How far is the saying true that “Every one lives either by working, or by begging, or by stealing.”’ Observe: This is primarily a question merely of fact, and not of right or wrong. There may be (1) Right Work and Wrong Work; (2) Begging that is justifiable, and Begging that is unjustifiable; (3) Stealing which is pardonable, and stealing which is unpardonable. In simply placing, therefore, any class of persons under one or another of these three heads, I am not necessarily either praising or blaming the individual members of that class. Again, of two paid workers one may be greatly underpaid, and the other as greatly overpaid. But neither is this consideration embraced in the question before us. We have not to do, tonight, with the merits of any individual, nor with the value or valuelessness of any kind of work, nor yet with the equitable assignment in any particular case of the reward of work. Let us, in the first place, classify the members of English society by dividing them simply into — I. Workers, and II. NonWorkers. I. Workers, e.g.: — Manual labourers, skilled and unskilled; domestic servants; soldiers; sailors; farmers; clerks and overseers; professional men; retail and wholesale dealers; merchants and manufacturers; bankers (sleeping partners are excepted); teachers and preachers; artists, authors, and editors; high officers and Ministers of State; the Sovereign; housewives. All these are doing work, and are receiving pay in coin or kind in return for their work. Some of them may be doing unpaid (honorary) work as well as paid work; and others may be getting interest (on a capital for which they never worked) in addition to those wages of superintendence which are strictly the reward of a merchant’s or manufacturer’s work. Again, some of them may be working in appointed places for definite salaries, while others may be working, so to speak, “on their own hook,” or, in more elegant language, “paddling their own canoe.” By what mark, then, shall we distinguish the type of man who lives by his work? What is his definition? He is the man who lives upon pay, in coin or kind, which is given him in return for his personal services. And only in proportion as his means of living are derived from such pay, or from his personal labour on the soil, can he properly be said to “live by working.’’ We have next to consider who are the (II.) Non-Workers of Society, and whether they may all, without exception, be properly included in the two classes, “Beggars,” and “Stealers” — whether, in fact, this two-fold division of them is an exhaustive one. Now, Beggars and Thieves are alike in these respects, that they, both of them, consume without producing, enjoy without labouring, are served but render no service to others, receive but give not in return, are clever in subtraction, but failures in addition. Wherein, then, do they differ from each other? They differ, for the purposes of the present argument, only in the different dispositions of their respective victims towards them. The victim of the Beggar is a willing victim; he is influenced by custom, or by compassion for weakness, pain, or privation. On the other hand, the victim of the Thief is an unwilling victim. It may be that he is unconscious of the spoliation that is perpetrated upon him.

But if he is conscious of it, his tendency is to resist it, if he dare, and prevent it, if he can. This I hold to be the fundamental and essential distinction, for the purposes of the present argument, between the beggar and the thief. The beggar is the man who victimises society with its leave; and the thief is the man who victimises society without its leave. Now, in relation to the present question, the Workers of Society are, in any case, the Victims, and, of course, they must be be either willingly or unwillingly. I propose, therefore, to entitle all those nonworkers to whose demands workers are willing victims, “Beggars;” and to give the name of “Thieves” to all those non-workers whose requirements are supplied by the workers against their will. I am quite aware that in thus applying these terms I am guilty of a logical fallacy, to wit, in having subjected a “Universal Affirmative Proposition” to the operation of “Simple Conversion;” for it does not, of course, necessarily follow that because all thieves victimise society against its will, therefore all who victimise society against its will are thieves. I am aware, too, that I am giving a somewhat liberal and unusual significance to the terms “Beggar” and “Thief;” but, for all that, I believe this interpretation is justified by (1) the essential meaning of the terms in question, and (2) the existence of a true analogy between the conventional “Beggar” and thief and my “Beggar” and thief — that is, the identity of the relation which both of them essentially bear to their respective victims, the individual and society. Let us now enumerate the different existing classes of Non-workers, and examine whether they do really come, all of them, legitimately, under one or other of these two classes, and whether it is against society’s will, or with iti consent, that they are severally victimising it. E.G. — Those who are too young to work; those who are too old to work; those who, through congenital or accidental deficiencies in mind or body, are incompetent to work; those who are too ill in mind or body to work; those who are being prepared, by education, for work. In the above list would be included the inmates of all nurseries, schools, sick-rooms, asylums, hospitals, and alms-houses, and, in part, of union workhouses and prisons. And all these may be properly classified as “Beggars,” seeing that they live upon means which are voluntarily provided for them by society — victimising it by its leave. On the other hand, robbers, swindlers, and adulterators at large — and also every member of society in ao far as he is extortionate or knowingly unfair to another’s disadvantage, and whether he is visibly a lawbreaker or not — may be classified as thieves, who victimise society against its will. There remain, however, certain classes of Non-workers, whose position cannot be assigned on a mere surface inspection, and whose true relation to society will require careful investigation: — (1.) The man who has lived by working, and, having saved some of his earnings, has retired to live at ease on his “savings” (I mean their corpus, as distinguished from any “Interest” which might accrue on them) — this man I should classify as one who lives by working. (2.) The man who is in the enjoyment of a life pension — the reward of his having personally fulfilled a stipulated period of professional toil — this man, too, may fairly be said to live by working. But (3) the man whose income arises from the rents of land or houses which he inherited — what shall we call him? (4.) How, too, shall we class the man whose income consists of the interest of inherited shares in Government, railway or other stocks? (5.) What title, again, shall we give to the sleeping partner in a business, and to the merchant or manufacturing capitalist in so far as his income accrues not as wages of superintendence, but in the way of interest on a capital which he inherited, and did not earn? How, in one word, shall we classify the men who are living — in so far as they are living — on what they inherited from their ancestors or friends? Here is a class of persons, none of them without ability to work, but all of them alike, as we are supposing, non-workers. Further, they are living, not on the saving of abstinence, at least not of their own abstinence; they are living idly on rents or on the interest of loans. We might have to travel back centuries in search of a personal industry which gathered, and a personal abstinence which saved, the family fortune, and after all find only fraud or force. How shall we classify these members of society? Well, I am reminded, when I contemplate them, of the description we gave alike to beggars and to thieves — who “consume without producing, enjoy without labouring, are served but render no service to others, receive but give not in return.” They must surely, then, belong to one or the other of these classes. They inherited the land or the capital which is the source of their income, never perhaps even saying, “Thank you” for it. Now, which are they — beggars or thieves? As to the forefather who founded the family, he may have been a noble worker, or, as I hinted above, a thief, or a receiver of stolen goods; but these men themselves, in the truth of things as it seems to me, occupy the middle place — they are “Beggars.” They victimise society, but they do so with its full consent. Here is their history: — The patriarch aforesaid, imagining that a wholly idle life must be a very desirable and honourable one, and preferring, naturally, the interests of his own children to those of other people’s children, determined, by settling his property on his posterity, or at any rate bequeathing it to them exclusively, to put them at ease in their circumstances for all future time. He compassionated them — he felt for them as we do for the beggar we meet in the street. His prophetic eye discerned a long line of unborn generations of descendants on their knees before him begging, and on his death-bed he entailed his property on them. The law allowed it. Society approved of it. Who can blame him? By way of further illustrating the position of his heirs, let us suppose the case of three imaginary men, named respectively, “Mr. Smith,” “Mr. Brown,” and “Mr. Robinson.” They are all of them honest saving and successful workers in their youth, and each of them retires at the age of 50 with a fortune of £20,000. This money they might have expended as fast as they earned it, but they did not. They had, at the date of their retirement, conferred each of them on society £20,000 worth of service more than they had exacted from it; and society owed each of them at that date an amount of service of precisely that value, neither more nor less. Now, mark their after course: “Mr. Smith” locks his £20,000 in a safe, takes out £1,000 a year, has nothing left on his 70th birthday, and then (we will hope, for his own sake and society’s) dies! Society has exactly paid him what it owed him, neither more nor less. Or he purchases with his £20,000 an annuity, and takes his chance of being a gainer or a loser by the transaction: and on the average we may assume that this transaction leaves him and society “quits.” “Mr. Brown " calculates on living 20 years; and reserving one thousand out of his twenty for his own expenditure during the next year, lends the remaining 19 thousands among nineteen of his friends, but without interest, and on the understanding that one thousand be repaid annually to him or his assignees until the whole nineteen have been returned. He dies 3 years afterwards, leaving his widow and children, — i.e., his “domestic beggars” — heirs to an income of £1,000 a year for 17 years; by which time he had calculated the widow would be dead, and the children able to support themselves by their own work. At the expiration of this period society will have conferred upon, his heirs and assignees exactly that balance of unrepaid service for which it was indebted to him at his death. “Mr. Robinson,” however, is too acute a fellow to accept 20 shillings in exchange for a sovereign, and he puts his £20,000 out in some concern at 5 percent interest. By this ingenious and legalised dodge he contrives not merely to get £1,000 a year for his own expenditure so long as he lives, but he further secures £1,000 a year to his posterity for ever, so that in the course of 1,000 years society pays him and his family £1,000,000 worth of service in return for the £20,000 worth of service which were properly owing to him on his 50th birthday. Is his family rendering society any “service” during this thousand years? Not at all! The land, the capital, from which the income accrues, would have been quite as beneficial to society in anyone else’s hands as in theirs; nay, much more beneficial if they had been nationalised. Society, however, unquestionably permits the arrangement, and being in this way victimised by its own permission, the persons who enjoy the fruits of the victimisation, come, according to our definition, under the appellation of “Beggars.” As to the ancestral Robinson, he did not consider (who does?) that exactly in proportion to the money he left to be spent in idleness by his posterity, he was laying a burden on labour, by mortgaging for ever part of the industry of the rest of society for the benefit of that one family: for both Interest and Rent are in all cases ultimately paid by labour. He never considered (who does?) that the surplus service of a single life can hardly constitute a fair claim upon society for all time. And so he did his best to beggar (in my sense of the term) his heirs and assigns for ever! It occurs to me, however, that two objections may probably be raised to this view: — (1) Though the descendants of such a man are not living by work of their own, they are living by work, for they are living by their ancestor’s work. I reply by denying in toto the doctrine of imputed industry, or of vicarious industry. These men do not live either by their ancestor’s work, or by their own working! If a man tells me he works for his living, it never occurs to me to suppose that he is referring to the work done by his great grandfather before he was born or thought of, least of all when the ancestral services have been already fully requited! But (2) it may perhaps be objected that the non-working inheritor of land or money is yet in some sense requiting society and doing it a valuable “service” by letting his acres to a farmer, and his cash to an employer of labour. And it would certainly be a worse thing for society if this gentleman left his land uncultivated, and possibly so if he locked up his money in a box. No doubt society is assisted in the production of its wealth by the cultivation of the land and the judicious employment of the money; even though the first charge upon the profits is assigned as rent or interest to the do-nothing proprietor (for I am supposing that he is a do-nothing); but in truth the service is rendered by the money and by the land, and not by the proprietor — who, when once the ancestral services have been fully requited, has no right, except that of law and might, to land or money, rent or interest, seeing he never earned them, but only begged them from some forefather, who, instead of leaving his accumulations to the State to be expended on the general good, and encouraging in his sons the industry which had been his crown, took advantage of the weakness, good nature, and shortsightedness of the law to lay a perpetual charge upon the industry of his country by establishing a family of “beggars,’’ who should too often be titled and bowed down to in proportion as they were vain and useless, and who should have the inalienable privilege of consuming as much as they would of the true — the lifesupporting — wealth which is produced by the toil and moil of living men, while offering in exchange nothing but the “unearned increments” on accumulations which were secured to them by dead parchments written by dead ancestors. In its moral aspect, however, this branch of our inquiry would seem to resolve itself into the deeper questions: — Can anything but personal service, justly claim a return of personal service? And, is the taking of interest on a loan for private gain morally justifiable? This aspect of the question is not, however, before us tonight, as we are only dealing with a question of fact. That all who live on the interest of accumulations are, in my opinion, really living by begging, may be inferred by what has been said above. And I can but sum up with the expression of my deliberate conviction that as a matter of fact, every member of society does live, practically and essentially, either by Working, or by Begging, or by Stealing. Four brief remarks, and then I close: — (1.) Any one of the “beggars” described above (and I am one) may, if he will, wipe from his shield all the dishonour which naturally attaches to his position, and may practically raise himself to the dignity of a working man and a patriot, if he will volunteer to take his fair share of the unpaid, but not on that account unimportant, work which society is always needing to have done by volunteers; and if he will further devote his surplus income to objects of public profit. I cannot for a moment doubt the desirableness of having in a metropolis, and within every area of local government, men of that leisure and liberal culture which are rarely to be found conjoined except in those who belong to the class of “Hereditary Beggars.” As it is said admirably in Ecclesiasticus (chap. 38), “The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure, and he that hath little business shall become wise. How can he get [political] wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of bullocks.’” &c, &c. (verses 21-34). And yet, on the other hand, how can we expect of any man, that, if he has never undergone any sort of labour on behalf of the community to which he belongs, he will be able to form any just estimate of the feelings and legislative needs of the class of Workers. In truth, there are “Beggars and Beggars,” and the class as a whole might most instructively be subdivided into Serviceable beggars and Unserviceable beggars. Would that all beggars were, according to their ability, of the “Serviceable” sub-class! And would that all those “beggars,” who, for want of a proper training, are obliged to take their place in the ignobler sub-class, would make it a point of honour and of duty to train and fit their children for the requital, by some personal service, of that working section of society apart from those personal labours even millionaires cannot live! (2.) The laws relating to bequest and inheritance ought, perhaps, to be reformed, and all bequests to be subjected to Government control and veto. (3.) It might be well, either that society should not allow the amassing of prodigious fortunes, or that a capable but idle inheritor should be compelled to serve society by being deprived of his inheritance. The 218th “Query” of Bishop Berkeley runs thus, “Whether a door ought not to be shut against all other methods of growing rich, save only by industry and merit? And whether wealth got otherwise would not be ruinous to the public?” (4.) People ought not to be ashamed of stating to proper authorities, and on reasonable occasions, what their income is and whence it comes. Though, as Ruskin says, “Every kind of vagabonds, high and low, agree in their dislike to give an account of the way they get their living, still more of how much they have got sewn up in their breeches’ pocket;” adding — and I heartily agree with him that, “It is of vital moment to a country to know how its vagabonds live.''

– E. D. Girdlestone, quoted in the Christian Socialist, a British monthly, December, 1883.

See also http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-world-according-to-team-walt.html.