If I were to prophesy that two hundred years hence a grocer would have
the right and habit of beating the grocer’s assistant with a stick, or
that shop girls might be flogged, as they already can be fined, many
would regard it as rather a rash remark. It would be a rash remark.
Prophecy is always unreliable; unless we except the kind which is
avowedly irrational, mystical and supernatural prophecy. But relatively
to nearly all the other prophecies that are being made around me to-day,
I should say my prediction stood an exceptionally good chance. In short,
I think the grocer with the stick is a figure we are far more likely to
see than the Superman or the Samurai, or the True Model Employer, or the
Perfect Fabian Official, or the citizen of the Collectivist State. And
it is best for us to see the full ugliness of the transformation which
is passing over our Society in some such abrupt and even grotesque image
at the end of it. The beginnings of a decline, in every age of history,
have always had the appearance of being reforms. Nero not only fiddled
while Rome was burning, but he probably really paid more attention to
the fiddle than to the fire. The Roi Soleil, like many other soleils,
was most splendid to all appearance a little before sunset. And if I
ask myself what will be the ultimate and final fruit of all our
social reforms, garden cities, model employers, insurances, exchanges,
arbitration courts, and so on, then, I say, quite seriously, “I think it
will be labour under the lash.”