Political Works

"The... surplus normally passes neither to the managers, nor to the other employees, nor to the public, but to the shareholders. Such an arrangement is preposterous in the literal sense of being the reverse of that which would be established by considerations of equity and common sense, and gives rise (among other things) to what is called "the struggle between labour and capital.""

"The interest of those who own the property used in industry... is that their capital should be dear and human beings cheap."

"A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and human beings dear: indeed the word "riches" has no other meaning."

"Since work and ownership are increasingly separated, the efficient use of the tools is not dependent on the maintenance of the proprietary rights exercised over them."

"The conduct of industry for the public advantage is impossible as long as the ultimate authority over its management is vested in those whose only connection with it, and interest in it, is the pursuit of gain. ...to that element in it which has least to do with its success. ...their obligation to their employers is to provide dividends not to provide service."

"If industry is to be organized as a profession, two changes are requisite, one negative and one positive. The first, is that it should cease to be conducted by the agents of property-owners for the advantage of property-owners, and should be carried on, instead, for the service of the public. The second, is that, subject to rigorous public supervision, the responsibility for the maintenance of the service should rest upon the shoulders of those, from organizer and scientist to labourer, by whom, in effect, the work is conducted."

"The work of making boots or building a house is in itself no more degrading than that of curing the sick or teaching the ignorant. It is as necessary and therefore as honourable. It should be at least equally bound by rules which have as their object to maintain the standards of professional service. It should be at least equally free from the vulgar subordination of moral standards to financial interests."

"A hundred years ago the trade of teaching, which to-day is on the whole an honourable public service, was rather a vulgar speculation upon public credulity. ...It is conceivable... that some branches of medicine might have developed on the lines of industrial capitalism, with hospitals as factories, doctors hired at competitive wages as their "hands," large dividends paid to shareholders by catering for the rich, and the poor, who do not offer a profitable market, supplied with an inferior service or with no service at all."

"The meaning of a profession is that it makes the traitors the exception, not as they are in industry, the rule. ...subordinating the inclination, appetites and ambitions of individuals to the rules of an organization which has as its object to promote the performance of function."

"There is all the difference between maintaining a standard which is occasionally abandoned, and affirming as the central truth of existence that there is no standard to maintain."

"If they are doctors... there are certain kinds of conduct which cannot be practised, however large the fee... because they are unprofessional; if scholars and teachers, that it is wrong to make money by deliberately deceiving the public, as is done by makers of patent medicines, however much the public may clamour to be deceived; if judges or public servants, that they must not increase their incomes by selling justice for money; if soldiers, that the service comes first, and their private inclinations, even the reasonable preference of life to death, second."

"The difference between industry... and a profession is... simple and unmistakable. The essence of the former is... the financial return which it offers to its shareholders. The essence of the latter, is... the service which they perform, not the gains which they amass. ...they do not consider that any conduct which increases their income is on that account good."

"The conception implied in the words "unprofessional conduct" is... the exact opposite of the theory and practice which assume that the service of the public is best secured by the unrestricted pursuit, on the part of rival traders, of their pecuniary self-interest."

"The application to industry of the principle of purpose is simple... is to turn it into a Profession... defined most simply as a trade which is organized... for the performance of function. ...It is a body of men who carry on their work in accordance with rules designed to enforce certain standards both for the better protection of its members and for the better service of the public. ...it deliberately prohibits certain kinds of conduct on the ground that, though they may be profitable to the individual, they are calculated to bring into disrepute the organization to which he belongs. While some of its rules are trade union regulations... to prevent the economic standards... being lowered by unscrupulous competition, others... secure that no member... shall have any but a purely professional interest in his work, by excluding the incentive of speculative profit."

"We shall treat mineral owners and land-owners... as Plato would have treated the poets, whom in their ability to make something out of nothing and to bewitch mankind with words they a little resemble, and crown them with flowers and usher them politely out of the State."

"We shall close these channels through which wealth leaks away by resuming the ownership of minerals and of urban land... We shall secure that such large accumulations as remain, change hands at least once in every generation, by increasing our taxes on inheritance till what passes to the heir is little more than personal possessions, not the right to a tribute from industry which, though qualified by death-duties, is what the son of a rich man inherits today."

"The reasons which form the justification... of property in land," wrote Mill in 1848, "are valid only in so far as the proprietor of land is its improver.... In no sound theory of private property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered on it."

"The first step... is to abolish those types of private property in return for which no function is performed."

"The fundamental issue... is not between different scales of ownership, but between ownership of different kinds, not between the large farmer or master and the small, but between property which is used for work and property which yields income without it."

"If by "Property" is meant the personal possessions which the word suggests to nine-tenths of the population, the object of socialists is not to undermine property but to protect and increase it."

"There is no inconsistency between encouraging simultaneously a multiplication of peasant farmers and small masters who own their own farms or shops, and the abolition of private ownership in those industries... in which the private owner is an absentee shareholder."

"It is not private ownership, but private ownership divorced from work, which is corrupting to the principle of industry; and the idea of some socialists that private property in land or capital is necessarily mischievous is a piece of scholastic pedantry as absurd as that of those conservatives who would invest all property with some kind of mysterious sanctity."

"The course of wisdom in the affairs of industry... above all it is to insist that all industries shall be conducted in complete publicity as to costs and profits, because publicity ought to be the antiseptic both of economic and political abuses, and no man can have confidence in his neighbour unless both work in the light."

"One of the uses of industry is to provide the wealth which may make possible better education."

"Those who dread these qualities, energy and thought and the creative spirit... will not discriminate... between different types and kinds of property... They will endeavour to preserve all private property, even in its most degenerate forms. And those who value those [qualities]... will not desire to establish any visionary communism, for... the free disposal of a sufficiency of personal possessions is the condition of a healthy and self-respecting life, and will seek to distribute more widely the property rights which make them today the privilege of a minority. ...They will insist that property is moral and healthy only when it is used as a condition not of idleness but of activity, and when it involves the discharge of definite personal obligations. They will endeavour, in short, to base it upon the principle of function."

"Functionless property is the greatest enemy of legitimate property itself. It is the parasite which kills the organism that produced it. ... It values neither culture nor beauty, but only the power which belongs to wealth and the ostentation which is the symbol of it."

"There is no more fatal obstacle to efficiency than the revelation that idleness has the same privileges as industry, and that for every additional blow with the pick or hammer an additional profit will be distributed among shareholders who wield neither."

"The real economic cleavage is not... between employers and employed, but between all who do constructive work, from scientist to labourer, on the one hand, and all whose main interest is the preservation of existing proprietary rights upon the other, irrespective of whether they contribute to constructive work or not."

"From the point of view of social health and economic efficiency, society should obtain its material equipment at the cheapest price possible, and after providing for depreciation and expansion should distribute the whole product to its working members and their dependants. What happens at present, however, is that its workers are hired at the cheapest price which the market (as modified by organization) allows, and that the surplus, somewhat diminished by taxation, is distributed to the owners of property."

"To build on a foundation of rights and of rights alone is to build on a quicksand."

"The owner of royalties who, when asked why he should be paid... from minerals which he has neither discovered nor developed nor worked but only owned, replies "But it's Property!"... His claim is to be allowed to continue to reap what another has sown."

"Property is not theft, but a good deal of theft becomes property."

"The considerations which justify ownership as a function are those which condemn it as a tax."

"Precisely in proportion as it is important to preserve the property which a man has in the results of his own efforts, is it important to abolish that which he has in the results of the efforts of some one else."

"Land and capital are equally investments... possess the common characteristic of yielding income without labour... and though their significance as economic categories may be different, their effect as social institutions is the same. It is to separate property from creative ability, and to divide society into two classes, of which one has its primary interest in passive ownership, while the other is mainly dependent upon active work."

"In reality... the greater part of modern property, whether, like mineral rights and urban ground-rents, it is merely a form of private taxation which the law allows certain persons to levy on the industry of others, or whether, like property in capital, it consists of rights to payment for instruments which the capitalist cannot himself use but puts at the disposal of those who can, has as its essential feature that it confers upon its owners income unaccompanied by personal service."

"What nature demands is work: few working aristocracies, however tyrannical, have fallen; few functionless aristocracies have survived. In society, as in the world of organic life, atrophy is but one stage removed from death."

"It is probable that war, which in barbarous ages used to be blamed as destructive of property, has recently created more titles to property than almost all other causes put together."

"The general tendency for the ownership and administration of property to be separated, the general refinement of property into a claim on goods produced by an unknown worker, is as unmistakable as the growth of capitalist industry and urban civilization themselves."

"The abolition of the economic privileges of agrarian feudalism, which, under the name of equality, was the driving force of the French Revolution, and which has taken place... in all countries touched by its influence, has been largely counter-balanced since 1800 by the growth of the inequalities springing from Industrialism."

"In [parts of] the United States... the population of peasant proprietors and small masters of the early nineteenth century were replaced in three generations by a propertyless proletariat and a capitalist plutocracy."

"It is questionable... whether economists shall call it "Property" at all, and not rather, as Mr. Hobson has suggested, "Improperty.""

"Ownership and use are normally divorced. The greater part of modern property... is normally valued precisely because it relieves the owner from any obligation to perform a positive or constructive function. Such property may be called passive property, or property for acquisition, for exploitation, or for power."

"In modern industrial societies the great mass of property consists, as the annual review of wealth passing at death reveals, neither of personal acquisitions such as household furniture, nor of the owner's stock-in-trade, but of rights of various kinds, such as royalties, ground-rents, and, above all, of course shares in industrial undertakings which yield an income irrespective of any personal service rendered by their owners."

"The characteristic fact, which differentiates most modern property from that of the pre-industrial age, and which turns against it the very reasoning by which formerly it was supported, is that in modern economic conditions ownership is not active, but passive, that to most of those who own property today it is not a means of work but an instrument for the acquisition of gain or the exercise of power, and that there is no guarantee that gain bears any relation to service, or power to responsibility."

"It is not merely that the ownership of any substantial share in the national wealth is concentrated today in the hands of a few... and that at the end of an age which began with an affirmation of the rights of property, proprietary rights are, in fact, far from being widely distributed. Nor is it merely that what makes property insecure today is not the arbitrary taxation... or the privileges of an idle noblesse, but the insatiable expansion and aggregation of property itself, which menaces with absorption all property less than the greatest, the small master, the little shopkeeper, the country bank, and has turned the mass of mankind into a proletariat working under the agents and for the profit of those who own."

"When Bacon, who commended Henry VII for protecting the tenant right of the small farmer, and pleaded in the House of Commons for more drastic land legislation, wrote "Wealth is like muck. It is not good but if it be spread," he was expressing in an epigram that was the commonplace of every writer on politics from Fortescue at the end of the fifteenth century to Harrington in the middle of the seventeenth."

"Before the rise of a commercial civilization, it was the mark of statesmanship... to cherish the small property-owner even to the point of offending the great.... Popular sentiment idealized the yeoman—"the Joseph of the country who keeps the poor from starving"... [and] cursed the usurer who took advantage of his neighbour's necessities to live without labour."

"The typical workman was not a labourer but a peasant or small master... the moral justification of the title to property was self-evident. It was obviously, what theorists said that it was, and plain men knew it to be, the labour spent in producing, acquiring and administering it. Such property was not a burden upon society, but a condition of its health and efficiency, and indeed, of its continued existence. To protect it was to maintain the organization through which public necessities were supplied."

"Property was defended as the most sacred of rights. ...a right which was not only widely exercised, but... indispensable to... providing food and clothing. For it consisted predominantly of... land or tools which were used by the owner for the purpose of production, and personal possessions which were the necessities or amenities of civilized existence."