they did not take the form of personal interferences and indignities.
The non-noble Frenchman was bond, and he knew it; the middle-class
Englishman to a great extent thought himself free: his economic
servitude, though it galled him, was not clearly distinguishable
from the niggardliness of nature. The landlord in France was an
obvious tyrant: here he certainly caused (by the abstraction of the
economic rent) an artificial barrenness of the workers’ labor; but
the barrenness was so old and had been so constant that it was not
seen to be artificial, and was not resented as such. No peasant rebels
against the blight. Accordingly, we have, since 1381, never had in
England a burning of the _chateaux_; and, accordingly, too, Adam Smith
is no complete champion of _laisser faire_, though his great work
was effective mainly in sweeping away foreign trade restrictions and
regulations, and in giving viability to labor by establishing the
laborer’s geographical freedom to move and to enter into the wage
contract when and where he best could. The English economists, stopping
illogically short of the complete freedom preached by Rousseau and
Godwin and the scientific Anarchists of to-day, advocated just as much
freedom as sufficed to make the fortunes of Lancashire capitalists and
to create the modern proletariat. The Utilitarians are appropriately
coupled with the Political Economists in connexion with this phase of
thought. Although Adam Smith did not belong to their school, almost
the whole work of developing and popularizing the new science was done
by them. It was not until after the Peace--when Bentham and James Mill
were in full vigor, and soon to be reinforced by Austin, Villiers,
John Stuart Mill, Roebuck, Grote, Ricardo, and others--that Political
Economy became a force in England. The motive and enthusiasm for the
new science undoubtedly came from the Utilitarian ethics. If the sole
masters of man were pleasure and pain, the knowledge of the natural
laws expressing the course of social action, and thus regulating
pleasure and pain, became of vital importance. If it is God’s will, as
Paley and Austin asserted, that men should seek for happiness, than
the study of how to obtain economic comfort becomes a sacred duty,
and has ever been so regarded by such rational divines as Malthus,
Chalmers, Maurice, Kingsley, and the young High Church party of to-day.
Christianity and the course of modern thought began to join hands;
and we may see in Bishop Berkeley and Paley the forerunners of such a
development as the Guild of St. Matthew.[28]
The Utilitarian philosophy, besides aiding in the popularization of
economic science, strongly influenced its early character. The tendency
to _Laisser Faire_ inherited from the country and century of upheaval
and revolt against authority, was fostered by Bentham’s destructive
criticism of all the venerable relics of the past. What is the use
of it, he asked, of every shred of social institution then existing.
What is the net result of its being upon individual happiness? Few
of the laws and customs--little, indeed, of the social organization
of that time could stand this test. England was covered with rotten
survivals from bygone circumstances; the whole administration was an
instrument for class domination and parasite nurture; the progress
of the industrial revolution was rapidly making obsolete all laws,
customs, proverbs, maxims, and nursery tales; and the sudden increase
of population was baffling all expectations and disconcerting all
arrangements. At last it came to be carelessly accepted as the teaching
both of philosophy and of experience that every man must fight for
himself; and “the devil take the hindmost” became the accepted
social creed of what was still believed to be a Christian nation.
Utilitarianism became the Protestantism of Sociology, and “how to make
for self and family the best of both worlds” was assumed to be the
duty, as it certainly was the aim, of every practical Englishman.
THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL REVOLT, AND ITS POLITICAL OUTCOME.
The new creed of “Philosophic Radicalism” did not have matters all its
own way. Its doctrines might suit mill-owners and merchant princes,
and all who were able to enjoy the delight of their own strength in
the battle of life. But it was essentially a creed of Murdstones and
Gradgrinds; and the first revolt came from the artistic side. The “nest
of singing birds” at the Lakes would have none of it, though De Quincey
worked out its abstract economics in a manner still unsurpassed.
Coleridge did his best to drown it in German Transcendentalism. Robert
Owen and his following of enthusiastic communistic co-operators
steadfastly held up a loftier ideal. The great mass of the wage earners
never bowed the knee to the principles upon which the current “White
Slavery” was maintained. But the first man who really made a dint in
the individualist shield was Carlyle, who knew how to compel men to
listen to him. Oftener wrong than right in his particular proposals, he
managed to keep alive the faith in nobler ends than making a fortune
in this world and saving one’s soul in the next. Then came Maurice,
Kingsley, Ruskin, and others who dared to impeach the current middle
class cult; until finally, through Comte and John Stuart Mill, Darwin
and Herbert Spencer, the conception of the Social Organism has at last
penetrated to the minds, though not yet to the books, even of our
professors of Political Economy.
Meanwhile, caring for none of these things, the practical man had been
irresistibly driven in the same direction. In the teeth of the current
Political Economy, and in spite of all the efforts of the millowning
Liberals, England was compelled to put forth her hand to succor and
protect her weaker members. Any number of Local Improvement Acts,
Drainage Acts, Truck Acts, Mines Regulation Acts, Factory Acts, Public
Health Acts, Adulteration Acts, were passing into law.[29] The liberty
of the property owner to oppress the propertyless by the levy of the
economic tribute of rent and interest began to be circumscribed, pared
away, obstructed and forbidden in various directions. Slice after slice
has gradually been cut from the profits of capital, and therefore
from its selling value, by socially beneficial restrictions on its
user’s liberty to do as he liked with it. Slice after slice has been
cut off the incomes from rent and interest by the gradual shifting of
taxation from consumers to persons enjoying incomes above the average
of the kingdom.[30] Step by step the political power and political
organization of the country have been used for industrial ends, until
to-day the largest employer of labor is one of the ministers of the
Crown (the Postmaster-General); and almost every conceivable trade
is, somewhere or other, carried on by parish, municipality, or the
National Government itself without the intervention of any middleman
or capitalist. The theorists who denounce the taking by the community
into its own hands of the organization of its own labor as a thing
economically unclean, repugnant to the sturdy individual independence
of Englishmen, and as yet outside the sphere of practical politics,
seldom have the least suspicion of the extent to which it has already
been carried.[31] Besides our international relations and the army,
navy, police, and the courts of justice, the community now carries on
for itself, in some part or another of these islands, the post-office,
telegraphs, carriage of small commodities, coinage, surveys, the
regulation of the currency and note issue, the provision of weights
and measures, the making, sweeping, lighting, and repairing of
streets, roads, and bridges, life insurance, the grant of annuities,
shipbuilding, stockbroking, banking, farming, and money-lending. It
provides for many thousands of us from birth to burial--midwifery,
nursery, education, board and lodging, vaccination, medical attendance,
medicine, public worship, amusements, and interment. It furnishes
and maintains its own museums, parks, art galleries, libraries,
concert-halls, roads, streets, bridges, markets, slaughter-houses,
fire-engines, lighthouses, pilots, ferries, surf-boats, steam-tugs,
life-boats, cemeteries, public baths, washhouses, pounds, harbors,
piers, wharves, hospitals, dispensaries, gasworks, waterworks,
tramways, telegraph cables, allotments, cow meadows, artizans’
dwellings, schools, churches, and reading-rooms. It carries on and
publishes its own researches in geology, meteorology, statistics,
zoology, geography, and even theology. In our Colonies the English
Government further allows and encourages the communities to provide for
themselves railways, canals, pawn-broking, theatres, forestry, cinchona
farms, irrigation, leper villages, casinos, bathing establishments,
and immigration, and to deal in ballast, guano, quinine, opium, salt,
and what not. Every one of these functions, with those of the army,
navy, police, and courts of justice, were at one time left to private
enterprise, and were a source of legitimate individual investment
of capital. Step by step the community has absorbed them, wholly or
partially; and the area of private exploitation has been lessened.
Parallel with this progressive nationalization or municipalization of
industry, there has gone on the elimination of the purely personal
element in business management. The older economists doubted whether
anything but banking and insurance could be carried on by joint
stock enterprise: now every conceivable industry, down to baking and
milk-selling, is successfully managed by the salaried officers of large
corporations of idle shareholders. More than one-third of the whole
business of England, measured by the capital employed,[32] is now done
by joint stock companies, whose shareholders could be expropriated by
the community with no more dislocation of the industries carried on
by them than is caused by the daily purchase of shares on the Stock
Exchange.
Besides its direct supersession of private enterprise, the State now
registers, inspects, and controls nearly all the industrial functions
which it has not yet absorbed. In addition to births, marriages,
deaths, and electors, the State registers all solicitors, barristers,
notaries, patent agents, brokers, newspaper proprietors, playing-card
makers, brewers, bankers, seamen, captains, mates, doctors, cabmen,
hawkers, pawnbrokers, tobacconists, distillers, plate dealers,
game dealers; all insurance companies, friendly societies, endowed
schools and charities, limited companies, lands, houses, deeds, bills
of sale, compositions, ships, arms, dogs, cabs, omnibuses, books,
plays, pamphlets, newspapers, raw cotton movements, trademarks, and
patents; lodging-houses, public-houses, refreshment-houses, theatres,
music-halls, places of worship, elementary schools, and dancing rooms.
Nor is the registration a mere form. Most of the foregoing are also
inspected and criticised, as are all railways, tramways, ships,
mines, factories, canal-boats, public conveyances, fisheries,
slaughter-houses, dairies, milkshops, bakeries, baby-farms, gasmeters,
schools of anatomy, vivisection laboratories, explosive works, Scotch
herrings, and common lodging-houses.
The inspection is often detailed and rigidly enforced. The State in
most of the larger industrial operations prescribes the age of the
worker, the hours of work, the amount of air, light, cubic space, heat,
lavatory accommodation, holidays and mealtimes; where, when and how
wages shall be paid; how machinery staircases, lift holes, mines and
quarries are to be fenced and guarded; how and when the plant shall
be cleaned, repaired and worked. Even the kind of package in which
some articles shall be sold is duly prescribed, so that the individual
capitalist shall take no advantage of his position. On every side he is
being registered, inspected, controlled and eventually superseded by
the community; and in the meantime he is compelled to cede for public
purposes an ever-increasing share of his rent and interest.
Even in the fields still abandoned to private enterprise, its
operations are thus every day more closely limited, in order that the
anarchic competition of private greed, which at the beginning of the
century was set up as the only infallible beneficent principle of
social action, may not utterly destroy the State. All this has been
done by “practical” men, ignorant, that is to say, of any scientific
sociology, believing Socialism to be the most foolish of dreams,
and absolutely ignoring, as they thought, all grandiloquent claims
for social reconstruction. Such is the irresistible sweep of social
tendencies, that in their every act they worked to bring about the very
Socialism they despised; and to destroy the Individualistic faith which
they still professed. They builded better than they knew.
It must by no means be supposed that these beginnings of social
reorganization have been effected, or the proposals for their
extension brought to the front, without the conscious efforts of
individual reformers. The “Zeitgeist” is potent; but it does not pass
Acts of Parliament without legislators, or erect municipal libraries
without town councillors. Though our decisions are moulded by the
circumstances of the time, and the environment at least roughhews our
ends, shape them as we will; yet each generation decides for itself.
It still rests with the individual to resist or promote the social
evolution, consciously or unconsciously, according to his character
and information. The importance of complete consciousness of the
social tendencies of the age lies in the fact that its existence and
comprehensiveness often determine the expediency of our particular
action: we move with less resistance with the stream than against it.
The general failure to realize the extent to which our unconscious
Socialism has already proceeded--a failure which causes much time
and labor to be wasted in uttering and elaborating on paper the
most ludicrously unpractical anti-Socialistic demonstrations of the
impossibility of matters of daily occurrence--is due to the fact that
few know anything of local administration outside their own town. It is
the municipalities which have done most to “socialize” our industrial
life; and the municipal history of the century is yet unwritten. A few
particulars may here be given as to this progressive “municipalization”
of industry. Most of us know that the local governments have assumed
the care of the roads, streets and bridges, once entirely abandoned
to individual enterprise, as well as the lighting and cleansing of
all public thoroughfares, and the provision of sewers, drains and
“storm-water courses.” It is, perhaps, not so generally known that no
less than £7,500,000 is annually expended on these services in England
and Wales alone, being about five per cent of the rent of the country.
The provision of markets, fairs, harbors, piers, docks, hospitals,
cemeteries and burial-grounds is still shared with private capitalists;
but those in public hands absorb nearly £2,000,000 annually. Parks,
pleasure grounds, libraries, museums, baths and washhouses cost the
public funds over half a million sterling. All these are, however,
comparatively unimportant services. It is in the provision of gas,
water and tramways that local authorities organize labor on a large
scale. Practically half the gas consumers in the kingdom are supplied
by public gas works, which exist in 168 separate localities, with
an annual expenditure of over three millions.[33] It need hardly be
added that the advantage to the public is immense, in spite of the
enormous price paid for the work in many instances; and that the
further municipalization of the gas industry is proceeding with great
rapidity, no fewer than twelve local authorities having obtained loans
for the purpose (and one for electric lighting) in a single year
(Local Government Board Report, 1887-8, c--5526, pp. 319-367). With
equal rapidity is the water supply becoming a matter of commercial
organization, the public expenditure already reaching nearly a million
sterling annually. Sixty-five local authorities borrowed money for
water supply in 1887-8, rural and urban districts being equally
represented (c--5550, pp. 319-367). Tramways and ferries are undergoing
the same development. About thirty-one towns, including nearly all
the larger provincial centres, own some or all of their own tramways.
Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham, Oldham, Sunderland and Greenock lease
their undertakings; but among the municipalities Huddersfield has the
good sense to work its lines without any “middleman” intervention,
with excellent public results. The tramway mileage belonging to local
authorities has increased five-fold since 1878, and comprises more than
a quarter of the whole (House of Commons Return, 1887-8, No. 347). The
last important work completed by the Metropolitan Board of Works was
the establishment of a “free steam ferry” on the Thames, charged upon
the rates. This is, in some respects, the most significant development
of all. The difference between a free steam ferry and a free railway is
obviously only one of degree.
A few more cases are worth mentioning. Glasgow builds and maintains
seven public “common lodging houses”; Liverpool provides science
lectures; Manchester builds and stocks an art gallery; Birmingham
runs schools of design; Leeds creates extensive cattle markets; and
Bradford supplies water below cost price. There are nearly one hundred
free libraries and reading rooms. The minor services now performed by
public bodies are innumerable.[34] This “Municipal Socialism” has been
rendered possible by the creation of a local debt now reaching over
£181,000,000.[35] Nearly £10,000,000 is annually paid as interest and
sinking fund on the debt; and to this extent the pecuniary benefit of
municipalization is diminished. The full advantages[36] of the public
organization of labor remain, besides a considerable pecuniary profit;
whilst the objective differentiation of the economic classes (by the
separation of the idle _rentier_ from the manager or _entrepreneur_)
enormously facilitates popular comprehension of the nature of the
economic tribute known as interest. To the extent, moreover, that
additional charges are thrown upon the rates, the interest paid to
the capitalist is levied mainly at the cost of the landlord, and we
have a corresponding “nationalization” of so much of the economic
rent. The increase in the local rates has been 36 per cent, or nearly
£7,000,000, in eleven years, and is still growing. They now amount to
over twenty-six millions sterling in England and Wales alone, or about
17 per cent of the rental of the country (C--5550, p. clxxiv).
Nor is there any apparent prospect of a slackening of the pace of this
unconscious abandonment of individualism. No member of Parliament
has so much as introduced a Bill to give effect to the anarchist
principles of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Man _versus_ the State.” The
not disinterested efforts of the Liberty and Property Defence League
fail to hinder even Conservative Parliament from further Socialistic
legislation. Mr. Gladstone remarked to a friend in 1886 that the Home
Rule question would turn the Liberal party into a Radical party. He
might have said that it would make both parties Socialistic. Free
elementary and public technical education is now practically accepted
on both sides of the House, provided that the so-called “voluntary
schools,” themselves half maintained from public funds, are not
extinguished. Mr. Chamberlain and the younger Conservatives openly
advocate far reaching projects of social reform through state and
municipal agency, as a means of obtaining popular support. The National
Liberal Federation adopts the special taxation of urban ground values
as the main feature in its domestic programme,[37] notwithstanding
that this proposal is characterized by old-fashioned Liberals as sheer
confiscation of so much of the landlords’ property. The London Liberal
and Radical Union, which has Mr. John Morley for its president, even
proposes that the County Council shall have power to rebuild the London
slums at the sole charge of the ground landlord.[38] It is, therefore,
not surprising that the Trades Union Congress should now twice have
declared in favor of “Land Nationalization” by large majorities, or
that the bulk of the London County Council should be returned on
an essentially Socialistic platform. The whole of the immediately
practicable demands of the most exacting Socialists are, indeed, now
often embodied in the current Radical programme; and the following
exposition of it, from the pages of the _Star_ newspaper, August 8,
1888, may serve as a statement of the current Socialist demands for
further legislation.[39]
REVISION OF TAXATION.
_Object._--Complete shifting of burden from the workers, of whatever
grade, to the recipients of rent and interest, with a view to the
ultimate and gradual extinction of the latter class.
_Means._--1. Abolition of all customs and excise duties, except those
on spirits. 2. Increase of income tax, differentiating in favor of
earned as against unearned incomes, and graduating cumulatively by
system of successive levels of abatement. 3. Equalization and increase
of death duties and the use of the proceeds as capital, not income.
4. Shifting of local rates and house duty from occupier to owner, any
contract to the contrary notwithstanding. 5. Compulsory redemption of
existing land tax and reimposition on all ground rents and increased
values. 6. Abolition of fees on licenses for employment. 7. Abolition
of police-court fees.
EXTENSION OF FACTORY ACTS.
_Object._--To raise, universally, the standard of comfort by obtaining
the general recognition of a minimum wage and a maximum working day.
_Means._--1. Extension of the general provisions of the Factory
and Workshops Acts (or the Mines Regulation Acts, as the case may
be) to all employers of labor. 2. Compulsory registration of all
employers of more than three (?) workers. 3. Largely increased number
of inspectors, and these to include women, and to be mainly chosen
from the wage-earning class. 4. Immediate reduction of maximum hours
to eight per day in all Government and municipal employment, in all
mines, and in all licensed monopolies such as railways, tramways,
gasworks, waterworks, docks, harbors, etc.; and in any trade in which
a majority of the workers desire it. 5. The compulsory insertion
of clauses in all contracts for Government or municipal supplies,
providing (_a_) that there shall be no sub-contracting, (_b_) that no
worker shall be employed more than eight hours per day, and (_c_) that
no wages less than a prescribed minimum shall be paid.
EDUCATIONAL REFORM.
_Object._--To enable all, even the poorest, children to obtain not
merely some, but the best education they are capable of.
_Means._--1. The immediate abolition of all fees in public elementary
schools, Board or voluntary, with a corresponding increase in the
Government grant. 2. Creation of a Minister for Education, with
control over the whole educational system, from the elementary school
to the University, and over all educational endowments. 3. Provision
of public technical and secondary schools wherever needed, and
creation of abundant public secondary scholarships. 4. Continuation,
in all cases, of elementary education at evening schools. 5.
Registration and inspection of all private educational establishments.
RE-ORGANIZATION OF POOR LAW ADMINISTRATION.
_Object._--To provide generously, and without stigma, for the aged,
the sick, and those destitute through temporary want of employment,
without relaxing the “tests” against the endowment of able-bodied
idleness.
_Means._--1. The separation of the relief of the aged and the sick
from the workhouse system, by a universal system of aged pensions,
and public infirmaries. 2. The industrial organization and technical
education of all able-bodied paupers. 3. The provision of temporary
relief works for the unemployed. 4. The supersession of the Boards of
Guardians by the local municipal authorities.
EXTENSION OF MUNICIPAL ACTIVITY.
_Object._--The gradual public organization of labor for all public
purposes, and the elimination of the private capitalist and middleman.