Chapter II: Part 2

The Money Market is not a market for the sale and purchase of spare money, but for its hire. Difference between hiring and borrowing. Payment for the hire of spare money is called in business interest, and in old-fashioned economic treatises “the reward of abstinence”. In the case of spare cash in the money market the obligation of the owner to the hirer is as great as that of the hirer to the owner, since capital not hired perishes by natural decay. Negative interest. The real business of the money market is to sell incomes for lump sums of spare ready money. Enormous rates of interest paid by the poor. The Bank Rate. Lending to companies. Limited liability. Varieties of shares and debentures. Jobbers and brokers. The connection of Stock Exchange transactions with industry is mostly only nominal. Warnings. Bogus companies. Genuine companies which are smoked out. “Coming in on the third reconstruction.” Perils of enterprise, of public spirit, of conscience, and of imaginative foresight. 231

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SPECULATION

Risk of becoming a gambler’s wife. Selling and buying imaginary shares for phantom prices. How this is possible. Settling day on the Stock Exchange. Fluctuations. Bulls, bears, and stags. Contango and Backwardation. Cornering the bears. The losses risked are only net, not gross. Cover. Bucket shops. Unreality of the transactions. An extraordinary daily waste of human energy, audacity, and cunning. 239

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BANKING

Spare money for business purposes is mostly hired from bankers. Overdrafts. Discounted bills of exchange. The Bank Rate. How the bankers get the spare money they deal in. Customers must not draw their balances simultaneously. The word credit. Credit is not capital: it is a purely abstract opinion formed by a bank manager as to the ability of a customer to repay an advance of goods. Credit, like invested capital, is a phantom category. Its confusion with real capital is a dangerous delusion of the practical business man. “Bubbles” founded on this delusion. The Bank Rate depends on the supply and demand of spare subsistence available. Effective demand. Proposals to tax invested capital and credit. A hypothetical example. 243

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MONEY

Money as a tool for buying and selling. As a measure of value. As material available for other purposes and therefore valuable apart from its use as money. The latter a guarantee against the dishonesty of governments. Debasing the currency. Paper money. Inflation. Post-war examples. Deflation. Stability the main desideratum. How to maintain this. Fluctuations in the value of money indicated by a general rise or fall of prices. Cheques and clearing houses as economisers of currency. Communism dispenses with pocket money. The Bank of England as the bankers’ bank. An intrinsically valuable coinage the safest and most stable. 251

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NATIONALIZATION OF BANKING

The nationalization of minting is necessary because only a Government can establish a legal tender currency. Cheques and the like, circulating as private currency, are not legal tender money but only private and insecure title deeds to such money; but legal tender money is a Government title deed to goods. Cheques and bills of exchange are senseless unless expressed in terms of money. The nationalization of the manufacture of money is a matter of course. The case for nationalization of banking, though less obvious, is equally strong. Profiteering in spare money. Municipal banks. There is no mystery about banking; and those who now conduct it are as available for public as for private employment. 264

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COMPENSATION FOR NATIONALIZATION

The fate of the shareholder when the banks are nationalized. Purchase of their shares no expense to the nation if the cost be levied on the whole body of capitalists. The apparent compensation is really distributed confiscation. The process a well established and familiar one. Candidates who advocate expropriation without compensation do not know their business and should not be voted for. Alternative of Government entering competitively into industries and beating private enterprises out of them. Objections. Wastefulness of competition. A competing State enterprise would have to allow competition with itself, which is often inadmissible in the case of ubiquitous services. The private competitor is indifferent to the ruin of a defeated rival; but the State must avoid this. 268

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PRELIMINARIES TO NATIONALIZATION

Nationalization, though theoretically sound, and its expense a bogey, is practically an arduous undertaking, involving the organization of a central department with local services throughout the country. It is possible only in stable and highly organized States. Revolutions and proclamations cannot by themselves nationalize anything. Governments may plunder and wreck State industries to avoid imposing unpopular direct taxes. 274

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CONFISCATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION

There is always a clamor by indignant idealists for direct retributive confiscation without compensation. Its possibilities. Taxation of capital as a means of forcing defaulters to surrender their title deeds and share certificates to the Government is plausible and not physically impossible. 276

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REVOLT OF THE PARASITIC PROLETARIAT

The expropriation of the rich is objected to on the ground that the rich give employment. The sense in which this is true. The parasitic proletariat. Bond Street and Bournemouth. All transfers of purchasing power from the rich to the Government depress the parasitic trades and their employees. A sudden wholesale transfer would produce an epidemic of bankruptcy and unemployment. Governments must immediately expend the incomes they confiscate. 277

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SAFETY VALVES

Doles. Throwing the confiscated money into nationalized banks. Raising wages in confiscated industries. War. Would these act quickly enough? An uninterrupted circulation of money is as necessary to a nation as an uninterrupted circulation of blood to an animal. Any general and simultaneous confiscation of income would produce congestion in London. Grants-in-aid to municipalities an important safety valve. Public works. Roads, forests, water power, reclamation of land from the sea, garden cities. Examination of these activities shews that none of them would act quickly enough. They would provoke a violent reaction which would give a serious set-back to Socialism. Nationalizations must be effected one at a time, and be compensated. 279

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WHY CONFISCATION HAS SUCCEEDED HITHERTO

Direct confiscation of income without compensation is already in vigorous operation. Income tax, super tax, and estate duties. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his budget. Gladstone’s attitude towards income tax. General agreement of Capitalist parties that all other means of raising money shall be exhausted before levying taxes on income. Contrary assumption of the proletarian Labor Party that the Capitalists should pay first, not last. This issue underlies all the Budget debates. Estate duties (“death duties”), though unsound economically, and often cruel and unfair in operation, succeed in carrying Socialistic confiscation further in England under Conservative Governments than some avowedly Socialistic ones have been able to carry it abroad. The success of the operation is due to the fact that the sums confiscated, though charged as percentages on capital values, can be paid out of income directly or indirectly (by insuring or borrowing), and are immediately thrown back into circulation by Government expenditure. Thus income can be safely confiscated if immediately redistributed; but the basic rule remains that the Government must not confiscate more than it can spend productively. This is the Socialist canon of taxation. 284

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HOW THE WAR WAS PAID FOR

War must be paid for on the nail: armies cannot be fed nor slaughtered by promissory notes. Men are obtained by conscription, and money partly by direct taxation and inflation, but mainly by borrowing from the capitalists in spite of the protests of the Labor Party against the exemption of capital from conscription. The quaint result is that in order to pay the capitalists the interest on their loans, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has to tax them so heavily that, as a class, they are losing by the transaction. Robbing Peter, who did not lend, to pay Paul, who did. As the property owners who hold War Loan Stock gain at the expense of those who do not, a unanimous Capitalist protest is impossible. An illustration. But the Labor contention that it would pay the propertied class as a whole to cancel the National Debt is none the less sound. Financing war by “funded” loans. As capital invested in war is utterly and destructively consumed it does not, like industrial capital, leave the nation better equipped for subsequent production. The War Loan, though registered in the books of the Bank of England as existing capital, is nothing but debt. The country is therefore impoverished to meet interest charges on 7000 millions of non-existent capital. There are reasons for not repudiating this debt directly; but as the war produced an enormous consumption of capital and yet left the world with less income to distribute than before, a veiled repudiation of at least part of the debt is inevitable. Our method of repudiation is to redistribute income as between the holders of War Loan and the other capitalists. But as the huge borrowing and confiscation of capital that was feasible when the Government had war employment ready for an unlimited number of proletarians leaves them destitute now that the Government has demobilized them without providing peace employment, the capitalists have now to pay doles in addition to finding the money to pay themselves their own interest. 289

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NATIONAL DEBT REDEMPTION LEVIES

Though taxation of capital is nonsensical, all proposals in that form are not necessarily impracticable. A Capitalist Government could, without requiring ready money or disturbing the Stock Exchange or the Bank Rate, cancel the domestic part of the National Debt to relieve private industry from taxation by veiling the repudiation as a levy on capital values and accepting loan and share scrip at face value in payment. Illustration. The objection to such a procedure is that levies, as distinguished from established annual taxes, are raids on private property. As such, they upset the sense of security which is essential to social stability, and are extremely demoralizing to Governments when once they are accepted as legitimate precedents. A raiding Chancellor of the Exchequer would be a very undesirable one. The regular routine of taxation of income and compensated nationalizations is available and preferable. 294

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THE CONSTRUCTIVE PROBLEM SOLVED

Recapitulation. The difficulty of applying the constructive program of Socialism lies not in the practical but in the metaphysical part of the business: the will to equality. When the Government finally acquires a virtually complete control of the national income it will have the power to distribute it unequally; and this possibility may enlist, and has to a certain extent already enlisted, the most determined opponents of Socialism on the side of its constructive political machinery. Thus Socialism ignorantly pursued may lead to State Capitalism instead of to State Socialism, the same road leading to both until the final distributive stage is reached. The solution of the constructive problem of Socialism does not allay the terrors of the alarmists who understand neither problem nor solution, and connect nothing with the word Socialism except red ruin and the breaking up of laws. Some examination of the effect of Socialism on institutions other than economic must therefore be appended. 297

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SHAM SOCIALISM

The War, by shewing how a Government can confiscate the incomes of one set of citizens and hand them over to another set with or without the intention of equalizing distribution or nationalizing industries or services, shewed also how any predominant class, trade, or clique which can nobble our Cabinet Ministers can use the power of the State for selfish ends by measures disguised as reforms or political necessities. All retrogressions and blunders, like all genuine reforms, are lucrative to somebody, and so never lack plausible advocates. Illustrative cases of exploitation of the rates and taxes and of private benevolence by Capitalism and Trade Unionism. Public parks, endowed schools, garden cities, and subsidies. The Government subsidy to the coal owners in 1925 not Socialistic nor even Capitalistic, but simply unbusinesslike. Poplarism. Mischief done by subsidies and doles. Subsidies plus Poplarism burn the candle at both ends. The danger of conscious and deliberate exploitation of the coercive and confiscatory powers of the Government by private or sectional interests is greatly increased by the modern American practice of employing first-rate brains as such in industrial enterprise. The American Trade Unions are following this example. Surprising results. What its adoption by English Trade Unions will mean. Socialists will still have to insist on equalization of income to prevent Capitalist big business and the aristocracy of Trade Unionism controlling Collectivist Governments for their private ends. 299

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CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION

Nothing stays put. Literal Conservatism impossible. Human society is like a glacier, apparently stationary, always in motion, always changing. To understand the changes that are happening, and the others that are coming, it is necessary to understand the changes that have gone before. Examples of every phase in economic evolution still survive and can be studied from life. Without such study we are liable to be misguided and corrupted or exasperated. Those adventures of Capitalism in pursuit of profits which took the form of thrilling exploits by extraordinary individuals with no sordid aims are narrated as the splendid history of our race. On the other hand, the more shameful episodes in that pursuit may be imputed to the greed of capitalists instead of to the ferocity and bigotry of their agents. Both views may be discounted as special pleadings. A capitalist may accidentally be a genius just as she may be a fool or a criminal. But a capitalist as such is only a person with spare money and a legal right to withhold it from the hungry. No special ability or quality of any sort beyond ordinary prudence and selfishness is involved in the capitalist’s function: the solicitor and stockbroker, the banker and employer, will carry the capital to the proletarians and see that when consuming it they replace it with interest. The most intelligent woman can do no better than invest her money, which does far more good when invested than when spent in charity. But the employers and financiers who exploit her capital are pressed by the exhaustion of home markets and old industries to finance adventurous and experimental geniuses who explore and invent and conquer. They cannot concern themselves with the effect of these enterprises on the world or even on the nation provided they bring back money to the shareholders. Capital, to save itself from rotting, has to be ruthless in its ceaseless search for investment; and mere Conservatism is of no avail against this iron necessity. Its chartered companies. It adds India, Borneo, Rhodesia to the white Englishman’s burden of its naval and military defence. It may yet shift our capital from Middlesex to Asia or West Africa. Our helplessness in such an event. No need to pack up yet; but we must get rid of static conceptions of civilization and geography. 308

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THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM

Controlled motion is a good thing; but the motion of Capital is uncontrollable and dangerous. As the future of civilization depends on Governments gaining control of the forces that are running away with Capitalism an understanding of them is necessary. Very few people do understand them. The Government does not: neither do the voters. The difference between Governments and governed. The Governments know the need for government and want to govern. The governed have no such knowledge: they resent government and desire freedom. This resentment, which is the central weakness of Democracy, was not of great importance when the people had no votes, as under Queen Elizabeth and Cromwell. But when great extensions of government and taxation came to be required to control and supplant Capitalism, bourgeois Democracy produced an increase of electoral resistance to government; and proletarian Democracy has continued the bourgeois tradition. The resultant paralysis of Parliament has produced a demand for dictatorships; and Europe has begun to clamor for political disciplinarians. Between our inability to govern well and our unwillingness to be governed at all, we furnish examples of the abuses of power and the horrors of liberty without ascertaining the limits of either. 314

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THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY

We are not born free: Nature is the supreme tyrant, and in our latitudes a hard taskmaster. Commercial progress has been at root nothing more than inventing ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less labor: in short, saving labor and winning leisure. Some examples. Actually Liberty is Leisure. Political liberations cannot add to liberty unless they add to leisure. For example: woman’s daily routine. Sleep, feeding, resting, and locomotion are not leisure: they are compulsory. A seven hour working day gives at most six hours leisure out of the seventeen non-working hours. The woman of property. Leisure is the incentive to attain her position. All wage workers value leisure more than money. Property coveted because it confers the maximum of leisure. Nevertheless, as leisure brings freedom, and freedom brings responsibility and self-determination, it is dreaded by those accustomed to tutelage: for instance, soldiers and domestic servants. The national fund of leisure. Its present misdistribution. Description of a hypothetical four hours working day. Exceptions to intermittent labor at regular hours. Pregnancy and nursing. Artistic, scientific, and political work. Fixed daily hours only a basis for calculation. A four hours day may mean in practice six days a month, two months a year, or an earlier retirement. Difference between routine work and creative work. Complete freedom impossible even during leisure. Legislative restraints on religion, sport, and marriage. The Inhibition Complex and the Punch baby. The contrary or Anarchic Complex. The instinctive resistance to Socialism as slavery obscures its aspect as a guarantee of the maximum possible of leisure and therefore of liberty. 319

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RENT OF ABILITY

The proper social use of brains. Methods of making exceptional personal talents lucrative. When the talents are popular, as in the case of artists, surgeons, sports champions and the like, they involve hard work and confer no political or industrial power. As their lucrativeness is a function of their scarcity their power to enrich their possessors is not formidable and is controllable by taxation. Occasional freak incomes would not matter if equality of income were general. Impossibility of living more expensively than the richest class. Millionaires give away money for this reason. Special case of the talent for exploitation, which is a real social danger. Its forms. Administrative ability. The ability to exercise authority and enforce discipline. Both are indispensable in industry and in all organized activities. When tactfully exercised they are not unpopular, as most of us like to be saved the trouble of thinking for ourselves and so are not averse from being directed. Authority and subordination in themselves are never unpopular; but Capitalism, by creating class differences and associating authority with insolence, destroys the social equality which is indispensable to voluntary subordination. Scolding, slave driving, cursing, kicking, and slacking. Reluctance to obey commanders who are trusted and liked is less likely to give trouble than reluctance to command. Fortunately, persons of exceptional ability do not need any special inducement to exercise it. Instances of their failure in subordinate employment. In our socialized services they do not demand excessive incomes. The demand of the real lady or gentleman. Both are compelled to act as cads in capitalist commerce, in which organizers and financiers, by reason of their special cunning, are able to extort prodigious shares of the country’s output as “rent of ability.” The meaning of rent. It cannot be abolished but it can be nationalized. Futility of recriminations as to indispensability between employers and employed. The talent of the exploiter is as indispensable to the landlord and capitalist as to the proletarian. Directed labor is indispensable to all three. Nationalization and equalization socializes rent of ability as well as rent of land and capital by defeating its private appropriation. 331

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PARTY POLITICS

The steps to Socialism will not necessarily be taken by Socialist Governments. Many of them may be taken, as some already have, by anti-Socialist Cabinets. The growth of the Labor Party and the enormous electoral preponderance of the proletarian electorate promises a complete Labor conquest of the House of Commons. In that case the victorious Labor Party would split into several irreconcilable groups and make parliamentary government impossible unless it contained a unanimous Socialist majority of members really clear in their minds as to what Socialism exactly means. Precedent in the Long Parliament. The danger is not peculiar to Labor. Any political party obtaining complete possession of Parliament may go to pieces and end in a dictatorship. The Conservative triumph produced by the anti-Russian scare of 1924 made it almost impossible to hold the party together. Large majorities in Parliament, far from enabling Cabinets to do what they like, destroy their cohesion and enfeeble their party. Demoralization of Parliament during the period of large majorities brought in by the South African war. Concealment of preparations for the war of 1914-18. Parliamentary value of the fact that Socialism cannot be shaken by political storms and changes. 343

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THE PARTY SYSTEM

Popular ignorance of what the term Party System really means. Enslavement of voters by the system, in and out of Parliament. Its advantage is that if the House of Commons has good leaders the quality of the rank and file does not matter. How it was introduced as a war measure by William III. Under it the upshot of the General Elections is determined not by the staunch party voters but by the floating body of independent electors who follow their impulses without regard to the Party System. The system is essentially a two-party system of solid majority Government party _versus_ solid minority Opposition party. When independence prevails, groups form, each in a minority in the House; and only by combining enough groups to form a majority can any leader form a Cabinet and carry on. Such combinations are called Blocks. They have little cohesion, and do not last. The French Chamber exhibits this phenomenon. Possibility of its occurring in the House of Commons. Alternative systems. Government by committees without a Cabinet as practised by our municipalities. This is a local survival of the old system of separate King’s cabinets upon which the Party System was imposed. The non-party methods of local government are quite efficient. Increasing tendency to lessen the rigidity of the Party System in Parliament by declaring more and more questions non-party. Tendency of Governments to resign on defeated votes of confidence only. Inadequacy of our two Houses of Parliament for the work put upon them by modern conditions. Need for changes involving the creation of new chambers. The Webb proposals. 348

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DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY

Questions on which the present apparent unanimity in the parliamentary Labor Party is delusive: for instance, the Right to Strike. Socialism and Compulsory Social Service _versus_ Trade Unionism and Freedom of Contract. A Bill to enforce social service and penalize strikes would split the party. Magnitude of modern strikes through the extension of Trade Unionism from crafts to industries. Modern strikes tend to become devastating civil wars. Arguments for Compulsory Labor. Military and civil service. When the issue is joined the non-Socialist Trade Unionists will combine with the Conservatives against the Socialists. 354

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RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS

The nation’s children. Religious teaching in public schools. Impossibility of expressing the multifarious conflict of opinions on this subject by a two-party conflict in the House of Commons. Sectarian private schools. Roman Catholic and Nonconformist scruples. Passive resistance. Impracticable solutions. Cowper-Templeism. The Bible and Copernican astronomy. Modern physics and evolutional biology. Men professing science are as bigoted as ecclesiastics. Secular education impossible because children must be taught conduct, and the ultimate sanctions of conduct are metaphysical. Weakness of the punishment system. Conceptions of God. Personifications of God as the Big Papa and the Roman Catholic Big Mamma needed for children. Voltaire and Robespierre anticipated in the nursery. Comte’s law of the three stages of belief. Tendency of parents, voters, elected persons, and governments to impose their religions, customs, names, institutions, and even their languages on everyone by force. Such substitutions may be progressive. Toleration is incompatible with complete sectarian conviction: the historic tolerations were only armistices or exhaustions after drawn battles. Examples of modern bigotry. Toleration is impossible as between Capitalism and Socialism. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate that a Labor Party can neither establish Socialism by exterminating its opponents, nor its opponents avert it by exterminating the Socialists. 359

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REVOLUTIONS

Difference between revolutions and elections or ordinary reforms. Revolutions transfer political power from one faction or leader to another by violence or the threat of violence. Examples from English history. The transfer of political power from our capitalists to our proletarians has already taken place in form but not in substance, because, as our proletariat is half parasitic on Capitalism, and only half productive and self-supporting, half the proletarians are on the side of Capitalism. “Ye are many: they are few” is a dangerously misleading slogan. Consciousness of their formidable proletarian backing may embolden the capitalists to refuse to accept a parliamentary decision on any issue which involves a serious encroachment of Socialism on Private Property. The case of Ireland, and the simultaneous post-war repudiations of parliamentary supremacy in several continental countries forbid us to dismiss this possibility as unlikely. But whether our political decisions are made by votes or by blood and iron the mere decisions to make changes and the overruling of their opponents cannot effect any changes except nominal ones. The Russian Revolution effected a complete change from absolute monarchy to proletarian republicanism and proclaimed the substitution of Communism for Capitalism; but the victorious Communists found themselves obliged to fall back on Capitalism and do their best to control it. Their difficulties were greatly increased by the destruction involved by violent revolution. Communism can spread only as a development of existing economic civilization and must be thrown back by any sudden overthrow of it. “The inevitability of gradualness” does not imply any inevitability of peaceful change; but Socialists will be strongly opposed to civil war if their opponents do not force it on them by repudiating peaceful methods, because though civil war may clear the way it can bring the goal no nearer. The lesson of history on this point. The French Revolution and the _mot_ of Fouquier Tinville. Socialism must therefore be discussed on its own merits as an order of society apart from the methods by which the necessary political power to establish it may be attained. 370

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CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY

As peaceful settlement of the struggle for political supremacy between the Capitalists and the Socialists cannot be guaranteed we must resign ourselves to the unpleasant possibilities of our sedulously glorified pugnacity. But as destructive quarreling must be followed by constructive co-operation if civilization is to be maintained the consummation of Socialism can proceed when the fighting is over. A civil war can therefore be only an interruption and need not be further considered. Socialism in Parliament. How a series of properly prepared and compensated nationalizations may be voted for by intelligent politicians who are not Socialists, and carried out without disturbing the routine to which the unthinking masses are accustomed. Importance of the preparations: every nationalization will require extensions of the civil and municipal services. Socialism at one stroke is impossible. How far it must stop short of its logical completion. 380

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SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

Private commercial enterprise will not be completely superseded by nationalization; but it may become bankrupt; and in that case it may demand and receive subsidies from the Government. A simple instance. This process, long familiar in cultural institutions, has now begun in big business: for example the Government subsidy to coal owners in 1925, the Capitalists thus themselves establishing the practice, and providing precedents for the subsidizing of private experimental ventures by Socialist Governments. Direct industrial nationalizations must be confined to well-established routine services. When State-financed private ventures succeed, and thereby cease to be experimental, they can be nationalized, throwing back private enterprise on its proper business of novelty, invention, and experiment. The objections of doctrinaire nationalizers. The Socialist objective is not nationalization but equalization of income, nationalization being only a means to that end. The abuse of subsidies. Looting the taxpayer. Subsidies as mortgages. The national war factories. Their sale to private bidders after the war as an illustration of the impossibility of nationalizing or retaining anything for which the Government cannot find immediate use. 386

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HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?

If it takes too long a revolutionary explosion may wreck civilization. Equality of income can be attained and maintained only in a settled and highly civilized society under a Government with a highly trained civil service and an elaborate code of laws, fortified by general moral approval. The process of its establishment will necessarily be dangerously slow rather than dangerously quick; for we are not educated to be Socialists: we teach children that Socialism is wicked. The material advantages of the steps towards Socialism are, however, biassing proletarian parents, who are in a huge majority, more and more in favor of the movement towards Socialism. This tendency is helped by the moral revolt against the cruelty of Capitalism in its operation and the sordidness of its principle. In a Socialist State economic selfishness would probably stand on the moral level now occupied by cardsharping instead of being held up as the key to social eminence. 391

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SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY

Nervous dread of over-regulation produced by the endless inspections and restrictions needed to protect the proletariat from unbridled Capitalist exploitation. These would have no sense in a Socialist state. Examples. Preoccupation of the police with the enforcement of private property rights and with the crimes and disorder caused by poverty. The drink question. Drink the great anæsthetic. Artificial happiness indispensable under Capitalism. Dutch courage. Drugs. Compulsory prophylactics as substitutes for sanitation. Direct restrictions of liberty by private property. “The right to roam.” Deer forests and sheep runs. Existing liberties which Socialism would abolish. The liberty to be idle. Nonsense about capital and not labor being source of wealth. The case of patents and copyrights. Unofficial tyrannies. Fashion. Estate rules. The value of conventionality. 393

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SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE

Socialists apt to forget that people object to new liberties more than to new laws. Marriage varies from frontier to frontier. Civil marriage. Religious and communist celibacy, or the negation of marriage. Socialism has nothing to do with these varieties, as equality of income applies impartially to them all. Why there is nevertheless a rooted belief that Socialism will alter marriage. The legend of Russian “nationalization of women”. Where women and children are economically dependent on husbands and fathers marriage is slavery for wives and home a prison for children. Socialism, by making them economically independent, would break the chain and open the prison door. Probable results. Improvement in domestic manners. The State should intervene to divorce separated couples, thus abolishing the present power of the parties to enforce a broken tie vindictively or religiously. Clash of Church and State on marriage. The State must intervene to control population. As Socialism would clear away the confusion into which Capitalism, with its inevitable result of parasitic labor and premature overpopulation, has plunged the subject, a Socialist state is more likely to interfere than a Capitalist one. Expedients. Limitation of families. Encouragement of families. Polygamy. Experience of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) on this point. Bounties for large families plus persecution of birth control. State endowment of parentage. Compulsory parentage. Monogamy practicable only when the numbers of the sexes are equal. Case of a male-destroying war. Conflicting domestic ideals affecting population. The Bass Rock ideal. The Boer ideal. The bungalow ideal. The monster hotel ideal. 406

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SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN

The State school child. Need for the protection of children against parents. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The new Adoption Act. Need for the organization of child life as such. Schools essentially prisons. General ignorance after nine years of enforced elementary schooling. Limits of child liberty. The real nature and purpose of education. Our stupidities about it. Injury done by forcing children to learn things beyond their capacity or foreign to their aptitudes. Girls and compulsory Beethoven. Boys and compulsory classics and mathematics. Eton began by forbidding play and now makes it compulsory. Children as animals to be tamed by beating and sacks to be filled with learning. Opportunities for the Sadist and child fancier. Children in school are outlawed. Typical case of assault. Unendurable strain of the relations between teachers and children. Schools, though educationally disastrous, have the incidental advantage of encouraging promiscuous social intercourse. University manners. Middle class manners. Garden City and Summer School manners. Need for personal privacy and free choice of company not supplied by the snobbery and class segregations of Capitalism. Socialism preferable on this score. Technical education for citizenship. As knowledge must not be withheld on the ground that it is as efficient for evil as for good, it must be accompanied by moral instruction and ethical inculcation. Doctrines a Socialist state could not tolerate. Variety and incompatibility of British religions. Original sin. Brimstone damnation. Children’s souls need protection more than their bodies. The Bible. A common creed necessary to citizenship. Certain prejudices must be inculcated. Need for an official second nature. Limits to State proselytizing. Beyond the irreducible minimum of education the hand should be left to find its own employment and the mind its own food. 412

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SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES

Will a Socialist State tolerate a Church? This question must be discussed objectively. Survey of the age-long struggle between Church and State for the control of political and social institutions. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber. Theocracy has not lost its power. Mormon Theocracy. Christian Science. Both have come into conflict with the secular government. New Churches capture secular Governments by denying that they are Churches. The persecutions and fanaticisms of today rage in the name of Science. The avowed Church of Christ Scientist _versus_ the masked Church of Jenner and Pasteur, Scientists. Tests for public office, governing bodies, and professions. Church of England tests broken by the English people refusing to remain in one Church. The Quakers. Admission to Parliament of Dissenters, then of Jews, finally of Atheists, leading to civil marriage and burial and the substitution of civil registration of birth for baptism, leaves the State in the grip of pseudo-scientific orthodoxy. Extravagances of this new faith in America and the new European republics. The assets of religion are also the assets of science. The masses, indifferent to both, are ungovernable without an inculcated faith (the official second nature). Modern conflicts between secular authority and Church doctrine. Cremation. Rights of animals. Use of cathedrals. The Russian situation: the State tolerating the Church whilst denouncing its teaching as dope. Such contemptuously tolerant anti-clericalism is necessarily transient: positive teaching being indispensable. Subjective religion. Courage. Redskin ideals. Man as hunter-warrior with Woman as everything else. Political uselessness of ferocity and sportsmanship. Fighting men cowardly and lazy as thinkers. Women anxious lest Socialism should attack their religion. It need not do so unless inequality of income is part of their religion. But they must beware of attempts to constitute Socialism as a Catholic Church with an infallible prophet and Savior. The Moscow Third International is essentially such a Church, with Karl Marx as its prophet. It must come into conflict with the Soviet and be mastered by it. We need not, however, repudiate its doctrine and vituperate its prophet on that account any more than we need repudiate the teaching of Christ and vilify his character when we insist that the State and not the Church shall govern England. The merits of Marx. 429

83

CURRENT CONFUSIONS

The Intelligent Woman must resist the impulse to intervene in conversational bickerings and letters to the Press about Socialism and Capitalism by people who understand neither. Meaningless vituperation and general misuse of nomenclature. Politicians misname themselves as well as oneanother. Self-contradictory names such as Communist-Anarchist. Real distinctions. Direct Action _versus_ Fabianism. Poor Man’s Capitalism: its forms. It often masquerades as Socialism. The assumption of the name Communist by the cruder sort of Direct-Actionists produces the anomaly of a Labor Party expelling Communists whilst advocating Communist legislation. Fascism, produced by impatient disgust with Parliament as an institution, is common to the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Methods of Direct Action. The General Strike. Its absurdity. Its futility as a preventive of war. Pacifism. Supernational social organization. Empires and Commonwealths. Confusions as to Democracy. Proletarian jealousy of official power. Resultant autocracy in the Trade Unions. Labor leaders more arbitrary than Peers, and much more cynical as to working class political capacity than middle class and aristocratic idealists. Democracy in practice has never been democratic; and the millennial hopes based on every extension of the franchise, from the Reform Bill of 1832 to Votes for Women, have been disappointed. The reaction. Discipline for everybody and votes for nobody. Why women should stick resolutely to their votes. Proportional Representation opposed by the Labor Party. Need for a scientific test of political capacity. Those who use democracy as a stepping stone to political power oppose it as a dangerous nuisance when they get there. Its real object is to establish a genuine aristocracy. To do this we must first ascertain which are the aristocrats; and it is here that popular voting fails. Mrs Everybody votes for Mrs Somebody only to discover that she has elected Mrs Noisy Nobody. 443

84

PERORATION

A last word. Danger of discouragement through excessive sympathy. Public evils are fortunately not millionfold evils. Suffering is not cumulative; but waste is; and the Socialist revolt is against waste. Honor, health, and joy of heart are impossible under Capitalism: rich and poor are alike detestable: both must cease to exist. Our need for neighbors whose interests do not compete with ours is against the principle of Capitalism. Waiting for dead men’s shoes. The professions. Husband hunting. The social friction is intense: Capitalism puts sand instead of oil in all the bearings of our machinery. The remonstrance of the optimist. Natural kindliness. Capitalism itself was better-intentioned in its inception than early Christianity. Goodwill is not enough: it is dangerous until it finds the right way. Unreasoning sentiment an unsafe guide. We believe what we want to believe: if a pecuniary bias is given to our activities it will corrupt them in institution, teaching, and practice until the best intentioned citizens will know no honest methods and doctrines. In our search for disinterested service we come up against profiteering and Trade Unionism at every turn. Resultant cynicism and pessimism. Gulliver’s Travels and Candide. Equality of income would make these terrible books mere clinical lectures on an extinct disease. The simple and noble meaning of gentility. 455

APPENDIX

Instead of a bibliography. The technical literature of Capitalism and Socialism mostly abstract, inhuman, and written in an academic jargon which only specialists find readable. Failure to define either capital or Socialism. The early Capitalist economists: their candor. Ricardo, De Quincey, and Austin. The Socialist reaction: Proudhon and Marx. The academic reaction: John Stuart Mill, Cairnes, and Maynard Keynes. The artistic reaction: Ruskin, Carlyle, and Morris. The reaction of the novelists: Dickens and Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett. The reaction in the theatre: Ibsen and Strindberg. Henry George and Land Nationalization. Literature of the conversion of Socialism from an insurrectionary movement in the Liberal tradition to a constitutional one. Fabian Essays. Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The author’s contributions. 465

INDEX 471

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM

1

A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS

It would be easy, dear madam, to refer you to the many books on modern Socialism which have been published since it became a respectable constitutional question in this country in the eighteen-eighties. But I strongly advise you not to read a line of them until you and your friends have discussed for yourselves how wealth should be distributed in a respectable civilized country, and arrived at the best conclusion you can.

For Socialism is nothing but an opinion held by some people on that point. Their opinion is not necessarily better than your opinion or anyone else’s. How much should you have and how much should your neighbors have? What is your own answer?

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them. Sometimes they are scrapped for new ones; sometimes they are altered; sometimes they are simply done away with as nuisances. The new ones have to be stretched in the law courts to make them fit, or to prevent them fitting too well if the judges happen to dislike them. There is no end to this scrapping and altering and innovating. New laws are made to compel people to do things they never dreamt of doing before (buying insurance stamps, for instance). Old laws are repealed to allow people to do what they used to be punished for doing (marrying their deceased wives’ sisters and husbands’ brothers, for example). Laws that are not repealed are amended and amended and amended like a child’s knickers until there is hardly a shred of the first stuff left. At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are.

Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, old-age and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts, are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their greatgrandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.

When studying how the wealth we produce every year should be shared among us, we must not be like either the children or the greatgrandmothers. We must bear constantly in mind that our shares are being changed almost every day on one point or another whilst Parliament is sitting, and that before we die the sharing will be different, for better or worse, from the sharing of today, just as the sharing of today differs from the nineteenth century sharing more than Queen Victoria could have believed possible. The moment you begin to think of our present sharing as a fixture, you become a fossil. Every change in our laws takes money, directly or indirectly, out of somebody’s pocket (perhaps yours) and puts it into somebody else’s. This is why one set of politicians demands each change and another set opposes it.

So what you have to consider is not whether there will be great changes or not (for changes there certainly will be) but what changes you and your friends think, after consideration and discussion, would make the world a better place to live in, and what changes you ought to resist as disastrous to yourself and everyone else. Every opinion you arrive at in this way will become a driving force as part of the public opinion which in the long run must be at the back of all the changes if they are to abide, and at the back of the policemen and jailers who have to enforce them, right or wrong, once they are made the law of the land.

It is important that you should have opinions of your own on this subject. Never forget that the old law of the natural philosophers, that Nature abhors a vacuum, is true of the human head. There is no such thing as an empty head, though there are heads so impervious to new ideas that they are for all mental purposes solid, like billiard balls. I know that you have not that sort of head, because, if you had, you would not be reading this book. Therefore I warn you that if you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters, from advertisements, from newspapers, from books and pamphlets, from gossip, from political speeches, from plays and pictures--and, you will add, from this book!

Well, of course I do not deny it. When I urge you to think for yourself (as all our nurses and mothers and schoolmistresses do even though they clout our heads the moment our conclusions differ from theirs) I do not mean that you should shut your eyes to everyone else’s opinions. I myself, though I am by way of being a professional thinker, have to content myself with secondhand opinions on a great many most important subjects on which I can neither form an opinion of my own nor criticize the opinions I take from others. I take the opinion of the Astronomer Royal as to when it is twelve o’clock; and if I am in a strange town I take the opinion of the first person I meet in the street as to the way to the railway station. If I go to law I have to consent to the absurd but necessary dogma that the king can do no wrong. Otherwise trains would be no use to me, and lawsuits could never be finally settled. We should never arrive anywhere or do anything if we did not believe what we are told by people who ought to know better than ourselves, and agree to stand by certain dogmas of the infallibility of authorities whom we nevertheless know to be fallible. Thus on most subjects we are forced by our ignorance to proceed with closed minds in spite of all exhortations to think boldly for ourselves, and be, above all things, original.

St Paul, a rash and not very deep man, as his contempt for women shews, cried “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good”. He forgot that it is quite impossible for one woman to prove all things: she has not the time even if she had the knowledge. For a busy woman there are no Open Questions: everything is settled except the weather; and even that is settled enough for her to buy the right clothes for summer and winter. Why, then, did St Paul give a counsel which he must have known to be impracticable if he ever thought about it for five minutes?

The explanation is that the Settled Questions are never really settled, because the answers to them are never complete and final truths. We make laws and institutions because we cannot live in society without them. We cannot make perfect institutions because we are not perfect ourselves. Even if we could make perfect institutions, we could not make eternal and universal ones, because the conditions change, and the laws and institutions that work well with fifty enclosed nuns in a convent would be impossible in a nation of forty million people at large. So we have to do the best we can at the moment, leaving posterity free to do better if it can. When we have made our laws in this makeshift way, the questions they concern are settled for the moment only. And in politics the moment may be twelve months or twelve hundred years, a mere breathing space or a whole epoch.

Consequently there come crises in history when questions that have been closed for centuries suddenly yawn wide open. It was in the teeth of one of these terrible yawns that St Paul cried that there are no closed questions, that we must think out everything for ourselves all over again. In his Jewish world nothing was more sacred than the law of Moses, and nothing more indispensable than the rite of circumcision. All law and all religion seemed to depend on them; yet St Paul had to ask the Jews to throw over the law of Moses for the contrary law of Christ, declaring that circumcision did not matter, as it was baptism that was essential to salvation. How could he help preaching the open mind and the inner light as against all laws and institutions whatever?

You are now in the position of the congregations of St Paul. We are all in it today. A question that has been practically closed for a whole epoch, the question of the distribution of wealth and the nature of property, has suddenly yawned wide open before us; and we all have to open our closed minds accordingly.

When I say that it has opened suddenly, I am not forgetting that it never has been closed completely for thoughtful people whose business it was to criticize institutions. Hundreds of years before St Paul was born, prophets crying in the wilderness had protested against the abominations that were rampant under the Mosaic law, and prophesied a Savior who would redeem us from its inhumanity. I am not forgetting either that for hundreds of years past our own prophets, whom we call poets or philosophers or divines, have been protesting against the division of the nation into rich and poor, idle and overworked. But there comes finally a moment at which the question that has been kept ajar only by persecuted prophets for a few disciples springs wide open for everybody; and the persecuted prophets with their tiny congregations of cranks grow suddenly into formidable parliamentary Oppositions which presently become powerful Governments.

Langland and Latimer and Sir Thomas More, John Bunyan and George Fox, Goldsmith and Crabbe and Shelley, Carlyle and Ruskin and Morris, with many brave and faithful preachers, in the Churches and out of them, of whom you have never heard, were our English prophets. They kept the question open for those who had some spark of their inspiration; but prosaic everyday women and men paid no attention until, within my lifetime and yours, quite suddenly ordinary politicians, sitting on the front benches of the House of Commons and of all the European legislatures, with vast and rapidly growing bodies of ordinary respectable voters behind them, began clamoring that the existing distribution of wealth is so anomalous, monstrous, ridiculous, and unbearably mischievous, that it must be radically changed if civilization is to be saved from the wreck to which all the older civilizations we know of were brought by this very evil.

That is why you must approach the question as an unsettled one, with your mind as open as you can get it. And it is from my own experience in dealing with such questions that I strongly advise you not to wait for a readymade answer from me or anyone else, but to try first to solve the problem for yourself in your own way. For even if you solve it all wrong, you will become not only intensely interested in it, but much better able to understand and appreciate the right solution when it comes along.

2

DIVIDING-UP

Everybody knows now that Socialism is a proposal to divide-up the income of the country in a new way. What you perhaps have not noticed is that the income of the country is being divided-up every day and even every minute at present, and must continue to be divided-up every day as long as there are two people left on earth to divide it. The only possible difference of opinion is not as to whether it shall be divided or not, but as to how much each person should have, and on what conditions he should be allowed to have it. St Paul said “He that will not work, neither shall he eat”; but as he was only a man with a low opinion of women, he forgot the babies. Babies cannot work, and are shockingly greedy; but if they were not fed there would soon be nobody left alive in the world. So that will not do.

Some people imagine that because they can save money the wealth of the world can be stored up. Stuff and nonsense. Most of the wealth that keeps us alive will not last a week. The world lives from hand to mouth. A drawingroom poker will last a lifetime; but we cannot live by eating drawingroom pokers; and though we do all we can to make our food keep by putting eggs into water-glass, tinning salmon, freezing mutton, and turning milk into dry goods, the hard fact remains that unless most of our food is eaten within a few days of its being baked or killed it will go stale or rotten, and choke or poison us. Even our clothes will not last very long if we work hard in them; and there is the washing. You may put india-rubber patches on your boot soles to prevent the soles wearing out; but then the patches will wear out.