THE REFORMER
It is impossible, unfortunately, in so brief a summary of Mr. Belloc's
views, even to suggest with what force of argument and wealth of example
he supports the thesis of _The Servile State_. What that thesis is it
may be well to state in full. Mr. Belloc says that _The Servile State_
was written "to maintain and prove the following truth":
That our free modern society in which the means of production are
owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is
tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the
establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those
who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those
who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the
non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and
in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided
into two sets; the first economically free and politically free,
possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in
that possession; the second economically unfree and politically
unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in
certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath
which they shall not fall.[21]
Now, the reader who has followed the brief summary of the preceding
chapter cannot fail to arrive at a consideration of apparently cardinal
importance. Even if he be convinced--as we are convinced--that the
servile state is actually upon us, he will yet feel that a people still
politically free will never allow what is to-day but a young growth to
attain its full stature. The English people, he will argue, hold their
own destiny in their own hand. We already possess all but manhood
suffrage; and, until that power is taken from us, which it could never
be without a fierce struggle, we possess a weapon with which any and
every attempt to re-introduce the servile status can successfully be
resisted.
A man reasoning thus should ask himself two questions: first, does the
proletariat object to the re-introduction of the servile status,
provided it brings with it security and sufficiency? second, does the
enjoyment of a wide suffrage connote the power of self-government?
These are questions which every intelligent man must be able to answer
for himself, and, if he answer them honestly, his answers, we think,
will agree with those Mr. Belloc has given. In _The Servile State_ he
affirms what we all know to be the fact, that the English proletariat of
to-day would not merely fail to reject the servile status, but would
welcome it. He puts the matter in this way:
If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a
wage with the proposal for the contract of service for life,
guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual
full wage, how many would refuse?
Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom; a life
contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is
the negation of contract and the acceptation of status.[22]
Every thinking man knows that the number to reject such a proposal would
be insignificant.
If, then, the great mass of the English people, the majority, that is,
of the voters, is prepared to welcome rather than to reject the
re-introduction of slavery, the possession or non-possession of the
power to reject it appears immaterial.
Let us suppose, however, an extreme case. Let us suppose an attempt to
reduce the wage-earners to slavery without guaranteeing them sufficiency
and security. There are many amiable maniacs who would be willing to
support such an attempt, though we cannot believe that their efforts
would be rewarded with success. They would be rewarded with revolution.
This is a point upon which too great insistence cannot be laid. Such an
attempt, if it were ever made, would produce a revolution: it would not
be quashed in a General Election or by any other form of constitutional
procedure, because, as a fact, the English people have no constitutional
power.
Ultimately, of course, the power of government can only rest with the
majority of the people, but in practice that power is often taken from
them. It has been taken from the English people.
These, then, are the two great simple truths which underlie Mr. Belloc's
whole attitude towards the public affairs of the England of to-day:
First, we are economically unfree.
Second, we are politically unfree.[23]
The causes of the existence of the first condition are analysed, as we
have seen, in _The Servile State_; the causes of the second are analysed
in _The Party System_.
With the prime truths of this book every man possessing but the most
elementary knowledge of political science and constitutional history is
familiar. They were proved by Bagehot many years ago, and no observant
man of average intelligence can fail to realize them for himself to-day.
Briefly, they are these. The representative system existing in England,
which was meant to be an organ of democracy, is actually an engine of
oligarchy. "Instead of the executive being controlled by the
representative assembly, it controls it. Instead of the demands of the
people being expressed for them by their representatives, the matters
discussed by the representatives are settled, not by the people, not
even by themselves, but by the very body which it is the business of the
representative assembly to check and control."
These truths are to-day common knowledge. We all know that the power of
government does not reside in practice with the people, but with some
body which remains for most of us undefined. It is the peculiar service
of the authors of _The Party System_ to have defined that body for us
and to have exposed its nature and composition. Bagehot referred to this
body as the Cabinet; in _The Party System_ it is shown that this body is
really composed of the members of the two Front Benches, which form "one
close oligarchical corporation, admission to which is only to be gained
by the consent of those who have already secured places therein." The
greater number, and by far the most important members, of this
corporation enter by right of relationship, and these family ties are
not confined to the separate sides of the House. They unite the
Ministerial with the Opposition Front Bench as closely as they unite
Ministers and ex-Ministers to each other. There is thus formed a
governing group which has attained absolute control over the procedure
of the House of Commons. It can settle how much time shall be given to
the discussion of any subject, and therefore, in effect, determine
whether any particular measure shall have a chance of passing into law.
It can also settle what subjects may be discussed and what may be said
on those subjects. Further, this group has at its disposal large funds
which are secretly subscribed and secretly disbursed, and, by the use of
these funds, as well as by other means, it is able to control elections
and decide to a considerable extent who shall be the representatives of
the people.
Can this system be mended? Is any reform possible within the system
itself? As long ago as 1899, in the first important book he published,
Mr. Belloc wrote these words:
... the _Mandat Imperatif_, the brutal and decisive weapon of the
democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, the mechanical
responsibility against which Burke had pleaded at Bristol, which
the American constitution vainly attempted to exclude in its
principal election, and which must in the near future be the method
of our final reforms.
It is a striking example of the solidity of Mr. Belloc's opinions to
find him expressing, twelve years later, exactly the same views. He went
into Parliament in 1906 holding this view; he came out of Parliament in
1910 confirmed in it. In 1911, the only possible means of reforming our
Parliamentary system, so far as he can see, is this:
It might be possible, by scattering and using a sufficient number
of trained workers, to extract from candidates definite pledges
during the electoral period.... The principal pledge which should
and could be extracted from candidates would be a pledge that they
would vote against the Government--whatever its composition--unless
there were carried through the House of Commons, within a set time,
those measures to which they stood pledged already in their
election addresses and on the platform.
But, just as Mr. Belloc realizes that the power of government must
always rest ultimately with the majority of the people, so he realizes
that all final reforms are brought about by the will of the majority.
Consequently, the first need in the attempt to remedy any evil is
exposure. The political education of democracy is the first step towards
a reform.
To tell a particular truth with regard to a particular piece of
corruption is, of course, dangerous in the extreme; the rash man
who might be tempted to employ this weapon would find himself
bankrupted or in prison, and probably both. But the general nature
of the unpleasant thing can be drilled into the public by books,
articles, and speeches.
This is the whole secret of Mr. Belloc's actions as a reformer. His
whole object, as has already been said in another connection, is to
instruct public opinion. His views and opinions are to be found clearly
expressed in books, but he is not content merely to express his views as
intellectual propositions, he is supremely anxious to convince men of
the truth and justice of his views, and to inspire men to action. Just
as he regards history as the record of the actions of men like
ourselves, so he regards the evils of the present day as the result of
men's actions and men's apathy. His whole object is to check those
actions and uproot that apathy.
It was with this object that he founded, in 1911, the weekly journal
called _The Eye-Witness_, the chief aim of which was to conduct a steady
and unflinching campaign against the evils of the Party System and of
Capitalism, and a notable feature of Mr. Belloc's editorship was that
the paper, during the time he was connected with it, reached and
maintained an extraordinarily high literary standard. It is a matter of
regret that Mr. Belloc, owing to a variety of circumstances, was
obliged, in the early part of 1912, to resign the position of editor of
the paper which he founded and which now, under the title of _The New
Witness_, is edited by Mr. Cecil Chesterton.
There can be no doubt, however, that the campaign which Mr. Belloc then
initiated has achieved some measure of success. Although it is
impossible to point to any organized body of opinion which definitely
supports Mr. Belloc's views on economic and political reform, yet it is
undeniable that those views have taken root and are to-day far more
common than at the time either _The Party System_ was written, or _The
Eye-Witness_ founded. This has come about by a very simple process--a
process which Mr. Belloc himself has analysed. In the last pages of _The
Party System_ there occurs this passage:
Truth has this particular quality about it (which the modern
defenders of falsehood seem to have forgotten), that when it has
been so much as suggested, it of its own self and by example tends
to turn that suggestion into a conviction.
You say to some worthy provincial, "English Prime Ministers sell
peerages and places on the Front Bench."
He is startled, and he disbelieves you; but when a few days
afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity
has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the
incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course
of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have
enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps he may know
from other sources than the Press to be a wealthy man who uses his
wealth in bribery) his doubt grows into conviction.
That is the way truth spreads....
The truth, when it is spoken for some useful purpose, must
necessarily seem obscure, extravagant, or merely false; for, were
it of common knowledge, it would not be worth expressing. And truth
being fact, and therefore hard, must irritate and wound; but it has
that power of growth and creation peculiar to itself which always
makes it worth the telling.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: _Servile State_, p. 3.]
[Footnote 22: _Servile State_, p. 140.]
[Footnote 23: The reader should take care to distinguish between the
phrase "politically unfree," as connoting the lack of constitutional
power, and the phrase "politically unfree," used by Mr. Belloc in _The
Servile State_ as connoting the lack of a free status in positive law,
and therefore the presence of servile conditions.]