are too well-off to make it possible to keep them ignorant, and who
receive what is called a complete education, are taught so many flat
lies that their false knowledge is more dangerous than the untutored
natural wit of savages. We all blame the ex-Kaiser for banishing from
the German schools and universities all teachers who did not teach
that history, science, and religion all prove that the rule of the
house of Hohenzollern: that is, of his own rich family, is the highest
form of government possible to mankind; but we do the same thing
ourselves, except that the worship of rich idleness in general is
substituted for the worship of the Hohenzollern family in particular,
though the Hohenzollerns have family traditions (including the learning
of a common craft by every man of them) which make them much more
responsible than any Tom or Dick who may happen to have made a huge
fortune in business.
As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read,
the corruption of the schools would not matter so much if the Press
were free. But the Press is not free. As it costs at least quarter
of a million of money to establish a daily newspaper in London, the
newspapers are owned by rich men. And they depend on the advertisements
of other rich men. Editors and journalists who express opinions in
print that are opposed to the interests of the rich are dismissed and
replaced by subservient ones. The newspapers therefore must continue
the work begun by the schools and colleges; so that only the strongest
and most independent and original minds can escape from the mass of
false doctrine that is impressed on them by the combined and incessant
suggestion and persuasion of Parliament, the law-courts, the Church,
the schools, and the Press. We are all brought up wrongheaded to keep
us willing slaves instead of rebellious ones.
What makes this so hard to discover and to believe is that the false
teaching is mixed up with a great deal of truth, because up to a
certain point the interests of the rich are the same as the interests
of everybody else. It is only where their interests differ from those
of their neighbors that the deception begins. For example, the rich
dread railway accidents as much as the poor; consequently the law on
railway accidents, the sermons about railway accidents, the school
teaching about railway accidents, and the newspaper articles about them
are all quite honestly directed to the purpose of preventing railway
accidents. But when anyone suggests that there would be fewer railway
accidents if the railwaymen worked fewer hours and had better wages,
or that in the division of the railway fares between the shareholders
and the workers the shareholders should get less and the workers
more, or that railway travelling would be safer if the railways were
in the hands of the nation like the posts and the telegraphs, there
is an immediate outcry in the Press and in Parliament against such
suggestions, coupled with denunciations of those who make them as
Bolsheviks or whatever other epithet may be in fashion for the moment
as a term of the most infamous discredit.
20
WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT
You may ask why not only the rich but the poor put up with all this,
and even passionately defend it as an entirely beneficial public
morality. I can only say that the defence is not unanimous: it is
always being attacked at one point or another by public-spirited
reformers and by persons whose wrongs are unbearable. But taking it in
the lump I should say that the evil of the corruption and falsification
of law, religion, education, and public opinion is so enormous that the
minds of ordinary people are unable to grasp it, whereas they easily
and eagerly grasp the petty benefits with which it is associated. The
rich are very charitable: they understand that they have to pay ransom
for their riches. The simple and decent village woman whose husband
is a woodman or gardener or gamekeeper, and whose daughters are being
taught manners as domestic servants in the country house, sees in the
lord of the manor only a kind gentleman who gives employment, and whose
wife gives clothes and blankets and little comforts for the sick, and
presides over the Cottage Hospital and all the little shows and sports
and well-meant activities that relieve the monotony of toil, and rob
illness of some of its terrors. Even in the towns, where the rich
and poor do not know oneanother, the lavish expenditure of the rich
is always popular. It provides much that people enjoy looking at and
gossiping about. The tradesman is proud of having rich customers, and
the servant of serving in a rich house. At the public entertainments
of the rich there are cheap seats for the poor. Ordinary thoughtless
people like all this finery. They will read eagerly about it, and look
with interest at the pictures of it in the illustrated papers, whereas
when they read that the percentage of children dying under the age
of five years has risen or fallen, it means nothing to them but dry
statistics which make the paper dull. It is only when people learn to
ask “Is this good for all of us all the time as well as amusing to
me for five minutes?” that they are on the way to understand how one
fashionably dressed woman may cost the life of ten babies.
Even then it seems to them that the alternative to having the
fashionably dressed rich ladies is that all women are to be dowdy. They
need not be afraid. At present nine women out of ten are dowdy. With a
reasonable distribution of income every one of the ten could afford to
look her best. That no woman should have diamonds until all women have
decent clothes is a sensible rule, though it may not appeal to a woman
who would like to have diamonds herself and does not care a rap whether
other women are well-dressed or not. She may even derive a certain
gratification from seeing other women worse dressed than herself. But
the inevitable end of that littleness of mind, that secret satisfaction
in the misfortunes of others which the Germans call _Schadenfreude_ (we
have no word for it), is that sooner or later a revolution breaks out
as it did in Russia; the diamonds go to the pawnbroker, who refuses
to advance any money on them because nobody can afford diamonds any
longer; and the fine ladies have to wear old clothes and cheaper and
worse readymades until there is nothing left for them to wear. Only, as
this does not happen all at once, the thoughtless do not believe that
the police will ever let it come; and the littlehearted do not care
whether it comes or not, provided it does not come until they are dead.
Another thing that makes us cling to this lottery with huge money
prizes is the dream that we may become rich by some chance. We read
of uncles in Australia dying and leaving £100,000 to a laborer or a
charwoman who never knew of his existence. We hear of somebody no
better off than ourselves winning the Calcutta Sweep. Such dreams would
be destroyed by an equal distribution of income. And people cling all
the more to dreams when they are too poor even to back horses! They
forget the million losses in their longing for the one gain that the
million unlucky ones have to pay for.
Poor women who have too much natural good sense to indulge in these
gambler’s dreams often make sacrifices in the hope that education will
enable their sons to rise from the slough of poverty; and some men with
an exceptional degree of the particular sort of cleverness that wins
scholarships owe their promotion to their mothers. But exceptional
cases, dazzling as some of them are, hold out no hope to ordinary
people; for the world consists of ordinary people: indeed that is the
meaning of the word ordinary. The ordinary rich woman’s child and the
ordinary poor woman’s child may be born with equally able brains; but
by the time they begin life as grown men the rich woman’s son has
acquired the speech, manners, personal habits, culture, and instruction
without which all the higher employments are closed to him; whilst the
poor woman’s son is not presentable enough to get any job which brings
him into contact with refined people. In this way a great deal of the
brain power of the country is wasted and spoiled; for Nature does not
care a rap for rich and poor. For instance, she does not give everybody
the ability to do managing work. Perhaps one in twenty is as far as she
goes. But she does not pick out the children of the rich to receive her
capricious gifts. If in every two hundred people there are only twenty
rich, her gift of management will fall to nine poor children and one
rich one. But if the rich can cultivate the gift and the poor cannot,
then nine-tenths of the nation’s natural supply of managing ability
will be lost to it; and to make up the deficiency many of the managing
posts will be filled up by pigheaded people only because they happen to
have the habit of ordering poor people about.
21
POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY
So far, we have not found one great national institution that escapes
the evil effects of a division of the people into rich and poor: that
is, of inequality of income. I could take you further; but we should
only fare worse. I could shew you how rich officers and poor soldiers
and sailors create disaffection in the army and navy; how disloyalty
is rampant because the relation between the royal family and the bulk
of the nation is the relation between one rich family and millions
of poor ones; how what we call peace is really a state of civil war
between rich and poor conducted by disastrous strikes; how envy and
rebellion and class resentments are chronic moral diseases with us. But
if I attempted this you would presently exclaim “Oh, for goodness’ sake
dont tell me everything or we shall never have done”. And you would be
quite right. If I have not convinced you by this time that there are
overwhelming reasons of State against inequality of income, I shall
begin to think that you dislike me.
Besides, we must get on to the positive reasons for the Socialist plan
of an equal division. I am specially interested in it because it is my
favorite plan. You had therefore better watch me carefully to see that
I play fairly when I am helping you to examine what there is to be said
for equality of income over and above that there is to be said against
inequality of income.
First, equal division is not only a possible plan, but one which has
been tested by long experience. The great bulk of the daily work of the
civilized world is done, and always has been done, and always must be
done, by bodies of persons receiving equal pay whether they are tall
or short, fair or dark, quick or slow, young or getting on in years,
teetotallers or beer drinkers, Protestants or Catholics, married or
single, short tempered or sweet tempered, pious or worldly: in short,
without the slightest regard to the differences that make one person
unlike another. In every trade there is a standard wage; in every
public service there is a standard pay; and in every profession the
fees are fixed with a view to enable the man who follows the profession
to live according to a certain standard of respectability which is the
same for the whole profession. The pay of the policeman and soldier
and postman, the wages of the laborer and carpenter and mason, the
salary of the judge and the member of Parliament, may differ, some of
them getting less than a hundred a year and others five thousand; but
all the soldiers get the same, all the judges get the same, all the
members of Parliament get the same; and if you ask a doctor why his fee
is half a crown or five shillings, or a guinea or three guineas, or
whatever it may be, instead of five shillings or ten shillings, or two
guineas or six guineas or a thousand guineas, he can give you no better
reason than that he is asking what all the other doctors ask, and that
they ask it because they find they cannot keep up their position on
less.
Therefore when some inconsiderate person repeats like a parrot that
if you gave everybody the same money, before a year was out you would
have rich and poor again just as before, all you have to do is to
tell him to look round him and see millions of people who get the
same money and remain in the same position all their lives without
any such change taking place. The cases in which poor men become rich
are most exceptional; and though the cases in which rich men become
poor are commoner, they also are accidents and not ordinary everyday
circumstances. The rule is that workers of the same rank and calling
are paid alike, and that they neither sink below their condition nor
rise above it. No matter how unlike they are to oneanother, you can
pay one of them two and sixpence and the other half a crown with the
assurance that as they are put so they will stay, though here and
there a great rogue or a great genius may surprise you by becoming
much richer or much poorer than the rest. Jesus complained that he was
poorer than the foxes and birds, as they had their holes and nests
whilst he had not a house to shelter him; and Napoleon became an
emperor; but we need take no more account of such extraordinary persons
in forming our general plan than a maker of readymade clothes takes of
giants and dwarfs in his price list. You may with the utmost confidence
take it as settled by practical experience that if we could succeed
in distributing income equally to all the inhabitants of the country,
there would be no more tendency on their part to divide into rich and
poor than there is at present for postmen to divide into beggars and
millionaires. The only novelty proposed is that the postmen should get
as much as the postmasters, and the postmasters no less than anybody
else. If we find, as we do, that it answers to give all judges the
same income, and all navy captains the same income, why should we go
on giving judges five times as much as navy captains? That is what the
navy captain would like to know; and if you tell him that if he were
given as much as the judge he would be just as poor as before at the
end of a year he will use language unfit for the ears of anyone but a
pirate. So be careful how you say such things.
Equal distribution is then quite possible and practicable, not only
momentarily but permanently. It is also simple and intelligible. It
gets rid of all squabbling as to how much each person should have. It
is already in operation and familiar over great masses of human beings.
And it has the tremendous advantage of securing promotion by merit for
the more capable.
22
MERIT AND MONEY
That last sentence may puzzle even the most Intelligent Woman if she
has never before given her mind seriously to the subject; so I had
better enlarge on it a little.
Nothing hides the difference in merit between one person and another
so much as differences in income. Take for example a grateful nation
making a parliamentary grant of twenty thousand pounds to a great
explorer, or a great discoverer, or a great military commander (I have
to make my example a man: women get only statues after their death).
Before he has walked half way down the street on his way home to
tell his wife about it he may meet some notorious fool or scandalous
libertine, or some quite ordinary character, who has not merely twenty
thousand pounds but twenty thousand a year or more. The great man’s
twenty thousand pounds will bring him in only a thousand a year; and
with this he finds himself in our society regarded as “a poor devil”
by tradesmen and financiers and quacks who are ten times as rich
because they have never in their lives done anything but make money for
themselves with entire selfishness, possibly by trading in the vices
or on the credulity of their fellow-countrymen. It is a monstrous
thing that a man who, by exercising a low sort of cunning, has managed
to grab three or four millions of money selling bad whiskey, or
forestalling the wheat harvest and selling it at three times its cost,
or providing silly newspapers and magazines for the circulation of
lying advertisements, should be honored and deferred to and waited on
and returned to Parliament and finally made a peer of the realm, whilst
men who have exercised their noblest faculties or risked their lives in
the furtherance of human knowledge and welfare should be belittled by
the contrast between their pence and the grabbers’ pounds.
Only where there is pecuniary equality can the distinction of merit
stand out. Titles, dignities, reputations do more harm than good if
they can be bought with money. Queen Victoria shewed her practical
common sense when she said that she would not give a title to anyone
who had not money enough to keep it up; but the result was that the
titles went to the richest, not to the best. Between persons of unequal
income all other distinctions are thrown into the background. The woman
with a thousand a year inevitably takes precedence of women with only
a hundred, no matter how inferior she may be to them; and she can give
her children advantages qualifying them for higher employments than
those open to poor children of equal or greater natural capacity.
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except
the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and
capacity are everything. Instead of all the workers being levelled
down to low wage standards and all the rich levelled up to fashionable
income standards, everybody under a system of equal incomes would find
her and his own natural level. There would be great people and ordinary
people and little people; but the great would always be those who had
done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them
and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the
little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not
poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always
in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and
the really great in favour of equality.
23
INCENTIVE
When we come to the objections to equal division of income we find that
most of them come to no more than this: that we are not accustomed to
it, and have taken unequal division between classes so much for granted
that we have never thought any other state of things possible, not to
mention that the teachers and preachers appointed for us by the rich
governing class have carefully hammered into us from our childhood that
it is wicked and foolish to question the right of some people to be
much better off than others.
Still, there are other objections. So many of them have been already
disposed of in our examination of the schemes for unequal distribution
that we need deal now with two only.
The first is that unless a woman were allowed to get more money than
another she would have no incentive to work harder.
One answer to this is that nobody wants her to work harder than another
at the national task. On the contrary, it is desirable that the burden
of work, without which there could be no income to divide, should be
shared equally by the workers. If those who are never happy unless they
are working insist on putting in extra work to please themselves, they
must not pretend that this is a painful sacrifice for which they should
be paid; and, anyhow, they can always work off their superfluous energy
on their hobbies.
On the other hand, there are people who grudge every moment they have
to spend in working. That is no excuse for letting them off their
share. Anyone who does less than her share of work, and yet takes her
full share of the wealth produced by work, is a thief, and should be
dealt with as any other sort of thief is dealt with.
But Weary Willie may say that he hates work, and is quite willing
to take less, and be poor and dirty and ragged or even naked for
the sake of getting off with less work. But that, as we have seen,
cannot be allowed: voluntary poverty is just as mischievous socially
as involuntary poverty: decent nations must insist on their citizens
leading decent lives, doing their full share of the nation’s work,
and taking their full share of its income. When Weary Willie has
done his bit he can be as lazy as he likes. He will have plenty of
leisure to lie on his back and listen to the birds, or watch his more
impetuous neighbors working furiously at their hobbies, which may be
sport, exploration, literature, the arts, the sciences, or any of
the activities which we pursue for their own sakes when our material
needs are satisfied. But poverty and social irresponsibility will be
forbidden luxuries. Poor Willie will have to submit, not to compulsory
poverty as at present, but to the compulsory well-being which he dreads
still more.
However, there are mechanical difficulties in the way of freedom to
work more or less than others in general national production. Such work
is not nowadays separate individual work: it is organized associated
work, carried on in great factories and offices in which work begins
and ends at fixed hours. Our clothes, for instance, are mostly washed
in steam laundries in which all the operations which used to be
performed by one woman with her own tub, mangle, and ironing board
are divided among groups of women using machinery and buildings which
none of them could use single-handed even if she could afford to buy
them, assisted by men operating a steam power plant. If some of these
women or men were to offer to come an hour earlier or stay two hours
later for extra wages the reply would be that such an arrangement was
impossible, as they could do nothing without the co-operation of the
rest. The machinery would not work for them unless the engine was
going. It is a case of all or nobody.
In short, associated work and factory work: that is to say, the sort of
work that makes it possible for our great modern civilized populations
to exist, would be impossible if every worker could begin when she
liked and leave off when she liked. In many factories the pace is set
for the lazy and energetic alike by the engine. The railway service
would not be of much use if the engine driver and the guard were to
stop the train to look at a football match when they felt inclined that
way. Casual people are useless in modern industry; and the other sort:
those who want to work longer and harder than the rest, find that they
cannot do it except in comparatively solitary occupations. Even in
domestic service, where the difference between the unpunctual slacker
and sloven and the model servant is very perceptible, the routine of
the household keeps everybody up to a certain mark below which a
servant is discharged as unemployable. And the slacker neither accepts
lower wages nor can be cured by higher.
No external incentive is needed to make first-rate workers do the
best work they can: their trouble is that they can seldom make a
living by it. First-rate work is done at present under the greatest
discouragement. There is the impossibility of getting paid as much
for it as for second-rate work. When it is not paid for at all, there
is the difficulty of finding leisure for it whilst earning a living
at common work. People seldom refuse a higher employment which they
feel capable of undertaking. When they do, it is because the higher
employment is so much worse paid or so unsuitable to their social
position that they cannot afford to take it. A typical case is that
of a non-commissioned officer in the army refusing a commission. If
the quartermaster-sergeant’s earnings and expenses came to no more
than those of the officer, and both men were of the same class, no
inducement in the way of extra money would be needed to make any
soldier accept promotion to the highest rank in which he felt he could
do himself credit. When he refuses, as he sometimes does, it is because
he would be poorer and less at home in the higher than in the lower
rank.