X Whom Do I Rob?

x WHOM DO I ROB . ? BACON, who must have been a poor judge of economic matters, said: "Property is like muck; it is good Qnly if it be spread." A consensus of opinion would, no doubt, declare that it would be better if an income such as mine were more widely dispersed. Most people would, for instance, argue that ten separate incomes of £1,000 a year would be better for the community than one income of £10,000 a year. Even those who are free from the folly of thinking that wealth is the cause of poverty, are many of them inclil!ed to believe that a more level .distribution' of it would be for the advantage of all. Although the Communist agitator does not generally inform his audience of the fact, it is not unusual for men of my class and position to think seriously and deeply on these questions and inquire amongst ourselves how far, if at all, it wou~d be possible, to effect a more equal distribution of income.

What good would arise if that could be done and what damage or loss would be incurred to balance the good? , " Whom do I rob?" is a question that I often ask myself. Could my income be better employed? Could it be more evenly distributed as betweeh me and others? Could the people who work for me have it? Could it be spread over the customers, or consumers whom I serve? And, lastly, could my contribution, whatever WHOM DO I ROB ... ? 171 it may be, to the general well-being be made without making my income? The simplest illustration of the right distribution of income that I remember is to be found in the accounts of the North-Eastern Railway Co. before the War. The Company had an almost equal number of railway workers and of shareholders. Each shareholder had contributed on the average £1,500 of capital. Each worker received in wages an average of £75, and ea~h shareholder received an average of £75 in dividends.

It took, therefore, £1,500 of capital to find employ ment for one worker. The capital received the 5 per cent. which we have noticed in a previous chapter as the minimum inducement which will bring it into being, and the worker received the whole of the rest of the money which was paid by the users of the North Eastern Railway. The most superficial examination of this position will show it to be completely sound and will indicate the only ways in which it could be altered. Any diminution in the £75 paid to the shareholders would discourage or stop the provision of any further capital for the North-Eastern Railway, whereas any increase in the money paid by the users of the railway could have been applied to the increase of the wages of the workers, and was, ~n fact, the only source from which any such increase could come. Had the workers, for instance, been willing to apply themselves to the use of labour-saving devices and to give twice the service with the same number of workers, or the same service with half the number, each man could have had double wages and with them acquired the spending power to employ the other half of the railwaymen in the provision of all the other· things that the double wages would call on to the market. But I am not discussing railway wages. I merely give the above illustration as an introduction to the· more detailed 172 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST discussion of my position, and because it happens .to state the problem with which I am concerned in the simplest possible way.

The most careful analysis of my own position drives me to the conclusion, to which I shall endeavour to lead the reader, that only one of two things can happen in regard to my own case. I can, through political action, be destroyed, wiped out, and shut up. My business and all the odd things .that I can do can be dispensed with, and I freely admit that there is a great . deal to be said in favour of this. course. But it is equally certain that I cannot be replaced, that no agency other than the individual can ever do my work and that all the activities for which I am responsible must cease if I and my class are to be abolished, and incomes such as mine are not to be allowed. The alternative, therefore, is to leave me with a freer hand to provide more wages and employment than I now do. Keeping my illustration of the North Eastern Railway in mind, my position may be stated in similarly simple terms. Income, £10,000, derived \> from a turnover of £4°0,000. Every year a large number of persons who think they like such matter as I publish pay to me of their own free-will the sum of £4°0,000. Of this money I pay away to workers and to others £390,000, and retain for my trouble the £10,000 which is the. cause of all this discussion. I take 2! per cent., or 6d. in the £. To be fair and exact, it should be pointed out that I really take 11 per cent., or 3d. in the £, for my personal use, and another Ii per cent., or 3d. in the £, for the benefit of the Chancellor. of the Exchequer. But without going into that, because, of course, I should be the first to vote for the abolition of the Chancellor and all his extortion, it may be said that. I charge 6d. for handling a sovereign. My .6d. can be divided in WHOM DO I ROB ... r 173 another way, and I may claim that I charge 3d. for providing £1 in wages to those who work for me and another 3d. for the delivery of £1 's worth of books and papers to those for whom I work. It would be very easy to develop the argument that my remunera tion is far too small to be really good for the. general community. I ought, so some people think, to make a very much higher percentage on my turnover, so that I might induce competition, offer a more brilliant exampIe and more serious temptation to others to com e along and provide work and goods as I have done, a tempt,:tion which is not offered by a paltry 6d. in the sovereIgn.

In these days, when the whole of the machinery of politics is concerned with the provision of the thing called " work," I am providing work at a cost to the wage-earner of 3d. in the sovereign. I distribute wages on a far lower expense ratio than Old Age Pensions are distributed. Unemployment pay costs much more to hand out over the counter of the Labour Exchange than I charge for handing out wages to the large num ber of persons who have become involved in the enter prise which I have built up. The best-managed insur ance office costs 1 0 or I 1 per cent.· in the simple business of paying out death benefits, and I pay wages in life, a much more difficult operation, for I! per cent. I should plead guilty were I charged with dam aging the community by earning far too little money and being in fact, in a dangerous form, a price-cutter. My second inquiry was whether my income could be more evenly divided. It seems, on the surface, obvious that this could be done, and that it would be good if it should be done. To take an extreme case. I receive £200 a week, and one of my office boys gets 25s. a week, out of which he has to help a widowed mother.

The widowed mother is, in these modern days, as 174 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST useful in argument to the Socialist as she was in my you~ger days, when in political discussion she always appeared as ,a brewery shareholder. Surely no damage could he done to 'anyone if I, being a well-disposed person, conscience-smitten with the disparity between my position and that of my office boy, decided that he should have £loa week and .that I should manage to struggle along with the £190 left to me? But such a superficial proposition needs to be examined rather more, carefully. It will be noticed that in taking 3d. in the £,from my wage-earners as 1 do, I am taking 3!d. a week from this particular office boy in respect of such service as I render to him by providing, or arranging, or being the instrument through which his '255. a week is secured. Put the other way round, if the office boy is really pulling his weight,' doing' ~is share 'of the total of the work of my organisation, 'he, is providing me with 3!d. per week, and the' other £199 195• 81d. which goes to make up my income belongs, if it does not belong to me, to all the col-' leagues of the office boy in proportions calculated at the rate of 3d. in the £ on their individual wages.

It is, of course, a duty and a pleasure now and again to help some boy who, for reasons with which everyone / is familiar, has fallen a victim to one or other of the many troubles that beset the human being. Notwith standing the fact that the Chancellor of the Exchequer takes exactly half my income and professes to deal with ' these same troubles, I find fromexperieD:ce that he does not do so, and that I am const3:t,ltlycalled upon to give a helping hand in one direction and another. The trouble here is that such help as one is able to give, notwithstanding a big income, is not more than enough to assist a fraction of the cases of distress which come under one's notice. I do, however, get a small degree of satisfaction from the thought that the few hundreds WHOM DO I ROB ... ? 175 a year which I am able to give away does a great deal more real good than the £5,000 a year which the State takes from me in the name of di stress, which it gener ally fails to alleviate. It will be noticed, therefore, that if I only give my office boy, with his 2 ss. a week, another 3!d., 1 hand over to him my share of the business in which he and I are jointly engaged. If I give him 7!d., I· hand over to him the share of some other oBice boy as well as his own.

My third inquiry, as to whether the worker could have my income, would thus seem to be disposed of. It is suggested that, in the ideal state, the' workers will em ploy the capitalist instead of the capitalist employing the workers. Mr. Sidney Webb has taken great pains to elaborate this idea. By ignoring .losses and concen trating on a few outstanding cases of excessive profits, he does not find it difficult to show how he thinks the workers could employ capital at a lower rate of re muneration than it occasionally secures. I venture the assertion, however, that if my 3d. in the £ were the rule, as it undoubtedly is the average,it is totally and utterly unthinkable and impossible that wages could be secured in any state of society, or under any system, at a lower cost than this which I charge. Many of the wage-earners who work for me could, however, secure a very great deal more than they now have if they would direct their attention not to my income but to my £400,000 turnover. In the larger sum there is ample room for rearrangement and reorganisation, forty times as much room, in fact, as in my paltry £10,000. It is beyond dispute that in taking the whole of the latter, my workers could only add 3d.

to every £ they now receive,whereas many of them could without trouble take twice·as much as they now take out of the £400,000 which comes through my bank account in the course of the year. The most 176 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST obvious way in which this can be done is by realising the effects of trade union practices and restrictive regulations. There is a sum which cannot be stated with any exactitude, which I ·put at a minimum of £50,000 a year, that is absolutely wasted, poured down the gutter or thrown into the air, by all those multifarious arrange ments with which I am surrounded, and which either forbid men to work or, which is far worse, stop machinery from working. The extent to which this wholly foolish idea has been developed i!1 these da ys is a chief cause of any lack of wealth from which any of us are suffering. Most printing works have to carryon their business at the dictation of at least fifteen trade, unions, each union having its own rules and regulations, and each concerned with its own rights and privileges.

Idleness by rule, enforced with all the powers of the union, may appear to produce wages, but it cannot pro duce any wealth. It does not even distribute wealth. It merely keeps back the progress of the race, The destruction of wealth, brought about by arrange ments of this kind, is not confined to the many absurd objections to machinery and speed. A circular was recently issued to a number of my employees by a printing trade union in the following terms: "DEAR COMRADE,-I am writing to let you know that we are in dispute with Messrs. X, and you are to use every effort to see that supplies are not handled for this· firm.- Yours fraternally, --, ,General .Secretary." I do no business with Messrs. X so far as I know, but the circular in question, sent to every member of the trade union concerned, will·undoubtedly have reached many houses which are in business connection with Messrs. X. The members of the union are not in formed what is the· nature of the dispute. They are WHOM DO I ROB .. ? 177 'Ihe Leather Goods Review.

Commercial Intelligence. Ways and Means. 'Ihe Egyptian 'lrade Journal. Australian Markets. Indian Markets. South American Markets. The Transport World. not invited to exercise any discretion in the matter. They are given no opportunity of 6xpressing a view with regard to it. They are not allowed to discuss the matter with other employees; but an arbitrary power, working in the backgroupd, more far-reaching and destructive in its operations than any power which was ever known in the days of slavery or feudalism, is able not only to punish Messrs. X,. but cause thousands of workers in hundreds of other firms to delay and destroy wealth-production at the expense of the whole community. In case it should be thought that I am guilty of some exaggeration, it may be well to mention some of the most obvious effects of this kind of thing upon my business. I have handled in my time some scores of publications, mostly weekly trade papers. The follow ing is a list of papers which I have discontinued, enter prises which have been killed, and several of which would have been running to-day if printing prices had remained at the I 914 figure. That figure is, of course, an impossibility, and the real economic price of print ing should probably be somewhere between the present extortionate figure and its 19 14 equivalent.

Among the many papers which I have been obliged to stop are: 'Ihe Goldsmiths' Review. Farm and Home. 'Ihe Argentine 'Irader. , 'Ihe China Clay 'Irade Review. Kelly's Monthly Trade Review. Tools. 'Ihe Retail 'Irader. 'Ihe Order Book. The Japan Trade Review. This little list could be' enlarged indefinitely, if an examination were to be made into the position of the trade paper business before the War and to-day. My M 178 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST turnover might be double what it is, my income might. be double, and there might be another £400,000 avail-, able in wages, if only the printing trade would allow the machinery which is at its disposal to work. To a large extent these people still look upon the machine as did the Luddites. There. is many a" small trade paper and many more small papers, concerned with small subjects and small causes, which could be ren dering useful service, to their own particular little circles, if they could be produced, for a matter of £50. or £100 a week.

The printers to-day have. only left room for the. big things, and the big things are not" always the. best things. While therefore there is, I claim, nothing to be got for' the workers out of my £10,000 a year, there is a great deal they might have, if they would direct their attention to the £400,000 a year which I handle. The abolition ormy £'10,000 would lleces sitate'the discovery of some agency to ta~e my place, an agency sufficiently solid and reliable to be able to. provide regular"wages"and the security which I cannot offer for less than the 3d. in the £ which I take. This brings us to the next of the questions which I set myself to answer. Could my income be given""to' my customers?· Could it be applied to the reduction of the price of the commodity which I sell? If the whole of it were so given there would, of course, be nothing for the workers to argue about, and there would be no revenue for the" Chancellor of the Ex chequer. On this question I need not go into the detail that I have devoted to the subject of the workers.

Much as I love my customers, and much as I desire to serve them, I may be permitted to remark that I am not prepared to hand on to them a sovereign's worth of material which I produce for their benefit at a lower commission than the 3d.'which I charge them WHOM DO I ROB ... r 179 for so doing. As· a matter of fact, I am working for my customers 'on a dangerously low scale of remunera tion. When my father, Sir John Benn, reached the most profit--ablestage in the career of The Cabinet Maker as a monthly publication, he was working on a' very small turnover and a profit of 25 per cent. The Cabinet Maker, monthly, with a revenue from sub~criptions and advertisements of slightly over £5,000 a year, enabled him to enjoy an income of £1,200 or£I,300. By pub lishing weekly and by publishing ten journals in stead of one, by further sifting out ten strong journals from a long list of weak ones, I have built up a business of much larger dimensions and have reduced the rate of profit to one-tenth of his figure, a fact which, as I have suggested, might constitute a much more serious charge against me than any which can be fabricated out of my supposed exorbitant income.

This again illustrates what Socialism has done for the printing and publishing businesses. It has wiped out the chances of the small enterprise and reduced the public to reading the big things. John Bulls, Daily Mails, and Hardware Trade Journals are all very well in their way, but they deny to numbers of serious thinkers and writers' the opportunity of communicating their thoughts to their fellows, opportunity which rests with the printing trade to, give. There is another way of looking at all this.' Leaving out figures of turnover or of income, leaving out the stereotyped discussion of production and ca' canny, is it for the good of the human race as a whole that I should be allowed to carryon at all my particular kind of business? Does the human being become a better human being because of the existence of The Gas World or The Hardware Trade Journal, or the volume whi<;h I publish entitled The Synthesis of Nitrogen Ring . Compounds?

180 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST Of course the world could get along without these things. Similarly the world could exist without tobacco; it would probably be better if there were no such thing as a hat; it is conceivable that human life might be tolerable without wireless-some people are firmly of that opinion. This is a line of argument which leads us to the still more reasonable conclusion that the world could do very well without me and without nine-tenths of its population-an ideal which, when reduced to its simplest terms, is the real aim of the Socialist. We could run this earth on one-tenth of our numbers, with the simplest forms of food and shelter; and weare doing our very best, by the stopping of machinery, by rules against work, by waste and destruction, and the prohi bition of human effort at every turn to achieve that end. If, on the other hand, it is desirable that we should multiply, that we should keep ourselves occupied, that we should develop our minds in such ways as are rendered possible by discussion of nitrogen ring com pounds, the peculiarities of tobacco, and by experi ment with wireless, then we must recognise that such enterprise as that for which I am responsible and such activities as those which I control, are the only ways of achieving those ends; that we can develop indefinitely in these ways and can secure much more wealth than we have ever yet dreamed of; that we can multiply wages and go on for ever adding to human enjoyment, if this is human enjoyment, only on such lines as those which I have described.

The industrial ideal which embodies prosperity of this kind is composed of four elements; four ele ments which are always found in combination, which must all be recognised, and which cannot for long exist one without the other. They are: 1. High Production. 3. High Profits. 2. High Wages. 4. Low Prices.

WHOM DO I ROB ... ? 181 There is no case of real industrial success in which anyone of these four elements has been· absent, and the attempt on the part of any party or any theory to deny the utility of anyone of them, or to secure any one of them without reference to the other three, has never yet failed to lead to disaster.