414 Lord Beay [May 14, 



duction, say, at tliree million hours of hond-fide labour, though the 

 labour may really be performed in four million hours, and you have 

 checks equivalent to one three-millionth part, and goods exchangeable 

 for such a check. 



The question naturally arises, what is to be done if — putting it in 

 its extreme form — the demand on the part of the owners of these 

 checks concentrates itself on, say, four or five kinds of produce, 

 leaving other kinds untouched. One of two things must follow ; either 

 the value of that produce for which there is a greater demand must 

 be increased, or the supply must be regulated, not according to 

 the demand, but according to an estimate made by the officials who 

 are in charge of the department of supply of goods. With the 

 latter form, liberty of demand disappears, with the former, socialism 

 comes down to the vulgarity of our present practice, and descends 

 from the higher regulation latitudes into the lower latitudes of 

 present economic anarchy of supply and demand. 



The great difficulty, however, is in the distribution of labour. 

 Socialism cannot afford to remunerate a skilled labourer for an hour's 

 good work on the same scale as an unskilled labourer, who is 

 practically wasting his time though he toils the whole day. It must, 

 therefore, either marshal its labouring population and assign to each 

 his work, or establish varying rates of payment on the basis of 

 results. If the latter is done, the labourer retains his liberty, and 

 will judge for himself whether he will pass from the field of labour 

 in which he is engaged, to one in which wages rule higher and where 

 the check of one three-millionth is more easily obtained than in 

 another. The question is simply this : does socialism make it 

 imperative to establish a code of labour enforcing production of 

 certain goods in a certain manner? In that case a certain number 

 of men would be told off to work a certain number of hours in the 

 fields, another set of men would be ordered to work a given number 

 of hours in a factory, another set of men would be obliged to carry 

 goods from one place to another, and strict supervision would become 

 necessary to distribute the checks in proper relation to the real 

 work which had been turned out. Or does socialism adopt a scale of 

 remuneration by labour-checks, leaving the labourer to be drawn by 

 his spontaneous action and independent judgment into those channels 

 to which the wants of the community seem to him to point ? In the 

 former case we should have universal vassalage, in the latter a situa- 

 tion not entirely at variance with that which exists. 



The former, however, seems more in accordance with the object 

 aimed at than the latter, and the more practical, if the object of 

 the socialists is to make the quantity of labour the only test of 

 value, and the only element in civilisation worthy of encouragement 

 or even of notice, and its remuneration equal. Even then how it 

 would be possible to tax the labour value of two pictures, or of two 

 comic songs, or of two lectures, seems to baffle human ingenuity. 

 Karl Marx, by far the most eminent social democrat of the present 



