The curious position of the Krupp firm in the awful story developing
around us is not quite sufficiently grasped. There is a kind of academic
clarity of definition which does not see the proportions of things for
which everything falls within a definition, and nothing ever breaks
beyond it. To this type of mind (which is valuable when set to its
special and narrow work) there is no such thing as an exception that
proves the rule. If I vote for confiscating some usurer’s millions I am
doing, they say, precisely what I should be doing if I took pennies out
of a blind man’s hat. They are both denials of the principle of private
property, and are equally right and equally wrong, according to our view
of that principle. I should find a great many distinctions to draw
in such a matter. First, I should say that taking a usurer’s money by
proper authority is not robbery, but recovery of stolen goods. Second,
I should say that even if there were no such thing as personal property,
there would still be such a thing as personal dignity, and different
modes of robbery would diminish it in very different ways. Similarly,
there is a truth, but only a half-truth, in the saying that all modern
Powers alike rely on the Capitalist and make war on the lines of
Capitalism. It is true, and it is disgraceful. But it is _not_ equally
true and equally disgraceful. It is not true that Montenegro is as much
ruled by financiers as Prussia, just as it is not true that as many men
in the Kaiserstrasse, in Berlin, wear long knives in their belts as wear
them in the neighbourhood of the Black Mountain. It is not true that
every peasant from one of the old Russian communes is the immediate
servant of a rich man, as is every employee of Mr. Rockefeller. It is as
false as the statement that no poor people in America can read or write.
There is an element of Capitalism in all modern countries, as there is
an element of illiteracy in all modern countries. There are some who
think that the number of our fellow-citizens who can sign their names
ought to comfort us for the extreme fewness of those who have anything
in the bank to sign it for, but I am not one of these.
In any case, the position of Krupp has certain interesting aspects. When
we talk of Army contractors as among the base but active actualities of
war, we commonly mean that while the contractor benefits by the war,
the war, on the whole, rather suffers by the contractor. We regard this
unsoldierly middleman with disgust, or great anger, or contemptuous
acquiescence, or commercial dread and silence, according to our personal
position and character. But we nowhere think of him as having anything
to do with fighting in the final sense. Those worthy and wealthy persons
who employ women’s labour at a few shillings a week do not do it to
obtain the best clothes for the soldiers, but to make a sufficient
profit on the worst. The only argument is whether such clothes are just
good enough for the soldiers, or are too bad for anybody or anything. We
tolerate the contractor, or we do not tolerate him; but no one admires
him especially, and certainly no one gives him any credit for any
success in the war. Confessedly or unconfessedly we knock his profits,
not only off what goes to the taxpayer, but what goes to the soldier. We
know the Army will not fight any better, at least, because the clothes
they wear were stitched by wretched women who could hardly see; or
because their boots were made by harassed helots, who never had time to
think. In war-time it is very widely confessed that Capitalism is not a
good way of ruling a patriotic or self-respecting people, and all sorts
of other things, from strict State organisation to quite casual personal
charity, are hastily substituted for it. It is recognised that the
“great employer,” nine times out of ten, is no more than the schoolboy
or the page who pilfers tarts and sweets from the dishes as they go up
and down. How angry one is with him depends on temperament, on the stage
of the dinner--also on the number of tarts.
Now here comes in the real and sinister significance of Krupps. There
are many capitalists in Europe as rich, as vulgar, as selfish, as
rootedly opposed to any fellowship of the fortunate and unfortunate. But
there is no other capitalist who claims, or can pretend to claim, that
he has very appreciably _helped_ the activities of his people in war. I
will suppose that Lipton did not deserve the very severe criticisms
made on his firm by Mr. Justice Darling; but, however blameless he was,
nobody can suppose that British soldiers would charge better with the
bayonet because they had some particular kind of groceries inside them.
But Krupp can make a plausible claim that the huge infernal machines to
which his country owes nearly all of its successes could only have been
produced under the equally infernal conditions of the modern factory
and the urban and proletarian civilisation. That is why the victory of
Germany would be simply the victory of Krupp, and the victory of Krupp
would be simply the victory of Capitalism. There, and there alone,
Capitalism would be able to point to something done successfully for a
whole nation--done (as it would certainly maintain) better than small
free States or natural democracies could have done it. I confess I think
the modern Germans morally second-rate, and I think that even war, when
it is conducted most successfully by machinery, is second-rate war. But
this second-rate war will become not only the first but the only brand,
if the cannon of Krupp should conquer; and, what is very much worse, it
will be the only intelligent answer that any capitalist has yet given
against our case that Capitalism is as wasteful and as weak as it is
certainly wicked. I do not fear any such finality, for I happen to
believe in the kind of men who fight best with bayonets and whose
fathers hammered their own pikes for the French Revolution.