The World in Chains Part 3

The sale of the finished product is controlled and restricted by the vendors of the raw material. Corn is imported by shipbuilders; ships are built by iron merchants; iron furnaces are controlled by coal owners, and coal mines are secured by money-lenders.

The system of the tied house, originally an indigenous corruption of the liquor trade, is being extended to every industry in the land. We can no longer buy the bread we like, but have to eat whatever by-product least interferes with the miller's profits.

The consumer's loss of any power of effective demand would not necessarily be of national importance, if at least there were any guarantee that the unique commodity offered by the average trust system were genuine and of good quality. One of the State's most elementary rights is that of ensuring to its citizens a pure supply of elementary commodities. Yet Commerce has taken no steps, even in its own interests, to suppress the horrid arts of adulteration, in which the motives of the thief usurp the methods of the poisoner, with results which may be inferred from the meagre chronicles of the a.n.a.lyst.[25]

Education is the life of the State.[26] It is therefore of the gravest importance that Commerce should in no circ.u.mstances whatever be allowed to interfere with the education of the future citizens. Yet, before the war, in spite of the legislation of the last fifty years,[27] no less than a quarter of a million children of school age were exempted from school attendance for employment in various occupations.[28] Even apart from such improper exemptions the "School Age" fixed by law in itself gives quite insufficient protection. The brain of a girl hardly begins to wake up, or take any natural interest in the acquisition of general ideas, before she comes to p.u.b.erty. But all over London girls of thirteen or fourteen leave school and are sent by their mothers to earn half a crown a week matching patterns or sewing on sequins.

More generally, the State is ent.i.tled to demand from Commerce that it should co-operate sincerely with the other elements in the State in pursuing the real objects of civilisation, inspired by an altruistic regard for the whole of which it is a part, that is by what is really "enlightened self-interest"; by what Plato has called Temperance[29] and Mr. H. G. Wells "a sense of the State."[30] We find instead that the trader has "day and night held on indignantly" in his disastrous hunt for markets, destroying by accident or design whatever amenity in the world does not contribute to his "one aim, one business, one desire."

After all, in our present pre-occupation with the horrors of war, we must not exaggerate their extent. War at its maddest rivals but cannot, at present, surpa.s.s the mortality caused by tuberculosis, alcoholism and syphilis, which peaceful Commerce, hand in hand with Christianity, carries into the remotest parts of the earth. Some reader may have noticed by this time that I am not a collector of statistics, but gather my ill.u.s.trations as I go from any sc.r.a.p of paper that comes to hand. It is a lazy trick; but at any rate one escapes the fallacy of over-elaborated evidence, by calling as witness the man who happens to be in the street at the moment. So at this point I happen to notice in the _Manchester Guardian_ an extract from the report of the Resident Commissioner in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate. This is what it says of the natives:--

The cotton smock for women and the cotton trousers and shirts for men, which in the mind of the people seem now so indispensable to professed Christianity, while reducing the endurance of the skin, render it the more susceptible to the chills which wet clothing engenders. The result is colds, pneumonia, influenza--eventually tuberculosis.

We may notice a not unexpected coincidence which the Resident Commissioner apparently omits to mention. It is that "professed Christianity," by insisting on the propriety of cotton garments for the islanders. .h.i.therto well clad in a film of coco-nut oil and a "_riri_ or kilt of finely worked leaves," is conferring a very appreciable benefit on the Manchester trade in "cotton goods." "Our colonial markets have steadily grown," says the Encyclopaedia, "and will yearly become of greater value." ...

On the same day as the issue of the _Manchester Guardian_ just quoted there appeared in the _Times Literary Supplement_ a review of Canon C.

H. Robinson's _History of Christian Missions_, "a very sound introduction to a vast and fascinating study." From this I gather that

there are few stories more romantic than the founding of the Uganda Christian Church in British East Africa. At first progress was very slow, and ... in 1890 there were scarcely 200 baptized Christians in the country; yet by 1913 those a.s.sociated with the Christian Churches were little short of half a million.

So before Europe has shown many signs of convalescence, Africa is already virulently infected. And "our markets will yearly become of greater value."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 23: See, for instance, the Report of the Committee of Public Accounts (commenting on the extravagance of Admiralty and War Contracts), summarised in _The Times_ of August 19, 1916.]

[Footnote 24: See Orage, _National Guilds_, p. 170 ff.]

[Footnote 25: Unfortunately I can find no authority for the amusing report that the annual export of "wine" from Paris is _greater_ than the annual import.]

[Footnote 26: That is, of course, of the modern or democratic state.

Democracy and education are interdependent.]

[Footnote 27: As a matter of fact, no serious attempt to protect children was made before the Factory and Workshops Act of 1878.]

[Footnote 28: Since the war there have been the most determined attempts to destroy all the social legislation so painfully acquired. See G. D.

H. Cole, _Labour in War Time_, pp. 254-274.]

[Footnote 29: _Republic_; 432 A. [Greek: armouia tiui e sophrosune omiotai, k.t.l.]]

[Footnote 30: See _The Future in America_, and _New Worlds for Old, pa.s.sim_.]

-- 8

Restricted Sphere of Government corresponding to Restricted Sphere of Morality

But to return to our sheep, or rather to those who fleece them,--there is one cardinal proof that trade, in so far as it depends on private enterprise, is a danger to the State, and is recognised as such. It is that as soon as war comes, the nation in danger instinctively adopts whatever measure of Socialism can be introduced during the temporary inhibition of capitalistic methods. The actual coming of war induces a brief panic in the marketplace, and during this momentary paralysis of private acquisitors the State makes a desperate attempt to subdue their activities to its own needs. By the mere instinct of self-preservation it clutches at some rudiment of Socialism, and makes a diffident gesture in the direction of nationalisation--(of the railways, for instance).

But the capitalists of England can point with pride to the fact that they very soon pulled themselves together. I hope to show in the following chapter that by the time the war was in full swing they had made it their own, and had banished every trace of socialism, with the relics of sanity and truth, to the confines of the Labour press.[31]

But still the danger was for the moment realised, and the attempt was made, the desperate and unsuccessful attempt to pull and squeeze and bind the inst.i.tutions of capitalism into an organised system of political obligations. It failed because the very abuses and intemperances of our commercial system are a sign that the sphere of government has not expanded with the growing complications of the modern community. Nevertheless the attempt was made: but no corresponding effort is being made to extend the system of moral obligations in which we live.

For it is just as the sphere of morality is unduly restricted and fails to correspond to the needs of humanity, that, on the political plane, the unduly restricted sphere of government has never been extended to include all the interrelations of industrial citizenship. Capitalism is a survival of the penultimate stage of political development, as war is a survival of the penultimate stage of morality.

The attempts both spasmodic and continuous to extend the sphere of government, which now begin to affect nearly all serious legislation, must remain incomplete without an a.n.a.logous and indeed corollary expansion of the moral system which will involve the obsolescence of war.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 31: This seems to apply to all belligerent states. Certainly very little sanity finds its way into Germany except through the pages of _Vorwaerts_. It is therefore humiliating to be told that _Vorwaerts_ has a much larger circulation than any socialist paper in England.]

CHAPTER III

Hinc usura uorax auidumque in tempora fenus et concussa fides et MULTIS UTILE BELLUM.

Lucan, I, 181.

Individuals are constantly trying to decrease supply for their own advantage.--_Fabian Essays_, 1889, p. 17.

-- 1

Trade during the War

Trade during the war seems to have had a remarkably good time. In the first year of warfare I began to collect a few facts in support of what then seemed the paradoxical view that war was, in essence if not in origin, a very profitable capitalistic manoeuvre; a view deduced from the opinion I had formed _a priori_ of the nature of all modern warfare.[32] Instead of a few corroborating voices I found testimony abundant in every paper I picked up, besides the live evidence received in private letters and conversations. This pamphlet being rather philosophic than statistical, I have taken the easy course of printing a selection of these testimonies, crude and undigested, in an appendix--a cold storage of facts and figures that allows me to repeat with a quiet conscience that trade is booming. The greater the war, apparently, the greater the profits. In the words of the _Manchester Guardian_:--

The first full calendar year of war has been a period of unparalleled industrial activity and, generally speaking, prosperity in this country. Heavy losses and bad times have been encountered in a few important industries, but these are balanced by unprecedented profits made by a large variety of industries, whether directly or indirectly affected by the war.[33] ... But it would be a mistake to suppose that, while war manufactures prospered, all other

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: See, for instance, my article "A Footnote to the Balkan War," published in the _Asiatic Review_ for July 1, 1914. This opinion is there expressed in the following words which I still think substantially true, though one or two phrases are rhetorically exaggerated.

"England and the rest of Western Europe have outgrown by about three hundred years the time in the development of nations when fighting is natural and even necessary. England, of course, continues to contemplate war, and to be bluffed by the threat of war in the circ.u.mlocutions of diplomacy. But her national welfare no longer requires war; and, if she ever undertakes it, it will be at the bidding of merchants and usurers, who do not represent even the baser instincts of the specifically national spirit, but are wholly foreign and parasitic. On that occasion the _Daily Mail_ and the Foreign Office will no doubt a.s.sure the British people that the war in question involves the whole honour and welfare of the State; and the people will believe it. But it will not be true. For England is happily not, or not yet, a nation of shopkeepers; and it will be only the shopkeepers whose welfare is concerned."]

industry languished and decayed. To prove the contrary and show that only here and there were there heavy losses, we may quote some figures compiled by the _Economist_....

And so forth.[34]

To this I will add only two typical paragraphs as a text for my subsequent remarks, as I believe they suggest the general economic process which enriches the particular industries to which they refer.

The first is taken from _the Sunday Pictorial_, of all papers.[35]

Immense increases in the profits of two shipping companies are, as a result of the ceaseless rise in freights, disclosed in the reports of two Newcastle lines published yesterday. The high cost of freights is largely responsible for the dearness of food, coal, and other necessities of life. The gross profits of the Cairn Line of Steamships, Ltd., amounted to 292,108, and the net profits, after deducting the special war taxation and other items, were 162,689. A dividend of 10 per cent, with bonus of 4s. per share, is recommended. This makes a total of 30 per cent, free of income tax, as against 10 per cent last year, when the total profits amounted to 97,335. Less than half of this company's capital is paid up, the total authorised being 600,000; there are also debentures of about 150,000.

The next quotation is from the _New Statesman_:--[36]

Glasgow is exceedingly prosperous, and iron and steel manufacturers tell me that the next three or four years, peace or war, must mean a period of prosperity for them. Government orders now absorb so large a proportion of output that outside requirements are simply not being met. Owing to the scarcity of shipping this deficiency is not being filled by imports from America (the only other possible source of supply), so that unfilled orders are acc.u.mulating. A waggon manufacturer told me he had sufficient work in sight to keep him going for five years. It must be remembered that part of the cost of the war is being met temporarily by depreciation--railway tracks, rolling stock, locomotives, etc., _to mention only one industry_,[37] not being replaced as they wear out, or being maintained to the minimum degree necessary. This means that, although less obvious than the reconstruction of ruined parts of Belgium, France, Poland, and Eastern Prussia, repairs and replacements aggregating many millions sterling in cost will have to be carried out after the war in countries that have not been invaded. A peace boom in the iron and steel and shipbuilding trades appears certain.