9fJ0 REPORT— 1898. 



and that in this way not only our obviously economic institutions, such as employ- 

 ment for wages, letting of land for rent, giving out of money for interest, but our 

 political, and even our ecclesiastical and educational institutions, and all our 

 prejudices and habits of thought about them, are all indirect effects of the external 

 economic environment. It is undeniable that there are indirect eflects of this 

 cause, just as there are of religion, patriotism, family pride, or personal ambition. 

 There are prejudices, for example, due to the character and bins given by particular 

 occupations. ' Division of labour, as Comte said, is unfavourable to a * view of the 

 whole.' A man acquires the defects as well as the virtues of his calling. Born 

 for the universe, he narrows his mind to the making of pin-points, and, as it were, 

 thinks in pin-points ; or, being a tanner, he thinks there is nothing like leather ; 

 or, being a doctor, he may speak as if, for his patients at least, physical health was 

 the main object in life. The mathematician speaks as if all science were mathe- 

 matics. The rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of economics if 

 economists discuss them. But surely this reflection should rather restrain than 

 encourage any inclination to deduce all our social institutions from economic 

 ■conditions. Even if they were first modelled in clay they are a precious work of 

 art now. We are told they are simply buttresses of established property, and 

 therefore all the work of mere hypocrisy. This would mean that justice and single- 

 ness of heart could only be the rare products of delusion and deception ; but, we 

 know, as a matter of fact, good men are to be found, and of the same type, in all 

 ranks, among those who have little or no property, and among those who have 

 great possessions, among those who have great learning, and those who have none 

 at all. There is not only some disinterestedness in science, art, and religion, a 

 disinterestedness exemplified by the very theorists we are criticising, but on the 

 whole it is growing at the expense of the selfishness. There are signs that, in- 

 stead of buttresses of property, our science, art, and religion, and even our political 

 and municipal institutions, are becoming better aids towards levelling; we never 

 allow them to become the tools of a class without being ashamed of ourselves ; 

 and this proper shame is as active, we think, among economists as among any others 

 who are trying to study a subject scientifically. It may not be true that all 

 government is plutocracy, but it is our part to see that ours is not. If our insti- 

 tutions were or were not ever on the side of a single class, it is our part to see 

 that they are not so now. The old notion that these institutions proceeded from 

 * a common but unknown root,' that they were distinct and mutually dependent 

 powers, and could be neutral, adverse, or friendly, jointly or severally, in a social 

 war, seems to suit the complicated nature of man and the complicated facts of the 

 present day better than the idea that they are all instruments of the wealthy, and 

 therefore rooted and grounded in self-interest and prejudice. 



These venerable truisms cannot have escaped our theorists, who would 

 probably answer as follows : That the idea of an unseen economic foundation of 

 society is large enough to be a very concrete general principle ; it includes much 

 more than the bare struggle for bare existence ; after self-preservation comes self- 

 advancement in material wealth, the progress of the few at the expense of the 

 greater number; the passions and ambitions of the few demand every growing 

 material resource to minister to them ; everywhere wealth is power, and it is not 

 by accident that the most powerful nations are the most wealthy. 



There is truth in this, but hardly the whole truth. Wealth does not always 

 give power, and the power, as with Mohammedanism and Christianity, sometimes 

 comes before the wealth. W^ealth is rather the controlled than the controlling 

 element in a healthy national polity ; and the programme of nations is not drawn 

 up with a single eye to material aggrandisement. We ourselves hold Egypt and 

 even India not from avarice, but from love of governing ; and we love governing 

 because we think we can govern well. Our own Colonies are not bound to 

 us by a nexus of cash payments, and our present treatment of our Colonies is not 

 more, but distinctly less, greedy than it was before we lost thebe.st of them nearly 

 four generations ago. The civilised nations of the world (and not, as Adam Smith 

 and Gibbon seemed to think, of Europe only) tend more and more to be a kind of 

 commonwealth. The bond that unites them has in it a commercial element, of 

 •which we allow the importance. If we have learned nothing else from the 



