latitudes a hard taskmaster. Commercial progress has been at root
nothing more than inventing ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less
labor: in short, saving labor and winning leisure. Some examples.
Actually Liberty is Leisure. Political liberations cannot add to
liberty unless they add to leisure. For example: woman’s daily
routine. Sleep, feeding, resting, and locomotion are not leisure:
they are compulsory. A seven hour working day gives at most six hours
leisure out of the seventeen non-working hours. The woman of property.
Leisure is the incentive to attain her position. All wage workers
value leisure more than money. Property coveted because it confers
the maximum of leisure. Nevertheless, as leisure brings freedom, and
freedom brings responsibility and self-determination, it is dreaded
by those accustomed to tutelage: for instance, soldiers and domestic
servants. The national fund of leisure. Its present misdistribution.
Description of a hypothetical four hours working day. Exceptions
to intermittent labor at regular hours. Pregnancy and nursing.
Artistic, scientific, and political work. Fixed daily hours only a
basis for calculation. A four hours day may mean in practice six days
a month, two months a year, or an earlier retirement. Difference
between routine work and creative work. Complete freedom impossible
even during leisure. Legislative restraints on religion, sport, and
marriage. The Inhibition Complex and the Punch baby. The contrary or
Anarchic Complex. The instinctive resistance to Socialism as slavery
obscures its aspect as a guarantee of the maximum possible of leisure
and therefore of liberty. 319
70
RENT OF ABILITY
The proper social use of brains. Methods of making exceptional
personal talents lucrative. When the talents are popular, as in the
case of artists, surgeons, sports champions and the like, they involve
hard work and confer no political or industrial power. As their
lucrativeness is a function of their scarcity their power to enrich
their possessors is not formidable and is controllable by taxation.
Occasional freak incomes would not matter if equality of income were
general. Impossibility of living more expensively than the richest
class. Millionaires give away money for this reason. Special case of
the talent for exploitation, which is a real social danger. Its forms.
Administrative ability. The ability to exercise authority and enforce
discipline. Both are indispensable in industry and in all organized
activities. When tactfully exercised they are not unpopular, as most
of us like to be saved the trouble of thinking for ourselves and so
are not averse from being directed. Authority and subordination in
themselves are never unpopular; but Capitalism, by creating class
differences and associating authority with insolence, destroys the
social equality which is indispensable to voluntary subordination.
Scolding, slave driving, cursing, kicking, and slacking. Reluctance
to obey commanders who are trusted and liked is less likely to
give trouble than reluctance to command. Fortunately, persons of
exceptional ability do not need any special inducement to exercise
it. Instances of their failure in subordinate employment. In our
socialized services they do not demand excessive incomes. The demand
of the real lady or gentleman. Both are compelled to act as cads in
capitalist commerce, in which organizers and financiers, by reason of
their special cunning, are able to extort prodigious shares of the
country’s output as “rent of ability.” The meaning of rent. It cannot
be abolished but it can be nationalized. Futility of recriminations
as to indispensability between employers and employed. The talent of
the exploiter is as indispensable to the landlord and capitalist as
to the proletarian. Directed labor is indispensable to all three.
Nationalization and equalization socializes rent of ability as well as
rent of land and capital by defeating its private appropriation. 331
71
PARTY POLITICS
The steps to Socialism will not necessarily be taken by Socialist
Governments. Many of them may be taken, as some already have, by
anti-Socialist Cabinets. The growth of the Labor Party and the
enormous electoral preponderance of the proletarian electorate
promises a complete Labor conquest of the House of Commons. In
that case the victorious Labor Party would split into several
irreconcilable groups and make parliamentary government impossible
unless it contained a unanimous Socialist majority of members really
clear in their minds as to what Socialism exactly means. Precedent
in the Long Parliament. The danger is not peculiar to Labor. Any
political party obtaining complete possession of Parliament may go to
pieces and end in a dictatorship. The Conservative triumph produced
by the anti-Russian scare of 1924 made it almost impossible to hold
the party together. Large majorities in Parliament, far from enabling
Cabinets to do what they like, destroy their cohesion and enfeeble
their party. Demoralization of Parliament during the period of large
majorities brought in by the South African war. Concealment of
preparations for the war of 1914-18. Parliamentary value of the fact
that Socialism cannot be shaken by political storms and changes. 343
72
THE PARTY SYSTEM
Popular ignorance of what the term Party System really means.
Enslavement of voters by the system, in and out of Parliament. Its
advantage is that if the House of Commons has good leaders the quality
of the rank and file does not matter. How it was introduced as a war
measure by William III. Under it the upshot of the General Elections
is determined not by the staunch party voters but by the floating body
of independent electors who follow their impulses without regard to
the Party System. The system is essentially a two-party system of
solid majority Government party _versus_ solid minority Opposition
party. When independence prevails, groups form, each in a minority
in the House; and only by combining enough groups to form a majority
can any leader form a Cabinet and carry on. Such combinations are
called Blocks. They have little cohesion, and do not last. The French
Chamber exhibits this phenomenon. Possibility of its occurring in
the House of Commons. Alternative systems. Government by committees
without a Cabinet as practised by our municipalities. This is a local
survival of the old system of separate King’s cabinets upon which the
Party System was imposed. The non-party methods of local government
are quite efficient. Increasing tendency to lessen the rigidity of
the Party System in Parliament by declaring more and more questions
non-party. Tendency of Governments to resign on defeated votes of
confidence only. Inadequacy of our two Houses of Parliament for the
work put upon them by modern conditions. Need for changes involving
the creation of new chambers. The Webb proposals. 348
73
DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY
Questions on which the present apparent unanimity in the parliamentary
Labor Party is delusive: for instance, the Right to Strike. Socialism
and Compulsory Social Service _versus_ Trade Unionism and Freedom of
Contract. A Bill to enforce social service and penalize strikes would
split the party. Magnitude of modern strikes through the extension
of Trade Unionism from crafts to industries. Modern strikes tend
to become devastating civil wars. Arguments for Compulsory Labor.
Military and civil service. When the issue is joined the non-Socialist
Trade Unionists will combine with the Conservatives against the
Socialists. 354
74
RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS
The nation’s children. Religious teaching in public schools.
Impossibility of expressing the multifarious conflict of opinions
on this subject by a two-party conflict in the House of Commons.
Sectarian private schools. Roman Catholic and Nonconformist scruples.
Passive resistance. Impracticable solutions. Cowper-Templeism. The
Bible and Copernican astronomy. Modern physics and evolutional
biology. Men professing science are as bigoted as ecclesiastics.
Secular education impossible because children must be taught conduct,
and the ultimate sanctions of conduct are metaphysical. Weakness of
the punishment system. Conceptions of God. Personifications of God as
the Big Papa and the Roman Catholic Big Mamma needed for children.
Voltaire and Robespierre anticipated in the nursery. Comte’s law
of the three stages of belief. Tendency of parents, voters, elected
persons, and governments to impose their religions, customs, names,
institutions, and even their languages on everyone by force. Such
substitutions may be progressive. Toleration is incompatible with
complete sectarian conviction: the historic tolerations were only
armistices or exhaustions after drawn battles. Examples of modern
bigotry. Toleration is impossible as between Capitalism and Socialism.
It is therefore necessary to demonstrate that a Labor Party can
neither establish Socialism by exterminating its opponents, nor its
opponents avert it by exterminating the Socialists. 359
75
REVOLUTIONS
Difference between revolutions and elections or ordinary reforms.
Revolutions transfer political power from one faction or leader to
another by violence or the threat of violence. Examples from English
history. The transfer of political power from our capitalists to our
proletarians has already taken place in form but not in substance,
because, as our proletariat is half parasitic on Capitalism, and
only half productive and self-supporting, half the proletarians
are on the side of Capitalism. “Ye are many: they are few” is a
dangerously misleading slogan. Consciousness of their formidable
proletarian backing may embolden the capitalists to refuse to accept
a parliamentary decision on any issue which involves a serious
encroachment of Socialism on Private Property. The case of Ireland,
and the simultaneous post-war repudiations of parliamentary supremacy
in several continental countries forbid us to dismiss this possibility
as unlikely. But whether our political decisions are made by votes
or by blood and iron the mere decisions to make changes and the
overruling of their opponents cannot effect any changes except nominal
ones. The Russian Revolution effected a complete change from absolute
monarchy to proletarian republicanism and proclaimed the substitution
of Communism for Capitalism; but the victorious Communists found
themselves obliged to fall back on Capitalism and do their best
to control it. Their difficulties were greatly increased by the
destruction involved by violent revolution. Communism can spread only
as a development of existing economic civilization and must be thrown
back by any sudden overthrow of it. “The inevitability of gradualness”
does not imply any inevitability of peaceful change; but Socialists
will be strongly opposed to civil war if their opponents do not force
it on them by repudiating peaceful methods, because though civil war
may clear the way it can bring the goal no nearer. The lesson of
history on this point. The French Revolution and the _mot_ of Fouquier
Tinville. Socialism must therefore be discussed on its own merits as
an order of society apart from the methods by which the necessary
political power to establish it may be attained. 370
76
CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY
As peaceful settlement of the struggle for political supremacy between
the Capitalists and the Socialists cannot be guaranteed we must
resign ourselves to the unpleasant possibilities of our sedulously
glorified pugnacity. But as destructive quarreling must be followed
by constructive co-operation if civilization is to be maintained
the consummation of Socialism can proceed when the fighting is
over. A civil war can therefore be only an interruption and need
not be further considered. Socialism in Parliament. How a series of
properly prepared and compensated nationalizations may be voted for
by intelligent politicians who are not Socialists, and carried out
without disturbing the routine to which the unthinking masses are
accustomed. Importance of the preparations: every nationalization will
require extensions of the civil and municipal services. Socialism at
one stroke is impossible. How far it must stop short of its logical
completion. 380
77
SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE
Private commercial enterprise will not be completely superseded
by nationalization; but it may become bankrupt; and in that case
it may demand and receive subsidies from the Government. A simple
instance. This process, long familiar in cultural institutions, has
now begun in big business: for example the Government subsidy to coal
owners in 1925, the Capitalists thus themselves establishing the
practice, and providing precedents for the subsidizing of private
experimental ventures by Socialist Governments. Direct industrial
nationalizations must be confined to well-established routine
services. When State-financed private ventures succeed, and thereby
cease to be experimental, they can be nationalized, throwing back
private enterprise on its proper business of novelty, invention,
and experiment. The objections of doctrinaire nationalizers. The
Socialist objective is not nationalization but equalization of
income, nationalization being only a means to that end. The abuse
of subsidies. Looting the taxpayer. Subsidies as mortgages. The
national war factories. Their sale to private bidders after the war
as an illustration of the impossibility of nationalizing or retaining
anything for which the Government cannot find immediate use. 386
78
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?
If it takes too long a revolutionary explosion may wreck civilization.
Equality of income can be attained and maintained only in a settled
and highly civilized society under a Government with a highly trained
civil service and an elaborate code of laws, fortified by general
moral approval. The process of its establishment will necessarily
be dangerously slow rather than dangerously quick; for we are not
educated to be Socialists: we teach children that Socialism is wicked.
The material advantages of the steps towards Socialism are, however,
biassing proletarian parents, who are in a huge majority, more and
more in favor of the movement towards Socialism. This tendency is
helped by the moral revolt against the cruelty of Capitalism in its
operation and the sordidness of its principle. In a Socialist State
economic selfishness would probably stand on the moral level now
occupied by cardsharping instead of being held up as the key to social
eminence. 391
79
SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY
Nervous dread of over-regulation produced by the endless inspections
and restrictions needed to protect the proletariat from unbridled
Capitalist exploitation. These would have no sense in a Socialist
state. Examples. Preoccupation of the police with the enforcement of
private property rights and with the crimes and disorder caused by
poverty. The drink question. Drink the great anæsthetic. Artificial
happiness indispensable under Capitalism. Dutch courage. Drugs.
Compulsory prophylactics as substitutes for sanitation. Direct
restrictions of liberty by private property. “The right to roam.”
Deer forests and sheep runs. Existing liberties which Socialism would
abolish. The liberty to be idle. Nonsense about capital and not labor
being source of wealth. The case of patents and copyrights. Unofficial
tyrannies. Fashion. Estate rules. The value of conventionality. 393
80
SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE
Socialists apt to forget that people object to new liberties more
than to new laws. Marriage varies from frontier to frontier. Civil
marriage. Religious and communist celibacy, or the negation of
marriage. Socialism has nothing to do with these varieties, as
equality of income applies impartially to them all. Why there is
nevertheless a rooted belief that Socialism will alter marriage.
The legend of Russian “nationalization of women”. Where women and
children are economically dependent on husbands and fathers marriage
is slavery for wives and home a prison for children. Socialism, by
making them economically independent, would break the chain and open
the prison door. Probable results. Improvement in domestic manners.
The State should intervene to divorce separated couples, thus
abolishing the present power of the parties to enforce a broken tie
vindictively or religiously. Clash of Church and State on marriage.
The State must intervene to control population. As Socialism would
clear away the confusion into which Capitalism, with its inevitable
result of parasitic labor and premature overpopulation, has plunged
the subject, a Socialist state is more likely to interfere than a
Capitalist one. Expedients. Limitation of families. Encouragement of
families. Polygamy. Experience of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) on
this point. Bounties for large families plus persecution of birth
control. State endowment of parentage. Compulsory parentage. Monogamy
practicable only when the numbers of the sexes are equal. Case of a
male-destroying war. Conflicting domestic ideals affecting population.
The Bass Rock ideal. The Boer ideal. The bungalow ideal. The monster
hotel ideal. 406
81
SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN
The State school child. Need for the protection of children against
parents. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The
new Adoption Act. Need for the organization of child life as such.
Schools essentially prisons. General ignorance after nine years of
enforced elementary schooling. Limits of child liberty. The real
nature and purpose of education. Our stupidities about it. Injury
done by forcing children to learn things beyond their capacity or
foreign to their aptitudes. Girls and compulsory Beethoven. Boys
and compulsory classics and mathematics. Eton began by forbidding
play and now makes it compulsory. Children as animals to be tamed
by beating and sacks to be filled with learning. Opportunities for
the Sadist and child fancier. Children in school are outlawed.
Typical case of assault. Unendurable strain of the relations between
teachers and children. Schools, though educationally disastrous,
have the incidental advantage of encouraging promiscuous social
intercourse. University manners. Middle class manners. Garden City
and Summer School manners. Need for personal privacy and free choice
of company not supplied by the snobbery and class segregations of
Capitalism. Socialism preferable on this score. Technical education
for citizenship. As knowledge must not be withheld on the ground
that it is as efficient for evil as for good, it must be accompanied
by moral instruction and ethical inculcation. Doctrines a Socialist
state could not tolerate. Variety and incompatibility of British
religions. Original sin. Brimstone damnation. Children’s souls need
protection more than their bodies. The Bible. A common creed necessary
to citizenship. Certain prejudices must be inculcated. Need for an
official second nature. Limits to State proselytizing. Beyond the
irreducible minimum of education the hand should be left to find its
own employment and the mind its own food. 412
82
SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES
Will a Socialist State tolerate a Church? This question must be
discussed objectively. Survey of the age-long struggle between Church
and State for the control of political and social institutions.
The Inquisition and the Star Chamber. Theocracy has not lost its
power. Mormon Theocracy. Christian Science. Both have come into
conflict with the secular government. New Churches capture secular
Governments by denying that they are Churches. The persecutions
and fanaticisms of today rage in the name of Science. The avowed
Church of Christ Scientist _versus_ the masked Church of Jenner and
Pasteur, Scientists. Tests for public office, governing bodies, and
professions. Church of England tests broken by the English people
refusing to remain in one Church. The Quakers. Admission to Parliament
of Dissenters, then of Jews, finally of Atheists, leading to civil
marriage and burial and the substitution of civil registration of
birth for baptism, leaves the State in the grip of pseudo-scientific
orthodoxy. Extravagances of this new faith in America and the new
European republics. The assets of religion are also the assets of
science. The masses, indifferent to both, are ungovernable without
an inculcated faith (the official second nature). Modern conflicts
between secular authority and Church doctrine. Cremation. Rights
of animals. Use of cathedrals. The Russian situation: the State
tolerating the Church whilst denouncing its teaching as dope. Such
contemptuously tolerant anti-clericalism is necessarily transient:
positive teaching being indispensable. Subjective religion. Courage.
Redskin ideals. Man as hunter-warrior with Woman as everything else.
Political uselessness of ferocity and sportsmanship. Fighting men
cowardly and lazy as thinkers. Women anxious lest Socialism should
attack their religion. It need not do so unless inequality of income
is part of their religion. But they must beware of attempts to
constitute Socialism as a Catholic Church with an infallible prophet
and Savior. The Moscow Third International is essentially such a
Church, with Karl Marx as its prophet. It must come into conflict with
the Soviet and be mastered by it. We need not, however, repudiate its
doctrine and vituperate its prophet on that account any more than we
need repudiate the teaching of Christ and vilify his character when
we insist that the State and not the Church shall govern England. The
merits of Marx. 429
83
CURRENT CONFUSIONS
The Intelligent Woman must resist the impulse to intervene in
conversational bickerings and letters to the Press about Socialism
and Capitalism by people who understand neither. Meaningless
vituperation and general misuse of nomenclature. Politicians misname
themselves as well as oneanother. Self-contradictory names such
as Communist-Anarchist. Real distinctions. Direct Action _versus_
Fabianism. Poor Man’s Capitalism: its forms. It often masquerades as
Socialism. The assumption of the name Communist by the cruder sort
of Direct-Actionists produces the anomaly of a Labor Party expelling
Communists whilst advocating Communist legislation. Fascism, produced
by impatient disgust with Parliament as an institution, is common to
the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Methods of Direct Action.
The General Strike. Its absurdity. Its futility as a preventive
of war. Pacifism. Supernational social organization. Empires and
Commonwealths. Confusions as to Democracy. Proletarian jealousy of
official power. Resultant autocracy in the Trade Unions. Labor leaders
more arbitrary than Peers, and much more cynical as to working class
political capacity than middle class and aristocratic idealists.
Democracy in practice has never been democratic; and the millennial
hopes based on every extension of the franchise, from the Reform Bill
of 1832 to Votes for Women, have been disappointed. The reaction.
Discipline for everybody and votes for nobody. Why women should stick
resolutely to their votes. Proportional Representation opposed by the
Labor Party. Need for a scientific test of political capacity. Those
who use democracy as a stepping stone to political power oppose it
as a dangerous nuisance when they get there. Its real object is to
establish a genuine aristocracy. To do this we must first ascertain
which are the aristocrats; and it is here that popular voting fails.
Mrs Everybody votes for Mrs Somebody only to discover that she has
elected Mrs Noisy Nobody. 443
84
PERORATION