tion of the consumer by the producer is simple. It is to turn
all men into producers, and thus to remove the temptation for
particular groups of workers to force their claims at the expense of
the public, by removing the valid excuse that such gains as they may
get are {134} taken from those who at present have no right to them,
because they are disproportionate to service or obtained for no service
at all. Indeed, if work were the only title to payment, the danger of
the community being exploited by highly organized groups of producers
would largely disappear. For, when no payments were made to
non-producers, there would be no debatable ground for which to
struggle, and it would become evident that if any one group of
producers took more, another must put up with less.

Under such conditions a body of workers who used their strong strategic
position to extort extravagant terms for themselves at the expense of
their fellow-workers might properly be described as exploiting the
community. But at present such a statement is meaningless. It is
meaningless because before the community can be exploited the community
must exist, and its existence in the sphere of economics is to-day not
a fact but only an aspiration. The procedure by which, whenever any
section of workers advance demands which are regarded as inconvenient
by their masters, they are denounced as a band of anarchists who are
preying on the public may be a convenient weapon in an emergency, but,
once it is submitted to analysis, it is logically self-destructive. It
has been applied within recent years, to the postmen, to the engineers,
to the policemen, to the miners and to the railway men, a population
with their dependents, of some eight million persons; and in the case
of the last two the whole body of organized labor made common cause
with those of whose exorbitant demands it was alleged to be the victim.
But when these {135} workers and their sympathizers are deducted, what
is "the community" which remains? It is a naive arithmetic which
produces a total by subtracting one by one all the items which compose
it; and the art which discovers the public interest by eliminating the
interests of successive sections of the public smacks of the
rhetorician rather than of the statesman.

The truth is that at present it is idle to seek to resist the demands
of any group of workers by appeals to "the interests of society,"
because to-day, as long as the econom