1
“Nothing will be the same after the war.” This is one of the consoling
platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter
it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, “Then how
will things be different?” is in many cases to rouse great resentment.
It is almost as rude as saying, “Was that thought of yours really a
thought?”
Let us in this chapter confine ourselves to the social-economic
processes that are going on. So far as I am able to distinguish among
the things that are being said in these matters, they may be classified
out into groups that centre upon several typical questions. There is
the question of “How to pay for the war?” There is the question of the
behaviour of labour after the war. “Will there be a Labour Truce or a
violent labour struggle?” There is the question of the reconstruction of
European industry after the war in the face of an America in a state
of monetary and economic repletion through non-intervention. My present
purpose in this chapter is a critical one; it is not to solve problems
but to set out various currents of thought that are flowing through
the general mind. Which current is likely to seize upon and carry human
affairs with it, is not for our present speculation.
There seem to be two distinct ways of answering the first of the
questions I have noted. They do not necessarily contradict each other.
Of course the war is being largely paid for immediately out of the
accumulated private wealth of the past. We are buying off the “hold-up”
of the private owner upon the material and resources we need, and paying
in paper money and war loans. This is not in itself an impoverishment of
the community. The wealth of individuals is not the wealth of nations;
the two things may easily be contradictory when the rich man's wealth
consists of land or natural resources or franchises or privileges the
use of which he reluctantly yields for high prices. The conversion of
held-up land and material into workable and actively used material in
exchange for national debt may be indeed a positive increase in the
wealth of the community. And what is happening in all the belligerent
countries is the taking over of more and more of the realities of wealth
from private hands and, in exchange, the contracting of great masses of
debt to private people. The nett tendency is towards the disappearance
of a reality holding class and the destruction of realities in warfare,
and the appearance of a vast _rentier_ class in its place. At the end
of the war much material will be destroyed for evermore, transit, food
production and industry will be everywhere enormously socialised, and
the country will be liable to pay every year in interest, a sum of money
exceeding the entire national expenditure before the war. From the point
of view of the state, and disregarding material and moral damages, that
annual interest is the annual instalment of the price to be paid for the
war.
Now the interesting question arises whether these great belligerent
states may go bankrupt, and if so to what extent. States may go bankrupt
to the private creditor without repudiating their debts or seeming to
pay less to him. They can go bankrupt either by a depreciation of their
currency or--without touching the gold standard--through a rise in
prices. In the end both these things work out to the same end; the
creditor gets so many loaves or pairs of boots or workman's hours of
labour for his pound _less_ than he would have got under the previous
conditions. One may imagine this process of price (and of course wages)
increase going on to a limitless extent. Many people are inclined to
look to such an increase in prices as a certain outcome of the war, and
just so far as it goes, just so far will the burthen of the _rentier_
class, their call, tat is, for goods and services, be lightened. This
expectation is very generally entertained, and I can see little reason
against it. The intensely stupid or dishonest “labour” press, however,
which in the interests of the common enemy misrepresents socialism and
seeks to misguide labour in Great Britain, ignores these considerations,
and positively holds out this prospect of rising prices as an alarming
one to the more credulous and ignorant of its readers.
But now comes the second way of meeting the after-the-war obligations.
This second way is by increasing the wealth of the state and by
increasing the national production to such an extent that the payment of
the _rentier_ class will not be an overwhelming burthen. Rising prices
bilk the creditor. Increased production will check the rise in prices
and get him a real payment. The outlook for the national creditor seems
to be that he will be partly bilked and partly paid; how far he will be
bilked and how far depends almost entirely upon this possible increase
in production; and there is consequently a very keen and quite
unprecedented desire very widely diffused among intelligent and active
people, holding War Loan scrip and the like, in all the belligerent
countries, to see bold and hopeful schemes for state enrichment pushed
forward. The movement towards socialism is receiving an impulse from a
new and unexpected quarter, there is now a _rentier_ socialism, and it
is interesting to note that while the London _Times_ is full of schemes
of great state enterprises, for the exploitation of Colonial state
lands, for the state purchase and wholesaling of food and many natural
products, and for the syndication of shipping and the great staple
industries into vast trusts into which not only the British but the
French and Italian governments may enter as partners, the so-called
socialist press of Great Britain is chiefly busy about the draughts in
the cell of Mr. Fenner Brockway and the refusal of Private Scott
Duckers to put on his khaki trousers. _The New Statesman_ and the Fabian
Society, however, display a wider intelligence.
There is a great variety of suggestions for this increase of public
wealth and production. Many of them have an extreme reasonableness. The
extent to which they will be adopted depends, no doubt, very largely
upon the politician and permanent official, and both these classes are
prone to panic in the presence of reality. In spite of its own interests
in restraining a rise in prices, the old official “salariat” is likely
to be obstructive to any such innovations. It is the resistance of spurs
and red tabs to military innovations over again. This is the resistance
of quills and red tape. On the other hand the organisation of Britain
for war has “officialised” a number of industrial leaders, and created
a large body of temporary and adventurous officials. They may want
to carry on into peace production the great new factories the war has
created. At the end of the war, for example, every belligerent country
will be in urgent need of cheap automobiles for farmers, tradesmen, and
industrial purposes generally, America is now producing such automobiles
at a price of eighty pounds. But Europe will be heavily in debt to
America, her industries will be disorganised, and there will therefore
be no sort of return payment possible for these hundreds of thousands of
automobiles. A country that is neither creditor nor producer cannot be
an importer. Consequently though those cheap tin cars may be stacked
as high as the Washington Monument in America, they will never come to
Europe. On the other hand the great shell factories of Europe will be
standing idle and ready, their staffs disciplined and available, for
conversion to the new task. The imperative common sense of the position
seems to be that the European governments should set themselves straight
away to out-Ford Ford, and provide their own people with cheap road
transport.
But here comes in the question whether this common-sense course is
inevitable. Suppose the mental energy left in Europe after the war is
insufficient for such a constructive feat as this. There will certainly
be the obstruction of official pedantry, the hold-up of this vested
interest and that, the greedy desire of “private enterprise” to exploit
the occasion upon rather more costly and less productive lines, the
general distrust felt by ignorant and unimaginative people of a new way
of doing things. The process after all may not get done in the obviously
wise way. This will not mean that Europe will buy American cars. It will
be quite unable to buy American cars. It will be unable to make anything
that America will not be able to make more cheaply for itself. But it
will mean that Europe will go on without cheap cars, that is to say
it will go on a more sluggishly and clumsily and wastefully at a lower
economic level. Hampered transport means hampered production of other
things, and in increasing inability to buy abroad. And so we go down and
down.
It does not follow that because a course is the manifestly right and
advantageous course for the community that it will be taken. I am
reminded of this by a special basket in my study here, into which I
pitch letters, circulars, pamphlets and so forth as they come to hand
from a gentleman named Gattie, and his friends Mr. Adrian Ross, Mr. Roy
Horniman, Mr. Henry Murray and others. His particular project is the
construction of a Railway Clearing House for London. It is an absolutely
admirable scheme. It would cut down the heavy traffic in the streets of
London to about one-third; it would enable us to run the goods traffic
of England with less than half the number of railway trucks we now
employ; it would turn over enormous areas of valuable land from their
present use as railway goods yards and sidings; it would save time
in the transit of goods and labour in their handling. It is a quite
beautifully worked out scheme. For the last eight or ten years this
group of devoted fanatics has been pressing this undertaking upon an
indifferent country with increasing vehemence and astonishment at that
indifference. The point is that its adoption, though it would be of
general benefit, would be of no particular benefit to any leading man
or highly placed official. On the other hand it would upset all sorts
of individuals who are in a position to obstruct it quietly--and they
do so. Meaning no evil. I dip my hand in the accumulation and extract
a leaflet by the all too zealous Mr. Murray. In it he denounces various
public officials by name as he cheats and scoundrels, and invites a
prosecution for libel.
In that fashion nothing will ever get done. There is no prosecution,
but for all that I do not agree with Mr. Murray about the men he names.
These gentlemen are just comfortable gentlemen, own brothers to these
old generals of ours who will not take off their spurs. They are
probably quite charming people except that they know nothing of that
Fear of God which searches by heart. Why should they bother?
So many of these after-the-war problems bring one back to the
question of how far the war has put the Fear of God into the hearts of
responsible men. There is really no other reason in existence that I
can imagine why they should ask themselves the question, “Have I done my
best?” and that still more important question, “Am I doing my best now?”
And so while I hear plenty of talk about the great reorganisations that
are to come after the war, while there is the stir of doubt among the
_rentiers_ whether, after all, they will get paid, while the unavoidable
stresses and sacrifices of the war are making many people question the
rightfulness of much that they did as a matter of course, and of much
that they took for granted, I perceive there is also something dull
and not very articulate in this European world, something resistant and
inert, that is like the obstinate rolling over of a heavy sleeper after
he has been called upon to get up. “Just a little longer.... Just for
_my_ time.”
One thought alone seems to make these more intractable people anxious.
I thrust it in as my last stimulant when everything else has failed.
“There will be _frightful_ trouble with labour after the war,” I say.
They try to persuade themselves that military discipline is breaking in
labour....
2
What does British labour think of the outlook after the war?
As a distinctive thing British labour does not think. “Class-conscious
labour,” as the Marxists put it, scarcely exists in Britain. The only
convincing case I ever met was a bath-chairman of literary habits
Eastbourne. The only people who are, as a class, class-conscious in
the British community are the Anglican gentry and their fringe of the
genteel. Everybody else is “respectable.” The mass of British workers
find their thinking in the ordinary halfpenny papers or in _John Bull._
The so-called labour papers are perhaps less representative of British
Labour than any other section of the press; the _Labour Leader_, for
example, is the organ of such people as Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee,
Morel, academic _rentiers_ who know about as much as of the labour side
of industrialism as they do of cock-fighting. All the British peoples
are racially willing and good-tempered people, quite ready to be led
by those they imagine to be abler than themselves. They make the most
cheerful and generous soldiers in the whole world, without insisting
upon that democratic respect which the Frenchman exacts. They do not
criticise and they do not trouble themselves much about the general plan
of operations, so long as they have confidence in the quality and good
will of their leading. But British soldiers will of their loading. But
British soldiers will hiss a general when they think he is selfish,
unfeeling, or a muff. And the socialist propaganda has imported ideas
of public service into private employment. Labour in Britain has been
growing increasingly impatient of bad or selfish industrial leadership.
Labour trouble in Great Britain turns wholly upon the idea crystallised
in the one word “profiteer.” Legislation and regulation of hours of
labour, high wages, nothing will keep labour quiet in Great Britain if
labour thinks it is being exploited for private gain.
Labour feels very suspicious of private gain. For that suspicion a
certain rather common type of employer is mainly to blame. Labour
believes that employers is mainly to blame. Labour believes that
employers as a class cheat workmen as a class, plan to cheat them of
their full share in the common output, and drive hard bargains. It
believes that private employers are equally ready to sacrifice the
welfare of the nation and the welfare of the workers for mere personal
advantage. It has a traditional experience to support these suspicions.
In no department of morals have ideas changed so completely during the
last eight years as in relation to “profits”. Eighty years ago everyone
believed in the divine right of property to do what it pleased its
advantages, a doctrine more disastrous socially than the divine right
of kings. There was no such sense of the immorality of “holding up” as
pervades the public conscience to-day. The worker was expected not only
to work, but to be grateful for employment. The property owner held his
property and handed it out for use and development or not, just as he
thought fit. These ideas are not altogether extinct today. Only a few
days ago I met a magnificent old lady of seventy nine or eighty, who
discoursed upon the wickedness of her gardener in demanding another
shilling a week because of war prices.
She was a valiant and handsome personage. A face that had still a
healthy natural pinkness looked out from under blond curls, and an
elegant and carefully tended hand tossed back some fine old lace to
gesticulate more freely. She had previously charmed her hearers by
sweeping aside certain rumours that were drifting about.
“Germans invade _Us!_” she cried. “Who'd _let_ 'em, I'd like to know?
Who'd _let_ 'em?”
And then she reverted to her grievance about the gardener.
“I told him that after the war he'd be glad enough to get anything.
Grateful! They'll all be coming back after the war--all of 'em, glad
enough to get anything. Asking for another shilling indeed!”
Everyone who heard her looked shocked. But that was the tone of everyone
of importance in the dark years that followed the Napoleonic wars.
That is just one survivor of the old tradition. Another is Blight
the solicitor, who goes about bewailing the fact that we writers are
“holding out false hopes of higher agricultural wages after the war.”
But these are both exceptions. They are held to be remarkable people
even by their own class. The mass of property owners and influential
people in Europe to-day no more believe in the sacred right of property
to hold up development and dictate terms than do the more intelligent
workers. The ideas of collective ends and of the fiduciary nature of
property, had been soaking through the European community for years
before the war. The necessity for sudden and even violent co-operations
and submersions of individuality in a common purpose, is rapidly
crystallising out these ideas into clear proposals.
War is an evil thing, but most people who will not learn from reason
must have an ugly teacher. This war has brought home to everyone the
supremacy of the public need over every sort of individual claim.
One of the most remarkable things in the British war press is the amount
of space given to the discussion of labour developments after the war.
This in its completeness peculiar to the British situation. Nothing on
the same scale is perceptible in the press of the Latin allies. A great
movement on the part of capitalists and business organisers is manifest
to assure the worker of a change of heart and a will to change method.
Labour is suspicious, not foolishly but wisely suspicious. But labour is
considering it.
“National industrial syndication,” say the business organisers.
“Guild socialism,” say the workers.
There is also a considerable amount of talking and writing about
“profit-sharing” and about giving the workers a share in the business
direction. Neither of these ideas appeals to the shrewder heads among
the workers. So far as direction goes their disposition is to ask
the captain to command the ship. So far as profits go, they think the
captain has no more right than the cabin boy to speculative gains; he
should do his work for his pay whether it is profitable or unprofitable
work. There is little balm for labour discontent in these schemes for
making the worker also an infinitesimal profiteer.
During my journey in Italy and France I met several men who were keenly
interested in business organisation. Just before I started my friend N,
who has been the chief partner in the building up of a very big and very
extensively advertised American business, came to see me on his way back
to America. He is as interested in his work as a scientific specialist,
and as ready to talk about it to any intelligent and interested
hearer. He was particularly keen upon the question of continuity in the
business, when it behoves the older generation to let in the younger
to responsible management and to efface themselves. He was a man of
five-and-forty. Incidentally he mentioned that he had never taken
anything for his private life out of the great business he had built up
but a salary, “a good salary,” and that now he was gong to grant himself
a pension. “I shan't interfere any more. I shall come right away and
live in Europe for a year so as not to be tempted to interfere. The boys
have got to run it some day, and they had better get their experience
while they're young and capable of learning by it. I did.”
I like N's ideas. “Practically,” I said, “you've been a public official.
You've treated your business like a public service.”
That was his idea.
“Would you mind if it was a public service?”
He reflected, and some disagreeable memory darkened his face. “Under the
politicians?” he said.
I took the train of thought N had set going abroad with me next day. I
had the good luck to meet men who were interesting industrially. Captain
Pirelli, my guide in Italy, has a name familiar to every motorist; his
name goes wherever cars go, spelt with a big long capital P. Lieutenant
de Tessin's name will recall one of the most interesting experiments
in profit-sharing to the student of social science. I tried over N's
problem on both of them. I found in both their minds just the same
attitude as he takes up towards his business. They think any businesses
that are worthy of respect, the sorts of businesses that interest them,
are public functions. Money-lenders and speculators, merchants and
gambling gentlefolk may think in terms of profit; capable business
directors certainly do nothing of the sort.
I met a British officer in France who is also a landowner. I got him to
talk about his administrative work upon his property. He was very keen
upon new methods. He said he tried to do his duty by his land.
“How much land?” I asked.
“Just over nine thousand acres,” he said.
“But you could manage forty or fifty thousand with little more trouble.”
“If I had it. In some ways it would be easier.”
“What a waste!” I said. “Of course you ought not to _own_ these acres;
what you ought to be is the agricultural controller of just as big an
estate of the public lands as you could manage--with a suitable salary.”
He reflected upon that idea. He said he did not get much of a salary
out of his land as it was, and made a regrettable allusion to Mr. Lloyd
George. “When a man tries to do his duty by his land,” he said...
But here running through the thoughts of the Englishman and the Italian
and the Frenchman and the American alike one finds just the same idea
of a kind of officialdom in ownership. It is an idea that pervades our
thought and public discussion to-day everywhere, and it is an idea that
is scarcely traceable at all in the thought of the early half of the
nineteenth century. The idea of service and responsibility in property
has increased and is increasing, the conception of “hold-up,” the
usurer's conception of his right to be bought out of the way, fades.
And the process has been enormously enhanced by the various big-scale
experiments in temporary socialism that have been forced upon the
belligerent powers. Men of the most individualistic quality are being
educated up to the possibilities of concerted collective action. My
friend and fellow-student Y, inventor and business organiser, who used
to make the best steam omnibuses in the world, and who is now making all
sorts of things for the army, would go pink with suspicious anger at the
mere words “inspector” or “socialism” three or four years ago. He does
not do so now.
A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive sort
of man in England, is thinking socialism to-day. They may not be saying
socialism, but they are thinking it. When labour begins to realise what
is adrift it will be divided between two things: between appreciative
co-operation, for which guild socialism in particular has prepared its
mind, and traditional suspicion. I will not over to guess here which
will prevail.
3
The impression I have of the present mental process in the European
communities is that while the official class and the _rentier_ class
is thinking very poorly and inadequately and with a merely obstructive
disposition; while the churches are merely wasting their energies in
futile self-advertisement; while the labour mass is suspicious and
disposed to make terms for itself rather than come into any large
schemes of reconstruction that will abolish profit as a primary aim in
economic life, there is still a very considerable movement towards such
a reconstruction. Nothing is so misleading as a careless analogy. In the
dead years that followed the Napoleonic wars, which are often quoted as
a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of collective service
was near its minimum; it was never so strong and never so manifestly
spreading and increasing as it is to-day.
But service to what?
I have my own very strong preconceptions here, and since my temperament
is sanguine they necessarily colour my view. I believe that this impulse
to collective service can satisfy itself only under the formula that
mankind is one state of which God is the undying king, and that the
service of men's collective needs is the true worship of God. But
eagerly as I would grasp at any evidence that this idea is being
developed and taken up by the general consciousness, I am quite unable
to persuade myself that anything of the sort is going on. I do perceive
a search for large forms into which the prevalent impulse to devotion
can be thrown. But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds
and badges and their instinct for self-preservation at any cost,
stand between men and their spiritual growth in just the same way the
forestallers stand between men and food. Their activities at present are
an almost intolerable nuisance. One cannot say “God” but some tout is
instantly seeking to pluck one into his particular cave of flummery and
orthodoxy. What a rational man means by God is just God. The more you
define and argue about God the more he remains the same simple thing.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, modern Hindu religious thought, all agree
in declaring that there is one God, master and leader of all mankind, in
unending conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly and waste. To my mind,
it follows immediately that there can be no king, no government of any
sort, which is not either a subordinate or a rebel government, a local
usurpation, in the kingdom of God. But no organised religious body has
ever had the courage and honesty to insist upon this. They all pander to
nationalism and to powers and princes. They exists so to pander. Every
organised religion in the world exists only to exploit and divert and
waste the religious impulse in man.
This conviction that the world kingdom of God is the only true method
of human service, is so clear and final in my own mind, it seems
so inevitably the conviction to which all right-thinking men must
ultimately come, that I feel almost like a looker-on at a game of
blind-man's bluff as I watch the discussion of synthetic political
ideas. The blind man thrusts his seeking hands into the oddest corners,
he clutches at chairs and curtains, but at last he must surely find and
hold and feel over and guess the name of the plainly visible quarry.
Some of the French and Italian people I talked to said they were
fighting for “Civilisation.” That is one name for the kingdom of God,
and I have heard English people use it too. But much of the contemporary
thought of England stills wanders with its back to the light. Most of it
is pawing over jerry-built, secondary things. I have before me a
little book, the joint work of Dr. Grey and Mr. Turner, of an ex-public
schoolmaster and a manufacturer, called _Eclipse or Empire?_ (The title
_World Might or Downfall?_ had already been secured in another quarter.)
It is a book that has been enormously advertised; it has been almost
impossible to escape its column-long advertisements; it is billed upon
the hoardings, and it is on the whole a very able and right-spirited
book. It calls for more and better education, for more scientific
methods, for less class suspicion and more social explicitness and
understanding, for a franker and fairer treatment of labour. But why
does it call for these things? Does it call for them because they are
right? Because in accomplishing them one serves God?
Not at all. But because otherwise this strange sprawling empire of ours
will drop back into a secondary place in the world. These two writers
really seem to think that the slack workman, the slacker wealthy man,
the negligent official, the conservative schoolmaster, the greedy
usurer, the comfortable obstructive, confronted with this alternative,
terrified at this idea of something or other called the Empire being
“eclipsed,” eager for the continuance of this undefined glory over their
fellow-creatures called “Empire,” will perceive the error of their ways
and become energetic, devoted, capable. They think an ideal of that sort
is going to change the daily lives of men.... I sympathise with their
purpose, and I deplore their conception of motives. If men will not
give themselves for righteousness, they will not give themselves for
a geographical score. If they will not work well for the hatred of bad
work, they will not work well for the hatred of Germans. This “Empire”
idea has been cadging about the British empire, trying to collect
enthusiasm and devotion, since the days of Disraeli. It is, I submit,
too big for the mean-spirited, and too tawdry and limited for the fine
and generous. It leaves out the French and the Italians and the Belgians
and all our blood brotherhood of allies. It has no compelling force
in it. We British are not naturally Imperialist; we are something
greater--or something less. For two years and a half now we have been
fighting against Imperialism in its most extravagant form. It is a
poor incentive to right living to propose to parody the devil we fight
against.
The blind man must lunge again.
For when the right answer is seized it answers not only the question why
men should work for their fellow-men but also why nation should cease to
arm and plan and contrive against nation. The social problem is only the
international problem in retail, the international problem is only the
social one in gross.
My bias rules me altogether here. I see men in social, in economic
and in international affairs alike, eager to put an end to conflict,
inexpressibly weary of conflict and the waste and pain and death it
involves. But to end conflict one must abandon aggressive or uncordial
pretensions. Labour is sick at the idea of more strikes and struggles
after the war, industrialism is sick of competition and anxious for
service, everybody is sick of war. But how can they end any of these
clashes except by the definition and recognition of a common end which
will establish a standard for the trial of every conceivable issue, to
which, that is, every other issue can be subordinated; and what common
end can there be in all the world except this idea of the world kingdom
of God? What is the good of orienting one's devotion to a firm, or to
class solidarity, or _La Republique Francais_, or Poland, or Albania, or
such love and loyalty as people profess for King George or King Albert
or the Duc d'Orleans--it puzzles me why--or any such intermediate object
of self-abandonment? We need a standard so universal that the platelayer
may say to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red Indian to the
Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn Feiner or the
Chinaman, “What are we two doing for it?” And to fill the place of that
“it,” no other idea is great enough or commanding enough, but only the
world kingdom of God.
However long he may have to hunt, the blind man who is seeking service
and an end to bickerings will come to that at last, because of all the
thousand other things he may clutch at, nothing else can satisfy his
manifest need.