I do not deny the intense human interest of these open questions, the imperative need there is to get the truth, whether one considers it to be one's own truth or the universal truth, upon them. But my point is that they are to be discussed apart from Socialist theory, and that anyhow they have nothing to do with Socialist politics. It is no doubt interesting to discuss the benefits of vaccination and the justice and policy of its public compulsion, to debate whether one should eat meat or confine oneself to a vegetable dietary, whether the overhead or the slot system is preferable for tramway traction, whether steamboats are needed on the Thames in winter, and whether it is wiser to use metal or paper for money; but none of these things have anything to do with the principles of Socialism. Nor need we decide whether Whistler, Raphael or Carpaccio has left us the most satisfying beauty, or which was the greater musician, Wagner, Scarlatti or Beethoven, nor pronounce on the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy in any prescribed way, because we accept Socialism.

Coming to graver matters there are ardent theologians who would create an absolute antagonism between Socialism and Christianity, who would tie up Socialism with some extraordinary doctrine of Predestination, or deny the possibility of a Christian being a Socialist or a Socialist being a Christian. But these are matters on different planes. In a sense Socialism is a religion; to me it is a religion, in the sense, that is, that it gives a work to do that is not self-seeking, that it determines one in a thousand indecisions, that it supplies that imperative craving of so many human souls, a devotion. But I do not see why a believer in any of the accepted creeds of Christianity, from the Apostles' Creed upward, should not also whole-heartedly give himself to this great work of social reconstruction. To believe in a real and personal Heaven is surely not to deny earth with its tragedy, its sorrows, its splendid possibilities. It is simply to believe a little more concretely than I do, that is all. To assert the brotherhood of man under God seems to me to lead logically to a repudiation of the severities of Private Ownership—that is to Socialism. When the rich young man was told to give up his property to follow Christ, when the disciples were told to leave father and mother, it seems to me ridiculous to present Christianity as opposed to the self-abnegation of the two main generalizations of Socialism—that relating to property in things, and that relating to property in persons. It is true that the Church of Rome has taken the deplorable step of forbidding Socialism (or at least Socialismus) to its adherents; but there is no need for Socialists to commit a reciprocal stupidity. Let us Socialists at any rate keep our intellectual partitions up. The Church that now quarrels with Socialism once quarrelled with astronomy and geology, and astronomers and geologists went on with their own business. Both religion and astronomy are still alive and in the same world together. And the Vatican observatory, by the bye, is honourably distinguished for its excellent stellar photographs. Perhaps, after all, the Church does not mean by Socialismus Socialism as it is understood in English; perhaps it simply means the dogmatically anti-Christian Socialism of the Continental type.

I am not advocating indifference to any interest I have here set aside as irrelevant to Socialism. Men have discussed and will, I hope, continue to discuss such questions as I have instanced with passionate zeal; but Socialism need not be entangled by their decisions. We can go on our road to Socialism, we can get to Socialism, to the Civilized State, whichever answer is given to any of these questions, great or small.



CHAPTER VII

WOULD MODERN SOCIALISM ABOLISH ALL PROPERTY?

Sec. 1.

Having in the previous chapter cleared up a considerable mass of misconception and possibility of misrepresentation about the attitude of Socialism to the home, let us now devote a little more attention to the current theory of property and say just exactly where Modern Socialism stands in that matter.

The plain fact of the case is that the Socialist, whether he wanted to or no, would no more be able to abolish personal property altogether than he would be able to abolish the human liver. The extension of one's personality to things outside oneself is indeed as natural and instinctive a thing as eating. But because the liver is necessary and inevitable, there is no reason why it should be enlarged to uncomfortable proportions, and because eating is an unconquerable instinct there is no excuse for repletion. The position of the modern Socialist is that the contemporary idea of personal property is enormously exaggerated and improperly extended to things that ought not to be "private"; not that it is not a socially most useful and desirable idea within its legitimate range.

There can be no doubt that many of those older writers who were "Socialists before Socialism," Plato, for instance, and Sir Thomas More, did very roundly abolish private property altogether. They were extreme Communists, and so were many of the earlier Socialists; in More's Utopia, doors might not be fastened, they stood open; one hadn't even a private room. These earlier writers wished to insist upon the need of self-abnegation in the ideal State, and to startle and confound, they insisted overmuch. The early Christians, one gathers, were almost completely communistic, and that interesting experiment in Christian Socialism (of a rather unorthodox type of Christianity), the American Oneida community, was successfully communistic in every respect for many years. But the modern Socialist is not a communist; the modern Socialist, making his scheme of social reconstruction for the whole world and for every type of character, recognizes the entire impracticability of such dreams, recognizing, too, it may be, the sacrifice of human personality and distinction such ideals involve.

The word "property," one must remember, is a slightly evasive word. Absolute property hardly exists—absolute, that is to say, in the sense of unlimited right of disposal; almost all property is incomplete and relative. A man, under our present laws, has no absolute property even in his own life; he is restrained from suicide and punished if he attempt it. He may not go offensively filthy nor indecently clad; there are limits to his free use of his body. The owner of a house, of land, of a factory is subject to all sorts of limitations, building regulations for example, and so is the owner of horse or dog. Nor again is any property exempt from taxation. Even now property is a limited thing, and it is well to bear that much in mind. It can be defined as something one may do "what one likes with," subject only to this or that specific restriction, and at any time, it would seem, the State is at least legally entitled to increase the quantity and modify the nature of the restriction. The extremest private property is limited to a certain sanity and humanity in its use.

In that sense every adult now-a-days has private property in his or her own person, in clothes, in such personal implements as hand-tools, as a bicycle, as a cricket-bat or golf-sticks. In quite the same sense would he have it under Socialism so far as these selfsame things go. The sense of property in such things is almost instinctive; my little boys of five and three have the keenest sense of mine and (almost, if not quite so vividly) thine in the matter of toys and garments. The disposition of modern Socialism is certainly no more to override these natural tendencies than it is to fly in the face of human nature in regard to the home. The disposition of modern Socialism is indeed far more in the direction of confirming and insuring this natural property. And again modern Socialism has no designs upon the money in a man's pocket. It is quite true that the earlier and extreme Socialist theorists did in their communism find no use for money, but I do not think there are any representative Socialists now who do not agree that the State must pay and receive in money, that money is indispensable to human freedom. The featurelessness of money, its universal convertibility, gives human beings a latitude of choice and self-expression in its spending that is inconceivable without its use.

All such property Socialism will ungrudgingly sustain, and it will equally sustain property in books and objects of aesthetic satisfaction, in furnishing, in the apartments or dwelling-house a man or woman occupies and in their household implements. It will sustain far more property than the average working-class man has to-day. Nor will it prevent savings or accumulations, if men do not choose to expend their earnings—nor need it interfere with lending. How far it will permit or countenance usury is another question altogether. There will no doubt remain, after all the work-a-day needs of the world have been met by a scientific public organization of the general property in Nature, a great number of businesses and enterprises and new and doubtful experiments outside the range of legitimate State activity. In these, interested and prosperous people will embark their surplus money as shareholders in a limited liability company, making partnership profits or losses in an entirely proper manner. But whether there should be debentures and mortgages or preference shares, or suchlike manipulatory distinctions, or interest in any shape or form, I am inclined to doubt. A money-lender should share risk as well as profit—that is surely the moral law in lending that forbids usury; he should not be allowed to bleed a failing business with his inexorable percentage and so eat up the ordinary shareholder or partner any more than the landlord should be allowed to eat up the failing tenant for rent. That was once the teaching of Christianity, and I do not know enough of the history or spiritual development of the Catholic Church to tell when she became what she now appears to be—the champion of the rent-exacting landlord and the usurer against Socialism. It is the present teaching of Socialism. If usury obtains at all under the Socialist State, if inexorable repayments are to be made in certain cases, it will, I conceive, be a State monopoly. The State will be the sole banker for every hoard and every enterprise, just as it will be the universal landlord and the universal fire and accident and old age insurance office. In money matters as in public service and administration, it will stand for the species, the permanent thing behind every individual accident and adventure.

Posthumous property, that is to say the power to bequeath and the right to inherit things, will also persist in a mitigated state under Socialism. There is no reason whatever why it should not do so. There is a strong natural sentiment in favour of the institution of heirlooms, for example; one feels a son might well own—though he should certainly not sell—the intimate things his father desires to leave him. The pride of descent is an honourable one, the love for one's blood, and I hope that a thousand years from now some descendant will still treasure an obsolete weapon here, a picture there, or a piece of faint and faded needlework from our days and the days before our own. One may hate inherited privileges and still respect a family tree.

Widows and widowers again have clearly a kind of natural property in the goods they have shared with the dead; in the home, in the garden close, in the musical instruments and books and pleasant home-like things. Now, in nine cases out of ten, we do in effect bundle the widow out; she remains nominally owner of the former home, but she has to let it furnished or sell it, to go and live in a boarding-house or an exiguous flat.

Even perhaps a proportion of accumulated money may reasonably go to friend or kin. It is a question of public utility; Socialism has done with absolute propositions in all such things, and views these problems now as questions of detail, matters for fine discriminations. We want to be quit of pedantry. All that property which is an enlargement of personality, the modern Socialist seeks to preserve; it is that exaggerated property that gives power over the food and needs of one's fellow-creatures, property and inheritance in land, in industrial machinery, in the homes of others and in the usurer's grip upon others, that he seeks to destroy. The more doctrinaire Socialists will tell you they do not object to property for use and consumption, but only to property in "the means of production," but I do not choose to resort to over-precise definitions. The general intention is clear enough, the particular instance requires particular application. But it is just because we modern Socialists want every one to have play for choice and individual expression in all these realities of property that we object to this monstrous property of a comparatively small body of individuals expropriating the world.

Sec. 2.

I am inclined to think—but here I speak beyond the text of contemporary Socialist literature—that in certain directions Socialism, while destroying property, will introduce a compensatory element by creating rights. For example, Socialism will certainly destroy all private property in land and in natural material and accumulated industrial resources; it will be the universal landlord and the universal capitalist, but that does not mean that we shall all be the State's tenants-at-will. There can be little doubt that the Socialist State will recognize the rights of the improving occupier and the beneficial hirer. It is manifestly in accordance both with justice and public policy that a man who takes a piece of land and creates a value on it—by making a vineyard, let us say—is entitled to security of tenure, is to be dispossessed only in exceptional circumstances and with ample atonement. If a man who takes an agricultural or horticultural holding comes to feel that there he will toil and there later he will rest upon his labours, I do not think a rational Socialism will war against this passion for the vine and fig-tree. If it absolutely refuses the idea of freehold, it will certainly not repudiate leasehold. I think the State may prove a far more generous and sentimental landlord in many things than any private person.

In another correlated direction, too, Socialism is quite reconcilable with a finer quality of property than our landowner-ridden Britain allows to any but the smallest minority. I mean property in the house one occupies.... If I may indulge in a quite unauthorized speculation, I am inclined to think there may be two collateral methods of home-building in the future. For many people always there will need to be houses to which they may come and go for longer and shorter tenancies and which they will in no manner own. Now-a-days such people are housed in the exploits of the jerry-builder—all England is unsightly with their meagre pretentious villas and miserable cottages and tenement houses. Such homes in the Socialist future will certainly be supplied by the local authority, but they will be fair, decent houses by good architects, fitted to be clean and lit, airy and convenient, the homes of civilized people, sightly things altogether in a generous and orderly world. But in addition there will be the prosperous private person with a taste that way, building himself a home as a lease-holder under the public landlord. For him, too, there will be a considerable measure of property, a measure of property that might even extend to a right, if not of bequest, then at any rate of indicating a preference among his possible successors in the occupying tenancy....

Then there is a whole field of proprietary sensations in relation to official duties and responsibility. Men who have done good work in any field are not to be lightly torn from it. A medical officer of health who has done well in his district, a teacher who has taught a generation of a town, a man who has made a public garden, have a moral lien upon their work for all their lives. They do not get it under our present conditions. I know that it will be quite easy to say all this is a question of administration and detail. It is. But it is, nevertheless, important to state it clearly here, to make it evident that the coming of Socialism involves no destruction of this sort of identification of a man with the thing he does; this identification that is so natural and desirable—that this living and legitimate sense of property will if anything be encouraged and its claims strengthened under Socialism. To-day that particularly living sort of property-sense is often altogether disregarded. Every day one hears of men who have worked up departments in businesses, men who have created values for employers, men who have put their lives into an industrial machine, being flung aside because their usefulness is over, or out of personal pique, or to make way for favourites, for the employer's son or cousin or what not, without any sort of appeal or compensation. Ownership is autocracy; at the best it is latent injustice in all such matters of employment.

Then again, consider the case of the artist and the inventor who are too often forced by poverty now to sell their early inventions for the barest immediate subsistence. Speculators secure these initial efforts—sometimes to find them worthless, sometimes to discover in them the sources of enormous wealth. In no matter is it more difficult to estimate value than in the case of creative work; few geniuses are immediately recognized, and the history of art, literature and invention is full of Chattertons and Savages who perished before recognition came, and of Dickenses who sold themselves unwisely. Consider the immense social benefit if the creator even now possessed an inalienable right to share in the appreciation of his work. Under Socialism it would for all his life be his—and the world's, and controllable by him. He would be free to add, to modify, to repeat.

In all these respects modern Socialism tends to create and confirm property and rights, the property of the user, the rights of the creator. It is quite other property it tends to destroy; the property, the claim, of the creditor, the mortgagee, the landlord, and usurer, the forestaller, gambling speculator, monopolizer and absentee.... In very truth Socialism would destroy no property at all, but only that sham property that, like some wizard-cast illusion, robs us all.

Sec. 3.

And now we are discussing the Socialist attitude towards property, it may be well to consider a little group of objections that are often made in anti-Socialist tracts. I refer more particularly to a certain hard case, the hard case of the Savings of the Virtuous Small Man.

The reader, if he is at all familiar with this branch of controversial literature, probably knows how that distressing case is put. One is presented with a poor man of inconceivable industry, goodness and virtue; he has worked, he has saved; at last, for the security of his old age, he holds a few shares in a business, a "bit of land" or—perhaps through a building society—house property. Would we—the Anti-Socialist chokes with emotion—so alter the world as to rob him of that? ... The Anti-Socialist gathers himself together with an effort and goes on to a still more touching thought ... the widow![13]

[13] "The ethical case for slavery in the Southern States of America," my friend Mr. Graham Wallas reminds me, "was largely argued on the instance of the widow 'with a few strong slaves.'"

Well, I think there are assurances in the previous section to disabuse the reader's mind a little in this matter. This solicitude for the Saving Small Man and for the widow and orphan seems to me one of the least honest of all the anti-Socialist arguments. The man "who has saved a few pounds," the poor widow woman and her children clinging to some scrap of freehold are thrust forward to defend the harvest of the landlord and the financier. Let us look at the facts of the case and see how this present economic system of ours really does treat the "stocking" of the poor.

In the first place it does not guarantee to the small investor any security for his little hoard at all. He comes into the world of investment ill-informed, credulous or only unintelligently suspicious—and he is as a class continually and systematically deprived of his little accumulations. One great financial operation after another in the modern world, as any well-informed person can witness, eats up the small investor. Some huge, vastly respectable-looking enterprise is floated with a capital of so many scores or hundreds of thousands, divided into so many thousands of ordinary shares, so many five or six per cent. preference, so much debentures. It begins its career with a flourish of prosperity, the ordinary shares for a few years pay seven, eight, ten per cent. The Virtuous Small Man provides for his widow and his old age by buying this estimable security. Its price clambers to a premium, and so it passes slowly and steadily from its first speculative holder into the hands of the investing public. Then comes a slow, quiet, downward movement, a check at the interim dividend, a rapid contraction. Consider such a case as that of the great British Electric Traction Company which began with ordinary shares at ten, which clambered above twenty-one (21-7/8), which is now (October 1907) fluctuating about two. Its six per cent, preference shares have moved between fourteen and five and a half. Its ordinary shares represent a total capital of L1,333,010, and its preference L1,614,370; so that here in this one concern we have a phantom appearance and disappearance of over two million pounds' worth of value and a real disappearance of perhaps half that amount. It requires only a very slight knowledge of the world to convince one that the bulk of that sum was contributed by the modest investments of mediocre and small people out of touch with the real conditions of the world of finance.

These little investors, it is said, are the bitter champions of private finance against the municipalities and Socialists. One wonders why.

One could find a score of parallels and worse instances representing in the end many scores of millions of pounds taken from the investing public in the last few years. I will, however, content myself with one sober quotation from the New York Journal of Commerce, which the reader will admit is not likely to be a willing witness for Socialism. Commenting on the testimony of the principal witness, Mr. Harriman, of the Illinois Central Railroad, before the Inter-State Commerce Commission (March 1907), it says:—

"On his own admission he was one of a 'combine' of four who got possession of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, and immediately issued bonds for $40,000,000, out of the proceeds of which they paid themselves a dividend of 30 per cent, on the stock they held, besides taking the bonds at 65 and subsequently selling them at 90 or more, some of them to life insurance companies with which Mr. Harriman had some kind of relation. There were no earnings or surplus out of which the dividend could be paid, but the books of the company were juggled by transferring some $12,000,000 expended for betterments to capital account as a sort of bookkeeping basis for the performance.

"Besides this, the Chicago and Alton Railroad was transformed into a 'railway,' and a capitalization of a little under $40,000,000 was swollen to nearly $123,000,000 to cover an actual expenditure in improvements of $22,500,000. In the process there was an injection of about $60,600,000 of 'water' into the stock held by the four, some of which was sold to the Union Pacific, of which Mr. Harriman was president, and more was 'unloaded' upon the Rock Island. Mr. Harriman refused to tell how much he made out of that operation.

"It shows how some of our enormous fortunes are made, as well as what motives and purposes sometimes prevail in the use of the power entrusted to the directors and officers of corporations. It is a simple and elementary principle that all values are created by the productive activity of capital, labour and ability in industrial operations of one kind and another. No wealth comes out of nothing, but all must be produced and distributed, and what one gets by indirection another loses or fails to get. The personal profit of these speculative operations in which the capital, credit and power of corporations are used by those entrusted with their direction come out of the general body of stockholders whose interests are sacrificed, or out of the public investors who are lured and deceived, or out of shippers who are overtaxed for the service for which railroads are chartered, or out of all these in varying proportions. In other words they are the fruits of robbery."

So that you see it is not only untrue that Socialism would rob a poor man of his virtuously acquired "bit of property," but the direct contrary is the truth, that the present system, non-Socialism, is now constantly butchering thrift! Simple people believe the great financiers win and lose money to each other. They are not—to put it plainly—such fools. They use the public, and the public goes on being used, as a perpetual source of freshly accumulated wealth. I know one case of a man of fifty who serves in a shop, a most industrious, competent man, who has been saving and investing money all his life in what he had every reason to believe were safe and sober businesses; he has been denying himself pleasures, cramping his life to put by about a third of his wages every year since he was two-and-twenty, and to-day he has not got his keep for a couple of years, and his only security against disablement and old age is his subscription to a Friendly Society, a society which I have a very strong suspicion is no better off than most other Friendly Societies—and that is by no means well off, and by no means confident of the future.

It is possible to argue that the small man ought to take more pains about his investments, but, as a matter of fact, investing money securely and profitably is a special occupation of extraordinary complexity, and the common man with a few hundred pounds has no more chance in that market than he would have under water in Sydney Harbour amidst a shoal of sharks. It may be said that he is greedy, wants too much interest, but that is nonsense. One of the crudest gulfs into which small savings have gone in the case of the British public has been the trap of Consols, which pay at the present price less than three per cent. Servants and working men with Post Office Savings' Bank accounts were urged, tempted and assisted to invest in this solemn security—even when it stood at 114. Those who did so have now (November 1907) lost almost a third of their money.

It is scarcely too much to say that a very large proportion of our modern great properties, tramway systems, railways, gas-works, bread companies, have been created for their present owners the debenture holders and mortgagers, the great capitalists, by the unintentional altruism of that voluntary martyr, the Saving Small Man.

Of course the habitual saver can insure with an insurance company for his old age and against all sorts of misadventures, and because of the Government interference with "private enterprise" in that sort of business, be reasonably secure; but under Socialism he would be able to do that with absolute security in the State Insurance Office—if the universal old age pension did not satisfy him. That, however, is beside our present discussion. I am writing now only of the sort of property that Socialism would destroy, and to show how little benefit or safety it brings to the small owner now. The unthinking rich prate "thrift" to the poor, and grow richer by a half-judicious, half-unconscious absorption of the resultant savings; that, in brief, is the grim humour of our present financial method.

It is not only in relation to investments that this absorption of small parcels of savings goes on. In every town the intelligent and sympathetic observer may see, vivid before the eyes of all who are not blind by use and wont, the slow subsidence of petty accumulations, The lodging-house and the small retail shop are, as it were, social "destructors"; all over the country they are converting hopeful, enterprising, ill-advised people with a few score or hundreds of pounds, slowly, inevitably into broken-hearted failures. It is, to my mind, the crudest aspect of our economic struggle. In the little High Street of Sandgate, over which my house looks, I should say between a quarter and a third of the shops are such downward channels from decency to despair; they are sanctioned, inevitable citizen breakers. Now it is a couple of old servants opening a "fancy" shop or a tobacco shop, now it is a young couple plunging into the haberdashery, now it is a new butcher or a new fishmonger or a grocer. This perpetual procession of bankruptcies has made me lately shun that pleasant-looking street, that in my unthinking days I walked through cheerfully enough. The doomed victims have a way of coming to the doors at first and looking out politely and hopefully. There is a rich and lucrative business done by certain wholesale firms in starting the small dealer in almost every branch of retail trade; they fit up his shop, stock him, take his one or two hundred pounds and give him credit for forty or fifty. The rest of his story is an impossible struggle to pay rent and get that debt down. Things go on for a time quite bravely. I go furtively and examine the goods in the window, with a dim hope that this time something really will come off; I learn reluctantly from my wife that they are no better than any one else's, and rather dearer than those of the one or two solid and persistent shops that do the steady business of the place. Perhaps I see the new people going to church once or twice very respectably, as I set out for a Sunday walk, and if they are a young couple the husband usually wears a silk hat. Presently the stock in the window begins to deteriorate in quantity and quality, and then I know that credit is tightening. The proprietor no longer comes to the door, and his first bright confidence is gone. He regards one now through the darkling panes with a gloomy animosity. He suspects one all too truly of dealing with the "Stores." ... Then suddenly he has gone; the savings are gone, and the shop—like a hungry maw—waits for a new victim. There is the simple common tragedy of the little shop; the landlord of the house has his money all right, the ground landlord has, of course, every penny of his money, the kindly wholesalers are well out of it, and the young couple or the old people, as the case may be, are looking for work or the nearest casual ward—just as though there was no such virtue as thrift in the world.

The particular function of the British lodging-house—though the science of economics is silent on this point—is to use up the last strength of the trusty old servant and the plucky widow. These people will invest from two or three hundred to a thousand pounds in order to gain a bare subsistence by toiling for boarders and lodgers. It is their idea of a safe investment. They can see it all the time. All over England this process goes on. The curious inquirer may see every phase for himself by simply looking for rooms among the apartment houses of such a region as Camden Town, London; he will realize more and more surely as he goes about that none of these people gain money, none of them ever recover the capital they sink, they are happy if they die before their inevitable financial extinction. It is so habitual with people to think of classes as stable, of a butcher or a baker as a man who keeps a shop of a certain sort at a certain level throughout a long and indeterminate life, that it may seem incredible to many readers that those two typically thrifty classes, the lodging-letting householder and the small retailer, are maintained by a steady supply of failing individuals; the fact remains that it is so. Their little savings are no good to them, investments and business beginnings mock them alike: steadily, relentlessly our competitive system eats them up.

It is said that no class of people in the community is more hostile to Socialism and Socialistic legislation than these small owners and petty investors, these small ratepayers. They do not understand. Rent they consider in the nature of things like hunger and thirst; the economic process that dooms the weak enterprise to ruin is beyond the scope of their intelligence; but the rate-collector who calls and calls again for money, for more money, to educate "other people's children," to "keep paupers in luxury," to "waste upon roads and light and trams," seems the agent of an unendurable wrong. So the poor creatures go out pallidly angry to vote down that hated thing municipal enterprise, and to make still more scope for that big finance that crushes them in the wine-press of its exploitation. It is a wretched and tragic antagonism, for which every intelligent Socialist must needs have sympathy, which he must meet with patience—and lucid explanations. If the public authority took rent there would be no need of rates; that is the more obvious proposition. But the ampler one is the cruelty, the absurdity and the social injury of the constant consumption of unprotected savings which is an essential part of our present system.

It is a doctrinaire and old-fashioned Socialism that quarrels with the little hoard; the quarrel of modern Socialism is with the landowner and the great capitalist who devour it.

Sec. 4.

While we are discussing the true attitude of modern Socialism to property, it will be well to explain quite clearly the secular change of opinion that is going on in the Socialist ranks in regard to the process of expropriation. Even in the case of those sorts of property that Socialism repudiates, property in land, natural productions, inherited business capital and the like, Socialism has become humanized and rational from its first extreme and harsh positions.

The earlier Socialism was fierce and unjust to owners. "Property is Robbery," said Proudhon, and right down to the nineties Socialism kept too much of the spirit of that proposition. The property owner was to be promptly and entirely deprived of his goods, and to think himself lucky he was not lynched forthwith as an abominable rascal. The first Basis of the Fabian Society, framed so lately as 1884, seems to repudiate "compensation," even a partial compensation of property owners, though in its practical proposals the Fabian Society has always admitted compensatory arrangements. The exact words of the Basis are "without compensation though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community." The wording is pretty evidently the result of a compromise between modern views and older teachings. If the Fabian Society were rewriting its Basis now I doubt if any section would insist even upon that eviscerated "without compensation."

Now property is not robbery. It may be a mistake, it may be unjust and socially disadvantageous to recognize private property in these great common interests, but every one concerned, and the majority of the property owners certainly, held and hold in good faith, and do their best by the light they have. We live to-day in a vast tradition of relationships in which the rightfulness of that kind of private property is assumed, and suddenly, instantly, to deny and abolish it would be—I write this as a convinced and thorough Socialist—quite the most dreadful catastrophe human society could experience. For what sort of provisional government should we have in that confusion?

Expropriation must be a gradual process, a process of economic and political readjustment, accompanied at every step by an explanatory educational advance. There is no reason why a cultivated property owner should not welcome and hasten its coming. Modern Socialism is prepared to compensate him, not perhaps "fully" but reasonably, for his renunciations and to avail itself of his help, to relieve him of his administrative duties, his excess of responsibility for estate and business. It does not grudge him a compensating annuity nor terminating rights of user. It has no intention of obliterating him nor the things he cares for. It wants not only to socialize his possessions, but to socialize his achievement in culture and all that leisure has taught him of the possibilities of life. It wants all men to become as fine as he. Its enemy is not the rich man but the aggressive rich man, the usurer, the sweater, the giant plunderer, who are developing the latent evil of riches. It repudiates altogether the conception of a bitter class-war between those who Have and those who Have Not.

But this new tolerant spirit in method involves no weakening of the ultimate conception. Modern Socialism sets itself absolutely against the creation of new private property out of land, or rights or concessions not yet assigned. All new great monopolistic enterprises in transit, building and cultivation, for example, must from the first be under public ownership. And the chief work of social statesmanship, the secular process of government, must be the steady, orderly resumption by the community, without violence and without delay, of the land, of the apparatus of transit, of communication, of food distribution and of all the great common services of mankind, and the care and training of a new generation in their collective use and in more civilized conceptions of living.



CHAPTER VIII

THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN, THE BUSINESS MAN, AND SOCIALISM

Sec. 1.

Let me insert here a few remarks upon a question that arises naturally out of the preceding discussion, and that is the future of that miscellaneous section of the community known as the middle class. It is one that I happen to know with a peculiar intimacy.

For a century or more the grinding out of the middle class has been going on. I began to find it interesting—altogether too interesting indeed, when I was still only a little boy. My father was one of that multitude of small shopkeepers which has been caught between the "Stores" and such-like big distributors above and the rising rates below, and from the knickerbocker stage onward I was acutely aware of the question hanging over us. "This isn't going on," was the proposition. "This shop in which our capital is invested will never return it. Nobody seems to understand what is happening, and there is nobody to advise or help us. What are we going to do?"

Except that people are beginning to understand a little now what it all means, exactly the same question hangs over many hundreds of thousands of households to-day, not only over the hundreds of small shopkeepers, but of small professional men, of people living upon small parcels of investments, of clerks who find themselves growing old and their value depreciated by the competition of a new, better-educated generation, of private school-masters, of boarding-and lodging-house keepers and the like. They are all vaguely aware of something more than personal failure, of a drift and process which is against all their kind, of the need of "doing something" for themselves and their children, something different from just sticking to the shop or the "situation"—and they don't know what to do! What ought they to do?

Well, first, before one answers that, let us ask what it is exactly that is grinding the middle class in this way. Is it a process we can stop? Can we direct the millstones? If we can, ought we to do so? And if we cannot, or decide that it isn't worth while, then what can we do to mitigate this cruelty of slowly impoverishing and taxing out of existence a class that was once the backbone of the community? It is not mere humanity dictates this much, it is a question that affects the State as a whole. It must be extremely bad for the spirit of the nation and for our national future that its middle mass should be in a state of increasing financial worry and stress, irritated, depressed, and broken in courage. One effect is manifest in our British politics now. Each fresh election turns upon expenditure more evidently than the last, and the promise to reduce taxation or lower the rates overrides more and more certainly any other consideration. What are Empire or Education to men who feel themselves drifting helplessly into debt? What chance has any constructive scheme with an electorate of men who are being slowly submerged in an economic bog?

The process that has brought the middle class into these troubles is a complex one, but the essential thing about it seems to be this, that there is a change of scale going on in most human affairs, a substitution of big organizations for detached individual effort almost everywhere. A hundred and fifty years ago or so the only very rich people in the community were a handful of great landowners and a few bankers; the rest of the world's business was being done by small prosperous independent men. The labourers were often very poor and wretched, ill clad, bootless, badly housed and short of food, but there was nevertheless a great deal of middle-class comfort and prosperity. The country was covered with flourishing farmers, every country town was a little world in itself, with busy tradespeople and professional men; manufacturing was still done mainly by small people employing a few hands, master and apprentice working together; in every town you found a private school or so, an independent doctor and the like, doing well in a mediocre, comfortable fashion. All the carrying trade was in the hands of small independent carriers; the shipping was held by hundreds of small shipowners. And London itself was only a larger country town. It was, in effect, a middle-class world ruled over by aristocrats; the millstones had as yet scarcely stirred.

Then machinery came into the lives of men, and steam power, and there began that change of scale which is going on still to-day, making an ever-widening separation of master and man and an ever-enlarging organization of industry and social method. Its most striking manifestation was at first the substitution of organized manufacture in factories for the half-domestic hand-industrialism of the earlier period; the growth of the fortunes of some of the merchants and manufacturers to dimensions comparable with the wealth of the great landowners, and the sinking of the rest of their class towards the status of wage-earners. The development of joint-stock enterprise arose concurrently with this to create a new sort of partnership capable of handling far greater concerns than any single wealthy person, as wealth was measured by the old scale, could do. There followed a great development of transit, culminating for a time in the coming of the railways and steamships, which abolished the isolation of the old towns and brought men at the remotest quarters of the earth into business competition. Big towns of the modern type, with half-a-million inhabitants or more, grew up rapidly all over Europe and America. For the European big towns are as modern as New York, and the East End and south side of London scarcely older than Chicago. Shopkeeping, like manufactures, began to concentrate in large establishments, and big wholesale distribution to replace individual buying and selling. As the need for public education under the changing conditions of life grew more and more urgent, the individual enterprise of this school-master and that gave place to the organized effort of such giant societies as (in Britain) the old National School Society and the British School Society, and at last to State education. And one after another the old prosperous middle-class callings fell under the stress of the new development.

The process still goes on, and there can be little doubt of the ultimate issue. The old small manufacturers are either ruined or driven into sweating and the slums; the old coaching innkeeper and common carrier have been impoverished or altogether superseded by the railways and big carrier companies; the once flourishing shopkeeper lives to-day on the mere remnants of the trade that great distributing stores or the branches of great companies have left him. Tea companies, provision-dealing companies, tobacconist companies, make the position of the old-established private shop unstable and the chances of the new beginner hopeless. Railways and tramways take the custom more and more effectually past the door of the small draper and outfitter to the well-stocked establishments at the centre of things; telephone and telegraph assist that shopping at the centre more and more. The small "middle-class" school-master finds himself beaten by revived endowed schools and by new public endowments; the small doctor, the local dentist, find Harley Street always nearer to them and practitioners in motor-cars from the great centres playing havoc with their practices. And while the small men are more and more distressed, the great organizations of trade, of production, of public science, continue to grow and coalesce, until at last they grow into national or even world trusts, or into publicly-owned monopolies. In America slaughtering and selling meat has grown into a trust, steel and iron are trustified, mineral oil is all gathered into a few hands. All through the trades and professions and sciences and all over the world the big eats up the small, the new enlarged scale replaces the old.

And this is equally true, though it is only now beginning to be recognized, of the securities of that other section of the middle class, the section which lives upon invested money. There, too, big eats little. There, too, the small man is more and more manifestly at the mercy of the large organization. It was a pleasant illusion of the Victorian time that one put one's hundred pounds or thousand pounds "into something," beside the rich man's tens of thousands, and drew one's secure and satisfying dividends. The intelligent reader of Mr. Lawson's Frenzied Finance or of the bankruptcy proceedings of Mr. Hooley realizes this idyll is scarcely true to nature. Through the seas and shallows of investment flow great tides and depressions, on which the big fortunes ride to harbour while the little accumulations, capsized and swamped, quiver down to the bottom. It becomes more and more true that the small man saves his money for the rich man's pocket. Only by drastic State intervention is a certain measure of safety secured for insurance, and in America recently we have had the spectacle of the people's insurance-money used as a till by the rich financiers.

And when the middle-class man turns in his desperation from the advance of the big competitor who is consuming him, as a big codfish eats its little brother, to the State, he meets a tax-paper; he sees as the State's most immediate aspect the rate-collector and inexorable demands. The burthen of taxation certainly falls upon him, and it falls upon him because he is collectively the weakest class that possesses any property to be taxed. Below him are classes either too poor to tax or too politically effective to stand taxation. Above him is the class which owns a large part of the property in the world; but it also owns the newspapers and periodicals that are necessary for an adequate discussion of social justice, and it finds it cheaper to pay a voluntary tax to the hoardings at election time than to take over the small man's burdens. He rolls about between these two parties, antagonized first to one and then the other, and altogether helpless and ineffectual. So the millstones grind, and so it would seem they will continue to grind until there is nothing between them; until organized property in the hands of the few on the one hand and the proletariat on the other grind face to face. So, at least, Karl Marx taught in Das Kapital.

But when one says the middle class will disappear, one means that it will disappear as a class. Its individuals and its children will survive, and the whole process is not nearly so fatalistic as the Marxists would have us believe. The new great organizations that are replacing the little private enterprises of the world before machinery are not all private property. There are alternatives in the matter of handling a great business. To the exact nature of these alternatives the middle-class mind needs to direct itself if it is to exert any control whatever over its future. Take the case of the butcher. It is manifestly written on the scroll of destiny that the little private slaughter-house, the little independent butcher's shop, buying and selling locally, must disappear. The meat will all be slaughtered at some great, conveniently organized centre, and distributed thence to shops that will necessarily be mere agencies for distributing meat. Now, this great slaughtering and distributing business may either be owned by one or a group of owners working it for profit—in which case it will be necessary for the State to employ an unremunerative army of inspectors to see that the business is kept decently clean and honest—or it may be run by the public authority. In the former case the present-day butcher or his son will be a slaughterman or shopkeeper employed by the private owners; in the latter case by the public authority. This is equally true of a milk-seller, of a small manufacturer, of a builder, of a hundred and one other trades. They are bound to be incorporated in a larger organization; they are bound to become salaried men where formerly they were independent men, and it is no good struggling against that. It is doubtful, indeed, whether from the standpoint of welfare it would be worth the middle-class man's while to struggle against that. But in the case of very many great public services—meat, milk, bread, transit, housing and land administration, education and research, and the public health—it is still an open question whether the big organization is to be publicly owned, publicly controlled, and constantly refreshed by public scrutiny and comment, or whether it is to be privately owned, and conducted solely for the profit of a small group of very rich owners. The alternatives are Plutocracy or Socialism, and between these the middle-class man remains weakly undecided and ineffectual, lending no weight to and getting small consideration therefore from either side. He remains so because he has not grasped the real nature of his problem, because he clings in the face of overwhelming fate to the belief that in some way the wheels of change may be arrested and his present method of living preserved.

I think, if he could shake himself free from that impossible conservatism he would realize that his interests lie with the interests of the intelligent working-class man—that is to say, in the direction of Socialism rather than in the direction of capitalistic competition; that the best use he can make of such educational and social advantages as still remain for him is to become the willing leader instead of the panic-fierce antagonist of the Socialist movement. His place, I hold, is to forward the development of that State and municipal machinery the Socialist foreshadows, and to secure for himself and his sons and daughters an adequate position and voice in the administration. Instead of struggling to diminish that burthen of public expenditure which educates and houses, conveys and protects him and his children, he ought rather to increase it joyfully, while at the same time working manfully to transfer its pressure to the broad shoulders of those very rich people who have hitherto evaded their legitimate share of it. The other course is to continue his present policy of obstinate resistance to the extension of public property and public services. In which case these things will necessarily become that basis of monopolistic property on which the coming plutocracy will establish itself. The middle-class man will be taxed and competed out of independence just the same, and he will become a salaried officer just the same, but with a different sort of master and under different social conditions according as one or other of these alternatives prevails.

Which is the better master—the democratic State or a "combine" of millionaires? Which will give the best social atmosphere for one's children to breathe—a Plutocracy or a Socialism? That is the real question to which the middle-class man should address himself.

No doubt to many minds a Plutocracy presents many attractions. In the works of Thomas Love Peacock, and still more clearly in the works of Mr. W. H. Mallock, you will find an agreeable rendering of that conception. The bulk of the people will be organized out of sight in a state of industrious and productive congestion, and a wealthy, leisurely, and refined minority will live in spacious homes, with excellent museums, libraries, and all the equipments of culture; will go to town, concentrate in Paris, London, and Rome, and travel about the world. It is to these large, luxurious, powerful lives that the idealist naturally turns. Their motor-cars, their aeroplanes, their steam yachts will awaken terror and respect in every corner of the globe. Their handsome doings will fill the papers. They will patronize the arts and literature, while at the same time mellowing them by eliminating that too urgent insistence upon contemporary fact which makes so much of what is done to-day harsh and displeasing. The middle-class tradition will be continued by a class of stewards, tenants, managers, and foremen, secretaries and the like, respected and respectful. The writer, the artist, will lead lives of comfortable dependence, a link between class and class, the lowest of the rich man's guests, the highest of his servants. As for the masses, they will be fed with a sort of careless vigour and considerable economy from the Chicago stockyards, and by agricultural produce trusts, big breweries, fresh-water companies, and the like; they will be organized industrially and carefully controlled. Their spiritual needs will be provided for by churches endowed by the wealthy, their physical distresses alleviated by the hope of getting charitable aid, their lives made bright and adventurous by the crumbs of sport that fall from the rich man's table. They will crowd to see the motor-car races, the aeroplane competitions. It will be a world rich in contrasts and not without its gleam of pure adventure. Every bright young fellow of capacity will have the hope of catching the eye of some powerful personage, of being advanced to some high position of trust, of even ending his days as a partner, a subordinate assistant plutocrat. Or he may win a quite agreeable position by literary or artistic merit. A pretty girl, a clever woman of the middle class would have before her even more brilliant and romantic possibilities.

There can be no denying the promises of colour and eventfulness a Plutocracy holds out, and though they do not attract me, I can quite understand their appeal to the more ductile and appreciative mind of Mr. Mallock. But there are countervailing considerations. There is, it is said, a tendency in Plutocracies either to become unprogressive, unenterprising and stagnantly autocratic, or to develop states of stress and discontent, and so drift towards Caesarism. The latter was the fate of the Roman Republic, and may perhaps be the destiny of the budding young Plutocracy of America. But the developing British Plutocracy, like the Carthaginian, will be largely Semitic in blood, and like the Carthaginian may resist these insurgent tendencies.

So much for the Plutocratic possibility. If the middle-class man on any account does not like that outlook, he can turn in the other direction; and then he will find fine promises indeed, but much more uncertainty than towards Plutocracy. Plutocracies the world has seen before, but a democratic civilization organized upon the lines laid down by modern Socialists would be a new beginning in the world's history. It is not a thing that will come about by itself; it will have to be the outcome of a sustained moral and intellectual effort in the community. If there is not that effort, if things go on as they are going now, the coming of a Plutocracy is inevitable. That effort, I am convinced, cannot be successfully made by the lower-class man alone; from him, unaided and unguided, there is nothing to be expected but wild convulsive attempts at social upheaval, which, whether they succeed (as the French Revolution did) or fail (as did the insurrectionary outbreaks of the Republic in Rome), lead ultimately to a Napoleon or a Caesar. But our contemporary civilization is unprecedented in the fact that the whole population now reads, and that intelligence and free discussion saturate the whole mass. Only time can show what possibilities of understanding, leadership, and political action lie in our new generation of the better-educated middle class. Will it presently begin to define a line for itself? Will it remain disorganized and passive, or will it become intelligent and decisive between these millstones of the organized property and the organizing State, between Plutocracy and Socialism, whose opposition is the supreme social and political fact in the world at the present time?

Sec. 2.

Perhaps, also, it may be helpful here to insert a view of the contemporary possibilities of Socialism from a rather different angle, a view that follows on to the matter of the previous section, but appeals to a different section of the Middle Class. It is a quotation from the Magazine of Commerce for September 1907, and leads to an explanation by the present writer.

"The recent return of Mr. Grayson, a Socialist, as member of Parliament for the Colne Valley, has brought prominently before the public mind the question of Socialism. Mr. Pete Curran's success at Jarrow a month or so ago, and the large number of Labour members returned at the last General Election, caused more or less desultory comment on Socialism as a possible feature of practical politics in the remote future; but Mr. Grayson can certainly claim that his achievement at Colne Valley brought the question of Socialism in to the very forefront at one bound. It is difficult to ignore Socialism, to dismiss it as a mere fad and fancy of a few hare-brained enthusiasts, after Mr. Grayson's success. The verdict of Colne Valley may be the verdict of many another constituency where the so-called working-class electors are numerically predominant. When we consider that the manual worker represents the majority of the electorate of the country, this contingency does not appear to be so very remote, provided that the leaders of Socialism can organize their resources and canvass the working-men on a wide and carefully-planned scale. In this respect the Colne Valley result may very well give them the lead and stimulus they have been waiting for. It must be borne in mind, too, that the forward section of the Labour Party is avowedly Socialist in its sympathies, and a definite start may therefore be said to have been made towards capturing the machinery of Government in the Cause of Socialism.

"How will Socialism affect the business world? This is a question which many thoughtful business men must have already put to themselves. For reply we must go to the leaders of Socialism, and discover what their policy actually is. The common impression that Socialism spells barefaced confiscation is too superficial to be seriously adduced as an argument against Socialism. The leaders of the Cause include some of the cleverest men of the day—men who have a more rational basis for their policy than that of simply robbing Peter to pay Paul. The suggestion that Socialism means a compulsory 'share out' may be rightly dismissed as an idle scare. The most bitter opponent of Socialism must at least admit that there is a stronger argument to be met than that implied by the parrot-cry of 'spoliation.' Socialism has, at any rate, so far advanced as to be allowed the ordinary courtesies of debate. We may oppose it tooth and nail, but we must confront argument with argument and not with abuse.

"Despite much excellent literature which is read widely by cultured people, very little is known by the general public of the principles which modern British Socialists have adopted as their guiding rules. Few business men care to study the subject. We have therefore addressed a letter to the chief leaders of the Cause, with the purpose of ascertaining the effect which Socialism would have on our business habits. Our object was to discover how far Socialism might disturb or improve business; whether it would altogether subvert present methods, or whether it could be applied without injury to these methods. To put the matter very plainly, we wished to learn whether we should carry on our business much as we do now, giving free play to individual effort and individual fortune-building.

"The reply of Mr. Wells is as follows:—

"'MY DEAR SIR,

"'I wish very much I could reply at adequate length to your very admirably framed question. The constant stream of abuse and of almost imbecile misrepresentations of Socialism in the Press has no doubt served to distort the idea of our movement in the minds of a large proportion of busy men, and filled them with an unfounded dread of social insecurity. If it were possible to allay that by an epigrammatic programme, "Socialism in a Nutshell," so to speak, I would do my best. But the economic and trading system of a modern State is not only a vast and complex tangle of organizations, but at present an uncharted tangle, and necessarily the methods of transition from the limited individualism of our present condition to the scientifically-organized State, which is the Socialist ideal, must be gradual, tentative and various.

"'To build up a body of social and economic science, to develop a class of trained administrators, to rearrange local government areas, to educate the whole community in the "sense of the State" are necessary parts of the Socialist scheme. You must try and induce your readers to recognize that when Socialism finds such supporters as Sir Oliver Lodge and Professor Karl Pearson, as William Morris (who revolutionized the furniture trade), as Granville Barker (who is revolutionizing the London stage), as Mr. George Cadbury and Mr. Fels (whose names are not unknown in the world of advertisement), as Mr. Allan (of the Allan Line), as Mr. George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Shaw, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and Sir Sidney Olivier (the present Governor of Jamaica)—all of them fairly comfortable and independent people, practically acquainted with the business of investment and affairs generally and quite alive to the present relations of property to the civilized life—the suggestion that it is a raid of the ignorant "Have-nots" on the possessions of the wise and good "Haves" cannot be a very intelligent one nor addressed to very intelligent people. Essentially Socialism is the scientifically-organized State as distinguished from the haphazard, wasteful, blundering, child-sweating State of the eighteenth century. It is the systematization of present tendency. Necessarily its methods of transition will be progressively scientific and humane.

"'So far as your specific questions go, I do not think there could possibly be anything in the nature of "compulsory profit-sharing" if a Socialist Government came into office. There is at present a compulsory profit-sharing in the form of an income-tax, but that tax does not appeal to the Socialist as a particularly scientific one. The advent of a strongly-Socialist Government would mean no immediate revolutionary changes at all. There would be, no doubt, a vigorous acceleration of the educational movement to increase the economic value and productivity of the average citizen of the next generation, and legislation upon the lines laid down by the principle of the "minimum wage" to check the waste of our national resources by destructive employment. Also a systematic shifting of the burthen of taxation from enterprise to rent would begin. But nothing convulsive would occur.'"

"'The means of transit and communication of the country (both internal and external), and especially the railways and canals (which are now rapidly falling into inefficiency through the exhaustion of their capital upon excessive dividends in the past), would probably be transferred from competitive private to organized public control—a transfer that would certainly be enormously stimulating to business generally. There would be no "robbery," the former shareholders would become stock or annuity holders. Nor would there be any financial convulsion due to the raising of the "enormous sum" necessary to effect this purchase. The country would simply create stock, while at the same time taking over assets to balance the new liability.

"'A Socialist Government would certainly also acquire the coal mines and the coal trade, and relieve industry from the inconveniences due to the manipulation of the supply of this vitally important factor, and it would accelerate the obvious tendency of the present time to bring the milk trade, the drink trade, slaughtering, local traffic, lighting and power supply into public hands. But none of this is the destruction of property, but only its organization and standardization. Such a State organization of public services is, I submit, enough to keep a Socialist Government busy for some few years, and makes not only for social progress, but social stability.

"'And does an honest and capable business man stand to lose or gain by the coming of such a Socialist Government? I submit that, on the whole, he stands to gain. Let me put down the essential points in his outlook as I conceive them.

"'Under a Socialist Government such as is quite possible in England at the present time:—

"'He will be restricted from methods of production and sale that are socially mischievous.

"'He will pay higher wages.

"'He will pay a larger proportion of his rate-rent outgoings to the State and Municipality, and less to the landlord. Ultimately he will pay it all to the State or Municipality, and as a voter help to determine how it shall be spent, and the landlord will become a Government stock-holder. Practically he will get his rent returned to him in public services.

"'He will speedily begin to get better-educated, better-fed and better-trained workers, so that he will get money value for the higher wages he pays.

"'He will get a regular, safe, cheap supply of power and material. He will get cheaper and more efficient internal and external transit.

"'He will be under an organized scientific State, which will naturally pursue a vigorous scientific collective policy in support of the national trade.

"'He will be less of an adventurer and more of a citizen....'"

So I wrote to the Magazine of Commerce, and that for the energetic man who is conducting a real and socially useful business is the outlook. Socialism is not the coming of chaos and repudiation, it is the coming of order and justice. For confusion and accident and waste, the Socialist seeks to substitute design and collective economy. That too is the individual aim of every good business man who is not a mere advertising cheat or financial adventurer. To the sound-minded, clear-headed man of affairs, Socialism appeals just as it appeals to the scientific man, to the engineer, to the artist, because it is the same reality, the large scale aspect of the same constructive motive, that stirs in himself.

Sec. 3.

Let me finally quote the chairman of one of the most enterprising and enlightened business organizations of our time to show that in claiming the better type of business man for modern Socialism I am making no vain boast. Sir John Brunner may not call himself a Socialist, but this is very probably due to the fact that he gets his ideas of Socialism from the misquotations of its interested adversaries. This that follows from the Manchester Guardian is pure Socialism.

Speaking at the annual meeting of Brunner, Mond and Co., Ltd., in Liverpool (1907), the chairman, Sir John Brunner, M.P., made a remarkable pronouncement on the subject of the collective ownership of canals. He said:—

"I have been one of a Royal Commission visiting the North of France, Belgium, and Northern Germany, and our duty has been to examine what those three countries have done in the improvement of their canals and their waterways. We have been very deeply impressed by what we have seen, and I can tell you to-day, speaking as a man of business to men of business, that the fact that in these three countries there is communal effort—that is to say, that the State in money and in credit for the benefit of the national trade—has brought to those three countries enormous, almost incalculable, benefits; and I think that any man, any intelligent man, who studies this matter as I have studied it for a great many years, will come the conclusion, as I have come very clearly and decidedly, that the old policy which we have adopted for generations of leaving all public works to private enterprise—the old policy, so called, of laissez faire—is played out completely, and I am of opinion, very firmly, that, if we mean to hold our own in matters of trade, we must learn to follow the example that has been set us not only by France, Belgium, and Germany, but by the United States and by every one of the Colonies of our Empire. Everywhere do you find that trade is helped by the effort of the community, by the force of the State, and I shall be very heartily pleased if those who hear me will think the matter over and decide for themselves whether or not we as business people—preeminently the business people of the world—are to maintain the old policy of leaving everything to private enterprise, or whether we are to act together for the good of all in this important matter of the national trade."



CHAPTER IX

SOME COMMON OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM

Sec. 1.

In the preceding eight chapters I have sought to give as plain and full an account of the great generalizations of Socialism as I can, and to make it clear exactly what these generalizations convey, and how far they go in this direction and that. Before we go on to a brief historical and anticipatory account of the actual Socialist movement, it may be worth while to take up and consider compactly the chief objections that are urged against the general propositions of Socialism in popular discussion.

Now a very large proportion of these arise out of the commonest vice of the human mind, its disposition to see everything as "yes" or "no," as "black" or "white," its impatience, its incapacity for a fine discrimination of intermediate shades.[14] The queer old scholastic logic still prevails remarkably in our modern world; you find Mr. Mallock, for example, going about arranging his syllogisms, extracting his opponent's "self-contradictions," and disposing of Socialism with stupendous self-satisfaction in all the magazines. He disposes of Socialism quite in the spirit of the young mediaeval scholar returning home to prove beyond dispute that "my cat has ten tails" and, given a yard's start, that a tortoise can always keep ahead of a running man. The essential fallacy is always to declare that either a thing is A or it is not A; either a thing is green or it is not green; either a thing is heavy or it is not heavy. Unthinking people, and some who ought to know better, fall into that trap. They dismiss from their minds the fact that there is a tinge of green in nearly every object in the world, and that there is no such thing as pure green, unless it be just one line or so in the long series of the spectrum; they forget that the lightest thing has weight and that the heaviest thing can be lifted. The rest of the process is simple and has no relation whatever to the realities of life. They agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of Socialism, permit the exponent to extract absurdities therefrom as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat, and retire with a conviction that on the whole it is well to have had this disturbing matter settled once for all.

[14] See "Scepticism of the Instrument," the Appendix to A Modern Utopia. (Chapman & Hall.)

For example, the Anti-Socialist declares that Socialism "abolishes property." He makes believe there is a hard absolute thing called "property" which must either be or not be, which is now, and which will not be under Socialism. To any person with a philosophical education this is a ridiculous mental process, but it seems perfectly rational to an untrained mind—and that is the usual case with the Anti-Socialist. Having achieved this initial absurdity, he then asks in a tone of bitter protest whether a man may not sleep in his own bed, and is he to do nothing if he finds a coal-heaver already in possession when he retires? This is the method of Mr. G. R. Sims, that delightful writer, who from altitudes of exhaustive misunderstanding tells the working-man that under Socialism he will have—I forget his exact formula, but it is a sort of refrain—no money of his own, no home of his own, no wife of his own, no hair of his own! It is effective nonsense in its way—but nonsense nevertheless. In my preceding chapters I hope I have made it clear that "property" even to-day is a very qualified and uncertain thing, a natural vague instinct capable of perversion and morbid exaggeration and needing control, and that Socialism seeks simply to give it a sharper, juster and rationally limited form in relation to the common-weal.

Or again, the opponent has it that Socialism "abolishes the family"—and with it, of course, "every sacred and tender association," etc., etc. To that also I have given a chapter.

I do not think much Anti-Socialism is dishonest in these matters. The tricks of deliberate falsification, forgery and falsehood that discredit a few Conservative candidates and speakers in the north of England and smirch the reputations of one or two London papers, are due to a quite exceptional streak of baseness in what is on the whole a straightforward opposition to Socialism. Anti-Socialism, as its name implies, is no alternative doctrine; it is a mental resistance, not a mental force. For the most part one is dealing with sheer intellectual incapacity; with people, muddle-headed perhaps, but quite well-meaning, who are really unable to grasp the quantitative element in things. They think with a simple flat certitude that if, for example, a doctor says quinine is good for a case it means that he wishes to put every ounce of quinine that can be procured into his patient, to focus all the quinine in the world upon him; or that if a woman says she likes dancing, that thereby she declares her intention to dance until she drops. They are dear lumpish souls who like things "straightforward" as they say—all or nothing. They think qualifications or any quantitative treatment "quibbling," to be loudly scorned, bawled down and set aside.

In controversy the temptations for a hot and generous temperament, eager for victory, to misstate and overstate the antagonist's position are enormous, and the sensible Socialist must allow for them unless he is to find discussion intolerable. The reader of the preceding chapters should know exactly how Socialism stands to the family relations, the things it urges, the things it regards with impartiality or patient toleration, the things it leaves alone. The preceding chapters merely summarize a literature that has been accessible for years. Yet it is extraordinary how few antagonists of Socialism seem able even to approach these questions in a rational manner. One admirably typical critic of a pamphlet in which I propounded exactly the same opinions as are here set out in the third chapter, found great comfort in the expression "brood mares." He took hold of my phrase, "State family," and ran wild with it. He declared it to be my intention that women were no longer to be wives but "brood mares" for the State. Nothing would convince him that this was a glaring untruth. His mind was essentially equestrian; "human stud farm" was another of his expressions.[15] Ridicule and argument failed to touch him; I believe he would have gone to the stake to justify his faith that Socialists want to put woman in the Government haras. His thick-headedness had, indeed, a touch of the heroic.

[15] What makes the expression particularly inappropriate in my case is the fact that in my Mankind in the Making there is a clearly-reasoned chapter (Ch. II.) which has never been answered, in which I discuss and, I think, conclusively dispose of Mr. Francis Galton's ideas of Eugenics and deliberate stirpiculture.

Then a certain Father Phelan of St. Louis, no doubt in a state of mental exaltation as honest as it was indiscriminating, told the world through the columns of an American magazine that I wanted to tear the babe from the mother's breast and thrust it into an "Institution." He said worse things than that—but I set them aside as pulpit eloquence. Some readers, no doubt, knew better and laughed, but many were quite sincerely shocked, and resolved after that to give Socialism a very wide berth indeed. Honi soit qui mal y pense; the revolting ideas that disgusted them were not mine, they came from some hot dark reservoir of evil thoughts that years of chastity and discipline seem to have left intact in Father Phelan's soul.

The error in all these cases is the error of overstatement, of getting into a condition of confused intellectual excitement, and because a critic declares your window curtains too blue, saying, therefore, and usually with passion, that he wants the whole universe, sky and sea included, painted bright orange. The inquirer into the question of Socialism will find that an almost incurable disease of these controversies. Again and again he will meet with it. If after that critic's little proposition about your window curtains he chances to say that on the whole he thinks an orange sky would be unpleasant, the common practice is to accuse him of not "sticking to his guns."

My friends, Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Max Beerbohm, those brilliant ornaments of our age, when they chance to write about Socialism, confess this universal failing—albeit in a very different quality and measure. They are not, it is true, distressed by that unwashed coal-heaver who haunts the now private bed of the common Anti-Socialist, nor have they any horrid vision of the fathers of the community being approved by a select committee of the County Council—no doubt wrapped in horse-cloths and led out by their grooms—such as troubles the spurred and quivering soul of that equestrian—I forget his name—the "brood-mare" gentleman who denounced me in the Pall Mall Gazette; but their souls fly out in a passion of protest against the hints of discipline and order the advancement of Socialism reveals. Mr. G. K. Chesterton mocks valiantly and passionately, I know, against an oppressive and obstinately recurrent anticipation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped, meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a fine for laughing—not that he would want to laugh—and austere exercises in several of the more metallic virtues daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm's conception is rather in the nature of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid, frozen flight from the pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of us short, inelegant men indeed, but for all that terribly resolute, indefatigable, incessant, to capture him, to drag him off to a mechanical Utopia and there to take his thumb-mark and his name, number him distinctly in indelible ink, dress him in an unbecoming uniform, and let him loose (under inspection) in a world of neat round lakes of blue lime water and vistas of white sanitary tiling....

The method of reasoning in all these cases is the same; it is to assume that whatever the Socialist postulates as desirable is wanted without limit or qualification, to imagine whatever proposal is chosen for the controversy is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and so to make a picture of the Socialist dream. This picture is presented to the simple-minded person in doubt with "This is Socialism. Surely! SURELY! you don't want this!"

And occasionally the poor, simple-minded person really is overcome by these imagined terrors. He turns back to our dingy realities again, to the good old grimy world he knows, thanking God beyond measure that he will never live to see the hateful day when one baby out of every four ceases to die in our manufacturing towns, when lives of sordid care are banished altogether from the earth, and when the "sense of humour" and the cult of Mark Tapley which flourishes so among these things will be in danger of perishing from disuse....

But the reader sees now what Socialism is in its essentials, the tempered magnificence of the constructive scheme to which it asks him to devote his life. It is a laborious, immense project to make the world a world of social justice, of opportunity and full living, to abolish waste, to abolish the lavish unpremeditated cruelty of our present social order. Do not let the wit or perversity of the adversary or, what is often a far worse influence, the zeal and overstatement of the headlong advocate, do not let the manifest personal deficiencies of this spokesman or that, distract you from the living heart in Socialism, its broad generosity of conception, its immense claim in kinship and direction upon your Good Will.

Sec. 2.

For the convenience of those readers who are in the position of inquirers, I had designed at this point a section which was to contain a list of the chief objections to Socialism—other than mere misrepresentations—which are current now-a-days. I had meant at first to answer each one fully and gravely, to clear them all up exhaustively and finally before proceeding. But I find now upon jotting them down, that they are for the most part already anticipated by the preceding chapters, and so I will note them here, very compactly indeed, and make but the briefest comment upon each.

There is first the assertion, which effectually bars a great number of people from further inquiry into Socialist teaching, that Socialism is contrary to Christianity. I would urge that this is the absolute inversion of the truth. Christianity involves, I am convinced, a practical Socialism if it is honestly carried out. This is not only my conviction, but the reader, if he is a Nonconformist, can find it set out at length by Dr. Clifford in a Fabian tract, Socialism and the Teaching of Christ; and, if a Churchman, by the Rev. Stewart Headlam in another, Christian Socialism. He will find a longer and fuller discussion of this question in the Rev. R. J. Campbell's Christianity and Social Order. In the list of members of such a Socialist Society as the Fabian Society will be found the names of clergy of the principal Christian denominations, excepting only the Roman Catholic Church. It is said, indeed, that a good Catholic of the Roman Communion cannot also be any sort of Socialist. Even this very general persuasion may not be correct. I believe the papal prohibition was originally aimed entirely at a specific form of Socialism, the Socialism of Marx, Engels and Bebel, which is, I must admit, unfortunately strongly anti-Christian in tone, as is the Socialism of the British Social Democratic Federation to this day. It is true that many leaders of the Socialist party have also been Secularists, and that they have mingled their theological prejudices with their political work. This is the case not only in Germany and America, but in Great Britain, where Mr. Robert Blatchford of the Clarion, for example, has also carried on a campaign against doctrinal Christianity. But this association of Secularism and Socialism is only the inevitable throwing together of two sets of ideas because they have this in common, that they run counter to generally received opinions; there is no other connection. Many prominent Secularists, like Charles Bradlaugh and Mr. J. M. Robertson, are as emphatically anti-Socialist as the Pope. Secularists and Socialists get thrown together and classed together just as early Christians and criminals and rebels against the Emperor were no doubt thrown together in the Roman gaols. They had this much in common, that they were in conflict with what most people considered to be right. It is a confusion that needs constant explaining away. It is to me a most lamentable association of two entirely separate thought processes, one constructive socially and the other destructive intellectually, and I have already, in Chapter VI., Sec. 4, done my best to disavow it.