THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN, THE BUSINESS MAN, AND SOCIALISM
§ 1.
Let me insert here a few remarks upon a question that arises naturally
out of the preceding discussion, and that is the future of that
miscellaneous section of the community known as the middle class. It
is one that I happen to know with a peculiar intimacy.
For a century or more the grinding out of the middle class has been
going on. I began to find it interesting--altogether too interesting
indeed, when I was still only a little boy. My father was one of that
multitude of small shopkeepers which has been caught between the
"Stores" and such-like big distributors above and the rising rates
below, and from the knickerbocker stage onward I was acutely aware of
the question hanging over us. "This isn't going on," was the
proposition. "This shop in which our capital is invested will never
return it. Nobody seems to understand what is happening, and there is
nobody to advise or help us. What are we going to do?"
Except that people are beginning to understand a little now what it
all means, exactly the same question hangs over many hundreds of
thousands of households to-day, not only over the hundreds of small
shopkeepers, but of small professional men, of people living upon
small parcels of investments, of clerks who find themselves growing
old and their value depreciated by the competition of a new,
better-educated generation, of private school-masters, of boarding-and
lodging-house keepers and the like. They are all vaguely aware of
something more than personal failure, of a drift and process which is
against all their kind, of the need of "doing something" for
themselves and their children, something different from just sticking
to the shop or the "situation"--and they don't know what to do! What
ought they to do?
Well, first, before one answers that, let us ask what it is exactly
that is grinding the middle class in this way. Is it a process we can
stop? Can we direct the millstones? If we can, ought we to do so? And
if we cannot, or decide that it isn't worth while, then what can we do
to mitigate this cruelty of slowly impoverishing and taxing out of
existence a class that was once the backbone of the community? It is
not mere humanity dictates this much, it is a question that affects
the State as a whole. It must be extremely bad for the spirit of the
nation and for our national future that its middle mass should be in a
state of increasing financial worry and stress, irritated, depressed,
and broken in courage. One effect is manifest in our British politics
now. Each fresh election turns upon expenditure more evidently than
the last, and the promise to reduce taxation or lower the rates
overrides more and more certainly any other consideration. What are
Empire or Education to men who feel themselves drifting helplessly
into debt? What chance has any constructive scheme with an electorate
of men who are being slowly submerged in an economic bog?
The process that has brought the middle class into these troubles is a
complex one, but the essential thing about it seems to be this, that
there is a _change of scale_ going on in most human affairs, a
substitution of big organizations for detached individual effort
almost everywhere. A hundred and fifty years ago or so the only very
rich people in the community were a handful of great landowners and a
few bankers; the rest of the world's business was being done by small
prosperous independent men. The labourers were often very poor and
wretched, ill clad, bootless, badly housed and short of food, but
there was nevertheless a great deal of middle-class comfort and
prosperity. The country was covered with flourishing farmers, every
country town was a little world in itself, with busy tradespeople and
professional men; manufacturing was still done mainly by small people
employing a few hands, master and apprentice working together; in
every town you found a private school or so, an independent doctor and
the like, doing well in a mediocre, comfortable fashion. All the
carrying trade was in the hands of small independent carriers; the
shipping was held by hundreds of small shipowners. And London itself
was only a larger country town. It was, in effect, a middle-class
world ruled over by aristocrats; the millstones had as yet scarcely
stirred.
Then machinery came into the lives of men, and steam power, and there
began that change of scale which is going on still to-day, making an
ever-widening separation of master and man and an ever-enlarging
organization of industry and social method. Its most striking
manifestation was at first the substitution of organized manufacture
in factories for the half-domestic hand-industrialism of the earlier
period; the growth of the fortunes of some of the merchants and
manufacturers to dimensions comparable with the wealth of the great
landowners, and the sinking of the rest of their class towards the
status of wage-earners. The development of joint-stock enterprise
arose concurrently with this to create a new sort of partnership
capable of handling far greater concerns than any single wealthy
person, as wealth was measured by the old scale, could do. There
followed a great development of transit, culminating for a time in the
coming of the railways and steamships, which abolished the isolation
of the old towns and brought men at the remotest quarters of the earth
into business competition. Big towns of the modern type, with
half-a-million inhabitants or more, grew up rapidly all over Europe
and America. For the European big towns are as modern as New York, and
the East End and south side of London scarcely older than Chicago.
Shopkeeping, like manufactures, began to concentrate in large
establishments, and big wholesale distribution to replace individual
buying and selling. As the need for public education under the
changing conditions of life grew more and more urgent, the individual
enterprise of this school-master and that gave place to the organized
effort of such giant societies as (in Britain) the old National School
Society and the British School Society, and at last to State
education. And one after another the old prosperous middle-class
callings fell under the stress of the new development.
The process still goes on, and there can be little doubt of the
ultimate issue. The old small manufacturers are either ruined or
driven into sweating and the slums; the old coaching innkeeper and
common carrier have been impoverished or altogether superseded by the
railways and big carrier companies; the once flourishing shopkeeper
lives to-day on the mere remnants of the trade that great distributing
stores or the branches of great companies have left him. Tea
companies, provision-dealing companies, tobacconist companies, make
the position of the old-established private shop unstable and the
chances of the new beginner hopeless. Railways and tramways take the
custom more and more effectually past the door of the small draper and
outfitter to the well-stocked establishments at the centre of things;
telephone and telegraph assist that shopping at the centre more and
more. The small "middle-class" school-master finds himself beaten by
revived endowed schools and by new public endowments; the small
doctor, the local dentist, find Harley Street always nearer to them
and practitioners in motor-cars from the great centres playing havoc
with their practices. And while the small men are more and more
distressed, the great organizations of trade, of production, of public
science, continue to grow and coalesce, until at last they grow into
national or even world trusts, or into publicly-owned monopolies. In
America slaughtering and selling meat has grown into a trust, steel
and iron are trustified, mineral oil is all gathered into a few hands.
All through the trades and professions and sciences and all over the
world the big eats up the small, the new enlarged scale replaces the
old.
And this is equally true, though it is only now beginning to be
recognized, of the securities of that other section of the middle
class, the section which lives upon invested money. There, too, big
eats little. There, too, the small man is more and more manifestly at
the mercy of the large organization. It was a pleasant illusion of the
Victorian time that one put one's hundred pounds or thousand pounds
"into something," beside the rich man's tens of thousands, and drew
one's secure and satisfying dividends. The intelligent reader of Mr.
Lawson's _Frenzied Finance_ or of the bankruptcy proceedings of Mr.
Hooley realizes this idyll is scarcely true to nature. Through the
seas and shallows of investment flow great tides and depressions, on
which the big fortunes ride to harbour while the little accumulations,
capsized and swamped, quiver down to the bottom. It becomes more and
more true that the small man saves his money for the rich man's
pocket. Only by drastic State intervention is a certain measure of
safety secured for insurance, and in America recently we have had the
spectacle of the people's insurance-money used as a till by the rich
financiers.
And when the middle-class man turns in his desperation from the
advance of the big competitor who is consuming him, as a big codfish
eats its little brother, to the State, he meets a tax-paper; he sees
as the State's most immediate aspect the rate-collector and inexorable
demands. The burthen of taxation certainly falls upon him, and it
falls upon him because he is collectively the weakest class that
possesses any property to be taxed. Below him are classes either too
poor to tax or too politically effective to stand taxation. Above him
is the class which owns a large part of the property in the world; but
it also owns the newspapers and periodicals that are necessary for an
adequate discussion of social justice, and it finds it cheaper to pay
a voluntary tax to the hoardings at election time than to take over
the small man's burdens. He rolls about between these two parties,
antagonized first to one and then the other, and altogether helpless
and ineffectual. So the millstones grind, and so it would seem they
will continue to grind until there is nothing between them; until
organized property in the hands of the few on the one hand and the
proletariat on the other grind face to face. So, at least, Karl Marx
taught in _Das Kapital_.
But when one says the middle class will disappear, one means that it
will disappear as a class. Its individuals and its children will
survive, and the whole process is not nearly so fatalistic as the
Marxists would have us believe. The new great organizations that are
replacing the little private enterprises of the world before machinery
are not all private property. There are alternatives in the matter of
handling a great business. To the exact nature of these alternatives
the middle-class mind needs to direct itself if it is to exert any
control whatever over its future. Take the case of the butcher. It is
manifestly written on the scroll of destiny that the little private
slaughter-house, the little independent butcher's shop, buying and
selling locally, must disappear. The meat will all be slaughtered at
some great, conveniently organized centre, and distributed thence to
shops that will necessarily be mere agencies for distributing meat.
Now, this great slaughtering and distributing business may either be
owned by one or a group of owners working it for profit--in which case
it will be necessary for the State to employ an unremunerative army of
inspectors to see that the business is kept decently clean and
honest--or it may be run by the public authority. In the former case
the present-day butcher or his son will be a slaughterman or
shopkeeper employed by the private owners; in the latter case by the
public authority. This is equally true of a milk-seller, of a small
manufacturer, of a builder, of a hundred and one other trades. They
are bound to be incorporated in a larger organization; they are bound
to become salaried men where formerly they were independent men, and
it is no good struggling against that. It is doubtful, indeed, whether
from the standpoint of welfare it would be worth the middle-class
man's while to struggle against that. But in the case of very many
great public services--meat, milk, bread, transit, housing and land
administration, education and research, and the public health--it is
still an open question whether the big organization is to be publicly
owned, publicly controlled, and constantly refreshed by public
scrutiny and comment, or whether it is to be privately owned, and
conducted solely for the profit of a small group of very rich owners.
The alternatives are Plutocracy or Socialism, and between these the
middle-class man remains weakly undecided and ineffectual, lending no
weight to and getting small consideration therefore from either side.
He remains so because he has not grasped the real nature of his
problem, because he clings in the face of overwhelming fate to the
belief that in some way the wheels of change may be arrested and his
present method of living preserved.
I think, if he could shake himself free from that impossible
conservatism he would realize that his interests lie with the
interests of the intelligent working-class man--that is to say, in the
direction of Socialism rather than in the direction of capitalistic
competition; that the best use he can make of such educational and
social advantages as still remain for him is to become the willing
leader instead of the panic-fierce antagonist of the Socialist
movement. His place, I hold, is to forward the development of that
State and municipal machinery the Socialist foreshadows, and to secure
for himself and his sons and daughters an adequate position and voice
in the administration. Instead of struggling to diminish that burthen
of public expenditure which educates and houses, conveys and protects
him and his children, he ought rather to increase it joyfully, while
at the same time working manfully to transfer its pressure to the
broad shoulders of those very rich people who have hitherto evaded
their legitimate share of it. The other course is to continue his
present policy of obstinate resistance to the extension of public
property and public services. In which case these things will
necessarily become that basis of monopolistic property on which the
coming plutocracy will establish itself. The middle-class man will be
taxed and competed out of independence just the same, and he will
become a salaried officer just the same, but with a different sort of
master and under different social conditions according as one or other
of these alternatives prevails.
Which is the better master--the democratic State or a "combine" of
millionaires? Which will give the best social atmosphere for one's
children to breathe--a Plutocracy or a Socialism? That is the real
question to which the middle-class man should address himself.
No doubt to many minds a Plutocracy presents many attractions. In the
works of Thomas Love Peacock, and still more clearly in the works of
Mr. W. H. Mallock, you will find an agreeable rendering of that
conception. The bulk of the people will be organized out of sight in a
state of industrious and productive congestion, and a wealthy,
leisurely, and refined minority will live in spacious homes, with
excellent museums, libraries, and all the equipments of culture; will
go to town, concentrate in Paris, London, and Rome, and travel about
the world. It is to these large, luxurious, powerful lives that the
idealist naturally turns. Their motor-cars, their aeroplanes, their
steam yachts will awaken terror and respect in every corner of the
globe. Their handsome doings will fill the papers. They will patronize
the arts and literature, while at the same time mellowing them by
eliminating that too urgent insistence upon contemporary fact which
makes so much of what is done to-day harsh and displeasing. The
middle-class tradition will be continued by a class of stewards,
tenants, managers, and foremen, secretaries and the like, respected
and respectful. The writer, the artist, will lead lives of comfortable
dependence, a link between class and class, the lowest of the rich
man's guests, the highest of his servants. As for the masses, they
will be fed with a sort of careless vigour and considerable economy
from the Chicago stockyards, and by agricultural produce trusts, big
breweries, fresh-water companies, and the like; they will be organized
industrially and carefully controlled. Their spiritual needs will be
provided for by churches endowed by the wealthy, their physical
distresses alleviated by the hope of getting charitable aid, their
lives made bright and adventurous by the crumbs of sport that fall
from the rich man's table. They will crowd to see the motor-car races,
the aeroplane competitions. It will be a world rich in contrasts and
not without its gleam of pure adventure. Every bright young fellow of
capacity will have the hope of catching the eye of some powerful
personage, of being advanced to some high position of trust, of even
ending his days as a partner, a subordinate assistant plutocrat. Or he
may win a quite agreeable position by literary or artistic merit. A
pretty girl, a clever woman of the middle class would have before her
even more brilliant and romantic possibilities.
There can be no denying the promises of colour and eventfulness a
Plutocracy holds out, and though they do not attract me, I can quite
understand their appeal to the more ductile and appreciative mind of
Mr. Mallock. But there are countervailing considerations. There is, it
is said, a tendency in Plutocracies either to become unprogressive,
unenterprising and stagnantly autocratic, or to develop states of
stress and discontent, and so drift towards Cæsarism. The latter was
the fate of the Roman Republic, and may perhaps be the destiny of the
budding young Plutocracy of America. But the developing British
Plutocracy, like the Carthaginian, will be largely Semitic in blood,
and like the Carthaginian may resist these insurgent tendencies.
So much for the Plutocratic possibility. If the middle-class man on
any account does not like that outlook, he can turn in the other
direction; and then he will find fine promises indeed, but much more
uncertainty than towards Plutocracy. Plutocracies the world has seen
before, but a democratic civilization organized upon the lines laid
down by modern Socialists would be a new beginning in the world's
history. It is not a thing that will come about by itself; it will
have to be the outcome of a sustained moral and intellectual effort in
the community. If there is not that effort, if things go on as they
are going now, the coming of a Plutocracy is inevitable. That effort,
I am convinced, cannot be successfully made by the lower-class man
alone; from him, unaided and unguided, there is nothing to be expected
but wild convulsive attempts at social upheaval, which, whether they
succeed (as the French Revolution did) or fail (as did the
insurrectionary outbreaks of the Republic in Rome), lead ultimately to
a Napoleon or a Cæsar. But our contemporary civilization is
unprecedented in the fact that the whole population now reads, and
that intelligence and free discussion saturate the whole mass. Only
time can show what possibilities of understanding, leadership, and
political action lie in our new generation of the better-educated
middle class. Will it presently begin to define a line for itself?
Will it remain disorganized and passive, or will it become intelligent
and decisive between these millstones of the organized property and
the organizing State, between Plutocracy and Socialism, whose
opposition is the supreme social and political fact in the world at
the present time?
§ 2.
Perhaps, also, it may be helpful here to insert a view of the
contemporary possibilities of Socialism from a rather different angle,
a view that follows on to the matter of the previous section, but
appeals to a different section of the Middle Class. It is a quotation
from the _Magazine of Commerce_ for September 1907, and leads to an
explanation by the present writer.
"The recent return of Mr. Grayson, a Socialist, as member of
Parliament for the Colne Valley, has brought prominently
before the public mind the question of Socialism. Mr. Pete
Curran's success at Jarrow a month or so ago, and the large
number of Labour members returned at the last General
Election, caused more or less desultory comment on Socialism
as a possible feature of practical politics in the remote
future; but Mr. Grayson can certainly claim that his
achievement at Colne Valley brought the question of Socialism
in to the very forefront at one bound. It is difficult to
ignore Socialism, to dismiss it as a mere fad and fancy of a
few hare-brained enthusiasts, after Mr. Grayson's success. The
verdict of Colne Valley may be the verdict of many another
constituency where the so-called working-class electors are
numerically predominant. When we consider that the manual
worker represents the majority of the electorate of the
country, this contingency does not appear to be so very
remote, provided that the leaders of Socialism can organize
their resources and canvass the working-men on a wide and
carefully-planned scale. In this respect the Colne Valley
result may very well give them the lead and stimulus they have
been waiting for. It must be borne in mind, too, that the
forward section of the Labour Party is avowedly Socialist in
its sympathies, and a definite start may therefore be said to
have been made towards capturing the machinery of Government
in the Cause of Socialism.
"How will Socialism affect the business world? This is a
question which many thoughtful business men must have already
put to themselves. For reply we must go to the leaders of
Socialism, and discover what their policy actually is. The
common impression that Socialism spells barefaced confiscation
is too superficial to be seriously adduced as an argument
against Socialism. The leaders of the Cause include some of
the cleverest men of the day--men who have a more rational
basis for their policy than that of simply robbing Peter to
pay Paul. The suggestion that Socialism means a compulsory
'share out' may be rightly dismissed as an idle scare. The
most bitter opponent of Socialism must at least admit that
there is a stronger argument to be met than that implied by
the parrot-cry of 'spoliation.' Socialism has, at any rate, so
far advanced as to be allowed the ordinary courtesies of
debate. We may oppose it tooth and nail, but we must confront
argument with argument and not with abuse.
"Despite much excellent literature which is read widely by
cultured people, very little is known by the general public of
the principles which modern British Socialists have adopted as
their guiding rules. Few business men care to study the
subject. We have therefore addressed a letter to the chief
leaders of the Cause, with the purpose of ascertaining the
effect which Socialism would have on our business habits. Our
object was to discover how far Socialism might disturb or
improve business; whether it would altogether subvert present
methods, or whether it could be applied without injury to
these methods. To put the matter very plainly, we wished to
learn whether we should carry on our business much as we do
now, giving free play to individual effort and individual
fortune-building.
"The reply of Mr. Wells is as follows:--
"'MY DEAR SIR,
"'I wish very much I could reply at adequate length to
your very admirably framed question. The constant stream
of abuse and of almost imbecile misrepresentations of
Socialism in the Press has no doubt served to distort
the idea of our movement in the minds of a large
proportion of busy men, and filled them with an
unfounded dread of social insecurity. If it were
possible to allay that by an epigrammatic programme,
"Socialism in a Nutshell," so to speak, I would do my
best. But the economic and trading system of a modern
State is not only a vast and complex tangle of
organizations, but at present an uncharted tangle, and
necessarily the methods of transition from the limited
individualism of our present condition to the
scientifically-organized State, which is the Socialist
ideal, must be gradual, tentative and various.
"'To build up a body of social and economic science, to
develop a class of trained administrators, to rearrange
local government areas, to educate the whole community
in the "sense of the State" are necessary parts of the
Socialist scheme. You must try and induce your readers
to recognize that when Socialism finds such supporters
as Sir Oliver Lodge and Professor Karl Pearson, as
William Morris (who revolutionized the furniture trade),
as Granville Barker (who is revolutionizing the London
stage), as Mr. George Cadbury and Mr. Fels (whose names
are not unknown in the world of advertisement), as Mr.
Allan (of the Allan Line), as Mr. George Bernard Shaw
and Mrs. Shaw, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and Sir Sidney
Olivier (the present Governor of Jamaica)--all of them
fairly comfortable and independent people, practically
acquainted with the business of investment and affairs
generally and quite alive to the present relations of
property to the civilized life--the suggestion that it
is a raid of the ignorant "Have-nots" on the possessions
of the wise and good "Haves" cannot be a very
intelligent one nor addressed to very intelligent
people. Essentially Socialism is the
scientifically-organized State as distinguished from the
haphazard, wasteful, blundering, child-sweating State of
the eighteenth century. It is the systematization of
present tendency. Necessarily its methods of transition
will be progressively scientific and humane.
"'So far as your specific questions go, I do not think
there could possibly be anything in the nature of
"compulsory profit-sharing" if a Socialist Government
came into office. There is at present a compulsory
profit-sharing in the form of an income-tax, but that
tax does not appeal to the Socialist as a particularly
scientific one. The advent of a strongly-Socialist
Government would mean no immediate revolutionary changes
at all. There would be, no doubt, a vigorous
acceleration of the educational movement to increase the
economic value and productivity of the average citizen
of the next generation, and legislation upon the lines
laid down by the principle of the "minimum wage" to
check the waste of our national resources by destructive
employment. Also a systematic shifting of the burthen of
taxation from enterprise to rent would begin. But
nothing convulsive would occur.'"
"'The means of transit and communication of the country
(both internal and external), and especially the
railways and canals (which are now rapidly falling into
inefficiency through the exhaustion of their capital
upon excessive dividends in the past), would probably be
transferred from competitive private to organized public
control--a transfer that would certainly be enormously
stimulating to business generally. There would be no
"robbery," the former shareholders would become stock or
annuity holders. Nor would there be any financial
convulsion due to the raising of the "enormous sum"
necessary to effect this purchase. The country would
simply create stock, while at the same time taking over
assets to balance the new liability.
"'A Socialist Government would certainly also acquire
the coal mines and the coal trade, and relieve industry
from the inconveniences due to the manipulation of the
supply of this vitally important factor, and it would
accelerate the obvious tendency of the present time to
bring the milk trade, the drink trade, slaughtering,
local traffic, lighting and power supply into public
hands. But none of this is the destruction of property,
but only its organization and standardization. Such a
State organization of public services is, I submit,
enough to keep a Socialist Government busy for some few
years, and makes not only for social progress, but
social stability.
"'And does an honest and capable business man stand to
lose or gain by the coming of such a Socialist
Government? I submit that, on the whole, he stands to
gain. Let me put down the essential points in his
outlook as I conceive them.
"'Under a Socialist Government such as is quite possible
in England at the present time:--
"'He will be restricted from methods of production and
sale that are socially mischievous.
"'He will pay higher wages.
"'He will pay a larger proportion of his rate-rent
outgoings to the State and Municipality, and less to the
landlord. Ultimately he will pay it all to the State or
Municipality, and as a voter help to determine how it
shall be spent, and the landlord will become a
Government stock-holder. Practically he will get his
rent returned to him in public services.
"'He will speedily begin to get better-educated,
better-fed and better-trained workers, so that he will
get money value for the higher wages he pays.
"'He will get a regular, safe, cheap supply of power and
material. He will get cheaper and more efficient
internal and external transit.
"'He will be under an organized scientific State, which
will naturally pursue a vigorous scientific collective
policy in support of the national trade.
"'He will be less of an adventurer and more of a
citizen....'"
So I wrote to the _Magazine of Commerce_, and that for the energetic
man who is conducting a real and socially useful business is the
outlook. Socialism is not the coming of chaos and repudiation, it is
the coming of order and justice. For confusion and accident and waste,
the Socialist seeks to substitute design and collective economy. That
too is the individual aim of every good business man who is not a mere
advertising cheat or financial adventurer. To the sound-minded,
clear-headed man of affairs, Socialism appeals just as it appeals to
the scientific man, to the engineer, to the artist, because it is the
same reality, the large scale aspect of the same constructive motive,
that stirs in himself.
§ 3.
Let me finally quote the chairman of one of the most enterprising and
enlightened business organizations of our time to show that in
claiming the better type of business man for modern Socialism I am
making no vain boast. Sir John Brunner may not call himself a
Socialist, but this is very probably due to the fact that he gets his
ideas of Socialism from the misquotations of its interested
adversaries. This that follows from the _Manchester Guardian_ is pure
Socialism.
Speaking at the annual meeting of Brunner, Mond and Co., Ltd.,
in Liverpool (1907), the chairman, Sir John Brunner, M.P.,
made a remarkable pronouncement on the subject of the
collective ownership of canals. He said:--
"I have been one of a Royal Commission visiting the North of
France, Belgium, and Northern Germany, and our duty has been
to examine what those three countries have done in the
improvement of their canals and their waterways. We have been
very deeply impressed by what we have seen, and I can tell you
to-day, speaking as a man of business to men of business, that
the fact that in these three countries there is communal
effort--that is to say, that the State in money and in credit
for the benefit of the national trade--has brought to those
three countries enormous, almost incalculable, benefits; and I
think that any man, any intelligent man, who studies this
matter as I have studied it for a great many years, will come
the conclusion, as I have come very clearly and decidedly,
that the old policy which we have adopted for generations of
leaving all public works to private enterprise--the old
policy, so called, of _laissez faire_--is played out
completely, and I am of opinion, very firmly, that, if we mean
to hold our own in matters of trade, we must learn to follow
the example that has been set us not only by France, Belgium,
and Germany, but by the United States and by every one of the
Colonies of our Empire. Everywhere do you find that trade is
helped by the effort of the community, by the force of the
State, and I shall be very heartily pleased if those who hear
me will think the matter over and decide for themselves
whether or not we as business people--preeminently the
business people of the world--are to maintain the old policy
of leaving everything to private enterprise, or whether we are
to act together for the good of all in this important matter
of the national trade."