“WHOM DO I ROB?”

Thames Star, Volume LIX, Issue 16656, 28 November 1925, Page 8

“WHOM DO I ROB?”

CAPITALIST’S CONFESSIONS. “I, own two motor-cars. I live amidst surroundings that to many people would seem luxurious. “I am, in fact, the sort of person against whom the whole of the Socialist propaganda seems to be launched, and when I listen to current political discussion, I. find myself regarded not only as a superfluity but as a bar to progress, as one of the causes of poverty, want, and distress. “My bookshelves are crammed with volumes explaining what an evil creature 1 am. I possess numbers of books telling me how beautiful the w'orld would be if only 1. and lhy class could be eradicated. “All this is boiled down at the street-corner to the charge of straightforward robbery.

“The main cause of the majority of our troubles is the modern mania for invoking public action, for taking money which would be productive and useful if left in private hands, and rendering it sterile and useless in the dead hand of the Stato machine.” From Sir Ernest Benn’s book “Tlie Confessions of a Capitalist.”

“It lias (jeecoine fashionable to belittle the part of the individual in tlio daily life of tlie world. Thus we are often enough told that the individual is nothing without society. In a sense that may be true! the more complicated any society—our own, for example—becomes the more necessary is for individuals to cooperate with one another,” states the Liverpool Post. “Besides, in an old arid densely populated country, human sympathies are greatly stimulated, if only by the mere fact of contiguity. But though human association is an indispensable condition of the highest civilisation, we ought not to imagine that the indivdual tends to be submedged in the multitude, and that individual initiative is of less account to-day than it was in more prmtive times.

“The fact is that society is depen dent upon individual impulse or enterprise for all change, whether it may prove to be beneficial or other; arid those who talk so loudly about the power of the State to do this or that, as if the State itself was not the creature of individual will, are deceiving themselves about the true nature of human affairs.”

The above is by way of preface to an interesting article in the Liverpool Post on Sir Ernest Benn’s book, “The Confession of a Capitalist,’ ’writes the Daily Telegraph, in an able notice, explains the scope of this notable book as follows: “ ‘Whom do I rob?’ asks the author, in a very instructive account of his financial position. He employs 2000 ‘wage-slaves,’ and he has a turnover of £400,000 a year. Of this he pays away £390,000, and retains £IO,OOO, or sixpence in the pound. Half of this goes to the Exchequer, so that Sir Ernest has threepence for every pound which lie handles. ‘Ought he to divest himself of part of his personal surplus so that he may add to his office boy’s salary of 25/- a week?’ Clearly he cannot, since the office boy’s contribuation to his employer s income is equivalent to no more than 3|d. a week. Sir Ernest’s income, if distrinbuted among his employees at this rate, would benefit none of them apreciably, while, deprived of bis guidance, the business, and with it the wages, might rapidly decline. “The only way in which his workpeople, or any others, can get more is by increasing the output and the turnover, so that there may be moie to divide. It is an elementary truth, but millions of our people unhappily disbelieve it and persist in dreaming of hidden stores of wealth which might be theirs if the capitalist were out of the way.

“Sir Ernest has some pungent things to say about the restrictive rules el trade unions and trade associations, about the growth of bureaucracy, the trials of the income-tax payer, and ‘the insecurity of inefficiency’ which he regards as our chief pern nowadays. By way of contrast he gives his impressions of America, which s 'as near to an economic heaven as wo mortals shall ever, approach’—where 110,000,000 human beings are ‘all as keen on efficiency as • we are on cricket.’ “H : s account of American thrift—especially of working men’s investments in the companies which employ them—is as remarkable as his illustrations of the average Amercan’s desire to increase output and save labour. ‘The whole force of public opinion in America.’ he concludes, ‘is directed to teaching its people bow to push. Our public opinion, on, the contrary, seems to lie concerned with teaching our people how to lean.’ ” Air. Horace Thorogood well sums up the book when he states: “These racy chapters teem with controversial things, but they are all based upon the experience of a keen business man well knewn as an excellent employer, and one has the agreeable assurance all through that he plots and works towards the same goal as the rest of us—namely, the increase of the general well-being. He is stoutly on the side of the angels.”