Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/455

 REVIEWS 433 grounds of expediency, since the world would not last for a year on any other plan. ' It is no doubt, he says, a case of "giving to him that hath" to pay exceptionally the men already exceptionally gifted by nature. It is not ideal justice which would seem to require less material reward for the person with higher qualities, the exercise of whic.h is pleasurable.' Ideal justice, then, according to Mr. Graham, requires that the capable be worse paid than the incapable, and there classes into the professions. to restrain monopolies, but NO. 2.--VOL. I is only, it would seem,' a sort of justice after all' in the common rule that pays him better; the ' sort of justice'being that 'if he is the means of increasing society's material products in a greater proportion than other productive labourers, he is entitled on that score to a liberal share of what would not exist but for him' (p. 202). But is not the latter principle much the more ideally just of the two ? Why should it be juster to pay a man by the selfish standard of the trouble of his work to himself than by the public standard of the value of his work to other people ? Why should a man have a right to get more money because he is able to give less ? The supposed higher standard of justice is really the lower and the more egotistic. If it be said that when a man does all he can he ought to be paid with the best, Mr. Graham himself will answer that objection, for he shows that if all were paid aBke neither the best nor the worst would]continue long to do all he can, and that means that everybody would be inflicting injustice upon his neighbour. The equalisation of competence and incompetence, or of industry and idleness, is really as contrary to ideal justice as it is to practical policy. It is not equality. Under the head of ' Practicable State Socialism,' Professor Graham points out such measures, legislative or administrative, as the State might simply adopt for improving the industrial situation, but there seems no reason for giving them the name of Socialism, unless it to be understood that any intervention of authority in behalf of the poorer classes, or any extension of State management, is of itself Socialistic. He sees no reinedy for low wages except extended markets, and all he asks from the State in that connexion is to try and get other States to give up their hostile tariffs. The eight hours day he would not introduce by authority except among the].miners (and perhaps the shop assistants), and then only if a very large majority of the trade demanded it. And for the unemployed he would do nothing but facilitate access to waste land and the acquisition cf allotments. has no great hope of co-operative production, but he would give a little public money for further experiments in it. He would try to intercept the unearned increment, and would increase the death duties and applly the money by preference to support friendly societies, orphan asylums, and education for' the benefit of those who may presumably have suffered pecuniary injury front the large accumulations.' He would have free primary education, and he would establish a system of scholarships by which the children of the poor could have the advan- tage of secondary education, and the way opened for talent in all Then he would have the State interfere not in any case to undertake industrial F F