common opinions as to social morality, are adapted to a society in
which every citizen is contributing active service. The most ancient
and universal judgments of mankind as to the virtues of industry, of
honesty, of loyalty and forbearance between man and man, of temperance,
fortitude and just dealing, point to the elementary conditions
necessary for the survival and strengthening of societies of equal and
free individuals dependent for their subsistence upon the exercise
of each one’s abilities, and upon his fitness for co-operation with
his fellows. But where a class or society exists, not dependent upon
its own industry, but feeding like a parasite upon another society
or class; when the individuals of such a parasitic society in no way
depend for their livelihood or their freedom upon their fitness for
co-operation one with another upon themselves, or upon any personal
relation with the class that feeds them; then the observation of the
moral conventions of industrial and co-operative societies is in many
respects quite unnecessary for the continuance of the life of the
parasitic society, or for the pleasant existence of the individuals
composing it. All that is necessary is that the established laws and
conventions should continue to be observed by the industrial class
(“it is required _in stewards_ that a man be found faithful”); and
as the existence of the propertied class in modern societies, does
depend ultimately upon the observance by the bulk of the people of
this conventional morality, the propertied class professes publicly
to venerate and observe conventions, which, in its private practice,
it has long admitted to be obsolete. This complication is a perennial
source of cant. To this we owe the spectacle of Sir William Harcourt
advocating total abstinence, of Mr. Arthur Balfour commending
Christianity; to this the continual inculcation of industry and thrift
by idle and extravagant people, with many another edifying variation on
the theme of Satan’s reproval of sin. Temperance, Christian morality,
industry, and economy are of considerable social utility; but for
the members of a propertied class they are not necessitated by the
conditions of its existence, and consequently in such classes are
neither observed nor commonly made the subject of moral criticism.
Consider the case of industry alone--of the moral habit of earning
one’s subsistence by useful activity. Assuming sustenance to be
guaranteed, there is no obvious and pressing social necessity for
such exertion. No doubt the paradise of the maid-of-all-work--where
she means to do _nothing_ for ever and ever--is the paradise of an
undeveloped intelligence. A society relieved of the function of
providing its own material sustenance need not relapse into general
torpor, though the result is very commonly that an individual so
circumstanced relapses into uselessness. It will be vain to preach to
such an individual that he will find his fullest satisfaction in honest
toil: he will simply laugh in your face, and go out partridge shooting,
hunting, or yachting, or to Monte Carlo or the Rocky Mountains, finding
in such an exercise of his capacities the keenest imaginable enjoyment
for months in succession. He may feel no inclination at all to work
for the benefit of the people whose work is supporting him: all that
he, like the rest of us, requires is to find some means of passing his
time in an agreeable or exciting manner. Accordingly, in that section
of our nation which speaks of itself as “society,” being indeed a
society separated by economic parasitism from the common mass, we find
that the characteristic activity is the provision of agreeable and
exciting methods of passing time. This being the end of fashionable
society, its code of morality is naturally quite different from the
code suitable for industrial societies. Truthfulness is preached in
these as a cardinal virtue. Lying is of course common enough in all
classes, and is generally immoral; but in the fashionable world it
is not only a perfectly legitimate means of avoiding an undesired
visitor, or almost any other unpleasant experience: it is a positive
necessity of conventional politeness and good manners. It is really
harmless here, almost a virtue. To return to the virtue of industry:
though the conventional morality of the people, necessary for the life
of the nation, permeates with its vibrations this parasitic society
which it enfolds; and though the unfailing contentment which a really
intelligent man finds in social activity keeps a good many of the
propertied class usefully occupied, the actual public opinion of that
class is absolutely in accordance with the conditions of their life.
The clerk in a Government office is congratulated by middle-class
acquaintances on his luck in obtaining a berth where he need do no
more work than he chooses; and it is habitually assumed that he will
choose, like the Trafalgar Square fountains, to play from ten to four,
with an interval for lunch. That may or may not be an adequate account
of his activities: the significant thing is that such an assumption
should not be considered insulting. But how indignantly will the very
same acquaintances denounce the idleness and untrustworthiness of a
British working man suspected, in the service of a private master, of
interpreting his time work as most servants of the public are good
humoredly assumed, without hint of disapproval, to interpret theirs!
This obsolescence of elementary social morality is most noticeable in
women dependent upon incomes from property. They are doubly removed
from the primary conditions of life; they are less likely than their
men folk to be engaged in any work of perceptible social utility
outside of their own homes; and their intellectual education being
generally far more imperfect, it is only natural that their ideas of
morality should be still more intimately adapted to the conditions
of their class, and less to the general conditions of human society.
The angels of heaven, we have always understood, are exempt from the
apparatus of digestion, and are clothed as freely as the lilies of the
field. In any society where all common needs are so supplied it would
be immoral, surely, because a waste of time, to work as for a living.
Now the universal ideal of capitalism is that man, being created a
little lower than the angels, should raise himself to their level in
this respect by the acquisition of property, a process pleasantly
described as attaining a competence or independence, that is to say
the right to be dependent and incompetent. The result of this has
been a prejudice, which only within quite recent years has begun to
be seriously shaken, that it is humiliating, even disgraceful, for a
lady to have to earn her own living at all, for a gentleman to practise
a handicraft for money, for a nobleman to go into trade: a prejudice
for which, in a class society, there was much justification, but
which is obviously a fragment of class morality directly antagonistic
to the common social morality which recognises all useful industry
as praiseworthy. It is now yielding to economic pressure and to the
stimulus of the desire to get rich. Ladies are being driven, and in
spite of Mr. Walter Besant’s protestations will continue to be driven,
into most of the female handicrafts, though some are still outside the
pale of respectability. Ranching in America, though not yet drovering
and butchering in England, is suitable occupation for the aristocracy.
The “directing” of companies and the patronizing of nitrogenous
Volunteer Colonels are legitimate modes of exploiting of a title. The
prejudice against useful employments is balanced for decency’s sake by
a hypocritical laudation of useless ones. The fiction so dear to the
Primrose Dame, that the rich are the employers of the poor, the idlers
the supporters of the industrious, takes nowadays forms more insidious
than the rugged proposition that private vices are public benefits. The
amusements, the purely recreational activities, of country gentlemen
are glorified in the _National Review_[69] as “hard work.” It is
pretended that the leisured class is the indispensable patron and
promoter of culture and the fine arts. The claim that such functions
are virtues is a direct concession to the feeling that some effort must
be made to exhibit the practices of parasitic society as compatible
with its preaching of the common social morality.
The same necessity causes an exaggerated tribute of praise to be
paid to such really useful work as is done under no compulsion but
that of the social instinct. This kind of activity is habitually
pointed to, by the friends of those who are engaged in it, as
evidence of extraordinary virtue. A few hours of attention every week
to the condition of the poor, a few gratuitously devoted to local
administration, a habit of industry in any branch of literature or
science: these are imputed as an excess of righteousness by persons
who denounce the wage laborer as an idler and a shirk. Such activity
is work of supererogation, approved but not required or expected. The
motto of “noblesse oblige” has not been adopted by the plutocracy.
Similar approbation and admiration are extended to those who, while
already earning their living by a reasonable day’s work, employ their
spare time, or a part of it, in gratuitous activities of the kinds
referred to. It may be safely said that by far the greater portion of
this kind of work is done by people who are simultaneously earning an
income in middle class professions or by the less exhausting forms of
wage labor. Most of them have probably had experience of the ridiculous
inappropriateness of the commendation usually paid to their gratuitous
energy by well-to-do friends. The activity is moral, no doubt; but
its exercise gives no sensation of virtue or praiseworthiness; it is
followed because it is seen to be reasonable, because it is the path
indicated by common-sense towards the satisfaction of the individual
passion for the extension of freedom and love.
The phenomena of class morality are ancient and familiar enough.
They have varied throughout history with the changing character of
the basis of class distinctions. The great permanent distinction of
sex, and the social relations between man and woman which have arisen
thereout in the period of civilisation from which the world is now
emerging, have resulted not only in the establishment of distinct codes
of chastity for the sexes, but also in innumerable prejudices against
the participation of one sex or the other in activities having nothing
whatever to do with physiological distinction. They have even succeeded
in producing, through inequality of freedom and education, well marked
differences in mental habit, which show themselves continually when
men and women are confronted with the same questions of truthfulness,
honor, or logic. It is hardly necessary to observe that most of these
differences are distinctly traceable to the institution of private
property, and to its concentration in the hands of the male as the
stronger individual in a competitive society. The class moralities
of societies whose orders have been based immediately on status or
caste have formed the subject of an extensive literature. The tracing
of all such distinctions to their root in economic circumstances is
scarcely less interesting than the investigation of the same foundation
for sex morality. But even the interpreters of the Church Catechism
have abandoned the appeal to status as the basis of duty; the idea
of hereditary aristocracy is dead; and class distinctions and their
appurtenant ethics are now founded directly and obviously on property.
We have glanced at some effects of our present property system which
work continually for the destruction of the traditions of social
morality in the capitalist class. The fundamental idea of that system,
that man can live without working, as the angels of heaven, is
(fortunately) self-contradictory in this respect, that in human society
no class can so live except by the double labor of another class or
classes. The would-be angelic society on earth must either own chattel
slaves, or be a military caste taking tribute, or a parasitical and
exploiting class extracting rent and interest by the operation of
the industrial system analysed in the preceding papers. Such a class
and such a system are, as we are all becoming aware, more virulently
revolutionary in their operation, and more certain to bring about their
own destruction than either chattel slavery or feudalism. Of these
three phases of human injustice that of wage slavery will surely be
the shortest. But meanwhile the propertied class assumes to represent
civilisation; its approved morality is preached and taught in church
and schools; it debases our public opinion; and it directly poisons all
that host of workers who are at present hangers-on of the rich, whether
as menial servants or as ministering to their especial amusements and
extravagance. There is no such snob as a fashionable dressmaker; and
there is no class of the proletariat so dehumanised as the class of
domestic servants.
Now if these results are effected in the class whose livelihood is
assured, and whose education and culture have given it a hold on the
higher inducements to morality--if we here find morality strangled at
the root and starving, what shall we find when we turn to the masses
whose livelihood is not assured them? Our Greek, perhaps, would say
that it was impossible for them to practise virtue, just as Plato in
his “Republic” suggested that only the philosophic class could be
really moral, since slaves and the proletariat could not receive the
intellectual education necessary to train the reason. The great bulk
of the wage earning class in modern civilised countries is so far
assured of its livelihood that it remains thoroughly permeated with
common social morality. It is, from habit and preference, generally
industrious and kindly, thus exhibiting the two most important
qualifications for social life. It remains to a great extent honest,
though competition and capitalism are directly antagonistic to
honesty. The decalogue of commercial morality has its own peculiar
interpretation of stealing, murder, false witness and coveting; and
yet the most unscrupulous wrecker in the City will be outraged in his
finest feelings by the class morality of the plumber, who, called in
to bring the gas to reason, takes the opportunity to disorganise the
water-supply and introduce a duster into the drain. The employer is
aghast at the increase of idleness and bad workmanship under a system
in which the good workman knows that to work his best will not only not
be worth his while but will lead to the exaction of heavier tasks from
his fellows.
But it is not in the mass of the proletariat that the action of our
property system in destroying elementary morality is most conspicuous.
It is in those whom it excludes even from the proletariat proper that
this extreme result is clearest. The characteristic operation of the
modern industrial economy is continually and repeatedly to thrust
out individuals or bodies of the workers from their settlement in
the social organism--to eject, as it were, the coral insect from the
cell in which he is developing. The capitalist farming system expels
the agricultural laborer from the village; the machine expels the
craftsman from the ranks of skilled labor; the perpetual competition
and consolidation of capital in every trade alternately destroys
employment in that trade and disorganises others. Overproduction in one
year leaves thousands of workers wageless in the next. The ranks of
unskilled labor, the army of the unemployed, are day by day recruited
in these fashions. An inveterate social habit, an almost indestructible
patience, a tenacious identification of his own desire with the
desire of those whom he loves, in most cases preserve the worker from
accepting the sentence of exclusion from society. If he is able-bodied,
intelligent and fortunate, he will struggle with hard times till he
finds fresh occupation among strange surroundings; but woe to him if
he be weakly, or old, or unpractical. In such a case he will almost
infallibly become a pauper or an outcast, one of that residuum of
unskilled, unemployed, unprofitable and hopeless human beings which
in all great cities festers about the base of the social pyramid. And
his children will become the street Arabs and the corner-boys and the
child-whores and the sneak-thieves who, when they come of age, accept
their position as outside of social life and resume the existence of
the wild beasts that fathered man--the purely predatory and unsocial
activity of harrying their neighbors for their own support. Before
society was, morality was not: those who have no part nor lot in the
ends for which society exists will adapt their morality to suit their
outcast state: there will indeed be honor among thieves, just as there
will be cant and insincerity among the parasitic rich; but the youth
who has been nurtured between the reformatory and the slum has little
chance of finding a foothold, if he would, in the restless whirl of
modern industry, and still less of retaining permanently such foothold
as he may manage to find.
When the conditions of social life are such that the individual may
be excluded through no unfitness of his own for co-operation, or may
be born without a chance of acquiring fitness for it, we are brought
face to face with the conditions of primitive ages. And if you force
him back upon the elemental instincts, one of two things will happen.
Either, if the individual is weak through physical deterioration or
incapacity to combine with his fellow outcasts, he will be crushed
and killed by society and putrefy about its holy places; or, if he
has indomitable life and vigor, he will revert to the argument of
elemental forces: he will turn and explode society. Here, then, we
should fear explosion, for we are not as submissive in extremities as
the proletariats of arrested Indian civilisations. But with us the
class whose freedom is incessantly threatened by the operation of
private capitalism is the class which by its political position holds
in its hands the key to the control of industrial form: that is to say,
its members can modify, as soon as they elect to, the laws of property
and inheritance in this State of Britain. They can, as soon as they
see clearly what is needed supersede institutions now immoral because
useless and mischievous by institutions which shall re-establish the
elementary conditions of social existence and the possibility of the
corresponding morality--namely, the opportunity for each individual to
earn his living and the compulsion upon him to do so.
Returning from the consideration of the “residuum” and the “criminal
classes,” we find that even the workers of the employed proletariat are
by no means wholly moral. In spite of the massive healthiness of their
behavior in ordinary relations, they are generally coarse in their
habits; they lack intelligence in their amusements and refinement in
their tastes. The worst result of this is the popularity of boozing
and gambling and allied forms of excitement, with their outcomes in
violence and meanness. But when once society has ensured for man the
opportunity for satisfying his primary needs--once it has ensured him
a healthy body and a wholesome life, his advance in the refinements of
social morality, in the conception and satisfaction of his secondary
and more distinctly human desires, is solely and entirely a matter of
education. This will be attested by every man and woman who has at all
passed through the primary to the secondary passions. But education in
the sense alluded to is impossible for the lad who leaves school at
fourteen and works himself weary six days in the week ever afterwards.
The oldest Socialistic institution of considerable importance and
extent is the now decrepit Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has
always insisted on the duty of helping the poor, not on the ground
of the social danger of a “residuum,” but by the nobler appeal to
the instinct of human benevolence. The Catholic Church developed,
relatively to the enlightenment of its age, the widest and freest
system of education the world has ever seen before this century.
Catholic Christianity, by its revolutionary conception that God
was incarnated in Man, exploding the hideous superstition that the
imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart was only to do evil
continually, and substituting the faith in the perfectibility of each
individual soul; by its brilliant and powerful generalisations that God
must be Love, because there is nothing better, and that man is freed
from the law by the inward guidance of grace, has done more for social
morality than any other religion of the world.
Protestant Individualism in England shattered the Catholic Church;
founded the modern land system upon its confiscated estates; destroyed
the mediæval machinery of charity and education; and in religion
rehabilitated the devil, and the doctrines of original sin and the
damnable danger of reason and good works.
Out of the wreckage of the Catholic Church, and amid the dissolution
of the Protestant religion, there successively emerged, at an interval
of some three hundred years, the two great socialistic institutions of
the Poor Law and the People’s Schools. As the pretence of a foundation
of Christian obligation withered from out of the Poor Law, till it has
come to be outspokenly recognised as nothing but a social safety-valve,
the individualist and commercial administration of this rudimentary
socialistic machinery deprived it of its efficiency even in this
elementary function. He to whom the workhouse means the break up of his
home, and his own condemnation to a drudgery insulting because useless
and wasteful, would as lief take his exclusion from society in another
and a less degrading way, either by death, or by reluctant enrolment in
the “residuum”; and so it has come to pass that outside of their use
as hospitals for the aged and infirm, the poor-houses are principally
employed as the club-houses and hotels of the great fraternity of
habitual tramps and cadgers; and not till he has sunk to this level
does the struggling proletarian seek “work” there.
Socialists would realize the idea of the Poor Law, regarding that
society as deadly sick in which the individual cannot find subsistence
by industry, in the only way in which it can be realised: namely, by
the organisation of production and the resumption of its necessary
instruments. It is not so great a matter in their eyes that the
perpetual toll of rent and interest deprives the workers of the wealth
which their activities produce; nor is it the actual pressure of this
heavy tribute that would force on the Social Revolution, if the
system only left men the assurance of the comforts of tame beasts. It
is the constant disquiet and uncertainty, the increasing frequency of
industrial crises, that are the revolutionary preachers of our age; and
it is the disappearance at the base and at the summit of society of the
conditions of social morality, that rouses those whose mere material
interests remain unaffected.
But though it is not envy or resentment at this tribute that mostly
moves us to our warfare, this tribute we must certainly resume if the
ideal of the school is to effect its social purpose. For the ideal of
the school implies, in the first place, leisure to learn: that is to
say, the release of children from all non-educational labor until mind
and physique have had a fair start and training, and the abolition of
compulsion on the adult to work any more than the socially necessary
stint. The actual expenditure on public education must also be
considerably increased, at any rate until parents are more generally
in a position to instruct their own children. But as soon as the mind
has been trained to appreciate the inexhaustible interest and beauty of
the world, and to distinguish good literature from bad, the remainder
of education, granted leisure, is a comparatively inexpensive matter.
Literature is become dirt-cheap; and all the other educational arts can
be communally enjoyed. The schools of the adult are the journal and the
library, social intercourse, fresh air, clean and beautiful cities,
the joy of the fields, the museum, the art-gallery, the lecture-hall,
the drama, and the opera; and only when these schools are free and
accessible to all will the reproach of proletarian coarseness be done
away.