Chapter XIX: Part 19

Note that rent of ability is a form of rent of labor. Rent is a word that it is very necessary to understand, and that very few people do understand: they think it is only what they have to pay to their landlord. But technically rent is a price that arises whenever there are differences in the yield of any particular source of wealth. When there is a natural difference between the yield of one field and another, or one coal-mine and another, or between the advantages of one building site and another, people will pay more for the better than for the worse; and that extra price is rent. Similarly, when there is a difference between the business ability of one person and another, the price of that difference is rent. You cannot abolish rent, because you cannot abolish the natural difference between one cornfield and another, one coal-field and another, or one person and another; but you can nationalize it by nationalizing the land, the mines, and the labor of the country either directly or by national appropriation of their product by taxation, as to which latter method, as we have seen, there are limits. Until this is done, rent of ability in profiteering will make its possessors rich enough to make their children idle landlords and capitalists and destroy economic equality. Great astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, explorers, discoverers, teachers, preachers, sociologists, and saints may be so poor that their wives are worn-out in a constant struggle to keep up appearances and make both ends meet; but the business organizers pile millions on millions whilst their unfortunate daughters carry about diamonds and sables to advertize their parent’s riches, and drink cocktails until they feel so bad inside that they pay large sums to surgeons to cut them open and find out what is the matter with them. If you reproach these organizers for their inordinate gains, they tell you--or they would tell you if they understood their own position and could express it intelligibly--that every penny they make is made by making money for other people as well; that before they can spend a farthing on themselves they must provide rent for the landlord, interest for the capitalist, and wages for the proletarian on a scale that would be impossible without them; and that England can support five times the number of people she could a hundred years ago because her industries are better organized and more amply financed by them and their like. This is true; but you need not be abashed by it; for which of us has not to provide rent for the landlord, interest for the capitalist, and wages for the laborer before we can spend a penny on ourselves? And why should the organizer and financier be paid more for the exercise of his particular faculty than we who have to co-operate with him by the exercise of our particular faculties before he can produce a loaf of bread or a glass of milk? It is not natural necessity but the capitalist system that enables him to snatch more than his fellow workers from the welter of competitive commerce; and while this lasts we shall have the financier’s daughter saying to the scavenger’s daughter “What would your common dirty father do without my father, who is going to be made a lord?” and the scavenger’s daughter retorting “What would your greedy robber of a father do if my father did not keep the streets clean for him?” Of course you have never heard a lady or a young person talk like that. And probably you never will. They are too polite and too thoughtless to discuss their father’s positions. Besides, they never speak to oneanother. But if they did, and anything upset their tempers, their last words before they came to blows would be just those which I have imagined. If you doubt it, read what the capitalist papers say about Trade Unionists and Socialists, and what the proletarian papers say about landlords and capitalists and bosses. Do you suppose that the charwoman, who has worked in her own necessary way all her life as hard as or harder than any financier, and in the end has nothing to leave to her daughter but her pail and scrubbing brush, really believes, or ever will believe, that Lady Billionham, inheriting a colossal income from her father the financier, has any moral right to her money? Or, if your father had discovered and worked out the theory of relativity, and was acknowledged throughout the world to have the greatest mind since Newton’s, would you consider it morally satisfactory to be obliged to jump at an offer of marriage from a Chicago pork king to enable your illustrious parent to have more than one presentable suit of clothes, knowing all the time that if it had not been for the work of men like your father in pure science not a wheel in the whole vast machinery of modern production would be turning, nor a bagman be able to travel faster than Marco Polo? Privately appropriated rent, whether of land, capital, or ability, makes bad blood; and it is of bad blood that civilizations die. That it is why it is our urgent business to see that Lord Billionham gets no more than Einstein, and neither of them more than the charwoman. You cannot equalize their abilities, but fortunately you can equalize their incomes. Billionham’s half-crown is as good as Einstein’s two-and-sixpence; and the charwoman’s thirty pennies will buy as much bread as either. Equalize them in that respect, and their sons and daughters will be intermarriageable, which will be a very good thing for them, and lead to an enormous improvement of our human stock, the quality of which is the most important thing in the world.

71

PARTY POLITICS

You are now in possession of enough knowledge of Socialism and Capitalism to enable you to understand what is going on in the world industrially and politically. I shall not advise you to discuss these matters with your friends. They would listen in distressed silence and then tell the neighborhood that you are what they imagine a Bolshevik to be.

It is possible, however, that you may be interested in current party politics yourself, even to the extent of attending party meetings, applauding party candidates, canvassing for party votes, and experiencing all the emotions of party enthusiasm, party loyalty, and party conviction that the other party and its candidate are enemies of the human race. In that case I must give you a warning.

Do not rush to the conclusion that Socialism will be established by a Socialist party and opposed by an anti-Socialist party. Within my lifetime I have seen the Conservatives, when in opposition, vehemently opposing and denouncing a measure proposed by the Liberals, and, when they had defeated the Liberals and come into power, pass that very measure themselves in a rather more advanced form. And I have seen the Liberals do the same, and this, too, not in matters of no great consequences, but in such far-reaching social changes as Free Trade, the enfranchisement of the working classes, the democratization of local government, and the buying-out of the Irish landlords. The Spanish lady in Byron’s poem, who, “swearing she would ne’er consent, consented”, was a model of consistency compared to our party governments. We have at present a Capitalist party opposed by a Labor party; but it is quite possible that all the legislative steps towards Socialism will be taken when the anti-Socialist party is in power, and pretty certain that at least half of them will. When they are proposed by a Capitalist Government they will be opposed by the Labor Opposition, and when they are proposed by a Labor Government they will be opposed by the Capitalist Opposition, because “it is the business of an Opposition to oppose”.

There is another possibility which may disappoint your expectation. The Labor Party is growing rapidly. Twenty years ago it did not exist officially in Parliament. Today it is the official Opposition. If it continues to grow at this rate the time is not very far off when it will take practically complete possession of the House of Commons. The Conservatives and Liberals left will, even in coalition, be too few to constitute an effective Opposition, much less form a Government. But beware of assuming that the result will be a unanimous House of Commons with an unopposed Labor Government carrying everything before it. Do not even assume that the Labor Party will split into two parties, one Conservative and the other Progressive. That would be the happiest of the possibilities. The danger is that it may split into half a dozen or more irreconcilable groups, making parliamentary government impossible. That is what happened in the Long Parliament in the seventeenth century, when men were just what they are now, except that they had no telephones nor airplanes. The Long Parliament was united at first by its opposition to the King. But when it cut off the King’s head, it immediately became so disunited that Cromwell, like Signor Mussolini today, had at last to suppress its dissensions by military force, and rule more despotically than ever the King had dared. When Cromwell died, it reassembled and split up again worse than ever, bringing about such a hopeless deadlock in government that there was no way out of the mess but to send for the dead King’s son and use him, under his father’s title, as the figurehead of a plutocratic oligarchy exercising all the old kingly powers and greatly extending them.

If six hundred Labor members were returned at the next General Election history might repeat itself. The Socialists, the Trade Unionists who are not Socialists, the Communists who are not Communists but only pseudo-Bolshevists, the Republicans, the Constitutional-Monarchists, the old Parliamentary hands who are pure Opportunists, and the uncompromising Idealists, to say nothing of the Churchmen and Anti-clericals (Episcopalians and Separatists), the Deists and Atheists, would come to loggerheads at once. As far as I can see, nothing could avert a repetition of the seventeenth century catastrophe, or the modern Italian and Spanish ones, except a solid Socialist majority of members who really know what Socialism means and are prepared to subordinate all their traditional political and religious differences to its establishment. Unfortunately most of the people who call themselves Socialists at present do not know what Socialism means, and attach its name to all sorts of fads and faiths and resentments and follies that have nothing to do with it. A Labor electoral triumph may end either in another Cromwell or Napoleon III or Mussolini or General Primo di Rivera if there happens to be one at hand, or in the passing of power to any party that is solid enough to keep together and vote together, even though its solidarity be the solidarity of sheepish stupidity or panic-stricken retreat. Stupidity and cowardice never lose this advantage. You must have noticed among your acquaintances that the very conventional ones have all the same old opinions, and are quite impervious to new ones, whilst the unconventional ones are all over the shop with all sorts of opinions, and disagree with and despise oneanother furiously. That is why, though all progress depends on the unconventional people who want to change things, they have so little influence politically. They pull hard; but they do not pull together; and they pull in different directions. The people whom in your moments of impatience with their dullness you call stick-in-the-muds either pull all together and in the same direction (generally backwards), or, more formidably still, stand together solid and foursquare, refusing to move in any direction. Against stupidity, said Schiller, the gods themselves fight in vain. Long before Schiller, Solomon said “Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly”. They were both right.

Yet it is a mistake to vote for stupidity on the ground that stupid people do not quarrel among themselves. Within the limits of their conservatism they quarrel more irreconcilably, because more unreasonably, than comparatively clever people. That is why we call them pigheaded. If six hundred of them were returned at the next General Election, so that they had no longer anything to fear from Labor or Liberalism or any other section, it would be just as impossible to keep them together as if they were proletarians. In 1924 the country was stampeded by a ridiculous anti-Russian scare into returning anti-Socialists in a majority of more than two to one. The result was, not a very solid Government, but a very fragmentary one. It soon split up into reckless Diehard Coercionists, timid Compromisers, cautious Opportunists, Low Church Protestants, Anglican Catholics, Protectionists from the Midlands, Free Traders from the ports, country gentlemen, city bosses, Imperialists, Little Englanders, innocents who think that Trade Unions ought to be exterminated like nests of vipers, and practical business men who know that big business could not be carried on without them, advocates of high expenditure on the fighting forces as Empire Insurance, blind resisters of taxation as such, Inflationists, Gold Bugs, High Tories who would have Government authority and interference everywhere, Laisser-faire doctrinaires who would suffer it as nearly as possible nowhere, and Heaven knows how many others, all pulling the Cabinet different ways, paralyzing it and neutralizing oneanother, whilst the runaway car of Capitalism kept rushing them into new places and dangerous situations all the time.

During the first half of my own lifetime: that is, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Conservative and Liberal parties were much more equally balanced than at present. The Governments were on their good behavior because their majorities were narrow. The House of Commons was then respected and powerful. With the South African war a period of large majorities set in. Immediately the House of Commons began to fall into something very like contempt in comparison with its previous standing. The majorities were so large that every Government felt that it could do what it liked. That quaint conscience which was invented by English statesmen to keep themselves honest, and called by everybody Public Opinion, was overthrown as an idol, and the ignorance, forgetfulness, and follies of the electorate were traded on cynically until the few thinkers who read the speeches of the political leaders and could remember for longer than a week the pledges and statements they contained, were amazed and scandalized at the audacity with which the people were humbugged. The specific preparations for war with Germany were concealed, and finally, when suspicion became acute, denied; and when at last we floundered into the horror of 1914-18, which left the English Church disgraced, and the great European empires shattered into struggling Republics (the very last thing that the contrivers of the war intended), the world had lost faith in parliamentary government to such an extent that it was suspended and replaced by dictatorship in Italy, Spain, and Russia without provoking any general democratic protest beyond a weary shrug of the shoulders. The old parliamentary democrats were accomplished and endless talkers; but their unreal theory that nothing political must be done until it was understood and demanded by a majority of the people (which meant in effect that nothing political must ever be done at all) had disabled them as men of action; and when casual bodies of impatient and irresponsible proletarian men of action attempted to break up Capitalism without knowing how to do it, or appreciating the nature and necessity of government, a temper spread in which it was possible for Signor Mussolini to be made absolute managing director (Dictator or Duce) of the Italian nation as its savior from parliamentary impotence and democratic indiscipline.

Socialism, however, cannot perish in these political storms and changes. Socialists have courted Democracy, and even called Socialism Social-Democracy to proclaim that the two are inseparable. They might just as plausibly argue that the two are incompatible. Socialism is committed neither way. It faces Caesars and Soviets, Presidents and Patriarchs, British Cabinets and Italian Dictators or Popes, patrician oligarchs and plebeian demagogues, with its unshaken demonstration that they cannot have a stable and prosperous State without equality of income. They may plead that such equality is ridiculous. That will not save them from the consequences of inequality. They must equate or perish. The despot who values his head and the crowd that fears for its liberty are equally concerned. I should call Socialism not Democratic but simply Catholic if that name had not been taken in vain so often by so many Churches that nobody would understand me.

72

THE PARTY SYSTEM

Our Party System does not mean, as many people suppose, that differences of opinion always divide human beings into parties. Such differences existed ages before the Party System was ever dreamt of.

What it means is that our monarchs, instead of choosing whom they please to advise them as Cabinet Ministers in ruling the realm (to form a Government, as we say), must choose them all from whatever party has a majority in the House of Commons, however much they may dislike them or mistrust their ability, or however obvious it may be that a more talented Cabinet could be formed by selecting the ablest men from both parties.

This system carries with it some quaint consequences. Not only must the King appoint to high offices persons whom he may privately regard as disastrous noodles, or whose political and religious principles he may abhor: the ordinary member of Parliament and the common voter are placed in a similar predicament, because every vote given in the House or at a parliamentary election becomes a vote on the question whether the Party in office is to remain there or not. For instance, a Bill is introduced by the Government to allow women to vote at the same age as men, or to put a tax on bachelors, or to institute pensions for widowed mothers, or to build ten more battleships, or to abolish or extend divorce, or to raise the age for compulsory school attendance, or to increase or diminish taxation, or anything else you please. Suppose this Bill is brought in by a Conservative Government, and you are a Conservative member of Parliament! You may think it a most detestable and mischievous Bill. But if you vote against it, and the Bill is thrown out, the Conservative Government will no longer be in a majority, or, as we say, it will no longer possess the confidence of the House. Therefore it must go to the King and resign, whereupon the King will dissolve Parliament; and there will be a General Election at which you will have to stand again (which will cost you a good deal of money and perhaps end in your defeat) before anything else can be done. Now if you are a good Conservative you always feel that however much you may dislike this Bill or that Bill, yet its passing into law would be a less evil than an overthrow of the Conservative Government, and the possible accession to power of the Labor Party. Therefore you swallow the Bill with a wry face, and vote just as the Government Whips tell you to, flatly against your convictions.

But suppose you are a member of the Labor Party instead, and think the Bill a good one. Then you are in the same fix: you must vote against it and against your convictions, because however good you may think the Bill, you think that a defeat of the Government and a chance for the Labor Party to return to power would be still better. Besides, if the Bill is good, the Labor Party can bring it in again and pass it when Labor wins a majority.

If you are only a voter you are caught in the same cleft stick. It may be plain to you that the candidate of your Party is a political imbecile, a pompous snob, a vulgar ranter, a conceited self-seeker, or anything else that you dislike, and his opponent an honest, intelligent, public-spirited person. No matter: you must vote for the Party candidate, because, if you do not, your Party may be defeated, and the other Party come into power. And, anyhow, however disagreeable your candidate may be personally, when he gets into the House he will have to vote as the Party Whips tell him to; so his personal qualities do not matter.

The advantage of this system is that a House of Commons consisting of about a dozen capable ministers and their opponents: say twenty-five effectives all told, and 590 idiots with just enough intelligence to walk into the lobby pointed out to them by the Whips and give their names at the door, can carry on the government of the country quite smoothly, when 615 independents, with opinions and convictions of their own, voting according to those opinions and convictions, would make party government impossible. It was not, however, on this ground that the party system was introduced, though it has a great deal to do with its maintenance. It was introduced because our Dutch king William the Third, of glorious, pious, and immortal memory, discovered that he could not fight the French king, Louis XIV, _le Roi Soleil_, with a House of Commons refusing him supplies and reducing the army just as each member thought fit. A clever statesman of that time named Robert Spencer, second Earl of Sunderland, pointed out to him that if he chose his ministers always from the strongest party in the House of Commons, which happened just then to be the Whig party, that party would have to back him through the war and make its followers do the same, just as I have described. King William hated the Whigs, being a strong Tory himself; and he did not like Sunderland’s advice. But he took it, and thereby set up the Party System under which we are ruled.

Is there any practicable alternative to the Party System? Suppose, for instance, that there was a general revolt against being compelled to vote for dummies and nincompoops, and that independent candidates became so popular that all party candidates were defeated by them, or, if you think that is going too far, suppose independent candidates returned in such numbers that they could defeat any Government by casting their votes in the House against it, like the old Irish Nationalist Party! Such a revolt already exists and always will exist. The upshot of the General Elections is determined, not by the voters who always vote for their party right or wrong, but by a floating body of independent electors who vote according to their interests and preferences, and often support one party at one election and the opposite party at the next. It is these unattached people who win the odd trick which decides which party shall govern. They either know nothing about the Party System, or snap their fingers at it and vote just as they please. It is probable that they outnumber the party voters, and return party members to Parliament only because, as no others are selected as candidates by the party organizations, there is seldom any independent candidate to vote for.

It is conceivable that the King might some day find himself confronted by a House of Commons in which neither party had a majority, the effective decision resting with members belonging to no party. In that case His Majesty might appeal in vain to the party leaders to form a Government. This situation has occurred several times of late in France, where it has been brought about by the existence in the French Chamber of so many parties that none of them is in a majority; so that a leader can form a Government only by inducing several of these parties to combine for the moment, and thus make what is called a Block. But this is not always easy; and even when it is accomplished, and the Blockmaker forms a Government, it is so hard to keep the Block together that nobody expects it to last for five years, as our party governments do: its lifetime is anything from a week to six months. There have been moments lately in France when we did not know from one day to another who was Prime Minister there, M. Briand, M. Herriot, M. Painlevé, or M. Poincaré. And what has happened in France may happen here, either through an overwhelming party majority causing the party to split up into hostile groups and thus substitute half a dozen parties, all in a minority, for the two parties which are necessary to the working of the Party System, or through the return of enough independent members to make any Party Government dependent on them. You will therefore be justified if you ask me rather anxiously whether Parliament can not be worked on some other than the Party System.

As a matter of fact in this country we have, beside the House of Commons, parliaments all over the place. We have the great city Corporations, the County Councils, the Borough Councils, the District Councils, and so on down to the Parish meetings in the villages; and not one of them is worked on the Party System. They get on quite well without it. If you mention this, you will be at once contradicted, because on many of these bodies party feeling is intense. The members hold party meetings. The elections are fought on party cries. Votes are taken on party lines, and members of the party which is in the minority are sometimes excluded from the committee chairmanships, which are the nearest things to ministerial offices available, though such exclusion is considered sharp practice if pushed too far. But all this does not involve the Party System any more than a pot of jam and a pound of flour constitute a roly-poly pudding. There is no Prime Minister and no Cabinet. The King does not meddle in the business: he does not send for the most prominent men and ask them to form a Government. There is no Government in the House of Commons sense of the word, though the city or county is nevertheless governed, and often governed with an efficiency which puts the House of Commons to shame. Every member can vote as he thinks best without the slightest risk of throwing his party out of power and bringing on a General Election. If a motion is defeated, nobody resigns: if it is carried, nobody’s position is changed. Things are not done in that very puzzling way.

The way they are done is simple enough. The Council is elected for three years; and until the three years are up there can be no general election. Its business is conducted by committees: Public Health Committees, Electric Lighting Committees, Finance Committees, and so forth. These committees meet separately, and set forth their conclusions as to what the Council ought to do in their departments in a series of resolutions. When the whole Council meets, these strings of resolutions are brought up as the reports of the Committees, and are confirmed or rejected or amended by the general vote. Many of our Labor members of the House of Commons have served their parliamentary apprenticeship on local bodies under this straightforward system.

The two systems, though widely different today, spring from the same root. Before Sunderland prompted William III to introduce the Party System, the King used to appoint committees, which were then all called cabinets, to deal with the different departments of government. These cabinets were committees of his Council; and in this stage they were the model of the municipal committees I have just described. The secretaries of the cabinets, called Secretaries of States, met to concert their activities. The activities thus concerted formed their policy; and they themselves, being all cabinet ministers, came to be called THE Cabinet, after which the word was no longer applied to other bodies. In politics it now means nothing else, the old cabinets being called Offices (Home Office, War Office, Foreign Office, etc.), Boards, Chanceries, Treasuries, or anything except cabinets.

The rigidity of the Party System, as we have seen, depends on the convention that whenever the Government is defeated on a division in the House, it must “appeal to the country”: that is, the Cabinet Ministers must resign their offices, and the King dissolve the Parliament and have a new one elected. But this leads to such absurd consequences when the question at issue is unimportant and the vote taken when many members are absent, and at all times it reduces the rank and file of the members to such abject voting machines, that if it were carried out to the bitter end members might as well stay at home and vote by proxy on postcards to the Whips, as shareholders do at company meetings. Such slavery is more than even parliamentary flesh and blood, to say nothing of brains, can stand; consequently Governments are forced to allow their followers some freedom by occasionally declaring that the measure under discussion is “not a Party Question”, and “taking off the Whips”, which means that members may vote as they please without fear of throwing their Party out of office and bringing on a General Election. This practice is bound to grow as members become more independent and therefore more apt to split up into groups. The tendency already is for Governments to resign only when they are defeated on an explicit motion that they possess or have forfeited the confidence of the House, except, of course, when the division is on one of those cardinal points of policy which, if decided against the Government, would involve an appeal to the country in any case. No doubt the Whips will continue to threaten weak-minded members that the slightest exercise of independence will wreck the Government; and those whose election expenses are paid out of party funds will find that when the Party pays the piper the Whips call the tune; but I think you may take it (in case you should think of going into Parliament) that the House of Commons is becoming less and less like a stage on which an opera chorus huddles round a few haughty soloists, never opening its hundred mouths except to echo these principals and give them time to breathe. It is already evident that the more women there are in the House, the more refractory it will be to the logical extremes of party discipline, and the sooner party questions will become the exceptions and open questions the rule.

Here, however, I must warn you of another possibility. The two Houses of Parliament are as much out of date as instruments for carrying on the public business of a modern community as a pair of horses for drawing an omnibus. In 1920 two famous Socialist professors of political science, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, published a Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. In that Constitution the notion of going on with our ancient political machinery at Westminster is discarded as impracticable, and its present condition described as one of creeping paralysis. Instead, it is proposed that we should have two parliaments, one political and the other industrial, the political one maintaining the cabinet system, and the industrial one the municipal system. I cannot go into the details of such a change here: you will find them in the book. I mention it just to prepare you for such happenings. Certain it is that if our old Westminster engine is left as it is to cope with the modern developments of Capitalism, Capitalism will burst it; and then something more adequate must be devised and set up, whether we like it or not.

73

DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY

You now see how essential it is to the working of our parliamentary system, under a Labor or any other Government, that the Cabinet should have a united party behind it, large enough to outvote any other party in the House. You see also that whereas a party only barely large enough to do this is held together by the fear of defeat, a party so large that the whole House belongs to it ceases to be a party at all, and is sure to split up into groups which have to be combined into blocks of groups before a Cabinet can be formed and government effectively carried on. In the nineteenth century we were all sure that this could never occur. In the twentieth it is as certain as anything of the kind can be that the Proletariat will extend its present invasion of Parliament until it achieves in effect complete conquest. Therefore we had better examine a few questions on which the apparent unanimity in the Labor Party is quite delusive.

To interest you I am tempted to begin with the question of the virtual exclusion of women from certain occupations. This morning I received a letter from the Government College of Lahore in the Punjab which contains the following words: “The number of people in India speaking Urdu of one kind or another is about 96,000,000. Out of this number 46,000,000 are women who are mostly in purdah and do not go out.” Now I dare not tell you, even if I knew, how many members of the Labor Party believe that the proper place for women is in purdah. There are enough, anyhow, to start a very pretty fight with those who would remove all artificial distinctions between men and women. But I must pass over this because, vital as it is, it will not split the Labor Party more than it has split the older parties. If men were the chattel slaves of women in law (as some of them are in fact), or women the chattel slaves of men in fact (as married women used to be in law), that would not affect the change from Capitalism to Socialism. Let us confine ourselves to cases that would affect it.

It is fundamental in Socialism that idleness shall not be tolerated on any terms. And it is fundamental in Trade Unionism that the worker shall have the right at any moment to down tools and refuse to do another stroke until his demands are satisfied. It is impossible to imagine a flatter contradiction. And the question of the right to strike is becoming more acute every year. We have seen how the little businesses have grown into big businesses, and the big businesses into Trusts that control whole industries. But the Trade Unions have kept up with this growth. The little unions have grown into big unions; and the big unions have combined into great federations of unions; consequently the little strikes have become terribly big strikes. A modern strike of electricians, a railway strike, or a coal strike can bring these industries, and dozens of others which depend on them, to a dead stop, and cause unbearable inconvenience and distress to the whole nation.

To make strikes more effective, a new sort of Trade Union has developed, called an Industrial Union to distinguish it from the old Craft Unions. The Craft Union united all the men who lived by a particular craft or trade: the carpenters, the masons, the tanners and so on. But there may be men of a dozen different crafts employed in one modern industry: for instance, the building industry employs carpenters, masons, bricklayers, joiners, plumbers, slaters, painters, and various kinds of laborers, to say nothing of the clerical staffs; and if these are all in separate unions a strike by one of them cannot produce the effect that a strike of all of them would. Therefore unions covering the whole industry without regard to craft (Industrial Unions) have been formed. We now have such bodies as the Transport Workers’ Union and the National Union of Railway Workers, in which workers from dozens of different trades are combined. They can paralyze the whole industry by a strike. In the nineteenth century very few strikes or lock-outs were big enough to be much noticed by the general public. In the twentieth there have already been several which were national calamities. The Government has been forced to interfere either by trying to buy the disputants off with subsidies, or to persuade the employers and the strikers to come to some agreement. But as the Government has no power either to force the men to go back to work or the employers to grant their demands, its intervention is not very effective, and never succeeds until a great deal of mischief has been done. It has been driven at last to attempt a limitation of the magnitude of strikes by an Act of 1927 forbidding “sympathetic” strikes and lock-outs, lock-outs being included to give the Act an air of fair play. But as this Act does not forbid the formation of industrial unions, nor take away the right to strike or lock-out when a grievance can be established (as of course it always can), it is only a gesture of impotent rage, useless as a remedy, but significant of the growing indisposition of the nation to tolerate big strikes. They are civil wars between Capital and Labor in which the whole country suffers.

The Socialist remedy for this dangerous nuisance is clear. Socialism would impose compulsory social service on all serviceable citizens, just as during the war compulsory military service was imposed on all men of military age. When we are at war nowadays no man is allowed to plead that he has a thousand a year of his own and need not soldier for a living. It does not matter if he has fifty thousand: he has to “do his bit” with the rest. In vain may he urge that he is a gentleman, and does not want to associate with common soldiers or be classed with them. If he is not a trained officer he has to become a private, and possibly find that his sergeant has been his valet, and that his lieutenant, his major, his colonel, and his brigadier are respectively his tailor, his bootmaker, his solicitor, and the manager of his favourite golfing hotel. The penalty of neglect to discharge his duties precisely and punctually even at the imminent risk of being horribly wounded or blown to bits, is death. Now the righteousness of military service is so questionable that the man who conscientiously refuses to perform it can justify himself by the test proposed by the philosopher Kant: that is, he can plead that if everybody did the same the world would be much safer, happier, and better.

A refusal of social service has no such excuse. If everybody refused to work, nine-tenths of the inhabitants of these islands would be dead within a month; and the rest would be too weak to bury them before sharing their fate. It is useless for a lady to plead that she has enough to live on without work: if she is not producing her own food and clothing and lodging other people must be producing them for her; and if she does not perform some equivalent service for them she is robbing them. It is absurd for her to pretend that she is living on the savings of her industrious grandmother; for not only is she alleging a natural impossibility, but there is no reason on earth why she should be allowed to undo by idleness the good that her grandmother did by industry. Compulsory social service is so unanswerably right that the very first duty of a government is to see that everybody works enough to pay her way and leave something over for the profit of the country and the improvement of the world. Yet it is the last duty that any government will face. What governments do at present is to reduce the mass of the people by armed force to a condition in which they must work for the capitalists or starve, leaving the capitalists free from any such obligation, so that capitalists can not only be idle but produce artificial overpopulation by withdrawing labor from productive industry and wasting it in coddling their idleness or ministering to their vanity. This our Capitalist Governments call protecting property and maintaining personal liberty; but Socialists believe that property, in that sense, is theft, and that allowable personal liberty no more includes the right to idle than the right to murder.

Accordingly, we may expect that when a Labor House of Commons is compelled to deal radically with some crushing national strike, the Socialists in the Labor Party will declare that the remedy is Compulsory Social Service for all ablebodied persons. The remnants of the old parties and the non-Socialist Trade Unionists in the Labor Party will at once combine against the proposal, and clamor for a subsidy to buy off the belligerents instead. Subsidy or no subsidy, the Trade Unionists will refuse to give up the right to strike, even in socialized industries. The strike is the only weapon a Trade Union has. The employers will be equally determined to maintain their right to lock-out. As to the landlords and capitalists, their dismay can be imagined. They will be far more concerned than the employers and financiers, because employers and financiers are workers: to have to work is no hardship to them. But the real ladies and gentlemen, who know no trade, and have been brought up to associate productive work with social inferiority, imprisonment in offices and factories, compulsory early rising, poverty, vulgarity, rude manners, roughness and dirt and drudgery, would see in compulsory social service the end of the world for them and their class, as indeed it happily will be, in a sense. The condition of many of them would be so pitiable (or at least they would imagine it to be so) that they would have to be provided with medical certificates of disability until they died out; for, after all, it is not their fault that they have been brought up to be idle, extravagant, and useless; and when that way of life (which, by the way, they often make surprisingly laborious) is abolished, they may reasonably claim the same consideration as other people whose occupation is done away with by law. We can afford to be kind to them.

However that may be, it is certain that the useless classes will join the Trade Unionists in frantic opposition to Compulsory Social Service. If the Labor ministers, being, as they now mostly are, Socialists, attempt to bring in a Compulsory Service Bill, they may be defeated by this combination, in which case there would be a general election on the question; and at this general election the contest would not be between the Labor Party and the Capitalists, but between the Conservative or Trade Unionist wing of the Labor Party, which would be called the Right, and the Socialist wing, which would be called the Left. So that even if the present Conservatives be wiped out of Parliament there may still be two parties contending for power; and the Intelligent Woman may be canvassed to vote Right or Left, or perhaps White or Red, just as she is now canvassed to vote Conservative or Labor.

74

RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS

However, two parties would not hurt the House of Commons, as it is worked by the division of the members into two sets, one carrying on the government and the other continually criticizing it and trying to oust it and become itself the Government. This two-division system is not really a two-party system in the sense that the two divisions represent different policies: they may differ about nothing but the desire for office. From the proletarian point of view the difference between Liberals and Conservatives since 1832 has been a difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But this did not matter, because the essence of the arrangement is that the Government shall be unsparingly and unceasingly criticized by a rival set of politicians who are determined to pick every possible hole in its proceedings. Government and Opposition might be called Performance and Criticism, the performers and critics changing places whenever the country is convinced that the critics are right and the performers wrong.

The division of the House of Commons into two parties with different policies suits this situation very well. But its division into half a dozen parties would not suit it at all, and might, as we have seen, deadlock parliamentary government altogether. Now there is abundant material for a dozen parties in the British proletariat. Take the subject of religion, inextricably bound up with the parliamentary question of education in public elementary schools. It is unlikely that a Proletarian House of Commons will suffer the nation’s children to go on being taught Capitalist and Imperialist morality in the disguise of religion; and yet, the moment the subject is touched, what a hornet’s nest is stirred up! Parents are inveterate proselytizers: they take it as a matter of course that they have a right to dictate their children’s religion. This right was practically undisputed, unless the parents were professed atheists, when all children who had any schooling went either to Biblical private schools or to public schools and universities where the established religion was the State religion. Nowadays Unitarian schools, Quaker schools, Roman Catholic schools, Methodist schools, Theosophist schools, and even Communist schools may be chosen by parents and guardians (not by the children) to suit their own private religious eccentricities.

But when schooling is made a national industry, and the Government sets up schools all over the country, and imposes daily attendance on the huge majority of children whose parents cannot afford to send their children to any but the State school, a conflict arises over the souls of the children. What religion is to be taught in the State school? The Roman Catholics try to keep their children out of the State school (they must send them to some school or other) by subscribing money themselves to maintain Roman Catholic schools alongside the State schools: and the other denominations, including the Church of England, do the same. But unless they receive State aid: that is, money provided by taxing and rating all citizens indiscriminately, they cannot afford to take in all the children, or to keep up to a decent standard the schooling of those whom they do take in. And the moment it is proposed to give them money out of the rates and taxes, the trouble begins. Rather than pay rates to be used in making Roman Catholics or even Anglo-Catholics of little English children, Nonconformist Protestant ratepayers will let themselves be haled before the magistrates and allow their furniture to be sold up. They would go to the stake if that were the alternative to paying Peter’s Pence to the Scarlet Woman and setting children’s feet in the way to eternal damnation. For it is not in Ireland alone that Protestants and Roman Catholics believe each that the other will spend eternity immersed in burning brimstone. Church of England zealots hold that belief even more convincedly about village Dissenters than about Roman Catholics.

The opinions of the parties are so irreconcilable, and the passion of their hostility so fierce, that the Government, when it is once committed to general compulsory education, either directly in its own schools or by subsidies to other schools, finds itself driven to devise some sort of neutral religion that will suit everybody, or else forbid all mention of the subject in school. An example of the first expedient is the Cowper-Temple clause in the Education Act of 1870, which ordains that the Bible shall be read in schools without reference to any creed or catechism peculiar “to any one denomination”. The total prohibition expedient is known as Secular Education, and has been tried extensively in Australia.

The Cowper-Temple plan does not meet the case of the Roman Catholics, who do not permit indiscriminate access to the Bible, nor of the Jews, who can hardly be expected to accept the reading of the New Testament as religious instruction. Besides, if the children are to learn anything more than the three Rs, they must be taught Copernican astronomy, electronic physics, and evolution. Now it is not good sense to lead a child at ten o’clock to attach religious importance to the belief that the earth is flat and immovable, and the sky a ceiling above it in which there is a heaven furnished like a king’s palace, and, at eleven, that the earth is a sphere spinning on its axis and rushing round the sun in limitless space with a multitude of other spheres. Nor can you reasonably order that during the religious instruction hour the children are to be informed that all forms of life were created within six days, including the manufacture of a full-grown woman out of a man’s rib, and, when the clock strikes, begin explaining that epochs of millions of years were occupied in experiments in the production of various forms of life, from prodigious monsters to invisibly small creatures, culminating in a very complicated and by no means finally satisfactory form called Woman, who specialized a variety of herself, in some respects even less satisfactory, called Man. This would not matter if the teacher might explain that as the astronomy and biology of the Bible are out of date, and we think we know better nowadays, they have been discarded like the barbarous morality of the Israelitish kings and the idol to which they made human sacrifices. But such explanations would frustrate the Cowper-Temple clause, under which the children were to be left to make what they could of the contradictions between their religious and secular instruction. They usually solve it by not thinking about it at all, provided their parents let them alone on the subject, which is not always the case.

As to the alternative of giving no religious instruction, and confining school teaching to what is called Secular or Matter-of-Fact Education, it is not really a possible plan, because children must be taught conduct as well as arithmetic, and the ultimate sanctions of conduct are metaphysical, by which imposing phrase I mean that from the purely matter-of-fact point of view there is no difference between a day’s thieving and a day’s honest work, between placid ignorance and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, between habitual lying and truth-telling: they are all human activities or inactivities, to be chosen according to their respective pleasantness or material advantages, and not to be preferred on any other grounds. When you find your children acting, as they often do (like their elders), quite secularly, and lying, stealing, or idling, you have to give them either a matter-of-fact or a religious reason for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well. The matter-of-fact reason is temptingly easy to manufacture. You can say “If I catch you doing that again I will clout your head, or smack your behind, or send you to bed without your supper, or injure you in some way or other that you will not like”. Unfortunately these secular reasons, though easy to devise and apply, and enjoyable if you have a turn that way, always seem avoidable by cunning concealment and a little additional lying. You know what becomes of the pseudo-morality produced by whipping the moment your back is turned. And what is your own life worth if it has to be spent spying on your children with a cane in your hand? Hardly worth living, I should say, unless you are one of the people who love caning as others love unnatural sensualities, in which case you may fall into the hands of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which will make short work of your moral pretensions. In any case you will find yourself strongly tempted to whack your children, not really to compel them to conduct themselves for their own good, but to conduct themselves in the manner most convenient to yourself, which is not always nor even often the same thing.