poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in
which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade
a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world,
which is only a large neighborhood. Its bad effects cannot be escaped
by the rich. When poverty produces outbreaks of virulent infectious
disease, as it always does sooner or later, the rich catch the disease
and see their children die of it. When it produces crime and violence
the rich go in fear of both, and are put to a good deal of expense
to protect their persons and property. When it produces bad manners
and bad language the children of the rich pick them up no matter how
carefully they are secluded; and such seclusion as they get does them
more harm than good. If poor and pretty young women find, as they do,
that they can make more money by vice than by honest work, they will
poison the blood of rich young men who, when they marry, will infect
their wives and children, and cause them all sorts of bodily troubles,
sometimes ending in disfigurement and blindness and death, and always
doing them more or less mischief. The old notion that people can “keep
themselves to themselves” and not be touched by what is happening to
their neighbors, or even to the people who live a hundred miles off,
is a most dangerous mistake. The saying that we are members one of
another is not a mere pious formula to be repeated in church without
any meaning: it is a literal truth; for though the rich end of the town
can avoid living with the poor end, it cannot avoid dying with it when
the plague comes. People will be able to keep themselves to themselves
as much as they please when they have made an end of poverty; but until
then they will not be able to shut out the sights and sounds and smells
of poverty from their daily walks, nor to feel sure from day to day
that its most violent and fatal evils will not reach them through their
strongest police guards.
Besides, as long as poverty remains possible we shall never be sure
that it will not overtake ourselves. If we dig a pit for others we may
fall into it: if we leave a precipice unfenced our children may fall
over it when they are playing. We see the most innocent and respectable
families falling into the unfenced pit of poverty every day; and how do
we know that it will not be our turn next?
It is perhaps the greatest folly of which a nation can be guilty to
attempt to use poverty as a sort of punishment for offences that it
does not send people to prison for. It is easy to say of a lazy man
“Oh, let him be poor: it serves him right for being lazy: it will
teach him a lesson”. In saying so we are ourselves too lazy to think
a little before we lay down the law. We cannot afford to have poor
people anyhow, whether they be lazy or busy, drunken or sober, virtuous
or vicious, thrifty or careless, wise or foolish. If they deserve
to suffer let them be made to suffer in some other way; for mere
poverty will not hurt them half as much as it will hurt their innocent
neighbors. It is a public nuisance as well as a private misfortune. Its
toleration is a national crime.
We must therefore take it as an indispensable condition of a sound
distribution of wealth that everyone must have a share sufficient to
keep her or him from poverty. This is not altogether new. Ever since
the days of Queen Elizabeth it has been the law of England that nobody
must be abandoned to destitution. If anyone, however undeserving,
applies for relief to the Guardians of the Poor as a destitute person,
the Guardians must feed and clothe and house that person. They may do
it reluctantly and unkindly; they may attach to the relief the most
unpleasant and degrading conditions they can think of; they may set
the pauper to hateful useless work if he is able-bodied, and have him
sent to prison if he refuses to do it; the shelter they give him may be
that of a horrible general workhouse in which the old and the young,
the sound and the diseased, the innocent girl and lad and the hardened
prostitute and tramp are herded together promiscuously to contaminate
one another; they can attach a social stigma to the relief by taking
away the pauper’s vote (if he has one), and making him incapable of
filling certain public offices or being elected to certain public
authorities; they may, in short, drive the deserving and respectable
poor to endure any extremity rather than ask for relief; but they
must relieve the destitute willy nilly if they do ask for it. To that
extent the law of England is at its root a Communistic law. All the
harshnesses and wickednesses with which it is carried out are gross
mistakes, because instead of saving the country from the degradation of
poverty they actually make poverty more degrading than it need be; but
still, the principle is there. Queen Elizabeth said that nobody must
die of starvation and exposure. We, after the terrible experience we
have had of the effects of poverty on the whole nation, rich or poor,
must go further and say that nobody must be poor. As we divide-up our
wealth day by day the first charge on it must be enough for everybody
to be fairly respectable and well-to-do. If they do anything or leave
anything undone that gives ground for saying that they do not deserve
it, let them be restrained from doing it or compelled to do it in
whatever way we restrain or compel evildoers of any other sort; but
do not let them, as poor people, make everyone else suffer for their
shortcomings.
Granted that people should not on any account be allowed to be poor,
we have still to consider whether they should be allowed to be rich.
When poverty is gone, shall we tolerate luxury and extravagance? This
is a poser, because it is much easier to say what poverty is than
what luxury is. When a woman is hungry, or ragged, or has not at
least one properly furnished room all to herself to sleep in, then
she is clearly suffering from poverty. When the infant mortality in
one district is much greater than in another; when the average age of
death for fully grown persons in it falls far short of the scriptural
threescore-and-ten; when the average weight of the children who survive
is below that reached by well-fed and well-cared-for children, then
you can say confidently that the people in that district are suffering
from poverty. But suffering from riches is not so easily measured. That
rich people do suffer a great deal is plain enough to anyone who has
an intimate knowledge of their lives. They are so unhealthy that they
are always running after cures and surgical operations of one sort or
another. When they are not really ill they imagine they are. They are
worried by their property, by their servants, by their poor relations,
by their investments, by the need for keeping up their social position,
and, when they have several children, by the impossibility of leaving
these children enough to enable them to live as they have been brought
up to live; for we must not forget that if a married couple with fifty
thousand a year have five children, they can leave only ten thousand
a year to each after bringing them up to live at the rate of fifty
thousand, and launching them into the sort of society that lives at
that rate, the result being that unless these children can make rich
marriages they live beyond their incomes (not knowing how to live
more cheaply) and are presently head over ears in debt. They hand on
their costly habits and rich friends and debts to their children with
very little else; so that the trouble becomes worse and worse from
generation to generation; and this is how we meet everywhere with
ladies and gentlemen who have no means of keeping up their position,
and are therefore much more miserable than the common poor.
Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from
their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations
to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position;
they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low
rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and
do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people
at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes. The
general run of rich people do not know what to do with themselves; and
the end of it is that they have to join a round of social duties and
pleasures mostly manufactured by West End shopkeepers, and so tedious
that at the end of a fashionable season the rich are more worn out
than their servants and tradesmen. They may have no taste for sport;
but they are forced by their social position to go to the great race
meetings and ride to hounds. They may have no taste for music; but they
have to go to the Opera and to the fashionable concerts. They may not
dress as they please nor do what they please. Because they are rich
they must do what all the other rich people are doing, there being
nothing else for them to do except work, which would immediately reduce
them to the condition of ordinary people. So, as they cannot do what
they like, they must contrive to like what they do, and imagine that
they are having a splendid time of it when they are in fact being bored
by their amusements, humbugged by their doctors, pillaged by their
tradesmen, and forced to console themselves unamiably for being snubbed
by richer people by snubbing poorer people.
To escape this boredom, the able and energetic spirits go into
Parliament or into the diplomatic service or into the army, or manage
and develop their estates and investments instead of leaving them to
solicitors and stockbrokers and agents, or explore unknown countries
with great hardship and risk to themselves, with the result that their
lives are not different from the lives of the people who have to do
these things for a living. Thus riches are thrown away on them; and
if it were not for the continual dread of falling into poverty which
haunts us all at present they would refuse to be bothered with much
property. The only people who get any special satisfaction out of
being richer than others are those who enjoy being idle, and like to
fancy that they are better than their neighbors and be treated as if
they were. But no country can afford to pamper snobbery. Laziness
and vanity are not virtues to be encouraged: they are vices to be
suppressed. Besides, the desire to be idle and lazy and able to order
poor people about could not be satisfied, even if it were right to
satisfy it, if there were no poor people to order about. What we should
have would be, not poor people and rich people, but simply people with
enough and people with more than enough. And that brings up at last the
knotty question, what is enough?
In Shakespear’s famous play, King Lear and his daughters have an
argument about this. His idea of enough is having a hundred knights to
wait on him. His eldest daughter thinks that fifty would be enough.
Her sister does not see what he wants with any knights at all when her
servants can do all he needs for him. Lear retorts that if she cuts
life down to what cannot be done without, she had better throw away her
fine clothes, as she would be warmer in a blanket. And to this she has
no answer. Nobody can say what is enough. What is enough for a gipsy is
not enough for a lady; and what is enough for one lady leaves another
very discontented. When once you get above the poverty line there is
no reason why you should stop there. With modern machinery we can
produce much more than enough to feed, clothe, and house us decently.
There is no end to the number of new things we can get into the habit
of using, or to the improvements we can make in the things we already
use. Our grandmothers managed to get on without gas cookers, electric
light, motor cars, and telephones; but today these things are no longer
curiosities and luxuries: they are matter-of-course necessities; and
nobody who cannot afford them is considered well-off.
In the same way the standard of education and culture has risen.
Nowadays a parlormaid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came
to the throne would be classed as mentally defective. As Queen Victoria
managed to get on very well in spite of her ignorance it cannot be
said that the knowledge in which the parlormaid has the advantage of
her is a necessity of civilized life any more than a telephone is; but
civilized life and highly civilized life are different: what is enough
for one is not enough for the other. Take a half-civilized girl into a
house; and though she may be stronger and more willing and goodnatured
than many highly civilized girls are, she will smash everything that
will not stand the roughest handling. She will be unable to take or
send written messages; and as to understanding or using such civilized
contrivances as watches, baths, sewing machines, and electric heaters
and sweepers, you will be fortunate if you can induce her to turn off a
tap instead of leaving the water running. And your civilized maid who
can be trusted with all these things would be like a bull in a china
shop if she were let loose in the laboratories where highly trained
scientific workers use machines and instruments of such delicacy
that their movements are as invisible as that of the hour hands of
our clocks, handling and controlling poisons and explosives of the
most dangerous kind; or in the operating rooms where surgeons have
to do things in which a slip of the hand might prove fatal. If every
housemaid had the delicacy of touch, the knowledge, and the patience
that are needed in the laboratories and operating theatres (where they
are unfortunately not always forthcoming), the most wonderful changes
could be made in our housekeeping: we could not only have the present
work done much more quickly, perfectly, and cleanly, but we could do a
great deal that is now quite impossible.
Now it costs more to educate and train a laboratory worker than a
housemaid, and more to train a housemaid than to catch a savage. What
is enough in one case is not enough in another. Therefore to ask baldly
how much is enough to live on is to ask an unanswerable question. It
all depends on what sort of life you propose to live. What is enough
for the life of a tramp is not enough for a highly civilized life, with
its personal refinements and its atmosphere of music, art, literature,
religion, science, and philosophy. Of these things we can never have
enough: there is always something new to be discovered and something
old to be bettered. In short, there is no such thing as enough
civilization, though there may be enough of any particular thing like
bread or boots at any particular moment. If being poor means wanting
something more and something better than we have--and it is hard to
say what else feeling poor means--then we shall always feel poor no
matter how much money we have, because, though we may have enough of
this thing or of that thing, we shall never have enough of everything.
Consequently if it be proposed to give some people enough, and others
more than enough, the scheme will break down; for all the money will
be used up before anybody will be content. Nobody will stop asking
for more for the sake of setting up and maintaining a fancy class of
pampered persons who, after all, will be even more discontented than
their poorer neighbors.
The only way out of this difficulty is to give everybody the same,
which is the Socialist solution of the distribution problem. But you
may tell me that you are prepared to swallow this difficulty rather
than swallow Socialism. Most of us begin like that. What converts us
is the discovery of the terrible array of evils around us and dangers
in front of us which we dare not ignore. You may be unable to see any
beauty in equality of income. But the least idealistic woman can see
the disasters of inequality when the evils with which she is herself
in daily conflict are traced to it; and I am now going to shew you the
connexion.
15
WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST
To test the effects of our unequal division of the nation’s income
on our national institutions and on the life and prosperity of the
whole people we must view the industry of the country, and see how
it is affected by inequality of income. We must view one by one the
institution of marriage, the working of the courts of justice, the
honesty of our Houses of Parliament, the spiritual independence of
the Church, the usefulness of our schools, and the quality of our
newspapers, and consider how each of them is dependent on the way in
which money is distributed.
Beginning with industry, we are at once plunged into what we call
political economy, to distinguish it from the domestic economy with
which we are all only too familiar. Men find political economy a dry
and difficult subject: they shirk it as they shirk housekeeping; yet
it means nothing more abstruse than the art of managing a country as a
housekeeper manages a house. If the men shirk it the women must tackle
it. The nation has a certain income to manage on just as a housekeeper
has; and the problem is how to spend that income to the greatest
general advantage.
Now the first thing a housekeeper has to settle is what things are
wanted most, and what things can be done without at a pinch. This
means that the housekeeper must settle the order in which things are
desirable. For example, if, when there is not enough food in the
house, she goes out and spends all her money on a bottle of scent
and an imitation pearl necklace, she will be called a vain and silly
woman and a bad mother. But a stateswoman would call her simply a bad
economist: one who does not know what should come first when money has
to be spent. No woman is fit to have charge of a household who has not
sense and self-control enough to see that food and clothing and housing
and firing come first, and that bottles of scent and pearl necklaces,
imitation or real, come a long way afterwards. Even in the jeweller’s
shop a wrist watch comes before a necklace as being more useful. I am
not saying that pretty things are not useful: they are very useful and
quite right in their proper order; but they do not come first. A Bible
may be a very proper present to give to a child; but to give a starving
child a Bible instead of a piece of bread and a cup of milk would be
the act of a lunatic. A woman’s mind is more wonderful than her flesh;
but if her flesh is not fed her mind will perish, whereas if you feed
her flesh her mind will take care of itself and of her flesh as well.
Food comes first.
Think of the whole country as a big household, and the whole nation as
a big family, which is what they really are. What do we see? Half-fed,
badly clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the
money that should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being
spent in millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs,
racing motor cars, January strawberries that taste like corks, and all
sorts of extravagances. One sister of the national family has a single
pair of leaking boots that keep her sniffing all through the winter,
and no handkerchief to wipe her nose with. Another has forty pairs of
high-heeled shoes and dozens of handkerchiefs. A little brother is
trying to grow up on a penn’orth of food a day, and is breaking his
mother’s heart and wearing out her patience by asking continually for
more, whilst a big brother, spending five or six pounds on his dinner
at a fashionable hotel, followed by supper at a night club, is in the
doctor’s hands because he is eating and drinking too much.
Now this is shockingly bad political economy. When thoughtless people
are asked to explain it they say “Oh, the woman with the forty shoes
and the man drinking at the night club got their money from their
father who made a fortune by speculating in rubber; and the girl with
the broken boots, and the troublesome boy whose mother has just clouted
his head, are only riffraff from the slums”. That is true; but it does
not alter the fact that the nation that spends money on champagne
before it has provided enough milk for its babies, or gives dainty
meals to Sealyham terriers and Alsatian wolf-hounds and Pekingese dogs
whilst the infant mortality rate shews that its children are dying by
thousands from insufficient nourishment, is a badly managed, silly,
vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the long run
no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself
by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth, and
thinking itself three times as rich as before when all the pet dogs
have litters of six puppies a couple. The only way in which a nation
can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that
is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and
allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities
have been thoroughly served.
But it is no use blaming the owners of the dogs. All these mischievous
absurdities exist, not because any sane person ever wanted them to
exist, but because they must occur whenever some families are very much
richer than others. The rich man, who, as husband and father, drags
the woman with him, begins as every one else begins, by buying food,
clothing, and a roof to shelter them. The poor man does the same. But
when the poor man has spent all he can afford on these necessaries,
he is still short of them: his food is insufficient; his clothes
are old and dirty; his lodging is a single room or part of one, and
unwholesome even at that. But when the rich man has fed himself, and
dressed himself, and housed himself as sumptuously as possible, he has
still plenty of money left to indulge his tastes and fancies and make
a show in the world. Whilst the poor man says “I want more bread, more
clothes, and a better house for my family; but I cannot pay for them”,
the rich man says “I want a fleet of motor cars, a yacht, diamonds
and pearls for my wife and daughters, and a shooting-box in Scotland.
Money is no object: I can pay and overpay for them ten times over”.
Naturally men of business set to work at once to have the cars and the
yacht made, the diamonds dug out in Africa, the pearls fished for, and
the shooting lodge built, paying no attention to the poor man with his
crying needs and empty pockets.
To put the same thing in another way, the poor man needs to have labor
employed in making the things he is short of: that is, in baking,
weaving, tailoring, and plain building; but he cannot pay the master
bakers and weavers enough to enable them to pay the wages of such
labor. The rich man meanwhile is offering money enough to provide good
wages for all the work required to please him. All the people who take
his money may be working hard; but their work is pampering people who
have too much instead of feeding people who have too little; therefore
it is misapplied and wasted, keeping the country poor and even making
it poorer for the sake of keeping a few people rich.
It is no excuse for such a state of things that the rich give
employment. There is no merit in giving employment: a murderer gives
employment to the hangman; and a motorist who runs over a child
gives employment to an ambulance porter, a doctor, an undertaker, a
clergyman, a mourning-dressmaker, a hearse driver, a gravedigger: in
short, to so many worthy people that when he ends by killing himself it
seems ungrateful not to erect a statue to him as a public benefactor.
The money with which the rich give the wrong sort of employment would
give the right sort of employment if it were equally distributed; for
then there would be no money offered for motor cars and diamonds until
everyone was fed, clothed, and lodged, nor any wages offered to men
and women to leave useful employments and become servants to idlers.
There would be less ostentation, less idleness, less wastefulness,
less uselessness; but there would be more food, more clothing, better
houses, more security, more health, more virtue: in a word, more real
prosperity.
16
EUGENICS
The question has been asked, would the masses be any better for having
more money? One’s first impulse on hearing such a silly question is
to take the lady who asks it by the shoulders and give her a violent
shaking. If a fully fed, presentably clothed, decently housed, fairly
literate and cultivated and gently mannered family is not better than a
half-starved, ragged, frowsy, overcrowded one, there is no meaning in
words.
Still, let us not lose our tempers. A well-fed, clean, decently
lodged woman is better than one trying to live on tea and rashers in
dirty clothes in a verminous garret. But so is a well-fed clean sow
better than a hungry dirty one. She is a sow all the same; and you
cannot make a silk purse out of her ear. If the common women of the
future were to be no better than our rich ladies today, even at their
best, the improvement would leave us deeply dissatisfied. And that
dissatisfaction would be a divine dissatisfaction. Let us consider,
then, what effect equality of income would have on the quality of our
people as human beings.