children and relations and friends out of the question, lest your
personal feelings upset your judgment. Some women would say “I never
think of anyone else: I don’t know anyone else”. But that will never do
in settling social questions. Capitalism and Socialism are not schemes
for distributing wealth in one lady’s circle only, but for distributing
wealth to everybody; and as the quantity to be distributed every year
is limited, if Mrs Dickson’s child, or her sister’s child, or her
dearest and oldest friend gets more, Mrs Johnson’s child or sister’s
child or dearest friend must get less. Mrs Dickson must forget not only
herself and her family and friends, but her class. She must imagine
herself for the moment a sort of angel acting for God, without any
earthly interests and affections to corrupt her integrity, concerned
solely with the task of deciding how much everybody should have out
of the national income for the sake of the world’s greatest possible
welfare and the greatest possible good of the world’s soul.
Of course I know that none of us can really do this; but we must get
as near it as we can. I know also that there are few things more
irritating than the glibness with which people tell us to think for
ourselves when they know quite well that our minds are mostly herd
minds, with only a scrap of individual mind on top. I am even prepared
to be told that when you paid the price of this book you were paying me
to think for you. But I can no more do that than I can eat your dinner
for you. What I can do is to cook your mental dinner for you by putting
you in possession of the thinking that has been done already on the
subject by myself and others, so that you may be saved the time and
trouble and disappointment of trying to find your way down blind alleys
that have been thoroughly explored, and found to be no-thoroughfares.
Here, then, are some plans that have been tried or proposed.
Let us begin with the simplest: the family plan of the apostles and
their followers. Among them everybody threw all that she or he had
into a common stock; and each took from it what she or he needed. The
obligation to do this was so sacred that when Ananias and Sapphira kept
back something for themselves, St Peter struck them dead for “lying to
the Holy Ghost”.
This plan, which is Communism in its primitive purity, is practised to
this day in small religious communities where the people live together
and are all known to one another. But it is not so simple for big
populations where the people do not live together and do not know each
other. Even in the family we practise it only partially; for though
the father gives part of his earnings to the mother, and the children
do the same when they are earning anything, and the mother buys food
and places it before all of them to partake in common, yet they all
keep some of their earnings back for their separate use; so that family
life is not pure Communism, but partly Communism and partly separate
property. Each member of the family does what Ananias and Sapphira
did; but they need not tell lies about it (though they sometimes do)
because it is understood between them that the children are to keep
back something for pocket money, the father for beer and tobacco, and
the mother for her clothes if there is any left.
Besides, family Communism does not extend to the people next door.
Every house has its own separate meals; and the people in the other
houses do not contribute to it, and have no right to share it. There
are, however, exceptions to this in modern cities. Though each family
buys its own beer separately, they all get their water communistically.
They pay what they call a water rate into a common fund to pay for a
constant supply to every house; and they all draw as much or as little
water as they need.
In the same way they pay for the lighting of the streets, for paving
them, for policemen to patrol them, for bridges across the rivers, and
for the removal and destruction of dustbin refuse. Nobody thinks of
saying “I never go out after dark; I have never called a policeman in
my life; I have no business on the other side of the river and never
cross the bridge; and therefore I will not help to pay the cost of
these things”. Everybody knows that town life could not exist without
lighting and paving and bridges and police and sanitation, and that
a bedridden invalid who never leaves the house, or a blind man whose
darkness no street lamp can dispel, is as dependent on these public
services for daily supplies of food and for safety and health as any
healthy person. And this is as true of the army and navy as of the
police force, of a lighthouse as of a street lamp, of a Town Hall as
of the Houses of Parliament: they are all paid for out of the common
stock made up by our rates and taxes; and they are for the benefit of
everybody indiscriminately. In short, they are Communistic.
When we pay our rates to keep up this Communism we do not, like
the apostles, throw all we have into the common stock: we make a
contribution according to our means; and our means are judged by the
value of the house we live in. But those who pay low contributions
have just the same use of the public services as those who pay high
ones; and strangers and vagrants who do not pay any contributions at
all enjoy them equally. Young and old, prince and pauper, virtuous and
vicious, black and white and yellow, thrifty and wasteful, drunk and
sober, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman
and thief, all have the same use and enjoyment of these communistic
conveniences and services which cost so much to keep up. And it works
perfectly. Nobody dreams of proposing that people should not be allowed
to walk down the street without paying and producing a certificate of
character from two respectable householders. Yet the street costs more
than any of the places you pay to go into, such as theatres, or any of
the places where you have to be introduced, like clubs.
6
LIMITS TO COMMUNISM
Would you ever have supposed from reading the newspapers that
Communism, instead of being a wicked invention of Russian
revolutionaries and British and American desperadoes, is a highly
respectable way of sharing our wealth, sanctioned and practised by
the apostles, and an indispensable part of our own daily life and
civilization? The more Communism, the more civilization. We could not
get on without it, and are continually extending it. We could give up
some of it if we liked. We could put turnpike gates on the roads and
make everybody pay for passing along them: indeed we may still see the
little toll houses where the old turnpike gates used to be. We could
abolish the street lamps, and hire men with torches to light us through
the streets at night: are not the extinguishers formerly used by hired
linkmen still to be seen on old-fashioned railings? We could even hire
policemen and soldiers by the job to protect us, and then disband the
police force and the army. But we take good care to do nothing of the
sort. In spite of the way people grumble about their rates and taxes
they get better value for them than for all the other money they spend.
To find a bridge built for us to cross the river without having to
think about it or pay anyone for it is such a matter of course to us
that some of us come to think, like the children, that bridges are
provided by nature, and cost nothing. But if the bridges were allowed
to fall down, and we had to find out for ourselves how to cross the
river by fording it or swimming it or hiring a boat, we should soon
realize what a blessed thing Communism is, and not grudge the few
shillings that each of us has to pay the rate collector for the upkeep
of the bridge. In fact we might come to think Communism such a splendid
thing that everything ought to be communized.
But this would not work. The reason a bridge can be communized is that
everyone either uses the bridge or benefits by it. It may be taken as
a rule that whatever is used by everybody or benefits everybody can
be communized. Roads, bridges, street lighting, and water supply are
communized as a matter of course in cities, though in villages and
country places people have to buy and carry lanterns on dark nights
and get their water from their own wells. There is no reason why
bread should not be communized: it would be an inestimable benefit to
everybody if there were no such thing in the country as a hungry child,
and no housekeeper had to think of the cost of providing bread for the
household. Railways could be communized. You can amuse yourself by
thinking of lots of other services that would benefit everyone, and
therefore could and should be communized.
Only, you will be stopped when you come to services that are not useful
to everyone. We communize water as a matter of course; but what about
beer? What would a teetotaller say if he were asked to pay rates or
taxes to enable his neighbors to have as much beer as they want for
the asking? He would have a double objection: first, that he would
be paying for something he does not use; and second, that in his
opinion beer, far from being a good thing, causes ill-health, crime,
drunkenness, and so forth. He would go to prison rather than pay rates
for such a purpose.
The most striking example of this difficulty is the Church. The Church
of England is a great communistic institution: its property is held
in trust for God; its temples and services are open to everybody; and
its bishops sit in Parliament as peers of the realm. Yet, because we
are not all agreed as to the doctrines of the Church of England, and
many of us think that a communion table with candles on it is too like
a Roman Catholic altar, we have been forced to make the Church rate a
voluntary one: that is, you may pay it or not as you please. And when
the Education Act of 1902 gave some public money to Church schools,
many people refused to pay their rates, and allowed their furniture to
be sold year after year, sooner than allow a penny of theirs to go to
the Church. Thus you see that if you propose to communize something
that is not used or at least approved of by everybody, you will be
asking for trouble. We all use roads and bridges, and agree that they
are useful and necessary things; but we differ about religion and
temperance and playgoing, and quarrel fiercely over our differences.
That is why we communize roads and bridges without any complaint or
refusal to pay rates, but have masses of voters against us at once when
we attempt to communize any particular form of public worship, or to
deal with beer or spirits as we deal with water, and as we should deal
with milk if we had sense enough to value the nation’s health.
This difficulty can be got round to some extent by give-and-take
between the people who want different things. For instance, there are
some people who care for flowers and do not care for music, and others
who care for games and boating and care neither for flowers nor music.
But these differently minded people do not object to paying rates for
the upkeep of a public park with flower-beds, cricket pitches, a lake
for boating and swimming, and a band. Laura will not object to pay for
what Beatrice wants if Beatrice does not object to pay for what Laura
wants.
Also there are many things that only a few people understand or use
which nevertheless everybody pays for because without them we should
have no learning, no books, no pictures, no high civilization. We have
public galleries of the best pictures and statues, public libraries
of the best books, public observatories in which astronomers watch
the stars and mathematicians make abstruse calculations, public
laboratories in which scientific men are supposed to add to our
knowledge of the universe. These institutions cost a great deal of
money to which we all have to contribute. Many of us never enter a
gallery or a museum or a library even when we live within easy reach
of them; and not one person in ten is interested in astronomy or
mathematics or physical science; but we all have a general notion that
these things are necessary; and so we do not object to pay for them.
Besides, many of us do not know that we pay for them: we think we
get them as kind presents from somebody. In this way a good deal of
Communism has been established without our knowing anything about it.
This is shewn by our way of speaking about communized things as free.
Because we can enter the National Gallery or the British Museum or the
cathedrals without paying at the doors, some of us seem to think that
they grew by the roadside like wildflowers. But they cost us a great
deal of money from week to week. The British Museum has to be swept and
dusted and scrubbed more than any private house, because so many more
people tramp through it with mud on their boots. The salaries of the
learned gentlemen who are in charge of it are a trifle compared with
the cost of keeping it tidy. In the same way a public park needs more
gardeners than a private one, and has to be weeded and mown and watered
and sown and so forth at a great cost in wages and seeds and garden
implements. We get nothing for nothing; and if we do not pay every time
we go into these places, we pay in rates and taxes. The poorest tramp,
though he may escape rent and rates by sleeping out, pays whenever he
buys tobacco, because he pays about eight times as much for the tobacco
as it costs to grow and put on the market; and the Government gets the
difference to spend on public purposes: that is, to maintain Communism.
And the poorest woman pays in the same way, without knowing it,
whenever she buys an article of food that is taxed. If she knew that
she was stinting herself to pay the salary of the Astronomer Royal, or
to buy another picture for the National Gallery, she might vote against
the Government at the next election for making her do it; but as she
does not know, she only grumbles about the high prices of food, and
thinks they are all due to bad harvests or hard times or strikes or
anything else that must be put up with. She might not grudge what she
has to pay for the King and Queen; but if she knew that she was paying
the wages of the thousands of charwomen who scrub the stone staircases
in the Houses of Parliament and other great public buildings, she would
not get much satisfaction out of helping to support them better than
she can afford to support herself.
We see then that some of the Communism we practise is imposed on us
without our consent: we pay for it without knowing what we are doing.
But, in the main, Communism deals with things that are either used by
all of us or necessary to all of us, whether we are educated enough to
understand the necessity or not.
Now let us get back to the things as to which tastes differ. We have
already seen that Church of England services and beer and wine and
spirits and intoxicants of all sorts are considered necessary to life
by some people, and pernicious and poisonous by others. We are not
agreed even about tea and meat. But there are many things that no one
sees any harm in; yet everybody does not want them. Ask a woman what
little present she would like; and one woman will choose a pet dog,
another a gramophone. A studious girl will ask for a microscope when
an active girl will ask for a motor bicycle. Indoor people want books
and pictures and pianos: outdoor people want guns and fishing-rods
and horses and motor cars. To communize these things in the way that
we communize roads and bridges would be ridiculously wasteful. If you
made enough gramophones and bred enough pet dogs to supply every woman
with both, or enough microscopes and motor bicycles to provide one each
for every girl, you would have heaps of them left on your hands by the
women and girls who did not want them and would not find house room for
them. They could not even sell them, because everybody who wanted one
would have one already. They would go into the dustbin.
There is only one way out of this difficulty. Instead of giving people
things you must give them money and let them buy what they like with
it. Instead of giving Mrs Smith, who wants a gramophone, a gramophone
and a pet dog as well, costing, say, five pounds apiece, and giving Mrs
Jones, who wants a pet dog, a pet dog and a gramophone as well, with
the certainty that Mrs Smith will drive her pet dog out of her house
and Mrs Jones will throw her gramophone into the dustbin, so that the
ten pounds they cost will be wasted, you can simply give Mrs Smith and
Mrs Jones five pounds apiece. Then Mrs Smith buys a gramophone; Mrs
Jones buys a pet dog; and both live happily ever after. And, of course,
you will take care not to manufacture more gramophones or breed more
dogs than are needed to satisfy them.
That is the use of money: it enables us to get what we want instead
of what other people think we want. When a young lady is married, her
friends give her wedding presents instead of giving her money; and the
consequence is that she finds herself loaded up with six fish-slices,
seven or eight travelling clocks, and not a single pair of silk
stockings. If her friends had the sense to give her money (I always
do), and she had the sense to take it (she always does), she would have
one fish-slice, one travelling clock (if she wanted such a thing), and
plenty of stockings. Money is the most convenient thing in the world:
we could not possibly do without it. We are told that the love of money
is the root of all evil; but money itself is one of the most useful
contrivances ever invented: it is not its fault that some people are
foolish or miserly enough to be fonder of it than of their own souls.
You now see that the great dividing-up of things that has to take
place year by year, quarter by quarter, month by month, week by week,
day by day, hour by hour, and even minute by minute, though some of it
can be done by the ancient simple family communism of the apostles, or
by the modern ratepayers’ communism of the roads and bridges and street
lamps and so forth, must in the main take the form of a dividing-up of
money. And as this throws you back again on the old questions: how much
is each of us to have? what is my fair share? what is your fair share?
and why? Communism has only partly solved the problem for you; so we
must have another shot at it.
7
SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED
A plan which has often been proposed, and which seems very plausible
to the working classes, is to let every person have that part of the
wealth of the country which she has herself produced by her work (the
feminine pronoun here includes the masculine). Others say let us all
get what we deserve; so that the idle and dissolute and weak shall have
nothing and perish, and the good and industrious and energetic shall
have all and survive. Some believe in “the good old rule, the simple
plan, that they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who
can”, though they seldom confess it nowadays. Some say let the common
people get enough to keep them alive in that state of life to which
it has pleased God to call them; and let the gentry take the rest,
though that, too, is not now said so openly as it was in the eighteenth
century. Some say let us divide ourselves into classes; and let the
division be equal in each class though unequal between the classes; so
that laborers shall get thirty shillings a week, skilled workers three
or four pounds, bishops two thousand five hundred a year, judges five
thousand, archbishops fifteen thousand, and their wives what they can
get out of them. Others say simply let us go on as we are.
What the Socialists say is that none of these plans will work well, and
that the only satisfactory plan is to give everybody an equal share no
matter what sort of person she is, or how old she is, or what sort of
work she does, or who or what her father was.
If this, or any of the other plans, happens to startle and scandalize
you, please do not blame me or throw my book into the fire. I am only
telling you the different plans that have been proposed and to some
extent actually tried. You are not bound to approve of any of them; and
you are quite free to propose a better plan than any of them if you can
think one out. But you are not free to dismiss it from your mind as
none of your business. It is a question of your food and lodging, and
therefore part of your life. If you do not settle it for yourself, the
people who are encouraging you to neglect it will settle it for you;
and you may depend on it they will take care of their own shares and
not of yours, in which case you may find yourself some day without any
share at all.
I have seen that happen very cruelly during my own lifetime. In the
country where I was born, which is within an hour’s run of England
at the nearest point, many ladies of high social standing and gentle
breeding, who thought that this question did not concern them because
they were well off for the moment, ended very pitiably in the
workhouse. They felt that bitterly, and hated those who had brought it
about; but they never understood why it happened. Had they understood
from the beginning how and why it might happen, they might have averted
it, instead of, as they did, doing everything in their power to hasten
their own ruin.
You may very easily share their fate unless you take care to understand
what is happening. The world is changing very quickly, as it was around
them when they thought it as fixed as the mountains. It is changing
much more quickly around you; and I promise you that if you will be
patient enough to finish this book (think of all the patience it has
cost me to finish it instead of writing plays!) you will come out with
much more knowledge of how things are changing, and what your risks and
prospects are, than you are likely to have learnt from your schoolbooks.
Therefore I am going to take all these plans for you one after another,
and examine them chapter by chapter until you know pretty well all that
is to be said for and against them.
8
TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES
The first plan: that of giving to every person exactly what he or she
has made by his or her labor, seems fair; but when we try to put it
into practice we discover, first, that it is quite impossible to find
out how much each person has produced, and, second, that a great deal
of the world’s work is neither producing material things nor altering
the things that Nature produces, but doing services of one sort or
another.
When a farmer and his laborers sow and reap a field of wheat nobody
on earth can say how much of the wheat each of them has grown. When a
machine in a factory turns out pins by the million nobody can say how
many pins are due to the labor of the person who minds the machine,
or the person who invented it, or the engineers who made it, to say
nothing of all the other persons employed about the factory. The
clearest case in the world of a person producing something herself by
her own painful, prolonged, and risky labor is that of a woman who
produces a baby; but then she cannot live on the baby: the baby lives
greedily on her.
Robinson Crusoe on his desert island could have claimed that the
boats and shelters and fences he made with the materials supplied by
Nature belonged to him because they were the fruit of nobody’s labor
but his own; but when he returned to civilization he could not have
laid his hand on a chair or table in his house which was not the work
of dozens of men: foresters who had planted the trees, woodmen who
had felled them, lumbermen and bargemen and sailors and porters who
had moved them, sawyers who had sawn them into planks and scantlings,
upholsterers and joiners who had fashioned them into tables and chairs,
not to mention the merchants who had conducted all the business
involved in these transactions, and the makers of the shops and ships
and all the rest of it. Anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes
must see that trying to divide-up by giving each worker exactly what
she or he has produced is like trying to give every drop of rain in a
heavy shower exactly the quantity of water it adds to the supply in
your cistern. It just cannot be done.