Chapter IV: Part 4

On this, Intelligent Lady, your first thought may be that if wealth is not distributed according to merit, it ought to be; and that we should at once set to work to alter our laws so that in future the good people shall be rich in proportion to their goodness and the bad people poor in proportion to their badness. There are several objections to this; but the very first one settles the question for good and all. It is, that the proposal is impossible. How are you going to measure anyone’s merit in money? Choose any pair of human beings you like, male or female, and see whether you can decide how much each of them should have on her or his merits. If you live in the country, take the village blacksmith and the village clergyman, or the village washerwoman and the village schoolmistress, to begin with. At present the clergyman often gets less pay than the blacksmith: it is only in some villages he gets more. But never mind what they get at present: you are trying whether you can set up a new order of things in which each will get what he deserves. You need not fix a sum of money for them: all you have to do is to settle the proportion between them. Is the blacksmith to have as much as the clergyman? or twice as much as the clergyman? or half as much as the clergyman? or how much more or less? It is no use saying that one ought to have more and the other less: you must be prepared to say exactly how much more or less in calculable proportion.

Well, think it out. The clergyman has had a college education; but that is not any merit on his part: he owes it to his father; so you cannot allow him anything for that. But through it he is able to read the New Testament in Greek; so that he can do something the blacksmith cannot do. On the other hand, the blacksmith can make a horse-shoe, which the parson cannot. How many verses of the Greek Testament are worth one horse-shoe? You have only to ask the silly question to see that nobody can answer it.

Since measuring their merits is no use, why not try to measure their faults? Suppose the blacksmith swears a good deal, and gets drunk occasionally! Everybody in the village knows this; but the parson has to keep his faults to himself. His wife knows them; but she will not tell you what they are if she knows that you intend to cut off some of his pay for them. You know that as he is only a mortal human being he must have some faults; but you cannot find them out. However, suppose he has some faults that you can find out! Suppose he has what you call an unfortunate manner; that he is a hypocrite; that he is a snob; that he cares more for sport and fashionable society than for religion! Does that make him as bad as the blacksmith, or twice as bad, or twice and a quarter as bad, or only half as bad? In other words, if the blacksmith is to have a shilling, is the parson to have a shilling also, or is he to have sixpence, or fivepence and one-third, or two shillings? Clearly these are fools’ questions: the moment they bring us down from moral generalities to business particulars it becomes plain to every sensible person that no relation can be established between human qualities, good or bad, and sums of money, large or small. It may seem scandalous that a prize-fighter, for hitting another prize-fighter so hard at Wembley that he fell down and could not rise within ten seconds, received the same sum that was paid to the Archbishop of Canterbury for acting as Primate of the Church of England for nine months; but none of those who cry out against the scandal can express any better in money the difference between the two. Not one of the persons who think that the prize-fighter should get less than the Archbishop can say how much less. What the prize-fighter got for his six or seven minutes boxing would pay a judge’s salary for two years; and we are all agreed that nothing could be more ridiculous, and that any system of distributing wealth which leads to such absurdities must be wrong. But to suppose that it could be changed by any possible calculation that an ounce of archbishop or three ounces of judge is worth a pound of prize-fighter would be sillier still. You can find out how many candles are worth a pound of butter in the market on any particular day; but when you try to estimate the worth of human souls the utmost you can say is that they are all of equal value before the throne of God. And that will not help you in the least to settle how much money they should have. You must simply give it up, and admit that distributing money according to merit is beyond mortal measurement and judgment.

10

TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB

The third plan: that of letting everyone have what she can lay her hands on, would produce a world in which there would be no peace and no security. If we were all equally strong and cunning we should all have an equal chance; but in a world where there are children and old people and invalids, and where able-bodied adults of the same age and strength vary greatly in greediness and wickedness, it would never do: we should get tired of it in no time. Even pirate crews and bands of robbers prefer a peaceful settled understanding as to the division of their plunder to the Kilkenny cat plan.

Among ourselves, though robbery and violence are forbidden, we still allow business to be conducted on the principle of letting everyone make what he can out of it without considering anyone but himself. A shopkeeper or a coal merchant may not pick your pocket; but he may overcharge you as much as he likes. Everyone is free in business to get as much and give as little for his money as he can induce his customers to put up with. House rent can be raised without any regard to the cost of the houses or the poverty of the tenant. But this freedom produces such bad results that new laws are continually being made to restrain it; and even when it is a necessary part of our freedom to spend our money and use our possessions as seems best to us, we still have to settle how much money and what possessions we should be given to start with. This distribution must be made according to some law or other. Anarchy (absence of law) will not work. We must go on with our search for a righteous and practicable law.

11

OLIGARCHY

The fourth plan is to take one person in every ten (say), and make her rich without working by making the other nine work hard and long every day, giving them only enough of what they make to keep them alive and enable them to bring up families to continue their slavery when they grow old and die. This is roughly what happens at present, as one-tenth of the English people own nine-tenths of all the property in the country, whilst most of the other nine-tenths have no property, and live from week to week on wages barely sufficient to support them in a very poor way. The advantage claimed for this plan is that it provides us with a gentry: that is, with a class of rich people able to cultivate themselves by an expensive education; so that they become qualified to govern the country and make and maintain its laws; to organize and officer the army for national defence; to patronize and keep alive learning, science, art, literature, philosophy, religion, and all the institutions that distinguish great civilizations from mere groups of villages; to raise magnificent buildings, dress splendidly, impose awe on the unruly, and set an example of good manners and fine living. Most important of all, as men of business think, by giving them much more than they need spend, we enable them to save those great sums of spare money that are called capital, and are spent in making railways, mines, factories full of machinery, and all the other contrivances by which wealth is produced in great quantities.

This plan, which is called Oligarchy, is the old English plan of dividing us into gentry living by property and common people living by work: the plan of the few rich and the many poor. It has worked for a long time, and is still working. And it is evident that if the incomes of the rich were taken from them and divided among the poor as we stand at present, the poor would be only very little less poor; the supply of capital would cease because nobody could afford to save; the country houses would fall into ruins; and learning and science and art and literature and all the rest of what we call culture would perish. That is why so many people support the present system, and stand by the gentry although they themselves are poor. They see that if ten women can produce only £110 a year each by their labor, it may be wiser for nine of them to be content with £50 apiece, and make the other one an educated lady, mistress, and ruler by giving her £500 a year without any obligation to work at all, or any inducement to work except the hope of finding how to make their work more fruitful for her own benefit, rather than to insist on having £110 a year each. Though we make this sort of arrangement at present because we are forced to, and indeed mostly without knowing that we are making it, yet it is conceivable that if we understood what we were doing and were free to carry it out or not as we thought best, we might still do it for the sake of having a gentry to keep up finer things in the world than a miserable crowd all equally poor, and all tied to primitive manual labor.

But the abuses that arise from this plan are so terrible that the world is becoming set against it. If we decide to go on with it, the first step is to settle who is to be the tenth person: the lady. How is that to be decided? True, we could begin by drawing lots; and after that the gentry could intermarry and be succeeded by their firstborns. But the mischief of it is that when we at last got our gentry established we should have no guarantee that they would do any of the things we intended them to do and paid them to do. With the best intentions, the gentry govern the country very badly because they are so far removed from the common people that they do not understand their needs. They use their power to make themselves still richer by forcing the common people to work still harder and accept still less. They spend enormous sums on sport and entertainment, gluttony and ostentation, and very little on science and art and learning. They produce poverty on a vast scale by withdrawing labor from production to waste it in superfluous menial service. They either shirk military duties or turn the army into a fashionable retinue for themselves and an instrument of oppression at home and conquest abroad. They corrupt the teaching in the universities and schools to glorify themselves and hide their misdeeds. They do the same with the Church. They try to keep the common people poor and ignorant and servile so as to make themselves more indispensable. At last their duties have to be taken out of their hands and discharged by Parliament, by the Civil Service, by the War Office and the Admiralty, by city corporations, by Poor Law Guardians, by County and Parish and District Councils, by salaried servants and Boards of paid directors, by societies and institutions of all kinds depending on taxation or on public subscription.

When this occurs, as it actually has occurred, all the cultural and political reasons for the maintenance of a gentry vanish. It always does occur when city life grows up and takes the place of country life. When a peeress resides on her estates in a part of the country where life is still very simple, and the nearest thing to a town is a village ten miles from the railway station, the people look to her ladyship for everything that is not produced by their daily toil. She represents all the splendor and greatness and romance of civilization, and does a good deal for them which they would not know how to do for themselves. In this way a Highland clan, before Scotland became civilized, always had a chief. The clansmen willingly gave him the lion’s share of such land and goods as they could come by, or of the plunder they took in their raids. They did this because they could not fight successfully without a leader, and could not live together without a lawgiver. Their chief was to them what Moses was to the Israelites in the desert. The Highland chief was practically a king in his clan, just as the peeress is a queen on her estates. Loyalty to him was instinctive.

But when a Highland chief walked into a city he had less power than the first police constable he met: in fact it sometimes happened that the police constable took him in charge, and the city authorities hanged him. When the peeress leaves her estate and goes up to London for the season, she becomes a nobody except to her personal acquaintances. Everything that she does for her people in the country is done in London by paid public servants of all sorts; and when she leaves the country and settles in America or on the Continent to evade British income tax she is not missed in London: everything goes on just as before. But her tenants, who have to earn the money she spends abroad, get nothing by her, and revile her as a fugitive and an Absentee.

Small wonder then that Oligarchy is no longer consented to willingly. A great deal of the money the oligarchs get is now taken back from them by taxation and death duties; so that the old families are being reduced very rapidly to the level of ordinary citizens; and when their estates are gone, as they will be after a few generations more of our present heavy death duties, their titles will only make their poverty ridiculous. Already many of their most famous country houses are occupied either by rich business families of quite ordinary quality, or by Co-operative Societies as Convalescent Homes or places for conference and recreation, or as hotels or schools or lunatic asylums.

You must therefore face the fact that in a civilization like ours, where most of the population lives in cities; where railways, motor cars, posts, telegraphs, telephones, gramophones and radio have brought city ways and city culture into the country; and where even the smallest village has its parish meeting and its communal policeman, the old reasons for making a few people very rich whilst all the others work hard for a bare subsistence have passed away. The plan no longer works, even in the Highlands.

Still, there is one reason left for maintaining a class of excessively rich people at the expense of the rest; and business men consider it the strongest reason of all. That reason is that it provides capital by giving some people more money than they can easily spend; so that they can save money (capital is saved money) without any privation. The argument is that if income were more equally distributed, we should all have so little that we should spend all our incomes, and nothing would be saved to make machinery and build factories and construct railways and dig mines and so forth. Now it is certainly necessary to high civilization that these savings should be made; but it would be hard to imagine a more wasteful way of bringing it about.

To begin with, it is very important that there should be no saving until there has been sufficient spending: spending comes first. A nation which makes steam engines before its little children have enough milk to make their legs strong enough to carry them is making a fool’s choice. Yet this is just what we do by this plan of making a few rich and the masses poor. Again, even if we put the steam engine before the milk, our plan gives us no security that we shall get the steam engine, or, if we get it, that it will be set up in our country. Just as a great deal of the money that was given to the country gentlemen of England on the chance of their encouraging art and science was spent by them on cock-fighting and horse-racing; so a shocking proportion of the money we give our oligarchs on the chance of their investing it as capital is spent by them in self-indulgence. Of the very rich it may be said that they do not begin to save until they can spend no more, and that they are continually inventing new and expensive extravagances that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. When their income outruns their extravagance so far that they must use it as capital or throw it away, there is nothing to prevent them investing it in South America, in South Africa, in Russia, or in China, though we cannot get our own slums cleaned up for want of capital kept in and applied to our own country. Hundreds of millions of pounds are sent abroad every year in this way; and we complain of the competition of foreigners whilst we allow our capitalists to provide them at our expense with the very machinery with which they are taking our industries from us.

Of course the capitalists plead that we are none the poorer, because the interest on their capital comes back into this country from the countries in which they have invested it; and as they invest it abroad only because they get more interest abroad than at home, they assure us that we are actually the richer for their export of capital, because it enables them to spend more at home and thus give British workers more employment. But we have no guarantee that they will spend it at home: they are as likely to spend it in Monte Carlo, Madeira, Egypt, or where not? And when they do spend it at home and give us employment, we have to ask what sort of employment? When our farms and mills and cloth factories are all ruined by our importing our food and cloth from abroad instead of making them ourselves, it is not enough for our capitalists to shew us that instead of the farms we have the best golf courses in the world; instead of mills and factories splendid hotels; instead of engineers and shipwrights and bakers and carpenters and weavers, waiters and chambermaids, valets and ladies’ maids, gamekeepers and butlers and so forth, all better paid and more elegantly dressed than the productive workers they have replaced. We have to consider what sort of position we shall be in when our workers are as incapable of supporting themselves and us as the idle rich themselves. Suppose the foreign countries stop our supplies either by a revolution followed by flat repudiation of their capitalistic debts, as in Russia, or by taxing and supertaxing incomes derived from investments, what will become of us then? What is becoming of us now as taxation of income spreads more and more in foreign countries? The English servant may still be able to boast that England can put a more brilliant polish on a multi-millionaire’s boots than any foreigner can; but what use will that be to us when the multi-millionaire is an expropriated or taxed-out pauper with no boots to have polished?

We shall have to go into this question of capital more particularly later on; but for the purposes of this chapter it is enough to shew that the plan of depending on oligarchy for our national capital is not only wasteful on the face of it, but dangerous with a danger that increases with every political development in the world. The only plea left for it is that there is no other way of doing it. But that will not hold water for a moment. The Government can, and to a considerable extent actually does, check personal expenditure and enforce the use of part of our incomes as capital, far less capriciously and more efficiently than our oligarchy does. It can nationalize banking, as we shall see presently. This leaves oligarchy without its sole economic excuse.

12

DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS

Now for the fifth plan, which is, that though everybody should work, society should be divided into as many classes as there are different sorts of work, and that the different classes should receive different payment for their work: for instance, the dustmen and scavengers and scullery-maids and charwomen and ragpickers should receive less than the doctors and clergymen and teachers and opera singers and professional ladies generally, and that these should receive less than the judges and prime ministers and kings and queens.

You will tell me that this is just what we have at present. Certainly it happens so in many cases; but there is no law that people employed in different sorts of work should be paid more or less than oneanother. We are accustomed to think that schoolmistresses and clergymen and doctors, being educated ladies and gentlemen, must be paid more than illiterate persons who work with their hands for weekly wages; but at the present time an engine driver, making no pretension to be a gentleman, or to have had a college education, is paid more than many clergymen and some doctors; and a schoolmistress or governess is very lucky indeed when she is as well off as a firstrate cook. Some of our most famous physicians have had to struggle pitiably against insufficient means until they were forty or fifty; and many a parson has brought up a family on a stipend of seventy pounds a year. You must therefore be on your guard against the common mistake of supposing that we need nowadays pay more for gentility and education than for bodily strength and natural cunning, or that we always do pay more. Very learned men often make little money or none; and gentility without property may prove rather a disadvantage than otherwise to a man who wants to earn a living. Most of the great fortunes are made in trade or finance, often by men without any advantages of birth or education. Some of the great poverties have been those of saints, or of geniuses whose greatness was not recognized until they were dead.

You must also get rid of the notion (if you have it: if not, forgive me for suspecting you of it) that it costs some workers more than others to live. The same allowance of food that will keep a laborer in health will keep a king. Many laborers eat and drink much more than the King does; and all of them wear out their clothes much faster. Our King is not rich as riches go nowadays. Mr Rockefeller probably regards His Majesty as a poor man, because Mr Rockefeller not only has much more money, but is under no obligation to spend it in keeping up a great establishment: that is, spending it on other people. But if you could find out how much the King and Mr Rockefeller spend on their own personal needs and satisfaction, you would find it came to no more than is now spent by any other two persons in reasonably comfortable circumstances. If you doubled the King’s allowance he would not eat twice as much, drink twice as much, sleep twice as soundly, build a new house twice as big as Buckingham Palace, or marry another queen and set up two families instead of one. The late Mr Carnegie, when his thousands grew to hundreds of thousands and his hundreds of thousands to millions, gave his money away in heaps because he already had everything he cared for that money could buy for himself or his household.

Then, it may be asked, why do we give some men more than they need and some less? The answer is that for the most part we do not give it to them: they get it because we have not arranged what anyone shall get, but have left it to chance and grab. But in the case of the King and other public dignitaries we have arranged that they shall have handsome incomes because we intend that they shall be specially respected and deferred to. Yet experience shews that authority is not proportionate to income. No person in Europe is approached with such awe as the Pope; but nobody thinks of the Pope as a rich man: sometimes his parents and brothers and sisters are very humble people, and he himself is poorer than his tailor or grocer. The captain of a liner sits at table every day with scores of people who could afford to throw his pay into the sea and not miss it; yet his authority is so absolute that the most insolent passenger dares not treat him disrespectfully. The village rector may not have a fifth of the income of his farmer churchwarden. The colonel of a regiment may be the poorest man at the mess table: everyone of his subalterns may have far more than double his income; but he is their superior in authority for all that. Money is not the secret of command.

Those who exercise personal authority among us are by no means our richest people. Millionaires in expensive cars obey policemen. In our social scale noblemen take precedence of country gentlemen, country gentlemen take precedence of professional men, professional men of traders, wholesale traders of retail traders, retail traders of skilled workmen, and skilled workmen of laborers; but if social precedence were according to income all this would be completely upset; for the tradesmen would take precedence of everybody; and the Pope and the King would have to touch their hats to distillers and pork packers.

When we speak of the power of the rich, we are speaking of a very real thing, because a rich man can discharge anyone in his employment who displeases him, and can take away his custom from any tradesman who is disrespectful to him. But the advantage a man gets by his power to ruin another is a quite different thing from the authority that is necessary to maintain law and order in society. You may obey the highwayman who puts a pistol to your head and demands your money or your life. Similarly you may obey the landlord who orders you to pay more rent or take yourself and your brats into the street. But that is not obedience to authority: it is submission to a threat. Real authority has nothing to do with money; and it is in fact exercised by persons who, from the King to the village constable, are poorer than many of the people who obey their orders.

13

LAISSER-FAIRE

And now, what about leaving things just as they are?

That is just what most people vote for doing. Even when they dont like what they are accustomed to, they dread change, lest it should make matters worse. They are what they call Conservative, though it is only fair to add that no Conservative statesman in his senses ever pretends (except perhaps occasionally at election times, when nobody ever tells the truth) that you can conserve things by simply letting them alone.

It seems the easiest plan and the safest; but as a matter of hard fact it is not only difficult but impossible. When Joshua told the sun to stand still on Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, for a trifle of twentyfour hours, he was modest in comparison with those who imagine that the world will stay put if they take care not to wake it up. And he knew he was asking for a miracle.

It is not that things as they are are so bad that nobody who knows how bad they are will agree to leave them as they are; for the reply to that may be that if they dont like them they must lump them, because there seems to be no way of changing them. The real difficulty is that things will not stay as they are, no matter how careful you are not to meddle with them. You might as well give up dusting your rooms and expect to find them this time next year just as they are now. You might as well leave the cat asleep on the hearthrug and assume that you would find her there, and not in the dairy, when you came back from church.

The truth is that things change much faster and more dangerously when they are let alone than when they are carefully looked after. Within the last hundred and fifty years the most astounding changes have taken place in this very business that we are dealing with (the production and distribution of the national income) just because what was everybody’s business was nobody’s business, and it was let run wild. The introduction of machinery driven by steam, and later on of electric power distributed from house to house like water or gas, and the invention of engines that not only draw trains along the ground and ships over and under the sea, but carry us and our goods flying through the air, has increased our power to produce wealth and get through our work easily and quickly to such an extent that there is no longer any need for any of us to be poor. A labor-saving house with gas stoves, electric light, a telephone, a vacuum cleaner, and a wireless set, gives only a faint notion of a modern factory full of automatic machines. If we each took our turn and did our bit in peace as we had to do during the war, all the necessary feeding and clothing and housing and lighting could be done handsomely by less than half our present day’s work, leaving the other half free for art and science and learning and playing and roaming and experimenting and recreation of all sorts.

This is a new state of things: a change that has come upon us when we thought we were leaving things just as they were. And the consequence of our not attending to it and guiding and arranging it for the good of the country is that it has actually left the poor much worse off than they used to be when there was no machinery at all, and people had to be more careful of pence than they now are of shillings; whilst the rich have become rich out of all reason, and the people who should be employed in making bread for the hungry and clothes for the naked, or building houses for the homeless, are wasting their labor in providing service and luxuries for idle rich people who are not in the old sense of the words either gentle or noble, and whose idleness and frivolity and extravagance set a most corrupting moral example.

Also it has produced two and a half revolutions in political power, by which the employers have overthrown the landed gentry, the financiers have overthrown the employers, and the Trade Unions have half overthrown the financiers. I shall explain this fully later on; meanwhile, you have seen enough of its effects in the rise of the Labor Party to take my word for it that politics will not stand still any more than industry merely because millions of timid old-fashioned people vote at every election for what they call Conservatism: that is, for shutting our eyes and opening our mouths.

If King Alfred had been told that the time would come in England when one idle family would have five big houses and a steam yacht to live in whilst hard-working people were living six in a room, and half starving at that, he would have said that God would never allow such things to happen except in a very wicked nation. Well, we have left God out of the question and allowed it to happen, not through wickedness, but through letting things alone and fancying that they would let themselves alone.

Have you noticed, by the way, that we no longer speak of letting things alone in the old-fashioned way? We speak of letting them slide; and this is a great advance in good sense; for it shews that we at last see that they slide instead of staying put; and it implies that letting them slide is a feckless sort of conduct. So you must rule out once for all the notion of leaving things as they are in the expectation that they will stay where they are. They wont. All we can do in that line is to sit idly and wonder what will happen next. And this is not like sitting on the bank of the stream waiting for the water to go by. It is like sitting idly in a carriage when the horse is running away. You can excuse it by saying “What else can I do?”; but your impotence will not avert a smash. People in that predicament must all think hard of some way of getting control of the horse, and meanwhile do all they can to keep the carriage right side up and out of the ditch.

The policy of letting things alone, in the practical sense that the Government should never interfere with business or go into business itself, is called Laisser-faire by economists and politicians. It has broken down so completely in practice that it is now discredited; but it was all the fashion in politics a hundred years ago, and is still influentially advocated by men of business and their backers who naturally would like to be allowed to make money as they please without regard to the interests of the public.

14

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

We seem now to have disposed of all the plans except the Socialist one. Before grappling with that, may I call your attention to something that happened in our examination of most of the others. We were trying to find out a sound plan of distributing money; and every time we proposed to distribute it according to personal merit or achievement or dignity or individual quality of any sort the plan reduced itself to absurdity. When we tried to establish a relation between money and work we were beaten: it could not be done. When we tried to establish a relation between money and character we were beaten. When we tried to establish a relation between money and the dignity that gives authority we were beaten. And when we gave it up as a bad job and thought of leaving things as they are we found that they would not stay as they are.

Let us then consider for a moment what any plan must do to be acceptable. And first, as everybody except the Franciscan Friars and the Poor Clares will say that no plan will be acceptable unless it abolishes poverty (and even Franciscan poverty must be voluntary and not compelled) let us study poverty for a moment.

It is generally agreed that poverty is a very uncomfortable misfortune for the individual who happens to be poor. But poor people, when they are not suffering from acute hunger and severe cold, are not more unhappy than rich people: they are often much happier. You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty; but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy. All the thoughtful ones will assure you that happiness and unhappiness are constitutional, and have nothing to do with money. Money can cure hunger: it cannot cure unhappiness. Food can satisfy the appetite, but not the soul. A famous German Socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, said that what beat him in his efforts to stir up the poor to revolt against poverty was their wantlessness. They were not, of course, content: nobody is; but they were not discontented enough to take any serious trouble to change their condition. It may seem a fine thing to a poor woman to have a large house, plenty of servants, dozens of dresses, a lovely complexion and beautifully dressed hair. But the rich woman who has these things often spends a good deal of her time travelling in rough places to get away from them. To have to spend two or three hours a day washing and dressing and brushing and combing and changing and being messed about generally by a lady’s maid is not on the face of it a happier lot than to have only five minutes to spend on such fatigues, as the soldiers call them. Servants are so troublesome that many ladies can hardly talk about anything else when they get together. A drunken man is happier than a sober one: that is why unhappy people take to drink. There are drugs that will make you ecstatically happy whilst ruining your body and soul. It is our quality that matters: take care of that, and our happiness will take care of itself. People of the right sort are never easy until they get things straight; but they are too healthy and too much taken up with their occupations to bother about happiness. Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount: the objection to it is not that it makes people unhappy, but that it degrades them; and the fact that they can be quite as happy in their degradation as their betters are in their exaltation makes it worse. When Shakespear’s king said

Then happy low, lie down:
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,

he forgot that happiness is no excuse for lowness. The divine spark in us flashes up against being bribed to submit to degradation by mere happiness, which a pig or a drunkard can achieve.

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood. Its bad effects cannot be escaped by the rich. When poverty produces outbreaks of virulent infectious disease, as it always does sooner or later, the rich catch the disease and see their children die of it. When it produces crime and violence the rich go in fear of both, and are put to a good deal of expense to protect their persons and property. When it produces bad manners and bad language the children of the rich pick them up no matter how carefully they are secluded; and such seclusion as they get does them more harm than good. If poor and pretty young women find, as they do, that they can make more money by vice than by honest work, they will poison the blood of rich young men who, when they marry, will infect their wives and children, and cause them all sorts of bodily troubles, sometimes ending in disfigurement and blindness and death, and always doing them more or less mischief. The old notion that people can “keep themselves to themselves” and not be touched by what is happening to their neighbors, or even to the people who live a hundred miles off, is a most dangerous mistake. The saying that we are members one of another is not a mere pious formula to be repeated in church without any meaning: it is a literal truth; for though the rich end of the town can avoid living with the poor end, it cannot avoid dying with it when the plague comes. People will be able to keep themselves to themselves as much as they please when they have made an end of poverty; but until then they will not be able to shut out the sights and sounds and smells of poverty from their daily walks, nor to feel sure from day to day that its most violent and fatal evils will not reach them through their strongest police guards.

Besides, as long as poverty remains possible we shall never be sure that it will not overtake ourselves. If we dig a pit for others we may fall into it: if we leave a precipice unfenced our children may fall over it when they are playing. We see the most innocent and respectable families falling into the unfenced pit of poverty every day; and how do we know that it will not be our turn next?

It is perhaps the greatest folly of which a nation can be guilty to attempt to use poverty as a sort of punishment for offences that it does not send people to prison for. It is easy to say of a lazy man “Oh, let him be poor: it serves him right for being lazy: it will teach him a lesson”. In saying so we are ourselves too lazy to think a little before we lay down the law. We cannot afford to have poor people anyhow, whether they be lazy or busy, drunken or sober, virtuous or vicious, thrifty or careless, wise or foolish. If they deserve to suffer let them be made to suffer in some other way; for mere poverty will not hurt them half as much as it will hurt their innocent neighbors. It is a public nuisance as well as a private misfortune. Its toleration is a national crime.

We must therefore take it as an indispensable condition of a sound distribution of wealth that everyone must have a share sufficient to keep her or him from poverty. This is not altogether new. Ever since the days of Queen Elizabeth it has been the law of England that nobody must be abandoned to destitution. If anyone, however undeserving, applies for relief to the Guardians of the Poor as a destitute person, the Guardians must feed and clothe and house that person. They may do it reluctantly and unkindly; they may attach to the relief the most unpleasant and degrading conditions they can think of; they may set the pauper to hateful useless work if he is able-bodied, and have him sent to prison if he refuses to do it; the shelter they give him may be that of a horrible general workhouse in which the old and the young, the sound and the diseased, the innocent girl and lad and the hardened prostitute and tramp are herded together promiscuously to contaminate one another; they can attach a social stigma to the relief by taking away the pauper’s vote (if he has one), and making him incapable of filling certain public offices or being elected to certain public authorities; they may, in short, drive the deserving and respectable poor to endure any extremity rather than ask for relief; but they must relieve the destitute willy nilly if they do ask for it. To that extent the law of England is at its root a Communistic law. All the harshnesses and wickednesses with which it is carried out are gross mistakes, because instead of saving the country from the degradation of poverty they actually make poverty more degrading than it need be; but still, the principle is there. Queen Elizabeth said that nobody must die of starvation and exposure. We, after the terrible experience we have had of the effects of poverty on the whole nation, rich or poor, must go further and say that nobody must be poor. As we divide-up our wealth day by day the first charge on it must be enough for everybody to be fairly respectable and well-to-do. If they do anything or leave anything undone that gives ground for saying that they do not deserve it, let them be restrained from doing it or compelled to do it in whatever way we restrain or compel evildoers of any other sort; but do not let them, as poor people, make everyone else suffer for their shortcomings.

Granted that people should not on any account be allowed to be poor, we have still to consider whether they should be allowed to be rich. When poverty is gone, shall we tolerate luxury and extravagance? This is a poser, because it is much easier to say what poverty is than what luxury is. When a woman is hungry, or ragged, or has not at least one properly furnished room all to herself to sleep in, then she is clearly suffering from poverty. When the infant mortality in one district is much greater than in another; when the average age of death for fully grown persons in it falls far short of the scriptural threescore-and-ten; when the average weight of the children who survive is below that reached by well-fed and well-cared-for children, then you can say confidently that the people in that district are suffering from poverty. But suffering from riches is not so easily measured. That rich people do suffer a great deal is plain enough to anyone who has an intimate knowledge of their lives. They are so unhealthy that they are always running after cures and surgical operations of one sort or another. When they are not really ill they imagine they are. They are worried by their property, by their servants, by their poor relations, by their investments, by the need for keeping up their social position, and, when they have several children, by the impossibility of leaving these children enough to enable them to live as they have been brought up to live; for we must not forget that if a married couple with fifty thousand a year have five children, they can leave only ten thousand a year to each after bringing them up to live at the rate of fifty thousand, and launching them into the sort of society that lives at that rate, the result being that unless these children can make rich marriages they live beyond their incomes (not knowing how to live more cheaply) and are presently head over ears in debt. They hand on their costly habits and rich friends and debts to their children with very little else; so that the trouble becomes worse and worse from generation to generation; and this is how we meet everywhere with ladies and gentlemen who have no means of keeping up their position, and are therefore much more miserable than the common poor.

Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes. The general run of rich people do not know what to do with themselves; and the end of it is that they have to join a round of social duties and pleasures mostly manufactured by West End shopkeepers, and so tedious that at the end of a fashionable season the rich are more worn out than their servants and tradesmen. They may have no taste for sport; but they are forced by their social position to go to the great race meetings and ride to hounds. They may have no taste for music; but they have to go to the Opera and to the fashionable concerts. They may not dress as they please nor do what they please. Because they are rich they must do what all the other rich people are doing, there being nothing else for them to do except work, which would immediately reduce them to the condition of ordinary people. So, as they cannot do what they like, they must contrive to like what they do, and imagine that they are having a splendid time of it when they are in fact being bored by their amusements, humbugged by their doctors, pillaged by their tradesmen, and forced to console themselves unamiably for being snubbed by richer people by snubbing poorer people.

To escape this boredom, the able and energetic spirits go into Parliament or into the diplomatic service or into the army, or manage and develop their estates and investments instead of leaving them to solicitors and stockbrokers and agents, or explore unknown countries with great hardship and risk to themselves, with the result that their lives are not different from the lives of the people who have to do these things for a living. Thus riches are thrown away on them; and if it were not for the continual dread of falling into poverty which haunts us all at present they would refuse to be bothered with much property. The only people who get any special satisfaction out of being richer than others are those who enjoy being idle, and like to fancy that they are better than their neighbors and be treated as if they were. But no country can afford to pamper snobbery. Laziness and vanity are not virtues to be encouraged: they are vices to be suppressed. Besides, the desire to be idle and lazy and able to order poor people about could not be satisfied, even if it were right to satisfy it, if there were no poor people to order about. What we should have would be, not poor people and rich people, but simply people with enough and people with more than enough. And that brings up at last the knotty question, what is enough?

In Shakespear’s famous play, King Lear and his daughters have an argument about this. His idea of enough is having a hundred knights to wait on him. His eldest daughter thinks that fifty would be enough. Her sister does not see what he wants with any knights at all when her servants can do all he needs for him. Lear retorts that if she cuts life down to what cannot be done without, she had better throw away her fine clothes, as she would be warmer in a blanket. And to this she has no answer. Nobody can say what is enough. What is enough for a gipsy is not enough for a lady; and what is enough for one lady leaves another very discontented. When once you get above the poverty line there is no reason why you should stop there. With modern machinery we can produce much more than enough to feed, clothe, and house us decently. There is no end to the number of new things we can get into the habit of using, or to the improvements we can make in the things we already use. Our grandmothers managed to get on without gas cookers, electric light, motor cars, and telephones; but today these things are no longer curiosities and luxuries: they are matter-of-course necessities; and nobody who cannot afford them is considered well-off.