The Camel and the Needle's EyePonsonby, Arthur Ponsonby, Baron
Philosophy
The Camel and the Needle's Eye
Ponsonby, Arthur Ponsonby, Baron
Wealth; Wealth -- Moral and ethical aspects
(3) Even if the experiment is admittedly useful and beneficial, it
has a strong tendency to encourage us, who constitute the community
as a whole, to think that as there are rich men who are sufficiently
enterprising and public-spirited to undertake these schemes and works
of general utility, it is unnecessary to organise corporate effort,
to establish them ourselves. Moreover, there is limit of productivity
in private enterprise.
(4) There are social schemes carefully conceived and elaborately
worked out which fail because the very security of certain
financial help and support has the effect of weakening initiative,
choking enterprise, and preventing the growth of the just pride and
self-reliance which individuals or bodies of individuals can only
develop in an independent struggle with the chances and changes of
their natural environment. Those who are supposed to benefit by the
scheme are in fact, oppressed by the shadow of the heavy arm of the
financial subsidy which dominates the whole situation. This may be
unreasonable, but it is quite natural, and it shows that money poured
out by one hand clogs the machinery of commercial and industrial
life, falls, so to speak, into clots and cannot spread itself
effectively as a lubricant into the many narrow and unseen corners of
the domestic, municipal, or rural life and activities of the people.
(5) Lastly, or it should have been said, primarily, the paramount
objection is that any good that may come from the particular scheme
or experiment is completely outweighed by the wrong that has been
perpetrated and the injury that has been inflicted, in countless
ways and in numberless directions, by the withdrawal from healthy
circulation and the accumulation of the very riches a part of which
is now being returned to the community in this doubtful form.
It would be ungenerous to deny that great care and forethought have
been exercised by the millionaires who have determined to devote a
large part of their wealth to some great religious, social, scientific,
or artistic cause. Distinct benefits have accrued from their action.
But emphatically this does not mean that surplus wealth in individual
hands can be used profitably. It means that human ingenuity,
intelligence, and generous feeling can to some small extent mitigate in
one direction the constant and pressing evils which the accumulation of
riches has caused and is causing in a vastly more extensive way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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