instead of to do you any service. At the beginning of the war, the
influence of the profiteers was so strong that they persuaded the
Government to allow them to make all the shells instead of having them
made in national factories. The result was that you were paying taxes
to keep workmen standing idle in Woolwich Arsenal at full wages in
order that the profiteering firms should have all the work at a profit.
You had to pay their workmen too, and the profit into the bargain. It
soon turned out that they could not make nearly enough shells. Those
they did make were unnecessarily expensive and not always explosive.
The result was an appalling slaughter of our young men in Flanders,
who were left almost defenceless in the trenches through the shortage
of munitions; and we were on the verge of being defeated by simple
extermination when the Government, taking the matter in hand itself,
opened national factories (you may have worked in some of them) in
which munitions were produced on such a scale that we have hardly
yet got rid of what was left of them when the war ended, besides
controlling the profiteers, teaching them their business (they did not
know even how to keep proper accounts, and were wasting money like
water), and limiting their profits drastically. And yet, in the face
of this experience (which was of course a tremendous triumph for the
advocates of nationalized industries), the war was no sooner at an end
than the capitalist papers began again with their foolish and corrupt
declarations that Governments are such incompetent and dishonest and
extravagant jobbers, and private firms so splendidly capable and
straightforward, that Governments must never do anything that private
firms can make profits by doing; and very soon all the national
factories were sold for an old song to the profiteers, and the national
workers were in the streets with the demobilized soldiers, living on
the dole, two millions strong.
This is only a sensational instance of something that is always going
on: namely, the wasting of your money by employing profiteering
contractors to do the work that could be done better by the
authorities themselves without charging you any profit.
You see therefore that when you pay rates and taxes you are not safe
from being charged not only the cost price of public services, but huge
sums which go to private employers as unnecessary or excessive profits,
to the landlords and capitalists whose land and capital these employers
use, and to those property owners who hold the War Loan and the other
stocks which represent the National Debt. But as you may also get back
some of it as a pensioner or a recipient of public relief in some form
or other, or as you may yourself be a holder of War Loan or Consols,
or a shareholder in one of the commercial concerns which get contracts
from the Government and the municipalities, it is impossible for me to
say whether, on the whole, you gain or lose. I can only say that the
chances are ten to one that you lose on balance; that is, that the rich
get more out of you through the Government than you get out of them. So
much for the taxes. Now for the rates.
31
YOUR RATES
The rates are not paid equally by everybody. The local authorities,
like the Government, have to recognize the fact that some people are
better able to pay than others, and make them pay accordingly. They do
this by calculating the rates on the value of the house occupied by the
ratepayer, and of his place of business, guessing that a person with
a house or shop worth a hundred a year will be richer than one with a
house or shop worth twenty, and rating him on the valuation.
Thus every rate is really a graduated income tax as well as a payment
for public services. Then there are the municipal debts as well as
the national debt; and as municipalities are as lazy and wasteful
as central governments in the way of giving public jobs out to
profiteering contractors, everything that happens with the taxes
happens with the rates as well on a smaller scale.
But there are other anomalies which rating brings out.
Just consider what happens when even the quite genuine part of our
national and municipal Communism, paying its way honestly by taxing and
rating, is applied, as we apply it, to people of whom some are very
poor and some are very rich. If a woman cannot afford to feed herself
well enough to nurse her baby properly she clearly cannot afford
to contribute to the maintenance of a stud of cream-colored ponies
in the stables of Buckingham Palace. If she lives with her husband
and children in a single room in a back-to-back dwelling in a slum,
hopelessly out of reach of the public parks of the great cities, with
their flowers and bands and rides and lakes and boats, it is rather
hard on her to have to pay a share of the cost of these places of
recreation, used largely by rich people whose horses and motor cars
shew that they could easily pay a charge for admission sufficient to
maintain the place without coming to her for a contribution.
In short, since communistic expenditure is compulsory expenditure,
enforced on everybody alike, it cannot be kept within everybody’s means
unless everybody has the same income. But the remedy is, not to abolish
the parks and the cream-colored ponies, and to tell the Prince of Wales
that he cannot have more than one suit of clothes until every poor
woman’s son has two, all of which is not only impossible but envious
and curmudgeonish, but to equalize incomes. In the meantime we must
pay our rates and taxes with the best grace we can, knowing that if we
tried to drag down public expenditure to the level of the worst private
poverty our lives would be unendurable even by savages.
This, however, does not apply to certain ways in which the ratepayer is
“exploited”. To exploit a person is to make money out of her without
giving her an equivalent return. Now practically all private employers
exploit the ratepayer more or less in a way that she never notices
unless she has studied the subject as we are studying it at present.
And the way they do it is this.
A woman who employs domestic servants gives regular employment to
most of them; but to some she gives only casual employment. The
housemaid and cook are in regular employment; the nurse is in temporary
employment; and the charwoman is in casual employment: that is, she is
taken on for a few hours or for a day, and then cast off to shift for
herself as best she can until she gets another equally short job. If
she is ill, none of her occasional employers need concern herself: and
when rich people die and make provision for their servants in their
wills, they never think of including a legacy for the charwoman.
Now no doubt it is very convenient to be able to pick up a woman
like a taxi for an hour or so, and then get rid of her without any
further responsibility by paying her a few shillings and turning her
into the street. But it means that when the charwoman is ill or out
of employment or getting so old that younger and stronger women are
preferred to her, somebody has to provide for her. And that somebody
is the ratepayer, who provides the outdoor relief and the workhouse,
besides, as taxpayer, the old age pension and part of the dole. If
the ratepayer did not do this the householder would have either to do
without the charwoman or pay her more. Even regular servants could not,
as at present, be discharged without pensions when they are worn out,
if the ratepayers made no provision for them. Thus the householder is
making the other ratepayers, many of whom do not employ charwomen, pay
part of the cost of her domestic service.
But this is perhaps not the most impressive case, because you, as an
experienced woman, can tell me that charwomen do not do so badly for
themselves; that they are hard to get; and that steady ones often have
their pick of several jobs, and make a compliment of taking one. But
think of the great industrial concerns which employ huge armies of
casuals. Take the dock companies for example. The men who load and
unload the ships are taken on by the hour in hundreds at a time; and
they never know whether there will be an hour’s work for them or eight
hours, or whether they will get two days in the week or six. I can
remember when they were paid twopence an hour, and how great a victory
they were supposed to have gained when they struck for sixpence an hour
and got it. The dock companies profit; but the men and their families
are nearly always living more or less on the rates.
Take the extreme case of this. The ratepayers have to maintain a
workhouse. If any man presents himself at that workhouse as a destitute
person, he must be taken in and lodged and fed and clothed. It is
an established practice with some men to live at the workhouse as
ablebodied paupers until they feel disposed for a night of drinking and
debauchery. Then they demand their discharge, and must be let out to
go about their business. They unload a ship; spend all the money they
earn in a reckless spree; and return to the workhouse next morning as
destitute persons to resume their residence there at the ratepayers’
expense. A woman can do the same when there are casual jobs within her
reach. This, I repeat, is the extreme case only: the decent respectable
laborers do not do it; but casual labor does not tend to make people
decent and respectable. If they were not careless, and did not keep up
their spirits and keep down their prudence by drinking more than is
good for them, they could not endure such worrying uncertainty.
Now, as it happens, dock labor is dangerous labor. In busy times in
big docks an accident happens about every twenty minutes. But the dock
company does not keep a hospital to mend its broken casuals. Why should
it? There is the Poor Law Infirmary, supported by the ratepayers, near
at hand, or a hospital supported by their charitable subscriptions; and
nothing is simpler than to carry the victim of the accident there to
be cured at the public expense without troubling the dock company. No
wonder the dock company chairmen and directors are often among our most
ardent advocates of public charity. With them it begins at home.
Another public institution kept by the ratepayers and taxpayers is
the prison, with its police force, its courts of law, its judges, and
all the rest of its very expensive retinue. An enormous proportion
of the offences they deal with are caused by drink. Now the trade
in drink is extremely profitable: so much so that in England it is
called _The_ Trade, which is short for The Trade of Trades. But why
is it profitable? Because the trader in drink takes all the money the
drunkard pays for his liquor, and when he is drunk throws him into the
street, leaving the ratepayer to pay for all the mischief he may do,
all the crimes he may commit, all the illness he may bring on himself
and his family, and all the poverty to which he may be reduced. If the
cost of these were charged against the drink trade instead of against
the police rates and poor rates, the profits of the trade would vanish
at once.
As it is, the trader gets all the takings; and the ratepayer stands
all the losses. That is why they made the trade unlawful in America.
They shut up the saloons (public houses), and found immediately that
they could shut up a good many of the prisons as well. But if they had
municipalized the drink traffic: that is, if the ratepayer had kept
the public house as well as the prison, the greatest care would have
been taken to discourage drunkenness, because drunkenness would have
produced a loss in the municipal accounts instead of a profit. As it
is, the ratepayer is being exploited outrageously by the drink trade,
and the whole nation weakened and demoralized in order that a handful
of people may become unnaturally rich. It is true that they rebuild our
tumble-down cathedrals for us occasionally; but then they expect to be
made peers for it. The bargain is an insanely bad one anyhow.
There is one more trick that can be played on you both by the
municipality and the Government. In spite of their obligation not to
profiteer, but to give you every service at cost price, they often do
profiteer quite openly, and actually boast of their profits as a proof
of their business efficiency. This takes place when you pay for the
service, not by a tax or a rate, but by the ordinary process of paying
for what you consume. Thus when you want a letter sent, you pay the
Government three halfpence across the counter for the job. When you
live where electric light is made and supplied by the municipality, you
do not pay for it in your rates: you pay so much for every unit you
consume.
I am sorry to have to add that the Postmaster-General takes advantage
of this to charge you more for carrying your letter than the average
cost of it to the Post Office. In this way he makes a profit which he
hands over to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who uses it to keep down
the income tax and supertax. You pay more that the income tax payers
may pay less. A fraction of your three halfpence goes into the pockets
of the millionaires. True, if you are an income tax payer you get a
scrap of it back yourself; but as most people do not pay income tax and
everybody buys at least a few postage stamps, the income tax payers
in effect exploit the purchasers of stamps. The principle is wrong,
and the practice a dangerous abuse, which is nevertheless applauded
and carried to greater and greater lengths as the Government adds
telegraphs to posts, telephones to telegraphs, and wireless to both.
In the case of a municipal electric lighting supply, I must tell you
that in spite of the fact that the municipality, unlike a private
company, has to begin paying off the cost of setting up its works from
the moment it borrows it, and must clear it all off within a certain
period, yet even when it does this and yet supplies electricity at
a lower price than the private companies, it makes a profit in spite
of itself. It applies the profit to a reduction of the rates; and the
ratepayers are so pleased by this, and so accustomed to think that a
business which makes profits must be a sound one, that the municipality
is tempted to make a profit on purpose, and even a big one, by charging
the consumer more than the supply costs. When this happens, it is
clear that the overcharged people who use electric light are paying
part of the rates of those who do not. Even if everybody used electric
light there would still be inequalities in the consumption of current.
A struggling shopkeeper, who must make his shop blaze with light to
attract custom, must have a heavier bill for electric light than much
richer people who have only their private houses to illuminate.
We must not spend any more time on your rates and taxes. If they were
entirely abolished (how popular that would be!) and their places taken
by profiteering charges for State and municipal services, the result
would be, not State and municipal Socialism but State and municipal
Capitalism. As it is, you can see how even in your rates, which ought
to be quite free from the idler’s toll, you can be and to some extent
are “exploited” just as you are in your ordinary shopping.
32
YOUR RENT
When we come from your rates and taxes to your rent, your grievance
is far clearer, because when you pay your rent you have to hand your
money directly to your exploiter to do what she or he likes with
instead of to a public treasurer who gives you value for part of
it in public service to yourself, and tells you nothing about the
remainder which goes to septuagenarians, paupers, ground landlords,
profiteering contractors, and so forth, some of whom are poorer than
you, which makes for equality of income and is therefore a move in the
right direction, and others richer, which aggravates inequality and is
therefore a move in the wrong direction.
Rent paying is simpler. If you rent a piece of land and work on it,
it is quite clear that the landlord is living on your earnings; and
you cannot prevent him, because the law gives him the power to turn
you off the land unless you pay him for leave to use it. You are so
used to this that it may never have struck you as extraordinary that
any private person should have the power to treat the earth as if it
belonged to him, though you would certainly think him mad if he claimed
to own the air or the sunlight or the sea. Besides, you may be paying
rent for a house; and it seems reasonable that the man who built the
house should be paid for it. But you can easily find out how much of
what you are paying is the value of the house. If you have insured the
house against fire (very likely the landlord makes you do this), you
know what it would cost to build the house, as that is the sum you have
insured it for. If you have not insured it, ask a builder what it would
cost to build a similar house. The interest you would have to pay every
year if you borrowed that sum on the security of the house is the value
of the house apart from the value of the land.
You will find that what you are paying exceeds this house value, unless
you are in the landlord’s employment or the house has become useless
for its original purpose: for instance, a medieval castle. In big
cities like London, it exceeds it so enormously that the value of the
building is hardly worth mentioning in comparison. In out-of-the-way
places the excess may be so small that it hardly goes beyond a
reasonable profit on the speculation of building the house. But in
the lump over the whole country it amounts to hundreds of millions of
pounds a year; and this is the price, not of the houses, but of the
landlords’ permission to live on the native earth on which the houses
have been built.
That any person should have the power to give or refuse an Englishwoman
permission to live in England, or indeed--for this is what it comes
to--to live at all, is so absurdly opposed to every possible conception
of natural justice that any lawyer will tell you that there is no such
thing as absolute private property in land, and that the King, in whom
the land is vested, may take it all back from its present holders if
he thinks fit. But as the landlords were for many centuries also both
the lawmakers and the kingmakers, they took care that, king or no king,
land should become in practice as much private property as anything
else, except that it cannot be bought and sold without paying fees to
lawyers and signing conveyances and other special legal documents. And
this private power over land has been bought and sold so often that you
never know whether your landlord will be a bold baron whose ancestors
have lived as petty kings on their tenants since the days of William
the Conqueror, or a poor widow who has invested all her hardearned
savings in a freehold.
Howbeit the fact remains that the case of landlord and tenant is one
in which an idle and possibly infamous person can with the police at
his back come quite openly to an industrious and respectable woman, and
say, “Hand me over a quarter of your earnings or get off the earth”.
The landlord can even refuse to accept a rent, and order her off the
earth unconditionally; and he sometimes does so; for you may remember
that in Scotland whole populations of fishermen and husbandmen with
their families have been driven from their country to the backwoods of
America because their landlords wanted the land on which they lived for
deer forests. In England people have been driven from the countryside
in multitudes to make room for sheep, because the sheep brought more
money to the landlord than the people. When the great London railway
stations, with their many acres of sidings, were first made, the houses
of great numbers of people were knocked down, and the inhabitants
driven into the streets; with the result that the whole neighbourhood
became so overcrowded that it was for many years a centre of disease
infecting all London. These things are still happening, and may happen
to you at any moment, in spite of a few laws which have been made to
protect tenants in towns in times of great scarcity of houses such as
that which followed the war, or in Ireland, where the Government bought
the agricultural land and resold it to the farmers, which eased matters
for a time, but in the long run can come to nothing but exchanging one
set of landlords for another.
It is in large towns and their neighbourhood that the Intelligent Woman
will find not only how much the landlord can make her give up to him,
but, oddly enough, how devoutly he believes in equality of income for
his tenants, if not for himself. In the middle of the town she will
find rents very high. If she or her husband has work to do there it
will occur to her that if she were to take a house in the suburbs,
where rents are lower, and use the tram to come to and fro, she might
save a little. But she will find that the landlord knows all about
that, and that though the further she moves out into the country the
lower the rents, yet the railway fare or tram fare will bring up the
yearly cost to what she would have to pay if she lived close enough in
to walk to her market or for her husband to walk to his work. Whatever
advantage she may try to gain, the landlord will snatch its full money
value from her sooner or later in rent, provided it is an advantage
open to everyone. It ought to be plain even to a fairly stupid woman
that if the land belongs to a few people they can make their own terms
with the rest, who must have land to live and work on or else starve on
the highway or be drowned in the sea. They can strip them of everything
except what is barely enough to keep them alive to earn money for the
landowner, and bring up families to do the same in the next generation.
It is easy to see how this foolish state of things comes about. As
long as there is plenty of land for everybody private property in land
works very well. The landholders are not preventing anyone else from
owning land like themselves; and they are quite justified in making
the strongest laws to protect themselves against having their lands
intruded on and their crops taken by rascals who want to reap where
they have not sown. But this state of things never lasts long with a
growing population, because at last all the land gets taken up, and
there is none left for the later comers. Even long before this happens
the best land is all taken up, and later comers find that they can do
as well by paying rent for the use of the best land as by owning poorer
land themselves, the amount of the rent being the difference between
the yield of the poorer land and the better. At this point the owners
of the best land can let their land; stop working; and live on the
rent: that is, on the labor of others, or, as they call it, by owning.
When big towns and great industries arise, the value of the land goes
up to enormous heights: in London bits of land with frontages on the
important streets sell at the rate of a million pounds an acre; and
men of business will pay the huge rents that make the land worth such
a figure, although there is land forty miles away to be had for next
to nothing. The land that was first let gets sublet, and yet again
and again sublet until there may be half a dozen leaseholders and
subleaseholders drawing more rent from it than the original ground
landlord; and the tenant who is in working occupation of it has to make
the money for all of them. Within the last hundred and fifty years
villages in Europe and pioneer encampments in the other continents
have grown into towns and cities making money by hundreds of millions;
yet most of the inhabitants whose work makes all this wealth are no
better off, and many of them decidedly worse off, than the villagers
or pioneer campers-out who occupied the place when it was not worth a
pound an acre. Meanwhile the landlords have become fabulously rich,
some of them taking every day, for doing nothing, more than many a
woman for sixty years drudgery.