For the first time in history, also, the tax-dodger, the contractor who puts up his price for public works, the sinecurist, the jobber, the protectionist and other parasites upon the public purse, will receive the general reprobation due to robbery.For when the State is recognised as having rights of property identical in origin and use with those of individual citizens, that property will claim and may receive a similar respect.Property, in a word, becomes a really sacred institution when the human law of distribution is applied to the whole income, surplus as well as costs.Such inequalities in income as survive will be plainly justified as the counterpart of inequality of efforts and of needs.The wide contrasts of rich and poor, of luxury and penury, of idleness and toil, will no longer stagger the reason and offend the heart.
So the standard of sentimental values which affects the conventional modes of living of all classes -- largely by snobbish imitation and rivalry -- will be transformed.
Ostentatious waste and conspicuous leisure, with all their injurious reactions upon our Education, Recreation, Morals, and AEsthetics, will tend to disappear.The illusory factor of Prestige will be undermined, so that the valuations, both of productive activities and of consumption, will shift towards a natural, or rational, standard.
§9.Not merely will the wide gulf which severs mental from manual workers disappear, but all the elaborate scale of values for different sorts of intellectual and manual work would undergo a radical revision.
The effect of setting on a human basis the industry of the country would, of course, react upon all other departments of life, Religion, Family and Civic Morality, Politics, Literature, Art and Science.For though economics alone cannot mould or interpret history, the distinctively economic institutions of Industry and Property have always exercised a powerful, sometimes a dominant influence, upon other institutions.The reformation of economic life must, therefore, produce equally beneficent effects upon all other departments -- transforming their standards and feeding the streams of their activities with new thoughts and feelings, drawn no longer from the minds of a little class or a few original natures, but from the whole tide of human life flowing freely along every channel of individual and social endeavour.
The security and rationality of the economic order will give to all that confidence in man, and that faith in his future, which are the prime conditions of safe and rapid progress.For the brutal and crushing pressure of the economic problem in its coarsest shape -- how to secure a material basis of livelihood -- has of necessity hitherto absorbed nearly all the energy of man, so that his powers of body soul and spirit have been mainly spent on an unsatisfactory and precarious solution of this personal economic problem.Religion, politics, the disinterested pursuits of truth or beauty, have had to live upon the leavings of the economic life.
An economic reformation which, by applying the human law of distribution, absorbs the unproductive surplus, would thus furnish a social environment which was stronger and better in the nourishment and education it afforded to man.Every organ of society would function more effectively, supplying richer opportunities for healthy all-round self-development to all.So far as the economic activities can be taken into separate consideration, it is evident that this justly-ordered environment would do much to raise the physical, and more to raise the moral efficiency of the individual as a wealth-producer and consumer.But its most important contribution to the value and the growth of human welfare would lie in other fields of personality than the distinctively economic, in the liberation, realisation and improved condition of other intellectual and spiritual energies at present thwarted by or subordinated to industrialism.
