132 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



as a social irritant, an economic ' sulkiiier.' All workers' efforts are then 

 crabbed and limited by their psychological state ; their output is restricted, 

 and often interrupted on trivial pretexts ; they have no ready elasticity 

 to participate willingly in new combinations of the organising mind. Then 

 the total economic result of the community's efforts may be less than if 

 our original mind had never exerted itself at all, producing individual 

 wealth for individual bequest. The individual may, indeed, have 

 abstracted, by his ingenuity, something as an accumulation for bequest, 

 but the quantitative reaction on the economic or environment heritage is, 

 in minute individual amounts, greater in the aggregate. The social 

 heritage for the forthcoming generation to work with is poorer. Even if 

 the lucky inheritor comes into his personal share he may have to employ it 

 with an impoverished social heritage which will reduce his share far below 

 what he, a man of ability, might have secured with a responsive social 

 environment and a better social heritage. And each individual of that 

 second generation has a poorer standard because of the stunted social 

 heritage, poorer perhaps even if he had his share of the direct inheritance 

 as a set-off. Here the truth of the conclusions is not objectively measur- 

 able, and depends on the truth of the assumption that the system is an 

 economic irritant. Whether the system is au individual incentive or a 

 social irritant, or both, or neither, is a question of average psychology. If 

 both assumptions are true, the effects may balance, and the resultant 

 economic systems, with or without the inheritance factor, be identical. But 

 if either is more powerful the result must be different, and a system 

 including inheritance either worse or better than the system without it. 



I have laboured all this preliminary analysis, because it is so necessary 

 to observe that tlie social and individual interact ; so necessary to convince 

 people that the dynamic tendencies of forces affecting the distribution of 

 wealth are at least as important as the static results, and may even be 

 more powerful. 



IV. Contributions by Classical Economists. 



The discussion by economists has usually arisen in connection with 

 ' social justice ' in distribution, or justice and expediency in connection 

 with taxation. I will take two examples : — 



In 1795 Jeremy Bentham asked the question, ' What is that mode of 

 supply of which tlie twentieth part is a tax, and that a heavy one, while 

 the whole would be no tax and would not be felt by anybody ? ' His 

 plan was to abolish intestacy, all property where there was no will going 

 to the State. He also proposed to limit the power of bequests of testators 

 who had no direct heirs, and, in addition, that the State should have a 

 half-share of sums going, either under a will or not, to such relatives as 

 grandparents, uncles and aunts, and perhaps nephews and nieces, and also 

 a reversionary interest in the succession of direct heirs who had no 

 children anc^no prospects of them. I am not concerned to give you all 

 the^various legal and philosophical reasons underlying Bentham's proposal. 

 He held that this was not a tax, and that its chief advantage was freedom 

 from oppressiveness. In the case of a tax on successions, a man looks on 

 the whole of what is left to him as his own, of which he is then called 

 upon to give up something. Bvit if, under the law regulating successions, 



