problem. If the workers received better wages many of the questions
which now perplex us would solve themselves. And here we are brought
directly to what Mr. Sidney Webb has called “the policy of the National
Minimum.” The principle of the national minimum has been long ago
embodied in legislation, and is in reality the root idea of factory
acts, public health acts, restrictions on over-crowding and most other
social reforms of the last century. But its possibilities are by no
means exhausted. We must develop it further along the same lines until
it gives us what we most want, a statutary minimum wage for labour.
This has been partially established in a few of the most prosperous of
our staple industries by the development of Trade Unionism. Its much
needed application to the unskilled trades where the rankest sweating
abounds can only be made possible by the exertion of state authority.
To those who are soaked in the Liberal tradition of “free contract” of
course the legal minimum wage will seem a piece of odious tyranny, but
there is, as it seems to me, no essential difference between the fixing
of maximum hours by law and the fixing of minimum wages. It is at least
as important to the community that its citizens should not be underpaid
as that they should not be overworked.
The Trade Unions to which we owe nearly all that betterment of the
condition of the workers which Liberals absurdly attribute to Free
Trade, cannot possibly be allowed to remain in the impossible position
in which recent legal decisions have placed them. But that is no
reason for agitating for what is called the _status quo ante_, which
is neither practicable nor desirable. The sound demand is that the
law should be made clear; that it should put single employés and
combinations of workmen on an equal footing; that legal disabilities of
Trade Unions should be removed; and that the liability of Trade Unions
should be definitely confined to those authorised acts of its servants
or agents for which a corporate body may fairly be held responsible.
This on the face of it is reasonable, and should be applicable to
employers’ associations also, so that when the time comes for the
enactment of a Compulsory Arbitration Law (as in Australia)--that is
when the trade unionists themselves recognise the desirability of such
a measure, the machinery for its execution will be available.
Then there is the perennial and apparently impenetrable problem of the
Unemployed. This is one of the problems which in all probability cannot
be finally solved except by a complete reorganization of society. But,
wisely handled, it can be palliated and reduced to more manageable
proportions. In discussing this question a distinction must always
be made between the temporary unemployment to which all workmen are
liable, and the permanent or chronic unemployment of the great masses
of the unfit which our social system is always throwing off. These poor
wretches are no more to be blamed for their idleness and worthlessness
(from the social standpoint) than the rich shareholder is to be blamed
for his. But their presence unquestionably complicates the problem and
their treatment must inevitably be different. The first thing to do is
to get at the facts. For this purpose there should be a Labour Bureau
in connection with every considerable local authority which should
keep a record of the state of the labour market from time to time.
These bureaus should be in constant communication with a Department
of Labour at Westminster, which is one of the most pressing needs of
the hour. As to relief works, Mr. Long’s farm colonies are good so
far as they go; schemes for re-afforestation and the reclamation of
fore-shores are perhaps even better. But it is well to keep in mind
that the great aim of all social reformers should be to eliminate the
“unemployable” class altogether. Mr. Webb’s “national minimum” policy
if carried out in all its branches would practically do this.
The question of employment is closely connected with the whole question
of our Poor Law, which badly wants re-modelling. Such a process should
include the abolition of the Poor Law Guardians (the last relic of the
_ad hoc_ principle and a far more indefensible one than the School
Boards) and the transfer of their powers to the local authority best
fitted to deal with them,--probably the County and Borough Councils. It
should also of course include the establishment of universal Old Age
Pensions, a measure whose popularity is as manifest as its justice, as
was proved in 1895, when it contributed enormously to swell the Tory
majority. The fact is that our present Poor Law was the first product
of middle class Liberalism, flushed with its stupendous victory of
1832. It is founded unmistakeably on the principles of that creed,
which, believing in the eternal justice of “economic harmonies,”
regarded the fact of a poor man being out of work as convincing proof
of his worthlessness and criminality. It is as impossible for us, as
the old Poor Law was for them.
Less obvious but not less certain is the connection between all these
problems and the decline of our agriculture. It is the decline of
agriculture which has driven into the towns the masses of unskilled
labour with which we have to deal. Indeed the Liberals foresaw and
deliberately planned this, when, first by the Poor Law and afterwards
by the Repeal of the Corn Laws, they drove labour off the land in
order to obtain it cheaply in the great industrial centres. And that
is how the situation has worked out, so that it is important, no less
in the interest of the town proletariat than in that of the country,
that we should re-organise the first and most necessary of our staple
industries. The idea apparently entertained in some Liberal circles
that this can be done by the taxation of land values is, as Mr.
Brougham Villiers has pointed out in “The Opportunity of Liberalism”
(not altogether I should suppose to the gratification of his Liberal
friends), on the face of it absurd. The end at which we are aiming is
not that the state should own the ground rents but that it should own
the land and the capital used to develop it, and it is towards this end
that our policy should be directed. To this end we want an energetic
system of state aid to farmers such as that already inaugurated by
Sir Horace Plunkett and others in Ireland. We want loans to farmers
on state security and experiments in cooperative farming under state
supervision and with state encouragement; we want increased powers for
local authorities in rural districts to buy and develop land; above
all we want light railways, cheap and rapid transit, an agricultural
parcels post (as proposed by Mr. Rider Haggard); and finally we want an
end put to the monstrous system whereby Railway Companies charge higher
rates to British than to foreign producers. When this policy has been
fairly tried we shall see whether we also want a protective tariff.
We do not want a tariff which will merely raise the landlord’s rent,
but, as I have already pointed out, Socialists have no theoretic bias
against such a tariff if it can be shown to be necessary to the public
interest.
But there is one question to which Socialists ought to devote a great
deal more attention than they show any signs of devoting at present.
Lord Randolph Churchill, the ablest and most far-sighted of modern
party leaders, saw its importance twenty years ago, and put it in the
fore-front of his programme. That question is the reform of government
departments. Until this is honestly faced and dealt with, the
Individualist will always have a powerful controversial weapon against
Socialist propaganda. When the Socialist demands that the state shall
undertake more duties, his opponent has only to point to the duties it
has already undertaken and ask if he wants any more duties performed
like that! A national system of transit run as the War Office is run
would hardly be an unqualified blessing and would probably produce
a reaction of the most damaging kind. The only answer is to reform
the government departments and make them workmanlike and efficient
bodies. Until this is done we shall be checked at every point every
time we want a measure involving state ownership carried. Moreover
we shall find it impossible to give effect to our policy of state
regulation. The War Office has on the whole been most unfairly treated
in being gibbetted as the supreme type of red tape and inefficiency.
In neither respect is it really worse than most other branches of our
administration--not so bad for example as the Local Government Board,
which is so hopelessly understaffed and so miserably ineffective that
it is obliged from mere instinct of self-preservation to oppose every
forward movement in municipal politics lest it should be overburdened
still further. It matters little who is its representative in the
Cabinet. It is the Board itself and not its President for the time
being that obstructs progress. Yet an efficient Local Government Board,
encouraging progressive local bodies and harrying up backward ones, is
an essential part of the “national minimum” policy. From every point
of view therefore it is essential that our departments of state should
be put on a new and better footing. A businesslike Home Office and a
businesslike Local Government Board would do more for social reform
than many acts of Parliament.
SOME MATERIALS AND A POSSIBILITY.
Successive Reform Acts have so widened the basis of the franchise
in this country that the working man has now the issue of the great
majority of elections in his hands. By the working man I here mean
the manual labourer who earns weekly wages; the definition is not
scientific, but it is I think effectively descriptive. It is difficult
to define a working man, but people know him when they see him, as
Mr. Morley said of a Jingo. The manual labourer then is master of the
situation; and it becomes a matter of primary importance for any party
which wishes for a parliamentary majority to consider what manner of
man he is, and what kind of policy is likely to receive his favour.
Now I have no sympathy at all with the contemptuous tone adopted by
most Socialists towards the working man. This scorn of the average
artisan or labourer may be regarded as the connecting bond between all
schools of modern Socialism in this country, the one sentiment common
to Mr. Hyndman and to Mr. Bernard Shaw. Were that scorn just, its
expression would be imprudent; for John Smith of Oldham, however stupid
he may be, is, as Mr. Blatchford has remarked “very numerous,” and in
a country ruled by the counting of heads it would be good policy to
treat him with respect and good humour. But it is not just. As a matter
of fact, the working man is by no means the slavish imbecile that some
Socialists seem to think him. The fact that he has built up with iron
resolution, in the face of stupendous difficulties, and at the cost of
terrible sacrifices, the Trade Union system of this country--perhaps
the noblest monument of the great qualities of the British character
that the century has seen--might well protect him from the sarcasms of
wealthy idealists. If he is not a Socialist, is that altogether his
fault? Or is it by any chance partly ours?
The British workman is not, as I have said, by any means a fool. He
does not enjoy being sweated; he is not in love with long hours and
low wages; he does not clamour for bad housing or dear transit. On
the contrary, when sufficiently skilled and educated to be capable of
effective organisation, he is a keen trade unionist, ready to stand
up promptly and with conspicuous success for the rights and interests
of his class; and he has shown himself able and willing to support
legislation for his own benefit and that of his fellows. The Socialists
have in him excellent raw material of which a most effective fighting
force could be made. How do they use him?
The first thing that a Socialist of the old school does, when brought
face to face with a working class audience, is deliberately to insult
it. I heard of one Socialist orator who began his address to an East
End meeting with the sentence--“What are you? Dogs!” I suggest that
this is not the way to placate the unbeliever or to allay the suspicion
with which his conservative instincts lead him to regard a new idea.
Moreover it is not true. The working man knows perfectly well that he
and his class are not “dogs”; and he rightly concludes that a man so
profoundly ignorant of his condition is not the man to improve it.
However, having collectively and individually insulted those whom he
seeks to convert, the preacher launches joyously into the abysses
and whirlpools of German philosophy and economics, calls his hearers
“proletarians” (to their intense astonishment), tells them that they
are being robbed of “surplus value,” discusses abstruse matters
concerning the relations between “exchange value” and “labour power,”
and generally leads them through mazes of foreign scientific jargon
from which they eventually emerge gasping for breath. Now I submit
that this is an absurd way of going to work. Not so did Cobden and his
allies act, when they set out to convert the middle classes to the
dogmas of Adam Smith. They had a systematic theory of economics as
elaborate as that of the Marxian, but they did not pelt miscellaneous
popular gatherings with its technicalities. They crystallised it into
one simple, effective and intelligible phrase,--“To buy in the cheapest
market and to sell in the dearest.” I will not disguise my personal
conviction that this maxim is of and from the Devil. But (perhaps for
that reason) it is lucid and unmistakeable and makes a definite and
persuasive appeal to the instincts and prejudices of the commercial
classes. I fear I cannot say as much for the crystallizations favoured
by Socialist propagandists. “The Abolition of the Wages System” and
“Production for Use and not for Profit” convey to the workman, I
imagine, no clearer meaning than they convey to me.
I am aware that there has been of late in Socialist circles something
of a reaction against this sort of thing, as also against the futile
Marxian prophecies to the effect that “economic forces” would produce
a “Crisis” which would have the effect of abolishing the capitalist
system whether anyone wanted it abolished or no. But the reaction
has taken an entirely wrong turn. It has resulted so far in nothing
better than an outburst of sheer sentimentalism as unacceptable to
the hard conservative common-sense of the workers as the doctrinaire
revolutionism that preceded it. The chief expression of this
sentimentalism may be found in the repudiation of the Class War by
the leaders of the I.L.P. and the substitution of vague talk about
Universal Love and the Brotherhood of Man. Now here the I.L.P. leaders
have got hold of quite the wrong end of the stick. The existence of
the class war is a fact of common observation. A short walk down any
street with your eyes open will show it to you. Indeed it is obvious
that there is and must be a permanent antagonism between the buyers
and sellers of labour--or if our hyper-economic critics prefer it of
“labour-power.” And moreover this fact of the class war is a fact,
which every workman (as also every capitalist) recognises in practice,
if not in theory. All trade unionism is built upon his recognition of
it; so is the demand for a labour party. The error of the S.D.F. did
not lie here.
The Marxians were not wrong in saying that there was a class war;
there is a class war. They were not wrong in saying that the worker
ought to be educated in class-consciousness; they ought to be so
educated for their class-consciousness is the best foundation for our
propaganda. Where the Marxians were wrong in regard to the class war
was in their tacit assumption that “class-consciousness” was identical
with Socialism. It is not. Socialists and Trade Unionists are alike in
their _recognition_ of the class war, but they differ widely in their
attitude towards it. The Socialist wishes so to organise society as
to bring the Class War to an end; the Trade Unionist wants the war to
go on, but he wants his own class to get better chances in it than
they get at present. As regards practical matters the path of the two
is for the present largely identical. Extended factory legislation,
old age pensions, housing, the municipalisation of monopolies are
desired by Socialists and Trade Unionists alike, though not entirely
for the same reasons. Here and there, on Trade Union Law, on Compulsory
Arbitration in industrial disputes, in some instances on Child Labour,
the attitude of the two may appear different, but it only requires the
better economic education of the unions to bring them into line with
the Socialists on these points. Nevertheless, the distinction as well
as the relation between the two must be kept constantly in mind, if
the attitude of the typical manual worker towards Socialism is to be
understood.
I confess that it strikes me as a little absurd that the very wing of
the Socialist army which most enthusiastically defends the obviously
sensible policy of forming an alliance with the Unions without asking
its allies to swallow imposing Socialist formulae, should be the one
to throw over the one effective link between Socialism and Trade
Unionism,--the recognition of the Class War. The result of this
repudiation and of the high-sounding humanitarian rhetoric with which
it is accompanied has been to hopelessly estrange the I.L.P. from the
Trade Union movement, so that it is now hardly more influential in that
direction than the S.D.F. itself. The I.L.P. does indeed to some degree
enlarge its boundaries, but the type of man it now principally attracts
is not the trade unionist or the labourer. The sort of person who finds
the I.L.P. creed as mirrored in the utterance of Messrs. Keir Hardie
and Bruce Glasier exactly to his taste is the wavering Nonconformist in
process of ceasing to believe in God who is looking about for something
“undenominational” to believe in. Universal Love, Brotherhood,
Righteousness--all that sort of thing suits him down to the ground. The
phenomenon is no new one in history. Just the same kind of sentiment
underlays the political propaganda of Isaac Butt, of Vergniaud, of Sir
Harry Vane. Its track is across history; its name is Girondism, and
its end has always been futility and disaster. The pious Girondins
were shocked at Danton’s declaration “terror is the order of the day,”
just as the I.L.P. rhetoricians are shocked at the recognition of the
Class War, because it contradicted their sentimental assumptions. But
Terror was the order of the day, and it was only because Terror was the
order of the day that France was saved from foreign conquerors and the
Revolution became an accomplished fact.
But, if the worker really does recognise the class war and if the
path of Socialism is for the present along the lines of the class
war, why does the worker distrust the Socialist? I have hinted at my
answer in a previous chapter, but I will take the present opportunity
of elaborating it a little. When Socialists of either of the above
types leave German dialect and Girondin declamation, which he does
not understand and come to practical business which he does, they
give the working man very little that he values and much that is
profoundly distasteful to him. When for example they touch on war and
foreign politics they give him, under a veil of specious rhetoric
which does not convince him, the general impression that they want
to see England “licked.” He does not like this, and he expresses his
dislike vehemently and not always very peaceably. Doubtless he often
vents his anger on people whose patriotism is as real as his own, and
who merely differ from him as to the merits of some particular war or
expedition. But on the whole the astonishingly shrewd instincts of
the workers do not mislead them. They are right in feeling that there
is in the Socialist movement a strong under-current of unmistakeable
anti-patriotism, a genuine hatred and contempt for England and her
honour. If anyone doubts this, I do not think he has spent so much time
in Socialist clubs as I have.
If all this anti-patriotic sentiment, which disgusts and repels the
workers so much, were an essential part of Socialism we might have to
accept our unpopularity as the inevitable penalty of our convictions
and make the best of it. But, if I have not proved that it is nothing
of the sort, this book has been written in vain. Anti-patriotism,
anti-imperialism, anti-militarism, these are not Socialist doctrines
but the faded relics of a particularly debased form of Liberalism.
There is nothing in Socialism to prevent us from appealing to the
passionate patriotism of the masses; there is much in it to give point
to such an appeal.
The workman is a Tory by instinct and tradition. He is a Jingo--a
much healthier and more reputable Jingo than his brother of the
stock-exchange,--but still a Jingo in the most emphatic sense. I am
moreover convinced that he is at heart a protectionist. He dislikes
the idea of a tax on bread, especially as Mr. Chamberlain gives
him no really convincing guarantee of better industrial conditions
to follow; but I believe, and I note that I have the support of so
irreproachable a Liberal and Free Trader as Mr. Brougham Villiers in
this belief, that, if at any time during the last quarter of a century
the protection of manufactures alone had been offered to the working
classes, they would have accepted it with the utmost eagerness. It is
noticeable that as soon as the workman goes to the Colonies he becomes
an out and out Protectionist. This would hardly happen if he had
imbibed the pure milk of Cobdenism with as much relish as the Liberals
would have us believe.
Here then is your Tory Jingo Protectionist working man. What are you
going to do with him? It is easy enough to abuse him, but he is your
only possible electoral material, he is the man by whose vote you have
got to establish Socialism if it is to be established at all. There are
much fewer Liberals than Tories among the workers and such as there
are will much less readily join you, for they represent generally the
uncompromising individualist Radicalism which spread from the middle
orders down through the upper ranks of the artisans during the dark
days of Manchester ascendancy. It is from the Tory much more than from
the Liberal worker that the Labour party gets its votes,[11] even now,
while its still burdened with a dead weight of senseless Liberal
traditions. How much greater would its expansive force become if once
this burden was removed.
What deduction must we draw from these things? Surely this; that we
must appeal to the working classes on a double programme of practical
and immediate industrial reform at home and at the same time of
imperial federation, a spirited foreign policy and adequate provision
for national defence. I believe this experiment would succeed, at any
rate it has never yet been effectively tried. When Mr. Bernard Shaw
taunts the workers with their steady Tory voting, one feels disposed to
ask him what he expects. Surely he would not have them vote Liberal?
And if he replies that they should vote Socialist, one may throw down
this direct challenge--Would Mr. Shaw himself (the most brilliant,
the most acute and the most sincere of English Socialists) vote for a
good many of the Socialist and “Labour” candidates who have from time
to time presented themselves before the British electorate? Would he
not himself often prefer a Tory? But is there any reason to suppose
that if a leader came to us with the specific talent and temperament
of the demagogue (the value of which to a politician Mr. Shaw knows as
well and regards as highly as I do) and made his appeal on the Fabian
programme plus a vigorous and intelligent Imperialism, the people of
England would refuse to return him? I think not.