book we have been thinking of the public, and of our two selves as
members of the public. This is our duty as citizens; but it may drive
us mad if we begin to think of public evils as millionfold evils. They
are nothing of the kind. What you yourself can suffer is the utmost
that can be suffered on earth. If you starve to death you experience
all the starvation that ever has been or ever can be. If ten thousand
other women starve to death with you, their suffering is not increased
by a single pang: their share in your fate does not make you ten
thousand times as hungry, nor prolong your suffering ten thousand
times. Therefore do not be oppressed by “the frightful sum of human
suffering”: there is no sum: two lean women are not twice as lean as
one nor two fat women twice as fat as one. Poverty and pain are not
cumulative: you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that
it is. If you can stand the suffering of one person you can fortify
yourself with the reflection that the suffering of a million is no
worse: nobody has more than one stomach to fill nor one frame to be
stretched on the rack. Do not let your mind be disabled by excessive
sympathy. What the true Socialist revolts against is not the suffering
that is not cumulative, but the waste that is. A thousand healthy,
happy, honorable women are not each a thousand times as healthy, happy,
or honorable as one; but they can co-operate to increase the health,
happiness, and honor possible for each of them. At present nobody can
be healthy, happy, or honorable: our standards are so low that when
we call ourselves so we mean only that we are not sick nor crying nor
lying nor stealing (legally or illegally) oftener than we must agree to
put up with under our Capitalist Constitution.
We have to confess it: Capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable.
Class hatred is not a mere matter of envy on the part of the poor and
contempt and dread on the part of the rich. Both rich and poor are
really hateful in themselves. For my part I hate the poor and look
forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little,
but am equally bent on their extermination. The working classes, the
business classes, the professional classes, the propertied classes,
the ruling classes, are each more odious than the other: they have no
right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all
die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be
replaced by people like themselves. I do not want any human child to
be brought up as I was brought up, nor as any child I have known was
brought up. Do you?
And yet I am not in the least a misanthrope. I am a person of normal
affections, as you probably are; but for that very reason I hate to
be surrounded, not by people whose interests are the same as my own,
whom I cannot injure without injuring myself, and who cannot injure
me without injuring themselves, but by people whose interest it is to
get as much out of me as they possibly can, and give me as little for
it as possible (if anything). If I were poor, my relatives, now that
I am old, would have to support me to keep me out of the workhouse,
which means that they would have a strong interest in my death. As I am
rich enough to leave some property, my children, if I had any, would
be looking forward impatiently to my funeral and the reading of my
will. The whole propertied class is waiting for dead men’s shoes all
the time. If I become ill and send for a doctor I know that if he does
not prolong my illness to the utmost, and send me to expensive nursing
homes to submit to still more expensive operations, he will be taking
bread out of his children’s mouths. My lawyer is bound by all his
affections to encourage me in litigation, and to make it as protracted
and costly as he can. Even my clergyman, partly State supported as
he is, dare not if I belong to the Church of England rebuke me for
oppressing the poor any more than he dare champion me against the
oppression of the rich if I were poor. The teacher in the school where
my neighbors’ children have their morals formed would find herself
in the gutter if she taught any child that to live on what is called
an independent income without working is to live the life of a thief
without the risks and enterprise that make the pirate and the burglar
seem heroic to boys. My tradesmen’s business is to overcharge me as
much as they can without running too great a risk of being undersold
by trade rivals. My landlord’s business is to screw out of me the
uttermost extractable farthing of my earnings for his permission to
occupy a place on earth. Were I unmarried I should be pursued by hordes
of women so desperately in need of a husband’s income and position that
their utmost efforts to marry me would be no evidence of their having
the smallest personal regard for me. I cannot afford the friendship of
people much richer than myself: those much poorer cannot afford mine.
Between those who do the daily work of my house, and are therefore
necessary partners in my work, and me there is a gulf of class which
is nothing but a gulf of unequal distribution of wealth. Life is made
lonely and difficult for me in a hundred unnecessary ways; and so few
people are clever and tactful and sensible and self-controlled enough
to pick their way through the world without giving or taking offence
that the first quality of capitalistic mankind is quarrelsomeness. Our
streets are fuller of feuds than the Highlands or the Arabian desert.
The social friction set up by inequality of income is intense: society
is like a machine designed to work smoothly with the oil of equality,
into the bearings of which some malignant demon keeps pouring the
sand of inequality. If it were not for the big pools of equality that
exist at different levels, the machine would not work at all. As it
is, the seizings-up, the smashings, the stoppages, the explosions,
never cease. They vary in magnitude from a railway worker crushed in
the shunting-yard to a world war in which millions of men with the
strongest natural reasons for saving each others’ lives destroy them
instead in the cruellest manner, and from a squabble over a penny in
a one-room tenement to a lawsuit lasting twenty years and reducing
all the parties to it to destitution. And to outface this miserable
condition we bleat once a year about peace on earth and good-will to
men: that is, among persons to whom we have distributed incomes ranging
from a starvation dole to several thousands a day, piously exhorting
the recipients to love oneanother. Have you any patience with it? I
have none.
Now you may, for all I know, be a sharp, cynical sort of person; or you
may be a nice, mushy, amiable, goodnatured one. If the latter you will
tell me that people are not governed so much by money considerations as
I make out: that your doctor hates to see you ill and does his best to
cure you; that your solicitor keeps you out of litigation when you lose
your temper and want to rush into it; that your clergyman calls himself
a Christian Socialist and leads all the popular agitations against the
oppression of the rich by the poor; that your children were heartbroken
when their father died and that you never had a cross word with him
about his property or yours; that your servants have been with you for
forty years and have brought you up from your childhood more devotedly
and affectionately than your own parents, and have remained part of
the family when your children flew away from the nest to new nests
of their own; that your tradesmen have never cheated you, and have
helped you over hard times by giving you long and forbearing credit:
in short, that in spite of all I may say, this Capitalist world is
full of kindliness and love and good-fellowship and genuine religion.
Dr Johnson, who described his life as one of wretchedness; Anatole
France, who said he had never known a moment’s happiness; Dean Swift,
who saw in himself and his fellowmen Yahoos far inferior to horses;
and Shakespear, to whom a man in authority was an angry ape, are known
to have been admired, loved, petted, entertained, even idolized,
throughout lives of honorable and congenial activity such as fall
to the lot of hardly one man in a billion; yet the obscure billions
manage to get on without unbearable discontent. William Morris, whose
abhorrence of Capitalism was far deeper than that of persons of only
ordinary mental capacity and sensibility, said, when he was told that
he was mortally ill, “Well, I cannot complain: I have had a good time”.
To all this consolation I have been able in this book to add that
Capitalism, though it richly deserves the very worst that Karl Marx
or even John Ruskin said of it and a good deal more that they never
thought of, was yet, in its origin, thoroughly well intentioned. It was
indeed much better intentioned than early Christianity, which treated
this world as a place of punishment for original sin, of which the
end was fortunately at hand. Turgot and Adam Smith were beyond all
comparison more sincere guides to earthly prosperity than St Paul. If
they could have foreseen the history of the practical application of
their principles in the nineteenth century in England they would have
recoiled in horror, just as Karl Marx would have recoiled if he had
been foreshewn what happened in Russia from 1917 to 1921 through the
action of able and devoted men who made his writings their Bible. Good
people are the very devil sometimes, because, when their good-will
hits on a wrong way, they go much further along it and are much more
ruthless than bad people; but there is always hope in the fact that
they mean well, and that their bad deeds are their mistakes and not
their successes; whereas the evils done by bad people are not mistakes
but triumphs of wickedness. And since all moral triumphs, like
mechanical triumphs, are reached by trial and error, we can despair
of Democracy and despair of Capitalism without despairing of human
nature: indeed if we did not despair of them as we know them we should
prove ourselves so worthless that there would be nothing left for the
world but to wait for the creation of a new race of beings capable of
succeeding where we have failed.
Nevertheless I must warn my amiable optimist and meliorist readers not
only that all the virtues that comfort them are operating in spite of
Capitalism and not as part of it, but that they are baffled by it in
ways that are hidden from people who have not examined the situation
with a good deal of technical knowledge and some subtlety. Take your
honest and kindly doctor, and your guardian angel solicitor. I quite
admit that there are plenty of them: the doctor who is a mercenary
scoundrel and the lawyer who is a mischievous and heartless rascal
is as exceptional as any other sort of criminal: I myself have never
chanced to come across one, and most likely you have not either. But
I have come across honest doctors whose treatment has been fatal, and
honest lawyers whose advice has been disastrous. So have you, perhaps.
You know the very true saying that where there is a will there is a
way. Unfortunately the good will does not necessarily find the right
way. There are always dozens of ways, bad, good, and indifferent.
You must know some bad women who are doing the right thing from bad
motives side by side with good women who are doing the wrong thing from
the best motives in the world. For instance, the number of children,
especially first children, who are guarded and swaddled and drugged and
doctored to death by the solicitude of their ignorantly affectionate
mothers, must be greater than that of the children who die of maternal
dislike and neglect. When silly people (writers, I regret to say, some
of them) tell you that a loving heart is enough, remind them that fools
are more dangerous than rogues, and that women with loving hearts are
often pitiable fools. The finding of the right way is not sentimental
work: it is scientific work, requiring observation, reasoning, and
intellectual conscientiousness.
It is on this point of intellectual conscientiousness that we all break
down under pecuniary temptation. We cannot help it, because we are so
constituted that we always believe finally what we wish to believe. The
moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments
for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we
want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed, we suddenly
discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against it, but that
this evidence was staring us in the face all the time. If you read the
account of the creation of the world in the book of Genesis with the
eye of faith you will not perceive a single contradiction in it. If
you read it with the eye of hostile critical science you will see that
it consists of two successive accounts, so different that they cannot
both be true. In modern books you will be equally baffled by your
bias. If you love animals and have a horror of injustice and cruelty,
you will read the books of wonderful discoveries and cures made by
vivisectors with a sickened detestation of their callous cruelty, and
with amazement that anyone could be taken in by such bad reasoning
about lies which have been reduced to absurdity by force of flat fact
every few years, only to be replaced by a fresh crop. If, however, you
have only a dread of disease for yourself or your family, and feel
that in comparison to relief from this terror the sufferings of a few
dogs and guinea-pigs are not worth bothering about, you will find in
the same books such authentic and convincing miracles, such marvellous
cures for all diseases, such gospels of hope, monuments of learning,
and infallible revelations of the deepest truths of Science, that your
indignation at the derisive scepticism of the humanitarians may develop
into an enmity (heartily reciprocated) that may end in persecutions
and wars of science like the persecutions and wars of religion that
followed the Reformation, and were not new then.
But, you will ask, what have Socialism and Capitalism to do with the
fact that belief is mostly bias. It is very simple. If by inequality
of income you give your doctors, your lawyers, your clergymen, your
landlords, or your rulers an overwhelming economic interest in any
sort of belief or practice, they will immediately begin to see all
the evidence in favor of that sort of belief and practice, and
become blind to all the evidence against it. Every doctrine that
will enrich doctors, lawyers, landlords, clergymen, and rulers will
be embraced by them eagerly and hopefully; and every doctrine that
threatens to impoverish them will be mercilessly criticized and
rejected. There will inevitably spring up a body of biassed teaching
and practice in medicine, law, religion, and government that will
become established and standardized as scientifically, legally,
religiously, constitutionally, and morally sound, taught as such to
all young persons entering these professions, stamping those who dare
dissent as outcast quacks, heretics, sedition mongers, and traitors.
Your doctor may be the honestest, kindliest doctor on earth; your
solicitor may be a second father or mother to you; your clergyman may
be a saint; your member of Parliament another Moses or Solon. They
may be heroically willing to put your health, your prosperity, your
salvation, and your protection from injustice before their interest
in getting a few extra pounds out of you; but how far will that help
you if the theory and practice of their profession, imposed on them as
a condition of being allowed to pursue it, has been corrupted at the
root by pecuniary interest? They can proceed only as the hospitals and
medical schools teach them and order them to proceed, as the courts
proceed, as the Church proceeds, as Parliament proceeds: that is their
orthodoxy; and if the desire to make money and obtain privileges has
been operating all the time in building up that orthodoxy, their
best intentions and endeavors may result in leaving you with your
health ruined, your pocket empty, your soul damned, and your liberties
abrogated by your best friends in the name of science, law, religion,
and the British constitution. Ostensibly you are served and protected
by learned professions and political authorities whose duty it is
to save life, minimize suffering, keep the public health as tested
by vital statistics at the highest attainable pitch, instruct you
as to your legal obligations and see that your legal rights are not
infringed, give you spiritual help and disinterested guidance when your
conscience is troubled, and make and administer, without regard to
persons or classes, the laws that protect you and regulate your life.
But the moment you have direct personal occasion for these services you
discover that they are all controlled by Trade Unions in disguise, and
that the high personal honor and kindliness of their individual members
is subject to the morality of Trade Unionism, so that their loyalty
to their union, which is essentially a defensive conspiracy against
the public, comes first, and their loyalty to you as patient, client,
employer, parishioner, customer or citizen, next. The only way in which
you can set their natural virtues free from this omnipresent trade
union and governing class corruption and tyranny is to secure for them
all equal incomes which none of them can increase without increasing
the income of everybody else to exactly the same amount; so that the
more efficiently and economically they do their work the lighter their
labor will be and the higher their credit.
Under such conditions you would find human nature good enough for all
your reasonable purposes; and when you took up such books as Gulliver’s
Travels or Candide which under Capitalism are unanswerable indictments
of mankind as the wickedest of all known species, you would see in
them only terribly vivid clinical lectures on extinct moral diseases
which were formerly produced by inequality as smallpox and typhus
were produced by dirt. Such books are never written until mankind is
horribly corrupted, not by original sin but by inequality of income.
Then the coveted distinction of lady and gentleman, instead of being
the detestable parasitic pretension it is at present, meaning persons
who never condescend to do anything for themselves that they can
possibly put on others without rendering them equivalent service, and
who actually make their religion centre on the infamy of loading the
guilt and punishment of all their sins on an innocent victim (what
real lady would do so base a thing?), will at last take on a simple
and noble meaning, and be brought within the reach of every ablebodied
person. For then the base woman will be she who takes from her country
more than she gives to it; the common person will be she who does
no more than replace what she takes; and the lady will be she who,
generously overearning her income, leaves the nation in her debt and
the world a better world than she found it.
By such ladies and their sons can the human race be saved, and not
otherwise.
AYOT ST LAWRENCE,
_16th March 1927_.
APPENDIX
INSTEAD OF A BIBLIOGRAPHY
This book is so long that I can hardly think that any woman will
want to read much more about Socialism and Capitalism for some time.
Besides, a bibliography is supposed to be an acknowledgment by the
author of the books from which his own book was compiled. Now this book
is not a compilation: it is all out of my own head. It was started
by a lady asking me to write her a letter explaining Socialism. I
thought of referring her to the hundreds of books which have been
written on the subject; but the difficulty was that they were nearly
all written in an academic jargon which, though easy and agreeable to
students of economics, politics, philosophy, and sociology generally,
is unbearably dry, meaning unreadable, to women not so specialized. And
then, all these books are addressed to men. You might read a score of
them without ever discovering that such a creature as a woman had ever
existed. In fairness let me add that you might read a good many of them
without discovering that such a thing as a man ever existed. So I had
to do it all over again in my own way and yours. And though there were
piles of books about Socialism, and an enormous book about Capitalism
by Karl Marx, not one of them answered the simple question, “What is
Socialism?” The other simple question, “What is Capital?” was smothered
in a mass of hopelessly wrong answers, the right one having been hit
on (as far as my reading goes) only once, and that was by the British
economist Stanley Jevons when he remarked casually that capital is
spare money. I made a note of that.
However, as I know that women who frequent University Extension
lectures will not be satisfied until they have choked their brains by
reading a multitude of books on the subject; and as the history of
Socialist thought is instructive, I will say just a word or two in the
customary pedantic manner about the literary milestones on the road
from Capitalism to Socialism.
The theory of Capitalism was not finally worked out until early in
the nineteenth century by Ricardo, a Jewish stockbroker. As he had a
curious trick of saying the opposite of what he meant whilst contriving
somehow to make his meaning clear, his demonstration was elegantly and
accurately paraphrased by a first rate literary artist and opium eater,
Thomas De Quincey, who could write readably and fascinatingly about
anything.
The theory was that if private property in land and capital, and
sanctity of free contract between individuals, were enforced as
fundamental constitutional principles, the proprietors would provide
employment for the rest of the community on terms sufficient to
furnish them with at least a bare subsistence in return for continuous
industry, whilst themselves becoming rich to such excess that the
investment of their superfluous income as capital would cost them no
privation. No attempt was made to disguise the fact that the resultant
disparity between the poverty of the proletarian masses and the riches
of the proprietors would produce popular discontent, or that as wages
fell and rents rose with the increase of population, the contrast
between laborious poverty and idle luxury would provide sensational
topics for Radical agitators. Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence and
Macaulay’s forecasts of the future of America prove that the more
clear-headed converts of the theory of Capitalism had no millennial
illusions.
But they could see no practicable alternative. The Socialist
alternative of State organization of industry was inconceivable,
because, as industry had not yet finished the long struggle by which
it extricated itself from the obsolete restrictions and oppressions of
medieval and feudal society, State interference, outside simple police
work, still seemed a tyranny to be broken, not a vital activity to be
extended. Thus the new Capitalist economic policy was put forward in
opposition, not to Socialism, but to Feudalism or Paternal Oligarchy.
It was dogmatically called Political Economy absolute, complete, and
inevitable; and the workers were told that they could no more escape or
modify its operation than change the orbits of the planets.