Social equality - 1884 Author:William Hurrell Mallock Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF MODEKJJ DEMOCRACY. To repeat again, then, what we arrived at in the last chapter, the entire theory of modern Democracy, ... more »with all the hopes it encourages, and with all the measures it advocates, depends on the doctrine that the cause of wealth is labor. Let us now inquire accurately what the Democratic theorists mean by it. And, first, it will be well to point out that, however false what they really mean may be, there are certain falsehoods which their language seems to imply, but which they themselves would be the first people to repudiate, and with which it would be idle and unfair to tax them. Having thus disposed of what they do not mean, we shall be freer to deal with what they do. For this purpose, let us turn once more to those sentences of Mr. Bright's, which were just now quoted. There, in a plain and highly popular way, labor is stated to be the cause of wealth ; and certain forms of wealth are particularly specified, which, being intended to prove the statement, must at all events show its meaning. These are fine clothes, a fine carriage, and a fine house ; and the relation of labor to these three productions is a type, for the Democrat, of its relation to wealth generally. What, then, did Mr. Bright mean to tell his workmen as to the relation of labor to a silk dress He did not mean to tell them that it produced the silkworms ; nor, in the case of the carriage, that it produced the wood or the leather; nor, in the case of the house, that it produced the stone or the marble. He did not mean to say, therefore, that it is the only cause of wealth ; but simply that it is the only human cause. Of other causes there may be any number, such as soil, climate, geographical position, and the distribution of coal and minerals; and t...« less