\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{book}

\author{John Ruskin}
\title{Unto This Last}

\oddsidemargin=0pt
\evensidemargin=0pt
\topmargin=0pt
\headheight=0pt
\headsep=30pt
\textheight=670pt
\textwidth=470pt
\setlength{\parindent}{20pt}        % for indentation of paragraphs
\setlength{\parskip}{1.2ex}          % for spacing between paragraphs
\footskip=35pt
\voffset=0pt

\usepackage{rotating}
\usepackage{indentfirst}
\usepackage[12pt]{moresize}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}           % for French characters
\usepackage[french,english]{babel}

\usepackage{times}

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\lhead{}
\chead{\textsc{Unto This Last}}
\rhead{}

\begin{document}

\selectlanguage{english}

\renewcommand{\thepart}{\Roman{part}.}
\renewcommand{\partname}{}
\renewcommand{\thesection}{\arabic{section}.}
%\setcounter{section}{0}

\thispagestyle{empty}
\vspace*{5ex}
\begin{center}
\fontsize{64pt}{72pt}\selectfont
Unto This Last\\
\vspace{5ex}
\fontsize{48pt}{48pt}\selectfont
John Ruskin
\end{center}

\vspace{40ex}
\begin{center}
\Large{Essays from the \emph{Cornhill Magazine} 1860,\\
reprinted as \emph{Unto This Last} in 1862.}
\end{center}

\newpage
\vspace*{40ex}
\begin{center}
\begin{quote}
``Friend, I do thee no wrong.\\
Didst not thou agree with me for a penny?\\
Take that thine is, and go thy way.\\
I will give unto this last even as unto thee.''\\

``If ye think good, give me my price;\\
And if not, forbear.\\
So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver.''
\end{quote}

\vspace{50ex}
\large{Published with the help of \LaTeXe{} on Debian GNU/Linux.}

\end{center}

\tableofcontents

\renewcommand{\chaptername}{}
\renewcommand{\thechapter}{}
\chapter{Preface}

\par The for following essays were published eighteen months ago in the
\emph{Corhill Magazine}, and were reprobated in a violent manner, as far as I
could hear, by most of the readers they met with.

\par Not a whit the less, I believe them to be the best, that is to say, the
truest, the rightest-worded, and most serviceable things I have ever written;
and the last of them, having had especial pains spent on it, is probably the
best I shall ever write.

\par ``This,'' the reader may reply, ``it might be, yet not therefore well
written.'' Which, in no mock humility, admitting, I yet satisfied with the
work, though with nothing else that I have done ; and purposing shortly to
follow out the subjects opened in these papers, as I may find leisure, I wish
the introductory statements to be within the reach of any one who may care to
refer to them. So I republish the essays as they appeared. One word only is
changed, correcting the estimate of a weight; and no word is added.

\par Although, however, I find nothing to modify in these papers, it is a
matter of regret to me that the most startling of all statements in them, ---
that respecting the necessity of the organization of labour, with fixed wages,
--- should have found its way into the first essay; it being quite one of the
least important, though by no means the least certain, of the positions to be
defended. The real gist of these papers, their central meaning and aim, is to
give, as I believe for the first time in plain English, --- it has often been
incidentally given in good Greek by Plato and Xenophon, and good Latin by
Cicero and Horace, --- a logical definition of \textsc{wealth}: such definition
being absolutely needed for a basis of economical science. The most reputed
essay on that subject which has appeared in modern times, after opening with
the statement that ``writers on political economy profess to teach, or to
investigate\footnote{Which? for where investigation is necessary, teaching is
impossible.}, the nature of wealth,'' thus follows up the declaration of its
thesis --- ``Every one has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purpose,
of what is meant by wealth.'' \ldots ``It is no part of the design of this
treatise to aim at metaphysical nicety of definition.''

\par Metaphysicial nicety, we assuredly do not need; but physical nicety, and
logical accuracy, with respect to a physical subject, we as assuredly do.

\par Suppose the subject of inquiry, instead of being House-law
(\emph{Oikonomia}), has been Star-law (\emph{Astronomia}), and that, ignoring
distinction between stars fixed and wandering, as here between wealth radiant
and wealth reflective, the writer had begun thus: ``Every one has a notion,
sufficiently correct for common purpose, of what is meant by stars.
Metaphysical nicety in the definition of a star is not the object of this
treatise''; --- the essay so opened might yet have been far more true in its
final statements, and a thousand fold more serviceable to the navigator, than
any treatise on wealth, which founds its conclusion on the popular conception
of wealth, can ever become to the economist.

\vspace{2ex}
\par It was, therefore, the first object of these following papers to give an
accurate and stable definition of wealth. Their second object was to show that
the acquisition of wealth was finally possible only under certain moral
conditions of society, of which quite the first was a belief in the existence,
and even, for practical purpose, in the attainability of honesty.

\par Without venturing to pronounce --- since on such matter human judgement is
by no means conclusive --- what is, or is not, the noblest of God's works, we
may yet admit so much of Pope's assertion as that an honest man is among His
best works presently visible, and, as things stand, a somewhat rare one; but
not an incredible or miraculous work; still less an abnormal one. Honesty is
not a disturbing force, which deranges the orbits of economy; but a consistent
and commanding force, by obedience to which --- and by no other obedience ---
those orbits can continue clear of chaos.

\par It is true, I have sometimes heard Pope condemned for the lowness, instead
of the height, of his standard: --- ``Honesty is indeed a respectable virtue;
but how much higher may men attain! Shall nothing more be asked of us than that
we be honest?''

For the present, good friends, nothing. It seems that in our aspirations to be
more than that, we have to some extent lost sight of the propriety of being so
much as that. What else we may have lost faith in, there shall be here no
question; but assuredly we have lost faith in common honesty, and in the
working power of it. And this faith, with the facts on which it may rest, it is
quite our first business to recover and keep: not only believing, but even by
experience assuring ourselves, that there are yet in the world men who can be
restrained from fraud otherwise than by the fear of losing
employment\footnote{``The effectual discipline which is exercised over a
workman is not that of his corporation, but of his customers. It is the fear of
losing their employment which restrains his frauds, and corrects his
negligence.' (\emph{Wealth of Nations}, Book I, chap. 10.)

\par \emph{Note to Second Edition.} --- The only addition I will make to the words of this book shall be a very earnest request to any Christian reader to think within himself what an entirely damned state of soul any human creature must have got into, who could read with acceptance such a sentence as this; much more, write it; and to oppose to it, the first commercial words of Venice, discovered by me in her first church:

\par ``Around this temple, let the Merchant's law be just, his weights true,
and his contracts guileless.''

\par If any of my present readers think that my language in this note is either
intemperate, or unbecoming, I will beg them to read with attention the
Eighteenth paragraph of \emph{Sesame and Lilies}; and to be assured that I
never, myself, now use, in writing, any word which is not, in my deliberate
judgement, the fittest for the occasion.
\begin{flushright}
\textsc{Venice},\\
\emph{Sunday, 18th March, 1877}.
\end{flushright}
}; nay, that it is even accurately in proportion to the number of such men in
any State, that the said State does or can prolong its existence.

\par To these two points, then, the following essays are mainly directed. The
subject of the organization of labour is only casually touched upon; because,
if we once can get sufficient quantity of honesty in our captains, the
organization of labour is easy, and will develop itself without quarrel or
difficulty; but if we cannot get honesty in our captains, the organization of
labour is for evermore impossible.

\par The several conditions of its possibility I purpose to examine at length
in the sequel. Yet, lest the reader should be alarmed by the hints thrown out
during the following investigation of first principles, as if they were leading
him into unexpectedly dangerous ground, I will, for his better assurance, state
at once the worst of the political creed at which I wish him to arrive.

\begin{enumerate}
\item First, --- that there should be training schools for youth established,
at Government cost\footnote{It will probably be inquired by near-sighted
persons, out of what funds such schools could be supported. The expedient modes
of direct provision for them I will examine hereafter; indirectly, they would
be far more than self-supporting. The economy in crime alone, (quite one of the
most costly articles of luxury in the modern European market,) which such
schools would induce, would suffice to support them ten times over. Their
economy of labour would be pure again, and that too large to be presently
calculable.}, and under Government discipline, over the whole country; that
every child born in the country should, at the parent's whish, be permitted
(and, in certain cases, be under penalty required) to pass through them; and
that, in these schools, the child should (with other minor pieces of knowledge
hereafter to be considered) imperatively be taught, with the best skill of
teaching that the country could produce, the following three things: ---
\begin{enumerate}
\item The laws of health, and the exercices anjoined by them;
\item Habits of gentleness and justice; and
\item The calling by which he is to live.
\end{enumerate}

\item Secondly, --- that, in connection with these training schools, there
should be established, also entirely under Government regulation, manufactories
and workshops for the production and sale of every necessary of life, and for
the exercise of every useful art. And that, interfering no whit with private
entreprise, nor setting any restraints or tax on private trade, but leaving
both to do their best, and beat the Government if they could, --- there should,
at these Government manufactories and shops, be authoritatively good and
examplary work done, and pure and true substance sold; so that a man could be
sure, if he chose to pay the Government price, that he got for his money bread
that was bread, ale that was ale, and work that was work.

\item Thirdly, --- that any man, or woman, or boy, or girl, out of employment,
should be at once received at the nearest Government school, and set to such
work as it appeared, on trial, they were fit for, at a fiwed rate of wages
determinable every year; --- that, being found incapable of work through
ignorance, they should be taught, or being found incapable of work through
sickness, should be tended; but that being found objecting to work, they should
be set, under compulsion of the strictest nature, to the more painful and
degrading forms of necessary toil, especially to that in mines and other places
of danger (such danger being, however, diminished to the utmost by careful
regulation and discipline), and the due wages of such work be retained, cost of
compulsion first abstracted --- to be at the workman's command, so soon as he
has come to sounder mind respecting the laws of employment.

\item Lastly, --- that for the old and destitute, comfort and home should be
provided; which provision, when misfortune had been by the working of such a
system sifted from guilt, would be honourable instead of disgraceful to the
receiver. For (I repaet this passage out of my \emph{Political Economy of Art},
to which the reader is referred for farther detail) ``a labourer serves his
country with his spade, just as a man in the middle ranks of life serves it
with sword, pen, or lancet. If the service be less, and, therefore, the wages
during health less, then the reward when health is broken may be less, but not
less honourable; and it ought to be quite as natural and straightforward a
matter for a labourer to take his pension from his parish, because he has
deserved well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension
from his country, because he has deserved well of his country.''
\end{enumerate}

\par To which statement, I will only add, for conclusion, respecting the
discipline and pay of life and death, that, for both high and low, Livy's last
words touching Valerius Publicola, ``de publico est elatus''\footnote{P.
Valerius, omnium consensu princeps belli pacisque artibus, anno post moritur;
glori� ingenti, copiis, familiaribus adeo exiguis, ut funeri sumtus deesset: de
publico est elatus. Luxere matronae ut Brutum. --- Lib. ii. c. xvi.}, ought not
to be a dishonourable close of epitaph.

\par These things, then, I believe, and am about, as I find power, to explain
and illustrate in their various bearings; following out also what belongs to
them of collateral inquiry. Here I state them only in brief, to prevent the
reader casting about in alarm for my ultimate meaning; yet requesting him, for
the present, to remember, that in a science dealing with so subtle elements as
those of human nature, it is only possible to answer for the final truth of
principles, not for the direct success of plans: and that in the best of these
last, what can ve immediately accomplished is always questionable, and what can
be finally accomplished, inconceivable.

\begin{flushright}
\textsc{Denmark Hill},\\
\emph{10th May, 1862}.
\end{flushright}


\renewcommand{\thechapter}{\Roman{chapter}.}
\renewcommand{\chaptername}{Essay}
\setcounter{chapter}{0}
\chapter[The Roots of Honour]
	{The Roots of Honour}

\par Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed themselves
of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the most curious ---
certainly the least creditable --- is the modern soi-disant science of
political economy, based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action
may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection.

\par Of course, as in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and
other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root
of it. ``The social affections,'' says the economist, ``are accidental and
disturbing elements in human nature; but avarice and the desire of progress are
constant elements. Let us eliminate the inconstants, and, considering the human
being merely as a covetous machine, examine by what laws of labour, purchase,
and sale, the greatest accumulative result in wealth is obtainable. Those laws
once determined, it will be for each individual afterwards to introduce as much
of the disturbing affectionate element as he chooses, and to determine for
himself the result on the new conditions supposed.''

\par This would be a perfectly logical and successful method of analysis, if
the accidentals afterwards to be introduced were of the same nature as the
powers first examined. Supposing a body in motion to be influenced by constant
and inconstant forces, it is usually the simplest way of examining its course
to trace it first under the persistent conditions, and afterwards introduce the
causes of variation. But the disturbing elements in the social problem are not
of the same nature as the constant ones: they alter the essence of the creature
under examination the moment they are added; they operate, not mathematically,
but chemically, introducing conditions which render all our previous knowledge
unavailable. We made learned experiments upon pure nitrogen, and have convinced
ourselves that it is a very manageable gas: but, behold! the thing which we
have practically to deal with is its chloride; and this, the moment we touch it
on our established principles, sends us and or apparatus through the ceiling.

\par Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its
terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in then, as I should be in those
of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be
shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students
up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that
when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be
attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might
be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in
applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis.
Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all
skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul;
and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number
of interesting geometrical figures with death's-head and humeri, successfully
proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular
structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its
applicability to the present phase of the world.

\par This inapplicability has been curiously manifested during the
embarrassment caused by the late strikes of our workmen. Here occurs one of the
simplest cases, in a pertinent and positive form, of the first vital problem
which political economy has to deal with (the relation between employer and
employed); and, at a severe crisis, when lives in multitudes and wealth in
masses are at stake, the political economists are helpless --- practically
mute: no demonstrable solution of the difficulty can be given by them, such as
may convince or calm the opposing parties. Obstinately the masters take one
view of the matter. obstinately the operatives another; and no political
science can set them at one.

\par It would be strange if it could, it being not by ``science'' of any kind
that men were ever intended to be set at one. Disputant after disputant vainly
strives to show that the interests of the masters are, or are not, antagonistic
to those of the men: none of the pleaders ever seeming to remember that it does
not absolutely or always follow that the persons must he antagonistic because
their interests are. If there is only a crust of bread in the house, and mother
and children are starving, their interests are not the same. If the mother eats
it, the children want it; if the children eat it, the mother must go hungry to
her work. yet it does not necessarily follow that there will be ``antagonism''
between them, that they will fight for the crust, and that the mother, being
strongest, will get it, and eat it. Neither, in any other case, whatever the
relations of the persons may be, can it be assumed for certain that, because
their interests are diverse, they must necessarily regard each other with
hostility, and use violence or cunning to obtain the advantage.

\par Even if this were so, and it were as just as it is convenient to consider
men as actuated by no other moral influences than those which affect rats or
swine, the logical conditions of the question are still indeterminable. It can
never be shown generally either that the interests of master and labourer are
alike, or that they are opposed; for, according to circumstances, they may be
either. It is, indeed, always the interest of both that the work should be
rightly done, and a just price obtained for it; but, in the division of
profits, the gain of the one may or may not be the loss of the other. It is not
the master's interest to pay wages so low as to leave the men sickly and
depressed, nor the workman's interest to be paid high wages if the smallness of
the master's profit hinders him from enlarging his business, or conducting it
in a safe and liberal way. A stoker ought not to desire high pay if the company
is too poor to keep the engine-wheels in repair.

\par And the varieties of circumstances which influence these reciprocal
interests are so endless, that all endeavour to deduce rules of action from
balance of expediency is in vain. And it is meant to be in vain. For no human
actions ever were intended by the maker of men to be guided by balances of
expediency, but by balances of justice. He has therefore rendered all
endeavours to determine expediency futile for evermore. No man ever knew, or
can know, what will be the ultimate result to himself, or to others, of any
given line of conduct. But every man may know, and most of us do know, what is
a just and unjust act. And all of us may know also, that the consequences of
justice will be ultimately the best possible, both to others and ourselves,
though we can neither say what is best, or how it is likely to come to pass.

\par I have said balances of justice, meaning, in the term justice, to include
affection, --- such affection as one man owes to another. All right relations
between master and operative, and all their best interests, ultimately depend
on these.

\par We shall find the best and simplest illustration of the relations of
master and operative in the position of domestic servants.

\par We will suppose that the master of a household desires only to get as much
work out of his servants as he can, at the rate of wages he gives. He never
allows them to be idle; feeds them as poorly and lodges them as ill as they
will endure, and in all things pushes his requirements to the exact point
beyond which he cannot go without forcing the servant to leave him. In doing
this, there is no violation on his part of what is commonly called ``justice.''
He agrees with the domestic for his whole time ad service, and takes them; ---
the limits of hardship in treatment being fixed by the practice of other
masters in his neighbourhood; that is to say, by the current rate of wages for
domestic labour. If the servant can get a better place, he is free to take one,
and the master can only tell what is the real market value of his labour, by
requiring as much as he will give.

\par This is the politico-economical view of the case, according to the doctors
of that science; who assert that by this procedure the greatest average of work
will be obtained from the servant, and therefore the greatest benefit to the
community, and through the community, by reversion, to the servant himself.

\par That, however, is not so. It would be so if the servant were an engine of
which the motive power was steam, magnetism, gravitation, or any other agent of
calculable force. But he being, on the contrary, an engine whose motive power
is a Soul, the force of this very peculiar agent, as an unknown quantity,
enters into all the political economist's equations, without his knowledge, and
falsifies every one of their results. The largest quantity of work will not be
done by this curious engine for pay, or under pressure, or by help of any kind
of fuel which may be supplied by the caldron. It will be done only when the
motive force, that is to say, the will or spirit of the creature, is brought to
its greatest strength by its own proper fuel: namely, by the affections.

\par It may indeed happen, and does happen often, that if the master is a man
of sense ad energy, a large quantity of material work may be done under
mechanical pressure, enforced by strong will and guided by wise method; also it
may happen, and does happen often, that if the master is indolent and weak
(however good-natured), a very small quantity of work, and that bad, may be
produced by the servant's undirected strength, and contemptuous gratitude. But
the universal law of the matter is that, assuming any given quantity of energy
and sense in master and servant, the greatest material result obtainable by
them will be, not through antagonism to each other, but through affection for
each other; and that if the master, instead of endeavouring to get as much work
as possible from the servant, seeks rather to render his appointed and
necessary work beneficial to him, and to forward his interests in all just and
wholesome ways, the real amount of work ultimately done, or of good rendered,
by the person so cared for, will indeed be the greatest possible.

\par Observe, I say, ``of good rendered,'' for a servant's work is not
necessarily or always the best thing he can give his master. But good of all
kinds, whether in material service, in protective watchfulness of his master's
interest and credit, or in joyful readiness to seize unexpected and irregular
occasions of help.

\par Nor is this one whit less generally true because indulgence will be
frequently abused, and kindness met with ingratitude. For the servant who,
gently treated, is ungrateful, treated ungently, will be revengeful; and the
man who is dishonest to a liberal master will be injurious to an unjust one.

\par In any case, and with any person, this unselfish treatment will produce
the most effective return. Observe, I am here considering the affections wholly
as a motive power; not at all as things in themselves desirable or noble, or in
any other way abstractedly good. I look at them simply as an anomalous force,
rendering every one of the ordinary political economist's calculations
nugatory; while, even if he desired to introduce this new element into his
estimates, he has no power of dealing with it; for the affections only become a
true motive power when they ignore every other motive and condition of
political economy. Treat the servant kindly, with the idea of turning his
gratitude to account, and you will get, as you deserve, no gratitude, nor any
value for your kindness; but treat him kindly without any economical purpose,
and all economical purposes will be answered; in this, as in all other matters,
whosoever will save his life shall lose it, whoso loses it shall find
it.\footnote{The difference between the two modes of treatment, and between
their effective material results, may be seen very accurately by a comparison
of the relations of Esther and Charlie in Bleak House, with those of Miss Brass
and the Marchioness in Master Humphrey's Clock.

\par The essential value and truth of Dickens's writings have been
unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons, merely because
he presents his truth with some colour of caricature. Unwisely,
because Dickens's caricature, though often gross, is never
mistaken. Allowing for his manner of telling them, the things he
tells us are always true. I wish that he could think it right to
limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public
amusement; and when he takes up a subject of high national
importance, such as that which he handled in Hard Times, that he
would use severer and more accurate analysis. The usefulness of
that work (to my mind, in several respects, the greatest he has
written) is with many persons seriously diminished because Mr
Bounderby is a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic
example of a worldly master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic
perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest
workman. But let us not lose the use of Dickens's wit and
insight, because he chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire.
He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book
he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard Times,
should be studied with close and earnest care by persons
interested in social questions. They will find much that is
partial, and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they
examine all the evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems
to overlook, it will appear, after all their trouble, that his
view was the finally right one, grossly and sharply told.}

\par The next clearest and simplest example of relation between
master and operative is that which exists between the commander
of a regiment and his men.

\par Supposing the officer only desires to apply the rules of discipline so as,
with least trouble to himself, to make the regiment most effective, he will not
be able, by any rules or administration of rules, on this selfish principle, to
develop the full strength of his subordinates. If a man of sense and firmness,
he may, as in the former instance, produce a better result than would be
obtained by the irregular kindness of a weak officer; but let the sense and
firmness be the same in both cases, and assuredly the officer who has the most
direct personal relations with his men, the most care for their interests, and
the most value for their lives, will develop their effective strength, through
their affection for his own person, and trust in his character, to a degree
wholly unattainable by other means. This law applies still more stringently as
the numbers concerned are larger: a charge may often be successful, though the
men dislike their officers; a battle has rarely been won, unless they loved
their general.

\par Passing from these simple examples to the more complicated relations
existing between a manufacturer and his workmen, we are met first by certain
curious difficulties, resulting, apparently, from a harder and colder state of
moral elements. It is easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection existing among
soldiers for the colonel. Not so easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection
among cotton-spinners for the proprietor of the mill. A body of men associated
for purposes of robbery (as a Highland clan in ancient times) shall be animated
by perfect affection, and every member of it be ready to lay down his life for
the life of his chief. But a band of men associated for purposes of legal
production and accumulation is usually animated, it appears, by no such
emotions, and none of them are in any wise willing to give his life for the
life of his chief. Not only are we met by this apparent anomaly, in moral
matters, but by others connected with it, in administration of system. For a
servant or a soldier is engaged at a definite rate of wages, for a definite
period; but a workman at a rate of wages variable according to the demand for
labour, and with the risk of being at any time thrown out of his situation by
chances of trade. Now, as, under these contingencies, no action of the
affections can take place, but only an explosive action of disaffections, two
points offer themselves for consideration in the matter.

\par The first --- How far the rate of wages may be so regulated as
not to vary with the demand for labour.

\par The second --- How far it is possible that bodies of workmen may be
engaged and maintained at such fixed rate of wages (whatever the state of trade
may be), without enlarging or diminishing their number, so as to give them
permanent interest in the establishment with which they are connected, like
that of the domestic servants in an old family, or an esprit de corps, like
that of the soldiers in a crack regiment.

\par The first question is, I say, how far it may be possible to
fix the rate of wages, irrespectively of the demand for labour.

\par Perhaps one of the most curious facts in the history of human error is the
denial by the common political economist of the possibility of thus regulating
wages; while, for all the important, and much of the unimportant, labour, on
the earth, wages are already so regulated.

\par We do not sell our prime-ministership by Dutch auction; nor, on the
decease of a bishop, whatever may be the general advantages of simony, do we
(yet) offer his diocese to the clergyman who will take the episcopacy at the
lowest contract. We (with exquisite sagacity of political economy!) do indeed
sell commissions; but not openly, generalships: sick, we do not inquire for a
physician who takes less than a guinea; litigious, we never think of reducing
six-and-eight-pence to four-and-sixpence; caught in a shower, we do not canvass
the cabmen, to find one who values his driving at less than sixpence a mile.

\par It is true that in all these cases there is, and in every conceivable case
there must be, ultimate reference to the presumed difficulty of the work, or
number of candidates for the office. If it were thought that the labour
necessary to make a good physician would be gone through by a sufficient number
of students with the prospect of only half-guinea fees, public consent would
soon withdraw the unnecessary half-guinea. In this ultimate sense, the price of
labour is indeed always regulated by the demand for it; but, so far as the
practical and immediate administration of the matter is regarded, the best
labour always has been, and is, as all labour ought to be, paid by an
invariable standard.

\par ``What!'' the reader perhaps answers amazedly: ``pay good and
bad workmen alike?''

\par Certainly. The difference between one prelate's sermons and his
successor's --- or between one physician's opinion and another's --- is far
greater, as respects the qualities of mind involved, and far more important in
result to you personally, than the difference between good and bad laying of
bricks (though that is greater than most people suppose). Yet you pay with
equal fee, contentedly, the good and bad workmen upon your soul, and the good
and bad workmen upon your body; much more may you pay, contentedly, with equal
fees, the good and bad workmen upon your house.

\par ``Nay, but I choose my physician and (?) my clergyman, thus indicating my
sense of the quality of their work.'' By all means, also, choose your
bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be ``chosen.''
The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid
at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed.
The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed
to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or
force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.

\par This equality of wages, then, being the first object toward which we have
to discover the directest available road; the second is, as above stated, that
of maintaining constant numbers of workmen in employment, whatever may be the
accidental demand for the article they produce.

\par I believe the sudden and extensive inequalities of demand, which
necessarily arise in the mercantile operations of an active nation, constitute
the only essential difficulty which has to be overcome in a just organization
of labour. The subject opens into too many branches to admit of being
investigated in a paper of this kind; but the following general facts bearing
on it may be noted.

\par The wages which enable any workman to live are necessarily higher, if his
work is liable to intermission, than if it is assured and continuous; and
however severe the struggle for work may become, the general law will always
hold, that men must get more daily pay if, on the average, they can only
calculate on work three days a week than they would require if they were sure
of work six days a week. Supposing that a man cannot live on less than a
shilling a day, his seven shillings he must get, either for three days' violent
work, or six days' deliberate work. The tendency of all modern mercantile
operations is to throw both wages and trade into the form of a lottery, and to
make the workman's pay depend on intermittent exertion, and the principal's
profit on dexterously used chance.

\par In what partial degree, I repeat, this may be necessary in consequence of
the activities of modern trade, I do not here investigate; contenting myself
with the fact, that in its fatalest aspects it is assuredly unnecessary, and
results merely from love of gambling on the part of the masters, and from
ignorance and sensuality in the men. The masters cannot bear to let any
opportunity of gain escape them, and frantically rush at every gap and breach
in the walls of Fortune, raging to be rich, and affronting, with impatient
covetousness, every risk of ruin, while the men prefer three days of violent
labour, and three days of drunkenness, to six days of moderate work and wise
rest. There is no way in which a principal, who really desires to help his
workmen, may do it more effectually than by checking these disorderly habits
both in himself and them; keeping his own business operations on a scale which
will enable him to pursue them securely, not yielding to temptations of
precarious gain; and, at the same time, leading his workmen into regular habits
of labour and life, either by inducing them rather to take low wages in the
form of a fixed salary, than high wages, subject to the chance of their being
thrown out of work; or, if this be impossible, by discouraging the system of
violent exertion for nominally high day wages, and leading the men to take
lower pay for more regular labour.

\par In effecting any radical changes of this kind, doubtless there would be
great inconvenience and loss incurred by all the originators of movement. That
which can be done with perfect convenience and without loss, is not always the
thing that most needs to be done, or which we are most imperatively required to
do.

\par I have already alluded to the difference hitherto existing between
regiments of men associated for purposes of violence, and for purposes of
manufacture; in that the former appear capable of self-sacrifice --- the
latter, not; which singular fact is the real reason of the general lowness of
estimate in which the profession of commerce is held, as compared with that of
arms. Philosophically, it does not, at first sight, appear reasonable (many
writers have endeavoured to prove it unreasonable) that a peaceable and
rational person, whose trade is buying and selling, should be held in less
honour than an unpeaceable and often irrational person, whose trade is slaying.
Nevertheless, the consent of mankind has always, in spite of the philosophers,
given precedence to the soldier.

\par And this is right.

\par For the soldier's trade, verily and essentially, is not slaying, but being
slain. This, without well knowing its own meaning, the world honours it for. A
bravo's trade is slaying; but the world has never respected bravos more than
merchants: the reason it honours the soldier is, because he holds his life at
the service of the State. Reckless he may be --- fond of pleasure or of
adventure-all kinds of bye-motives and mean impulses may have determined the
choice of his profession, and may affect (to all appearance exclusively) his
daily conduct in it; but our estimate of him is based on this ultimate fact ---
of which we are well assured --- that put him in a fortress breach, with all
the pleasures of the world behind him, and only death and his duty in front of
him, he will keep his face to the front; and he knows that his choice may be
put to him at any moment --- and has beforehand taken his part --- virtually
takes such part continually --- does, in reality, die daily.

\par Not less is the respect we pay to the lawyer and physician, founded
ultimately on their self-sacrifice. Whatever the learning or acuteness of a
great lawyer, our chief respect for him depends on our belief that, set in a
judge's seat, he will strive to judge justly, come of it what may. Could we
suppose that he would take bribes, and use his acuteness and legal knowledge to
give plausibility to iniquitous decisions, no degree of intellect would win for
him our respect. Nothing will win it, short of our tacit conviction, that in
all important acts of his life justice is first with him; his own interest,
second.

\par In the case of a physician, the ground of the honour we render him is
clearer still. Whatever his science, we would shrink from him in horror if we
found him regard his patients merely as subjects to experiment upon; much more,
if we found that, receiving bribes from persons interested in their deaths, he
was using his best skill to give poison in the mask of medicine.

\par Finally, the principle holds with utmost clearness as it respects
clergymen. No goodness of disposition will excuse want of science in a
physician, or of shrewdness in an advocate; but a clergyman, even though his
power of intellect be small, is respected on the presumed ground of his
unselfishness and serviceableness.

\par Now, there can be no question but that the tact, foresight, decision, and
other mental powers, required for the successful management of a large
mercantile concern, if not such as could be compared with those of a great
lawyer, general, or divine, would at least match the general conditions of mind
required in the subordinate officers of a ship, or of a regiment, or in the
curate of a country parish. If, therefore, all the efficient members of the
so-called liberal professions are still, somehow, in public estimate of honour,
preferred before the head of a commercial firm, the reason must lie deeper than
in the measurement of their several powers of mind.

\par And the essential reason for such preference will he found to lie in the
fact that the merchant is presumed to act always selfishly. His work may be
very necessary to the community. but the motive of it is understood to be
wholly personal. The merchant's first object in all his dealings must be (the
public believe) to get as much for himself, and leave as little to his
neighbour (or customer) as possible. Enforcing this upon him, by political
statute, as the necessary principle of his action; recommending it to him on
all occasions, and themselves reciprocally adopting it, proclaiming
vociferously, for law of the universe, that a buyer's function is to cheapen,
and a seller's to cheat, --- the public, nevertheless, involuntarily condemn
the man of commerce for his compliance with their own statement, and stamp him
for ever as belonging to an inferior grade of human personality.

\par This they will find, eventually, they must give up doing. They must not
cease to condemn selfishness; but they will have to discover a kind of commerce
which is not exclusively selfish. Or, rather, they will have to discover that
there never was, or can be, any other kind of commerce; that this which they
have called commerce was not commerce at all, but cozening; and that a true
merchant differs as much from a merchant according to laws of modern political
economy, as the hero of the Excursion from Autolycus. They will find that
commerce is an occupation which gentlemen will every day see more need to
engage in, rather than in the businesses of talking to men, or slaying them;
that, in true commerce, as in true preaching, or true fighting, it is necessary
to admit the idea of occasional voluntary loss; --- that sixpences have to be
lost, as well as lives, under a sense of duty. that the market may have its
martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms as well as war.

\par May have --- in the final issue, must have-and only has not had yet,
because men of heroic temper have always been misguided in their youth into
other fields; not recognising what is in our days, perhaps, the most important
of all fields; so that, while many a jealous person loses his life in trying to
teach the form of a gospel, very few will lose a hundred pounds in showing the
practice of one.

\par The fact is, that people never have had clearly explained to
them the true functions of a merchant with respect to other
people. I should like the reader to be very clear about this.

\par Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of
life, have hitherto existed --- three exist necessarily, in every civilised
nation:

\par The Soldier's profession is to defend it.

\par The Pastor's to teach it.

\par The Physician's to keep it in health.

\par The lawyer's to enforce justice in it.

\par The Merchant's to provide for it.

\par And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.

\par ``On due occasion,'' namely: -

\par The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle.

\par The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague.

\par The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood.

\par The lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice.

\par The Merchant --- what is his ``due occasion'' of death?

\par It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly,
the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

\par Observe, the merchant's function (or manufacturer's, for in the broad
sense in which it is here used the word must be understood to include both) is
to provide for the nation. It is no more his function to get profit for himself
out of that provision than it is a clergyman's function to get his stipend.
This stipend is a due and necessary adjunct, but not the object of his life, if
he be a true clergyman, any more than his fee (or honorarium) is the object of
life to a true physician. Neither is his fee the object of life to a true
merchant. All three, if true men, have a work to be done irrespective of fee
--- to be done even at any cost, or for quite the contrary of fee; the pastor's
function being to teach, the physician's to heal, and the merchant's, as I have
said, to provide. That is to say, he has to understand to their very root the
qualities of the thing he deals in, and the means of obtaining or producing it;
and he has to apply all his sagacity and energy to the producing or obtaining
it in perfect state, and distributing it at the cheapest possible price where
it is most needed.

\par And because the production or obtaining of any commodity involves
necessarily the agency of many lives and hands, the merchant becomes in the
course of his business the master and governor of large masses of men in a more
direct, though less confessed way, than a military officer or pastor; so that
on him falls, in great part, the responsibility for the kind of life they lead:
and it becomes his duty, not only to be always considering how to produce what
he sells, in the purest and cheapest forms, but how to make the various
employments involved in the production, or transference of it, most beneficial
to the men employed.

\par And as into these two functions, requiring for their right exercise the
highest intelligence, as well as patience, kindness, and tact, the merchant is
bound to put all his energy, so for their just discharge he is bound, as
soldier or physician is bound, to give up, if need be, his life, in such way as
it may be demanded of him. Two main points he has in his providing function to
maintain: first, his engagements (faithfulness to engagements being the real
root of all possibilities, in commerce); and, secondly, the perfectness and
purity of the thing provided; so that, rather than fail in any engagement, or
consent to any deterioration, adulteration, or unjust and exorbitant price of
that which he provides, he is bound to meet fearlessly any form of distress,
poverty, or labour, which may, through maintenance of these points, come upon
him.

\par Again: in his office as governor of the men employed by him, the merchant
or manufacturer is invested with a distinctly paternal authority and
responsibility. In most cases, a youth entering a commercial establishment is
withdrawn altogether from home influence; his master must become his father,
else he has, for practical and constant help, no father at hand: in all cases
the master's authority, together with the general tone and atmosphere of his
business, and the character of the men with whom the youth is compelled in the
course of it to associate, have more immediate and pressing weight than the
home influence, and will usually neutralize it either for good or evil; so that
the only means which the master has of doing justice to the men employed by him
is to ask himself sternly whether he is dealing with such subordinate as he
would with his own son, if compelled by circumstances to take such a position.

\par Supposing the captain of a frigate saw it right, or were by any chance
obliged, to place his own son in the position of a common sailor: as he would
then treat his son, he is bound always to treat every one of the men under him.
So, also, supposing the master of a manufactory saw it right, or were by any
chance obliged, to place his own son in the position of an ordinary workman; as
he would then treat his son, he is bound always to treat every one of his men.
This is the only effective, true, or practical Rule which can be given on this
point of political economy.

\par And as the captain of a ship is bound to be the last man to leave his ship
in case of wreck, and to share his last crust with the sailors in case of
famine, so the manufacturer, in any commercial crisis or distress, is bound to
take the suffering of it with his men, and even to take more of it for himself
than he allows his men to feel; as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or
battle, sacrifice himself for his son.

\par All which sounds very strange: the only real strangeness in the matter
being, nevertheless, that it should so sound. For all this is true, and that
not partially nor theoretically, but everlastingly and practically: all other
doctrine than this respecting matters political being false in premises, absurd
in deduction, and impossible in practice, consistently with any progressive
state of national life; all the life which we now possess as a nation showing
itself in the resolute denial and scorn, by a few strong minds and faithful
hearts, of the economic principles taught to our multitudes, which principles,
so far as accepted, lead straight to national destruction. Respecting the modes
and forms of destruction to which they lead, and, on the other hand, respecting
the farther practical working of true polity, I hope to reason farther in a
following paper.

\chapter{The Veins of Wealth}

\par The answer which would be made by any ordinary political economist to the
statements contained in the preceding paper, is in few words as follows:

\par ``It is indeed true that certain advantages of a general nature may be
obtained by the development of social affections. But political economists
never professed, nor profess, to take advantages of a general nature into
consideration. Our science is simply the science of getting rich. So far from
being a fallacious or visionary one, it is found by experience to be
practically effective. Persons who follow its precepts do actually become rich,
and persons who disobey them become poor. Every capitalist of Europe has
acquired his fortune by following the known laws of our science, and increases
his capital daily by an adherence to them. It is vain to bring forward tricks
of logic, against the force of accomplished facts. Every man of business knows
by experience how money is made, and how it is lost.''

\par Pardon me. Men of business do indeed know how they themselves made their
money, or how, on occasion, they lost it. Playing a long-practised game, they
are familiar with the chances of its cards, and can rightly explain their
losses and gains. But they neither know who keeps the bank of the
gambling-house, nor what other games may be played with the same cards, nor
what other losses and gains, far away among the dark streets, are essentially,
though invisibly, dependent on theirs in the lighted rooms. They have learned a
few, and only a few, of the laws of mercantile economy; but not one of those of
political economy.

\par Primarily, which is very notable and curious, I observe that men of
business rarely know the meaning of the word ``rich.'' At least, if they know,
they do not in their reasonings allow for the fact, that it is a relative word,
implying its opposite ``poor'' as positively as the word ``north'' implies its
opposite ``south.'' Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were
absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for
everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity,
acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the
guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in
your neighbour's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you;
the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he
has for it, --- and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile
economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your
neighbour poor.

\par I would not contend in this matter (and rarely in any matter) for the
acceptance of terms. But I wish the reader clearly and deeply to understand the
difference between the two economies, to which the terms ``Political'' and
``Mercantile'' might not unadvisedly be attached.

\par Political economy (the economy of a State, or of citizens) consists simply
in the production, preservation, and distribution, at fittest time and place,
of useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time;
the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in sound wood; the builder who
lays good bricks in well-tempered mortar; the housewife who takes care of her
furniture in the parlour, and guards against all waste in her kitchen; and the
singer who rightly disciplines, and never overstrains her voice, are all
political economists in the true and final sense: adding continually to the
riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong.

\par But mercantile economy, the economy of ``merces'' or of ``pay,'' signifies
the accumulation, in the hands of individuals, of legal or moral claim upon, or
power over, the labour of others; every such claim implying precisely as much
poverty or debt on one side, as it implies riches or right on the other.

\par It does not, therefore, necessarily involve an addition to the actual
property, or well-being, of the State in which it exists. But since this
commercial wealth, or power over labour, is nearly always convertible at once
into real property, while real property is not always convertible at once into
power over labour, the idea of riches among active men in civilized nations,
generally refers to commercial wealth; and in estimating their possessions,
they rather calculate the value of their horses and fields by the number of
guineas they could get for them, than the value of their guineas by the number
of horses and fields they could buy with them.

\par There is, however, another reason for this habit of mind; namely, that an
accumulation of real property is of little use to its owner, unless, together
with it, he has commercial power over labour. Thus, suppose any person to be
put in possession of a large estate of fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in
its gravel, countless herds of cattle in its pastures; houses, and gardens, and
storehouses full of useful stores; but suppose, after all, that he could get no
servants? In order that he may be able to have servants, some one in his
neighbourhood must be poor, and in want of his gold --- or his corn. Assume
that no one is in want of either, and that no servants are to be had. He must,
therefore, bake his own bread, make his own clothes, plough his own ground, and
shepherd his own flocks. His gold will be as useful to him as any other yellow
pebbles on his estate. His stores must rot, for he cannot consume them. He can
eat no more than another man could eat, and wear no more than another man could
wear. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to procure even ordinary
comforts; he will be ultimately unable to keep either houses in repair, or
fields in cultivation; and forced to content himself with a poor man's portion
of cottage and garden, in the midst of a desert of waste land, trampled by wild
cattle, and encumbered by ruins of palaces, which he will hardly mock at
himself by calling ``his own.''

\par The most covetous of mankind would, with small exultation, I presume,
accept riches of this kind on these terms. What is really desired, under the
name of riches, is essentially, power over men; in its simplest sense, the
power of obtaining for our own advantage the labour of servant, tradesman, and
artist; in wider sense, authority of directing large masses of the nation to
various ends (good, trivial or hurtful, according to the mind of the rich
person). And this power of wealth of course is greater or less in direct
proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse
proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves, and who are
ready to give the same price for an article of which the supply is limited. If
the musician is poor, he will sing for small pay, as long as there is only one
person who can pay him; but if there be two or three, he will sing for the one
who offers him most. And thus the power of the riches of the patron (always
imperfect and doubtful, as we shall see presently, even when most
authoritative) depends first on the poverty of the artist, and then on the
limitation of the number of equally wealthy persons, who also want seats at the
concert. So that, as above stated, the art of becoming ``rich,'' in the common
sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for
ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In
accurate terms, it is ``the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our
own favour.''

\par Now, the establishment of such inequality cannot be shown in the abstract
to be either advantageous or disadvantageous to the body of the nation. The
rash and absurd assumption that such inequalities are necessarily advantageous,
lies at the root of most of the popular fallacies on the subject of political
economy. For the eternal and inevitable law in this matter is, that the
beneficialness of the inequality depends, first, on the methods by which it was
accomplished; and, secondly, on the purposes to which it is applied.
Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation
in which they exist during their establishment; and, unjustly directed, injure
it yet more during their existence. But inequalities of wealth, justly
established, benefit the nation in the course of their establishment; and,
nobly used, aid it yet more by their existence. That is to say, among every
active and well-governed people, the various strength of individuals, tested by
full exertion and specially applied to various need, issues in unequal, but
harmonious results, receiving reward or authority according to its class and
service\footnote{I have been naturally asked several times, with respect to the
sentence in the first of these papers, ``the bad workmen unemployed,'' ``But
what are you to do with your bad unemployed workmen?'' Well, it seems to me the
question might have occurred to you before. Your housemaid's place is vacant
--- you give twenty pounds a year-two girls come for it, one neatly dressed,
the other dirtily; one with good recommendations, the other with none. You do
not, under these circumstances, usually ask the dirty one if she will come for
fifteen pounds, or twelve; and, on her consenting, take her instead of the
well-recommended one. Still less do you try to beat both down by making them
bid against each other, till you can hire both, one at twelve pounds a year,
and the other at eight. You simply take the one fittest for the place, and send
away the other, not perhaps concerning yourself quite as much as you should
with the question which you now impatiently put to me, ``What is to become of
her?'' For all that I advise you to do, is to deal with workmen as with
servants; and verily the question is of weight: ``Your bad workman, idler, and
rogue --- what are you to do with him?''

\par We will consider of this presently: remember that the administration of a
complete system of national commerce and industry cannot be explained in full
detail within the space of twelve pages. Meantime, consider whether, there
being confessedly some difficulty in dealing with rogues and idlers, it may not
be advisable to produce as few of them as possible. If you examine into the
history of rogues, you will find they are as truly manufactured articles as
anything else, and it is just because our present system of political economy
gives so large a stimulus to that manufacture that you may know it to be a
false one. We had better seek for a system which will develop honest men, than
for one which will deal cunningly with vagabonds. Let us reform our schools,
and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.}; while, in the inactive
or ill-governed nation, the gradations of decay and the victories of treason
work out also their own rugged system of subjection and success; and
substitute, for the melodious inequalities of concurrent power, the iniquitous
dominances and depressions of guilt and misfortune.

\par Thus the circulation of wealth in a nation resembles that of the blood in
the natural body. There is one quickness of the current which comes of cheerful
emotion or wholesome exercise; and another which comes of shame or of fever.
There is a flush of the body which is full of warmth and life; and another
which will pass into putrefaction.

\par The analogy will hold down even to minute particulars. For as diseased
local determination of the blood involves depression of the general health of
the system, all morbid local action of riches will be found ultimately to
involve a weakening of the resources of the body politic.

\par The mode in which this is produced may be at once understood by examining
one or two instances of the development of wealth in the simplest possible
circumstances.

\par Suppose two sailors cast away on an uninhabited coast, and obliged to
maintain themselves there by their own labour for a series of years.

\par If they both kept their health, and worked steadily and in amity with each
other, they might build themselves a convenient house, and in time come to
possess a certain quantity of cultivated land, together with various stores
laid up for future use. All these things would be real riches or property; and,
supposing the men both to have worked equally hard, they would each have right
to equal share or use of it. Their political economy would consist merely in
careful preservation and just division of these possessions. Perhaps, however,
after some time one or other might be dissatisfied with the results of their
common farming; and they might in consequence agree to divide the land they had
brought under the spade into equal shares, so that each might thenceforward
work in his own field, and live by it. Suppose that after this arrangement had
been made, one of them were to fall ill, and be unable to work on his land at a
critical time --- say of sowing or harvest.

\par He would naturally ask the other to sow or reap for him.

\par Then his companion might say, with perfect justice, ``I will do this
additional work for you; but if I do it, you must promise to do as much for me
at another time. I will count how many hours I spend on your ground, and you
shall give me a written promise to work for the same number of hours on mine,
whenever I need your help, and you are able to give it.'' Suppose the disabled
man's sickness to continue, and that under various circumstances, for several
years, requiring the help of the other, he on each occasion gave a written
pledge to work, as soon as he was able, at his companion's orders, for the same
number of hours which the other had given up to him. What will the positions of
the two men be when the invalid is able to resume work?

\par Considered as a ``Polis,'' or state, they will be poorer than they would
have been otherwise: poorer by the withdrawal of what the sick man's labour
would have produced in the interval. His friend may perhaps have toiled with an
energy quickened by the enlarged need, but in the end his own land and property
must have suffered by the withdrawal of so much of his time and thought from
them: and the united property of the two men will be certainly less than it
would have been if both had remained in health and activity.

\par But the relations in which they stand to each other are also widely
altered. The sick man has not only pledged his labour for some years, but will
probably have exhausted his own share of the accumulated stores, and will be in
consequence for some time dependent on the other for food, which he can only
``pay'' or reward him for by yet more deeply pledging his own labour.

\par Supposing the written promises to be held entirely valid (among civilized
nations their validity is secured by legal measures\footnote{The disputes which
exist respecting the real nature of money arise more from the disputants
examining its functions on different sides, than from any real dissent in their
opinions. All money, properly so called, is an acknowledgment of debt; but as
such, it may either be considered to represent the labour and property of the
creditor, or the idleness and penury of the debtor. The intricacy of the
question has been much increased by the (hitherto necessary) use of marketable
commodities, such as gold, silver, salt, shells, etc., to give intrinsic value
or security to currency; but the final and best definition of money is that it
is a documentary promise ratified and guaranteed by the nation to give or find
a certain quantity of labour on demand. A man's labour for a day is a better
standard of value than a measure of any produce, because no produce ever
maintains a consistent rate of productibility.}), the person who had hitherto
worked for both might now, if he chose, rest altogether, and pass his time in
idleness, not only forcing his companion to redeem all the engagements he had
already entered into, but exacting from him pledges for further labour, to an
arbitrary amount, for what food he had to advance to him.

\par There might not, from first to last, be the least illegality (in the
ordinary sense of the word) in the arrangement; but if a stranger arrived on
the coast at this advanced epoch of their political economy, he would find one
man commercially Rich; the other commercially Poor. He would see, perhaps, with
no small surprise, one passing his days in idleness; the other labouring for
both, and living sparely, in the hope of recovering his independence at some
distant period.

\par This is, of course, an example of one only out of many ways in which
inequality of possession may be established between different persons, giving
rise to the Mercantile forms of Riches and Poverty. In the instance before us,
one of the men might from the first have deliberately chosen to be idle, and to
put his life in pawn for present ease; or he might have mismanaged his land,
and been compelled to have recourse to his neighbour for food and help,
pledging his future labour for it. But what I want the reader to note
especially is the fact, common to a large number of typical cases of this kind,
that the establishment of the mercantile wealth which consists in a claim upon
labour, signifies a political diminution of the real wealth which consists in
substantial possessions.

\par Take another example, more consistent with the ordinary course of affairs
of trade. Suppose that three men, instead of two, formed the little isolated
republic, and found themselves obliged to separate, in order to farm different
pieces of land at some distance from each other along the coast: each estate
furnishing a distinct kind of produce, and each more or less in need of the
material raised on the other. Suppose that the third man, in order to save the
time of all three, undertakes simply to superintend the transference of
commodities from one farm to the other; on condition of receiving some
sufficiently remunerative share of every parcel of goods conveyed, or of some
other parcel received in exchange for it.

\par If this carrier or messenger always brings to each estate, from the other,
what is chiefly wanted, at the right time, the operations of the two farmers
will go on prosperously, and the largest possible result in produce, or wealth,
will be attained by the little community. But suppose no intercourse between
the landowners is possible, except through the travelling agent; and that,
after a time, this agent, watching the course of each man's agriculture, keeps
back the articles with which he has been entrusted until there comes a period
of extreme necessity for them, on one side or other, and then exacts in
exchange for them all that the distressed farmer can spare of other kinds of
produce: it is easy to see that by ingeniously watching his opportunities, he
might possess himself regularly of the greater part of the superfluous produce
of the two estates, and at last, in some year of severest trial or scarcity,
purchase both for himself and maintain the former proprietors thenceforward as
his labourers or servants.

\par This would be a case of commercial wealth acquired on the exactest
principles of modern political economy. But more distinctly even than in the
former instance, it is manifest in this that the wealth of the State, or of the
three men considered as a society, is collectively less than it would have been
had the merchant been content with juster profit. The operations of the two
agriculturists have been cramped to the utmost; and the continual limitations
of the supply of things they wanted at critical times, together with the
failure of courage consequent on the prolongation of a struggle for mere
existence, without any sense of permanent gain, must have seriously diminished
the effective results of their labour; and the stores finally accumulated in
the merchant's hands will not in any wise be of equivalent value to those
which, had his dealings been honest, would have filled at once the granaries of
the farmers and his own.

\par The whole question, therefore, respecting not only the advantage, but even
the quantity, of national wealth, resolves itself finally into one of abstract
justice. It is impossible to conclude, of any given mass of acquired wealth,
merely by the fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the
nation in the midst of which it exists. Its real value depends on the moral
sign attached to it, just as sternly as that of a mathematical quantity depends
on the algebraical sign attached to it. Any given accumulation of commercial
wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive
energies, and productive ingenuities: or, on the other, it may be indicative of
mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicane. Some treasures are heavy
with human tears, as an ill-stored harvest with untimely rain; and some gold is
brighter in sunshine than it is in substance.

\par And these are not, observe, merely moral or pathetic attributes of riches,
which the seeker of riches may, if he chooses, despise; they are, literally and
sternly, material attributes of riches, depreciating or exalting, incalculably,
the monetary signification of the sum in question. One mass of money is the
outcome of action which has created, another, of action which has annihilated,
--- ten times as much in the gathering of it; such and such strong hands have
been paralyzed, as if they had been numbed by nightshade: so many strong men's
courage broken, so many productive operations hindered; this and the other
false direction given to labour, and lying image of prosperity set up, on Dura
plains dug into seven-times-heated furnaces. That which seems to be wealth may
in verity be only the gilded index of far-reaching ruin: a wrecker's handful of
coin gleaned from the beach to which he has beguiled an argosy; a
camp-follower's bundle of rags unwrapped from the breasts of goodly soldiers
dead; the purchase-pieces of potter's fields, wherein shall be buried together
the citizen and the stranger.

\par And therefore, the idea that directions can be given for the gaining of
wealth, irrespectively of the consideration of its moral sources, or that any
general and technical law of purchase and gain can be set down for national
practice, is perhaps the most insolently futile of all that ever beguiled men
through their vices. So far as I know, there is not in history record of
anything so disgraceful to the human intellect as the modern idea that the
commercial text, ``Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,''
represents, or under any circumstances could represent, an available principle
of national economy. Buy in the cheapest market? yes; but what made your market
cheap? Charcoal may be cheap among your roof timbers after a fire, and bricks
may be cheap in your streets after an earthquake; but fire and earthquake may
not therefore he national benefits. Sell in the dearest? --- Yes, truly; but
what made your market dear? You sold your bread well to-day: was it to a dying
man who gave his last coin for it, and will never need bread more; or to a rich
man who to-morrow will buy your farm over your head; or to a soldier on his way
to pillage the bank in which you have put your fortune?

\par None of these things you can know. One thing only you can know: namely,
whether this dealing of yours is a just and faithful one, which is all you need
concern yourself about respecting it; sure thus to have done your own part in
bringing about ultimately in the world a state of things which will not issue
in pillage or in death. And thus every question concerning these things merges
itself ultimately in the great question of justice, which, the ground being
thus far cleared for it. I will enter upon the next paper, leaving only, in
this, three final points for the reader's consideration.

\par It has been shown that the chief value and virtue of money consists in its
having power over human beings; that, without this power, large material
possessions are useless, and to any person possessing such power, comparatively
unnecessary. But power over human beings is attainable by other means than by
money. As I said a few pages back, the money power is always imperfect and
doubtful; there are many things which cannot be reached with it, others which
cannot be retained by it. Many joys may be given to men which cannot be bought
for gold, and many fidelities found in them which cannot be rewarded with it.

\par Trite enough, --- the reader thinks. Yes: but it is not so trite, --- I
wish it were, --- that in this moral power, quite inscrutable and immeasurable
though it be, there is a monetary value just as real as that represented by
more ponderous currencies. A man's hand may be full of invisible gold, and the
wave of it, or the grasp, shall do more than another's with a shower of
bullion. This invisible gold, also, does not necessarily diminish in spending.
Political economists will do well some day to take heed of it, though they
cannot take measure.

\par But farther. Since the essence of wealth consists in its authority over
men, if the apparent or nominal wealth fail in this power, it fails in essence;
in fact, ceases to be wealth at all. It does not appear lately in England, that
our authority over men is absolute. The servants show some disposition to rush
riotously upstairs, under an impression that their wages are not regularly
paid. We should augur ill of any gentleman's property to whom this happened
every other day in his drawing-room.

\par So, also, the power of our wealth seems limited as respects the comfort of
the servants, no less than their quietude. The persons in the kitchen appear to
be ill-dressed, squalid, half-starved. One cannot help imagining that the
riches of the establishment must be of a very theoretical and documentary
character.

\par Finally. Since the essence of wealth consists in power over men, will it
not follow that the nobler and the more in number the persons are over whom it
has power, the greater the wealth? Perhaps it may even appear, after some
consideration, that the persons themselves are the wealth that these pieces of
gold with which we are in the habit of guiding them, are, in fact, nothing more
than a kind of Byzantine harness or trappings, very glittering and beautiful in
barbaric sight, wherewith we bridle the creatures; but that if these same
living creatures could be guided without the fretting and jingling of the
Byzants in their mouths and ears, they might themselves be more valuable than
their bridles. In fact, it may be discovered that the true veins of wealth are
purple --- and not in Rock, but in Flesh --- perhaps even that the final
outcome and consummation of all wealth is in the producing as many as possible
full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures. Our modern
wealth, I think, has rather a tendency the other way; --- most political
economists appearing to consider multitudes of human creatures not conducive to
wealth, or at best conducive to it only by remaining in a dim-eyed and
narrow-chested state of being.

\par Nevertheless, it is open, I repeat, to serious question, which I leave to
the reader's pondering, whether, among national manufactures, that of Souls of
a good quality may not at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one? Nay,
in some far-away and yet undreamt-of hour, I can even imagine that England may
cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom
they first arose; and that, while the sands of the Indus and adamant of
Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban
of the slave, she, as a Christian mother, may at last attain to the virtues and
the treasures of a Heathen one, and be able to lead forth her Sons, saying, ---

\begin{center}
\par ``These are My Jewels.''
\end{center}

\chapter{Qui Judicatis Terram}

\par Some centuries before the Christian era, a Jew merchant largely engaged in
business on the Gold Coast, and reported to have made one of the largest
fortunes of his time, (held also in repute for much practical sagacity,) left
among his ledgers some general maxims concerning wealth, which have been
preserved, strangely enough, even to our own days. They were held in
considerable respect by the most active traders of the middle ages, especially
by the Venetians, who even went so far in their admiration as to place a statue
of the old Jew on the angle of one of their principal public buildings. Of late
years these writings have fallen into disrepute, being opposed in every
particular to the spirit of modern commerce. Nevertheless I shall reproduce a
passage or two from them here, partly because they may interest the reader by
their novelty; and chiefly because they will show him that it is possible for a
very practical and acquisitive tradesman to hold, through a not unsuccessful
career, that principle of distinction between well-gotten and ill-gotten
wealth, which, partially insisted on in my last paper, it must be our work more
completely to examine in this.

\par He says, for instance, in one place: ``The getting of treasures by a lying
tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro of them that see death: ``adding in
another, with the same meaning (he has a curious way of doubling his sayings):
``Treasures of wickedness profit nothing: but justice delivers from death.''
Both these passages are notable for their assertion of death as the only real
issue and sum of attainment by any unjust scheme of wealth. If we read,
instead of ``lying tongue,'' ``lying label, title, pretence, or
advertisement,'' we shall more clearly perceive the bearing of the words on
modern business. The seeking of death is a grand expression of the true course
of men's toil in such business. We usually speak as if death pursued us, and we
fled from him; but that is only so in rare instances. Ordinarily he masks
himself --- makes himself beautiful --- all-glorious; not like the King's
daughter, all-glorious within, but outwardly: his clothing of wrought gold. We
pursue him frantically all our days, he flying or hiding from us. Our crowning
success at three-score and ten is utterly and perfectly to seize, and hold him
in his eternal integrity --- robes, ashes, and sting.

\par Again: the merchant says, ``He that oppresseth the poor to increase his
riches, shall surely come to want.'' And again, more strongly: ``Rob not the
poor because he is poor; neither oppress the afflicted in the place of
business. For God shall spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.''

\par This ``robbing the poor because he is poor,'' is especially the mercantile
form of theft, consisting in talking advantage of a man's necessities in order
to obtain his labour or property at a reduced price. The ordinary highwayman's
opposite form of robbery --- of the rich, because he is rich --- does not
appear to occur so often to the old merchant's mind; probably because, being
less profitable and more dangerous than the robbery of the poor, it is rarely
practised by persons of discretion.

\par But the two most remarkable passages in their deep general
significance are the following: --- 

\par ``The rich and the poor have met. God is their maker.''

\par ``The rich and the poor have met. God is their light.''

\par They ``have met:'' more literally, have stood in each other's way
(obviaverunt). That is to say, as long as the world lasts, the action and
counteraction of wealth and poverty, the meeting, face to face, of rich and
poor, is just as appointed and necessary a law of that world as the flow of
stream to sea, or the interchange of power among the electric clouds: --- ``God
is their maker.'' But, also, this action may be either gentle and just, or
convulsive and destructive: it may be by rage of devouring flood, or by lapse
of serviceable wave; --- in blackness of thunderstroke, or continual force of
vital fire, soft, and shapeable into love-syllables from far away. And which of
these it shall be depends on both rich and poor knowing that God is their
light; that in the mystery of human life, there is no other light than this by
which they can see each other's faces, and live; --- light, which is called in
another of the books among which the merchant's maxims have been preserved, the
``sun of justice,''\footnote{More accurately, Sun of Justness; but, instead of
the harsh word ``Justness,'' the old English ``Righteousness'' being commonly
employed, has, by getting confused with ``godliness,'' or attracting about it
various vague and broken meanings. prevented most persons from receiving the
force of the passages in which it occurs. The word ``righteousness'' properly
refers to the justice of rule, or right, as distinguished from ``equity,''
which refers to the justice of balance. More broadly, Righteousness is King's
justice; and Equity, Judge's justice; the King guiding or ruling all, the Judge
dividing or discerning between opposites (therefore the double question, ``Man,
who made me a ruler --- dikastes --- or a dividermeristes --- over you?'')
Thus, with respect to the Justice of Choice (selection, the feebler and passive
justice), we have from lego, --- lex, legal, loi, and loyal; and with respect
to the Justice of Rule (direction, the stronger and active justice), we have
from rego, --- rex, regal, roi, and royal.} of which it is promised that it
shall rise at last with ``healing'' (health-giving or helping, making whole or
setting at one) in its wings. For truly this healing is only possible by means
of justice; no love, no faith, no hope will do it; men will be unwisely
fond-vainly faithful, unless primarily they are just; and the mistake of the
best men through generation after generation, has been that great one of
thinking to help the poor by almsgiving, and by preaching of patience or of
hope, and by every other means, emollient or consolatory, except the one thing
which God orders for them, justice. But this justice, with its accompanying
holiness or helpfulness, being even by the best men denied in its trial time,
is by the mass of men hated wherever it appears: so that, when the choice was
one day fairly put to them, they denied the Helpful One and the
Just\footnote{In another place written with the same meaning, ``Just, and
having salvation.''}; and desired a murderer, sedition-raiser, and robber, to
be gran ted to them; --- the murderer instead of the Lord of Life, the
sedition-raiser instead of the Prince of Peace, and the robber instead of the
Just Judge of all the world.

\par I have just spoken of the flowing of streams to the sea as a partial image
of the action of wealth. In one respect it is not a partial, but a perfect
image. The popular economist thinks himself wise in having discovered that
wealth, or the forms of property in general, must go where they are required;
that where demand is, supply must follow. He farther declares that this course
of demand and supply cannot be forbidden by human laws. Precisely in the same
sense, and with the same certainty, the waters of the world go where they are
required. Where the land falls, the water flows. The course neither of clouds
nor rivers can be forbidden by human will. But the disposition and
administration of them can be altered by human forethought. Whether the stream
shall be a curse or a blessing, depends upon man's labour, and administrating
intelligence. For centuries after centuries, great districts of the world, rich
in soil, and favoured in climate, have lain desert under the rage of their own
rivers; nor only desert, but plague-struck. The stream which, rightly directed,
would have flowed in soft irrigation from field to field --- would have
purified the air, given food to man and beast, and carried their burdens for
them on its bosom --- now overwhelms the plain, and poisons the wind; its
breath pestilence, and its work famine. In like manner this wealth ``goes where
it is required.'' No human laws can withstand its flow. They can only guide it:
but this, the lending trench and limiting mound can do so thoroughly, that it
shall become water of life --- the riches of the hand of
wisdom\footnote{``Length of days in her right hand; in her left, riches and
honour.''}; or, on the contrary, by leaving it to its own lawless flow, they
may make it, what it has been too often, the last and deadliest of national
plagues: water of Marah --- the water which feeds the roots of all evil.

\par The necessity of these laws of distribution or restraint is curiously
over-looked in the ordinary political economist's definition of his own
``science.'' He calls it, shortly, the ``science of getting rich.'' But there
are many sciences, as well as many arts, of getting rich. Poisoning people of
large estates, was one employed largely in the middle ages; adulteration of
food of people of small estates, is one employed largely now. The ancient and
honourable Highland method of blackmail; the more modern and less honourable
system of obtaining goods on credit, and the other variously improved methods
of appropriation --- which, in major and minor scales of industry, down to the
most artistic pocket-picking, we owe to recent genius, --- all come under the
general head of sciences, or arts, of getting rich.

\par So that it is clear the popular economist, in calling his science the
science par excellence of getting rich, must attach some peculiar ideas of
limitation to its character. I hope I do not misrepresent him, by assuming that
he means his science to be the science of ``getting rich by legal or just
means.'' In this definition, is the word ``just,'' or ``legal,'' finally to
stand? For it is possible among certain nations, or under certain rulers, or by
help of certain advocates, that proceedings may be legal which are by no means
just. If, therefore, we leave at last only the word ``just'' in that place of
our definition, the insertion of this solitary and small word will make a
notable difference in the grammar of our science. For then it will follow that,
in order to grow rich scientifically, we must grow rich justly; and, therefore,
know what is just; so that our economy will no longer depend merely on
prudence, but on jurisprudence --- and that of divine, not human law. Which
prudence is indeed of no mean order, holding itself, as it were, high in the
air of heaven, and gazing for ever on the light of the sun of justice; hence
the souls which have excelled in it are represented by Dante as stars, forming
in heaven for ever the figure of the eye of an eagle: they having been in life
the discerners of light from darkness; or to the whole human race, as the light
of the body, which is the eye; while those souls which form the wings of the
bird (giving power and dominion to justice, ``healing in its wings'') trace
also in light the inscription in heaven: ``DILIGITE JUSTITIAM QUI JUDICATIS
TERRAM.'' ``Ye who judge the earth, give'' (not, observe, merely love, but)
``diligent love to justice:'' the love which seeks diligently, that is to say,
choosingly, and by preference, to all things else. Which judging or doing
judgment in the earth is, according to their capacity and position, required
not of judges only, nor of rulers only, but of all men\footnote{I hear that
several of our lawyers have been greatly amused by the statement in the first
of these papers that a lawyer's function was to do justice. I did not intend it
for a jest; nevertheless it will be seen that in the above passage neither the
determination nor doing of justice are contemplated as functions wholly
peculiar to the lawyer. Possibly, the more our standing armies, whether of
soldiers, pastors, or legislators (the generic term ``pastor'' including all
teachers, and the generic term ``lawyer'' including makers as well as
interpreters of law), can be superseded by the force of national heroism,
wisdom, and honesty, the better it may be for the nation.}: a truth sorrowfully
lost sight of even by those who are ready enough to apply to themselves
passages in which Christian men are spoken of as called to be ``saints'' (i.e.
to helpful or healing functions); and ``chosen to be kings'' (i.e. to knowing
or directing functions); the true meaning of these titles having been long lost
through the pretences of unhelpful and unable persons to saintly and kingly
character; also through the once popular idea that both the sanctity and
royalty are to consist in wearing long robes and high crowns, instead of in
mercy and judgment; whereas all true sanctity is saving power, as all true
royalty is ruling power; and injustice is part and parcel of the denial of such
power, which ``makes men as the creeping things, as the fishes of the sea, that
have no ruler over them.''\footnote{It being the privilege of the fishes, as it
is of rats and wolves, to live by the laws of demand and supply; but the
distinction of humanity, to live by those of right.}

\par Absolute justice is indeed no more attainable than absolute truth; but the
righteous man is distinguished from the unrighteous by his desire and hope of
justice, as the true man from the false by his desire and hope of truth. And
though absolute justice be unattainable, as much justice as we need for all
practical use is attainable by all those who make it their aim.

\par We have to examine, then, in the subject before us, what are the laws of
justice respecting payment of labour --- no small part, these, of the
foundations of all jurisprudence.

\par I reduced, in my last paper, the idea of money payment to its simplest or
radical terms. In those terms its nature, and the conditions of justice
respecting it, can be best ascertained.

\par Money payment, as there stated, consists radically in a promise to some
person working for us, that for the time and labour he spends in our service
to-day we will give or procure equivalent time and labour in his service at any
future time when he may demand it.\footnote{It might appear at first that the
market price of labour expressed such an exchange: but this is a fallacy, for
the market price is the momentary price of the kind of labour required, but the
just price is its equivalent of the productive labour of mankind. This
difference will be analyzed in its place. It must be noted also that I speak
here only of the exchangeable value of labour, not of that of commodities. The
exchangeable value of a commodity is that of the labour required to produce it,
multiplied into the force of the demand for it. If the value of the labour = x
and the force of demand = y, the exchangeable value of the commodity is xy, in
which if either x = 0, or y = 0, xy = 0.}

\par If we promise to give him less labour than he has given us, we under-pay
him. If we promise to give him more labour than he has given us, we over-pay
him. In practice, according to the laws of demand and supply, when two men are
ready to do the work, and only one man wants to have it done, the two men
underbid each other for it; and the one who gets it to do, is under-paid. But
when two men want the work done, and there is only one man ready to do it, the
two men who want it done over-bid each other, and the workman is over-paid.

\par I will examine these two points of injustice in succession;
but first I wish the reader to clearly understand the central
principle, lying between the two, of right or just payment.

\par When we ask a service of any man, he may either give it us freely, or
demand payment for it. Respecting free gift of service, there is no question at
present, that being a matter of affection --- not of traffic. But if he demand
payment for it, and we wish to treat him with absolute equity, it is evident
that this equity can only consist in giving time for time, strength for
strength, and skill for skill. If a man works an hour for us, and we only
promise to work half-an-hour for him in return, we obtain an unjust advantage.
If, on the contrary, we promise to work an hour and a half for him in return,
he has an unjust advantage. The justice consists in absolute exchange; or, if
there be any respect to the stations of the parties, it will not be in favour
of the employer: there is certainly no equitable reason in a main's being poor,
that if he give me a pound of bread to-day, I should return him less than a
pound of bread to-morrow; or any equitable reason in a man's being uneducated,
that if he uses a certain quantity of skill and knowledge in my service, I
should use a less quantity of skill and knowledge in his. Perhaps, ultimately,
it may appear desirable, or, to say the least, gracious, that I should give in
return somewhat more than I received. But at present, we are concerned on the
law of justice only, which is that of perfect and accurate exchange; --- one
circumstance only interfering with the simplicity of this radical idea of just
payment --- that inasmuch as labour (rightly directed) is fruitful just as seed
is, the fruit (or ``interest,'' as it is called) of the labour first given, or
``advanced,'' ought to be taken into account, and balanced by an additional
quantity of labour in the subsequent repayment. Supposing the repayment to take
place at the end of a year, or of any other given time, this calculation could
be approximately made; but as money (that is to say, cash) payment involves no
reference to time (it being optional with the person paid to spend what he
receives at once or after any number of years), we can only assume, generally,
that some slight advantage must in equity be allowed to the person who advances
the labour, so that the typical form of bargain will be: If you give me an hour
to-day, I will give you an hour and five minutes on demand. If you give me a
pound of bread to day, I will give you seventeen ounces on demand, and so on.
All that it is necessary for the reader to note is, that the amount returned is
at least in equity not to be less than the amount given.

\par The abstract idea, then, of just or due wages, as respects the labourer,
is that they will consist in a sum of money which will at any time procure for
him at least as much labour as he has given, rather more than less. And this
equity or justice of payment is, observe, wholly independent of any reference
to the number of men who are willing to do the work. I want a horseshoe for my
horse. Twenty smiths, or twenty thousand smiths, may be ready to forge it;
their number does not in one atom's weight affect the question of the equitable
payment of the one who does forge it. It costs him a quarter of an hour of his
life, and so much skill and strength of arm to make that horseshoe for me.
Then at some future time I am bound in equity to give a quarter of an hour, and
some minutes more, of my life (or of some other person's at my disposal), and
also as much strength of arm and skill, and a little more, in making or doing
what the smith may have need of.

\par Such being the abstract theory of just remunerative payment, its
application is practically modified by the fact that the order for labour,
given in payment, is general, while labour received is special. The current
coin or document is practically an order on the nation for so much work of any
kind; and this universal applicability to immediate need renders it so much
more valuable than special labour can be, that an order for a less quantity of
this general toil will always be accepted as a just equivalent for a greater
quantity of special toil. Any given craftsman will always be willing to give an
hour of his own work in order to receive command over half-an-hour, or even
much less, of national work. This source of uncertainty, together. with the
difficulty of determining the monetary value of skill\footnote{Under the term
``skill'' I mean to include the united force of experience, intellect, and
passion in their operation on manual labour: and under the term ``passion,'' to
include the entire range and agency of the moral feelings; from the simple
patience and gentleness of mind which will give continuity and fineness to the
touch, or enable one person to work without fatigue, and with good effect,
twice as long as another, up to the qualities of character which renders
science possible --- (the retardation of science by envy is one of the most
tremendous losses in the economy of the present century) --- and to the
incommunicable emotion and imagination which are the first and mightiest
sources of all value in art.

\par It is highly singular that political economists should not yet have
perceived, if not the moral, at least the passionate element, to be an
inextricable quantity in every calculation. I cannot conceive, for instance,
how it was possible that Mr Mill should have followed the true clue so far as
to write, --- ``No limit can be set to the importance --- even in a purely
productive and material point of view --- of mere thought,'' without seeing
that it was logically necessary to add also, ``and of mere feeling.'' And this
the more, because in his first definition of labour he includes in the idea of
it ``all feelings of a disagreeable kind connected with the employment of one's
thoughts in a particular occupation.'' True; but why not also, ``feelings of an
agreeable kind?'' It can hardly be supposed that the feelings which retard
labour are more essentially a part of the labour than those which accelerate
it. The first are paid for as pain, the second as power. The workman is merely
indemified for the first; but the second both produce a part of the
exchangeable value of the work, and materially increase its actual quantity.

\par ``Fritz is with us. He is worth fifty thousand men.'' Truly, a large
addition to the material force; --- consisting, however, be it observed, not
more in operations carried on in Fritz's head, than in operations carried on in
his armies' heart. ``No limit can be set to the importance of mere thought.''
Perhaps not! Nay, suppose some day it should turn out that ``mere'' thought was
in itself a recommendable object of production, and that all Material
production was only a step towards this more precious Immaterial one?}, renders
the ascertainment (even approximate) of the proper wages of any given labour in
terms of a currency matter of considerable complexity. But they do not affect
the principle of exchange. The worth of the work may not be easily known; but
it has a worth, just as fixed and real as the specific gravity of a substance,
though such specific gravity may not be easily ascertainable when the substance
is united with many others. Nor is there so much difficulty or chance in
determining it as in determining the ordinary maxima and minima of vulgar
political economy. There are few bargains in which the buyer can ascertain with
anything like precision that the seller would have taken no less; --- or the
seller acquire more than a comfortable faith that the purchaser would have
given no more. This impossibility of precise knowledge prevents neither from
striving to attain the desired point of greatest vexation and injury to the
other, nor from accepting it for a scientific principle that he is to buy for
the least and sell for the most possible, though what the real least or most
may be he cannot tell. In like manner, a just person lays it down for a
scientific principle that he is to pay a just price, and, without being able
precisely to ascertain the limits of such a price, will nevertheless strive to
attain the closest possible approximation to them. A practically serviceable
approximation he can obtain. It is easier to determine scientifically what a
man ought to have for his work, than what his necessities will compel him to
take for it. His necessities can only be ascertained by empirical, but his due
by analytical, investigation. In the one case, you try your answer to the sum
like a puzzled schoolboy --- till you find one that fits; in the other, you
bring out your result within certain limits, by process of calculation.

\par Supposing, then, the just wages of any quantity of given labour to have
been ascertained, let us examine the first results of just and unjust payment,
when in favour of the purchaser or employer; i.e. when two men are ready to do
the work, and only one wants to have it done.

\par The unjust purchaser forces the two to bid against each other till he has
reduced their demand to its lowest terms. Let us assume that the lowest bidder
offers to do the work at half its just price.

\par The purchaser employs him, and does not employ the other. The first or
apparent result is, therefore, that one of the two men is left out of employ,
or to starvation, just as definitely as by the just procedure of giving fair
price to the best workman. The various writers who endeavoured to invalidate
the positions of my first paper never saw this, and assumed that the unjust
hirer employed both. He employs both no more than the just hirer. The only
difference (in the outset, is that the just man pays sufficiently, the unjust
man insufficiently, for the labour of the single person employed.

\par I say, ``in the outset;'' for this first or apparent, difference is not
the actual difference. By the unjust procedure, half the proper price of the
work is left in the hands of the employer. This enables him to hire another man
at the same unjust rate, on some other kind of work; and the final result is
that he has two men working for him at half price, and two are out of employ.

\par By the just procedure, the whole price of the first piece of work goes in
the hands of the man who does it. No surplus being left in the employer's
hands, he cannot hire another man for another piece of labour. But by precisely
so much as his power is diminished, the hired workman's power is increased;
that is to say, by the additional half of the price he has received; which
additional half he has the power of using to employ another man in his service.
I will suppose, for the moment, the least favourable, though quite probable,
case --- that, though justly treated himself, he yet will act unjustly to his
subordinate; and hire at half-price, if he can. The final result will then be,
that one man works for the employer, at just price; one for the workman, at
half-price; and two, as in the first case, are still out of employ. These two,
as I said before, are out of employ in both cases. The difference between the
just and unjust procedure does not lie in the number of men hired, but in the
price paid to them, and the persons by whom it is paid. The essential
difference, that which I want the reader to see clearly, is, that in the unjust
case, two men work for one, the first hirer. In the just case, one man works
for the first hirer, one for the person hired, and so on, down or up through
the various grades of service; the influence being carried forward by justice,
and arrested by injustice. The universal and constant action of justice in this
matter is therefore to diminish the power oF wealth, in the hands of one
individual, over masses of men, and to distribute it through a chain of men.
The actual power exerted by the wealth is the same in both cases; but by
injustice it is put all into one man's hands, so that he directs at once and
with equal force the labour of a circle of men about him; by the just
procedure, he is permitted to touch the nearest only, through whom, with
diminished force, modified by new minds, the energy of the wealth passes on to
others, and so till it exhausts itself.

\par The immediate operation of justice in this respect is therefore to
diminish the power of wealth, first in acquisition of luxury, and, secondly, in
exercise of moral influence. The employer cannot concentrate so multitudinous
labour on his own interests, nor can he subdue so multitudinous mind to his own
will. But the secondary operation of justice is not less important. The
insufficient payment of the group of men working for one, places each under a
maximum of difficulty in rising above his position. The tendency of the system
is to check advancement. But the sufficient or just payment, distributed
through a descending series oF offices or grades or labour\footnote{I am sorry
to lose time by answering, however curtly, the equivocations of the writers who
sought to obscure the instances given of regulated labour in the first of these
papers, by confusing kinds, ranks, and quantities of labour with its qualities.
I never said that a colonel should have the same pay as a private, nor a bishop
the same pay as a curate. Neither did I say that more work ought to be paid as
less work (so that the curate of a parish of two thousand souls should have no
more than the curate of a parish of five hundred). But I said that, so far as
you employ it at all, bad work should be paid no less than good work; as a bad
clergyman yet takes his tithes, a bad physician takes bis fee, and a bad lawyer
his costs. And this, as will be farther shown in the conclusion, I said, and
say, partly because the best work never was, nor ever will be, done for money
at all; but chiefly because, the moment people know they have to pay the bad
and good alike, they will try to discern the one from the other, and not use
the bad. A sagacious writer in the Scotsman asks me if I should like any common
scribbler to be paid by Messrs Smith, Elder and Co. as their good authors are.
I should, if they employed him-but would seriously recommend them, for the
scribbler's sake, as well as their own, not to employ him. The quantity of its
money which the country at present invests in scribbling is not, in the outcome
of it, economically spent; and even the highly ingenious person to whom this
question occurred, might perhaps have been more beneficially employed than in
printing it.}, gives each subordinated person fair and sufficient means of
rising in the social scale, if he chooses to use them; and thus not only
diminishes the immediate power of wealth, but removes the worst disabilities of
poverty.

\par It is on this vital problem that the entire destiny of the labourer is
ultimately dependent. Many minor interests may sometimes appear to interfere
with it, but all branch from it. For instance, considerable agitation is often
caused in the minds of the lower classes when they discover the share which
they nominally, and to all appearance, actually, pay out of their wages in
taxation (I believe thirty-five or forty per cent). This sounds very grievous;
but in reality the labourer does not pay it, but his employer. If the workman
had not to pay it, his wages would be less by just that sum: competition would
still reduce them to the lowest rate at which life was possible. Similarly the
lower orders agitated for the repeal of the corn laws\footnote{I have to
acknowledge an interesting communication on the subject of free trade from
Paisley (for a short letter from ``A Well-wisher'' at my thanks are yet more
due). But the Scottish writer will, I fear, be disagreeably surprised to hear,
that I am, and always have been, an utterly fearless and unscrupulous
free-trader. Seven years ago, speaking of the various signs of infancy in the
European mind (Stones of Venice, vol. iii. p. 168), I wrote: ``The first
principles of commerce were acknowledged by the English parliament only a few
months ago, in its free-trade measures, and are still so little understood by
the million, that no nation dares to abolish its custom-houses.''

\par It will be observed that I do not admit even the idea of reciprocity. Let
other nations, if they like, keep their ports shut; every wise nation will
throw its own open. It is not the opening them, but a sudden, inconsiderate,
and blunderingly experimental manner of opening them, which does the harm. If
you have been protecting a manufacture for a long series of years, you must not
take the protection off in a moment, so as to throw every one of its operatives
at once out of employ, any more than you must take all its wrappings off a
feeble child at once in cold weather, though the cumber of them may have been
radically injuring its health. Little by little, you must restore it to freedom
and to air.

\par Most people's minds are in curious confusion on the subject of free trade,
because they suppose it to imply enlarged competition. On the contrary, free
trade puts an end to all competition. ``Protection'' (among various other
mischievous functions,) endeavours to enable one country to compete with
another in the production of an article at a disadvantage. When trade is
entirely free, no country can be competed with in the articles for the
production of which it is naturally calculated; nor can it compete with any
other, in the production of articles for which it is not naturally calculated.
Tuscany, for instance, cannot compete with England in steel, nor England with
Tuscany in oil. They must exchange their steel and oil. Which exchange should
be as frank and free as honesty and the sea-winds can make it. Competition,
indeed, arises at first, and sharply, in order to prove which is strongest in
any given manufacture possible to both; this point once ascertained,
competition is at an end.}, thinking they would be better off if bread were
cheaper; never perceiving that as soon as bread was permanently cheaper, wages
would permanently fall in precisely that proportion. The corn laws were rightly
repealed; not, however, because they directly oppressed the poor, but because
they indirectly oppressed them in causing a large quantity of their labour to
be consumed unproductively. So also unnecessary taxation oppresses them,
through destruction of capital, but the destiny of the poor depends primarily
always on this one question of dueness of wages. Their distress (irrespectively
of that caused by sloth, minor error, or crime) arises on the grand scale from
the two reacting forces of competition and oppression. There is not yet, nor
will yet for ages be, any real over-population in the world; but a local
over-population, or, more accurately, a degree of population locally
unmanageable under existing circumstances for want of forethought and
sufficient machinery, necessarily shows itself by pressure of competition; and
the taking advantage of this competition by the purchaser to obtain their
labour unjustly cheap, consummates at once their suffering and his own; for in
this (as I believe in every other kind of slavery) the oppressor suffers at
last more than the oppressed, and those magnificent lines of Pope, even in all
their force, fall short of the truth --- 

\begin{quote}
 ``Yet, to be just to these poor men of pelf,\\
 Each does but HATE HIS NEIGHBOUR AS HIMSELF:\\
 Damned to the mines, an equal fate betides\\
 The slave that digs it, and the slave that hides.''
\end{quote}

\par The collateral and reversionary operations of justice in this matter I
shall examine hereafter (it being needful first to define the nature of value);
proceeding then to consider within what practical terms a juster system may be
established; and ultimately the vexed question of the destinies of the
unemployed workmen\footnote{I should be glad if the reader would first clear
the ground for himself so far as to determine whether the difficulty lies in
getting the work or getting the pay for it. Does he consider occupation itself
to be an expensive luxury, difficult of attainment, of which too little is to
be found in the world? or is it rather that, while in the enjoyment even of the
most athletic delight, men must nevertheless be maintained, and this
maintenance is not always forthcoming? We must be clear on this head before
going farther, as most people are loosely in the habit of talking of the
difficulty of ``finding employment.'' Is it employment that we want to find, or
support during employment? Is it idleness we wish to put an end to, or hunger?
We have to take up both questions in succession, only not both at the same
time. No doubt that work is a luxury, and a very great one. It is, indeed, at
once a luxury and a necessity; no man can retain either health of mind or body
without it. So profoundly do I feel this, that, as will be seen in the sequel,
one of the principal objects I would recommend to benevolent and practical
persons, is to induce rich people to seek for a larger quantity of this luxury
than they at present possess. Nevertheless, it appears by experience that even
this healthiest of pleasures may be indulged in to excess, and that human
beings are just as liable to surfeit of labour as to surfeit of meat; so that,
as on the one hand, it may be charitable to provide, for some people, lighter
dinner, and more work, for others, it may be equally expedient to provide
lighter work, and more dinner.}. Lest, however, the reader should be alarmed at
some of the issues to which our investigations seem to be tending, as if in
their bearing against the power of wealth they had something in common with
those of socialism, I wish him to know in accurate terms, one or two of the
main points which I have in view.

\par Whether socialism has made more progress among the army and navy (where
payment is made on my principles), or among the manufacturing operatives (who
are paid on my opponents' principles), I leave it to those opponents to
ascertain and declare. Whatever their conclusion may be, I think it necessary
to answer for myself only this: that if there be any one point insisted on
throughout my works more frequently than another, that one point is the
impossibility of Equality. My continual aim has been to show the eternal
superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others; and
to show also the advisability of appointing such persons or person to guide, to
lead, or on occasion even to compel and subdue, their inferiors, according to
their own better knowledge and wiser will. My principles of Political Economy
were all involved in a single phrase spoken three years ago at Manchester.
``Soldiers of the Ploughshare as well as soldiers of the Sword:'' and they were
all summed in a single sentence in the last volume of Modern Painters ---
``Government and co-operation are in all things the Laws of Life; Anarchy and
competition the Laws of Death.''

\par And with respect to the mode in which these general principles affect the
secure possession of property, so far am I from invalidating such security,
that the whole gist of these papers will be found ultimately to aim at an
extension in its range; and whereas it has long been known and declared that
the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known
and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

\par But that the working of the system which I have undertaken to develope
would in many ways shorten the apparent and direct, though not the unseen and
collateral, power, both of wealth, as the Lady of Pleasure, and of capital as
the Lord of Toil, I do not deny on the contrary, I affirm it in all joyfulness;
knowing that the attraction of riches is already too strong, as their authority
is already too weighty, for the reason of mankind. I said in my last paper that
nothing in history had ever been so disgraceful to human intellect as the
acceptance among us of the common doctrines of political economy as a science.
I have many grounds for saying this, but one of the chief may be given in few
words. I know no previous instance in history of a nation's establishing a
systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion. The
writings which we (verbally) esteem as divine, not only denounce the love of
money as the source of all evil, and as an idolatry abhorred of the Deity, but
declare mammon service to be the accurate and irreconcileable opposite of God's
service: and, whenever they speak of riches absolute, and poverty absolute,
declare woe to the rich, and blessing to the poor. Where upon we forthwith
investigate a science of becoming rich as the shortest road to national
prosperity.

\begin{quote}
 ``Tai Cristian dannera l' Etiope,\\
 Quando si partiranno i due collegi,\\
 L'UNO IN ETERNO RICCO, E L'ALTRO INOPE.''
\end{quote}

\chapter{Ad Valorem}

\par We saw that just payment of labour consisted in a sum of money which would
approximately obtain equivalent labour at a future time: we have now to examine
the means of obtaining such equivalence. Which question involves the definition
of Value, Wealth, Price, and Produce.

\par None of these terms are yet defined so as to be understood by the public.
But the last, Produce, which one might have thought the clearest of all, is, in
use, the most ambiguous; and the examination of the kind of ambiguity attendant
on its present employment will best open the way to our work.

\par In his chapter on Capital\footnote{Book I. chap. iv. s. 1. To save space,
my future references to Mr Mill's work will be by numerals only, as in this
instance, I. iv. I. Ed. in 2 vols. 8vo. Parker, 1848.}, Mr J.S. Mill instances,
as a capitalist, a hardware manufacturer, who, having intended to spend a
certain portion of the proceeds of his business in buying plate and jewels,
changes his mind, and, 'pays it as wages to additional workpeople.'' The effect
is stated by Mr Mill to be, that ``more food is appropriated to the consumption
of productive labourers.''

\par Now I do not ask, though, had I written this paragraph, it would surely
have been asked of me, What is to become of the silversmiths? If they are truly
unproductive persons, we will acquiesce in their extinction. And though in
another part of the same passage, the hardware merchant is supposed also to
dispense with a number of servants, whose ``food is thus set free for
productive purposes,'' I do not inquire what will be the effect, painful or
otherwise, upon the servants, of this emancipation of their food. But I very
seriously inquire why ironware is produce, and silverware is not? That the
merchant consumes the one, and sells the other, certainly does not constitute
the difference, unless it can be shown (which, indeed, I perceive it to be
becoming daily more and more the aim of tradesmen to show) that commodities are
made to be sold, and not to be consumed. The merchant is an agent of conveyance
to the consumer in one case, and is himself the consumer in the
other\footnote{If Mr Mill had wished to show the difference in result between
consumption and sale, he should have represented the hardware merchant as
consuming his own goods instead of selling them; similarly, the silver merchant
as consuming his own goods instead of welling them. Had he done this, he would
have made his position clearer, though less tenable; and perhaps this was the
position he really intended to take, tacitly involving his theory, elsewhere
stated, and shown in the sequel of this paper to be false, that demand for
commodities is not demand for labour. But by the most diligent scrutiny of the
paragraph now under examination, I cannot determine whether it is a fallacy
pure and simple, or the half of one fallacy supported by the whole of a greater
one; so that I treat it here on the kinder assumption that it is one fallacy
only.}: but the labourers are in either case equally productive, since they
have produced goods to the same value, if the hardware and the plate are both
goods.

\par And what distinction separates them? It is indeed possible that in the
``comparative estimate of the moralist,'' with which Mr Mill says political
economy has nothing to do (III. i. 2), a steel fork might appear a more
substantial production than a silver one: we may grant also that knives, no
less than forks, are good produce; and scythes and ploughshares serviceable
articles. But, how of bayonets? Supposing the hardware merchant to effect large
sales of these, by help of the ``setting free'' of the food of his servants and
his silversmith, --- is he still employing productive labourers, or, in Mr
Mill's words, labourers who increase ``the stock of permanent means of
enjoyment'' (I. iii. 4)? Or if, instead of bayonets, he supply bombs, will not
the absolute and final ``enjoyment'' of even these energetically productive
articles (each of which costs ten pounds\footnote{I take Mr Helps' estimate in
his essay on War.}) be dependent on a proper choice of time and place for their
enfantement; choice, that is to say, depending on those philosophical
considerations with which political economy has nothing to do\footnote{Also
when the wrought silver vases of Spain were dashed to fragments by our
custom-house officers, because bullion might be imported free of duty, but not
brains, was the axe that broke them productive? --- the artist who wrought them
unproductive? Or again. If the woodman's axe is productive, is the
executioner's? as also, if the hemp of a cable be productive, does not the
productiveness of hemp in a halter depend on its moral more than on its
material application?}?

\par I should have regretted the need of pointing out inconsistency in any
portion of Mr Mill's work, had not the value of his work proceeded from its
inconsistencies. He deserves honour among economists by inadvertently
disclaiming the principles which he states, and tacitly introducing the moral
considerations with which he declares his science has no connection. Many of
his chapters are, therefore, true and valuable; and the only conclusions of his
which I have to dispute are those which follow from his premises.

\par Thus, the idea which lies at the root of the passage we have just been
examining, namely, that labour applied to produce luxuries will not support so
many persons as labour applied to produce useful articles, is entirely true;
but the instance given fails --- and in four directions of failure at
once-because Mr Mill has not defined the real meaning of usefulness. The
definition which he has given-'' capacity to satisfy a desire, or serve a
purpose'' (III. i. 2) --- applies equally to the iron and silver. while the
true definition which he has not given, but which nevertheless underlies the
false verbal definition in his mind, and comes out once or twice by accident
(as in the words ``any support to life or strength'' in I. iii. 5) --- applies
to some articles of iron, but not to others, and to some articles of silver,
but not to others. It applies to ploughs, but not to bayonets; and to forks,
but not to filigree\footnote{Filigree: that is to say, generally, ornament
dependent on complexity, not on art.}.

\par The eliciting of the true definitions will give us the reply to our first
question, ``What is value?'' respecting which, however, we must first hear the
popular statements.

\par ``The word 'value,' when used without adjunct, always means, in political
economy, value in exchange'' (Mill, III. i. 2). So that, if two ships cannot
exchange their rudders, their rudders are, in politico-economic language, of no
value to either.

\par But ``the subject of political economy is wealth.'' --- (Preliminary
remarks, page 1)

\par And wealth ``consists of all useful and agreeable objects which possess
exchangeable value.'' --- (Preliminary remarks, page 10.)

\par It appears, then, according to Mr Mill, that usefulness and agreeableness
underlie the exchange value, and must be ascertained to exist in the thing,
before we can esteem it an object of wealth.

\par Now, the economical usefulness of a thing depends not merely on its own
nature, but on the number of people who can and will use it. A horse is
useless, and therefore unsaleable, if no one can ride, --- a sword, if no one
can strike, and meat, if no one can eat. Thus every material utility depends on
its relative human capacity.

\par Similarly: The agreeableness of a thing depends not merely on its own
likeableness, but on the number of people who can be got to like it. The
relative agreeableness, and therefore saleableness, of ``a pot of the smallest
ale,'' and of ``Adonis painted by a running brook,'' depends virtually on the
opinion of Demos, in the shape of Christopher Sly. That is to say, the
agreeableness of a thing depends on its relatively human
disposition\footnote{These statements sound crude in their brevity; but will be
found of the utmost importance when they are developed. Thus, in the above
instance, economists have never perceived that disposition to buy is a wholly
moral element in demand: that is to say, when you give a man half-a-crown, it
depends on his disposition whether he is rich or poor with it --- whether he
will buy disease, ruin, and hatred, or buy health, advancement, and domestic
love. And thus the agreeableness or exchange value of every offered commodity
depends on production, not merely of the commodity, but of buyers of it;
therefore on the education of buyers, and on all the moral elements by which
their disposition to buy this, or that, is formed. I will illustrate and expand
into final consequences every one of these definitions in its place: at present
they can only be given with extremest brevity; for in order to put the subject
at once in a connected form before the reader, I have thrown into one, the
opening definitions of four chapters; namely, of that on Value (``Ad
Valorem''); on Price (``Thirty Pieces''); on Production (``Demeter''); and on
Economy (``The Law of the House'').}. Therefore, political economy, being a
science of wealth, must be a science respecting human capacities and
dispositions. But moral considerations have nothing to do with political
economy (III. i. 2). Therefore, moral considerations have nothing to do with
human capacities and dispositions.

\par I do not wholly like the look of this conclusion from Mr Mill's
statements: --- let us try Mr Ricardo's.

\par ``Utility is not the measure of exchangeable value, though it is
absolutely essential to it.'' --- (Chap. I. sect. i) essential in what degree,
Mr Ricardo? There may be greater and less degrees of utility. Meat, for
instance, may be so good as to be fit for any one to eat, or so bad as to be
fit for no one to eat. What is the exact degree of goodness which is
``essential'' to its exchangeable value, but not ``the measure'' of it? How
good must the meat be, in order to possess any exchangeable value; and how bad
must it be --- (I wish this were a settled question in London markets) --- in
order to possess none?

\par There appears to be some hitch, I think, in the working even of Mr.
Ricardo's principles; but let him take his own example. ``Suppose that in the
early stages of society the bows and arrows of the hunter were of equal value
with the implements of the fisherman. Under such circumstances the value of the
deer, the produce of the hunter's day's labour, would be exactly equal to the
value of the fish, the product of the fisherman's day's labour, The comparative
value of the fish and game would be entirely regulated by the quantity of
labour realized in each.'' (Ricardo, chap. iii. On Value).

\par Indeed! Therefore, if the fisherman catches one sprat, and the huntsman
one deer, one sprat will be equal in value to one deer but if the fisherman
catches no sprat, and the huntsman two deer, no sprat will be equal in value to
two deer?

\par Nay but --- Mr Ricardo's supporters may say --- he means, on an average,
--- if the average product of a day's work of fisher and hunter be one fish
and one deer, the one fish will always be equal in value to the one deer.

\par Might I inquire the species of fish? Whale? or white-bait\footnote{Perhaps
it may be said, in farther support of Mr Ricardo, that he meant, ``when the
utility is constant or given, the price varies as the quantity of labour.'' If
he meant this, he should have said it; but, had he meant it, he could have
hardly missed the necessary result, that utility would be one measure of price
(which he expressly denies it to be); and that, to prove saleableness, he had
to prove a given quantity of utility, as well as a given quantity of labour: to
wit, in his own instance, that the deer and fish would each feed the same
number of men, for the same number of days, with equal pleasure to their
palates. The fact is, he did not know what he meant himself. The general idea
which he had derived from commercial experience, without being able to analyze
it, was, that when the demand is constant, the price varies as the quantity of
labour required for production; or, --- using the formula I gave in last paper
--- when y is constant, x y varies as x. But demand never is, nor can be,
ultimately constant, if x varies distinctly; for, as price rises, consumers
fall away; and as soon as there is a monopoly (and all scarcity is a form of
monopoly; so that every commodity is affected occasionally by some colour of
monopoly), y becomes the most influential condition of the price. Thus the
price of a painting depends less on its merits than on the interest taken in it
by the public; the price of singing less on the labour of the singer than the
number of persons who desire to hear him; and the price of gold less on the
scarcity which affects it in common with cerium or iridium, than on the
sunlight colour and unalterable purity by which it attracts the admiration and
answers the trust of mankind.

\par It must be kept in mind, however, that I use the word ``demand'' in a
somewhat different sense from economists usually. They mean by it ``the
quantity of a thing sold.'' I mean by it ``the force of the buyer's capable
intention to buy.'' In good English, a person's ``demand'' signifies, not what
he gets, but what he asks for.

\par Economists also do not notice that objects are not valued by absolute bulk
or weight, but by such bulk and weight as is necessary to bring them into use.
They say, for instance, that water bears no price in the market. It is true
that a cupful does not, but a lake does; just as a handful of dust does not,
but an acre does. And were it possible to make even the possession of the
cupful or handful permanent, (i.e. to find a place for them,) the earth and sea
would be bought up for handfuls and cupfuls.}?

\par It would be waste of time to purpose these fallacies farther;
we will seek for a true definition.

\par Much store has been set for centuries upon the use of our English
classical education. It were to be wished that our well-educated merchants
recalled to mind always this much of their latin schooling, --- that the
nominative of valorem (a word already sufficiently familiar to them) is valor;
a word which, therefore, ought to be familiar to them. Valor, from valere, to
be well or strong; --- strong, life (if a man), or valiant; strong, for life
(if a thing), or valuable. To be ``valuable,'' therefore, is to ``avail towards
life.'' A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its
whole strength. In proportion as it does not lead to life, or as its strength
is broken, it is less valuable; in proportion as it leads away from life, it is
unvaluable or malignant.

\par The value of a thing, therefore, is independent of opinion, and of
quantity. Think what you will of it, gain how much you may of it, the value of
the thing itself is neither greater nor less. For ever it avails, or avails
not; no estimate can raise, no disdain repress, the power which it holds from
the Maker of things and of men.

\par The real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished
from the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from
astrology, is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things
that lead to life: and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that
lead to destruction. And if, in a state of infancy, they supposed indifferent
things, such as excrescences of shell-fish, and pieces of blue and red stone,
to be valuable, and spent large measures of the labour which ought to be
employed for the extension and ennobling of life, in diving or digging for
them, and cutting them into various shapes,or if, in the same state of infancy,
they imagine precious and beneficent things, such as air, light, and
cleanliness, to be valueless,-or if, finally, they imagine the conditions of
their own existence, by which alone they can truly possess or use anything,
such, for instance, as peace, trust, and love, to be prudently exchangeable,
when the markets offer, for gold, iron, or excresrences of shells --- the great
and only science of Political Economy teaches them, in all these cases, what is
vanity, and what substance; and how the service of Death, the lord of Waste,
and of eternal emptiness, differs from the service of Wisdom, the lady of
Saving, and of eternal fulness; she who has said, ``I will cause those that
love me to inherit SUBSTANCE; and I will FILL their treasures.''

\par The ``Lady of Saving,'' in a profounder sense than that of the savings
bank, though that is a good one: Madonna della Salute, --- Lady of Health, ---
which, though commonly spoken of as if separate from wealth, is indeed a part
of wealth. This word, ``wealth,'' it will be remembered, is the next we have to
define.

\par ``To be wealthy'' says Mr Mill, ``is to have a large stock of useful
articles.'' I accept this definition. Only let us perfectly understand it. My
opponents often lament my not giving them enough logic: I fear I must at
present use a little more than they will like: but this business of Political
Economy is no light one, and we must allow no loose terms in it.

\par We have, therefore, to ascertain in the above definition, first, what is
the meaning of ``having,'' or the nature of Possession. Then what is the
meaning of ``useful,'' or the nature of Utility.

\par And first of possession. At the crossing of the transepts of Milan
Cathedral has lain, for three hundred years, the embalmed body of St. Carlo
Borromeo. It holds a golden crosier, and has a cross of emeralds on its breast.
Admitting the crosier and emeralds to be useful articles, is the body to be
considered as ``having'' them? Do they, in the politico-economical sense of
property, belong to it? If not, and if we may, therefore, conclude generally
that a dead body cannot possess property, what degree and period of animation
in the body will render possession possible?

\par As thus: lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers
fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he
was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking --- had he the
gold? or had the gold him\footnote{Compare George Herbert, The Church Porch,
Staza 28.}?

\par And if, instead of sinking him in the sea by its weight, the gold had
struck him on the forehead, and thereby caused incurable disease --- suppose
palsy or insanity, --- would the gold in that case have been more a
``possession'' than in the first? Without pressing the inquiry up through
instances of gradually increasing vital power over the gold (which I will,
however, give, if they are asked for), I presume the reader will see that
possession, or ``having,'' is not an absolute, but a gradated, power; and
consists not only in the quantity or nature of the thing possessed, but also
(and in a greater degree) in its suitableness to the person possessing it and
in his vital power to use it.

\par And our definition of Wealth, expanded, becomes: ``The possession of
useful articles, which we can use.'' This is a very serious change. For wealth,
instead of depending merely on a ``have,'' is thus seen to depend on a ``can.''
Gladiator's death, on a ``habet''; but soldier's victory, and State's
salvation, on a ``quo plurimum posset.'' (liv. VII. 6.) And what we reasoned of
only as accumulation of material, is seen to demand also accumulation of
capacity.

\par So much for our verb. Next for our adjective. What is the meaning of
``useful''?

\par The inquiry is closely connected with the last. For what is capable of use
in the hands of some persons, is capable, in the hands of others, of the
opposite of use, called commonly ``from-use,'' or ``ab-use.'' And it depends on
the person, much more than on the article, whether its usefulness or
ab-usefulness will be the quality developed in it. Thus, wine, which the
Greeks, in their Bacchus, made rightly the type of all passion, and which, when
used, ``cheereth god and man'' (that is to say, strengthens both the divine
life, or reasoning power, and the earthy, or carnal power, of man); yet, when
abused, becomes ``Dionysos,'' hurtful especially to the divine part of man, or
reason. And again, the body itself, being equally liable to use and to abuse,
and, when rightly disciplined, serviceable to the State, both for war and
labour, --- but when not disciplined, or abused, valueless to the State, and
capable only of continuing the private or single existence of the individual
(and that but feebly) --- the Greeks called such a body an ``idiotic'' or
``private'' body, from their word signifying a person employed in no way
directly useful to the State; whence finally, our ``idiot,'' meaning a person
entirely occupied with his own concerns.

\par Hence, it follows that if a thing is to be useful, it must be not only of
an availing nature, but in availing hands. Or, in accurate terms, usefulness is
value in the hands of the valiant; so that this science of wealth being, as we
have just seen, when regarded as the science of Accumulation, accumulative of
capacity as well as of material, --- when regarded as the Science of
Distribution, is distribution not absolute, but discriminate; not of every
thing to every man, but of the right thing to the right man. A difficult
science, dependent on more than arithmetic.

\par Wealth, therefore, is ``THE POSSESSION OF THE VALUABLE BY THE VALIANT'';
and in considering it as a power existing in a nation, the two elements, the
value of the thing, and the valour of its possessor, must be estimated
together. Whence it appears that many of the persons commonly considered
wealthy, are in reality no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong
boxes are, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth; and
operating for the nation, in an economical point of view, either as pools of
dead water, and eddies in a stream (which, so long as the stream flows, are
useless, or serve only to drown people, but may become of importance in a state
of stagnation should the stream dry); or else, as dams in a river, of which the
ultimate service depends not on the dam, but the miller; or else, as mere
accidental stays and impediments, acting not as wealth, but (for we ought to
have a correspondent term) as ``illth,'' causing various devastation and
trouble around them in all directions; or lastly, act not at all, but are
merely animated conditions of delay, (no use being possible of anything they
have until they are dead,) in which last condition they are nevertheless often
useful as delays, and ``impedimenta,'' if a nation is apt to move too fast.

\par This being so, the difficulty of the true science of Political Economy
lies not merely in the need of developing manly character to deal with material
value, but in the fact, that while the manly character and material value only
form wealth by their conjunction, they have nevertheless a mutually destructive
operation on each other. For the manly character is apt to ignore, or even cast
away, the material value: --- whence that of Pope: --- 

\par ``Sure, of qualities demanding praise,

\par More go to ruin fortunes, than to raise.''

\par And on the other hand, the material value is apt to undermine the manly
character; so that it must be our work, in the issue, to examine what evidence
there is of the effect of wealth on the minds of its possessors; also, what
kind of person it is who usually sets himself to obtain wealth, and succeeds in
doing so; and whether the world owes more gratitude to rich or to poor men,
either for their moral influence upon it, or for chief goods, discoveries, and
practical advancements. I may, however, anticipate future conclusions, so far
as to state that in a community regulated only by laws of demand and supply,
but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally
speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible,
unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the
entirely foolish, the entirely wise\footnote{``O Zeus dipou penetai'' ---
Arist. Plut. 582. It would but weaken the grad words to lean on the preceding
ones: --- ``Oti tou Platon parecho Beltionas, andpas, kai tin gnomen, kai ten
idean.''}, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the
imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly
and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely
merciful, just, and godly person.

\par Thus far, then, of wealth. Next, we have to ascertain the nature of PRICE;
that is to say, of exchange value, and its expression by currencies.

\par Note first, of exchange, there can be no profit in it. It is only in
labour there can be profit --- that is to say, a ``making in advance,'' or
``making in favour of'' (from proficio). In exchange, there is only advantage,
i.e., a bringing of vantage or power to the exchanging persons. Thus, one man,
by sowing and reaping, turns one measure of corn into two measures. That is
Profit. Another, by digging and forging, turns one spade into two spades. That
is Profit. But the man who has two measures of corn wants sometimes to dig; and
the man who has two spades wants sometimes to eat:They exchange the gained
grain for the gained tool; and both are the better for the exchange; but though
there is much advantage in the transaction, there is no profit. Nothing is
constructed or produced. Only that which had been before constructed is given
to the person by whom it can be used. If labour is necessary to effect the
exchange, that labour is in reality involved in the production, and, like all
other labour, bears profit. Whatever number of men are concerned in the
manufacture, or in the conveyance, have share in the profit; but neither the
manufacture nor the conveyance are the exchange, and in the exchange itself
there is no profit.

\par There may, however, be acquisition, which is a very different thing. If,
in the exchange, one man is able to give what cost him little labour for what
has cost the other much, he ``acquires'' a certain quantity of the produce of
the other's labour. And precisely what he acquires, the other loses. In
mercantile language, the person who thus acquires is commonly said to have
``made a profit''; and I believe that many of our merchants are seriously under
the impression that it is possible for everybody, somehow, to make a profit in
this manner. Whereas, by the unfortunate constitution of the world we live in,
the laws both of matter and motion have quite rigorously forbidden universal
acquisition of this kind. Profit, or material gain, is attainable only by
construction or by discovery; not by exchange. Whenever material gain follows
exchange, for every plus there is a precisely equal minus.

\par Unhappily for the progress of the science of Political Economy, the plus
quantities, or, --- if I may be allowed to coin an awkward plural --- the
pluses, make a very positive and venerable appearance in the world, so that
every one is eager to learn the science which produces results so magnificent;
whereas the minuses have, on the other hand, a tendency to retire into back
streets, and other places of shade, --- or even to get themselves wholly and
finally put out of sight in graves: which renders the algebra of this science
peculiar, and difficultly legible; a large number of its negative signs being
written by the account-keeper in a kind of red ink, which starvation thins, and
makes strangely pale, or even quite invisible ink, for the present.

\par The Science of Exchange, or, as I hear it has been proposed to call it, of
``Catallactics,'' considered as one of gain, is, therefore, simply nugatory;
but considered as one of acquisition, it is a very curious science, differing
in its data and basis from every other science known. Thus: --- if I can
exchange a needle with a savage for a diamond, my power of doing so depends
either on the savage's ignorance of social arrangements in Europe, or on his
want of power to take advantage of them, by selling the diamond to any one else
for more needles. If, farther, I make the bargain as completely advantageous to
myself as possible, by giving to the savage a needle with no eye in it
(reaching, thus a sufficiently satisfactory type of the perfect operation of
catallactic science), the advantage to me in the entire transaction depends
wholly upon the ignorance, powerlessness, or heedlessness of the person dealt
with. Do away with these, and catallactic advantage becomes impossible. So far,
therefore, as the science of exchange relates to the advantage of one of the
exchanging persons only, it is founded on the ignorance or incapacity of the
opposite person. Where these vanish, it also vanishes. It is therefore a
science founded on nescience, and an art founded on artlessness. But all other
sciences and arts, except this, have for their object the doing away with their
opposite nescience and artlessness. This science, alone of sciences, must, by
all available means, promulgate and prolong its opposite nescience; otherwise
the science itself is impossible. It is, therefore, peculiarly and alone the
science of darkness; probably a bastard science --- not by any means a divina
scientia, but one begotten of another father, that father who, advising his
children to turn stones into bread, is himself employed in turning bread into
stones, and who, if you ask a fish of him (fish not being producible on his
estate), can but give you a serpent.

\par The general law, then, respecting just or economical exchange, is simply
this: --- There must be advantage on both sides (or if only advantage on one,
at least no disadvantage on the other) to the persons exchanging; and just
payment for his time, intelligence, and labour, to any intermediate person
effecting the transaction (commonly called a merchant); and whatever advantage
there is on either side, and whatever pay is given to the intermediate person,
should be thoroughly known to all concerned. All attempt at concealment implies
some practice of the opposite, or undivine science, founded on nescience.
Whence another saying of the Jew merchant's --- ``As a nail between the stone
joints, so doth sin stick fast between buying and selling.'' Which peculiar
riveting of stone and timber, in men's dealings with each other, is again set
forth in the house which was to be destroyed --- timber and stones together ---
when Zechariah's roll (more probably ``curved sword'') flew over it: ``the
curse that goeth forth over all the earth upon every one that stealeth and
holdeth himself guiltless,'' instantly followed by the vision of the Great
Measure; --- the measure ``of the injustice of them in all the earth'' (auti i
adikia auton en pase te ge), with the weight of lead for its lid, and the
woman, the spirit of wickedness, within it; --- that is to say, Wickedness
hidden by Dulness, and formalized, outwardly, into ponderously established
cruelty. ``It shall be set upon its own base in the land of
Babel.''\footnote{23. Zech. v. ii.}

\par I have hitherto carefully restricted myself, in speaking of exchange, to
the use of the term ``advantage''; but that term includes two ideas; the
advantage, namely, of getting what we need, and that of getting what we wish
for. Three-fourths of the demands existing in the world are romantic; founded
on visions, idealisms, hopes, and affections; and the regulation of the purse
is, in its essence, regulation of the imagination and the heart. Hence, the
right discussion of the nature of price is a very high metaphysical and
psychical problem; sometimes to be solved only in a passionate manner, as by
David in his counting the price of the water of the well by the gate of
Bethlehem; but its first conditions are the following: --- The price of
anything is the quantity of labour given by the person desiring it, in order to
obtain possession of it. This price depends on four variable quantities. A. The
quantity of wish the purchaser has for the thing; opposed to a, the quantity of
wish the seller has to keep it. B. The quantity of labour the purchaser can
afford, to obtain the thing opposed to B, the quantity of labour the seller can
afford, to keep it. These quantities are operative only in excess; i.e. the
quantity of wish (A) means the quantity of wish for this thing, above wish for
other things; and the quantity of work (B) means the quantity which can be
spared to get this thing from the quantity needed to get other things.

\par Phenomena of price, therefore, are intensely complex, curious, and
interesting --- too complex, however, to be examined yet; every one of them,
when traced far enough, showing itself at last as a part of the bargain of the
Poor of the Flock (or ``flock of slaughter''), ``If ye think good, give ME my
price, and if not, forbear'' Zech. xi. 12; but as the price of everything is to
be calculated finally in labour, it is necessary to define the nature of that
standard.

\par Labour is the contest of the life of man with an opposite; --- the term
``life'' including his intellect, soul, and physical power, contending with
question, difficulty, trial, or material force.

\par Labour is of a higher or lower order, as it includes more or fewer of the
elements of life: and labour of good quality, in any kind, includes always as
much intellect and feeling as will fully and harmoniously regulate the physical
force.

\par In speaking of the value and price of labour, it is necessary always to
understand labour of a given rank and quality, as we should speak of gold or
silver of a given standard. Bad (that is, heartless, inexperienced, or
senseless) labour cannot be valued; it is like gold of uncertain alloy, or
flawed iron\footnote{Labour which is entirely good of its kind, that is to say,
effective, or efficient, the Greeks called ``weighable,'' or axios, translated
usually ``worthy,'' and because thus substantial and true, they called its
price time, the ``honourable estimate'' of it (honorarium): this word being
founded on their conception of true labour as a divine thing, to be honoured
with the kind of honour given to the gods; whereas the price of false labour,
or of that which led away from life, was to be, not honour, but vengeance; for
which they reserved another word, attributing the exaction of such price to a
peculiar goddess, called Tisiphone, the ``requiter (or quittance-taker) of
death''; a person versed in the highest branches of arithmetic, and punctual in
her habits; with whom accounts current have been opened also in modern days.}.

\par The quality and kind of labour being given, its value, like that of all
other valuable things, is invariable. But the quantity of it which must be
given for other things is variable: and in estimating this variation, the price
of other things must always be counted by the quantity of labour; not the price
of labour by the quantity of other things.

\par Thus, if we want to plant an apple sapling in rocky ground, it may take
two hours' work; in soft ground, perhaps only half an hour. Grant the soil
equally good for the tree in each case. Then the value of the sapling planted
by two hours' work is nowise greater than that of the sapling planted in half
an hour. One will bear no more fruit than the other. Also, one half-hour of
work is as valuable as another half-hour; nevertheless the one sapling has cost
four such pieces of work, the other only one. Now the proper statement of this
fact is, not that the labour on the hard ground is cheaper than on the soft;
but that the tree is dearer. The exchange value may, or may not, afterwards
depend on this fact. If other people have plenty of soft ground to plant in,
they will take no cognizance of our two hours' labour, in the price they will
offer for the plant on the rock. And if, through want of sufficient botanical
science, we have planted an upas tree instead of an apple, the exchange-value
will be a negative quantity; still less proportionate to the labour expended.

\par What is commonly called cheapness of labour, signifies, therefore, in
reality, that many obstacles have to be overcome by it; so that much labour is
required to produce a small result. But this should never be spoken of as
cheapness of labour, but as dearness of the object wrought for. It would be
just as rational to say that walking was cheap, because we had ten miles to
walk home to our dinner, as that labour was cheap, because we had to work ten
hours to earn it.

\par The last word which we have to define is ``Production.''

\par I have hitherto spoken of all labour as profitable; because it is
impossible to consider under one head the quality or value of labour, and its
aim. But labour of the best quality may be various in aim. It may be either
constructive (``gathering'' from con and struo), as agriculture; nugatory, as
jewel-cutting; or destructive (``scattering,'' from de and struo), as war. It
is not, however, always easy to prove labour, apparently nugatory, to be
actually so\footnote{The most accurately nugatory labour is, perhaps, that of
which not enough is given to answer a purpose effectually, and which,
therefore, has all to be done over again. Also, labour which fails of effect
through non-co-operation. The cure of a little village near Bellinzona, to whom
I had expressed wonder that the peasants allowed the Ticino to flood their
fields, told me that they would not join to build an effectual embankment high
up the valley, because everybody said ``that would help his neighbours as much
as himself.'' So every proprietor built a bit of low embankment about his own
field; and the Ticino, as soon as it had a mind, swept away and swallowed all
up together.}; generally, the formula holds good: ``he that gathereth not,
scattereth''; thus, the jeweller's art is probably very harmful in its
ministering to a clumsy and inelegant pride. So that, finally, I believe nearly
all labour may be shortly divided into positive and negative labour: positive,
that which produces life; negative, that which produces death; the most
directly negative labour being murder, and the most directly positive, the
bearing and rearing of children; so that in the precise degree in which murder
is hateful, on the negative side of idleness, in the exact degree child-rearing
is admirable, on the positive side of idleness. For which reason, and because
of the honour that there is in rearing children\footnote{Observe, I say,
rearing,'' not ``begetting.'' The praise is in the seventh season, not in
sporitos, nor in phutalia, but in opora. It is strange that men always praise
enthusiastically any person who, by a momentary exertion, saves a life; but
praise very hesitatingly a person who, by exertion and self-denial prolonged
through years, creates one. We give the crown ``ob civem servatum''; --- why
not ``ob civem natum?'' Born, I mean, to the full, in soul as well as body.
England has oak enough, I think, for both chaplets.}, while the wife is said to
be as the vine (for cheering), the children are as the olive branch, for
praise: nor for praise only, but for peace (because large families can only be
reared in times of peace): though since, in their spreading and voyaging in
various directions, they distribute strength, they are, to the home strength,
as arrives in the hand of the giant --- striking here, and there far away.

\par Labour being thus various in its result, the prosperity of any nation is
in exact proportion to the quantity of labour which it spends in obtaining and
employing means of life. Observe, --- I say, obtaining and employing; that is
to say, not merely wisely producing, but wisely distributing and consuming.
Economists usually speak as if there were no good in consumption
absolute\footnote{When Mr Mill speaks of productive consumption, he only means
consumption which results in increase of capital, or material wealth. See I.
iii. 4, and I. iii. 5.}. So far from this being so, consumption absolute is the
end, crown, and perfection of production; and wise consumption is a far more
difficult art than wise production. Twenty people can gain money for one who
can use it; and the vital question, for individual and for nation, is, never
``how much do they make?'' but ``to what purpose do they spend?''

\par The reader may, perhaps, have been surprised at the slight reference I
have hitherto made to ``capital,'' and its functions. It is here the place to
define them.

\par Capital signifies ``head, or source, or root material'' --- it is material
by which some derivative or secondary good is produced. It is only capital
proper (caput vivum, not caput mortuum) when it is thus producing something
different from itself. It is a root, which does not enter into vital function
till it produces something else than a root: namely, fruit. That fruit will in
time again produce roots; and so all living capital issues in reproduction of
capital; but capital which produces nothing but capital is only root producing
root; bulb issuing in bulb, never in tulip; seed issuing in seed, never in
bread. The Political Economy of Europe has hitherto devoted itself wholly to
the multiplication, or (less even) the aggregation, of bulbs. It never saw, nor
conceived, such a thing as a tulip. Nay, boiled bulbs they might have been ---
glass bulbs --- Prince Rupert's drops, consummated in powder (well, if it were
glass-powder and not gunpowder), for any end or meaning the economists had in
defining the laws of aggregation. We will try and get a clearer notion of them.

\par The best and simplest general type of capital is a well-made ploughshare.
Now, if that ploughshare did nothing but beget other ploughshares, in a
polypous manner, --- however the great cluster of polypous plough might glitter
in the sun, it would have lost its function of capital. It becomes true capital
only by another kind of splendour, --- when it is seen ``splendescere sulco,''
to grow bright in the furrow; rather with diminution of its substance, than
addition, by the noble friction. And the true home question, to every
capitalist and to every nation, is not, ``how many ploughs have you?'' but,
``where are your furrows?'' not --- ``how quickly will this capital reproduce
itself?'' --- but, ``what will it do during reproduction?'' What substance will
it furnish, good for life? what work construct, protective of life? if none,
its own reproduction is useless --- if worse than none, (for capital may
destroy life as well as support it), its own reproduction is worse than
useless; it is merely an advance from Tisiphone, on mortgage --- not a profit
by any means.

\par Not a profit, as the ancients truly saw, and showed in the type of Ixion;
--- for capital is the head, or fountain head of wealth --- the ``well-head''
of wealth, as the clouds are the well-heads of rain; but when clouds are
without water, and only beget clouds, they issue in wrath at last, instead of
rain, and in lightning instead of harvest; whence Ixion is said first to have
invited his guests to a banquet, and then made them fall into a pit, (as also
Demas' silver mine,) after which, to show the rage of riches passing from lust
of pleasure to lust of power, yet power not truly understood, Ixion is said to
have desired Juno, and instead, embracing a cloud (or phantasm), to have
begotten the Centaurs; the power of mere wealth being, in itself, as the
embrace of a shadow, --- comfortless, (so also ``Ephraim feedeth on wind and
followth after the east wind;'' or ``that which is not'' --- Prov. xxiii. 5;
and again Dante's Geryon, the type of avaricious fraud, as he flies, gathers
the air up with retractile claws, --- ``l'aer a se raccolse''\footnote{So also
in the vision of the women bearing the ephah, before quoted, ``the wind was in
their wings,'' not wings ``of a stork,'' as in our version; but ``miivi,'' of a
kite, in the Vulgate, or perhaps more accurately still in the Septuagint,
``hoopoe,'' a bird connected typically with the power of riches by many
traditions, of which that of its petition for a crest of gold is perhaps the
most interesting. The ``Birds'' of Aristophanes, in which its part is
principal, are full of them; note especially the ``fortification of the air
with baked bricks, like Babylon,'' I. 550; and, again, compare the Plutus of
Dante, who (to show the influence of riches in destroying the reason) is the
only one of the powers of the Inferno who cannot speak intelligibly and also
the cowardliest; he is not merely quelled or restrained, but literally
``collapses'' at a word; the sudden and helpless operation of mercantile panic
being all told in the brief metaphor, ``as the sails, swollen with the wind,
fall, when the mast breaks.''}) but in its offspring, a mingling of the brutal
with the human nature; human in sagacity --- using both intellect and arrow;
but brutal in its body and hoof, for consuming, and trampling down. For which
sin Ixion is at last bound upon a wheel --- fiery and toothed, and rolling
perpetually in the air: --- the type of human labour when selfish and fruitless
(kept far into the Middle Ages in their wheels of fortune); the wheel which has
in it no breath or spirit, but is whirled by chance only; whereas of all true
work the Ezekiel vision is true, that the Spirit of the living creature is in
the wheels, and where the angels go, the wheels go by them; but move no
otherwise.

\par This being the real nature of capital, it follows that there are two kinds
of true production, always going on in an active State: one of seed, and one of
food; or production for the Ground, and for the Mouth; both of which are by
covetous persons thought to be production only for the granary; whereas the
function of the granary is but intermediate and conservative, fulfilled in
distribution; else it ends in nothing but mildew, and nourishment of rats and
worms. And since production for the Ground is only useful with future hope of
harvest, all essential production is for the Mouth; and is finally measured by
the mouth; hence, as I said above, consumption is the crown of production; and
the wealth of a nation is only to be estimated by what it consumes.

\par The want of any clear sight of this fact is the capital error, issuing in
rich interest and revenue of error among the political economists. Their minds
are continually set on money-gain, not on mouth-gain; and they fall into every
sort of net and snare, dazzled by the coin-glitter as birds by the fowler's
glass; or rather (for there is not much else like birds in them) they are like
children trying to jump on the heads of their own shadows; the money-gain being
only the shadow of the true gain, which is humanity.

\par The final object of political economy, therefore, is to get good method of
consumption, and great quantity of consumption: in other words, to use
everything, and to use it nobly. whether it be substance, service, or service
perfecting substance. The most curious error in Mr Mill's entire work,
(provided for him originally by Ricardo,) is his endeavour to distinguish
between direct and indirect service, and consequent assertion that a demand for
commodities is not demand for labour (I. v. 9, et seq.). He distinguishes
between labourers employed to lay out pleasure grounds, and to manufacture
velvet; declaring that it makes material difference to the labouring classes in
which of these two ways a capitalist spends his money; because the employment
of the gardeners is a demand for labour, but the purchase of velvet is
not\footnote{The value of raw material, which has, indeed, to be deducted from
the price of the labour, is not contemplated in the passages referred to, Mr.
Mill having fallen into the mistake solely by pursuing the collateral results
of the payment of wages to middlemen. He says'' The consumer does not, with his
own funds, pay the weaver for his day's work. ``Pardon me; the consumer of the
velvet pays the weaver with his own funds as much as he pays the gardener. He
pays, probably, an intermediate ship-owner, velvet merchant, and shopman; pays
carriage money, shop rent, damage money, time money, and care money; all these
are above and beside the velvet price, (just as the wages of a head gardener
would be above the grass price). but the velvet is as much produced by the
consumer's capital, though he does not pay for it till six months after
production, as the grass is produced by his capital, though he does not pay the
man who mowed and rolled it on Monday, till Saturday afternoon. I do not know
if Mr. Mill's conclusion, --- ``the capital cannot be dispensed with, the
purchasers can `` (p. 98), has yet been reduced to practice in the City on any
large scale.}. Error colossal, as well as strange. It will, indeed, make a
difference to the labourer whether we bid him swing his scythe in the spring
winds, or drive the loom in pestilential air. but, so far as his pocket is
concerned, it makes, to him absolutely no difference whether we order him to
make green velvet, with seed and a scythe, or red velvet, with silk and
scissors. Neither does it anywise concern him whether, when the velvet is made,
we consume it by walking on it, or wearing it, so long as our consumption of it
is wholly selfish. But if our consumption is to be in anywise unselfish, not
only our mode of consuming the articles we require interests him, but also the
kind of article we require with a view to consumption. As thus (returning for a
moment to Mr Mill's great hardware theory\footnote{Which, observe, is the
precise opposite of the one under examination. The hardware theory required us
to discharge our gardeners and engage manufacturers; the velvet theory requires
us to discharge our manufacturers and engage gardeners.}): it matters, so far
as the labourer's immediate profit is concerned, not an iron filing whether I
employ him in growing a peach, or forging a bombshell; but my probable mode of
consumption of those articles matters seriously. Admit that it is to be in both
cases ``unselfish,'' and the difference, to him, is final, whether when his
child is ill, I walk into his cottage and give it the peach, or drop the shell
down his chimney, and blow his roof off.

\par The worst of it, for the peasant, is, that the capitalist's consumption of
the peach is apt to be selfish, and of the shell, distributive\footnote{It is
one very awful form of the operation of wealth in Europe that it is entirely
capitalists' wealth which supports unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much
money to support them; for most of the men who wage such, wage them gratis; but
for an unjust war, men's bodies and souls have both to be bought; and the best
tools of war for them besides; which makes such war costly to the maximum; not
to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations which
have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to buy an hour's
peace of mind with: as, at present, France and England, purchasing of each
other ten millions sterling worth of consternation annually, (a remarkably
light crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves, --- sown, reaped, and granaried
by the ``science'' of the modern political economist, teaching covetousness
instead of truth.) And all unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of
the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid by subsequent
taxation of the people, who appear to have no will in the matter, the
capitalists' will being the primary root of the war; but its real root is the
covetousness of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness,
or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his own separate loss
and punishment to each person.}; but, in all cases, this is the broad and
general fact, that on due catallactic commercial principles, somebody's roof
must go off in fulfilment of the bomb's destiny. You may grow for your
neighbour, at your liking, grapes or grape-shot; he will also, catallactically,
grow grapes or grape-shot for you, and you will each reap what you have sown.

\par It is, therefore, the manner and issue of consumption which are the real
tests of production. Production does not consist in things laboriously made,
but in things serviceably consumable; and the question for the nation is not
how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces. For as consumption
is the end and aim of production, so life is the end and aim of consumption.

\par I left this question to the reader's thought two months ago, choosing
rather that he should work it out for himself than have it sharply stated to
him. But now, the ground being sufficiently broken (and the details into which
the several questions, here opened, must lead us, being too complex for
discussion in the pages of a periodical, so that I must pursue them elsewhere),
I desire, in closing the series of introductory papers, to leave this one great
fact clearly stated. THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its
powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which
nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is
richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has
also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his
possessions, over the lives of others.

\par A strange political economy; the only one, nevertheless, that ever was or
can be: all political economy founded on self-interest\footnote{``In all
reasoning about prices, the proviso must be understood, 'supposing all parties
to take care of their own interest.''' --- Mill, III. i. 5.} being but the
fulfilment of that which once brought schism into the Policy of angels, and
ruin into the Economy of Heaven.

\par ``The greatest number of human beings noble and happy.'' But is the
nobleness consistent with the number? Yes, not only consistent with it, but
essential to it. The maximum of life can only be reached by the maximum of
virtue. In this respect the law of human population differs wholly from that of
animal life. The multiplication of animals is checked only by want of food, and
by the hostility of races; the population of the gnat is restrained by the
hunger of the swallow, and that of the swallow by the scarcity of gnats. Man,
considered as an animal, is indeed limited by the same laws: hunger, or plague,
or war, are the necessary and only restraints upon his increase, --- effectual
restraints hitherto, --- his principal study having been how most swiftly to
destroy himself, or ravage his dwelling-places, and his highest skill directed
to give range to the famine, seed to the plague, and sway to the sword. But,
considered as other than an animal, his increase is not limited by these laws.
It is limited only by the limits of his courage and his love. Both of these
have their bounds; and ought to have; his race has its bounds also; but these
have not yet been reached, nor will be reached for ages.

\par In all the ranges of human thought I know none so melancholy as the
speculations of political economists on the population question. It is proposed
to better the condition of the labourer by giving him higher wages. ``Nay,''
says the economist, --- ``if you raise his wages, he will either people down to
the same point of misery at which you found him, or drink your wages away.'' He
will. I know it. Who gave him this will? Suppose it were your own son of whom
you spoke, declaring to me that you dared not take him into your firm, nor even
give him his just labourer's wages, because if you did he would die of
drunkenness, and leave half a score of children to the parish. ``Who gave your
son these dispositions?'' --- I should enquire. Has he them by inheritance or
by education? By one or other they must come; and as in him, so also in the
poor. Either these poor are of a race essentially different from ours, and
unredeemable (which, however, often implied, I have heard none yet openly say),
or else by such care as we have ourselves received, we may make them continent
and sober as ourselves-wise and dispassionate as we are models arduous of
imitation. ``But,'' it is answered, ``they cannot receive education.'' Why not?
That is precisely the point at issue.  Charitable persons suppose the worst
fault of the rich is to refuse the people meat; and the people cry for their
meat, kept back by fraud, to the Lord of Multitudes\footnote{James v. 4.
Observe, in these statements I am not talking up, nor countenancing one whit,
the common socialist idea of division of property; division of property is its
destruction; and with it the destruction of all hope, all industry, and all
justice: it is simply chaos a chaos towards which the believers in modern
political economy are fast tending, and from which I am striving to save them.
The rich man does not keep back meat from the poor by retaining his riches; but
by basely using them. Riches are a form of strength; and a strong man does not
injure others by keeping his strength, but by using it injuriously. The
socialist, seeing a strong man oppress a weak one, cries out. --- ``Break the
strong man's arms.'' but I say, ``Teach him to use them to better purpose.''
The fortitude and intelligence which acquire riches are intended, by the Giver
of both, not to scatter, nor to give away, but to employ those riches in the
service of mankind; in other words, in the redemption of the erring and aid of
the weak --- that is to say, there is first to be the work to gain money; then
the Sabbath of use for it --- the Sabbath, whose law is, not to lose life, but
to save. It is continually the fault or the folly of the poor that they are
poor, as it is usually a child's fault if it falls into a pond, and a cripple's
weakness that slips at a crossing; nevertheless, most passers --- by would pull
the child out, or help up the cripple. Put it at the worst, that all the poor
of the world are but disobedient children, or careless cripples, and that all
rich people are wise and strong, and you will see at once that neither is the
socialist right in desiring to make everybody poor, powerless, and foolish as
he is himself, nor the rich man right in leaving the children in the mire.}.
Alas! it is not meat of which the refusal is cruelest, or to which the claim is
validest. The life is more than the meat. The rich not only refuse food to the
poor; they refuse wisdom; they refuse virtue; they refuse salvation. Ye sheep
without shepherd, it is not the pasture that has been shut from you, but the
Presence. Meat! perhaps your right to that may be pleadable; but other rights
have to be pleaded first. Claim your crumbs from the table, if you will; but
claim them as children, not as dogs; claim your right to be fed, but claim more
loudly your right to be holy, perfect, and pure.

\par Strange words to be used of working people: ``What! holy; without any long
robes nor anointing oils; these rough-jacketed, rough-worded persons; set to
nameless and dishonoured service? Perfect! --- these, with dim eyes and cramped
limbs, and slowly wakening minds? Pure --- these, with sensual desire and
grovelling thought; foul of body, and coarse of soul?'' It may be so;
nevertheless, such as they are, they are the holiest, perfectest, purest
persons the earth can at present show. They may be what you have said; but if
so, they yet are holier than we, who have left them thus.

\par But what can be done for them? Who can clothe --- who teach --- who
restrain their multitudes? What end can there he for them at last, but to
consume one another?

\par I hope for another end, though not, indeed, from any of the
three remedies for over-population commonly suggested by economists.

\par These three are, in brief --- Colonization; Bringing in of
waste lands; or Discouragement of Marriage.

\par The first and second of these expedients merely evade or delay the
question. It will, indeed, be long before the world has been all colonized, and
its deserts all brought under cultivation. But the radical question is not how
much habitable land is in the world, but how many human beings ought to be
maintained on a given space of habitable land.

\par Observe, I say, ought to be, not how many can be. Ricardo, with his usual
inaccuracy, defines what he calls the ``natural rate of wages'' as ``that which
will maintain the labourer.'' Maintain him! yes; but how? --- the question was
instantly thus asked of me by a working girl, to whom I read the passage. I
will amplify her question for her. ``Maintain him, how?'' As, first, to what
length of life? Out of a given number of fed persons how many are to be old ---
how many young; that is to say, will you arrange their maintenance so as to
kill them early --- say at thirty or thirty-five on the average, including
deaths of weakly or ill-fed children? --- or so as to enable them to live out a
natural life? You will feed a greater number, in the first case\footnote{The
quantity of life is the same in both cases; but it is differently allotted.},
by rapidity of succession; probably a happier number in the second: which does
Mr Ricardo mean to be their natural state, and to which state belongs the
natural rate of wages?

\par Again: A piece of land which will only support ten idle, ignorant, and
improvident persons, will support thirty or forty intelligent and industrious
ones. Which of these is their natural state, and to which of them belongs the
natural rate of wages?

\par Again: If a piece of land support forty persons in industrious ignorance;
and if, tired of this ignorance, they set apart ten of their number to study
the properties of cones, and the sizes of stars; the labour of these ten, being
withdrawn from the ground, must either tend to the increase of food in some
transitional manner, or the persons set apart for sidereal and conic purposes
must starve, or some one else starve instead of them. What is, therefore, the
natural rate of wages of the scientific persons, and how does this rate relate
to, or measure, their reverted or transitional productiveness?

\par Again: If the ground maintains, at first, forty labourers in a peaceable
and pious state of mind, but they become in a few years so quarrelsome and
impious that they have to set apart five, to meditate upon and settle their
disputes; --- ten, armed to the teeth with costly instruments, to enforce the
decisions; and five to remind everybody in an eloquent manner of the existence
of a God; what will be the result upon the general power of production, and
what is the ``natural rate of wages'' of the meditative, muscular, and oracular
labourers?

\par Leaving these questions to be discussed, or waived, at their pleasure, by
Mr Ricardo's followers, I proceed to state the main facts bearing on that
probable future of the labouring classes which has been partially glanced at by
Mr Mill. That chapter and the preceding one differ from the common writing of
political economists in admitting some value in the aspect of nature, and
expressing regret at the probability of the destruction of natural scenery. But
we may spare our anxieties, on this head. Men can neither drink steam, nor eat
stone. The maximum of population on a given space of land implies also the
relative maximum of edible vegetable, whether for men or cattle; it implies a
maximum of pure air; and of pure water. Therefore: a maximum of wood, to
transmute the air, and of sloping ground, protected by herbage from the extreme
heat of the sun, to feed the streams. All England may, if it so chooses, become
one manufacturing town; and Englishmen, sacrificing themselves to the good of
general humanity, may live diminished lives in the midst of noise, of darkness,
and of deadly exhalation. But the world cannot become a factory, nor a mine. No
amount of ingenuity will ever make iron digestible by the million, nor
substitute hydrogen for wine. Neither the avarice nor the rage of men will ever
feed them, and however the apple of Sodom and the grape of Gomorrah may spread
their table for a time with dainties of ashes, and nectar of asps, --- so long
as men live by bread, the far away valleys must laugh as they are covered with
the gold of God, and the shouts of His happy multitudes ring round the
wine-press and the well.

\par Nor need our more sentimental economists fear the too wide spread of the
formalities of a mechanical agriculture. The presence of a wise population
implies the search for felicity as well as for food; nor can any population
reach its maximum but through that wisdom which ``rejoices'' in the habitable
parts of the earth. The desert has its appointed place and work; the eternal
engine, whose beam is the earth's axle, whose beat is its year, and whose
breath is its ocean, will still divide imperiously to their desert kingdoms,
bound with unfurrowable rock, and swept by unarrested sand, their powers of
frost and fire: but the zones and lands between, habitable, will be loveliest
in habitation. The desire of the heart is also the light of the eyes. No scene
is continually and untiringly loved, but one rich by joyful human labour;
smooth in field; fair in garden; full in orchard; trim, sweet, and frequent in
homestead; ringing with voices of vivid existence. No air is sweet that is
silent; it is only sweet when full of low currents of under sound-triplets of
birds, and murmur and chirp of insects, and deep-toned words of men, and
wayward trebles of childhood. As the art of life is learned, it will be found
at last that all lovely things are also necessary: --- the wild flower by the
wayside, as well as the tended corn; and the wild birds and creatures of the by
every wondrous word and unknowable work of God. Happy, in that he knew them
not, nor did his fathers know; and that round about him reaches yet into the
infinite, the amazement of his existence.

\par Note, finally, that all effectual advancement towards this true felicity
of the human race must be by individual, not public effort. Certain general
measures may aid, certain revised laws guide, such advancement; but the measure
and law which have first to be determined are those of each man's home. We
continually hear it recommended by sagacious people to complaining neighbours
(usually less well placed in the world than themselves), that they should
``remain content in the station in which Providence has placed them.'' There
are perhaps some circumstances of life in which Providence has no intention
that people should be content.  Nevertheless, the maxim is on the whole a good
one; but it is peculiarly for home use. That your neighbour should, or should
not, remain content with his position, is not your business; but it is very
much your business to remain content with your own.  What is chiefly needed in
England at the present day is to show the quantity of pleasure that may be
obtained by a consistent, well-administered competence, modest, confessed, and
laborious.  We need examples of people who, leaving Heaven to decide whether
they are to rise in the world, decide for them selves that they will be happy
in it, and have resolved to seek-not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure; not
higher fortune, but deeper felicity; making the first of possessions,
self-possession; and honouring themselves in the harmless pride and calm
pursuits of piece.

\par Of which lowly peace it is written that ``justice'' and peace have kissed
each other;'' and that the fruit of justice is ``sown in peace of them that
make peace;'' not ``peace-makers'' in the common understanding --- reconcilers
of quarrels; (though that function also follows on the greater one;) but
peace-Creators; Givers of Calm. Which you cannot give, unless you first gain;
nor is this gain one which will follow assuredly on any course of business,
commonly so called. No form of gain is less probable, business being (as is
shown in the language of all nations --- polein from pelo, prasis from perao,
venire, vendre, and venal, from venio, etc.) essentially restless --- and
probably contentious; --- having a raven-like mind to the motion to and fro, as
to the carrion food; whereas the olive-feeding and bearing birds look for rest
for their feet: thus it is said of Wisdom that she ``hath builded her house,
and hewn out her seven pillars;'' and even when, though apt to wait long at the
door-posts, she has to leave her house and go abroad, her paths are peace also.

\par For us, at all events, her work must begin at the entry of the doors: all
true economy is ``Law of the house.'' Strive to make that law strict, simple,
generous: waste nothing, and grudge nothing. Care in nowise to make more of
money, but care to make much of it; remembering always the great, palpable,
inevitable fact --- the rule and root of all economy --- that what one person
has, another cannot have; and that every atom of substance, of whatever kind,
used or consumed, is so much human life spent; which, if it issue in the saving
present life, or gaining more, is well spent, but if not, is either so much
life prevented, or so much slain. In all buying, consider, first, what
condition of existence you cause in the producers of what you buy; secondly,
whether the sum you have paid is just to the producer, and in due proportion,
lodged in his hands\footnote{The proper offices of middle-men, namely,
overseers (or authoritative workmen), conveyancers (merchants, sailors, retail
dealers, etc.), and order-takers (persons employed to receive directions from
the consumer), must, of course, be examined before I can enter farther into the
question of just payment of the first producer. But I have not spoken of them
in these introductory papers, because the evils attendant on the abuse of such
intermediate functions result not from any alleged principle of modern
political economy, but from private carelessness or iniquity.}; thirdly, to how
much clear use, for food, knowledge, or joy, this that you have bought can be
put; and fourthly, to whom and in what way it can be most speedily and
serviceably distributed: in all dealings whatsoever insisting on entire
openness and stern fulfilment; and in all doings, on perfection and loveliness
of accomplishment; especially on fineness and purity of all marketable
commodity: watching at the same time for all ways of gaining, or teaching,
powers of simple pleasure, and of showing oson en asphodelps geg oneiar --- the
sum of enjoyment depending not on the quantity of things tasted, but on the
vivacity and patience of taste.

\par And if, on due and honest thought over these things, it seems that the
kind of existence to which men are now summoned by every plea of pity and claim
of right, may, for some time at least, not be a luxurious one; --- consider
whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if
we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world.
Luxury is indeed possible in the future --- innocent and exquisite; luxury for
all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the
ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat
blindfold. Raise the veil boldly; face the light; and if, as yet, the light of
the eye can only be through tears, and the light of the body through sackcloth,
go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed, until the time come, and the
kingdom, when Christ's gift of bread, and bequest of peace, shall be ``Unto
this last as unto thee''; and when, for earth's severed multitudes of the
wicked and the weary, there shall be holier reconciliation than that of the
narrow home, and calm economy, where the Wicked cease --- not from trouble, but
from troubling --- and the Weary are at rest.

\end{document}
