Mr.Carnegie and Mr.Rockefeller have seriously propounded the theory that certain individuals are endowed by nature or by circumstances with the opportunity and power of accumulating great wealth, but that their wealth, though legally their private property, is rightly to be regarded by them as a 'social trust' to be administered by them for the benefit of their fellow-men.It seems to them a matter of indifference that this wealth is 'unearned,' provided that it is productively expended.So fragments of profits, earned by sweating labour or by rack renting tenants, are spent on pensions, public hospitals or housing reform.Fractions of the excessive prices the consuming public pays to privileged transport companies or 'protected'
manufacturers are given back in parks or universities.Great inheritances, passing on the death of rich bankers, contractors or company promoters, drop heavy tears of charity to soften the fate of those who have failed in the business struggle.Fortunes, gained by setting nation against nation, are applied to promote the cause of international peace.This humor is inevitable.Unearned property can find no social uses more exigent than the application of charitable remedies to the very diseases to which it owes its origin.So everywhere we find the beneficiaries of economic force, luck, favour and privilege, trying to pour balm and oil into the wounds which they have made.The effect of the process, and what may be called its unconscious intention, is to defend the irrationality and injustice of these unearned properties by buying off clear scrutiny into their origins.
Sometimes, indeed, the intention attains a measure of clear consciousness, as in the cases where rich men or firms regard the subscriptions given to public purposes as sound business expenditure, applying one fraction of their gross profits to a propitiation fund as they apply another to an insurance fund.
§7.The radical defect of this doctrine and practice of the 'social trust' is its false severance of origin from use.The organic law of industry has joined origin and use, work and wealth, production and consumption.
It affirms a natural and necessary relation between getting and spending.
A man who puts no effort into getting, a rent-receiver, cannot put well-directed effort into spending.He is by natural proclivity a wastrel.A man who is purely selfish in his getting, as the sweater, gambler, or monopolist, cannot be social in his spending.The recipient of unearned income is impelled by the conditions of his being to a life of idleness and luxury: this is the life he is fitted for.He is unfitted for the administration of a social trust.
These obvious truths, so fatally neglected, are no vague maxims of revolutionary ethics, but are firmly rooted in physical and moral fact.
We have seen that there is throughout organic life a quantitative and qualitative relation between function and nutrition, each being the condition of the other.He who does not eat cannot work; he who does not work cannot eat.
It is true that the latter law works less directly and less immediately than the former.Parasitism, individual or social, continues to exist to many walks of life.But it never thrives, it always tends to degeneration, atrophy and decay.Normally, and in the long run, it remains true that 'Whosoever will not work, neither can he eat.' If then the recipiency of unearned wealth, parasitism, disables the recipient from putting his 'property'
to sound personal uses, is it likely that he can put it to sound social uses? Though abnormal instances may seem, here as elsewhere, to contravene the natural law, it remains true that the power of individual earning, not merely involves no power of social spending, but negates that power.
It might even be contended that there will be a natural disposition in the recipient of unearned wealth to spend that wealth in precisely those ways in which it injures most the society he seeks to serve.This is probably the case.It is more socially injurious for the millionaire to spend his surplus wealth in charity than in luxury.For by spending it on luxury, he chiefly injures himself and his immediate circle, but by spending it in charity he inflicts a graver injury upon society.For every act of charity, applied to heal suffering arising from defective arrangements of society, serves to weaken the personal springs of social reform, alike by the 'miraculous'
