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THE UNSOLVED RIDDLE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
BY STEPHEN LEACOCK
=B. A., Ph. D., Litt. D., F. R. S. C.=
_Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal_
Author of "Essays and Literary Studies," Etc.
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY: MCMXX
BY STEPHEN LEACOCK
FRENZIED FICTION FURTHER FOOLISHNESS BEHIND THE BEYOND NONSENSE NOVELS LITERARY LAPSES SUNSHINE SKETCHES ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH ESSAYS AND LITERARY STUDIES MOONBEAMS FROM THE LARGER LUNACY THE HOHENZOLLERNS IN AMERICA
Copyright, 1920,
By John Lane Company
_CONTENTS_
CHAPTER PAGE I. The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour 9 II. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness 33 III. The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty 48 IV. Work and Wages 66 V. The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist 88 VI. How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward 103 VII. What Is Possible and What Is Not 124
THE UNSOLVED RIDDLEOF SOCIAL JUSTICE
_I.--The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour_
THESE are troubled times. As the echoes of the war die away the sound of a new conflict rises on our ears. All the world is filled with industrial unrest. Strike follows upon strike. A world that has known five years of fighting has lost its taste for the honest drudgery of work. Cincinnatus will not back to his plow, or, at the best, stands sullenly between his plow-handles arguing for a higher wage.
The wheels of industry are threatening to stop. The laborer will not work because the pay is too low and the hours are too long. The producer cannot employ him because the wage is too high, and the hours are too short. If the high wage is paid and the short hours are granted, then the price of the thing made, so it seems, rises higher still. Even the high wages will not buy it. The process apparently moves in a circle with no cessation to it. The increased wages seem only to aggravate the increasing prices. Wages and prices, rising together, call perpetually for more money, or at least more tokens and symbols, more paper credit in the form of checks and deposits, with a value that is no longer based on the rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but that floats upon the mere atmosphere of expectation.
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice by Leacock
- 2: The capitalist retorts with calling him a Bolshevik
- 3: Inequality begins from the very cradle
- 4: Poverty was inevitable and perpetual
- 5: The machine penetrated everywhere
- 6: Nor is the money calculus of any avail
- 7: The other nine perform superfluous services
- 8: Puzzled only as to how much of a collectivist to be
- 9: Along with the era of machinery itself
- 10: The argument of the classicists ran thus
- 11: Failing this the economist could wash his hands of the poor
- 12: Earns nothing and gets nothing
- 13: Now the older economists taught
- 14: Complete and malicious fallacies
- 15: Here then is your basis of value
- 16: The conjurer has slipped the phrase
- 17: For a bidder to take the article from me by force
- 18: Represented by a particular price
- 19: But what the socialist offers us is total blindness
- 20: The monopolist employer being willing for various reasons
- 21: Were banded together in a tight and unbreakable union
- 22: Industrial society is therefore mobile
- 23: Pauperism spread like a plague
- 24: Socialism was from the beginning
- 25: And in this the socialist is very largely right
- 26: His gaze bent on the bright colors of the floating bubble
- 27: Bellamy's charming commonwealth
- 28: With the ideal world of 2000 A
- 29: Beside autocratic kingship it shines with a white light
- 30: Bellamy pictures his elected managers
- 31: Bellamy or any other socialist
- 32: Under the socialist commonwealth
- 33: On either side is the brink of an abyss
- 34: But conscription has its other side
- 35: Viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor
- 36: But it is time that the Malthusian doctrine
- 37: Starved and stunted only by lack of opportunity
- 38: The case of the Minimum wage law
- 39: The industrial world is restless
- 40: Inordinate and fortuitous gain