Part 14 (1/2)
C. Their power of PROVISION or ”preparatory sight” (for pro-acc.u.mulation is by no means necessarily pro-vision), is dependent upon their redundance; which may of course by active persons be made available in preparation for future work or future profit; in which function riches have generally received the name of capital; that is to say, of head- or source-material. The business of the economist is to show how this provision may be a Distant one.
The examination of these three functions of riches will embrace every final problem of political economy;--and, above, or before all, this curious and vital problem,--whether, since the wholesome action of riches in these three functions will depend (it appears) on the Wisdom, Justice, and Far-sightedness of the holders; and it is by no means to be a.s.sumed that persons primarily rich, must therefore be just and wise,--it may not be ultimately possible so, or somewhat so, to arrange matters, as that persons primarily just and wise, should therefore be rich.
Such being the general plan of the inquiry before us, I shall not limit myself to any consecutive following of it, having hardly any good hope of being able to complete so laborious a work as it must prove to me; but from time to time, as I have leisure, shall endeavour to carry forward this part or that, as may be immediately possible; indicating always with accuracy the place which the particular essay will or should take in the completed system.
II.
NATURE OF WEALTH, VARIATIONS OF VALUE, THE NATIONAL STORE, NATURE OF LABOUR, VALUE AND PRICE, THE CURRENCY.
The last paper having consisted of little more than definition of terms, I purpose, in this, to expand and ill.u.s.trate the given definitions, so as to avoid confusion in their use when we enter into the detail of our subject.
The view which has been taken of the nature of wealth, namely, that it consists in an intrinsic value developed by a vital power, is directly opposed to two nearly universal conceptions of wealth. In the a.s.sertion that value is primarily intrinsic, it opposes the idea that anything which is an object of desire to numbers, and is limited in quant.i.ty, may be called, or virtually become, wealth. And in the a.s.sertion that value is secondarily dependent upon power in the possessor, it opposes the idea that wealth consists of things exchangeable at rated prices. Before going farther, we will make these two positions clearer.
First. All wealth is intrinsic, and is not const.i.tuted by the judgment of men. This is easily seen in the case of things affecting the body; we know that no force of fantasy will make stones nouris.h.i.+ng, or poison innocent; but it is less apparent in things affecting the mind.
We are easily--perhaps willingly--misled by the appearance of beneficial results obtained by industries addressed wholly to the gratification of fanciful desire; and apt to suppose that whatever is widely coveted, dearly bought, and pleasurable in possession, must be included in our definition of wealth. It is the more difficult to quit ourselves of this error because many things which are true wealth in moderate use, yet become false wealth in immoderate; and many things are mixed of good and evil,--as, mostly, books and works of art,--out of which one person will get the good, and another the evil; so that it seems as if there were no fixed good or evil in the things themselves, but only in the view taken, and use made of them. But that is not so. The evil and good are fixed in essence and in proportion.
They are separable by instinct and judgment, but not interchangeable; and in things in which evil depends upon excess, the point of excess, though indefinable, is fixed; and the power of the thing is on the hither side for good, and on the farther side for evil. And in all cases this power is inherent, not dependent on opinion or choice. Our thoughts of things neither make, nor mar their eternal force; nor--which is the most serious point for future consideration--can they prevent the effect of it upon ourselves.
Therefore, the object of special a.n.a.lysis of wealth into which we have presently to enter will be not so much to enumerate what is serviceable, as to distinguish what is destructive; and to show that it is inevitably destructive; that to receive pleasure from an evil thing is not to escape from, or alter the evil of it, but to be altered by it; that is, to suffer from it to the utmost, having our own nature, in that degree, made evil also. And it will be shown farther that, through whatever length of time or subtleties of connexion the harm is accomplished (being also less or more according to the fineness and worth of the humanity on which it is wrought), still, nothing but harm ever comes of a bad thing.
So that, finally, wealth is not the accidental object of a morbid desire, but the constant object of a legitimate one.[70] By the fury of ignorance, and fitfulness of caprice, large interests may be continually attached to things unserviceable or hurtful; if their nature could be altered by our pa.s.sions, the science of Political Economy would be but as the weighing of clouds, and the portioning out of shadows. But of ignorance there is no science; and of caprice no law. Their disturbing forces interfere with the operations of economy, but have nothing in common with them; the calm arbiter of national destiny regards only essential power for good in all it acc.u.mulates, and alike disdains the wanderings of imagination and the thirsts of disease.
[70] Few pa.s.sages of the Book which at least some part of the nations at present most advanced in civilization accept as an expression of final truth, have been more distorted than those bearing on Idolatry. For the idolatry there denounced is neither sculpture, nor veneration of sculpture. It is simply the subst.i.tution of an ”Eidolon,” phantasm, or imagination of Good, for that which is real and enduring; from the Highest Living Good, which gives life, to the lowest material good which ministers to it. The Creator, and the things created, which He is said to have ”seen good” in creating, are in this their eternal goodness always called Helpful or Holy: and the sweep and range of idolatry extend to the rejection of all or any of these, ”calling evil good, or good evil,--putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter,” so betraying the first of all Loyalties, to the fixed Law of life, and with resolute opposite loyalty serving our own imagination of good, which is the law, not of the dwelling, but of the Grave (otherwise called the law of error; or ”mark missing,” which we translate law of ”Sin”), these ”two masters,” between whose services we have to choose, being otherwise distinguished as G.o.d and ”Mammon,” which Mammon, though we narrowly take it as the power of money only, is in truth the great evil spirit of false and fond desire, or ”Covetousness, which is Idolatry.”
So that Iconoclasm--image or likeness-breaking--is easy; but an idol cannot be broken--it must be forsaken, and this is not so easy, either in resolution or persuasion. For men may readily be convinced of the weakness of an image, but not of the emptiness of a phantasm.
Secondly. The a.s.sertion that wealth is not only intrinsic, but dependent, in order to become effectual, on a given degree of vital power in its possessor, is opposed to another popular view of wealth;--namely, that though it may always be const.i.tuted by caprice, it is, when so const.i.tuted, a substantial thing, of which given quant.i.ties may be counted as existing here, or there, and exchangeable at rated prices.
In this view there are three errors. The first and chief is the overlooking the fact that all exchangeableness of commodity, or effective demand for it, depends on the sum of capacity for its use existing, here or elsewhere. The book we cannot read, or picture we take no delight in, may indeed be called part of our wealth, in so far as we have power of exchanging either for something we like better.
But our power of effecting such exchange, and yet more, of effecting it to advantage, depends absolutely on the number of accessible persons who can understand the book, or enjoy the painting, and who will dispute the possession of them. Thus the actual worth of either, even to us, depends no less on their essential goodness than on the capacity consisting somewhere for the perception of it; and it is vain in any completed system of production to think of obtaining one without the other. So that, though the great political economist knows that co-existence of capacity for use with temporary possession cannot be always secured, the final fact, on which he bases all action and administration, is that, in the whole nation, or group of nations, he has to deal with, for every grain of intrinsic value produced he must with exactest chemistry produce its twin grain of governing capacity, or in the degrees of his failure he has no wealth. Nature's challenge to us is in earnest, as the a.s.syrian's mock, ”I will give you two thousand horses, if thou be able on thy part to set riders upon them.”
Bavieca's paces are brave, if the Cid backs him; but woe to us, if we take the dust of capacity, wearing the armour of it, for capacity itself, for so all procession, however goodly in the show of it, is to the tomb.
The second error in this popular view of wealth is that, in estimating property which we cannot use as wealth, because it is exchangeable, we in reality confuse wealth with money. The land we have no skill to cultivate, the book which is sealed to us, or dress which is superfluous, may indeed be exchangeable, but as such are nothing more than a c.u.mbrous form of bank-note, of doubtful and slow convertibility. As long as we retain possession of them, we merely keep our bank-notes in the shape of gravel or clay, of book leaves, or of embroidered tissue. Circ.u.mstances may perhaps render such forms the safest, or a certain complacency may attach to the exhibition of them;--into both these advantages we shall inquire afterwards; I wish the reader only to observe here, that exchangeable property which we cannot use is, to us personally, merely one of the forms of money, not of wealth.
The third error in the popular view is the confusion of guardians.h.i.+p with possession; the real state of men of property being, too commonly that of curators, not possessors of wealth. For a man's power of Use, Administration, Ostentation, Destruction, or Bequest; and possession is in use only, which for each man is sternly limited; so that such things, and so much of them, are well for him, or Wealth; and more of them, or any other things, are ill for him, or Illth. Plunged to the lips in Orinoco, he shall drink to his thirst measure,--more, at his peril; with a thousand oxen on his lands, he shall eat to his hunger measure,--more, at his peril. He cannot live in two houses at once; a few bales of silk or wool will suffice for the fabric of all the clothes he can ever wear, and a few books will probably hold all the furniture good for his brain.[71] Beyond these, in the best of us but narrow, capacities, we have but the power of administering, or if for harm, mal-administering, wealth (that is to say, distributing, lending, or increasing it);--of exhibiting it (as in magnificence of retinue or furniture), of destroying, or, finally, of bequeathing it.
And with mult.i.tudes of rich men, administration degenerates into curators.h.i.+p; they merely hold their property in charge, as Trustees, for the benefit of some person or persons to whom it is to be delivered upon their death; and the position, explained in clear terms, would hardly seem a covetable one. What would be the probable decision of a youth on his entrance into life, to whom the career hoped for him was proposed in terms such as these: ”You must work unremittingly, and with your utmost intelligence, during all your available years; you will thus acc.u.mulate wealth to a large amount; but you must touch none of it, beyond what is needful for your support. Whatever sums you may gain beyond those required for your decent and moderate maintenance shall be properly taken care of, and on your death-bed you shall have the power of determining to whom they shall belong, or to what purposes be applied?”
[71] I reserve, until the completion and collection of these papers, any support by the authority of other writers of the statements made in them; were, indeed, such authorities wisely sought for and shown, there would be no occasion for my writing at all. Even in the scattered pa.s.sages referring to this subject in three books of Carlyle's:--”Sartor Resartus”; ”Past and Present”; and the ”Latter-Day Pamphlets”; all has been said that needs to be said, and far better than I shall ever say it again. But the habit of the public mind at the present is to require everything to be uttered diffusely, loudly, and seven times over, before it will listen; and it has exclaimed against these papers of mine, as if they contained things daring and new, when there is not one a.s.sertion in them of which the truth has not been for ages known to the wisest, and proclaimed by the most eloquent of men. It will be a far greater pleasure to me hereafter, to collect their words than add to mine; Horace's clear rendering of the substance of the preceding pa.s.sages in the text may be found room for at once:--
Si quis emat citharas, emptas comportet in unum, Nec studio citharae, nec Musae deditus ulli; Si scalpra et formas, non sutor; nautica vela, Aversus mercaturis: delirus et amens Undique dicatur merito. Qui discrepat istis, Qui nummos aurumque recondit, nescius uti Compositis, metuensque velut contingere sacrum?
With which it is perhaps desirable also to give Xenophon's statement, it being clearer than any English one can be, owing to the power of the general Greek term for wealth, ”useable things”:--
[Greek: Tauta ara onta, to men epistameno chresthai auton hekastois chremata esti, to de me epistameno, ou chremata; hosper ge auloi to men epistameno axios logou aulein chremata eisi, to de me epistameno ouden mallon e achrestoi lithoi, ei me apsdidoito ge autous.
* * * Me poloumenoi men gar ou chremata eisin hoi auloi; (ouden gar chresimoi eisi) poloumenoi de chremata; Pros tauta d' ho Sokrates eipen, en epistetai ge polein.
Ei de poloin hau pros touton hos me epistetai chresthai, oude poloumenoi eisi chremata.]
The labour of life, under such conditions, would probably be neither zealous nor cheerful; yet the only difference between this position and that of the ordinary capitalist is the power which the latter delights in supposing himself to possess, and which is attributed to him by others, of spending his money at any moment. This pleasure, taken in the imagination of power to part with that which we have no intention of parting with, is one of the most curious though commonest forms of Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth. But the political economist has nothing to do with this idealism, and looks only to the practical issue of it,--namely, that the holder of wealth, in such temper, may be regarded simply as a mechanical means of collection; or as a money-chest with a slit in it,[72] set in the public thoroughfare;--chest of which only Death has the key, and probably Chance the distribution of contents. In his function of lender (which, however, is one of administration, not use, as far as he is himself concerned), the capitalist takes, indeed, a more interesting aspect; but even in that function, his relations with the state are apt to degenerate into a mechanism for the convenient contraction of debt;--a function the more mischievous, because a nation invariably appeases its conscience with respect to an unjustifiable expense by meeting it with borrowed funds,--expresses its repentance of a foolish piece of business by letting its tradesmen wait for their money,--and always leaves its descendants to pay for the work which will be of the least service to them.[73]