My Life and Work | Page 5

It is sometimes called "the right of property." It is sometimes
masked in the command, "Thou shalt not steal." It is the other man's
right in his property that makes stealing a crime. When a man has
earned his bread, he has a right to that bread. If another steals it, he
does more than steal bread; he invades a sacred human right. If we
cannot produce we cannot have--but some say if we produce it is only

for the capitalists. Capitalists who become such because they provide
better means of production are of the foundation of society. They have
really nothing of their own. They merely manage property for the
benefit of others. Capitalists who become such through trading in
money are a temporarily necessary evil. They may not be evil at all if
their money goes to production. If their money goes to complicating
distribution--to raising barriers between the producer and the
consumer--then they are evil capitalists and they will pass away when
money is better adjusted to work; and money will become better
adjusted to work when it is fully realized that through work and work
alone may health, wealth, and happiness inevitably be secured.
There is no reason why a man who is willing to work should not be
able to work and to receive the full value of his work. There is equally
no reason why a man who can but will not work should not receive the
full value of his services to the community. He should most certainly
be permitted to take away from the community an equivalent of what
he contributes to it. If he contributes nothing he should take away
nothing. He should have the freedom of starvation. We are not getting
anywhere when we insist that every man ought to have more than he
deserves to have--just because some do get more than they deserve to
have.
There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity
in general than to insist that all men are equal. Most certainly all men
are not equal, and any democratic conception which strives to make
men equal is only an effort to block progress. Men cannot be of equal
service. The men of larger ability are less numerous than the men of
smaller ability; it is possible for a mass of the smaller men to pull the
larger ones down--but in so doing they pull themselves down. It is the
larger men who give the leadership to the community and enable the
smaller men to live with less effort.
The conception of democracy which names a leveling-down of ability
makes for waste. No two things in nature are alike. We build our cars
absolutely interchangeable. All parts are as nearly alike as chemical
analysis, the finest machinery, and the finest workmanship can make

them. No fitting of any kind is required, and it would certainly seem
that two Fords standing side by side, looking exactly alike and made so
exactly alike that any part could be taken out of one and put into the
other, would be alike. But they are not. They will have different road
habits. We have men who have driven hundreds, and in some cases
thousands of Fords and they say that no two ever act precisely the
same--that, if they should drive a new car for an hour or even less and
then the car were mixed with a bunch of other new ones, also each
driven for a single hour and under the same conditions, that although
they could not recognize the car they had been driving merely by
looking at it, they could do so by driving it.
I have been speaking in general terms. Let us be more concrete. A man
ought to be able to live on a scale commensurate with the service that
he renders. This is rather a good time to talk about this point, for we
have recently been through a period when the rendering of service was
the last thing that most people thought of. We were getting to a place
where no one cared about costs or service. Orders came without effort.
Whereas once it was the customer who favored the merchant by dealing
with him, conditions changed until it was the merchant who favored the
customer by selling to him. That is bad for business. Monopoly is bad
for business. Profiteering is bad for business. The lack of necessity to
hustle is bad for business. Business is never as healthy as when, like a
chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching for what it gets.
Things were coming too easily. There was a let-down of the principle
that an honest relation ought to obtain between values and prices. The
public no longer had to be "catered