the penalties were not exacted; the Morris wall-papers remained; and
the illicit teas continued; but the incident illustrates the extent
to which individual liberty has been cut down under Capitalism for
good as well as for evil. Where women are concerned it is assumed
that they must be protected to a degree that is unnecessary for men
(as if men were any more free in a factory than women); consequently
the regulations are so much stricter that women are often kept out of
employments to which men are welcomed. Besides the factory inspector
there are the Commissioners of Inland Revenue inquiring into your
income and making you disgorge a lot of it, the school attendance
visitors taking possession of your children, the local government
inspectors making you build and drain your house not as you please
but as they order, the Poor Law officers, the unemployment insurance
officers, the vaccination officers, and others whom I cannot think of
just at present. And the tendency is to have more and more of them
as we become less tolerant of the abuses of our capitalist system.
But if you study these interferences with our liberties closely you
will find that in practice they are virtually suspended in the case
of people well enough off to be able to take care of themselves: for
instance, the school attendance officer never calls at houses valued
above a certain figure, though the education of the children in them is
often disgracefully neglected or mishandled. Poor Law officers would
not exist if there were no poor, nor unemployment insurance officers
if we all got incomes whether we were employed or not. If nobody could
make profits by sweating, nor compel us to work in uncomfortable,
unsafe, insanitary factories and workshops, a great deal of our
factory regulations would become not only superfluous but unbearably
obstructive.
Then consider the police: the friends of the honest woman and the
enemies and hunters of thieves, tramps, swindlers, rioters, confidence
tricksters, drunkards, and prostitutes. The police officer, like the
soldier who stands behind him, is mainly occupied today in enforcing
the legalized robbery of the poor which takes place whenever the wealth
produced by the labor of a productive worker is transferred as rent
or interest to the pockets of an idler or an idler’s parasite. They
are even given powers to arrest us for “sleeping out”, which means
sleeping in the open air without paying a landlord for permission to
do so. Get rid of this part of their duties, and at the same time of
the poverty which it enforces, with the mass of corruption, thieving,
rioting, swindling, and prostitution which poverty produces as surely
as insanitary squalor produces smallpox and typhus and you get rid of
the least agreeable part of our present police activity, with all that
it involves in prisons, criminal courts, and jury duties.
By getting rid of poverty we shall get rid of the unhappiness and
worry which it causes. To defend themselves against this, women,
like men, resort to artificial happiness, just as they resort to
artificial insensibility when they have to undergo a painful operation.
Alcohol produces artificial happiness, artificial courage, artificial
gaiety, artificial self-satisfaction, thus making life bearable for
millions who would otherwise be unable to endure their condition. To
them alcohol is a blessing. Unfortunately, as it acts by destroying
conscience, self-control, and the normal functioning of the body,
it produces crime, disease, and degradation on such a scale that its
manufacture and sale are at present prohibited by law throughout the
United States of America, and there is a strong movement to introduce
the same prohibition here.
The ferocity of the resistance to this attempt to abolish artificial
happiness shows how indispensable it has become under Capitalism.
A famous American Prohibitionist was mobbed by medical students in
broad daylight in the streets of London, and barely escaped with the
loss of one eye, and his back all but broken. If he had been equally
famous for anything else, the United States Government would have
insisted on the most ample reparation, apology, and condign punishment
of his assailants; and if this had been withheld, or even grudged,
American hotheads would have clamored for war. But for the enemy of the
anæsthetic that makes the misery of the poor and the idleness of the
rich tolerable, turning it into a fuddled dream of enjoyment, neither
his own country nor the public conscience of ours could be moved even
to the extent of a mild censure on the police. It was evident that had
he been torn limb from limb the popular verdict would have been that it
served him jolly well right.
Alcohol, however, is a very mild drug compared with the most
effective modern happiness producers. These give you no mere sodden
self-satisfaction and self-conceit: they give you ecstasy. It is
followed by hideous wretchedness; but then you can cure that by taking
more and more of the drug until you become a living horror to all about
you, after which you become a dead one, to their great relief. As to
these drugs, not even a mob of medical students, expressly educated
to make their living by trading in artificial health and happiness,
dares protest against strenuous prohibition, provided they may still
prescribe the drug; nevertheless the demand is so great in the classes
who have too much money and too little work that smuggling, which is
easy and very profitable, goes on in spite of the heaviest penalties.
Our efforts to suppress this trade in artificial happiness has already
landed us in such interferences with personal liberty that we are not
allowed to purchase many useful drugs for entirely innocent purposes
unless we first pay (not to say bribe) a doctor to prescribe it.
Still, prohibition of the fiercer drugs has the support of public
opinion. It is the prohibition of alcohol that rouses such opposition
that the strongest governments shrink from it in spite of overwhelming
evidence of the increase in material well-being produced by it wherever
it has been risked. You prove to people that as teetotallers they will
dwell in their own houses instead of in a frowsy tenement, besides
keeping their own motor car, having a bank account, and living ten
years longer. They angrily deny it; but when you crush their denials
by unquestionable American statistics they tell you flatly that they
had rather be happy for thirty years in a tenement without a car or
a penny to put in the bank than be unhappy for forty years with all
these things. You find a wife distracted because her husband drinks
and is ruining her and her children; yet when you induce him to take
the pledge, you find presently that she has tempted him to drink again
because he is so morose when he is sober that she cannot endure living
with him. And to make his drunkenness bearable she takes to drink
herself, and lives happily in shameless degradation with him until they
both drink themselves dead.
Besides, the vast majority of modern drinkers do not feel any the worse
for it, because they do not miss the extra efficiency they would enjoy
on the water waggon. Very few people are obliged by their occupations
to work up to the extreme limit of their powers. Who cares whether
a lady gardener or a bookkeeper or a typist or a shop assistant is
a teetotaller or not, provided she always stops well short of being
noticeably drunk? It is to the motorist or the aeroplane pilot that a
single glass of any intoxicant may make the difference between life and
death. What would be sobriety for a billiard marker would be ruinous
drunkenness for a professional billiard player. The glass of stimulant
that enlivens a routine job is often dropped because when the routineer
plays golf “to keep herself fit” she finds that it spoils her putting.
Thus you find that you can sometimes make a worker give up alcohol
partly or wholly by giving her more leisure. She finds that a woman who
is sober enough to do her work as well as it need be done is not sober
enough to play as well as she would like to do it. The moment people
are in a position to develop their fitness, as they call it, to the
utmost, whether at work or at play, they begin to grudge the sacrifice
of the last inch of efficiency which alcohol knocks off, and which
in all really fine work makes the difference between first rate and
second rate. If this book owed any of its quality to alcohol or to any
other drug, it might amuse you more; but it would be enormously less
conscientious intellectually, and therefore much more dangerous to your
mind.
If you put all this together you will see that any social change
which abolishes poverty and increases the leisure of routine workers
will destroy the need for artificial happiness, and increase the
opportunities for the sort of activity that makes people very jealous
of reducing their fitness by stimulants. Even now we admit that the
champion athlete must not drink whilst training; and the nearer we get
to a world in which everyone is in training all the time the nearer we
shall get to general teetotalism, and to the possibility of discarding
all those restrictions on personal liberty which the prevalent dearth
of happiness and consequent resort to pernicious artificial substitutes
now force us to impose.
As to such serious personal outrages as compulsory vaccination and
the monstrous series of dangerous inoculations which are forced
on soldiers, and at some frontiers on immigrants, they are only
desperate attempts to stave off the consequences of bad sanitation and
overcrowding by infecting people with disease when they are well and
strong in the hope of developing their natural resistance to it by
exercise sufficiently to prevent them from catching it when they are
ailing and weak. The poverty of our doctors forces them to support such
practices in the teeth of all experience and disinterested science; but
if we get rid of poor doctors and overcrowded and insanitary dwellings
we get rid of the diseases which terrify us into these grotesque witch
rituals; and no woman will be forced to expose her infant to the risk
of a horrible, lingering, hideously disfiguring death from generalized
vaccinia lest it should catch confluent smallpox, which, by the way,
is, on a choice between the two evils, much to be preferred. Dread
of epidemics: that is, of disease and premature death, has created a
pseudo-scientific tyranny just as the dread of hell created a priestly
tyranny in the ages of faith. Florence Nightingale, a sensible woman
whom the doctors could neither humbug nor bully, told them that what
was wrong with our soldiers was dirt, bad food, and foul water: in
short, the conditions produced by war in the field and poverty in the
slum. When we get rid of poverty the doctors will no longer be able to
frighten us into imposing on ourselves by law pathogenic inoculations
which, under healthy conditions, kill more people than the diseases
against which they pretend to protect them. And when we get rid of
Commercialism, and vaccines no longer make dividends for capitalists,
the fairy tales by which they are advertized will drop out of the
papers, and be replaced, let us hope, by disinterested attempts to
ascertain and publish the scientific truth about them, which, by the
way, promises to be much more hopeful and interesting.
As to the mass of oppressive and unjust laws that protect property
at the expense of humanity, and enable proprietors to drive whole
populations off the land because sheep or deer are more profitable, we
have said enough about them already. Naturally we shall get rid of them
when we get rid of private property.
Now, however, I must come to one respect in which official interference
with personal liberty would be carried under Socialism to lengths
undreamed of at present. We may be as idle as we please if only we have
money in our pockets; and the more we look as if we had never done a
day’s work in our lives and never intend to, the more we are respected
by every official we come in contact with, and the more we are envied,
courted, and deferred to by everybody. If we enter a village school the
children all rise and stand respectfully to receive us, whereas the
entrance of a plumber or carpenter leaves them unmoved. The mother who
secures a rich idler as a husband for her daughter is proud of it: the
father who makes a million uses it to make rich idlers of his children.
That work is a curse is part of our religion: that it is a disgrace is
the first article in our social code. To carry a parcel through the
streets is not only a trouble, but a derogation from one’s rank. Where
there are blacks to carry them, as in South Africa, it is virtually
impossible for a white to be seen doing such a thing. In London we
condemn these colonial extremes of snobbery; but how many ladies could
we persuade to carry a jug of milk down Bond Street on a May afternoon,
even for a bet?
Now it is not likely, human laziness being what it is, that under
Socialism anyone will carry a parcel or a jug if she can induce
somebody else (her husband, say) to carry it for her. But nobody will
think it disgraceful to carry a parcel because carrying a parcel is
work. The idler will be treated not only as a rogue and a vagabond, but
as an embezzler of the national funds, the meanest sort of thief. The
police will not have much trouble in detecting such offenders. They
will be denounced by everybody, because there will be a very marked
jealousy of slackers who take their share without “doing their bit”.
The real lady will be the woman who does more than her bit, and thereby
leaves her country richer than she found it. Today nobody knows what a
real lady is; but the dignity is assumed most confidently by the women
who ostentatiously take as much and give as nearly nothing as they can.
The snobbery that exists at present among workers will also disappear.
Our ridiculous social distinctions between manual labor and brain
work, between wholesale business and retail business, are really class
distinctions. If a doctor considers it beneath his dignity to carry a
scuttle of coals from one room to another, but is proud of his skill
in performing some unpleasantly messy operation, it is clearly not
because the one is any more or less manual than the other, but solely
because surgical operations are associated with descent through younger
sons from the propertied class, and carrying coals with proletarian
descent. If the petty ironmonger’s daughter is not considered eligible
for marriage with the ironmaster’s son, it is not because selling steel
by the ounce and selling it by the ton are attributes of two different
species, but because petty ironmongers have usually been poor and
ironmasters rich. When there are no rich and no poor, and descent from
the proprietary class will be described as “criminal antecedents”,
people will turn their hands to anything, and indeed rebel against
any division of labor that deprives them of physical exercise. My own
excessively sedentary occupation makes me long to be a half-time navvy.
I find myself begging my gardener, who is a glutton for work, to leave
me a few rough jobs to do when I have written myself to a standstill;
for I cannot go out and take a hand with the navvies, because I should
be taking the bread out of a poor man’s mouth; nor should we be very
comfortable company for oneanother with our different habits and speech
and bringing-up, all produced by differences in our parents’ incomes
and class. But with all these obstacles swept away by Socialism I
could lend a hand at any job within my strength and skill, and help my
mates instead of hurting them, besides being as good company for them
as I am now for professional persons or rich folk. Even as it is a good
deal of haymaking is done for fun; and I am persuaded (having some
imagination, thank Heaven!) that under Socialism open air workers would
have plenty of voluntary help, female as well as male, without the
trouble of whistling for it. Laws might have to be made to deal with
officiousness. Everything would make for activity and against idleness:
indeed it would probably be much harder to be an idler than it is now
to be a pickpocket. Anyhow, as idleness would be not only a criminal
offence, but unladylike and ungentlemanly in the lowest degree, nobody
would resent the laws against it as infringements of natural liberty.
Lest anyone should at this point try to muddle you with the inveterate
delusion that because capital can increase wealth people can live on
capital without working, let me go back just for a moment to the way in
which capital becomes productive.
Let us take those cases in which capital is used, not for destructive
purposes, as in war, but for increasing production: that is, saving
time and trouble in future work. When all the merchandise in a country
has to be brought from the makers to the users on packhorses or carts
over bad roads the cost in time and trouble and labor of man and beast
is so great that most things have to be made and consumed on the spot.
There may be a famine in one village and a glut in another a hundred
miles off because of the difficulty of sending food from one to the
other. Now if there is enough spare subsistence (capital) to support
gangs of navvies and engineers and other workers whilst they cover the
country with railways, canals, and metalled roads, and build engines
and trains, barges and motor cars to travel on them, to say nothing
of aeroplanes, then all sorts of goods can be sent long distances
quickly and cheaply; so that the village which formerly could not get
a cartload of bread and a few cans of milk from a hundred miles off
to save its life is able to buy quite cheaply grain grown in Russia
or America and domestic articles made in Germany or Japan. The spare
subsistence will be entirely consumed in the operation: there will
be no more left of it than of the capital lent for the war; but it
will leave behind it the roadways and waterways and machinery by which
labor can do a great deal more in a given time than it could without
them. The destruction of these aids to labor would be a very different
matter from our annual confiscations of the National Debt by taxation.
It would leave us much poorer and less civilized: in fact most of us
would starve, because big modern populations cannot support themselves
without elaborate machinery and railways and so forth.
Still, roadways and machines can produce nothing by themselves. They
can only assist labor. And they have to be continually repaired and
renewed by labor. A country crammed with factories and machines,
traversed in all directions by roadways, tramways and railways, dotted
with aerodromes and hangars and garages, each crowded with aeroplanes
and airships and motor cars, would produce absolutely nothing at all
except ruin and rust and decay if the inhabitants ceased to work. We
should starve in the midst of all the triumphs of civilization because
we could not breakfast on the clay of the railway embankments, lunch on
boiled aeroplanes, and dine on toasted steam-hammers. Nature inexorably
denies to us the possibility of living without labor or of hoarding its
most vital products. We may be helped by past labor; but we must live
by present labor. By telling off one set of workers to produce more
than they consume, and telling off another set to live on the surplus
while the first set makes roads and machines, we may make our labor
much more productive, and take out the gain either in shorter hours of
work or bigger returns from the same number of hours of work as before;
but we cannot stop working and sit down and look on while the roads
and machines make and fetch and carry for us without anyone lifting a
finger. We may reduce our working hours to two a day, or increase our
income tenfold, or even conceivably do both at once; but by no magic
on earth can any of us honestly become an idler. When you see a person
who does no productive or serviceable work, you may conclude with
absolute certainty that she or he is spunging on the labor of other
people. It may or may not be expedient to allow certain persons this
privilege for a time: sometimes it is; and sometimes it is not. I have
already described how we offer at present, to anyone who can invent a
labor-saving machine, what is called a patent: that is, a right to
take a share of what the workers produce with the help of that machine
for fourteen years. When a man writes a book or a play, we give him,
by what is called copyright, the power to make everybody who reads the
book or sees the play performed pay him and his heirs something during
his lifetime and fifty years afterwards. This is our way of encouraging
people to invent machines and to write books and plays instead of being
content with the old handiwork, and with the Bible and Shakespear; and
as we do it with our eyes open and with a definite purpose, and the
privilege lasts no longer than enough to accomplish its purpose, there
is a good deal to be said for it. But to allow the descendants of a
man who invested a few hundred pounds in the New River Water Company
in the reign of James I to go on for ever and ever living in idleness
on the incessant daily labor of the London ratepayers is senseless and
mischievous. If they actually did the daily work of supplying London
with water, they might reasonably claim either to work for less time
or receive more for their work than a water-carrier in Elizabeth’s
time; but for doing no work at all they have not a shadow of excuse. To
consider Socialism a tyranny because it will compel everyone to share
the daily work of the world is to confess to the brain of an idiot and
the instinct of a tramp.
Speaking generally, it is a mistake to suppose that the absence of
law means the absence of tyranny. Take, for example, the tyranny of
fashion. The only law concerned in this is the law that we must all
wear something in the presence of other people. It does not prescribe
what a woman shall wear: it only says that in public she shall be a
draped figure and not a nude one. But does this mean that a woman can
wear what she likes? Legally she can; but socially her slavery is more
complete than any sumptuary law could make it. If she is a waitress or
a parlormaid there is no question about it: she must wear a uniform
or lose her employment and starve. If she is a duchess she must dress
in the fashion or be ridiculous. In the case of the duchess nothing
worse than ridicule is the penalty of unfashionable dressing. But any
woman who has to earn her living outside her own house finds that
if she is to keep her employment she must also keep up appearances,
which means that she must dress in the fashion, even when it is not at
all becoming to her, and her wardrobe contains serviceable dresses a
couple of years out of date. And the better her class of employment
the tighter her bonds. The ragpicker has the melancholy privilege of
being less particular about her working clothes than the manageress of
a hotel; but she would be very glad to exchange that freedom for the
obligation of the manageress to be always well dressed. In fact the
most enviable women in this respect are nuns and policewomen, who, like
gentlemen at evening parties and military officers on parade, never
have to think of what they will wear, as it is all settled for them by
regulation and custom.
This dress question is only one familiar example of the extent to which
the private employment of today imposes regulations on us which are
quite outside the law, but which are none the less enforced by private
employers on pain of destitution. The husband in public employment, the
socialized husband, is much freer than the unsocialized one in private
employment. He may travel third class, wearing a lounge suit and soft
hat, living in the suburbs, and spending his Sundays as he pleases,
whilst the others must travel first class, wear a frock coat and tall
hat, live at a fashionable address, and go to church regularly. Their
wives have to do as they do; and the single women who have escaped from
the limitations of the home into independent activity find just the
same difference between public work and private: in public employment
their livelihood is never at the mercy of a private irresponsible
person as it is in private. The lengths to which women are sometimes
forced to go to please their private employers are much more revolting
than, for instance, the petty dishonesties in which clerks are forced
to become accomplices.