The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice

Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice,
by Stephen Leacock

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Title: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice
Author: Stephen Leacock
Release Date: September 17, 2007 [EBook #22651]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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UNSOLVED RIDDLE ***

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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.
But the sheer quantity of the inflated currency and false money forces
prices higher still. The familiar landmarks of wages, salaries and prices
are being obliterated. The "scrap of paper" with which the war began
stays with us as its legacy. It lies upon the industrial landscape like
snow, covering up, as best it may, the bare poverty of a world desolated
by war.
Under such circumstances national finance seems turned into a delirium.
Billions are voted where once a few poor millions were thought
extravagant. The war debts of the Allied Nations, not yet fully
computed, will run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars apiece. But

the debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger as
the assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth or is it
poverty? The world seems filled with money and short of goods, while
even in this very scarcity a new luxury has broken out. The capitalist
rides in his ten thousand dollar motor car. The seven-dollar-a-day
artisan plays merrily on his gramophone in the broad daylight of his
afternoon that is saved, like all else, by being "borrowed" from the
morning. He calls the capitalist a "profiteer." The capitalist retorts with
calling him a "Bolshevik."
Worse portents appear. Over the rim of the Russian horizon are seen
the fierce eyes and the unshorn face of the real and undoubted
Bolshevik, waving his red flag. Vast areas of what was a fertile
populated world are overwhelmed in chaos. Over Russia there lies a
great darkness, spreading ominously westward into Central Europe.
The criminal sits among his corpses. He feeds upon the wreck of a
civilization that was.
The infection spreads. All over the world the just claims of organized
labor are intermingled with the