Chapter IX: Part 9

Now if the traffic on the road be so great that the shillings, and the spare food they represent, pile themselves up on her hands faster than she can spend them (or eat them), she will have to find some new means of spending them to prevent the new spare food going bad. She will have to call the hungry men back and find something new for them to do. She might set them to build houses all along the road. Then she could present the road to the local authorities to be maintained by the ratepayers as a public street, and yet greatly increase her income by letting the houses. Having in this way obtained more spare money than ever, she could establish a service of motor buses to the nearest town to enable her tenants to work there and her workmen to live there. She could set up an electric lighting plant and gasworks to supply their houses. She could turn her big house into a hotel, or knock it down and cover its site and the park with new houses and streets. The hungry would do all the executive work for her: what she would have to do would be to give them the necessary orders and allow them to live on her spare food meanwhile.

But, you will say, only an exceptionally able and hardworking woman of business could plan all this and superintend its carrying-out. Suppose she were too stupid or too lazy to think of these things, or a genius occupied with art or science or religion or politics! Well, if only she had the spare money, hungry women and men with the requisite ability would come to her and offer to develop her estate and to pay her so much a year for the use of her land and of her spare money, arranging it all with her solicitor so that she would not have to lift her little finger in the matter except to sign her name sometimes. In business language, she could invest her capital in the development of her estate.

Now consider how much further these operations can be carried than the mere investment of one lady’s savings, and the development of one lady’s estate in the country. Big companies, by collecting millions of spare subsistence in small or large sums from people all over the country who are willing to take shares according to their means, can set the hungry to dig those mines that run out under the sea and need twenty years work before the coal is reached. They can make railways and monster steamships; they can build factories employing thousands of men, and equip them with machinery; they can lay cables across the ocean: there is no end or limit to what they can do as long as they can borrow spare food enough for the hungry men until the preparations are finished and the businesses begin to pay their own way.

Sometimes the schemes fail, and the owners of the spare food lose it; but they have to risk this because, as the food will not keep, they would lose it all the same if they did not invest it. So there is always spare money being offered to the big men of business and their companies; and thus our queer civilization, with its many poor and its few rich, grows as we see it with all its shops, factories, railways, mines, ocean liners, aeroplanes, telephones, palaces, mansions, flats, and cottages, on top of the fundamental sowing and reaping of the food that it all depends on.

Such is the magic of spare subsistence, called capital. That is how idle people who have land and spare subsistence become enormously rich without knowing how, and make their babies enormously rich in their cradles, whilst the landless penniless persons who do it all by slaving from dawn to dusk are left as poor at the end of the job as they were at the beginning.

35

LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM

Many people are so impressed with the achievements of Capitalism that they believe that if you overthrow it you overthrow civilization. It seems to them indispensable. We must therefore consider, first, what are the disadvantages of this way of doing it? and, second, is there any other way?

Now in one sense there is no other way. All the businesses that need to have many weeks or months or years of work done on them by large bodies of men before they can pay their way, require great quantities of spare subsistence. If it takes ten years to make a harbor or twenty years to make a coal mine, the men who are making it will be eating their heads off all that time. Other people must be providing them with food, clothes, lodging, and so forth without immediate return, just as parents have to provide for growing children. In this respect it makes no difference whether we vote for Capitalism or Socialism. The process is one of natural necessity which cannot be changed by any political revolution nor evaded by any possible method of social organization.

But it does not follow that the collection and employment of spare subsistence for these purposes must be done by private companies touting for the money that very rich people are too gorged with luxuries to be able to spend, and that people of more moderate means are prudent enough to put by for a rainy day.

To begin with, there are many most necessary things that the private companies and employers will not do because they cannot make people pay for them when they are done. Take for instance a lighthouse. Without lighthouses we should hardly dare to go to sea; and the trading ships would have to go so slowly and cautiously, and so many of them would be wrecked, that the cost of the goods they carry would be much higher than it is. Therefore we all benefit greatly by lighthouses, even those of us who have never seen the sea and never expect to. But the capitalists will not build lighthouses. If the lighthouse keeper could collect a payment from every ship that passed, they would build them fast enough until the cost was lighted all round like the sea front in Brighton; but as this is impossible, and the lighthouses must shine on every ship impartially without making the captain put his hand in his pocket for it, the capitalists leave the coast in the dark. Therefore the Government steps in and collects spare subsistence in the shape of taxes from everybody (which is quite fair, as everybody shares the benefit), and builds the lighthouses. Here we see Capitalism failing completely to supply what to a seafaring nation like ours is one of the first necessaries of life (for we should starve without our shipping) and thereby forcing us to resort to Communism.

But Capitalism often refuses necessary work even when some money can be made out of it directly.

For example, a lighthouse reminds us of a harbor, which is equally necessary. Every ship coming into a harbor has to pay harbor dues; therefore anyone making a harbor can make money by it. But great harbors, with their breakwaters and piers built up in the sea, take so many years to construct, and the work is so liable to damage and even destruction in storms, and the impossibility of raising harbor dues beyond a certain point without sending the ships round to cheaper harbors so certain, that private capital turns away from it to enterprises in which there is more certainty as to what the cost will be, less delay, and more money to be made. For instance, distilleries make large profits. There is no uncertainty about the cost of building them and fitting them up; and a ready sale for whiskey can always be depended on. You can tell to within a few hundred pounds what a big distillery will cost, whereas you cannot tell to within a million what a big harbor will cost. All this would not influence the Government, which has to consider only whether another distillery or another harbor is more wanted for the good of the nation. But the private capitalists have not the good of the nation in their charge: all they have to consider is their duty to themselves and their families, which is to choose the safest and most profitable way of investing their spare money. Accordingly they choose the distillery; and if we depended on private capitalists alone the country would have as many distilleries as the whiskey market could support, and no harbors. And when they have established their distillery they will spend enormous sums of money in advertisements to persuade the public that their whiskey is better and healthier and older and more famous than the whiskey made in other distilleries, and that everybody ought to drink whiskey every day as a matter of course. As none of these statements is true, the printing of them is, from the point of view of the nation, a waste of wealth, a perversion of labor, and a propaganda of pernicious humbug.

The private capitalists not only choose what will make most money for them, but what will make it with least trouble: that is, they will do as little for it as possible. If they sell an article or a service, they will make it as dear as possible instead of as cheap as possible. This would not matter if, as thoughtless people imagine, the lower the price the bigger the sale, and the bigger the sale the greater the profit. It is true in many cases that the lower the price the bigger the sale; but it is not true that the bigger the sale the greater the profit. There may be half a dozen prices (and consequently sales) at which the profit will be exactly the same.

Take the case of a cable laid across the ocean to send messages to foreign countries. How much a word is the company to charge for the messages? If the charge is a pound a word very few people can afford to send them. If the charge is a penny a word the cable will be crowded with messages all day and all night. Yet the profit may be the same; and, if it is, it will be far less trouble to send one word at a pound than two hundred and forty words at a penny.

The same is true of the ordinary telegraph service. When it was in the hands of private companies, the service was restricted and expensive. When the Government took it over, it not only extended lines of all sorts to out-of-the-way places; cheapened the service; and did without a profit: it actually ran it at what the private capitalist calls a loss. It did this because the cheap service was such a benefit to the whole community, including the people who never send telegrams as well as those who send a dozen every day, that it paid the nation and was much fairer as well to reduce the price charged to the actual senders below the cost of the service, the difference being made up by everybody in taxes.

This very desirable arrangement is quite beyond the power of private Capitalism, which not only keeps the price as high as possible above the cost of production and service for the sake of making the utmost profit, but has no power to distribute that cost over all the people who benefit, and must levy it entirely on those who actually buy the goods or pay for the service. It is true that business people can pass the cost of their telegrams and telephone messages on to their customers in the price of the things they sell; but a great deal of our telegraphing and telephoning is not business telegraphing and telephoning; and its cost cannot be passed on by the senders to anyone. The only objection to throwing the cost entirely on public taxation is that if we could all send telegrams of unlimited length without having to pay across the counter enough ready money to prevent us using the telegraph service when the post would do as well, or sticking in “kind regards from all to dear Aunt Jane and a kiss from Baby” at the end of every message, the lines would be so choked that we should not be able to send telegrams at all. As to the telephone, some women would hang on to it all day if it made no difference to their pockets. Even as it is, a good deal of unnecessary work is put upon the telegraph service by people spinning out their messages to twelve words because they are not allowed to pay for less, and they think they are not getting full value for their money if they say what they have to say in six. It does not occur to them that they are wasting their own time and that of the officials, besides increasing their taxes. It seems a trifle; but public affairs consist of trifles multiplied by as many millions as there are people in the country; and trifles cease to be trifles when they are multiplied on that scale. Snowball letters, which seem a kindly joke to the idiots who start them, would wreck our postal system if sensible people did not conscientiously throw them into the waste paper basket.

It is necessary to understand these things very clearly, because most people are so simple and ignorant of big business matters that the private capitalists are actually able to persuade them that Capitalism is a success because it makes profits, and public service (or Communism) a failure because it makes none. The simpletons forget that the profits come out of their own pockets, and that what is the better for the private capitalists in this respect is the worse for their customers, the disappearance of profit being simply the disappearance of overcharge.

36

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

You now see how it is that the nation cannot depend on private capital because there are so many vitally necessary things, from town drainage to lighthouses, which it will not provide at all, and how what it does provide it provides in the wrong order, refusing to make a harbor until it has made as many distilleries as the trade will hold, and building five luxurious houses for one rich person whilst a shocking proportion of the nation’s children is dying of overcrowding in slums.

In short, the private capitalists, instead of doing the most desirable work first, begin at the wrong end. All that can be said for this policy is that if you begin at the wrong end you may be driven towards the right end when you have done your worst and can get no further in the wrong direction; and this is in fact the position into which our most respectable capitalists have been forced by circumstances. When the poor have bought all the strong drink they can afford to pay for, and the rich their racing stables and all the pearls they can find room for on their wives’ necks, the capitalists are forced to apply their next year’s accumulations of capital to the production of more necessary things.

Before the hungry can be set to work building mills and making machinery to equip them, somebody, possibly a woman, must invent the machinery. The capitalists buy her invention. If she is good at business, which very few inventors are, she makes them pay her enough to become a capitalist herself; but in most cases she makes a very poor bargain, because she has to sell the lion’s share in her invention for a few pounds to enable her to pay for the necessary models and trials. It is only in modern Big Business that inventiveness in method and organization superadded to mechanical ingenuity has a chance against capital. If you have that talent the Big Business people will not trouble to buy your patents: they will buy you at a handsome price, and take you into the concern. But the simpleminded mechanical inventor has no such luck. In any case, the capitalists have made a communist law nationalizing all inventions after fourteen years, when the capitalists can use them without paying the inventor anything. They soon persuade themselves, or at least try to persuade others, that they invented the machines themselves, and deserve their riches for their ingenuity. Quite a number of people believe them.

Thus equipped with mechanical devices which are quite beyond the means of small producers, the big capitalists begin to wipe the small producers off the face of the earth. They seize on the work done by the handloom weaver in his cottage, and do it much more cheaply in great mills full of expensive machine looms driven by steam. They take the work of the oldtime miller with his windmill or waterwheel, and do it in vast buildings with steel rollers and powerful engines. They set up against the blacksmith a Nasmyth hammer that a thousand Vulcans could not handle, and scissors that snip sheet steel and bite off heavy bars more easily than he could open a tin of condensed milk. They launch huge steel ships, driven by machinery which the shipwrights who built for Columbus would have called devil’s work. They raise houses in skyscraping piles of a hundred dwellings one on top of another, in steel and concrete, so that in place of one horizontal street you have bunches of perpendicular ones. They make lace by machinery, more of it in a day than ten thousand women could make by hand. They make boots by machinery, clocks by machinery, pins and needles by machinery. They sell you machines to use yourself in your own house, such as vacuum cleaners, to replace your old sweeping brush and tea leaves. They lay on the electric power and hydraulic power that they use in their factories to your house like water or gas; so that you can light and heat your house with it, and have yourself carried in a lift from the basement to the attic and back again without the trouble of climbing the stairs. You can boil your kettle and cook your dinner with it. You could even make toast with it (they sell you a little oven for the purpose) if it were not that you always forget to take the toast out before it is burnt to a cinder.

Bad as the machine-made goods are at first compared to hand-made goods, they end by being sometimes better, sometimes as good, sometimes as well worth buying at the lower price, and always in the long run the only goods you can get. For at last we forget how to make things by hand, and become dependent on the bigger machine industries in spite of the little groups of artists who try to keep the old handicrafts alive. When William Morris, a great artist and craftsman, invented a story about the handle coming off a rake in a village, and nobody knowing how to put it on again, so that they had to get a big machine and eight engineers down from London to do it, his tale was not at all so improbable as it would have been in the days of Queen Anne. Our consolation is that if machinery makes rakes so cheap that it is not worth while mending them instead of throwing them away and going on with new ones, the loss is greater than the gain. And if the people who work the machines have a better life of it than the old handy people, then the change is for the better.

Mind: I do not say that these advantages are always gained at present. Most of us are using cheap and nasty articles, and living a cheap and nasty life; but this is not the fault of the machines and the great factories, nor of the application of spare money to construct them: it is the fault of the unequal distribution of the product and of the leisure gained by their saving of labor.

Now this misdistribution need not have occurred if the spare money had not been in private hands. If it had been in the hands of national and municipal banks controlling its use in the interest of all of us the capitalization of industry on a large scale would have been an unmixed blessing, instead of being, as it is at present, a blessing so mixed with curses of one kind or another that in Samuel Butler’s famous Utopia, called Erewhon, the making and even the possession of machinery is punished as a crime.

Some of our cleverest anti-Socialists advocate a return to the life of the early eighteenth century, before the machines and factories came in. But that would mean going back to the small population of that time, as the old methods would not produce enough for our fortytwo millions. High capitalization of industry, in which a million of spare money is spent to provide us with fourpenny reels of cotton, has come to stay; but if Socialism prevails, the million will be public and not private property, and the reels will cost considerably less than twopence. To put it shortly, capitalization is one thing, and Capitalism quite another. Capitalization does not hurt us as long as capital is our servant and not our master. Capitalism inevitably makes it our master instead of our servant. Instead of public servants we are private slaves.

Note that the great change from cottage handicraft to factories and machine industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is called by economists and historians The Industrial Revolution.

37

SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY

So far we have considered the growth of Capitalism as it occurs at home. But capital has no home, or rather it is at home everywhere. It is a quaint fact that though professed Socialists and Communists call themselves Internationalists, and carry a red flag which is the flag of the workers of all nations, and though most capitalists are boastfully national, and wave the Union Jack on every possible occasion, yet when you come down from the cries and catchwords to the facts, you find that every practical measure advocated by British Socialists would have the effect of keeping British capital in Britain to be spent on improving the condition of their native country, whilst the British Capitalists are sending British capital out of Britain to the ends of the earth by hundreds of millions every year. If, with all our British spare money in their hands, they were compelled to spend it in the British Isles, or were patriotic or public spirited or insular enough to do so without being compelled, they could at least call themselves patriots with some show of plausibility. Unfortunately we allow them to spend it where they please; and their only preference, as we have seen, is for the country in which it will yield them the largest income. Consequently, when they have begun at the wrong end at home, and have exhausted its possibilities, they do not move towards the right end until they have exhausted the possibilities of the wrong end abroad as well.

Take the drink trade again as the most obvious example of the wrong end being the most profitable end commercially.

It soon became so certain that free Capitalism in drink in England would destroy England, that the Government was forced to interfere. Spirits can be distilled so cheaply that it is quite possible to make a woman “drunk for a penny: dead drunk for twopence”, and make a handsome profit by doing it. When the capitalists were allowed to do this they did it without remorse, having nothing to consider commercially but their profits. The Government found that masses of people were poisoning, ruining, maddening themselves with cheap gin. Accordingly a law was made by which every distiller had to pay the Government so much money for every gallon of strong drink he manufactured that he could make no profit unless he added this tax to the price of the drink; and this made the drink so dear that though there was still a great deal too much drunkenness, and working women suffered because much more had to come out of the housekeeping money for the men’s beer and spirits, yet the working people could not afford to drink as recklessly and ruinously as they did in the days when Hogarth’s picture of Gin Lane was painted.

In the United States of America the resistance of the Government to the demoralization of the people by private traffic in drink has gone much further. These States, after trying the plan of taxing strong drink, and finding it impossible to stop excessive drinking in this way, were driven one by one to a resolution to exterminate the trade altogether, until at last it was prohibited in so many States that it became possible to make a Federal law (that is, a law for all the States) prohibiting the sale or even the possession of intoxicating liquor anywhere within the United States. The benefits of this step were so immediate and so enormous that even the Americans who buy drink from smugglers (bootleggers) whenever they can, vote steadily for Prohibition; and so, of course, do the bootleggers, whose profits are prodigious. Prohibition will sooner or later be forced on every Capitalist country as a necessary defence against the ruinous effect of private profiteering in drink. The only practicable alternative is the municipalization of the drink trade: that is, socialism.

When our drink profiteers and their customers fill the newspapers with stories about Prohibition being a failure in America, about all Americans taking to drugs because they cannot get whiskey, about their drinking more whiskey than ever, and when they quote a foolish saying of a former bishop of Peterborough, that he would rather see England free than England sober (as if a drunken man could be free in any sense, even if he escaped arrest by the police), you must bear in mind the fact, never mentioned by them, that millions of Americans who have never been drunk in their lives, and who do not believe that their moderate use of the intoxicants they have found pleasant has ever done them the slightest harm, have yet voted away this indulgence for the general good of their country and in the interests of human dignity and civilization. Remember also that our profiteers have engaged in the smuggling trade, and actually tried to represent the measures taken against it by the American Government as attacks on British liberties. If America were as weak militarily as China was in 1840 they would drive us into a war to force whiskey on America.

Do not, however, rush to the conclusion that Prohibition, because it is a violently effective method of combating unscrupulous profiteering in drink, is an ideal method of dealing with the drink question. It is not certain that there would be any drink question if we got rid of capitalism. We shall consider that later on: our present point is simply that capital has no conscience and no country. Capitalism, beaten in a civilized country by Prohibition, can send its capital abroad to an uncivilized one where it can do what it likes. Our capitalists wiped multitudes of black men out of existence with gin when they were forcibly prevented by law from doing the same to their own countrymen. They would have made Africa a desert white with the bones of drunkards had they not discovered that more profit could be made by selling men and women than by poisoning them. The drink trade was rich; but the slave trade was richer. Huge profits were made by kidnapping shiploads of negroes and selling them as slaves. Cities like Bristol have been built upon that black foundation. White queens put money into it. The slave trade would still be a British trade if it had not been forbidden by law through the efforts of British philanthropists who, with their eyes in the ends of the earth, did not know that British children were being overworked and beaten in British factories as cruelly as the negro children in the plantations.

If you are a softhearted person, be careful not to lose your head as you read of these horrors. Virtuous indignation is a powerful stimulant, but a dangerous diet. Keep in mind the old proverb: anger is a bad counsellor. Our capitalists did not begin in this way as perversely wicked people. They did not soil their own hands with the work. Their hands were often the white hands of refined, benevolent, cultivated ladies of the highest rank. All they did or could do was to invest their spare money in the way that brought them the largest income. If milk had paid better than gin, or converting negroes to Christianity better than converting them into slaves, they would have traded in milk and Bibles just as willingly, or rather just as helplessly, as in gin and slaves.

When the gin trade was overdone and exhausted, and the slave trade suppressed, they went on into ordinary industrial work, and found that profits could be made by employing slaves as well as by kidnapping and selling them. They used their political power to induce the British Government to annex great tracts of Africa, and to impose on the natives taxes which they could not possibly pay except by working for the capitalists like English working men, only at lower wages and without the protection of English Factory Acts and English public opinion. Great fortunes were made in this way. The Empire was enlarged: “trade followed the flag” they said, meaning that the flag followed trade and then more trade followed the flag; British capital developed the world everywhere (except at home); the newspapers declared that it was all very splendid; and generals like Lord Roberts expressed their belief that God meant that three-quarters of the earth should be ruled by young gentlemen from our public schools, in which schools, by the way, nothing whatever was done to explain to them what this outrageous pillage of their own country for the development of the rest of the earth really meant over and above the temporary enrichment of their own small class.

Nothing in our political history is more appalling than the improvidence with which we have allowed British spare money, desperately needed at home for the full realization of our own powers of production, and for the clearing away of our disgraceful slum centres of social corruption, to be driven abroad at the rate of two hundred millions every year, loading us with unemployed, draining us by emigration, imposing huge military and naval forces upon us, strengthening the foreign armies of which we are afraid, and providing all sorts of facilities for the foreign industries which destroy our powers of self-support by doing for us what we could and should do just as well for ourselves. If a fraction of the British spare money our capitalists have spent in providing South America with railways and mines and factories had been spent in making roads to our natural harbors and turning to account the gigantic wasted water power of the tideways and torrents of barren savage coasts in Scotland and Ireland, or even in putting an end to such capitalistic absurdities as the sending of farm produce from one English county to another by way of America, we should not now be complaining that the countries our spare money has developed can undersell our merchants and throw our workers on public charity for want of employment.

38

DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES

I became a little rhetorical at the end of the last chapter, as Socialists will when they have, like myself, acquired the habit of public speaking. I hope I have not carried you away so far as to make you overlook in your indignation the fact that, whilst all these dreadful things have been going on, the profits of the capital which has gone abroad are coming into the country gratuitously (imports without equivalent exports) and being spent here by the capitalists, and that their expenditure gives employment. The capital went out; but the income comes in; and the question arises, are we any the worse for being pampered paupers, living on the labor of other nations? If the money that is coming in in income is more than went out as capital, are we not better off?

One’s impulse is to say certainly not, because the same money spent as capital at home would have brought us in just as large an income, and perhaps larger, than it fetches from abroad, though the capitalists might not have got so much of it. Indeed they might have got none of it if it had been spent in great public works like clearing slums, embanking rivers, roadmaking, smoke abatement, free schools and universities, and other good things that cannot be charged for except communistically through rates and taxes. But the question is more complicated than that.

Suppose yourself a mill hand in a factory, accustomed to tend a machine there, and to live with your people in a poor quarter of a manufacturing town. Suddenly you find yourself discharged, and the factory shut up, because the trade has mysteriously gone abroad. You find that mill hands are not wanted, but that there is a scarcity of lady’s maids, of assistants in fashionable shops, of waitresses in week-end motoring hotels, of stewardesses in palatial steamships, of dressmakers, of laundresses, of fine cooks (hidden in the kitchen and spoken of as “_the chef_”), of all sorts of women whose services are required by idle rich people. But you cannot get one of these jobs because you do not know the work, and are not the sort of person, and have not the speech, dress, and manners which are considered indispensable. After a spell of starvation and despair you find a job in a chocolate cream factory or a jam and pickles works, or you become a charwoman. And if you have a daughter you bring her up to the chocolate cream or lady’s maid business, and not to weaving and spinning.

It is possible that in the end your daughter may be better paid, better dressed, more gently spoken, more ladylike than you were in the old mill. You may come to thank God that some Indian, or Chinaman, or negro, or simply some foreigner is doing the work you used to do, and setting your daughter free to do something that is considered much more genteel and is better paid and more respected. Your son may be doing better as a trainer of racehorses than his father did as a steel smelter, and be ever so much more the gentleman. You might, if you lived long enough, see the ugly factory towns of the Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham districts, and of the Potteries, disappear and be replaced by nice residential towns and pleasure resorts like Bournemouth, Cheltenham, and the Malverns. You might see the valleys of Wales recover the beauty they had before the mines spoiled them. And it would be quite natural for you to call these changes prosperity, and vote for them, and sincerely loathe anyone who warned you that all it meant was that the nation, having become a parasite on foreign labor, was going to the devil as fast as it could.

Yet the warning would be much needed. If a nation turns its rough mill hands into well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken, ladylike mill officials, properly respected, and given a fair share of the wealth they help to produce, the nation is the stronger, the richer, the happier, and the holier for the change. If it turns them into lady’s maids and sellers of twenty-guinea hats, it breaks its own backbone and exchanges its page in honorable history for a chapter in The Ruins of Empires. It becomes too idle and luxurious to be able to compel the foreign countries to pay the tribute on which it lives; and when they cease to feed it, it has lost the art of feeding itself and collapses in the midst of its genteel splendor.

But this dismal sketch of the future of countries that let themselves become dependent on the labor of other countries and settle down into a comfortable and ladylike parasitism is really much too favorable. If all our factory foremen could be turned into headwaiters with a touch of Cinderella’s godmother’s wand, neither they nor their wives might object. But this is not what happens. The factory foreman may bring up his son to be a waiter; but he himself becomes an unemployed man. If he is not fit for any of the new jobs, and too old to learn, and his trade is not merely going through one of the usual periods of depression but has left the country for good, he becomes a permanently unemployed man, and consequently a starving man. Now a starving man is a dangerous man, no matter how respectable his political opinions may be. A man who has had his dinner is never a revolutionist: his politics are all talk. But hungry men, rather than die of starvation, will, when there are enough of them to overpower the police, begin by rioting, and end by plundering and burning rich men’s houses, upsetting the government, and destroying civilization. And the women, sooner than see their children starve, will make the men do it, small blame to them.

Consequently the capitalists, when they have sent their capital abroad instead of giving continuous employment with it at home, and are confronted at home with masses of desperate men for whom they can find no suitable jobs, must either feed them for nothing or face a revolution. And so you get what we call the dole. Now small as the dole may be it must be sufficient to live on; and if two or three in one household put their doles together, they grow less keen on finding employment, and develop a taste for living like ladies and gentlemen: that is, amusing themselves at the expense of others instead of earning anything. We used to moralize over this sort of thing as part of the decline and fall of ancient Rome; but we have been heading straight for it ourselves for a long while past, and the war has plunged us into it head over ears. For it was after the war that the capitalists failed to find employment for no less than two million demobilized soldiers who had for four years been not only well fed and clothed, but trained in the handling of weapons whilst occupied in slaughtering, burning, destroying, and facing terrible risks of being themselves destroyed. If these men had not been given money to live on they would have taken it by violence. Accordingly the Government had to take millions of spare money from the capitalists and give it to the demobilized men; and they are still doing so, with the grudged consent of the capitalists themselves, who complain bitterly, but fear that if they refuse they will lose everything.

At this point Capitalism becomes desperate, and quite openly engages in attempts to get rid of the unemployed: that is, to empty the country of part of its population, which it calls overpopulation. How is it to be done? As the unemployed will not let themselves be starved, still less will they let themselves be gassed or poisoned or shot, which would be the logical Capitalist way out of the mess. But they can perhaps be induced to leave the country and try their luck elsewhere if the Government will pay the fare, or as much of it as they cannot scrape up themselves. As I write these lines the Government announces that if any Englishwoman or Englishman will be so kind as to clear out of England to the other side of the world it will cost them only three pounds apiece instead of five times that sum, as the Government will provide the odd twelve pounds. And if sufficient numbers do not jump at this offer before these lines are printed, the Government may be driven to offer to send them away for nothing and give them ten pounds apiece to start with in their new country. That would be cheaper than keeping them at home on the dole.

Thus we see Capitalism producing the amazing and fantastic result that the people of the country become a drawback to it, and have to be got rid of like vermin (polite people call the process Assisted Emigration), leaving nobody in it but capitalists and landlords and their attendants, living on imported food and manufactures in an elegant manner, and realizing the lady’s and gentleman’s dream of a country in which there is lavish consumption and no production, stately parks and palatial residences without factories or mines or smoke or slums or any unpleasantness that heaps of gratuitous money can prevent, and contraception in full swing to avoid any further increase in the population.

Surely, you will say, if Capitalism leads to this, it leads to an earthly paradise. Leaving out of account the question whether the paradise, if realized, would not be a fool’s paradise (for, I am sorry to say, we have all been brought up to regard such a state of things as the perfection of human society), and admitting that something like it has been half realized in spots in many places from Monte Carlo to Gleneagles, and from Gleneagles to Palm Beach, it is never realized for a whole country. It has often been carried far enough to reduce powerful empires like Rome and Spain to a state of demoralized impotence in which they were broken up and plundered by the foreigners on whom they had allowed themselves to become dependent; but it never has, and never can, build up a stable Parasitic State in which all the workers are happy and contented because they share the riches of the capitalists, and are kept healthy and pleasant and nice because the capitalists are cultivated enough to dislike seeing slums and shabby ugly people and running the risk of catching infectious diseases from them. When capitalists are intelligent enough to care whether the whole community is healthy and pleasant and happy or not, even when the unpleasantnesses do not come under their own noses, they become Socialists, for the excellent reason that there is no fun in being a capitalist if you have to take care of your servants and tradesmen (which means sharing your income with them) as affectionately as if they were your own family. If your taste and conscience were cultivated to that extent you would find such a responsibility unbearable, because you would have to be continually thinking of others, not only to the necessary and possible extent of taking care that your own activities and conveniences did not clash unreasonably and unkindly with theirs, but to the unnecessary and impossible extent of doing all the thinking for them that they ought to do, and in freedom could do, for themselves. It is easy to say that servants should be treated well not only because humanity requires it but because they will otherwise be unpleasant and dishonest and inefficient servants. But if you treat your servants as well as you treat yourself, which really amounts to spending as much money on them as on yourself, what is the use of having servants? They become a positive burden, expecting you to be a sort of Earthly Providence to them, which means that you spend half your time thinking for them and the other half talking about them. Being able to call your servants your own is a very poor compensation for not being able to call your soul your own. That is why, even as it is, you run away from your comfortable house to live in hotels (if you can afford it), because, when you have paid your bill and tipped the waiter and the chambermaid, you are finished with them, and have not to be a sort of matriarch to them as well.

Anyhow, most of those who are ministering to your wants are not in personal contact with you. They are the employees of your tradesmen; and as your tradesmen trade capitalistically, you have inequality of income, unemployment, sweating, division of society into classes, with the resultant dysgenic restrictions on marriage, and all the other evils which prevent a capitalist society from achieving peace or permanence. A self-contained, self-supporting Capitalism would at least be safe from being starved out as Germany was in the war in spite of her military successes; but a completely parasitic Capitalism, however fashionable, would be simply Capitalism with that peril intensified to the utmost.

39

FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG

Now let us turn back to inquire whether sending our capital abroad, and consenting to be taxed to pay emigration fares to get rid of the women and men who are left without employment in consequence, is all that Capitalism can do when our employers, who act for our capitalists in industrial affairs, and are more or less capitalists themselves in the earlier stages of capitalistic development, find that they can sell no more of their goods at a profit, or indeed at all, in their own country.

Clearly they cannot send abroad the capital they have already invested, because it has all been eaten up by the workers, leaving in its place factories and railways and mines and the like; and these cannot be packed into a ship’s hold and sent to Africa. It is only the freshly saved capital that can be sent out of the country. This, as we have seen, does go abroad in heaps. But the British employer who is working with capital in the shape of works fixed to British land held by him on long lease, must, when once he has sold all the goods at home that his British customers can afford to buy, either shut up his works until the customers have worn out their stock of what they have bought, which would bankrupt him (for the landlord will not wait), or else sell his superfluous goods somewhere else: that is, he must send them abroad.

Now it is not so easy to send them to civilized countries, because they practise Protection, which means that they impose heavy taxes (customs duties) on foreign goods. Uncivilized countries, without Protection, and inhabited by natives to whom gaudy calicoes and cheap showy brass ware are dazzling and delightful novelties, are the best places to make for at first.

But trade requires a settled government to put down the habit of plundering strangers. This is not a habit of simple tribes, who are often friendly and honest. It is what civilized men do where there is no law to restrain them. Until quite recent times it was extremely dangerous to be wrecked on our own coasts, as wrecking, which meant plundering wrecked ships and refraining from any officious efforts to save the lives of their crews, was a well-established business in many places on our shores. The Chinese still remember some astonishing outbursts of looting perpetrated by English ladies of high position, at moments when law was suspended and priceless works of art were to be had for the grabbing. When trading with aborigines begins with the visit of a single ship, the cannons and cutlasses it carries may be quite sufficient to overawe the natives if they are troublesome. The real difficulty begins when so many ships come that a little trading station of white men grows up and attracts the white ne’er-do-wells and violent roughs who are always being squeezed out of civilization by the pressure of law and order. It is these riffraff who turn the place into a sort of hell in which sooner or later missionaries are murdered and traders plundered. Their home Governments are appealed to to put a stop to this. A gunboat is sent out and an inquiry made. The report after the inquiry is that there is nothing to be done but set up a civilized government, with a post office, police, troops, and a navy in the offing. In short, the place is added to some civilized Empire. And the civilized taxpayer pays the bill without getting a farthing of the profits.

Of course the business does not stop there. The riffraff who have created the emergency move out just beyond the boundary of the annexed territory, and are as great a nuisance as ever to the traders when they have exhausted the purchasing power of the included natives and push on after fresh customers. Again they call on their home Government to civilize a further area; and so bit by bit the civilized Empire grows at the expense of the home taxpayers, without any intention or approval on their part, until at last, though all their real patriotism is centred on their own people and confined to their own country, their own rulers, and their own religious faith, they find that the centre of their beloved realm has shifted to the other hemisphere. That is how we in the British Islands have found our centre moved from London to the Suez Canal, and are now in the position that out of every hundred of our fellow-subjects, in whose defence we are expected to shed the last drop of our blood, only eleven are whites or even Christians. In our bewilderment some of us declare that the Empire is a burden and a blunder, whilst others glory in it as a triumph. You and I need not argue with them just now, our point for the moment being that, whether blunder or glory, the British Empire was quite unintentional. What should have been undertaken only as a most carefully considered political development has been a series of commercial adventures thrust on us by capitalists forced by their own system to cater for foreign customers before their own country’s needs were one-tenth satisfied.

40

EMPIRES IN COLLISION

If the British Empire were the only State on earth, the process might go on peacefully (except for ordinary police coercion) until the whole earth was civilized under the British flag. This is the dream of British Imperialism. But it is not what the world is like. There are all the other States, large and small, with their Imperialist dreamers and their very practical traders pushing for foreign markets, and their navies and armies to back the traders and annex these markets. Sooner or later, as they push their boundaries into Africa and Asia, they come up against oneanother. A collision of that kind (called the Fashoda incident) very nearly involved us in a war with France. Fortunately France gave way, not being prepared to fight us just then; but France and Britain were left with the whole Sudan divided between them. France had before this pushed into and annexed Algeria and (virtually) Tunisia; and Spain was pushing into Morocco. Italy, alarmed lest there should be nothing left for her, made a dash at Tripoli and annexed it. England was in Egypt as well as in India.