SOME ARGUMENTS _AD HOMINEM_
§ 1.
Before I conclude this compact exposition of modern Socialism, it is
reasonable that the reader should ask for some little help in figuring
to himself this new world at which we Socialists aim.
"I see the justice of much of the Socialist position," he will say,
"and the soundness of many of your generalizations. But it still seems
to remain--generalizations; and I feel the need of getting it into my
mind as something concrete and real. What will the world be _like_
when its state is really a Socialist one? That's my difficulty."
The full answer to that would be another book. I myself have tried to
render my own personal dream in a book called _A Modern Utopia_,[26]
but that has not been so widely read as I could have wished, it does
not appeal strongly enough, perhaps, to the practical every-day side
of life, and here I may do my best to give very briefly some
intimation of a few of the differences that would strike a
contemporary if he or she could be transferred to the new order we are
trying to evolve.
[26] Chapman & Hall.
It would be a world and a life in no fundamental respect different
from the world of to-day, made up of the same creatures as ourselves,
as limited in capacity if not in outlook, as hasty, as quick to take
offence, as egotistical essentially, as hungry for attention, as
easily discouraged--they would indeed be better educated and better
trained, less goaded and less exasperated, with ampler opportunities
for their finer impulses and smaller scope for rage and secrecy, but
they would still be human. At bottom it would still be a struggle for
individual ends, albeit ennobled individual ends; for self-gratification
and self-realization against external difficulty and internal
weakness. Self-gratification would be sought more keenly in
self-development and self-realization in service, but that is a change
of tone and not of nature. We shall still be individuals. You might,
indeed, were you suddenly flung into it, fail to note altogether for a
long time the widest of the differences between the Socialist State
and our present one--the absence of that worrying urgency to earn,
that sense of constant economic insecurity, which afflicts all but the
very careless or the very prosperous to-day. Painful things being
absent are forgotten. On the same principle certain common objects of
our daily life you might not miss at all. There would be no slums, no
hundreds of miles of insanitary, ignoble homes, no ugly
health-destroying cheap factories. If you were not in the habit of
walking among slums and factories you would scarcely notice that. Din
and stress would be enormously gone. But you would remark simply a
change in the atmosphere about you and in your own contentment that
would be as difficult to analyze as the calm of a Sunday morning in
sunshine in a pleasant country.
Let me put my conception of the Socialist world to a number of typical
readers, as it were, so that they may see clearly just what difference
in circumstances there would be for them if we Socialists could have
our way now. Let me suppose them as far as possible exactly what they
are now save for these differences.
Then first let us take a sample case and suppose yourself to be an
elementary teacher. So far as your work went you would be very much as
you are to-day; you would have a finer and more beautiful school-room
perhaps, better supplied with apparatus and diagrams; you would have
cleaner and healthier, that is to say brighter and more responsive
children, and you would have smaller and more manageable classes.
Schools will be very important things in the Socialist State, and you
will find outside your class-room a much ampler building with open
corridors, a library, a bath, refectory for the children's midday
meal, and gymnasium, and beyond the playground a garden. You will be
an enlisted member of a public service, free under reasonable
conditions to resign, liable under extreme circumstances to dismissal
for misconduct, but entitled until you do so to a minimum salary, a
maintenance allowance, that is, and to employment. You will have had a
general education from the State up to the age of sixteen or
seventeen, and then three or four years of sound technical training,
so that you will know your work from top to bottom. You will have
applied for your present position in the service, whatever it is, and
have been accepted, much as you apply and are accepted for positions
now, by the school managers, and you will have done so because it
attracted you and they will have accepted you because your
qualifications seemed adequate to them. You will draw a salary
attached to the position, over and above that minimum maintenance
salary to which I have already alluded. You will be working just as
keenly as you are now, and better because of the better training you
have had, and because of shorter hours and more invigorating
conditions, and you will be working for much the same ends, that is to
say for promotion to a larger salary and wider opportunities and for
the interest and sake of the work. In your leisure you may be
studying, writing, or doing some work of supererogation for the school
or the State--because _under Socialist conditions it cannot be too
clearly understood that all the reasons the contemporary Trade
Unionist finds against extra work and unpaid work will have
disappeared_! You will not in a Socialist State make life harder for
others by working keenly and doing much if you are so disposed. You
will be free to give yourself generously to your work. You will have
no anxiety about sickness or old age, the State, the universal
Friendly Society, will hold you secure against that; but if you like
to provide extra luxury and dignity for your declining years, if you
think you will be amused to collect prints or books, or travel then,
or run a rose garden or grow chrysanthemums, the State will be quite
ready for you to pay it an insurance premium in order that you may
receive in due course an extra annuity to serve that end you
contemplate.
You will probably live as a tenant in a house which may either stand
alone or be part of a terrace or collegiate building, but instead of
having a private landlord, exacting of rent and reluctant of repairs,
your house landlord will very probably be, and your ground landlord
will certainly be, the municipality, the great Birmingham or London or
Hampshire or Glasgow or such-like municipality; and your house will be
built solidly and prettily instead of being jerry-built and
mean-looking, and it will have bathroom, electric light, electrically
equipped kitchen and so forth, as every modern civilized house might
have and should have now. If your taste runs to a little close garden
of your own, you will probably find plenty of houses with one; if that
is not so, and you want it badly, you will get other people of like
tastes to petition the municipality to provide some, and if that will
not do, you will put yourself up as a candidate for the parish or
municipal council to bring this about. You will pay very much the sort
of rent you pay now, but you will not pay it to a private landlord to
spend as he likes at Monte Carlo or upon foreign missions or in
financing "Moderate" bill-posting or what not, but to the
municipality, and you will pay no rates at all. The rent will do under
Socialism what the rates do now. You cannot grasp too clearly that
_Socialism will abolish rates_ absolutely. Rates for public purposes
are necessary to-day because the landowners of the world evade the
public obligations that should, in common sense, go with the rent.
Light, heating, water and so on will either be covered by the rent or
charged for separately, and they will be supplied just as near
cost-price as possible. I don't think you will buy coals, because I
think that in a few years' time it will be possible to heat every
house adequately by electricity; but if I am wrong in that, then you
will buy your coals just as you do now, except that you will have an
honest coal merchant, the Public Coal Service, a merchant not greedy
for profit nor short in the weight, calculating and foreseeing your
needs, not that it may profit by them but in order to serve them,
storing coal against a demand and so never raising the price in
winter.
I am assuming you are going to be a house occupier, but if you are a
single man, you will probably live in pleasant apartments in an hotel
or college and dine in a club, and perhaps keep no more than a couple
of rooms, one for sleep and one for study and privacy of your own. But
if you are a married man, then I must enlarge a little further upon
your domestic details, because you will probably want a "home of your
own."...
§ 2.
Now, just how a married couple lives in the Socialist State will
depend very much, as indeed it does now, on the individual relations
and individual taste and proclivities of the two people most
concerned. Many couples are childless now, and indisposed for home and
children, and such people will also be found in the Socialist State,
and in their case the wife will probably have an occupation and be a
teacher, a medical practitioner, a government clerk or official, an
artist, a milliner, and earn her own living. In which case they will
share apartments, perhaps, and dine in a club and go about together
very much as a childless couple of journalists or artists or
theatrical people do in London to-day. But of course if either of them
chooses to idle more or less and live on the earnings of the other,
that will be a matter quite between themselves. No one will ask who
pays their rent and their bills; that will be for their own private
arrangement.
But if they are not childless people, but have children, things will
be on a rather different footing. Then they will probably have a home
all to themselves, and that will be the wife's chief affair; only
incidentally will she attend to any other occupation. You will
remember that the State is to be a sort of universal Friendly Society
supplying good medical advice and so forth, and so soon as a woman is
likely to become a mother, her medical adviser, man or woman as the
case may be, will report this to the proper officials and her special
income as a prospective mother in the State will begin. Then, when her
child is born, there will begin an allowance for its support, and
these payments will continue monthly or quarterly, and will be larger
or smaller according first to the well-being of the child, and
secondly to the need the State may have for children--so long as the
children are in their mother's care. All this money for maternity will
be the wife's independent income, and normally she will be the house
ruler--just as she is now in most well-contrived households. Her
personality will make the home atmosphere; that is the woman's gift
and privilege, and she will be able to do it with a free hand. I
suppose that for the husband's cost in the household the present
custom of cultivated people of independent means will continue, and he
will pay over to his wife his share of the household expenses....
After the revenue in the domestic budget under Socialism one must
consider the expenditure. I have already given an idea how the rent
and rates, lighting and water are to be dealt with under Socialist
conditions. For the rest, the housewife will be dealing on very
similar lines to those she goes upon at present. She will buy what she
wants and pay cash for it. The milkman will come in the morning and
leave his "book" at the end of the week, but instead of coming from
Mr. Watertap Jones' or the Twenty-per-cent. Dairy Company, he will
come from the Municipal Dairy; he will have no interest in giving
short measure, and all the science in the State will be behind him in
keeping the milk clean and pure. If he is unpunctual or trying in any
way, the lady will complain just as she does now, but to his official
superiors instead of his employer; and if that does not do, she and
her aggrieved neighbours (all voters, you will understand) will put
the thing to their representative in the parish or municipal council.
Then she will buy her meat and grocery and so on, not in one of a
number of inefficient little shops with badly assorted goods under
unknown brands as she does now if she lives in a minor neighbourhood,
but in a branch of a big, well-organized business like Lipton's or
Whiteley's or Harrod's. She may have to go to it on a municipal
electric car, for which she will probably pay a fare just as she does
now, unless, perhaps, her house rent includes a season ticket. The
store will not belong to Mr. Lipton or Mr. Whiteley or Mr. Harrod, but
to the public--that will be the chief difference--and if she does not
like her service she will be able to criticize and remedy it, just as
one can now criticize and remedy any inefficiency in one's local
post-office. If she does not like the brands of goods supplied she
will be able to insist upon others. There will be brands, too,
different from the household names of to-day in the goods she will
buy. The county arms of Devon will be on the butter paper, Hereford
and Kent will guarantee her cider, Hampshire and Wiltshire answer for
her bacon--just as now already Australia brands her wines and New
Zealand protects her from deception (and insures clean, decent
slaughtering) in the matter of Canterbury lamb. I rather like to think
of the red dagger of London on the wholesome bottled ales of her great
(municipalized) breweries, and Maidstone or Rochester, let us say,
boasting a special reputation for jam or pickles. Good honest food all
of it will be, made by honest unsweated women and men, with the pride
of broad vales and uplands, counties, principalities and great cities
behind it. Each county and municipality will be competing freely
against its fellows, not in price but quality, the cheeses of Cheshire
against the cheeses of France and Switzerland, the beer of Munich
against the Kentish brew; bread from the bakeries of London and Paris,
biscuits from Reading town, chocolates from Switzerland and
Bourneville, side by side with butter from the meadows of Denmark and
Russia.
Then, when the provisions have been bought, she will go perhaps to the
other departments of the great store and buy or order the fine linen
and cotton of the Manchester men, the delicate woollens of the
Bradford city looms, the silks of London or Mercia, Northampton or
American boots, and so forth, just as she does now in any of the great
stores. But, as I say, all these goods will be honest goods, made to
wear as well as look well, and the shopman will have no "premiums" to
tempt him to force rubbish upon her instead of worthy makes by
specious "introduction."
But suppose she wants a hat or a dress made. Then, probably, for all
that the world is under Socialism she will have to go to private
enterprise; a matter of taste and individuality such as dress cannot
be managed in a wholesale way. She will probably find in the same
building as the big department store, a number of little
establishments, of Madame This, of Mrs. That, some perhaps with
windows displaying a costume or so or a hat or so, and here she will
choose her particular artiste and contrive the thing with her. I am
inclined to think the dressmaker or milliner will charge a fee
according to her skill and reputation for designing and cutting and so
on, and that the customer will pay the store separately for material
and the municipal workshop for the making under the artiste's
direction. I don't think, that is, that the milliner or dressmaker
will make a trading profit, but only an artiste's fee.
And if the lady wants to buy books, music, artistic bric-a-brac, or
what not, she will find the big store displaying and selling all these
things on commission for the municipal or private producers all over
the world....
So much for the financial and economic position of an ordinary woman
in a Socialist State. But management and economies are but the basal
substance of a woman's life. She will be free not merely financially;
the systematic development of the social organisation and of the
mechanism of life will be constantly releasing her more and more from
the irksome duties and drudgeries that have consumed so much of the
energies of her sex in the past. She will be a citizen, and free as a
man to read for herself, think for herself and seek expression. Under
the law, in politics and all the affairs of life she will be the equal
of a man. No one will control her movements or limit her actions or
stand over her to make decisions for her. All these things are
implicit in the fundamental generalization of Socialism, which denies
property in human beings.
§ 3.
Perhaps now the reader will be able to figure a little better the
common texture of the life of a teacher or a housewife under
Socialism. And incidentally I have glanced at the position a clever
milliner or dressmaker would probably have under the altered
conditions. The great mass of the _employés_ in the distributing trade
would obviously be living a sort of clarified, dignified version of
their present existence, freed from their worst anxieties, the terror
of the "swap," the hopeless approach of old age, and from the sweated
food and accommodation of the living-in system. Under Socialism the
"living-in" system would be incredible. Their conditions of life would
approximate to those of the teacher. Like him they would be enrolled a
part of a great public service, and like him entitled to a minimum
wage, and over and above that they would draw salaries commensurate
with the positions their energy and ability had won. The prosperous
merchant of to-day would find himself somewhere high in the hierarchy
of the distributing service. If, for example, you are a tea merchant
or a provision broker, then probably if you like that calling, you
would be handling the same kind of goods, not for profit but
efficiency, "shipping into the Midlands" from Liverpool, let us say,
much as you do now. You would be keener on quality and less keen on
deals; that is all. You would not be trying to "skin" a business
rival, but very probably you would be just as keen to beat the London
distributers and distinguish yourself in that way. And you would get a
pretty good salary; modern Socialism does not propose to maintain any
dead-level to the detriment of able men. Modern Socialism has cleared
itself of that jealous hatred of prosperity that was once a part of
class-war Socialism. You would be, you see, far more than you are now,
one of the pillars of your town's prosperity--and the Town Hall would
be a place worth sitting in....
So far as the rank and file of the distributing service is concerned
the chief differences would be a better education, security for a
minimum living, an assured old age, shorter hours, more private
freedom and more opportunity. Since the whole business would be public
and the customer would be one's indirect master through the polling
booth, promotion would be far more by merit than it is now in private
businesses, where irrelevant personal considerations are often
overpowering, and it would be open to any one to apply for a transfer
to some fresh position if he or she found insufficient scope in the
old one. The staff of the stores will certainly "live out," and their
homes and way of living will be closely parallel to that of the two
people I have sketched in §§ 1 and 2.
In the various municipal and State Transit Services, the condition of
affairs would be even closer to a broadened and liberalized version of
things as they are. The conductors and drivers will no doubt wear
uniforms for convenience of recognition, but a uniform will carry with
it no association with the idea of a livery as it does at the present
time. Mostly this service will be run by young men, and each one, like
the private of the democratic French Army, will feel that he has a
marshal's _batôn_ in his knapsack. He will have had a good education;
he will have short hours of duty and leisure for self-improvement or
other pursuits, and if he remains a conductor or driver all his life
he will have only his own unpretending qualities to thank for that. He
will probably remain a conductor if he likes to remain a conductor,
and go elsewhere if he does not. He is not obliged to take that
_batôn_ out and bother with it if he has quiet tastes.
The great organized industries, mining, cotton, iron, building and the
like, would differ chiefly in the permanence of employment and the
systematic evasion of the social hardship caused now-a-days by new
inventions and economies in method. There will exist throughout the
world an organized economic survey, which will continually prepare and
revise estimates of the need of iron, coal, cloth and so forth in the
coming months; the blind speculative production of our own times is
due merely to the dark ignorance in which we work in these matters,
and with such a survey, employment will lose much of the cruel
intermittence it now displays. The men in these great productive
services, quite equally with teachers and railwaymen, will be
permanently employed. They will be no more taken on and turned off by
the day or week than we should take on or turn off an extra policeman,
or depend for our defence upon soldiers casually engaged upon the
battlefield at sixpence an hour. And if by adopting some ingenious
device we dispense suddenly with the labour of hundreds of men, the
Socialist State will send them, not into the casual wards and colonies
as our State does, to become a social burthen there, but into the
technical schools to train for some fresh use of their energies. Taken
all round, of course, these men, even the least enterprising or able,
will be better off than they are now, with a fuller share of the
product of their industry. Many will no doubt remain as they are,
rather through want of ambition than want of push, because under
Socialism life will be tolerable for a poor man. A man who chooses to
do commonplace work and spend his leisure upon chess or billiards, or
in gossip or eccentric studies, or amusing but ineffectual art, will
remain a poor man indeed, but not be made a wretched one. Sheer toil
of a mechanical sort there is little need of in the world now, it
could be speedily dispensed with at a thousand points were human
patience not cheaper than good machinery, but there will still remain
ten thousand undistinguished sorts of work for unambitious men....
If you are a farmer or any sort of horticulturist, a fruit or flower
grower, let us say, or a seedsman, you will probably find yourself
still farming under Socialism--that is to say, renting land and
getting what you can out of it. Your rent will be fixed just as it is
to-day by what people will give. But your landlord will be the
Municipality or the County, and the rent you pay will largely come
back to you in repairs, in the guiding reports and advice of the
Agricultural Department, in improved roads, in subventions to a good
electric car service to take your produce to market; in aids and
education for your children. You will probably have a greater fixity
of tenure and a clearer ownership in improvements than you have
to-day. I am inclined to think that your dairying and milking and so
forth will be done for you wholesale in big public dairies and mills
because of the economy of that; you will send up the crude produce and
sell it, perhaps, to the county association to brand and distribute.
It is probable you will sell your crops standing, and the public
authority will organize the harvesting and bring out an army of
workers from the towns to gather your fruit, hops and corn. You will
need, therefore, only a small permanent staff of labourers, and these
are much more likely to be partners with you in the enterprise than
wage workers needing to be watched and driven.
In your leisure you will shoot, perhaps, or hunt, if your tastes
incline that way--it is quite likely that scattered among the farms of
the future countryside will be the cottages and homes of all sorts of
people with open-air tastes who will share their sports with you. One
need not dread the disappearance of sport with the disappearance of
the great house.... In the dead winter-time you will probably like to
run into the nearest big town with your wife and family, stay in an
hotel for a few weeks to talk to people in your clubs, see what plays
there are in the municipal theatres and so forth. And you will no
doubt travel also in your holidays. All the world will know something
of the pleasures and freedom of travel, of wandering and the enjoyment
of unfamiliar atmospheres, of mountains and deserts and remote cities
and deep forests, and the customs of alien peoples.
§ 4.
A medical man or woman, or a dentist or any such skilled professional,
like the secondary school-master, will cease to be a private
adventurer under Socialism, concerned chiefly with the taking of a
showy house and the use of a showy conveyance; he or she will become
part of one of the greatest of all the public services in the coming
time, the service of public health. Either he--I use this pronoun and
imply its feminine--will be on the staff of one of the main hospitals
(which will not be charities, but amply endowed public institutions),
or he will be a part of a district staff, working in conjunction with
a nursing organization, a cottage hospital, an isolation hospital and
so forth, or he will be an advising specialist, or mainly engaged in
research or teaching and training a new generation in the profession.
He must not judge his life and position quite by the lives and
position of publicly endowed investigators and medical officers of
health to-day. At present, because of the jealousy of the private
owner who has, as he says, to "find the funds," almost all public
employment is badly paid relatively to privately earned incomes. The
same thing is true of all scientific investigators and of most public
officials. The state of things to which Socialism points is a world
that will necessarily be harmonious with these constructive
conceptions and free from these jealousies. Whitehall and South
Kensington have much to fear from the wanton columns of a vulgarized
capitalistic press and from the greedy intrigues of syndicated
capital, but nothing from a sane constructive Socialism. To the public
official, therefore, of the present time, the Socialist has merely to
say that he will probably be better paid, relatively, than he is now,
and in the matter of his house rents and domestic marketing, _vide
supra_....
But now, suppose you are an artist--and I use the word to cover all
sorts of art, literary, dramatic and musical, as well as painting,
sculpture, design and architecture--you want before all things freedom
for personal expression, and you probably have an idea that this is
the last thing you will get in the Socialist State. But, indeed, you
will get far more than you do now. You will begin as a student, no
doubt, in your local Municipal Art Schools, and there you will win
prizes and scholarships and get some glorious years of youth and work
in Italy or Paris, or Germany or London, or Boston or New York, or
wherever the great teachers and workers of your art gather thickest;
and then you will compete, perhaps, for some public work, and have
something printed or published or reproduced and sold for you by your
school or city; or get a loan from your home municipality for
material--if your material costs money--and set to work making that
into some saleable beautiful thing. If you are at all distinguished in
quality, you will have a competition among public authorities from the
beginning, to act as sponsors and dealers for your work; benevolent
dealers they will be, and content with a commission. And if you make
things that make many people interested and happy, you may by that
fortunate gift of yours, grow to be as rich and magnificent a person
as any one in the Socialist State. But if you do not please people at
all, either the connoisseurs of the municipal art collection or
private associations of art patrons or the popular buyer, well, then
your lot will be no harder than the lot of any unsuccessful artist
now; you will have to do something else for a time and win leisure to
try again.
Theatrical productions will be run on a sort of improvement upon
contemporary methods, but there will be no cornering of talent
possible, no wild advertisement of favoured stars upon strictly
commercial lines, no Theatrical Trust. The theatres will be municipal
buildings, every theatre-going voter will be keen to see them
comfortable and fine; they will, perhaps, be run in some cases by a
public repertoire company and in another by a lessee, and this latter
may be financed by his own private savings or by subscribers or
partners, or by a loan from the public bank as the case may be. This
latter method of exploitation by a lessee will probably also work best
in the public Music Halls, but it is quite equally possible that these
may be controlled by managers under partly elected and partly
appointed public committees. In some cases the theatrical lessee might
be a kind of stage society organized for the production of particular
types of play. The spectators will pay for admission, of course, as
they do now, but to the municipal box offices; and I suppose the
lessee or the author and artists will divide up the surplus after the
rent of the theatre has been deducted for the municipal treasury. In
every town of any importance there will be many theatres, music halls
and the like, perhaps under competing committees. In all these
matters, as every intelligent person understands, one has to maintain
variety of method, a choice of avenues, freedom from autocracies; and
since the Socialist community will contain a great number of
intelligent persons with leisure and opportunity for artistic
appreciation, there is little chance of this important principle being
forgotten, much less than there is in this world where a group of
dealers can often make an absolute corner in this artistic market or
that. You will not, under Socialism, see Sarah Bernhardt playing in a
tent as she had to do in America, because all the theatres have been
closed against her through some mean dispute with a Trust about the
sharing of profits....
And if it is not too sudden a transition, it seems most convenient in
a Socialist State to leave religious worship entirely to the care of
private people; to let them subscribe among themselves, subject, of
course, to a reasonable statute of mortmain, to lease land, and build
and endow and maintain churches and chapels, altars and holy places
and meeting-houses, priests and devout ceremonies. This will be the
more easily done since the heavy social burthens that oppress
religious bodies at the present time will be altogether lifted from
them; they will have no poor to support, no schools, no hospitals, no
nursing sisters, the advance of civilization will have taken over
these duties of education and humanity that Christianity first taught
us to realize. So, too, there seems no objection and no obstacle in
Socialism to religious houses, to nunneries, monasteries and the like,
so far as these institutions are compatible with personal freedom and
the public health, but of course factory laws and building laws will
run through all these places, and the common laws and limitations of
contract override their vows, if their devotees repent. So that you
see Socialism will touch nothing living of religion, and if you are a
religious minister, you will be very much as you are at the present
time, but with lightened parochial duties. If you are an earnest woman
and want to nurse the sick and comfort the afflicted, you will need
only, in addition to your religious profession, to qualify as a nurse
or medical practitioner. There will still be ample need of you.
Socialism will not make an end of human trouble, either of the body or
of the soul, albeit it will put these things into such comfort and
safety as it may.
§ 5.
And now let me address a section to those particular social types
whose method of living seems most threatened by the development of an
organized civilization, who find it impossible to imagine lives at all
like their own in the Socialist State....
But first it may be well to remind them again of something I have
already done my best to make clear, that the modern Socialist
contemplates no swift change of conditions from those under which we
live, to Socialism. There will be no wonderful Monday morning when the
old order will give place to the new. Year by year the great change
has to be brought about, now by this socialization of a service, now
by an alteration in the incidence of taxation, now by a new device of
public trading, now by an extension of education. This problem at the
utmost is a problem of adaptation, and for most of those who would
have no standing under the revised conceptions of social intercourse,
it is no more than to ask whether it is wise they should prepare their
sons or daughters to follow in their footsteps or consent to regard
their callings as a terminating function.
So far as many professions and callings go, this matter may be
dismissed in a few words. Under Socialism, while the particular trade
or profession might not exist, there would probably be ample scope in
the public machine for the socially more profitable employment of the
same energies. A family solicitor, such as we know now, would have a
poor time in a Socialist State, but the same qualities of watchful
discretion would be needed at a hundred new angles and friction
surfaces of the State organization. In the same way the private
shopkeeper, as I have already explained, would be replaced by the
department managers and buyers of the public stores, the rent
collector, the estate bailiff--one might make long lists of social
types who would undergo a parallel transformation.
But suppose now you are a servant, I mean a well-trained, expert,
prosperous servant; would the world have no equivalent of you under
the new order? I think probably it would. With a difference, there
will be room for a vast body of servants in the Socialist State. But I
think there will be very few servants to private people, and that the
"menial" conception of a servant will have vanished in an entirely
educated community. The domestic work of the ordinary home, one may
prophesy confidently, will be very much reduced in the near future
whether we move toward Socialism or no; all the dirt of coal, all the
disagreeableness attendant upon lamps and candles, most of the heavy
work of cooking will be obviated by electric lighting and heating, and
much of the bedroom service dispensed with through the construction of
properly equipped bath-dressing-rooms. In addition, it is highly
probable that there will be a considerable extension of the club idea;
ordinary people will dine more freely in public places, and
conveniences for their doing so will increase. The single-handed
servant will have disappeared, and if you are one of that class you
must console yourself by thinking that under Socialism you would have
been educated up to seventeen or eighteen and then equipped for some
more interesting occupation. But there will remain much need of
occasional help of a more skilled sort, in cleaning out the house
thoroughly every now and then, probably with the help of mechanisms,
in recovering and repairing furniture, and in all this sort of
"helping" which will be done as between one social equal and another,
many people who are now, through lack of opportunity and education,
servants, will no doubt be employed. But where the better type of
service will be found will probably be in the clubs and associated
homes, where pleasant-mannered, highly-paid, skilful people will see
to the ease and comfort of a considerable _clientèle_ without either
offence or servility. There still remains, no doubt, a number of
valets, footmen, maids and so on, who under Socialism would not be
servants at all, but something far better, more interesting and more
productive socially.
But this writing of servants brings me now to another possibility, and
that is that perhaps you are, dear reader, one of that small number of
fortunate people, rich and well placed in the world, who even under
existing conditions seem to possess all that life can offer a human
being. You live beautifully in a great London house, waited upon by
companies of servants, you have country seats with parks about them
and fine gardens, you can travel luxuriously to any part of the
civilized world and live sumptuously there. All things are done for
you, all ways are made smooth for you. A skilled maid or valet saves
you even the petty care of your person; skilled physicians, wonderful
specialists intervene at any threat of illness or discomfort; you keep
ten years younger in appearance than your poorer contemporaries and
twice as splendid. And above all you have an immense sense of downward
perspectives, of being special and apart and above the common herd of
mankind.
Now frankly Socialism will be incompatible with this patrician style.
You must contemplate the end of all that. You may still be healthy,
refined, free, beautifully clothed and housed; but you will not have
either the space or the service or the sense of superiority you enjoy
now, under Socialism. You would have to take your place among the
multitude again. Only a moiety of your property will remain to your
sort of person if any revolution is achieved. The rents upon which you
live, the investments that yield the income that makes the employment
of that army of butlers and footmen, estate workers and underlings
possible, that buys your dresses, your jewels, your motorcars, your
splendid furnishings and equipments, will for the most part be public
property, yielding revenue to some national or municipal treasury. You
will have to give up much of that. There is no way out of it, your way
to Socialism is through "the needle's eye." From your rare class and
from your class alone does Socialism require a real material
sacrifice. You must indeed give up much coarse pride. There is no help
for it, you must face that if you face Socialism at all. You must come
down to a simpler and, in many material aspects, less distinguished
way of living.
This is so clearly evident that to any one who believes self-seeking
is the ruling motive, the only possible motive in mankind, it seems
incredible that your class ever will do anything than oppose to the
last the advancement of Socialism. You will fight for what you have,
and the Have-nots will fight to take it away. Therefore it is that the
Socialists of the Social Democratic Federation preach a class war; to
my mind a lurid, violent and distasteful prospect. We shall have to
get out of the miseries and disorder of to-day, they think, if not by
way of chateau-burning and tumbrils, at least by a mitigated
equivalent of that. But I am not of that opinion. I have a lurking
belief that you are not altogether eaten up by the claims of your own
magnificence. While there are no doubt a number of people in your
class who would fight like rats in a corner against, let us say, the
feeding of poor people's starving children or the recovery of the land
by the State to which it once belonged, I believe there is enough of
nobility in your class as a whole to considerably damp their
resistance. Because you have silver mirrors and silver hairbrushes, it
does not follow that you have not a conscience. I am no believer in
the theory that to be a _sans-culotte_ is to be morally impeccable, or
that a man loses his soul because he possesses thirty pairs of
trousers beautifully folded by a valet. I cherish the belief that your
very refinement will turn--I have seen it in one or two fine minds
visibly turning--against the social conditions that made it possible.
All this space, all this splendour has its traceable connection with
the insufficiencies and miseries from which you are so remote. Once
that realization comes to you the world changes. In certain lights,
correlated with that, your magnificence can look, you will
discover--forgive the word!--a little _vulgar_....
Once you have seen that you will continue to see it. The _nouveau
riche_ of the new Plutocratic type comes thrusting among you,
demonstrating that sometimes quite obtrusively. You begin by feeling
sorry for his servants and then apologetic to your own. You cannot "go
it" as the rich Americans and the rich South Africans, or prosperous
book-makers or rich music-hall proprietors, "go it," their silver and
ivory and diamonds throw light on your own. And among other things you
discover you are not nearly so dependent on the numerous men in
livery, the spaces and enrichments, for your pride and comfort, as
these upstart people.
I trust also to the appeal of the intervening spaces. You cannot so
entirely close your world in from the greater world without that, in
transit at least, the other aspects do not intrude. Every time you
leave Charing Cross for the Continent, for example, there are all
those horrible slums on either side of the line. These things _are_,
you know, a part of your system, part of you; they are the reverse of
that splendid fabric and no separate thing, the wide rich tapestry of
your lives comes through on the other side, stitch for stitch in
stunted bodies, in children's deaths, in privation and anger. Your
grandmothers did not realize that. You do. You _know_. In that
recognition and a certain nobility I find in you, I put my hope, much
more than in any dreadful memories of 1789 and those vindictive pikes.
Your class is a strangely mixed assembly of new and old, of base and
fine. But through it all, in Great Britain and Western Europe
generally, soaks a tradition truly aristocratic, a tradition that
transcends property; you are aware, and at times uneasily aware, of
duty and a sort of honour. You cannot bilk cabmen nor cheat at cards;
there is something in your making forbids that as strongly as an
instinct. But what if it is made clear to you (and it is being made
clear to you) that the wealth you have is, all unwittingly on your
part, the outcome of a colossal--if unpremeditated--social bilking?
Moreover, though Socialism does ask you to abandon much space and
service, it offers you certain austere yet not altogether inadequate
compensations. If you will cease to have that admirable house in
Mayfair and the park in Kent and the moorlands and the Welsh castle,
yet you will have another ownership of a finer kind to replace those
things. For all London will be yours, a city to serve indeed, and a
sense of fellowship that is, if you could but realize it, better than
respect. The common people will not be common under Socialism. That is
a very important thing for you to remember. But better than those
thoughts is this, that you will own yourself too, more than you do
now. All that state, all that prominence of yours--do you never feel
how it stands between you and life?
So I appeal from your wealth to your nobility, to help us to
impoverish your class a little relatively and make all the world
infinitely richer by that impoverishment. And I am sure that to some
of you I shall not appeal in vain....
§ 6.
And lastly, perhaps you are chiefly a patriot and you are concerned
for the flag and country with which your emotions have interwoven. You
find that the Socialist talks constantly of internationalism and the
World State, and that presents itself to your imagination as a very
vague and colourless substitute for a warm and living reality of
England or "these States" or the Empire. Well, your patriotism will
have suffered a change, but I do not think it need starve under
Socialist conditions. It may be that war will have ceased, but the
comparison and competition and pride of communities will not have
ceased. Philadelphia and Chicago, Boston and New York are at peace, in
all probability for ever at peace, so far as guns and slaughter go,
but each perpetually criticizes, goads and tries to outshine the
other. And the civic pride and rivalry of to-day will be nothing to
that pride and rivalry when every man's business is the city and the
city's honour and well-being is his own. You will have, therefore,
first this civic patriotism, your ancient pride in your city, a city
which will be like the city of the ancient Athenian's, or the mediæval
Italian's, the centre of a system of territories and the property and
chief interest of its citizens. I, for instance, should love and
serve, even as I love to-day, my London and my Cinque Ports, these
Home Counties about London, the great lap of the Thames valley and the
Weald and Downland, my own country in which all my life has been
spent; for you the city may be Ulster or Northumbria, or Wales or East
or West Belgium, or Finland or Burgundy, or Berne or Berlin, or
Venetia, Pekin, Calcutta, Queensland or San Francisco. And keeping the
immediate peace between these vigorous giant municipal states and
holding them together there will still be in many cases the old
national or Imperial government and the old flag, a means of joint
action between associated and kindred municipalities with a common
language and a common history and a common temper and race. The nation
and the national government will be the custodian of the national
literature and the common law, the controller and perhaps the vehicle
of intermunicipal and international trade, and an intermediary between
its municipal governments and that great Congress to which all things
are making, that permanent international Congress which will be
necessary to insure the peace of the world.
That, at least, is my own dream of the order that may emerge from the
confusion of distrusts and tentatives and dangerous absurdities, those
reactions of fear and old traditional attitudes and racial
misconceptions which one speaks of as international relations to-day.
For I do not believe that war is a necessary condition to human
existence and progress, that it is anything more than a confusion we
inherit from the less organized phases of social development. I think
but a little advancement in general intelligence will make it an
impossible thing.
But suppose after all that I am wrong in my estimate in this matter,
and that war will still be possible in a Socialist or partly Socialist
world; suppose that the Socialist State in which I am imagining you to
live is threatened by some military power. Then I don't think the
military power that threatens it need threaten very long. Because
consider, here will be a State organized for collective action as
never a State has been organized before, a State in which every man
and woman will be a willing and conscious citizen saturated with the
spirit of service, in which scientific research will be at a maximum
of vigour and efficiency. What individualist or autocratic militarism
will stand a chance against it? It goes quite without saying from the
essential principles of Socialism that _if war is necessary_ then
every citizen will, as a matter of course, take his part in that war.
It is mere want of intellectual grasp that has made a few
working-class Socialists in England and France oppose military
service. Universal military service, given the need for it, is innate
in the Socialist idea, just as it is blankly antagonistic to the
"private individual" ideas of Eighteenth-Century Liberalism. It is
innate in the Socialist idea, but equally innate in that is the
conception of establishing and maintaining for ever a universal peace.