What Social Classes Owe to Each Other | Page 2

for default. The task or problem is not specifically
defined. Part of the task which devolves on those who are subject to the

duty is to define the problem. They are told only that something is the
matter: that it behooves them to find out what it is, and how to correct it,
and then to work out the cure. All this is more or less truculently set
forth.
After reading and listening to a great deal of this sort of assertion I find
that the question forms itself with more and more distinctness in my
mind: Who are those who assume to put hard questions to other people
and to demand a solution of them? How did they acquire the right to
demand that others should solve their world-problems for them? Who
are they who are held to consider and solve all questions, and how did
they fall under this duty?
So far as I can find out what the classes are who are respectively
endowed with the rights and duties of posing and solving social
problems, they are as follows: Those who are bound to solve the
problems are the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable,
educated, and healthy; those whose right it is to set the problems are
those who have been less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for
existence. The problem itself seems to be, How shall the latter be made
as comfortable as the former? To solve this problem, and make us all
equally well off, is assumed to be the duty of the former class; the
penalty, if they fail of this, is to be bloodshed and destruction. If they
cannot make everybody else as well off as themselves, they are to be
brought down to the same misery as others.
During the last ten years I have read a great many books and articles,
especially by German writers, in which an attempt has been made to set
up "the State" as an entity having conscience, power, and will
sublimated above human limitations, and as constituting a tutelary
genius over us all. I have never been able to find in history or
experience anything to fit this concept. I once lived in Germany for two
years, but I certainly saw nothing of it there then. Whether the State
which Bismarck is moulding will fit the notion is at best a matter of
faith and hope. My notion of the State has dwindled with growing
experience of life. As an abstraction, the State is to me only All-of-us.
In practice--that is, when it exercises will or adopts a line of action--it

is only a little group of men chosen in a very haphazard way by the
majority of us to perform certain services for all of us. The majority do
not go about their selection very rationally, and they are almost always
disappointed by the results of their own operation. Hence "the State,"
instead of offering resources of wisdom, right reason, and pure moral
sense beyond what the average of us possess, generally offers much
less of all those things. Furthermore, it often turns out in practice that
"the State" is not even the known and accredited servants of the State,
but, as has been well said, is only some obscure clerk, hidden in the
recesses of a Government bureau, into whose power the chance has
fallen for the moment to pull one of the stops which control the
Government machine. In former days it often happened that "The
State" was a barber, a fiddler, or a bad woman. In our day it often
happens that "the State" is a little functionary on whom a big
functionary is forced to depend.
I cannot see the sense of spending time to read and write observations,
such as I find in the writings of many men of great attainments and of
great influence, of which the following might be a general type: If the
statesmen could attain to the requisite knowledge and wisdom, it is
conceivable that the State might perform important regulative functions
in the production and distribution of wealth, against which no positive
and sweeping theoretical objection could be made from the side of
economic science; but statesmen never can acquire the requisite
knowledge and wisdom.--To me this seems a mere waste of words. The
inadequacy of the State to regulative tasks is agreed upon, as a matter
of fact, by all. Why, then, bring State regulation into the discussion
simply in order to throw it out again? The whole subject ought to be
discussed and settled aside from the hypothesis of State regulation.
The little group of public servants who, as I have said, constitute the
State, when the State determines on anything, could not do much for
themselves or anybody else by their own