first police constable he met: in fact it sometimes happened that the
police constable took him in charge, and the city authorities hanged
him. When the peeress leaves her estate and goes up to London for the
season, she becomes a nobody except to her personal acquaintances.
Everything that she does for her people in the country is done in
London by paid public servants of all sorts; and when she leaves the
country and settles in America or on the Continent to evade British
income tax she is not missed in London: everything goes on just as
before. But her tenants, who have to earn the money she spends abroad,
get nothing by her, and revile her as a fugitive and an Absentee.
Small wonder then that Oligarchy is no longer consented to willingly.
A great deal of the money the oligarchs get is now taken back from
them by taxation and death duties; so that the old families are being
reduced very rapidly to the level of ordinary citizens; and when their
estates are gone, as they will be after a few generations more of our
present heavy death duties, their titles will only make their poverty
ridiculous. Already many of their most famous country houses are
occupied either by rich business families of quite ordinary quality,
or by Co-operative Societies as Convalescent Homes or places for
conference and recreation, or as hotels or schools or lunatic asylums.
You must therefore face the fact that in a civilization like ours,
where most of the population lives in cities; where railways, motor
cars, posts, telegraphs, telephones, gramophones and radio have brought
city ways and city culture into the country; and where even the
smallest village has its parish meeting and its communal policeman, the
old reasons for making a few people very rich whilst all the others
work hard for a bare subsistence have passed away. The plan no longer
works, even in the Highlands.
Still, there is one reason left for maintaining a class of excessively
rich people at the expense of the rest; and business men consider it
the strongest reason of all. That reason is that it provides capital
by giving some people more money than they can easily spend; so that
they can save money (capital is saved money) without any privation. The
argument is that if income were more equally distributed, we should all
have so little that we should spend all our incomes, and nothing would
be saved to make machinery and build factories and construct railways
and dig mines and so forth. Now it is certainly necessary to high
civilization that these savings should be made; but it would be hard to
imagine a more wasteful way of bringing it about.
To begin with, it is very important that there should be no saving
until there has been sufficient spending: spending comes first. A
nation which makes steam engines before its little children have enough
milk to make their legs strong enough to carry them is making a fool’s
choice. Yet this is just what we do by this plan of making a few rich
and the masses poor. Again, even if we put the steam engine before
the milk, our plan gives us no security that we shall get the steam
engine, or, if we get it, that it will be set up in our country. Just
as a great deal of the money that was given to the country gentlemen of
England on the chance of their encouraging art and science was spent
by them on cock-fighting and horse-racing; so a shocking proportion of
the money we give our oligarchs on the chance of their investing it as
capital is spent by them in self-indulgence. Of the very rich it may
be said that they do not begin to save until they can spend no more,
and that they are continually inventing new and expensive extravagances
that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. When their income
outruns their extravagance so far that they must use it as capital or
throw it away, there is nothing to prevent them investing it in South
America, in South Africa, in Russia, or in China, though we cannot get
our own slums cleaned up for want of capital kept in and applied to our
own country. Hundreds of millions of pounds are sent abroad every year
in this way; and we complain of the competition of foreigners whilst
we allow our capitalists to provide them at our expense with the very
machinery with which they are taking our industries from us.
Of course the capitalists plead that we are none the poorer, because
the interest on their capital comes back into this country from the
countries in which they have invested it; and as they invest it abroad
only because they get more interest abroad than at home, they assure
us that we are actually the richer for their export of capital,
because it enables them to spend more at home and thus give British
workers more employment. But we have no guarantee that they will spend
it at home: they are as likely to spend it in Monte Carlo, Madeira,
Egypt, or where not? And when they do spend it at home and give us
employment, we have to ask what sort of employment? When our farms and
mills and cloth factories are all ruined by our importing our food and
cloth from abroad instead of making them ourselves, it is not enough
for our capitalists to shew us that instead of the farms we have
the best golf courses in the world; instead of mills and factories
splendid hotels; instead of engineers and shipwrights and bakers and
carpenters and weavers, waiters and chambermaids, valets and ladies’
maids, gamekeepers and butlers and so forth, all better paid and more
elegantly dressed than the productive workers they have replaced. We
have to consider what sort of position we shall be in when our workers
are as incapable of supporting themselves and us as the idle rich
themselves. Suppose the foreign countries stop our supplies either
by a revolution followed by flat repudiation of their capitalistic
debts, as in Russia, or by taxing and supertaxing incomes derived from
investments, what will become of us then? What is becoming of us now
as taxation of income spreads more and more in foreign countries? The
English servant may still be able to boast that England can put a more
brilliant polish on a multi-millionaire’s boots than any foreigner
can; but what use will that be to us when the multi-millionaire is an
expropriated or taxed-out pauper with no boots to have polished?
We shall have to go into this question of capital more particularly
later on; but for the purposes of this chapter it is enough to shew
that the plan of depending on oligarchy for our national capital is
not only wasteful on the face of it, but dangerous with a danger that
increases with every political development in the world. The only plea
left for it is that there is no other way of doing it. But that will
not hold water for a moment. The Government can, and to a considerable
extent actually does, check personal expenditure and enforce the use
of part of our incomes as capital, far less capriciously and more
efficiently than our oligarchy does. It can nationalize banking, as we
shall see presently. This leaves oligarchy without its sole economic
excuse.
12
DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS
Now for the fifth plan, which is, that though everybody should work,
society should be divided into as many classes as there are different
sorts of work, and that the different classes should receive different
payment for their work: for instance, the dustmen and scavengers
and scullery-maids and charwomen and ragpickers should receive less
than the doctors and clergymen and teachers and opera singers and
professional ladies generally, and that these should receive less than
the judges and prime ministers and kings and queens.
You will tell me that this is just what we have at present. Certainly
it happens so in many cases; but there is no law that people employed
in different sorts of work should be paid more or less than oneanother.
We are accustomed to think that schoolmistresses and clergymen and
doctors, being educated ladies and gentlemen, must be paid more than
illiterate persons who work with their hands for weekly wages; but
at the present time an engine driver, making no pretension to be a
gentleman, or to have had a college education, is paid more than many
clergymen and some doctors; and a schoolmistress or governess is
very lucky indeed when she is as well off as a firstrate cook. Some
of our most famous physicians have had to struggle pitiably against
insufficient means until they were forty or fifty; and many a parson
has brought up a family on a stipend of seventy pounds a year. You must
therefore be on your guard against the common mistake of supposing
that we need nowadays pay more for gentility and education than for
bodily strength and natural cunning, or that we always do pay more.
Very learned men often make little money or none; and gentility without
property may prove rather a disadvantage than otherwise to a man who
wants to earn a living. Most of the great fortunes are made in trade
or finance, often by men without any advantages of birth or education.
Some of the great poverties have been those of saints, or of geniuses
whose greatness was not recognized until they were dead.
You must also get rid of the notion (if you have it: if not, forgive
me for suspecting you of it) that it costs some workers more than
others to live. The same allowance of food that will keep a laborer in
health will keep a king. Many laborers eat and drink much more than
the King does; and all of them wear out their clothes much faster.
Our King is not rich as riches go nowadays. Mr Rockefeller probably
regards His Majesty as a poor man, because Mr Rockefeller not only has
much more money, but is under no obligation to spend it in keeping up
a great establishment: that is, spending it on other people. But if
you could find out how much the King and Mr Rockefeller spend on their
own personal needs and satisfaction, you would find it came to no more
than is now spent by any other two persons in reasonably comfortable
circumstances. If you doubled the King’s allowance he would not eat
twice as much, drink twice as much, sleep twice as soundly, build a
new house twice as big as Buckingham Palace, or marry another queen
and set up two families instead of one. The late Mr Carnegie, when
his thousands grew to hundreds of thousands and his hundreds of
thousands to millions, gave his money away in heaps because he already
had everything he cared for that money could buy for himself or his
household.
Then, it may be asked, why do we give some men more than they need and
some less? The answer is that for the most part we do not give it to
them: they get it because we have not arranged what anyone shall get,
but have left it to chance and grab. But in the case of the King and
other public dignitaries we have arranged that they shall have handsome
incomes because we intend that they shall be specially respected and
deferred to. Yet experience shews that authority is not proportionate
to income. No person in Europe is approached with such awe as the Pope;
but nobody thinks of the Pope as a rich man: sometimes his parents and
brothers and sisters are very humble people, and he himself is poorer
than his tailor or grocer. The captain of a liner sits at table every
day with scores of people who could afford to throw his pay into the
sea and not miss it; yet his authority is so absolute that the most
insolent passenger dares not treat him disrespectfully. The village
rector may not have a fifth of the income of his farmer churchwarden.
The colonel of a regiment may be the poorest man at the mess table:
everyone of his subalterns may have far more than double his income;
but he is their superior in authority for all that. Money is not the
secret of command.
Those who exercise personal authority among us are by no means our
richest people. Millionaires in expensive cars obey policemen. In our
social scale noblemen take precedence of country gentlemen, country
gentlemen take precedence of professional men, professional men of
traders, wholesale traders of retail traders, retail traders of skilled
workmen, and skilled workmen of laborers; but if social precedence
were according to income all this would be completely upset; for the
tradesmen would take precedence of everybody; and the Pope and the King
would have to touch their hats to distillers and pork packers.
When we speak of the power of the rich, we are speaking of a very real
thing, because a rich man can discharge anyone in his employment who
displeases him, and can take away his custom from any tradesman who is
disrespectful to him. But the advantage a man gets by his power to ruin
another is a quite different thing from the authority that is necessary
to maintain law and order in society. You may obey the highwayman
who puts a pistol to your head and demands your money or your life.
Similarly you may obey the landlord who orders you to pay more rent or
take yourself and your brats into the street. But that is not obedience
to authority: it is submission to a threat. Real authority has nothing
to do with money; and it is in fact exercised by persons who, from the
King to the village constable, are poorer than many of the people who
obey their orders.
13
LAISSER-FAIRE
And now, what about leaving things just as they are?
That is just what most people vote for doing. Even when they dont like
what they are accustomed to, they dread change, lest it should make
matters worse. They are what they call Conservative, though it is only
fair to add that no Conservative statesman in his senses ever pretends
(except perhaps occasionally at election times, when nobody ever tells
the truth) that you can conserve things by simply letting them alone.
It seems the easiest plan and the safest; but as a matter of hard fact
it is not only difficult but impossible. When Joshua told the sun to
stand still on Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, for a
trifle of twentyfour hours, he was modest in comparison with those who
imagine that the world will stay put if they take care not to wake it
up. And he knew he was asking for a miracle.
It is not that things as they are are so bad that nobody who knows how
bad they are will agree to leave them as they are; for the reply to
that may be that if they dont like them they must lump them, because
there seems to be no way of changing them. The real difficulty is that
things will not stay as they are, no matter how careful you are not
to meddle with them. You might as well give up dusting your rooms and
expect to find them this time next year just as they are now. You
might as well leave the cat asleep on the hearthrug and assume that you
would find her there, and not in the dairy, when you came back from
church.
The truth is that things change much faster and more dangerously
when they are let alone than when they are carefully looked after.
Within the last hundred and fifty years the most astounding changes
have taken place in this very business that we are dealing with (the
production and distribution of the national income) just because what
was everybody’s business was nobody’s business, and it was let run
wild. The introduction of machinery driven by steam, and later on of
electric power distributed from house to house like water or gas, and
the invention of engines that not only draw trains along the ground
and ships over and under the sea, but carry us and our goods flying
through the air, has increased our power to produce wealth and get
through our work easily and quickly to such an extent that there is no
longer any need for any of us to be poor. A labor-saving house with gas
stoves, electric light, a telephone, a vacuum cleaner, and a wireless
set, gives only a faint notion of a modern factory full of automatic
machines. If we each took our turn and did our bit in peace as we
had to do during the war, all the necessary feeding and clothing and
housing and lighting could be done handsomely by less than half our
present day’s work, leaving the other half free for art and science and
learning and playing and roaming and experimenting and recreation of
all sorts.
This is a new state of things: a change that has come upon us when we
thought we were leaving things just as they were. And the consequence
of our not attending to it and guiding and arranging it for the good of
the country is that it has actually left the poor much worse off than
they used to be when there was no machinery at all, and people had to
be more careful of pence than they now are of shillings; whilst the
rich have become rich out of all reason, and the people who should be
employed in making bread for the hungry and clothes for the naked, or
building houses for the homeless, are wasting their labor in providing
service and luxuries for idle rich people who are not in the old sense
of the words either gentle or noble, and whose idleness and frivolity
and extravagance set a most corrupting moral example.
Also it has produced two and a half revolutions in political power,
by which the employers have overthrown the landed gentry, the
financiers have overthrown the employers, and the Trade Unions have
half overthrown the financiers. I shall explain this fully later on;
meanwhile, you have seen enough of its effects in the rise of the
Labor Party to take my word for it that politics will not stand still
any more than industry merely because millions of timid old-fashioned
people vote at every election for what they call Conservatism: that is,
for shutting our eyes and opening our mouths.
If King Alfred had been told that the time would come in England when
one idle family would have five big houses and a steam yacht to live
in whilst hard-working people were living six in a room, and half
starving at that, he would have said that God would never allow such
things to happen except in a very wicked nation. Well, we have left God
out of the question and allowed it to happen, not through wickedness,
but through letting things alone and fancying that they would let
themselves alone.
Have you noticed, by the way, that we no longer speak of letting things
alone in the old-fashioned way? We speak of letting them slide; and
this is a great advance in good sense; for it shews that we at last see
that they slide instead of staying put; and it implies that letting
them slide is a feckless sort of conduct. So you must rule out once for
all the notion of leaving things as they are in the expectation that
they will stay where they are. They wont. All we can do in that line
is to sit idly and wonder what will happen next. And this is not like
sitting on the bank of the stream waiting for the water to go by. It is
like sitting idly in a carriage when the horse is running away. You can
excuse it by saying “What else can I do?”; but your impotence will not
avert a smash. People in that predicament must all think hard of some
way of getting control of the horse, and meanwhile do all they can to
keep the carriage right side up and out of the ditch.
The policy of letting things alone, in the practical sense that the
Government should never interfere with business or go into business
itself, is called Laisser-faire by economists and politicians. It has
broken down so completely in practice that it is now discredited; but
it was all the fashion in politics a hundred years ago, and is still
influentially advocated by men of business and their backers who
naturally would like to be allowed to make money as they please without
regard to the interests of the public.
14
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
We seem now to have disposed of all the plans except the Socialist one.
Before grappling with that, may I call your attention to something that
happened in our examination of most of the others. We were trying to
find out a sound plan of distributing money; and every time we proposed
to distribute it according to personal merit or achievement or dignity
or individual quality of any sort the plan reduced itself to absurdity.
When we tried to establish a relation between money and work we were
beaten: it could not be done. When we tried to establish a relation
between money and character we were beaten. When we tried to establish
a relation between money and the dignity that gives authority we were
beaten. And when we gave it up as a bad job and thought of leaving
things as they are we found that they would not stay as they are.
Let us then consider for a moment what any plan must do to be
acceptable. And first, as everybody except the Franciscan Friars and
the Poor Clares will say that no plan will be acceptable unless it
abolishes poverty (and even Franciscan poverty must be voluntary and
not compelled) let us study poverty for a moment.
It is generally agreed that poverty is a very uncomfortable misfortune
for the individual who happens to be poor. But poor people, when they
are not suffering from acute hunger and severe cold, are not more
unhappy than rich people: they are often much happier. You can easily
find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty;
but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy.
All the thoughtful ones will assure you that happiness and unhappiness
are constitutional, and have nothing to do with money. Money can cure
hunger: it cannot cure unhappiness. Food can satisfy the appetite, but
not the soul. A famous German Socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, said that
what beat him in his efforts to stir up the poor to revolt against
poverty was their wantlessness. They were not, of course, content:
nobody is; but they were not discontented enough to take any serious
trouble to change their condition. It may seem a fine thing to a poor
woman to have a large house, plenty of servants, dozens of dresses,
a lovely complexion and beautifully dressed hair. But the rich woman
who has these things often spends a good deal of her time travelling
in rough places to get away from them. To have to spend two or three
hours a day washing and dressing and brushing and combing and changing
and being messed about generally by a lady’s maid is not on the face
of it a happier lot than to have only five minutes to spend on such
fatigues, as the soldiers call them. Servants are so troublesome that
many ladies can hardly talk about anything else when they get together.
A drunken man is happier than a sober one: that is why unhappy people
take to drink. There are drugs that will make you ecstatically happy
whilst ruining your body and soul. It is our quality that matters: take
care of that, and our happiness will take care of itself. People of
the right sort are never easy until they get things straight; but they
are too healthy and too much taken up with their occupations to bother
about happiness. Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in
the Sermon on the Mount: the objection to it is not that it makes
people unhappy, but that it degrades them; and the fact that they can
be quite as happy in their degradation as their betters are in their
exaltation makes it worse. When Shakespear’s king said
Then happy low, lie down:
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,
he forgot that happiness is no excuse for lowness. The divine spark in
us flashes up against being bribed to submit to degradation by mere
happiness, which a pig or a drunkard can achieve.