8. The Unproductive Rich.

Beaten out of their first position, Socialists take up this second and stronger ground. “ Granted that some capitalists can rightly claim a reward as productive causes, for example, a gentleman farmer, or the managing partner in a factory, or the lessee of a coal-pit, what shall we say of the young nobleman who owns this pit and half a dozen others, and who is lounging about Pall Mall or Rotten Row, with less knowledge of coal than a housemaid, and with less brains than four-fifths of the miners ? ”

Personally, of course, he is not a productive cause, though his money is. But what good comes to society of his having that money and that exemption from all personal labour of production ? Why this, that such sinecures are the prizes of the intellectual labour that is thrown into the work of production. The managing partner, and the coal-pit lessee aforesaid, toils and moils in the hope that, before the evening of life, he shall have reached an opulence which shall enable him to spend the rest of his days exempt from the labour of producing, and moreover to hand over his store, undiminished by his period of rest, to his children. His ambition is to found a family in wealth. He works that his posterity may not have to work as he does. An ignoble desire, you say : but a potent moral cause of production. This second and further good comes from the existence of a class of unproductive capitalists, that society has available an array, as it were, of pensioners, who can, and who as a class do, undertake and perform a mass of ministrative duties. Of this class are our Cabinet Ministers, and our higher Public Service generally, our clergy, authors, scientific investigators, musicians, artists, poets, the men who refine our taste and brighten our lives. Society exists not for consumption alone, nor for consumption chiefly, and quite as little for production alone. Socialists, who are fond of the fable of the Belly and the Members, may remember that some organs in the body minister to higher purposes than those of nutrition and reproduction.

The class, then, of unproductive capitalists is valuable to society. The drones, who are found in this class as in every other class, and well-nigh in every family, high and low, should be induced to such labour as they are capable of by public opinion. There is no harm trying to render their position uncomfortable, even by law, if that can be done without destroying greater store of goods than they at present idly consume. For example, they may be taxed in proportion to their laziness and their luxury, if need be : but they are not a reason for overturning the whole Social Beehive, in the hope of building up the comb afresh on unnatural lines of Socialism.