forth the actual political programme or “platform,” as it is called
in America, of the Fabian Society. Yes, that is just what I am going
to do. As the Fabian Society holds that social transformation must
be gradual, unless there is to be a general smash-up, it proposes a
series of reforms for effecting the gradual change of society into
a really social democratic state. But these reforms, it will be
understood, are adopted with a distinct end in view, which fact makes
all the difference between people of principle and mere opportunists
who have no end in view other than the personal end of lining their
own pockets. The following, then, are the planks of the Fabian
political platform: Adult suffrage, Parliamentary and municipal,
one vote for each man and each woman of twenty-one and upwards who
are not in prison or in a lunatic asylum. The second ballot, as in
France, Germany and Switzerland, so that whoever is elected will have
an absolute majority of the votes polled. Payment of members by the
state and of election expenses by the district (it must be remembered
that at present representatives are not paid in England). Taxation of
unearned incomes by such means as a land tax, heavy death duties to
go to municipalities, and a progressive income tax. Municipalization
of land and local industries, so that free and honorable municipal
employment may be substituted for private charity, which, to vary a
well-known line of Shakespeare, is twice cursed,--it curseth him who
gives and him who takes. All education to be at the public cost for all
classes, including manual as well as book training. Nationalization
of all canals and railways, so that the public highways may belong to
the public, as they always did until the new era of steam, when they
got into the hands of capitalists. It is as ridiculous to pay Mr.
Vanderbilt if you happen to want to go from New York to Chicago as it
would be to pay him if you desired to take a walk down Fifth Avenue.
The eight hours day for wage-workers in all government and municipal
offices, in all monopolies like coal mines and railways, and in all
industries where the workers want it. Parish councils for the laborers,
with compulsory power to acquire land to build dwellings, to administer
schools and charities, and to engage in co-operative farming.
Such is the programme through the adoption of which the Fabian Society
believes that the country once called “merry England,” but the greater
portion of which is now dreary and sordid and cursed with poverty,
might again be really happy and be converted into a land of real and
not of sham freedom. And now a word, in conclusion, on an important
point,--the relation of the intellectual proletariat, as it has been
called, to the masses, of the educated young men to the bulk of
the working classes. Most of the members of the Fabian Society are
educated, middle-class people, though there are workingmen connected
with it also. What is to be the relation of these educated middle-class
people to the swarming multitudes of workers? This is a vital social
question, the most vital we have immediately before us. One remembers
what Matthew Arnold said in America,--that the salvation of modern
society lay in the hands of a remnant. I should be inclined to put it
rather differently, and to say that, if the social evolution is to be
peaceful and rational, it must be effected by the union of a cultivated
remnant with the masses of the toiling people. American optimism may
chafe at the little word “if.” Can there be any doubt, you may ask,
that we shall go on prosperously and peacefully? I reply, yes, there is
quite good enough ground for doubting this. As Mr. Pearson, the author
of that remarkable book on “National Life and Character,” which has
impressed us in England very deeply, has said, ancient civilization in
the times of the Antonines seemed as firm and strong as does ours, nay,
stronger, for it had, in the main, lasted as many centuries as ours has
lasted decades.
Stout was its arm, each nerve and bone
Seemed puissant and alive.
Had you predicted then to a Roman senator that the splendid Greco-Roman
cities would be given to the flames, and that the Roman Senate and
legions would be trampled down by ignorant hordes of barbarians, he
would have smiled, offered you another cup of Falernian wine, and
changed the subject. Yet we know this happened; and I confess I can
see nothing in our mushroom civilization which we have any particular
right to regard as inherently more enduring than the elaborate and
stately organism of Roman jurisprudence. But there are no barbarians!
Yes, there are; but they are not outside us,--they are in our midst.
Do you suppose that the grim victim of crushing poverty in a London
attic or a Berlin cellar cares one pin’s head for all the heritage
of the world’s thought which appeals to the highly educated? How are
these huge masses of poor people to be welded into a great phalanx,
to be induced to subordinate their passions to the demands of reason,
to look not merely at the needs of the moment, but at those of next
year, to realize that the world cannot be remade in a day, but yet
that it can be so reconstituted as to give all opportunities to live
as human beings should? Silly people are always talking nonsense about
the danger of “agitators.” I know all about agitators. I know nearly
every prominent agitator in Great Britain; and I can say confidently
that it is the agitators who have to hold back, to restrain the people
from rash and even mad action. The record of every English strike would
show that this was the case. If all the labor leaders and agitators
were silenced, it would be the very worst thing that could befall the
capitalist class. The masses are at present, at the very best, an army
of privates without officers. This is not their fault; it is their
misfortune. They have not had the training, the culture, which enables
them to meet rich men and their agents on equal ground. An English
statesman, whose name is known the world over, said privately to me
not long ago: “The labor men here in the House of Commons are all good
fellows, but they are no use as leaders; the principal men of either
party can twist them round their fingers with the greatest ease. If the
labor movement is to be a success, it must be led by educated men.” I
believe that verdict of one of the ablest and best-informed public men
now living to be true. To what does it point? To the union of culture
with labor, to reform this badly-jointed system. Only, be it observed,
it must be union on equal terms. There must be no lofty condescension
on the part of culture any more than base truckling on the part of
labor. It must be an equal copartnership, where each partner recognizes
that the other has something which he needs. And let me say, as one
who knows workmen, that, in a certain and very real way, culture has
as much to learn from labor as labor from culture. Let the cultured
man approach the laboring man on perfectly equal terms, in a cordial
and open way; and let both unite to deliver a groaning world from the
bondage of riches. English experience shows that this can be done;
and this idea is to a very great degree the _idée mère_ of the Fabian
Society, whose members have no higher ambition than to mingle freely
with the workmen and share in the common life. By this means the hatred
and suspicion felt by the French and German workmen towards any one who
wears a black coat is eliminated, and both labor and culture gain in
breadth, knowledge and sympathy, and the cause of rational progress is
rendered more secure. Walt Whitman has told us, in “Leaves of Grass,”
how he went “freely with powerful, uneducated persons,”--a gospel which
Mr. John Addington Symonds, in his essay on Whitman, tells us, saved
him from being a prig. And this gospel of free intercourse with the
so-called “common people,” who are neither saints nor great sinners,
but real men, more real than the conventional middle-class man can
ever afford to be, is the healthiest, best advice which I can give to
cultivated men.
THE FABIAN ESSAYS.
PREFACE.
The essays in this volume were prepared last year as a course of
lectures for delivery before mixed audiences in London and the
provinces. They have been revised for publication, but not recast. The
matter is put, not as an author would put it to a student, but as a
speaker with only an hour at his disposal has to put it to an audience.
Country readers may accept the book as a sample of the propaganda
carried on by volunteer lecturers in the workmen’s clubs and political
associations of London.[1] Metropolitan readers will have the advantage
of making themselves independent of the press critic by getting face
to face with the writers, stripping the veil of print from their
personality, cross-examining, criticising, calling them to account
amid surroundings which inspire no awe, and before the most patient
of audiences. For any Sunday paper which contains a lecture list will
shew where some, if not all, of the seven essayists may be heard for
nothing; and on all such occasions questions and discussion form part
of the procedure.
The projection and co-ordination of these lectures is not the work
of any individual. The nominal editor is only the member told off to
arrange for the publication of the papers, and see them through the
press with whatever editorial ceremony might be necessary. Everything
that is usually implied by the authorship and editing of a book has in
this case been done by the seven essayists, associated as the Executive
Council of the Fabian Society; and not one of the essays could be
what it is had the writer been a stranger to his six colleagues and
to the Society. But there has been no sacrifice of individuality--no
attempt to cut out every phrase and opinion the responsibility for
which would not be accepted by every one of the seven. Had the sections
been differently allotted, they would have been differently treated,
though the net result would probably have been the same. The writers
are all Social Democrats, with a common conviction of the necessity of
vesting the organization of industry and the material of production in
a State identified with the whole people by complete Democracy. But
that conviction is peculiar to no individual bias: it is a Capitol to
which all roads lead; and at least seven of them are represented in
these Fabian Essays; so that the reader need not fear oppression here,
any more than in the socialized State of the future, by the ascendancy
of one particular cast of mind.
There are at present no authoritative teachers of Socialism. The
essayists make no claim to be more than communicative learners.
LONDON, December, 1889.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In the year ending April, 1889, the number of lectures delivered by
members of the Fabian Society alone was upwards of 700.
THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.
ECONOMIC.
BY G. BERNARD SHAW.
All economic analyses begin with the cultivation of the earth. To the
mind’s eye of the astronomer, the earth is a ball spinning in space
without ulterior motives. To the bodily eye of the primitive cultivator
it is a vast green plain, from which, by sticking a spade into it,
wheat and other edible matters can be made to spring. To the eye of the
sophisticated city man, this vast green plain appears rather as a great
gaming-table, your chances in the game depending chiefly on the place
where you deposit your stakes. To the economist, again, the green plain
is a sort of burial-place of hidden treasure, where all the forethought
and industry of man are set at naught by the caprice of the power which
hid the treasure. The wise and patient workman strikes his spade in
here, and with heavy toil can discover nothing but a poor quality of
barley, some potatoes and plentiful nettles, with a few dock leaves
to cure his stings. The foolish spendthrift on the other side of the
hedge, gazing idly at the sand glittering in the sun, suddenly realizes
that the earth is offering him gold--is dancing it before his listless
eyes lest it should escape him. Another man, searching for some more
of this tempting gold, comes upon a great hoard of coal, or taps a jet
of petroleum. Thus is Man mocked by Earth, his step-mother, and never
knows as he tugs at her closed hand whether it contains diamonds or
flints, good red wheat or a few clayey and blighted cabbages. Thus,
too, he becomes a gambler, and scoffs at the theorists who prate of
industry and honesty and equality. Yet against this fate he eternally
rebels. For since in gambling the many must lose in order that the few
may win; since dishonesty is mere shadow-grasping where every one is
dishonest; and since inequality is bitter to all except the highest,
and miserably lonely for him, men come greatly to desire that these
capricious gifts of Nature might be intercepted by some agency having
the power and the goodwill to distribute them justly according to the
labor done by each in the collective search for them. This desire is
Socialism; and, as a means to its fulfilment, Socialists have devised
communes, kingdoms, principalities, churches, manors, and finally,
when all these had succumbed to the old gambling spirit, the Social
Democratic State, which yet remains to be tried. As against Socialism,
the gambling spirit urges man to allow no rival to come between his
private individual powers and Step-mother Earth, but rather to secure
some acres of her and take his chance of getting diamonds instead of
cabbages. This is Private Property, or Unsocialism. Our own choice
is shewn by our continual aspiration to possess property, our common
hailing of it as sacred, our setting apart of the word Respectable for
those who have attained it, our ascription of pre-eminent religiousness
to commandments forbidding its violation, and our identification of law
and order among men with its protection. Therefore is it vital to a
living knowledge of our society that Private Property should be known
in every step of its progress from its source in cupidity to its end in
confusion.
Let us, in the manner of the Political Economist, trace the effects
of settling a country by private property with undisturbed law and
order. Figure to yourself the vast green plain of a country virgin
to the spade, awaiting the advent of man. Imagine then the arrival
of the first colonist, the original Adam, developed by centuries of
civilization into an Adam Smith, prospecting for an suitable patch of
Private Property. Adam is, as Political Economy fundamentally assumes
him to be, “on the make”; therefore he drives his spade into, and sets
up his stockade around, the most fertile and favorably situated patch
he can find. When he has tilled it, Political Economy inspired to
prophesy by the spectacle, metaphorically exhibits Adam’s little patch
of cultivation as a pool that will yet rise and submerge the whole
land. Let us not forget this trope: it is the key to the ever-recurring
phrase, “margin of cultivation,” in which, as may now be perceived,
there lurks a little unsuspected poetry. And truly the pool soon
spreads. Other Adams come, all on the make, and therefore all sure to
pre-empt patches as near as may be to that of the first Adam’s, partly
because he has chosen the best situation, partly for the pleasure of
his society and conversation, and partly because where two men are
assembled together there is a two-man power that is far more than
double one-man power, being indeed in some instances a quite new force,
totally destructive of the idiotic general hypothesis that society
is no more than the sum of the units which compose it. These Adams,
too, bring their Cains and Abels, who do not murder one another, but
merely pre-empt adjacent patches. And so the pool rises, and the margin
spreads more and more remote from the centre, until the pool becomes a
lake, and the lake an inland sea.
RENT.
But in the course of this inundation the caprices of Nature begin to
operate. That specially fertile region upon which Adam pitched is
sooner or later all pre-empted; and there is nothing for the new-comer
to pre-empt save soil of the second quality. Again, division of labor
sets in among Adam’s neighbors; and with it, of course, comes the
establishment of a market for the exchange of the products of their
divided labor. Now it is not well to be far afield from that market,
because distance from it involves extra cost for roads, beasts of
burden, time consumed in travelling thither and back again. All this
will be saved to Adam at the centre of cultivation, and incurred
by the new-comer at the margin of cultivation. Let us estimate the
annual value of Adam’s produce at £1,000, and the annual produce of
the new-comer’s land on the margin of cultivation at £500, assuming
that Adam and the new-comer are equally industrious. Here is a clear
advantage of £500 a year to the first comer. This £500 is economic
rent. It matters not at all that it is merely a difference of income,
and not an overt payment from a tenant to a landlord. The two men labor
equally; and yet one gets £500 a year more than the other through the
superior fertility of his land and convenience of its situation. The
excess due to that fertility is rent; and before long we shall find it
recognized as such and paid in the fashion with which we are familiar.
For why should not Adam let his patch to the new-comer at a rent of
£500 a year? Since the produce will be £1,000, the new-comer will have
£500 left for himself, or as much as he could obtain by cultivating a
patch of his own at the margin; and it is pleasanter, besides, to be
in the centre of society than on the outskirts of it. The new-comer
will himself propose the arrangement; and Adam may retire as an idle
landlord with a perpetual pension of £500 rent. The excess of fertility
in Adam’s land is thenceforth recognized as rent and paid, as it is
to-day, regularly by a worker to a drone. A few samples of the way
in which this simple and intelligible transaction is stated by our
economists may now, I hope, be quoted without any danger of their
proving so difficult as they appear in the text-books from which I have
copied them.
Stuart Mill[2] says that “the rent of land consists of the excess
of its return above the return to the worst land in cultivation.”
Fawcett[3] says that “the rent of land represents the pecuniary value
of the advantages which such land possesses over the worst land in
cultivation.” Professor Marshall[4] says that “the rent of a piece
of land is the excess of its produce over the produce of an adjacent
piece of land which would not be cultivated at all if rent were paid
for it.” Professor Sidgwick[5] cautiously puts it that “the normal
rent _per acre_ of any piece” [of land] “is the surplus of the value
of its produce over the value of the net produce per acre of the
least advantageous land that it is profitable to cultivate.” General
Walker[6] declares that “specifically, the rent of any piece of land is
determined by the difference between its annual yield and that of the
least productive land actually cultivated for the supply of the same
market, it being assumed that the quality of the land as a productive
agent is, in neither case, impaired or improved by such cultivation.”
All these definitions are offered by the authors as elaborations of
that given by their master Ricardo,[7] who says, “Rent is that portion
of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord for the use
of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.”
THE COUNTY FAMILY.
Let us return to our ideal country. Adam is retiring from productive
industry on £500 a year; and his neighbors are hastening to imitate
him as fresh tenants present themselves. The first result is the
beginning of a tradition that the oldest families in the country
enjoy a superior position to the rest, and that the main advantage of
their superior position is that they enjoy incomes without working.
Nevertheless, since they still depend on their tenants’ labor for their
subsistence, they continue to pay Labor, with a capital L, a certain
meed of mouth honor; and the resultant association of prosperity with
idleness, and praise with industry, practically destroys morality by
setting up that incompatibility between conduct and principle which
is the secret of the ingrained cynicism of our own time, and which
produces the curious Ricardian phenomenon of the man of business
who goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village
blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of
conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the
following week.
According to our hypothesis, the inland sea of cultivation has now
spread into the wilderness so far that at its margin the return to
a man’s labor for a year is only £500. But as there is always a
flood-tide in that sea, caused by the incessant increase of population,
the margin will not stop there; it will at last encroach upon every
acre of cultivable land, rising to the snow line on the mountains and
falling to the coast of the actual salt water sea, but always reaching
the barrenest places last of all, because the cultivators are still,
as ever, on the make, and will not break bad land when better is to be
had. But suppose that now, at last, the uttermost belt of free land is
reached, and that upon it the yield to a man’s year’s labor is only
£100. Clearly now the rent of Adam’s primeval patch has risen to £900,
since that is the excess of its produce over what is by this time all
that is to be had rent free. But Adam has yielded up his land for £500
a year to a tenant. It is this tenant accordingly who now lets Adam’s
patch for £900 a year to the new-comer, who of course loses nothing
by the bargain, since it leaves him the £100 a year with which he
must be content anyhow. Accordingly he labors on Adam’s land; raises
£1,000 a year from it; keeps £100 and pays £900 to Adam’s tenant, who
pays £500 to Adam, keeping £400 for himself, and thus also becoming an
idle gentleman, though with a somewhat smaller income than the man of
older family. It has, in fact, come to this, that the private property
in Adam’s land is divided between three men, the first doing none of
the work and getting half the produce; the second doing none of the
work and getting two-fifths of the produce; and the third doing all
the work and getting only one-tenth of the produce. Incidentally also,
the moralist who is sure to have been prating somewhere about private
property leading to the encouragement of industry, the establishment
of a healthy incentive, and the distribution of wealth according to
exertion, is exposed as a futile purblind person, starting _a priori_
from blank ignorance, and proceeding deductively to mere contradiction
and patent folly.
All this, however, is a mere trifle compared to the sequel. When the
inland sea has risen to its confines--when there is nothing but a strip
of sand round the coast between the furrow and the wave--when the very
waves themselves are cultivated by fisherfolk--when the pastures and
timber forests have touched the snow line--when, in short, the land is
all private property, yet every man is a proprietor, though it may be
only of a tenant right. He enjoys fixity of tenure at what is called
a fair rent; that is, he fares as well as he could on land wholly his
own. All the rent is economic rent; the landlord cannot raise it nor
the tenant lower it; it is fixed naturally by the difference between
the fertility of the land for which it is paid and that of the worst
land in the country. Compared with the world as we know it, such a
state of things is freedom and happiness.
THE PROLETARIAT.