culminated in the increase of the miners’ daily working hours from
seven to eight. It is said that the miners want a seven hours working
day. This is the wrong way to put it. What the miners want is not seven
hours mining but seventeen hours off, out of which Nature will take at
least ten for her occasions, and locomotion another. Thus the miner,
by rigidly economizing his time, cutting out all loafing, and being
fortunate in the weather and season, might conceivably manage to have
six hours of effective leisure out of the twenty-four on the basis of
seven hours earning and eleven hours for sleep, recreation, loafing
and locomotion. And it is this six hours of liberty that he wants to
increase. Even when the immediate object of his clamor for shorter
hours of work is only a mask for his real intention of working as long
as before but receiving overtime pay (half as much again) for the last
hour, his final object is to obtain more money to spend on his leisure.
The pieceworker, the moment the piecework rate enables him to earn as
much in three or four days as he has been accustomed to earn in a week,
is as likely as not to take two or three days off instead of working
as long as before for twice as much money. He wants leisure more than
money.
But the conclusive instance is that of property. Women desire to be
women of property because property secures to them the maximum of
leisure. The woman of property need not get up at six in the morning
to light the fire. She need not prepare her husband’s breakfast nor
her own. She need not wash-up nor empty the slops nor make the beds.
She need not do the marketing, nor any shopping except the sort she
enjoys. She need not bother more about her children than she cares
to. She need not even brush her own hair; and if she must still eat
and sleep and wash and move from place to place, these operations
are made as luxurious as possible. She can count on at least twelve
hours leisure every day. She may work harder at trying on new dresses,
hunting, dancing, visiting, receiving, bridge, tennis, mountain
climbing, or any other hobby she may have, than a laborer’s wife works
at her compulsory housekeeping; but she is doing what she likes all
the time, and not what she must. And so, having her fill of liberty,
she is usually an ardent supporter of every political movement that
protects her privilege, and a strenuous and sometimes violently
abusive opponent of every political movement that threatens to curtail
her leisure or reduce the quantity of money at her disposal for its
enjoyment. She clings to her position because it gives her the utmost
possible liberty; and her grievance is that she finds it difficult to
obtain and retain domestic servants because, though she offers them
higher wages and better food and lodging and surroundings than they
can secure for themselves as industrial employees, she also offers
them less freedom. Their time, as they say, is never their own except
for occasional evenings out. Formerly women of all classes, from
governesses to scullery maids, went into domestic service because the
only alternative was rough work in unbearably coarse company, and
because, with comparatively gentle dispositions, they were for the most
part illiterate and ignorant. Nowadays, being imprisoned in schools
daily for at least nine years, they are no longer illiterate; and there
are many occupations open to them (for instance, in city offices) that
were formerly reserved for men. Even in rough employment the company
is not so rough as it used to be; besides, women of gentle nurture
are no longer physically disabled for them by the dress and habits
that made the Victorian woman half an invalid. A hundred years ago a
housemaid was so different from a herring-gutter or a ragpicker that
she was for all business purposes an animal of another species. Today
they are all “young ladies” in their leisure hours; and the single fact
that a housemaid has less leisure than an industrial employee makes it
impossible to obtain a housemaid who is not half imbecile in a factory
town, and not easy to get one in a fishing port.
It is the same with men. But do not conclude that every woman and every
man desires freedom above all things. Some people are very much afraid
of it. They are so conscious that they cannot fend for themselves
either industrially or morally that they feel that the only safe
condition for them is one of tutelage, in which they will always have
someone to tell them not only what to do but how to behave. Women of
this kind seek domestic service, and men military service, not in spite
of the forfeiture of their freedom but because of it. Were it not for
this factor in the problem it would be harder to get domestic servants
and soldiers than it is. Yet the ideal of the servant and soldier is
not continual tutelage and service: it is tutelage relieved by an
occasional spree. They both want to be as free as they dare. Again, the
very last thing the ordinary industrial male worker wants is to have to
think about his work. That is the manager’s job. What he wants to think
about is his play. For its sake he wants his worktime to be as short,
and his playtime as long, as he can afford. Women, from domestic
necessity and habit, are more accustomed to think about their work than
men; for a housewife must both work and manage; but she also is glad
when her work is over.
The great problem of the distribution of the national income thus
becomes also a problem of the distribution of necessary work and the
distribution of leisure or liberty. And this leisure or liberty is what
we all desire: it is the sphere of romance and infinite possibilities,
whilst worktime is the sphere of cut and dried compulsory reality. All
the inventions and expedients by which labor is made more productive
are hailed with enthusiasm, and called progress, because they make
more liberty possible for us. Unfortunately, we distribute the leisure
gained by the invention of the machines in the most absurd way that can
be conceived. Take your woman of property whom we have just discussed,
with her fifteen hours leisure out of the twenty-four. How does she
obtain that leisure? Not by inventing anything, but by owning machines
invented by somebody else and keeping the leisure they produce all
to herself, leaving those who actually work the machines with no
more leisure than they had before. Do not blame her: she cannot help
herself, poor lady! that is Capitalist law.
Look at it in the broader case of the whole nation. Modern methods of
production enable each person in the nation to produce much more than
they need consume to keep themselves alive and reproduce themselves.
That means that modern methods produce not only a national fund of
wealth but a national fund of leisure or liberty. Now just as you can
distribute the wealth so as to make a few people monstrously rich
whilst leaving all the rest as poor as before, you can distribute the
leisure in such a way as to make a few people free for fifteen hours
a day whilst the rest remain as they were, with barely four hours to
dispose of as they please. And this is exactly what the institution of
private property has done, and why a demand for its abolition and for
the equal distribution of the national leisure or liberty among the
whole population has arisen under the banner of Socialism.
Let us try to make a rough picture of what would happen if leisure, and
consequently productive work, were equally distributed. Let us pretend
that if we all worked four hours a day for thirtyfive years each of us
could live as well as persons with at least a thousand a year do now.
Let us assume that this state of things has been established by general
agreement, involving a compromise between the people who want to work
only two hours and live on a five-hundred-a-year scale and those who
want to work four hours and live twice as expensively!
The difficulty then arises that some kinds of work will not fit
themselves into instalments of four hours a day. Suppose you are
married, for example. If your husband is in business there is no
trouble for him. He does every day what he now does on Saturday: that
is, begins at nine and knocks off at one. But what about your work?
The most important work in the world is that of bearing and rearing
children; for without that the human race would presently be extinct.
All women’s privileges are based on that fact. Now a woman cannot be
pregnant for four hours a day, and normal for the rest of it. Nor
can she nurse her infant for four hours and neglect it until nine
next morning. It is true that pregnancy does not involve complete and
continuous disablement from every other productive activity: indeed, no
fact is better established by experience than that any attempt to treat
it as such is morbid and dangerous. As some writers inelegantly express
it, it is not a whole time job. Nursing is much more continuously
exacting, as children in institutions who receive only what ignorant
people call necessary attention mostly die, whilst home children who
are played with and petted and coddled and tossed and sung-to survive
with a dirty rag or two for clothing, and a thatched cabin with one
room and a clay floor for habitation.
A four hours working day, then, does not mean that everybody can begin
work at nine and leave off at one. Pregnancy and nursing are only
items in the long list of vitally important occupations that cannot be
interrupted and resumed at the sound of a hooter. It is possible in
a factory to keep a continuous process going by having six shifts of
workers to succeed oneanother during the twentyfour hours, so that each
shift works no more than four hours; but a ship, being a home as well
as a workplace, cannot accommodate six crews. Even if we built warships
big enough to hold 5000 and carry food for them, the shifts could not
retire from Jutland battles at the end of each spell of four hours. Nor
is such leisure as is possible on board ship the equivalent of shore
leisure, as the leisured passengers, with their silly deck games, and
their agonized scamperings fore and aft for exercise know only too well.
Then there are the jobs that cannot be done in shifts because they
must be done by the same person throughout with a continuance that
stretches human endurance to the utmost limit. A chemist or physicist
watching an experiment, an astronomer watching an eclipse, a doctor or
nurse watching a difficult case, a Cabinet minister dealing with news
from the front during a war, a farmer saving his hay in the face of an
unfavorable weather forecast, or a body of scavengers clearing away a
snowfall, must go on if necessary until they drop, four hours or no
four hours. Handel’s way of composing an oratorio was to work at it
night and day until it was finished, keeping himself awake as best he
might. Explorers are lucky if they do not die of exhaustion, as many of
them have, from prolonged effort and endurance.
A four hour working day therefore, though just as feasible as an eight
hour day is now, or the five day week which is the latest cry, is in
practice only a basis of calculation. In factory and office work, and
cognate occupations out of doors, it can be carried out literally. It
may mean short and frequent holidays or long and rare ones. I do not
know what happens to you in this respect; but in my own case, in spite
of the most fervent resolutions to order my work more sensibly, and of
the fact that an author’s work can as a rule quite well be divided into
limited daily periods, I am usually obliged to work myself to the verge
of a complete standstill and then go away for many weeks to recuperate.
Eight or nine months overwork, and three or four months change and
overleisure, is very common among professional persons.
Then there is a vital difference between routine work and what is
called creative or original work. When you hear of a man achieving
eminence by working sixteen hours a day for thirty years, you may
admire that apparently unnatural feat; but you must not conclude that
he has any other sort of ability: in fact you may quite safely put
him down as quite incapable of doing anything that has not been done
before, and doing it in the old way. He never has to think or invent.
To him today’s work is a repetition of yesterday’s work. Compare him,
for example, with Napoleon. If you are interested in the lives of such
people you are probably tired of hearing how Napoleon could keep on
working with fierce energy long after all the members of his council
were so exhausted that they could not even pretend to keep awake. But
if you study the less often quoted memoirs of his secretary Bourrienne
you will learn that Napoleon often moodled about for a week at a time
doing nothing but play with children or read trash or waste his time
helplessly. During his enforced leisure in St Helena, which he enjoyed
so little that he probably often exclaimed, after Cowper’s Selkirk,
“Better live in the midst of alarms than dwell in this horrible place”,
he was asked how long a general lasted. He replied, “Six years”. An
American president is not expected to last more than four years. In
England, where there is no law to prevent a worn-out dotard from being
Prime Minister, even so imposing a parliamentary figure as Gladstone
had to be practically superannuated when he tried to continue into the
eighteen-nineties the commanding activities which had exhausted him
in the seventies. To descend to more commonplace instances you cannot
make an accountant work as long as a bookkeeper, nor a historian as
continuously as a scrivener or typist, though they are performing the
same arithmetical and manual operations. One will be tired out in three
hours: the other can do eight without turning a hair with the help of a
snack or a cup of tea to relieve her boredom occasionally. In the face
of such differences you cannot distribute work equally and uniformly in
quantities measured by time. What you can do is to give the workers, on
the whole, equal leisure, bearing in mind that rest and recuperation
are not leisure, and that periods of necessary recuperation in idleness
must be counted as work, and often very irksome work, to those who have
been prostrated by extraordinary efforts excessively prolonged.
The long and short of it is that freedom with a large F, general and
complete, has no place in nature. In practice the questions that
arise in its name are, first, how much leisure can we afford to allow
ourselves? and second, how far can we be permitted to do what we like
when we are at leisure? For instance, may we hunt stags on Dartmoor?
Some of us say no; and if our opinion becomes law, the liberty of
the Dartmoor Hunt will be curtailed to that extent. May we play golf
on Sundays during church hours? Queen Elizabeth would not only have
said no, but made churchgoing compulsory, and thereby have made
Sunday a half-holiday instead of a whole one. Nowadays we enjoy the
liberty of Sunday golf. Under Charles II, on the other hand, women
were not allowed to attend Quaker meetings, and were flogged if they
did. In fact attendance at any sort of religious service except that
of the Church of England was a punishable offence; and though it was
not possible to enforce this law fully against Roman Catholics and
Jews, its penalties were ruthlessly inflicted on George Fox and John
Bunyan, though King Charles himself sympathized with them. It cost us
a revolution to establish comparative “liberty of conscience”; and
we can now build and attend handsome temples of The Church of Christ
Scientist, and form fantastic Separatist sects by the score if it
pleases us.
On the other hand many things that we were free to do formerly we may
not do now. In England until quite lately, as in Italy to this day,
when a woman married, all her property became her husband’s; and if
she had the ill luck to marry a drunken blackguard, he could leave her
to make a home for herself and her children by her own work, and then
come back and seize everything she possessed and spend it in drink
and debauchery. He could do it again and again, and sometimes did.
Attempts to remedy this were denounced by happily married pious people
as attacks on the sanctity of the marriage tie; and women who advocated
a change were called unwomanly; but at last commonsense and decency
prevailed; and in England a married woman is now so well protected from
plunder and rapine committed by her husband that a Married Men’s Rights
agitation has begun.
Outside the home a factory owner might and did work little children to
death with impunity, and do or leave undone anything he liked in his
factory. Today he can no more do what he likes there than you can do
what you like in Westminster Abbey. He is compelled by law to put up in
a conspicuous place a long list of the things he must do and the things
he may not do, whether he likes it or not. And when he is at leisure he
is still subject to laws that restrict his freedom and impose duties
and observances on him. He may not drive his motor car faster than
twenty miles an hour (though he always does), and must drive on the
left and pass on the right in England, and drive to the right and pass
on the left in France. In public he must wear at least some clothing,
even when he is taking a sunbath. He may not shoot wild birds or catch
fish for sport except during certain seasons of the year; and he may
not shoot children for sport at all. And the liberty of women in these
respects is limited as the liberty of men is.
I need not bother you with more instances: you can think of dozens for
yourself. Suffice it that without leisure there is no liberty, and
without law there is no secure leisure. In an ideal free State, the
citizen at leisure would find herself headed off by a police officer
(male or female) whenever she attempted to do something that her
fellow citizens considered injurious to them, or even to herself; but
the assumption would be that she had a most sacred right to do as she
pleased, however eccentric her conduct might appear, provided it was
not mischievous. It is the contrary assumption that she must not do
anything that she is not expressly licensed to do, like a child who
must come to its mother and ask leave to do anything that is not in the
daily routine, that destroys liberty. There is in British human nature,
and I daresay in human nature in general, a very strong vein of pure
inhibitiveness. Never forget the children in Punch, who, discussing
how to amuse themselves, decided to find out what the baby was doing
and tell it it mustnt. Forbiddance is an exercise of power; and we
all have a will to personal power which conflicts with the will to
social freedom. It is right that it should be jealously resisted when
it leads to acts of irresponsible tyranny. But when all is said, the
people who shout for freedom without understanding its limitations, and
call Socialism or any other advance in civilization slavery because it
involves new laws as well as new liberties, are as obstructive to the
extension of leisure and liberty as the more numerous victims of the
Inhibition Complex who, if they could, would handcuff everybody rather
than face the risk of having their noses punched by somebody.
70
RENT OF ABILITY
Having cleared up the Liberty question by a digression (which must
have been a relief) from the contemplation of capital running away
with us, perhaps another digression on the equally confused question
of the differences in ability between one person and another may not
be out of place; for the same people who are in a continual scare
about losing the liberty which they have mostly not got are usually
much troubled about these differences. Years ago I wrote a small book
entitled Socialism and Superior Brains which I need not repeat here,
as it is still accessible. It was a reply to the late William Hurrell
Mallock, who took it as a matter of course, apparently, that the proper
use of cleverness in this world is to take advantage of stupid people
to obtain a larger share than they of the nation’s income. Rascally
as this notion is, it is too common to be ignored. The proper social
use of brains is to increase the amount of wealth to be divided, not
to grab an unfair share of it; and one of the most difficult of our
police problems is to prevent this grabbing, because it is a principle
of Capitalism that everyone shall use not only her land and capital,
but her cunning, to obtain as much money for herself as possible.
Capitalism indeed compels her to do so by making no other provision for
the clever ones than what they can make out of their cleverness.
Let us begin by taking the examples which delight and dazzle us: that
is, the possessors of some lucrative personal talent. A lady with a
wonderful voice can hire a concert room to sing in, and admit nobody
who does not pay her. A gentleman able to paint a popular picture can
hang it in a gallery with a turnstile at the door, passable only on
payment. A surgeon who has mastered a dangerous operation can say to
his patient, in effect, “Your money or your life”. Giants, midgets,
Siamese twins, and two-headed singers exhibit themselves for money as
monsters. Attractive ladies receive presents enough to make them richer
than their plainer or more scrupulous neighbors. So do fascinating male
dancing partners. Popular actresses sometimes insist on being pampered
and allowed to commit all sorts of follies and extravagances on the
ground that they cannot keep up their peculiar charm without them; and
the public countenances their exactions fondly.
These cases need not worry us. They are very scarce: indeed if they
became common their power to enrich would vanish. They do not confer
either industrial power or political privilege. The world is not ruled
by prima donnas and painters, two-headed nightingales and surgical
baronets, as it is by financiers and industrial organizers. Geniuses
and monsters may make a great deal of money; but they have to work
for it: I myself, through the accident of a lucrative talent, have
sometimes made more than a hundred times as much money in a year as
my father ever did; but he, as an employer, had more power over the
lives of others than I. A practical political career would stop my
professional career at once. It is true that I or any other possessor
of a lucrative talent or charm can buy land and industrial incomes with
our spare money, and thus become landlords and capitalists. But if that
resource were cut off, by Socialism or any other change in the general
constitution of society, I doubt whether anyone would grudge us our
extra spending money. An attempt by the Government to tax it so as to
reduce us to the level of ordinary mortals would probably be highly
unpopular, because the pleasure we give is delightful and widespread,
whilst the harm we do by our conceit and tantrums and jealousies and
spoiltness is narrowly limited to the unfortunate few who are in
personal contact with us. A prima donna with a rope of pearls ten feet
long and a coronet of Kohinoors does not make life any worse for the
girl with a string of beads who, by buying a five shilling ticket,
helps to pay for the pearls: she makes it better by enchanting it.
Besides, we know by our own experience, not only of prima donnas but
of commercial millionaires, that regular daily personal expenditure
cannot be carried beyond that of the richest class to be found in
the community. Persons richer than that, like Cecil Rhodes, Andrew
Carnegie, and Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite (to name only the
dead), cannot spend their incomes, and are forced to give away money
in millions for galleries and museums which they fill with magnificent
collections and then leave to the public, or for universities, or
churches, or prizes, or scholarships, or any sort of public object that
appeals to them. If equality of income were general, a freak income
here and there would not enable its possessor to live differently from
the rest. A popular soprano might be able to fill the Albert Hall for
100 nights in succession at a guinea a head for admission; but she
could not obtain a lady’s maid unless ladies’ maids were a social
institution. Nor could she leave a farthing to her children unless
inheritance were a social institution, nor buy an unearned and as yet
unproduced income for them unless Capitalism were a social institution.
Thus, though it is always quite easy for a Government to checkmate
any attempt of an individual to become richer than her neighbors by
supertaxing her or directly prohibiting her methods, it is unlikely
that it will ever be worth while to do so where the method is the
exercise of a popular personal talent.