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production of that kind of luxury which can only be enjoyed by few, but to the creation of beauty. Beauty
is at the door of every man who can appreciate it: and with that comes happiness.
O foolish men! who hath bewitched you? Wish no more to have, but will to be!
Equal Distribution
It is impossible to treat Mr. Shaw's conclusion that the share of every member of the community must be
equal, at all seriously. It would simply mean that most rare and beautiful things would cease to exist. Even
assuming (what is enormous exaggeration) that the income of each person would work out at five
hundred pounds a year, who is to wear a pearl necklace worth a hundred thousand pounds? The interest
on the money comes to more than the total share. The necklace would have to be broken up or put in a
museum, {120} and all its value lost to mankind.
Similarly there could be no private ownership of pictures of any value, there could be no beautiful houses,
or gardens, no parks except public parks, which produce (in me at least) nothing but a sense of dreary
dissatisfaction, and are not even enjoyed by the people they are intended to benefit. Battersea Park, for
instance, is within three minutes' walk of innumerable slums; but the children play in the slums, not in the
park.
There is also the obvious point that people will not work exceptionally unless they get exceptional
payment. If there were no possibility of in some way improving my position-if only by making myself
more infamous even than I am (Matthew V, 11,12) by writing this essay, I should certainly not trouble to
do it. Men will work themselves to death to advance in the world, or to make the lives of those they love
happier. But if everything is to be on the dead level, they will not 'put themselves out', they will not take
risks. Humanity will become stagnant.
The Captain and the Cabin Boy
Mr. Shaw's argument for equalizing the income of these two persons, is as follows: Nothing, therefore, is
really in question, or ever has been, but the differences between class incomes. Already there is economic
equality between captains, and economic equality between cabin boys. What is at issue still is whether
there shall be economic equality between captains and cabin boys. What would Jesus have said?
Presumably he would have said that if your only object is to produce a Captain and a cabin boy for the
purpose of transferring you from Liverpool to New York, or to manoeuvre {121} a fleet and carry
powder from the magazine to the gun, then you need give no more than a shilling to the cabin boy, for
every pound you give to the more expensively trained captain. But, if in addition to this you desire to
allow the two human souls which are inseparable from the captain and the cabin boy, and which alone
differentiate them from the donkey-engine, to develop all their possibilities, then you may find the cabin
boy costing rather more than the captain, because cabin boy's work does not do so much for the soul as
the captain's work. Consequently you will have to give him at least as much as the captain unless you
definitely wish him to be a lower creature, in which case the sooner you are hanged as an abortionist the
better. That is the fundamental argument.
It is really good to hear the fundamental argument at last! The only explanation of it appears to be that Mr.
Shaw is making the common error of confusing money and money's worth. If a man has everything he
wants, he does not care, unless he happens to be a money maniac, in what terms his wealth is expressed.
Suppose (for example) that I wish to achieve a gigantic and highly desirable feat, such as the codification
of the Laws of England. For me to do that I must be trained from childhood in an extremely special way. I
must always have servants to attend to food and clothing so that I never have to think about them. I must
have secretaries to save me manual labour, to look up my references, and to do a thousand other services
of the kind. I must have a comfortable house, an enormous library, and a thousand other things which are
expressions of wealth, and which certainly everybody cannot have. In these circumstances I should not
mind whether you called my {122} income a cent a year or a dollar a minute. And since I am enjoying
these special advantages, they cannot be equally enjoyed by all those who are working under me. It is not
obvious how they can be compensated spiritually for the inferior character of their tasks merely by giving
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