My Life and Work
is that one may change the foundation--usurp the part of destiny in the
social process. The foundations of society are the men and means to
_grow_ things, to _make_ things, and to _carry_ things. As long as
agriculture, manufacture, and transportation survive, the world can
survive any economic or social change. As we serve our jobs we serve the
world.
There is plenty of work to do. Business is merely work. Speculation in
things already produced--that is not business. It is just more or less
respectable graft. But it cannot be legislated out of existence. Laws
can do very little. Law never does anything constructive. It can never
be more than a policeman, and so it is a waste of time to look to our
state capitals or to Washington to do that which law was not designed to
do. As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish
special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special
privilege grow. We have had enough of looking to Washington and we have
had enough of legislators--not so much, however, in this as in other
countries--promising laws to do that which laws cannot do.
When you get a whole country--as did ours--thinking that Washington is a
sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence,
you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which
augurs ill for the future. Our help does not come from Washington, but
from ourselves; our help may, however, go to Washington as a sort of
central distribution point where all our efforts are coordinated for the
general good. We may help the Government; the Government cannot help us.
The slogan of "less government in business and more business in
government" is a very good one, not mainly on account of business or
government, but on account of the people. Business is not the reason why
the United States was founded. The Declaration of Independence is not a
business charter, nor is the Constitution of the United States a
commercial schedule. The United States--its land, people, government,
and business--are but methods by which the life of the people is made
worth while. The Government is a servant and never should be anything
but a servant. The moment the people become adjuncts to government, then
the law of retribution begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural,
immoral, and inhuman. We cannot live without business and we cannot live
without government. Business and government are necessary as servants,
like water and grain; as masters they overturn the natural order.
The welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. That is
where it should be and that is where it is safest. Governments can
promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver. They can juggle
the currencies as they did in Europe (and as bankers the world over do,
as long as they can get the benefit of the juggling) with a patter of
solemn nonsense. But it is work and work alone that can continue to
deliver the goods--and that, down in his heart, is what every man knows.
There is little chance of an intelligent people, such as ours, ruining
the fundamental processes of economic life. Most men know they cannot
get something for nothing. Most men feel--even if they do not know--that
money is not wealth. The ordinary theories which promise everything to
everybody, and demand nothing from anybody, are promptly denied by the
instincts of the ordinary man, even when he does not find reasons
against them. He _knows_ they are wrong. That is enough. The present
order, always clumsy, often stupid, and in many ways imperfect, has this
advantage over any other--it works.
Doubtless our order will merge by degrees into another, and the new one
will also work--but not so much by reason of what it is as by reason of
what men will bring into it. The reason why Bolshevism did not work, and
cannot work, is not economic. It does not matter whether industry is
privately managed or socially controlled; it does not matter whether you
call the workers' share "wages" or "dividends"; it does not matter
whether you regimentalize the people as to food, clothing, and shelter,
or whether you allow them to eat, dress, and live as they like. Those
are mere matters of detail. The incapacity of the Bolshevist leaders is
indicated by the fuss they made over such details. Bolshevism failed
because it was both unnatural and immoral. Our system stands. Is it
wrong? Of course it is wrong, at a thousand points! Is it clumsy? Of
course it is clumsy. By all right and reason it ought to break down. But
it does not--because it is instinct with certain economic and moral
fundamentals.
The economic fundamental is labour. Labour is the human element which
makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. It is men's
labour that makes the harvest what it is. That is the economic
fundamental: every one of us is working with material which we did not
and could not create, but which was presented to us by Nature.
The moral fundamental is man's right in his labour. This is variously
stated. It is sometimes called "the right of property." It is sometimes
masked in the command, "Thou shalt not steal." It is the other man's
right in his property that makes stealing a crime. When a man has earned
his bread, he has a right to that bread. If another steals it, he does
more than steal bread; he invades a sacred human right. If we cannot
produce we cannot have--but some say if we produce it is only for the
capitalists. Capitalists who become such because they provide better
means of production are of the foundation of society. They have really
nothing of their own. They merely manage property for the benefit of
others. Capitalists who become such through trading in money are a
temporarily necessary evil. They may not be evil at all if their money
goes to production. If their money goes to complicating distribution--to
raising barriers between the producer and the consumer--then they are
evil capitalists and they will pass away when money is better adjusted
to work; and money will become better adjusted to work when it is fully
realized that through work and work alone may health, wealth, and
happiness inevitably be secured.
There is no reason why a man who is willing to work should not be able
to work and to receive the full value of his work. There is equally no
reason why a man who can but will not work should not receive the full
value of his services to the community. He should most certainly be
permitted to take away from the community an equivalent of what he
contributes to it. If he contributes nothing he should take away
nothing. He should have the freedom of starvation. We are not getting
anywhere when we insist that every man ought to have more than he
deserves to have--just because some do get more than they deserve to
have.
There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity
in general than to insist that all men are equal. Most certainly all men
are not equal, and any democratic conception which strives to make men
equal is only an effort to block progress. Men cannot be of equal
service. The men of larger ability are less numerous than the men of
smaller ability; it is possible for a mass of the smaller men to pull
the larger ones down--but in so doing they pull themselves down. It is
the larger men who give the leadership to the community and enable the
smaller men to live with less effort.
The conception of democracy which names a leveling-down of ability makes
for waste. No two things in nature are alike. We build our cars
absolutely interchangeable. All parts are as nearly alike as chemical
analysis, the finest machinery, and the finest workmanship can make
them. No fitting of any kind is required, and it would certainly seem
that two Fords standing side by side, looking exactly alike and made so
exactly alike that any part could be taken out of one and put into the
other, would be alike. But they are not. They will have different road
habits. We have men who have driven hundreds, and in some cases
thousands of Fords and they say that no two ever act precisely the
same--that, if they should drive a new car for an hour or even less and
then the car were mixed with a bunch of other new ones, also each driven
for a single hour and under the same conditions, that although they
could not recognize the car they had been driving merely by looking at
it, they could do so by driving it.
I have been speaking in general terms. Let us be more concrete. A man
ought to be able to live on a scale commensurate with the service that
he renders. This is rather a good time to talk about this point, for we
have recently been through a period when the rendering of service was
the last thing that most people thought of. We were getting to a place
where no one cared about costs or service. Orders came without effort.
Whereas once it was the customer who favored the merchant by dealing
with him, conditions changed until it was the merchant who favored the
customer by selling to him. That is bad for business. Monopoly is bad
for business. Profiteering is bad for business. The lack of necessity to
hustle is bad for business. Business is never as healthy as when, like a
chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching for what it gets.
Things were coming too easily. There was a let-down of the principle
that an honest relation ought to obtain between values and prices. The
public no longer had to be "catered to." There was even a "public be
damned" attitude in many places. It was intensely bad for business. Some
men called that abnormal condition "prosperity." It was not prosperity--
it was just a needless money chase. Money chasing is not business.
It is very easy, unless one keeps a plan thoroughly in mind, to get
burdened with money and then, in an effort to make more money, to forget
all about selling to the people what they want. Business on a
money-making basis is most insecure. It is a touch-and-go affair, moving
irregularly and rarely over a term of years amounting to much. It is the
function of business to produce for consumption and not for money or
speculation. Producing for consumption implies that the quality of the
article produced will be high and that the price will be low--that the
article be one which serves the people and not merely the producer. If
the money feature is twisted out of its proper perspective, then the
production will be twisted to serve the producer.
The producer depends for his prosperity upon serving the people. He may
get by for a while serving himself, but if he does, it will be purely
accidental, and when the people wake up to the fact that they are not
being served, the end of that producer is in sight. During the boom
period the larger effort of production was to serve itself and hence,
the moment the people woke up, many producers went to smash. They said
that they had entered into a "period of depression." Really they had
not. They were simply trying to pit nonsense against sense which is
something that cannot successfully be done. Being greedy for money is
the surest way not to get it, but when one serves for the sake of
service--for the satisfaction of doing that which one believes to be
right--then money abundantly takes care of itself.
Money comes naturally as the result of service. And it is absolutely
necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of
money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service. In my
mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. None of us has any
right to ease. There is no place in civilization for the idler. Any
scheme looking to abolishing money is only making affairs more complex,
for we must have a measure. That our present system of money is a