CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM
§ 1.
Such a group of ideas and motives as Socialism, fundamentally true as
it is to the needs of life, and arising as it does from the inevitable
suggestion of very widely dispersed evils and insufficiencies, does
not spring from any one source, nor develop along any single line. It
appears as a smouldering fire appears, first here, then there, first
in one form of expression and then another, now under this name and
now under that.
The manifest new possibilities created by the progress of applied
science, the inevitable change of scale and of the size and conception
of a community that arises out of them, _necessitate_ at least the
material form of Socialism--that is to say, the replacement of
individual action by public organization, in spite of a hundred vested
interests. The age that regarded Herbert Spencer as its greatest
philosopher, for example, was urged nevertheless, unwillingly and
protestingly but effectually, through phase after phase of more and
more co-ordinated voluntary effort, until at last it had to undertake
a complete system of organized free public primary education. There
the moving finger of change halts not a moment; already it is going on
to secondary education, to schemes for a complete public educational
organization from reformatory school up to professorial chair. The
practical logic of the case is invincible.
So, too, the public organization of scientific research goes on
steadily against all prejudices and social theories, and, in a very
different field, the plain inconveniences of a private control of
traffic in America and England alike, force the affected property
owners whose businesses are hampered and damaged towards the
realization that freedom of private property, in these services at
least, is evil and must end. As the proofs of these pages pass through
my hands comes the news of Mr. Lloyd George's settlement of the
dispute between railway directors and _employés_ by the establishment
of a method of compulsory arbitration. Then, again, the movement for
public sanitation and hygiene spreads and broadens, and the natural
alarm of even the most conservative at the falling birth-rate and the
stationary infantile death-rate is evidently ripening for an advance
towards public control and care even in the relation of child to
parent, the most intimate of all personal affairs.
Inevitably all such movements must coalesce--their spirit is one, the
spirit of construction--and inevitably their coalescence will take the
form of a wide and generous restatement of Socialism. Nothing but a
broader understanding of the broadening propositions of Socialism is
needed for that recognition now.
Socialism, indeed, does not simply look, it appeals to the
constructive professions at the present time, to the medical man, the
engineer, the architect, the scientific agriculturist.
Each of these sorts of men, in just so far as he is concerned with the
reality of his profession, in just so far as he is worthy of his
profession, must resent the considerations of private profit, of base
economies, that constantly limit and spoil his work and services in
the interests of a dividend or of some financial manoeuvre. So far they
have been antagonized towards Socialism by the errors of its
adherents, by the impression quite wantonly created, that Socialism
meant either mob rule or the rule of pedantic, unsympathetic
officials. They have heard too much of democracy, too much of
bureaucracy, and not enough of construction. They have felt that on
the whole the financial exploiter, detestable master as he often is,
was better than the rule of either clamour on the one hand or red tape
on the other. But, as I have been seeking to suggest, mob rule and
official rule do not exhaust the possible alternatives. Neither
ignorant democracy nor narrow bureaucracy can be the destined rulers
of a Socialist State. The only conceivable rule in a Socialist
civilization is through the operation of a collective mind that must
be by its nature constructive and enterprising, because only through
the creation of such a mind can Socialism be brought about. A
Socialist State cannot exist without that mind existing also, and a
collective mind can scarcely appear without some form of Socialism
giving it a material body. Now it is only under an intelligent
collective mind that any of the dreams of these constructive
professions can attain an effective realization. Where will the
private profit in a universal sanitation, for example, be found, in
the abolition of diseases, in the planned control of the public
health, in the abolition of children's deaths? What thought of private
gain will ever scrap our obsolescent railroads and our stagnating
industrial monopolies for new clean methods? So long as they pay a
dividend they will keep on upon their present lines. The modern
architect knows, the engineer knows we might build ourselves perfectly
clean, smokeless magnificent cities to-day, as full of pure water as
ancient Rome, as full of pure air as the Engadine, if private
ownership did not block the way. Who can doubt it who understands what
a doctor, or an electrical engineer, or a real architect understands?
Surely all the best men in these professions are eager to get to work
on the immense possibilities of life, possibilities of things cleared
up, of things made anew, that their training has enabled them to
visualize! What stands in their way, stands in our way; social
disorganization, individualist self-seeking, narrowness of outlook,
self-conceit, ignorance.
With that conception they must surely turn in the end, as we
Socialists turn, to the most creative profession of all, to that great
calling which with each generation renews the world's "circle of
ideas," the Teachers!
The whole trend and purpose of this book from the outset has been to
insist upon _the mental quality of Socialism_, to maintain that it is
a business of conventions about property and plans of reorganization,
that is to say, of changes and expansions of the ideas of men, changes
and expansions of their spirit of action and their habitual circles of
ideas. Unless you can change men's minds you cannot effect Socialism,
and when you have made clear and universal certain broad
understandings, Socialism becomes a mere matter of science and devices
and applied intelligence. That is the constructive Socialist's
position. Logically, therefore, he declares the teacher master of the
situation. Ultimately the Socialist movement _is_ teaching, and the
most important people in the world from the Socialist's point of view
are those who teach--I mean of course not simply those who teach in
schools, but those who teach in pulpits, in books, in the press, in
universities and lecture-theatres, in parliaments and councils, in
discussions and associations and experiments of every sort, and, last
in my list but most important of all, those mothers and motherly women
who teach little children in their earliest years. Every one, too, who
enunciates a new and valid idea, or works out a new contrivance, is a
teacher in this sense.
And these Teachers collectively, perpetually renew the collective
mind. In the measure that in each successive generation they apprehend
Socialism and transmit its spirit, is Socialism nearer its goal.
§ 2.
At the present time in America and all the western European countries,
there is a collective mind, a public opinion made up of the most
adventitious and interesting elements. It is not even a national or a
racial thing, it is curiously international, curiously responsive to
thought from every quarter; a something, vague here, clear there, here
diffused, there concentrated. It demands the closest attention from
Socialists this something, this something which is so hard to define
and so impossible to deny--civilized feeling, the thought of our age,
the mind of the world. It has organs, it has media, yet it is as hard
to locate as the soul of a man. We know that somewhere in the brain
and body of a man lives his Self; that you must preserve that brain
entire, aërate it, nourish it lest it die and his whole being die, and
yet you cannot say it is in this cell--or in that. So with an equal
mystery of diffusion the mind of mankind exists. No man, no
organization, no authority, can be more than a part of it. Twice at
least have there been attempts of parts to be the whole; the Catholic
Church and the Chinese Academy have each in varying measure sought to
play the part of a collective mind for all humanity and failed. All
individual achievement, fine books, splendid poems, great discoveries,
new generalizations, lives of thought, are no more than flashes in
this huge moral and intellectual being which grows now self-conscious
and purposeful, just as a child grows out of its early self-ignorance
to an elusive, indefinable, indisputable sense of itself. This
collective mind has to be filled and nourished with the Socialist
purpose, to receive and assimilate our great idea. That is the true
work of Socialism.
Consider the organs and media of the collective mind as one finds them
in England or America now, how hazardous they are and accidental! At
the basis of this strange thought-process is the intelligence of the
common man, once illiterate and accessible only to the crude,
inarticulate influences of talk and rumour, now rapidly becoming
educated, or at any rate educated to the level of a reader and writer,
and responding more and more to literary influences. The great mass of
the population is indeed at the present time like clay which has
hitherto been a mere deadening influence underneath, but which this
educational process, like some drying and heating influence upon that
clay, is rendering resonant, capable of, in a dim answering way,
_ringing_ to the appeals made upon it. Reaching through this mass,
appealing to it in various degrees at various levels and to various
ends, there are a number of systems of organizations of unknown value
and power. Its response, such as it is, robbed by multitudinousness of
any personality or articulation, is a broad emotional impulse.
Above this fundamental mass is the growing moiety which has a
conscious thought-process, of a sort. Its fundamental ideas, its
preconceptions, are begotten of a mixture of social traditions learnt
at home and in school and from the suggestions of contemporary customs
and affairs. But it reads and listens more or less. And scattered
through this, here and there, are people really learning, really
increasing and accumulating knowledge, really thinking and
conversing--the active mind-cells, as it were, of the world. Their
ideas are conveyed into the mass much as impulses are conveyed into an
imperfectly innervated tissue, they are conveyed by books and
pamphlets, by lecturing, by magazine articles and newspaper articles,
by the agency of the pulpit, by organized propaganda, by political
display and campaigns. The gross effect is considerable, but it is
just as well that the Socialist should look a little closely at the
economic processes that underlie these intellectual activities at the
present time. Except for the universities and much of the public
educational organization, except for a few pulpits endowed for good
under conditions that limit freedom of thought and expression, except
for certain needy and impecunious propagandas, the whole of this
apparatus of public thought and discussion to-day has been created and
is sustained by commercial necessity.
For example, consider what is I suppose by far the most important
vehicle of ideas at the present time, which for a huge majority of
adults is the sole vehicle of ideas, the newspaper. It is universal
because it is cheap, and it is cheap because the cost of production is
paid for by the advertisements of private enterprise. The newspaper is
to a very large extent parasitic upon competition; its criticism, its
discussion, its correspondence, are, from the business point of view,
written on the backs of puffs of competing tobaccos, soaps, medicines
and the like. No newspaper could pay upon its sales alone, and the
same thing is true of most popular magazines and weekly publications.
It is highly probable that whatever checks public advertisement in
other directions, the prohibition of bill-posting upon hoardings, for
example, the protection of scenery, railway carriages and architecture
from the advertiser, stimulates the production of attractive
literature. Necessarily what is published in newspapers and magazines
must be acceptable to advertising businesses and not too openly
contrary to their interests. With that limitation the newspapers
provide a singularly free and various arena for discussion at the
present time. It must, however, be obvious that to advance towards
Socialism is, if not to undermine the newspaper altogether, at least
to change very profoundly this material vehicle of popular thought....
The newspaper disseminates ideas. So, too, does the book and the
pamphlet, and so far as these latter are concerned, their distribution
does not at present rest in the same degree upon their value as
vehicles of advertisement. They are saleable things unaided. The
average book of to-day at its nominal price of six shillings pays in
itself and supports its producers. So in a lesser degree does the
sixpenny pamphlet, but neither book nor pamphlet reach so wide a
public as the halfpenny and penny press. The methods and media of the
book trade have grown up, no man designing them; they change, and no
one is able to foretell the effect of their changes. At present there
is a great movement to cheapen new books, and it would seem the
cheapening is partly to be made up for in enhanced sales and partly by
an increased use of new books for advertisement. Many people consider
this cheapening of new books as being detrimental to the interests of
all but the most vulgarly popular authors. They believe it will
increase the difficulty of new writers, and hopelessly impoverish just
the finest element in our literary life, those original and
exceptional minds who demand educated appreciation and do not appeal
to the man in the street. This may or may not be true; the aspect of
interest to Socialists is that here is a process going on which is
likely to produce the most far-reaching results upon the collective
mind, upon that thought-process of the whole community which is
necessary for the progressive organization of Society. It is a process
which is likely to spread one type of writer far and wide, which may
silence or demoralize another, which may vulgarize and debase
discussion, and which will certainly make literature far more
dependent than it is at present upon the goodwill of advertising
firms. Yet as Socialists they have no ideas whatever in this matter;
their project of activities ignores it altogether....
Books and newspapers constitute two among the chief mental organs of a
modern community, but almost, if not equally important is that great
apparatus for the dissemination of ideas made up of the pulpits and
lecture halls of a thousand sects and societies. Towards all these
things Socialism has hitherto maintained an absurd attitude of
_laissez faire_....
So far I have looked at the collective mind as a thought process only,
but it has much graver and more immediate functions in a democratic
State. It has, one must remember, to _will_ social order and
development. In every country the machinery for determining and
expressing this will is complex. The common method in the modern
western State is through the voting of a numerous electorate, which
tends, it would seem, to become more and more the entire manhood, if
not the entire adult population of the country. It is a curious but
perhaps inevitable method. Practically thought has to percolate down
to the common man through all those strange and accidental channels,
newspapers which are advertisement sheets, books which may be
boycotted in a "Book War," pulpits pledged to doctrine and lecture
halls kept open by rich people's subscriptions; it has to reach him,
to mingle itself with generalized emotional forces in the heat of
mysteriously subsidized election campaigns, and then return as a
collective determination. For the Statesman and the Socialist there
could hardly be any study more important, one might think, than the
science of these processes and methods. Yet the world has still to
produce even the rudimentary generalizations of this needed science of
collective psychology.
§ 3.
Now, I ask the reader to consider very carefully how the Socialist
movement, using that expression now in its wider sense, stands to this
very vague and very real outcome of social evolution, the Collective
Mind; what it is really aspiring to do in that Collective Mind.
One has to recognize that this mind is at present a mind in a state of
confusion, full of warring suggestions and warring impulses. It is
like a very disturbed human mind, it is without a clear aim, it does
not know except in the vaguest terms what it wants to do, it has
impulses, it has fancies, it begins and forgets. In addition it is
afflicted with a division within itself that is strictly analogous to
that strange mental disorder, which is known to psychologists as
multiple personality. It has no clear conception of the whole of
itself, it goes about forgetting its proper name and address. Part of
it thinks of itself as one great being, as, let us say, Germany;
another thinks of itself as Catholicism, another as the White Race, or
Judæa. At times one might deem the whole confusion not so much a mind
as incurable dementia, a chaos of mental elements, haunted by
invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas. This you will remember
is the gist of that melancholy torso of irony, Flaubert's _Bouvard et
Pécuchet_.
In its essence the Socialist movement amounts to this; it is an
attempt in this warring chaos of a collective mind to pull itself
together, to develop and establish a governing idea of itself. It is
like a man saying to himself resolutely, "What am I? What am I doing
with myself? Where am I drifting?" and making an answer, hesitating at
first, crude at first, and presently clear and lucid.
The Socialist movement is from this point of view, no less than the
development of the collective self-consciousness of humanity.
Necessarily, therefore, it must be international as well as outspoken,
making no truce with prejudices against race and colour. These
national and racial collective consciousnesses of to-day are things as
vague, as fluctuating as mists or clouds, they melt, dissolve into one
another, they coalesce, they split. No clear isolated national mind
can ever maintain itself under modern conditions; even the mind of
Japan now comes into the common melting-pot of thought. We Socialists
take up to-day the assertion the early Christians were the first to
make, that mankind is of one household and one substance; the
Samaritan who stoops to the wounded stranger by the wayside our
brother rather than that Levite....
In a very different sense indeed the Socialist propaganda must be _the
germ of the collective self-consciousness of mankind in the coming
time_. If the purpose of Socialism is to prevail, its scattered
writings, its dispersed, indistinct and confused utterances must
increase in height and breadth and range, increase in power and
service, gather to themselves every means of expression, grow into an
ordered system of thought, art, literature and will. The Socialist
Propaganda of to-day must beget the whole Public Opinion of to-morrow
or fail, the Socialists must play the part of a little leaven to
leaven the whole world. If they do not leaven it then they are
altogether defeated....
§ 4.
Now, this conception of Socialism as being ultimately a moral and
intellectual synthesis of mankind from which fresh growth may come,
sets a fresh test of value upon all the activities of the
Socialist--and opens up altogether new departments for research. Let
us face the peculiar difficulty of the Socialist position. We propose
to destroy the competitive capitalistic system that owns and sustains
our present newspapers, gives and leaves money to universities, endows
fresh pulpits, publishes, advertises, and buys books; we have to ask,
as reasonable creatures, what new media we propose to give in the
place of these accidental and unsatisfactory methods of distributing
and exchanging thought. It would almost seem as though current
Socialism breathes public opinion as the Middle Ages breathed air,
without realizing that it existed, that it might be vitiated or
withheld. And so we are beyond the range of prepared and digested
Socialist proposals here altogether. It is still open to the
Anti-Socialist to allege that Socialism may incidentally destroy
itself by choking the channels of its own thinking, and the Socialist
has still to reply in vague general terms.
_We must insure the continuity of the collective mind_; that is
manifestly a primary necessity for Socialism. The attempt to realize
the Marxist idea of a democratic Socialism without that, might easily
fail into the abortive birth of an acephalous monster, the secular
development of administrative Socialism give the world over to a
bureaucratic mandarinate, self-satisfied, interfering and unteachable,
with whom wisdom would die. And yet we Socialists can produce in our
plans no absolute bar to these possibilities. Here I can suggest only
in the most general terms methods and certain principles. They need to
be laid down as vitally necessary to Socialism, and so far they have
not been so laid down. They have still to be incorporated in the
Socialist creed. They are essentially principles of that Liberalism
out of whose generous aspirations Socialism sprang, but they are
principles that even to-day, unhappily, do not figure in the
fundamental professions of any Socialist body.
The first of these is the principle of _freedom of speech_; the
second, _freedom of writing_; and the third, _universality of
information_. In the civilized State every one must be free to know,
knowledge must be patent and at hand, and any one must be free to
discuss, write, suggest and persuade. These freedoms must be guarded
as sacred things. It is not in the untutored nature of man to respect
any of these freedoms; it is not in the bureaucratic habit of mind.
Indeed, the desire to suppress opinions adverse to our own is almost
instinctive in human nature. It is an instinct we have to conquer.
Fair play in discussion is sustained by a cultivated respect, by a
correction of natural instinct; men need to be _trained_ to be jealous
of obscurantism, of unfair argument, of authoritative interference
with opinion when that opinion is against them. In England such a
jealousy does already largely exist, it has been cultivated with us
since the seventeenth century at least; America, it seemed to me
during my short visit to the States, has somewhat retrograded from its
former British standard in this respect, there is a crude majority
tyranny in the matter of publication, an un-English disposition to
boycott libraries, books, authors and publications upon petty issues,
a growing disposition to discriminate in the mails against unpopular
views. These interferences with open statement and discussion are
decivilizing forces.
Given a clear public understanding of these necessities as primary,
then one may point out that the next necessity for the mental
existence of a Socialist State is an extension and cheapening of the
impartial universal distributing activity of the public post so that
it becomes not only the means of correspondence, but also of
distributing books and newspapers, pamphlets and every form of printed
matter. The post-office must become bookseller and newsagent. In
France this is already the case with the press, and newspapers are
handed in not by the newsboy but by the public mail. In England
Messrs. Smith and Mudie, and so forth, may censor what they like among
periodicals or books. The remedy is more toilsome and vexatious than
the injury. Neither England nor America has any security against
finding its public supply of magazines or literature suddenly choked
by the manoeuvres of some blackmailing Book or News Trust squalidly
"fighting" author or publisher for an increase in its proportion of
profits, or interested in financial exploitations liable to exposure.
Neither country is secure against the complete control of its channels
of thought by some successful monopolistic adventurer....
The Socialist State will not for a moment permit such risks as these;
it must certainly be a ubiquitous newsvendor and bookseller; the
ordinary newsvendor and bookseller must become an impartial State
official, working for a sure and comfortable salary instead of for
precarious profits. And this amplification of the book and news post
and the book and news trades will need to be not simply a municipal
but a State service of the widest range.
Distribution, however, is only the beginning of the problem. There is
the more difficult issue of getting books and papers printed and
published. And here we come to an intricate puzzle in reconciling the
indisputable need for untrammelled individual expression on the one
hand with public ownership on the other, and also with the difficult
riddle how authors may be supported under Socialist conditions. It is
not within the design of this book to do more than indicate a possible
solution. These are problems the Socialist has still to work out. At
present authors with business shrewdness and the ability to be
interesting get an income from the sale of their books, and it seems
possible that they might continue to be paid in that way under
Socialism. It is difficult outside the field of specialist work (which
under any social system has to be endowed in relation to colleges and
universities) to find any other just way of discriminating between the
author who ought to get a living from writing, and the author who has
no reasonable claim to do so. But under Socialism, in addition to the
private publisher or altogether replacing him, there will have to be
some sort of public publisher.
Here again difficulties arise. It is difficult to see how, if there is
only one general State publishing department, a sort of censorship can
be altogether avoided, and even if, for example, one insists upon the
right of every one who cares to pay for it to have matter printed,
bound and issued by the public presses and binders, it still leaves a
disagreeable possibility of uniformity haunting the mind. But the
whole trend of administrative Socialism is towards a conception of
great local governments, of land, elementary education,
omnibus-transit, power distribution and the like, vesting in the hands
of municipalities as great as mediæval principalities; and it seems
possible to look to these great bodies and to the municipal patriotism
and inter-municipal rivalries that will develop about them, for just
that spirited and competitive publishing that is desirable, just as
one looks now to their rivalries as a stimulus for art and
architecture and public dignity and display.[25] Already, as I have
pointed out in a previous chapter (Chapter IX., § 5), the decorative
arts had to be rescued from the degrading influence of private
enterprise; no one wants to go back now to the early Victorian state
of affairs, and so it is reasonable to hope that out of the municipal
art and technical schools, which teach printing, binding and the like,
public presses, public binderies and all the machinery of book
production may be developed in a natural and convenient manner. So,
too, the municipalities might publish, seek out, maintain and honour
writers and sell the books they produced, against each other all over
the world. It would be a matter of pride for authors still
unrecognized to go forth to the world with the arms of some great city
on their covers, and it would be a matter of pride for any city to
have its arms upon work become classic and immortal. So at least one
method of competition is possible in this matter....
[25] I visited Liverpool and Manchester the other day for
the first time in my life, and was delighted to find how the
inferiority of the local art galleries to those of Glasgow
rankled in people's minds.
This, however, is but one passing suggestion out of many
possibilities. But in all these issues of the intellectual life, it is
manifest that public ownership must be so contrived, and can be so
contrived as to avoid centralization and a control without
alternatives. Moreover, whatever public publishing is done, it must be
left open to any one to set up as an independent publisher or printer,
and to sell and advertise through the impartial public book and news
distributing organization.
I lay some stress upon this matter of book issuing because I think it
is a remarkable and regrettable thing about contemporary Socialist
discussion that it does not seem to be in the least alive to the great
public disadvantage of leaving this vitally important service to
private gain getting. Municipal coal, municipal milk, municipal house
owning, the Socialists seem prepared for, and even municipal theatres,
but municipal publication they still do not take into consideration.
They leave the capitalist free to contrive the control of their book
supply and to check and determine all the provender of their minds....
The problem of the press is perhaps to be solved by some parallel
combination of individual enterprise and public resources. All sorts
of things may happen to the newspaper of to-day even in the near
future, it cannot but be felt that in its present form it is an
extremely transitory phenomenon, that it no longer embodies and rules
public thought as it did in the middle and later Victorian period, and
that a separation of public discussion from the news sheet is already
in progress. Both in England and America the popular magazine seems
taking over an increasing share of the public thinking. The newspaper
appears to be in the opening throes of a period of fundamental change.
But I will not go into the future of the newspaper here. All these
suggestions are merely thrown out in the most tentative way to
indicate the nature of the field for study that lies open for any
intelligent worker to cultivate, and that Socialists have so far been
too busy to consider....
The same truth that controls must be divided and a competition at
least for honour and repute kept alive under Socialism, needs also to
be applied to schools and colleges, and all the vast machinery of
research. It is imperative that there should be overlapping and
competing organizations. An educated and prosperous community such as
we postulate for the Socialist State will necessarily be more alert
for interest and intellectual quality than our present "driven"
multitude; its ampler leisure, its wider horizons, will keep it
critical and exacting of what claims its attention. The rivalries of
institutions and municipalities will be part of the drama of life.
Under Socialism, with the extension of the educational process it
contemplates, universities and colleges must become the most prominent
of facts; nearly every one will have that feeling for some such place
which now one finds in a Trinity man for Trinity; the sort of feeling
that sent the last thoughts of Cecil Rhodes back to Oriel. Everywhere,
balanced against the Town Hall or the Parliament House, will be the
great university buildings and art museums, the lecture halls open to
all comers, the great noiseless libraries, the book exhibitions and
book and pamphlet stores, keenly criticized, keenly used, will teem
with unhurrying, incessant, creative activities.
And all this immense publicly sustained organization will be doing
greatly and finely what now our scattered line of Socialist
propagandists is doing under every disadvantage, that is to say it
will be developing and sustaining the social self-consciousness, the
collective sense of the State.
§ 5.
I am naturally preoccupied with the Mind of that Civilized State we
seek to make; because my work lies in this department. But while the
writer, the publisher and printer, the bookseller and librarian, and
teacher and preacher must chiefly direct himself to developing this
great organized mind and intention in the world, other sorts of men
will be concerned with parallel aspects of the Socialist synthesis.
The medical worker or the medical investigator will be building up the
body of a new generation, the Body of the Civilized State, and he will
be doing all he can not simply as an individual, but as a citizen, to
_organize_ his services of cure and prevention, of hygiene and
selection. And the specialized man of science--he will be concerned
with his own special synthesis, the Knowledge of the Civilized State,
whether he measure crystals or stain microtome sections or count
stars. A great and growing multitude of men will be working out the
Apparatus of the Civilized State; the students of transit and housing,
the engineers in their incessantly increasing variety, the miners and
geologists estimating the world's resources in metals and minerals,
the mechanical inventors perpetually economizing force. The scientific
agriculturist, again, will be studying the food supply of the world as
a whole, and how it may be increased and distributed and economized.
And to the student of law comes the task of rephrasing his intricate
and often quite beautiful science in relation to the new social
assumptions we have laid down. All these and a hundred other aspects
are integral to the wide project of Constructive Socialism as it
shapes itself now.
And to the man or woman who looks at these issues not as one
specialized in relation to some constructive calling but as a common
citizen, a mere human being eager to make and do from the standpoint
of personal liberty and personal affections, the appeal of this great
constructive project is equally strong. You want security and liberty!
Here it is, safe from the greed of trust and landlord; here is
investment with absolute assurance and trading with absolute justice;
this is the only safe way to build your own house in perfect security,
to make your own garden safe for yourself and for your children's
children, the only way in which you can link a hundred million kindred
wills in loyal co-operation with your own, and that is to do it not
for yourself alone and for your children alone, but for all the
world--all the world doing it also for you--to join yourself to this
great making of a permanent well-being for mankind.
And here, finally, let me set out a sort of programme of Constructive
Socialism, as it seems to be shaping itself in the minds of
contemporary Socialists out of the Fabianism of the eighties and
nineties, in order that the reader may be able to measure this fuller
and completer proposition against the earlier Administrative Socialism
whose propositions are set out in Chapter XI., § 1. All those are
incorporated in this that follows--there is no contradiction whatever
between them, but there is amplification; new elements are taken into
consideration, once disregarded difficulties have been faced and
partially resolved.
First, then, the Constructive Socialist has to do whatever lies in his
power towards _the enrichment of the Socialist idea_. He has to give
whatever gifts he has as artist, as writer, as maker of any sort to
increasing and refining the conception of civilized life. He has to
embody and make real the State and the City. And the Socialist idea,
constantly restated, refreshed and elaborated, has to be made a part
of the common circle of ideas; has to be grasped and felt and
assimilated by the whole mass of mankind, has to be made the basis of
each individual's private morality. That mental work is the primary,
most essential function of Constructive Socialism.
And next, Constructive Socialism has in every country to direct its
energies and attention to _political reform_, to the scientific
reconstruction of our representative and administrative machinery so
as to give power and real expression to the developing collective mind
of the community, and to remove the obstructions to Socialization that
are inevitable where institutions stand for "interests" or have fallen
under the sway of aggressive private property or of narrowly organized
classes. Governing and representative bodies, advisory and
investigatory organizations of a liberal and responsive type have to
be built up, bodies that shall be really capable of the immense
administrative duties the secular abolition of the great bulk of
private ownership will devolve upon them.
Thirdly, the constructive Socialist sets himself to forward _the
resumption of the land by the community_, by increased control, by
taxation, by death duties, by purchase and by partially compensated
confiscation as circumstances may render advisable, and so to make the
municipality the sole landlord in the reorganized world.
And meanwhile the constructive Socialist goes on also with the work of
_socializing the main public services_, by transferring them steadily
from private enterprise to municipal and State control, by working
steadily for such transfers and by opposing every party and every
organization that does not set its face resolutely against the private
exploitation of new needs and services.
There are four distinct systems of public service which could very
conveniently be organized under collective ownership and control now,
and each can be attacked independently of the others. There is first
the need of public educational machinery, and by education I mean not
simply elementary education, but the equally vital need for great
colleges not only to teach and study technical arts and useful
sciences, but also to enlarge learning and sustain philosophical and
literary work. A civilized community is impossible without great
public libraries, public museums, public art schools, without public
honour and support for contemporary thought and literature, and all
these things the constructive Socialist may forward at a hundred
points.
Then next there is the need and opportunity of organizing the whole
community in relation to health, the collective development of
hospitals, medical aid, public sanitation, child welfare, into one
great loyal and efficient public service. This, too, may be pushed
forward either as part of the general Socialist movement or
independently as a thing in itself by those who may find the whole
Socialist proposition unacceptable or inconvenient.
A third system of interests upon which practical work may be done at
the present time lies in the complex interdependent developments of
transit and housing, questions that lock up inextricably with the
problem of re-planning our local government areas. Here, too, the
whole world is beginning to realize more and more clearly that private
enterprise is wasteful and socially disastrous, that collective
control, collective management, and so on to collective enterprise and
ownership of building-land, houses, railways, tramways and omnibuses,
give the only way of escape from an endless drifting entanglement and
congestion of our mobile modern population.
The fourth department of economic activity in which collectivism is
developing, and in which the constructive Socialist will find enormous
scope for work, is in connection with the more generalized forms of
public trading, and especially with the production, handling and
supply of food and minerals. When the lagging enterprise of
agriculture needs to be supplemented by endowed educational machinery,
agricultural colleges and the like; when the feeble intellectual
initiative of the private adventure miner and manufacturer
necessitates a London "Charlottenburg," it must be manifest that State
initiative has altogether out-distanced the possibilities of private
effort, and that the next step to the public authority instructing men
how to farm, prepare food, run dairies, manage mines and distribute
minerals, is to cut out the pedagogic middleman and undertake the work
itself. The State education of the expert for private consumption
(such as we see at the Royal School of Mines) is surely too ridiculous
a sacrifice of the community to private property to continue at that.
The further inevitable line of advance is the transfer from private to
public hands by purchase, by competing organizations or what not, of
all those great services, just as rapidly as the increasing capacity
and experience of the public authority permits.
This briefly is the work and method of Constructive Socialism to-day.
Under one or other head it can utilize almost every sort of capacity
and every type of opportunity. It refuses no one who will serve it. It
is no narrow doctrinaire cult. It does not seek the best of an
argument, but the best of a world. Its worst enemies are those foolish
and litigious advocates who antagonize and estrange every development
of human Good Will that does not pay tribute to their vanity in open
acquiescence. Its most loyal servants, its most effectual helpers on
the side of art, invention and public organization and political
reconstruction, may be men who will never adopt the Socialist name.