How far is the saying true that "Every one lives either by working, or by begging, or by stealing."' Observe: This is primarily a question merely of fact, and not of right or wrong. There may be (1) Right Work and Wrong Work; (2) Begging that is justifiable, and Begging that is unjustifiable; (3) Stealing which is pardonable, and stealing which is unpardonable. In simply placing, therefore, any class of persons under one or another of these three heads, I am not necessarily either praising or blaming the individual members of that class. Again, of two paid workers one may be greatly underpaid, and the other as greatly overpaid. But neither is this consideration embraced in the question before us. We have not to do, tonight, with the merits of any individual, nor with the value or valuelessness of any kind of work, nor yet with the equitable assignment in any particular case of the reward of work. Let us, in the first place, classify the members of English society by dividing them simply into — I. Workers, and II. NonWorkers. I. Workers, e.g.: — Manual labourers, skilled and unskilled; domestic servants; soldiers; sailors; farmers; clerks and overseers; professional men; retail and wholesale dealers; merchants and manufacturers; bankers (sleeping partners are excepted); teachers and preachers; artists, authors, and editors; high officers and Ministers of State; the Sovereign; housewives. All these are doing work, and are receiving pay in coin or kind in return for their work. Some of them may be doing unpaid (honorary) work as well as paid work; and others may be getting interest (on a capital for which they never worked) in addition to those wages of superintendence which are strictly the reward of a merchant's or manufacturer's work. Again, some of them may be working in appointed places for definite salaries, while others may be working, so to speak, "on their own hook," or, in more elegant language, "paddling their own canoe." By what mark, then, shall we distinguish the type of man who lives by his work? What is his definition? He is the man who lives upon pay, in coin or kind, which is given him in return for his personal services. And only in proportion as his means of living are derived from such pay, or from his personal labour on the soil, can he properly be said to "live by working.'' We have next to consider who are the (II.) Non-Workers of Society, and whether they may all, without exception, be properly included in the two classes, "Beggars," and "Stealers" — whether, in fact, this two-fold division of them is an exhaustive one. Now, Beggars and Thieves are alike in these respects, that they, both of them, consume without producing, enjoy without labouring, are served but render no service to others, receive but give not in return, are clever in subtraction, but failures in addition. Wherein, then, do they differ from each other? They differ, for the purposes of the present argument, only in the different dispositions of their respective victims towards them. The victim of the Beggar is a willing victim; he is influenced by custom, or by compassion for weakness, pain, or privation. On the other hand, the victim of the Thief is an unwilling victim. It may be that he is unconscious of the spoliation that is perpetrated upon him.
But if he is conscious of it, his tendency is to resist it, if
he dare, and prevent it, if he can. This I hold to be the fundamental
and essential distinction, for the purposes of the present argument,
between the beggar and the thief. The beggar is the man who victimises
society with its leave; and the thief is the man who victimises society without its leave. Now, in relation to the present question, the Workers of Society are, in any case, the Victims,
and, of course, they must be be either willingly or unwillingly. I
propose, therefore, to entitle all those nonworkers to whose demands
workers are willing victims, "Beggars;" and to give the name of "Thieves" to all those non-workers whose requirements are supplied by the workers against their will.
I am quite aware that in thus applying these terms I am guilty of a
logical fallacy, to wit, in having subjected a "Universal Affirmative
Proposition" to the operation of "Simple Conversion;" for it does not,
of course, necessarily follow that because all thieves victimise society
against its will, therefore all who victimise society against its will
are thieves. I am aware, too, that I am giving a somewhat liberal and
unusual significance to the terms "Beggar" and "Thief;" but, for all
that, I believe this interpretation is justified by (1) the essential
meaning of the terms in question, and (2) the existence of a true
analogy between the conventional "Beggar" and thief and my
"Beggar" and thief — that is, the identity of the relation which both
of them essentially bear to their respective victims, the individual and
society. Let us now enumerate the different existing classes of
Non-workers, and examine whether they do really come, all of them,
legitimately, under one or other of these two classes, and whether it is
against society's will, or with iti consent, that they are severally
victimising it. E.G. — Those who are too young to work; those who are
too old to work; those who, through congenital or accidental
deficiencies in mind or body, are incompetent to work; those who are too
ill in mind or body to work; those who are being prepared, by
education, for work. In the above list would be included the inmates of
all nurseries, schools, sick-rooms, asylums, hospitals, and alms-houses,
and, in part, of union workhouses and prisons. And all these may be
properly classified as "Beggars," seeing that they live upon means which
are voluntarily provided for them by society — victimising it by its leave.
On the other hand, robbers, swindlers, and adulterators at large — and
also every member of society in ao far as he is extortionate or
knowingly unfair to another's disadvantage, and whether he is visibly a
lawbreaker or not — may be classified as thieves, who victimise society against its will.
There remain, however, certain classes of Non-workers, whose position
cannot be assigned on a mere surface inspection, and whose true relation
to society will require careful investigation: — (1.) The man who has
lived by working, and, having saved some of his earnings, has retired to
live at ease on his "savings" (I mean their corpus, as distinguished from any "Interest" which might accrue on them) — this man I should classify as one who lives by working.
(2.) The man who is in the enjoyment of a life pension — the reward of
his having personally fulfilled a stipulated period of professional
toil — this man, too, may fairly be said to live by working. But (3) the man whose income arises from the rents of land or houses which he inherited — what shall we call him? (4.) How, too, shall we class the man whose income consists of the interest of inherited shares
in Government, railway or other stocks? (5.) What title, again, shall
we give to the sleeping partner in a business, and to the merchant or
manufacturing capitalist in so far as his income accrues not as wages of
superintendence, but in the way of interest on a capital which he
inherited, and did not earn? How, in one word, shall we classify the men
who are living — in so far as they are living — on what they inherited
from their ancestors or friends? Here is a class of persons, none of
them without ability to work, but all of them alike, as we are
supposing, non-workers. Further, they are living, not on the saving of
abstinence, at least not of their own abstinence; they are living
idly on rents or on the interest of loans. We might have to travel back
centuries in search of a personal industry which gathered, and a
personal abstinence which saved, the family fortune, and after all find
only fraud or force. How shall we classify these members of society?
Well, I am reminded, when I contemplate them, of the description we gave
alike to beggars and to thieves — who "consume without producing, enjoy
without labouring, are served but render no service to others, receive
but give not in return." They must surely, then, belong to one or the
other of these classes. They inherited the land or the capital which is
the source of their income, never perhaps even saying, "Thank you" for
it. Now, which are they — beggars or thieves? As to the
forefather who founded the family, he may have been a noble worker, or,
as I hinted above, a thief, or a receiver of stolen goods; but these men
themselves, in the truth of things as it seems to me, occupy the middle
place — they are "Beggars." They victimise society, but they do so with
its full consent. Here is their history: — The patriarch aforesaid,
imagining that a wholly idle life must be a very desirable and
honourable one, and preferring, naturally, the interests of his own
children to those of other people's children, determined, by settling his
property on his posterity, or at any rate bequeathing it to them
exclusively, to put them at ease in their circumstances for all future
time. He compassionated them — he felt for them as we do for the beggar
we meet in the street. His prophetic eye discerned a long line of unborn
generations of descendants on their knees before him begging,
and on his death-bed he entailed his property on them. The law allowed
it. Society approved of it. Who can blame him? By way of further
illustrating the position of his heirs, let us suppose the case of three
imaginary men, named respectively, "Mr. Smith," "Mr. Brown," and "Mr.
Robinson." They are all of them honest saving and successful workers in
their youth, and each of them retires at the age of 50 with a fortune of
£20,000. This money they might have expended as fast as they earned it,
but they did not. They had, at the date of their retirement, conferred
each of them on society £20,000 worth of service more than they had exacted from it; and society owed each of them at that date an amount of service of
precisely that value, neither more nor less. Now, mark their after
course: "Mr. Smith" locks his £20,000 in a safe, takes out £1,000 a
year, has nothing left on his 70th birthday, and then (we will hope, for
his own sake and society's) dies! Society has exactly paid him what it
owed him, neither more nor less. Or he purchases with his £20,000 an
annuity, and takes his chance of being a gainer or a loser by the
transaction: and on the average we may assume that this transaction
leaves him and society "quits." "Mr. Brown " calculates on living 20
years; and reserving one thousand out of his twenty for his own
expenditure during the next year, lends the remaining 19 thousands among
nineteen of his friends, but without interest, and on the understanding
that one thousand be repaid annually to him or his assignees until the
whole nineteen have been returned. He dies 3 years afterwards, leaving
his widow and children, — i.e., his "domestic beggars" — heirs to an
income of £1,000 a year for 17 years; by which time he had calculated
the widow would be dead, and the children able to support themselves by
their own work. At the expiration of this period society will
have conferred upon, his heirs and assignees exactly that balance of
unrepaid service for which it was indebted to him at his death. "Mr.
Robinson," however, is too acute a fellow to accept 20 shillings in
exchange for a sovereign, and he puts his £20,000 out in some concern at
5 percent interest. By this ingenious and legalised dodge he contrives
not merely to get £1,000 a year for his own expenditure so long as he
lives, but he further secures £1,000 a year to his posterity for ever,
so that in the course of 1,000 years society pays him and his family
£1,000,000 worth of service in return for the £20,000 worth of service
which were properly owing to him on his 50th birthday. Is his family
rendering society any "service" during this thousand years? Not at all!
The land, the capital, from which the income accrues, would have been
quite as beneficial to society in anyone else's hands as in theirs; nay,
much more beneficial if they had been nationalised. Society, however,
unquestionably permits the arrangement, and being in this way victimised by its own permission,
the persons who enjoy the fruits of the victimisation, come, according
to our definition, under the appellation of "Beggars." As to the
ancestral Robinson, he did not consider (who does?) that exactly in
proportion to the money he left to be spent in idleness by his
posterity, he was laying a burden on labour, by mortgaging for ever part
of the industry of the rest of society for the benefit of that one
family: for both Interest and Rent are in all cases ultimately paid by labour.
He never considered (who does?) that the surplus service of a single
life can hardly constitute a fair claim upon society for all time. And
so he did his best to beggar (in my sense of the term) his heirs
and assigns for ever! It occurs to me, however, that two objections may
probably be raised to this view: — (1) Though the descendants of such a
man are not living by work of their own, they are living by work, for they are living by their ancestor's work. I reply by denying in toto the doctrine of imputed industry, or of vicarious industry. These men do not live either by their ancestor's work, or by their own working!
If a man tells me he works for his living, it never occurs to me to
suppose that he is referring to the work done by his great grandfather
before he was born or thought of, least of all when the ancestral
services have been already fully requited! But (2) it may perhaps be
objected that the non-working inheritor of land or money is yet in some
sense requiting society and doing it a valuable "service" by letting his
acres to a farmer, and his cash to an employer of labour. And it would
certainly be a worse thing for society if this gentleman left his land
uncultivated, and possibly so if he locked up his money in a box. No
doubt society is assisted in the production of its wealth by the
cultivation of the land and the judicious employment of the money; even
though the first charge upon the profits is assigned as rent or interest
to the do-nothing proprietor (for I am supposing that he is a
do-nothing); but in truth the service is rendered by the money and by the land, and not by the proprietor
— who, when once the ancestral services have been fully requited, has
no right, except that of law and might, to land or money, rent or
interest, seeing he never earned them, but only begged them from
some forefather, who, instead of leaving his accumulations to the State
to be expended on the general good, and encouraging in his sons the
industry which had been his crown, took advantage of the weakness, good
nature, and shortsightedness of the law to lay a perpetual charge upon
the industry of his country by establishing a family of "beggars,'' who
should too often be titled and bowed down to in proportion as they were
vain and useless, and who should have the inalienable privilege of
consuming as much as they would of the true — the lifesupporting —
wealth which is produced by the toil and moil of living men, while
offering in exchange nothing but the "unearned increments" on
accumulations which were secured to them by dead parchments written by
dead ancestors. In its moral aspect, however, this branch of our inquiry
would seem to resolve itself into the deeper questions: — Can anything but personal service, justly claim a return of personal service? And, is the taking of interest on a loan for private gain morally justifiable? This aspect of the question is not, however, before us tonight, as we are only dealing with a question of fact. That all who live on the interest of accumulations are, in my opinion, really living by begging, may be inferred by what has been said above. And I can but sum up with the expression of my deliberate conviction that as
a matter of fact, every member of society does live, practically and
essentially, either by Working, or by Begging, or by Stealing. Four
brief remarks, and then I close: — (1.) Any one of the "beggars"
described above (and I am one) may, if he will, wipe from his shield all
the dishonour which naturally attaches to his position, and may
practically raise himself to the dignity of a working man and a patriot,
if he will volunteer to take his fair share of the unpaid, but not on
that account unimportant, work which society is always needing to have
done by volunteers; and if he will further devote his surplus income to
objects of public profit. I cannot for a moment doubt the desirableness
of having in a metropolis, and within every area of local government,
men of that leisure and liberal culture which are rarely to be found
conjoined except in those who belong to the class of "Hereditary
Beggars." As it is said admirably in Ecclesiasticus (chap. 38), "The
wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure, and he that
hath little business shall become wise. How can he get [political]
wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that
driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of
bullocks.'" &c, &c. (verses 21-34). And yet, on the other hand,
how can we expect of any man, that, if he has never undergone any sort
of labour on behalf of the community to which he belongs, he will be
able to form any just estimate of the feelings and legislative needs of
the class of Workers. In truth, there are "Beggars and Beggars," and the
class as a whole might most instructively be subdivided into Serviceable beggars and Unserviceable beggars. Would that all beggars were, according to their ability, of the "Serviceable" sub-class! And would that all those "beggars," who, for want of a proper training, are obliged to take their place in the ignobler sub-class, would make it a point of honour and of duty to train and fit their children for the requital, by some personal service, of that working section of society apart from those personal labours even millionaires cannot live!
(2.) The laws relating to bequest and inheritance ought, perhaps, to be
reformed, and all bequests to be subjected to Government control and
veto. (3.) It might be well, either that society should not allow the
amassing of prodigious fortunes, or that a capable but idle inheritor
should be compelled to serve society by being deprived of his
inheritance. The 218th "Query" of Bishop Berkeley runs thus,
"Whether a door ought not to be shut against all other methods of
growing rich, save only by industry and merit? And whether wealth got
otherwise would not be ruinous to the public?" (4.) People ought not to
be ashamed of stating to proper authorities, and on reasonable
occasions, what their income is and whence it comes. Though, as Ruskin says,
"Every kind of vagabonds, high and low, agree in their dislike to give
an account of the way they get their living, still more of how much they
have got sewn up in their breeches' pocket;" adding — and I heartily
agree with him that, "It is of vital moment to a country to know how its vagabonds live.''
-- E. D. Girdlestone, quoted in the Christian Socialist, a British monthly, December, 1883.
See also http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-world-according-to-team-walt.html.
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