75 OXE MAWS GAIN ANOTHER MAN'S LOSS? 149 



It is absolutely false to suppose that the well-being of one man 

 must entail the ill-being of another, but it may produce it. 



What does all this mean ? It is an attempt to show that 

 poverty might be found where all men laboured, where the 

 fertile soil was no monopoly, where no capitalist claimed a share 

 of produce and where no profit was made by trade. These 

 things may or may not cause poverty, but let us put them on 

 one side for the moment. When they are all removed, we can 

 still picture to ourselves a state where a whole class of men 

 might be poor with no injustice, no moral blame attaching either 

 to the poorer or richer classes. 



In order to show this two assumptions were necessary : 1st. 

 Our labourers were not self-sufficing ; a division of labour was 

 treated as inevitable : 2nd. Some men produced the wrong thing 

 by their labour. Why was the thing wrong ? Both when our 

 hunters still hunted and when they gave up hunting for farming, 

 they produced food, which at first seems not only a right thing, 

 but the most right of all things, being a universal need. Their 

 produce of venison was a wrong thing, because others wanted 

 that special food either not at all, or so little that they did not 

 care to purchase it by giving what cost them continual labour. 

 To avoid poverty a man must not only produce what another 

 may want, he must produce what, is wanted by a second man 

 who is both able and willing to give in return something which 

 the first wants more than his own produce. There is no re- 

 markable selfishness involved in this law. No socialistic 

 reformer would propose that all men should be condemned to 

 eat a food they did not like in order that the producers of that 

 food should be richer. They would at once admit that the 

 hunters, when venison became unpopular, should be set to 

 produce a right thing instead of a wrong one ; and the right 

 thing is something which others would be willing and able to 

 buy. Even food may be a wrong thing to produce when there 

 is plenty of other preferable food for every one in the market. 

 We found that matters were mended very little by setting the 

 hunters to produce preferable food. A right thing was produced, 

 but too many men were employed in its production. This is a 

 second cause of poverty wholly independent of all the stock 

 bogies nursed by social agitators. If ten men can grow all the 



