have children. Now an income which is comfortable for two people
may not be enough for three or four children in addition, to say
nothing of possibly twice or thrice that number. And when the three
or four children grow up and marry and have three or four children
each, what meant riches for the grandparents may mean poverty for the
grandchildren.
To avoid this, propertied families may arrange that only the eldest
son shall inherit the property, leaving the younger sons to shift for
themselves, and the daughters to marry men of property if they can.
This is called primogeniture. Until 1926 it was the law of the land
in England when the owner of a landed estate died without leaving a
will to the contrary. Where there is no such law, and all the children
inherit equal shares of the parents’ property, as they do among the
peasant proprietors in France, the family must come to an arrangement
of the same kind between themselves, or else sell the property and
leave its owners with a few pounds each that will not last them very
long. Therefore they almost always do agree that the younger children
shall live by working like the hungry, whilst the eldest keeps the
farm and cultivates it. This cannot be done when the property is not
land but capital, and all the members of the family are living on the
interest of hired out spare money. Parents may make wills leaving all
of it or most of it to one son; but they do not do this as a rule; and
sooner or later the property gets divided and divided among children
and other next-of-kin until the inheritors cannot live on their shares.
But please remark that the younger sons who are thus thrown on the
world to earn their living have the tastes and habits and speech and
appearance and education of rich men. They are well connected, as
we say. Their near relations may be peers. Some of them have been
schooled at Eton and Harrow, and have taken degrees at Oxford and
Cambridge. Others have less distinguished connections. Their parents or
grandparents may have made money in business; and they may have gone
to the big city schools, or to day schools, instead of to Eton, and
either to one of the new democratic universities or to no university
at all. Their most important relative may be a mayor or alderman.
But they are educated at secondary as distinguished from elementary
schools; and though not what they themselves call great swells, they
have the manners and appearance and speech and habits of the capitalist
class, are described as gentlemen, and politely addressed by letter as
Esquires instead of plain Misters.
All these propertyless people who have the ways and the culture
of propertied ones have to live by their wits. They go into the
army and navy as officers, or into the upper grades of the civil
service. They become clergymen, doctors, lawyers, authors, actors,
painters, sculptors, architects, schoolmasters, university professors,
astronomers and the like, forming what we call the professional class.
They are treated with special respect socially; but they see successful
men of business, inferior to themselves in knowledge, talent,
character, and public spirit, making much larger incomes. The highest
sorts of mental work are often so unremunerative that it is impossible
to make a living by practising them commercially. Spinoza lived by
grinding lenses, and Rousseau by copying music. Einstein lives by
professorships. Newton lived, not by discovering gravitation and
measuring fluxions, but by acting as Master of the Mint, which other
men could have done as well. Even when a profession is comparatively
lucrative and popular, its gains are restricted by the fact that the
work must all be done by the practitioner’s own hand; for a surgeon
cannot employ a thousand subordinates to deal with a million patients
as a soap king deals with a million customers, nor the President of the
Royal Academy hand over a two thousand guinea portrait sitter to his
secretary. The years of professional success are usually preceded by a
long struggle with scanty means. I myself am held to be a conspicuous
example of success in the most lucrative branch of the literary
profession; but until I was thirty I could not make even a bare living
by my pen. At thirty-eight I thought myself passing rich on six or
seven pounds a week; and even now, when I am seventy, and have achieved
all that can be achieved commercially at my job, I see in the paper
every day, under the heading Wills and Bequests, that the widow of some
successful man of business, wholly unknown to fame, has died leaving a
fortune which reduces my gains to insignificance.
The consequence is that professional men and civil servants, when they
are not incurable old-fashioned snobs who regard trade as beneath the
dignity of their family, and when their sons have no overwhelming
aptitude for one or other of the professions, advise them strongly to
go in for business. The man of business may not have much chance of a
public statue unless he pays for it and presents it to his native town
with a spacious public park attached; and his occupation may be a dry
one in itself, however exciting the prospect of pocketing more and more
money may make it. But he can make profits not only out of his work,
like the surgeon or painter, but out of the work of thousands of others
as well. And his work is not necessarily dry: modern businesses tend to
become more interesting and important, and even more scientific, than
average professional work. Their activities are much more varied: in
fact modern commercial magnates, when they control a dozen different
businesses, become better informed and better developed mentally than
the rank and file of the professions. What is more, they are learning
to snap up the ablest university scholars and civil servants, and
take them into partnership not as office managers but as thinkers,
diplomatists, and commercial scientists. It is in industrially
undeveloped countries that professional men rank as an aristocracy of
learning and intellect: in European centres today commercial society
is a more effective reserve of culture than professional society. When
the professional man or the public servant tells his son that a berth
in the civil service is a blind alley, or doctoring at the call of the
night bell a dog’s life, contrasting them with the unlimited prospects
and the infinite scope for personal initiative in business, he is
recommending the young man to improve on his father’s condition instead
of starting him on the downward path socially.
And what is business in the lump? It is hiring land from landlords and
spare money from capitalists, and employing the hungry to make enough
money out of them day by day to pay the wages for their keep and bring
in a profit as well. Astonishing fortunes can be made in this way by
men and women with the necessary ability and decision who have the
particular sort of pecuniary keenness and pertinacity that business
requires. Even more staggering profits are made sometimes by accident,
the business man hitting by chance on something new that the public
happens to fancy. Millions are made by medicines which injure people’s
health instead of improving it (read Tono-Bungay), and hair restorers
that leave the buyer as bald as before. Articles that nobody needs,
and sham pleasures that give only fatigue and boredom at extravagant
prices, are advertized and advertized until people are beglamored into
thinking they cannot do without them.
But the main scope in business is for honorable and useful activity,
from growing food and building houses and making clothes, or
manufacturing spades and sewing-machines, to laying cables round the
world, and building giant ships to turn the ocean or the air into
a highway. The planning and management and ordering of this gives
employment to able and energetic men who have no property, but have
the education and social address of the propertied class. The educated
who are neither able nor energetic, and who have no professions, find
employment as agents or clerks carrying out the routine and keeping the
accounts of businesses which the able ones have established and are
directing. And the women of their class are forced to live by marrying
them.
In this way we get, between the propertied class and the hungry mass,
a middle class which acts as a sort of Providence to both of them. It
cultivates the land and employs the capital of the property holders,
paying them the rent of their lands and the hire of their spare money
without asking them to lift a finger, and giving the hungry wages to
live on without asking them to think or decide or know or do anything
except their own little bit of the job in hand. The hungry have neither
to buy the material nor to sell the product, neither to organize the
service nor find the customer. Like children they are told what to do,
and fed and lodged and clothed whilst they are doing it, not always
very handsomely perhaps; but at worst they are kept alive long enough
to produce a fresh set of hungry ones to replace them when they are
worn out.
There are always a few cases in which this management is done, not by
descendants of propertied folk, but by men and women sprung from the
hungriest of the hungry. These are the geniuses who know most of the
things that other people have to be taught, and who educate themselves
as far as they need any education. But there are so few of them that
they need not be taken into account. In great social questions we are
dealing with the abilities of ordinary citizens: that is, the abilities
we can depend on everyone except invalids and idiots possessing, and
not with what one man or woman in ten thousand can do. In spite of
several cases in which persons born in poverty and ignorance have risen
to make vast fortunes, to become famous as philosophers, discoverers,
authors, and even rulers of kingdoms, to say nothing of saints and
martyrs, we may take it that business and the professions are closed
to those who cannot read and write, travel and keep accounts, besides
dressing, speaking, behaving, and handling and spending money more or
less in the manner of the propertied classes.
This is another way of saying that until about fifty years ago the
great mass of our people working for weekly wages were as completely
shut out from the professions and from business as if there had been
a law forbidding them on pain of death to attempt to enter them. I
remember wondering when I was a lad at a man who was in my father’s
employment as a miller. He could neither read nor write nor cipher
(that is, do sums on paper); but his natural faculty for calculation
was so great that he could solve instantly all the arithmetical
problems that arose in the course of his work: for instance, if it
were a question of so many sacks of flour at so much a sack, he could
tell you the answer straight off without thinking, which was more
than my father or his clerks could do. But because he did not know
his alphabet, and could not put pen to paper, and had not the speech
and manners and habits and dress without which he would not have
been admitted into the company of merchants and manufacturers, or of
lawyers, doctors, and clergymen, he lived and died a poor employee,
without the slightest chance of rising into the middle class, or the
faintest pretension to social equality with my father. And my father,
though he was propertyless, and worked as a middle class civil servant
and subsequently as a merchant, was not at all proud of being a member
of the middle class: on the contrary, he resented that description,
holding on to his connexion with the propertied class as a younger
son of many former younger sons, and therefore, though unfortunately
reduced to living not very successfully by his wits, a man of family
and a gentleman.
But this was sixty years ago. Since then we have established Communism
in education. If my father’s miller were a boy now, he would go to
school for nine years, whether his parents liked it or not, at the
expense of the whole community; and his mathematical gift would enable
him to win a scholarship that would take him on to a secondary school,
and another scholarship there that would take him to the university
and qualify him for a profession. At the very least he would become an
accountant, even were it only as a bookkeeper or clerk. In any case he
would be qualified for middle class employment and pass into that class.
Now the social significance of this is that the middle class, which
the younger sons and their descendants formerly had all to themselves
as far as the most desirable positions in it were concerned, is now
recruited from the working class as well. These recruits, with no
gentlemanly nonsense about them, are not only better taught than the
boys who go to cheapish middle class schools, but better trained to
face the realities of life. Also the old differences in speech and
dress and manners are much less than they were, partly because the
working class is picking up middle class manners, but much more
because they are forcing their own manners and speech on the middle
class as standards. A man like my father, half a merchant, but ashamed
of it and unable to make up his mind to it, and half a gentleman
without any property to uphold his pretension, would, if he were
a boy nowadays, be beaten hollow in the competition for land, for
capital, and for position in the civil service by the sons of men
whose grandfathers would never have dreamed of presuming to sit down
in his presence. The futile propertyless gentlemen, the unserviceable
and grossly insolent civil servants whom Dickens described, have to be
content nowadays with the refuse of middle class employment. They are
discontented, unhappy, impecunious, struggling with a false position,
borrowing (really begging) from their relatives, and unable to realize,
or unwilling to admit, that they have fallen out of the propertied
class, not into an intermediate position where they have a monopoly of
all the occupations and employments that require a little education
and manners, but right down into the ranks of the hungry, without the
hardening that makes the hungry life bearable.
And what of the daughters? Their business is to get married; and I
can remember the time when there was no other hopeful opening in life
for them. When they failed to find husbands, and no special provision
had been made for them, they became governesses or school teachers
or “companions” or genteel beggars under the general heading of
poor relations. They had been carefully trained to feel that it was
unladylike to work, and still more unladylike to propose marriage to
men. The professions were closed to them. The universities were closed
to them. The business offices were closed to them. Their poverty cut
them off from propertied society. Their ladylikeness cut them off
from the society of working people as poor as themselves, and from
inter-marriage with them. Life was a ghastly business for them.
Nowadays, there are far more careers open to women. We have women
barristers and women doctors in practice. True, the Church is closed
against them, to its own great detriment, as it could easily find
picked women, eloquent in the pulpit and capable in parish management,
to replace the male refuse it has too often to fall back on; but women
can do without ecclesiastical careers now that the secular and civil
services are open. The closing of the fighting services is socially
necessary, as women are far too valuable to have their lives risked
in battle as well as in child-bearing. If ninety out of every hundred
young men were killed we could recover from the loss, but if ninety out
of every hundred young women were killed there would be an end of the
nation. That is why modern war, which is not confined to battle fields,
and rains high explosives and poison gas on male and female civilians
indiscriminately in their peaceful homes, is so much more dangerous
than war has ever been before.
Besides, women are now educated as men are: they go to the universities
and to the technical colleges if they can afford it; and, as Domestic
Service is now an educational subject with special colleges, a woman
can get trained for such an occupation as that of manageress of a hotel
as well as for the practice of law or medicine, or for accountancy
and actuarial work. In short, nothing now blocks a woman’s way
into business or professional life except prejudice, superstition,
old-fashioned parents, shyness, snobbery, ignorance of the contemporary
world, and all the other imbecilities for which there is no remedy
but modern ideas and force of character. Therefore it is no use
facing the world today with the ideas of a hundred years ago, when
it was practically against the law for a lady who was not a genius
to be self-supporting; for if she kept a shop, or even visited at
the house of a woman who kept a shop, she was no lady. I know better
than you (because I am probably much older) that the tradition of
those bad old times still wastes the lives of single gentlewomen to
a deplorable extent; but, for all that, every year sees an increase
in the activities of gentlewomen outside the home in business and
the professions, and even in perilous professional exploration and
adventure with a cinematographic camera in attendance.
This increase is hastened by the gigantic scale of capitalist
production, which, as we have seen, reduces the old household labor
of baking and brewing, spinning and weaving, first to shopping at
separate shops, and then to telephoning the day’s orders to one big
multiple shop. We have seen also how it leads prematurely to Birth
Control, which has reduced the number of children in the middle class
households very notably. Many middle-class women who could formerly
say with truth that there was no end to a woman’s work in the house
are now underworked, in spite of the difficulty of finding servants.
It is conceivable that women may drive men out of many middle class
occupations as they have already driven them out of many city offices.
We are losing the habit of regarding business and the professions as
male employments.
Nevertheless males are in a vast majority in these departments, and
must remain so as long as our family arrangements last, because the
bearing and rearing of children, including domestic housekeeping, is
woman’s natural monopoly. As such, being as it is the most vital of all
the functions of mankind, it gives women a power and importance that
they can attain to in no other profession, and that man cannot attain
to at all. In so far as it is a slavery, it is a slavery to Nature and
not to Man: indeed it is the means by which women enslave men, and thus
create a Man Question which is called, very inappropriately, the Woman
Question. Woman as Wife and Mother stands apart from the development
we are dealing with in this chapter, which is, the rise of a business
and professional middle class out of the propertied class. This is
a sexless development, because when the unmarried daughters, like
the younger sons, become doctors, barristers, ministers in the Free
Churches, managers, accountants, shopkeepers, and clerks under the term
typist (in America stenographer), they virtually leave their sex behind
them, as men do. In business and the professions there are neither men
nor women: economically they are all neuters, as far as that is humanly
possible. The only disadvantage the woman is at in competition with
the man is that the man must either succeed in his business or fail
completely in life, whilst the woman has a second string to her bow in
the possibility of getting married. A young woman who regards business
employment as only a temporary support until she can find an eligible
husband will never master her work as a man must.
45
DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER
At first sight it would seem that the employers must be the most
powerful class in the community, because the others can do nothing
without them. So they were, a hundred years ago. The dominant man
then was not the capitalist nor the landlord nor the laborer, but
the employer who could set capital and land and labor to work. These
employers began as office employees; for business in those days was
mostly on so small a scale that any middle class employee who had
learnt the routine of business as a clerk or apprentice, in his
father’s office or elsewhere, and who could scrape together a few
hundred pounds, could enter into partnership with another thrifty
employee, and set up in almost any sort of business as an employer.
But as spare money accumulated in larger and larger quantity, and
enterprise expanded accordingly, business came to be done on a larger
and larger scale until these old-fashioned little firms found their
customers being taken away from them by big concerns and joint stock
companies who could, with their huge capitals and costly machinery,
not only undersell them, but make a greater profit out of their lower
prices. Women see this in their shopping. They used to buy their
umbrellas at an umbrella shop, their boots at a boot shop, their
books at a book shop, and their lunches-out at a restaurant. Nowadays
they buy them all at the same shop, lunch and all. Huge bazaars like
Selfridge’s and Whiteley’s in London, and the great multiple shops
in the provincial cities, are becoming the only shops where you can
buy anything, because they are taking away the trade of the small
separate shops and ruining the shopkeepers who kept them. These ruined
shopkeepers may think themselves lucky if they get jobs in the multiple
shops as shop assistants, managers of departments, and the like, when
they are not too old for the change.
Sometimes the change is invisible. Certain retail trades have to be
carried on in small shops scattered all over the place. For example,
oil shops, public houses, and tobacconists. These look like separate
small businesses. But they are not. The public houses are tied houses
practically owned in dozens by the brewers. A hundred oil shops or
tobacco shops may belong to a single big company, called a Trust. Just
as the little businesses conducted by a couple of gentlemen partners,
starting with a capital which they counted in hundreds, had to give way
to companies counting their capital in thousands, so these companies
are being forced to combine into Trusts which count their capital in
millions.
These changes involve another which is politically very important.
When the employers had it all their own way, and were in business for
themselves separately and independently, they worked with what we
should call small capitals, and had no difficulty in getting them.
Capital was positively thrown down their throats by the bankers, who,
as we shall see later, have most of the spare money to keep. Those were
the days of arrogant cotton lords and merchant princes. The man who
could manage a business took every penny that was left in the till when
the landlord had had his rent, the capitalist (who was often himself)
his interest, and the employees their wages. If he were a capable man,
what remained for him as profit was enough to make him rich enough to
go into Parliament if he cared to. Sometimes it was enough to enable
him to buy his way into the peerage. Capital being useless and Labor
helpless without him, he was, as an American economist put it, master
of the situation.