Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/277

Rh we are discussing is that contributed by the editor, Mr. Thomas Mackay, on Investment. In a certain sense it may be said to cover the whole ground; for it deals in the most exhaustive and logical manner with the pretension put forward by socialists that all capital should be vested in the state and used by it for the general good. It shows that as an investor of capital the state is conspicuously incompetent, and that this is so from the very nature of the case. We are tempted to reproduce Mr. Mackay's terse and vigorous statement of his own position: "We argue that capital should belong to him who has earned it, that he alone can make the best use of it, and that he alone should suffer if it is allowed to disappear in ill-considered ventures, or to waste away more rapidly than is necessary for want of due reparation and care; further, that the right of bequest and inheritance is the most economical as well as the most equitable method for the devolution of property from one generation to another; and that the socialist ideal of the universal usefulness of capital, which is our ideal also, can be reached by an ever-widening extension of private ownership and by that means only." This is a succinct and to us refreshing statement of the individualist position; but Mr. Mackay is careful to add that he has no "superstitious respect for the laws which guarantee to owners too extended an authority over their property"; and he lays down what seems to us a useful definition when he says that "the rights of property are those which the mutual forbearance of the members of society finds convenient and indispensable." He thinks that matters in which the courts of law now intervene could be better settled by the parties out of court, and that a certain curtailment in the number of actionable cases might well be made. "In an atmosphere of liberty human character," he declares, "has an adaptability which will prove equal to all occasions." What he desiderates is a "character saturated with the motives of the free life, and in the conviction realized by experience, sanctioned by free choice and made instinctive by custom, that the free interchange of mutual service and mutual forbearance is the beneficent and yet attainable principle on which the well-being of society depends." These, however, are mere expressions of opinion, and Mr. Mackay does not put them forward without bringing facts to their support. His criticism of the state as an investor of the people's money will be found most searching; at the same time he frankly admits that the constantly recurring scandals which mark national and municipal administration are due, "not so much to the incapacity of vestrydom as to the impossible duties for which it is held responsible." He believes (with Henry George) that the legal restrictions on the liquor-traffic have impeded the growth of temperance, and he gives his reasons which we can not here reproduce. Of capital philanthropically employed, he says very tersely that "its usefulness varies inversely as its philanthropy"; and this opinion, too, is backed by cogent reasons drawn from actual experience. Long ago the world's greatest dramatist said, in a passage which Mr. Spencer has most effectively quoted in his First Principles,

We may apply this somewhat differently from what Mr. Spencer has done, and say that Nature can not be bettered by any mean that is not itself natural; and it is because so much philanthropy is against Nature actually intended to check and antagonize the working of natural laws that it so signally and lamentably fails of any useful effect, and tends rather to aggravate social evils. The laws of the universe are more beneficent than we sometimes take them to be, even the law of natural selection which is so often railed against as cruel.