CHAPTER III

THE MEANS BY WHICH THE GREAT MAN APPLIES HIS GREATNESS TO WEALTH-PRODUCTION

The whole secret of social progress, other than the most rudimentary, is summed up in the formula with which the preceding chapter has concluded. Progress is the result of the domination or the triumphant influence of the greatest. That is to say, the civilisation of the entire community depends alike for its advance and for its maintenance on a struggle which is confined within the limits of an exceptional class; and the ordinary members of the community are connected with it only by the fact that when the fittest competitor achieves the domination for which he is struggling, they, instead of being defeated by him, share the advantage of his victory. When the scientific doctor discredits the theories of the quack, when the competent organiser of industry causes the ruin of the incompetent, when a good ministry drives a bad from office, when a great general supersedes one who is inferior, or when a true religious teacher destroys the influence of a false, the whole community gains, except the men who have personally lost {152} authority, and who share the merited fate of their own errors or deficiencies.

The progress and the maintenance, then, of civilisation in any community depends on its possessing a number of great men, of which number the greatest shall, by competition with the others, succeed in gaining a control over the beliefs and actions of the majority.

Here, however, we are introduced to two new sets of facts, which have not thus far come under our consideration at all.

In the first place, great men do not come into the world ready-made. Their greatness is potential only, or in other words it is practically non-existent, until it has been developed; and the process of developing it is in most cases extremely arduous. The philosopher, the soldier, the inventor, the statesman, the great merchant or manufacturer, achieve success only by prolonged and intense effort, by study, by concentrated thought, by action, by rude experience. Genius, indeed, has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking trouble; and the definition, though very incomplete, is, so far as it goes, true. No one, however, takes trouble without a motive; and a motive being some object of desire, such as money, rank, or pleasure, which a man hopes to attain by a certain line of action, it follows that if a community is to possess great men as actual agents of progress, and not merely as wasted potentialities, its social constitution must be such as to offer and make attainable positions, possessions, {153} pleasures, or other advantages which its potentially great men will feel to be worth working for.

In the second place, since the great man, as we have seen, is an agent of progress and civilisation only because he influences others—because he guides their speculative beliefs, and in certain respects commands their actions—the society or community to which the great man belongs must be such as not only to supply him with a motive for exercising this influence, but also to enable him to secure for himself the means by which it may be exercised; and, furthermore, the means in question must be of a kind which will enable the rival great men to bring their respective capacities to a decisive practical test, so that the influence of the most efficient may establish itself, and that of the less efficient cease.

Now the whole question of motive we will deal with later on. We will for the present put it altogether aside. We will assume a natural impulse on the part of all great men to develop their powers to the utmost, and employ them in influencing others, wholly independent of any other reward than such a minimum of sustenance and comfort as is physically essential to their efficiency; and we will confine our attention altogether to the question of the means by which the influence of the great men over the majority is obtained.

Human progress, however, being a complex thing, and taking place in different domains of activity, the means by which the great man influences others will vary with the nature of the results which his {154} influence aims at eliciting. The social activities on which progress depends, though they may be subdivided indefinitely, are reducible to five kinds—intellectual, religious, military, economic, and political; and with regard to the two first, the influence of the great man exerts itself to determine what others shall believe and think; with regard to the three last, it exerts itself to determine what others shall do.

Now out of these five domains of activity the three first—namely, the intellectual, the religious, and the military—are such that the means by which the great man makes his influence felt in them hardly require discussion. In the first place, they are obvious—there is no dispute about what they are; and, in the second place, the fact of their being what they are has no bearing, except such as is very remote, on any disputed question concerning the practical organisation of society. In the intellectual world thinkers, scholars, and men of science gain their influence by discussions, for the most part embodied in books, which discussions are carried on before a jury of expert critics, each man defending his own views against the views of those who differ from him; and the jury of experts ultimately gives its verdict, to which sooner or later the community at large submits. The religious leader gains his influence similarly. He gains it by arguments and persuasions, which are felt by a band of followers to touch the spirit more deeply than those of other prophets. He gives to his disciples, and his {155} disciples give to the multitude. But these means are of so universal a kind, and have so little connection with any specific social arrangements, that none of the disputed points of social politics are involved in them; and we consequently have at present no occasion to discuss them. So, too, with regard to the military leader, though the means which are employed by him do, beyond a doubt, imply social arrangements of a very specific kind—namely, an iron system of discipline, with death and the lash to sanction it; yet these arrangements, however they may be denounced by sentimentalists, have always been found essential to the efficiency of every army; and though many worthy people would abolish military activity altogether, and whilst socialists especially express themselves anxious to do so, it is perfectly evident—nor would any socialist deny it—that a socialist State, if it had to fight for its existence, would be obliged to enforce the required military discipline by methods essentially identical with those of Cæsar or Wellington. It may, indeed, be disputed whether the great military leader is not a superfluous figure on the social stage; but so long as his greatness makes itself felt at all, it will continue to make itself felt by the same means.

The only domains of social activity, therefore, in which the means employed by the great man to control the actions of others so that ordinary men may be guided by the faculties of the exceptional—the only domains of activity in which these means, {156} thus employed, really require minute and careful discussion, and have really a direct bearing on the practical problems of the day—are the domain of economic production and the domain of political government. These, indeed, may be said to contain between them the whole of the questions with regard to which parties are divided—with regard to which those who believe that the conditions of civilisation may be indefinitely improved but can never be fundamentally altered, are divided from those who believe them to be capable of indefinite metamorphosis.

This is specially true of the domain of economic production; for it is mainly on account of its connection with the production and distribution of wealth that political government excites so much popular interest and forms the subject of so much vehement controversy. And in every other domain of human activity equally, we shall find that the interests, the endeavours, and the disputes of men have an economic process as their basis, or economic progress as their object. The processes of production and commerce are, in fact, the central processes of every nation’s life. Government exists to foster them, and changes its form as these processes develop; whilst fleets and armies exist mainly for their protection, and more and more depend on the progress that takes place in them. It is, in short, in the domain of economics that all the social problems of the day either begin or end; and consequently in examining the means by which the great man influences others, the question which it is {157} really our first concern to examine relates to the means by which great men, whose greatness consists in the fact that they are exceptional in their powers of causing the production of wealth, and on whom consequently the wealth of the whole community depends, obtain a control over other men’s productive actions.

This control can be secured in two ways only, or else in some way that is a combination or modification of both. One of these ways is slavery; the other is the capitalistic wage-system. Let us consider how the two resemble each other, and also how they differ.

They resemble each other because both, in so far as they subserve progress, subserve it for precisely the same reason. They are both contrivances by which the superior few may secure, so far as industry is concerned, the implicit obedience of the many. On the private lives of the many their effects will be widely different; but so far as concerns their direct connection with industry—their operation on men during the actual processes of production—slavery and the capitalistic wage-system differ only in this: that the one secures the required industrial obedience by operating on men’s fears; the other secures it by operating on their desires and wills. Thus the slaves who built the pyramids had each some specified task—the making of so many bricks, the cutting of such and such stones, or the fixing of bricks and stones in such and such situations—which had to be performed if the pyramids were to be built at all. So, too, if the Hotel Metropole at Brighton was to {158} be built at all, the bricklayers, masons, and other workmen who built it had to perform tasks of a precisely similar kind. But obedience to orders on the part of the Egyptian slave was secured by the knowledge on his part that disobedience would be punished by some form of chastisement, and very likely of torture, whilst obedience on the part of the Brighton workman was secured by the knowledge on his part that, unless he chose to yield it, one way, at all events, of earning a livelihood would be closed to him.

It is this latter method of securing industrial obedience that is made possible by the capitalistic wage-system; and it is primarily for this reason that what is called capitalism is an agent of progress, and has developed itself in progressive communities. As for capital itself, this, as we all know, performs part of its functions by assuming the form of machinery, buildings, bridges, railways, and a variety of structures and appliances which are grouped together under the general head of _fixed capital_ by economists. But these structures and appliances are themselves the result of the previous influence of great men on the industrial actions of the many; and as it was by means of wage-capital that this influence was secured, the primary and most essential functions which capital fulfils, and which really form the essence of the capitalistic system, are to be found by considering capital as employed in the payment of wages.

Now capital as thus employed consists of an {159} accumulation of the necessaries and comforts of life, by the consumption and use of which men are able to sustain themselves when engaged on works requiring a long period for their completion, which will when completed be useful and produce much, but which, until they are completed, will be of no use at all, and will consequently supply nothing to the workers when actually engaged on them. The simplest example of work of this kind is agriculture. The first man who saved sufficient food to support himself, whilst tilling the soil and waiting for his crops to ripen, was the first capitalist. But capital, when it takes the form of accumulated necessaries and comforts, though it now reaches the workers in the form of wages usually, need not do so of necessity. It need not do so when the work is extremely simple and the methods employed are rude. Wherever agriculture, for example, is in its earliest stages, every husbandman may be his own capitalist, and start with an accumulation of food in his own cottage which will keep him alive till his crops are ready for sale or for consumption. In cases such as these we have capital which, so far as its substance is concerned, is identical with wage-capital, but is not wage-capital nevertheless. In order to turn it into wage-capital it is necessary that these accumulations of food shall pass out of the control of the workers—such as the husbandmen just referred to—and be brought under the control of some other person or persons, who will dole them out to the workers on certain conditions only. The wage-system, in short, {160} does not represent capital as such. It represents capital, in the form of the immediate means of subsistence, as owned or controlled by a small number of persons; and its efficiency as a productive agent resides in the bargain which it enables any great man possessing it to make with ordinary workers—a bargain, not that they shall work such and such a number of hours (for that they would have to do were each man his own employer), but that they shall do their work in accordance with the great man’s directions.

Now this fact that the wage-system represents the control of capital by the few—and this is its essential characteristic—is the fact on which, more than on any other, the socialistic opponents of the modern wage-system insist. They are never weary of insisting that it has its foundation in a monopoly. But though they perceive the fact, they entirely miss its significance. Karl Marx conceives of the capitalists as a body of men who, so far as production is concerned, are absolutely inert and passive. Owing to a variety of causes, he says, during the past four hundred years all the means of production have come under their control, and access can be had to them only, as it were, through gates, of which these tyrants hold the key. Outside are the manual labourers, who are the sole producers of wealth, but who, without the means of production, naturally can produce nothing—not even enough to live on; and the sole economic function which the capitalist fulfils is to let the {161} labourers in every day through the gates, on the condition that every evening the unhappy men render up to him the whole produce of their labours, except that insignificant fraction of it which is just necessary to fit them for the labours of the day following. Now it is no doubt theoretically possible that a society might exist, composed of a mass of undifferentiated and undirected manual labourers on the one hand, and on the other of a few passive monopolists who extracted from them most of what they produced, as the price of allowing them the opportunity of producing anything; but it is perfectly certain that a society of this kind would exhibit none of the increasing productive power which, as even Marx and his school admit, is one of the most distinctive features of industry under the capitalistic wage-system. Under that system productive power has increased, not because capital has enabled a few men to remain idle, but because it has enabled a few men to apply, with the most constant and intense effort, their intellectual faculties to industry in its minutest details. It has increased not because the monopoly of capital has enabled the few to say to the many, “We will allow you to work at nothing, unless you give us most of what you produce,” but because it has enabled them to say to the many, “We will allow you to work at nothing, unless you will consent to work in the ways that we indicate to you.”

The few, so far as our present argument is {162} concerned, may appropriate much of the gross product or little; or they may leave the whole of it to be divided amongst their employees. What they actually have done, or do, or may do, in this respect, is another question altogether, and will be discussed hereafter separately. The essence of the wage-system, in so far as it has influenced the actual processes of production, is in the power it gives to the few to direct the producers, not in the power it gives them to appropriate the products. It will indeed require very little reflection to show us that if the great men in the industrial world would only develop and use their faculties, without any motive of ambition or self-interest to stimulate them,—as indeed at the present moment we are assuming that they do,—they could use the wage-system for the purpose of directing industry merely by monopolising the control of capital without monopolising, and even without sharing in, its possession.

This truth will become plainer still when we reflect that if only certain conditions prevailed which in many civilised countries survived till quite recently, the whole process of production as we now have it might be carried on without any wage-capital at all. These conditions are those of the _corvée_ system, under which peasants and others who owned the lands upon which they lived, and maintained themselves on those lands in a certain position of independence, were compelled to place their labour, for so many days a week, at the absolute {163} disposal of this or that superior. Such a system, if applied to modern industry, would have, no doubt, many incidental disadvantages; but if only a number of independent peasant-proprietors could be forced to give half their time to the proprietor of a neighbouring factory, and during that time to work in it under his orders, the entire use and necessity of wage-capital would in theory, at all events, be gone. The same thing is also true of slavery, between which and the wage-system the _corvée_ system stands midway. Like the peasant-proprietor, who is forced to give part of his labour to his over-lord, the slave is supplied with the necessaries of life independently of his obedience to the detailed orders of his task-master. The peasant maintains himself by tilling his own fields; the slave-owner feeds his slave just as he would feed an animal. In neither case is the giving or the withholding of a livelihood used as the motive or sanction by which industrial obedience is ensured. Obedience is ensured by the direct application of force, or the knowledge on the slave’s part or the peasant’s that force will be applied if necessary.

It will, no doubt, be urged by some that whatever assistance is afforded by the talents of the few to the industrial efforts of the many, may be secured by a third means, which is neither slavery nor yet the wage-system—that is to say, by what is called the system of “co-operation.” Co-operative production, however, when it differs in anything except in name from production as carried on under the ordinary {164} wage-system, differs from it only in being the wage-system under a thin disguise. For the ideal cooperative factory is simply a factory in which all the shareholders are workers, and all the workers are shareholders, and in which, being shareholders, they elect their manager. Under such conditions, each of these working shareholders may receive his remuneration under the form, not of wages, but of profits. But if any shareholder, or any group of shareholders, should systematically shirk working, or disobey the manager’s orders, the whole, or a part of the payment that would be otherwise due to him, would be withheld; for unless some regulation of this kind were in force, it would be impossible to ensure any co-operation amongst the co-operators, or any order, or any equality of diligence. Each worker’s profits, then, are in reality his wages, being essentially a payment which is made to him only on condition that he performs certain specified tasks in a certain specified way.

We are thus brought back to the point from which we started—namely, that there are two methods only by which, in the domain of industry, the superior faculties of the few can direct the faculties of the many: firstly, the capitalistic wage-system, which is the method of inducement; secondly, slavery, complete or partial, which is the method of coercion. And of the truth of this assertion the reader shall now be presented with a highly interesting and curiously conclusive proof, taken from the very last quarter in which he would naturally expect to find {165} it. This proof is afforded us by the schemes which, with ever-increasing clearness, have of recent years been put forward by all the more thoughtful socialists.

These enthusiasts, who are still careful to tell us that they regard the wage-system as the source of all social evils, have been slowly coming to perceive that the ability with which the labour is directed is as important a factor in production as the labour itself, which is directed by it. They propose accordingly to regenerate the human race by transferring the ownership of capital from private employers, not to groups of factory-hands, as the “co-operators” propose, but to the State; and by substituting for the private employers a hierarchy of State officials. Now these officials, so far as the wage-system is concerned, if they differed at all from private employers of to-day, would and could differ from them in the following way only. The present dispensers of wages assign the means of subsistence to each worker in proportion to the exactness, intelligence, and efficiency with which he obeys orders. The dispensers of wages under socialism would dispense these means daily to every worker alike, with no immediate reference to his industrial actions whatsoever; and the direction of his actions would be a second, and wholly distinct process.

That such is the case is shown, and indeed distinctly admitted, in a preface to the American edition of _Fabian Essays_. It is there stated that {166} with regard to the apportionment of the means of subsistence, the only “_truly socialistic_” scheme is one which would “_absolutely abolish_” all economic distinctions, “_and the possibility of their again arising, by making an equal provision for the maintenance of all an incident and an indefeasible condition of citizenship, without any regard whatever to the relative specific services of different citizens. The rendering of such services, on the other hand, instead of being left to the option of the citizen, with the alternative of starvation, would be required under one uniform law or civic duty, precisely like other forms of taxation or military service._”

Such, then, is the most advanced socialistic programme—the programme of the men who have set themselves to devise an escape from capitalism. An escape from capitalism it may be; but it is an escape into complete slavery. For the very essence of the position of the slave, as contrasted with the wage-labourer, so far as the direction of his productive actions is concerned, is that he has not to work as he is bidden in order to gain his livelihood, but that, his livelihood being assured to him, he has to work as he is bidden in order that he may avoid the lash, or some other form of punishment; and amongst all the more thoughtful socialists there is now a consensus of admission that the socialistic State would necessarily have in reserve the severest pains and penalties for the idle and the careless and the disobedient.

Since, then—let us once more repeat it—the {167} progress and maintenance of economic civilisation depend, as even socialists are now beginning to perceive, on the industrial actions of average men being subjected to the control of exceptional men, and since this control can be secured by two methods only—that of the wage-payer and that of the slave-owner—it is evident that all progress and civilisation implies the existence of either one system or the other, and that socialists accordingly, in proportion as they reject the wage-system, are obliged to replace it by what is essentially the system of slavery.

We have thus far, however, dealt with but one half of our subject. We have considered merely the means by which any one great man exercises industrial control over the actions of a number of ordinary men. We have still to consider the means by which the most efficient of the great men get this control into their own hands, and take it out of the hands of the less efficient.

Under the _régime_ of private capitalism this process is simple. The fitness or efficiency of each great man is according to the acceptability to the public of the goods or services which he offers them. If the public are not pleased with these goods and services, they do not buy or demand them; and the capital of the man by whom they are offered, not being renewed by any money received, melts in his hands, and with it his control over other men’s labour. Meanwhile, by a converse process, the great men who offer goods and services which the public desire {168} and find serviceable, renew and increase by their payments the capital which has been disbursed by him, and renew and increase his control over other men’s labour along with it.

Now if the wage-system is the sole alternative to slavery as a means by which the great man controls the actions of the ordinary man, it is still more obviously the sole alternative to slavery as a means by which one great man, in controlling them, shall compete against another great man. Indeed, we may speak still more strongly. We may say not only that it is the sole alternative means, but that it is the sole efficient means. And if we desire a proof of this, all we have to do is to repeat our former procedure, and consider how the socialists propose to supply its place.

It is, no doubt, true that when we first begin this consideration it does not appear that we should derive from it much direct enlightenment; because, if we may go by what the socialists themselves tell us, one of their principal objects is to abolish competition altogether. Their protestations, however, with regard to this matter betray a most curious and most amusing confusion of thought. They declare that competition must be abolished because it inflicts misery on the majority—that is to say, on the weakest in what they call the “_cut-throat struggle_.” But, as was shown at great length in the last chapter, competition means two, and two absolutely distinct things—one being a struggle to live, the other a struggle to dominate; and {169} the effects of the two on the majority are altogether different. To this fundamental truth the socialists are completely blind. The struggle to live, or, in other words, the struggle to secure employment, no doubt, when it is severe, does entail suffering on the strugglers. But this struggle, though it often accompanies progress, under the capitalistic system is not essential to it—as is shown by the fact that when such progress is most rapid the struggle in question tends to disappear altogether; for the competition is then amongst the employers to find labour, rather than amongst the labourers to find employment. Now if the struggle for employment could be obviated by any kind of social reform, an indubitable benefit would, no doubt, be conferred on the workers generally. But just as this struggle for work or for existence—this struggle of one worker against another—is not essential to the capitalistic wage-system, and certainly did not originate with it, and just as that system would not necessarily be abolished by its overthrow, so it is not the kind of competition against which the socialists direct their main attacks. Their main attacks are directed against the struggle between the wage-payers, not the wage-earners—that is to say, against the struggle not for existence, but for domination; and the struggle for domination has on the workers generally no evil effects at all, except such as are occasional and accidental. On the contrary, the workers are as much interested in its maintenance as anybody; for {170} not only does it inflict no injury on themselves, but to it that progress in the processes of production is due on which their own hopes depend, as much as do those of their employers. Accordingly, the socialists, profound thinkers as they are, propose to abolish the competition by which the workers benefit, because they confuse it with the competition by which the workers suffer. The point, however, which concerns us here is not that they have made a blunder as to the kind of competition which they should attack, but that the kind of competition which they declare themselves pledged to abolish, as a thing accursed, and the root of all social evils, they really reintroduce into their own programme, altered only by being associated with the system of slavery, and by being robbed of its practical efficiency, and robbed of nothing else.

For our contemporary socialists, who have at last come to perceive that the productivity of labour depends on the ability with which it is directed, perceive also the fact that, out of many possible directors, some would direct it far more efficiently than others. They also perceive the fact that the directors of labour, who, according to their proposals, would be officials of the bureaucratic State, could prove their efficiency only by practical experiment. Now if all capital were, as socialists propose it should be, owned by the State, and if all the means of subsistence were apportioned amongst the citizens equally, without reference to the work performed by them; and if all the directors of labour, whether inventors or business {171} organisers, had to act as State officials, or else not act at all, the practical experiments necessary to show which officials were the fittest could be brought about only by the State investing such and such of them with a quasi-military power over so many regiments of labourers for such and such a time, which power would be renewed if they could persuade the State to reappoint them, or taken from them if the State should be persuaded that some other men, their rivals, would employ this power more usefully. And this is precisely what the proposals of the socialists come to. The whole multitude of State officials who would direct socialistic industry would, according to every socialistic programme, be appointed, promoted, or degraded to the ranks of ordinary workers in accordance with the efficiency shown by them in the practical command of labour. Some socialists propose that these officials should owe their appointment to a central governing body; others propose that they should owe them to popular election; but in either case, appointment, promotion, or degradation would necessarily and avowedly, if it did not depend on favouritism, depend on the practical results which the different men in question elicited from labour by their different methods of directing it. In other words, the whole system of socialistic production would involve and depend on competition; and the only essential difference between this bureaucratic competition under socialism and the competition of {172} capitalists which socialists so furiously denounce, is that whilst the capitalists obtain control over labour by means of wages, which control, by a natural and automatic process, is gradually extinguished unless it is used efficiently, the competitors for office under socialism would obtain the same control by compulsory powers with which the State would invest them, and which they would lose or retain at the pleasure of some more or less arbitrary authority.

Competition, then, between the directors of labour—or, as it is here defined, the struggle for industrial domination—is as much a part of the theoretical _régime_ of socialism as it is a part of the actual _régime_ of capitalism. The only differences between the two consist, firstly, in the means by which labour is directed, coercion being employed in one case, and in the other the inducement of wages; and, secondly, in the means by which the fittest director is placed in power, and the less fit deprived of it—an official body deciding the matter in the one case, and the mass of the consuming public deciding it in the other for themselves.

Now we may safely say that the _régime_ of industrial coercion, or slavery, even though it should bear the name of socialism, is not in these days possible. It is impossible for two reasons—one, that it is out of harmony with the sentiments of the modern world; and the other—equally strong, though not so generally avowed—that it is an exceedingly clumsy and wasteful instrument of {173} competition. We may, accordingly, dismiss it from our consideration; and such being the case, there remains for us the absolute certainty that if society is to make any further industrial advance, or if it is to save itself from a relapse into industrial helplessness, the capitalistic wage-system, and with it capitalistic competition, or, in other words, the competitive struggle for domination, must both of them be continued under some form or other; nor, although they may be modified in an indefinite number of their details, is there any apparent possibility of ever modifying them in any of their essentials. Indeed, the great moral to be drawn from the facts that have been here elucidated is that if any one institution in the modern world threatens to be permanent, that institution is the capitalistic wage-system; and all proposed alterations in it we may set down as impossible in precise proportion as the socialists attach value to them. The foolish dreamers who imagine that they can overthrow it, consider only its outer aspect, and not the forces of which it is the expression. It is perfectly true that this system might at any given time, and in any given country, be paralysed or reduced to ashes; but the forces that would overthrow it would be essentially non-productive. The men who destroyed it would find themselves powerless without it, and would be obliged to submit to, and assist in, its reconstruction. For the outer form of capitalism is not what capitalism is, any more than a painter’s brush is the power that paints great pictures. Capitalism, in its essence, is merely {174} the realised process of the more efficient members of the human race controlling and guiding the less efficient; capitalistic competition is the means by which, out of these more efficient members, society itself selects those who serve it best; and no society which intends to remain civilised, and is not prepared to return to the direct coercion of slavery, can escape from competition and the wage-system, under some form or other, any more than it can stand in its own shadow.

With regard, then, to economic production, which, of all social activities, is for the practical sociologist incomparably the most important, what we have thus far seen is as follows. We have seen, not that it is impossible—for this question has been expressly postponed—that men may be made far more equal than they are now in respect of the possession of wealth; but that whatever degree of equality they may some day attain to in its possession, they can never be otherwise than unequal in the parts played by them in its production; that their inequality in productive power is of such a kind as to render the industrial obedience of the larger number of them to the minority the primary and permanent condition on which economic progress is possible; that what feather-brained fanatics call “_economic freedom_” would be merely another name for economic helplessness; and that all the democratic formulas which for the past hundred years have represented the employed as the producers of wealth, and the capitalistic employers as the appropriators of it, are, {175} instead of being, as they claim to be, the expressions of a profound truth, related to truth only as being direct inversions of it. Whatever appearances may seem to show to the contrary, it is the few and not the many who, in the domain of economic production, are essentially and permanently the chief repositories of power. That this is so in the domain of intellect we have seen already. We will now turn our attention to the domain of political government, and consider the part played by the exceptional few there—the nature and origin of their power, and the means by which it is exercised.

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