to get the greater surplus out of him, lowers the margin of human
cultivation, and so raises the “rent of ability.” The most important
form of that rent is the profit of industrial management. The gains
of a great portrait painter or fashionable physician are much less
significant, since these depend entirely on the existence of a very
rich class of patrons subject to acute vanity and hypochondriasis. But
the industrial organiser is independent of patrons: instead of merely
attracting a larger share of the product of industry to himself, he
increases the product by his management. The market price of such
ability depends upon the relation of the supply to the demand: the
more there is of it the cheaper it is: the less, the dearer. Any cause
that increases the supply lowers the price. Now it is evident that
since a manager must be a man of education and address, it is useless
to look ordinarily to the laboring class for a supply of managerial
skill. Not one laborer in a million succeeds in raising himself on
the shoulders of his fellows by extraordinary gifts, or extraordinary
luck, or both. The managers must be drawn from the classes which
enjoy education and social culture; and their price, rapidly as it
is falling with the spread of education and the consequent growth of
the “intellectual proletariat,” is still high. It is true that a very
able and highly-trained manager can now be obtained for about £800 a
year, provided his post does not compel him to spend two-thirds of
his income on what is called “keeping up his position,” instead of on
his own gratification.[93] Still, when it is considered that laborers
receive less than £50 a year, and that the demand for laborers is
necessarily vast in proportion to the demand for able managers, nay,
that there is an inverse ratio between them, since the manager’s talent
is valuable in proportion to quantity of labor he can organise, it will
be admitted that £800 a year represents an immense rent of ability.
But if the education and culture which are a practically indispensable
part of the equipment of competitors for such posts were enjoyed by
millions instead of thousands, that rent would fall considerably. Now
the tendency of private property is to keep the masses mere beasts of
burden. The tendency of Social Democracy is to educate them, to make
men of them. Social Democracy would not long be saddled with the rents
of ability which have during the last century made our born captains of
industry our masters and tyrants instead of our servants and leaders.
It is even conceivable that rent of managerial ability might in course
of time become negative,[94] astonishing as that may seem to the many
persons who are by this time so hopelessly confused amid existing
anomalies, that the proposition that “whosoever of you will be the
chiefest, shall be servant of all,” strikes them rather as a Utopian
paradox than as the most obvious and inevitable of social arrangements.
The fall in the rent of ability will, however, benefit not only the
municipality, but also its remaining private competitors. Nevertheless,
as the prestige of the municipality grows, and as men see more and
more clearly what the future is to it, able organisers will take lower
salaries for municipal than for private employment; whilst those who
can beat even the municipality at organising, or who, as professional
men, can deal personally with the public without the intervention of
industrial organisation, will pay the rent of their places of business
either directly to the municipality, or to the private landlord whose
income the municipality will absorb by taxation. Finally, when rents
of ability had reached their irreducible natural level, they could be
dealt with by a progressive Income Tax in the very improbable case of
their proving a serious social inconvenience.
It is not necessary to go further into the economic detail of the
process of the extinction of private property. Much of that process
as sketched here may be anticipated by sections of the proprietary
class successively capitulating, as the net closes about their special
interests, on such terms as they may be able to stand out for before
their power is entirely broken.[95]
We may also safely neglect for the moment the question of the
development of the House of Commons into the central government which
will be the organ for federating the municipalities, and nationalising
inter-municipal rents by an adjustment of the municipal contributions
to imperial taxation: in short, for discharging national as distinct
from local business. One can see that the Local Government Board of
the future will be a tremendous affair; that foreign States will be
deeply affected by the reaction of English progress; that international
trade, always the really dominant factor in foreign policy, will have
to be reconsidered from a new point of view when profit comes to
be calculated in terms of net social welfare instead of individual
pecuniary gain; that our present system of imperial aggression, in
which, under pretext of exploration and colonisation, the flag follows
the filibuster and trade follows the flag, with the missionary bringing
up the rear, must collapse when the control of our military forces
passes from the capitalist class to the people; that the disappearance
of a variety of classes with a variety of what are now ridiculously
called “public opinions” will be accompanied by the welding of society
into one class with a public opinion of inconceivable weight; that this
public opinion will make it for the first time possible effectively
to control the population; that the economic independence of women,
and the supplanting of the head of the household by the individual as
the recognized unit of the State, will materially alter the status of
children and the utility of the institution of the family; and that the
inevitable reconstitution of the State Church on a democratic basis
may, for example, open up the possibility of the election of an avowed
Freethinker like Mr. John Morley or Mr. Bradlaugh to the deanery of
Westminster. All these things are mentioned only for the sake of a
glimpse of the fertile fields of thought and action which await us when
the settlement of our bread and butter question leaves us free to use
and develop our higher faculties.
This, then, is the humdrum programme of the practical Social Democrat
to-day. There is not one new item in it. All are applications of
principles already admitted, and extensions of practices already in
full activity. All have on them that stamp of the vestry which is so
congenial to the British mind. None of them compel the use of the words
Socialism or Revolution: at no point do they involve guillotining,
declaring the Rights of Man, swearing on the altar of the country,
or anything else that is supposed to be essentially un-English. And
they are all sure to come--landmarks on our course already visible to
farsighted politicians even of the party which dreads them.
Let me, in conclusion, disavow all admiration for this inevitable, but
sordid, slow, reluctant, cowardly path to justice. I venture to claim
your respect for those enthusiasts who still refuse to believe that
millions of their fellow creatures must be left to sweat and suffer
in hopeless toil and degradation, whilst parliaments and vestries
grudgingly muddle and grope towards paltry instalments of betterment.
The right is so clear, the wrong so intolerable, the gospel so
convincing, that it seems to them that it _must_ be possible to enlist
the whole body of workers--soldiers, policemen, and all--under the
banner of brotherhood and equality; and at one great stroke to set
Justice on her rightful throne. Unfortunately, such an army of light
is no more to be gathered from the human product of nineteenth century
civilisation than grapes are to be gathered from thistles. But if we
feel glad of that impossibility; if we feel relieved that the change
is to be slow enough to avert personal risk to ourselves; if we feel
anything less than acute disappointment and bitter humiliation at
the discovery that there is yet between us and the promised land a
wilderness in which many must perish miserably of want and despair:
then I submit to you that our institutions have corrupted us to the
most dastardly degree of selfishness. The Socialists need not be
ashamed of beginning as they did by proposing militant organisation
of the working classes and general insurrection. The proposal proved
impracticable; and it has now been abandoned--not without some
outspoken regrets--by English Socialists. But it still remains as the
only finally possible alternative to the Social Democratic programme
which I have sketched to-day.
FOOTNOTES:
[73] An address delivered on the 7th September, 1888, to the Economic
Section of the British Association at Bath.
[74] Explained in the first essay in this volume.
[75] See page 57-61.
[76] “Principles of Political Economy,” chap. xxiv, p. 202.
[77] “Theory of Political Economy.” By W. Stanley Jevons (London:
Macmillan & Co.). See also “The Alphabet of Economic Science.” Part by
Philip H. Wicksteed. (Same publishers.)
[78] See pp. 7-9 _ante_.
[79] The general impression that the old Poor Law had become an
indefensible nuisance is a correct one. All attempts to mitigate
Individualism by philanthropy instead of replacing it by Socialism are
foredoomed to confusion.
[80] See Final Report of Royal Commission on Trade Unions, 1869. Vol.
i, p. xvii, sec. 46.
[81] See Mr. Robert Giffen’s address on “The Recent Rate of Material
Progress in England.” Proceedings of the British Association at
Manchester in 1887, page 806.
[82] See Mr. Robert Giffen on Import and Export Statistics, “Essays on
Finance,” Second Series, p. 194. (London: G. Bell & Sons. 1886.)
[83] This same Government, beginning to realise what it has
unintentionally done for Social Democracy, is already (1889) doing what
it can to render the new County Councils socialistically impotent by
urgently reminding them of the restrictions which hamper their action.
[84] The authority for this figure will be found in Fabian Tract, No.
5, “Facts for Socialists.”
[85] Mr. R. Giffen, “Essays in Finance,” Second Series, p. 393.
[86] Proceedings of the Pan-Anglican Synod: Lambeth, 1888. Report of
Committee on Socialism.
[87] Finally, the Commissioner was superseded; and Mr. Burns was
elected a member of the first London County Council by a large majority.
[88] It is due to the leaders of the Co-operative movement to say here
that they are no parties to the substitution of dividend-hunting by
petty capitalists for the pursuit of the ideal of Robert Owen, the
Socialist founder of Co-operation; and that they are fully aware that
Co-operation must be a political as well as a commercial movement if it
is to achieve a final solution of the labor question.
[89] Ample material for a study of West End mob panic may be found in
the London newspapers of February, 1886, and November, 1887.
[90] Lord Bramwell, President of the Economic Section of the British
Association in 1888.
[91] See note, p. 171.
[92] The meaning of these terms will be familiar to readers of the
first essay.
[93] See note, p. 16.
[94] That is, the manager would receive less for his work than the
artisan. Cases in which the profits of the employer are smaller than
the wages of the employee are by no means uncommon in certain grades of
industry where small traders have occasion to employ skilled workmen.
[95] Such capitulations occur already when the Chancellor of the
Exchequer takes advantage of the fall in the current rate of interest
(explained on page 20) to reduce Consols. This he does by simply
threatening to pay off the stockholders with money freshly borrowed at
the current rate. They, knowing that they could not reinvest the money
on any better terms than the reduced ones offered by the Chancellor,
have to submit. There is no reason why the municipalities should not
secure the same advantages for their constituents. For example, the
inhabitants of London now pay the shareholders of the gas companies a
million and a half annually, or 11 per cent on the £13,650,000 which
the gas works cost. The London County Council could raise that sum for
about £400,000 a year. By threatening to do this and start municipal
gas works, it could obviously compel the shareholders to hand over
their works for £400,000 a year, and sacrifice the extra 8 per cent
now enjoyed by them. The saving to the citizens of London would be
£1,000,000 a year, sufficient to defray the net cost of the London
School Board. Metropolitan readers will find a number of cognate
instances in Fabian Tract No. 8, “Facts for Londoners.”
THE OUTLOOK.
BY HUBERT BLAND.
Mr. Webb’s historical review brought us from the “break up of the
old synthesis” (his own phrase), a social system founded on a basis
of religion, a common belief in a divine order, to the point where
perplexed politicians, recognising the futility of the principle of
Individualism to keep the industrial machine in working order, with
“freedom of contract” upon their lips spent their nights in passing
Factory Acts, and devoted their fiscal ingenuity to cutting slice after
slice off incomes derived from rent and interest. His paper was an
inductive demonstration of the failure of anarchy to meet the needs of
real concrete men and women--a proof from history that the world moves
from system, through disorder, back again to system.
Mr. Clarke showed us, also by the historic method, that given a
few more years of economic progress on present lines, and we shall
reach, _via_ the Ring and the Trust, that period of “well defined
confrontation of the rich and poor” upon which German thought has
settled as the brief stage of sociological evolution immediately
preceding organic change.
The truth of this postulate of Teutonic philosophers and economists no
one who has given to it a moment’s serious thought is likely to call in
question. Nor does anyone who has followed the argument developed in
these lectures believe that the transition from mitigated individualism
to full collectivity can be made until the capitalist system has worked
itself out to its last logical expression. Till then, no political or
social upheaval, however violent, nay, even though the “physical force
revolutionists” should chase the Guards helter-skelter down Parliament
Street and the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society hold its
meetings in the Council Chamber of Windsor Castle, will be anything
more than one of those “transient riots,” spoken of by Mrs. Besant,
which “merely upset thrones and behead monarchs.”[96] All sociologists
I think, all Socialists I am sure, are agreed that until the economic
moment has arrived, although the hungry or the ignorant may kick up a
dust in Whitechapel and make a bloody puddle in Trafalgar Square, the
Social Revolution is impossible. But I, for my part, do not believe in
the even temporary rout of the Household Brigade, nor indeed in any
popular outbreak not easily suppressible by the Metropolitan police;
and I shall waste no time in discussing that solution of the social
problem of which more was heard in the salad days of the English
Socialist movement--in its pre-Fabian era--than now, _viz._, physical
force employed by a vigorous few. The physical force man, like the
privileged Tory, has failed to take note of the flux of things, and
to recognise the change brought about by the ballot. Under a lodger
franchise the barricade is the last resort of a small and desperate
minority, a frank confession of despair, a reduction to absurdity
of the whole Socialist case. Revolutionary heroics, natural and
unblameable enough in exuberant puerility, are imbecile babblement in
muscular adolescence, and in manhood would be criminal folly.
Let us assume then that the present economic progress will continue
on its present lines. That machinery will go on replacing hand labor;
that the joint-stock company will absorb the private firm, to be,
in its turn, swallowed up in the Ring and the Trust. That thus the
smaller producers and distributors will gradually, but at a constantly
increasing pace, be squeezed out and reduced to the condition of
employees of great industrial and trade corporations, managed by highly
skilled captains of industry, in the interests of idle shareholders.
In a parliamentarian State like ours, the economic cleavage, which
divides the proprietors from the propertyless, ever growing wider and
more clearly defined, must have its analogue in the world of politics.
The revolution of the last century, which ended in the installation
of the Grand Industry, was the last of the great unconscious world
changes. It was helped by legislation of course; but the help was
only of the negative and destructive sort. “Break our fetters and
let us alone,” was the cry of the revolutionists to Parliament. The
lawmakers, not knowing quite what they were doing, responded, and then
blythely contracted debts, and voted money for commercial wars. Such a
sight will never be seen again. The repeated extension of the suffrage
has done more than make the industrial masses articulate, it has given
them consciousness; and for the future the echo of the voices of those
who suffer from economic changes will be heard clamoring for relief
within the walls of St. Stephen’s and the urban guildhalls.
Thus the coming struggle between “haves” and “have nots” will be a
conflict of parties, each perfectly conscious of what it is fighting
about and fully alive to the life and death importance of the issues at
stake.
I say “will be”; for one has only to read a few speeches of political
leaders or attend a discussion at a workman’s club to be convinced that
at present it is only the keener and more alert minds on either side
which are more than semi-conscious of the true nature of the campaign
of which the first shots may even now be heard at every bye-election.
But as nothing makes one so entirely aware of one’s own existence as
a sharp spasm of pain; so it is to the suffering--the hunger, the
despair of to-morrow’s dinner, the anxiety about the next new pair
of trousers--wrought by the increasing economic pressure upon the
enfranchised and educated proletariat that we must look to awaken that
free self-consciousness which will give the economic changes political
expression and enable the worker to make practical use of the political
weapons which are his.
The outlook then from the point of view of this paper is a political
one--one in which we should expect to see the world political gradually
becoming a reflex of the world economic. That political should be
slow in coming into line with economic facts is only in accordance
with all that the past history of our country has to teach us. For
years and decades the squirearchy retained an influence in the House
of Commons out of all proportion to its potency as an economic force;
and even at this moment the “landed interest” bears a much larger
part in law-making than that to which its real importance entitles
it. Therefore we must be neither surprised nor dispirited if, in a
cold-blooded envisagement of the condition of English parties, the
truth is borne in upon us that the pace of political progress has
no proper relation to the rate at which we are travelling towards
Socialism in the spheres of thought and industry.
This fact is probably--nay almost certainly--very much more patent
to the Socialist and the political student than to the man in the
street, or even to him of the first class railway carriage. The noisy
jubilation of the Radical press over the victory of a Home Ruler
at a bye-election, at a brief and vague reference to the “homes of
the people” in a two hours’ speech from a Liberal leader, or at the
insertion of a “social” plank in a new annual programme, is well and
cleverly calculated to beguile the ardent Democrat, and strike cold
terror to the heart of the timorous Tory. But a perfectly impartial
analysis of the present state of parties will convince the most
sanguine that the breath of the great economic changes dealt with in
Mr. Clarke’s paper has as yet scarcely ruffled the surface of the House
of Commons.
When the syllabus of this course of lectures was drawn up, those who
were responsible for it suggested as the first subheading of this
paper, the well worn phrase, “The disappearance of the Whig.” It is a
happy expression, and one from the contemplation of which much comfort
may be derived by an optimistic and unanalytical temperament. Printed
are at this disadvantage compared with spoken words, they fail to
convey the nicer _nuances_ of meaning bestowed by tone and emphasis;
and thus the word “disappearance” meets the eye, carrying with it no
slightest suggestion of irony. Yet the phrase is pointless, if not
“meant surcarstic”; for so far is the Whig from “disappearing,” that
he is the greatest political fact of the day. To persons deafened
by the daily democratic shouting of the Radical newspapers this
assertion may require some confirmation and support. Let us look at
the facts then. The first thing which strikes us in connexion with
the present Parliament is that it no longer consists of two distinct
parties, _i.e._, of two bodies of men differentiated from each other
by the holding of _fundamentally_ different principles. Home Rule
left out,[97] there remains no reason whatever, except the quite
minor question of Disestablishment, why even the simulacrum of party
organisation should be maintained, or why the structural arrangements
of the House of Commons should not be so altered as to resemble those
of a town hall, in which all the seats face the chair.
But fifty years ago the floor of the House was a frontier of genuine
significance; and the titles “Whig” and “Tory” were word-symbols of
real inward and spiritual facts. The Tory party was mostly made up of
men who were conscientiously opposed to popular representation, and
prepared to stand or fall by their opposition. They held, as a living
political creed, that the government of men was the eternal heritage of
the rich, and especially of those whose riches spelt rent. The Whigs,
on the other hand, believed, or said they believed, in the aphorism
“_Vox populi, vox Dei_”; and they, on the whole, consistently advocated
measures designed to give that voice a distincter and louder utterance.
Here, then, was one of those fundamental differences in the absence of
which party nomenclature is a sham. But there was another. In the first
half of this century the Tories, hidebound in historic traditions and
deaf to the knell of the old _régime_ tolling in the thud, thud, of the
piston rods of the new steam engines, clung pathetically to the old
idea of the functions of the State and to territorial rights. The Whigs
went for _laisser faire_ and the consequent supremacy of the business
man. I am making a perfectly provable proposition when I say that all
the political disputes[98] which arose between the Revolution of 1688
and the enfranchisement of the £10 householder by Disraeli had their
common cause in one of these two root differences. But the battle has
long ago been lost and won. The Whigs have triumphed all along the
line. The Tories have not only been beaten, they have been absorbed. A
process has gone on like that described by Macaulay as following on the
Norman invasion, when men gradually ceased to call themselves Saxon and
Norman and proudly boasted of being English. The difference in the case
before us is that while the Tories have accepted the whole of the Whig
principles they still abjure the Whig name.
No so-called Conservative to-day will venture on opposing an extension
of the franchise on the plain ground of principle. At most he will but
temporise and plead for delay. No blush of conscious inconsistency
suffused Mr. Ritchie’s swarthy features when introducing his “frankly
democratic” Local Government Bill. And rightly not; for he was doing no
violence to party principles.
In the matter of the functions of the State, the absorption of the Tory
is not quite so obvious, because there never has been, and, as long
as society lasts, never can be, a _parti serieux_ of logical _laisser
faire_. Even in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, the difference
between the two great parties was mainly one of tendency--of attitude
of mind. The Tory had a certain affection for the State--a natural
self-love: the Whig distrusted it. This distrust is now the sentiment
of the whole of our public men. They see, some of them perhaps more
clearly than others, that there is much the State must do; but they all
wish that much to be as little as possible. Even when, driven by an
irresistible force which they feel but do not understand (which none
but the Socialist does or can understand), they bring forward measures
for increasing the power of the whole over the part, their arguments
are always suffused in a sickly halo of apology: their gestures are
always those of timorous deprecation and fretful diffidence. They are
always nervously anxious to explain that the proposal violates no
principle of political economy, and with them political economy means,
not Professor Sidgwick, but Adam Smith.
The reason why this unanimity of all prominent politicians on great
fundamental principles is not manifest to the mind of the average man
is that, although there is nothing left to get hot or even moderately
warm about, the political temperature is as high as ever. It is not in
the dust of the arena, but only in the repose of the auditorium that
one is able to realise that men will fight as fiercely and clapper-claw
each other as spitefully over a dry bone as over a living principle.
One has to stand aside awhile to see that politicians are like the
theological controversialists of whom Professor Seeley somewhere says
that they never get so angry with each other as when their differences
are almost imperceptible, except perhaps when they are quite so.