The Acquisitive Society quotes

Most generations, it might be said, walk in a path which they neither make, nor discover, but accept; the main thing is that they should march.

The blinkers worn by Englishmen enable them to trot all the more steadily along the beaten road, without being disturbed by curiosity as to their destination.

But if the medicine of the constitution ought not to be made its daily food, neither can its daily food be made its medicine. There are times which are not ordinary, and in such times it is not enough to follow the road.

It is a commonplace that the characteristic virtue of Englishmen is their power of sustained practical activity, and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles.

They are incurious as to theory, take fundamentals for granted, and are more interested in the state of the roads than in their place on the map.

And it might fairly be argued that in ordinary times that combination of intellectual tameness with practical energy is sufficiently serviceable to explain, if not to justify, the equanimity with which its possessors bear the criticism of more mentally adventurous nations.

for it makes a decision even if it refuses to decide. If it is to make a decision which will wear, it must travel beyond the philosophy momentarily in favor with the proprietors of its newspapers.

Unless it is to move with the energetic futility of a squirrel in a revolving cage, it must have a clear apprehension both of the deficiency of what is, and of the character of what ought to be.

And to obtain this apprehension it must appeal to some standard more stable than the momentary exigencies of its commerce or industry or social life, and judge them by it. It must, in short, have recourse to Principles.

The search for another involves reflection, which is uncongenial to the bustling people who describe themselves as practical, because they take things as they are and leave them as they are.

But the practical thing for a traveler who is uncertain of his path is not to proceed with the utmost rapidity in the wrong direction: it is to consider how to find the right one.

And the practical thing for a nation which has stumbled upon one of the turning-points of history is not to behave as though nothing very important were involved, as if it did not matter whether it turned to the right or to the left, went …

An appeal to principles is the condition of any considerable reconstruction of society, because social institutions are the visible expression of the scale of moral values which rules the minds of individuals, and it is impossible to alter institutions without altering that moral valuation.

Parliament, industrial organizations, the whole complex machinery through which society expresses itself, is a mill which grinds only what is put into it, and when nothing is put into it grinds air.

There are many, of course, who desire no alteration, and who, when it is attempted, will oppose it. They have found the existing economic order profitable in the past. They desire only such changes as will insure that it is equally profitable in the future.

Such rights are, strictly speaking, privileges.

For the definition of a privilege is a right to which no corresponding function is attached.

The enjoyment of property and the direction of industry are considered, in short, to require no social justification, because they are regarded as rights which stand by their own virtue, not functions to be judged by the success with which they contribute to a social …

… it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches, and therefore gives free play to one of the most powerful of human instincts.

To the strong it promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong.

Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expansion.

… fortune, because it treats all economic activities as standing upon the same level, and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces.

Under the impulse of such ideas men do not become religious or wise or artistic; for religion and wisdom and art imply the acceptance of limitations.

But they become powerful and rich. They inherit the earth and change the face of nature, if they do not possess their own souls;

Hence it divorces gain from service, and justifies rewards for which no function is performed, or which are out of all proportion to it.

Wealth in modern societies is distributed according to opportunity; and while opportunity depends partly upon talent and energy, it depends still more upon birth, social position, access to education and inherited wealth; in a word, upon property.

For talent and energy can create opportunity. But property need only wait for it. It is the sleeping partner who draws the dividends which the firm produces, the residuary legatee who always claims his share in the estate.

Wealth in modern societies is distributed according to opportunity; and while opportunity depends partly upon talent and energy, it depends still more upon birth, social position, access to education and inherited wealth; in a word, upon property.

For talent and energy can create opportunity. But property need only wait for it.

It is the sleeping partner who draws the dividends which the firm produces, the residuary legatee who always claims his share in the estate.

For they have abolished the principle which makes activity significant, and therefore estimable. They are, indeed, more truly pitiable than some of those who envy them.

For like the spirits in the Inferno, they are punished by the attainment of their desires.

A society ruled by these notions is necessarily the victim of an irrational inequality.

… the result of the application of science to war, and the idea that it is something inevitable in a community which uses coal and iron and machinery, so far from being the truth, is itself a product of the perversion of mind which industrialism produces.

Men may use what mechanical instruments they please and be none the worse for their use. What kills their souls is when they allow their instruments to use them.

The essence of industrialism, in short, is not any particular method of industry, but a particular estimate of the importance of industry, which results in it being thought the only thing that is important at all, so that it is elevated from the subordinate place …

It is a contempt for all interests which do not contribute obviously to economic activity. When the Press clamors that the one thing needed to make this island an Arcadia is productivity, and more productivity, and yet more productivity, that is Industrialism.

It is the confusion of means with ends.

Men will always confuse means with ends if they are without any clear conception that it is the ends, not the means, which matter—if they allow their minds to slip from the fact that it is the social purpose of industry which gives it meaning …

They rose together. It is probable that, if ever they decline, they will decline together. For life cannot be cut in compartments.

In the long run the world reaps in war what it sows in peace.

And to expect that international rivalry can be exorcised as long as the industrial order within each nation is such as to give success to those whose existence is a struggle for self-aggrandizement is a dream which has not even the merit of being beautiful.

… produce of his toil, then 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 someone else.

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

Property is not theft, but a good deal of theft becomes property. The owner of royalties who, when asked why he should be paid £50,000 a year from minerals which he has neither discovered nor developed nor worked but only owned, replies “But it’s Property!”

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

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

The owner of royalties who, when asked why he should be paid £50,000 a year from minerals which he has neither discovered nor developed nor worked but only owned, replies “But it’s Property!” may feel all the awe which his language suggests.

… suffer most from the abuses of property, as well as those who, if they could profit by them, would be least inclined to do so, will tolerate and even defend them, for fear lest the knife which trims dead matter should cut into the quick.

They have seen too many men drown to be critical of dry land, though it be an inhospitable rock.

They are haunted by the nightmare of the future, and, if a burglar broke it, would welcome a burglar.

… necessity of earning, must be maintained for the sake of the widow and the orphan, the vast majority of whom have neither and would gladly part with them all for a safe annuity if they had, is, to say the least of it, extravagantly malapropos.

It is like pitching a man into the water because he expresses a wish for a bath, or presenting a tiger cub to a householder who is plagued with mice, on the ground that tigers and cats both belong to the genus felis.

The tiger hunts for itself not for its masters, and when game is scarce will hunt them. The classes who own little or no property may reverence it because it is security.

For he is an owner of property. A landowner may draw rents from slums in which young children die at the rate of 200 per 1000; but he will be none the less welcome in polite society.

For property has no obligations and therefore can do no wrong.

Urban land may be held from the market on the outskirts of cities in which human beings are living three to a room, and rural land may be used for sport when villagers are leaving it to overcrowd them still more.

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.

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.

Every country has its traitors, every army its deserters, and every profession its blacklegs.

To idealize the professional spirit would be very absurd; it has its sordid side, and, if it is to be fostered in industry, safeguards will be needed to check its excesses.

The phrase is apposite, since it is as absurd as the relations of which it is intended to be a description.

To deplore “ill-feeling” or to advocate “harmony” between “labor and capital” is as rational as to lament the bitterness between carpenters and hammers or to promote a mission for restoring amity between mankind and its boots.

The only significance of these clichés is that their repetition tends to muffle their inanity, even to the point of persuading sensible men that capital “employs” labor, much as our pagan ancestors imagined that the other pieces of wood and iron, which they deified in …

When men have gone so far as to talk as though their idols have come to life, it is time that someone broke them.

Labor consists of persons, capital of things.

The only use of things is to be applied to the service of persons. The business of persons is to see that they are there to use, and that no more than need be is paid for using them.

It is quite another to be a director of a railway company or coal corporation with a minimum rate of profit guaranteed by the State, and a maximum rate of profit which cannot be exceeded.

Hybrids are apt to be sterile.

It may be questioned whether, in drawing the teeth of private capitalism, this type of compromise does not draw out most of its virtues as well.

Nor is it appropriate to the situation to indulge in full-blooded denunciations of the “selfishness” of the working classes. “To draw an indictment against a whole nation” is a procedure which is as impossible in industry as it is in politics.

Institutions must be adapted to human nature, not human nature to institutions.

If the effect of the industrial system is such that a large and increasing number of ordinary men and women find that it offers them no adequate motive for economic effort, it is mere pedantry to denounce men and women instead of amending the system.

He has neither the service of docile obedience, nor the service of intelligent cooperation.

For slavery will work⁠—as long as the slaves will let it; and freedom will work when men have learned to be free; but what will not work is a combination of the two.

So the public goes short of coal not only because of the technical deficiencies of the system under which it is raised and distributed, but because the system itself has lost its driving force—because the coal owners can no longer persuade the miners into producing …

… the golden sixties, when workmen were docile and confiding, and trade unions were still half illegal, and foreign competition meant English competition in foreign countries, and prices were rising a little and not rising too much, is the one Utopia which can never be realized.

The King may walk naked as long as his courtiers protest that he is clad; but when a child or a fool has broken the spell a tailor is more important than all their admiration.

If the public, which suffers from the slackening of economic activity, desires to end its malaise, it will not laud as admirable and all-sufficient the operation of motives which are plainly ceasing to move.

It is trying to produce its results by conquering professional feeling instead of using it. It is carrying not only its inevitable economic burdens, but an ever increasing load of ill will and skepticism.

It has in fact “shot the bird which caused the wind to blow” and goes about its business with the corpse round its neck.

Compared with that psychological incubus, the technical deficiencies of industry, serious though they often are, are a bagatelle, and the business men who preach the gospel of production without offering any plan for dealing with what is now the central fact in the economic situation, …

… knowledge of practical men who know by daily experience the points at which the details of administration can be improved, and the stimulus to efficiency springing from the corporate pride of a profession which is responsible for maintaining and improving the character of its service.

Professional spirit is a force like gravitation, which in itself is neither good nor bad, but which the engineer uses, when he can, to do his work for him.

If it is foolish to idealize it, it is equally shortsighted to neglect it.

… equipment and organization, the shortage of trams, rails, tubs and timber, the “creaming” of the pits by the working of easily got coal to their future detriment, their wasteful layout caused by the vagaries of separate ownership, by which at present the output is reduced.

The public cannot have it both ways. If it allows workmen to be treated as “hands” it cannot claim the service of their wills and their brains.

If it desires them to show the zeal of skilled professionals, it must secure that they have sufficient power to allow of their discharging professional responsibilities.

For ultimately, if by slow degrees, power follows the ability to wield it; authority goes with function.

The workers cannot have it both ways. They must choose whether to assume the responsibility for industrial discipline and become free, or to repudiate it and continue to be serfs.

If, organized as professional bodies, they can provide a more effective service than that which is now, with increasing difficulty, extorted by the agents of capital, they will have made good their hold upon the future.

If they cannot, they will remain among the less calculable instruments of production which many of them are today.

The instinct of mankind warns it against accepting at their face value spiritual demands which cannot justify themselves by practical achievements.

And the road along which the organized workers, like any other class, must climb to power, starts from the provision of a more effective economic service than their masters, as their grip upon industry becomes increasingly vacillating and uncertain, are able to supply.

… organized workers have secured advances, their own salaries have often remained almost stationary, because they have been too genteel to take part in trade unionism, and that today they are sometimes paid less than the men for whose work they are supposed to be responsible.

Regarded by the workmen as the hangers-on of the masters, and by their employers as one section among the rest of the “hands,” they have the odium of capitalism without its power or its profits.

From the conversion of industry into a profession those who at present do its intellectual work have as much to gain as the manual workers.

… in the course of the nineteenth century did not admit any principle of organization other than the convenience of the individual, who by enterprise, skill, good fortune, unscrupulous energy or mere nepotism, happened at any moment to be in a position to wield economic authority.

His powers were what he could exercise; his rights were what at any time he could assert.

The Lancashire mill-owner of the fifties was, like the Cyclops, a law unto himself.

His powers were what he could exercise; his rights were what at any time he could assert.

The Lancashire mill-owner of the fifties was, like the Cyclops, a law unto himself.

Hence, since subordination and discipline are indispensable in any complex undertaking, the subordination which emerged in industry was that of servant to master, and the discipline such as economic strength could impose upon economic weakness.

He would not suffer from the perversion of values which rates the talent and energy by which wealth is created lower than the possession of property, which is at best their pensioner and at worst the spendthrift of what intelligence has produced.

In a society organized for the encouragement of creative activity those who are esteemed most highly will be those who create, as in a world organized for enjoyment they are those who own.

Such considerations are too general and abstract to carry conviction. Greater concreteness may be given them by comparing the present position of mine-managers with that which they would occupy were effect given to Mr. Justice Sankey’s scheme for the nationalization of the Coal Industry.

… The reason for its falling short is undoubtedly that the men directing it had been trained in a business system operated for profits, and did not understand one operated solely for production.

This is no criticism of the men as individuals; they simply did not know the job, and, what is worse, they did not know that they did not know it.

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