people are so simple and ignorant of big business matters that the
private capitalists are actually able to persuade them that Capitalism
is a success because it makes profits, and public service (or
Communism) a failure because it makes none. The simpletons forget that
the profits come out of their own pockets, and that what is the better
for the private capitalists in this respect is the worse for their
customers, the disappearance of profit being simply the disappearance
of overcharge.
36
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
You now see how it is that the nation cannot depend on private capital
because there are so many vitally necessary things, from town drainage
to lighthouses, which it will not provide at all, and how what it does
provide it provides in the wrong order, refusing to make a harbor until
it has made as many distilleries as the trade will hold, and building
five luxurious houses for one rich person whilst a shocking proportion
of the nation’s children is dying of overcrowding in slums.
In short, the private capitalists, instead of doing the most desirable
work first, begin at the wrong end. All that can be said for this
policy is that if you begin at the wrong end you may be driven towards
the right end when you have done your worst and can get no further in
the wrong direction; and this is in fact the position into which our
most respectable capitalists have been forced by circumstances. When
the poor have bought all the strong drink they can afford to pay for,
and the rich their racing stables and all the pearls they can find
room for on their wives’ necks, the capitalists are forced to apply
their next year’s accumulations of capital to the production of more
necessary things.
Before the hungry can be set to work building mills and making
machinery to equip them, somebody, possibly a woman, must invent
the machinery. The capitalists buy her invention. If she is good at
business, which very few inventors are, she makes them pay her enough
to become a capitalist herself; but in most cases she makes a very poor
bargain, because she has to sell the lion’s share in her invention for
a few pounds to enable her to pay for the necessary models and trials.
It is only in modern Big Business that inventiveness in method and
organization superadded to mechanical ingenuity has a chance against
capital. If you have that talent the Big Business people will not
trouble to buy your patents: they will buy you at a handsome price, and
take you into the concern. But the simpleminded mechanical inventor has
no such luck. In any case, the capitalists have made a communist law
nationalizing all inventions after fourteen years, when the capitalists
can use them without paying the inventor anything. They soon persuade
themselves, or at least try to persuade others, that they invented the
machines themselves, and deserve their riches for their ingenuity.
Quite a number of people believe them.
Thus equipped with mechanical devices which are quite beyond the
means of small producers, the big capitalists begin to wipe the small
producers off the face of the earth. They seize on the work done by the
handloom weaver in his cottage, and do it much more cheaply in great
mills full of expensive machine looms driven by steam. They take the
work of the oldtime miller with his windmill or waterwheel, and do it
in vast buildings with steel rollers and powerful engines. They set up
against the blacksmith a Nasmyth hammer that a thousand Vulcans could
not handle, and scissors that snip sheet steel and bite off heavy bars
more easily than he could open a tin of condensed milk. They launch
huge steel ships, driven by machinery which the shipwrights who built
for Columbus would have called devil’s work. They raise houses in
skyscraping piles of a hundred dwellings one on top of another, in
steel and concrete, so that in place of one horizontal street you have
bunches of perpendicular ones. They make lace by machinery, more of it
in a day than ten thousand women could make by hand. They make boots
by machinery, clocks by machinery, pins and needles by machinery. They
sell you machines to use yourself in your own house, such as vacuum
cleaners, to replace your old sweeping brush and tea leaves. They
lay on the electric power and hydraulic power that they use in their
factories to your house like water or gas; so that you can light and
heat your house with it, and have yourself carried in a lift from the
basement to the attic and back again without the trouble of climbing
the stairs. You can boil your kettle and cook your dinner with it. You
could even make toast with it (they sell you a little oven for the
purpose) if it were not that you always forget to take the toast out
before it is burnt to a cinder.
Bad as the machine-made goods are at first compared to hand-made goods,
they end by being sometimes better, sometimes as good, sometimes as
well worth buying at the lower price, and always in the long run the
only goods you can get. For at last we forget how to make things by
hand, and become dependent on the bigger machine industries in spite
of the little groups of artists who try to keep the old handicrafts
alive. When William Morris, a great artist and craftsman, invented
a story about the handle coming off a rake in a village, and nobody
knowing how to put it on again, so that they had to get a big machine
and eight engineers down from London to do it, his tale was not at all
so improbable as it would have been in the days of Queen Anne. Our
consolation is that if machinery makes rakes so cheap that it is not
worth while mending them instead of throwing them away and going on
with new ones, the loss is greater than the gain. And if the people who
work the machines have a better life of it than the old handy people,
then the change is for the better.
Mind: I do not say that these advantages are always gained at present.
Most of us are using cheap and nasty articles, and living a cheap and
nasty life; but this is not the fault of the machines and the great
factories, nor of the application of spare money to construct them:
it is the fault of the unequal distribution of the product and of the
leisure gained by their saving of labor.
Now this misdistribution need not have occurred if the spare money had
not been in private hands. If it had been in the hands of national and
municipal banks controlling its use in the interest of all of us the
capitalization of industry on a large scale would have been an unmixed
blessing, instead of being, as it is at present, a blessing so mixed
with curses of one kind or another that in Samuel Butler’s famous
Utopia, called Erewhon, the making and even the possession of machinery
is punished as a crime.
Some of our cleverest anti-Socialists advocate a return to the life of
the early eighteenth century, before the machines and factories came
in. But that would mean going back to the small population of that
time, as the old methods would not produce enough for our fortytwo
millions. High capitalization of industry, in which a million of spare
money is spent to provide us with fourpenny reels of cotton, has
come to stay; but if Socialism prevails, the million will be public
and not private property, and the reels will cost considerably less
than twopence. To put it shortly, capitalization is one thing, and
Capitalism quite another. Capitalization does not hurt us as long as
capital is our servant and not our master. Capitalism inevitably makes
it our master instead of our servant. Instead of public servants we are
private slaves.
Note that the great change from cottage handicraft to factories and
machine industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is called
by economists and historians The Industrial Revolution.
37
SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY
So far we have considered the growth of Capitalism as it occurs at
home. But capital has no home, or rather it is at home everywhere. It
is a quaint fact that though professed Socialists and Communists call
themselves Internationalists, and carry a red flag which is the flag of
the workers of all nations, and though most capitalists are boastfully
national, and wave the Union Jack on every possible occasion, yet when
you come down from the cries and catchwords to the facts, you find
that every practical measure advocated by British Socialists would
have the effect of keeping British capital in Britain to be spent on
improving the condition of their native country, whilst the British
Capitalists are sending British capital out of Britain to the ends of
the earth by hundreds of millions every year. If, with all our British
spare money in their hands, they were compelled to spend it in the
British Isles, or were patriotic or public spirited or insular enough
to do so without being compelled, they could at least call themselves
patriots with some show of plausibility. Unfortunately we allow them to
spend it where they please; and their only preference, as we have seen,
is for the country in which it will yield them the largest income.
Consequently, when they have begun at the wrong end at home, and have
exhausted its possibilities, they do not move towards the right end
until they have exhausted the possibilities of the wrong end abroad as
well.
Take the drink trade again as the most obvious example of the wrong end
being the most profitable end commercially.
It soon became so certain that free Capitalism in drink in England
would destroy England, that the Government was forced to interfere.
Spirits can be distilled so cheaply that it is quite possible to make a
woman “drunk for a penny: dead drunk for twopence”, and make a handsome
profit by doing it. When the capitalists were allowed to do this
they did it without remorse, having nothing to consider commercially
but their profits. The Government found that masses of people were
poisoning, ruining, maddening themselves with cheap gin. Accordingly a
law was made by which every distiller had to pay the Government so much
money for every gallon of strong drink he manufactured that he could
make no profit unless he added this tax to the price of the drink; and
this made the drink so dear that though there was still a great deal
too much drunkenness, and working women suffered because much more had
to come out of the housekeeping money for the men’s beer and spirits,
yet the working people could not afford to drink as recklessly and
ruinously as they did in the days when Hogarth’s picture of Gin Lane
was painted.
In the United States of America the resistance of the Government to
the demoralization of the people by private traffic in drink has gone
much further. These States, after trying the plan of taxing strong
drink, and finding it impossible to stop excessive drinking in this
way, were driven one by one to a resolution to exterminate the trade
altogether, until at last it was prohibited in so many States that
it became possible to make a Federal law (that is, a law for all the
States) prohibiting the sale or even the possession of intoxicating
liquor anywhere within the United States. The benefits of this step
were so immediate and so enormous that even the Americans who buy
drink from smugglers (bootleggers) whenever they can, vote steadily
for Prohibition; and so, of course, do the bootleggers, whose profits
are prodigious. Prohibition will sooner or later be forced on every
Capitalist country as a necessary defence against the ruinous effect of
private profiteering in drink. The only practicable alternative is the
municipalization of the drink trade: that is, socialism.
When our drink profiteers and their customers fill the newspapers
with stories about Prohibition being a failure in America, about all
Americans taking to drugs because they cannot get whiskey, about their
drinking more whiskey than ever, and when they quote a foolish saying
of a former bishop of Peterborough, that he would rather see England
free than England sober (as if a drunken man could be free in any
sense, even if he escaped arrest by the police), you must bear in mind
the fact, never mentioned by them, that millions of Americans who have
never been drunk in their lives, and who do not believe that their
moderate use of the intoxicants they have found pleasant has ever done
them the slightest harm, have yet voted away this indulgence for the
general good of their country and in the interests of human dignity and
civilization. Remember also that our profiteers have engaged in the
smuggling trade, and actually tried to represent the measures taken
against it by the American Government as attacks on British liberties.
If America were as weak militarily as China was in 1840 they would
drive us into a war to force whiskey on America.
Do not, however, rush to the conclusion that Prohibition, because it
is a violently effective method of combating unscrupulous profiteering
in drink, is an ideal method of dealing with the drink question. It
is not certain that there would be any drink question if we got rid
of capitalism. We shall consider that later on: our present point is
simply that capital has no conscience and no country. Capitalism,
beaten in a civilized country by Prohibition, can send its capital
abroad to an uncivilized one where it can do what it likes. Our
capitalists wiped multitudes of black men out of existence with gin
when they were forcibly prevented by law from doing the same to their
own countrymen. They would have made Africa a desert white with the
bones of drunkards had they not discovered that more profit could be
made by selling men and women than by poisoning them. The drink trade
was rich; but the slave trade was richer. Huge profits were made by
kidnapping shiploads of negroes and selling them as slaves. Cities
like Bristol have been built upon that black foundation. White queens
put money into it. The slave trade would still be a British trade
if it had not been forbidden by law through the efforts of British
philanthropists who, with their eyes in the ends of the earth, did not
know that British children were being overworked and beaten in British
factories as cruelly as the negro children in the plantations.
If you are a softhearted person, be careful not to lose your head
as you read of these horrors. Virtuous indignation is a powerful
stimulant, but a dangerous diet. Keep in mind the old proverb: anger
is a bad counsellor. Our capitalists did not begin in this way as
perversely wicked people. They did not soil their own hands with the
work. Their hands were often the white hands of refined, benevolent,
cultivated ladies of the highest rank. All they did or could do was
to invest their spare money in the way that brought them the largest
income. If milk had paid better than gin, or converting negroes to
Christianity better than converting them into slaves, they would
have traded in milk and Bibles just as willingly, or rather just as
helplessly, as in gin and slaves.
When the gin trade was overdone and exhausted, and the slave trade
suppressed, they went on into ordinary industrial work, and found that
profits could be made by employing slaves as well as by kidnapping and
selling them. They used their political power to induce the British
Government to annex great tracts of Africa, and to impose on the
natives taxes which they could not possibly pay except by working for
the capitalists like English working men, only at lower wages and
without the protection of English Factory Acts and English public
opinion. Great fortunes were made in this way. The Empire was enlarged:
“trade followed the flag” they said, meaning that the flag followed
trade and then more trade followed the flag; British capital developed
the world everywhere (except at home); the newspapers declared that it
was all very splendid; and generals like Lord Roberts expressed their
belief that God meant that three-quarters of the earth should be ruled
by young gentlemen from our public schools, in which schools, by the
way, nothing whatever was done to explain to them what this outrageous
pillage of their own country for the development of the rest of the
earth really meant over and above the temporary enrichment of their own
small class.
Nothing in our political history is more appalling than the
improvidence with which we have allowed British spare money,
desperately needed at home for the full realization of our own powers
of production, and for the clearing away of our disgraceful slum
centres of social corruption, to be driven abroad at the rate of two
hundred millions every year, loading us with unemployed, draining
us by emigration, imposing huge military and naval forces upon us,
strengthening the foreign armies of which we are afraid, and providing
all sorts of facilities for the foreign industries which destroy our
powers of self-support by doing for us what we could and should do
just as well for ourselves. If a fraction of the British spare money
our capitalists have spent in providing South America with railways
and mines and factories had been spent in making roads to our natural
harbors and turning to account the gigantic wasted water power of the
tideways and torrents of barren savage coasts in Scotland and Ireland,
or even in putting an end to such capitalistic absurdities as the
sending of farm produce from one English county to another by way of
America, we should not now be complaining that the countries our spare
money has developed can undersell our merchants and throw our workers
on public charity for want of employment.
38
DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES
I became a little rhetorical at the end of the last chapter, as
Socialists will when they have, like myself, acquired the habit of
public speaking. I hope I have not carried you away so far as to make
you overlook in your indignation the fact that, whilst all these
dreadful things have been going on, the profits of the capital which
has gone abroad are coming into the country gratuitously (imports
without equivalent exports) and being spent here by the capitalists,
and that their expenditure gives employment. The capital went out; but
the income comes in; and the question arises, are we any the worse for
being pampered paupers, living on the labor of other nations? If the
money that is coming in in income is more than went out as capital, are
we not better off?
One’s impulse is to say certainly not, because the same money spent as
capital at home would have brought us in just as large an income, and
perhaps larger, than it fetches from abroad, though the capitalists
might not have got so much of it. Indeed they might have got none of
it if it had been spent in great public works like clearing slums,
embanking rivers, roadmaking, smoke abatement, free schools and
universities, and other good things that cannot be charged for except
communistically through rates and taxes. But the question is more
complicated than that.
Suppose yourself a mill hand in a factory, accustomed to tend a
machine there, and to live with your people in a poor quarter of a
manufacturing town. Suddenly you find yourself discharged, and the
factory shut up, because the trade has mysteriously gone abroad. You
find that mill hands are not wanted, but that there is a scarcity of
lady’s maids, of assistants in fashionable shops, of waitresses in
week-end motoring hotels, of stewardesses in palatial steamships, of
dressmakers, of laundresses, of fine cooks (hidden in the kitchen and
spoken of as “_the chef_”), of all sorts of women whose services are
required by idle rich people. But you cannot get one of these jobs
because you do not know the work, and are not the sort of person,
and have not the speech, dress, and manners which are considered
indispensable. After a spell of starvation and despair you find a
job in a chocolate cream factory or a jam and pickles works, or you
become a charwoman. And if you have a daughter you bring her up to
the chocolate cream or lady’s maid business, and not to weaving and
spinning.
It is possible that in the end your daughter may be better paid, better
dressed, more gently spoken, more ladylike than you were in the old
mill. You may come to thank God that some Indian, or Chinaman, or
negro, or simply some foreigner is doing the work you used to do, and
setting your daughter free to do something that is considered much
more genteel and is better paid and more respected. Your son may be
doing better as a trainer of racehorses than his father did as a steel
smelter, and be ever so much more the gentleman. You might, if you
lived long enough, see the ugly factory towns of the Manchester and
Sheffield and Birmingham districts, and of the Potteries, disappear
and be replaced by nice residential towns and pleasure resorts like
Bournemouth, Cheltenham, and the Malverns. You might see the valleys of
Wales recover the beauty they had before the mines spoiled them. And it
would be quite natural for you to call these changes prosperity, and
vote for them, and sincerely loathe anyone who warned you that all it
meant was that the nation, having become a parasite on foreign labor,
was going to the devil as fast as it could.
Yet the warning would be much needed. If a nation turns its rough mill
hands into well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken, ladylike mill
officials, properly respected, and given a fair share of the wealth
they help to produce, the nation is the stronger, the richer, the
happier, and the holier for the change. If it turns them into lady’s
maids and sellers of twenty-guinea hats, it breaks its own backbone
and exchanges its page in honorable history for a chapter in The Ruins
of Empires. It becomes too idle and luxurious to be able to compel the
foreign countries to pay the tribute on which it lives; and when they
cease to feed it, it has lost the art of feeding itself and collapses
in the midst of its genteel splendor.
But this dismal sketch of the future of countries that let themselves
become dependent on the labor of other countries and settle down into
a comfortable and ladylike parasitism is really much too favorable. If
all our factory foremen could be turned into headwaiters with a touch
of Cinderella’s godmother’s wand, neither they nor their wives might
object. But this is not what happens. The factory foreman may bring up
his son to be a waiter; but he himself becomes an unemployed man. If he
is not fit for any of the new jobs, and too old to learn, and his trade
is not merely going through one of the usual periods of depression but
has left the country for good, he becomes a permanently unemployed man,
and consequently a starving man. Now a starving man is a dangerous man,
no matter how respectable his political opinions may be. A man who has
had his dinner is never a revolutionist: his politics are all talk.
But hungry men, rather than die of starvation, will, when there are
enough of them to overpower the police, begin by rioting, and end by
plundering and burning rich men’s houses, upsetting the government, and
destroying civilization. And the women, sooner than see their children
starve, will make the men do it, small blame to them.