Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/202

 180 craft, and patience are inseparable from himself, and it was for him to use them or leave them unused, yet the results are not to be his, they are to be treated as part of the common stock of all his fellows. I am not dealing here with the difficulty of organizing society which would be consequent upon the adoption of the doctrine laid down. I am simply stating the moral difficulty lying in the way of Socialism in getting popular sanction for the doctrine—a doctrine, be it observed, involving, and confessedly involving, the confiscation of all the superior results arising from the differentiated superiorities of different men; or, to use the technical phrase, the rent of ability. Once more, however, let me say that, so far as men can be persuaded to adopt the principle of renunciation, this objection vanishes; though it may he urged that, where renunciation becomes the cardinal principle of life, the appetite for confiscation dies away. For renunciation is the death of self and kills the very spirit of appropriation which is the strength of confiscation. It may be said that no one dreams of putting such a strain as has been suggested upon the moral judgment of the world, and that these difficulties in the way of Socialism are imaginary giants which are not even metamorphosed windmills. I do not think this will be said by sincerer and franker Socialists. No doubt it may be contemplated that just as the members of a family may possess trinkets and paraphernalia which are treated as their own, so the members of the human family of the future may have the separate control of some things, the fewer the better, attached to themselves; which they might possibly accumulate or hoard if so morbidly inclined. But it is essential that these things should not be appropriated to industrial employment, for that would at once disarrange the new economy; aud in view of this danger private thrift may be treated as a vice—only not classed as a crime because the things saved may not be intended for profitable use.

Let us, however, look at the milder form that maybe presented of installing Socialism. What may be done—so it is persuasively put—is nothing but the development of what has been done. As municipalities have taken our gas and water undertakings, as the nation has assumed the telegraphic service, so municipalities may take our bakeries and breweries (if the latter be not reformed out of existence), and the nation may add railways, mines, and banks to the services it discharges. The agglomeration of widely diffused trades under one management, as the establishment of a salt union