abroad instead of giving continuous employment with it at home, and
are confronted at home with masses of desperate men for whom they can
find no suitable jobs, must either feed them for nothing or face a
revolution. And so you get what we call the dole. Now small as the
dole may be it must be sufficient to live on; and if two or three in
one household put their doles together, they grow less keen on finding
employment, and develop a taste for living like ladies and gentlemen:
that is, amusing themselves at the expense of others instead of earning
anything. We used to moralize over this sort of thing as part of the
decline and fall of ancient Rome; but we have been heading straight for
it ourselves for a long while past, and the war has plunged us into it
head over ears. For it was after the war that the capitalists failed
to find employment for no less than two million demobilized soldiers
who had for four years been not only well fed and clothed, but trained
in the handling of weapons whilst occupied in slaughtering, burning,
destroying, and facing terrible risks of being themselves destroyed. If
these men had not been given money to live on they would have taken it
by violence. Accordingly the Government had to take millions of spare
money from the capitalists and give it to the demobilized men; and
they are still doing so, with the grudged consent of the capitalists
themselves, who complain bitterly, but fear that if they refuse they
will lose everything.
At this point Capitalism becomes desperate, and quite openly engages in
attempts to get rid of the unemployed: that is, to empty the country of
part of its population, which it calls overpopulation. How is it to be
done? As the unemployed will not let themselves be starved, still less
will they let themselves be gassed or poisoned or shot, which would
be the logical Capitalist way out of the mess. But they can perhaps
be induced to leave the country and try their luck elsewhere if the
Government will pay the fare, or as much of it as they cannot scrape
up themselves. As I write these lines the Government announces that
if any Englishwoman or Englishman will be so kind as to clear out of
England to the other side of the world it will cost them only three
pounds apiece instead of five times that sum, as the Government will
provide the odd twelve pounds. And if sufficient numbers do not jump at
this offer before these lines are printed, the Government may be driven
to offer to send them away for nothing and give them ten pounds apiece
to start with in their new country. That would be cheaper than keeping
them at home on the dole.
Thus we see Capitalism producing the amazing and fantastic result
that the people of the country become a drawback to it, and have to
be got rid of like vermin (polite people call the process Assisted
Emigration), leaving nobody in it but capitalists and landlords and
their attendants, living on imported food and manufactures in an
elegant manner, and realizing the lady’s and gentleman’s dream of a
country in which there is lavish consumption and no production, stately
parks and palatial residences without factories or mines or smoke or
slums or any unpleasantness that heaps of gratuitous money can prevent,
and contraception in full swing to avoid any further increase in the
population.
Surely, you will say, if Capitalism leads to this, it leads to an
earthly paradise. Leaving out of account the question whether the
paradise, if realized, would not be a fool’s paradise (for, I am sorry
to say, we have all been brought up to regard such a state of things
as the perfection of human society), and admitting that something
like it has been half realized in spots in many places from Monte
Carlo to Gleneagles, and from Gleneagles to Palm Beach, it is never
realized for a whole country. It has often been carried far enough to
reduce powerful empires like Rome and Spain to a state of demoralized
impotence in which they were broken up and plundered by the foreigners
on whom they had allowed themselves to become dependent; but it never
has, and never can, build up a stable Parasitic State in which all the
workers are happy and contented because they share the riches of the
capitalists, and are kept healthy and pleasant and nice because the
capitalists are cultivated enough to dislike seeing slums and shabby
ugly people and running the risk of catching infectious diseases from
them. When capitalists are intelligent enough to care whether the
whole community is healthy and pleasant and happy or not, even when
the unpleasantnesses do not come under their own noses, they become
Socialists, for the excellent reason that there is no fun in being a
capitalist if you have to take care of your servants and tradesmen
(which means sharing your income with them) as affectionately as if
they were your own family. If your taste and conscience were cultivated
to that extent you would find such a responsibility unbearable,
because you would have to be continually thinking of others, not only
to the necessary and possible extent of taking care that your own
activities and conveniences did not clash unreasonably and unkindly
with theirs, but to the unnecessary and impossible extent of doing all
the thinking for them that they ought to do, and in freedom could do,
for themselves. It is easy to say that servants should be treated well
not only because humanity requires it but because they will otherwise
be unpleasant and dishonest and inefficient servants. But if you treat
your servants as well as you treat yourself, which really amounts to
spending as much money on them as on yourself, what is the use of
having servants? They become a positive burden, expecting you to be a
sort of Earthly Providence to them, which means that you spend half
your time thinking for them and the other half talking about them.
Being able to call your servants your own is a very poor compensation
for not being able to call your soul your own. That is why, even as it
is, you run away from your comfortable house to live in hotels (if you
can afford it), because, when you have paid your bill and tipped the
waiter and the chambermaid, you are finished with them, and have not to
be a sort of matriarch to them as well.
Anyhow, most of those who are ministering to your wants are not in
personal contact with you. They are the employees of your tradesmen;
and as your tradesmen trade capitalistically, you have inequality of
income, unemployment, sweating, division of society into classes,
with the resultant dysgenic restrictions on marriage, and all the
other evils which prevent a capitalist society from achieving peace or
permanence. A self-contained, self-supporting Capitalism would at least
be safe from being starved out as Germany was in the war in spite of
her military successes; but a completely parasitic Capitalism, however
fashionable, would be simply Capitalism with that peril intensified to
the utmost.
39
FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG
Now let us turn back to inquire whether sending our capital abroad, and
consenting to be taxed to pay emigration fares to get rid of the women
and men who are left without employment in consequence, is all that
Capitalism can do when our employers, who act for our capitalists in
industrial affairs, and are more or less capitalists themselves in the
earlier stages of capitalistic development, find that they can sell no
more of their goods at a profit, or indeed at all, in their own country.
Clearly they cannot send abroad the capital they have already invested,
because it has all been eaten up by the workers, leaving in its place
factories and railways and mines and the like; and these cannot be
packed into a ship’s hold and sent to Africa. It is only the freshly
saved capital that can be sent out of the country. This, as we have
seen, does go abroad in heaps. But the British employer who is working
with capital in the shape of works fixed to British land held by him
on long lease, must, when once he has sold all the goods at home that
his British customers can afford to buy, either shut up his works until
the customers have worn out their stock of what they have bought, which
would bankrupt him (for the landlord will not wait), or else sell his
superfluous goods somewhere else: that is, he must send them abroad.
Now it is not so easy to send them to civilized countries, because they
practise Protection, which means that they impose heavy taxes (customs
duties) on foreign goods. Uncivilized countries, without Protection,
and inhabited by natives to whom gaudy calicoes and cheap showy brass
ware are dazzling and delightful novelties, are the best places to make
for at first.
But trade requires a settled government to put down the habit of
plundering strangers. This is not a habit of simple tribes, who are
often friendly and honest. It is what civilized men do where there is
no law to restrain them. Until quite recent times it was extremely
dangerous to be wrecked on our own coasts, as wrecking, which meant
plundering wrecked ships and refraining from any officious efforts
to save the lives of their crews, was a well-established business in
many places on our shores. The Chinese still remember some astonishing
outbursts of looting perpetrated by English ladies of high position,
at moments when law was suspended and priceless works of art were to
be had for the grabbing. When trading with aborigines begins with the
visit of a single ship, the cannons and cutlasses it carries may be
quite sufficient to overawe the natives if they are troublesome. The
real difficulty begins when so many ships come that a little trading
station of white men grows up and attracts the white ne’er-do-wells and
violent roughs who are always being squeezed out of civilization by
the pressure of law and order. It is these riffraff who turn the place
into a sort of hell in which sooner or later missionaries are murdered
and traders plundered. Their home Governments are appealed to to put
a stop to this. A gunboat is sent out and an inquiry made. The report
after the inquiry is that there is nothing to be done but set up a
civilized government, with a post office, police, troops, and a navy in
the offing. In short, the place is added to some civilized Empire. And
the civilized taxpayer pays the bill without getting a farthing of the
profits.
Of course the business does not stop there. The riffraff who have
created the emergency move out just beyond the boundary of the annexed
territory, and are as great a nuisance as ever to the traders when they
have exhausted the purchasing power of the included natives and push
on after fresh customers. Again they call on their home Government to
civilize a further area; and so bit by bit the civilized Empire grows
at the expense of the home taxpayers, without any intention or approval
on their part, until at last, though all their real patriotism is
centred on their own people and confined to their own country, their
own rulers, and their own religious faith, they find that the centre of
their beloved realm has shifted to the other hemisphere. That is how
we in the British Islands have found our centre moved from London to
the Suez Canal, and are now in the position that out of every hundred
of our fellow-subjects, in whose defence we are expected to shed the
last drop of our blood, only eleven are whites or even Christians.
In our bewilderment some of us declare that the Empire is a burden
and a blunder, whilst others glory in it as a triumph. You and I need
not argue with them just now, our point for the moment being that,
whether blunder or glory, the British Empire was quite unintentional.
What should have been undertaken only as a most carefully considered
political development has been a series of commercial adventures thrust
on us by capitalists forced by their own system to cater for foreign
customers before their own country’s needs were one-tenth satisfied.
40
EMPIRES IN COLLISION
If the British Empire were the only State on earth, the process might
go on peacefully (except for ordinary police coercion) until the whole
earth was civilized under the British flag. This is the dream of
British Imperialism. But it is not what the world is like. There are
all the other States, large and small, with their Imperialist dreamers
and their very practical traders pushing for foreign markets, and their
navies and armies to back the traders and annex these markets. Sooner
or later, as they push their boundaries into Africa and Asia, they come
up against oneanother. A collision of that kind (called the Fashoda
incident) very nearly involved us in a war with France. Fortunately
France gave way, not being prepared to fight us just then; but France
and Britain were left with the whole Sudan divided between them.
France had before this pushed into and annexed Algeria and (virtually)
Tunisia; and Spain was pushing into Morocco. Italy, alarmed lest there
should be nothing left for her, made a dash at Tripoli and annexed it.
England was in Egypt as well as in India.
Now imagine yourself for a moment a German trader, with more goods
than you can sell in Germany, having either to shut up your factory and
be ruined, or find a foreign market in Africa. Imagine yourself looking
at the map of Africa. The entire Mediterranean coast, the pick of the
basket, is English, Italian, French, and Spanish. The Hinterland, as
you call it, is English and French. You cannot get in anywhere without
going through the English Suez Canal or round the Cape to some remote
place down south. Do you now understand what the German Kaiser meant
when he complained that Germany had not been left “a place in the
sun”? That hideous war of 1914-18 was at bottom a fight between the
capitalists of England, France, and Italy on the one side, and those of
Germany on the other, for command of the African markets. On top, of
course, it was about other things: about Austria making the murder of
the Archduke a pretext for subjugating Serbia; about Russia mobilizing
against Austria to prevent this; about Germany being dragged into the
Austro-Russian quarrel by her alliance with Austria; about France being
dragged in on the other side by her alliance with Russia; about the
German army having to make a desperate attempt to conquer the French
army before the Russian troops could reach her; about England having to
attack Germany because she was allied to France and Russia; and about
the German army having taken the shortest cut through Belgium, not
knowing that Belgium had a secret arrangement with England to have a
British expedition sent to defend her if Germany invaded her. Of course
the moment the first shot was fired all the Britons and Belgians and
Germans and French and Austrians and Russians became enraged sheep, and
imagined all sorts of romantic reasons for fighting, in addition to the
solid reason that if Tommy and the Poilu and Ivan did not kill Hans and
Fritz, Hans and Fritz would kill Tommy and the Poilu and Ivan. Before
the killing had gone on very long, the Turks, the Bulgarians, the
Japanese, the Americans, and other States that had no more to do with
the first quarrel than you had, were in it and at it hammer and tongs.
The whole world went mad, and never alluded to markets except when they
ridiculed the Kaiser for his demand for a place in the sun.
Yet there would have been no war without the alliances; and the
alliances could not have fought if they had not set up great
armaments, especially the new German navy, to protect their foreign
markets and frontiers. These armaments, created to produce a sense of
security, had produced a sense of terror in which no nation dared go
unarmed unless it was too small to have any chance against the great
Powers, and could depend on their jealousy of oneanother to stave off
a conquest by any one of them. Soon the nations that dared not go
unarmed became more terrified still, and dared not go alone: they had
to form alliances and go in twos and threes, like policemen in thieves’
quarters, Germany and Austria in one group and England, France, and
Russia in another, both trying to induce Italy and Turkey and America
to join them. Their differences were not about their own countries:
the German navy was not built to bombard Portsmouth nor the British
navy to bombard Bremerhaven. But when the German navy interfered in the
north of Africa, which was just what it was built for, and the French
and British navies frightened it off from that market in the sun, the
capitalist diplomatists of these nations saw that the first thing
to concentrate on was not the markets but the sinking of the German
navy by the combined French and British navies (or vice versa) on any
available pretext. And as you cannot have fleets fighting on the sea
without armies fighting on the land to help them, the armies grew like
the fleets; the Race of Armaments became as familiar as the Derby; all
the natural and kindly sentiments of white civilized nations towards
oneanother were changed into blustering terror, the parent of hatred,
malice, and all uncharitableness; and after all, when the explosive
mixture blew up at last, and blew millions of us with it, it was not
about the African markets, but about a comparatively trumpery quarrel
between Austria and Serbia which the other Powers could have settled
with the greatest ease, without the shedding of one drop of blood,
if they had been on decent human terms with oneanother instead of on
competitive capitalistic terms.
And please do not fail to note that whereas in the early days of
Capitalism our capitalists did not compel us to fight for their
markets with our own hands, but hired German serfs and British
voluntary professional soldiers for the job, their wars have now
become so colossal that every woman’s husband, father, son, brother,
or sweetheart, if young and strong enough to carry a rifle, must go
to the trenches as helplessly as cattle go to the slaughterhouse,
abandoning wife and children, home and business, and renouncing normal
morality and humanity, pretending all the time that such conduct is
splendid and heroic and that his name will live for ever, though he
may have the greatest horror of war, and be perfectly aware that the
enemy’s soldiers, against whom he is defending his hearth, are in
exactly the same predicament as himself, and would never dream of
injuring him or his if the pressure of the drive for markets were
removed from both.
I have purposely brought you to the question of war because your
conscience must be sorely troubled about it. You have seen the men
of Europe rise up and slaughter oneanother in the most horrible
manner in millions. Your son, perhaps, has received a military cross
for venturing into the air in a flying machine and dropping a bomb
on a sleeping village, blowing several children into fragments, and
mutilating or killing their parents. From a militarist, nationalist,
or selfishly patriotic point of view such deeds may appear glorious
exploits; but from the point of view of any universally valid morality:
say from the point of view of a God who is the father of Englishmen
and Germans, Frenchmen and Turks alike, they must seem outbursts of
the most infernal wickedness. As such they have caused many of us to
despair of human nature. A bitter cynicism has succeeded to transports
of pugnacious hatred of which all but the incorrigibly thoughtless, and
a few incurables who have been mentally disabled for life by the war
fever, are now heartily ashamed. I can hardly believe that you have
escaped your share of this crushing disillusion. If you are human as
well as intelligent you must feel about your species very much as the
King of Brobdingnag did when he took Gulliver in his hand as a child
takes a tin soldier, and heard his boastful patriotic discourse about
the glories of military history.
Perhaps I can console you a little. If you will look at the business in
the light of what we have just been studying I think you will see that
the fault lay not so much in our characters as in the capitalist system
which we had allowed to dominate our lives until it became a sort of
blind monster which neither we nor the capitalists could control.
It is absurd to pretend that the young men of Europe ever wanted to
hunt each other into holes in the ground and throw bombs into the
holes to disembowel oneanother, or to have to hide in those holes
themselves, eaten with lice and sickened by the decay of the unburied,
in unutterable discomfort, boredom, and occasionally acute terror, or
that any woman ever wanted to put on her best Sunday clothes and be
gratified at the honor done to her son for killing some other woman’s
babies. The capitalists and their papers try to persuade themselves
and us that we are like that and always will be, in spite of all the
Christmas cards and Leagues of Nations. It is not a bit true. The
staggering fact about all these horrors was that we found ourselves
compelled to do them in spite of the fact that they were so unintended
by us, and so repugnant and dreadful to us that, when at last the war
suddenly stopped, our heroic pretences dropped from us like blown-off
hats, and we danced in the streets for weeks, mad with joy, until
the police had to stop us to restore the necessary traffic. We still
celebrate, by two minutes’ national silence, not the day on which the
glorious war broke out, but the day on which the horrible thing came
to an end. Not the victory, which we have thrown away by abusing it
as helplessly as we fought for it, but the Armistice, the Cessation,
the stoppage of the Red Cross vans from the terminuses of the Channel
railways with their heartbreaking loads of mutilated men, was what we
danced for so wildly and pitifully. If ever there was anything made
clear in the world it was that we were no more directly guilty of the
war than we were guilty of the earthquake of Tokio. We and the French
and the Germans and the Turks and the rest found ourselves conscripted
for an appalling slaughtering match, ruinous to ourselves, ruinous
to civilization, and so dreaded by the capitalists themselves that
it was only by an extraordinary legal suspension of all financial
obligations (called the Moratorium) that the City was induced to face
it. The attempt to fight out the war with volunteers failed: there were
not enough. The rest went because they were forced to go, and fought
because they were forced to fight. The women let them go partly because
they could not help themselves, partly because they were just as
pugnacious as the men, partly because they read the papers (which were
not allowed to tell them the truth), and partly because most of them
were so poor that they grasped at the allowances which left most of
them better off with their husbands in the trenches than they had ever
been with their husbands at home.
How had they got into this position? Simply by the original sin of
allowing their countries to be moved and governed and fed and clothed
by the pursuit of profit for capitalists instead of by the pursuit
of righteous prosperity for “all people that on earth do dwell”. The
first ship that went to Africa to sell things to the natives at more
than cost price because there was no sale for them at home began not
only this war, but the other and worse wars that will follow it if we
persist in depending on Capitalism for our livelihood and our morals.
All these monstrous evils begin in a small and apparently harmless way.
It is not too much to say that when a nation, having five shillings
to divide-up, gives four to Fanny and one to Sarah instead of giving
half a crown to each and seeing that she earns it, it sows the seed of
all the evils that now make thoughtful and farseeing men speak of our
capitalistic civilization as a disease instead of a blessing.
41
THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
Do not, however, disparage foreign trade. There is nothing wrong
with foreign trade as such. We could have no gold without foreign
trade; and gold has all sorts of uses and all sorts of beauties. I
will not add that we could have no tea, because I happen to think
that we should be better without this insidious Chinese stimulant.
It is safer and probably healthier for a nation to live on the food
and drink it can itself produce, as the Esquimaux manage to do under
much harder conditions. But there are many necessaries of a high
civilization that nations cannot find within their own boundaries, and
must buy from oneanother. We must trade and travel and come to know
oneanother all over the habitable globe. We have to make international
institutions as well as national ones, beginning with Trading Treaties
and Postal Conventions and Copyright Conventions, and going on to
the Leagues of Nations. The necessities of travelling and trade, and
the common interest of all nations in the works and discoveries of
art, literature, and science, have forced them to make international
agreements and treaties with oneanother which are making an end
of “keeping ourselves to ourselves”, and throwing half bricks at
foreigners and strangers. Honest foreign trade would never have got us
into trouble.