them as carefully as you breed thoroughbred horses and pedigree boars.
No doubt you must; but there are two difficulties. First, you cannot
very well mate men and women as you mate bulls and cows, stallions and
mares, boars and sows, without giving them any choice in the matter.
Second, even if you could, you would not know how to do it, because you
would not know what sort of human being you wanted to breed. In the
case of a horse or a pig the matter is very simple: you want either a
very fast horse for racing or a very strong horse for drawing loads;
and in the case of the pig you want simply plenty of bacon. And yet,
simple as that is, any breeder of these animals will tell you that he
has a great many failures no matter how careful he is.
The moment you ask yourself what sort of child you want, beyond
preferring a boy or a girl, you have to confess that you do not know.
At best you can mention a few sorts that you dont want: for instance,
you dont want cripples, deaf mutes, blind, imbecile, epileptic, or
drunken children. But even these you do not know how to avoid as there
is often nothing visibly wrong with the parents of such unfortunates.
When you turn from what you dont want to what you do want you may say
that you want good children; but a good child means only a child that
gives its parents no trouble; and some very useful men and women have
been very troublesome children. Energetic, imaginative, enterprising,
brave children are never out of mischief from their parents’ point
of view. And grown-up geniuses are seldom liked until they are dead.
Considering that we poisoned Socrates, crucified Christ, and burnt Joan
of Arc amid popular applause, because, after a trial by responsible
lawyers and Churchmen, we decided that they were too wicked to be
allowed to live, we can hardly set up to be judges of goodness or to
have any sincere liking for it.
Even if we were willing to trust any political authority to select
our husbands and wives for us with a view to improving the race, the
officials would be hopelessly puzzled as to how to select. They might
begin with some rough idea of preventing the marriage of persons with
any taint of consumption or madness or syphilis or addiction to drugs
or drink in their families; but that would end in nobody being married
at all, as there is practically no family quite free from such taints.
As to moral excellence, what model would they take as desirable? St
Francis, George Fox, William Penn, John Wesley, and George Washington?
or Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Bismarck? It takes all sorts to
make a world; and the notion of a Government department trying to make
out how many different types were necessary, and how many persons of
each type, and proceeding to breed them by appropriate marriages, is
amusing but not practicable. There is nothing for it but to let people
choose their mates for themselves, and trust to Nature to produce a
good result.
“Just as we do at present, in fact,” some will say. But that is just
what we do not do at present. How much choice has anyone among us when
the time comes to choose a mate? Nature may point out a woman’s mate to
her by making her fall in love at first sight with the man who would be
the best mate for her; but unless that man happens to have about the
same income as her father, he is out of her class and out of her reach,
whether above her or below her. She finds she must marry, not the man
she likes, but the man she can get; and he is not often the same man.
The man is in the same predicament. We all know by instinct that it is
unnatural to marry for money or social position instead of for love;
yet we have arranged matters so that we must all marry more or less
for money or social position or both. It is easy to say to Miss Smith
or Miss Jones “Follow the promptings of your heart, my dear; and marry
the dustman or marry the duke, whichever you prefer”. But she cannot
marry the dustman; and the duke cannot marry her; because they and
their relatives have not the same manners and habits; and people with
different manners and habits cannot live together. And it is difference
of income that makes difference of manners and habits. Miss Smith and
Miss Jones have finally to make up their minds to like what they can
get, because they can very seldom get what they like; and it is safe
to say that in the great majority of marriages at present Nature has
very little part in the choice compared to circumstances. Unsuitable
marriages, unhappy homes, ugly children are terribly common; because
the young woman who ought to have all the unmarried young men in the
country open to her choice, with dozens of other strings to her bow
in the event of her first choice not feeling a reciprocal attraction,
finds that in fact she has to choose between two or three in her own
class, and has to allow herself to be much petted and tempted by
physical endearments, or made desperate by neglect, before she can
persuade herself that she really loves the one she dislikes least.
Under such circumstances we shall never get a well-bred race; and it is
all the fault of inequality of income. If every family were brought up
at the same cost, we should all have the same habits, manners, culture,
and refinement; and the dustman’s daughter could marry the duke’s son
as easily as a stockbroker’s son now marries a bank manager’s daughter.
Nobody would marry for money, because there would be no money to be
gained or lost by marriage. No woman would have to turn her back on
a man she loved because he was poor, or be herself passed by for the
same reason. All the disappointments would be natural and inevitable
disappointments; and there would be plenty of alternatives and
consolations. If the race did not improve under these circumstances, it
must be unimprovable. And even if it be so, the gain in happiness by
getting rid of the heartbreak that now makes the world, and especially
its women, so miserable, would make the equalization of income worth
while even if all the other arguments for it did not exist.
17
THE COURTS OF LAW
When we come to the courts of law the hopeless incompatibility of
inequality of income with justice is so plain that you must have been
struck by it if you ever notice such things. The very first condition
of legal justice is that it shall be no respecter of persons; that it
shall hold the balance impartially between the laborer’s wife and the
millionairess; and that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty
except by the verdict of a jury of her peers, meaning her equals.
Now no laborer is ever tried by a jury of his peers: he is tried by
a jury of ratepayers who have a very strong class prejudice against
him because they have larger incomes, and consider themselves better
men on that account. Even a rich man tried by a common jury has to
reckon with their envy as well as their subservience to wealth. Thus
it is a common saying with us that there is one law for the rich and
another for the poor. This is not strictly true: the law is the same
for everybody: it is the incomes that need changing. The civil law
by which contracts are enforced, and redress given for slanders and
injuries that are not dealt with by the police, requires so much legal
knowledge and artistic eloquence to set it in motion that an ordinary
woman with no legal knowledge or eloquence can get the benefit of
it only by employing lawyers whom she has to pay very highly, which
means, of course, that the rich woman can afford to go to law and the
poor woman cannot. The rich woman can terrorize the poor woman by
threatening to go to law with her if her demands are not complied with.
She can disregard the poor woman’s rights, and tell her that if she is
dissatisfied she can take her complaint into court, knowing very well
that her victim’s poverty and ignorance will prevent her from obtaining
proper legal advice and protection. When a rich woman takes a fancy
to a poor woman’s husband, and persuades him to abandon her, she can
practically buy him by starving the abandoned wife into divorcing
him for a sufficient allowance. In America, where the wife can sue
for damages, the price of the divorce is higher: that is all. When
the abandoned wife cannot be starved into the divorce court she can
stand out for an exorbitant price before setting her husband free to
remarry; and an abandoned husband can sell out likewise. Men and women
now trap one another into marriage with this object to such an extent
that in some States the word alimony has come to mean simply blackmail.
Mind: I am not disparaging either divorce or alimony. What is wrong is
that any woman should by mere superiority of income be able to make
another woman’s husband much more comfortable than his wife can, or
that any man should be able to offer another man’s wife luxuries that
her husband cannot afford: in short, that money should have any weight
whatever either in contracting or dissolving a marriage.
The criminal law, though we read murder trials and the like so eagerly,
is less important than the civil law, because only a few exceptional
people commit crimes, whilst we all marry and make civil contracts.
Besides, the police set the criminal law in motion without charging the
injured party anything. Nevertheless, rich prisoners are favored by
being able to spend large sums in engaging famous barristers to plead
for them, hunting up evidence all over the country or indeed over the
world, bribing or intimidating witnesses, and exhausting every possible
form of appeal and method of delay. We are fond of pointing to American
cases of rich men at large who would have been hanged or electrocuted
if they had been poor. But who knows how many poor people are in prison
in England who might have been acquitted if they could have spent a few
hundred pounds on their defence?
The laws themselves are contaminated at their very source by being made
by rich men. Nominally all adult men and women are eligible to sit in
Parliament and make laws if they can persuade enough people to vote for
them. Something has been done of late years to make it possible for
poor persons to avail themselves of this right. Members of Parliament
now receive salaries; and certain election expenses formerly borne by
the candidate are now public charges. But the candidate must put down
£150 to start with; and it still costs from five hundred to a thousand
pounds to contest a parliamentary election. Even when the candidate
is successful, the salary of four hundred a year, which carries with
it no pension and no prospects when the seat is lost (as it may be at
the next election) is not sufficient for the sort of life in London a
member of Parliament is obliged to lead. This gives the rich such an
advantage that though the poor are in a nine-to-one majority in the
country their representatives are in a minority in Parliament; and
most of the time of Parliament is taken up, not by discussing what is
best for the nation, and passing laws accordingly, but by the class
struggle set up by the rich majority trying to maintain and extend its
privileges against the poor minority trying to curtail or abolish them.
That is, in pure waste of it.
By far the most unjust and mischievous privilege claimed by the
rich is the privilege to be idle with complete legal impunity; and
unfortunately they have established this privilege so firmly that we
take it as a matter of course, and even venerate it as the mark of a
real lady or gentleman, without ever considering that a person who
consumes goods or accepts services without producing equivalent goods
or performing equivalent services in return inflicts on the country
precisely the same injury as a thief does: in fact, that is what theft
means. We do not dream of allowing people to murder, kidnap, break
into houses, sink, burn, and destroy at sea or on land, or claim
exemption from military service, merely because they have inherited
a landed estate or a thousand a year from some industrious ancestor;
yet we tolerate idling, which does more harm in one year than all the
legally punishable crimes in the world in ten. The rich, through their
majority in Parliament, punish with ruthless severity such forms of
theft as burglary, forgery, embezzlement, pocket-picking, larceny, and
highway robbery, whilst they exempt rich idling, and even hold it up
as a highly honorable way of life, thereby teaching our children that
working for a livelihood is inferior, derogatory, and disgraceful. To
live like a drone on the labor and service of others is to be a lady
or a gentleman: to enrich the country by labor and service is to be
base, lowly, vulgar, contemptible, fed and clothed and lodged on the
assumption that anything is good enough for hewers of wood and drawers
of water. This is nothing else than an attempt to turn the order of
Nature upside down, and to take “Evil: be thou my good” as the national
motto. If we persist in it, it must finally bring upon us another of
those wrecks of civilization in which all the great empires in the past
have crashed. Yet nothing can prevent this happening where income is
unequally distributed, because the laws will inevitably be made by the
rich; and the law that all must work, which should come before every
other law, is a law that the rich never make.
18
THE IDLE RICH
Do not let yourself be put out at this point by the fact that people
with large unearned incomes are by no means always loafing or lolling.
The energetic ones often overexert themselves, and have to take “rest
cures” to recover. Those who try to make life one long holiday find
that they need a holiday from that too. Idling is so unnatural and
boresome that the world of the idle rich, as they are called, is a
world of ceaseless activities of the most fatiguing kind. You may
find on old bookshelves a forgotten nineteenth century book in which
a Victorian lady of fashion defended herself against the charge of
idleness by describing her daily routine of fashion both as hostess
and visitor in London. I would cheerfully sweep a crossing rather than
be condemned to it. In the country, sport is so elaborately organized
that every month in the year has its special variety: the necessary
fishes and birds and animals are so carefully bred and preserved for
the purpose that there is always something to be killed. Risks and
exposures and athletic feats of which the poor in towns know nothing
are matters of course in the country house, where broken collar
bones are hardly exceptional enough to be classed as accidents. If
sports fail there are always games: ski-ing and tobogganing, polo,
tennis, skating on artificial ice, and so forth, involving much more
exhausting physical exercise than many poor women would care to face.
A young lady, after a day of such exercise, will, between dinner and
bedtime, dance a longer distance than the postman walks. In fact
the only people who are disgustingly idle are the children of those
who have just become rich, the new rich as they are called. As these
unfortunate fortunates have had neither the athletic training nor the
social discipline of the old rich, with whom what we call high life is
a skilled art needing a stern apprenticeship, they do not know what to
do with themselves; and their resourceless loafing and consumption of
chocolate creams, cigarets, cocktails, and the sillier sort of novels
and illustrated papers whilst they drift about in motor cars from one
big hotel to another, is pitiable. But in the next generation they
either relapse into poverty or go to school with the class they can now
afford to belong to, and acquire its accomplishments, its discipline,
and its manners.
But beside this Spartan routine invented to employ people who have not
to work for their living, and which, you will notice, is a survival of
the old tribal order in which the braves hunted and fought whilst the
squaws did the domestic work, there is the necessary public work which
must be done by a governing class if it is to keep all political power
in its own hands. By not paying for this work, or paying so little for
it that nobody without an unearned income can afford to undertake it,
and by attaching to the upper division of the civil service examination
tests that only expensively educated persons can pass, this work is
kept in the hands of the rich. That is the explanation of the otherwise
unaccountable way in which the proprietary class has opposed every
attempt to attach sufficient salaries to parliamentary work to make
those who do it self-supporting, although the proprietors themselves
were the holders of the main parliamentary posts. Though they officered
the army, they did everything they could to make it impossible for an
officer to live on his pay. Though they contested every parliamentary
seat, they opposed the public payment of members of Parliament and
their election expenses. Though they regarded the diplomatic service as
a preserve for their younger sons, they attached to it the condition
that no youth should be eligible for it without a private income of
four hundred a year. They fought, and still fight, against making
government a self-supporting occupation, because the effect would be to
throw it open to the unpropertied, and destroy their own monopoly of it.
But as the work of government must be done, they must do it themselves
if they will not let other people do it. Consequently you find rich men
working in Parliament, in diplomacy, in the army, in the magistracy,
and on local public bodies, to say nothing of the management of their
own estates. Men so working cannot accurately be called the idle rich.
Unfortunately they do all this governing work with a bias in favour of
the privilege of their class to be idle. From the point of view of the
public good, it would be far better if they amused themselves like most
of their class, and left the work of governing to be done by well-paid
officials and ministers whose interests were those of the nation as a
whole.
The stamina of the women of the idle class was formerly maintained by
their work in childbearing and family housekeeping. But at present many
of them resort to contraception (called birth control) not to regulate
the number of their children and the time of their birth, but to avoid
bearing any children at all. Hotel life, or life in service flats, or
the delegation of household management to professional ladies who are
practically private hotel managers, is more and more substituted for
old-fashioned domestic housekeeping. If this were an ordinary division
of labor to enable a woman to devote herself entirely to a professional
career of some sort, it would be defensible; for many women, as you
must often have noticed, have no aptitude for domestic work, and
are as much out of place in the kitchen and nursery as all men are
conventionally supposed to be; but when you have women with unearned
and excessive incomes its possibility involves an equal possibility of
complete uselessness and self-indulgence, of which many rich women,
knowing no better, take the fullest advantage.
There are always a few cases in which exceptional men and women with
sufficient unearned income to maintain them handsomely without a
stroke of work are found working harder than most of those who have
to do it for a living, and spending most of their money on attempts
to better the world. Florence Nightingale organized the hospital work
of the Crimean war, including the knocking of some sense into the
heads of the army medical staff, and much disgusting and dangerous
drudgery in the wards, when she had the means to live comfortably at
home doing nothing. John Ruskin published accounts of how he had spent
his comfortable income and what work he had done, to shew that he,
at least, was an honest worker and a faithful administrator of the
part of the national income that had fallen to his lot. This was so
little understood that people concluded that he must have gone out of
his mind; and as he afterwards did, like Dean Swift, succumb to the
melancholia and exasperation induced by the wickedness and stupidity of
capitalistic civilization, they joyfully persuaded themselves that they
had been quite right about him.
But when every possible qualification of the words Idle Rich has been
made, and it is fully understood that idle does not mean doing nothing
(which is impossible), but doing nothing useful, and continually
consuming without producing, the term applies to the class, numbering
at the extreme outside one-tenth of the population, to maintain whom in
their idleness the other nine-tenths are kept in a condition of slavery
so complete that their slavery is not even legalized as such: hunger
keeps them sufficiently in order without imposing on their masters any
of those obligations which make slaves so expensive to their owners.
What is more, any attempt on the part of a rich woman to do a stroke of
ordinary work for the sake of her health would be bitterly resented by
the poor because, from their point of view, she would be a rich woman
meanly doing a poor woman out of a job.
And now comes the crowning irony of it all, which many intelligent
women to whom irony means nothing will prefer to call the judgment
of God. When we have conferred on these people the coveted privilege
of having plenty of money and nothing to do (our idiotic receipt for
perfect happiness and perfect freedom) we find that we have made them
so wretched and unhealthy that instead of doing nothing they are always
doing something “to keep themselves fit” for doing nothing; and instead
of doing what they like, they bind themselves to a laborious routine
of what they call society and pleasure which you could not impose on a
parlormaid without receiving notice instantly, or on a Trappist without
driving him to turn atheist to escape from it. Only one part of it, the
Red Indian part, the frank return to primitive life, the hunting and
shooting and country life, is bearable; and one has to be by nature
half a savage to enjoy that continually. So much for the exertions of
the idle rich!
19
CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS
Just as Parliament and the Courts are captured by the rich, so is
the Church. The average parson does not teach honesty and equality
in the village school: he teaches deference to the merely rich, and
calls that loyalty and religion. He is the ally of the squire, who,
as magistrate, administers the laws made in the interests of the rich
by the parliament of rich men, and calls that justice. The villagers,
having no experience of any other sort of religion or law, soon lose
all respect for both, and become merely cynical. They may touch their
hats and curtsey respectfully; but they whisper to oneanother that
the squire, no matter how kind his wife may be at Christmas by way of
ransom, is a despoiler and oppressor of the poor, and the parson a
hypocrite. In revolutions, it is the respectful peasants who burn the
country houses and parsonages, and rush to the cathedrals to deface the
statues, shatter the stained windows, and wreck the organ.
By the way, you may know parsons who are not like that. At least I do.
There are always men and women who will stand out against injustice,
no matter how prosperous and well-spoken-of it may be. But the result
is that they are ill-spoken-of themselves in the most influential
quarters. Our society must be judged, not by its few rebels, but by its
millions of obedient subjects.
The same corruption reaches the children in all our schools.
Schoolmasters who teach their pupils such vital elementary truths
about their duty to their country as that they should despise and
pursue as criminals all able-bodied adults who do not by personal
service pull their weight in the social boat, are dismissed from their
employment, and sometimes prosecuted for sedition. And from this
elementary morality up to the most abstruse and philosophic teaching
in the universities, the same corruption extends. Science becomes a
propaganda of quack cures, manufactured by companies in which the rich
hold shares, for the diseases of the poor who need only better food
and sanitary houses, and of the rich who need only useful occupation,
to keep them both in health. Political economy becomes an impudent
demonstration that the wages of the poor cannot be raised; that without
the idle rich we should perish for lack of capital and employment;
and that if the poor would take care to have fewer children everything
would be for the best in the worst of all possible worlds.