Chapter VI: Introduction (4)

Now this state of public feeling has produced one rather odd, but very important, effect. While our attitude is growing more revolutionary, it is growing less Socialistic. For Socialism proposes to give to the state, and therefore to statesmen, fresh powers against social abuses. And England in its modern mood is rather more suspicious of the statesmen than of the bosses or middlemen whom they are supposed to control. The simple Socialistic formula that government should own the mines, for example--that simple formula begins to look a little too simple when people are suspecting that the mine-owners own the government. The mere proposal to set the politician to watch the capitalist has been disturbed by the rather disconcerting discovery that they are both the same man. We are past the point where being a capitalist is the only way of becoming a politician, and we are dangerously near the point where being a politician is much the quickest way of becoming a capitalist. But while the European _haute politique_ is hypocritical and diseased (much more so, I should say, than the American), there is certainly less “graft” and corrupt give-and-take in the mass of minor functionaries or moderate fortunes; and this very comparative honesty in the less successful mass of Europe increases their uneasiness touching the national leadership. The English people, so far from being supine or decadent, are much more vigorous and wide-awake than they have been for a long time. But they have awakened in a cage. This cage produces a curious situation in which we silently but suddenly find ourselves.

When your nation separated from our nation, to my present delight and yours, it separated before most men had become commercial wage-earners. Our ruler was called Farmer George; but yours might have been called Farmer George also. Last week I went up the great Sussex road where stands the village of Washington; and I remembered that your sword was also beaten out of a plowshare. If we had separated later, he might have been called General Brighton, or Heaven knows what.

Now the big difference made by that fact is this: that in America industrialism may be quite as strong; but agriculture is not so weak. A hazy horizon of free farms surrounds your most insane cities: but with us all the eager and intelligent have become servants of the capitalists; it is only the idle or idiotic that remain servants of the landlords. It is undoubtedly tenable that the idle and idiotic were the wiser of the two.

On us, thus situated, has come an insurrection against industrialism itself. Our recent strikes have really been a revolt against the whole system of wage-earning. But while your workers would have some cloudy notion of an alternative in farming the larger country by freer men, with us the agricultural alternative has slipped out of sight. The workers know what they don’t want more than what they do; like _Miss Arabella Allen_ in “Pickwick.” This state of mind is called by the learned syndicalism. It is really something much more serious; it is anger.

In the stress of these strikes two extraordinary things happened. The capitalist became a Socialist. The proletarian became an individualist. The employer wanted the community to intervene; and the employee didn’t want it to intervene. It was the rich man who used the Socialist argument; the comfort and convenience of the whole nation. It was the poor man who used the individualist argument; the freedom of contract and the private rights of man. It was the coal-owner who said, “_Salus populi suprema lex_.” It was the coal-miner who said, “_Fiat justitia ruat cœlum_.” He may not have expressed it precisely in those terms; though he is often no more illiterate than the coal-owner. This, then, is the extraordinary inversion that is the deepest dilemma of England to-day. _Hamlet_ and _Laertes_ have really changed swords in the scuffle: which is the poisoned sword I will not at this moment inquire.

The results of this extend and solidify every hour. For nearly a century now Socialists and social reformers in England, as in the rest of Europe and in America, have preached either greater philanthropy among the rich or greater rebellion among the poor. In both cases they have been suddenly taken at their word; but in such a manner as to sweep away the very foundations of their social science and their social scheme. The rich have become philanthropists; the rich have, in a sense, become Socialists; but only on condition that they may also be slave-owners. The poor have become rebels--but rebels against Socialism.

So far is this from being an exaggeration that every daily detail in the present development illustrates this and nothing else. The railway men, who led the revolt, were not, literally and legally, striking against an employer at all. They were striking against the decisions of State Arbitration Courts and Conciliation Boards such as State Socialists would set up; and semi-socialistic publicists had set up. The capitalists, wishing to strike back at the trade-unions, have not struck back by cutthroat competition or irresponsible locking out. They have struck back by a big act of Parliament, aimed at limiting the trade-unions by the law of the land; and tying men to their masters by a new and constructive social scheme. Here they have much the advantage of their proletarian opponents; who have to fight mainly with the remains of rather rhetorical Socialism and dreams, as yet somewhat dim, of the old liberty of the medieval guilds and charters. Thus it may too often seem that capitalists can combine and Socialists can only quarrel.

I do not myself think things can be cured except by a wider equalization of strictly private property, especially in land. This is not done or even demanded, not because it is impossible, but because its tradition has been lost. Meanwhile the Insurance Act, by which the rich contribute to the medical support of their servants, on condition of obtaining a tighter hold on their service, is the first of many legislative acts which will have for their object the ordering and cleansing, but also the strengthening, of the wage-system. They will attempt to forbid strikes. Thus we shall have the poor, with better conditions perhaps and under some general social stipulations; but bound irrevocably to particular and private masters.

The only thing I have to say about such a scheme concerns your country more than mine. This system of fixed service for certain masters has much to be said for it; and much was said by men dead and alive. In the wilderness by Chancellorsville or down all the roads to Richmond, there must be the dust of great gentlemen who came up out of the South to fight for such a system; and I think our Liberal social reformers owe them an apology. I think they ought to stand a moment and salute the dead, who had the courage to die for this thing, and the courage to call it by its name.

© V. O.

“LIGHT IS THERE ABOVE
WHICH MAKES THE
CREATOR VISIBLE

TO THAT CREATURE
WHICH HAS ITS
PEACE ONLY IN
SEEING HIM”

PARADISO
CANTO
XXIX-XXX

THE
RIVER OF
LIGHT

The Divine Comedy
of Dante Alighieri

Studies in Red Chalk
by Violet Oakley, for
the medallions of a painted glass
window made for the house of
Mr. Robert J. Collier
]

“O GLORY AND LIGHT
OF OTHER POETS:
MAY THE LONG
ZEAL

AVAIL ME AND THE
GREAT LOVE THAT
MADE ME SEARCH
THY VOLUME”

INFERNO