Your theory does not work out consistently with itself. It strikes impartial men as an outrage upon common sense. It strikes at the basis of all property whatever, and would upset society. It would destroy your own title to your own hat, or to your tea crocks, which you could not make; or to your house, which you could not build. It destroys your title to your own book, or your own weekly paper, or to your own life, which you have not created. Everything is the product of joint labour much sub-divided, and if a man is to have a right only to that which he has created by the use of his own unaided faculties, he can have a right to nothing. Such principles carried out would resolve society into chaos.

Your objection to interest is similarly unfounded. Interest is money paid for the use of money. Money is a useful article, as we all know. It may be kept for personal use, or it may be hired out for the use of another. If a man have £100 that he could use with profit to himself, but which he can spare for me to use if I like, I may consider £5 a very small sum for me to pay for the use of it for a whole year. He is entitled to some consideration for giving it up for all that time. You say I have to work for the interest. True, but the use of the £100 gives me the opportunity of not only making the interest, but much more besides which I could not get if I had not the use of the money. Money "breeds money" by enabling the possessor to make money which he could not make without it; and certainly the provider of the money is entitled to a share of the result. The three monkeys are useful again here. Am I to refuse the top monkey his bite of the apple because he does not actually clutch it out of the water, but merely allows me to hold on by him while I clutch it?

All interest is truly paid by the British worker as regards the origin of the money that pays the interest, but the British worker cannot be considered by himself. He is only the third monkey, and must give the first and second their share. He is protected from foreign violence by the army; he is protected in the enjoyment of his life by the police; he is provided with many conveniences, shelter, gas, water, drainage, etc.; and the organization of society enables him to get food where he would starve. The stability of society enables him to be sure of continuance of the privileges he enjoys. It is right, therefore, that he should pay his quota towards the provision of these things, without which the country would soon be a desert and life an impossibility.

Your philosophy does not sweep widely enough. You pick out the drawbacks of the present system without recognizing the compensations. There may be something unsatisfactory in the inheritance of the results of industry being secured to those who did not earn them, but as we must have drawbacks of some kind in this present imperfect state-surely error and death are drawbacks -it is better to have the lesser than the greater ones. It is better to have ornamental and refining anomalies than to have the barbarism that would ensue on the removal of those bulwarks and securities to society and industry that arise out of the law of inheritance.

Again I am,

Your decidedly hard-headed, but respectful friend,

JOHN SMITH.

Men in Business.

IN

My Dear Mr. Blatchford,

this does

N your ninth chapter, you seem to be getting worse and worse. You not only object to the landlord having his rent, but you object to the tradesman having his profit. You object to the profits of those who take part in the process of distributing food among the people; and even in this you are not consistent, for while you would allow the coster to make a profit on the fish he buys in the market and takes round to the public, you would not allow the man who brings the fish from the seaside to the market to have his profit. Why? You call him a "middleman; not settle the question, it is merely calling names. He performs a service, and you refuse him his wages. You say he "does nothing but sign cheques." This is not true. He effects a very important arrangement between the fisherman who catches the fish and the coster who sells them to the public, without which the fisherman's fish would rot on the beach, and the coster would be unable to make his living. He pays the fisherman at once for the fish that the fisherman brings to the shore, taking the risk upon himself of their going bad or not being sold, and he arranges with the railway company to have them conveyed to the various markets, where the coster can procure them to supply the public with; why is he not to have a profit and a good profit for all this risky service?

I could understand your objection if you refused to allow the fisherman to have anything for taking the fish out of the sea, and the coster for taking the fish round to the public; but to allow these two their recompense for their part of the labour, and deny it to the merchant, who carries the fish over the great distance lying between the thwarts of the boat and the cart of the coster, is absurd and monstrous. Do remember the middle monkey, Mr. Blatchford; he

is a most important link in the chain of supply. Do not call him a "snatcher of profits, taking from the producer on the one hand and the consumer on the other." There would neither be producer nor consumer but for him. The consumer could not get the fish to consume, and the producer could have no object in catching fish he could not sell. Be fair and level, Mr. Blatchford.

To speak of "the idle capitalist who pays men to work for him, and pays managers to direct them, but never works himself," is not to represent the matter candidly, or to speak reasonably. It is to speak “rumbustically," which can never serve any just cause in the long run, though it may please partisans. You might just as well speak of the captain of a ship as an idle mariner who gets other men to handle the ropes and steer the ship; or of a general as an idle soldier who gets other men to do the fighting; or of the editor of a weekly paper as an idle printer who gets other men to set the types. A man is not necessarily idle who does not use his hands. The brain worker may be the busiest man in the place and the most essential too. Of fifty hands in a factory you might spare any one or two of them without interfering with the place going on; but remove the man who does the finance and gets orders, and where would the work be? Where the wages on Saturday? The whole thing would come to a stand and the workpeople starve for want of the man you call "the idle capitalist."

You should speak with more discrimination, Mr. Blatchford, and give your thoughts a wider range. Cleverness is pretty, but to be useful, it must be solid as to facts. There is such a thing as being too clever by half, and this seems to me to be the case with much of the Socialist argument.

I am bound to admire your remarks on the indebtedness of every man to the rest of the community for what he is able to do. But it strikes me that a just application of these remarks would do more than anything to destroy the fallacious canon of "right" which is at the bottom of Socialism-the notion, I mean, that a man has a right only to that which his own unaided faculties enable him to create. According to your own exhibition of the endless ramifications of individual indebtedness, it is evident that no man's faculties are unaided. The inventor is indebted to his predecessors for the elementary ideas of ievers and cogs on which he works. The gift to write a successful book is the result of various activities, which preceded and developed the writer. The subjects are

supplied by fellow-creatures. The circumstances that give readers and buyers are totally independent of the author.

This is all most true; but see how it affects your principle of right. As no man produces anything by his own unaided faculties, no man according to your principle has a right to anything! The money earned by your successful book is not yours, because others contributed the principal elements involved in its production. What are you going to do then? Are you going to divide it up? You say you must pay back to all men what they have lent to you. This is pretty. But can you do it? How are you going to find out your particular creditors? And will you keep back nothing for yourself? No clothes, no body, no life? for you are indebted to some or to all men for all of these.

Mr. Blatchford, you are a forcible writer, but you should not be absurd. You cannot pay back to all men what they have lent to you. Nobody asks you to do it. It is an amiable conceit you have invented in support of the Socialistic theory; but the theory is wrong. Consistently carried out, it would render the society of human life impossible-which is its condemnation. Human life is a fact, and before it can, it all its appetites, desires, and impulses, exist as a society, it must be put under laws and rules regulating the relation of man to man. These laws must recognise the rights of individual possession in some shape or form as the basis of all other rules, otherwise we sink to the level of a herd of cattle. Society has evolved itself in a rough sort of way on this basis. There are many blots and inequalities in the arrangement, but it is better than the barbarism that would result from the principle that a man is only to be entitled to what he produces with his own hands, and not even to that if it can be shown that others have contributed to its "creation."

If our civilisation is defective, it is better than chaos. You don't want chaos-you are not aiming at it--but it is what your principles would end in. They would set free the baser elements, and bring up a flood of ignoble life that would submerge the beautiful tracts of country that have been reclaimed from the bog. The beauty of British culture would disappear under an inundation of liquid mud, and the intellectual conquests of ages would be lost in the tide of ignorance and brutality that could not be kept within bounds when once the fountains of the great deep were opened up.