"Social Diseases and Suggested Remedies." By the Rev. John Blacket

MISCELLANEOUS WORKS.
"Social Diseases and Suggested Remedies." By the Rev. John Blacket, author of "A South Australian Romance." London: Arthur H. Stockwell.

In this suggestive volume, the nature of which is well indicated by its title, Mr. Blacket discusses the two great remedies suggested for the misery which springs from, unavoidable poverty—the one specific being the unadulterated individualism of Henry George and the other the pure socialism of Karl Marx. Mr. Blacket is evidently of belief that the church has yet something to say on the social problem, and that while it should not support visionary schemes or sanction revolutionary proposals, it should not confine its attention solely to another world, or in its denunciation of wrong restrict itself to the misconduct of the drunkard, the wife-beater, and other friendless sinners. It should have a word also to say about the "insatiable greed and hardness of heart of those who would feast and fatten themselves by taking, a mean advantage of others," it should remind men that Christianity is a practice and not a profession; it should say with the Apostle James. "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold the hue of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth." In this spirit the church, Mr. Blacket holds, should make careful study of all schemes that offer promise of relief for the poor. He cannot agree that State socialism makes good its claims in this direction. Is all value, he asks, created by labor, as the socialists declare? He meets the question with an emphatic "No."
Mr. Blacket's economics here and there are marked by originality, as where he lays stress upon the allowance which must be made for brains in the creation of value. The textbooks of political economy recognise but three factors in the production of wealth, land, labor, and capital, but Mr. Blacket knows of a fourth, which he calls ability. A little reflection will show that the product of the brain is as much a product of labor as that of muscle. The brain produces nothing until it is exercised and more than does muscle, and it is this exercise which older and sounder economists than Mr. Blacket described as muscle. The employer is a laborer—that is to say, he labors to the extent to which the success of his business is due to his own skill and intelligence. The author, however, takes an unassailable position when he says that "in providing the material and the machinery, in superintending the business, in watching markets, the employer plays a prominent part in the creation of value, and should receive his reward. Capitalists must not be expected, to give away their money in the interest of labor, any more than the wage-earner should be expected to render service for nothing in the interest of capital." All this is equivalent, to saying that the success of business is often due to the labor, it may be mental or it may be physical, of the capitalist. State socialism, the author is convinced, by repressing individualism, abolishing competition, and crushing the spirit of enterprise, would remove the spur to industry.
As for the extremer form of individualism known as Georgianism, which aspires to put all individuals on the same footing in relation to their natural environment, and to limit every man's possessions to what he can earn in all competition, Mr. Blacket perceives difficulties which George's books have failed to answer. "If man has only an absolute right to what he makes; if what existed before he came upon earth belongs equally to all men, then we must communise gold, precious stones, coal, fish, cattle." It is true that it is by labor that fish are caught, by labor nuggets are discovered and made use of, but they were not brought into existence by human exertion any more than was land; and the mere fact that land is necessarily of limited quantity, whereas horses, cattle, and sheep can be multiplied, does not, in the author's view, affect the principle that "if private property in land is robbery on the basis that land is a gift from God, then private property in any other gift from God must be robbery too." Still, George's gospel has its facts as well as its assumptions, and Mr. Blacket will not be deterred by a regard for the feelings of "interested persons" in proclaiming what he believes to be the truth that "Georges law of rent is applicable to many who hold property in the heart of our thriving towns and great cities." Every year—not once in a lifetime—every year, there are landlords who are "reaping a fortune and rendering no commensurate service for it. The fortune is not created by them—there is no personal exertion on their part—it is created by the pressure of numbers, or the growth of the community, which calls into existence ground values." These values the author would tax on a progressive scale. At the same time he holds that no economic change will bring in the millennium, which is only to be secured by that fundamental transformation of human nature which it is the aim of Christianity to effect.

The Advertiser(10/6/1905), http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5049299