Commonwealths undesirable: on the contrary, the fewer frontiers the
better. The establishment of law and order in uncivilized places should
not have made us hated there: it should have made us popular; and it
often did--at first. The annexation of other countries under our flag,
when it was really needed, should have been a welcome privilege and a
strengthening partnership for the inhabitants of the annexed regions.
Indeed we have always pretended that this was actually the case, and
that we were in foreign countries for the good of the inhabitants
and not for our own sake. Unfortunately we never could make these
pretensions good in the long run. However noble the aspirations of our
Imperialist idealists might be, our capitalist traders were there to
make as much profit out of the inhabitants as they could, and for no
other purpose. They had abandoned their own country because there was
no more profit to be made there, or not so much; and it is not to be
expected that they would become idealistically disinterested the moment
they landed on foreign shores. They stigmatized the Stay-at-homes,
the anti-Expansionists, the Little-Englanders, as friends of every
country but their own; but they themselves were the enemies of every
country, including their own, where there was a sweatable laborer
to make dividends for them. They pretended that the civilization of
the annexed country was “the white man’s burden”, and posed as weary
Titans reluctantly shouldering the public work of other nations as a
duty imposed on them by Providence; but when the natives, having been
duly civilized, declared that they were now quite ready to govern
themselves, the capitalists held on to their markets as an eagle holds
on to its prey, and, throwing off their apostolic mask, defended their
annexations with fire and sword. They said they would fight to the last
drop of their blood for “the integrity of the Empire”; and they did
in fact pay many thousands of hungry men to fight to that extremity.
In spite of them half of North America broke loose, after a war which
left a volcano of hatred that is still smouldering and winning Chicago
elections after a century of American independence. Roman Catholic
Ireland, South Africa, and Egypt have extorted self-government from us.
India is doing the same. But they do not thank us for it, knowing how
loth our Capitalism was to let them go.
On the other hand look at Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We did
not dare coerce them after our failure in North America. We provide a
costly fleet gratuitously to protect their shores from invasion. We
give them preferences in trade whilst allowing them to set up heavy
protective duties against us. We allow them to be represented at
international congresses as if they were independent nations. We even
allow them access to the King independently of the London Cabinet. The
result is that they hang on to us with tyrannical devotion, waving
the Union Jack as enthusiastically as the Americans wave the Stars
and Stripes. And this is not because they are of our own race. The
Americans were that; yet they broke away; so were the Irish and their
leaders. The French Canadians, who are of the same race with us only
in the sense that we all belong to the human race, cling to us just
as hard. They all follow us to war so boldly that we begin to have
misgivings as to whether someday they may not make us follow them to
war. The last land to strike for independence of the British Empire may
be Protestant England herself, with Ulster and Scotland for allies, and
the Irish Free State heading her Imperialist opponents.
But Capitalism can be depended on to spoil all these reconciliations
and loyalties. True, we no longer exploit colonies capitalistically:
we allow them to do it for themselves, and to call the process
self-government. Whilst we persisted in governing them they blamed
us for all the evils Capitalism brought upon them; and they finally
refused to endure our government. When we left them to govern
themselves they became less and less hostile to us. But the change
always impoverishes them, and leaves them in comparative disorder.
The capitalistic evils for which they blamed us still oppress them.
Their self-government is more tyrannical than our alien government
ever dared to be. Their new relation to the Imperial State becomes
more dangerously strained than the old relation, precisely as the
relation of England to Germany was more dangerously strained in
1913 than the relation of England to Ireland. The most liberal
allowance of self-government cannot reconcile people as long as their
capitalists are competing for markets. Nationalism may make Frenchmen
and Englishmen, Englishmen and Irishmen, savage enemies when it is
infringed. Frenchmen and Irishmen laid their own countries waste to get
rid of English rule. But Capitalism makes all men enemies all the time
without distinction of race, color, or creed. When all the nations have
freed themselves Capitalism will make them fight more furiously than
ever, if we are fools enough to let it.
Have you ever seen the curiosity called a Prince Rupert’s Drop? It
is a bead of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you
break off the tiniest corner the whole bead flies violently to bits.
Europe was like that in 1914. A handful of people in Serbia committed
a murder, and the next moment half Europe was murdering the other
half. This frightful condition of internal strain and instability was
not set up by human nature: it was, I repeat, intensely repugnant to
human nature, being a condition of chronic terror that at last became
unbearable, like that of a woman who commits suicide because she can
no longer endure the dread of death. It was set up by Capitalism.
Capitalism, you will say, is at bottom nothing but covetousness; and
covetousness is human nature. That is true; but covetousness is not
the whole of human nature; it is only a part, and one that vanishes
when it is satisfied, like hunger after a meal, up to which point it
is wholesome and necessary. Under Capitalism it becomes a dread of
poverty and slavery, which are neither wholesome nor necessary. And,
as we have just seen, capital is carried by its own nature beyond the
control of both human covetousness and human conscience, marching on
blindly and automatically, until we find on the one hand the masses
of mankind condemned to poverty relieved only by horrible paroxysms
of bloodshed, and on the other a handful of hypertrophied capitalists
gasping under the load of their growing millions, and giving it away
in heaps in a desperate attempt, partly to get rid of it without
being locked up as madmen for throwing it into the sea, and partly to
undo, by founding Rockefeller institutes and Carnegie libraries, and
hospitals and universities and schools and churches, the effects of the
welter of ignorance and poverty produced by the system under which it
has accumulated on their hands. To call these unfortunate billionaires
monsters of covetousness in the face of their wild disgorgings (to say
nothing of their very ordinary portraits) is silly. They are rather to
be compared to the sorcerer’s apprentice who called up a demon to fetch
a drink for him, and, not knowing the spell for stopping him when he
had brought enough, was drowned in an ocean of wine.
42
HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY
I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in
the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control.
To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big
things like empires and their wars to little familiar things. Take pins
for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my
wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I
will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important
to women.
There was a time when pinmakers could buy the material; shape it; make
the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to market or to your
door and sell it to you. They had to know three trades: buying, making,
and selling; and the making required skill in several operations. They
not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could
do it. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for a
farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman’s dress allowance was called
pin money.
By the end of the eighteenth century Adam Smith boasted that it took
eighteen men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and
passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a
whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The
most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how
it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they
were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pinmakers,
you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilization
when its effect was so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that
by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing
but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it
is said, could turn out nearly five thousand pins a day each; and thus
pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer
because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere
machines doing their work without intelligence, and being fed by the
spare food of the capitalist as an engine is fed with coals and oil.
That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well
as a poet, complained that “wealth accumulates, and men decay”.
Nowadays Adam Smith’s eighteen men are as extinct as the diplodocus.
The eighteen flesh-and-blood machines are replaced by machines of
steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them
into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the
exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how
to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker
in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent and skilful
and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we
have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single
pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on
to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so
recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to
persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal a pin.
Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been
greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether
we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and
degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the
ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution
of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old ways;
for if the saving of time by modern machinery were equally divided
among us, it would set us all free for higher work than pinmaking or
the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that pins are now made
by men and women who cannot make anything by themselves, and could not
arrange between themselves to make anything even in little bits. They
are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their
day’s work until it has all been arranged for them by their employers,
who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay
other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker’s
directions.
The same is true of clothes. Formerly the whole work of making clothes,
from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and
washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the
men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this
day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left
of all this but the sheep-shearing; and even that, like the milking
of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a
sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not
only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are as likely as not
to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and
clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at a
shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and
silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and
other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or
how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly
anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The
people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them
are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own
clothes.
Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance
of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused
them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and
encyclopedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the
books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their
information from other books, what they tell us is from twenty to fifty
years out of date, and unpractical at that. And of course most of us
are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about
it: what we need is a cinema to take our minds off it and feed our
imagination.
It is a funny place, this world of Capitalism, with its astonishing
spread of ignorance and helplessness, boasting all the time of its
spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of
property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to
make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells
them, none of them having the least notion of how it is that they find
people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And
when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux
and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more
intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything
else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties
if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated
newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive;
but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more
or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.
Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays
myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I
see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion
and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of Capitalism as
the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women
are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as
far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been
formed in the cinema, I realize that I had better stop writing plays
for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with
those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.
43
DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW
You must not conclude from what I have just said that I grudge the
people their amusements. I have made most of my money by amusing
them. I recognize more clearly than most people that not only does
all work and no play make Jill a dull girl, but that she works so
that she may be able to enjoy life as well as to keep herself from
dying of hunger and exposure. She wants, and needs, leisure as well
as wages. But breadwinning must come before charabancs and cinemas. I
have the strongest sympathy, as I daresay you have, with the French
gentleman who said that if he could have the luxuries of life he could
do without the necessities; but unfortunately Nature does not share
our sympathy, and ruthlessly puts breadwinning first on pain of death.
The French gentleman is less important than the women who are asking
for an eight-hour working day, because, though what they are really
asking for is for a few hours more leisure when they have rested and
slept, cooked and fed and washed up, yet they know that leisure must be
worked for, and that no woman can shirk her share of the work except by
putting it on some other woman and cutting short _her_ leisure.
Therefore when I say that Capitalism has reduced our people to a
condition of abject helplessness and ignorance in their productive
capacity as workers, you cannot reassure me by pointing out that
factory girls are no fools when it comes to gossiping and amusing
themselves; that they are resourceful enough to learn lip reading in
the weaving-sheds, where the banging of the looms makes it impossible
to hear each other speak; that their dances and charabanc excursions
and whist drives and dressing and wireless concerts stimulate and
cultivate them to an extent unknown to their grandmothers; that
they consume frightful quantities of confectionery; and that they
limit their families to avoid too much mothering. But all this is
consumption, not production. When they are engaged in producing these
amusements: when they take the money for the tickets at the pay-boxes,
or do some scrap of the work of making a charabanc, or wind the wire
on a coil for broadcasting, they are mere machines, taking part in a
routine without knowing what came before or what is to follow.
In giving all the work to one class and all the leisure to another as
far as the law will let it, the Capitalist system disables the rich
as completely as the poor. By letting their land and hiring out their
spare money (capital) to others, they can have plenty of food and fun
without lifting their little fingers. Their agents collect the rent
for the land, and lodge it in the bank for them. The companies which
have hired their spare money lodge the half-yearly hire (dividends)
in the same way. Bismarck said of them that they had only to take a
pair of scissors and cut off a coupon; but he was wrong: the bank does
even that for them; so that all they have to do is to sign the cheques
with which they pay for everything. They need do nothing but amuse
themselves; and they would get their incomes just the same if they
did not do even that. They can only plead that their ancestors worked
productively, as if everybody’s ancestors had not worked productively,
or as if this were any excuse for their not following their ancestors’
excellent example. We cannot live on the virtues of our grandmothers.
They may have farmed their own land, and invented the ways in which
their spare money was applied to the land to make them richer; but when
their successors found that all this trouble would be taken for them by
others, they simply let the land and put out their spare money for hire
(invested it).
Some of our great landholders inherit their land from feudal times,
when there were no factories nor railways, and when towns were so
small that they were walled in as gardens are now. In those days the
landholders, with the king at their head, had to raise armies and
defend the country at their own cost. They had to make the laws and
administer them, doing military work, police work, and government work
of all sorts. Henry IV, who died of overwork, found to his cost how
true it was in those days that the greatest among us must be servant
to all the rest. Nowadays it is the other way about: the greatest is
she to whom all the rest are servants. All the chores and duties of
the feudal barons are done by paid officials. In country places they
may still sit on the Bench as unpaid magistrates; and there remains
the tradition that military service as officers is proper for their
sons. A few of them, with the help of solicitors and agents, manage
the estates on which they actually live, or allow their wives to do
it. But these are only vestiges of a bygone order, maintained mostly
by rich purchasers of estates who are willing to take a little trouble
to be ranked as country gentlemen and county ladies. There are always
newly enriched folk who have this vanity for a while, and will buy
the estate of a real country gentleman to take on his position in the
country. But at any moment our landed gentry, whether they are so by
descent or purchase, can sell their country houses and parks, and
live anywhere they please in the civilized world without any public
duties or responsibilities. Sooner or later they all do so, thus
breaking the only link that binds them to the old feudal aristocracy
save their names and titles. For all the purposes of the real world
of today there is no longer a feudal aristocracy: it is merged in the
industrial capitalist class, with which it associates and intermarries
without distinction, money making up for everything. If it be still
necessary to call the rich an ocracy of any kind, they must be called
a plutocracy, in which the oldest ducal estate and the newest fortune
made in business are only forms of capital, imposing no public duties
on the owner.
Now this state of things may seem extremely jolly for the plutocracy
from the point of view of those who are so overworked and underamused
that they can imagine nothing better than a life that is one long
holiday; but it has the disadvantage of making the plutocrats as
helpless as babies when they are left to earn their own living. You
know that there is nothing more pitiable on earth within the limits
of good health than born ladies and gentlemen suddenly losing their
property. But have you considered that they would be equally pitiable
if their property were thrown on their own hands to make what they
could of it? They would not know how to farm their lands or to work
their mines and railways or to sail their ships. They would perish
surrounded by what Dr Johnson called “the potentiality of growing rich
beyond the dreams of avarice”. Without the hungry they would have to
say “I cannot dig: to beg (even if I knew how) I am ashamed”. The
hungry could do without them, and be very much the better for it; but
they could not do without the hungry.
Yet most of the hungry, left to themselves, would be quite as helpless
as the plutocrats. Take the case of a housemaid, familiar to the
intelligent lady who can afford to keep one. A woman may be a very
good housemaid; but you have to provide the house for her and manage
the house before she can set to work. Many excellent housemaids, when
they marry, make a poor enough job of their own housekeeping. Ask them
to manage a big hotel, which employs dozens of housemaids, and they
will think you are laughing at them: you might as well ask the porter
at the Bank of England to manage the bank. A bricklayer may be a very
good bricklayer; but he cannot build a house nor even make the bricks
he lays. Any laborer can lay a plank across a stream, or place a row of
stepping-stones in it; but just ask him to build a bridge, whether it
be the simplest sort of canal bridge or a gigantic construction like
the Forth Bridge! You might as well ask your baby to make its cot and
knit its jumper, or your cook to design and construct a kitchen range
and water supply.
This helplessness gets more and more complete as civilization advances.
In villages you may still find carpenters and blacksmiths who can make
things. They can even choose and buy their materials, and then sell
the finished article. But in the cities on which our existence now
depends you find multitudes of workers and plutocrats who cannot make
anything; do not know how anything is made; and are so inept at buying
and selling that without fixed-price-shops they would perish.
44
THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE
And now, if the landlords and capitalists can neither make anything
nor even tell others how to make it; and if the workers can do nothing
until they are told what to do, how does the world get on? There must
be some third class standing between the propertied class on the one
hand and the propertyless class on the other, to lease the land and
hire the capital and tell the workers what to do with them.
There is. You can see for yourself that there is a middle class which
does all the managing and directing and deciding work of the nation,
besides carrying on the learned and literary and artistic professions.
Let us consider how this class arose, and how it is continually
recruited from the capitalist families.