down when they strike; and 'a man,' he says, 'may make a fortune there and keep it as securely as here.' In fact, every gift of character-drawing which Mr. Whiteing exhibits in John Street' he has lost as soon as he migrates to Mayfair or Belgravia.

What concerns us, however, is not the fact, but the reason of it. Mr. Whiteing does justice to John Street because he has really acquired some knowledge of it, and has vitalised his knowledge by an act of imaginative sympathy. Of Mayfair he has no such knowledge at all. And now having glanced in succession at the various interesting lights which Mr. Whiteing's books throw on his capacity as an observer of modern civilisation, let us consider his theories of it, his explanation of the origin of its evils, and the nature of the medicine which he passionately recommends to us as a remedy for them. Seeing, as we have done, how many are the talents possessed by him, and how honest he is in his wish to reveal the truth, his theories, when we examine them, excite in us nothing but astonishment. Put in their briefest form they come simply to this: that the riches of Mayfair are the cause of the poverty at John Street. The inhabitants of John Street make all the wealth of the world. The inhabitants of Mayfair appropriate and squander all of it, except an insignificant fraction, with which John Street buys crusts and cat's meat. So far as the actual productive process is concerned, there is no inherent connexion between the origin of wealth and the distribution of it. The latter depends at present on ill-adjusted social arrangements, and vicious ideals and propensities prevalent through the whole community; but these can be completely changed without the former being affected. The vicious ideals are those which represent as an object in life the attainment by each individual of the best conditions attainable by him. The vicious propensities are propensities to regard this object as the true one. Let us only cease to desire wealth for ourselves, and it will still continue to be produced in order that we may distribute it among our neighbours. In other words, the riches of a nation depend on a process of production which is essentially self-contained, and on which we may always count. The riches of individuals depend on a process of grabbing, with which the process of production, as such, has nothing at all to do; and the poverty of individuals depends on their inability to grab successfully. Verily,' exclaims Mr. Whiteing in his imaginary character of aristocrat, we are

'but huge river pike in black and white. Our craving for superfluities balks so much honest craving for need.' You get rich,' he says, 'by getting as much as you can 'for yourself, and giving as little as you can to others.' Even,' he continues, if the rich man is not actually a 6 robber, he is using his cleverness to take some one else's 'share' -a doctrine which Mr. Whiteing explains with more precision by giving it to us in economic language :—

'A factory is a place where a number of people work together to simplify the process of appropriating their earnings to one. You give them a little of it back for provender, and keep as much of it as you can for yourself. What you keep back is called capital. They make it all, of course, or some of their forerunners made it, every sou or You get it-that is the main point. Your share is claimed as cost of superintendence, charge for the loan of your brains, or, by-andby, as interest on your savings-a very superior plea. But it all comes out of labour-all, all, all.'

cent.

Here, with the exception of one important detail, we have simply a reproduction, in their crudest form, of the fallacies which Karl Marx invested with a semblance of science, and imposed for a time on the majority of European Socialists, but which even Socialists have been forced to abandon, and which Marx himself admitted before his death to be quite inadequate as an explanation of economic facts. Over and over again have these fallacies been exposed. Over and over again has it been shown that mere labour, taken by itself, instead of producing all, all, ALL-every sou and cent,' is, in the production of wealth, merely one force out of many; that taken by itself it produces extremely little, and that if it were really to-day our sole productive agent, we all of us, Mr. Whiteing included, should be shivering, half-starved savages. And yet here, in spite of this, we have a man of Mr. Whiteing's attainments enunciating it again as some solemn and stupendous truth. He differs, however, from Karl Marx in this-and exhibits in doing so an immense intellectual superiority to him-that whereas Marx attributed the existing inequalities of wealth to the historical vicissitudes of Europe since the close of the feudal ages, coupled with a diabolical brutality inherent in the nature of the rich, Mr. Whiteing attributes them to some deeper and far more general cause--to certain characteristics, certain moral or immoral tendencies, pertaining to the dispositions of rich men and poor men equally. John Street, he says, 'is merely Bond Street without Bond Street's luck, and he admits that though economic conditions may react

on human nature, it is human nature that is ultimately the cause of economic conditions. But having divined so much of the truth, Mr. Whiteing's error is as follows. Having traced inequalities of wealth to their origin in human nature, he imagines them to originate only in the emotional facts of that nature; he does not see that they primarily originate in the intellectual facts; or, if he sees this, he mistakes entirely the manner in which they originate. He thinks that some men are rich and some poor because, with different opportunities, or a differing quickness in using them, they, in obedience to the same selfish desire, seize upon differing shares of wealth already produced. He fails to see that the main cause of these inequalities is the fact that men, with their differing intellectual gifts, differ indefinitely in the power which they possess of producing it. Mr. Whiteing's analysis of the situation would be partly, though not wholly, true if applied solely to such fortunes as result from a certain class of gambling on the Stock Exchange, or from the promotion of unsound companies. Fortunes which result thus may doubtless, with some justice, be described as due to a process of competitive grabbing, stimulated by the desire of each to grab all he can for himself. But it is not by such a process as this a nation's wealth increases, or that, having increased, it is kept from again dwindling. That vast multiplication of necessaries, comforts, and conveniences which is the distinctive feature of the progressive nations of to-day-the mass and substance of the wealth that the rich and poor divide-does not depend on the fact that men struggle to seize them. Nor does it depend on a multiplication of labourers, though it produces this. It depends on the assistance increasingly lent to labour by the power which Mr. Whiteing sneers at as 'precious brains'-a power which enables the same number of labourers to participate in the production of a continuously increasing product. Though without labour there would be no wealth at all, yet without the precious brains,' of the wealth that is now produced there would be produced only a fraction; and the 'precious brains' are not only precious, but exceptional. That is to say, in every wealthy community a large part of its wealth owes its existence and its continuance, not to the labours of the many, but to the concentrated intelligence of the few. The intelligence of the few varies in its productive efficacy. Some men produce thousands, another man produces millions, and the origin of individual riches, though it may be partially hidden by inheritance, is as a rule—though

there are doubtless glaring exceptions-not, as Mr. Whiteing imagines, somebody's adroitness in seizing them, but the exceptional efficiency of somebody's power of producing them. They represent, that is to say, not abstractions from an existing stock, but additions to an existing stock, and additions made by the persons who enjoy them now, or by persons from whom those who enjoy them now have inherited them. Mr. Whiteing's attacks on society, as he himself conducts them, have their root in the idea that no man can make himself rich except by making a number of others poorer than they otherwise would be. No idea could be more absolutely false to facts. He might as well argue that if two similar fields are given to two cultivators, one of them by his skill and intelligence cannot double the previous crop without preventing his neighbour from raising any crop at all. It is, of course, obvious that if a man of great individual genius has made a million of money, and employed ten thousand labourers, the workmen would be richer if, instead of keeping it for himself, he made a present of a hundred pounds to each of them, and if he refused to do this they would be poorer than they would have been if he had done it. But his refusal to give them the money which he himself had made, even if we should admit that such a refusal is wrong, is a wrong of a kind altogether different from that of embezzling money that had been made, not by him, but them. Mr. Whiteing mistakes the former process for the latter. He sees a man refuse to give a beggar a shilling, and declares that he has taken a shilling out of the beggar's pocket.

The whole of Mr. Whiteing's case against society as it exists is founded on a misconception. We are not saying that society is not darkened by many evils. We are not saying that Mr. Whiteing is not right in deploring them, and in urging us to seek for them every possible remedy; but that, while he is right in deploring them, he is wrong in his diagnosis of their nature. Such being the case, we will now proceed to show that he is also wrong in his estimate of their extent, and yet more wrong in the prescription which he offers us for a remedy.

That he should be wrong in his estimate of their extent will hardly surprise the reader, who has seen from his fantastic pictures of the lives of the rich and fashionable with what naïve and impassioned credulity he can take fancies for facts. It is not, however, necessary for us to trust to a general inference like this in order to realise how wild a

6

misconception of facts underlies Mr. Whiteing's misconception of principles. In addition to giving us pictures of the startling inequalities of life, he reduces them in the last chapter of Number 5 John Street' to a definite statistical statement. Nine-tenths of mankind,' he says—' mankind as it exists in England--still live as brutes in regard to all 'that makes life worth living, while the other tenth rots, in 'character with the infirmities of plethora and excess.' Now let us apply these estimates to the actual condition of England. And first we may notice that the ordinary socialistic agitator, while it is his invariable custom when contrasting riches and poverty to declare, as Mr. Whiteing does, that the rich are physically rotten with self-indulgence, also invariably contrasts, when he slightly shifts his ground, the excellent health of the rich with the precarious health of the poor. Both these statements cannot possibly be true. The rich cannot be exceptionally rotten, and at the same time invidiously healthy. As a matter of fact both statements are absurd; but if we confine our conception of the poor to the workers in some certain dangerous industries, the former is truer than the latter, which Mr. Whiteing endorses. But for argument's sake let us accept this latter statement as true. Let us assume that the rich are rotten with plethora and excess, as he says they are. If such be the case, the rich being a tenth of the population, the number of people who are rotting from prodigal selfindulgence cannot, in this country, be less than four millions. Now, how much does it cost a man, in Mr. Whiteing's estimation, to rot in the manner he describes ? His typical rich young man, who sleeps between silk sheets, cannot accomplish the feat on less than 7,000l. a year allowed him by his father, and some additional thousands which he borrows; the total coming, we may conclude, to at least 10,000l.; while as for the father, who is rotting even more obviously than the son, the process costs him annually 100,000l. at least. Now, how many people in this country have 100,000l. a year? Only seven or eight hundred have more than a fifth of that income. Not more than two thousand have so much as a tenth of it. But perhaps Mr. Whiteing thinks that it is possible to rot with plethora on less. Still, if the hero of the silk sheets, the white and gold awnings, and the bowers of priceless roses, cannot rot on less than 10,000l. a year as a bachelor, a family will require at least an equal amount to do so. Now, a few years before Mr. Whiteing's first book was