United States or Argentina ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Wells, this shareholding class is on the way to extinction in any case, fortunately he also thinks, and the student of social economics need not concern himself with its future, only so far as its example influences the real bone and sinew of the republic, the working men and women who make the world the place it is.
It made no mention of my refusal to buy a certain mill for the combine at an excessive cost to the shareholding public. On the contrary, those who had failed to induce me to break faith with the investing public appealed to that public to condemn me for forming a Trust. I am prepared now to confess that I was bitterly hurt and injured by the injustice of these attacks. But I regret nothing. Why?
Related in its character of absolute irresponsibility to this shareholding class is a kindred class that has grown with the growth of the great towns, the people who live upon ground rents.
If they favour it, it will survive; when they do not, it will vanish as the mists of the morning before the sun. Neglecting a few exceptional older corporations which, indeed, in their essence are not usurious, but of unlimited liability, the shareholding body appeared first, in its present character, in the seventeenth century, and came to its full development in the mid-nineteenth.
Those who belong to this shareholding class only partially, who partially depend upon dividends and partially upon activities, occur in every rank and order of the whole social body.
It needed the Olympian unworldliness of an irresponsible rich man of the shareholding type, a Ruskin or a Morris playing at life, to imagine as much. Road-making under Mr. Ruskin's auspices was a joy at Oxford no doubt, and a distinction, and it still remains a distinction; it proved the least contagious of practices.
But the shareholding ingredient of our new society, so far as its shareholding goes, has no need of strength or wisdom; the countless untraceable Owner of the modern world presents in a multitudinous form the image of a Merovingian king.
The facies of the social fabric has changed, and as I hope to make clear is still changing in a direction from which, without a total destruction and rebirth of that fabric, there can never be any return. The most striking of the new classes to emerge is certainly the shareholding class, the owners of a sort of property new in the world's history.
The gentry were largely in a process of decomposition. They still possessed the basis of their existence, their land, but the land was falling in value, as there were now other opportunities of capital investment, such as export-import, shareholding in foreign enterprises, or industrial undertakings. It is important to note, however, that there was not much fluid capital at their disposal.
Every man will be soberly and intelligently setting about the particular thing he has to do even the rich shareholding sort of person, the hereditary mortgager of society, will be given something to do, and if he has learnt nothing else he will serve to tie up parcels of ammunition or pack army sausage.
Word Of The Day