



Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian
Libraries)






Barbara Weinstock Lectures on The Morals of Trade

SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM.
By John Bates Clark.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PRIVATE MONOPOLY AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP.
By John Graham Brooks.

COMMERCIALISM AND JOURNALISM.
By Hamilton Holt.

THE BUSINESS CAREER IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONS.
By Albert Shaw.




SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM



BY

JOHN BATES CLARK

PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AT
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY



BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1914

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE REGENTS OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published April 1914_




BARBARA WEINSTOCK
LECTURES ON THE MORALS OF TRADE

This series will contain essays by representative scholars and men of
affairs dealing with the various phases of the moral law in its bearing
on business life under the new economic order, first delivered at the
University of California on the Weinstock foundation.




SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM


It is currently reported that the late King Edward once said, "We are
all Socialists, now": and if the term "Socialism" meant to-day what His
Majesty probably meant by it, many of us could truthfully make a
similar statement. Without any doubt, we could do so if we attached to
the term the meaning which it had when it was first invented. It came
into use in the thirties of the last century, and expressed a certain
disappointment over the result of political reform. The bill which gave
more men the right to vote did not give them higher wages. The
conditions of labor were deplorable before the Reform Bill was passed
and they continued to be so for some time afterwards. A merely
political change, therefore, was not all that was wanted, and it was
necessary to carry democracy into a social sphere in order to improve
the condition of the poorer classes. The term "Socialism," therefore,
was chosen to describe a play of forces that would act in this way on
society itself, and was an excellent term for describing this right and
just tendency. The name was quickly adopted by those with whose
practical plans most of us do not agree; but its original idea was
democracy carried into business, and at present that is the dominant
tendency of all successful parties. For six months we have been living
under what may be called "triumphant democracy," not because the
Democratic Party has beaten its rivals and come into control of the
Government, but for a much deeper reason, namely, that a democracy
carried into industrial life is the dominating principle of every
political body that can hope for success. Every party must show by its
action that it values the man more than the dollar. To this extent we
are all democrats and wish the Government to act for the people as well
as to be controlled by the people.

When we differ, it is in deciding on the means to carry out our common
purpose; and here we differ very widely. Some would use the power of
the State to correct and improve our system of industry, and these
constitute a party of reform. Others would abolish that system and
substitute something untried. For private capital they would put public
capital and for private management, public management--either in the
whole field of industry or in that great part of it where large capital
rules. These are Socialists in the modern and current sense of the
term.

One difference of view which was formerly very sharp is now scarcely
traceable. Every one knows that we must invoke the aid of the State in
order to make industry what it should be. The rule that would bid the
State keep its hands off the entire field of business, the extreme
_laissez-faire_ policy once dominant in literature and thought, now
finds few persons bold enough to advocate it or foolish enough to
believe in it. In a very chastened form, however, the spirit that would
put a reasonable limit on what the State shall be asked to do happily
does survive and is powerful. It seeks a golden mean between letting
the State do nothing and asking it to do everything. It is this plan of
action that I shall try to outline, and it will appear that even this
plan requires that the State should do very much. Under an inert
government the industrial system would suffer irreparably.

The thing first to be rescued is competition--meaning that healthful
rivalry between different producers which has always been the guaranty
of technical progress. That such progress has gone on with bewildering
rapidity since the invention of the steam engine is nowhere denied; and
neither is it denied that competition of the normal kind--the effort of
rivals to excel in productive processes--has caused it. It has
multiplied the product of labor here tenfold, there, twentyfold, and
elsewhere a hundredfold and more.

This increased power to produce has rescued us from an appalling evil.
Without it, such a crowding of population as some countries have
experienced would have carried their peoples to and below the
starvation level. Machinery now enables us to live; and if
world-crowding were to go on in the future as it has done, and the
technical progress should cease, many of us could not live. Poverty
would increase till its cruelest effects would be realized and lives
enough would be crushed out to enable the survivors to get a living. Of
all conditions of human happiness, the one which is most underestimated
is progress in power to produce. Hardly any of those who would
revolutionize the industrial State, and not all of those who would
reform it, have any conception of the importance of this progress. It
is the _sine qua non_ of any hopeful outlook for the future of mankind.

I am to speak, however, of _justice_ in the business relations of life,
and it might seem that this shut out the mere question of general
prosperity. The most obvious issue between different social classes
concerns the division of whatever income exists. Whatever there is, be
it large or small, may be divided rightly or wrongly; but I am not able
to see that the mere division of it exhausts the application of the
principle of justice. While it is clearly wrong for one party to
plunder another, it is almost as clearly wrong for one party to reduce
the general income and so, in a sense, rob everybody. A party that
should systematically hinder production and reduce its fruits would rob
a myriad of honest laborers who are ill prepared to stand this loss and
have a perfect right to be protected from it.

Every man, woman, and child has a right to demand that the powers that
be remove hindrances in the way of production, and not only allow the
general income to be large and grow larger, but do everything that they
possibly can do to make it grow larger. It is an unjust act to reduce
general earnings, even though no one is singled out for particular
injury. On this ground we insist on trust legislation, tariff reform,
the conservation of natural resources, etc. I am prepared to claim that
it is in this spirit that we demand that private initiative, which has
given us the amount of prosperity that we have thus far obtained, shall
be enabled to continue its work without being supplanted by monopoly.
In a general way I should include public monopoly as well as private
among the things which would put a damper on the progress of
improvement and lessen the income on which the comfort of laborers in
the near future will be dependent. Monopoly of any sort is hostile to
improvement, and in this chiefly lies the menace which it holds for
mankind.

It is a fairly safe prediction that, if a public monopoly were to exist
in every part of the industrial field, the _per capita_ income would
grow less, and that it would be only a question of time, and a short
time at that, when the laborers would be worse off than they are now.
Though, at the outset, they might absorb the entire incomes of the
well-to-do classes, the amount thus gained would shrink in their hands
until their position would be worse than their present one. They would
have pulled down the capitalists without more than a momentary benefit
for themselves and with a prospect of soon sinking to a lower level
than as a class they have thus far reached.

The impulse to revolutionize the system comes from the belief that it
is irreclaimably bad. The first thing to be done is to see how much
reclaiming the system is capable of; and the only sure way to test this
question is to use all our power in the effort to improve it. When all
such efforts shall have failed, it will be time for desperate measures.

Our industrial system has many faults:--here we are happily agreed. It
is the inferences we draw from this fact that are different. The one
that I draw is like one which is recorded in a famous case in
antiquity. When the Macedonian armies seemed about to overwhelm Greece,
Demosthenes encouraged the Athenians by this very sound bit of
philosophy: "The worst fact in our past affords the brightest hope for
our future. It is the fact that our misfortunes have come because of
our own faults. If they