FALLACIES OF MODERN ECONOMISTS. 235 



tagonistic to others, impinging on each other, rebounding, ex- 

 pending force uselessly, with endless friction, noise, and break- 

 age. How difficult it must be to form any intelligent classifica- 

 tion, a moment's thought must convince us. Here is a man whose 

 motive power is love of money, who shrinks from nothing, dares 

 all, endures all, to satisfy this passion. There is one whose sym- 

 pathies are strong, who spends and is spent for others, philan- 

 thropically. Another is driven by conceit, by love of fame ; an- 

 other by fine clothes, and another by love of power ; another 

 sacrifices all for knowledge, and so on. All these and thousands 

 of other types, possessing not one, but many passions in varied 

 amounts, and probably no two individuals identical, go to make 

 up this unit which we call society. And then we divide them 

 into laborers and capitalists, and prescribe hard and fast rules by 

 which we assume the conduct of each class is controlled, and on 

 these assumptions we build a science! Such is the science of 

 political economy ! 



Take, for instance, the term " laborer." To whom does it re- 

 fer ? " To the producer," says our economist. Producers of what ? 

 " Of wealth." And what is wealth ? " Good things," says one. 

 " Useful things,", says another. And what is a useful thing ? 

 " That which in its operation conduces to human welfare or pleas- 

 ure." So that the laborer is an animal or a machine, the product 

 of which is finally resolved into terms of human pleasure. What 

 man is there who is not a laborer ? Who does not produce pleas- 

 ure to others as well as to himself ? Why, the very act of living 

 requires an expenditure of labor. And from this sheer act of 

 existence up to the hardest kind of manual labor there is a grad- 

 ual crescendo, a line of unbroken continuity. 



How, then, can you draw a complete dividing line separating 

 producers from non-producers? Surely not at digging the earth, 

 nor even at manual labor. Try as you will, I fail to see where a 

 dividing line comes, save only between the dead and the living. 

 If, for instance, you admit the school-teacher, the actor, the musi- 

 cian, the painter, the confectioner, or the milliner, as laborers, 

 why should you omit the friend, the husband, the child ? For 

 the basis of the classification of the first is the satisfaction of 

 human desires. The latter class likewise satisfy human desires ! * 



Again, if we attempt to draw a line separating capitalists from 

 laborers, we are met with the same difficulty. For, as capital is 

 the mother of labor, every laborer must of necessity be a capital- 

 ist, and from the man who possesses simply physical health, 

 strength, and reasoning faculties, with clothes enough to cover 



* " There is no wealth but life ; life including all its powers of love, of joy, and of 

 admiration." — Ruskin. 



