The Acquisitive Society

the contents of that place of gloom into elegant chambers in London and a place in the country is not the monopoly of royalty owners. A similar feat of prestidigitation is performed by the owner of urban ground-rents. In rural districts some landlords, perhaps many landlords, are partners in the hazardous and difficult business of agriculture, and, though they may often exercise a power which is socially excessive, the position which they hold and the income which they receive are, in part at last, a return for the functions which they perform. The ownership of urban land has been refined till of that crude ore only the pure gold is left. It is the perfect sinecure, for the only function it involves is that of collecting its profits, and in an age when the struggle of Liberalism against sinecures was still sufficiently recent to stir some chords of memory, the last and greatest of liberal thinkers drew the obvious deduction. “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.” Urban ground-rents and royalties are, in fact, as the Prime Minister in his unregenerate days suggested, a tax which some persons are permitted by the law to levy upon the industry of others. They differ from public taxation only in that their amount increases in proportion not to the nation’s need of revenue but to its need of the coal and space on which they are levied, that their growth inures to private gain not to public benefit, and that if the proceeds are wasted on frivolous expenditure no one has any right to complain, because the arrangement by which Lord Smith spends wealth produced by Mr. Brown on objects which do no good to either is part of the system which, under the name of private property, Mr. Brown as well as Lord Smith have learned to regard as essential to the higher welfare of mankind.

But if we accept the principle of function we shall ask what is the purpose of this arrangement, and for what end the inhabitants of, for example, London pay $64,000,000 a year to their ground landlords. And if we find that it is for no purpose and no end, but that these things are like the horseshoes and nails which the City of London presents to the Crown on account of land in the Parish of St. Clement Danes, then we shall not deal harshly with a quaint historical survival, but neither shall we allow it to distract us from the business of the present, as though there had been history but there were not history any longer. We shall close these channels through which wealth leaks away by resuming the ownership of minerals and of urban land, as some communities in the British Dominions and on the Continent of Europe have resumed it already. 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. We shall treat mineral owners and landowners, in short, 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.

Industry as a Profession

Rights without functions are like the shades in Homer which drank blood but scattered trembling at the voice of a man. To extinguish royalties and urban ground-rents is merely to explode a superstition. It needs as little⁠—and as much⁠—resolution as to put one’s hand through any other ghost. In all industries except the diminishing number in which the capitalist is himself the manager, property in capital is almost equally passive. Almost, but not quite. For, though the majority of its owners do not themselves exercise any positive function, they appoint those who do. It is true, of course, that the question of how capital is to be owned is distinct from the question of how it is to be administered, and that the former can be settled without prejudice to the latter. To infer, because shareholders own capital which is indispensable to industry, that therefore industry is dependent upon the maintenance of capital in the hands of shareholders, to write, with some economists, as though, if private property in capital were further attenuated or abolished altogether, the constructive energy of the managers who may own capital or may not, but rarely, in the more important industries, own more than a small fraction of it, must necessarily be impaired, is to be guilty of a robust non sequitur and to ignore the most obvious facts of contemporary industry. The less the mere capitalist talks about the necessity for the consumer of an efficient organization of industry, the better; for, whatever the future of industry may be, an efficient organization is likely to have no room for him. But though shareholders do not govern, they reign, at least to the extent of saying once a year “le roy le veult.” If their rights are pared down or extinguished, the necessity for some organ to exercise them will still remain. And the question of the ownership of capital has this much in common with the question of industrial organization, that the problem of the constitution under which industry is to be conducted is common to both.

That constitution must be sought by considering how industry can be organized to express most perfectly the principle of purpose. The application to industry of the principle of purpose is