Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/54

46 know that whether a better regime is conceivable or not, human nature being what it is now (and I am one of those who think that the régime is the best, the general result of a vast community living as the British nation does, with all the means of healthy life and civilization at command, being little short of a marvel if we only consider for a moment what vices of anarchy and misrule in society have had to be rooted out to make this marvel); still, whether best or not, it is something to know that vast improvement has been possible with this régime. Surely the lesson is that the nation ought to go on improving on the same lines, relaxing none of the efforts which have been so successful. Steady progress in the direction maintained for the last fifty years must soon make the English people vastly superior to what they are now.

I should like to add just one or two remarks bearing on questions of the moment, and as to the desirability or possibility of a change of régime now so much discussed, which the figures I have brought before you suggest. One is, that, apart from all objections of principle to schemes of confiscating capital—land nationalization, or collectivism, or whatever they may be called—the masses could not hope to have much to divide by any such schemes. Taking the income from capital at £400,000,000, we must not suppose that the whole of that would be divisible among the masses if capital were confiscated. What the capitalist classes spend is a very different thing from what they make. The annual savings of the country now exceed £200,000,000, being made as a rule, though not exclusively, by the capitalist classes. If, then, the £400,000,000 were to be confiscated, one of two things would happen—either the savings would not be made, in which case the condition of the working-classes would soon deteriorate, for everything depends upon the steady increase of capital; or the savings would be made, in which case the spending power of the masses would not be so very much increased. The difference would be that they would be owners of the capital, but the income would itself remain untouched. The system under which large capitals are in a few hands may, in fact, have its good side in this, that the Jay Goulds, Vanderbilts, and Rothschilds can not spend their income. The consequent accumulation of capital is, in fact, one of the reasons why the reward for labor is so high, and the masses get nearly all the benefit of the great increase of production. The other remark I have to make is that, if the object really aimed at by those who talk of land nationalization and the like is carried out, the people who will suffer are those who receive large wages. To effect what they intend, the agitators must not merely seize on the property of a few, they must confiscate what are as much earnings as those of a mechanic or a laborer, and the wages of the most skilled mechanics and artisans themselves. The agitation is, in fact, to level down, to diminish the reward of laborers who receive a large wage because they can do the work the