Capitalism does a great deal. When it has filled the home markets with
all the common goods the people can afford to pay for out of their
wages, and all the established fashionable luxuries the rich will
buy, it must apply its fresh accumulations of spare money to more
out-of-the-way and hazardous enterprises. It is then that Capitalism
becomes adventurous and experimental; listens to the schemes of hungry
men who are great inventors or chemists or engineers; and establishes
new industries and services like telephones, motor charabancs, air
services, wireless concerts, and so forth. It is then that it begins to
consider the question of harbors, which, as we saw, it would not look
at whilst there was still room for new distilleries. At the present
moment an English company has undertaken to build a harbor at a cost of
a million pounds for a Portuguese island in the Atlantic, and even to
make it a free port (that is, charge no harbor dues) if the Government
of the island lets it collect and keep the customs duties.
The capitalists, though they are very angry when the hungry ask
for Government help of any kind, have no scruples about asking it
for themselves. The railways ask the Government to guarantee their
dividends; the air services ask for large sums from the Government to
help them to maintain their aeroplanes and make money out of them;
the coalowners and the miners between them extort subsidies from the
Government by threatening a strike if they do not get it; and the
Government, under the Trades Facilities Acts, guarantees loans to
private capitalists without securing any share in their enterprises
for the nation, which provides them with capital cheaply, but has to
pay profiteering prices for their goods and services all the same. In
the end there is hardly any conceivable enterprise that can be made
to pay dividends that Capitalism will not undertake as long as it can
find spare money; and when it cannot it is quite ready to extract money
from the Government--that is, to take it forcibly from the people by
taxes--by assuring everyone that the Government can do nothing itself
for the people, who must always come to the capitalists to get it done
for them in return for substantial profits, dividends, and rents. Its
operations are so enormous that it alters the size and meaning of what
we call our country. Trading companies of capitalists have induced
the Government to give them charters under which they have seized
large and populous islands like Borneo, whole empires like India, and
great tracts of country like Rhodesia, governing them and maintaining
armies in them for the purpose of making as much money out of them
as possible. But they have taken care to hoist the British flag, and
make use directly or indirectly, of the British army and navy at the
cost of the British taxpayers to defend these conquests of theirs;
and in the end the British Commonwealth has had to take over their
responsibilities and add the islands and countries they have seized
to what is called the British Empire, with the curious result, quite
unintended by the British people, that the centre of the British
Empire is now in the East instead of in Great Britain, and out of
every hundred of our fellow subjects only eleven are whites, or even
Christians. Thus Capitalism leads us into enterprises of all sorts, at
home and abroad, over which we have no control, and for which we have
no desire. The enterprises are not necessarily bad: some of them have
turned out well; but the point is that Capitalism does not care whether
they turn out well or ill for us provided they promise to bring in
money to the shareholders. We never know what Capitalism will be up to
next; and we never can believe a word its newspapers tell us about its
doings when the truth seems likely to be unpopular.
It is hard to believe that you may wake up one morning, and learn from
your newspaper that the Houses of Parliament and the King have moved
to Constantinople or Baghdad or Zanzibar, and that this insignificant
island is to be retained only as a meteorological station, a bird
sanctuary, and a place of pilgrimage for American tourists. But if
that did happen, what could you do? It would be a perfectly logical
development of Capitalism. And it is no more impossible than the
transfer of the mighty Roman empire from Rome to Constantinople was
impossible. All you could do, if you wished to be in the fashion, or
if your business or that of your husband could be conducted only in
a great metropolitan centre, would be to go east after the King and
Parliament, or west to America and cease to be a Briton.
You need not, however, pack up just yet. But what you really need do
is rid your mind of the notion that mere Conservatism, in its general
sense of a love for the old ways and institutions you were brought
up with, will be of any avail against Capitalism. Capitalism, in its
ceaseless search for investment, its absolute necessity for finding
hungry men to eat its spare bread before it goes stale, breaks through
every barrier, rushes every frontier, swallows every religion, levels
every institution that obstructs it, and sets up any code of morals
that facilitates it, as soullessly as it sets up banks and lays cables.
And you must approve and conform, or be ruined, and perhaps imprisoned
or executed.
68
THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM
Capitalism, then, keeps us in perpetual motion. Now motion is not a bad
thing: it is life as opposed to stagnation, paralysis, and death. It
is novelty as opposed to monotony; and novelty is so necessary to us
that if you take the best thing within your reach (say the best food,
the best music, the best book, the best state of mind, or the best
anything that remains the same always), and if you stick to it long
enough you will come to loathe it. Changeable women, for instance, are
more endurable than monotonous ones, however unpleasant some of their
changes may be: they are sometimes murdered but seldom deserted; and it
is the ups and downs of married life that make it bearable. When people
shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them
how they would like to live in a stationary one and do without change.
Nobody who buys a motor car says “the slower the better”. Motion is
delightful when we can control it, guide it, and stop it when it is
taking us into danger.
Uncontrolled motion is terrible. Fancy yourself in a car which you do
not know how to steer and cannot stop, with an inexhaustible supply of
petrol in the tank, rushing along at fifty miles an hour on an island
strewn with rocks and bounded by cliff precipices! That is what living
under Capitalism feels like when you come to understand it. Capital is
running away with us; and we know that it has always ended in the past
by taking its passengers over the brink of the precipice at the foot of
which are strewn the ruins of empires. The desperately pressing present
problem for all governments is how to get control of this motion; make
safe highways for it; and steer it along those highways. If only we
could stop it whilst we sit down and think! But no: the car will not
stop: on the contrary it goes faster and faster as capital accumulates
in greater and greater quantities, and as we multiply our numbers. One
statesman after another snatches at the wheel and tries his hand. Kings
try their hands; dictators try their hands; democratic prime ministers
try their hands; committees and Soviets try their hands; and we look
hopefully to them for a moment, imagining that they have got control
because they do it with an air of authority, and assure us that it will
be all right if only we will sit quiet. But Capital runs away with them
all; and we palpitate between relief when our ungovernable vehicle
blunders into a happy valley, and despair when we hear the growl of the
waves at the foot of the cliffs grow louder and louder instead of dying
away in the distance. Blessed then are those who do not know and cannot
think: to them life seems a joyride with a few disagreeable incidents
that must be put up with. They sometimes make the best rulers, just as
the best railway signalman is he who does not feel his responsibility
enough to be frightened out of his wits by it. But in the long run
civilization depends on our governments gaining an intelligent control
of the forces that are running away with Capitalism; and for that an
understanding of them is necessary. Mere character and energy, much
as we admire them, are positively mischievous without intellect and
knowledge.
Our present difficulty is that nobody understands except a few students
whose books nobody else reads, or here and there a prophet crying in
the wilderness and being either ignored by the press or belittled as
a crank. Our rulers are full of the illusions of the money market,
counting £5 a year as £100. Our voters have not got even so far as
this, because nine out of ten of them, women or men, have no more
experience of capital than a sheep has of a woollen mill, though the
wool comes off its own back.
But between the government and the governed there is a very important
difference. The governments do not know how to govern; but they know
that government is necessary, and that it must be paid for. The voters
regard government as a tyrannical interference with their personal
liberty, and taxation as the plunder of the private citizen by the
officials of a tyrannous state. Formerly this did not matter much,
because the people had no votes. Queen Elizabeth, for instance, told
the common people, and even the jurymen and the Knights of the Shires
who formed the Parliament in her time, that affairs of State were not
their business, and that it was the grossest presumption on their part
to have any opinion of their own on such matters. If they attempted
to argue with her she threw them into prison without the smallest
hesitation. Yet even she could not extract money enough from them in
taxes to follow up her political successes. She could barely hold her
own by being quite right about the incompetence of the commoners and
knights, and being herself the most competent person of her time. These
two advantages made her independent of the standing armies by which
other despots maintained themselves. She could depend on the loyalty
of her people because she was able, as we say, to deliver the goods.
When her successors attempted to be equally despotic without being able
to deliver the goods, one of them was beheaded, and the other driven
out of the country. Cromwell rivalled her in ability; but though he
was a parliament man, he was finally driven to lay violent hands on
Parliament, and rule by armed force.
As to the common people, the view that their poverty and political
ignorance disqualified them for any share in the government of the
country was accepted until within my own lifetime. Within my father’s
lifetime the view that to give every man a vote (to say nothing of
every woman) was ridiculous and, if acted on, dangerous, seemed a
matter of course not only to Tories like the old Duke of Wellington,
but to extreme revolutionaries like the young poet Shelley. It seems
only the other day that Mr Winston Churchill declared that Labor is not
fit to govern.
Now you probably agree with Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Wellington,
Shelley, and Mr Winston Churchill. At all events if you do you are
quite right. For although Mr Ramsay MacDonald easily convinced the
country that a Labor Government can govern at least as well as either
the Liberal or Conservative Governments who have had the support of
Mr Churchill, the truth is that none of them can govern: Capitalism
runs away with them all. The hopes that we founded on the extension of
the franchise, first to working men and finally to women, which means
in effect to all adults, have been disappointed as far as controlling
Capitalism is concerned, and indeed in most other respects too. The
first use the women made of their votes was to hurl Mr MacDonald out of
Parliament and vote for hanging the Kaiser and making Germany pay for
the war, both of them impossibilities which should not have imposed on
even a male voter. They got the vote mainly by the argument that they
were as competent politically as the men; and when they got it they
at once used it to prove that they were just as incompetent. The only
point they scored at the election was that the defeat of Mr MacDonald
by their vote in Leicester shewed that they were not, as the silliest
of their opponents had alleged, sure to vote for the best-looking man.
What the extension of political power to the whole community
(Democracy, as they call it) has produced is a reinforcement of the
popular resistance to government and taxation at a moment when nothing
but a great extension of government and taxation can hope to control
the Gadarene rush of Capitalism towards the abyss. And this has
produced a tendency which is the very last that the old Suffragists
and Suffragettes dreamt of, or would have advocated if they had dreamt
of it: namely, a demand for the abandonment of parliamentary government
and the substitution of a dictatorship. In desperation at the failure
of Parliament to rescue industry from the profiteers, and currency
from the financiers (which means rescuing the livelihood of the people
from the purely predatory side of Capitalism), Europe has begun to
clamor for political disciplinarians to save her. Victorious France,
with her currency in the gutter, may be said to be advertising for a
Napoleon or a political Messiah. Italy has knocked its parliament down
and handed the whip to Signor Mussolini to thrash Italian democracy
and bureaucracy into some sort of order and efficiency. In Spain the
king and the military commander-in-chief have refused to stand any more
democratic nonsense, and taken the law into their own hands. In Russia
a minority of devoted Marxists maintain by sheer force such government
as is possible in the teeth of an intensely recalcitrant peasantry. In
England we should welcome another Cromwell but for two considerations.
First, there is no Cromwell. Second, history teaches us that if there
were one, and he again ruled us by military force after trying every
sort of parliament and finding each worse than the other, he would be
worn out or dead after a few years; and then we should return like the
sow to her wallowing in the mire and leave the restored profiteers to
wreak on the corpse of the worn-out ruler the spite they dared not
express whilst he was alive. Thus our inability to govern ourselves
lands us in such a mess that we hand the job over to any person strong
enough to undertake it; and then our unwillingness to be governed at
all makes us turn against the strong person, the Cromwell or Mussolini,
as an intolerable tyrant, and relapse into the condition of Bunyan’s
Simple, Sloth, and Presumption the moment his back is turned or his
body buried. We clamor for a despotic discipline out of the miseries of
our anarchy, and, when we get it, clamor out of the severe regulation
of our law and order for what we call liberty. At each blind rush from
one extreme to the other we empty the baby out with the bath, learning
nothing from our experience, and furnishing examples of the abuses of
power and the horrors of liberty without ascertaining the limits of
either.
Let us see whether we cannot clear up this matter of government versus
liberty a little before we give up the human race as politically
hopeless.
69
THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY
Once for all, we are not born free; and we never can be free. When all
the human tyrants are slain or deposed there will still be the supreme
tyrant that can never be slain or deposed, and that tyrant is Nature.
However easygoing Nature may be in the South Sea Islands, where you can
bask in the sun and have food for the trouble of picking it up, even
there you have to build yourself a hut, and, being a woman, to bear and
rear children with travail and trouble. And, as the men are handsome
and quarrelsome and jealous, and, having little else to do except make
love, combine exercise with sport by killing oneanother, you have to
defend yourself with your own hands.
But in our latitudes Nature is a hard taskmaster. In primitive
conditions it was only by working strenuously early and late that we
could feed and clothe and shelter ourselves sufficiently to be able
to survive the rigors of our climate. We were often beaten by famine
and flood, wolves and untimely rain and storms; and at best the women
had to bear large families to make up for the deaths of children. They
had to make the clothes of the family and bake its bread as well as
cook its meals. Such leisure as a modern woman enjoys was not merely
reprehensible: it was impossible. A chief had to work hard for his
power and privileges as lawgiver, administrator, and chief of police;
and had even his most pampered wife attempted to live as idly and
wastefully as thousands of ordinary ladies now do with impunity,
he would certainly have corrected her with a stick as thick as his
thumb, and been held not only guiltless, but commendably active in the
discharge of his obvious social duty. And the women were expected to
do the like by their daughters instead of teaching them, as Victorian
ladies did, that to do anything useful is disgraceful, and that if, as
inevitably happens, something useful has to be done, you must ring for
a servant and by no means do it yourself.
Now commercial civilization has been at root nothing more than the
invention of ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less labor. Men of
science invent because they want to discover Nature’s secrets; but such
popular inventions as the bow and spear, the spade and plough, the
wheel and arch, come from the desire to make work easier out of doors.
Indoors the spinning wheel and loom, the frying-pan and poker, the
scrubbing brush and soap, the needle and safety pin, make domestic work
easier. Some inventions make the work harder, but also much shorter
and more intelligent, or else they make operations possible that were
impossible before: for instance, the alphabet, Arabic numerals, ready
reckoners, logarithms, and algebra. When instead of putting your back
into your work you put the horse’s or ox’s back into it, and later
on set steam and explosive spirits and electricity to do the work of
the strained backs, a state of things is reached in which it becomes
possible for people to have less work than is good for them instead of
more. The needle becomes a sewing machine, the sweeping brush becomes
a vacuum cleaner, and both are driven from a switch in the wall by an
engine miles away instead of being treadled and wielded by foot and
hand. In Chapter 42 we had a glance at the way in which we lost the
old manual skill and knowledge of materials and of buying and selling,
first through division of labor (a very important invention), and
then through machinery. If you engage a servant today who has been
trained at a first-rate institution in the use of all the most modern
domestic machinery, and take her down to a country house, I will not go
quite so far yet as to warn you that though she knows how to work the
buttons on an automatic electric lift or step on and off an escalator
without falling on her nose, she cannot walk up or downstairs; but it
may come to that before long. Meanwhile you will have on your hands a
supercivilized woman whom you will be glad to replace by a girl from
the nearest primitive village, if any primitive villages are left in
your neighborhood.
Let us, however, confine ourselves to the bearing of all this on that
pet topic of the leisured class, our personal liberty.
What is liberty? Leisure. What is leisure? Liberty. If you can at any
moment in the day say “I can do as I please for the next hour” then for
that hour you are at liberty. If you say “I must now do such and such
things during the next hour whether I like it or not” then you are not
at liberty for that hour in spite of Magna Carta, the Declaration of
Rights (or of Independence), and all the other political title-deeds of
your so-called freedom.
May I, without being too intrusive, follow you throughout your daily
routine? You are wakened in the morning, whether you like it or not,
either by a servant or by that nerve-shattering abomination an alarum
clock. You must get up and light the fire and wash and dress and
prepare and eat your breakfast. So far, no liberty. You simply must.
Then you have to make your bed, wash up the breakfast things, sweep
and tidy-up the place, and tidy yourself up, which means that you must
more or less wash and re-dress your person until you are presentable
enough to go out and buy fresh supplies of food and do other necessary
shopping. Every meal you take involves preparation, including cooking,
and washing up afterwards. In the course of these activities you will
have to travel from place to place, which even in the house often means
treadmill work on the stairs. You must rest a little occasionally. And
finally you must go to sleep for eight hours.
In addition to all this you must earn the money to do your shopping
and pay your rent and rates. This you can do in two main ways. You can
work in some business for at least eight hours a day, plus the journeys
to and from the place where you work. Or you can marry, in which case
you will have to do for your husband and children all the preparation
of meals and marketing that you had to do for yourself, to wash and
dress the children until they are able to wash and dress themselves,
and to do all the other things that belong to the occupation of wife
and mother, including the administration of most of the family income.
If you add up all the hours you are forced to spend in these ways,
and subtract them from the twenty-four hours allowed you by Nature to
get through them in, the remainder will be your daily leisure: that
is, your liberty. Historians and journalists and political orators
may assure you that the defeat of the Armada, the cutting off of King
Charles’s head, the substitution of Dutch William for Scottish James
on the throne, the passing of the Married Women’s Property Acts, and
the conquest by the Suffragettes of Votes for Women, have set you free;
and in moments of enthusiasm roused by these assurances you may sing
fervently that Britons never never will be slaves. But though all
these events may have done away with certain grievances from which you
might be suffering if they had not occurred, they have added nothing to
your leisure and therefore nothing to your liberty. The only Acts of
Parliament that have really increased liberty: that is, added to the
number of minutes in which a woman’s time is her own, are the Factory
Acts which reduced her hours of industrial labor, the Sunday Observance
Acts which forbid commercial work on every seventh day, and the Bank
Holiday Acts.
You see, then, that the common trick of speaking of liberty as if we
were all either free or slaves, is a foolish one. Nature does not allow
any of us to be wholly free. In respect of eating and drinking and
washing and dressing and sleeping and the other necessary occasions
of physical life, the most incorrigible tramp, sacrificing every
decency and honesty to freedom, is as much a slave for at least ten or
eleven hours a day as a constitutional king, who has to live an almost
entirely dictated life. An enslaved negress who has six hours a day
to herself has more liberty than a “free” white woman who has only
three. The white woman is free to go on strike, and the negress is not;
but the negress can console herself by her freedom to commit suicide
(fundamentally much the same thing), and by pitying the Englishwoman
because, having so much less liberty, she is only poor white trash.
Now in our desire for liberty we all sympathize with the tramp. Our
difference from him, when we do differ, is that some of us want leisure
so that we may be able to work harder at the things we like than
slaves, except under the most brutal compulsion, work at the things
they must do. The tramp wastes his leisure and is miserable: we want to
employ our leisure and be happy. For leisure, remember, is not rest.
Rest, like sleep, is compulsory. Genuine leisure is freedom to do as we
please, not to do nothing.