Contemporary Socialism Part 14

A third cause of decline to which the American experience shows socialistic inst.i.tutions to be incident is a certain weakness in the management, produced sometimes by divided counsels, sometimes by the delay involved in getting the sanction of a Board to every little detail of business, and sometimes by a difficulty which we find also shattering similar experiments in France, that men were raised to the Committee by their gifts of persuasion rather than their gifts of administration. Well-meaning persons, with a great itch for managing things, and a great turn for bungling them, for whom there is, under the present order of society, a considerable safety-valve in philanthropy, contrive in a socialistic community to get appointed on the Council of Industry, and play sad havoc with the common good. While they preached and wasted, the really practical men who, with better power of talk, might have confounded them, could only sulk and grumble, and eventually lost heart in their work, and all interest and confidence in the concern. This had much to do, according to Mr. Meeker, an old Fourierist, with the ruin of the North American Phalanx, one of the most important of the transatlantic experiments, and it was the main cause apparently of the downfall of the community of c.o.xsackie--"They had many persons engaged in talking and law-making who did not work at any useful employment; the consequences were that after struggling on for between one and two years the experiment came to an end." A socialist State would probably have as many difficulties with this bustling but unsatisfactory cla.s.s of persons as a socialist Phalanx, nor would the evils of divided counsels and departmental delays be a whit milder; and the extension of State management to branches of work for which it had not otherwise some sort of special natural qualification would have the same kind of ruinous operation.

In spirit and effect, therefore, as may be palpably seen from these actual experiments, the equalizing inst.i.tutions of socialism stand quite apart from the very restricted use of State management and the remedial or invigorating legislation that a sound social policy prescribes. When England is accused of heading the nations in the race of State socialism, because England has nationalized the post and telegraph service, and pa.s.sed a series of factory and agrarian Acts for the protection of the weaker cla.s.ses of the people, the accusation is made without proper discrimination. It is not the frequency of the intervention, but its purpose and consequences that make it socialistic.

If the post is better managed by the State than by private initiative, if the factory and agrarian laws merely reinstate weaker cla.s.ses in the conditions essential for a normal human life, and neither seek nor produce that equalization of the differences of fortune or skill which is fatal to any high and progressive general level of comfort, then there is no State socialism in it at all. State management is not pushed beyond the limit of efficiency, nor popular rights beyond the positive claims of social justice. Let us go a little further into detail.

IV. _State Socialism and State Management._

What are the conditions of efficient State administration? The State possesses several natural characteristics which give it a decided advantage as an industrial manager, some for one branch of work, some for another. It has stability, it has permanency, and it has--what is perhaps its princ.i.p.al industrial superiority--unrivalled power of securing unity of administration, since it is the only agency that can use force for the purpose. On the other hand, it has one great natural defect, its want of a personal stake in the produce of the business it conducts, its want of that keen check on waste and that pushing incentive to exertion which private undertakings enjoy in the eye and energy of the master. This is the great taproot from which all the usual faults of Government management spring--its routine, red-tape spirit, its sluggishness in noting changes in the market, in adapting itself to changes in the public taste, and in introducing improved methods of production. Government servants may very generally be men of a higher stamp and training than the servants of a private company, but they are proverbial, on the one hand, for a certain lofty disdain of the humble but valuable virtue of parsimony, and, on the other, for an unprogressive, unenterprising, uninventive administration of business.

Now the branches of industry which the State is fitted to carry on are of course those in which its great fault happens to have small scope for play, and in which its great merit or merits have great scope for play; those, for example, which gain largely in efficiency or economy by a centralized administration, and suffer little harm comparatively from a routine one. That is the reason Governments always manage the postal service well. In post-office work the specific industrial superiority of Government carries its maximum of advantage, and its specific industrial defect does its minimum of injury. The carrying and delivery of letters from one part of the empire to another require, for efficiency, a single co-ordinated system, and, on the other hand, those operations themselves are of so unvariable and routine a character that little harm is done by their being carried on in a routine spirit; they involve so little capital expenditure--the entire capital of the department in England is only 80,000--that the opportunity for waste and corruption is slight; and being conducted much more largely under the public eye than the affairs of other departments of State, they are consequently subject to the constant and interested criticism of the people whose wants they are meant to satisfy. The same reason explains why Government dockyards and arms factories are always managed so unsatisfactorily. There is, on the one hand, no need in them for any higher unity of administration than is wanted in any ordinary single business establishment; but, on the other, progressiveness and adaptability are of the first moment, routine and obstruction to improvement being indeed among their worst dangers. Then the risk of prodigality and corruption is high, for their capital expenditure is great, and the check of public criticism very distant and ineffectual. So exceptional a business is the post, that the telegraphs, though managed by the same department, have never been managed with the same success. They were bought at first at a ransom, they have involved an increasing loss nearly ever since, and the public have to pay practically as much for their telegrams--perhaps more--than the public of the United States pay to their telegraph companies. Even in the postal department, Government administration shows the usual official slowness in adopting much-needed and even lucrative reforms. Of this, a good example occurred only the other day. It was not until a Boys'

Messenger Company was already in the field and doing the work, that the Postmaster-General was brought to recognise, as he said, "the desirability of providing a more rapid means of transmitting single letters for short distances and under special circ.u.mstances than at present exists."

It ought of course to be acknowledged that State management in England is tried under the very worst possible conditions, inasmuch as it is tied to the fortunes and exigencies of political party. No business could be expected to thrive where the supreme control is placed in the hands of a good parliamentary debater, who knows nothing about the special work of the department he undertakes; where, even at that, this inexperienced hand is changed for another inexperienced hand every three or four years; where policy shifts without continuity, to dodge the popular breeze of to-day, or to catch the popular breeze of to-morrow; and where the actual inc.u.mbent of office, is always able to evade censure by throwing the responsibility on his predecessors, who are out of office. Well may a sagacious man like Mr. Samuel Laing, with large experience of administration both in the affairs of State and of private companies, exclaim: "I often think what the result would be if the railway companies managed their affairs on the same principles as the nation applies to its naval and military expenditure. Suppose the Brighton Board were turned out every three years, and a new Board came in with new views and a new policy, and new men at the head of the locomotive, traffic, and other spending departments, how long would it be before expenses went up and dividends down?" If State management is to succeed--if it is to have fair play--it must be entirely divorced from party fortunes, while subject, of course, to the criticism of Parliament, under some system like that adopted in Victoria for the management of the railways. In such circ.u.mstances the question of the advisability of Government a.s.suming the management of any industry, is a question of balancing the probable gains from the greater unity of the administration against the probable losses from its greater inertia.

There are some exceptional branches of industry in which Government does better than private persons, because private persons have too little interest to do the work well, or even to do it at all, and there are others in which the State's very want of personal interest is its advantage instead of its drawback. Forestry is the best example of the first sort. One generation must plant, and another cut down, so that the present owner is often unwilling to incur the expense of a speculation of which he is unlikely to live to reap the fruits; but the natural permanence of the State leads it to do more justice to this important branch of production, and experience everywhere shows that State forests are more productive than private ones. In Prussia and Belgium they are nearly twice as productive. The average annual produce of all forests in Prussia (including State forests) is 0.36 thaler per Morgen, but the produce of State forests alone is 0.66 thaler per Morgen. In Belgium the produce of all forests is 19.33 francs per hectare, and of State forests 34.42 francs.[9] The erection of lighthouses is also a public service, which falls to the State because of individual inability; it cannot be undertaken in any way to make it remunerative to private adventurers.

The best example of an industrial work for which the State's want of personal interest is its advantage is the Mint. n.o.body would trust the stamp of a private a.s.sayer as he trusts the stamp of the Government, because the private a.s.sayer could never succeed in placing his personal disinterestedness so absolutely above the suspicion of fraud. The policy of the official attestation of the quality of commodities is often disputed on the ground that it discourages improvement above the pa.s.s standard, but it is never doubted that if a brand is wanted, the brand to command most confidence is the brand of the Crown. Our own Government, out of the infinity of commodities offered for sale, attests none but six--b.u.t.ter, herrings, plate, gun barrels, chains, and anchors--articles in which the dangers of deterioration probably exceed the chances of improvement, and in the case of some of these six there is a strong feeling abroad that the State's intervention is doing more harm than good. Scotch herrings have suffered lately in the German markets, because they were worse cured than the Norwegian, and the herring brand was blamed for the unprogressiveness of the cure. This cla.s.s of interventions, therefore, is neither numerous now, nor likely to become very numerous in the future.

A more important cla.s.s of undertakings in which the State's industrial advantage lies in its superiority to the temptations of self-interest, is that of industries which naturally a.s.sume something of the character of a monopoly, and in which self-interest lacks both the check on its rapacity, and the spur to its activity supplied by effective compet.i.tion. It is true of more things than railways that when combination is possible, compet.i.tion is impossible, and the growth of syndicates, trusts and pooling arrangements at the present day has led to considerable agitation for State interference, especially in the case of commodities like salt and coal, which are necessaries of life. Our experience of these things is as yet limited, but so far as it has gone it seems to show that the public dangers dreaded from them are apt to be exaggerated. The combinations fear to raise the price to the public so high as to provoke compet.i.tion, and in most cases in America have not raised it at all, drawing their advantage rather from the reduction in expense of management, and the saving of capital; and the State would not be likely to manage industries producing for the markets any better than, or even so well as, the more keenly interested board of private directors. But if the balance of evidence seems against public management in this cla.s.s of monopolies, it stands, I think, decidedly in favour of public management in another and not unimportant cla.s.s. The gas and water supply of towns is a monopoly, and though the point is not undisputed, it appears to answer better on the whole in public than in private hands, because the management has no interest to serve except the interest of the public. Experience has not been everywhere the same, but usually it has been that under munic.i.p.al control the quality of the gas has been improved and the price reduced. But this is munic.i.p.al management of course, not State management, and the difference is material, inasmuch as munic.i.p.al management, in the case of gas and water supply, is the management of the production of things of general consumption under the direct control of the very people who consume them, so that it is constantly exposed to effective public criticism, perhaps as good a subst.i.tute as things admit of for the eye of the master. The natural defect of public management is so mitigated by this circ.u.mstance, that probably of all forms of public management, munic.i.p.al management is the best, and when applied to branches of production that tend to become monopolies at any rate, it answers well. The question is entirely different with proposals that are sometimes made for converting into munic.i.p.al monopolies branches of production--such, for example, as the bread supply of the community--which are carried on by individual management under effective compet.i.tion. To do as well as joint-stock management uncontrolled by compet.i.tion is one thing; to do as well as individual management subject to compet.i.tion is another; and so long as public management replaces nothing but the former cla.s.s of enterprises, which are in any case a sort of natural monopolies, it will never contract the vast field of individual enterprise to any very serious extent.

When we pa.s.s from munic.i.p.al monopolies to State monopolies, the problem becomes more grave. The two largest current proposals of this kind are those of land nationalization and railway nationalization. The former proposal, though much more noisily advocated than the other, has incomparably the weaker case. For apart altogether from the mischief of making every rent settlement a political question, and looking at the matter merely in its economic aspect, land, of all things, is that which is least suited for centralized administration, and yields its best results under the minute concentrated supervision of individual and occupying ownership. The magic of property is now a proverbial phrase; it is truer of land than anything else, and it merely means that for land interested administration is everything, comprehensive administration nothing, that the zeal of the resident owner to improve his own land knows no limit, whereas the obstructive forces of routine and official inertia have nowhere more power to blight than in land management. In Adam Smith's time, as he mentions in the "Wealth of Nations," the Crown lands were everywhere the least productive lands in their respective countries, and the experience is the same still. It is so even in Prussia, in spite of its economical and skilled bureaucracy.

Professor Roscher says it is a common remark in Germany that Crown lands sell for a greater number of years' purchase than other lands, because they are known to be less improved, and are therefore expected to yield better results to the energy of the purchaser, and he quotes official figures for 1857, showing that the domain land of Prussia had not risen in value so much as the other land in the country. Great expectations are often entertained from the unearned increment, though there is not likely to be much of that in agricultural land for years to come; but what is a much more important consideration for the community is the earned increment, and under State management the earned increment would infallibly decline. Of course, this does not exclude the necessity of strict State control, so far as required by justice, humanity, and the growth and comfort of the general community. Under land nationalization here I have not considered schemes which do not give the State any real ownership in the land more than it at present enjoys, or, at any rate, place no real management of the land in its hands. The rival schemes of Mr. A. R. Wallace and Mr. Henry George are really only more or less objectionable methods of increasing the land-tax.

The question of a State railway is not so easily determined. There are certainly few branches of business where unity of administration is more advantageous, or where the public would benefit more from affairs being conducted from the public point of view of developing the greatest amount of gross traffic, instead of from the private point of view of making the greatest amount of net profit. A railway differs from other enterprises, because it affects all others very seriously for good or ill; it may for the sake of more profit give preferences that are hurtful to industrial development, or deny facilities that are essential to it. A private company may find it more profitable to carry a less quant.i.ty at a high rate than a greater quant.i.ty at a low, and it cannot be expected to run a line that does not pay, though the general community might benefit greatly more by the increase of traffic which the line creates than covers the loss incurred by running it. Now it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of having a public work like a railway, which can help or hinder every trade in the land, conducted from a public point of view instead of a private, and the present discussion in this country on rates and fares points to the desirability of changes to which private companies are not likely to resort of their own accord, nor the railway commission to be able to compel them. But, on the other hand, it is equally impossible to exaggerate the risks of the undertaking. The post office, with its capital of 80,000, is a plaything to the railways with their capital of 800,000,000, and their revenue little short of that of the State itself. The operations are of a most varied nature, and only some of them could be exposed to effective criticism. The mere transaction of purchase excites in many minds a not unreasonable fear. If Government made a bad bargain with the telegraph companies, it would be sure to make a worse with the railway companies, who are fifty times more powerful; and besides, it would very likely have to borrow its money at a higher figure, for though it could borrow two millions at 3 per cent., it could not therefore borrow eight hundred millions, for the simple reason that the number of people who want 3 per cent. is limited, most holders of stock preferring investments which, though more risky, offer a prospect of more gain. If in trying to balance these weighty _pros_ and equally weighty _cons_ one turns to the experience of State railways, he will find that as yet it affords few very sure or decisive data, because it varies in the different countries and times, and has been very differently interpreted.

Of the Continental State railways, those of Belgium and Germany are usually counted the most favourable examples. But Mr. Hadley, in his excellent work on Railway Transportation, shows that the State lines of Belgium were conducted in an extremely slovenly, perfunctory way until 1853, when private lines began to increase and compete with them, and that though the low rates which this compet.i.tion was the means of introducing still remain after the private lines have been largely bought out, there has been, on the other hand, latterly a decline in the profits of the State system, an increasing tendency to slackness and inertia in the management, and growing complaints of creating posts to reward political services, and manipulating accounts to suit Government exigencies. In Germany the rates are certainly low and the management economical, but complaints are made that less is done for the encouragement of the national resources, and unprofitable traffic is more severely declined than by the private railways. On the whole, probably the best State railway system is that of Victoria; charging low rates, self-supporting, offering every encouragement to industrial development; and the opinion of England will probably be largely determined by further observation of that experiment.

The sister colony of New Zealand has made a successful experiment in another department of industrial enterprise, life insurance, for which Government management indeed is highly adapted, because, in the first place, it is a business in which absolute security is of the last consequence, and there is no security like Government guarantee; and in the second, it is a business in which the calculations of the whole administration are virtually matters of mechanical routine. The Government office was only opened in 1871, under the influence of a widespread distrust of private offices, caused by recent bankruptcies, and it now transacts one-third of the life insurance business of the colony; it has probably tended to encourage life insurance, for while there are only 26 policies per 1000 of population in the United Kingdom, there are 80 per 1000 in New Zealand, and its management is much cheaper than that of any other insurance company in the colony, except the Australian United. The proportion of expenses to revenue in the Australian United is 13.66 per cent., in the Government Office 17.23, and in none of the other companies (whose gross business, however, is much smaller) is it under 43.02.

Adam Smith thought there were only four branches of enterprise which were fitted to be profitably conducted by a joint-stock company. We have seen in our day almost every branch of industry conducted by such companies, and an idea is often expressed that whatever a joint-stock company can do, Government can do at least quite as well, because the defect of both is the same. The defect is the same, but Government has it in larger measure. Joint-stock management is certainly much less productive in most industries than private management. The Report of the Ma.s.sachusetts Labour Bureau for 1878 contains some curious statistics on the subject. There were then in the Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts, 10,395 private manufacturing establishments, employing in all 166,588 persons, and 520 joint-stock manufacturing establishments, employing 101,337 persons, and the private establishments, while they paid a much higher average rate of wages than the joint-stock, produced at the same time not far from twice as much for the capital invested. The average wages per head in the private establishments was 474.37 dollars a year, and in the joint-stock was 383.47 dollars a year; while the produce per dollar of capital was 2.58 dollars' worth in the private, and 1.37 dollars' worth in the joint-stock, and though part of this difference is attributed to the circ.u.mstance that private manufacturers sometimes hire their factories and companies do not, the substance of it is believed to be due to the inferiority of the joint-stock management. Anyhow, that circ.u.mstance could have no influence in producing the very marked difference in the wages given by the two cla.s.ses of enterprise, and the higher wages would not, and could not, be given unless the production was higher. If all the industries of the country, then, were put under joint-stock management, the result would be (1) a general reduction in the amount produced, and (2) a consequent reduction in the general remuneration of the working cla.s.ses, and the general level of natural comfort; and the result would be still worse under universal Government management. One of the labourer's greatest interests is efficient management, and if he suffers from the replacement of individual employers by joint-stock companies, he would suffer much more by the replacement of both by the State, excepting only in those few departments of business for which the State happens to possess peculiar advantages and apt.i.tude.

V. _State Socialism and Popular Right._

The limits of the legitimate intervention of the public authority with respect to the moral development of the community are prescribed by a different rule from those with respect to its material development.

Efficiency is still, indeed, a governing consideration, for perhaps more measures for popular improvement fail from sheer ineffectuality than from any other reason. The history of social reform is strewn thick with these dead-letter measures. There is a cry and a lamentation, and a feeling that something must be done; and an Act of Parliament is pa.s.sed containing injunctions which no Act of Parliament can enforce, or which address themselves to mere accidental circ.u.mstances, and leave the real causes of the evil entirely unaffected. And there would be no impropriety in describing impracticable or ill-directed legislation of this kind as being socialistic, for, besides the old a.s.sociation of socialism with impracticable schemes, impracticable legislation is always unjust legislation, and unjust legislation for behoof of the labouring cla.s.s is essentially socialistic. Every State interference necessarily involves a certain restriction of the liberty or other general rights of some cla.s.s of persons; and although this restriction would be perfectly justifiable if it actually secured the prior or more urgent right of another and perhaps much more numerous cla.s.s of persons, it is injustice, and nothing but injustice, when it merely hurts the former cla.s.s without doing any good to the latter. It may hurt both cla.s.ses even--well-meaning meddling often does; but what I desire to bring out here is that labour legislation, which may have been entirely just and free from socialism in its intention, may be unjust and full of socialism in its result. We may therefore, without any fault, include under the head of State socialism that common sort of proposal which, without urging any wrong claim, merely asks the State to do the wrong thing--to do either something it cannot do at all, or something that will not answer the purpose intended. It is socialistic not because it is impracticable, but because it is unjust.

Since well-meant legislation may thus become urgent, and therefore socialistic for want of result, it is plain that the efficiency of the intervention is a very important consideration in determining the State's duty with respect to popular rights. But the primary consideration here is the extent of the moral claim which the individual, by reason of his weakness, has upon the resources of society, and it is upon that consideration that the division of conflicting political theories on the subject turns. All the several theories are agreed that the enlargement of popular rights, when the enlargement is required by a just popular claim, is entirely within the proper and natural province of the State; where they differ, and differ seriously, is partly in their views of the justice of particular elements in the popular claim of the time being, but more especially in their whole conception of the nature and extent of the popular claim in general. There are still some persons to be found contending that there are no such things as natural rights, and there are plenty who cannot hear the words without a sensation of alarm. But it is now generally admitted, even by those who adopt the narrowest political theories, that legal rights are merely the ratification of moral rights already existing, and that the creation of new legal rights for securing the just aspirations of ill-protected cla.s.ses of the people belongs to the ordinary daily duties of all civil government. Mr. Spencer very readily admits that some of the latest const.i.tuted rights in this country--the new seamen's right of the Merchant Shipping Act, and the new women's right of the Married Women's Property Act--are perfectly justifiable for the prevention in the one case of seamen being fraudulently betrayed into unseaworthy ships, and in the other of women being robbed of their own personal earnings. But then the new rights which he would most condemn--the right to public a.s.sistance, the right to education, the right to a habitable dwelling, the right to a fair rent--are quite as susceptible of justification on the ground of natural justice as either the right to a seaworthy ship or the right to one's own earnings. Mr.

Spencer's theory errs by unduly contracting men's natural claim. They have a right to more than equal freedom; they have a right, to use Smith's phrase, to an undeformed and unmutilated humanity, to that original basis of human dignity which it is the business of organized society to defend for its weaker members against the a.s.saults of fortune as well as the a.s.saults of men. That is what I have called, for the sake of distinction, the English theory of social politics. On the other hand, socialism unduly extends this claim. The right to fair wages is one thing; the State could not realize it, but it at least represents no unjust aspiration; but the right to an equal dividend of the national income, claimed by utopian socialists, including Mr. Bellamy at the present day, and the right to the full produce of labour claimed by the revolutionary socialists, and meaning, as explained by them, the right to the entire product of labour and capital together, are really rights to unfair wages, and the whole objection to them is that they are at variance with social justice. If we keep these distinctions in view, we shall be able to discriminate between interventions of authority which are innocent, and interventions which are tainted with State socialism.

Take an ill.u.s.tration or two, 1st, of interventions for settling the claims of the poor in society in general, and 2nd, of interventions for adjusting the differences between one cla.s.s and another, between employer and labourer, between landlord and tenant, and the like.

1. Under the first head, the most important question is the question of public a.s.sistance. Prince Bismarck created a considerable European sensation when he first announced his new social policy in 1884, by declaring in favour of the three claims of labour, which have been so commonly regarded as the very alpha and omega of social revolution--the right to existence for the infirm, the right to labour for the able-bodied, and the right to superannuation for the aged. "Give the labourer," he said, "the right to labour when he is able-bodied; give him the right to relief when he is sick; give him the right to maintenance when he is old; and if you do so--if you do not shrink from the sacrifice, and do not cry out about State socialism whenever the State does anything for the labourer in the way of Christian charity--then I believe you will destroy the charm of the Wyden (_i.e._, Social Democratic) programme." These three rights are really two, the right of relief when one is sick and of maintenance when one is old being only different phases of the right to existence. Now the right to existence and the right to labour are in themselves both perfectly just claims, but the construction Prince Bismarck gave them pa.s.sed decidedly over into State socialism.

The right to existence is seldom called in question. Malthus, it is true, said a man had a right to live only as he had a right to live a hundred years--_if he could_. He might as well have argued that a man had a right to escape murder only as he had a right to escape murder for a hundred years--_if he could_. It is really because he cannot that he has the right--it is because he cannot protect himself against violence that he has a right to protection from the State, and because, and as far as, he cannot protect himself against starvation that he has a just claim upon the State for food. And his claim is obviously bounded in the one case as in the other by the ability of society. If society cannot protect him, it is of course absurd to talk of any right to its protection, but if society can, society ought. To suffer a fellow-citizen to die of hunger is felt by a civilized community to be at least as just a disgrace to its government as it would be to leave him a prey to the knife of the a.s.sa.s.sin, or to the incursions of marauders from over the enemy's border. But as the State furnishes protection against human violence by its courts of justice, and against disease by its sanitary laws, so it furnishes protection against famine and indigence by its legal provision of relief. The claim of the perishing stands on the same footing as any other claim which is an admitted right of man to-day; it is a claim to an essential condition of normal manhood--to existence itself. But then, if the right to existence must be admitted, it can only be admitted where the individual is, for whatever reason, unable to make provision for himself, and it can only be admitted in such measure and form as will not discourage other individuals from trying to make independent provision for themselves before their day of disability comes, because that, in turn, is the way prescribed by normal manhood and true human dignity.

What State socialists claim, however, is not the right to existence, but the right to decent and comfortable existence--the right to the style of living which is customary among the independent poor. The labourer ought, in their eyes, to be treated as a public servant, and his sick pay and his pension ought both to be commensurate with the claims and dignity of honest labour. Now it is of course impossible not to sympathize much with this view, but the difficulty is that if you make a.s.sisted labour as good as independent labour, you shall soon have more a.s.sisted labour than you can manage, you shall have weakened the push, energy, and forethought of your labouring cla.s.s, you shall have really done much to destroy that very dignity of labour which you desire to establish. The State may probably, with great advantage, do more for working-cla.s.s insurance than it at present does. It could conduct the business of the burial benefit and the superannuation benefit better than any private company or friendly society, because it could offer a surer guarantee and the business is routine; Mr. Gladstone's excellent annuity scheme has remained sterile only because it has not been pushed, and the canva.s.ser and collector are indispensable in working-cla.s.s insurance. But the socialist proposal is that the State ought to give every man a pension after a certain age, irrespectively altogether of his own contributions. Mr. Webb is one of its most recent advocates, and, according to the useful figures he has taken the trouble to obtain, there are in the United Kingdom 1,700,000 persons over sixty-five years of age, of whom 1,300,000 contrive to pension themselves, either by their own savings or the a.s.sistance of their families, while the remaining 400,000 are supported by the rates at an average cost of ten guineas a year. Mr. Webb's proposal is that in order to save the feelings of the 400,000 dependants you are to make the other 1,300,000 persons dependants along with them, and give ten guineas a year all round. But you cannot make a public dole a pension by merely calling it a pension. A pension is a payment made by one's actual employer for work done--it is wages, and the man who has earned his own pension, or has provided it by his own saving, feels himself and is an independent man.

It is right to maintain the 400,000--whether out of national or parochial funds is a detail--but sound policy would rather aim at raising the 400,000 to be as the 1,300,000, than at lowering the 1,300,000 to the level of the 400,000. With Mr. Webb it is not a question of giving the 400,000 better allowances than they receive at present--which might be most reasonably entertained--but it is a mere question of not suffering them to be looked down on by the 1,300,000 who have fought their own way, and that is not possible, nor, with all respect for them, is it, from a public point of view, desirable. It is right to support those who cannot support themselves, but it is neither right nor wise to remove all distinction between the dependent poor and the independent.

But the line between State socialism and sound social politics in the matter of public a.s.sistance may perhaps be better shown in another branch of Poor Law administration--the right to labour for the able-bodied. The socialist right to labour is the right of the unemployed to get labour in their own trades and at good or current rates of wages. That is the right which Bismarck substantially admitted in his famous speech. He said there was a crowd of suitable undertakings which the State could establish to furnish the unemployed with a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. It is also practically the right which prevailed in England between 1782, when Gilbert's Act abolished the old workhouse test, and 1835, when the new Poor Law restored it. Gilbert's Act gave the able-bodied poor the right (1) to obtain from the guardians work near their own residence and suited to their respective strength and capacity; (2) to receive for their labour all the money earned by it; and (3) if that sum fell short of their requirements, to have the difference made up out of the parochial funds. The effect of that, as we know, was, that public relief became too desirable, the dependants on it multiplied, the poor rate rose, the wages of labour fell, the very efficiency of the labourer himself withered, and the new Poor Law reverted to the workhouse test, which, harsh though it was considered to be, was in reality a necessary defence of the character and comfort of the labouring cla.s.s from further decadence.

To provide the unemployed with work in their own trades is only to increase the evil you wish to remedy, for the very existence of the unemployed shows that those particular trades are slack at the time, that there is no demand for the articles they produce, and consequently any attempt by the State to throw fresh supplies of these articles on the already over-stocked market can have no other effect than to increase the depression and turn out of employ the men that are still at work. Paying relief work at the common market rate of wages is attended with the same objection. The remedy only aggravates the disease, and what ought to be merely the labourer's temporary resource against adversity tends to grow into his regular staff of life. Relief wages, while sufficient for the family's support, should remain below the current rates so as to give the labourer an effective inducement to seek better employment as soon as better employment can possibly be obtained.

The true and natural defence against misfortune is the man's own personal exertion and provision, and the purpose of the public intervention is to stimulate and a.s.sist, not to supplant, that _vis medicatrix naturae_.

But under these limitations a right to labour is a just claim of the unfortunate. It is admitted in the English Poor Law, and it is admitted in the Scotch parochial practice, which constructively considers want of employment a form of sickness or accident, and it requires in both countries to be better realized than it is. 1st: although it is unadvisable to give every man work at his own trade, and although the choice of trades for relief purposes is attended with as much difficulty as the choice of those for prison labour is found to be, yet certainly the circle of relief trades ought to be extended beyond stone-breaking and oak.u.m-picking. Socialists themselves are among the foremost in complaining of the compet.i.tion of prison labour with honest labour, although they fail to see that precisely the same objection attends the compet.i.tion of relieved labor in public workshops with unrelieved labour in regular private employment. The kind of work most free from objection on this score would probably be the production of articles now imported from abroad, and there are a great many trades in which, while we make most of their products at home, we import particular articles or sorts of articles for one reason or another. Some of these might be found suitable for the purpose in view. Or the men in the public workshops might be employed in making a variety of things used in public offices, imperial or local. 2nd: what is even more important, a distinction ought to be made between the industrious poor and that residuum of confirmed failures for whom the stoneyard test is really intended, and the former ought not to be made to feel themselves any way degraded in their work, their small remuneration being trusted to act as a sufficient preventive against their permanent dependence on the public for employment. 3rd: then a third and most important requisite is to supplement the public provision of work with a public provision of information about the demand for labour over the country from day to day, so as not merely to support the men in adversity, but to facilitate their restoration to their normal condition of prosperity.

For we ought to recognise that though the problem of the unemployed is not, as many persons imagine, one of increasing gravity in our time--although, on the contrary, if we go back thirty years, sixty years, or a hundred years, we always find worse complaints and more distressing sufferings from that cause than at present, yet it is certainly a constant problem. The unemployed we have always with us, and even their numbers vary less from time to time than we are apt to suppose. Trades dependent on fine weather are, of course, slack in winter, but then trades dependent on fashion are slack in summer, while there are some large trades--such as the shoemakers--that are made brisk by bad weather. Even a general commercial crisis which throws the workpeople of many trades idle, makes those of others busy. The building trades are always busy in bad times, because money and labour are then cheap, and the opportunity is seized of building or extending factories, and laying down plant of every description. It was so to a very remarkable extent during the Lancashire cotton distress of 1862; it was so all over England in the depression of 1877-78, and the same fact was observed again in Scotland, and commented upon by the factory inspector in 1886. Other trades are brisker in a crisis for less happy causes, _e.g._, the bakers for the melancholy reason that the working cla.s.ses are more generally driven from meat to bread. These natural corrections or compensations elicited by the depression itself prevent the numbers of the unemployed from growing so very much larger in a crisis than in ordinary times that their case would not be overtaken satisfactorily by the general systematic provision of relief work, if that were once established. The excess is met now so effectually by a few special local efforts, that we have sometimes far fewer able-bodied paupers in bad years than in good. The number of able-bodied paupers was very much less in the bad years 1876-1878 than in the good years immediately after them, or in the still better years immediately before them. The problem being, then, so largely constant from season to season, and from cycle to cycle, ought clearly to be solved by a permanent and systematic provision.

The same principle which governs this right to labour--the principle of preventing degradation and facilitating self-recovery--governs other social legislation for the unfortunate besides the Poor Law. It lies at the bottom of the homestead exemptions of America, and our own prohibition of arrestment of tools and wages for debt, and our occasional measures for cancelling arrears. It is the principle laid down by Pitt when he said that no temporary occasion should be suffered to force a British subject to part with his last shilling. He had a right to his last shilling, because he had a right to an undegraded humanity. The last shilling stopped his fall, and perhaps helped him to rise again.

Many persons will admit the right to public a.s.sistance, because it seems limited to saving men from extremities, who will see nothing but socialism of a perilous sort in other public provisions, for which popular claims are advanced. Schools, museums, libraries, parks, open s.p.a.ces, footpaths, baths, are certainly means of intellectual and physical life, which keep the manhood of a community in normal vigour; but, it will be asked, if the State once begins to supply such things, where is it to stop? Is free education to go beyond the primary branches? What length are you to go? is the question Mr. Spencer always raises as a bar to your going at all. But the same question of degree can be raised about everything, about the duties Mr. Spencer himself imposes upon the State as really as about those he refuses to sanction.

In the matter of protection, for instance, how many policemen are we required to detail to a district? Or how great an army and navy are we to maintain? During the excitement about the Jack the Ripper murders there was much clamour about the police being too few, and we are subject to periodical panics as to our imperial defences, in the course of which no two persons agree in answering the question, what length are we to go? The question can only be settled of course by measuring the length of our necessities with the length of our purse, and the same cla.s.s of considerations rules in the other case, the importance and cost of the given provision to a community of such education and culture, together with the impossibility of getting it adequately supplied without public agency. The opinion of the time may vary as to what is essential for a whole and wholesome manhood, and its resources may vary as to what may be easily borne to supply it; but the same variation takes place with respect to the duties of national defence, or the administration of justice. The objection is therefore nothing more or less than the very ancient and famous logical fallacy with which the Greek sophists used to nonplus their antagonists. As in other affairs, the problem so far will settle itself practically as it goes along, and the important distinction to bear in mind is that to give every man the essential conditions of all humane living is a very different kind of aim from giving every man the same share in the national production, or a lien on his neighbour's luck or industry or alertness.

2. From rights realizing general claims of the unfortunate on society at large, let us now pa.s.s to rights realizing special claims of certain weaker cla.s.ses of society against certain stronger cla.s.ses. The most typical examples of this sort of legislation are the intervention of the State between buyer and seller, between landlord and tenant, between employer and labourer, for the judicial determination of a fair price, a fair rent, or fair wages, or for the regulation of the conditions of labour, and tenure of land. Professor Sidgwick declares the Irish and Scotch Land Acts, which provide for the judicial determination of a fair rent, to be the most distinctively socialistic measures the English Legislature has yet pa.s.sed; but in reality these Land Acts are not a bit more socialistic than the laws which fix a fair price for railway rates and fares, and much less socialistic than the old usury Acts which sought to determine fair interest. Such interferences with freedom of contract as these are, of course, only justifiable when the absence of effective compet.i.tion places the real power of settlement of terms practically in the hands of one side alone, and conduces, therefore, inevitably to the serious injury and oppression of the other. Parliament controls railway charges because the railway companies enjoy a monopoly of most important business, and might use their monopoly to wrong the public, and when Parliament is asked, as it sometimes is, to discourage corners, rings, syndicates, or pooling combinations, it is on the ground that these various agencies are attempts, more or less successful, to exclude compet.i.tion for the purpose of exacting from the public more than a fair price. On the other hand, the reason why we have given up fixing fair interest now is because we have come to see that compet.i.tion, being very effective among money-lenders, fixes it far better for us without the intervention of the law, and, of course, an unnecessary interference with freedom of contract is nothing but pernicious. But, although for ordinary commercial loans the compet.i.tion of lenders is a sufficient security for the fair treatment of borrowers, it affords no protection against extortion to the very necessitous man, who must accept any terms or starve. His poverty leaves him no proper freedom to make a contract, and the law still condemns oppressive rates of usury, to which, as the Apothecary says in "Romeo and Juliet," the poor man's poverty, but not his will, consents. In such a case, accordingly, an authoritative prescription of fair interest is only a necessary requirement of justice and humanity.

The public determination of fair rent stands on precisely the same ground. The rent of large farms, like the interest on ordinary commercial loans, may be safely left to be settled by commercial compet.i.tion, because large farms are taken by men of capital as a business speculation, and landlords cannot exact more rent than the farms will bear without driving capital out of agriculture into other branches of production, and so reducing the demand for that cla.s.s of farms to an extent that will bring the rent down to its proper level again. But the rent of small holdings, like the interest on loans to persons in extremity, is ruled by other considerations. Cottier tenants, between their numbers and their necessities, are continually driven into offering rents the land can never be made to pay, and thereby incurring for the rest of their days the burden of a lengthening chain of arrears little better than Oriental debt-slavery. Other work is hard to find; the land being limited in supply is a natural monopoly; and the State merely steps in to save the tenantry from the injurious effects of their own over-compet.i.tion for an essential instrument of their labour, and, through their labour, of their very existence. The interference, therefore, is perfectly justifiable if the machinery it inst.i.tutes can carry out the purpose efficiently, and there is this difference between a court for fixing rent and a court for fixing the price of bread, or beer, or labour, that it is only doing work which in the natural course of things is very usually done by periodical and independent valuation, instead of by the ordinary higgling of the market. It has always been the custom on many large estates to call in a valuator from the outside for the revision of the rents, and a valuator appointed by the Crown cannot be expected to do the work any less effectively than a valuator appointed by the landlord. Moreover, the tendency of opinion seems to be towards the simplication of the process by some self-working scheme, a sliding scale for apportioning an annual rent to the annual production.

State intervention in the determination of the rate of wages is often proposed either for the purpose of settling trade disputes on the subject, or for the purpose of suppressing what is called starvation wages and fixing a legal minimum rate. As for arbitration in trade disputes, the object is, of course, in no way socialistic, for it is strictly allied with the ordinary judicial work of the State, and a public and permanent tribunal would probably answer the purpose much better than a private and merely occasional one; for even although it might not be able to enforce its judgments in all cases by compulsion on the parties, it would be more likely than the other to command their confidence and secure by its moral authority their voluntary submission, and this authority would increase with the experience of the court.

In certain cases compulsory arbitration seems to be required. There are trades in which the public interest may require strikes to be prohibited, in order to prevent a whole community suffering grave privations, perhaps being starved of its supply of a necessary of life.

The Trades Union Act imposes express restrictions on combinations among the labourers at gas and water works, and the recent railway strike in Scotland, which not only paralyzed trade for a time, but stopped the supply of coal to whole districts in the middle of the severest winter of the last part of the century, suggested to many minds the propriety of similar interference in railway disputes. But if the State interfered to stop the strike, the State must needs in equity interfere to decide upon the cause of quarrel. And happily these are the very cases which are best fitted for compulsory arbitration, because the trades concerned are not subject to the market fluctuations to which other trades are liable, and are therefore better suited for fixed settlements of definite and considerable duration.

But what socialists claim is a universal determination of normal wages, so as to give every man the full product of his labour, as the full product of his labour is understood upon their theory. For the present, however, they are content to ask for at least the establishment of a legal minimum rate of wages; in fact, an international minimum rate of wages and an international eight hours working day are the two demands on which their agitation is in the meantime most strenuously concentrated. In their recent policy they have reverted to the kind of remedies they used to speak of with such lofty disdain as mere palliatives, and have only preserved their separate ident.i.ty from other reformers by asking for these palliatives in their least practicable form. An international compulsory minimum wage is impossible, for even a national one is so, and that is the only objection, but a very sufficient one, to the proposal. If you could wipe out starvation wages by pa.s.sing an Act of Parliament, let the Act be pa.s.sed to-morrow, for starvation wages is surely the worst and most exasperating of all the enemies of humane living. To starve for want of power to work is bad; to starve for want of work is worse; but to work and yet starve, to work a long, long day without obtaining the bread that should be its natural reward, is a third and worst degree of misfortune, for it mocks the fitness and equity of things, and seizes the mind like a wrong. If it is right to suppress starvation by law, it would seem more right still to suppress starvation wages; and if the socialist contention were in the least true, that in consequence of the "iron and cruel law" all wages are starvation wages, and all work sweaters' work, that work and starve is the inevitable rule under the present system of things, there would be no good answer to their demand for the abolition of the present system of things. But as a matter of fact working and starving is the condition of only exceptional groups of workpeople, and the right to a minimum wage, in the sense of a wage above starvation point, would have no bearing on the great majority of the labouring cla.s.ses, inasmuch as they stand already on a considerably higher level of remuneration.

Ought the State, however, to fix a legal minimum of wages for the protection of the exceptional groups of workpeople to whose situation such a measure might have relation? The objection to this course comes less from want of justice in the claim than from want of power in the State to realize it. The fixing of a legal minimum rate of wages is a task which it is beyond the State's power to accomplish, except by paying up the minimum out of its own funds; for, though the law fixed a minimum to-morrow, it could not compel employers to engage workmen at that minimum; and if employers found it unprofitable to do so, the only effect of the legislation would be to throw numbers of men out of work, and make their maintenance at the legal minimum an obligation of the public treasury. Of the results of paying wages out of the rates we have had plenty of experience. To suppress starvation wages in this way by direct statute is merely impossible, however, and there would be no taint of socialism in it, if it could be done. Much less can the like objection be made against any milder remedies. The only danger is that they would not prove effectual, and would address themselves to false causes. Take the sweating system of the East End of London, in which, bad conditions of labour always going together, we find starvation wages combined with long hours and unwholesome work-rooms. Two of the favourite remedies are the abolition of sub-contracting and the prohibition of pauper Jewish immigration; but neither of these things is the cause of sweating. The sweating contractor of the East End is not a sub-contractor at all; he is the only contractor in the business, and even if he were a sub-contractor, we know that sub-contractors often pay far better wages than the chief contractor can, because they know their men better, and get better work out of them.

A temporary increase in the Jewish immigration may occasion a temporary aggravation of the difficulty, but the permanent causes lie elsewhere, and even in the way of aggravation a matter of a thousand Jews more, or a thousand Jews less, cannot play an all-important part in a system affecting some hundred thousand workpeople. Sweating is no more incident to Jewish labour than to English labour. The cheap clothing trade of Birmingham is certainly in the hands of Jews, yet sweating is--or at least was when the factory inspector reported in 1879--absolutely unknown. The wages, he said, were good, the hours were not long, and there were no overcrowded dens. On the other hand, sweating has not only been for years endemic in the East End of London, but has even appeared in a very acute form, apart from any alien influence, in the tailoring trade in Melbourne, the paradise of working people, as it is sometimes not unjustly denominated. The sweating there was conducted largely by ladies who took in bands of learners, and, according to the evidence before the Shopkeepers' Commission, of 1883, every second house in some of the suburbs was a shop of that kind. There was an excessive influx of labour into that trade, because little other work could be found for women who entertained, as they do generally in that colony, a prejudice against both factory labour and domestic service. On the other hand, this overflow was diverted in Birmingham into other channels by the comparative abundance of light employments the district afforded. But apart from temporary or local circ.u.mstances that serve to aggravate things or alleviate them, the tailor trade is everywhere naturally subject beyond all others to over-compet.i.tion: (1) because the work can be done at home; (2) because it can be learnt in a few weeks or months well enough to earn starvation wages in a long day at some sorts of work; (3) because it needs as little capital for the contractor to start business as it needs training for the operatives; and (4) because the operatives being scattered about in their own homes, or in small workshops here and there, have a natural difficulty in coming to any concerted action that might otherwise mitigate the effects of the over-compet.i.tion, and if there is any general remedy for sweating, it must deal with these causes. To replace homework by common work in wholesome workshops, as far as that can be done, might interfere with what some poor persons found a convenient resource, but would do no harm to the working cla.s.s generally. The work it was less convenient for some to do would be done by others. The change would remove at once one of the evils of sweating--the unhealthy work-places--and it would contribute to remove the others, first by facilitating combination, and second by improving the personal efficiency of the labourer and the amount of his production. Dr. Watts, of Manchester, speaking from long experience, tells us in his "Facts of the Cotton Famine" (p. 44) that "men often care more about being employed in a good mill (_i.e._, a mill with plenty of room, air, and light) than about the exact price per pound for spinning, or per piece for weaving, for they know practically what is the effect of these conditions upon the weekly wages." Various measures have been suggested which have some such end in view--the compulsory registration of the contractor's workrooms and his outworkers, the requiring him to provide workshops for all his hands, the joint liability of the clothier with him for the wholesomeness of the workplaces, the erection of public workshops where workpeople may be accommodated for hire; they may be open to various objections--and there is no s.p.a.ce to indicate or discuss them here--but if they are effectual for the purpose contemplated, that purpose saves them at least from the reproach of socialism.

The international compulsory eight hours day is attended with like difficulty. The eight hours day is no necessary plank of socialism, though socialists have at present united to demand it. Rodbertus, the most learned and scientific of modern socialists, always contended that the normal working-day ought not to be of uniform length, but should vary inversely with the relative strain of the several trades, and Mr.

Bellamy, under his system of absolute equality of income, makes differences in the hours of labour answer the purpose of regulating the choice of occupation, and preventing too many persons running into the easier trades, and too few into the harder. Nor, indeed, apart from the element of universal compulsion, has the eight hours day anything of socialism in it at all. In some trades it is probably a simple necessity for protecting the workpeople in normal conditions of health; but above all its sanitary benefits it would confer upon the workpeople of every trade alike the much grander blessing of admitting them to a reasonable share of the intellectual, social, domestic, religious, and political life of their time. If the State could bestow upon them this sovereign blessing without forcing them to accept a reduction of wages, which might deprive them of things even more essential for their elevation, and which would only breed among them an intolerable discontent, by all means let the State declare the glad decree. But experience shows that in matters of this kind the State--and especially the democratic State--is a very limited agent, and cannot successfully enforce its decrees upon unwilling trades. In certain special cases, when the short day is demanded for the purpose of averting admitted dangers to health, as with the miners, or for the safety of the public, as with the railway service, there is a recognised stringency of obligation which is exceptional; but in the great run of trades the question is virtually one of mere preference between an hour's leisure and an hour's pay, and in these circ.u.mstances a law has too little moral authority behind it to be practically enforceable by penalties in the absence of decided working-cla.s.s opinion in its favour in the affected trades. In Victoria more than fifty separate trades have obtained the eight hours day without any parliamentary a.s.sistance, and almost the only remaining trades which do not yet enjoy it are the very trades which have been protected by an eight hours Factory Act since 1874. As soon as the Act was pa.s.sed, the operatives, men and women both, pet.i.tioned the Chief Secretary for its suspension, and it has remained in suspended animation to this day. A democratic government cannot risk incurring the discontent of a body of the people merely to prevent them from working an hour more when they want to earn a little more. California has had an Eight Hours Act on the statute-book for even a longer period, but it has remained a mere dead letter, because employers began to pay wages by the hour or the p