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II. THE SWEDISH PEOPLE.
them and the other classes of the community. Class warfare and its
immediate expression, general strikes, have consequently been adopted to
fulfil aspirations which are so extreme that they must be labelled as
purely Utopian.
The class-system ultimately rests on the difference between work with
the head and that with the hands, that is between the control and the
execution of work, and for that reason civilization cannot dispense with it.
Consequently, the inequalities of income and capital, too, which necessarily
result from the specified distinctions, cannot be obliterated, even if
development can and ought to imply a more equal division than is the case at
present. The main point is that the condition of the workers is improved
— and this object is uninterruptedly being achieved, as much by the
increased output of national labour as by social legislation — because then
economic differences are automatically reduced. However, Sweden is, in
this respect, better situated than the greater civilized countries, with their
crowded city populations on the one hand, and their millionaires on the
other.
Of the distribution of capital and income in Sweden we still know but
little, although general taxation has for a long time provided a source of
knowledge on the subject, and the new taxes on income and capital, witli
the obligation of declaring them (since 1910), have opened up new
possibilities for acquiring such knowledge. There is certainly no lack of
calculations concerning the distribution of capital, nor of returns as to
incomes. But. for different reasons, these only render incomplete
information about the economic basis of the social structure of the community,
and even about the various economic conditions.
On the whole, our knowledge of the distribution of wealth is, in this
respect, not very instructive. For instance, there are many who, in spite
of having no property other than clothing and personal chattels, possess
considerable incomes and are not only well-to-do, but even rich. Even the
grouping together of all kinds of values — consumption-values and
production-values — in one and the same computation of the wealth of the
country (though quite needful for statistical purposes) renders these
calculations less useful for throwing light on the economic position of the
various strata of society. For, with regard to absolute wealth, this depends
far more on the amount of wealth being actively employed as an economic
agent of production than on consumption. Therefore, returns that only
deal with the distribution of the agents of production are of greater
importance for an estimate of the economic basis of the social classes, than an
undifferentiated account of the distribution of the entire property of the
nation. For this reason we refrain from introducing here the calculations iu
question, in which, moreover, many uncertain factors are still included.
However, in order to avoid entire omission of this aspect of the social
conditions in Sweden, wc will advert to the distribution of land, the principal agent
of production, and the information that agricultural statistics afford.
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