Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/46

and saving would be operative? The workers would, as you admit, save a smaller proportion of their enlarged income than the well-to-do classes had saved before; might they not be expected, from the very pressure of new-felt wants for satisfaction, to save too little, and so check development of the arts of industry to their own disadvantage later on? Mr. Keynes expresses with great confidence the view that "it was precisely the inequality of the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age" (the nineteenth century) "from all others." "Like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect." This capitalist economy, he holds, throve not merely on inequality but upon iniquity. For "the immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the War, could never have come about in a society where wealth was divided equitably."^[1] In fact, he contends, this "great benefit" was based upon "a double bluff or deception," the workers being "compelled, persuaded or cajolled" into taking very little of the cake, while the capitalists took the best part of the cake on "the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice." Here, indeed, Adam Smith's mysticism of the "invisible hand," by which individual greed is transmuted into common benefit, is carried a stage farther. For iniquity is made the very foundation-stone of