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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75859 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                     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.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75859 ***
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+      The Intelligent Woman’s Guide To Socialism and Capitalism | Project Gutenberg
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75859 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover">
+</div>
+
+<h1>
+THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE<br>
+TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM
+</h1>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig1.jpg" alt="lady">
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="sp up">
+THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE<br>
+<span class="sp1">TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM</span><br>
+BY BERNARD SHAW
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter1">
+<img src="images/fig2.jpg" alt="decoration">
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="c p2 xlarge">
+BRENTANO’S <span class="pad1">PUBLISHERS</span> NEW YORK</p>
+
+<p class="c large">1928
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="c sp med">COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY BRENTANO’S INC.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp mid p2"><i>First printing, June, 1928</i></p>
+
+<p class="c sp half p2">MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="c sp">
+TO<br>
+<br>
+MY SISTER-IN-LAW<br>
+<br>
+<span class="large">MARY STEWART CHOLMONDELY</span><br>
+<br>
+THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN TO WHOSE QUESTION<br>
+THIS BOOK IS THE BEST ANSWER I CAN MAKE<br>
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</span></p>
+
+<p class="ph2">A FOREWORD FOR AMERICAN READERS</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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 <i>is</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</span>
+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 <i>her</i> business
+of high politics.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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——!!!</p>
+
+<p class="r">G. B. S.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Conway, North Wales</span><br>
+<i>17th April 1928</i>
+</p>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</span></p>
+
+<p class="large sp lsp c">TABLE OF CONTENTS</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p class="c p2"><a href="#c1">1</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS</p>
+
+<p>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.              
+<span class="allsmcap">PAGE 1</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c2">2</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DIVIDING-UP</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c3">3</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW MUCH FOR EACH?</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c4">4</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c5">5</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">COMMUNISM</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c6">6</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">LIMITS TO COMMUNISM</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</span>
+consulting the electors, who are left to believe that Greenwich Observatories,
+National Galleries, British Museums and the like are provided
+gratuitously by Nature.          14</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c7">7</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c8">8</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES</p>
+
+<p>Apparent fairness of this plan. Two fatal objections to it: (<i>a</i>) it is
+impossible to ascertain how much each person produces even when the
+product is a material object; and (<i>b</i>) 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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c9">9</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c10">10</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB</p>
+
+<p>This plan postulates equal grabbing power as between children, old
+people, invalids, and ablebodied persons in the prime of life. That is,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xvi">[Pg xvi]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c11">11</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">OLIGARCHY</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c12">12</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xvii">[Pg xvii]</span>
+are often much poorer in money than those whom they command.
+Illustrative cases. Real authority has nothing to do with money.             35</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c13">13</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">LAISSER-FAIRE</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c14">14</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c15">15</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xviii">[Pg xviii]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c16">16</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">EUGENICS</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c17">17</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE COURTS OF LAW</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c18">18</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE IDLE RICH</p>
+
+<p>Idleness does not mean inactivity. Over-exertion and “rest cures” of
+the rich. Their dangerous and exhausting sports. The flapper dances<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xix">[Pg xix]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c19">19</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c20">20</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c21">21</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xx">[Pg xx]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c22">22</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">MERIT AND MONEY</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c23">23</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">INCENTIVE</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxi">[Pg xxi]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c24">24</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE TYRANNY OF NATURE</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c25">25</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE POPULATION QUESTION</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxii">[Pg xxii]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c26">26</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c27">27</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>Panem et circenses.</i>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c28">28</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CAPITALISM</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxiii">[Pg xxiii]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c29">29</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">YOUR SHOPPING</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c30">30</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">YOUR TAXES</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c31">31</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">YOUR RATES</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c32">32</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">YOUR RENT</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c33">33</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WHAT CAPITAL IS</p>
+
+<p>Definition of Capital. Spare money. Pathological character of Capitalist
+civilization. Wickedness of preaching thrift to the poor. Capital, being<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxiv">[Pg xxiv]</span>
+perishable, must be consumed promptly, disappearing in the process.
+Danger of Hoarding. Instability of money values. Inflation. Debasing the
+currency. Constant expenditure necessary.       127</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c34">34</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c35">35</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM</p>
+
+<p>Capital is indispensable to civilization; but its private appropriation is
+finally a hindrance to it, and perverts the order of its application. Examples:
+Distilleries <i>versus</i> 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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c36">36</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c37">37</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxv">[Pg xxv]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c38">38</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c39">39</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c40">40</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">EMPIRES IN COLLISION</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxvi">[Pg xxvi]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c41">41</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c42">42</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c43">43</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxvii">[Pg xxvii]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c44">44</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c45">45</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c46">46</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE PROLETARIAT</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c47">47</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxviii">[Pg xxviii]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c48">48</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c49">49</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">TRADE UNION CAPITALISM</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxix">[Pg xxix]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c50">50</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DIVIDE AND GOVERN</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c51">51</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DOMESTIC CAPITAL</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxx">[Pg xxx]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c52">52</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE MONEY MARKET</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c53">53</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SPECULATION</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c54">54</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">BANKING</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxi">[Pg xxxi]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c55">55</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">MONEY</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c56">56</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">NATIONALIZATION OF BANKING</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c57">57</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">COMPENSATION FOR NATIONALIZATION</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxii">[Pg xxxii]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c58">58</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">PRELIMINARIES TO NATIONALIZATION</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c59">59</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CONFISCATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c60">60</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">REVOLT OF THE PARASITIC PROLETARIAT</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c61">61</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SAFETY VALVES</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxiii">[Pg xxxiii]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c62">62</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WHY CONFISCATION HAS SUCCEEDED HITHERTO</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c63">63</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW THE WAR WAS PAID FOR</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxiv">[Pg xxxiv]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c64">64</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">NATIONAL DEBT REDEMPTION LEVIES</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c65">65</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE CONSTRUCTIVE PROBLEM SOLVED</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxv">[Pg xxxv]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c66">66</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SHAM SOCIALISM</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c67">67</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxvi">[Pg xxxvi]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c68">68</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c69">69</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY</p>
+
+<p>We are not born free: Nature is the supreme tyrant, and in our latitudes
+a hard taskmaster. Commercial progress has been at root nothing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxvii">[Pg xxxvii]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c70">70</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">RENT OF ABILITY</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxviii">[Pg xxxviii]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c71">71</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">PARTY POLITICS</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c72">72</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE PARTY SYSTEM</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xxxix">[Pg xxxix]</span>
+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 <i>versus</i> 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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c73">73</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>versus</i> 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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c74">74</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xl">[Pg xl]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c75">75</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">REVOLUTIONS</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>mot</i> 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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xli">[Pg xli]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c76">76</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c77">77</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c78">78</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?</p>
+
+<p>If it takes too long a revolutionary explosion may wreck civilization.
+Equality of income can be attained and maintained only in a settled and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xlii">[Pg xlii]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c79">79</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c80">80</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xliii">[Pg xliii]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c81">81</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xliv">[Pg xliv]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c82">82</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>versus</i> 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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c83">83</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CURRENT CONFUSIONS</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xlv">[Pg xlv]</span>
+general misuse of nomenclature. Politicians misname themselves as well
+as oneanother. Self-contradictory names such as Communist-Anarchist.
+Real distinctions. Direct Action <i>versus</i> 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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c p1"><a href="#c84">84</a></p>
+
+<p class="c less sp">PERORATION</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xlvi">[Pg xlvi]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<p class="c less sp p1"><a href="#c85">APPENDIX</a></p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p><a href="#c86"><span class="smcap">Index</span></a>      <span class="pad2">471</span></p>
+</div>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p>
+
+<p class="c sp" id="c1">THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE TO<br>
+SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM</p>
+</div>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">1</h2>
+
+
+<p class="c less sp">A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>T 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is important that you should have opinions of your own on
+this subject. Never forget that the old law of the natural philosophers,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c2">2</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DIVIDING-UP</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">E</span>VERYBODY 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c3">3</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW MUCH FOR EACH?</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c4">4</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span>EFORE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c5">5</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">COMMUNISM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>F 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, are some plans that have been tried or proposed.</p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c6">6</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">LIMITS TO COMMUNISM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>OULD 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>You now see that the great dividing-up of things that has to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c7">7</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c8">8</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c9">9</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Well, think it out. The clergyman has had a college education;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c10">10</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c11">11</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">OLIGARCHY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
+by her, and revile her as a fugitive and an Absentee.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c12">12</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">N</span>OW 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When we speak of the power of the rich, we are speaking of a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c13">13</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">LAISSER-FAIRE</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>ND now, what about leaving things just as they are?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
+backers who naturally would like to be allowed to make money as
+they please without regard to the interests of the public.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c14">14</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>E 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>
+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</p>
+
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Then happy low, lie down:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+compel evildoers of any other sort; but do not let them, as poor
+people, make everyone else suffer for their shortcomings.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c15">15</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>O 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now the first thing a housekeeper has to settle is what things are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now this is shockingly bad political economy. When thoughtless<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c16">16</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">EUGENICS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>
+but the man she can get; and he is not often the same man.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c17">17</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE COURTS OF LAW</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>HEN 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c18">18</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE IDLE RICH</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">D</span>O 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But as the work of government must be done, they must do it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c19">19</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">J</span>UST 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c20">20</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Schadenfreude</i>
+(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.</p>
+
+<p>Another thing that makes us cling to this lottery with huge
+money prizes is the dream that we may become rich by some<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c21">21</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span>O 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c22">22</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">MERIT AND MONEY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HAT 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c23">23</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">INCENTIVE</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>HEN 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The first is that unless a woman were allowed to get more money
+than another she would have no incentive to work harder.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
+a servant is discharged as unemployable. And the slacker neither
+accepts lower wages nor can be cured by higher.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
+that they are not in the highest degree honorable, nor do the most
+fastidiously refined women shirk their turn when it comes.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c24">24</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE TYRANNY OF NATURE</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c25">25</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE POPULATION QUESTION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is, of course, that the nine servants are attending
+mostly to one another and not to their employers. If you must<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>
+in the cases in which he has to supply them at his own cost.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
+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?”</p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>
+law of Nature instead of by an artificial and disastrous
+misdistribution of the national income which we can remedy.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c26">26</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>E 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.</p>
+
+<p>“And if I cannot,” you will say, “I suppose you will tell me I
+must join the Socialists!”</p>
+
+<p>Dear lady: have you ever read St Augustine? If you have, you
+will remember that he had to admit that the early Christians were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c27">27</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>ND 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 (<i>panem et circenses</i>); 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>
+out of all our pockets) and would stop it tomorrow if we dared.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c28">28</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CAPITALISM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">N</span>OBODY 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>
+say that the sooner private property is done away with the better.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>So now let us come down to tin tacks.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c29">29</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">YOUR SHOPPING</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>SK yourself this question: “Where does unequal distribution
+of the national income hit me in my everyday life?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c30">30</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">YOUR TAXES</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span>ESIDES 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>
+by Capitalists who throw on the rents and taxes certain
+expenses which they should pay out of their own pockets.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>
+thus communized already amounts to nearly a million a day.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span>
+the authorities themselves without charging you any profit.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c31">31</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">YOUR RATES</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But there are other anomalies which rating brings out.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>
+they never think of including a legacy for the charwoman.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c32">32</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">YOUR RENT</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>HEN 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c33">33</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CAPITAL</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">N</span>OW 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>alias</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c34">34</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>F, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c35">35</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span>ANY 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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But Capitalism often refuses necessary work even when some
+money can be made out of it directly.</p>
+
+<p>For example, a lighthouse reminds us of a harbor, which is
+equally necessary. Every ship coming into a harbor has to pay<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span>
+sale the greater the profit. There may be half a dozen prices (and
+consequently sales) at which the profit will be exactly the same.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c36">36</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span>
+them: it is the fault of the unequal distribution of the product
+and of the leisure gained by their saving of labor.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c37">37</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span>O 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Take the drink trade again as the most obvious example of the
+wrong end being the most profitable end commercially.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c38">38</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap1">I</span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 “<i>the chef</i>”), 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Anyhow, most of those who are ministering to your wants are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c39">39</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">N</span>OW 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c40">40</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">EMPIRES IN COLLISION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>F 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.</p>
+
+<p>Now imagine yourself for a moment a German trader, with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there would have been no war without the alliances; and
+the alliances could not have fought if they had not set up great<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</span>
+which left most of them better off with their husbands in
+the trenches than they had ever been with their husbands at home.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c41">41</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">D</span>O 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c42">42</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap1">I</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</span>
+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”.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span>
+by carrying out the machine maker’s directions.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c43">43</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</span>
+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 <i>her</i> leisure.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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’<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</span>
+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).</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span>
+oldest ducal estate and the newest fortune made in business are
+only forms of capital, imposing no public duties on the owner.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This helplessness gets more and more complete as civilization
+advances. In villages you may still find carpenters and blacksmiths<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c44">44</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>ND 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</span>
+And the women of their class are forced to live by marrying them.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c45">45</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>T 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</span>
+finally lost their supremacy and became employees.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</span>
+£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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c46">46</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE PROLETARIAT</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>E 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span>
+work and routine managing and professional work.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c47">47</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span>
+disregard of all natural kindness will pay him better than any attempt
+to reconcile his interest with the welfare of his employees.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c48">48</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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”.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</span>
+five legitimate children she was on velvet until the Government,
+after centuries of blind neglect, began to pension widows.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c49">49</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">TRADE UNION CAPITALISM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">N</span>OW 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</span>
+of labor except labor in factories and mines or on railways.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>The first necessity of the situation was that everybody in the
+trade should join the union, as outsiders could be used by employers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c50">50</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DIVIDE AND GOVERN</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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”.</p>
+
+<p>And how did the employees, who had no votes at that time,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Under this delusion a Liberal Government made a bid for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</span>
+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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c51">51</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DOMESTIC CAPITAL</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>FTER 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>can</i> 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 <i>provided too many
+other people are not trying to do them at the same time</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>But please remark that it takes two to make the bargain, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</span>
+find that her income was real, and her capital imaginary.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c52">52</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE MONEY MARKET</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>ND 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When you have taken a share, and it is bringing you in an income,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c53">53</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SPECULATION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>N 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</span>
+are being beared may make all the money the bears lose. Cornering
+the bears is a recognized part of the game of speculation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c54">54</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">BANKING</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>By the way, now that we are picking up the terms Supply and
+Demand, remember that Demand in the money market sense<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c55">55</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">MONEY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</span>
+be no buses because there would be nobody willing to take them,
+unless buses were communized and fares abolished.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At present (1927) we do not use sovereigns. We use bits of
+paper, mostly dirty and smelly, with the words <i>One Pound</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</span>
+anything to fry) whatever happened; but the ten million marks
+might not pay a tram fare by five o’clock the same evening.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</span>
+gold in their cellars to redeem the notes when presented, and, of
+course, that they do not pay their debts in their own notes.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It may amuse you to realize that when coinage disappears altogether
+it does not matter whether we call our debts sovereigns<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c56">56</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">NATIONALIZATION OF BANKING</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="allsmcap">THE</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</span>
+perfectly satisfied with the nationalization of the Mint that they
+never even notice that it is nationalized, poor dears!</p>
+
+<p>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 (<i>a</i>) that you have enough Government
+money at your bank to meet the cheque when it is presented for
+payment, and (<i>b</i>) 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”.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c57">57</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">COMPENSATION FOR NATIONALIZATION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span>Y 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In this way you get the constitutional rule for nationalization of
+private property, which is, always to pay the full market price or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c58">58</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">PRELIMINARIES TO NATIONALIZATION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</span>
+without a Railway Board and a Railroadmaster-General as
+important as the Post Office and the Postmaster-General.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c59">59</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CONFISCATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span>UR 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The scheme is plausible enough.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c60">60</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">REVOLT OF THE PARASITIC PROLETARIAT</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span>UT 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</span>
+without a moment’s interruption, operate by continual expenditure
+(mainly household expenditure) and continual investment of
+the enormous total of all our private incomes.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c61">61</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SAFETY VALVES</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>T 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</span>
+on whom much more money could and should be spent than at
+present, with great uncommercial profit to the next generation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</span>
+Tongue, he would have found many months slipping by him before
+he could set the first gang of navvies to work.</p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c62">62</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">WHY CONFISCATION HAS SUCCEEDED HITHERTO</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">N</span>OW 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</span>
+principles of the prophet Marx! Yet we took it lying down.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c63">63</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW THE WAR WAS PAID FOR</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>N 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</span>
+therefore supports the Government in the arrangement, whilst
+Peter complains that the burden of taxation is intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c64">64</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">NATIONAL DEBT REDEMPTION LEVIES</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>LTHOUGH 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>By such a levy the Government could take off the taxation it had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c65">65</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE CONSTRUCTIVE PROBLEM SOLVED</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c66">66</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SHAM SOCIALISM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</span>
+£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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the proletarian quarters of London, notably in Poplar,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Those profits are the snag in the stream of prosperity. If they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c67">67</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>ND 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, <span class="allsmcap">NOTHING STAYS PUT</span>? 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Note that I say the capitalists <i>as such</i>; 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</span>
+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).</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The capitalists, though they are very angry when the hungry
+ask for Government help of any kind, have no scruples about<span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c68">68</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span>APITALISM, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</span>
+though he was a parliament man, he was finally driven to lay
+violent hands on Parliament, and rule by armed force.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c69">69</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span>NCE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now commercial civilization has been at root nothing more<span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, however, confine ourselves to the bearing of all this on
+that pet topic of the leisured class, our personal liberty.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</span>
+as the leisured passengers, with their silly deck games, and their
+agonized scamperings fore and aft for exercise know only too well.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c70">70</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">RENT OF ABILITY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>AVING 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</span>
+ground that they cannot keep up their peculiar charm without
+them; and the public countenances their exactions fondly.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</span>
+“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?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c71">71</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">PARTY POLITICS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</span></p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c72">72</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">THE PARTY SYSTEM</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span>UR 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</span></p>
+
+<p>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, <i>le Roi Soleil</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c73">73</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>To make strikes more effective, a new sort of Trade Union has
+developed, called an Industrial Union to distinguish it from the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c74">74</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>OWEVER, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</span></p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c75">75</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">REVOLUTIONS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>OU 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</span>
+Socialist, has overridden parliament in Italy, his followers having
+established what is called a reign of terror by frank violence.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>coup d’état</i>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</span>
+standing than most of them can hope for under Capitalism.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>coups d’état</i>, 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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c76">76</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">L</span>ET 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>However, let us put all disagreeable possibilities out of our
+heads for the moment, and consider how Socialism is likely to advance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</span>
+it is detestably bad for them, than to try a new system, even
+though it promises to be millennially good for them.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</span>
+induce anyone to cross the street to prevent it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c77">77</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>HILST 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</span>
+public enterprises to employ them for peace purposes.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c78">78</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HEN 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I purposely avoid anticipating any moral pressure of public
+opinion against economic selfishness. No doubt that will become<span class="pagenum" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c79">79</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Still, prohibition of the fiercer drugs has the support of public<span class="pagenum" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</span>
+time. For instance, if you rebel against high-heeled shoes, take
+care to do it in a very smart hat.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c80">80</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>HEN 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now marriage institutions are not a part of Socialism. Marriage,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</span>
+envious, with different and antagonistic tastes and beliefs, incapable
+of understanding oneanother: in short, antipathetic and
+incompatible, it produces much untold human unhappiness.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c81">81</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>N 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</span>
+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 <i>ad libitum</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>As a general result we find that what we call education is a
+failure. The poor woman’s child is imprisoned for nine years<span class="pagenum" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</span>
+than the college, that it is also the better mannered.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A Capitalist Government must inculcate whatever doctrine is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c82">82</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>OW 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</span>
+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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</span>
+of England sometimes does in the choir, would destroy their
+value for those who cannot worship without the aid of a ritual.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</span>
+Capitalism today, if you are in the employment of a bigot.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</span>
+as Lenin very soon found out and very frankly confessed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c83">83</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">CURRENT CONFUSIONS</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap1">I</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>But the names we hurl at oneanother are much less confusing
+than the names we give ourselves. For instance, quite a lot<span class="pagenum" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>coup d’état</i>. 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</span>
+tempted to try a British-Fascist <i>coup d’état</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>pax Americana</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>You will find constitutional changes specially bothersome because
+of the continual clashing between the tightening-up of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c84">84</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">PERORATION</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>ND 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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”.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>You know the very true saying that where there is a will there<span class="pagenum" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>By such ladies and their sons can the human race be saved, and
+not otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Ayot St Lawrence</span>,<br>
+&#160;&#160; <i>16th March</i> 1927.
+</p>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c85">APPENDIX</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp">INSTEAD OF A BIBLIOGRAPHY</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HIS 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In 1840 a French proletarian, Proudhon, published an essay with the
+startling title “What is Property? Theft”. In it he demonstrated that a
+<i>rentier</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</span>
+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, <i>faute de mieux</i>, for the first
+fifty years, and for the last fifty has been collapsing more and more on
+its crazy foundation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_469">[Pg 469]</span>
+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 <i>littérateurs</i> of the middle of the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c86">INDEX</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c less sp"><span class="smcap">By</span> BEATRICE WHITE, M.A.</p>
+
+<ul class="index">
+<li class="ifrst">Abatement, smoke, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Aberdeen, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Abernethy, John, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ability, managerial, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">to maintain discipline, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">necessary to nationalize, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Abortion, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">surgical, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Abraham, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Access to rare books and pictures, <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Accountants, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Acrobats, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Actors, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Actresses, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">popular, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Acts of Parliament, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Admiralty, the, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Adoption, compulsory, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Adulterators, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Adults, dysgenic, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Adventurers, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Advertisements, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Aerodromes, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Aeroplane lines, the, <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Aeroplane pilots, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Aeroplanes, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Affiliation allowances, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Afforestation, <a href="#Page_281">281</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Africa, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">African markets, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">African “medicine”, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Agents, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Agitators, Socialistic, <a href="#Page_305">305</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Agnostics, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Agricultural harvests, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Agricultural laborers, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Air services, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Airships, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Albert Hall, the, <a href="#Page_333">333</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alcohol, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alexander the Great, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alfonso, King, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alfred, King, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Algeria, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Allah, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alliances, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Allotment holders, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Almsgiving, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ambassadors, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ambulance porters, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">America, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_430">430</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">America, United States of, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">anti-British feeling in, <a href="#Page_158">158-159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">American dollars, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">employers and financiers, methods of, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">hotheads, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">plantations, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">presidents, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">State Legislatures, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">statistics, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">villages, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Americans, the, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Amsterdam, <a href="#Page_259">259</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Amusements, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ananias and Sapphira, <a href="#Page_12">12</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anarchism, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anarchists, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anarchy, <a href="#Page_29">29-30</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Andes, the, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anglican Churches, the, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anglo-Catholics, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anne, Queen, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anti-clericalism, <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anti-clericals, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anti-Russian scare, the 1924, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anti-Socialists, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Apostles, the, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Apostles’ creed, the, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Apothecaries, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Apprentice, The Sorcerer’s</i>, <a href="#Page_157">157-61</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Appropriation Act, the, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arabian desert, the, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arabs, the, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Archbishop Laud, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Archbishops, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Architects, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arcos, raid on, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Aristocracy, the landed, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Aristotle, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Armada, the, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Armaments, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the race of, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Armistice, the, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Army, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_98">98</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arnold, Whately, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Art, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Art of living, the, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Articles, the Thirty-nine, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Artificial happiness, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Artificial overpopulation, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Artists, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Asia, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">British Empire in, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Asquith, Herbert Henry, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Assaults in school, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Assistants, shop, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_397">397</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Associated work, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Astor property, the, <a href="#Page_8">8</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Astronomer Royal, the, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Astronomers, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Astronomy, Copernican, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Asylums, lunatic, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Athanasian creed, the, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Atheists, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Athenian democracy, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Athens, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Athletes, champion, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Atlantic, the, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Attendants, picture gallery, <a href="#Page_79">79</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Augury, ancient, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Augustine, Saint, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Australasia, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Australia, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">uncles in, <a href="#Page_67">67</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Australians, the, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Austria, <a href="#Page_263">263</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Austrian Government, the, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Authority, <a href="#Page_37">37-8</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and subordination, <a href="#Page_337">337</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Authors, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Averaging. <i>See</i> Nationalization</li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Babies, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">superfluous, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Babylon, <a href="#Page_372">372</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bachelors, <a href="#Page_349">349</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Baghdad, <a href="#Page_314">314</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bagmen, <a href="#Page_343">343</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Baked-potato men, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bakers, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Baldwin, Stanley, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Balfour, Arthur James, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bank of England, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bank Holiday, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bank Holiday Acts, <a href="#Page_322">322</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bank managers, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bank rate, the, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bank transactions, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Banker-General, <a href="#Page_273">273</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bankers, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Banking, <a href="#Page_243">243-51</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">nationalization of, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264-8</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Banks, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Scottish and Irish, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">national and municipal, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Baptism, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Barbers, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bargemen, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Barges, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Barristers, <i>See</i> Lawyers</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Baronets, surgical, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bass Rock ideal, the, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bastille, the, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Battlefields, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Battleships, <a href="#Page_349">349</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Beachcombers, <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Beaconsfield, Earl of, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Becket, Thomas à, <a href="#Page_430">430</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bedford, endowed schools of, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bees, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Beethoven, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Behaviour, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Belgium, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Belief, differences of, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">mostly bias, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bell, answering the, <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bench, the, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bennett, Arnold, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Betterton, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Biarritz, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bible, the, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_424">424</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">astronomy and biology of, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of the working classes, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bibles, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Big business, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">capitalist, <a href="#Page_308">308</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Billiard markers, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Birmingham, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">municipal bank of, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Birth control, <i>See</i> Contraception</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bishops, <a href="#Page_434">434</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bismarck, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Blacklegs, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Blacksmiths, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">village, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bloated aristocrats, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Blocks, parliamentary, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Blockmakers, parliamentary, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Boards, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Boatswains, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Boer ideal, the, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bogey Bolshevism, <a href="#Page_14">14</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bogies, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bolsheviks, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Communist, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bolshevism, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bombay Ginning Mills, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bombing aeroplanes, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bonar Law, Mr, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bond Street, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Book of Common Prayer, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bookkeepers, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bookkeeping, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bookmakers, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bootle, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bootlegging, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bootmakers, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Boots, broken, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Borneo, <a href="#Page_313">313</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Borough Councils, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Borrovians, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Borrow, George, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Borrowing and hiring, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Borrowing from and taxing capitalists, <a href="#Page_290">290</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bound feet, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bounderby, <a href="#Page_303">303</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bountiful ladies, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bourgeois, the, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bournemouth, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bourneville, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bourrienne, memoirs of, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bourses, Continental, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Boy Scouts, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bradlaugh, Charles, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brahma, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brains, proper social use of, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bread, communization of, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bread and circuses, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Breadwinning, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Breaking a bank, <a href="#Page_246">246</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Breakwaters, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bremerhaven, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brewers, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Briand, Aristide, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bricklayers, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brickmakers, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bridges, <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brigadiers, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brigham Young, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a Mormon Moses, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bright, John, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brighton, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bristol, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Britain, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">British army and navy, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">brains, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Commonwealth, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">courage, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Empire, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in Asia, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">flag, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">genius, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">human nature, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">husbands, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">people, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">proletariat, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">proletarian voters, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Museum, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">anti-Socialist governments, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">employers, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Government, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">race, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Raj, <a href="#Page_453">453</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">religions, variety and incompatibility of, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">taxpayers, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">workman, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">turf, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Socialists, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Isles, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Trade Unionists, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brobdingnag, the King of, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brummagem buttons, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brunswick, Duke of, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Buccaneers, capitalist, <a href="#Page_417">417</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bucket shops, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Buckingham Palace, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Buckle’s History of Civilization, <a href="#Page_467">467</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Budget, the, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">annual debates on, <a href="#Page_286">286</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Budgets, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Building societies, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">trades, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bullion, <a href="#Page_259">259</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bulls and bears, <a href="#Page_241">241</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bumble, Mr, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bunyan, John, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">his Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, <a href="#Page_318">318</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bureaucracy. <i>See</i> Civil Service Burglars, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bus conductors, <a href="#Page_251">251</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Business, wholesale, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">private, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Business ability, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Business man, the practical, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Business men, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Business principles, <a href="#Page_208">208</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Butchers, <a href="#Page_422">422</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Butler, Samuel, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Byron, Lord, <a href="#Page_344">344</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Cabinet, the, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cabinet Ministers, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cabinets, British, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cablegrams, <a href="#Page_136">136</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ca’canny, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cadbury, Mr, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cæsar, Julius, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cæsars, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cairnes, John Elliot, <a href="#Page_467">467</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Calculus, the, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Calcutta Sweep, the, <a href="#Page_67">67</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Calvin, John, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cambridge University, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canada, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canadians, French, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canals, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Candidates, the No-Compensation, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Candide, <a href="#Page_462">462</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canossa, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canterbury, <a href="#Page_430">430</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Capel Court, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Capital, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127-31</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">export of, <a href="#Page_140">140-44</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">definition of, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">driven abroad, <a href="#Page_34">34-5</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">homeless and at home everywhere, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">party of, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">levy, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">investing and “realizing”, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">taxation of, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">domestic, <a href="#Page_225">225-31</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Capitalism, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100-104</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_459">459</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">adventurous and experimental, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">diehard, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Liberal constitutional, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">limitations of, <a href="#Page_133">133-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">mammonist morality of, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in perpetual motion, <a href="#Page_308">308-14</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">on paper, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a principle of, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">provides selfish motives for doing good, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">secular, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">ruthless, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">uncontrollable, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">well-established method of, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">runaway car of, <a href="#Page_314">314-19</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Capitalist and genius, the, <a href="#Page_311">311</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Capitalist morality, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">law, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">system, one of worst vices of, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">papers, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Government and Opposition, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">crusade, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">exploitations of the taxpayers, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">oligarchy, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">mankind detestable, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and Socialist Governments, difference between, <a href="#Page_390">390</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Capitalists, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dictatorship of, <a href="#Page_376">376</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Captains, navy, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">sea, <a href="#Page_422">422</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cardinals, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Careerists, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Careers open to women, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">his Past and Present, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Sartor Resartus, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Shooting Niagara, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carnegie, Andrew, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carnegie charities, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carpenters, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">village, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carriage of mails oversea, <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carriers, village, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">C.O.D. parcel post, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Casual labor, <a href="#Page_118">118-20</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Casual people, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cathedrals, the, <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Catholic Church, the, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Catholic theoracy, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Catholicism, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Catholics, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Celibacy, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chambermaids, <a href="#Page_149">149</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chancellor of the Exchequer, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chanceries, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Change, continuous, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">constructive, must be parliamentary, <a href="#Page_380">380-86</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Changes, social, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chaplains, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charabancs, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Character, <a href="#Page_26">26</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charity, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charlemagne, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charles I, King, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charles, II, King, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chartists, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charwomen, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_420">420</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chauffeurs, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cheap and nasty, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cheltenham, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chemists, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cheques and clearing houses, <a href="#Page_261">261</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cheques and Bills, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chicago municipal elections, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chicago pork kings, <a href="#Page_343">343</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Child-bearing, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Child fanciers, <a href="#Page_415">415</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Child farming, <a href="#Page_415">415</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Child labor, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Child life, organization of, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Children, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_392">392</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and parents, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and young persons overworked, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">bearing and rearing of, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cost of, <a href="#Page_87">87-8</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">exposure of female, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">illegitimate, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">institutional treatment of, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">matter-of-fact, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Roman Catholic, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">ugly, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Children’s ordinary human rights, disregard of, <a href="#Page_415">415</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Children’s religion, dictated by parents, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Children’s wages, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">China, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chocolate creams, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cholera epidemics, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Christ, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the mother of, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Christ Scientist, the Church of, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Christian Science, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Christian Scientists, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Christian Socialists, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Christianity, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">early, <a href="#Page_459">459</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Christians, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">early, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Christmas, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cards, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church, the, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church Catechism, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>, <a href="#Page_425">425</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church of England, the, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_435">435</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church of Jenner and Pasteur Scientists, the new, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church livings, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church rates, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church of Rome, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church, school and Press, <a href="#Page_63">63-5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church schools, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church and State, quarrel between, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Churches, the, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">attitude towards marriage, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dangerous pretensions of, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Churches, the Free, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Churchill, Winston, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Churchmen, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cinemas, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cinematography, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Circumcision, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Citizens, <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">City bosses, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">City corporations, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">City offices, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Civil servants, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_340">340</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Civil Service, the, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>, <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Civilians no longer spared in war, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Civilization a disease, <a href="#Page_127">127</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clandestine Communism and confiscation, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clares, the Poor, <a href="#Page_41">41</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Class distinctions, <a href="#Page_420">420</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Class hatred, <a href="#Page_456">456</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Class splits in the professions, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Class struggle, the, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Class war, the, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clearing houses, <a href="#Page_261">261</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cleopatra, <a href="#Page_333">333</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clergymen, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_425">425</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clerical staffs, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clerks, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and clerking, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clever women, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clothes, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Sunday, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clubs, <a href="#Page_418">418</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clydeside Scots, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Coal, cost under capitalism, <a href="#Page_107">107-9</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">how to cheapen, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">harvests, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">commission, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">mines, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">nationalization of, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">owners, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">supply, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Coalmaster-General, wanted a, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cocktails, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Coinage, debasement of, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">value of gold coinage fixes itself, <a href="#Page_259">259</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">College education, <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Colonels, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Colonies, British, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Colored labor, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Colored persons, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Columbus, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Combinations of workers, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Commandments, the Ten, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Commercial civilization, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">profiteers, <a href="#Page_383">383</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Commercialism, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Commissioners of Inland Revenue, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Commissions fixing prices, <a href="#Page_224">224</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Common creed of the nation, formation of the, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Common people, the, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Common sense and prejudice, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Commonwealths, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Communisms, <a href="#Page_11">11-13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">clandestine, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">reduces need for pocket money, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">parochial, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Christian morality of, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a development of existing economic civilization, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Communist, present connotation of, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Communist schools, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Communist-Anarchists, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Communistic monstrosities, our, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Communists, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">pseudo-Bolshevist, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Companies and trusts, <a href="#Page_231">231</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Companions, lady, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Company promotion, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Compensation for expropriation, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Compensation for nationalization, <a href="#Page_268">268-274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Compensation really distributed confiscation, <a href="#Page_270">270-71</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Competitive method in industry, wasteful, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">inadmissable in case of ubiquitous services, <a href="#Page_273">273</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Composers, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Compromisers, timid, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Compulsory schooling, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Compulsory social service, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conduct, difficulty of teaching, <a href="#Page_363">363</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Confectionery, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Confidence tricksters, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Confiscated income must be immediately redistributed, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Confiscation, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">without compensation, <a href="#Page_276">276-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">with a vengeance, <a href="#Page_290">290</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conscience, the national, <a href="#Page_393">393</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conscientious objectors, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">objection, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conscription, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conservatism, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conservative Act of 1867, <a href="#Page_452">452</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conservative Governments, <a href="#Page_389">389</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conservative Party, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conservatives, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_344">344</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Consols, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conspiracies <i>alias</i> Trade Unions, <a href="#Page_209">209</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Constables, police, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Constantinople, <a href="#Page_314">314</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, <a href="#Page_354">354</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Constitutional Monarchists, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Constructive problem solved, the, <a href="#Page_297">297-9</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Contraception, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88-9</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Contractors, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Contracts, civil, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Convalescent homes, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Conventions, <a href="#Page_405">405</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cooks, <a href="#Page_24">24-5</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Co-operative societies, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Co-operators, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Copper harvests, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Copyright conventions, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Copyrights, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cost price, <a href="#Page_107">107-11</a>. <i>See</i> Nationalization</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cottage handicrafts, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">hospitals, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">industry, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cotton lords, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">spinners, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Country gentlemen, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Country houses, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">County Councils, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">County ladies, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Covetousness, human, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cowper, William, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cowper-Temple Clause, the, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Crabbe, George, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Craft Unions, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Craftsmen, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Creative work, <a href="#Page_327">327</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Credit, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">real, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">tax on, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Crews, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Crime, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Crimean War, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Criminal Courts, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Law, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cromer, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cromwell, Oliver, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Crusoe, Robinson, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Culture, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">reserves of now rather commercial than professional, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Currencies, private, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Current confusions, <a href="#Page_433">433-55</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cynicism, not justified by the horrors of Capitalism, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Daily routine, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dairymaids, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dancing partners, fascinating male, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dartmoor, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dartmoor hunt, the, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Daughters, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">unmarried, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Day of Judgment, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Daylight in winter, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dealers in pit props, <a href="#Page_304">304</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dean Swift, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Death duties, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">stupid, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Death-rate, high, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Debasement of currency, called inflation, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Debentures, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Debt, municipal, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Debt, the National, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_294">294-7</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Debt redemption levy, <a href="#Page_296">296</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Deceased Wife’s Sister Act, <a href="#Page_1">1</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Declaration of Rights, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Decline of the employer, the, <a href="#Page_177">177-82</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Deer forests, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Deflation, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Defoe, Daniel, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Deists, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Demagogues, plebeian, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Demand, effective, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">money market sense of, <a href="#Page_248">248-9</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Democracy, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">result of, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Democratic Prime Ministers, <a href="#Page_315">315</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dens, sweaters’, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dentists, <a href="#Page_194">194</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Department of Mines, creation of, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Department of Woods and Forests, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Depopulation, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Deposit at elections, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">De Quincey, Thomas, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Derby, the, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Descartes, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Destitute persons, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Detective stories, <a href="#Page_415">415</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Devil, the, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Diagnostic of Socialism, the, <a href="#Page_92">92-5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Diamonds, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dickens, Charles, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">his Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Pickwick Papers, Our Mutual Friend, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dictators, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Italian, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Diehard coercionists, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Diminishing Return, Law of, <a href="#Page_91">91</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Diplomacy, <a href="#Page_60">60-61</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Diplomatic service, the, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Direct Action men, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Direct Action, policy of, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dirty work, <a href="#Page_74">74-6</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Disablement above and below, <a href="#Page_164">164-8</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Discoveries, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Disease, venereal, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">hereditary, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Disguised Church, the, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Disraeli, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>. <i>See</i> Beaconsfield, Earl of</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dissenters, the, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Distilleries, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Distribution, traumatic, not spontaneous, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">anomalous, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">seven ways of, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">by class, <a href="#Page_35">35-8</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">District Councils, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Divide and govern, <a href="#Page_213">213-25</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dividing-up, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Division of labor, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Divisions within the Labor Party, <a href="#Page_354">354-9</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Divorce, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dock companies, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dock labor, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dockers, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dockyards, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Doctors, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Doctrinaires, Marxist, <a href="#Page_372">372</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Doles, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Doles, depopulation and parasitic paradises, <a href="#Page_145">145-50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Domestic capital, <a href="#Page_225">225-31</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Domestic debt redemption levies, objection to, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Domestic servants. <i>See</i> Servants</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Domestic work woman’s monopoly, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dominic, Saint, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dominions, the, <a href="#Page_437">437</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dope, <a href="#Page_374">374</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Downing tools, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drainage, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drawingroom amusements, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dress, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dress question, the, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dressing, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dressmakers, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">jobbing, <a href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dressmaking, <a href="#Page_420">420</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drink, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drones, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drugging, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drugs, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drunkards, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dublin, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ducal estates, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Duchesses, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dukes, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dustmen, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dwarfs, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dysgenic reactions of inequality, <a href="#Page_54">54-6</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">adults, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Earthquakes, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eastern Europe, <a href="#Page_437">437</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eastern women, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eclipses, <a href="#Page_365">365</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eddy, Mrs, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Education, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">college, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a failure, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">impracticable, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">middle-class monopoly of, <a href="#Page_177">177-82</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">secular, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">stupidities about, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">technical, compulsory and liberal, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Socialist idea of, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Education Act of 1870, the, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of 1902, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Egypt, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">self-government in, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Egyptian fiasco, the, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eight hours day, the, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Einstein, Albert, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Election of 1918, the, <a href="#Page_454">454</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Electric Lighting Committees, <a href="#Page_352">352</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Electric lighting, municipal, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Electric power, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Electricians, <a href="#Page_355">355</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Electrocution, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Electronic physics, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Elementary schools, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Elizabeth, Queen, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Elizabeth, statute of, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Emigration, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Emotional Socialism, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Empire, the medieval, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Empire insurance, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Empires, in collision, <a href="#Page_152">152-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">their origin in trade, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">ruins of, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">shifting centres of, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Employees, badly sweated, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>. <i>See</i> Trade Union Capitalism</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Employers, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">industrial, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and financiers, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">petty, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Victorian, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li>
+<li class="isub1"><i>See</i> Trade Union Capitalism</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Employers’ Federations, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Employment of first-rate business brains by Trade Unions, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Empress Catherine II of Russia, the, <a href="#Page_449">449</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Encyclopedias, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Engels, Friedrich, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Engine drivers, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Engineers, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">England, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_454">454</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Protestant, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English big business, Americanized, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English Church, the, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English ladies, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English market, the, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English nation, the, <a href="#Page_366">366</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English Parliament, the, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English pound, the, <a href="#Page_263">263</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English State, the, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English statesmen, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">English Trade Unions, Americanized, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Englishmen, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Enlightenment, modern, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Enough? How much is, <a href="#Page_41">41-9</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Epidemics, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dread of, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Epileptics, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Episcopalians, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Equal wages for equal work, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Equality, positive reasons for, <a href="#Page_68">68-70</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Equality of income, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of opportunity, <a href="#Page_93">93-4</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Erewhon, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Errand boys, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Esquimaux, the, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Estate rules, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ethical societies, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eton, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eugenics, <a href="#Page_53">53-6</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Europe, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">kings of, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">States of, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">European empires, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Evasion of income tax, <a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eve, the sin of, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Evolution, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Evolutionists, creative, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Exceptional ability, question of, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Excessive incomes, extortion of, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Exchequer, the 276;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Chancellor of the, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Exclusion of women from the professions, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Executioners, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Experimenting, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Exploitation, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of the State by Capitalism and Trade Unionism, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Exploration, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">professional, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Explorers, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Exposure of female children, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Expropriation Act, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Expropriative taxation, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Extension of franchise, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">disappointing, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Extremists, <a href="#Page_373">373</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Fabian Acts of Parliament, <a href="#Page_372">372</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fabian Essays, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fabian lecturers, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fabian methods, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fabian Society, the, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_467">467</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fabianism or constitutional action, <a href="#Page_446">446-7</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factories, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">child labor in, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Ford, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">national, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">munition, <a href="#Page_390">390</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory Acts, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189-94</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory employees, condition of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory foremen, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory girls, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory hands, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory inspectors, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory legislation, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory regulations, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory work, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Factory working day, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fairies, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fanaticisms, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Farm produce, transport of, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Farmers, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_447">447</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">English, <a href="#Page_374">374</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Farming, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">large-scale, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">fancy fruit, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fascism (capitalist dictatorship), <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fascists, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fashion, tyranny of, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fashoda, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Father, the author’s, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Faust, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fecundity, human, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Federations, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Female virtue, <a href="#Page_199">199</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ferryman, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fertility, <a href="#Page_90">90</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Feudalism, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Feuerbach, L. A., <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Field-marshals, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Film actresses, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Filmstars, <a href="#Page_22">22</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Films, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Finance committees, <a href="#Page_352">352</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Financial gamblers, <a href="#Page_382">382</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Financiers, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_340">340</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">profiteering, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and bankers are money profiteers, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">First-rate work, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fishermen, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fitters, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Flag, trade following the, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Flanders, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">battlefields in, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fluctuations on the Stock Exchange, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Flying Services, <a href="#Page_389">389</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Football, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ford, Henry, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ford factories, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Foreign markets. <i>See</i> Markets</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Foreign Office, the, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Foreign trade, <a href="#Page_150">150-52</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Foresters, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Forewomen and foremen, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Formulas, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Forth Bridge, the, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fourier, Charles, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fox, George, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Foxhunting, <a href="#Page_420">420</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">France, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">decreasing population of, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">France, Anatole, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Franchise, extension of, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">extension of, disappointing, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Francis, Saint, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Franciscans, the, <a href="#Page_41">41</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Free Churches, the, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Free Trade, <a href="#Page_344">344</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Free Traders, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Free Trade controversy, <a href="#Page_286">286</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Freedom, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">no place in nature, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">restricted, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">French, the, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">French Chamber, the, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">French Government, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">French nation, the, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">French peasant proprietors, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">French Republic, the, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">French Revolution, the, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Freud, Sigmund, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Frontiers, automatic advance of, <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fundholders, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Funding, <a href="#Page_291">291</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Galsworthy, John, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gambling, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Game Laws, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gamekeepers, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gaming Act, the, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Garages, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Garden cities, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the property of capitalists, <a href="#Page_301">301</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gardeners, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">lady, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gardening, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">kitchen, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gas, poison, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">General elections, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_353">353</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">stampeding, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">General Medical Council, the, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">General Post Office, the, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">General Strike, the, <a href="#Page_448">448</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">General strikes, a form of national suicide, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">General teetotalism, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Generals, military, <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Genesis, the book of, <a href="#Page_460">460</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Geneva, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Geniuses, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gentility without property, <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gentlemen, our sort of, <a href="#Page_358">358</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gentry, the, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">landed, <a href="#Page_40">40</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">George IV, King, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">George V, King, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">George, Henry, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">German employers, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">German Government, the, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">German money, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">German racial stock, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">German schools and universities, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Germans, the, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Germany, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">increasing population of, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">war with, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Giants, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gin Lane, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Girl Guides, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gladstone, W. E., <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gleneagles hotel, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">God, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_411">411</a>, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>; the</li>
+<li class="isub1">Church of England, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the greater glory of, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the idea of, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">ideas about, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">intentions of, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">not patriotic, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gold bugs, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gold currency, natural stability of the, <a href="#Page_263">263</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Goldsmith, Oliver, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Golf, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Sunday, <a href="#Page_329">329</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Golfing hotel managers, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gospels, the, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Governesses, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Government, the Capitalist, of 1914-1918, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the most sacred economic duty of, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and garden cities, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and governed, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and Opposition, or performance and criticism, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">as national landlord, financier and employer, <a href="#Page_97">97</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Government confiscation without preparation, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Government grants, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in aid to municipalities, <a href="#Page_281">281</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Government intervention in strikes, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">intervention between Capital and Labor. <i>See</i> Factory legislation and Taxation</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Government subsidy to coalowners in 1925, the, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_387">387</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Government subsidies, <a href="#Page_387">387</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Government Whips, <a href="#Page_349">349</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Governments, failures and frauds of, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Italian and Spanish, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">misdeeds of, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gradgrind, <a href="#Page_303">303</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gradual expropriation possible, <a href="#Page_295">295</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gramophones, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gravediggers, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Great Britain, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Great Western Railway, the, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Greece, ancient, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Greek, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the value of, <a href="#Page_28">28</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Greek Church, the, <a href="#Page_374">374</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Greenland, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Grocers, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ground rents, <a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Guardians, Poor Law, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Guards, railway, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Guides, postal and official, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gulliver’s Travels, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_462">462</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gwynne, Nell, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Habeas Corpus Act, <a href="#Page_308">308</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hamlet, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Handel, G. F., <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Handicrafts, cottage, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Handloom weavers, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hand-to-mouth, the world lives from, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hangmen, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Happiness, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hara-kiri, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Harboro, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hardie, Keir, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Harrow, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hatmakers, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Haymaking, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Head waiters, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Health, Ministry of, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hearse drivers, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Heartlessness of parents, the apparent, <a href="#Page_193">193</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hegel, G. W. F., <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hegelian dialectic, the, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Helmer, Nora, <a href="#Page_408">408</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Helplessness, of proprietary and working classes, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of individuals, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Henry IV, King, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Henry VIII, King, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hereditary disease, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Herring gutters, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Herriot, Édouard, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">High Tories, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">High wages and colossal profits, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Highland chieftains, <a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Highlands, the, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Highway lighting, <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Highwaymen, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hiring spare money, <a href="#Page_244">244</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Historians, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hoarding, <a href="#Page_129">129-31</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hobbies, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hogarth, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hohenzollern family, the, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Holidays, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Holland, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Holy Ghost, the, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Home, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Home Office, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Home Rule Question, the, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Homer, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hood, Thomas, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Horace, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Horses, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">old, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hospitals, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cottage, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hotel manageresses, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hotels, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hours of labor, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">House of Commons, the, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_354">354</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Labor members of, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a proletarian, <a href="#Page_359">359</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">House of Lords, the, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Housekeepers, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Housekeeping, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">national, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Housekeeping money, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Housemaids, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Houses, scarcity of, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Houses of Parliament, the, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">out of date, <a href="#Page_354">354</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">How long will it take?, <a href="#Page_391">391-3</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">How much is enough?, <a href="#Page_41">41-9</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">How the War was paid for, <a href="#Page_289">289-94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">How wealth accumulates and men decay, <a href="#Page_161">161-4</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Human nature, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Human society like a glacier, <a href="#Page_308">308</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Human stock, improvement of, <a href="#Page_343">343</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hungry, the, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Husbandmen, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Husbands, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and wives, <a href="#Page_408">408</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hyndman, Henry Mayers, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Ibsen, Henrik, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_440">440</a>, <a href="#Page_470">470</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Idealists, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Idiots, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Idle rich, the, <a href="#Page_59">59-62</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Idleness, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Idlers, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_400">400</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Idling, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Idolatry, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ignorance, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">about Socialism, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Illegitimate children, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Illinois, State of, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Immigrants, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Immigration, restricted, <a href="#Page_194">194</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Imperialism, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Imperialist morality, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Imperialists, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inability to govern, our, <a href="#Page_318">318</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Incentive, <a href="#Page_72">72</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Income, family, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Income tax, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and super tax and estate duties other names for confiscation, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and death duties and supertax, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">evasion of, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">rates a form of, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Increasing return, law of, <a href="#Page_91">91</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Independent candidates, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Independent Labor Party, foundation of the, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Independent voters, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">India, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Indians, the, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industrial employees, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industrial employers, <a href="#Page_285">285</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industrial male workers, the ordinary, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industrial organizers, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industrial and Provident Societies Act, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industrial Revolution, the, <a href="#Page_137">137-40</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industrial Unions, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industries, the big, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">competitive entry of the Government into, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Industry, the dye, <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inequality of income, <a href="#Page_418">418</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inevitability of gradualness, the, <a href="#Page_377">377</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Infallibility, necessary dogma of, <a href="#Page_3">3</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Infant mortality, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Infant schools, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Infidels, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inflation, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inflationists, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ingoldsby Legends, The, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inheritance, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inhibition complex, <a href="#Page_330">330</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Innkeepers, <a href="#Page_387">387</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inoculations, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dangerous, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">pathogenic, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Inquisition, the, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">water torture of, <a href="#Page_415">415</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Insurance, National, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Insurance premiums, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Insurance stamps, <a href="#Page_1">1</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Interest, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">positive and negative, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">exorbitant rates to the poor, <a href="#Page_234">234</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">International, the Third, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">International Anarchism, the present, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">International institutions, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Internationalism, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Invalids, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Invention, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">inventions and inventors, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">inventions, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">inventors, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Investing capital, <a href="#Page_292">292</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Investment and enterprise, <a href="#Page_131">131-3</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ireland, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ireland scholars, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Irish Free State, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Irish Home Rule, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Irish ladies in the workhouse, <a href="#Page_20">20</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Irish Nationalist Party, the old, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Irish peers, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ironmasters, <a href="#Page_400">400</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ironmongers, <a href="#Page_400">400</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Islam, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Isle of Wight, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Israelites, the, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Italian nation, the, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Italy, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_347">347</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Jacobins, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">James I, King, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">James II, King, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">James, Saint, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Japan, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jehovah, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jenner, Edward, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jericho, <a href="#Page_392">392</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jesuits, the, <a href="#Page_368">368</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jesus. <i>See</i> Christ</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jevons, Stanley, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jews, the, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Joan of Arc, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jobbing dressmakers, <a href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">John, King, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Joiners, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Joint stock companies, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Joshua, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Journalists, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Judas Iscariot, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Judges, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Judgment, Day of, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Judgment, the Last, <a href="#Page_437">437</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Juries, trial by, <a href="#Page_56">56</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jurors, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jury duties, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jurymen, <a href="#Page_316">316</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Jutland, battle of, <a href="#Page_326">326</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Kaiser, the ex-, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kantian test, the, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kapital, Das, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Keynes, Maynard, <a href="#Page_467">467</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kilkenny cats, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King, the, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_349">349</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_427">427</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">his Speech, <a href="#Page_208">208</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Alfonso, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Alfred, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Charles I, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Charles II, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King George IV, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King George V, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Henry II, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Henry IV, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Henry VIII, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King James I, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King James II, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King John, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Lear, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Louis XIV, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King Philip II of Spain, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King William III, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">King William IV, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kings, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Israelitish, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kingsley, Charles, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Knights of the Shires, <a href="#Page_316">316</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Knox, John, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kruger, President, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Krupp’s, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kyle of Tongue, the, <a href="#Page_283">283</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Labor, capitalized, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">costly materials and equipment for, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">curse of, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">market value of, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of women and girls, <a href="#Page_196">196-204</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">party of, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor Chancellor, <a href="#Page_286">286</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor Government, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of 1923, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor House of Commons, <a href="#Page_358">358</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor leaders, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor markets, the, <a href="#Page_186">186-96</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor members, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor Opposition, <a href="#Page_344">344</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor Party, the, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">establishment of, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a political federation of Trade Unions and Socialist Societies, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">rapid growth of, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>,</li>
+<li class="isub1">danger of splits in, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Socialists in, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the present, <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor-saving appliances, <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor-saving contrivances, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labor-saving machinery, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laboratory work, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laborers, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laborists, the, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ladies, attractive, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">English, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">our sort of, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">real, <a href="#Page_400">400</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ladies’ maids, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lahore, Government College of, <a href="#Page_355">355</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laisser-faire, <a href="#Page_38">38-41</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laisser-faire doctrinaires, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lancashire, <a href="#Page_216">216</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Land, nationalization of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Land Purchase Acts, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Land values, <a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Landlords, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and capitalists, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and raised rents, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Irish, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">powers of, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124-5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Langland, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lassalle, Ferdinand, <a href="#Page_41">41</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Latimer, Hugh, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Latin, literary, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>, <a href="#Page_415">415</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Latin stock, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Latin verses, <a href="#Page_422">422</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Latter Day Saints, the, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laud, Archbishop, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laundresses, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laundries, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Law, the Courts of, <a href="#Page_56">56-9</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Criminal, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Mosaic, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Law of Diminishing Return, the, <a href="#Page_91">91</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Law of Increasing Return, the, <a href="#Page_91">91</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laws, oppressive and unjust, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lawyers, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laziness, mental, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">League of Nations, the. <i>See</i> Nations</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lear, King, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Learned men, <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Learning, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Legislation, Socialistic, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Leicester, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Leisure, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">distribution of, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lenin, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Letters, anonymous, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">snowball, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Leverhulme, Lord, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Levies on capital are raids on private property, <a href="#Page_296">296</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lewis, George Cornewall, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Liberal impulse, the, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Liberal Party, the, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">working class members of, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">wiped out, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Liberalism, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">revolutionary traditions of, <a href="#Page_276">276</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Liberals, the, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Liberty, the desire for, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the fear of, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">unfair distribution of, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">natural limit to, <a href="#Page_319">319-30</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and Socialism, <a href="#Page_393">393-406</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Liberty of conscience, comparative, <a href="#Page_329">329</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Libraries, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lies, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lieutenants, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lighthouses, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and lightships, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Limitations of Capitalism, <a href="#Page_133">133-7</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lisbon, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lister, Joseph, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Literary property, <a href="#Page_104">104</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Literature, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">treasures of, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Little Englanders, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Liveries, <a href="#Page_75">75-6</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Liverpool, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lloyd George, David, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Loan Stock, <a href="#Page_301">301</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Local Government, <a href="#Page_352">352</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Local Government inspectors, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lock-outs, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Logic of Political Economy, DeQuincey’s, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">London, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">overpopulation of, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Socialist movement in, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">London citizen, the, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">London Midland and Scottish Railway, <a href="#Page_268">268</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Long Parliament, the, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Looting by ladies, <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Low Church Protestants, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Loyalty, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Luddites (machine wreckers), <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lumbermen, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lunatic asylums, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Luther, Martin, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Luxury trades, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Macaulay, T. B., <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">MacDonald, James Ramsay, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Machine guns, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Machinery, <a href="#Page_138">138-9</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">displaces labor, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Machinery wrecking, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Machines, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Madeira, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Magee, Bishop, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Magistrates, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Magna Carta, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mahomet, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mahometans, <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Majors, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Malaya, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Male prostitution, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mallock, William Hurrell, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Malverns, the, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mammon, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Man, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Man Question, the, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Management, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">routine, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">scientific, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Managerial ability, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Managers, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manchester, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manchester School, the, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manchester and Sheffield Outrages, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manchu ladies, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manifestoes, Communist, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manners, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mansion House funds, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manual labor, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manufacture of pins, the, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manufactured pleasures, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manufacturers, <a href="#Page_173">173</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manufacturing towns, overcrowded slums of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marbot, General, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marco Polo, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">travels of, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Markets, the struggle for, <a href="#Page_150">150-53</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marks, paper, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marriage, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">English, Scottish, and Irish, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marriage and the State, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marriages, unsuitable, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Married Men’s Rights agitation, <a href="#Page_329">329</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Married women, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Married Women’s Property Acts, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mars, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Martyrs, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marx, Karl, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_443">443</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>, <a href="#Page_466">466</a>, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_469">469</a>, <a href="#Page_470">470</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marxian class-consciousness, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marxism, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marxist Bible, the, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marxist Church, the, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marxist Communists, <a href="#Page_373">373</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marxist fanatics, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marxists, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marx’s slogan, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mary Queen of Scots, <a href="#Page_311">311</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mary Tudor, Queen, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Masons, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Master of the Mint, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Match girls, <a href="#Page_448">448</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Materialists, the, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mathematicians, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mating, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Matrons, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Maurice, Frederick Denison, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mayfair, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Means of production, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Medieval robber barons, <a href="#Page_417">417</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Medical research, <a href="#Page_437">437</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Medical schools, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mediterranean, annexations of the African coast, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Members of Parliament, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">payment of, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Men of science, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mental “defectives”, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mental work, unremunerative, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mephistopheles, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Merchant princes, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Merchants, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">gold, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">coal, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Merit, promotion by, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and money, <a href="#Page_70">70-71</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Messiah, political, <a href="#Page_318">318</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Metaphysics, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Methodist schools, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Methodists, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Middle class, the, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Middle class manners, <a href="#Page_418">418</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Middle station in life, the, <a href="#Page_168">168-76</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Middlemen, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Midgets, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Military officers, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Military rank, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Military service, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">compulsory, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">righteousness of, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mill, John Stuart, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_467">467</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mill hands, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Millennium, the, <a href="#Page_423">423</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Millers, oldtime, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Millionaires, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">commercial, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mines, the, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">nationalization of, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Miners, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and mine owners, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">grievances of, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mining, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ministry of Health, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mint, the, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">nationalization of, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Royal, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Misdeeds of the landed gentry, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Miseries of the rich, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Missionaries, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern conscience, the, <a href="#Page_423">423</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern domestic machinery, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern examination-passing classes, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern garden cities and suburbs, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern Italian and Spanish <i>coups d’état</i>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern living, the art of, <a href="#Page_422">422</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern psychological research, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern psychology, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern toleration a myth, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modern war, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Monarchs, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Money, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251-63</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">congested, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Martian, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">spare, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">measure of value, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a tool for buying and selling, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and merit, <a href="#Page_70">70-71</a>.</li>
+<li class="isub1"><i>See</i> Capital, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Money lenders, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Money market, the, <a href="#Page_231">231-9</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">fluctuation of, <a href="#Page_231">231</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Monogamy, <a href="#Page_411">411</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Monopoly, woman’s natural, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Monsters, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Monte Carlo, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Morality by Act of Parliament, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Morals, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Moratorium, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">More, Sir Thomas, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mormon theocracy, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mormon women, <a href="#Page_411">411</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mormonism, <a href="#Page_443">443</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mormons, the, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Morning Post, the, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Morocco, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Morris, William, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">his News from Nowhere, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Morris wallpapers, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mortality, excessive, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">infant, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mosaic Law, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Moscow, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Moscow Soviet, the, <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Moses, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Moslems, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mother, the author’s, <a href="#Page_104">104</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mothers, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">soldiers’, <a href="#Page_155">155-6</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">widowed, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and wives, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Motion, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">uncontrolled, <a href="#Page_315">315</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Motor bus companies, sham, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Motor cars, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Motor charabancs, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Motorists, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mount, Sermon on the, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mozart, W. A., <a href="#Page_339">339</a>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Multiple shops, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Multiplication table, the, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipal banks on the Birmingham model, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipal building always insolvent, <a href="#Page_273">273</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipal committees, <a href="#Page_352">352</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipal debt, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipal electric lighting, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipal exploitation, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipal service, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipal trading, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Municipalization, <a href="#Page_390">390</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Muscovite Marxist Church, the, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Museum, the British, <a href="#Page_16">16</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Music, school-taught, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mussolini, Benito, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nakedness, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Napoleon, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Napoleon III, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">National Debt, the, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cancellation of, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">increase of, <a href="#Page_289">289</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">National Debt redemption levies, <a href="#Page_294">294-7</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">National electrification scheme, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">National factories, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">National Gallery, the, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">National housekeeping, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">National Union of Railway Workers, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nationalists, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nationalization, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of banking, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264-8</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">must be prepared and compensated, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">theoretically sound, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of land, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">examples of, <a href="#Page_105">105-11</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nationalized banks, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nations, League of, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the present, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Natural limit to liberty, <a href="#Page_319">319-30</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Natural Selectionists, Darwinian, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nature, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_320">320</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cruelty of, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">hand of, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">human, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the supreme tyrant, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">tyranny of, <a href="#Page_80">80-83</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">voice of, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Navigators, <a href="#Page_422">422</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Navvies, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Navy captains, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Need for play, the, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Needle manufacturers, <a href="#Page_258">258</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Negro slavery, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nell Gwynne, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nelson, Horatio, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Neuters, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Neva, the, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">New Capitalist method, the, <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">New churches and secular governments, <a href="#Page_434">434</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">New companies, insecurity of, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">New pauperism, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">New River Water Company, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">New Testament, the, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">New York, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Newspaper Articles, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Newspapers, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">respectable English, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Newton, Isaac, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nicene Creed, the, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Night cafés, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Night clubs, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nightingale, Florence, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nightingales, two-headed, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nineteenth century revolution of 1832, the, <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nineveh, <a href="#Page_372">372</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nitrogen, supply of, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nobel, Alfred, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Noblemen, old-fashioned, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Non-commissioned officers, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nonconformist Protestant ratepayers, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nonconformists, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">persecution of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nonconformity, <a href="#Page_425">425</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Northern Europe, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Novels, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nuns, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">enclosed, <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nurses, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nursing, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Ocean cables, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Officers, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">military, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">non-commissioned, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oil harvests, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oil shops, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Old age pensions, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Old horses, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Old-fashioned parents, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oligarchs, patrician, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oligarchy, <a href="#Page_30">30-35</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oliver Twist, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Olivier, Sidney (Lord), <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Opera, the, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Opera singers, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Operators of calculating machines, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Opium war, the, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Opportunists, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cautious, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Orators, political, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Order of production, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Organizers, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Outrages, Trade Union, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Overcrowding, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Overpopulation, artificial, <a href="#Page_90">90</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Overwork, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Owen, Robert, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oxford University, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Pacific, the, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pacifism, <a href="#Page_449">449</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Painlevé, Paul, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Painters, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Palaces, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Palm Beach, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pampering, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Panem et circenses</i>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pantheists, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Paper money, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Papers, the, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">capitalist and anti-capitalist, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">capitalist, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the Sunday, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the daily, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">illustrated, <a href="#Page_66">66</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Paraclete, the, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parasitic paradises, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parasitic proletariat, revolt of the, <a href="#Page_277">277-9</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parasitism, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84-5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parcel Post, C.O.D. development of, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parentage, compulsory, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">State endowment of, <a href="#Page_411">411</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parents, the author’s, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and children, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">old-fashioned, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">old Roman rights of, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">natural and adoptive, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">proletarian, <a href="#Page_392">392</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Paris, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Paris Commune of 1871, the, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parish Councils, <a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parish meetings, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Park Lane, <a href="#Page_276">276</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parks, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_400">400</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parliament, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60-61</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in Gladstone’s time, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and the Churches, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parliamentary Labor Party, the, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parliamentary struggle, the, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parlormaids, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Parsons, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Partnerships, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Party candidates, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Party discipline, less rigorous now, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Party newspapers, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Party politics, <a href="#Page_343">343-8</a>, <a href="#Page_420">420</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Party System, the, <a href="#Page_348">348-54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Party Whips, <a href="#Page_349">349</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pasteur, Louis, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Patents, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Patriotism, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Paul, Saint, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_459">459</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pauperization, national, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pawnbrokers, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Pax Americana</i>, the, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Payment of M.P.’s, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pearls, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">imitation, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Peasant proprietors, French, <a href="#Page_374">374</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Peasant proprietorship, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Peerages, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Peers, Irish, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pence, Peter’s, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Penn, William, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Penny postage, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Penny transport, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pensions, old age, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">widows’, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Penzance, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Persecution of Russians in America, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Personal liberty, the pet topic of the leisured class, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Personal property, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Personal righteousness, <a href="#Page_95">95-9</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Personal talent, possessors of, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Peru, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pessimism, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a by-product of capitalism, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pet dogs, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Peter, Saint, <a href="#Page_12">12</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Peter the Great, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Peterborough, the Bishop of, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Petrograd, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Philanthropy, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Philosophers, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Philosophy, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Phosphorus poisoning, <a href="#Page_199">199</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Physicians, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Physicists, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Physics, <a href="#Page_423">423</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pickpockets, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Picture galleries, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Picture gallery attendants, <a href="#Page_79">79</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Piece work, <a href="#Page_79">79</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Piece work wages, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Piece worker, the, <a href="#Page_323">323</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Piers, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pin machines, <a href="#Page_333">333</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pin makers, <a href="#Page_333">333</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pin money, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pin-making, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pinero, Sir Arthur, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pins, manufacture of, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pirate crews, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pirates, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pisteurs. <i>See</i> Dancing partners</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pitt, William, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Plagues, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Plato, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_454">454</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Platonic rule, the, <a href="#Page_338">338</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Play, need for, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Playing, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Plays, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pleasures, manufactured, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Plumbers, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Plutocracy, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poincaré, Raymond, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poison gas, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poison gas shells, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Police, the, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Police constables, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Police officers, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Policemen, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Policewomen, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Political disciplinarians, <a href="#Page_318">318</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Political economy, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">bad, <a href="#Page_50">50-51</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Polygamy, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Solomonic, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Polytechnics, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pooh-Bah, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poor, legalized robbery of the, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poor Law, the, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Government administration of, <a href="#Page_330">330</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poor Law Guardians, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poor Law officers, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poor Law relief, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poor relations, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poor white trash, <a href="#Page_322">322</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pope, the, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Popes, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poplar, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poplarism, <a href="#Page_305">305</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Popular inventions, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Popularity of lavish expenditure, <a href="#Page_66">66</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Population, checks on, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">decrease in France and increase in Germany, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">importance of rate of increase, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Population question, the, <a href="#Page_83">83-92</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pork packers, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Port Sunlight, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Porters, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">ambulance, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">railway, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Portsmouth, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Positive reasons for equality, <a href="#Page_68">68-70</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Positivist societies, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Post Office, the, <a href="#Page_106">106-7</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Post Office Savings Bank, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Post offices and savings banks, national, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Postal conventions, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Postal system, the, <a href="#Page_391">391</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Postmasters, <a href="#Page_70">70</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Postmaster-General, the, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Postmen, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Postmistresses, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Potter, Beatrice, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>. <i>See</i> Webb, Beatrice</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Poverty, <a href="#Page_42">42-5</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">abolition of, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">as a punishment, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Franciscan, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">infectious, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and pestilence, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and progress, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Powers, the leading military, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Practical business men, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prayer Book, revision of the, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Preachers, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Precedence, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pregnancy, <a href="#Page_326">326</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prejudice and common sense, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Preliminaries to nationalization, <a href="#Page_274">274-6</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Preparatory schools, <a href="#Page_417">417</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Presence, the Real, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Presidents, American, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Presidents and patriarchs, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Press, the, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>. <i>See</i> Newspapers</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Press, Church, and school, <a href="#Page_63">63-5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prices, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prices and profits, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Priests, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">power of, <a href="#Page_430">430</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prima donnas, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prime Minister, the average Capitalist, <a href="#Page_308">308</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prime Ministers, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Jewish and Gentile, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Primo di Rivera, General, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Primogeniture, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prince Rupert’s Drop, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prince of Wales, the, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Princes, merchant, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prisons, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Private enterprise, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131-3</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">proper business of, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and public utility, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Private property, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Privates, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prize-fighters, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prize-fights, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proclamations, royal or dictatorial, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Professional billiard players, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Professional classes, the, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Professional fees, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Professional politicians, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Professions open to women, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Professors, university, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Profiteers, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Profits, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">not a measure of utility, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and prices, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Progress and Poverty</i>, Henry George’s, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prohibition, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletarian dictators, <a href="#Page_379">379</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletarian leader, the typical, <a href="#Page_452">452</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletarian papers, the, <a href="#Page_342">342</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletarian parents, <a href="#Page_392">392</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletarian resistance to Capitalism, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletarian voters, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletarianism, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletarians, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proletariat, the, <a href="#Page_183">183-6</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_448">448</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">parasitic and Socialist, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">plunder of, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and proprietariat, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Promiscuity, social, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Promised Land, the, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Promoters, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Promotion, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Property, literary, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">personal, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">private, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">real, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">secures maximum of leisure to owners, <a href="#Page_323">323</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Property owners, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proportional Representation, <a href="#Page_454">454</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proprietary Trade Unionism, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prostitutes, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prostitution, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">male, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Protection, <a href="#Page_150">150</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Protectionists from the Midlands, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Protestants, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Proudhon, Joseph, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pseudo-Socialism, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Psycho-analysis, the morbidities of, <a href="#Page_420">420</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Psychology, <a href="#Page_365">365</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Public departments, <a href="#Page_376">376</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Public Health Committees, <a href="#Page_352">352</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Public houses, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Public libraries, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Public opinion, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Public schools, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Public trustee, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Public works, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Punch</i>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Punjab, the, <a href="#Page_355">355</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Purchasing power, transfer of from the rich to the Government, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Purdah, women in, <a href="#Page_355">355</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">“Pussyfoot” Johnson, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Quack cures, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">remedies, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Quaker meetings, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">schools, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Quakers, the, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Quarrelling, domestic, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Quartermaster-sergeants, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Queen, the, <a href="#Page_385">385</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Racehorse trainers, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Racing stables, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Radicals, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Radio, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Radium, the cost of, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ragpickers, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Raid on Russian Arcos Officers, the, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railroadmaster-General, wanted a, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway, the Great Western, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway, the London, Midland and Scottish, <a href="#Page_268">268</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway accidents, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway Board, wanted a, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway chairmen, <a href="#Page_389">389</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway guards, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway porters, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway signalmen, <a href="#Page_315">315</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway travelling, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railway workers, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railwaymen, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Railways, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">State, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rank, military, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">“Rat-houses” (non-union), <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rate collectors, <a href="#Page_14">14</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ratepayers, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">exploited by workers, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rates, <a href="#Page_117">117-22</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and taxes, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Reactionaries, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Real property, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Reason, goddess of, <a href="#Page_365">365</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Recognition of Trade Unions, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Red Cross, the, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Red flag, the, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Red Indian morals, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Red Russian scare, the, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Redistribution of income, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Reform Bill of 1832, the, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Reformation, the, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Reforms, disguised, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">popular, <a href="#Page_299">299</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Registrar, the civil, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Registrar-General, the, <a href="#Page_303">303</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Relations, poor, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Religion, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">male and female, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Religious dissensions, <a href="#Page_359">359-70</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Religious instruction hour, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rent, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122-6</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the meaning of, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rent of ability, <a href="#Page_331">331-43</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">called profit, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Republic, the Communist, <a href="#Page_374">374</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Republican Governments, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Republicans, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Research, scientific, <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rest cures, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Restaurants, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Resting, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Restricting output, <a href="#Page_208">208</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Resumption of land by the Crown, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Retail trade less respectable than wholesale, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Retail traders, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Retail trades, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Revolt of the parasitic proletariat, <a href="#Page_277">277-9</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Revolution, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the industrial, <a href="#Page_137">137-40</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the Russian, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Revolutionists, <a href="#Page_147">147</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Revolutions, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370-79</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rhodes, Cecil, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rhodesia, <a href="#Page_313">313</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ricardo, David, <a href="#Page_465">465</a>, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rich, the idle, <a href="#Page_59">59-62</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">miseries of the, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the new, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the old, now called the New Poor, <a href="#Page_270">270</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rich women, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Righteousness, personal, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rioters, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Riveters, <a href="#Page_224">224</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Riviera, the, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roads, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">metalled, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roadways, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roaming, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roberts of Kandahar, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Robespierre, Maximilien, <a href="#Page_365">365</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Robinson Crusoe, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rockefeller, John Davidson, <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rockefeller charities, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rogues, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roi Soleil, le, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roman Catholic schools, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roman Catholicism, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roman Catholics, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roman Empire, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rome, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">ancient, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Church of, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roulette table, the, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rousseau, Jean Jacques, <a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Routine, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Routine management, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Routine work, <a href="#Page_327">327</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Royal Academy of Arts, the, <a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Royal Family, the, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rubber harvests, <a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ruined shopkeepers, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ruins of empires, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Runaway car of Capitalism, the, <a href="#Page_314">314-19</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ruskin, John, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_466">466</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_467">467</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">his Ethics of the Dust, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Fors Clavigera, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russia, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_373">373</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dictatorship in, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian Archbishop, the, <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian Capitalist civilization, <a href="#Page_376">376</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian Communist, the, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian Government, the, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian International Church, the, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian landlords, <a href="#Page_270">270</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian peasants, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">people, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian Revolution, the, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian Revolutionaries, <a href="#Page_14">14</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian Soviet, the, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_406">406</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian State, the, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian subscription to Strike funds, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russian word Bolshevik, the, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Russians, the, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Sables, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sadists, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Safety valves, <a href="#Page_279">279-84</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sailors, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saint Augustine, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saint Francis, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saint Helena, the island of, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saint Joan, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saint Paul, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_459">459</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saint Peter, <a href="#Page_12">12</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saint Simon, the speculations of, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saints, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Salt Lake City, the Latter Day Saints of, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Samaritans, Good, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Francisco, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sanitary inspectors, public, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sapphira, <a href="#Page_12">12</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saving, the fallacy of, <a href="#Page_6">6-7</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Savings banks, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Savings certificates, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Savior, the, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_463">463</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saviors, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sawgrinders, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sawyers, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scabs, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scarecrows, boy, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scavengers, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scent, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Schadenfreude</i>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Schiller, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scholarships, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">School, Church, and Press, <a href="#Page_63">63-5</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">School attendance, compulsory, <a href="#Page_349">349</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">School attendance visitors, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">School teaching, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Schoolchildren, <a href="#Page_368">368</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Schoolmasters, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Schoolmistresses, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Schools, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">like Bastilles, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">like prisons or child-farms, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">public, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">village, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">secondary, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">State, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">elementary, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">preparatory, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">infant, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Science, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_461">461</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and State compulsion, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">power of, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">professors of, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scientific management, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scotland, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_431">431</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">shooting lodges in, <a href="#Page_251">251</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scotland Yard, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scriveners, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sculleries, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scullerymaids, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sculptors, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sea captains, <a href="#Page_422">422</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Second-rate work, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Secondary schools, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Secretaries of State, <a href="#Page_352">352</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Self-government in Egypt, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Selfridge’s, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Selkirk, Alexander, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sempstresses, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sending capital out of the country, <a href="#Page_140">140-44</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sentries, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Separatist sects, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Serajevo murder, the, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Serbia, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Serfdom, <a href="#Page_10">10</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Serfs, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sergeants, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sermon on the Mount, the, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Servants, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118-19</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">domestic, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83-4</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Service, domestic, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Service, military, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">compulsory, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">righteousness of, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Service flats, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Services, international and national, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Seven ways of distribution, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Seventeenth-century revolutions, <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Severn, the, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sewermen, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sex, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sextons, <a href="#Page_93">93</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shaftesbury, Lord, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shakespear, William, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sham Socialism, <a href="#Page_299">299-308</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shareholders, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shares, buying and selling, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">imaginary, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">preference and ordinary, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shaw, Bernard, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_470">470</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sheep runs, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sheffield, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sheffield sawgrinders, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shelley, Percy Bysshe, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shifting centres of empires, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ship captains, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shipyards, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shoes, high-heeled, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shooting boxes, <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shop assistants, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_397">397</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shop Hours Act, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shopkeepers, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shopkeeping, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shopmen, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shopping, <a href="#Page_105">105-11</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shops, bucket, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">multiple, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Shorthand typists, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Showrooms, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Siamese twins, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Silk stockings, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, Bunyan’s, <a href="#Page_318">318</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Singers, two-headed, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Single taxers, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sirdar, the, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sisters, the Tudor, <a href="#Page_368">368</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Skyscrapers, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slaters, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slave trade, the, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slavedrivers, <a href="#Page_338">338</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slavery, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slogan, Marx’s, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sloggers, <a href="#Page_208">208</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slumps, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slum towns, demolition of, <a href="#Page_281">281</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slum userers, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Slums, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_378">378</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smallpox epidemics, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smith, Adam, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smith, Joseph, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smithies, village, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smoke, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smoke abatement, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smuggling, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of drugs, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Snobbery, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Snowball letters, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soap kings, <a href="#Page_170">170</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Social changes, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Social creed, the, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Socialism, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">alarmist idea of, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and children, <a href="#Page_412">412-29</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and liberty, <a href="#Page_393">393-406</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and marriage, <a href="#Page_406">406-12</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and superior brains, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and the Churches, <a href="#Page_429">429-43</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">as a religion, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">books on, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Catholic rather than democratic, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">constitutional, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+<li class="isub1">constructive political machinery of, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">diagnostic of, <a href="#Page_92">92-4</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dread of, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">emotional, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">establishment of, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">fancy, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">first and last commandment of, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">genuine and sham, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">idealist, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">matter of law, not personal righteousness, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">new, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">not charity, <a href="#Page_95">95-6</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">object of, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">secular, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">series of Parliamentary measures, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">unskilled, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">utopian and theocratic, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Socialist societies, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Socialist State and the child, the, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Socialists, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a mixed lot, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and Trade Unionists, Cabinet of, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">deprecate bloodshed, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">joining the, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">who are not Socialists, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Society of Friends, the, <a href="#Page_435">435</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">S.P.C.C., the, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">records of, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sociologists, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Socrates, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soldiering, not advisable for women, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soldiers, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_390">390</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_433">433</a>, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">demobilized, <a href="#Page_147">147</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soldiers’ mothers, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soldiers’ wives, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Solent, the, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Solicitors, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_458">458</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Solomon, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Solomonic polygamy, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Solon, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Sonata, the Pathetic</i>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Song of the Shirt</i>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soot, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The</i>, <a href="#Page_157">157-61</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sorceresses, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soul, the, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">South Africa, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">South African War, the, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">South America, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>, <a href="#Page_437">437</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">South American Revolutions, <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">South Carolina, the State of, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">South of England, the, <a href="#Page_372">372</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">South Sea Islands, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Southampton, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soviet, the Russian, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_406">406</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soviet legislators, the, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Soviets, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spain, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_453">453</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dictatorship in, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spare food, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spare money. <i>See</i> Capital, and Capitalism</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spartacus, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spartan routine of the old rich, <a href="#Page_60">60</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Speculation, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239-43</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Speech, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spencer, Herbert, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spencer, Robert, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>. <i>See</i> Sunderland, Earl of</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spinoza, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sport, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sports, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Squeers, Mr, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stage, the, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Standard wages, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Star Chamber, the, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_434">434</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stars and Stripes, the, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Starvation wages, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">State Capitalism, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">State interference, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">with Church teaching, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">State railways, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">State schools, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Statesmen, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stationmasters, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Steamships, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Steel smelters, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stenographers. <i>See</i> Typists</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stewardesses, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stock Exchange, the, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stockbreeding, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stockbrokers, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stockjobbers, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stonehenge, <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Strawberries, January, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Strike, the General, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Strikes, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Socialist remedies for, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Strindberg, August, <a href="#Page_470">470</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Struggle between Capitalist and Labor Parties in Parliament, <a href="#Page_286">286</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stupid women, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Subalterns, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Subsidies, exploitations of the taxpayer by bankrupt Capitalism, <a href="#Page_305">305</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Subsidies and doles demoralizing, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Subsidized private enterprise, <a href="#Page_386">386-91</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Subsistence wage, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sudan, the, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Suez Canal, the, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Suffragettes, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Suffragists, <a href="#Page_318">318</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Summer schools, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sunday clothes, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sunday golf, <a href="#Page_329">329</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sunday Observance Acts, <a href="#Page_322">322</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sunday school teachers, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sunderland, the Earl of, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Supernationalism, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Supertax, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Supply and demand, <a href="#Page_248">248</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Surgeons, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Surgical baronets, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Surveyors, <a href="#Page_422">422</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Suttee, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sweating, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sweating of one industry by another, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sweden, <a href="#Page_448">448</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Swift, Dean, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Swindlers, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Switzerland, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Syndicalism, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Syndicalists, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Tailors, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Talent, exploitation of, <a href="#Page_333">333</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tanners, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tax collectors, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tax on credit, resultant chaos from, <a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Taxation, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of unearned incomes, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of capital as a means of nationalizing without compensating, <a href="#Page_277">277</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Taxes, <a href="#Page_111">111-17</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tea, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Teachers, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_412">412</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">State, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Teaching, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">coercive, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">corrupt, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Teetotallers, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Telegrams, <a href="#Page_136">136</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Telegraph rates, <a href="#Page_136">136</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Telephone messages, <a href="#Page_136">136</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Telephone operators, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Telephone and telegraph services, III, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Telephones, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Telephoning, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ten Commandments, the, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tenements, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thackeray, William Makepeace, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Theatre, the art of the, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Theatres, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Theocracy, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Theosophist schools, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thibet, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thieves, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Third-class travel, <a href="#Page_419">419</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thirty-nine Articles, the, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thompson, Big Bill, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Three R’s, the, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thrift, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thucydides, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thugs, the, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Thurso, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tides, the, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tied houses, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Time wages, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tinville, Fouquier, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Titles, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Toasters, electric, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tobacconists, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tokio, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Toll bridges, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tolstoy, Leo, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tono-Bungay, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Toots, Mr, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tories, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and Whigs, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Torquemada, Thomas de, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tourists, American, <a href="#Page_314">314</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tower of Babel, the, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trade, the. <i>See</i> Drink</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trade Union Capitalism, <a href="#Page_204">204-13</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trade Union secretaries, <a href="#Page_451">451</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trade Unionism, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>, <a href="#Page_462">462</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">weakness of, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">aristocracy of, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">first really scientific history of, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a contradiction of Socialism, <a href="#Page_355">355</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trade Unionist Government, <a href="#Page_224">224</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trade Unionists, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">number of, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and Socialists, Cabinet of, <a href="#Page_221">221</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trade Unions, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>, <a href="#Page_462">462</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Capitalist, <a href="#Page_225">225</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trades Facilities Acts, <a href="#Page_313">313</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tradesmen, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_457">457</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trading stations, <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trains, <a href="#Page_401">401</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tramps, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tramways, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">horse, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Transport services, <a href="#Page_383">383</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Transport Workers’ Union, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trappists, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Treasuries, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Treasury, the, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_390">390</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Treasury notes, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Treaties, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tripoli, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trollope, Anthony, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Troops, <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trotsky, Leo, <a href="#Page_376">376</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trustee, the Public, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trusts, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tsar, the, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tsardom, the, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">collapse of, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tsars, marriage under the, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tunisia, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Turgot, <a href="#Page_459">459</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Turkey, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Turnpike roads, <a href="#Page_131">131-2</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Turnpikes, <a href="#Page_14">14</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Twain, Mark, <a href="#Page_392">392</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Twist, Oliver, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Two-headed nightingales, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Typhus epidemics, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Typists, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tyranny, of nature, <a href="#Page_80">80-83</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">pseudo-scientific, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">social, <a href="#Page_405">405</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tyrants, <a href="#Page_444">444</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Ugly children, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ulster, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Uncles in Australia, <a href="#Page_67">67</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Undertakers, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unearned incomes, <a href="#Page_112">112</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unemployment, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unemployment insurance, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unemployment insurance officers, <a href="#Page_394">394</a> 395</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unhappiness incurable by money, <a href="#Page_41">41</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Union Congresses, the, <a href="#Page_451">451</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Union Jack, the, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Union of Mathematical Instrument Makers, <a href="#Page_417">417</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Union of Soviet Republics, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unionists, the, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unitarian schools, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">United States, the, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>. <i>See</i> America</li>
+
+<li class="indx">United States Government, the, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Universities, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_417">417</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>. <i>See</i> Oxford and Cambridge</li>
+
+<li class="indx">University extension lectures, <a href="#Page_456">456</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">University professors, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">manners, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">snobs, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">students, <a href="#Page_417">417</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unladylike activities, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unmarried daughter and younger son class, the genteel disendowed, <a href="#Page_415">415</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unmarried daughters, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unpaid magistrates, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unproductive labor, <a href="#Page_85">85</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unsuitable marriages, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Unwillingness to be governed, our, <a href="#Page_318">318</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Upholsterers, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Urdu, <a href="#Page_355">355</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Utopias, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Vaccination, compulsory, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vaccination officers, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vaccinia, generalized, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vacuum cleaners, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Valets, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Value of Greek, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of men and women, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of souls, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vegetarianism, <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Venereal disease, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vermin, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vesuvius, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Victoria, Queen, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Victorian employers, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">ladies, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">parents, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">point of view, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">women, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Village blacksmiths, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">carpenters, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">schools, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Villagers, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Villages, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">American, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Virgil, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Virtue, female, <a href="#Page_199">199</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vivisectors, <a href="#Page_460">460</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Voice of Nature, the, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Voluntary work, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Volunteer armies, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Voltaire, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_454">454</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Voter, the female, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Votes for everybody, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Votes for women, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>, <a href="#Page_454">454</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Wage workers, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wages, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">standard, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of sin, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">wives’, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">time and piecework, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wages Boards, <a href="#Page_224">224</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wagner, Richard, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Waiters, <a href="#Page_149">149</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Waitresses, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_448">448</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wall Street, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wallas, Graham, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">War, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">modern, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the late (1914-1918), <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>, <a href="#Page_450">450</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the South African, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">General Strike against, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">War Debt, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">to America, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">domestic, <a href="#Page_296">296</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">War Loan, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">War Loan interest, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">War Loan register, <a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">War Loan Stock, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">War Office, the, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">War taxation, <a href="#Page_114">114-15</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wardresses, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Warehousemen, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Warwick, Countess of, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Washerwomen, <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Washing, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Washington, George, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Waste of time, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Watch committees, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Water power, wasted, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Water wagon, the, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Watts, G. F., <a href="#Page_233">233</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Weary Willies, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Weavers, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Weaving mills, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Weaving sheds, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Sidney, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Beatrice, <a href="#Page_467">467</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wedding presents, <a href="#Page_18">18</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Weeding the world, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Week ends, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wellington, the Duke of, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">his horse, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wells, H. G., <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wembley, <a href="#Page_28">28</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wesley, John, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Western women, extravagances of, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">West Indian plantations, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Westminster, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Westminster Abbey, <a href="#Page_329">329</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Westminster Confession, the, <a href="#Page_425">425</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">What we should buy first, <a href="#Page_49">49-52</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Whigs, the, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">and Tories, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Whips, the, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Whist drives, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Whiteley’s, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wholesale trade formerly more respectable than retail, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wholesalers, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Why confiscation has succeeded hitherto, <a href="#Page_284">284-8</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Widows’ pensions, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wife and mother, the occupation of, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wight, Isle of, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">William the Conqueror, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">William III, King, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">William IV, King, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Windfalls, <a href="#Page_67">67</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wireless concerts, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wireless sets, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Witchcraft, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wives and mothers, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wives’ wages, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Woman, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Scarlet, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Woman question, the, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Woman’s natural monopoly, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Women, changeable, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">clever, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">stupid, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">married, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">rich, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in the labor market, <a href="#Page_196">196-204</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Woodcutters, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Woodman, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Woolbrokers, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Woolwich Arsenal, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Work, an author’s, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">craze for, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">creative, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">routine, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">first-rate, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">second-rate, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Workers, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">equal leisure for, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">open-air, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">scientific, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">snobbery among, <a href="#Page_400">400</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Workhouse, the, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the general, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Workmen, <a href="#Page_388">388</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">World War, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wrecking, <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Yahoos, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Younger son and unmarried daughter class, <a href="#Page_415">415</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">Zanzibar, <a href="#Page_314">314</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="transnote">
+
+<p class="c">Transcriber’s Notes:</p>
+
+<p>Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.</p>
+
+<p>Perceived typographical errors have been changed.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75859 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this book outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+book #75859 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75859)