Great Throughts Treasury

"So to those who clamor, as many now do, "Produce! Produce!" one simple question may be addressed:?"Produce what?" ...What can be more childish than to urge the necessity that productive power should be increased, if part of the productive power which exists already is misapplied? Is not less production of futilities as important as, indeed a condition of, more production of things of moment?... Yet this result of inequality... cannot be prevented, or checked, or even recognized by a society which excludes the idea of purpose from its social arrangements and industrial activity."

"Social institutions are the visible expression of the scale of moral values which rules the minds of individuals, and it is impossible to alter institutions without altering that moral valuation."

"Society assumed something of the appearance of a great joint-stock company, in which political power and the receipt of dividends were justly assigned to those who held the most numerous shares."

"Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth. The appeal of this conception... has laid the whole modern world under its spell... It is an invitation to men to use the powers... without inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should be limited."

"Society... was ruled by law, not by the caprice of Governments, but which recognized no moral limitation on the pursuit by individuals of their economic self-interest."

"That conception is written large over the history of the nineteenth century... The doctrine which it inherited was that property was held by an absolute right on an individual basis, and to this fundamental it added another... which grew to its full stature only after the rise of capitalist industry, that societies act both unfairly and unwisely when they limit opportunities of economic enterprise... private rights... are thought to be primary and absolute, and public interests secondary and contingent."

"The administrative systems obtaining in a society which has nationalized its foundation industries will... be as various as in one that resigns them to private ownership... when the question of ownership has been settled the question of administration remains for solution."

"The American Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man both treated property as one of the fundamental rights which Governments exist to protect. The English Revolution of 1688... had in effect done the same. The great individualists from Locke to Turgot, Adam Smith and Bentham all repeated... a similar conception... the dogma of the sanctity of private property was maintained as tenaciously by French Jacobins as by English Tories; and the theory that property is an absolute, which is held by many modern Conservatives, is identical... with that not only of the men of 1789, but of the Convention itself."

"The application to industry of the principle of purpose is simple... is to turn it into a Profession... defined most simply as a trade which is organized... for the performance of function... It is a body of men who carry on their work in accordance with rules designed to enforce certain standards both for the better protection of its members and for the better service of the public... it deliberately prohibits certain kinds of conduct on the ground that, though they may be profitable to the individual, they are calculated to bring into disrepute the organization to which he belongs. While some of its rules are trade union regulations... to prevent the economic standards... being lowered by unscrupulous competition, others... secure that no member... shall have any but a purely professional interest in his work, by excluding the incentive of speculative profit."

"The abolition of the economic privileges of agrarian feudalism, which, under the name of equality, was the driving force of the French Revolution, and which has taken place... in all countries touched by its influence, has been largely counter-balanced since 1800 by the growth of the inequalities springing from Industrialism."

"The blinkers worn by Englishmen enable them to trot all the more steadily along the beaten road, without being disturbed by curiosity as to their destination."

"The change is significant. It is the difference between the universal and equal citizenship of France... and the organized inequality of England established solidly upon class... the descent from hope to resignation, from the fire and passion... to the monotonous beat of the factory engine, from Turgot and Condorcet to the melancholy mathematical creed of Bentham and Ricardo and James Mill."

"The characteristic fact, which differentiates most modern property from that of the pre-industrial age, and which turns against it the very reasoning by which formerly it was supported, is that in modern economic conditions ownership is not active, but passive, that to most of those who own property today it is not a means of work but an instrument for the acquisition of gain or the exercise of power, and that there is no guarantee that gain bears any relation to service, or power to responsibility."

"The conditions of a right organization of industry are... permanent, unchanging, and capable of being apprehended by the most elementary intelligence, provided it will read the nature of its countrymen in the large outlines of history, not in the bloodless abstractions of experts."

"The conception of men as united to each other, and of all mankind as united to God, by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end, which vaguely conceived and imperfectly realized, had been the keystone holding together the social fabric, ceased to be impressed upon men's minds, when Church and State withdrew from the center of social life to its circumference. What remained... was private rights and private interests, the materials of a society rather than a society itself."

"The conception implied in the words "unprofessional conduct" is... the exact opposite of the theory and practice which assume that the service of the public is best secured by the unrestricted pursuit, on the part of rival traders, of their pecuniary self-interest."

"The control of a large works does... confer a kind of private jurisdiction in matters concerning the life and livelihood of the workers... described as "industrial feudalism." It is not easy to understand how the traditional liberties... are compatible with an organization of industry which... permits populations almost as large as those of some famous cities... to be controlled... in their work, economic opportunities, and social life by... half-a-dozen Directors."

"The difference between industry... and a profession is... simple and unmistakable. The essence of the former is... the financial return which it offers to its shareholders. The essence of the latter, is... the service which they perform, not the gains which they amass... they do not consider that any conduct which increases their income is on that account good."

"The course of wisdom is neither to attack private property in general nor to defend it in general; for things are not similar in quality, merely because they are identical in name. It is to discriminate between the various concrete embodiments of what, in itself, is, after all, little more than an abstraction."

"The considerations which justify ownership as a function are those which condemn it as a tax."

"The doctrine which found the justification of private property in the fact that it enabled the industrious man to reap where he had sown, was not a paradox, but, as far as the mass of the population was concerned, almost a truism."

"The course of wisdom in the affairs of industry... above all it is to insist that all industries shall be conducted in complete publicity as to costs and profits, because publicity ought to be the antiseptic both of economic and political abuses, and no man can have confidence in his neighbor unless both work in the light."

"The eighteenth century found, in the beneficence of natural instincts, a substitute for the God whom it had expelled... and did not hesitate to identify them. "Thus God and nature planned the general frame and bade self-love and social be the same.""

"The first [condition of a right organization of industry is that it should be subordinated to the community in such a way as to render the best service technically possible, that those who render no service should not be paid at all, because it is of the essence of a function that it should find its meaning in the satisfaction, not of itself, but of the end which it serves."

"The first step to preventing the exploitation of the consumer by the producer is simple. It is to turn all men into producers."

"The first [stage] is to free it [industry] from subordination to the pecuniary interests of the owners of property, because they are the magnetic pole which sets all the compasses wrong, and which causes industry, however swiftly it may progress, to progress in the wrong direction."

"The English Parliamentarians and the French philosophers who made the inviolability of property rights the center of their political theory, when they defended those who owned, were incidentally, if sometimes unintentionally, defending those who labored."

"The essence of industrialism, in short, is not any particular method of industry, but a particular estimate of the importance of industry, which results in it being thought the only thing that is important at all, so that it is elevated from the subordinate place which it should occupy among human interests and activities into being the standard by which all other interests and activities are judged."

"The first step... is to abolish those types of private property in return for which no function is performed."

"The fundamental issue... is not between different scales of ownership, but between ownership of different kinds, not between the large farmer or master and the small, but between property which is used for work and property which yields income without it."

"The general note of what may conveniently be called the Socialist criticism of property is what the word Socialism itself implies... that the economic evils of society are primarily due to the unregulated operation, under modern conditions of industrial organization, of the institution of private property."

"The general tendency for the ownership and administration of property to be separated, the general refinement of property into a claim on goods produced by an unknown worker, is as unmistakable as the growth of capitalist industry and urban civilization themselves."

"The grievance, of which the Press makes so much, that some workers may be taking too large a share compared with others, is masked by the much greater grievance, of which it says nothing whatever, that some idlers take any share at all."

"The ingenuity of financiers long ago devised methods of grading stock... All are property, but not all carry proprietary rights of the same degree."

"The interest of those who own the property used in industry... is that their capital should be dear and human beings cheap."

"The magnificent formul‘ in which a society of farmers and master craftsmen enshrined its philosophy of freedom are in danger of becoming fetters used by an Anglo-Saxon business aristocracy to bind insurgent movements on the part of an immigrant and semi-servile proletariat."

"The most obvious and fundamental of all rights was property?property absolute and unconditioned?and those who possessed it were regarded as the natural governors of those who did not."

"The most conservative thinkers recognize that the present organization of industry is intolerable in the sacrifice of liberty which it entails upon the producer. But each effort which he makes to emancipate himself is met by a protest that... efficient service is threatened by movements which aim at placing a greater measure of industrial control in the hands of the workers."

"The master builder, who owns the capital used, can be included, not qua capitalist, but qua builder, if he surrenders some of the rights of ownership."

"The meaning of a profession is that it makes the traitors the exception, not as they are in industry, the rule... subordinating the inclination, appetites and ambitions of individuals to the rules of an organization which has as its object to promote the performance of function."

"The merits of nationalization do not stand or fall with the efficiency or inefficiency of existing state departments as administrators of industry."

"The motive... is not the attempt to secure the fulfilment of tasks undertaken for the public service, but to increase the opportunities open to individuals of attaining the objects which they conceive to be advantageous to themselves."

"The objection to public ownership, in so far as it is intelligent, is in reality largely an objection to over-centralization. But the remedy for over-centralization is not the maintenance of functionless property in private hands, but the decentralized ownership of public property."

"The organization of industry as a profession does not involve only the abolition of functionless property, and the maintenance of publicity as the indispensable condition of a standard of professional honor. It implies also that that those who perform its work should undertake that its work is performed effectively... that they should treat the discharge of professional responsibilities as an obligation attaching not only to a small ‚lite of intellectuals, managers or "bosses,"... but as implied by the... corporate consent and initiative of the rank and file of workers."

"The object in purchasing land is to establish small holders, not to set up farms administered by state officials; and the object of nationalizing mining or railways or the manufacture of steel should not be to establish any particular form of state management, but to release those who do constructive work from the control of those whose sole interest is pecuniary gain, in order that they may be free to apply their energies to the true purpose of industry, which is the provision of service, not the provision of dividends."

"The only significance of these clich‚s is that their repetition tends to muffle their inanity, even to the point of persuading sensible men that capital "employs" labor, much as our pagan ancestors imagined that the other pieces of wood and iron, which they deified in their day, sent their crops and won their battles."

"The owner of royalties who, when asked why he should be paid... from minerals which he has neither discovered nor developed nor worked but only owned, replies "But it's Property!"... His claim is to be allowed to continue to reap what another has sown."

"The owners of mines and minerals, in their new role as protectors of the poor, lament the "selfishness" of the miners, as though nothing but pure philanthropy had hitherto caused profits and royalties to be reluctantly accepted by themselves."

"The perversion of nationalism is imperialism, as the perversion of individualism is industrialism... because the principle is defective and reveals its defects as it reveals its power. For it asserts that the rights of nations and individuals are absolute, which is false... their sphere itself is contingent upon the part which they play in the community of nations and individuals... It constrains them to a career of indefinite expansion, in which they devour continents and oceans, law, morality and religion, and last of all their own souls, in an attempt to attain infinity by the addition to themselves of all that is finite."

"The phraseology of political controversy continues to reproduce the conventional antitheses of the early nineteenth century; "private enterprise" and "public ownership" are still contrasted with each other as light with darkness or darkness with light. But, in reality, behind the formal shell of the traditional legal system the elements of a new body of relationship have already been prepared, and find piece-meal application through policies devised, not by socialists, but by men who repeat the formul‘ of individualism, at the very moment when they are undermining it."