Chapter XVII: Part 17

It is already a well-established method of Capitalism to ask the Government to provide for some private enterprise on the ground of its public utility. Some good has been done in this way: for instance, some of our modern garden cities and suburbs could not have been built if the companies that built them had not been enabled, under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, to borrow a large share of their capital from the Government on the understanding that the shareholders were poor people holding no more than £200 capital apiece. But this limitation is quite illusory, because, though the companies may not issue more than £200 in shares to any individual, they may and do borrow unlimited sums by creating what is called Loan Stock; and the very same person who is not allowed to have more than £200 in shares may have two hundred millions in Loan Stock if the company can use them. Consequently these garden cities, which are most commendable enterprises in their way, are nevertheless the property of rich capitalists. As I hold a good deal of stock in them myself I am tempted to claim that their owners are specially philanthropic and public-spirited men, who have voluntarily invested their capital where it will do the most good and not where it will make the most profit for them; but they are not immortal; and we have no guarantee that their heirs will inherit their disinterestedness. Meanwhile the fact remains that they have built up their property largely with public money: that is, by money raised by taxing the rest of the community, and that this does not make the nation the owner of the garden city, nor even a shareholder in it. The Government is simply a creditor who will finally be paid off, leaving the cities in the hands of their capitalist proprietors. The tenants, though led to expect a share in the surplus profits of the city, find such profits practically always applied to extending the enterprise for the benefit of fresh investors. The garden cities and suburbs are an enormous improvement on the manufacturing towns produced by unaided private enterprise; but as they do not pay their proprietors any better than slum property, nor indeed as well, it is quite possible that this consideration may induce the future owners to abolish their open spaces and overcrowd them with houses until they are slums. To guarantee the permanence of the improvement it would be safer for the Government to buy out the shareholders than for the shareholders to pay off the Government, though even that would fail if the Government acted on Capitalist principles by selling the cities to the highest bidders.

A more questionable development of this exploitation of the State by Capitalism and Trade Unionism is the subsidy of £10,000,000 paid by the Government to the coalowners in 1925 to avoid a strike. The coal miners said they would not work unless they got such and such wages. The employers vowed they could not afford to keep their mines open unless the men would accept less; and a great press campaign was set up to persuade us that the country was on the verge of ruin through excessive wages when as a matter of fact the country was in a condition that at many earlier periods would have been described as cheerfully prosperous. Finally the Government, to avert a strike which would have paralyzed the main industries of the country, had either to make up out of the taxes the wages offered by the employers to the wages demanded by the men, or else nationalize the mines. Being a Capitalist Government, pledged not to nationalize anything, it chose to make up the wages out of the taxes. When the £10,000,000 was exhausted, the trouble began again. The Government refused to renew the subsidy; the employers refused to go on without it unless the miners worked eight hours a day instead of seven; the miners refused to work more or take less; there was a big strike, in which the workers in several other industries at first took part “sympathetically” until they realized that by using up the funds of the Trade Unions on strike pay they were hindering the miners instead of helping them; and many respectable people were, as usual on such occasions, frightened out of their wits and into the belief that the country was on the verge of revolution. And there was this excuse for them: that under fully-developed Capitalism civilization is always on the verge of revolution. We live as in a villa on Vesuvius.

During the strike the taxpayer was no longer exploited by the owners; but the ratepayer was exploited by the workers. A man on strike has no right to outdoor relief; but his wife and children have. Consequently a married miner with two children could depend on receiving a pound a week at the expense of the ratepayers whilst he was refusing to work. This development of parochial Communism really knocks the bottom out of the Capitalist system, which depends on the ruthless compulsion of the proletariat to work on pain of starvation or imprisonment under detestable conditions in the workhouse. Thus you have had the Government first giving outdoor relief (the ten million subsidy) to the owners at the expense of the taxpayers, and then the local authorities giving outdoor relief to the proletariat at the expense of the ratepayers, the Government being manned mostly by capitalists and the local authorities by proletarians.

It was in the proletarian quarters of London, notably in Poplar, that the Poor Law Guardians first claimed the right to give outdoor relief at full subsistence rates to all unemployed persons, thereby freeing their proletarian constituents from “the lash of starvation”, and enabling them to hold out for the highest wages their trades could afford. The mining districts followed suit during the coal strike of 1926. This right was contested by the Government, which tried to supplant the parochial authorities by the central Ministry of Health. The Ministry, through the auditors of public accounts, surcharged the Guardians with the part of the outdoor relief which they considered excessive; but as the Guardians could not have paid the surcharge even if the proceedings taken against them had not failed, the Government took the administration of the Poor Law into its own hands, and passed Acts to confirm its powers to do so. This was essentially an attempt by the Capitalist central Government to recover the weapon of starvation which the proletarian local authorities had taken out of the owners’ hands. But the day had gone by for the ultra-capitalist relief rules of the nineteenth century, when, as I well recollect, the Registrar-General’s returns of the causes of the deaths during the year always included starvation as a matter of course. The lowest scale of relief which the Government ventured to propose would have seemed ruinously extravagant and demoralizing to the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys denounced by Dickens in 1854.

As to the demoralization, they would not have been very far wrong. If mine-owners, or any other sort of owners, find that when they get into difficulties through being lazy, or ignorant, or too grasping, or behind the times, or all four, they can induce the Government to confiscate the taxpayers’ incomes for subsidies to get them out of their difficulties, they will go from bad to worse. If miners, or any other sort of workers, find that the local authorities will confiscate the incomes of the ratepayers to feed them when they are idle, their incentive to pay their way by their labor will be, to say the least, perceptibly slackened. Yet it is no use simply refusing to make these confiscations. If the nation will not take its industries out of the hands of private owners it must enable them to carry them on, whether they can make them pay or not. If the owners will not pay subsistence wages the nation must; for it cannot afford to have its children undernourished and its civil and military strength weakened, though it was fool enough to think it could in Queen Victoria’s time. Subsidies and doles are demoralizing, both for employers and proletarians; but they stave off Socialism, which people seem to consider worse than pauperized insolvency, Heaven knows why!

Still, governments need not be so shamelessly unbusinesslike as they are when subsidies are in question. The subsidizing habit was acquired by the British Government during the war, when certain firms had to be kept going at all costs, profit or no profit, because their activities were indispensable. It was against all Capitalist principles; but in war economic principles are thrown to the wind like Christian principles; and the habits of war are not cured instantly by armistices. In 1925, when the Government was easily blackmailed into paying the mine-owners ten millions of the money of the general taxpayer (your money and mine), it might at least have secured for us an equivalent interest in the mines. It might have obliged the owners to mortgage their property to the nation for the means to carry on, as they would have had to do if they had raised the money in the ordinary commercial way. As to the miners, they felt no responsibility, because, as the owners bought labor in the market exactly as they bought pit props, there was no more excuse for asking the miners to admit indebtedness for the subsidy than the dealers in pit props. On every principle of Capitalism the Government should either have refused to interfere, and have let the comparatively barren mines which could not afford to pay the standard wage for the standard working day go smash, or else it should have advanced the millions by way of mortgage, not on the worthless security of the defaulting mines, but on that of all the coal mines, good and bad. The interest on the mortgage would in that case have been paid to the nation by the good mines, which would thus have been compelled to make up the deficits of the bad ones; and if the interest had not been paid, the Government could finally have nationalized the mines by simple foreclosure instead of by purchase.

But capitalists are by no means in favor of having Capitalist principles applied to themselves in their dealings with the State. Besides, why should the fortunate owners of solvent mines subsidize the owners of insolvent ones? If the Government chooses to subsidize bad mines, let it be content with the security of the bad mines. It ended in the Government making the owners a present of the ten millions. The owners had to pass it on to the miners as wages: at least that was the idea; and it was more or less the fact also. But whether we regard it as a subsidy to the miners or to the owners or to both, it was none the less confiscated from the general taxpayer and handed as alms to favored persons.

The people who say that such subsidies are Socialistic, whether with the object of discrediting them or recommending them, are talking nonsense: they might as well say that the perpetual pensions conferred by Charles II on his illegitimate children were Socialistic. They are frank exploitations of the taxpayer by bankrupt Capitalism and its proletarian dependents. Socialist agitators, far from supporting such subsidies, will shout at you that you are paying part of the men’s wages whilst the mine-owners take all the profits; that if you will stand that, you will stand anything; that you are paying for nationalization and not getting it; that you are being saddled with a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the rich in addition to their rents, their dividends, and the doles they have left you to pay to their discarded employees; that the capitalists, having plundered everything else, land, capital, and labor, are now plundering the Treasury; that, not content with overcharging you for every article you buy, they are now taxing you through the Government collector; and that as they will have to hand over a share of what they take from you in this way as wages, the Trade Unions are taking good care to make the Labor Party support the subsidies in Parliament.

Meanwhile you hear from all quarters angry denunciations of Poplarism as a means by which the rate collector robs you of your possibly hardearned money, often to the tune of twentyfour shillings for every pound of the value of your house, to keep idle ablebodied laborers eating their heads off at a higher rate of expenditure than you, perhaps, can afford in your own house.

All this, with due allowance for platform rhetoric, is true. The attempt to maintain a failing system by subsidies plus Poplarism burns the candle at both ends, and makes straight for industrial bankruptcy. But you will not, if you are wise, waste your forces in resentful indignation. The capitalists are not making a conscious attempt to rob you. They are the flies on the wheel of their own system, which they understand as little as you did before we sat down to study it. All they know is that Trade Unionism is playing their own game against them with such success that more and more of the overcharges (to you) that formerly went to profit are now going to wages. They cry to the Government to save them, and it saves them (at your expense) partly because it is afraid of a big strike; partly because it wants to put off the alternative of nationalization as long as possible; partly because it has to consider the proletarian vote at the next general election; and mostly because it can think of nothing better to do in the rare moments when it has time to think at all. The British employers, the British Trade Unionists, and the British Government have no deep designs: so far it is just hand to mouth with them; and you need not waste any moral indignation on them. But please note the word British, thrice repeated in the last sentence, and also the words “so far”. The American employers and financiers are far more self-conscious than our business men and working men are; and the Americans are teaching our people their methods. Modern scientific discoveries have set them dreaming of enormously increased production; and they have found out that as the world depends on the people who work, whether with head or hand, they can by combining prevent idle and incapable owners of land and capital from getting too much of the increase. They know that they can neither realize their dream nor combine properly by using their own brains; and they are now paying large salaries to clever persons whose sole business is to think for them. Suppose you were the managing head of a big business, and that you were determined not to tolerate Trade Unionism among your workpeople, and therefore had to treat them well enough to prevent them feeling the want of a union. In England your firm would be called “a rat house”, in America simply a non-union house. Imagine yourself visited by a well-dressed lady or gentleman with the pleasant nonchalance of a person of proved and conscious ability and distinction. She (we will assume that she is a lady) has called to suggest that you should order all your workpeople to join the union of their trade, of which she is the pampered representative. You gasp, and would order her out if you dared; but how can one shew the door to a superior and perfectly self-confident person. She proceeds to explain whilst you are staring at her. She says it will be worth your while: that her union is prepared to put some new capital into your business, and that it will come to a friendly arrangement with you as to the various trade restrictions to which you so much object. She points out that if instead of working to increase the dividends of your idle shareholders you were just to give them what they are accustomed to expect, and use the rest of the profit for bettering the condition of the people who are doing the work (including yourself), the business would receive a fresh impulse, and you and all the really effective people in it make much more money. She suggests ways of doing it that you have never dreamt of. Can you see any reason except stupid conservatism for refusing such a proposal?

This is not a fancy picture. It has actually occurred in America as the result of the Trade Unions employing first-rate business brains to think for them, and not grudging them salaries equal to the wages of a dozen workmen. When English Trade Unions become Americanized as English big business is becoming Americanized they will do the same. Our big businesses are already picking out brainy champions from the universities and the public services to do just such jobs for them. Both big business and skilled labor will presently be managing their affairs scientifically, instead of dragging heavily and unimaginatively through the old ruts. And when this is accomplished they will enslave the unskilled, unorganized proletariat, including, as we have seen, the middle-class folk who have no aptitude for money making. They will enslave the Government. And they will do it mostly by the methods of Socialism, effecting such manifest improvements in the condition of the masses that it will be inhuman to stop them. The organized workers will live, not in slums, but in places like Port Sunlight, Bournville, and the Garden Cities. Employers like Mr Ford, Lord Leverhulme and Mr Cadbury will be the rule and not the exception; and the sense of helpless dependence on them will grow at the expense of individual adventurousness. The old communal cry of high rates and a healthy city will be replaced by Mr Ford’s cry of high wages and colossal profits.

Those profits are the snag in the stream of prosperity. If they are unequally distributed they will wreck the system that has produced them, and involve the nation in the catastrophe. In spite of all the apparent triumphs of increased business efficiency the Socialists will still have to insist on public control of distribution and equalization of income. Without that, capitalist big business, in league with the aristocracy of Trade Unionism, will control the Government for its private ends; and you may find it very difficult, as a voter, to distinguish between the genuine Socialism that changes private into public ownership of our industries, and the sham Socialism that confiscates the money of one set of citizens without compensation only to hand it over to another set, not to make our incomes more equal, but to give more to those who have already too much.

67

CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION

And now, learned lady reader (for by this time you know much more about the vital history and present social problems of your country and of the world than an average Capitalist Prime Minister), do you notice that in these ceaseless activities which keep all of us fed and clothed and lodged, and some of us even pampered, NOTHING STAYS PUT? Human society is like a glacier: it looks like an immovable and eternal field of ice; but it is really flowing like a river; and the only effect of its glassy rigidity is that its own unceasing movement splits it up into crevasses that make it frightfully dangerous to walk on, all the more as they are beautifully concealed by natural whitewash in the shape of snow. Your father’s bankruptcy, your husband’s, or your own may precipitate you at any moment into a little crevasse. A big one may suddenly swallow a whole empire, as three of them were swallowed in 1918. If, as is most likely, you have been brought up to believe that the world is a place of permanent governments, settled institutions, and unchangeable creeds in which all respectable people believe, to which they all conform, and which are unalterable because they are founded for all eternity on Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Ten Commandments, what you have gathered here of the continual and unexpected changes and topsy-turvy developments of our social order, the passing of power from one class to another, the changes of opinion by which what was applauded as prosperity and honor and piety at the beginning of the nineteenth century came to be execrated as greedy villainy at the end of it, and what were prosecuted as criminal conspiracies under George IV are legalized and privileged combinations, powerful in Parliament, under George V, may have driven you to ask, what is the use of your drudging through all these descriptions and explanations if by the time you have reached the end of the book everything will have changed? I can only assure you that the way to understand the changes that are going on is to understand the changes that have gone before, and warn you that many women have spoilt their whole lives and misled their children disastrously by not understanding them.

Besides, the things I have been describing have not passed wholly away. There are still old-fashioned noblemen who lord it over the countryside as their ancestors have done for hundreds of years, sometimes benevolently, sometimes driving the inhabitants out to make room for sheep or deer at their pleasure. There are still farmers, large and small. There are still many petty employers carrying on small businesses singly or in firms of two or three partners. There are still joint stock companies that have not been merged in Trusts. There are still multitudes of employees who belong to no Trade Union, and are as badly sweated as the woman who sat in unwomanly rags and sang the Song of the Shirt. There are still children and young persons who are cruelly over-worked in spite of the Acts of Parliament that reach only the factories and workshops. The world at large, though it contains London and Paris and New York, also contains primitive villages where gas, electric light, tap water and main drainage are as unknown as they were to King Alfred. Our famous universities and libraries and picture galleries are within travelling distance of tribes of savages and cannibals, and of barbarian empires. Thus you can see around you living examples of all the stages of the Capitalist System I have described. Indeed, if you come, or your parents came (like mine) from one of those families of more than a dozen children in the genteel younger-son class which were more common formerly than they are today, you are certain to have found, without going further than your parents, your brothers and sisters, your uncles and aunts, your first cousins, and perhaps yourself, examples of every phase of the conditions produced by Capitalism in that class during the last two centuries, to say nothing of the earlier half medieval phases in which most women, especially respectable women, are still belated.

Beside the Changing and the Changed stand the Not Yet Changed; and we have to deal with all three in our daily business. Until we know what has happened to the Changed we shall not understand what is going to happen to the Not Yet Changed, and may ourselves, with the best intentions, effect mischievous changes, or oppose and wreck beneficial ones. If we look for guidance to the articles in our party newspapers (all living on profiteers’ advertisements) or the speeches of party politicians, or the gossip of our politically ignorant and class-prejudiced neighbors and relatives, which is unfortunately just what most of us do, we are sure to be either misguided and corrupted or exasperated.

Take, as a warning, those adventures of Capitalism in pursuit of profits which I sketched for you in Chapter 37 and the few following ones. They are always described to you in books and newspapers as the history of the British race, or (in France) the French nation, or (in Germany or Italy) the grand old German or Latin stock, dauntlessly exercising its splendid virtues and talents in advancing civilization at home and establishing it among the heathen abroad. Capitalism can be made to look very well on paper. But beware of allowing your disillusion to disable you by plunging you into disgust and general cynical incredulity. Our thrilling columns of national self-praise and mutual admiration must not be dismissed as mere humbug. Without great discoverers and inventors and explorers, great organizers and engineers and soldiers, hardy and reckless sailors, great chemists and mathematicians, devoted missionaries and desperate adventurers, our capitalists would be no better off today than they would have remained in Greenland or Thibet. But the extraordinary men whose exploits have made the capitalists rich were not themselves capitalists. The best of them received little or no encouragement from capitalists, because there was seldom any prospect of immediate profit from their labors and adventures. Many of them were and are not only poor but persecuted. And when the time comes, mostly after their deaths, to bring their discoveries and conquests into everyday use, the work is done by the hungry ones: the capitalists providing only the spare food they have neither sown nor reaped, baked nor brewed, but only collected from the hungry as rent or interest, and appropriated under laws made by capitalist legislators for that purpose. British brains, British genius, British courage and resolution have made the great reputation of Britain, as the same qualities in other nations have made the other great national reputations; but the capitalists as such have provided neither brains, genius, courage, nor resolution. Their contribution has been the spare food on which the geniuses have lived; and this the capitalists did not produce: they only intercepted it during its transfer from the hungry ones who made it to the hungry ones who consumed it.

Note that I say the capitalists _as such_; for the accident of a person being both a capitalist and a genius may happen just as easily as the accident of being both a genius and a pauper. Nature takes no notice of money. It is not likely that a born capitalist (that is, the inheritor of a fortune) will be a genius, because it is not likely that anybody will be born a genius, the phenomenon being naturally rare; but it may happen to capitalists occasionally, just as it has happened to princes. Queen Elizabeth was able to tell her ministers that if they put her into the street without anything but her petticoat she could make her living with the best of them. At the same time Queen Mary of Scotland was proving that if she had been put into the street with a hundred millions of money and an army of fifty thousand men she would have made a mess of it all somehow and come to a bad end. But their being queens had nothing to do with that: it was their personal quality as women that made the difference. In the same way, when one born capitalist happens to be a genius and another a waster, the capital produces neither the ability nor the worthlessness. Take away their capital, and they remain just the same: double it, and you double neither their ability nor their imbecility. The stupidest person in the country may be the richest: the cleverest and greatest may not know where tomorrow’s dinner is to come from. I repeat, capitalists as such need no special ability, and lose nothing by the lack of it. If they seem able to feed Peter the Laborer it is only because they have taken the food from Paul the Farmer; and even this they have not done with their own hands: they have paid Matthew the Agent to do it, and had his salary from Mark the Shopkeeper. And when Peter is a navvy, Paul an engineer, Matthew the manager of a Trust, and Mark a banker, the situation remains essentially unchanged. Peter and Paul, Matthew and Mark, do all the work: the capitalist does nothing but take as much of what they make as she can without starving them (killing the goose that lays the golden eggs).

Therefore you may disregard both the Capitalist papers which claim all the glories of our history as the fruit of Capitalist virtue and talent, and the anti-Capitalist papers which ascribe all our history’s shames and disgraces to the greed of the capitalists. Waste neither your admiration nor your indignation. The more you understand the system, the better you will see that the most devout personal righteousness cannot evade it except by political changes which will rescue the whole nation from it.

But though the capitalist as such does nothing but invest her money, Capitalism does a great deal. When it has filled the home markets with all the common goods the people can afford to pay for out of their wages, and all the established fashionable luxuries the rich will buy, it must apply its fresh accumulations of spare money to more out-of-the-way and hazardous enterprises. It is then that Capitalism becomes adventurous and experimental; listens to the schemes of hungry men who are great inventors or chemists or engineers; and establishes new industries and services like telephones, motor charabancs, air services, wireless concerts, and so forth. It is then that it begins to consider the question of harbors, which, as we saw, it would not look at whilst there was still room for new distilleries. At the present moment an English company has undertaken to build a harbor at a cost of a million pounds for a Portuguese island in the Atlantic, and even to make it a free port (that is, charge no harbor dues) if the Government of the island lets it collect and keep the customs duties.

The capitalists, though they are very angry when the hungry ask for Government help of any kind, have no scruples about asking it for themselves. The railways ask the Government to guarantee their dividends; the air services ask for large sums from the Government to help them to maintain their aeroplanes and make money out of them; the coalowners and the miners between them extort subsidies from the Government by threatening a strike if they do not get it; and the Government, under the Trades Facilities Acts, guarantees loans to private capitalists without securing any share in their enterprises for the nation, which provides them with capital cheaply, but has to pay profiteering prices for their goods and services all the same. In the end there is hardly any conceivable enterprise that can be made to pay dividends that Capitalism will not undertake as long as it can find spare money; and when it cannot it is quite ready to extract money from the Government--that is, to take it forcibly from the people by taxes--by assuring everyone that the Government can do nothing itself for the people, who must always come to the capitalists to get it done for them in return for substantial profits, dividends, and rents. Its operations are so enormous that it alters the size and meaning of what we call our country. Trading companies of capitalists have induced the Government to give them charters under which they have seized large and populous islands like Borneo, whole empires like India, and great tracts of country like Rhodesia, governing them and maintaining armies in them for the purpose of making as much money out of them as possible. But they have taken care to hoist the British flag, and make use directly or indirectly, of the British army and navy at the cost of the British taxpayers to defend these conquests of theirs; and in the end the British Commonwealth has had to take over their responsibilities and add the islands and countries they have seized to what is called the British Empire, with the curious result, quite unintended by the British people, that the centre of the British Empire is now in the East instead of in Great Britain, and out of every hundred of our fellow subjects only eleven are whites, or even Christians. Thus Capitalism leads us into enterprises of all sorts, at home and abroad, over which we have no control, and for which we have no desire. The enterprises are not necessarily bad: some of them have turned out well; but the point is that Capitalism does not care whether they turn out well or ill for us provided they promise to bring in money to the shareholders. We never know what Capitalism will be up to next; and we never can believe a word its newspapers tell us about its doings when the truth seems likely to be unpopular.

It is hard to believe that you may wake up one morning, and learn from your newspaper that the Houses of Parliament and the King have moved to Constantinople or Baghdad or Zanzibar, and that this insignificant island is to be retained only as a meteorological station, a bird sanctuary, and a place of pilgrimage for American tourists. But if that did happen, what could you do? It would be a perfectly logical development of Capitalism. And it is no more impossible than the transfer of the mighty Roman empire from Rome to Constantinople was impossible. All you could do, if you wished to be in the fashion, or if your business or that of your husband could be conducted only in a great metropolitan centre, would be to go east after the King and Parliament, or west to America and cease to be a Briton.

You need not, however, pack up just yet. But what you really need do is rid your mind of the notion that mere Conservatism, in its general sense of a love for the old ways and institutions you were brought up with, will be of any avail against Capitalism. Capitalism, in its ceaseless search for investment, its absolute necessity for finding hungry men to eat its spare bread before it goes stale, breaks through every barrier, rushes every frontier, swallows every religion, levels every institution that obstructs it, and sets up any code of morals that facilitates it, as soullessly as it sets up banks and lays cables. And you must approve and conform, or be ruined, and perhaps imprisoned or executed.

68

THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM

Capitalism, then, keeps us in perpetual motion. Now motion is not a bad thing: it is life as opposed to stagnation, paralysis, and death. It is novelty as opposed to monotony; and novelty is so necessary to us that if you take the best thing within your reach (say the best food, the best music, the best book, the best state of mind, or the best anything that remains the same always), and if you stick to it long enough you will come to loathe it. Changeable women, for instance, are more endurable than monotonous ones, however unpleasant some of their changes may be: they are sometimes murdered but seldom deserted; and it is the ups and downs of married life that make it bearable. When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to live in a stationary one and do without change. Nobody who buys a motor car says “the slower the better”. Motion is delightful when we can control it, guide it, and stop it when it is taking us into danger.

Uncontrolled motion is terrible. Fancy yourself in a car which you do not know how to steer and cannot stop, with an inexhaustible supply of petrol in the tank, rushing along at fifty miles an hour on an island strewn with rocks and bounded by cliff precipices! That is what living under Capitalism feels like when you come to understand it. Capital is running away with us; and we know that it has always ended in the past by taking its passengers over the brink of the precipice at the foot of which are strewn the ruins of empires. The desperately pressing present problem for all governments is how to get control of this motion; make safe highways for it; and steer it along those highways. If only we could stop it whilst we sit down and think! But no: the car will not stop: on the contrary it goes faster and faster as capital accumulates in greater and greater quantities, and as we multiply our numbers. One statesman after another snatches at the wheel and tries his hand. Kings try their hands; dictators try their hands; democratic prime ministers try their hands; committees and Soviets try their hands; and we look hopefully to them for a moment, imagining that they have got control because they do it with an air of authority, and assure us that it will be all right if only we will sit quiet. But Capital runs away with them all; and we palpitate between relief when our ungovernable vehicle blunders into a happy valley, and despair when we hear the growl of the waves at the foot of the cliffs grow louder and louder instead of dying away in the distance. Blessed then are those who do not know and cannot think: to them life seems a joyride with a few disagreeable incidents that must be put up with. They sometimes make the best rulers, just as the best railway signalman is he who does not feel his responsibility enough to be frightened out of his wits by it. But in the long run civilization depends on our governments gaining an intelligent control of the forces that are running away with Capitalism; and for that an understanding of them is necessary. Mere character and energy, much as we admire them, are positively mischievous without intellect and knowledge.

Our present difficulty is that nobody understands except a few students whose books nobody else reads, or here and there a prophet crying in the wilderness and being either ignored by the press or belittled as a crank. Our rulers are full of the illusions of the money market, counting £5 a year as £100. Our voters have not got even so far as this, because nine out of ten of them, women or men, have no more experience of capital than a sheep has of a woollen mill, though the wool comes off its own back.

But between the government and the governed there is a very important difference. The governments do not know how to govern; but they know that government is necessary, and that it must be paid for. The voters regard government as a tyrannical interference with their personal liberty, and taxation as the plunder of the private citizen by the officials of a tyrannous state. Formerly this did not matter much, because the people had no votes. Queen Elizabeth, for instance, told the common people, and even the jurymen and the Knights of the Shires who formed the Parliament in her time, that affairs of State were not their business, and that it was the grossest presumption on their part to have any opinion of their own on such matters. If they attempted to argue with her she threw them into prison without the smallest hesitation. Yet even she could not extract money enough from them in taxes to follow up her political successes. She could barely hold her own by being quite right about the incompetence of the commoners and knights, and being herself the most competent person of her time. These two advantages made her independent of the standing armies by which other despots maintained themselves. She could depend on the loyalty of her people because she was able, as we say, to deliver the goods. When her successors attempted to be equally despotic without being able to deliver the goods, one of them was beheaded, and the other driven out of the country. Cromwell rivalled her in ability; but though he was a parliament man, he was finally driven to lay violent hands on Parliament, and rule by armed force.

As to the common people, the view that their poverty and political ignorance disqualified them for any share in the government of the country was accepted until within my own lifetime. Within my father’s lifetime the view that to give every man a vote (to say nothing of every woman) was ridiculous and, if acted on, dangerous, seemed a matter of course not only to Tories like the old Duke of Wellington, but to extreme revolutionaries like the young poet Shelley. It seems only the other day that Mr Winston Churchill declared that Labor is not fit to govern.

Now you probably agree with Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Wellington, Shelley, and Mr Winston Churchill. At all events if you do you are quite right. For although Mr Ramsay MacDonald easily convinced the country that a Labor Government can govern at least as well as either the Liberal or Conservative Governments who have had the support of Mr Churchill, the truth is that none of them can govern: Capitalism runs away with them all. The hopes that we founded on the extension of the franchise, first to working men and finally to women, which means in effect to all adults, have been disappointed as far as controlling Capitalism is concerned, and indeed in most other respects too. The first use the women made of their votes was to hurl Mr MacDonald out of Parliament and vote for hanging the Kaiser and making Germany pay for the war, both of them impossibilities which should not have imposed on even a male voter. They got the vote mainly by the argument that they were as competent politically as the men; and when they got it they at once used it to prove that they were just as incompetent. The only point they scored at the election was that the defeat of Mr MacDonald by their vote in Leicester shewed that they were not, as the silliest of their opponents had alleged, sure to vote for the best-looking man.

What the extension of political power to the whole community (Democracy, as they call it) has produced is a reinforcement of the popular resistance to government and taxation at a moment when nothing but a great extension of government and taxation can hope to control the Gadarene rush of Capitalism towards the abyss. And this has produced a tendency which is the very last that the old Suffragists and Suffragettes dreamt of, or would have advocated if they had dreamt of it: namely, a demand for the abandonment of parliamentary government and the substitution of a dictatorship. In desperation at the failure of Parliament to rescue industry from the profiteers, and currency from the financiers (which means rescuing the livelihood of the people from the purely predatory side of Capitalism), Europe has begun to clamor for political disciplinarians to save her. Victorious France, with her currency in the gutter, may be said to be advertising for a Napoleon or a political Messiah. Italy has knocked its parliament down and handed the whip to Signor Mussolini to thrash Italian democracy and bureaucracy into some sort of order and efficiency. In Spain the king and the military commander-in-chief have refused to stand any more democratic nonsense, and taken the law into their own hands. In Russia a minority of devoted Marxists maintain by sheer force such government as is possible in the teeth of an intensely recalcitrant peasantry. In England we should welcome another Cromwell but for two considerations. First, there is no Cromwell. Second, history teaches us that if there were one, and he again ruled us by military force after trying every sort of parliament and finding each worse than the other, he would be worn out or dead after a few years; and then we should return like the sow to her wallowing in the mire and leave the restored profiteers to wreak on the corpse of the worn-out ruler the spite they dared not express whilst he was alive. Thus our inability to govern ourselves lands us in such a mess that we hand the job over to any person strong enough to undertake it; and then our unwillingness to be governed at all makes us turn against the strong person, the Cromwell or Mussolini, as an intolerable tyrant, and relapse into the condition of Bunyan’s Simple, Sloth, and Presumption the moment his back is turned or his body buried. We clamor for a despotic discipline out of the miseries of our anarchy, and, when we get it, clamor out of the severe regulation of our law and order for what we call liberty. At each blind rush from one extreme to the other we empty the baby out with the bath, learning nothing from our experience, and furnishing examples of the abuses of power and the horrors of liberty without ascertaining the limits of either.

Let us see whether we cannot clear up this matter of government versus liberty a little before we give up the human race as politically hopeless.

69

THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY

Once for all, we are not born free; and we never can be free. When all the human tyrants are slain or deposed there will still be the supreme tyrant that can never be slain or deposed, and that tyrant is Nature. However easygoing Nature may be in the South Sea Islands, where you can bask in the sun and have food for the trouble of picking it up, even there you have to build yourself a hut, and, being a woman, to bear and rear children with travail and trouble. And, as the men are handsome and quarrelsome and jealous, and, having little else to do except make love, combine exercise with sport by killing oneanother, you have to defend yourself with your own hands.

But in our latitudes Nature is a hard taskmaster. In primitive conditions it was only by working strenuously early and late that we could feed and clothe and shelter ourselves sufficiently to be able to survive the rigors of our climate. We were often beaten by famine and flood, wolves and untimely rain and storms; and at best the women had to bear large families to make up for the deaths of children. They had to make the clothes of the family and bake its bread as well as cook its meals. Such leisure as a modern woman enjoys was not merely reprehensible: it was impossible. A chief had to work hard for his power and privileges as lawgiver, administrator, and chief of police; and had even his most pampered wife attempted to live as idly and wastefully as thousands of ordinary ladies now do with impunity, he would certainly have corrected her with a stick as thick as his thumb, and been held not only guiltless, but commendably active in the discharge of his obvious social duty. And the women were expected to do the like by their daughters instead of teaching them, as Victorian ladies did, that to do anything useful is disgraceful, and that if, as inevitably happens, something useful has to be done, you must ring for a servant and by no means do it yourself.

Now commercial civilization has been at root nothing more than the invention of ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less labor. Men of science invent because they want to discover Nature’s secrets; but such popular inventions as the bow and spear, the spade and plough, the wheel and arch, come from the desire to make work easier out of doors. Indoors the spinning wheel and loom, the frying-pan and poker, the scrubbing brush and soap, the needle and safety pin, make domestic work easier. Some inventions make the work harder, but also much shorter and more intelligent, or else they make operations possible that were impossible before: for instance, the alphabet, Arabic numerals, ready reckoners, logarithms, and algebra. When instead of putting your back into your work you put the horse’s or ox’s back into it, and later on set steam and explosive spirits and electricity to do the work of the strained backs, a state of things is reached in which it becomes possible for people to have less work than is good for them instead of more. The needle becomes a sewing machine, the sweeping brush becomes a vacuum cleaner, and both are driven from a switch in the wall by an engine miles away instead of being treadled and wielded by foot and hand. In Chapter 42 we had a glance at the way in which we lost the old manual skill and knowledge of materials and of buying and selling, first through division of labor (a very important invention), and then through machinery. If you engage a servant today who has been trained at a first-rate institution in the use of all the most modern domestic machinery, and take her down to a country house, I will not go quite so far yet as to warn you that though she knows how to work the buttons on an automatic electric lift or step on and off an escalator without falling on her nose, she cannot walk up or downstairs; but it may come to that before long. Meanwhile you will have on your hands a supercivilized woman whom you will be glad to replace by a girl from the nearest primitive village, if any primitive villages are left in your neighborhood.

Let us, however, confine ourselves to the bearing of all this on that pet topic of the leisured class, our personal liberty.

What is liberty? Leisure. What is leisure? Liberty. If you can at any moment in the day say “I can do as I please for the next hour” then for that hour you are at liberty. If you say “I must now do such and such things during the next hour whether I like it or not” then you are not at liberty for that hour in spite of Magna Carta, the Declaration of Rights (or of Independence), and all the other political title-deeds of your so-called freedom.

May I, without being too intrusive, follow you throughout your daily routine? You are wakened in the morning, whether you like it or not, either by a servant or by that nerve-shattering abomination an alarum clock. You must get up and light the fire and wash and dress and prepare and eat your breakfast. So far, no liberty. You simply must. Then you have to make your bed, wash up the breakfast things, sweep and tidy-up the place, and tidy yourself up, which means that you must more or less wash and re-dress your person until you are presentable enough to go out and buy fresh supplies of food and do other necessary shopping. Every meal you take involves preparation, including cooking, and washing up afterwards. In the course of these activities you will have to travel from place to place, which even in the house often means treadmill work on the stairs. You must rest a little occasionally. And finally you must go to sleep for eight hours.

In addition to all this you must earn the money to do your shopping and pay your rent and rates. This you can do in two main ways. You can work in some business for at least eight hours a day, plus the journeys to and from the place where you work. Or you can marry, in which case you will have to do for your husband and children all the preparation of meals and marketing that you had to do for yourself, to wash and dress the children until they are able to wash and dress themselves, and to do all the other things that belong to the occupation of wife and mother, including the administration of most of the family income. If you add up all the hours you are forced to spend in these ways, and subtract them from the twenty-four hours allowed you by Nature to get through them in, the remainder will be your daily leisure: that is, your liberty. Historians and journalists and political orators may assure you that the defeat of the Armada, the cutting off of King Charles’s head, the substitution of Dutch William for Scottish James on the throne, the passing of the Married Women’s Property Acts, and the conquest by the Suffragettes of Votes for Women, have set you free; and in moments of enthusiasm roused by these assurances you may sing fervently that Britons never never will be slaves. But though all these events may have done away with certain grievances from which you might be suffering if they had not occurred, they have added nothing to your leisure and therefore nothing to your liberty. The only Acts of Parliament that have really increased liberty: that is, added to the number of minutes in which a woman’s time is her own, are the Factory Acts which reduced her hours of industrial labor, the Sunday Observance Acts which forbid commercial work on every seventh day, and the Bank Holiday Acts.