THE SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM
§ 1.
We have considered the Socialist criticism of the present state of
affairs in relation to the most important of all public questions, the
question of the welfare and upbringing of the next generation. We have
stated the general principle of social reconstruction that emerges
from that criticism. We have now to enter upon the question of ways
and means, the economic question. We have to ask whether the vision we
have conjured up of a whole population well fed, well clad, well
educated--in a word, well brought-up--is, after all, only an amiable
dream. Is it true that humanity is producing all that it can produce
at the present time, and managing everything about as well as it can
be managed; that, as a matter of fact, there isn't enough of food and
care to go round, and hence the unavoidable anxiety in the life of
every one (except in the case of a small minority of exceptionally
secure people), and the absolute wretchedness of vast myriads of the
poorer sort?
The Socialist says, No! He asserts that our economic system is as
chaotic and wasteful as our system of rearing children--is only
another aspect of the same planlessness--that it does its work with a
needless excess of friction, that it might be far simpler and almost
infinitely more productive than it is.
Let us detach ourselves a little from our everyday habits of thinking
in these matters; let us cease to take customary things for granted,
and let us try and consider how our economic arrangements would strike
a disinterested intelligence that looked at them freshly for the first
time. Let us take some matter of primary economic importance, such as
the housing of the population, and do our best to criticize it in this
spirit of personal aloofness.
In order to do that, let us try to detach ourselves a little from our
own personal interest in these affairs. Imagine a mind ignorant of our
history and traditions, coming from some other sphere, from some world
more civilized, from some other planet perhaps, to this earth. Would
our system of housing strike it as the very wisest and most practical
possible, would it really seem to be the attainable maximum of outcome
for human exertion, or would it seem confused, disorderly, wasteful
and bad? The Socialist holds that the latter would certainly be the
verdict of such an impartial examination.
What would our visitor find in such a country as England, for example?
He would find a few thousand people housed with conspicuous comfort
and sumptuousness, in large, airy and often extremely beautiful homes
equipped with every convenience--except such as economize labour--and
waited on by many thousands of attendants. He would find next, several
hundreds of thousands in houses reasonably well built, but for the
most part ill designed and unpleasant to the eye, houses passably
sanitary and convenient, fitted with bathrooms, with properly equipped
kitchens, usually with a certain space of air and garden about them.
And the rest of our millions he would find crowded into houses
evidently too small for a decent life, and often dreadfully dirty and
insanitary, without proper space or appliances to cook properly, wash
properly or indeed perform any of the fundamental operations of a
civilized life tolerably well--without, indeed, even the privacy
needed for common decency. In the towns he would find most of the
houses occupied by people for whose needs they were obviously not
designed, and in many cases extraordinarily crowded, ramshackle and
unclean; in the country he would be amazed to find still denser
congestion, sometimes a dozen people in one miserable, tumble-down,
outwardly picturesque and inwardly abominable two-roomed cottage,
people living up against pigsties and drawing water from wells they
could not help but contaminate. Think of how the intimate glimpses
from the railway train one gets into people's homes upon the outskirts
of any of our large towns would impress him. And being, as we assume,
clear minded and able to trace cause and effect, he would see all this
disorder working out in mortality, disease, misery and intellectual
and moral failure.
All this would strike our visitor as a very remarkable state of
affairs for reasonable creatures to endure, and probably he would not
understand at first that millions of people were content to regard all
this disorder as the permanent lot of humanity. He would assume that
this must be a temporary state of affairs due to some causes unknown
to him, some great migration, for example. He would suppose we were
all busy putting things right. He would see on the one hand unemployed
labour and unemployed material; on the other, great areas of suitable
land and the crying need for more and better homes than the people
had, and it would seem the most natural thing in the world that the
directing intelligence of the community should set the unemployed
people to work with the unemployed material upon the land to house the
whole population fairly and well. There exists all that is needed to
house the whole population admirably, the building material, the room,
the unoccupied hands. Why is it not being done?
Our answer would be, of course, that he did not understand our
difficulties; the land was not ours to do as we liked with, it did not
belong to the community but to certain persons, the Owners, who either
refused to let us build upon it or buy it or have anything to do with
it, or demanded money we could not produce for it; that equally the
material was not ours, but belonged to certain other Owners, and that,
thirdly, the community had insufficient money or credit to pay the
wages and maintenance and equipment of the workers who starved and
degenerated in our streets--for that money, too, was privately owned.
This would puzzle our visitor considerably.
"Why do you have Owners?" he would ask.
We might find that difficult to answer.
"But why do you let the land be owned?" he would go on. "You don't let
people own the air. And these bricks and timber you mustn't touch, the
mortar you need and the gold you need--they all came out of the
ground--they all belonged to everybody or nobody a little while ago!"
You would say something indistinct about Property.
"But why?"
"Somebody must own the things."
"Well, let the State own the things and use them for the common good.
It owns the roads, it owns the foreshores and the territorial
seas--nobody owns the air!"
If you entered upon historical explanations with him, you would soon
be in difficulties. You would find that so recently as the Feudal
System--which was still living, so to speak, yesterday--the King, who
stood for the State, held the land as the Realm, and the predecessors
of the present owners held under him merely as the administrative
officials who performed all sorts of public services and had all sorts
of privileges thereby. They have dropped the services and stuck to the
land and the privileges; that is all.
"I begin to perceive," our visitor would say as this became clear;
"your world is under the spell of an exaggerated idea, this
preposterous idea there must be an individual Owner for everything in
the world. Obviously you can't get on while you are under the spell of
that! So long as you have this private ownership in everything,
there's no help for you. You cut up your land and material in parcels
of all sorts and sizes among this multitude of irresponsible little
monarchs; you let all the material you need get distributed among
another small swarm of Owners, and clearly you can only get them to
work for public ends in the most roundabout, tedious and wasteful way.
Why should they? They're very well satisfied as they are! But if the
community as a whole insisted that this idea of private Ownership you
have in regard to land and natural things was all nonsense--and it is
all nonsense!--just think what you might not do with it now that you
have all the new powers and lights that Science has given you. You
might turn all your towns into garden cities, put an end to
overcrowding, abolish smoky skies----"
"Hush!" I should have to interrupt; "if you talk of the things that
are clearly possible in the world to-day, they will say you are an
Utopian dreamer!"
But at least one thing would have become clear, the little swarm of
Owners and their claims standing in the way of any bold collective
dealing with housing or any such public concern. The real work to be
done here is to change an idea, that idea of ownership, to so modify
it that it will cease to obstruct the rational development of life;
and that is what the Socialist seeks to do.
§ 2.
Now the argument that the civilized housing of the masses of our
population now is impossible because if you set out to do it you come
up against the veto of the private owner at every stage, can be
applied to almost every general public service. Some little while ago
I wrote a tract for the Fabian Society about Boots;[3] and I will not
apologize for repeating here a passage from that. To begin with, this
tract pointed out the badness, unhealthiness and discomfort of
people's footwear as one saw it in every poor quarter, and asked why
it was that things were in so disagreeable a state. There was plenty
of leather in the world, plenty of labour.
[3] _This Misery of Boots._ It is intended as an
introductory tract explaining the central idea of Socialism
for propaganda purposes, and it is published by the Fabian
Society, of 3 Clement's Inn, London, at 3_d._ That, together
with my tract _Socialism and the Family_ (A. C. Fifield, 44
Fleet Street, London, 6_d._), gives the whole broad outline
of the Socialist attitude.
"Here on the one hand--you can see for yourself in any
unfashionable part of Great Britain--are people badly,
uncomfortably, painfully shod in old boots, rotten boots, sham
boots; and on the other great stretches of land in the world,
with unlimited possibilities of cattle and leather and great
numbers of people who, either through wealth or trade
disorder, are doing no work. And our question is: 'Why cannot
the latter set to work and make and distribute boots?'
"Imagine yourself trying to organize something of this kind of
Free Booting expedition and consider the difficulties you
would meet with. You would begin by looking for a lot of
leather. Imagine yourself setting off to South America, for
example, to get leather; beginning at the very beginning by
setting to work to kill and flay a herd of cattle. You find at
once you are interrupted. Along comes your first obstacle in
the shape of a man who tells you the cattle and the leather
belong to him. You explain that the leather is wanted for
people who have no decent boots in England. He says he does
not care a rap what you want it for; before you may take it
from him you have to buy him off; it is his private property,
this leather, and the herd and the land over which the herd
ranges. You ask him how much he wants for his leather, and he
tells you frankly, just as much as he can induce you to give.
"If he chanced to be a person of exceptional sweetness of
disposition, you might perhaps argue with him. You might point
out to him that this project of giving people splendid boots
was a fine one that would put an end to much human misery. He
might even sympathize with your generous enthusiasm, but you
would, I think, find him adamantine in his resolve to get just
as much out of you for his leather as you could with the
utmost effort pay.
"Suppose, now, you said to him: 'But how did you come by this
land and these herds so that you can stand between them and
the people who have need of them, exacting this profit?' He
would probably either embark upon a long rigmarole, or, what
is much more probable, lose his temper and decline to argue.
Pursuing your doubt as to the rightfulness of his property in
these things, you might admit he deserved a certain reasonable
fee for the rough care he had taken of the land and herds. But
cattle breeders are a rude violent race, and it is doubtful if
you would get far beyond your proposition of a reasonable fee.
You would, in fact, have to buy off this owner of the leather
at a good thumping price--he exacting just as much as he could
get from you--if you wanted to go on with your project.
"Well, then you would have to get your leather here, and to do
that you would have to bring it by railway and ship to this
country. And here again you would find people without any
desire or intention of helping your project, standing in your
course resolved to make every possible penny out of you on
your way to provide sound boots for every one. You would find
the railway was private property and had an owner or owners;
you would find the ship was private property with an owner or
owners, and that none of these would be satisfied for a moment
with a mere fee adequate to their services. They too would be
resolved to make every penny of profit out of you. If you made
inquiries about the matter, you would probably find the real
owners of railway and ship were companies of shareholders, and
the profit squeezed out of your poor people's boots at this
stage went to fill the pockets of old ladies, at Torquay,
spendthrifts in Paris, well-booted gentlemen in London clubs,
all sorts of glossy people....
"Well, you get the leather to England at last; and now you
want to make it into boots. You take it to a centre of
population, invite workers to come to you, erect sheds and
machinery upon a vacant piece of ground, and start off in a
sort of fury of generous industry, boot-making.... Do you?
There comes along an owner for that vacant piece of ground,
declares it is his property, demands an enormous sum for rent.
And your workers all round you, you find, cannot get house
room until they too have paid rent--every inch of the country
is somebody's property, and a man may not shut his eyes for an
hour without the consent of some owner or other. And the food
your shoe-makers eat, the clothes they wear, have all paid
tribute and profit to land-owners, cart-owners, house-owners,
endless tribute over and above the fair pay for work that has
been done upon them....
"So one might go on. But you begin to see now one set of
reasons at least why every one has not good comfortable boots.
There could be plenty of leather; and there is certainly
plenty of labour and quite enough intelligence in the world to
manage that and a thousand other desirable things. But this
institution of Private Property in land and naturally produced
things, these obstructive claims that prevent you using
ground, or moving material, and that have to be bought out at
exorbitant prices, stand in the way. All these owners hang
like parasites upon your enterprise at its every stage; and by
the time you get your sound boots well made in England, you
will find them costing about a pound a pair--high out of reach
of the general mass of people. And you will perhaps not think
me fanciful and extravagant when I confess that when I realize
this and look at poor people's boots in the street, and see
them cracked and misshapen and altogether nasty, I seem to see
also a lot of little phantom land-owners, cattle-owners,
house-owners, owners of all sorts, swarming over their pinched
and weary feet like leeches, taking much and giving nothing
and being the real cause of all such miseries."
§ 3.
Our visitor would not only be struck by the clogging of our social
activities through this system of leaving everything to private
enterprise; he would also be struck by the immense wastefulness.
Everywhere he would see things in duplicate and triplicate; down the
High Street of any small town he would find three or four
butchers--mostly selling New Zealand mutton and Argentine beef as
English--five or six grocers, three or four milk shops, one or two big
drapers and three or four small haberdashers, milliners, and "fancy
shops," two or three fishmongers, all very poor, all rather bad, most
of them in debt and with their assistants all insecure and underpaid.
He would find in spite of this wealth of competition that every one
who could contrive it, all the really prosperous people in fact,
bought most of their food and drapery from big London firms.
But why should I go on writing fresh arguments when we have Elihu's
classic tract[4] to quote.
[4] Elihu's tracts are published by the Independent Labour
Party at one penny each. The best are: _Whose Dog Art Thou?_
_A Nation of Slaves_; _Milk and Postage Stamps_; _A Corner
in Flesh and Blood_; and _Simple Division_.
"Observe how private enterprise supplies the streets with
milk. At 7.30 a milk cart comes lumbering along and delivers
milk at one house and away again. Half-an-hour later another
milk cart arrives and delivers milk, first on this side of the
street and then on that, until seven houses have been
supplied, and then he departs. During the next three or four
hours four other milk carts put in an appearance at varying
intervals, supplying a house here and another there, until
finally, as it draws towards noon, their task is accomplished
and the street supplied with milk.
"The time actually occupied by one and another of these
distributors of milk makes in all about an hour and forty
minutes, six men and six horses and carts being required for
the purpose, and these equipages rattle along one after the
other, all over the district, through the greater part of the
day, in the same erratic and extraordinary manner."
§ 4.
Our imaginary visitor would probably quite fail to grasp the reasons
why we do not forthwith shake off this obstructive and harmful idea of
Private Ownership, dispossess our Landowners and so forth as gently as
possible, and set to work upon collective housing and the rest of it.
And so he would "exit wondering."
But that would be only the opening of the real argument. A competent
Anti-Socialist of a more terrestrial experience would have a great
many very effectual and very sound considerations to advance in
defence of the present system.
He might urge that our present way of doing things, though it was
sometimes almost as wasteful as Nature when fresh spawn or pollen
germs are scattered, was in many ways singularly congenial to the
infirmities of humanity. The idea of property is a spontaneous product
of the mortal mind; children develop it in the nursery, and are
passionately alive to the difference of _meum_ and _tuum_, and its
extension to land, subterranean products and wild free things, even if
it is under analysis a little unreasonable, was at least singularly
acceptable to humanity.
And there would be admirable soundness in all this. There can be
little or no doubt that the conception of personal ownership has in
the past contributed elements to human progress that could have come
through no other means. It has allowed private individuals in odd
corners to try experiments in new methods and new appliances, that the
general intelligence, such as it was, of the community could not have
understood. For all its faults, our present individualistic order
compared not simply with the communism of primitive tribes, but even
with the personal and largely illiterate control of the mediæval
feudal governments, is a good efficient working method. I don't think
a Socialist need quarrel with the facts of history or human nature.
But he would urge that Private Ownership is only a phase, though no
doubt quite a necessary phase, in human development. The world has
needed Private Ownership just as (Lester F. Ward declares[5]) it once
needed slavery to discipline men and women to agriculture and habits
of industry, and just as it needed autocratic kings to weld warring
tribes into nations and nations into empires, to build high roads, end
private war and establish the idea of Law, and a wider than tribal
loyalty. But just as Western Europe has passed out of the phases of
slavery and of autocracy (which is national slavery) into
constitutionalism, so, he would hold, we are passing out of the phase
of private ownership of land and material and food. We are doing so
not because we reject it, but because we have worked it out, because
we have learnt its lessons and can now go on to a higher and finer
organization.
[5] _Pure Sociology_, p. 271-2, by Lester F. Ward. (The
Macmillan Company, New York.)
There the Anti-Socialist would join issue with a lesser advantage. He
would have to show not only that Private Ownership has been
serviceable and justifiable in the past--which many Socialists admit
quite cheerfully--but that it is the crown and perfection of human
methods, which the Socialists flatly deny. Universal Private
Ownership, an extreme development of the sentiment of individual
autonomy and the limitation of the State to the merest police
functions, were a necessary outcome of the breakdown of the
unprogressive authoritative Feudal System in alliance with a dogmatic
Church. It reached its maximum in the eighteenth century, when even
some of the prisons and workhouses were run by private contract, when
people issued a private money, the old token coinage, and even
regiments of soldiers were raised by private enterprise. It was, the
Socialist alleges, a mere phase of that breaking up of the old social
edifice, a weakening of the old circle of ideas that had to precede
the new constructive effort. But with land, with all sorts of property
and all sorts of businesses and public services, just as with the old
isolated private family, the old separateness and independence is
giving way to a new synthesis. The idea of Private Ownership, albeit
still the ruling idea of our civilization, does not rule nearly so
absolutely as it did. It weakens and falters before the inexorable
demands of social necessity--manifestly under our eyes.
The Socialist would be able to appeal to a far greater number of laws
in the nature of limitation of the owner of property than could be
quoted to show the limitation of the old supremacy of the head of the
family. In the first place he would be able to point to a constantly
increasing interference with the right of the landowner to do what he
liked with his own, building regulations, intervention to create
allotments and so forth. Then there would be a vast mass of factory
and industrial legislation, controlling, directing, prohibiting;
fencing machinery, interfering on behalf of health, justice and public
necessity with the owner's free bargain with his work-people. His
business undertakings would be under limitations his grandfather never
knew--even harmless adulterations that merely intensify profit,
forbidden him!
And in the next place and still more significant is the manifest
determination to keep in public hands many things that would once
inevitably have become private property. For example, in the middle
Victorian period a water supply, a gas supply, a railway or tramway
was inevitably a private enterprise, the creation of a new property;
now, this is the exception rather than the rule. While gas and water
and trains were supplied by speculative owners for profit, electric
light and power, new tramways and light railways are created in an
increasing number of cases by public bodies who retain them for the
public good. Nobody who travels to London as I do regularly in the
dirty, over-crowded carriages of the infrequent and unpunctual trains
of the South-Eastern Company, and who then transfers to the cleanly,
speedy, frequent--in a word, "civilized" electric cars of the London
County Council, can fail to estimate the value and significance of
this supersession of the private owner by the common-weal.
All these things, the Socialists insist, are but a beginning. They
point to a new phase in social development, to the appearance of a
collective intelligence and a sense of public service taking over
appliances, powers, enterprises, with a growing confidence that must
end finally in the substitution of collective for private ownership
and enterprise throughout the whole area of the common business of
life.
§ 5.
In relation to quite a number of large public services it can be shown
that even under contemporary conditions Private Ownership does work
with an enormous waste and inefficiency. Necessarily it seeks for
profit; necessarily it seeks to do as little as possible for as much
as possible. The prosperity of all Kent is crippled by a "combine" of
two ill-managed and unenterprising railway companies, with no funds
for new developments, grinding out an uncertain dividend by clipping
expenditure.
I happen to see this organization pretty closely, and I can imagine no
State enterprise west of Turkey or Persia presenting even to the
passing eye so deplorable a spectacle of ruin and inefficiency. The
South-Eastern Company's estate at Seabrook presents the dreariest
spectacle of incompetent development conceivable; one can see its
failure three miles away; it is a waste with an embryo slum in one
corner protected by an extravagant sea-wall, already partly shattered,
from the sea.
To-day (Nov. 4, 1907) the price of the ordinary South-Eastern stock is
65 and its deferred stock 31; of the London, Chatham and Dover
ordinary stock 10-1/2; an eloquent testimony to the disheartened state
of the owners who now cling reluctantly to this disappointing
monopoly. Spite of this impoverishment of the ordinary shareholder,
this railway system has evidently paid too much profit in the past for
efficiency; the rolling stock is old and ageing--much of it is by
modern standards abominable--the trains are infrequent, and the
shunting operations at local stations, with insufficient sidings and
insufficient staffs, produce a chronic dislocation and unpunctuality
in the traffic that is exaggerated by the defects of direction evident
even in the very time-tables. The trains are not well planned, the
connections with branch lines are often extremely ill managed. The
service is bad to its details. It is the exception rather than the
rule to find a ticket-office in the morning with change for a
five-pound note; and, as a little indication of the spirit of the
whole machine, I discovered the other day that the conductors upon the
South-Eastern trams at Hythe start their morning with absolutely no
change at all. Recently the roof of the station at Charing Cross fell
in--through sheer decay.... A whole rich county now stagnates
hopelessly under the grip of this sample of private enterprise, towns
fail to grow, trade flows sluggishly from point to point. No
population in the world would stand such a management as it endures at
the hands of the South-Eastern Railway from any responsible public
body. Out would go the whole board of managers at the next election.
Consider what would have happened if the London County Council had
owned Charing Cross Station three years ago. But manifestly there is
nothing better to be done under private ownership conditions. The
common shareholders are scattered and practically powerless, and their
collective aim is, at any expense to the public welfare, to keep the
price of the shares from going still lower.
The South-Eastern Railway is only one striking instance of the general
unserviceableness of private ownership for public services. Nearly all
the British railway companies, in greater or less degree, present now
a similar degenerative process. Years of profit-sweating, of high
dividends, have left them with old stations, old rolling stock, old
staffs, bad habits and diminishing borrowing power. Only a few of
these corporations make any attempt to keep pace with invention. It is
remarkable now in an epoch of almost universal progress how stagnant
the British privately owned railways are. One travels now-a-days if
anything with a decrease of comfort from the 1880 accommodation,
because of the greater overcrowding; and there has been no general
increase of speed, no increase in smooth running, no increase in
immunity from accident now for quite a number of years. One travels in
a dingy box of a compartment that is too ill-lit at night for reading
and full of invincible draughts. In winter the only warmth is too
often an insufficient footwarmer of battered tin, for which the
passengers fight fiercely with their feet. An observant person cannot
fail to be struck--especially if he is returning from travel upon the
State railways of Switzerland or Germany--by the shabby-looking
porters on so many of our lines--they represent the standard of good
clothing for the year 1848 or thereabouts--and by the bleak misery of
many of the stations, the universal dirt that electricity might even
now abolish. You dare not drop a parcel on any British railway cushion
for fear of the cloud of horrible dust you would raise; you have to
put it down softly. Consider, too, the congested infrequent suburban
trains that ply round any large centre of population, the inefficient
goods and parcel distribution that hangs up the trade of the local
shopman everywhere. Not only in the arrested standard of comfort, but
in the efficiency of working also are our privately owned railways a
hopeless discredit to private ownership.
None of them, hampered by their present equipment, are able to adapt
themselves readily to the new and better mechanism science produces
for them, electric traction, electric lighting and so forth; and it
seems to me highly probable that the last steam-engines and the last
oil lamps in the world will be found upon the southern railway lines
of Great Britain. How can they go on borrowing new capital with their
stock at the prices I have quoted, and how can they do anything
without new capital? The conception of profit-raising that rules our
railways takes rather an altogether different direction; it takes the
form of attempts to procure a monopoly even of the minor traffic by
resisting the development of light railways, and of keeping the
standard of comfort, decency and cleanliness low. As for the vast
social ameliorations that could be wrought now, and are urgently
needed now, by redistributing population through enhanced and
cheapened services scientifically planned, and by an efficient
collection and carriage of horticultural and agricultural produce,
these things lie outside the philosophy of the Private Owner
altogether. They would probably not pay him, and there the matter
ends; that they would pay the community enormously, does not for one
moment enter into his circle of ideas.
There can be little doubt that in the next decade or so the secular
decay and lagging of the British railway services which is inevitable
under existing conditions (in speed, in comfort, they have long been
distanced by continental lines), the probable increase in accidents
due to economically administered permanent ways and ageing stations
and bridges, and the ever more perceptible check to British economic
development due to this clogging of the circulatory system, will be of
immense value to the Socialist propaganda as an object lesson in
private ownership. In Italy the thing has already passed its
inevitable climax, and the State is now struggling valiantly to put a
disorganized, ill-equipped and undisciplined network of railways, the
legacy of a period of private enterprise, into tolerable working
order.
§ 6.
In a second great public service there is a perceptible, a growing
recognition of the evil and danger of allowing profit-seeking Private
Ownership to prevail; and that is the general food supply. A great
quickening of the public imagination in this matter has occurred
through the "boom" of Mr. Upton Sinclair's book, _The Jungle_--a book
every student of the elements of Socialism should read. He accumulated
a considerable mass of facts about the Chicago stockyards, and
incorporated them with his story, and so enabled people to realize
what they might with a little imaginative effort have inferred before;
that the slaughtering of cattle and the preparation of meat, when it
is done wholly and solely for profit, that is to say when it is done
as rapidly and cheaply as possible, is done _horribly_; that it is a
business cruel to the beasts, cruel to the workers and dangerous to
the public health. The United States has long recognized the
inadequacy of private consciences in this concern, and while all the
vast profits of the business go to the meat packers, the community has
maintained an insufficient supply of underpaid and, it is said in some
cases, bribable inspectors to look after the public welfare.
In this country also, slaughtering is a private enterprise but
slightly checked by inspection, and if we have no Chicago, we probably
have all its mean savings, its dirt and carelessness and filth,
scattered here and there all over the country, a little in this
privately owned slaughter-house, a little in that. For what inducement
has a butcher to spend money and time in making his slaughter-house
decent, sanitary and humane above the standard of his fellows? To do
that will only make him poor and insolvent. Anyhow, few of his
customers will come to see their meat butchered, and, as they say in
the South of England, "What the eye don't see the heart don't grieve."
Many witnesses concur in declaring that our common jam, pickle and
preserve trade is carried on under equally filthy conditions. If it is
not, it is a miracle, in view of the inducements the Private Owner has
to cut his expenses, economize on premises and wages, and buy his
fruit as near decay and his sugar as near dirt as he can. The scandal
of our milk supply is an open one; it is more and more evident that so
long as Private Ownership rules the milk trade, we can never be sure
that at every point in the course of the milk from cow to consumer
there will not creep in harmful and dishonest profit-making elements.
The milking is too often done dirtily from dirty cows and into dirty
vessels--why should a business man fool away his profits in paying for
scrupulous cleanliness when it is almost impossible to tell at sight
whether milk is clean or dirty?--and there come more or less harmful
dilutions and adulterations and exposures to infection at every
handling, at every chance at profit making. The unavoidable
inefficiency of the private milk trade reflects itself in infant
mortality--we pay our national tribute to private enterprise in milk,
a tribute of many thousands of babies every year. We try to reduce
this tribute by inspection. But why should the State pay money for
inspection, upon keeping highly-trained and competent persons merely
to pry and persecute in order that private incompetent people should
reap profits with something short of a maximum of child murder? It
would be much simpler to set to work directly, employ and train these
private persons, and run the dairies and milk distribution ourselves.
There is an equally strong case for a public handling of bakehouses
and the bread supply. Already the public is put to great and entirely
unremunerative expense in inspecting and checking weights and hunting
down the grosser instances of adulteration, grubbiness and dirt, and
with it all the common bakehouse remains for the most part a
subterranean haunt of rats, mice and cockroaches, and the ordinary
baker's bread is so insipid and unnutritious that a great number of
more prosperous people now-a-days find it advantageous to health and
pocket alike to bake at home. A considerable amount of physical
degeneration may be connected with the general poorness of our bread.
The plain fact of the case is that our population will never get good
wholesome bread from the Private Owner's bakehouse, until it employs
one skilled official to watch every half-dozen bakers--and another to
watch him; and it seems altogether saner and cheaper to abolish the
Private Owner in this business also and do the job cleanly, honestly
and straightforwardly in proper buildings with properly paid labour as
a public concern.
Now, what has been said of the food supply is still truer of the trade
in fuel. Between the consumer and the collier is a string of private
persons each resolved to squeeze every penny of profit out of the coal
on its way to the cheap and wasteful grate one finds in the
jerry-built homes of the poor. In addition there is every winter now,
whether in Great Britain or America, a manipulation of the coal market
and a more or less severe coal famine. Coal is jerked up to
unprecedented prices, and the small consumer, who has no place for
storage, who must buy, if not from day to day, from week to week,
finds he must draw upon his food fund and his savings to meet the
Private Owner's raised demands--or freeze. Every such coal famine
reaps its harvest for death of old people and young children, and
wipes out so many thousands of savings' bank accounts and hoarded
shillings. Consider the essential imbecility of allowing the nation's
life and the nation's thrift to be preyed upon for profit in this way!
Is it possible to doubt that the civilized community of the future
will have to resume possession of all its stores of fuel, will keep
itself informed of the fluctuating needs of its population, and will
distribute and sell coal, gas and oil--not for the maximum profit, but
the maximum general welfare?[6]
[6] In Dakota, 1906-7, private enterprise led to a
particularly severe coal famine in the bitterest weather,
and the shortage was felt so severely that the population
rose and attacked and stopped passing coal-trains.
Another great branch of trade in which Private Ownership and private
freedom is manifestly antagonistic to the public welfare is the Drink
Traffic. Here we have a commodity, essentially a drug, its use readily
developing a vice, deleterious at its best, complex in composition,
and particularly susceptible to adulteration and the enhancement of
its attraction by poisonous ingredients and indeed to every sort of
mischievous secret manipulation. Probably nothing is more rarely found
pure and honest than beer or whisky; whisky begins to be blended and
doctored before it leaves the distillery. And we allow the production
and distribution of this drug of alcoholic drink to be from first to
last a source of private profit. We so contrive it that we put money
prizes upon the propaganda of drink. Is it any wonder that drink is
not only made by adulteration far more evil than it naturally is, but
that it is forced upon the public in every possible way?
"He tempts them to drink," I have heard a clergyman say of his village
publican. But what else did he think the publican was there for?--to
preach total abstinence? Naturally, inevitably, the whole of the Trade
is a propaganda--not of drunkenness, but of habitual heavy drinking.
The more successful propagandists, the great brewers and distillers
grow rich just in the proportion that people consume beer and spirits;
they gain honour and peerages in the measure of their success.
It is very interesting to the Socialist to trace the long struggle of
the temperance movement against its initial ideas of freedom, and to
see how inevitably the most reluctant and unlikely people have been
forced to recognize Private Ownership in this trade and for profit as
the ultimate evil. I am delighted to have to hand an excellent little
tract by "A Ratepayer": _National Efficiency and the Drink Traffic_.
It has a preface by Mr. Haldane, and it is as satisfactory a
demonstration of the absolute necessity of thoroughgoing Socialism in
this particular field as any Socialist could wish. One encounters the
Bishop of Chester, for example, in its pages talking the purest
Socialism, and making the most luminous admissions of the
impossibility of continued private control, in phrases that need but a
few verbal changes to apply equally to milk, to meat, to bread, to
housing, to book-selling[7]....
[7] For a clear and admirable account of the Socialist
attitude to the temperance question, see the tract on
_Municipal Drink Traffic_ published by the Fabian Society;
price one penny.
§ 7.
Land and housing, railways, food, drink, coal, in each of these great
general interests there is a separate strong case for the substitution
of collective control for the Private Ownership methods of the present
time. There is a great and growing number of people like "A Ratepayer"
and Mr. Haldane, who do not call themselves Socialists but who are yet
strongly tinged with Socialist conceptions; who are convinced--some in
the case of the land, some in the case of the drink trade or the milk,
that Private Ownership and working for profit must cease. But they
will not admit a general principle, they argue each case on its
merits.
The Socialist maintains that, albeit the details of each problem must
be studied apart, there does underlie all these cases and the whole
economic situation at the present time, one general fact, that through
our whole social system from top to base we find things under the
influence of a misleading idea that must be changed, and which, until
it is changed, will continue to work out in waste, unserviceableness,
cramped lives and suffering and death. Each man is for himself, that
is this misleading idea, seeking, perforce, ends discordant with the
general welfare; who serves the community without exacting pay, goes
under; who exacts pay without service prospers and continues; success
is not to do well, it is to have and to get; failure is not to do ill,
it is to lose and not have; and under these conditions how can we
expect anything but dislocated, unsatisfying service at every turn?
The contemporary anti-Socialist moralist and the social satirist would
appeal to the Owner's sense of duty; he would declare in a
platitudinous tone that property had its duties as well as its rights,
and so forth. The Socialist, however, looks a little deeper, and puts
the thing differently. He brings both rights and duties to a keener
scrutiny. What underlies all these social disorders, he alleges, is
one simple thing, a misconception of property; an unreasonable
exaggeration, an accumulated, inherited exaggeration, of the idea of
property. He says the idea of private property, which is just and
reasonable in relation to intimate personal things, to clothes,
appliances, books, one's home or apartments, the garden one loves or
the horse one rides, has become unreasonably exaggerated until it
obsesses the world; that the freedom we have given men to claim and
own and hold the land upon which we must live, the fuel we burn, the
supplies of food and metal we require, the railways and ships upon
which our business goes, and to fix what prices they like to exact for
all these services, leads to the impoverishment and practical
enslavement of the mass of mankind.
And so he comes to his second main generalization, which I may perhaps
set out in these words:--
_The idea of the private ownership of things and the rights of owners
is enormously and mischievously exaggerated in the contemporary world.
The conception of private property has been extended to land, to
material, to the values and resources accumulated by past generations,
to a vast variety of things that are properly the inheritance of the
whole race. As a result of this, there is much obstruction and waste
of human energy and a huge loss of opportunity and freedom for the
mass of mankind; progress is retarded, there is a vast amount of
avoidable wretchedness, cruelty and injustice._
_The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be
inalienably the owner and administrator of the land, of raw materials,
of values and resources accumulated from the past, and that private
property must be of a terminable nature, reverting to the community,
and subject to the general welfare._
This is the second of the twin generalizations upon which the edifice
of modern Socialism rests. Like the first, and like the practical side
of all sound religious teaching, it is a specific application of one
general rule of conduct, and that is the subordination of the
individual motive to the happiness and welfare of the species.
§ 8.
But now the reader unaccustomed to Socialist discussion will begin to
see the crude form of the answer to the question raised by the
previous chapter; he will see the resources from which the enlargement
of human life we there contemplated is to be derived, and realize the
economic methods to be pursued. Collective ownership is the necessary
corollary of collective responsibility. There are to be no private
land owners, no private bankers and lenders of money, no private
insurance adventurers, no private railway owners nor shipping owners,
no private mine owners, oil kings, silver kings, coal and wheat
forestallers or the like. All this realm of property is to be resumed
by the State, is to be State-owned and State-managed, and the vast
revenues that are now devoted to private ends will go steadily to
feed, maintain and educate a new and better generation, to promote
research and advance science, to build new houses, develop fresh
resources, plant, plan, beautify and reconstruct the world.