Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/804

 782 private individuals and companies, can give completer security to creditors. Again it may be profitable to the community to spend public funds on the education of labourers, but not the interest of the labourers themselves or their parents to trench upon a narrow income, for a gain so distant. By these and other arguments, stated more fully in his earlier work, Dr. Sidgwick establishes the conclusion thus announced in his particularly lucid Table of Contents: ' Abstract theory shows several cases in which the individual's interest does not tend in the direction most conducive to the common interests---even assuming that utility to society is accurately measured by market value.' The bourgeois doctrinaire is overthrown even upon the ground which he has himself chosen. But of course that is a very narrow ground, in which the philo- sophie mind cannot consent to rest. The end of politics according to Dr. Sidgwick is the greatest quantity, not of wealth, but of happiness. In applying the greatest happiness principle Dr. Sidgwick follows Bentham rather than recent utilitarians. Like Bentham, Dr.Sidgck derives his precepts from the pure fount of utilitarian first principle, without admixture of turbid elements from alien sources. g.S. Mill, when the question rises why equality should be aimed at, affirms, rather than demonstrates, ' the equal claim of everybody to all the means of happiness' (Utilitarianism, p. 93). But Dr. Sidgwick follows Bentham in deducing the equal distribution of wealth from the principle of greatest happiness combined with the law of diminishing utility, to use Jevons's phrase; or what Bentham calls, in a passage quoted by Dr.. Sidgwick, the 'pathological propositions upon which the good of equality is founded,' viz. that ceteris laribus ' each portion of wealth has as corresponding to it a portion' or rather a ' certain chance' of happiness: that' of two individuals with equal fortunes he that has the most wealth has the greatest chance of happiness,' but that ' the excess in happiness of the richer will not be so great as the excess of his wealth.' This reasoning has appeared foolishness to some-too simple for the metaphysician, too moderate for the demagogue 2..but it is the reasoning of Bentham and Dr. Sidgwick. The Bentham-Sidgwick argument would lead direct to socialism, but that the measures commonly proposed for equalising wealth are fatal to the other factor of the utilitarian end, quantity of wealth. Dr. Sidgwick is of opinion ' that leaving out of account the disturbance of the transition the realisation of the collectivist idea at the present time or in the proximate future would arrest industrial progress; and  In a passage of profound ethical and political interest (oh. xxx. p. 2), Dr. Sidg- wick says: ' I do not think that Bentham, when he said, "everybody to comt for one," intended to deny (1) that one person may be more capable of happiness than another; or (2)that, if so, the former's happiness is more important than the latter's as an. element of general happiness .... .. To aim at equality in distribution of happiness may obviously be incompatible with ginting at the greatest happiness on the whole, if the happiness of one person can ever be increased by diminishing to a less extent the happiness of another already less happy.'