Are the rewards of the successful enterpriser greater than he deserves? How shall it be judged what he deserves? The answer is in the form of a question, Could society have the service without the reward? Society may be thought of as hiring the services of the efficient business man at the lowest price. Does it wish the services of Cornelius Vanderbilt in organizing a great system of railroads, of Andrew Carnegie, of Pierpont Morgan? What can it get them for? It must appeal not only to their love of money but to their love of power. Large services and large results can be bought only with large rewards. The shrewd enterpriser is not to be paid with abstract social gratitude. He is not to be tricked, as is a Chinese god, with tissue-paper gold.
But in many ways fortunes appear to grow without social services, and sometimes with social harm. Russell Sage, the noted capitalist (who should know something of Wall Street), in speaking of the greatest of American corporations, said: "They dominate wherever they choose to go. They can make and unmake any property, no matter how vast. They can almost compel any man to sell out anything, at any price." Henry Clews, the well-known New York banker, said of a certain group of financiers: "Their resources are so vast that they need only to concentrate on any given property in order to do with it what they please.... There is an utter absence of chance that is terrible to contemplate. This combination controls Wall Street almost absolutely. With such power and facilities it is easily conceivable that these men must make enormous sums on either side of the market."
2. The high pay of rare ability and skilled labor reflects in general a high social service. The large income of some men reflects service to a narrow class, not to society as a whole. Lawyers as a class aid in maintaining right, but a corporation lawyer may get enormous fees for defeating just public claims; a skilful criminal lawyer may grow rich aiding the guilty to escape justice. Other service ministers to the whims, follies, and vices of the men who pay the bill. Such a service is "social" in a mean sense, corresponding to the low standards of desire in that social group. But what of the high rewards of skilled service ministering to worthy ends? Such favorites of fortune as Jenny Lind and Patti have received five thousand dollars for a single concert. Is this because they are the lucky possessors of a rare gift, or because they perform a social service deserving such reward? Certainly many of their auditors get what they want and believe they are getting the worth of their money.
In general the legal right of everyone to get the highest pay he can in a free and open market is essential to the calling forth of ability. In a particular instance it is possible that the service would continue if one half or more of the income were confiscated by the public; but such a personal discrimination would introduce an arbitrary and demoralizing uncertainty into the problem. Who can tell how far the exceptional money rewards have inspired to the highest cultivation of great genius and of many minor talents? In a broad but very true sense, therefore, it appears that high personal achievement, large economic reward, and large social service are connected.
3. The low income of unskilled labor seems to fall short of its social service. This does not refer to the feeble-minded or utterly inefficient, but rather to honest, industrious, "day-laborers," and to the low-paid manual workers in field, on railroad, and in factory. Their service is essential to the existence of society as it is, to all the higher arts, to the sciences, and to the amenities of life; their tasks are the roughest, most painful, most dangerous; yet their pecuniary rewards are the lowest. There is such a unity in society that each more fortunate man is dependent on the services of the humbler laborers who make up a large part of society. According to the breadth of social sympathy their claims seem more or less urgent.
There is a vaguely recognized and growing conviction that these hewers of wood and drawers of water should enjoy a larger income. But how are they to get it? How is society to grant it to them? They get what they can under the competitive conditions, they get what their service is worth in the market. Are the conditions of the competition fair? If not, what will be the effect of a change? If they get more, others will get less; and with what result? However great the wish for better things, the attempt to change conditions fundamentally in a forcible and artificial way is both dangerous and foolish. Improvement must come through the coöperation of many indirect agencies gradually changing the nature and direction of the deeper economic forces.
4. The services of each are being measured and paid for by each and all. In two ways society is putting its valuation on the economic services of other members of society: first, by law, or formal social convention; secondly, by individual estimates. By formal law is determined what institutions shall be continued. If the class of property owners is considered worthy of this reward, the institution of property will be continued; if not, it will be altered or destroyed. These decisions are made imperfectly, but as well as men of limited intelligence and honesty can make them. If men were more capable in both these ways they would enact better laws. Again, individuals are putting their estimates on others in bidding for services to minister to wisdom and virtue or to ignorance and vice. If there is to be a much juster estimate of social service, there must be wiser men in society.
Does the world owe each man a living? No; on the contrary, each man owes the world his services in exchange for his living. The pauperism of spirit that consists in taking something for nothing is found in every rank of society that enjoys the blessings of progress without giving its best services in return. The ideal of a better adjustment of reward and service grows in the minds of men. Social evolution, shaped by this changing ideal and by accumulating experience, will bring into closer relation the social services and the economic rewards of men.
1. The accidental destruction of wealth is a loss to the owner, rarely with benefit, on the whole, to others. In the consumption of wealth the loss of its utility is accompanied by the gratifying of wants; in the destruction of wealth utility is lost without the gratifying of wants. In a simple society, without exchange, the result of such a loss is evident. If food is destroyed, men suffer from hunger or gratify appetite less perfectly; if clothing is destroyed, they are cold; if houses are destroyed, they have no shelter. Likewise, if the self-sufficing family on a farm loses wealth by fire or storm or blight, its economic environment is made less fitted to gratify wants. In the conditions of our society, where goods are exchanged, the result appears to be different. The need to replace the lost goods makes a demand for special kinds of labor or goods. There may be, therefore, an immediate benefit to some, which obscures the corresponding loss to others. If a part of the income of the loser must be diverted from other uses to replace the wealth destroyed, those from whom he would have bought suffer an unexpected falling off of their sales, and he has himself gained nothing. The net result is a loss of wealth and gratification to the community as a whole.
There is a real exception where the accidental destruction removes some social difficulty. The great fire in London and the great fire in Chicago resulted in wonderful improvement. When an old city is built almost entirely of wood, each owner may think it to his interest to keep the old buildings. A great fire sweeps them all down and compels the rebuilding of the city on a new and higher standard. But the usual social result of accidental destruction is a loss. It is a use of wealth without a fulfilling of the purpose of production, the gratifying of wants.
2. The intentional destruction of wealth by the owner, to make trade good, benefits neither himself nor others. The case in mind is one where there is full choice between keeping or losing the good, not such a case as the throwing overboard of a part of the cargo when the ship is in danger of sinking, in the hope thereby of saving the rest, or as the blowing up of buildings to prevent the spread of a fire. In such cases the destruction is inevitable without man's action; he merely tries to minimize it. The case in mind is the deliberate destruction of wealth that might be kept for use. One labor leader, for example, boasted that when he drank pop he always broke the bottle "to make trade good" by helping the glass industry. The refuting of this fallacy is one of the time-honored tasks in political economy. There is, it is true, an increase in the demand for glass and glass-blowers' labor, but without an increase in gratification; but at the same time there is a decrease in the demand for other goods which would afford additional gratification. The proverb, old in Shakespeare's time, runs, "Nothing can come of nothing." What is spent for one purpose cannot be for another; "you cannot eat your cake and have it too." A given income can be spent in one of many ways, but not in all ways or even in two ways at once. It is a question of this or that. At the same moment that the demand for pop-bottles is increased, the demand for other things is decreased, possibly that for pop-corn or pop-guns or Populist papers—who can tell? Such a form of benevolence is a mistaken, uneconomic attempt to provide labor for one man by taking it from another.
If the advocate of wealth-destruction would be consistent, he should break, not merely the pop-bottle, but the water-pitcher and the table as well; he should make a bonfire at least once daily of his clothing, his house, and its furnishings; he should advise blowing up the steamboat and ripping up the railroad when they have carried a single load of passengers. Thus, when all men were naked and starving, and civilization had sunk to savagery, trade would have been made as "good" as, by the policy of destruction, he could ever hope to make it.
3. The intentional destruction of wealth owned by other persons is falsely thought to benefit trade in general. The cases referred to are not acts done with criminal motives, but those done with a view to the public interest. If one sets fire to the property of another, seeking revenge or plunder, he is guilty of the crime of arson. But what shall be said of volunteer firemen that let an old house burn down to provide labor for carpenters and "to make business good"? The duty of firemen is to put out fires, no matter what the building is; but they choose sometimes to be ministers to the social interest as they interpret it. The more spent for carpenters' work out of any income, the less can be spent for other objects. It is true, however, that if in a small town the money to rebuild is borrowed from a distant loan or insurance company, there is an increase in employment in that town for one season; and that is as far as most men try to carry their economic analysis. Let the student carry it further.
Servants sometimes excuse the breaking of dishes and furniture on the ground that it makes work, and that the employer can afford it. But income is thus diverted from other expenditure, either for production or for consumption. In the light of the theory of wages, it would appear that carelessness reduces the servant's own efficiency, and in the long run the loss comes, in part at least, off the wages of that particular servant. Bastiat's discussion of the broken window-pane is often and deservedly quoted. What is seen is a certain immediate benefit that the glass-maker and glazier get; what is not seen is that the power to expend an equal amount for other things is thereby lost by the owner of the house.
4. The destruction of unnecessarily large value to secure a given gratification is not economically sound. The careless use of wealth to secure an inadequate result is likewise justified as "making trade good." The blunder that compels the rebuilding of a wall in a rich man's garden is an occasion for congratulation to those who see in it a happy provision of work for the unemployed. It is easy to forget that the proper use of goods is the final step in production. According as goods are well or poorly used, the production—that is, the real income or gratification they afford—is large or small. Differences in skill in the use of wealth are great. A French cook, we are often told, can make a palatable soup from what goes from the average American kitchen into the swill-pail. Waste in the use of goods is more likely to be found in new countries where wealth comes more easily and necessity does not enforce frugality.
The praise of waste implies the error noted in the preceding propositions. Deliberately securing less than the maximum result from wealth is merely a minor degree of the intentional destruction of wealth. The mistaken view is essentially that of the opponents of labor-saving machinery. It may be true, if the interests of a small class of workers or of tradesmen for the moment are looked at; it is false, if the interests of society as a whole be considered. Far more of wisdom lies in the proverb, "A penny saved is two earned." The economic use of wealth as surely adds to wealth (and, ultimately, to the income of society) as any other mode of production.
Some government expenditures, as for river and harbor improvements, are sometimes favored, not because their immediate purposes are good, but because they "make work" and "distribute money" throughout the country. This money comes from taxation, and no matter what the system of taxation, the burden falls on some one, reducing the incomes at the disposal of the people to expend for objects of their own choice. If the work is not worth doing for itself, the collection of money in small amounts from many taxpayers and its expenditure as a large sum in one locality results in a net loss to society as a whole. Where the result is worth something, but not enough by itself to justify the expenditure, the fallacy of the destruction of wealth is present in a smaller degree. Examples are seen in the extreme use of pensions and in some public subsidies.
5. The supposed benefits of destruction and waste are due to a narrow and incomplete view of the question. Let us restate the ideas that have been touched upon. In many cases it is possible that one person may benefit by another's mishap or folly in the use of wealth. The complex interrelations of men in society make this inevitable. But, to appreciate the final effects of such action upon society, one needs but to go back to the essential thought of wealth and its purposes. As the average efficiency and bounty of the world fall, so fall the income and welfare of men. As it rises, the social and economic levels rise also. Every kind of economic wealth has potentially two kinds of uses: to gratify wants—thus fulfilling its destiny—or to be converted into higher and more efficient agents—consumption or production. That the possibilities of the latter are boundless is overlooked in the fallacies here criticized. An efficient world would be the result of "economy" and saving; a wasted and used-up world, the result of the fallacy of the destruction and waste of wealth.
1. Luxury, while variously defined, involves always the thought of great consumption of wealth for unessential pleasures. It is not possible to define luxury absolutely; it is a relative term. Those opposed to it condemn it in their definition of it, as, for example: "an excessive consumption of wealth," or "devoting a relatively large amount of wealth to the satisfaction of a relatively superfluous want." Those who take a more moderate and favorable view say: "It is the enjoyment of forms of wealth not obtainable by the mass of men." The difficulty in the definition as well as in the problem of luxury is that it involves a mixture of economic and of ethical questions.
2. Luxury is erroneously justified by some as giving employment to labor. Typical instances are extravagant dress and elaborate balls where fine and costly flowers, decorations, music, coaches, require the expenditure of a large amount of money. It is said of the Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, that, in order to help the glove industry of France, she wore no pair of gloves more than once; in order to help other French industries, she purchased many silks and laces. It is a very comfortable doctrine to some people that the oftener they change their dress, the greater benefactors to society they are. A few years ago the "Bradley-Martin ball" was given in New York city. It was possibly little more elaborate and expensive than many another ball, but it chanced to be a dull time for news and the papers all over the land gave columns to its discussion. In the many interviews with ministers and business men, the thought appeared over and over that the ball had at least the merit of giving employment to labor.
The fallacy of this is essentially the same as that in the argument for waste and destruction. From the fact that these particular tailors, musicians, and florists would have less employment if this ball were not given, it is falsely concluded that, but for this ball, this particular income, or capital, would not be used at all. The average of employment in those special industries which minister to luxury is the result of and is determined by the average level of demand. There are more caterers and florists in Ithaca than in Hayt's Corners. A more than ordinarily gay season gives unusual profits to these enterprises, and it is true that an abrupt and extreme falling off in demand would cause them large losses, and leave many workers lacking employment for that one season. But, if this limited demand became usual, capital and labor would shift to the other industries to which expenditure had shifted. Other modes of expenditure than twenty-five thousand-dollar balls are possible, as, for example, twenty-five thousand-dollar public libraries. Mr. Carnegie takes his dissipation in that form. That gives employment also; not less does investment in new houses, in new railroads, and in new factories. More employment of a particular kind of labor is caused in one case than in another, but not more employment of labor as a whole and on the average.
3. If all extreme luxury ceased, men of means would improve durable agents more or would give more or would take more leisure while producing less. The question of luxury is most difficult when put thus: What would happen if everybody began suddenly to live on the simplest food and to confine himself to the bare necessities of life? A sudden change of this sort is almost unthinkable, but if it took place, all the factories and agents used for non-essentials would lose their value at once. A great industrial crisis would follow, as industry would have to adjust itself abruptly to an unprecedented standard of desires. What would happen if that standard continued would vary as human nature varies. There might follow increase of population, or a heightening of the efficiency of such agents as were of use, or, more probable than all else, a progressive lightening of labor, a use of the surplus of energy in study, rest, and recreation. It is, of course, illogical to suppose that with limited desires for the objective goods of the world there would continue undiminished efforts to produce goods and to save for future superfluities. In actual life changes of standard occur gradually. Economizing in material things by simpler living makes possible not only the increased efficiency of productive agents but the increased enjoyment of immaterial goods.
4. The defenders of luxury claim that it is the great incentive to progress. It is undoubtedly true that a dead level of conditions is unfavorable to the progress of society. There must be in society some motive for emulation and ambition after the bare necessities of life are provided. There is therefore much strength in the defense of luxury. Necessities, strictly understood, are things absolutely essential to life and health. No hard line can be drawn between necessities and comforts, between comforts and luxuries. The level rises; it is a trite and true saying that the luxuries of one age become the necessities of the next. The rise of the bath-tub in the nineteenth century is an epitome of the progress of civilization in that period. The free baths in our cities surpass the hopes of the wealthy of a century ago. Even the meaner motives of envy may have their social function. The lower social grades, emulous of the higher standard held before them, labor with greater energy. The successful and capable, not content with necessities, continue to give their efforts to production. The destruction of the motive of luxury before the development of a substitute in a higher social conscience, would be paralyzing to industry. Luxury in a moderate measure may be defended by the same arguments as those for private property. True as this view may be in many cases, in others it seems directly opposed to the facts. Let us look at the economico-moral questions involved from the side of the individual who is indulging in luxury, and from that of the society in which he lives.
5. As a question of consumption luxury involves for the individual both an economic and a moral problem. The economic question is, Does luxury enhance the man's real income? Does a greater expenditure on himself give him a larger sum of gratification in life than a moderate expenditure would give? Ostentation has its penalties. Undue striving after effect defeats its own purpose. This is the cold fact of experience, not a speculative proposition. To get back to the fundamental principle: gratification results from a harmonious relation between man's nature and the world. Life loaded with too much luggage staggers under the burden. The tired faculties of the Sybarite cease at length to respond to natural pleasures. When the senses are robbed of their fineness, youth grows blasé, mature manhood is ennuied, life is empty. The praise of "the simple life" has lately been heard in a quarter whence such counsel does not usually come. In gay Paris, a wise pastor has made one of the most beautiful and rational pleas for plain and sincere living that society has heard since the time of the stoic philosophers. The word is needed. With the growth of incomes grows the strain to reach the self-imposed standards of frivolity. Insanity and suicide are on the increase. The stress of modern life makes men yearn for the simpler joys. Happiness dwells not outside of men; they must seek it within.
An economic failure, luxury is likewise in most cases a moral failure. Morality has to do with others; the social aspect of luxury is its effect on other people. The mere spending of a large income in selfish indulgence absorbs all the energies and interests of some men and women. Not only happiness in the narrow sense, but self-realization, is to such lives impossible. Those absorbed in display can give no due measure of thought to social obligations. A society made up of self-absorbed and self-centered individuals is a selfish society, foredoomed to decay.
6. The larger moral problem involved in luxury is connected with distribution or the justice of the income, rather than with consumption or the spending of the income. The individual effects of luxury broaden thus into the larger social effects. Most of the enemies of luxury condemn all expenditure of wealth above a very moderate sum, declaring that it is "unjust" for one man to have much while others are in poverty. This communistic doctrine pervades the teaching of many moral teachers, pagan and Christian. In many ways a public opinion can be developed to disapprove and condemn ostentation. Frivolous display becomes bad taste. Flaunting riches meet the public frown. The spending of income for dress and display has never been successfully forbidden by law. The Middle Ages are full of futile sumptuary laws which sprang from the envy of the nobles for the wealthy merchants. The growth of good taste may do what formal law found impossible.
The use of wealth in these days is taking more social directions. It turns from dress toward education, art, music, and travel; then ceases to be applied merely to self and family, and benefits the community. Nowhere and never before has this movement gone so far as in America. Andrew Carnegie, with his gifts of millions annually to public libraries; Peter Cooper, founder of the People's Institute; Ezra Cornell, the patron and prophet of the modern type of higher education—are citizens of a kind better known in this country than in any other.
The immorality of luxury rests in most minds on the conviction that it is unjust that any one should have so large an income to use. The question of luxury leads back to the question of distribution: Has the man honestly gained his wealth? If so, he may spend it with good judgment or poor, with good taste or bad, but, so long as he does not injure others in the spending of it, there is much vagueness and confusion in the talk of "justice" or "injustice." Each must in large measure be his own judge of the wisdom of expenditure. Luxury is not always a question of wealth. Every person of moderate income has relatively superfluous and expensive tastes. One spends more for music than many a millionaire does; another more for books. How many college students' budgets could pass the censorship of Hetty Green, reputed to be the richest woman in America? If expenditures were regulated by the public, few persons would be within the law. But whatever the goods that are bought, if income is unjustly acquired, if its distribution is by rules that do not give the best possible approach to social service, there may well be talk of injustice. There is need of better standards of taste and judgment in expenditure, but not of sumptuary laws. If there is any legal change, it should be rather in the law of property.
1. Economic consumption is the enjoyment of the utilities which wealth is capable of affording. All wealth looks toward consumption. To take away the prospect of the enjoyment of goods is to take away all their value. Consumption involves generally the using up of a thing. Food is consumed quickly, clothing more slowly, and houses wear out after many years. The using up is, in some cases, due to the forces of nature, and is not hastened by enjoyment. A house goes to ruin more rapidly if uninhabited than with a careful tenant; clothing is destroyed more quickly by moths than by wear. The use of many goods that give esthetic pleasures, as art, painting, sculpture, and the enjoyment of fine scenery or of beautiful building sites, does not destroy the things that afford the pleasure. The idea that all value originates in labor has led to false views on this question. The essential mark of consumption is the using of the income as it arises, not necessarily the using up of the material agents that afford it, though this frequently occurs as well.
2. The kind of consumption affects the value of material agents. Each buyer helps to determine the use of productive agents. The control of purchasing power means the potential control of industry to that degree. It was necessary in discussing the enterpriser to recognize that the buyer eventually dictates the direction of industry; the enterpriser seeks to produce that for which there is most demand. A change of taste affects the value of natural agents. An increase in the demand for meat affects the value of wheat and potatoes, and also the land used for producing them. A change in the national diet may be equivalent to the discovery or to the destruction of half a continent. If one chooses to drink wine instead of buying statuary, he increases the value of vineyards and decreases that of marble quarries: If one drinks beer, he bids for barley; if he eats candy, he may be offering a bounty for beets. Therefore, choosing vines or violets, pictures or pretzels, each with his nickel helps to determine what shall be produced.
The distribution of wealth thus affects the value of agents. The wealthy spend relatively more for luxuries, the poor for food and other essentials. Where wealth and incomes are very nearly equally distributed, the demand of different families will be for much the same kinds of goods. If there were no rich men, the demand for vineyards producing fine wines would be less. The very best qualities of goods take on the highest prices when there is a small, but very wealthy, class of purchasers.
Inventions often shift demand, and value follows. The invention of the bicycle with pneumatic tires, coincident with the adoption of electric traction for street cars, reduced the price of horses between 1890 and 1895. This doubtless was a factor in agricultural land values at that time. This change was sudden, extreme, and temporary, and there has since been a gradual adjustment and a return to the former values.
3. The production of the next period may be radically affected by the use now made of agents. Some consumption takes the form of using up and reducing the stock of wealth. The demand for lumber causes the disappearance of the forests, whereas the demand for oranges stimulates the planting of orange trees. The reckless exploitation of natural resources leaves society poorer. Great herds of buffalo were slaughtered to get the hides, which were of comparatively slight value. Rich land has been exhausted to get a few harvests.
War is a use of wealth for ends believed at the time to be necessary and believed to forward social welfare better in the long run than would dishonorable submission; but it causes misery and leaves industry prostrate. The forms taken by saving are affected by the choice of expenditure. In war the savings of individuals are given to the government and used for destructive purposes. The lender parts with his wealth and society uses it up. While the lender has a claim on the industry and on the remaining property of the community, society as a whole is the poorer. If the savings had taken the form of public buildings, libraries, railroads, and factories, the wealth and income of society as a whole would have been enhanced.
4. The kind of consumption affects the wages of the various classes of labor. That an increase in the supply of a given grade of labor reduces its wages and encourages its use, and vice versa, is a truth that became familiar in the study of wages. An influence also is exerted from the side of goods upon the price of labor. A shift of demand from one kind of goods to another depresses the wage of the one kind of labor and raises that of the other. A low grade of labor that performs only simple tasks, and those but badly, is injured if demand shifts to better products. Back of the sweat-shop shirt is the problem of the inefficient worker. Progress takes place by the effort of labor to increase its efficiency and to move into higher paid callings, and at the same time by the desire of the purchaser to buy as good a quality as he can.
Every buyer then determines in some degree the direction of industry. The market is a democracy where every penny gives a right of vote. It is the thought of the society called "The Consumers' League" that through purchases, pressure may be brought to bear upon the employer to provide better conditions of work. The members of The Consumers' League refuse to buy goods not made under sanitary conditions. Undoubtedly there is here a great economic force which an enlightened public opinion, even without a formal association, can make in large measure effective. Every individual may organize a consumer's league, leaguing himself with the powers of righteousness. Will he read a yellow journal or a pink or a white one? A nickel or two will buy either. He has a dollar; will he go to the theater or buy ten dishes of ice-cream? He decides to buy a book, and more type and paper are made, and more printers are employed; he subscribes to foreign missions and Christian workers penetrate farther into Africa. Every purchase has far-reaching consequences. You may spend your monthly allowance as an agent of iniquity or of truth. You cannot escape a choice even by burying the money, for that is either a demand for gold or a gift to the issuer of paper currency.
1. All consumption works some temporary change in the consumer, making him a more or less efficient producer. Most consumption goods are used to gratify a wish of the moment. Many actions are governed by impulse rather than by reason; but in general this impulse is in harmony with the interests of efficiency. In primitive society instinct and appetite must generally have been safe guides. Food not merely appeased hunger and gratified the palate, but it gave strength. Sensations of cold, hunger, and thirst were developed by nature to stimulate men to do the things that helped them to survive. In primitive societies there are few chances to seek pleasures that are not favorable to efficiency. In the struggle for existence the more efficient tribes survive, and those that develop many abnormal tastes must perish. But the conditions of modern life are more complex, and temptations beset men on every side. Tastes are pampered and appetite is gratified at the expense of later welfare.
2. The physical efficiency of the worker is conditioned on wise consumption. Chemists and physiologists are telling now in accurate terms how the nutritive values of foods differ. Food values are not measured by the pleasure afforded the palate. The wide variety and greater choice now possible, even to the modest purse, make the chance of error much greater than in simpler conditions. This subject, already touched upon in the sections on the efficiency of labor, deserves further notice. From youth to age, the foolish choice of goods yields its harvest of ultimate misery. When babies are fed on crackers dipped in coffee, or, as among the Italian immigrants, on stale bread dipped in sour wine, there is a poor foundation laid for a vigorous manhood. Rich and poor cook too much for taste and too little for nutrition or digestion. Much cooking is still done in ways fit only for our grandfathers who had cast-iron stomachs and worked in the open air. Culinary methods have not been adapted as yet to a sedentary life.
Drinking tempts some men not only by taste, but by the appeal to sociability; to other coarser natures the joys of Bacchus offer the one hope of exhilaration. The pleasure from alcoholic liquor may at the moment outweigh the cost in money, but a diseased appetite forbids any reckoning of the vast psychic cost that follows. The coin paid for the drink is the beginning of the expense; misery, disgrace, degeneracy, and bestialty too often are the unreckoned items.
Clothing is primarily for ornament, secondly for physical comfort. That was the historical order, and it is the logical order in most minds to-day. How badly the two needs are harmonized! No wonder that the savage suffers in adopting civilized dress. Travelers describe the African potentate, attired in a high hat and a bracelet, striving to outshine his rival resplendent in full-dress coat and a palm-leaf fan. Civilization is making headway there; but the student of primitive peoples finds one of the important causes of their decay to be their bad judgment in adopting civilized dress, unsuited to their customs and climate. A mistake is made likewise by workers in physical tasks in imitating the dress of the wealthy and professional classes. The dress of the higher classes often is chosen because of its unsuitableness for an active worker. It serves thus to mark its wearer as one engaged in delicate tasks or as a person of leisure. Possibly, therefore, because of their strong social ambitions, the manual workers in America more than elsewhere adopt a costume that is not sensible or sanitary.
3. The intelligence of the worker is affected by the form of his enjoyments. This does not refer to the use made of spare time for regular study in night schools, correspondence schools, vacation work, but to the use of time when seeking recreation. The choice of recreation reacts upon the nature of the man. Will he read a book or play billiards? In proper proportions both may be good, in excess both are evil. Liking realism, does he read Howells or the blood-curdling serial entitled "Piping the Mystery"? Does he devote his spare hours to the "Scientific American" or to the "Police Gazette"? At the moment there may be as much pleasure in one as in the other (and one might add, in Hibernian phrase, "Yes, and more too."). Does he enjoy music, the theater, or the cheaper attractions of Coney Island and the Bowery? Is his recreation permeated with a certain intellectual ambition? There may be just as much momentary joy in one choice as in another, and life is shaped by the direction of one's enjoyments. Much depends on the natural bent; some natures incline to the healthy as the plant grows toward the sun. With most characters much depends on the influences of neighborhood life; thus the boy's clubs and college settlements of the cities, the schools and playgrounds of the villages, are tending to surround child life with healthier conditions, that will mould it into better social habits.
4. The form of the worker's expenditures affects his industrial virtues. This is not a moral lecture; it is a look at the economic side of the subject. There are some moral qualities, however, that are closely connected with efficiency, while others are not. Some individuals are corrupt in private personal relations, but "square" in business dealings. But usually there is some connection between the two, and under modern conditions this is becoming closer. Fitness for daily tasks is affected by the daily thoughts of the worker. Sordid and foul thoughts, like an internal malady, sap the economic efficiency of the worker; clean, bright thoughts act as a tonic. Drink, gambling, fast living, unfit men for positions of trust, while many pastimes leave the moral nature cleaner and stronger. Few can live a double life—honorable, conscientious, and exact in one part of the day, and corrupt in another. Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes are not often found in real life. The habitual train of thought in leisure hours possesses and controls the man throughout his work. It is said that "A man is what his work makes him," but it is equally true that a man's work tends to become what he is. A man fit for a higher kind of work rises to it in the usual order of things; but no matter how humble the task, it partakes of the worth and wholesomeness of its doer.
1. Man and his welfare are the end and aim of the economic process. The starting point of industry is wants; the goal is welfare. Momentary gratification is only a way-station, not the journey's end. Too often, in economic reasoning, things are looked at from the employer's point of view. The older writers, such as Ricardo and Mill, were inclined to take what John B. Clark has called the "feed and work" view,—the view that the workman is merely an agent of production, a means to an end; that his food, the same as coal for an engine, is to be thought of rather as employer's cost than as consumer's gratification. But, in the broader view, the welfare of men as men is the subject most worthy of economic study. The workman's food is to gratify his hunger, primarily; not merely to make him a better working machine. This reverses the order of the older reasoning. The use made of the income is itself a kind of production—its last stage. Is the process, on the whole, worth while? This can only be judged by finding whether, on the whole, the welfare of man has been furthered.
2. An income yields the maximum gratification when it is apportioned among goods so that their marginal utilities, as nearly as possible, are equal. Even a small income is income capable of many applications. The choice lies among many thousands of articles. Utility varies not only according to the kinds of good, but according to the varying quantities of each. Every moment, therefore, the conditions of a choice are changing. The best use of income forbids the purchase of an additional unit of any good unless it affords the highest gratification obtainable, at the moment, at an equal price. Various circumstances prevent the exact application of this rule. Expenditure is a matter of habit, in large measure, rather than a matter of judgment. The knowledge needed for a rational choice very often is lacking. Appetites change, making unwise the old purchases, yet men go on buying the same things in the same proportions simply because a readjustment that would give greater gratification requires thought. Finally, the best economic adjustment must conform to the abiding physical and moral welfare of the user, not to a temporary impulse; and such a choice is far more difficult than that of the temporary good.
3. Progress takes place where new wealth gratifies marginal wants as intense as those of the preceding period. If the utility of every kind of goods decreased uniformly as wealth increased, desire would steadily decline in intensity. But old wants vary and new wants develop with prosperity. Desire grows by what it feeds on. Ambition passes on to other and higher peaks. The direction of the individual man's life thus is determined by the expenditure of his increasing income. Wealth makes possible a new adjustment of life, a new character, both in the individual and in the society.