GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

570
POLITICS
also sponsored an economic system under which only a
few seemed substantially to benefit from this increase. In
I937> fa* example, there were in Great Britain some ten
thousand people drawing incomes of twenty thousand
pounds or more a year. The majority of these persons
performed no service to the community; they were, that
is to say, unemployed. At the other end of the economic
scale there were eleven million wage-earners receiving
less than 125 a year, the average wage for the country
as a- whole being less than 100 a year. All these wageearners
worked for seven, many for eight, some for nine
or ten hours a day in order that they might draw these
wages. Mr. Seebohm Rowntree has estimated that a
careful housewife, who was a good buyer, required in that
year 53*. a week if she lived in a town, and 411. a week if
in the country, in order to keep a husband and three
children reasonably well-fed. It will be seen that the bulk
of the wage-earners in Great Britain in 1937 did not reach
this standard. Now the socialist contention, which began
increasingly to be urged from the middle of the nineteenth
century onwards, was that, until every man had a chance,
and an equal chance, of obtaining a reasonable economic
livelihood, men were being deprived of one of their natural
rights, their right, namely, to a living wage. To translate
this socialist contention into the language which we have
been using, we shall say that a man has a natural right
to the full development of his personality; he has also a
natural right to pursue ideal ends. These rights cannot,
however, we shall insist, be exercised, unless he enjoys
economic security and material well-being. He has a right,
then, to economic security and material well-being; or
rather, he has a right to the same opportunity as have
all his fellow citizens to secure these conditions necessary
to the realization of his moral rights. Equal opportunity
with others cannot, however, be extended to him so long
as a privileged class hold the keys of economic power. He
has a right, then, to endeavour to dispossess this privileged
dass, and work for such an apportionment of the economic