THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE
§ 1.
We have stated now how the constructive plan of Socialism aims to
replace the accepted ideas about two almost fundamental human
relations by broader and less fiercely egotistical conceptions; how it
denies a man "property" rights over his wife and children, leaving,
however, all his other relations with them intact, how it would insure
and protect their welfare, and how it asserts that a vast range of
inanimate things also which are now held as private property must be
regarded as the inalienable possession of the whole community. This
change in the circle of ideas (as the Herbartians put it) is the
essence of the Socialist project.
It means no little change. It means a general change in the spirit of
living; it means a change from the spirit of gain (which now
necessarily rules our lives) to the spirit of service.
I have tried to show in the preceding chapter that Socialism seeks to
make life less squalid and cruel, less degrading and dwarfing for the
children that are born into it, and I have tried also to make clear
that realization of, and revolt against, the bad management and waste
and muddle which result from our present economic system. I want now
to point out that Socialism seeks to ennoble the intimate personal
life, by checking and discouraging passions that at present run
rampant, and by giving wider scope for passions that are now thwarted
and subdued. The Socialist declares that life is now needlessly
dishonest, base and mean, because our present social organization,
such as it is, makes an altogether too powerful appeal to some of the
very meanest elements in our nature.
Not perhaps to the lowest. There can be no disputing that our present
civilization does discourage much of the innate bestiality of man;
that it helps people to a measure of continence, cleanliness and
mutual toleration; that it does much to suppress brute violence, the
spirit of lawlessness, cruelty and wanton destruction. But on the
other hand it does also check and cripple generosity and frank
truthfulness, any disinterested creative passion, the love of beauty,
the passion for truth and research, and it stimulates avarice,
parsimony, overreaching, usury, falsehood and secrecy, by making
money-getting its criterion of intercourse.
Whether we like it or not, we who live in this world to-day find we
must either devote a considerable amount of our attention to getting
and keeping money, and shape our activities--or, if you will, distort
them--with a constant reference to that process, or we must accept
futility. Whatever powers men want to exercise, whatever service they
wish to do, it is a preliminary condition for most of them that they
must, by earning something or selling something, achieve opportunity.
If they cannot turn their gift into some saleable thing or get some
propertied man to "patronize" them, they cannot exercise these gifts.
The gift for getting is the supreme gift--all others bow before it.
Now this is not a thing that comes naturally out of the quality of
man; it is the result of a blind and complex social growth, of this
set of ideas working against that, and of these influences modifying
those. The idea of property has run wild and become a choking
universal weed. It is not the natural master-passion of a wholesome
man to want constantly to own. People talk of Socialism as being a
proposal "against human nature," and they would have us believe that
this life of anxiety, of parsimony and speculation, of mercenary
considerations and forced toil we all lead, is the complete and final
expression of the social possibilities of the human soul. But, indeed,
it is only quite abnormal people, people of a narrow, limited,
specialized intelligence, Rockefellers, Morgans and the like, people
neither great nor beautiful, mere financial monomaniacs, who can keep
themselves devoted to and concentrated upon gain. To the majority of
capable good human stuff, buying and selling, saving and investing,
insuring oneself and managing property, is a mass of uncongenial,
irrational and tiresome procedure, conflicting with the general trend
of instinct and the finer interests of life. The great mass of men and
women, indeed, find the whole process so against nature, that in spite
of all the miseries of poverty, all the slavery of the economic
disadvantage, they cannot urge themselves to this irksome cunning game
of besting the world, they remain poor. Most, in a sort of despair,
make no effort; many resort to that floundering endeavour to get by
accident, gambling; many achieve a precarious and unsatisfactory
gathering of possessions, a few houses, a claim on a field, a few
hundred pounds in some investment as incalculable as a kite in a gale;
just a small minority have and get--for the most part either
inheritors of riches or energetic people who, through a real dulness
toward the better and nobler aspects of life, can give themselves
almost entirely to grabbing and accumulation. To such as these, all
common men who are not Socialists do in effect conspire to give the
world.
The Anti-Socialist argues that out of this evil of encouraged and
stimulated avarice comes good, and that this peculiar meanly greedy
type that predominates in the individualist world to-day, the
Rockefeller-Harriman type, "creates" great businesses, exploits the
possibilities of nature, gives mankind railways, power, commodities.
As a matter of fact, a modern intelligent community is quite capable
of doing all these things infinitely better for itself, and the
beneficent influence of commerce may easily become, and does easily
become, the basis of a cant. Exploitation by private persons is no
doubt a necessary condition to economic development in an illiterate
community of low intelligence, just as flint implements marked a
necessary phase in the social development of mankind; but to-day the
avaricious getter, like some obsolescent organ in the body, consumes
strength and threatens health. And to-day he is far more mischievous
than ever he was before, because of the weakened hold of the old
religious organization upon his imagination. For the most part the
great fortunes of the modern world have been built up by proceedings
either not socially beneficial, or in some cases positively harmful.
Consider some of the commoner methods of growing rich. There is first
the selling of rubbish for money, exemplified by the great patent
medicine fortunes and the fortunes achieved by the debasement of
journalism, the sale of prize-competition magazines and the like; next
there is forestalling, the making of "corners" in such commodities as
corn, nitrates, borax and the like; then there is the capture of what
Americans call "franchises," securing at low terms by expedients that
usually will not bear examination, the right to run some profitable
public service for private profit which would be better done in public
hands--the various private enterprises for urban traffic, for example;
then there are the various more or less complex financial operations,
watering stock, "reconstructing," "shaking out" the ordinary
shareholder, which transfer the savings of the common struggling
person to the financial magnate. All the activities in this list are
more or less anti-social, yet it is by practising them that the great
successes of recent years have been achieved. Fortunes of a second
rank have no doubt been made by building up manufactures and
industries of various types by persons who have known how to buy
labour cheap, organize it well and sell its produce dear, but even in
these cases the social advantage of the new product is often largely
discounted by the labour conditions. It is impossible, indeed,
directly one faces current facts, to keep up the argument of the
public good achieved by men under the incentive of gain and the
necessity of that incentive to progress and economic development.
Now not only is it true that the subordination of our affairs to this
spirit of gain placed our world in the hands of a peculiar,
acquisitive, uncreative, wary type of person, and that the mass of
people hate serving the spirit of gain and are forced to do so through
the obsession of the whole community by this idea of Private
Ownership, but it is also true that even now the real driving force
that gets the world along is not that spirit at all, but the spirit of
service. Even to-day it would be impossible for the world to get along
if the mass of its population was really specialized for gain. A world
of Rockefellers, Morgans and Rothschilds would perish miserably after
a vigorous campaign of mutual skinning; it is only because the common
run of men is better than these profit-hunters that any real and human
things are achieved.
Let us go into this aspect of the question a little more fully,
because it is one that appears to be least clearly grasped by those
who discuss Socialism to-day.
§ 2.
This fact must be insisted upon, that most of the work of the world
and all the good work is done to-day for some other motive than gain;
that profit-seeking not only is not the moving power of the world but
that it cannot be, that it runs counter to the doing of effectual work
in every department of life.
It is hard to know how to set about proving a fact that is to the
writer's perception so universally obvious. One can only appeal to the
intelligent reader to use his own personal observation upon the people
about him. Everywhere he will see the property-owner doing nothing,
the profit-seeker busy with unproductive efforts, with the writing of
advertisements, the misrepresentation of goods, the concoction of a
plausible prospectus and the extraction of profits from the toil of
others, while the real necessary work of the world--I don't mean the
labour and toil only, but the intelligent direction, the real planning
and designing and inquiry, the management and the evolution of ideas
and methods, is in the enormous majority of cases done by salaried
individuals working either for a fixed wage and the hope of increments
having no proportional relation to the work done, or for a wage
varying within definite limits. All the engineering design, all
architecture, all our public services,--the exquisite work of our
museum control, for example,--all the big wholesale and retail
businesses, almost all big industrial concerns, mines, estates, all
these things are really in the hands of salaried or quasi-salaried
persons _now_--just as they would be under Socialism. They are only
possible now because all these managers, officials, employees are as a
class unreasonably honest and loyal, are interested in their work and
anxious to do it well, and do not seek _profits_ in every transaction
they handle. Give them even a small measure of security and they are
content with interesting work; they are glad to set aside the urgent
perpetual search for personal gain that Individualists have persuaded
themselves is the ruling motive of mankind, they are glad to set these
aside altogether and, as the phrase goes, "get something done." And
this is true all up and down the social scale. A bricklayer is no good
unless he can be interested in laying bricks. One knows whenever a
domestic servant becomes mercenary, when she ceases to take, as people
say, "a pride in her work," and thinks only of "tips" and getting, she
becomes impossible. Does a signalman every time he pulls over a lever,
or a groom galloping a horse, think of his wages,--or want to?
I will confess I find it hard to write with any patience and civility
of this argument that humanity will not work except for greed or need
of money and only in proportion to the getting. It is so patently
absurd. I suppose the reasonable Anti-Socialist will hardly maintain
it seriously with that crudity. He will qualify. He will say that
although it may be true that good work is always done for the interest
of the doing or in the spirit of service, yet in order to get and keep
people at work, and to keep the standard high through periods of
indolence and distraction, there must be the dread of dismissal and
the stimulating eye of the owner. That certainly puts the case a good
deal less basely and much more plausibly.
There is, perhaps, this much truth in that, that most people do need a
certain stimulus to exertion and a certain standard of achievement to
do their best, but to say that this is provided by private ownership
and can only be provided by private ownership is an altogether
different thing. Is the British Telephone Service, for example, kept
as efficient as it is--which isn't very much, by the bye, in the way
of efficiency--by the protests of the shareholders or of the
subscribers? Does the grocer's errand-boy loiter any less than his
brother who carries the Post Office telegrams? In the matter of the
public milk supply, again, would not an intelligently critical public
anxious for its milk good and early be a far more formidable master
than a speculative proprietor in the back room of a creamery? And when
one comes to large business organizations managed by officials and
owned by dispersed shareholders, the contrast is all to the advantage
of the community.
No! the only proper virtues in work, the virtues that must be relied
upon, and developed and rewarded in the civilized State we Socialists
are seeking to bring about, are the spirit of service and the passion
for doing well, the honourable competition not to get but to _do_. By
sweating and debasing urgency, we get meagrely done what we might get
handsomely done by the Good Will of emancipated mankind. For all who
really make, who really do, the imperative of gain is the
inconvenience, the enemy. Every artist, every scientific investigator,
every organizer, every good workman, knows that. Every good architect
knows that this is so and can tell of time after time when he has
sacrificed manifest profit and taken a loss to get a thing done as he
wanted it done, right and well; every good doctor, too, has turned
from profit and high fees to the moving and interesting case, to the
demands of knowledge and the public health; every teacher worth his or
her salt can witness to the perpetual struggle between business
advantage and right teaching; every writer has faced the alternative
of his æsthetic duty and the search for beauty on one hand and the
"saleable" on the other. All this is as true of ordinary making as of
special creative work. Every plumber capable of his business hates to
have to paint his leadwork; every carpenter knows the disgust of
turning out unfinished "cheap" work, however well it pays him; every
tolerable cook can feel shame for an unsatisfying dish, and none the
less shame because by making it materials are saved and economies
achieved.
And yet, with all these facts clear as day before any observant
person, _we are content to live on in an economic system that raises
every man who subordinates these wholesome prides and desires to
watchful, incessant getting, over the heads of every other type of
character_; that in effect gives all the power and influence in our
State to successful getters; that subordinates art, direction, wisdom
and labour to these inferior narrow men, these men who clutch and
keep.
Our social system, based on Private Ownership, encourages and
glorifies this spirit of gain, and cripples and thwarts the spirit of
service. You need but have your eyes once opened to its influence, and
thereafter you will never cease to see how the needs and imperatives
of property taint the honour and dignity of human life. Just where
life should flower most freely into splendour, this chill, malign
obsession most nips and cripples. The law that makes getting and
keeping an imperative necessity poisons and destroys the freedom of
men and women in love, in art and in every concern in which spiritual
or physical beauty should be the inspiring and determining factor.
Behind all the handsome professions of romantic natures the gaunt
facts of monetary necessity remain the rulers of life. Every youth who
must sell his art and capacity for gain, every girl who must sell
herself for money, is one more sacrifice to the Minotaur of Private
Ownership--before the Theseus of Socialism comes.
Opponents of Socialism, ignoring all these things and inventing with
that profusion which is so remarkable a trait of the anti-Socialist
campaign, are wont to declare that we, whose first and last thought is
the honour and betterment of life, seek to destroy all beauty and
freedom in love, accuse us of aiming at some "human stud farm." The
reader will measure the justice of that by the next chapter, but here
I would say that just as the private ownership of all that is
necessary to humanity, except the air and sunlight and a few things
that it has been difficult to appropriate, debases work and all the
common services of life, so also it taints and thwarts the emotions,
and degrades the intimate physical and emotional existence of an
innumerable multitude of people.
All this amounts to a huge impoverishment of life, a loss of beauty
and discrimination of rich and subtle values. Human existence to-day
is a mere tantalizing intimation of what it might be. It is
frostbitten and dwarfed from palace to slum. It is not only that a
great mass of our population is deprived of space, beauty and
pleasure, but that a large proportion of such space, beauty and
pleasure as there are in the world must necessarily have a
meretricious taint and be in the nature of things bought and made for
pay.
§ 3.
If there is one profession more than another in which devotion is
implied and assumed, it is that of the doctor. It happens that on the
morning when this chapter was drafted, I came upon the paragraph that
follows; it seemed to me to supply just one striking concrete instance
of how life is degraded by our present system, and to offer me a
convenient text for a word or so more upon this question between gain
and service. It is a little vague in its reference to Mr. Tompkins "of
Birmingham," and I should not be surprised if it were a considerable
exaggeration of what really happened. But it is true enough to life in
this, that it is a common practice, a necessity with doctors in poor
neighbourhoods to insist inexorably upon a fee before attendance.
"A case of medical inhumanity is reported from Birmingham. A
poor man named Tompkins was taken seriously ill early on
Christmas morning, and although snow was falling and the
atmosphere was terribly raw, his wife left the house in search
of a doctor. The nearest practitioner declined to leave the
house without being paid his fee; a second imposed the same
condition, and the woman then went to the police station. As
the horse ambulance was out, they could not help her, and she
tried other doctors. In all the poor woman called on eight,
and the only one who did not decline to get up without his fee
was down with influenza. Eventually a local chemist was
persuaded to see the man, and he ordered his removal to the
hospital."
That is the story. You note the charge of "inhumanity" in the very
first line, and in much subsequent press comment there was the same
note. Apparently every one expects a doctor to be ready at any point
in the day or night to attend anybody for nothing. Most Socialists are
disposed to agree with the spirit of that expectation. A practising
doctor should be in lifelong perpetual war against pain and disease,
just as a campaigning soldier is continually alert and serving. But
existing conditions will not permit that. Existing conditions require
the doctor to get his fee at any cost; if he goes about doing work for
nothing, they punish him with shabbiness and incapacitating need, they
forbid his marriage or doom his wife and children to poverty and
unhappiness. A doctor _must_ make money whatever else he does or does
not do; he _must_ secure his fees. He is a private adventurer,
competing in a crowded market for gain, and keeping his energies
perforce for those who can pay best for them. To expect him to behave
like a public servant whose income and outlook are secure, or like a
priest whose church will never let him want or starve, is ridiculous.
If you put him on a footing with the greengrocer and coal merchant,
you must expect him to behave like a tradesman. Why should the press
blame the poor doctor of a poor neighbourhood because a moneyless man
goes short of medical attendance, when it does not for one moment
blame Mr. J. D. Rockefeller because a poor man goes short of oil, or
the Duke of Devonshire because tramps need lodgings in Eastbourne? One
never reads this sort of paragraph:--
"A case of commercial inhumanity is reported from Birmingham.
A poor man named Tompkins was seriously hungry early on
Christmas morning, and although snow was falling and the
atmosphere was terribly raw, his wife left the house in search
of food. The nearest grocer declined to supply provisions
without being paid his price; a second imposed the same
condition, and the woman then went to the police station. As
that is not a soup-kitchen, they could not help her, and she
tried other grocers and bread-shops. In all the poor woman
called on eight, and the only one who did not decline to
supply food without payment was for some reason bankrupt and
out of stock. Eventually a local overseer was persuaded to see
the man, and he ordered his removal to the workhouse, where,
after considerable hardship, he was partly appeased with
skilly."
I, myself, have known an overworked, financially worried doctor at his
bedroom window call out, "Have you brought the fee?" and have pitied
and understood his ugly alternatives. "Once I began that sort of
thing," he explained to me a little apologetically, "they'd none of
them pay--none."
The Socialist's remedy for this squalid state of affairs is plain and
simple. Medicine is a public service, an honourable devotion; it
should no more be a matter of profit-making than the food-supply
service or the house-supply service--or salvation. It should be a part
of the organization of a civilized State to have a Public Health
service of well-paid, highly-educated men distributed over the country
and closely correlated with public research departments and a reserve
of specialists, who would be as ready and eager to face dangers and to
sacrifice themselves for honour and social necessity as soldiers or
sailors. I believe every honourable man in the medical profession
under forty now would rather it were so. It is, indeed, a transition
from private enterprise to public organization that is already
beginning. We have the first intimation of the change in the
appearance of the medical officer of health, underpaid, overworked and
powerless though he is at the present time. It cannot be long before
the manifest absurdity of our present conditions begins a process of
socialization of the medical profession entirely analogous to that
which has changed three-fourths of the teachers in Great Britain from
private adventurers to public servants in the last forty years.
And that is the aim of Socialism all along the line; to convert one
public service after another from a chaotic profit-scramble of
proprietors amidst a mass of sweated employees into a secure and
disciplined service, in which every man will work for honour,
promotion, achievement and the commonweal.
I write a "secure and disciplined service," and I intend by that not
simply an exterior but an interior discipline. Let us have done with
this unnatural theory that men may submit unreservedly to the guidance
of "self-interest." Self-interest never took a man or a community to
any other end than damnation. For all services there is necessary a
code of honour and devotion which a man must set up for himself and
obey, to which he must subordinate a number of his impulses. The must
is seconded by an internal imperative. Men and women _want_ to have a
code of honour. In the army, for example, there is among the officers
particularly, a tradition of courage, cleanliness and good form, more
imperative than any law; in the little band of men who have given the
world all that we mean by science, the little host of volunteers and
underpaid workers who have achieved the triumphs of research, there is
a tradition of self-abnegation and of an immense, painstaking,
self-forgetful veracity. These traditions work. They add something to
the worth of every man who comes under them.
Every writer, again, knows clearly the difference between gain-seeking
and doing good work, and few there are who have not at times done
something, as they say, "to please themselves." Then in the studio,
for all the non-moral protests of Bohemia, there is a tradition, an
admirable tradition, of disregard for mercenary imperatives, a scorn
of shams and plagiarism that triumphs again and again over economic
laws. The public services of the coming civilization will demand, and
will develop, a far completer discipline and tradition of honour.
Against the development and persistence of all such honourable codes
now, against every attempt at personal nobility, at a new chivalry, at
sincere artistry, our present individualist system wages pitiless
warfare, says in effect, "Fools you are! Look at Rockefeller! Look at
Pierpont Morgan! Get money! All your sacrifices only go to their
enrichment. You cannot serve humanity however much you seek to do so.
They block your way, enormously receptive of all you give. All the
increment of human achievement goes to them--they own it _a
priori_.... Get money! Money is freedom to do, to keep, to rule. Do
you care nothing for your wives and children? Are you content to breed
servants and dependants for the children of these men? Make things
beautiful, make things abundant, make life glorious! Fools! if you
work and sacrifice yourselves and do not _get_, they will possess.
Your sons shall be the loan-monger's employees, your daughters
handmaidens to the millionaire. Or, if you cannot face that, go
childless, and let your life-work gild the palace of the millionaire's
still more acquisitive descendants!"
Who can ignore the base scramble for money under these alternatives?
§ 4.
Let me here insert a very brief paragraph to point out one particular
thing, and that is that Socialism does not propose to "abolish
competition"--as many hasty and foolish antagonists declare. If the
reader has gone through what has preceded this he will know that this
is not so. Socialism trusts to competition, looks to competition for
the service and improvement of the world. And in order that
competition between man and man may have free play, Socialism seeks to
abolish one particular form of competition, the competition to get and
hold property--even to marry property, that degrades our present
world. But it would leave men free to compete for fame, for service,
for salaries, for position and authority, for leisure, for love and
honour.
§ 5.
And now let me take up certain difficulties the student of Socialism
encounters. He comes thus far perhaps with the Socialist argument, and
then his imagination gets to work trying to picture a world in which a
moiety of the population, perhaps even the larger moiety, is employed
by the State, and in which the whole population is educated by the
State and insured of a decent and comfortable care and subsistence
during youth and old age. He then begins to think of how all this vast
organization is to be managed, and with that his real difficulties
begin.
Now I for one am prepared to take these difficulties very seriously,
as the latter part of this book will show. I will even go so far as to
say that, to my mind, the contemporary Socialist controversialist
meets all this system of objections far too cavalierly. These
difficulties are real difficulties for the convinced Socialist as for
the inquirer; they open up problems that have still to be solved
before the equipment of Socialism is complete. "How will you
Socialists get the right men in the right place for the work that has
to be done? How will you arrange promotion? How will you determine" (I
put the argument in its crudest form) "who is to engage in historical
research in the Bodleian, and who is to go out seaward in November and
catch mackerel?" Such "posers"--they have a thousand variants--convey
the spirit of the living resistance to Socialism; they explain why
every rational man is not an enraptured Socialist at the present time.
Throughout the rest of this book I hope that the reader will be able
to see growing together in this aspect and then in that, in this and
that suggestion, the complex solution of this complex system of
difficulties. My object in raising them now is not to dispose of them,
but to give them the fullest recognition--and to ask the student to
read on. In all these matters the world is imperfect now, and it will
still be imperfect under Socialism--though, I firmly believe, with an
infinitely lesser and altogether nobler imperfection.
But I do want to point out here that though these are reasonable and,
to all undogmatic men, most helpful criticisms of the Socialist
design, they are no sort of justification for things as they are. All
the difficulties that the ordinary exposition of Socialism seems to
leave unsolved are at least equally not solved now. Only rarely does
the right man seem to struggle to his place of adequate opportunity.
Men and women get their chance in various ways; some of implacable
temper and versatile gifts thrust themselves to the position they need
for the exercise of their powers; others display an astonishing
facility in securing honours and occasions they can then only waste;
others, outside their specific gift, are the creatures of luck or the
victims of modesty, tactlessness or incapacity. Most of the large
businesses of the world now are in the hands of private proprietors
and managed either directly by an owner or by directors or managers
acting for directors. The quality of promotion or the recognition of
capacity varies very much in these great concerns, but they are on the
whole probably inferior to the public services. Even where the
administration is keenest it must be remembered it is not seeking the
men who work the machine best, but the men who can work it cheapest
and with the maximum of profit. It is pure romancing to represent the
ordinary business magnate as being in perpetual search for capacity
among the members of his staff. He wants them to get along and not
make trouble.
Among the smaller businesses that still, I suppose, constitute the
bulk of the world's economic body, capacity is enormously hampered. I
was once an apprentice in a chemist's shop, and also once in a
draper's--two of my brothers have been shop assistants, and so I am
still able to talk understandingly with clerks and employees, and I
know that in all that world all sorts of minor considerations obstruct
the very beginnings of efficient selection. Every shop is riddled with
jealousies, "sucking up to the gov'nor" is the universal crime, and
among the women in many callings promotion is too often tainted by
still baser suspicions. No doubt in a badly criticized public service
there is such a thing as "sucking up to" the head of the department,
but at its worst it is not nearly so bad as things may be in a small
private concern under a petty autocrat.
In America it is said that the public services are inferior in
personal quality to the staffs of the great private business
organizations. My own impression is that, considering the salaries
paid, they are, so far as Federal concerns go, immeasurably superior.
In State and municipal affairs, American conditions offer no
satisfactory criterion; the Americans are, for reasons I have
discussed elsewhere,[8] a "State-blind" people concentrated upon
private getting; they have been negligent of public concerns, and the
public appointments have been left to the peculiarly ruffianly type of
politician their unfortunate Constitution and their individualist
traditions have evolved. In England, too, public servants are
systematically undersalaried, so that the big businesses have merely
to pay reasonably well to secure the pick of the national capacity.
Moreover, it must be remembered by the reader that the public services
do not advertise, and that the private businesses do; so that while
there is the fullest ventilation of any defects in our military or
naval organization, there is a very considerable check upon the
discussion of individualist incapacity. An editor will rush into print
with the flimsiest imputations upon the breech of a new field-gun or
the housing of the militia at Aldershot, but he thinks twice before he
proclaims that the preserved fruits that pay his proprietor a tribute
of some hundreds a year are an unwholesome embalmment of decay. On the
whole it is probable that in spite of scandalously bad pay and of the
embarrassment of party considerations, the British Navy, Post Office,
and Civil Service generally, and the educational work and much of the
transit and building work of the London County Council and of many of
the greater English and Scotch municipalities, are as well managed as
any private businesses in the world.
[8] _The Future in America_, Ch. IX. (Chapman & Hall, 1906.)
On the other hand, one must admit there are political and social
conditions that can carry the quality of the State service almost as
low as the lowest type of private enterprise. It is little marvel that
under the typical eighteenth century monarchy, when the way to ship,
regiment and the apostolic succession alike lay through the
ante-chamber of the king's mistress, there was begotten that absolute
repudiation of State Control to which Herbert Spencer was destined at
last to give the complete expression, that irrational, passionate
belief that whatever else is right the State is necessarily
incompetent and wrong....
The gist of this matter seems to be that where you have honourable
political institutions, free speech and a general high level of
intelligence and education, you will have an efficient criticism of
men and their work and powers, and you will get a wholesome system of
public promotion and many right men in the right place. The higher the
collective intelligence, that is to say, the higher is the collective
possibility. Under Socialist institutions which will give education
and a sense of personal security to every one, this necessity of
criticism is likely to be most freely, frankly and disinterestedly
provided. But it is well to keep in mind the entire dependence of
Socialism upon a high level of intelligence, education and freedom.
Socialist institutions, as I understand them, are only possible in a
civilized State, in a State in which the whole population can read,
write, discuss, participate and in a considerable measure understand.
Education must precede the Socialist State. Socialism, modern
Socialism that is to say, such as I am now concerned with, is
essentially an exposition of and training in certain general ideas; it
is impossible in an illiterate community, a basely selfish community,
or in a community without the capacity to use the machinery and the
apparatus of civilization. At the best, and it is a poor best, a
stupid, illiterate population can but mock Socialism with a sort of
bureaucratic tyranny; for a barbaric population too large and various
for the folk-meeting, there is nothing but monarchy and the ownership
of the king; for a savage tribe, tradition and the undocumented will
of the strongest males. Socialism, I will admit, presupposes
intelligence, and demands as fundamental necessities schools,
organized science, literature and a sense of the State.