THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH
IN the last sentence of the last chapter I spoke of education,
pacification, and industrial organisation as the three monumental
tasks of a reformed political system. If the supreme object of a
central administration--the sooner we cease to talk of "government"
the better--is to make a people healthy, prosperous, and happy,
these are surely the three reforms to which it will most resolutely
apply itself. I have spoken of the very grave and pressing
nature of one of these reforms: the need to abolish militarism and
war. Later chapters will deal with education, in the very broad and
rich meaning which I assign to the word. Here I would sketch the
problem which seems to me to weigh heavily on us in connection with
the distribution of wealth and the present disorganisation of
industry.
It is useful sometimes to imagine ourselves in the year 3000 or so
looking back with critical eye on the twentieth century. One pictures
the future historian--some narrowly specialised expert on the social
life of the second decade of the twentieth century--discoursing on us.
A strange and interesting people, he will say. They boasted of their
intelligence, and they really did display a creditable measure of
intelligence in their research and their applied science. They
regarded themselves as far superior in humane sentiment to the Middle
Ages, to which they properly belong, and they put forward many
excellent vague proposals of social improvement. Yet it is not easy to
understand their slavery to ancient prejudices, sometimes of a quite
barbaric character. A superficial observer would say that the
contradiction was due to their unhappy practice of leaving the
majority of the community at a low level of culture, so that the
intelligent minority were checked by a slower-minded majority. But it
is a singular fact that some of the most intelligent men among the
minority, such as Mr. A. Balfour and Mr. F. E. Smith, held much the
same views as the agricultural workers, and made a kind of religion,
which they called Conservatism, of this obstinate retention of old
traditions. They seem, with all their pride in their culture, to have
mistaken their place in the evolution of the race. No people is
entitled to be called civilised which complacently tolerates war,
squalid and widespread poverty, dense areas of ignorance, political
corruption, and the many other remnants of barbarism which they
tolerated. The twentieth century was the last hour of barbarism, lit
by a few rays of the civilisation which dawned in the twenty-first
century.
If the infliction of pain and misery is, as I believe, the worst form
of crime, this retention of war and poverty is the gravest of our
social transgressions. But the guilt of our generation in regard to
these two crimes is very unequal. The way to abolish war is clear, but
the remedy of this other open sore of our social organism, a poverty
which stunts and embitters the lives of millions in every large
civilisation, is not at all clear. The plain man who, oppressed by the
spectacle of this desolating, unchanging poverty, seeks a remedy in
social literature, is at once beset by a dozen rival theorists. The
Socialist, the Anarchist, the Eugenist, the Malthusian, the
Single-Taxer, and other austere thinkers press on him their
contradictory formulae and their mutual abuse; these in turn are
assailed contemptuously by men who are not less acquainted with
economic matters; and the older political parties observe, with a
sigh, that poverty seems to be an inherent evil of every industrial
order, and we can do no more than mitigate its hardships. To this last
position the plain man usually comes.
Let us grant at once that the older political parties have done much
toward the alleviation of poverty. No one who is acquainted with the
condition of the workers a hundred years ago can hesitate to admit
this. Impatience is too rare a virtue, it is true, but this does not
dispense us from cultivating wisdom. A great deal has been won, and
generally won by the middle class, for the oppressed workers. Between
1830 and 1880, at least, thousands of middle-class men were working in
Europe for the advance and enlightenment of the workers. The old
doctrine of _laissez-faire_ has been forced to compromise with
decency. We have entirely abolished the horrible exploitation of cheap
child-labour which was common early in the nineteenth century. Our
Francis Places and Robert Owens have won for the worker the right to
form Trade Unions, and others the free education of his children. We
no longer permit the employer to fix the conditions and hours of
labour as he wills. The cotton-worker of Manchester, labouring twelve
or fourteen hours a day, and living in a squalid cellar, one hundred
years ago, would be amazed if he could visit the factories and homes
and places of amusement of his grandchildren. Even the poorer workers
are no longer left to God and the clergy; while the bulk of the
workers have numbers of cheap luxuries which would have seemed an
apocalyptic dream to the worker of Napoleon's day.
But let us not imagine that we have got our axe into the roots of
poverty and are in a fair way to abolish it. This is one of the most
dangerous fallacies of our age; and against that comfortable assurance
I, knowing well all that has been done, plead that not one of our
reforms makes for the abolition or the material restriction of
poverty. We pension the very aged worker and the still more aged
widow: on the pauper scale. We build substantial, if rather cheerless,
homes for the destitute, and we put warm, if ignominious, clothing on
the back of the orphan. We appoint minimum wages, and permit maximum
prices. We have labour bureaux, and district visitors, and a Salvation
Army, and a Church Army. All of which means that we give a drink to
the crucified; it might be well to study if we can cease to crucify.
The plain man or woman who earnestly wishes to help in the improvement
of life will inquire first, and most resolutely, what the actual range
and depth of poverty are; will study, secondly, how far our measures
of reform afford us any hope of curtailing it; and will, in the third
place, ask whether there is any other way of action which does offer
some hope of restricting, if not removing, the evil.
In the mind of many people poverty means that somewhere in the darker
depths of our cities, happily remote from the shopping centres, there
are a number of people who, from lack of skill or excess of drink,
cannot find regular employment, and must live. ... One does not know
exactly how they live, but certainly on unpleasantly short and dry
rations. In earlier times one dropped a half-sovereign into the
poor-box at church for these creatures, if they would come to church
and learn resignation. To-day one subscribes to the Charity
Organisation Society or the Salvation Army, or joins one of the many
enterprising associations which are going to make the poor richer
without making the rich poorer. We have a social conscience. We
believe in _laissez-faire_, but, being humane, we will not push it to
extremes. At the same time, being sensible men, we are not going to
push humanitarianism to extremes. The phrase-maker is the great
benefactor.
For a first acquaintance with poverty I would recommend a man to spend
a few hours, some Saturday evening, among those markets of the poor
which still line many of our more dingy thoroughfares. As the night
draws on, and the oil-lamps begin to flare and splutter over the
stalls, the grim courts and narrow streets of the district discharge
their grey streams of life upon the market. There is plenty of
laughter, you observe; there are plenty of round-faced matrons, with
clean, honest eyes and comfortable dress. "We ain't got much
money, but we do live," I heard one of them remark, in an interval
between bursts of raillery. The wives of regularly employed, and often
not ill-paid, workers are there, as well as poorer folk. But study
some of the quieter figures which move slowly among the throng or
linger enviously before the cheap shops. Notice the puny, shrivelled
infants, with quaint staring eyes, which, at the door of the
public-house, lie lightly in the arms of women whose faces are bloated
with drink and coarse food: the lean and ragged boys and girls, with
hollow and prematurely sharpened eyes, who hang about the
fruit-stalls, ready to dart upon the rotten castaways, or foster, in
darker spots, the premature sex-development which will drain their
scanty strength: the woman who, with drawn face, waits near the Red
Lion to see how many shillings her sodden brute of a husband will at
length hand her for a week's shopping: the weary old couple who have
seen better days, and now pass in silence through the babel of
vulgarity: the haggard-faced widow in mouldy black who hides her
paltry Sunday dinner in a worn bag: the eager eyes of the poorer
hawkers, which light up pathetically when a penny comes their way: the
men whose faces change at a drunken jibe into such faces as we have
seen behind the bars of a cage in a zoological garden, and the crowd
of men, women, and children rushing to enjoy the gratuitous spectacle
of a fight: the cheap, middle-aged prostitute, whose features are a
caricature of the features of woman.
You may see these things in all parts of London--north, south, east,
and west--every Saturday evening, and many other evenings, all the
year round. You may see them in all the other large towns and cities
of Britain, and the cities of France and Germany and the United States
and all other "great civilisations." I have studied them on
Saturday nights in half the cities of Britain: in Amsterdam and
Brussels and Cologne, in Paris and Nice, in Venice and Rome and
Naples, in New York and Chicago: and in the light of our historical
research one sees their ancestors in all the great cities of all the
great civilisations that ever were. As it was in the beginning ... But
that refers to the glory of God.
Follow to their homes these more pathetic figures of a London crowd.
You need not do so literally, for more observant and sympathetic
visitors have been there before you, and they told London long ago, as
far as London was willing to hear, how the majority of its citizens
live. Mr. Booth's book, _Life and Labour in London_, had better be
suppressed when its work is done, lest the men and women of a more
humane age learn too much about us; also Mr. Rowntree's book, which
shows this same fetid poverty lying at the feet of a superb minster,
the symbol of ages of ecclesiastical wealth and power; and many other
books. Let me summarise the relevant record of the natural history of
London.
We may begin with the lowest depth, with life as it is lived in some
of the streets which still linger about Covent Garden, and in east and
west and south. We are beginning to see the grim humour of tolerating
the existence of these hotbeds of corruption under the very shadow of
our marble palaces of justice and our marble hotels for millionaires,
and we are destroying them; but the life remains still in sufficient
quantity to fill a large town. In tenements of this order fifteen
rooms out of twenty are indescribably filthy. Legions of bugs lurk by
day behind the faded rags of ancient wallpaper or in the crevices of
the unwashed floor, or even venture forth as securely as if they were
conscious of free citizenship in these places. The "windows" are a
rough mosaic of dirty glass and roughly plastered paper. The ceiling
is pale black, the floor filthy. A table, one or two dilapidated
chairs, a kind of bed--the "landlord" would, in most cases, not
raise two shillings on the lot--and an entire family of ragged,
vermin-eaten human beings fill this foul box, which is often only
eight or ten feet square.
These people are thieves, cheap prostitutes, hawkers, porters,
charwomen, flower-sellers, ragmen--the most pitiful of the irregulars
which we suffer, age after age, to live and breed and die beyond the
extreme fringe of our industrial army. Sometimes they have nearly as
much food to eat as a workhouse-idler: generally not. Drink--the vile
mixtures of the cheaper public-house--they have more constantly; and
their children are not in their teens before they are familiar with
all the vice and crime and brutality which seven out of ten of these
rooms breed as naturally as they breed lice or bugs. In winter the
doors and windows are sealed, and men, women, and children huddle
together or, at times, crouch over a few lighted sticks. And year by
year, century by century, babies are ushered into this underworld in
edifying abundance, to live its ghastly life until the yellow frame
and dull brain are worn out.
Shocking, you will say, but happily rare. Do you know that, according
to the best authorities, 50,000 men, women, and children in London
alone live in this atmosphere of squalor and brutality and chronic
hunger?
Let us pass to the next higher circle of the modern Inferno--the
category of casual or very badly paid labour and chronic poverty, the
makers of your cheap furniture and clothes and brushes, your
match-boxes and chocolate-boxes, the hawkers and costers and regular
porters and dockers. Now there are generally two rooms to each family,
but the vermin still thrive in more than half of them, and the rooms
are filthy, and the children breathe an air that is foul with drink
and cursing and the most open and gross sexuality: not now in fifteen
cases out of twenty, it is true, but in ten cases out of twenty. Food
is habitually insufficient, for labour is uncertain, and profit is
infinitesimal; and, as a man _must_ drink, there are constant
disturbances to break the monotony and help one to forget the
customary hunger. You may have at times noticed the dejected hawker
returning, on a wet summer's day, with his tomatoes unsold: or the
children eager to collect fragments of the lids of orange-boxes in the
winter. Countess Russell told me that she once visited, unexpectedly,
a group of homes of this class, within a few minutes' walk of Gordon
Square, in the depth of winter. Hardly any had the material for a
fire, and few had food in the house. So they live, year in, year out;
and all that we propose to do is to give them five shillings a week
each if they will sustain the burden honestly for six decades, or
house and feed them in jail if they do not succeed in curbing their
criminal impulses.
Once, in the Westminster Court, I saw a young and humane judge hand
certain tickets to the jury, when they had established the guilt of
two petty criminals of this class. "These, gentlemen," he said,
"are permits to inspect the jail; go some day and see the place to
which you send criminals." A very wise and benevolent innovation,
but we still await the judge who will send the jury to inspect the
homes in which these men conceive crime.
About 400,000 citizens of the greatest city in the world belong to
this class. If 400,000 do not constitute a sufficiently important
problem, let us see the homes of the next category. These are the
irregularly employed and badly paid, though not the worst paid,
workers: costers, labourers, dockers, etc. There are about a million
of them in London alone. They know quite well what hunger is: for
weeks together, sometimes, the wage does not suffice to buy that
minimum quantity of nitrogen and carbon which men of science have
declared to be necessary, and the money is ill expended. They know
what cold is, for many a hard spell of winter finds them in want. They
have two or three rooms to each family, but, as a rule, not much of
that "Christian reticence" on which our clergy congratulate us.
To the great majority of these million and a half of London's poor,
sexual pleasure is the one cheap luxury; and we encourage them to
breed industriously. My wife, with other ladies and gentlemen,
addresses them on the subject from the tail of a cart in South London,
and teaches the heavy-burdened mothers how to avoid having so many
children; and the leader of this little group was sourly and
menacingly (and quite falsely) told by a distinguished Churchman,
sitting in a Royal Commission, that they were breaking the law of the
land. A friend of mine has been hounded out of the United States by
the police for attempting to give similar information to the poorer
mothers of New York.
Even in this third and very large category of London homes there is
much filth; and the windows, across which is drawn an odd cloth or a
ragged and dirty curtain, abound in broken panes. They have periods of
comparative plenty, when the children get boots and socks, and their
elders soak in beer and may even venture to a cinematograph show, if
the crude pictures on its garish façade promise a sufficiently silly
or sufficiently bloody programme. All that the police and the clergy
care about is that not more than an inch or two of underclothing are
exhibited in these places. They have also periods of want, when the
clothes go to the pawnshop, and life runs on the exasperating,
brutalising lines of the lower class. The daily round of life is
itself stupefying. At five or six they are dragged out of an
insufficient sleep, and they dully take their tea (of a kind) and
bread and margarine on a dirty table. After ten or twelve hours of
anxious quest of minute profits they return home for a slightly better
meal--a kipper, perhaps, or a few bits of cheap meat--too tired in
mind and body to do more than smoke and drink. They have plenty of
fun, of a sort, and take their tragedies lightly; but the angels, if
there are any, must fold their wings over their faces at the aspect of
these fellow-immortals. Even a politician might be expected to blush
for this self-governing democracy. It is a squalid, degrading,
stupefying life, below the level of civilisation.
Nearly one-third of the citizens of London do not rise above this
level. The three classes that I have described, or the mass of people
who spread continuously over these classes, were found by Mr. Booth to
number 1,300,000 of the four and a half million inhabitants of the
city. The figure for the Greater London of to-day is, of course,
immensely higher. "The submerged tenth" is a most unfortunate
phrase. It leads many, who know little of these matters, to suppose
that only a tenth of the inhabitants of London are very poor. The
truth is that a tenth live in a condition of misery, filth, and
degradation of which the ordinary decent citizen can form no
conception. They are the shirkers, the abnormal, and the worst casual
workers. But the life of this further million--or nearly one-fourth of
the total inhabitants of the Metropolis--the irregular or badly paid
workers, is a grave and accusing problem to every man of decent
sentiment. Their condition is not consistent with civilisation.
Certainly large numbers of them live clean and cheerful lives, but
even in these cases it is scandalous that sober and willing toil
should receive wage enough only to secure cleanliness and the
necessaries of life; while a far larger number sink under the burden,
and are dirty, intemperate, gross, and improvident.
Conceive the extension of this class all over Britain: the further
vast contingents of this army of poverty in the slums of Glasgow and
Liverpool and Manchester, in all our great manufacturing and shipping
towns, even in the heart of pretty rural England, where the wretched
wage and low standard and large family stunt and degrade our
agricultural worker. It is a very serious error to imagine that this
is merely an unhappy issue of the crowding in our great cities. In
picturesque and highly respectable York Mr. Rowntree found that thirty
per cent. of the citizens lived in very real poverty: that ten per
cent. did not earn money enough to buy a normal and sufficient
quantity of plain food, to say nothing of luxuries.
This is the problem of poverty. If you want it in figures, a fourth of
the inhabitants of London, where rents are appalling, live on from
eighteen to twenty-one shillings weekly per family, and some hundreds
of thousands live on less than this. One might with some profit and
pertinence go on to inquire into the life of the half of the
population of London who are described as "comfortable workers."
Whether the little luxuries they have are a fit reward for the hard
work they usually do, whether there can be any development of
distinctively human powers among them, whether we may cherish a
feeling of entire security in basing our political system on that
foundation, are questions worth putting; and some day they will put
them to us. But it is better for the moment to confine ourselves to
that pitiful fourth of the community which lives in degrading poverty
because it has only irregular or wretchedly paid employment. Is it an
exaggeration to suspect that this vast acreage of poverty will make
the future historian hesitate to class us as civilised?
Our social structure is of the nature of a pyramid. At its apex,
glittering in the sun, calling forth our pride and praise, are culture
and wealth and power, and all the fine things they bring into
existence. At its base are the supporting stones, crushed into the
soil by the towering mass: the millions of stunted or brutalised
lives. I know both extremes of this social order, and I have felt,
hundreds of times, that if it is permanently to retain this pyramidal
form, the refined lives and great achievements of the few resting on
this broad base of squalid and undeveloped lives, civilisation is an
impossible dream. I have felt that, if men and women realised the full
meaning and range of poverty, they would suspend the progress of art
and science, of commerce and industry, for a hundred years, if need
were, in order to concentrate the best intelligence of the race upon
the search for the remedy of this vast disorder. And, if it be true,
as I think, that these people, once dead, are dead for ever, and that
the tradition of a hundredfold reward in heaven for their privations
on earth is an illusion with which pastors and masters have reconciled
them to their burdens, I would, if I could, send that assurance like a
trumpet-blast through the slums of the world and make this vast army
of the stricken summon us, the intelligent minority, to a tardy
judgment.
I do not, as will appear later, advocate the equal distribution of
wealth. I do assuredly not plead that one who has wealth should give
it to the poor: to see it gather again, perhaps, in less worthy hands.
I add the contrast of wealth at this point only in order to make quite
sensible the darkness of the life of millions. One's first task is
to establish, with what faint power the pen has, the appalling
magnitude of the evil. If any very large number of us did really grasp
the human significance of these facts and figures, the industrial
problem would not long be resigned, as it is, to bloodless economists
and obscure propagandist bodies.
And the second aim of those who would see the world bettered is, as I
said, to inquire into the effect of the remedies we actually trust and
apply. Here we enter the mistier region of controversy, and I can but
set out the grounds of my sincere convictions.
Of labour bureaux, in the first place, it will not be doubted that
they are an advantage to employed and employers. They are an advance
toward organisation. They bring the worker more promptly to the work
that awaits him. But they, obviously, do not add one iota to the
insufficient work, for which myriads are struggling: they do not add
one penny to the wage that is earned: and they are of little or no
service to the poorest workers, who chiefly concern us.
Old age pensions and insurance and free education are, similarly,
great advantages to the workers, in which we may justly take some
pride, but they do not promise to abolish or greatly diminish poverty.
The pension, or the insurance benefit, is necessarily granted on the
poverty scale, and is in some sense a recognition of it as one of the
permanent institutions of life; and the elementary instruction which
we give has raised the qualifications for work, as well as the
equipment, so that the proportion of unemployed, or ill-employed, is
little changed. Nor would it be entirely wrong to say that, in
relieving the poor man of the direct charge of education and
insurance, we have put the difference on his rent.
Of our poor-law system, that lamentable compromise with a stupid old
tradition, it is difficult to speak with patience. The able-bodied
idlers of our workhouses and our countryside are a mockery of the
workers. The tramp, the professional idler in search of idleness,
maintained in his repulsive ways by an undiscriminating system of
poorhousing and by a large body of "charitable" women, is one of
the quaintest survivals of an older order. His father idled through
life before him, and he in turn drags along the road a mate and
children who will sustain the ignoble tradition. He ought to be
washed, clothed, and put on an industrial estate; and, if his disease
prove incurable, he ought to be anæthetised out of existence, or at
least prevented from reproducing his like.
Then there are the emigration societies. One fears that in large part
they transport to the colonies either the men whom the colonies do not
want, the men who will enlarge the slum-area of colonial cities, or
the men whom we ought not to spare. At the best, emigration is a means
of leaving the problem of poverty to our grandchildren, who will find
no more open spaces for the dumping of our human surplus. In point of
fact, however, apart from the dispatch of a small proportion of
specially prepared boys, emigration is not affecting our problem of
poverty. The half-million very poor of London, with the corresponding
hundreds of thousands in our other cities, do not make emigrants at
all; and very few of the next and far larger class are, or could be,
fit for agricultural deportation.
Lastly of these devices which the less thoughtful are apt to regard as
relieving poverty, we have the Salvation Army, which is quite the most
preposterous social sham of our age. But its religious-social
burlesque, its pretentious concealment of bad results and loud
proclamation of good results, its refusal to print a plain
balance-sheet from which a social student can measure the definite
good done and the cost of it, its undercutting of existing work, and
so on, have been sufficiently exposed to excuse us from dwelling on
it. It contains some earnest men and women, and has had undoubted
successes, but the system is too nebulous, garrulous, and wasteful to
merit serious attention.
Let us turn to graver matters. The mass of the workers, apart from the
more advanced bodies of Socialists and Syndicalists, believe that the
solution of the problem of poverty will be found in the development of
Trade Unions and of the political power of Labour. By political power,
with the aid of sympathetic members of the middle-class, they have won
the right of combination and a whole code of labour-laws; by an
increased political power, ultimately a political all-power, they will
secure all the legislation they deem expedient.
In spite of the distraction of many of the workers by Anarchists and
Syndicalists, who despise political action, and in spite of the
restrictions of the franchise which are maintained by the older
political parties, it seems plain that at some not very remote date
the workers will control the world. Ever since the door of the
political world was opened to Demos, eighty years ago, he was certain
eventually to reach the throne, no matter how long he might be seduced
to tarry by the way. Those who think otherwise must put their trust in
the permanent unintelligence of the workers. The interests of the mass
of workers are so far identical that they must finally combine to
promote them. We are plainly moving, all over the world, in this
direction. In Australasia, where the virgin soil permitted an
exceptionally rapid growth, we see the farthest point yet reached, and
within a decade or so Labour will have unshakable power all over
Australia, at least. "Conservatism" has already disappeared, or
changed its name to "Liberalism." In Germany and France and
Belgium we see the same disposition of the rival parties to unite in
face of advancing Demos. In England there are signs that we shall at
no distant date see a similar redistribution of political forces, and
it is anticipated in the United States. In all countries the political
energies are slowly gathering about two poles: Liberal (including the
old Conservatives) and Labour. Even in such countries as Spain,
Russia, Turkey, Japan, and China the initial stages of the development
may be detected. When the workers at last unite and secure an absolute
majority-power, they will legislate on familiar lines. Wages will
rise, hours of labour will be shortened, and place will be found for
larger numbers of workers.
It is little use moralising on this change. It is coming on like the
tide. There will, no doubt, be temporary abuses of power, as there
have always been, but the workers will learn the vital needs of an
industrial order, and they will not starve the roots of their new
prosperity. Let us assume that a state of equilibrium has been
reached: that the workers have paramount political power, and wages
are considerably increased. Does this promise a solution of the
problem of poverty?
I am purposely leaving out of account the contemporary growth of rings
and trusts. Paradoxical as it may seem to say so, they are not an
essential element of the problem. The employers will (as is happening)
form unions in face of the men's unions, and the strain laid on
individual employers and small companies will favour the growth of
trusts. In so far as these make for economy, they are clearly useful;
but no doubt they will be tempted to use their monopoly to dictate
arbitrary prices. When, however, the workers have a majority-power,
they can either slay the trusts or draw their teeth. On the other
hand, a beneficent or labour-saving trust will not afford any
advantage to the less skilful workers, who make up the great army of
the poor, and it will reduce prices only by an unimportant fraction.
The chief significance of trusts is that they tend to annihilate the
individualist employer, who was once considered an indispensable
institution, and they may thus dispose obstinate admirers of the older
industrial order to welcome a radical change. They are more deadly to
the middle-class than to the working-class.
The really vital question is whether the raising of wages and
reduction of hours, accompanied by a large amount of secondary
legislation to the advantage of the worker, will solve _the_ social
problem: which is not the problem of the existence of a few thousand
prostitutes, but the problem of the existence of, in every country,
several million people who live in privation and squalor, and cannot
develop human personalities. On this I offer two or three
observations.
Does the price of commodities rise in proportion to the rise of wages?
If it does, the securing of a nominally higher wage is clearly a
delusion. This seems, however, to be our experience. In England,
during sixty or seventy years of trade-combination, wages have risen,
and hours and conditions of labour have been improved, to a remarkable
extent, in spite of open competition in an overcrowded market. But
prices and rents also have risen, and it is not clear that there has
been a net advantage to the worker. It is very difficult to answer the
question precisely, because other factors (such as the application of
science) have increased the productiveness of labour and have
cheapened certain commodities (books, clothes, pictures, tea, etc.).
The workers have shared these advantages, and are in a position of far
greater comfort than they were formerly. But in seriously testing the
claim and promise of the Trade Unionist and the Labour politician we
have to endeavour to subtract the improvement in the workers'
condition which is due to the application of science, and of better
methods, to production and distribution. When we make allowance for
this, it is certainly not clear that the rise of wages shows a margin
over the increased price of commodities: that, in other words, the
higher wage is a real advantage.
It is difficult to see how it could be otherwise. When wages are
raised, who pays the increment in the cost of production? The employer
or the consumer? It is a familiar experience, and an inherent
necessity of our industrial order, that the consumer does; and the
consumer is the worker--the middle-class or wealthy consumer generally
gets the difference in other ways. It would be bold to say that our
employers have paid even a fraction of the increased wage out of their
own pockets. More usually they put a fifth of a penny on commodities
when the worker has secured a sixth. Competition alone restrains them,
and this is largely superseded by agreements. We have had innumerable
instances of this during the war. Class after class of workers claimed
a higher wage, and prices rose higher and higher "on account of the
increased cost of production." If a Labour Government were to
prevent employers from increasing the cost of commodities and raising
rents in exact proportion to the demand for higher wages--were, in
other words, to direct the employers to pay the increase of wage out
of their own profits--we should soon see the end of this industrial
order. The State would be compelled to become the employer.
This seems to be true of practically all the legislation which a
political power of Labour could secure. Compensation, pennons, and
insurance are typical instances. The new demand on the employer's
profits is met in one of two ways: he withdraws voluntary
contributions to these or similar purposes, or he raises the price of
his goods. The larger consumer meets the burden by raising his rents
or fees. The unreflecting worker imagines that "the country" pays
for these things; he forms, in this respect, a larger proportion of
the country than he thinks.
The second and more important consideration is that this power to
dictate wages and pass measures in favour of the workers does not hold
out a prospect of absorbing that surplusage of labour which is our
real problem. I am assuming that even the poorer and unskilled workers
will have their unions and their share of the political power. Their
wage will rise, and the price of their food and clothing and rooms
will rise; but it is of greater consequence to reflect that the less
competent workers on the fringe of the industrial army will receive
little advantage. Some benefit they will certainly have, since the
curtailment of hours and the slowing of the pace of production will
make room for more workers in each industry; though we must remember
that the pay of these new workers will either be taken from the older
workers, whose hours are shortened, or--which comes to the same
thing--will be put on the commodities. The total production will not
be increased, and the employer will not relinquish his profit. In any
case, even this method of finding room for more workers will affect
relatively few.
Again I may quote the experience of Australia, where the workers have
very great power. In Melbourne, alone, in 1913, I found 30,000 men
unemployed; and there and in other cities the tainted area of poverty
and distress was increasing. All the elaborate organisation and
political power of the workers could not add to the sum of available
work and thus absorb the surplus of labour. I am contending that until
we do this we do not solve the poverty-problem. The chief cause of
this appalling social disease is the inequality of natural
endowment--either of muscle or nerve--in face of an unorganised system
of production. There is not work, with regular and decent wage, for
all. The weaker, the lazier, the more drunken, and the slower of
intellect, are crowded out of the ranks and driven to casual
employment. This is the tap-root of poverty, and the benefits secured
for those who are in regular employment will not affect it.
Thirdly, this labour-legislation will not touch the second chief root
of poverty, the extreme inequality of the distribution of wealth.
Since wealth is, in this regard, a fixed quantity,--we are not
concerned here with the effect of fresh applications of science to
production,--an accumulation of commodities at one point leads to
thinness at another. I am not pleading for equality of income. Many
workers have an exaggerated idea of the gain they might have by an
equal distribution of wealth. The total annual income of the
population of the United Kingdom is now believed to be about
£2,400,000,000. If this were distributed equally amongst the heads of
our ten million families and our large army of unmarried workers, the
result would be barely £200 a year; and the equalisation of taxation,
the granting of substantial pensions, etc., would further reduce it.
There is, however, no serious need to discuss this idea. I see no
moral principle which forbids that we should reward a man according to
his productiveness or inventiveness or other value to the community,
although his fellows are not responsible for their lesser capacity;
and it is idle to speculate on some imaginary phase of human
development in which the more gifted and more useful will refuse to be
more richly rewarded than the less useful.
But it does not follow that the community has no right to control the
distribution of wealth. At one time such a proposal would have been
branded "robbery." To-day even Conservatives do not threaten to
remove the death-duties and graduated income-tax by which we
confiscate some of the wealth of the more fortunate. The only question
is, to what _extent_ we may or ought to prevent the excessive
accumulation of wealth, or to disperse it after accumulation.
There occur at once two methods of enrichment which invite careful
attention. One is the power to transmit wealth to one's descendants
in perpetuity, or until they choose to dissipate it. Most of us will
admit that in a social order at all resembling our own--and I do not
care to speculate about Utopian or imaginable orders--the power to win
advantages for one's children as well as for oneself is a sound
incentive to work. But the wish to relieve one's descendants of the
need to work, to make them for ever a burden on the community, is a
perverse ideal. It is one of those unsound primitive traditions which
we detect in the actual stream of our ideas and sentiments, and
instances are not unknown in our time of such holders of hereditary
wealth revolting against the tradition. When we realise that this
inherited wealth means, in plain terms, the right to have a hundred or
a thousand fellow-men working for us or our descendants in perpetuity,
for no merit or service on our part, and when we consider the folly
and waste which so commonly follow large inherited fortunes, we must
regard this tradition as evil and indefensible. One wonders how long
the working community is going to sustain this burden, and how long
refined men and women will imagine that they have a right to live like
Oriental potentates because they had a shrewd or a gifted ancestor.
It is sometimes said in their favour that they employ labour with
their wealth. I have heard bishops give them this foolish consolation.
As if the wealth would cease to exist, and to employ labour, if it
were in the pockets of a thousand men, instead of the pockets of one
Duke of Norfolk or Duke of Westminster! The only difference would be
that this wealth, instead of paying a thousand servants and
tradespeople to work for the comfort of one family, would pay a
thousand men, who would lose nothing by the change of employment, to
produce comfort for a thousand families. Meantime, the Duke is
embarrassed by his wealth, or spends it on superfluous things, and the
thousand families live in vicious misery. Their babies die for lack of
good milk in the hot summer, and the rich youth or maiden--I have
known this done--carelessly takes a bath of milk. Let us understand
clearly this economic truth: great wealth is the accumulation in one
man's hands of the right or power of a thousand families to employ
labour.
The second source of wealth which invites consideration is the
unearned increment on ground-values, or any other unearned and
accidental increase of value. It is now very commonly admitted that
this belongs to the community, and I need not enlarge on it.
We have, as I said, admitted the community's right to interfere with
this scandalous clotting of wealth, and no doubt a Labour-majority
would increase death-duties until money could not be transmitted
beyond, at most, the third generation, and not in quantities
sufficient to make men and women a lifelong burden on the working
community. Possibly some day there will be a general scrutiny of
titles to wealth: not merely as far back as the enclosure of the
commons a hundred years ago, but back to the landing in this country
of William of Normandy. Possibly a day will come when men and women
will conceal the fact that their ancestors "came over with the
Conqueror," since it generally implies that the descendants of those
lucky adventurers have not done an honest day's work since that
time. Possibly the sons of some of our "captains of industry" of
a century ago will burn the family records, lest some prying historian
should learn by what horrible exploitation of child-labour the fortune
was made. Prescriptive right is a purely artificial right created by
the community, and it may be withdrawn by the community.
Such measures as these a Labour Government will, no doubt, eventually
take, and they will do much to relieve poverty and increase the
production of commodities of general use. But they will add rather to
the comfort of workers who are already above the poverty-line, and
they will not prevent an excessive accumulation of wealth, though they
may finally disperse it. This means the continuance of deep poverty.
As long as a gifted man may amass a fortune in a comparatively short
time, without adding to the wealth of the community, there will be
squalid poverty somewhere.
In sum, if the political ideal of Labour were fully realised, it would
not put an end to, and might not very materially lessen, our
widespread poverty. It would not enlarge the amount of available
productive employment, and so the weak in body or mind or character
would still form a pitiable army of slum-dwellers. It would, having no
more control of industry than the present Parliament has, be unable to
meet any grave disturbance of the industrial world, such as the
release of hundreds of thousands of workers by disarmament. It would
have no power to secure for the workers their full share of the
advantage of any new application of science, and it would be unable to
guide into new positions the men displaced by this application. We
should continue to suffer the disadvantage of an imperfectly organised
industrial system; each new enlistment of the great forces of nature
or of the cunning of science in the service of man would enrich a few
and impoverish many. In order to meet all these grave difficulties--in
order to do more than secure certain advantages for the better
equipped workers--a Labour Power would be forced radically to alter
its principle and undertake the organisation of employment.
This organisation of industry seems to be the only device which will
gradually restrict, and finally abolish, poverty. The opposition to it
of middle-class workers and of so many artisans is unintelligible. It
is time that we ceased to confine the term "workers" to the poorer
and less cultivated caste among those who work: time that the lawyer
and actor and housewife claimed that honourable title no less than the
carpenter or navvy. In restricting the term to manual and badly paid
workers we have concealed from ourselves the real community of
interest of all who work. All of us, except those who live on the
labour of others, have an interest in the proper organisation of the
work of the world and the removal from our shoulders of this
intolerable burden of the irregular workers and the idlers. The
middle-class has an even greater interest than what is narrowly called
the working-class, because the tendency of Labour-legislation is, and
will increasingly be, to put the heavier charge, not on large
employers, who easily evade it, but on the middle-class generally.
Here again the war has luminously illustrated our position. Both
employers and employed (in the current industrial sense) have made
great profit by it: the middle-class generally has suffered severely.
A proper organisation of work would have prevented this.
It can easily be shown that this national organisation of employment,
with graded incomes according to service rendered, is the only remedy
of poverty. The chief root of poverty is, as I said, the insufficiency
of properly paid work, and this is entirely due to the haphazard and
unsystematic nature of our industrial order. The private employer
looks only to the actual demand of commodities, or to the actual funds
for buying commodities. He has no interest in the moneyless
unemployed; indeed, he finds it a convenience to have a large number
from which he may select his workers. As a result, a large proportion
of our people are unable to demand their normal share of commodities
because they are not employed, or because they have no wage; and they
are not employed because they do not demand commodities. Plainly, the
community alone can alter this paradoxical state of things; and, since
the community is now compelled by its more humane sentiments to carry
the poor on its shoulders, it may at length be induced to see that it
would be better to set them on their own feet. In a properly organised
industrial system a worker will be paid by the commodities which he or
she actually produces, or their exchange-value. There can be no such
thing as a superfluous worker. It is only a lamentable issue of our
perverse pre-scientific system that millions must lack the food and
clothing and luxuries which they themselves could and would, under a
more orderly system, produce.
This implies, of course, the transfer to the community, at a just
payment, of the land, the mines, and the means of transit, and the
gradual extension of municipal enterprise to productive and
distributive industries. I am contending only for principles, and
would refer the closer inquirer to such detailed constructive works as
those of Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be futile to construct a rigid
scheme of collectivist organisation. Such industries as the press,
literature, art, etc., present difficulties which it would be foolish
to override. But these affect comparatively few workers, and it is
pedantry of an unintelligent kind to wrangle over them while we have a
clear case in regard to other industries which involve many millions
of workers. We would do well, however, to remember that the
middle-class industries themselves are overcrowded and chaotic, and
that most members of that class would gain by organisation, wherever
it is possible. Instead of shrinking from it and inventing
difficulties, we ought to be eager to discover its possibilities.
I ignore also certain more or less academic objections which have been
made against this proposal to organise employment. Mill's essay _On
Liberty_ is a monument of the futility of this kind of reasoning. Mill
was a civil servant, and, except in the case of the idle and criminal,
no restriction of individual liberty is proposed other than that which
Mill cheerfully endured. Middle-class men are apt to take fright at
the word "Socialism." It ought to be by this time generally known
that half a dozen very different theories pass under that name, and it
is particularly unintelligent to confuse the extreme and the moderate
proposals. Nearly the whole of the employment in any civilisation
could be organised without laying on any who are willing to work a
greater restraint than is laid on officials of the postal service. As
to "confiscation," it will be gathered from an earlier page that I
favour generous compensation to actual holders of land or mines, but
no perpetual pensions.
I do not anticipate from this change all the advantages which some
Socialist writers expect. Their schemes of high universal prosperity
seem to me to have an absurdly slender basis of actual work. Mr.
William Morris conjectured that if all of us were to work for four
hours a day there would be enough produced for all of us to live in
luxury; whereas Mr. Sidney Webb calculates that it would need six
hours' work a day, on the part of all, to produce the necessaries of
life. It is true that a very large body of middlemen, commercial
travellers, footmen and other servants, and duplicate workers in rival
industries would be set free for sound productive or distributive or
professional work; but the easing of the hours of our actual workers,
the removal of the young from the market, and other collateral
improvements, must be taken into account. If we take one hour a day
from the actual workers in our heavier industries, we absorb at once
more than a million new men without increasing production. In any
case, it is lamentable to dangle before the eyes of men the ideal of
working only four hours a day. We want more of Browning's gospel of
work with cheerfulness. No doubt the idea is that, if the hours of
labour are reduced, the leisure will be employed in reading Bergson
and mastering Brahms. This optimistic theory seems to be at variance
with our experience. Improvement of financial position more usually
means the substitution of Bass or Dewar for cheap ale, and of stalls
for the gallery at the variety theatre. A later chapter will, however,
discuss our interests in this connection.
The fact remains that collectivism is the only remedy of poverty. The
redistribution of wealth, or the prevention of excessive wealth,
would, in my view, add comparatively little to the wages of the
millions; and we must not put to the credit of an economic scheme the
profit of such changes as disarmament. It is not this, but the note of
efficiency, organisation, and economy which appeals to me in the
Socialist ideal. It would abolish a vast amount of duplicate and
unnecessary work, and it would conduct to their proper place in the
industrial order the large army of casual workers. London or New York
is a colossal monument of industrial inefficiency. Our chaotic mass of
duplicate and triplicate rival grocers, bakers, butchers, etc., our
rival railways and other purveyors and producers, with their separate
staffs and their appalling waste in advertisement, are a reproach to
our intelligence. We want an orderly and economical system both of
production and distribution, and only the municipality (or else a vast
and tyrannical trust) can conduct it. Most of all we want a power that
will sweep the myriads of costers, hawkers, newspaper-youths,
flower-girls, casual porters, loafers, musicians, etc., off our
streets, and put them to productive work. We want a great curtailment
of certain luxury-industries and fictitious industries. This would
give us an immensely increased volume of productive work, and a great
saving in distribution. The middle-class has not less to gain than the
workers by such a scheme of organising our resources, and it offers us
the only confident prospect of abolishing poverty and crime and
gradually uplifting the mass of the people.
Naturally, we should for a long time have to deal with a great deal of
refractory material. Idleness and crime are diseases, and they ought
to be treated by the methods of modern medicine: scientific, humane,
sometimes surgical. Certainly we would exercise "tyranny" in
dealing with these. Probably in a properly ordered society all
citizens would be enrolled in an industrial register. The
hyper-sensitive would have the same guarantee of privacy as under our
income-tax system, and the police would have a most effective means of
locating the criminal. Any who were permanently refractory, or showed
an incurable disposition to revert to crime or to the vagrant
industries which disgrace our cities to-day, would have no moral right
to burden us with their existence. The community would offer work and
sufficient wage to all. The rest might disappear into segregated
"homes of idleness," or, if we are as wise as we ought to be, into
lethal chambers.
This incurably refractory group would, however, probably prove smaller
than many believe. We are at present a little too much inclined to
consult scientific theorists about heredity (which is still very
obscure in science) and too little inclined to make social
experiments. I am assuming that a dozen other reforms would proceed
simultaneously with the reform of industry. Education would no longer
confine itself to giving an elementary literacy to children, without
any further care what use they make of their literacy; it would, as I
will suggest later, seriously concern itself with the adult
population. A bolder treatment of the housing question would stimulate
those who have evil traditions; we should not confine ourselves to
building clean rooms for them, which they might make filthy if they
wished. Prudential restriction of the birth-rate would be impressed on
the poorer class, with great benefit to themselves and their children
and the State. Eugenic proposals might be practically formulated and
encouraged. We should not expect industrial betterment to have some
mystic or magical effect of itself in uplifting the mass of the
people; but, until this betterment occurs, other efforts to help them
will be seriously hampered or entirely futile. The very magnitude of
the task would prove a magnificent tonic and stimulation to the jaded
mind of the community.
An increasing number of middle-class men and women now recognise that
this is, not merely the only solution of the problem of poverty, but
the most profitable scheme of national life for all who are willing to
work. So detached an observer as Mr. Carveth Read, professor of
Philosophy at London University, observes that "probably the future
lies either with Co-operation or with Socialism" (_Natural and
Social Morals_, p. 211). On the Continent, especially in Italy,
France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Russia, there is a
high proportion of cultivated and professional men in the Socialist
movement. No one need fear its advance except the idler and the man
whose work does not add to the wealth of the community or facilitate
its distribution. It is the application of sound and tried
business-principles to national life; and, when those principles have
first been applied to the governmental machine, and made it an
effective and disinterested administration, we shall move more quickly
toward the Collectivist ideal.
Some may wonder that a student of science should come to this
conclusion. There is a vague idea abroad that an individualist
struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is the supreme and
unalterable law of life. This idea, though encouraged by men like Mr.
Kidd, is due to a merely superficial acquaintance with biology. In
past ages nature has certainly evolved higher types mainly by a bloody
struggle of individuals or a very calamitous pressure of environment.
_In the past_: there is the limit of the teaching of biology. A new
thing--human intelligence--has now entered the life of the earth, and
it has in countless ways superseded the laws (that is to say,
practices) of unconscious nature. The human mind is now a part of
nature, and therefore "natural selection" is a wholly different
matter from what it once was. Maurice Maeterlinck has suggested this
with his usual felicity. He imagines himself on a hill, from which he
sees two watercourses stretching toward the sea. One meanders over the
plains, wasting time and space, blindly finding its way over the
uneven ground: that is the old, unintelligent method of nature. The
other waterway stretches straight across the landscape, a canal cut by
man in the course of a few years, with no waste of ground: it is the
new, intelligent method of nature. By this method we now create new
species of plants in a thousandfold less time than natural selection
(in the usual sense) could do; and we do it precisely by dispensing
with the individualist struggle, by intelligent arrangement and
control.
Early science set up unintelligent nature as a grand model for man. It
is time we outgrew this phase of infancy. Intelligence must
increasingly count in the life of the earth. We first organise a
nation, and presently we shall organise international life. We
organise particular businesses, and presently we shall organise the
whole industrial life of the planet. There is no part of human life
which calls more urgently for the application of intelligence than
this disordered, wasteful, pitiless, poverty-saturated industrial
world of ours. Let us treat human beings at least as intelligently as
we treat our flowers, and as humanely as we treat our horses. We do
not entrust those to the tragedy of struggle and survival. We need not
fear that there will be any restriction of the development of
personality. Under such a Collectivist system as I have in mind,
personality will be developed until every man and woman is conscious
of his or her share in the control of the destinies of this planet,
and the sheep-like respect for ancient traditions and abuses, which
impedes our progress to-day, will be for ever abolished.