spends at the work. Time is something that can be measured in figures.
It is quite easy to pay a worker twice as much for two hours work as
for one. There are people who will work for sixpence an hour, people
who will work for eighteenpence an hour, people who will work for two
guineas an hour, people who will work for a hundred and fifty guineas
an hour. These prices depend on how many competitors there are in the
trade looking for the work, and whether the people who want it done are
rich or poor. You pay a sempstress a shilling to sew for an hour, or a
laborer to chop wood, when there are plenty of unemployed sempstresses
and laborers starving for a job, each of them trying to induce you to
give it to her or him rather than to the next applicant by offering to
do it at a price that will barely keep body and soul together. You pay
a popular actress two or three hundred pounds a week, or a famous opera
singer as much a night, because the public will pay more than that to
hear her. You pay a famous surgeon a hundred and fifty guineas to cut
out your appendix, or a famous barrister the same to plead for you,
because there are so few famous surgeons or barristers, and so many
patients and clients offering them large sums to work for them rather
than for you. This is called settling the price of a worker’s time, or
rather letting it settle itself, by supply and demand.
Unfortunately, supply and demand may produce undesirable results. A
division in which one woman gets a shilling and another three thousand
shillings for an hour of work has no moral sense in it: it is just
something that happens, and that ought not to happen. A child with an
interesting face and pretty ways, and some talent for acting, may, by
working for the films, earn a hundred times as much as its mother can
earn by drudging at an ordinary trade. What is worse, a pretty girl can
earn by vice far more than her plain sister can earn as an honest wife
and mother.
Besides, it is not so easy to measure the time spent on a piece of work
as it seems at first. Paying a laborer twice as much for two hours work
as for one is as simple as twice one are two; but when you have to
divide between an opera singer and her dresser, or an unskilled laborer
and a doctor, you find that you cannot tell how much time you have to
allow for. The dresser and the laborer are doing what any ablebodied
person can do without long study or apprenticeship. The doctor has
to spend six years in study and training, on top of a good general
education, to qualify himself to do his work. He claims that six years
of unpaid work are behind every minute of his attendance at your
bedside. A skilled workman may claim in the same way that seven years
of apprenticeship are behind every stroke of his hammer. The opera
singer has had to spend a long time learning her parts, even when, as
sometimes happens, she has never learnt to sing. Everybody acknowledges
that this makes a difference; but nobody can measure exactly what the
difference is, either in time or money.
The same difficulty arises in attempting to compare the value of the
work of a clever woman with that of a stupid one. You may think that
the work of the clever woman is worth more; but when you are asked how
much more in pounds, shillings, and pence you have to give it up and
fall back on supply and demand, confessing that the difference cannot
be measured in money.
In these examples I have mixed up making things with doing services;
but I must now emphasize this distinction, because thoughtless people
are apt to think a brickmaker more of a producer than a clergyman.
When a village carpenter makes a gate to keep cattle out of a field of
wheat, he has something solid in his hand which he can claim for his
own until the farmer pays him for it. But when a village boy makes a
noise to keep the birds off he has nothing to shew, though the noise
is just as necessary as the gate. The postman does not make anything:
he only delivers letters and parcels. The policeman does not make
anything; and the soldier not only does not make things: he destroys
them. The doctor makes pills sometimes; but that is not his real
business, which is to tell you when you ought to take pills, and what
pills to take, unless indeed he has the good sense to tell you not to
take them at all, and you have the good sense to believe him when he
is giving you good advice instead of bad. The lawyer does not make
anything substantial, nor the clergyman, nor the member of Parliament,
nor the domestic servant (though she sometimes breaks things), nor the
Queen or King, nor an actor. When their work is done they have nothing
in hand that can be weighed or measured: nothing that the maker can
keep from others until she is paid for it. They are all in service: in
domestic service like the housemaid, or in commercial service like the
shop assistant, or in Government service like the postman, or in State
service like the King; and all of us who have fullsize consciences
consider ourselves in what some of us call the service of God.
And then, beside the persons who make the substantial things there must
be persons to find out how they should be made. Beside the persons who
do things there must be persons who know how they should be done, and
decide when they should be done, and how much they should be done.
In simple village life both the making or the doing and the thinking
may be done by the same person when he is a blacksmith, carpenter,
or builder; but in big cities and highly civilized countries this is
impossible: one set of people has to make and do whilst another set of
people thinks and decides what, when, how much, and by whom.
Our villages would be improved by a little of this division of labor;
for it is a great disadvantage in country life that a farmer is
expected to do so many different things: he has not only to grow crops
and raise stock (two separate arts to begin with, and difficult ones
too), but to be a man of business, keeping complicated accounts and
selling his crops and his cattle, which is a different sort of job,
needing a different sort of man. And, as if this were not enough,
he has to keep his dwelling house as part of his business; so that
he is expected to be a professional man, a man of business, and a
sort of country gentleman all at once; and the consequence is that
farming is all a muddle: the good farmer is poor because he is a bad
man of business; the good man of business is poor because he is a bad
farmer; and both of them are often bad husbands because their work is
not separate from their home, and they bring all their worries into
the house with them instead of locking them up in a city office and
thinking no more about them until they go back there next morning. In
a city business one set of men does the manual work; another set keeps
the accounts; another chooses the markets for buying and selling; and
all of them leave their work behind them when they go home.
The same trouble is found in a woman’s housekeeping. She is expected to
do too many different things. She may be a very good housekeeper and
a very bad cook. In a French town this would not matter, because the
whole family would take all the meals that require any serious cooking
in the nearest restaurant; but in the country the woman must do both
the housekeeping and the cooking unless she can afford to keep a cook.
She may be both a good housekeeper and a good cook, but be unable to
manage children; and here again, if she cannot afford a capable nurse,
she has to do the thing she does badly along with the things she
does well, and has her life muddled and spoilt accordingly. It is a
mercy both to her and the children that the school (which is a bit of
Communism) takes them off her hands for most of the day. It is clear
that the woman who is helped out by servants or by restaurants and
schools has a much better chance in life than the woman who is expected
to do three very different things at once.
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to
the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again,
because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition
to regard a married woman’s work as no work at all, and to take it as a
matter of course that she should not be paid for it. A man gets higher
wages than a woman because he is supposed to have a family to support;
yet if he spends the extra money in drink or betting, the woman has no
remedy against him if she is married to him. But if she is his hired
housekeeper she can recover her wages at law. And the married man is
in the same predicament. When his wife spends the housekeeping money
in drink he has no remedy, though he could have a hired housekeeper
imprisoned for theft if she did the very same thing.
Now with these examples in mind, how can an Intelligent Woman settle
what her time is worth in money compared to her husband’s? Imagine her
husband looking at it as a matter of business, and saying “I can hire a
housekeeper for so much, and a nursemaid for so much, and a cook for so
much, and a pretty lady to keep company with for so much; and if I add
up all this the total will be what a wife is worth; but it is more than
I can afford to pay”! Imagine her hiring a husband by the hour, like a
taxi cab!
Yet the income of the country has to be divided-up between husbands and
wives just as it has between strangers; and as most of us are husbands
and wives, any plan for dividing-up that breaks down when it is applied
to husbands and wives breaks in the middle and is no use. The old plan
of giving the man everything, and leaving the woman to get what she
could out of him, led to such abuses that it had to be altered by the
Married Women’s Property Acts, under which a rich woman with a poor
husband can keep all her property to herself whilst her husband is
imprisoned for life for not paying her taxes. But as nine families out
of ten have no property, they have to make the best of what the husband
can earn at his trade; and here we have the strangest muddles: the
wife getting nothing of her own, and the bigger children making a few
shillings a week and having the difference between it and a living wage
made up by the father’s wage; so that the people who are employing the
children cheaply are really sweating the father, who is perhaps being
sweated badly enough by his own employer. Of this, more later on.
Try to straighten out this muddle on the plan of giving the woman and
the children and the man what they produce each by their own work, or
what their time is worth in money to the country; and you will find the
plan nonsensical and impossible. Nobody but a lunatic would attempt to
put it into practice.
9
TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES
The second plan we have to examine is that of giving to each person
what she deserves. Many people, especially those who are comfortably
off, think that this is what happens at present: that the industrious
and sober and thrifty are never in want, and that poverty is due to
idleness, improvidence, drink, betting, dishonesty, and bad character
generally. They can point to the fact that a laborer whose character is
bad finds it more difficult to get employment than one whose character
is good; that a farmer or country gentleman who gambles and bets
heavily, and mortgages his land to live wastefully and extravagantly,
is soon reduced to poverty; and that a man of business who is lazy and
does not attend to it becomes bankrupt. But this proves nothing but
that you cannot eat your cake and have it too: it does not prove that
your share of the cake was a fair one. It shews that certain vices and
weaknesses make us poor; but it forgets that certain other vices make
us rich. People who are hard, grasping, selfish, cruel, and always
ready to take advantage of their neighbors, become very rich if they
are clever enough not to overreach themselves. On the other hand,
people who are generous, public-spirited, friendly, and not always
thinking of the main chance, stay poor when they are born poor unless
they have extraordinary talents. Also, as things are today, some are
born poor and others are born with silver spoons in their mouths: that
is to say, they are divided into rich and poor before they are old
enough to have any character at all. The notion that our present system
distributes wealth according to merit, even roughly, may be dismissed
at once as ridiculous. Everyone can see that it generally has the
contrary effect: it makes a few idle people very rich, and a great many
hardworking people very poor.
On this, Intelligent Lady, your first thought may be that if wealth is
not distributed according to merit, it ought to be; and that we should
at once set to work to alter our laws so that in future the good people
shall be rich in proportion to their goodness and the bad people poor
in proportion to their badness. There are several objections to this;
but the very first one settles the question for good and all. It is,
that the proposal is impossible. How are you going to measure anyone’s
merit in money? Choose any pair of human beings you like, male or
female, and see whether you can decide how much each of them should
have on her or his merits. If you live in the country, take the village
blacksmith and the village clergyman, or the village washerwoman and
the village schoolmistress, to begin with. At present the clergyman
often gets less pay than the blacksmith: it is only in some villages
he gets more. But never mind what they get at present: you are trying
whether you can set up a new order of things in which each will get
what he deserves. You need not fix a sum of money for them: all you
have to do is to settle the proportion between them. Is the blacksmith
to have as much as the clergyman? or twice as much as the clergyman?
or half as much as the clergyman? or how much more or less? It is no
use saying that one ought to have more and the other less: you must be
prepared to say exactly how much more or less in calculable proportion.
Well, think it out. The clergyman has had a college education; but
that is not any merit on his part: he owes it to his father; so you
cannot allow him anything for that. But through it he is able to read
the New Testament in Greek; so that he can do something the blacksmith
cannot do. On the other hand, the blacksmith can make a horse-shoe,
which the parson cannot. How many verses of the Greek Testament are
worth one horse-shoe? You have only to ask the silly question to see
that nobody can answer it.
Since measuring their merits is no use, why not try to measure their
faults? Suppose the blacksmith swears a good deal, and gets drunk
occasionally! Everybody in the village knows this; but the parson has
to keep his faults to himself. His wife knows them; but she will not
tell you what they are if she knows that you intend to cut off some of
his pay for them. You know that as he is only a mortal human being he
must have some faults; but you cannot find them out. However, suppose
he has some faults that you can find out! Suppose he has what you call
an unfortunate manner; that he is a hypocrite; that he is a snob; that
he cares more for sport and fashionable society than for religion! Does
that make him as bad as the blacksmith, or twice as bad, or twice and a
quarter as bad, or only half as bad? In other words, if the blacksmith
is to have a shilling, is the parson to have a shilling also, or is he
to have sixpence, or fivepence and one-third, or two shillings? Clearly
these are fools’ questions: the moment they bring us down from moral
generalities to business particulars it becomes plain to every sensible
person that no relation can be established between human qualities,
good or bad, and sums of money, large or small. It may seem scandalous
that a prize-fighter, for hitting another prize-fighter so hard at
Wembley that he fell down and could not rise within ten seconds,
received the same sum that was paid to the Archbishop of Canterbury for
acting as Primate of the Church of England for nine months; but none of
those who cry out against the scandal can express any better in money
the difference between the two. Not one of the persons who think that
the prize-fighter should get less than the Archbishop can say how much
less. What the prize-fighter got for his six or seven minutes boxing
would pay a judge’s salary for two years; and we are all agreed that
nothing could be more ridiculous, and that any system of distributing
wealth which leads to such absurdities must be wrong. But to suppose
that it could be changed by any possible calculation that an ounce of
archbishop or three ounces of judge is worth a pound of prize-fighter
would be sillier still. You can find out how many candles are worth a
pound of butter in the market on any particular day; but when you try
to estimate the worth of human souls the utmost you can say is that
they are all of equal value before the throne of God. And that will not
help you in the least to settle how much money they should have. You
must simply give it up, and admit that distributing money according to
merit is beyond mortal measurement and judgment.
10
TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB
The third plan: that of letting everyone have what she can lay her
hands on, would produce a world in which there would be no peace and
no security. If we were all equally strong and cunning we should all
have an equal chance; but in a world where there are children and old
people and invalids, and where able-bodied adults of the same age and
strength vary greatly in greediness and wickedness, it would never do:
we should get tired of it in no time. Even pirate crews and bands of
robbers prefer a peaceful settled understanding as to the division of
their plunder to the Kilkenny cat plan.
Among ourselves, though robbery and violence are forbidden, we still
allow business to be conducted on the principle of letting everyone
make what he can out of it without considering anyone but himself. A
shopkeeper or a coal merchant may not pick your pocket; but he may
overcharge you as much as he likes. Everyone is free in business to get
as much and give as little for his money as he can induce his customers
to put up with. House rent can be raised without any regard to the cost
of the houses or the poverty of the tenant. But this freedom produces
such bad results that new laws are continually being made to restrain
it; and even when it is a necessary part of our freedom to spend our
money and use our possessions as seems best to us, we still have to
settle how much money and what possessions we should be given to start
with. This distribution must be made according to some law or other.
Anarchy (absence of law) will not work. We must go on with our search
for a righteous and practicable law.
11
OLIGARCHY
The fourth plan is to take one person in every ten (say), and make
her rich without working by making the other nine work hard and long
every day, giving them only enough of what they make to keep them
alive and enable them to bring up families to continue their slavery
when they grow old and die. This is roughly what happens at present,
as one-tenth of the English people own nine-tenths of all the property
in the country, whilst most of the other nine-tenths have no property,
and live from week to week on wages barely sufficient to support them
in a very poor way. The advantage claimed for this plan is that it
provides us with a gentry: that is, with a class of rich people able
to cultivate themselves by an expensive education; so that they become
qualified to govern the country and make and maintain its laws; to
organize and officer the army for national defence; to patronize and
keep alive learning, science, art, literature, philosophy, religion,
and all the institutions that distinguish great civilizations from mere
groups of villages; to raise magnificent buildings, dress splendidly,
impose awe on the unruly, and set an example of good manners and fine
living. Most important of all, as men of business think, by giving
them much more than they need spend, we enable them to save those
great sums of spare money that are called capital, and are spent in
making railways, mines, factories full of machinery, and all the other
contrivances by which wealth is produced in great quantities.
This plan, which is called Oligarchy, is the old English plan of
dividing us into gentry living by property and common people living
by work: the plan of the few rich and the many poor. It has worked
for a long time, and is still working. And it is evident that if the
incomes of the rich were taken from them and divided among the poor as
we stand at present, the poor would be only very little less poor; the
supply of capital would cease because nobody could afford to save;
the country houses would fall into ruins; and learning and science
and art and literature and all the rest of what we call culture would
perish. That is why so many people support the present system, and
stand by the gentry although they themselves are poor. They see that
if ten women can produce only £110 a year each by their labor, it may
be wiser for nine of them to be content with £50 apiece, and make the
other one an educated lady, mistress, and ruler by giving her £500 a
year without any obligation to work at all, or any inducement to work
except the hope of finding how to make their work more fruitful for her
own benefit, rather than to insist on having £110 a year each. Though
we make this sort of arrangement at present because we are forced to,
and indeed mostly without knowing that we are making it, yet it is
conceivable that if we understood what we were doing and were free to
carry it out or not as we thought best, we might still do it for the
sake of having a gentry to keep up finer things in the world than a
miserable crowd all equally poor, and all tied to primitive manual
labor.
But the abuses that arise from this plan are so terrible that the world
is becoming set against it. If we decide to go on with it, the first
step is to settle who is to be the tenth person: the lady. How is that
to be decided? True, we could begin by drawing lots; and after that
the gentry could intermarry and be succeeded by their firstborns. But
the mischief of it is that when we at last got our gentry established
we should have no guarantee that they would do any of the things we
intended them to do and paid them to do. With the best intentions, the
gentry govern the country very badly because they are so far removed
from the common people that they do not understand their needs. They
use their power to make themselves still richer by forcing the common
people to work still harder and accept still less. They spend enormous
sums on sport and entertainment, gluttony and ostentation, and very
little on science and art and learning. They produce poverty on a vast
scale by withdrawing labor from production to waste it in superfluous
menial service. They either shirk military duties or turn the army into
a fashionable retinue for themselves and an instrument of oppression at
home and conquest abroad. They corrupt the teaching in the universities
and schools to glorify themselves and hide their misdeeds. They do
the same with the Church. They try to keep the common people poor and
ignorant and servile so as to make themselves more indispensable. At
last their duties have to be taken out of their hands and discharged by
Parliament, by the Civil Service, by the War Office and the Admiralty,
by city corporations, by Poor Law Guardians, by County and Parish and
District Councils, by salaried servants and Boards of paid directors,
by societies and institutions of all kinds depending on taxation or on
public subscription.
When this occurs, as it actually has occurred, all the cultural and
political reasons for the maintenance of a gentry vanish. It always
does occur when city life grows up and takes the place of country life.
When a peeress resides on her estates in a part of the country where
life is still very simple, and the nearest thing to a town is a village
ten miles from the railway station, the people look to her ladyship for
everything that is not produced by their daily toil. She represents
all the splendor and greatness and romance of civilization, and does a
good deal for them which they would not know how to do for themselves.
In this way a Highland clan, before Scotland became civilized, always
had a chief. The clansmen willingly gave him the lion’s share of such
land and goods as they could come by, or of the plunder they took in
their raids. They did this because they could not fight successfully
without a leader, and could not live together without a lawgiver. Their
chief was to them what Moses was to the Israelites in the desert. The
Highland chief was practically a king in his clan, just as the peeress
is a queen on her estates. Loyalty to him was instinctive.