convention that whenever the Government is defeated on a division
in the House, it must “appeal to the country”: that is, the Cabinet
Ministers must resign their offices, and the King dissolve the
Parliament and have a new one elected. But this leads to such absurd
consequences when the question at issue is unimportant and the vote
taken when many members are absent, and at all times it reduces the
rank and file of the members to such abject voting machines, that if
it were carried out to the bitter end members might as well stay at
home and vote by proxy on postcards to the Whips, as shareholders do
at company meetings. Such slavery is more than even parliamentary
flesh and blood, to say nothing of brains, can stand; consequently
Governments are forced to allow their followers some freedom by
occasionally declaring that the measure under discussion is “not a
Party Question”, and “taking off the Whips”, which means that members
may vote as they please without fear of throwing their Party out of
office and bringing on a General Election. This practice is bound to
grow as members become more independent and therefore more apt to split
up into groups. The tendency already is for Governments to resign only
when they are defeated on an explicit motion that they possess or have
forfeited the confidence of the House, except, of course, when the
division is on one of those cardinal points of policy which, if decided
against the Government, would involve an appeal to the country in any
case. No doubt the Whips will continue to threaten weak-minded members
that the slightest exercise of independence will wreck the Government;
and those whose election expenses are paid out of party funds will
find that when the Party pays the piper the Whips call the tune;
but I think you may take it (in case you should think of going into
Parliament) that the House of Commons is becoming less and less like a
stage on which an opera chorus huddles round a few haughty soloists,
never opening its hundred mouths except to echo these principals and
give them time to breathe. It is already evident that the more women
there are in the House, the more refractory it will be to the logical
extremes of party discipline, and the sooner party questions will
become the exceptions and open questions the rule.
Here, however, I must warn you of another possibility. The two Houses
of Parliament are as much out of date as instruments for carrying
on the public business of a modern community as a pair of horses
for drawing an omnibus. In 1920 two famous Socialist professors of
political science, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, published a Constitution
for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. In that Constitution
the notion of going on with our ancient political machinery at
Westminster is discarded as impracticable, and its present condition
described as one of creeping paralysis. Instead, it is proposed that we
should have two parliaments, one political and the other industrial,
the political one maintaining the cabinet system, and the industrial
one the municipal system. I cannot go into the details of such a change
here: you will find them in the book. I mention it just to prepare you
for such happenings. Certain it is that if our old Westminster engine
is left as it is to cope with the modern developments of Capitalism,
Capitalism will burst it; and then something more adequate must be
devised and set up, whether we like it or not.
73
DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY
You now see how essential it is to the working of our parliamentary
system, under a Labor or any other Government, that the Cabinet should
have a united party behind it, large enough to outvote any other party
in the House. You see also that whereas a party only barely large
enough to do this is held together by the fear of defeat, a party
so large that the whole House belongs to it ceases to be a party at
all, and is sure to split up into groups which have to be combined
into blocks of groups before a Cabinet can be formed and government
effectively carried on. In the nineteenth century we were all sure that
this could never occur. In the twentieth it is as certain as anything
of the kind can be that the Proletariat will extend its present
invasion of Parliament until it achieves in effect complete conquest.
Therefore we had better examine a few questions on which the apparent
unanimity in the Labor Party is quite delusive.
To interest you I am tempted to begin with the question of the virtual
exclusion of women from certain occupations. This morning I received
a letter from the Government College of Lahore in the Punjab which
contains the following words: “The number of people in India speaking
Urdu of one kind or another is about 96,000,000. Out of this number
46,000,000 are women who are mostly in purdah and do not go out.” Now I
dare not tell you, even if I knew, how many members of the Labor Party
believe that the proper place for women is in purdah. There are enough,
anyhow, to start a very pretty fight with those who would remove all
artificial distinctions between men and women. But I must pass over
this because, vital as it is, it will not split the Labor Party more
than it has split the older parties. If men were the chattel slaves
of women in law (as some of them are in fact), or women the chattel
slaves of men in fact (as married women used to be in law), that would
not affect the change from Capitalism to Socialism. Let us confine
ourselves to cases that would affect it.
It is fundamental in Socialism that idleness shall not be tolerated
on any terms. And it is fundamental in Trade Unionism that the worker
shall have the right at any moment to down tools and refuse to do
another stroke until his demands are satisfied. It is impossible to
imagine a flatter contradiction. And the question of the right to
strike is becoming more acute every year. We have seen how the little
businesses have grown into big businesses, and the big businesses into
Trusts that control whole industries. But the Trade Unions have kept up
with this growth. The little unions have grown into big unions; and the
big unions have combined into great federations of unions; consequently
the little strikes have become terribly big strikes. A modern strike
of electricians, a railway strike, or a coal strike can bring these
industries, and dozens of others which depend on them, to a dead stop,
and cause unbearable inconvenience and distress to the whole nation.
To make strikes more effective, a new sort of Trade Union has
developed, called an Industrial Union to distinguish it from the
old Craft Unions. The Craft Union united all the men who lived by a
particular craft or trade: the carpenters, the masons, the tanners
and so on. But there may be men of a dozen different crafts employed
in one modern industry: for instance, the building industry employs
carpenters, masons, bricklayers, joiners, plumbers, slaters, painters,
and various kinds of laborers, to say nothing of the clerical staffs;
and if these are all in separate unions a strike by one of them cannot
produce the effect that a strike of all of them would. Therefore unions
covering the whole industry without regard to craft (Industrial Unions)
have been formed. We now have such bodies as the Transport Workers’
Union and the National Union of Railway Workers, in which workers from
dozens of different trades are combined. They can paralyze the whole
industry by a strike. In the nineteenth century very few strikes or
lock-outs were big enough to be much noticed by the general public.
In the twentieth there have already been several which were national
calamities. The Government has been forced to interfere either by
trying to buy the disputants off with subsidies, or to persuade the
employers and the strikers to come to some agreement. But as the
Government has no power either to force the men to go back to work or
the employers to grant their demands, its intervention is not very
effective, and never succeeds until a great deal of mischief has
been done. It has been driven at last to attempt a limitation of the
magnitude of strikes by an Act of 1927 forbidding “sympathetic” strikes
and lock-outs, lock-outs being included to give the Act an air of fair
play. But as this Act does not forbid the formation of industrial
unions, nor take away the right to strike or lock-out when a grievance
can be established (as of course it always can), it is only a gesture
of impotent rage, useless as a remedy, but significant of the growing
indisposition of the nation to tolerate big strikes. They are civil
wars between Capital and Labor in which the whole country suffers.
The Socialist remedy for this dangerous nuisance is clear. Socialism
would impose compulsory social service on all serviceable citizens,
just as during the war compulsory military service was imposed on all
men of military age. When we are at war nowadays no man is allowed to
plead that he has a thousand a year of his own and need not soldier for
a living. It does not matter if he has fifty thousand: he has to “do
his bit” with the rest. In vain may he urge that he is a gentleman,
and does not want to associate with common soldiers or be classed
with them. If he is not a trained officer he has to become a private,
and possibly find that his sergeant has been his valet, and that his
lieutenant, his major, his colonel, and his brigadier are respectively
his tailor, his bootmaker, his solicitor, and the manager of his
favourite golfing hotel. The penalty of neglect to discharge his duties
precisely and punctually even at the imminent risk of being horribly
wounded or blown to bits, is death. Now the righteousness of military
service is so questionable that the man who conscientiously refuses to
perform it can justify himself by the test proposed by the philosopher
Kant: that is, he can plead that if everybody did the same the world
would be much safer, happier, and better.
A refusal of social service has no such excuse. If everybody refused
to work, nine-tenths of the inhabitants of these islands would be dead
within a month; and the rest would be too weak to bury them before
sharing their fate. It is useless for a lady to plead that she has
enough to live on without work: if she is not producing her own food
and clothing and lodging other people must be producing them for her;
and if she does not perform some equivalent service for them she is
robbing them. It is absurd for her to pretend that she is living on the
savings of her industrious grandmother; for not only is she alleging a
natural impossibility, but there is no reason on earth why she should
be allowed to undo by idleness the good that her grandmother did by
industry. Compulsory social service is so unanswerably right that the
very first duty of a government is to see that everybody works enough
to pay her way and leave something over for the profit of the country
and the improvement of the world. Yet it is the last duty that any
government will face. What governments do at present is to reduce the
mass of the people by armed force to a condition in which they must
work for the capitalists or starve, leaving the capitalists free from
any such obligation, so that capitalists can not only be idle but
produce artificial overpopulation by withdrawing labor from productive
industry and wasting it in coddling their idleness or ministering
to their vanity. This our Capitalist Governments call protecting
property and maintaining personal liberty; but Socialists believe that
property, in that sense, is theft, and that allowable personal liberty
no more includes the right to idle than the right to murder.
Accordingly, we may expect that when a Labor House of Commons is
compelled to deal radically with some crushing national strike,
the Socialists in the Labor Party will declare that the remedy is
Compulsory Social Service for all ablebodied persons. The remnants of
the old parties and the non-Socialist Trade Unionists in the Labor
Party will at once combine against the proposal, and clamor for a
subsidy to buy off the belligerents instead. Subsidy or no subsidy,
the Trade Unionists will refuse to give up the right to strike, even
in socialized industries. The strike is the only weapon a Trade Union
has. The employers will be equally determined to maintain their right
to lock-out. As to the landlords and capitalists, their dismay can
be imagined. They will be far more concerned than the employers and
financiers, because employers and financiers are workers: to have
to work is no hardship to them. But the real ladies and gentlemen,
who know no trade, and have been brought up to associate productive
work with social inferiority, imprisonment in offices and factories,
compulsory early rising, poverty, vulgarity, rude manners, roughness
and dirt and drudgery, would see in compulsory social service the end
of the world for them and their class, as indeed it happily will be,
in a sense. The condition of many of them would be so pitiable (or
at least they would imagine it to be so) that they would have to be
provided with medical certificates of disability until they died out;
for, after all, it is not their fault that they have been brought up to
be idle, extravagant, and useless; and when that way of life (which,
by the way, they often make surprisingly laborious) is abolished, they
may reasonably claim the same consideration as other people whose
occupation is done away with by law. We can afford to be kind to them.
However that may be, it is certain that the useless classes will join
the Trade Unionists in frantic opposition to Compulsory Social Service.
If the Labor ministers, being, as they now mostly are, Socialists,
attempt to bring in a Compulsory Service Bill, they may be defeated
by this combination, in which case there would be a general election
on the question; and at this general election the contest would
not be between the Labor Party and the Capitalists, but between the
Conservative or Trade Unionist wing of the Labor Party, which would
be called the Right, and the Socialist wing, which would be called
the Left. So that even if the present Conservatives be wiped out of
Parliament there may still be two parties contending for power; and the
Intelligent Woman may be canvassed to vote Right or Left, or perhaps
White or Red, just as she is now canvassed to vote Conservative or
Labor.
74
RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS
However, two parties would not hurt the House of Commons, as it is
worked by the division of the members into two sets, one carrying on
the government and the other continually criticizing it and trying to
oust it and become itself the Government. This two-division system
is not really a two-party system in the sense that the two divisions
represent different policies: they may differ about nothing but the
desire for office. From the proletarian point of view the difference
between Liberals and Conservatives since 1832 has been a difference
between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But this did not matter, because
the essence of the arrangement is that the Government shall be
unsparingly and unceasingly criticized by a rival set of politicians
who are determined to pick every possible hole in its proceedings.
Government and Opposition might be called Performance and Criticism,
the performers and critics changing places whenever the country is
convinced that the critics are right and the performers wrong.
The division of the House of Commons into two parties with different
policies suits this situation very well. But its division into half a
dozen parties would not suit it at all, and might, as we have seen,
deadlock parliamentary government altogether. Now there is abundant
material for a dozen parties in the British proletariat. Take the
subject of religion, inextricably bound up with the parliamentary
question of education in public elementary schools. It is unlikely that
a Proletarian House of Commons will suffer the nation’s children to go
on being taught Capitalist and Imperialist morality in the disguise of
religion; and yet, the moment the subject is touched, what a hornet’s
nest is stirred up! Parents are inveterate proselytizers: they take
it as a matter of course that they have a right to dictate their
children’s religion. This right was practically undisputed, unless
the parents were professed atheists, when all children who had any
schooling went either to Biblical private schools or to public schools
and universities where the established religion was the State religion.
Nowadays Unitarian schools, Quaker schools, Roman Catholic schools,
Methodist schools, Theosophist schools, and even Communist schools may
be chosen by parents and guardians (not by the children) to suit their
own private religious eccentricities.
But when schooling is made a national industry, and the Government sets
up schools all over the country, and imposes daily attendance on the
huge majority of children whose parents cannot afford to send their
children to any but the State school, a conflict arises over the souls
of the children. What religion is to be taught in the State school?
The Roman Catholics try to keep their children out of the State school
(they must send them to some school or other) by subscribing money
themselves to maintain Roman Catholic schools alongside the State
schools: and the other denominations, including the Church of England,
do the same. But unless they receive State aid: that is, money provided
by taxing and rating all citizens indiscriminately, they cannot afford
to take in all the children, or to keep up to a decent standard the
schooling of those whom they do take in. And the moment it is proposed
to give them money out of the rates and taxes, the trouble begins.
Rather than pay rates to be used in making Roman Catholics or even
Anglo-Catholics of little English children, Nonconformist Protestant
ratepayers will let themselves be haled before the magistrates and
allow their furniture to be sold up. They would go to the stake if that
were the alternative to paying Peter’s Pence to the Scarlet Woman and
setting children’s feet in the way to eternal damnation. For it is not
in Ireland alone that Protestants and Roman Catholics believe each that
the other will spend eternity immersed in burning brimstone. Church of
England zealots hold that belief even more convincedly about village
Dissenters than about Roman Catholics.
The opinions of the parties are so irreconcilable, and the passion
of their hostility so fierce, that the Government, when it is once
committed to general compulsory education, either directly in its own
schools or by subsidies to other schools, finds itself driven to devise
some sort of neutral religion that will suit everybody, or else forbid
all mention of the subject in school. An example of the first expedient
is the Cowper-Temple clause in the Education Act of 1870, which ordains
that the Bible shall be read in schools without reference to any creed
or catechism peculiar “to any one denomination”. The total prohibition
expedient is known as Secular Education, and has been tried extensively
in Australia.
The Cowper-Temple plan does not meet the case of the Roman Catholics,
who do not permit indiscriminate access to the Bible, nor of the
Jews, who can hardly be expected to accept the reading of the New
Testament as religious instruction. Besides, if the children are to
learn anything more than the three Rs, they must be taught Copernican
astronomy, electronic physics, and evolution. Now it is not good
sense to lead a child at ten o’clock to attach religious importance
to the belief that the earth is flat and immovable, and the sky a
ceiling above it in which there is a heaven furnished like a king’s
palace, and, at eleven, that the earth is a sphere spinning on its
axis and rushing round the sun in limitless space with a multitude of
other spheres. Nor can you reasonably order that during the religious
instruction hour the children are to be informed that all forms of life
were created within six days, including the manufacture of a full-grown
woman out of a man’s rib, and, when the clock strikes, begin explaining
that epochs of millions of years were occupied in experiments in the
production of various forms of life, from prodigious monsters to
invisibly small creatures, culminating in a very complicated and by no
means finally satisfactory form called Woman, who specialized a variety
of herself, in some respects even less satisfactory, called Man. This
would not matter if the teacher might explain that as the astronomy
and biology of the Bible are out of date, and we think we know better
nowadays, they have been discarded like the barbarous morality of the
Israelitish kings and the idol to which they made human sacrifices.
But such explanations would frustrate the Cowper-Temple clause, under
which the children were to be left to make what they could of the
contradictions between their religious and secular instruction. They
usually solve it by not thinking about it at all, provided their
parents let them alone on the subject, which is not always the case.
As to the alternative of giving no religious instruction, and confining
school teaching to what is called Secular or Matter-of-Fact Education,
it is not really a possible plan, because children must be taught
conduct as well as arithmetic, and the ultimate sanctions of conduct
are metaphysical, by which imposing phrase I mean that from the
purely matter-of-fact point of view there is no difference between a
day’s thieving and a day’s honest work, between placid ignorance and
the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, between habitual lying
and truth-telling: they are all human activities or inactivities,
to be chosen according to their respective pleasantness or material
advantages, and not to be preferred on any other grounds. When you
find your children acting, as they often do (like their elders), quite
secularly, and lying, stealing, or idling, you have to give them
either a matter-of-fact or a religious reason for ceasing to do evil
and learning to do well. The matter-of-fact reason is temptingly easy
to manufacture. You can say “If I catch you doing that again I will
clout your head, or smack your behind, or send you to bed without your
supper, or injure you in some way or other that you will not like”.
Unfortunately these secular reasons, though easy to devise and apply,
and enjoyable if you have a turn that way, always seem avoidable by
cunning concealment and a little additional lying. You know what
becomes of the pseudo-morality produced by whipping the moment your
back is turned. And what is your own life worth if it has to be spent
spying on your children with a cane in your hand? Hardly worth living,
I should say, unless you are one of the people who love caning as
others love unnatural sensualities, in which case you may fall into the
hands of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which
will make short work of your moral pretensions. In any case you will
find yourself strongly tempted to whack your children, not really to
compel them to conduct themselves for their own good, but to conduct
themselves in the manner most convenient to yourself, which is not
always nor even often the same thing.