THE ABOLITION OF INHERITANCE.•
BECAUSE of this book there will be many searohings of heart. It is a blow aimed at the hereditary.principle over the back of the war. The American writer, be it understood, is altogether, isheart and soul, in favour of America's participation in the European struggle ; but how, he asks, is the war bill to be paid ? So far as the United States is concerned, it cannot, he is certain, be paid by workers. It must, in his belief, come out of " unearned wealth." The defraying of this debt will be, he hopes, the immediate cause of the greatest economic reform that modern society has ever known. " Inheritance must be abolished." At present sixty per cent. of the wealth of the United States is in the hands of two per cent. of the population. The working class cannot live in comfort unless a large proportion of its women work outside their homes. Thirty- seven per cent. of workmen's wives in the United States are forced, in order to add to the family income, to neglect their households and children. The older children in the schools show signs of discontent • and discouragement—so the schoolmasters declare. No one, it is argued, doubts that the present state of things is utterly unsatisfactory. The Government themselves have published an advertisement, designed to induce men to join the Navy, depicting the conditions of working-class life in American cities in dull, drab, one might almost say black, colours. Is it possible, asks our • The Abolition of Inheritance. By Harlan Eugene Read. New York; The Macmillan Company. i $1.00.!,
author, to place knew financial burden upon shoulders already thus bent ? He thinks not ; but the burden can be borne, and borne easily, if men will but free themselves from the tyranny of the dead. The man who leaves a huge fortune to his heir says practically : " I hereby instruct or decree that to the extent of one hundred million dollars the workers of the next generation shall produce and not receive." To uphold this obviously most question- able assertion he argues that mankind lives from hand to mouth, and that there is no property rightly so called apart from labour.
To the ordinary objections to the contention that such a method of equalizing opportunity as he advocates will destroy the incentive to labour, weaken the bond between parents and children, interrupt the course of business, render the fortune of the State huge and unwieldy, and run counter to the natural law which seems to favour inequalities, he makes a very plausible reply. To take the last objection first, he denies that his scheme would create equality. Equality of lot, even of financial lot, is, he assures his readers, the last thing he desires to see. The welfare of a man's children will always be, he admits, his best reason for the output of his whole energy, but, he argues, the poor put forth all their powers without hope of making bequests. The President of the United States works as hard as any King, though his post is not hereditary. The majority of well-off American men, he says, work for the love of work and for power, and these incentives his scheme does not touch. The inequalities decreed by Nature are not analo- gous to the financial inequalities due to law, in that the advantage Nature gives to her favoured sons is not given at the expense of the others—it is arbitrary. The more control of money the State has, the more obviously does the State become the rich benefactor, and consequently the object of a more and more devoted patriotism. When he comes to the question of the dislocation of business involved in his scheme our author is evidently less sure of his ground. We quote his somewhat unsatisfactory reply to his supposed critics :— " The vast majority of the large businesses of the United States are owned by corporations. The thing that is transferred from father to son in such case is a certificate of stock or a bond. These c 'rtificates of stock and bonds are constantly changing hands regardless of the death or the life of the persons who own them. In fact the handling of such commercial papers is one of the largest businesses in the world. There are brokers in every town or city in all the civilized nations of the earth who are engaged in selling com- mercial paper. The management of a corporation is in no way affected by this transfer of stock."
After the reader has followed the author's arguments for a long while he finds that even this devoted advocate of revolutionary change is not prepared for a literal application of his own drastic remedy. He thinks it would be reasonable to allow bequests to children up to £375 a year, and he would not alter for the worse the present position of a wife in the matter of inheritance. He does not, in actual fact, want to start every child fair ; he merely wants to reduce the handicap. He does not claim for his suggestion that it will make Heaven upon earth, but that it is the simplest method of rectifying the injustices inherent in the present social situation. He claims that he has thought out, and set out, his case well, and that his words are not " the mental wanderings of a loose-tongued, tangent-minded fanatic." In this we entirely agree with him, end are grateful for a book which at least makes a considerable contribution to the stuff of which political dreams are made—never forgetting that it is out of such stuff that social reform must in the end come. His picture of a new earth does not altogether commend itself to us, even if his theory were to be accounted practicable and tried. Supposing, as he supposes, that the sum of the force which goes to making money were in no degree lessened by incapacity to bequeath it, what sort of a set of men should we have at the top of American society ? There is no intensive form of the word " new." These men would be the newest of the new rich, hot from the oven of commerce, unleavened by any classmates who had got used to wealth. Would they not be exceedingly reckless, fearfully hasty, even perhaps exceedingly cruel ? Their money would seem to them nothing but the just reward of their energies and abilities. They would acknowledge no responsibilities towards it whatever. Would they not experience the strongest possible temptation to " blue " their money while they had it, and would not America find that she had put a gigantic power into the hands of drunken men— full of new money ? The self-made Frenchman who said that he himself was an ancestor did more than throw back a vulgar gibe. In a literal sense of the words, he stood upon his dignity. Take away his solicitude for his children, and his children's children, and he would have had none to stand on. The man who gives his life to making a fortune for himself is not of much good to any com- munity. Surely it would be better for a society to be without rich men at all than, while retaining them in all their pride, to take from them the natural check upon their selfishness, the natural rein upon their recklessness, which comes of the inborn desire to serve their children, and their children's children, rather than themselves.
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