But the vital point is that the confession of mere rebellion softens
the startling lawlessness of our enemies. Suppose a publisher’s clerk
politely asked his employer for a rise in his salary; and, on being
refused, said he must leave the employment? Suppose the employer knocked
him down with a ruler, tied him up as a brown paper parcel, addressed
him (in a fine business hand) to the Governor of Rio Janeiro and then
asked the policeman to promise never to arrest him for what he had
done? That is a precise copy, in every legal and moral principle, of the
“deportation of the strikers.” They were assaulted and kidnapped for not
accepting a contract, and for nothing else; and the act was so avowedly
criminal that the law had to be altered afterwards to cover the crime.
Now suppose some postal official, between here and Rio Janeiro, had
noticed a faint kicking inside the brown paper parcel, and had attempted
to ascertain the cause. And suppose the clerk could only explain, in a
muffled voice through the brown paper, that he was by constitution and
temperament a Rebel. Don’t you see that he would be rather understating
his case? Don’t you see he would be bearing his injuries much too
meekly? They might take him out of the parcel; but they would very
possibly put him into a mad-house instead. Symbolically speaking, that
is what they would like to do with us. Symbolically speaking, the dirty
misers who rule us will put us in a mad-house--unless we can put them
there.
Or suppose a bank cashier were admittedly allowed to take the money out
of the till, and put it loose in his pocket, more or less mixed up with
his own money; afterwards laying some of both (at different odds) on
“Blue Murder” for the Derby. Suppose when some depositor asked mildly
what day the accountants came, he smote that astonished inquirer on the
nose, crying: “Slanderer! Mud-slinger!” and suppose he then resigned his
position. Suppose no books were shown. Suppose when the new cashier came
to be initiated into his duties, the old cashier did not tell him about
the money, but confided it to the honour and delicacy of his own maiden
aunt at Cricklewood. Suppose he then went off in a yacht to visit
the whale fisheries of the North Sea. Well, in every moral and legal
principle, that is a precise account of the dealings with the Party
Funds. But what would the banker say? What would the clients say? One
thing, I think, I can venture to promise; the banker would not march up
and down the office exclaiming in rapture, “I’m a rebel! That’s what I
am, a rebel!” And if he said to the first indignant depositor “You are
a rebel,” I fear the depositor might answer, “You are a robber.” We have
no need to elaborate arguments for breaking the law. The capitalists
have broken the law. We have no need of further moralities. They have
broken their own morality. It is as if you were to run down the street
shouting, “Communism! Communism! Share! Share!” after a man who had run
away with your watch.
We want a term that will tell everybody that there is, by the common
standard, frank fraud and cruelty pushed to their fierce extreme; and
that we are fighting THEM. We are not in a state of “divine discontent”;
we are in an entirely human and entirely reasonable rage. We say we have
been swindled and oppressed, and we are quite ready and able to prove it
before any tribunal that allows us to call a swindler a swindler. It is
the protection of the present system that most of its tribunals do not.
I cannot at the moment think of any party name that would particularly
distinguish us from our more powerful and prosperous opponents, unless
it were the name the old Jacobites gave themselves; the Honest Party.