no such thing as a gay 
 book on political economy for reading in a 
 hammock. Yet Mr. Bellamy succeeded. His 
 book is in cold reality nothing but a series of 
 conversations explaining how a socialist com- 
 monwealth is supposed to work. Yet he con- 
 trives to bring into it a hero and a heroine, 
 and somehow the warm beating of their hearts 
 and the stolen glances in their eyes breathe into 
 the dry dust of economic argument the breath 
 of life. Nor was ever a better presentation 
 made of the essential program of socialism. 
 
 It is worth while then, as was said in the 
 preceding chapter, to consider Mr. Bellamy's 
 commonwealth as the most typical and the most 
 carefully constructed of all the ready-made 
 socialisms that have been put forward. 
 
 The mere machinery of the story can be
 
 106 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 lightly passed over. It is intended simply as 
 the sugar that lures the random bee. The 
 hero, living in Boston in 1887, is supposed to 
 fall asleep in a deep, underground chamber 
 which he has made for himself as a remedy 
 against a harassing insomnia. Unknown to 
 the sleeper the house above his retreat is 
 burned down. He remains in a trance for a 
 hundred and thirteen years and awakes to find 
 himself in the Boston of the year 2000 A. D. 
 Kind hands remove him from his sepulcher. 
 He is revived. He finds himself under the 
 care of a certain learned and genial Dr. Leete, 
 whose house stands on the very site where once 
 the sleeper lived. The beautiful daughter of 
 Dr. Leete looks upon the newcomer from the 
 lost world with eyes in which, to the mind of 
 the sagacious reader, love is seen at once to 
 dawn. In reality she is the great-granddaughter 
 of the fiancee whom the sleeper was to have 
 married in his former life; thus a faint sugges- 
 tion of the transmigration of souls illuminates 
 their intercourse. Beyond that there is no 
 story and at the end of the book the sleeper,
 
 of Social Justice 107 
 
 in another dream, is conveniently transported 
 back to 1887 which he can now contrast, in 
 horror, with the ideal world of 2000 A. D. 
 
 And what was this world? The sleeper's 
 first vision of it was given him by Dr. Leete, 
 who took him to the house top and let him see 
 the Boston of the future. Wide avenues re- 
 place the crowded, noisy streets. There are 
 no shops but only here and there among the 
 trees great marble buildings, the emporiums 
 from which the goods are delivered to the pur- 
 ple public. 
 
 And the goods are delivered indeed! 
 Dr. Leete explains it all with intervals of grate- 
 ful cigar smoking and of music and prome- 
 nades with the beautiful Edith, and meals in 
 wonderful communistic restaurants with roman- 
 tic waiters, who feel themselves, mirabile dictu, 
 quite independent. 
 
 And this is how the commonwealth operates. 
 Everybody works or at least works until the 
 age of forty, so that it may be truly said in these 
 halcyon days everybody works but father. But 
 the work of life does not begin till education
 
 108 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 ends at the age of twenty-one. After that all 
 the young men and women pass for three years 
 into the general "Industrial Army," much as 
 the young men used to pass into the ranks of 
 conscription. Afterwards each person may se- 
 lect any trade that he likes. But the hours are 
 made longer or shorter according to whether 
 too many or too few young people apply to 
 come in. A gardener works for more hours 
 than a scavenger. Yet all occupations are 
 equally honorable. The wages of all the peo- 
 ple are equal; or rather there are no wages at 
 all, as the workers merely receive cards, which 
 entitle them to goods of such and such a quan- 
 tity at any of the emporiums: The cards are 
 punched out as the goods are used. The goods 
 are all valued according to the amount of time 
 used in their making and each citizen draws 
 out the same total amount. But he may take 
 it out in installments just as he likes, drawing 
 many things one month and few the next. He 
 may even get goods in advance if he has any 
 special need. He may, within a certain time 
 limit, save up his cards, but it must be remem-
 
 of Social Justice 109 
 
 bered that the one thing which no card can buy 
 and which no citizens can own is the "means 
 of production." These belong collectively to 
 all. Land, mines, machinery, factories and the 
 whole mechanism of transport, these things are 
 public property managed by the State. Its 
 workers in their use of them are all directed 
 by public authority as to what they shall make 
 and when they shall make it, and how much 
 shall be made. On these terms all share alike; 
 the cripple receives as much as the giant; the 
 worker of exceptional dexterity and energy the 
 same as his slower and less gifted fellow. 
 
 All the management, the control and let 
 this be noted, for there is no escape from it 
 either by Mr. Bellamy or by anybody else- 
 is exercised by boards of officials elected by the 
 people. All the complex organization by 
 which production goes on by which the workers 
 are supervised and shifted from trade to trade, 
 by which their requests for a change of work 
 or an extension of credit are heard and judged 
 all of this is done by the elected "bosses." 
 One lays stress on this not because it is Mr.
 
 110 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 Bellamy's plan, but because it is, and it has to 
 be, the plan of anybody who constructs a social- 
 ist commonwealth. 
 
 Mr. Bellamy has many ingenious arrange- 
 ments to meet the needs of people who want 
 to be singers or actors or writers, in other 
 words, who do not want to work. They may 
 sing or act as much as they like, provided that 
 enough other people will hand over enough of 
 their food cards to keep them going. But if 
 no one wants to hear them sing or see them act 
 they may starve, just as they do now. Here 
 the author harks back unconsciously to his nine- 
 teenth century individualism; he need not have 
 done so; other socialist writers would have it 
 that one of the everlasting boards would "sit 
 on" every aspiring actor or author before he 
 was allowed to begin. But we may take it 
 cither way. It is not the major point. There 
 is no need to discuss the question of how to 
 deal with the artist under socialism. If the 
 rest of it were all right, no one need worry 
 about the artist. Perhaps he would do better 
 without being remunerated at all. It is doubt-
 
 of Social Justice 111 
 
 ful whether the huge commercial premium that 
 greets success to-day does good or harm. But 
 let it pass. It is immaterial to the present 
 matter. 
 
 One comes back to the essential question of 
 the structure of the commonwealth. Can such 
 a thing, or anything conceived in its likeness, 
 possibly work? The answer is, and must be, 
 absolutely and emphatically no. 
 
 Let anyone conversant with modern democ- 
 racy as it is, not as its founders dreamed of 
 it, picture to himself the operation of a sys- 
 tem whereby anything and everything is con- 
 trolled by elected officials, from whom there is 
 no escape, outside of whom is no livelihood and 
 to whom all men must bow! Democracy, let 
 us grant it, is the best system of government 
 as yet operative in this world of sin. Beside 
 autocratic kingship it shines with a white light; 
 it is obviously the portal of the future. But 
 we know it now too well to idealize its merits. 
 
 A century and a half ago when the world 
 was painfully struggling out of the tyranny of 
 autocratic kingship, when English liberalism
 
 112 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 was in its cradle, when Thomas Jefferson was 
 composing the immortal phrases of the Dec- 
 laration of Independence and unknown patriots 
 dreamed of freedom in France, at such an 
 epoch it was but natural that the principle of 
 popular election should be idealized as the sov- 
 ereign remedy for the political evils of man- 
 kind. It was natural and salutary that it 
 should be so. The force of such idealization 
 helped to carry forward the human race to a 
 new milestone on the path of progress. 
 
 But when it is proposed to entrust to the 
 method of elective control not a part but the 
 whole of the fortunes of humanity, to commit 
 to it not merely the form of government and 
 the necessary maintenance of law, order and 
 public safety, but the whole operation of the 
 production and distribution of the world's 
 goods, the case is altered. The time is ripe 
 then for retrospect over the experience of the 
 nineteenth century and for a realization of 
 what has proved in that experience the peculiar 
 defects of elective democracy. 
 
 Mr. Bellamy pictures his elected managers,
 
 of Social Justice 113 
 
 as every socialist has to do, as a sagacious 
 and paternal group, free from the interest of 
 self and the play of the baser passions and ani- 
 mated only by the thought of the public good. 
 Gravely they deliberate; wisely and justly they 
 decide. Their gray heads for Bellamy pre- 
 fers them old are bowed in quiet confabula- 
 tion over the nice adjustment of the national 
 production, over the petition of this or that 
 citizen. The public care sits heavily on their 
 breast. Their own peculiar fortune they have 
 lightly passed by. They do not favor their 
 relations or their friends. They do not count 
 their hours of toil. They do not enumerate 
 their gain. They work, in short, as work the 
 angels. 
 
 Now let me ask in the name of sanity where 
 are such officials to be found? Here and 
 there, perhaps, one sees in the world of to-day 
 in the stern virtue of an honorable public ser- 
 vant some approximation to such a civic ideal. 
 But how much, too, has been seen of the rule 
 of "cliques" and "interests" and "bosses;" of 
 the election of genial incompetents popular as
 
 114 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 spendthrifts; of crooked partisans warm to 
 their friends and bitter to their enemies; of 
 administration by a party for a party; and of 
 the insidious poison of commercial greed defil- 
 ing the wells of public honesty. The unending 
 conflict between business and politics, between 
 the private gain and the public good, has been 
 for two generations the despair of modern de- 
 mocracy. It turns this way and that in its vain 
 effort to escape corruption. It puts its faith 
 now in representative legislatures, and now in 
 appointed boards and commissions; it appeals 
 to the vote of the whole people or it places an 
 almost autocratic power and a supreme respon- 
 sibility in the hands of a single man. And 
 nowhere has the escape been found. The mel- 
 ancholy lesson is being learned that the path of 
 human progress is arduous and its forward 
 movement slow and that no mere form of gov- 
 ernment can aid unless it is inspired by a higher 
 public spirit of the individual citizen than we 
 have yet managed to achieve. 
 
 And of the world of to-day, be it remem- 
 bered, elective democratic control covers only
 
 of Social Justice 115 
 
 a part of the field. Under socialism it covers 
 it all. To-day in our haphazard world a man 
 is his own master; often indeed the mastership 
 is but a pitiful thing, little more than being 
 master of his own failure and starvation; often 
 indeed the dead weight of circumstance, the ac- 
 cident of birth, the want of education, may so 
 press him down that his freedom is only a 
 mockery. Let us grant all that. But under 
 socialism freedom is gone. There is nothing 
 but the rule of the elected boss. The worker 
 is commanded to his task and obey he must. 
 If he will not, there is, there can only be, the 
 prison and the scourge, or to be cast out in the 
 wilderness to starve. 
 
 Consider what it would mean to be under a 
 socialist state. Here for example is a worker 
 who is, who says he is, too ill to work. He 
 begs that he may be set free. The grave of- 
 ficial, as Mr. Bellamy sees him, looks at the 
 worker's tongue. "My poor fellow," says he, 
 "you are indeed ill. Go and rest yourself un- 
 der a shady tree while the others are busy with 
 the harvest." So speaks the ideal official deal-
 
 116 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 ing with the ideal citizen in the dream life 
 among the angels. But suppose that the 
 worker, being not an angel but a human being, 
 is but a mere hulking, lazy brute who prefers 
 to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of 
 toil. Or suppose that the grave official is not 
 an angel, but a man of hateful heart or one 
 with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. 
 What then? How could one face a regime in 
 which the everlasting taskmaster held control? 
 There is nothing like it among us at the pres- 
 ent day except within the melancholy precincts 
 of the penitentiary. There and there only, the 
 socialist system is in operation. 
 
 Who can deny that under such a system 
 the man with the glib tongue and the persuasive 
 manner, the babbling talker and the scheming 
 organizer, would secure all the places of power 
 and profit, while patient merit went to the wall? 
 
 Or turn from the gray officials to the purple 
 citizens of the soap bubble commonwealth of 
 socialism. All work, we are told, and all re- 
 ceive their remuneration. We must not think 
 of it as money-wages, but, all said and done,
 
 of Social Justice 117 
 
 an allotted share of goods, marked out upon a 
 card, comes pretty much to the same thing. 
 The wages that the citizens receive must either 
 be equal or not equal. That at least is plain 
 logic. Either everybody gets exactly the same 
 wages irrespective of capability and diligence, 
 or else the wages or salaries or whatever one 
 calls them, are graded, so that one receives 
 much and the other little. 
 
 Now either of these alternatives spells dis- 
 aster. If the wages are graded according to 
 capacity, then the grading is done by the ever- 
 lasting elective officials. They can, and they 
 will, vote themselves and their friends or adher- 
 ents into the good jobs and the high places. 
 The advancement of a bright and capable 
 young man will depend, not upon what he does, 
 but upon what the elected bosses are pleased 
 to do with him; not upon the strength of his 
 own hands, but upon the strength of the "pull" 
 that he has with the bosses who run the part of 
 the industry that he is in. Unequal wages un- 
 der socialism would mean a fierce and corrupt 
 scramble for power, office and emolument, be-
 
 118 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 side which the utmost aberrations of Tammany 
 Hall would seem as innocuous as a Sunday 
 School picnic. 
 
 "But," objects Mr. Bellamy or any other 
 socialist, "you forget. Please remember that 
 under socialism the scramble for wealth is 
 limited; no man can own capital, but only con- 
 sumption goods. The most that any man may 
 acquire is merely the articles that he wants to 
 consume, not the engines and machinery of pro- 
 duction itself. Hence even avarice dwindles 
 and dies, when its wonted food of 'capitalism' 
 is withdrawn." 
 
 But surely this point of view is the very con- 
 verse of the teachings of common sense. "Con- 
 sumption goods" are the very things that we 
 do want. All else is but a means to them. 
 One admits, as per exception, the queer acquis- 
 itiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the 
 game for his own sake. Undoubtedly he ex- 
 ists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product of 
 the system, a pathological product, a kind of 
 elephantiasis of individualism. But speaking 
 broadly, consumption goods, present or future,
 
 of Social Justice 119 
 
 are the end in sight of the industrial struggle. 
 Give me the houses and the gardens, the 
 yachts, the motor cars and the champagne and 
 I do not care who owns the gravel crusher and 
 the steam plow. And if under a socialist com- 
 monwealth a man can vote to himself or gain 
 by the votes of his adherents, a vast income of 
 consumption goods and leave to his unhappy 
 fellow a narrow minimum of subsistence, then 
 the resulting evil of inequality is worse, far 
 worse than it could even be to-day. 
 
 Or try, if one will, the other horn of the 
 dilemma. That, too, one will find as ill a rest- 
 ing place as an upright thistle. Let the wages, 
 as with Mr. Bellamy, all be equal. The 
 managers then cannot vote themselves large 
 emoluments if they try. But what about the 
 purple citizens? Will they work, or will they 
 lie round in their purple garments and loaf? 
 Work? Why should they work, their pay is 
 there "fresh and fresh"? Why should they 
 turn up on time for their task? Why should 
 they not dawdle at their labor sitting upon the 
 fence in endless colloquy while the harvest rots
 
 120 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 upon the stalk? If among them is one who 
 cares to work with a fever of industry that even 
 socialism cannot calm, let him do it. We, his 
 fellows, will take our time. Our pay is there 
 as certain and as sound as his. Not for us the 
 eager industry and the fond plans for the fu- 
 ture, for the home and competence that 
 spurred on the strenuous youth of old days, 
 not for us the earnest planning of the husband 
 and wife thoughtful and anxious for the future 
 of their little ones. Not for us the honest 
 penny saved for a rainy day. Here in the 
 dreamland of socialism there are no rainy days. 
 It is sunshine all the time in this lotus land of 
 the loafer. And for the future, let the "State" 
 provide; for the children's welfare let the 
 "State" take thought; while we live it shall feed 
 us, when we fall ill it shall tend us and when 
 we die it shall bury us. Meantime let us eat, 
 drink and be merry and work as little as we 
 may. Let us sit among the flowers. It is too 
 hot to labor. Let us warm ourselves beside 
 the public stove. It is too cold to work. 
 But what? Such conduct, you say, will not
 
 of Social Justice 121 
 
 be allowed in the commonwealth. Idleness and 
 slovenly, careless work will be forbidden? 
 Ah ! then you must mean that beside the worker 
 will be the overseer with the whip; the time- 
 clock will mark his energy upon its dial; the 
 machine will register his effort; and if he will 
 not work there is lurking for him in the back- 
 ground the shadowed door of the prison. Ex- 
 actly and logically so. Socialism, in other 
 words, is slavery. 
 
 But here the socialist and his school inter- 
 pose at once with an objection. Under the 
 socialist commonwealth, they say, the people 
 will want to work; they will have acquired a 
 new civic spirit; they will work eagerly and 
 cheerfully for the sake of the public good and 
 from their love of the system under which they 
 live. The loafer will be extinct. The sponge 
 and the parasite will have perished. Even 
 crime itself, so the socialist tells us, will di- 
 minish to the vanishing point, till there is noth- 
 ing of it except here and there a sort of patho- 
 logical survival, an atavism, or a "throwing 
 back" to the forgotten sins of the grandfathers.
 
 122 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 Here and there, some poor fellow afflicted with 
 this disease may break into my socialistic house 
 and steal my pictures and my wine. Poor 
 chap ! Deal with him very gently. He is not 
 wicked. He is ill. 
 
 This last argument, in a word, begs the whole 
 question. With perfect citizens any govern- 
 ment is good. In a population of angels a 
 socialistic commonwealth would work to per- 
 fection. But until we have the angels we must 
 keep the commonwealth waiting. 
 
 Nor is it necessary here to discuss the hundred 
 and one modifications of the socialistic plan. 
 Each and all fail for one and the same reason. 
 The municipal socialist, despairing of the huge 
 collective state, dreams of his little town as an 
 organic unit in which all share alike ; the syndi- 
 calist in his fancy sees his trade united into a 
 co-operative body in which all are equal; the 
 gradualist, in whose mind lingers the leaven of 
 doubt, frames for himself a hazy vision of a 
 prolonged preparation for the future, of social- 
 ism achieved little by little, the citizens being 
 trained as it goes on till they are to reach some-
 
 of Social Justice 123 
 
 how or somewhere in cloud land the nirvana 
 of the elimination of self; like indeed, they are, 
 to the horse in the ancient fable that was being 
 trained to live without food but died, alas, just 
 as the experiment was succeeding. 
 
 There is no way out. Socialism is but a 
 dream, a bubble floating in the air. In the 
 light of its opalescent colors we may see many 
 visions of what we might be if we were better 
 than we are, we may learn much that is useful 
 as to what we can be even as we are; but if we 
 mistake the floating bubble for the marble pal- 
 aces of the city of desire, it will lead us forward 
 in our pursuit till we fall over the edge of the 
 abyss beyond which is chaos.
 
 VII. What Is Possible and What Is Not 
 
 SOCIALISM, then, will not work, and 
 neither will individualism, or at least 
 the older individualism that we have 
 hitherto made the basis of the social 
 order. Here, therefore, stands humanity, in 
 the middle of its narrow path in sheer perplex- 
 ity, not knowing which way to turn. On either 
 side is the brink of an abyss. On one hand is 
 the yawning gulf of social catastrophe repre- 
 sented by socialism. On the other, the slower, 
 but no less inevitable disaster that would attend 
 the continuation in its present form of the sys- 
 tem under which we have lived. Either way 
 lies destruction; the one swift and immediate 
 as a fall from a great height; the other grad- 
 ual, but equally dreadful, as the slow strangu- 
 lation in a morass. Somewhere between the 
 two lies such narrow safety as may be found. 
 124
 
 The Unsolved Riddle 125 
 
 The Ancients were fond of the metaphor, 
 taken from the vexed Sicilian Seas, of Scylla 
 and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threat- 
 ened the affrightened mariner on either side. 
 To avoid one he too hastily cast the ship to 
 destruction in the other. Such is precisely the 
 position that has been reached at the present 
 crisis in the course of human progress. When 
 we view the shortcomings of the present indi- 
 vidualism, its waste of energy, its fretful over- 
 work, its cruel inequality and the bitter lot that 
 it brings to the uncounted millions of the sub- 
 merged, we are inclined to cry out against it, 
 and to listen with a ready ear to the easy prom- 
 ises of the idealist. But when we turn to the 
 contrasted fallacies of socialism, its obvious 
 impracticality and the dark gulf of social chaos 
 that yawns behind it, we are driven back shud- 
 dering to cherish rather the ills we have than 
 fly to others we know not of. 
 
 Yet out of the whole discussion of the mat- 
 ter some few things begin to merge into the 
 clearness of certain day. It is clear enough 
 on the one hand that we can expect no sudden
 
 126 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 and complete transformation of the world in 
 which we live. Such a process is impossible. 
 The industrial system is too complex, its roots 
 are too deeply struck and its whole organism 
 of too delicate a growth to permit us to tear it 
 from the soil. Nor is humanity itself fitted for 
 the kind of transformation which fills the 
 dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of 
 selfishness that has been the survival instinct of 
 existence since life first crawled from the slime 
 of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mit- 
 igated. In the long process of time some 
 higher cosmic sense may take its place. It has 
 not done so yet. If the kingdom of socialism 
 were opened to-morrow, there are but few 
 fitted to enter. 
 
 But on the other hand it is equally clear that 
 the doctrine of "every man for himself," as 
 it used to be applied, is done with forever. 
 The time has gone by when a man shall starve 
 asking in vain for work; when the listless out- 
 cast shall draw his rags shivering about him 
 unheeded of his fellows; when children shall 
 be born in hunger and bred in want and broken
 
 of Social Justice 127 
 
 in toil with never a chance in life. If noth- 
 ing else will end these things, fear will do it. 
 The hardest capitalist that ever gripped his 
 property with the iron clasp of legal right re- 
 laxes his grasp a little when he thinks of the 
 possibilities of a social conflagration. In this 
 respect five years of war have taught us more 
 than a century of peace. It has set in a clear 
 light new forms of social obligation. The war 
 brought with it conscription not as we used 
 to see it, as the last horror of military tyranny, 
 but as the crowning pride of democracy. An 
 inconceivable revolution in the thought of the 
 English speaking peoples has taken place in 
 respect to it. The obligation of every man, 
 according to his age and circumstance, to take 
 up arms for his country and, if need be, to die 
 for it, is henceforth the recognized basis of 
 progressive democracy. 
 
 But conscription has its other side. The 
 obligation to die must carry with it the right 
 to live. If every citizen owes it to society that 
 he must fight for it in case of need, then so- 
 ciety owes to every citizen the opportunity of
 
 128 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 a livelihood. "Unemployment," in the case of 
 the willing and able becomes henceforth a so- 
 cial crime. Every democratic Government 
 must henceforth take as the starting point of 
 its industrial policy, that there shall be no such 
 thing as able bodied men and women "out of 
 work," looking for occupation and unable to 
 find it. Work must either be found or must 
 be provided by the State itself. 
 
 Yet it is clear that a policy of state work 
 and state pay for all who are otherwise unable 
 to find occupation involves appalling difficulties. 
 The opportunity will loom large for the prodi- 
 gal waste of money, for the undertaking of 
 public works of no real utility and for the sub- 
 sidizing of an army of loafers. But the dif- 
 ficulties, great though they are, are not in- 
 superable. The payment for state labor of 
 this kind can be kept low enough to make it 
 the last resort rather than the ultimate am- 
 bition of the worker. Nor need the work be 
 useless. In new countries, especially such as 
 Canada and the United States and Australia, 
 the development of latent natural assets could
 
 of Social Justice 129 
 
 absorb the labor of generations. There are 
 still unredeemed empires in the west. Clearly 
 enough a certain modicum of public honesty 
 and integrity is essential for such a task; more, 
 undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able 
 to enlist in the service of the commonwealth. 
 But without it we perish. Social betterment 
 must depend at every stage on the force of 
 public spirit and public morality that inspires it. 
 So much for the case of those who are able 
 and willing to work. There remain still the 
 uncounted thousands who by accident or ill- 
 ness, age or infirmity, are unable to maintain 
 themselves. For these people, under the older 
 dispensation, there was nothing but the poor- 
 house, the jail or starvation by the roadside. 
 The narrow individualism of the nineteenth 
 century refused to recognize the social duty of 
 supporting somebody else's grandmother. 
 Such charity began, and ended, at home. But 
 even with the passing of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury an awakened sense of the collective re- 
 sponsibility of society towards its weaker mem- 
 bers began to impress itself upon public policy.
 
 130 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 Old age pension laws and national insurance 
 against illness and accident were already be- 
 ing built into the legislative codes of the demo- 
 cratic countries. The experience of the war 
 has enormously increased this sense of social 
 solidarity. It is clear now that our fortunes 
 are not in our individual keeping. We stand 
 or fall as a nation. And the nation which 
 neglects the aged and infirm, or which leaves a 
 family to be shipwrecked as the result of a 
 single accident to a breadwinner, cannot sur- 
 vive as against a nation in which the welfare 
 of each is regarded as contributory to the safety 
 of all. Even the purest selfishness would dic- 
 tate a policy of social insurance. 
 
 There is no need to discuss the particular 
 way in which this policy can best be carried 
 out. It will vary with the circumstances of 
 each community. The action of the munici- 
 pality, or of the state or province, or of the 
 central government itself may be called into 
 play. But in one form or another, the eco- 
 nomic loss involved in illness and infirmity must 
 be shifted from the shoulders of the individual
 
 of Social Justice 131 
 
 to those of society at large. There was but 
 little realization of this obligation in the nine- 
 teenth century. Only in the sensational mo- 
 ments of famine, flood or pestilence was a gen- 
 eral social effort called forth. But in the 
 clearer view of the social bond which the war 
 has given us we can see that famine and pesti- 
 lence are merely exaggerated forms of what 
 is happening every day in our midst. 
 
 We spoke much during the war of "man 
 power." We suddenly realized that after all 
 the greatness and strength of a nation is made 
 up of the men and women who compose it. 
 Its money, in the narrow sense, is nothing; 
 a set of meaningless chips and counters piled 
 upon a banker's table ready to fall at a touch. 
 Even before the war we had begun to talk 
 eagerly and anxiously of the conservation of 
 national resources, of the need of safeguard- 
 ing the forests and fisheries and the mines. 
 These are important things. But the war has 
 shown that the most important thing of all is 
 the conservation of men and women. 
 
 The attitude of the nineteenth century upon
 
 132 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 this point was little short of insane. The mel- 
 ancholy doctrine of Malthus had perverted the 
 public mind. Because it was difficult for a poor 
 man to bring up a family, the hasty conclusion 
 was reached that a family ought not to be 
 brought up. But the war has entirely inverted 
 and corrected this point of view. The father 
 and mother who were able to send six sturdy, 
 native-born sons to the conflict were regarded 
 as benefactors of the nation. But these six 
 sturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, 
 six "puling infants," viewed with gloomy dis- 
 approval by the Malthusian bachelor. If the 
 strength of the nation lies in its men and women 
 there is only one way to increase it. Before 
 the war it was thought that a simpler and eas- 
 ier method of increase could be found in the 
 wholesale import of Austrians, Bulgarians and 
 Czecho-Slovaks. The newer nations boasted 
 proudly of their immigration tables. The fal- 
 lacy is apparent now. Those who really count 
 in a nation and those who govern its destinies 
 for good or ill are those who are born in it. 
 It is difficult to over-estimate the harm that
 
 of Social Justice 133 
 
 has been done to public policy by this same 
 Malthusian theory. It has opposed to every 
 proposal of social reform an obstacle that 
 seemed insuperable, the danger of a rapid 
 overincrease of population that would pauper- 
 ize the community. Population, it was said, 
 tends always to press upon the heels of sub- 
 sistence. If the poor are pampered, they will 
 breed fast: the time will come when there will 
 not be food for all and we shall perish in a 
 common destruction. Seen in this light, infant 
 mortality and the cruel wastage of disease were 
 viewed with complacence. It was "Nature's" 
 own process at work. The "unfit," so called, 
 were being winnowed out that only the best 
 might survive. The biological doctrine of evo- 
 lution was misinterpreted and misapplied to 
 social policy. 
 
 But in the organic world there is no such 
 thing as the "fit" or the "unfit," in any higher 
 or moral sense. The most hideous forms of 
 life may "survive" and thrust aside the most 
 beautiful. It is only by a confusion of thought 
 that the processes of organic nature which ren-
 
 134 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 der every foot of fertile ground the scene of 
 unending conflict can be used to explain away 
 the death of children of the slums. The whole 
 theory of survival is only a statement of what 
 is, not of what ought to be. The moment that 
 we introduce the operation of human volition 
 and activity, that, too, becomes one of the fac- 
 tors of "survival." The dog, the cat, and the 
 cow live by man's will, where the wolf and the 
 hyena have perished. 
 
 But it is time that the Malthusian doctrine, 
 the fear of over-population as a hindrance to 
 social reform, was dismissed from considera- 
 tion. It is at best but a worn-out scarecrow 
 shaking its vain rags in the wind. Population, 
 it is true, increases in a geometrical ratio. The 
 human race, if favored by environment, can 
 easily double itself every twenty-five years. If 
 it did this, the time must come, through sheer 
 power of multiplication, when there would not 
 be standing room for it on the globe. All of 
 this is undeniable, but it is quite wide of the 
 mark. It is time enough to cross a bridge when 
 we come to it. The "standing room" prob-
 
 of Social Justice 135 
 
 lem is still removed from us by such uncounted 
 generations that we need give no thought to it. 
 The physical resources of the globe are as yet 
 only tapped, and not exhausted. We have done 
 little more than scratch the surface. Because 
 we are crowded here and there in the ant-hills 
 of our cities, we dream that the world is full. 
 Because, under our present system, we do not 
 raise enough food for all, we fear that the food 
 supply is running short. All this is pure fancy. 
 Let any one consider in his mind's eye the enor- 
 mous untouched assets still remaining for man- 
 kind in the vast spaces filled with the tangled 
 forests of South America, or the exuberant fer- 
 tility of equatorial Africa or the huge plains of 
 Canada, Australia, Southern Siberia and the 
 United States, as yet only thinly dotted with 
 human settlement. There is no need to draw 
 up an anxious balance sheet of our assets. 
 There is still an uncounted plenty. And every 
 human being born upon the world represents a 
 power of work that, rightly directed, more than 
 supplies his wants. The fact that as an infant 
 he does not maintain himself has nothing to do
 
 136 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 with the case. This was true even in the 
 Garden of Eden. 
 
 The fundamental error of the Malthusian 
 theory of population and poverty is to confound 
 the difficulties of human organization with the 
 question of physical production. Our existing 
 poverty is purely a problem in the direction and 
 distribution of human effort. It has no con- 
 nection as yet with the question of the total 
 available means of subsistence. Some day, in 
 a remote future, in which under an improved 
 social system the numbers of mankind might 
 increase to the full power of the natural capac- 
 ity of multiplication, such a question might con- 
 ceivably disturb the equanimity of mankind. 
 But it need not now. It is only one of many 
 disasters that must sooner or later overtake 
 mankind. The sun, so the astronomer tells us, 
 is cooling down; the night is coming; an all- 
 pervading cold will some day chill into rigid 
 death the last vestige of organic life. Our 
 poor planet will be but a silent ghost whirling 
 on its dark path in the starlight. This ulti-
 
 of Social Justice 137 
 
 mate disaster is, as far as our vision goes, in- 
 evitable. Yet no one concerns himself with 
 it. So should it be with the danger of the ulti- 
 mate overcrowding of the globe. 
 
 I lay stress upon this problem of the increase 
 of population because, to my thinking, it is in 
 this connection that the main work and the best 
 hope of social reform can be found. The chil- 
 dren of the race should be the very blossom of 
 its fondest hopes. Under the present order 
 and with the present gloomy preconceptions 
 they have been the least of its collective cares. 
 Yet here and here more than anywhere 
 is the point towards which social effort and 
 social legislation may be directed immediately 
 and successfully. The moment that we get 
 away from the idea that the child is a mere 
 appendage of the parent, bound to share good 
 fortune and ill, wealth and starvation, accord- 
 ing to the parent's lot, the moment we regard 
 the child as itself a member of society clothed 
 in social rights a burden for the moment but 
 an asset for the future we turn over a new
 
 138 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 leaf in the book of human development, we 
 pass a new milestone on the upward path of 
 progress. 
 
 It should be recognized in the coming order 
 of society, that every child of the nation has 
 the right to be clothed and fed and trained 
 irrespective of its parents' lot. Our feeble be- 
 ginnings in the direction of housing, sanitation, 
 child welfare and education, should be ex- 
 panded at whatever cost into something truly 
 national and all embracing. The ancient 
 grudging selfishness that would not feed other 
 people's children should be cast out. In the 
 war time the wealthy bachelor and the spinster 
 of advancing years took it for granted that 
 other people's children should fight for them. 
 The obligation must apply both ways. 
 
 No society is properly organized until every 
 child that is born into it shall have an oppor- 
 tunity in life. Success in life and capacity to 
 live we cannot give. But opportunity we can. 
 We can at least see that the gifts that are laid 
 in the child's cradle by nature are not oblit- 
 erated by the cruel fortune of the accident of
 
 of Social Justice 139 
 
 birth: that its brain and body arc not stunted 
 by lack of food and air and by the heavy bur- 
 den of premature toil. The playtime of child- 
 hood should be held sacred by the nation. 
 
 This, as I see it, should be the first and the 
 greatest effort of social reform. For the 
 adult generation of to-day many things are no 
 longer possible. The time has passed. We 
 are, as viewed with a comprehensive eye, a 
 damaged race. Few of us in mind or body are 
 what we might be ; and millions of us, the vast 
 majority of industrial mankind known as the 
 working class, are distorted beyond repair from 
 what they might have been. In older societies 
 this was taken for granted: the poor and the 
 humble and the lowly reproduced from gen- 
 eration to generation, as they grew to adult life, 
 the starved brains and stunted outlook of their 
 forbears, starved and stunted only by lack of 
 opportunity. For nature knows of no such dif- 
 ferences in original capacity between the chil- 
 dren of the fortunate and the unfortunate. 
 Yet on this inequality, made by circumstance, 
 was based the whole system of caste, the strati-
 
 140 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 fication of the gentle and the simple on which 
 society rested. In the past it may have been 
 necessary. It is not so now. If, with all our 
 vast apparatus of machinery and power, we 
 cannot so arrange society that each child has 
 an opportunity in life, it would be better to 
 break the machinery in pieces and return to 
 the woods from which we came. 
 
 Put into the plainest of prose, then, we are 
 saying that the government of every country 
 ought to supply work and pay for the unem- 
 ployed, maintenance for the infirm and aged, 
 and education and opportunity for the children. 
 These are vast tasks. And they involve, of 
 course, a financial burden not dreamed of be- 
 fore the war. But here again the war has 
 taught us many things. It would have seemed 
 inconceivable before, that a man of great 
 wealth should give one-half of his income to 
 the state. The financial burden of the war, 
 as the full measure of it dawned upon our 
 minds, seemed to betoken a universal bank- 
 ruptcy. But the sequel is going to show that 
 the finance of the war will prove to be a lesson
 
 of Social Justice 141 
 
 in the finance of peace. The new burden has 
 come to stay. No modern state can hope to 
 survive unless it meets the kind of social claims 
 on the part of the unemployed, the destitute and 
 the children that have been described above. 
 And it cannot do this unless it continues to use 
 the terrific engine of taxation already fash- 
 ioned in the war. Undoubtedly the progres- 
 sive income tax and the tax on profits and tax- 
 ation of inheritance must be maintained to an 
 
 extent never dreamed of before. 
 
 <. 
 
 But the peace finance and the war finance 
 will differ in one most important respect. The 
 war finance was purely destructive. From it 
 came national security and the triumph of right 
 over wrong. No one would belittle the worth 
 of the sacrifice. But in the narrower sense of 
 production, of bread winning, there came noth- 
 ing; or nothing except a new power of organi- 
 zation, a new technical skill and a new aspira- 
 tion towards better things. But the burden of 
 peace finance directed towards social efforts 
 will bring a direct return. Every cent that 
 is spent upon the betterment of the popu-
 
 142 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 lation will come back, sooner or later, as two. 
 
 But all of this deals as yet only with the field 
 of industry and conduct in which the state rules 
 supreme. Governmental care of the unem- 
 ployed, the infant and the infirm, sounds like 
 a chapter in socialism. If the same regime 
 were extended over the whole area of produc- 
 tion, we should have socialism itself and a mere 
 soap-bubble bursting into fragments. There 
 is no need, however, to extend the regime of 
 compulsion over the whole field. The vast 
 mass of human industrial effort must still lie 
 outside of the immediate control of the gov- 
 ernment. Every man will still earn his own 
 living and that of his family as best he can, 
 relying first and foremost upon his own ef- 
 forts. 
 
 One naturally asks, then, To what extent can 
 social reform penetrate into the ordinary oper- 
 ation of industry itself? Granted that it is im- 
 possible for the state to take over the whole 
 industry of the nation, does that mean that the 
 present inequalities must continue? The 
 framework in which our industrial life is set
 
 of Social Justice 143 
 
 cannot be readily broken asunder. But we can 
 to a great extent ease the rigidity of its out- 
 lines. A legislative code that starts from 
 sounder principles than those which have ob- 
 tained hitherto can do a great deal towards 
 progressive betterment. Each decade can be 
 an improvement upon the last. Hitherto we 
 have been hampered at every turn by the sup- 
 posed obstacle of immutable economic laws. 
 The theory of "natural" wages and prices of 
 a supposed economic order that could not be 
 disturbed, set up a sort of legislative paralysis. 
 The first thing needed is to get away entirely 
 from all such preconceptions, to recognize that 
 the "natural" order of society, based on the 
 "natural" liberty, does not correspond with real 
 justice and real liberty at all, but works injus- 
 tice at every turn. And at every turn intrusive 
 social legislation must seek to prevent such in- 
 justice. 
 
 It is no part of the present essay to attempt 
 to detail the particulars of a code of social leg- 
 islation. That must depend in every case upon 
 the particular circumstances of the community
 
 144 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 i 
 concerned. But some indication may be given 
 
 here of the kind of legislation that may serve 
 to render the conditions of industry more in 
 conformity with social justice. Let us take, as 
 a conspicuous example, the case of the Min- 
 imum wage law. Here is a thing sternly con- 
 demned in the older thought as an economic 
 impossibility. It was claimed, as we have seen, 
 that under free contract a man was paid 
 what he earned and no law could make it more. 
 But the older theory was wrong. The min- 
 imum wage law ought to form, in one fashion 
 or another, a part of the code of every com- 
 munity. It may be applied by specific legisla- 
 tion from a central power, or it may be applied 
 by the discretionary authority of district boards, 
 or it may be regulated, as it has been in some 
 of the beginnings already made, within the 
 compass of each industry or trade. But the 
 principle involved is sound. The wage as paid 
 becomes a part of the conditions of industry. 
 Interest, profits and, later, the direction of con- 
 sumption and then of production, conform 
 themselves to it.
 
 of Social Justice 145 
 
 True it is, that in this as in all cases of social 
 legislation, no application of the law can be 
 made so sweeping and so immediate as to dis- 
 locate the machine and bring industry to a stop. 
 It is probable that at any particular time and 
 place the legislative minimum wage cannot be 
 very much in advance of the ordinary or aver- 
 age wage of the people in employment. But 
 its virtue lies in its progression. The modest 
 increase of to-day leads to the fuller increase 
 of to-morrow. Properly applied, the capitalist 
 and the employer of labor need have nothing 
 to fear from it. Its ultimate effect will not 
 fall upon them, but will serve merely to alter 
 the direction of human effort. 
 
 Precisely the same reasoning holds good of 
 the shortening of the hours of labor both by 
 legislative enactment and by collective organi- 
 zation. Here again the first thing necessary 
 is a clear vision of the goal towards which we 
 are to strive. The hours of labor are too long. 
 The world has been caught in the wheels of its 
 own machinery which will not stop. With each 
 advance in invention and mechanical power it
 
 146 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 works harder still. New and feverish desires 
 for luxuries replace each older want as satisfied. 
 The nerves of our industrial civilization are 
 worn thin with the rattle of its own machinery. 
 The industrial world is restless, over-strained 
 and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious dis- 
 content, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. 
 It needs a rest. It should be sent, as nerve 
 patients are, to the seaside or the quiet of the 
 hills. Failing this, it should at least slacken 
 the pace of its work and shorten its working 
 day. 
 
 And for this the thing needed is an altered 
 public opinion on the subject of work in rela- 
 tion to human character and development. 
 The nineteenth century glorified work. The 
 poet, sitting beneath a shady tree, sang of its 
 glories. The working man was incited to con- 
 template the beauty of the night's rest that fol- 
 lowed on the exhaustion of the day. It was 
 proved to him that if his day was dull at least 
 his sleep was sound. The ideal of society was 
 the cheery artisan and the honest blacksmith, 
 awake and singing with the lark and busy all
 
 of Social Justice 147 
 
 day long at the loom and the anvil, till the 
 grateful night soothed them into well-earned 
 slumber. This, they were told, was better than 
 the distracted sleep of princes. 
 
 The educated world repeated to itself these 
 grotesque fallacies till it lost sight of plain and 
 simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning 
 is too early for any rational human being to 
 be herded into a factory at the call of a steam 
 whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task 
 is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours 
 is too long. I am not raising here the question 
 as to how and to what extent the eight hours 
 can be shortened, but only urging the primary 
 need of recognizing that a working day of 
 eight hours is too long for the full and proper 
 development of human capacity and for the ra- 
 tional enjoyment of life. There is no need to 
 quote here to the contrary the long and sus- 
 tained toil of the pioneer, the eager labor of 
 the student, unmindful of the silent hours, or 
 the fierce acquisitive activity of the money- 
 maker that knows no pause. Activities such 
 as these differ with a whole sky from the wage-
 
 148 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 work of the modern industrial worker. The 
 task in one case is done for its own sake. It 
 is life itself. The other is done only for the 
 sake of the wage it brings. It is, or should be, 
 a mere preliminary to living. 
 
 Let it be granted, of course, that a certain 
 amount of work is an absolute necessity for 
 human character. There is no more pathetic 
 spectacle on our human stage than the figure 
 of poor puppy in his beach suit and his tuxedo 
 jacket seeking in vain to amuse himself for 
 ever. A leisure class no sooner arises than the 
 melancholy monotony of amusement forces it 
 into mimic work and make-believe activities. 
 It dare not face the empty day. 
 
 But when all is said about the horror of idle- 
 ness the broad fact remains that the hours of 
 work are too long. If we could in imagina- 
 tion disregard for a moment all question of 
 how the hours of work are to be shortened and 
 how production is to be maintained and ask 
 only what would be the ideal number of the 
 daily hours of compulsory work, for charac- 
 ter's sake, few of us would put them at more
 
 of Social Justice 149 
 
 than four or five. Many of us, as applied to 
 ourselves, at least, would take a chance on char- 
 acter at two. 
 
 The shortening of the general hours of work, 
 then, should be among the primary aims of 
 social reform. There need be no fear that 
 with shortened hours of labor the sum total of 
 production would fall short of human needs. 
 This, as has been shown from beginning to end 
 of this essay, is out of the question. Human 
 desires would eat up the result of ten times the 
 work we now accomplish. Human needs 
 would be satisfied with a fraction of it. But 
 the real difficulty in the shortening of hours lies 
 elsewhere. Here, as in the parallel case of the 
 minimum wage, the danger is that the attempt 
 to alter things too rapidly may dislocate the in- 
 dustrial machine. We ought to attempt such 
 a shortening as will strain the machine to a 
 breaking point, but never break it. This can 
 be done, as with the minimum wage, partly by 
 positive legislation and partly collective action. 
 Not much can be done at once. But the proc- 
 ess can be continuous. The short hours
 
 150 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 achieved with acclamation to-day will later be 
 denounced as the long hours of to-morrow. 
 The essential point to grasp, however, is that 
 society at large has nothing to lose by the 
 process. The shortened hours become a part 
 of the framework of production. It adapts it- 
 self to it. Hitherto we have been caught in 
 the running of our own machine : it is time that 
 we altered the gearing of it. 
 
 The two cases selected, the minimum wage 
 and the legislative shortening of hours, have 
 been chosen merely as illustrations and are not 
 exhaustive of the things that can be done in the 
 field of possible and practical reform. It is 
 plain enough that in many other directions the 
 same principles may be applied. The rectifica- 
 tion of the ownership of land so as to eliminate 
 the haphazard gains of the speculator and the 
 unearned increment of wealth created by the 
 efforts of others, is an obvious case in point. 
 The "single taxer" sees in this a cure-all for 
 the ills of society. But his vision is distorted. 
 The private ownership of land is one of the 
 greatest incentives to human effort that the
 
 of Social Justice 151 
 
 world has ever known. It would be folly to 
 abolish it, even if we could. But here as else- 
 where we can seek to re-define and regulate the 
 conditions of ownership so as to bring them 
 more into keeping with a common sense view 
 of social justice. 
 
 But the inordinate and fortuitous gains from 
 land are really only one example from a gen- 
 eral class. The war discovered the "profi- 
 teer." The law-makers of the world are busy 
 now with smoking him out from his lair. But 
 he was there all the time. Inordinate and for- 
 tuitous gain, resting on such things as monop- 
 oly, or trickery, or the mere hazards of abun- 
 dance and scarcity, complying with the letter of 
 the law but violating its spirit, are fit objects 
 for appropriate taxation. The ways and 
 means are difficult, but the social principle in- 
 volved is clear. 
 
 We may thus form some sort of vision of 
 the social future into which we are passing. 
 The details are indistinct. But the outline at 
 least in which it is framed is clear enough. The 
 safety of the future lies h a progressive move-
 
 152 The Unsolved Riddle 
 
 ment of social control alleviating the misery 
 which it cannot obliterate and based upon the 
 broad general principle of equality of oppor- 
 tunity. The chief immediate direction of social 
 effort should be towards the attempt to give 
 to every human being in childhood adequate 
 food, clothing, education and an opportunity in 
 life. This will prove to be the beginning of 
 many things. 
 
 THE END
 
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