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Title: The intelligent woman's guide to socialism and capitalism

Author: Bernard Shaw

Illustrator: Eric Kennington

Release date: April 14, 2025 [eBook #75859]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Brentano's Publishers, 1928

Credits: Alan, deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM ***





                     THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE
                      TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM


                            [Illustration]




                     THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE
                      TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM
                            BY BERNARD SHAW

                            [Illustration]

                    BRENTANO’S PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
                                 1928




                  COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY BRENTANO’S INC.

                     _First printing, June, 1928_

             MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                                  TO

                           MY SISTER-IN-LAW

                       MARY STEWART CHOLMONDELY

                THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN TO WHOSE QUESTION
                THIS BOOK IS THE BEST ANSWER I CAN MAKE




A FOREWORD FOR AMERICAN READERS


I have never been in America; therefore I am free from the delusion,
commonly entertained by the people who happen to have been born there,
that they know all about it, and that America is their country in the
same sense that Ireland is my country by birth, and England my country
by adoption and conquest. You, dear madam, are an American in the sense
that I am a European, except that the American States have a language
in common and are federated, and the European states are still on the
tower of Babel and are separated by tariff fortifications. When I hear
people asking why America does not join the League of Nations I have
to point out to them that America _is_ a League of Nations, and sealed
the covenant of her solidity as such by her blood more than sixty years
ago, whereas the affair at Geneva is not a League of Nations at all,
but only a so far unsuccessful attempt to coax Europe to form one at
the suggestion of a late American President, with the result that the
British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs makes occasional trips
to Geneva, and, on returning, reassures the British House of Commons by
declaring that in spite of all Woodrow-Wilsonic temptations to combine
with other nations he remains an Englishman first, last, and all the
time; that the British Empire comes before everything with him; and
that it is on this understanding and this alone that he consents to
discuss with foreigners any little matters in which he can oblige them
without detriment to the said reserved interests. And this attitude
seems to us in England so natural, so obvious, so completely a matter
of course, that the newspapers discuss the details of Mr Chamberlain’s
report of his trip without a word about the patriotic exordium which
reduces England’s membership of the League to absurdity.

Now your disadvantage in belonging to a league of nations instead of
to a nation is that if you belong to New York or Massachusetts, and
know anything beyond the two mile radius of which you are the centre,
you probably know much more of England, France, and Italy than you do
of Texas or Arizona, though you are expected, as an American, to know
all about America. Yet I never met an American who knew anything about
America except the bits she had actually set eyes on or felt with her
boots; and even of that she could hardly see the wood for the trees.
By comparison I may be said to know almost all about America. I am
far enough off to get a good general view, and, never having assumed,
as the natives do, that a knowledge of America is my intuitional
birthright, I have made enquiries, read books, availed myself of the
fact that I seem to be personally an irresistible magnet for every
wandering American, and even gathered something from the recklessly
confidential letters which every American lady who has done anything
unconventional feels obliged to write me as a testimony to the ruinous
efficacy of my books and plays. I could and should have drawn all the
instances in this book from American life were it not that America
is such a fool’s paradise that no American would have believed a
word of them, and I should have been held up, in exact proportion
to my accuracy and actuality, as a grossly ignorant and prejudiced
Britisher, defaming the happy West as ludicrously as the capitalist
West defames Russia. What I tell you of England you will believe. What
I could tell you of America might provoke you to call on me with a
gun. Also it would lead you to class me as a bitter enemy to America,
whereas I assure you that though I do not adore your country with the
passion professed by English visitors at public banquets when you have
overwhelmed them with your reckless hospitality, I give it a good deal
of my best attention as a very interesting if still very doubtful
experiment in civilization.

But this much I will permit myself to say. Do not imagine that because
at this moment certain classes of American workmen are buying bathtubs
and Ford cars, and investing in building societies and the like the
money that they formerly spent in the saloons, that America is doing
as well as can be expected. If you were at this moment a miner’s wife
in South Wales you would be half starving; but the wife of a Colorado
miner might think you very lucky in having nothing more violent than
half starving to endure. The sweated women workers in the tenements
of your big cities are told that in America anyone can make a fortune
who wants to. Here we spare them that mockery, at least. You must take
it from me, without driving me to comparisons that between nations
wound as personalities do between individuals, that Capitalism is the
same everywhere, and that if you look for its evils at home you will
miss nothing of them except perhaps some of the socialistic defences
which European States have been forced to set up against their worst
extremities.

In truth it is odd that this book should not have been written by an
American. Its thesis is the hopelessness of our attempts to build up a
stable civilization with units of unequal income; and it was in America
that this inequality first became monstrous not only in money but in
its complete and avowed dissociation from character, rank, and the
public responsibility traditionally attached to rank. On the eastern
shores of the Atlantic the money makers formed a middle class between
the proletariat, or manual working class, and the aristocracy, or
governing class. Thus labor was provided for; business was provided
for; and government was provided for; and it was possible to allow and
even encourage the middle class to make money without regard to public
interests, as these were the business of the aristocracy.

In America, however, the aristocracy was abolished; and the only
controlling and directing force left was business, with nothing to
restrain it in its pursuit of money except the business necessity for
maintaining property in land and capital and enforcing contracts, the
business prudence which perceives that it would be ruinous to kill
outright the proletarian goose that lays the golden eggs, and the
fear of insurrection. There was no longer a king and an aristocratic
governing class to say to the tradesman “Never mind the public
interest: that is our business: yours is to get as rich as you can,
incidentally giving employment to the proletariat and increasing our
rent rolls”. All that remained was the tradition of unscrupulous
irresponsibility in business; and when the American millionaires first
began to astonish Europe with their wealth it was possible for the most
notorious of them, in the course of an enquiry into the proceedings
of a Trust with which he was connected, to reply to a criticism as to
the effect of his business policy on the public with a simple “Damn
the public!”. Had he been a middle class man in a country where there
was a governing class outside and above business, or a monarch with
a council in the same position, or even a State Church, his answer
would have been entirely in order apart from its verbal profanity. Duly
bowdlerized it would have run “I am a man of business, not a ruler and
a lawgiver. The public interest is not my job: I do not presume to
meddle with it. My sole function is to make as much money as I can”.
Queen Elizabeth would have applauded such an attitude as socially
sound and highly becoming: nothing angered her more than presumptuous
attempts on the part of common persons to concern themselves with _her_
business of high politics.

When America got rid of monarchs and prelates and popes and British
cabinets and the like, and plunged into the grand republican experiment
which has become the rule instead of the exception in Europe since the
war swept all the emperors into the dustbin of history, she raised the
middle classes to the top of the social structure and thus delivered
its civilization into their hands without ennobling their traditions.
Naturally they raced for money, for more money, and still more money,
and damned the public when they were not doping it with advertisements
which were by tacit agreement exempted from the law against obtaining
money by false pretences or practising medicine without qualifications.
It is true that they were forced to govern as well by the impossibility
of maintaining civilization without government; but their government
was limited and corrupted by their principle of letting nothing stand
in the way of their getting rich quickly. And the ablest of them at
that game (which has no attraction for the ability that plays the
higher games by which finally civilization must live) soon became rich
at a rate that made the European middle classes envious. In my youth I
heard little of great men arising in America--not that America did not
produce them, but that her money masters were more apt to persecute
than to advertize them--but I heard much of the great fortunes that
were being made there. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Carnegie, Rockefeller
became famous by bringing our civilization to the point to which
Crassus and the other millionaire contemporaries of Sulla and Julius
Cæsar brought the civilization of ancient republican Rome just before
it set up Emperor idolatry as a resting place on the road to ruin.
Nowadays we have multimillionaires everywhere; but they began in
America; and that is why I wonder this book of mine was not written
in America by an American fifty years ago. Henry George had a shot at
it: indeed it was his oratory (to which I was exposed for fortyfive
minutes fortyfive years ago by pure chance) that called my attention
to it; but though George impressed his generation with the outrageous
misdistribution of income resulting from the apparently innocent
institution of private property in land, he left untouched the positive
problem of how else income was to be distributed, and what the nation
was to do with the rent of its land when it was nationalized, thus
leaving the question very much where it had been left a century earlier
by the controversy between Voltaire and the elder Mirabeau, except for
the stupendous series of new illustrations furnished by the growth of
the great cities of the United States. Still, America can claim that in
this book I am doing no more than finishing Henry George’s job.

Finally, I have been asked whether there are any intelligent women
in America. There must be; for politically the men there are such
futile gossips that the United States could not possibly carry on
unless there were some sort of practical intelligence back of them.
But I will let you into a secret which bears on this point. By this
book I shall get at the American men through the American women. In
America as in England every male citizen is supposed to understand
politics and economics and finance and diplomacy and all the rest of
a democratic voter’s business on the strength of a Fundamentalist
education that excites the public scorn of the Sioux chiefs who have
seen their country taken from them by palefaced lunatics. He is ashamed
to expose the depths of his ignorance by asking elementary questions;
and I dare not insult him by volunteering the missing information.
But he has no objection to my talking to his wife as to one who knows
nothing of these matters: quite the contrary. And if he should chance
to overhear----!!!

G. B. S.

  CONWAY, NORTH WALES
  _17th April 1928_




TABLE OF CONTENTS


 1

 A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS

 Socialism is an opinion as to how the income of the country should be
 distributed. Its distribution is not a natural phenomenon: it is a
 matter for arrangement, subject to change like any other arrangement.
 It has been changed within living memory to an extent that would have
 seemed incredible and scandalous to Queen Victoria, and is still being
 changed from year to year. Therefore what we have to consider is not
 whether our distribution shall be altered or not, but what further
 changes are desirable to attain a prosperous stability. This is the
 closed question which re-opened in the nineteenth century under the
 banner of Socialism; but it is one on which everyone should try to
 form an original personal opinion without prompting from Socialists.
 PAGE 1


 2

 DIVIDING-UP

 Dividing-up is neither a revolutionary novelty nor a Mosaic jubilee:
 it is a necessary and unpostponable daily and hourly event of
 civilized life. As wealth consists of food that becomes uneatable
 unless immediately consumed, and of articles that wear out in use and
 perish if kept unused, it must be divided-up and consumed at once.
 Saving is impossible: the things will not keep. What is called saving
 is a bargain whereby a person in possession of spare food allows
 another to consume it in return for an undertaking to reverse the
 transaction at some future time. Between the two nothing is saved, as
 one consumes what the other saves. A proposal that everybody should
 save is pure nonsense. A nation which stopped working would perish
 within a fortnight even if every member of it had “saved” a million. 6


 3

 HOW MUCH FOR EACH?

 This question does not settle itself. It has to be settled by law
 and enforced by the police. If the shares are to be altered the law
 must be altered. Examples of existing distribution. This has today
 become so repugnant to the general moral conception of fairness and so
 incompatible with the public health that there is a general revulsion
 of feeling against it. But the revulsion can have no political effect
 until it becomes arithmetically precise. It cannot be dealt with in
 terms of more or less: the question of how much more or less must be
 exactly determined. And as wealth is measured in money, distribution
 must be dealt with in terms of income. 7


 4

 NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK

 As a nation lives from hand to mouth there must be continuous
 productive labor or there will be no food to distribute. But though
 everyone must eat, everyone need not work, because under modern
 conditions each of us can produce much more than enough to support
 one person. If everyone worked everyone would have a good deal of
 leisure. But it is possible to arrange that some people shall do all
 the work and have no leisure in order that others should have all
 leisure and no work. These two extremes are represented by complete
 Socialism and complete Slavery. Serfdom and Feudalism and Capitalism
 are intermediate stages. The continual struggle of persons and classes
 to alter the allotment of the labor task and the distribution of
 wealth and leisure in their own favor is the key to the history of
 revolutions. Enormous increase of the stakes in this game through
 modern discoveries and inventions. 9


 5

 COMMUNISM

 Communism must be considered without personal, political, or religious
 prejudice as a plan of distribution like any other. It was the plan
 of the apostles, and is universally practised in the family. It is
 indispensable in modern cities. All services and commodities which
 are paid for by a common fund and are at the disposal of everyone
 indiscriminately are examples of communism in practice. Roads and
 bridges, armies and navies, street lighting and paving, policemen,
 dustmen, and sanitary inspectors are familiar and obvious instances. 11


 6

 LIMITS TO COMMUNISM

 Communism is so satisfactory and unquestioned as far as it has gone
 that those who are conscious of it may ask why everything should
 not be communized. Reasons why this cannot be done. Communism is
 applicable only to commodities and services which, being necessary or
 useful to everybody, enjoy general moral approval. It can be extended
 to matters in which the citizens are willing to give and take, as
 when the oarsman pays rates for a cricket pitch in consideration of
 the cricketer paying rates for the lake. But services as to which
 there is any serious difference of opinion, such as church services,
 and commodities which some people believe to be deleterious, such
 as alcoholic liquors, are excluded from the scope of Communism.
 Surreptitious communism is necessary in the case of science, and of
 learning generally, because the ordinary citizen does not understand
 their importance sufficiently to be willing to pay for their
 endowment. Governments are therefore obliged to endow them without
 consulting the electors, who are left to believe that Greenwich
 Observatories, National Galleries, British Museums and the like are
 provided gratuitously by Nature. 14


 7

 SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED

 Seven plans of distribution are at present advocated or practised. 1.
 To each what he or she produces. 2. To each what he or she deserves.
 3. To each what he or she can get and hold. 4. To the common people
 enough to keep them alive whilst they work all day, and the rest to
 the gentry. 5. Division of society into classes, the distribution
 being equal or thereabouts within each class, but unequal as between
 the classes. 6. Let us go on as we are. 7. Socialism: an equal share
 to everybody. 19


 8

 TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES

 Apparent fairness of this plan. Two fatal objections to it: (_a_)
 it is impossible to ascertain how much each person produces even
 when the product is a material object; and (_b_) most people’s work
 consists, not in the production of material objects, but in services.
 The clearest case of individual production is that of a baby by its
 mother; but a baby is an expense, not a source of income. In practice
 production and service are made commensurate by paying the workers
 according to the time taken in producing the commodity or rendering
 the service; but this does not carry out the plan, as, when the time
 spent in qualifying the worker is taken into account, the calculation
 becomes impossible. Illustrative cases. Case of the married woman
 keeping a house and bringing up a family. The plan is impossible, and,
 at bottom, nonsensical. 21


 9

 TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES

 Tendency of those who are comfortably off to believe that this is
 what is actually happening. Circumstances which support this view.
 Facts which reduce it to absurdity. Proposals to adopt the principle
 and make it happen in future. The first and final objection is that
 it cannot be done. Merit cannot be measured in money. The truth
 of this can be ascertained at once by taking any real case of two
 human beings, and attempting to fix the proportion of their incomes
 according to their merits or faults. 26


 10

 TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB

 This plan postulates equal grabbing power as between children, old
 people, invalids, and ablebodied persons in the prime of life. That
 is, it presupposes a state of things that does not exist. Otherwise
 it is simple amorality, which even pirates find impossible if they are
 to hold together for any length of time. It is, however, tolerated at
 present in trade. Lawless robbery and violence are barred; but the
 tradesman may get as much and give as little for it as he can; and the
 landlord may even use legalized violence to get the utmost for the
 use of his land. The results of this limited toleration of grab are
 so unsatisfactory that laws are continually being made to palliate
 them. The plan, which is really no plan at all, must be dismissed as
 disastrous. 29


 11

 OLIGARCHY

 The plan of making the few rich and the many poor has worked for a
 long time and is still working. The advantages claimed for it. The
 rich class as a preserve of culture. The incomes of the rich as
 a reservoir of money which provides by its overflow the socially
 necessary fund of spare money called capital. The privileges of the
 rich as a means of securing a governing class. Efficacy of the plan
 when organized as the Feudal System. How it works in villages and
 Highland clans. How it fails in cities. Modern urbanized civilization
 has no use for it, all our governing work being done by paid public
 servants. This leaves it with only one pretension: that of providing
 capital by satiation and overflow. But the satiation is too costly
 even when it is achieved. There is no guarantee that the rich will use
 any part of their income as capital, or that when they do so they will
 invest it at home where it is most needed. The accumulation of capital
 can be provided for in other ways. The plan is breaking under the
 weight of its enormous abuses. 30


 12

 DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS

 This happens to some extent at present. We are accustomed to think
 that monarchs, as a class, should receive more than manual laborers;
 and as a rule they do. But monarchs receive much less than Steel
 Kings and Pork Barons; and unskilled laborers receive more than
 great mathematicians, who, as such, receive nothing, and have to
 live by poorly paid professorships. Clergymen get very little; and
 racing bookmakers get a good deal. Nobody can determine what they
 ought to get; yet nobody can defend what they do get on any rational
 ground. Those who think it a matter of course that scavengers should
 receive less than bank managers cannot say how much less, without
 which determination their opinion can have no effect in a political
 settlement of distribution. The main argument for enriching a class is
 that it enabled them to produce an idolatrous illusion of superiority
 which gives them authority, which is necessary in organizing society.
 But in modern society the persons in authority are often much poorer
 in money than those whom they command. Illustrative cases. Real
 authority has nothing to do with money. 35


 13

 LAISSER-FAIRE

 Letting things alone is now called letting them slide: an admission
 that they will not stay where they are. Change is a law of nature; and
 when parliaments neglect it and Churches try to ignore it, the effect
 is not to avert the changes but to make them hasty, ill-considered,
 and often catastrophic. Unless laws and Articles of Religion change
 as often and as quickly as the activities they control, a strain is
 set up which, if not relieved by the prevalence of up-to-date ideas in
 government and the Churches, must wreck civilization. 38


 14

 HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

 The study of poverty. Poverty does not produce unhappiness: it
 produces degradation: that is why it is dangerous to society. Its
 evils are infectious, and cannot be avoided by any possible isolation
 of the rich. The attractions of poverty. The folly of tolerating it as
 a punishment. We cannot afford to have the poor always with us. The
 statute of Elizabeth. What constitutes poverty. The sufferings of the
 rich. They are avoidable only by voluntarily foregoing idleness and
 gluttony: that is, foregoing the only privileges that riches confer.
 Poor and rich being equally objectionable, the question arises how
 much is enough? What is enough for savage life. What was enough for
 our grandmothers is not enough for ourselves. There is no limit to the
 higher requirements of mankind. The question is therefore unanswerable
 as applied to civilized life. The problem of distribution cannot be
 solved by giving everyone enough: nobody can ever have enough of
 everything. But it is possible to give everybody the same. 41


 15

 WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST

 The effect of distribution on industry. Political economy, or the art
 of spending the national income to the greatest general advantage.
 Importance of the order in which goods are produced. Those which are
 wanted most should be produced first. Food, clothes, and houses should
 come before scent and jewellery, babies’ needs before the needs of
 lapdogs. Nothing but equality of purchasing power can preserve this
 vital order in the industries which cater for purchasers. Inequality
 of income upsets it hopelessly: the labor which should feed starving
 children is expended in the production of trivial luxuries. This is
 excused on the ground that the purchasers give employment. Absurdity
 of this plea. 49


 16

 EUGENICS

 Effect of distribution on the quality of people as human beings. The
 problem of breeding the nation. In breeding animals the problem is
 simple though the art is uncertain and difficult, because the animal
 is bred for some single specific purpose, such as the provision of
 food or for racing or haulage. The stockbreeder knows exactly what
 sort of animal is wanted. Nobody can say what sort of human being is
 wanted. It is not enough to say that certain sorts are not wanted.
 The stockbreeders’ methods are therefore not applicable: the keeper
 of a human stud farm, if such a thing were established by a mad
 professor of eugenics, would not know what to aim at or how to begin.
 We are therefore thrown back on natural sexual attraction as our only
 guide. Sexual attraction in human beings is not promiscuous: it is
 always specific: we choose our mates. But this choice is defeated by
 inequality of income, which restricts our choice to members of our own
 class: that is, persons with similar incomes or no incomes. Resultant
 prevalence of bad breeding and domestic unhappiness. The most vital
 condition of good distribution is that it shall widen the field
 of sexual selection to the extent of making the nation completely
 intermarriageable. Only equality of income can do this. 53


 17

 THE COURTS OF LAW

 Though Justice should not be a respecter of persons, the courts must
 respect persons if they have different incomes. Trial by jury is
 trial by a jury of peers, not only the peers of the accused but of
 the accusers and of the whole body of citizens. This is in practice
 impossible in a civilized society of persons with unequal incomes,
 as the person with a large income has not the same interests and
 privileges as the person with a small one. As access to the courts of
 justice costs money the poor are cut off from them by their poverty or
 terrorized by the threats of the rich to drag them there. The abuses
 of divorce and alimony. Sale of husbands and wives. Blackmail. Abuses
 in the criminal courts. Corruption of the law itself at its source in
 Parliament by the rich majority there. Severity of the laws against
 theft practised by the poor on the rich. Complete exemption of the
 crime of rich idling, which is the form of theft practised by the rich
 on the poor. Inequality of income thus effects a divorce of law from
 justice, leading to an anarchic disrespect for the law and a general
 suspicion of the good faith of lawyers. 56


 18

 THE IDLE RICH

 Idleness does not mean inactivity. Over-exertion and “rest cures” of
 the rich. Their dangerous and exhausting sports. The flapper dances
 harder than the postman walks. Spartan training of the old rich.
 It is soon acquired by the new rich, who begin by trying to loaf.
 The diplomatic and military services as preserves for the energetic
 rich. The unpaid magistry. Estate management. Parliament. Effect
 of contraception and hotel life in service flats in extending the
 possibilities of complete uselessness and self-indulgence. Exceptional
 cases of eminent workers with unearned incomes. Florence Nightingale
 and John Ruskin. Not inactivity but consuming without producing is
 what is meant by economic idleness. Ironic vanity of the attempt to
 secure happiness and freedom by having plenty of money and nothing to
 do. 59


 19

 CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS

 The Church school in the village. Deference to the rich taught as
 loyalty and religion. Persecution of schoolmasters for teaching
 equalitarian morality. Corruption of the universities and of the
 newspapers. Difficulty of separating the mass of falsehood inculcated
 and advertized in the interest of the rich from the genuine learning
 and information in which rich and poor have a common interest. 63


 20

 WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT

 We endure misdistribution and even support it because it is associated
 with many petty personal benefits and amusements which come to us
 by way of charity and pageantry, and with the chance of winning the
 Calcutta Sweep or inheriting a fortune from an unknown relative.
 These pageants and prizes are apprehensible by the narrowest minds in
 the most ignorant classes, whereas the evils of the system are great
 national evils, apprehensible only by trained minds capable of public
 affairs. Without such training the natural supply of broad minds
 is wasted. Poverty, by effecting this waste on an appalling scale,
 produces an artificial dearth of statesmanlike brains, compelling
 us to fill up first-rate public posts with second-rate and often
 sixth-rate functionaries. We tolerate the evils of inequality of
 income literally through want of thought. 65


 21

 POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY

 Equal division has been tested by long experience. Practically all
 the work of the world has been done and is being done by bodies
 of persons receiving equal incomes. The inequality that exists is
 between classes and not between individuals. This arrangement is
 quite stable: there is no tendency for the equality to be upset
 by differences of individual character. Here and there abnormal
 individuals make their way into a better paid class or are thrown
 out into an unpaid vagrancy; but the rule is that each class either
 keeps its economic level or rises and falls as a class, its internal
 equality being maintained at every level. As people are put so they
 will stay. Equality of income, far from being a novelty, is an
 established practice, and the only possible one as between working
 individuals in organized industry. The problem is therefore not one of
 its introduction, but of its extension from the classes to the whole
 community. 68


 22

 MERIT AND MONEY

 Equality of income has the advantage of securing promotion by merit.
 When there is inequality of income all merits are overshadowed by
 the merit of having a large income, which is not a merit at all.
 Huge incomes are inherited by nincompoops or made by cunning traders
 in vice or credulity; whilst persons of genuine merit are belittled
 by the contrast between their pence and the pounds of fools and
 profiteers. The person with a thousand a year inevitably takes
 precedence of the person with a hundred in popular consideration, no
 matter how completely this may reverse their order of merit. Between
 persons of equal income there can be no eminence except that of
 personal merit. Hence the naturally eminent are the chief preachers of
 equality, and are always bitterly opposed by the naturally ordinary or
 inferior people who have the larger shares of the national income. 70


 23

 INCENTIVE

 It is urged against equality that unless a person can earn more than
 another by working harder she will not work harder or longer. The
 reply is that it is neither fair nor desirable that she should work
 harder or longer. In factory and machine industry extra exertion is
 not possible: collective work goes on at the engine’s speed and stops
 when the engine stops. The incentive of extra pay does not appeal
 to the slacker, whose object is to avoid work at any cost. The cure
 for that is direct compulsion. What is needed is an incentive to the
 community as a whole to choose a high standard of living rather than
 a lazy and degraded one, all standards being possible. Inequality of
 income is not merely useless for this purpose, but defeats it. The
 problem of the Dirty Work. On examination we discover that as it is
 done mostly by the worst paid people it is not provided for at present
 by the incentive of extra pay. We discover also that some of the
 very dirtiest work is done by professional persons of gentle nurture
 without exceptional incomes. The objection to dirty work is really an
 objection to work that carries a stigma of social inferiority. The
 really effective incentive to work is our needs, which are equal, and
 include leisure. 72


 24

 THE TYRANNY OF NATURE

 The race must perish through famine if it stops working. Nobody
 calls this natural obligation to work slavery, the essence of which
 is being compelled to carry another ablebodied person’s burden of
 work as well as one’s own. Pleasurable toil and toilsome pleasure.
 General ignorance of the art of enjoying life. The imposture of our
 commercially provided amusements. Working for fun is more recreative
 than wasting time and money. Monotonous work makes even a painful
 change welcome: hence our hideous excursion train holidays. Labor is
 doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like; rest, or doing
 nothing, is a necessity imposed by work, and is not leisure. Work can
 be so absorbing that it can become a craze like the craze for drink.
 Herbert Spencer’s warning. 80


 25

 THE POPULATION QUESTION

 To every proposal for a general increase of incomes it is objected
 that its benefits will be swallowed up by married people having too
 many children. It is also alleged that existing poverty is due to
 the world being too small to produce food enough for all the people
 in it. The real cause is that there are too many people living as
 parasites on their fellows instead of by production. Illustrations
 from domestic service. Increase of population, leading to division of
 labor, enriches the community instead of impoverishing it. Limits to
 this law of increasing return. Possibilities of human multiplication.
 The question is not one of food alone but of space. The speed at which
 population increases has to be considered as well as the ultimate
 desirability of the increase. Too many unproductive children may
 starve a family though the country as a whole may have unlimited
 employment for adults; therefore the cost of bearing and bringing up
 children should be borne by the State. Checks to population. War,
 pestilence, and poverty. Contraception, or artificial birth control.
 Exposure of female infants. Mahomet’s view of it. Capitalism, by
 producing parasitism on an enormous scale has produced premature
 overpopulation, kept under by excessive infant mortality and the
 diseases of poverty and luxury. Equality of income can get rid of
 this, and place population on its natural basis. University teaching
 on the subject, which alleges that a natural law of diminishing return
 is now in operation, is merely one of the corruptions of political
 science by Capitalism. Possibility of local overpopulation in an
 underpopulated world. Examples. 83


 26

 THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM

 Socialism entirely independent of Socialists or their writings and
 utterances. “Joining the Socialists”. Many professed Socialists
 are so because they believe in a delusion called Equality of
 Opportunity, and would recant if they discovered that Socialism
 means unconditional equality of income for everyone without regard
 to character, talent, age, or sex. This is the true diagnostic of
 Socialism, and the touchstone by which Socialists may be distinguished
 from Philanthropists, Liberals, Radicals, Anarchists, Nationalists,
 Syndicalists, and malcontents of all sorts. Henri Quatre’s
 prescription of “a chicken in the pot for everybody” is amiable and
 kindly; but it is not Socialism. 92


 27

 PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

 Amateur reformers who believe that the world can be made good by
 individual effort. Ordering the servants to dine with you. Inequality
 is not the fault of the rich. Poverty is not the fault of the poor.
 Socialism has nothing to do with almsgiving or personal generosity or
 kindness to the poor. Socialism abhors poverty and the poor, and has
 no more to do with relieving them than with relieving riches and the
 rich: it means to abolish both ruthlessly. Questionableness of the
 virtues that feed on suffering. Doles and almsgiving are necessary
 at present as an insurance against rebellion; but they are dangerous
 social evils. _Panem et circenses._ Government cannot suppress this
 abuse until it possesses the powers of employment now in private
 hands. It must become the national landlord, employer, and financier.
 It is not enough to know the object of Socialism and to be convinced
 of its possibility. Commandments are no use without laws; and
 Socialism is from beginning to end a matter of law and not of personal
 righteousness. 95


 28

 CAPITALISM

 Capitalism might more properly be called Proletarianism. Its
 abolition does not involve the destruction of capital. The social
 theory of Capitalism. The Manchester School. Property, private or
 real, and personal. Powers of landlords. Distinction between private
 property and personal possession. Private property an integral part
 of Capitalism. Incompatible with Socialism. Conservative and Labor
 parties are at bottom parties for the maintenance and abolition
 respectively of private property. Literary property. 100


 29

 YOUR SHOPPING

 Incidence of unequal distribution in the shop. Nothing obtainable at
 cost price: every price is loaded with a tribute to private property.
 Averaging the cost of production of the entire national supply gives
 the real cost price. This is the price aimed at by Socialism. Under
 Capitalism the cost of production of that part of the supply which is
 produced under the most unfavorable circumstances fixes the price of
 the entire supply. The coal supply. By nationalizing the coal industry
 the public can be supplied at the averaged cost price per ton.
 Examples from our numerous existing nationalizations. 105


 30

 YOUR TAXES

 Grumbling about the taxes. Government gives value at the cost price
 to itself; but this includes loaded prices paid by it to profiteers
 and landlords for materials, services, and sites. Taxation of unearned
 income as a method of avoiding these overcharges and even of providing
 the service at the cost of the landlords and capitalists. Income tax,
 supertax, and death duties. The National Debt. Taxation as a means of
 redistributing income. The War Loan. The failure of private enterprise
 and the success of National Factories during the war. 111


 31

 YOUR RATES

 The method of rating makes every rate a roughly graduated income tax.
 How the ratepayers are exploited. Illustrations: the charwoman, the
 Dock Companies, and the Drink Trade. The Poor Law, Municipal trading,
 and the Post Office as instruments of exploitation. 117


 32

 YOUR RENT

 Rent is the most simple and direct form of exploitation. Difference
 between house rent and cost of house. Ground rents in great cities.
 Powers of life and death and of exile enjoyed by landlords. Sheep
 runs. Deer forests. The value of all improvements is finally
 appropriated by the landlords. The Single Tax. 122


 33

 WHAT CAPITAL IS

 Definition of Capital. Spare money. Pathological character of
 Capitalist civilization. Wickedness of preaching thrift to the poor.
 Capital, being perishable, must be consumed promptly, disappearing
 in the process. Danger of Hoarding. Instability of money values.
 Inflation. Debasing the currency. Constant expenditure necessary. 127


 34

 INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE

 The nature of investment. Not deferred consumption, but transferred
 and postponed claim to be fed. Exploitation of the hungry by the
 intelligent. Estate Development. Illustrative case of a country house
 and park developed into a suburb. Proprietors without the necessary
 business ability can hire it. Big business. The magic of capital. 131


 35

 LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM

 Capital is indispensable to civilization; but its private
 appropriation is finally a hindrance to it, and perverts the order
 of its application. Examples: Distilleries _versus_ lighthouses and
 harbors. Error of assuming that low prices with large sales are more
 profitable than high prices with restricted sales. Cases in point:
 telegraph and telephone services. Snowball letters. Commercial profit
 is no index to social utility. 113


 36

 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

 Capital, though beginning at the wrong end, is driven finally to
 the right end. Invention and inventors. Labor-saving machinery.
 Power: water, steam, and electric. Handmade and machine-made goods.
 Cheapness. The industrial revolution, though it has wrought evil, is
 not evil in itself. Retrogression is neither possible nor desirable.
 137


 37

 SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY

 Capital has no country, being at home everywhere. Restrictions on
 trade at home, however beneficial, drive it abroad. Example: the
 trade in intoxicating drink may be driven to Africa by high excise in
 England and prohibition in America. Superior attraction of the slave
 trade. Suppression of slave trading followed by indirect enforcement
 of compulsory labor by means of hut taxes and the like. Development
 of other countries by English capital accompanied by neglect of home
 industrial resources and of the improvement of our towns. The foreign
 competition of which capitalists complain is often created by their
 own exports of capital. 140


 38

 DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES

 Investments of our capital abroad bring in gratuitous imports as
 interest. The expenditure of this tribute gives employment. It is,
 however, parasitic employment. The employees may be more pampered than
 productive employees; and this, combined with the disappearance of
 manufacturing towns and their replacement by attractive residential
 resorts, may produce an air of increased prosperity and refinement
 in all classes; but it does not provide suitable employment for the
 rougher workers discharged by the discarded factories, who have to
 be got rid of by Assisted Emigration or kept quiet by doles. If the
 process were unchecked England would become a country of luxurious
 hotels and pleasure cities inhabited by wealthy hotel guests and
 hotel servants with their retinue of importers and distributors, all
 completely dependent on foreign tribute from countries which might at
 any moment tax the incomes of absentee capitalists to extinction, and
 leave us to starve. 145


 39

 FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG

 Only freshly saved capital can be exported. The capital consumed in
 the establishment of mines, railways, and fixed industrial plant
 cannot be shipped abroad. When the home market supplied by them dries
 up through change or exhaustion of demand, the plant must either close
 down or seek markets abroad. This is the beginning of foreign trade.
 Trade with civilized nations is hampered by foreign protective duties
 or by the competition of the manufacturers on the spot. Undeveloped
 countries which have no tariffs and no manufactures are the most
 lucrative markets; but the ships’ crews and cargoes must be defended
 against massacre and plunder by the natives. This leads to the
 establishment of trading stations where British law is enforced. The
 annexation of the station makes it an outpost of the British Empire;
 and its boundary becomes a frontier. The policing of the frontier
 soon necessitates the inclusion of the lawless district beyond the
 frontier; and thus the empire grows without premeditation until its
 centre shifts to the other side of the earth. 150


 40

 EMPIRES IN COLLISION

 Collision of the expanding empires. Fashoda incidents. The German
 demand for a place in the sun. The war of 1914-18. Expansion of
 professional soldiering into conscription. The strains set up
 automatically by the pressure of capitalistic commerce, and not the
 depravity of human nature, are the causes of modern wars. Its horrors
 are therefore not a ground for despair of political mankind. We
 celebrate the end of the Great War, not the beginning of it. The real
 origin of the mischief. 152


 41

 THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

 Foreign trade not objectionable as such. Need for international
 institutions as well as national ones. Supernational federations
 and Commonwealths highly desirable: the fewer frontiers the better.
 Combination obstructed by the hard fact that Capitalism creates
 universal rivalry, seeking, not to combine for the common benefit, but
 to appropriate for the individual benefit. Its resistance to national
 self-determination and independence arises from its reluctance to
 relinquish its booty. Our colonies and our conquests. Being by its
 nature insatiable Capital cannot stop fighting until it is killed.
 Hence the comparison of our civilization to the magician’s apprentice
 who set demons to work for him, but could not stop them when his life
 depended on his getting rid of them. 157


 42

 HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY

 Personal helplessness produced by division of labor. Illustration from
 pin manufacture. Optimism of Adam Smith. The various qualifications
 and accomplishments of the complete individual craftsman. The relative
 incompetence and ignorance of the employed through division of labor.
 Total technical ignorance of the machine minder. Misgivings of Oliver
 Goldsmith, Ruskin, and Morris. The remedy not retrogression but
 equal distribution of the leisure made possible by mass production.
 Ignorance and helplessness as great in the modern household as in the
 factory. 161


 43

 DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW

 As the disablement does not extend to the workers’ leisure it is
 important that they should have plenty of it. Unfortunately it is
 as ill distributed as income, the tendency of Capitalism being to
 separate the population into a class doing all the work with no
 leisure and a class doing no work and having all the leisure. The
 feudal system avoided this by placing all the public services on
 the shoulders of the landlords. The transfer of these services to
 a bureaucracy leaves the proprietary or capitalist class even more
 completely disabled than the proletariat for the conduct of industry.
 This disablement increases with the development of capitalist
 civilization, and maybe regarded as a function of it. 164


 44

 THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE

 The industrial disablement of the proletariat and the proprietariat
 necessitates the intervention of a middle class to direct industrial
 operations and transact the business they involve. How this
 necessity was met. Primogeniture. The propertyless younger sons. The
 professions. The men of business. The clerks. The breakdown of the
 monopoly of education by the middle class now opens it to capable
 proletarians as well as to younger sons and their descendants. The
 resultant hardening of the lot of the younger sons. The propertyless
 daughters. Opening of the professions to them. Woman’s natural
 monopoly of housekeeping. It creates not only a Woman Question but a
 Man Question. 168


 45

 DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER

 The employer was master of the situation in the days of small
 firms with modest capitals. Modern big business has outgrown their
 resources. Joint stock companies have succeeded to firms, and
 Trusts to joint stock companies. Multiple shops are conquering the
 retail trade. Enormous capitals now required. Resultant rise of the
 financier, whose special function it is to procure such capitals and
 promote companies to exploit them. Thus the owner-employer becomes the
 employed employer, and, as an employee, falls into the proletariat.
 His son cannot succeed him, as he could when the employer was also the
 owner. This disappearance of the old nepotism in business is a public
 advantage, but abolishes heredity in the business class. “The Middle
 Station in Life” so highly praised by Defoe is now the least eligible
 in the community. 177


 46

 THE PROLETARIAT

 The slogan of Karl Marx. The reduction of the middle class employer
 to a proletarian employee produces Socialism. The Fabian Society.
 Its success as a middle class society. Failure of its Socialist
 rivals as working class societies. Working class organization against
 Capitalism. Trade Unionism, or the Capitalism of the working class
 proletariat. 183


 47

 THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS

 Employers and employed alike buy in the cheapest and sell in the
 dearest markets open to them. Resultant opposition of interest
 between the buyer of labor and the seller of it. The Class War. Its
 atrocities. Slaves better cared for than “free” vendors of their
 own labor. Exposures by Karl Marx. Restraints imposed by factory
 legislation. Opposition by employers. Their apprehension not
 justified by the effect of the Acts. Opposition of the proletariat.
 Its parental interest in child labor. The parish apprentices. Prices
 in the labor market. The value of labor falls to zero. The theory of
 Capitalism. The Manchester school. Failure of the Capitalist system to
 make good its guarantees. The reserve army of unemployed. The Statute
 of Elizabeth. The workhouse. Child sweating practically compulsory on
 parents. 187


 48

 WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET

 Men’s wages are family wages, women’s wages individual wages. The
 effect is to make the proletarian married woman the slave of a slave,
 and to establish conventions that the man is the breadwinner; that
 the woman’s work in the home being apparently gratuitous, is not work
 at all; and that women, when they are directly paid for their work,
 should be paid less than men. Protection of women in the propertied
 class by marriage settlements, and in the middle class by the Married
 Women’s Property Acts. The sweating of daughters living partly on
 their father’s wages enables one trade to sweat another, and produces
 a class of women who work for less than subsistence wages without
 starving. Their competition brings down the wages of all women of
 their class below subsistence level, with the result that women who
 have neither husband nor father to make up the shortage must make
 it up by prostitution or suffer the extremity of excessive toil
 and insufficient food. The wages of sin often much higher than the
 wages of virtue. The affiliation laws and the advantages of having
 illegitimate children. The Song of the Shirt and the Mind The Paint
 Girl. Male prostitution: dancing partners, barristers, clerks,
 journalists, parliamentary careerists, doctors, etc. Difference in
 quality between the physical prostitution forced on the woman and the
 mental prostitution forced on the man. 196


 49

 TRADE UNION CAPITALISM

 Resistance of the proletariat to the capitalists. Combination the
 first condition of effective resistance. Combination difficult
 or impossible as between segregated workers (domestic servants
 and agricultural laborers) and workers differing greatly in class
 (actors). Easy as between factory operatives, miners, and railway
 workers. The weapon of the combinations is the strike: that of
 the employers’ counter-combinations the lock-out. The warfare at
 its worst. Rattening. The Manchester and Sheffield outrages. “Ca’
 canny”, and “restricting output”. The cost of this warfare to the
 community. Capitalism cannot check it because Trade Unionism is only
 the application of the Capitalist principle to labor as well as to
 land and capital. Resistance of the employers. Attempt to suppress
 the Unions as criminal conspiracies. Refusal to employ unionists.
 Combinations of employers into employers’ federations. Victimization.
 The disablement of labor by machinery obliges the Unions to insist on
 piecework wages instead of time wages. Machine minding by girls’ and
 women’s Unions. Failure of the proletariat to secure any considerable
 share of the increase in the national output produced by machinery. 204


 50

 DIVIDE AND GOVERN

 The impermanence of the concessions wrested by the Unions from the
 employers by strikes makes it necessary for the proletariat to have
 them established as laws (Factory Acts, etc.): hence the appearance
 in Parliament of Labor members, and finally of an Independent Labor
 Party. The Factory Acts, beginning with the protection of children
 and women, acted as a protection for the men also. In factories,
 when the women and children stop the engine stops; and when the
 engine stops the men must stop. How these concessions were wrung
 from Parliament through a split in the Capitalist ranks whilst Labor
 was in a negligible minority there. The manufacturers in 1832 break
 the monopoly of Parliament by the landlords. The Factory Acts as the
 revenge of the landlords. These two Capitalist parties compete for
 popular support by bribing the proletariat with votes. Final complete
 enfranchisement of the proletariat. Meanwhile Socialism, having
 sprung into existence under middle class leadership, had undertaken
 the political education of the proletariat. Romantic illusions of
 the middle class about the industrial proletariat. Failure of the
 Socialist societies to supplant Trade Unionism. Success of the Fabian
 Society as a middle class body permeating all existing political
 organizations. Establishment of the Labor Party in Parliament as a
 political federation of Socialist societies and Trade Unions. Its
 history up to 1927. On the Trade Union side the tendency is not to
 Socialism but to Capitalism controlled by Labor, with the middle
 and propertied classes reduced to subjection in the interest of the
 proletariat. As the proletariat has the advantage of numbers this
 arrangement would profit the majority; but it would be so unpalatable
 to the propertied and learned classes that they may conceivably be
 driven to clamor for Socialism to save them from it. 213


 51

 DOMESTIC CAPITAL

 The conversion of capital into machines, vehicles, and other aids
 to labor. The delusion that this operation can be reversed, and
 the machines and vehicles converted into spare ready money. Why
 this impossible operation seems to practical business men to be not
 only possible but an everyday occurrence. The real nature of the
 transactions which delude them. As these transactions can be effected
 only by a few people at a time, an attempt to force them on the
 whole Capitalist class simultaneously by a tax on capital must fail.
 The income of the capitalist is real: her capital, once invested, is
 imaginary, as it has been consumed in the act of converting it into
 aids to labor. Death Duties, nominally taxes on capital, are not
 really so, and are as objectionable in practice as they are unsound in
 theory. Insanity of estimates of the wealth of the country in terms of
 capital values. 225


 52

 THE MONEY MARKET

 The Money Market is not a market for the sale and purchase of spare
 money, but for its hire. Difference between hiring and borrowing.
 Payment for the hire of spare money is called in business interest,
 and in old-fashioned economic treatises “the reward of abstinence”.
 In the case of spare cash in the money market the obligation of the
 owner to the hirer is as great as that of the hirer to the owner,
 since capital not hired perishes by natural decay. Negative interest.
 The real business of the money market is to sell incomes for lump sums
 of spare ready money. Enormous rates of interest paid by the poor.
 The Bank Rate. Lending to companies. Limited liability. Varieties of
 shares and debentures. Jobbers and brokers. The connection of Stock
 Exchange transactions with industry is mostly only nominal. Warnings.
 Bogus companies. Genuine companies which are smoked out. “Coming in on
 the third reconstruction.” Perils of enterprise, of public spirit, of
 conscience, and of imaginative foresight. 231


 53

 SPECULATION

 Risk of becoming a gambler’s wife. Selling and buying imaginary
 shares for phantom prices. How this is possible. Settling day on the
 Stock Exchange. Fluctuations. Bulls, bears, and stags. Contango and
 Backwardation. Cornering the bears. The losses risked are only net,
 not gross. Cover. Bucket shops. Unreality of the transactions. An
 extraordinary daily waste of human energy, audacity, and cunning. 239


 54

 BANKING

 Spare money for business purposes is mostly hired from bankers.
 Overdrafts. Discounted bills of exchange. The Bank Rate. How the
 bankers get the spare money they deal in. Customers must not draw
 their balances simultaneously. The word credit. Credit is not capital:
 it is a purely abstract opinion formed by a bank manager as to the
 ability of a customer to repay an advance of goods. Credit, like
 invested capital, is a phantom category. Its confusion with real
 capital is a dangerous delusion of the practical business man.
 “Bubbles” founded on this delusion. The Bank Rate depends on the
 supply and demand of spare subsistence available. Effective demand.
 Proposals to tax invested capital and credit. A hypothetical example.
 243


 55

 MONEY

 Money as a tool for buying and selling. As a measure of value. As
 material available for other purposes and therefore valuable apart
 from its use as money. The latter a guarantee against the dishonesty
 of governments. Debasing the currency. Paper money. Inflation.
 Post-war examples. Deflation. Stability the main desideratum. How
 to maintain this. Fluctuations in the value of money indicated by
 a general rise or fall of prices. Cheques and clearing houses as
 economisers of currency. Communism dispenses with pocket money. The
 Bank of England as the bankers’ bank. An intrinsically valuable
 coinage the safest and most stable. 251


 56

 NATIONALIZATION OF BANKING

 The nationalization of minting is necessary because only a Government
 can establish a legal tender currency. Cheques and the like,
 circulating as private currency, are not legal tender money but only
 private and insecure title deeds to such money; but legal tender money
 is a Government title deed to goods. Cheques and bills of exchange
 are senseless unless expressed in terms of money. The nationalization
 of the manufacture of money is a matter of course. The case for
 nationalization of banking, though less obvious, is equally strong.
 Profiteering in spare money. Municipal banks. There is no mystery
 about banking; and those who now conduct it are as available for
 public as for private employment. 264


 57

 COMPENSATION FOR NATIONALIZATION

 The fate of the shareholder when the banks are nationalized. Purchase
 of their shares no expense to the nation if the cost be levied on
 the whole body of capitalists. The apparent compensation is really
 distributed confiscation. The process a well established and familiar
 one. Candidates who advocate expropriation without compensation do
 not know their business and should not be voted for. Alternative of
 Government entering competitively into industries and beating private
 enterprises out of them. Objections. Wastefulness of competition.
 A competing State enterprise would have to allow competition with
 itself, which is often inadmissible in the case of ubiquitous
 services. The private competitor is indifferent to the ruin of a
 defeated rival; but the State must avoid this. 268


 58

 PRELIMINARIES TO NATIONALIZATION

 Nationalization, though theoretically sound, and its expense a bogey,
 is practically an arduous undertaking, involving the organization of a
 central department with local services throughout the country. It is
 possible only in stable and highly organized States. Revolutions and
 proclamations cannot by themselves nationalize anything. Governments
 may plunder and wreck State industries to avoid imposing unpopular
 direct taxes. 274


 59

 CONFISCATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION

 There is always a clamor by indignant idealists for direct retributive
 confiscation without compensation. Its possibilities. Taxation of
 capital as a means of forcing defaulters to surrender their title
 deeds and share certificates to the Government is plausible and not
 physically impossible. 276


 60

 REVOLT OF THE PARASITIC PROLETARIAT

 The expropriation of the rich is objected to on the ground that the
 rich give employment. The sense in which this is true. The parasitic
 proletariat. Bond Street and Bournemouth. All transfers of purchasing
 power from the rich to the Government depress the parasitic trades and
 their employees. A sudden wholesale transfer would produce an epidemic
 of bankruptcy and unemployment. Governments must immediately expend
 the incomes they confiscate. 277


 61

 SAFETY VALVES

 Doles. Throwing the confiscated money into nationalized banks. Raising
 wages in confiscated industries. War. Would these act quickly enough?
 An uninterrupted circulation of money is as necessary to a nation
 as an uninterrupted circulation of blood to an animal. Any general
 and simultaneous confiscation of income would produce congestion in
 London. Grants-in-aid to municipalities an important safety valve.
 Public works. Roads, forests, water power, reclamation of land
 from the sea, garden cities. Examination of these activities shews
 that none of them would act quickly enough. They would provoke a
 violent reaction which would give a serious set-back to Socialism.
 Nationalizations must be effected one at a time, and be compensated.
 279


 62

 WHY CONFISCATION HAS SUCCEEDED HITHERTO

 Direct confiscation of income without compensation is already in
 vigorous operation. Income tax, super tax, and estate duties. The
 Chancellor of the Exchequer and his budget. Gladstone’s attitude
 towards income tax. General agreement of Capitalist parties that
 all other means of raising money shall be exhausted before levying
 taxes on income. Contrary assumption of the proletarian Labor
 Party that the Capitalists should pay first, not last. This issue
 underlies all the Budget debates. Estate duties (“death duties”),
 though unsound economically, and often cruel and unfair in operation,
 succeed in carrying Socialistic confiscation further in England under
 Conservative Governments than some avowedly Socialistic ones have
 been able to carry it abroad. The success of the operation is due to
 the fact that the sums confiscated, though charged as percentages
 on capital values, can be paid out of income directly or indirectly
 (by insuring or borrowing), and are immediately thrown back into
 circulation by Government expenditure. Thus income can be safely
 confiscated if immediately redistributed; but the basic rule remains
 that the Government must not confiscate more than it can spend
 productively. This is the Socialist canon of taxation. 284


 63

 HOW THE WAR WAS PAID FOR

 War must be paid for on the nail: armies cannot be fed nor slaughtered
 by promissory notes. Men are obtained by conscription, and money
 partly by direct taxation and inflation, but mainly by borrowing from
 the capitalists in spite of the protests of the Labor Party against
 the exemption of capital from conscription. The quaint result is
 that in order to pay the capitalists the interest on their loans,
 the Chancellor of the Exchequer has to tax them so heavily that,
 as a class, they are losing by the transaction. Robbing Peter, who
 did not lend, to pay Paul, who did. As the property owners who hold
 War Loan Stock gain at the expense of those who do not, a unanimous
 Capitalist protest is impossible. An illustration. But the Labor
 contention that it would pay the propertied class as a whole to cancel
 the National Debt is none the less sound. Financing war by “funded”
 loans. As capital invested in war is utterly and destructively
 consumed it does not, like industrial capital, leave the nation better
 equipped for subsequent production. The War Loan, though registered
 in the books of the Bank of England as existing capital, is nothing
 but debt. The country is therefore impoverished to meet interest
 charges on 7000 millions of non-existent capital. There are reasons
 for not repudiating this debt directly; but as the war produced an
 enormous consumption of capital and yet left the world with less
 income to distribute than before, a veiled repudiation of at least
 part of the debt is inevitable. Our method of repudiation is to
 redistribute income as between the holders of War Loan and the other
 capitalists. But as the huge borrowing and confiscation of capital
 that was feasible when the Government had war employment ready for an
 unlimited number of proletarians leaves them destitute now that the
 Government has demobilized them without providing peace employment,
 the capitalists have now to pay doles in addition to finding the money
 to pay themselves their own interest. 289


 64

 NATIONAL DEBT REDEMPTION LEVIES

 Though taxation of capital is nonsensical, all proposals in that form
 are not necessarily impracticable. A Capitalist Government could,
 without requiring ready money or disturbing the Stock Exchange or the
 Bank Rate, cancel the domestic part of the National Debt to relieve
 private industry from taxation by veiling the repudiation as a levy
 on capital values and accepting loan and share scrip at face value
 in payment. Illustration. The objection to such a procedure is that
 levies, as distinguished from established annual taxes, are raids on
 private property. As such, they upset the sense of security which
 is essential to social stability, and are extremely demoralizing to
 Governments when once they are accepted as legitimate precedents.
 A raiding Chancellor of the Exchequer would be a very undesirable
 one. The regular routine of taxation of income and compensated
 nationalizations is available and preferable. 294


 65

 THE CONSTRUCTIVE PROBLEM SOLVED

 Recapitulation. The difficulty of applying the constructive program
 of Socialism lies not in the practical but in the metaphysical part
 of the business: the will to equality. When the Government finally
 acquires a virtually complete control of the national income it will
 have the power to distribute it unequally; and this possibility
 may enlist, and has to a certain extent already enlisted, the most
 determined opponents of Socialism on the side of its constructive
 political machinery. Thus Socialism ignorantly pursued may lead to
 State Capitalism instead of to State Socialism, the same road leading
 to both until the final distributive stage is reached. The solution of
 the constructive problem of Socialism does not allay the terrors of
 the alarmists who understand neither problem nor solution, and connect
 nothing with the word Socialism except red ruin and the breaking up
 of laws. Some examination of the effect of Socialism on institutions
 other than economic must therefore be appended. 297


 66

 SHAM SOCIALISM

 The War, by shewing how a Government can confiscate the incomes
 of one set of citizens and hand them over to another set with or
 without the intention of equalizing distribution or nationalizing
 industries or services, shewed also how any predominant class,
 trade, or clique which can nobble our Cabinet Ministers can use the
 power of the State for selfish ends by measures disguised as reforms
 or political necessities. All retrogressions and blunders, like
 all genuine reforms, are lucrative to somebody, and so never lack
 plausible advocates. Illustrative cases of exploitation of the rates
 and taxes and of private benevolence by Capitalism and Trade Unionism.
 Public parks, endowed schools, garden cities, and subsidies. The
 Government subsidy to the coal owners in 1925 not Socialistic nor
 even Capitalistic, but simply unbusinesslike. Poplarism. Mischief
 done by subsidies and doles. Subsidies plus Poplarism burn the candle
 at both ends. The danger of conscious and deliberate exploitation of
 the coercive and confiscatory powers of the Government by private
 or sectional interests is greatly increased by the modern American
 practice of employing first-rate brains as such in industrial
 enterprise. The American Trade Unions are following this example.
 Surprising results. What its adoption by English Trade Unions will
 mean. Socialists will still have to insist on equalization of income
 to prevent Capitalist big business and the aristocracy of Trade
 Unionism controlling Collectivist Governments for their private ends.
 299


 67

 CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION

 Nothing stays put. Literal Conservatism impossible. Human society
 is like a glacier, apparently stationary, always in motion, always
 changing. To understand the changes that are happening, and the
 others that are coming, it is necessary to understand the changes
 that have gone before. Examples of every phase in economic evolution
 still survive and can be studied from life. Without such study we are
 liable to be misguided and corrupted or exasperated. Those adventures
 of Capitalism in pursuit of profits which took the form of thrilling
 exploits by extraordinary individuals with no sordid aims are narrated
 as the splendid history of our race. On the other hand, the more
 shameful episodes in that pursuit may be imputed to the greed of
 capitalists instead of to the ferocity and bigotry of their agents.
 Both views may be discounted as special pleadings. A capitalist may
 accidentally be a genius just as she may be a fool or a criminal. But
 a capitalist as such is only a person with spare money and a legal
 right to withhold it from the hungry. No special ability or quality of
 any sort beyond ordinary prudence and selfishness is involved in the
 capitalist’s function: the solicitor and stockbroker, the banker and
 employer, will carry the capital to the proletarians and see that when
 consuming it they replace it with interest. The most intelligent woman
 can do no better than invest her money, which does far more good when
 invested than when spent in charity. But the employers and financiers
 who exploit her capital are pressed by the exhaustion of home markets
 and old industries to finance adventurous and experimental geniuses
 who explore and invent and conquer. They cannot concern themselves
 with the effect of these enterprises on the world or even on the
 nation provided they bring back money to the shareholders. Capital, to
 save itself from rotting, has to be ruthless in its ceaseless search
 for investment; and mere Conservatism is of no avail against this iron
 necessity. Its chartered companies. It adds India, Borneo, Rhodesia to
 the white Englishman’s burden of its naval and military defence. It
 may yet shift our capital from Middlesex to Asia or West Africa. Our
 helplessness in such an event. No need to pack up yet; but we must get
 rid of static conceptions of civilization and geography. 308


 68

 THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM

 Controlled motion is a good thing; but the motion of Capital is
 uncontrollable and dangerous. As the future of civilization depends
 on Governments gaining control of the forces that are running away
 with Capitalism an understanding of them is necessary. Very few people
 do understand them. The Government does not: neither do the voters.
 The difference between Governments and governed. The Governments
 know the need for government and want to govern. The governed have
 no such knowledge: they resent government and desire freedom. This
 resentment, which is the central weakness of Democracy, was not
 of great importance when the people had no votes, as under Queen
 Elizabeth and Cromwell. But when great extensions of government and
 taxation came to be required to control and supplant Capitalism,
 bourgeois Democracy produced an increase of electoral resistance to
 government; and proletarian Democracy has continued the bourgeois
 tradition. The resultant paralysis of Parliament has produced a demand
 for dictatorships; and Europe has begun to clamor for political
 disciplinarians. Between our inability to govern well and our
 unwillingness to be governed at all, we furnish examples of the abuses
 of power and the horrors of liberty without ascertaining the limits of
 either. 314


 69

 THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY

 We are not born free: Nature is the supreme tyrant, and in our
 latitudes a hard taskmaster. Commercial progress has been at root
 nothing more than inventing ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less
 labor: in short, saving labor and winning leisure. Some examples.
 Actually Liberty is Leisure. Political liberations cannot add to
 liberty unless they add to leisure. For example: woman’s daily
 routine. Sleep, feeding, resting, and locomotion are not leisure:
 they are compulsory. A seven hour working day gives at most six hours
 leisure out of the seventeen non-working hours. The woman of property.
 Leisure is the incentive to attain her position. All wage workers
 value leisure more than money. Property coveted because it confers
 the maximum of leisure. Nevertheless, as leisure brings freedom, and
 freedom brings responsibility and self-determination, it is dreaded
 by those accustomed to tutelage: for instance, soldiers and domestic
 servants. The national fund of leisure. Its present misdistribution.
 Description of a hypothetical four hours working day. Exceptions
 to intermittent labor at regular hours. Pregnancy and nursing.
 Artistic, scientific, and political work. Fixed daily hours only a
 basis for calculation. A four hours day may mean in practice six days
 a month, two months a year, or an earlier retirement. Difference
 between routine work and creative work. Complete freedom impossible
 even during leisure. Legislative restraints on religion, sport, and
 marriage. The Inhibition Complex and the Punch baby. The contrary or
 Anarchic Complex. The instinctive resistance to Socialism as slavery
 obscures its aspect as a guarantee of the maximum possible of leisure
 and therefore of liberty. 319


 70

 RENT OF ABILITY

 The proper social use of brains. Methods of making exceptional
 personal talents lucrative. When the talents are popular, as in the
 case of artists, surgeons, sports champions and the like, they involve
 hard work and confer no political or industrial power. As their
 lucrativeness is a function of their scarcity their power to enrich
 their possessors is not formidable and is controllable by taxation.
 Occasional freak incomes would not matter if equality of income were
 general. Impossibility of living more expensively than the richest
 class. Millionaires give away money for this reason. Special case of
 the talent for exploitation, which is a real social danger. Its forms.
 Administrative ability. The ability to exercise authority and enforce
 discipline. Both are indispensable in industry and in all organized
 activities. When tactfully exercised they are not unpopular, as most
 of us like to be saved the trouble of thinking for ourselves and so
 are not averse from being directed. Authority and subordination in
 themselves are never unpopular; but Capitalism, by creating class
 differences and associating authority with insolence, destroys the
 social equality which is indispensable to voluntary subordination.
 Scolding, slave driving, cursing, kicking, and slacking. Reluctance
 to obey commanders who are trusted and liked is less likely to
 give trouble than reluctance to command. Fortunately, persons of
 exceptional ability do not need any special inducement to exercise
 it. Instances of their failure in subordinate employment. In our
 socialized services they do not demand excessive incomes. The demand
 of the real lady or gentleman. Both are compelled to act as cads in
 capitalist commerce, in which organizers and financiers, by reason of
 their special cunning, are able to extort prodigious shares of the
 country’s output as “rent of ability.” The meaning of rent. It cannot
 be abolished but it can be nationalized. Futility of recriminations
 as to indispensability between employers and employed. The talent of
 the exploiter is as indispensable to the landlord and capitalist as
 to the proletarian. Directed labor is indispensable to all three.
 Nationalization and equalization socializes rent of ability as well as
 rent of land and capital by defeating its private appropriation. 331


 71

 PARTY POLITICS

 The steps to Socialism will not necessarily be taken by Socialist
 Governments. Many of them may be taken, as some already have, by
 anti-Socialist Cabinets. The growth of the Labor Party and the
 enormous electoral preponderance of the proletarian electorate
 promises a complete Labor conquest of the House of Commons. In
 that case the victorious Labor Party would split into several
 irreconcilable groups and make parliamentary government impossible
 unless it contained a unanimous Socialist majority of members really
 clear in their minds as to what Socialism exactly means. Precedent
 in the Long Parliament. The danger is not peculiar to Labor. Any
 political party obtaining complete possession of Parliament may go to
 pieces and end in a dictatorship. The Conservative triumph produced
 by the anti-Russian scare of 1924 made it almost impossible to hold
 the party together. Large majorities in Parliament, far from enabling
 Cabinets to do what they like, destroy their cohesion and enfeeble
 their party. Demoralization of Parliament during the period of large
 majorities brought in by the South African war. Concealment of
 preparations for the war of 1914-18. Parliamentary value of the fact
 that Socialism cannot be shaken by political storms and changes. 343


 72

 THE PARTY SYSTEM

 Popular ignorance of what the term Party System really means.
 Enslavement of voters by the system, in and out of Parliament. Its
 advantage is that if the House of Commons has good leaders the quality
 of the rank and file does not matter. How it was introduced as a war
 measure by William III. Under it the upshot of the General Elections
 is determined not by the staunch party voters but by the floating body
 of independent electors who follow their impulses without regard to
 the Party System. The system is essentially a two-party system of
 solid majority Government party _versus_ solid minority Opposition
 party. When independence prevails, groups form, each in a minority
 in the House; and only by combining enough groups to form a majority
 can any leader form a Cabinet and carry on. Such combinations are
 called Blocks. They have little cohesion, and do not last. The French
 Chamber exhibits this phenomenon. Possibility of its occurring in
 the House of Commons. Alternative systems. Government by committees
 without a Cabinet as practised by our municipalities. This is a local
 survival of the old system of separate King’s cabinets upon which the
 Party System was imposed. The non-party methods of local government
 are quite efficient. Increasing tendency to lessen the rigidity of
 the Party System in Parliament by declaring more and more questions
 non-party. Tendency of Governments to resign on defeated votes of
 confidence only. Inadequacy of our two Houses of Parliament for the
 work put upon them by modern conditions. Need for changes involving
 the creation of new chambers. The Webb proposals. 348


 73

 DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY

 Questions on which the present apparent unanimity in the parliamentary
 Labor Party is delusive: for instance, the Right to Strike. Socialism
 and Compulsory Social Service _versus_ Trade Unionism and Freedom of
 Contract. A Bill to enforce social service and penalize strikes would
 split the party. Magnitude of modern strikes through the extension
 of Trade Unionism from crafts to industries. Modern strikes tend
 to become devastating civil wars. Arguments for Compulsory Labor.
 Military and civil service. When the issue is joined the non-Socialist
 Trade Unionists will combine with the Conservatives against the
 Socialists. 354


 74

 RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS

 The nation’s children. Religious teaching in public schools.
 Impossibility of expressing the multifarious conflict of opinions
 on this subject by a two-party conflict in the House of Commons.
 Sectarian private schools. Roman Catholic and Nonconformist scruples.
 Passive resistance. Impracticable solutions. Cowper-Templeism. The
 Bible and Copernican astronomy. Modern physics and evolutional
 biology. Men professing science are as bigoted as ecclesiastics.
 Secular education impossible because children must be taught conduct,
 and the ultimate sanctions of conduct are metaphysical. Weakness of
 the punishment system. Conceptions of God. Personifications of God as
 the Big Papa and the Roman Catholic Big Mamma needed for children.
 Voltaire and Robespierre anticipated in the nursery. Comte’s law
 of the three stages of belief. Tendency of parents, voters, elected
 persons, and governments to impose their religions, customs, names,
 institutions, and even their languages on everyone by force. Such
 substitutions may be progressive. Toleration is incompatible with
 complete sectarian conviction: the historic tolerations were only
 armistices or exhaustions after drawn battles. Examples of modern
 bigotry. Toleration is impossible as between Capitalism and Socialism.
 It is therefore necessary to demonstrate that a Labor Party can
 neither establish Socialism by exterminating its opponents, nor its
 opponents avert it by exterminating the Socialists. 359


 75

 REVOLUTIONS

 Difference between revolutions and elections or ordinary reforms.
 Revolutions transfer political power from one faction or leader to
 another by violence or the threat of violence. Examples from English
 history. The transfer of political power from our capitalists to our
 proletarians has already taken place in form but not in substance,
 because, as our proletariat is half parasitic on Capitalism, and
 only half productive and self-supporting, half the proletarians
 are on the side of Capitalism. “Ye are many: they are few” is a
 dangerously misleading slogan. Consciousness of their formidable
 proletarian backing may embolden the capitalists to refuse to accept
 a parliamentary decision on any issue which involves a serious
 encroachment of Socialism on Private Property. The case of Ireland,
 and the simultaneous post-war repudiations of parliamentary supremacy
 in several continental countries forbid us to dismiss this possibility
 as unlikely. But whether our political decisions are made by votes
 or by blood and iron the mere decisions to make changes and the
 overruling of their opponents cannot effect any changes except nominal
 ones. The Russian Revolution effected a complete change from absolute
 monarchy to proletarian republicanism and proclaimed the substitution
 of Communism for Capitalism; but the victorious Communists found
 themselves obliged to fall back on Capitalism and do their best
 to control it. Their difficulties were greatly increased by the
 destruction involved by violent revolution. Communism can spread only
 as a development of existing economic civilization and must be thrown
 back by any sudden overthrow of it. “The inevitability of gradualness”
 does not imply any inevitability of peaceful change; but Socialists
 will be strongly opposed to civil war if their opponents do not force
 it on them by repudiating peaceful methods, because though civil war
 may clear the way it can bring the goal no nearer. The lesson of
 history on this point. The French Revolution and the _mot_ of Fouquier
 Tinville. Socialism must therefore be discussed on its own merits as
 an order of society apart from the methods by which the necessary
 political power to establish it may be attained. 370


 76

 CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY

 As peaceful settlement of the struggle for political supremacy between
 the Capitalists and the Socialists cannot be guaranteed we must
 resign ourselves to the unpleasant possibilities of our sedulously
 glorified pugnacity. But as destructive quarreling must be followed
 by constructive co-operation if civilization is to be maintained
 the consummation of Socialism can proceed when the fighting is
 over. A civil war can therefore be only an interruption and need
 not be further considered. Socialism in Parliament. How a series of
 properly prepared and compensated nationalizations may be voted for
 by intelligent politicians who are not Socialists, and carried out
 without disturbing the routine to which the unthinking masses are
 accustomed. Importance of the preparations: every nationalization will
 require extensions of the civil and municipal services. Socialism at
 one stroke is impossible. How far it must stop short of its logical
 completion. 380


 77

 SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

 Private commercial enterprise will not be completely superseded
 by nationalization; but it may become bankrupt; and in that case
 it may demand and receive subsidies from the Government. A simple
 instance. This process, long familiar in cultural institutions, has
 now begun in big business: for example the Government subsidy to coal
 owners in 1925, the Capitalists thus themselves establishing the
 practice, and providing precedents for the subsidizing of private
 experimental ventures by Socialist Governments. Direct industrial
 nationalizations must be confined to well-established routine
 services. When State-financed private ventures succeed, and thereby
 cease to be experimental, they can be nationalized, throwing back
 private enterprise on its proper business of novelty, invention,
 and experiment. The objections of doctrinaire nationalizers. The
 Socialist objective is not nationalization but equalization of
 income, nationalization being only a means to that end. The abuse
 of subsidies. Looting the taxpayer. Subsidies as mortgages. The
 national war factories. Their sale to private bidders after the war
 as an illustration of the impossibility of nationalizing or retaining
 anything for which the Government cannot find immediate use. 386


 78

 HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?

 If it takes too long a revolutionary explosion may wreck civilization.
 Equality of income can be attained and maintained only in a settled
 and highly civilized society under a Government with a highly trained
 civil service and an elaborate code of laws, fortified by general
 moral approval. The process of its establishment will necessarily
 be dangerously slow rather than dangerously quick; for we are not
 educated to be Socialists: we teach children that Socialism is wicked.
 The material advantages of the steps towards Socialism are, however,
 biassing proletarian parents, who are in a huge majority, more and
 more in favor of the movement towards Socialism. This tendency is
 helped by the moral revolt against the cruelty of Capitalism in its
 operation and the sordidness of its principle. In a Socialist State
 economic selfishness would probably stand on the moral level now
 occupied by cardsharping instead of being held up as the key to social
 eminence. 391


 79

 SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY

 Nervous dread of over-regulation produced by the endless inspections
 and restrictions needed to protect the proletariat from unbridled
 Capitalist exploitation. These would have no sense in a Socialist
 state. Examples. Preoccupation of the police with the enforcement of
 private property rights and with the crimes and disorder caused by
 poverty. The drink question. Drink the great anæsthetic. Artificial
 happiness indispensable under Capitalism. Dutch courage. Drugs.
 Compulsory prophylactics as substitutes for sanitation. Direct
 restrictions of liberty by private property. “The right to roam.”
 Deer forests and sheep runs. Existing liberties which Socialism would
 abolish. The liberty to be idle. Nonsense about capital and not labor
 being source of wealth. The case of patents and copyrights. Unofficial
 tyrannies. Fashion. Estate rules. The value of conventionality. 393


 80

 SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE

 Socialists apt to forget that people object to new liberties more
 than to new laws. Marriage varies from frontier to frontier. Civil
 marriage. Religious and communist celibacy, or the negation of
 marriage. Socialism has nothing to do with these varieties, as
 equality of income applies impartially to them all. Why there is
 nevertheless a rooted belief that Socialism will alter marriage.
 The legend of Russian “nationalization of women”. Where women and
 children are economically dependent on husbands and fathers marriage
 is slavery for wives and home a prison for children. Socialism, by
 making them economically independent, would break the chain and open
 the prison door. Probable results. Improvement in domestic manners.
 The State should intervene to divorce separated couples, thus
 abolishing the present power of the parties to enforce a broken tie
 vindictively or religiously. Clash of Church and State on marriage.
 The State must intervene to control population. As Socialism would
 clear away the confusion into which Capitalism, with its inevitable
 result of parasitic labor and premature overpopulation, has plunged
 the subject, a Socialist state is more likely to interfere than a
 Capitalist one. Expedients. Limitation of families. Encouragement of
 families. Polygamy. Experience of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) on
 this point. Bounties for large families plus persecution of birth
 control. State endowment of parentage. Compulsory parentage. Monogamy
 practicable only when the numbers of the sexes are equal. Case of a
 male-destroying war. Conflicting domestic ideals affecting population.
 The Bass Rock ideal. The Boer ideal. The bungalow ideal. The monster
 hotel ideal. 406


 81

 SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN

 The State school child. Need for the protection of children against
 parents. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The
 new Adoption Act. Need for the organization of child life as such.
 Schools essentially prisons. General ignorance after nine years of
 enforced elementary schooling. Limits of child liberty. The real
 nature and purpose of education. Our stupidities about it. Injury
 done by forcing children to learn things beyond their capacity or
 foreign to their aptitudes. Girls and compulsory Beethoven. Boys
 and compulsory classics and mathematics. Eton began by forbidding
 play and now makes it compulsory. Children as animals to be tamed
 by beating and sacks to be filled with learning. Opportunities for
 the Sadist and child fancier. Children in school are outlawed.
 Typical case of assault. Unendurable strain of the relations between
 teachers and children. Schools, though educationally disastrous,
 have the incidental advantage of encouraging promiscuous social
 intercourse. University manners. Middle class manners. Garden City
 and Summer School manners. Need for personal privacy and free choice
 of company not supplied by the snobbery and class segregations of
 Capitalism. Socialism preferable on this score. Technical education
 for citizenship. As knowledge must not be withheld on the ground
 that it is as efficient for evil as for good, it must be accompanied
 by moral instruction and ethical inculcation. Doctrines a Socialist
 state could not tolerate. Variety and incompatibility of British
 religions. Original sin. Brimstone damnation. Children’s souls need
 protection more than their bodies. The Bible. A common creed necessary
 to citizenship. Certain prejudices must be inculcated. Need for an
 official second nature. Limits to State proselytizing. Beyond the
 irreducible minimum of education the hand should be left to find its
 own employment and the mind its own food. 412


 82

 SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES

 Will a Socialist State tolerate a Church? This question must be
 discussed objectively. Survey of the age-long struggle between Church
 and State for the control of political and social institutions.
 The Inquisition and the Star Chamber. Theocracy has not lost its
 power. Mormon Theocracy. Christian Science. Both have come into
 conflict with the secular government. New Churches capture secular
 Governments by denying that they are Churches. The persecutions
 and fanaticisms of today rage in the name of Science. The avowed
 Church of Christ Scientist _versus_ the masked Church of Jenner and
 Pasteur, Scientists. Tests for public office, governing bodies, and
 professions. Church of England tests broken by the English people
 refusing to remain in one Church. The Quakers. Admission to Parliament
 of Dissenters, then of Jews, finally of Atheists, leading to civil
 marriage and burial and the substitution of civil registration of
 birth for baptism, leaves the State in the grip of pseudo-scientific
 orthodoxy. Extravagances of this new faith in America and the new
 European republics. The assets of religion are also the assets of
 science. The masses, indifferent to both, are ungovernable without
 an inculcated faith (the official second nature). Modern conflicts
 between secular authority and Church doctrine. Cremation. Rights
 of animals. Use of cathedrals. The Russian situation: the State
 tolerating the Church whilst denouncing its teaching as dope. Such
 contemptuously tolerant anti-clericalism is necessarily transient:
 positive teaching being indispensable. Subjective religion. Courage.
 Redskin ideals. Man as hunter-warrior with Woman as everything else.
 Political uselessness of ferocity and sportsmanship. Fighting men
 cowardly and lazy as thinkers. Women anxious lest Socialism should
 attack their religion. It need not do so unless inequality of income
 is part of their religion. But they must beware of attempts to
 constitute Socialism as a Catholic Church with an infallible prophet
 and Savior. The Moscow Third International is essentially such a
 Church, with Karl Marx as its prophet. It must come into conflict with
 the Soviet and be mastered by it. We need not, however, repudiate its
 doctrine and vituperate its prophet on that account any more than we
 need repudiate the teaching of Christ and vilify his character when
 we insist that the State and not the Church shall govern England. The
 merits of Marx. 429


 83

 CURRENT CONFUSIONS

 The Intelligent Woman must resist the impulse to intervene in
 conversational bickerings and letters to the Press about Socialism
 and Capitalism by people who understand neither. Meaningless
 vituperation and general misuse of nomenclature. Politicians misname
 themselves as well as oneanother. Self-contradictory names such
 as Communist-Anarchist. Real distinctions. Direct Action _versus_
 Fabianism. Poor Man’s Capitalism: its forms. It often masquerades as
 Socialism. The assumption of the name Communist by the cruder sort
 of Direct-Actionists produces the anomaly of a Labor Party expelling
 Communists whilst advocating Communist legislation. Fascism, produced
 by impatient disgust with Parliament as an institution, is common to
 the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Methods of Direct Action.
 The General Strike. Its absurdity. Its futility as a preventive
 of war. Pacifism. Supernational social organization. Empires and
 Commonwealths. Confusions as to Democracy. Proletarian jealousy of
 official power. Resultant autocracy in the Trade Unions. Labor leaders
 more arbitrary than Peers, and much more cynical as to working class
 political capacity than middle class and aristocratic idealists.
 Democracy in practice has never been democratic; and the millennial
 hopes based on every extension of the franchise, from the Reform Bill
 of 1832 to Votes for Women, have been disappointed. The reaction.
 Discipline for everybody and votes for nobody. Why women should stick
 resolutely to their votes. Proportional Representation opposed by the
 Labor Party. Need for a scientific test of political capacity. Those
 who use democracy as a stepping stone to political power oppose it
 as a dangerous nuisance when they get there. Its real object is to
 establish a genuine aristocracy. To do this we must first ascertain
 which are the aristocrats; and it is here that popular voting fails.
 Mrs Everybody votes for Mrs Somebody only to discover that she has
 elected Mrs Noisy Nobody. 443


 84

 PERORATION

 A last word. Danger of discouragement through excessive sympathy.
 Public evils are fortunately not millionfold evils. Suffering is not
 cumulative; but waste is; and the Socialist revolt is against waste.
 Honor, health, and joy of heart are impossible under Capitalism:
 rich and poor are alike detestable: both must cease to exist. Our
 need for neighbors whose interests do not compete with ours is
 against the principle of Capitalism. Waiting for dead men’s shoes.
 The professions. Husband hunting. The social friction is intense:
 Capitalism puts sand instead of oil in all the bearings of our
 machinery. The remonstrance of the optimist. Natural kindliness.
 Capitalism itself was better-intentioned in its inception than
 early Christianity. Goodwill is not enough: it is dangerous until
 it finds the right way. Unreasoning sentiment an unsafe guide. We
 believe what we want to believe: if a pecuniary bias is given to our
 activities it will corrupt them in institution, teaching, and practice
 until the best intentioned citizens will know no honest methods and
 doctrines. In our search for disinterested service we come up against
 profiteering and Trade Unionism at every turn. Resultant cynicism
 and pessimism. Gulliver’s Travels and Candide. Equality of income
 would make these terrible books mere clinical lectures on an extinct
 disease. The simple and noble meaning of gentility. 455


 APPENDIX

 Instead of a bibliography. The technical literature of Capitalism
 and Socialism mostly abstract, inhuman, and written in an academic
 jargon which only specialists find readable. Failure to define either
 capital or Socialism. The early Capitalist economists: their candor.
 Ricardo, De Quincey, and Austin. The Socialist reaction: Proudhon
 and Marx. The academic reaction: John Stuart Mill, Cairnes, and
 Maynard Keynes. The artistic reaction: Ruskin, Carlyle, and Morris.
 The reaction of the novelists: Dickens and Wells, Galsworthy and
 Bennett. The reaction in the theatre: Ibsen and Strindberg. Henry
 George and Land Nationalization. Literature of the conversion of
 Socialism from an insurrectionary movement in the Liberal tradition
 to a constitutional one. Fabian Essays. Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The
 author’s contributions. 465

 INDEX 471




THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM




1

A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS


It would be easy, dear madam, to refer you to the many books on modern
Socialism which have been published since it became a respectable
constitutional question in this country in the eighteen-eighties. But
I strongly advise you not to read a line of them until you and your
friends have discussed for yourselves how wealth should be distributed
in a respectable civilized country, and arrived at the best conclusion
you can.

For Socialism is nothing but an opinion held by some people on that
point. Their opinion is not necessarily better than your opinion or
anyone else’s. How much should you have and how much should your
neighbors have? What is your own answer?

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy
with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which
we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing
people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not.
Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for
granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that
they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact
transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by
well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a
prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament,
because we are never satisfied with them. Sometimes they are scrapped
for new ones; sometimes they are altered; sometimes they are simply
done away with as nuisances. The new ones have to be stretched in the
law courts to make them fit, or to prevent them fitting too well if
the judges happen to dislike them. There is no end to this scrapping
and altering and innovating. New laws are made to compel people to do
things they never dreamt of doing before (buying insurance stamps,
for instance). Old laws are repealed to allow people to do what they
used to be punished for doing (marrying their deceased wives’ sisters
and husbands’ brothers, for example). Laws that are not repealed are
amended and amended and amended like a child’s knickers until there
is hardly a shred of the first stuff left. At the elections some
candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old
ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is
impossible. Things will not stay as they are.

Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few
generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years
in school, old-age and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and
short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in
the courts, are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever
shall be; but their greatgrandmothers would have set down anyone who
told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted
them to come as wicked.

When studying how the wealth we produce every year should be
shared among us, we must not be like either the children or the
greatgrandmothers. We must bear constantly in mind that our shares
are being changed almost every day on one point or another whilst
Parliament is sitting, and that before we die the sharing will be
different, for better or worse, from the sharing of today, just as
the sharing of today differs from the nineteenth century sharing more
than Queen Victoria could have believed possible. The moment you begin
to think of our present sharing as a fixture, you become a fossil.
Every change in our laws takes money, directly or indirectly, out of
somebody’s pocket (perhaps yours) and puts it into somebody else’s.
This is why one set of politicians demands each change and another set
opposes it.

So what you have to consider is not whether there will be great changes
or not (for changes there certainly will be) but what changes you and
your friends think, after consideration and discussion, would make
the world a better place to live in, and what changes you ought to
resist as disastrous to yourself and everyone else. Every opinion you
arrive at in this way will become a driving force as part of the public
opinion which in the long run must be at the back of all the changes
if they are to abide, and at the back of the policemen and jailers who
have to enforce them, right or wrong, once they are made the law of the
land.

It is important that you should have opinions of your own on this
subject. Never forget that the old law of the natural philosophers,
that Nature abhors a vacuum, is true of the human head. There is no
such thing as an empty head, though there are heads so impervious to
new ideas that they are for all mental purposes solid, like billiard
balls. I know that you have not that sort of head, because, if you
had, you would not be reading this book. Therefore I warn you that if
you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other
people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters, from advertisements,
from newspapers, from books and pamphlets, from gossip, from political
speeches, from plays and pictures--and, you will add, from this book!

Well, of course I do not deny it. When I urge you to think for yourself
(as all our nurses and mothers and schoolmistresses do even though they
clout our heads the moment our conclusions differ from theirs) I do
not mean that you should shut your eyes to everyone else’s opinions.
I myself, though I am by way of being a professional thinker, have to
content myself with secondhand opinions on a great many most important
subjects on which I can neither form an opinion of my own nor criticize
the opinions I take from others. I take the opinion of the Astronomer
Royal as to when it is twelve o’clock; and if I am in a strange town I
take the opinion of the first person I meet in the street as to the way
to the railway station. If I go to law I have to consent to the absurd
but necessary dogma that the king can do no wrong. Otherwise trains
would be no use to me, and lawsuits could never be finally settled.
We should never arrive anywhere or do anything if we did not believe
what we are told by people who ought to know better than ourselves, and
agree to stand by certain dogmas of the infallibility of authorities
whom we nevertheless know to be fallible. Thus on most subjects we are
forced by our ignorance to proceed with closed minds in spite of all
exhortations to think boldly for ourselves, and be, above all things,
original.

St Paul, a rash and not very deep man, as his contempt for women shews,
cried “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good”. He forgot that
it is quite impossible for one woman to prove all things: she has not
the time even if she had the knowledge. For a busy woman there are no
Open Questions: everything is settled except the weather; and even
that is settled enough for her to buy the right clothes for summer and
winter. Why, then, did St Paul give a counsel which he must have known
to be impracticable if he ever thought about it for five minutes?

The explanation is that the Settled Questions are never really settled,
because the answers to them are never complete and final truths. We
make laws and institutions because we cannot live in society without
them. We cannot make perfect institutions because we are not perfect
ourselves. Even if we could make perfect institutions, we could not
make eternal and universal ones, because the conditions change, and
the laws and institutions that work well with fifty enclosed nuns in
a convent would be impossible in a nation of forty million people
at large. So we have to do the best we can at the moment, leaving
posterity free to do better if it can. When we have made our laws in
this makeshift way, the questions they concern are settled for the
moment only. And in politics the moment may be twelve months or twelve
hundred years, a mere breathing space or a whole epoch.

Consequently there come crises in history when questions that have
been closed for centuries suddenly yawn wide open. It was in the teeth
of one of these terrible yawns that St Paul cried that there are no
closed questions, that we must think out everything for ourselves all
over again. In his Jewish world nothing was more sacred than the law of
Moses, and nothing more indispensable than the rite of circumcision.
All law and all religion seemed to depend on them; yet St Paul had to
ask the Jews to throw over the law of Moses for the contrary law of
Christ, declaring that circumcision did not matter, as it was baptism
that was essential to salvation. How could he help preaching the open
mind and the inner light as against all laws and institutions whatever?

You are now in the position of the congregations of St Paul. We are all
in it today. A question that has been practically closed for a whole
epoch, the question of the distribution of wealth and the nature of
property, has suddenly yawned wide open before us; and we all have to
open our closed minds accordingly.

When I say that it has opened suddenly, I am not forgetting that it
never has been closed completely for thoughtful people whose business
it was to criticize institutions. Hundreds of years before St Paul
was born, prophets crying in the wilderness had protested against the
abominations that were rampant under the Mosaic law, and prophesied
a Savior who would redeem us from its inhumanity. I am not forgetting
either that for hundreds of years past our own prophets, whom we
call poets or philosophers or divines, have been protesting against
the division of the nation into rich and poor, idle and overworked.
But there comes finally a moment at which the question that has been
kept ajar only by persecuted prophets for a few disciples springs
wide open for everybody; and the persecuted prophets with their tiny
congregations of cranks grow suddenly into formidable parliamentary
Oppositions which presently become powerful Governments.

Langland and Latimer and Sir Thomas More, John Bunyan and George Fox,
Goldsmith and Crabbe and Shelley, Carlyle and Ruskin and Morris, with
many brave and faithful preachers, in the Churches and out of them,
of whom you have never heard, were our English prophets. They kept
the question open for those who had some spark of their inspiration;
but prosaic everyday women and men paid no attention until, within
my lifetime and yours, quite suddenly ordinary politicians, sitting
on the front benches of the House of Commons and of all the European
legislatures, with vast and rapidly growing bodies of ordinary
respectable voters behind them, began clamoring that the existing
distribution of wealth is so anomalous, monstrous, ridiculous,
and unbearably mischievous, that it must be radically changed if
civilization is to be saved from the wreck to which all the older
civilizations we know of were brought by this very evil.

That is why you must approach the question as an unsettled one, with
your mind as open as you can get it. And it is from my own experience
in dealing with such questions that I strongly advise you not to wait
for a readymade answer from me or anyone else, but to try first to
solve the problem for yourself in your own way. For even if you solve
it all wrong, you will become not only intensely interested in it, but
much better able to understand and appreciate the right solution when
it comes along.




2

DIVIDING-UP


Everybody knows now that Socialism is a proposal to divide-up the
income of the country in a new way. What you perhaps have not noticed
is that the income of the country is being divided-up every day and
even every minute at present, and must continue to be divided-up every
day as long as there are two people left on earth to divide it. The
only possible difference of opinion is not as to whether it shall be
divided or not, but as to how much each person should have, and on what
conditions he should be allowed to have it. St Paul said “He that will
not work, neither shall he eat”; but as he was only a man with a low
opinion of women, he forgot the babies. Babies cannot work, and are
shockingly greedy; but if they were not fed there would soon be nobody
left alive in the world. So that will not do.

Some people imagine that because they can save money the wealth of
the world can be stored up. Stuff and nonsense. Most of the wealth
that keeps us alive will not last a week. The world lives from hand to
mouth. A drawingroom poker will last a lifetime; but we cannot live by
eating drawingroom pokers; and though we do all we can to make our food
keep by putting eggs into water-glass, tinning salmon, freezing mutton,
and turning milk into dry goods, the hard fact remains that unless most
of our food is eaten within a few days of its being baked or killed it
will go stale or rotten, and choke or poison us. Even our clothes will
not last very long if we work hard in them; and there is the washing.
You may put india-rubber patches on your boot soles to prevent the
soles wearing out; but then the patches will wear out.

Every year must bring its own fresh harvest and its new generations
of sheep and cattle: we cannot live on what is left of last year’s
harvest; and as next year’s does not yet exist, we must live in the
main on this year’s, making things and using them up, sowing and
reaping, brewing and baking, breeding and butchering (unless we are
vegetarians like myself), soiling and washing, or else dying of dirt
and starvation. What is called saving is only making bargains for the
future. For instance, if I bake a hundred and one loaves of bread, I
can eat no more than the odd one; and I cannot save the rest, because
they will be uneatable in a week. All I can do is to bargain with
somebody who wants a hundred loaves to be eaten on the spot by himself
and his family and persons in his employment, that if I give my hundred
spare loaves to him he will give me, say, five new loaves to eat every
year in future. But that is not saving up the loaves. It is only a
bargain between two parties: one who wants to provide for the future,
and another who wants to spend heavily in the present. Consequently I
cannot save until I find somebody else who wants to spend. The notion
that we could all save together is silly: the truth is that only a few
well-off people who have more than they need can afford to provide
for their future in this way; and they could not do it were there not
others spending more than they possess. Peter must spend what Paul
saves, or Paul’s savings will go rotten. Between the two nothing is
saved. The nation as a whole must make its bread and eat it as it goes
along. A nation which stopped working would be dead in a fortnight
even if every man, woman, and child in it had houses and lands and a
million of money in the savings bank. When you see the rich man’s wife
(or anyone else’s wife) shaking her head over the thriftlessness of the
poor because they do not all save, pity the lady’s ignorance; but do
not irritate the poor by repeating her nonsense to them.




3

HOW MUCH FOR EACH?


You now realize that a great baking and making and serving and counting
must take place every day; and that when the loaves and other things
are made they must be divided-up immediately, each of us getting her
or his legally appointed share. What should that share be? How much
is each of us to have; and why is each of us to have that much and
neither more nor less? If the hardworking widow with six children is
getting two loaves a week whilst some idle and dissolute young bachelor
is wasting enough every day to feed six working families for a month,
is that a sensible way of dividing-up? Would it not be better to give
more to the widow and less to the bachelor? These questions do not
settle themselves: they have to be settled by law. If the widow takes
one of the bachelor’s loaves the police will put her in prison, and
send her children to the workhouse. They do that because there is a
law that her share is only two loaves. That law can be repealed or
altered by parliament if the people desire it and vote accordingly.
Most people, when they learn this, think the law ought to be altered.
When they read in the papers that an American widow left with one baby
boy, and an allowance of one hundred and fifty pounds a week to bring
him up on, went to the courts to complain that it was not enough, and
had the allowance increased to two hundred, whilst other widows who
had worked hard early and late all their lives, and brought up large
families, were ending their days in the workhouse, they feel that
there is something monstrously unjust and wicked and stupid in such a
dividing-up, and that it must be changed. They get it changed a little
by taking back some of the rich American widow’s share in taxes, and
giving it to the poor in old-age pensions and widows’ pensions and
unemployment doles and “free” elementary education and other things.
But if the American widow still has more than a hundred pounds a week
for the keep of her baby boy, and a large income for herself besides,
whilst the poor widow at the other end of the town has only ten
shillings a week pension between her and the workhouse, the difference
is still so unfair that we hardly notice the change. Everybody wants
a fairer division except the people who get the best of it; and as
they are only one in ten of the population, and many of them recognize
the injustice of their own position, we may take it that there is a
general dissatisfaction with the existing daily division of wealth, and
a general intention to alter it as soon as possible among those who
realize that it can be altered.

But you cannot alter anything unless you know what you want to alter it
to. It is no use saying that it is scandalous that Mrs A. should have
a thousand pounds a day and poor Mrs B. only half a crown. If you want
the law altered you must be prepared to say how much you think Mrs A.
should have, and how much Mrs B. should have. And that is where the
real trouble begins. We are all ready to say that Mrs B. ought to have
more, and Mrs A. less; but when we are asked to say exactly how much
more and how much less, some say one thing; others say another; and
most of us have nothing to say at all except perhaps that Mrs A. ought
to be ashamed of herself or that it serves Mrs B. right.

People who have never thought about the matter say that the honest way
is to let everyone have what she has the money to pay for, just as at
present. But that does not get us out of the difficulty. It only sets
us asking how the money is to be allotted. Money is only a bit of paper
or a bit of metal that gives its owner a lawful claim to so much bread
or beer or diamonds or motor-cars or what not. We cannot eat money, nor
drink money, nor wear money. It is the goods that money can buy that
are being divided-up when money is divided-up. Everything is reckoned
in money; and when the law gives Mrs B. her ten shillings when she is
seventy years old and young Master A. his three thousand shillings
before he is seven minutes old, the law is dividing-up the loaves
and fishes, the clothes and houses, the motor-cars and perambulators
between them as if it were handing out these articles directly instead
of handing out the money that buys them.




4

NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK


Before there can be any wealth to divide-up, there must be labor at
work. There can be no loaves without farmers and bakers. There are a
few little islands thousands of miles away where men and women can lie
basking in the sun and live on the cocoa-nuts the monkeys throw down to
them. But for us there is no such possibility. Without incessant daily
labor we should starve. If anyone is idle someone else must be working
for both or there would be nothing for either of them to eat. That was
why St Paul said “If a man will not work neither shall he eat”. The
burden of labor is imposed on us by Nature, and has to be divided-up as
well as the wealth it produces.

But the two divisions need not correspond to oneanother. One person
can produce much more than enough to feed herself. Otherwise the young
children could not be fed; and the old people who are past work would
starve. Many a woman with nothing to help her but her two hands has
brought up a family on her own earnings, and kept her aged parents into
the bargain, besides making rent for a ground landlord as well. And
with the help of water power, steam power, electric power, and modern
machinery, labor can be so organized that one woman can turn out more
than a thousand women could turn out 150 years ago.

This saving of labor by harnessing machines to natural forces, like
wind and water and the heat latent in coal, produces leisure, which
also has to be divided-up. If one person’s labor for ten hours can
support ten persons for a day, the ten can arrange in several different
ways. They can put the ten hours’ work on one person and let the other
nine have all the leisure as well as free rations. Or they can each do
one hour’s work a day and each have nine hours leisure. Or they can
have anything between these extremes. They can also arrange that three
of them shall work ten hours a day each, producing enough for thirty
people, so that the other seven will not only have nothing to do, but
will be able to eat enough for fourteen and to keep thirteen servants
to wait on them and keep the three up to their work into the bargain.

Another possible arrangement would be that they should all work much
longer every day than was necessary to keep them, on condition that
they were not required to work until they were fully grown and well
educated, and were allowed to stop working and amuse themselves for
the rest of their lives when they were fifty. Scores of different
arrangements are possible between out-and-out slavery and an equitable
division of labor, leisure, and wealth. Slavery, Serfdom, Feudalism,
Capitalism, Socialism, Communism are all at bottom different
arrangements of this division. Revolutionary history is the history of
the effects of a continual struggle by persons and classes to alter
the arrangement in their own favor. But for the moment we had better
stick to the question of dividing-up the income the labor produces;
for the utmost difference you can make between one person and another
in respect of their labor or leisure is as nothing compared to the
enormous difference you can make in their incomes by modern methods and
machines. You cannot put more than 24 hours into a rich man’s day; but
you can put 24 million pounds into his pocket without asking him to
lift his little finger for it.




5

COMMUNISM


If I have made this clear to you, will you try to make up your mind how
you would like to see the income of your country divided-up day by day?
Do not run to the Socialists or the Capitalists, or to your favorite
newspaper, to make up your mind for you: they will only unsettle and
bewilder you when they are not intentionally misleading you. Think it
out for yourself. Conceive yourself as a national trustee with the
entire income of the country placed in your hands to be distributed
so as to produce the greatest social wellbeing for everybody in the
country.

By the way, you had better leave your own share and that of your
children and relations and friends out of the question, lest your
personal feelings upset your judgment. Some women would say “I never
think of anyone else: I don’t know anyone else”. But that will never do
in settling social questions. Capitalism and Socialism are not schemes
for distributing wealth in one lady’s circle only, but for distributing
wealth to everybody; and as the quantity to be distributed every year
is limited, if Mrs Dickson’s child, or her sister’s child, or her
dearest and oldest friend gets more, Mrs Johnson’s child or sister’s
child or dearest friend must get less. Mrs Dickson must forget not only
herself and her family and friends, but her class. She must imagine
herself for the moment a sort of angel acting for God, without any
earthly interests and affections to corrupt her integrity, concerned
solely with the task of deciding how much everybody should have out
of the national income for the sake of the world’s greatest possible
welfare and the greatest possible good of the world’s soul.

Of course I know that none of us can really do this; but we must get
as near it as we can. I know also that there are few things more
irritating than the glibness with which people tell us to think for
ourselves when they know quite well that our minds are mostly herd
minds, with only a scrap of individual mind on top. I am even prepared
to be told that when you paid the price of this book you were paying me
to think for you. But I can no more do that than I can eat your dinner
for you. What I can do is to cook your mental dinner for you by putting
you in possession of the thinking that has been done already on the
subject by myself and others, so that you may be saved the time and
trouble and disappointment of trying to find your way down blind alleys
that have been thoroughly explored, and found to be no-thoroughfares.

Here, then, are some plans that have been tried or proposed.

Let us begin with the simplest: the family plan of the apostles and
their followers. Among them everybody threw all that she or he had
into a common stock; and each took from it what she or he needed. The
obligation to do this was so sacred that when Ananias and Sapphira kept
back something for themselves, St Peter struck them dead for “lying to
the Holy Ghost”.

This plan, which is Communism in its primitive purity, is practised to
this day in small religious communities where the people live together
and are all known to one another. But it is not so simple for big
populations where the people do not live together and do not know each
other. Even in the family we practise it only partially; for though
the father gives part of his earnings to the mother, and the children
do the same when they are earning anything, and the mother buys food
and places it before all of them to partake in common, yet they all
keep some of their earnings back for their separate use; so that family
life is not pure Communism, but partly Communism and partly separate
property. Each member of the family does what Ananias and Sapphira
did; but they need not tell lies about it (though they sometimes do)
because it is understood between them that the children are to keep
back something for pocket money, the father for beer and tobacco, and
the mother for her clothes if there is any left.

Besides, family Communism does not extend to the people next door.
Every house has its own separate meals; and the people in the other
houses do not contribute to it, and have no right to share it. There
are, however, exceptions to this in modern cities. Though each family
buys its own beer separately, they all get their water communistically.
They pay what they call a water rate into a common fund to pay for a
constant supply to every house; and they all draw as much or as little
water as they need.

In the same way they pay for the lighting of the streets, for paving
them, for policemen to patrol them, for bridges across the rivers, and
for the removal and destruction of dustbin refuse. Nobody thinks of
saying “I never go out after dark; I have never called a policeman in
my life; I have no business on the other side of the river and never
cross the bridge; and therefore I will not help to pay the cost of
these things”. Everybody knows that town life could not exist without
lighting and paving and bridges and police and sanitation, and that
a bedridden invalid who never leaves the house, or a blind man whose
darkness no street lamp can dispel, is as dependent on these public
services for daily supplies of food and for safety and health as any
healthy person. And this is as true of the army and navy as of the
police force, of a lighthouse as of a street lamp, of a Town Hall as
of the Houses of Parliament: they are all paid for out of the common
stock made up by our rates and taxes; and they are for the benefit of
everybody indiscriminately. In short, they are Communistic.

When we pay our rates to keep up this Communism we do not, like
the apostles, throw all we have into the common stock: we make a
contribution according to our means; and our means are judged by the
value of the house we live in. But those who pay low contributions
have just the same use of the public services as those who pay high
ones; and strangers and vagrants who do not pay any contributions at
all enjoy them equally. Young and old, prince and pauper, virtuous and
vicious, black and white and yellow, thrifty and wasteful, drunk and
sober, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman
and thief, all have the same use and enjoyment of these communistic
conveniences and services which cost so much to keep up. And it works
perfectly. Nobody dreams of proposing that people should not be allowed
to walk down the street without paying and producing a certificate of
character from two respectable householders. Yet the street costs more
than any of the places you pay to go into, such as theatres, or any of
the places where you have to be introduced, like clubs.




6

LIMITS TO COMMUNISM


Would you ever have supposed from reading the newspapers that
Communism, instead of being a wicked invention of Russian
revolutionaries and British and American desperadoes, is a highly
respectable way of sharing our wealth, sanctioned and practised by
the apostles, and an indispensable part of our own daily life and
civilization? The more Communism, the more civilization. We could not
get on without it, and are continually extending it. We could give up
some of it if we liked. We could put turnpike gates on the roads and
make everybody pay for passing along them: indeed we may still see the
little toll houses where the old turnpike gates used to be. We could
abolish the street lamps, and hire men with torches to light us through
the streets at night: are not the extinguishers formerly used by hired
linkmen still to be seen on old-fashioned railings? We could even hire
policemen and soldiers by the job to protect us, and then disband the
police force and the army. But we take good care to do nothing of the
sort. In spite of the way people grumble about their rates and taxes
they get better value for them than for all the other money they spend.
To find a bridge built for us to cross the river without having to
think about it or pay anyone for it is such a matter of course to us
that some of us come to think, like the children, that bridges are
provided by nature, and cost nothing. But if the bridges were allowed
to fall down, and we had to find out for ourselves how to cross the
river by fording it or swimming it or hiring a boat, we should soon
realize what a blessed thing Communism is, and not grudge the few
shillings that each of us has to pay the rate collector for the upkeep
of the bridge. In fact we might come to think Communism such a splendid
thing that everything ought to be communized.

But this would not work. The reason a bridge can be communized is that
everyone either uses the bridge or benefits by it. It may be taken as
a rule that whatever is used by everybody or benefits everybody can
be communized. Roads, bridges, street lighting, and water supply are
communized as a matter of course in cities, though in villages and
country places people have to buy and carry lanterns on dark nights
and get their water from their own wells. There is no reason why
bread should not be communized: it would be an inestimable benefit to
everybody if there were no such thing in the country as a hungry child,
and no housekeeper had to think of the cost of providing bread for the
household. Railways could be communized. You can amuse yourself by
thinking of lots of other services that would benefit everyone, and
therefore could and should be communized.

Only, you will be stopped when you come to services that are not useful
to everyone. We communize water as a matter of course; but what about
beer? What would a teetotaller say if he were asked to pay rates or
taxes to enable his neighbors to have as much beer as they want for
the asking? He would have a double objection: first, that he would
be paying for something he does not use; and second, that in his
opinion beer, far from being a good thing, causes ill-health, crime,
drunkenness, and so forth. He would go to prison rather than pay rates
for such a purpose.

The most striking example of this difficulty is the Church. The Church
of England is a great communistic institution: its property is held
in trust for God; its temples and services are open to everybody; and
its bishops sit in Parliament as peers of the realm. Yet, because we
are not all agreed as to the doctrines of the Church of England, and
many of us think that a communion table with candles on it is too like
a Roman Catholic altar, we have been forced to make the Church rate a
voluntary one: that is, you may pay it or not as you please. And when
the Education Act of 1902 gave some public money to Church schools,
many people refused to pay their rates, and allowed their furniture to
be sold year after year, sooner than allow a penny of theirs to go to
the Church. Thus you see that if you propose to communize something
that is not used or at least approved of by everybody, you will be
asking for trouble. We all use roads and bridges, and agree that they
are useful and necessary things; but we differ about religion and
temperance and playgoing, and quarrel fiercely over our differences.
That is why we communize roads and bridges without any complaint or
refusal to pay rates, but have masses of voters against us at once when
we attempt to communize any particular form of public worship, or to
deal with beer or spirits as we deal with water, and as we should deal
with milk if we had sense enough to value the nation’s health.

This difficulty can be got round to some extent by give-and-take
between the people who want different things. For instance, there are
some people who care for flowers and do not care for music, and others
who care for games and boating and care neither for flowers nor music.
But these differently minded people do not object to paying rates for
the upkeep of a public park with flower-beds, cricket pitches, a lake
for boating and swimming, and a band. Laura will not object to pay for
what Beatrice wants if Beatrice does not object to pay for what Laura
wants.

Also there are many things that only a few people understand or use
which nevertheless everybody pays for because without them we should
have no learning, no books, no pictures, no high civilization. We have
public galleries of the best pictures and statues, public libraries
of the best books, public observatories in which astronomers watch
the stars and mathematicians make abstruse calculations, public
laboratories in which scientific men are supposed to add to our
knowledge of the universe. These institutions cost a great deal of
money to which we all have to contribute. Many of us never enter a
gallery or a museum or a library even when we live within easy reach
of them; and not one person in ten is interested in astronomy or
mathematics or physical science; but we all have a general notion that
these things are necessary; and so we do not object to pay for them.

Besides, many of us do not know that we pay for them: we think we
get them as kind presents from somebody. In this way a good deal of
Communism has been established without our knowing anything about it.
This is shewn by our way of speaking about communized things as free.
Because we can enter the National Gallery or the British Museum or the
cathedrals without paying at the doors, some of us seem to think that
they grew by the roadside like wildflowers. But they cost us a great
deal of money from week to week. The British Museum has to be swept and
dusted and scrubbed more than any private house, because so many more
people tramp through it with mud on their boots. The salaries of the
learned gentlemen who are in charge of it are a trifle compared with
the cost of keeping it tidy. In the same way a public park needs more
gardeners than a private one, and has to be weeded and mown and watered
and sown and so forth at a great cost in wages and seeds and garden
implements. We get nothing for nothing; and if we do not pay every time
we go into these places, we pay in rates and taxes. The poorest tramp,
though he may escape rent and rates by sleeping out, pays whenever he
buys tobacco, because he pays about eight times as much for the tobacco
as it costs to grow and put on the market; and the Government gets the
difference to spend on public purposes: that is, to maintain Communism.
And the poorest woman pays in the same way, without knowing it,
whenever she buys an article of food that is taxed. If she knew that
she was stinting herself to pay the salary of the Astronomer Royal, or
to buy another picture for the National Gallery, she might vote against
the Government at the next election for making her do it; but as she
does not know, she only grumbles about the high prices of food, and
thinks they are all due to bad harvests or hard times or strikes or
anything else that must be put up with. She might not grudge what she
has to pay for the King and Queen; but if she knew that she was paying
the wages of the thousands of charwomen who scrub the stone staircases
in the Houses of Parliament and other great public buildings, she would
not get much satisfaction out of helping to support them better than
she can afford to support herself.

We see then that some of the Communism we practise is imposed on us
without our consent: we pay for it without knowing what we are doing.
But, in the main, Communism deals with things that are either used by
all of us or necessary to all of us, whether we are educated enough to
understand the necessity or not.

Now let us get back to the things as to which tastes differ. We have
already seen that Church of England services and beer and wine and
spirits and intoxicants of all sorts are considered necessary to life
by some people, and pernicious and poisonous by others. We are not
agreed even about tea and meat. But there are many things that no one
sees any harm in; yet everybody does not want them. Ask a woman what
little present she would like; and one woman will choose a pet dog,
another a gramophone. A studious girl will ask for a microscope when
an active girl will ask for a motor bicycle. Indoor people want books
and pictures and pianos: outdoor people want guns and fishing-rods
and horses and motor cars. To communize these things in the way that
we communize roads and bridges would be ridiculously wasteful. If you
made enough gramophones and bred enough pet dogs to supply every woman
with both, or enough microscopes and motor bicycles to provide one each
for every girl, you would have heaps of them left on your hands by the
women and girls who did not want them and would not find house room for
them. They could not even sell them, because everybody who wanted one
would have one already. They would go into the dustbin.

There is only one way out of this difficulty. Instead of giving people
things you must give them money and let them buy what they like with
it. Instead of giving Mrs Smith, who wants a gramophone, a gramophone
and a pet dog as well, costing, say, five pounds apiece, and giving Mrs
Jones, who wants a pet dog, a pet dog and a gramophone as well, with
the certainty that Mrs Smith will drive her pet dog out of her house
and Mrs Jones will throw her gramophone into the dustbin, so that the
ten pounds they cost will be wasted, you can simply give Mrs Smith and
Mrs Jones five pounds apiece. Then Mrs Smith buys a gramophone; Mrs
Jones buys a pet dog; and both live happily ever after. And, of course,
you will take care not to manufacture more gramophones or breed more
dogs than are needed to satisfy them.

That is the use of money: it enables us to get what we want instead
of what other people think we want. When a young lady is married, her
friends give her wedding presents instead of giving her money; and the
consequence is that she finds herself loaded up with six fish-slices,
seven or eight travelling clocks, and not a single pair of silk
stockings. If her friends had the sense to give her money (I always
do), and she had the sense to take it (she always does), she would have
one fish-slice, one travelling clock (if she wanted such a thing), and
plenty of stockings. Money is the most convenient thing in the world:
we could not possibly do without it. We are told that the love of money
is the root of all evil; but money itself is one of the most useful
contrivances ever invented: it is not its fault that some people are
foolish or miserly enough to be fonder of it than of their own souls.

You now see that the great dividing-up of things that has to take
place year by year, quarter by quarter, month by month, week by week,
day by day, hour by hour, and even minute by minute, though some of it
can be done by the ancient simple family communism of the apostles, or
by the modern ratepayers’ communism of the roads and bridges and street
lamps and so forth, must in the main take the form of a dividing-up of
money. And as this throws you back again on the old questions: how much
is each of us to have? what is my fair share? what is your fair share?
and why? Communism has only partly solved the problem for you; so we
must have another shot at it.




7

SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED


A plan which has often been proposed, and which seems very plausible
to the working classes, is to let every person have that part of the
wealth of the country which she has herself produced by her work (the
feminine pronoun here includes the masculine). Others say let us all
get what we deserve; so that the idle and dissolute and weak shall have
nothing and perish, and the good and industrious and energetic shall
have all and survive. Some believe in “the good old rule, the simple
plan, that they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who
can”, though they seldom confess it nowadays. Some say let the common
people get enough to keep them alive in that state of life to which
it has pleased God to call them; and let the gentry take the rest,
though that, too, is not now said so openly as it was in the eighteenth
century. Some say let us divide ourselves into classes; and let the
division be equal in each class though unequal between the classes; so
that laborers shall get thirty shillings a week, skilled workers three
or four pounds, bishops two thousand five hundred a year, judges five
thousand, archbishops fifteen thousand, and their wives what they can
get out of them. Others say simply let us go on as we are.

What the Socialists say is that none of these plans will work well, and
that the only satisfactory plan is to give everybody an equal share no
matter what sort of person she is, or how old she is, or what sort of
work she does, or who or what her father was.

If this, or any of the other plans, happens to startle and scandalize
you, please do not blame me or throw my book into the fire. I am only
telling you the different plans that have been proposed and to some
extent actually tried. You are not bound to approve of any of them; and
you are quite free to propose a better plan than any of them if you can
think one out. But you are not free to dismiss it from your mind as
none of your business. It is a question of your food and lodging, and
therefore part of your life. If you do not settle it for yourself, the
people who are encouraging you to neglect it will settle it for you;
and you may depend on it they will take care of their own shares and
not of yours, in which case you may find yourself some day without any
share at all.

I have seen that happen very cruelly during my own lifetime. In the
country where I was born, which is within an hour’s run of England
at the nearest point, many ladies of high social standing and gentle
breeding, who thought that this question did not concern them because
they were well off for the moment, ended very pitiably in the
workhouse. They felt that bitterly, and hated those who had brought it
about; but they never understood why it happened. Had they understood
from the beginning how and why it might happen, they might have averted
it, instead of, as they did, doing everything in their power to hasten
their own ruin.

You may very easily share their fate unless you take care to understand
what is happening. The world is changing very quickly, as it was around
them when they thought it as fixed as the mountains. It is changing
much more quickly around you; and I promise you that if you will be
patient enough to finish this book (think of all the patience it has
cost me to finish it instead of writing plays!) you will come out with
much more knowledge of how things are changing, and what your risks and
prospects are, than you are likely to have learnt from your schoolbooks.

Therefore I am going to take all these plans for you one after another,
and examine them chapter by chapter until you know pretty well all that
is to be said for and against them.




8

TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES


The first plan: that of giving to every person exactly what he or she
has made by his or her labor, seems fair; but when we try to put it
into practice we discover, first, that it is quite impossible to find
out how much each person has produced, and, second, that a great deal
of the world’s work is neither producing material things nor altering
the things that Nature produces, but doing services of one sort or
another.

When a farmer and his laborers sow and reap a field of wheat nobody
on earth can say how much of the wheat each of them has grown. When a
machine in a factory turns out pins by the million nobody can say how
many pins are due to the labor of the person who minds the machine,
or the person who invented it, or the engineers who made it, to say
nothing of all the other persons employed about the factory. The
clearest case in the world of a person producing something herself by
her own painful, prolonged, and risky labor is that of a woman who
produces a baby; but then she cannot live on the baby: the baby lives
greedily on her.

Robinson Crusoe on his desert island could have claimed that the
boats and shelters and fences he made with the materials supplied by
Nature belonged to him because they were the fruit of nobody’s labor
but his own; but when he returned to civilization he could not have
laid his hand on a chair or table in his house which was not the work
of dozens of men: foresters who had planted the trees, woodmen who
had felled them, lumbermen and bargemen and sailors and porters who
had moved them, sawyers who had sawn them into planks and scantlings,
upholsterers and joiners who had fashioned them into tables and chairs,
not to mention the merchants who had conducted all the business
involved in these transactions, and the makers of the shops and ships
and all the rest of it. Anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes
must see that trying to divide-up by giving each worker exactly what
she or he has produced is like trying to give every drop of rain in a
heavy shower exactly the quantity of water it adds to the supply in
your cistern. It just cannot be done.

What can be done is to pay every person according to the time she or he
spends at the work. Time is something that can be measured in figures.
It is quite easy to pay a worker twice as much for two hours work as
for one. There are people who will work for sixpence an hour, people
who will work for eighteenpence an hour, people who will work for two
guineas an hour, people who will work for a hundred and fifty guineas
an hour. These prices depend on how many competitors there are in the
trade looking for the work, and whether the people who want it done are
rich or poor. You pay a sempstress a shilling to sew for an hour, or a
laborer to chop wood, when there are plenty of unemployed sempstresses
and laborers starving for a job, each of them trying to induce you to
give it to her or him rather than to the next applicant by offering to
do it at a price that will barely keep body and soul together. You pay
a popular actress two or three hundred pounds a week, or a famous opera
singer as much a night, because the public will pay more than that to
hear her. You pay a famous surgeon a hundred and fifty guineas to cut
out your appendix, or a famous barrister the same to plead for you,
because there are so few famous surgeons or barristers, and so many
patients and clients offering them large sums to work for them rather
than for you. This is called settling the price of a worker’s time, or
rather letting it settle itself, by supply and demand.

Unfortunately, supply and demand may produce undesirable results. A
division in which one woman gets a shilling and another three thousand
shillings for an hour of work has no moral sense in it: it is just
something that happens, and that ought not to happen. A child with an
interesting face and pretty ways, and some talent for acting, may, by
working for the films, earn a hundred times as much as its mother can
earn by drudging at an ordinary trade. What is worse, a pretty girl can
earn by vice far more than her plain sister can earn as an honest wife
and mother.

Besides, it is not so easy to measure the time spent on a piece of work
as it seems at first. Paying a laborer twice as much for two hours work
as for one is as simple as twice one are two; but when you have to
divide between an opera singer and her dresser, or an unskilled laborer
and a doctor, you find that you cannot tell how much time you have to
allow for. The dresser and the laborer are doing what any ablebodied
person can do without long study or apprenticeship. The doctor has
to spend six years in study and training, on top of a good general
education, to qualify himself to do his work. He claims that six years
of unpaid work are behind every minute of his attendance at your
bedside. A skilled workman may claim in the same way that seven years
of apprenticeship are behind every stroke of his hammer. The opera
singer has had to spend a long time learning her parts, even when, as
sometimes happens, she has never learnt to sing. Everybody acknowledges
that this makes a difference; but nobody can measure exactly what the
difference is, either in time or money.

The same difficulty arises in attempting to compare the value of the
work of a clever woman with that of a stupid one. You may think that
the work of the clever woman is worth more; but when you are asked how
much more in pounds, shillings, and pence you have to give it up and
fall back on supply and demand, confessing that the difference cannot
be measured in money.

In these examples I have mixed up making things with doing services;
but I must now emphasize this distinction, because thoughtless people
are apt to think a brickmaker more of a producer than a clergyman.
When a village carpenter makes a gate to keep cattle out of a field of
wheat, he has something solid in his hand which he can claim for his
own until the farmer pays him for it. But when a village boy makes a
noise to keep the birds off he has nothing to shew, though the noise
is just as necessary as the gate. The postman does not make anything:
he only delivers letters and parcels. The policeman does not make
anything; and the soldier not only does not make things: he destroys
them. The doctor makes pills sometimes; but that is not his real
business, which is to tell you when you ought to take pills, and what
pills to take, unless indeed he has the good sense to tell you not to
take them at all, and you have the good sense to believe him when he
is giving you good advice instead of bad. The lawyer does not make
anything substantial, nor the clergyman, nor the member of Parliament,
nor the domestic servant (though she sometimes breaks things), nor the
Queen or King, nor an actor. When their work is done they have nothing
in hand that can be weighed or measured: nothing that the maker can
keep from others until she is paid for it. They are all in service: in
domestic service like the housemaid, or in commercial service like the
shop assistant, or in Government service like the postman, or in State
service like the King; and all of us who have fullsize consciences
consider ourselves in what some of us call the service of God.

And then, beside the persons who make the substantial things there must
be persons to find out how they should be made. Beside the persons who
do things there must be persons who know how they should be done, and
decide when they should be done, and how much they should be done.
In simple village life both the making or the doing and the thinking
may be done by the same person when he is a blacksmith, carpenter,
or builder; but in big cities and highly civilized countries this is
impossible: one set of people has to make and do whilst another set of
people thinks and decides what, when, how much, and by whom.

Our villages would be improved by a little of this division of labor;
for it is a great disadvantage in country life that a farmer is
expected to do so many different things: he has not only to grow crops
and raise stock (two separate arts to begin with, and difficult ones
too), but to be a man of business, keeping complicated accounts and
selling his crops and his cattle, which is a different sort of job,
needing a different sort of man. And, as if this were not enough,
he has to keep his dwelling house as part of his business; so that
he is expected to be a professional man, a man of business, and a
sort of country gentleman all at once; and the consequence is that
farming is all a muddle: the good farmer is poor because he is a bad
man of business; the good man of business is poor because he is a bad
farmer; and both of them are often bad husbands because their work is
not separate from their home, and they bring all their worries into
the house with them instead of locking them up in a city office and
thinking no more about them until they go back there next morning. In
a city business one set of men does the manual work; another set keeps
the accounts; another chooses the markets for buying and selling; and
all of them leave their work behind them when they go home.

The same trouble is found in a woman’s housekeeping. She is expected to
do too many different things. She may be a very good housekeeper and
a very bad cook. In a French town this would not matter, because the
whole family would take all the meals that require any serious cooking
in the nearest restaurant; but in the country the woman must do both
the housekeeping and the cooking unless she can afford to keep a cook.
She may be both a good housekeeper and a good cook, but be unable to
manage children; and here again, if she cannot afford a capable nurse,
she has to do the thing she does badly along with the things she
does well, and has her life muddled and spoilt accordingly. It is a
mercy both to her and the children that the school (which is a bit of
Communism) takes them off her hands for most of the day. It is clear
that the woman who is helped out by servants or by restaurants and
schools has a much better chance in life than the woman who is expected
to do three very different things at once.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to
the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again,
because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition
to regard a married woman’s work as no work at all, and to take it as a
matter of course that she should not be paid for it. A man gets higher
wages than a woman because he is supposed to have a family to support;
yet if he spends the extra money in drink or betting, the woman has no
remedy against him if she is married to him. But if she is his hired
housekeeper she can recover her wages at law. And the married man is
in the same predicament. When his wife spends the housekeeping money
in drink he has no remedy, though he could have a hired housekeeper
imprisoned for theft if she did the very same thing.

Now with these examples in mind, how can an Intelligent Woman settle
what her time is worth in money compared to her husband’s? Imagine her
husband looking at it as a matter of business, and saying “I can hire a
housekeeper for so much, and a nursemaid for so much, and a cook for so
much, and a pretty lady to keep company with for so much; and if I add
up all this the total will be what a wife is worth; but it is more than
I can afford to pay”! Imagine her hiring a husband by the hour, like a
taxi cab!

Yet the income of the country has to be divided-up between husbands and
wives just as it has between strangers; and as most of us are husbands
and wives, any plan for dividing-up that breaks down when it is applied
to husbands and wives breaks in the middle and is no use. The old plan
of giving the man everything, and leaving the woman to get what she
could out of him, led to such abuses that it had to be altered by the
Married Women’s Property Acts, under which a rich woman with a poor
husband can keep all her property to herself whilst her husband is
imprisoned for life for not paying her taxes. But as nine families out
of ten have no property, they have to make the best of what the husband
can earn at his trade; and here we have the strangest muddles: the
wife getting nothing of her own, and the bigger children making a few
shillings a week and having the difference between it and a living wage
made up by the father’s wage; so that the people who are employing the
children cheaply are really sweating the father, who is perhaps being
sweated badly enough by his own employer. Of this, more later on.

Try to straighten out this muddle on the plan of giving the woman and
the children and the man what they produce each by their own work, or
what their time is worth in money to the country; and you will find the
plan nonsensical and impossible. Nobody but a lunatic would attempt to
put it into practice.




9

TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES


The second plan we have to examine is that of giving to each person
what she deserves. Many people, especially those who are comfortably
off, think that this is what happens at present: that the industrious
and sober and thrifty are never in want, and that poverty is due to
idleness, improvidence, drink, betting, dishonesty, and bad character
generally. They can point to the fact that a laborer whose character is
bad finds it more difficult to get employment than one whose character
is good; that a farmer or country gentleman who gambles and bets
heavily, and mortgages his land to live wastefully and extravagantly,
is soon reduced to poverty; and that a man of business who is lazy and
does not attend to it becomes bankrupt. But this proves nothing but
that you cannot eat your cake and have it too: it does not prove that
your share of the cake was a fair one. It shews that certain vices and
weaknesses make us poor; but it forgets that certain other vices make
us rich. People who are hard, grasping, selfish, cruel, and always
ready to take advantage of their neighbors, become very rich if they
are clever enough not to overreach themselves. On the other hand,
people who are generous, public-spirited, friendly, and not always
thinking of the main chance, stay poor when they are born poor unless
they have extraordinary talents. Also, as things are today, some are
born poor and others are born with silver spoons in their mouths: that
is to say, they are divided into rich and poor before they are old
enough to have any character at all. The notion that our present system
distributes wealth according to merit, even roughly, may be dismissed
at once as ridiculous. Everyone can see that it generally has the
contrary effect: it makes a few idle people very rich, and a great many
hardworking people very poor.

On this, Intelligent Lady, your first thought may be that if wealth is
not distributed according to merit, it ought to be; and that we should
at once set to work to alter our laws so that in future the good people
shall be rich in proportion to their goodness and the bad people poor
in proportion to their badness. There are several objections to this;
but the very first one settles the question for good and all. It is,
that the proposal is impossible. How are you going to measure anyone’s
merit in money? Choose any pair of human beings you like, male or
female, and see whether you can decide how much each of them should
have on her or his merits. If you live in the country, take the village
blacksmith and the village clergyman, or the village washerwoman and
the village schoolmistress, to begin with. At present the clergyman
often gets less pay than the blacksmith: it is only in some villages
he gets more. But never mind what they get at present: you are trying
whether you can set up a new order of things in which each will get
what he deserves. You need not fix a sum of money for them: all you
have to do is to settle the proportion between them. Is the blacksmith
to have as much as the clergyman? or twice as much as the clergyman?
or half as much as the clergyman? or how much more or less? It is no
use saying that one ought to have more and the other less: you must be
prepared to say exactly how much more or less in calculable proportion.

Well, think it out. The clergyman has had a college education; but
that is not any merit on his part: he owes it to his father; so you
cannot allow him anything for that. But through it he is able to read
the New Testament in Greek; so that he can do something the blacksmith
cannot do. On the other hand, the blacksmith can make a horse-shoe,
which the parson cannot. How many verses of the Greek Testament are
worth one horse-shoe? You have only to ask the silly question to see
that nobody can answer it.

Since measuring their merits is no use, why not try to measure their
faults? Suppose the blacksmith swears a good deal, and gets drunk
occasionally! Everybody in the village knows this; but the parson has
to keep his faults to himself. His wife knows them; but she will not
tell you what they are if she knows that you intend to cut off some of
his pay for them. You know that as he is only a mortal human being he
must have some faults; but you cannot find them out. However, suppose
he has some faults that you can find out! Suppose he has what you call
an unfortunate manner; that he is a hypocrite; that he is a snob; that
he cares more for sport and fashionable society than for religion! Does
that make him as bad as the blacksmith, or twice as bad, or twice and a
quarter as bad, or only half as bad? In other words, if the blacksmith
is to have a shilling, is the parson to have a shilling also, or is he
to have sixpence, or fivepence and one-third, or two shillings? Clearly
these are fools’ questions: the moment they bring us down from moral
generalities to business particulars it becomes plain to every sensible
person that no relation can be established between human qualities,
good or bad, and sums of money, large or small. It may seem scandalous
that a prize-fighter, for hitting another prize-fighter so hard at
Wembley that he fell down and could not rise within ten seconds,
received the same sum that was paid to the Archbishop of Canterbury for
acting as Primate of the Church of England for nine months; but none of
those who cry out against the scandal can express any better in money
the difference between the two. Not one of the persons who think that
the prize-fighter should get less than the Archbishop can say how much
less. What the prize-fighter got for his six or seven minutes boxing
would pay a judge’s salary for two years; and we are all agreed that
nothing could be more ridiculous, and that any system of distributing
wealth which leads to such absurdities must be wrong. But to suppose
that it could be changed by any possible calculation that an ounce of
archbishop or three ounces of judge is worth a pound of prize-fighter
would be sillier still. You can find out how many candles are worth a
pound of butter in the market on any particular day; but when you try
to estimate the worth of human souls the utmost you can say is that
they are all of equal value before the throne of God. And that will not
help you in the least to settle how much money they should have. You
must simply give it up, and admit that distributing money according to
merit is beyond mortal measurement and judgment.




10

TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB


The third plan: that of letting everyone have what she can lay her
hands on, would produce a world in which there would be no peace and
no security. If we were all equally strong and cunning we should all
have an equal chance; but in a world where there are children and old
people and invalids, and where able-bodied adults of the same age and
strength vary greatly in greediness and wickedness, it would never do:
we should get tired of it in no time. Even pirate crews and bands of
robbers prefer a peaceful settled understanding as to the division of
their plunder to the Kilkenny cat plan.

Among ourselves, though robbery and violence are forbidden, we still
allow business to be conducted on the principle of letting everyone
make what he can out of it without considering anyone but himself. A
shopkeeper or a coal merchant may not pick your pocket; but he may
overcharge you as much as he likes. Everyone is free in business to get
as much and give as little for his money as he can induce his customers
to put up with. House rent can be raised without any regard to the cost
of the houses or the poverty of the tenant. But this freedom produces
such bad results that new laws are continually being made to restrain
it; and even when it is a necessary part of our freedom to spend our
money and use our possessions as seems best to us, we still have to
settle how much money and what possessions we should be given to start
with. This distribution must be made according to some law or other.
Anarchy (absence of law) will not work. We must go on with our search
for a righteous and practicable law.




11

OLIGARCHY


The fourth plan is to take one person in every ten (say), and make
her rich without working by making the other nine work hard and long
every day, giving them only enough of what they make to keep them
alive and enable them to bring up families to continue their slavery
when they grow old and die. This is roughly what happens at present,
as one-tenth of the English people own nine-tenths of all the property
in the country, whilst most of the other nine-tenths have no property,
and live from week to week on wages barely sufficient to support them
in a very poor way. The advantage claimed for this plan is that it
provides us with a gentry: that is, with a class of rich people able
to cultivate themselves by an expensive education; so that they become
qualified to govern the country and make and maintain its laws; to
organize and officer the army for national defence; to patronize and
keep alive learning, science, art, literature, philosophy, religion,
and all the institutions that distinguish great civilizations from mere
groups of villages; to raise magnificent buildings, dress splendidly,
impose awe on the unruly, and set an example of good manners and fine
living. Most important of all, as men of business think, by giving
them much more than they need spend, we enable them to save those
great sums of spare money that are called capital, and are spent in
making railways, mines, factories full of machinery, and all the other
contrivances by which wealth is produced in great quantities.

This plan, which is called Oligarchy, is the old English plan of
dividing us into gentry living by property and common people living
by work: the plan of the few rich and the many poor. It has worked
for a long time, and is still working. And it is evident that if the
incomes of the rich were taken from them and divided among the poor as
we stand at present, the poor would be only very little less poor; the
supply of capital would cease because nobody could afford to save;
the country houses would fall into ruins; and learning and science
and art and literature and all the rest of what we call culture would
perish. That is why so many people support the present system, and
stand by the gentry although they themselves are poor. They see that
if ten women can produce only £110 a year each by their labor, it may
be wiser for nine of them to be content with £50 apiece, and make the
other one an educated lady, mistress, and ruler by giving her £500 a
year without any obligation to work at all, or any inducement to work
except the hope of finding how to make their work more fruitful for her
own benefit, rather than to insist on having £110 a year each. Though
we make this sort of arrangement at present because we are forced to,
and indeed mostly without knowing that we are making it, yet it is
conceivable that if we understood what we were doing and were free to
carry it out or not as we thought best, we might still do it for the
sake of having a gentry to keep up finer things in the world than a
miserable crowd all equally poor, and all tied to primitive manual
labor.

But the abuses that arise from this plan are so terrible that the world
is becoming set against it. If we decide to go on with it, the first
step is to settle who is to be the tenth person: the lady. How is that
to be decided? True, we could begin by drawing lots; and after that
the gentry could intermarry and be succeeded by their firstborns. But
the mischief of it is that when we at last got our gentry established
we should have no guarantee that they would do any of the things we
intended them to do and paid them to do. With the best intentions, the
gentry govern the country very badly because they are so far removed
from the common people that they do not understand their needs. They
use their power to make themselves still richer by forcing the common
people to work still harder and accept still less. They spend enormous
sums on sport and entertainment, gluttony and ostentation, and very
little on science and art and learning. They produce poverty on a vast
scale by withdrawing labor from production to waste it in superfluous
menial service. They either shirk military duties or turn the army into
a fashionable retinue for themselves and an instrument of oppression at
home and conquest abroad. They corrupt the teaching in the universities
and schools to glorify themselves and hide their misdeeds. They do
the same with the Church. They try to keep the common people poor and
ignorant and servile so as to make themselves more indispensable. At
last their duties have to be taken out of their hands and discharged by
Parliament, by the Civil Service, by the War Office and the Admiralty,
by city corporations, by Poor Law Guardians, by County and Parish and
District Councils, by salaried servants and Boards of paid directors,
by societies and institutions of all kinds depending on taxation or on
public subscription.

When this occurs, as it actually has occurred, all the cultural and
political reasons for the maintenance of a gentry vanish. It always
does occur when city life grows up and takes the place of country life.
When a peeress resides on her estates in a part of the country where
life is still very simple, and the nearest thing to a town is a village
ten miles from the railway station, the people look to her ladyship for
everything that is not produced by their daily toil. She represents
all the splendor and greatness and romance of civilization, and does a
good deal for them which they would not know how to do for themselves.
In this way a Highland clan, before Scotland became civilized, always
had a chief. The clansmen willingly gave him the lion’s share of such
land and goods as they could come by, or of the plunder they took in
their raids. They did this because they could not fight successfully
without a leader, and could not live together without a lawgiver. Their
chief was to them what Moses was to the Israelites in the desert. The
Highland chief was practically a king in his clan, just as the peeress
is a queen on her estates. Loyalty to him was instinctive.

But when a Highland chief walked into a city he had less power than the
first police constable he met: in fact it sometimes happened that the
police constable took him in charge, and the city authorities hanged
him. When the peeress leaves her estate and goes up to London for the
season, she becomes a nobody except to her personal acquaintances.
Everything that she does for her people in the country is done in
London by paid public servants of all sorts; and when she leaves the
country and settles in America or on the Continent to evade British
income tax she is not missed in London: everything goes on just as
before. But her tenants, who have to earn the money she spends abroad,
get nothing by her, and revile her as a fugitive and an Absentee.

Small wonder then that Oligarchy is no longer consented to willingly.
A great deal of the money the oligarchs get is now taken back from
them by taxation and death duties; so that the old families are being
reduced very rapidly to the level of ordinary citizens; and when their
estates are gone, as they will be after a few generations more of our
present heavy death duties, their titles will only make their poverty
ridiculous. Already many of their most famous country houses are
occupied either by rich business families of quite ordinary quality,
or by Co-operative Societies as Convalescent Homes or places for
conference and recreation, or as hotels or schools or lunatic asylums.

You must therefore face the fact that in a civilization like ours,
where most of the population lives in cities; where railways, motor
cars, posts, telegraphs, telephones, gramophones and radio have brought
city ways and city culture into the country; and where even the
smallest village has its parish meeting and its communal policeman, the
old reasons for making a few people very rich whilst all the others
work hard for a bare subsistence have passed away. The plan no longer
works, even in the Highlands.

Still, there is one reason left for maintaining a class of excessively
rich people at the expense of the rest; and business men consider it
the strongest reason of all. That reason is that it provides capital
by giving some people more money than they can easily spend; so that
they can save money (capital is saved money) without any privation. The
argument is that if income were more equally distributed, we should all
have so little that we should spend all our incomes, and nothing would
be saved to make machinery and build factories and construct railways
and dig mines and so forth. Now it is certainly necessary to high
civilization that these savings should be made; but it would be hard to
imagine a more wasteful way of bringing it about.

To begin with, it is very important that there should be no saving
until there has been sufficient spending: spending comes first. A
nation which makes steam engines before its little children have enough
milk to make their legs strong enough to carry them is making a fool’s
choice. Yet this is just what we do by this plan of making a few rich
and the masses poor. Again, even if we put the steam engine before
the milk, our plan gives us no security that we shall get the steam
engine, or, if we get it, that it will be set up in our country. Just
as a great deal of the money that was given to the country gentlemen of
England on the chance of their encouraging art and science was spent
by them on cock-fighting and horse-racing; so a shocking proportion of
the money we give our oligarchs on the chance of their investing it as
capital is spent by them in self-indulgence. Of the very rich it may
be said that they do not begin to save until they can spend no more,
and that they are continually inventing new and expensive extravagances
that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. When their income
outruns their extravagance so far that they must use it as capital or
throw it away, there is nothing to prevent them investing it in South
America, in South Africa, in Russia, or in China, though we cannot get
our own slums cleaned up for want of capital kept in and applied to our
own country. Hundreds of millions of pounds are sent abroad every year
in this way; and we complain of the competition of foreigners whilst
we allow our capitalists to provide them at our expense with the very
machinery with which they are taking our industries from us.

Of course the capitalists plead that we are none the poorer, because
the interest on their capital comes back into this country from the
countries in which they have invested it; and as they invest it abroad
only because they get more interest abroad than at home, they assure
us that we are actually the richer for their export of capital,
because it enables them to spend more at home and thus give British
workers more employment. But we have no guarantee that they will spend
it at home: they are as likely to spend it in Monte Carlo, Madeira,
Egypt, or where not? And when they do spend it at home and give us
employment, we have to ask what sort of employment? When our farms and
mills and cloth factories are all ruined by our importing our food and
cloth from abroad instead of making them ourselves, it is not enough
for our capitalists to shew us that instead of the farms we have
the best golf courses in the world; instead of mills and factories
splendid hotels; instead of engineers and shipwrights and bakers and
carpenters and weavers, waiters and chambermaids, valets and ladies’
maids, gamekeepers and butlers and so forth, all better paid and more
elegantly dressed than the productive workers they have replaced. We
have to consider what sort of position we shall be in when our workers
are as incapable of supporting themselves and us as the idle rich
themselves. Suppose the foreign countries stop our supplies either
by a revolution followed by flat repudiation of their capitalistic
debts, as in Russia, or by taxing and supertaxing incomes derived from
investments, what will become of us then? What is becoming of us now
as taxation of income spreads more and more in foreign countries? The
English servant may still be able to boast that England can put a more
brilliant polish on a multi-millionaire’s boots than any foreigner
can; but what use will that be to us when the multi-millionaire is an
expropriated or taxed-out pauper with no boots to have polished?

We shall have to go into this question of capital more particularly
later on; but for the purposes of this chapter it is enough to shew
that the plan of depending on oligarchy for our national capital is
not only wasteful on the face of it, but dangerous with a danger that
increases with every political development in the world. The only plea
left for it is that there is no other way of doing it. But that will
not hold water for a moment. The Government can, and to a considerable
extent actually does, check personal expenditure and enforce the use
of part of our incomes as capital, far less capriciously and more
efficiently than our oligarchy does. It can nationalize banking, as we
shall see presently. This leaves oligarchy without its sole economic
excuse.




12

DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS


Now for the fifth plan, which is, that though everybody should work,
society should be divided into as many classes as there are different
sorts of work, and that the different classes should receive different
payment for their work: for instance, the dustmen and scavengers
and scullery-maids and charwomen and ragpickers should receive less
than the doctors and clergymen and teachers and opera singers and
professional ladies generally, and that these should receive less than
the judges and prime ministers and kings and queens.

You will tell me that this is just what we have at present. Certainly
it happens so in many cases; but there is no law that people employed
in different sorts of work should be paid more or less than oneanother.
We are accustomed to think that schoolmistresses and clergymen and
doctors, being educated ladies and gentlemen, must be paid more than
illiterate persons who work with their hands for weekly wages; but
at the present time an engine driver, making no pretension to be a
gentleman, or to have had a college education, is paid more than many
clergymen and some doctors; and a schoolmistress or governess is
very lucky indeed when she is as well off as a firstrate cook. Some
of our most famous physicians have had to struggle pitiably against
insufficient means until they were forty or fifty; and many a parson
has brought up a family on a stipend of seventy pounds a year. You must
therefore be on your guard against the common mistake of supposing
that we need nowadays pay more for gentility and education than for
bodily strength and natural cunning, or that we always do pay more.
Very learned men often make little money or none; and gentility without
property may prove rather a disadvantage than otherwise to a man who
wants to earn a living. Most of the great fortunes are made in trade
or finance, often by men without any advantages of birth or education.
Some of the great poverties have been those of saints, or of geniuses
whose greatness was not recognized until they were dead.

You must also get rid of the notion (if you have it: if not, forgive
me for suspecting you of it) that it costs some workers more than
others to live. The same allowance of food that will keep a laborer in
health will keep a king. Many laborers eat and drink much more than
the King does; and all of them wear out their clothes much faster.
Our King is not rich as riches go nowadays. Mr Rockefeller probably
regards His Majesty as a poor man, because Mr Rockefeller not only has
much more money, but is under no obligation to spend it in keeping up
a great establishment: that is, spending it on other people. But if
you could find out how much the King and Mr Rockefeller spend on their
own personal needs and satisfaction, you would find it came to no more
than is now spent by any other two persons in reasonably comfortable
circumstances. If you doubled the King’s allowance he would not eat
twice as much, drink twice as much, sleep twice as soundly, build a
new house twice as big as Buckingham Palace, or marry another queen
and set up two families instead of one. The late Mr Carnegie, when
his thousands grew to hundreds of thousands and his hundreds of
thousands to millions, gave his money away in heaps because he already
had everything he cared for that money could buy for himself or his
household.

Then, it may be asked, why do we give some men more than they need and
some less? The answer is that for the most part we do not give it to
them: they get it because we have not arranged what anyone shall get,
but have left it to chance and grab. But in the case of the King and
other public dignitaries we have arranged that they shall have handsome
incomes because we intend that they shall be specially respected and
deferred to. Yet experience shews that authority is not proportionate
to income. No person in Europe is approached with such awe as the Pope;
but nobody thinks of the Pope as a rich man: sometimes his parents and
brothers and sisters are very humble people, and he himself is poorer
than his tailor or grocer. The captain of a liner sits at table every
day with scores of people who could afford to throw his pay into the
sea and not miss it; yet his authority is so absolute that the most
insolent passenger dares not treat him disrespectfully. The village
rector may not have a fifth of the income of his farmer churchwarden.
The colonel of a regiment may be the poorest man at the mess table:
everyone of his subalterns may have far more than double his income;
but he is their superior in authority for all that. Money is not the
secret of command.

Those who exercise personal authority among us are by no means our
richest people. Millionaires in expensive cars obey policemen. In our
social scale noblemen take precedence of country gentlemen, country
gentlemen take precedence of professional men, professional men of
traders, wholesale traders of retail traders, retail traders of skilled
workmen, and skilled workmen of laborers; but if social precedence
were according to income all this would be completely upset; for the
tradesmen would take precedence of everybody; and the Pope and the King
would have to touch their hats to distillers and pork packers.

When we speak of the power of the rich, we are speaking of a very real
thing, because a rich man can discharge anyone in his employment who
displeases him, and can take away his custom from any tradesman who is
disrespectful to him. But the advantage a man gets by his power to ruin
another is a quite different thing from the authority that is necessary
to maintain law and order in society. You may obey the highwayman
who puts a pistol to your head and demands your money or your life.
Similarly you may obey the landlord who orders you to pay more rent or
take yourself and your brats into the street. But that is not obedience
to authority: it is submission to a threat. Real authority has nothing
to do with money; and it is in fact exercised by persons who, from the
King to the village constable, are poorer than many of the people who
obey their orders.




13

LAISSER-FAIRE


And now, what about leaving things just as they are?

That is just what most people vote for doing. Even when they dont like
what they are accustomed to, they dread change, lest it should make
matters worse. They are what they call Conservative, though it is only
fair to add that no Conservative statesman in his senses ever pretends
(except perhaps occasionally at election times, when nobody ever tells
the truth) that you can conserve things by simply letting them alone.

It seems the easiest plan and the safest; but as a matter of hard fact
it is not only difficult but impossible. When Joshua told the sun to
stand still on Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, for a
trifle of twentyfour hours, he was modest in comparison with those who
imagine that the world will stay put if they take care not to wake it
up. And he knew he was asking for a miracle.

It is not that things as they are are so bad that nobody who knows how
bad they are will agree to leave them as they are; for the reply to
that may be that if they dont like them they must lump them, because
there seems to be no way of changing them. The real difficulty is that
things will not stay as they are, no matter how careful you are not
to meddle with them. You might as well give up dusting your rooms and
expect to find them this time next year just as they are now. You
might as well leave the cat asleep on the hearthrug and assume that you
would find her there, and not in the dairy, when you came back from
church.

The truth is that things change much faster and more dangerously
when they are let alone than when they are carefully looked after.
Within the last hundred and fifty years the most astounding changes
have taken place in this very business that we are dealing with (the
production and distribution of the national income) just because what
was everybody’s business was nobody’s business, and it was let run
wild. The introduction of machinery driven by steam, and later on of
electric power distributed from house to house like water or gas, and
the invention of engines that not only draw trains along the ground
and ships over and under the sea, but carry us and our goods flying
through the air, has increased our power to produce wealth and get
through our work easily and quickly to such an extent that there is no
longer any need for any of us to be poor. A labor-saving house with gas
stoves, electric light, a telephone, a vacuum cleaner, and a wireless
set, gives only a faint notion of a modern factory full of automatic
machines. If we each took our turn and did our bit in peace as we
had to do during the war, all the necessary feeding and clothing and
housing and lighting could be done handsomely by less than half our
present day’s work, leaving the other half free for art and science and
learning and playing and roaming and experimenting and recreation of
all sorts.

This is a new state of things: a change that has come upon us when we
thought we were leaving things just as they were. And the consequence
of our not attending to it and guiding and arranging it for the good of
the country is that it has actually left the poor much worse off than
they used to be when there was no machinery at all, and people had to
be more careful of pence than they now are of shillings; whilst the
rich have become rich out of all reason, and the people who should be
employed in making bread for the hungry and clothes for the naked, or
building houses for the homeless, are wasting their labor in providing
service and luxuries for idle rich people who are not in the old sense
of the words either gentle or noble, and whose idleness and frivolity
and extravagance set a most corrupting moral example.

Also it has produced two and a half revolutions in political power,
by which the employers have overthrown the landed gentry, the
financiers have overthrown the employers, and the Trade Unions have
half overthrown the financiers. I shall explain this fully later on;
meanwhile, you have seen enough of its effects in the rise of the
Labor Party to take my word for it that politics will not stand still
any more than industry merely because millions of timid old-fashioned
people vote at every election for what they call Conservatism: that is,
for shutting our eyes and opening our mouths.

If King Alfred had been told that the time would come in England when
one idle family would have five big houses and a steam yacht to live
in whilst hard-working people were living six in a room, and half
starving at that, he would have said that God would never allow such
things to happen except in a very wicked nation. Well, we have left God
out of the question and allowed it to happen, not through wickedness,
but through letting things alone and fancying that they would let
themselves alone.

Have you noticed, by the way, that we no longer speak of letting things
alone in the old-fashioned way? We speak of letting them slide; and
this is a great advance in good sense; for it shews that we at last see
that they slide instead of staying put; and it implies that letting
them slide is a feckless sort of conduct. So you must rule out once for
all the notion of leaving things as they are in the expectation that
they will stay where they are. They wont. All we can do in that line
is to sit idly and wonder what will happen next. And this is not like
sitting on the bank of the stream waiting for the water to go by. It is
like sitting idly in a carriage when the horse is running away. You can
excuse it by saying “What else can I do?”; but your impotence will not
avert a smash. People in that predicament must all think hard of some
way of getting control of the horse, and meanwhile do all they can to
keep the carriage right side up and out of the ditch.

The policy of letting things alone, in the practical sense that the
Government should never interfere with business or go into business
itself, is called Laisser-faire by economists and politicians. It has
broken down so completely in practice that it is now discredited; but
it was all the fashion in politics a hundred years ago, and is still
influentially advocated by men of business and their backers who
naturally would like to be allowed to make money as they please without
regard to the interests of the public.




14

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?


We seem now to have disposed of all the plans except the Socialist one.
Before grappling with that, may I call your attention to something that
happened in our examination of most of the others. We were trying to
find out a sound plan of distributing money; and every time we proposed
to distribute it according to personal merit or achievement or dignity
or individual quality of any sort the plan reduced itself to absurdity.
When we tried to establish a relation between money and work we were
beaten: it could not be done. When we tried to establish a relation
between money and character we were beaten. When we tried to establish
a relation between money and the dignity that gives authority we were
beaten. And when we gave it up as a bad job and thought of leaving
things as they are we found that they would not stay as they are.

Let us then consider for a moment what any plan must do to be
acceptable. And first, as everybody except the Franciscan Friars and
the Poor Clares will say that no plan will be acceptable unless it
abolishes poverty (and even Franciscan poverty must be voluntary and
not compelled) let us study poverty for a moment.

It is generally agreed that poverty is a very uncomfortable misfortune
for the individual who happens to be poor. But poor people, when they
are not suffering from acute hunger and severe cold, are not more
unhappy than rich people: they are often much happier. You can easily
find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty;
but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy.
All the thoughtful ones will assure you that happiness and unhappiness
are constitutional, and have nothing to do with money. Money can cure
hunger: it cannot cure unhappiness. Food can satisfy the appetite, but
not the soul. A famous German Socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, said that
what beat him in his efforts to stir up the poor to revolt against
poverty was their wantlessness. They were not, of course, content:
nobody is; but they were not discontented enough to take any serious
trouble to change their condition. It may seem a fine thing to a poor
woman to have a large house, plenty of servants, dozens of dresses,
a lovely complexion and beautifully dressed hair. But the rich woman
who has these things often spends a good deal of her time travelling
in rough places to get away from them. To have to spend two or three
hours a day washing and dressing and brushing and combing and changing
and being messed about generally by a lady’s maid is not on the face
of it a happier lot than to have only five minutes to spend on such
fatigues, as the soldiers call them. Servants are so troublesome that
many ladies can hardly talk about anything else when they get together.
A drunken man is happier than a sober one: that is why unhappy people
take to drink. There are drugs that will make you ecstatically happy
whilst ruining your body and soul. It is our quality that matters: take
care of that, and our happiness will take care of itself. People of
the right sort are never easy until they get things straight; but they
are too healthy and too much taken up with their occupations to bother
about happiness. Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in
the Sermon on the Mount: the objection to it is not that it makes
people unhappy, but that it degrades them; and the fact that they can
be quite as happy in their degradation as their betters are in their
exaltation makes it worse. When Shakespear’s king said

  Then happy low, lie down:
  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,

he forgot that happiness is no excuse for lowness. The divine spark in
us flashes up against being bribed to submit to degradation by mere
happiness, which a pig or a drunkard can achieve.

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the
poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in
which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade
a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world,
which is only a large neighborhood. Its bad effects cannot be escaped
by the rich. When poverty produces outbreaks of virulent infectious
disease, as it always does sooner or later, the rich catch the disease
and see their children die of it. When it produces crime and violence
the rich go in fear of both, and are put to a good deal of expense
to protect their persons and property. When it produces bad manners
and bad language the children of the rich pick them up no matter how
carefully they are secluded; and such seclusion as they get does them
more harm than good. If poor and pretty young women find, as they do,
that they can make more money by vice than by honest work, they will
poison the blood of rich young men who, when they marry, will infect
their wives and children, and cause them all sorts of bodily troubles,
sometimes ending in disfigurement and blindness and death, and always
doing them more or less mischief. The old notion that people can “keep
themselves to themselves” and not be touched by what is happening to
their neighbors, or even to the people who live a hundred miles off,
is a most dangerous mistake. The saying that we are members one of
another is not a mere pious formula to be repeated in church without
any meaning: it is a literal truth; for though the rich end of the town
can avoid living with the poor end, it cannot avoid dying with it when
the plague comes. People will be able to keep themselves to themselves
as much as they please when they have made an end of poverty; but until
then they will not be able to shut out the sights and sounds and smells
of poverty from their daily walks, nor to feel sure from day to day
that its most violent and fatal evils will not reach them through their
strongest police guards.

Besides, as long as poverty remains possible we shall never be sure
that it will not overtake ourselves. If we dig a pit for others we may
fall into it: if we leave a precipice unfenced our children may fall
over it when they are playing. We see the most innocent and respectable
families falling into the unfenced pit of poverty every day; and how do
we know that it will not be our turn next?

It is perhaps the greatest folly of which a nation can be guilty to
attempt to use poverty as a sort of punishment for offences that it
does not send people to prison for. It is easy to say of a lazy man
“Oh, let him be poor: it serves him right for being lazy: it will
teach him a lesson”. In saying so we are ourselves too lazy to think
a little before we lay down the law. We cannot afford to have poor
people anyhow, whether they be lazy or busy, drunken or sober, virtuous
or vicious, thrifty or careless, wise or foolish. If they deserve
to suffer let them be made to suffer in some other way; for mere
poverty will not hurt them half as much as it will hurt their innocent
neighbors. It is a public nuisance as well as a private misfortune. Its
toleration is a national crime.

We must therefore take it as an indispensable condition of a sound
distribution of wealth that everyone must have a share sufficient to
keep her or him from poverty. This is not altogether new. Ever since
the days of Queen Elizabeth it has been the law of England that nobody
must be abandoned to destitution. If anyone, however undeserving,
applies for relief to the Guardians of the Poor as a destitute person,
the Guardians must feed and clothe and house that person. They may do
it reluctantly and unkindly; they may attach to the relief the most
unpleasant and degrading conditions they can think of; they may set
the pauper to hateful useless work if he is able-bodied, and have him
sent to prison if he refuses to do it; the shelter they give him may be
that of a horrible general workhouse in which the old and the young,
the sound and the diseased, the innocent girl and lad and the hardened
prostitute and tramp are herded together promiscuously to contaminate
one another; they can attach a social stigma to the relief by taking
away the pauper’s vote (if he has one), and making him incapable of
filling certain public offices or being elected to certain public
authorities; they may, in short, drive the deserving and respectable
poor to endure any extremity rather than ask for relief; but they
must relieve the destitute willy nilly if they do ask for it. To that
extent the law of England is at its root a Communistic law. All the
harshnesses and wickednesses with which it is carried out are gross
mistakes, because instead of saving the country from the degradation of
poverty they actually make poverty more degrading than it need be; but
still, the principle is there. Queen Elizabeth said that nobody must
die of starvation and exposure. We, after the terrible experience we
have had of the effects of poverty on the whole nation, rich or poor,
must go further and say that nobody must be poor. As we divide-up our
wealth day by day the first charge on it must be enough for everybody
to be fairly respectable and well-to-do. If they do anything or leave
anything undone that gives ground for saying that they do not deserve
it, let them be restrained from doing it or compelled to do it in
whatever way we restrain or compel evildoers of any other sort; but
do not let them, as poor people, make everyone else suffer for their
shortcomings.

Granted that people should not on any account be allowed to be poor,
we have still to consider whether they should be allowed to be rich.
When poverty is gone, shall we tolerate luxury and extravagance? This
is a poser, because it is much easier to say what poverty is than
what luxury is. When a woman is hungry, or ragged, or has not at
least one properly furnished room all to herself to sleep in, then
she is clearly suffering from poverty. When the infant mortality in
one district is much greater than in another; when the average age of
death for fully grown persons in it falls far short of the scriptural
threescore-and-ten; when the average weight of the children who survive
is below that reached by well-fed and well-cared-for children, then
you can say confidently that the people in that district are suffering
from poverty. But suffering from riches is not so easily measured. That
rich people do suffer a great deal is plain enough to anyone who has
an intimate knowledge of their lives. They are so unhealthy that they
are always running after cures and surgical operations of one sort or
another. When they are not really ill they imagine they are. They are
worried by their property, by their servants, by their poor relations,
by their investments, by the need for keeping up their social position,
and, when they have several children, by the impossibility of leaving
these children enough to enable them to live as they have been brought
up to live; for we must not forget that if a married couple with fifty
thousand a year have five children, they can leave only ten thousand
a year to each after bringing them up to live at the rate of fifty
thousand, and launching them into the sort of society that lives at
that rate, the result being that unless these children can make rich
marriages they live beyond their incomes (not knowing how to live
more cheaply) and are presently head over ears in debt. They hand on
their costly habits and rich friends and debts to their children with
very little else; so that the trouble becomes worse and worse from
generation to generation; and this is how we meet everywhere with
ladies and gentlemen who have no means of keeping up their position,
and are therefore much more miserable than the common poor.

Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from
their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations
to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position;
they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low
rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and
do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people
at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes. The
general run of rich people do not know what to do with themselves; and
the end of it is that they have to join a round of social duties and
pleasures mostly manufactured by West End shopkeepers, and so tedious
that at the end of a fashionable season the rich are more worn out
than their servants and tradesmen. They may have no taste for sport;
but they are forced by their social position to go to the great race
meetings and ride to hounds. They may have no taste for music; but they
have to go to the Opera and to the fashionable concerts. They may not
dress as they please nor do what they please. Because they are rich
they must do what all the other rich people are doing, there being
nothing else for them to do except work, which would immediately reduce
them to the condition of ordinary people. So, as they cannot do what
they like, they must contrive to like what they do, and imagine that
they are having a splendid time of it when they are in fact being bored
by their amusements, humbugged by their doctors, pillaged by their
tradesmen, and forced to console themselves unamiably for being snubbed
by richer people by snubbing poorer people.

To escape this boredom, the able and energetic spirits go into
Parliament or into the diplomatic service or into the army, or manage
and develop their estates and investments instead of leaving them to
solicitors and stockbrokers and agents, or explore unknown countries
with great hardship and risk to themselves, with the result that their
lives are not different from the lives of the people who have to do
these things for a living. Thus riches are thrown away on them; and
if it were not for the continual dread of falling into poverty which
haunts us all at present they would refuse to be bothered with much
property. The only people who get any special satisfaction out of
being richer than others are those who enjoy being idle, and like to
fancy that they are better than their neighbors and be treated as if
they were. But no country can afford to pamper snobbery. Laziness
and vanity are not virtues to be encouraged: they are vices to be
suppressed. Besides, the desire to be idle and lazy and able to order
poor people about could not be satisfied, even if it were right to
satisfy it, if there were no poor people to order about. What we should
have would be, not poor people and rich people, but simply people with
enough and people with more than enough. And that brings up at last the
knotty question, what is enough?

In Shakespear’s famous play, King Lear and his daughters have an
argument about this. His idea of enough is having a hundred knights to
wait on him. His eldest daughter thinks that fifty would be enough.
Her sister does not see what he wants with any knights at all when her
servants can do all he needs for him. Lear retorts that if she cuts
life down to what cannot be done without, she had better throw away her
fine clothes, as she would be warmer in a blanket. And to this she has
no answer. Nobody can say what is enough. What is enough for a gipsy is
not enough for a lady; and what is enough for one lady leaves another
very discontented. When once you get above the poverty line there is
no reason why you should stop there. With modern machinery we can
produce much more than enough to feed, clothe, and house us decently.
There is no end to the number of new things we can get into the habit
of using, or to the improvements we can make in the things we already
use. Our grandmothers managed to get on without gas cookers, electric
light, motor cars, and telephones; but today these things are no longer
curiosities and luxuries: they are matter-of-course necessities; and
nobody who cannot afford them is considered well-off.

In the same way the standard of education and culture has risen.
Nowadays a parlormaid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came
to the throne would be classed as mentally defective. As Queen Victoria
managed to get on very well in spite of her ignorance it cannot be
said that the knowledge in which the parlormaid has the advantage of
her is a necessity of civilized life any more than a telephone is; but
civilized life and highly civilized life are different: what is enough
for one is not enough for the other. Take a half-civilized girl into a
house; and though she may be stronger and more willing and goodnatured
than many highly civilized girls are, she will smash everything that
will not stand the roughest handling. She will be unable to take or
send written messages; and as to understanding or using such civilized
contrivances as watches, baths, sewing machines, and electric heaters
and sweepers, you will be fortunate if you can induce her to turn off a
tap instead of leaving the water running. And your civilized maid who
can be trusted with all these things would be like a bull in a china
shop if she were let loose in the laboratories where highly trained
scientific workers use machines and instruments of such delicacy
that their movements are as invisible as that of the hour hands of
our clocks, handling and controlling poisons and explosives of the
most dangerous kind; or in the operating rooms where surgeons have
to do things in which a slip of the hand might prove fatal. If every
housemaid had the delicacy of touch, the knowledge, and the patience
that are needed in the laboratories and operating theatres (where they
are unfortunately not always forthcoming), the most wonderful changes
could be made in our housekeeping: we could not only have the present
work done much more quickly, perfectly, and cleanly, but we could do a
great deal that is now quite impossible.

Now it costs more to educate and train a laboratory worker than a
housemaid, and more to train a housemaid than to catch a savage. What
is enough in one case is not enough in another. Therefore to ask baldly
how much is enough to live on is to ask an unanswerable question. It
all depends on what sort of life you propose to live. What is enough
for the life of a tramp is not enough for a highly civilized life, with
its personal refinements and its atmosphere of music, art, literature,
religion, science, and philosophy. Of these things we can never have
enough: there is always something new to be discovered and something
old to be bettered. In short, there is no such thing as enough
civilization, though there may be enough of any particular thing like
bread or boots at any particular moment. If being poor means wanting
something more and something better than we have--and it is hard to
say what else feeling poor means--then we shall always feel poor no
matter how much money we have, because, though we may have enough of
this thing or of that thing, we shall never have enough of everything.
Consequently if it be proposed to give some people enough, and others
more than enough, the scheme will break down; for all the money will
be used up before anybody will be content. Nobody will stop asking
for more for the sake of setting up and maintaining a fancy class of
pampered persons who, after all, will be even more discontented than
their poorer neighbors.

The only way out of this difficulty is to give everybody the same,
which is the Socialist solution of the distribution problem. But you
may tell me that you are prepared to swallow this difficulty rather
than swallow Socialism. Most of us begin like that. What converts us
is the discovery of the terrible array of evils around us and dangers
in front of us which we dare not ignore. You may be unable to see any
beauty in equality of income. But the least idealistic woman can see
the disasters of inequality when the evils with which she is herself
in daily conflict are traced to it; and I am now going to shew you the
connexion.




15

WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST


To test the effects of our unequal division of the nation’s income
on our national institutions and on the life and prosperity of the
whole people we must view the industry of the country, and see how
it is affected by inequality of income. We must view one by one the
institution of marriage, the working of the courts of justice, the
honesty of our Houses of Parliament, the spiritual independence of
the Church, the usefulness of our schools, and the quality of our
newspapers, and consider how each of them is dependent on the way in
which money is distributed.

Beginning with industry, we are at once plunged into what we call
political economy, to distinguish it from the domestic economy with
which we are all only too familiar. Men find political economy a dry
and difficult subject: they shirk it as they shirk housekeeping; yet
it means nothing more abstruse than the art of managing a country as a
housekeeper manages a house. If the men shirk it the women must tackle
it. The nation has a certain income to manage on just as a housekeeper
has; and the problem is how to spend that income to the greatest
general advantage.

Now the first thing a housekeeper has to settle is what things are
wanted most, and what things can be done without at a pinch. This
means that the housekeeper must settle the order in which things are
desirable. For example, if, when there is not enough food in the
house, she goes out and spends all her money on a bottle of scent
and an imitation pearl necklace, she will be called a vain and silly
woman and a bad mother. But a stateswoman would call her simply a bad
economist: one who does not know what should come first when money has
to be spent. No woman is fit to have charge of a household who has not
sense and self-control enough to see that food and clothing and housing
and firing come first, and that bottles of scent and pearl necklaces,
imitation or real, come a long way afterwards. Even in the jeweller’s
shop a wrist watch comes before a necklace as being more useful. I am
not saying that pretty things are not useful: they are very useful and
quite right in their proper order; but they do not come first. A Bible
may be a very proper present to give to a child; but to give a starving
child a Bible instead of a piece of bread and a cup of milk would be
the act of a lunatic. A woman’s mind is more wonderful than her flesh;
but if her flesh is not fed her mind will perish, whereas if you feed
her flesh her mind will take care of itself and of her flesh as well.
Food comes first.

Think of the whole country as a big household, and the whole nation as
a big family, which is what they really are. What do we see? Half-fed,
badly clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the
money that should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being
spent in millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs,
racing motor cars, January strawberries that taste like corks, and all
sorts of extravagances. One sister of the national family has a single
pair of leaking boots that keep her sniffing all through the winter,
and no handkerchief to wipe her nose with. Another has forty pairs of
high-heeled shoes and dozens of handkerchiefs. A little brother is
trying to grow up on a penn’orth of food a day, and is breaking his
mother’s heart and wearing out her patience by asking continually for
more, whilst a big brother, spending five or six pounds on his dinner
at a fashionable hotel, followed by supper at a night club, is in the
doctor’s hands because he is eating and drinking too much.

Now this is shockingly bad political economy. When thoughtless people
are asked to explain it they say “Oh, the woman with the forty shoes
and the man drinking at the night club got their money from their
father who made a fortune by speculating in rubber; and the girl with
the broken boots, and the troublesome boy whose mother has just clouted
his head, are only riffraff from the slums”. That is true; but it does
not alter the fact that the nation that spends money on champagne
before it has provided enough milk for its babies, or gives dainty
meals to Sealyham terriers and Alsatian wolf-hounds and Pekingese dogs
whilst the infant mortality rate shews that its children are dying by
thousands from insufficient nourishment, is a badly managed, silly,
vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the long run
no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself
by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth, and
thinking itself three times as rich as before when all the pet dogs
have litters of six puppies a couple. The only way in which a nation
can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that
is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and
allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities
have been thoroughly served.

But it is no use blaming the owners of the dogs. All these mischievous
absurdities exist, not because any sane person ever wanted them to
exist, but because they must occur whenever some families are very much
richer than others. The rich man, who, as husband and father, drags
the woman with him, begins as every one else begins, by buying food,
clothing, and a roof to shelter them. The poor man does the same. But
when the poor man has spent all he can afford on these necessaries,
he is still short of them: his food is insufficient; his clothes
are old and dirty; his lodging is a single room or part of one, and
unwholesome even at that. But when the rich man has fed himself, and
dressed himself, and housed himself as sumptuously as possible, he has
still plenty of money left to indulge his tastes and fancies and make
a show in the world. Whilst the poor man says “I want more bread, more
clothes, and a better house for my family; but I cannot pay for them”,
the rich man says “I want a fleet of motor cars, a yacht, diamonds
and pearls for my wife and daughters, and a shooting-box in Scotland.
Money is no object: I can pay and overpay for them ten times over”.
Naturally men of business set to work at once to have the cars and the
yacht made, the diamonds dug out in Africa, the pearls fished for, and
the shooting lodge built, paying no attention to the poor man with his
crying needs and empty pockets.

To put the same thing in another way, the poor man needs to have labor
employed in making the things he is short of: that is, in baking,
weaving, tailoring, and plain building; but he cannot pay the master
bakers and weavers enough to enable them to pay the wages of such
labor. The rich man meanwhile is offering money enough to provide good
wages for all the work required to please him. All the people who take
his money may be working hard; but their work is pampering people who
have too much instead of feeding people who have too little; therefore
it is misapplied and wasted, keeping the country poor and even making
it poorer for the sake of keeping a few people rich.

It is no excuse for such a state of things that the rich give
employment. There is no merit in giving employment: a murderer gives
employment to the hangman; and a motorist who runs over a child
gives employment to an ambulance porter, a doctor, an undertaker, a
clergyman, a mourning-dressmaker, a hearse driver, a gravedigger: in
short, to so many worthy people that when he ends by killing himself it
seems ungrateful not to erect a statue to him as a public benefactor.
The money with which the rich give the wrong sort of employment would
give the right sort of employment if it were equally distributed; for
then there would be no money offered for motor cars and diamonds until
everyone was fed, clothed, and lodged, nor any wages offered to men
and women to leave useful employments and become servants to idlers.
There would be less ostentation, less idleness, less wastefulness,
less uselessness; but there would be more food, more clothing, better
houses, more security, more health, more virtue: in a word, more real
prosperity.




16

EUGENICS


The question has been asked, would the masses be any better for having
more money? One’s first impulse on hearing such a silly question is
to take the lady who asks it by the shoulders and give her a violent
shaking. If a fully fed, presentably clothed, decently housed, fairly
literate and cultivated and gently mannered family is not better than a
half-starved, ragged, frowsy, overcrowded one, there is no meaning in
words.

Still, let us not lose our tempers. A well-fed, clean, decently
lodged woman is better than one trying to live on tea and rashers in
dirty clothes in a verminous garret. But so is a well-fed clean sow
better than a hungry dirty one. She is a sow all the same; and you
cannot make a silk purse out of her ear. If the common women of the
future were to be no better than our rich ladies today, even at their
best, the improvement would leave us deeply dissatisfied. And that
dissatisfaction would be a divine dissatisfaction. Let us consider,
then, what effect equality of income would have on the quality of our
people as human beings.

There are some who say that if you want better people you must breed
them as carefully as you breed thoroughbred horses and pedigree boars.
No doubt you must; but there are two difficulties. First, you cannot
very well mate men and women as you mate bulls and cows, stallions and
mares, boars and sows, without giving them any choice in the matter.
Second, even if you could, you would not know how to do it, because you
would not know what sort of human being you wanted to breed. In the
case of a horse or a pig the matter is very simple: you want either a
very fast horse for racing or a very strong horse for drawing loads;
and in the case of the pig you want simply plenty of bacon. And yet,
simple as that is, any breeder of these animals will tell you that he
has a great many failures no matter how careful he is.

The moment you ask yourself what sort of child you want, beyond
preferring a boy or a girl, you have to confess that you do not know.
At best you can mention a few sorts that you dont want: for instance,
you dont want cripples, deaf mutes, blind, imbecile, epileptic, or
drunken children. But even these you do not know how to avoid as there
is often nothing visibly wrong with the parents of such unfortunates.
When you turn from what you dont want to what you do want you may say
that you want good children; but a good child means only a child that
gives its parents no trouble; and some very useful men and women have
been very troublesome children. Energetic, imaginative, enterprising,
brave children are never out of mischief from their parents’ point
of view. And grown-up geniuses are seldom liked until they are dead.
Considering that we poisoned Socrates, crucified Christ, and burnt Joan
of Arc amid popular applause, because, after a trial by responsible
lawyers and Churchmen, we decided that they were too wicked to be
allowed to live, we can hardly set up to be judges of goodness or to
have any sincere liking for it.

Even if we were willing to trust any political authority to select
our husbands and wives for us with a view to improving the race, the
officials would be hopelessly puzzled as to how to select. They might
begin with some rough idea of preventing the marriage of persons with
any taint of consumption or madness or syphilis or addiction to drugs
or drink in their families; but that would end in nobody being married
at all, as there is practically no family quite free from such taints.
As to moral excellence, what model would they take as desirable? St
Francis, George Fox, William Penn, John Wesley, and George Washington?
or Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Bismarck? It takes all sorts to
make a world; and the notion of a Government department trying to make
out how many different types were necessary, and how many persons of
each type, and proceeding to breed them by appropriate marriages, is
amusing but not practicable. There is nothing for it but to let people
choose their mates for themselves, and trust to Nature to produce a
good result.

“Just as we do at present, in fact,” some will say. But that is just
what we do not do at present. How much choice has anyone among us when
the time comes to choose a mate? Nature may point out a woman’s mate to
her by making her fall in love at first sight with the man who would be
the best mate for her; but unless that man happens to have about the
same income as her father, he is out of her class and out of her reach,
whether above her or below her. She finds she must marry, not the man
she likes, but the man she can get; and he is not often the same man.

The man is in the same predicament. We all know by instinct that it is
unnatural to marry for money or social position instead of for love;
yet we have arranged matters so that we must all marry more or less
for money or social position or both. It is easy to say to Miss Smith
or Miss Jones “Follow the promptings of your heart, my dear; and marry
the dustman or marry the duke, whichever you prefer”. But she cannot
marry the dustman; and the duke cannot marry her; because they and
their relatives have not the same manners and habits; and people with
different manners and habits cannot live together. And it is difference
of income that makes difference of manners and habits. Miss Smith and
Miss Jones have finally to make up their minds to like what they can
get, because they can very seldom get what they like; and it is safe
to say that in the great majority of marriages at present Nature has
very little part in the choice compared to circumstances. Unsuitable
marriages, unhappy homes, ugly children are terribly common; because
the young woman who ought to have all the unmarried young men in the
country open to her choice, with dozens of other strings to her bow
in the event of her first choice not feeling a reciprocal attraction,
finds that in fact she has to choose between two or three in her own
class, and has to allow herself to be much petted and tempted by
physical endearments, or made desperate by neglect, before she can
persuade herself that she really loves the one she dislikes least.

Under such circumstances we shall never get a well-bred race; and it is
all the fault of inequality of income. If every family were brought up
at the same cost, we should all have the same habits, manners, culture,
and refinement; and the dustman’s daughter could marry the duke’s son
as easily as a stockbroker’s son now marries a bank manager’s daughter.
Nobody would marry for money, because there would be no money to be
gained or lost by marriage. No woman would have to turn her back on
a man she loved because he was poor, or be herself passed by for the
same reason. All the disappointments would be natural and inevitable
disappointments; and there would be plenty of alternatives and
consolations. If the race did not improve under these circumstances, it
must be unimprovable. And even if it be so, the gain in happiness by
getting rid of the heartbreak that now makes the world, and especially
its women, so miserable, would make the equalization of income worth
while even if all the other arguments for it did not exist.




17

THE COURTS OF LAW


When we come to the courts of law the hopeless incompatibility of
inequality of income with justice is so plain that you must have been
struck by it if you ever notice such things. The very first condition
of legal justice is that it shall be no respecter of persons; that it
shall hold the balance impartially between the laborer’s wife and the
millionairess; and that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty
except by the verdict of a jury of her peers, meaning her equals.
Now no laborer is ever tried by a jury of his peers: he is tried by
a jury of ratepayers who have a very strong class prejudice against
him because they have larger incomes, and consider themselves better
men on that account. Even a rich man tried by a common jury has to
reckon with their envy as well as their subservience to wealth. Thus
it is a common saying with us that there is one law for the rich and
another for the poor. This is not strictly true: the law is the same
for everybody: it is the incomes that need changing. The civil law
by which contracts are enforced, and redress given for slanders and
injuries that are not dealt with by the police, requires so much legal
knowledge and artistic eloquence to set it in motion that an ordinary
woman with no legal knowledge or eloquence can get the benefit of
it only by employing lawyers whom she has to pay very highly, which
means, of course, that the rich woman can afford to go to law and the
poor woman cannot. The rich woman can terrorize the poor woman by
threatening to go to law with her if her demands are not complied with.
She can disregard the poor woman’s rights, and tell her that if she is
dissatisfied she can take her complaint into court, knowing very well
that her victim’s poverty and ignorance will prevent her from obtaining
proper legal advice and protection. When a rich woman takes a fancy
to a poor woman’s husband, and persuades him to abandon her, she can
practically buy him by starving the abandoned wife into divorcing
him for a sufficient allowance. In America, where the wife can sue
for damages, the price of the divorce is higher: that is all. When
the abandoned wife cannot be starved into the divorce court she can
stand out for an exorbitant price before setting her husband free to
remarry; and an abandoned husband can sell out likewise. Men and women
now trap one another into marriage with this object to such an extent
that in some States the word alimony has come to mean simply blackmail.
Mind: I am not disparaging either divorce or alimony. What is wrong is
that any woman should by mere superiority of income be able to make
another woman’s husband much more comfortable than his wife can, or
that any man should be able to offer another man’s wife luxuries that
her husband cannot afford: in short, that money should have any weight
whatever either in contracting or dissolving a marriage.

The criminal law, though we read murder trials and the like so eagerly,
is less important than the civil law, because only a few exceptional
people commit crimes, whilst we all marry and make civil contracts.
Besides, the police set the criminal law in motion without charging the
injured party anything. Nevertheless, rich prisoners are favored by
being able to spend large sums in engaging famous barristers to plead
for them, hunting up evidence all over the country or indeed over the
world, bribing or intimidating witnesses, and exhausting every possible
form of appeal and method of delay. We are fond of pointing to American
cases of rich men at large who would have been hanged or electrocuted
if they had been poor. But who knows how many poor people are in prison
in England who might have been acquitted if they could have spent a few
hundred pounds on their defence?

The laws themselves are contaminated at their very source by being made
by rich men. Nominally all adult men and women are eligible to sit in
Parliament and make laws if they can persuade enough people to vote for
them. Something has been done of late years to make it possible for
poor persons to avail themselves of this right. Members of Parliament
now receive salaries; and certain election expenses formerly borne by
the candidate are now public charges. But the candidate must put down
£150 to start with; and it still costs from five hundred to a thousand
pounds to contest a parliamentary election. Even when the candidate
is successful, the salary of four hundred a year, which carries with
it no pension and no prospects when the seat is lost (as it may be at
the next election) is not sufficient for the sort of life in London a
member of Parliament is obliged to lead. This gives the rich such an
advantage that though the poor are in a nine-to-one majority in the
country their representatives are in a minority in Parliament; and
most of the time of Parliament is taken up, not by discussing what is
best for the nation, and passing laws accordingly, but by the class
struggle set up by the rich majority trying to maintain and extend its
privileges against the poor minority trying to curtail or abolish them.
That is, in pure waste of it.

By far the most unjust and mischievous privilege claimed by the
rich is the privilege to be idle with complete legal impunity; and
unfortunately they have established this privilege so firmly that we
take it as a matter of course, and even venerate it as the mark of a
real lady or gentleman, without ever considering that a person who
consumes goods or accepts services without producing equivalent goods
or performing equivalent services in return inflicts on the country
precisely the same injury as a thief does: in fact, that is what theft
means. We do not dream of allowing people to murder, kidnap, break
into houses, sink, burn, and destroy at sea or on land, or claim
exemption from military service, merely because they have inherited
a landed estate or a thousand a year from some industrious ancestor;
yet we tolerate idling, which does more harm in one year than all the
legally punishable crimes in the world in ten. The rich, through their
majority in Parliament, punish with ruthless severity such forms of
theft as burglary, forgery, embezzlement, pocket-picking, larceny, and
highway robbery, whilst they exempt rich idling, and even hold it up
as a highly honorable way of life, thereby teaching our children that
working for a livelihood is inferior, derogatory, and disgraceful. To
live like a drone on the labor and service of others is to be a lady
or a gentleman: to enrich the country by labor and service is to be
base, lowly, vulgar, contemptible, fed and clothed and lodged on the
assumption that anything is good enough for hewers of wood and drawers
of water. This is nothing else than an attempt to turn the order of
Nature upside down, and to take “Evil: be thou my good” as the national
motto. If we persist in it, it must finally bring upon us another of
those wrecks of civilization in which all the great empires in the past
have crashed. Yet nothing can prevent this happening where income is
unequally distributed, because the laws will inevitably be made by the
rich; and the law that all must work, which should come before every
other law, is a law that the rich never make.




18

THE IDLE RICH


Do not let yourself be put out at this point by the fact that people
with large unearned incomes are by no means always loafing or lolling.
The energetic ones often overexert themselves, and have to take “rest
cures” to recover. Those who try to make life one long holiday find
that they need a holiday from that too. Idling is so unnatural and
boresome that the world of the idle rich, as they are called, is a
world of ceaseless activities of the most fatiguing kind. You may
find on old bookshelves a forgotten nineteenth century book in which
a Victorian lady of fashion defended herself against the charge of
idleness by describing her daily routine of fashion both as hostess
and visitor in London. I would cheerfully sweep a crossing rather than
be condemned to it. In the country, sport is so elaborately organized
that every month in the year has its special variety: the necessary
fishes and birds and animals are so carefully bred and preserved for
the purpose that there is always something to be killed. Risks and
exposures and athletic feats of which the poor in towns know nothing
are matters of course in the country house, where broken collar
bones are hardly exceptional enough to be classed as accidents. If
sports fail there are always games: ski-ing and tobogganing, polo,
tennis, skating on artificial ice, and so forth, involving much more
exhausting physical exercise than many poor women would care to face.
A young lady, after a day of such exercise, will, between dinner and
bedtime, dance a longer distance than the postman walks. In fact
the only people who are disgustingly idle are the children of those
who have just become rich, the new rich as they are called. As these
unfortunate fortunates have had neither the athletic training nor the
social discipline of the old rich, with whom what we call high life is
a skilled art needing a stern apprenticeship, they do not know what to
do with themselves; and their resourceless loafing and consumption of
chocolate creams, cigarets, cocktails, and the sillier sort of novels
and illustrated papers whilst they drift about in motor cars from one
big hotel to another, is pitiable. But in the next generation they
either relapse into poverty or go to school with the class they can now
afford to belong to, and acquire its accomplishments, its discipline,
and its manners.

But beside this Spartan routine invented to employ people who have not
to work for their living, and which, you will notice, is a survival of
the old tribal order in which the braves hunted and fought whilst the
squaws did the domestic work, there is the necessary public work which
must be done by a governing class if it is to keep all political power
in its own hands. By not paying for this work, or paying so little for
it that nobody without an unearned income can afford to undertake it,
and by attaching to the upper division of the civil service examination
tests that only expensively educated persons can pass, this work is
kept in the hands of the rich. That is the explanation of the otherwise
unaccountable way in which the proprietary class has opposed every
attempt to attach sufficient salaries to parliamentary work to make
those who do it self-supporting, although the proprietors themselves
were the holders of the main parliamentary posts. Though they officered
the army, they did everything they could to make it impossible for an
officer to live on his pay. Though they contested every parliamentary
seat, they opposed the public payment of members of Parliament and
their election expenses. Though they regarded the diplomatic service as
a preserve for their younger sons, they attached to it the condition
that no youth should be eligible for it without a private income of
four hundred a year. They fought, and still fight, against making
government a self-supporting occupation, because the effect would be to
throw it open to the unpropertied, and destroy their own monopoly of it.

But as the work of government must be done, they must do it themselves
if they will not let other people do it. Consequently you find rich men
working in Parliament, in diplomacy, in the army, in the magistracy,
and on local public bodies, to say nothing of the management of their
own estates. Men so working cannot accurately be called the idle rich.
Unfortunately they do all this governing work with a bias in favour of
the privilege of their class to be idle. From the point of view of the
public good, it would be far better if they amused themselves like most
of their class, and left the work of governing to be done by well-paid
officials and ministers whose interests were those of the nation as a
whole.

The stamina of the women of the idle class was formerly maintained by
their work in childbearing and family housekeeping. But at present many
of them resort to contraception (called birth control) not to regulate
the number of their children and the time of their birth, but to avoid
bearing any children at all. Hotel life, or life in service flats, or
the delegation of household management to professional ladies who are
practically private hotel managers, is more and more substituted for
old-fashioned domestic housekeeping. If this were an ordinary division
of labor to enable a woman to devote herself entirely to a professional
career of some sort, it would be defensible; for many women, as you
must often have noticed, have no aptitude for domestic work, and
are as much out of place in the kitchen and nursery as all men are
conventionally supposed to be; but when you have women with unearned
and excessive incomes its possibility involves an equal possibility of
complete uselessness and self-indulgence, of which many rich women,
knowing no better, take the fullest advantage.

There are always a few cases in which exceptional men and women with
sufficient unearned income to maintain them handsomely without a
stroke of work are found working harder than most of those who have
to do it for a living, and spending most of their money on attempts
to better the world. Florence Nightingale organized the hospital work
of the Crimean war, including the knocking of some sense into the
heads of the army medical staff, and much disgusting and dangerous
drudgery in the wards, when she had the means to live comfortably at
home doing nothing. John Ruskin published accounts of how he had spent
his comfortable income and what work he had done, to shew that he,
at least, was an honest worker and a faithful administrator of the
part of the national income that had fallen to his lot. This was so
little understood that people concluded that he must have gone out of
his mind; and as he afterwards did, like Dean Swift, succumb to the
melancholia and exasperation induced by the wickedness and stupidity of
capitalistic civilization, they joyfully persuaded themselves that they
had been quite right about him.

But when every possible qualification of the words Idle Rich has been
made, and it is fully understood that idle does not mean doing nothing
(which is impossible), but doing nothing useful, and continually
consuming without producing, the term applies to the class, numbering
at the extreme outside one-tenth of the population, to maintain whom in
their idleness the other nine-tenths are kept in a condition of slavery
so complete that their slavery is not even legalized as such: hunger
keeps them sufficiently in order without imposing on their masters any
of those obligations which make slaves so expensive to their owners.
What is more, any attempt on the part of a rich woman to do a stroke of
ordinary work for the sake of her health would be bitterly resented by
the poor because, from their point of view, she would be a rich woman
meanly doing a poor woman out of a job.

And now comes the crowning irony of it all, which many intelligent
women to whom irony means nothing will prefer to call the judgment
of God. When we have conferred on these people the coveted privilege
of having plenty of money and nothing to do (our idiotic receipt for
perfect happiness and perfect freedom) we find that we have made them
so wretched and unhealthy that instead of doing nothing they are always
doing something “to keep themselves fit” for doing nothing; and instead
of doing what they like, they bind themselves to a laborious routine
of what they call society and pleasure which you could not impose on a
parlormaid without receiving notice instantly, or on a Trappist without
driving him to turn atheist to escape from it. Only one part of it, the
Red Indian part, the frank return to primitive life, the hunting and
shooting and country life, is bearable; and one has to be by nature
half a savage to enjoy that continually. So much for the exertions of
the idle rich!




19

CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS


Just as Parliament and the Courts are captured by the rich, so is
the Church. The average parson does not teach honesty and equality
in the village school: he teaches deference to the merely rich, and
calls that loyalty and religion. He is the ally of the squire, who,
as magistrate, administers the laws made in the interests of the rich
by the parliament of rich men, and calls that justice. The villagers,
having no experience of any other sort of religion or law, soon lose
all respect for both, and become merely cynical. They may touch their
hats and curtsey respectfully; but they whisper to oneanother that
the squire, no matter how kind his wife may be at Christmas by way of
ransom, is a despoiler and oppressor of the poor, and the parson a
hypocrite. In revolutions, it is the respectful peasants who burn the
country houses and parsonages, and rush to the cathedrals to deface the
statues, shatter the stained windows, and wreck the organ.

By the way, you may know parsons who are not like that. At least I do.
There are always men and women who will stand out against injustice,
no matter how prosperous and well-spoken-of it may be. But the result
is that they are ill-spoken-of themselves in the most influential
quarters. Our society must be judged, not by its few rebels, but by its
millions of obedient subjects.

The same corruption reaches the children in all our schools.
Schoolmasters who teach their pupils such vital elementary truths
about their duty to their country as that they should despise and
pursue as criminals all able-bodied adults who do not by personal
service pull their weight in the social boat, are dismissed from their
employment, and sometimes prosecuted for sedition. And from this
elementary morality up to the most abstruse and philosophic teaching
in the universities, the same corruption extends. Science becomes a
propaganda of quack cures, manufactured by companies in which the rich
hold shares, for the diseases of the poor who need only better food
and sanitary houses, and of the rich who need only useful occupation,
to keep them both in health. Political economy becomes an impudent
demonstration that the wages of the poor cannot be raised; that without
the idle rich we should perish for lack of capital and employment;
and that if the poor would take care to have fewer children everything
would be for the best in the worst of all possible worlds.

Thus the poor are kept poor by their ignorance; and those whose parents
are too well-off to make it possible to keep them ignorant, and who
receive what is called a complete education, are taught so many flat
lies that their false knowledge is more dangerous than the untutored
natural wit of savages. We all blame the ex-Kaiser for banishing from
the German schools and universities all teachers who did not teach
that history, science, and religion all prove that the rule of the
house of Hohenzollern: that is, of his own rich family, is the highest
form of government possible to mankind; but we do the same thing
ourselves, except that the worship of rich idleness in general is
substituted for the worship of the Hohenzollern family in particular,
though the Hohenzollerns have family traditions (including the learning
of a common craft by every man of them) which make them much more
responsible than any Tom or Dick who may happen to have made a huge
fortune in business.

As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read,
the corruption of the schools would not matter so much if the Press
were free. But the Press is not free. As it costs at least quarter
of a million of money to establish a daily newspaper in London, the
newspapers are owned by rich men. And they depend on the advertisements
of other rich men. Editors and journalists who express opinions in
print that are opposed to the interests of the rich are dismissed and
replaced by subservient ones. The newspapers therefore must continue
the work begun by the schools and colleges; so that only the strongest
and most independent and original minds can escape from the mass of
false doctrine that is impressed on them by the combined and incessant
suggestion and persuasion of Parliament, the law-courts, the Church,
the schools, and the Press. We are all brought up wrongheaded to keep
us willing slaves instead of rebellious ones.

What makes this so hard to discover and to believe is that the false
teaching is mixed up with a great deal of truth, because up to a
certain point the interests of the rich are the same as the interests
of everybody else. It is only where their interests differ from those
of their neighbors that the deception begins. For example, the rich
dread railway accidents as much as the poor; consequently the law on
railway accidents, the sermons about railway accidents, the school
teaching about railway accidents, and the newspaper articles about them
are all quite honestly directed to the purpose of preventing railway
accidents. But when anyone suggests that there would be fewer railway
accidents if the railwaymen worked fewer hours and had better wages,
or that in the division of the railway fares between the shareholders
and the workers the shareholders should get less and the workers
more, or that railway travelling would be safer if the railways were
in the hands of the nation like the posts and the telegraphs, there
is an immediate outcry in the Press and in Parliament against such
suggestions, coupled with denunciations of those who make them as
Bolsheviks or whatever other epithet may be in fashion for the moment
as a term of the most infamous discredit.




20

WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT


You may ask why not only the rich but the poor put up with all this,
and even passionately defend it as an entirely beneficial public
morality. I can only say that the defence is not unanimous: it is
always being attacked at one point or another by public-spirited
reformers and by persons whose wrongs are unbearable. But taking it in
the lump I should say that the evil of the corruption and falsification
of law, religion, education, and public opinion is so enormous that the
minds of ordinary people are unable to grasp it, whereas they easily
and eagerly grasp the petty benefits with which it is associated. The
rich are very charitable: they understand that they have to pay ransom
for their riches. The simple and decent village woman whose husband
is a woodman or gardener or gamekeeper, and whose daughters are being
taught manners as domestic servants in the country house, sees in the
lord of the manor only a kind gentleman who gives employment, and whose
wife gives clothes and blankets and little comforts for the sick, and
presides over the Cottage Hospital and all the little shows and sports
and well-meant activities that relieve the monotony of toil, and rob
illness of some of its terrors. Even in the towns, where the rich
and poor do not know oneanother, the lavish expenditure of the rich
is always popular. It provides much that people enjoy looking at and
gossiping about. The tradesman is proud of having rich customers, and
the servant of serving in a rich house. At the public entertainments
of the rich there are cheap seats for the poor. Ordinary thoughtless
people like all this finery. They will read eagerly about it, and look
with interest at the pictures of it in the illustrated papers, whereas
when they read that the percentage of children dying under the age
of five years has risen or fallen, it means nothing to them but dry
statistics which make the paper dull. It is only when people learn to
ask “Is this good for all of us all the time as well as amusing to
me for five minutes?” that they are on the way to understand how one
fashionably dressed woman may cost the life of ten babies.

Even then it seems to them that the alternative to having the
fashionably dressed rich ladies is that all women are to be dowdy. They
need not be afraid. At present nine women out of ten are dowdy. With a
reasonable distribution of income every one of the ten could afford to
look her best. That no woman should have diamonds until all women have
decent clothes is a sensible rule, though it may not appeal to a woman
who would like to have diamonds herself and does not care a rap whether
other women are well-dressed or not. She may even derive a certain
gratification from seeing other women worse dressed than herself. But
the inevitable end of that littleness of mind, that secret satisfaction
in the misfortunes of others which the Germans call _Schadenfreude_ (we
have no word for it), is that sooner or later a revolution breaks out
as it did in Russia; the diamonds go to the pawnbroker, who refuses
to advance any money on them because nobody can afford diamonds any
longer; and the fine ladies have to wear old clothes and cheaper and
worse readymades until there is nothing left for them to wear. Only, as
this does not happen all at once, the thoughtless do not believe that
the police will ever let it come; and the littlehearted do not care
whether it comes or not, provided it does not come until they are dead.

Another thing that makes us cling to this lottery with huge money
prizes is the dream that we may become rich by some chance. We read
of uncles in Australia dying and leaving £100,000 to a laborer or a
charwoman who never knew of his existence. We hear of somebody no
better off than ourselves winning the Calcutta Sweep. Such dreams would
be destroyed by an equal distribution of income. And people cling all
the more to dreams when they are too poor even to back horses! They
forget the million losses in their longing for the one gain that the
million unlucky ones have to pay for.

Poor women who have too much natural good sense to indulge in these
gambler’s dreams often make sacrifices in the hope that education will
enable their sons to rise from the slough of poverty; and some men with
an exceptional degree of the particular sort of cleverness that wins
scholarships owe their promotion to their mothers. But exceptional
cases, dazzling as some of them are, hold out no hope to ordinary
people; for the world consists of ordinary people: indeed that is the
meaning of the word ordinary. The ordinary rich woman’s child and the
ordinary poor woman’s child may be born with equally able brains; but
by the time they begin life as grown men the rich woman’s son has
acquired the speech, manners, personal habits, culture, and instruction
without which all the higher employments are closed to him; whilst the
poor woman’s son is not presentable enough to get any job which brings
him into contact with refined people. In this way a great deal of the
brain power of the country is wasted and spoiled; for Nature does not
care a rap for rich and poor. For instance, she does not give everybody
the ability to do managing work. Perhaps one in twenty is as far as she
goes. But she does not pick out the children of the rich to receive her
capricious gifts. If in every two hundred people there are only twenty
rich, her gift of management will fall to nine poor children and one
rich one. But if the rich can cultivate the gift and the poor cannot,
then nine-tenths of the nation’s natural supply of managing ability
will be lost to it; and to make up the deficiency many of the managing
posts will be filled up by pigheaded people only because they happen to
have the habit of ordering poor people about.




21

POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY


So far, we have not found one great national institution that escapes
the evil effects of a division of the people into rich and poor: that
is, of inequality of income. I could take you further; but we should
only fare worse. I could shew you how rich officers and poor soldiers
and sailors create disaffection in the army and navy; how disloyalty
is rampant because the relation between the royal family and the bulk
of the nation is the relation between one rich family and millions
of poor ones; how what we call peace is really a state of civil war
between rich and poor conducted by disastrous strikes; how envy and
rebellion and class resentments are chronic moral diseases with us. But
if I attempted this you would presently exclaim “Oh, for goodness’ sake
dont tell me everything or we shall never have done”. And you would be
quite right. If I have not convinced you by this time that there are
overwhelming reasons of State against inequality of income, I shall
begin to think that you dislike me.

Besides, we must get on to the positive reasons for the Socialist plan
of an equal division. I am specially interested in it because it is my
favorite plan. You had therefore better watch me carefully to see that
I play fairly when I am helping you to examine what there is to be said
for equality of income over and above that there is to be said against
inequality of income.

First, equal division is not only a possible plan, but one which has
been tested by long experience. The great bulk of the daily work of the
civilized world is done, and always has been done, and always must be
done, by bodies of persons receiving equal pay whether they are tall
or short, fair or dark, quick or slow, young or getting on in years,
teetotallers or beer drinkers, Protestants or Catholics, married or
single, short tempered or sweet tempered, pious or worldly: in short,
without the slightest regard to the differences that make one person
unlike another. In every trade there is a standard wage; in every
public service there is a standard pay; and in every profession the
fees are fixed with a view to enable the man who follows the profession
to live according to a certain standard of respectability which is the
same for the whole profession. The pay of the policeman and soldier
and postman, the wages of the laborer and carpenter and mason, the
salary of the judge and the member of Parliament, may differ, some of
them getting less than a hundred a year and others five thousand; but
all the soldiers get the same, all the judges get the same, all the
members of Parliament get the same; and if you ask a doctor why his fee
is half a crown or five shillings, or a guinea or three guineas, or
whatever it may be, instead of five shillings or ten shillings, or two
guineas or six guineas or a thousand guineas, he can give you no better
reason than that he is asking what all the other doctors ask, and that
they ask it because they find they cannot keep up their position on
less.

Therefore when some inconsiderate person repeats like a parrot that
if you gave everybody the same money, before a year was out you would
have rich and poor again just as before, all you have to do is to
tell him to look round him and see millions of people who get the
same money and remain in the same position all their lives without
any such change taking place. The cases in which poor men become rich
are most exceptional; and though the cases in which rich men become
poor are commoner, they also are accidents and not ordinary everyday
circumstances. The rule is that workers of the same rank and calling
are paid alike, and that they neither sink below their condition nor
rise above it. No matter how unlike they are to oneanother, you can
pay one of them two and sixpence and the other half a crown with the
assurance that as they are put so they will stay, though here and
there a great rogue or a great genius may surprise you by becoming
much richer or much poorer than the rest. Jesus complained that he was
poorer than the foxes and birds, as they had their holes and nests
whilst he had not a house to shelter him; and Napoleon became an
emperor; but we need take no more account of such extraordinary persons
in forming our general plan than a maker of readymade clothes takes of
giants and dwarfs in his price list. You may with the utmost confidence
take it as settled by practical experience that if we could succeed
in distributing income equally to all the inhabitants of the country,
there would be no more tendency on their part to divide into rich and
poor than there is at present for postmen to divide into beggars and
millionaires. The only novelty proposed is that the postmen should get
as much as the postmasters, and the postmasters no less than anybody
else. If we find, as we do, that it answers to give all judges the
same income, and all navy captains the same income, why should we go
on giving judges five times as much as navy captains? That is what the
navy captain would like to know; and if you tell him that if he were
given as much as the judge he would be just as poor as before at the
end of a year he will use language unfit for the ears of anyone but a
pirate. So be careful how you say such things.

Equal distribution is then quite possible and practicable, not only
momentarily but permanently. It is also simple and intelligible. It
gets rid of all squabbling as to how much each person should have. It
is already in operation and familiar over great masses of human beings.
And it has the tremendous advantage of securing promotion by merit for
the more capable.




22

MERIT AND MONEY


That last sentence may puzzle even the most Intelligent Woman if she
has never before given her mind seriously to the subject; so I had
better enlarge on it a little.

Nothing hides the difference in merit between one person and another
so much as differences in income. Take for example a grateful nation
making a parliamentary grant of twenty thousand pounds to a great
explorer, or a great discoverer, or a great military commander (I have
to make my example a man: women get only statues after their death).
Before he has walked half way down the street on his way home to
tell his wife about it he may meet some notorious fool or scandalous
libertine, or some quite ordinary character, who has not merely twenty
thousand pounds but twenty thousand a year or more. The great man’s
twenty thousand pounds will bring him in only a thousand a year; and
with this he finds himself in our society regarded as “a poor devil”
by tradesmen and financiers and quacks who are ten times as rich
because they have never in their lives done anything but make money for
themselves with entire selfishness, possibly by trading in the vices
or on the credulity of their fellow-countrymen. It is a monstrous
thing that a man who, by exercising a low sort of cunning, has managed
to grab three or four millions of money selling bad whiskey, or
forestalling the wheat harvest and selling it at three times its cost,
or providing silly newspapers and magazines for the circulation of
lying advertisements, should be honored and deferred to and waited on
and returned to Parliament and finally made a peer of the realm, whilst
men who have exercised their noblest faculties or risked their lives in
the furtherance of human knowledge and welfare should be belittled by
the contrast between their pence and the grabbers’ pounds.

Only where there is pecuniary equality can the distinction of merit
stand out. Titles, dignities, reputations do more harm than good if
they can be bought with money. Queen Victoria shewed her practical
common sense when she said that she would not give a title to anyone
who had not money enough to keep it up; but the result was that the
titles went to the richest, not to the best. Between persons of unequal
income all other distinctions are thrown into the background. The woman
with a thousand a year inevitably takes precedence of women with only
a hundred, no matter how inferior she may be to them; and she can give
her children advantages qualifying them for higher employments than
those open to poor children of equal or greater natural capacity.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except
the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and
capacity are everything. Instead of all the workers being levelled
down to low wage standards and all the rich levelled up to fashionable
income standards, everybody under a system of equal incomes would find
her and his own natural level. There would be great people and ordinary
people and little people; but the great would always be those who had
done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them
and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the
little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not
poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always
in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and
the really great in favour of equality.




23

INCENTIVE


When we come to the objections to equal division of income we find that
most of them come to no more than this: that we are not accustomed to
it, and have taken unequal division between classes so much for granted
that we have never thought any other state of things possible, not to
mention that the teachers and preachers appointed for us by the rich
governing class have carefully hammered into us from our childhood that
it is wicked and foolish to question the right of some people to be
much better off than others.

Still, there are other objections. So many of them have been already
disposed of in our examination of the schemes for unequal distribution
that we need deal now with two only.

The first is that unless a woman were allowed to get more money than
another she would have no incentive to work harder.

One answer to this is that nobody wants her to work harder than another
at the national task. On the contrary, it is desirable that the burden
of work, without which there could be no income to divide, should be
shared equally by the workers. If those who are never happy unless they
are working insist on putting in extra work to please themselves, they
must not pretend that this is a painful sacrifice for which they should
be paid; and, anyhow, they can always work off their superfluous energy
on their hobbies.

On the other hand, there are people who grudge every moment they have
to spend in working. That is no excuse for letting them off their
share. Anyone who does less than her share of work, and yet takes her
full share of the wealth produced by work, is a thief, and should be
dealt with as any other sort of thief is dealt with.

But Weary Willie may say that he hates work, and is quite willing
to take less, and be poor and dirty and ragged or even naked for
the sake of getting off with less work. But that, as we have seen,
cannot be allowed: voluntary poverty is just as mischievous socially
as involuntary poverty: decent nations must insist on their citizens
leading decent lives, doing their full share of the nation’s work,
and taking their full share of its income. When Weary Willie has
done his bit he can be as lazy as he likes. He will have plenty of
leisure to lie on his back and listen to the birds, or watch his more
impetuous neighbors working furiously at their hobbies, which may be
sport, exploration, literature, the arts, the sciences, or any of
the activities which we pursue for their own sakes when our material
needs are satisfied. But poverty and social irresponsibility will be
forbidden luxuries. Poor Willie will have to submit, not to compulsory
poverty as at present, but to the compulsory well-being which he dreads
still more.

However, there are mechanical difficulties in the way of freedom to
work more or less than others in general national production. Such work
is not nowadays separate individual work: it is organized associated
work, carried on in great factories and offices in which work begins
and ends at fixed hours. Our clothes, for instance, are mostly washed
in steam laundries in which all the operations which used to be
performed by one woman with her own tub, mangle, and ironing board
are divided among groups of women using machinery and buildings which
none of them could use single-handed even if she could afford to buy
them, assisted by men operating a steam power plant. If some of these
women or men were to offer to come an hour earlier or stay two hours
later for extra wages the reply would be that such an arrangement was
impossible, as they could do nothing without the co-operation of the
rest. The machinery would not work for them unless the engine was
going. It is a case of all or nobody.

In short, associated work and factory work: that is to say, the sort of
work that makes it possible for our great modern civilized populations
to exist, would be impossible if every worker could begin when she
liked and leave off when she liked. In many factories the pace is set
for the lazy and energetic alike by the engine. The railway service
would not be of much use if the engine driver and the guard were to
stop the train to look at a football match when they felt inclined that
way. Casual people are useless in modern industry; and the other sort:
those who want to work longer and harder than the rest, find that they
cannot do it except in comparatively solitary occupations. Even in
domestic service, where the difference between the unpunctual slacker
and sloven and the model servant is very perceptible, the routine of
the household keeps everybody up to a certain mark below which a
servant is discharged as unemployable. And the slacker neither accepts
lower wages nor can be cured by higher.

No external incentive is needed to make first-rate workers do the
best work they can: their trouble is that they can seldom make a
living by it. First-rate work is done at present under the greatest
discouragement. There is the impossibility of getting paid as much
for it as for second-rate work. When it is not paid for at all, there
is the difficulty of finding leisure for it whilst earning a living
at common work. People seldom refuse a higher employment which they
feel capable of undertaking. When they do, it is because the higher
employment is so much worse paid or so unsuitable to their social
position that they cannot afford to take it. A typical case is that
of a non-commissioned officer in the army refusing a commission. If
the quartermaster-sergeant’s earnings and expenses came to no more
than those of the officer, and both men were of the same class, no
inducement in the way of extra money would be needed to make any
soldier accept promotion to the highest rank in which he felt he could
do himself credit. When he refuses, as he sometimes does, it is because
he would be poorer and less at home in the higher than in the lower
rank.

But what about the dirty work? We are so accustomed to see dirty work
done by dirty and poorly paid people that we have come to think that it
is disgraceful to do it, and that unless a dirty and disgraced class
existed it would not be done at all. This is nonsense. Some of the
dirtiest work in the world is done by titled surgeons and physicians
who are highly educated, highly paid, and move in the best society. The
nurses who assist them are often their equals in general education,
and sometimes their superiors in rank. Nobody dreams of paying nurses
less or respecting them less than typists in city offices, whose work
is much cleaner. Laboratory work and anatomical work, which involves
dissecting dead bodies, and analysing the secretions and excretions of
live ones, is sometimes revoltingly dirty from the point of view of a
tidy housekeeper; yet it has to be done by gentlemen and ladies of the
professional class. And every tidy housekeeper knows that houses cannot
be kept clean without dirty work. The bearing and nursing of children
are by no means elegant drawingroom amusements; but nobody dares
suggest that they are not in the highest degree honorable, nor do the
most fastidiously refined women shirk their turn when it comes.

It must be remembered too that a great deal of work which is now
dirty because it is done in a crude way by dirty people can be done
in a clean way by clean people. Ladies and gentlemen who attend to
their own motor cars, as many of them do, manage to do it with less
mess and personal soiling than a slovenly general servant will get
herself into when laying a fire. On the whole, the necessary work of
the world can be done with no more dirt than healthy people of all
classes can stand. The truth of the matter is that it is not really
the work that is objected to so much as its association with poverty
and degradation. Thus a country gentleman does not object to drive
his car; but he would object very strongly to wear the livery of his
chauffeur; and a lady will tidy up a room without turning a hair,
though she would die rather than be seen in a parlormaid’s cap and
apron, neat and becoming as they are. These are as honorable as any
other uniform, and much more honorable than the finery of an idle
woman: the parlormaids are beginning to object to them only because
they have been associated in the past with a servile condition and a
lack of respect to which parlormaids are no longer disposed to submit.
But they have no objection to the work. Both the parlormaid and her
employer (I dare not say her mistress), if they are fond of flowers
and animals, will grub in a garden all day, or wash dogs or rid them
of vermin with the greatest solicitude, without considering the dirt
involved in these jobs in the least derogatory to their dignity. If
all dustmen were dukes nobody would object to the dust: the dustmen
would put little pictures on their notepaper of their hats with flaps
down the backs just as now dukes put little pictures of their coronets;
and everyone would be proud to have a dustman to dinner if he would
condescend to come. We may take it that nobody objects to necessary
work of any kind because of the work itself; what everybody objects to
is being seen doing something that is usually done only by persons of
lower rank or by colored slaves. We sometimes even do things badly on
purpose because those who do them well are classed as our inferiors.
For example, a foolish young gentleman of property will write badly
because clerks write well; and the ambassador of a republic will wear
trousers instead of knee-breeches and silk stockings at court, because,
though breeches and stockings are handsomer, they are a livery; and
republicans consider liveries servile.

Still, when we have put out of our heads a great deal of nonsense about
dirty work, the fact remains that though all useful work may be equally
honorable, all useful work is most certainly not equally agreeable or
equally exhausting. To escape facing this fact we may plead that some
people have such very queer tastes that it is almost impossible to
mention an occupation that you will not find somebody with a craze for.
There is never any difficulty in finding a willing hangman. There are
men who are happy keeping lighthouses on rocks in the sea so remote
and dangerous that it is often months before they can be relieved.
And a lighthouse is at least steady, whereas a lightship may never
cease rolling about in a way that would make most of us wish ourselves
dead. Yet men are found to man lightships for wages and pensions no
better than they could find in good employment on shore. Mining seems
a horrible and unnatural occupation; but it is not unpopular. Children
left to themselves do the most uncomfortable and unpleasant things to
amuse themselves, very much as a blackbeetle, though it has the run of
the house, prefers the basement to the drawingroom. The saying that God
never made a job but He made a man or woman to do it is true up to a
certain point.

But when all possible allowances are made for these idiosyncrasies it
remains true that it is much easier to find a boy who wants to be a
gardener or an engine driver, and a girl who wants to be a film actress
or a telephone operator, than a boy who wants to be a sewerman, or a
girl who wants to be a ragpicker. A great deal can be done to make
unpopular occupations more agreeable; and some of them can be got rid
of altogether, and would have been got rid of long ago if there had
been no class of very poor and rough people to put them upon. Smoke and
soot can be done away with; sculleries can be made much pleasanter than
most solicitors’ offices; the unpleasantness of a sewerman’s work is
already mostly imaginary; coal mining may be put an end to by using the
tides to produce electric power; and there are many other ways in which
work which is now repulsive can be made no irksomer than the general
run of necessary labor. But until this happens all the people who have
no particular fancy one way or the other will want to do the pleasanter
sorts of work.

Fortunately there is a way of equalizing the attraction of different
occupations. And this brings us to that very important part of our
lives that we call our leisure. Sailors call it their liberty.

There is one thing that we all desire; and that is freedom. By this
we mean freedom from any obligation to do anything except just what
we like, without a thought of tomorrow’s dinner or any other of the
necessities that make slaves of us. We are free only as long as we can
say “My time is my own”. When workers working ten hours a day agitate
for an eight-hour day, what they really want is not eight hours work
instead of ten, but sixteen hours off duty instead of fourteen. And
out of this sixteen hours must come eight hours sleep and a few hours
for eating and drinking, dressing and undressing, washing and resting;
so that even with an eight hours working day the real leisure of the
workers: that is, the time they have after they are properly rested
and fed and cleaned up and ready for any adventures or amusements or
hobbies they care for, is no more than a few hours; and these few are
reduced in value by the shortness of daylight in winter, and cut down
by the time it takes to get into the country or wherever is the best
place to enjoy oneself. Married women, whose working place is the man’s
home, want to get away from home for recreation, just as men want to
get away from the places where they work; in fact a good deal of our
domestic quarrelling arises because the man wants to spend his leisure
at home whilst the woman wants to spend hers abroad. Women love hotels:
men hate them.

Take, however, the case of a man and his wife who are agreed in liking
to spend their leisure away from home. Suppose the man’s working day
is eight hours, and that he spends eight hours in bed and four over
his breakfast, dinner, washing, dressing, and resting. It does not
follow that he can have four hours to spare for amusement with his wife
every day. Their spare four hours are more likely to be half wasted in
waiting for the theatre or picture show to begin; for they must leave
the open air amusements, tennis, golf, cycling, and the seaside, for
the week-end or Bank Holiday. Consequently he is always craving for
more leisure. This is why we see people preferring rough and strict
employments which leave them some time to themselves to much more
gentle situations in which they are never free. In a factory town it is
often impossible to get a handy and intelligent domestic servant, or
indeed to get a servant at all. That is not because the servant need
work harder or put up with worse treatment than the factory girl or
the shop assistant, but because she has no time she can call her own.
She is always waiting on the doorbell even when you dare not ring the
drawingroom bell lest she should rush up and give notice. To induce
her to stay, you have to give her an evening out every fortnight; then
one every week; then an afternoon a week as well; then two afternoons
a week; then leave to entertain her friends in the drawingroom and use
the piano occasionally (at which times you must clear out of your own
house); and the end is that, long before you have come to the end of
the concessions you are expected to make, you discover that it is not
worth keeping a servant at all on such terms, and take to doing the
housework yourself with modern labor saving appliances. But even if you
put up with the evenings out and all the rest of it, the girl has still
no satisfying sense of freedom; she may not want to stay out all night
even for the most innocent purposes; but she wants to feel that she
might if she liked. That is human nature.

We now see how we can make compensatory arrangements as between
people who do more or less agreeable and easy sorts of work. Give
more leisure, earlier retirement into the superannuated class, more
holidays, in the less agreeable employments, and they will be as much
sought after as the more agreeable ones with less leisure. In a picture
gallery you will find a nicely dressed lady sitting at a table with
nothing to do but to tell anyone who asks what is the price of any
particular picture, and take an order for it if one is given. She has
many pleasant chats with journalists and artists; and if she is bored
she can read a novel. Her desk chair is comfortable; and she takes care
that it shall be near the stove. But the gallery has to be scrubbed
and dusted every day; and its windows have to be kept clean. It is
clear that the lady’s job is a much softer one than the charwoman’s. To
balance them you must either let them take their turns at the desk and
at the scrubbing on alternate days or weeks; or else, as a first-rate
scrubber and duster and cleaner might make a very bad business lady,
and a very attractive business lady might make a very bad scrubber, you
must let the charwoman go home and have the rest of the day to herself
earlier than the lady at the desk.

Public picture galleries, in which the pictures are not sold, require
the services of guardians who have nothing to do but wear a respectable
uniform and see that people do not smoke nor steal the pictures, nor
poke umbrellas through them when pointing out their beauties. Compare
this work with that of the steel smelter, who has to exercise great
muscular strength among blast furnaces and pools of molten metal; that
is to say, in an atmosphere which to an unaccustomed person would seem
the nearest thing to hell on earth! It is true that the steel smelter
would very soon get bored with the gallery attendant’s job, and would
go back to the furnaces and the molten metal sooner than stick it;
whilst the gallery attendant could not do the steel smelter’s job at
all, being too old, or too soft, or too lazy, or all three combined.
One is a young man’s job and the other an old man’s job. We balance
them at present by paying the steel smelter more wages. But the same
effect can be produced by giving him more leisure, either in holidays
or shorter hours. The workers do this themselves when they can. When
they are paid, not by time, but by the piece; and when through a rise
in prices or a great rush of orders they find that they can earn twice
as much in a week as they are accustomed to live on, they can choose
between double wages and double leisure. They usually choose double
leisure, taking home the same money as before, but working from Monday
to Wednesday only, and taking a Thursday to Saturday holiday. They do
not want more work and more money: they want more leisure for the same
work, which proves that money is not the only incentive to work, nor
the strongest. Leisure, or freedom, is stronger when the work is not
pleasurable in itself.




24

THE TYRANNY OF NATURE


The very first lesson that should be taught us when we are old enough
to understand it is that complete freedom from the obligation to work
is unnatural, and ought to be illegal, as we can escape our share of
the burden of work only by throwing it on someone else’s shoulders.
Nature inexorably ordains that the human race shall perish of famine if
it stops working. We cannot escape from this tyranny. The question we
have to settle is how much leisure we can afford to allow ourselves.
Even if we must work like galley slaves whilst we are at it, how soon
may we leave off with a good conscience, knowing that we have done our
share and may now go free until tomorrow? That question has never been
answered, and cannot be answered under our system because so many of
the workers are doing work that is not merely useless but harmful. But
if by an equal distribution of income and a fair division of work we
could find out the answer, then we should think of our share of work as
earning us, not so much money, but so much freedom.

And another curious thing would happen. We now revolt against the
slavery of work because we feel ourselves to be the slaves, not of
Nature and Necessity, but of our employers and those for whom they
have to employ us. We therefore hate work and regard it as a curse.
But if everyone shared the burden and the reward equally, we should
lose this feeling. Nobody would feel put upon; and everybody would
know that the more work was done the more everybody would get, since
the division of what the work produced would be equal. We should then
discover that haymaking is not the only work that is enjoyable. Factory
work, when it is not overdriven, is very social and can be very jolly:
that is one of the reasons why girls prefer working in weaving sheds
in a deafening din to sitting lonely in a kitchen. Navvies have heavy
work; but they are in the open air: they talk, fight, gamble, and have
plenty of change from place to place; and this is much better fun than
the sort of clerking that means only counting another man’s money and
writing it down in figures in a dingy office. Besides the work that is
enjoyable from its circumstances there is the work that is interesting
and enjoyable in itself, like the work of the philosophers and of the
different kinds of artists who will work for nothing rather than not
work at all; but this, under a system of equal division, would probably
become a product of leisure rather than of compulsory industry.

Now consider the so-called pleasures that are sold to us as more
enjoyable than work. The excursion train, the seaside lodgings, the
catchpenny shows, the drink, the childish excitement about football
and cricket, the little bands of desperately poor Follies and Pierrots
pretending to be funny and cute when they are only vulgar and silly,
and all the rest of the attempts to persuade the Intelligent Woman that
she is having a glorious treat when she is in fact being plundered and
bored and tired out and sent home cross and miserable: do not these
shew that people will snatch at anything, however uneasy, for the
sake of change when their few whole days of leisure are given to them
at long intervals on Bank Holidays and the like? If they had enough
real leisure every day as well as work they would learn how to enjoy
themselves. At present they are duffers at this important art. All they
can do is to buy the alluringly advertized pleasures that are offered
to them for money. They seldom have sense enough to notice that these
pleasures have no pleasure in them, and are endured only as a relief
from the monotony of the daily leisureless drudgery.

When people have leisure enough to learn how to live, and to know the
difference between real and sham enjoyment, they will not only begin
to enjoy their work, but to understand why Sir George Cornewall Lewis
said that life would be tolerable but for its amusements. He was clever
enough to see that the amusements, instead of amusing him, wasted
his time and his money and spoiled his temper. Now there is nothing
so disagreeable to a healthy person as wasting time. See how healthy
children pretend to be doing something or making something until they
are tired! Well, it would be as natural for grown-up people to build
real castles for the fun of it as for children to build sand castles.
When they are tired they do not want to work at all, but just to do
nothing until they fall asleep. We never want to work at pleasure: what
we want is work with some pleasure and interest in it to occupy our
time and exercise our muscles and minds. No slave can understand this,
because he is overworked and underrespected; and when he can escape
from work he rushes into gross and excessive vices that correspond
to his gross and excessive labor. Set him free, and he may never be
able to shake off his old horror of labor and his old vices; but never
mind: he and his generation will die out; and their sons and daughters
will be able to enjoy their freedom. And one way in which they will
enjoy it will be to put in a great deal of extra work for the sake of
making useful things beautiful and good things better, to say nothing
of getting rid of bad things. For the world is like a garden: it needs
weeding as well as sowing. There is use and pleasure in destruction as
well as in construction: the one is as necessary as the other.

To have a really precise understanding of this matter you must
distinguish not merely between labor and leisure but between leisure
and rest. Labor is doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like;
rest is doing nothing whilst our bodies and minds are recovering
from their fatigue. Now doing what we like is often as laborious as
doing what we must. Suppose it takes the form of running at the top
of our speed to kick a ball up and down a field! That is harder than
many forms of necessary labor. Looking at other people doing it is a
way of resting, like reading a book instead of writing it. If we all
had a full share of leisure we could not spend the whole of it in
kicking balls, or whacking them about with golf clubs, or in shooting
and hunting. Much of it would be given to useful work; and though
our compulsory labor, neglect to perform which would be treated as
a crime, might possibly be reduced to two or three hours a day, we
should add much voluntary work to that in our leisure time, doing for
fun a huge mass of nationally beneficial work that we cannot get done
at present for love or money. Every woman whose husband is engaged
in interesting work knows the difficulty of getting him away from it
even to his meals; in fact, jealousy of a man’s work sometimes causes
serious domestic unhappiness; and the same thing occurs when a woman
takes up some absorbing pursuit, and finds it and its associations more
interesting than her husband’s company and conversation and friends.
In the professions where the work is solitary and independent of
office and factory hours and steam engines, the number of people who
injure their health and even kill themselves prematurely by overwork
is so considerable that the philosopher Herbert Spencer never missed
an opportunity of warning people against the craze for work. It can
get hold of us exactly as the craze for drink can. Its victims go on
working long after they are so worn out that their operations are doing
more harm than good.




25

THE POPULATION QUESTION


The second of the two stock objections to equal division of income
is that its benefits, if any, would soon be swallowed up by married
couples having too many children. The people who say this always
declare at the same time that our existing poverty is caused by there
being already too many people in the world, or, to put it the other way
round, that the world is too small to produce food enough for all the
people in it.

Now even if this were true, it would be no objection to an equal
division of income; for the less we have, the more important it is that
it should be equally divided, so as to make it go as far as possible,
and avoid adding the evils of inequality to those of scarcity. But it
is not true. What is true is that the more civilized people there are
in the world the poorer most of them are relatively; but the plain
cause of this is that the wealth they produce and the leisure they
provide for are so unequally divided between them that at least half of
them are living parasitically on the other half instead of producing
maintenance for themselves.

Consider the case of domestic servants. Most people who can afford to
keep a servant keep one only; but in Mayfair a young couple moving in
the richest society cannot get on without nine servants, even before
they have any children to be attended to. Yet everyone knows that the
couples who have only one servant, or at most two (to say nothing of
those who have none), are better attended to and more comfortable in
their homes than the unfortunate young people who have to find room for
nine grown-up persons downstairs, and keep the peace between them.

The truth is, of course, that the nine servants are attending mostly to
one another and not to their employers. If you must have a butler and
footman because it is the fashion, you must have somebody to cook their
meals and make their beds. Housekeepers and ladies’ maids need domestic
service as much as the lady of the house, and are much more particular
about not putting their hands to anything that is not strictly their
business. It is therefore a mistake to say that nine servants are
ridiculous with only two people to be attended. There are eleven people
in the house to be attended; and as nine of them have to do all this
attendance between them, there is not so much to spare for the odd
two as might be imagined. That is why couples with nine servants are
continually complaining of the difficulty of getting on with so few,
and supplementing them with charwomen and jobbing dressmakers and
errand boys. Families of ordinary size and extraordinary income find
themselves accumulating thirty servants; and as the thirty are all more
or less waiting on oneanother there is no limit except that of sleeping
room to the number wanted; the more servants you have, the less time
they have to attend to you, and therefore, the more you need, or rather
the more they need, which is much jollier for them than for you.

Now it is plain that these hordes of servants are not supporting
themselves. They are supported by their employer; and if he is an idle
rich man living on rents and dividends: that is, being supported by
the labor of his tenants and of the workers in the companies in which
he has shares, then the whole establishment, servants, employer and
all, is not self-supporting, and would not be even if the world were
made ten times as large as it is to accommodate them. Instead of too
many people in the world there are too many idlers, and much too many
workers wasting their time in attending to idlers. Get rid of the
idlers, and set these workers to useful work, and we shall hear no more
for a long time yet about the world being overcrowded. Perhaps we shall
never hear of it again. Nature has a way with her in these matters.

Some people will find it easier to understand this if I put it to
them like a sum in arithmetic. Suppose 20 men are producing by their
labor £100 a year each, and they agree, or are forced by law, to give
up £50 of it to the owner of the estate on which they work. The owner
will receive £1000 a year, not for work, but for owning. The owner can
afford to spend £500 a year on himself, which makes him ten times as
rich as any of the twenty workers, and use the other £500 to hire six
men and a boy at £75 a year each to wait on him as servants and act as
an armed force to deal with any of the twenty men who may attempt to
rebel and withhold the £50 from him. The six men will not take the part
of the men with £50 a year because they themselves get £75; and they
are not clever enough to see that if they all joined to get rid of the
owner and do useful work, they could have £100 a year apiece.

You have only to multiply the twenty workers and the six or seven
retainers by millions to get the ground plan of what exists in every
country where there is a class of owners, with a great police force and
an army to protect their property, great numbers of servants to wait on
them, and masses of workers making luxuries for them, all supported by
the labor of the really useful workers who have to support themselves
as well. Whether an increase of population will make the country richer
or poorer depends, not on the natural fruitfulness of the earth, but
on whether the additional people are set to do useful work or not. If
they are, then the country will be richer. If, however, the additional
people are set to work unproductively for the property owners as
servants, or armed guardians of the rights of property, or in any of
the other callings and professions to minister only to the owners,
then the country will be poorer, though the property owners may become
richer, the display of diamonds and fine dresses and cars much more
splendid, and the servants and other retainers receiving higher wages
and more schooling than their grandfathers.

In the natural course of things the more people there are in a country
the richer it ought to be, because of the advantage of division of
labor. Division of labor means that instead of every man having to
do everything for himself like Robinson Crusoe, the different sorts
of work are done by different sets of men, who become very quick and
skilful at their job by doing nothing else. Also their work can be
directed by others who give their whole minds to directing it. The time
saved in this way can be used in making machinery, roads, and all sorts
of contrivances for saving more time and labor later on. That is how
twenty workers can produce more than twice what ten can produce, and a
hundred much more than five times what twenty can produce. If wealth
and the labor of producing it were equally shared, a population of a
hundred would be much better off than a population of ten, and so on up
to modern populations of millions, which ought to be enormously better
off than the old communities of thousands. The fact that they are
either very little better off or sometimes actually worse off, is due
wholly to the idlers and idlers’ parasites who are plundering them as
we plunder the poor bees.

I must not, however, let you believe that if we all shared equally the
increase of wealth per head could go on for ever. Human beings can
multiply very fast under favorable conditions. A single pair, if their
posterity managed their affairs well enough to avoid war, pestilence,
and premature death, might have twenty million descendants alive at
the end of four hundred years. If all the couples now alive were to
multiply at that rate there would soon not be standing room on the
earth, much less fields to grow wheat in. There is a limit to the
quantity of food the earth can yield to labor; and if there were no
limit to the increase of population we should at last find that instead
of increasing our shares of food by breeding more human beings, we
should diminish them.

Though we now cultivate the skies by extracting nitrogen from the air,
other considerations than that of food will check our multiplication.
Man does not live by bread alone; and it is possible for people to
be overfed and overcrowded at the same time. After the war there was
no exceptional scarcity of food in England; but there was a terrible
scarcity of houses. Our cities are monstrously overcrowded: to provide
every family they contain with a comfortably spacious house and garden
some of our streets would have to be spread over miles of country. Some
day we may have to make up our minds how many people we need to keep us
all healthy, and stick to that number until we see reason to change it.

In this matter the women who have to bear the children must be
considered. It is possible for a woman to bear twenty children. In
certain country districts in Europe families of fifteen are not
uncommon enough to be regarded as extraordinary. But though a properly
cared-for woman of vigorous constitution, with her confinements
reasonably spaced out, can apparently stand this strain without
permanent disablement or damage, and remain as well and strong as
women who have borne no children at all, yet the bearing of each
child involves a long period of discomfort and sickness, culminating
in temporary disablement, severe pain, and a risk of death. The
father escapes this; but at present he has to earn wages to support
the children while they are growing; and though there may be plenty
of employment for them when they come to working age, that does not
provide any bread and butter for them in the meantime. Consequently an
increase of population that benefits the country and the world may be
an almost unbearable burden to the parents. They therefore restrict
their families to the number the father can afford, or the mother cares
to bear, except when they do not know how this can be done, or are
forbidden by their religion to practise birth control.

This has a very important bearing on the equal distribution of income.
To understand this I must go back a little, and seem to change the
subject; but the connexion will soon be plain.

If the workers in all occupations are to receive the same income, how
are we to deal with the fact that though the cost of living is the
same for all workers, whether they are philosophers or farm hands, the
cost of their work varies very greatly. A woman in the course of a
day’s work may use up a reel of cotton costing a few pence whilst her
husband, if a scientific worker, may require some radium, which costs
£16,000 an ounce. The gunners on the battle-fields in Flanders, working
at a dreadful risk of life and limb, needed very little money for
themselves; but the cost of the materials they used up in a single day
was prodigious. If they had had to pay on the nail, out of their wages,
for the cannons they wore out and the shells they fired, there would
have been no war.

This inequality of expense cannot be got over by any sort of adjustment
of leisure or holidays or privileges of any sort between worker and
worker. Still less can it be met by unequal wages. Even the maddest
upholder of our wage system will not propose that the man who works
a steam hammer costing many thousands of pounds should have wages
proportionately higher than the wages of the navvy who swings a
sledgehammer or the woodcutter who wields a beetle costing shillings
instead of thousands of pounds. The worker cannot bear the cost of his
materials and implements if he is to have only an equal share of the
national income: he must either be supplied with them, or repaid for
them in the cases in which he has to supply them at his own cost.

Applying this to the labor of child-bearing and the cost of supporting
children, it is clear that the expenses of both should not be borne
by the parents. At present they are repaid very insufficiently by
maternity benefits and by an allowance off income tax for each child
in the family. Under a system of equal division of income each child
would be entitled to its share from birth; and the parents would be
the trustees for the children, subject, no doubt, to the obligation of
satisfying the Public Trustee, if any neglect were reported, that the
children were getting the full benefit of their incomes. In this way a
family of growing children would always be in easy circumstances; and
the mother could face the labor and risk of bearing them for the sake
of motherhood’s natural privileges, dignities, and satisfaction.

But it is conceivable that such pleasant conditions, combined with
early marriages and the disappearance of the present terrible infant
mortality, would lead to a greater increase of population than might
seem desirable, or, what is equally inconvenient, a faster increase;
for the pace of the increase is very important: it might be desirable
to double the population in a hundred years and very undesirable to
double it in fifty. Thus it may become necessary to control our numbers
purposely in new ways.

What are the present ways? How is the population kept down to the
numbers our system of unequal sharing can support? They are mostly very
dreadful and wicked ways. They include war, pestilence, and poverty
that causes multitudes of children to die of bad feeding and clothing
and housing before they are a year old. Operating side by side with
these horrors, we have the practice of artificial birth control by
the parents on such an enormous scale that among the educated classes
which resort to it, including the skilled artisan class, population
is actually decreasing seriously. In France the Government, dreading
a dearth of soldiers, urges the people to have more children to make
up a deficiency of twenty millions as compared with Germany. To such
restrictions on population must be added the criminal practice of
abortion, which is terribly prevalent, and, in eastern countries, the
more straightforward custom of frank infanticide by literally throwing
away the unwanted child, especially the female child, and leaving it
to perish of exposure. The humane Mahomet could not convince the Arabs
that this was sinful; but he told them that on the Day of Judgment the
female child that was exposed would rise up and ask “What fault did I
commit?” In spite of Mahomet children are still exposed in Asia; and
when exposure is effectually prevented by law as it is in nominally
Christian countries, the unwanted children die in such numbers from
neglect, starvation, and ill-usage, that they, too, may well ask on the
Day of Judgment “Would it not have been kinder to expose us?”

Of all these methods of keeping down the population there can be
no doubt that artificial birth control: that is, the prevention of
conception, is the most humane and civilized, and by far the least
demoralizing. Bishops and cardinals have denounced it as sinful; but
their authority in the matter is shaken by their subjection to the
tradition of the early Christians, for whom there was no population
question. They believed also that marriage is sinful in itself, whether
conception be prevented or not. Thus our Churchmen are obliged to
start by assuming that sex is a curse imposed on us by the original
sin of Eve. But we do not get rid of a fact by calling it a curse and
trying to ignore it. We must face it with one eye on the alternatives
to birth control, and the other on the realities of our sexual nature.
The practical question for the mass of mankind is not whether the
population shall be kept down or not, but whether it shall be kept down
by preventing the conception of children or by bringing them into the
world and then slaughtering them by abortion, exposure, starvation,
neglect, ill-usage, plague, pestilence and famine, battle, murder
and sudden death. I defy any bishop or cardinal to choose the latter
alternatives. St Paul abhorred marriage; but he said “Better marry than
burn”. Our bishops and cardinals may abhor contraception (so do I, by
the way); but which of them would not say, when put to it like St Paul,
“Better have no children, by whatever means, than have them and kill
them as we are killing them at present”.

We have seen how our present unequal sharing of the national income has
forced this question of Birth Control prematurely on us whilst there
is still plenty of room left in the world. Canada and Australia seem
underpopulated; but the Australians say that their waste spaces are
uninhabitable, though the overcrowded Japanese are restrained only
by our military prestige from saying “Well, if you will not inhabit
them, we will”. We have birth control even where the Churches struggle
hardest against it. The only thing that can check it is the abolition
of the artificial poverty that has produced it prematurely. As equal
division of income can do this, those who dislike birth control and
would defer it to the latest possible moment, have that reason as well
as all the others we have studied, for advocating equal division.

When the last possible moment comes, nobody can foresee how the
necessary restriction of the population will be effected. It may be
that Nature will interfere and take the matter out of our hands. This
possibility is suggested by the fact that the number of children born
seems to vary according to the need for them. When they are exposed to
such dangers and hard conditions that very few of them can be expected
to survive, Nature, without any artificial interference, produces
enormous numbers to provide against the complete extinction of the
species. We have all heard of the codfish with its million eggs and of
the queen bee laying four thousand eggs a day. Human beings are less
prolific; but even within human limits Nature apparently distinguishes
between poor, undernourished, uncultivated, defective people whose
children die early and in great numbers, and people who are fully
cultivated mentally and physically. The defectives are appallingly
prolific: the others have fewer children even when they do not practise
birth control. It is one of the troubles of our present civilization
that the inferior stocks are outbreeding the superior ones. But the
inferior stocks are really starved stocks, slum stocks, stocks not
merely uncultivated but degraded by their wretched circumstances. By
getting rid of poverty we should get rid of these circumstances and of
the inferior stocks they produce; and it is not at all unlikely that in
doing so we should get rid of the exaggerated fertility by which Nature
tries to set off the terrible infant mortality among them.

For if Nature can and does increase fertility to prevent the extinction
of a species by excessive mortality, need we doubt that she can and
will decrease it to prevent its extinction by overcrowding? It is
certain that she does, in a mysterious way, respond to our necessities,
or rather to her own. But her way is one that we do not understand.
The people who say that if we improve the condition of the world it
will be overpopulated are only pretending to understand it. If the
Socialists were to say positively that Nature will keep the population
within bounds under Socialism without artificial birth control, they
would be equally pretending to understand it. The sensible course
is to improve the condition of the world and see what will happen,
or, as some would say, trust in God that evil will not come out of
good. All that concerns us at present is that as the overpopulation
difficulty has not yet arisen except in the artificial form produced
by our unequal distribution of income, and curable by a better
distribution, it would be ridiculous to refrain from making ourselves
more comfortable on the ground that we may find ourselves getting
uncomfortable again later on. We should never do anything at all if we
listened to the people who tell us that the sun is cooling, or the end
of the world coming next year, or the increase of population going to
eat us off the face of the earth, or, generally, that all is vanity and
vexation of spirit. It would be quite sensible to say “Let us eat and
drink; for tomorrow we die” if only we were certain about tomorrow; but
it would be foolish anyhow to say “It is not worth while to live today;
for we shall die tomorrow”. It is just like saying “It will be all the
same a thousand years hence” as lazy people do when they have neglected
their duties. The fact is that the earth can accommodate its present
population more comfortably than it does or ever did; and whilst we
last we may as well make ourselves as comfortable as we can.

Note that as long as two persons can produce more than twice as much
as one, and two million very much more than twice as much as one
million, the earth is said by the political economists to be under the
Law of Increasing Return. And if ever we reach a point when there will
be more people than the earth can feed properly, and the next child
born will make the whole world poorer, then the earth will be under
the Law of Diminishing Return. If any gentleman tries to persuade you
that the earth is now under the Law of Diminishing Return you may
safely conclude that he has been told to say so at a university for
the sons of the rich, who would like you to believe that their riches,
and the poverty of the rest, are brought about by an eternal and
unchangeable law of Nature instead of by an artificial and disastrous
misdistribution of the national income which we can remedy.

All the same, do not overlook the fact that there may be overpopulation
in spots whilst the world as a whole is underpopulated. A boat in
mid ocean, containing ten castaways, a pint of water, and a pound
of biscuits, is terribly overpopulated. The cottage of a laborer
with thirty shillings a week and eight children is overpopulated. A
tenement house with twelve rooms and fifty people living in them is
overpopulated. London is abominably overpopulated. Therefore, though
there is no world population question, and the world is under the law
of increasing return, there are innumerable spots in the world which
are overpopulated and under the law of diminishing return. Equality of
income would enable the unfortunate denizens of these plague spots to
escape from the slavery of diminishing returns to the prosperity of
increasing returns.




26

THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM


We have now disposed of the only common objections to equal division
of income not dealt with in our earlier examination of the various
ways in which income is or might be unequally divided. And we have
done the whole business without bothering over what the Socialists
say, or quoting any of their books. You see how any intelligent woman,
sitting down to decide for herself how the national income should be
distributed, and without having ever heard the word Socialism or read
a line by any Socialist writer, may be driven by her own common sense
and knowledge of the world to the conclusion that the equal plan is the
only permanent and prosperous one possible in a free community. If you
could find a better way out of our present confusion and misery for us,
you would be hailed as one of the greatest of discoverers.

“And if I cannot,” you will say, “I suppose you will tell me I must
join the Socialists!”

Dear lady: have you ever read St Augustine? If you have, you will
remember that he had to admit that the early Christians were a very
mixed lot, and that some of them were more addicted to blackening their
wives’ eyes for tempting them, and wrecking the temples of the pagans,
than to carrying out the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed
you must have noticed that we modern Christians are still a very mixed
lot, and that it is necessary to hang a certain number of us every
year for our country’s good. Now I will be as frank as St Augustine,
and admit that the professed Socialists are also a very mixed lot, and
that if joining them meant inviting them indiscriminately to tea I
should strongly advise you not to do it, as they are just like other
people, which means that some of them steal spoons when they get the
chance. The nice ones are very nice; the general run are no worse than
their neighbors; and the undesirable ones include some of the most
thoroughpaced rascals you could meet anywhere. But what better can you
expect from any political party you could join? You are, I hope, on the
side of the angels; but you cannot join them until you die; and in the
meantime you must put up with mere Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists,
Protestants, Catholics, Dissenters, and other groups of mortal women
and men, very mixed lots all of them, so that when you join them you
have to pick your company just as carefully as if they had no labels
and were entire strangers to you. Carlyle lumped them all as mostly
fools; and who can deny that, on the whole, they deserve it?

But, after all, you are an Intelligent Woman, and know this as well as
I do. What you may be a little less prepared for is that there are a
great many people who call themselves Socialists who do not clearly and
thoroughly know what Socialism is, and would be shocked and horrified
if you told them that you were in favor of dividing-up the income of
the country equally between everybody, making no distinction between
lords and laborers, babies in arms and able-bodied adults, drunkards
and teetotallers, archbishops and sextons, sinners and saints. They
would assure you that all this is a mere ignorant delusion of the
man in the street, and that no educated Socialist believes such
crazy nonsense. What they want, they will tell you, is equality of
opportunity, by which I suppose they mean that Capitalism will not
matter if everyone has an equal opportunity of becoming a Capitalist,
though how that equality of opportunity can be established without
equality of income they cannot explain. Equality of opportunity is
impossible. Give your son a fountain pen and a ream of paper, and tell
him that he now has an equal opportunity with me of writing plays,
and see what he will say to you! Do not let yourself be deceived by
such phrases, or by protestations that you need not fear Socialism
because it does not really mean Socialism. It does; and Socialism means
equality of income and nothing else. The other things are only its
conditions or its consequences.

You may, if you have a taste that way, read all the books that
have been written to explain Socialism. You can study the Utopian
Socialism of Sir Thomas More, the Theocratic Socialism of the Incas,
the speculations of Saint Simon, the Communism of Fourier and Robert
Owen, the so-called Scientific Socialism of Karl Marx, the Christian
Socialism of Canon Kingsley and the Rev. F. D. Maurice, William
Morris’s News from Nowhere (a masterpiece of literary art which you
should read anyhow), the Constitutional Socialism of Sidney and
Beatrice Webb and of the highly respectable Fabian Society, and several
fancy Socialisms preached by young men who have not yet had time to
become celebrated. But clever as they all are, if they do not mean
equality of income they mean nothing that will save civilization. The
rule that subsistence comes first and virtue afterwards is as old as
Aristotle and as new as this book. The Communism of Christ, of Plato,
and of the great religious orders, all take equality in material
subsistence for granted as the first condition of establishing the
Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Whoever has reached this conclusion, by
whatever path, is a Socialist; and whoever has not reached it is no
Socialist, though he or she may profess Socialism or Communism in
passionate harangues from one end of the country to the other, and even
suffer martyrdom for it.

So now you know, whether you agree with it or not, exactly what
Socialism is, and why it is advocated so widely by thoughtful and
experienced people in all classes. Also, you can distinguish between
the genuine Socialists, and the curious collection of Anarchists,
Syndicalists, Nationalists, Radicals, and malcontents of all sorts
who are ignorantly classed as Socialists or Communists or Bolshevists
because they are all hostile to the existing state of things, as well
as the professional politicians, or Careerists, who are deserting
Liberalism for Labor because they think the Liberal ship is sinking.
And you are qualified to take at its proper value the nonsense that
is talked and written every day by anti-Socialist politicians and
journalists who have never given five minutes serious thought to the
subject, and who trot round imaginary Bolshies as boys trot round Guys
on the fifth of November.




27

PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS


And now that you know what Socialism is, let me give you a warning,
with an apology in advance if the warning is unnecessary. English
people, especially English ladies, are so individualistically brought
up that the moment they are convinced that anything is right they are
apt to announce that they are going to begin practising it at once, and
to order their children and servants to do the same. I have known women
of exceptional natural intelligence and energy who believed firmly
that the world can be made good by independent displays of coercive
personal righteousness. When they became convinced of the righteousness
of equality, they proceeded to do ridiculous things like commanding
their servants to take their meals with the family (forgetting that the
servants had not bargained for their intimacy and might strongly object
to it), with Heaven knows what other foolishness, until the servants
gave notice, and their husbands threatened to run away, and sometimes
even did.

It is perhaps natural that ignorant poor women should imagine that
inequality is the fault of the rich women. What is more surprising is
that many rich women, though they ought to know better than anybody
that a woman can no more help being born rich than born poor, feel
guilty and ashamed of their wealth, and plunge into almsgiving to
relieve their sickly consciences. They often conceive Socialism as a
charitable enterprise for the benefit of the poor. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Socialism abhors poverty, and would abolish
the poor. A hearty dislike and disapproval of poor people as such is
the first qualification of a good Equalizer. Under Socialism people
would be prosecuted for being poor as they are now for being naked.
Socialism loathes almsgiving, not only sentimentally because it fills
the paupers with humiliation, the patrons with evil pride, and both
with hatred, but because in a country justly and providently managed
there could be neither excuse for it on the pauper’s part nor occasion
for it on the patron’s. Those who like playing the good Samaritan
should remember that you cannot have good Samaritans without thieves.
Saviors and rescuers may be splendid figures in hagiography and
romance; but as they could not exist without sinners and victims they
are bad symptoms.

The virtues that feed on suffering are very questionable virtues.
There are people who positively wallow in hospitals and charitable
societies and Relief Funds and the like, yet who, if the need for their
charitable exercises were removed, could spend their energy to great
advantage in improving their own manners and learning to mind their
own business. There will always be plenty of need in the world for
kindness; but it should not be wasted on preventible starvation and
disease. Keeping such horrors in existence for the sake of exercising
our sympathies is like setting our houses on fire to exercise the vigor
and daring of our fire brigades. It is the people who hate poverty, not
those who sympathize with it, who will put an end to it. Almsgiving,
though it cannot be stopped at present, as without it we should have
hunger riots, and possibly revolution, is an evil. At present we give
the unemployed a dole to support them, not for love of them, but
because if we left them to starve they would begin by breaking our
windows and end by looting our shops and burning our houses.

It is true that a third of the money has come directly out of their
own pockets; but the way in which it is repaid to them is none the
less demoralizing. They find out that whether they contribute or not,
the rich will pay ransom all the same. In ancient Rome the unemployed
demanded not only bread to feed them but gladiator shows to keep them
amused (_panem et circenses_); and the result was that Rome became
crowded with playboys who would not work at all, and were fed and
amused with money taken from the provinces. That was the beginning
of the end of ancient Rome. We may come to bread and football (or
prize-fights) yet: indeed the dole has brought us to the bread already.
There is not even the blessing of kindness on it; for we all grudge the
dole (it comes out of all our pockets) and would stop it tomorrow if
we dared.

Equalization of Income will be brought about, not by every woman making
it her private business, but by every woman making it her public
business: that is, by law. And it will not be by a single law, but a
long series of laws. These laws will not be commandments saying thou
shalt or thou shalt not. The Ten Commandments gave the Israelites a
set of precepts which none of their laws were to violate; but the
commandments were politically useless until an elaborate set of laws
and institutions had been provided to give effect to them. The first
and last commandment of Socialism is “Thou shalt not have a greater or
less income than thy neighbor”; but before such a commandment can be
even approximately obeyed we shall have not only to pass hundreds of
new Acts of Parliament and repeal hundreds of old ones, but to invent
and organize new Government departments; train and employ no end of
women and men as public servants; educate children to look at their
country’s affairs in a new way; and struggle at every step with the
opposition of ignorance, stupidity, custom, prejudice, and the vested
interests of the rich.

Imagine a Socialist Government elected by an overwhelming majority
of people who have read the preceding chapters of this book and been
convinced by them, but not otherwise prepared for any change. Imagine
it confronted with a starving woman. The woman says “I want work, not
charity”. The Government, not having any work for her, replies “Read
Shaw; and you will understand all about it”. The woman will say “I am
too hungry to read Shaw, even if I considered him an edifying author.
Will you please give me some food, and a job to enable me to pay for it
honestly?” What could the Government do but confess that it had no job
to give her, and offer her a dole, just as at present.

Until the Government has acquired all the powers of employment that the
private employers now possess, it can give nothing to starving women,
but outdoor relief with money taken by taxation from the employers and
their landlords and financiers, which is just what any unsocialist
government does. To acquire those powers it must itself become the
national landlord, the national financier, and the national employer.
In other words, it cannot distribute the national income equally
until it, instead of the private owners, has the national income to
distribute. Until it has done so you cannot practise Socialism even
if you want to: you may even be severely punished for trying. You may
agitate and vote for all the steps by which equalization of income will
be reached; but in your private life you cannot do otherwise than you
have to do at present: that is, keep your social rank (know your place,
as it is called), paying or receiving the usual wages, investing your
money to the best advantage, and so forth.

You see, it is one thing to understand the aim of Socialism, and
quite another to carry it into practice, or even to see how it can
or ever could be carried into practice. Jesus tells you to take no
thought for the morrow’s dinner or dress. Matthew Arnold tells you
to choose equality. But these are commandments without laws. How can
you possibly obey them at present? To take no thought for the morrow
as we now are is to become a tramp; and nobody can persuade a really
intelligent woman that the problems of civilization can be solved by
tramps. As to choosing equality, let us choose it by all means; but
how? A woman cannot go into the streets to rifle the pockets of those
who have more money than she has, and give money away to those who
have less: the police would soon stop that, and pass her on from the
prison cell to the lunatic asylum. She knows that there are things that
the Government may do by law that no private person could be allowed
to do. The Government may say to Mrs Jobson “If you murder Mrs Dobson
(or anyone else) you will be hanged”. But if Mrs Dobson’s husband said
to Mrs Jobson “If you murder my wife I will strangle you” he would be
threatening to commit a crime, and could be severely punished for it,
no matter how odious and dangerous Mrs Jobson might be. In America,
crowds sometimes take criminals out of the hands of the law and lynch
them. If they attempted to do that in England they would be dispersed
by the police, or shot down by the soldiers, no matter how wicked the
criminal and how natural their indignation at the crime.

The first thing civilized people have to learn politically is that they
must not take the law into their own hands. Socialism is from beginning
to end a matter of law. It will have to make idlers work; but it must
not allow private persons to take this obligation on themselves. For
instance, an Intelligent Woman, having to deal with a lazy slut, might
feel strongly tempted to take up the nearest broomstick and say “If you
dont get on with your work and do your fair share of it I will lambaste
you with this stick until you are black and blue”. That occasionally
happens at present. But such a threat, and much more its execution, is
a worse crime than idleness, however richly the slattern may deserve
the thrashing. The remedy must be a legal remedy. If the slattern is to
be whacked it must be done by order of a court of law, by an officer of
the law, after a fair trial by law. Otherwise life would be unbearable;
for if we were all allowed to take the law into our own hands as we
pleased, no woman could walk down the street without risk of having her
hat torn off and stamped on by some æsthete who happened to think it
unbecoming, or her silk stockings tarred by some fanatic who considers
women’s legs indecent, not to mention mobs of such people.

Besides, the Intelligent Woman might not be stronger than the lazy one;
and in that case the lazy one might take the broomstick and whack the
intelligent one for working too hard and thereby causing more to be
expected from the lazy ones. That, also, has often been done by too
zealous Trade Unionists.

I need not labor this point any more. Should you become a convert to
Socialism you will not be committed to any change in your private
life, nor indeed will you find yourself able to make any change that
would be of the smallest use in that direction. The discussions in the
papers as to whether a Socialist Prime Minister should keep a motor
car, or a Socialist playwright receive fees for allowing his plays to
be performed, or Socialist landlords and capitalists charge rent for
their land or interest on their capital, or a Socialist of any sort
refrain from selling all that she has and giving it to the poor (quite
the most mischievous thing she could possibly do with it), are all
disgraceful displays of ignorance not only of Socialism, but of common
civilization.




28

CAPITALISM


Nobody who does not understand Capitalism can change it into Socialism,
or have clear notions of how Socialism will work. Therefore we shall
have to study Capitalism as carefully as Socialism. To begin with,
the word Capitalism is misleading. The proper name of our system
is Proletarianism. When practically every disinterested person who
understands our system wants to put an end to it because it wastes
capital so monstrously that most of us are as poor as church mice, it
darkens counsel to call it Capitalism. It sets people thinking that
Socialists want to destroy capital, and believe that they could do
without it: in short, that they are worse fools than their neighbors.

Unfortunately that is exactly what the owners of the newspapers want
you to think about Socialists, whilst at the same time they would
persuade you that the British people are a free and independent race
who would scorn to be proletarians (except a few drunken rascals and
Russians and professional agitators): therefore they carefully avoid
the obnoxious word Proletarianism and stick to the flattering title
of Capitalism, which suggests that the capitalists are defending that
necessary thing, Capital.

However, I must take names as I find them; and so must you. Let it be
understood between us, then, that when we say Capitalism we mean the
system by which the land of the country is in the hands, not of the
nation, but of private persons called landlords, who can prevent anyone
from living on it or using it except on their own terms. Lawyers tell
you that there is no such thing as private property in land because
all the land belongs to the King, and can legally be “resumed” by him
at any moment. But as the King never resumes it nowadays, and the
freeholder can keep you off it, private property in land is a fact in
spite of the law.

The main advantage claimed for this arrangement is that it makes the
landholders rich enough to accumulate a fund of spare money called
capital. This fund is also private property. Consequently the entire
industry of the country, which could not exist without land and
capital, is private property. But as industry cannot exist without
labor, the owners must for their own sakes give employment to those
who are not owners (called proletarians), and must pay them enough
wages to keep them alive and enable them to marry and reproduce
themselves, though not enough to enable them ever to stop working
regularly.

In this way, provided the owners make it their duty to be selfish, and
always hire labor at the lowest possible wage, the industry of the
country will be kept going, and the people provided with a continuous
livelihood, yet kept under a continuous necessity to go on working
until they are worn out and fit only for the workhouse. It is fully
admitted, by those who understand this system, that it produces
enormous inequality of income, and that the cheapening of labor which
comes from increase of population must end in an appalling spread
of discontent, misery, crime, and disease, culminating in violent
rebellion, unless the population is checked at the point up to which
the owners can find employment for it; but the argument is that this
must be faced because human nature is so essentially selfish, and
so inaccessible to any motive except pecuniary gain, that no other
practicable way of building up a great modern civilization stands open
to us.

This doctrine used to be called the doctrine of The Manchester School.
But as the name became unpopular, it is now described generally as
Capitalism. Capitalism therefore means that the only duty of the
Government is to maintain private property in land and capital, and
to keep on foot an efficient police force and magistracy to enforce
all private contracts made by individuals in pursuance of their own
interests, besides, of course, keeping civil order and providing for
naval and military defence or adventure.

In opposition to Capitalism, Socialism insists that the first duty of
the Government is to maintain equality of income, and absolutely denies
any private right of property whatever. It would treat every contract
as one to which the nation is a party, with the nation’s welfare as
the predominant consideration, and would not for a moment tolerate
any contract the effect of which would be that one woman should work
herself to death prematurely in degrading poverty in order that another
should live idly and extravagantly on her labor. Thus it is quite true
that Socialism will abolish private property and freedom of contract:
indeed it has done so already to a much greater extent than people
realize; for the political struggle between Capitalism and Socialism
has been going on for a century past, during which Capitalism has been
yielding bit by bit to the public indignation roused by its worst
results, and accepting instalments of Socialism to palliate them.

Do not, by the way, let yourself be confused by the common use of
the term private property to denote personal possession. The law
distinguished between Real Property (lordship) and Personal Property
until the effort to make a distinction between property in land and
property in capital produced such a muddle that it was dropped in 1926.
Socialism, far from absurdly objecting to personal possessions, knows
them to be indispensable, and looks forward to a great increase of
them. But it is incompatible with real property.

To make the distinction clear let me illustrate. You call your umbrella
your private property, and your dinner your private property. But they
are not so: you hold them on public conditions. You may not do as you
please with them. You may not hit me on the head with your umbrella;
and you may not put rat poison into your dinner and kill me with it, or
even kill yourself; for suicide is a crime in British law. Your right
to the use and enjoyment of your umbrella and dinner is a personal
right, rigidly limited by public considerations. But if you own an
English or Scottish county you may drive the inhabitants off it into
the sea if they have nowhere else to go. You may drag a sick woman with
a newly born baby in her arms out of her house and dump her in the snow
on the public road for no better reason than that you can make more
money out of sheep and deer than out of women and men. You may prevent
a waterside village from building a steamboat pier for the convenience
of its trade because you think the pier would spoil the view from your
bedroom window, even though you never spend more than a fortnight a
year in that bedroom, and often do not come there for years together.
These are not fancy examples: they are things that have been done again
and again. They are much worse crimes than hitting me over the head
with your umbrella. And if you ask why landowners are allowed to do
with their land what you are not allowed to do with your umbrella, the
reply is that the land is private property, or, as the lawyers used
to say, real property, whilst the umbrella is only personal property.
So you will not be surprised to hear Socialists say that the sooner
private property is done away with the better.

Both Capitalism and Socialism claim that their object is the attainment
of the utmost possible welfare for mankind. It is in their practical
postulates for good government, their commandments if you like to call
them so, that they differ. These are, for Capitalism, the upholding
of private property in land and capital, the enforcement of private
contracts, and no other State interference with industry or business
except to keep civil order; and, for Socialism, the equalization of
income, which involves the complete substitution of personal for
private property and of publicly regulated contract for private
contract, with police interference whenever equality is threatened, and
complete regulation and control of industry and its products by the
State.

As far as political theory is concerned you could hardly have a flatter
contradiction and opposition than this; and when you look at our
Parliament you do in fact see two opposed parties, the Conservative
and the Labor, representing roughly Capitalism and Socialism. But
as members of Parliament are not required to have had any political
education, or indeed any education at all, only a very few of them,
who happen to have made a special study, such as you are making, of
social and political questions, understand the principles their parties
represent. Many of the Labor members are not Socialists. Many of the
Conservatives are feudal aristocrats, called Tories, who are as keen
on State interference with everything and everybody as the Socialists.
All of them are muddling along from one difficulty to another, settling
as best they can when they can put it off no longer, rather than on
any principle or system. The most you can say is that, as far as the
Conservative Party has a policy at all, it is a Capitalistic policy,
and as far as the Labor Party has a policy at all it is a Socialist
policy; so that if you wish to vote against Socialism you should vote
Conservative; and if you wish to vote against Capitalism you should
vote Labor. I put it in this way because it is not easy to induce
people to take the trouble to vote. We go to the polling station mostly
to vote against something instead of for anything.

We can now settle down to our examination of Capitalism as it comes to
our own doors. And, as we proceed, you must excuse the disadvantage I
am at in not knowing your private affairs. You may be a capitalist.
You may be a proletarian. You may be betwixt-and-between in the sense
of having an independent income sufficient to keep you, but not
sufficient to enable you to save any more capital. I shall have to
treat you sometimes as if you were so poor that the difference of a few
shillings a ton in the price of coal is a matter of serious importance
in your housekeeping, and sometimes as if you were so rich that your
chief anxiety is how to invest the thousands you have not been able to
spend.

There is no need for you to remain equally in the dark about me; and
you had better know whom you are dealing with. I am a landlord and
capitalist, rich enough to be supertaxed; and in addition I have a
special sort of property called literary property, for the use of which
I charge people exactly as a landlord charges rent for his land. I
object to inequality of income not as a man with a small income, but as
one with a middling big one. But I know what it is to be a proletarian,
and a poor one at that. I have worked in an office; and I have pulled
through years of professional unemployment, some of the hardest of them
at the expense of my mother. I have known the extremes of failure and
of success. The class in which I was born was that most unlucky of all
classes: the class that claims gentility and is expected to keep up its
appearances without more than the barest scrap and remnant of property
to do it on. I intrude these confidences on you because it is as well
that you be able to allow for my personal bias. The rich often write
about the poor, and the poor about the rich, without really knowing
what they are writing about. I know the whole gamut from personal
experience, short of actual hunger and homelessness, which should never
be experienced by anybody. If I cry sour grapes, you need not suspect
that they are only out of my reach: they are all in my hand at their
ripest and best.

So now let us come down to tin tacks.




29

YOUR SHOPPING


Ask yourself this question: “Where does unequal distribution of the
national income hit me in my everyday life?”

The answer is equally plain and practical. When you go out to do your
marketing it hits you in every purchase you make. For every head of
cabbage you buy, every loaf of bread, every shoulder of mutton, every
bottle of beer, every ton of coals, every bus or tram fare, every
theatre ticket, every visit from your doctor or charwoman, every word
of advice from your lawyer, you have to pay not only what they cost,
but an additional charge which is handed over finally to people who
have done nothing whatever for you.

Now though every intelligent woman knows that she cannot expect to have
goods or services for less than they cost in education, materials,
labor, management, distribution, and so on, no intelligent woman will
consent, if she knows about it and can help it, to pay over and above
this inevitable cost for the luxuries and extravagances of idlers,
especially if she finds great difficulty in making both ends meet by
working pretty hard herself.

To rid her of this overcharge, Socialists propose to secure goods for
everyone at cost price by nationalizing the industries which produce
them. This terrifies the idlers and their dependents so much that they
do their best to persuade the Intelligent Woman in their newspapers
and speeches and sermons that nationalization is an unnatural crime
which must utterly ruin the country. That is all nonsense. We have
plenty of nationalization at present; and nobody is any the worse for
it. The army and navy, the civil service, the posts and telegraphs and
telephones, the roads and bridges, the lighthouses and royal dockyards
and arsenals, are all nationalized services; and anyone declaring
that they were unnatural crimes and were ruining the country would be
transferred to the county lunatic asylum, also a national institution.

And we have much more nationalization than this in the form called
municipalization, the only difference being that instead of the central
Westminster Parliament owning and conducting the industry for the
nation, as it does the Post Office, the industry is owned and conducted
by City Corporations or County Councils for the local ratepayers. Thus
we get publicly owned electric light works, gas works, water works,
trams, baths and washhouses, public health services, libraries, picture
galleries, museums, lavatories, parks and piers with pavilions and
bands and stages, besides many other public services which concern the
maintenance of the Empire, and of which the public knows nothing.

Most of these things could be done by private companies and shops;
indeed many of them are done at present partly by private enterprise
and partly by public: for instance, in London private electric lighting
companies supply light in one district whilst the Borough Councils
provide a municipal supply in others. But the municipal supply is
cheaper, and with honest and capable management always must be cheaper
than the private company’s supply.

You will ask, why must it? Well, shortly, because it pays less for its
capital, less for its management, and nothing at all for profits, this
triple advantage going to the consumer in cheapness. But to take in
the whole scope of public enterprise as compared with private, let us
begin with the nationalized services. Why is it that the nationalized
Post Office is so much cheaper and more extensive than a private
letter-carrying company could make it, that private letter-carrying is
actually forbidden by law?

The reason is that the cost of carrying letters differs greatly as
between one letter and another. The cost of carrying a letter from
house to house in the same terrace is so small that it cannot be
expressed in money: it is as near nothing as does not matter: to get
a figure at all you would have to take the cost per thousand letters
instead of per letter. But the cost of carrying the same letter from
the Isle of Wight to San Francisco is considerable. It has to be
taken from the train to the ship to cross the Solent; changed into
another ship at Southampton or perhaps at Liverpool after another
train journey; carried across the Atlantic Ocean; then across the
continent of North America; and finally delivered at the opposite
side of the world to the Isle of Wight. You would naturally expect
the Postmaster-General to deliver a dozen letters for you in the
same terrace for a penny, and charge you a pound or so for sending
one letter to San Francisco. What he actually does for you is to
deliver the thirteen letters for three-halfpence apiece. By the time
these lines are in print he may be charging you only a penny apiece,
as he used to before the war. He charges you less than the cost of
sending the long-distance letter, and more than the cost of sending
the short-distance letters; but as he has thousands of short-distance
letters to send and only dozens of long-distance ones he can make up
for the undercharge on the long by an overcharge on the short. This
charging the same for all letters is called by economists averaging.
Others call it gaining on the swings what we lose on the roundabouts.

Our reason for forbidding private persons or companies to carry letters
is that if they were allowed to meddle, there would soon be companies
selling stamps at threepence a dozen to deliver letters within a few
miles. The Postmaster-General would get nothing but long-distance
letters: that is, the ones with a high cost of carriage. He would have
to put up the price of his stamps; and when we found that the advantage
of sending a letter a mile or two for a farthing was accompanied by
the disadvantage of paying sixpence or a shilling when we wanted to
write to someone ten miles off, we should feel that we had made a very
bad bargain. The only gainers would be the private companies who had
upset our system. And when they had upset it they would raise their
short-distance prices to the traditional penny, if not higher.

Now let us turn from this well-established nationalized service to one
that might be nationalized, and that concerns every housekeeper in the
country very intimately. I mean the coal supply. Coals have become a
necessary of life in our climate; and they are dreadfully dear. As
I write these lines it is midsummer, when coals are cheapest; and a
circular dated the 16th June offers me drawingroom coal for thirty-six
and threepence a ton, and anthracite for seventy shillings. That is
much more than the average cost. Why must I pay it? Why must you pay
it? Simply because the coal industry is not yet nationalized. It is
private property.

The cost price of coal varies from nothing to a pound a ton or more,
without counting what it costs to carry and distribute the coal
throughout the country. Perhaps you do not believe that coals can be
had for nothing; but I assure you that on the Sunderland coast when the
tide is out coals can be picked up on the shore by all comers as freely
as shells or seaweed. I have seen them with my own eyes doing it. A
sack and a back to carry it on is all that anybody needs there to set
up as a hawker of coals in a small way, or to fill the cellar at home.
Elsewhere on our coasts coal is so hard to reach that shafts have been
sunk and mines dug for miles under the sea, the coal not having been
reached until after twenty years work and a heavy expenditure of money.
Between these two extremes there are all sorts of mines, some yielding
so little coal at such high cost that they are worked only when the
price of coal rises to exceptional heights, and others in which coal
is so plentiful and easily got at that it is always profitable to work
them even when coal is unusually cheap. The money they cost to open up
varies from £350 to over a million. But the price you have to pay never
falls below the cost from the very dearest mines.

The reason is this. What makes prices high is scarcity: what
brings them down is plenty. Coals rise and fall in price just like
strawberries. They are dear when scarce, cheap when plenty.

Now an article can become scarce in several ways. One is by reducing
the quantity in the market by slackening or ceasing to manufacture.
Another is to increase the number of people who want to buy the
article and have money enough to pay for it. Yet another is to find
out new uses for it. A scarcity of coal can be produced not only by
the increase of the population, but by the people who formerly wanted
only a scuttle of coals for the kitchen fire wanting thousands of tons
for blast furnaces and ocean steamers. It is the scarcity produced
in these ways that has raised the price of coal to such a point that
it is now worth while to tunnel out mines under the sea. The cost of
such mines is heavy; but it is not incurred until the price of coal
has gone up sufficiently to cover it with a profit. If the price falls
enough to cut off that profit the mine stops working and is abandoned.
And what is the consequence of that? The stopping of the mine cuts off
the supply of coals it used to send to the market; and the scarcity
produced by the stoppage sends the price up again until it is high
enough to restart the mine without losing money by it.

In this way the Intelligent Woman (and also the unintelligent one)
finds herself condemned always to pay for her coals the full cost of
getting them from the very dearest mines in use, though she may know
that only the fag end of the supply comes from these mines, the rest
coming from mines where the cost is much lower. She will be assured,
if she remonstrates, that the price is barely sufficient to enable
some of the collieries to continue working; and this will be quite
true. What she will not be told, though it also is quite true, is that
the better mines are making excessive profits at her expense, to say
nothing of landlord’s royalties.

And here comes in another complication. The miners who hew out the coal
for wages in the better mines are paid no more than those in the worse
ones which can barely afford to keep going, because the men, unlike the
coal, can go from one mine to another, and what the poorest miner must
accept all must accept. Thus the wages of all the miners are kept down
to the poverty of the worst mines, just as the coal bills of all the
housekeepers are kept up to their high cost. The dissatisfied miners
strike, making coals scarcer and dearer than ever. The housekeepers
grumble, but cannot bring down prices, and blame “the middleman”.
Nobody is satisfied except the owners of the better mines.

The remedy here is, of course, the Postmaster-General’s plan of
averaging. If all the coal mines belonged to a Coalmaster-General he
could set off the good mines against the bad, and sell coal for the
average cost of getting the whole supply instead of having to sell
it for the cost of getting it in the very worst mines. To take fancy
figures, if half the supply cost a pound a ton to raise and the other
half cost half a crown a ton, he could sell at eleven and threepence
a ton instead of at a pound. A Commercial Coal Trust, though it might
come to own all the mines, would not do this, because its object would
be to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders instead of
to make coal as cheap for you as possible. There is only one owner who
would work in your interest, and not want to make any profit at all.
That owner would be a Government Coalmaster-General, acting for the
nation: that is, acting for you and all the other housekeepers and
users of coal.

Now you understand why you have the miners and the intelligent users
and buyers of coal demanding the nationalization of the coal mines,
and all the owners of the mines and the sellers of coal shrieking
that nationalization would mean waste, corruption, ruinously high
prices, the destruction of our commerce and industry, the end of our
empire, and anything else they can think of in their dismay at the
prospect of losing the profits they make by compelling us to pay a
great deal more for our coal than it costs. But however recklessly
they shriek, they are careful never to mention the real point of the
whole business: that is, the procuring of coal for everybody at cost
price. To keep the attention of the public off that, they will declare
that nationalization is a wicked invention of the Bolshevists, and
that the British Government is so corrupt and incompetent that it
could not manage a baked potato stand honestly and capably, much less
a coal mine. You may read ten debates in the House of Commons on coal
nationalization, and a hundred newspaper articles on those debates,
without ever learning what I have just told you about the difference
between the mines, and how by averaging the cost of working them the
price of your coals could be greatly reduced. Once these facts are
known and understood there is no room for further argument: every
purchaser of coal becomes a nationalizer at once; though every coal
proprietor is ready to spend the last penny he can spare to discredit
and prevent nationalization.

You see then how separate private property in coal mines hits a woman
every time she buys coals. Well, it hits her in precisely the same way
every time she buys a pair of scissors or a set of knives and forks
or a flat-iron, because iron mines and silver mines differ like coal
mines. It hits her every time she buys a loaf of bread, because wheat
farms differ in fertility just like mines: a bushel of wheat will cost
much more to raise on one farm than on another. It hits her every time
she buys anything that is made in a factory, because factories differ
according to their distance from railways or canals or seaports or big
market towns or places where their raw materials are plentiful, or
where there is natural water power to drive their works. In every case
the shop price represents the cost of the article in the few mines and
factories where the cost of production is greatest. It never represents
the average cost taking one factory and one mine with another, which
is the real national cost. Thus she is kept poor in a rich country
because all the difference between the worst and the best in it is
skimmed off for the private owners of the mines and factories by simply
charging her more for everything she uses than the things cost. And
it is to save her from this monstrous imposition that the Socialists,
and many people who never dream of calling themselves Socialists,
propose that the mines and factories shall be made national property
instead of private property. The difference between the Socialist and
non-Socialist nationalizers is that the non-Socialists aim only at
cheap coal, whereas the Socialists have the ulterior object of bringing
the mines into national ownership and control so as to prevent their
remaining an instrument of inequality of income. On the immediate
practical question of nationalization they are agreed. That is how
Socialism can advance without a majority of professed Socialists in
Parliament, or even without any.

Note that the difference between the highest cost of production under
the worst circumstances and the lower costs under more favorable
circumstances is called by economists rent. Mining rents and rents of
copyrights and patent rights are called royalties; and most people call
nothing rent except what they pay for house and land. But rent is part
of the price of everything that has a price at all, except things that
are communized, and things that are produced under the most unfavorable
conditions.




30

YOUR TAXES


Besides buying things in the shops you have to pay rates, taxes,
telephone rent (if you have a telephone), and rent of house and land.
Let us examine this part of your expenditure, and see whether you get
hit here again and again.

People grumble a great deal about the rates, because they get nothing
across the counter for them; and what they do get they share with
everyone else, so that they have no sense of individual property in
it, as they have in their clothes and houses and furniture. But they
would not possess their clothes or their furniture or their houses very
long in peace but for the paved and lighted and policed streets, the
water supply and drainage, and all the other services the rates pay
for. The Intelligent Woman, when she begins to study these matters,
soon realizes that she gets better value for her rates than for any
other part of her expenditure, and that the municipal candidates who
ask for her vote on the ground that they are going to abolish or reduce
the rates (which they fortunately cannot do) are mostly either fools
or humbugs, if not both. And she has the satisfaction of knowing that
she gets these services as nearly as possible at their cost to the
local authority, which not only does not profiteer at her expense, but
does for nothing a great deal of directorial work that in any private
business would have to be paid for, and under present circumstances
ought to be paid for, in public business as well.

The same advantage can be claimed for taxes. Of all the public services
which you pay for in taxes to the Government it can be said that there
is no direct profiteering in them: you get them for what they cost the
Government: that is, for much less than you would have to pay if they
were private business concerns.

So far it would seem that when you pay your rates and taxes you escape
the exactions which pursue you whenever you spend money in any other
way. You are perhaps beginning to feel that the next time the collector
calls you will hear his knock with joy, and welcome him with the
beaming face of the willing giver.

I am sorry to spoil it all; but the truth is that Capitalism plunders
you through the Government and the municipalities and County Councils
as effectually as it does through the shopkeeper. It is not only
that the Government and the local authorities, in order to carry on
their public services, have to buy vast quantities of goods from
private profiteers who charge them more than cost price, and that this
overcharge is passed on to you as a ratepayer and taxpayer. Nor is
it that the Government of the country, acting for the people of the
country, cannot use the land of the country without paying some private
person heavily for leave to do so. There are ways of getting round
these overcharges, as, for instance, when the Government buys a piece
of land for its operations, but raises the money to pay for it by a tax
on rent which only the landlords pay, or when it raises capital by a
tax on unearned incomes. By this expedient it can, and sometimes does,
give you a complete and genuine cost price service. It can even give it
to you for nothing and make richer people pay for it.

But you are rated and taxed not only to pay for public services which
are equally useful to all, but for other things as well; and when you
come to these you may, if you are a rich woman, complain that you are
being plundered by Socialists for the benefit of the poor, or, if you
are a poor woman, that you are being plundered by Capitalists who
throw on the rents and taxes certain expenses which they should pay out
of their own pockets.

Let us see what foundation there is for such complaints. Let us begin
with the rich. By taxation rich people have a quarter or a third
of their incomes, and very rich people more than half, taken from
them by the Government, not for any specified public service, but as
pure nationalization (communization) of their income to that extent
without any compensation, and by simple coercion. This is now taken so
completely as a matter of course that the rich never dream of asking
for compensation, or refusing to pay until their goods are forcibly
seized, or even of calling it Bolshevik confiscation; and so we are apt
to talk as if such things never happened except in the imaginations
of wicked Communists; but they happen in Great Britain regularly
every January; and the Act authorizing them is brought in every April
by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Though reassuringly called the
Appropriation Act it is really an Expropriation Act.

There is nothing in the law or the Constitution, or in any custom or
tradition or parliamentary usage or any other part of our established
morality, to prevent this confiscated third or half being raised to
three-quarters, nine-tenths, or the whole. Besides this, when a very
rich person dies, the Government confiscates the entire income of the
property for the next eight years. The smallest taxable properties have
to give up their incomes to the Government for ten months, and the rest
for different periods between these extremes, in proportion to their
amount.

In addition, there are certain taxes paid by rich and poor alike,
called indirect taxes. Some of them are taxes on certain articles of
food, and on tobacco and spirits, which you pay in the shop when you
buy them, as part of the price. Others are stamp duties: twopence
if you give a receipt for £2 or more, sixpence if you make a simple
written agreement, hundreds of pounds on certain other documents which
propertyless people never use. None of these taxes are levied for a
named service like the police rate or the water rate: they are simple
transfers of income from private pockets to the national pocket, and,
as such, acts of pure Communism. It may surprise you to learn that even
without counting the taxes on food, which fall on all classes, the
private property thus communized already amounts to nearly a million a
day.

The rich may well gasp at the figure, and ask what does the Government
do with it all? What value do they get for this contribution which
appears so prodigious to most of us who have to count our incomes
in hundreds a year and not in millions a day? Well, the Government
provides an army and navy, a civil service, courts of law and so forth;
and, as we have seen, it provides them either at cost price or more
nearly at cost price than any commercial concern would. But over a
hundred million solid pounds of it are handed over every year in hard
cash in pensions and doles to the unfortunate people who have small
incomes or none.

This is pure redistribution of income: that is, pure Socialism. The
officers of the Government take the money from the rich and give it to
the poor because the poor have not enough and the rich have too much,
without regard to their personal merits. And here again there is no
constitutional limit to the process. I can remember a time when there
was no supertax, and the income tax was twopence in the pound instead
of four-and-sixpence or five shillings, and when Gladstone hoped to
abolish it altogether. Nobody dreamt then of using taxation as an
instrument for effecting a more equal distribution of income. Nowadays
it is one of the chief uses of taxation; and it could be carried to
complete equality without any change in our annual exchequer routine.

So far the poor have the better of the bargain. But some of the rich
do very well out of the taxes. By far the heaviest single item of
Government expenditure is the annual payment for the hire of the money
we borrowed for the war. It is all spent and gone; but we must go on
paying for the hire until we replace and repay it. Most of it was
borrowed from the rich, because they alone had any spare money to lend.
Consequently the Government takes a vast sum of money every year from
the whole body of rich, and immediately hands it back to those who
lent it money for the war. The effect of this transaction is simply to
redistribute income between the rich themselves. Those who lose by it
make a fuss about what they call the burden of the National Debt; but
the nation is not a penny the poorer for taking money from one bold
Briton and giving it to another. Whether the transfer is for better
or worse depends on whether it increases or diminishes the existing
inequality. Unfortunately, it is bound, on the whole, to increase it,
because the Government, instead of taking money from some capitalists
and dividing it among them all, is taking money from all capitalists
and dividing it among some of them. This is the real mischief of the
National Debt, which, in so far as it is owed to our own people, is
not a debt at all. To illustrate, one may say that an elephant does
not complain of being burdened because its legs have to carry its own
weight; but if all the weight were on one side instead of being equally
distributed between the legs, the elephant would hardly be able to
carry it, and would roll over on its back when it met the slightest
obstacle, which is very much what our trade does under our unequal
system.

It is sometimes said that the capitalists who lent the Government the
money for the war deserve the hire of it because they made sacrifices.
As I was one of them myself I can tell you without malice that this
is sentimental nonsense. They were the only people who were not
called on to make any sacrifice: on the contrary, they were offered
a gilt-edged investment at five per cent when they would have taken
four. The people who were blinded, maimed, or killed by the war were
those really sacrificed; and those who worked and fought were the real
saviors of the country; whilst the people who did nothing but seize
the national loaf that others had made, and take a big bite out of it
(they and their servants) before passing on what they left of it to
the soldiers, did no personal service at all: they only made the food
shortage still shorter. The reason for pampering them in this absurd
fashion was not for any service or merit on their part: it was the
special consideration we have to shew to spare money as such because
we are afraid there would not be any available if we did not pamper a
class by giving it more than it can spend. We shall have to go further
into this when we examine the nature of capital later on. Meanwhile, if
you had the misfortune to lose an eye during one of the air raids, or
if you lost your husband or son, or if you “did your bit” strenuously
throughout the war, and are now a taxpayer, it must seem to you, to say
the least, funny to have money taken from you by the Government and
handed over to some lady who did nothing but live as indulgently as
she could all the time. You will not easily be convinced that it would
have been a more dreadful thing for the Government to commandeer her
money than your husband’s limbs, or your son’s life. The utmost that
can be said is that it may have been more expedient.

One more example of how your taxes may be used to enrich profiteers
instead of to do you any service. At the beginning of the war, the
influence of the profiteers was so strong that they persuaded the
Government to allow them to make all the shells instead of having them
made in national factories. The result was that you were paying taxes
to keep workmen standing idle in Woolwich Arsenal at full wages in
order that the profiteering firms should have all the work at a profit.
You had to pay their workmen too, and the profit into the bargain. It
soon turned out that they could not make nearly enough shells. Those
they did make were unnecessarily expensive and not always explosive.
The result was an appalling slaughter of our young men in Flanders,
who were left almost defenceless in the trenches through the shortage
of munitions; and we were on the verge of being defeated by simple
extermination when the Government, taking the matter in hand itself,
opened national factories (you may have worked in some of them) in
which munitions were produced on such a scale that we have hardly
yet got rid of what was left of them when the war ended, besides
controlling the profiteers, teaching them their business (they did not
know even how to keep proper accounts, and were wasting money like
water), and limiting their profits drastically. And yet, in the face
of this experience (which was of course a tremendous triumph for the
advocates of nationalized industries), the war was no sooner at an end
than the capitalist papers began again with their foolish and corrupt
declarations that Governments are such incompetent and dishonest and
extravagant jobbers, and private firms so splendidly capable and
straightforward, that Governments must never do anything that private
firms can make profits by doing; and very soon all the national
factories were sold for an old song to the profiteers, and the national
workers were in the streets with the demobilized soldiers, living on
the dole, two millions strong.

This is only a sensational instance of something that is always going
on: namely, the wasting of your money by employing profiteering
contractors to do the work that could be done better by the
authorities themselves without charging you any profit.

You see therefore that when you pay rates and taxes you are not safe
from being charged not only the cost price of public services, but huge
sums which go to private employers as unnecessary or excessive profits,
to the landlords and capitalists whose land and capital these employers
use, and to those property owners who hold the War Loan and the other
stocks which represent the National Debt. But as you may also get back
some of it as a pensioner or a recipient of public relief in some form
or other, or as you may yourself be a holder of War Loan or Consols,
or a shareholder in one of the commercial concerns which get contracts
from the Government and the municipalities, it is impossible for me to
say whether, on the whole, you gain or lose. I can only say that the
chances are ten to one that you lose on balance; that is, that the rich
get more out of you through the Government than you get out of them. So
much for the taxes. Now for the rates.




31

YOUR RATES


The rates are not paid equally by everybody. The local authorities,
like the Government, have to recognize the fact that some people are
better able to pay than others, and make them pay accordingly. They do
this by calculating the rates on the value of the house occupied by the
ratepayer, and of his place of business, guessing that a person with
a house or shop worth a hundred a year will be richer than one with a
house or shop worth twenty, and rating him on the valuation.

Thus every rate is really a graduated income tax as well as a payment
for public services. Then there are the municipal debts as well as
the national debt; and as municipalities are as lazy and wasteful
as central governments in the way of giving public jobs out to
profiteering contractors, everything that happens with the taxes
happens with the rates as well on a smaller scale.

But there are other anomalies which rating brings out.

Just consider what happens when even the quite genuine part of our
national and municipal Communism, paying its way honestly by taxing and
rating, is applied, as we apply it, to people of whom some are very
poor and some are very rich. If a woman cannot afford to feed herself
well enough to nurse her baby properly she clearly cannot afford
to contribute to the maintenance of a stud of cream-colored ponies
in the stables of Buckingham Palace. If she lives with her husband
and children in a single room in a back-to-back dwelling in a slum,
hopelessly out of reach of the public parks of the great cities, with
their flowers and bands and rides and lakes and boats, it is rather
hard on her to have to pay a share of the cost of these places of
recreation, used largely by rich people whose horses and motor cars
shew that they could easily pay a charge for admission sufficient to
maintain the place without coming to her for a contribution.

In short, since communistic expenditure is compulsory expenditure,
enforced on everybody alike, it cannot be kept within everybody’s means
unless everybody has the same income. But the remedy is, not to abolish
the parks and the cream-colored ponies, and to tell the Prince of Wales
that he cannot have more than one suit of clothes until every poor
woman’s son has two, all of which is not only impossible but envious
and curmudgeonish, but to equalize incomes. In the meantime we must
pay our rates and taxes with the best grace we can, knowing that if we
tried to drag down public expenditure to the level of the worst private
poverty our lives would be unendurable even by savages.

This, however, does not apply to certain ways in which the ratepayer is
“exploited”. To exploit a person is to make money out of her without
giving her an equivalent return. Now practically all private employers
exploit the ratepayer more or less in a way that she never notices
unless she has studied the subject as we are studying it at present.
And the way they do it is this.

A woman who employs domestic servants gives regular employment to
most of them; but to some she gives only casual employment. The
housemaid and cook are in regular employment; the nurse is in temporary
employment; and the charwoman is in casual employment: that is, she is
taken on for a few hours or for a day, and then cast off to shift for
herself as best she can until she gets another equally short job. If
she is ill, none of her occasional employers need concern herself: and
when rich people die and make provision for their servants in their
wills, they never think of including a legacy for the charwoman.

Now no doubt it is very convenient to be able to pick up a woman
like a taxi for an hour or so, and then get rid of her without any
further responsibility by paying her a few shillings and turning her
into the street. But it means that when the charwoman is ill or out
of employment or getting so old that younger and stronger women are
preferred to her, somebody has to provide for her. And that somebody
is the ratepayer, who provides the outdoor relief and the workhouse,
besides, as taxpayer, the old age pension and part of the dole. If
the ratepayer did not do this the householder would have either to do
without the charwoman or pay her more. Even regular servants could not,
as at present, be discharged without pensions when they are worn out,
if the ratepayers made no provision for them. Thus the householder is
making the other ratepayers, many of whom do not employ charwomen, pay
part of the cost of her domestic service.

But this is perhaps not the most impressive case, because you, as an
experienced woman, can tell me that charwomen do not do so badly for
themselves; that they are hard to get; and that steady ones often have
their pick of several jobs, and make a compliment of taking one. But
think of the great industrial concerns which employ huge armies of
casuals. Take the dock companies for example. The men who load and
unload the ships are taken on by the hour in hundreds at a time; and
they never know whether there will be an hour’s work for them or eight
hours, or whether they will get two days in the week or six. I can
remember when they were paid twopence an hour, and how great a victory
they were supposed to have gained when they struck for sixpence an hour
and got it. The dock companies profit; but the men and their families
are nearly always living more or less on the rates.

Take the extreme case of this. The ratepayers have to maintain a
workhouse. If any man presents himself at that workhouse as a destitute
person, he must be taken in and lodged and fed and clothed. It is
an established practice with some men to live at the workhouse as
ablebodied paupers until they feel disposed for a night of drinking and
debauchery. Then they demand their discharge, and must be let out to
go about their business. They unload a ship; spend all the money they
earn in a reckless spree; and return to the workhouse next morning as
destitute persons to resume their residence there at the ratepayers’
expense. A woman can do the same when there are casual jobs within her
reach. This, I repeat, is the extreme case only: the decent respectable
laborers do not do it; but casual labor does not tend to make people
decent and respectable. If they were not careless, and did not keep up
their spirits and keep down their prudence by drinking more than is
good for them, they could not endure such worrying uncertainty.

Now, as it happens, dock labor is dangerous labor. In busy times in
big docks an accident happens about every twenty minutes. But the dock
company does not keep a hospital to mend its broken casuals. Why should
it? There is the Poor Law Infirmary, supported by the ratepayers, near
at hand, or a hospital supported by their charitable subscriptions; and
nothing is simpler than to carry the victim of the accident there to
be cured at the public expense without troubling the dock company. No
wonder the dock company chairmen and directors are often among our most
ardent advocates of public charity. With them it begins at home.

Another public institution kept by the ratepayers and taxpayers is
the prison, with its police force, its courts of law, its judges, and
all the rest of its very expensive retinue. An enormous proportion
of the offences they deal with are caused by drink. Now the trade
in drink is extremely profitable: so much so that in England it is
called _The_ Trade, which is short for The Trade of Trades. But why
is it profitable? Because the trader in drink takes all the money the
drunkard pays for his liquor, and when he is drunk throws him into the
street, leaving the ratepayer to pay for all the mischief he may do,
all the crimes he may commit, all the illness he may bring on himself
and his family, and all the poverty to which he may be reduced. If the
cost of these were charged against the drink trade instead of against
the police rates and poor rates, the profits of the trade would vanish
at once.

As it is, the trader gets all the takings; and the ratepayer stands
all the losses. That is why they made the trade unlawful in America.
They shut up the saloons (public houses), and found immediately that
they could shut up a good many of the prisons as well. But if they had
municipalized the drink traffic: that is, if the ratepayer had kept
the public house as well as the prison, the greatest care would have
been taken to discourage drunkenness, because drunkenness would have
produced a loss in the municipal accounts instead of a profit. As it
is, the ratepayer is being exploited outrageously by the drink trade,
and the whole nation weakened and demoralized in order that a handful
of people may become unnaturally rich. It is true that they rebuild our
tumble-down cathedrals for us occasionally; but then they expect to be
made peers for it. The bargain is an insanely bad one anyhow.

There is one more trick that can be played on you both by the
municipality and the Government. In spite of their obligation not to
profiteer, but to give you every service at cost price, they often do
profiteer quite openly, and actually boast of their profits as a proof
of their business efficiency. This takes place when you pay for the
service, not by a tax or a rate, but by the ordinary process of paying
for what you consume. Thus when you want a letter sent, you pay the
Government three halfpence across the counter for the job. When you
live where electric light is made and supplied by the municipality, you
do not pay for it in your rates: you pay so much for every unit you
consume.

I am sorry to have to add that the Postmaster-General takes advantage
of this to charge you more for carrying your letter than the average
cost of it to the Post Office. In this way he makes a profit which he
hands over to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who uses it to keep down
the income tax and supertax. You pay more that the income tax payers
may pay less. A fraction of your three halfpence goes into the pockets
of the millionaires. True, if you are an income tax payer you get a
scrap of it back yourself; but as most people do not pay income tax and
everybody buys at least a few postage stamps, the income tax payers
in effect exploit the purchasers of stamps. The principle is wrong,
and the practice a dangerous abuse, which is nevertheless applauded
and carried to greater and greater lengths as the Government adds
telegraphs to posts, telephones to telegraphs, and wireless to both.

In the case of a municipal electric lighting supply, I must tell you
that in spite of the fact that the municipality, unlike a private
company, has to begin paying off the cost of setting up its works from
the moment it borrows it, and must clear it all off within a certain
period, yet even when it does this and yet supplies electricity at
a lower price than the private companies, it makes a profit in spite
of itself. It applies the profit to a reduction of the rates; and the
ratepayers are so pleased by this, and so accustomed to think that a
business which makes profits must be a sound one, that the municipality
is tempted to make a profit on purpose, and even a big one, by charging
the consumer more than the supply costs. When this happens, it is
clear that the overcharged people who use electric light are paying
part of the rates of those who do not. Even if everybody used electric
light there would still be inequalities in the consumption of current.
A struggling shopkeeper, who must make his shop blaze with light to
attract custom, must have a heavier bill for electric light than much
richer people who have only their private houses to illuminate.

We must not spend any more time on your rates and taxes. If they were
entirely abolished (how popular that would be!) and their places taken
by profiteering charges for State and municipal services, the result
would be, not State and municipal Socialism but State and municipal
Capitalism. As it is, you can see how even in your rates, which ought
to be quite free from the idler’s toll, you can be and to some extent
are “exploited” just as you are in your ordinary shopping.




32

YOUR RENT


When we come from your rates and taxes to your rent, your grievance
is far clearer, because when you pay your rent you have to hand your
money directly to your exploiter to do what she or he likes with
instead of to a public treasurer who gives you value for part of
it in public service to yourself, and tells you nothing about the
remainder which goes to septuagenarians, paupers, ground landlords,
profiteering contractors, and so forth, some of whom are poorer than
you, which makes for equality of income and is therefore a move in the
right direction, and others richer, which aggravates inequality and is
therefore a move in the wrong direction.

Rent paying is simpler. If you rent a piece of land and work on it,
it is quite clear that the landlord is living on your earnings; and
you cannot prevent him, because the law gives him the power to turn
you off the land unless you pay him for leave to use it. You are so
used to this that it may never have struck you as extraordinary that
any private person should have the power to treat the earth as if it
belonged to him, though you would certainly think him mad if he claimed
to own the air or the sunlight or the sea. Besides, you may be paying
rent for a house; and it seems reasonable that the man who built the
house should be paid for it. But you can easily find out how much of
what you are paying is the value of the house. If you have insured the
house against fire (very likely the landlord makes you do this), you
know what it would cost to build the house, as that is the sum you have
insured it for. If you have not insured it, ask a builder what it would
cost to build a similar house. The interest you would have to pay every
year if you borrowed that sum on the security of the house is the value
of the house apart from the value of the land.

You will find that what you are paying exceeds this house value, unless
you are in the landlord’s employment or the house has become useless
for its original purpose: for instance, a medieval castle. In big
cities like London, it exceeds it so enormously that the value of the
building is hardly worth mentioning in comparison. In out-of-the-way
places the excess may be so small that it hardly goes beyond a
reasonable profit on the speculation of building the house. But in
the lump over the whole country it amounts to hundreds of millions of
pounds a year; and this is the price, not of the houses, but of the
landlords’ permission to live on the native earth on which the houses
have been built.

That any person should have the power to give or refuse an Englishwoman
permission to live in England, or indeed--for this is what it comes
to--to live at all, is so absurdly opposed to every possible conception
of natural justice that any lawyer will tell you that there is no such
thing as absolute private property in land, and that the King, in whom
the land is vested, may take it all back from its present holders if
he thinks fit. But as the landlords were for many centuries also both
the lawmakers and the kingmakers, they took care that, king or no king,
land should become in practice as much private property as anything
else, except that it cannot be bought and sold without paying fees to
lawyers and signing conveyances and other special legal documents. And
this private power over land has been bought and sold so often that you
never know whether your landlord will be a bold baron whose ancestors
have lived as petty kings on their tenants since the days of William
the Conqueror, or a poor widow who has invested all her hardearned
savings in a freehold.

Howbeit the fact remains that the case of landlord and tenant is one
in which an idle and possibly infamous person can with the police at
his back come quite openly to an industrious and respectable woman, and
say, “Hand me over a quarter of your earnings or get off the earth”.
The landlord can even refuse to accept a rent, and order her off the
earth unconditionally; and he sometimes does so; for you may remember
that in Scotland whole populations of fishermen and husbandmen with
their families have been driven from their country to the backwoods of
America because their landlords wanted the land on which they lived for
deer forests. In England people have been driven from the countryside
in multitudes to make room for sheep, because the sheep brought more
money to the landlord than the people. When the great London railway
stations, with their many acres of sidings, were first made, the houses
of great numbers of people were knocked down, and the inhabitants
driven into the streets; with the result that the whole neighbourhood
became so overcrowded that it was for many years a centre of disease
infecting all London. These things are still happening, and may happen
to you at any moment, in spite of a few laws which have been made to
protect tenants in towns in times of great scarcity of houses such as
that which followed the war, or in Ireland, where the Government bought
the agricultural land and resold it to the farmers, which eased matters
for a time, but in the long run can come to nothing but exchanging one
set of landlords for another.

It is in large towns and their neighbourhood that the Intelligent Woman
will find not only how much the landlord can make her give up to him,
but, oddly enough, how devoutly he believes in equality of income for
his tenants, if not for himself. In the middle of the town she will
find rents very high. If she or her husband has work to do there it
will occur to her that if she were to take a house in the suburbs,
where rents are lower, and use the tram to come to and fro, she might
save a little. But she will find that the landlord knows all about
that, and that though the further she moves out into the country the
lower the rents, yet the railway fare or tram fare will bring up the
yearly cost to what she would have to pay if she lived close enough in
to walk to her market or for her husband to walk to his work. Whatever
advantage she may try to gain, the landlord will snatch its full money
value from her sooner or later in rent, provided it is an advantage
open to everyone. It ought to be plain even to a fairly stupid woman
that if the land belongs to a few people they can make their own terms
with the rest, who must have land to live and work on or else starve on
the highway or be drowned in the sea. They can strip them of everything
except what is barely enough to keep them alive to earn money for the
landowner, and bring up families to do the same in the next generation.

It is easy to see how this foolish state of things comes about. As
long as there is plenty of land for everybody private property in land
works very well. The landholders are not preventing anyone else from
owning land like themselves; and they are quite justified in making
the strongest laws to protect themselves against having their lands
intruded on and their crops taken by rascals who want to reap where
they have not sown. But this state of things never lasts long with a
growing population, because at last all the land gets taken up, and
there is none left for the later comers. Even long before this happens
the best land is all taken up, and later comers find that they can do
as well by paying rent for the use of the best land as by owning poorer
land themselves, the amount of the rent being the difference between
the yield of the poorer land and the better. At this point the owners
of the best land can let their land; stop working; and live on the
rent: that is, on the labor of others, or, as they call it, by owning.

When big towns and great industries arise, the value of the land goes
up to enormous heights: in London bits of land with frontages on the
important streets sell at the rate of a million pounds an acre; and
men of business will pay the huge rents that make the land worth such
a figure, although there is land forty miles away to be had for next
to nothing. The land that was first let gets sublet, and yet again
and again sublet until there may be half a dozen leaseholders and
subleaseholders drawing more rent from it than the original ground
landlord; and the tenant who is in working occupation of it has to make
the money for all of them. Within the last hundred and fifty years
villages in Europe and pioneer encampments in the other continents
have grown into towns and cities making money by hundreds of millions;
yet most of the inhabitants whose work makes all this wealth are no
better off, and many of them decidedly worse off, than the villagers
or pioneer campers-out who occupied the place when it was not worth a
pound an acre. Meanwhile the landlords have become fabulously rich,
some of them taking every day, for doing nothing, more than many a
woman for sixty years drudgery.

And all this could have been avoided if we had only had the sense and
foresight to insist that the land should remain national property in
fact as well as in legal theory, and that all rents should be paid into
a common stock and used for public purposes. If that had been done
there need have been no slums, no ugly mean streets and buildings,
nor indeed any rates or taxes: everybody would benefit by the rent;
everybody would have to contribute to it by work; and no idler would
be able to live on the labor of others. The prosperity of our great
towns would be a real prosperity, shared by everyone, and not what it
is now, the enslavement and impoverishment of nine persons out of every
ten in order that the tenth should be idle and rich and extravagant
and useless. This evil is so glaring, so inexcusable by any sophistry
that the cleverest landlord can devise, that, long before Socialism was
heard of, a demand arose for the abolition of all taxation except the
taxation of landowners; and we still have among us people called Single
Taxers, who preach the same doctrine.




33

CAPITAL


Now the Single Taxers are not wrong in principle; but they are behind
the times. Out of landowning there has grown a lazier way of living on
other people’s labor without doing anything for them in return. Land
is not the only property that returns a rent to the owner. Spare money
will do the same if it is properly used. Spare money is called Capital;
its owner is called a capitalist; and our system of leaving all the
spare money in the country in private hands like the land is called
Capitalism. Until you understand Capitalism you do not understand human
society as it exists at present. You do not know the world, as the
saying is. You are living in a fool’s paradise; and Capitalism is doing
its best to keep you there. You may be happier in a fool’s paradise;
and as I must now proceed to explain Capitalism, you will read the rest
of this book at the risk of being made unhappy and rebellious, and
even of rushing into the streets with a red flag and making a greater
fool of yourself than Capitalism has ever made of you. On the other
hand, if you do not understand Capitalism you may easily be cheated out
of all your money, if you have any, or, if you have none, duped into
sacrificing yourself in all sorts of ways for the profit of mercenary
adventurers and philanthropic humbugs under the impression that you are
exercising the noblest virtues. Therefore I will risk letting you know
where you are and what is happening to you.

Nothing but a very narrow mind can save you from despair if you look at
all the poverty and misery around you and can see no way out of it all.
And if you had a narrow mind you would never have dreamt of buying this
book and reading it. Fortunately, you need not be afraid to face the
truth about our Capitalism. Once you understand it, you will see that
it is neither eternal nor even very old-established, neither incurable
nor even very hard to cure when you have diagnosed it scientifically. I
use the word cure because the civilization produced by Capitalism is a
disease due to shortsightedness and bad morals: and we should all have
died of it long ago if it were not that happily our society has been
built up on the ten commandments and the gospels and the reasonings
of jurists and philosophers, all of which are flatly opposed to the
principles of Capitalism. Capitalism, though it has destroyed many
ancient civilizations, and may destroy ours if we are not careful, is
with us quite a recent heresy, hardly two hundred years old at its
worst, though the sins it has let loose and glorified are the seven
deadly ones, which are as old as human nature.

And now I hear you say “My gracious goodness me, what on the face of
the earth has all this to do with the possession of spare money by
ordinary ladies and gentlemen, which you say is all that Capitalism
is?” And I reply, farfetched as it may seem, that it is out of that
innocent looking beginning that our huge burden of poverty and misery
and drink and crime and vice and premature death has grown. When we
have examined the possibilities of this apparently simple matter of
spare money, _alias_ Capital, you will find that spare money is the
root of all evil, though it ought to be, and can be made, the means of
all betterment.

What is spare money? It is the money you have left when you have bought
everything you need to keep you becomingly in your station in life. If
you can live on ten pounds a week in the way you are accustomed and
content to live, and your income is fifteen pounds a week, you have
five pounds spare money at the end of the week, and are a capitalist
to that amount. To be a capitalist, therefore, you must have more than
enough to live on.

Consequently a poor person cannot become a capitalist. A poor person
is one who has less than enough to live on. I can remember a bishop,
who ought to have known better, exhorting the poor in the east end
of London, at a time when poverty there was even more dreadful than
it is at present, to become capitalists by saving. He really should
have had his apron publicly and officially torn off him, and his
shovel hat publicly and officially jumped on, for such a monstrously
wicked precept. Imagine a woman, without enough money to feed her
children properly and clothe them decently and healthily, letting them
starve still more, and go still more ragged and naked, to buy Savings
Certificates, or to put her money in the Post Office Savings Bank and
keep it there until there is enough of it to buy stocks and shares! She
would be prosecuted for neglecting her children: and serve her right!
If she pleaded that the bishop incited her to commit this unnatural
crime, she would be told that the bishop could not possibly have meant
that she should save out of her children’s necessary food and clothing,
or even out of her own. And if she asked why the bishop did not say so,
she would be told to hold her tongue; and the gaoler would be ordered
to remove her to the cells.

Poor people cannot save, and ought not to try. Spending is not only
a first necessity but a first duty. Nine people out of ten have not
enough money to spend on themselves and their families; and to preach
saving to them is not only foolish but wicked. Schoolmistresses are
already complaining that the encouragement held out by Building
Societies to poor parents to buy their own houses has led to the
underfeeding of their children. Fortunately most of the poor neither
save nor try to. All the spare money invested in the Savings Banks and
Building Societies and Co-operative Societies and Savings Certificates,
though it sounds very imposing when it is totalled up into hundreds
of millions, and all credited to the working classes, is such a mere
fleabite compared to the total sums invested that its poor owners would
gain greatly by throwing it into the common stock if the capital owned
by the rich were thrown in at the same time. The great bulk of British
capital, the capital that matters, is the spare money of those who have
more than enough to live on. It saves itself without any privation to
the owner. The only question is, what is to be done with it? The answer
is, keep it for a rainy day: you may want it yet. This is simple; but
suppose it will not keep! Of course Treasury notes will keep; and Bank
notes will keep; and metal coins will keep: and cheque books will keep;
and entries of sums of money in the ledgers in the bank will keep
safely enough. But these things are only legal claims to the goods we
need, chiefly food. Food, we know, will not keep. And what good will
spare money be to us when the food it represents has gone rotten?

The Intelligent Woman, when she realizes that money really means the
things that money can buy, and that the most important of these things
are perishable, will see that spare money cannot be saved: it must be
spent at once. It is only the Very Simple Woman who puts her spare
money into an old stocking and hides it under a loose board in the
floor. She thinks that money is always money. But she is quite wrong
in this. It is true that gold coins will always be worth the metal
they are made of; but in Europe at present gold coins are not to be
had: there is nothing but paper money; and within the last few years
we have seen English paper money fall in value until a shilling would
buy no more than could be bought for sixpence before the war, whilst
on the Continent a thousand pounds would not buy a postage stamp, and
notes for fifty thousand pounds would hardly pay a tram fare. People
who thought themselves and their children provided for for life were
reduced to destitution all over Europe; and even in England women left
comfortably-off by insurances made by their fathers found themselves
barely able to get along by the hardest pinching. That was what came of
putting their trust in money.

Whilst people were being cheated in this fashion out of their savings
by Governments printing heaps of Treasury notes and Bank notes with no
goods at their back, several rich men of business became enormously
richer because, having obtained goods on credit, they were able to
pay for them in money that had become worthless. Naturally these rich
men of business used all their power and influence to make their
Governments go from bad to worse with their printing of bogus notes,
whilst other rich men of business who, instead of owing money were
owed it, used their influence in the opposite direction; so that the
Governments never knew where they were: one set of business men telling
them to print more notes, and another set to print less, and none of
them seeming to realize that they were playing with the food of the
people. The bad advice always won, because the Governments themselves
owed money, and were glad enough to pay it in cheap paper, following
the example of Henry VIII, who cheated his creditors by giving short
weight in his silver coins.

The Intelligent Woman will conclude, and conclude rightly, that
hoarding money is not a safe way of saving. If her money is not spent
at once she can never be sure what it will be worth ten years hence, or
ten weeks or even ten days or minutes in war time.

But you, prudent lady, will remind me that you do not want to spend
your spare money: you want to keep it. If you wanted anything that it
could buy it would not be spare money. If a woman has just finished
a good dinner it is no use advising her to order another and eat it
immediately so as to make sure of getting something for her money: she
had better throw it out of the window. What she wants to know is how
she can spend it and save it too. That is impossible; but she can spend
it and increase her income by spending it. If you would like to know
how, read the next chapter.




34

INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE


If, having finished your dinner, you can find a hungry person who can
be depended on to give you a dinner, say after a year’s time, for
nothing, you can spend your spare money in giving him a dinner for
nothing; and in this way you will in a sense both spend your money on
the spot and save it for next year, or, to put it the other way, you
will have your spare food eaten while it is fresh and yet have fresh
food to eat a year hence.

You will at once reply that you can find a million hungry persons
only too easily, but that none of them can be depended on to provide
a dinner for themselves, much less for you, next year: if they could,
they would not be hungry. You are quite right; but there is a way
round the difficulty. You will not be able to find dependable men who
are hungry; but your banker or stockbroker or solicitor will find you
plenty of more or less dependable persons, some of them enormously
rich, who, though overfed, are nevertheless always in want of huge
quantities of spare food.

What do they want it for? Why, to feed the hungry men who cannot be
depended on, not on the chance of their returning the compliment next
year, but for doing some work immediately that will bring in money
later on. There is nothing to prevent any Intelligent Woman with spare
money enough from doing this herself if she has enough invention and
business ability.

Suppose, for instance, she has a big country house in a big park.
Suppose her park blocks up the shortest way from one important town to
another, and that the public roads that go round her park are hilly and
twisty and dangerous for motor cars. She can then use her spare food to
feed the hungry men while they make a road for motors through her park.
When this is done she can send the hungry men away to find another job
as best they can, leaving herself with a new road for the use of which
she can charge a shilling to every motorist who uses it, as they all
will to save time and risk and difficulty. She can keep one of the
hungry men to collect the shillings for her. In this way she will have
changed her spare food into a steady income. In city language, she will
have gone into business as a roadmaker with her own capital.

Now if the traffic on the road be so great that the shillings, and
the spare food they represent, pile themselves up on her hands faster
than she can spend them (or eat them), she will have to find some new
means of spending them to prevent the new spare food going bad. She
will have to call the hungry men back and find something new for them
to do. She might set them to build houses all along the road. Then she
could present the road to the local authorities to be maintained by the
ratepayers as a public street, and yet greatly increase her income by
letting the houses. Having in this way obtained more spare money than
ever, she could establish a service of motor buses to the nearest town
to enable her tenants to work there and her workmen to live there. She
could set up an electric lighting plant and gasworks to supply their
houses. She could turn her big house into a hotel, or knock it down and
cover its site and the park with new houses and streets. The hungry
would do all the executive work for her: what she would have to do
would be to give them the necessary orders and allow them to live on
her spare food meanwhile.

But, you will say, only an exceptionally able and hardworking woman of
business could plan all this and superintend its carrying-out. Suppose
she were too stupid or too lazy to think of these things, or a genius
occupied with art or science or religion or politics! Well, if only she
had the spare money, hungry women and men with the requisite ability
would come to her and offer to develop her estate and to pay her so
much a year for the use of her land and of her spare money, arranging
it all with her solicitor so that she would not have to lift her little
finger in the matter except to sign her name sometimes. In business
language, she could invest her capital in the development of her estate.

Now consider how much further these operations can be carried than
the mere investment of one lady’s savings, and the development of one
lady’s estate in the country. Big companies, by collecting millions
of spare subsistence in small or large sums from people all over the
country who are willing to take shares according to their means, can
set the hungry to dig those mines that run out under the sea and need
twenty years work before the coal is reached. They can make railways
and monster steamships; they can build factories employing thousands
of men, and equip them with machinery; they can lay cables across the
ocean: there is no end or limit to what they can do as long as they can
borrow spare food enough for the hungry men until the preparations are
finished and the businesses begin to pay their own way.

Sometimes the schemes fail, and the owners of the spare food lose it;
but they have to risk this because, as the food will not keep, they
would lose it all the same if they did not invest it. So there is
always spare money being offered to the big men of business and their
companies; and thus our queer civilization, with its many poor and its
few rich, grows as we see it with all its shops, factories, railways,
mines, ocean liners, aeroplanes, telephones, palaces, mansions, flats,
and cottages, on top of the fundamental sowing and reaping of the food
that it all depends on.

Such is the magic of spare subsistence, called capital. That is how
idle people who have land and spare subsistence become enormously rich
without knowing how, and make their babies enormously rich in their
cradles, whilst the landless penniless persons who do it all by slaving
from dawn to dusk are left as poor at the end of the job as they were
at the beginning.




35

LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM


Many people are so impressed with the achievements of Capitalism that
they believe that if you overthrow it you overthrow civilization. It
seems to them indispensable. We must therefore consider, first, what
are the disadvantages of this way of doing it? and, second, is there
any other way?

Now in one sense there is no other way. All the businesses that need
to have many weeks or months or years of work done on them by large
bodies of men before they can pay their way, require great quantities
of spare subsistence. If it takes ten years to make a harbor or twenty
years to make a coal mine, the men who are making it will be eating
their heads off all that time. Other people must be providing them with
food, clothes, lodging, and so forth without immediate return, just as
parents have to provide for growing children. In this respect it makes
no difference whether we vote for Capitalism or Socialism. The process
is one of natural necessity which cannot be changed by any political
revolution nor evaded by any possible method of social organization.

But it does not follow that the collection and employment of spare
subsistence for these purposes must be done by private companies
touting for the money that very rich people are too gorged with
luxuries to be able to spend, and that people of more moderate means
are prudent enough to put by for a rainy day.

To begin with, there are many most necessary things that the private
companies and employers will not do because they cannot make people pay
for them when they are done. Take for instance a lighthouse. Without
lighthouses we should hardly dare to go to sea; and the trading ships
would have to go so slowly and cautiously, and so many of them would
be wrecked, that the cost of the goods they carry would be much higher
than it is. Therefore we all benefit greatly by lighthouses, even
those of us who have never seen the sea and never expect to. But the
capitalists will not build lighthouses. If the lighthouse keeper could
collect a payment from every ship that passed, they would build them
fast enough until the cost was lighted all round like the sea front in
Brighton; but as this is impossible, and the lighthouses must shine on
every ship impartially without making the captain put his hand in his
pocket for it, the capitalists leave the coast in the dark. Therefore
the Government steps in and collects spare subsistence in the shape
of taxes from everybody (which is quite fair, as everybody shares the
benefit), and builds the lighthouses. Here we see Capitalism failing
completely to supply what to a seafaring nation like ours is one of the
first necessaries of life (for we should starve without our shipping)
and thereby forcing us to resort to Communism.

But Capitalism often refuses necessary work even when some money can be
made out of it directly.

For example, a lighthouse reminds us of a harbor, which is equally
necessary. Every ship coming into a harbor has to pay harbor dues;
therefore anyone making a harbor can make money by it. But great
harbors, with their breakwaters and piers built up in the sea, take
so many years to construct, and the work is so liable to damage and
even destruction in storms, and the impossibility of raising harbor
dues beyond a certain point without sending the ships round to cheaper
harbors so certain, that private capital turns away from it to
enterprises in which there is more certainty as to what the cost will
be, less delay, and more money to be made. For instance, distilleries
make large profits. There is no uncertainty about the cost of building
them and fitting them up; and a ready sale for whiskey can always be
depended on. You can tell to within a few hundred pounds what a big
distillery will cost, whereas you cannot tell to within a million what
a big harbor will cost. All this would not influence the Government,
which has to consider only whether another distillery or another harbor
is more wanted for the good of the nation. But the private capitalists
have not the good of the nation in their charge: all they have to
consider is their duty to themselves and their families, which is to
choose the safest and most profitable way of investing their spare
money. Accordingly they choose the distillery; and if we depended on
private capitalists alone the country would have as many distilleries
as the whiskey market could support, and no harbors. And when they have
established their distillery they will spend enormous sums of money
in advertisements to persuade the public that their whiskey is better
and healthier and older and more famous than the whiskey made in other
distilleries, and that everybody ought to drink whiskey every day as
a matter of course. As none of these statements is true, the printing
of them is, from the point of view of the nation, a waste of wealth, a
perversion of labor, and a propaganda of pernicious humbug.

The private capitalists not only choose what will make most money for
them, but what will make it with least trouble: that is, they will do
as little for it as possible. If they sell an article or a service,
they will make it as dear as possible instead of as cheap as possible.
This would not matter if, as thoughtless people imagine, the lower the
price the bigger the sale, and the bigger the sale the greater the
profit. It is true in many cases that the lower the price the bigger
the sale; but it is not true that the bigger the sale the greater the
profit. There may be half a dozen prices (and consequently sales) at
which the profit will be exactly the same.

Take the case of a cable laid across the ocean to send messages to
foreign countries. How much a word is the company to charge for the
messages? If the charge is a pound a word very few people can afford to
send them. If the charge is a penny a word the cable will be crowded
with messages all day and all night. Yet the profit may be the same;
and, if it is, it will be far less trouble to send one word at a pound
than two hundred and forty words at a penny.

The same is true of the ordinary telegraph service. When it was in the
hands of private companies, the service was restricted and expensive.
When the Government took it over, it not only extended lines of all
sorts to out-of-the-way places; cheapened the service; and did without
a profit: it actually ran it at what the private capitalist calls a
loss. It did this because the cheap service was such a benefit to
the whole community, including the people who never send telegrams
as well as those who send a dozen every day, that it paid the nation
and was much fairer as well to reduce the price charged to the actual
senders below the cost of the service, the difference being made up by
everybody in taxes.

This very desirable arrangement is quite beyond the power of private
Capitalism, which not only keeps the price as high as possible above
the cost of production and service for the sake of making the utmost
profit, but has no power to distribute that cost over all the people
who benefit, and must levy it entirely on those who actually buy the
goods or pay for the service. It is true that business people can
pass the cost of their telegrams and telephone messages on to their
customers in the price of the things they sell; but a great deal of
our telegraphing and telephoning is not business telegraphing and
telephoning; and its cost cannot be passed on by the senders to anyone.
The only objection to throwing the cost entirely on public taxation is
that if we could all send telegrams of unlimited length without having
to pay across the counter enough ready money to prevent us using the
telegraph service when the post would do as well, or sticking in “kind
regards from all to dear Aunt Jane and a kiss from Baby” at the end of
every message, the lines would be so choked that we should not be able
to send telegrams at all. As to the telephone, some women would hang
on to it all day if it made no difference to their pockets. Even as it
is, a good deal of unnecessary work is put upon the telegraph service
by people spinning out their messages to twelve words because they are
not allowed to pay for less, and they think they are not getting full
value for their money if they say what they have to say in six. It
does not occur to them that they are wasting their own time and that
of the officials, besides increasing their taxes. It seems a trifle;
but public affairs consist of trifles multiplied by as many millions
as there are people in the country; and trifles cease to be trifles
when they are multiplied on that scale. Snowball letters, which seem a
kindly joke to the idiots who start them, would wreck our postal system
if sensible people did not conscientiously throw them into the waste
paper basket.

It is necessary to understand these things very clearly, because most
people are so simple and ignorant of big business matters that the
private capitalists are actually able to persuade them that Capitalism
is a success because it makes profits, and public service (or
Communism) a failure because it makes none. The simpletons forget that
the profits come out of their own pockets, and that what is the better
for the private capitalists in this respect is the worse for their
customers, the disappearance of profit being simply the disappearance
of overcharge.




36

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION


You now see how it is that the nation cannot depend on private capital
because there are so many vitally necessary things, from town drainage
to lighthouses, which it will not provide at all, and how what it does
provide it provides in the wrong order, refusing to make a harbor until
it has made as many distilleries as the trade will hold, and building
five luxurious houses for one rich person whilst a shocking proportion
of the nation’s children is dying of overcrowding in slums.

In short, the private capitalists, instead of doing the most desirable
work first, begin at the wrong end. All that can be said for this
policy is that if you begin at the wrong end you may be driven towards
the right end when you have done your worst and can get no further in
the wrong direction; and this is in fact the position into which our
most respectable capitalists have been forced by circumstances. When
the poor have bought all the strong drink they can afford to pay for,
and the rich their racing stables and all the pearls they can find
room for on their wives’ necks, the capitalists are forced to apply
their next year’s accumulations of capital to the production of more
necessary things.

Before the hungry can be set to work building mills and making
machinery to equip them, somebody, possibly a woman, must invent
the machinery. The capitalists buy her invention. If she is good at
business, which very few inventors are, she makes them pay her enough
to become a capitalist herself; but in most cases she makes a very poor
bargain, because she has to sell the lion’s share in her invention for
a few pounds to enable her to pay for the necessary models and trials.
It is only in modern Big Business that inventiveness in method and
organization superadded to mechanical ingenuity has a chance against
capital. If you have that talent the Big Business people will not
trouble to buy your patents: they will buy you at a handsome price, and
take you into the concern. But the simpleminded mechanical inventor has
no such luck. In any case, the capitalists have made a communist law
nationalizing all inventions after fourteen years, when the capitalists
can use them without paying the inventor anything. They soon persuade
themselves, or at least try to persuade others, that they invented the
machines themselves, and deserve their riches for their ingenuity.
Quite a number of people believe them.

Thus equipped with mechanical devices which are quite beyond the
means of small producers, the big capitalists begin to wipe the small
producers off the face of the earth. They seize on the work done by the
handloom weaver in his cottage, and do it much more cheaply in great
mills full of expensive machine looms driven by steam. They take the
work of the oldtime miller with his windmill or waterwheel, and do it
in vast buildings with steel rollers and powerful engines. They set up
against the blacksmith a Nasmyth hammer that a thousand Vulcans could
not handle, and scissors that snip sheet steel and bite off heavy bars
more easily than he could open a tin of condensed milk. They launch
huge steel ships, driven by machinery which the shipwrights who built
for Columbus would have called devil’s work. They raise houses in
skyscraping piles of a hundred dwellings one on top of another, in
steel and concrete, so that in place of one horizontal street you have
bunches of perpendicular ones. They make lace by machinery, more of it
in a day than ten thousand women could make by hand. They make boots
by machinery, clocks by machinery, pins and needles by machinery. They
sell you machines to use yourself in your own house, such as vacuum
cleaners, to replace your old sweeping brush and tea leaves. They
lay on the electric power and hydraulic power that they use in their
factories to your house like water or gas; so that you can light and
heat your house with it, and have yourself carried in a lift from the
basement to the attic and back again without the trouble of climbing
the stairs. You can boil your kettle and cook your dinner with it. You
could even make toast with it (they sell you a little oven for the
purpose) if it were not that you always forget to take the toast out
before it is burnt to a cinder.

Bad as the machine-made goods are at first compared to hand-made goods,
they end by being sometimes better, sometimes as good, sometimes as
well worth buying at the lower price, and always in the long run the
only goods you can get. For at last we forget how to make things by
hand, and become dependent on the bigger machine industries in spite
of the little groups of artists who try to keep the old handicrafts
alive. When William Morris, a great artist and craftsman, invented
a story about the handle coming off a rake in a village, and nobody
knowing how to put it on again, so that they had to get a big machine
and eight engineers down from London to do it, his tale was not at all
so improbable as it would have been in the days of Queen Anne. Our
consolation is that if machinery makes rakes so cheap that it is not
worth while mending them instead of throwing them away and going on
with new ones, the loss is greater than the gain. And if the people who
work the machines have a better life of it than the old handy people,
then the change is for the better.

Mind: I do not say that these advantages are always gained at present.
Most of us are using cheap and nasty articles, and living a cheap and
nasty life; but this is not the fault of the machines and the great
factories, nor of the application of spare money to construct them:
it is the fault of the unequal distribution of the product and of the
leisure gained by their saving of labor.

Now this misdistribution need not have occurred if the spare money had
not been in private hands. If it had been in the hands of national and
municipal banks controlling its use in the interest of all of us the
capitalization of industry on a large scale would have been an unmixed
blessing, instead of being, as it is at present, a blessing so mixed
with curses of one kind or another that in Samuel Butler’s famous
Utopia, called Erewhon, the making and even the possession of machinery
is punished as a crime.

Some of our cleverest anti-Socialists advocate a return to the life of
the early eighteenth century, before the machines and factories came
in. But that would mean going back to the small population of that
time, as the old methods would not produce enough for our fortytwo
millions. High capitalization of industry, in which a million of spare
money is spent to provide us with fourpenny reels of cotton, has
come to stay; but if Socialism prevails, the million will be public
and not private property, and the reels will cost considerably less
than twopence. To put it shortly, capitalization is one thing, and
Capitalism quite another. Capitalization does not hurt us as long as
capital is our servant and not our master. Capitalism inevitably makes
it our master instead of our servant. Instead of public servants we are
private slaves.

Note that the great change from cottage handicraft to factories and
machine industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is called
by economists and historians The Industrial Revolution.




37

SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY


So far we have considered the growth of Capitalism as it occurs at
home. But capital has no home, or rather it is at home everywhere. It
is a quaint fact that though professed Socialists and Communists call
themselves Internationalists, and carry a red flag which is the flag of
the workers of all nations, and though most capitalists are boastfully
national, and wave the Union Jack on every possible occasion, yet when
you come down from the cries and catchwords to the facts, you find
that every practical measure advocated by British Socialists would
have the effect of keeping British capital in Britain to be spent on
improving the condition of their native country, whilst the British
Capitalists are sending British capital out of Britain to the ends of
the earth by hundreds of millions every year. If, with all our British
spare money in their hands, they were compelled to spend it in the
British Isles, or were patriotic or public spirited or insular enough
to do so without being compelled, they could at least call themselves
patriots with some show of plausibility. Unfortunately we allow them to
spend it where they please; and their only preference, as we have seen,
is for the country in which it will yield them the largest income.
Consequently, when they have begun at the wrong end at home, and have
exhausted its possibilities, they do not move towards the right end
until they have exhausted the possibilities of the wrong end abroad as
well.

Take the drink trade again as the most obvious example of the wrong end
being the most profitable end commercially.

It soon became so certain that free Capitalism in drink in England
would destroy England, that the Government was forced to interfere.
Spirits can be distilled so cheaply that it is quite possible to make a
woman “drunk for a penny: dead drunk for twopence”, and make a handsome
profit by doing it. When the capitalists were allowed to do this
they did it without remorse, having nothing to consider commercially
but their profits. The Government found that masses of people were
poisoning, ruining, maddening themselves with cheap gin. Accordingly a
law was made by which every distiller had to pay the Government so much
money for every gallon of strong drink he manufactured that he could
make no profit unless he added this tax to the price of the drink; and
this made the drink so dear that though there was still a great deal
too much drunkenness, and working women suffered because much more had
to come out of the housekeeping money for the men’s beer and spirits,
yet the working people could not afford to drink as recklessly and
ruinously as they did in the days when Hogarth’s picture of Gin Lane
was painted.

In the United States of America the resistance of the Government to
the demoralization of the people by private traffic in drink has gone
much further. These States, after trying the plan of taxing strong
drink, and finding it impossible to stop excessive drinking in this
way, were driven one by one to a resolution to exterminate the trade
altogether, until at last it was prohibited in so many States that
it became possible to make a Federal law (that is, a law for all the
States) prohibiting the sale or even the possession of intoxicating
liquor anywhere within the United States. The benefits of this step
were so immediate and so enormous that even the Americans who buy
drink from smugglers (bootleggers) whenever they can, vote steadily
for Prohibition; and so, of course, do the bootleggers, whose profits
are prodigious. Prohibition will sooner or later be forced on every
Capitalist country as a necessary defence against the ruinous effect of
private profiteering in drink. The only practicable alternative is the
municipalization of the drink trade: that is, socialism.

When our drink profiteers and their customers fill the newspapers
with stories about Prohibition being a failure in America, about all
Americans taking to drugs because they cannot get whiskey, about their
drinking more whiskey than ever, and when they quote a foolish saying
of a former bishop of Peterborough, that he would rather see England
free than England sober (as if a drunken man could be free in any
sense, even if he escaped arrest by the police), you must bear in mind
the fact, never mentioned by them, that millions of Americans who have
never been drunk in their lives, and who do not believe that their
moderate use of the intoxicants they have found pleasant has ever done
them the slightest harm, have yet voted away this indulgence for the
general good of their country and in the interests of human dignity and
civilization. Remember also that our profiteers have engaged in the
smuggling trade, and actually tried to represent the measures taken
against it by the American Government as attacks on British liberties.
If America were as weak militarily as China was in 1840 they would
drive us into a war to force whiskey on America.

Do not, however, rush to the conclusion that Prohibition, because it
is a violently effective method of combating unscrupulous profiteering
in drink, is an ideal method of dealing with the drink question. It
is not certain that there would be any drink question if we got rid
of capitalism. We shall consider that later on: our present point is
simply that capital has no conscience and no country. Capitalism,
beaten in a civilized country by Prohibition, can send its capital
abroad to an uncivilized one where it can do what it likes. Our
capitalists wiped multitudes of black men out of existence with gin
when they were forcibly prevented by law from doing the same to their
own countrymen. They would have made Africa a desert white with the
bones of drunkards had they not discovered that more profit could be
made by selling men and women than by poisoning them. The drink trade
was rich; but the slave trade was richer. Huge profits were made by
kidnapping shiploads of negroes and selling them as slaves. Cities
like Bristol have been built upon that black foundation. White queens
put money into it. The slave trade would still be a British trade
if it had not been forbidden by law through the efforts of British
philanthropists who, with their eyes in the ends of the earth, did not
know that British children were being overworked and beaten in British
factories as cruelly as the negro children in the plantations.

If you are a softhearted person, be careful not to lose your head
as you read of these horrors. Virtuous indignation is a powerful
stimulant, but a dangerous diet. Keep in mind the old proverb: anger
is a bad counsellor. Our capitalists did not begin in this way as
perversely wicked people. They did not soil their own hands with the
work. Their hands were often the white hands of refined, benevolent,
cultivated ladies of the highest rank. All they did or could do was
to invest their spare money in the way that brought them the largest
income. If milk had paid better than gin, or converting negroes to
Christianity better than converting them into slaves, they would
have traded in milk and Bibles just as willingly, or rather just as
helplessly, as in gin and slaves.

When the gin trade was overdone and exhausted, and the slave trade
suppressed, they went on into ordinary industrial work, and found that
profits could be made by employing slaves as well as by kidnapping and
selling them. They used their political power to induce the British
Government to annex great tracts of Africa, and to impose on the
natives taxes which they could not possibly pay except by working for
the capitalists like English working men, only at lower wages and
without the protection of English Factory Acts and English public
opinion. Great fortunes were made in this way. The Empire was enlarged:
“trade followed the flag” they said, meaning that the flag followed
trade and then more trade followed the flag; British capital developed
the world everywhere (except at home); the newspapers declared that it
was all very splendid; and generals like Lord Roberts expressed their
belief that God meant that three-quarters of the earth should be ruled
by young gentlemen from our public schools, in which schools, by the
way, nothing whatever was done to explain to them what this outrageous
pillage of their own country for the development of the rest of the
earth really meant over and above the temporary enrichment of their own
small class.

Nothing in our political history is more appalling than the
improvidence with which we have allowed British spare money,
desperately needed at home for the full realization of our own powers
of production, and for the clearing away of our disgraceful slum
centres of social corruption, to be driven abroad at the rate of two
hundred millions every year, loading us with unemployed, draining
us by emigration, imposing huge military and naval forces upon us,
strengthening the foreign armies of which we are afraid, and providing
all sorts of facilities for the foreign industries which destroy our
powers of self-support by doing for us what we could and should do
just as well for ourselves. If a fraction of the British spare money
our capitalists have spent in providing South America with railways
and mines and factories had been spent in making roads to our natural
harbors and turning to account the gigantic wasted water power of the
tideways and torrents of barren savage coasts in Scotland and Ireland,
or even in putting an end to such capitalistic absurdities as the
sending of farm produce from one English county to another by way of
America, we should not now be complaining that the countries our spare
money has developed can undersell our merchants and throw our workers
on public charity for want of employment.




38

DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES


I became a little rhetorical at the end of the last chapter, as
Socialists will when they have, like myself, acquired the habit of
public speaking. I hope I have not carried you away so far as to make
you overlook in your indignation the fact that, whilst all these
dreadful things have been going on, the profits of the capital which
has gone abroad are coming into the country gratuitously (imports
without equivalent exports) and being spent here by the capitalists,
and that their expenditure gives employment. The capital went out; but
the income comes in; and the question arises, are we any the worse for
being pampered paupers, living on the labor of other nations? If the
money that is coming in in income is more than went out as capital, are
we not better off?

One’s impulse is to say certainly not, because the same money spent as
capital at home would have brought us in just as large an income, and
perhaps larger, than it fetches from abroad, though the capitalists
might not have got so much of it. Indeed they might have got none of
it if it had been spent in great public works like clearing slums,
embanking rivers, roadmaking, smoke abatement, free schools and
universities, and other good things that cannot be charged for except
communistically through rates and taxes. But the question is more
complicated than that.

Suppose yourself a mill hand in a factory, accustomed to tend a
machine there, and to live with your people in a poor quarter of a
manufacturing town. Suddenly you find yourself discharged, and the
factory shut up, because the trade has mysteriously gone abroad. You
find that mill hands are not wanted, but that there is a scarcity of
lady’s maids, of assistants in fashionable shops, of waitresses in
week-end motoring hotels, of stewardesses in palatial steamships, of
dressmakers, of laundresses, of fine cooks (hidden in the kitchen and
spoken of as “_the chef_”), of all sorts of women whose services are
required by idle rich people. But you cannot get one of these jobs
because you do not know the work, and are not the sort of person,
and have not the speech, dress, and manners which are considered
indispensable. After a spell of starvation and despair you find a
job in a chocolate cream factory or a jam and pickles works, or you
become a charwoman. And if you have a daughter you bring her up to
the chocolate cream or lady’s maid business, and not to weaving and
spinning.

It is possible that in the end your daughter may be better paid, better
dressed, more gently spoken, more ladylike than you were in the old
mill. You may come to thank God that some Indian, or Chinaman, or
negro, or simply some foreigner is doing the work you used to do, and
setting your daughter free to do something that is considered much
more genteel and is better paid and more respected. Your son may be
doing better as a trainer of racehorses than his father did as a steel
smelter, and be ever so much more the gentleman. You might, if you
lived long enough, see the ugly factory towns of the Manchester and
Sheffield and Birmingham districts, and of the Potteries, disappear
and be replaced by nice residential towns and pleasure resorts like
Bournemouth, Cheltenham, and the Malverns. You might see the valleys of
Wales recover the beauty they had before the mines spoiled them. And it
would be quite natural for you to call these changes prosperity, and
vote for them, and sincerely loathe anyone who warned you that all it
meant was that the nation, having become a parasite on foreign labor,
was going to the devil as fast as it could.

Yet the warning would be much needed. If a nation turns its rough mill
hands into well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken, ladylike mill
officials, properly respected, and given a fair share of the wealth
they help to produce, the nation is the stronger, the richer, the
happier, and the holier for the change. If it turns them into lady’s
maids and sellers of twenty-guinea hats, it breaks its own backbone
and exchanges its page in honorable history for a chapter in The Ruins
of Empires. It becomes too idle and luxurious to be able to compel the
foreign countries to pay the tribute on which it lives; and when they
cease to feed it, it has lost the art of feeding itself and collapses
in the midst of its genteel splendor.

But this dismal sketch of the future of countries that let themselves
become dependent on the labor of other countries and settle down into
a comfortable and ladylike parasitism is really much too favorable. If
all our factory foremen could be turned into headwaiters with a touch
of Cinderella’s godmother’s wand, neither they nor their wives might
object. But this is not what happens. The factory foreman may bring up
his son to be a waiter; but he himself becomes an unemployed man. If he
is not fit for any of the new jobs, and too old to learn, and his trade
is not merely going through one of the usual periods of depression but
has left the country for good, he becomes a permanently unemployed man,
and consequently a starving man. Now a starving man is a dangerous man,
no matter how respectable his political opinions may be. A man who has
had his dinner is never a revolutionist: his politics are all talk.
But hungry men, rather than die of starvation, will, when there are
enough of them to overpower the police, begin by rioting, and end by
plundering and burning rich men’s houses, upsetting the government, and
destroying civilization. And the women, sooner than see their children
starve, will make the men do it, small blame to them.

Consequently the capitalists, when they have sent their capital
abroad instead of giving continuous employment with it at home, and
are confronted at home with masses of desperate men for whom they can
find no suitable jobs, must either feed them for nothing or face a
revolution. And so you get what we call the dole. Now small as the
dole may be it must be sufficient to live on; and if two or three in
one household put their doles together, they grow less keen on finding
employment, and develop a taste for living like ladies and gentlemen:
that is, amusing themselves at the expense of others instead of earning
anything. We used to moralize over this sort of thing as part of the
decline and fall of ancient Rome; but we have been heading straight for
it ourselves for a long while past, and the war has plunged us into it
head over ears. For it was after the war that the capitalists failed
to find employment for no less than two million demobilized soldiers
who had for four years been not only well fed and clothed, but trained
in the handling of weapons whilst occupied in slaughtering, burning,
destroying, and facing terrible risks of being themselves destroyed. If
these men had not been given money to live on they would have taken it
by violence. Accordingly the Government had to take millions of spare
money from the capitalists and give it to the demobilized men; and
they are still doing so, with the grudged consent of the capitalists
themselves, who complain bitterly, but fear that if they refuse they
will lose everything.

At this point Capitalism becomes desperate, and quite openly engages in
attempts to get rid of the unemployed: that is, to empty the country of
part of its population, which it calls overpopulation. How is it to be
done? As the unemployed will not let themselves be starved, still less
will they let themselves be gassed or poisoned or shot, which would
be the logical Capitalist way out of the mess. But they can perhaps
be induced to leave the country and try their luck elsewhere if the
Government will pay the fare, or as much of it as they cannot scrape
up themselves. As I write these lines the Government announces that
if any Englishwoman or Englishman will be so kind as to clear out of
England to the other side of the world it will cost them only three
pounds apiece instead of five times that sum, as the Government will
provide the odd twelve pounds. And if sufficient numbers do not jump at
this offer before these lines are printed, the Government may be driven
to offer to send them away for nothing and give them ten pounds apiece
to start with in their new country. That would be cheaper than keeping
them at home on the dole.

Thus we see Capitalism producing the amazing and fantastic result
that the people of the country become a drawback to it, and have to
be got rid of like vermin (polite people call the process Assisted
Emigration), leaving nobody in it but capitalists and landlords and
their attendants, living on imported food and manufactures in an
elegant manner, and realizing the lady’s and gentleman’s dream of a
country in which there is lavish consumption and no production, stately
parks and palatial residences without factories or mines or smoke or
slums or any unpleasantness that heaps of gratuitous money can prevent,
and contraception in full swing to avoid any further increase in the
population.

Surely, you will say, if Capitalism leads to this, it leads to an
earthly paradise. Leaving out of account the question whether the
paradise, if realized, would not be a fool’s paradise (for, I am sorry
to say, we have all been brought up to regard such a state of things
as the perfection of human society), and admitting that something
like it has been half realized in spots in many places from Monte
Carlo to Gleneagles, and from Gleneagles to Palm Beach, it is never
realized for a whole country. It has often been carried far enough to
reduce powerful empires like Rome and Spain to a state of demoralized
impotence in which they were broken up and plundered by the foreigners
on whom they had allowed themselves to become dependent; but it never
has, and never can, build up a stable Parasitic State in which all the
workers are happy and contented because they share the riches of the
capitalists, and are kept healthy and pleasant and nice because the
capitalists are cultivated enough to dislike seeing slums and shabby
ugly people and running the risk of catching infectious diseases from
them. When capitalists are intelligent enough to care whether the
whole community is healthy and pleasant and happy or not, even when
the unpleasantnesses do not come under their own noses, they become
Socialists, for the excellent reason that there is no fun in being a
capitalist if you have to take care of your servants and tradesmen
(which means sharing your income with them) as affectionately as if
they were your own family. If your taste and conscience were cultivated
to that extent you would find such a responsibility unbearable,
because you would have to be continually thinking of others, not only
to the necessary and possible extent of taking care that your own
activities and conveniences did not clash unreasonably and unkindly
with theirs, but to the unnecessary and impossible extent of doing all
the thinking for them that they ought to do, and in freedom could do,
for themselves. It is easy to say that servants should be treated well
not only because humanity requires it but because they will otherwise
be unpleasant and dishonest and inefficient servants. But if you treat
your servants as well as you treat yourself, which really amounts to
spending as much money on them as on yourself, what is the use of
having servants? They become a positive burden, expecting you to be a
sort of Earthly Providence to them, which means that you spend half
your time thinking for them and the other half talking about them.
Being able to call your servants your own is a very poor compensation
for not being able to call your soul your own. That is why, even as it
is, you run away from your comfortable house to live in hotels (if you
can afford it), because, when you have paid your bill and tipped the
waiter and the chambermaid, you are finished with them, and have not to
be a sort of matriarch to them as well.

Anyhow, most of those who are ministering to your wants are not in
personal contact with you. They are the employees of your tradesmen;
and as your tradesmen trade capitalistically, you have inequality of
income, unemployment, sweating, division of society into classes,
with the resultant dysgenic restrictions on marriage, and all the
other evils which prevent a capitalist society from achieving peace or
permanence. A self-contained, self-supporting Capitalism would at least
be safe from being starved out as Germany was in the war in spite of
her military successes; but a completely parasitic Capitalism, however
fashionable, would be simply Capitalism with that peril intensified to
the utmost.




39

FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG


Now let us turn back to inquire whether sending our capital abroad, and
consenting to be taxed to pay emigration fares to get rid of the women
and men who are left without employment in consequence, is all that
Capitalism can do when our employers, who act for our capitalists in
industrial affairs, and are more or less capitalists themselves in the
earlier stages of capitalistic development, find that they can sell no
more of their goods at a profit, or indeed at all, in their own country.

Clearly they cannot send abroad the capital they have already invested,
because it has all been eaten up by the workers, leaving in its place
factories and railways and mines and the like; and these cannot be
packed into a ship’s hold and sent to Africa. It is only the freshly
saved capital that can be sent out of the country. This, as we have
seen, does go abroad in heaps. But the British employer who is working
with capital in the shape of works fixed to British land held by him
on long lease, must, when once he has sold all the goods at home that
his British customers can afford to buy, either shut up his works until
the customers have worn out their stock of what they have bought, which
would bankrupt him (for the landlord will not wait), or else sell his
superfluous goods somewhere else: that is, he must send them abroad.

Now it is not so easy to send them to civilized countries, because they
practise Protection, which means that they impose heavy taxes (customs
duties) on foreign goods. Uncivilized countries, without Protection,
and inhabited by natives to whom gaudy calicoes and cheap showy brass
ware are dazzling and delightful novelties, are the best places to make
for at first.

But trade requires a settled government to put down the habit of
plundering strangers. This is not a habit of simple tribes, who are
often friendly and honest. It is what civilized men do where there is
no law to restrain them. Until quite recent times it was extremely
dangerous to be wrecked on our own coasts, as wrecking, which meant
plundering wrecked ships and refraining from any officious efforts
to save the lives of their crews, was a well-established business in
many places on our shores. The Chinese still remember some astonishing
outbursts of looting perpetrated by English ladies of high position,
at moments when law was suspended and priceless works of art were to
be had for the grabbing. When trading with aborigines begins with the
visit of a single ship, the cannons and cutlasses it carries may be
quite sufficient to overawe the natives if they are troublesome. The
real difficulty begins when so many ships come that a little trading
station of white men grows up and attracts the white ne’er-do-wells and
violent roughs who are always being squeezed out of civilization by
the pressure of law and order. It is these riffraff who turn the place
into a sort of hell in which sooner or later missionaries are murdered
and traders plundered. Their home Governments are appealed to to put
a stop to this. A gunboat is sent out and an inquiry made. The report
after the inquiry is that there is nothing to be done but set up a
civilized government, with a post office, police, troops, and a navy in
the offing. In short, the place is added to some civilized Empire. And
the civilized taxpayer pays the bill without getting a farthing of the
profits.

Of course the business does not stop there. The riffraff who have
created the emergency move out just beyond the boundary of the annexed
territory, and are as great a nuisance as ever to the traders when they
have exhausted the purchasing power of the included natives and push
on after fresh customers. Again they call on their home Government to
civilize a further area; and so bit by bit the civilized Empire grows
at the expense of the home taxpayers, without any intention or approval
on their part, until at last, though all their real patriotism is
centred on their own people and confined to their own country, their
own rulers, and their own religious faith, they find that the centre of
their beloved realm has shifted to the other hemisphere. That is how
we in the British Islands have found our centre moved from London to
the Suez Canal, and are now in the position that out of every hundred
of our fellow-subjects, in whose defence we are expected to shed the
last drop of our blood, only eleven are whites or even Christians.
In our bewilderment some of us declare that the Empire is a burden
and a blunder, whilst others glory in it as a triumph. You and I need
not argue with them just now, our point for the moment being that,
whether blunder or glory, the British Empire was quite unintentional.
What should have been undertaken only as a most carefully considered
political development has been a series of commercial adventures thrust
on us by capitalists forced by their own system to cater for foreign
customers before their own country’s needs were one-tenth satisfied.




40

EMPIRES IN COLLISION


If the British Empire were the only State on earth, the process might
go on peacefully (except for ordinary police coercion) until the whole
earth was civilized under the British flag. This is the dream of
British Imperialism. But it is not what the world is like. There are
all the other States, large and small, with their Imperialist dreamers
and their very practical traders pushing for foreign markets, and their
navies and armies to back the traders and annex these markets. Sooner
or later, as they push their boundaries into Africa and Asia, they come
up against oneanother. A collision of that kind (called the Fashoda
incident) very nearly involved us in a war with France. Fortunately
France gave way, not being prepared to fight us just then; but France
and Britain were left with the whole Sudan divided between them.
France had before this pushed into and annexed Algeria and (virtually)
Tunisia; and Spain was pushing into Morocco. Italy, alarmed lest there
should be nothing left for her, made a dash at Tripoli and annexed it.
England was in Egypt as well as in India.

Now imagine yourself for a moment a German trader, with more goods
than you can sell in Germany, having either to shut up your factory and
be ruined, or find a foreign market in Africa. Imagine yourself looking
at the map of Africa. The entire Mediterranean coast, the pick of the
basket, is English, Italian, French, and Spanish. The Hinterland, as
you call it, is English and French. You cannot get in anywhere without
going through the English Suez Canal or round the Cape to some remote
place down south. Do you now understand what the German Kaiser meant
when he complained that Germany had not been left “a place in the
sun”? That hideous war of 1914-18 was at bottom a fight between the
capitalists of England, France, and Italy on the one side, and those of
Germany on the other, for command of the African markets. On top, of
course, it was about other things: about Austria making the murder of
the Archduke a pretext for subjugating Serbia; about Russia mobilizing
against Austria to prevent this; about Germany being dragged into the
Austro-Russian quarrel by her alliance with Austria; about France being
dragged in on the other side by her alliance with Russia; about the
German army having to make a desperate attempt to conquer the French
army before the Russian troops could reach her; about England having to
attack Germany because she was allied to France and Russia; and about
the German army having taken the shortest cut through Belgium, not
knowing that Belgium had a secret arrangement with England to have a
British expedition sent to defend her if Germany invaded her. Of course
the moment the first shot was fired all the Britons and Belgians and
Germans and French and Austrians and Russians became enraged sheep, and
imagined all sorts of romantic reasons for fighting, in addition to the
solid reason that if Tommy and the Poilu and Ivan did not kill Hans and
Fritz, Hans and Fritz would kill Tommy and the Poilu and Ivan. Before
the killing had gone on very long, the Turks, the Bulgarians, the
Japanese, the Americans, and other States that had no more to do with
the first quarrel than you had, were in it and at it hammer and tongs.
The whole world went mad, and never alluded to markets except when they
ridiculed the Kaiser for his demand for a place in the sun.

Yet there would have been no war without the alliances; and the
alliances could not have fought if they had not set up great
armaments, especially the new German navy, to protect their foreign
markets and frontiers. These armaments, created to produce a sense of
security, had produced a sense of terror in which no nation dared go
unarmed unless it was too small to have any chance against the great
Powers, and could depend on their jealousy of oneanother to stave off
a conquest by any one of them. Soon the nations that dared not go
unarmed became more terrified still, and dared not go alone: they had
to form alliances and go in twos and threes, like policemen in thieves’
quarters, Germany and Austria in one group and England, France, and
Russia in another, both trying to induce Italy and Turkey and America
to join them. Their differences were not about their own countries:
the German navy was not built to bombard Portsmouth nor the British
navy to bombard Bremerhaven. But when the German navy interfered in the
north of Africa, which was just what it was built for, and the French
and British navies frightened it off from that market in the sun, the
capitalist diplomatists of these nations saw that the first thing
to concentrate on was not the markets but the sinking of the German
navy by the combined French and British navies (or vice versa) on any
available pretext. And as you cannot have fleets fighting on the sea
without armies fighting on the land to help them, the armies grew like
the fleets; the Race of Armaments became as familiar as the Derby; all
the natural and kindly sentiments of white civilized nations towards
oneanother were changed into blustering terror, the parent of hatred,
malice, and all uncharitableness; and after all, when the explosive
mixture blew up at last, and blew millions of us with it, it was not
about the African markets, but about a comparatively trumpery quarrel
between Austria and Serbia which the other Powers could have settled
with the greatest ease, without the shedding of one drop of blood,
if they had been on decent human terms with oneanother instead of on
competitive capitalistic terms.

And please do not fail to note that whereas in the early days of
Capitalism our capitalists did not compel us to fight for their
markets with our own hands, but hired German serfs and British
voluntary professional soldiers for the job, their wars have now
become so colossal that every woman’s husband, father, son, brother,
or sweetheart, if young and strong enough to carry a rifle, must go
to the trenches as helplessly as cattle go to the slaughterhouse,
abandoning wife and children, home and business, and renouncing normal
morality and humanity, pretending all the time that such conduct is
splendid and heroic and that his name will live for ever, though he
may have the greatest horror of war, and be perfectly aware that the
enemy’s soldiers, against whom he is defending his hearth, are in
exactly the same predicament as himself, and would never dream of
injuring him or his if the pressure of the drive for markets were
removed from both.

I have purposely brought you to the question of war because your
conscience must be sorely troubled about it. You have seen the men
of Europe rise up and slaughter oneanother in the most horrible
manner in millions. Your son, perhaps, has received a military cross
for venturing into the air in a flying machine and dropping a bomb
on a sleeping village, blowing several children into fragments, and
mutilating or killing their parents. From a militarist, nationalist,
or selfishly patriotic point of view such deeds may appear glorious
exploits; but from the point of view of any universally valid morality:
say from the point of view of a God who is the father of Englishmen
and Germans, Frenchmen and Turks alike, they must seem outbursts of
the most infernal wickedness. As such they have caused many of us to
despair of human nature. A bitter cynicism has succeeded to transports
of pugnacious hatred of which all but the incorrigibly thoughtless, and
a few incurables who have been mentally disabled for life by the war
fever, are now heartily ashamed. I can hardly believe that you have
escaped your share of this crushing disillusion. If you are human as
well as intelligent you must feel about your species very much as the
King of Brobdingnag did when he took Gulliver in his hand as a child
takes a tin soldier, and heard his boastful patriotic discourse about
the glories of military history.

Perhaps I can console you a little. If you will look at the business in
the light of what we have just been studying I think you will see that
the fault lay not so much in our characters as in the capitalist system
which we had allowed to dominate our lives until it became a sort of
blind monster which neither we nor the capitalists could control.
It is absurd to pretend that the young men of Europe ever wanted to
hunt each other into holes in the ground and throw bombs into the
holes to disembowel oneanother, or to have to hide in those holes
themselves, eaten with lice and sickened by the decay of the unburied,
in unutterable discomfort, boredom, and occasionally acute terror, or
that any woman ever wanted to put on her best Sunday clothes and be
gratified at the honor done to her son for killing some other woman’s
babies. The capitalists and their papers try to persuade themselves
and us that we are like that and always will be, in spite of all the
Christmas cards and Leagues of Nations. It is not a bit true. The
staggering fact about all these horrors was that we found ourselves
compelled to do them in spite of the fact that they were so unintended
by us, and so repugnant and dreadful to us that, when at last the war
suddenly stopped, our heroic pretences dropped from us like blown-off
hats, and we danced in the streets for weeks, mad with joy, until
the police had to stop us to restore the necessary traffic. We still
celebrate, by two minutes’ national silence, not the day on which the
glorious war broke out, but the day on which the horrible thing came
to an end. Not the victory, which we have thrown away by abusing it
as helplessly as we fought for it, but the Armistice, the Cessation,
the stoppage of the Red Cross vans from the terminuses of the Channel
railways with their heartbreaking loads of mutilated men, was what we
danced for so wildly and pitifully. If ever there was anything made
clear in the world it was that we were no more directly guilty of the
war than we were guilty of the earthquake of Tokio. We and the French
and the Germans and the Turks and the rest found ourselves conscripted
for an appalling slaughtering match, ruinous to ourselves, ruinous
to civilization, and so dreaded by the capitalists themselves that
it was only by an extraordinary legal suspension of all financial
obligations (called the Moratorium) that the City was induced to face
it. The attempt to fight out the war with volunteers failed: there were
not enough. The rest went because they were forced to go, and fought
because they were forced to fight. The women let them go partly because
they could not help themselves, partly because they were just as
pugnacious as the men, partly because they read the papers (which were
not allowed to tell them the truth), and partly because most of them
were so poor that they grasped at the allowances which left most of
them better off with their husbands in the trenches than they had ever
been with their husbands at home.

How had they got into this position? Simply by the original sin of
allowing their countries to be moved and governed and fed and clothed
by the pursuit of profit for capitalists instead of by the pursuit
of righteous prosperity for “all people that on earth do dwell”. The
first ship that went to Africa to sell things to the natives at more
than cost price because there was no sale for them at home began not
only this war, but the other and worse wars that will follow it if we
persist in depending on Capitalism for our livelihood and our morals.
All these monstrous evils begin in a small and apparently harmless way.
It is not too much to say that when a nation, having five shillings
to divide-up, gives four to Fanny and one to Sarah instead of giving
half a crown to each and seeing that she earns it, it sows the seed of
all the evils that now make thoughtful and farseeing men speak of our
capitalistic civilization as a disease instead of a blessing.




41

THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE


Do not, however, disparage foreign trade. There is nothing wrong
with foreign trade as such. We could have no gold without foreign
trade; and gold has all sorts of uses and all sorts of beauties. I
will not add that we could have no tea, because I happen to think
that we should be better without this insidious Chinese stimulant.
It is safer and probably healthier for a nation to live on the food
and drink it can itself produce, as the Esquimaux manage to do under
much harder conditions. But there are many necessaries of a high
civilization that nations cannot find within their own boundaries, and
must buy from oneanother. We must trade and travel and come to know
oneanother all over the habitable globe. We have to make international
institutions as well as national ones, beginning with Trading Treaties
and Postal Conventions and Copyright Conventions, and going on to
the Leagues of Nations. The necessities of travelling and trade, and
the common interest of all nations in the works and discoveries of
art, literature, and science, have forced them to make international
agreements and treaties with oneanother which are making an end
of “keeping ourselves to ourselves”, and throwing half bricks at
foreigners and strangers. Honest foreign trade would never have got us
into trouble.

Neither is the combination of little States in great Federations and
Commonwealths undesirable: on the contrary, the fewer frontiers the
better. The establishment of law and order in uncivilized places should
not have made us hated there: it should have made us popular; and it
often did--at first. The annexation of other countries under our flag,
when it was really needed, should have been a welcome privilege and a
strengthening partnership for the inhabitants of the annexed regions.
Indeed we have always pretended that this was actually the case, and
that we were in foreign countries for the good of the inhabitants
and not for our own sake. Unfortunately we never could make these
pretensions good in the long run. However noble the aspirations of our
Imperialist idealists might be, our capitalist traders were there to
make as much profit out of the inhabitants as they could, and for no
other purpose. They had abandoned their own country because there was
no more profit to be made there, or not so much; and it is not to be
expected that they would become idealistically disinterested the moment
they landed on foreign shores. They stigmatized the Stay-at-homes,
the anti-Expansionists, the Little-Englanders, as friends of every
country but their own; but they themselves were the enemies of every
country, including their own, where there was a sweatable laborer
to make dividends for them. They pretended that the civilization of
the annexed country was “the white man’s burden”, and posed as weary
Titans reluctantly shouldering the public work of other nations as a
duty imposed on them by Providence; but when the natives, having been
duly civilized, declared that they were now quite ready to govern
themselves, the capitalists held on to their markets as an eagle holds
on to its prey, and, throwing off their apostolic mask, defended their
annexations with fire and sword. They said they would fight to the last
drop of their blood for “the integrity of the Empire”; and they did
in fact pay many thousands of hungry men to fight to that extremity.
In spite of them half of North America broke loose, after a war which
left a volcano of hatred that is still smouldering and winning Chicago
elections after a century of American independence. Roman Catholic
Ireland, South Africa, and Egypt have extorted self-government from us.
India is doing the same. But they do not thank us for it, knowing how
loth our Capitalism was to let them go.

On the other hand look at Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We did
not dare coerce them after our failure in North America. We provide a
costly fleet gratuitously to protect their shores from invasion. We
give them preferences in trade whilst allowing them to set up heavy
protective duties against us. We allow them to be represented at
international congresses as if they were independent nations. We even
allow them access to the King independently of the London Cabinet. The
result is that they hang on to us with tyrannical devotion, waving
the Union Jack as enthusiastically as the Americans wave the Stars
and Stripes. And this is not because they are of our own race. The
Americans were that; yet they broke away; so were the Irish and their
leaders. The French Canadians, who are of the same race with us only
in the sense that we all belong to the human race, cling to us just
as hard. They all follow us to war so boldly that we begin to have
misgivings as to whether someday they may not make us follow them to
war. The last land to strike for independence of the British Empire may
be Protestant England herself, with Ulster and Scotland for allies, and
the Irish Free State heading her Imperialist opponents.

But Capitalism can be depended on to spoil all these reconciliations
and loyalties. True, we no longer exploit colonies capitalistically:
we allow them to do it for themselves, and to call the process
self-government. Whilst we persisted in governing them they blamed
us for all the evils Capitalism brought upon them; and they finally
refused to endure our government. When we left them to govern
themselves they became less and less hostile to us. But the change
always impoverishes them, and leaves them in comparative disorder.
The capitalistic evils for which they blamed us still oppress them.
Their self-government is more tyrannical than our alien government
ever dared to be. Their new relation to the Imperial State becomes
more dangerously strained than the old relation, precisely as the
relation of England to Germany was more dangerously strained in
1913 than the relation of England to Ireland. The most liberal
allowance of self-government cannot reconcile people as long as their
capitalists are competing for markets. Nationalism may make Frenchmen
and Englishmen, Englishmen and Irishmen, savage enemies when it is
infringed. Frenchmen and Irishmen laid their own countries waste to get
rid of English rule. But Capitalism makes all men enemies all the time
without distinction of race, color, or creed. When all the nations have
freed themselves Capitalism will make them fight more furiously than
ever, if we are fools enough to let it.

Have you ever seen the curiosity called a Prince Rupert’s Drop? It
is a bead of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you
break off the tiniest corner the whole bead flies violently to bits.
Europe was like that in 1914. A handful of people in Serbia committed
a murder, and the next moment half Europe was murdering the other
half. This frightful condition of internal strain and instability was
not set up by human nature: it was, I repeat, intensely repugnant to
human nature, being a condition of chronic terror that at last became
unbearable, like that of a woman who commits suicide because she can
no longer endure the dread of death. It was set up by Capitalism.
Capitalism, you will say, is at bottom nothing but covetousness; and
covetousness is human nature. That is true; but covetousness is not
the whole of human nature; it is only a part, and one that vanishes
when it is satisfied, like hunger after a meal, up to which point it
is wholesome and necessary. Under Capitalism it becomes a dread of
poverty and slavery, which are neither wholesome nor necessary. And,
as we have just seen, capital is carried by its own nature beyond the
control of both human covetousness and human conscience, marching on
blindly and automatically, until we find on the one hand the masses
of mankind condemned to poverty relieved only by horrible paroxysms
of bloodshed, and on the other a handful of hypertrophied capitalists
gasping under the load of their growing millions, and giving it away
in heaps in a desperate attempt, partly to get rid of it without
being locked up as madmen for throwing it into the sea, and partly to
undo, by founding Rockefeller institutes and Carnegie libraries, and
hospitals and universities and schools and churches, the effects of the
welter of ignorance and poverty produced by the system under which it
has accumulated on their hands. To call these unfortunate billionaires
monsters of covetousness in the face of their wild disgorgings (to say
nothing of their very ordinary portraits) is silly. They are rather to
be compared to the sorcerer’s apprentice who called up a demon to fetch
a drink for him, and, not knowing the spell for stopping him when he
had brought enough, was drowned in an ocean of wine.




42

HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY


I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in
the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control.
To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big
things like empires and their wars to little familiar things. Take pins
for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my
wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I
will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important
to women.

There was a time when pinmakers could buy the material; shape it; make
the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to market or to your
door and sell it to you. They had to know three trades: buying, making,
and selling; and the making required skill in several operations. They
not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could
do it. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for a
farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman’s dress allowance was called
pin money.

By the end of the eighteenth century Adam Smith boasted that it took
eighteen men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and
passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a
whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The
most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how
it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they
were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pinmakers,
you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilization
when its effect was so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that
by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing
but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it
is said, could turn out nearly five thousand pins a day each; and thus
pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer
because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere
machines doing their work without intelligence, and being fed by the
spare food of the capitalist as an engine is fed with coals and oil.
That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well
as a poet, complained that “wealth accumulates, and men decay”.

Nowadays Adam Smith’s eighteen men are as extinct as the diplodocus.
The eighteen flesh-and-blood machines are replaced by machines of
steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them
into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the
exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how
to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker
in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent and skilful
and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we
have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single
pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on
to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so
recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to
persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal a pin.

Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been
greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether
we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and
degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the
ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution
of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old ways;
for if the saving of time by modern machinery were equally divided
among us, it would set us all free for higher work than pinmaking or
the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that pins are now made
by men and women who cannot make anything by themselves, and could not
arrange between themselves to make anything even in little bits. They
are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their
day’s work until it has all been arranged for them by their employers,
who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay
other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker’s
directions.

The same is true of clothes. Formerly the whole work of making clothes,
from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and
washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the
men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this
day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left
of all this but the sheep-shearing; and even that, like the milking
of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a
sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not
only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are as likely as not
to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and
clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at a
shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and
silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and
other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or
how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly
anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The
people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them
are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own
clothes.

Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance
of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused
them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and
encyclopedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the
books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their
information from other books, what they tell us is from twenty to fifty
years out of date, and unpractical at that. And of course most of us
are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about
it: what we need is a cinema to take our minds off it and feed our
imagination.

It is a funny place, this world of Capitalism, with its astonishing
spread of ignorance and helplessness, boasting all the time of its
spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of
property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to
make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells
them, none of them having the least notion of how it is that they find
people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And
when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux
and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more
intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything
else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties
if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated
newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive;
but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more
or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.

Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays
myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I
see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion
and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of Capitalism as
the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women
are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as
far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been
formed in the cinema, I realize that I had better stop writing plays
for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with
those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.




43

DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW


You must not conclude from what I have just said that I grudge the
people their amusements. I have made most of my money by amusing
them. I recognize more clearly than most people that not only does
all work and no play make Jill a dull girl, but that she works so
that she may be able to enjoy life as well as to keep herself from
dying of hunger and exposure. She wants, and needs, leisure as well
as wages. But breadwinning must come before charabancs and cinemas. I
have the strongest sympathy, as I daresay you have, with the French
gentleman who said that if he could have the luxuries of life he could
do without the necessities; but unfortunately Nature does not share
our sympathy, and ruthlessly puts breadwinning first on pain of death.
The French gentleman is less important than the women who are asking
for an eight-hour working day, because, though what they are really
asking for is for a few hours more leisure when they have rested and
slept, cooked and fed and washed up, yet they know that leisure must be
worked for, and that no woman can shirk her share of the work except by
putting it on some other woman and cutting short _her_ leisure.

Therefore when I say that Capitalism has reduced our people to a
condition of abject helplessness and ignorance in their productive
capacity as workers, you cannot reassure me by pointing out that
factory girls are no fools when it comes to gossiping and amusing
themselves; that they are resourceful enough to learn lip reading in
the weaving-sheds, where the banging of the looms makes it impossible
to hear each other speak; that their dances and charabanc excursions
and whist drives and dressing and wireless concerts stimulate and
cultivate them to an extent unknown to their grandmothers; that
they consume frightful quantities of confectionery; and that they
limit their families to avoid too much mothering. But all this is
consumption, not production. When they are engaged in producing these
amusements: when they take the money for the tickets at the pay-boxes,
or do some scrap of the work of making a charabanc, or wind the wire
on a coil for broadcasting, they are mere machines, taking part in a
routine without knowing what came before or what is to follow.

In giving all the work to one class and all the leisure to another as
far as the law will let it, the Capitalist system disables the rich
as completely as the poor. By letting their land and hiring out their
spare money (capital) to others, they can have plenty of food and fun
without lifting their little fingers. Their agents collect the rent
for the land, and lodge it in the bank for them. The companies which
have hired their spare money lodge the half-yearly hire (dividends)
in the same way. Bismarck said of them that they had only to take a
pair of scissors and cut off a coupon; but he was wrong: the bank does
even that for them; so that all they have to do is to sign the cheques
with which they pay for everything. They need do nothing but amuse
themselves; and they would get their incomes just the same if they
did not do even that. They can only plead that their ancestors worked
productively, as if everybody’s ancestors had not worked productively,
or as if this were any excuse for their not following their ancestors’
excellent example. We cannot live on the virtues of our grandmothers.
They may have farmed their own land, and invented the ways in which
their spare money was applied to the land to make them richer; but when
their successors found that all this trouble would be taken for them by
others, they simply let the land and put out their spare money for hire
(invested it).

Some of our great landholders inherit their land from feudal times,
when there were no factories nor railways, and when towns were so
small that they were walled in as gardens are now. In those days the
landholders, with the king at their head, had to raise armies and
defend the country at their own cost. They had to make the laws and
administer them, doing military work, police work, and government work
of all sorts. Henry IV, who died of overwork, found to his cost how
true it was in those days that the greatest among us must be servant
to all the rest. Nowadays it is the other way about: the greatest is
she to whom all the rest are servants. All the chores and duties of
the feudal barons are done by paid officials. In country places they
may still sit on the Bench as unpaid magistrates; and there remains
the tradition that military service as officers is proper for their
sons. A few of them, with the help of solicitors and agents, manage
the estates on which they actually live, or allow their wives to do
it. But these are only vestiges of a bygone order, maintained mostly
by rich purchasers of estates who are willing to take a little trouble
to be ranked as country gentlemen and county ladies. There are always
newly enriched folk who have this vanity for a while, and will buy
the estate of a real country gentleman to take on his position in the
country. But at any moment our landed gentry, whether they are so by
descent or purchase, can sell their country houses and parks, and
live anywhere they please in the civilized world without any public
duties or responsibilities. Sooner or later they all do so, thus
breaking the only link that binds them to the old feudal aristocracy
save their names and titles. For all the purposes of the real world
of today there is no longer a feudal aristocracy: it is merged in the
industrial capitalist class, with which it associates and intermarries
without distinction, money making up for everything. If it be still
necessary to call the rich an ocracy of any kind, they must be called
a plutocracy, in which the oldest ducal estate and the newest fortune
made in business are only forms of capital, imposing no public duties
on the owner.

Now this state of things may seem extremely jolly for the plutocracy
from the point of view of those who are so overworked and underamused
that they can imagine nothing better than a life that is one long
holiday; but it has the disadvantage of making the plutocrats as
helpless as babies when they are left to earn their own living. You
know that there is nothing more pitiable on earth within the limits
of good health than born ladies and gentlemen suddenly losing their
property. But have you considered that they would be equally pitiable
if their property were thrown on their own hands to make what they
could of it? They would not know how to farm their lands or to work
their mines and railways or to sail their ships. They would perish
surrounded by what Dr Johnson called “the potentiality of growing rich
beyond the dreams of avarice”. Without the hungry they would have to
say “I cannot dig: to beg (even if I knew how) I am ashamed”. The
hungry could do without them, and be very much the better for it; but
they could not do without the hungry.

Yet most of the hungry, left to themselves, would be quite as helpless
as the plutocrats. Take the case of a housemaid, familiar to the
intelligent lady who can afford to keep one. A woman may be a very
good housemaid; but you have to provide the house for her and manage
the house before she can set to work. Many excellent housemaids, when
they marry, make a poor enough job of their own housekeeping. Ask them
to manage a big hotel, which employs dozens of housemaids, and they
will think you are laughing at them: you might as well ask the porter
at the Bank of England to manage the bank. A bricklayer may be a very
good bricklayer; but he cannot build a house nor even make the bricks
he lays. Any laborer can lay a plank across a stream, or place a row of
stepping-stones in it; but just ask him to build a bridge, whether it
be the simplest sort of canal bridge or a gigantic construction like
the Forth Bridge! You might as well ask your baby to make its cot and
knit its jumper, or your cook to design and construct a kitchen range
and water supply.

This helplessness gets more and more complete as civilization advances.
In villages you may still find carpenters and blacksmiths who can make
things. They can even choose and buy their materials, and then sell
the finished article. But in the cities on which our existence now
depends you find multitudes of workers and plutocrats who cannot make
anything; do not know how anything is made; and are so inept at buying
and selling that without fixed-price-shops they would perish.




44

THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE


And now, if the landlords and capitalists can neither make anything
nor even tell others how to make it; and if the workers can do nothing
until they are told what to do, how does the world get on? There must
be some third class standing between the propertied class on the one
hand and the propertyless class on the other, to lease the land and
hire the capital and tell the workers what to do with them.

There is. You can see for yourself that there is a middle class which
does all the managing and directing and deciding work of the nation,
besides carrying on the learned and literary and artistic professions.
Let us consider how this class arose, and how it is continually
recruited from the capitalist families.

The capitalists do something more than merely own. They marry and
have children. Now an income which is comfortable for two people
may not be enough for three or four children in addition, to say
nothing of possibly twice or thrice that number. And when the three
or four children grow up and marry and have three or four children
each, what meant riches for the grandparents may mean poverty for the
grandchildren.

To avoid this, propertied families may arrange that only the eldest
son shall inherit the property, leaving the younger sons to shift for
themselves, and the daughters to marry men of property if they can.
This is called primogeniture. Until 1926 it was the law of the land
in England when the owner of a landed estate died without leaving a
will to the contrary. Where there is no such law, and all the children
inherit equal shares of the parents’ property, as they do among the
peasant proprietors in France, the family must come to an arrangement
of the same kind between themselves, or else sell the property and
leave its owners with a few pounds each that will not last them very
long. Therefore they almost always do agree that the younger children
shall live by working like the hungry, whilst the eldest keeps the
farm and cultivates it. This cannot be done when the property is not
land but capital, and all the members of the family are living on the
interest of hired out spare money. Parents may make wills leaving all
of it or most of it to one son; but they do not do this as a rule; and
sooner or later the property gets divided and divided among children
and other next-of-kin until the inheritors cannot live on their shares.

But please remark that the younger sons who are thus thrown on the
world to earn their living have the tastes and habits and speech and
appearance and education of rich men. They are well connected, as
we say. Their near relations may be peers. Some of them have been
schooled at Eton and Harrow, and have taken degrees at Oxford and
Cambridge. Others have less distinguished connections. Their parents or
grandparents may have made money in business; and they may have gone
to the big city schools, or to day schools, instead of to Eton, and
either to one of the new democratic universities or to no university
at all. Their most important relative may be a mayor or alderman.
But they are educated at secondary as distinguished from elementary
schools; and though not what they themselves call great swells, they
have the manners and appearance and speech and habits of the capitalist
class, are described as gentlemen, and politely addressed by letter as
Esquires instead of plain Misters.

All these propertyless people who have the ways and the culture
of propertied ones have to live by their wits. They go into the
army and navy as officers, or into the upper grades of the civil
service. They become clergymen, doctors, lawyers, authors, actors,
painters, sculptors, architects, schoolmasters, university professors,
astronomers and the like, forming what we call the professional class.
They are treated with special respect socially; but they see successful
men of business, inferior to themselves in knowledge, talent,
character, and public spirit, making much larger incomes. The highest
sorts of mental work are often so unremunerative that it is impossible
to make a living by practising them commercially. Spinoza lived by
grinding lenses, and Rousseau by copying music. Einstein lives by
professorships. Newton lived, not by discovering gravitation and
measuring fluxions, but by acting as Master of the Mint, which other
men could have done as well. Even when a profession is comparatively
lucrative and popular, its gains are restricted by the fact that the
work must all be done by the practitioner’s own hand; for a surgeon
cannot employ a thousand subordinates to deal with a million patients
as a soap king deals with a million customers, nor the President of the
Royal Academy hand over a two thousand guinea portrait sitter to his
secretary. The years of professional success are usually preceded by a
long struggle with scanty means. I myself am held to be a conspicuous
example of success in the most lucrative branch of the literary
profession; but until I was thirty I could not make even a bare living
by my pen. At thirty-eight I thought myself passing rich on six or
seven pounds a week; and even now, when I am seventy, and have achieved
all that can be achieved commercially at my job, I see in the paper
every day, under the heading Wills and Bequests, that the widow of some
successful man of business, wholly unknown to fame, has died leaving a
fortune which reduces my gains to insignificance.

The consequence is that professional men and civil servants, when they
are not incurable old-fashioned snobs who regard trade as beneath the
dignity of their family, and when their sons have no overwhelming
aptitude for one or other of the professions, advise them strongly to
go in for business. The man of business may not have much chance of a
public statue unless he pays for it and presents it to his native town
with a spacious public park attached; and his occupation may be a dry
one in itself, however exciting the prospect of pocketing more and more
money may make it. But he can make profits not only out of his work,
like the surgeon or painter, but out of the work of thousands of others
as well. And his work is not necessarily dry: modern businesses tend to
become more interesting and important, and even more scientific, than
average professional work. Their activities are much more varied: in
fact modern commercial magnates, when they control a dozen different
businesses, become better informed and better developed mentally than
the rank and file of the professions. What is more, they are learning
to snap up the ablest university scholars and civil servants, and
take them into partnership not as office managers but as thinkers,
diplomatists, and commercial scientists. It is in industrially
undeveloped countries that professional men rank as an aristocracy of
learning and intellect: in European centres today commercial society
is a more effective reserve of culture than professional society. When
the professional man or the public servant tells his son that a berth
in the civil service is a blind alley, or doctoring at the call of the
night bell a dog’s life, contrasting them with the unlimited prospects
and the infinite scope for personal initiative in business, he is
recommending the young man to improve on his father’s condition instead
of starting him on the downward path socially.

And what is business in the lump? It is hiring land from landlords and
spare money from capitalists, and employing the hungry to make enough
money out of them day by day to pay the wages for their keep and bring
in a profit as well. Astonishing fortunes can be made in this way by
men and women with the necessary ability and decision who have the
particular sort of pecuniary keenness and pertinacity that business
requires. Even more staggering profits are made sometimes by accident,
the business man hitting by chance on something new that the public
happens to fancy. Millions are made by medicines which injure people’s
health instead of improving it (read Tono-Bungay), and hair restorers
that leave the buyer as bald as before. Articles that nobody needs,
and sham pleasures that give only fatigue and boredom at extravagant
prices, are advertized and advertized until people are beglamored into
thinking they cannot do without them.

But the main scope in business is for honorable and useful activity,
from growing food and building houses and making clothes, or
manufacturing spades and sewing-machines, to laying cables round the
world, and building giant ships to turn the ocean or the air into
a highway. The planning and management and ordering of this gives
employment to able and energetic men who have no property, but have
the education and social address of the propertied class. The educated
who are neither able nor energetic, and who have no professions, find
employment as agents or clerks carrying out the routine and keeping the
accounts of businesses which the able ones have established and are
directing. And the women of their class are forced to live by marrying
them.

In this way we get, between the propertied class and the hungry mass,
a middle class which acts as a sort of Providence to both of them. It
cultivates the land and employs the capital of the property holders,
paying them the rent of their lands and the hire of their spare money
without asking them to lift a finger, and giving the hungry wages to
live on without asking them to think or decide or know or do anything
except their own little bit of the job in hand. The hungry have neither
to buy the material nor to sell the product, neither to organize the
service nor find the customer. Like children they are told what to do,
and fed and lodged and clothed whilst they are doing it, not always
very handsomely perhaps; but at worst they are kept alive long enough
to produce a fresh set of hungry ones to replace them when they are
worn out.

There are always a few cases in which this management is done, not by
descendants of propertied folk, but by men and women sprung from the
hungriest of the hungry. These are the geniuses who know most of the
things that other people have to be taught, and who educate themselves
as far as they need any education. But there are so few of them that
they need not be taken into account. In great social questions we are
dealing with the abilities of ordinary citizens: that is, the abilities
we can depend on everyone except invalids and idiots possessing, and
not with what one man or woman in ten thousand can do. In spite of
several cases in which persons born in poverty and ignorance have risen
to make vast fortunes, to become famous as philosophers, discoverers,
authors, and even rulers of kingdoms, to say nothing of saints and
martyrs, we may take it that business and the professions are closed
to those who cannot read and write, travel and keep accounts, besides
dressing, speaking, behaving, and handling and spending money more or
less in the manner of the propertied classes.

This is another way of saying that until about fifty years ago the
great mass of our people working for weekly wages were as completely
shut out from the professions and from business as if there had been
a law forbidding them on pain of death to attempt to enter them. I
remember wondering when I was a lad at a man who was in my father’s
employment as a miller. He could neither read nor write nor cipher
(that is, do sums on paper); but his natural faculty for calculation
was so great that he could solve instantly all the arithmetical
problems that arose in the course of his work: for instance, if it
were a question of so many sacks of flour at so much a sack, he could
tell you the answer straight off without thinking, which was more
than my father or his clerks could do. But because he did not know
his alphabet, and could not put pen to paper, and had not the speech
and manners and habits and dress without which he would not have
been admitted into the company of merchants and manufacturers, or of
lawyers, doctors, and clergymen, he lived and died a poor employee,
without the slightest chance of rising into the middle class, or the
faintest pretension to social equality with my father. And my father,
though he was propertyless, and worked as a middle class civil servant
and subsequently as a merchant, was not at all proud of being a member
of the middle class: on the contrary, he resented that description,
holding on to his connexion with the propertied class as a younger
son of many former younger sons, and therefore, though unfortunately
reduced to living not very successfully by his wits, a man of family
and a gentleman.

But this was sixty years ago. Since then we have established Communism
in education. If my father’s miller were a boy now, he would go to
school for nine years, whether his parents liked it or not, at the
expense of the whole community; and his mathematical gift would enable
him to win a scholarship that would take him on to a secondary school,
and another scholarship there that would take him to the university
and qualify him for a profession. At the very least he would become an
accountant, even were it only as a bookkeeper or clerk. In any case he
would be qualified for middle class employment and pass into that class.

Now the social significance of this is that the middle class, which
the younger sons and their descendants formerly had all to themselves
as far as the most desirable positions in it were concerned, is now
recruited from the working class as well. These recruits, with no
gentlemanly nonsense about them, are not only better taught than the
boys who go to cheapish middle class schools, but better trained to
face the realities of life. Also the old differences in speech and
dress and manners are much less than they were, partly because the
working class is picking up middle class manners, but much more
because they are forcing their own manners and speech on the middle
class as standards. A man like my father, half a merchant, but ashamed
of it and unable to make up his mind to it, and half a gentleman
without any property to uphold his pretension, would, if he were
a boy nowadays, be beaten hollow in the competition for land, for
capital, and for position in the civil service by the sons of men
whose grandfathers would never have dreamed of presuming to sit down
in his presence. The futile propertyless gentlemen, the unserviceable
and grossly insolent civil servants whom Dickens described, have to be
content nowadays with the refuse of middle class employment. They are
discontented, unhappy, impecunious, struggling with a false position,
borrowing (really begging) from their relatives, and unable to realize,
or unwilling to admit, that they have fallen out of the propertied
class, not into an intermediate position where they have a monopoly of
all the occupations and employments that require a little education
and manners, but right down into the ranks of the hungry, without the
hardening that makes the hungry life bearable.

And what of the daughters? Their business is to get married; and I
can remember the time when there was no other hopeful opening in life
for them. When they failed to find husbands, and no special provision
had been made for them, they became governesses or school teachers
or “companions” or genteel beggars under the general heading of
poor relations. They had been carefully trained to feel that it was
unladylike to work, and still more unladylike to propose marriage to
men. The professions were closed to them. The universities were closed
to them. The business offices were closed to them. Their poverty cut
them off from propertied society. Their ladylikeness cut them off
from the society of working people as poor as themselves, and from
inter-marriage with them. Life was a ghastly business for them.

Nowadays, there are far more careers open to women. We have women
barristers and women doctors in practice. True, the Church is closed
against them, to its own great detriment, as it could easily find
picked women, eloquent in the pulpit and capable in parish management,
to replace the male refuse it has too often to fall back on; but women
can do without ecclesiastical careers now that the secular and civil
services are open. The closing of the fighting services is socially
necessary, as women are far too valuable to have their lives risked
in battle as well as in child-bearing. If ninety out of every hundred
young men were killed we could recover from the loss, but if ninety out
of every hundred young women were killed there would be an end of the
nation. That is why modern war, which is not confined to battle fields,
and rains high explosives and poison gas on male and female civilians
indiscriminately in their peaceful homes, is so much more dangerous
than war has ever been before.

Besides, women are now educated as men are: they go to the universities
and to the technical colleges if they can afford it; and, as Domestic
Service is now an educational subject with special colleges, a woman
can get trained for such an occupation as that of manageress of a hotel
as well as for the practice of law or medicine, or for accountancy
and actuarial work. In short, nothing now blocks a woman’s way
into business or professional life except prejudice, superstition,
old-fashioned parents, shyness, snobbery, ignorance of the contemporary
world, and all the other imbecilities for which there is no remedy
but modern ideas and force of character. Therefore it is no use
facing the world today with the ideas of a hundred years ago, when
it was practically against the law for a lady who was not a genius
to be self-supporting; for if she kept a shop, or even visited at
the house of a woman who kept a shop, she was no lady. I know better
than you (because I am probably much older) that the tradition of
those bad old times still wastes the lives of single gentlewomen to
a deplorable extent; but, for all that, every year sees an increase
in the activities of gentlewomen outside the home in business and
the professions, and even in perilous professional exploration and
adventure with a cinematographic camera in attendance.

This increase is hastened by the gigantic scale of capitalist
production, which, as we have seen, reduces the old household labor
of baking and brewing, spinning and weaving, first to shopping at
separate shops, and then to telephoning the day’s orders to one big
multiple shop. We have seen also how it leads prematurely to Birth
Control, which has reduced the number of children in the middle class
households very notably. Many middle-class women who could formerly
say with truth that there was no end to a woman’s work in the house
are now underworked, in spite of the difficulty of finding servants.
It is conceivable that women may drive men out of many middle class
occupations as they have already driven them out of many city offices.
We are losing the habit of regarding business and the professions as
male employments.

Nevertheless males are in a vast majority in these departments, and
must remain so as long as our family arrangements last, because the
bearing and rearing of children, including domestic housekeeping, is
woman’s natural monopoly. As such, being as it is the most vital of all
the functions of mankind, it gives women a power and importance that
they can attain to in no other profession, and that man cannot attain
to at all. In so far as it is a slavery, it is a slavery to Nature and
not to Man: indeed it is the means by which women enslave men, and thus
create a Man Question which is called, very inappropriately, the Woman
Question. Woman as Wife and Mother stands apart from the development
we are dealing with in this chapter, which is, the rise of a business
and professional middle class out of the propertied class. This is
a sexless development, because when the unmarried daughters, like
the younger sons, become doctors, barristers, ministers in the Free
Churches, managers, accountants, shopkeepers, and clerks under the term
typist (in America stenographer), they virtually leave their sex behind
them, as men do. In business and the professions there are neither men
nor women: economically they are all neuters, as far as that is humanly
possible. The only disadvantage the woman is at in competition with
the man is that the man must either succeed in his business or fail
completely in life, whilst the woman has a second string to her bow in
the possibility of getting married. A young woman who regards business
employment as only a temporary support until she can find an eligible
husband will never master her work as a man must.




45

DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER


At first sight it would seem that the employers must be the most
powerful class in the community, because the others can do nothing
without them. So they were, a hundred years ago. The dominant man
then was not the capitalist nor the landlord nor the laborer, but
the employer who could set capital and land and labor to work. These
employers began as office employees; for business in those days was
mostly on so small a scale that any middle class employee who had
learnt the routine of business as a clerk or apprentice, in his
father’s office or elsewhere, and who could scrape together a few
hundred pounds, could enter into partnership with another thrifty
employee, and set up in almost any sort of business as an employer.

But as spare money accumulated in larger and larger quantity, and
enterprise expanded accordingly, business came to be done on a larger
and larger scale until these old-fashioned little firms found their
customers being taken away from them by big concerns and joint stock
companies who could, with their huge capitals and costly machinery,
not only undersell them, but make a greater profit out of their lower
prices. Women see this in their shopping. They used to buy their
umbrellas at an umbrella shop, their boots at a boot shop, their
books at a book shop, and their lunches-out at a restaurant. Nowadays
they buy them all at the same shop, lunch and all. Huge bazaars like
Selfridge’s and Whiteley’s in London, and the great multiple shops
in the provincial cities, are becoming the only shops where you can
buy anything, because they are taking away the trade of the small
separate shops and ruining the shopkeepers who kept them. These ruined
shopkeepers may think themselves lucky if they get jobs in the multiple
shops as shop assistants, managers of departments, and the like, when
they are not too old for the change.

Sometimes the change is invisible. Certain retail trades have to be
carried on in small shops scattered all over the place. For example,
oil shops, public houses, and tobacconists. These look like separate
small businesses. But they are not. The public houses are tied houses
practically owned in dozens by the brewers. A hundred oil shops or
tobacco shops may belong to a single big company, called a Trust. Just
as the little businesses conducted by a couple of gentlemen partners,
starting with a capital which they counted in hundreds, had to give way
to companies counting their capital in thousands, so these companies
are being forced to combine into Trusts which count their capital in
millions.

These changes involve another which is politically very important.
When the employers had it all their own way, and were in business for
themselves separately and independently, they worked with what we
should call small capitals, and had no difficulty in getting them.
Capital was positively thrown down their throats by the bankers, who,
as we shall see later, have most of the spare money to keep. Those were
the days of arrogant cotton lords and merchant princes. The man who
could manage a business took every penny that was left in the till when
the landlord had had his rent, the capitalist (who was often himself)
his interest, and the employees their wages. If he were a capable man,
what remained for him as profit was enough to make him rich enough to
go into Parliament if he cared to. Sometimes it was enough to enable
him to buy his way into the peerage. Capital being useless and Labor
helpless without him, he was, as an American economist put it, master
of the situation.

When joint stock companies, which were formerly supposed to be suitable
for banking and insurance only, came into business generally, the
situation of the employers began to change. In a joint stock concern
you have, instead of one or two capitalists, hundreds of capitalists,
called shareholders, each contributing what spare money she or he
can afford. It began with £100 shares, and has gone on to £10 and
£1 shares; so that a single business today may belong to a host of
capitalist proprietors, many of them much poorer people than could ever
have acquired property in pre-company days. This had two results. One
was that a woman with a £5 note to spare could allow a company to spend
it, and thereby become entitled to, say, five shillings a year out of
the gains of that company as long as it lasted. In this way Capitalism
was strengthened by the extension of property in industry from rich
people with large sums of spare money to poor people with small ones.
But the employers were weakened, and finally lost their supremacy and
became employees.

It happened in this way. The joint stock company system made it
possible to collect much larger capitals to start business with than
the old separate firms could command. It was already known that the
employer with a thousand pounds worth of machinery and other aids
to production (called plant) could be undersold and driven out of
the market by the employer with twenty thousand pounds worth. Still,
employers could get twenty thousand pounds lent to them easily enough
if it was believed that they could handle it profitably. But when
companies came into the field equipped with hundreds of thousands of
pounds, and these companies began to combine into Trusts equipped with
millions, the employers were outdone. They could not raise such sums
among their acquaintances. No bank would allow them to overdraw their
accounts on such a gigantic scale. To get more capital, they had to
turn their businesses into joint stock companies.

This sounds simple; but the employers did not find it so. You, I hope,
would not buy shares in a new company unless you saw what are called
good names on the prospectus, shewing that half a dozen persons whom
you believe to be wealthy, trustworthy, good judges of business, and
in responsible social stations were setting you the example. If ever
you do you will regret it, possibly in the workhouse. Now the art
of getting at the people with the good names, and interesting them,
is one at which practical employers are for the most part incurably
unskilled. Therefore when they want to raise capital on the modern
scale they are forced to go to persons who, having made a special
profession of it, know where to go and how to proceed. These persons
are called Promoters, though they usually call themselves financiers.
They naturally charge a very high commission for their services; and
the accountants and solicitors whose reputations inspire confidence
put a high price on their names also. They all find that they can
make so much by raising large capitals that it is not worth their
while to trouble themselves with small ones; and the quaint result
of this is that an employer finds it easier to raise large sums than
small ones. If he wants only £20,000, the promoters and financiers
shew him the door contemptuously: the pickings on so small a sum are
beneath their notice. If, however, he wants £100,000, they will
listen superciliously, and perhaps get it for him. Only, though he
has to pay interest on £100,000, and stand indebted in that amount,
he is very lucky if he receives £70,000 in cash. The promoters and
financiers divide the odd £30,000 among themselves for their names
and their trouble in raising the money. The employers are helpless in
their hands: it is a case of take it or leave it: if they refuse the
terms they get no capital. Thus the financiers and their go-betweens
are now masters of the situation; and the men who actually conduct and
order the industry of the country, who would have been great commercial
magnates in Queen Victoria’s reign, are now under the thumbs of men who
never employed an industrial workman nor entered a factory or mine in
their lives, and never intend to.

And that is not all. When an employer turns his business into a joint
stock company he becomes an employee. He may be the head employee who
orders all the other employees about, engaging and dismissing them as
he thinks fit; but still he is an employee, and can be dismissed by
the shareholders and replaced by another manager if they think he is
taking too much for his services. Against this possibility he usually
protects himself by selling his establishment to the company at first
for a number of shares sufficient to enable him to outvote all the
discontented shareholders (each share carries a vote); and in any case
his position as the established head who has made a success of the
business, or at least persuaded the shareholders that he has, is a
strong one. But he does not live for ever. When he dies or retires, a
new manager must be found; and this successor is not his heir, but a
stranger entering as a removable employee, managing the concern for a
salary and perhaps a percentage of the profits.

Now an able employee-manager can command a high salary, and have a
good deal of power, because he is felt to be indispensable until he is
worn out. But he can never be as indispensable as the old employers
who invented their own methods, and clung to their “trade secrets”
jealously. Their methods necessarily resolved themselves into an office
routine which could be picked up, however unintelligently, by those
employed in it. The only trade secret that really counted was the new
machinery, which was not secret at all; for all the great mechanical
inventions are soon communized by law: that is, instead of the
inventor of a machine being allowed to keep it as his private property
for ever and make all the employers who use it pay him a royalty, he is
allowed to monopolize it in this way under a patent for fourteen years
only, after which it is at everybody’s disposal.

You can guess the inevitable result. It may take a genius to invent,
say a steam-engine, but once it is invented a couple of ordinary
workmen can keep it going; and when it is worn out any ordinary
engineering firm can replace it by copying it. Also, though it may
need exceptional talent, initiative, energy, and concentration to set
up a new business, yet when it is once set up, and the routine of
working it established, it can be kept going by ordinary persons who
have learnt the routine, and whose rule is “When in doubt as to what
to do, see what was done the last time, and do it over again”. Thus
a very clever man may build up a great business, and leave it to his
quite ordinary son to carry on when he is dead; and the son may get on
very well without ever really understanding the business as his father
did. Or the father may leave it to his daughter with the certainty
that if she cannot or will not do the directing work herself, she can
easily hire employee-employers who can and will, for a salary plus a
percentage. The famous Krupp factory in Germany belongs to a lady.
I will not go so far as to say that managerial ability has become a
drug in the market, though, in the little businesses which are still
conducted in the old way in the poorer middle class, the employer often
has to pay his more highly skilled employees more than he gets out of
the business for himself. But the monopoly of business technique which
made the capitalist-employer supreme in the nineteenth century has
gone for ever. Employers today are neither capitalists nor monopolists
of managerial ability. The political and social power which their
predecessors enjoyed has passed to the financiers and bankers, who
monopolize the art of collecting millions of spare money. That monopoly
will be broken in its turn by the communization of banking, to which we
shall come presently.

Meanwhile you, putting all these developments together in your mind,
can now contemplate the Middle Class understandingly. You know now
how it sprang from the propertied class as an educated younger-son
class without property, and supported itself by practising the
professions, and by doing the business of the propertied class. You
know how it rose to supreme power and riches when the development of
modern machinery (called the Industrial Revolution) made business so
big and complicated that neither the propertied class nor the working
class could understand it, and the middle class men who did (called
generally employers), became masters of the situation. You know how,
when the first generations of employers had found out how to do this
work, and established a routine of doing it which any literate man
could learn and practise, and when all that remained was to find more
and more capital to feed it as its concerns grew bigger and bigger,
the supremacy passed from the employers to the financiers who hold it
at present. You know also that this last change has been accompanied
by a change in the status of the employer, who instead of hiring the
land and capital of the propertied classes for a fixed payment of rent
and interest, and taking as his profit all that remains, is now simply
employed to manage for companies and trusts, the shareholders taking
everything that is left after they have paid rent and wages (including
his salary). You see that in applying for such posts he has to meet the
competition not only of other middle class men as of old, but of clever
sons of the working class, raised into the middle class by education at
the public expense by our system of scholarships, which act as ladders
from the elementary school to the University or the Polytechnic. You
see that this applies not only to employers, but much more to their
clerks. Clerking was formerly a monopoly of the less energetic sons of
the middle class. Now that everybody has to go to school the middle
class monopoly of reading, writing, and ciphering is gone; and skilled
manual workers are better paid than clerks, being scarcer. As to
parlormaids, what ordinary typist does not envy their creature comforts?

The Middle Station in Life no longer justifies the pæan in its praise
which Daniel Defoe raised in Robinson Crusoe. For those who possess no
special talent of a lucrative kind, it is now the least eligible class
in the community.




46

THE PROLETARIAT


We have disposed of the Middle Classes: let us turn to the Lower
Classes, the Hungry Ones, the Working Classes, the Masses, the Mob,
or whatever else you call them. Classical culture has invented a
general name for all people, of whatever nation, color, sex, sect,
or social pretension, who, having no land nor capital (no property),
have to hire themselves out for a living. It calls them proletarians,
or, in the lump, The Proletariat. Karl Marx, who was born in Rhenish
Germany in 1818, and died in London in 1883, after spending the last
thirty-four years of his life in England making a special study of the
development of Capitalism among us, was, and still is, the most famous
champion of the Proletariat as the really organic part of civilized
society to which all the old governing and propertied classes must
finally succumb. When Marx raised his famous slogan, “Proletarians of
all lands: unite”, he meant that all who live by the sale or hire of
their labor should combine to do away with private property in land and
capital, and to make everyone do her or his bit of the labor of the
world, and share the product without paying toll to any idler.

The difficulty at that time was that the employers, without whom the
proletarians could do nothing, were, as we have seen, strong, rich,
independent, and masterful. They not only owned a good deal of land and
capital themselves, but fully intended to become propertied country
gentlemen when they retired. It was not until they began to slip down
into a salaried, or proletarian class, that they also began to listen
to Karl Marx. You see, they were losing their personal interest in
private property with its rents and dividends, and were becoming
interested solely in the price that could be got out of the landlords
and capitalists for active services: that is, for labor of hand and
brain. Instead of wanting to give Labor as little as possible and get
as much out of it as possible, they wanted property to get as little
as possible, and the sort of labor they themselves did to get as much
as possible. They found that skilled manual work, and even unskilled
manual strength, was coming more and more to be better paid than
bookkeeping work and routine managing and professional work.

Now it is no use pretending to be better than other people when you are
poorer. It only leads to keeping up more expensive appearances on less
money, and forbidding your children to associate with most people’s
children whilst they forbid their children to speak to yours. If the
parents do not realize the vanity of such pretension the children do.
I remember thinking when I was a boy how silly it was that my father,
whose business was wholesale business, should consider himself socially
superior to his tailor, who had the best means of knowing how much
poorer than himself my father was, and who had a handsome residence,
with ornamental grounds and sailing-boats, at the seaside place where
we spent the summer in a six-roomed cottage-villa with a small garden.
The great Grafton Street shopkeepers of Dublin outshone the tailor
with their palaces and yachts; and their children had luxuries that I
never dreamt of as possible for me, besides being far more expensively
educated. My father’s conviction that they were too lowly to associate
with me, when it was so clear that I was too poor to associate with
them, may have had some sort of imaginary validity for him; but for me
it was snobbish nonsense. I lived to see those children entertaining
the Irish peerage and the Viceroy without a thought of the old social
barriers; and very glad the Irish peers were to be entertained by them.
I lived to see those shops become multiple shops managed by salaried
employees who have less chance of entertaining the peerage than a
baked-potato man of entertaining the King.

My father was an employer whose whole capital added to that of his
partner would not have kept a big modern company in postage stamps for
a fortnight. But at my start in life I found it impossible to become
an employer like him: I had to become a clerk at fifteen. I was a
proletarian undisguised. Therefore, when I began to take an interest
in politics, I did not join the Conservative Party. It was the party
of the landlords; and I was not a landlord. I did not join the Liberal
Party. It was the party of the employers; and I was an employee. My
father voted Conservative or Liberal just as the humor took him,
and never imagined that any other party could exist. But I wanted a
proletarian party; and when the Karl Marx slogan began to take effect
in all the countries in Europe by producing proletarian political
societies, which came to be called Socialist societies because they
aimed at the welfare of society as a whole as against class prejudices
and property interests, I naturally joined one of these societies, and
so came to be called, and was proud to call myself, a Socialist.

Now the significant thing about the particular Socialist society which
I joined was that the members all belonged to the middle class. Indeed
its leaders and directors belonged to what is sometimes called the
upper middle class: that is, they were either professional men like
myself (I had escaped from clerkdom into literature) or members of
the upper division of the civil service. Several of them have since
had distinguished careers without changing their opinions or leaving
the Society. To their Conservative and Liberal parents and aunts and
uncles fifty years ago it seemed an amazing, shocking, unheard-of
thing that they should become Socialists, and also a step bound to
make an end of all their chances of success in life. Really it was
quite natural and inevitable. Karl Marx was not a poor laborer: he was
the highly educated son of a rich Jewish lawyer. His almost equally
famous colleague, Friedrich Engels, was a well-to-do employer. It
was precisely because they were liberally educated, and brought up
to think about how things are done instead of merely drudging at the
manual labor of doing them, that these two men, like my colleagues in
The Fabian Society (note, please, that we gave our society a name that
could have occurred only to classically educated men), were the first
to see that Capitalism was reducing their own class to the condition
of a proletariat, and that the only chance of securing anything more
than a slave’s share in the national income for anyone but the biggest
capitalists or the cleverest professional or business men lay in a
combination of all the proletarians without distinction of class or
country to put an end to Capitalism by developing the communistic side
of our civilization until Communism became the dominant principle
in society, and mere owning, profiteering, and genteel idling were
disabled and discredited. Or, as our numerous clergymen members put
it, to worship God instead of Mammon. Communism, being the lay form of
Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack
of chaplains.

I may mention, as illustrating the same point, that The Fabian Society,
when I joined it immediately after its foundation in 1884, had only
two rival Socialist Societies in London, both professing, unlike the
Fabian, to be working-class societies. But one of them was dominated
by the son of a very rich man who bequeathed large sums to religious
institutions in addition to providing for his sons, to whom he had
given a first-rate education. The other was entirely dependent on one
of the most famous men of the nineteenth century, who was not only a
successful employer and manufacturer in the business of furnishing and
decorating palaces and churches, but an eminent artistic designer, a
rediscoverer of lost arts, and one of the greatest of English poets
and writers. These two men, Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris,
left their mark on the working-class proletariat as preachers of
Socialism, but failed in their attempts to organize a new working-class
Socialist Party in their own upper middle class way under their own
leadership and in their own dialect (for the language of ladies and
gentlemen is only a dialect), because the working classes had already
organized themselves in their own way, under their own leaders,
and in their own dialect. The Fabian Society succeeded because it
addressed itself to its own class in order that it might set about
doing the necessary brain work of planning Socialist organization for
all classes, meanwhile accepting, instead of trying to supersede, the
existing political organizations which it intended to permeate with the
Socialist conception of human society.

The existing form of working-class organization was Trade Unionism.
Trade Unionism is not Socialism: it is the Capitalism of the
Proletariat. This requires another chapter of explanation, and a
very important one; for Trade Unionism is now very powerful, and
occasionally leaves the Intelligent Woman without coals or regular
trains for weeks together. Before we can understand it, however, we
must study the Labor Market out of which it grew; and this will take
several preliminary chapters, including a somewhat grim one on the
special position of women as sellers in that market.




47

THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS


The workwoman working for weekly wages is like her employer in one
respect. She has something to sell; and she has to live on the price
of it. That something is her labor. The more she gets for it the
better-off she is: the less she gets for it the worse-off she is: if
she can get nothing for it she starves or becomes a pauper. When she
marries, she finds her husband in the same position; and he has to pay
for the upkeep of her domestic labor out of the price of his industrial
labor. Under these circumstances they are both naturally keen on
getting as much for his industrial labor as possible, and giving as
little for its price as the purchaser (the employer) will put up with.
This means that they want the highest wages and the shortest hours of
work they can get. Unless they are exceptionally thoughtful and public
spirited persons, their ideas are limited to that.

The employer is in the same predicament. He does not sell labor: he
has to buy it: what he sells are the goods or services produced under
his direction; and if he, as mostly happens, is neither thoughtful nor
public spirited, his ideas are limited to getting as much for what he
sells as possible and giving as little for the money as the purchaser
will put up with. In buying labor his interest and policy are to pay as
little and get as much as he can, being thus precisely the opposites of
the workers’ interest and policy.

This not only produces that unhappy and dangerous conflict of feeling
and interest between employers and employed called Class War, but
leads to extremities of social wickedness that are hardly credible of
civilized people. The Government has been forced again and again to
interfere between the buyers and sellers of labor to compel them to
keep their bargains within the barest limits of common humanity. To
begin with, all the employers want is labor, and whether the labor
is done by a child or a woman or a man is nothing to them: they buy
whatever labor is cheapest. Also the effect of the work on the health
and morals of the employed is nothing to the employer except in so far
as they may make a difference in his profit; and when he takes them
into consideration with this in view he may conclude that an inhuman
disregard of all natural kindness will pay him better than any attempt
to reconcile his interest with the welfare of his employees.

To illustrate this I may cite the case of the London tramways when the
cars were drawn by horses, and of certain plantations in America before
negro slavery was abolished there. The question to be decided by the
tramway managers was, what is the most moneymaking way of treating
tramway horses? A well-cared-for horse, if not overworked, may live
twenty years, or even, like the Duke of Wellington’s horse, forty. On
the other hand, reckless ill-usage will kill a horse in less than a
year, as it will kill anyone else. If horses cost nothing, and a new
horse could be picked up in the street when the old one died, it would
be more profitable commercially to work horses to death in six months,
say, than to treat them humanely and let them retire to the salt
marshes of Norfolk at the age of eighteen or so. But horses cost money;
and the tramway managers knew that if they wore out a horse too quickly
he would not pay for his cost. After figuring it out they decided that
the most profitable way of treating tram horses was to wear them out
in four years. The same calculation was made on the plantations. The
slave, like the horse, cost a substantial sum of money; and if he were
worked to death too soon his death would result in a loss. The most
businesslike planters settled that the most paying plan was to wear out
their slaves in seven years; and this was the result they instructed
their overseers to aim at.

The Intelligent Woman will naturally exclaim “What a dreadful thing to
be a company’s horse or a slave!” But wait a moment. Horses and slaves
are worth something: if you kill them you have to pay for new ones. But
if instead of employing horses and slave you employ “free” children
and women and men, you may work them to death as hard and as soon as
you like: there are plenty more to be had for nothing where they came
from. What is more, you need not support them, as you have to support
slaves, during the weeks when you have no work for them. You take them
on by the week; and when trade is slack, and you have no work for them,
you just discharge them, leaving them to starve or shift for themselves
as best they can. In the heyday of Capitalism, when this system was
in full swing, and no laws had been made to limit its abuse, small
children were worked to death under the whip until it was commonly
said that the northern factory employers were using up nine generations
in one generation. Women were employed at the mines under conditions of
degradation which would have horrified any negress in South Carolina.
Men were reduced to lives which savages would have despised. The places
these unhappy people lived in were beyond description. Epidemics of
cholera and smallpox swept the country from time to time; typhus was
commoner than measles today; drunkenness and brutal violence were
considered as natural to the working classes as fustian coats and horny
hands. The respectability and prosperity of the propertied and middle
classes who grew rich on sweated labor covered an abyss of horror;
and it was by raising the lid from that abyss that Karl Marx, in his
terrible and epoch-making book called Capital, became the prophet of
that great revolt of outraged humanity against Capitalism which is the
emotional force of the Socialist movement. However, your subject and
mine just now is not Emotional Socialism but Intelligent Socialism; so
let us keep calm. Anger is a bad counsellor.

Long before Marx published his book the Government had been forced to
interfere. A succession of laws called the Factory Acts, which include
regulation of mines and other industries, were passed to forbid the
employment of children below a certain age; to regulate the employment
of women and young persons; to limit the hours during which a factory
employing such persons could be kept open; to force employers to fence
in machines which crushed and tore to pieces the employees who brushed
against them in moments of haste or carelessness; to pay wages in money
instead of in credit at employers’ shops where bad food and bad clothes
were sold at exorbitant prices; to provide sanitary conveniences; to
limewash factory walls at frequent intervals; to forbid the practice
of taking meals at work in the factory instead of during an interval
and in another place; to frustrate the dodges by which these laws were
at first evaded by the employers; and to appoint factory inspectors
to see that the laws were carried out. These laws were the fruit of
an agitation headed, not by Socialists, but by a pious Conservative
nobleman, Lord Shaftesbury, who did not find in his Bible any authority
for the Capitalist theory that you could and should produce universal
well-being by breaking all the laws of God and Man whenever you could
make a commercial profit by doing so. This amazing theory was not only
put into practice by greedy people, but openly laid down and explicitly
advocated in books by quite sincere and serious professors of political
economy and jurisprudence (calling themselves The Manchester School)
and in speeches made in opposition to the Factory Acts by moral and
highminded orator-manufacturers like John Bright. It is still taught
as authentic political science at our universities. It has broken the
moral authority of university bred Churchmen, and reduced university
bred Statesmen to intellectually self-satisfied impotence. It is
perhaps the worst of the many rationalist dogmas that have in the
course of human history led naturally amiable logicians to countenance
and commit villainies that would revolt professed criminals.

Now one would suppose on first thoughts that the Factory Acts would
have been opposed by all the employers and supported by all their
employees. But there are good employers as well as bad ones; and
there are ignorant and shortsighted laborers as well as wise ones.
The employers who had tender consciences, or who, like some of the
Quakers, had a form of religion which compelled them to think sometimes
of what they were doing by throwing all the responsibility for it on
themselves and not on any outside authority like the professors of
Capitalist political economy, were greatly troubled by the condition of
their employees. You may ask why, in that case, they did not treat them
better. The answer is that if they had done so they would have been
driven out of business and ruined by the bad employers.

It would have occurred in this way. Cheap sweated labor meant not only
bigger profits: it also meant cheaper goods. If the good employer paid
a decent living wage to his workpeople, and worked them for eight hours
a day instead of from twelve to sixteen, he had to charge high enough
prices for his goods to enable him to pay such wages. But in that case
the bad employer could and would at once offer the same goods at a
lower price and thus take all the good employer’s customers away from
him. The good employer was therefore obliged to join Lord Shaftesbury
in telling the Government that unless laws were passed to force all
employers, good and bad alike, to behave better, there could never
be any improvement, because the good employers would have either to
sweat the workers like the bad ones, or else be driven out of business,
leaving matters worse than ever. They found that social problems cannot
be solved by personal righteousness, and that under Capitalism not only
must men be made moral by Act of Parliament, but cannot be made moral
in any other way, no matter how benevolent their dispositions may be.

The opposition to the Factory Acts by the workers themselves was
actually harder to overcome in some ways than that of the employers,
because the employers, when they were forced by law to try the
experiment, found that extreme sweating, like killing the goose that
laid the golden eggs, was not the best way to make business pay, and
that they could more than make up for the cost of complying with
the very moderate requirements of the Acts by putting a little more
brains into their work. Even the stupid ones found that by speeding
up their machinery, and thus making their employees pull themselves
together and work harder, they could get more out of them in ten hours
than in twelve. The Intelligent Woman, if she has travelled, may have
noticed that in countries where there is no Shop Hours Act, and shops
remain open until everyone has gone to bed, the shopkeepers and their
assistants are far less tired and strained at nine in the evening than
the assistants in a big shop in a big English city are at five in the
afternoon, though the shop closes at six. Impossible as it may sound,
in the ginning mills of Bombay, before any factory legislation was
introduced, the children employed went into the factory, not for so
many hours a day, but for months at a time; and there are such things
in the world as Italian cafés that are open day and night without
regular night and day waiters, the employees taking a nap when and
where they can. And this lazy happy-go-lucky way of doing business may
do no great harm, whilst an eight hour day at high wages under modern
scientific management may mean work so intense that it takes the last
inch out of the workers, and cannot be done except by persons in the
prime of life, nor even by them for many consecutive months.

The employers had another resource in the introduction of machinery.
When employers can get plenty of cheap labor they will not introduce
machinery: it is too much trouble, and though the machine may do the
work of several persons it may cost more. At this moment (1925) in
Lisbon the very rough and dirty business of coaling steamships can be
done by machinery. The machinery is actually there ready for use. But
the work is done by women, because they are cheaper and there is no
law against it. If a Portuguese Factory Act were passed, forbidding
the employment of women, or imposing restrictions and regulations on
it (possibly not really for the sake of the women, but only to keep
them out of the job and thus reserve it for men), the machinery would
be turned on at once; and it would soon be improved and added to until
it became indispensable. But as the women would lose their employment,
they would object to any such Factory Act much more vociferously than
the employers.

All the protestations of the employers that they would be ruined by the
Factory Acts were contradicted by experience. By better management,
more and better machinery, and speeding up the work, they made bigger
profits than ever. If they had been half as clever as they claimed
to be, they would have imposed on themselves all the regulations the
Factory Acts imposed on them, without waiting to be forced by law. But
profiteering does not cultivate men’s minds as public service does.
The greatest advances in industrial organization have been forced on
employers in spite of their piteous protests that they would be unable
to carry on under them, and that British industry must consequently
perish. It may shock you to learn that the employees themselves
resisted the Factory Acts at first because the Acts began by putting
a stop to the ill treatment and overworking of children too young to
be decently put to commercial work at all. At first these victims of
unregulated Capitalism were little Oliver Twists, sold into slavery by
the Guardians of the Poor to get rid of them. But the later generations
were the children of the employees; and the wage on which the employee
kept his family in squalid poverty was added to by the children’s
earnings. When people are very poor the loss of a shilling a week is
much worse than the loss of £500 a week to a millionaire: it means, for
the woman who has a desperate struggle to keep the house and make both
ends meet every Saturday, that her task becomes impossible. It is easy
for comparatively rich people to say “You should not send your young
children out to work under such inhuman conditions”, or, “You should
rejoice in a new Factory Act which makes such infamies impossible”.
But if the immediate result of listening to them is that the children
who were only half starved before are now to be three-quarters
starved, such pious remonstrances produce nothing but exasperation.
The melancholy truth is that, as the Factory Acts were passed one
after another, gradually raising the age at which children might be
employed in factories from infancy to fourteen and sixteen, and half
the children’s time below a certain age had to be spent in school, the
parents were the fiercest opponents of the Acts; and when they got the
vote, and became able to influence Parliament directly, they made it
impossible for anybody to get elected as a member for a factory town
where children’s labor was employed unless he pledged himself to oppose
any extension of the laws restricting child labor. The common saying
that the parents are the best people to take care of the interests of
the children depends not only on the sort of people the parents are,
but on whether they are well enough off to be able to afford to indulge
their natural parental instinct. Only a small proportion of parents,
and these not the poorest, will deliberately bring up their children
to be thieves and prostitutes; but practically all parents will, and
indeed must, sweat their children if they are themselves sweated
so mercilessly that they cannot get on without the few pence their
children can earn.

Now that I have explained the seeming heartlessness of the parents, you
have still to ask me why these parents accepted wages so low that they
were forced to sacrifice their children to the employers’ greed for
profits. The answer is that the increase of population which produced
the younger son class in the propertied class, and finally built up the
middle class, went on also among the employees who lived from hand to
mouth on the wages of manual labor. Now manual labor is like fish or
asparagus, dear when it is scarce, cheap when it is plentiful. As the
numbers of propertyless manual workers grew from thousands to millions
the price of their labor fell and fell. In the nineteenth century
everybody knew that wages were higher in America and Australia than in
Great Britain and Ireland, because labor was scarcer there; and those
who could afford it emigrated to these countries. Half the population
of Ireland went to America, where labor was so scarce that immigrants
were welcomed from all countries. But today the labor market in America
is so choked with them that immigration is sternly restricted to a
fixed number from each European country every year. Australia restricts
its births artificially, and refuses to admit Chinamen or Japanese on
any terms. America also excludes Japanese. But in the days when the
Factory Acts were made really effective (the first ones were evaded
by all sorts of employers’ tricks) emigration from our islands was
unrestricted, and went on at a great rate among those who could afford
the passage money.

This shewed that our labor market was overstocked. When the fish market
is overstocked the fish are thrown back into the sea. Emigration was,
in effect, throwing men and women into the sea with a ship to cling
to and a chance of reaching another country in it. The value of men
and women in England, unless they could do some sort of work that was
still scarce, had fallen to nothing. Doctors and dentists and lawyers
and parsons were still worth something (parsons shamefully little:
£70 a year for a curate with a family); and exceptionally skilled or
physically powerful workmen could earn more than the poorer clergy;
but the mass of manual employees, those who could do nothing except
under direction, and even under direction could do nothing that any
ablebodied person could not learn to do in a very short time, were
literally worth nothing: you could get them for what it cost to keep
them alive, and to enable them to bring up children enough to replace
them when they were worn out. It was just as if steam-engines had been
made in such excessive quantities that the manufacturers would give
them for nothing to anyone who would take them away. Whoever took them
away would still have to feed them with coal and oil before they could
work; but this would not mean that they had any value, or that they
would be taken proper care of, or that the coal and oil would be of
decent quality.

You see, people without property have no other way of living than
selling themselves for their market value, or, when their value falls
to nothing, offering to work for anyone who will feed them. They have
no land, and cannot afford to buy any: and even if land were given to
them few of them would know how to cultivate it. They cannot become
capitalists, because capital is spare money, and they have no money
to spare. They cannot set up in business for themselves with borrowed
money, because nobody will lend them money: if anyone did, they would
lose it all and become bankrupt for want of the requisite education and
training. They must find an employer or starve; and if they attempt to
bargain for anything more than a bare subsistence wage they are told
curtly but only too truthfully that if they do not choose to take it
there are plenty of others who will.

Even at this they cannot all get employment. Although the plea made
for Capitalism by the professors of The Manchester School was that at
least it would always provide the workers with employment at a living
wage, it has never either kept that promise or justified that plea.
The employers have had to confess that they need what is called “a
reserve army of unemployed”, so that they can always pick up “hands”
when trade is good and throw them back into the street when it is bad.
Throwing them back into the street means forcing them to spend the few
shillings they may have been able to put by while employed, selling or
pawning their clothes and furniture, and finally going on the rates
as paupers. The ratepayers naturally object very strongly to having
to support the employer’s workmen whenever he does not happen to want
them; consequently, when the Capitalist system developed on a large
scale, the ratepayers made Poor Law relief such a disgraceful, cruel,
and degrading business that decent working class families would suffer
any extremity rather than resort to it. We said to the unemployed
father of a starving family, “We must feed you and your children if
you are destitute, because the Statute of Elizabeth obliges us to; but
you must bring your daughters and sons into the workhouse with you
to live with drunkards, prostitutes, tramps, idiots, epileptics, old
criminals, the very dregs and refuse of human society at its worst,
and having done that you will never be able to hold up your head again
among your fellows”. The man naturally said “Thank you: I had rather
see my children dead”, and starved it out as best he could until trade
revived, and the employers had another job for him. And to get that job
he would accept the barest wages the family could support life on. If
his children could earn a little in a factory he would snatch at wages
that were just enough, when the children’s earnings were thrown in, to
support them all; and in this way he did not benefit in the long run
by letting his children go out to work, as it ended in their earnings
being used to beat down his own wages; so that, though he at first sent
his children into the factories to get a little extra money, he was at
last forced to do it to make up his own wages to subsistence point;
and when the law stepped in to rescue the children from their slavery,
he opposed the law because he did not see how he could live unless his
children earned something instead of going to school.




48

WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET


The effect of the system on women was worse in some respects than
on men. As no industrial employer would employ a woman if he could
get a man for the same money, women who wished to get any industrial
employment could do so only by offering to do it for less than men.
This was possible, because even when the man’s wage was a starvation
wage it was the starvation wage of a family, not of a single person.
Out of it the man had to pay for the subsistence of his wife and
children, without whom the Capitalist system would soon have come to an
end for want of any young workers to replace the old ones. Therefore
even when the men’s wages were down to the lowest point at which their
wives and children could be kept alive, a single woman could take
less without being any worse off than her married neighbors and their
children. In this way it became a matter of course that women should
be paid less than men; and when any female rebel claimed to be paid as
much as a man for the same work (“Equal wages for equal work”), the
employer shut her up with two arguments: first, “If you dont take the
lower wage there are plenty of others who will”, and, second, “If I
have to pay a man’s wages I will get a man to do the work”.

The most important and indispensable work of women, that of bearing
and rearing children, and keeping house for them, was never paid for
directly to the woman but always through the man; and so many foolish
people came to forget that it was work at all, and spoke of Man as The
Breadwinner. This was nonsense. From first to last the woman’s work
in the home was vitally necessary to the existence of society, whilst
millions of men were engaged in wasteful or positively michievous work,
the only excuse for which was that it enabled them to support their
useful and necessary wives. But the men, partly through conceit, partly
through thoughtlessness, and very largely because they were afraid that
their wives might, if their value were recognized, become unruly and
claim to be the heads of the household, set up a convention that women
earned nothing and men everything, and refused to give their wives
any legal claim on the housekeeping money. By law everything a woman
possessed became the property of her husband when she married: a state
of things that led to such monstrous abuses that the propertied class
set up an elaborate legal system of marriage settlements, the effect of
which was to hand over the woman’s property to some person or persons
yet unborn before her marriage; so that though she could have an income
from the property during her life, it was no longer her property, and
therefore her husband could not make ducks and drakes of it. Later on
the middle classes made Parliament protect their women by The Married
Women’s Property Acts under which we still live; and these Acts, owing
to the confusion of people’s minds on the subject, overshot the mark
and produced a good deal of injustice to men. That, however, is another
part of the story: the point to be grasped here is that under the
Capitalist system women found themselves worse off than men because,
as Capitalism made a slave of the man, and then, by paying the woman
through him, made her his slave, she became the slave of a slave, which
is the worst sort of slavery.

This suits certain employers very well, because it enables them to
sweat other employers without being found out. And this is how it is
done. A laborer finds himself bringing up a family of daughters on a
wage of twenty-nine shillings a week in the country (it was thirteen in
the nineteenth century) or, in or near a city, of from thirty (formerly
eighteen) to seventy, subject to deductions for spells of unemployment.
Now in a household scraping along on thirty shillings a week another
five shillings a week makes an enormous difference: far more, I repeat,
than another five hundred pounds makes to a millionaire. An addition
of fifteen shillings or a pound a week raises the family of a laborer
to the money level of that of a skilled workman. How were such tempting
additions possible? Simply by the big girls going out to work at five
shillings a week each, and continuing to live at home with their
fathers. One girl meant another five shillings, two meant another ten
shillings, three another fifteen shillings. Under such circumstances
huge factories sprang up employing hundreds of girls at wages of from
four-and-sixpence to seven-and-sixpence a week, the great majority
getting five. These were called starvation wages; but the girls were
much better fed and jollier and healthier than women who had to support
themselves altogether. Some of the largest fortunes made in business:
for example in the match industry, were made out of the five shilling
girl living with, and of course partly on, her father, or as a lodger
on somebody else’s father, a girl lodger being as good as a daughter in
this respect. Thus the match manufacturer was getting three-quarters
of his labor at the father’s expense. If the father worked in, say, a
brewery, the match manufacturer was getting three-quarters of his labor
at the expense of the brewer. In this way one trade lives by sweating
another trade; and factory girls getting wages that would hardly
support a prize cat are plump and jolly and willing and vigorous and
rowdy, whilst older women, many of them widows with young children,
are told that if they are not satisfied with the same wages there are
plenty of strong girls who will be glad to get them.

It was not merely the daughters but the wives of working men who
brought down women’s wages in this way. In the cities young women,
married to young men, and not yet burdened with many children or with
more than a room or two to keep tidy at home (and they were often not
too particular about tidiness), or having no children, used to be quite
willing to go out as charwomen for an hour a day for five shillings
a week, plus such little perquisites and jobs of washing as might be
incidental to this employment. As such a charwoman had nothing to do
at home, and was not at all disposed to go on to a second job when she
had secured the five shillings that made all the difference between
pinching and prodigality to her and her husband, the hour easily
stretched to half a day. The five shillings have now become ten or so;
but as they buy no more, the situation is not altered.

In this way the labor market is infested with subsidized wives and
daughters willing to work for pocket money on which no independent
solitary woman or widow can possibly subsist. The effect is to make
marriage compulsory as a woman’s profession: she has to take anything
she can get in the way of a husband rather than face penury as a single
woman. Some women get married easily; but others, less attractive or
amiable, are driven to every possible trick and stratagem to entrap
some man into marriage; and that sort of trickery is not good for a
woman’s self-respect, and does not lead to happy marriages when the men
realize that they have been “made a convenience of”.

This is bad enough; but there are lower depths still. It may not be
respectable to live on a man’s wages without marrying him; but it is
possible. If a man says to a destitute woman “I will not take you
until death do us part, for better for worse, in sickness and in
health and so forth; nor will I give you my name and the status of
my legal wife; but if you would like to be my wife illegally until
tomorrow morning, here is sixpence and a drink for you, or, as the
case may be, a shilling, or a pound, or ten pounds, or a hundred
pounds, or a villa with a pearl necklace and a sable mantle and a
motor car”, he will not always meet with a refusal. It is easy to ask
a woman to be virtuous; but it is not reasonable if the penalty of
virtue be starvation, and the reward of vice immediate relief. If you
offer a pretty girl twopence halfpenny an hour in a match factory,
with a chance of contracting necrosis of the jawbone from phosphorus
poisoning on the one hand, and on the other a jolly and pampered
time under the protection of a wealthy bachelor, which was what the
Victorian employers did and what employers still do all over the world
when they are not stopped by resolutely socialistic laws, you are
loading the dice in favor of the devil so monstrously as not only to
make it certain that he will win, but raising the question whether
the girl does not owe it to her own self-respect and desire for wider
knowledge and experience, more cultivated society, and greater grace
and elegance of life, to sell herself to a gentleman for pleasure
rather than to an employer for profit. To warn her that her beauty
will not last for ever only reminds her that if she takes reasonable
care of her beauty it will last long past the age at which women, “too
old at twenty-four”, find the factory closed to them, and their places
filled by younger girls. She has actually less security of respectable
employment than of illicit employment; for the women who sell labor
are often out of work through periods of bad trade and consequent
unemployment; but the women who sell pleasure, if they are in other
respects well conducted and not positively repulsive, are seldom
at a loss for a customer. The cases which are held up as terrible
warnings of how a woman may fall to the lowest depths of degradation by
listening to such arguments are pious inventions, supported by examples
of women who through drink, drugs, and general depravity or weakness
of character would have fallen equally if they had been respectably
married or had lived in the strictest celibacy. The incidental risks
of venereal diseases are unfortunately not avoidable by respectable
matrimony: more women are infected by their husbands than by their
lovers. If a woman accepts Capitalist morality, and does what pays her
best, she will take what district visitors call (when poor women are
concerned) the wages of sin rather than the wages of sweated labor.

There are cases, too, where the wedding ring may be a drawback instead
of a makeweight. Illicit unions are so common under the Capitalist
system that the Government has had to deal with them; and the law at
present is that if an unmarried woman bears a child she can compel its
father to pay her seven-and-sixpence a week for its support until it is
sixteen, at which age it can begin to help to support her. Meanwhile
the child belongs to her instead of to the father (it would belong to
him if they were married); and she is free from any obligation to keep
his house or do any ordinary drudgery for him. Rather than be brought
into court he will pay without demur; and when he is goodnatured and
not too poor he will often pay her more than he is legally obliged
to. The effect of this is that a careful, discreet, sensible,
pleasant sort of woman who has not scrupled to bear five illegitimate
children may find herself with a legally guaranteed steady income of
thirty-seven-and-sixpence a week in addition to what she can earn by
respectable work. Compared to a widow with five legitimate children
she was on velvet until the Government, after centuries of blind
neglect, began to pension widows.

In short, Capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into
sex relations for money, whether in or out of marriage; and against
this bribe there stands nothing beyond the traditional respectability
which Capitalism ruthlessly destroys by poverty, except religion and
the inborn sense of honor which has its citadel in the soul and can
hold out (sometimes) against all circumstances.

It is useless to pretend that religion and tradition and honor always
win the day. It is now a century and a half since the poet Oliver
Goldsmith warned us that “Honor sinks where commerce long prevails”;
and the economic pressure by which Capitalism tempts women grew fiercer
after his time. We have just seen how in the case of the parents
sending their children out to work in their infancy to add a little to
the family income, they found that their wages fell until what they and
the children between them could earn was no more than they had been
able to earn by themselves before, so that in order to live they now
had to send their children to work whether they liked it or not. In
the same way the women who occasionally picked up a little extra money
illicitly, presently found themselves driven to snatch at employment
by offering to take lower wages and depending on the other resource to
make them up to subsistence point. Then the women who stood on their
honor were offered those reduced wages, and, when they said they could
not live on them, were told as usual that others could, and that they
could do what the others did.

In certain occupations prostitution thus became practically compulsory,
the alternative being starvation. Hood’s woman clad in unwomanly rags,
who sang the Song of the Shirt, represents either the woman who would
starve rather than sell her person or the woman neither young enough
nor agreeable enough to earn even the few pence she could hope for from
the men within her reach. The occupations in which prostitution is
almost a matter of course are by no means the sensationally abject and
miserable ones. It is rather in the employments in which well-dressed
and goodlooking but unskilled women are employed to attract the
public, that wages are paid on which they cannot possibly keep up the
appearance expected from them. Girls with thirty shillings a week
come to their work in expensive motor cars, and wear strings of pearls
which, if not genuine, are at least the best imitations. If one of them
asks how she can dress as she is expected to on thirty shillings a week
she is either met with the old retort, “If you wont take it there are
plenty who will”, or else told quite frankly that she is very lucky
to get thirty shillings in addition to such a splendid advertisement
and show-case for her attractions as the stage or the restaurant, the
counter or the showroom, afford her. You must not, however, infer from
this that all theatres, restaurants, showrooms and so forth exploit
prostitution in this way. Most of them have permanent staffs of
efficient respectable women, and could not be conducted in any other
way. Neither must it be inferred that the young gentlemen who provide
the motor cars and furs and jewels are always allowed to succeed in
their expensive courtship. Sir Arthur Pinero’s play Mind the Paint is
instructively true to life on this point. But such relations are not
made edifying by the plea that the gentlemen are bilked. It is safe to
assume that when women are employed, not to do any specially skilled
work, but to attract custom to the place by their sex, their youth,
their good looks and their smart dressing, employers of a certain
type will underpay them, and by their competition finally compel more
scrupulous employers to do the same or be undersold and driven out of
the business. Now these are extremities to which men cannot be reduced.
It is true that smart ladies can and do hire dancing partners at fifty
francs an evening on the Riviera; but this quite innocent transaction
does not mean that Capitalism can as yet say to a man, “If your wages
are not enough to live on, go out into the streets and sell pleasures
as others do”. When the man deals in that commodity he does so as a
buyer, not as a seller. Thus it is the woman, not the man, who suffers
the last extremity of the Capitalist system; and this is why so many
conscientious women are devoting their lives to the replacement of
Capitalism by Socialism.

But let not anyone imagine that men escape prostitution under
Capitalism. If they do not sell their bodies they sell their souls.
The barrister who in court strives “to make the worse appear the
better cause” has been held up as a stock example of the dishonesty
of misrepresenting for money. Nothing could be more unjust. It is
agreed, and necessarily agreed, that the best way of learning the truth
about anything is not to listen to a vain attempt at an impartial and
disinterested statement, but to hear everything that can possibly be
said for it, and then everything that can possibly be said against
it, by skilled pleaders on behalf of the interested parties on both
sides. A barrister is bound to do his utmost to obtain a verdict for a
client whom he privately believes to be in the wrong, just as a doctor
is bound to do his utmost to save the life of a patient whose death
would, in his private opinion, be a good riddance. The barrister is an
innocent figure who is used to distract our attention from the writer
and publisher of lying advertisements which pretend to prove the worse
the better article, the shopman who sells it by assuring the customer
that it is the best, the agents of drugging and drink, the clerk making
out dishonest accounts, the adulterator and giver of short weight,
the journalist writing for Socialist papers when he is a convinced
Liberal, or for Tory papers when he is an Anarchist, the professional
politician working for his party right or wrong, the doctor paying
useless visits and prescribing bogus medicines to hypochondriacs who
need only Abernethy’s advice, “Live on sixpence a day, and earn it”,
the solicitor using the law as an instrument for the oppression of the
poor by the rich, the mercenary soldier fighting for a country which he
regards as the worst enemy of his own, and the citizens of all classes
who have to be obsequious to the rich and insolent to the poor. These
are only a few examples of the male prostitutions, so repeatedly and
vehemently denounced by the prophets in the Bible as whoredoms and
idolatries, which are daily imposed on men by Capitalism.

We see, then, that when the reproach of prostitution is raised neither
woman nor man dares cast the first stone; for both have been equally
stained with it under Capitalism. It may even be urged by special
pleaders on behalf of women that the prostitution of the mind is more
mischievous, and is a deeper betrayal of the divine purpose of our
powers, than the prostitution of the body, the sale of which does not
necessarily involve its misuse. As a matter of fact nobody has ever
blamed Nell Gwynne for selling her body as Judas Iscariot for selling
his soul. But whatever satisfaction the pot may have in calling the
kettle blacker than itself the two blacks do not make a white. And
the abstract identity of male and female prostitution only brings out
more strongly the physical difference, which no abstract argument can
balance. The violation of one’s person is a quite peculiar sort of
outrage. Anyone who does not draw a line between it and offences to
the mind ignores the plain facts of human sensitiveness. For instance,
landlords have had the power to force Dissenters to send their children
to Church schools, and have used it. They have also had a special power
over women to anticipate a husband’s privilege, and have either used
it or forced the woman to buy them off. Can a woman feel about the one
case as about the other? A man cannot. The quality of the two wrongs is
quite different. The remedy for the one could wait until after the next
general election. The other does not bear thinking of for a moment. Yet
there it is.




49

TRADE UNION CAPITALISM


Now we must go into the history of the resistance offered by the
proletariat to the capitalists. It was evident, to begin with, that no
woman or man could do anything against the employers single-handed.
The stock retort, “If you will not take the wage offered, and do
the work put upon you, there are plenty who will”, checkmated the
destitute solitary bargainer for a decent living wage and a reasonable
day’s work. The first necessity for effective resistance was that
the employees should form some sort of union and stand together. In
many cases this was impossible, because the employees did not know
oneanother, and had no opportunities of coming together and agreeing
on a joint course of action. For instance, domestic servants could not
form unions. They were in private kitchens all over the country, more
or less imprisoned in them, and working singly, or at most in groups of
two or three, except in the houses of the very rich, where the groups
might be as large as thirty or forty. Or take agricultural laborers.
It is very difficult to organize them into unions, and still more
difficult to keep their unions together for any length of time. They
live too far apart. The same thing is true more or less of almost every
kind of labor except labor in factories and mines or on railways.

In some callings there are such differences of pay and social position
that even if all their members could be brought together they would not
mix. Thus on the stage an actor may be a highly accomplished gentleman
with a title, who plays Hamlet, or a lady who is an aristocrat and a
Dame of the British Empire, and plays Portia: both of them receiving
weekly salaries counted in hundreds of pounds. With them are working
every night actors and actresses who never utter a word, because, if
they did, their speech would betray the fact that, far from being the
court lords and ladies they are dressed up to look like, they are not
earning as much as the carpenters who shift the scenes. It is even
possible for an acrobat or clown to be more highly paid than Hamlet,
and yet in private life be so illiterate, and have such shocking table
manners, that the titled Hamlet could endure neither his conversation
nor his company at dinner. For this reason a union of actors is
difficult: a class split is inevitable. Union is possible only in
trades where the members work together in large bodies; live in the
same neighborhoods; belong all to the same social class; and earn about
the same money. The miners in the coalfields, the cotton spinners in
the factory towns of Lancashire, the metal smelters and fitters in the
Midlands, were the first to form enduring and powerful unions. The
bricklayers, masons, carpenters, and joiners who come together in the
building trades were also early in the field with attempts at unionism.
Under the stress of some intolerable oppression they would combine to
make the employers see their situation in some particular point; and
when they had carried that point, or were defeated, the union would
dissolve until another emergency arose. Then they began to subscribe to
form little insurance funds against unemployment, which obliged them to
keep the union together; and in this way the unions grew from momentary
rebellions into permanent Trade Unions of the kind we know.

We now have to consider what a union of proletarians can do to defend
their livelihood from the continual encroachments of Capitalism. First,
when the union is sufficiently complete, it enables them to face the
employer without any risk of being told that if they will not submit
to his terms others will. If nearly all the bricklayers in a town
form a union, and each pays into it week by week a small contribution
until they have a little fund to fall back on, then, if their employers
attempt to reduce their wages, they can, by refusing to work and living
on their fund, bring the employers’ business to a dead stop for weeks
or months, according to the size of the fund. This is called a strike.
They can strike not only against a reduction of wages but for an
increase, or for a reduction of their working hours, or for anything
that may be in dispute between them and the employers. Their success
will depend on the state of the employers’ business. The employers
can practically always wait if they choose until the strike fund is
exhausted, and thus starve the strikers into submission. But if trade
is so flourishing at the moment, and the employers consequently in such
a hurry to get on with their profit making, that they would lose more
by an interruption to their business than by giving the strikers what
they demand, then the employers will give in.

But the employers will bide their time for a counterstrike. When trade
gets slack again, and they have little or nothing to lose by shutting
up their works for a while, they reduce the wage, and lock out all the
workers who will not submit to the reduction. This is why an employers’
strike is called a lock-out. The newspapers use the word strike for
strikes and lock-outs indiscriminately, because their readers blame the
workers instead of the employers for a strike; but some of the greatest
so-called strikes should have been called lock-outs. A boom in trade
always produces a series of strikes which are generally successful. A
falling-off in trade produces a series of lock-outs; and they, too, are
generally successful, the one series undoing the work of the other in a
dreary see-saw. After the war we went through a gigantic boom followed
by a disastrous slump, with strikes and lock-outs all complete. Your
own experience of these civil wars of strike and lock-out must have
left you convinced that they are public disasters which would have no
sort of sense in a well ordered community. But let that pass for the
moment. We have not yet finished our study of primitive Trade Unionism,
nor seen what it led to besides saving up for a strike and then
“downing tools”.

The first necessity of the situation was that everybody in the trade
should join the union, as outsiders could be used by employers to
break the strike by taking on the work that the strikers refused.
Consequently a fierce hatred of the men who would not join the unions
grew up. They were called scabs and blacklegs, and boycotted in every
possible way by the unionists. But vituperation and boycotting were
not sufficient to deter the scabs. The unions, when they declared a
strike, stationed bodies of strikers at the gates of the works to
persuade the scabs not to enter. No Intelligent Woman will need to be
told that unless there was a strong force of police on the spot the
persuasion was so vigorous that the scabs felt lucky when they survived
it without broken bones. At last there came a time in Sheffield and
Manchester when scabs working at furnaces found bombs there that blew
them to pieces; when machinery and tools were tampered with so as to
make them dangerous to those who used them (this was called rattening);
and when factory chimneys were shattered by explosives like fulminate
of mercury, so risky to handle that only very ignorant and desperate
men would venture on their use. This was stopped less by punishing the
perpetrators than by forcing the employers to relax the provocation.
For instance, the Sheffield sawgrinders died prematurely, and suffered
miserably during their lifetimes, because the air they breathed was
half steel dust. It was quite easy to prevent this by using vacuum
cleaners (as we call them) to suck away the deadly dust; but the
employers would not fit them, because, as they cost extra capital on
which there was no extra profit, an employer who fitted them could
be undersold by those who did not. At that time a Sheffield steel
worker of fifty (when he was lucky enough to reach that age) looked
like a weedy and very unhealthy lad of seventeen. In the face of such
murderous conditions, persisted in for a hundred years, the burst of
outrage on the part of the victims seems trifling enough. At last the
Government had to come to the rescue and force all the employers to fit
suction fans. Sheffielders’ lungs are now no worse than most people’s,
and better than those of many who are not so carefully protected by the
law.

But accepting a lower wage than that demanded by the union was not the
only way in which an employee could drag down his fellows. In many
trades it was not much use fixing the wage the worker was to receive
unless the quantity of work he gave for it was also fixed. You must
be tired by this time of the silly joking of the Capitalist newspapers
about bricklayers who are not allowed by their unions to lay more than
three bricks a day. A bricklayer has clearly as much right to charge
a day’s wages for laying three bricks as his employer has to sell the
house when it is built for the biggest price he can get for it. Those
who condemn either of them are condemning the Capitalist system, like
good Bolshevists. The three-brick joke is only a comic exaggeration of
what actually occurs. The employers, to find out how much work can be
got out of a man, pick out an exceptionally quick and indefatigable man
called a slogger, and try to impose what he can do in a day on all the
rest. The unions naturally retort by forbidding any of their members to
lay a brick more than he must do if he is to be worth employing at all.
This practice of deliberately doing the least they dare instead of the
most they can is the ca’canny of which the employers complain so much,
though they all do the same thing themselves under the more respectable
name of “restricting output” and selling in the dearest market. It is
the principle on which the Capitalist system is avowedly founded.

Thus Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the
employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts
all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best!
You may ask why this does not end in a deadlock. The answer is it is
producing deadlocks twice a day or thereabouts. The King’s speeches
in opening Parliament now contain regularly an appeal to the workers
and employers to be good boys and not paralyze the industry of the
nation by the clash of their quite irreconcilable interests. The
reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for
more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it
has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete
that everybody acts on strictly business principles. The mass of the
nation has been humbly and ignorantly taking what the employers offer
and working as well as it can, either believing that it is doing its
duty in that station of life to which it has pleased God to call it,
or not thinking about the matter at all, but suffering its lot as
something that cannot be helped, like the weather. Even late in the
nineteenth century, when there were fourteen million wage workers,
only a million and a half of them were in trade unions, which meant
that only a million and a half of them were selling their labor on
systematic Capitalist business principles. Today nearly four and a
half millions of them are converts to Capitalism, and duly enrolled in
militant unions. Between six and seven hundred battles a year, called
trade disputes, are fought; and the number of days of work lost to
the nation by them sometimes totals up to ten millions and more. If
the matter were not so serious for all of us one could laugh at the
silly way in which people talk of the spread of Socialism when what is
really threatening them is the spread of Capitalism. The moment the
propertyless workers refuse to see the finger of God in their poverty,
and begin organizing themselves in unions to make the most money they
can out of their labor exactly as they find the landlord doing with his
land, the capitalist with his capital, the employer with his knowledge
of business, and the financier with his art of promotion, the industry
of the country, on which we all depend for our existence, begins
rolling faster and faster down two opposite slopes, at the bottom of
which there will be a disastrous collision which will bring it to
a standstill until either Property drives Labor by main force into
undisguised and unwilling slavery, or Labor gains the upper hand, and
the long series of changes by which the mastery of the situation has
already passed from the landlord-capitalist to the individual employer,
from the individual employer to the joint stock company, from the joint
stock company to the Trust, and finally from the industrialists in
general to the financiers, will culminate in its passing to capitalized
Labor. The battle for this supremacy is joined; and here we are in the
thick of it, our country ravaged by strikes and lock-outs, a huge army
of unemployed billeted upon us, the ladies and gentlemen declaring that
it is all the fault of the workers, and the workers either declaring
that it is all the fault of the ladies and gentlemen, or else, more
sensibly, concluding that it is the fault of the Capitalist system, and
taking to Socialism not so much because they understand it as because
it promises a way out.

When this open war was first declared, the employers used their
command of Parliament to have it punished as a crime. The unions were
classed as conspiracies; and anybody who joined one was held to be a
conspirator and punished accordingly. This did not prevent the unions:
it only “drove them underground”: that is, made secret societies of
them, and thereby put them into the hands of more determined and less
law-abiding leaders. The Government at last found it impossible to
go on with such coercion; for the few cases in which the law could
be carried out had the effect of martyrdoms, producing noisy popular
agitations, and stimulating Trade Unionism instead of suppressing it.

Then the employers tried what they could do for themselves. They
refused to employ unionists. This was no use: they could not get
enough non-unionist labor to go on with: and the unionists whom they
had to employ refused to work with non-unionists. Then the employers
refused to “recognize” the unions, which meant that they refused to
negotiate questions of wages with the secretaries of the unions, and
insisted on dealing with their employees directly and individually,
one at a time. This also failed. Making a separate bargain with each
employee is easy enough in the case of a woman engaging a domestic
servant or an oldfashioned merchant engaging a clerk or warehouseman;
but when men have to be taken on by the hundred, and sometimes by
the thousand, separate bargaining is impossible. The big employers
who talked about it at first really meant that there was to be no
bargaining at all. The men were to come in and just take what they
were told were the wages of the firm, and not presume to argue. The
moment the formation of the unions enabled the men to bargain, the big
employers, to save their own time, had to insist on its being done with
a single representative of the men who was experienced in bargaining
and qualified to discuss business: that is, with the secretary of the
Trade Union; so that all the fuss ended in the unions being not only
recognized by the big employers, but looked on as a necessary part of
their industry. Finally the unions were legalized; and here, as in the
case of the Married Women’s Property Acts, the change from outlawry to
legal protection went a little beyond the mark, in its reaction against
previous injustice, and gave the Trade Unions privileges and immunities
which are not enjoyed by ordinary societies. The employers then found
that they also must act together in dealing with the Trade Unions.
Accordingly, they formed unions of their own, called Employers’
Federations. The war of Capital with Labor is now a war of Trade Unions
with Employers’ Federations. Their battles, or rather blockades, are
lock-outs and strikes, lasting, like modern military battles, for
months.

Though some of the battles are about victimization (that is,
discharging an employee for actively advocating Trade Unionism, or
refusing to reinstate a prominent striker when the strike is over), all
the disputes in which ground is won or lost are about wages or hours of
work. You must understand that there are two sorts of wages: time wages
and piecework wages. Time wages are paid for the employee’s time by the
month, week, day, or hour, no matter how much or how little work may be
done during those periods. Piecework wages are paid according to the
work done: so much for each piece of work turned out.

Now you would suppose that the employees would be unanimously in favor
of time wages, and the employers of piecework wages: indeed this was
roughly so in early days. But the introduction of machinery altered the
case. Piecework wages are really only time wages paid in such a way as
to prevent the employee from slacking. He has to keep hard at it to
earn the wage; but the amount of the wage is arrived at by considering
whether what he can make in an hour or a day or a week at piecework
will enable him to live in the way he is accustomed to live, or, as
it is called, to maintain his standard of subsistence. Now suppose a
machine is invented by which he can turn out twice as many pieces in
a day as before. He will then find that he has earned as much in the
week by Wednesday evening as he had previously earned by Saturday.
What will he do? You may think, if you are a very energetic lady,
that he will put in the whole week as usual, and rejoice his wife by
bringing home twice as much money. But that is not what a man is like.
He prefers a shillingsworth of leisure to another shillingsworth of
bread and cheese or a new hat for his wife. What he actually does is
to bring her just what he brought her before, and have a holiday on
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, leaving his employer with no labor to
go on with, and perhaps with the most pressing contracts to be finished
by a certain date. To force him to remain at work the whole week the
employer has to “cut the rate”: that is, to reduce the piecework wage
by half. Then the fat is in the fire: the Trade Union resists the
reduction fiercely, and threatens that if the employees are to have no
benefit from the new machine they will refuse to work it. There was a
time when the introduction of machines led to riots and the wrecking
of newly equipped factories by furious mobs of handworkers. When the
mobs were replaced by Trade Unions the introduction of new machines was
often followed by strikes and lock-outs. But when the heated personal
disputes of hot-headed employers with resentful employees gave way
to cool negotiations between experienced secretaries of Employers’
Federations and equally experienced secretaries of Trade Unions, who
had settled similar difficulties many times before, it became an
established practice to readjust the piecework wage so as to allow the
employee to share the benefit of the machine with the employer. The
only question was how much each could claim.

On time wages the employee gets no benefit from the introduction of a
machine. The product of his labor may be multiplied a hundred times;
but he remains as poor as before. That is why in many industries the
employees insist on piecework wages, and the employers would be only
too glad to pay time wages: all the more because, when machinery comes
into play, the machine works the man instead of the man working the
machine, and slacking becomes either impossible or easy to detect.

But it often happens that neither the time wage worker nor the piece
wage worker has any say in the matter at all, for the very simple
reason that the introduction of the machine enables the employer to
“slack the lot” and replace them by girls who are only machine minders.
And we have already seen what the effect of women’s and girls’ labor
has on wages. Besides, Trade Unionism is weaker among women than among
men, because, as most women regard industrial employment as merely a
temporary expedient to keep them going until they get married, they
will not take the duty of combination as seriously as the men, who
know that they will be industrial employees all their lives. In the
Lancashire weaving industry, where women do not retire from the factory
when they marry, the women’s unions are as strong as the men’s.

In the long run the reserves of the employer are so much greater than
those of the employees that though John Stuart Mill’s statement in
the middle of last century that the wage workers had not benefited by
the introduction of machinery is no longer quite true, yet they have
gained so little in comparison with the prodigiously greater national
output from the machines, that it is putting it very mildly to say that
they have not only not gained but lost ground heavily relatively to the
capitalists.




50

DIVIDE AND GOVERN


The weakness of Trade Unionism was that the concessions wrung from the
employers when trade was good were taken back again when trade was
bad, because, as the employers commanded the main national store of
spare money, they could always stop working without starving for longer
than their employees. The Trade Unions soon had to face the fact that
unless they could get the concessions fixed and enforced by law, they
were certain to lose by the lock-outs all they gained by the strikes.
At the same time they saw that Parliament had put a permanent stop to
the sweating of very young children in factories; and though, as I have
explained, their members had been driven by poverty to object to this
reform, nevertheless it convinced them that Parliament, if it liked,
could fix any reform so firmly that the employers could not go back on
it. They wanted a permanent reduction in the then monstrous length of
the factory working day. The cry for a reduction to eight hours was
set up. At first it seemed an unattainable ideal; and it is still very
far from being completely attained. But a ten hours day for women and
children and young persons seemed reasonable and possible. As to the
men, they were told they were grown-up independent Britons, and that it
would be an outrage on British liberty to prevent an Englishman from
working as long as he liked. But when the women and young children
go home the factory engine is stopped, because its work cannot go on
without them. When the engine stops the men may as well go home too, as
their work cannot go on without the engine. So the men got the factory
hours shortened by law “behind the petticoats of the women”.

And how did the employees, who had no votes at that time, induce
Parliament, in which there were only landlords, capitalists, and
employers, to pass these benevolent Acts of Parliament for the
protection of the employees against the employers?

If I were to reply that they were acts of pure conscience, nobody
nowadays would believe me, because Capitalism has destroyed our belief
in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. But
even Capitalist cynicism will admit that however unconscionable we may
be when our own interests are affected, we can be most indignantly
virtuous at the expense of others. The Intelligent Woman must guard
herself against imagining that the property owners and employers in
Parliament a hundred years ago had read this book, and therefore
understood that their interests were the same, though their occupations
and habits and social positions were so very different. The country
gentlemen despised the employers as vulgar tradesmen, and made them
feel it. The employers, knowing that any fool might be a peer or a
country gentleman if he had the luck to be born in a country house,
whilst success in business needed business ability, were determined to
destroy the privileges of the landed aristocracy. This had been done
in France in 1789 by a revolution; and it was by threatening a similar
revolution that the English employers, in 1832, forced the King and the
peerage, after a long popular agitation, to pass into law the famous
Reform Bill which practically transferred the command of Parliament
in England from the hereditary landed aristocracy to the industrial
employers.

You know what a popular agitation means. It means a little reasoning
and a great deal of abuse of the other side. Before 1832 the employers
did not confine themselves to pointing out the absurdity of allowing
a couple of cottages owned by a county aristocrat to send a member
to Parliament when the city of Birmingham was not represented there.
Most people thought it quite natural that great folk should have great
privileges, and cared nothing about Birmingham, which they had heard
of only as a dirty place where most of the bad pennies (Brummagem
buttons) came from. The employers therefore stirred up public feeling
against the landed gentry by exposing all their misdeeds: their driving
of whole populations out of the country to make room for sheep or
deer; their ruthless enforcement of the Game Laws, under which men
were transported with the worst felons for poaching a few hares or
pheasants; the horrible condition of the laborers’ cottages on their
estates; the miserable wages they paid: their bigoted persecution of
Nonconformists not only by refusing to allow any places of worship
except those of the Church of England to be built on their estates, but
by nominating to the Church livings such clergymen as could be depended
on to teach the children in the village schools that all Dissenters
were disgraced in this world and damned in the next; their equally
bigoted boycotting of any shopkeeper who dared to vote against their
candidates at elections; with all the other tyrannies which in those
days made it a common saying, even among men of business, that “the
displeasure of a lord is a sentence of death”. By harping on these
grievances the employers at last embittered public opinion against the
squires to such a pitch that the fear of a repetition in England of the
French Revolution broke down the opposition to the Reform Bill. The
employers, after propitiating King William IV by paying his debts, were
able to force Parliament to pass the Bill; and that event inaugurated
the purseproud reign of the English middle class under Queen Victoria.

Naturally the squires were not disposed to take this defeat lying down.
They revenged themselves by taking up Lord Shaftesbury’s agitation for
the Factory Acts, and shewing that the employer’s little finger was
thicker than the country gentleman’s loins; that the condition of the
factory employees was worse than that of the slaves on the American
and West Indian plantations; that the worst cottages of the worst
landlords had at least fresher air than the overcrowded slums of the
manufacturing towns; that if the employers did not care whether their
“hands” were Church of England or Methodist, neither did they care
whether they were Methodists or Atheists, because they had no God but
Mammon; that if they did not persecute politically it was only because
the hands had no votes; that they persecuted industrially as hard as
they could by imprisoning Trade Unionists; and that the personal and
often kindly relations between the peasantry and the landlords, the
training in good manners and decent housekeeping traditions learnt by
the women in domestic service in the country houses, the kindnesses
shewn to the old and sick on the great estates, were all lost in
the squalor and misery, the brutality and blasphemy, the incestuous
overcrowding, and the terrible dirt epidemics in the mining and factory
populations where English life was what the employer’s greed had made
it.

All this, though quite true, was merely the pot again calling the
kettle black; for the country gentlemen did not refuse the dividends
made for them by the employers in the mines and factories, nor
refuse to let factories and slums be built all over their estates
in Lancashire; nor did the employers, when they had made fortunes,
hesitate to buy country estates and “found families” to be brought up
in the strictest county traditions, nor to disparage trade as vulgar
when the generation that remembered what their grandfathers were had
died out. But the quarrel between them explains how it was that when
Parliament consisted exclusively of landlords and capitalist employers
or their nominees, and the proletariat had no votes, yet the Factory
Acts got passed. The Acts were the revenge of the squires for the
Reform Act.

Also, the poor were not wholly voteless. The owner of a freehold
worth forty shillings a year had a vote; and a number of odd old
franchises existed which gave quite poor people a certain weight at
elections. They could not return a Labor member (such a thing was then
unheard of); but they could sometimes turn the scale as between the
Conservative landlord and the Liberal employer. If the Conservatives
and Liberals had understood that their political interests were the
same, and that they must present a united front to Labor, the employees
would have had no hope except in revolution. But the Conservatives
and Liberals did not understand their commercial interests. The
Conservative clung blindly to his old privileges: the Liberal followed
the slot of his new profits as thoughtlessly as a hound follows the
slot of a fox. Both of them wanted to be in Parliament because it gave
them personal importance, opening the way to the front bench, where the
Cabinet Ministers sit, and to knighthoods, baronetcies, and peerages.
The Liberals considered themselves the party of reform because they
had carried the Reform Bill, and, as the employees wanted all sorts
of reform very badly, took it for granted that they would always vote
gratefully for the Liberals.

Under this delusion a Liberal Government made a bid for popular
support by offering votes to the working class. The Conservatives at
first opposed this so fiercely that they turned the Liberals out at the
next election; but a very clever Conservative leader named Benjamin
Disraeli, afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield, a Jew who had begun his
political career, like Karl Marx, as a champion of the proletariat,
persuaded the Conservatives that they were really more popular in the
country than the Liberals, and induced them to make the very extension
of the franchise they had just been opposing. Naturally the employees,
when they got some votes in this way, used them to get more votes; and
the end of it was that everybody got a vote, including at long last the
women, though the women had to make a special and furious fight for
their inclusion, and did not win it until the national work they did
when they took the place of the absent men during the war of 1914-18
shamed the country into enfranchising them.

The proletarian voters who could formerly only turn the scale between
Conservative and Liberal can now turn out both Conservative and
Liberal, and elect candidates of their own. They did not at first
realize this, and have not fully realized it yet. They began by timidly
sending into Parliament about a dozen men who were not called Labor
members, but working class members of the Liberal Party. It became the
custom for Liberal Governments to give a minor ministerial post to some
mild middle class professor who was vaguely supposed to be interested
in factory legislation and popular education, and who was openly
treated as a negligible nobody by the rest of the Cabinet.

Meanwhile Socialist societies were growing up among students of Karl
Marx’s famous exposure of the sins of Capitalism, and of a very widely
circulated book called Progress and Poverty, written by an American
named Henry George, who had seen within his own lifetime American
villages, where people were neither poor enough to be degraded and
miserable nor rich enough to be idle and extravagant, changed by the
simple operation of private property in land and capital into cities
of fabulous wealth, so badly divided that the mass of the people were
weltering in shocking poverty whilst a handful of owners wallowed
in millions. These Societies broke the tradition of proletarian
attachment to the Liberal Party by making the workers what Marx called
class-conscious, a phrase which the Intelligent Woman has probably met
several times in the papers without knowing any more clearly than the
newspaper writers exactly what it means. The voters who had believed
that there were only two parties in politics, the Conservatives and the
Liberals (or Tories and Whigs), representing the two great religious
parties of the Churchmen and the Dissenters, and the two great economic
interests of the country farmers with their landlords and the town
men of business with their capitalists, were now taught that from the
point of view of the employee there is not a penny to choose between
Conservatives and Liberals, as the gain of either means the employee’s
loss, and that the only two parties who really have opposed interests
are the party of the propertied class on the one hand and the party of
the propertyless proletariat on the other: in other words, the party of
Capital and the party of Labor. What mattered was not the Parliamentary
struggle between the Liberal Mr Gladstone and the Conservative Mr
Disraeli as to which should be Prime Minister, or between their
successors Mr Balfour, Mr Bonar Law, and Mr Baldwin of the one party,
and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr Asquith, and Mr Lloyd George
of the other. To the class-conscious proletarian all that is mere
Tweedledum and Tweedledee: what is really moving the world is the Class
Struggle, the Class War (both terms are in use) between the proprietors
and the proletariat for the possession of the land and capital of the
country (the Means of Production). When a man realized that, he was
said to be class-conscious. These terms are misleading because they
imply that all the proletarians are in one camp and all the bourgeoisie
in the other, which is untrue; but as the Intelligent Woman who has
read thus far now knows what they mean, let them pass for the moment.

The Socialist Societies had begun badly by treating Parliament as
the enemy’s camp; boycotting the Churches as mere contrivances for
doping the workers into submission to Capitalism; and denouncing Trade
Unionism and Co-operation as mistaken remedies. Under Marx and Engels,
Morris and Hyndman, Socialism was a middle class movement caused by the
revolt of the consciences of educated and humane men and women against
the injustice and cruelty of Capitalism, and also (this was a very
important factor with Morris) against its brutal disregard of beauty
and the daily human happiness of doing fine work for its own sake. Now
the strongest and noblest feelings of this kind were quite compatible
with the most complete detachment from and ignorance of proletarian
life and history in the class that worked for weekly wages. The most
devoted middle class champions of the wage workers knew what housemaids
and gardeners and railway porters and errand boys and postmen were
like; but factory hands, miners, and dockers might as well have been
fairies for all their lady and gentleman sympathizers knew about them.

Whenever your sympathies are strongly stirred on behalf of some cruelly
ill used person or persons of whom you know nothing except that they
are ill used, your generous indignation attributes all sorts of virtues
to them, and all sorts of vices to those who oppress them. But the
blunt truth is that ill used people are worse than well used people:
indeed this is at bottom the only good reason why we should not allow
anyone to be ill used. If I thought you would be made a better woman by
ill treatment I should do my best to have you ill treated. We should
refuse to tolerate poverty as a social institution not because the poor
are the salt of the earth, but because “the poor in a lump are bad”.
And the poor know this better than anyone else. When the Socialist
movement in London took its tone from lovers of art and literature who
had read George Borrow until they had come to regard tramps as saints,
and passionate High Church clergymen (Anglo-Catholics) who adored
supertramps like St Francis, it was apt to assume that all that was
needed was to teach Socialism to the masses (vaguely imagined as a huge
crowd of tramplike saints) and leave the rest to the natural effect
of sowing the good seed in kindly virgin soil. But the proletarian
soil was neither virgin nor exceptionally kindly. The masses are not
in the least like tramps; and they have no romantic illusions about
oneanother, whatever illusions each of them may cherish about herself.
When John Stuart Mill was a Parliamentary candidate in Westminster, his
opponents tried to defeat him by recalling an occasion on which he had
said flatly that the British workman was neither entirely truthful,
entirely sober, entirely honest, nor imbued with a proper sense of
the wickedness of gambling: in short, that he was by no means the
paragon he was always assumed to be by parliamentary candidates when
they addressed his class as “Gentlemen”, and begged for his vote. Mill
probably owed his success on that occasion to the fact that instead of
denying his opinion he uncompromisingly reaffirmed it. The wage workers
are as fond of flattery as other people, and will swallow any quantity
of it from candidates provided it be thoroughly understood that it is
only flattery, and that the candidates know better; but they have no
use for gushingly idealistic ladies and gentlemen who are fools enough
to think that the poor are cruelly misunderstood angels.

In the eighteen-eighties the Socialists found out their mistake. The
Fabian Society got rid of its Anarchists and Borrovians, and presented
Socialism in the form of a series of parliamentary measures, thus
making it possible for an ordinary respectable religious citizen
to profess Socialism and belong to a Socialist Society without any
suspicion of lawlessness, exactly as he might profess himself a
Conservative and belong to an ordinary constitutional club. A leader
of the society, Mr Sidney Webb, married Miss Beatrice Potter, who had
made a study at first hand of working-class life and organization,
and had published a book on Co-operation. They wrote the first really
scientific history of Trade Unionism, and thereby not only made the
wage-workers conscious of the dignity of their own political history (a
very important step in the Marxian class-consciousness) but shewed the
middle-class Socialists what the public work of the wage-working world
was really like, and convinced them of the absurdity of supposing that
Socialists could loftily ignore the organization the people had already
accomplished spontaneously in their own way. Only by grafting Socialism
on this existing organization could it be made a really powerful
proletarian movement.

The Liberals, still believing themselves to be the party of progress,
assumed that all progressive movements would be grafted on the
Liberal Party as a matter of course, to be patronized and adopted
by the Liberal leaders in Parliament as far as they approved. They
were disagreeably surprised when the first effect of the adoption of
constitutional parliamentarism by the Fabian Society was an attack on
the Liberal Government of that day, published in one of the leading
reviews, for being more reactionary and hostile to the wage-workers
than the Conservatives. The Liberals were so astonished and scandalized
that they could only suggest that the Fabian Society had been bribed
by the Conservatives to commit what seemed to all Liberals to be
an act of barefaced political treachery. They soon had their eyes
opened much more widely. The Fabian Society followed up its attack by
a proposal for the establishment of a Labor Party in Parliament to
oppose both Conservatives and Liberals impartially. A working-class
leader, Keir Hardie, formerly a miner, founded a Society called the
Independent Labor Party to put this proposal into practice. Among the
members of the Fabian Society who became a leader in this new Society
was Mr Ramsay MacDonald, who, by his education and knowledge of the
world outside the wage-working class, was better qualified than Keir
Hardie for successful leadership in Parliament. From the Independent
Labor Party sprang The Labor Party, a political federation, much more
powerful, of Trade Unions and of Socialist Societies, whose delegates
sat on its executive committee. As all the persons who were members of
Trade Unions at that time could, by subscribing a penny a week each,
have provided a political fund of over £325,000 (there are three times
as many now), this combination with the Trade Unionists was decisive.
At the election of 1906 enough Labor members were elected to form an
independent party in Parliament. By 1923 they had encroached so much
that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives had a majority in the
House; and Mr Ramsay MacDonald was challenged to form a Government and
shew whether Labor could govern or not. He accepted the challenge, and
became British Prime Minister with a Cabinet of Socialists and Trade
Unionists. It was a more competent government than the Conservative
Government that preceded it, partly because its members, having risen
from poverty or obscurity to eminence by their personal ability, were
unhampered by nonentities, and partly because it knew what the world
is like today, and was not dreaming, as even the cleverest of the
Conservative leaders still were, of the Victorian mixture of growing
cotton lordship and decaying feudal lordship in the capitalist class,
with starved helpless ignorance and submissive servitude in the
proletariat, which had not even lasted out Queen Victoria’s lifetime.
In fact, the Labor leaders were to an extraordinary degree better
educated and more experienced than their opponents, who infatuatedly
took it for granted that rich men must be superior in education because
they graduate in the two aristocratic universities instead of in the
school of economically organic life.

The Liberals and Conservatives, disgusted with this result, and
ruefully sorry that by derisively giving Labor a chance to prove its
relative incompetence it had proved the opposite, combined to throw
Mr MacDonald out of office in 1924. Although he had as yet no real
chance of a majority in the country, he had so scared the plutocrats in
Parliament by his comparative success as Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs, which they had regarded as the department in which Labor was
certain to break down ridiculously, that they overdid their attack
by persuading the country that he was connected with the Communist
Government of Russia. The panic which followed, lasting until the
election was over, wiped out at the polls, not the Labor Party, which
just managed to hold its own, but the innocent Liberal Party.

The danger of stampeding a general election is that all sorts of
political lunatics, whom no one would dream of taking seriously in
quiet times, get elected by screaming that the country is in danger,
whilst sober candidates are defeated ignominiously. In 1906, when a
general election was stampeded by an alarm of Chinese labor, third
rate Liberal candidates ousted first rate Conservative ones by the
score. In 1924 the Red Russian scare enabled third rate Conservatives
to oust first rate Liberals. In both cases the result was a grave
falling-off in the quality of the victorious party. When the Sirdar,
our representative in Egypt, was unluckily assassinated just after
the election, the Conservatives, drunk with their victory, could not
be restrained by the Prime Minister, Mr Baldwin, from hurling at the
assassins an insane threat to cut off the water supply of Egypt. This
extravagance, which startled all Europe, was felt to be just the
sort of thing that Mr MacDonald would not have done. The Government
had to climb down rather abjectly when it discovered that it could
neither carry out its threat nor expect anything but reprobation
from all sides, both at home and abroad, for having been so absurd
as to make it; for though a forceful wickedness is, I am sorry to
say, rather popular than otherwise when our Governments indulge
in it at the expense of foreigners, we expect it to be successful.
A climb-down is unpopular in proportion to the arrogance of the
climb-up. Consequently the Government lost on the Egyptian fiasco
the support won by the Russian scare; but it lost its head again at
a crazy threat of a general strike by the Trade Unions. The Russians
sent us a very handsome subscription to the strike funds; and the
Government, frightened and infuriated, and quite incapable of measuring
the danger (which need not have alarmed a mouse) brought in a futile
but provocative Bill to make Trade Unionism illegal, and broke off
diplomatic relations with Russia after raiding the offices of the
Russian Government in London. Meanwhile, Labor in Parliament, having
recovered from the shock of the election, settled into its place as the
official Opposition.

To sum up the story to the point it has now reached (1927), the
Proletariat, having begun its defensive operations in the Class War
by organizing its battalions into Trade Unions, only to discover
that it could not retain its winnings without passing them into law,
organized itself politically as a Labor Party, and returned enough
members to Parliament to change the House of Commons from a chamber
in which two capitalist parties, calling themselves Conservative and
Liberal, contended for the spoils of office and the honor and glory of
governing, to an arena in which the Proletariat and the Proprietariat
face each other on a series of questions which are all parts of two
main questions: first, whether the national land and capital and
industry shall be held and controlled by the nation for the nation, or
left in the hands of a small body of private men to do as they please
with; second, whilst the capitalist system lasts, which shall be top
dog, the provider of capital or the provider of labor. The first is
a Socialist question, because until land and capital and the control
of industry are in the hands of the Government it cannot equalize the
distribution either of the product or of the labor of producing it.

The second is a Trade Unionist question. The Labor Party consists not
only of Socialists aiming at equality of income, but of Trade Unionists
who have no objection to the continuance of the capitalist method in
industry provided that Labor gets the lion’s share. It should be easier
to maintain the capitalist system with the proletarians taking the
lion’s share, and the landlords, capitalists, and employers reduced to
comparative penury, than to maintain it as at present; for the laborers
and mechanics and their wives and daughters form about nine-tenths of
the nation; and on all accounts it should be safer and steadier to have
only one discontented person to every nine contented ones than nine
discontented persons to every one contented one. To put it another
way, it should be easier for a government supported by nine-tenths
of the voters to collect income tax and supertax from landlords and
capitalists until they had to sell their country houses and motor
cars to their tenants and employees, and live in the gardener’s
cottage themselves, than it is for a landlord to collect his rents or
a capitalist to find investments on which he can live in luxury. An
engineer designing a Forth Bridge, or an architect a cathedral or a
palace, can quite easily be reduced to accept less money for his work
than the riveters and fitters and masons and bricklayers and painters
who carry out the designs. It is true that labor could no more do
without them than they could do without labor; but labor would have
the advantage in bargaining, because the talented worker, sooner than
waste his talent, would rather exercise it for a low wage than fix
rivets or pile bricks for a high one. At his own job he will work on
any terms for the pleasure of working, and loathe any other job; whilst
the reluctant laborer will do nothing for nothing and very little for a
halfpenny.

Thus a Trade Unionist Government, with the mass of the people at its
back, could, by ruthless taxation of unearned incomes, by Factory Acts,
by Wages Boards fixing wages, by Commissions fixing prices, by using
the income tax to subsidize trades in which wages were low (all of
these devices are already established in parliamentary practice) could
redistribute the national income in such a way that the present rich
would become the poor, and the laborer would be cock of the walk. What
is more, that arrangement would be much more stable than the present
state of affairs in which the many are poor and the few rich. The
only threat to its permanence would come from the owners of property
refusing to go on collecting rent and interest merely to have it nearly
all seized by the tax collector. If you have a thousand a year and a
turn for business, you must sometimes feel that you are really only
collecting money for the Government at a commission of seventy per cent
or thereabouts. Suppose the commission were reduced to twenty-five per
cent, what could you do but pay £750 out of your thousand as helplessly
as you now pay £250? Just as the owners of property, when they
controlled Parliament, used their power to extort the utmost farthing
from Labor, Labor can and probably will use its power to extort the
utmost farthing from Property unless equal distribution for all is made
a fundamental constitutional dogma. At present the propertied classes
are looking to capitalist Trade Unions to save them from Socialism. The
time is coming when they will clamor for Socialism to save them from
capitalist Trade Unionism: that is, from Capitalized Labor. Already in
America Trade Unionism is combining with Big Business to squeeze the
sleeping partner. More of that later on.




51

DOMESTIC CAPITAL


After talking so long about Capitalism in the lump, let us take a few
chapters off to examine it as it affects you personally if you happen
to be a lady with a little capital of your own: one who, after living
in the style customary in her class, still has some money to spare to
use as capital so as to increase her income. I will begin by the simple
case of a woman earning money, not as an employer, but by her own work.

Let us assume that her work involves doing sums (she is an accountant),
or writing (she is an author or scrivener), or visiting clients instead
of waiting in an office to receive them (she is a doctor). It is
evident that if she can spare money enough to buy an adding-machine
which will enable her to do the work of three ordinary bookkeepers, or
a sewing-machine, or a typewriter, or a bicycle, or a motor car, as
the case may be, the machine will enable her to get through so much
more work every day that she will be able to earn more money with them
than without them. The machine will be carelessly called her capital
(most people muddle themselves with that mistake when they discuss
economics); but the capital was the money saved to pay for the machine,
and as it was eaten up by the workers who made the machine, it no
longer exists. What does exist is the machine, which is continually
wearing out, and can never be sold secondhand for its price when new.
Its value falls from year to year until it falls to nothing but the
value of the old iron of which it is made.

Now suppose she marries, thus changing her profession for that of wife,
mother, housekeeper, and so forth! Or suppose that the introduction of
an electric tram service, and the appearance of plenty of taxis in the
streets, enable her to do all the travelling she wants as well and more
cheaply than her private car! What is she to do with her adding-machine
or sewing-machine, her typewriter or her car? She cannot eat them or
wear them on her back. The adding-machine will not iron shirt fronts:
the sewing-machine will not fry eggs: the typewriter will not dust the
furniture: the motor car, for all its marvels, will not wash the baby.

If you shew what I have just written to the sort of male who calls
himself a practical business man, he will at once say that I am
childishly wrong: that you _can_ eat an adding-or sewing-machine; dust
the furniture with a typewriter; and wash a hundred babies with a motor
car. All you have to do is to sell the sewing-machine and buy food with
the price you get for it; sell the typewriter and buy a vacuum cleaner;
sell the motor car and hire a few nurses after buying a bath and soap
and towels. And he will be so far right that you certainly can do all
these things _provided too many other people are not trying to do them
at the same time_. It is because the practical business man always
forgets this proviso that he is such a hopeless idiot politically. When
you have sold the sewing-machine and bought food with the price, you
have not really turned the sewing-machine into food. The sewing-machine
remains as uneatable as ever: not even an ostrich could get a tooth
into it or digest it afterwards. What has happened is that you,
finding yourself with a sewing-machine which you no longer want, and
being in want of food, find some other woman who has some spare food
which she does not want, but who wants a sewing-machine. You have a
sewing-machine for which you have no use, and an unsatisfied appetite.
She has food for which she has no appetite, and wants a sewing-machine.
So you two make an exchange: and there you are! Nothing could be
simpler.

But please remark that it takes two to make the bargain, and that the
two must want opposite things. If they both want the same thing, or
want to get rid of the same thing, there will be no deal. Now suppose
the Chancellor of the Exchequer took it into his head as a practical
business man to raise money by a tax on capital instead of on income.
Suppose he were to say that as thousands of women have capital in the
form of sewing-machines which they can sell for, say, £5 apiece, they
can each afford to pay a tax of £3. Suppose he actually induced the
House of Commons to impose such a tax under the title of a Capital Levy
or some such practical business nonsense, and that every woman had to
sell her sewing-machine to pay the tax! What would be the result? Each
woman trying to sell her machine would find all the other women trying
to sell their machines too, and nobody wanting to buy them. She could
sell it as old iron for a shilling perhaps, but that would not enable
her to pay the tax. The tax collector, not being paid, would distrain
on her goods: that is, he would seize the sewing-machine. But as he
also could not sell it, he would have to hand it over unsold to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who would find himself heaped up with
thousands of unsellable sewing-machines instead of the thousands of
pounds he was looking forward to. He would have no money; and the women
would have no sewing-machines: all because the practical business men
told him that sewing-machines could be turned into bread.

If you consider this a little you will see that the difference between
private affairs and State affairs is that private affairs are what
people can do by themselves, one at a time and once in a way, whereas
State affairs are what we are all made to do by law at the same moment.
At home you are a private woman dealing with your own private affairs;
but if you go into Parliament and perhaps into the Cabinet, you become
a stateswoman. As a private woman all you have to consider is, “Suppose
I were to do this or that”. But as a stateswoman you must consider
“Suppose everybody had to do this or that”. This is called the Kantian
test.

For instance, if you become Chancellor of the Exchequer, your common
sense as a private woman will save you from such a folly as supposing
that a sewing-machine in the house is the same as £5 in the house. But
that very same private common sense of yours may persuade you that an
income of £5 a year is the same as £100 ready money, because you know
that if you want £100 your stockbroker can get it for you in exchange
for £5 a year of your income. You might therefore be tempted to lay a
tax of £30 on everyone with £5 a year, and imagine that you would not
only get the £30, but that the taxpayer would have £70 left to go on
with. Let me therefore explain the nature of this business of £5 a year
being worth £100 cash to you privately, and worth just £5 a year to the
Chancellor publicly and not a rap more.

When we were dealing with the impossibility of saving I pointed out
that there are certain everyday transactions that are like saving and
that are called saving, very much as selling a sewing-machine and
buying food with the price may be called eating the sewing-machine.
Do not bother to try to remember this now: it is easier to go over
it again. Suppose you have £100 and you wish to save it: that is, to
consume it at some future time instead of immediately! The objection is
that as the things the money represents will rot unless they are used
at once, what you want to do is impossible. But suppose there is in
the next street a woman who has been left by the death of her parents
with nothing but an income of £5 a year. Evidently she cannot live on
that. But if she had £100 in ready money she could emigrate, or set
up a typewriting office, or stock a little shop, or take lessons in
some moneymaking art, or buy some smart clothes to improve her chances
of getting respectable employment, or any of the things that poor
women imagine they could do if only they had a little ready money. Now
nothing is easier than for you to make an exchange with this woman. She
gives you her right to take £5 every year fresh-and-fresh out of each
year’s harvest as it comes; and you give her your hundred pounds to
spend at once. Your stockbroker or banker will bring you together. You
go to him and say that you want him to invest your £100 for you at five
per cent; and she goes to him and says that she wants to sell her £5
a year for ready money. He effects the change for a small commission.
But the transaction is disguised under such fantastic names (like the
water and breadcrumb in doctors’ prescriptions) that neither you nor
the other woman understands what has really happened. You are said to
have invested £100, and to be “worth” £100, and to have added £100 to
the capital of the country: and she is said to have “realized her
capital”. But all that has actually occurred is that your £100 has
been handed over to be spent and done for by the other woman, and
that you are left with the right to take £5 out of the income of the
country without working for it year after year for ever, or until you
in your turn sell that right for £100 down if you should unhappily find
yourself in the same predicament as the other lady was in when you
bought it.

Now suppose you brought in your tax of £30 on every £5 a year in the
country! Or suppose a Conservative Government, led by the nose by
practical business men who know by experience that people who have £5
a year can sell it for £100 whenever they want to, were to do it! Or
suppose a Labor Government, misled by the desire to take capital out
of private hands and vest it in the State, were to do it! They would
call it a levy of thirty per cent on capital; and most of them would
vote for it without understanding what it really meant. Its opponents
would vote against it in equal ignorance of its nature; so that their
arguments would convince nobody. What would happen? Evidently no woman
could pay £30 out of £5 a year. She would have to sell the £5 a year
for £100, and then reinvest the odd £70. But she would not get the
£100 because, as the tax would not fall on her alone, but on all the
other capitalists as well, her stockbroker would find everybody asking
him to sell future incomes for ready money and nobody offering ready
money for future incomes. It would be the story of the sewing-machines
over again. She would have to tell the tax collector that she
could not pay the tax, and that he might sell her furniture and be
damned (intelligent women use recklessly strong language under such
circumstances). But the tax collector would reply that her furniture
was no good to him; for as he was selling up all the other capitalists’
furniture at the same time, and as only those who were too poor to have
any capital to be taxed were buying it, Chippendale chairs were down to
a shilling a dozen and dining room tables to five shillings; so that
it would cost him more to take her furniture away and sell it or store
it than it would fetch. He would have to go away empty handed; and all
the Government could do would be to take her £5 a year from her for six
years and four months, the odd months being for the interest to pay for
waiting. In other words it would find that her income was real, and
her capital imaginary.

But even this would not work if the tax were imposed every year, like
the income tax, because at the end of the six years she would owe
£180, incurring a debt of £30 every year and getting only £5 to pay
it with; so that it would be much better for her to give up her £5 a
year for ever and support herself entirely by work. And the Government
would have to admit that a tax on capital is an impossibility, for the
unanswerable reason that the capital has no existence, having been
eaten up long ago.

There is a tax on capital actually in existence which is often referred
to as proving that such taxes are possible. When we die, taxes called
Death Duties (officially Estate Duties) are levied on the fictitious
capital value of our estates, if we leave any. The reason people manage
to pay them is that we do not all die simultaneously every year on
the 5th April and thus incur death duties payable on the following
31st December. We die seldom and slowly, less than twenty out of every
thousand of us in one year, and out of that twenty not more than two at
the outside have any capital. Their heirs, one would think, would find
it easy to sell part of their income for enough ready money to pay the
duties, the purchasers being capitalists whose fathers or uncles have
not died lately. And yet the Government has to wait for its money often
and long. The tax is a stupid one, not because it confiscates property
by making the State inherit part of it (why not?) but because it
operates cruelly and unfairly. One estate, passing by death from heir
to heir three times in a century, will hardly feel the duties. Another,
passing three times in one year (as happens easily during a war), is
wiped out by them, and the heirs reduced from affluence to destitution.
When you make your will, be careful how you leave valuable objects to
poor people. If they keep them they may have to pay more for them in
death duties than they can afford. Probably they will have to sell them
to pay the duty.

This is so little understood, that men not otherwise mad are found
estimating the capital of the country at sums varying from ten thousand
millions before the war to thirty thousand millions after it (as if
the war had made the country richer instead of poorer), and actually
proposing in the House of Commons to tax that thirty thousand millions
as available existing wealth and to pay off the cost of the war with
it. They all know that you cannot eat your cake and have it too; yet,
because we have spent seven thousand millions on a frightful war, and,
as they calculate, twenty thousand millions more on mines and railways
and factory plant and so on, and because these sums are written down
in the books of the Bank of England and the balance sheets of the
Companies and Trusts, they think they still exist, and that we are
an enormously rich nation instead of being, as anyone can see by the
condition of nine-tenths of the population, a disgracefully poor one.




52

THE MONEY MARKET


And now, still assuming that you are a lady of some means, perhaps I
can be a little useful to you in your private affairs if I explain that
mysterious institution where your investments are made for you, called
the Money Market, with its chronic ailment of Fluctuations that may at
any moment increase your income pleasantly without any trouble to you,
or swallow it up and ruin you in ways that a man can never make a woman
understand because he does not understand them himself.

A market for the purchase and sale of money is nonsense on the face
of it. You can say reasonably “I want five shillingsworth of salmon”;
but it is ridiculous to say “I want five shillingsworth of money”.
Five shillingsworth of money is just five shillings; and who wants to
exchange five shillings for five shillings? Nobody buys money for money
except money changers, who buy foreign coins and notes to sell to you
when you are going abroad.

But though nobody in England wants to buy English money, we often want
to hire it, or, as we say, to borrow it. Borrow and hire, however,
do not always mean the same thing. You may borrow your neighbor’s
frying-pan, and return it to her later on with a thank you kindly. But
in the money market there is no kindness: you pay for what you get,
and charge for what you give, as a matter of business. And it is quite
understood that what you hire you do not give back: you consume it at
once. If you ask your neighbor to lend you, not a frying-pan, but a
loaf of bread and a candle, it is understood that you eat the bread and
burn the candle, and repay her later on by giving her a fresh loaf
and a new candle. Now when you borrow money you are really borrowing
what it will buy: that is, bread and candles and material things of all
sorts for immediate consumption. If you borrow a shilling you borrow it
because you want to buy a shillingsworth of something to use at once.
You cannot pay that something back: all you can do is to make something
new or do some service that you can get paid a shilling for, and pay
with that shilling. (You can, of course, borrow another shilling from
someone else, or beg it or steal it; but that would not be a ladylike
transaction.) At all events, not until you pay can the lender consume
the things that the shilling represents. If you pay her anything
additional for waiting you are really hiring the use of the money from
her.

In that case you are under no obligation to her whatever, because you
are doing her as great a service as she is doing you. You may not see
this at first; but just consider. All money that is lent is necessarily
spare money, because people cannot afford to lend money until they have
spent enough of it to support themselves. Now this spare money is only
a sort of handy title deed to spare things, mostly food, which will rot
and perish unless they are consumed immediately. If your neighbor has
a loaf left over from her week’s household supply you are doing her a
service in eating it for her and promising to give her a fresh loaf
next week. In fact a woman who found herself with a tenpenny loaf on
her hands over and above what her family needed to eat, might, sooner
than throw the loaf into the dustbin, say to her neighbor, “You can
have this loaf if you will give me half a fresh loaf for it next week”:
that is to say, she might offer half the loaf for the service of saving
her from the total loss of it by natural decay.

The economists call this paying negative interest. What it means is
that you pay people to keep your spare money for you until you want
it instead of making them pay you for allowing them to keep it, which
the economists call paying positive interest. One is just as natural
as the other; and the sole reason why nobody at present will pay you
to borrow from them, whereas everyone will pay you to lend to them, is
that under our system of unequal division of income there are so very
few of us with spare money to lend, and so very many with less than
they need for immediate consumption, that there are always plenty
of people offering not only to spend the spare money at once, but to
replace it later on in full with fresh goods and pay the lenders for
waiting into the bargain. The economists used to call this payment the
reward of abstinence, which was silly, as people do not need to be
rewarded for abstaining from eating a second dinner, or from wearing
six suits of clothes at a time, or living in a dozen houses: on the
contrary, they ought to be extremely obliged to anyone who will use
these superfluities for them and pay them something as well. If instead
of having a few rich amid a great many poor, we had a great many rich,
the bankers would charge you a high price for keeping your money; and
the epitaph of the dead knight in Watts’s picture, “What I saved I
lost”, would be true materially as well as spiritually. If you then had
£100 to spare, and wanted to save it until next year, and took it to
the manager of your bank to keep it for you, he would say “I am sorry,
madam; but your hundred pounds will not keep. The best I can do for
you is to promise you seventy pounds next year (or fifty, or twenty,
or five, as the case might be); and you are very fortunate to be able
to get that with so much spare money lying about. You had really much
better not save. Increase your expenditure; and enjoy your money before
what it represents goes rotten. Banking is not what it was.”

This cannot happen under Capitalism, because Capitalism distributes
the national income in such a way that the many are poor and the few
enormously rich. Therefore for the present you may count on being able
to lend (invest) all your spare money, and on being paid so much a year
for waiting until the borrower replaces what you have lent. The payment
for waiting is called interest, or, in the Bible, usury. Interest is
the polite word. The borrower, in short, hires the use of your spare
money from you; and there is nothing dishonest nor dishonorable in the
transaction. You hand over your spare ready money (your capital) to the
borrower; and the borrower binds herself to pay you a certain yearly or
monthly or weekly income until she repays it to you in full.

The money market is the place in the city where yearly incomes are
bought for lump sums of spare ready money. The income you can buy for
£100 (which is the measuring figure) varies from day to day, according
to the plenty or scarcity of spare money offered for hire and of
incomes offered for sale. It varies also according to the security of
the income and the chances of its fluctuating from year to year. When
you take your spare £100 to your stockbroker to invest for you (that
is, to hire out for an income in the money market) he can, at the
moment when I write these lines (1926) get you £4: 10s. a year certain,
£6 a year with the chance of its rising or falling, or £10 a year and
upwards if you will take a sporting chance of never receiving anything
at all.

The poor do not meddle with this official money market, because the
only security they can give when borrowing ready money from anyone but
the pawnbroker is their promise to pay so much a week out of their
earnings. This being much more uncertain than a share certificate or a
lease of land, they have to pay comparatively prodigious prices. For
instance, a poor working woman can hire a shilling for a penny a week.
This is the usual rate; and it seems quite reasonable to very poor
people; but it is more than eighty-six times as much as the Government
pays for the hire of money. It means paying at the rate of £433: 10s. a
year for the use of £100, or, as we say, interest at 433½ per cent:
a rate no rich man would dream of paying. The poorer you are the more
you pay, because the risk of your failing to pay is greater. Therefore
when you see in the paper that the price of hiring money has been fixed
by the Bank of England (that is why it is called the Bank Rate) at five
per cent, or reduced to four-and-a-half per cent, or raised to six per
cent, or what not, you must not suppose that you or anyone else can
hire money at that rate: it means only that those who are practically
certain to be able to pay, like the Government or the great financiers
and business houses, can borrow from the banks at that rate. In their
case the rate changes not according to any risk of their being unable
to pay, but according to the quantity of spare money available for
lending. And no matter how low the rate falls, the charwoman still has
to pay 433½ per cent, partly because the risk of her being unable to
pay is great, partly because the expense of lending money by shillings
and collecting the interest every week is much greater than the expense
of lending it by millions and collecting the interest every six months,
and partly because the charwoman is ignorant and helpless and does not
know that the slum usurer, whom she regards as her best friend in need,
is charging her anything more than a millionaire is charged.

The price of money varies also according to the purpose for which it is
borrowed. You are, I hope, concerned with the money market as a lender
rather than as a borrower. Do not be startled at the notion of being
a moneylender (not, I repeat, that there is anything dishonorable in
it): nobody will call your investments loans. But they are loans for
all that. Only, they are loans made, not to individuals, but to joint
stock companies on special conditions. The business people in the city
are always forming these companies and asking you to lend them money
to start some big business undertaking, which may be a shop in the
next street, or a motor bus service along it, or a tunnel through the
Andes, or a harbor in the Pacific, or a gold mine in Peru, or a rubber
plantation in Malaya, or any mortal enterprise out of which they think
they can make money. But they do not borrow on the simple condition
that they pay you for the hire of the money until they pay it back.
Their offer is that when the business is set up it shall belong to you
and to all your fellow lenders (called shareholders); so that when it
begins to make money the profits will be distributed among you all in
proportion to the amount each of you has lent. On the other hand, if it
makes no profits you lose your money. Your only consolation is that you
can lose no more. You cannot be called on to pay the Company’s debts if
it has spent more than you lent it. Your liability is limited, as they
say.

This is a chancy business; and to encourage you if you are timid (or
shall we say cautious?) these companies may ask you to lend your spare
money to them at the fixed rate of, say, six or seven per cent, on
the understanding that this is to be paid before any of the ordinary
lenders get anything, but that you will get nothing more no matter how
big the profits may be. If you accept this offer you are said to have
debentures or preference shares in the company; and the others are said
to have ordinary shares. There are a few varieties both of preference
and ordinary shares; but they are all ways of hiring spare money:
the only difference is in the conditions on which you are invited to
provide it.

When you have taken a share, and it is bringing you in an income,
you can at any time, if you are pressed for ready money, sell your
share for what it may be worth in the money market to somebody who has
spare money and wants to “save” it by exchanging it for an income. The
department of the money market in which shares are bought and sold in
this way is called the Stock Exchange. To sell a share you have to
employ an agent (called a stockbroker), who takes your share to the
Exchange and asks another agent (called a stockjobber) to “make him a
price”: It is the jobber’s business to know what the share is worth,
according to the prospects of the company, the quantity of spare money
being offered for incomes, and the number of income producing shares
being offered for sale. Never speak disrespectfully of stockjobbers:
they are very important people, and consider themselves greater masters
of the money business than the stockbrokers.

The legitimate business of the Stock Exchange is this selling and
buying of shares in companies already established. It is largely
occupied also with a curious game called speculation, in which
phantom prices are offered for imaginary shares; but for the moment
let us keep to the point that the shares dealt in are practically
all in established companies, because what is nationally important
is the application of spare money, not to the purchase of shares in
old companies, but to the foundation of new ones, or at least to
the extension of the plant and operations of the old ones. Now the
business done on the Stock Exchange is no index to this, and indeed
may have nothing to do with it. Suppose, for example, that you have
£50,000 to spare, and you invest it all in railway shares! You will
not by doing so create a single yard of railway, nor cause a single
additional train to be run, nor even supply an existing train with
an extra footwarmer. Your money will have no effect whatever on the
railways. All that will happen is that your name will be substituted
for some other name or names in the list of shareholders, and that for
the future you will get the income the owners of those names would get
if they had not sold their shares to you. Also, of course, that they
will get your £50,000 to do what they like with. They may spend it on
the gambling tables at Monte Carlo, or on the British turf; or they
may present it to the funds of the Labor Party. You may disapprove
strongly of gambling; and you may have a horror of the Labor Party.
You may say “If I had thought this was going to happen to my money, I
would have bought shares privately from some persons whose principles
were well known to me and whom I could trust not to spend it foolishly
instead of from that wicked stockjobber who has no more conscience
than a cash register, and does not care what becomes of my money”. But
your protest will be vain. In practice you will find that you must buy
your shares in established companies on the Stock Exchange; that your
money will never go into the company whose shares you buy; and that its
real destination will be entirely beyond your control. A day’s work on
the Stock Exchange, nominally a most gratifying addition of hundreds
of thousands of pounds of spare money to the industrial capital of
the country, may be really a waste of them in extravagant luxury, or
ruinous vice, to say nothing of the possibility of their being sent
abroad to establish some foreign business which will capture the
business of the company whose shares you have bought, and thus reduce
you to indigence.

And now you will say that if this is so, you will take particular care
to buy nothing but new shares in new companies, sending the money
directly to their bankers according to the form enclosed with the
prospectus, without allowing any stockbroker or stockjobber to know
anything about it, thus making sure that your money will be used to
create a new business and add it to the productive resources of your
country’s industry. My dear lady, you will lose it all unless you are
very careful, very well informed as to the risks involved, and very
intelligent in money matters. Company promotion, I am sorry to say,
is a most rascally business in its shadier corners. Act after Act of
Parliament has been passed, without much effect, to prevent swindlers
from forming companies for some excellent object, and, when they have
collected as much money as they can by selling shares in it, making no
serious attempt to carry out that object, but simply taking offices,
ordering goods, appointing themselves directors and managers and
secretaries and anything else that carries a salary, taking commissions
on all their orders, and, when they have divided all the plunder in
this way (which is perfectly legal), winding up the company as a
failure. All you can do in that case is to go to the shareholders’
meeting and make a row, being very careful not to tell the swindlers
that they are swindlers, because if you do they will immediately take
an action against you for slander and get damages out of you. But
making a row will not save your money. The amount that is stolen from
innocent women every year in this way is appalling; and it has been
done as much by sham motor bus companies, which if genuine would have
been very sensible and publicly useful investments, as by companies to
work bogus gold mines, which are suspect on the face of them.

Even if you escape this swindling by blackguards who know what they
are doing, and would be as much disconcerted by the success of their
companies as a burglar if he found himself politely received and
invited to dinner in a house he had broken into, you may be tempted
by the companies founded by genuine enthusiasts who believe in their
scheme, who are quite right in believing in it, who are finally
justified by its success, and who put all their own spare money and a
great deal of hard work into it. But they almost always underestimate
its cost. Because it is new, they have no experience to guide them;
and they have their own enthusiasm to mislead them. When they are half
way to success the share money is all used up; and they are forced to
sell out all they have done for an old song to a new company formed
expressly to take advantage of them. Sometimes this second company
shares the fate of the first, and is bought out by a third. The company
which finally succeeds may be built on the money and work of three
or four successive sets of pioneers who have run short of the cash
needed for completion of the plant. The experienced men of the city
know this, and lie in wait until the moment has come for the final
success. As one of them has put it “the money is made by coming in on
the third reconstruction”. For them it may be a splendid investment;
but the original shareholders, who had the intelligence to foresee the
successful future of the business, and the enterprise to start it,
are cleaned out. They see their hopes fulfilled and their judgment
justified; but as they have to look through the workhouse windows, they
are a warning rather than an example to later investors.

You can avoid these risks by never meddling with a new company, but
calling in your stockbroker to buy shares in a well established old
one. You will not do it any good; but at all events you will know that
it is neither a bogus company nor one which has started with too little
capital and will presently have to sell out at a heavy or total loss.
Beware of enterprise: beware of public spirit: beware of conscience and
visions of the future. Play for safety. Lend to the Government or the
Municipalities if you can, though the income may be less; for there is
no investment so safe and useful as a communal investment. And when
you find journalists glorifying the Capitalist system as a splendid
stimulus to all these qualities against which I have just warned
you, restrain the unladylike impulse to imitate the sacristan in the
Ingoldsby Legends, who said no word to indicate a doubt, but put his
thumb unto his nose, and spread his fingers out.




53

SPECULATION


In the preceding chapter I have been assuming that you are a
capitalist. I am now going to assume that you are perhaps a bit of a
gambler. Even if you abhor gambling it is a necessary part of your
education in modern social conditions to know how most of it is done.
Without such knowledge you might, for instance, marry a gambler after
having taken the greatest pains to assure yourself that he had never
touched a playing card, sat at a roulette table, or backed a horse in
his life, and was engaged solely in financial operations on the Stock
Exchange. You might find him encouraging you to spend money like water
in one week, and in the next protesting that he could not possibly
afford you a new hat. In short, you might find yourself that tragic
figure, the gambler’s wife who is not by temperament a gambler.

A page or two ago I dropped a remark about a game played on the Stock
Exchange and called Speculation, at which phantom prices are offered
for imaginary shares. I will explain this game to you, leaving it to
your taste and conscience to decide whether you will shun it or plunge
into it. It is by far the most widely practised and exciting form of
gambling produced by Capitalism.

To understand it you must know that on the London Stock Exchange
you can buy a share and not have to pay for it, or sell a share and
not have to hand over the share certificate, until next settling
day, which may be a fortnight off. You may not see at first what
difference that makes. But a great deal may happen in a fortnight.
Just recollect what you have learnt about the continual fluctuations
in the prices of incomes and of spare subsistence in the Money Market!
Think of the hopes and fears raised by the flourishing and decaying
of the joint stock companies as their business and prospects grow or
shrink according as the harvests are good or bad: rubber harvests, oil
harvests, coal harvests, copper harvests, as well as the agricultural
harvests: all meaning that there will be more or less money to divide
among the shareholders as yearly income, and more or less spare money
available to buy shares with. The prices of shares change not only from
year to year but from day to day, from hour to hour, and, in moments of
excitement on the Stock Exchange, from minute to minute. The share that
was obtained years ago or centuries ago by giving £100 spare money to
start a new company may bring its owner £5000 a year, or it may bring
her thirty shillings, or it may bring her nothing, or it may bring her
all three in succession. Consequently that share, which cost somebody
£100 spare money when it was new, she may be able to sell for £100,000
at one moment, for £30 at another, whilst at yet another she may be
unable to sell it at all, for love or money. As she opens her newspaper
in the morning she looks at the city page, with its list of yesterday’s
prices of stocks and shares, to see how rich she is today; and she
seldom finds that her shares are worth the same price for a week at a
time unless she has been prudent enough to lend it to the Government or
to a municipality (in which case she has communal security) instead of
to private companies.

Now put these two things together: the continual change in the prices
of shares, and the London Stock Exchange rule that they need not be
paid for nor delivered until next settling day. Suppose you have not
a penny of spare cash in your possession, nor a share (carrying an
income) to sell! Suppose you believe for some reason or other that the
price of shares in a certain company (call it company A) is going to
rise in value within the next few days! And suppose you believe that
the price of shares in a certain other company (company B) is going
to fall. If you are right, all you have to do to make some money by
your good guessing is to buy shares in company A and sell shares in
company B. You may say “How am I to buy shares without money or sell
them without the share certificates?” It is very simple: you need not
produce either the money or the certificates until settling day. Before
settling day you sell the A shares for more than you bought them for on
credit; and you buy the B certificates for less than you pretended to
sell them for. On settling day you will get the money from the people
you sold to, and the certificates from the people you bought from; and
when you have paid for the A shares and handed over the B certificates,
you will be in pocket by the difference between their values on the
day you bought and sold them and their values on settling day. Simple
enough, is it not?

This is the game of speculation. Nobody will blame you for engaging in
it; but on the Stock Exchange they will call you a bull for pretending
to buy the A shares, and a bear for pretending to sell the B shares. If
you pay a small sum to get shares allotted to you in a new company on
the chance of selling them at a profit before you have to pay up, they
will call you a stag. If you ask why not a cow or a hind, the reply
is that as the Stock Exchange was founded by men for men its slang is
exclusively masculine.

But, you may say, suppose my guess was wrong! Suppose the price of
the A shares goes down instead of up, and the price of the B shares
up instead of down! Well, that often happens, either through some
unforeseen event affecting the companies, or simply because you guessed
badly. But do not be too terrified by this possibility; for all you can
lose is the difference between the prices; and as this may be only a
matter of five or ten pounds for every hundred you have been dealing
in you can pawn your clothes and furniture and try again. You can
even have your account “carried over” to next settling day by paying
“contango” if you are a bull, or “backwardation” if you are a bear, on
the chance of your luck changing in the extra fortnight.

I must warn you, however, that if a great many other bears have guessed
just as you have, and sold imaginary shares in great numbers, you may
be “cornered”. This means that the bears have sold either more shares
than actually exist, or more than the holders will sell except at a
great advance in price. Bulls who are cunning enough to foresee this
and to buy up the shares which are being beared may make all the money
the bears lose. Cornering the bears is a recognized part of the game of
speculation.

As the game is one of knowledge and skill and character (or no
character) as well as of chance, a good guesser, or one with private
(inside) information as to facts likely to affect share prices, can
make a living at it; and some speculators have made and lost princely
fortunes. Some women play at it just as others back horses. Sometimes
they do it intelligently through regular stockbrokers, with a clear
understanding of the game. Sometimes they are blindly tempted by
circulars sent out from Bucket Shops; so I had better enlighten you as
to what a bucket shop is.

You will remember that a speculator does not stand to lose the whole
price she offers for a share, or the whole value of the share she
pretends to buy. If she loses she loses only the difference between
the prices she expected and the prices she has to pay. If she has
a sufficient sum in hand to meet this she escapes bankruptcy. This
sufficient sum is called “cover”. A bucket shop keeper is one who
undertakes to speculate for anyone who will send him cover. His
circulars say, in effect, “Send me ten pounds, and the worst that can
happen to you is to lose it; but I may be able to double it for you or
even double it many times over. I can refer you to clients who have
sent me £10 and got back £50 or £100.” A lady, not understanding the
business in the least, is tempted to send him £10, and very likely
loses it, in which case she usually tries to get it back by risking
another £10 note if she has one left. But she may be lucky and pocket
some winnings; for bucket shops must let their clients win sometimes or
they could hardly exist. But they can generally prevent your winning,
if they choose, by taking advantage of some specially low price of
shares to shew that your cover has disappeared, or even by selling two
or three shares themselves at a low price and quoting it against you.
Besides, if you sue them for your winnings they can escape by pleading
the Gaming Act. They cannot be mulcted or expelled by the Stock
Exchange Committee; for they are not members of the Stock Exchange, and
have given no securities. A bucket shop keeper is not necessarily a
swindler any more than a bookmaker is necessarily a welsher; but if he
fleeces you you have no remedy, whereas if a stockbroker cheats you it
may cost him his livelihood.

If you speculate through a regular stockbroker you must bear in mind
that he is supposed to deal in genuine investments only: that is, in
the buying of shares by clients who have the money to pay for them,
and the sale of shares by those who really possess them and wish to
exchange them for a lump sum of spare money. The difference is that
if you go into a bucket shop and say frankly “Here is a five pound
note, which is all I have in the world. Will you take it as cover, and
speculate with it for me in stocks of ten times its value”, the bucket
shop will oblige you; but if you say this to a stockbroker he must have
you shewn out. You must allow him to believe, or pretend to believe,
that you really have the spare money or the shares in which you want to
deal.

You will now understand what gambling on the London Stock Exchange
means. The game can be played with certain variations, called options
and double options and so on, which are as easily picked up as the
different hazards of the roulette table; and the foreign stock
exchanges have rules which are not so convenient for the bears as our
rules; but these differences do not change the nature of the game.
Every day speculative business is done in Capel Court in London, on
Wall Street in New York, in the Bourses on the Continent, to the tune
of millions of pounds; and it is literally only a tune: the buyers have
no money and the sellers no goods; and their countries are no richer
for it all than they are for the gaming tables at Monte Carlo or the
bookmakers’ settlements at the end of a horse race. Yet the human
energy, audacity, and cunning wasted on it would, if rightly directed,
make an end of our slums and epidemics and most of our prisons in fewer
hours than it has taken days of Capitalism to produce them.




54

BANKING


The Stock Exchange is only a department of the money market. The
commonest way of hiring money for business purposes is to keep an
account at a bank, and hire spare money there when you want it. The
bank manager will lend it to you if he feels reasonably sure that
you will be able to repay him: in fact that is his real business, as
we shall see presently. He may do it by letting you overdraw your
account. Or if somebody with whom you are doing business has given you
a written promise to pay you a sum of money at some future time (this
written promise is called a bill of exchange) and the bank manager
thinks the promise will be kept, he will give you the money at once,
only deducting enough to pay him for its hire until your customer pays
it. This is called discounting the bill. All such transactions are
forms of hiring spare money; and when you read in the city articles
in the papers that money is cheap or money is dear, it means that the
price you have to pay your banker for the hire of spare money is low or
high as the case may be.

Sometimes you will see a fuss made because the Bank of England has
raised or lowered the Bank Rate. This means that the Bank of England is
going to charge more or less, as the case may be, for discounting bills
of exchange, because spare money has become dearer or cheaper: that is
to say, because spare subsistence has become scarcer or more plentiful.
If you are overdrawn at your bank, the announcement that the Bank Rate
is raised may bring you a letter from the manager to say that you must
not overdraw any more, and that he will be obliged to you if you will
pay off your overdraft as soon as possible. What he means is that as
spare subsistence has become scarce and dear he cannot go on supplying
you with it, and would like you to replace what he has already
supplied. This may be very inconvenient to you, and may prevent you
from extending your business. That is why there is great consternation
and lamentation among business people when the Bank Rate goes up, and
jubilation when it goes down. For when the terms on which spare money
can be hired at the Bank of England go up, they go up everywhere;
so that the Bank Rate is an index to the cost of hiring spare money
generally.

And now comes the question, where on earth do the banks get all the
spare money they deal in? To the Intelligent Woman who is not engaged
in business, or who, if she has a bank account, never overdraws it
or brings a bill to be discounted, a bank seems only a place where
they very kindly pay her cheques and keep her money safe for her for
nothing, as if she were paying them a compliment by allowing them to do
it. They will even hire money from her when she has more than enough to
go on with, provided she will agree not to draw it out without giving
them some days’ notice (they call this placing it on deposit). She must
ask herself sometimes how they can possibly afford to keep up a big
handsomely fitted building and a staff of respectably dressed clerks
with a most polite and sympathetic manager to do a lot of her private
business for her and charge her nothing for it.

The explanation is that people hardly ever draw as much money from the
bank as they put in; and even when they do, it remains in the bank for
some time. Suppose you lodge a hundred pounds in the bank on Monday to
keep it safe because you will have to draw a cheque for it on Saturday!
That cheque will not be presented for payment until the following
Monday. Consequently the bank has your hundred pounds in its hands
for a week, and can therefore hire it out for a week for a couple of
shillings.

But very few bank transactions are as unprofitable as this. Most people
keep their bank accounts open all the year round; and instead of paying
in every week exactly what they want to spend and drawing it out again
by their cheques as they spend it, they keep a round sum always at
their call so as to be ready when they may happen to want it. The
poorest woman who ever dreams of keeping a bank account at all is not
often driven to draw the last half crown out: when her balance falls
as low as that, she knows it is time to put in another pound or two.
Indeed it is not every bank that will do business on so small a scale
as this: the Governor of the Bank of England would turn blue and order
the porters to remove you if you offered him an account of that sort.
Bank customers are people some of whom keep £20 continually at call,
some £100, some £1000, and some many thousands, according to the extent
of their business or the rate at which they are living. This means that
no matter how much money they may put into the bank or take out, there
always remains in the bank a balance that they never draw out; and when
all these balances are added up they come to a huge amount of spare
money in the hands of the bank. It is by hiring out this money that the
banks make their enormous profits. They can well afford to be polite to
you.

And now the Intelligent Woman who keeps a bank account, and most
conscientiously never lets her balance fall below a certain figure, may
ask in some alarm whether her bank, instead of keeping her balance
always in the bank ready for her to draw out if she should need it,
actually lends it to other people. The reply is, Yes: that is not only
what the bank does, but what it was founded to do. But, the Intelligent
Woman will exclaim, that means that if I were to draw a cheque for
my balance there would be no money in the bank to pay it with. And
certainly that would happen if all the other customers of the bank drew
cheques for their balances on the same day. But they never do. “Still”,
you urge, “they might.” Never mind: the bank does not trouble about
what might happen. It is concerned only with what does happen; and what
does happen is that if out of every pound lodged with them the bankers
keep about three shillings in the till to pay their customers’ cheques
it will be quite sufficient.

Only, please remember that the woman who has a bank account should
never frighten the others by letting them know this. They would all
rush to the bank and draw out their balances; and when the bankers had
paid to the first comers all the three shillingses they had kept, they
would stop payment and put up the shutters. This sometimes actually
happens when a report is spread that some particular bank is not to be
trusted. Something or somebody starts a panic; there is “a run on the
bank”; the bank is broken; and its customers are very angry with the
directors, clamoring to have them prosecuted and sent to prison, which
is unreasonable; for they ought to have known that banks, with all the
services they give for nothing, can exist only on condition that their
customers do not draw out their balances all on the same day.

Perhaps, by the way, you know some woman who not only always draws her
full balance, but overdraws it; so that she is always in debt to the
bank. Her case is very simple. The bank lends her the other customers’
money to go on with, and charges her for the hire of it. That sort of
business pays them very well.

And now that you know what banking is from the inside, and how the
bankers get all the spare money they let on hire, may I remind you
again, if I am not too tiresome, that this spare money is really spare
subsistence, mainly perishable stuff that must be used at once. One of
the greatest public dangers of our day is that the bankers do not know
this, because they never handle or store the stuff themselves; and the
right to take it away and use it which they sell on the hire system
is disguised under the name of Credit. Consequently they come to think
that credit is something that can be eaten and drunk and worn and made
into houses and railways and factories and so on, whereas real credit
is only the lender’s opinion that the borrower will be able to pay him.

Now you cannot feed workmen or build houses or butter parsnips with
opinions. When you hear of a woman living on credit or building a house
on credit or having a car on credit you may rest assured that she is
not doing anything of the kind: she is living on real victuals; having
her house built of bricks and mortar by men who are eating substantial
meals; and driving about in a steel car full of highly explosive
petrol. If she has not made them nor paid for them somebody else has;
and all that her having them on credit means is that the bank manager
believes that at some future time she will replace them with equally
substantial equivalent goods of the same value after paying the bank
for waiting meanwhile. But when she goes to the bank manager she does
not ask for food and bricks and cars: she says she wants credit. And
when the bank manager allows her to draw the money that is really an
order for so much food and so many bricks and a car, he says nothing
about these things. He says, and thinks, that he is giving her credit.
And so at last all the bankers and the practical business men come to
believe that credit is something eatable, drinkable, and substantial,
and that bank managers can increase or diminish the harvest by becoming
more credulous or more sceptical as to whether the people to whom they
lend money will pay them or not (issuing or restricting credit, as
they call it). The city articles in the papers, the addresses of bank
chairmen at the annual shareholders’ meetings, the financial debates
in Parliament, are full of nonsensical phrases about issuing credit,
destroying credit, restricting credit, as if somebody were shovelling
credit about with a spade. Clever men put forward wonderful schemes
based on the calculation that when a banker lends five thousand pounds
worth of spare subsistence he also gives the borrower credit for five
thousand pounds, the five thousand credit added to the five thousand
spare subsistence making ten thousand altogether! Instead of being
immediately rushed into the nearest lunatic asylum, these clever ones
find disciples both in Parliament and in the city. They propose to
extend our industries (that is, build ships and factories and railway
engines and the like) with credit. They believe that you can double
the quantity of goods in the country by changing the cipher 2 into the
cipher 4. Whenever a scarcity of spare subsistence forces the Bank of
England to raise the Bank Rate they accuse the directors of playing
them a dirty trick and preventing them from extending their business,
as if the Governor and Company of the Bank of England could keep the
rate down any more than the barometer can keep the mercury down in fair
weather. They think they know, because they are “practical business
men”. But for national purposes they are maniacs with dangerous
delusions; and the Governments who take their advice soon find
themselves on the rocks.

What is it, then, that really fixes the price you have to pay if you
hire ready money from your bank, or that you receive for lending it to
the bank (on deposit), or to trading companies by buying shares, or to
the Government or the Municipalities? In other words, what fixes the
so-called price of money, meaning the cost of hiring it? And what fixes
the price of incomes when their owners sell them for ready money in the
Stock Exchange?

Well, it depends on the proportion between the quantity of spare
subsistence (“saved” money) there may be in the market to be hired, and
how much the people who want to use it up are able and willing to pay
for the hire of it. On the one hand you have the property owners who
are living on less than their incomes and therefore want to dispose of
their spare stuff before it goes rotten. On the other are the business
men who want what the property owners have not consumed to feed the
proletarians whose labor they need to start new businesses or extend
old ones. Beside these, you have the spendthrift property owners who
have lived beyond their incomes, and must therefore sell the incomes
(or part of them) for ready money to pay their debts. Between them all,
you get a Supply and Demand according to which spare money and incomes
are cheap or dear. The price runs up when the supply runs short or the
demand becomes more pressing. It runs down when the supply increases or
the demand slackens.

By the way, now that we are picking up the terms Supply and Demand,
remember that Demand in the money market sense does not mean want
alone: it means only the want that the wanter can afford to satisfy.
The demand of a hungry child for food is very strong and very loud; but
it does not count in business unless the mother has money to buy food
for the child. But with this rather inhuman qualification supply and
demand (called “effective demand”) settle the price of everything that
has a price.

Banks are safe when they lend their money (or rather yours)
judiciously. If they make bad investments, or trust the wrong people,
or speculate, they may ruin themselves and their customers. This
happened occasionally when there were many banks. But now that the
big ones have swallowed up the little ones they are so few and so big
that they could not afford to let one another break, nor indeed could
the Government. So you are fairly safe in keeping your money at a big
bank, and need have no scruple about availing yourself of its readiness
to oblige you in many ways, including acting as your stockbroker,
borrowing from you at interest (on deposit account), and lending you,
though at a considerably higher rate, any ready money for the repayment
of which you can offer reasonably satisfactory security.

As we now see why the hiring terms for money vary from time to time,
sometimes from hour to hour, let us amuse ourselves by working out what
would happen at the banks if the Government, misled by the practical
business men, or by the millennial amateurs, were to attempt to raise
say £30,000 millions by a tax on capital, and another £30,000 millions
by a tax on credit.

The announcement of the tax on credit would make an end of that part of
the business at once by destroying all credit. The financial magnate
who the day before could raise a million at six or seven per cent by
raising his finger would not be able to borrow five shillings from his
butler unless the butler let him have it for the sake of old times
without the least hope of ever seeing it again.

To pay the tax the capitalists would have to draw out every farthing
they had in the bank, and instruct their stockbrokers to sell out all
their shares and debentures and Government and municipal stock. There
would be such a prodigious demand for ready money that the Governor
and Company of the Bank of England would meet at eleven o’clock and
resolve, after some hesitation, to raise the Bank Rate boldly to ten
per cent. After lunch they would be summoned hurriedly to raise it
to a hundred per cent; and before they could send out this staggering
announcement they would learn that they might save themselves the
trouble, as all the banks, after paying out three shillings in the
pound, had stopped payment and stuck up a notice on their closed doors
that they hoped to be able to pay their customers the rest when they
had realized their investments: that is, called in their loans and sold
their stocks and shares. But the stockbrokers would report only one
price for all stocks, that price being no pounds, no shillings, and
no pence, not even farthings. For that is the price in a market where
there are all sellers and no buyers.

When the tax collector called for his money, the taxpayer would have
to say “I can get no money for you; so instead of paying the tax on
my capital, here is the capital itself for you. Here is a bundle of
share certificates which you can sell to the waste paper dealer for
a halfpenny. Here is a bundle of bonds payable to bearer which you
can try your luck with, and a sheet of coupons which in a few years’
time will be as valuable as rare and obsolete postage stamps. Here is
a transfer which will authorize the Bank of England to run its pen
through my name in the War Loan register and substitute your own.
And much good may they all do you! I must shew you out myself, as my
servants are in the streets starving because I have no money to pay
their wages: in fact, I should not have had anything to eat myself
today if I had not pawned my evening clothes; and precious little the
pawnbroker would give me on them, as he is short of money and piled up
to the ceiling with evening suits. Good morning.”

You may ask what, after all, would that matter? As nine out of every
ten people have no capital and no credit in the financial sense (that
is to say, though a shopkeeper might trust them until the end of the
week, no banker would dream of lending them a sixpence), they could
look on and laugh, crying “Let the rich take their turn at being
penniless, as we so often are”. But what about the great numbers of
poor who live on the rich, the servants, the employers and employed
in the luxury trades, the fashionable doctors and solicitors? Even in
the productive trades what would happen with the banks all shut up and
bankrupt, the money for wages all taken by the Government, no cheque
payable and no bill of exchange discountable? Unless the Government
were ready instantly to take over and manage every business in the
country: that is, to establish complete nationalization of industry in
a thunderclap without ever having foreseen or intended such a thing,
ruin and starvation would be followed by riot and looting: riot and
looting would only make bad worse; and finally the survivors, if there
were any, would be only too glad to fall on their knees before any
Napoleon or Mussolini who would organize the violence of the mob and
re-establish the old state of things, or as much of it as could be
rescued from the chaos, by main force applied by a ruthless dictator.




55

MONEY


You now know more than most people about the money market. But it is
not enough to know what settles the value of stocks and shares in spare
money from day to day. All money is not spare money. Few of us spend
as much on shares as on food and clothes and lodging. Most of us,
having no spare money, would as soon dream of buying shooting lodges in
Scotland as of investing or speculating on the Stock Exchange; yet we
use money. Suppose there were no spare money on earth, what would fix
the value of money? What is money?

Take a gold coin for instance. You are probably old enough to remember
such things before the war swept them away and substituted bits of
paper called Treasury notes; and you may be young enough to live until
they come back again. What is a gold coin? It is a tool for buying
things in exactly the same sense as a silver spoon is a tool for
eating an egg. Buying and selling would be impossible without such
tools. Suppose they did not exist, and you wanted to go somewhere in a
bus! Suppose the only movable property you had was twenty ducks and a
donkey! When the bus conductor came round for the fare you would offer
him the donkey and ask for the change in potatoes, or offer him a duck
and ask for the change in eggs. This would be so troublesome, and the
bargaining so prolonged, that next time you would find it cheaper to
ride the donkey instead of taking the bus: indeed there would be no
buses because there would be nobody willing to take them, unless buses
were communized and fares abolished.

Now it is troublesome to take a donkey about, even when it takes you,
but quite easy to carry as much gold as a donkey is worth. Accordingly,
the Government cuts up gold into conveniently shaped bits weighing
a little over 123 grains of standard gold (22 carat) apiece, to be
used for buying and selling. For transactions that are too small to
be settled by a metal so costly as gold it provides bronze and silver
coins, and makes a law that so many of these coins shall pass as worth
one of the gold coins. Then buying and selling become quite easy.
Instead of offering your donkey to the bus conductor you exchange it
for its worth in coins; and with these in your pocket you can pay your
bus fare in two seconds without having any words about it.

Thus you see that money is not only a necessary tool for buying and
selling, but also a measure of value; for when it is introduced we
stop saying that a donkey is worth so many ducks or half a horse, and
say instead that it is worth so many pounds or shillings. This enables
accounts to be kept, and makes commerce possible.

All this is as easy as A B C. What is not so easy is the question why
the donkey should be worth, say, three-quarters of a sovereign (fifteen
bob, it would be called at this price), or, to put it the other way,
why fifteen bob should be worth a donkey. All you can say is that a
buyer at this price is a person with fifteen shillings who wants a
donkey more than she wants the fifteen shillings, and a seller at this
price a person with a donkey who would rather have fifteen shillings
than keep the donkey. The buyer, though she wants a donkey, does not
want it badly enough to give more than fifteen shillings for it; and
the seller, though she wants money, will not let the donkey go for less
than fifteen; and so they exchange. Their respective needs just balance
at that figure.

Now a donkey represents just a donkey and nothing else; but fifteen
shillings represents fifteen shillingsworth of anything you like,
from food and drink to a cheap umbrella. Any fund of money represents
subsistence; but do not forget that though you can eat and drink and
wear subsistence, you cannot eat or drink or wear Treasury notes and
metal coins. Granted that if you have two shillings the dairyman will
give you a pound of butter for it; still, a pound of butter is no more
a round piece of metal than a cat is a flat iron; and if there were no
butter you would have to eat dry bread, even if you had millions and
millions of shillings.

Besides, butter is not always two shillings: it is sometimes two and
twopence or even two and sixpence. There are people now living who have
bought good fresh butter for fourpence a pound, and complained of its
being dear at that. It is easy to say that butter is cheap when it is
plentiful, and dear when it is scarce; but this is only one side of
the bargain. If ten pounds of butter cost a sovereign on Monday and
a sovereign and a quarter on Saturday, is that because there is less
butter or more gold?

Well, it may be one or the other or both combined. If the Government
were to strike off enough new sovereigns at the Mint to double the
number in circulation we should have to pay two sovereigns for ten
pounds of butter, not because butter would be scarcer but because gold
would be more plentiful. But there is no danger of this happening,
because gold is so scarce and hard to get that if the Government turned
more of it into sovereigns than were needed to conduct our buying and
selling, the superfluous ones would be melted down, and the gold used
for other purposes, in spite of the law against it; and this would go
on until sovereigns were so scarce that you could get more for gold in
the form of sovereigns than in the form of watch chains or bracelets.
For this reason people feel safe with gold money: the gold in the
sovereign keeps its value for other purposes than buying and selling;
and if the worst came to the worst, and the British Empire were annexed
by the planet Mars, and only Martian money were current, the sovereigns
would still be taken in exchange for as much butter or anything else
as before, not as money, but as so much gold; so that the British
sovereign would buy as much as a Martian gold sovereign of equal weight.

Suppose, however, you had a dishonest Government! Suppose the country
and its Mint were ruled by a king who was a thief. Suppose he owed
large sums of money, and wished to cheat his creditors. He could do it
by paying in sovereigns which were made of lead, with just gold enough
in them to make them look genuine. Henry the Eighth did it less crudely
by giving short weight in silver coins; and he was not the only ruler
who played the same trick when pressed for money. When such frauds are
discovered prices go up and wages follow them. The only gainers were
those who, like the king, had borrowed heavy money and were paying it
in light; and what they gained the creditors lost. But it was a low
trick, damaging English as well as royal credit, as all English debtors
were inextricably and involuntarily engaged in the swindle as deeply as
the king.

The moral is that a dishonest ruler is one of the greatest dangers a
nation has to dread. People who do not understand these things make a
great fuss because Henry married six wives and had very bad luck with
most of them, and because he allowed the nobles to plunder the Church.
But we are far more concerned today with his debasement of the coinage;
for that is a danger that is hanging over our own heads. Henry’s trick
is now played not only by kings, but by republican governments with
Socialist majorities and by the Soviets of proletarian States, with
the result that innocent women, provided comfortably for by years of
self-denial on the part of their parents in paying insurance premiums,
find themselves starving; pensions earned by lifetimes of honorable and
arduous service lose their value, leaving the pensioners to survive
their privations as castaways survive in a boat at sea; and enormous
fortunes are made without the least merit by A, B, and C, whilst X, Y,
and Z, without the least fault, go bankrupt. The matter is so serious
and so menacing that you must summon all your patience while I explain
it more particularly.

At present (1927) we do not use sovereigns. We use bits of paper,
mostly dirty and smelly, with the words _One Pound_ printed in large
letters on them, and a picture of the Houses of Parliament on the back.
There is also a printed notice that the bit of paper is a currency
note, and that by Act of Parliament IV and V Geo. V, ch. XIV, if you
owe anyone a pound you can pay him by handing him the bit of paper,
which he must accept as a full discharge of your debt to him whether he
likes or not.

Now there is no use pretending that this bit of paper which you can
pass as a pound is worth anything at all as paper. It is too small
and too crowded with print and pictures to be usable for any of the
uses to which paper can be put, except that of a short title deed to a
poundsworth of goods. Yet there is no law to prevent the Government,
which owes 7700 million pounds to its creditors, from printing off 7700
millions of these one pound Treasury notes, and paying off all its home
creditors with them, even though a thousand of them would not buy a
cigarette.

You may say that this is too monstrous to be possible. But it has
been done, and that quite recently, as I know to my cost. The German
Government did it after the war when the conquerors, with insane spite,
persisted in demanding sums of money that the Germans had not got. The
Austrian Government did it. The Russian Government did it. I was owed
by these countries sums sufficient to support me for the rest of my
days; and they paid me in paper money, four thousand million pounds
of which was worth exactly twopence halfpenny in English money. The
British Government thought it was making Germany pay for the war;
but it was really making me and all the other creditors of Germany
pay for it. Now as I was a foreigner and an alien enemy, the Germans
probably do not feel very sorry for me. But the same occurred to the
Germans who were owed German money, whether by foreigners or by other
Germans. Merchants who had obtained goods for bills payable in six
months paid those bills with paper Marks and thus got the goods for
nothing. Mortgages on land and houses, and debentures and loan stocks
of every redeemable sort, were cleared off in the same way. And one
very unexpected result of this was that German employers, relieved of
the burden of mortgages and loans such as the English employers were
bearing, were able to undersell the English even in the English market.
All sorts of extraordinary things happened. Nobody saved money, because
its value fell from hour to hour: people went into a restaurant for a
five million lunch, and when they came to pay found that the price had
gone up to seven millions whilst they were eating. The moment a woman
got a scrap of money she rushed to the shops to buy something with it;
for the thing she bought would keep its usefulness, but the money that
bought it, if she kept it until tomorrow, might not purchase half so
much, or a tenth so much, or indeed anything at all. It was better to
pay ten million marks for a frying-pan, even if you had two frying-pans
already, than to buy nothing; for the frying-pan would remain a
frying-pan and fry things (if you had anything to fry) whatever
happened; but the ten million marks might not pay a tram fare by five
o’clock the same evening.

A still better plan in Germany then was to buy shares if you could get
them; for factories and railways will keep as well as frying-pans.
Thus, though people were in a frantic hurry to spend their money, they
were also in a frantic hurry to invest it: that is, use it as capital;
so that there was not only a delusive appearance of an increase in
the national capital produced by the simple expedient of calling a
spare loaf of bread fifty thousand pounds, but a real increase in the
proportion of their subsistence which people were willing to invest
instead of spending. But however the money was spent, the object of
everyone was to get rid of it instantly by exchanging it for something
that would not change in value. They soon began to use foreign money
(American dollars mostly); and this expedient, eked out with every
possible device for doing without money altogether by bartering, tided
them over until the Government was forced to introduce a new gold
currency and leave the old notes to be thrown into the waste paper
basket or kept to be sold fifty years hence as curiosities, like the
famous assignats of the French Revolution.

This process of debasement of the currency by a Government in order
that it may cheat its creditors is called by the polite name, which few
understand, of Inflation; and the reversal of the process by going back
to a currency of precious metal is called Deflation. The worst of it is
that the remedy is as painful as the disease, because if Inflation, by
raising prices, enables the debtor to cheat the creditor, Deflation, by
lowering them, enables the creditor to cheat the debtor. Therefore the
most sacred economic duty of a Government is to keep the value of money
steady; and it is because Governments can play tricks with the value of
money that it is of such vital importance that they should consist of
men who are honest, and who understand money thoroughly.

At present there is not a Government in the world that answers fully
to this description. Between our own Government, which took advantage
of the war to substitute Treasury notes for our gold currency, and
the German and Russian Governments, which issued so many notes that a
vanload of them would hardly buy a postage stamp, the difference is
only one of degree. And this degree was not in the relative honesty of
Englishmen, Russians, and Germans, but in the pressure of circumstances
on them, and consequently of temptation. Had we been defeated and
forced to pay impossible sums to our conquerors, or momentarily wrecked
as Russia was by the collapse of the Tsardom, we should not have been
any honester; for though the doubling of prices that occurred here
seems to have been caused by scarcity of goods and labor rather than by
an excessive issue of paper money, we still treat with great respect as
high financial authorities gentlemen who recommend Inflation as a means
of providing industry with additional capital. Whether these gentlemen
really believe that we could double our wealth by simply printing twice
as many Treasury notes, or whether they owe so much money that they
would be greatly relieved if only they could be let pay it in paper
pounds worth only ten shillings, is not always easy to guess. But if
you catch your Parliamentary representative advocating Inflation, and
ask him, at the risk of being told that you are no lady, whether he is
a fool or a rogue, you will give him a salutary shock, and force him
to think for a moment instead of merely grabbing at the illusion of
enriching the nation by calling a penny twopence.

And now, if you agree with me that it is the duty of a Government to
keep the value of its money always as nearly as possible at the same
level, we are both up against the question, “What level?” Well, you
may take it as a rule of thumb that the answer always is the existing
level, unless it has been tampered with and has wobbled badly, in which
case the easiest answer is “Whatever level it had before it began to
wobble”. But if you want a real explanation and not a mere rule of
thumb, you must think of coins and notes as useful articles which you
carry about because without them you cannot take a bus or a taxi or a
train, or buy a bun. There must be enough of them to supply you and
all the other people who have purchases to make. In short, coins and
notes are like needles or shovels; and their value is settled in the
same way. If the manufacturers make ten times as many needles as anyone
wants, then their needles will fetch nothing as needles, because no
woman will pay anything for the one needle she wants if there are nine
lying about to be had for nothing. So all that can be done is to take
the nine worthless needles and use the steel in them to make something
else (say steel pens), after which there will be no longer any useless
needles, and the remaining useful ones will be worth at least what it
cost to make them, because sempstresses will want them badly enough
to be willing to pay that price. An intelligent community will try
to regulate the supply of needles so as to keep their value at that
level as nearly as possible. A Capitalist community, on the contrary,
will regulate it so as to make needles yield the utmost profit to the
capitalist. But anyhow the value will depend on the quantity available.

Now just as a needle is for sewing, and is of no legitimate use for
anything else, so coins and notes are for enabling people to buy and
sell, and no use for anything else. And one coin will do for many
sales as it passes from hand to hand, just as one needle will do to
hem many handkerchiefs. This makes it very difficult to find out how
many needles and coins are wanted. You cannot say “There are so many
handkerchiefs in the country which must be hemmed; so we will make a
needle for every one of them”, or “There are so many loaves of bread
to be sold every morning; so we will make coins or issue notes for the
price of every one of them”. No person or Government on earth can say
beforehand how many needles or coins will be enough. You can count
the mouths you have to feed, and say how many loaves will be required
to fill them, because a slice of bread can be eaten only once, and is
destroyed by being eaten; but a needle or a sovereign or a Treasury
note can be used over and over again. One pound may be lying in an
old stocking until the landlord calls for it, whilst another may be
changing hands fifty times a day and effecting a sale every time. How
then is a Government to settle how many coins and notes it shall issue?
And how is a needle manufacturer to decide how many needles he shall
make?

There is only one way of doing it. The needle makers just keep on
making needles at a fancy price until they find they cannot sell them
all without charging less for them; and then they go on charging less
and less, but selling more and more (because of the cheapness), until
the price is so low that they would make less profit if it went any
lower, after which they make no more needles than are necessary to
keep the supply, and consequently the price, just at that point. The
Government has to do the same with gold coins. At first, because gold
is more useful for coins than for anything else, an ounce of gold
coined into sovereigns will be worth more than an ounce of uncoined
gold (called bar or bullion). But if the Government issues more
sovereigns than are needed for our buying and selling there will be
more sovereigns than are wanted; and their value per ounce of gold will
fall below that of gold bullion. This will be shewn by all prices going
up, including that of gold in bars and ingots. The result will be that
gold merchants will find it profitable to melt down sovereigns into
bars of gold to be made into watches and bracelets and other things
than coins. But this melting down reduces the number of sovereigns,
which immediately begin to rise in value as they become scarcer until
gold in the form of sovereigns is worth as much as gold in any other
form. In this way, as long as money consists of gold, and melting down
cannot be prevented as soon as it becomes profitable, the value of the
coinage fixes and maintains itself automatically. It is against the
British law to melt down a British sovereign in the British Empire; but
as this silly law cannot restrain, say, a Dutch goldsmith in Amsterdam
from melting down as many British sovereigns as he pleases, it does not
count.

Though this settles the value of gold money, and all prices can be
fixed in terms of gold, a penny being the two hundred and fortieth part
of a sovereign, half a crown the eighth part of a sovereign, and so on,
yet you cannot have gold pennies or even sixpences: they would be too
small to handle. Also, if you want to make or receive a payment of five
thousand pounds, you would find five thousand sovereigns more than you
would care to carry. We get out of the penny and sixpenny difficulty
by using coins of bronze and silver, making a law that bronze pennies
shall be accepted, provided not more than twelve are offered at a time,
as worth the two hundred and fortieth part of a sovereign, and that
silver coins shall pass up to £2. We get over the five thousand pound
difficulty by allowing the Bank of England to issue promissory notes,
payable at sight in gold at the Bank, for sums of five pounds, ten
pounds, a hundred pounds, and so on. People hand these notes from one
to another in buying and selling, knowing them to be “as good as gold”.
Certain Scottish and Irish banks have the same privilege on condition
that they hold sufficient gold in their cellars to redeem the notes
when presented, and, of course, that they do not pay their debts in
their own notes.

In this way we all get used to paper money as well as to bronze and
silver coins: that is, we get used to pretending that a scrap of paper
with a water mark is worth 615 grains of gold or thereabouts; that a
bit of metal that is only half silver is worth a much larger piece of
pure silver; that 240 bits of bronze are worth a sovereign, and so on.
We find these cheap substitutes do just as well as gold coins; and we
naturally begin to ask what is the use of having any gold money at
all, seeing that we get on quite well without it. Paper is just as
effective as an instrument of exchange, and much less heavy to handle.
We measure prices in quantities of gold; but imaginary gold does for
that as well as real gold, just as you can measure fluids by pints and
quarts without having a drop of beer in the house. If only the honesty
of Governments could be depended on, the use of gold for money would
be a pure luxury, like using gold safety pins and diamond shirt studs
instead of common ones, which fasten quite as well.

But that is a very large If. When there is a genuine gold currency,
the purchasing power of the coins does not depend on the honesty of
the Government: they are valuable as precious metal, and can be turned
to other purposes if the Government issues more of them than are
needed for buying and selling. But the Government can go on printing
and issuing paper money until it is worthless. Where should it stop
when the check of gold is removed? As we have seen, it should stop the
moment there is any sign of a general rise of prices, because the only
thing that can cause a general rise of prices is a fall in the value of
money. This or that article may become cheaper by the discovery of new
ways of making it, or dearer by a failure in the crops, or worthless
by a change of fashion; but all the articles do not move together from
these causes: some rise and others fall. When they all rise or fall
simultaneously, then it is not the articles that are changing in value
but the money. In a paper money country the Government should watch
carefully for such movements; and when prices all rise together they
should withdraw notes from circulation until prices all fall again.
When all prices fall simultaneously the Government should issue fresh
notes until they rise again. What is needed is just enough money to
do all the ready money selling and buying in the country. When less is
issued money gets a scarcity value; so that when you go into a grocer’s
shop he will give you more for your money (falling prices); and when
more is issued there is a glut of it and the grocer will give less
for it (rising prices). The business of an honest and understanding
Government is to keep it steady by adjusting the supply to the demand.
When Governments are either dishonest or ignorant, or both, there is no
safety save in a currency of precious metal.

Remember, by the way, that modern banking makes it possible to do an
enormous quantity of business without coinage or notes or money of any
sort. Suppose Mrs John Doe and Mrs Richard Roe are both in business.
Suppose Mrs Doe sells Mrs Roe five hundred pounds’ worth of goods,
and at the same time buys goods from her to the value of five hundred
pounds and one penny. They do business to the amount of a thousand
pounds and one penny; yet all the money they need to settle their
accounts is the odd penny. If they keep their accounts at the same
bank even the penny is not necessary. The banker transfers a penny
from Mrs Doe’s account to Mrs Roe’s; and the thing is done. When you
have to pay a business debt you do not give your creditor the money:
you give him an order on your banker for it (a cheque); and he does
not go to your bank and cash the cheque: he gives it to his own banker
to collect. Thus every bank finds every day that it has to pay a heap
of money to other banks which hold cheques on it for collection, and
at the same time to receive a heap of money for the cheques it has
received for collection from the other banks. These cheques taken
together may amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds, yet the
difference between the ones to be paid and the ones to be collected
may be only a few pounds or less. So the banks began by setting up a
Clearing House, as they call it, to add up all the cheques and find
out what each bank ought to pay or receive on balance. This saved a
great deal of money handling, as the transfer of a single pound from
one bank to another would settle transactions involving huge sums. But
it presently occurred to the banks that even this pound might be saved
if they all kept an account at the same bank. So the banks themselves
opened accounts at the Bank of England; and now their accounts with
oneanother are settled by a couple of entries in the Bank of England’s
books; and trade to the amount of millions and millions is done by pure
figures without the use of coinage or notes. If we were all well enough
off to have banking accounts money might disappear altogether, except
for small transactions between strangers whose names and addresses were
unknown to oneanother: for instance, you give an order and pay by a
cheque in a shop because you can count on finding the shopkeeper in the
same place if there is anything wrong with the goods; and he can count
on finding you similarly if there is anything wrong with your cheque;
but if you take a taxi on the way home, you can hardly expect the
driver to open an account for you; so you settle with him by handing
him his fare in coin.

This need for pocket money (change) is greatly reduced by Communism. In
the days of turnpike roads and toll bridges every traveller had to keep
a supply of money to pay tolls at every turnpike gate and bridge head.
Now that the roads and bridges are communized he can travel by road
from London to Aberdeen in his car without having to put his hand in
his pocket once to pay for the roads, because he has already paid when
taking out the communal license for his car. If he pays his hotel bills
by cheque he needs no money for his journey except for tips; and when
these fall into disuse, as the old custom of making presents to judges
has done, it is easy to conceive motoring trips, in the Communist
future, being carried out in the greatest luxury by highly prosperous
but literally penniless persons.

In this way actual money is coming to be replaced more and more by
money of account: that is, we still count our earnings and our debts
in terms of money, and value our position in the same way, earning
hundreds of pounds, paying hundreds of pounds, owning hundreds of
poundsworth of furniture and clothes and motor cars, and yet never
having more than a few pounds and a handful of silver in our pockets
from one end of our lives to the other. The cost of providing coins and
notes for the nation to buy and sell with is dwindling continuously to
a smaller and smaller percentage of the value of the goods bought and
sold.

It may amuse you to realize that when coinage disappears altogether it
does not matter whether we call our debts sovereigns and pennies and
shillings or millions and billions and trillions. When the Germans were
paying millions for tram fares and postage stamps, no harm was done by
the apparent magnitude of the price: poor men could still ride in trams
and send letters. If only those prices could have been depended on to
stay put, so that the poor man (or the rich one for that matter) could
have felt sure that his million mark note would buy as much tomorrow
as today, and as much next year as this year, it would not have
inconvenienced him in the least that the million mark note used to be
a bronze coin. Germany has now stabilized her currency at the old rate
of twenty marks to the English pound. Austria stabilized hers at first
at the startling rate of 300,000 tenpences to the English pound but had
to alter this to 34½ sevenpenny schillings later on. Except for the
look of the thing the change made no great difference to the marketing
housekeeper. When prices are in millions she soon gets into the habit
of dropping the six noughts in conversation across the counter. Such
prices seem silly to us because we are not accustomed to millionaire
scavengers and beef at billions a pound. We are accustomed to pounds
worth 160 ounces of butter; but pounds worth half a grain of butter
or ten tons of butter will do as long as they are stabilized at that,
and as long as the money is either money of account, existing only as
ink marks in ledgers, or paper notes of no intrinsic value. If a tram
ticket costs a million pounds it can be paid more cheaply than by a
penny, provided the million pounds be only a scrap of paper costing
less than a disk of bronze.

To sum up, the most important thing about money is to maintain its
stability, so that a pound will buy as much a year hence or ten years
hence or fifty years hence as today, and no more. With paper money this
stability has to be maintained by the Government. With a gold currency
it tends to maintain itself even when the natural supply of gold is
increased by discoveries of new deposits, because of the curious fact
that the demand for gold in the world is practically infinite. You have
to choose (as a voter) between trusting to the natural stability of
gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the
members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I
advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.




56

NATIONALIZATION OF BANKING


You now know enough about banking and the manufacture of money to
understand that they are necessities of civilization. They are in some
respects quite peculiar businesses. Banking heaps up huge masses of
capital in the banker’s hands for absolutely nothing but the provision
of a till to put it in, and clerks to keep an account of it. Coinage is
useless without a Government guarantee of the genuineness of the coins,
and a code of laws making it a serious crime for any private person to
make counterfeit coins, besides settling the limits within which coins
that are stamped with more than their value as metal (called token
coinage) can be used for paying debts.

As it is impossible for any private person or company to fulfil these
coinage conditions satisfactorily, the manufacture of money is a
nationalized business, unlike the manufacture of boots. You do not
see a mint in every street as you see a bootmaker’s. All the money
is made in THE Mint, which is a Government factory of coins. If, in
your disgust at the disagreeable white metal shillings which have been
substituted since the war for the old silver ones, you were to set up a
private mint of your own, you would be sent to prison for coining, even
though you could prove that your nice shillings were worth more than
the nasty ones of the Government. Formerly, if you had a quantity of
gold, you could take it to the Mint, and have it made into sovereigns
for you at a small charge for the King’s image and guarantee called
seignorage; but you were not allowed to make the coins for yourself out
of your own gold. Today the Mint will not do that for you because it
is easier for you to give your gold to your banker, who will give you
credit for its worth in money. Thus the whole business is as strictly
nationalized as that of the Post Office. Perhaps you do not know that
you can be prosecuted for carrying a letter for hire instead of giving
it to the Postmaster-General to carry. But you can, just as you can
be prosecuted for making a coin, or for melting one down. And nobody
objects. The people who, when it is proposed to nationalize the coal
mines and the railways, shriek into your ears that nationalization is
robbery and ruin, are so perfectly satisfied with the nationalization
of the Mint that they never even notice that it is nationalized, poor
dears!

However, private persons can issue a currency of their own, provided it
is not an imitation of the Government currency. You may write a cheque,
or a bill of exchange, and use it as paper money as often as you
please; and no policeman can lay a finger on you for it provided (_a_)
that you have enough Government money at your bank to meet the cheque
when it is presented for payment, and (_b_) that the piece of paper on
which your cheque is printed, or your bill of exchange drawn, bears
no resemblance to a Treasury note or a bank note. An enormous volume
of business is done today by these private currencies of cheques and
bills of exchange. But they are not money: they are only title deeds to
money, just as money itself is only a title deed to goods. If you owe
money to your grocer he may refuse to take a cheque in payment; but if
you offer him Treasury notes or sovereigns, he must take them whether
he likes them or not. If you are trading with a manufacturer, and offer
him a bill of exchange pledging you to pay for his goods in six months,
he may refuse it and insist on Government money down on the nail. But
he may not refuse Government money. Your offer of it is “legal tender”.

Besides, money, as we have seen, is a measure of value; and cheques and
bills are not. The cheques and bills would have no meaning and no use
unless they were expressed in terms of money. They are all for so many
pounds, shillings, and pence; and if there were no pounds, shillings,
and pence in the background, a cheque would have to run “Pay to Emma
Wilkins or Order two pairs of secondhand stockings, slightly laddered,
my share of the family Pekingese dog, and half an egg”. No banker would
undertake to pay cheques of that sort. Both cheques and banking depend
on the existence of nationalized money.

Banking is not yet nationalized; but it will be, because the public
gain from nationalization will lead people to vote for it when they
understand it just as they will vote for nationalization of the
coal mines. Business people need capital to start and extend their
businesses just as they need coal to warm themselves. As we have seen,
when they want hundreds of thousands they get them by paying enormous
commissions to financiers, who are so spoiled by huge profits that
they will not deign to look at what they regard as small business.
Those who want tens of thousands are not catered for: and those who
want modest hundreds are often driven to borrow from money lenders at
high rates of interest because the bank manager does not think it worth
the bank’s while to let them overdraw. If you could shew these traders
a bank working not to make profits at the expense of its customers
but to distribute capital as cheaply as possible for the good of the
country to all the businesses, large or small, which needed it, they
would rush to it and snap their fingers at the profiteering financiers.
A national or municipal bank would be just that. It would bring down
the price of capital just as nationalization of the coal mines would
bring down the price of coal, by eliminating the profiteer; and all the
profiteers except the money profiteers (financiers and bankers) will
be finally converted to it by this prospect, because, though they aim
at making as much profit as possible out of you when you go shopping,
they are determined that other people shall make as little profit as
possible out of them.

Nationalization of Banking therefore needs no Socialist advocacy to
recommend it to the middle class. It is just as likely to be finally
achieved by a Conservative Government as by a Labor one. The proof is
that the first municipal bank has been established in Birmingham, which
returns twelve members to Parliament of whom eleven are Conservatives,
and strong ones at that. Only one is Labor. The Birmingham municipal
bank has been so easily and brilliantly successful that unless it be
deliberately sabotaged in the interests of the financiers by a press
campaign against it, which is practically impossible in a city of
manufacturers, it will lead to a development of municipal banking all
over the manufacturing districts. Already there are several others.

Meanwhile the bankers and financiers continue to assure us that their
business is such a mysteriously difficult one that no Government or
municipal department could deal with it successfully. They are right
about the mystery, which is due to the fact that they only half
understand their own business, and their customers do not understand
it at all. By this time I hope you understand it much better than an
average banker. But the difficulty is all nonsense. Let us see again
what a bank has to do.

By simply offering to keep people’s money safe for them, and to make
payments out of it for them to anyone they choose to name (by cheque),
and to keep a simple cash account of these payments for them, it gets
into its hands a mass of spare money which it professes to keep at
its customers’ call, but which it finds by experience it can hire
out to the extent of about sixteen shillings in the pound because
each customer keeps a balance to his credit all the time. There is
no mystery or difficulty about this. It can be done by government or
municipal banks as easily as petty banking, with its currency of postal
notes and stamps, is done by our national post offices and savings
banks. The only part of it that is not automatically successful is
the hiring out of the money when it is paid in. A bank manager whose
judgment was bad would very soon get his bank into difficulties by
hiring out the spare money to traders who are in a bad way, either
because their businesses were being superseded by new businesses, or
because they were too honest, or not honest enough, or extravagant, or
drunken, or lazy, or not good men of business, or poetically unfitted
to succeed. But a manager who was too cautious to lend any money at all
would be still more disastrous; for we must continually remember that
the things represented by the spare money in the bank will not keep,
and that if fifty billions’ worth of food were saved out of the year’s
harvest and lodged in a State bank (or any other bank) it would be a
dead loss and waste if it were not eaten pretty promptly by workers
building up facilities for producing future harvests. The bank manager
can choose the person to whom he lends the bank’s spare money; but he
cannot choose not to lend it at all; just as a baker, when he has sold
all the bread he can for ready money, must either give credit for the
rest to somebody or else throw the loaves into the dustbin.

Only, there is this difference between the baker and the banker. The
baker can refrain from baking more loaves than he can reasonably expect
to sell; but the banker may find himself heaped up with far more spare
money than he can find safe hirers for; and then he has not only to
take chances himself, but to tempt tradesmen by low rates of hire to
take them (“the banks are granting credit freely” the city articles
in the papers will say), whereas at other times his spare money will
be so short that he will pick and choose and charge high interest
(“the bankers are restricting credit”); and this is why it takes more
knowledge and critical judgment to manage a bank than to run a baker’s
shop.

No wonder the bankers, who make enormous profits, and consequently have
the greatest dread of having these cut off by the nationalization of
banking, declare that no Government could possibly do this difficult
work of hiring out money, and that it must be left to them, as they
alone understand it! Now, to begin with, they neither understand it nor
do it themselves. Their bad advice produced widespread ruin in Europe
after the war, simply because they did not understand the rudiments of
their business, and persisted in reasoning on the assumption that spent
capital still exists, and that credit is something solid that can be
eaten and drunk and worn and lived in. The people who do the really
successful work of hiring out the heaps of spare money in the bank for
use in business are not the bankers but the bank managers, who are only
employees. Their position as such is not more eligible either in money
or social standing than that of an upper division civil servant, and
is in many respects much less eligible. They would be only too glad
to be civil servants instead of private employees. As to the superior
direction which deals with what may be called the wholesale investment
of the banked spare money as distinguished from its retail hirings to
ordinary tradesmen and men of business, the pretence that this could
not be done by the Treasury or any modern public finance department is
a tale for the marines. The Bank of England is as glad to have a former
Treasury official on its staff as the London Midland and Scottish
Railway to have a former civil servant for its Chairman.




57

COMPENSATION FOR NATIONALIZATION


By the way, when demonstrating the need for the nationalization of
banking to you I did not forget that you may be a bank shareholder,
and that your attention may have been distracted by your wonder as to
what will become of your shares when the banks are nationalized. I have
had to consider this question rather closely myself, because, as it
happens, my wife is a bank shareholder. We might have to cut down our
household expenses if everyone went to a national or municipal bank
instead of to her bank. In fact, when banking is nationalized, private
banking will probably be made a crime, like private coining or letter
carrying. So we shall certainly insist on the Government buying her
shares when it nationalizes banking.

The Government will buy them willingly enough, for the excellent reason
that it will get the money by taxing all capitalists’ incomes; so that
if my wife were the only capitalist in the country the transaction
would be as broad as it was long: the Government would take from her
with one hand what it gave her with the other. Fortunately for her
there are plenty of other capitalists to be taxed along with her; so
that instead of having to provide all the money to buy herself out,
she will have to provide only a little bit of it; and all the little
bits that the other capitalists will have to provide will go into her
pocket. This transaction is called Compensation.

It is very important that you should grasp this quaint process which
seems so perfectly fair and ordinary. It explains how Governments
compensate without really compensating, and how such compensation
costs the nation nothing, being really a method of expropriation. Just
consider. If the Government purchases a piece of land or a railway or
a bank or a coal mine, and pays for it out of the taxes, it is evident
that the Government gets it for nothing: it is the taxpayers who pay.
And if the tax is a tax like the income tax, from which the bulk of
the nation is wholly or partially exempt, or the supertax and estate
duties, which fall on the capitalist classes only, then the Government
has compelled the capitalist class to buy out one of themselves and
present her property to the nation without any compensation whatever.
The so-called compensation is only an adjustment by which the loss is
shared by the whole capitalist class instead of being borne wholly by
the particular member of it whose piece of land or bank shares or other
property the Government happens to want. Even that member pays her
share of the tax without compensation.

Some ladies may find this clearer if an imaginary case is put before
them in figures. Suppose the Government wants a piece of land of the
market value of £1000! Suppose it raises that sum, not by taxing
the nation, but by taxing the incomes of a hundred rich landlords,
including the owner of the piece of land, making each of them
contribute £10! The Government then takes the piece of land, and
solemnly hands £1000 to its former owner, telling him that he has
nothing to complain of, as he has been paid the full market value of
his land instead of having had it wrested from him violently in a
revolutionary manner, as the Bolshevists took the land from the Russian
landlords in 1917. Nothing can be more reasonable and constitutional
and customary; the most Conservative Government might do it; in fact
(except for the substitution of all the landlords for a hundred
selected ones) Conservative Governments have done it over and over
again. None the less, at the end of the transaction a piece of land
has passed from private property into national property; and a hundred
landlords have had their incomes reduced by ten shillings a year each
(the interest on £10 at 5 per cent). It is quite clear that if such a
transaction is repeated often enough the nation will have all the land,
and the incomes of the landlords will be reduced to nothing, although
every acre has been bought from its owner at full market price. The
process can be applied to bank shares or any other shares as easily as
to acres.

Let me repeat that this is not something that may be done: it is
something that has been done and is being done. It has gone so far
already that a huge quantity of property formerly owned by private
persons is now owned by the Government and the municipalities: that
is, by the nation; whilst taxation has risen to such a point that the
rich have to remind themselves continually that their pounds are only
thirteen-and-fourpences or less, because the Government will take the
other six and eightpence or more as income tax and supertax, and that
even out of the thirteen and fourpence the municipalities of the places
where their houses are (rich men keep from two to five houses) will
take a considerable dollop in rates for pure Communism. At present
they are selling their houses in all directions to speculators and
contractors who have made large fortunes out of inflation and War; but
these New Rich will in their turn be forced to buy oneanother out just
as the Old Rich, now called the New Poor, were.

In this way you get the constitutional rule for nationalization of
private property, which is, always to pay the full market price or
more to the proprietors for every scrap of property nationalized. Pay
for it by taxing incomes derived from property (there is, of course, no
compensation for taxation). Your own rule as a voter should be never to
vote for a candidate who advocates expropriation without compensation,
whether he calls himself a Socialist or Communist, in which case he
does not understand his own political business, or a Liberal. The
Liberal impulse is almost always to give a dog a bad name and hang him:
that is, to denounce the menaced proprietors as enemies of mankind, and
ruin them in a transport of virtuous indignation. But Liberals are not,
as such, hostile to capitalists, nor indeed to anybody but publicans
and imaginary feudal landlords. Conservatives are practically always
for compensation to property owners; and they are right; but they do
not see through the trick of it as you now do.

Anyhow, always vote against the no-compensation candidate unless you
are opposed to nationalization, and are subtle enough to see that
the surest way to defeat it is to advocate its being carried out
vindictively without a farthing of compensation.

There is, however, an alternative to compensated nationalization of
private industries. Why should not the Government set up for itself
in the industry it desires to nationalize, and extinguish its private
competitors just as the big multiple shops extinguish the small shops,
by underselling them, and by all the other methods of competitive
trade? The Birmingham municipality has begun the nationalization of
banking without troubling itself about the private banks: it has simply
opened its bank in the street and gone ahead. The parcel post was
established without any compensation to private carriers; and the Cash
on Delivery development of it was effected without any consideration
for the middlemen whom it superseded. Private employers have always
proceeded in this manner on competitive principles; why should not the
State, as public employer, do just the same?

The reason is that the competitive method is an extremely wasteful one.
When two bakeries are set up in a district that could be quite well
served by one, or two milk carts ply in the same street, each trying
to snatch the other’s custom, it means that the difference between the
cost of running two and one is sheer waste. When a woman wears out her
hat, or rather when the hatmakers change the fashion so as to compel
her to buy a new hat before the one she is wearing is half worn out,
and fifty shops make new hats on the chance of selling that one to her,
there is overproduction, with its sequel of unemployment.

Now apply this to, for example, the nationalization of railways. The
Government could, no doubt, construct a network of State railways
parallel with the existing railways; so that you could go from London
to Penzance either by the Great Western or by a new State line running
side by side with it. The State could then, by introducing the system
of Penny Transport proposed by Mr Whately Arnold on the lines of Penny
Postage, undersell the separate private companies and take all their
traffic from them. That would be the competitive method. Then there
would be two railways to Penzance and Thurso and Bristol and Cromer and
everywhere else, one of them carrying nearly all the traffic, and the
other carrying only its leavings and holiday overflows until it fell
into hopeless and dangerous decay and ruin.

But can you imagine anything more idiotically wasteful? The cost
of making the competing State railway would be enormous, and quite
unnecessary. The ruin of the private railway would be sheer destruction
of a useful and sufficient means of communication which had itself cost
a huge sum. The land occupied by one of the railways would be wasted.
What Government in its senses would propose such a thing when it could
take over the existing railways by compensating the shareholders in
the manner I have described: that is, distributing their loss over the
propertied class without a farthing of expense to the nation as a whole?

The same considerations must lead the State to take over the existing
banks. Municipal banks on the Birmingham model may be competing banks;
but when a national banking service comes, it will come by way of
nationalizing the existing private banks.

There is another objection to the competitive method. If the State is
to compete with private enterprise, it must allow private enterprise to
compete with it. Now this is not practicable if the full advantage of
nationalization is to be obtained. The Post Office is able to establish
a letter service and C.O.D. parcel post in every village in the
country, and a telephone and telegraph service in most of them, with
charges reckoned in pence and halfpence, on condition that profiteers
are not allowed to come in and pick out the easy bits of the business
to exploit for themselves. The Postmaster-General does things for the
nation that no profiteer would or could do; but his rule is All or
Nothing.

A Banker-General would have to insist on the same rule. He would
establish banks, if not literally everywhere, at least in hundreds of
places where the private banks would no more dream of opening a branch,
even on the open-once-a-week scale, than of building a Grand Opera
House. But he, too, would say “All or Nothing: I will not have any
intelligent Jewish gentleman, or rapacious Christian person trained in
the intelligent Jewish gentleman’s office, picking the plums out of my
pudding”.

Yet do not conclude that all State activities will be State monopolies.
Indeed the nationalization of banking will certainly enlarge the
possibilities of private activity in all sorts of ways. But as the big
public services will have to be made practically ubiquitous, charging
more than they cost in one place and less in another, they must be
protected against sectional private competition. Otherwise we should
have what prevails at present in municipal building, where all the
lucrative contracts for the houses of the rich and the offices of the
capitalists and the churches and institutions and so forth go to the
private employer, whilst the municipality may build only dwellings
for the poor at a loss, which they conceal from the ratepayers by
fictitious figures as to the value of the land. Municipal building is
always insolvent. If it had a monopoly it could afford to make every
town in the land a ratepayers’ and tenants’ paradise.

This reminds me to remind you that every nationalization of an industry
or service involves the occupation of land by the State. This land
should always be nationalized by purchase and compensation. For if it
is merely rented, as I am sorry to say it sometimes is, the charges
made to the public must be raised by the amount of the rent, thus
giving the ground landlord the money value of all the advantages of the
nationalization.

I have said nothing about one of the cruelest effects of superseding an
industry by competition instead of buying it up. The process consists
fundamentally of the gradual impoverishment and ruin of those who
are carrying on the superseded business. Capitalism is ruthless on
this point: its principle is “Each for himself; and devil take the
hindmost!” But the State has to consider the loser as well as the
winner. It must not impoverish anybody. It must let the loser down
easily; and there is no other way of doing this except the way of
purchase and compensation.




58

PRELIMINARIES TO NATIONALIZATION


You now see that nationalization and municipalization are so desirable
as a means of cheapening the things we all need that the most violently
anti-Socialist Parliaments and municipal corporations have established
nationalized and municipalized industries in the past, and are quite
likely to do so in future under electoral pressure from Conservative
voters. You see also that the alleged enormous expense of buying out
private owners, which has been alleged by a Coal Commission as an
insuperable objection to the nationalization of our coal mines, is a
bogey, because, though the coalowners (of whom, by the way, I am one)
will be fully compensated, the proprietary class as a whole will pay
the bill out of their unearned incomes, leaving the nation richer
instead of poorer by the transaction. So far so good. Theoretically,
nationalization is perfectly sound.

Practically, it takes, as the people very accurately put it, a lot
of doing. A mere proclamation that such and such an industry is
nationalized can do nothing but just put a stop to it. Before any
industry or service can be effectively nationalized a new department
of the Civil Service must be created to carry it on. Unless we had a
War Office we could not have an army, because no soldier could get his
pay, or his uniform, or his weapons. Without an Admiralty, no navy.
Without a General Post Office and a Postmaster-General, no letters
in the morning. Without a Royal Mint and a Master of the Mint, no
money. Without Scotland Yard in London, and Watch Committees in the
country, no police. And as in the present so in the future. Without a
great extension of the Treasury, banking cannot be nationalized, nor
coal without the creation of a Department of Mines much bigger than
our existing Department of Woods and Forests, nor railways without a
Railway Board and a Railroadmaster-General as important as the Post
Office and the Postmaster-General.

Such institutions can be set up by stable and highly organized States
only, which means--and here is the political moral of it--that they
cannot be done by revolutions, or by improvised dictatorships, or
even by permanent States in which, as in America, where in some cases
the civil services are still regarded as the spoils of office, a new
set of officials oust the old ones whenever the Opposition ousts the
Government. What a revolution can do towards nationalization is to
destroy the political power of the class which opposes nationalization.
But such a revolution by itself cannot nationalize; and the new
Government it sets up may be unable even to carry on the nationalized
services it finds in existence, and be obliged to abandon them to
private enterprise.

A nationalizing Government must also be financially honest, and
determined to make the nationalization a success, and neither plunder
it to eke out the general revenue, nor discredit and wreck it so to
have an excuse for giving the nationalized service back to the private
profiteers. State railways have sometimes been standing examples of
what State management can be at its worst. The Governments, instead of
keeping the railways in proper repair, grabbed all the money paid by
the public in fares and freightage; applied it to the relief of general
taxation; and let the stations and rolling stock decay until their
railways were the worst in the world, and there was a general clamor
for their denationalization. Private profiteering enterprises have gone
to pieces in the same way and worse; but, as they have been responsible
to themselves only, their failures and frauds have passed unnoted,
whilst the failures and frauds of Governments have raised great popular
agitations and even provoked revolutions. The misdeeds of Governments
are public and conspicuous: the misdeeds of private traders are
practically invisible; and thus an illusion is created that Governments
are less honest and efficient than private traders. It is only an
illusion; but all the same, honesty and good faith are as necessary in
nationalized businesses as in private ones. Our British nationalized
services are held up as models of integrity; yet the Postmaster-General
overcharges us a little for our letters, and puts the profit into the
pockets of the propertied class in the form of reduced income tax; and
the Admiralty is continually fighting against the tendency to keep down
taxation by starving the navy. These depredations do not amount to
much; but they illustrate what may be done when voters are not vigilant
and well instructed.




59

CONFISCATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION


Our study of nationalization by compensated or distributed
confiscation has no doubt relieved you from all anxiety as to the
need for nationalization without compensation. But there is always a
loud-mouthed, virtuously indignant political group, still saturated
with the revolutionary traditions of Liberalism, which opposes
compensation. If the property owner is, in effect, a thief, they say,
why should he be compensated for being compelled to cease to do evil
and learn to do well? If by taxation we can make the whole capitalist
class find the money to buy out the coalowners, and thus transfer their
property to the nation to that extent, why not take the rest of their
property simply for the sake of transferring it also to the nation?
Our joint stock companies work as well with one set of shareholders
as with another: in fact their shares change hands so continually in
the Money Market that they never have the same set of shareholders
from one working day to the next. If all the railway shares in the
country were held on Monday by the inhabitants of Park Lane, and on
Tuesday by the British Government, the railways would go on just the
same. In like case so would any other of the great industrial services
now in joint stock ownership. If a landlord had to hand over the
title-deeds of half a dozen farms and an urban street to the Exchequer,
the farmers would go on farming, and the tenants go on living in the
street, unaffected by the obligation to pay their rents in future to
an agent of the Government instead of to the agent of a duke or any
other plutocrat. The business of a bank would proceed just as smoothly
after as before the owners had handed over their claims on its profits
to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Then why not at once push taxation
of capital to the point at which the capitalist taxpayer, unable to
find the money, will be forced to surrender to the Government his share
certificates, his War Loan interest, and his title-deeds? The share
certificates would not be worth a farthing on the Stock Exchange,
because there would be all sellers and no buyers there; but none the
less each certificate would, like the title-deeds to the land, carry
the right to an income out of the future harvests of the country; and
if the Government could immediately use that income for the benefit of
the nation, it would be extremely well worth its while to get hold of
it by accepting the certificates at their face value.

It could even do so with a show of generosity; for it could say to the
capitalist, “You owe the tax collector a thousand pounds (say); but
instead of selling you up we are authorizing him to give you a clean
receipt, not for the money, but for ten paper certificates marked a
hundred pounds each, for which the cleverest stockbroker in London
could not get you twopence”. “But”, exclaims the cornered capitalist,
“what becomes of my income? What am I to do for a living?” “Work for
it, as others have to do”, is the reply. In short, from the point of
view of its Socialist advocates, taxation of capital, though absurd
as a means of raising ready money for the expenses of Government, is
a way of confiscating without compensation the title-deeds of, and
thereby nationalizing, the land and the mines and the railways and all
the other industries which the capitalists now hold as their private
property.

The scheme is plausible enough.




60

REVOLT OF THE PARASITIC PROLETARIAT


But there is an objection to it; and that objection may be learnt from
the stupidest woman you ask in the street. She will tell you that
you must not take away the property of the rich, because “they give
employment”. Now, as we have seen, it is quite true that fundamentally
it is nonsense to say that an unproductive rich person can give
employment in any other sense than as a lunatic gives employment to
her keeper. An idle rich woman can give no productive employment: the
employment she gives is wasteful. But wasteful or not, she gives it
and pays for it. She may not have earned the money she pays with; but
it will buy as good bread and clothes for her employee as the most
honestly earned money in the kingdom. The idler is a parasite: and
the idler’s employee, however industrious, is therefore a parasite
on a parasite; but if you leave the parasite destitute you leave
the parasite’s parasites destitute; and unless you have productive
employment ready for them they will have to starve or steal or rebel;
and as they will certainly not choose to starve, their choice of the
remaining two alternatives (which they will probably combine) may upset
the Government if they are numerous enough. And they are, as a matter
of fact, very numerous, as you may see by counting the Conservative
votes that are given at every General Election by people who work for
weekly wages in wholly or partly parasitic occupations. The plunder
of the proletariat is shared handsomely by the plunderers with the
proletarians. If our capitalists could not plunder our proletarians,
our proletarians and their middle class organizers, from the Bond
Street art dealers and jewellers to the errand boys of Bournemouth,
could not live on the custom of our capitalists. That is why neither
Bond Street nor Bournemouth can be persuaded to vote for uncompensated
expropriation, and why, if it came to fighting instead of voting, they
would fight against it.

The trouble would begin, not with the nationalized industries, but with
the others. As we have seen, the mines and banks and railways, being
already organized as going concerns, and managed by directors elected
by the votes of the shareholders, could be confiscated by taxing the
shareholders heavily enough to oblige them to transfer their shares to
the Government in payment of the tax. But the income derived from these
shares would therefore go into the pocket of the Government instead of
into the pockets of the shareholders. Thus the purchasing power of the
shareholders would pass to the Government; and every shop or factory
that depended on their custom would have to shut up and discharge all
its employees. The saving power of the shareholders, which means, as
we now understand, the power of supplying the spare money needed for
starting new industrial enterprises or extending old ones to keep pace
with civilization, would also pass to the Government. These powers,
which must be kept in action without a moment’s interruption, operate
by continual expenditure (mainly household expenditure) and continual
investment of the enormous total of all our private incomes.

What could the Government do with that total? If it simply dropped
it into the national till, and sat on it, most of it would perish by
natural decay; and meanwhile a great many of the people would perish
too. There would be a monster epidemic of bankruptcy and unemployment.
The tide of calamity would sweep away any Government unless it
proclaimed itself a Dictatorship, and employed, say, a third of the
population to shoot down another third, whilst the remaining third
footed the bill with its labor. What could the Government do to avert
this, short of handing back the confiscated property to the owners with
apologies for having made a fool of itself?




61

SAFETY VALVES


It could distribute the money in doles; but that would only spread the
very evil the confiscation was intended to destroy: that is to say, the
evil of unearned income. A much sounder plan (and do not forget this
when next you are tempted to give a spare £5 note to a beggar instead
of putting it on deposit at your bank) would be to throw all the money
into the confiscated banks, and lend it to employers at unprecedentedly
cheap rates. Another expedient would be to raise wages handsomely in
the confiscated industries. Another, the most desperate of all, but by
no means the least probable, would be to go to war, and waste on the
soldier the incomes formerly wasted on the plutocrat.

These expedients do not exclude oneanother. Doles, cheap capital
available in Government-owned banks, and high wages, could be resorted
to simultaneously to redistribute purchasing power and employing power.
The doles and pensions would tide over the remaining years of those
discharged servants of the ruined rich who were incapable of changing
their occupations, and of the ruined rich themselves. The cheap capital
at the banks would enable employers to start new businesses, or modify
old ones, and to cater for the increased purchasing power of the
workers whose wages had been raised, thereby giving employment to the
workers who had lost their jobs in Bournemouth or Bond Street. The art
dealers could sell pictures to the National Gallery and the provincial
municipal galleries. There would be a crisis: but what of that?
Capitalism has often enough produced displacements of purchasing power
and loss of livelihood to large bodies of citizens, and fallen back
on doles in the shape of Mansion House Funds and the like as safety
valves to ease the pressure when the unemployed began to riot and break
windows. Why should we not muddle through as we have always done?

Well, we might. But serious as the biggest crises of Capitalism have
been, they have never been as big as the crash that would follow
confiscation by the Government of the entire property of the whole
propertied class without any preparation for the immediate productive
employment not only of the expropriated owners (who are too few to give
much trouble) but of the vast parasitic proletariat who produce their
luxuries. Would the safety valves act quickly enough and open widely
enough? We must examine them more closely before we can judge.

A civilized country depends on the circulation of its money as much
as a living animal depends on the circulation of its blood. A general
confiscation of private property and its incomes would produce an
unprecedented congestion in London, where the national Treasury is,
of money from all over the kingdom; and it would become a matter of
life or death for the Government to pump that congested money promptly
back again to the extremities of the land. Remember that the total
sum congested would be much larger than under the capitalist system,
because, as the capitalists spend much more of their incomes than they
save, the huge amount of this expenditure would be saved and added to
the Government revenue from the confiscated property.

Now for the safety valves. A prodigious quantity of the congested money
would come from the confiscated ground rents of our cities and towns.
The present proprietors spend these rents where they please; and they
seldom please to spend them in the places where they were produced by
the work of the inhabitants. A plutocrat does not decide to live in
Bootle when he is free to live in Biarritz. The inhabitants of Bootle
do not get the benefit of his expenditure, which goes to the west
end of London and to the pleasure resorts and sporting grounds of all
the world, though perhaps a little of it may come back if the town
manufactures first class boots and riding breeches and polo mallets.
The dwellers in the town enjoy a good deal of municipal communism;
but they have to pay for it in rates which are now oppressively heavy
everywhere. And they would be heavier still if the Government did not
make what are called Grants-in-Aid to the municipalities.

An obvious safety valve, and a popular one with the ratepayers, would
be the payment of the rates by the Treasury through greatly increased
grants. If you are a ratepaying householder, and your landlord were
suddenly to announce that in future he would pay the rates, you
would rejoice in the prospect of having that much more money to
spend on yourself. A similar announcement by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer would be equally welcome. It would relieve the congestion
at the Treasury, and send a flood of money back from the heart to the
extremities.

Then there is the combination of raised wages in the confiscated
industries with a flood of cheap capital pumped to all the business
centres through the confiscated banks. The raised wages would check
the flow of income to the Treasury by reducing dividends; and the
cheapening of capital would enable new businesses to be started and old
ones re-equipped to meet the demand created by the increased purchasing
power (pocket money) of the wage workers and the disburdened ratepayers.

And there is always a good deal to be done in the way of public
expenditure on roads; on reclamations of land from the sea; on
afforestation; on building great dams across valleys and barrages
across rivers and tideways to concentrate waterflow on turbine engines;
on stations for the distribution of the power thus gained; on the
demolition of slum towns that should never have been built, and their
replacement by properly planned, healthy and handsome garden cities;
and on a hundred other things that Capitalism never dreams of doing
because it is impossible to appropriate their advantages as commercial
profit. The demand for labor created by such operations would absorb
all the employable unemployed, and leave only the superannuated and the
incurably unemployable on the dole, with, of course, the children, on
whom much more money could and should be spent than at present, with
great uncommercial profit to the next generation.

All this sounds very reassuring, and costs little to describe on paper.
But a few minutes’ reflection will dispel all hope that it could occur
instantly and spontaneously through the uncompensated transfer of
all existing shares and title-deeds to the Government. The Ministry
of Health would have to produce a huge scheme for the grants-in-aid
to the cities; and Parliament would wrangle for months over it. As
to glutting the existing banks with spare money to lend without any
further interference with them, the results would include an orgy of
competitive enterprise, overcapitalization, overproduction, hopeless
shops and businesses started by inexperienced or silly or rash people
or people who are all three: in short, a boom followed by a slump, with
the usual unemployment, bankruptcies, and so forth. To keep that part
of the program under control, it would be necessary to set up a new
department of the Treasury to replace the present boards of predatory
company directors; to open banks wherever the post offices are doing
substantial business; and to staff the new banks with specially trained
civil servants. And all that would take longer than it takes a ruined
citizen to starve.

As to raising industrial wages and reducing prices with the object of
eliminating profit, that is so precisely the contrary of the policy
which the existing managers of our industry have trained themselves
to pursue, and which alone they understand, that their replacement by
civil servants would be just as necessary as in the case of the banks.
Such replacements could be effected only as part of an elaborate scheme
requiring long preliminary cogitation and a practical preparation
involving the establishment of new public departments of unprecedented
magnitude.

Public works, too, cannot be set on foot offhand in the manner of Peter
the Great, who, when asked to dictate the route to be taken by his new
road from Moscow to Petrograd, took up a ruler and drew a straight
line on the map from the word Moscow to the Neva. If Peter had had to
get a proposal for a turbine barrage through a parliament with a fiery
Welsh contingent determined that it should be across the Severn, and an
equally touchy Scots contingent bent on having it across the Kyle of
Tongue, he would have found many months slipping by him before he could
set the first gang of navvies to work.

I need not weary you by multiplying instances. Wholesale
nationalization without compensation is catastrophic: the patient dies
before the remedy has time to operate. If you prefer a mechanical
metaphor, the boiler bursts because the safety valves jam. The
attempted nationalization would produce a revolution. You may say
“Well, why not? What I have read in this book has made me impatient for
revolution. The fact that any measure would produce a revolution is its
highest recommendation”.

If that is yours view, your feelings do you credit: they are or have
been shared by many good citizens. But when you go thoroughly into the
matter you will realize that revolutions do not nationalize anything,
and often make it much more difficult to nationalize them than it
would have been without the revolution if only the people had had
some education in political economy. If a revolution were produced by
unskilled Socialism (all our parliamentary parties are dangerously
unskilled at present) in the teeth of a noisy and inveterate Capitalist
Opposition, it would produce reaction instead of progress, and give
Capitalism a new lease of life. The name of Socialism would stink in
the nostrils of the people for a generation. And that is just the
sort of revolution that an attempt to nationalize all property at a
blow would provoke. You must therefore rule out revolution on this
particular issue of out-and-out uncompensated and unprepared general
nationalization versus a series of carefully prepared and compensated
nationalizations of one industry after another.

Later on, we shall expatiate a little on what revolutions can do
and what they cannot. Meanwhile, note as a canon of nationalization
(economists like to call their rules for doing anything canons) that
all nationalizations must be prepared and compensated. This will
be found an effectual safeguard against too many nationalizations
being attempted at a time. We might even say against more than one
nationalization being attempted at a time; only we must not forget
that industries are now so amalgamated before they are ripe for
nationalization that it is practically impossible to nationalize one
without nationalizing half a dozen others that are inextricably mixed
up with it. You would be surprised to learn how many other things a
railway company does besides running trains. And if you have ever gone
to sea in a big liner you have perhaps sometimes looked round you and
wondered whether the business of making it was called shipbuilding or
hotel building, to say nothing of engineering.




62

WHY CONFISCATION HAS SUCCEEDED HITHERTO


Now that I have impressed on you at such length as a canon of
nationalization that Parliament must always buy the owners out and
not simply tax them out, I am prepared to be informed that the canon
is dead against the facts, because the direct attack on property by
simple confiscation: that is, by the Government taking the money of the
capitalists away from them by main force and putting it into the public
treasury, has already, without provoking reaction or revolution, been
carried by Conservative and Liberal Governments to lengths which would
have seemed monstrous and incredible to nineteenth century statesmen
like Gladstone, proving that you can introduce almost any measure of
Socialism or Communism into England provided you call it by some other
name. Propose Socialistic confiscation of the incomes of the rich, and
the whole country will rise to repel such Russian wickedness. Call
it income tax, supertax, and estate duties, and you can lift enough
hundreds of millions from the pockets of our propertied class to turn
the Soviet of Federated Russian Republics green with envy.

Take a case or two in figures. Gladstone thought it one of his triumphs
as Chancellor of the Exchequer to reduce the income tax to twopence in
the pound, and hoped to be able to abolish it altogether. Instead of
which it went up to six shillings in 1920, and stopped at that only
because it was supplemented by an additional income tax (Supertax or
Surtax) on the larger incomes, and a partial abolition of inheritance
which makes the nation heir to a considerable part of our property when
we die possessed of any. Just imagine the fuss there would have been
over this if it had been proposed by a Socialist Prime Minister as
Confiscation, Expropriation, and Nationalization of Inheritance on the
Communist principles of the prophet Marx! Yet we took it lying down.

You have perhaps not noticed how this taxation is arrived at in
Parliament at present. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the Minister
who has to arrange the national housekeeping for the year, and screw
out of a reluctant House of Commons its consent to tax us for the
housekeeping money; for with the negligible exception of the interest
on certain shares in the Suez Canal and in some ten companies who had
to be helped to keep going during the war the nation has no income
from property. Whom he will be allowed to tax depends on the sort of
members who have been returned to Parliament. Without their approval
his Budget, as he calls his proposals for taxation, cannot become law;
and until it becomes law nobody can be compelled to pay the taxes.
In Gladstone’s time Parliament consisted practically of landlords
and capitalists and employers, the handful of working class members
being hopelessly outvoted by the other three sections combined, or
even single. Each of these sections naturally tried to throw as much
of the burden of taxation as possible on the others; but all three
were heartily agreed in throwing on the working class as much of it
as they could without losing too many working class votes at the next
election. Therefore the very last tax they wished to sanction was
the income tax, which all of them had to pay directly, and which the
wage workers escaped, as it does not apply to small incomes. Thus the
income tax became a sort of residual tax or last resort: an evil to be
faced only when every other device for raising money had been found
insufficient. When Gladstone drove it down from sixpence to fourpence,
and from fourpence to twopence, and expressed his intention of doing
without it altogether, he was considered a very great Chancellor of the
Exchequer indeed. To do this he had to raise money by putting taxes on
food and drink and tobacco, on legal documents of different kinds, from
common receipts and cheques and contracts to bills of exchange, share
certificates, marriage settlements, leases and the like. Then there
were the customs, or duties payable on goods sent into the country
from abroad. The industrial employers, who were great importers of
raw materials, and wanted food to be cheap because cheap food meant
low wages, said “Let them come in free, and tax the landlords”. The
country gentlemen said “Tax imports, especially corn, to encourage
agriculture”. This created the great Free Trade controversy on which
the Tories fought the Liberals for so many years. But both parties
always agreed that income tax should not be imposed until every other
means of raising the money had been exhausted, and that even then it
should be kept down to the lowest possible figure.

When Socialism became Fabianized and began to influence Parliament
through a new proletarian Labor Party, budgeting took a new turn. The
Labor Party demanded that the capitalists should be the first to pay,
and not the last, and that the taxation should be higher on unearned
than on earned incomes. This involved a denial of the need for keeping
Government expenditure and taxation down to the lowest possible figure.
When taxation consists in taking money away from people who have not
earned it and restoring it to its real earners by providing them with
schools, better houses, improved cities, and public benefits of all
sorts, then clearly the more the taxation the better for the nation.
Where Gladstone cried “I have saved the income tax payers of the
country another million. Hurrah!” a Labor Chancellor will cry “I have
wrung another million from the supertaxed idlers, and spent it on the
welfare of our people! Hooray!”

Thus for the last fifteen years we have had a running struggle in
Parliament between the Capitalist and Labor parties: the former trying
to keep down the income tax, the supertax, the estate duties, and
public expenditure generally, and the latter trying to increase them.
The annual debates on the Budget always turn finally on this point,
though it is seldom frankly faced; and the capitalists have been losing
bit by bit until now (in the nineteen-twenties) we have advanced from
Gladstone’s income tax of 2d. in the pound to rates of from four to six
shillings, with, on incomes exceeding £2000, surtaxes that range from
eighteen pence to six shillings according to the amount of the income;
whilst on the death of a property owner his heirs have to hand over to
the Government a share of the estate ranging from one per cent of its
fictitious capital value when it is a matter of a little over £100, to
forty per cent when it exceeds a couple of millions.

That is to say, if your uncle leaves you five guineas a year you have
to pay the Government seventy-three days income. If he leaves you a
hundred thousand a year you pay eight years income, and starve for the
eight years unless you can raise the money by mortgaging your future
income, or have provided for it by insuring your life at a heavy
premium for the nation’s benefit.

Now suppose this income of a hundred thousand a year belongs to an
aristocratic family in which military service as an officer is a
tradition which is practically obligatory. In a war it may easily
happen, as it did sometimes during the late war, that the owner of such
a property and his two brothers next in succession are killed within
a few months. This would bring the income of £100,000 a year down to
£12,000, the difference having been confiscated by the Government.
If we were to read in The Morning Post that the Russian Soviet had
taken £78,000 a year from a private family without paying a penny of
compensation, most of us would thank heaven that we were not living in
a country where such Communistic monstrosities are possible. Yet our
British anti-Socialist Governments, both Liberal and Conservative, do
it as a matter of routine, though their Chancellors of the Exchequer
go on making speeches against Socialistic confiscation as if nobody
outside Russia ever dreamt of such a thing!

That is just like us. All the time we are denouncing Communism as
a crime, every street lamp and pavement and water tap and police
constable is testifying that we could not exist for a week without it.
Whilst we are shouting that Socialistic confiscation of the incomes of
the rich is robbery and must end in red revolution, we are actually
carrying it so much further than any other fully settled country that
many of our capitalists have gone to live in the south of France for
seven months in the year to avoid it, though they affirm their undying
devotion to their native country by insisting that our national anthem
shall be sung every Sunday on the Riviera as part of the English divine
service, whilst the Chancellor of the Exchequer at home implores heaven
to “frustrate their knavish tricks” until he can devise some legal
means of defeating their evasions of his tax collectors.

But startling from the Victorian point of view as are the sums taken
annually from the rich, they have not in the lump gone beyond what
the property owners can pay in cash out of their incomes, nor what
the Government is prepared to throw back into circulation again by
spending it immediately. They have transferred purchasing power from
the rich to the poor, producing minor commercial crises here and there,
and often seriously impoverishing the old rich; but they have been
accompanied by such a development of capitalism that there are more
rich, and richer rich, than ever; so that the luxury trades have had
to expand instead of contract, giving more employment instead of less.
And they have proved that you may safely confiscate income derived
from property provided you can immediately redistribute it. But you
cannot tax it to extinction at a single mortal blow. You have always
to consider most carefully how far and how fast you can go without
crashing. The rule that the Government must not tax at all until it
has an immediate use for the money it takes is fundamental: it holds
in every case. The rule that if it uses it to nationalize an already
established commercial industry or service it must have a new public
department ready to take the business over, and must compensate the
owners from whom it takes it, is also invariable. When the object is
not nationalization, but simple redistribution of income within the
capitalist system by transferring purchasing power from one set of
people to another, usually from a richer set to a poorer set, thus
changing the demand in the shops from dear luxuries to comparatively
cheap necessities, then the process must go no faster than the
capitalist shops can adapt themselves to this change. Else it may
produce enough bankruptcies to make the Government very unpopular at
the next election.

Let us study a sensational instance in which we have incurred a heavy
additional burden of unearned income, so strongly resented by the mass
of the people that our Governments, whether Labor or Conservative, may
not long be able to resist the demand for its redistribution.




63

HOW THE WAR WAS PAID FOR


In 1914 we went to war. War is frightfully expensive and frightfully
destructive: it results in a dead loss as far as money is concerned.
And everything has to be paid for on the nail; for you cannot kill
Germans with promissory notes or mortgages or national debts: you must
have actual stores of food, clothing, weapons, munitions, fighting men,
and nursing, car driving, munition making women of military age. When
the army has worn out the clothes and eaten up the food, and fired off
the munitions, and shed its blood in rivers, there is nothing eatable,
drinkable, wearable, or livable-in left to shew for it: nothing visible
or tangible but ruin and desolation. For most of these military stores
the Government in 1914-18 went heavily into debt. It took the blood
and work of the young men as a matter of course, compelling them to
serve whether they liked it or not, and breaking up their businesses,
when they had any, without compensation of any kind. But being a
Capitalist Government it did not take all the needed ready money from
the capitalists in the same way. It took some of it by taxation. But in
the main, it borrowed it.

Naturally the Labor Party objected very strongly to this exemption of
the money of the rich from the conscription that was applied ruthlessly
to the lives and livelihoods and limbs of the poor. Its protests were
disregarded. The spare subsistence needed to support the soldiers and
the workers who were producing food and munitions for them, instead of
being all taken without compensation by taxation, was for the most part
hired from capitalists, their price being the right to take without
working, for every hundred pounds worth of spare subsistence lent, five
pounds a year out of the future income of the country for waiting until
the hundred pounds they put down was repaid to them in full.

Roughly, and in round figures, what happened was that the National
Debt of 660 millions owing in 1914 from former wars was increased by
the new war to over 7000 millions. Until we are able to repay this
in full we have to pay more than 350 millions a year to the lenders
for waiting; and as the current expenses of our civil services (300
millions), with our army, our navy, our air force, and all the other
socialized national establishments, come to more than as much again,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer has now to budget for more than two
millions a day, and get that out of our pockets as best he can. And as
it is no use asking the proletarians for it at a time when perhaps a
million or so of them are unemployed, and have to be supported out of
the taxes instead of paying any, he has to make the property holders
contribute, in income tax, supertax, and estate duties, over 380
millions a year: that is, a million and fifty thousand a day, or more
than half the total taxation. This is confiscation with a vengeance.

Does it strike you that there is something funny about this business
of borrowing most of the 7000 millions from our own capitalists by
promising to pay them, say 325 millions a year whilst they are waiting
for repayment, and then taxing them to the tune of 382 millions a year
to pay not only their own waiting money but that of the foreign lenders
as well? They are paying over 50 millions a year more than they are
getting, and are therefore, as a class, losing by the transaction. The
Government pays them with one hand, and takes the money back again,
plus over 17 per cent interest, with the other. Why do they put up with
it so tamely?

The explanation is easy. If the Government took back from each holder
of War Loan exactly what it had paid him plus three and sixpence in
the pound, all the holders would very promptly cry “Thank you for
worse than nothing: we will cancel the debt; and much good may it do
you”. But that is not what happens. The holders of War Loan Stock
are only a part of the general body of property owners; but all the
property owners have to pay income tax and death duties, and, when
their income exceeds £2000, supertax. Those who did not lend money to
the Government for the war get nothing from it. Those who did lend get
the 325 millions a year all to themselves; but their liability for the
taxation out of which it is paid is shared with all the other property
owners. Therefore, though the property owners as a whole lose by the
transaction, those property owners who hold War Loan Stock gain by
it at the expense of those who do not. The Government not only robs
capitalist Peter to pay capitalist Paul, but robs both of more than it
pays to Paul; yet though Peter and Paul taken together are poorer, Paul
taken by himself is richer, and therefore supports the Government in
the arrangement, whilst Peter complains that the burden of taxation is
intolerable.

To illustrate, my wife and I are capitalists, but I hold some War Loan
stock, whilst all her money is in bank, railway, and other stocks. We
are both taxed equally to pay me the interest on my War Loan; but as
the Government pays me that interest and does not pay her anything,
I gain by the transaction at her expense; so that if we were not, as
it happens, on the communal footing of man and wife, we should never
agree about it. Most capitalists do not understand the deal, and are
in effect humbugged by it; but those who do understand it will never
be unanimous in resisting it; consequently it is voteproof at the
parliamentary elections.

This quaint state of things enables the Labor Party to demonstrate
that it would pay the propertied class, as a whole, to cancel the
National Debt, and put an end to the absurdity of a nation complaining
that it is staggering under an intolerable burden of debt when as a
matter of fact it owes most of the money to itself. The cancellation
of the debt (except the fraction due to foreigners) would be simply
a redistribution of income between its citizens without costing the
nation, as a whole, a single farthing.

The plan of raising public money by borrowing money from capitalists
instead of confiscating it by direct taxation is called funding; and
lending money to the Government used to be called putting it in the
Funds. And as the terms of the borrowing are that the lender is to have
an income for nothing by waiting until his money is repaid, we get
the queer phenomenon of lenders who, instead of being anxious to get
their money back, dread nothing more; so that the Government, in order
to get the loans, has actually to promise that it will not pay back
the loan before a certain date, the further off the better. According
to Capitalist morality people who live on their capital instead of
on interest (as the payment for waiting is called) are spendthrifts
and wasters. The capitalist must never consume his spare subsistence
himself even when it is of a kind that will keep until he is hungry
again. He must use it to purchase an income; and if the purchaser stops
paying the income and repays the sum lent him, the lender must not
spend that sum, but must immediately buy another income with it, or, as
we say, invest it.

This is not merely a matter of prudence: it is a matter of necessity;
for as investing capital means lending it to be consumed before it
rots, it can never really be restored to the investor. Investing it
means, as we have seen, allowing a body of workmen to eat it up whilst
they are engaged in preparing some income producing concern like a
railway or factory; and when it is once consumed no mortal power
can bring it back into existence. If you do a man or a company or a
Government the good turn of letting them use up what you can spare this
year, he or she or they may do you the good turn of letting you have
an equivalent if they can spare it twenty years hence, and pay you for
waiting meanwhile; but they cannot restore what you actually lend them.

The war applied our spare money, not to a producing concern but to a
destroying one. In the books of the Bank of England are written the
names of a number of persons as the owners of capital to the value
of 7000 million pounds. They are said in common speech to be “worth
7000 millions”. Now they are in fact “worth” nothing at all. Their
7000 millions have long since been eaten, drunk, worn out, or blown
to smithereens, along with much other valuable property and precious
lives, on battle-fields all over the world. We are therefore in the
ridiculous position of pretending that our country is enriched by
property to the value of 7000 millions when as a matter of fact it is
impoverished by having to find 350 fresh millions a year for people
who are not doing a stroke of work for her in return: that is, who
are consuming a huge mass of wealth without producing any. It is as
if a bankrupt, asked if he has any assets, should reply proudly, “Oh
no: I have made ducks and drakes of all my assets; but then I have a
tremendous lot of debts”. The 7000 millions of capital standing in the
names of the stockholders in the Bank of England is not wealth, it is
debt. If we flatly repudiated it, the nation would be richer not only
by 350 millions a year, but by the work the stockholders would have to
do to support themselves when their incomes were cut off. The objection
to repudiating it is not that it would make the nation poorer, but that
repudiation would seem a breach of contract after which nobody would
ever lend money to the Government again. Besides, the United States,
which lent us a thousand millions of it, might distrain on us for that
amount by force of arms. Therefore we protest that nothing would
induce us to commit such an act of cynical dishonesty. But that does
not prevent us, as far as the debt is due to our own capitalists, from
paying them honestly with one hand, and forcibly taking back the money
plus seventeen per cent interest with the other.

By the way, lest somebody should come along and assure you that these
figures are inaccurate, and that I am not to be trusted, I had better
warn you that the figures are in round numbers; that they vary from
year to year through paying off and fluctuation of values; that the
thousand millions borrowed from America were lent by us to allies of
whom some cannot afford to pay us at all, and others, who can, are
trying how little we can be induced to take; that the rest of the money
was raised through the banks in such a way that indignant statisticians
have proved that we accepted indebtedness for nearly twice what we
actually spent; that the rise in the market price of hiring spare
money must have enriched the capitalists more than the war taxation
impoverished them: in short, that the simplicity of the case can be
addled by a hundred inessential circumstances when the object is to
addle and not to elucidate. My object being elucidatory, I have left
them all out, as I want to shew you the nest, not the hedge.

The point is that the war has produced an enormous consumption
of capital; and instead of this consumption leaving behind it an
addition to our industrial plant and means of communication and other
contrivances for increasing our output of wealth, it has effected a
wholesale destruction of such things, leaving the world with less
income to distribute than before. The fact that it has swept away
three empires, and substituted republicanism for monarchy as the
prevalent form of government in Europe, thus bringing Europe into
line with America as a republican continent, may seem to you to be
worth the money; or, as this is not in the least what was intended by
the British or any other of the belligerent Powers, it may seem to
you a scandalous disaster. But that is a matter of sentiment, not of
economics. Whether you regard the political result with satisfaction or
dismay, the cost of the war remains the same, and so does the effect
of our way of paying it on the distribution of our national income. We
are all heavily taxed to enable that section of the capitalist class
which invested in War Loan for five per cent interest (a high rate
considering the security), to draw henceforth a million a day from the
fruits of our daily labor without contributing to them. True, we take
that much, and more, back from the whole capitalist class by taxation;
so that what really happens is a redistribution of income among the
capitalists, leaving the proletariat rather better off than worse,
though unfortunately it is not the sort of redistribution that makes
for equality of income or discredit of idleness. But it illustrates the
point of this chapter, which is that a virtual confiscation of capital
to the amount of thousands of millions proved perfectly feasible when
the Government had employment in the shape of national service, even
in work of destruction, instantly ready for an unlimited number of
proletarians, male and female. Those had been halcyon days but for the
bloodshed.




64

NATIONAL DEBT REDEMPTION LEVIES


Although the taxation of capital is nonsensical, it does not follow
that every proposal presented to you in that form must necessarily be
impracticable. It is true that the Government, if it wants ready money,
can obtain it only by confiscating income; but this does not rule out
operations for which no ready money is required, nor does it prevent
the Government from taking not only the income of a proprietor, but
the source of his income: that is, his property, as well. To take a
possibility that is quite likely to become a fact in your experience,
suppose the Government were driven to the conclusion that the National
Debt, or some part of it, must be wiped out, either because the
taxation needed to pay the interest of it is hampering capitalist
enterprise, which would be a Conservative Government’s reason, or
for the sake of redistributing income more equally, which would be a
Socialist Government’s reason! To pay off what we have borrowed from
America, or from foreigners of any nationality, would need ready money;
and therefore the simple wiping out of this part of the national debt
would be impossible except by flat repudiation, which would destroy
our credit abroad and probably involve us in a war of distraint. But
that part of the debt which we owe to ourselves could be wiped out
without a farthing of ready money by a tax presented and assessed as a
tax on capital, or rather a levy on capital (to indicate that it was
not to be an annual tax but only a once-in-a-way tax). Take the war
debt as an illustration of the possibility of a total wipe-out. Let us
suppose for the sake of simplicity that as much of the National Debt
as the Government owes to its own subjects is £100, all lent to it by
one woman (call her Mary Anne) for the war, and, of course, long since
spent and blown to bits, leaving nothing behind but the obligation of
the Government to pay Mary Anne £5 a year out of the taxes. Imagine
also that there is only one other capitalist in the country (say
Sarah Jane), whose property consists of £100 from stocks and land
yielding an income of £5 a year. That is, Sarah Jane owns the entire
industrial plant of the country; and Mary Anne is the sole domestic
(as distinguished from foreign) national creditor. The Chancellor of
the Exchequer brings in a tax of 100 per cent on capital, and demands
£100 from Sarah Jane and £100 from Mary Anne. Neither of them can pay
£100 ready money out of their £5; but Sarah Jane can hand over all her
share certificates to the Government; and the Government can transfer
Mary Anne’s War Loan of £100 to itself. Mary and Sarah, left destitute,
will have to work for their livings; and all the industrial plant of
the country will have passed into the hands of the Government; that is,
been nationalized.

In this transaction there is no physical impossibility, no selling of
worthless shares for non-existent ready money, no rocketing of the
Bank Rate, nothing but simple expropriation. The fact that the £200 at
stake are really thousands of millions, and that there are many Marys
and many Sarahs, each with her complement of Toms and Dicks, alters the
size of the transaction, but not its balance. The thing could be done.
Further, if the disturbance created by a sudden and total expropriation
would be too great, it could be done in instalments of any desired
magnitude. The 100 per cent tax on capital could be 50 per cent or
5 per cent or 2½ per cent every ten years or what you please. If
100 per cent meant a catastrophe (as it would) and 10 per cent only a
squeeze, then the Government could content itself with the squeeze.

By such a levy the Government could take off the taxation it had
formerly imposed to pay the home War Loan interest, and use the
dividends of the confiscated shares to pay the interest on our war debt
to America, taking off also the taxation that now pays that interest.
If it were a Conservative Government it would take it off in the form
of a reduction of income tax, supertax, excess profits tax (if any),
death duties, and other taxes on property and big business. A Labor
Government would leave these taxes untouched, and take taxes off food,
or increase its contributions to the unemployed fund, its grants-in-aid
to the municipalities for public work, or anything else that would
benefit the proletariat and make for equality of income. Thus the levy
could be manipulated to make the rich richer as easily as to raise the
general level of well-being; and this is why it is just as likely to be
done by a Capitalist as by a Labor Government until the domestic war
debt is--shall we say liquidated, as repudiated sounds so badly?

The special objection to such practicable levies is that they are raids
on private property rather than orderly and gradual conversions of
it into public property. The objection to raids is that they destroy
the sense of security which induces the possessors of spare money to
invest it instead of spreeing it. Insecurity discourages saving among
those who can afford to save, and encourages reckless expenditure. If
you have a thousand pounds to spare, and have not the slightest doubt
that by investing it you can secure a future income of £50 a year,
subject only to income tax, you will invest it. If you are led to
think it just as likely as not that if you invest it the Government
will presently take it or some considerable part of it from you under
pretext of a Debt Redemption Levy, you will probably conclude that
you may as well spend it while you are sure of it. It would be much
better for the country and for yourself if you could feel sure that
if the Government took your property it would buy it from you at full
market price, or, if that were for any reason impracticable, compensate
you fully for it. It is true that, as we found when we went into the
question of compensation, this apparently conservative way of doing it
is really as expropriative as the direct levy, because the Government
raises the purchase money or compensation by taxing property; so that
the proprietors buy each other out and are not as a body compensated
at all; but the sense of insecurity created by the raiding method
is demoralizing, as you will understand if you read the description
by Thucydides of the plague at Athens, which applies to all plagues,
pathological or financial. Plagues destroy the sense of security of
life: people come to feel that they will probably be dead by the end of
the week, and throw their characters away for a day’s pleasure just as
capitalists throw their money away when it is no longer safe. A raid on
property, as distinguished from a regular annual income tax, is like
a plague in this respect. Also it forms a bad precedent and sets up a
raiding habit. Thus domestic debt redemption levies, though physically
practicable, are highly injudicious.




65

THE CONSTRUCTIVE PROBLEM SOLVED


You may now stop for breath, as you are at last in possession not only
of the object of Socialism, which is simply equality of income, but
of the methods by which it can be attained. You know why coal mining
and banking should be nationalized, and how the expropriation of the
coalowners and bankers can be compensated so as to avoid injustice to
individuals or any shock to the sense of security which is necessary
to prevent the continued investment of spare money as capital. Now
when you have the formula for these two nationalizations, one of a
material industry involving much heavy manual work, and the other a
service conducted by sedentary brain work, you have a formula for all
nationalizations. And when you have the formula for the constitutional
compensated expropriation of the coalowners and bankers by taxation
you have the formula for the expropriation of all proprietors. Knowing
how to nationalize industry you know how to place the Government in
control of the distribution of the income produced by industry. We
have not only found these formulas, but seen them tested in practice
in our existing institutions sufficiently to have no more doubt that
they would work than we have that next year’s budget will work.
Therefore we need no longer be worried by demands for what people call
a constructive program. There it is for them; and what will surprise
them most about it is that it does not contain a single novelty. The
difficulties and the novelty are not, as they imagine, in the practical
part of the business, which turns out to be quite plain sailing, but
in the metaphysical part: that is, in the will to equality. We know
how to take the distribution of the national income out of the hands
of the private owners of property and place it under the control of
the Government. But the Government can distribute it unequally if it
decides to do so. Instead of destroying the existing inequality it can
intensify it. It can maintain a privileged class of idlers with huge
incomes, and give them State security for the continuance of those
incomes.

It is this possibility that may enlist and to a certain extent has
already enlisted the most determined opponents of Socialism on the side
of nationalization, expropriative taxation, and all the constructive
political machinery of Socialism, as a means of redistributing income,
the catch in it being that the redistribution at which they aim is not
an equal distribution, but a State-guaranteed unequal one. John Bunyan,
with his queer but deep insight, pointed out long ago that there is
a way to hell even from the gates of heaven; that the way to heaven
is therefore also the way to hell; and that the name of the gentleman
who goes to hell by that road is Ignorance. The way to Socialism,
ignorantly pursued, may land us in State Capitalism. Both must travel
the same road; and this is what Lenin, less inspired than Bunyan,
failed to see when he denounced the Fabian methods as State Capitalism.
What is more, State Capitalism, plus Capitalist Dictatorship (Fascism),
will compete for approval by cleaning up some of the dirtiest of our
present conditions: raising wages; reducing death rates; opening the
career to the talents; and ruthlessly cashiering inefficiency, before
in the long run succumbing to the bane of inequality, against which no
civilization can finally stand out.

This is why, though you are now equipped with a complete answer to
those who very properly demand from Socialists constructive plans,
practical programs, a constitutional parliamentary routine, and so
forth, you are still not within eight score pages of the end of this
book. We have still to discuss not only the pseudo-Socialism against
which I have just warned you, but other things which I cannot omit
without leaving you more or less defenceless against the alarmist
who, instead of being sensibly anxious about constructive methods,
is quite convinced that the world can be turned upside down in a
day by an unwashed Russian in a red tie and an uncombed woman with
a can of petrol if only they are wicked enough. These poor scared
things will ask you what about revolution? what about marriage? what
about children? what about sex? when, as they assume, Socialism will
have upset all our institutions and substituted for our present
population of sheep a raving pack of mad dogs. No doubt you can tell
them to go away, or to talk about such matters as they are capable
of understanding; but you will find that they are only the extreme
instances of a state of mind that is very common. Not only will plenty
of your most sensible friends want to discuss these subjects in
connection with Socialism, but you yourself will be as keen about them
as they. So now that we know exactly what Socialism aims at and how it
can be done, let us leave all that as settled, and equip ourselves for
general conversation on or around the subject.




66

SHAM SOCIALISM


The example of the war shews how easy it is for a government to
confiscate the incomes of one set of citizens, and hand them over to
another without any intention of equalizing distribution or effecting
any nationalization of industries or services. If any class or trade
or clique can obtain control of Parliament, it can use its power to
plunder any other class or trade or clique, to say nothing of the
nation as a whole, for its own benefit. Such operations are of course
always disguised as reforms of one kind or another, or as political
necessities; but they are really intrigues to use the State for selfish
ends. They are not on that account to be opposed as pernicious: rogues
with axes to grind must use popular reforms as bait to catch votes for
Acts of Parliament in which they have some personal interest. Besides,
all reforms are lucrative to somebody. For instance, the landlords of
a city may be the warmest supporters of street improvements, and of
every public project for making the city more attractive to residents
and tourists, because they hope to reap the whole money value of the
improvements in raised rents. When a public park is opened, the rents
of all the houses looking on that park go up. When some would-be public
benefactor endows a great public school for the purpose of making
education cheap, he unintentionally makes all the private houses within
reach of it dear. In the long run the owners of the land take from us
as rent in one form or another everything that we can do without. But
the improvements are none the less improvements. Nobody would destroy
the famous endowed schools of Bedford because rents are higher there
than in towns which possess no such exceptional advantage. When Faust
asked Mephistopheles what he was, Mephistopheles answered that he was
part of a power that was always willing evil and always doing good; and
though our landlords and capitalists are certainly not always either
willing evil or doing good, yet Capitalism justifies itself and was
adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides
selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing
except for selfish motives. Now though the best things have to be done
for the greater glory of God, as some of us say, or for the enlargement
of life and the bettering of humanity, as others put it, yet it is
very true that if you want to get a philanthropic measure enacted by
a public body, parliamentary or municipal, you may find it shorter to
give the rogues an axe to grind than to stir up the philanthropists
to do anything except preach at the rogues. Rogues, by which perhaps
rather invidious name I designate persons who will do nothing unless
they get something out of it for themselves, are often highly effective
persons of action, whilst idealist talkers only sow the wind, leaving
the next generation of men of action to reap the whirlwind.

It is already a well-established method of Capitalism to ask the
Government to provide for some private enterprise on the ground of its
public utility. Some good has been done in this way: for instance,
some of our modern garden cities and suburbs could not have been
built if the companies that built them had not been enabled, under
the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, to borrow a large share
of their capital from the Government on the understanding that the
shareholders were poor people holding no more than £200 capital
apiece. But this limitation is quite illusory, because, though the
companies may not issue more than £200 in shares to any individual,
they may and do borrow unlimited sums by creating what is called Loan
Stock; and the very same person who is not allowed to have more than
£200 in shares may have two hundred millions in Loan Stock if the
company can use them. Consequently these garden cities, which are most
commendable enterprises in their way, are nevertheless the property
of rich capitalists. As I hold a good deal of stock in them myself I
am tempted to claim that their owners are specially philanthropic and
public-spirited men, who have voluntarily invested their capital where
it will do the most good and not where it will make the most profit for
them; but they are not immortal; and we have no guarantee that their
heirs will inherit their disinterestedness. Meanwhile the fact remains
that they have built up their property largely with public money: that
is, by money raised by taxing the rest of the community, and that this
does not make the nation the owner of the garden city, nor even a
shareholder in it. The Government is simply a creditor who will finally
be paid off, leaving the cities in the hands of their capitalist
proprietors. The tenants, though led to expect a share in the surplus
profits of the city, find such profits practically always applied to
extending the enterprise for the benefit of fresh investors. The garden
cities and suburbs are an enormous improvement on the manufacturing
towns produced by unaided private enterprise; but as they do not pay
their proprietors any better than slum property, nor indeed as well, it
is quite possible that this consideration may induce the future owners
to abolish their open spaces and overcrowd them with houses until they
are slums. To guarantee the permanence of the improvement it would
be safer for the Government to buy out the shareholders than for the
shareholders to pay off the Government, though even that would fail if
the Government acted on Capitalist principles by selling the cities to
the highest bidders.

A more questionable development of this exploitation of the State by
Capitalism and Trade Unionism is the subsidy of £10,000,000 paid by
the Government to the coalowners in 1925 to avoid a strike. The coal
miners said they would not work unless they got such and such wages.
The employers vowed they could not afford to keep their mines open
unless the men would accept less; and a great press campaign was set
up to persuade us that the country was on the verge of ruin through
excessive wages when as a matter of fact the country was in a condition
that at many earlier periods would have been described as cheerfully
prosperous. Finally the Government, to avert a strike which would
have paralyzed the main industries of the country, had either to make
up out of the taxes the wages offered by the employers to the wages
demanded by the men, or else nationalize the mines. Being a Capitalist
Government, pledged not to nationalize anything, it chose to make up
the wages out of the taxes. When the £10,000,000 was exhausted, the
trouble began again. The Government refused to renew the subsidy; the
employers refused to go on without it unless the miners worked eight
hours a day instead of seven; the miners refused to work more or take
less; there was a big strike, in which the workers in several other
industries at first took part “sympathetically” until they realized
that by using up the funds of the Trade Unions on strike pay they were
hindering the miners instead of helping them; and many respectable
people were, as usual on such occasions, frightened out of their wits
and into the belief that the country was on the verge of revolution.
And there was this excuse for them: that under fully-developed
Capitalism civilization is always on the verge of revolution. We live
as in a villa on Vesuvius.

During the strike the taxpayer was no longer exploited by the owners;
but the ratepayer was exploited by the workers. A man on strike has no
right to outdoor relief; but his wife and children have. Consequently
a married miner with two children could depend on receiving a pound a
week at the expense of the ratepayers whilst he was refusing to work.
This development of parochial Communism really knocks the bottom out
of the Capitalist system, which depends on the ruthless compulsion
of the proletariat to work on pain of starvation or imprisonment
under detestable conditions in the workhouse. Thus you have had the
Government first giving outdoor relief (the ten million subsidy) to the
owners at the expense of the taxpayers, and then the local authorities
giving outdoor relief to the proletariat at the expense of the
ratepayers, the Government being manned mostly by capitalists and the
local authorities by proletarians.

It was in the proletarian quarters of London, notably in Poplar,
that the Poor Law Guardians first claimed the right to give outdoor
relief at full subsistence rates to all unemployed persons, thereby
freeing their proletarian constituents from “the lash of starvation”,
and enabling them to hold out for the highest wages their trades could
afford. The mining districts followed suit during the coal strike
of 1926. This right was contested by the Government, which tried to
supplant the parochial authorities by the central Ministry of Health.
The Ministry, through the auditors of public accounts, surcharged the
Guardians with the part of the outdoor relief which they considered
excessive; but as the Guardians could not have paid the surcharge even
if the proceedings taken against them had not failed, the Government
took the administration of the Poor Law into its own hands, and
passed Acts to confirm its powers to do so. This was essentially an
attempt by the Capitalist central Government to recover the weapon of
starvation which the proletarian local authorities had taken out of
the owners’ hands. But the day had gone by for the ultra-capitalist
relief rules of the nineteenth century, when, as I well recollect, the
Registrar-General’s returns of the causes of the deaths during the year
always included starvation as a matter of course. The lowest scale
of relief which the Government ventured to propose would have seemed
ruinously extravagant and demoralizing to the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys
denounced by Dickens in 1854.

As to the demoralization, they would not have been very far wrong.
If mine-owners, or any other sort of owners, find that when they get
into difficulties through being lazy, or ignorant, or too grasping,
or behind the times, or all four, they can induce the Government to
confiscate the taxpayers’ incomes for subsidies to get them out of
their difficulties, they will go from bad to worse. If miners, or any
other sort of workers, find that the local authorities will confiscate
the incomes of the ratepayers to feed them when they are idle, their
incentive to pay their way by their labor will be, to say the least,
perceptibly slackened. Yet it is no use simply refusing to make these
confiscations. If the nation will not take its industries out of the
hands of private owners it must enable them to carry them on, whether
they can make them pay or not. If the owners will not pay subsistence
wages the nation must; for it cannot afford to have its children
undernourished and its civil and military strength weakened, though it
was fool enough to think it could in Queen Victoria’s time. Subsidies
and doles are demoralizing, both for employers and proletarians; but
they stave off Socialism, which people seem to consider worse than
pauperized insolvency, Heaven knows why!

Still, governments need not be so shamelessly unbusinesslike as
they are when subsidies are in question. The subsidizing habit was
acquired by the British Government during the war, when certain firms
had to be kept going at all costs, profit or no profit, because
their activities were indispensable. It was against all Capitalist
principles; but in war economic principles are thrown to the wind like
Christian principles; and the habits of war are not cured instantly
by armistices. In 1925, when the Government was easily blackmailed
into paying the mine-owners ten millions of the money of the general
taxpayer (your money and mine), it might at least have secured for us
an equivalent interest in the mines. It might have obliged the owners
to mortgage their property to the nation for the means to carry on, as
they would have had to do if they had raised the money in the ordinary
commercial way. As to the miners, they felt no responsibility, because,
as the owners bought labor in the market exactly as they bought
pit props, there was no more excuse for asking the miners to admit
indebtedness for the subsidy than the dealers in pit props. On every
principle of Capitalism the Government should either have refused to
interfere, and have let the comparatively barren mines which could not
afford to pay the standard wage for the standard working day go smash,
or else it should have advanced the millions by way of mortgage, not
on the worthless security of the defaulting mines, but on that of all
the coal mines, good and bad. The interest on the mortgage would in
that case have been paid to the nation by the good mines, which would
thus have been compelled to make up the deficits of the bad ones; and
if the interest had not been paid, the Government could finally have
nationalized the mines by simple foreclosure instead of by purchase.

But capitalists are by no means in favor of having Capitalist
principles applied to themselves in their dealings with the State.
Besides, why should the fortunate owners of solvent mines subsidize the
owners of insolvent ones? If the Government chooses to subsidize bad
mines, let it be content with the security of the bad mines. It ended
in the Government making the owners a present of the ten millions. The
owners had to pass it on to the miners as wages: at least that was the
idea; and it was more or less the fact also. But whether we regard it
as a subsidy to the miners or to the owners or to both, it was none
the less confiscated from the general taxpayer and handed as alms to
favored persons.

The people who say that such subsidies are Socialistic, whether with
the object of discrediting them or recommending them, are talking
nonsense: they might as well say that the perpetual pensions conferred
by Charles II on his illegitimate children were Socialistic. They
are frank exploitations of the taxpayer by bankrupt Capitalism and
its proletarian dependents. Socialist agitators, far from supporting
such subsidies, will shout at you that you are paying part of the
men’s wages whilst the mine-owners take all the profits; that if you
will stand that, you will stand anything; that you are paying for
nationalization and not getting it; that you are being saddled with a
gigantic system of outdoor relief for the rich in addition to their
rents, their dividends, and the doles they have left you to pay to
their discarded employees; that the capitalists, having plundered
everything else, land, capital, and labor, are now plundering the
Treasury; that, not content with overcharging you for every article you
buy, they are now taxing you through the Government collector; and that
as they will have to hand over a share of what they take from you in
this way as wages, the Trade Unions are taking good care to make the
Labor Party support the subsidies in Parliament.

Meanwhile you hear from all quarters angry denunciations of Poplarism
as a means by which the rate collector robs you of your possibly
hardearned money, often to the tune of twentyfour shillings for every
pound of the value of your house, to keep idle ablebodied laborers
eating their heads off at a higher rate of expenditure than you,
perhaps, can afford in your own house.

All this, with due allowance for platform rhetoric, is true. The
attempt to maintain a failing system by subsidies plus Poplarism burns
the candle at both ends, and makes straight for industrial bankruptcy.
But you will not, if you are wise, waste your forces in resentful
indignation. The capitalists are not making a conscious attempt to
rob you. They are the flies on the wheel of their own system, which
they understand as little as you did before we sat down to study it.
All they know is that Trade Unionism is playing their own game against
them with such success that more and more of the overcharges (to you)
that formerly went to profit are now going to wages. They cry to the
Government to save them, and it saves them (at your expense) partly
because it is afraid of a big strike; partly because it wants to put
off the alternative of nationalization as long as possible; partly
because it has to consider the proletarian vote at the next general
election; and mostly because it can think of nothing better to do
in the rare moments when it has time to think at all. The British
employers, the British Trade Unionists, and the British Government have
no deep designs: so far it is just hand to mouth with them; and you
need not waste any moral indignation on them. But please note the word
British, thrice repeated in the last sentence, and also the words “so
far”. The American employers and financiers are far more self-conscious
than our business men and working men are; and the Americans are
teaching our people their methods. Modern scientific discoveries have
set them dreaming of enormously increased production; and they have
found out that as the world depends on the people who work, whether
with head or hand, they can by combining prevent idle and incapable
owners of land and capital from getting too much of the increase. They
know that they can neither realize their dream nor combine properly
by using their own brains; and they are now paying large salaries to
clever persons whose sole business is to think for them. Suppose you
were the managing head of a big business, and that you were determined
not to tolerate Trade Unionism among your workpeople, and therefore
had to treat them well enough to prevent them feeling the want of a
union. In England your firm would be called “a rat house”, in America
simply a non-union house. Imagine yourself visited by a well-dressed
lady or gentleman with the pleasant nonchalance of a person of proved
and conscious ability and distinction. She (we will assume that she is
a lady) has called to suggest that you should order all your workpeople
to join the union of their trade, of which she is the pampered
representative. You gasp, and would order her out if you dared; but
how can one shew the door to a superior and perfectly self-confident
person. She proceeds to explain whilst you are staring at her. She says
it will be worth your while: that her union is prepared to put some
new capital into your business, and that it will come to a friendly
arrangement with you as to the various trade restrictions to which you
so much object. She points out that if instead of working to increase
the dividends of your idle shareholders you were just to give them
what they are accustomed to expect, and use the rest of the profit for
bettering the condition of the people who are doing the work (including
yourself), the business would receive a fresh impulse, and you and all
the really effective people in it make much more money. She suggests
ways of doing it that you have never dreamt of. Can you see any reason
except stupid conservatism for refusing such a proposal?

This is not a fancy picture. It has actually occurred in America as
the result of the Trade Unions employing first-rate business brains
to think for them, and not grudging them salaries equal to the wages
of a dozen workmen. When English Trade Unions become Americanized as
English big business is becoming Americanized they will do the same.
Our big businesses are already picking out brainy champions from the
universities and the public services to do just such jobs for them.
Both big business and skilled labor will presently be managing their
affairs scientifically, instead of dragging heavily and unimaginatively
through the old ruts. And when this is accomplished they will enslave
the unskilled, unorganized proletariat, including, as we have seen,
the middle-class folk who have no aptitude for money making. They will
enslave the Government. And they will do it mostly by the methods of
Socialism, effecting such manifest improvements in the condition of
the masses that it will be inhuman to stop them. The organized workers
will live, not in slums, but in places like Port Sunlight, Bournville,
and the Garden Cities. Employers like Mr Ford, Lord Leverhulme and
Mr Cadbury will be the rule and not the exception; and the sense of
helpless dependence on them will grow at the expense of individual
adventurousness. The old communal cry of high rates and a healthy city
will be replaced by Mr Ford’s cry of high wages and colossal profits.

Those profits are the snag in the stream of prosperity. If they are
unequally distributed they will wreck the system that has produced
them, and involve the nation in the catastrophe. In spite of all the
apparent triumphs of increased business efficiency the Socialists will
still have to insist on public control of distribution and equalization
of income. Without that, capitalist big business, in league with
the aristocracy of Trade Unionism, will control the Government for
its private ends; and you may find it very difficult, as a voter,
to distinguish between the genuine Socialism that changes private
into public ownership of our industries, and the sham Socialism that
confiscates the money of one set of citizens without compensation only
to hand it over to another set, not to make our incomes more equal, but
to give more to those who have already too much.




67

CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION


And now, learned lady reader (for by this time you know much more about
the vital history and present social problems of your country and of
the world than an average Capitalist Prime Minister), do you notice
that in these ceaseless activities which keep all of us fed and clothed
and lodged, and some of us even pampered, NOTHING STAYS PUT? Human
society is like a glacier: it looks like an immovable and eternal field
of ice; but it is really flowing like a river; and the only effect of
its glassy rigidity is that its own unceasing movement splits it up
into crevasses that make it frightfully dangerous to walk on, all the
more as they are beautifully concealed by natural whitewash in the
shape of snow. Your father’s bankruptcy, your husband’s, or your own
may precipitate you at any moment into a little crevasse. A big one may
suddenly swallow a whole empire, as three of them were swallowed in
1918. If, as is most likely, you have been brought up to believe that
the world is a place of permanent governments, settled institutions,
and unchangeable creeds in which all respectable people believe, to
which they all conform, and which are unalterable because they are
founded for all eternity on Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the
Apostles’ Creed, and the Ten Commandments, what you have gathered here
of the continual and unexpected changes and topsy-turvy developments
of our social order, the passing of power from one class to another,
the changes of opinion by which what was applauded as prosperity and
honor and piety at the beginning of the nineteenth century came to be
execrated as greedy villainy at the end of it, and what were prosecuted
as criminal conspiracies under George IV are legalized and privileged
combinations, powerful in Parliament, under George V, may have driven
you to ask, what is the use of your drudging through all these
descriptions and explanations if by the time you have reached the end
of the book everything will have changed? I can only assure you that
the way to understand the changes that are going on is to understand
the changes that have gone before, and warn you that many women have
spoilt their whole lives and misled their children disastrously by not
understanding them.

Besides, the things I have been describing have not passed wholly
away. There are still old-fashioned noblemen who lord it over the
countryside as their ancestors have done for hundreds of years,
sometimes benevolently, sometimes driving the inhabitants out to make
room for sheep or deer at their pleasure. There are still farmers,
large and small. There are still many petty employers carrying on small
businesses singly or in firms of two or three partners. There are still
joint stock companies that have not been merged in Trusts. There are
still multitudes of employees who belong to no Trade Union, and are
as badly sweated as the woman who sat in unwomanly rags and sang the
Song of the Shirt. There are still children and young persons who are
cruelly over-worked in spite of the Acts of Parliament that reach only
the factories and workshops. The world at large, though it contains
London and Paris and New York, also contains primitive villages where
gas, electric light, tap water and main drainage are as unknown as they
were to King Alfred. Our famous universities and libraries and picture
galleries are within travelling distance of tribes of savages and
cannibals, and of barbarian empires. Thus you can see around you living
examples of all the stages of the Capitalist System I have described.
Indeed, if you come, or your parents came (like mine) from one of those
families of more than a dozen children in the genteel younger-son
class which were more common formerly than they are today, you are
certain to have found, without going further than your parents, your
brothers and sisters, your uncles and aunts, your first cousins, and
perhaps yourself, examples of every phase of the conditions produced by
Capitalism in that class during the last two centuries, to say nothing
of the earlier half medieval phases in which most women, especially
respectable women, are still belated.

Beside the Changing and the Changed stand the Not Yet Changed; and
we have to deal with all three in our daily business. Until we know
what has happened to the Changed we shall not understand what is
going to happen to the Not Yet Changed, and may ourselves, with the
best intentions, effect mischievous changes, or oppose and wreck
beneficial ones. If we look for guidance to the articles in our party
newspapers (all living on profiteers’ advertisements) or the speeches
of party politicians, or the gossip of our politically ignorant and
class-prejudiced neighbors and relatives, which is unfortunately just
what most of us do, we are sure to be either misguided and corrupted or
exasperated.

Take, as a warning, those adventures of Capitalism in pursuit of
profits which I sketched for you in Chapter 37 and the few following
ones. They are always described to you in books and newspapers as the
history of the British race, or (in France) the French nation, or (in
Germany or Italy) the grand old German or Latin stock, dauntlessly
exercising its splendid virtues and talents in advancing civilization
at home and establishing it among the heathen abroad. Capitalism
can be made to look very well on paper. But beware of allowing your
disillusion to disable you by plunging you into disgust and general
cynical incredulity. Our thrilling columns of national self-praise
and mutual admiration must not be dismissed as mere humbug. Without
great discoverers and inventors and explorers, great organizers and
engineers and soldiers, hardy and reckless sailors, great chemists and
mathematicians, devoted missionaries and desperate adventurers, our
capitalists would be no better off today than they would have remained
in Greenland or Thibet. But the extraordinary men whose exploits have
made the capitalists rich were not themselves capitalists. The best
of them received little or no encouragement from capitalists, because
there was seldom any prospect of immediate profit from their labors
and adventures. Many of them were and are not only poor but persecuted.
And when the time comes, mostly after their deaths, to bring their
discoveries and conquests into everyday use, the work is done by the
hungry ones: the capitalists providing only the spare food they have
neither sown nor reaped, baked nor brewed, but only collected from
the hungry as rent or interest, and appropriated under laws made by
capitalist legislators for that purpose. British brains, British
genius, British courage and resolution have made the great reputation
of Britain, as the same qualities in other nations have made the other
great national reputations; but the capitalists as such have provided
neither brains, genius, courage, nor resolution. Their contribution
has been the spare food on which the geniuses have lived; and this
the capitalists did not produce: they only intercepted it during its
transfer from the hungry ones who made it to the hungry ones who
consumed it.

Note that I say the capitalists _as such_; for the accident of a person
being both a capitalist and a genius may happen just as easily as the
accident of being both a genius and a pauper. Nature takes no notice of
money. It is not likely that a born capitalist (that is, the inheritor
of a fortune) will be a genius, because it is not likely that anybody
will be born a genius, the phenomenon being naturally rare; but it
may happen to capitalists occasionally, just as it has happened to
princes. Queen Elizabeth was able to tell her ministers that if they
put her into the street without anything but her petticoat she could
make her living with the best of them. At the same time Queen Mary of
Scotland was proving that if she had been put into the street with a
hundred millions of money and an army of fifty thousand men she would
have made a mess of it all somehow and come to a bad end. But their
being queens had nothing to do with that: it was their personal quality
as women that made the difference. In the same way, when one born
capitalist happens to be a genius and another a waster, the capital
produces neither the ability nor the worthlessness. Take away their
capital, and they remain just the same: double it, and you double
neither their ability nor their imbecility. The stupidest person in the
country may be the richest: the cleverest and greatest may not know
where tomorrow’s dinner is to come from. I repeat, capitalists as such
need no special ability, and lose nothing by the lack of it. If they
seem able to feed Peter the Laborer it is only because they have taken
the food from Paul the Farmer; and even this they have not done with
their own hands: they have paid Matthew the Agent to do it, and had
his salary from Mark the Shopkeeper. And when Peter is a navvy, Paul
an engineer, Matthew the manager of a Trust, and Mark a banker, the
situation remains essentially unchanged. Peter and Paul, Matthew and
Mark, do all the work: the capitalist does nothing but take as much of
what they make as she can without starving them (killing the goose that
lays the golden eggs).

Therefore you may disregard both the Capitalist papers which claim
all the glories of our history as the fruit of Capitalist virtue
and talent, and the anti-Capitalist papers which ascribe all our
history’s shames and disgraces to the greed of the capitalists. Waste
neither your admiration nor your indignation. The more you understand
the system, the better you will see that the most devout personal
righteousness cannot evade it except by political changes which will
rescue the whole nation from it.

But though the capitalist as such does nothing but invest her money,
Capitalism does a great deal. When it has filled the home markets with
all the common goods the people can afford to pay for out of their
wages, and all the established fashionable luxuries the rich will
buy, it must apply its fresh accumulations of spare money to more
out-of-the-way and hazardous enterprises. It is then that Capitalism
becomes adventurous and experimental; listens to the schemes of hungry
men who are great inventors or chemists or engineers; and establishes
new industries and services like telephones, motor charabancs, air
services, wireless concerts, and so forth. It is then that it begins to
consider the question of harbors, which, as we saw, it would not look
at whilst there was still room for new distilleries. At the present
moment an English company has undertaken to build a harbor at a cost of
a million pounds for a Portuguese island in the Atlantic, and even to
make it a free port (that is, charge no harbor dues) if the Government
of the island lets it collect and keep the customs duties.

The capitalists, though they are very angry when the hungry ask
for Government help of any kind, have no scruples about asking it
for themselves. The railways ask the Government to guarantee their
dividends; the air services ask for large sums from the Government to
help them to maintain their aeroplanes and make money out of them;
the coalowners and the miners between them extort subsidies from the
Government by threatening a strike if they do not get it; and the
Government, under the Trades Facilities Acts, guarantees loans to
private capitalists without securing any share in their enterprises
for the nation, which provides them with capital cheaply, but has to
pay profiteering prices for their goods and services all the same. In
the end there is hardly any conceivable enterprise that can be made
to pay dividends that Capitalism will not undertake as long as it can
find spare money; and when it cannot it is quite ready to extract money
from the Government--that is, to take it forcibly from the people by
taxes--by assuring everyone that the Government can do nothing itself
for the people, who must always come to the capitalists to get it done
for them in return for substantial profits, dividends, and rents. Its
operations are so enormous that it alters the size and meaning of what
we call our country. Trading companies of capitalists have induced
the Government to give them charters under which they have seized
large and populous islands like Borneo, whole empires like India, and
great tracts of country like Rhodesia, governing them and maintaining
armies in them for the purpose of making as much money out of them
as possible. But they have taken care to hoist the British flag, and
make use directly or indirectly, of the British army and navy at the
cost of the British taxpayers to defend these conquests of theirs;
and in the end the British Commonwealth has had to take over their
responsibilities and add the islands and countries they have seized
to what is called the British Empire, with the curious result, quite
unintended by the British people, that the centre of the British
Empire is now in the East instead of in Great Britain, and out of
every hundred of our fellow subjects only eleven are whites, or even
Christians. Thus Capitalism leads us into enterprises of all sorts, at
home and abroad, over which we have no control, and for which we have
no desire. The enterprises are not necessarily bad: some of them have
turned out well; but the point is that Capitalism does not care whether
they turn out well or ill for us provided they promise to bring in
money to the shareholders. We never know what Capitalism will be up to
next; and we never can believe a word its newspapers tell us about its
doings when the truth seems likely to be unpopular.

It is hard to believe that you may wake up one morning, and learn from
your newspaper that the Houses of Parliament and the King have moved
to Constantinople or Baghdad or Zanzibar, and that this insignificant
island is to be retained only as a meteorological station, a bird
sanctuary, and a place of pilgrimage for American tourists. But if
that did happen, what could you do? It would be a perfectly logical
development of Capitalism. And it is no more impossible than the
transfer of the mighty Roman empire from Rome to Constantinople was
impossible. All you could do, if you wished to be in the fashion, or
if your business or that of your husband could be conducted only in
a great metropolitan centre, would be to go east after the King and
Parliament, or west to America and cease to be a Briton.

You need not, however, pack up just yet. But what you really need do
is rid your mind of the notion that mere Conservatism, in its general
sense of a love for the old ways and institutions you were brought
up with, will be of any avail against Capitalism. Capitalism, in its
ceaseless search for investment, its absolute necessity for finding
hungry men to eat its spare bread before it goes stale, breaks through
every barrier, rushes every frontier, swallows every religion, levels
every institution that obstructs it, and sets up any code of morals
that facilitates it, as soullessly as it sets up banks and lays cables.
And you must approve and conform, or be ruined, and perhaps imprisoned
or executed.




68

THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM


Capitalism, then, keeps us in perpetual motion. Now motion is not a bad
thing: it is life as opposed to stagnation, paralysis, and death. It
is novelty as opposed to monotony; and novelty is so necessary to us
that if you take the best thing within your reach (say the best food,
the best music, the best book, the best state of mind, or the best
anything that remains the same always), and if you stick to it long
enough you will come to loathe it. Changeable women, for instance, are
more endurable than monotonous ones, however unpleasant some of their
changes may be: they are sometimes murdered but seldom deserted; and it
is the ups and downs of married life that make it bearable. When people
shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them
how they would like to live in a stationary one and do without change.
Nobody who buys a motor car says “the slower the better”. Motion is
delightful when we can control it, guide it, and stop it when it is
taking us into danger.

Uncontrolled motion is terrible. Fancy yourself in a car which you do
not know how to steer and cannot stop, with an inexhaustible supply of
petrol in the tank, rushing along at fifty miles an hour on an island
strewn with rocks and bounded by cliff precipices! That is what living
under Capitalism feels like when you come to understand it. Capital is
running away with us; and we know that it has always ended in the past
by taking its passengers over the brink of the precipice at the foot of
which are strewn the ruins of empires. The desperately pressing present
problem for all governments is how to get control of this motion; make
safe highways for it; and steer it along those highways. If only we
could stop it whilst we sit down and think! But no: the car will not
stop: on the contrary it goes faster and faster as capital accumulates
in greater and greater quantities, and as we multiply our numbers. One
statesman after another snatches at the wheel and tries his hand. Kings
try their hands; dictators try their hands; democratic prime ministers
try their hands; committees and Soviets try their hands; and we look
hopefully to them for a moment, imagining that they have got control
because they do it with an air of authority, and assure us that it will
be all right if only we will sit quiet. But Capital runs away with them
all; and we palpitate between relief when our ungovernable vehicle
blunders into a happy valley, and despair when we hear the growl of the
waves at the foot of the cliffs grow louder and louder instead of dying
away in the distance. Blessed then are those who do not know and cannot
think: to them life seems a joyride with a few disagreeable incidents
that must be put up with. They sometimes make the best rulers, just as
the best railway signalman is he who does not feel his responsibility
enough to be frightened out of his wits by it. But in the long run
civilization depends on our governments gaining an intelligent control
of the forces that are running away with Capitalism; and for that an
understanding of them is necessary. Mere character and energy, much
as we admire them, are positively mischievous without intellect and
knowledge.

Our present difficulty is that nobody understands except a few students
whose books nobody else reads, or here and there a prophet crying in
the wilderness and being either ignored by the press or belittled as
a crank. Our rulers are full of the illusions of the money market,
counting £5 a year as £100. Our voters have not got even so far as
this, because nine out of ten of them, women or men, have no more
experience of capital than a sheep has of a woollen mill, though the
wool comes off its own back.

But between the government and the governed there is a very important
difference. The governments do not know how to govern; but they know
that government is necessary, and that it must be paid for. The voters
regard government as a tyrannical interference with their personal
liberty, and taxation as the plunder of the private citizen by the
officials of a tyrannous state. Formerly this did not matter much,
because the people had no votes. Queen Elizabeth, for instance, told
the common people, and even the jurymen and the Knights of the Shires
who formed the Parliament in her time, that affairs of State were not
their business, and that it was the grossest presumption on their part
to have any opinion of their own on such matters. If they attempted
to argue with her she threw them into prison without the smallest
hesitation. Yet even she could not extract money enough from them in
taxes to follow up her political successes. She could barely hold her
own by being quite right about the incompetence of the commoners and
knights, and being herself the most competent person of her time. These
two advantages made her independent of the standing armies by which
other despots maintained themselves. She could depend on the loyalty
of her people because she was able, as we say, to deliver the goods.
When her successors attempted to be equally despotic without being able
to deliver the goods, one of them was beheaded, and the other driven
out of the country. Cromwell rivalled her in ability; but though he
was a parliament man, he was finally driven to lay violent hands on
Parliament, and rule by armed force.

As to the common people, the view that their poverty and political
ignorance disqualified them for any share in the government of the
country was accepted until within my own lifetime. Within my father’s
lifetime the view that to give every man a vote (to say nothing of
every woman) was ridiculous and, if acted on, dangerous, seemed a
matter of course not only to Tories like the old Duke of Wellington,
but to extreme revolutionaries like the young poet Shelley. It seems
only the other day that Mr Winston Churchill declared that Labor is not
fit to govern.

Now you probably agree with Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Wellington,
Shelley, and Mr Winston Churchill. At all events if you do you are
quite right. For although Mr Ramsay MacDonald easily convinced the
country that a Labor Government can govern at least as well as either
the Liberal or Conservative Governments who have had the support of
Mr Churchill, the truth is that none of them can govern: Capitalism
runs away with them all. The hopes that we founded on the extension of
the franchise, first to working men and finally to women, which means
in effect to all adults, have been disappointed as far as controlling
Capitalism is concerned, and indeed in most other respects too. The
first use the women made of their votes was to hurl Mr MacDonald out of
Parliament and vote for hanging the Kaiser and making Germany pay for
the war, both of them impossibilities which should not have imposed on
even a male voter. They got the vote mainly by the argument that they
were as competent politically as the men; and when they got it they
at once used it to prove that they were just as incompetent. The only
point they scored at the election was that the defeat of Mr MacDonald
by their vote in Leicester shewed that they were not, as the silliest
of their opponents had alleged, sure to vote for the best-looking man.

What the extension of political power to the whole community
(Democracy, as they call it) has produced is a reinforcement of the
popular resistance to government and taxation at a moment when nothing
but a great extension of government and taxation can hope to control
the Gadarene rush of Capitalism towards the abyss. And this has
produced a tendency which is the very last that the old Suffragists
and Suffragettes dreamt of, or would have advocated if they had dreamt
of it: namely, a demand for the abandonment of parliamentary government
and the substitution of a dictatorship. In desperation at the failure
of Parliament to rescue industry from the profiteers, and currency
from the financiers (which means rescuing the livelihood of the people
from the purely predatory side of Capitalism), Europe has begun to
clamor for political disciplinarians to save her. Victorious France,
with her currency in the gutter, may be said to be advertising for a
Napoleon or a political Messiah. Italy has knocked its parliament down
and handed the whip to Signor Mussolini to thrash Italian democracy
and bureaucracy into some sort of order and efficiency. In Spain the
king and the military commander-in-chief have refused to stand any more
democratic nonsense, and taken the law into their own hands. In Russia
a minority of devoted Marxists maintain by sheer force such government
as is possible in the teeth of an intensely recalcitrant peasantry. In
England we should welcome another Cromwell but for two considerations.
First, there is no Cromwell. Second, history teaches us that if there
were one, and he again ruled us by military force after trying every
sort of parliament and finding each worse than the other, he would be
worn out or dead after a few years; and then we should return like the
sow to her wallowing in the mire and leave the restored profiteers to
wreak on the corpse of the worn-out ruler the spite they dared not
express whilst he was alive. Thus our inability to govern ourselves
lands us in such a mess that we hand the job over to any person strong
enough to undertake it; and then our unwillingness to be governed at
all makes us turn against the strong person, the Cromwell or Mussolini,
as an intolerable tyrant, and relapse into the condition of Bunyan’s
Simple, Sloth, and Presumption the moment his back is turned or his
body buried. We clamor for a despotic discipline out of the miseries of
our anarchy, and, when we get it, clamor out of the severe regulation
of our law and order for what we call liberty. At each blind rush from
one extreme to the other we empty the baby out with the bath, learning
nothing from our experience, and furnishing examples of the abuses of
power and the horrors of liberty without ascertaining the limits of
either.

Let us see whether we cannot clear up this matter of government versus
liberty a little before we give up the human race as politically
hopeless.




69

THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY


Once for all, we are not born free; and we never can be free. When all
the human tyrants are slain or deposed there will still be the supreme
tyrant that can never be slain or deposed, and that tyrant is Nature.
However easygoing Nature may be in the South Sea Islands, where you can
bask in the sun and have food for the trouble of picking it up, even
there you have to build yourself a hut, and, being a woman, to bear and
rear children with travail and trouble. And, as the men are handsome
and quarrelsome and jealous, and, having little else to do except make
love, combine exercise with sport by killing oneanother, you have to
defend yourself with your own hands.

But in our latitudes Nature is a hard taskmaster. In primitive
conditions it was only by working strenuously early and late that we
could feed and clothe and shelter ourselves sufficiently to be able
to survive the rigors of our climate. We were often beaten by famine
and flood, wolves and untimely rain and storms; and at best the women
had to bear large families to make up for the deaths of children. They
had to make the clothes of the family and bake its bread as well as
cook its meals. Such leisure as a modern woman enjoys was not merely
reprehensible: it was impossible. A chief had to work hard for his
power and privileges as lawgiver, administrator, and chief of police;
and had even his most pampered wife attempted to live as idly and
wastefully as thousands of ordinary ladies now do with impunity,
he would certainly have corrected her with a stick as thick as his
thumb, and been held not only guiltless, but commendably active in the
discharge of his obvious social duty. And the women were expected to
do the like by their daughters instead of teaching them, as Victorian
ladies did, that to do anything useful is disgraceful, and that if, as
inevitably happens, something useful has to be done, you must ring for
a servant and by no means do it yourself.

Now commercial civilization has been at root nothing more than the
invention of ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less labor. Men of
science invent because they want to discover Nature’s secrets; but such
popular inventions as the bow and spear, the spade and plough, the
wheel and arch, come from the desire to make work easier out of doors.
Indoors the spinning wheel and loom, the frying-pan and poker, the
scrubbing brush and soap, the needle and safety pin, make domestic work
easier. Some inventions make the work harder, but also much shorter
and more intelligent, or else they make operations possible that were
impossible before: for instance, the alphabet, Arabic numerals, ready
reckoners, logarithms, and algebra. When instead of putting your back
into your work you put the horse’s or ox’s back into it, and later
on set steam and explosive spirits and electricity to do the work of
the strained backs, a state of things is reached in which it becomes
possible for people to have less work than is good for them instead of
more. The needle becomes a sewing machine, the sweeping brush becomes
a vacuum cleaner, and both are driven from a switch in the wall by an
engine miles away instead of being treadled and wielded by foot and
hand. In Chapter 42 we had a glance at the way in which we lost the
old manual skill and knowledge of materials and of buying and selling,
first through division of labor (a very important invention), and
then through machinery. If you engage a servant today who has been
trained at a first-rate institution in the use of all the most modern
domestic machinery, and take her down to a country house, I will not go
quite so far yet as to warn you that though she knows how to work the
buttons on an automatic electric lift or step on and off an escalator
without falling on her nose, she cannot walk up or downstairs; but it
may come to that before long. Meanwhile you will have on your hands a
supercivilized woman whom you will be glad to replace by a girl from
the nearest primitive village, if any primitive villages are left in
your neighborhood.

Let us, however, confine ourselves to the bearing of all this on that
pet topic of the leisured class, our personal liberty.

What is liberty? Leisure. What is leisure? Liberty. If you can at any
moment in the day say “I can do as I please for the next hour” then for
that hour you are at liberty. If you say “I must now do such and such
things during the next hour whether I like it or not” then you are not
at liberty for that hour in spite of Magna Carta, the Declaration of
Rights (or of Independence), and all the other political title-deeds of
your so-called freedom.

May I, without being too intrusive, follow you throughout your daily
routine? You are wakened in the morning, whether you like it or not,
either by a servant or by that nerve-shattering abomination an alarum
clock. You must get up and light the fire and wash and dress and
prepare and eat your breakfast. So far, no liberty. You simply must.
Then you have to make your bed, wash up the breakfast things, sweep
and tidy-up the place, and tidy yourself up, which means that you must
more or less wash and re-dress your person until you are presentable
enough to go out and buy fresh supplies of food and do other necessary
shopping. Every meal you take involves preparation, including cooking,
and washing up afterwards. In the course of these activities you will
have to travel from place to place, which even in the house often means
treadmill work on the stairs. You must rest a little occasionally. And
finally you must go to sleep for eight hours.

In addition to all this you must earn the money to do your shopping
and pay your rent and rates. This you can do in two main ways. You can
work in some business for at least eight hours a day, plus the journeys
to and from the place where you work. Or you can marry, in which case
you will have to do for your husband and children all the preparation
of meals and marketing that you had to do for yourself, to wash and
dress the children until they are able to wash and dress themselves,
and to do all the other things that belong to the occupation of wife
and mother, including the administration of most of the family income.
If you add up all the hours you are forced to spend in these ways,
and subtract them from the twenty-four hours allowed you by Nature to
get through them in, the remainder will be your daily leisure: that
is, your liberty. Historians and journalists and political orators
may assure you that the defeat of the Armada, the cutting off of King
Charles’s head, the substitution of Dutch William for Scottish James
on the throne, the passing of the Married Women’s Property Acts, and
the conquest by the Suffragettes of Votes for Women, have set you free;
and in moments of enthusiasm roused by these assurances you may sing
fervently that Britons never never will be slaves. But though all
these events may have done away with certain grievances from which you
might be suffering if they had not occurred, they have added nothing to
your leisure and therefore nothing to your liberty. The only Acts of
Parliament that have really increased liberty: that is, added to the
number of minutes in which a woman’s time is her own, are the Factory
Acts which reduced her hours of industrial labor, the Sunday Observance
Acts which forbid commercial work on every seventh day, and the Bank
Holiday Acts.

You see, then, that the common trick of speaking of liberty as if we
were all either free or slaves, is a foolish one. Nature does not allow
any of us to be wholly free. In respect of eating and drinking and
washing and dressing and sleeping and the other necessary occasions
of physical life, the most incorrigible tramp, sacrificing every
decency and honesty to freedom, is as much a slave for at least ten or
eleven hours a day as a constitutional king, who has to live an almost
entirely dictated life. An enslaved negress who has six hours a day
to herself has more liberty than a “free” white woman who has only
three. The white woman is free to go on strike, and the negress is not;
but the negress can console herself by her freedom to commit suicide
(fundamentally much the same thing), and by pitying the Englishwoman
because, having so much less liberty, she is only poor white trash.

Now in our desire for liberty we all sympathize with the tramp. Our
difference from him, when we do differ, is that some of us want leisure
so that we may be able to work harder at the things we like than
slaves, except under the most brutal compulsion, work at the things
they must do. The tramp wastes his leisure and is miserable: we want to
employ our leisure and be happy. For leisure, remember, is not rest.
Rest, like sleep, is compulsory. Genuine leisure is freedom to do as we
please, not to do nothing.

As I write, a fierce fight between the miners and the mine-owners has
culminated in the increase of the miners’ daily working hours from
seven to eight. It is said that the miners want a seven hours working
day. This is the wrong way to put it. What the miners want is not seven
hours mining but seventeen hours off, out of which Nature will take at
least ten for her occasions, and locomotion another. Thus the miner,
by rigidly economizing his time, cutting out all loafing, and being
fortunate in the weather and season, might conceivably manage to have
six hours of effective leisure out of the twenty-four on the basis of
seven hours earning and eleven hours for sleep, recreation, loafing
and locomotion. And it is this six hours of liberty that he wants to
increase. Even when the immediate object of his clamor for shorter
hours of work is only a mask for his real intention of working as long
as before but receiving overtime pay (half as much again) for the last
hour, his final object is to obtain more money to spend on his leisure.
The pieceworker, the moment the piecework rate enables him to earn as
much in three or four days as he has been accustomed to earn in a week,
is as likely as not to take two or three days off instead of working
as long as before for twice as much money. He wants leisure more than
money.

But the conclusive instance is that of property. Women desire to be
women of property because property secures to them the maximum of
leisure. The woman of property need not get up at six in the morning
to light the fire. She need not prepare her husband’s breakfast nor
her own. She need not wash-up nor empty the slops nor make the beds.
She need not do the marketing, nor any shopping except the sort she
enjoys. She need not bother more about her children than she cares
to. She need not even brush her own hair; and if she must still eat
and sleep and wash and move from place to place, these operations
are made as luxurious as possible. She can count on at least twelve
hours leisure every day. She may work harder at trying on new dresses,
hunting, dancing, visiting, receiving, bridge, tennis, mountain
climbing, or any other hobby she may have, than a laborer’s wife works
at her compulsory housekeeping; but she is doing what she likes all
the time, and not what she must. And so, having her fill of liberty,
she is usually an ardent supporter of every political movement that
protects her privilege, and a strenuous and sometimes violently
abusive opponent of every political movement that threatens to curtail
her leisure or reduce the quantity of money at her disposal for its
enjoyment. She clings to her position because it gives her the utmost
possible liberty; and her grievance is that she finds it difficult to
obtain and retain domestic servants because, though she offers them
higher wages and better food and lodging and surroundings than they
can secure for themselves as industrial employees, she also offers
them less freedom. Their time, as they say, is never their own except
for occasional evenings out. Formerly women of all classes, from
governesses to scullery maids, went into domestic service because the
only alternative was rough work in unbearably coarse company, and
because, with comparatively gentle dispositions, they were for the most
part illiterate and ignorant. Nowadays, being imprisoned in schools
daily for at least nine years, they are no longer illiterate; and there
are many occupations open to them (for instance, in city offices) that
were formerly reserved for men. Even in rough employment the company
is not so rough as it used to be; besides, women of gentle nurture
are no longer physically disabled for them by the dress and habits
that made the Victorian woman half an invalid. A hundred years ago a
housemaid was so different from a herring-gutter or a ragpicker that
she was for all business purposes an animal of another species. Today
they are all “young ladies” in their leisure hours; and the single fact
that a housemaid has less leisure than an industrial employee makes it
impossible to obtain a housemaid who is not half imbecile in a factory
town, and not easy to get one in a fishing port.

It is the same with men. But do not conclude that every woman and every
man desires freedom above all things. Some people are very much afraid
of it. They are so conscious that they cannot fend for themselves
either industrially or morally that they feel that the only safe
condition for them is one of tutelage, in which they will always have
someone to tell them not only what to do but how to behave. Women of
this kind seek domestic service, and men military service, not in spite
of the forfeiture of their freedom but because of it. Were it not for
this factor in the problem it would be harder to get domestic servants
and soldiers than it is. Yet the ideal of the servant and soldier is
not continual tutelage and service: it is tutelage relieved by an
occasional spree. They both want to be as free as they dare. Again, the
very last thing the ordinary industrial male worker wants is to have to
think about his work. That is the manager’s job. What he wants to think
about is his play. For its sake he wants his worktime to be as short,
and his playtime as long, as he can afford. Women, from domestic
necessity and habit, are more accustomed to think about their work than
men; for a housewife must both work and manage; but she also is glad
when her work is over.

The great problem of the distribution of the national income thus
becomes also a problem of the distribution of necessary work and the
distribution of leisure or liberty. And this leisure or liberty is what
we all desire: it is the sphere of romance and infinite possibilities,
whilst worktime is the sphere of cut and dried compulsory reality. All
the inventions and expedients by which labor is made more productive
are hailed with enthusiasm, and called progress, because they make
more liberty possible for us. Unfortunately, we distribute the leisure
gained by the invention of the machines in the most absurd way that can
be conceived. Take your woman of property whom we have just discussed,
with her fifteen hours leisure out of the twenty-four. How does she
obtain that leisure? Not by inventing anything, but by owning machines
invented by somebody else and keeping the leisure they produce all
to herself, leaving those who actually work the machines with no
more leisure than they had before. Do not blame her: she cannot help
herself, poor lady! that is Capitalist law.

Look at it in the broader case of the whole nation. Modern methods of
production enable each person in the nation to produce much more than
they need consume to keep themselves alive and reproduce themselves.
That means that modern methods produce not only a national fund of
wealth but a national fund of leisure or liberty. Now just as you can
distribute the wealth so as to make a few people monstrously rich
whilst leaving all the rest as poor as before, you can distribute the
leisure in such a way as to make a few people free for fifteen hours
a day whilst the rest remain as they were, with barely four hours to
dispose of as they please. And this is exactly what the institution of
private property has done, and why a demand for its abolition and for
the equal distribution of the national leisure or liberty among the
whole population has arisen under the banner of Socialism.

Let us try to make a rough picture of what would happen if leisure, and
consequently productive work, were equally distributed. Let us pretend
that if we all worked four hours a day for thirtyfive years each of us
could live as well as persons with at least a thousand a year do now.
Let us assume that this state of things has been established by general
agreement, involving a compromise between the people who want to work
only two hours and live on a five-hundred-a-year scale and those who
want to work four hours and live twice as expensively!

The difficulty then arises that some kinds of work will not fit
themselves into instalments of four hours a day. Suppose you are
married, for example. If your husband is in business there is no
trouble for him. He does every day what he now does on Saturday: that
is, begins at nine and knocks off at one. But what about your work?
The most important work in the world is that of bearing and rearing
children; for without that the human race would presently be extinct.
All women’s privileges are based on that fact. Now a woman cannot be
pregnant for four hours a day, and normal for the rest of it. Nor
can she nurse her infant for four hours and neglect it until nine
next morning. It is true that pregnancy does not involve complete and
continuous disablement from every other productive activity: indeed, no
fact is better established by experience than that any attempt to treat
it as such is morbid and dangerous. As some writers inelegantly express
it, it is not a whole time job. Nursing is much more continuously
exacting, as children in institutions who receive only what ignorant
people call necessary attention mostly die, whilst home children who
are played with and petted and coddled and tossed and sung-to survive
with a dirty rag or two for clothing, and a thatched cabin with one
room and a clay floor for habitation.

A four hours working day, then, does not mean that everybody can begin
work at nine and leave off at one. Pregnancy and nursing are only
items in the long list of vitally important occupations that cannot be
interrupted and resumed at the sound of a hooter. It is possible in
a factory to keep a continuous process going by having six shifts of
workers to succeed oneanother during the twentyfour hours, so that each
shift works no more than four hours; but a ship, being a home as well
as a workplace, cannot accommodate six crews. Even if we built warships
big enough to hold 5000 and carry food for them, the shifts could not
retire from Jutland battles at the end of each spell of four hours. Nor
is such leisure as is possible on board ship the equivalent of shore
leisure, as the leisured passengers, with their silly deck games, and
their agonized scamperings fore and aft for exercise know only too well.

Then there are the jobs that cannot be done in shifts because they
must be done by the same person throughout with a continuance that
stretches human endurance to the utmost limit. A chemist or physicist
watching an experiment, an astronomer watching an eclipse, a doctor or
nurse watching a difficult case, a Cabinet minister dealing with news
from the front during a war, a farmer saving his hay in the face of an
unfavorable weather forecast, or a body of scavengers clearing away a
snowfall, must go on if necessary until they drop, four hours or no
four hours. Handel’s way of composing an oratorio was to work at it
night and day until it was finished, keeping himself awake as best he
might. Explorers are lucky if they do not die of exhaustion, as many of
them have, from prolonged effort and endurance.

A four hour working day therefore, though just as feasible as an eight
hour day is now, or the five day week which is the latest cry, is in
practice only a basis of calculation. In factory and office work, and
cognate occupations out of doors, it can be carried out literally. It
may mean short and frequent holidays or long and rare ones. I do not
know what happens to you in this respect; but in my own case, in spite
of the most fervent resolutions to order my work more sensibly, and of
the fact that an author’s work can as a rule quite well be divided into
limited daily periods, I am usually obliged to work myself to the verge
of a complete standstill and then go away for many weeks to recuperate.
Eight or nine months overwork, and three or four months change and
overleisure, is very common among professional persons.

Then there is a vital difference between routine work and what is
called creative or original work. When you hear of a man achieving
eminence by working sixteen hours a day for thirty years, you may
admire that apparently unnatural feat; but you must not conclude that
he has any other sort of ability: in fact you may quite safely put
him down as quite incapable of doing anything that has not been done
before, and doing it in the old way. He never has to think or invent.
To him today’s work is a repetition of yesterday’s work. Compare him,
for example, with Napoleon. If you are interested in the lives of such
people you are probably tired of hearing how Napoleon could keep on
working with fierce energy long after all the members of his council
were so exhausted that they could not even pretend to keep awake. But
if you study the less often quoted memoirs of his secretary Bourrienne
you will learn that Napoleon often moodled about for a week at a time
doing nothing but play with children or read trash or waste his time
helplessly. During his enforced leisure in St Helena, which he enjoyed
so little that he probably often exclaimed, after Cowper’s Selkirk,
“Better live in the midst of alarms than dwell in this horrible place”,
he was asked how long a general lasted. He replied, “Six years”. An
American president is not expected to last more than four years. In
England, where there is no law to prevent a worn-out dotard from being
Prime Minister, even so imposing a parliamentary figure as Gladstone
had to be practically superannuated when he tried to continue into the
eighteen-nineties the commanding activities which had exhausted him
in the seventies. To descend to more commonplace instances you cannot
make an accountant work as long as a bookkeeper, nor a historian as
continuously as a scrivener or typist, though they are performing the
same arithmetical and manual operations. One will be tired out in three
hours: the other can do eight without turning a hair with the help of a
snack or a cup of tea to relieve her boredom occasionally. In the face
of such differences you cannot distribute work equally and uniformly in
quantities measured by time. What you can do is to give the workers, on
the whole, equal leisure, bearing in mind that rest and recuperation
are not leisure, and that periods of necessary recuperation in idleness
must be counted as work, and often very irksome work, to those who have
been prostrated by extraordinary efforts excessively prolonged.

The long and short of it is that freedom with a large F, general and
complete, has no place in nature. In practice the questions that
arise in its name are, first, how much leisure can we afford to allow
ourselves? and second, how far can we be permitted to do what we like
when we are at leisure? For instance, may we hunt stags on Dartmoor?
Some of us say no; and if our opinion becomes law, the liberty of
the Dartmoor Hunt will be curtailed to that extent. May we play golf
on Sundays during church hours? Queen Elizabeth would not only have
said no, but made churchgoing compulsory, and thereby have made
Sunday a half-holiday instead of a whole one. Nowadays we enjoy the
liberty of Sunday golf. Under Charles II, on the other hand, women
were not allowed to attend Quaker meetings, and were flogged if they
did. In fact attendance at any sort of religious service except that
of the Church of England was a punishable offence; and though it was
not possible to enforce this law fully against Roman Catholics and
Jews, its penalties were ruthlessly inflicted on George Fox and John
Bunyan, though King Charles himself sympathized with them. It cost us
a revolution to establish comparative “liberty of conscience”; and
we can now build and attend handsome temples of The Church of Christ
Scientist, and form fantastic Separatist sects by the score if it
pleases us.

On the other hand many things that we were free to do formerly we may
not do now. In England until quite lately, as in Italy to this day,
when a woman married, all her property became her husband’s; and if
she had the ill luck to marry a drunken blackguard, he could leave her
to make a home for herself and her children by her own work, and then
come back and seize everything she possessed and spend it in drink
and debauchery. He could do it again and again, and sometimes did.
Attempts to remedy this were denounced by happily married pious people
as attacks on the sanctity of the marriage tie; and women who advocated
a change were called unwomanly; but at last commonsense and decency
prevailed; and in England a married woman is now so well protected from
plunder and rapine committed by her husband that a Married Men’s Rights
agitation has begun.

Outside the home a factory owner might and did work little children to
death with impunity, and do or leave undone anything he liked in his
factory. Today he can no more do what he likes there than you can do
what you like in Westminster Abbey. He is compelled by law to put up in
a conspicuous place a long list of the things he must do and the things
he may not do, whether he likes it or not. And when he is at leisure he
is still subject to laws that restrict his freedom and impose duties
and observances on him. He may not drive his motor car faster than
twenty miles an hour (though he always does), and must drive on the
left and pass on the right in England, and drive to the right and pass
on the left in France. In public he must wear at least some clothing,
even when he is taking a sunbath. He may not shoot wild birds or catch
fish for sport except during certain seasons of the year; and he may
not shoot children for sport at all. And the liberty of women in these
respects is limited as the liberty of men is.

I need not bother you with more instances: you can think of dozens for
yourself. Suffice it that without leisure there is no liberty, and
without law there is no secure leisure. In an ideal free State, the
citizen at leisure would find herself headed off by a police officer
(male or female) whenever she attempted to do something that her
fellow citizens considered injurious to them, or even to herself; but
the assumption would be that she had a most sacred right to do as she
pleased, however eccentric her conduct might appear, provided it was
not mischievous. It is the contrary assumption that she must not do
anything that she is not expressly licensed to do, like a child who
must come to its mother and ask leave to do anything that is not in the
daily routine, that destroys liberty. There is in British human nature,
and I daresay in human nature in general, a very strong vein of pure
inhibitiveness. Never forget the children in Punch, who, discussing
how to amuse themselves, decided to find out what the baby was doing
and tell it it mustnt. Forbiddance is an exercise of power; and we
all have a will to personal power which conflicts with the will to
social freedom. It is right that it should be jealously resisted when
it leads to acts of irresponsible tyranny. But when all is said, the
people who shout for freedom without understanding its limitations, and
call Socialism or any other advance in civilization slavery because it
involves new laws as well as new liberties, are as obstructive to the
extension of leisure and liberty as the more numerous victims of the
Inhibition Complex who, if they could, would handcuff everybody rather
than face the risk of having their noses punched by somebody.




70

RENT OF ABILITY


Having cleared up the Liberty question by a digression (which must
have been a relief) from the contemplation of capital running away
with us, perhaps another digression on the equally confused question
of the differences in ability between one person and another may not
be out of place; for the same people who are in a continual scare
about losing the liberty which they have mostly not got are usually
much troubled about these differences. Years ago I wrote a small book
entitled Socialism and Superior Brains which I need not repeat here,
as it is still accessible. It was a reply to the late William Hurrell
Mallock, who took it as a matter of course, apparently, that the proper
use of cleverness in this world is to take advantage of stupid people
to obtain a larger share than they of the nation’s income. Rascally
as this notion is, it is too common to be ignored. The proper social
use of brains is to increase the amount of wealth to be divided, not
to grab an unfair share of it; and one of the most difficult of our
police problems is to prevent this grabbing, because it is a principle
of Capitalism that everyone shall use not only her land and capital,
but her cunning, to obtain as much money for herself as possible.
Capitalism indeed compels her to do so by making no other provision for
the clever ones than what they can make out of their cleverness.

Let us begin by taking the examples which delight and dazzle us: that
is, the possessors of some lucrative personal talent. A lady with a
wonderful voice can hire a concert room to sing in, and admit nobody
who does not pay her. A gentleman able to paint a popular picture can
hang it in a gallery with a turnstile at the door, passable only on
payment. A surgeon who has mastered a dangerous operation can say to
his patient, in effect, “Your money or your life”. Giants, midgets,
Siamese twins, and two-headed singers exhibit themselves for money as
monsters. Attractive ladies receive presents enough to make them richer
than their plainer or more scrupulous neighbors. So do fascinating male
dancing partners. Popular actresses sometimes insist on being pampered
and allowed to commit all sorts of follies and extravagances on the
ground that they cannot keep up their peculiar charm without them; and
the public countenances their exactions fondly.

These cases need not worry us. They are very scarce: indeed if they
became common their power to enrich would vanish. They do not confer
either industrial power or political privilege. The world is not ruled
by prima donnas and painters, two-headed nightingales and surgical
baronets, as it is by financiers and industrial organizers. Geniuses
and monsters may make a great deal of money; but they have to work
for it: I myself, through the accident of a lucrative talent, have
sometimes made more than a hundred times as much money in a year as
my father ever did; but he, as an employer, had more power over the
lives of others than I. A practical political career would stop my
professional career at once. It is true that I or any other possessor
of a lucrative talent or charm can buy land and industrial incomes with
our spare money, and thus become landlords and capitalists. But if that
resource were cut off, by Socialism or any other change in the general
constitution of society, I doubt whether anyone would grudge us our
extra spending money. An attempt by the Government to tax it so as to
reduce us to the level of ordinary mortals would probably be highly
unpopular, because the pleasure we give is delightful and widespread,
whilst the harm we do by our conceit and tantrums and jealousies and
spoiltness is narrowly limited to the unfortunate few who are in
personal contact with us. A prima donna with a rope of pearls ten feet
long and a coronet of Kohinoors does not make life any worse for the
girl with a string of beads who, by buying a five shilling ticket,
helps to pay for the pearls: she makes it better by enchanting it.

Besides, we know by our own experience, not only of prima donnas but
of commercial millionaires, that regular daily personal expenditure
cannot be carried beyond that of the richest class to be found in
the community. Persons richer than that, like Cecil Rhodes, Andrew
Carnegie, and Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite (to name only the
dead), cannot spend their incomes, and are forced to give away money
in millions for galleries and museums which they fill with magnificent
collections and then leave to the public, or for universities, or
churches, or prizes, or scholarships, or any sort of public object that
appeals to them. If equality of income were general, a freak income
here and there would not enable its possessor to live differently from
the rest. A popular soprano might be able to fill the Albert Hall for
100 nights in succession at a guinea a head for admission; but she
could not obtain a lady’s maid unless ladies’ maids were a social
institution. Nor could she leave a farthing to her children unless
inheritance were a social institution, nor buy an unearned and as yet
unproduced income for them unless Capitalism were a social institution.
Thus, though it is always quite easy for a Government to checkmate
any attempt of an individual to become richer than her neighbors by
supertaxing her or directly prohibiting her methods, it is unlikely
that it will ever be worth while to do so where the method is the
exercise of a popular personal talent.

But when we come to that particular talent which makes its money out
of the exercise of other people’s talents, the case becomes gravely
different. To allow Cleopatra to make money out of her charms is one
thing: to allow a trader to become enormously rich by engaging five
hundred Cleopatras at ten pounds a week or less, and hiring them
out at ten pounds a day or more, is quite another. We may forgive a
burglar in our admiration of his skill and nerve; but for the fence
who makes money by purchasing the burglar’s booty at a tenth of its
value it is impossible to feel any sympathy. When we come to reputable
women and honest men we find that they are exploited in the same way.
Civilization makes matters worse in this respect, because civilization
means division of labor. Remember the pin makers and pin machines. In a
primitive condition of society the maker of an article saves the money
to buy the materials, selects them, purchases them, and, having made
the article out of these materials, sells it to the user or consumer.
Today the raising of the money to buy the materials is a separate
business; the selection and purchasing is another separate business;
the making is divided between several workers or else done by a machine
tended by a young person; and the marketing is yet another separate
business. Indeed it is much more complicated than that, because the
separate businesses of buying materials and marketing products are
themselves divided into several separate businesses; so that between
the origin of the product in raw material from the hand of Nature
and its final sale across the counter to you there may be dozens of
middlemen, of whom you complain because they each take a toll which
raises the price to you, and it is impossible for you to find out how
many of them are really necessary agents in the process and how many
mere intercepters and parasites.

The same complication is found in that large part of the world’s work
which consists, not in making things, but in service. The woman who
once took the wool that her husband had just shorn from their sheep,
and with her own hands transformed it into a garment and sold it to the
wearer, or clothed her family with it, is now replaced by a financier,
a shipper, a woolbroker, a weaving mill, a wholesaler, a shopkeeper,
a shop assistant, and Heaven knows how many others besides, each able
to do her own bit of the process but ignorant of the other bits, and
unable to do even her own bit until all the others are doing their bits
at the same time. Any one of them without the others would be like an
artillery man without a cannon or a shop assistant with nothing to sell.

Now if you go through all these indispensable parties to any industry
or service, you will come on our question of exceptional ability in
its most pressing and dangerous form. You will find, for instance,
that whereas any ablebodied normal woman can be trained to become a
competent shop assistant, or a shorthand typist and operator of a
calculating machine (arithmetic is done by machines nowadays), or
a factory hand, or a teacher, hardly five out of every hundred can
manage a business or administer an estate or handle a large capital.
The number of persons who can do what they are told is always greatly
in excess of the number who can tell others what to do. If an educated
woman asks for more than four or five pounds a week in business, nobody
asks whether she is a good woman or a bad one: the question is, is
there a post for her in which she will have to make decisions, and if
so, can she be trusted to make them. If the answer is yes, she will be
paid more than a living wage: if not, no.

Even when there is no room for original decisions, and there is nothing
to do but keep other people hard at their allotted work, and maintain
discipline generally, the ability to do this is an exceptional gift
and has a special value. It may be nothing more admirable than the
result of a combination of brute energy with an unamiable indifference
to the feelings of others; but its value is unquestionable: it makes
its possessor a forewoman or foreman in a factory, a wardress in a
prison, a matron in an institution, a sergeant in the army, a mistress
in a school, and the like. Both the managing people and the mere
disciplinarians may be, and often are, heartily detested; but they are
so necessary that any body of ordinary persons left without what they
call superiors, will immediately elect them. A crew of pirates, subject
to no laws except the laws of nature, will elect a boatswain to order
them about and a captain to lead them and navigate the ship, though
the one may be the most insufferable bully and the other the most
tyrannical scoundrel on board. In the revolutionary army of Napoleon
an expeditionary troop of dragoons, commanded by an officer who became
terrified and shammed illness, insisted on the youngest of their
number, a boy of sixteen, taking command, because he was an aristocrat,
and they were accustomed to make aristocrats think for them. He
afterwards became General Marbot: you will find the incident recorded
in his memoirs. Every woman knows that the most strongminded woman in
the house can set up a domestic tyranny which is sometimes a reign of
terror. Without directors most of us would be like riderless horses in
a crowded street. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, though a very clever
man, had the amiable trait in his character of an intense dislike to
coercion. He could not bring himself even to coerce his horse; and the
result was that he had to sell it and go on foot, because the horse,
uncoerced, could do nothing but stop and graze. Tolstoy, equally a
professed humanitarian, tamed and managed the wildest horses; but he
did it by the usual method of making things unpleasant for the horse
until it obeyed him.

However, horses and human beings are alike in that they very seldom
object to be directed: they are usually only too glad to be saved
the trouble of thinking and planning for themselves. Ungovernable
people are the exception and not the rule. When authority is abused
and subordination made humiliating, both are resented; and anything
from a mutiny to a revolution may ensue; but there is no instance on
record of a beneficially and tactfully exercised authority provoking
any reaction. Our mental laziness is a guarantee of our docility:
the mother who says “How dare you go out without asking my leave?”
presently finds herself exclaiming “Why cant you think for yourself
instead of running to me for everything?” But she would be greatly
astonished if a rude motor car manufacturer said to her, “Why cant you
make a car for yourself instead of running to me for it?”

I am myself by profession what is called an original thinker, my
business being to question and test all the established creeds and
codes to see how far they are still valid and how far worn out or
superseded, and even to draft new creeds and codes. But creeds and
codes are only two out of the hundreds of useful articles that make
for a good life. All the other articles I have to take as they are
offered to me on the authority of those who understand them; so that
though many people who cannot bear to have an established creed or
code questioned regard me as a dangerous revolutionary and a most
insubordinate fellow, I have to be in most matters as docile a creature
as you could desire to meet. When a railway porter directs me to
number ten platform I do not strike him to earth with a shout of “Down
with tyranny!” and rush violently to number one platform. I accept
his direction because I want to be directed, and want to get into the
right train. No doubt if the porter bullied and abused me, and I, after
submitting to this, found that my train really started from number
seven platform and that the number ten train landed me in Portsmouth
when my proper destination was Birmingham, I should rise up against
that porter and do what I could to contrive his downfall; but if he
had been reasonably civil and had directed me aright I should rally
to his defence if any attempt were made to depose him. I have to be
housekept-for, nursed, doctored, and generally treated like a child
in all sorts of situations in which I do not know what to do; and far
from resenting such tutelage I am only too glad to avail myself of it.
The first time I was ever in one of those electric lifts which the
passengers work for themselves instead of being taken up and down by a
conductor pulling at a rope, I almost cried, and was immensely relieved
when I stepped out alive.

You may think I am wandering from our point; but I know too well by
experience that there is likely to be at the back of your mind a notion
that it is in our nature to resent authority and subordination as such,
and that only an unpopular and stern coercion can maintain them. Have
I not indeed just been impressing on you that the miseries of the
world today are due in great part to our objection, not merely to bad
government, but to being governed at all? But you must distinguish.
It is true that we dislike being interfered with, and want to do as
we like when we know what to do, or think we know. But when there is
something that obviously must be done, and only five in every hundred
of us know how to do it, then the odd ninetyfive will not merely be
led by the five: they will clamor to be led, and will, if necessary,
kill anyone who obstructs the leaders. That is why it is so easy for
ambitious humbugs to get accepted as leaders. No doubt competent
leadership may be made unpopular by bad manners and pretension to
general superiority; and subordination may be made intolerable by
humiliation. Leaders who produce these results should be ruthlessly
cashiered, no matter how competent they are in other respects, because
they destroy self-respect and happiness, and create a dangerous
resentment complex which reduces the competence and upsets the tempers
of those whom they lead. But you may take it as certain that authority
and subordination in themselves are never unpopular, and can be trusted
to re-establish themselves after the most violent social convulsion.
What is to be feared is less their overthrow than the idolization of
those who exercise authority successfully. Nelson was idolized by his
seamen; Lenin was buried as a saint by revolutionary Russia; Signor
Mussolini is adored in Italy as The Leader (Il Duce); but no anarchist
preaching resistance to authority as such has ever been popular or ever
will be.

Now it is unfortunately one of the worst vices of the Capitalist system
that it destroys the social equality that is indispensable to natural
authority and subordination. The very word subordination, which is
properly co-ordination, betrays this perversion. Under it directing
ability is sold in the market like fish; and, like sturgeon, it is dear
because it is scarce. By paying the director more than the directee
it creates a difference of class between them; and the difference
of class immediately changes a direction or command which naturally
would not only not be resented but desired and begged for, into an
assertion of class superiority which is fiercely resented. “Who are you
that you should order me about? I am as good as you”, is an outburst
that never occurs when Colonel Smith gives an order to Lieutenant the
Duke of Tencounties. But it very often rises to the lips of Mrs Hicks
(though she may leave it unspoken out of natural politeness or fear
of consequences), who lives in a slum, when she receives from Mrs
Huntingdon Howard, who lives in a square, an order, however helpful to
her, given in a manner which emphasizes, and is meant to emphasize, the
lady’s conviction that Mrs Hicks is an inferior sort of animal. And Mrs
Howard sometimes feels, when Lady Billionham refuses to know her, that
Lord Billionham’s rank is but the guinea’s stamp: her man Huntingdon’s
the gowd for a’ that. Nothing would please her better than to take
her super-incomed neighbor down a peg. Whereas if Mrs Hicks and Mrs
Huntingdon Howard and Lady Billionham all had equal incomes, and their
children could intermarry without derogation, they would never dream
of quarrelling because they (or their husbands) could tell oneanother
what to do when they did not know themselves. To be told what to do is
to escape responsibility for its consequences; and those who fear any
dislike of such telling between equals know little of human nature.

The worst of it is that Capitalism produces a class of persons so
degraded by their miserable circumstances that they are incapable of
responding to an order civilly given, and have to be fiercely scolded
or cursed and kicked before any work can be got out of them; and these
poor wretches in turn produce a class of slavedrivers who know no other
methods of maintaining discipline. The only remedy is not to produce
such people. They are abortions produced by poverty, and will disappear
with it.

Reluctance to command is a more serious difficulty. When a couple of
soldiers are sent on any duty one of them must be made a corporal for
the occasion, as there must be someone to make the decisions and be
responsible for them. Usually both men object: each trying to shove the
burden on to the other. When they differ in this respect the Platonic
rule is to choose the reluctant man, as the probability is that the
ambitious one is a conceited fool who does not feel the responsibility
because he does not understand it. This kind of reluctance cannot be
overcome by extra pay. It may be overcome by simple coercion, as in
the case of common jurors. If you are a direct ratepayer you may find
yourself at any moment summoned to serve on a jury and make decisions
involving the disgrace or vindication, the imprisonment or freedom,
the life or death of your fellowcreatures, as well as to maintain the
rights of the jury against the continual tendency of the Bench to
dictate its decisions. You are not paid to do this: you are forced to
do it, just as men were formerly pressed into the navy or forced to sit
in Parliament against their will and that of their constituents.

But though in the last resort coercion remains available as a means of
compelling citizens to undertake duties from which they shrink, it is
found in practice that fitness for special kinds of work carries with
it a desire to exercise it, even at serious material disadvantages.
Mozart could have made much more money as a valet than he did as the
greatest composer of his time, and indeed one of the greatest composers
of all time; nevertheless he chose to be a composer and not a valet.
He knew that he would be a bad valet, and believed that he could be
a good composer; and this outweighed all money considerations with
him. When Napoleon was a subaltern he was by no means a success. When
Nelson was a captain he was found so unsatisfactory that he was left
without a ship on half pay for several years. But Napoleon was a great
general and Nelson a great admiral; and I have not the smallest doubt,
nor probably have you, that if Napoleon and Nelson had been forced to
choose between being respectively a drummer boy and a cabin boy and
being a general and an admiral for the same money, they would have
chosen the job in which their genius had full scope. They would even
have accepted less money if they could have secured their proper job
in no other way. Have we not already noted, in Chapter 6, how the
capitalist system leaves men of extraordinary and beneficent talent,
poor whilst making nonentities and greedy money hunters absurdly rich?

Let us therefore dismiss the fear that persons of exceptional ability
need special inducements to exercise that ability to the utmost.
Experience proves that even the most severe discouragements and
punishments cannot restrain them from trying to do so. Let us return to
the real social problem: that of preventing them from taking advantage
of the vital necessity and relative scarcity of certain kinds of
ability to extort excessive incomes.

In socialized services no difficulty arises. The civil servant, the
judge, the navy captain, the field marshal, the archbishop, however
extraordinary able, gets no more than any routineer of his rank and
seniority. A real gentleman is not supposed to sell himself to the
highest bidder: he asks his country for a sufficient provision and a
dignified position in return for the best work he can do for it. A
real lady can say no less. But in capitalist commerce they are both
forced to be cads: that is, to hold up to ransom those to whom their
services are indispensable, and become rich at their expense. The mere
disciplinarian cannot extort very much because disciplinarians of one
sort or another are not very scarce. But the organizer and financier
is in a strong position. The owner of a big business, if his employees
ask for anything more than a subsistence wage as their share of its
product, can always say “Well, if you are not satisfied, take the
business and work it yourself without me”. This they are unable to do.
The Trade Union to which his employees belong may be tempted to take
him at his word; but it soon finds itself unable to carry on, that sort
of management not being its job. He says in effect, and often in so
many words, “You cannot do without me; so you must work on my terms”.
They reply with perfect truth “Neither can you do without us: let us
see you organize without any workers to organize”. But he beats them;
and the reason is not that he can do without them any more than they
can do without him (or her), but that his bargain for the use of his
ability is not really made with them but with the landlords whose land
he is using and the capitalists who have lent him the capital for his
enterprise. It is to them that he can say unanswerably “You cannot
do without me”. They may say “Yes we can. We can tell the workers
that unless they give up everything they can make out of our land
and capital to us except what is enough to keep them alive and renew
themselves from generation to generation they shall starve; because
they cannot produce without land and capital, and we own all there
is available of both”. “That is true” retorts the able organizer and
financier; “but please to remember that without an elaborate scientific
organization of their labor they can produce no more than a mob of
allotment holders, or of serfs on a tenth century manor, whereas if
I organize them for you industrially and financially I can multiply
their product a thousandfold. Even if you have to pay me a large
share of the increase due to my ability you are still far richer than
if you did without me.” And to this there is no reply. In this way
there arises under Capitalism not only a rent of land and a rent of
capital (called interest), but a rent of ability (called profit); and
just as in order to secure equality of income it becomes necessary to
nationalize land and capital, so it becomes necessary to nationalize
ability. We already do this in part by taxing profits. But we do it
completely only when, as in the public services, we give it direct
national or municipal employment.

Note that rent of ability is a form of rent of labor. Rent is a word
that it is very necessary to understand, and that very few people
do understand: they think it is only what they have to pay to their
landlord. But technically rent is a price that arises whenever there
are differences in the yield of any particular source of wealth. When
there is a natural difference between the yield of one field and
another, or one coal-mine and another, or between the advantages of
one building site and another, people will pay more for the better
than for the worse; and that extra price is rent. Similarly, when
there is a difference between the business ability of one person and
another, the price of that difference is rent. You cannot abolish
rent, because you cannot abolish the natural difference between one
cornfield and another, one coal-field and another, or one person and
another; but you can nationalize it by nationalizing the land, the
mines, and the labor of the country either directly or by national
appropriation of their product by taxation, as to which latter method,
as we have seen, there are limits. Until this is done, rent of ability
in profiteering will make its possessors rich enough to make their
children idle landlords and capitalists and destroy economic equality.
Great astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers,
explorers, discoverers, teachers, preachers, sociologists, and saints
may be so poor that their wives are worn-out in a constant struggle
to keep up appearances and make both ends meet; but the business
organizers pile millions on millions whilst their unfortunate daughters
carry about diamonds and sables to advertize their parent’s riches,
and drink cocktails until they feel so bad inside that they pay large
sums to surgeons to cut them open and find out what is the matter with
them. If you reproach these organizers for their inordinate gains, they
tell you--or they would tell you if they understood their own position
and could express it intelligibly--that every penny they make is made
by making money for other people as well; that before they can spend
a farthing on themselves they must provide rent for the landlord,
interest for the capitalist, and wages for the proletarian on a scale
that would be impossible without them; and that England can support
five times the number of people she could a hundred years ago because
her industries are better organized and more amply financed by them
and their like. This is true; but you need not be abashed by it; for
which of us has not to provide rent for the landlord, interest for the
capitalist, and wages for the laborer before we can spend a penny on
ourselves? And why should the organizer and financier be paid more for
the exercise of his particular faculty than we who have to co-operate
with him by the exercise of our particular faculties before he can
produce a loaf of bread or a glass of milk? It is not natural necessity
but the capitalist system that enables him to snatch more than his
fellow workers from the welter of competitive commerce; and while this
lasts we shall have the financier’s daughter saying to the scavenger’s
daughter “What would your common dirty father do without my father, who
is going to be made a lord?” and the scavenger’s daughter retorting
“What would your greedy robber of a father do if my father did not keep
the streets clean for him?” Of course you have never heard a lady or
a young person talk like that. And probably you never will. They are
too polite and too thoughtless to discuss their father’s positions.
Besides, they never speak to oneanother. But if they did, and anything
upset their tempers, their last words before they came to blows would
be just those which I have imagined. If you doubt it, read what the
capitalist papers say about Trade Unionists and Socialists, and what
the proletarian papers say about landlords and capitalists and bosses.
Do you suppose that the charwoman, who has worked in her own necessary
way all her life as hard as or harder than any financier, and in the
end has nothing to leave to her daughter but her pail and scrubbing
brush, really believes, or ever will believe, that Lady Billionham,
inheriting a colossal income from her father the financier, has any
moral right to her money? Or, if your father had discovered and worked
out the theory of relativity, and was acknowledged throughout the
world to have the greatest mind since Newton’s, would you consider it
morally satisfactory to be obliged to jump at an offer of marriage from
a Chicago pork king to enable your illustrious parent to have more
than one presentable suit of clothes, knowing all the time that if
it had not been for the work of men like your father in pure science
not a wheel in the whole vast machinery of modern production would
be turning, nor a bagman be able to travel faster than Marco Polo?
Privately appropriated rent, whether of land, capital, or ability,
makes bad blood; and it is of bad blood that civilizations die. That
it is why it is our urgent business to see that Lord Billionham gets
no more than Einstein, and neither of them more than the charwoman.
You cannot equalize their abilities, but fortunately you can equalize
their incomes. Billionham’s half-crown is as good as Einstein’s
two-and-sixpence; and the charwoman’s thirty pennies will buy as much
bread as either. Equalize them in that respect, and their sons and
daughters will be intermarriageable, which will be a very good thing
for them, and lead to an enormous improvement of our human stock, the
quality of which is the most important thing in the world.




71

PARTY POLITICS


You are now in possession of enough knowledge of Socialism and
Capitalism to enable you to understand what is going on in the world
industrially and politically. I shall not advise you to discuss these
matters with your friends. They would listen in distressed silence and
then tell the neighborhood that you are what they imagine a Bolshevik
to be.

It is possible, however, that you may be interested in current party
politics yourself, even to the extent of attending party meetings,
applauding party candidates, canvassing for party votes, and
experiencing all the emotions of party enthusiasm, party loyalty, and
party conviction that the other party and its candidate are enemies of
the human race. In that case I must give you a warning.

Do not rush to the conclusion that Socialism will be established by
a Socialist party and opposed by an anti-Socialist party. Within my
lifetime I have seen the Conservatives, when in opposition, vehemently
opposing and denouncing a measure proposed by the Liberals, and,
when they had defeated the Liberals and come into power, pass that
very measure themselves in a rather more advanced form. And I have
seen the Liberals do the same, and this, too, not in matters of no
great consequences, but in such far-reaching social changes as Free
Trade, the enfranchisement of the working classes, the democratization
of local government, and the buying-out of the Irish landlords.
The Spanish lady in Byron’s poem, who, “swearing she would ne’er
consent, consented”, was a model of consistency compared to our party
governments. We have at present a Capitalist party opposed by a Labor
party; but it is quite possible that all the legislative steps towards
Socialism will be taken when the anti-Socialist party is in power,
and pretty certain that at least half of them will. When they are
proposed by a Capitalist Government they will be opposed by the Labor
Opposition, and when they are proposed by a Labor Government they will
be opposed by the Capitalist Opposition, because “it is the business of
an Opposition to oppose”.

There is another possibility which may disappoint your expectation.
The Labor Party is growing rapidly. Twenty years ago it did not exist
officially in Parliament. Today it is the official Opposition. If it
continues to grow at this rate the time is not very far off when it
will take practically complete possession of the House of Commons. The
Conservatives and Liberals left will, even in coalition, be too few to
constitute an effective Opposition, much less form a Government. But
beware of assuming that the result will be a unanimous House of Commons
with an unopposed Labor Government carrying everything before it. Do
not even assume that the Labor Party will split into two parties, one
Conservative and the other Progressive. That would be the happiest of
the possibilities. The danger is that it may split into half a dozen or
more irreconcilable groups, making parliamentary government impossible.
That is what happened in the Long Parliament in the seventeenth
century, when men were just what they are now, except that they had no
telephones nor airplanes. The Long Parliament was united at first by
its opposition to the King. But when it cut off the King’s head, it
immediately became so disunited that Cromwell, like Signor Mussolini
today, had at last to suppress its dissensions by military force, and
rule more despotically than ever the King had dared. When Cromwell
died, it reassembled and split up again worse than ever, bringing about
such a hopeless deadlock in government that there was no way out of
the mess but to send for the dead King’s son and use him, under his
father’s title, as the figurehead of a plutocratic oligarchy exercising
all the old kingly powers and greatly extending them.

If six hundred Labor members were returned at the next General
Election history might repeat itself. The Socialists, the Trade
Unionists who are not Socialists, the Communists who are not
Communists but only pseudo-Bolshevists, the Republicans, the
Constitutional-Monarchists, the old Parliamentary hands who are pure
Opportunists, and the uncompromising Idealists, to say nothing of the
Churchmen and Anti-clericals (Episcopalians and Separatists), the
Deists and Atheists, would come to loggerheads at once. As far as I
can see, nothing could avert a repetition of the seventeenth century
catastrophe, or the modern Italian and Spanish ones, except a solid
Socialist majority of members who really know what Socialism means
and are prepared to subordinate all their traditional political and
religious differences to its establishment. Unfortunately most of the
people who call themselves Socialists at present do not know what
Socialism means, and attach its name to all sorts of fads and faiths
and resentments and follies that have nothing to do with it. A Labor
electoral triumph may end either in another Cromwell or Napoleon III
or Mussolini or General Primo di Rivera if there happens to be one at
hand, or in the passing of power to any party that is solid enough to
keep together and vote together, even though its solidarity be the
solidarity of sheepish stupidity or panic-stricken retreat. Stupidity
and cowardice never lose this advantage. You must have noticed among
your acquaintances that the very conventional ones have all the
same old opinions, and are quite impervious to new ones, whilst the
unconventional ones are all over the shop with all sorts of opinions,
and disagree with and despise oneanother furiously. That is why, though
all progress depends on the unconventional people who want to change
things, they have so little influence politically. They pull hard; but
they do not pull together; and they pull in different directions. The
people whom in your moments of impatience with their dullness you call
stick-in-the-muds either pull all together and in the same direction
(generally backwards), or, more formidably still, stand together solid
and foursquare, refusing to move in any direction. Against stupidity,
said Schiller, the gods themselves fight in vain. Long before Schiller,
Solomon said “Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a
fool in his folly”. They were both right.

Yet it is a mistake to vote for stupidity on the ground that
stupid people do not quarrel among themselves. Within the limits
of their conservatism they quarrel more irreconcilably, because
more unreasonably, than comparatively clever people. That is why we
call them pigheaded. If six hundred of them were returned at the
next General Election, so that they had no longer anything to fear
from Labor or Liberalism or any other section, it would be just as
impossible to keep them together as if they were proletarians. In 1924
the country was stampeded by a ridiculous anti-Russian scare into
returning anti-Socialists in a majority of more than two to one. The
result was, not a very solid Government, but a very fragmentary one. It
soon split up into reckless Diehard Coercionists, timid Compromisers,
cautious Opportunists, Low Church Protestants, Anglican Catholics,
Protectionists from the Midlands, Free Traders from the ports, country
gentlemen, city bosses, Imperialists, Little Englanders, innocents
who think that Trade Unions ought to be exterminated like nests of
vipers, and practical business men who know that big business could
not be carried on without them, advocates of high expenditure on the
fighting forces as Empire Insurance, blind resisters of taxation as
such, Inflationists, Gold Bugs, High Tories who would have Government
authority and interference everywhere, Laisser-faire doctrinaires who
would suffer it as nearly as possible nowhere, and Heaven knows how
many others, all pulling the Cabinet different ways, paralyzing it and
neutralizing oneanother, whilst the runaway car of Capitalism kept
rushing them into new places and dangerous situations all the time.

During the first half of my own lifetime: that is, during the latter
half of the nineteenth century, the Conservative and Liberal parties
were much more equally balanced than at present. The Governments were
on their good behavior because their majorities were narrow. The House
of Commons was then respected and powerful. With the South African
war a period of large majorities set in. Immediately the House of
Commons began to fall into something very like contempt in comparison
with its previous standing. The majorities were so large that every
Government felt that it could do what it liked. That quaint conscience
which was invented by English statesmen to keep themselves honest,
and called by everybody Public Opinion, was overthrown as an idol,
and the ignorance, forgetfulness, and follies of the electorate were
traded on cynically until the few thinkers who read the speeches of
the political leaders and could remember for longer than a week the
pledges and statements they contained, were amazed and scandalized
at the audacity with which the people were humbugged. The specific
preparations for war with Germany were concealed, and finally, when
suspicion became acute, denied; and when at last we floundered into
the horror of 1914-18, which left the English Church disgraced, and
the great European empires shattered into struggling Republics (the
very last thing that the contrivers of the war intended), the world
had lost faith in parliamentary government to such an extent that it
was suspended and replaced by dictatorship in Italy, Spain, and Russia
without provoking any general democratic protest beyond a weary shrug
of the shoulders. The old parliamentary democrats were accomplished and
endless talkers; but their unreal theory that nothing political must be
done until it was understood and demanded by a majority of the people
(which meant in effect that nothing political must ever be done at all)
had disabled them as men of action; and when casual bodies of impatient
and irresponsible proletarian men of action attempted to break up
Capitalism without knowing how to do it, or appreciating the nature and
necessity of government, a temper spread in which it was possible for
Signor Mussolini to be made absolute managing director (Dictator or
Duce) of the Italian nation as its savior from parliamentary impotence
and democratic indiscipline.

Socialism, however, cannot perish in these political storms and
changes. Socialists have courted Democracy, and even called Socialism
Social-Democracy to proclaim that the two are inseparable. They might
just as plausibly argue that the two are incompatible. Socialism is
committed neither way. It faces Caesars and Soviets, Presidents and
Patriarchs, British Cabinets and Italian Dictators or Popes, patrician
oligarchs and plebeian demagogues, with its unshaken demonstration
that they cannot have a stable and prosperous State without equality
of income. They may plead that such equality is ridiculous. That will
not save them from the consequences of inequality. They must equate or
perish. The despot who values his head and the crowd that fears for its
liberty are equally concerned. I should call Socialism not Democratic
but simply Catholic if that name had not been taken in vain so often by
so many Churches that nobody would understand me.




72

THE PARTY SYSTEM


Our Party System does not mean, as many people suppose, that
differences of opinion always divide human beings into parties. Such
differences existed ages before the Party System was ever dreamt of.

What it means is that our monarchs, instead of choosing whom they
please to advise them as Cabinet Ministers in ruling the realm (to form
a Government, as we say), must choose them all from whatever party has
a majority in the House of Commons, however much they may dislike them
or mistrust their ability, or however obvious it may be that a more
talented Cabinet could be formed by selecting the ablest men from both
parties.

This system carries with it some quaint consequences. Not only must
the King appoint to high offices persons whom he may privately regard
as disastrous noodles, or whose political and religious principles
he may abhor: the ordinary member of Parliament and the common voter
are placed in a similar predicament, because every vote given in the
House or at a parliamentary election becomes a vote on the question
whether the Party in office is to remain there or not. For instance,
a Bill is introduced by the Government to allow women to vote at
the same age as men, or to put a tax on bachelors, or to institute
pensions for widowed mothers, or to build ten more battleships, or to
abolish or extend divorce, or to raise the age for compulsory school
attendance, or to increase or diminish taxation, or anything else you
please. Suppose this Bill is brought in by a Conservative Government,
and you are a Conservative member of Parliament! You may think it a
most detestable and mischievous Bill. But if you vote against it, and
the Bill is thrown out, the Conservative Government will no longer be
in a majority, or, as we say, it will no longer possess the confidence
of the House. Therefore it must go to the King and resign, whereupon
the King will dissolve Parliament; and there will be a General Election
at which you will have to stand again (which will cost you a good deal
of money and perhaps end in your defeat) before anything else can be
done. Now if you are a good Conservative you always feel that however
much you may dislike this Bill or that Bill, yet its passing into law
would be a less evil than an overthrow of the Conservative Government,
and the possible accession to power of the Labor Party. Therefore you
swallow the Bill with a wry face, and vote just as the Government Whips
tell you to, flatly against your convictions.

But suppose you are a member of the Labor Party instead, and think the
Bill a good one. Then you are in the same fix: you must vote against it
and against your convictions, because however good you may think the
Bill, you think that a defeat of the Government and a chance for the
Labor Party to return to power would be still better. Besides, if the
Bill is good, the Labor Party can bring it in again and pass it when
Labor wins a majority.

If you are only a voter you are caught in the same cleft stick. It
may be plain to you that the candidate of your Party is a political
imbecile, a pompous snob, a vulgar ranter, a conceited self-seeker,
or anything else that you dislike, and his opponent an honest,
intelligent, public-spirited person. No matter: you must vote for the
Party candidate, because, if you do not, your Party may be defeated,
and the other Party come into power. And, anyhow, however disagreeable
your candidate may be personally, when he gets into the House he will
have to vote as the Party Whips tell him to; so his personal qualities
do not matter.

The advantage of this system is that a House of Commons consisting of
about a dozen capable ministers and their opponents: say twenty-five
effectives all told, and 590 idiots with just enough intelligence to
walk into the lobby pointed out to them by the Whips and give their
names at the door, can carry on the government of the country quite
smoothly, when 615 independents, with opinions and convictions of their
own, voting according to those opinions and convictions, would make
party government impossible. It was not, however, on this ground that
the party system was introduced, though it has a great deal to do with
its maintenance. It was introduced because our Dutch king William the
Third, of glorious, pious, and immortal memory, discovered that he
could not fight the French king, Louis XIV, _le Roi Soleil_, with a
House of Commons refusing him supplies and reducing the army just as
each member thought fit. A clever statesman of that time named Robert
Spencer, second Earl of Sunderland, pointed out to him that if he chose
his ministers always from the strongest party in the House of Commons,
which happened just then to be the Whig party, that party would have
to back him through the war and make its followers do the same, just
as I have described. King William hated the Whigs, being a strong Tory
himself; and he did not like Sunderland’s advice. But he took it, and
thereby set up the Party System under which we are ruled.

Is there any practicable alternative to the Party System? Suppose,
for instance, that there was a general revolt against being compelled
to vote for dummies and nincompoops, and that independent candidates
became so popular that all party candidates were defeated by them, or,
if you think that is going too far, suppose independent candidates
returned in such numbers that they could defeat any Government by
casting their votes in the House against it, like the old Irish
Nationalist Party! Such a revolt already exists and always will exist.
The upshot of the General Elections is determined, not by the voters
who always vote for their party right or wrong, but by a floating
body of independent electors who vote according to their interests
and preferences, and often support one party at one election and the
opposite party at the next. It is these unattached people who win the
odd trick which decides which party shall govern. They either know
nothing about the Party System, or snap their fingers at it and vote
just as they please. It is probable that they outnumber the party
voters, and return party members to Parliament only because, as no
others are selected as candidates by the party organizations, there is
seldom any independent candidate to vote for.

It is conceivable that the King might some day find himself confronted
by a House of Commons in which neither party had a majority, the
effective decision resting with members belonging to no party. In
that case His Majesty might appeal in vain to the party leaders to
form a Government. This situation has occurred several times of late
in France, where it has been brought about by the existence in the
French Chamber of so many parties that none of them is in a majority;
so that a leader can form a Government only by inducing several of
these parties to combine for the moment, and thus make what is called a
Block. But this is not always easy; and even when it is accomplished,
and the Blockmaker forms a Government, it is so hard to keep the Block
together that nobody expects it to last for five years, as our party
governments do: its lifetime is anything from a week to six months.
There have been moments lately in France when we did not know from one
day to another who was Prime Minister there, M. Briand, M. Herriot, M.
Painlevé, or M. Poincaré. And what has happened in France may happen
here, either through an overwhelming party majority causing the party
to split up into hostile groups and thus substitute half a dozen
parties, all in a minority, for the two parties which are necessary
to the working of the Party System, or through the return of enough
independent members to make any Party Government dependent on them.
You will therefore be justified if you ask me rather anxiously whether
Parliament can not be worked on some other than the Party System.

As a matter of fact in this country we have, beside the House of
Commons, parliaments all over the place. We have the great city
Corporations, the County Councils, the Borough Councils, the District
Councils, and so on down to the Parish meetings in the villages; and
not one of them is worked on the Party System. They get on quite well
without it. If you mention this, you will be at once contradicted,
because on many of these bodies party feeling is intense. The members
hold party meetings. The elections are fought on party cries. Votes
are taken on party lines, and members of the party which is in the
minority are sometimes excluded from the committee chairmanships,
which are the nearest things to ministerial offices available, though
such exclusion is considered sharp practice if pushed too far. But all
this does not involve the Party System any more than a pot of jam and
a pound of flour constitute a roly-poly pudding. There is no Prime
Minister and no Cabinet. The King does not meddle in the business:
he does not send for the most prominent men and ask them to form a
Government. There is no Government in the House of Commons sense of the
word, though the city or county is nevertheless governed, and often
governed with an efficiency which puts the House of Commons to shame.
Every member can vote as he thinks best without the slightest risk of
throwing his party out of power and bringing on a General Election.
If a motion is defeated, nobody resigns: if it is carried, nobody’s
position is changed. Things are not done in that very puzzling way.

The way they are done is simple enough. The Council is elected for
three years; and until the three years are up there can be no general
election. Its business is conducted by committees: Public Health
Committees, Electric Lighting Committees, Finance Committees, and
so forth. These committees meet separately, and set forth their
conclusions as to what the Council ought to do in their departments in
a series of resolutions. When the whole Council meets, these strings
of resolutions are brought up as the reports of the Committees, and
are confirmed or rejected or amended by the general vote. Many of our
Labor members of the House of Commons have served their parliamentary
apprenticeship on local bodies under this straightforward system.

The two systems, though widely different today, spring from the same
root. Before Sunderland prompted William III to introduce the Party
System, the King used to appoint committees, which were then all
called cabinets, to deal with the different departments of government.
These cabinets were committees of his Council; and in this stage they
were the model of the municipal committees I have just described. The
secretaries of the cabinets, called Secretaries of States, met to
concert their activities. The activities thus concerted formed their
policy; and they themselves, being all cabinet ministers, came to be
called THE Cabinet, after which the word was no longer applied to other
bodies. In politics it now means nothing else, the old cabinets being
called Offices (Home Office, War Office, Foreign Office, etc.), Boards,
Chanceries, Treasuries, or anything except cabinets.

The rigidity of the Party System, as we have seen, depends on the
convention that whenever the Government is defeated on a division
in the House, it must “appeal to the country”: that is, the Cabinet
Ministers must resign their offices, and the King dissolve the
Parliament and have a new one elected. But this leads to such absurd
consequences when the question at issue is unimportant and the vote
taken when many members are absent, and at all times it reduces the
rank and file of the members to such abject voting machines, that if
it were carried out to the bitter end members might as well stay at
home and vote by proxy on postcards to the Whips, as shareholders do
at company meetings. Such slavery is more than even parliamentary
flesh and blood, to say nothing of brains, can stand; consequently
Governments are forced to allow their followers some freedom by
occasionally declaring that the measure under discussion is “not a
Party Question”, and “taking off the Whips”, which means that members
may vote as they please without fear of throwing their Party out of
office and bringing on a General Election. This practice is bound to
grow as members become more independent and therefore more apt to split
up into groups. The tendency already is for Governments to resign only
when they are defeated on an explicit motion that they possess or have
forfeited the confidence of the House, except, of course, when the
division is on one of those cardinal points of policy which, if decided
against the Government, would involve an appeal to the country in any
case. No doubt the Whips will continue to threaten weak-minded members
that the slightest exercise of independence will wreck the Government;
and those whose election expenses are paid out of party funds will
find that when the Party pays the piper the Whips call the tune;
but I think you may take it (in case you should think of going into
Parliament) that the House of Commons is becoming less and less like a
stage on which an opera chorus huddles round a few haughty soloists,
never opening its hundred mouths except to echo these principals and
give them time to breathe. It is already evident that the more women
there are in the House, the more refractory it will be to the logical
extremes of party discipline, and the sooner party questions will
become the exceptions and open questions the rule.

Here, however, I must warn you of another possibility. The two Houses
of Parliament are as much out of date as instruments for carrying
on the public business of a modern community as a pair of horses
for drawing an omnibus. In 1920 two famous Socialist professors of
political science, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, published a Constitution
for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. In that Constitution
the notion of going on with our ancient political machinery at
Westminster is discarded as impracticable, and its present condition
described as one of creeping paralysis. Instead, it is proposed that we
should have two parliaments, one political and the other industrial,
the political one maintaining the cabinet system, and the industrial
one the municipal system. I cannot go into the details of such a change
here: you will find them in the book. I mention it just to prepare you
for such happenings. Certain it is that if our old Westminster engine
is left as it is to cope with the modern developments of Capitalism,
Capitalism will burst it; and then something more adequate must be
devised and set up, whether we like it or not.




73

DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY


You now see how essential it is to the working of our parliamentary
system, under a Labor or any other Government, that the Cabinet should
have a united party behind it, large enough to outvote any other party
in the House. You see also that whereas a party only barely large
enough to do this is held together by the fear of defeat, a party
so large that the whole House belongs to it ceases to be a party at
all, and is sure to split up into groups which have to be combined
into blocks of groups before a Cabinet can be formed and government
effectively carried on. In the nineteenth century we were all sure that
this could never occur. In the twentieth it is as certain as anything
of the kind can be that the Proletariat will extend its present
invasion of Parliament until it achieves in effect complete conquest.
Therefore we had better examine a few questions on which the apparent
unanimity in the Labor Party is quite delusive.

To interest you I am tempted to begin with the question of the virtual
exclusion of women from certain occupations. This morning I received
a letter from the Government College of Lahore in the Punjab which
contains the following words: “The number of people in India speaking
Urdu of one kind or another is about 96,000,000. Out of this number
46,000,000 are women who are mostly in purdah and do not go out.” Now I
dare not tell you, even if I knew, how many members of the Labor Party
believe that the proper place for women is in purdah. There are enough,
anyhow, to start a very pretty fight with those who would remove all
artificial distinctions between men and women. But I must pass over
this because, vital as it is, it will not split the Labor Party more
than it has split the older parties. If men were the chattel slaves
of women in law (as some of them are in fact), or women the chattel
slaves of men in fact (as married women used to be in law), that would
not affect the change from Capitalism to Socialism. Let us confine
ourselves to cases that would affect it.

It is fundamental in Socialism that idleness shall not be tolerated
on any terms. And it is fundamental in Trade Unionism that the worker
shall have the right at any moment to down tools and refuse to do
another stroke until his demands are satisfied. It is impossible to
imagine a flatter contradiction. And the question of the right to
strike is becoming more acute every year. We have seen how the little
businesses have grown into big businesses, and the big businesses into
Trusts that control whole industries. But the Trade Unions have kept up
with this growth. The little unions have grown into big unions; and the
big unions have combined into great federations of unions; consequently
the little strikes have become terribly big strikes. A modern strike
of electricians, a railway strike, or a coal strike can bring these
industries, and dozens of others which depend on them, to a dead stop,
and cause unbearable inconvenience and distress to the whole nation.

To make strikes more effective, a new sort of Trade Union has
developed, called an Industrial Union to distinguish it from the
old Craft Unions. The Craft Union united all the men who lived by a
particular craft or trade: the carpenters, the masons, the tanners
and so on. But there may be men of a dozen different crafts employed
in one modern industry: for instance, the building industry employs
carpenters, masons, bricklayers, joiners, plumbers, slaters, painters,
and various kinds of laborers, to say nothing of the clerical staffs;
and if these are all in separate unions a strike by one of them cannot
produce the effect that a strike of all of them would. Therefore unions
covering the whole industry without regard to craft (Industrial Unions)
have been formed. We now have such bodies as the Transport Workers’
Union and the National Union of Railway Workers, in which workers from
dozens of different trades are combined. They can paralyze the whole
industry by a strike. In the nineteenth century very few strikes or
lock-outs were big enough to be much noticed by the general public.
In the twentieth there have already been several which were national
calamities. The Government has been forced to interfere either by
trying to buy the disputants off with subsidies, or to persuade the
employers and the strikers to come to some agreement. But as the
Government has no power either to force the men to go back to work or
the employers to grant their demands, its intervention is not very
effective, and never succeeds until a great deal of mischief has
been done. It has been driven at last to attempt a limitation of the
magnitude of strikes by an Act of 1927 forbidding “sympathetic” strikes
and lock-outs, lock-outs being included to give the Act an air of fair
play. But as this Act does not forbid the formation of industrial
unions, nor take away the right to strike or lock-out when a grievance
can be established (as of course it always can), it is only a gesture
of impotent rage, useless as a remedy, but significant of the growing
indisposition of the nation to tolerate big strikes. They are civil
wars between Capital and Labor in which the whole country suffers.

The Socialist remedy for this dangerous nuisance is clear. Socialism
would impose compulsory social service on all serviceable citizens,
just as during the war compulsory military service was imposed on all
men of military age. When we are at war nowadays no man is allowed to
plead that he has a thousand a year of his own and need not soldier for
a living. It does not matter if he has fifty thousand: he has to “do
his bit” with the rest. In vain may he urge that he is a gentleman,
and does not want to associate with common soldiers or be classed
with them. If he is not a trained officer he has to become a private,
and possibly find that his sergeant has been his valet, and that his
lieutenant, his major, his colonel, and his brigadier are respectively
his tailor, his bootmaker, his solicitor, and the manager of his
favourite golfing hotel. The penalty of neglect to discharge his duties
precisely and punctually even at the imminent risk of being horribly
wounded or blown to bits, is death. Now the righteousness of military
service is so questionable that the man who conscientiously refuses to
perform it can justify himself by the test proposed by the philosopher
Kant: that is, he can plead that if everybody did the same the world
would be much safer, happier, and better.

A refusal of social service has no such excuse. If everybody refused
to work, nine-tenths of the inhabitants of these islands would be dead
within a month; and the rest would be too weak to bury them before
sharing their fate. It is useless for a lady to plead that she has
enough to live on without work: if she is not producing her own food
and clothing and lodging other people must be producing them for her;
and if she does not perform some equivalent service for them she is
robbing them. It is absurd for her to pretend that she is living on the
savings of her industrious grandmother; for not only is she alleging a
natural impossibility, but there is no reason on earth why she should
be allowed to undo by idleness the good that her grandmother did by
industry. Compulsory social service is so unanswerably right that the
very first duty of a government is to see that everybody works enough
to pay her way and leave something over for the profit of the country
and the improvement of the world. Yet it is the last duty that any
government will face. What governments do at present is to reduce the
mass of the people by armed force to a condition in which they must
work for the capitalists or starve, leaving the capitalists free from
any such obligation, so that capitalists can not only be idle but
produce artificial overpopulation by withdrawing labor from productive
industry and wasting it in coddling their idleness or ministering
to their vanity. This our Capitalist Governments call protecting
property and maintaining personal liberty; but Socialists believe that
property, in that sense, is theft, and that allowable personal liberty
no more includes the right to idle than the right to murder.

Accordingly, we may expect that when a Labor House of Commons is
compelled to deal radically with some crushing national strike,
the Socialists in the Labor Party will declare that the remedy is
Compulsory Social Service for all ablebodied persons. The remnants of
the old parties and the non-Socialist Trade Unionists in the Labor
Party will at once combine against the proposal, and clamor for a
subsidy to buy off the belligerents instead. Subsidy or no subsidy,
the Trade Unionists will refuse to give up the right to strike, even
in socialized industries. The strike is the only weapon a Trade Union
has. The employers will be equally determined to maintain their right
to lock-out. As to the landlords and capitalists, their dismay can
be imagined. They will be far more concerned than the employers and
financiers, because employers and financiers are workers: to have
to work is no hardship to them. But the real ladies and gentlemen,
who know no trade, and have been brought up to associate productive
work with social inferiority, imprisonment in offices and factories,
compulsory early rising, poverty, vulgarity, rude manners, roughness
and dirt and drudgery, would see in compulsory social service the end
of the world for them and their class, as indeed it happily will be,
in a sense. The condition of many of them would be so pitiable (or
at least they would imagine it to be so) that they would have to be
provided with medical certificates of disability until they died out;
for, after all, it is not their fault that they have been brought up to
be idle, extravagant, and useless; and when that way of life (which,
by the way, they often make surprisingly laborious) is abolished, they
may reasonably claim the same consideration as other people whose
occupation is done away with by law. We can afford to be kind to them.

However that may be, it is certain that the useless classes will join
the Trade Unionists in frantic opposition to Compulsory Social Service.
If the Labor ministers, being, as they now mostly are, Socialists,
attempt to bring in a Compulsory Service Bill, they may be defeated
by this combination, in which case there would be a general election
on the question; and at this general election the contest would
not be between the Labor Party and the Capitalists, but between the
Conservative or Trade Unionist wing of the Labor Party, which would
be called the Right, and the Socialist wing, which would be called
the Left. So that even if the present Conservatives be wiped out of
Parliament there may still be two parties contending for power; and the
Intelligent Woman may be canvassed to vote Right or Left, or perhaps
White or Red, just as she is now canvassed to vote Conservative or
Labor.




74

RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS


However, two parties would not hurt the House of Commons, as it is
worked by the division of the members into two sets, one carrying on
the government and the other continually criticizing it and trying to
oust it and become itself the Government. This two-division system
is not really a two-party system in the sense that the two divisions
represent different policies: they may differ about nothing but the
desire for office. From the proletarian point of view the difference
between Liberals and Conservatives since 1832 has been a difference
between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But this did not matter, because
the essence of the arrangement is that the Government shall be
unsparingly and unceasingly criticized by a rival set of politicians
who are determined to pick every possible hole in its proceedings.
Government and Opposition might be called Performance and Criticism,
the performers and critics changing places whenever the country is
convinced that the critics are right and the performers wrong.

The division of the House of Commons into two parties with different
policies suits this situation very well. But its division into half a
dozen parties would not suit it at all, and might, as we have seen,
deadlock parliamentary government altogether. Now there is abundant
material for a dozen parties in the British proletariat. Take the
subject of religion, inextricably bound up with the parliamentary
question of education in public elementary schools. It is unlikely that
a Proletarian House of Commons will suffer the nation’s children to go
on being taught Capitalist and Imperialist morality in the disguise of
religion; and yet, the moment the subject is touched, what a hornet’s
nest is stirred up! Parents are inveterate proselytizers: they take
it as a matter of course that they have a right to dictate their
children’s religion. This right was practically undisputed, unless
the parents were professed atheists, when all children who had any
schooling went either to Biblical private schools or to public schools
and universities where the established religion was the State religion.
Nowadays Unitarian schools, Quaker schools, Roman Catholic schools,
Methodist schools, Theosophist schools, and even Communist schools may
be chosen by parents and guardians (not by the children) to suit their
own private religious eccentricities.

But when schooling is made a national industry, and the Government sets
up schools all over the country, and imposes daily attendance on the
huge majority of children whose parents cannot afford to send their
children to any but the State school, a conflict arises over the souls
of the children. What religion is to be taught in the State school?
The Roman Catholics try to keep their children out of the State school
(they must send them to some school or other) by subscribing money
themselves to maintain Roman Catholic schools alongside the State
schools: and the other denominations, including the Church of England,
do the same. But unless they receive State aid: that is, money provided
by taxing and rating all citizens indiscriminately, they cannot afford
to take in all the children, or to keep up to a decent standard the
schooling of those whom they do take in. And the moment it is proposed
to give them money out of the rates and taxes, the trouble begins.
Rather than pay rates to be used in making Roman Catholics or even
Anglo-Catholics of little English children, Nonconformist Protestant
ratepayers will let themselves be haled before the magistrates and
allow their furniture to be sold up. They would go to the stake if that
were the alternative to paying Peter’s Pence to the Scarlet Woman and
setting children’s feet in the way to eternal damnation. For it is not
in Ireland alone that Protestants and Roman Catholics believe each that
the other will spend eternity immersed in burning brimstone. Church of
England zealots hold that belief even more convincedly about village
Dissenters than about Roman Catholics.

The opinions of the parties are so irreconcilable, and the passion
of their hostility so fierce, that the Government, when it is once
committed to general compulsory education, either directly in its own
schools or by subsidies to other schools, finds itself driven to devise
some sort of neutral religion that will suit everybody, or else forbid
all mention of the subject in school. An example of the first expedient
is the Cowper-Temple clause in the Education Act of 1870, which ordains
that the Bible shall be read in schools without reference to any creed
or catechism peculiar “to any one denomination”. The total prohibition
expedient is known as Secular Education, and has been tried extensively
in Australia.

The Cowper-Temple plan does not meet the case of the Roman Catholics,
who do not permit indiscriminate access to the Bible, nor of the
Jews, who can hardly be expected to accept the reading of the New
Testament as religious instruction. Besides, if the children are to
learn anything more than the three Rs, they must be taught Copernican
astronomy, electronic physics, and evolution. Now it is not good
sense to lead a child at ten o’clock to attach religious importance
to the belief that the earth is flat and immovable, and the sky a
ceiling above it in which there is a heaven furnished like a king’s
palace, and, at eleven, that the earth is a sphere spinning on its
axis and rushing round the sun in limitless space with a multitude of
other spheres. Nor can you reasonably order that during the religious
instruction hour the children are to be informed that all forms of life
were created within six days, including the manufacture of a full-grown
woman out of a man’s rib, and, when the clock strikes, begin explaining
that epochs of millions of years were occupied in experiments in the
production of various forms of life, from prodigious monsters to
invisibly small creatures, culminating in a very complicated and by no
means finally satisfactory form called Woman, who specialized a variety
of herself, in some respects even less satisfactory, called Man. This
would not matter if the teacher might explain that as the astronomy
and biology of the Bible are out of date, and we think we know better
nowadays, they have been discarded like the barbarous morality of the
Israelitish kings and the idol to which they made human sacrifices.
But such explanations would frustrate the Cowper-Temple clause, under
which the children were to be left to make what they could of the
contradictions between their religious and secular instruction. They
usually solve it by not thinking about it at all, provided their
parents let them alone on the subject, which is not always the case.

As to the alternative of giving no religious instruction, and confining
school teaching to what is called Secular or Matter-of-Fact Education,
it is not really a possible plan, because children must be taught
conduct as well as arithmetic, and the ultimate sanctions of conduct
are metaphysical, by which imposing phrase I mean that from the
purely matter-of-fact point of view there is no difference between a
day’s thieving and a day’s honest work, between placid ignorance and
the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, between habitual lying
and truth-telling: they are all human activities or inactivities,
to be chosen according to their respective pleasantness or material
advantages, and not to be preferred on any other grounds. When you
find your children acting, as they often do (like their elders), quite
secularly, and lying, stealing, or idling, you have to give them
either a matter-of-fact or a religious reason for ceasing to do evil
and learning to do well. The matter-of-fact reason is temptingly easy
to manufacture. You can say “If I catch you doing that again I will
clout your head, or smack your behind, or send you to bed without your
supper, or injure you in some way or other that you will not like”.
Unfortunately these secular reasons, though easy to devise and apply,
and enjoyable if you have a turn that way, always seem avoidable by
cunning concealment and a little additional lying. You know what
becomes of the pseudo-morality produced by whipping the moment your
back is turned. And what is your own life worth if it has to be spent
spying on your children with a cane in your hand? Hardly worth living,
I should say, unless you are one of the people who love caning as
others love unnatural sensualities, in which case you may fall into the
hands of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which
will make short work of your moral pretensions. In any case you will
find yourself strongly tempted to whack your children, not really to
compel them to conduct themselves for their own good, but to conduct
themselves in the manner most convenient to yourself, which is not
always nor even often the same thing.

Finally, if you are not selfish and cruel, you will find that you
must give the children some reason for behaving well when no one is
looking, and there is no danger of being found out, or when they would
rather do the forbidden thing at the cost of a whacking than leave it
undone with impunity. You may tell them that God is always looking,
and will punish them inevitably when they die. But you will find that
posthumous penalties are not immediate enough nor real enough to deter
a bold child. In the end you must threaten it with some damage to a
part of it called its soul, of the existence of which you can give it
no physical demonstration whatever. You need not use the word soul:
you can put the child “on its honor”. But its honor also is an organ
which no anatomist has yet succeeded in dissecting out and preserving
in a bottle of spirits of wine for the instruction of infants. When it
transgresses you can resort to scolding, calling it a naughty, dirty,
greedy little thing. Or you may lecture it, telling it solemnly that
“it is a sin to steal a pin” and so forth. But if you could find such
a monster as an entirely matter-of-fact child, it might receive both
scoldings and lectures unmoved, and ask you “What then? What is a
sin? What do you mean by naughty, greedy? I understand dirty; but why
should I wash my hands if I am quite comfortable with them dirty. I
understand greedy; but if I like chocolates why should I give half of
them to Jane?” You may retort with “Have you no conscience, child?”;
but the matter-of-fact reply is “What is conscience?” Faced with this
matter-of-fact scepticism you are driven into pure metaphysics, and
must teach your child that conduct is a matter, not of fact, but of
religious duty. Good conduct is a respect which you owe to yourself in
some mystical way; and people are manageable in proportion to their
possession of this self-respect. When you remonstrate with a grown-up
person you say “Have you no self-respect?” But somehow one does not say
that to an infant. If it tells a lie, you do not say “You owe it to
yourself to speak the truth”, because the little animal does not feel
any such obligation, though it will later on. If you say “You must not
tell lies because if you do nobody will believe what you say”, you are
conscious of telling a thundering lie yourself, as you know only too
well that most lies are quite successful, and that human society would
be impossible without a great deal of goodnatured lying. If you say
“You must not tell lies because if you do you will find yourself unable
to believe anything that is told to you”, you will be much nearer the
truth; but it is a truth that a child cannot understand: you might as
well tell it the final truth of the matter, which is, that there is a
mysterious something in us called a soul, which deliberate wickedness
kills, and without which no material gain can make life bearable. How
can you expect a naughty child to take that in? If you say “You must
not tell a lie because it will grieve your dear parents”, the effect
will depend on how much the child cares whether its parents are grieved
or not. In any case to most young children their parents are as gods,
too great to be subject to grief, as long as the parents play up to
that conception of them. Also, as it is not easy to be both loved and
feared, parents who put on the majesty of gods with their children must
not allow the familiarity of affection, and are lucky if their children
do not positively hate them. It is safer and more comfortable to invent
a parent who is everybody’s Big Papa, even Papa’s papa, and introduce
it to the child as God. And it must be a god that children can imagine.
It must not be an abstraction, a principle, a vital impulse, a life
force, or the Church of England god who has neither body, parts, nor
passions. It must be, like the real papa, a grown-up person in Sunday
clothes, very very good, terribly powerful, and all-seeing: that is,
able to see what you are doing when nobody is looking. In this way the
child who is too young to have a sufficiently developed self-respect
and intelligent sense of honor: in short, a conscience, is provided
with an artificial, provisional, and to a great extent fictitious
conscience which tides it over its nonage until it is old enough to
attach a serious meaning to the idea of God.

In this way it was discovered in the nursery, long before Voltaire said
it, that “if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him”.
After Voltaire’s death, when the government of France fell into the
hands of a set of very high-principled professional and middle-class
gentlemen who had no experience of government, and ended by making
such a mess of it that France would have been ruined if they had not
fortunately all cut oneanother’s heads off on the highest principles,
the most high-principled of them all, an intensely respectable lawyer
named Robespierre, who had tried to govern without God because a
good many of the stories told to children about God were evidently
not strictly true, found that governments dealing with nations could
no more do without God than parents dealing with their families. He,
too, declared, echoing Voltaire, that if there were no God it would
be necessary to invent one. He had previously, by the way, tried a
goddess whom he called the Goddess of Reason; but she was no use at
all, not because she was a goddess (for Roman Catholic children have a
Big Mamma, or Mamma’s mamma, who is everybody’s mamma, and makes the
boys easier to manage, as well as a Big Papa), but because good conduct
is not dictated by reason but by a divine instinct that is beyond
reason. Reason only discovers the shortest way: it does not discover
the destination. It would be quite reasonable for you to pick your
neighbor’s pocket if you felt sure that you could make a better use of
your money than she could; but somehow it would not be honorable; and
honor is a part of divinity: it is metaphysics: it is religion. Some
day it may become scientific psychology; but psychology is as yet in
its crudest infancy; and when it grows up it will very likely be too
difficult not only for children but for many adults, like the rest of
the more abstruse sciences.

Meanwhile we must bear in mind that our beliefs are continually passing
from the metaphysical and legendary into the scientific stage. In
China, when an eclipse of the sun occurs, all the intelligent and
energetic women rush out of doors with pokers and shovels, trays and
saucepan lids, and bang them together to frighten away the demon who is
devouring the sun; and the perfect success of this proceeding, which
has never been known to fail, proves to them that it is the right thing
to do. But you, who know all about eclipses, sit calmly looking at
them through bits of smoked glass, because your belief about them is a
scientific belief and not a metaphysical one. You probably think that
the women who are banging the saucepans in China are fools; but they
are not: you would do the same yourself if you lived in a country where
astronomy was still in the metaphysical stage.

You must also beware of concluding, because their conduct seems to
you ridiculous, and because you know that there is no demon, that
there is no eclipse. You may say that nobody could make a mistake
like that; but I assure you that a great many people, seeing how many
childish fables and ridiculous ceremonies have been attached to the
conception of divinity, have rushed to the conclusion that no such
thing as divinity exists. When they grow out of believing that God is
an old gentleman with a white beard, they think they have got rid of
everything that the old gentleman represented to their infant minds. On
the contrary, they have come a little nearer to the truth about it.

Now the English nation consists of many million parents and children
of whom hardly any two are in precisely the same stage of belief as to
the sanctions of good conduct. Many of the parents are still in the
nursery stage: many of the children are in the comparatively scientific
stage. Most of them do not bother much about it, and just do what their
neighbors do and say they believe what most of their neighbors say
they believe. But those who do bother about it differ very widely and
differ very fiercely. Take those who, rejecting the first article of
the Church of England, attach to the word God the conception of a Ruler
of the universe with the body, parts, and passions of man, but with
unlimited knowledge and power. Here at least, you might think, we have
agreement. But no. There are two very distinct parties to this faith.
One of them believes in a God of Wrath, imposing good conduct on us by
threats of casting us for ever into an inconceivably terrible hell.
Others believe in a God of Love, and openly declare that if they could
be brought to believe in a God capable of such cruelty as hell implies,
they would spit in his face. Others hold that conduct has nothing to do
with the matter, and that though hell exists, anyone, however wicked,
can avoid it by believing that God accepted the cruel death of his own
son as an expiation of their misdeeds, whilst nobody, however virtuous,
can avoid it if she has the slightest doubt on this point. Others
declare that neither conduct nor belief has anything to do with it,
as every person is from birth predestined to fall into hell or mount
into heaven when they die, and that nothing that they can say or do or
believe or disbelieve can help them. Voltaire described us as a people
with thirty religions and only one sauce; and though this was a great
compliment to the activity and independence of our minds, it held out
no hope of our ever agreeing about religion.

Even if we could confine religious instruction to subjects which are
supposed to have passed from the metaphysical to the scientific stage,
which is what the advocates of secular education mean, we should be
no nearer to unanimity; for not only do our scientific bigots differ
as fiercely as those of the sects and churches, and try to obtain
powers of ruthless persecution from the Government, but their pretended
advances from the metaphysical to the scientific are often disguised
relapses into the pre-metaphysical stage of crude witchcraft, ancient
augury, and African “medicine”.

Roughly speaking, governments in imposing education on the people
have to deal with three fanaticisms: first, that which believes in a
God of Wrath, and sees in every earthquake, every pestilence, every
war: in short, every calamity of impressive or horrifying magnitude,
a proof of God’s terrible power and a warning to sinners; second,
that which believes in a God of Love in conflict with a Power of Evil
personified as the Devil; and third, that of the magicians and their
dupes, believing neither in God nor devil, claiming that the pursuit
of knowledge is absolutely free from moral law, however atrocious
its methods, and pretending to work miracles (called “the marvels of
science”) by which they hold the keys of life and death, and can make
mankind immune from disease if they are given absolute control over our
bodies.

A good many women are still so primitive and personal in religious
matters that their first impulse on hearing them discussed at all is
to declare that their beliefs are the only true beliefs, and must of
course be imposed on everyone, all other beliefs to be punished as
monstrous blasphemies. They do not regard Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, as
different names for God: if they call God Brahma they regard Allah and
Jehovah as abominable idols, and all Christians and Moslems as wicked
idolaters whom no respectable person would visit. Or if Jehovah, they
class Moslems and Indians as “the heathen”, and send out missionaries
to convert them. But this childish self-conceit would wreck the British
Empire if our rulers indulged it. Only about 11 per cent of British
subjects are Christians: the enormous majority of them call God Allah
or Brahma, and either do not distinguish Jesus from any other prophet
or have never even heard of him. Consequently when a woman goes into
Parliament, central or local, she should leave the sectarian part of
her religion behind her, and consider only that part of it which is
common to all the sects and Churches, however the names may differ.
Unfortunately this is about the last thing that most elected persons
ever dream of doing. They all strive to impose their local customs,
names, institutions, and even languages on the schoolchildren by main
force.

Now there is this to be said for their efforts, that all progress
consists in imposing on children nobler beliefs and better institutions
than those at present inculcated and established. For instance, as
every Socialist believes that Communism is more nobly inspired and
better in practice than private property and competition, her object in
entering Parliament is to impose that belief on her country by having
it taught to the children in the public schools so that they may grow
up to regard it as the normal obvious truth, and to abhor Capitalism
as a disastrous idolatry. At present she finds herself opposed by
statesmen who quite lately spent a hundred millions of English public
money in subsidizing military raids on the Russian Government because
it was a Socialist Government. To such statesmen Socialist, Communist,
Bolshevist, are synonyms for Scoundrel, Thief, Assassin. In opposition
to them the Socialists compare Labor exploited by landlords and
capitalists to Christ crucified between two thieves. They both say that
we no longer persecute in the name of religion; but this means only
that they refuse to call the creeds they are persecuting religions,
whilst the beliefs they do call religions have become comparatively
indifferent to them. To put down sedition, rebellion, and attacks on
property, or, on the other hand, to make an end of the robbery of
the poor, suppress shameless idleness, and restore the land of our
country, which God made for us all, to the whole people, seems simple
enforcement of the moral law, and not persecution; therefore those who
do it are not, they think, persecutors, to prove which they point to
the fact that they allow us all to go to church or not as we please,
and to believe or disbelieve in transubstantiation according to our
fancy. Do not be deceived by modern professions of toleration. Women
are still what they were when the Tudor sisters sent Protestants to
the stake and Jesuits to the rack and gallows; when the defenders of
property and slavery in Rome set up crosses along the public roads
with the crucified followers of the revolted gladiator slave Spartacus
dying horribly upon them in thousands; and when the saintly Torquemada
burnt alive every Jew he could lay hands on as piously as he told
his beads. The difference between the Socialist versus Capitalist
controversy and the Jew versus Christian controversy or the Roman
Catholic versus Protestant controversy is not that the modern bigot is
any more tolerant or less cruel than her ancestors, nor even that the
proletarians are too numerous and the proprietors too powerful to be
persecuted. If the controversy between them could be settled by either
party exterminating the other, they would both do their worst to settle
it in that way. History leaves us no goodnatured illusions on this
point. From the wholesale butcheries which followed the suppression
of the Paris Commune of 1871 to the monstrous and quite gratuitous
persecution of Russians in the United States of America after the
war of 1914-18, in which girls were sentenced to frightful terms of
imprisonment for remarks that might have been made by any Sunday
School teacher, there is abundant evidence that modern diehards are no
better than medieval zealots, and that if they are to be restrained
from deluging the world in blood and torture in the old fashion it
will not be by any imaginary advance in toleration or in humanity. At
this moment (1927) our proprietary classes appear to have no other
conception of the Russian Soviet Government and its sympathizers than
as vermin to be ruthlessly exterminated; and when the Russian Communist
and his western imitators speak of the proprietors and their political
supporters as “bourgeois”, they make no secret of regarding them as
enemies of the human race. The spirit of the famous manifesto of 1792,
in which the Duke of Brunswick, in the name of the monarchs of Europe,
announced that he meant to exterminate the French Republican Government
and deliver up the cities which tolerated it to “military execution
and total subversion”, is reflected precisely in the speeches made
by our own statesmen in support of the projected expedition against
the Union of Soviet Republics which was countermanded a few years ago
only because the disapproval of the British proletarian voters became
so obvious that the preparations for the Capitalist Crusade had to be
hastily dropped.

It is therefore very urgently necessary that I should explain to
you why it is that a Labor Party can neither establish Socialism by
exterminating its opponents, nor its opponents avert Socialism by
exterminating the Socialists.




75

REVOLUTIONS


You must first grasp the difference between revolutions and social
changes. A revolution transfers political power from one party to
another, or one class to another, or even one individual to another,
just as a conquest transfers it from one nation or race to another. It
can be and often is effected by violence or the threat of violence.
Of our two revolutions in the seventeenth century, by which political
power in England was transferred from the throne to the House of
Commons, the first cost a civil war; and the second was bloodless only
because the King ran away. A threat of violence was sufficient to carry
the nineteenth century revolution of 1832, by which the political
power was transferred from the great agricultural landowners to the
industrial urban employers. The South American revolutions which
substitute one party or one President for another are general elections
decided by shooting instead of by voting.

Now the transfer of political power from our capitalists to our
proletariat, without which Socialist propaganda would be suppressed
by the Government as sedition, and Socialist legislation would be
impossible, has already taken place in form. The proletarians can
outvote the capitalists overwhelmingly whenever they choose to do so.
If on the issue of Socialism versus Capitalism all the proletarians
were for Socialism and all the capitalists for Capitalism, Capitalism
would have had to capitulate to overwhelming numbers long ago. But the
proletarians who live upon the incomes of the capitalists as their
servants, their tradesmen, their employees in the luxury trades, their
lawyers and doctors and so on, not to mention the troops raised,
equipped, and paid by them to defend their property (in America there
are private armies of this kind) are more violently Conservative than
the capitalists themselves, many of whom, like Robert Owen and William
Morris, not to mention myself, have been and are ardent Socialists. The
Countess of Warwick is a noted Socialist; so you have seen a Socialist
Countess (or at least her picture); but have you ever seen a countess’s
dressmaker who was a Socialist? If the capitalists refused to accept a
parliamentary decision against them, and took to arms, like Charles I,
they would have in many places a majority of the proletariat on their
side.

If you are shocked by the suggestion that our capitalists would act so
unconstitutionally, consider the case of Ireland, in which after thirty
years of parliamentary action, and an apparently final settlement of
the Home Rule question by Act of Parliament, the establishment of the
Irish Free State was effected by fire and slaughter, the winning side
being that which succeeded in burning the larger number of the houses
of its opponents.

Parliamentary constitutionalism holds good up to a certain point: the
point at which the people who are outvoted in Parliament will accept
their defeat. But on many questions people feel so strongly, or have
such big interests at stake, that they leave the decision to Parliament
only as long as they think they will win there. If Parliament decides
against them, and they see any chance of a successful resistance, they
throw Parliament over and fight it out. During the thirty years of the
parliamentary campaign for Irish Home Rule there were always Direct
Action men who said “It is useless to go to the English Parliament:
the Unionists will never give up their grip of Ireland until they are
forced to; and you may as well fight it out first as last”. And these
men, though denounced as wanton incendiaries, turned out to be right.
The French had to cut off the heads of both king and queen because the
king could not control the queen, and the queen would not accept a
constitutional revolution, nor stop trying to induce the other kings
of Europe to march their armies into France and slaughter the Liberals
for her. In England we beheaded our king because he would not keep
faith with the Liberal Parliament even after he had fought it and
lost. In Spain at this moment the King and the army have suppressed
Parliament, and are ruling by force of arms on the basis of divine
right, which is exactly what Cromwell did in England after he had cut
off King Charles’s head for trying to do the same. Signor Mussolini,
a Socialist, has overridden parliament in Italy, his followers having
established what is called a reign of terror by frank violence.

These repudiations of constitutionalism in Spain and Italy have been
made, not to effect any definite social change, but because the Spanish
and Italian governments had become so unbearably inefficient that
the handiest way to restore public order was for some sufficiently
energetic individuals to take the law into their own hands and just
break people’s heads if they would not behave themselves. And it may
quite possibly happen that even if the most perfect set of Fabian Acts
of Parliament for the constitutional completion of Socialism in this
country be passed through Parliament by duly elected representatives of
the people; swallowed with wry faces by the House of Lords; and finally
assented to by the King and placed on the statute book, the capitalists
may, like Signor Mussolini, denounce Parliament as unpatriotic,
pernicious, and corrupt, and try to prevent by force the execution of
the Fabian Acts. We should then have a state of civil war, with, no
doubt, the Capitalist forces burning the co-operative stores, and the
proletarians burning the country houses, as in Ireland, in addition to
the usual war routine of devastation and slaughter.

As we have seen, the capitalists would be at no loss for proletarian
troops. The war would not be as the Marxist doctrinaires of the Class
War seem to imagine. In our examination of the effect of unequal
distribution of income we found that it is not only the rich who live
on the poor, but also the servants and tradesmen who live on the money
the rich spend, and who have their own servants and tradesmen. In the
rich suburbs and fashionable central quarters of the great cities,
and all over the South of England where pleasant country houses are
dotted over the pleasantest of the English counties, it is as hard
to get a Labor candidate into Parliament as in Oxford University. If
the unearned incomes of the rich disappeared, places like Bournemouth
would either perish like the cities of Nineveh and Babylon, or else the
inhabitants would have, as they would put it, to cater for a different
class of people; and many of them would be ruined before they could
adapt themselves to the new conditions. Add to these the young men who
are out of employment, and will fight for anyone who will pay them well
for an exciting adventure, with all the people who dread change of
any sort, or who are duped by the newspapers into thinking Socialists
scoundrels, or who would be too stupid to understand such a book as
this if they could be persuaded to read anything but a cheap newspaper;
and you will see at once that the line that separates those who live on
rich customers from those who live on poor customers: in other words
which separates those interested in the maintenance of Capitalism from
those interested in its replacement by Socialism, is a line drawn
not between rich and poor, capitalist and proletarian, but right
down through the middle of the proletariat to the bottom of the very
poorest section. In a civil war for the maintenance of Capitalism the
capitalists would therefore find masses of supporters in all ranks of
the community; and it is their knowledge of this that makes the leaders
of the Labor Party so impatient with the extremists who talk of such a
war as if it would be a Class War, and echo Shelley’s very misleading
couplet “Ye are many: they are few”. And as the capitalists know it
too, being reminded of it by the huge number of votes given for them
by the poor at every election, I cannot encourage you to feel too sure
that their present denunciations of Direct Action by their opponents
mean that when their own sooner-or-later inevitable defeat by Labor in
Parliament comes, they will take it lying down.

But no matter how the government of the country may pass from the hands
of the capitalists into those of the Socialist proletarians, whether
by peaceful parliamentary procedure or the bloodiest conceivable civil
war, at the end of it the survivors will be just where they were at
the beginning as far as practical Communism is concerned. Returning a
majority of Socialists to Parliament will not by itself reconstruct
the whole economic system of the country in such a way as to produce
equality of income. Still less will burning and destroying buildings
or killing several of the opponents of Socialism, and getting several
Socialists killed in doing so. You cannot wave a wand over the country
and say “Let there be Socialism”: at least nothing will happen if you
do.

The case of Russia illustrates this. After the great political
revolution of 1917 in that country, the Marxist Communists were so
completely victorious that they were able to form a Government far more
powerful than the Tsar had ever really been. But as the Tsar had not
allowed Fabian Societies to be formed in Russia to reduce Socialism
to a system of law, this new Russian Government did not know what to
do, and, after trying all sorts of amateur experiments which came to
nothing more than pretending that there was Communism where there
was nothing but the wreck of Capitalism, and giving the land to the
peasants, who immediately insisted on making private property of it
over again, had to climb down hastily and leave the industry of the
country to private employers very much as the great ground landlords
of our cities leave the work of the shops to their tenants, besides
allowing the peasant farmers to hold their lands and sell their produce
just as French peasant proprietors or English farmers do.

This does not mean that the Russian Revolution has been a failure. In
Russia it is now established that capital was made for Man, and not
Man for Capitalism. The children are taught the Christian morality of
Communism instead of the Mammonist morality of Capitalism. The palaces
and pleasure seats of the plutocrats are used for the recreation of
workers instead of for the enervation of extravagant wasters. Idle
ladies and gentlemen are treated with salutary contempt, whilst the
worker’s blouse is duly honored. The treasures of art, respected and
preserved with a cultural conscientiousness which puts to shame our
own lootings in China, and our iconoclasms and vandalisms at home, are
accessible to everyone. The Greek Church is tolerated (the Bolsheviks
forbore to cut off their Archbishop’s head as we cut off Archbishop
Laud’s); but it is not, as the Church of England is, allowed without
contradiction to tell little children lies about the Bible under
pretence of giving them religious instruction, nor to teach them to
reverence the merely rich as their betters. That sort of doctrine is
officially and very properly disavowed as Dope.

All this seems to us too good to be true. It places the Soviet
Government in the forefront of cultural civilization as far as good
intention goes. But it is not Socialism. It still involves sufficient
inequality of income to undo in the long run enough of its achievements
to degrade the Communist Republic to the level of the old Capitalist
Republics of France and America. In short, though it has made one of
those transfers of political power which are the object of revolutions,
and are forced through by simple slaughter and terror, and though
this political transfer has increased Russian self-respect and changed
the moral attitude of the Russian State from pro-Capitalist to
anti-Capitalist, it has not yet established as much actual Communism as
we have in England, nor even raised Russian wages to the English level.

The explanation of this is that Communism can spread only as Capitalism
spread: that is, as a development of existing economic civilization and
not by a sudden wholesale overthrow of it. What it proposes is not a
destruction of the material utilities inherited from Capitalism, but
a new way of managing them and distributing the wealth they produce.
Now this development of Capitalism into a condition of ripeness
for Socialization had not been reached in Russia; consequently the
victorious Communist Bolsheviks in 1917 found themselves without any
highly organized Capitalistic industry to build upon. They had on their
hands an enormous agricultural country with a population of uncivilized
peasants, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, cruel, and land-hungry.
The cities, few and far between, with their relatively insignificant
industries, often managed by foreigners, and their city proletariats
living on family wages of five and threepence a week, were certainly
in revolt against the misdistribution of wealth and leisure; but they
were so far from being organized to begin Socialism that it was only
in a very limited sense that they could be said to have begun urban
civilization. There were no Port Sunlights and Bournvilles, no Ford
factories in which workmen earn £9 in a five-day week and have their
own motor cars, no industrial trusts of national dimensions, no public
libraries, no great public departments manned by picked and tested
civil servants, no crowds of men skilled in industrial management
and secretarial business looking for employment, no nationalized and
municipalized services with numerous and competent official staffs,
no national insurance, no great Trade Union organization representing
many millions of workmen and able to extort subsidies from Capitalist
governments by threatening to stop the railways and cut off the coal
supply, no fifty years of compulsory schooling supplemented by forty
years of incessant propaganda of political science by Fabian and other
lecturers, no overwhelming predominance of organized industry over
individualist agriculture, no obvious breakdown of Capitalism under
the strain of the war, no triumphant rescue by Socialism demonstrating
that even those public departments that were bywords for incompetence
and red tape were far more efficient than the commercial adventurers
who derided them. Well may Mr Trotsky say that the secret of the
completeness of the victory of the Russian Proletarian Revolution
over Russian Capitalist civilization was that there was virtually no
Capitalist civilization to triumph over, and that the Russian people
had been saved from the corruption of bourgeois ideas, not by the
famous metaphysical dialectic inherited by Marx from the philosopher
Hegel, but by the fact that they are still primitive enough to be
incapable of middle class ideas. In England, when Socialism is
consummated it will plant the red flag on the summit of an already
constructed pyramid; but the Russians have to build right up from the
sand. We must build up Capitalism before we can turn it into Socialism.
But meanwhile we must learn how to control it instead of letting it
demoralize us, slaughter us, and half ruin us, as we have hitherto done
in our ignorance.

Thus the fact that the Soviet has had to resort to controlled
Capitalism and bourgeois enterprise, after denouncing them so
fiercely under the Tsardom in the phrases used by Marx to denounce
English Capitalism, does not mean that we shall have to recant in the
same way when we complete our transfer of political power from the
proprietary classes and their retainers to the Socialist proletariat.
The Capitalism which the Russian Government is not only tolerating but
encouraging would be for us, even now under Capitalism, an attempt to
set back the clock. We could not get back to it if we tried, except
by smashing our machinery, breaking up our industrial organization,
burning all the plans and documents from which it could be
reconstructed, and substituting an eighteenth for a twentieth century
population.

The moral of all this is that though a political revolution may be
necessary to break the power of the opponents of Socialism if they
refuse to accept it as a Parliamentary reform, and resist it violently
either by organizing what is now called Fascism or a _coup d’état_ to
establish a Dictatorship of the Capitalists, yet neither a violent
revolution nor a peacefully accepted series of parliamentary reforms
can by themselves create Socialism, which is neither a battle cry nor
an election catchword, but an elaborate arrangement of our production
and distribution of wealth in such a manner that all our incomes
shall be equal. This is why Socialists who understand their business
are always against bloodshed. They are no milder than other people;
but they know that bloodshed cannot do what they want, and that the
indiscriminate destruction inseparable from civil war will retard
it. Mr Sidney Webb’s much quoted and in some quarters much derided
“inevitability of gradualness” is an inexorable fact. It does not,
unfortunately, imply inevitability of peacefulness. We can fight over
every step of the gradual process if we are foolish enough. We shall
come to an armed struggle for political power between the parasitic
proletariat and the Socialist proletariat if the Capitalist leaders of
the parasitic proletariat throw Parliament and the Constitution over,
and declare for a blood and iron settlement instead of a settlement by
votes. But at the end of the fighting we shall all be the poorer, none
the wiser, and some of us the deader. If the Socialists win, the road
to Socialism may be cleared; but the pavement will be torn up and the
goal as far off as ever.

All the historical precedents illustrate this. A monarchy may be
changed into a republic, or an oligarchy into a democracy, or one
oligarchy supplanted by another, if the people who favor the change
kill enough of the people who oppose it to intimidate the rest; and
when the change is made you may have factions fighting instead of
voting for the official posts of power and honor until, as in South
America in the nineteenth century, violent revolutions become so common
that other countries hardly notice them; but no extremity of fighting
and killing can alter the distribution of wealth or the means of
producing it. The guillotining of 4000 people in eighteen months during
the French Revolution left the people poorer than before; so that when
the Public Prosecutor who had sent most of the 4000 to the guillotine
was sent there himself, and the people cursed him as he passed to his
death, he said, “Will your bread be any cheaper tomorrow, you fools?”
That did not affect the Capitalist makers of the French Revolution,
because they did not want to make the bread of the poor cheaper: they
wanted to transfer the government of France from the King and the
nobles to the middle class. But if they had been Socialists, aiming
at making everything much cheaper except human life, they would have
had to admit that the laugh was with Citizen Fouquier Tinville. And
if William Pitt and the kings of Europe had let the French Revolution
alone, and it had been as peaceful and parliamentary as our own
revolutionary Reform Bill of 1832, it would have been equally futile as
far as putting another pennorth of milk into baby’s mug was concerned.

Whenever our city proletarians, in the days before the dole (say 1885
for instance), were driven by unemployment to threaten to burn down
the houses of the rich, the Socialists said “No: if you are foolish
enough to suppose that burning houses will put an end to unemployment,
at least have sense enough to burn down your own houses, most of
which are unfit for human habitation. The houses of the rich are good
houses, of which we have much too few.” Capitalism has produced not
only slums but palaces and handsome villas, not only sweaters’ dens but
first-rate factories, shipyards, steamships, ocean cables, services
that are not only national but international, and what not. It has also
produced a great deal of Communism, without which it could not exist
for a single day (we need not go over all the examples already given:
the roads and bridges and so forth). What Socialist in his senses
would welcome a civil war that would destroy all or any of this, and
leave his party, even if it were victorious, a heritage of blackened
ruins and festering cemeteries? Capitalism has led up to Socialism
by changing the industries of the country from petty enterprises
conducted by petty proprietors into huge Trusts conducted by employed
proletarians directing armies of workmen, operating with millions of
capital on vast acreages of land. In short, Capitalism tends always to
develop industries until they are on the scale of public affairs and
ripe for transfer to public hands. To destroy them would be to wreck
the prospects of Socialism. Even the proprietors who think that such
a transfer would be robbery have at least the consolation of knowing
that the thief does not destroy the property of the man he intends to
rob, being as much interested in it as the person from whom he means to
steal it. As to managing persons, Socialism will need many more of them
than there are at present, and will give them much greater security in
their jobs and dignity in their social standing than most of them can
hope for under Capitalism.

And now I think we may dismiss the question whether the return of
a decisive majority of Socialists to Parliament will pass without
an appeal to unconstitutional violence by the capitalists and their
supporters. Whether it does or not may matter a good deal to those
unlucky persons who will lose their possessions or their lives in the
struggle if there be a struggle; but when the shouting and the killing
and the house burning are over the survivors must settle down to some
stable form of government. The mess may have to be cleared up by a
dictatorship like that of Napoleon the Third, King Alfonso, Cromwell,
Napoleon, Mussolini, or Lenin; but dictatorial strong men soon die or
lose their strength, and kings, generals, and proletarian dictators
alike find that they cannot carry on for long without councils or
parliaments of some sort, and that these will not work unless they are
in some way representative of the public, because unless the citizens
co-operate with the police the strongest government breaks down, as
English government did in Ireland.

In the long run (which nowadays is a very short run) you must have
your parliament and your settled constitution back again; and the
risings and _coups d’état_, with all their bloodshed and burnings and
executions, might as well have been cut out as far as the positive
constructive work of Socialism is concerned. So we may just as well
ignore all the battles that may or may not be fought, and go on to
consider what may happen to the present Labor Party if its present
constitutional growth be continued and consummated by the achievement
of a decisive Socialist majority in Parliament, and its resumption of
office, not, as in 1923-24, by the sufferance of the two Capitalist
parties and virtually under their control, but with full power to
carry out a proletarian policy, and, if it will, to make Socialism the
established constitutional order in Britain.




76

CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY


Let us assume, then, that we have resigned ourselves, as we must sooner
or later, to a parliamentary settlement of the quarrels between the
Capitalists and the Socialists. Mind: I cannot, women and men being
what they are, offer you any sincere assurances that this will occur
without all the customary devilments. Every possible wrong and wicked
way may be tried before their exhaustion drives us back into the right
way. Attempts at a general strike, a form of national suicide which
sane people are bound to resist by every extremity of violent coercion,
may lead to a proclamation of martial law by the Government, whether
it be a Labor or a Capitalist Government, followed by slaughtering
of mobs, terroristic shelling of cities (as in the case of Dublin),
burning and looting of country houses, shooting of police officers at
sight as uniformed enemies of the people, and a hectic time for those
to whom hating and fighting and killing are a glorious sport that makes
life worth living and death worth dying. Or if the modern machine gun,
the bombing aeroplane, and the poison gas shell make military coercion
irresistible, or if the general strikers have sufficient sense shot
into them to see that blockade and boycott are not good tactics for
the productive proletariat because they themselves are necessarily
the first victims of it, still Parliament may be so split up into
contending groups as to become unworkable, forcing the nation to fall
back on a dictatorship. The dictator may be another Bismarck ruling in
the name of a royal personage, or a forceful individual risen from the
ranks like Mahomet or Brigham Young or Signor Mussolini, or a general
like Cæsar or Napoleon or Primo di Rivera.

In the course of these social convulsions you and I may be outraged,
shot, gas poisoned, burnt out of house and home, financially ruined,
just as anyone else may. We must resign ourselves to such epidemics
of human pugnacity and egotism just as we have to resign ourselves to
epidemics of measles. Measles are less bitter to us because we have at
least never done anything to encourage them, whereas we have recklessly
taught our children to glorify pugnacity and to identify gentility and
honor with the keeping down of the poor and the keeping up of the
rich, thus producing an insanitary condition of public morals which
makes periodic epidemics of violence and class hatred inevitable.

But sooner or later, the irreconcilables exterminate oneanother like
the Kilkenny cats; for when the toughest faction has exterminated all
the other factions it proceeds to exterminate itself. And the dictators
die as Cromwell died, or grow old and are sent to the dustbin by
ambitious young monarchs as Bismarck was; and dictators and ambitious
monarchs alike find that autocracy is not today a practical form of
government except in little tribes like Brigham Young’s Latter Day
Saints, nor even complete there. The nearest thing to it that will now
hold together is the presidency of the United States of America; and
the President, autocrat as he is for his four years of office, has
to work with a Cabinet, deal with a Congress and a Senate, and abide
the result of popular elections. To this parliamentary complexion we
must all come at last. Every bumptious idiot thinks himself a born
ruler of men; every snob thinks that the common people must be kept in
their present place or shot down if society is to be preserved; every
proletarian who resents his position wants to strike at something or
somebody more vulnerable than the capitalist system in the abstract;
but when they have all done their worst the dead they have slain must
be buried, the houses they have burned rebuilt, and the hundred other
messes they have left cleared up by women and men with sense enough to
take counsel together without coming to blows, and business ability
enough to organize the work of the community. These sensible ones may
not always have been sensible: some of them may have done their full
share of mischief before the necessary sanity was branded into them by
bitter experience or horrified contemplation of the results of anarchy;
but between the naturally sensible people and the chastened ones
there will finally be some sort of Parliament to conduct the nation’s
business, unless indeed civilization has been so completely wrecked in
the preliminary quarrels that there is no nation worth troubling about
left, and consequently no national business to transact. That has often
happened.

However, let us put all disagreeable possibilities out of our heads
for the moment, and consider how Socialism is likely to advance in
a Parliament kept in working order by the establishment of two main
parties competing for office and power: one professing to resist the
advance and the other to further it, but both forced by the need for
gaining some sort of control of the runaway car of Capitalism to
take many steps when in power which they vehemently denounced when
in opposition, and in the long run both contributing about equally
(as hitherto) to the redistribution of the national income and the
substitution of public for private property in land and industrial
organization.

Do not fear that I am about to inflict a complete program on you. Even
if I could foresee it I know better than to weary you to that extent.
All I intend is to give you a notion of the sort of legislation that
is likely to be enacted, and of the sort of opposition it is likely
to provoke; so that you may be better able to judge on which side you
should vote when an election gives you the chance, or when a seat on
some parliamentary body, local or central, calls you to more direct
action. You must understand that my designs on you do not include
making you what is called a good party woman. Rather do I seek to add
you to that floating body of openminded voters who are quite ready
to vote for this party today and for the opposite party tomorrow if
you think the balance of good sense and practical ability has changed
(possibly by the ageing of the leaders) or that your former choice
has taken a wrong turn concerning some proposed measure of cardinal
importance. Good party people think such openmindedness disloyal; but
in politics there should be no loyalty except to the public good. If,
however, you prefer to vote for the same side every time through thick
and thin, why not find some person who has made the same resolution in
support of the opposite party? Then, as they say in Parliament, you can
pair with her: that is, you can both agree never to vote at all, which
will have the same effect as if you voted opposite ways; and neither of
you need ever trouble to vote again.

We are agreed, I take it, that practical Socialism must proceed by the
Government nationalizing our industries one at a time by a series of
properly compensated expropriations, after an elaborate preparation
for their administration by a body of civil servants, who will consist
largely of the old employees, but who will be controlled and financed
by Government departments manned by public servants very superior
in average ability, training, and social dignity to the commercial
profiteers and financial gamblers who now have all our livelihoods at
their mercy.

Now this preparation and nationalization will hardly be possible
unless the voters have at least a rough notion of what the Government
is doing, and approve of it. They may not understand Socialism as a
whole; but they can understand nationalization of the coal mines quite
well enough to desire it and vote for its advocates, if not for the
sake of the welfare of the nation, at least for the sake of getting
their coal cheaper. Just so with the railways and transport services
generally: the most prejudiced Conservatives may vote for their
nationalization on its merits as an isolated measure, for the sake of
cheaper travelling and reasonable freights for internal produce. A few
big nationalizations effected with this sort of popular support will
make nationalization as normal a part of our social policy as old age
pensions are now, though it seems only the other day that such pensions
were denounced as rank Communism, which indeed they are.

There is therefore no hope for Capitalism in the difficulty that
baffled the Soviet in dealing with the land: that is, that the
Russian people were not Communists, and would not work the Communist
system except under a compulsion which it was impossible to apply on
a sufficiently large scale, because if a system can be maintained
only by half the ablebodied persons in the country being paid to do
nothing but stand over the other half, rifle in hand, then it is not
a practicable system and may as well be dropped first as last. But a
series of properly prepared nationalizations may not only be understood
and voted for by people who would be quite shocked if they were called
Socialists, but would fit in perfectly with the habits of the masses
who take their bread as it comes and never think about anything of a
public nature. To them the change would be only a change of masters,
to which they are so accustomed that it would not strike them as a
change at all, whilst it would be also a change in the remuneration,
dignity, and certainty of employment, which is just what they are
always clamoring for. This overcomes the difficulty, familiar to all
reformers, that it is much easier to induce people to do things in
the way to which they are accustomed, even though it is detestably
bad for them, than to try a new system, even though it promises to be
millennially good for them.

Socialistic legislation, then, will be no mere matter of forbidding
people to be rich, and calling a policeman when the law is broken. It
means an active interference in the production and distribution of the
nation’s income; and every step of it will require a new department
or extension of the civil service or the municipal service to execute
and manage it. If we had sense enough to make a law that every baby,
destitute or not, should have plenty of bread and milk and a good
house to shelter it, that law would remain a dead letter until all the
necessary bakeries and dairies and builders’ yards were ready. If we
made a law that every ablebodied adult should put in a day’s work for
his or her country every day, we could not carry out that law until
we had a job ready for everybody. All constructive and productive
legislation is quite different from the Ten Commandments: it means the
employment of masses of men, the establishing of offices and works, the
provision of large sums of money to start with, and the services of
persons of special ability to direct. Without these, all the Royal or
Dictatorial Proclamations, all the Commandments, and all the Communist
Manifestoes are waste paper as far as the establishment of practical
Socialism is concerned.

You may therefore take it that the change from inequality to
equality of income, though it will be made by law and cannot be
made in any other way, will not be made by simply passing a single
Act of Parliament ordering everybody to have the same income, with
arithmetical exactness in every case. Dozens of extensions of the civil
and municipal services, dozens of successive nationalizations, dozens
of annual budgets, all warmly contested on one ground or another, will
take us nearer and nearer to Equality of Income until we are so close
that the evil of such trifling inequalities as may be left is no longer
serious enough to be worth bothering about. At present, when one baby
has a hundred thousand a year, and a hundred other babies are dying of
insufficient nourishment, equality of income is something to be fought
for and died for if necessary. But if every baby had its fill, the fact
that here and there a baby’s father or mother might get hold of an
extra five shillings or five pounds would not matter enough to induce
anyone to cross the street to prevent it.

All social reforms stop short, not at absolute logical completeness or
arithmetical exactness, but at the point at which they have done their
work sufficiently. To a poor woman the difference between a pound a
week and a guinea a week is very serious, because a shilling is a large
sum of money to her. But a woman with twenty pounds a week would not
engage in a civil war because some other woman had twenty guineas. She
would not feel the difference. Therefore we need not imagine a state of
society in which we should call the police if somebody made a little
extra money by singing songs or selling prize chrysanthemums, though we
might come to consider such conduct so sordidly unladylike that even
the most impudent woman would not dare do it openly. As long as we were
all equally well off, so that anybody’s daughter could marry anybody
else’s son without any question of marrying above or beneath her, we
should be contented enough not to haggle over halfpence in the division
of the national income. For all that, equality of income should remain
a fundamental principle, any noticeable departure from which would be
jealously watched, and tolerated, if at all, with open eyes. There are
no limits to the possibility of its enforcement.

This does not mean that there are no limits to any device of Socialism:
for example, to the process of nationalizing industry and turning
private employees into Government employees. We could not nationalize
everything even if we went mad on nationalization and wanted to. There
will never be a week in which the Sunday papers will report that
Socialism was established in Great Britain last Wednesday, on which
occasion the Queen wore a red silk scarf fastened on the shoulder with
a circlet of rubies consecrated and presented to her by the Third
International, and containing a portrait of Karl Marx with the famous
motto, “Proletarians of All Lands: Unite”. It is far more likely that
by the time nationalization has become the rule, and private enterprise
the exception, Socialism (which is really rather a bad name for the
business) will be spoken of, if at all, as a crazy religion held by a
fanatical sect in that darkest of dark ages, the nineteenth century.
Already, indeed, I am told that Socialism has had its day, and that the
sooner we stop talking nonsense about it and set to work, like the
practical people we are, to nationalize the coal mines and complete
a national electrification scheme, the better. And I, who said forty
years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the
Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help
me to get the thing.

What I meant by my jibe at the Socialists of the eighteen-eighties was
that nothing is ever done, and much is prevented, by people who do not
realize that they cannot do everything at once.




77

SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE


Whilst we are nationalizing the big industries and the wholesale
businesses we may have to leave a good many unofficial retailers to
carry on the work of petty distribution much as they do at present,
except that we may control them in the matter of prices as the Trusts
do, whilst allowing them a better living than the landlords and
capitalists allow them, and relieving them from the continual fear of
bankruptcy inseparable from the present system. We shall nationalize
the mines long before we nationalize the village smithy and make
the village blacksmith a public official. We shall have national or
municipal supplies of electric power laid on from house to house
long before we meddle with the individual artists and craftsmen and
scientific workers who will use that power, to say nothing of the
housemaids who handle the vacuum cleaners. We shall nationalize land
and large-scale farming without simultaneously touching fancy fruit
farming and kitchen gardening. Long after Capitalism as we know it
shall have passed away more completely than feudalism has yet passed
away there may be more men and women working privately in businesses of
their own than there ever can be under our present slavish conditions.

The nationalization of banking will make it quite easy for private
businesses to be carried on under Socialism to any extent that may
be found convenient, and will in fact stimulate them vigorously. The
reduction of the incomes derived from them to the common level could be
effected by taxing them if they were excessive. But the difficulty is
more likely to be the other way: that is, the people in the private
businesses might find themselves, as most of them do at present,
poorer than they would be in public employment. The immense fortunes
that are made in private businesses to-day are made by the employment
of workers who, as they cannot live without access to the products
of land and capital, must either starve or consent to work for the
landlords and capitalists for much less than their work creates. But
when everybody could get a job in one of the nationalized industries,
and receive an income which would include his or her share of the rent
of the nationalized land, and the interest on the nationalized capital,
no private employer could induce anyone to come and work for wages
unless the wages were big enough to be equivalent to the advantages
of such public employment; therefore private employment could not
create poverty, and would in fact become bankrupt unless the employers
were either clever and useful enough to induce the public to pay them
handsomely for their products or services, or else were content, for
the sake of doing things in their own way, to put up with less than
they could make in some national establishment round the corner.
To maintain their incomes at the national level some of them might
actually demand and receive subsidies from the Government. To take a
very simple instance: in an out-of-the-way village or valley, where
there was not enough business to pay a carrier, the Government or local
authority might find that the most economical and sensible plan was to
pay a local farmer or shopkeeper or innkeeper a contribution towards
the cost of keeping a motor lorry on condition that he undertook the
carrying for the district.

In big business, as we have seen, this process has actually begun. When
Trade Unionism forced up the wages of the coal miners to a point at
which the worst coal mines could not afford to continue working, the
owners, though devout opponents of Socialism, demanded and obtained
from a Conservative Government a subsidy of £10,000,000 to enable
them to make both ends meet. But it was too ridiculous to tax the
general public to keep a few bad mines going, and incidentally to keep
up the monstrous prices charged for coal, when the mines as a whole
were perfectly well able to pay a decent living wage, which was all
the Trade Unions asked for. The subsidy was stopped; and a terrific
lock-out ensued. All this could have been prevented by nationalizing
the coal mines and thus making it possible to keep up wages and reduce
the price of coals to the public simultaneously. However, that is
not our point at present. What comes in here is that the capitalists
themselves have established the Socialistic practice of subsidizing
private businesses when they do not yield sufficient profit to support
those engaged in them, though they are too useful to be dispensed with.
The novelty, by the way, is only in subsidizing common industries.
Scientific research, education, religion, popular access to rare books
and pictures, exploration, carriage of mails oversea, and the like
are partly dependent on Government grants, which are subsidies under
another name.

What is more, capitalists are now openly demanding subsidies to enable
them to start their private enterprises. The aeroplane lines, for
instance, boldly took it as a matter of course that the Government
should help them, just as it had helped the dye industry during the war
(and been sorry for it afterwards). I draw your attention specially to
this new capitalistic method because by it you are not only invited to
throw over the Capitalist principle of trusting to unaided competitive
private enterprise for the maintenance of our industries, but taxed to
take all the risks of it whilst the capitalists take all the profits
and keep prices as high as possible against you, thus fleecing you both
ways. They cannot consistently object (though they do object) when
workmen ask the Government to guarantee them a living wage as well as
guaranteeing profits and keeping up prices for their employers.

When Socialism is the order of the day these capitalistic exploitations
of the taxpayer will have provided plenty of precedents for subsidizing
experimental private ventures in new industries or inventions and
new methods, or, as in the case of the village carrier, making it
worth somebody’s while to undertake some necessary service that is
not for the moment worth nationalizing. In fact this will be the most
interesting part of Socialism to clever business people. Direct and
complete nationalizations will be confined mostly to well established
routine services.

There are doctrinaire Socialists who will be shocked at the suggestion
that a Socialist Government should not only tolerate private
enterprise, but actually finance it. But the business of Socialist
rulers is not to suppress private enterprise as such, but to attain
and maintain equality of income. The substitution of public for
private enterprise is only one of several means to that end; and if
in any particular instance the end can be best served for the moment
by private enterprise, a Socialist Government will tolerate private
enterprise, or subsidize private enterprise, or even initiate private
enterprise. Indeed Socialism will be more elastic and tolerant than
Capitalism, which would leave any district without a carrier if no
private carrier could make it pay.

Note, however, that when a private experiment in business has been
financed by the State, and has been successful in establishing some
new industry or method or invention as part of the routine of national
production and service, it will then be nationalized, leaving private
enterprise to return to its proper business of making fresh experiments
and discovering new services, instead of, as at present, wallowing
in the profits of industries which are no longer experimental. For
example, it has for many years past been silly to leave railways
in the hands of private companies instead of nationalizing them,
especially as the most hidebound bureaucrat could not have been more
obsoletely reactionary, uninventive, and obstructive than some of our
most pretentious railway chairmen have been. Everything is known about
railway locomotion that need be known for nationalization purposes.
But the flying services are still experimenting, and may be treated as
State-aided private enterprises until their practice becomes as well
established and uniform as railway practice.

Unfortunately this is so little understood that the capitalists,
through their agents the employers and financiers, are now persuading
our Conservative governments into financing them at the taxpayers’
expense without retaining the taxpayers’ interest in the venture. For
instance, the £10,000,000 subsidy to the coalowners should clearly have
been given by way of mortgage on the mines. For every £100 granted to
private enterprise the Government should demand a share certificate.
Otherwise, if and when it subsequently nationalizes the enterprise,
it will be asked to compensate the proprietors for the confiscation
of its own capital; and though this, as we have seen in our study of
compensation, does not really matter, it does matter very seriously
that the State should not have at least a shareholder’s control. To
make private adventurers an unconditional present of public money is to
loot the Treasury and plunder the taxpayer.

So, you see, the difference between Capitalist and Socialist
governments is not as to whether nationalization should be tolerated;
for neither could get on for a day without it: the difference is
as to how far it should be carried and how fast pushed. Capitalist
governments regard nationalization and municipalization as evils
to be confined to commercially unprofitable works; so as to leave
everything profitable to the profiteers. When they acquire land for
some temporary public purpose, they sell it to a private person
when they have done with it, and use the price to reduce the income
tax. Thereby a piece of land which was national property becomes
private property; and the unearned incomes of the income taxpayers
are increased by the relief from taxation. Socialist governments,
on the other hand, push the purchase of land for the nation at the
expense of the capitalists as hard and as fast as they can, and oppose
its resale to private individuals fiercely. But they are often held
back and even thrown back, just as the Russian Soviet was, by the
inexorable necessity for keeping land and capital in constant and
energetic use. If the Government takes an acre of fertile land or a
ton of spare subsistence (capital) that it is not prepared instantly
to cultivate or feed productive labor with, then, whether it likes or
not, it must sell it back again into private hands and thus retrace
the step towards Socialism which it took without being sufficiently
prepared for it. During the war, when private enterprise broke down
hopelessly, and caused an appalling slaughter of our young soldiers
in Flanders by leaving the army without shells, the munitions had to
be made in national factories. When the war was over, the Capitalist
Government of 1918 sold off these factories as fast as it possibly
could for an old song, in spite of the protests of the Labor Party.
Some of the factories were unsaleable, either because they were in
such out-of-the-way places (lest they should be bombarded) that
private enterprise thought it could do better elsewhere, or because
private enterprise was so wretchedly unenterprising. Yet when a Labor
Government took office it, too, had to try to sell these remaining war
factories because it could not organize enough new public enterprises
to employ them for peace purposes.

This was another object-lesson in the impossibility of taking over land
from the landlords and capital from the capitalists merely because
doing so is Socialistic, without being ready to employ it productively.
If you do, you will have to give it back again, as the Moscow Soviet
had. You must take it only when you have some immediate use for it, and
are ready to start on the job next morning. If a Capitalist Government
were forced by a wave of successful Socialist propaganda to confiscate
more property than it could administer, it might quite easily be forced
to reissue it (not at all unwillingly, and with triumphant cries of “I
told you so”) to private employers on much worse terms for the nation
than those on which it is held at present.




78

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?


Then as to the rate at which the change can take place. If it be put
off too long, or brought about too slowly, there may be a violent
revolution which may produce a dismal equality by ruining everybody
who is not murdered. But equality produced in that way does not
last. Only in a settled and highly civilized society with a strong
Government and an elaborate code of laws can equality of income be
attained or maintained. Now a strong Government is not one with
overwhelming fighting forces in its pay: that is rather the mark of
a panicky Government. It is one that commands the moral approval of
an overwhelming majority of the people. To put it more particularly,
it is one in which the police and the other executive officers of the
Government can always count on the sympathy and, when they need it,
the co-operation of the citizens. A morally shocking Government cannot
last, and cannot carry out such changes as the change from our present
system to Socialism, which are matters of long business arrangements
and extensions of the Civil Service. They must be made thoughtfully,
bit by bit; and they must be popular enough to establish themselves too
solidly for changes of Government to shake them, like our postal system
or our Communism in roads, bridges, police, drainage, and highway
lighting.

It is a great pity that the change cannot be made more quickly; but
we must remember that when Moses delivered the Israelites from their
bondage in Egypt, he found them so unfitted for freedom, that he had to
keep them wandering round the desert for forty years, until those who
had been in bondage in Egypt were mostly dead. The trouble was not the
distance from Egypt to the Promised Land, which was easily walkable in
forty weeks, but the change of condition, and habit, and mind, and the
reluctance of those who had been safe and well treated as slaves to
face danger and hardship as free adventurers. We should have the same
trouble if we attempted to impose Socialism all in a lump on people not
brought up to it. They would wreck it because they could not understand
it nor work its institutions; and some of them would just hate it.
The truth is, we are at present wandering in the desert between the
old Commercialism and the new Socialism. Our industries and our
characters and our laws and our religions are partly commercialized,
partly nationalized, partly municipalized, partly communized; and the
completion of the change will take place like the beginning of it:
that is, without the unintelligent woman knowing what is happening,
or noticing anything except that some ways of life are getting harder
and some easier, with the corresponding exclamations about not knowing
what the world is coming to, or that things are much better than they
used to be. Mark Twain said “It is never too late to mend: there is no
hurry”; and those who dread the change may comfort themselves by the
assurance that there is more danger of its coming too slowly than too
quickly, even though the more sloth the more suffering. It is well that
we who are hopelessly unfitted for Socialism by our bringing-up will
not live for ever. If only it were possible for us to cease corrupting
our children our political superstitions and prejudices would die
with us; and the next generation might bring down the walls of
Jericho. Fortunately, the advantages to be gained by Socialism for the
proletariat, and the fact that proletarian parents are a huge majority
of the electorate, may be depended on to bias moral education more and
more in favor of the movement towards Socialism.

I purposely avoid anticipating any moral pressure of public opinion
against economic selfishness. No doubt that will become part of the
national conscience under Socialism, just as under Capitalism children
are educated to regard success in life as meaning more money than
anyone else and no work to do for it. But I know how hard it is for
you to believe that public opinion could change so completely. You may
have observed that at present, although people do not always choose
the occupation at which they can make the most money, and indeed will
give up lucrative jobs to starve at more congenial ones, yet, when
they have chosen their job, they will take as much as they can get
for it; and the more they can get the better they are thought of. So
I have assumed that they will continue to do so as far as they are
allowed (few of them have any real liberty of this kind now), though
I can quite conceive that in a Socialist future any attempt to obtain
an economic advantage over one’s neighbors, as distinguished from an
economic advantage for the whole community, might come to be considered
such exceedingly bad form that nobody could make it without losing her
place in society just as a detected card-sharper does at present.




79

SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY


The dread of Socialism by nervous people who do not understand it, on
the ground that there would be too much law under it, and that every
act of our lives would be regulated by the police, is more plausible
than the terrors of the ignorant people who think it would mean the
end of all law, because under Capitalism we have been forced to impose
restrictions that in a socialized nation would have no sense, in
order to save the proletariat from extermination, or at least from
extremities that would have provoked it to rebellion. Here is a little
example. A friend of mine who employed some girls in an artistic
business in which there was not competition enough to compel him to do
his worst in the way of sweating them, took a nice old riverside house,
and decorated it very prettily with Morris wall-papers, furnishing
it in such a way that the girls could have their tea comfortably in
their workrooms, which he made as homelike as possible. All went well
until one day a gentleman walked in and announced himself to my
friend as the factory inspector. He looked round him, evidently much
puzzled, and asked where the women worked. “Here” replied my friend,
with justifiable pride, confident that the inspector had never seen
anything so creditable in the way of a factory before. But what the
inspector said was “Where is the copy of the factory regulations which
you are obliged by law to post up on your walls in full view of your
employees?” “Surely you dont expect me to stick up a beastly ugly thing
like that in a room furnished like a drawing room” said my friend.
“Why, that paper on the wall is a Morris paper: I cant disfigure it by
pasting up a big placard on it.” “You are liable to severe penalties”
replied the inspector “for having not only omitted to post the
regulations, but for putting paper on your walls instead of having them
limewashed at the intervals prescribed by law.” “But hang it all!” my
friend remonstrated, “I want to make the place homely and beautiful.
You forget that the girls are not always working. They take their tea
here.” “For allowing your employees to take their meals in the room
where they work you have incurred an additional penalty” said the
inspector. “It is a gross breach of the Factory Acts.” And he walked
out, leaving my friend an abashed criminal caught redhanded.

As it happened, the inspector was a man of sense. He did not return;
the penalties were not exacted; the Morris wall-papers remained; and
the illicit teas continued; but the incident illustrates the extent
to which individual liberty has been cut down under Capitalism for
good as well as for evil. Where women are concerned it is assumed
that they must be protected to a degree that is unnecessary for men
(as if men were any more free in a factory than women); consequently
the regulations are so much stricter that women are often kept out of
employments to which men are welcomed. Besides the factory inspector
there are the Commissioners of Inland Revenue inquiring into your
income and making you disgorge a lot of it, the school attendance
visitors taking possession of your children, the local government
inspectors making you build and drain your house not as you please
but as they order, the Poor Law officers, the unemployment insurance
officers, the vaccination officers, and others whom I cannot think of
just at present. And the tendency is to have more and more of them
as we become less tolerant of the abuses of our capitalist system.
But if you study these interferences with our liberties closely you
will find that in practice they are virtually suspended in the case
of people well enough off to be able to take care of themselves: for
instance, the school attendance officer never calls at houses valued
above a certain figure, though the education of the children in them is
often disgracefully neglected or mishandled. Poor Law officers would
not exist if there were no poor, nor unemployment insurance officers
if we all got incomes whether we were employed or not. If nobody could
make profits by sweating, nor compel us to work in uncomfortable,
unsafe, insanitary factories and workshops, a great deal of our
factory regulations would become not only superfluous but unbearably
obstructive.

Then consider the police: the friends of the honest woman and the
enemies and hunters of thieves, tramps, swindlers, rioters, confidence
tricksters, drunkards, and prostitutes. The police officer, like the
soldier who stands behind him, is mainly occupied today in enforcing
the legalized robbery of the poor which takes place whenever the wealth
produced by the labor of a productive worker is transferred as rent
or interest to the pockets of an idler or an idler’s parasite. They
are even given powers to arrest us for “sleeping out”, which means
sleeping in the open air without paying a landlord for permission to
do so. Get rid of this part of their duties, and at the same time of
the poverty which it enforces, with the mass of corruption, thieving,
rioting, swindling, and prostitution which poverty produces as surely
as insanitary squalor produces smallpox and typhus and you get rid of
the least agreeable part of our present police activity, with all that
it involves in prisons, criminal courts, and jury duties.

By getting rid of poverty we shall get rid of the unhappiness and
worry which it causes. To defend themselves against this, women,
like men, resort to artificial happiness, just as they resort to
artificial insensibility when they have to undergo a painful operation.
Alcohol produces artificial happiness, artificial courage, artificial
gaiety, artificial self-satisfaction, thus making life bearable for
millions who would otherwise be unable to endure their condition. To
them alcohol is a blessing. Unfortunately, as it acts by destroying
conscience, self-control, and the normal functioning of the body,
it produces crime, disease, and degradation on such a scale that its
manufacture and sale are at present prohibited by law throughout the
United States of America, and there is a strong movement to introduce
the same prohibition here.

The ferocity of the resistance to this attempt to abolish artificial
happiness shows how indispensable it has become under Capitalism.
A famous American Prohibitionist was mobbed by medical students in
broad daylight in the streets of London, and barely escaped with the
loss of one eye, and his back all but broken. If he had been equally
famous for anything else, the United States Government would have
insisted on the most ample reparation, apology, and condign punishment
of his assailants; and if this had been withheld, or even grudged,
American hotheads would have clamored for war. But for the enemy of the
anæsthetic that makes the misery of the poor and the idleness of the
rich tolerable, turning it into a fuddled dream of enjoyment, neither
his own country nor the public conscience of ours could be moved even
to the extent of a mild censure on the police. It was evident that had
he been torn limb from limb the popular verdict would have been that it
served him jolly well right.

Alcohol, however, is a very mild drug compared with the most
effective modern happiness producers. These give you no mere sodden
self-satisfaction and self-conceit: they give you ecstasy. It is
followed by hideous wretchedness; but then you can cure that by taking
more and more of the drug until you become a living horror to all about
you, after which you become a dead one, to their great relief. As to
these drugs, not even a mob of medical students, expressly educated
to make their living by trading in artificial health and happiness,
dares protest against strenuous prohibition, provided they may still
prescribe the drug; nevertheless the demand is so great in the classes
who have too much money and too little work that smuggling, which is
easy and very profitable, goes on in spite of the heaviest penalties.
Our efforts to suppress this trade in artificial happiness has already
landed us in such interferences with personal liberty that we are not
allowed to purchase many useful drugs for entirely innocent purposes
unless we first pay (not to say bribe) a doctor to prescribe it.

Still, prohibition of the fiercer drugs has the support of public
opinion. It is the prohibition of alcohol that rouses such opposition
that the strongest governments shrink from it in spite of overwhelming
evidence of the increase in material well-being produced by it wherever
it has been risked. You prove to people that as teetotallers they will
dwell in their own houses instead of in a frowsy tenement, besides
keeping their own motor car, having a bank account, and living ten
years longer. They angrily deny it; but when you crush their denials
by unquestionable American statistics they tell you flatly that they
had rather be happy for thirty years in a tenement without a car or
a penny to put in the bank than be unhappy for forty years with all
these things. You find a wife distracted because her husband drinks
and is ruining her and her children; yet when you induce him to take
the pledge, you find presently that she has tempted him to drink again
because he is so morose when he is sober that she cannot endure living
with him. And to make his drunkenness bearable she takes to drink
herself, and lives happily in shameless degradation with him until they
both drink themselves dead.

Besides, the vast majority of modern drinkers do not feel any the worse
for it, because they do not miss the extra efficiency they would enjoy
on the water waggon. Very few people are obliged by their occupations
to work up to the extreme limit of their powers. Who cares whether
a lady gardener or a bookkeeper or a typist or a shop assistant is
a teetotaller or not, provided she always stops well short of being
noticeably drunk? It is to the motorist or the aeroplane pilot that a
single glass of any intoxicant may make the difference between life and
death. What would be sobriety for a billiard marker would be ruinous
drunkenness for a professional billiard player. The glass of stimulant
that enlivens a routine job is often dropped because when the routineer
plays golf “to keep herself fit” she finds that it spoils her putting.
Thus you find that you can sometimes make a worker give up alcohol
partly or wholly by giving her more leisure. She finds that a woman who
is sober enough to do her work as well as it need be done is not sober
enough to play as well as she would like to do it. The moment people
are in a position to develop their fitness, as they call it, to the
utmost, whether at work or at play, they begin to grudge the sacrifice
of the last inch of efficiency which alcohol knocks off, and which
in all really fine work makes the difference between first rate and
second rate. If this book owed any of its quality to alcohol or to any
other drug, it might amuse you more; but it would be enormously less
conscientious intellectually, and therefore much more dangerous to your
mind.

If you put all this together you will see that any social change
which abolishes poverty and increases the leisure of routine workers
will destroy the need for artificial happiness, and increase the
opportunities for the sort of activity that makes people very jealous
of reducing their fitness by stimulants. Even now we admit that the
champion athlete must not drink whilst training; and the nearer we get
to a world in which everyone is in training all the time the nearer we
shall get to general teetotalism, and to the possibility of discarding
all those restrictions on personal liberty which the prevalent dearth
of happiness and consequent resort to pernicious artificial substitutes
now force us to impose.

As to such serious personal outrages as compulsory vaccination and
the monstrous series of dangerous inoculations which are forced
on soldiers, and at some frontiers on immigrants, they are only
desperate attempts to stave off the consequences of bad sanitation and
overcrowding by infecting people with disease when they are well and
strong in the hope of developing their natural resistance to it by
exercise sufficiently to prevent them from catching it when they are
ailing and weak. The poverty of our doctors forces them to support such
practices in the teeth of all experience and disinterested science; but
if we get rid of poor doctors and overcrowded and insanitary dwellings
we get rid of the diseases which terrify us into these grotesque witch
rituals; and no woman will be forced to expose her infant to the risk
of a horrible, lingering, hideously disfiguring death from generalized
vaccinia lest it should catch confluent smallpox, which, by the way,
is, on a choice between the two evils, much to be preferred. Dread
of epidemics: that is, of disease and premature death, has created a
pseudo-scientific tyranny just as the dread of hell created a priestly
tyranny in the ages of faith. Florence Nightingale, a sensible woman
whom the doctors could neither humbug nor bully, told them that what
was wrong with our soldiers was dirt, bad food, and foul water: in
short, the conditions produced by war in the field and poverty in the
slum. When we get rid of poverty the doctors will no longer be able to
frighten us into imposing on ourselves by law pathogenic inoculations
which, under healthy conditions, kill more people than the diseases
against which they pretend to protect them. And when we get rid of
Commercialism, and vaccines no longer make dividends for capitalists,
the fairy tales by which they are advertized will drop out of the
papers, and be replaced, let us hope, by disinterested attempts to
ascertain and publish the scientific truth about them, which, by the
way, promises to be much more hopeful and interesting.

As to the mass of oppressive and unjust laws that protect property
at the expense of humanity, and enable proprietors to drive whole
populations off the land because sheep or deer are more profitable, we
have said enough about them already. Naturally we shall get rid of them
when we get rid of private property.

Now, however, I must come to one respect in which official interference
with personal liberty would be carried under Socialism to lengths
undreamed of at present. We may be as idle as we please if only we have
money in our pockets; and the more we look as if we had never done a
day’s work in our lives and never intend to, the more we are respected
by every official we come in contact with, and the more we are envied,
courted, and deferred to by everybody. If we enter a village school the
children all rise and stand respectfully to receive us, whereas the
entrance of a plumber or carpenter leaves them unmoved. The mother who
secures a rich idler as a husband for her daughter is proud of it: the
father who makes a million uses it to make rich idlers of his children.
That work is a curse is part of our religion: that it is a disgrace is
the first article in our social code. To carry a parcel through the
streets is not only a trouble, but a derogation from one’s rank. Where
there are blacks to carry them, as in South Africa, it is virtually
impossible for a white to be seen doing such a thing. In London we
condemn these colonial extremes of snobbery; but how many ladies could
we persuade to carry a jug of milk down Bond Street on a May afternoon,
even for a bet?

Now it is not likely, human laziness being what it is, that under
Socialism anyone will carry a parcel or a jug if she can induce
somebody else (her husband, say) to carry it for her. But nobody will
think it disgraceful to carry a parcel because carrying a parcel is
work. The idler will be treated not only as a rogue and a vagabond, but
as an embezzler of the national funds, the meanest sort of thief. The
police will not have much trouble in detecting such offenders. They
will be denounced by everybody, because there will be a very marked
jealousy of slackers who take their share without “doing their bit”.
The real lady will be the woman who does more than her bit, and thereby
leaves her country richer than she found it. Today nobody knows what a
real lady is; but the dignity is assumed most confidently by the women
who ostentatiously take as much and give as nearly nothing as they can.

The snobbery that exists at present among workers will also disappear.
Our ridiculous social distinctions between manual labor and brain
work, between wholesale business and retail business, are really class
distinctions. If a doctor considers it beneath his dignity to carry a
scuttle of coals from one room to another, but is proud of his skill
in performing some unpleasantly messy operation, it is clearly not
because the one is any more or less manual than the other, but solely
because surgical operations are associated with descent through younger
sons from the propertied class, and carrying coals with proletarian
descent. If the petty ironmonger’s daughter is not considered eligible
for marriage with the ironmaster’s son, it is not because selling steel
by the ounce and selling it by the ton are attributes of two different
species, but because petty ironmongers have usually been poor and
ironmasters rich. When there are no rich and no poor, and descent from
the proprietary class will be described as “criminal antecedents”,
people will turn their hands to anything, and indeed rebel against
any division of labor that deprives them of physical exercise. My own
excessively sedentary occupation makes me long to be a half-time navvy.
I find myself begging my gardener, who is a glutton for work, to leave
me a few rough jobs to do when I have written myself to a standstill;
for I cannot go out and take a hand with the navvies, because I should
be taking the bread out of a poor man’s mouth; nor should we be very
comfortable company for oneanother with our different habits and speech
and bringing-up, all produced by differences in our parents’ incomes
and class. But with all these obstacles swept away by Socialism I
could lend a hand at any job within my strength and skill, and help my
mates instead of hurting them, besides being as good company for them
as I am now for professional persons or rich folk. Even as it is a good
deal of haymaking is done for fun; and I am persuaded (having some
imagination, thank Heaven!) that under Socialism open air workers would
have plenty of voluntary help, female as well as male, without the
trouble of whistling for it. Laws might have to be made to deal with
officiousness. Everything would make for activity and against idleness:
indeed it would probably be much harder to be an idler than it is now
to be a pickpocket. Anyhow, as idleness would be not only a criminal
offence, but unladylike and ungentlemanly in the lowest degree, nobody
would resent the laws against it as infringements of natural liberty.

Lest anyone should at this point try to muddle you with the inveterate
delusion that because capital can increase wealth people can live on
capital without working, let me go back just for a moment to the way in
which capital becomes productive.

Let us take those cases in which capital is used, not for destructive
purposes, as in war, but for increasing production: that is, saving
time and trouble in future work. When all the merchandise in a country
has to be brought from the makers to the users on packhorses or carts
over bad roads the cost in time and trouble and labor of man and beast
is so great that most things have to be made and consumed on the spot.
There may be a famine in one village and a glut in another a hundred
miles off because of the difficulty of sending food from one to the
other. Now if there is enough spare subsistence (capital) to support
gangs of navvies and engineers and other workers whilst they cover the
country with railways, canals, and metalled roads, and build engines
and trains, barges and motor cars to travel on them, to say nothing
of aeroplanes, then all sorts of goods can be sent long distances
quickly and cheaply; so that the village which formerly could not get
a cartload of bread and a few cans of milk from a hundred miles off
to save its life is able to buy quite cheaply grain grown in Russia
or America and domestic articles made in Germany or Japan. The spare
subsistence will be entirely consumed in the operation: there will
be no more left of it than of the capital lent for the war; but it
will leave behind it the roadways and waterways and machinery by which
labor can do a great deal more in a given time than it could without
them. The destruction of these aids to labor would be a very different
matter from our annual confiscations of the National Debt by taxation.
It would leave us much poorer and less civilized: in fact most of us
would starve, because big modern populations cannot support themselves
without elaborate machinery and railways and so forth.

Still, roadways and machines can produce nothing by themselves. They
can only assist labor. And they have to be continually repaired and
renewed by labor. A country crammed with factories and machines,
traversed in all directions by roadways, tramways and railways, dotted
with aerodromes and hangars and garages, each crowded with aeroplanes
and airships and motor cars, would produce absolutely nothing at all
except ruin and rust and decay if the inhabitants ceased to work. We
should starve in the midst of all the triumphs of civilization because
we could not breakfast on the clay of the railway embankments, lunch on
boiled aeroplanes, and dine on toasted steam-hammers. Nature inexorably
denies to us the possibility of living without labor or of hoarding its
most vital products. We may be helped by past labor; but we must live
by present labor. By telling off one set of workers to produce more
than they consume, and telling off another set to live on the surplus
while the first set makes roads and machines, we may make our labor
much more productive, and take out the gain either in shorter hours of
work or bigger returns from the same number of hours of work as before;
but we cannot stop working and sit down and look on while the roads
and machines make and fetch and carry for us without anyone lifting a
finger. We may reduce our working hours to two a day, or increase our
income tenfold, or even conceivably do both at once; but by no magic
on earth can any of us honestly become an idler. When you see a person
who does no productive or serviceable work, you may conclude with
absolute certainty that she or he is spunging on the labor of other
people. It may or may not be expedient to allow certain persons this
privilege for a time: sometimes it is; and sometimes it is not. I have
already described how we offer at present, to anyone who can invent a
labor-saving machine, what is called a patent: that is, a right to
take a share of what the workers produce with the help of that machine
for fourteen years. When a man writes a book or a play, we give him,
by what is called copyright, the power to make everybody who reads the
book or sees the play performed pay him and his heirs something during
his lifetime and fifty years afterwards. This is our way of encouraging
people to invent machines and to write books and plays instead of being
content with the old handiwork, and with the Bible and Shakespear; and
as we do it with our eyes open and with a definite purpose, and the
privilege lasts no longer than enough to accomplish its purpose, there
is a good deal to be said for it. But to allow the descendants of a
man who invested a few hundred pounds in the New River Water Company
in the reign of James I to go on for ever and ever living in idleness
on the incessant daily labor of the London ratepayers is senseless and
mischievous. If they actually did the daily work of supplying London
with water, they might reasonably claim either to work for less time
or receive more for their work than a water-carrier in Elizabeth’s
time; but for doing no work at all they have not a shadow of excuse. To
consider Socialism a tyranny because it will compel everyone to share
the daily work of the world is to confess to the brain of an idiot and
the instinct of a tramp.

Speaking generally, it is a mistake to suppose that the absence of
law means the absence of tyranny. Take, for example, the tyranny of
fashion. The only law concerned in this is the law that we must all
wear something in the presence of other people. It does not prescribe
what a woman shall wear: it only says that in public she shall be a
draped figure and not a nude one. But does this mean that a woman can
wear what she likes? Legally she can; but socially her slavery is more
complete than any sumptuary law could make it. If she is a waitress or
a parlormaid there is no question about it: she must wear a uniform
or lose her employment and starve. If she is a duchess she must dress
in the fashion or be ridiculous. In the case of the duchess nothing
worse than ridicule is the penalty of unfashionable dressing. But any
woman who has to earn her living outside her own house finds that
if she is to keep her employment she must also keep up appearances,
which means that she must dress in the fashion, even when it is not at
all becoming to her, and her wardrobe contains serviceable dresses a
couple of years out of date. And the better her class of employment
the tighter her bonds. The ragpicker has the melancholy privilege of
being less particular about her working clothes than the manageress of
a hotel; but she would be very glad to exchange that freedom for the
obligation of the manageress to be always well dressed. In fact the
most enviable women in this respect are nuns and policewomen, who, like
gentlemen at evening parties and military officers on parade, never
have to think of what they will wear, as it is all settled for them by
regulation and custom.

This dress question is only one familiar example of the extent to which
the private employment of today imposes regulations on us which are
quite outside the law, but which are none the less enforced by private
employers on pain of destitution. The husband in public employment, the
socialized husband, is much freer than the unsocialized one in private
employment. He may travel third class, wearing a lounge suit and soft
hat, living in the suburbs, and spending his Sundays as he pleases,
whilst the others must travel first class, wear a frock coat and tall
hat, live at a fashionable address, and go to church regularly. Their
wives have to do as they do; and the single women who have escaped from
the limitations of the home into independent activity find just the
same difference between public work and private: in public employment
their livelihood is never at the mercy of a private irresponsible
person as it is in private. The lengths to which women are sometimes
forced to go to please their private employers are much more revolting
than, for instance, the petty dishonesties in which clerks are forced
to become accomplices.

Then there are estate rules: that is to say, edicts drawn up by private
estate owners and imposed on their tenants without any legal sanction.
These often prohibit the building on the estate of any place of worship
except an Anglican church, or of any public house. They refuse houses
to practitioners of the many kinds that are now not registered by the
General Medical Council. In fact they exercise a tyranny which would
lead to a revolution if it were attempted by the King, and which
did actually provoke us to cut off a king’s head in the seventeenth
century. We have to submit to these tyrannies because the people who
can refuse us employment or the use of land have powers of life and
death over us, and can therefore make us do what they like, law or no
law. Socialism would transfer this power of life and death from private
hands to the hands of the constitutional authorities, and regulate it
by public law. The result would be a great increase of independence,
self-respect, freedom from interference with our tastes and ways of
living, and, generally, all the liberty we really care about.

Childish people, we saw, want to have all their lives regulated for
them, with occasional holiday outbursts of naughtiness to relieve the
monotony; and we admitted that the ablebodied ones make good soldiers
and steady conventional employees. When they are left to themselves
they make laws of fashions, customs, points of etiquette, and “what
other people will say”, hardly daring to call their souls their own,
though they may be rich enough to do as they please. Money as a means
of freedom is thrown away on these people. It is funny to hear them
declaring, as they often do, that Socialism would be unendurable
because it would dictate to them what they should eat and drink and
wear, leaving them no choice in the matter, when they are cowering
under a social tyranny which regulates their meals, their clothes,
their hours, their religion and politics, so ruthlessly that they dare
no more walk down a fashionable street in an unfashionable hat, which
there is no law to prevent them doing, than to walk down it naked,
which would be stopped by the police. They regard with dread and
abhorrence the emancipated spirits who, within the limits of legality
and cleanliness and convenience, do not care what they wear, and boldly
spend their free time as their fancy dictates.

But do not undervalue the sheepish wisdom of the conventional. Nobody
can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people
are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality
saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one
sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure for freedom
than unconventionality does. Believe me, unless you intend to devote
your life to preaching unconventionality, and thus make it your
profession, the more conventional you are, short of being silly or
slavish or miserable, the easier life will be for you. Even as a
professional reformer you had better be content to preach one form
of unconventionality at a time. For instance, if you rebel against
high-heeled shoes, take care to do it in a very smart hat.




80

SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE


When promising new liberties, Socialists are apt to forget that people
object even more strongly to new liberties than to new laws. If a woman
has been accustomed to go in chains all her life and to see other women
doing the same, a proposal to take her chains off will horrify her. She
will feel naked without them, and clamor to have any impudent hussy who
does not feel about them exactly as she does taken up by the police. In
China the Manchu ladies felt that way about their crippled feet. It is
easier to put chains on people than to take them off if the chains look
respectable.

In Russia marriage under the Tsars was an unbreakable chain. There was
no divorce; but on the other hand there was, as with us, a widespread
practice of illicit polygamy. A woman could live with a man without
marrying him. A man could live with a woman without marrying her. In
fact each might have several partners. In Russia under the Communist
Soviet this state of things has been reversed. If a married couple
cannot agree, they can obtain a divorce without having to pretend to
disgrace themselves as in Protestant England. That shocks many English
ladies, married or unmarried, who take the Book of Common Prayer
literally. But the Soviet does not tolerate illicit relations. If a
man lives with a woman as husband with wife he must marry her, even if
he has to divorce another wife to do it. The woman has the right to
the status of a wife, and must claim it. This seems to many English
gentlemen an unbearable tyranny: they regard the Soviet legislators as
monsters for interfering with male liberty in this way; and they have
plenty of female sympathizers.

In countries and sects where polygamy is legal, the laws compelling the
husband to pay equal attention to all his wives are staggering to a
British husband, who is not now, as he was formerly, legally obliged to
pay any attention to his one wife, nor she to him.

Now marriage institutions are not a part of Socialism. Marriage, of
which we speak as if it were one and the same thing all the world over,
differs so much from sect to sect and from country to country that to
a Roman Catholic or a citizen of the State of South Carolina it means
strict monogamy without the possibility of divorce; whilst to our high
caste fellow-subjects in India it means unlimited polygamy, as it did
to the Latter Day Saints of Salt Lake City within my recollection.
Between these extremes there are many grades. There are marriages
which nothing can break except death or annulment by the Pope; and
there are divorces that can be ordered at a hotel like a bottle of
champagne or a motor car. There is English marriage, Scottish marriage,
and Irish marriage, all different. There is religious marriage and
civil marriage, civil marriage being a recent institution won from
the Churches after a fierce struggle, and still regarded as invalid
and sinful by many pious people. There is an established celibacy,
the negation of marriage, among nuns, priests, and certain Communist
sects. With all this Socialism has nothing directly to do. Equality of
income applies impartially to all the sects, all the States, and all
the communities, to monogamists, polygamists, and celibates, to infants
incapable of marriage and centenarians past it.

Why, then, is it that there is a rooted belief that Socialism would in
some way alter marriage, if not abolish it? Why did quite respectable
English newspapers after the Russian revolution of 1917 gravely infer
that the Soviet had not only nationalized land and capital, but
proceeded, as part of the logic of Socialism, to nationalize women?
No doubt the main explanation of that extravagance is that the highly
respectable newspapers in question still regard women as property,
nationalizable like any other property, and were consequently unable
to understand that this very masculine view is inconceivable to a
Communist. But the truth under all such nonsense is that Socialism
must have a tremendous effect on marriage and the family. At present
a married woman is a female slave chained to a male one; and a girl
is a prisoner in the house and in the hands of her parents. When the
personal relation between the parties is affectionate, and their powers
not abused, the arrangement works well enough to be bearable by people
who have been brought up to regard it as a matter of course. But
when the parties are selfish, tyrannical, jealous, cruel, envious,
with different and antagonistic tastes and beliefs, incapable of
understanding oneanother: in short, antipathetic and incompatible, it
produces much untold human unhappiness.

Why is this unhappiness endured when the door is not locked, and the
victims can walk into the street at any moment? Obviously because
starvation awaits them at the other side of the door. Vows and
inculcated duties may seem effective in keeping unhappy wives and
revolting daughters at home when they have no alternative; but there
must be an immense number of cases in which wives and husbands, girls
and boys, would walk out of the house, like Nora Helmer in Ibsen’s
famous play, if they could do so without losing a single meal, a single
night’s protection and shelter, or the least loss of social standing in
consequence.

As Socialism would place them in this condition it would infallibly
break up unhappy marriages and families. This being obviously desirable
we need not pretend to deplore it. But we must not expect more domestic
dissolutions than are likely to happen. No parent would tyrannize as
some parents tyrannize now if they knew that the result would be the
prompt disappearance of their children, unless indeed they disliked
their children enough to desire that result, in which case so much the
better; but the normal merely hasty parent would have to recover the
fugitives by apologies, promises of amendment, or bribes, and keep them
by more stringent self-control and less stringent parental control.
Husbands and wives, if they knew that their marriage could only last on
condition of its being made reasonably happy for both of them, would
have to behave far better to oneanother than they ever seem to dream
of doing now. There would be such a prodigious improvement in domestic
manners all round that a fairly plausible case can be made out for
expecting that far fewer marriages and families will be broken up under
Socialism than at present. Still, there will be a difference, even
though the difference be greatly for the better. When once it becomes
feasible for a wife to leave her husband, not for a few days or weeks
after a tiff because they are for the moment tired of oneanother, but
without any intention of returning, there must be prompt and almost
automatic divorce, whether they like it or not. At present a deserted
wife or husband, by simply refusing to sue for divorce, can in mere
revenge or jealousy or on Church grounds, prevent the deserter from
marrying again. We should have to follow the good example of Russia
in refusing to tolerate such situations. Both parties must be either
married or unmarried. An intermediate state in which each can say to
the other “Well, if I cannot have you nobody else shall” is clearly
against public morality.

It is on marriage that the secular State is likely to clash most
sensationally with the Churches, because the Churches claim that
marriage is a metaphysical business governed by an absolute right and
wrong which has been revealed to them by God, and which the State must
therefore enforce without regard to circumstances. But to this the
State will never assent, except in so far as clerical notions happen to
be working fairly well and to be shared by the secular rulers. Marriage
is for the State simply a licence to two citizens to beget children.
To say that the State must not concern itself with the question of
how many people the community is to consist of, and, when a change is
desired, at what rate the number should be increased or reduced, is to
treat the nation as no sane person would dream of treating a ferryman.
If the ferryman’s boat will hold only ten passengers, and you tell him
that it has been revealed to you by God that he must take all who want
to cross over, even though they number a thousand, the ferryman will
not argue with you, he will refuse to take more than ten, and will
smite you with his oar if you attempt to detain his boat and shove a
couple more passengers into it. And, obviously, the ten already aboard
will help him for their own sakes.

When Socialism does away with the artificial overpopulation which
Capitalism, as we have seen, produces by withdrawing workers from
productive employments to wasteful ones, the State will be face to
face at last with the genuine population question: the question of how
many people it is desirable to have in the country. To get rid of the
million or so for whom our capitalists fail to find employment, the
State now depends on a high death-rate, especially for infants, on war,
and on swarming like the bees. Africa, America, and Australasia have
taken millions of our people from us in bee swarms. But in time all
places comfortable enough to tempt people to emigrate get filled up;
and their inhabitants, like the Americans and Australians today, close
their gates against further immigration. If we find our population
still increasing, we may have to discuss whether we should keep it
down, as we keep down the cat population, by putting the superfluous
babies into the bucket, which would be no wickeder than the avoidable
infant mortality and surgical abortion resorted to at present. The
alternative would be to make it a severely punishable crime for
married couples to have more than a prescribed number of children.
But punishing the parents would not dispose of the unwanted children.
The fiercest persecution of the mothers of illegitimate children has
not prevented illegitimate children from being born, though it has
made most of them additionally undesirable by afflicting them with the
vices and infirmities of disgrace and poverty. Any State limiting the
number of children permitted to a family would be compelled not only
to tolerate contraception, but to inculcate it and instruct women in
its methods. And this would immediately bring it into conflict with
the Churches. Whether under such circumstances the State would simply
ignore the Churches or pass a law under which their preachers could
be prosecuted for sedition would depend wholly on the gravity of the
emergency, and not on the principles of liberty, toleration, freedom of
conscience, and so forth which were so stirringly trumpeted in England
in the eighteenth century when the boot was on the other foot.

In France at present the State is striving to increase the population.
It is thus in the position of the Israelites in the Promised Land,
and of Joseph Smith and his Mormons in the State of Illinois in 1843,
when only a rapid increase in their numbers could rescue them from a
condition of dangerous numerical inferiority to their enemies. Joseph
Smith did what Abraham did: he resorted to polygamy. We, not being in
any such peril ourselves, have seen nothing in this but an opportunity
for silly and indecent jocularity; but there are not many political
records more moving than Brigham Young’s description of the horror with
which he received Joseph’s revelation that it was the will of God that
they should all take as many wives as possible. He had been brought up
to regard polygamy as a mortal sin, and did sincerely so regard it.
And yet he believed that Smith’s revelations were from God. In his
perplexity, he tells us, he found himself, when a funeral passed in
the street, envying the corpse (another mortal sin); and there is not
the slightest reason to doubt that he was perfectly sincere. After all,
it is not necessary for a married man to have any moral or religious
objection to polygamy to be horrified at the prospect of having twenty
additional wives “sealed” to him. Yet Brigham Young got over his
horror, and was married more than thirty times. And the genuinely pious
Mormon women, whose prejudices were straiter than those of the men,
were as effectively and easily converted to polygamy as Brigham.

Though this proves that western civilization is just as susceptible
to polygamy as eastern when the need arises, the French Government,
for very good reasons, has not ventured to propose it as a remedy for
underpopulation in France. The alternatives are prizes and decorations
for the parents of large families (families of fifteen have their
group portraits in the illustrated papers, and are highly complimented
on their patriotism), bounties, exemptions from taxation, vigorous
persecution of contraception as immoral, facilities for divorce
amounting to successive as distinguished from simultaneous polygamy,
all tending towards that State endowment of parentage which seems
likely to become a matter of course in all countries, with, of course,
encouragement to desirable immigrants. To these measures no Church is
likely to object, unless indeed it holds that celibacy is a condition
of salvation, a doctrine which has never yet found enough practising
converts to threaten a modern nation with sterility. Compulsory
parentage is as possible as compulsory military service; but just as
the soldier who is compelled to serve must have his expenses paid by
the State, a woman compelled to become a mother can hardly be expected
to do so at her own expense.

But the maintenance of monogamy must always have for its basis a
practical equality in numbers between men and women. If a war reduced
the male population by, say, 70 per cent, and the female population
by only one per cent, polygamy would immediately be instituted, and
parentage made compulsory, with the hearty support of all the really
popular Churches.

Thus, it seems, the State, Capitalist or Socialist, will finally settle
what marriage is to be, no matter what the Churches say. A Socialist
State is more likely to interfere than a Capitalist one, because
Socialism will clear the population question from the confusion into
which Capitalism has thrown it. The State will then, as I have said, be
face to face with the real population question; but nobody yet knows
what the real population question will be like, because nobody can
now settle how many persons per acre offer the highest possibilities
of living. There is the Boer ideal of living out of sight of your
neighbors’ chimneys. There is the Bass Rock ideal of crowding as many
people on the earth as it can support. There is the bungalow ideal and
the monster hotel ideal. Neither you nor I can form the least notion of
how posterity will decide between them when society is well organized
enough to make the problem practical and the issues clear.




81

SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN


In the case of young children we have gone far in our interference
with the old Roman rights of parents. For nine mortal years the child
is taken out of its parents’ hands for most of the day, and thus made
a State school child instead of a private family child. The records
of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children are still
sickening enough to shew how necessary it is to protect children
against their parents; but the bad cases are scarce, and shew that it
is now difficult for the worst sort of parent to evade for long the
school attendance officer, the teacher, and the police. Unfortunately
the proceedings lead to nothing but punishment of the parents: when
they come out of prison the children are still in their hands. When
we have beaten the cat for cruelty we give it back its mouse. We have
now, however, taken a step in the right direction by passing an Act
of Parliament by which adoptive parents have all the rights of real
parents. You can now adopt a child with complete security against the
parents coming to claim the child back again whenever it suits them.
All their rights pass to you by the adoption. Bad natural parents can
be completely superseded by adoptive ones: it remains only to make
the operation compulsory where it is imperative. Compulsory adoption
is already an old established institution in the case of our Poor Law
Guardians. Oliver Twist was a compulsory adopted child. His natural
parents were replaced by very unnatural ones. Mr Bumble is being
happily abolished; but there must still be somebody to adopt Oliver.
When equality of income makes an end of his social disadvantages there
will be no lack of childless volunteers.

Our eyes are being opened more and more to the fact that in our school
system education is only the pretext under which parents get rid of
the trouble of their children by bundling them off into a prison or
child farm which is politely called a school. We also know, or ought to
know, that institutional treatment of children is murderous for infants
and bad for all children. Homeless infants can be saved from that by
adoption; but the elder children are forcing us to face the problem of
organizing child life as such, giving children constitutional rights
just as we have had to give them to women, and ceasing to shirk that
duty either by bundling the children off to Bastilles called schools
or by making the child the property of its father (in the case of an
illegitimate child, of its mother) as we have ceased to shirk women’s
rights by making the woman the property of her husband. The beginnings
of such organization are already visible in the Girl Guides and the
Boy Scouts. But the limits to liberty which the State has to set and
the obligations which it has to impose on adults are as imperative for
children as for adults. The Girl Guide cannot be always guiding nor
the Boy Scout always scouting. They must qualify themselves for adult
citizenship by certain acquirements whether they like it or not. That
is our excuse for school: they must be educated.

Education is a word that in our mouths covers a good many things.
At present we are only extricating ourselves slowly and, as usual,
reluctantly and ill humoredly, from our grossest stupidities about
it. One of them is that it means learning lessons, and that learning
lessons is for children, and ceases when they come of age. I, being a
septuagenarian, can assure you confidently that we never cease learning
to the extent of our capacity for learning until our faculties fail
us. As to what we have been taught in school and college, I should say
roughly that as it takes us all our lives to find out the meaning of
the small part of it that is true and the error of the large part that
is false, it is not surprising that those who have been “educated”
least know most. It is gravely injurious both to children and adults
to be forced to study subjects for which they have no natural aptitude
even when some ulterior object which they have at heart gives them a
fictitious keenness to master it. Mental disablement caused in this way
is common in the modern examination-passing classes. Dickens’s Mr Toots
is not a mere figure of fun: he is an authentic instance of a sort
of imbecility that is dangerously prevalent in our public school and
university products. Toots is no joke.

Even when a natural aptitude exists it may be overcome by the repulsion
created by coercive teaching. If a girl is unmusical, any attempt to
force her to learn to play Beethoven’s sonatas is torture to herself
and to her teachers, to say nothing of the agonies of her audiences
when her parents order her to display her accomplishment to visitors.
But unmusical girls are as exceptional as deaf girls. The common case
of a rooted loathing for music, and a vindictive hope that Beethoven
may be expiating a malevolent life in eternal torment, is that of the
normally musical girl who, before she had ever heard a sonata or any
other piece of music played well enough to seem beautiful to her, has
been set to practise scales in a cold room, rapped over the knuckles
when she struck a wrong note, and had the Pathetic Sonata rapped and
scolded and bullied into her bar by bar until she could finger it
out without a mistake. That is still what school-taught music means
to many unfortunate young ladies whose parents desire them to have
accomplishments, and accordingly pay somebody who has been handled in
the same way to knock this particular accomplishment into them. If
these unhappy victims thought that Socialism meant compulsory music
they would die in the last ditch fighting against it; and they would be
right.

If I were writing a book for men I should not speak of music: I should
speak of verses written in literary Latin (meaning a sort of Latin
that nobody ever spoke), of Greek, and of algebra. Many an unhappy lad
who would have voluntarily picked up enough Latin and Greek to read
Virgil, Horace, and Homer, or to whom Descartes, Newton, and Einstein
would be heroes such as Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner are to
unspoilt musicians, loathes every printed page except in a newspaper
or detective story, and shrinks from an algebraic symbol or a diagram
of the parallelogram of forces as a criminal from a prison. This is
the result of our educational mania. When Eton was founded, the idea
was that the boys should be roused at six in the morning and kept hard
at their Latin without a moment’s play until they went to bed. And
now that the tendency is to keep them hard at play instead, without
a moment for free work, their condition is hardly more promising.
Either way an intelligent woman, remembering her own childhood, must
stand aghast at the utter disregard of the children’s ordinary human
rights, and the classing of them partly as animals to be tamed and
broken in, for which, provided the methods are not those of the trainer
of performing animals, there is something to be said, and partly as
inanimate sacks into which learning is to be poured _ad libitum_, for
which there is nothing to be said except what can be said for the water
torture of the Inquisition, in which the fluid was poured down the
victims’ throats until they were bloated to death. But there was some
method in this madness. I have already hinted to you what you must have
known very well, that children, unless they are forced into a quiet,
sedentary, silent, motionless, and totally unnatural association with
adults, are so troublesome at home that humane parents who would submit
to live in a bear-garden or a monkey-house rather than be cruelly
repressive, are only too glad to hand them over to anyone who will
profess to educate them, whilst the desperate struggle of the genteel
disendowed younger son and unmarried daughter class to find some means
of livelihood produces a number of persons who are willing to make a
profession of child farming under the same highly plausible pretext.

Socialism would abolish this class by providing its members with less
hateful and equally respectable employment. Nobody who had not a
genuine vocation for teaching would adopt teaching as a profession.
Sadists, female and male, who now get children into their power so
as to be able to torture them with impunity, and child fanciers (who
are sometimes the same people) of the kind that now start amateur
orphanages because they have the same craze for children that some
people have for horses and dogs, although they often treat them
abominably, would be checkmated if the children had any refuge from
them except the homes from which they had been practically turned out,
and from which they would be promptly returned to their tyrants with
the assurance that if they were punished it served them right for being
naughty. Within a few days of writing this I have read as part of the
day’s news of a case in which a mother summoned a schoolmaster because
he had first caned her boy for hiccuping, which is not a voluntary
action, and then, because the boy made light of the punishment, fell
on him in a fury and thrashed him until he raised wheals on him that
were visible eight days afterwards. Magistrates are usually as lenient
in dealing with these assaults as with similar assaults by husbands
on their wives (assaults by wives are laughed out of court): indeed
they usually dismiss the case with a rebuke to the victim for being
an unmanly little coward and not taking his licking in good part;
but this time they admitted that the punishment, as they called it,
was too severe; and the schoolmaster had to pay the mother’s costs,
though nobody hinted at any unfitness on his part for the duties he had
assumed. And, in fairness, it did not follow that the man was a savage
or a Sadist, any more than it follows that married people who commit
furious assaults on one another have murderous natural dispositions.
The truth is that just as married life in a one-room tenement is
more than human nature can bear even when there are no children to
complicate it, life in the sort of prison we call a school, where
the teacher who hates her work is shut in with a crowd of unwilling,
hostile, restless children, sets up a strain and hatred that explodes
from time to time in onslaughts with the cane, not only for hiccuping,
but for talking, whispering, looking out of the window (inattention),
and even moving. Modern psychological research, even in its rather
grotesque Freudian beginnings, is forcing us to recognize how serious
is the permanent harm that comes of this atmosphere of irritation on
the one side and suppression, terror, and reactionary naughtiness
on the other. Even those who do not study psychology are beginning
to notice that chaining dogs makes them dangerous, and is a cruel
practice. They will presently have misgivings about chained children
too, and begin to wonder whether thrashing and muzzling them is the
proper remedy.

As a general result we find that what we call education is a failure.
The poor woman’s child is imprisoned for nine years under pretext
of teaching it to read, write, and speak its own language: a year’s
work at the outside. And at the end of the nine years the prisoner
can do none of these things presentably. In 1896, after twenty-six
years of compulsory general education, the secretary of the Union of
Mathematical Instrument Makers told me that most of his members signed
with a mark. Rich male children are kept in three successive prisons,
the preparatory school, the public school (meaning a very exclusive
private school malversating public endowments), and the university, the
period of imprisonment being from twelve to fourteen years, and the
subjects taught including classical languages and higher mathematics.
Rich female children, formerly imprisoned in the family dungeon under
a wardress called a governess, are now sent out like their brothers.
The result is a slightly greater facility in reading and writing,
the habits and speech of the rich idle classes, and a moral and
intellectual imbecility which leaves them politically at the mercy of
every bumptious adventurer and fluent charlatan who has picked up their
ways and escaped their education, and morally on the level of medieval
robber barons and early capitalist buccaneers. When they are energetic
and courageous, in spite of their taming, they are public dangers:
when they are mere sheep, doing whatever their class expects them to
do, they will follow any enterprising bell-wether to the destruction
of themselves and the whole community. Fortunately humanity is so
recuperative that no system of suppression and perversion can quite
abort it; but as far as our standard lady’s and gentleman’s education
goes the very least that can be said against it is that most of its
victims would be better without it.

It is, however, incidentally advantageous. The university student who
is determined not to study, gains from the communal life of the place
a social standing that is painfully lacking in the people who have
been brought up in a brick box in ill mannered intercourse with two
much older people and three or four younger ones, all keeping what
they call their company manners (meaning an affectation which has no
desirable quality except bare civility) for the few similarly reared
outsiders who are neither too poor to be invited in nor too rich to
condescend to enter the box. Nobody can deny that these middle class
families which cannot afford the university for their sons, and must
send them out as workers at fifteen or so, appear utterly unpresentable
vulgarians compared to our university products. The woman from the
brick box maintains her social position by being offensive to the
immense number of people whom she considers her inferiors, reserving
her civility for the very few who are clinging to her own little ledge
on the social precipice; for inequality of income takes the broad,
safe, and fertile plain of human society and stands it on edge so
that everyone has to cling desperately to her foothold and kick off
as many others as she can. She would cringe to her superiors if they
could be persuaded to give her the chance, whereas at a university
she would have to meet hundreds of other young women on equal terms,
and to be at least commonly civil to everybody. It is true that
university manners are not the best manners, and that there is plenty
of foundation for the statement that Oxford and Cambridge are hotbeds
of exclusiveness, university snobs being perhaps the most incorrigible
of all snobs. For all that, university snobbery is not so disabling as
brick box snobbery. The university woman can get on without friction or
awkwardness with all sorts of people, high or low, with whom the brick
box woman simply does not know how to associate. But the university
curriculum has nothing to do with this. On the contrary, it is the
devoted scholar who misses it, and the university butterfly, barely
squeezing through her examinations, who acquires it to perfection.
Also, it can now be acquired and greatly improved on by young people
who break loose from the brick box into the wider social life of clubs
and unofficial cultural associations of all kinds. The manners of
the garden city and the summer school are already as far superior to
the manners of the university college as these are to the manners of
the brick box. There is no word that has more sinister and terrible
connotations in our snobbish society than the word promiscuity; but
if you exclude its special and absurd use to indicate an imaginary
condition of sexual disorder in which every petticoat and every coat
and trousers fall into oneanother’s embraces at sight, you will see
that social promiscuity is the secret of good manners, and that it is
precisely because the university is more promiscuous than the brick
box, and the Theosophical or Socialist summer school more promiscuous
than the college, that it is also the better mannered.

Socialism involves complete social promiscuity. It has already gone
very far. When the great Duke of Wellington fell ill, he said “Send
for the apothecary”, just as he would have said “Send for the barber”;
and the apothecary no doubt “your Graced” him in a very abject manner:
indeed I can myself remember famous old physicians, even titled ones,
who took your fee exactly as a butler used to take your tip. In the
seventeenth century a nobleman would sometimes admit an actor to an
intimate friendship; but when he wrote to him he began his letter, not
“My dear So and So”, but “To Betterton the player”. Nowadays a duke who
went on like that would be ridiculed as a Pooh Bah. Everybody can now
travel third class in England without being physically disgusted by
their fellow-travellers. I can remember when second class carriages,
now extinct, were middle class necessities.

The same process that has levelled the social intercourse between
dukes and doctors or actors can level it between duchesses and
dairymaids, or, what seems far less credible, between doctors’ wives
and dairymaids. But whilst Socialism makes for this sort of promiscuity
it will also make for privacy and exclusiveness. At present the
difference between a dairymaid and any decent sort of duchess is
marked, not by a wounding difference between the duchess’s address
to the dairymaid and her address to another duchess, but by a very
marked difference between the address of a dairymaid to the duchess
and her address to another dairymaid. The decent duchess’s civility is
promiscuous; but her intimate friendship and society is not. Civility
is one thing, familiarity quite another. The duchess’s grievance at
present is that she is obliged by her social and political position
to admit to her house and table a great many people whose tastes and
intellectual interests are so different from her own that they bore her
dreadfully, whilst her income cuts her off from familiar intercourse
with many poor people whose society would be delightful to her, but
who could not afford her expensive habits. Equality would bring to
the duchess the blessing of being able to choose her familiars as far
as they were willing to respond. She would no longer have to be bored
by men who could talk about nothing but fox hunting or party politics
when she wanted to talk about science or literature, dressmaking or
gardening, or, if her tastes were more curious, the morbidities of
psycho-analysis. Socialism, by steam-rollering our class distinctions
(really income distinctions) would break us up into sets, cliques, and
solitaries. The duchess would play golf (if people could still find
no more interesting employment for their leisure) with any charwoman,
and lunch with her after; but the intimate circle of the duchess and
the charwoman would be more exclusive and highly selected than it can
possibly be now. Socialism thus offers the utmost attainable society
and the utmost attainable privacy. We should be at the same time much
less ceremonious in our public relations and much more delicate about
intruding on oneanother in our private ones.

You may say, what has all this to do with education? Have we not
wandered pretty far from it? By no means: a great part of our education
comes from our social intercourse. We educate oneanother; and we
cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough
to talk to. But enough of that side of the subject. Let us leave
the social qualifications which children, like adults, pick up from
their surroundings and from the company they keep, and return to
the acquirements which the State must impose on them compulsorily,
providing the teachers and schools and apparatus; testing the success
of the teaching; and giving qualifying certificates to those who have
passed the tests.

It is now evident in all civilized States that there are certain things
which people must know in order to play their part as citizens. There
are technical things that must be learned, and intellectual conceptions
that must be understood. For instance, you are not fit for life in a
modern city unless you know the multiplication table, and agree that
you must not take the law into your own hands. That much technical
and liberal education is indispensable, because a woman who could
not pay fares and count change, and who flew at people with whom she
disagreed and tried to kill them or scratch their eyes out, would
be as incapable of civilized life as a wild cat. In our huge cities
reading is necessary, as people have to proceed by written directions.
In a village or a small country town you can get along by accosting
the police officer, or the railway porter or station-master, or the
post-mistress, and asking them what to do and where to go; but in
London five minutes of that would bring business and locomotion to a
standstill: the police and railway officials, hard put to it as it is
answering the questions of foreigners and visitors from the country,
would be driven mad if they had to tell everybody everything. The
newspapers, the postal and other official guides, the innumerable
notice boards and direction posts, do for the London citizen what the
police constable or the nearest shopkeeper rather enjoys doing for the
villager, as a word with a stranger seems an almost exciting event in a
place where hardly anything else happens except the motion of the earth.

In the days when even the biggest cities were no bigger than our
country towns, and all civilized life was conducted on what we should
call village lines, “clergy”, or the ability to read and write, was
not a necessity: it was a means of extending the mental culture of the
individual for the individual’s own sake, and was quite exceptional.
This notion still sticks in our minds. When we force a girl to learn
to read, and make that an excuse for imprisoning her in a school, we
pretend that the object of it is to cultivate her as an individual,
and open to her the treasures of literature. That is why we do it so
badly and take so long over it. But our right to cultivate a girl in
any particular way against her will is not clear, even if we could
claim that sitting indoors on a hard seat and being forbidden to talk
or fidget or attend to anything but the teacher cultivated a girl
more highly than the free activities from which this process cuts her
off. The only valid reason for forcing her at all costs to acquire
the technique of reading, writing, and arithmetic enough for ordinary
buying and selling is that modern civilized life is impossible without
them. She may be said to have a natural right to be taught them just as
she has a natural right to be nursed and weaned and taught to walk.

So far the matter is beyond argument. It is true that in teaching
her how to write you are also teaching her how to forge cheques and
write spiteful anonymous letters, and that in teaching her to read
you are opening her mind to foul and silly books, and putting into
her hands those greatest wasters of time in the world, the novels
that are not worth reading (say ninetynine out of every hundred).
All such objections go down before the inexorable necessity for the
accomplishments that make modern life possible: you might as well
object to teaching her how to use a knife to cut her food on the ground
that you are also teaching her how to cut the baby’s throat. Every
technical qualification for doing good is a technical qualification
for doing evil as well; but it is not possible to leave our citizens
without any technical qualifications for the art of modern living on
that account.

But this does not justify us in giving our children technical education
and damning the consequences. The consequences would damn us. If we
teach a girl to shoot without teaching her also that thou shalt not
kill, she may send a bullet through us the first time she loses her
temper; and if we proceed to hang her, she may say, as so many women
now say when they are in trouble, “Why did nobody tell me?” This is why
compulsory education cannot be confined to technical education. There
are parts of liberal education which are as necessary in modern social
life as reading and writing; and it is this that makes it so difficult
to draw the line beyond which the State has no right to meddle with
the child’s mind or body without its free consent. Later on we may
make conditions: for instance, we may say that a surveyor must learn
trigonometry, a sea captain navigation, and a surgeon at least as much
dexterity in the handling of saws and knives on bones and tissues as a
butcher acquires. But that is not the same thing as forcing everybody
to be a qualified surveyor, navigator, or surgeon. What we are now
considering is how much the State must force everyone to learn as the
minimum qualification for life in a civilized city. If the Government
forces a woman to acquire the art of composing Latin verses, it is
forcing on her an accomplishment which she can never need to exercise,
and which she can acquire for herself in a few months if she should
nevertheless be cranky enough to want to exercise it. There is the same
objection to forcing her to learn the calculus. Yet somewhere between
forcing her to learn to read and put two and two together accurately,
and forcing her to write sham Horace or learn the calculus, the line
must be drawn. The question is, where to draw it.

On the liberal side of education it is clear that a certain minimum
of law, constitutional history, and economics is indispensable as a
qualification for a voter even if ethics are left entirely to the inner
light. In the case of young children, dogmatic commandments against
murder, theft, and the more obvious possibilities of untutored social
intercourse, are imperative; and it is here that we must expect fierce
controversy. I need not repeat all that we have already been through
as to the impossibility of ignoring this part of education and calling
our neglect Secular Education. If on the ground that the subject is a
controversial one you leave a child to find out for itself whether the
earth is round or flat, it will find out that it is flat, and, after
blundering into many mistakes and superstitions, be so angry with you
for not teaching it that it is round, that when it becomes an adult
voter it will insist on its own children having uncompromising positive
guidance on the point.

What will not work in physics will not work in metaphysics either. No
Government, Socialist or anti-Socialist or neutral, could possibly
govern and administer a highly artificial modern State unless every
citizen had a highly artificial modern conscience: that is, a creed or
body of beliefs which would never occur to a primitive woman, and a
body of disbeliefs, or negative creed, which would strike a primitive
woman as fantastic blasphemies that must bring down on her tribe the
wrath of the unseen powers. Modern governments must therefore inculcate
these beliefs and disbeliefs, or at least see that they are inculcated
somehow; or they cannot carry on. And the reason we are in such a mess
at present is that our governments are trying to carry on with a set
of beliefs and disbeliefs that belong to bygone phases of science and
extinct civilizations. Imagine going to Moses or Mahomet for a code to
regulate the modern money market!

If we all had the same beliefs and disbeliefs, we could go smoothly
on, whether to our destruction or the millennium. But the conflicts
between contradictory beliefs, and the progressive repudiations of
beliefs which must continue as long as we have different patterns of
mankind in different phases of evolution, will necessarily produce
conflicts of opinion as to what should be taught in the public schools
under the head of religious dogma and liberal education. At the present
moment there are many people who hold that it is absolutely necessary
to a child’s salvation from an eternity of grotesque and frightful
torment in a lake of burning brimstone that it should be baptized with
water, as it is born under a divine curse and is a child of wrath and
sin, and that as it grows into a condition of responsibility it must
be impressed with this belief, with the addition that all its sins
were atoned for by the sacrifice of Christ, the Son of God, on the
cross, this atonement being effectual only for those who believe in
it. Failing such belief the efficacy of the baptism is annulled, and
the doom of eternal damnation reincurred. This is the official and
State-endowed religion in our country today; and there is still on the
statute book a law decreeing heavy punishments for anyone who denies
its validity, which no Cabinet dares repeal.

Now it is not probable that a fully developed Socialist State will
either impress these beliefs on children or permit any private person
to do so until the child has reached what is called in another
connection the age of consent. The State has to protect the souls of
the children as well as their bodies; and modern psychology confirms
common experience in teaching that to horrify a young child with
stories of brimstone hells, and make it believe that it is a little
devil who can only escape from that hell by maintaining a sinless
virtue to which no saint or heroine has ever pretended, is to injure it
for life more cruelly than by any act of bodily violence that even the
most brutal taskmaster would dare to prescribe or justify. To put it
quite frankly and flatly, the Socialist State, as far as I can guess,
will teach the child the multiplication table, but will not only not
teach it the Church Catechism, but if the State teachers find that the
child’s parents have been teaching it the Catechism otherwise than as
a curious historical document, the parents will be warned that if they
persist the child will be taken out of their hands and handed over to
the Lord Chancellor, exactly as the children of Shelley were when their
maternal grandfather denounced his son-in-law as an atheist.

Further, a Socialist State will not allow its children to be taught
that polygamy, slaughter of prisoners of war, and blood sacrifices,
including human sacrifices, are divinely appointed institutions; and
this means that it will not allow the Bible to be introduced in schools
otherwise than as a collection of old chronicles, poems, oracles, and
political fulminations, on the same footing as the travels of Marco
Polo, Goethe’s Faust, Carlyle’s Past and Present and Sartor Resartus,
and Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust. Also the doctrine that our life in
this world is only a brief preliminary episode in preparation for
an all-important life to come, and that it does not matter how poor
or miserable or plague ridden we are in this world, as we shall be
gloriously compensated in the next if we suffer patiently, will be
prosecuted as seditious and blasphemous.

Such a change would not be so great as some of us fear, though it
would be a cataclysm if our present toleration and teaching of these
doctrines were sincere. Fortunately it is not. The people who take them
seriously, or even attach any definite meaning to the words in which
they are formulated, are so exceptional that they are mostly marked
off into little sects which are popularly regarded as not quite sane.
It may be questioned whether as much as one per cent of the people
who describe themselves as members of the Church of England, sending
their children to its baptismal fonts, confirmation rite, and schools,
and regularly attending its services, either know or care what they
are committed to by its dogmas or articles, or read and believe them
as they read and believe the morning paper. Possibly the percentage
of Nonconformists who know the Westminster Confession and accept it
may be slightly larger, because Nonconformity includes the extreme
sects; but as these sects play the most fantastic variations on the
doctrine of the Catechism, Nonconformity covers views which have been
violently persecuted by the Church as blasphemous and atheistic. I am
quite sure that unless you have made a special study of the subject
you have no suspicion of the variety and incompatibility of the
British religions that come under the general heading of Christian. No
Government could possibly please them all. Queen Elizabeth, who tried
to do it by drawing up thirtynine articles alternately asserting and
denying the disputed doctrines, so that every woman could find her own
creed affirmed there and the other woman’s creed denounced, has been a
complete failure except as a means of keeping tender consciences and
scrupulous intellects out of the Church. Ordinary clergymen subscribe
them under duress because they cannot otherwise obtain ordination.
Nobody pretends that they are all credible by the same person at the
same moment; and few people even know what they are or what they mean.
They could all be dropped silently without any shock to the real
beliefs of most of us.

A Capitalist Government must inculcate whatever doctrine is best
calculated to make the common people docile wage slaves; and a
Socialist Government must equally inculcate whatever doctrine will
make the sovereign people good Socialists. No Government, whatever
its policy may be, can be indifferent to the formation of the
inculcated common creed of the nation. Society is impossible unless
the individuals who compose it have the same beliefs as to what is
right and wrong in commonplace conduct. They must have a common creed
antecedent to the Apostles’ creed, the Nicene creed, the Athanasian
creed, and all the other religious manifestoes. Queen Mary Tudor and
Queen Elizabeth, King James the Second and King William the Third,
could not agree about the Real Presence; but they all agreed that it
was wrong to rob, murder, or set fire to the house of your neighbor.
The sentry at the gate of Buckingham Palace may disagree with the
Royal Family on many points, ranging from the imperial policy of the
Cabinet, or the revision of the Prayer Book, to which horse to back
for the Derby; but unless there were perfect harmony between them as
to the proper limits to the use of his rifle and bayonet their social
relation could not be maintained: there could be neither king nor
sentry. We all deprecate prejudice; but if all of us were not animated
sacks of prejudices, and at least nine-tenths of them were not the same
prejudices so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices
but call them common sense, we could no more form a community than so
many snakes.

This common sense is not all inborn. Some of it is: for instance, a
woman knows without being told that she must not eat her baby, and
that she must feed it and rear it at all hazards. But she has not
the same feeling about paying her rates and taxes, although this is
as necessary to the life of society as the rearing of infants to the
life of humanity. A friend of mine who was a highly educated woman,
the head of a famous college in the north of London, fiercely disputed
the right of the local authority to have the drainage of the college
examined by a public sanitary inspector. Her creed was that of a
jealously private lady brought up in a private house; and it seemed
an outrage to her that a man with whom she was not on visiting terms
should be legally privileged to walk into the most private apartments
of her college otherwise than at her invitation. Yet the health of the
community depends on a general belief that this privilege is salutary
and reasonable. The enlargement of the social creed to that extent is
the only way to get rid of cholera epidemics. But this very able and
highly instructed lady, though still in the prime of life, was too old
to learn.

The social creed must be imposed on us when we are children; for it is
like riding, or reading music at sight: it can never become a second
nature to those who try to learn it as adults; and the social creed, to
be really effective, must be a second nature to us. It is quite easy to
give people a second nature, however unnatural, if you catch them early
enough. There is no belief, however grotesque and even villainous, that
cannot be made a part of human nature if it is inculcated in childhood
and not contradicted in the child’s hearing. Now that you are grown
up, nothing could persuade you that it is right to lame every woman
for life by binding her feet painfully in childhood on the ground that
it is not ladylike to move about freely like an animal. If you are the
wife of a general or admiral nothing could persuade you that when the
King dies you and your husband are bound in honor to commit suicide
so as to accompany your sovereign into the next world. Nothing could
persuade you that it is every widow’s duty to be cremated alive with
the dead body of her husband. But if you had been caught early enough
you could have been made to believe and do all these things exactly
as Chinese, Japanese, and Indian women have believed and done them.
You may say that these were heathen Eastern women, and that you are a
Christian Western. But I can remember when your grandmother, also a
Christian Western, believed that she would be disgraced for ever if she
let anyone see her ankles in the street, or (if she was “a real lady”)
walk there alone. The spectacle she made of herself when, as a married
woman, she put on a cap to announce to the world that she must no
longer be attractive to men, and the amazing figure she cut as a widow
in crape robes symbolic of her utter desolation and woe, would, if you
could see or even conceive them, convince you that it was purely her
luck and not any superiority of western to eastern womanhood that saved
her from the bound feet, the suttee, and the hara-kiri. If you still
doubt it, look at the way in which men go to war and commit frightful
atrocities because they believe it is their duty, and also because the
women would spit in their faces if they refused, all because this
has been inculcated upon them from their childhood, thus creating
the public opinion which enables the Government not only to raise
enthusiastic volunteer armies, but to enforce military service by heavy
penalties on the few people who, thinking for themselves, cannot accept
wholesale murder and ruin as patriotic virtues.

It is clear that if all female children are to have their minds formed
as the mind of Queen Victoria was formed in her infancy, a Socialist
State will be impossible. Therefore it may be taken as certain that
after the conquest of Parliament by the proletariat, the formation
of a child’s mind on that model will be prevented by every means
within the power of the Government. Children will not be taught to
ask God to bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our
proper stations, nor will they be brought up in such a way that it
will seem natural to them to praise God because he makes them eat
whilst others starve, and sing while others do lament. If teachers
are caught inculcating that attitude they will be sacked: if nurses,
their certificates will be cancelled, and jobs found for them that do
not involve intercourse with young children. Victorian parents will
share the fate of Shelley. Adults must think what they please subject
to their being locked up as lunatics if they think too unsocially; but
on points that are structural in the social edifice, constitutional
points as we call them, no quarter will be given in infant schools. The
child’s up-to-date second nature will be an official second nature,
just as the obsolete second nature inculcated at our public schools and
universities is at present.

When the child has learnt its social creed and catechism, and can read,
write, reckon, and use its hands: in short, when it is qualified to
make its way about in modern cities and do ordinary useful work, it
had better be left to find out for itself what is good for it in the
direction of higher cultivation. If it is a Newton or a Shakespear it
will learn the calculus or the art of the theatre without having them
shoved down its throat: all that is necessary is that it should have
access to books, teachers, and theatres. If its mind does not want
to be highly cultivated, its mind should be let alone on the ground
that its mind knows best what is good for it. Mentally, fallow is as
important as seedtime. Even bodies can be exhausted by overcultivation.
Trying to make people champion athletes indiscriminately is as idiotic
as trying to make them Ireland Scholars indiscriminately. There is no
reason to expect that Socialist rule will be more idiotic than the rule
which has produced Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and Squeers.




82

SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES


How far a Socialist State will tolerate a Church in our sense at all
is a pretty question. The quarrel between Church and State is an old
one. In speculating on it we must for the moment leave our personal
churchgoings and persuasions out of account, and try to look at the
question from the outside as we look at the religions of the east;
or, to put it bookishly, objectively, not subjectively. At present,
if a woman opens a consulting room in Bond Street, and sits there in
strange robes professing to foretell the future by cards or crystals
or revelations made to her by spirits, she is prosecuted as a criminal
for imposture. But if a man puts on strange robes and opens a church
in which he professes to absolve us from the guilt of our misdeeds,
to hold the keys of heaven and hell, to guarantee that what he looses
or binds on earth shall be loosed and bound in heaven, to alleviate
the lot of souls in purgatory, to speak with the voice of God, and
to dictate what is sin and what is not to all the world (pretensions
which, if you look at them objectively, are far more extravagant
and dangerous than those of the poor sorceress with her cards and
tea leaves and crystals), the police treat him with great respect;
and nobody dreams of prosecuting him as an outrageous impostor. The
objective explanation of his immunity is that a great many people do
not think him an impostor: they believe devoutly that he can do all
these things that he pretends to do; and this enables him and his
fellow priests to organize themselves into a powerful and rich body
calling itself The Church, supported by the money, the votes, and the
resolution to die in its defence, of millions of citizens. The priest
can not only defy the police as the common sorceress cannot: he has
only to convince a sufficient number of people of his divine mission
to thrust the Government aside; assume all its functions except the
dirty work that he does not care to soil his hands with and therefore
leaves to “the secular arm”; take on himself powers of life and death,
salvation and damnation; dictate what we shall all read and think;
and place in every family an officer to regulate our lives in every
particular according to his notions of right and wrong.

This is not a fancy picture. History tells us of an emperor crawling
on his knees through the snow and lying there all night supplicating
pardon from the head of a Church, and of a king of England flogging
himself in the cathedral where a priest had been murdered at his
suggestion. Citizens have been stripped of all their possessions,
tortured, mutilated, burned alive, by priests whose wrath did not spare
even the dead in their graves, whilst the secular rulers of the land
were forced, against their own interest and better sense, to abet them
in their furious fanaticism.

You may say that this was far off or long ago; that I am raking up old
tales of Canossa, of Canterbury in the middle ages, of Spain in the
fifteenth century, of Orange bogies like Bloody Mary and Torquemada;
that such things have not been done in England since the British
parliamentary government cut off Archbishop Laud’s head for doing them;
and that popes are now in greater danger of being imprisoned, and
priests and monks of being exiled, by emperors and republicans alike,
than statesmen of being excommunicated. You may add that the British
State burnt women alive for coining and for rebellion, and pressed
men to death under heavy weights for refusing for their wives’ and
children’s sake to plead to charges of felony, long after priests had
dropped such methods of dealing with heretics.

But even if women were still burnt at the stake as ruthlessly as
negroes are today by lynching mobs in America, there would still be a
struggle between Church and State as to which of them had the right
and power to burn. Who is to be allowed to exercise the great powers
that the Government of a modern civilized State must possess if its
civilization is to endure? The kings have subjugated the barons; the
parliaments have subjugated the kings; democracy has been subjugated by
plutocracy; and plutocracy is blindly provoking the subjugated Demos to
set up the proletarian State and make an end of Capitalist Oligarchy.
But there is a rival power which has persisted and will persist through
all these changes; and that is Theocracy, the power of priests
(sometimes called parsons) organized into Churches professing to derive
their authority from God. Crushed in one form it arises in another.
When it was organized as the Church of Rome its abuses provoked the
Reformation in England and Northern Europe, and in France the wrath of
Voltaire and the French revolution. In both cases it was disarmed until
its power to overrule the State was broken, and it became a mere tool
of Plutocracy.

But note what followed. The reaction against the priests went so far
in Britain, Switzerland, Holland, and America that at the cry of No
Popery every Roman Catholic trembled for his house and every priest for
his life. Yet under Laud and the Star Chamber in England, and Calvin
in Geneva, Theocracy was stronger than ever; for Calvin outpoped all
the popes, and John Knox in Scotland made her princes tremble as no
pope had ever done. But perhaps you will say again “This was long ago:
we have advanced since them”. So you have always been told; but look
at the facts within my own recollection. Among my contemporaries I can
remember Brigham Young, President Kruger, and Mrs Eddy. Joseph Smith,
Junior, was martyred only twelve years before I was born. You may never
have heard of Joseph; but I assure you his career was in many respects,
up to the date of his martyrdom, curiously like that of Mahomet, the
obscure Arab camel driver whose followers conquered half the world,
and are still making the position of the British Empire in Asia very
difficult. Joseph claimed direct revelation from God, and set up a
Theocracy which was carried on by Brigham Young, a Mormon Moses, one of
the ablest rulers on record, until the secular Government of the United
States became convinced that Mormon Theocracy was not compatible with
American Democracy, and took advantage of the popular prejudice against
its “plurality of wives” (polygamy) to smash it. It is by no means dead
yet; but for the moment its teeth, which were sharp, are drawn; and its
place in the struggle is occupied by The Church of Christ Scientist,
founded by an American lady (who might have been yourself) named Mrs
Eddy. I often pass two handsome churches of hers in London; and for all
I know there may be others that are out of my beat there. Now unless
you happen to be a Mormon or a Christian Scientist, it is probable
that you think about Mrs Eddy exactly as a Roman lady in the second
century a.d. thought about the mother of Christ, and about Joseph
Smith as an English lady in the Middle Ages thought about “the accurst
Mahound” You may be right or you may be wrong; but for all you know
Mrs Eddy a thousand years hence may be worshipped as the Divine Woman
by millions of civilized people, and Joseph Smith may be to millions
more what Mahomet now is to Islam. You never can tell. People begin by
saying “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” and end by saying “Behold the
Lamb of God!”

The secular Governments, or States, of the future, like those of the
present and past, will find themselves repeatedly up against the
pretensions of Churches, new and old, to exercise, as Theocracies,
powers and privileges which no secular Government now claims. The
trouble becomes serious when a new Church attempts to introduce new
political or social institutions, or to revive obsolete ones. Joseph
Smith was allowed to represent himself as having been directed by
an angel to a place where a continuation of the Bible, inscribed on
gold plates, was buried in the earth, and as having direct and, if
necessary, daily revelations from God which enabled him to act as an
infallible lawgiver. When he found plenty of able business women and
men to believe him, the Government of the United States held that their
belief was their own business and within their own rights as long as
Joseph’s laws harmonized with the State laws. But when Joseph revived
Solomonic polygamy the monogamic secular Government had to cross
swords with him. Not for many years did it get the upper hand; and its
adversary is not dead yet.

Mrs Eddy did the opposite: she did not introduce a new institution; but
she challenged one of the standing institutions of the secular State.
The secular State prescribed pathogenic inoculations as preventives of
disease, and bottles of medicine and surgical operations, administered
and performed by its registered doctors and surgeons, as cures; and
anyone who left a child or an invalid for whom she was responsible
undoctored was punished severely for criminal neglect. Some governments
refused to admit uninoculated persons into their territories. Mrs Eddy
revived the practice prescribed by St James in the New Testament,
instructing her disciples to have nothing to do with bottles and
inoculations; and immediately the secular government was at war with
Christian Science and began to persecute its healers.

This case is interesting because it illustrates the fact that new
Churches sometimes capture the secular government by denying that
they are Churches. The conflict between Mrs Eddy and the secular
governments was really a conflict between the Church of Christ
Scientist and the new Church of Jenner and Pasteur Scientists, which
has the secular governments in its pocket exactly as the Church of
Rome had Charlemagne. It also incidentally illustrates the tendency
of all Churches to institute certain rites to signalize the reception
of children and converts into the Church. The Jews prescribe a
surgical operation, fortunately not serious nor harmful. The Christian
Churches prescribe water baptism and anointing: also quite harmless.
The babies object vociferously; but as they neither foresee the rite
nor remember it they are none the worse. But the inoculations of the
modern Churches which profess Science, with their lists of miracles,
their biographies of their saints, their ruthless persecutions,
their threats of dreadful plagues and horrible torments if they are
dis-obeyed, their claims to hold the keys of mortal life and death,
their sacrifices and divinations, their demands for exemption from all
moral law in their researches and all legal responsibility in their
clinical practice, leave the pretensions of the avowed priests and
prophets nowhere, are dangerous and sometimes deadly; and it is round
this disguised Church that the persecutions and fanaticisms of today
rage. There is very little danger of a British Parliament persecuting
in the name of Christ, and none at all of its persecuting in the name
of Mahomet in the west; but it has persecuted cruelly for a century
in the name of Jenner; and there is a very serious danger of its
persecuting the general public as it now persecutes soldiers in the
name of Pasteur, whose portrait is already on the postage stamps of the
resolutely secularist (as it imagines) French Republic. In the broadest
thoroughfare of fashionable London we have erected a startling brazen
image of the famous Pasteurite surgeon Lord Lister, who, when the
present age of faith in scientific miracles has passed, will probably
be described as a high priest who substituted carbolic acid for holy
water and consecrated oil as a magic cure for festering wounds. His
methods are no longer in fashion in the hospitals; and he has been
left far behind as a theorist; but when the centenary of his birth was
celebrated in 1927, the stories of his miracles, told with boundless
credulity and technical ignorance in all the newspapers, shewed that he
was really being worshipped as a saint.

From this, I invite you to note how deceptive history may be. The
continual springing up of new Churches has always forced secular
governments to make and administer laws to deal with them, because,
though some of them are reasonable and respectable enough to be left
alone, and others are too strongly represented in Parliament and in
the electorate to be safely interfered with, a good many of which you
have never heard defy the laws as to personal decency and violate the
tables of consanguinity to such an extent that if the authorities did
not suppress them the people would lynch them. That is why tribunals
like the Inquisition and the Star Chamber had to be set up to bring
them to justice. But as these were not really secular tribunals, being
in fact instruments of rival Churches, their powers were abused, the
new prophets and their followers being restrained or punished, not
as offenders against the secular law, but as heretics: that is, as
dissenters from the Church which had gained control of the secular
government: the Church of Rome in the case of the Inquisition, and the
Church of England in the case of the Star Chamber.

The difficulty, you see, is that though there is a continual rivalry
between Churches and States for the powers of government, yet the
States do not disentangle themselves from the Churches, because the
members of the secular parliaments and Cabinets are all Churchmen of
one sort or another. In England this muddle is illustrated by the
ridiculous fact that the bishops of the Church of England have seats as
such in the House of Lords whilst the clergy are excluded as such from
the House of Commons. The Parliaments are the rivals of the Churches
and yet become their instruments; so that the struggle between them
is rather as to whether the Churches shall exercise power directly,
calling in the secular arm merely to enforce their decisions without
question, or whether they shall be mere constituents of the Parliaments
like any other society of citizens, leaving the ultimate decisions to
the State. If, however, any particular Church is powerful enough to
make it a condition of admission to Parliament, or of occupation of the
throne or the judicial bench, or of employment in the public services
or the professions, that the postulant shall be one of its members,
that Church will be in practice, if not in theory, stronger than it
could be as a Theocracy ruling independently of the secular State. This
power was actually achieved by the Church of England; but it broke down
because the English people would not remain in one Church. They broke
away from the Church of England in all directions, and formed Free
Churches. One of these, called the Society of Friends (popularly called
Quakers), carried its repudiation of Church of England ecclesiasticism
to the length of denouncing priests as impostors, set prayers as an
insult to God (“addressing God in another man’s words”), and church
buildings as “steeple houses”; yet this body, by sheer force of
character, came out of a savage persecution the most respected and
politically influential of religious forces in the country. When the
Free Churches could no longer be kept out of Parliament, and the
Church of England could not be induced to grant any of them a special
privilege, there was nothing for it but to admit everybody who was a
Christian Deist of any denomination. The line was still drawn at Jews
and Atheists; but the Jews soon made their way in; and finally a famous
Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, broke down the last barrier to the House
of Commons by forcing the House to accept, instead of the Deist oath,
a form of affirmation which relieved Atheists from the necessity of
perjuring themselves before taking their seats. We are now accustomed
to Jewish Prime Ministers; and we do not know whether our Gentile
Prime Ministers are Atheists or not, because it never occurs to us to
ask the question. The King alone remains bound by a coronation oath
which obliges him to repudiate the Church of many of his subjects,
though he has to maintain that Church and several others, some not even
Christian, in parts of the Empire where the alternative would be no
Church at all.

When Parliament is open to all the Churches, including the Atheist
Churches (for the Positivist Societies, the Ethical Societies, the
Agnostics, the Materialists, the Darwinian Natural Selectionists, the
Creative Evolutionists, and even the Pantheists are all infidels and
Atheists from the strict Evangelical or Fundamentalist point of view),
it becomes impossible to attach religious rites to our institutions,
because none of the Churches will consent to make any rites but their
own legally obligatory. Parliament is therefore compelled to provide
purely civil formalities as substitutes for religious services in the
naming of children, in marriage, and in the disposal of the dead. Today
the civil registrar will marry you and name your children as legally as
an archbishop or a cardinal; and when there is a death in the family
you can have the body cremated either with any sort of ceremony you
please or no ceremony at all except the registration of the death after
certification of its cause by a registered doctor.

As, in addition, you need not now pay Church rates unless you want to,
we have arrived at a point at which, from one end of our lives to the
other, we are not compelled by law to pay a penny to the priest unless
we are country landlords, nor attend a religious service, nor concern
ourselves in any way with religion in the popular sense of the word.
Compulsion by public opinion, or by our employers or landlords, is,
as we have seen, another matter; but here we are dealing only with
State compulsion. Delivered from all this, we are left face to face
with a body of beliefs calling itself Science, now more Catholic than
any of the avowed Churches ever succeeded in being (for it has gone
right round the world), demanding, and in some countries obtaining,
compulsory inoculation for children and soldiers and immigrants,
compulsory castration for dysgenic adults, compulsory segregation and
tutelage for “mental defectives”, compulsory sanitation for our houses,
and hygienic spacing and placing for our cities, with other compulsions
of which the older Churches never dreamt, at the behest of doctors and
“men of science”. In England we are still too much in the grip of the
old ways to have done either our best or our worst in this direction;
but if you care to know what Parliaments are capable of when they
have ceased to believe what oldfashioned priests tell them and lavish
all their natural childish credulity on professors of Science you
must study the statute books of the American State Legislatures, the
“crowned republics” of our own Dominions, and the new democracies of
South America and Eastern Europe. When all the States are captured by
the proletariat in the names of Freedom and Equality, the cry may arise
that the little finger of Medical Research (calling itself Science) is
thicker than the loins of Religion.

Now what made the oldfashioned religion so powerful was that at its
best (meaning in the hands of its best believers) there was much
positive good in it, and much comfort for those who could not bear
the cruelty of nature without some explanation of life that carried
with it an assurance that righteousness and mercy will have the last
word. This is the power of Science also: it, too, at its best has done
enormous positive good; and it also at its highest flight gives a
meaning to life which is full of encouragement, exultation, and intense
interest. You may yourself be greatly concerned as to whether the old
or the new explanation is the true one; but looking at it objectively
you must put aside the question of absolute truth, and simply observe
and accept the fact that the nation is made up of a relatively small
number of religious or scientific zealots, a huge mass of people who
do not bother about the business at all, their sole notion of religion
and morality being to do as other people in their class do, and a good
many Betwixt-and-Betweens. The neutrals are in one sense the important
people, because any creed may be imposed on them by inculcation during
infancy, whereas the believers and unbelievers who think for themselves
will let themselves be burnt alive rather than conform to a creed
imposed on them by any power except their own consciences. It is over
the inculcation, involving the creation of that official second nature
which we discussed in the preceding chapter, that the State finds
itself at loggerheads with the Churches which have not captured it.

Take a typical example or two. If any society of adults, calling itself
a Church or not, preaches the old doctrine of the resurrection of the
body at a great Last Judgment of all mankind, there is no likelihood
of the municipality of a crowded city objecting. But if a survival of
the childish idea that a body can be preserved for resurrection by
putting it into a box and burying it in the earth, whereas reducing it
to ashes in two hours in a cremation furnace renders its resurrection
impossible, leads any sect or Church or individual to preach and
practise intramural interment as a religious duty, then it is pretty
certain that the municipality will not only keep such preaching out
of its schools, but see to it that the children are taught to regard
cremation as the proper way of disposing of the dead in towns, and
forcibly prevent intramural interment whether pious parents approve of
it or not.

If a Church, holding that animals are set apart from human beings by
having no souls, and were created for the use of mankind and not for
their own sakes, teaches that animals have no rights, and women and men
no duties to them, their teaching on that point will be excluded from
the schools and their members prosecuted for cruelty to animals by the
secular authority.

If another Church wants to set up an abattoir in which animals will be
killed in a comparatively cruel manner instead of by a humane killer in
the municipal abattoir, it will not be allowed to do it nor to teach
children that it ought to be done, unless, indeed, it commands votes
enough to control the municipality to that extent; and if its members
refuse to eat humanely slaughtered meat they will have to advance, like
me, to vegetarianism.

When the question is raised, as it will be sooner or later, of the
reservation of our cathedrals for the sermons of one particular
Church, it will not be settled on the assumption that any one Church
has a monopoly of religious truth. It is settled at present on the
Elizabethan assumption that the services of the Church of England ought
to please everybody; and it is quite possible that if the services
of the Church of England were purified from its grosser sectarian
superstitions, and a form of service arrived at containing nothing
offensive to anyone desiring the consolation or stimulus of a religious
ritual, the State might very well reserve the cathedrals for that form
of service exclusively, provided that, as at present, the building were
available most of the time for free private meditation and prayer.
(You may not have realized that any Jew, any Mahometan, any Agnostic,
any woman of any creed or no creed, may use our cathedrals daily to
“make her soul” between the services.) To throw open the cathedrals to
the rituals of all the Churches is a physical impossibility. To sell
them on capitalist principles to the highest bidders to do what they
like with is a moral impossibility for the State, though the Church
has sold churches often enough. To simply make of them show places
like Stonehenge, and charge for admission, as the Church of England
sometimes does in the choir, would destroy their value for those who
cannot worship without the aid of a ritual.

There is also the Russian plan of the State taking formal possession
of the material property of the national Church, and then letting it
go on as before, with the quaint difference that the statesmen and
officials, instead of posing as devout Churchmen, sincerely or not,
as in England, solemnly warn the people that the whole business is a
superstitious mummery got up to keep them in submissive slavery by
doping them with promises of bliss after death if only they will suffer
poverty and slavery patiently before it. This, however, cannot last. It
is only the reaction of the victorious proletariat against the previous
unholy alliance of the Church with their former oppressors. It is mere
anti-clericalism; and when clericalism as we know it disappears, and
Churches can maintain themselves only as Churches of the people and not
as spiritual fortresses of Capitalism, the anti-clerical reaction will
pass away. The Russian Government knows that a purely negative attitude
towards religion is politically impossible; accordingly, it teaches the
children a new creed called Marxism, of which more presently. Even in
the first flush of the reaction the Soviet was more tolerant than we
were when our hour came to revolt. We frankly robbed the Church of all
it possessed and gave the plunder to the landlords. Long after that we
deliberately cut off our Archbishop’s head. Certainly the Soviet made
it quite clear to the Russian archbishop that if he did not make up his
mind to accept the fact of the revolution and give to the Soviet the
allegiance he had formerly given to the Tsar, he would be shot. But
when he very sensibly and properly made up his mind accordingly, he was
released, and is now presumably pontificating much more freely than the
Archbishop of Canterbury.

So far, I have dealt with the Churches objectively and not with
religion subjectively. It is an old saying: the nearer the Church the
farther from God. But we must cross the line just for a paragraph or
two. A live religion alone can nerve women to overcome their dread of
any great social change, and to face that extraction of dead religions
and dead parts of religions which is as necessary as the extraction of
dead or decaying teeth. All courage is religious: without religion we
are cowards. Men, because they have been specialized for fighting and
hunting whilst women, as the child-bearers, have had to be protected
from such risks, have got into the way of accepting the ferocities
of war and the daring emulations of sportsmanship as substitutes for
courage; and they have imposed that fraud to some extent on women. But
women know instinctively, even when they are echoing male glory stuff,
that communities live not by slaughter and by daring death, but by
creating life and nursing it to its highest possibilities. When Ibsen
said that the hope of the world lay in the women and the workers he was
neither a sentimentalist nor a demagogue. You cannot have read this far
(unless you have skipped recklessly) without discovering that I know as
well as Ibsen did, or as you do, that women are not angels. They are as
foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to
life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes
a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced
to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is
to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.
But the homicidal heroes are often abject cowards in the face of new
ideas, and veritable Weary Willies when they are asked to think. Their
heroism is politically mischievous and useless. Knowing instinctively
that if they thought about what they do they might find themselves
unable to do it, they are afraid to think. That is why the heroine has
to think for them, even to the extent of often having no time left to
think for herself. She needs more and not less courage than a man;
and this she must get from a creed that will bear thinking of without
becoming incredible.

Let me then assume that you have a religion, and that the most
important question you have to ask about Socialism is whether it
will be hostile to that religion. The reply is quite simple. If your
religion requires that incomes shall be unequal, Socialism will do
all it can to persecute it out of existence, and will treat you much
as the government of British India treated the Thugs in 1830. If your
religion is compatible with equality of income, there is no reason on
earth to fear that a Socialist Government will treat it or you any
worse than any other sort of government would; and it would certainly
save you from the private persecution, enforced by threats of loss of
employment, to which you are subject under Capitalism today, if you
are in the employment of a bigot.

There is, however, a danger against which you should be on your guard.
Socialism may be preached, not as a far-reaching economic reform, but
as a new Church founded on a new revelation of the will of God made by
a new prophet. It actually is so preached at present. Do not be misled
by the fact that the missionaries of Church Socialism do not use the
word God, nor call their organization a Church, nor decorate their
meeting-places with steeples. They preach an inevitable, final, supreme
category in the order of the universe in which all the contradictions
of the earlier and lower categories will be reconciled. They do not
speak, except in derision, of the Holy Ghost or the Paraclete; but they
preach the Hegelian Dialectic. Their prophet is named neither Jesus nor
Mahomet nor Luther nor Augustine nor Dominic nor Joseph Smith, Junior,
nor Mary Baker Glover Eddy, but Karl Marx. They call themselves, not
the Catholic Church, but the Third International. Their metaphysical
literature begins with the German philosophers Hegel and Feuerbach,
and culminates in Das Kapital, the literary masterpiece of Marx,
described as “The Bible of the working classes”, inspired, infallible,
omniscient. Two of their tenets contradict oneanother as flatly as
the first two paragraphs of Article 27 of the Church of England. One
is that the evolution of Capitalism into Socialism is predestined,
implying that we have nothing to do but sit down and wait for it to
occur. This is their version of Salvation by Faith. The other is that
it must be effected by a revolution establishing a dictatorship of the
proletariat. This is their version of Salvation by Works.

The success of the Russian revolution was due to its leadership by
Marxist fanatics; but its subsequent mistakes had the same cause.
Marxism is not only useless but disastrous as a guide to the practice
of government. It gets no nearer to a definition of Socialism than as
a Hegelian category in which the contradictions of Capitalism shall
be reconciled, and in which political power shall have passed to
the proletariat. Germans and Clydeside Scots find spiritual comfort
in such abstractions; but they are unintelligible and repulsive to
Englishwomen, and could not by themselves qualify anyone, English,
Scotch, or German, to manage a whelkstall for five minutes, much less
to govern a modern State, as Lenin very soon found out and very
frankly confessed.

But Lenin and his successors were not able to extricate the new
Russian national State they had set up from this new Russian
international (Catholic) Church any more than our Henry II or the
Emperor who had come to Canossa were able to extricate the English
State and the medieval Empire from the Church of Rome. Nobody can
foresee today whether the policy of Russia in any crisis will be
determined on secular and national grounds by the Soviet or by the
Third International on Marxist grounds. We are facing the Soviet as
Queen Elizabeth faced Philip of Spain, willing enough to deal with
him as an earthly king, but not as the agent of a Catholic Theocracy.
In Russia the State will sooner or later have to break the temporal
power of the Marxist Church and take politics out of its hands, exactly
as the British and other Protestant States have broken the temporal
power of the Roman Church, and been followed much more drastically
by the French and Italian States. But until then the Church of Marx,
the Third International, will give as much trouble as the Popes did
formerly. It will give it in the name of Communism and Socialism,
and be resisted not only by Capitalists but by the Communists and
Socialists who understand that Communism and Socialism are matters for
States and not for Churches to handle. King John was no less Christian
than the Pope when he said that no Italian priest should tithe and
toll in his dominions; and our Labor leaders can remain convinced
Socialists and Communists whilst refusing to stand any foreign or
domestic interference from the Third International or to acknowledge
the divinity of Marx.

Still, our Protestant repudiation of the authority of the new Marxist
Church should not make us forget that if the Marxist Bible cannot be
taken as a guide to parliamentary tactics, the same may be said of
those very revolutionary documents the Gospels. We do not on that
account burn the Gospels and conclude that the preacher of The Sermon
on the Mount has nothing to teach us; and neither should we burn Das
Kapital and ban Marx as a worthless author whom nobody ought to read.
Marx did not get his great reputation for nothing: he was a very great
teacher; and the people who have not yet learnt his lessons make most
dangerous stateswomen and statesmen. But those who have really learnt
from him instead of blindly worshipping him as an infallible prophet
are not Marxists any more than Marx himself was a Marxist. I myself
was converted to Socialism by Das Kapital; and though I have since had
to spend a good deal of time pointing out Marx’s mistakes in abstract
economics, his total lack of experience in the responsible management
of public affairs, and the unlikeness at close quarters of his typical
descriptions of the proletariat to any earthly working woman or of the
bourgeoisie to any real lady of property, you may confidently set down
those who speak contemptuously of Karl Marx either as pretenders who
have never read him or persons incapable of his great mental range. Do
not vote for such a person. Do not, however, vote for a Marxist fanatic
either, unless you can catch one young enough or acute enough to grow
out of Marxism after a little experience, as Lenin did. Marxism,
like Mormonism, Fascism, Imperialism, and indeed all the would-be
Catholicisms except Socialism and Capitalism, is essentially a call
to a new Theocracy. Both Socialism and Capitalism certainly do what
they can to obtain credit for representing a divinely appointed order
of the universe; but the pressure of facts is too strong for their
pretensions: they are forced to present themselves at last as purely
secular expedients for securing human welfare, the one advocating
equal distribution of income, and the other private property with free
contract, as the secret of general prosperity.




83

CURRENT CONFUSIONS


I could go on like this for years; but I think I have now told you
enough about Socialism and Capitalism to enable you to follow the
struggle between them intelligently. You will find it irritating
at first to read the newspapers and listen to the commonplaces of
conversation on the subject, knowing all the time that the writers
and talkers do not know what they are writing and talking about. The
impulse to write to the papers, or intervene in the conversation to set
matters right, may be almost irresistible. But it must be resisted,
because if you once begin there will be no end to it. You must sit
with an air of placid politeness whilst your neighbors, by way of
talking politics, denounce the people they do not like as Socialists,
Bolshevists, Syndicalists, Anarchists, and Communists on the one side,
and Capitalists, Imperialists, Fascists, Reactionaries, and Bourgeois
on the other, none of them having an idea of the meaning of these words
clear enough to be called without flattery the ghost of a notion.
A hundred years ago they would have called one another Jacobins,
Radicals, Chartists, Republicans, Infidels, and even, to express
the lowest depth of infamy, Co-operators; or, contrariwise, Tories,
Tyrants, Bloated Aristocrats, and Fundholders. None of these names hurt
now: Jacobins and Chartists are forgotten; republics are the rule and
not the exception in Europe as well as in America; Co-operators are as
respectable as Quakers; Bloated Aristocracy is the New Pauperism; and
the proletariat, with its millions invested in Savings Certificates
and Savings Bank deposits, would not at all object to being described
as having money “in the funds”, if that expression were still current.
But the names in the mouths of the factions mean nothing anyhow. They
are mere electioneering vituperation. In France at elections the
Opposition posters always exhort the electors to vote against Assassins
and Thieves (meaning the Cabinet); and the Government posters “feature”
precisely the same epithets, whilst the candidates in their own homes
call their pet dogs Bandits when pretending to scold them. It all means
nothing. They had much better call each other Asses and Bitches (they
sometimes do, by the way), because everyone knows that a man is not
an ass nor a woman a bitch, and that calling them so is only a coarse
way of insulting them; whereas most people do not know what the words
Bolshevik, Anarchist, Communist, and so forth mean, and are too easily
frightened into believing that they denote every imaginable extremity
of violence and theft, rapine and murder. The Russian word Bolshevik,
which has such a frightful sound to us, means literally nothing more
than a member of a parliamentary majority; but as an English epithet
it is only the political form of Bogey or Blackguard or the popular
Bloody, denoting simply somebody or something with whom the speaker
disagrees.

But the names we hurl at oneanother are much less confusing than the
names we give ourselves. For instance, quite a lot of people, mostly a
very amiable mild sort of people, call themselves Communist-Anarchists,
which Conservatives interpret as Double-Dyed Scoundrels. This is very
much as if they called themselves Roman Catholic Protestants, or
Christian Jewesses, or undersized giantesses, or brunette blondes,
or married maids, or any other flat contradiction in terms; for
Anarchism preaches the obliteration of statute law and the abolition
of Governments and States, whilst Communism preaches that all the
necessary business of the country shall be done by public bodies
and regulated by public law. Nobody could logically be in favor of
both all the time. But there is a muddled commonsense in the name
for all that. What the Communist-Anarchist really means is that she
is willing to be a Communist as to the work and obedience to public
law for everybody that is necessary to keep the community healthy
and solvent, and that then she wants to be let go her own way. It is
her manner of saying that she needs leisure and freedom as well as
taskwork and responsibility: in short, as I have heard it expressed,
that she does not want to be “a blooming bee”. That is the attitude of
all capable women; but to apply the term Communist-Anarchism to it is
so confusing, and so often perversely adopted by the kind of muddler
who, being against law and public enterprise because she wants to be
free, and against freedom because freedom of contracts is a capitalist
device for exploiting the proletariat, spends her life in obstructing
both Socialism and Capitalism and never getting anywhere, that, on the
whole, I should not call myself a Communist-Anarchist if I were you.

The truth is, we live in a Tower of Babel where a confusion of names
prevents us from finishing the social edifice. The Roman Catholic who
does not know what his Church teaches, the member of the Church of
England who would repudiate several of the Thirty-Nine Articles if
they were propounded to her without a hint of where they came from,
the Liberal who has never heard of the principles of the Manchester
School and would not have understood them if she had, and the Tory who
is completely innocent of De Quincey’s Logic of Political Economy: that
is to say, the vast majority of Catholics, Protestants, Liberals, and
Tories, have their counterparts in the Socialists, the Communists, the
Syndicalists, the Anarchists, the Laborists, who denounce Capitalism
and middle class morality, and are saturated with both all the time.
The Intelligent Woman, as she reads the newspapers, must allow for
this as best she can. She must not only remember that every professing
Socialist is not necessarily a Trade Unionist, and cannot logically
be an Anarchist, but is sometimes so little a Socialist that, when
entrusted with public business enough to bring her face to face with
the Conservative or Liberal leaders she has been denouncing, she will
be flattered to find that these eminent persons are quite of her real
way of thinking, and vote with them enthusiastically every time.

The name Communist is at the present moment (1927) specially applied
to and adopted by those who believe that Capitalism will never be
abolished by constitutional parliamentary means in the Fabian manner,
but must be overthrown by armed revolution and supplanted by the
Muscovite Marxist Church. This is politely called the policy of Direct
Action. Conservative Diehards who advocate a forcible usurpation of
the government by the capitalists as such call it a _coup d’état_. But
a proletarian may be an advocate of Direct Action without being a bit
of a Communist. She may believe that the mines should belong to the
miners, the railways to the railwaymen, the army to the soldiers, the
churches to the clergymen, and the ships to the crews. She may even
believe that the houses should belong to the housemaids, especially if
she is a housemaid herself. Socialism will not hear of this. It insists
that industries shall be owned by the whole community, and regulated
in the interests of the consumer (or customer), who must be able to
buy at cost price without paying a profit to anybody. A shop, for
instance, must not belong to the shop assistants, nor be exploited by
them for their profit: it must be run for the benefit of the customers,
the shop assistant’s safeguard against finding herself sacrificed
to the customer being that she is herself a customer at the other
shops, and the customer herself a worker in other establishments. When
incomes are equal, and everyone is both a producer and a consumer, the
producers and consumers may be trusted to treat each other fairly from
self-love if from no more generous motive; but until then, to make any
industry the property of the workers in it would be merely to replace
the existing idle joint stock shareholders by working shareholders
profiteering on a much larger scale, as they would appropriate the
rent of their sites and make none of those contributions to a central
exchequer for the benefit of the nation that now take place under
parliamentary rule. The inequalities of income between, say, miners in
the richest mines and farmers on the poorest soils would be monstrous.
But I need not plague you with arguments: the arrangement is impossible
anyhow; only, as several of the proletarian proposals, and cries of
the day, including Trade Unionism, Producers’ Co-operation, Workers’
Control, Peasant Proprietorship, and the cruder misunderstandings of
Syndicalism and Socialism, are either tainted or saturated with it to
such an extent that it wrecked the proletarian movement in Italy after
the war and led to the dictatorship of Signor Mussolini, and as it is
often supposed to be part of Socialism, you had better beware of it;
for it has many plausible pseudo-socialistic disguises. It is really
only Poor Man’s Capitalism, like Poor Man’s Gout.

On their negative side the proletarian Isms are very much alike: they
all bring the same accusations against Capitalism; and Capitalism makes
no distinction between them because they agree in their hostility
to it. But there is all the difference in the world between their
positive remedies; and any woman who voted for Syndicalism or Anarchism
or Direct Action disguised as Communism indiscriminately under the
impression that she was voting for Socialism would be as mistaken as
one who voted for Conservatism or Liberalism or Imperialism or the
Union Jack or King and Country or Church and State indiscriminately
under a general impression that she was voting against Socialism.

And so you have the curious spectacle of our Parliamentary Labor Party,
led by Socialists who are all necessarily Communists in principle,
and are advocating sweeping extensions of Communism, expelling the
so-called Communist Party from its ranks, refusing to appear on the
same platforms with its members in public, and being denounced by it
as bourgeois reactionaries. It is most confusing until you know; and
then you see that the issue just now between the rival proletarian
parties in England is not Communism against Socialism: it is
constitutional action, or Fabianism as it used to be called, against
Direct Action followed by a dictatorship. And as Diehard Capitalism is
now sorely tempted to try a British-Fascist _coup d’état_ followed
by a dictatorship, as opposed to Liberal constitutional Capitalism,
the confusion and disunion are by no means all on the Labor side. The
extremists of the Right and those of the Left are both propagandists of
impatient disgust with parliament as an institution. There is a Right
wing of the Right just as there is a Left wing of the Left; whilst the
Constitutional Centre is divided between Capitalism and Socialism. You
will need all your wits about you to find out where you are and keep
there during the coming changes.

The proletarian party inherits from Trade Unionism the notion that the
strike is the classic weapon and the only safeguard of proletarian
labor. It is therefore dangerously susceptible to the widespread
delusion that if instead of a coal strike here and a railway strike
there, a lightning strike of waitresses in a restaurant today, and
a lightning strike of match girls in a factory tomorrow, all the
workers in all the occupations were to strike simultaneously and
sympathetically, Capitalism would be brought to its knees. This is
called The General Strike. It is as if the crew of a ship, oppressed by
its officers, were advised by a silly-clever cabin boy to sink the ship
until all the officers and their friends the passengers were drowned,
and then take victorious command of it. The objection that the crew
could not sail the ship without navigating officers is superfluous,
because there is the conclusive preliminary objection that the crew
would be drowned, cabin boy and all, as well as the officers. In a
General Strike ashore the productive proletarians would be starved
before the employers, capitalists, and parasitic proletarians, because
these would have possession of the reserves of spare food. It would be
national suicide.

Obvious as this is, the General Strike has been attempted again and
again, notably on one occasion in Sweden, when it was very thoroughly
tried out; and though it has always necessarily collapsed, it is still
advocated by people who imagine that the remedy for Capitalism is to
treat labor as the capital of the proletariat (that is, the spare
money of those who have no money), and to hold up the Capitalists by
threat of starvation just as the Capitalists have hitherto held up the
proletariat. They forget that the capitalists have never yet been so
absurd as to attempt a general lock-out. It would be much more sensible
to support a particular strike by calling all other strikes off, thus
isolating the particular employers aimed at, and enabling all the other
workers to contribute to the strike fund. But we have already discussed
the final impossibility of tolerating even particular strikes or
lock-outs, much less general ones. They will pass away as duelling has
passed away. Meanwhile be on your guard against propagandists of the
General Strike; but bear in mind too that the term is now being used
so loosely in the daily papers that we see it applied to any strike in
which more than one trade is concerned.

A favorite plea of the advocates of the General Strike is that it could
prevent a war. Now it may be admitted that the fear of an attempt at
it does to some extent restrain governments from declaring unpopular
wars. Unfortunately once the first fellow-countryman is killed or the
first baby bombed, no war is unpopular: on the contrary, it is as well
known to our Capitalist governments as it was to that clever lady the
Empress Catherine of Russia that when the people become rebellious
there is nothing like “a nice little war” for bringing them to heel
again in a patriotic ecstasy of loyalty to the Crown. Besides, the
fundamental objection to the general strike, that when everybody stops
working the nation promptly perishes, applies just as fatally to a
strike against war as to a strike against a reduction of wages. It is
true that if the vast majority in the belligerent nations, soldiers and
all, simultaneously became conscientious objectors, and the workers
all refused to do military service of any kind, whether in the field
or in the provisioning, munitioning, and transport of troops, no
declaration of war could be carried out. Such a conquest of the earth
by Pacifism seems millennially desirable to many of us; but the mere
statement of these conditions is sufficient to shew that they do not
constitute a general strike, and that they are so unlikely to occur
that no sane person would act on the chance of their being realized.
A single schoolboy militarist dropping a bomb from an aeroplane into
a group of children will make an end of local pacifism in an instant
until it becomes certain that the bomber and his employers will be
called to account before a competent and dreaded tribunal. Meanwhile
the fear of a so-called General Strike against war will never deter any
bellicose Government from equipping and commissioning such adventurous
young aces. But no Government dare send them if it knew that it would
be blockaded by a combination of other nations sufficiently strong to
intimidate the most bellicose single nation.

The formation of such a combination is the professed object of the
present League of Nations; and though there is no sign so far of the
leading military Powers even consulting it, much less obeying and
supporting it, when they have any weighty military interests at stake,
still even their military interests will force them sooner or later
to take the League seriously, substitute supernational morality,
law, and action, for the present international anarchism, according
to which it is proper for nations, under certain forms, to murder
and plunder foreigners, though it is a crime for them to murder and
plunder oneanother. No other method of preventing war so far discovered
is worth your attention. It is very improbable even that our quaint
and illogical toleration of conscientious objection during the last
war will ever be repeated; and in any case the experiment proved its
futility as a preventive of war. The soldier in the trenches will
always ask why he should be shot for refusing to go “over the top” when
his brother at home is spared after refusing even to enter the trench.
The General Strike is still more futile. War cannot be stopped by the
refusal of individuals or even of whole trades to take part in it:
nothing but combinations of nations, each subordinating what they call
their sovereign rights to the world’s good, or at least to the good of
the combination, can prevail against it.

This subordination of nationalism is called supernationalism, and might
be called catholicism if that word could be freed from misleading
historical associations. It already exists in the United States of
America, which are federated for certain purposes, including currency
and a _pax Americana_ which was established at the cost of a fierce
war. There is no reason except pure devilment why the States of Europe,
or, to begin with, a decisive number of them, should not federate to
the same extent for the same purposes. The Empires are changing into
Commonwealths, or voluntary federations, for common human purposes.
Here, and not in local antipatriotic strikes, are the real hopes of
peace.

You will find constitutional changes specially bothersome because of
the continual clashing between the tightening-up of social discipline
demanded by Socialism and the jealousy of official power and desire to
do what we like which we call Democracy. Democracy has a very strong
hold on organized labor. In the Trade Unions every device is tried to
make the vote of the whole union supreme. When delegates vote at the
Union Congresses they are allowed a vote for every member of their
respective unions; and as far as possible the questions on which they
cast their hundreds of thousands of votes are settled beforehand in
the unions by the votes of the members; so that when the delegates go
to Congress they are not representatives but mere spokesmen handing in
the decisions of their unions. But these crude democratic precautions
defeat their own object. In practice, a Trade Union secretary is the
nearest thing on earth to an irremovable autocrat. The “card vote” is
not called for except to decide questions on which the decisions could
not be carried out unless the delegates of the Big Powers of trade
unionism (that is, the unions whose membership runs into millions)
could outvote the delegates of the Little Powers; and as in the ranks
of Labor not only is “the career open to the talents” but absolutely
closed to nonentities, the leaders are much more arbitrary than they
would be in the House of Lords, where the hereditary peers may include
persons of average or less than average ability. Even the humblest
Trade Union secretary must have exceptional business ability and power
of managing people; and if anyone but a secretary obtains a delegation
to a Congress he must have at least a talent for self-assertion. He may
be for all public purposes an idiot; but he must be a fairly blatant
idiot, and to some extent a representative one, or he could never
persuade large bodies of his equals to pick him out from the obscurity
of his lot.

Now as this oligarchy of bureaucrats and demagogues is the result of
the most jealous democracy, the oligarchs of labor are determined to
maintain the system which has placed them in power. You must have
noticed that some of the most imperiously wilful women, unable to
bear a moment’s contradiction, and tyrannizing over their husbands,
daughters, and servants until nobody else in the house can call
her soul her own, have been the most resolute opponents of Women’s
Rights. The reason is that they know that as long as the men govern
they can govern the men. Just so a good many of the ablest and most
arbitrary of the leaders of Trade Unionism are resolutely democratic
in Labor politics because they know very well that as long as the
workers can vote they can make the workers vote as they please. They
are democrats, not because of their faith in the judgment, knowledge,
and initiative of the masses, but because of their experience of mass
ignorance, gullibility, and sheepishness. It is only the idealists of
the propertied and cultivated middle classes who believe that the voice
of the people is the voice of God: the typical proletarian leader is
a cynic in this matter, believing secretly that the working folk will
have to be born again and born differently before they can be safely
allowed to have their own silly way in public affairs: indeed it is
to make this rebirth possible that the leaders are Socialists. They
have often been strongly anti-Socialist. Thus both the cynics and the
idealists are strenuous defenders of democracy, and regard the series
of enfranchisements of the people which began with the Conservative Act
of 1867 and culminated in Votes for Women, as a glorious page in the
history of the emancipation of mankind from tyranny and oppression,
instead of a reduction to absurdity of the notion that giving slaves
votes to defend their political rights and redress their wrongs is much
wiser than giving razors to infants for the same purpose.

The naked truth is that democracy, or government by the people through
votes for everybody, has never been a complete reality; and to the
very limited extent to which it has been a reality it has not been
a success. The extravagant hopes which have been attached to every
extension of it have been disappointed. A hundred years ago the great
Liberal Reform Bill was advocated as if its passage into law would
produce the millennium. Only the other day the admission of women
to the electorate, for which women fought and died, was expected to
raise politics to a nobler plane and purify public life. But at the
election which followed, the women voted for hanging the Kaiser;
rallied hysterically round the worst male candidates; threw out all
the women candidates of tried ability, integrity, and devotion; and
elected just one titled lady of great wealth and singular demagogic
fascination, who, though she justified their choice subsequently, was
then a beginner. In short, the notion that the female voter is more
politically intelligent or gentler than the male voter proved as great
a delusion as the earlier delusions that the business man was any wiser
politically than the country gentleman or the manual worker than the
middle class man. If there were any disfranchised class left for our
democrats to pin their repeatedly disappointed hopes on, no doubt they
would still clamor for a fresh set of votes to jump the last ditch
into their Utopia; and the vogue of democracy might last a while yet.
Possibly there may be here and there lunatics looking forward to votes
for children, or for animals, to complete the democratic structure. But
the majority shows signs of having had enough of it. Discipline for
Everybody and Votes for Nobody is the fashion in Spain and Italy; and
for some years past in Russia the proletarian Government has taken no
more notice of an adverse vote than the British Raj of an Indian jury’s
verdict, except when it turns the majority out of doors in the manner
of Bismarck or Cromwell.

These reactions of disgust with democracy are natural enough where
Capitalism, having first produced a huge majority of proletarians with
no training in management, responsibility, or the handling of big
money, nor any notion of the existence of such a thing as political
science, gives this majority the vote for the sake of gaining party
advantages by popular support. Even in ancient Greece, where our
proletarians were represented by slaves, and only what we call the
middle and upper classes voted, there was the same reaction, which is
hardly surprising in view of the fact that one of the famous feats
of Athenian democracy was to execute Socrates for using his superior
brains to expose its follies.

Nevertheless, I advise you to stick to your vote as hard as you can,
because though its positive effects may do you more harm than good,
its negative effect may be of great value to you. If one candidate is
a Socratic person and the other a fool who attracts you by echoing
your own follies and giving them an air of patriotism and virtuous
indignation, you may vote for the fool, that being as near as you can
get to executing Socrates; and so far your vote is all to the bad. But
the fact that your vote, though only one among many thousands, may
conceivably turn the scale at an election, secures you a consideration
in Parliament which it would be mad and cowardly for you to relinquish
as long as inequality of income prevents you from being really
represented by the members of the Government. Therefore cling to it
tooth and nail, however unqualified you may be to make a wise use of it.

The Labor Party is in a continual dilemma on this point. At the
election of 1918 the leader of the Labor Party, a steadfast supporter
of votes for women, knew quite well that he would be defeated in his
old constituency by the vote of the suburban ladies; and he was.
The Labor Party, confronted by a scheme for making Parliament more
representative of public opinion by securing due representation for
minorities (called Proportional Representation), finds itself forced to
oppose it lest it should break Parliament up into a host of squabbling
groups and make parliamentary government impossible. All reformers who
use democracy as a stepping stone to power find it a nuisance when
they get there. The more power the people are given the more urgent
becomes the need for some rational and well-informed superpower to
dominate them and disable their inveterate admiration of international
murder and national suicide. Voltaire said that there is one person
wiser than Mrs Anybody, and that is Mrs Everybody; but Voltaire had
not seen modern democracy at work: the democracy he admired in England
was a very exclusive oligarchy; and the mixture of theocracy and
hereditary autocracy that disgusted him in France was not a fair test
of aristocracy, or government by the best qualified. We now know that
though Mrs Everybody knows where the shoe pinches and must therefore
have a say in the matter, she cannot make the shoe, and cannot tell a
good shoemaker from a bad one by his output of hot air on a platform.
Government demands ability to govern: it is neither Mrs Everybody’s
business nor Mrs Anybody’s, but Mrs Somebody’s. Mrs Somebody will
never be elected unless she is protected from the competition of Mrs
Noodle and Mrs Bounder and Mrs Noisy Nobody and Mrs King-and-Country
and Mrs Class War and Mrs Hearth-and-Home and Mrs Bountiful and Mrs
Hands-off-the-Church and Mrs Please-I-want-everybody-to-love-me. If
democracy is not to ruin us we must at all costs find some trustworthy
method of testing the qualifications of candidates before we allow
them to seek election. When we have done that we may have great
trouble in persuading the right people to come forward. We may even
be driven to compel them; for those who fully understand how heavy
are the responsibilities of government and how exhausting its labor
are the least likely to shoulder them voluntarily. As Plato said, the
ideal candidate is the reluctant one. When we discover such a test you
will still have your electoral choice between several Mrs Somebodys,
which will make them all respect you; but you will not be taken in by
Mrs Noodle and Co. because they will not be eligible for election.
Meanwhile, Heaven help us! we must do the best we can.




84

PERORATION


And now a last word as to your own spiritual centre. All through this
book we have been thinking of the public, and of our two selves as
members of the public. This is our duty as citizens; but it may drive
us mad if we begin to think of public evils as millionfold evils. They
are nothing of the kind. What you yourself can suffer is the utmost
that can be suffered on earth. If you starve to death you experience
all the starvation that ever has been or ever can be. If ten thousand
other women starve to death with you, their suffering is not increased
by a single pang: their share in your fate does not make you ten
thousand times as hungry, nor prolong your suffering ten thousand
times. Therefore do not be oppressed by “the frightful sum of human
suffering”: there is no sum: two lean women are not twice as lean as
one nor two fat women twice as fat as one. Poverty and pain are not
cumulative: you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that
it is. If you can stand the suffering of one person you can fortify
yourself with the reflection that the suffering of a million is no
worse: nobody has more than one stomach to fill nor one frame to be
stretched on the rack. Do not let your mind be disabled by excessive
sympathy. What the true Socialist revolts against is not the suffering
that is not cumulative, but the waste that is. A thousand healthy,
happy, honorable women are not each a thousand times as healthy, happy,
or honorable as one; but they can co-operate to increase the health,
happiness, and honor possible for each of them. At present nobody can
be healthy, happy, or honorable: our standards are so low that when
we call ourselves so we mean only that we are not sick nor crying nor
lying nor stealing (legally or illegally) oftener than we must agree to
put up with under our Capitalist Constitution.

We have to confess it: Capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable.
Class hatred is not a mere matter of envy on the part of the poor and
contempt and dread on the part of the rich. Both rich and poor are
really hateful in themselves. For my part I hate the poor and look
forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little,
but am equally bent on their extermination. The working classes, the
business classes, the professional classes, the propertied classes,
the ruling classes, are each more odious than the other: they have no
right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all
die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be
replaced by people like themselves. I do not want any human child to
be brought up as I was brought up, nor as any child I have known was
brought up. Do you?

And yet I am not in the least a misanthrope. I am a person of normal
affections, as you probably are; but for that very reason I hate to
be surrounded, not by people whose interests are the same as my own,
whom I cannot injure without injuring myself, and who cannot injure
me without injuring themselves, but by people whose interest it is to
get as much out of me as they possibly can, and give me as little for
it as possible (if anything). If I were poor, my relatives, now that
I am old, would have to support me to keep me out of the workhouse,
which means that they would have a strong interest in my death. As I am
rich enough to leave some property, my children, if I had any, would
be looking forward impatiently to my funeral and the reading of my
will. The whole propertied class is waiting for dead men’s shoes all
the time. If I become ill and send for a doctor I know that if he does
not prolong my illness to the utmost, and send me to expensive nursing
homes to submit to still more expensive operations, he will be taking
bread out of his children’s mouths. My lawyer is bound by all his
affections to encourage me in litigation, and to make it as protracted
and costly as he can. Even my clergyman, partly State supported as
he is, dare not if I belong to the Church of England rebuke me for
oppressing the poor any more than he dare champion me against the
oppression of the rich if I were poor. The teacher in the school where
my neighbors’ children have their morals formed would find herself
in the gutter if she taught any child that to live on what is called
an independent income without working is to live the life of a thief
without the risks and enterprise that make the pirate and the burglar
seem heroic to boys. My tradesmen’s business is to overcharge me as
much as they can without running too great a risk of being undersold
by trade rivals. My landlord’s business is to screw out of me the
uttermost extractable farthing of my earnings for his permission to
occupy a place on earth. Were I unmarried I should be pursued by hordes
of women so desperately in need of a husband’s income and position that
their utmost efforts to marry me would be no evidence of their having
the smallest personal regard for me. I cannot afford the friendship of
people much richer than myself: those much poorer cannot afford mine.
Between those who do the daily work of my house, and are therefore
necessary partners in my work, and me there is a gulf of class which
is nothing but a gulf of unequal distribution of wealth. Life is made
lonely and difficult for me in a hundred unnecessary ways; and so few
people are clever and tactful and sensible and self-controlled enough
to pick their way through the world without giving or taking offence
that the first quality of capitalistic mankind is quarrelsomeness. Our
streets are fuller of feuds than the Highlands or the Arabian desert.
The social friction set up by inequality of income is intense: society
is like a machine designed to work smoothly with the oil of equality,
into the bearings of which some malignant demon keeps pouring the
sand of inequality. If it were not for the big pools of equality that
exist at different levels, the machine would not work at all. As it
is, the seizings-up, the smashings, the stoppages, the explosions,
never cease. They vary in magnitude from a railway worker crushed in
the shunting-yard to a world war in which millions of men with the
strongest natural reasons for saving each others’ lives destroy them
instead in the cruellest manner, and from a squabble over a penny in
a one-room tenement to a lawsuit lasting twenty years and reducing
all the parties to it to destitution. And to outface this miserable
condition we bleat once a year about peace on earth and good-will to
men: that is, among persons to whom we have distributed incomes ranging
from a starvation dole to several thousands a day, piously exhorting
the recipients to love oneanother. Have you any patience with it? I
have none.

Now you may, for all I know, be a sharp, cynical sort of person; or you
may be a nice, mushy, amiable, goodnatured one. If the latter you will
tell me that people are not governed so much by money considerations as
I make out: that your doctor hates to see you ill and does his best to
cure you; that your solicitor keeps you out of litigation when you lose
your temper and want to rush into it; that your clergyman calls himself
a Christian Socialist and leads all the popular agitations against the
oppression of the rich by the poor; that your children were heartbroken
when their father died and that you never had a cross word with him
about his property or yours; that your servants have been with you for
forty years and have brought you up from your childhood more devotedly
and affectionately than your own parents, and have remained part of
the family when your children flew away from the nest to new nests
of their own; that your tradesmen have never cheated you, and have
helped you over hard times by giving you long and forbearing credit:
in short, that in spite of all I may say, this Capitalist world is
full of kindliness and love and good-fellowship and genuine religion.
Dr Johnson, who described his life as one of wretchedness; Anatole
France, who said he had never known a moment’s happiness; Dean Swift,
who saw in himself and his fellowmen Yahoos far inferior to horses;
and Shakespear, to whom a man in authority was an angry ape, are known
to have been admired, loved, petted, entertained, even idolized,
throughout lives of honorable and congenial activity such as fall
to the lot of hardly one man in a billion; yet the obscure billions
manage to get on without unbearable discontent. William Morris, whose
abhorrence of Capitalism was far deeper than that of persons of only
ordinary mental capacity and sensibility, said, when he was told that
he was mortally ill, “Well, I cannot complain: I have had a good time”.

To all this consolation I have been able in this book to add that
Capitalism, though it richly deserves the very worst that Karl Marx
or even John Ruskin said of it and a good deal more that they never
thought of, was yet, in its origin, thoroughly well intentioned. It was
indeed much better intentioned than early Christianity, which treated
this world as a place of punishment for original sin, of which the
end was fortunately at hand. Turgot and Adam Smith were beyond all
comparison more sincere guides to earthly prosperity than St Paul. If
they could have foreseen the history of the practical application of
their principles in the nineteenth century in England they would have
recoiled in horror, just as Karl Marx would have recoiled if he had
been foreshewn what happened in Russia from 1917 to 1921 through the
action of able and devoted men who made his writings their Bible. Good
people are the very devil sometimes, because, when their good-will
hits on a wrong way, they go much further along it and are much more
ruthless than bad people; but there is always hope in the fact that
they mean well, and that their bad deeds are their mistakes and not
their successes; whereas the evils done by bad people are not mistakes
but triumphs of wickedness. And since all moral triumphs, like
mechanical triumphs, are reached by trial and error, we can despair
of Democracy and despair of Capitalism without despairing of human
nature: indeed if we did not despair of them as we know them we should
prove ourselves so worthless that there would be nothing left for the
world but to wait for the creation of a new race of beings capable of
succeeding where we have failed.

Nevertheless I must warn my amiable optimist and meliorist readers not
only that all the virtues that comfort them are operating in spite of
Capitalism and not as part of it, but that they are baffled by it in
ways that are hidden from people who have not examined the situation
with a good deal of technical knowledge and some subtlety. Take your
honest and kindly doctor, and your guardian angel solicitor. I quite
admit that there are plenty of them: the doctor who is a mercenary
scoundrel and the lawyer who is a mischievous and heartless rascal
is as exceptional as any other sort of criminal: I myself have never
chanced to come across one, and most likely you have not either. But
I have come across honest doctors whose treatment has been fatal, and
honest lawyers whose advice has been disastrous. So have you, perhaps.

You know the very true saying that where there is a will there is a
way. Unfortunately the good will does not necessarily find the right
way. There are always dozens of ways, bad, good, and indifferent.
You must know some bad women who are doing the right thing from bad
motives side by side with good women who are doing the wrong thing from
the best motives in the world. For instance, the number of children,
especially first children, who are guarded and swaddled and drugged and
doctored to death by the solicitude of their ignorantly affectionate
mothers, must be greater than that of the children who die of maternal
dislike and neglect. When silly people (writers, I regret to say, some
of them) tell you that a loving heart is enough, remind them that fools
are more dangerous than rogues, and that women with loving hearts are
often pitiable fools. The finding of the right way is not sentimental
work: it is scientific work, requiring observation, reasoning, and
intellectual conscientiousness.

It is on this point of intellectual conscientiousness that we all break
down under pecuniary temptation. We cannot help it, because we are so
constituted that we always believe finally what we wish to believe. The
moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments
for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we
want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed, we suddenly
discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against it, but that
this evidence was staring us in the face all the time. If you read the
account of the creation of the world in the book of Genesis with the
eye of faith you will not perceive a single contradiction in it. If
you read it with the eye of hostile critical science you will see that
it consists of two successive accounts, so different that they cannot
both be true. In modern books you will be equally baffled by your
bias. If you love animals and have a horror of injustice and cruelty,
you will read the books of wonderful discoveries and cures made by
vivisectors with a sickened detestation of their callous cruelty, and
with amazement that anyone could be taken in by such bad reasoning
about lies which have been reduced to absurdity by force of flat fact
every few years, only to be replaced by a fresh crop. If, however, you
have only a dread of disease for yourself or your family, and feel
that in comparison to relief from this terror the sufferings of a few
dogs and guinea-pigs are not worth bothering about, you will find in
the same books such authentic and convincing miracles, such marvellous
cures for all diseases, such gospels of hope, monuments of learning,
and infallible revelations of the deepest truths of Science, that your
indignation at the derisive scepticism of the humanitarians may develop
into an enmity (heartily reciprocated) that may end in persecutions
and wars of science like the persecutions and wars of religion that
followed the Reformation, and were not new then.

But, you will ask, what have Socialism and Capitalism to do with the
fact that belief is mostly bias. It is very simple. If by inequality
of income you give your doctors, your lawyers, your clergymen, your
landlords, or your rulers an overwhelming economic interest in any
sort of belief or practice, they will immediately begin to see all
the evidence in favor of that sort of belief and practice, and
become blind to all the evidence against it. Every doctrine that
will enrich doctors, lawyers, landlords, clergymen, and rulers will
be embraced by them eagerly and hopefully; and every doctrine that
threatens to impoverish them will be mercilessly criticized and
rejected. There will inevitably spring up a body of biassed teaching
and practice in medicine, law, religion, and government that will
become established and standardized as scientifically, legally,
religiously, constitutionally, and morally sound, taught as such to
all young persons entering these professions, stamping those who dare
dissent as outcast quacks, heretics, sedition mongers, and traitors.
Your doctor may be the honestest, kindliest doctor on earth; your
solicitor may be a second father or mother to you; your clergyman may
be a saint; your member of Parliament another Moses or Solon. They
may be heroically willing to put your health, your prosperity, your
salvation, and your protection from injustice before their interest
in getting a few extra pounds out of you; but how far will that help
you if the theory and practice of their profession, imposed on them as
a condition of being allowed to pursue it, has been corrupted at the
root by pecuniary interest? They can proceed only as the hospitals and
medical schools teach them and order them to proceed, as the courts
proceed, as the Church proceeds, as Parliament proceeds: that is their
orthodoxy; and if the desire to make money and obtain privileges has
been operating all the time in building up that orthodoxy, their
best intentions and endeavors may result in leaving you with your
health ruined, your pocket empty, your soul damned, and your liberties
abrogated by your best friends in the name of science, law, religion,
and the British constitution. Ostensibly you are served and protected
by learned professions and political authorities whose duty it is
to save life, minimize suffering, keep the public health as tested
by vital statistics at the highest attainable pitch, instruct you
as to your legal obligations and see that your legal rights are not
infringed, give you spiritual help and disinterested guidance when your
conscience is troubled, and make and administer, without regard to
persons or classes, the laws that protect you and regulate your life.
But the moment you have direct personal occasion for these services you
discover that they are all controlled by Trade Unions in disguise, and
that the high personal honor and kindliness of their individual members
is subject to the morality of Trade Unionism, so that their loyalty
to their union, which is essentially a defensive conspiracy against
the public, comes first, and their loyalty to you as patient, client,
employer, parishioner, customer or citizen, next. The only way in which
you can set their natural virtues free from this omnipresent trade
union and governing class corruption and tyranny is to secure for them
all equal incomes which none of them can increase without increasing
the income of everybody else to exactly the same amount; so that the
more efficiently and economically they do their work the lighter their
labor will be and the higher their credit.

Under such conditions you would find human nature good enough for all
your reasonable purposes; and when you took up such books as Gulliver’s
Travels or Candide which under Capitalism are unanswerable indictments
of mankind as the wickedest of all known species, you would see in
them only terribly vivid clinical lectures on extinct moral diseases
which were formerly produced by inequality as smallpox and typhus
were produced by dirt. Such books are never written until mankind is
horribly corrupted, not by original sin but by inequality of income.

Then the coveted distinction of lady and gentleman, instead of being
the detestable parasitic pretension it is at present, meaning persons
who never condescend to do anything for themselves that they can
possibly put on others without rendering them equivalent service, and
who actually make their religion centre on the infamy of loading the
guilt and punishment of all their sins on an innocent victim (what
real lady would do so base a thing?), will at last take on a simple
and noble meaning, and be brought within the reach of every ablebodied
person. For then the base woman will be she who takes from her country
more than she gives to it; the common person will be she who does
no more than replace what she takes; and the lady will be she who,
generously overearning her income, leaves the nation in her debt and
the world a better world than she found it.

By such ladies and their sons can the human race be saved, and not
otherwise.

  AYOT ST LAWRENCE,
  _16th March 1927_.




APPENDIX

INSTEAD OF A BIBLIOGRAPHY


This book is so long that I can hardly think that any woman will
want to read much more about Socialism and Capitalism for some time.
Besides, a bibliography is supposed to be an acknowledgment by the
author of the books from which his own book was compiled. Now this book
is not a compilation: it is all out of my own head. It was started
by a lady asking me to write her a letter explaining Socialism. I
thought of referring her to the hundreds of books which have been
written on the subject; but the difficulty was that they were nearly
all written in an academic jargon which, though easy and agreeable to
students of economics, politics, philosophy, and sociology generally,
is unbearably dry, meaning unreadable, to women not so specialized. And
then, all these books are addressed to men. You might read a score of
them without ever discovering that such a creature as a woman had ever
existed. In fairness let me add that you might read a good many of them
without discovering that such a thing as a man ever existed. So I had
to do it all over again in my own way and yours. And though there were
piles of books about Socialism, and an enormous book about Capitalism
by Karl Marx, not one of them answered the simple question, “What is
Socialism?” The other simple question, “What is Capital?” was smothered
in a mass of hopelessly wrong answers, the right one having been hit
on (as far as my reading goes) only once, and that was by the British
economist Stanley Jevons when he remarked casually that capital is
spare money. I made a note of that.

However, as I know that women who frequent University Extension
lectures will not be satisfied until they have choked their brains by
reading a multitude of books on the subject; and as the history of
Socialist thought is instructive, I will say just a word or two in the
customary pedantic manner about the literary milestones on the road
from Capitalism to Socialism.

The theory of Capitalism was not finally worked out until early in
the nineteenth century by Ricardo, a Jewish stockbroker. As he had a
curious trick of saying the opposite of what he meant whilst contriving
somehow to make his meaning clear, his demonstration was elegantly and
accurately paraphrased by a first rate literary artist and opium eater,
Thomas De Quincey, who could write readably and fascinatingly about
anything.

The theory was that if private property in land and capital, and
sanctity of free contract between individuals, were enforced as
fundamental constitutional principles, the proprietors would provide
employment for the rest of the community on terms sufficient to
furnish them with at least a bare subsistence in return for continuous
industry, whilst themselves becoming rich to such excess that the
investment of their superfluous income as capital would cost them no
privation. No attempt was made to disguise the fact that the resultant
disparity between the poverty of the proletarian masses and the riches
of the proprietors would produce popular discontent, or that as wages
fell and rents rose with the increase of population, the contrast
between laborious poverty and idle luxury would provide sensational
topics for Radical agitators. Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence and
Macaulay’s forecasts of the future of America prove that the more
clear-headed converts of the theory of Capitalism had no millennial
illusions.

But they could see no practicable alternative. The Socialist
alternative of State organization of industry was inconceivable,
because, as industry had not yet finished the long struggle by which
it extricated itself from the obsolete restrictions and oppressions of
medieval and feudal society, State interference, outside simple police
work, still seemed a tyranny to be broken, not a vital activity to be
extended. Thus the new Capitalist economic policy was put forward in
opposition, not to Socialism, but to Feudalism or Paternal Oligarchy.
It was dogmatically called Political Economy absolute, complete, and
inevitable; and the workers were told that they could no more escape or
modify its operation than change the orbits of the planets.

In 1840 a French proletarian, Proudhon, published an essay with the
startling title “What is Property? Theft”. In it he demonstrated that
a _rentier_, or person living, as we now put it, by owning instead of
by working, inflicts on society precisely the same injury as a thief.
Proudhon was a poor Frenchman; but a generation later John Ruskin,
a rich Englishman of the most conservative education and culture,
declared that whoever was not a worker was either a beggar or a robber,
and published accounts of his personal activities and expenditure
to prove that he had given good value for his rents and dividends.
A generation later again Cecil Rhodes, an ultra-imperialist, made a
famous will bequeathing his large fortune for public purposes, and
attaching the condition that no idler should ever benefit by it. It
may be said that from the moment when Capitalism established itself
as a reasoned-out system to be taught at the universities as standard
political economy, it began to lose its moral plausibility, and, in
spite of its dazzling mechanical triumphs and financial miracles,
steadily progressed from inspiring the sanguine optimism of Macaulay
and his contemporaries to provoking a sentiment which became more and
more like abhorrence among the more thoughtful even of the capitalists
themselves.

All such moral revolutions have their literary prophets and theorists;
and among them the first place was taken by Karl Marx, in the second
half of the nineteenth century, with his history of Capital, an
overwhelming exposure of the horrors of the industrial revolution
and the condition to which it had reduced the proletariat. Marx’s
contribution to the abstract economic theory of value, by which
he set much store, was a blunder which was presently corrected and
superseded by the theory of Jevons; but as Marx’s category of “surplus
value” (Mehrwerth), meaning rent, interest, and profits, represented
solid facts, his blunder in no way invalidated his indictment of
the capitalist system, nor his historical generalization as to the
evolution of society on economic lines. His so-called Historic
Materialism is easily vulnerable to criticism as a law of nature; but
his postulate that human society does in fact evolve on its belly,
as an army marches, and that its belly biases its brains, is a safe
working one. Buckle’s much less read History of Civilization, also a
work of the mind changing sort, has the same thesis but a different
moral: to wit, that progress depends on the critical people who do not
believe everything they are told: that is, on scepticism.

Even before Karl Marx the Capitalist economists had lost their
confidence, and its ordinary exponents become disingenuously evasive.
Not so the bigger men. John Stuart Mill began as a Ricardian and ended
as an avowed Socialist. Cairnes still saw no practicable alternative to
Capitalism; but his contempt for the “drones in the hive” who live by
owning was as thorough and outspoken as Ruskin’s. Their latest academic
successor, Mr Maynard Keynes, dismisses Laisser-faire contemptuously as
an exploded fallacy.

After Cairnes a school of British Socialist economists arose, notably
Sidney and Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society, who substituted the
term Political Science for Political Economy. They gave historical
consciousness to the proletarian movement by writing its history
with the intimate knowledge and biographical vivacity needed to give
substance to the abstract proletariat described by Marx. The evolution
of Trade Unionism, Co-operation, and proletarian politics (Industrial
Democracy) was reasoned out and documented by them. Their histories
of English local government and of the Poor Law cover a huge part
of the general field of British constitutional and administrative
activity, past and present. They cured Fabianism of the romantic
amateurishness which had made the older Socialist agitations negligible
and ridiculous, and contributed most of the Fabian Society’s practical
proposals for the solution of pressing problems. They shattered the
old Capitalist theory of the impotence of the State for anything but
mischief in industry, and demonstrated not only that communal and
collective enterprise has already attained a development undreamt of by
Ricardo and his contemporaries, but that Capitalism itself is dependent
for its existence on State guidance, and has evolved collective
forms of its own which have taken it far beyond the control of the
individual private investor, and left it ripe for transfer to national
or municipal ownership. Their volume on the decay of Capitalism has
completed Marx’s work of driving Capitalism from its old pretension to
be normal, inevitable, and in the long run always beneficial in modern
society, to a position comparable to that of an army digging itself
into its last ditch after a long series of surrenders and retreats.
They estimate roughly that in its hundred years of supremacy Capitalism
justified its existence, _faute de mieux_, for the first fifty years,
and for the last fifty has been collapsing more and more on its crazy
foundation.

Beatrice Webb’s curious mixture of spiritual and technical
autobiography, entitled My Apprenticeship, describes how an intelligent
girl-capitalist, with a sensitive social conscience and a will of her
own, critically impervious to mere persuasion, and impressible by
first hand evidence and personal experience only, was led to Socialism
by stubbornly investigating the facts of Capitalist civilization for
herself. The Intelligent Woman with a turn for investigation or an
interest in character study, or both, should read it.

Between Karl Marx and the Webbs came Henry George with his Progress and
Poverty, which converted many to Land Nationalization. It was the work
of a man who had seen that the conversion of an American village to a
city of millionaires was also the conversion of a place where people
could live and let live in tolerable comfort to an inferno of seething
poverty and misery. Tolstoy was one of his notable converts. George’s
omission to consider what the State should do with the national rent
after it had taken it into the public treasury stopped him on the
threshold of Socialism; but most of the young men whom he had led up
to it went through (like myself) into the Fabian Society and other
Socialist bodies. Progress and Poverty is still Ricardian in theory:
indeed it is on its abstract side a repetition of De Quincey’s Logic
of Political Economy; but whereas De Quincey, as a true-blue British
Tory of a century ago, accepted the Capitalist unequal distribution of
income, and the consequent division of society into rich gentry and
poor proletarians, as a most natural and desirable arrangement, George,
as an equally true-blue American republican, was revolted by it.

After Progress and Poverty the next milestone is Fabian Essays,
edited by myself, in which Sidney Webb first entered the field as a
definitely Socialist writer with Graham Wallas, whose later treatises
on constitutional problems are important, and Sydney Olivier (Lord
Olivier) whose studies of the phenomenon of the “poor white” in Africa
and America, facing the competition of the black proletariats created
by negro slavery, should be read by Colonial Ministers. In Fabian
Essays Socialism is presented for the first time as a completely
constitutional political movement, which the most respectable and
least revolutionary citizen can join as irreproachably as he might
join the nearest Conservative club. Marx is not mentioned; and his
peculiar theory of value is entirely ignored, the economic theories
relied on being Jevons’ theory of value and Ricardo’s theory of the
rent of land, the latter being developed so as to apply to industrial
capital and interests as well. In short, Socialism appears in Fabian
Essays purged of all its unorthodox views and insurrectionary Liberal
associations. This is what distinguished the volume at that time
from such works as the England For All of Henry Mayers Hyndman, the
founder of the Social-Democratic Federation, who, until 1918, when
the Russian Marxists outraged his British patriotism by the treaty
of Brest Litovsk, clung to Marx’s value theory, and to the Marxian
traditions of the barricade Liberalism of 1848, with a strong dash of
the freethinking gentlemanly cosmopolitanism of the advanced republican
_littérateurs_ of the middle of the nineteenth century.

After Fabian Essays treatises on Socialism followed, first singly, then
in dozens, then in scores, and now in such profusion that I never read
them unless I know the writers personally, nor always, I confess, even
then.

If you read Sociology, not for information but for entertainment (small
blame to you!), you will find that the nineteenth-century poets and
prophets who denounced the wickedness of our Capitalism exactly as
the Hebrew prophets denounced the Capitalism of their time, are much
more exciting to read than the economists and writers on political
science who worked out the economic theory and political requirements
of Socialism. Carlyle’s Past and Present and Shooting Niagara,
Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust and Fors Clavigera, William Morris’s News
from Nowhere (the best of all the Utopias), Dickens’s Hard Times and
Little Dorrit, are notable examples: Ruskin in particular leaving
all the professed Socialists, even Karl Marx, miles behind in force
of invective. Lenin’s criticisms of modern society seem like the
platitudes of a rural dean in comparison. Lenin wisely reserved his
most blighting invectives for his own mistakes.

But I doubt whether nineteenth-century writers can be as entertaining
to you as they are to me, who spent the first forty-four years of my
life in that benighted period. If you would appreciate the enormous
change from nineteenth-century self-satisfaction to twentieth-century
self-criticism you can read The Pickwick Papers (jolly early Dickens)
and then read Our Mutual Friend (disillusioned mature Dickens),
after which you can try Dickens’s successor H. G. Wells, who, never
having had any illusions about the nineteenth century, is utterly
impatient of its blunderings, and full of the possibilities of social
reconstruction. When you have studied nineteenth-century county
gentility in the novels of Anthony Trollope and Thackeray for the sake
of understanding your more behind-hand friends, you must study it
up-to-date in the novels of John Galsworthy. To realize how ignorant
even so great an observer as Dickens could be of English life outside
London and the main coaching routes you can compare his attempt to
describe the Potteries in Hard Times with Arnold Bennett’s native
pictures of the Five Towns; but to appreciate his much more serious and
complete ignorance of working-class history and organization in his own
day you would have to turn from fiction to the Webbs’ History of Trade
Unionism.

The earlier nineteenth-century literature, for all its invective,
satire, derision and caricature, made amiable by its generous
indignation, was not a literature of revolt. It was pre-Marxian.
Post-Marxian literature, even in its most goodhumored pages by men who
never read Marx, is revolutionary: it does not contemplate the survival
of the present order, which Thackeray, for instance, in his bitterest
moods seems never to have doubted.

For women the division is made by Marx’s Norwegian contemporary Ibsen
rather than by Marx. Ibsen’s women are all in revolt against Capitalist
morality; and the clever ladies who have since filled our bookshelves
with more or less autobiographical descriptions of female frustration
and slavery are all post-Ibsen. The modern literature of male
frustration, much less copious, is post-Strindberg. In neither branch
are there any happy endings. They have the Capitalist horror without
the Socialist hope.

The post-Marxian, post-Ibsen psychology gave way in 1914-18 to the
post-war psychology. It is very curious; but it is too young, and I
too old, for more than this bare mention of its existence and its
literature.

Finally I may mention some writings of my own, mostly in the form of
prefaces to my published plays. One of the oddities of English literary
tradition is that plays should be printed with prefaces which have
nothing to do with them, and are really essays, or manifestoes, or
pamphlets, with the plays as a bait to catch readers. I have exploited
this tradition very freely, puzzling many good people who thought the
prefaces must be part of the plays. In this guise I contended that
poverty should be neither pitied as an inevitable misfortune, nor
tolerated as a just retribution for misconduct, but resolutely stamped
out and prevented from recurring as a disease fatal to human society.
I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income
or nothing, and that under Socialism you would not be allowed to be
poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed
whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not
character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might
possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted
to live you would have to live well. Also you would not be allowed to
have half a crown an hour when other women had only two shillings, or
to be content with two shillings when they had half a crown. As far as
I know I was the first Socialist writer to whom it occurred to state
this explicitly as a necessary postulate of permanent civilization; but
as nothing that is true is ever new I daresay it had been said again
and again before I was born.

Two Fabian booklets of mine entitled Socialism and Superior Brains and
The Common Sense of Municipal Trading are still probably worth reading,
as they are written from personal experience of both.




INDEX

BY BEATRICE WHITE, M.A.


  Abatement, smoke, 145

  Aberdeen, 262

  Abernethy, John, 203

  Ability, managerial, 67, 181;
    to maintain discipline, 334, 335;
    necessary to nationalize, 341

  Abortion, 88;
    surgical, 410

  Abraham, 410

  Access to rare books and pictures, 388

  Accountants, 173, 176, 179, 225, 328

  Acrobats, 205

  Actors, 23, 169, 205, 419

  Actresses, 22;
    popular, 331

  Acts of Parliament, 254, 299, 309, 322, 356, 371, 384, 412

  Admiralty, the, 32, 274, 276

  Adoption, compulsory, 413

  Adulterators, 203

  Adults, dysgenic, 436

  Adventurers, 310

  Advertisements, 135, 203, 310

  Aerodromes, 402

  Aeroplane lines, the, 388

  Aeroplane pilots, 397

  Aeroplanes, 313, 345, 402

  Affiliation allowances, 200

  Afforestation, 281

  Africa, 52, 143, 150, 152, 154, 157, 409

  African markets, 154

  African “medicine”, 367

  Agents, 166

  Agitators, Socialistic, 305

  Agnostics, 436, 438

  Agricultural harvests, 240

  Agricultural laborers, 204

  Air services, 312, 313

  Airships, 402

  Albert Hall, the, 333

  Alcohol, 395, 396, 397, 398

  Alexander the Great, 54

  Alfonso, King, 318, 371, 379

  Alfred, King, 40, 309

  Algeria, 152

  Allah, 367

  Alliances, 153

  Allotment holders, 340

  Almsgiving, 95

  Ambassadors, 75

  Ambulance porters, 52

  America, 8, 57, 98, 120, 124, 142, 144, 154, 176, 188, 193, 194, 225,
           275, 293, 294, 296, 306, 307, 314, 370, 374, 401, 409, 430,
           431, 444, 466

  America, United States of, 141, 369, 381, 396, 450;
    anti-British feeling in, 158-159

  American dollars, 256;
    employers and financiers, methods of, 306, 307;
    hotheads, 396;
    plantations, 215;
    presidents, 328, 381;
    State Legislatures, 436;
    statistics, 397;
    villages, 217

  Americans, the, 410

  Amsterdam, 259

  Amusements, 165

  Ananias and Sapphira, 12

  Anarchism, 445, 447

  Anarchists, 94, 203, 220, 444, 446

  Anarchy, 29-30, 381

  Andes, the, 235

  Anglican Churches, the, 404

  Anglo-Catholics, 219, 346, 360

  Anne, Queen, 139

  Anti-clericalism, 439

  Anti-clericals, 345

  Anti-Russian scare, the 1924, 346

  Anti-Socialists, 346

  Apostles, the, 12, 13, 14, 19

  Apostles’ creed, the, 308, 426

  Apothecaries, 419

  _Apprentice, The Sorcerer’s_, 157-61

  Appropriation Act, the, 113

  Arabian desert, the, 457

  Arabs, the, 87

  Archbishop Laud, 374, 430, 431, 439

  Archbishops, 28, 93, 340, 436, 439

  Architects, 169

  Arcos, raid on, 223

  Aristocracy, the landed, 214

  Aristotle, 94

  Armada, the, 321

  Armaments, 144;
    the race of, 154

  Armistice, the, 156

  Army, the, 31, 289

  Arnold, Matthew, 98

  Arnold, Whately, 272

  Art, 30, 31, 39, 48, 157

  Art of living, the, 60

  Articles, the Thirty-nine, 425, 441, 445

  Artificial happiness, 395, 398

  Artificial overpopulation, 357, 409

  Artists, 78, 81, 386

  Asia, 89, 152;
    British Empire in, 431

  Asquith, Herbert Henry, 218

  Assaults in school, 416

  Assistants, shop, 78, 145, 163, 177, 334, 397, 446

  Associated work, 73

  Astor property, the, 8

  Astronomer Royal, the, 3, 17

  Astronomers, 16, 169, 327, 341

  Astronomy, Copernican, 361

  Asylums, lunatic, 33

  Athanasian creed, the, 426

  Atheists, 215, 345, 435

  Athenian democracy, 453

  Athens, 297

  Athletes, champion, 398, 429

  Atlantic, the, 106, 312

  Attendants, picture gallery, 79

  Augury, ancient, 367

  Augustine, Saint, 92, 93, 441

  Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, 466

  Australasia, 409

  Australia, 89, 193, 194, 361;
    uncles in, 67

  Australians, the, 410

  Austria, 263

  Austrian Government, the, 255

  Authority, 37-8;
    and subordination, 337

  Authors, 169, 172, 225

  Averaging. _See_ Nationalization


  Babies, 6, 384, 433;
    superfluous, 410

  Babylon, 372

  Bachelors, 349

  Baghdad, 314

  Bagmen, 343

  Baked-potato men, 184

  Bakers, 9, 52, 266

  Baldwin, Stanley, 218, 222

  Balfour, Arthur James, 218

  Bank of England, 167, 231, 244, 248, 249, 250, 259, 261, 292

  Bank Holiday, 77, 81

  Bank Holiday Acts, 322

  Bank managers, 55, 268

  Bank rate, the, 244, 249, 295

  Bank transactions, 245

  Banker-General, 273

  Bankers, 131, 178, 181, 266, 268, 297

  Banking, 243-51;
    nationalization of, 35, 140, 181, 264-8, 386

  Banks, 278;
    Scottish and Irish, 259;
    national and municipal, 140, 266

  Baptism, 4, 424, 433

  Barbers, 419

  Bargemen, 21

  Barges, 401

  Barristers, _See_ Lawyers

  Baronets, surgical, 332

  Bass Rock ideal, the, 412

  Bastille, the, 413

  Battlefields, 87, 292

  Battleships, 349

  Beachcombers, 151

  Beaconsfield, Earl of, 217

  Becket, Thomas à, 430

  Bedford, endowed schools of, 300

  Bees, 86, 90

  Beethoven, 414

  Behaviour, 172, 173

  Belgium, 153

  Belief, differences of, 366, 367;
    mostly bias, 460, 461

  Bell, answering the, 78

  Bench, the, 339

  Bennett, Arnold, 469

  Betterton, 419

  Biarritz, 280

  Bible, the, 189, 203, 233, 361, 374, 403, 424, 432, 459;
    astronomy and biology of, 361;
    of the working classes, 441

  Bibles, 50, 143

  Big business, 225;
    capitalist, 308

  Billiard markers, 397

  Birmingham, 146, 214, 266, 271, 336;
    municipal bank of, 266

  Birth control, _See_ Contraception

  Bishops, 434

  Bismarck, 54, 165, 380, 381, 453

  Blacklegs, 207

  Blacksmiths, 27, 138;
    village, 167, 386

  Bloated aristocrats, 444

  Blocks, parliamentary, 351

  Blockmakers, parliamentary, 351

  Boards, 353

  Boatswains, 335

  Boer ideal, the, 412

  Bogey Bolshevism, 14

  Bogies, 95

  Bolsheviks, 65, 94, 110, 208, 270, 343, 368, 374, 444;
    Communist, 375

  Bolshevism, 113

  Bombay Ginning Mills, 191

  Bombing aeroplanes, 380

  Bonar Law, Mr, 218

  Bond Street, 278, 280, 399, 429

  Book of Common Prayer, 406

  Bookkeepers, 173, 225, 328, 397

  Bookkeeping, 184

  Bookmakers, 242

  Bootle, 280

  Bootlegging, 142

  Bootmakers, 357

  Boots, broken, 50

  Borneo, 313

  Borough Councils, 351

  Borrovians, 220

  Borrow, George, 219

  Borrowing and hiring, 231, 232

  Borrowing from and taxing capitalists, 290

  Bound feet, 427

  Bounderby, 303

  Bountiful ladies, 65

  Bourgeois, the, 369, 444

  Bournemouth, 146, 278, 280, 372

  Bourneville, 307, 375

  Bourrienne, memoirs of, 328

  Bourses, Continental, 243

  Boy Scouts, 413

  Bradlaugh, Charles, 435

  Brahma, 367

  Brains, proper social use of, 331

  Bread, communization of, 15

  Bread and circuses, 96

  Breadwinning, 164, 197

  Breaking a bank, 246

  Breakwaters, 135

  Bremerhaven, 154

  Brewers, 177

  Briand, Aristide, 351

  Bricklayers, 167, 205, 208, 224, 356

  Brickmakers, 23

  Bridges, 391

  Brigadiers, 357

  Brigham Young, 380, 410, 411;
    a Mormon Moses, 431

  Bright, John, 190

  Brighton, 134

  Bristol, 143, 272

  Britain, 311, 379, 431

  British army and navy, 313;
    brains, 311;
    Commonwealth, 313;
    courage, 311;
    Empire, 253, 259, 313, 367;
    in Asia, 431;
    flag, 313;
    genius, 311;
    human nature, 330;
    husbands, 406;
    people, 313;
    proletariat, 359;
    proletarian voters, 369;
    Museum, 16;
    anti-Socialist governments, 287;
    employers, 306;
    Government, 255, 306;
    race, 310;
    Raj, 453;
    religions, variety and incompatibility of, 425;
    taxpayers, 313;
    workman, 219;
    turf, 236;
    Socialists, 141;
    Isles, 141;
    Trade Unionists, 306

  Brobdingnag, the King of, 155

  Brummagem buttons, 214

  Brunswick, Duke of, 369

  Buccaneers, capitalist, 417

  Bucket shops, 242

  Buckingham Palace, 37, 118, 426

  Buckle’s History of Civilization, 467

  Budget, the, 285;
    annual debates on, 286

  Budgets, 384

  Building societies, 129;
    trades, 205

  Bullion, 259

  Bulls and bears, 241

  Bumble, Mr, 413

  Bunyan, John, 5, 298, 329;
    his Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, 318

  Bureaucracy. _See_ Civil Service Burglars, 457

  Bus conductors, 251

  Business, wholesale, 386;
    private, 387, 388

  Business ability, 131

  Business man, the practical, 226, 249

  Business men, 24, 130, 170, 171, 248

  Business principles, 208

  Butchers, 422

  Butler, Samuel, 140

  Byron, Lord, 344


  Cabinet, the, 353, 354

  Cabinet Ministers, 216, 348, 353

  Cabinets, British, 348

  Cablegrams, 136

  Ca’canny, 208, 211

  Cadbury, Mr, 307

  Cæsar, Julius, 54, 380

  Cæsars, 348

  Cairnes, John Elliot, 467

  Calculus, the, 422, 428

  Calcutta Sweep, the, 67

  Calvin, John, 431

  Cambridge University, 169, 418, 429

  Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 218

  Canada, 89

  Canadians, French, 159

  Canals, 401

  Candidates, the No-Compensation, 271

  Candide, 462

  Canossa, 430, 442

  Canterbury, 430

  Capel Court, 243

  Capital, 33, 115, 127-31, 133;
    export of, 140-44, 150;
    definition of, 100;
    driven abroad, 34-5;
    homeless and at home everywhere, 140;
    party of, 218;
    levy, 227, 229, 230;
    investing and “realizing”, 228;
    taxation of, 277, 294;
    domestic, 225-31

  Capitalism, 10, 100-104, 185, 233, 368, 378, 459;
    adventurous and experimental, 312;
    diehard, 447;
    Liberal constitutional, 447;
    limitations of, 133-7;
    mammonist morality of, 374;
    in perpetual motion, 308-14;
    on paper, 310;
    a principle of, 331;
    provides selfish motives for doing good, 300;
    secular, 443;
    ruthless, 314;
    uncontrollable, 317;
    well-established method of, 300;
    runaway car of, 314-19

  Capitalist and genius, the, 311

  Capitalist morality, 200, 291, 359, 360;
    law, 325;
    system, one of worst vices of, 337;
    papers, 116, 342;
    Government and Opposition, 344;
    crusade, 369;
    exploitations of the taxpayers, 388, 389;
    oligarchy, 431;
    mankind detestable, 456;
    and Socialist Governments, difference between, 390

  Capitalists, 444;
    dictatorship of, 376

  Captains, navy, 70;
    sea, 422

  Cardinals, 436

  Careerists, 95

  Careers open to women, 174

  Carlyle, Thomas, 5, 93;
    his Past and Present, 424, 469;
    Sartor Resartus, 425;
    Shooting Niagara, 469

  Carnegie, Andrew, 37, 332

  Carnegie charities, 160

  Carpenters, 23, 69, 205, 356, 399;
    village, 167

  Carriage of mails oversea, 388

  Carriers, village, 387, 388, 389

  C.O.D. parcel post, 271, 272

  Casual labor, 118-20

  Casual people, 73

  Cathedrals, the, 438

  Catholic Church, the, 441

  Catholic theoracy, 442

  Catholicism, 185

  Catholics, 68, 93, 445

  Celibacy, 407

  Chambermaids, 149

  Chancellor of the Exchequer, 113, 121, 227, 276, 281,
                               285, 287, 290, 295

  Chanceries, 353

  Change, continuous, 2;
    constructive, must be parliamentary, 380-86

  Changes, social, 39

  Chaplains, 185

  Charabancs, 164, 165, 312

  Character, 26

  Charity, 95, 144

  Charlemagne, 433

  Charles I, King, 321, 345, 371, 405

  Charles, II, King, 305, 329, 345

  Chartists, 444

  Charwomen, 17, 35, 78, 79, 84, 105, 118, 119, 146, 198, 234, 342, 420

  Chauffeurs, 75

  Cheap and nasty, 139

  Cheltenham, 146

  Chemists, 310, 312, 327, 341

  Cheques and clearing houses, 261

  Cheques and Bills, 265

  Chicago municipal elections, 159

  Chicago pork kings, 343

  Child-bearing, 74, 88, 176, 196

  Child fanciers, 415

  Child farming, 415

  Child labor, 192

  Child life, organization of, 413

  Children, 53, 76, 360, 361, 362, 363, 392, 393, 423, 428, 436, 460;
    and parents, 134, 193, 364, 366, 408;
    and young persons overworked, 309;
    bearing and rearing of, 74, 196, 326;
    cost of, 87-8;
    exposure of female, 89;
    illegitimate, 200, 410;
    institutional treatment of, 413;
    matter-of-fact, 363;
    Roman Catholic, 365;
    ugly, 55

  Children’s ordinary human rights, disregard of, 415

  Children’s religion, dictated by parents, 360

  Children’s wages, 196

  China, 34, 142, 151, 194, 365, 374, 406

  Chocolate creams, 145, 146

  Cholera epidemics, 189, 427

  Christ, 4, 54, 69, 94, 98, 367, 368, 424, 433, 441;
    the mother of, 432

  Christ Scientist, the Church of, 329, 431, 433

  Christian Science, 433

  Christian Scientists, 432

  Christian Socialists, 458

  Christianity, 89, 92, 143;
    early, 459

  Christians, 93, 313, 367, 369;
    early, 89, 92

  Christmas, 63;
    cards, 156

  Church, the, 32, 49, 64, 174, 254, 429, 461

  Church Catechism, 424, 425

  Church of England, the, 15, 17, 28, 32, 49, 215, 329, 360, 366,
                          374, 425, 434, 435, 438, 439, 441, 445, 457

  Church of Jenner and Pasteur Scientists, the new, 433

  Church livings, 215

  Church rates, 436

  Church of Rome, 431, 433, 434, 442

  Church, school and Press, 63-5

  Church schools, 204

  Church and State, quarrel between, 429

  Churches, the, 218, 407, 409, 410, 412;
    attitude towards marriage, 89;
    dangerous pretensions of, 432

  Churches, the Free, 176, 435

  Churchill, Winston, 317

  Churchmen, 54, 190, 218, 345, 434

  Cinemas, 163, 164

  Cinematography, 175

  Circumcision, 4, 433

  Citizens, 391

  City bosses, 346

  City corporations, 351

  City offices, 176, 324

  Civil servants, 170, 171, 174, 262, 282, 340, 375, 382

  Civil Service, the, 32, 60, 97, 105, 174, 185, 274, 384, 391

  Civilians no longer spared in war, 175

  Civilization a disease, 127

  Clandestine Communism and confiscation, 287

  Clares, the Poor, 41

  Class distinctions, 420

  Class hatred, 456

  Class splits in the professions, 205

  Class struggle, the, 58, 218

  Class war, the, 187, 218, 372, 373

  Clearing houses, 261

  Cleopatra, 333

  Clergymen, 23, 27, 35, 36, 52, 63, 169, 173, 176, 185, 194, 215, 425,
             434, 446, 456, 458, 461

  Clerical staffs, 356

  Clerks, 75, 80, 173, 176, 182, 184, 203, 210, 245, 264, 404;
    and clerking, 182

  Clever women, 23

  Clothes, 66, 163, 404;
    Sunday, 156

  Clubs, 418

  Clydeside Scots, 441

  Coal, cost under capitalism, 107-9;
    how to cheapen, 109;
    harvests, 240;
    commission, 274;
    mines, 133;
    nationalization of, 266, 274, 297, 383, 386, 388;
    owners, 274, 276, 297, 313, 322;
    supply, 375

  Coalmaster-General, wanted a, 109

  Cocktails, 341

  Coinage, debasement of, 253, 254;
    value of gold coinage fixes itself, 259

  College education, 36

  Colonels, 37, 357

  Colonies, British, 159

  Colored labor, 146

  Colored persons, 75

  Columbus, 139

  Combinations of workers, 204

  Commandments, the Ten, 97, 127, 308, 384

  Commercial civilization, 319;
    profiteers, 383

  Commercialism, 399

  Commissioners of Inland Revenue, 394

  Commissions fixing prices, 224

  Common creed of the nation, formation of the, 426

  Common people, the, 317

  Common sense and prejudice, 426

  Commonwealths, 158, 450

  Communisms, 11-13, 14, 113, 117, 134, 185, 368, 445;
    clandestine, 16;
    reduces need for pocket money, 262;
    parochial, 302;
    Christian morality of, 374;
    a development of existing economic civilization, 375

  Communist, present connotation of, 446

  Communist schools, 360

  Communist-Anarchists, 445

  Communistic monstrosities, our, 287

  Communists, 94, 444, 446;
    pseudo-Bolshevist, 345

  Companies and trusts, 231

  Companions, lady, 174

  Company promotion, 237

  Compensation for expropriation, 113

  Compensation for nationalization, 268-274

  Compensation really distributed confiscation, 270-71

  Competitive method in industry, wasteful, 271, 272;
    inadmissable in case of ubiquitous services, 273

  Composers, 339

  Compromisers, timid, 346

  Compulsory schooling, 375

  Compulsory social service, 356, 357, 358

  Conduct, difficulty of teaching, 363

  Confectionery, 165

  Confidence tricksters, 395

  Confiscated income must be immediately redistributed, 288

  Confiscation, 113;
    without compensation, 276-7;
    with a vengeance, 290

  Conscience, the national, 393

  Conscientious objectors, 449;
    objection, 450

  Conscription, 154, 156, 289

  Conservatism, 313, 447

  Conservative Act of 1867, 452

  Conservative Governments, 389

  Conservative Party, 38, 103, 184

  Conservatives, 93, 216, 217, 218, 220, 344

  Consols, 177

  Conspiracies _alias_ Trade Unions, 209

  Constables, police, 38

  Constantinople, 314

  Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, 354

  Constitutional Monarchists, 345

  Constructive problem solved, the, 297-9

  Contraception, 61, 87, 88-9, 90, 91, 148, 165, 175, 410

  Contractors, 116

  Contracts, civil, 57

  Convalescent homes, 33

  Conventions, 405

  Cooks, 24-5, 36, 145

  Co-operative societies, 33, 129

  Co-operators, 444

  Copper harvests, 240

  Copyright conventions, 157

  Copyrights, 403

  Cost price, 107-11. _See_ Nationalization

  Cottage handicrafts, 140;
    hospitals, 65;
    industry, 163

  Cotton lords, 178;
    spinners, 205

  Country gentlemen, 75, 166, 286, 346

  Country houses, 131

  County Councils, 32, 351

  County ladies, 166

  Covetousness, human, 160

  Cowper, William, 328

  Cowper-Temple Clause, the, 361

  Crabbe, George, 5

  Craft Unions, 356

  Craftsmen, 386

  Creative work, 327

  Credit, 247;
    real, 247;
    tax on, 249

  Crews, 446

  Crime, 58

  Crimean War, 61

  Criminal Courts, 395;
    Law, 57

  Cromer, 272

  Cromwell, Oliver, 316, 318, 345, 371, 379, 381, 453

  Crusoe, Robinson, 21, 85, 121

  Culture, 30, 48;
    reserves of now rather commercial than professional, 171

  Currencies, private, 265

  Current confusions, 433-55

  Cynicism, not justified by the horrors of Capitalism, 155


  Daily routine, 321

  Dairymaids, 419

  Dancing partners, fascinating male, 202, 331

  Dartmoor, 328

  Dartmoor hunt, the, 328

  Daughters, 174, 197;
    unmarried, 176

  Day of Judgment, 89

  Daylight in winter, 77

  Dealers in pit props, 304

  Dean Swift, 62, 458

  Death duties, 113;
    stupid, 230

  Death-rate, high, 407

  Debasement of currency, called inflation, 256

  Debentures, 235

  Debt, municipal, 117

  Debt, the National, 114, 115, 117, 289, 291, 294-7, 402

  Debt redemption levy, 296

  Deceased Wife’s Sister Act, 1

  Declaration of Rights, 320

  Decline of the employer, the, 177-82

  Deer forests, 124

  Deflation, 256

  Defoe, Daniel, 182

  Deists, 345

  Demagogues, plebeian, 348

  Demand, effective, 51;
    money market sense of, 248-9

  Democracy, 164, 451, 452, 453, 459;
    result of, 317

  Democratic Prime Ministers, 315

  Dens, sweaters’, 378

  Dentists, 194

  Department of Mines, creation of, 274

  Department of Woods and Forests, 274

  Depopulation, 148

  Deposit at elections, 57

  De Quincey, Thomas, 445, 465, 468

  Derby, the, 154, 426

  Descartes, 414

  Destitute persons, 119

  Detective stories, 415

  Devil, the, 199, 367

  Diagnostic of Socialism, the, 92-5

  Diamonds, 9, 51, 66, 341

  Dickens, Charles, 174, 303, 414;
    his Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Pickwick Papers,
    Our Mutual Friend, 469

  Dictators, 315;
    Italian, 348

  Diehard coercionists, 346

  Diminishing Return, Law of, 91

  Diplomacy, 60-61

  Diplomatic service, the, 46, 60

  Direct Action men, 371

  Direct Action, policy of, 446, 447

  Dirty work, 74-6

  Disablement above and below, 164-8

  Discoveries, 172, 310, 341

  Disease, venereal, 43, 54, 200;
    hereditary, 54

  Disguised Church, the, 433

  Disraeli, Benjamin, 217, 218. _See_ Beaconsfield, Earl of

  Dissenters, the, 93, 204, 215, 218, 360

  Distilleries, 135, 137, 312

  Distribution, traumatic, not spontaneous, 1;
    anomalous, 5;
    seven ways of, 19;
    by class, 35-8

  District Councils, 32, 351

  Divide and govern, 213-25

  Dividing-up, 6, 7, 8, 21

  Division of labor, 24, 85, 161

  Divisions within the Labor Party, 354-9

  Divorce, 57, 349, 409

  Dock companies, 119

  Dock labor, 119

  Dockers, 219

  Dockyards, 105

  Doctors, 22, 23, 35, 36, 46, 52, 105, 169, 173, 176, 194, 203, 225,
           250, 327, 370, 398, 399, 400, 419, 432, 436, 456, 458,
           459, 461

  Doctrinaires, Marxist, 372

  Doles, 8, 96, 119, 147, 279

  Doles, depopulation and parasitic paradises, 145-50

  Domestic capital, 225-31

  Domestic debt redemption levies, objection to, 297

  Domestic servants. _See_ Servants

  Domestic work woman’s monopoly, 176

  Dominic, Saint, 441

  Dominions, the, 437

  Dope, 374

  Downing tools, 206

  Drainage, 137, 391

  Drawingroom amusements, 74

  Dress, 46, 145, 172, 173

  Dress question, the, 404

  Dressing, 77

  Dressmakers, 52, 145;
    jobbing, 84

  Dressmaking, 420

  Drink, 15, 17, 42, 83, 120, 135, 141, 203, 395

  Drones, 58

  Drugging, 42

  Drugs, 396

  Drunkards, 93, 195, 395

  Dublin, 184, 380

  Ducal estates, 167

  Duchesses, 403, 419

  Dukes, 55, 75, 419

  Dustmen, 35, 55, 75

  Dwarfs, 69

  Dysgenic reactions of inequality, 54-6, 150;
    adults, 436


  Earthquakes, 156

  Eastern Europe, 437

  Eastern women, 427

  Eclipses, 365

  Eddy, Mrs, 431, 432, 433, 441

  Education, 27, 36, 173, 388;
    college, 36;
    a failure, 417;
    impracticable, 362;
    middle-class monopoly of, 177-82;
    secular, 361, 423;
    stupidities about, 413;
    technical, compulsory and liberal, 422;
    Socialist idea of, 428

  Education Act of 1870, the, 361;
    of 1902, 15

  Egypt, 34, 222, 392;
    self-government in, 159

  Egyptian fiasco, the, 223

  Eight hours day, the, 77

  Einstein, Albert, 170, 343, 414

  Election of 1918, the, 454

  Electric Lighting Committees, 352

  Electric lighting, municipal, 121, 122

  Electric power, 76, 386

  Electricians, 355

  Electrocution, 57

  Electronic physics, 361

  Elementary schools, 169

  Elizabeth, Queen, 44, 311, 316, 317, 329, 403, 425, 426, 442

  Elizabeth, statute of, 44, 119, 195

  Emigration, 144, 148, 193, 194

  Emotional Socialism, 189

  Empire, the medieval, 442

  Empire insurance, 346

  Empires, in collision, 152-7;
    their origin in trade, 151;
    ruins of, 146;
    shifting centres of, 152

  Employees, badly sweated, 309. _See_ Trade Union Capitalism

  Employers, 177, 187, 195;
    industrial, 214;
    and financiers, 358;
    petty, 309;
    Victorian, 199.
    _See_ Trade Union Capitalism

  Employers’ Federations, 211, 212

  Employment of first-rate business brains by Trade Unions, 307

  Empress Catherine II of Russia, the, 449

  Encyclopedias, 163

  Engels, Friedrich, 185, 218

  Engine drivers, 36, 73, 76

  Engineers, 310, 312, 401

  England, 124, 329, 330, 342, 371, 375, 376, 410, 430, 431, 436, 438,
           454, 459;
    Protestant, 406

  English big business, Americanized, 307

  English Church, the, 347

  English ladies, 95

  English market, the, 255

  English nation, the, 366

  English Parliament, the, 371

  English pound, the, 263

  English State, the, 442

  English statesmen, 347

  English Trade Unions, Americanized, 307

  Englishmen, 257

  Enlightenment, modern, 163

  Enough? How much is, 41-9

  Epidemics, 189;
    dread of, 398

  Epileptics, 195

  Episcopalians, 345

  Equal wages for equal work, 196

  Equality, positive reasons for, 68-70

  Equality of income, 384, 385, 391, 407, 413;
    of opportunity, 93-4

  Erewhon, 140

  Errand boys, 84, 219

  Esquimaux, the, 157, 164

  Estate rules, 404

  Ethical societies, 435

  Eton, 169, 415, 429

  Eugenics, 53-6

  Europe, 86, 126, 152, 171, 222, 268, 293, 318, 369, 444;
    kings of, 371, 378;
    States of, 450

  European empires, 347

  Evasion of income tax, 32

  Eve, the sin of, 89

  Evolution, 361

  Evolutionists, creative, 436

  Exceptional ability, question of, 334

  Excessive incomes, extortion of, 340

  Exchequer, the 276;
    Chancellor of the, 113, 121, 227, 276, 281, 285, 287, 290, 295

  Exclusion of women from the professions, 174

  Executioners, 76

  Experimenting, 39

  Exploitation, 118;
    of the State by Capitalism and Trade Unionism, 300, 301

  Exploration, 388;
    professional, 175

  Explorers, 46, 310, 327, 341

  Exposure of female children, 89

  Expropriation Act, 113

  Expropriative taxation, 298

  Extension of franchise, 217;
    disappointing, 317

  Extremists, 373


  Fabian Acts of Parliament, 372

  Fabian Essays, 468

  Fabian lecturers, 375

  Fabian methods, 298

  Fabian Society, the, 94, 185, 186, 220, 221, 374, 467

  Fabianism or constitutional action, 446-7

  Factories, 133, 143, 150, 378, 402;
    child labor in, 188;
    Ford, 375;
    national, 116;
    munition, 390

  Factory Acts, 143, 189-94, 192, 215, 216, 224, 322, 394

  Factory employees, condition of, 215

  Factory foremen, 146, 147

  Factory girls, 78, 165, 198

  Factory hands, 219, 334

  Factory inspectors, 394

  Factory legislation, 207

  Factory regulations, 394, 395

  Factory work, 73, 80

  Factory working day, 213

  Fairies, 219

  Fanaticisms, 367

  Farm produce, transport of, 144

  Farmers, 9, 24, 124, 309, 327, 387, 447;
    English, 374

  Farming, 21, 24;
    large-scale, 386;
    fancy fruit, 386

  Fascism (capitalist dictatorship), 298, 376, 443

  Fascists, 444

  Fashion, tyranny of, 403, 404

  Fashoda, 152

  Father, the author’s, 173, 184, 317, 332

  Faust, 300, 424

  Fecundity, human, 86

  Federations, 158

  Female virtue, 199

  Ferryman, 409

  Fertility, 90

  Feudalism, 10, 166, 386

  Feuerbach, L. A., 441

  Field-marshals, 340

  Film actresses, 76

  Filmstars, 22

  Films, 164

  Finance committees, 352

  Financial gamblers, 382

  Financiers, 40, 70, 170, 265, 332, 334, 340, 342;
    profiteering, 266;
    and bankers are money profiteers, 266

  First-rate work, 74, 398

  Fishermen, 124

  Fitters, 205, 224

  Flag, trade following the, 144

  Flanders, 390;
    battlefields in, 87

  Fluctuations on the Stock Exchange, 240

  Flying Services, 389

  Football, 82

  Ford, Henry, 307

  Ford factories, 375

  Foreign markets. _See_ Markets

  Foreign Office, the, 353

  Foreign trade, 150-52, 157

  Foresters, 21

  Forewomen and foremen, 335

  Formulas, 297

  Forth Bridge, the, 167, 224

  Fourier, Charles, 94

  Fox, George, 5, 54, 329

  Foxhunting, 420

  France, 152, 287, 310, 318, 330, 351, 364, 371, 374, 377, 410, 411,
          431, 444, 454;
    decreasing population of, 88

  France, Anatole, 458

  Franchise, extension of, 217;
    extension of, disappointing, 317

  Francis, Saint, 54, 219

  Franciscans, the, 41

  Free Churches, the, 176, 435

  Free Trade, 344

  Free Traders, 346

  Free Trade controversy, 286

  Freedom, 77;
    no place in nature, 328;
    restricted, 329, 330

  French, the, 371

  French Chamber, the, 351

  French Government, 369, 411

  French nation, the, 310

  French peasant proprietors, 168, 374

  French Republic, the, 433

  French Revolution, the, 214, 215, 256, 377, 378, 431

  Freud, Sigmund, 416

  Frontiers, automatic advance of, 151

  Fundholders, 444

  Funding, 291


  Galsworthy, John, 469

  Gambling, 239

  Game Laws, 214

  Gamekeepers, 65

  Gaming Act, the, 242

  Garages, 402

  Garden cities, 281, 307, 418;
    the property of capitalists, 301

  Gardeners, 65, 76, 219;
    lady, 397

  Gardening, 420;
    kitchen, 386

  Gas, poison, 148, 175

  General elections, 278, 345, 346, 349, 350, 353;
    stampeding, 222

  General Medical Council, the, 404

  General Post Office, the, 274

  General Strike, the, 448

  General strikes, a form of national suicide, 380

  General teetotalism, 398

  Generals, military, 379

  Genesis, the book of, 460

  Geneva, 431

  Geniuses, 172, 332

  Gentility without property, 36

  Gentlemen, our sort of, 358

  Gentry, the, 19, 30, 31, 32;
    landed, 40

  George IV, King, 309

  George V, King, 254, 309

  George, Henry, 217, 468

  German employers, 255

  German Government, the, 255, 256

  German money, 255

  German racial stock, 310

  German schools and universities, 64

  Germans, the, 257, 289, 441

  Germany, 159, 181, 183, 255, 256, 263, 310, 317, 401;
    increasing population of, 88;
    war with, 347

  Giants, 69, 331

  Gin Lane, 141

  Girl Guides, 413

  Gladstone, W. E., 114, 218, 284, 285, 286, 328

  Gleneagles hotel, 148

  God, 76, 91, 146, 185, 190, 208, 209, 363, 365, 368, 409, 410, 411,
       424, 428, 429, 432, 435, 439, 441, 452; the
    Church of England, 364;
    the greater glory of, 300;
    the idea of, 364;
    ideas about, 366, 367;
    intentions of, 144;
    not patriotic, 155

  Gold bugs, 346

  Gold currency, natural stability of the, 263

  Goldsmith, Oliver, 5, 162, 201

  Golf, 82, 420;
    Sunday, 329

  Golfing hotel managers, 357

  Gospels, the, 127, 442

  Governesses, 36, 174, 324, 416

  Government, the Capitalist, of 1914-1918, 289;
    the most sacred economic duty of, 256;
    and garden cities, 301;
    and governed, 316;
    and Opposition, or performance and criticism, 359;
    as national landlord, financier and employer, 97

  Government confiscation without preparation, 280

  Government grants, 388;
    in aid to municipalities, 281

  Government intervention in strikes, 356;
    intervention between Capital and Labor. _See_ Factory legislation
    and Taxation

  Government subsidy to coalowners in 1925, the, 301, 302, 304, 305,
                                                 387, 389

  Government subsidies, 387

  Government Whips, 349

  Governments, failures and frauds of, 275;
    Italian and Spanish, 372;
    misdeeds of, 275

  Gradgrind, 303

  Gradual expropriation possible, 295

  Gramophones, 18, 33

  Gravediggers, 52

  Great Britain, 193, 313, 385

  Great Western Railway, the, 272

  Greece, ancient, 453

  Greek, 414;
    the value of, 28

  Greek Church, the, 374

  Greenland, 310

  Grocers, 265

  Ground rents, 123

  Guardians, Poor Law, 192, 195, 303, 413

  Guards, railway, 73

  Guides, postal and official, 421

  Gulliver’s Travels, 155, 462

  Gwynne, Nell, 203


  Habeas Corpus Act, 308

  Hamlet, 205

  Handel, G. F., 327, 414

  Handicrafts, cottage, 140

  Handloom weavers, 138

  Hand-to-mouth, the world lives from, 6, 7

  Hangmen, 76

  Happiness, 42

  Hara-kiri, 427

  Harboro, 134, 137, 312

  Hardie, Keir, 221

  Harrow, 169, 429

  Hatmakers, 272

  Haymaking, 80, 401

  Head waiters, 146

  Health, Ministry of, 282

  Hearse drivers, 52

  Heartlessness of parents, the apparent, 193

  Hegel, G. W. F., 376, 441

  Hegelian dialectic, the, 441

  Helmer, Nora, 408

  Helplessness, of proprietary and working classes, 172;
    of individuals, 162

  Henry IV, King, 166

  Henry VIII, King, 130, 253, 254

  Hereditary disease, 54

  Herring gutters, 324

  Herriot, Édouard, 351

  High Tories, 346

  High wages and colossal profits, 307

  Highland chieftains, 32

  Highlands, the, 457

  Highway lighting, 391

  Highwaymen, 38

  Hiring spare money, 244

  Historians, 321, 328

  Hoarding, 129-31

  Hobbies, 77

  Hogarth, 141

  Hohenzollern family, the, 64

  Holidays, 59, 79, 167

  Holland, 431

  Holy Ghost, the, 12, 441

  Home, 77

  Home Office, 353

  Home Rule Question, the, 371

  Homer, 414

  Hood, Thomas, 201

  Horace, 414, 421

  Horses, 335;
    old, 188

  Hospitals, 434, 461;
    cottage, 65

  Hotel manageresses, 404

  Hotels, 33, 61, 77, 145, 149, 167

  Hours of labor, 82, 206

  House of Commons, the, 5, 106, 285, 344, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351,
                         352, 353, 354, 359, 370, 434;
    Labor members of, 352;
    a proletarian, 359

  House of Lords, the, 372, 434, 451

  Housekeepers, 74

  Housekeeping, 24, 176, 196;
    national, 49, 285

  Housekeeping money, 211

  Housemaids, 167, 219, 324, 386, 446

  Houses, scarcity of, 86

  Houses of Parliament, the, 254, 314;
    out of date, 354

  How long will it take?, 391-3

  How much is enough?, 41-9

  How the War was paid for, 289-94

  How wealth accumulates and men decay, 161-4

  Human nature, 155, 160

  Human society like a glacier, 308

  Human stock, improvement of, 343

  Hungry, the, 131, 132, 133, 167, 172

  Husbandmen, 124

  Husbands, 25;
    and wives, 408

  Hyndman, Henry Mayers, 186, 218, 469


  Ibsen, Henrik, 408, 440, 470

  Idealists, 345

  Idiots, 172, 195

  Idle rich, the, 59-62, 145, 399

  Idleness, 46, 403

  Idlers, 84, 105, 399, 400

  Idling, 58, 399

  Idolatry, 203

  Ignorance, 162;
    about Socialism, 345

  Illegitimate children, 200, 410

  Illinois, State of, 410

  Immigrants, 398, 436

  Immigration, restricted, 194

  Imperialism, 152, 443, 447

  Imperialist morality, 359, 360

  Imperialists, 346, 444

  Inability to govern, our, 318

  Incentive, 72

  Income, family, 321

  Income tax, 114;
    and super tax and estate duties other names for confiscation, 284;
    and death duties and supertax, 290;
    evasion of, 32;
    rates a form of, 117

  Increasing return, law of, 91

  Independent candidates, 350

  Independent Labor Party, foundation of the, 221

  Independent voters, 350, 382

  India, 152, 313, 355, 407, 440

  Indians, the, 367

  Industrial employees, 324

  Industrial employers, 285

  Industrial male workers, the ordinary, 324

  Industrial organizers, 332

  Industrial and Provident Societies Act, 300

  Industrial Revolution, the, 137-40, 182

  Industrial Unions, 355, 356

  Industries, the big, 386;
    competitive entry of the Government into, 271

  Industry, the dye, 388

  Inequality of income, 418

  Inevitability of gradualness, the, 377

  Infallibility, necessary dogma of, 3

  Infant mortality, 45, 66, 88, 90, 410

  Infant schools, 428

  Infidels, 444

  Inflation, 130, 256, 257, 270

  Inflationists, 346

  Ingoldsby Legends, The, 239

  Inheritance, 165, 166

  Inhibition complex, 330

  Innkeepers, 387

  Inoculations, 433;
    dangerous, 398;
    pathogenic, 399, 432

  Inquisition, the, 434;
    water torture of, 415

  Insurance, National, 375

  Insurance premiums, 254

  Insurance stamps, 1

  Interest, 178, 182;
    positive and negative, 232;
    exorbitant rates to the poor, 234

  International, the Third, 385, 441, 442

  International Anarchism, the present, 450

  International institutions, 157

  Internationalism, 140

  Invalids, 172

  Invention, 131;
    inventions and inventors, 138;
    inventions, 180;
    inventors, 310, 312

  Investing capital, 292

  Investment and enterprise, 131-3

  Ireland, 124, 144, 193, 194, 371, 372, 379

  Ireland scholars, 429

  Irish Free State, 159, 371

  Irish Home Rule, 371

  Irish ladies in the workhouse, 20

  Irish Nationalist Party, the old, 350

  Irish peers, 184

  Ironmasters, 400

  Ironmongers, 400

  Islam, 432

  Isle of Wight, 106

  Israelites, the, 392, 410

  Italian nation, the, 348

  Italy, 152, 154, 310, 318, 329, 337, 347, 372, 453


  Jacobins, 444

  James I, King, 403

  James II, King, 321, 370, 426

  James, Saint, 433

  Japan, 194, 402

  Jehovah, 367

  Jenner, Edward, 433

  Jericho, 392

  Jesuits, the, 368

  Jesus. _See_ Christ

  Jevons, Stanley, 465, 467, 468

  Jews, the, 329, 361, 369, 433, 435, 438

  Joan of Arc, 54

  Jobbing dressmakers, 84

  John, King, 442

  Johnson, Samuel, 167, 458

  Joiners, 21, 205, 356

  Joint stock companies, 178, 180, 209, 235, 240, 276, 309

  Joshua, 38

  Journalists, 64, 78, 95, 203, 239, 321

  Judas Iscariot, 203

  Judges, 28, 29, 35, 69, 70, 340

  Judgment, Day of, 89

  Judgment, the Last, 437

  Juries, trial by, 56

  Jurors, 339

  Jury duties, 395

  Jurymen, 316

  Jutland, battle of, 326


  Kaiser, the ex-, 64, 153, 317, 452

  Kantian test, the, 227, 357

  Kapital, Das, 441, 442, 443

  Keynes, Maynard, 467

  Kilkenny cats, 29, 381

  King, the, 36, 37, 38, 100, 184, 314, 349, 351, 352, 353, 372, 404,
             427, 435;
    his Speech, 208

  King Alfonso, 318, 371, 379

  King Alfred, 40, 309

  King Charles I, 321, 345, 371, 405

  King Charles II, 305, 329, 345

  King George IV, 309

  King George V, 254, 309

  King Henry II, 430, 442

  King Henry IV, 166

  King Henry VIII, 130, 253, 254

  King James I, 403

  King James II, 321, 370, 426

  King John, 442

  King Lear, 47

  King Louis XIV, 350

  King Philip II of Spain, 442

  King William III, 321, 350, 352, 426

  King William IV, 215

  Kings, 315, 379;
    Israelitish, 361

  Kingsley, Charles, 94

  Knights of the Shires, 316

  Knox, John, 431

  Kruger, President, 431

  Krupp’s, 181

  Kyle of Tongue, the, 283


  Labor, capitalized, 225;
    costly materials and equipment for, 87;
    curse of, 80, 82;
    market value of, 194;
    of women and girls, 196-204, 212;
    party of, 218

  Labor Chancellor, 286

  Labor Government, 344;
    of 1923, 221

  Labor House of Commons, 358

  Labor leaders, 373, 442

  Labor markets, the, 186-96, 199

  Labor members, 217

  Labor Opposition, 344

  Labor Party, the, 40, 95, 103, 286, 289, 291, 305, 349, 355, 390, 454;
    establishment of, 220;
    a political federation of Trade Unions and Socialist Societies, 221;
    rapid growth of, 344,
    danger of splits in, 345;
    Socialists in, 358;
    the present, 379

  Labor-saving appliances, 78

  Labor-saving contrivances, 39, 48

  Labor-saving machinery, 139

  Laboratory work, 74

  Laborers, 69, 93, 356

  Laborists, the, 446

  Ladies, attractive, 331;
    English, 95;
    our sort of, 358;
    real, 400

  Ladies’ maids, 42, 145, 146, 333

  Lahore, Government College of, 355

  Laisser-faire, 38-41, 103

  Laisser-faire doctrinaires, 347

  Lancashire, 216

  Land, nationalization of, 112

  Land Purchase Acts, 124

  Land values, 123

  Landlords, 457, 461;
    and capitalists, 358;
    and raised rents, 299, 300;
    Irish, 344;
    powers of, 38, 102, 124-5

  Langland, 5

  Lassalle, Ferdinand, 41

  Latimer, Hugh, 5

  Latin, literary, 414, 415

  Latin stock, 310

  Latin verses, 422

  Latter Day Saints, the, 381, 407

  Laud, Archbishop, 374, 430, 431, 439

  Laundresses, 145

  Laundries, 73

  Law, the Courts of, 56-9, 64;
    Criminal, 57;
    Mosaic, 5

  Law of Diminishing Return, the, 91

  Law of Increasing Return, the, 91

  Laws, oppressive and unjust, 399

  Lawyers, 22, 23, 54, 57, 105, 124, 169, 173, 176, 194, 202, 203, 370,
           456, 459, 461

  Laziness, mental, 335

  League of Nations, the. _See_ Nations

  Lear, King, 47

  Learned men, 36

  Learning, 30, 31, 39

  Legislation, Socialistic, 384

  Leicester, 317

  Leisure, 10, 77, 82, 320;
    distribution of, 162, 325

  Lenin, 298, 337, 379, 442, 443, 469

  Letters, anonymous, 421;
    snowball, 137

  Leverhulme, Lord, 307

  Levies on capital are raids on private property, 296

  Lewis, George Cornewall, 81

  Liberal impulse, the, 271

  Liberal Party, the, 95, 184;
    working class members of, 217;
    wiped out, 222

  Liberalism, 447;
    revolutionary traditions of, 276

  Liberals, the, 93, 216, 217, 218, 220, 344, 445

  Liberty, the desire for, 322;
    the fear of, 324;
    unfair distribution of, 325;
    natural limit to, 319-30;
    and Socialism, 393-406

  Liberty of conscience, comparative, 329

  Libraries, 309

  Lies, 64, 363, 364

  Lieutenants, 357

  Lighthouses, 105, 134, 137;
    and lightships, 76

  Limitations of Capitalism, 133-7

  Lisbon, 192

  Lister, Joseph, 433

  Literary property, 104

  Literature, 30, 48, 157, 420;
    treasures of, 421

  Little Englanders, 158, 346

  Liveries, 75-6

  Liverpool, 106

  Lloyd George, David, 218

  Loan Stock, 301

  Local Government, 352

  Local Government inspectors, 394

  Lock-outs, 206, 356

  Logic of Political Economy, DeQuincey’s, 445

  London, 32, 58, 59, 64, 106, 123, 124, 125, 139, 152, 183, 262,
          274, 277, 280, 281, 302, 309, 399, 403, 421, 432, 433, 469;
    overpopulation of, 92;
    Socialist movement in, 219

  London citizen, the, 421

  London Midland and Scottish Railway, 268

  Long Parliament, the, 345

  Looting by ladies, 151

  Low Church Protestants, 346

  Loyalty, 159

  Luddites (machine wreckers), 212

  Lumbermen, 21

  Lunatic asylums, 33

  Luther, Martin, 441

  Luxury trades, 288, 370


  Macaulay, T. B., 466

  MacDonald, James Ramsay, 221, 222, 317

  Machine guns, 380

  Machinery, 138-9;
    displaces labor, 192

  Machinery wrecking, 212

  Machines, 402

  Madeira, 34

  Magee, Bishop, 142

  Magistrates, 416

  Magna Carta, 308, 320

  Mahomet, 89, 380, 423, 431, 432, 433, 441

  Mahometans, 438

  Majors, 357

  Malaya, 235

  Male prostitution, 203

  Mallock, William Hurrell, 331

  Malverns, the, 146

  Mammon, 185, 215

  Man, 361

  Man Question, the, 176

  Management, 171;
    routine, 184;
    scientific, 170, 191

  Managerial ability, 67, 181

  Managers, 176

  Manchester, 146

  Manchester School, the, 101, 190, 195, 445

  Manchester and Sheffield Outrages, 207

  Manchu ladies, 406

  Manifestoes, Communist, 384

  Manners, 30, 43, 145, 205, 418

  Mansion House funds, 280

  Manual labor, 183

  Manufacture of pins, the, 161

  Manufactured pleasures, 46

  Manufacturers, 173

  Manufacturing towns, overcrowded slums of, 215, 216

  Marbot, General, 335

  Marco Polo, 343;
    travels of, 424

  Markets, the struggle for, 150-53

  Marks, paper, 255

  Marriage, 25, 176;
    English, Scottish, and Irish, 407

  Marriage and the State, 409

  Marriages, unsuitable, 55

  Married Men’s Rights agitation, 329

  Married women, 77

  Married Women’s Property Acts, 26, 197, 210, 321

  Mars, 253

  Martyrs, 172

  Marx, Karl, 94, 183, 184, 185, 189, 217, 218, 285, 376, 385, 441,
              442, 443, 459, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470

  Marxian class-consciousness, 220

  Marxism, 439, 441, 443

  Marxist Bible, the, 442

  Marxist Church, the, 442

  Marxist Communists, 373

  Marxist fanatics, 441, 443

  Marxists, 318, 443

  Marx’s slogan, 183, 184

  Mary Queen of Scots, 311

  Mary Tudor, Queen, 426, 430

  Masons, 205, 224, 356

  Master of the Mint, 274

  Match girls, 448

  Materialists, the, 436

  Mathematicians, 16, 310, 341

  Mating, 54

  Matrons, 335

  Maurice, Frederick Denison, 94

  Mayfair, 83

  Means of production, 218

  Medieval robber barons, 417

  Medical research, 437

  Medical schools, 416

  Mediterranean, annexations of the African coast, 153

  Members of Parliament, 69, 461;
    payment of, 60

  Men of science, 320

  Mental “defectives”, 436

  Mental work, unremunerative, 169

  Mephistopheles, 300

  Merchant princes, 178

  Merchants, 21, 173;
    gold, 259;
    coal, 29

  Merit, promotion by, 70;
    and money, 70-71

  Messiah, political, 318

  Metaphysics, 363, 423

  Methodist schools, 360

  Methodists, 215

  Middle class, the, 172, 181

  Middle class manners, 418

  Middle station in life, the, 168-76, 182

  Middlemen, 334

  Midgets, 331

  Military officers, 74

  Military rank, 74

  Military service, 31, 50, 166, 324, 449;
    compulsory, 411, 428;
    righteousness of, 357

  Mill, John Stuart, 212, 219, 220, 467

  Mill hands, 145

  Millennium, the, 423

  Millers, oldtime, 138

  Millionaires, 37, 160, 192;
    commercial, 332

  Mines, the, 150, 231, 278, 386, 387;
    nationalization of, 266, 274, 297, 383, 386, 388

  Miners, 205, 219, 313, 446, 447;
    and mine owners, 322;
    grievances of, 109

  Mining, 76

  Ministry of Health, 282, 303

  Mint, the, 253, 264;
    nationalization of, 265;
    Royal, 274

  Misdeeds of the landed gentry, 214, 215

  Miseries of the rich, 45

  Missionaries, 143, 151, 310

  Modern conscience, the, 423

  Modern domestic machinery, 320

  Modern examination-passing classes, 414

  Modern garden cities and suburbs, 300

  Modern Italian and Spanish _coups d’état_, 345

  Modern living, the art of, 422

  Modern psychological research, 416

  Modern psychology, 424

  Modern toleration a myth, 368, 369

  Modern war, 175

  Monarchs, 23, 35, 36

  Money, 9, 41, 53, 130, 251-63;
    congested, 280;
    Martian, 253;
    spare, 232, 233, 465;
    measure of value, 252;
    a tool for buying and selling, 252;
    and merit, 70-71.
    _See_ Capital, 100

  Money lenders, 266

  Money market, the, 231-9, 240, 276, 316;
    fluctuation of, 231

  Monogamy, 411

  Monopoly, woman’s natural, 176

  Monsters, 332

  Monte Carlo, 45, 148, 236, 243

  Morality by Act of Parliament, 191

  Morals, 31, 39

  Moratorium, 156

  More, Sir Thomas, 5, 94

  Mormon theocracy, 431

  Mormon women, 411

  Mormonism, 443

  Mormons, the, 410, 432

  Morning Post, the, 287

  Morocco, 152

  Morris, William, 5, 139, 162, 186, 218, 219, 371, 458;
    his News from Nowhere, 469

  Morris wallpapers, 393, 394

  Mortality, excessive, 90;
    infant, 45, 66, 88, 90, 410

  Mosaic Law, 5

  Moscow, 282

  Moscow Soviet, the, 391

  Moses, 4, 32, 392, 423, 431, 461

  Moslems, 367

  Mother, the author’s, 104

  Mothers, 3;
    soldiers’, 155-6;
    widowed, 349;
    and wives, 25, 176

  Motion, 314;
    uncontrolled, 315

  Motor bus companies, sham, 238

  Motor cars, 9, 33, 47, 50, 51, 75, 262, 375, 401, 402

  Motor charabancs, 164, 165, 312

  Motorists, 397

  Mount, Sermon on the, 42, 93, 442

  Mozart, W. A., 339, 414

  Multiple shops, 175, 177

  Multiplication table, the, 420, 424

  Municipal banks on the Birmingham model, 272

  Municipal building always insolvent, 273

  Municipal committees, 352

  Municipal debt, 117

  Municipal electric lighting, 121

  Municipal exploitation, 113

  Municipal service, 384

  Municipal trading, 106, 121

  Municipalization, 390

  Muscovite Marxist Church, the, 446

  Museum, the British, 16

  Music, school-taught, 414

  Mussolini, Benito, 251, 318, 337, 345, 348, 371, 372, 379, 380

  Nakedness, 95

  Napoleon, 54, 69, 251, 318, 327, 328, 335, 339, 379, 380

  Napoleon III, 345, 379

  National Debt, the, 114, 115, 117, 295, 402;
    cancellation of, 291;
    increase of, 289

  National Debt redemption levies, 294-7

  National electrification scheme, 386

  National factories, 116

  National Gallery, the, 16, 17, 280

  National housekeeping, 49, 285

  National Union of Railway Workers, 356

  Nationalists, 94

  Nationalization, 298, 383, 384, 390;
    of banking, 35, 140, 181, 264-8, 386;
    must be prepared and compensated, 283;
    theoretically sound, 274;
    of land, 112;
    examples of, 105-11

  Nationalized banks, 271

  Nations, League of, 156, 157;
    the present, 450

  Natural limit to liberty, 319-30

  Natural Selectionists, Darwinian, 436

  Nature, 3, 9, 21, 55, 59, 67, 80, 84, 90, 91, 164, 176, 311, 320,
          321, 322, 402;
    cruelty of, 437;
    hand of, 334;
    human, 155, 160;
    the supreme tyrant, 319;
    tyranny of, 80-83;
    voice of, 54

  Navigators, 422

  Navvies, 80, 87, 283, 400, 401

  Navy captains, 70, 340

  Need for play, the, 164

  Needle manufacturers, 258

  Negro slavery, 75, 188

  Nell Gwynne, 203

  Nelson, Horatio, 337, 339

  Neuters, 176

  Neva, the, 282

  New Capitalist method, the, 388

  New churches and secular governments, 434

  New companies, insecurity of, 238

  New pauperism, 444

  New River Water Company, 403

  New Testament, the, 28, 361, 443

  New York, 243, 309

  Newspaper Articles, 65

  Newspapers, 3, 11, 14, 49, 64, 71, 100, 105, 144, 164, 203, 206, 208,
              218, 310, 316, 373, 415, 421, 443, 446;
    respectable English, 407

  Newton, Isaac, 170, 343, 414, 428

  Nicene Creed, the, 426

  Night cafés, 191

  Night clubs, 50

  Nightingale, Florence, 61, 398

  Nightingales, two-headed, 332

  Nineteenth century revolution of 1832, the, 370

  Nineveh, 372

  Nitrogen, supply of, 86

  Nobel, Alfred, 332

  Noblemen, old-fashioned, 309

  Non-commissioned officers, 74

  Nonconformist Protestant ratepayers, 360

  Nonconformists, 425;
    persecution of, 215

  Nonconformity, 425

  Northern Europe, 431

  Novels, 164, 421

  Nuns, 404, 407;
    enclosed, 4

  Nurses, 3, 74, 327, 428

  Nursing, 74, 326


  Ocean cables, 378

  Officers, 68, 357;
    military, 74, 404;
    non-commissioned, 74

  Oil harvests, 240

  Oil shops, 177

  Old age pensions, 8, 119, 383

  Old horses, 188

  Old-fashioned parents, 175

  Oligarchs, patrician, 348

  Oligarchy, 30-35

  Oliver Twist, 192, 413

  Olivier, Sidney (Lord), 468

  Opera, the, 46

  Opera singers, 22, 35

  Operators of calculating machines, 334

  Opium war, the, 142

  Opportunists, 345;
    cautious, 346

  Orators, political, 321

  Order of production, 50

  Organizers, 310, 337, 342

  Outrages, Trade Union, 207

  Overcrowding, 92, 137

  Overpopulation, artificial, 90

  Overwork, 83

  Owen, Robert, 94, 370

  Oxford University, 169, 372, 418, 429


  Pacific, the, 235

  Pacifism, 449

  Painlevé, Paul, 351

  Painters, 169, 170, 224, 332, 356

  Palaces, 378

  Palm Beach, 148

  Pampering, 52

  _Panem et circenses_, 96

  Pantheists, 436

  Paper money, 130, 260

  Papers, the, 156, 203, 267, 312, 399;
    capitalist and anti-capitalist, 312;
    capitalist, 116, 342;
    the Sunday, 385;
    the daily, 449;
    illustrated, 66

  Paraclete, the, 441

  Parasitic paradises, 148

  Parasitic proletariat, revolt of the, 277-9

  Parasitism, 83, 84-5

  Parcel Post, C.O.D. development of, 271

  Parentage, compulsory, 411;
    State endowment of, 411

  Parents, the author’s, 309;
    and children, 134, 193, 364, 366, 408;
    old-fashioned, 175;
    old Roman rights of, 412;
    natural and adoptive, 412;
    proletarian, 392

  Paris, 309

  Paris Commune of 1871, the, 369

  Parish Councils, 32

  Parish meetings, 351

  Park Lane, 276

  Parks, 118, 131, 148, 166, 400

  Parliament, 49, 57, 58, 60-61, 64, 213, 214, 216, 217;
    in Gladstone’s time, 285;
    and the Churches, 435

  Parliamentary Labor Party, the, 447

  Parliamentary struggle, the, 218

  Parlormaids, 75, 182, 403

  Parsons, 63

  Partnerships, 177, 178

  Party candidates, 350

  Party discipline, less rigorous now, 353

  Party newspapers, 310

  Party politics, 343-8, 420

  Party System, the, 348-54

  Party Whips, 349

  Pasteur, Louis, 433

  Patents, 403

  Patriotism, 155

  Paul, Saint, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 89, 459

  Pauperization, national, 145

  Pawnbrokers, 234, 250

  _Pax Americana_, the, 450

  Payment of M.P.’s, 60

  Pearls, 51, 138, 202;
    imitation, 50

  Peasant proprietors, French, 374

  Peasant proprietorship, 168

  Peerages, 178

  Peers, Irish, 184

  Pence, Peter’s, 360

  Penn, William, 54

  Penny postage, 272

  Penny transport, 272

  Pensions, old age, 2, 8, 119, 383;
    widows’, 2, 8, 201

  Penzance, 272

  Persecution of Russians in America, 369

  Personal liberty, the pet topic of the leisured class, 320

  Personal property, 102

  Personal righteousness, 95-9

  Personal talent, possessors of, 331

  Peru, 235

  Pessimism, 91;
    a by-product of capitalism, 155

  Pet dogs, 18, 51, 75

  Peter, Saint, 12

  Peter the Great, 282

  Peterborough, the Bishop of, 142

  Petrograd, 282

  Philanthropy, 95

  Philosophers, 81, 172, 341

  Philosophy, 30, 48

  Phosphorus poisoning, 199

  Physicians, 74, 419

  Physicists, 327, 341

  Physics, 423

  Pickpockets, 401

  Picture galleries, 309

  Picture gallery attendants, 79

  Piece work, 79

  Piece work wages, 211

  Piece worker, the, 323

  Piers, 135

  Pin machines, 333

  Pin makers, 333

  Pin money, 161

  Pin-making, 21

  Pinero, Sir Arthur, 202

  Pins, manufacture of, 161

  Pirate crews, 29, 335

  Pirates, 457

  Pisteurs. _See_ Dancing partners

  Pitt, William, 378

  Plagues, 42, 297

  Plato, 94, 454

  Platonic rule, the, 338

  Play, need for, 164

  Playing, 39

  Plays, 164

  Pleasures, manufactured, 46

  Plumbers, 356, 399

  Plutocracy, 166, 431

  Poincaré, Raymond, 351

  Poison gas, 148, 175

  Poison gas shells, 380

  Police, the, 57, 147, 385, 391, 393, 395, 396, 400, 405, 412, 429

  Police constables, 38

  Police officers, 380, 421

  Policemen, 12, 23, 37, 69, 154, 384

  Policewomen, 404

  Political disciplinarians, 318

  Political economy, 48, 63, 190;
    bad, 50-51

  Polygamy, 406, 407, 410, 411;
    Solomonic, 432

  Polytechnics, 182

  Pooh-Bah, 419

  Poor, legalized robbery of the, 395

  Poor Law, the, 120;
    Government administration of, 330

  Poor Law Guardians, 32, 44, 192, 195, 303, 413

  Poor Law officers, 394, 395

  Poor Law relief, 195

  Poor relations, 174

  Poor white trash, 322

  Pope, the, 37, 407, 442

  Popes, 348, 431, 442

  Poplar, 302

  Poplarism, 305

  Popular inventions, 320

  Popularity of lavish expenditure, 66

  Population, checks on, 86;
    decrease in France and increase in Germany, 88;
    importance of rate of increase, 88

  Population question, the, 83-92, 410

  Pork packers, 37

  Port Sunlight, 307, 375

  Porters, 21;
    ambulance, 52;
    railway, 219, 421

  Portsmouth, 154, 336

  Positive reasons for equality, 68-70

  Positivist societies, 435

  Post Office, the, 106-7, 121, 264, 272, 275

  Post Office Savings Bank, 128, 129

  Post offices and savings banks, national, 267

  Postal conventions, 157

  Postal system, the, 391

  Postmasters, 70

  Postmaster-General, the, 121, 264, 273, 274, 275

  Postmen, 23, 69, 70, 219

  Postmistresses, 421

  Potter, Beatrice, 220. _See_ Webb, Beatrice

  Poverty, 42-5, 72, 395;
    abolition of, 398;
    as a punishment, 43;
    Franciscan, 41;
    infectious, 42;
    and pestilence, 42;
    and progress, 217

  Powers, the leading military, 450

  Practical business men, 346

  Prayer Book, revision of the, 426

  Preachers, 72, 341, 410

  Precedence, 37

  Pregnancy, 326

  Prejudice and common sense, 426

  Preliminaries to nationalization, 274-6

  Preparatory schools, 417

  Presence, the Real, 426

  Presidents, American, 328

  Presidents and patriarchs, 348

  Press, the, 64. _See_ Newspapers

  Press, Church, and school, 63-5

  Prices, 260

  Prices and profits, 135

  Priests, 407, 429, 435, 436;
    power of, 430

  Prima donnas, 332

  Prime Minister, the average Capitalist, 308

  Prime Ministers, 35, 328;
    Jewish and Gentile, 435

  Primo di Rivera, General, 318, 345, 380

  Primogeniture, 31, 168

  Prince Rupert’s Drop, 160

  Prince of Wales, the, 118

  Princes, merchant, 178

  Prisons, 120, 243, 395

  Private enterprise, 116, 131-3, 275;
    proper business of, 389;
    and public utility, 300

  Private property, 100, 102

  Privates, 357

  Prize-fighters, 28, 29

  Prize-fights, 28, 96

  Proclamations, royal or dictatorial, 384

  Professional billiard players, 397

  Professional classes, the, 169

  Professional fees, 68

  Professional politicians, 203

  Professions open to women, 174

  Professors, university, 169

  Profiteers, 116, 390

  Profits, 182;
    not a measure of utility, 137;
    and prices, 135

  _Progress and Poverty_, Henry George’s, 217, 468

  Prohibition, 120, 142, 396, 397

  Proletarian dictators, 379

  Proletarian leader, the typical, 452

  Proletarian papers, the, 342

  Proletarian parents, 392

  Proletarian resistance to Capitalism, 204

  Proletarian voters, 217

  Proletarianism, 100

  Proletarians, 205, 248, 290, 294, 302, 370

  Proletariat, the, 183-6, 223, 294, 296, 302, 307, 355, 359, 441,
                    443, 445, 448;
    parasitic and Socialist, 377;
    plunder of, 278;
    and proprietariat, 223

  Promiscuity, social, 418, 419

  Promised Land, the, 392, 410

  Promoters, 179

  Promotion, 74

  Property, literary, 104;
    personal, 102;
    private, 100;
    real, 102;
    secures maximum of leisure to owners, 323

  Property owners, 163, 248

  Proportional Representation, 454

  Proprietary Trade Unionism, 447

  Prostitutes, 195, 395

  Prostitution, 22, 43, 199;
    male, 203

  Protection, 150

  Protectionists from the Midlands, 346

  Protestants, 68, 93, 360, 368, 369, 445

  Proudhon, Joseph, 466

  Pseudo-Socialism, 298

  Psycho-analysis, the morbidities of, 420

  Psychology, 365

  Public departments, 376

  Public Health Committees, 352

  Public houses, 177

  Public libraries, 375

  Public opinion, 65, 347

  Public schools, 144, 169, 368, 417, 423, 428

  Public trustee, 88

  Public works, 145, 281, 282

  _Punch_, 330

  Punjab, the, 355

  Purchasing power, transfer of from the rich to the Government, 278

  Purdah, women in, 355

  “Pussyfoot” Johnson, 396


  Quack cures, 63;
    remedies, 171

  Quaker meetings, 329;
    schools, 360

  Quakers, the, 190, 435, 444

  Quarrelling, domestic, 77, 82

  Quartermaster-sergeants, 74

  Queen, the, 385


  Racehorse trainers, 146

  Racing stables, 138

  Radicals, 94, 444

  Radio, 33

  Radium, the cost of, 87

  Ragpickers, 35, 76, 324, 404

  Raid on Russian Arcos Officers, the, 223

  Railroadmaster-General, wanted a, 275

  Railway, the Great Western, 272

  Railway, the London, Midland and Scottish, 268

  Railway accidents, 65

  Railway Board, wanted a, 275

  Railway chairmen, 389

  Railway guards, 73

  Railway porters, 219, 421

  Railway signalmen, 315

  Railway travelling, 65

  Railway workers, 457

  Railwaymen, 446

  Railways, 33, 133, 150, 231, 278, 313, 375, 383, 389, 401, 402;
    State, 275

  Rank, military, 74

  “Rat-houses” (non-union), 306

  Rate collectors, 14

  Ratepayers, 303;
    exploited by workers, 302

  Rates, 117-22;
    and taxes, 17, 111

  Reactionaries, 444

  Real property, 102

  Reason, goddess of, 365

  Recognition of Trade Unions, 210

  Red Cross, the, 156

  Red flag, the, 140, 376

  Red Indian morals, 62

  Red Russian scare, the, 222

  Redistribution of income, 114

  Reform Bill of 1832, the, 214, 215, 216, 378, 452

  Reformation, the, 431, 461

  Reforms, disguised, 299;
    popular, 299

  Registrar, the civil, 436

  Registrar-General, the, 303

  Relations, poor, 174

  Religion, 30, 48, 388;
    male and female, 440

  Religious dissensions, 359-70

  Religious instruction hour, 361

  Rent, 111, 122-6, 178, 182;
    the meaning of, 341

  Rent of ability, 331-43;
    called profit, 341

  Republic, the Communist, 374

  Republican Governments, 254

  Republicans, 75, 345, 444

  Research, scientific, 388

  Rest cures, 59

  Restaurants, 202

  Resting, 77, 82

  Restricting output, 208

  Resumption of land by the Crown, 102, 123

  Retail trade less respectable than wholesale, 184

  Retail traders, 37

  Retail trades, 177

  Revolt of the parasitic proletariat, 277-9

  Revolution, 283;
    the industrial, 137-40, 182;
    the Russian, 35, 374, 376, 407, 441

  Revolutionists, 147

  Revolutions, 63, 134, 370-79

  Rhodes, Cecil, 332, 446

  Rhodesia, 313

  Ricardo, David, 465, 467, 468

  Rich, the idle, 59-62, 145, 399;
    miseries of the, 45;
    the new, 270;
    the old, now called the New Poor, 270

  Rich women, 56, 95

  Righteousness, personal, 95

  Rioters, 395

  Riveters, 224

  Riviera, the, 202, 287

  Roads, 391;
    metalled, 401

  Roadways, 402

  Roaming, 39

  Roberts of Kandahar, 144

  Robespierre, Maximilien, 365

  Robinson Crusoe, 21, 85, 182

  Rockefeller, John Davidson, 36

  Rockefeller charities, 160

  Rogues, 300

  Roi Soleil, le, 350

  Roman Catholic schools, 360

  Roman Catholicism, 15

  Roman Catholics, 329, 360, 361, 369, 407, 431, 445

  Roman Empire, 148, 314

  Rome, 314, 368;
    ancient, 96, 147, 148;
    Church of, 431, 433, 434, 442

  Roulette table, the, 239, 243

  Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 170

  Routine, 181

  Routine management, 184

  Routine work, 327

  Royal Academy of Arts, the, 170

  Royal Family, the, 68, 426

  Rubber harvests, 240

  Ruined shopkeepers, 177

  Ruins of empires, 146

  Runaway car of Capitalism, the, 314-19

  Ruskin, John, 5, 61, 162, 459, 466, 467;
    his Ethics of the Dust, 425, 469;
    Fors Clavigera, 469

  Russia, 34, 35, 66, 153, 287, 318, 373, 374, 375, 401, 406, 409,
          439, 442, 453, 459;
    dictatorship in, 347

  Russian Archbishop, the, 439

  Russian Capitalist civilization, 376

  Russian Communist, the, 369

  Russian Government, the, 255, 256, 368, 369, 376, 439

  Russian International Church, the, 442

  Russian landlords, 270

  Russian peasants, 374, 375;
    people, 376, 383

  Russian Revolution, the, 35, 374, 376, 407, 441

  Russian Revolutionaries, 14

  Russian Soviet, the, 284, 287, 376, 383, 390, 406, 407, 439, 442

  Russian State, the, 375

  Russian subscription to Strike funds, 223

  Russian word Bolshevik, the, 444

  Russians, the, 100, 257


  Sables, 341

  Sadists, 415, 416

  Safety valves, 279-84

  Sailors, 21, 68, 77, 310

  Saint Augustine, 92, 93, 441

  Saint Francis, 54, 219

  Saint Helena, the island of, 328

  Saint Joan, 54

  Saint Paul, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 89, 459

  Saint Peter, 12

  Saint Simon, the speculations of, 94

  Saints, 172, 341

  Salt Lake City, the Latter Day Saints of, 407

  Samaritans, Good, 96

  San Francisco, 106

  Sanitary inspectors, public, 426

  Sapphira, 12

  Saving, the fallacy of, 6-7, 129

  Savings banks, 128, 267, 444

  Savings certificates, 128, 129, 444

  Savior, the, 5, 463

  Saviors, 96

  Sawgrinders, 207

  Sawyers, 21

  Scabs, 207

  Scarecrows, boy, 23

  Scavengers, 35, 327, 342

  Scent, 50

  _Schadenfreude_, 66

  Schiller, 346

  Scholarships, 67, 173, 182

  School, Church, and Press, 63-5

  School attendance, compulsory, 349

  School attendance visitors, 394, 395, 412

  School teaching, 65

  Schoolchildren, 368

  Schoolmasters, 63, 169

  Schoolmistresses, 3, 27, 36, 129, 335

  Schools, 31, 33, 49, 63, 64, 145, 173, 324, 420;
    like Bastilles, 413;
    like prisons or child-farms, 413;
    public, 144, 169, 368, 417, 423, 428;
    village, 63, 399;
    secondary, 166, 169;
    State, 360;
    elementary, 169, 182;
    preparatory, 417;
    infant, 428

  Science, 30, 31, 39, 48, 157, 420, 461;
    and State compulsion, 436;
    power of, 437;
    professors of, 436

  Scientific management, 170, 191

  Scotland, 32, 51, 124, 144, 159, 431;
    shooting lodges in, 251

  Scotland Yard, 274

  Scriveners, 225, 328

  Sculleries, 76

  Scullerymaids, 35, 324

  Sculptors, 169

  Sea captains, 422

  Second-rate work, 73, 398

  Secondary schools, 166, 169

  Secretaries of State, 352

  Self-government in Egypt, 159

  Selfridge’s, 177

  Selkirk, Alexander, 328

  Sempstresses, 22, 258

  Sending capital out of the country, 140-44

  Sentries, 426

  Separatist sects, 329, 345

  Serajevo murder, the, 160

  Serbia, 153, 160

  Serfdom, 10

  Serfs, 341

  Sergeants, 335, 357

  Sermon on the Mount, the, 42, 93, 442

  Servants, 23, 42, 47, 48, 118-19, 149, 204, 210, 370, 372, 458;
    domestic, 65, 73, 75, 78, 83-4, 95, 323, 324

  Service, domestic, 24, 73, 175, 215, 324

  Service, military, 31, 50, 166, 324, 449;
    compulsory, 411, 428;
    righteousness of, 357

  Service flats, 61

  Services, international and national, 378

  Seven ways of distribution, 19

  Seventeenth-century revolutions, 370

  Severn, the, 282

  Sewermen, 76

  Sex, 89

  Sextons, 93

  Shaftesbury, Lord, 189, 190, 215

  Shakespear, William, 42, 403, 428, 458

  Sham Socialism, 299-308

  Shareholders, 235

  Shares, buying and selling, 240, 241;
    imaginary, 241;
    preference and ordinary, 235

  Shaw, Bernard, 97, 470

  Sheep runs, 124

  Sheffield, 146, 207

  Sheffield sawgrinders, 207

  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5, 317, 373, 424, 428

  Shifting centres of empires, 152

  Ship captains, 37

  Shipyards, 378

  Shoes, high-heeled, 50, 406

  Shooting boxes, 51

  Shop assistants, 78, 145, 163, 177, 334, 397, 446

  Shop Hours Act, 191

  Shopkeepers, 29, 176, 334, 387, 421

  Shopkeeping, 175

  Shopmen, 203

  Shopping, 105-11, 175

  Shops, bucket, 242;
    multiple, 175, 177

  Shorthand typists, 334

  Showrooms, 202

  Siamese twins, 331

  Silk stockings, 18, 99

  Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, Bunyan’s, 318

  Singers, two-headed, 331

  Single taxers, 126, 127

  Sirdar, the, 222

  Sisters, the Tudor, 368

  Skyscrapers, 139

  Slaters, 356

  Slave trade, the, 143

  Slavedrivers, 338

  Slavery, 10, 64

  Slogan, Marx’s, 183, 184

  Sloggers, 208

  Slumps, 206, 282

  Slum towns, demolition of, 281

  Slum userers, 135

  Slums, 34, 118, 126, 137, 145, 148, 149, 215, 243, 281, 301, 307,
         378, 399

  Smallpox epidemics, 189

  Smith, Adam, 161, 162, 459

  Smith, Joseph, 410, 411, 431, 432, 441

  Smithies, village, 386

  Smoke, 76

  Smoke abatement, 145

  Smuggling, 142;
    of drugs, 396

  Snobbery, 47, 175, 184

  Snowball letters, 137

  Soap kings, 170

  Social changes, 39

  Social creed, the, 427

  Socialism, 10;
    alarmist idea of, 299;
    and children, 412-29;
    and liberty, 393-406;
    and marriage, 406-12;
    and superior brains, 331;
    and the Churches, 429-43;
    as a religion, 441
    books on, 1;
    Catholic rather than democratic, 348;
    constitutional, 94
    constructive political machinery of, 298;
    diagnostic of, 92-4;
    dread of, 393;
    emotional, 189;
    establishment of, 344;
    fancy, 94;
    first and last commandment of, 97;
    genuine and sham, 308;
    idealist, 219;
    matter of law, not personal righteousness, 98;
    new, 392;
    not charity, 95-6;
    object of, 297;
    secular, 443;
    series of Parliamentary measures, 220;
    unskilled, 283;
    utopian and theocratic, 94

  Socialist societies, 186, 217, 218

  Socialist State and the child, the, 424

  Socialists, 220, 444, 446;
    a mixed lot, 93;
    and Trade Unionists, Cabinet of, 221;
    deprecate bloodshed, 377;
    joining the, 92;
    who are not Socialists, 345

  Society of Friends, the, 435

  S.P.C.C., the, 362;
    records of, 412

  Sociologists, 341

  Socrates, 54, 453

  Soldiering, not advisable for women, 175

  Soldiers, 23, 68, 69, 74, 88, 116, 203, 289, 310, 324, 338, 357,
            390, 395, 398, 399, 405, 411, 433, 436, 446, 449, 450;
    demobilized, 147

  Soldiers’ mothers, 155, 156

  Soldiers’ wives, 156

  Solent, the, 106

  Solicitors, 46, 131, 166, 179, 250, 357, 458, 459, 461

  Solomon, 346

  Solomonic polygamy, 432

  Solon, 461

  _Sonata, the Pathetic_, 414

  _Song of the Shirt_, 201, 309

  Soot, 76

  _Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The_, 157-61

  Sorceresses, 429

  Soul, the, 363, 364

  South Africa, 399

  South African War, the, 347

  South America, 34, 144, 377, 437

  South American Revolutions, 370

  South Carolina, the State of, 189, 407

  South of England, the, 372

  South Sea Islands, 9, 319

  Southampton, 106

  Soviet, the Russian, 284, 287, 376, 383, 390, 406, 407, 439, 442

  Soviet legislators, the, 406

  Soviets, 254, 315, 348

  Spain, 149, 152, 318, 371, 372, 430, 453;
    dictatorship in, 347

  Spare food, 131, 132, 133

  Spare money. _See_ Capital, and Capitalism

  Spartacus, 369

  Spartan routine of the old rich, 60

  Speculation, 236, 239-43

  Speech, 172, 173

  Spencer, Herbert, 83, 335

  Spencer, Robert, 350. _See_ Sunderland, Earl of

  Spinoza, 169

  Sport, 31, 82

  Sports, 59, 77

  Squeers, Mr, 429

  Stage, the, 202, 205

  Standard wages, 68

  Star Chamber, the, 431, 434

  Stars and Stripes, the, 159

  Starvation wages, 198

  State Capitalism, 298

  State interference, 103;
    with Church teaching, 437, 438

  State railways, 275

  State schools, 360

  Statesmen, 190

  Stationmasters, 421

  Steamships, 133, 378

  Steel smelters, 79, 146, 205

  Stenographers. _See_ Typists

  Stewardesses, 145

  Stock Exchange, the, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 248, 251, 277

  Stockbreeding, 53

  Stockbrokers, 46, 55, 131, 236, 237, 250

  Stockjobbers, 236, 237

  Stonehenge, 439

  Strawberries, January, 50

  Strike, the General, 448, 449, 450

  Strikes, 68, 206, 302, 303, 355, 356;
    Socialist remedies for, 356

  Strindberg, August, 470

  Struggle between Capitalist and Labor Parties in Parliament, 286

  Stupid women, 23

  Subalterns, 37

  Subsidies, exploitations of the taxpayer by bankrupt Capitalism, 305

  Subsidies and doles demoralizing, 303, 304

  Subsidized private enterprise, 386-91

  Subsistence wage, 195

  Sudan, the, 152

  Suez Canal, the, 152, 153, 285

  Suffragettes, 318, 321

  Suffragists, 318

  Summer schools, 419

  Sunday clothes, 156

  Sunday golf, 329

  Sunday Observance Acts, 322

  Sunday school teachers, 369

  Sunderland, the Earl of, 350, 352

  Supernationalism, 450

  Supertax, 114, 284

  Supply and demand, 248

  Surgeons, 22, 48, 74, 170, 342, 422, 432

  Surgical baronets, 332

  Surveyors, 422

  Suttee, 427

  Sweating, 190

  Sweating of one industry by another, 197

  Sweden, 448

  Swift, Dean, 62, 458

  Swindlers, 395

  Switzerland, 431

  Syndicalism, 447

  Syndicalists, 94, 444


  Tailors, 357

  Talent, exploitation of, 333

  Tanners, 356

  Tax collectors, 224, 227, 229, 250, 277

  Tax on credit, resultant chaos from, 250

  Taxation, 134;
    of unearned incomes, 112;
    of capital as a means of nationalizing without compensating, 277

  Taxes, 111-17

  Tea, 157

  Teachers, 35, 36, 72, 334, 341, 361, 412, 416, 420, 421, 428, 457;
    State, 424

  Teaching, 415, 424;
    coercive, 414;
    corrupt, 64

  Teetotallers, 15, 68, 93, 397

  Telegrams, 136

  Telegraph rates, 136

  Telephone messages, 136

  Telephone operators, 76

  Telephone and telegraph services, III, 121

  Telephones, 33, 47, 105, 121, 312, 345

  Telephoning, 175

  Ten Commandments, the, 97, 308, 384

  Tenements, 397

  Thackeray, William Makepeace, 469

  Theatre, the art of the, 428

  Theatres, 428

  Theocracy, 431, 435, 443

  Theosophist schools, 360

  Thibet, 310

  Thieves, 395

  Third-class travel, 419

  Thirty-nine Articles, the, 425, 441, 445

  Thompson, Big Bill, 159

  Three R’s, the, 361, 421

  Thrift, 128

  Thucydides, 297

  Thugs, the, 440

  Thurso, 272

  Tides, the, 76

  Tied houses, 177

  Time wages, 22, 211

  Tinville, Fouquier, 378

  Titles, 74

  Toasters, electric, 139

  Tobacconists, 177

  Tokio, 156

  Toll bridges, 262

  Tolstoy, Leo, 335, 468

  Tono-Bungay, 171

  Toots, Mr, 414

  Tories, 103, 350, 444, 446;
    and Whigs, 218

  Torquemada, Thomas de, 369, 430

  Tourists, American, 314

  Tower of Babel, the, 445

  Trade, the. _See_ Drink

  Trade Union Capitalism, 204-13

  Trade Union secretaries, 451

  Trade Unionism, 186, 387, 448, 462;
    weakness of, 213;
    aristocracy of, 308;
    first really scientific history of, 220;
    a contradiction of Socialism, 355

  Trade Unionist Government, 224

  Trade Unionists, 446;
    number of, 209;
    and Socialists, Cabinet of, 221

  Trade Unions, 40, 204, 223, 305, 346, 355, 358, 375, 387, 462;
    Capitalist, 225

  Trades Facilities Acts, 313

  Tradesmen, 46, 70, 370, 372, 457, 458

  Trading stations, 151

  Trains, 401

  Tramps, 44, 48, 98, 195, 219, 322, 395

  Tramways, 402;
    horse, 188

  Transport services, 383

  Transport Workers’ Union, 356

  Trappists, 62

  Treasuries, 353

  Treasury, the, 274, 280, 281, 282, 305, 390

  Treasury notes, 251, 252, 254, 256, 257, 258, 265

  Treaties, 157

  Tripoli, 152

  Trollope, Anthony, 469

  Troops, 370

  Trotsky, Leo, 376

  Trustee, the Public, 88

  Trusts, 109, 178, 179, 209, 386

  Tsar, the, 373, 374, 439

  Tsardom, the, 376;
    collapse of, 257

  Tsars, marriage under the, 406

  Tunisia, 152

  Turgot, 459

  Turkey, 154

  Turnpike roads, 131-2, 262

  Turnpikes, 14

  Twain, Mark, 392

  Twist, Oliver, 192, 413

  Two-headed nightingales, 332

  Typhus epidemics, 189

  Typists, 74, 176, 182, 328, 397

  Tyranny, of nature, 80-83;
    pseudo-scientific, 398;
    social, 405

  Tyrants, 444


  Ugly children, 55

  Ulster, 159

  Uncles in Australia, 67

  Undertakers, 52

  Unearned incomes, 112

  Unemployment, 97, 144, 195

  Unemployment insurance, 205

  Unemployment insurance officers, 394 395

  Unhappiness incurable by money, 41

  Union Congresses, the, 451

  Union Jack, the, 140, 159, 447

  Union of Mathematical Instrument Makers, 417

  Union of Soviet Republics, 369

  Unionists, the, 371

  Unitarian schools, 360

  United States, the, 292, 431, 432. _See_ America

  United States Government, the, 396

  Universities, the, 31, 145, 174, 182, 309, 417,
                     428. _See_ Oxford and Cambridge

  University extension lectures, 456

  University professors, 169;
    manners, 418;
    snobs, 418;
    students, 417

  Unladylike activities, 174

  Unmarried daughter and younger son class, the genteel disendowed, 415

  Unmarried daughters, 176

  Unpaid magistrates, 166

  Unproductive labor, 85

  Unsuitable marriages, 55

  Unwillingness to be governed, our, 318

  Upholsterers, 21

  Urdu, 355

  Utopias, 140, 453


  Vaccination, compulsory, 398

  Vaccination officers, 394

  Vaccinia, generalized, 398

  Vacuum cleaners, 39, 386

  Valets, 339, 357

  Value of Greek, 28;
    of men and women, 194;
    of souls, 29

  Vegetarianism, 438

  Venereal disease, 43, 54, 200

  Vermin, 75

  Vesuvius, 302

  Victoria, Queen, 2, 47, 71, 180, 215, 221, 304, 428

  Victorian employers, 199;
    ladies, 319;
    parents, 428;
    point of view, 287;
    women, 324

  Village blacksmiths, 168;
    carpenters, 167;
    schools, 63, 399

  Villagers, 421

  Villages, 167;
    American, 217

  Virgil, 414

  Virtue, female, 199

  Vivisectors, 460

  Voice of Nature, the, 54

  Voluntary work, 82

  Volunteer armies, 428

  Voltaire, 364, 365, 366, 431, 454

  Voter, the female, 453

  Votes for everybody, 164

  Votes for women, 321, 452, 454


  Wage workers, 163, 209, 213, 219, 220, 221, 281, 285

  Wages, 178, 182;
    standard, 68;
    of sin, 200;
    wives’, 197;
    time and piecework, 211

  Wages Boards, 224

  Wagner, Richard, 414

  Waiters, 149

  Waitresses, 145, 403, 448

  Wall Street, 243

  Wallas, Graham, 468

  War, 270, 289;
    modern, 175;
    the late (1914-1918), 147, 153, 160, 230, 251, 268, 287, 293,
                          304, 347, 369, 376, 388, 390, 402, 450;
    the South African, 347;
    General Strike against, 449, 450

  War Debt, 295;
    to America, 296;
    domestic, 296

  War Loan, 117, 290, 291, 294, 295

  War Loan interest, 277, 296

  War Loan register, 250

  War Loan Stock, 290, 291

  War Office, the, 32, 274, 353

  War taxation, 114-15

  Wardresses, 335

  Warehousemen, 210

  Warwick, Countess of, 371

  Washerwomen, 27

  Washing, 77

  Washington, George, 54

  Waste of time, 81

  Watch committees, 274

  Water power, wasted, 144

  Water wagon, the, 397

  Watts, G. F., 233

  Weary Willies, 72, 440

  Weavers, 52, 138, 212

  Weaving mills, 334

  Weaving sheds, 80, 165

  Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 94, 354, 467, 468, 469;
    Sidney, 220, 377;
    Beatrice, 467

  Wedding presents, 18

  Weeding the world, 82

  Week ends, 77

  Wellington, the Duke of, 317, 419;
    his horse, 188

  Wells, H. G., 171, 469

  Wembley, 28

  Wesley, John, 54

  Western women, extravagances of, 427

  West Indian plantations, 215

  Westminster, 219, 354

  Westminster Abbey, 329

  Westminster Confession, the, 425

  What we should buy first, 49-52, 137, 141

  Whigs, the, 350;
    and Tories, 218

  Whips, the, 350, 353

  Whist drives, 165

  Whiteley’s, 177

  Wholesale trade formerly more respectable than retail, 37, 184

  Wholesalers, 334

  Why confiscation has succeeded hitherto, 284-8

  Widows’ pensions, 2, 8, 201

  Wife and mother, the occupation of, 321

  Wight, Isle of, 106

  William the Conqueror, 124

  William III, King, 321, 350, 352, 426

  William IV, King, 215

  Windfalls, 67

  Wireless concerts, 165, 312

  Wireless sets, 39

  Witchcraft, 367

  Wives and mothers, 25, 176, 321

  Wives’ wages, 197

  Woman, 361;
    The Scarlet, 360

  Woman question, the, 176

  Woman’s natural monopoly, 176

  Women, changeable, 315;
    clever, 23;
    stupid, 23;
    married, 77;
    rich, 56, 95;
    in the labor market, 196-204

  Woodcutters, 87

  Woodman, 21, 65

  Woolbrokers, 334

  Woolwich Arsenal, 116

  Work, an author’s, 327;
    craze for, 83;
    creative, 327;
    routine, 327;
    first-rate, 74, 398;
    second-rate, 73, 398

  Workers, 289, 387;
    equal leisure for, 328;
    open-air, 401;
    scientific, 386;
    snobbery among, 400

  Workhouse, the, 44, 119, 456;
    the general, 195

  Workmen, 388

  World War, 457

  Wrecking, 151


  Yahoos, 458

  Younger son and unmarried daughter class, 415


  Zanzibar, 314




  Transcriber's Notes:

  Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

  Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

  Perceived typographical errors have been changed.





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