Chapter X: Part 10

Now imagine yourself for a moment a German trader, with more goods than you can sell in Germany, having either to shut up your factory and be ruined, or find a foreign market in Africa. Imagine yourself looking at the map of Africa. The entire Mediterranean coast, the pick of the basket, is English, Italian, French, and Spanish. The Hinterland, as you call it, is English and French. You cannot get in anywhere without going through the English Suez Canal or round the Cape to some remote place down south. Do you now understand what the German Kaiser meant when he complained that Germany had not been left “a place in the sun”? That hideous war of 1914-18 was at bottom a fight between the capitalists of England, France, and Italy on the one side, and those of Germany on the other, for command of the African markets. On top, of course, it was about other things: about Austria making the murder of the Archduke a pretext for subjugating Serbia; about Russia mobilizing against Austria to prevent this; about Germany being dragged into the Austro-Russian quarrel by her alliance with Austria; about France being dragged in on the other side by her alliance with Russia; about the German army having to make a desperate attempt to conquer the French army before the Russian troops could reach her; about England having to attack Germany because she was allied to France and Russia; and about the German army having taken the shortest cut through Belgium, not knowing that Belgium had a secret arrangement with England to have a British expedition sent to defend her if Germany invaded her. Of course the moment the first shot was fired all the Britons and Belgians and Germans and French and Austrians and Russians became enraged sheep, and imagined all sorts of romantic reasons for fighting, in addition to the solid reason that if Tommy and the Poilu and Ivan did not kill Hans and Fritz, Hans and Fritz would kill Tommy and the Poilu and Ivan. Before the killing had gone on very long, the Turks, the Bulgarians, the Japanese, the Americans, and other States that had no more to do with the first quarrel than you had, were in it and at it hammer and tongs. The whole world went mad, and never alluded to markets except when they ridiculed the Kaiser for his demand for a place in the sun.

Yet there would have been no war without the alliances; and the alliances could not have fought if they had not set up great armaments, especially the new German navy, to protect their foreign markets and frontiers. These armaments, created to produce a sense of security, had produced a sense of terror in which no nation dared go unarmed unless it was too small to have any chance against the great Powers, and could depend on their jealousy of oneanother to stave off a conquest by any one of them. Soon the nations that dared not go unarmed became more terrified still, and dared not go alone: they had to form alliances and go in twos and threes, like policemen in thieves’ quarters, Germany and Austria in one group and England, France, and Russia in another, both trying to induce Italy and Turkey and America to join them. Their differences were not about their own countries: the German navy was not built to bombard Portsmouth nor the British navy to bombard Bremerhaven. But when the German navy interfered in the north of Africa, which was just what it was built for, and the French and British navies frightened it off from that market in the sun, the capitalist diplomatists of these nations saw that the first thing to concentrate on was not the markets but the sinking of the German navy by the combined French and British navies (or vice versa) on any available pretext. And as you cannot have fleets fighting on the sea without armies fighting on the land to help them, the armies grew like the fleets; the Race of Armaments became as familiar as the Derby; all the natural and kindly sentiments of white civilized nations towards oneanother were changed into blustering terror, the parent of hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; and after all, when the explosive mixture blew up at last, and blew millions of us with it, it was not about the African markets, but about a comparatively trumpery quarrel between Austria and Serbia which the other Powers could have settled with the greatest ease, without the shedding of one drop of blood, if they had been on decent human terms with oneanother instead of on competitive capitalistic terms.

And please do not fail to note that whereas in the early days of Capitalism our capitalists did not compel us to fight for their markets with our own hands, but hired German serfs and British voluntary professional soldiers for the job, their wars have now become so colossal that every woman’s husband, father, son, brother, or sweetheart, if young and strong enough to carry a rifle, must go to the trenches as helplessly as cattle go to the slaughterhouse, abandoning wife and children, home and business, and renouncing normal morality and humanity, pretending all the time that such conduct is splendid and heroic and that his name will live for ever, though he may have the greatest horror of war, and be perfectly aware that the enemy’s soldiers, against whom he is defending his hearth, are in exactly the same predicament as himself, and would never dream of injuring him or his if the pressure of the drive for markets were removed from both.

I have purposely brought you to the question of war because your conscience must be sorely troubled about it. You have seen the men of Europe rise up and slaughter oneanother in the most horrible manner in millions. Your son, perhaps, has received a military cross for venturing into the air in a flying machine and dropping a bomb on a sleeping village, blowing several children into fragments, and mutilating or killing their parents. From a militarist, nationalist, or selfishly patriotic point of view such deeds may appear glorious exploits; but from the point of view of any universally valid morality: say from the point of view of a God who is the father of Englishmen and Germans, Frenchmen and Turks alike, they must seem outbursts of the most infernal wickedness. As such they have caused many of us to despair of human nature. A bitter cynicism has succeeded to transports of pugnacious hatred of which all but the incorrigibly thoughtless, and a few incurables who have been mentally disabled for life by the war fever, are now heartily ashamed. I can hardly believe that you have escaped your share of this crushing disillusion. If you are human as well as intelligent you must feel about your species very much as the King of Brobdingnag did when he took Gulliver in his hand as a child takes a tin soldier, and heard his boastful patriotic discourse about the glories of military history.

Perhaps I can console you a little. If you will look at the business in the light of what we have just been studying I think you will see that the fault lay not so much in our characters as in the capitalist system which we had allowed to dominate our lives until it became a sort of blind monster which neither we nor the capitalists could control. It is absurd to pretend that the young men of Europe ever wanted to hunt each other into holes in the ground and throw bombs into the holes to disembowel oneanother, or to have to hide in those holes themselves, eaten with lice and sickened by the decay of the unburied, in unutterable discomfort, boredom, and occasionally acute terror, or that any woman ever wanted to put on her best Sunday clothes and be gratified at the honor done to her son for killing some other woman’s babies. The capitalists and their papers try to persuade themselves and us that we are like that and always will be, in spite of all the Christmas cards and Leagues of Nations. It is not a bit true. The staggering fact about all these horrors was that we found ourselves compelled to do them in spite of the fact that they were so unintended by us, and so repugnant and dreadful to us that, when at last the war suddenly stopped, our heroic pretences dropped from us like blown-off hats, and we danced in the streets for weeks, mad with joy, until the police had to stop us to restore the necessary traffic. We still celebrate, by two minutes’ national silence, not the day on which the glorious war broke out, but the day on which the horrible thing came to an end. Not the victory, which we have thrown away by abusing it as helplessly as we fought for it, but the Armistice, the Cessation, the stoppage of the Red Cross vans from the terminuses of the Channel railways with their heartbreaking loads of mutilated men, was what we danced for so wildly and pitifully. If ever there was anything made clear in the world it was that we were no more directly guilty of the war than we were guilty of the earthquake of Tokio. We and the French and the Germans and the Turks and the rest found ourselves conscripted for an appalling slaughtering match, ruinous to ourselves, ruinous to civilization, and so dreaded by the capitalists themselves that it was only by an extraordinary legal suspension of all financial obligations (called the Moratorium) that the City was induced to face it. The attempt to fight out the war with volunteers failed: there were not enough. The rest went because they were forced to go, and fought because they were forced to fight. The women let them go partly because they could not help themselves, partly because they were just as pugnacious as the men, partly because they read the papers (which were not allowed to tell them the truth), and partly because most of them were so poor that they grasped at the allowances which left most of them better off with their husbands in the trenches than they had ever been with their husbands at home.

How had they got into this position? Simply by the original sin of allowing their countries to be moved and governed and fed and clothed by the pursuit of profit for capitalists instead of by the pursuit of righteous prosperity for “all people that on earth do dwell”. The first ship that went to Africa to sell things to the natives at more than cost price because there was no sale for them at home began not only this war, but the other and worse wars that will follow it if we persist in depending on Capitalism for our livelihood and our morals. All these monstrous evils begin in a small and apparently harmless way. It is not too much to say that when a nation, having five shillings to divide-up, gives four to Fanny and one to Sarah instead of giving half a crown to each and seeing that she earns it, it sows the seed of all the evils that now make thoughtful and farseeing men speak of our capitalistic civilization as a disease instead of a blessing.

41

THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

Do not, however, disparage foreign trade. There is nothing wrong with foreign trade as such. We could have no gold without foreign trade; and gold has all sorts of uses and all sorts of beauties. I will not add that we could have no tea, because I happen to think that we should be better without this insidious Chinese stimulant. It is safer and probably healthier for a nation to live on the food and drink it can itself produce, as the Esquimaux manage to do under much harder conditions. But there are many necessaries of a high civilization that nations cannot find within their own boundaries, and must buy from oneanother. We must trade and travel and come to know oneanother all over the habitable globe. We have to make international institutions as well as national ones, beginning with Trading Treaties and Postal Conventions and Copyright Conventions, and going on to the Leagues of Nations. The necessities of travelling and trade, and the common interest of all nations in the works and discoveries of art, literature, and science, have forced them to make international agreements and treaties with oneanother which are making an end of “keeping ourselves to ourselves”, and throwing half bricks at foreigners and strangers. Honest foreign trade would never have got us into trouble.

Neither is the combination of little States in great Federations and Commonwealths undesirable: on the contrary, the fewer frontiers the better. The establishment of law and order in uncivilized places should not have made us hated there: it should have made us popular; and it often did--at first. The annexation of other countries under our flag, when it was really needed, should have been a welcome privilege and a strengthening partnership for the inhabitants of the annexed regions. Indeed we have always pretended that this was actually the case, and that we were in foreign countries for the good of the inhabitants and not for our own sake. Unfortunately we never could make these pretensions good in the long run. However noble the aspirations of our Imperialist idealists might be, our capitalist traders were there to make as much profit out of the inhabitants as they could, and for no other purpose. They had abandoned their own country because there was no more profit to be made there, or not so much; and it is not to be expected that they would become idealistically disinterested the moment they landed on foreign shores. They stigmatized the Stay-at-homes, the anti-Expansionists, the Little-Englanders, as friends of every country but their own; but they themselves were the enemies of every country, including their own, where there was a sweatable laborer to make dividends for them. They pretended that the civilization of the annexed country was “the white man’s burden”, and posed as weary Titans reluctantly shouldering the public work of other nations as a duty imposed on them by Providence; but when the natives, having been duly civilized, declared that they were now quite ready to govern themselves, the capitalists held on to their markets as an eagle holds on to its prey, and, throwing off their apostolic mask, defended their annexations with fire and sword. They said they would fight to the last drop of their blood for “the integrity of the Empire”; and they did in fact pay many thousands of hungry men to fight to that extremity. In spite of them half of North America broke loose, after a war which left a volcano of hatred that is still smouldering and winning Chicago elections after a century of American independence. Roman Catholic Ireland, South Africa, and Egypt have extorted self-government from us. India is doing the same. But they do not thank us for it, knowing how loth our Capitalism was to let them go.

On the other hand look at Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We did not dare coerce them after our failure in North America. We provide a costly fleet gratuitously to protect their shores from invasion. We give them preferences in trade whilst allowing them to set up heavy protective duties against us. We allow them to be represented at international congresses as if they were independent nations. We even allow them access to the King independently of the London Cabinet. The result is that they hang on to us with tyrannical devotion, waving the Union Jack as enthusiastically as the Americans wave the Stars and Stripes. And this is not because they are of our own race. The Americans were that; yet they broke away; so were the Irish and their leaders. The French Canadians, who are of the same race with us only in the sense that we all belong to the human race, cling to us just as hard. They all follow us to war so boldly that we begin to have misgivings as to whether someday they may not make us follow them to war. The last land to strike for independence of the British Empire may be Protestant England herself, with Ulster and Scotland for allies, and the Irish Free State heading her Imperialist opponents.

But Capitalism can be depended on to spoil all these reconciliations and loyalties. True, we no longer exploit colonies capitalistically: we allow them to do it for themselves, and to call the process self-government. Whilst we persisted in governing them they blamed us for all the evils Capitalism brought upon them; and they finally refused to endure our government. When we left them to govern themselves they became less and less hostile to us. But the change always impoverishes them, and leaves them in comparative disorder. The capitalistic evils for which they blamed us still oppress them. Their self-government is more tyrannical than our alien government ever dared to be. Their new relation to the Imperial State becomes more dangerously strained than the old relation, precisely as the relation of England to Germany was more dangerously strained in 1913 than the relation of England to Ireland. The most liberal allowance of self-government cannot reconcile people as long as their capitalists are competing for markets. Nationalism may make Frenchmen and Englishmen, Englishmen and Irishmen, savage enemies when it is infringed. Frenchmen and Irishmen laid their own countries waste to get rid of English rule. But Capitalism makes all men enemies all the time without distinction of race, color, or creed. When all the nations have freed themselves Capitalism will make them fight more furiously than ever, if we are fools enough to let it.

Have you ever seen the curiosity called a Prince Rupert’s Drop? It is a bead of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you break off the tiniest corner the whole bead flies violently to bits. Europe was like that in 1914. A handful of people in Serbia committed a murder, and the next moment half Europe was murdering the other half. This frightful condition of internal strain and instability was not set up by human nature: it was, I repeat, intensely repugnant to human nature, being a condition of chronic terror that at last became unbearable, like that of a woman who commits suicide because she can no longer endure the dread of death. It was set up by Capitalism. Capitalism, you will say, is at bottom nothing but covetousness; and covetousness is human nature. That is true; but covetousness is not the whole of human nature; it is only a part, and one that vanishes when it is satisfied, like hunger after a meal, up to which point it is wholesome and necessary. Under Capitalism it becomes a dread of poverty and slavery, which are neither wholesome nor necessary. And, as we have just seen, capital is carried by its own nature beyond the control of both human covetousness and human conscience, marching on blindly and automatically, until we find on the one hand the masses of mankind condemned to poverty relieved only by horrible paroxysms of bloodshed, and on the other a handful of hypertrophied capitalists gasping under the load of their growing millions, and giving it away in heaps in a desperate attempt, partly to get rid of it without being locked up as madmen for throwing it into the sea, and partly to undo, by founding Rockefeller institutes and Carnegie libraries, and hospitals and universities and schools and churches, the effects of the welter of ignorance and poverty produced by the system under which it has accumulated on their hands. To call these unfortunate billionaires monsters of covetousness in the face of their wild disgorgings (to say nothing of their very ordinary portraits) is silly. They are rather to be compared to the sorcerer’s apprentice who called up a demon to fetch a drink for him, and, not knowing the spell for stopping him when he had brought enough, was drowned in an ocean of wine.

42

HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY

I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to little familiar things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.

There was a time when pinmakers could buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to market or to your door and sell it to you. They had to know three trades: buying, making, and selling; and the making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for a farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman’s dress allowance was called pin money.

By the end of the eighteenth century Adam Smith boasted that it took eighteen men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pinmakers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilization when its effect was so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly five thousand pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence, and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that “wealth accumulates, and men decay”.

Nowadays Adam Smith’s eighteen men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The eighteen flesh-and-blood machines are replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent and skilful and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal a pin.

Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old ways; for if the saving of time by modern machinery were equally divided among us, it would set us all free for higher work than pinmaking or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that pins are now made by men and women who cannot make anything by themselves, and could not arrange between themselves to make anything even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day’s work until it has all been arranged for them by their employers, who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker’s directions.

The same is true of clothes. Formerly the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep-shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are as likely as not to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at a shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes.

Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is from twenty to fifty years out of date, and unpractical at that. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it: what we need is a cinema to take our minds off it and feed our imagination.

It is a funny place, this world of Capitalism, with its astonishing spread of ignorance and helplessness, boasting all the time of its spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive; but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.

Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of Capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realize that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.

43

DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW

You must not conclude from what I have just said that I grudge the people their amusements. I have made most of my money by amusing them. I recognize more clearly than most people that not only does all work and no play make Jill a dull girl, but that she works so that she may be able to enjoy life as well as to keep herself from dying of hunger and exposure. She wants, and needs, leisure as well as wages. But breadwinning must come before charabancs and cinemas. I have the strongest sympathy, as I daresay you have, with the French gentleman who said that if he could have the luxuries of life he could do without the necessities; but unfortunately Nature does not share our sympathy, and ruthlessly puts breadwinning first on pain of death. The French gentleman is less important than the women who are asking for an eight-hour working day, because, though what they are really asking for is for a few hours more leisure when they have rested and slept, cooked and fed and washed up, yet they know that leisure must be worked for, and that no woman can shirk her share of the work except by putting it on some other woman and cutting short _her_ leisure.

Therefore when I say that Capitalism has reduced our people to a condition of abject helplessness and ignorance in their productive capacity as workers, you cannot reassure me by pointing out that factory girls are no fools when it comes to gossiping and amusing themselves; that they are resourceful enough to learn lip reading in the weaving-sheds, where the banging of the looms makes it impossible to hear each other speak; that their dances and charabanc excursions and whist drives and dressing and wireless concerts stimulate and cultivate them to an extent unknown to their grandmothers; that they consume frightful quantities of confectionery; and that they limit their families to avoid too much mothering. But all this is consumption, not production. When they are engaged in producing these amusements: when they take the money for the tickets at the pay-boxes, or do some scrap of the work of making a charabanc, or wind the wire on a coil for broadcasting, they are mere machines, taking part in a routine without knowing what came before or what is to follow.

In giving all the work to one class and all the leisure to another as far as the law will let it, the Capitalist system disables the rich as completely as the poor. By letting their land and hiring out their spare money (capital) to others, they can have plenty of food and fun without lifting their little fingers. Their agents collect the rent for the land, and lodge it in the bank for them. The companies which have hired their spare money lodge the half-yearly hire (dividends) in the same way. Bismarck said of them that they had only to take a pair of scissors and cut off a coupon; but he was wrong: the bank does even that for them; so that all they have to do is to sign the cheques with which they pay for everything. They need do nothing but amuse themselves; and they would get their incomes just the same if they did not do even that. They can only plead that their ancestors worked productively, as if everybody’s ancestors had not worked productively, or as if this were any excuse for their not following their ancestors’ excellent example. We cannot live on the virtues of our grandmothers. They may have farmed their own land, and invented the ways in which their spare money was applied to the land to make them richer; but when their successors found that all this trouble would be taken for them by others, they simply let the land and put out their spare money for hire (invested it).

Some of our great landholders inherit their land from feudal times, when there were no factories nor railways, and when towns were so small that they were walled in as gardens are now. In those days the landholders, with the king at their head, had to raise armies and defend the country at their own cost. They had to make the laws and administer them, doing military work, police work, and government work of all sorts. Henry IV, who died of overwork, found to his cost how true it was in those days that the greatest among us must be servant to all the rest. Nowadays it is the other way about: the greatest is she to whom all the rest are servants. All the chores and duties of the feudal barons are done by paid officials. In country places they may still sit on the Bench as unpaid magistrates; and there remains the tradition that military service as officers is proper for their sons. A few of them, with the help of solicitors and agents, manage the estates on which they actually live, or allow their wives to do it. But these are only vestiges of a bygone order, maintained mostly by rich purchasers of estates who are willing to take a little trouble to be ranked as country gentlemen and county ladies. There are always newly enriched folk who have this vanity for a while, and will buy the estate of a real country gentleman to take on his position in the country. But at any moment our landed gentry, whether they are so by descent or purchase, can sell their country houses and parks, and live anywhere they please in the civilized world without any public duties or responsibilities. Sooner or later they all do so, thus breaking the only link that binds them to the old feudal aristocracy save their names and titles. For all the purposes of the real world of today there is no longer a feudal aristocracy: it is merged in the industrial capitalist class, with which it associates and intermarries without distinction, money making up for everything. If it be still necessary to call the rich an ocracy of any kind, they must be called a plutocracy, in which the oldest ducal estate and the newest fortune made in business are only forms of capital, imposing no public duties on the owner.

Now this state of things may seem extremely jolly for the plutocracy from the point of view of those who are so overworked and underamused that they can imagine nothing better than a life that is one long holiday; but it has the disadvantage of making the plutocrats as helpless as babies when they are left to earn their own living. You know that there is nothing more pitiable on earth within the limits of good health than born ladies and gentlemen suddenly losing their property. But have you considered that they would be equally pitiable if their property were thrown on their own hands to make what they could of it? They would not know how to farm their lands or to work their mines and railways or to sail their ships. They would perish surrounded by what Dr Johnson called “the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice”. Without the hungry they would have to say “I cannot dig: to beg (even if I knew how) I am ashamed”. The hungry could do without them, and be very much the better for it; but they could not do without the hungry.

Yet most of the hungry, left to themselves, would be quite as helpless as the plutocrats. Take the case of a housemaid, familiar to the intelligent lady who can afford to keep one. A woman may be a very good housemaid; but you have to provide the house for her and manage the house before she can set to work. Many excellent housemaids, when they marry, make a poor enough job of their own housekeeping. Ask them to manage a big hotel, which employs dozens of housemaids, and they will think you are laughing at them: you might as well ask the porter at the Bank of England to manage the bank. A bricklayer may be a very good bricklayer; but he cannot build a house nor even make the bricks he lays. Any laborer can lay a plank across a stream, or place a row of stepping-stones in it; but just ask him to build a bridge, whether it be the simplest sort of canal bridge or a gigantic construction like the Forth Bridge! You might as well ask your baby to make its cot and knit its jumper, or your cook to design and construct a kitchen range and water supply.

This helplessness gets more and more complete as civilization advances. In villages you may still find carpenters and blacksmiths who can make things. They can even choose and buy their materials, and then sell the finished article. But in the cities on which our existence now depends you find multitudes of workers and plutocrats who cannot make anything; do not know how anything is made; and are so inept at buying and selling that without fixed-price-shops they would perish.

44

THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE

And now, if the landlords and capitalists can neither make anything nor even tell others how to make it; and if the workers can do nothing until they are told what to do, how does the world get on? There must be some third class standing between the propertied class on the one hand and the propertyless class on the other, to lease the land and hire the capital and tell the workers what to do with them.

There is. You can see for yourself that there is a middle class which does all the managing and directing and deciding work of the nation, besides carrying on the learned and literary and artistic professions. Let us consider how this class arose, and how it is continually recruited from the capitalist families.

The capitalists do something more than merely own. They marry and have children. Now an income which is comfortable for two people may not be enough for three or four children in addition, to say nothing of possibly twice or thrice that number. And when the three or four children grow up and marry and have three or four children each, what meant riches for the grandparents may mean poverty for the grandchildren.

To avoid this, propertied families may arrange that only the eldest son shall inherit the property, leaving the younger sons to shift for themselves, and the daughters to marry men of property if they can. This is called primogeniture. Until 1926 it was the law of the land in England when the owner of a landed estate died without leaving a will to the contrary. Where there is no such law, and all the children inherit equal shares of the parents’ property, as they do among the peasant proprietors in France, the family must come to an arrangement of the same kind between themselves, or else sell the property and leave its owners with a few pounds each that will not last them very long. Therefore they almost always do agree that the younger children shall live by working like the hungry, whilst the eldest keeps the farm and cultivates it. This cannot be done when the property is not land but capital, and all the members of the family are living on the interest of hired out spare money. Parents may make wills leaving all of it or most of it to one son; but they do not do this as a rule; and sooner or later the property gets divided and divided among children and other next-of-kin until the inheritors cannot live on their shares.

But please remark that the younger sons who are thus thrown on the world to earn their living have the tastes and habits and speech and appearance and education of rich men. They are well connected, as we say. Their near relations may be peers. Some of them have been schooled at Eton and Harrow, and have taken degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. Others have less distinguished connections. Their parents or grandparents may have made money in business; and they may have gone to the big city schools, or to day schools, instead of to Eton, and either to one of the new democratic universities or to no university at all. Their most important relative may be a mayor or alderman. But they are educated at secondary as distinguished from elementary schools; and though not what they themselves call great swells, they have the manners and appearance and speech and habits of the capitalist class, are described as gentlemen, and politely addressed by letter as Esquires instead of plain Misters.

All these propertyless people who have the ways and the culture of propertied ones have to live by their wits. They go into the army and navy as officers, or into the upper grades of the civil service. They become clergymen, doctors, lawyers, authors, actors, painters, sculptors, architects, schoolmasters, university professors, astronomers and the like, forming what we call the professional class. They are treated with special respect socially; but they see successful men of business, inferior to themselves in knowledge, talent, character, and public spirit, making much larger incomes. The highest sorts of mental work are often so unremunerative that it is impossible to make a living by practising them commercially. Spinoza lived by grinding lenses, and Rousseau by copying music. Einstein lives by professorships. Newton lived, not by discovering gravitation and measuring fluxions, but by acting as Master of the Mint, which other men could have done as well. Even when a profession is comparatively lucrative and popular, its gains are restricted by the fact that the work must all be done by the practitioner’s own hand; for a surgeon cannot employ a thousand subordinates to deal with a million patients as a soap king deals with a million customers, nor the President of the Royal Academy hand over a two thousand guinea portrait sitter to his secretary. The years of professional success are usually preceded by a long struggle with scanty means. I myself am held to be a conspicuous example of success in the most lucrative branch of the literary profession; but until I was thirty I could not make even a bare living by my pen. At thirty-eight I thought myself passing rich on six or seven pounds a week; and even now, when I am seventy, and have achieved all that can be achieved commercially at my job, I see in the paper every day, under the heading Wills and Bequests, that the widow of some successful man of business, wholly unknown to fame, has died leaving a fortune which reduces my gains to insignificance.

The consequence is that professional men and civil servants, when they are not incurable old-fashioned snobs who regard trade as beneath the dignity of their family, and when their sons have no overwhelming aptitude for one or other of the professions, advise them strongly to go in for business. The man of business may not have much chance of a public statue unless he pays for it and presents it to his native town with a spacious public park attached; and his occupation may be a dry one in itself, however exciting the prospect of pocketing more and more money may make it. But he can make profits not only out of his work, like the surgeon or painter, but out of the work of thousands of others as well. And his work is not necessarily dry: modern businesses tend to become more interesting and important, and even more scientific, than average professional work. Their activities are much more varied: in fact modern commercial magnates, when they control a dozen different businesses, become better informed and better developed mentally than the rank and file of the professions. What is more, they are learning to snap up the ablest university scholars and civil servants, and take them into partnership not as office managers but as thinkers, diplomatists, and commercial scientists. It is in industrially undeveloped countries that professional men rank as an aristocracy of learning and intellect: in European centres today commercial society is a more effective reserve of culture than professional society. When the professional man or the public servant tells his son that a berth in the civil service is a blind alley, or doctoring at the call of the night bell a dog’s life, contrasting them with the unlimited prospects and the infinite scope for personal initiative in business, he is recommending the young man to improve on his father’s condition instead of starting him on the downward path socially.

And what is business in the lump? It is hiring land from landlords and spare money from capitalists, and employing the hungry to make enough money out of them day by day to pay the wages for their keep and bring in a profit as well. Astonishing fortunes can be made in this way by men and women with the necessary ability and decision who have the particular sort of pecuniary keenness and pertinacity that business requires. Even more staggering profits are made sometimes by accident, the business man hitting by chance on something new that the public happens to fancy. Millions are made by medicines which injure people’s health instead of improving it (read Tono-Bungay), and hair restorers that leave the buyer as bald as before. Articles that nobody needs, and sham pleasures that give only fatigue and boredom at extravagant prices, are advertized and advertized until people are beglamored into thinking they cannot do without them.

But the main scope in business is for honorable and useful activity, from growing food and building houses and making clothes, or manufacturing spades and sewing-machines, to laying cables round the world, and building giant ships to turn the ocean or the air into a highway. The planning and management and ordering of this gives employment to able and energetic men who have no property, but have the education and social address of the propertied class. The educated who are neither able nor energetic, and who have no professions, find employment as agents or clerks carrying out the routine and keeping the accounts of businesses which the able ones have established and are directing. And the women of their class are forced to live by marrying them.

In this way we get, between the propertied class and the hungry mass, a middle class which acts as a sort of Providence to both of them. It cultivates the land and employs the capital of the property holders, paying them the rent of their lands and the hire of their spare money without asking them to lift a finger, and giving the hungry wages to live on without asking them to think or decide or know or do anything except their own little bit of the job in hand. The hungry have neither to buy the material nor to sell the product, neither to organize the service nor find the customer. Like children they are told what to do, and fed and lodged and clothed whilst they are doing it, not always very handsomely perhaps; but at worst they are kept alive long enough to produce a fresh set of hungry ones to replace them when they are worn out.

There are always a few cases in which this management is done, not by descendants of propertied folk, but by men and women sprung from the hungriest of the hungry. These are the geniuses who know most of the things that other people have to be taught, and who educate themselves as far as they need any education. But there are so few of them that they need not be taken into account. In great social questions we are dealing with the abilities of ordinary citizens: that is, the abilities we can depend on everyone except invalids and idiots possessing, and not with what one man or woman in ten thousand can do. In spite of several cases in which persons born in poverty and ignorance have risen to make vast fortunes, to become famous as philosophers, discoverers, authors, and even rulers of kingdoms, to say nothing of saints and martyrs, we may take it that business and the professions are closed to those who cannot read and write, travel and keep accounts, besides dressing, speaking, behaving, and handling and spending money more or less in the manner of the propertied classes.

This is another way of saying that until about fifty years ago the great mass of our people working for weekly wages were as completely shut out from the professions and from business as if there had been a law forbidding them on pain of death to attempt to enter them. I remember wondering when I was a lad at a man who was in my father’s employment as a miller. He could neither read nor write nor cipher (that is, do sums on paper); but his natural faculty for calculation was so great that he could solve instantly all the arithmetical problems that arose in the course of his work: for instance, if it were a question of so many sacks of flour at so much a sack, he could tell you the answer straight off without thinking, which was more than my father or his clerks could do. But because he did not know his alphabet, and could not put pen to paper, and had not the speech and manners and habits and dress without which he would not have been admitted into the company of merchants and manufacturers, or of lawyers, doctors, and clergymen, he lived and died a poor employee, without the slightest chance of rising into the middle class, or the faintest pretension to social equality with my father. And my father, though he was propertyless, and worked as a middle class civil servant and subsequently as a merchant, was not at all proud of being a member of the middle class: on the contrary, he resented that description, holding on to his connexion with the propertied class as a younger son of many former younger sons, and therefore, though unfortunately reduced to living not very successfully by his wits, a man of family and a gentleman.

But this was sixty years ago. Since then we have established Communism in education. If my father’s miller were a boy now, he would go to school for nine years, whether his parents liked it or not, at the expense of the whole community; and his mathematical gift would enable him to win a scholarship that would take him on to a secondary school, and another scholarship there that would take him to the university and qualify him for a profession. At the very least he would become an accountant, even were it only as a bookkeeper or clerk. In any case he would be qualified for middle class employment and pass into that class.