Public evils are fortunately not millionfold evils. Suffering is not
cumulative; but waste is; and the Socialist revolt is against waste.
Honor, health, and joy of heart are impossible under Capitalism:
rich and poor are alike detestable: both must cease to exist. Our
need for neighbors whose interests do not compete with ours is
against the principle of Capitalism. Waiting for dead men’s shoes.
The professions. Husband hunting. The social friction is intense:
Capitalism puts sand instead of oil in all the bearings of our
machinery. The remonstrance of the optimist. Natural kindliness.
Capitalism itself was better-intentioned in its inception than
early Christianity. Goodwill is not enough: it is dangerous until
it finds the right way. Unreasoning sentiment an unsafe guide. We
believe what we want to believe: if a pecuniary bias is given to our
activities it will corrupt them in institution, teaching, and practice
until the best intentioned citizens will know no honest methods and
doctrines. In our search for disinterested service we come up against
profiteering and Trade Unionism at every turn. Resultant cynicism
and pessimism. Gulliver’s Travels and Candide. Equality of income
would make these terrible books mere clinical lectures on an extinct
disease. The simple and noble meaning of gentility. 455
APPENDIX
Instead of a bibliography. The technical literature of Capitalism
and Socialism mostly abstract, inhuman, and written in an academic
jargon which only specialists find readable. Failure to define either
capital or Socialism. The early Capitalist economists: their candor.
Ricardo, De Quincey, and Austin. The Socialist reaction: Proudhon
and Marx. The academic reaction: John Stuart Mill, Cairnes, and
Maynard Keynes. The artistic reaction: Ruskin, Carlyle, and Morris.
The reaction of the novelists: Dickens and Wells, Galsworthy and
Bennett. The reaction in the theatre: Ibsen and Strindberg. Henry
George and Land Nationalization. Literature of the conversion of
Socialism from an insurrectionary movement in the Liberal tradition
to a constitutional one. Fabian Essays. Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The
author’s contributions. 465
INDEX 471
THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM
1
A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS
It would be easy, dear madam, to refer you to the many books on modern
Socialism which have been published since it became a respectable
constitutional question in this country in the eighteen-eighties. But
I strongly advise you not to read a line of them until you and your
friends have discussed for yourselves how wealth should be distributed
in a respectable civilized country, and arrived at the best conclusion
you can.
For Socialism is nothing but an opinion held by some people on that
point. Their opinion is not necessarily better than your opinion or
anyone else’s. How much should you have and how much should your
neighbors have? What is your own answer?
As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy
with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which
we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing
people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not.
Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for
granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that
they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact
transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by
well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a
prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament,
because we are never satisfied with them. Sometimes they are scrapped
for new ones; sometimes they are altered; sometimes they are simply
done away with as nuisances. The new ones have to be stretched in the
law courts to make them fit, or to prevent them fitting too well if
the judges happen to dislike them. There is no end to this scrapping
and altering and innovating. New laws are made to compel people to do
things they never dreamt of doing before (buying insurance stamps,
for instance). Old laws are repealed to allow people to do what they
used to be punished for doing (marrying their deceased wives’ sisters
and husbands’ brothers, for example). Laws that are not repealed are
amended and amended and amended like a child’s knickers until there
is hardly a shred of the first stuff left. At the elections some
candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old
ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is
impossible. Things will not stay as they are.
Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few
generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years
in school, old-age and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and
short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in
the courts, are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever
shall be; but their greatgrandmothers would have set down anyone who
told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted
them to come as wicked.
When studying how the wealth we produce every year should be
shared among us, we must not be like either the children or the
greatgrandmothers. We must bear constantly in mind that our shares
are being changed almost every day on one point or another whilst
Parliament is sitting, and that before we die the sharing will be
different, for better or worse, from the sharing of today, just as
the sharing of today differs from the nineteenth century sharing more
than Queen Victoria could have believed possible. The moment you begin
to think of our present sharing as a fixture, you become a fossil.
Every change in our laws takes money, directly or indirectly, out of
somebody’s pocket (perhaps yours) and puts it into somebody else’s.
This is why one set of politicians demands each change and another set
opposes it.
So what you have to consider is not whether there will be great changes
or not (for changes there certainly will be) but what changes you and
your friends think, after consideration and discussion, would make
the world a better place to live in, and what changes you ought to
resist as disastrous to yourself and everyone else. Every opinion you
arrive at in this way will become a driving force as part of the public
opinion which in the long run must be at the back of all the changes
if they are to abide, and at the back of the policemen and jailers who
have to enforce them, right or wrong, once they are made the law of the
land.
It is important that you should have opinions of your own on this
subject. Never forget that the old law of the natural philosophers,
that Nature abhors a vacuum, is true of the human head. There is no
such thing as an empty head, though there are heads so impervious to
new ideas that they are for all mental purposes solid, like billiard
balls. I know that you have not that sort of head, because, if you
had, you would not be reading this book. Therefore I warn you that if
you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other
people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters, from advertisements,
from newspapers, from books and pamphlets, from gossip, from political
speeches, from plays and pictures--and, you will add, from this book!
Well, of course I do not deny it. When I urge you to think for yourself
(as all our nurses and mothers and schoolmistresses do even though they
clout our heads the moment our conclusions differ from theirs) I do
not mean that you should shut your eyes to everyone else’s opinions.
I myself, though I am by way of being a professional thinker, have to
content myself with secondhand opinions on a great many most important
subjects on which I can neither form an opinion of my own nor criticize
the opinions I take from others. I take the opinion of the Astronomer
Royal as to when it is twelve o’clock; and if I am in a strange town I
take the opinion of the first person I meet in the street as to the way
to the railway station. If I go to law I have to consent to the absurd
but necessary dogma that the king can do no wrong. Otherwise trains
would be no use to me, and lawsuits could never be finally settled.
We should never arrive anywhere or do anything if we did not believe
what we are told by people who ought to know better than ourselves, and
agree to stand by certain dogmas of the infallibility of authorities
whom we nevertheless know to be fallible. Thus on most subjects we are
forced by our ignorance to proceed with closed minds in spite of all
exhortations to think boldly for ourselves, and be, above all things,
original.
St Paul, a rash and not very deep man, as his contempt for women shews,
cried “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good”. He forgot that
it is quite impossible for one woman to prove all things: she has not
the time even if she had the knowledge. For a busy woman there are no
Open Questions: everything is settled except the weather; and even
that is settled enough for her to buy the right clothes for summer and
winter. Why, then, did St Paul give a counsel which he must have known
to be impracticable if he ever thought about it for five minutes?
The explanation is that the Settled Questions are never really settled,
because the answers to them are never complete and final truths. We
make laws and institutions because we cannot live in society without
them. We cannot make perfect institutions because we are not perfect
ourselves. Even if we could make perfect institutions, we could not
make eternal and universal ones, because the conditions change, and
the laws and institutions that work well with fifty enclosed nuns in
a convent would be impossible in a nation of forty million people
at large. So we have to do the best we can at the moment, leaving
posterity free to do better if it can. When we have made our laws in
this makeshift way, the questions they concern are settled for the
moment only. And in politics the moment may be twelve months or twelve
hundred years, a mere breathing space or a whole epoch.
Consequently there come crises in history when questions that have
been closed for centuries suddenly yawn wide open. It was in the teeth
of one of these terrible yawns that St Paul cried that there are no
closed questions, that we must think out everything for ourselves all
over again. In his Jewish world nothing was more sacred than the law of
Moses, and nothing more indispensable than the rite of circumcision.
All law and all religion seemed to depend on them; yet St Paul had to
ask the Jews to throw over the law of Moses for the contrary law of
Christ, declaring that circumcision did not matter, as it was baptism
that was essential to salvation. How could he help preaching the open
mind and the inner light as against all laws and institutions whatever?
You are now in the position of the congregations of St Paul. We are all
in it today. A question that has been practically closed for a whole
epoch, the question of the distribution of wealth and the nature of
property, has suddenly yawned wide open before us; and we all have to
open our closed minds accordingly.
When I say that it has opened suddenly, I am not forgetting that it
never has been closed completely for thoughtful people whose business
it was to criticize institutions. Hundreds of years before St Paul
was born, prophets crying in the wilderness had protested against the
abominations that were rampant under the Mosaic law, and prophesied
a Savior who would redeem us from its inhumanity. I am not forgetting
either that for hundreds of years past our own prophets, whom we
call poets or philosophers or divines, have been protesting against
the division of the nation into rich and poor, idle and overworked.
But there comes finally a moment at which the question that has been
kept ajar only by persecuted prophets for a few disciples springs
wide open for everybody; and the persecuted prophets with their tiny
congregations of cranks grow suddenly into formidable parliamentary
Oppositions which presently become powerful Governments.
Langland and Latimer and Sir Thomas More, John Bunyan and George Fox,
Goldsmith and Crabbe and Shelley, Carlyle and Ruskin and Morris, with
many brave and faithful preachers, in the Churches and out of them,
of whom you have never heard, were our English prophets. They kept
the question open for those who had some spark of their inspiration;
but prosaic everyday women and men paid no attention until, within
my lifetime and yours, quite suddenly ordinary politicians, sitting
on the front benches of the House of Commons and of all the European
legislatures, with vast and rapidly growing bodies of ordinary
respectable voters behind them, began clamoring that the existing
distribution of wealth is so anomalous, monstrous, ridiculous,
and unbearably mischievous, that it must be radically changed if
civilization is to be saved from the wreck to which all the older
civilizations we know of were brought by this very evil.
That is why you must approach the question as an unsettled one, with
your mind as open as you can get it. And it is from my own experience
in dealing with such questions that I strongly advise you not to wait
for a readymade answer from me or anyone else, but to try first to
solve the problem for yourself in your own way. For even if you solve
it all wrong, you will become not only intensely interested in it, but
much better able to understand and appreciate the right solution when
it comes along.
2
DIVIDING-UP
Everybody knows now that Socialism is a proposal to divide-up the
income of the country in a new way. What you perhaps have not noticed
is that the income of the country is being divided-up every day and
even every minute at present, and must continue to be divided-up every
day as long as there are two people left on earth to divide it. The
only possible difference of opinion is not as to whether it shall be
divided or not, but as to how much each person should have, and on what
conditions he should be allowed to have it. St Paul said “He that will
not work, neither shall he eat”; but as he was only a man with a low
opinion of women, he forgot the babies. Babies cannot work, and are
shockingly greedy; but if they were not fed there would soon be nobody
left alive in the world. So that will not do.
Some people imagine that because they can save money the wealth of
the world can be stored up. Stuff and nonsense. Most of the wealth
that keeps us alive will not last a week. The world lives from hand to
mouth. A drawingroom poker will last a lifetime; but we cannot live by
eating drawingroom pokers; and though we do all we can to make our food
keep by putting eggs into water-glass, tinning salmon, freezing mutton,
and turning milk into dry goods, the hard fact remains that unless most
of our food is eaten within a few days of its being baked or killed it
will go stale or rotten, and choke or poison us. Even our clothes will
not last very long if we work hard in them; and there is the washing.
You may put india-rubber patches on your boot soles to prevent the
soles wearing out; but then the patches will wear out.
Every year must bring its own fresh harvest and its new generations
of sheep and cattle: we cannot live on what is left of last year’s
harvest; and as next year’s does not yet exist, we must live in the
main on this year’s, making things and using them up, sowing and
reaping, brewing and baking, breeding and butchering (unless we are
vegetarians like myself), soiling and washing, or else dying of dirt
and starvation. What is called saving is only making bargains for the
future. For instance, if I bake a hundred and one loaves of bread, I
can eat no more than the odd one; and I cannot save the rest, because
they will be uneatable in a week. All I can do is to bargain with
somebody who wants a hundred loaves to be eaten on the spot by himself
and his family and persons in his employment, that if I give my hundred
spare loaves to him he will give me, say, five new loaves to eat every
year in future. But that is not saving up the loaves. It is only a
bargain between two parties: one who wants to provide for the future,
and another who wants to spend heavily in the present. Consequently I
cannot save until I find somebody else who wants to spend. The notion
that we could all save together is silly: the truth is that only a few
well-off people who have more than they need can afford to provide
for their future in this way; and they could not do it were there not
others spending more than they possess. Peter must spend what Paul
saves, or Paul’s savings will go rotten. Between the two nothing is
saved. The nation as a whole must make its bread and eat it as it goes
along. A nation which stopped working would be dead in a fortnight
even if every man, woman, and child in it had houses and lands and a
million of money in the savings bank. When you see the rich man’s wife
(or anyone else’s wife) shaking her head over the thriftlessness of the
poor because they do not all save, pity the lady’s ignorance; but do
not irritate the poor by repeating her nonsense to them.
3
HOW MUCH FOR EACH?
You now realize that a great baking and making and serving and counting
must take place every day; and that when the loaves and other things
are made they must be divided-up immediately, each of us getting her
or his legally appointed share. What should that share be? How much
is each of us to have; and why is each of us to have that much and
neither more nor less? If the hardworking widow with six children is
getting two loaves a week whilst some idle and dissolute young bachelor
is wasting enough every day to feed six working families for a month,
is that a sensible way of dividing-up? Would it not be better to give
more to the widow and less to the bachelor? These questions do not
settle themselves: they have to be settled by law. If the widow takes
one of the bachelor’s loaves the police will put her in prison, and
send her children to the workhouse. They do that because there is a
law that her share is only two loaves. That law can be repealed or
altered by parliament if the people desire it and vote accordingly.
Most people, when they learn this, think the law ought to be altered.
When they read in the papers that an American widow left with one baby
boy, and an allowance of one hundred and fifty pounds a week to bring
him up on, went to the courts to complain that it was not enough, and
had the allowance increased to two hundred, whilst other widows who
had worked hard early and late all their lives, and brought up large
families, were ending their days in the workhouse, they feel that
there is something monstrously unjust and wicked and stupid in such a
dividing-up, and that it must be changed. They get it changed a little
by taking back some of the rich American widow’s share in taxes, and
giving it to the poor in old-age pensions and widows’ pensions and
unemployment doles and “free” elementary education and other things.
But if the American widow still has more than a hundred pounds a week
for the keep of her baby boy, and a large income for herself besides,
whilst the poor widow at the other end of the town has only ten
shillings a week pension between her and the workhouse, the difference
is still so unfair that we hardly notice the change. Everybody wants
a fairer division except the people who get the best of it; and as
they are only one in ten of the population, and many of them recognize
the injustice of their own position, we may take it that there is a
general dissatisfaction with the existing daily division of wealth, and
a general intention to alter it as soon as possible among those who
realize that it can be altered.
But you cannot alter anything unless you know what you want to alter it
to. It is no use saying that it is scandalous that Mrs A. should have
a thousand pounds a day and poor Mrs B. only half a crown. If you want
the law altered you must be prepared to say how much you think Mrs A.
should have, and how much Mrs B. should have. And that is where the
real trouble begins. We are all ready to say that Mrs B. ought to have
more, and Mrs A. less; but when we are asked to say exactly how much
more and how much less, some say one thing; others say another; and
most of us have nothing to say at all except perhaps that Mrs A. ought
to be ashamed of herself or that it serves Mrs B. right.
People who have never thought about the matter say that the honest way
is to let everyone have what she has the money to pay for, just as at
present. But that does not get us out of the difficulty. It only sets
us asking how the money is to be allotted. Money is only a bit of paper
or a bit of metal that gives its owner a lawful claim to so much bread
or beer or diamonds or motor-cars or what not. We cannot eat money, nor
drink money, nor wear money. It is the goods that money can buy that
are being divided-up when money is divided-up. Everything is reckoned
in money; and when the law gives Mrs B. her ten shillings when she is
seventy years old and young Master A. his three thousand shillings
before he is seven minutes old, the law is dividing-up the loaves
and fishes, the clothes and houses, the motor-cars and perambulators
between them as if it were handing out these articles directly instead
of handing out the money that buys them.
4
NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK
Before there can be any wealth to divide-up, there must be labor at
work. There can be no loaves without farmers and bakers. There are a
few little islands thousands of miles away where men and women can lie
basking in the sun and live on the cocoa-nuts the monkeys throw down to
them. But for us there is no such possibility. Without incessant daily
labor we should starve. If anyone is idle someone else must be working
for both or there would be nothing for either of them to eat. That was
why St Paul said “If a man will not work neither shall he eat”. The
burden of labor is imposed on us by Nature, and has to be divided-up as
well as the wealth it produces.
But the two divisions need not correspond to oneanother. One person
can produce much more than enough to feed herself. Otherwise the young
children could not be fed; and the old people who are past work would
starve. Many a woman with nothing to help her but her two hands has
brought up a family on her own earnings, and kept her aged parents into
the bargain, besides making rent for a ground landlord as well. And
with the help of water power, steam power, electric power, and modern
machinery, labor can be so organized that one woman can turn out more
than a thousand women could turn out 150 years ago.
This saving of labor by harnessing machines to natural forces, like
wind and water and the heat latent in coal, produces leisure, which
also has to be divided-up. If one person’s labor for ten hours can
support ten persons for a day, the ten can arrange in several different
ways. They can put the ten hours’ work on one person and let the other
nine have all the leisure as well as free rations. Or they can each do
one hour’s work a day and each have nine hours leisure. Or they can
have anything between these extremes. They can also arrange that three
of them shall work ten hours a day each, producing enough for thirty
people, so that the other seven will not only have nothing to do, but
will be able to eat enough for fourteen and to keep thirteen servants
to wait on them and keep the three up to their work into the bargain.
Another possible arrangement would be that they should all work much
longer every day than was necessary to keep them, on condition that
they were not required to work until they were fully grown and well
educated, and were allowed to stop working and amuse themselves for
the rest of their lives when they were fifty. Scores of different
arrangements are possible between out-and-out slavery and an equitable
division of labor, leisure, and wealth. Slavery, Serfdom, Feudalism,
Capitalism, Socialism, Communism are all at bottom different
arrangements of this division. Revolutionary history is the history of
the effects of a continual struggle by persons and classes to alter
the arrangement in their own favor. But for the moment we had better
stick to the question of dividing-up the income the labor produces;
for the utmost difference you can make between one person and another
in respect of their labor or leisure is as nothing compared to the
enormous difference you can make in their incomes by modern methods and
machines. You cannot put more than 24 hours into a rich man’s day; but
you can put 24 million pounds into his pocket without asking him to
lift his little finger for it.
5
COMMUNISM
If I have made this clear to you, will you try to make up your mind how
you would like to see the income of your country divided-up day by day?
Do not run to the Socialists or the Capitalists, or to your favorite
newspaper, to make up your mind for you: they will only unsettle and
bewilder you when they are not intentionally misleading you. Think it
out for yourself. Conceive yourself as a national trustee with the
entire income of the country placed in your hands to be distributed
so as to produce the greatest social wellbeing for everybody in the
country.