State in law or proposals of law will fall into two sorts--(a) Laws or
proposals of law compelling the proletariat to work--(b) Financial
operations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society--As
to (a), we find it /already/ at work in measures such as the Insurance Act
and proposals such as Compulsory Arbitration, the enforcement of Trades
Union bargains and the erection of "Labour Colonies," etc., for the
"unemployable"--As to the second, we find that so-called "Municipal" or
"Socialist" experiments in acquiring the means of production have /already/
increased and are continually increasing the dependence of society upon the
Capitalist.
Conclusion
* * *
The Servile State
* * *
Introduction
The Subject of This Book
This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth:--
That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by
a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a
condition of stable equilibrium /by the establishment of compulsory labour
legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production for
the advantage of those who do/. With this principle of compulsion applied
against the non-owners there must also come a difference in their status;
and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided into
two sets: the first economically free and politically free, possessed of
the means of production, and securely confirmed in that possession; the
second economically unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by
their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum
of well-being beneath which they shall not fall.
Society having reached such a condition would be released from its present
internal strains and would have taken on a form which would be stable: that
is, capable of being indefinitely prolonged without change. In it would be
resolved the various factors of instability which increasingly disturb that
form of society called _Capitalist_, and men would be satisfied to accept,
and to continue in, such a settlement.
To such a stable society I shall give, for reasons which will be described
in the next section, the title of THE SERVILE STATE.
I shall not undertake to judge whether this approaching organisation of our
modern society be good or evil. I shall concern myself only with showing
the necessary tendency towards it which has long existed and the recent
social provisions which show that it has actually begun.
This new state will be acceptable to those who desire consciously or by
implication the re-establishment among us of a difference of status between
possessor and non-possessor: it will be distasteful to those who regard
such a distinction with ill favour or with dread.
My business will not be to enter into the discussion between these two
types of modern thinkers, but to point out to each and to both that that
which the one favours and the other would fly is upon them.
I shall prove my thesis in particular from the case of the industrial
society of Great Britain, including that small, alien, and exceptional
corner of Ireland, which suffers or enjoys industrial conditions to-day.
I shall divide the matter thus:--
(1) I shall lay down certain definitions.
(2) Next, I shall describe the institution of slavery and /The Servile
State/ of which it is the basis, as these were in the ancient world. I
shall then:
(3) Sketch very briefly the process whereby that age-long institution of
slavery was slowly dissolved during the Christian centuries, and whereby
the resulting medieval system, based upon highly divided property in the
means of production, was
(4) wrecked in certain areas of Europe as it approached completion, and had
substituted for it, in practice though not in legal theory, a society based
upon /Capitalism/.
(5) Next, I shall show how Capitalism was of its nature unstable, because
its social realities were in conflict with all existing or possible systems
of law, and because its effects in denying _sufficiency_ and _security_
were intolerable to men; how being thus _unstable_, it consequently
presented a _problem_ which demanded a solution: to wit, the establishment
of some stable form of society whose law and social practice should
correspond, and whose economic results, by providing _sufficiency_ and
_security_, should be tolerable to human nature.
(6) I shall next present the only three possible solutions:--
(_a_) Collectivism, or the placing of the means of production in the hands
of the political officers of the community.
(_b_) Property, or the re-establishment of a Distributive State in which
the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production.
(_c_) Slavery, or a Servile State in which those who do not own the means
of production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do, and
shall receive in exchange a security of livelihood.
Now, seeing the distaste which the remains of our long Christian tradition
has bred in us for directly advocating the third solution and boldly
supporting the re-establishment of slavery, the first two alone are open to
reformers: (1) a reaction towards a condition of well-divided property or
the _Distributive State_; (2) an attempt to achieve the ideal _Collectivist
State_.
It can easily be shown that this second solution appeals most naturally and
easily to a society already Capitalist on account of the difficulty which
such a society has to discover the energy, the will, and the vision
requisite for the first solution.
(7) I shall next proceed to show how the pursuit of this ideal Collectivist
State which is bred of Capitalism leads men acting upon a Capitalist
society not towards the Collectivist State nor anything like it, but to
that third utterly different thing--the _Servile State_.
To this eighth section I shall add an appendix showing how the attempt to
achieve Collectivism gradually by public purchase is based upon an
illusion.
(8) Recognising that theoretical argument of this kind, though
intellectually convincing, is not sufficient to the establishment of my
thesis, I shall conclude by giving examples from modern English
legislation, which examples prove that the Servile State is actually upon
us.
Such is the scheme I design for this book.
Section One
Definitions
Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his
environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a
condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to
his needs.
That special, conscious, and intelligent transformation of his environment
which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man
we call the _Production of Wealth_.
_Wealth_ is matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed
from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more
serviceable to a human need.
Without _Wealth_ man cannot exist. The production of it is a necessity to
him, and though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary, and even
to those forms of production which we call luxuries, yet in any given human
society there is a certain _kind_ and a certain _amount_ of wealth without
which human life cannot be lived: as, for instance, in England to-day,
certain forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth,
and habitation.
Therefore, to control the production of wealth is to control human life
itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to
refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the
production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the
citizens can legally exist.
Wealth can only be produced by the application of human energy, mental and
physical, to the forces of nature around us, and to the material which
those forces inform.
This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we
will call _Labour_. As for that material and those natural forces, we will
call them, for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conventionally
accepted, term _Land_.
It would seem, therefore, that all problems connected with the production
of wealth, and all discussion thereupon, involve but two principal original
factors, to wit, _Labour_ and _Land_, But it so happens that the conscious,
artificial, and intelligent action of man upon nature, corresponding to his
peculiar character compared with other created beings, introduces a third
factor of the utmost importance.
Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious methods of varying and often
increasing complexity, and aids himself by the construction of
_implements_. These soon become in each new department of the production as
truly necessary to that production as _labour_ and _land_. Further, any
process of production takes a certain time; during that time the producer
must be fed, and clothed, and housed, and the rest of it. There must
therefore be an _accumulation of wealth_ created in the past, and reserved
with the object of maintaining labour during its effort to produce for the
future.
Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool, or the setting aside of
a store of provisions, _labour_ applied to _land_ for either purpose is not
producing wealth for immediate consumption. It is setting aside and
reserving somewhat, and that _somewhat_ is always necessary in varying
proportions according to the simplicity or complexity of the economic
society to the production of wealth.
To such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future
production, and not for immediate consumption, whether it be in the form of
instruments and tools, or in the form of stores for the maintenance of
labour during the process of production, we give the name of _Capital_.
There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth, which
we may conventionally term _Land_, _Capital_, and _Labour_.
When we talk of the _Means of Production_ we signify land and capital
combined. Thus, when we say that a man is "dispossessed of the means of
production," or cannot produce wealth save by the leave of another who
"possesses the means of production," we mean that he is the master only of
his labour and has no control, in any useful amount, over either capital,
or land, or both combined.
A man politically free, that is, one who enjoys the right before the law to
exercise his energies when he pleases (or not at all if he does not so
please), but not possessed by legal right of control over any useful amount
of the means of production, we call _proletarian_, and any considerable
class composed of such men we call a _proletariat_.
_Property_ is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the
control of land and of wealth made from land, including therefore all the
means of production, is vested in some person or corporation. Thus we may
say of a building, including the land upon which it stands, that it is the
"property" of such and such a citizen, or family, or college, or of the
State, meaning that those who "own" such property are guaranteed by the
laws in the right to use it or withhold it from use. _Private property_
signifies such wealth (including the means of production) as may, by the
arrangements of society, be in the control of persons or corporations
_other_ than the political bodies of which these persons or corporations
are in another aspect members. What distinguishes private property is not
that the possessor thereof is less than the State, or is only a part of the
State (for were that so we should talk of municipal property as private
property), but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to
his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy
of political institutions. Thus Mr Jones is a citizen of Manchester, but he
does not own his private property as a citizen of Manchester, he owns it as
Mr Jones, whereas, if the house next to his own be owned by the Manchester
municipality, they own it only because they are a political body standing
for the whole community of the town. Mr Jones might move to Glasgow and
still own his property in Manchester, but the municipality of Manchester
can only own its property in connection with the corporate political life
of the town.
An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of
the political officers of the community we call _Collectivist_, or more
generally _Socialist_.[1]
A society in which private property in land and capital, that is, the
ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined
to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social
mass of the State, while the rest have not such property and are therefore
proletarian, we call _Capitalist_; and the method by which wealth is
produced in such a society can only be the application of labour, the
determining mass of which must necessarily be proletarian, to land and
capital, in such fashion that, of the total wealth produced, the
Proletariat which labours shall only receive a portion.
The two marks, then, defining the Capitalist State are: (1) That the
citizens thereof are politically free: _i.e._ can use or withhold at will
their possessions or their labour, but are also (2) divided into capitalist
and proletarian in such proportions that the State as a whole is not
characterised by the institution of ownership among free citizens, but by
the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole, or
even to a small minority. Such a _Capitalist State_ is essentially divided
into two classes of free citizens, the one capitalist or owning, the other
propertyless or proletarian.
My last definition concerns the Servile State itself, and since the idea is
both somewhat novel and also the subject of this book, I will not only
establish but expand its definition.
The definition of the Servile State is as follows:--
"_That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the
families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the
advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community
with the mark of such labour we call_ /The Servile State/."
Note first certain negative limitations in the above which must be clearly
seized if we are not to lose clear thinking in a fog of metaphor and
rhetoric.
That society is not servile in which men are intelligently constrained to
labour by enthusiasm, by a religious tenet, or indirectly from fear of
destitution, or directly from love of gain, or from the common sense which
teaches them that by their labour they may increase their well-being.
A clear boundary exists between the servile and the non-servile condition
of labour, and the conditions upon either side of that boundary utterly
differ one from another, Where there is _compulsion_ applicable by
_positive law_ to men of a certain _status_, and such compulsion enforced
in the last resort by the powers at the disposal of the State, there is the
institution of _Slavery_; and if that institution be sufficiently expanded
the whole State may be said to repose upon a servile basis, and is a
Servile State.
Where such formal, legal status is absent the conditions are not servile;
and the difference between servitude and freedom, appreciable in a thousand
details of actual life, is most glaring in this: that the free man can
refuse his labour and use that refusal as an instrument wherewith to
_bargain_; while the slave has no such instrument or power to bargain at
all, but is dependent for his well-being upon the custom of society, backed
by the regulation of such of its laws as may protect and guarantee the
slave.
Next, let it be observed that the State is not servile because the mere
institution of slavery is to be discovered somewhere within its confines.
The State is only servile when so considerable a body of forced labour is
affected by the compulsion of positive law as to give a character to the
whole community.
Similarly, that State is not servile in which _all_ citizens are liable to
submit their energies to the compulsion of positive law, and must labour at
the discretion of State officials. By loose metaphor and for rhetorical
purposes men who dislike Collectivism (for instance) or the discipline of a
regiment will talk of the "servile" conditions of such organisations. But
for the purposes of strict definition and clear thinking it is essential to
remember that a servile condition only exists by contrast with a free
condition. The servile condition is present in society only when there is
also present the free citizen for whose benefit the slave works under the
compulsion of positive law.
Again, it should be noted that this word "servile" in no way connotes the
worst, nor even necessarily a bad, arrangement of society, This point is so
clear that it should hardly delay us; but a confusion between the
rhetorical and the precise use of the word servile I have discovered to
embarrass public discussion of the matter so much that I must once more
emphasise what should be self-evident.
The discussion as to whether the institution of slavery be a good or a bad
one, or be relatively better or worse than other alternative institutions,
has nothing whatever to do with the exact definition of that institution.
Thus Monarchy consists in throwing the responsibility for the direction of
society upon an individual. One can imagine some Roman of the first century
praising the new Imperial power, but through a muddle-headed tradition
against "kings" swearing that he would never tolerate a "monarchy." Such a
fellow would have been a very futile critic of public affairs under Trajan,
but no more futile than a man who swears that nothing shall make him a
"slave," though well prepared to accept laws that compel him to labour
without his consent, under the force of public law, and upon terms dictated
by others.
Many would argue that a man so compelled to labour, guaranteed against
insecurity and against insufficiency of food, housing and clothing,
promised subsistence for his old age, and a similar set of advantages for
his posterity, would be a great deal better off than a free man lacking all
these things. But the argument does not affect the definition attaching to
the word servile. A devout Christian of blameless life drifting upon an
ice-flow in the Arctic night, without food or any prospect of succour, is
not so comfortably circumstanced as the Khedive of Egypt; but it would be
folly in establishing the definition of the words "Christian" and
"Mahommedan" to bring this contrast into account.
We must then, throughout this inquiry, keep strictly to the economic aspect
of the case. Only when that is established and when the modern tendency to
the re-establishment of slavery is clear, are we free to discuss the
advantages and disadvantages of the revolution through which we are
passing.
It must further be grasped that the essential mark of the Servile
Institution does not depend upon the ownership of the slave by a particular
master. That the institution of slavery tends to that form under the
various forces composing human nature and human society is probable enough.
That if or when slavery were re-established in England a particular man
would in time be found the slave not of Capitalism in general but of, say,
the Shell Oil Trust in particular, is a very likely development; and we
know that in societies where the institution was of immemorial antiquity
such direct possession of the slave by the free man or corporation of free
men had come to be the rule. But my point is that such a mark is not
essential to the character of slavery. As an initial phase in the
institution of slavery, or even as a permanent phase marking society for an
indefinite time, it is perfectly easy to conceive of a whole class rendered
servile by positive law, and compelled by such law to labour for the
advantage of another non-servile free class, without any direct act of
possession permitted to one man over the person of another.
The final contrast thus established between slave and free might be
maintained by the State guaranteeing to the _un-free_, security in their
subsistence, to the free, security in their property and profits, rent and
interest. What would mark the slave in such a society would be his
belonging to that set or status which was compelled by no matter what
definition to labour, and was thus cut off from the other set or status not
compelled to labour, but free to labour or not as it willed.
Again, the Servile State would certainly exist even though a man, being
only compelled to labour during a portion of his time, were free to bargain
and even to accumulate in his "free" time. The old lawyers used to
distinguish between a serf "in gross" and a serf "regardant." A serf "in
gross" was one who was a serf at all times and places, and not in respect
to a particular lord. A serf "regardant" was a serf only in his bondage to
serve a particular lord. He was free as against other men. And one might
perfectly well have slaves who were only slaves "regardant" to a particular
type of employment during particular hours. But they would be slaves none
the less, and if their hours were many and their class numerous, the State
which they supported would be a Servile State.
Lastly, let it be remembered that the servile condition remains as truly an
institution of the State when it attaches permanently and irrevocably at
any one time to a particular set of human beings as when it attaches to a
particular class throughout their lives. Thus the laws of Paganism
permitted the slave to be enfranchised by his master: it further permitted
children or prisoners to be sold into slavery. The Servile Institution,
though perpetually changing in the elements of its composition, was still
an unchanging factor in the State. Similarly, though the State should only
subject to slavery those who had less than a certain income, while leaving
men free by inheritance or otherwise to pass out of, and by loss to pass
into, the slave class, that slave class, though fluctuating as to its
composition, would still permanently exist.
Thus, if the modern industrial State shall make a law by which servile
conditions shall not attach to those capable of earning more than a certain
sum by their own labour, but shall attach to those who earn less than this
sum; or if the modern industrial State defines manual labour in a
particular fashion, renders it compulsory during a fixed time for those who
undertake it, but leaves them free to turn later to other occupations if
they choose, undoubtedly such distinctions, though they attach to
conditions and not to individuals, establish the Servile Institution.
Some considerable number must be manual workers by definition, and while
they were so defined would be slaves. Here again the composition of the
Servile class would fluctuate, but the class would be permanent and large
enough to stamp all society. I need not insist upon the practical effect:
that such a class, once established, tends to be fixed in the great
majority of those which make it up, and that the individuals entering or
leaving it tend to become few compared to the whole mass.
There is one last point to be considered in this definition.
It is this:--
Since, in the nature of things, a free society must enforce a contract (a
free society consisting in nothing else but the enforcement of free
contracts), how far can that be called a Servile condition which is the
result of contract nominally or really free? In other words, is not a
contract to labour, however freely entered into, servile of its nature when
enforced by the State?
For instance, I have no food or clothing, nor do I possess the means of
production whereby I can produce any wealth in exchange for such. I am so
circumstanced that an owner of the Means of Production will not allow me
access to those Means unless I sign a contract to serve him for a week at a
wage of bare subsistence. Does the State in enforcing that contract make me
for that week a slave?
Obviously not. For the institution of Slavery presupposes a certain
attitude of mind in the free man and in the slave, a habit of living in
either, and the stamp of both those habits upon society. No such effects
are produced by a contract enforceable by the length of one week. The
duration of human life is such, and the prospect of posterity, that the
fulfilling of such a contract in no way wounds the senses of liberty and of
choice.
What of a month, a year, ten years, a lifetime? Suppose an extreme case,
and a destitute man to sign a contract binding him and all his children who
were minors to work for a bare subsistence until his own death, or the
attainment of majority of the children, whichever event might happen
latest; would the State in forcing that contract be making the man a slave?
As undoubtedly as it would not be making him a slave in the first case, it
would be making him a slave in the second.
One can only say to ancient sophistical difficulties of this kind, that the
sense of men establishes for itself the true limits of any object, as of
freedom. What freedom is, or is not, in so far as mere measure of time is
concerned (though of course much else than time enters in), human habit
determines; but the enforcing of a contract of service certainly or
probably leaving a choice after its expiration is consonant with freedom.
The enforcement of a contract probably binding one's whole life is not
consonant with freedom. One binding to service a man's natural heirs is
intolerable to freedom.
Consider another converse point. A man binds himself to work for life and
his children after him so far as the law may permit him to bind them in a
particular society, but that not for a bare subsistence, but for so large a
wage that he will be wealthy in a few years, and his posterity, when the
contract is completed, wealthier still. Does the State in forcing such a
contract make the fortunate employee a slave? No. For it is in the essence
of slavery that subsistence or little more than subsistence should be
guaranteed to the slave. Slavery exists in order that the Free should
benefit by its existence, and connotes a condition in which the men
subjected to it may demand secure existence, but little more.
If anyone were to draw an exact line, and to say that a life-contract
enforceable by law was slavery at so many shillings a week, but ceased to
be slavery after that margin, his effort would be folly. None the less,
there is a standard of subsistence in any one society, the guarantee of
which (or little more) under an obligation to labour by compulsion is
slavery, while the guarantee of very much more is not slavery.
This verbal jugglery might be continued. It is a type of verbal difficulty
apparent in every inquiry open to the professional disputant, but of no
effect upon the mind of the honest inquirer whose business is not dialectic
but truth.
It is always possible by establishing a cross-section in a set of
definitions to pose the unanswerable difficulty of degree, but that will
never affect the realities of discussion. We know, for instance, what is
meant by torture when it exists in a code of laws, and when it is
forbidden. No imaginary difficulties of degree between pulling a man's hair
and scalping him, between warming him and burning him alive, will disturb a
reformer whose business it is to expunge torture from some penal code.
In the same way we know what is and what is not compulsory labour, what is
and what is not the Servile Condition. Its test is, I repeat, the
withdrawal from a man of his free choice to labour or not to labour, here
or there, for such and such an object; and the compelling of him by
positive law to labour for the advantage of others who do not fall under
the same compulsion.
Where you have _that_, you have slavery: with all the manifold, spiritual,
and political results of that ancient institution.
Where you have slavery affecting a class of such considerable size as to
mark and determine the character of the State, there you have the Servile
State.
* * * * *
To sum up, then:--The /Servile State/ is that in which we find so
considerable a body of families and individuals distinguished from _free
citizens_ by the mark of compulsory labour as to stamp a general character
upon society, and all the chief characters, good or evil, attaching to the
institution of slavery will be found permeating such a State, whether the
slaves be directly and personally attached to their masters, only
indirectly attached through the medium of the State, or attached in a third
manner through their subservience to corporations or to particular
industries. The slave so compelled to labour will be one dispossessed of
the means of production, and compelled by law to labour for the advantage
of all or any who are possessed thereof. And the distinguishing mark of the
slave proceeds from the special action upon him of a positive law which
first separates one body of men, the less-free, from another, the more
free, in the function of contract within the general body of the community.
Now, from a purely Servile conception of production and of the arrangement
of society we Europeans sprang. The Immemorial past of Europe is a Servile
past. During some centuries which the Church raised, permeated, and
constructed, Europe was gradually released or divorced from this immemorial
and fundamental conception of slavery; to that conception, to that
institution, our Industrial or Capitalist society is now upon its return.
We are re-establishing the slave.
* * * * *
Before proceeding to the proof of this, I shall, in the next few pages,
digress to sketch very briefly the process whereby the old Pagan slavery
was transformed into a free society some centuries ago. I shall then
outline the further process whereby the new non-servile society was wrecked
at the Reformation in certain areas of Europe, and particularly in England.
There was gradually produced in its stead the transitory phase of society
(now nearing its end) called generally _Capitalism_ or the _Capitalist
State_.
Such a digression, being purely historical, is not logically necessary to a
consideration of our subject, but it is of great value to the reader,
because the knowledge of how, in reality and in the concrete, things have
moved better enables us to understand the logical process whereby they tend
towards a particular goal in the future.
One could prove the tendency towards the Servile State in England to-day to
a man who knew nothing of the past of Europe; but that tendency will seem
to him far more reasonably probable, far more a matter of experience and
less a matter of mere deduction, when he knows what our society once was,
and how it changed into what we know to-day.
Section Two
Our Civilisation Was Originally Servile
In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find,
from two thousand years ago upwards, one fundamental institution whereupon
the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is Slavery.
There is here no distinction between the highly civilised City-State of the
Mediterranean, with its letters, its plastic art, and its code of laws,
with all that makes a civilisation--and this stretching back far beyond any
surviving record,--there is here no distinction between that civilised body
and the Northern and Western societies of the Celtic tribes, or of the
little known hordes that wandered in the Germanies. _All_ indifferently
reposed upon slavery. It was a fundamental conception of society. It was
everywhere present, nowhere disputed.
There _is_ a distinction (or would appear to be) between Europeans and
Asiatics in this matter. The religion and morals of the one so differed in
their very origin from those of the other that every social institution was
touched by the contrast--and Slavery among the rest.
But with that we need not concern ourselves. My point is that our European
ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with
little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the
economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never
doubted but that it was normal to all human society.
It is a matter of capital importance to seize this.
An arrangement of such a sort would not have endured without intermission
(and indeed without question) for many centuries, nor have been found
emerging fully grown from that vast space of unrecorded time during which
barbarism and civilisation flourished side by side in Europe, had there not
been something in it, good or evil, native to our blood.
There was no question in those ancient societies from which we spring of
making subject races into slaves by the might of conquering races. All that
is the guess-work of the universities. Not only is there no proof of it,
rather all the existing proof is the other way. The Greek had a Greek
slave, the Latin a Latin slave, the German a German slave, the Celt a
Celtic slave. The theory that "superior races" invaded a land, either drove
out the original inhabitants or reduced them to slavery, is one which has
no argument either from our present knowledge of man's mind or from
recorded evidence. Indeed, the most striking feature of that Servile Basis
upon which Paganism reposed was the human equality recognised between
master and slave. The master might kill the slave, but both were of one
race and each was human to the other.
This spiritual value was not, as a further pernicious piece of guess-work
would dream, a "growth" or a "progress." The doctrine of human equality was
inherent in the very stuff of antiquity, as it is inherent in those
societies which have not lost tradition.
We may presume that the barbarian of the North would grasp the great truth
with less facility than the civilised man of the Mediterranean, because
barbarism everywhere shows a retrogression in intellectual power; but the
proof that the Servile Institution was a social arrangement rather than a
distinction of type is patent from the coincidence everywhere of
Emancipation with Slavery. Pagan Europe not only thought the existence of
Slaves a natural necessity to society, but equally thought that upon giving
a Slave his freedom the enfranchised man would naturally step, though
perhaps after the interval of some lineage, into the ranks of free society.
Great poets and great artists, statesmen and soldiers were little troubled
by the memory of a servile ancestry.
On the other hand, there was a perpetual recruitment of the Servile
Institution, just as there was a perpetual emancipation from it, proceeding
year after year; and the natural or normal method of recruitment is most
clearly apparent to us in the simple and barbaric societies which the
observation of contemporary civilised Pagans enables us to judge.
It was poverty that made the slave.
Prisoners of war taken in set combat afforded one mode of recruitment, and
there was also the raiding of men by pirates in the outer lands and the
selling of them in the slave markets of the South. But at once the cause of
the recruitment and the permanent support of the institution of slavery was
the indigence of the man who sold himself into slavery, _or was born into
it_; for it was a rule of Pagan Slavery that the slave bred the slave, and
that even if one of the parents were free the offspring was a slave.
The society of antiquity, therefore, was normally divided (as must at last
be the society of any servile state) into clearly marked sections: there
was upon the one hand the citizen who had a voice in the conduct of the
State, who would often labour--but labour of his own free will--and who was
normally possessed of property; upon the other hand, there was a mass
dispossessed of the means of production and compelled by positive law to
labour at command.
It is true that in the further developments of society the accumulation of
private savings by a slave was tolerated and that slaves so favoured did
sometimes purchase their freedom.
It is further true that in the confusion of the last generations of
Paganism there arose in some of the great cities a considerable class of
men who, though free, were dispossessed of the means of production. But
these last never existed in a sufficient proportion to stamp the whole
State of society with a character drawn from their proletarian
circumstance. To the end the Pagan world remained a world of free
proprietors possessed, in various degrees, of the land and of the capital
whereby wealth may be produced, and applying to that land and capital for
the purpose of producing wealth, _compulsory_ labour.
Certain features in that original Servile State from which we all spring
should be carefully noted by way of conclusion.
First, though all nowadays contrast slavery with freedom to the advantage
of the latter, yet men then accepted slavery freely as an alternative to
indigence.
Secondly (and this is most important for our judgment of the Servile
Institution as a whole, and of the chances of its return), in all those
centuries we find no organised effort, nor (what is still more significant)
do we find any _complaint of conscience_ against the institution which
condemned the bulk of human beings to forced labour.
Slaves may be found in the literary exercises of the time bewailing their
lot and joking about it; some philosophers will complain that an ideal
society should contain no slaves; others will excuse the establishment of
slavery upon this plea or that, while granting that it offends the dignity
of man. The greater part will argue of the State that it is necessarily
Servile. But no one, slave or free, dreams of abolishing or even of
changing the thing. You have no martyrs for the case of "freedom" as
against "slavery." The so-called Servile wars are the resistance on the
part of escaped slaves to any attempt at recapture, but they are not
accompanied by an accepted affirmation that servitude is an intolerable
thing; nor is that note struck at all from the unknown beginnings to the
Catholic endings of the Pagan world. Slavery is irksome, undignified,
woeful; but it is, to them, of the nature of things.
You may say, to be brief, that this arrangement of society was the very air
which Pagan Antiquity breathed.
Its great works, its leisure and its domestic life, its humour, its
reserves of power, all depend upon the fact that its society was that of
the Servile State.
Men were happy in that arrangement, or, at least, as happy as men ever are.
The attempt to escape by a personal effort, whether of thrift, of
adventure, or of flattery to a master, from the Servile condition had never
even so much of driving power behind it as the attempt many show to-day to
escape from the rank of wage-earners to those of employers. Servitude did
not seem a hell into which a man would rather die than sink, or out of
which at any sacrifice whatsoever a man would raise himself. It was a
condition accepted by those who suffered it as much as by those who enjoyed
it, and a perfectly necessary part of all that men did and thought.
You find no barbarian from some free place astonished at the institution of
Slavery; you find no Slave pointing to a society in which Slavery was
unknown as towards a happier land. To our ancestors not only for those few
centuries during which we have record of their actions, but apparently
during an illimitable past, the division of society into those who must
work under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labour was the
very plan of the State apart from which they could hardly think of society
as existing at all.
Let all this be clearly grasped. It is fundamental to an understanding of
the problem before us. Slavery is no novel experience in the history of
Europe; nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of Slavery as
acceptable to European men. Slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for
thousands upon thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that
considerable moral experiment called _The Faith_, which many believe to be
now accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem
that the old and primary institution of Slavery must return.
For there came upon us Europeans after all those centuries, and centuries
of a settled social order which was erected upon Slavery as upon a sure
foundation, the experiment called the Christian Church.
Among the by-products of this experiment, very slowly emerging from the old
Pagan world, and not long completed before Christendom itself suffered a
shipwreck, was the exceedingly gradual transformation of the Servile State
into something other: a society of owners. And how that something other did
proceed from the Pagan Servile State I will next explain.
Section Three
How the Servile Institution Was for a Time Dissolved
The process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men, though very
lengthy in its development (it covered close upon a thousand years), and
though exceedingly complicated in its detail, may be easily and briefly
grasped in its main lines.
Let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which
the European mind passed bet ween the first and the fourth centuries (that
revolution which is often termed the Conversion of the World to
Christianity, but which should for purposes of historical accuracy be
called the Growth of the Church) included no attack upon the Servile
Institution.
No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and
purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a
Christian to be a contravention of any human right.
The emancipation of Slaves was indeed regarded as a good work by the
Faithful: but so was it regarded by the Pagan. It was, on the face of it, a
service rendered to one's fellowmen. The sale of Christians to Pagan
masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not
because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of
treason to civilisation to force men away from Civilisation to Barbarism.
In general you will discover no pronouncement against slavery as an
institution, nor any moral definition attacking it, throughout all those
early Christian centuries during which it none the less effectively
disappears.
The form of its disappearance is well worth noting. It begins with the
establishment as the fundamental unit of production in Western Europe of
those great landed estates, commonly lying in the hands of a single
proprietor, and generally known as /Villae/.
There were, of course, many other forms of human agglomeration: small
peasant farms owned in absolute proprietorship by their petty masters;
groups of free men associated in what was called a Vicus; manufactories in
which groups of slaves were industrially organised to the profit of their
master; and, governing the regions around them, the scheme of Roman towns.
But of all these the Villa the dominating type; and as society passed from
the high civilisation of the first four centuries into the simplicity of
the Dark Ages, the Villa, the unit of agricultural production, became more
and more the model of all society.
Now the Villa began as a considerable extent of land, containing, like a
modern English estate, pasture, arable, water, wood and heath, or waste
land. It was owned by a dominus or _lord_ in absolute proprietorship, to
sell, or leave by will, to do with it whatsoever he chose. It was
cultivated for him by _Slaves_ to whom he owed nothing in return, and whom
it was simply his interest to keep alive and to continue breeding in order
that they might perpetuate his wealth.
I concentrate particularly upon these Slaves, the great majority of the
human beings inhabiting the land, because, although there arose in the Dark
Ages, when the Roman Empire was passing into the society of the Middle
Ages, other social elements within the _Villae_--the Freed men who owed the
lord a modified service, and even occasionally independent citizens present
through a contract terminable and freely entered into yet it is the _Slave_
who is the mark of all that society.
At its origin, then, the Roman Villa was a piece of absolute property, the
production of wealth upon which was due to the application of slave labour
to the natural resources of the place; and that slave labour was as much
the property of the lord as was the land itself.
The first modification which this arrangement showed in the new society
which accompanied the growth and establishment of the Church in the Roman
world, was a sort of customary rule which modified the old arbitrary
position of the Slave.
The Slave was still a Slave, but it was both more convenient in the decay
of communications and public power, and more consonant with the social
spirit of the time to make sure of that Slave's produce by asking him for
no more than certain customary dues. The Slave and his descendants became
more or less rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, but in
decreasing numbers. As the generations passed a larger and a larger
proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived, and the produce
which they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount, which the
lord was content to receive and ask no more. The arrangement was made
workable by leaving to the Slave all the remaining produce of his own
labour. There was a sort of implied bargain here, in the absence of public
powers and in the decline of the old highly centralised and vigorous system
which could always guarantee to the master the full product of the Slave's
effort. The bargain implied was, that if the Slave Community of the Villa
would produce for the benefit of its Lord not less than a certain customary
amount of goods from the soil of the Villa, the Lord could count on their
always exercising that effort by leaving to them all the surplus, which
they could increase, if they willed, indefinitely.
By the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for a
matter of some three hundred years, one fixed form of productive unit began
to be apparent throughout Western Christendom.
The old absolutely owned estate had come to be divided into three portions.
One of these was pasture and arable land, reserved privately to the lord,
and called _domain_: that is, lord's land. Another was in the occupation,
and already almost in the possession (practically, though not legally), of
those who had once been Slaves. A third was common land over which both the
Lord and the Slave exercised each their various rights, which rights were
minutely remembered and held sacred by custom. For instance, in a certain
village, if there was beech pasture for three hundred swine, the lord might
put in but fifty: two hundred and fifty were the rights of the "village."
Upon the first of these portions, Domain, wealth was produced by the
obedience of the Slave for certain fixed hours of labour. He must come so
many days a week, or upon such and such occasions (all fixed and
customary), to till the land of the Domain for his Lord, and _all_ the
produce of this must be handed over to the Lord though, of course, a daily
wage in kind was allowed, for the labourer must live.
Upon the second portion, "Land in Villenage," which was nearly always the
most of the arable and pasture land of the _Villae_, the Slaves worked by
rules and customs which they gradually came to elaborate for themselves.
They worked under an officer of their own, sometimes nominated, sometimes
elected: nearly always, in practice, a man suitable to them and more or
less of their choice; though this co-operative work upon the old
Slave-ground was controlled by the general customs of the village, common
to lord and slave alike, and the principal officer over both kinds of land
was the Lord's Steward.
Of the wealth so produced by the Slaves, a certain fixed portion (estimated
originally in kind) was payable to the Lord's Bailiff, and became the
property of the Lord.
Finally, on the third division of the land, the "Waste," the "Wood," the
"Heath," and certain common pastures, wealth was produced as elsewhere by
the labour of those who had once been the Slaves, but divided in customary
proportions between them and their master. Thus, such and such a water
meadow would have grazing for so many oxen; the number was rigidly defined,
and of that number so many would be the Lord's and so many the Villagers'.
During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries this system crystallised and
became so natural in men's eyes that the original servile character of the
working folk upon the Villa was forgotten.
The documents of the time are rare. These three centuries are the crucible
of Europe, and record is drowned and burnt in them. Our study of their
social conditions, especially in the latter part, are matter rather of
inference than of direct evidence. But the sale and purchase of men,
already exceptional at the beginning of this period, is almost unknown
before the end of it. Apart from domestic slaves within the household,
slavery in the old sense which Pagan antiquity gave that institution had
been transformed out of all knowledge, and when, with the eleventh century,
the true Middle Ages begin to spring from the soil of the Dark Ages, and a
new civilisation to arise, though the old word _servus_ (the Latin for a
slave) is still used for the man who works the soil, his status in the now
increasing number of documents which we can consult is wholly changed; we
can certainly no longer translate the word by the English word _slave_; we
are compelled to translate it by a new word with very different
connotations: the word _serf_.
The Serf of the early Middle Ages, of the eleventh and early twelfth
centuries, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, is already nearly a
peasant. He is indeed bound in legal theory to the soil upon which he was
born. In social practice, all that is required of him is that his family
should till its quota of servile land, and that the dues to the lord shall
not fail from absence of labour. That duty fulfilled, it is easy and common
for members of the serf-class to enter the professions and the Church, or
to go wild; to become men practically free in the growing industries of the
towns. With every passing generation the ancient servile conception of the
labourer's status grows more and more dim, and the Courts and the practice
of society treat him more and more as a man strictly bound to certain dues
and to certain periodical labour within his industrial unit, but in all
other respects free.
As the civilisation of the Middle Ages develops, as wealth increases and
the arts progressively flourish, this character of freedom becomes more
marked. In spite of attempts in time of scarcity (as after a plague) to
insist upon the old rights to compulsory labour, the habit of commuting
these rights for money-payments and dues has grown too strong to be
resisted.
If at the end of the fourteenth century, let us say, or at the beginning of
the fifteenth, you had visited some Squire upon his estate in France or in
England, he would have told you of the whole of it, "These are my lands."
But the peasant (as he now was) would have said also of his holding, "This
is my land." He could not be evicted from it. The dues which he was
customarily bound to pay were but a fraction of its total produce. He could
not always sell it, but it was always inheritable from father to son; and,
in general, at the close of this long process of a thousand years the Slave
had become a free man for all the ordinary purposes of society. He bought
and sold. He saved as he willed, he invested, he built, he drained at his
discretion, and if he improved the land it was to his own profit.
Meanwhile, side by side with this emancipation of mankind in the direct
line of descent from the old chattel slaves of the Roman villa went, in the
Middle Ages, a crowd of institutions which all similarly made for a
distribution of property, and for the destruction of even the fossil
remnants of a then forgotten Servile State. Thus industry of every kind in
the towns, in transport, in crafts, and in commerce, was organised in the
form of _Guilds_. And a Guild was a society partly co-operative, but in the
main composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was
self-governing, and was designed to check competition between its members:
to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. Above all, most
jealously did the Guild safeguard the division of property, so that there
should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the one side, and no
monopolising capitalist upon the other.
There was a period of apprenticeship at a man's entry into a Guild, during
which he worked for a master; but in time he became a master in his turn.
The existence of such corporations as the normal units of industrial
production, of commercial effort, and of the means of transport, is proof
enough of what the social spirit was which had also enfranchised the
labourer upon the land. And while such institutions flourished side by side
with the no longer servile village communities, freehold or absolute
possession of the soil, as distinguished from the tenure of the serf under
the lord, also increased.
These three forms under which labour was exercised the serf, secure in his
position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of
his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which
were more of a tax than a rent; the Guild, in which well-divided capital
worked co-operatively for craft production, for transport and for
commerce--all three between them were making for a society which should be
based upon the principle of property. All, or most,--the normal
family--should own. And on ownership the freedom of the State should
repose.
The State, as the minds of men envisaged it at the close of this process,
was an agglomeration of families of varying wealth, but by far the greater
number owners of the means of production. It was an agglomeration in which
the stability of this _distributive_ system (as I have called it) was
guaranteed by the existence of co-operative bodies, binding men of the same
craft or of the same village together; guaranteeing the small proprietor
against loss of his economic independence, while at the same time it
guaranteed society against the growth of a proletariat. If liberty of
purchase and of sale, of mortgage and of inheritance was restricted, it was
restricted with the social object of preventing the growth of an economic
oligarchy which could exploit the rest of the community. The restraints
upon liberty were restraints designed for the preservation of liberty; and
every action of Mediaeval Society, from the flower of the Middle Ages to
the approach of their catastrophe, was directed towards the establishment
of a State in which men should be economically free through the possession
of capital and of land.
Save here and there in legal formulae, or in rare patches isolated and
eccentric, the Servile Institution had totally disappeared; nor must it be
imagined that anything in the nature of Collectivism had replaced it. There
was common land, but it was common land jealously guarded by men who were
also personal proprietors of other land. Common property in the village was
but one of the forms of property, and was used rather as the fly-wheel to
preserve the regularity of the co-operative machine than as a type of
holding in any way peculiarly sacred. The Guilds had property in common,
but that property was the property necessary to their co-operative life,
their Halls, their Funds for Relief, their Religious Endowments. As for the
instruments of their trades, those instruments were owned by the individual
members, _not_ by the guild, save where they were of so expensive a kind as
to necessitate a corporate control.
Such was the transformation which had come over European society in the
course of ten Christian centuries. Slavery had gone, and in its place had
come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men,
and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found
for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an
awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and
brought into existence the /Distributive State/.
That excellent consummation of human society passed, as we know, and was in
certain Provinces of Europe, but more particularly in Britain, destroyed.
For a society in which the determinant mass of families were owners of
capital and of land; for one in which production was regulated by
self-governing corporations of small owners; and for one in which the
misery and insecurity of a proletariat was unknown, there came to be
substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is
now turned, and which goes by the name of _Capitalism_.
How did such a catastrophe come about? Why was it permitted, and upon what
historical process did the evil batten? What turned an England economically
free into the England which we know to-day, of which at least one-third is
indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of
land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon
its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of
unsocial and irresponsible monopolies?
The answer most usually given to this fundamental question in our history,
and the one most readily accepted, is that this misfortune came about
through a material process known as the _Industrial Revolution_. The use of
expensive machinery, the concentration of industry and of its implements
are imagined to have enslaved, in some blind way, apart from the human
will, the action of English mankind.
The explanation is wholly false. No such material cause determined the
degradation from which we suffer.
It was the deliberate action of men, evil will in a few and apathy of will
among the many, which produced a catastrophe as human in its causes and
inception as in its vile effect.
Capitalism was not the growth of the industrial movement, nor of chance
material discoveries. A little acquaintance with history and a little
straightforwardness in the teaching of it would be enough to prove that.
The Industrial System was a growth proceeding from Capitalism, not its
cause. Capitalism was here in England before the Industrial System came
into being;--before the use of coal and of the new expensive machinery, and
of the concentration of the implements of production in the great towns.
Had Capitalism not been present before the Industrial Revolution, that
revolution might have proved as beneficent to Englishmen as it has proved
maleficent. But Capitalism--that is, the ownership by a few of the springs
of life--was present long before the great discoveries came. It warped the
effect of these discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them from a
good into an evil thing. It was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it
was the loss of a free mind.
Section Four
How the Distributive State Failed
With the close of the middle ages the societies of Western Christendom and
England among the rest were economically free.
Property was an institution native to the State and enjoyed by the great
mass of its citizens. Co-operative institutions, voluntary regulations of
labour, restricted the completely independent use of property by its owners
only in order to keep that institution intact and to prevent the absorption
of small property by great.
This excellent state of affairs which we had reached after many centuries
of Christian development, and in which the old institution of slavery had
been finally eliminated from Christendom, did not everywhere survive. In
England in particular it was ruined. The seeds of the disaster were sown in
the sixteenth century. Its first apparent effects came to light in the
seventeenth. During the eighteenth century England came to be finally,
though insecurely, established upon a proletarian basis, that is, it had
already become a society of rich men possessed of the means of production
on the one hand, and a majority dispossessed of those means upon the other.
With the nineteenth century the evil plant had come to its maturity, and
England had become before the close of that period a purely Capitalist
State, the type and model of Capitalism for the whole world: with the means
of production tightly held by a very small group of citizens, and the whole
determining mass of the nation dispossessed of capital and land, and
dispossessed, therefore, in all cases of security, and in many of
sufficiency as well. The mass of Englishmen, still possessed of political,
lacked more and more the elements of economic, freedom, and were in a worse
posture than free citizens have ever found themselves before in the history
of Europe.
By what steps did so enormous a catastrophe fall upon us?
The first step in the process consisted in the mishandling of a great
economic revolution which marked the sixteenth century. The lands and the
accumulated wealth of the monasteries were taken out of, the hands of their
old possessors with the intention of vesting them in the Crown--but they
passed, as a fact, not into the hands of the Crown, but into the hands of
an already wealthy section of the community who, after the change was
complete, became in the succeeding hundred years the governing power of
England.
This is what happened:--
The England of the early sixteenth century, the England over which Henry
VIII inherited his powerful Crown in youth, though it was an England in
which the great mass of men owned the land they tilled and the houses in
which they dwelt, and the implements with which they worked, was yet an
England in which these goods, though widely distributed, were distributed
unequally.
Then, as now, the soil and its fixtures were the basis of all wealth, but
the proportion between the value of the soil and its fixtures and the value
of other means of production (implements, stores of clothing and of
subsistence, etc.) was different from what it is now. The land and the
fixtures upon it formed a very much larger fraction of the totality of the
means of production than they do to-day. They represent to-day not one-half
the total means of production of this country, and though they are the
necessary foundation for all wealth production, yet our great machines, our
stores of food and clothing, our coal and oil, our ships and the rest of
it, come to more than the true value of the land and of the fixtures upon
the land: they come to more than the arable soil and the pasture, the
constructional value of the houses, wharves and docks, and so forth. In the
early sixteenth century the land and the fixtures upon it came, upon the
contrary, to very much more than all other forms of wealth combined.
Now this form of wealth was here, more than in any other Western European
country, already in the hands of a wealthy land-owning class at the end of
the Middle Ages.
It is impossible to give exact statistics, because none were gathered, and
we can only make general statements based upon inference and research. But,
roughly speaking, we may say that of the total value of the land and its
fixtures, probably rather more than a quarter, though less than a third,
was in the hands of this wealthy class.
The England of that day was mainly agricultural, and consisted of more than
four, but less than six million people, and in every agricultural community
you would have the Lord, as he was legally called (the squire, as he was
already conversationally termed), in possession of more demesne land than
in any other country. On the average you found him, I say, owning in this
absolute fashion rather more than a quarter, perhaps a third of the land of
the village: in the towns the distribution was more even. Sometimes it was
a private individual who was in this position, sometimes a corporation, but
in every village you would have found this demesne land absolutely owned by
the political head of the village, occupying a considerable proportion of
its acreage. The rest, though distributed as property among the less
fortunate of the population, and carrying with it houses and implements
from which they could not be dispossessed, paid certain dues to the Lord,
and, what was more, the Lord exercised local justice. This class of wealthy
landowners had been also for now one hundred years the Justices upon whom
local administration depended.
There was no reason why this state of affairs should not gradually have led
to the rise of the Peasant and the decay of the Lord. That is what happened
in France, and it might perfectly well have happened here. A peasantry
eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the
expense of the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, which was
already fairly complete, there might have been added another excellent
element, namely, the more equal possession of that property. But any such
process of gradual buying by the small man from the great, such as would
seem natural to the temper of us European people, and such as has since
taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon
their popular instincts, was interrupted in this country by an artificial
revolution of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution consisted
in the seizing of the monastic lands by the Crown.
It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation, for the
whole economic future of England was to flow from it.
Of the _demesne_ lands, and the power of local administration which they
carried with them (a very important feature, as we shall see later), rather
more than a quarter were in the hands of the Church; the Church was
therefore the "Lord" of something over 25 per cent. say 28 per cent. or
perhaps nearly 30 per cent. of English agricultural communities, and the
overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce. The
Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 per
cent. of the demesne land in the villages, and the receiver of something
like 30 per cent. of the customary dues, etc., paid by the smaller owners
to the greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of
Cathedral Chapters, communities of monks and nuns, educational
establishments conducted by the clergy, and so forth.
When the Monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII, not the whole of
this vast economic influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular clergy
remained endowed, and most of the educational establishments, though
looted, retained some revenue; but though the whole 30 per cent. did not
suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent. did, and the
revolution effected by this vast operation was by far the most complete,
the most sudden, and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the
economic history of any European people.
It was at first _intended_ to retain this great mass of the means of
production in the hands of the Crown: that must be clearly remembered by
any student of the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the
contrast between the old England and the new.
Had that intention been firmly maintained, the English State and its
government would have been the most powerful in Europe.
The Executive (which in those days meant the _King_) would have had a
greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing
its political power with economic power, and for ordering the social life
of its subjects than any other executive in Christendom.
Had Henry VIII and his successors kept the land thus confiscated, the power
of the French Monarchy, at which we are astonished, would have been nothing
to the power of the English.
The King of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of
control of the most absolute sort. He would presumably have used it, as a
strong central government always does, for the weakening of the wealthier
classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people. At any
rate, it would have been a very different England indeed from the England
we know, if the King had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the
monasteries.
Now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution
appears. _The King failed to keep the lands he had seized._ That class of
large landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said,
anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England,
were too strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to
themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and
they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative
power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied. Nothing that the
Crown let go ever went back to the Crown, and year after year more and more
of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute possession of
the large landowners.
Observe the effect of this. All over England men who already held in
virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and
the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few
years of a further great section of the means of production, which turned
the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra
fifth. They became at a blow the owners of _half_ the land! In many centres
of capital importance they had come to own _more_ than half the land. They
were in many districts not only the unquestioned superiors, but the
economic masters of the rest of the community. They could buy to the
greatest advantage. They were strictly _competitive_, getting every
shilling of due and of rent where the old clerical landlords had been
_customary_--leaving much to the tenant. They began to fill the
universities, the judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great
and small. More and more the great could decide in their own favour. They
soon possessed by these operations the bulk of the means of production, and
they immediately began the process of eating up the small independent men
and gradually forming those great estates which, in the course of a few
generations, became identical with the village itself. All over England you
may notice that the great squires' houses date from this revolution or
after it. The manorial house, the house of the local great man as it was in
the Middle Ages, survives here and there to show of what immense effect
this revolution was. The low-timbered place with its steadings and
outbuildings, only a larger farmhouse among the other farmhouses, is turned
after the Reformation and thenceforward into a palace. Save where great
castles (which were only held of the Crown and not owned) made an
exception, the pre-Reformation gentry lived as men richer than, but not the
masters of, other farmers around them. _After_ the Reformation there began
to arise all over England those great "country houses" which rapidly became
the typical centres of English agricultural life.
The process was in full swing before Henry died. Unfortunately for England,
he left as his heir a sickly child, during the six years of whose reign,
from 1547 to 1553, the loot went on at an appalling rate. When he died and
Mary came to the throne it was nearly completed. A mass of new families had
arisen, wealthy out of all proportion to anything which the older England
had known, and bound by a common interest to the older families which had
joined in the grab. Every single man who sat in Parliament for a country
required his price for voting the dissolution of the monasteries; every
single man received it. A list of the members of the Dissolution Parliament
is enough to prove this, and, apart from their power in Parliament, this
class had a hundred other ways of insisting on their will. The Howards
(already of some lineage), the Cavendishes, the Cecils, the Russels, and
fifty other new families thus rose upon the ruins of religion; and the
process went steadily on until, about one hundred years after its
inception, the whole face of England was changed.
In the place of a powerful Crown disposing of revenues far greater than
that of any subject, you had a Crown at its wit's end for money, and
dominated by subjects some of whom were its equals in wealth, and who
could, especially through the action of Parliament (which they now
controlled), do much what they willed with Government.
In other words, by the first third of the seventeenth century, by 1630--40,
the economic revolution was finally accomplished, and the new economic
reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was a powerful
oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and dwindled
monarchy.
Other causes had contributed to this deplorable result. The change in the
value of money had hit the Crown very hard;[2] the peculiar history of the
Tudor family, their violent passions, their lack of resolution and of any
continuous policy, to some extent the character of Charles I himself, and
many another subsidiary cause may be quoted. But the great main fact upon
which the whole thing is dependent is the fact that the Monastic Lands, at
least a fifth of the wealth of the country, had been transferred to the
great landowners, and that this transference had tipped the scale over
entirely in their favour as against the peasantry.
The diminished and impoverished Crown could no longer stand. It fought
against the new wealth, the struggle of the Civil Wars; it was utterly
defeated; and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660, you have all
the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy
men, the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old
power, but in practice a salaried puppet. And in that economic world which
underlies all political appearances, the great dominating note was that a
few wealthy families had got hold of the bulk of the means of production in
England, while the same families exercised all local administrative power
and were moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the Church, and the
generals. They quite overshadowed what was left of central government in
this country.
Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time
more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not
one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house
of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could
not be turned off.
Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and
certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means
of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in
which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad
business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by
that date England had already become /Capitalist/. She had already
permitted a vast section of her population to become _proletarian_, and it
is this and _not_ the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later thing,
which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves
to-day.
How true this is what I still have to say in this section will prove.
In an England thus already cursed with a very large proletariat class, and
in an England already directed by a dominating Capitalist class, possessing
the means of production, there came a great industrial development.
Had that industrial development come upon a people economically free, it
would have taken a co-operative form. Coming as it did upon a people which
had already largely lost its economic freedom, it took at its very origin a
_Capitalist_ form, and this form it has retained, expanded, and perfected
throughout two hundred years.
It was in England that the Industrial System arose. It was in England that
all its traditions and habits were formed; and because the England in which
it arose was already a Capitalist England, modern Industrialism, wherever
you see it at work to-day, having spread from England, has proceeded upon
the Capitalist model.
It was in 1705 that the first practical steam-engine, Newcomen's, was set
to work. The life of a man elapsed before this invention was made, by
Watt's introduction of the condenser, into the great instrument of
production which has transformed our industry--but in those sixty years all
the origins of the Industrial System are to be discovered. It was just
before Watt's patent that Hargreaves' spinning-jenny appeared. Thirty years
earlier, Abraham Darby of Colebrook Dale, at the end of a long series of
experiments which had covered more than a century, smelted iron-ore
successfully with coke. Not twenty years later, King introduced the flying
shuttle, the first great improvement in the hand-loom; and in general the
period covered by such a life as that of Dr Johnson, born just after
Newcomen's engine was first set working, and dying seventy-four years
afterwards, when the Industrial System was in full blast, covers that great
transformation of England. A man who, as a child, could remember the last
years of Queen Anne, and who lived to the eve of the French Revolution, saw
passing before his eyes the change which transformed English society and
has led it to the expansion and peril in which we see it to-day.
What was the characteristic mark of that half-century and more? Why did the
new inventions give us the form of society now known and hated under the
name of Industrial? Why did the vast increase in the powers of production,
in population and in accumulation of wealth, turn the mass of Englishmen
into a poverty-stricken proletariat, cut off the rich from the rest of the
nation, and develop to the full all the evils which we associate with the
Capitalist State?
To that question an answer almost as universal as it is unintelligent has
been given. That answer is not only unintelligent but false, and it will be
my business here to show how false it is. The answer so provided in
innumerable textbooks, and taken almost as commonplace in our universities,
is that the new methods of production--the new machinery, the new
implements--fatally and of themselves developed a Capitalist State in which
a few should own the means of production and the mass should be
proletariat. The new instruments, it is pointed out, were on so vastly
greater a scale than the old, and were so much more expensive, that the
small man could not afford them; while the rich man, who could afford them,
ate up by his competition, and reduced from the position of a small owner
to that of a wage-earner, his insufficiently equipped competitor who still
attempted to struggle on with the older and cheaper tools. To this (we are
told) the advantages of concentration were added in favour of the large
owner against the small. Not only were the new instruments expensive almost
in proportion to their efficiency, but, especially after the introduction
of steam, they were efficient in proportion to their concentration in few
places and under the direction of a few men. Under the effect of such false
arguments as these we have been taught to believe that the horrors of the
Industrial System were a blind and necessary product of material and
impersonal forces, and that wherever the steam engine, the power loom, the
blast furnace and the rest were introduced, there fatally would soon appear
a little group of owners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed.
It is astonishing that a statement so unhistorical should have gained so
general a credence. Indeed, were the main truths of English history taught
in our schools and universities to-day, were educated men familiar with the
determining and major facts of the national past, such follies could never
have taken root. The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of
ownership into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those
owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection
with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of production.
The evil proceeded indirect historical sequence, proceeded patently and
demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed-plot of the Industrial
System, was _already_ captured by a wealthy oligarchy _before_ the series
of great discoveries began.
Consider in what way the Industrial System developed upon Capitalist lines.
Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new
methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of
contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new
machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the
England upon which the new discoveries had come was _already_ an England
owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it
was _already_ an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was
proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand.
When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be _capitalised_;
that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which
would support labour in the process of production until that process should
be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and
the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the
raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article
could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned
it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected
by co-operative guilds fenced round and supported by custom and by the
autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth,
necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each
new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small
owners. _Their_ corporations, _their_ little parcels of wealth combined
would have furnished the _capitalisation_ required for the new processes,
and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have
increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing the balance
of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience
which binds the capitalisation of a new process with the idea of a few
employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage. Such
great discoveries coming in a society like that of the thirteenth century
would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral
conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse.
To whom could the new industry turn for capitalisation? The small owner had
already largely disappeared. The corporate life and mutual obligations
which had supported him and confirmed him in his property had been broken
to pieces by no "economic development," but by the deliberate action of the
rich. He was ignorant because his schools had been taken from him and the
universities closed to him. He was the more ignorant because the common
life which once nourished his social sense and the co-operative
arrangements which had once been his defence had disappeared. When you
sought an accumulation of corn, of clothing, of housing, of fuel as the
indispensable preliminary to the launching of your new industry; when you
looked round for someone who could find the accumulated wealth necessary
for these considerable experiments, you had to turn to the class which had
already monopolised the bulk of the means of production in England. The
rich men alone could furnish you with those supplies.
Nor was this all. The supplies once found and the adventure "capitalised,"
that form of human energy which lay best to hand, which was indefinitely
exploitable, weak, ignorant, and desperately necessitous, ready to produce
for you upon almost any terms, and glad enough if you would only keep it
alive, was the existing proletariat which the new plutocracy had created
when, in cornering the wealth of the country after the Reformation, they
had thrust out the mass of Englishmen from the possession of implements, of
houses, and of land.
The rich class, adopting some new process of production for its private
gain, worked it upon those lines of mere competition which its avarice had
already established. Co-operative tradition was dead. Where would it find
its cheapest labour? Obviously among the proletariat--not among the
remaining small owners. What class would increase under the new wealth?
Obviously the proletariat again, without responsibilities, with nothing to
leave to its progeny; and as they swelled the capitalist's gain, they
enabled him with increasing power to buy out the small owner and send him
to swell by another tributary the proletarian mass.
It was upon this account that the Industrial Revolution, as it is called,
took in its very origins the form which has made it an almost unmixed curse
for the unhappy society in which it has flourished. The rich, already
possessed of the accumulations by which that industrial change could alone
be nourished, inherited all its succeeding accumulations of implements and
all its increasing accumulations of subsistence. The factory system,
starting upon a basis of capitalist and proletariat, grew in the mould
which had determined its origins. With every new advance the capitalist
looked for proletariat grist to feed the productive mill. Every
circumstance of that society, the form in which the laws that governed
ownership and profit were cast, the obligations of partners, the relations
bet ween "master" and "man," directly made for the indefinite expansion of
a subject, formless, wage-earning class controlled by a small body of
owners, which body would tend to become smaller and richer still, and to be
possessed of power ever greater and greater as the bad business unfolded.
The spread of economic oligarchy was everywhere, and not in industry alone.
The great landlords destroyed deliberately and of set purpose and to their
own ad vantage the common rights over common land. The small plutocracy
with which they were knit up, and with whose mercantile elements they were
now fused, directed everything to its own ends. That strong central
government which should protect the community against the rapacity of a few
had gone generations before. Capitalism triumphant wielded all the
mechanism of legislation and of information too. It still holds them; and
there is not an example of so-called "Social Reform" to-day which is not
demonstrably (though often subconsciously) directed to the further
entrenchment and confirmation of an industrial society in which it is taken
for granted that a few shall own, that the vast majority shall live at a
wage under them, and that all the bulk of Englishmen may hope for is the
amelioration of their lot by regulations and by control from above--but not
by property; not by freedom.
We all feel--and those few of us who have analysed the matter not only feel
but know--that the Capitalist society thus gradually developed from its
origins in the capture of the land four hundred years ago has reached its
term. It is almost self-evident that it cannot continue in the form which
now three generations have known, and it is equally self-evident that some
solution must be found for the intolerable and increasing instability with
which it has poisoned our lives. But before considering the solutions
variously presented by various schools of thought, I shall in my next
section show how and why the English Capitalist Industrial System is thus
intolerably unstable and consequently presents an acute problem which must
be solved under pain of social death.
* * * * *
It must be noted that modern Industrialism has spread to many other centres
from England. It bears everywhere the features stamped upon it by its
origin in this country.
Section Five
The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable
From the historical digression which I have introduced by way of
illustrating my subject in the last two sections I now return to the
general discussion of my thesis and to the logical process by which it may
be established.
* * * * *
The Capitalist State is unstable, and indeed more properly a transitory
phase lying between two permanent and stable states of society.
In order to appreciate why this is so, let us recall the definition of the
Capitalist State:--
"A society in which the ownership of the means of production is confined to
a body of free citizens, not large enough to make up properly a general
character of that society, while the rest are dispossessed of the means of
production, and are therefore proletarian, we call _Capitalist_."
Note the several points of such a state of affairs. You have private
ownership; but it is not private ownership distributed in many hands and
thus familiar as an institution to society as a whole. Again, you have the
great majority dispossessed but at the same time citizens, that is, men
politically free to act, though economically impotent; again, though it is
but an inference from our definition, it is a necessary inference that
there will be under Capitalism a conscious, direct, and planned
_exploitation_ of the majority, the free citizens who do not own by the
minority who are owners. For wealth must be produced: the whole of that
community must live: and the possessors can make such terms with the
non-possessors as shall make it certain that a portion of what the
non-possessors have produced shall go to the possessors.
A society thus constituted cannot endure. It cannot endure because it is
subject to two very severe strains: strains which increase in severity in
proportion as that society becomes more thoroughly Capitalist. The first of
these strains arises from the divergence between the moral theories upon
which the State reposes and the social facts which those moral theories
attempt to govern. The second strain arises from the insecurity to which
Capitalism condemns the great mass of society, and the general character of
anxiety and peril which it imposes upon all citizens, but in particular
upon the majority, which consists, under Capitalism, of dispossessed free
men.
Of these two strains it is impossible to say which is the gravest. Either
would be enough to destroy a social arrangement in which it was long
present. The two combined make that destruction certain; and there is no
longer any doubt that Capitalist society must transform itself into some
other and more stable arrangement. It is the object of these pages to
discover what that stable arrangement will probably be.
* * * * *
We say that there is a moral strain already intolerably severe and growing
more severe with every perfection of Capitalism.
This moral strain comes from a contradiction between the realities of
Capitalist and the moral base of our laws and traditions.
The moral base upon which our laws are still administered and our
conventions raised presupposes a state composed of free citizens. Our laws
defend property as a normal institution with which all citizens are
acquainted, and which all citizens respect. It punishes theft as an
abnormal incident only occurring when, through evil motives, one free
citizen acquires the property of another without his knowledge and against
his will. It punishes fraud as another abnormal incident in which, from
evil motives, one free citizen induces another to part with his property
upon false representations. It enforces contract, the sole moral base of
which is the freedom of the two contracting parties, and the power of
either, if it so please him, not to enter into a contract which, once
entered into, must be enforced. It gives to an owner the power to leave his
property by will, under the conception that such ownership and such passage
of property (to natural heirs as a rule, but exceptionally to any other
whom the testator may point out) is the normal operation of a society
generally familiar with such things, and finding them part of the domestic
life lived by the mass of its citizens. It casts one citizen in damages if
by any wilful action he has caused loss to another--for it presupposes him
able to pay.
The sanction upon which social life reposes is, in our moral theory, the
legal punishment enforceable in our Courts, and the basis presupposed for
the security and material happiness of our citizens is the possession of
goods which shall guarantee us from anxiety and permit us an independence
of action in the midst of our fellowmen.
Now contrast all this, the moral theory upon which society is still
perilously conducted, the moral theory to which Capitalism itself turns for
succour when it is attacked, contrast, I say, its formulae and its
presuppositions with the social reality of a Capitalist State such as is
England to-day.
Property remains as an instinct perhaps with most of the citizens; as an
experience and a reality it is unknown to nineteen out of twenty. One
hundred forms of fraud, the necessary corollary of unrestrained competition
between a few and of unrestrained avarice as the motive controlling
production, are not or cannot be punished: petty forms of violence in theft
and of cunning in fraud the laws can deal with, but they cannot deal with
these alone. Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for
protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the
hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens. The vast bulk of
so-called "free" contracts are to-day leonine contracts: arrangements which
one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free
to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation.
Most important of all, the fundamental social fact of our movement, far
more important than any security afforded by law, or than any machinery
which the State can put into action, is the fact that livelihood is at the
will of the possessors. It can be granted by the possessors to the
non-possessors, or it can be withheld. The real sanction in our society for
the arrangements by which it is conducted is not punishment enforceable by
the Courts, but the withholding of _livelihood_ from the dispossessed by
the possessors. Most men now fear the loss of employment more than they
fear legal punishment, and the discipline under which men are coerced in
their modern forms of activity in England is the fear of dismissal. The
true master of the Englishman to-day is not the Sovereign nor the officers
of State, nor, save indirectly, the laws; his true master is the
Capitalist.
Of these main truths everyone is aware; and anyone who sets out to deny
them does so to-day at the peril of his reputation either for honesty or
for intelligence.
If it be asked why things have come to a head so late (Capitalism having
been in growth for so long), the answer is that England, even now the most
completely Capitalist State of the modern world, did not itself become a
completely Capitalist State until the present generation. Within the memory
of men now living half England was agricultural, with relations domestic
rather than competitive between the various human factors to production.
This moral strain, therefore, arising from the divergence between what our
laws and moral phrases pretend, and what our society actually is, makes of
that society an utterly unstable thing.
This spiritual thesis is of far greater gravity than the narrow materialism
of a generation now passing might imagine. Spiritual conflict is more
fruitful of instability in the State than conflict of any other kind, and
there is acute spiritual conflict, conflict in every man's conscience and
ill-ease throughout the commonwealth when the realities of society are
divorced from the moral base of its institution.
The second strain which we have noted in Capitalism, its second element of
instability, consists in the fact that Capitalism destroys security.
* * * * *
Experience is enough to save us any delay upon this main point of our
matter. But even without experience we could reason with absolute certitude
from the very nature of Capitalism that its chief effect would be the
destruction of security in human life.
Combine these two elements: the ownership of the means of production by a
very few; the political freedom of owners and non-owners alike. There
follows immediately from that combination a competitive market wherein the
labour of the non-owner fetches just what it is worth, not as full
productive power, but as productive power which will leave a surplus to the
Capitalist. It fetches nothing when the labourer cannot work, more in
proportion to the pace at which he is driven; less in middle age than in
youth; less in old age than in middle age; nothing in sickness; nothing in
despair.
A man in a position to accumulate (the normal result of human labour), a
man founded upon property in sufficient amount and in established form is
no more productive in his non-productive moments than is a proletarian; but
his life is balanced and regulated by his reception of rent and interest as
well as wages. Surplus values come to him, and are the fly-wheel balancing
the extremes of his life and carrying him over his bad times. With a
proletarian it cannot be so. The aspect from Capital looks at a human being
whose labour it proposes to purchase cuts right across that normal aspect
of human life from which we all regard our own affections, duties, and
character. A man thinks of himself, of his chances and of his security
along the line of his own individual existence from birth to death. Capital
purchasing his labour (and not the man himself) purchases but a
cross-section of his life, his moments of activity. For the rest, he must
fend for himself; but to fend for yourself when you have nothing is to
starve.
As a matter of fact, where a few possess the means of production perfectly
free political conditions are impossible. A perfect Capitalist State cannot
exist, though we have come nearer to it in modern England than other and
more fortunate nations had thought possible. In the perfect Capitalist
State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was
actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending
all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement. If
you left men completely free under a Capitalist system, there would be so
heavy a mortality from starvation as would dry up the sources of labour in
a very short time.
Imagine the dispossessed to be ideally perfect cowards, the possessors to
consider nothing whatsoever except the buying of their labour in the
cheapest market--and the system would break down from the death of children
and of out-o'-works and of women. You would not have a State in mere
decline such as ours is. You would have a State manifestly and patently
perishing.
As a fact, of course, Capitalism cannot proceed to its own logical extreme.
So long as the political freedom of all citizens is granted the freedom of
the few possessors of food to grant or withhold it, of the many
non-possessors to strike any bargain at all, lest they lack it: to exercise
such freedom fully is to starve the very young, the old, the impotent, and
the despairing to death. Capitalism must keep alive, by non Capitalist
methods, great masses of the population who would otherwise starve to
death; and that is what Capitalism was careful to do to an increasing
extent as it got a stronger and a stronger grip upon the English people.
Elizabeth's Poor Law at the beginning of the business, the Poor Law of
1834, coming at a moment when nearly half England had passed into the grip
of Capitalism, are original and primitive instances: there are to-day a
hundred others.
Though this cause of insecurity--the fact that the possessors have no
direct incentive to keep men alive--is logically the most obvious, and
always the most enduring under a Capitalist system, there is another cause
more poignant in its effect upon human life. That other cause is the
competitive anarchy in production which restricted ownership coupled with
freedom involves. Consider what is involved by the very process of
production where the implements and the soil are in the hands of a few
whose motive for causing the proletariat to produce is not the use of the
wealth created but the enjoyment by those possessors of surplus value or
"profit."
* * * * *
If full political freedom be allowed to any two such possessors of
implements and stores, each will actively watch his market, attempt to
undersell the other, tend to overproduce at the end of some season of extra
demand for his article, thus glut the market only to suffer a period of
depression afterwards--and so forth. Again, the Capitalist, free,
individual director of production, will miscalculate; sometimes he will
fail, and his works will be shut down. Again, a mass of isolated,
imperfectly instructed competing units cannot but direct their clashing
efforts at an enormous waste, and that waste will fluctuate. Most
commissions, most advertisements, most parades, are examples of this waste.
If this waste of effort could be made a constant, the parasitical
employment it afforded would be a constant too. But of its nature it is a
most inconstant thing, and the employment it affords is therefore
necessarily precarious. The concrete translation of this is the insecurity
of the commercial traveller, the advertising agent, the insurance agent,
and every form of touting and cozening which competitive Capitalism carries
with it.
Now here again, as in the case of the insecurity produced by age and
sickness, Capitalism cannot be pursued to its logical conclusion, and it is
the element of freedom which suffers. Competition is, as a fact, restricted
to an increasing extent by an understanding between the competitors,
accompanied, especially in this country, by the ruin of the smaller
competitor through secret conspiracies entered into by the larger men, and
supported by the secret political forces of the State.[3] In a word,
Capitalism, proving almost as unstable to the owners as to the non-owners,
is tending towards stability by losing its essential character of political
freedom. No better proof of the instability of Capitalism as a system could
be desired.
Take any one of the numerous Trusts which now control English industry, and
have made of modern England the type, quoted throughout the Continent, of
artificial monopolies. If the full formula of Capitalism were accepted by
our Courts and our executive statesmen, anyone could start a rival
business, undersell those Trusts and shatter the comparative security they
afford to industry within their field. The reason that no one does this is
that political freedom is not, as a fact, protected here by the Courts in
commercial affairs. A man attempting to compete with one of our great
English Trusts would find himself at once undersold. He might, by all the
spirit of European law for centuries, indict those who would ruin him,
citing them for a conspiracy in restraint of trade; of this conspiracy he
would find the judge and the politicians most heartily in support.
But it must always be remembered that these conspiracies in restraint of
trade which are the mark of modern England are in themselves a mark of the
transition from the true Capitalist phase to another.
Under the essential conditions of Capitalism--under a perfect political
freedom--such conspiracies would be punished by the Courts for what they
are: to wit, a contravention of the fundamental doctrine of political
liberty. For this doctrine, while it gives any man the right to make any
contract he chooses with any labourer and offer the produce at such prices
as he sees fit, also involves the protection of that liberty by the
punishment of any conspiracy that may have monopoly for its object. If such
perfect freedom is no longer attempted, if monopolies are permitted and
fostered, it is because the unnatural strain to which freedom, coupled with
restricted ownership, gives rise, the insecurity of its mere competition,
the anarchy of its productive methods have at last proved intolerable.
I have already delayed more than was necessary in this section upon the
causes which render a Capitalist State essentially unstable.
I might have treated the matter empirically, taking for granted the
observation which all my readers must have made, that Capitalism is as a
fact doomed, and that the Capitalist State has already passed into its
first phase of transition.
We are clearly no longer possessed of that absolutely political freedom
which true Capitalism essentially demands. The insecurity involved, coupled
with the divorce between our traditional morals and the facts of society,
have already introduced such novel features as the permission of conspiracy
among both possessors and non-possessors, the compulsory provision of
security through State action, and all these reforms, implicit or explicit,
the tendency of which I am about to examine.
Section Six
The Stable Solutions of This Instability
Given a capitalist state, of its nature unstable, it will tend to reach
stability by some method or another.
It is the definition of unstable equilibrium that a body in unstable
equilibrium is seeking a stable equilibrium. For instance, a pyramid
balanced upon its apex is in unstable equilibrium; which simply means that
a slight force one way or the other will make it fall into a position where
it will repose. Similarly, certain chemical mixtures are said to be in
unstable equilibrium when their constituent parts have such affinity one
for another that a slight shock may make them combine and transform the
chemical arrangement of the whole. Of this sort are explosives.
If the Capitalist State is in unstable equilibrium, this only means that it
is seeking a stable equilibrium, and that Capitalism cannot but be
transformed into some other arrangement wherein Society may repose.
There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism:
Slavery, Socialism, and Property.
I may imagine a mixture of any two of these three or of all the three, but
each is a dominant type, and from the very nature of the problem no fourth
arrangement can be devised.
The problem turns, remember, upon the control of the means of production.
Capitalism means that this control is vested in the hands of few, while
political freedom is the appanage of all. If this anomaly cannot endure,
from its insecurity and from its own contradiction with its presumed moral
basis, you must either have a transformation of the one or of the other of
the two elements which combined have been found unworkable. These two
factors are (1) The ownership of the means of Production by a few; (2) The
Freedom of all. To solve Capitalism you must get rid of restricted
ownership, or of freedom, or of both. Now there is only one alternative to
freedom, which is the negation of it. Either a man is free to work and not
to work as he pleases, or he may be liable to a legal compulsion to work,
backed by the forces of the State. In the first he is a free man; in the
second he is by definition a slave. We have, therefore, so far as this
factor of freedom is concerned, no choice between a number of changes, but
only the opportunity of one, to wit, the establishment of slavery in place
of freedom. Such a solution, the direct, immediate, and conscious
re-establishment of slavery, would provide a true solution of the problems
which Capitalism offers. It would guarantee, under workable regulations,
sufficiency and security for the dispossessed. Such a solution, as I shall
show, is the probable goal which our society will in fact approach. To its
immediate and conscious acceptance, however, there is an obstacle.
A direct and conscious establishment of slavery as a solution to the
problem of Capitalism, the surviving Christian tradition of our
civilisation compels men to reject. No reformer will advocate it; no
prophet dares take it as yet for granted. All theories of a reformed
society will therefore attempt, at first, to leave untouched the factor of
_Freedom_ among the elements which make up Capitalism, and will concern
themselves with some change in the factor of _Property_.[4]
Now, in attempting to remedy the evils of Capitalism by remedying that one
of its two factors which consists in an ill distribution of property, you
have two, and only two, courses open to you.
If you are suffering because property is restricted to a few, you can alter
that factor in the problem _either_ by putting property into the hands of
many, or by putting it into the hands of none. There is no third course.
In the concrete, to put property in the hands of "none" means to vest it as
a trust in the hands of political officers. If you say that the evils
proceeding from Capitalism are due to the institution of property itself,
and not to the dispossession of the many by the few, then you must forbid
the private possession of the means of production by any particular and
private part of the community: but someone must control the means of
production, or we should have nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine
means the management of the means of production by those who are the public
officers of the community. Whether these public officers are themselves
controlled by the community or no has nothing to do with this solution on
its economic side. The essential point to grasp is that the only
alternative to private property is public property. Somebody must see to
the ploughing and must control the ploughs; otherwise no ploughing will be
done.
It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil
but only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase
the number of those owners.
So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like
ours, disliking the name of "slavery," and avoiding a direct and conscious
re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the
reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is
the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called
Collectivism: that is, the management of the means of production by the
political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution
of property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole
State, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of
capital or land, or both.
The first model we call _Socialism_ or the Collectivist State; the second
we call the Proprietary or Distributive State.
With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the
second model, involving the redistribution of property, is rejected as
impracticable by our existing Capitalist Society, and why, therefore, the
model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a Collectivist State.