Dr. Johnsons Defense of Property

Mr. Vallance was recently awarded a Joseph Medill Patterson scholarship in journalism at Fordham University.

The quotations in this article are from Bos­well’s Life of Samuel Johnson and from Rambler articles by Johnson dated April 17 and October 6, 1750.

The eighteenth century’s Dr. Samuel Johnson lived at a time when the economic doctrine of common property (later developed intensively by Karl Marx) ex­tended itself into the discussions of thinking men and into the teaching of children.

"You teach them," Johnson told a friend, "the community of goods; for which there are as many plausible arguments as for most erroneous doctrines. You teach them that all things at first were in common, and that no man had a right to any thing but as he laid his hands upon it; and that this still is, or ought to be, the rule amongst mankind. Here, Sir, you sap a great principle of society, — property."

It was from principle, not vested interest, that the author of the first English Dictionary defended property. Samuel Johnson had come to London in his early years accompanied by a former pupil of his, David Garrick, and between them they had only fourpence to start with in perhaps the only English city where one could raise his station. Both would strongly apply themselves: Johnson as a "drudge" with his dictionary and various other writings, Garrick upon the stage where he would gain fame in the city’s dramatic circles.

The fact, therefore, that John­son achieved a degree of wealth both little and late testifies to his integrity when he dealt with the subject of property. What led Johnson to defend personal posses­sion was his basic view of life.

The brilliant lexicographer took life as he saw it around him (there was no question here of guessing at man’s antediluvian condition), and he viewed it as no easy journey. In a 1762 letter to a friend immigrating to America there is a notion that he would keep all his life:

"It is a melancholy considera­tion," he wrote, "that so much of our time is necessarily to be spent upon the care of living, and that we seldom can obtain ease in one respect but by resigning it in an­other; yet I suppose we are by this dispensation not less happy in the whole, than if the spontaneous bounty of Nature poured all that we want into our hands."

But, however much he might see the activity of living as a dreary task with little comfort even in bounty, poverty was no state to praise. The next year, when Johnson was 54 years old, he recalled in conversation his early years in London:

"When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plen­tiful fortune.— So you hear people talking how miserable a king must be; and yet all wish to be in his place."

Wealth Not Everything

Here, Johnson was not proclaim­ing any great benefits to be de­rived from wealth but merely say­ing that man wishes to be happy and finds the possession of prop­erty a suitable prerequisite. How­ever, Johnson would warn against too fervid a desire for riches, not so much because of a probable des­pair in not attaining them but more because even their attain­ment proved to be unsatisfactory. Johnson wrote about this desire in a semiweekly London magazine called The Rambler to which he regularly contributed:

"When therefore the desire of wealth is taking hold of the heart, let us look round and see how it operates upon those whose indus­try or fortune has obtained it. When we find them oppressed with their own abundance, luxurious without pleasure, idle without ease, impatient and querulous in themselves, and despised or hated by the rest of mankind, we shall soon be convinced that if the real wants of our condition are satis­fied, there remains little to be fought with solicitude, or desired with eagerness."

So, Johnson was not one who saw in wealth or property a solu­tion to man’s pursuit of happiness. He, like his friend and fellow club member, Edmund Burke, felt the presence of an "unbought grace of life" and, besides, viewed the wealth he defended as a moral means (if not an always success­ful one) to a moral end.

Because this end, though moral, could not ensure happiness, Dr. Johnson tried to show to those who bewailed the unequal distri­bution of property that their cries were little justified.

In the same article in The Ram­bler he asked them to consider "that the inequality of distribu­tion, at which we murmur, is for the most part less than it seems, and that the greatness, which we admire at a distance, has much fewer advantages, and much less splendour, when we are suffered to approach it."

This view, though it dismissed the argument that wealth made one man so much greater than an­other and therefore was not to be allowed, did not preclude a man’s rising in the world or mean that he should be "kept in his place." In another issue of The Rambler Johnson without qualification agreed that a man’s ability to rise should not be hindered:

"Every man ought to endeavour at eminence, not by pulling others down, but by raising himself, and enjoy the pleasure of his own su­periority, whether imaginary or real, without interrupting others in the same felicity."

So this was Dr. Johnson’s basic view of life: the necessity of meet­ing one’s needs; the desire for wealth; the unsatisfactory nature of both wealth and poverty and the questionable argument for reduc­ing their differences; finally, the ability to rise in life without hin­drance. What of his defense of property against erroneous doc­trines? A preamble can be seen above, and it can now be presented within the context of these other views.

Ownership in Common

It was in The Rambler again that Johnson questioned the soundness of common property as an idea and there reached a most simple conclusion — the idea just doesn’t work out in the world as we know it:

"Community of possession must include spontaneity of production; for what is obtained by labour will be of right the property of him by whose labour it is gained. And while a rightful claim to pleasure or to affluence must be procured either by slow industry or uncertain hazard, there will al­ways be multitudes whom coward­ice or impatience incite to more safe and more speedy methods, who strive to pluck the fruit with­out cultivating the tree, and to share the advantages of victory without partaking the danger of the battle."

Johnson has to find something that does work and so he relies on a great principle of society—prop­erty — as a basis for argument. The scope of his intelligence and the fund of knowledge which he constantly added to by reading and conversation prepared him to meet most fallacious reasonings and nonsensical propositions. The latter he considered Rousseau’s speculation on the origin of in­equality. Johnson’s excellent bio­grapher, James Boswell, recorded his subject’s opinion of this kind of speculation:

"Knowledge of all things is good. Conjecture, as to things use­ful, is good; but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, such as whether man went upon all four, is very idle."

Where Rousseau has deduced a system, guessed at an unknown condition, and finds himself griev­ing over the state into which no­ble, primitive man has descended, Johnson has looked to experience, examined known conditions, and grieves only that, as he had writ­ten to his emigrant friend, "so much of our time is necessarily to be spent upon the care of living."

Grounded in Reality

The reason why Johnson always seems to be in a defensive position may be added here. Anyone could imagine a utopian state and by comparison with the unimagined hardship and injustice of real life show the system that produces these to be evil in its operation. Johnson acknowledged that evil but could not abandon such a sys­tem as the necessity of living de­mands in favor of a utopia where that necessity, because it is un­considered, makes nonsense of that ideal state. He spoke of a real world, not of an easily fabri­cated one:

"Sir, there is nothing for which you may not muster up more plausible arguments, than those which are urged against wealth and other external advantages. Why, now, there is stealing; why should it be thought a crime? When we consider by what unjust methods property has been often acquired, and that what was un­justly got it must be unjust to keep, where is the harm in one man’s taking the property of an­other from him? Besides, Sir, when we consider the bad use which many people make of their property, and how much better use the thief may make of it, it may be defended as a very allowable practice. Yet, Sir, the experience of mankind has discovered steal­ing to be so very bad a thing, that they make no scruple to hang a man for it."

The Uncertainty of Giving

While defending wealth, John­son tried to resolve the problem of just concern for the poor. If the real world was not a vale of tears to him, it was at least no easy traveling. It was also nothing to capriciously tamper with as some would do who, after a pitying view of the poor, would distribute the luxury of the wealthy among them. Here is how Johnson rea­soned against this:

"A man gives half a guinea for a dish of green peas. How much gardening does this occasion? How many labourers must the competi­tion, to have such things early in the market, keep in employment? You will hear it said, very grave­ly, Why has not the half-guinea, thus spent in luxury, been given to the poor? To how many might it have afforded a good meal? Alas! has it not gone to the in­dustrious poor, whom it is better to support than the idle poor?" The industrious poor would not be harmed by luxury spread in this manner because "luxury, so far as it reaches the poor, will do good to the race of people; it will strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation was ever hurt by luxury; for, as I said before, it can reach but to a very few."

And it was with these "very few" and the use they made of their riches that Johnson was often concerned. His defense of property is strengthened by his opinion of its proper use. It is really an element of the defense.

A man of wealth to Johnson’s mind has a prime obligation. He is obliged to spread that wealth for the benefit of society. Johnson rules out giving wealth away:

"A man cannot make a bad use of his money, so far as regards Society, if he does not hoard it; for if he either spends it or lends it out, Society has the benefit. It is in general better to spend money than to give it away; for industry is more promoted by spending money than by giving it away. A man who spends his money is sure he is doing good with it: he is not so sure when he gives it away. A man who spends ten thousand a year will do more good than a man who spends two thousand and gives away eight."

Thus, the artificial dole is dis­missed. "Earning your pay" is far better than receiving it outright. This opinion finds a possible justi­fication in our own time in two areas; in foreign aid, where the position of the receiver is discom­forting and gives rise to ill-feel­ing, and in programs for the poor, where government administrators have learned the importance of the poor’s own involvement and action in return for the helping hand.

For Johnson proper use of riches can also refute the notion (held by Rousseau among others) that there is some better quality in poverty which sets it above wealth as a state to be desired. This is a silly notion because "he who is rich in a civilized society must be happier than he who is poor, as riches, if properly used (and it is a man’s own fault if they are not), must be productive of the highest advantage."

Indebtedness Frowned Upon

Surely, Dr. Johnson is concerned with how well property is managed and to illustrate just how much he is concerned about the matter we may look into the 1782 cor­respondence Johnson had with biographer Boswell, then at his estate in Scotland. In three separ­ate letters he enjoins Boswell to avoid debt. Once, he warns:

"Poverty, my dear friend, is so great an evil, and pregnant with so much temptation, and so much misery, that I cannot but earnest­ly enjoin you to avoid it. Live on what you have; live if you can on less; do not borrow either for vanity or pleasure; the vanity will end in shame, and the pleas­ure in regret…"

In another, he advises:

"Let it be your first care not to be in any man’s debt. When the thoughts are extended to a future state, the present life seems hard­ly worthy of all those principles of conduct, and maxims of prudence, which one generation of men has transmitted to another; but upon a closer view, when it is perceived how much evil is produced, and how much good is impeded by em­barrassment and distress, and how little room the expedients of pov­erty leave for the exercise of vir­tue, it grows manifest that the boundless importance of the next life enforces some attention to the interests of this."

In a third, his tone is again admonishing:

"Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an incon­venience; you will find it a calam­ity. Poverty takes away so many means of doing good, and pro­duces so much inability to resist evil, both natural and moral, that it is by all virtuous means to be avoided."

So much for the proper use of property which Johnson has seen as so positive in its effects that he defends wealth against its en­emies, moral and doctrinal. His life shows that the integrity of his defense cannot be questioned and, although social and political cir­cumstances change, the soundness of his reasoning remains along with the necessity of man’s meet­ing the demands of life. Wealth is as good or better an answer to these demands as any other thing and private possession ensures wealth’s good use. After all, one has to at least recognize Dr. Sam­uel Johnson’s common sense and preserve the resulting wisdom.

"Of riches it is not necessary to write the praise. Let it, however, be remembered, that he who has money to spare, has it always in his power to benefit others; and of such power a good man must always be desirous."

***

A Question of Property

If, as M. Proudhon asserts, "all property is robbery"—if no one can equitably become the exclusive possessor of any article, or, as we say, obtain a right to it—then, among other consequences, it follows that a man can have no right to the things he consumes for food. And if these are not his before eating them, how can they become his at all? As Locke asks, "When do they begin to be his? when he digests? or when he eats? or when he boils? or when he brings them home?" If no previous acts can make them his property, neither can any process of assimilation do it: not even absorption of them into the tissues. Wherefore, pursuing the idea, we arrive at the curious conclusion, that as the whole of his bones, muscles, skin, and so forth, have been thus built up from nutriment not belonging to him, a man has no property in his own flesh and blood—has no more claim to his own limbs than he has to the limbs of another; and has as good a right to his neighbour’s body as his own! Did we exist after the same fashion as those compound polyps, in which a number of individ­uals are based upon a living trunk common to them all, such a theory would be rational enough. But until Communism can be carried to that extent, it will be best to stand by the old doctrine.

HERBERT SPENCER, Social Statics (Rev. ed., 1892)