Let us arrange in some order a number of converging considerations that
all point in this direction. (1) It is broadly true, no doubt, that the
weapon of the employer has hitherto been the threat of dismissal, that
is, the threat of enforced starvation. He is a Sultan who need not order
the bastinado, so long as he can order the sack. But there are not a few
signs that this weapon is not quite so convenient and flexible a one
as his increasing rapacities require. The fact of the introduction of
fines, secretly or openly, in many shops and factories, proves that it
is convenient for the capitalists to have some temporary and adjustable
form of punishment besides the final punishment of pure ruin. Nor is it
difficult to see the commonsense of this from their wholly inhuman
point of view. The act of sacking a man is attended with the same
disadvantages as the act of shooting a man: one of which is that you can
get no more out of him. It is, I am told, distinctly annoying to blow a
fellow creature’s brains out with a revolver and then suddenly remember
that he was the only person who knew where to get the best Russian
cigarettes. So our Sultan, who is the orderer of the sack, is also the
bearer of the bow-string. A school in which there was no punishment,
except expulsion, would be a school in which it would be very difficult
to keep proper discipline; and the sort of discipline on which the
reformed capitalism will insist will be all of the type which in free
nations is imposed only on children. Such a school would probably be in
a chronic condition of breaking up for the holidays. And the reasons
for the insufficiency of this extreme instrument are also varied and
evident. The materialistic Sociologists, who talk about the survival of
the fittest and the weakest going to the wall (and whose way of looking
at the world is to put on the latest and most powerful scientific
spectacles, and then shut their eyes), frequently talk as if a
workman were simply efficient or non-efficient, as if a criminal were
reclaimable or irreclaimable. The employers have sense enough at least
to know better than that. They can see that a servant may be useful in
one way and exasperating in another; that he may be bad in one part of
his work and good in another; that he may be occasionally drunk and yet
generally indispensable. Just as a practical school-master would know
that a schoolboy can be at once the plague and the pride of the school.
Under these circumstances small and varying penalties are obviously the
most convenient things for the person keeping order; an underling can be
punished for coming late, and yet do useful work when he comes. It will
be possible to give a rap over the knuckles without wholly cutting
off the right hand that has offended. Under these circumstances the
employers have naturally resorted to fines. But there is a further
ground for believing that the process will go beyond fines before it is
completed.
(2) The fine is based on the old European idea that everybody possesses
private property in some reasonable degree; but not only is this not
true to-day, but it is not being made any truer, even by those who
honestly believe that they are mending matters. The great employers will
often do something towards improving what they call the “conditions”
of their workers; but a worker might have his conditions as carefully
arranged as a racehorse has, and still have no more personal property
than a racehorse. If you take an average poor seamstress or factory
girl, you will find that the power of chastising her through her
property has very considerable limits; it is almost as hard for the
employer of labour to tax her for punishment as it is for the Chancellor
of the Exchequer to tax her for revenue. The next most obvious thing to
think of, of course, would be imprisonment, and that might be effective
enough under simpler conditions. An old-fashioned shopkeeper might have
locked up his apprentice in his coal-cellar; but his coal-cellar would
be a real, pitch dark coal-cellar, and the rest of his house would be a
real human house. Everybody (especially the apprentice) would see a most
perceptible difference between the two. But, as I pointed out in the
article before this, the whole tendency of the capitalist legislation
and experiment is to make imprisonment much more general and automatic,
while making it, or professing to make it, more humane. In other words,
the hygienic prison and the servile factory will become so uncommonly
like each other that the poor man will hardly know or care whether he
is at the moment expiating an offence or merely swelling a dividend. In
both places there will be the same sort of shiny tiles. In neither place
will there be any cell so unwholesome as a coal-cellar or so wholesome
as a home. The weapon of the prison, therefore, like the weapon of
the fine, will be found to have considerable limitations to its
effectiveness when employed against the wretched reduced citizen of our
day. Whether it be property or liberty you cannot take from him what he
has not got. You cannot imprison a slave, because you cannot enslave a
slave.