and feelings.”131 Self-regarding self-interest, the gospel of Adam Smith, is not alone sufficient for
industrial salvation: a leaf must be taken from his older and less familiar testament, of which the
cardinal doctrine was sympathy. Sympathy does not necessarily imply sentimental attachment:
sympathy, according to Adam Smith, is the basis of a not very sociable emotion,—ambition. A
distinguished psychologist has not hesitated to pronounce “sympathy compatible with dislike.”132
It is, then, no counsel of perfection to cultivate sympathy, in the sense of mutual understanding,
between the parties to distribution. No Utopian eradication of self-love is contemplated. It may be
hoped, indeed, that through the practice of conciliation, in the course of generations, the dispositions
of which the gratification constitutes self-interest may become more social, so that, for instance, an
advantage founded on the extreme privation of others would not appear desirable to the capitalist
employer of the future. But such “moralization” of the saving classes, though it may be expected,
need not be postulated for the working of conciliation. Intellectual sympathy alone might effect
much. The arts133 by which the sympathetic imagination may be cultivated form a supremely
important topic, but one which hardly falls under the theory of Distribution.
Note
[On the remuneration for risk some additional light is derivable from Mr. Keynes’ great treatise on
Probability; where he shows that mathematical expectation—the product of advantage and the proba-
bility of obtaining it—is not the measure of expediency (ch. xxvi. p. 311 et seq.; discussed by the
present writer in Mind, 1922, vol. xxxi p. 276 et seq.). The motives of the entrepreneur may be
illustrated by the position of Paul in the classical problem which Mr. Keynes thus restates: “Peter
engages to pay Paul one shilling if a head appears at the first toss of a coin, two shillings if it does
not appear until the second, and in general 2r - 1 shillings if no head appears until the r th toss. What
is the value of Paul's expectation?” If the number of tosses is limited to a finite number n, the
mathematical expectation is ½ n. But, if n is large, no sensible person would give anything like that
sum for the chance. Now Paul may be taken as typical of the entrepreneur. Peter in this case may fix
what Paul must pay for a trial—corresponding, say, to the outlay on factors of production required
131. Political Economy, Book V. chap. ii. § 4.
132. Bain, Emotion and Will (Table of Contents).
133. For example, co operation, as many economists have pointed out, would have among its good
effects that of enabling workmen to realize the position of employers. Again, the training of future
business men in economies at the universities as Professor Marshall has lately urged, would tend to
develop the sympathetic use of the imagination. “It has been found,” he says, “by experience in
England n in America that the young man who has studied both sides of labour questions in the frank
and impartial atmosphere of a great university is often able to throw himself into the point of view
of the working-men and to act as interpreter between them and persons of his own class with larger
experience than his own.” See his address on “Economic Teaching at the Universities,” published
in the Review of the Charity Organisation Society, January, 1903, noticed in the Economic Journal,
Vol. XIII. p. 155, and his Plea for the creation of a curriculum in economies (addressed to the
Cambridge Senate), noticed in the Economic Journal, Vol. XII. p. 289.
Compare the expressions in the Report of the Anthracite Coal Commission, USA (1908), on
the Importance of “a more conciliatory disposition in the operators and their employees.”