who pays four shillings a week rent can only be hindered from voting
by anomalous conditions of registration which are likely to be swept
away very shortly. This is all but manhood suffrage; and it will soon
complete itself as adult suffrage. However, I may leave adult suffrage
out of the question, because the outlawry of women, monstrous as it
is, is not a question of class privilege, but of sex privilege. To
complete the foundation of the democratic State, then, we need manhood
suffrage, abolition of all poverty disqualifications, abolition of
the House of Lords, public payment of candidature expenses, public
payment of representatives, and annual elections. These changes are now
inevitable, however unacceptable they may appear to those of us who
are Conservatives. They have been for half a century the commonplaces
of Radicalism. We have next to consider that the State is not merely
an abstraction: it is a machine to do certain work; and if that work
be increased and altered in its character, the machinery must be
multiplied and altered too. Now, the extension of the franchise does
increase and alter the work very considerably; but it has no direct
effect on the machinery. At present the State machine has practically
broken down under the strain of spreading democracy, the work being
mainly local, and the machinery mainly central. Without efficient local
machinery the replacing of private enterprise by State enterprise is
out of the question; and we shall presently see that such replacement
is one of the inevitable consequences of Democracy. A democratic State
cannot become a _Social_-Democratic State unless it has in every
centre of population a local governing body as thoroughly democratic
in its constitution as the central Parliament. This matter is also
well in train. In 1888 a Government avowedly reactionary passed a
Local Government Bill which effected a distinct advance towards the
democratic municipality.[83] It was furthermore a Bill with no single
aspect of finality anywhere about it. Local Self-Government remains
prominent within the sphere of practical politics. When it is achieved,
the democratic State will have the machinery for Socialism.
And now, how is the raw material of Socialism--otherwise the
Proletarian man--to be brought to the Democratic State machinery? Here
again the path is easily found. Politicians who have no suspicion
that they are Socialists, are advocating further instalments of
Socialism with a recklessness of indirect results which scandalizes the
conscious Social Democrat. The phenomenon of economic rent has assumed
prodigious proportions in our great cities. The injustice of its
private appropriation is glaring, flagrant, almost ridiculous. In the
long suburban roads about London, where rows of exactly similar houses
stretch for miles countrywards, the rent changes at every few thousand
yards by exactly the amount saved or incurred annually in travelling
to and from the householder’s place of business. The seeker after
lodgings, hesitating between Bloomsbury and Tottenham, finds every
advantage of situation skimmed off by the landlord with scientific
precision. As lease after lease falls in, houses, shops, goodwills of
businesses which are the fruits of the labor of lifetimes, fall into
the maw of the ground landlord. Confiscation of capital, spoliation
of households, annihilation of incentive, everything that the most
ignorant and credulous fundholder ever charged against the Socialist,
rages openly in London, which begins to ask itself whether it exists
and toils only for the typical duke and his celebrated jockey and his
famous racehorse. Lord Hobhouse and his unimpeachably respectable
committee for the taxation of ground values are already in the field
claiming the value of the site of London for London collectively; and
their agitation receives additional momentum from every lease that
falls in. Their case is unassailable; and the evil they attack is one
that presses on the ratepaying and leaseholding classes as well as upon
humbler sufferers. This economic pressure is reinforced formidably by
political opinion in the workmen’s associations. Here the moderate
members are content to demand a progressive Income Tax, which is
virtually Lord Hobhouse’s proposal; and the extremists are all for Land
Nationalisation, which is again Lord Hobhouse’s principle. The cry for
such taxation cannot permanently be resisted. And it is very worthy
of remark that there is a new note in the cry. Formerly taxes were
proposed with a specific object--as to pay for a war, for education,
or the like. Now the proposal is to tax the landlords in order to get
some of _our_ money back from them--take it from them first and find
a use for it afterwards. Ever since Mr. Henry George’s book reached
the English Radicals, there has been a growing disposition to impose
a tax of twenty shillings in the pound on obviously unearned incomes;
that is, to dump four hundred and fifty millions[84] a year down on
the Exchequer counter; and then retire with three cheers for the
restoration of the land to the people.
The results of such a proceeding, if it actually came off, would
considerably take its advocates aback. The streets would presently
be filled with starving workers of all grades, domestic servants,
coach-builders, decorators, jewellers, lace-makers, fashionable
professional men, and numberless others whose livelihood is at present
gained by ministering to the wants of these and of the proprietary
class. “This,” they would cry, “is what your theories have brought
us to! Back with the good old times, when we received our wages,
which were at least better than nothing.” Evidently the Chancellor
of the Exchequer would have three courses open to him. (1) He would
give the money back again to the landlords and capitalists with an
apology. (2) He could attempt to start State industries with it for the
employment of the people. (3) Or he could simply distribute it among
the unemployed. The last is not to be thought of: anything is better
than _panem et circenses_. The second (starting State industries)
would be far too vast an undertaking to get on foot soon enough to
meet the urgent difficulty. The first (the return with an apology)
would be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole affair--a confession
that the private proprietor, for all his idleness and his voracity,
is indeed performing an indispensable economic function--the function
of capitalising, however wastefully and viciously, the wealth
which surpasses his necessarily limited power of immediate personal
consumption. And here we have checkmate to mere Henry Georgism, or
State appropriation of rent without Socialism. It is easy to shew that
the State is entitled to the whole income of the Duke of Westminster,
and to argue therefrom that he should straightway be taxed twenty
shillings in the pound. But in practical earnest the State has no right
to take five farthings of capital from the Duke or anybody else until
it is ready to invest them in productive enterprise. The consequences
of withdrawing capital from private hands merely to lock it up
unproductively in the treasury would be so swift and ruinous, that no
statesman, however fortified with the destructive resources of abstract
economics, could persist in it. It will be found in the future as in
the past that governments will raise money only because they want it
for specific purposes, and not on _a priori_ demonstrations that they
have a right to it. But it must be added that when they _do_ want it
for a specific purpose, then, also in the future as in the past, they
will raise it without the slightest regard to _a priori_ demonstrations
that they have no right to it.
Here then we have got to a dead lock. In spite of democrats and land
nationalisers, rent cannot be touched unless some pressure from
quite another quarter forces productive enterprise on the State.
Such pressure is already forthcoming. The quick starvation of the
unemployed, the slow starvation of the employed who have no relatively
scarce special skill, the unbearable anxiety or dangerous recklessness
of those who are employed to-day and unemployed to-morrow, the rise in
urban rents, the screwing down of wages by pauper immigration and home
multiplication, the hand-in-hand advance of education and discontent,
are all working up to explosion point. It is useless to prove by
statistics that most of the people are better off than before, true as
that probably is, thanks to instalments of Social Democracy. Yet even
that is questionable; for it is idle to claim authority for statistics
of things that have never been recorded. Chaos has no statistics: it
has only statisticians; and the ablest of them prefaces his remarks
on the increased consumption of rice by the admission that “no one
can contemplate the present condition of the masses without desiring
something like a revolution for the better.”[85] The masses themselves
are being converted so rapidly to that view of the situation, that we
have Pan-Anglican Synods, bewildered by a revival of Christianity,
pleading that though Socialism is eminently Christian, yet “the Church
must act safely as well as sublimely.”[86] During the agitation made
by the unemployed last winter (1887-8), the Chief Commissioner of
Police in London started at his own shadow, and mistook Mr. John Burns
for the French Revolution, to the great delight of that genial and
courageous champion of his class.[87] The existence of the pressure
is further shewn by the number and variety of safety valves proposed
to relieve it--monetization of silver, import duties, “leaseholds
enfranchisement,” extension of joint-stock capitalism masquerading as
co-operation,[88] and other irrelevancies. My own sudden promotion from
the street corner to this platform is in its way a sign of the times.
But whilst we are pointing the moral and adorning the tale according
to our various opinions, an actual struggle is beginning between the
unemployed who demand work and the local authorities appointed to
deal with the poor. In the winter, the unemployed collect round red
flags, and listen to speeches for want of anything else to do. They
welcome Socialism, insurrectionism, currency craze--anything that
passes the time and seems to express the fact that they are hungry.
The local authorities, equally innocent of studied economic views,
deny that there is any misery; send leaders of deputations to the
Local Government Board, who promptly send them back to the guardians;
try bullying; try stoneyards; try bludgeoning; and finally sit down
helplessly and wish it were summer again or the unemployed at the
bottom of the sea. Meanwhile the charity fund, which is much less
elastic than the wages fund, overflows at the Mansion House only to
run dry at the permanent institutions. So unstable a state of things
cannot last. The bludgeoning, and the shocking clamor for bloodshed
from the anti-popular newspapers, will create a revulsion among the
humane section of the middle class. The section which is blinded
by class prejudice to all sense of social responsibility, dreads
personal violence from the working class with a superstitious terror
that defies enlightenment or control.[89] Municipal employment must
be offered at last. This cannot be done in one place alone: the rush
from other parts of the country would swamp an isolated experiment.
Wherever the pressure is, the relief must be given on the spot.
And since public decency, as well as consideration for its higher
officials, will prevent the County Council from instituting a working
day of sixteen hours at a wage of a penny an hour or less, it will
soon have on its hands not only the unemployed, but also the white
slaves of the sweater, who will escape from their dens and appeal to
the municipality for work the moment they become aware that municipal
employment is better than private sweating. Nay, the sweater himself,
a mere slave driver paid “by the piece,” will in many instances be
as anxious as his victims to escape from his hideous trade. But the
municipal organisation of the industry of these people will require
capital. Where is the municipality to get it? Raising the rates is
out of the question: the ordinary tradesmen and householders are
already rated and rented to the limit of endurance: further burdens
would almost bring them into the street with a red flag. Dreadful
dilemma! in which the County Council, between the devil and the deep
sea, will hear Lord Hobhouse singing a song of deliverance, telling
a golden tale of ground values to be municipalised by taxation. The
land nationalisers will swell the chorus: the Radical progressive
income taxers singing together, and the ratepaying tenants shouting
for joy. The capital difficulty thus solved--for we need not seriously
anticipate that the landlords will actually fight, as our President[90]
once threatened--the question of acquiring land will arise. The
nationalisers will declare for its annexation by the municipality
without compensation; but that will be rejected as spoliation, worthy
only of revolutionary Socialists. The no-compensation cry is indeed
a piece of unpractical catastrophic insurrectionism; for whilst
compensation would be unnecessary and absurd if every proprietor
were expropriated simultaneously, and the proprietary system at once
replaced by full blown Socialism, yet when it is necessary to proceed
by degrees, the denial of compensation would have the effect of
singling out individual proprietors for expropriation whilst the others
remained unmolested, and depriving them of their private means long
before there was suitable municipal employment ready for them. The
land, as it is required, will therefore be honestly purchased; and the
purchase money, or the interest thereon, will be procured, like the
capital, by taxing rent. Of course this will be at bottom an act of
expropriation just as much as the collection of Income Tax to-day is an
act of expropriation. As such, it will be denounced by the landlords
as merely a committing of the newest sin the oldest kind of way. In
effect, they will be compelled at each purchase to buy out one of their
body and present his land to the municipality, thereby distributing the
loss fairly over their whole class, instead of placing it on one man
who is no more responsible than the rest. But they will be compelled to
do this in a manner that will satisfy the moral sense of the ordinary
citizen as effectively as that of the skilled economist.
We now foresee our municipality equipped with land and capital for
industrial purposes. At first they will naturally extend the industries
they already carry on, road making, gas works, tramways, building, and
the like. It is probable that they will for the most part regard their
action as a mere device to meet a passing emergency. The Manchester
School will urge its Protectionist theories as to the exemption of
private enterprise from the competition of public enterprise, in one
supreme effort to practise for the last time on popular ignorance of
the science which it has consistently striven to debase and stultify.
For a while the proprietary party will succeed in hampering and
restricting municipal enterprise;[91] in attaching the stigma of
pauperism to its service; in keeping the lot of its laborers as nearly
as possible down to private competition level in point of hard work
and low wages. But its power will be broken by the disappearance of
that general necessity for keeping down the rates which now hardens
local authority to humane appeals. The luxury of being generous at
someone else’s expense will be irresistible. The ground landlord will
be the municipal milch cow; and the ordinary ratepayers will feel the
advantage of sleeping in peace, relieved at once from the fear of
increased burdens and of having their windows broken and their premises
looted by hungry mobs, nuclei of all the socialism and scoundrelism of
the city. They will have just as much remorse in making the landlord
pay as the landlord has had in making them pay--just as much and
no more. And as the municipality becomes more democratic, it will
find landlordism losing power, not only relatively to democracy, but
absolutely.
The ordinary ratepayer, however, will not remain unaffected for long.
At the very outset of the new extension of municipal industries, the
question of wage will arise. A minimum wage must be fixed; and though
at first, to avoid an overwhelming rush of applicants for employment,
it must be made too small to tempt any decently employed laborer to
forsake his place and run to the municipality, still, it will not be
the frankly infernal competition wage. It will be, like mediæval wages,
fixed with at least some reference to public opinion as to a becoming
standard of comfort. Over and above this, the municipality will
have to pay to its organisers, managers, and incidentally necessary
skilled workers the full market price of their ability, minus only
what the superior prestige and permanence of public employment may
induce them to accept. But whilst these high salaries will make no
more disturbance in the labor market than the establishment of a new
joint-stock company would, the minimum wage for laborers will affect
that market perceptibly. The worst sort of sweaters will find that if
they are to keep their “hands,” they must treat them at least as well
as the municipality. The consequent advance in wage will swallow up the
sweater’s narrow margin of profit. Hence the sweater must raise the
price per piece against the shops and wholesale houses for which he
sweats. This again will diminish the profits of the wholesale dealers
and shopkeepers, who will not be able to recover this loss by raising
the price of their wares against the public, since, had any such step
been possible, they would have taken it before. But fortunately for
them, the market value of their ability as men of business is fixed
by the same laws that govern the prices of commodities. Just as the
sweater is worth his profit, so they are worth their profit; and just
as the sweater will be able to exact from them his old remuneration in
spite of the advance in wages, so they will be able to exact their old
remuneration in spite of the advance in sweaters’ terms. But from whom,
it will be asked, if not from the public by raising the price of the
wares? Evidently from the landlord upon whose land they are organising
production. In other words, they will demand and obtain a reduction of
rent. Thus the organiser of industry, the employer pure and simple, the
_entrepreneur_, as he is often called in economic treatises nowadays,
will not suffer. In the division of the product his share will remain
constant; whilst the industrious wage-worker’s share will be increased,
and the idle proprietor’s share diminished. This will not adjust itself
without friction and clamor; but such friction is constantly going on
under the present system in the opposite direction, _i.e._, by the
raising of the proprietor’s share at the expense of the worker’s.
The contraction of landlords’ incomes will necessarily diminish
the revenue from taxation on such incomes. Let us suppose that the
municipality, to maintain its revenue, puts on an additional penny
in the pound. The effect will be to burn the landlord’s candle at
both ends--obviously not a process that can be continued to infinity.
But long before taxation fails as a source of municipal capital, the
municipalities will have begun to save capital out of the product of
their own industries. In the market the competition of those industries
with the private concerns will be irresistible. Unsaddled with a single
idle person, and having, therefore, nothing to provide for after paying
their employees except extension of capital, they will be able to offer
wages that no business burdened with the unproductive consumption of
an idle landlord or shareholder could afford, unless it yielded a
heavy rent in consequence of some marked advantage of site. But even
rents, when they are town rents, are at the mercy of a municipality
in the long run. The masters of the streets and the traffic can nurse
one site and neglect another. The rent of a shop depends on the number
of persons passing its windows per hour. A skilfully timed series of
experiments in paving, a new bridge, a tramway service, a barracks,
or a small-pox hospital are only a few of the circumstances of which
city rents are the creatures. The power of the municipality to control
these circumstances is as obvious as the impotence of competing private
individuals. Again, competing private individuals are compelled to sell
their produce at a price equivalent to the full cost of production at
the margin of cultivation.[92] The municipality could compete against
them by reducing prices to the average cost of production over the
whole area of municipal cultivation. The more favorably situated
private concerns could only meet this by ceasing to pay rent; the less
favorably situated would succumb without remedy. It would be either
stalemate or checkmate. Private property would either become barren, or
it would yield to the actual cultivator of average ability no better an
income than could be obtained more securely in municipal employment.
To the mere proprietor it would yield nothing. Eventually the land and
industry of the whole town would pass by the spontaneous action of
economic forces into the hands of the municipality; and, so far, the
problem of socialising industry would be solved.