Britain For The British Part 14

Now, isn't that a precious piece of nonsense? There are two things to be said about that rich man's cabinet. The first is, that it was made by some workman who, if he had not been so employed, might have been producing what _would_ be useful to the poor. So that the cabinet has cost the poor something. The second is, that a priceless buhl cabinet _can_ be divided. Of course, it would be folly to hack it into shavings and serve them out amongst the mob; but if that cabinet is a thing of beauty and worth the seeing, it ought to be taken from the rich benefactor, whose benefaction consists in his having plundered it from the poor, and it ought to be put into a public museum where thousands could see it, and where the rich man could see it also if he chose.

This, indeed, is the proper way to deal with all works of art, and this is one of the rich man's greatest crimes--that he keeps h.o.a.rded up in his house a number of things that ought to be the common heritage of the people.

Every article of luxury has to be paid for not in _money_, but in _labour_. Every gla.s.s of wine drunk by my lord, and every diamond star worn by my lady, has to be paid for with the sweat and the tears of the poorest of our people. I believe it is a literal fact that many of the artificial flowers worn at Court are actually stained with the tears of the famished and exhausted girls who make them.

To say that the extravagance of the rich finds useful employment for the poor, is more foolish than to say that the drunkard finds useful employment for the brewers.

The drunkard may have a better defence than the duke, because he may perhaps have produced, or earned, the money he spends in beer, whereas the duke's rents are not produced by the duke nor earned by him.

That is clear, is it not? And yet a few weeks since I saw an article in a London weekly paper in which we were told that the thief was an indispensable member of society, because he found employment for policemen, gaolers, builders of gaols, and other persons.

The excuse for the thief is as valid as the excuse for the duke. The thief finds plenty of employment for the people. But who _pays_ the persons employed?

The police, the gaolers, and all the other persons employed in catching, holding, and feeding the thief, are paid out of the rates and taxes. Who pays the taxes? The British public. Then the British public have to support not only the police and the rest, but the thief as well.

What do the police, the thief, and the gaoler produce? Do they produce any wealth? No. They consume wealth, and the thief is so useful that if he died out for ever, it would pay us better to feed the gaolers and police for doing nothing than to fetch the thief back again to feed him as well.

Work is useless unless it be productive work. It would be work for a man to dig a hole and then fill it up again; but the work would be of no benefit to the nation. It would be work for a man to grow strawberries to feed the Duke of Argyll's donkey on, but it would be useless work, because it would add nothing to the general store of wealth.

Policemen and gaolers are men withdrawn from the work of producing wealth to wait upon useless criminals. They, like soldiers and many others, do not produce wealth, but they consume it, and the greater the number of producers and the smaller the number of consumers the richer the State must be. For which family would be the better off--the family wherein ten earned wages and none wasted them, or the family in which two earned wages and eight spent them?

Do not imagine, as some do, that increased consumption is a blessing. It is the amount of wealth you produce that makes a nation prosperous; and the idle rich man, who produces nothing, only makes his crime worse by spending a great deal.

The great ma.s.s of the workers lead mean, penurious, and joyless lives; they crowd into small and inconvenient houses; they occupy the darkest, narrowest, and dirtiest streets; they eat coa.r.s.e and cheap food, when they do not go hungry; they drink adulterated beer and spirits; they wear shabby and ill-made clothes; they ride in third-cla.s.s carriages, sit in the worst seats of the churches and theatres; and they stint their wives of rest, their children of education, and themselves of comfort and of honour, that they may pay rent, and interest, and profits for the idle rich to spend in luxury and folly.

And if the workers complain, or display any signs of suspicion or discontent, they are told that the rich are keeping them.

That is not _true_. It is the workers who are keeping the rich.

CHAPTER VII

WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT

It is no use telling you what _Socialism_ is until I have told you what it is not. Those who do not wish you to be Socialists have given you very false notions about _Socialism_, in the hope of setting you against it. They have brought many false charges against Socialists, in the hope of setting you against them. So you have come to think of _Socialism_ as a thing foolish, or vile, and when it is spoken of, you turn up your noses (instead of trying to see beyond them) and turn your backs on it.

A friend offers to give you a good house-dog; but someone tells you it is mad. Your friend will be wise to satisfy you that the dog is _not_ mad before he begins to tell you how well it can guard a house. Because, as long as you think the dog will bite you, you are not in the frame of mind to hear about its usefulness.

A sailor is offering to sell an African chief a telescope; but the chief has been told that the thing is a gun. Then before the sailor shows the chief what the gla.s.s is good for, he will be wise to prove to him that it will not go off at half-c.o.c.k and blow his eye out.

So with _Socialism_: before I try to show you what it really is, I must try to clear your mind of the prejudice which has been sown there by those who wish to make you hate Socialism because they fear it.

As a rule, my friends, it will be wise for you to look very carefully and hopefully at anything which Parliament men, or employers, or pressmen, call bad or foolish, because what helps you hinders them, and the stronger you grow the weaker they become.

Well, the men who have tried to smash your unions, who have written against you, and spoken against you, and acted against you in all great strikes and lock-outs, are the same men who speak and write against _Socialism_.

And what have they told you? Let us take their commonest statements, and see what they are made of.

They say that Socialists want to get up a revolution, to turn the country upside down by force, to seize all property, and to divide it equally amongst the whole people.

We will take these charges one at a time.

As to _Revolution_. I think I shall be right if I say that not one Socialist in fifty, at this day, expects or wishes to get _Socialism_ by force of arms.

In the early days of _Socialism_, when there were very few Socialists, and some of those rash, or angry, men, it may have been true that _Socialism_ implied revolution and violence. But to-day there are very few Socialists who believe in brute force, or who think a revolution possible or desirable. The bulk of our Socialists are for peaceful and lawful means. Some of them hope to bring _Socialism_ to pa.s.s by means of a reformed Parliament; others hope to bring it to pa.s.s by means of a newer, wiser, and juster public opinion.

I have always been dead against the idea of revolution, for many reasons. I do not think a revolution is _possible_ in Britain. Firstly, because the people have too much sense; secondly, because the people are by nature patient and kindly; thirdly, because the people are too _free_ to make force needful.

I do not think a revolution is _advisable_. Because, firstly, it would be almost sure to fail; secondly, if it did not fail it would put the worst kind of men into power, and would destroy order and method before it was ready to replace them; thirdly, because a State built up on force is very likely to succ.u.mb to fraud; so that after great bloodshed, trouble, labour, and loss the people would almost surely slip down into worse evils than those against which they had fought, and would find that they had suffered and sinned in vain.

I do not believe in force, and I do not believe in haste. What we want is _reason_ and _right_; and we can only hope to get reason and right by right and reasonable means.

The men who would come to the top in a civil war would be fighters and strivers; they would not be the kind of men to wisely model and patiently and justly rule or lead a new State. Your barricade man may be very useful--at the barricades; but when the fighting is over, and his work is done, he may be a great danger, for he is not the man, usually, to stand aside and make way for the builders to replace by right laws the wrong laws which his arms have destroyed.

Revolution by force of arms is not desirable nor feasible; but there is another kind of revolution from which we hope great things. This is a revolution of _thought_. Let us once get the people, or a big majority of the people, to understand _Socialism_, to believe in _Socialism_, and to work for _Socialism_, and the _real_ revolution is accomplished.

In a free country, such as ours, the almighty voice is the voice of public opinion. What the public _believe in_ and _demand_ has got to be given. Who is to refuse? Neither King nor Parliament can stand against a united and resolute British people.

And do not suppose, either, that brute force, which is powerless to get good or to keep it, has power to resist it or destroy it. Neither truncheons nor bayonets can kill a truth. The sword and the cannon are impotent against the pen and the tongue.

Believe me, we can overcome the constable, the soldier, the Parliament man, the landlord, and the man of wealth, without shedding one drop of blood, or breaking one pane of gla.s.s, or losing one day's work.

Our real task is to win the trust and help of the _people_ (I don't mean the workers only, but the British people), and the first thing to be done is to educate them--to teach them and tell them what we mean; to make quite clear to them what _Socialism_ is, and what it is _not_.

One of the things it is not, is British imitation of the French Revolution. Our method is persuasion; our cause is justice; our weapons are the tongue and the pen.

Next: As to seizing the wealth of the country and sharing it out amongst the people. First, we do not propose to _seize_ anything. We do propose to get some things,--the land, for instance,--and to make them the property of the whole nation; but we mean that to be done by Act of Parliament, and by purchase. Second, we have no idea of "sharing out"

the land, nor the railways, nor the money, nor any other kind of wealth or property, equally amongst the people. To share these things out--if they _could_ be shared, which they could not be--would be to make them _private_ property, whereas we want them to be _public_ property, the property of the British _nation_.

Yet, how often have you been told that Socialists want to have the wealth equally divided amongst all? And how often have you been told that if you divided the wealth in that way it would soon cease to be equally divided, because some would waste and some would save?

"Make all men equal in possessions," cry the non-Socialists, "and in a very short time there would be rich and poor, as before."

This is no argument against _Socialism_, for Socialists do not seek any such division. But I want to point out to you that though it _looks_ true, it is _not_ true.

It is quite true that, did we divide all wealth equally to-morrow, there would in a short time be many penniless, and a few in a way of getting rich; but it is only true if we suppose that after the sharing we allowed private ownership of land and the old system of trade and compet.i.tion to go on as before. Change those things: do away with the bad system which leads to poverty and to wealth, and we should have no more rich and poor.

_Destroy_ all the wealth of England to-morrow--we will not talk of "sharing" it out, but _destroy_ it--and establish _Socialism_ on the ruins and the bareness, and in a few years we should have a prosperous, a powerful, and a contented nation. There would be no rich and there would be no poor. But the nation would be richer and happier than it ever has been.

Another charge against Socialists is that they are _Atheists_, whose aim is to destroy all religion and all morality.

This is not true. It is true that some Socialists are Agnostics and some are Atheists. But Atheism is no more a part of Socialism than it is a part of Toryism, or of Radicalism, or of Liberalism. Many prominent Socialists are Christians, not a few are clergymen. Many Liberal and Tory leaders are Agnostics or Atheists. Mr. Bradlaugh was a Radical, and an Atheist; Prof. Huxley was an opponent of Socialism, and an Agnostic.

Socialism does not touch religion at any point. It deals with laws, and with _industrial_ and _political_ government.

It is not sense to say, because some Atheists are Socialists, that all Socialists are Atheists.