New Worlds For Old Part 5

"He tempts them to drink," I have heard a clergyman say of his village publican. But what else did he think the publican was there for?--to preach total abstinence? Naturally, inevitably, the whole of the Trade is a propaganda--not of drunkenness, but of habitual heavy drinking.

The more successful propagandists, the great brewers and distillers grow rich just in the proportion that people consume beer and spirits; they gain honour and peerages in the measure of their success.

It is very interesting to the Socialist to trace the long struggle of the temperance movement against its initial ideas of freedom, and to see how inevitably the most reluctant and unlikely people have been forced to recognize Private Ownership in this trade and for profit as the ultimate evil. I am delighted to have to hand an excellent little tract by "A Ratepayer": _National Efficiency and the Drink Traffic_.

It has a preface by Mr. Haldane, and it is as satisfactory a demonstration of the absolute necessity of thoroughgoing Socialism in this particular field as any Socialist could wish. One encounters the Bishop of Chester, for example, in its pages talking the purest Socialism, and making the most luminous admissions of the impossibility of continued private control, in phrases that need but a few verbal changes to apply equally to milk, to meat, to bread, to housing, to book-selling[7]....

[7] For a clear and admirable account of the Socialist att.i.tude to the temperance question, see the tract on _Munic.i.p.al Drink Traffic_ published by the Fabian Society; price one penny.

-- 7.

Land and housing, railways, food, drink, coal, in each of these great general interests there is a separate strong case for the subst.i.tution of collective control for the Private Ownership methods of the present time. There is a great and growing number of people like "A Ratepayer"

and Mr. Haldane, who do not call themselves Socialists but who are yet strongly tinged with Socialist conceptions; who are convinced--some in the case of the land, some in the case of the drink trade or the milk, that Private Ownership and working for profit must cease. But they will not admit a general principle, they argue each case on its merits.

The Socialist maintains that, albeit the details of each problem must be studied apart, there does underlie all these cases and the whole economic situation at the present time, one general fact, that through our whole social system from top to base we find things under the influence of a misleading idea that must be changed, and which, until it is changed, will continue to work out in waste, unserviceableness, cramped lives and suffering and death. Each man is for himself, that is this misleading idea, seeking, perforce, ends discordant with the general welfare; who serves the community without exacting pay, goes under; who exacts pay without service prospers and continues; success is not to do well, it is to have and to get; failure is not to do ill, it is to lose and not have; and under these conditions how can we expect anything but dislocated, unsatisfying service at every turn?

The contemporary anti-Socialist moralist and the social satirist would appeal to the Owner's sense of duty; he would declare in a plat.i.tudinous tone that property had its duties as well as its rights, and so forth. The Socialist, however, looks a little deeper, and puts the thing differently. He brings both rights and duties to a keener scrutiny. What underlies all these social disorders, he alleges, is one simple thing, a misconception of property; an unreasonable exaggeration, an acc.u.mulated, inherited exaggeration, of the idea of property. He says the idea of private property, which is just and reasonable in relation to intimate personal things, to clothes, appliances, books, one's home or apartments, the garden one loves or the horse one rides, has become unreasonably exaggerated until it obsesses the world; that the freedom we have given men to claim and own and hold the land upon which we must live, the fuel we burn, the supplies of food and metal we require, the railways and ships upon which our business goes, and to fix what prices they like to exact for all these services, leads to the impoverishment and practical enslavement of the ma.s.s of mankind.

And so he comes to his second main generalization, which I may perhaps set out in these words:--

_The idea of the private ownership of things and the rights of owners is enormously and mischievously exaggerated in the contemporary world.

The conception of private property has been extended to land, to material, to the values and resources acc.u.mulated by past generations, to a vast variety of things that are properly the inheritance of the whole race. As a result of this, there is much obstruction and waste of human energy and a huge loss of opportunity and freedom for the ma.s.s of mankind; progress is r.e.t.a.r.ded, there is a vast amount of avoidable wretchedness, cruelty and injustice._

_The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be inalienably the owner and administrator of the land, of raw materials, of values and resources acc.u.mulated from the past, and that private property must be of a terminable nature, reverting to the community, and subject to the general welfare._

This is the second of the twin generalizations upon which the edifice of modern Socialism rests. Like the first, and like the practical side of all sound religious teaching, it is a specific application of one general rule of conduct, and that is the subordination of the individual motive to the happiness and welfare of the species.

-- 8.

But now the reader unaccustomed to Socialist discussion will begin to see the crude form of the answer to the question raised by the previous chapter; he will see the resources from which the enlargement of human life we there contemplated is to be derived, and realize the economic methods to be pursued. Collective ownership is the necessary corollary of collective responsibility. There are to be no private land owners, no private bankers and lenders of money, no private insurance adventurers, no private railway owners nor shipping owners, no private mine owners, oil kings, silver kings, coal and wheat forestallers or the like. All this realm of property is to be resumed by the State, is to be State-owned and State-managed, and the vast revenues that are now devoted to private ends will go steadily to feed, maintain and educate a new and better generation, to promote research and advance science, to build new houses, develop fresh resources, plant, plan, beautify and reconstruct the world.

CHAPTER V

THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE

-- 1.

We have stated now how the constructive plan of Socialism aims to replace the accepted ideas about two almost fundamental human relations by broader and less fiercely egotistical conceptions; how it denies a man "property" rights over his wife and children, leaving, however, all his other relations with them intact, how it would insure and protect their welfare, and how it a.s.serts that a vast range of inanimate things also which are now held as private property must be regarded as the inalienable possession of the whole community. This change in the circle of ideas (as the Herbartians put it) is the essence of the Socialist project.

It means no little change. It means a general change in the spirit of living; it means a change from the spirit of gain (which now necessarily rules our lives) to the spirit of service.

I have tried to show in the preceding chapter that Socialism seeks to make life less squalid and cruel, less degrading and dwarfing for the children that are born into it, and I have tried also to make clear that realization of, and revolt against, the bad management and waste and muddle which result from our present economic system. I want now to point out that Socialism seeks to enn.o.ble the intimate personal life, by checking and discouraging pa.s.sions that at present run rampant, and by giving wider scope for pa.s.sions that are now thwarted and subdued. The Socialist declares that life is now needlessly dishonest, base and mean, because our present social organization, such as it is, makes an altogether too powerful appeal to some of the very meanest elements in our nature.

Not perhaps to the lowest. There can be no disputing that our present civilization does discourage much of the innate b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of man; that it helps people to a measure of continence, cleanliness and mutual toleration; that it does much to suppress brute violence, the spirit of lawlessness, cruelty and wanton destruction. But on the other hand it does also check and cripple generosity and frank truthfulness, any disinterested creative pa.s.sion, the love of beauty, the pa.s.sion for truth and research, and it stimulates avarice, parsimony, overreaching, usury, falsehood and secrecy, by making money-getting its criterion of intercourse.

Whether we like it or not, we who live in this world to-day find we must either devote a considerable amount of our attention to getting and keeping money, and shape our activities--or, if you will, distort them--with a constant reference to that process, or we must accept futility. Whatever powers men want to exercise, whatever service they wish to do, it is a preliminary condition for most of them that they must, by earning something or selling something, achieve opportunity.

If they cannot turn their gift into some saleable thing or get some propertied man to "patronize" them, they cannot exercise these gifts.

The gift for getting is the supreme gift--all others bow before it.

Now this is not a thing that comes naturally out of the quality of man; it is the result of a blind and complex social growth, of this set of ideas working against that, and of these influences modifying those. The idea of property has run wild and become a choking universal weed. It is not the natural master-pa.s.sion of a wholesome man to want constantly to own. People talk of Socialism as being a proposal "against human nature," and they would have us believe that this life of anxiety, of parsimony and speculation, of mercenary considerations and forced toil we all lead, is the complete and final expression of the social possibilities of the human soul. But, indeed, it is only quite abnormal people, people of a narrow, limited, specialized intelligence, Rockefellers, Morgans and the like, people neither great nor beautiful, mere financial monomaniacs, who can keep themselves devoted to and concentrated upon gain. To the majority of capable good human stuff, buying and selling, saving and investing, insuring oneself and managing property, is a ma.s.s of uncongenial, irrational and tiresome procedure, conflicting with the general trend of instinct and the finer interests of life. The great ma.s.s of men and women, indeed, find the whole process so against nature, that in spite of all the miseries of poverty, all the slavery of the economic disadvantage, they cannot urge themselves to this irksome cunning game of besting the world, they remain poor. Most, in a sort of despair, make no effort; many resort to that floundering endeavour to get by accident, gambling; many achieve a precarious and unsatisfactory gathering of possessions, a few houses, a claim on a field, a few hundred pounds in some investment as incalculable as a kite in a gale; just a small minority have and get--for the most part either inheritors of riches or energetic people who, through a real dulness toward the better and n.o.bler aspects of life, can give themselves almost entirely to grabbing and acc.u.mulation. To such as these, all common men who are not Socialists do in effect conspire to give the world.

The Anti-Socialist argues that out of this evil of encouraged and stimulated avarice comes good, and that this peculiar meanly greedy type that predominates in the individualist world to-day, the Rockefeller-Harriman type, "creates" great businesses, exploits the possibilities of nature, gives mankind railways, power, commodities.

As a matter of fact, a modern intelligent community is quite capable of doing all these things infinitely better for itself, and the beneficent influence of commerce may easily become, and does easily become, the basis of a cant. Exploitation by private persons is no doubt a necessary condition to economic development in an illiterate community of low intelligence, just as flint implements marked a necessary phase in the social development of mankind; but to-day the avaricious getter, like some obsolescent organ in the body, consumes strength and threatens health. And to-day he is far more mischievous than ever he was before, because of the weakened hold of the old religious organization upon his imagination. For the most part the great fortunes of the modern world have been built up by proceedings either not socially beneficial, or in some cases positively harmful.

Consider some of the commoner methods of growing rich. There is first the selling of rubbish for money, exemplified by the great patent medicine fortunes and the fortunes achieved by the debas.e.m.e.nt of journalism, the sale of prize-compet.i.tion magazines and the like; next there is forestalling, the making of "corners" in such commodities as corn, nitrates, borax and the like; then there is the capture of what Americans call "franchises," securing at low terms by expedients that usually will not bear examination, the right to run some profitable public service for private profit which would be better done in public hands--the various private enterprises for urban traffic, for example; then there are the various more or less complex financial operations, watering stock, "reconstructing," "shaking out" the ordinary shareholder, which transfer the savings of the common struggling person to the financial magnate. All the activities in this list are more or less anti-social, yet it is by practising them that the great successes of recent years have been achieved. Fortunes of a second rank have no doubt been made by building up manufactures and industries of various types by persons who have known how to buy labour cheap, organize it well and sell its produce dear, but even in these cases the social advantage of the new product is often largely discounted by the labour conditions. It is impossible, indeed, directly one faces current facts, to keep up the argument of the public good achieved by men under the incentive of gain and the necessity of that incentive to progress and economic development.

Now not only is it true that the subordination of our affairs to this spirit of gain placed our world in the hands of a peculiar, acquisitive, uncreative, wary type of person, and that the ma.s.s of people hate serving the spirit of gain and are forced to do so through the obsession of the whole community by this idea of Private Ownership, but it is also true that even now the real driving force that gets the world along is not that spirit at all, but the spirit of service. Even to-day it would be impossible for the world to get along if the ma.s.s of its population was really specialized for gain. A world of Rockefellers, Morgans and Rothschilds would perish miserably after a vigorous campaign of mutual skinning; it is only because the common run of men is better than these profit-hunters that any real and human things are achieved.

Let us go into this aspect of the question a little more fully, because it is one that appears to be least clearly grasped by those who discuss Socialism to-day.

-- 2.

This fact must be insisted upon, that most of the work of the world and all the good work is done to-day for some other motive than gain; that profit-seeking not only is not the moving power of the world but that it cannot be, that it runs counter to the doing of effectual work in every department of life.

It is hard to know how to set about proving a fact that is to the writer's perception so universally obvious. One can only appeal to the intelligent reader to use his own personal observation upon the people about him. Everywhere he will see the property-owner doing nothing, the profit-seeker busy with unproductive efforts, with the writing of advertis.e.m.e.nts, the misrepresentation of goods, the concoction of a plausible prospectus and the extraction of profits from the toil of others, while the real necessary work of the world--I don't mean the labour and toil only, but the intelligent direction, the real planning and designing and inquiry, the management and the evolution of ideas and methods, is in the enormous majority of cases done by salaried individuals working either for a fixed wage and the hope of increments having no proportional relation to the work done, or for a wage varying within definite limits. All the engineering design, all architecture, all our public services,--the exquisite work of our museum control, for example,--all the big wholesale and retail businesses, almost all big industrial concerns, mines, estates, all these things are really in the hands of salaried or quasi-salaried persons _now_--just as they would be under Socialism. They are only possible now because all these managers, officials, employees are as a cla.s.s unreasonably honest and loyal, are interested in their work and anxious to do it well, and do not seek _profits_ in every transaction they handle. Give them even a small measure of security and they are content with interesting work; they are glad to set aside the urgent perpetual search for personal gain that Individualists have persuaded themselves is the ruling motive of mankind, they are glad to set these aside altogether and, as the phrase goes, "get something done." And this is true all up and down the social scale. A bricklayer is no good unless he can be interested in laying bricks. One knows whenever a domestic servant becomes mercenary, when she ceases to take, as people say, "a pride in her work," and thinks only of "tips" and getting, she becomes impossible. Does a signalman every time he pulls over a lever, or a groom galloping a horse, think of his wages,--or want to?

I will confess I find it hard to write with any patience and civility of this argument that humanity will not work except for greed or need of money and only in proportion to the getting. It is so patently absurd. I suppose the reasonable Anti-Socialist will hardly maintain it seriously with that crudity. He will qualify. He will say that although it may be true that good work is always done for the interest of the doing or in the spirit of service, yet in order to get and keep people at work, and to keep the standard high through periods of indolence and distraction, there must be the dread of dismissal and the stimulating eye of the owner. That certainly puts the case a good deal less basely and much more plausibly.

There is, perhaps, this much truth in that, that most people do need a certain stimulus to exertion and a certain standard of achievement to do their best, but to say that this is provided by private ownership and can only be provided by private ownership is an altogether different thing. Is the British Telephone Service, for example, kept as efficient as it is--which isn't very much, by the bye, in the way of efficiency--by the protests of the shareholders or of the subscribers? Does the grocer's errand-boy loiter any less than his brother who carries the Post Office telegrams? In the matter of the public milk supply, again, would not an intelligently critical public anxious for its milk good and early be a far more formidable master than a speculative proprietor in the back room of a creamery? And when one comes to large business organizations managed by officials and owned by dispersed shareholders, the contrast is all to the advantage of the community.

No! the only proper virtues in work, the virtues that must be relied upon, and developed and rewarded in the civilized State we Socialists are seeking to bring about, are the spirit of service and the pa.s.sion for doing well, the honourable compet.i.tion not to get but to _do_. By sweating and debasing urgency, we get meagrely done what we might get handsomely done by the Good Will of emanc.i.p.ated mankind. For all who really make, who really do, the imperative of gain is the inconvenience, the enemy. Every artist, every scientific investigator, every organizer, every good workman, knows that. Every good architect knows that this is so and can tell of time after time when he has sacrificed manifest profit and taken a loss to get a thing done as he wanted it done, right and well; every good doctor, too, has turned from profit and high fees to the moving and interesting case, to the demands of knowledge and the public health; every teacher worth his or her salt can witness to the perpetual struggle between business advantage and right teaching; every writer has faced the alternative of his aesthetic duty and the search for beauty on one hand and the "saleable" on the other. All this is as true of ordinary making as of special creative work. Every plumber capable of his business hates to have to paint his leadwork; every carpenter knows the disgust of turning out unfinished "cheap" work, however well it pays him; every tolerable cook can feel shame for an unsatisfying dish, and none the less shame because by making it materials are saved and economies achieved.

And yet, with all these facts clear as day before any observant person, _we are content to live on in an economic system that raises every man who subordinates these wholesome prides and desires to watchful, incessant getting, over the heads of every other type of character_; that in effect gives all the power and influence in our State to successful getters; that subordinates art, direction, wisdom and labour to these inferior narrow men, these men who clutch and keep.

Our social system, based on Private Ownership, encourages and glorifies this spirit of gain, and cripples and thwarts the spirit of service. You need but have your eyes once opened to its influence, and thereafter you will never cease to see how the needs and imperatives of property taint the honour and dignity of human life. Just where life should flower most freely into splendour, this chill, malign obsession most nips and cripples. The law that makes getting and keeping an imperative necessity poisons and destroys the freedom of men and women in love, in art and in every concern in which spiritual or physical beauty should be the inspiring and determining factor.

Behind all the handsome professions of romantic natures the gaunt facts of monetary necessity remain the rulers of life. Every youth who must sell his art and capacity for gain, every girl who must sell herself for money, is one more sacrifice to the Minotaur of Private Ownership--before the Theseus of Socialism comes.

Opponents of Socialism, ignoring all these things and inventing with that profusion which is so remarkable a trait of the anti-Socialist campaign, are wont to declare that we, whose first and last thought is the honour and betterment of life, seek to destroy all beauty and freedom in love, accuse us of aiming at some "human stud farm." The reader will measure the justice of that by the next chapter, but here I would say that just as the private ownership of all that is necessary to humanity, except the air and sunlight and a few things that it has been difficult to appropriate, debases work and all the common services of life, so also it taints and thwarts the emotions, and degrades the intimate physical and emotional existence of an innumerable mult.i.tude of people.

All this amounts to a huge impoverishment of life, a loss of beauty and discrimination of rich and subtle values. Human existence to-day is a mere tantalizing intimation of what it might be. It is frostbitten and dwarfed from palace to slum. It is not only that a great ma.s.s of our population is deprived of s.p.a.ce, beauty and pleasure, but that a large proportion of such s.p.a.ce, beauty and pleasure as there are in the world must necessarily have a meretricious taint and be in the nature of things bought and made for pay.

-- 3.

If there is one profession more than another in which devotion is implied and a.s.sumed, it is that of the doctor. It happens that on the morning when this chapter was drafted, I came upon the paragraph that follows; it seemed to me to supply just one striking concrete instance of how life is degraded by our present system, and to offer me a convenient text for a word or so more upon this question between gain and service. It is a little vague in its reference to Mr. Tompkins "of Birmingham," and I should not be surprised if it were a considerable exaggeration of what really happened. But it is true enough to life in this, that it is a common practice, a necessity with doctors in poor neighbourhoods to insist inexorably upon a fee before attendance.

"A case of medical inhumanity is reported from Birmingham. A poor man named Tompkins was taken seriously ill early on Christmas morning, and although snow was falling and the atmosphere was terribly raw, his wife left the house in search of a doctor. The nearest pract.i.tioner declined to leave the house without being paid his fee; a second imposed the same condition, and the woman then went to the police station. As the horse ambulance was out, they could not help her, and she tried other doctors. In all the poor woman called on eight, and the only one who did not decline to get up without his fee was down with influenza. Eventually a local chemist was persuaded to see the man, and he ordered his removal to the hospital."

That is the story. You note the charge of "inhumanity" in the very first line, and in much subsequent press comment there was the same note. Apparently every one expects a doctor to be ready at any point in the day or night to attend anybody for nothing. Most Socialists are disposed to agree with the spirit of that expectation. A practising doctor should be in lifelong perpetual war against pain and disease, just as a campaigning soldier is continually alert and serving. But existing conditions will not permit that. Existing conditions require the doctor to get his fee at any cost; if he goes about doing work for nothing, they punish him with shabbiness and incapacitating need, they forbid his marriage or doom his wife and children to poverty and unhappiness. A doctor _must_ make money whatever else he does or does not do; he _must_ secure his fees. He is a private adventurer, competing in a crowded market for gain, and keeping his energies perforce for those who can pay best for them. To expect him to behave like a public servant whose income and outlook are secure, or like a priest whose church will never let him want or starve, is ridiculous.

If you put him on a footing with the greengrocer and coal merchant, you must expect him to behave like a tradesman. Why should the press blame the poor doctor of a poor neighbourhood because a moneyless man goes short of medical attendance, when it does not for one moment blame Mr. J. D. Rockefeller because a poor man goes short of oil, or the Duke of Devonshire because tramps need lodgings in Eastbourne? One never reads this sort of paragraph:--

"A case of commercial inhumanity is reported from Birmingham.

A poor man named Tompkins was seriously hungry early on Christmas morning, and although snow was falling and the atmosphere was terribly raw, his wife left the house in search of food. The nearest grocer declined to supply provisions without being paid his price; a second imposed the same condition, and the woman then went to the police station. As that is not a soup-kitchen, they could not help her, and she tried other grocers and bread-shops. In all the poor woman called on eight, and the only one who did not decline to supply food without payment was for some reason bankrupt and out of stock. Eventually a local overseer was persuaded to see the man, and he ordered his removal to the workhouse, where, after considerable hardship, he was partly appeased with skilly."

I, myself, have known an overworked, financially worried doctor at his bedroom window call out, "Have you brought the fee?" and have pitied and understood his ugly alternatives. "Once I began that sort of thing," he explained to me a little apologetically, "they'd none of them pay--none."