British Socialism Part 20

The foregoing extracts should suffice to show that the Socialists mean to ruin the owners of property of every kind by indirect confiscation in the form of extortionate taxation, which is to be constantly increased and which may be followed by direct confiscation, and that they rely upon force for achieving their aim. Capitalists may leave the country, but they must leave their capital behind, and their disappearance, Socialists a.s.sert, will be no loss. "The vast majority of our employers are routineers, who could no more contribute an intelligent statement of their industrial function to this paper than a bee could write the works of Lord Avebury. Routineers can always be replaced, and replaced with profit, by educated functionaries.

Consequently when the employers threaten us with emigration, our only regret as to the majority of them is that it is too good to be true."[472] "Supposing those who have the money were to threaten to leave the country and to take their money with them, would not that upset your plans? Money is not wealth. You would have cause to rejoice. So would the country which was fortunate enough to see its capitalists emigrate."[473]

According to the Socialist teaching, the workers maintain the capitalists. The brain is mightier than the hand, though the brain requires the hand. In reality it rather seems that the capitalists maintain the workers. It cannot too often be pointed out that those countries which have many wealthy capitalists are highly civilised and prosperous, and their workers are well off. On the other hand, those countries which have few or no wealthy capitalists are little civilised and poor, and their workers are exceedingly badly off. The ma.s.ses may conceivably rob the capitalists of their property, and try to manage the national capital themselves, but whether they will benefit by spoliation remains to be seen. Lacking direction, foresight, unity, organisation, discipline, and thrift, the ma.s.ses will probably quickly waste the national capital, and national ruin and distress and starvation will be the consequences of wholesale robbery.

The confiscation experiment has often been tried in the past, and it has always failed. The last time it has been tried was at the time of the French Revolution. The money secured by robbery was recklessly squandered. Production was neglected, and the people became poorer than ever. In the country agriculture came to a standstill, weeds grew where corn had been growing, gardens became a natural wilderness, and wolves roamed in thousands.[474] The great manufacturing towns were dead, manufacturers in Paris who had employed sixty or eighty men employed but ten.[475] The people in town and country were starving.

Many lived on roots and bark. Many of the poor in Paris waited outside the slaughter-houses and lapped the blood from the gutters like dogs.

Private capital has existed in all countries and at all times, because it is a plant of natural growth. One can destroy it, but it will ever grow again.

FOOTNOTES:

[449] Snowden, _Socialist Budget_, p. 1.

[450] _Ibid._

[451] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 2.

[452] _Ibid._ pp. 7, 8.

[453] _Socialism and Labour Policy_, p. 4.

[454] _Ibid._ pp. 4, 5.

[455] _Ibid._ p. 5.

[456] Glyde, _A Peep Behind the Scenes on a Board of Guardians_, pp.

28,29.

[457] Smart, _Socialism and the Budget_, pp. 14,15.

[458] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, pp. 78, 79.

[459] Smart, _Socialism and the Budget_, p. 8.

[460] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 81.

[461] _Ibid._ p. 82.

[462] _Ibid._ pp. 82, 83.

[463] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 84.

[464] Smart, _Socialism and the Budget_, p. 15.

[465] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 15.

[466] _Ibid._ p. 31.

[467] _Ibid._ p. 16.

[468] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 17.

[469] _Ibid._ pp. 21, 22.

[470] Snowden, _The Socialist's Budget_, p. 71.

[471] _Ibid._ p. 59.

[472] G.B. Shaw in the _New Age_, November 30, 1907.

[473] Wheatley, _How the Miners are Robbed_, p. 12.

[474] Vandal, _Avenement de Bonaparte_, 1903, vol. i. p. 25.

[475] Schmidt, _Tableaux de la Revolution_, vol. iv. p. 383.

CHAPTER XI

SOCIALISM AND THE EMPIRE

Most British Socialists object to the Empire on various grounds, and desire its downfall and dissolution. According to their views Great Britain should, in the first place, give up her non-self-governing colonies. Let us take note of some Socialistic p.r.o.nouncements to that effect:

"Governments have no right to exist except with the consent of the governed, and the British have no more right to dominate other peoples than other peoples have to dominate us. What we can only hold by maintaining an alien garrison had better be given up. The people of these islands would not be losers, but the gainers by such a course."[476] "Is it possible for a self-governing people to rule a subject race, and yet keep its own love for liberty? Neither the Greeks nor the Romans could do it, and we are not doing it very well ourselves. The reason is obvious. No nation can play the part of the despot (even the benevolent despot) abroad and that of the democrat at home."[477] "Socialists should oppose the creation of empires on this simple ground--that empire-building is accompanied by terrible misery and suffering for those subject races, as they are called, which are the chosen victims sacrificed on the altar of cupidity and pride."[478] "A people gain power and influence in the world in proportion as they solve for themselves the great problems of democratic self-government. We shall do more to civilise Africa by civilising the East End of London than by governing from Cape to Cairo."[479] "It is not only impossible for one nation to civilise another by governing it; it is wrong that it should attempt to do so.

Conquest may have opened up one civilisation to another in times long antecedent to the steam engine and a world commerce, but to-day its only effect is to crush out and level down all national life to the dead uniformity of an alien political routine."[480]

"What is the att.i.tude of Socialism towards backward races, savage and barbaric peoples who are to-day outside the civilised world? The position of Socialism towards these races is one of absolute non-interference. We hold that they should be left entirely alone to develop themselves in the natural order of things; which they must inevitably do or die out. It is the duty of Socialists to support the barbaric races in their resistance to aggression."[481] "It is the duty of International Socialists, the only international non-capitalist party, to denounce, and wherever possible to prevent, the extension of colonisation and conquest, leaving to each race and creed and colour the full opportunity to develop itself until complete economic and social emanc.i.p.ation is secured by all."[482] "Duty, like charity, begins at home, and if the civilisation of the blacks is to be purchased only by the destruction of our own democratic spirit, the balance to the world is of evil, not of good. There is another view of Imperialism expressed with brutal candour by Mr. Rhodes when he said that the flag was our best commercial a.s.set, that trade follows the flag. Trade does no such thing. Trade follows business enterprise.

Imperialism is, indeed, a policy of industrial deterioration, and by impoverishing the skill of the country and encouraging the worst forms of financial capitalism, must crush out every budding hope that labour has of becoming economically and politically free."[483]

The foregoing extracts should suffice to show that there is among British Socialists a strong desire to abandon the non-self-governing colonies.

The att.i.tude of the British Socialists towards the great self-governing dominions is not much more favourable than it is towards tropical colonies. Their att.i.tude is one of hardly disguised hostility, which appears to spring partly from jealousy of the colonists, partly from hatred of the British capitalists who have invested money in the colonies. The loss of British capital invested in the colonies would probably be greeted with jubilation by the Socialists. "The well-to-do sections of society in Great Britain have found a secure and profitable outlet for their capital in loans and advances to the colonists alike as organised communities and as individual property-owners. But the drain for interest and dividends to England on this account is heavy, and is severely felt at times of depression, such as that which Australia as a whole has been suffering from during the recent seven years of almost continuous drought. It seems tolerably certain, therefore, that this comparative handful of colonists, eleven millions in all, of which only four millions in Australia, will in time to come, and as the Labour party and Socialists gain strength, repudiate, or at any rate reduce, these onerous obligations. It is also probable that with regard to Australia, as the white population does not increase and England's day as a colonising power proper is practically over (having no longer any agricultural population to send out as emigrants), this huge territory will not be permanently left at the sole dog-in-the-manger control of its present handful of inhabitants. We may expect, at least, that Australia will not be permanently able to retain its position without an infusion of entirely fresh blood, and should other peoples require an outlet in that direction, the present preposterous policy will have to be abandoned."[484]

Socialists seem, on the whole, to be opposed to the federation of the British Empire. "The Labour party approaches Imperial problems with the politics of the industrious cla.s.ses as guide on the one hand, and the internationalism of its nature as guide on the other."[485] Its "internationalism" apparently prevents it from approving of any practical scheme of Imperial Federation. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., of the Labour party, has not expressed actual hostility to the Empire.

In fact, he has even declared: "Socialism did not intend to re-write history. It accepted the facts of life, and one of these facts was that we were responsible for the Empire, and, whether we liked it or not, we had to rule that Empire. He was overjoyed the other day to find that at Stuttgart their Dutch and German and French friends were fully aware of the fact that, if Socialism was to play the proper part that belonged to it, it must devise a colonial policy."[486]

Nevertheless, Mr. Macdonald's views do not appear to be very practical, as will be seen in the following pages.

"These free colonies, though of enormous extent, count for little in the matter of population. Their wealth is out of all proportion to their numbers, as their pretensions are out of all proportion to their power. That they will play any very great part in the future of the world, either federated to the mother country or in any other way, seems exceedingly improbable."[487] "Imperialism is crudely ineffective. Imperial Federation would give the colonies a fuller sense of independence and liberty, and thus far would benefit them.

But Imperial Federation is not approved on this account, but because it is supposed to be a way of uniting the Empire. That, it will not do: it will very likely do the opposite. In whatever form it comes, it will give to the independent interests of the colonies new importance.

We shall then hear less of the Empire and more of Canada, or New Zealand, or South Africa, and a great danger will arise that a purely sectional view of Imperial interests may secure the support of the might and the arrogance of the whole Empire."[488] "Canada has almost claimed that it is a right of self-governing States to be allowed to make treaties for themselves. When that happens, the colonies might as well sever themselves from the mother country altogether. For under present circ.u.mstances the authority which makes treaties is the authority which ultimately controls armies. To give any of our colonies the power to embroil us in war, or to determine our relations with European Powers, is to give the first shattering blow to Imperial solidarity."[489]

Nearly all British Socialists pa.s.sionately oppose the retention of India. They never tire of condemning British rule in India, and of endeavouring to incite the native races to rebellion. According to the a.s.sertions of Socialists, the British Government has "manufactured"

famine and plague in India, and its rule is the worst, the most cruel, and the most pernicious form of despotism which the world has seen.

Mr. Hyndman says: "India is the greatest and most awful instance of the cruelty, greed, and short-sightedness of the capitalist cla.s.s of which history gives any record. Even the horrors of Spanish rule in South America are dwarfed into insignificance in comparison with the cold, calculating, economic infamy which has starved, and is still deliberately starving, millions of people to death in British India."[490] "I charge it against the British Government, at this moment, that the economic condition of India is much more horrible than ever it was. I declare that the despotism of Russia is more apparently cruel, but the actual economic effect of the British Government's rule in India is more desperate than anything in the situation in Russia."[491]