PRO-MUNICIPAL WORK.
There will be found in every progressive community societies and
organisations which represent a far higher level of public spirit
and enterprise than that possessed or displayed by such communities
in their collective capacity. It is probable that the government of
a community can never reach a higher tone or work on a higher plane
than the average sense of that community demands and enforces; and it
will greatly conduce to the well-being of any society if the efforts
of its State or municipal organisations are inspired and quickened by
those of its members whose ideals of society duty rise higher than the
average.[18]
And so it may be in Garden City. There will be discovered many
opportunities for public service which neither the community as a
whole, nor even a majority of its members, will at first recognise
the importance of, or see their way to embrace, and which public
services it would be useless, therefore, to expect the municipality to
undertake; but those who have the welfare of society at heart will, in
the free air of the city, be always able to experiment on their own
responsibility, and thus quicken the public conscience and enlarge the
public understanding.
The whole of the experiment which this book describes is indeed of
this character. It represents pioneer work, which will be carried out
by those who have not a merely pious opinion, but an effective belief
in the economic, sanitary, and social advantages of common ownership
of land, and who, therefore, are not satisfied merely to advocate that
those advantages should be secured on the largest scale at the national
expense, but are impelled to give their views shape and form as soon
as they can see their way to join with a sufficient number of kindred
spirits. And what the whole experiment is to the nation, so may what we
term “pro-municipal” undertakings be to the community of Garden City
or to society generally. Just as the larger experiment is designed to
lead the nation into a juster and better system of land tenure and a
better and more common-sense view of how towns should be built, so are
the various pro-municipal undertakings of Garden City devised by those
who are prepared to lead the way in enterprises designed to further the
well-being of the town, but who have not as yet succeeded in getting
their plans or schemes adopted by the Central Council.
Philanthropic and charitable institutions, religious societies, and
educational agencies of various kinds occupy a very large part in this
group of pro-municipal or pro-national agencies, and these have been
already referred to, and their nature and purposes are well known.
But institutions which aim at the more strictly material side of
well-being, such as banks and building societies, may be found here
too. Just as the founders of the Penny Bank paved the way for the Post
Office Savings Bank, so may some of those who study carefully the
experiment of building up Garden City see how useful a bank might be,
which, like the Penny Bank, aims not so much at gain for its founders
as at the well-being of the community at large. Such a bank might
arrange to pay the whole of its net profits or all its profits over
a certain fixed rate, into the municipal exchequer, and give to the
authorities of the town the option of taking it over should they be
convinced of its utility and its general soundness.
There is another large field for pro-municipal activity in the work of
building homes for the people. The municipality would be attempting too
much if it essayed this task, at least at the outset. To do so would
be perhaps to depart too widely from the path which experience has
justified, however much might be said in favour of such a course on the
part of a municipal body in command of ample funds. The municipality
has, however, done much to make the building of bright and beautiful
homes for the people possible. It has effectually provided against any
over-crowding within its area, thus solving a problem found insoluble
in existing cities, and it offers sites of ample size at an average
rate of £6 per annum for ground-rent and rates. Having done so much,
the municipality will pay heed to the warning of an experienced
municipal reformer, whose desire for the extension of municipal
enterprise cannot be doubted (Mr. John Burns, M.P., L.C.C.), who has
said: “A lot of work has been thrown upon the Works Committee of the
London County Council by councillors who are so anxious for its success
that they would choke it by a burden of work.”
There are, however, other sources to which the workers may look for
means to build their own homes. They may form building societies or
induce co-operative societies, friendly societies, and trade unions
to lend them the necessary money, and to help them to organise the
requisite machinery. Granted the existence of the true social spirit,
and not its mere letter and name, and that spirit will manifest itself
in an infinite variety of ways. There are in this country--who can
doubt it?--many individuals and societies who would be ready to raise
funds and organise associations for assisting bodies of workmen secure
of good wages to build their own homes on favourable terms.
A better security the lenders could scarcely have, especially having
regard to the ridiculously small landlord’s rent paid by the borrowers.
Certain it is that if the building of the homes for these workmen is
left to speculative builders of a strongly-pronounced individualistic
type, and these reap golden harvests, it will be the fault, amongst
others, of those large organisations of working-men which now place
their capital in banks, whence it is withdrawn by those who with
it “exploit” the very men who have placed it there. It is idle for
working-men to complain of this self-imposed exploitation, and to
talk of nationalising the entire land and capital of this country
under an executive of their own class, until they have first been
through an apprenticeship at the humbler task of organising men and
women with their own capital in constructive work of a less ambitious
character--until they have assisted far more largely than they have
yet done in building up capital, not to be wasted in strikes, or
employed by capitalists in fighting strikers, but in securing homes
and employment for themselves and others on just and honourable terms.
The true remedy for capitalist oppression where it exists, is not the
strike of _no work_, but the strike of _true work_, and against this
last blow the oppressor has no weapon. If labour leaders spent half the
energy in co-operative organisation that they now waste in co-operative
disorganisation, the end of our present unjust system would be at hand.
In Garden City such leaders will have a fair field for the exercise
of pro-municipal functions--functions which are exercised for the
municipality, though not by it--and the formation of building societies
of this type would be of the greatest possible utility.
But would not the amount of capital required for the building of the
dwelling-houses of a town of 30,000 be enormous? Some persons with whom
I have discussed the question look at the matter thus. So many houses
in Garden City at so many hundred of pounds a-piece, capital required
so much.[19] This is, of course, quite a mistaken way of regarding the
problem. Let us test the matter thus. How many houses have been built
in London within the last ten years? Shall we say, at the very roughest
of guesses 150,000, costing on an average £300 a-piece--to say nothing
of shops, factories, and warehouses. Well, that is £45,000,000. Was
£45,000,000 raised for this purpose? Yes, certainly, or the houses
would not have been built. But the money was not raised all at once,
and if one could recognise the actual sovereigns that were raised for
the building of these 150,000 houses, one would often find the very
same coins turning up again and again. So in Garden City. Before it is
completed, there will be 5,500 houses at, say, £300 a-piece, making
£1,650,000. But this capital will not be raised all at once, and here,
far more than in London, the very same sovereigns would be employed in
building many houses. For observe, money is not lost or consumed when
it is spent. It merely changes hands. A workman of Garden City borrows
£200 from a pro-municipal building society, and builds a house with
it. That house costs him £200, and the 200 sovereigns disappear so far
as he is concerned, but they become the property of the brickmakers,
builders, carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, etc., who have built his
house, whence those sovereigns would find their way into the pockets
of the tradesmen and others with whom such workmen deal, and thence
would pass into the pro-municipal bank of the town, when presently,
those 200 identical sovereigns might be drawn out and employed in
building another house. Thus there would be presented the apparent
anomaly of two, and then three, and then four or more houses, each
costing £200, being built with 200 sovereigns.[20] But there is no real
anomaly about it. The coins, of course, did not build the houses in
any of the supposed cases. The coins were but the measure of value,
and like a pair of scales and weights, may be used over and over again
without any perceptible lessening of their worth. What built the houses
was really labour, skill, enterprise, working up the free gifts of
nature; and though each of the workers might have his reward weighed
out to him in coins, the cost of all buildings and works in Garden
City must be mainly determined by the skill and energy with which its
labours are directed. Still, so long as gold and silver are recognised
as the medium of exchange, it will be necessary to use them, and of
great importance to use them skilfully--for the skill with which they
are used, or their unnecessary use dispensed with, as in a banker’s
clearing house, will have a most important bearing upon the cost of
the town, and upon the annual tax levied in the shape of interest on
borrowed capital. Skill must be therefore directed to the object of so
using coins that they may quickly effect their object of measuring one
value, and be set to work to measure another--that they may be turned
over as many times as possible in the year, in order that the amount of
labour measured by each coin may be as large as possible, and thus the
amount represented by interest on the coins borrowed, though paid at
the normal or usual rate, shall bear as small a proportion as possible
to the amount paid to labour. If this is done effectively, then a
saving to the community in respect of interest as great as the more
easily demonstrated saving in landlord’s rent may probably be effected.
And now the reader is asked to observe how admirably, and, as it were,
automatically, a well-organised migratory movement to land held in
common lends itself to the economic use of money, and to the making of
one coin serve many purposes. Money, it is often said, is “a drug in
the market.” Like labour itself, it seems enchanted, and thus one sees
millions in gold and silver lying idle in banks facing the very streets
where men are wandering workless and penniless. But here, on the site
of Garden City, the cry for employment on the part of those willing to
work will no more be heard in vain. Only yesterday it may have been
so, but to-day the enchanted land is awake, and is loudly calling
for its children. There is no difficulty in finding work--profitable
work--work that is really urgently, imperatively needed--the building
of a home-city, and, as men hasten to build up this and the other
towns which must inevitably follow its construction, the migration to
the towns--the old, crowded, chaotic slum-towns of the past--will be
effectually checked, and the current of population set in precisely the
opposite direction--to the new towns, bright and fair, wholesome and
beautiful.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] “Only a proportion of each in one society can have nerve enough to
grasp the banner of a new truth, and endurance enough to bear it along
rugged and untrodden ways.... To insist on a whole community being made
at once to submit to the reign of new practices and new ideas which
have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced speculative
intelligence of the time--this, even if it were a possible process,
would do much to make life impracticable and to hurry on social
dissolution.... A new social state can never establish its ideas unless
the persons who hold them confess them openly and give them an honest
and effective adherence.”--Mr. John Morley, “On Compromise,” Chap. v.
[19] The position was so stated by Mr. Buckingham in “National Evils
and Practical Remedies,” see Chap. x.
[20] A similar line of argument to this is very fully elaborated in a
most able work entitled “The Physiology of Industry,” by Mummery and
Hobson (MacMillan & Co.).