W. H. Mallock

“ It is obvious that Labour did not produce more, for no more was produced; and it is also obvious that if, since that time, it had never been assisted and never controlled by Ability, the same amount of Labour would produce no more now. We are therefore, let me repeat, plainly understating the case if we say that British Labour by itself—in other words, Labour shut out from, and unassisted by the industrial Ability of the past ninety years—can, at the utmost, produce annually a hundred and forty million pounds for every ten millions of the population. ”

“ I have shown that Ability and Labour are two distinct forces, in the sense that whilst the latter represents a faculty common to all men, the possession of the former is the natural monopoly of the few; that the labourer and the man of Ability play such different parts in production that a given amount of wealth is no more their joint product than a picture is the joint product of a great painter and a canvas-stretcher ”

“ For we must bear in mind that not even in thought or theory is an equal division of the national income possible, unless all the products of the labour of every citizen are in the first place taken by the State as sole employer and capitalist, and are then distributed as wages in equal portions. Under no other conditions could equality be more than momentary. If each worker himself sold his own products to the consumer,—which he could not do, because no one produces the whole of anything,—the strong and industrious would soon be richer than the idle ”

“ Thus these so-called Labour leaders, no matter how considerable may be many of their intellectual and moral qualities, are indeed leaders of labourers; but they are no more leaders of Labour than a sergeant who drilled a volunteer corps of art students could be called the leader of a rising school of painting; and a strike is no more the expression of the power of Labour than Byron’s swimming across the Hellespont was an expression of the power of poetry, or than Burns’s poetry was an expression of the power of ploughing. ”

“ But the bulk of modern capital is historically the creation of ability, which has miraculously multiplied the few loaves and fishes existing at the close of the last century. Interest may therefore be called the secondary or indirect product of ability, whilst earnings and profits may be called the direct product of ability. Any one who is living on interest at the present moment is almost sure to be living, not on his own ability, but on the products of the ability of some member of his own family who has added to the national wealth within the past two generations. ”

“ The real contention of the Socialist is simply this—not that labour makes what is actually made by machinery; but that labourers ought to own the machinery, and for that reason appropriate what is made by it. A machine or engine, in fact, which is used to assist labour is, in its quality of a producing agent, just as separate from the labour with which it co-operates, as a donkey, in its quality of a carrying agent, is distinct from its master, if the master is walking along carrying one sack of corn, and guiding the donkey who walks carrying seven. ”

“ Let us imagine a community of eight labouring men, who make each of them fifty pounds a year, and who represent Labour; and let us imagine a ninth man,—a man of Ability,—who represents the minority. The ninth man might, if he were strong enough, rob each of the eight men of twenty-five pounds, compelling them each to live on twenty-five pounds instead of on fifty pounds, and appropriate to himself an annual two hundred pounds. ”

“ But a co-operative cotton-mill that was owned by all the workers, in the old sense of the word would not be owned by anybody. Could any one of these thousand or more men say that any part of the mill was his own personal property? Could he treat a single bolt, or a brick, or a wheel, or a door-nail, as he might have treated a loom left to him in his cottage by his father? Obviously not. No part of the mill would be his own private property, any more than a train starting from Euston Station is the property of any shareholder in the London and North-Western Railway. ”

“ Ability—or the faculty by which one man assists the Labour of an indefinite number of men—consists in what may be called exceptional gifts of character, quite as much as in exceptional gifts of intellect. A sagacity, an instinctive quickness in recognising the intellect of others, a strength of will that sometimes is almost brutal, and will force a way for a new idea, like a pugilist forcing himself through a crowd, these are faculties quite as necessary as intellect for giving effect to what intellect discovers or creates ”

“ The two Darbys, the two Craneges, and Reynolds, though not encountering, as Dudley did, the hostility of their contemporaries, yet achieved their work without the slightest encouragement or assistance from them. The younger Darby, solitary as Columbus on his quarter-deck, watched all night by his furnace as he was bringing his process to perfection. His workmen, like the sailors of Columbus, obeyed their orders blindly; and in hardly a brain but his own did there exist the smallest consciousness that one man was laying, in secret, the foundation of his country’s greatness. ”

“ It is not that such arguments as these will extinguish the desire of Labour to increase its own wages at the expense of interest, if possible; for might—the might that can sustain itself, not the brute force of the moment—will always form in the long run the practical rule of right; but they will disseminate a dispassionate view of what the limits of possibility are, and on what these limits depend. ”

“ And now comes the point on which I am concerned to insist here: that conversely Wage Capital, when employed so as to increase the productivity of labour,—in other words when employed by men with the requisite capacity,—is in its essence but another form of machinery. Machinery may be called congealed Wage Capital. Wage Capital may be called fluid machinery. For the function of both—namely, to increase wealth—is the same, and they fulfil this function by means of the same virtue residing in them. ”

“ Capital is not only the material means through which Ability acts on and assists Labour, but it is a material means which Ability has itself created. So long as Labour alone was the principal productive agent, those vast accumulations which are distinctive of the modern world were unknown and impossible. Professor Thorold Rogers has pointed out how small was the Capital of this country at so late a date as the close of the seventeenth century. Labour alone was unable to supply a surplus from which any such accumulation as we now call Capital could be taken. ”

“ It is not to enable labourers to wait for the results of their labours. It is to enable the exceptional knowledge, ingenuity, enterprise, and productive genius of a few men so to animate, to organise, and direct the average physical exertions of the many, as to improve, to multiply, or to hasten the results of that exertion without increasing its quantity. All civilisations, ancient as well as modern, have involved, in a certain sense, the direction by the few of the many. ”

“ The land, which is worth fifteen hundred million pounds, depends for its value on the application of human labour to it, and the profitable application of labour depends on skill and intelligence. The value of the houses depends on our means of living in them—depends not on themselves, but on the way in which they are inhabited. What are railways or steamships, regarded as dead matter, or all the machinery belonging to all the manufacturing companies? Nothing. They are no more wealth than a decomposing corpse is a man. ”

“ A strike, therefore, represents the power not of Labour, but of Capital. [39] The Capital which is available in the present day for supporting strikes would never have been in existence but for the past action of Ability; and what is still more important, a widespread strike would very quickly exhaust it. Further, a strike, no matter what Capital were at the back of it, could never be more than partial for even a single day; for there are many kinds of Labour, such as transport and distribution of food, the constant performance of which is required by even the humblest lives. ”

“ But what reasoning will not do, industrial history will. Industrial history will provide us with an answer of the most striking kind—general, indeed, in its character; but not, for that reason, any the less decided, or less full of instruction. For industrial history, in a way which few people realise, will show us how, during the past hundred years, Labour [244] has actually succeeded in accomplishing the feat we are considering; how, without checking the development and the power of Ability, it has been able to appropriate year by year a certain share of what Ability produces. ”

“ The gas-strikes and the dock-strikes in London, and the great railway-strikes, and the strike at Homestead in America, are cases in point, and are enough to illustrate my meaning. They impress the imagination with a sense that Labour is becoming omnipotent. But in all these Labour movements there is one unchanging feature, which seems never to be realised either by those who take part in them or by observers, but on which really their entire character depends, and which makes their actual character entirely different from what it seems to be. ”

“ The mind of one man has often to borrow from another man the matter through which alone it is able to operate in production. Thus though Ability and Capital, when viewed from the standpoint of Labour, are one thing, when viewed from the standpoint of their different processes they are two; and Capital is seen to produce a part of the product, as distinguished from the Ability whose tool and organ it is. Mr. Shaw says that the capital of the country at the present time produces five hundred million pounds annually, and, for argument’s sake, I accept this figure. ”

“ For the most powerful argumentative appeal which Socialism can make to the majority is merely some amplification of the statement, which is no doubt plausible, and is advanced by Socialists as an axiom, that the exertions of the majority—or, in other words, Labour—has produced all wealth, and that therefore the majority not only ought to possess it, but will be able to possess it by the simple process of retaining it. But the moment the productive functions of industrial ability are made clear, the doctrine which seemed an axiom is reduced to an absurdity ”

“ Give a man comfort in even the humblest cottage, and the glow of patriotism may, and probably will, give an added warmth to that which shines on him from his fireside. But if his children are crying for food, and he is shivering by a cold chimney, he will not find much to excite him in the knowledge that we govern India. Thus, from whatever point of view we regard the matter, the welfare of the home as secured by a sufficient income is seen to be at once the test and the end of Government ”

“ I have shown that of the present annual wealth of the nation Ability creates very nearly two-thirds. But it may truly be said to have created far more than this. It may be said to have created not only two-thirds of the income, but also to have created two-thirds of the inhabitants. If the minority of this country, in pursuit of their own advantage, had not exercised their Ability and increased production as they have done, it is not too much to say that of our country’s present inhabitants twenty-four millions would never have been in existence. ”

“ The income which Labour receives already is largely in excess of what Labour itself produces. Were Ability crippled, or discouraged from exerting itself, the entire income of the nation would dwindle down to an amount which would not yield Labour so much as it takes now; whilst any advance, no matter how small, on what Labour takes now must come from an increasing product, which Ability only can produce. ”

“ If it could by itself, without any Ability to guide it, have succeeded then, when production was so much simpler, in just producing the yearly amount in question,—which, as a matter of fact, it could not have done even then,—the same amount of Labour, without any Ability to guide it, could certainly not succeed in producing so much now, when all the conditions of production have become so much more complicated, and when elaborate organisation is necessary to make almost any effort effective. ”

“ Thus the two chief factors in the production of the national income—in the production of that wealth which must be produced before it can be distributed—are not Labour and Capital, which terms, as commonly used, mean living labourers on the one hand, and dead material on the other; but they are two distinct bodies of living men—labourers on the one hand, and on the other men of Ability. ”

“ We assume that where the ordinary man, of whatever class or party, votes for a member of Parliament, or supports any political measure, he is primarily actuated by one of two hopes, or both of them—the first being the hope of securing the continuance of his present income, the second being the hope of increasing it. Now, to secure what they have already got is the hope of all classes; but to increase it by legislation is the hope of the poorer only. ”

“ Wealth is mainly valuable, and sought for, not for the sake of the pleasures of sense which it secures for a man’s individual nervous system, but for the sake of the entourage—of the world—which it creates around him, which it peoples with companions for him brought up and refined in a certain way, and in which alone his mere personal pleasures can be fully enjoyed. Capitalism, as Mr. Shaw truly observes, produces many personal inequalities, which without it could not exist. ”

“ Here we come to a number of complicated tasks, in which the faculty of invention or discovery offers no assistance whatsoever. We come to tasks which have to do, not with natural principles, but with men—the thousand tasks of daily and of hourly management. A machine or process is invented by intellect—there is one step. It is put into practical operation with the aid of Capital—there is another. ”

“ We are forced to reflect that though Shakespeare’s mind may have been what it was because the age acted on it, the age was acting on all Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and yet it produced one Shakespeare only. If Queen Elizabeth had been told that it was the age which produced Shakespeare, and in consequence had ordered that three or four more Shakespeares should be brought to her, her courtiers, do what they would, would have been unable to find them; and the reason is plain. The age acts on, or sets its stamp on, the character of every single mind that belongs to it ”

“ The part which Nature has in any work of man is indefinite and immeasurable. It is impossible to decide that in any one thing Nature does more than in any other. One cannot even say that Labour does less. Less Labour may be required; but if that which is required is absolutely indispensable, the result is just as much the product of Labour as of Nature. ”

“ But whereas when we talk of Labour we mean an immense number of men, when we talk of Ability—as I shall show presently—we mean a number that by comparison is extremely small. The real fact then on which I am here insisting, and which I shall now proceed to substantiate and explain further, is that, whilst the immense majority of the population of this country produce little more than one-third of the income, a body of men who are comparatively a mere handful actually produce little less than two-thirds of it. ”

“ Capital, in so far as it increased the productivity of Labour, was mental and moral energy as applied to muscular energy, I might have said with equal propriety, had my argument advanced far enough, that it was one kind of Human Exertion guiding and controlling another kind. Here we come to the great central fact which forms the key to the whole economic problem: the fact that in the production of wealth two kinds of Human Exertion are involved, and not, as economists have hitherto told us, one—two kinds of exertion absolutely distinct, and, as we shall see presently, following different laws. ”