Dulness.
To many the great bugbear of country life is its peace, which they call dulness. But with population on the ground, the amenities would come as a natural consequence. The aim of well-balanced social development is to have population evenly distributed, with no house out of sight of any other, with church, school, shops, and social centres, such as halls and libraries, within convenient distance. A food-producing population, working on farms and in gardens, needs the subsidiary crafts - blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, masons, joiners, even printers; for the country has dances, flower shows, and concerts as well as the town, even as things are. This distribution of population is still preserved in other countries, and was the rule in this till past the middle of the eighteenth century. In his ‘Tour,’ written in 1725, Daniel Defoe thus describes the country life of the time:- The land near Halifax was divided into Small Enclosures from two acres to six or seven each, seldom more. Every three or four Pieces of Land had an house belonging to them, . . . hardly an house standing out of speaking-distance from another . . . We could see, at every house a Tenter, and on almost every Tenter a piece of Cloth, or Kersie, or Shalloon. . . . At every considerable house was a manufactory. . . . Every clothier keeps one horse at least to carry his manufactures to the markets; and everyone generally keeps a cow or two or more for his Family. By this means the small Pieces of enclosed Land about each house are occupied, for they scarce sow corn enough to feed their poultry. The houses are full of lusty fellows, some at the die-vat, some at the looms, others dressing the cloths; the women and children carding and spinning; being all employed from the youngest to the oldest. . . . Not a Beggar to be seen, nor an idle person. Till long past that time the distribution of the population was 8o per cent. rural and 20 per cent. urban, whereas by the census of 1921 it was almost exactly the reverse, the percentages being: Urban, 79.3; rural, 20.7. These are the 1921 figures, and that is seven years ago. The diffusion of electricity has already on the continent set up a tendency in the opposite direction. In France, Germany, and especially in Switzerland, electricity for power, light, and heat is everywhere on tap. The de-urbanisation of industry began before the war even in this country, high rents and rates in the large centres helping, while heavy gas and electricity bills for lights burned all day in darksome smoke-bound days were a contributory element. Coal and steam gathered men together. Electricity tends to correct this congestion. The factory in the country, with a receiving office in town connected by telephone, is the natural order, now that distance has been annihilated by improvements in the means of communication and transport. There is now no reason for large centres, and a multitude of arguments against them. The Individual. So much in broad social-industrial outline; but what of ourselves and our way of life as individuals. I have answered that so far already in saying that there is too much of a hungry, questing tendency to migrate and emigrate. I am very far from disapproving of Scotsmen seeing the world. But Sandy does not come back. If he does it is on a visit, not as a rule to settle. In 1905 I printed a volume of poems for an Aberdeenshire man who had made money as a farmer in New Zealand, and had been twice mayor of his town. The poems breathed the most passionate love of Scotland; but this man who had prospered, and who could easily have come home often, was re-visiting his ‘Caledon, the dearly loved,’ as he called it, after an absence of over forty years. He and his old wife were both very Scots as to accent, looks, and mental make-up - hard nuts both of them. The man who is willing to stay away from a land he professes passionately to love and long for would surely have some difficulty in proving that he is not a humbug. Antisyzygy. Blarney is supposed to be a specially Irish foible; but the Scot has it even more highly developed, and in a solemn form. Stevenson, one of the most lovable of men and of writers, had been specially racketty as a student, but latterly preached in verse and prose. George MacDonald’s tendency to sermonise in his stories was natural enough in an ex-Congregational minister but other parsons, not Scotsmen, avoid it in their non-theological writing. Harry Lauder is not only very much at home on the Rotarian platform, but preaches even in his patter, as Funny Frame did before him. Frame was a more versatile and ingenious comedian than Lauder; but caution in money matters he carried to the extent of dishonour, as I have personally good cause to remember. I am far from objecting to preaching so long as it is not too flatulently platitudinarian, as with a certain Scots type it rather tends to be. I shall not labour the point, as it is admitted. Mr. C. M. Grieve, one of the protagonists of the Scotish Renaissance movement, excuses it on the ground that the Scots character is specially prone to what has been called antisyzygy, a fizzing word coined by Professor Gregory Smith to indicate the combination in one personality of quite opposite qualities - as saintliness and vice, kindness and cruelty, a tendency to moralise combined with a tendency to play the gay dog. There is room for a treatise on this point alone. Suffice it to say that combinations of zig-zag contradictions in one individual are common to all nationalities. Lord Melbourne, Victoria’s first Premier, a great student of theology, but using ‘Damns’ even in her presence; the French and the Irish, fervent patriots, but so ready to deal with the enemy that during the Great War French country folk were constantly being shot for giving away secrets, while it was said by an Irishman that wherever two of his countrymen plotted, one of them was sure to be a traitor; Rasputin, the Holy Devil; David, the Psalmist, putting Bathsheba’s husband in the forefront of the battle; Abraham passing off Sarah as his sister; and Jacob starting the double shuffle from the hour of his birth, are examples from nations widely separated in space and time. The combination of pietism and materialism is not to be excused by a word. Humbug and hypocrisy are in no way redeemed by calling them antisyzygy. In any case, Scots blarney is responsible for an abundant lack of social confidence and the enterprise and fair dealing based upon such confidence. I once took part in the discussion following a largely-attended and notable lecture. A typical Scots business man hurried after me at the close of the meeting to ask what I thought of the lecture. In some surprise, I said: ‘You have just heard what I thought of the lecture.’ ‘Ay, ay,’ was the answer; ‘but I mean your private opinion?’ As if having two opposite opinions were a matter of course. Slowness. The lack of confidence born of double dealing is deepened by the dilatoriness of parts remote from the centre of things. Locally we are not so very bad in this respect; yet a wall has just been rebuilt after having lain for years as it fell, leaving one side of the parish church enclosure open. In 1918 a balance sheet was published in connection with a fund to build a spire on the parish church. There were £130 in the fund even then. The spire has not materialised yet. £1300 were raised for an ex-service men’s institute, and there is an offer, still standing, of an additional £330 from the ex-service men’s headquarters. But the building lingers. Some years ago, I understand, a bazaar was held to raise money for a playing-field for the children. A sum of £2oo was the result, and it is the only result so far. No one, it appears, knows where the money is. Successful sports were held in the Den, and a concert took place which was largely attended - both under the auspices of an ex-service men’s organization. The proceeds have been lost sight of. At the present moment there are some thirteen masons in Turriff, and only bits of jobbing work for them to do. An additional housing scheme has been under contemplation for months, and would provide work for these men as for the building trades generally. But the Council was so badly used by the building fraternity over its last scheme that dilatoriness has begot dilatoriness, and trade suffers in consequence. So far as the Council is concerned, so soon as it is known that we wish to secure a particular site, up goes the price. We have powers of compulsory purchase; but we hesitate to enforce them, and the housing shortage, which is being so handsomely overtaken elsewhere, becomes worse as time passes with so little done. In one recent year England spent £22,000,000 on subsidised houses. Scotland, with heavier arrears, spent £1,500,000 that year. Any moderately prosperous community which will build houses at present will attract population by the mere provision of accommodation for it. At every fresh letting of municipal houses we have as many applicants left over as we have been able to serve; and they are usually persons whom it would be altogether desirable to have as tenants and citizens. In Turriff we have built houses, made roads, and this year opened an auxiliary water supply. In spite of all this expenditure, present and prospective, the local rates are substantially down. The valuation of the town has been increased, and as working expenses have not been raised in proportion, the rate per £ has fallen with the greater number of £'s to be rated upon. We are only at the beginning of municipal housing. Scotland has been, and is, kept back in population, wealth, and civilization by the way in which she has hung back in the matter of housing, English municipalities were building houses as far back as 1857, at low rates of interest, but without any subsidy. The pre-war demand of the Social-Democratic Federation was for houses to be let ‘at rents sufficient to cover cost of construction and maintenance only.’ This Collectivist demand was so little heeded, when all is said, that a succession of Acts became necessary - the Addison, Chamberlain, and Wheatley Acts - under which roughly a third of the rent of each house has to paid by the general public, so that State-aided housing now takes rank alongside State and rate aided schools, roads, libraries, picture-galleries, baths, wash-houses, crèches, scientific research, water-supply, lectures, organ recitals, art galleries, museums, fire brigade, police, army, navy, coastguards, and all the other Socialistic and Communistic services - Socialistic where they are paid for, Communistic where they are given free and put upon the rates. So that when teachers shudder at the mention of Communism they forget that they are themselves the products and the employees of a communistic institution, the couple who have no children paying for the education of the parents who have ten. This of course is entirely right. Children do not belong to their parents. They belong to the nation. They give the nation the benefit of their education, and will themselves be the nation long after their parents are dead or have otherwise ceased to be responsible for them. Scotland lags behind in the provision of municipal houses, and loses population to England and the Colonies because of the lack of trade and prosperity which would be immensely stimulated by expenditure on building. This apart altogether from the civilization, health, and happiness to be furthered by transferring the people from slums and mean streets to sunny garden cities, such as the Hilton estate outside of Aberdeen, where over 4000 working folk are accommodated in roomy houses, electrically lit, with gardens back and front. One reason why municipal housing has hung fire in Scotland is the low housing standard which has always prevailed. To people who have been accustomed to pay twelve, ten, eight, or even as low as three or four pounds for a house, the lowest rent sanctioned by the Ministry of Health seems excessive. Many heads of families insist on living in mean houses, and will rather pay doctor’s bills than pay rent for a better house. In England weekly rents of 15s. for a working class house are quite common in the provinces, and £1 in London. This would be a fifth to a third of the tenant’s income. Whereas the Scots idea is a rental of a 15th to a 2oth of the income. In Iceland, owing to the high price of building materials, which have to be imported, the urban tenant has to pay one-half of his income in rent. If he is able to live on the other half, why not? A house is the place in which a family lives, moves, and has its being. Our ancestors lived in darksome, smoky abodes, and were accustomed to say that they liked better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep, meaning that they preferred out of doors. The same idea must have been in the mind of a mother I once heard say as I passed by, ‘Jist gie them a piece an’ bung them oot!’ She was referring to her children, I take it, and was reflecting the old-fashioned idea that a house is a lair in which to eat and sleep, closely packed. The newer conception of a house is a home, for the enjoyment of reading, social intercourse, and music, provided with books, pictures, a musical instrument or two, and with room enough to afford separation from the discomfort and distraction of cooking, washing, and baking, and give seclusion and quiet to those who wish it. ‘Remote, Unfriended, Melancholy, Slow.’ We are remote; we may be unfriended; but we need not be either melancholy or slow. One of the greatest genial hustlers I know is a local man. He is open-handed, fair-dealing, a good employer, and has in his time given some service to the public, as his father gave much before him. And father, son, and now grandson have their reward in what is probably the largest business of the kind north of Aberdeen. There is no reason except one why from this little town travellers should go over a large part of the county, booking orders in the neighbourhood of larger towns and possessing a monopoly of one important line of supplies. No reason, I say, except one, and that is business aptitude, and especially despatch and diligence. But one sees men gossip by the hour. I have seen three men with their hands at one windlass raising a bucket out of a hole. I have passed men supposed to be working who morning, mid-day, and afternoon were gossiping and malingering, with a change of abettor each time. If their employer could not afford it they were robbing him. If he could afford it, then he must have been robbing those for whom the work was being done. The person always a failure at home who succeeds abroad has almost to a certainty changed his ways, and he might have done that without going away. I want to see the economic development go forward; for without population there are amenities of life that cannot be secured. Man is, or should be, an intelligent animal, and bovine mooning is unworthy of the species. But quite often a remark addressed to people in the country is met with ‘?’ or ‘What was that ye said?’ Sir Walter Scott remarked of Scots country folk that the commonest response to a remark or question was the inquiry ‘What’s yer wull?’ I was brought up in a different school. In the newspaper office a question not promptly answered was met with sardonic shouts of ‘Wake up!’ or ‘Take the wax out of your ears!’ A local variant of ‘What’s yer wull?’ is ‘What way?’ Both are in form and substance ungainly interrogations which mean, not that the questioner hasn’t heard, but that he hasn’t understood. Politeness, as George Eliot said, is an air-cushion which eases the jolts of social intercourse; but when I hear a person say ‘Eyh?’ I recall a scene I witnessed from a barrack gate once in Aberdeen. The adjutant of a militia corps addressed a question to one of the men on parade who must have been what is called a raw recruit, for he answered ‘Eyh?’ with a blank and not respectful look. They have summary ways and despotic powers in the army, and at some distance off we could hear the resounding slap in the face which rewarded this supercilious monosyllable. PART THREE THE FINAL PART DUE NEXT MONTH. PART TWO
The Real Dilemma of Collectivism. Social students, such as Dr. Shadwell, write and speak of the ‘dilemma’ in which Socialists are placed by the failure of Sovietism in Russia. They claim, fairly enough, that Communism is simply Socialism in a hurry, and they say that the refusal of the Russian peasants to fall in with the spirit of the revolution is typical of a personal recalcitrancy that might well shipwreck Collectivist attempts elsewhere. This is so far the most formidable objection that can be urged against Socialism. The objection is that we have not enough public spirit to make full-blown Socialism as satisfactory in its results as even Individualism, defective as we know the present system to be. The Russian Disappointment. I have been and still am a defender of the Russian revolution. It was inevitable, and has carried in its train many blessings, among them, as one of the best, the holy war upon illiteracy. One has attributed the failure to reach pre-war productivity to the dislocation and destruction caused by the Great War, the repeated invasions since then, and to the famine caused by the deadly drought of 1921. But all these events are of the receding past. The Russian authorities themselves admit that the recovery is not sufficiently rapid, and in the Soviet Review, which I got regularly till it was discontinued on the expulsion, it was at least once stated that there was a personal demoralization. I am not paying any attention to the lurid tales of reactionaries. I am going by admitted failures reported by the agencies of the Soviet Government. The country in Europe that could most readily be self-supporting is Russia. With her vast territories, her range of climate and variety of products, her natural wealth in timber, oil, furs, great corn lands, and even sub-tropical produce such as tea, Russia ought to have recovered from all her troubles quicker than any other European nation. The shortage of machinery and rolling stock on the railways should long since have been overcome, given the willingness of good citizenship and even the relative efficiency of Tsarist Russia. Is the average worker not good enough for Collectivism? Will he not work for himself as hard or as carefully as he does for an employer? Does he need the fear of dismissal to keep him up to the full height of his efficiency? Is he incapable of realising in practice that as a public servant he is working for himself? If industry were fully socialised would he wipe out the benefits secured from consolidation, efficiency, and the stoppage of waste by simply becoming a slacker? Existing Collectivism Hardly a Fair Test. The answer to these fears is so far to hand. The Socialism of the State and the municipality, one is glad to say, has been overwhelmingly successful on the whole. But outside of Russia this Socialism is still exceptional in the industrial life of the nation. The prevailing atmosphere is still that of Individualism. The State or Municipal employee knows that if he does not attain a certain standard of diligence and efficiency he will be dismissed almost as readily as by a private employer. The present Postmaster-General is, of course, a Tory, and local postmasters are doubtless not all Socialists. The discipline represented in the system of signing on and off duty, the timing of postmen upon rounds, the keeping of an individual employee’s record, with black marks against him for faults, represent forms of discipline which might conceivably be considerably slackened under Socialist auspices, where the employee would know that he had friends all up through the official hierarchy, and where he would know that he had to be maintained in some way no matter how he behaved? The Co-operative Movement. Something of an approach to Socialist conditions is shown in the co-operative movement. It has been called ‘a State within the State.’ Do we find co-operative employees ideally loyal? Are they always as civil and efficient as the servants of private enterprise? Can it honestly be said of the Co-operative Movement as a whole that it serves the public cheaper and better than the private shops? Co-operative prices ought to be lower than shop prices; but they are not. They are often so much higher that, taking them all over and deducting the dividend, it is extremely doubtful, to say the least, whether the store does not take more from the public for the service it renders than does the private shopkeeper. The dividend should stand for the shopkeeper’s profit, but it really seems to be rather a mere rebate, rendered possible only by the higher prices charged. Many housewives regard the store as a means of compulsory saving, believing that they hand over week by week in higher prices what they receive at the end of the half-year in dividend. This means, to put it bluntly, that the Co-operative movement is spoiled of its full effect by inefficiency and probably a certain amount of corruption. There are, after all, no substitutes for integrity and brains. An Object Lesson. I once had, during 4½ years, the manager-editorship of a co-operative newspaper and job printing office. From my young manhood I have had to do with the giving out of work to men and women, and never had any difficulty in ‘managing’ them so long as they were accountable only to myself. But in this concern the employees declared that it had never paid a dividend, and they would ‘take ___ good care it never did.’ This would not have distressed the shareholders, working folk as they were; but they did not want the enterprise to fail. One of the ways in which the payment of a dividend was prevented was by the regular working of overtime, at, of course, overtime rates, and with lessened efficiency during the ordinary time. One overseer complained after I had been there some time that ‘the job wasn’t worth so much,’ meaning that the overtime had been cut down and more labour employed. When I took over there was also bad time-keeping in the mornings. By being early myself, and often in the work-rooms at starting-time, the latecomers were shamed into punctuality without a word spoken. You passed two men talking in the yard, and not only did they continue their talk, but when you returned five minutes later, the talk was still going on and work was at a standstill, the workplace being indoors. ‘Affect a virtue if you have it not,’ you quoted. They separated at that; but the reproof was resented; for were we not a Socialist concern, and did not Socialists condemn slave-driving? They made no allowance for handicaps, one of these being that our newspapers had hardly any really profitable advertisements, and another that we worked a forty-eight hours’ week and had few apprentices, while we had to compete for jobwork with rivals who worked a longer week, avoided overtime, and employed many apprentices We paid, besides, a wage higher than the local standard. Up to that point one’s experience of estimating the time required for a job was that it could usually be done well within the time given, That is entirely as it should be. In fact it is the only line of ultimate solvency. In that establishment, however, the time taken, with machine composition (supposed to be an economy), always substantially exceeded the time-price allowed for hand composition. Occasional dismissals - sometimes carried out with storm and stress - served to tighten the screws a little, though some of these dismissals meant that I had to take on the duties of the discharged one as an extra. As showing the spirit of that staff, one operator before my time had been known to tear up an article of which he disapproved, saying he would not set ‘that stuff.’ And the easy-going editor of that time evidently let him off with it! That concern, launched under favourable auspices, has long since been wound up, with a loss to the shareholders, and the loss, also, of a thousand pounds raised by a bazaar. This was in a district which returns Socialist members to Parliament in a straight fight with both the old schools of politicians. The two privately owned newspapers in that district are still going, for anything I know, although the majority of the citizens vote Labour. This tells its own tale. It is worth pointing out that, although the shares in this co-operative society were held by working folk, no member of the staff except myself held any shares. Too much Democracy. The cause of the industrial-commercial failure of this paper was too much democracy and interference with the management. Even a stupid office-boy could not be dismissed for disobedience without a crisis over it. I resigned some time before the end came to a system that was obviously unworkable. Comparing notes with the managers of similar establishments - some extinct and some still going - I have found general agreement that the chief bugbear to success is indiscipline, the interference of the directorate between manager and men, and the excessive amenableness of directors to outside protest and dictation. Collectivism can and does abolish a hundred and one wastes - in duplication, advertising, canvassing, and overlapping. Its credit is the best. It can buy to the highest advantage. It can command the best organising skill. But, given a rank-and-file community of comparative slackers, all these advantages might easily he cancelled out. Give working men a privilege, and how often do we not see it abused? Allow them to smoke at work, or to have afternoon tea, and see how much time will he spent over a concession meant to be for their reasonable use and enjoyment. Stop clocking on, and see how men will come dawdling in, and how they will stand about the works entrance till minutes past the starting-time even if they are doing nothing and not even talking. Certain it is that Russia should have been by now an object lesson to which we ought to have been able to point with pride and triumph. Instead of that we are constantly explaining and making excuses for her failure to produce more than 6o per cent. of the Tsarist output, and this with the idlers and wasters supposed to be eliminated, and organization at last introduced. Peace Patriotism Required. I am deeply sorry that the first Socialist Republic should have made so poor a showing, and should have had to fall back upon partial Capitalism as a ‘New’ Economic Policy. I can but wish that the lesson may be taken to heart by Socialists everywhere. It must be realised that Collectivism is essentially a constructive policy, and that the same ardour is required for the detail work of the transfer from Capitalism to Collectivism that is shown, in the name of patriotism, when a war is being waged. When working men say they cannot afford to risk coming out into the open as Labour representatives, or that they cannot afford the time, the answer is: Very well, we cannot win the greatest struggle of all. King Harry on Crispin Crispian’s day sought to hearten his troops by telling them they could ‘gentle’ their condition by fighting and prevailing against the French. What will you do to ‘gentle’ your condition? Will you read? Will you learn to speak and write at least one language correctly or even with some grace, that language being the speech of the country in which you were born? The gentle and strong shall bear rule, ought to bear rule. They have read, they have attended and assimilated cultural lectures, they have undergone the discipline of learning, they have qualified themselves to speak and discuss by reading and writing. The workman may do all these things. He has abundance of time for reading and worthy discussion. ‘The true university,’ said Thomas Carlyle, ‘is a library of books.’ The humblest has access to such a library, and consequently may have a university training of the best, such a training as Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, and Shaw had - infinitely better in fact than the first three of these had. The will is all. Mind Your Own Business. Or, ARE YOU A ROBOT? 'And stab my spirit broad awake!' R. L. STEVENSON: The Celestial Surgeon. 'Just the same fine sort of fellows they were, agreeably dull-witted, as sent hundreds of thousands of Englishmen to cruel and useless deaths in France.' - H. G. WELLS. PART ONE What is your business? All business is your business. You may produce only one thing; but you buy many things. Food, clothing, houseroom, fuel, light, streets and roads, the means of locomotion and transport - they are all your business. That you should work hard at one thing by which you make a livelihood, and then allow yourself to be robbed at every turn, not so much by any glaring individual turpitude as by the faults and costs of chaotic and wasteful methods of production and supply, is a fool’s game. Yet that is the position of the man who myopically gives his attention to making money, and takes no heed of how his life is wasted in earning the wherewithal merely to pay his way, so that the end comes to most of us before we have given ourselves a chance to live.
The Main Chance. If you are a man who mind ‘your own business’ according to current standards, you will probably scoff more or less at politicians of all schools, and you will give your thoughts to what you consider ‘the main chance.’ You will plume yourself upon the fact that you are not ‘deceived’ by either Stanley Baldwin, or Lloyd George, or Ramsay MacDonald; and as regards local politics, you will have an easy contempt for the members of your town council, county council, and education authority. What will ‘They’ Do? If you are a working man you will perhaps belong to your trade union because it is sometimes easier to belong to a union than not, and you are the kind of man who takes the line of least resistance. To be sure, you may be shrewd enough to see that it is the best organised callings that have the best wages (such as the close corporations of lawyers and doctors, where the non-unionist is not allowed); and in order to preserve the position won, you may realise the necessity of keeping up your union membership. But if you are an average man you will not be a trade union official. And if you are not, the chances are you will refer to the executive of your union as ‘they,’ as if the men you have elected had become a class apart, whom you expected to get things done for you without any co-operation or assistance on your part. You do not even regard them as particularly competent, while, as regards motives, you view them as just men like yourself, studying the main chance, and accepting official position for the sake of the salary, which is the one consideration that would tempt you to accept it. You will not for a moment believe that they are actuated by any large or disinterested desire to serve their fellow men in general and the members of their craft in particular. I have myself been a trade union branch secretary for a salary that was neither here nor there, and I know that the few pounds a-year was the least thing that appealed to me in doing work for which the salary was a ridiculously inadequate return. Even you know in your mind of minds that a trade union secretary who still continues to work at his trade is a more or less marked man, and that that of itself would be the chief reason why you would not have taken the job even in the unlikely event of its having been offered you. I say ‘the unlikely event,’ because I assume that you would not be particularly forward in matters affecting the general wellbeing. Public Work, Valuable but Unvalued. As regards politicians and members of local boards, you know that these are needed and wanted; that the community and the nation have to be run and that men are needed to do it. But as a reason for not being forward in politics, you contrive to persuade yourself that the men who take office do so because they like public work. And as you don’t; you assume the account is squared when you give them your vote and turn to your private amusements or money-making. You have no gratitude to the men who serve you in unsalaried office, and the reason must be that you set store by the ‘honour’ you confer upon them, and persuade yourself that they do the same. It is an honour - a moral honour. Whoever gives the public his time, and therefore his money, for nothing acquires the double honour of conferring a disinterested service and taking part in work which, if well done, is more important than any kind of work for self, since the man who works for the public is working disinterestedly for the many, while the man who works for himself and his family is working self-regardingly. To borrow a simile from trade, the former is a disinterested wholesaler, the latter an interested retailer. The public business is your business. You are one of the public. You have no moral right to expect service for nothing if you are not prepared to render such service yourself. You may not have the ability; but are you sure you have the will? The one so often depends on the other. Do not lay the consolatory unction to your soul that the public man finds public business pay him. There are men with good businesses who take part in public work; but their business, believe me, always suffers. If they retain their clientèle it will be in spite of their public work. The Cost of Public Spirit. Lord Asquith, who had a splendid practice at the bar before he took up politics, has just had to have a pension made up for him by his admirers. But he gave the old folk a pension as a matter of right from the State. Richard Cobden failed in business, and John Bright’s firm is reputed to have been more than once in difficulties. But Bright and Cobden did more between them to reduce the cost of living than all the rest of the nation together. Mr. Stanley Baldwin said he was living on his capital; and while I think he is a slack and dear servant at £5000 a-year, I recognise that the many years he has given to public work may have something to do with the fact that his business does not pay. Gladstone married the heiress of an encumbered property, and for all his financial ability, the estate continued to be encumbered; for his financial ability was displayed in the public service and not in the concerns of the Hawarden estate. Earl Balfour inherited a fortune: he never would have made it. Disraeli married money made by obscure people who neither wrote books nor governed a State, as he did. When William Pitt could not pay his coachbuilder’s account he ordered a new carriage. Burke was a poor man all his life. Sheridan was both bankrupt and had a fire - Drury Lane Theatre no less. When, on seeking to draw near the burning building, he was pushed back by a soldier, he said, ‘You might let a man warm himself at his own fire!’ Charles Stewart Parnell, as leader of the Irish Nationalists, was a party to the promulgation of the Plan of Campaign, which included a No-Rent Manifesto, although he was a landlord. Asked by a reporter how the Plan was going, he answered that he did not know how it was going generally, but that his own tenants had, to a man, refused to pay their rents. So that if you think men go into politics for money, there would seem to be plenty of reason why you should alter your opinion and consider whether there may not be motives of social service and public-spiritedness which are none the less real because they never exactly inspired you. Everybody can and ought to help. In the palmy days of Greece the person who took no part in public affairs was called idiotees, original of our word ‘idiot.’ With the inevitable increase of civic work, the number of public representatives must be immensely increased, and even now the quality is not even reasonably good. Social Progress Hangs Fire. I dwell on this matter of public spirit because it is the highest virtue and the rarest. Social adjustment in the interests of the general community everywhere hangs fire because the average man is an Individualist in practice, even when he has declared for the principles of the Labour Party. He is what he calls a rank-and-file member. It is easy to secure Parliamentary candidates, because there is both a salary and a recognised social status. The work of local government, however, goes a-begging, because it takes much time, has no pecuniary rewards, and carries no particular social status with it. Seats in the local bodies are largely left to shopkeepers and members of the building trades, whose motives tend to be reactionary rather than progressive. There are now many centres which are represented in Parliament by Labour members returned with substantial majorities; but in the same constituencies it is rare to find, as might reasonably be expected, that Labour has a majority on the local bodies. Even Glasgow, which in imperial politics votes overwhelmingly Labour, does not return a Labour majority to the City Council. The reason is that men can be induced to take imperial politics seriously and equip themselves for public work, because Parliamentary membership is regarded as a career, while the at least equally important business of local government offers no corresponding temptation. The Great Shoal. This lack of good citizenship is the shoal upon which the Collectivist movement tends to be stranded. I write to claim that the public business is every man’s business, and that there can be no efficient social organization unless and until we can inspire the average man with the idea that local civic business is worthy of the best attention of the best minds among us. One is glad to think that Lord Rosebery did not disdain to be the first chairman of the London County Council, and that John Burns, Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw have all taken part in local government. We have to get out of our heads the idea that Collectivist representation must needs be a professional career, followed only by men who make a whole-time job of it. Parliament may pass any amount of legislation granting optional powers to local authorities; but if these remain constituted as at present that legislation will not be applied. We see this particularly in regard to housing. England spent last year on subsidised house-building some 22½ millions, whereas Scotland, whose building arrears were much heavier, spent only 1½ millions. I am not in favour of subsidies; but if subsidies are going, communities are not doing themselves justice if they do not spend their quota, since they will have to find the money in taxation all the same. The fault of the Dutch was in giving too little and asking too much, but Scotland’s lethargy places her in fault in the opposite way. Her share of imperial taxation is roughly an eighth; but for housing she took about a fifteenth, and this is typical of the proportion of public money she secures for local purposes. Asleep. The elections are once again at hand, and nothing is so necessary as to point out that municipally Scotland is asleep. She sends her very full proportion of Labour legislators to Westminster. Indeed there is such a scarcity of good municipal candidates that it looks as if she had made too many M.P.s and drained off too much talent. England has also her leeway to make up; but it is nothing like so big as that of Scotland. Municipally Scotland is relatively stagnant. There is, for one thing, nothing in the north here resembling the English Municipal Sunday. Since ever I can remember, moreover, housing has always been a fairly live issue in English municipal politics; but it is only since the war that Scotland has taken any interest in housing, and it is very much of a minus quantity still. It is disgraceful to find numbers of well-to-do people here who do not even now understand anything about the subsidies. People who buy from a speculative builder a house on which £1oo of subsidy has been paid are greatly astonished when they are told that the general community has helped to pay part of the purchase price of their house. PART TWO NEXT MONTH
Marx and Faith.
But the essential difference between Karl Marx and all prophets and the orthodox economists as well, is that he was a Social-Democrat first, and an economist only as a means of making an end of capitalism. The orthodox economists might deprecate the excessive share taken by capital; but they were not concerned with anything beyond the ‘moralisation’ less or more of a relationship which Marx held to be fundamentally immoral and which could be moralised only by extinction. Marx was so much of a moralist that, unlike the commercial economists, he believed the evil thing could be ended. The commercial economist, moreover, is usually a man of the study; but Marx was a man of action as well. Hunted out of Germany, hunted out of France, resident for a time in Brussels, but, returning to Germany and expelled once more, finally making London his home; dominating the strongest and inspiring some of the best men with whom he came into contact; leader and teacher of the International; watching events and in touch with revolutionists everywhere; opportunist man of affairs; London correspondent of the New York Tribune (at a guinea a week!); friend of trades unionists and of co-operators, Marx was an insurgent politician working for remote but inevitable ends. Despite the careful analyses in the first volume of the ‘Capital’ – analyses which the historical student will best appreciate as marvels of generalization – Marx, with all his deductiveness, was full of preconceived ideas passionately held and promulgated. He had faith that a system motived on reaping without sowing, to which Adam Smith made placid reference, must end. The expropriators would themselves be expropriated. He had faith that the progress made in the class stuggles of the past would result in the conquest of the means of life by the proletariate and the ending of classes and class struggles alike. The historical process which had seen the end of chattel slavery and of serfdom, why should it not witness the end of wage servitude, under which the proletarian must ‘beg a brother of the earth,’ to give him the means of living upon it? Marx a Politician. Unlike some of his doctrinaire followers today, he did not wait for the great change to work itself out, looking for ‘the inevitable to function inevitably.’ He believed that social order could not be secured without social organization by the individual units who desired and required it. His opportunism was shown by the way in which, in ‘Value, Price and Profit,’ he downed Weston for attacking trades unionism by maintaining that the policy of strikes was, what we know it to be, a see-saw of prices and wages, wages and prices, a chasing by the dog of its own tail. He may have realised that, even so, trades unionism could not, under capitalism, give up its powers to resist and to attack, just as today we cannot give up the idea of the right to strike even if strikes fail oftener than they succeed, and hit the striker and his dependents first and most heavily. The trade union can standardise conditions and preserve a minimum. In periods of expansion it may advance the standard, and resist retrogression in times of slump. Finally, and most hopeful of all, the trade union is a political force even more potent than the employers’ federation, since it controls more votes. Marx gave the revolt against exploitation a political turn. He said ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have a whole world to win and nothing to lose but your chains.’ He left no definite scheme whereby the expropriators were to be expropriated, and his early followers in all lands looked to barricades and a cataclysmic revolution. It may come to that as a result of the lack of class-consciousness and of political aptitude on the part of the proletariate. The present attempt to make the House of Lords supreme in Britain is the counterpart of Fascism in Italy and dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Turkey etc. If the gradual socialization of industry and commerce are to be frustrated by the janissaries of the established order, it is possible that there might be fighting in Britain. A few swashbucklers like Galloper Smith and Birkenhead might easily precipitate civil war. But it should not be, it need not be, and we hope it will not be. Russia had proved, what never was in doubt, that a change of government is one thing and a change of social structure is something very different and a much more prolonged process. Mrs Kingsley rejects Mr Ramsay MacDonald’s theory of gradualism, as based on the slow course of organic transformation. We need not, indeed, make love to gradualism. Quite the reverse. Let us, if anything, make love to speed. But even speed has its laws, and furious driving is apt to end in a smash. In the commandeering of socially-created wealth for public purposes, Britain, with its hundreds of millions of taxation extracted from the rich for education, water-supply, streets and roads, poor relief, unemployment and maternity benefit, art galleries and museums, public libraries, public health, street-lighting, traffic control, and research, is more communistic than Russia is after ten years of Maximalist government. So that gradualism has it as against ‘Mutations’ so far. Miracles. Mrs Kingsley, however, believes in miracles, as we have seen, and she would fain shift the onus probandi to those who question the occurrence of miracles. She says it is an ‘example of the loose and unscientific statements so often made by rationalists’ that ‘science on its own data cannot explain miracles, but it does not refute them.’ But the onus of proof rests with those who assert that miracles have happened. Science does not need to refute what it does not believe. The proofs of the universal reign of unbroken law form a categorical refutation of miracles. A miracle requires an abrogation of natural law, and Mrs Kingsley, who pins her faith in a general way to the transcendentalism of Emerson, would do well to recall Emerson’s dictum that ‘Nothing is that errs from law.’ Low Materialism. I seem to be emphasising my points of difference with Mrs Kingsley more than my points of agreement; but I hope all my denials have really an affirmative upshot. I should not write of her pamphlet if I did not find it, as I have said, arrestive and tending to make us review the grounds of our beliefs. As a Socialist and a public administrator I am at present busy with schemes of housing and of road-making byt direct labour because in a small community there is little else that one can do that is anything like so important. These schemes are all of the very essence of gradualism, and when a critic comes along and tells us in effect that all this is neither here nor there, and that the Social Revolution is to be carried by a Mutation, one is naturally pulled up sharp and nettled into meeting views that may very well be held by thousands besides this lady. Her pamphlet abounds in the signs of wide reading and she can state her extraordinary case very pointedly. The Two Materialisms. Philosophical materialism we accept. The vulgar materialism of ‘wealth, material comfort, and sensuous pleasure’ we reject. That is to say, philosophical materialists mostly reject it. And be it said, also, a great many spiritists, including most conventional Christians, are very much fonder of the fleshpots than are the philosophical materialists. No one could be less of a vulgar materialist than was Heinrich Karl Marx, born to middle-class comfort, but choosing the rugged service of the Social Revolution; grinding microscopic lenses and writing to the press for a living; not unfamiliar with the pawnbroker’s shop, and losing several of his children by death; consecrating his great powers to the service of an event in any case remote from his time – surely none was ever less of a materialist in the vulgar sense. He is but one in a noble company, living and dead, who have seen man’s life conditioned by circumstances over which man himself had potentially real control, with neither gods above nor devils below to prevent his being master of his fate collectively. The one condition was that he should learn the laws of social life, should realise and perform its civic duties, should above all things believe that the strong shall bear rule, and that the great mass of the exploited were in their numbers and the justice of their cause immensely the strongest and socially most important of all. Not Enough. Sir Thomas Harrison, the amiable old-time author of ‘Oceana’ believed that ‘The highest earthly felicity that people can ask or God can give is an equal and well-ordered commonwealth.’ But to Mrs Kingsley this does not seem enough. ‘No Communist’ she says, ‘can think that by merely getting enough food and clothes and better houses the workers are going to be happy and virtuous; look at the rich!’ But why ‘merely’? Could such a good change come without being accomplished by other good changes? The appeal does not hold. The rich do not work and can have none of the satisfactions discipline, and self-respect of the worker. Those who have no work have no leisure. Robert Burns was a good judge, and he saw the rich as those who ‘By evendown want o’ wark are curst.’ Patmore sang ‘Who pleasure follows pleasure slays.’ And Matthew Arnold saw the idle rich of decadent Rome sated and disgusted with the hell of a life in which there was nothing to enjoy because there was nothing to do. Look at the rich indeed! With their cars and their tennis racquets, their golf clubs and their jazz, their night clubs and revues and bawdy plays, their Blue Train and their attempts to fly from themselves and the boredom of their empty lives, they are indeed a warning rather than an example. Mrs Kingsley apparently seeks to make out that even lawful pleasure, comfort, and the highest mundane endeavour are not enough. She cites the longing of Morris’s wayfarers for the Earthly Paradise, the Acre of the Undying, and their ‘half-shame at having undertaken the quest and their regret that it has been all in vain.’ The poet’s excuse for their quest is that they ‘Had need of Life, to right the blindness and the wrong.’ But the blindness and the wrong are not to be righted by quitting the field. That was written before Morris had fully learned the great secret of the happy life, which is to be found in service and the immortality of fellowship as pictured by him in the ‘Dream of John Bull’ And the deeds that you do upon the earth, it is for fellowship sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you a part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane. The Craving for Unending. When he wrote of the old-time traditional quest of ‘a land where death is not’ he was still ‘the idle singer of an empty day,’ content that other people and not he should bear a hand with the slaying of the social monsters. The hatefulness of death as a mere deprivation of life and all its legitimate satisfactions was the most outstanding feature in Morris’s reflective life. The intensest pleasure made him in the last resort, ‘only the more mindful that the sweet days die.’ All this meant that he enjoyed life so much that death would be the greatest imaginable evil. Very evidently it did not mean that he had any hope of a reincarnation. Perhaps, also, Morris had an idea that he would not live long enough to be willing to take the final rest. He was but sixty-two when he was cut off in the full tide of his happy craftsmanship, with the latest of his great experiments, the Kelmscott Press, still in its infancy. In private he dwelt sometimes on the shortness of life and the possibility of lengthening it: but, unlike Shaw, whose thoughts tend the same way, he neither husbanded his great strength nor denied himself ‘pig,’ latakia, nor many cups of tea. Even so, he lasted longer than his father. We mostly do. Every generation extends the span of life by living less unhygenically. The remedy for the craving for unending life lies, not alone in the great extension of the life-span, but, above all, in the recognition of the quite plain fact that life is not to be reckoned in terms of the individual. The philosophy of Socialism leads in its ultimate interpretation to the frank recognition that man at his best is only a unit in the social scheme, a link in the endless chain of eternal life, not a complete being with a godlike claim to eternal life himself. In times of national stress this unitary character of man is recognised. Man, the lower animals, even ants, give their lives automatically, under stress of strong social feeling, for the good of the nation, herd, or colony. Humble people of socialised instincts risk their lives any day to save a fellow-creature. The poet Swinburne payed that he might be saved ‘from too much love of living’ and when we hear very ordinary people objecting strenuously to being ‘snuffed out’ as they indignantly say, and see them holding ‘circles’ and prying into the possibilities of a continued life for them on another plane, we cannot help regarding it as a greed of life which no achievement of theirs has ever justified in the past or is likely to justify in such a future as they picture. All that we learn from Spiritualists as to life on the astral plane shows it to be such a dull, stagnant, trivial affair that it would add a new terror to death if we believed that a life of that kind lay beyond. At one time I worked as a printer on The Two Worlds, the Spiritualist weekly, and saw a good deal of the Spiritualist fraternity at close quarters in that way and otherwise. Of their messages from the other world the general impression is of paltryness, the most outstanding memory being of repeated assurances to ‘take car of yourself’ and to ‘be sure you wear flannels next your skin.’ Carlyle somewhere tells of an old man who spoke to his (Carlyle’s) father in rapturous terms of the joys of heaven. And the old Scots mason retorted: ‘Who wants a stinking of clog like you in heaven? Don’t you think that seventy years of you is enough?’ It was brutal; but Carlyle manifestly tells the story with a chuckle as if he agreed with the rough justice of it. What we think about life on an alleged astral plane will not alter the fact whatever the fact may be; but in the absence of adequate proof it seems an overweening claim that the human mite, marvellous as he is, should seek to live for ever, or otherwise viewed, should, like the idiot Struldbrugs of Gulliver, have sentence of eternal life passed upon him. The good we do lives after us, and if that is sometimes very little, our claim to continued life on another plane is surely all the less, unless, indeed, we are to be taught there to be less self-centred, to have more of the spirit of comradeship and service. Already we have more pity than is needed for our own sorrows, more laughter than is warranted by our own joys, even when we know nothing of its cause, and we often worry over the troubles of others more than they do themselves. This altruism, which is by no means overdone, cannot but be greatly strengthened in the more socialised life of the future. ‘Sanctions.’ In a letter to me Mrs Kingsley says there are no moral sanctions today. She means, I take it, that the law and the commandments have lost their Divine authority and that no authoritative taboos have taken their place. But there are surely more taboos than ever, while law and public opinion are more strongly operative than ever. Morals are always ahead of theology. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not bear false witness – the public opinion behind these existed long before Moses formulated it as Divine law. All these taboos and many others have more force than ever they had; and they are reinforced by a thousand acquired instincts that are more potent than any old priestly taboo. In spite of a very much extended penal code, with vastly more efficient policing, the prison population is less and less. In spite of the coarsening effects of war, the increased decency of average social feeling is manifested in various ways. The war itself actually helped. Profiteering was never generally condemned till the word was coined for it, and till, with our backs to the wall it was felt to be the dirty game which it is, whether peace or war. The ‘slacker’ was one who wangled out of his duty as a citizen in time of national danger, but it stands in time of peace, also, for the two million men in Britain who were not ashamed to return themselves to the census-takers as ‘of no occupation.’ Homes for heroes, self-determination, direct labour, direct action, camouflage for that which needs to be disguised, C3 as a deplorable category – all are hopeful, illuminating verbal facets augmenting the vocabulary of a more socialised world. Mrs Kingsley, quoting Bertrand Russel says: ‘The whole solidity of matter has gone,’ En avent! That does but make it the more plastic and potent. The trouble with the grey matter up to now has been stodginess. That its solidity has gone is good news. It is still material despite its fluidity. By a natural dialectical tendency, I have dwelt upon the controversial aspects of Mrs Kingsley’s thesis, passing by much of which it is possible heartily to approve. The production of marvels – such as spirit-writing, ‘precipitation’ of letters from the ceiling, and ‘materialisations’ – has been so often shown to be mere trickery that it is depressing to think of fine minds being deflected from open forthright pursuit of the open forthright business of the world to such jugglery. There is no particular mystery about the things that really matter. In a capitalist society both culture and creativity are commodified. Is this a problem? Maybe it’s a bit weighty of a topic for you. It’s certainly something that consumes my thoughts for large spells of time but to wean you in to it gently, I’ll start this stage of the cultural revolution with an exemplar. Let me ask you to consider another question, and forgive me if you think I’m patronising you because the answer seems so obvious! If an author wants the most people possible to read his work (and most do) what should he/she do to achieve this? Simple answer: Make the book available as easily as possible to the widest number of people at the cheapest possible price. Ignoring the fact that even if you make a book available for free on every current ‘platform’ you aren’t guaranteeing readers - you can lead the reader to the book but you can’t make them read after all – it does seem a bit of a no-brainer that you do what you can to make the book available if you want people to read it. In a capitalist world of course you have to add on ‘make it appealing’ which takes us down a whole new path of commodification – I will not dwell on this here but return to it at a later date. The point I am trying to make is that if you want people to read books you should price them sensibly and make them easily available. So. Hold that thought. I wanted to read a book. The process starts: I have very limited funds and a ‘budget’ for book-buying of £10 a month. Yet I read probably 10 books a month at least including work and pleasure related texts. So where possible I try to find the books I want to read for free. I can rarely get the kind of books I want to read free online (though some use of Project Guthenberg and the online library can bear fruit). When I fail online I try to access the books I’m interested in free via libraries – I have maintained some academic online library privileges over the past decade (mainly by taking a wide range of Open University courses) and more recently the National Library of Scotland has opened up much of its digital archive. But plenty remains stuck behind the academic paywall. I am a life ‘friend’ of an academic library but they won’t let me access their digital collection. So, sometimes, I have to resort to buying books. I’ve been trying to get hold of a copy of R.D.S.Jack’s ‘Myths and the Mythmaker’ for five years. It was published in 2010 but it took me 2 years to find out it even existed (I was busy with other authors and Barrie had slipped off my radar for a time). Perhaps I didn’t try as hard as I might have in 2012– f the eye-watering price of £70 put me off – especially combined with a review that said most of the ground was covered in ‘The Road to Neverland’ (never trust reviews, it’s simply not true!) But since the death late last year of the author R.D.S.Jack who was perhaps Barrie’s greatest living advocate, I have felt increasingly uneasy about who will now carry the torch for Barrie into the future. There is some ‘interest’ in him from a range of quarters, but forgive my cynicism, most of them seem to be trying to shoe-horn Barrie into their own areas of research (feminism, modernism etc) and that does him a great dis-service. Barrie has been kicked enough over the centuries by the ignorant, the lazy and those with an axe to grind. He deserves much, much better. So I turned again to an attempt to purchase the book. Result: Myths and the Mythmaker: A Literary Account of J.M. Barrie's Formative Years. (SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language & Literature) 12 Nov 2010 by R. D. S. Jack Paperback £69.00Prime Eligible for FREE UK Delivery Only 1 left in stock - order soon. More buying choices £43.95used & new(9 offers) (In America it comes in at more than $100!!!) The publishers are cited as Rodopi, now owned by Brill – whom Google reveals to be large academic publishers of some repute. Their reputation suggests highwayman to me!
And allergic as I am to highway robbery, I felt I had to try to go down the cheaper route ( I use the word ‘cheap’ with something of a sneer.) I discovered I could get a ‘used like new’ one for £45. To me that’s still an obscene amount of money to pay for a book. I could eat for more than a week for that. I would need to eat less well for a number of weeks in order to pay for it. I didn’t buy it. I went online. I hunted it down via my online library access. After failing in 3 of my 4 possible options, I hit pay dirt. I was able to break through the paywall and offered the choice to read it online or download for a maximum of 21 days. All well and good. I started reading it online. I hate reading online. I downloaded it. I pretty quickly realised that this is a beezer of a book. One that I would need to refer to time and again. It’s an absolutely vital book for anyone with an interest in Barrie. (Mental note to self, write review on Amazon site to that effect!). And so, I ‘just clicked’ and bought it at £45. I held back my ire at the capitalist economic models of ‘supply and demand’ and smug comments of the cultural elitists who claim ‘the value of anything is the price anyone is willing to pay’ still ring in my ears. Let me make it clear, I have no reservations regarding the quality or value of the book (priceless) but it still really irks me to have to pay that sort of money. It’s a perfect example of the price of culture. It’s a salutary lesson and it is disgusting that a book so central to our Scottish cultural and literary heritage should be hidden from the general reader. But this is the price of a capitalist, hierarchical, elitist ‘canonical’ structure. And guess what. That’s kind of the point that Jack makes in the book. (okay he doesn’t mention capitalism but the rest is more or less consistent with his views.) Does that give you any idea why it is that you just can’t read this book unless you are an academic or pretty well heeled? Might I suggest there are three obvious reasons why a publisher would put out a book at a ridiculous price (given that there’s no way it can cost them this to publish – or if so, they shouldn’t be in business because Deveron Press can do it a lot cheaper – time to change the business model Brill!). The reasons are: 1) Naked Greed. 2) They don’t want people to read it. 3) They don’t think you should read it. I suggest it’s a combination of all three reasons. The publishers know the ‘academic’ market will bear the cost. It’s just the other end of the ‘Amazon free’ spectrum. Books are seen as ‘product’ in a ‘marketplace’, so while Brill clearly work on the basis that if you feign exclusivity you can hike up the price, Amazon work on the spread betting principle of hoovering up the odd penny/dime on every single purchase that goes through their site. We are simply cultural sheep disguised as consumers, waiting to be skinned one way or the other. So. Motive 1: Greed. Motive 3: they don’t want you to read it. There appears to be something of a ‘social cultural contract’ within the elite that says that as long as you are a) rich or b) part of academia and therefore by definition an intellecutal (?) you can gain access suggests that capitalism is at the heart of our academic model. I for one, have issues with this. It’s not enough to offer people ‘free’ tuition at higher education level (you’ll note this is only for undergraduate study not postgraduate study, that is a truly rarified intellectual arena – until which stage you are not considered ‘appropriate’ as a reader of books such as those published by the Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature. Unfair, I hear you cry. Undergrads can read those books too. Yes they can. If they are encouraged to. I have this nasty wee ‘impish’ voice in me that suggests that in Scottish academia it is the undergrads who help keep the postgrads and ‘true’ academics in their jobs – the classic hierarchical pyramid structure is alive and well in academia and this trickles down to Scots culture in general ( I will develop this point another time). For now I simply call them out. Shame on you publishers. Shame on you editorial boards (I know, you are simply soldiers following orders) and shame on you the Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature. I suggest all the above mentioned ‘they’s’ do not want you to know what Jack thinks about Barrie or Scottish Literature and culture. I suggest that his work doesn’t fit into their created dominant narrative and they don’t want you to read beyond the ‘canon’. This is the rather unpleasant side effect of the formerly stated motive 2. Even if ‘they’ think that Jack’s book is a good book for ‘them’ to read and write about, somehow ‘they’ don’t think that ‘you’ or ‘I’ or any of us outwith the hallowed halls of academe should have it made available to read. Are we too wee, too poor and too stupid? Did you never realise how political an issue culture is? Or how significant a role publishing and reading plays in our culture? It seems that our academic establishments and cultural bodies are in danger of selling us a Scotland where the general reader is not considered either capable of understanding or interested in engaging in Scots culture. Give us T2 Trainspotting and leave us to wallow eh? No offence Irvine Welsh, but I personally have more interest in the work of J.M.Barrie – and I’m not afraid to say it. So what of the ‘book’ itself? Here is the promotional blurb: J.M. Barrie's critical reputation is unusually problematic. Originally viewed as a genius to rank with Shaw and Wilde, Barrie soon fell victim to damaging psychological theories about his life and his patriotism. The few critics who have commented on Barrie have colluded with dominant myths about a figure who, like his most famous creation, never grew up, who abandoned Scotland and made light of his own people when serious social analyses of the nation's condition were called for, and who scorned the opportunities of University learning when at Edinburgh. Myths and the Mythmaker attempts to challenge these myths and offer a just revaluation of Barrie's genius. Through closely focused textual analyses, it dispels the popular images of Barrie as "escapist" writer and immature, mother-fixated artist. It seeks to replace the narrow prose canon on which the "Oedipal" and "Kailyard" myths are based with a thorough account of his Victorian apprenticeship. New research into Barrie's early work and criticism show the enduring influence of his Edinburgh education on his creative writing, his academic articles, and his own complex views on artistic genius. This is exactly the kind of book I want to read – and it doesn’t disappoint. I’ve read the downloaded version and I am hanging by the post box waiting for the delivery of my gold-plated paperback copy due for delivery by the time this month’s Gateway goes out. You haven’t heard the last of this book, or of Barrie, from the Orraman believe me! Oh, the good news is that for those of you who would now like to read some Barrie, even if you can’t afford to read about Barrie) and who are not averse to ereaders – you can pick up the COMPLETE J.M.BARRIE from Delphi Classics HERE for under a fiver. That’s 54 texts for about 9pence each. Might I suggest that if you want to join the cultural revolution, you start by reading the books they DON’T want you to read, rather than flocking to the ones they are pushing in your face on a daily basis – whatever the price. Let me end with a 'rif' on what is a currently popular/populist 'theme': Choose Books. Choose cultural freedom. Don’t allow anyone to tell you that Scotland is a pish, crap place where our cultural identity is revealed in any number of Trainspotting Generations. Sure Trainspotting has its place. I’m not suggesting we sanitise our view of our culture and ourselves. I’m just suggesting we don’t allow ourselves to be degraded by a cultural elite for whom we are so much cultural canon-fodder. When undergraduates are ‘taught’ Trainspotting’ over the works of J.M.Barrie I have to question quite where our cultural ‘head’ is at. Orraman Matter, Spirit, and Karl Marx Is our Science all wrong? Startling Claims from a Spiritualist Angle The Rally of an Expelled Communist (first published July 1927) PART TWO An Unbridged Gulf.
Let us be quite frank and say that there is no explanation of how matter thinks. We know what neurosis is, but we do not know how it becomes psychosis. We touch hot iron and instantaneously the contact is telegraphed along the nerves to the brain. But how that neurotic process, which is physical, should become a psychological experience, we do not know. Consciousness has yet to find its Newton. All that we know is that spirit has an ‘invariable and concomitant’ relationship with matter, the matter being first as the basis of spirit. There is no thought without a material thinker. And, testing the relationship, there may be a dead thinker without thought. The young thinker has youthful thoughts, indicating a soul no older than his body. The dependence thus meets the test by being exclusive, inclusive, and conditional. A live brain thinks, a dead body does not think, a youthful body thinks youthfully in accordance with lack of long training and experience. The Pythagoreans believed in the transmigration of souls. In their view the ego of Shakespeare existed before his body was born and still exists in some lowlier incarnation. This seems wildly unthinkable; but granted the independent, separable, eternal life of the soul, what more feasible, if the soul must function through a body? Spiritualism seeks to dispose of the necessity for transmigration by asserting the existence of an astral body for us all. There is no evidence of the existence of anything so unlikely, and there would need to be the best. Attendance at séances is the best way of finding out how little is to be seen, and how trivial and inept is all that is to be heard. I have no pleasure in discussing the obvious; but one further remark on these definitions may be made. Spirit in the Universe. Of ‘spirit in the universe’ we have no knowledge. All talk of final causes is jargon. If every effect can be related to its natural antecedent causes, does it not seem obscurantism to posit a final cause behind the natural, obvious antecedents pursued as far back as science, assisted by telescope and microscope, can go? It is a law of the mind, the basis of all reasoning whatever, that there must be an Absolute, independent of time and destruction, and comprehending, rather than existing throughout, infinite space. Why object to regard the Universe itself as this Absolute? Is it not big enough, grand, varied, beautiful, majestic, powerful enough? The teleological craving is so strong with some, and especially with people who are not busy with any kind of finite work, that if by searching they could find out god, they would want to question him as to his antecedents, and would probably, if put off, wax scornful over the idea that he should not have an origin like everything else. Logic is satisfied with one infinity and incapable of conceiving two - an infinite God and an infinite Universe as well. There must be one sole entity that, unlike all finite things, had no origin. A Roman Catholic casuist said ‘ God and the Universe are co-existent eternities.’ That is as good a theory as any other theological doctrine. We would not expect a theologian to explain how the creation was as old as its creator. Theology is essentially concerned with a mystery; though, happily, religion itself is plain and simple and entirely concerned with the known and the knowable – with love and kindness and fair dealing between man and man. The attitude if not the expressed question, of the wise workaday man will be: Why drag in God? The Cosmos is equal to all its work. One thinks of it as the only system of perpetual motion, self-sufficing, kept going by its own momentum, with a complete circle of conservation in all its forces and elements, the only system that repairs its own waste in one part by building up another, that has had no conceivable beginning and can have no conceivable end. To posit intelligence behind it – the old exploded Design Argument of Paley – is a poor finite craving born of incapacity to apprehend the infinite. This persistent discounting of the Universe is not so much ungrateful blasphemy as just the cry of a distressed child for its mother even when it knows that Mother is not there. For the sake of truth and humanity, let jus recognise that after Nature has done her best, man takes up the tale, and, acting as his own Adjunct Providence, makes good her absence of design, correcting her extremes of cold and heat, her crudeness, the unintentional cruelty of the machine, the imperfections of structural forms – as in eye, ear, throat, stomach and teeth – the disabilities of rudimentary organs and vestigial remains, the perverse distribution of plant life which placed the medicinal cinchona on the inaccessible heights of the Andes, though it has been found to thrive on the low grounds where it is wanted, and the maleficent palmella or ague plant where it could communicate the maximum of contagion; and lastly to correct the wildness and awkwardness of the natural man himself. The Materialist Conception of History. It is because I think that Mrs Kingsley has a good case against the Materialist Conception of History that I regret she should fall back upon Spiritism, which at best is occult, to justify beliefs which may be demonstrated by simple proofs of every day. What, for example, could be less materialistic than the love of a mother for a child? An infant is a cause of expense and trouble in the present and of anxiety for its future. The lucky parent may rejoice in the credit that a clever or prosperous son or daughter may bring, and there are parents who batten on their children; but as a rule the most that a good parent can hope for is that the boy or girl will do well and not be either a burden or a heartbreak in after life. Or what could be more disintegrated, what could be less materialistic, than the love of a wife for an ailing and slowly dying husband whom perhaps she may have to work to maintain? I shall not traverse ground I have covered in these pages on previous occasions to point out the disinterestedness of patriotic surrender of life, martyrdom for a cause, the zeal of crusaders, Mahometan and Pagan as well as Christian, the love of country which induces men not only to die for it, but to go on living in it in spite of disastrous earthquakes as in Japan, or volcanic devastation as in Italy. Nay, the falsity of the materialistic conception is shown even by the persecuting sovereigns who by Bartholomew massacres and Jewish pogroms have decimated their own subjects and cess-payers in their zeal for what they regarded as religion. If vulgar materialism moves men to set store chiefly by whatever increases their wealth and comfort, who could be less materialistic than a doctor who poisoned his paying patients, or a merchant who murdered his customers? Yet Charles IX of France and the last Nicholas of Russia did the like in their zeal for a form of theology. Marx Primarily a Moralist. Mrs Kingsley is very right and says what needed to be said when she points out that Marx was stating ‘a moral ideal’ when he claimed that ‘the value of the commodities produced by labour is equal to the quantity of labour socially necessary to produce them.’ The same idea was promulgated by Adam Smith in 1775 as an application of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. He wrote (Ch v of The Wealth of Nations) Labour is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. The real price of everything… is the toil and trouble of acquiring it, Labour… is the only universal as well as the only accurate measure of value, or the only standard by which we can compare the values of different commodities at all times and at all places In Chapter VI he re-states with interesting variants: - In that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them one for another… In this state of things the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer; and the quantity of labour commonly employed in acquiring or producing any commodity is the only circumstance which can regulate the quantity of labour which it ought commonly to purchase, command, and exchange for. Adam Smith was professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, and it was a part of his duties that he expounded in extempore lectures the views afterwards written down for the ‘Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.’ The idea of labour being the basis of wealth is so obvious that one is surprised it should be regarded as in any way notable. That it is an ethical as well as a merely factual claim is equally clear. Why should the work of a man’s hands belong to him? Why should it not belong to the idler? Because that is ethically unjust. Rent, profit, and interest, as taken, are robbery. Adam Smith (chap vi) says:- As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The cool ‘like all other men’ there embodies the difference between Smith and Marx. It is customary to speak of Marx’s science; but Marx was not typically scientific. He was a master of irony and invective, which do not belong to the scientist. Marx, says Mrs Kingsley, was ‘a sharply indignant moralist,’ and his book is a ‘passionate indictment of expropriation.’ The ‘Capital’ is, indeed, not at all ‘the Bible of Socialism,’ as it has been called. The Jewish Bible contains the law, the Commandments, and the Beatitudes (The Beatitudes are in the New Testament, but they were spoken by a Jew and the New Testament is itself a Jewish Book); but Marx’s book is ‘A Criticism of Political Economy’ without any pretence of constructive teaching. Laurence Gronlund’s ‘Co-operative Commonwealth,’ which used to be referred to as the New Testament of Socialism, is constructive. About Marx’s moral indignation there can be no question. Among other phrases quoted by Mrs Kingsley are: The thing that you represent has no heart in its breast (which is certainly not the language of mental science) the capitalist is a national miser. To Marx the defender-exponents of capitalism are ‘fish-blooded doctrinaires.’ Capitalism itself is ‘as merciless vandalism’ and ‘comes into the world dripping from head to foot and from every pore with blood and dirt.’ The capitalist himself is a ‘vampire.’ The Class War in the Bible. This moral indignation against the taking of surplus value was not a new thing. There is a Chinese proverb, doubtless thousands of years old, that ‘If one man lives in laziness another will die of hunger.’ Isaiah said to the rich of his day: ‘Ye have eaten up the vineyards; the spoil of the poor is in your houses.’ He also said of the exploited class, referring to a golden time still ahead: ‘They shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.’ The apostle James wrote: ‘Behold the hire of the labourers which … is of you kept back by fraud.’ ‘Woe unto you that are rich,’ Jesus said. ‘It is as easy for a camel to go through the eye of a needle as for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven’; and in the parable of Lazarus there is nothing against the rich man except his riches to warrant him being consigned to the pit. Paul said: ‘Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labour, working with his hands.’ This is a recognition that the only alternative to stealing a livelihood is to work for it. He did not even contemplate the third way, namely begging it. He himself worked at his calling of tent-maker, even when on a mission. The Fathers Also. The Fathers of the Church were violently anti-capitalist, Opulence (says St Jerome) is always the product of theft committed, if not by the actual possesor, then by his ancestors. Some persons imagine that usury obtains only in money, but the Scriptures, foreseeing this, have exploded every increase, so that you cannot receive more than you gave. And St Ambrose said: - It is the bread of the hungry thou keepest; it is the clothing of the naked thou lockest up; the money thou buriest is the redemption of the wretched. St. Basil, St Chrysostom, Origen, Tertullian are all emphatic in condemning the rentier, without having anything to suggest an alternative to private-enterprise methods. John Ball, one of Wickliffe’s russet priests, had got his cue from the newly translated Bible when in 1381 he said: They are clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and ermine, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and our toil that these men hold their state. Dr Barrow, the seventeenth century divine, said: - A noble heart will disdain to subsist like a drone upon other’s labours, like a vermin to filch his food out of the public granaries, or like a shark to prey upon the lesser fry. No Communist ever delivered a more vehement ‘class war’ diatribe than Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More, who in the long indignant conclusion of ‘Utopia’ found the contemporary State just ‘a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the common wealth.’ The final part will be published in next month’s Gateway.
The Twentieth Century Puzzle.
That the principle underlying all this beneficent work should be systematically repudiated and scorned, and that associations should exist to combat and resist its further application, is, indeed, the record political anomaly of the twentieth century. Rivers of blood have flowed in the name of religion. Applied science, the practical arts, social changes, even impalpable thought itself have all been repressed and thwarted in the name of religion. But no life has been taken by persecuting Socialists. Unlike the Protestant Church, we have the blood of no mild Servetus on our hands. Unlike the Catholic Church, we have martyred no Bruno, threatened no Galileo, we have on our conscience no Vanini with his tongue torn out, in the name of God, before his body was reduced to ashes. No inventor or discoverer has been overawed with the stake or the hangman’s cord by Socialists. Socialism has had no Alva, no Torquemada, no Bartholomew nights, no pogroms. To the very limited extent that it has been adopted, Collectivism has been as manifest a blessing as most organised religions have been curses. And it is only one of the world’s sorry jests to ignore, condemn, or anathematise this blessed recreating principle, which alone can keep the world sweet. Socialism is not employers’ liability. It is the abolition of employers and the socialising of industry. It is not the taxation of fleecings, but the stoppage of theft at the fountain head. It is not heavy death duties upon successful, law-abiding exploiters, but ‘Catch ’em alive 0.’ It is not an elaborate system of insurance premiums paid by State, employer, and worker, but automatic provision for contingencies by the State or the Municipality as the sole employer. Socialism is not After-Care Committees or the feeding of necessitous children; it is paying the parent and guardian the full value of his labour and breeding a race of men and women with whom parental feeling and care will be as natural and spontaneous as they are with birds, beasts, and insects. Socialism is not the propping of an inverted social pyramid with laws and regulations and committees and bureaux and inspectors; it is the up-ending of the pyramid so that it shall stand, not upon an apex of rank, idleness, luxury, and robbery, with a King of the Robbers at the end of all, but upon the broad base of labour and service; a base composed of useful, industrious, free, self-respecting manhood and womanhood. As Guiding Principle. It is the glory of Socialism that its great central principal of public control of the means of life serves as a guiding star by which the Socialist can steer amid the rocks and shoals and maelstroms of current politics. We are with the Forwards every time. Is a cowardly and useless war forced upon two little Republics in South Africa? The Socialist Party everywhere protests, and all who recognise the necessity for fair-dealing between nations as between individuals, all who put justice above false patriotism, know that wherever the Socialists are gathered together there they will have sympathisers and temporary allies. The Health Reformer knows that the Socialists are everywhere with him. And with the Socialist, health reform is not merely an affair of open windows, Condy’s fluid, and efficient sewer traps, but better houses, the abatement of the smoke nuisance, more and better food, more intelligent cooking, shorter hours of work, dental attention, more and longer holidays, and the wherewithal to travel and enjoy these. The Educational Reformer knows that whoever may palter with the question of expense, the Socialist puts educational efficiency first, regardless of rates and vested interests. The Housing Reformer knows that he has no more thorough-paced supporters than the Socialists, who are so anxious to secure the best homes that they will not trust landlordism to provide them, but have all along put the responsibility on the county councils and municipalities. The Home Ruler knows that Socialism stands for Home Rule All Round, and that we advocated Irish Home Rule while Gladstone was still a passionate Coercionist. The Radical who is jealous of the power of the House of Lords knows that the Socialist Party stands alone for the abolition of the hereditary principle in Government, this applying to the Monarchy as well. The Co-operator knows that we believe in the Co-operation, not only of the Store, but of the State. The Humanitarian knows that we are opposed to the cruel treatment of the lower animals and that we alone among politicians recognise that the overworking of the noblest of animals, the horse, will continue so long as the overworking of the horse’s driver continues. The Democrat knows that there are no more complete and consistent Democrats than the SOCIAL-Democrats. The well-informed Vegetarian knows that so long as men work beyond their strength, breathe impure air, and work dismally long hours, the devitalised worker will have recourse to stimulants in his food and drink. The Temperance Reformer knows that the best corrective of drinking habits is that raising of the standard of comfort, and that brightening of the whole outl000k upon life, for which Socialism stands more than any other political system. The advocates of national and municipal theatres who look and long for a vast improvement of this potentially great medium of popular culture, like all other reformers who are very much in earnest, turn to the Socialists as being inevitably and by virtue of their principles sound upon this also. When a Liberal or Tory member of Parliament is enraged at the gross and shameless sale of ‘honours,’ it is in Socialist quarters alone that he expects to have a sympathetic hearing. No Fashions in Socialist Politics. The true Socialist is not a man of fashion in politics. He is not a Republican or Home Ruler to-day, and a mere Minimum-Wage or Prevention-of-Destitution Man tomorrow. He is ready for every chance that comes along of affirming and, if possible, advancing his principles. Socialism is, of course, republican. It is true, the direct pecuniary results of the abolition of the monarchy would mean a saving of only sixpence a-head of the population per annum. But the indirect benefits must needs be incalculably great. The monarchy keeps all the abuses of caste in countenance. We cannot consistently object to factory inspectors being taken from Oxford so long as the Head of the State is selected merely because he is his father’s son. We cannot consistently object to the minor lords so long as we adulate and crown a ‘lord’ who has not even the prestige attaching to ability and services rendered as Proconsul or as Minister of State. We cannot consistently object to hardened and experienced soldiers being led by lisping lieutenants just from school so long as the affairs of the nation are in any way subject to the caprice of an ex-lieutenant of the navy of no particular brains and of no particular service. ‘Set the feet above the brain’ says Tennyson, ‘and swear the brain is in the feet.’ That is what we do when we put George Wettin over the leaders of ‘the elect of the people.’ In bygone days a whole generation regarded that heartless scoundrel George the Fourth as ‘the glass of fashion and the mould of form,’ and students of history know the result. Sir Walter Scott was no small man; but the poison of loyalism so worked in him that on one occasion he pocketted the glass out of which George had drunk. The incident had an appropriate ending in respect that Sir Walter sat down upon the glass and broke it; but just imagine the mental attitude expressed in such an act! To the good Social-Democrat every proposal holds the field till it is carried, and every passing incident which may seem to offer an opportunity will be used by him in order to impress his view upon the thoughts and the actions of his fellows. In such ways only can his great and many-sided social philosophy find currency and furtherance. One More Instance. With respect to the latest scheme for keeping the people on the land, the Socialist method would not be to entrust a Government bureau or commissioners with the duty of seeing that farmers all over the country paid not less than a fixed minimum wage, but to have agriculture, like all other industries, gradually organised under the local governing bodies, who would have no interest in sweating the labourer. The immediate method of approach to a revival of agriculture would be through Control, high farming, guaranteed prices and wages, to be secured, as during the War, by the Government purchase of imported food and the regulation of prices in the interest of the public. The Socialist method would not be to hand the land over to peasant cultivators as has been done in Ireland, where a hundred small landlords, who are serfs of the soil, have been created in place of one large landlord. The Socialist does not believe in individual ownership of land, nor in peasant proprietorship, nor even in capitalist farming on the small scale. For the so-called ‘magic of ownership’ he would substitute communal ownership and communal farming under expert management, with the best implements, seeds, fertilisers, and marketing. By all means let the agricultural workers have fixity of tenure in their houses, and liberal gardens attached to those houses; but the communal fields worked by gangs of cheery workers, ploughing, sowing, mowing, reaping sociably - that is the true line of evolution so far as rural work is concerned. Many benevolent measures forced upon local communities by the central government represent, not democracy, but bureaucracy, whereas Socialism is not bureaucratic, but democratic, and Socialists recognise that social-democracy can exist and flourish only with the hearty co-operation of a majority of the citizens in a given locality. The object of the Socialist party is, not to shower upon localities a succession of compulsory benefits for which they have not asked, but to carry the evangel of communal control of the means of life to every corner of the land, so that the people may gradually and eagerly take charge of what is really their own business, ousting the landlord and capitalist steadily from the field, where they have always failed anyhow. The limits of even benevolent compulsion are soon reached; but the possibilities of intelligent, active citizenship are as boundless as they are attractive. Democracy in practice is only at its beginnings as yet. The Last Friend. Is the State the enemy of the people? Ask the old age pensioner who besides the State would have given him a pension. Ask the bedridden pauper who besides the State would give him the airy home, the clean bed, the good plain food, the institutional care in general that he receives in the poorhouse. Ask the man, innocent or guilty, meritorious or vile, surrounded by a mob that thirsts to do him violence, who besides the State will or can protect him. When all other friends have given you up, or when you, for reason good, scorn to appeal to your friends, you know that there is one friend that will not fail you, be you good or evil, deserving or a scallywag. The only friend that sticketh closer than a brother is the State. All else may be inhumane; but with the State humanity is a standing principle to the end. Matter, Spirit, and Karl Marx Is our Science all wrong? Startling Claims from a Spiritualist Angle The Rally of an Expelled Communist (first published July 1927) PART ONE ‘The history of each of the sciences is a record of the progressive substitution of matter for spirit and law for sponteneity.’ Encyclopedia Britannica. Recent achievements of applied physical science – such as the gramophone, wireless, telegraphy, and the promised television, with, above all, the new subdivision of matter called the electron – are supposed to have given the philosophical materialist pause, and on this assumption the Spiritists are inclined to be aggressive. When Shakespeare said there were more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy he was making a wise allowance for the extension of the realm of the knowable. We have been extending that realm, and all the legitimate, real extensions of it have been along the lines of simple naturalism. There was a time when spirits pervaded all things. Animism put kelpies in the pools, furies in the winds, fairies on the green, fauns and satyrs in the woods, and ghosts everywhere. ‘Devils’ were exorcised with priestly abracadabra, witches were burnt after they had been forced to confess impossible deeds by the applications of pincers. Even the astronomer Kepler believed there were spirits of the planets, and similarly biology was not yet got rid of ‘final causes.’ An Arrestive Treatise These reflections are suggested by a pamphlet of an unusually arrestive, and on its human side valuable, kind. The treatise is an answer to the question ‘Is Materialism the Basis of Communism?’ (Henderson, 66 Charing Cross Road, London ,6d). The author, Mrs. Isabel Kingsley makes out an excellent case against the materialist conception of history; and many who see in Collectivism an ideal or ideals which will change, not only the economic basis of society, but will revolutionise the whole of life and human nature itself, will be glad of this excursion into the more attractive realm which lies beyond the politico-economic wrangle. There are some of us who grudge having to be politicians at all. Decently-minded people want to cultivate their bodies and minds, and enjoy life peacefully in a society where one part of the population does not live by picking the pockets of the majority; and politics represent, broadly, a mere attempt to suppress pocket0picking and to force men like the Duke of Northumberland and the average idle shareholder to do their fair share of the necessary work of the world. But Mrs Kingsley is not concerned about the wrangle, the immediate thing, such as fighting the Trade Disputes Bill or the attempt to set the House of Lords over both the Commons and the Monarchy. Still less is she concerned with the gradual extension of Municipal and State Collectivism. One of the advantages of keeping free from legislative and administrative entanglements is that one can project one’s mind into the future and get busy over matters that have nothing to do with current issues. Gradualness Rejected Mrs. Kingsley apparently rejects the philosophy of gradualness. She says the slow course of organic transformation may be ‘rejected on strictly scientific grounds’ and refers to De Vries having shown by verified experiments the abrupt appearance of new vegetable species without any immediate transitional forms. These changes he calls ‘mutations’ and from his observations it is seriously argued that abrupt transformation may well be the rule in evolution. This is an immensely convenient theory. I have never seen the blue rose that gardeners have long tried to evolve by stages of crossing. I have read of a blue rose and have heard of a black one. But there is such a thing as colour blindness. There is also a thing called throwing the hatchet. When the loganberry was produced by crossing the bramble with the raspberry, gardeners made some noise about it; but if a new variety sprang up like a weed, without being man-planted, and with no known antecedents, there would surely be some shout about the miraculous apparition. The much canvassed problem of priority touching the hen and the egg would have a kindred conundrum. When Topsy said she was not born, but just growed, she did not know that a scientist was to come along and say that it was possible to grow without being born. We have heard an enthusiastic breeder discussing aloud, on the other side of a hedge, and all alone, how, by selection, he could produce something that would carry everything before it in the showyard, beating all he had done before by the same means. To leave it all to ‘mutations’ would, no doubt, have been easier. Faith-Healing. Mrs. Kingsley’s view makes short work of all the sciences, including that of healing. She cites from Myers and Richet the case of a rich Belgian workman who had both legs broken. There was: ‘suppuration and no disposition of the bones to unite; the lower part of the leg could be moved in all directions. He refused to have it amputated, and had been on crutches for eight years, when one day, while at prayer at a shrine, he felt himself cured, stood up, put his feet to the ground, and walked without assistance.’ The suppuration, it seems, stopped, the accretions cleared away, the disjointed bones set painlessly and without manipulative pressure! Does Mrs Kingsley, one wonders, have her meals cooked without fire, without cutting vegetables, without any of the adaptation of means to ends that all processes have heretofore been supposed to require? When we cannot induce the majority to do the easy and obvious, the thing of proved adequacy, it may be right to suggest something unheard of and unlikely. But as it is, we put on poultices to extract a virus, we reduce inflammations and fevers by ointments, fomentations, quinine and other febrifugres. In politics, when private enterprise breaks down, public effort comes to the rescue, as with housing. Is all this kind of thing a mere tinkering with evils that can be met with a general fiat lux and effort of faith? This is transcendentalism with a vengeance. Unfortunately it leaves us all awash. Nothing is as it seems. All our knowledge simply misleads us. The only people who do not know about things are the people who have given a lifetime’s study to them. The Belgian workman who would not have his gangrened leg amputated was right, and the doctors were wrong. When your waterpipes burse call in the tailor. When your coat is torn take it to the plumber. Science, like Love, ‘smiles but to deceive.’ There are of course, cases where the scientist and the politicians are wrong. By citing instances here and there you may make all the experts look foolish in turn. But argument based upon exceptions is special pleading. Mrs Kingsley spoils her case against Materialism-ridden-to-death by setting up the Supernatural against it. And that is not only unnecessary, but mischievous. Definitions But I have got ahead unduly, thinking of the treatise as a whole. Let me begin more or less at the beginning, only remarking incidentally that it is ‘signifcant of much’ that Mrs. Kingsley belonged to the Communist Party, and has apparently been expelled for heresy! Our authoress accepts the dictionary definitions of Materialism: 1. Materialism – The denial of the existence in man of an immaterial substance which alone is conscious, distinct, and separable from the body. The reduction of psychical processes to physical is the special thesis of Materialism. 2. Materialism – He who denies spirit in man or in the universe. In the domain of ethics and practical life, Materialism is a term use to denote the temper of mind which sees in the acquisition of wealth, material comfort, and sensuous pleasure the only reasonable objects of human endeavour. As the antithesis of this the following definition is given – Idealism – Any theory which maintains the universe to be throughout the work or the embodiment of reason or mind. Any theory which seeks the explanation or ultimate raison d’être of the cosmic evolution in the realisation of reason, self-consciousness, or spirit. I have one or two objections to make to these definitions. The reference to an ‘immaterial substance’ is an obvious contradiction in terms. If there is one thing that ‘substance’ cannot be it is ‘immaterial.’ Substance must be substantial in greater or lesser degree. Water is less substantial than wood, and wood than iron; but all three are substances. An immaterial materiality is naturally repudiated by Materialists or anyone who wishes to use language with any degree of accuracy. The Materialist does not deny ‘spirit in man.’ He does not deny spirit even in horses and dogs. He only denies that spirit is ‘distinct and separable from the body.’ He does not deny music; he only denies that music can be produced without physical means – voice, violin, or organ – while at the same time he denies that the music itself is physical. In the Phaedo Plato gives Socrates most of the talk (in a dialogue at which Plato himself was confessedly not present); but he gives Simmias the best of the argument in the following passage: Anyone might use the same argument with respect to harmony, and a lyre and its chords – that harmony is something invisible and incorporeal, very beautiful and divine in a well modulated lyre; but the lyre and its chords are bodies and of corporeal form, compounded and earthly, and akin to that which is mortal. When anyone, then, has broken or burst the chords, he might maintain, from the same reasoning as yours, that it is necessary that harmony should still exist and not be destroyed. .. Our body being compacted and held together by heat and cold, dryness and moisture, and other such qualities, our soul is the fusion and harmony of these when they are well and duly combined with each other. If, then, the soul is a kind of harmony, it is evident that when our body is unduly relaxed or strained through diseases or other maladies the soul must of necessity immediately perish, although it is most divine, just as other harmonies which subsist in sounds or in the various works of artizans, but that the remains of the body of each person last a long time till they are without being or decayed. Consider, then, what we shall say… if anyone should maintain that the soul, being a fusion of the several qualities in the body, perishes first in that which is called death.’ After this we read (Phaedo, sec 80) that Socrates, awaiting death, looked ‘steadfastly at us,’ and, smiling said, ‘Simmias indeed speaks justly.’ Those who, like the Swedenborgians and the Spiritualists, conceive of spirit as something which can put on clothes, or be hit with a stick, are more materialistic than the Materialists. The Materialist believes that the spirit is spiritual. The Spiritualist believes it is material, and does not laugh when he sees an imposter or impostress walking about performing senseless tricks while professing to be a spirit. to the Materialist, spirit is mettle, vital force, which he derives from his body nourished with food, air, and sleep. When the Materialist speaks of a person having ‘a poor spirit’ he means simply that the person makes a poor show in energy, hopefulness, courage, or initiative. The dependence of spirit on the material body is shown by the fact that poor health means poor spirits. The same dependence is shown by the fact that the same individual is one person when hungry and a very different person when rested. When the Materialist speaks of a ‘spirited’ horse he means a horse that has plenty of energy and action. PART TWO WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE FEBRUARY EDITION OF THE NEW GATEWAY Is the state the enemy? PART TWO
Capitalism. Nor was capitalism created by the State. It was created by individual cunning and the simple willingness and even anxiety of working men to attach themselves to a master, even if they must labour for his profit. Even to-day one sees many a man who is possessed of both the money to start in business and the skill to carry it on, continue to work for a master owing to sheer lack of initiative and self-confidence. Such men have been the creators and perpetuators of capitalism, small blame to them. The primitive craftsman employing a journeyman and an apprentice or two, who boarded with him, was the natural enough precursor of the joint stock company of to-day, with its shareholders drawing their dividends thousands of miles away. The public had to be served somehow. Certainly the State is not to blame for having allowed capitalism to grow. It had no mandate to prevent it or to organise production itself, which would alone have prevented capitalism from growing bloated. It was not the State that caused long hours in factories; but it was the State that curtailed them. It was not the State that sent coffin ships to sea and pocketed the insurance money when they went down with all hands in mid-ocean, as it was intended they should do; but it was the State that introduced the load line, the Merchant Shipping Act, the Survey, and the Board of Trade Regulations. It was not the State that sent the climbing boys up the chimneys; but the State forbade it. It is not the State that causes railway and coal strikes; but the State often intervenes to stop them. The State did not cause parents to bring up their children in ignorance; it passed the Education Acts. It did not make fiery mines or ordain that machinery should be used in factories; but it insisted on the safety lamp, and ventilation, and pumping; and it ordered dangerous machinery to be fenced and sent inspectors to see that it was done. The Strong shall bear Rule. The State is the organ of whichever class has the courage, the ability, and the numbers to capture and run it. The upper class once controlled it; the middle class since 1832 has taken hold of it; the workers now have the power to capture it and wield it to their purposes, and if they use that power it will be THEIR State - the State will be the people incorporated. The State is not merely a repressive Policeman or Tax-Gatherer. It is the servant of the comunity as well. The hundreds of thousands of postal employees were some years ago joined by 18,000 telephone workers. The Municipality is not a mere Night-Watchman. It sends you gas men, sanitary men, electricians. It will send you others if you will have it so. The enemy is not the responsible Public Servant. The enemy is the irresponsible private adventurer. It is not the elected persons who are ‘audacious.’ The audacious person is the non-elected capitalist or landlord, strong in the mere fact of possession and in the ignorance and subserviency of the public. Socialism is the bringing of the processes and services of life under the Reign of Law. It is the substitution of communal order for commercial chaos. The only alternatives to the State of to-day would be a congeries of warring communities, polluting each other’s drinking water, wrangling about each other’s sewage, refusing to join for common purposes as they often refuse at present, each taking its own way as to education, the protection of foreshores, the maintenance of roads, the running of through traffic. It is possible to have too much home rule. The Natural State. The people of Great Britain speak, write, read the same language. Their habits, local institutions, business methods, food, dress, traditions, music, domestic arrangements, literature, drama, ideas, tastes, are similar - sadly similar. Why should they not be a State, a united Nation? Why should Bradford seek to be independent of Manchester because they are in different counties? Why should they want to be independent? Race, language, the mountain chain, the broad river, the sounding sea constitute the natural divisions of nations. To say that these should count for nothing is to fly in the face of Nature. But Socialism is not a divider, but a uniter. They who pretend that Socialism is at war with the State are not Socialists, but Anarchists, who wish to set up a monopoly of the craftsmen for the monopoly of the capitalists. Socialism sets up the community as above both. Obviously there can be no nationalization without a State, and without a State one can readily imagine the complications and bickerings that would arise between the not too wise men of the various Gothams, over postal facilities, sewering, rivers, railways, defence, education, and other matters as to which the State has the final word to-day. The strife of the Brugeois and the Ghentois, of the Italian states, of the early Saxon kings of counties might well be repeated in pitched battles between the men of Manchester and the men of Liverpool. Leeds and Bradford and Sheffield, no longer content with football victories, would march against each other with more than Ulsterian venom and with more deadly weapons than dummy muskets and wooden cannon. The hordes of Glasgow would overrun Scotia’s ancient capital inflamed with the animus of a jealousy nursed for generations, and Cardiff and Bristol would carry on a war of tariffs that might end in reciprocal bombardments. As it is, the Government keeps the scattered townships knit together under the law. It lends them money at the lowest possible rate of interest, and it must have power to enforce the payments of the loans. It gives imperial taxation to be used for local purposes - as education and roads - and it insists upon a certain standard of efficiency in the teachers, a certain standard of suitability in the school buildings and equipment. It can enforce its demands by refusing to pay grants to the local bodies who want to conduct public services on the cheap. The State a Blessing. The Individualist or Anarchist critics attack the State as if it were and must remain a pure evil to be fought. It is, as a matter of fact, a blessing. It behaves better to the workers than they would behave to themselves. It educates them in spite of themselves. It has given them old-age pensions which they would never have devised for themselves. It inspects their food, their workplaces, and the ladders and scaffoldings upon which private enterprise compels them to risk their necks. It condemns rotten fruit, tuberculous beef, milk which is below the standard. It insists on dangerous machines being fenced, upon a certain amount of cubic air space being provided in factories and in the forecastles of ships. It stipulates for a certain food standard on board ship. It forbids excessive deck-loading. It insists on a load line. It makes regulations as to pumping, air fans, shot-firing, and props in the mines, and if accidents occur it is because of the cupidity of the owners or the carelessness of the men, which more inspectors might correct, but could never abolish. Of course Socialism would substitute public ownership of factories, ships, and mines; and a good deal of the inspection and regulation and registration would be quite unnecessary under Socialism; but the point is that the State in all these matters behaves, not as the enemy, but as the friend of the workers. The State insists on many things for their good that they themselves often do their best to defeat or render nugatory. What is the good of pretending that anybody or anything is to blame except the stupidity and apathy of the workers themselves, who vote against the people who would confer benefits upon them? To look back upon all the silly causes for which the people have shed their blood is pitiful. To think of all the good causes they have neglected or deserted is tragic. The London apprentices turned out for Essex, as the Scotsmen did for the Old and the Young Pretenders later in the day. The farm labourers of Somersetshire mustered, scythe in hand, to fight for Monmouth, unworthy son of a king’s strumpet, and for this base cause they died in thousands on the rhine banks of Sedgmoor. But they deserted Wat Tyler and John Ball and John Cade at the first promise of redress from the authorities or the first sign of failure on the part of these honest and capable working-men leaders, as later in the day they melted away from Robert Owen, and Ernest Jones, and Joseph Arch in the early Socialist, the Chartist, and the trade union movements. Who is to Blame? How can Socialists pretend that the State is to blame? As clearly as anything can be, it is the workers who are to blame, possessed of political power as they are to make the State whatever they want it to be. They elect the slum-owner in preference to the slum-abolisher. They prefer the landlord to the land nationaliser. They elect the capitalist, and put the worker at the bottom of the poll. When they get a good servant who gives all his waking hours for little reward and no thanks they cast about for accusations to urge against him. The sincere man who hates rhodomontade and talks plain good sense is assailed with abuse and watched with suspicion, while the adventurer who is at best only an indifferent ‘variety turn,’ and will lecture on anything for fees - this man is taken to the heart of the gullible ones, and the more fierily impossible or the more jocularly useless he is the better they will like him. The stabs of the enemy, the boycott of the capitalist, the contumely of the rich and proud, are as nothing by comparison with the folly, the suspicion, the rudeness, the ungrateful desertion, and the political malingering of the workers. The only practical question for to-day is: ‘Should the working class make use of its political power?’ Must the State CONTINUE to be the organ of the possessing classes? Of course I say No. I say the workers can capture the political machine and use it for their own purposes, and I want to see them do it. But when I say the State I do not mean merely or chiefly the Central Government. I am not specially enamoured of the legislative adjustments of the Wage System which are what we mostly get from Parliament. I attach (as I say with necessary iteration) more importance to capturing the machinery of local government. I hold that it would be absurd to nationalise local services like the milk or the coal supply or the running of the textile industries. All these must be municipalised. Yet without Socialist possession of the Central Government as well we should not be allowed to develop Socialism locally. More than that, a hostile Central Government could conceivably take away our local governing powers. So that I am all for getting Socialists elected to the local bodies first; though of course we could not do that without having enough power to enable us to return Socialist members of Parliament as well. Buckle’s View. In a passage which Statophobists are fond of quoting, H. T. Buckle, the Individualist Victorian author of a ‘History of Civilisation,’ says Every great reform which has been effected has consisted, not in doing something new, but in undoing something old. The most valuable additions made to legislation have been enactments destructive of preceding legislation; and the best laws which have been passed have been those by which some former laws were repealed. This untenable view is based on such measures as the Catholic Emancipation Act, the Act removing the Disabilities of the Jews, with, above all, the Acts repealing the Corn Laws. It would be nearer the truth to say that the best legislation has been that which created rights and privileges to the whole common people as against classes and individuals holding power and enjoying possession, not so much by the help of the law as by means of superior force and cunning exercised often in defiance of the law. Magna Charta, ‘the foundation-stone of English liberty,’ gave rights which no previous law or charter either DENIED OR AFFIRMED. So did the Bill of Rights. So did the Factory Acts. The Reform Bills of ’32 and ’67 and ’85 did not so much abolish previous legislation as create new and additional civic rights and powers for the whole body of householders. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, the Merchant Shipping Acts, Mines Regulation Acts, Truck Act, Education and Free Libraries Acts did not abolish previous legislation, but called into existence new legal rights to remove old social wrongs, The evils from which civilised nations suffer to-day are not evils which have been created by law. They are evils which have arisen because there was no law and no practice to prevent them from arising. In the hour of need we call for the police, and as our servant the policeman comes at the call of the humblest. If the police were not the servants of the community, the rich could hire both their own police and their own soldiers, as they did in days gone by. The True State. The true Socialist view of the State is thus enunciated by Laurence Gronlund: It is Society, organised society, the State, that gives us all the rights we have. To the State we owe our freedom. To it we owe our living and property, for outside of organised society man’s needs far surpass his means. The humble beggar owes much to the State, but the haughty millionaire far more; for outside of it they both would be worse off than the beggar now is. To it we owe all that we are and all that we have. To it we owe our civilization. It is by its help that we have reached such a condition as man individually never would have been able to attain. Progress is the struggle with Nature for mastery, is war with misery and inabilities of our ‘natural’ condition. The State is the organic union of us all to wage that war, to subdue Nature, to redress natural defects and inequalities. The State, therefore, so far from being a burden to the ‘good,’ a ‘necessary evil,’ is man’s greatest good. This is simply a striking paraphrase and extension of the passage from Ferdinand Lassalle which we have prefixed as an epigraph to these pages. Practical Implications. So much by way of abstract principles; but what are the practical implications of this theory of the function of the State as head of the grouped communes of a nation? What has Socialism to say of the present? The great cleavage between Socialists and all Individualist politicians is that in spite of the manifest failure of Individualism on every hand, all so-called practical politicians continue to believe in it, and in spite of the universal success of Socialism, continue to treat Socialism as utopian and unpractical. Although State and Municipal service is everywhere better and cheaper than capitalistic service, although State and Municipal employees are better treated than the employees of private enterprise, although the most important jobs are everywhere done by the State and the Municipalities, and the State and the Municipalities are constantly having to come to the rescue of Private Enterprise, the amazing fact remains that this triumphant thing Socialism is still a nickname. Daniel O’Connell enraged the Irish virago by calling her a Logarithm, and when a Tory wishes to be specially exasperating he calls a piece of legislation Socialistic, with the never-failing result that ministers rise and indignantly repudiate the opprobrious epithet, without having even the Irishwoman’s excuse, for she was angry because she did not know what a Logarithm was. In social service no other principle save public control and public responsibility and public efficiency is now or ever was any good. All that has been of any service in legislation from the beginning of time has been where corporate control was extended over the means of life, where the State stepped in to preserve the peace, to protect life and property, to educate the ignorant, to provide legal aid to accused persons, to run the mails, to inspect mines, ships, ladders, scaffoldings, weights and measures, to develop telegraphs and railways, to help with great distance-saving canals, to encourage agriculture, fishing, and handicrafts. Is a great estuary of the sea to be reclaimed from Father Neptune and made into good arable land? The Dutch Government does it once and again - first with the Polders and then with the Zuyder Zee. One third of the area of the country has been ‘made’ by the State in this way. Has a railway to be built through a desert inhabitated by hostile tribesmen? Again the undertaking is so large that only the State can do it. When the Manchester Ship Canal Company had spent all its money, Manchester City had to come to the rescue and finish the canal. Though armies of old were raised by private enterprise, the Great War could only have been waged by States and State armies. The very largest jobs always have to be done by the State or the Municipality. In resources, in command of credit, in command of the best talent, the State and the Municipality are easily first. This is so obvious that it would not be worth stating if it were not habitually forgotten in practice and theory alike. The Concluding part - part three will be available in the February edition of Gateway. PART ONE: This is a long article and will be available for free download in pdf format when part three is posted in February. Is the State the Enemy of the People? History, gentlemen, is a struggle with Nature - the misery, the ignorance, the poverty, the weakness, and consequent slavery in which we were involved when the human race came upon the scene in the beginning of history. The progressive victory over this weakness - this is the development of freedom which history displays to us. It is the State whose function it is to carry on THIS DEVELOPMENT OF FREEDOM, this development of the human race until its freedom is attained. The State is this unity of individuals into a moral whole, a unity which increases a million-fold the strength of all the individuals who are comprehended in it, and multiplies a million times the power which would be at the disposal of them as individuals. - FERDINAND LASSALLE: The Working Man’s Programme. Till all, recanting, own the State Means nothing but the People. MACAULAY. Travellers report that Arab boatmen used to be incapable of pulling altogether with a ‘Yo, heave ho!’ (or its Arabic equivalent), but tugged separately and ineffectively; and an inability fully to co-operate is noted as a characteristic of primitive man, animals, and the insane. Most of our present-day troubles appear to be fundamentally due to the lack of organization, and of the efficiency, economy, and real freedom (from disabilities) that come with a proper adaptation of means to ends. Is there less freedom to all because of the rules of the road, the regulation of traffic, and the principle of the queue? The man who elbows, jostles, and spreads himself in car or carriage curtails the freedom of other people. The demands for amalgamation, consolidation, and working agreements are simply reactions from the hindrances and losses due to licence and confusion. A hundred and twenty competing railways amalgamated into six groups, with a saving of expense which has enabled them to carry on despite the handicap of the heavy road traffic. But they amalgamated to suit their own interests. A still greater consolidation in the public interest could be effected by amalgamating the six groups into one State service. Coalmining companies ought long since to have followed the example set by the railways; but it seems they will do so only on State compulsion, and to this all Individualists think they are opposed. Socialism is, they pretend, ‘the end of all things.’ The objection to nationalization is the most palpable of all the prejudices. The State is our friend even if we have no other. It takes an interest in us almost as soon as we are born, and if there is no one else to bury us the State will do it. If a poor woman whom nobody would have looked at is knocked down in the street, the representative of the State will hold up the whole of the traffic till she is gathered into safety. She will be taken to hospital and have such skill and care as she never would have got from her friends. The organised community is her best friend. We all fall back upon the State when in trouble. Even the malefactor is glad of police protection from private vengeance. The capitalist himself, much as he hates and professes to despise the State, is glad of a State subsidy, and is fain to appeal to the courts for justice as against birds of his own feather. I one day came upon a group of youths who were tormenting a blind man. When they saw me they ran away, and a policeman coming upon the scene almost at the same moment, he took hold of the bind man in kindness. The sightless face was strained with fear and anxiety, but when the bobby laid hands on him the man seemed to know the difference. He ran his sensitive fingers rapidly up and down the bobby’s buttons, and his face broke into a pleased smile. He knew it was the protective hand of the State rescuing him from private enterprise. Private enterprise no longer builds houses, or plants trees, or lays down sewers, or carries out large electrical installations. These things all bring us back to the State. The traders of the United States clamour for railway rates the same as those of Canada, because, although Canada is much more sparsely peopled than the States, it can give lower rates, the service having been nationalised. There are no dividends to find. The Post Office is the biggest and most efficient business in the country, and it gives the cheapest service. Although it does not exist for profit, but primarily for service, it netted £44,000,000 of profit during the thirteen years 1912-25, in spite, too, of all the gratuitous services (constantly being increased) which it performs. The Civil Services are turning over £223,000,000 worth of business a-year, and they do it on working expenses of £11,000,000, or about 5 per cent. No private business is managed upon so small a percentage. The Social-Democratic State. Since the time of Plato at least wise men have looked to the State and to the principle of Nationalization as affording the means of social redress. For eighty years the Socialist demand has been for the setting up of a Social-Democratic State, with national ownership of land and machinery. This did not mean that purely local industries were to be managed by a Government bureau at Whitehall, but merely that the communal authorities in localities possessing valuable natural resources such as coal or granite, or acquired skill in metallurgy or textiles, should own allegiance to a central authority that would prevent the setting up of local monopolies claiming monopoly privileges. This ideal of mutually interdependent and co-ordinated communities of weavers and fishermen, of graziers and grain-raisers, is evidently too large for some minds; and we have had first the Syndicalist demand for the politically independent trade union, and now we have, apparently, a demand from some who regard themselves as Socialists for the political independence of the commune. This last conception is as old at least as the time of the Communards of 1871, who in several populous centres of France rose in armed revolt against the newly-formed Republic, and declared for ‘a free federation of independent communes.’ France and Britain are free federations of communes already; and as to the ‘independence,’ London and Leeds no more need or want to be independent of each other than the nose needs or wants to be independent of the eyes or ears. This idea of the State as an evil is the great bugbear which stands between the nation and the control of its essential services. Critics who turn a blind eye to the gross and palpable evils of Individualism - with its recurring holdups and its permanent waste and inefficiency - inveigh against the imaginary evil of the functions of the State being indefinitely increased, and the business of the nation being made to flow through the Post Office to a still greater extent than it is now doing; though be it said the Post Office has added Old Age Pensions and State Insurance business to its numerous other departments with the maximum of ease, efficiency, and economy. Still, the dislike of certain aspects of bureaucracy is wholesome enough. But the suspicion with respect to excessive centralization becomes itself an excess when the suspecters go on roundly to declare, as they do, that the State is in any case an evil. Social Evils not State-Created. We are NOT at war with the State. The evils of life have not been State-created. It was not the State that called slavery into existence; but it did something to protect the slave from his master. The slave was the captive of his owner, who had originally either taken him prisoner in war or captured him in a slave-raid. But while the State did not introduce slavery, and there was slavery before there was a State, it was the State that abolished it, finding twenty millions sterling for the compensation of the dispossessed ‘owners’ in British Dominions, while in America the North fought the South to abolish it. Serfdom was a remnant of slavery. The basis was the strong hand and willpower of the dominant class. Where it was abolished the State either abolished it summarily, as in Russia, or connived at its abolition by declaring, as England did in the fourteenth century, that a year’s residence in a corporate town freed the serf. Landlordism. In its inception landlordism is not State-created. The strong men who came to Britain with Hengist and Horsa found the land cultivated by free and half-free colonii, who had been left behind as a relic of the Roman occupation. The masterless man, living in a wild country, made haste to find himself a strong man for master. He was willing to abandon the wild places, the No-Man’s Land, and till another man’s land because of the protection that lay in numbers and the fighting capabilities of his chief. Up to the reign of Alfred, the Saxon tribesmen were freeholders, owing fealty to no overlord. They had got their land from the invading chiefs in freehold, on the ground of their strength, courage, and skill in battle, and it was because of the lack of public spirit on the part of these tribesmen that Alfred the Great and Archbishop Dunstan (the wisest and most public-spirited men of their time) called into existence the feudal system, which made the tribesmen only holders of the land of which they previously had been owners. They would not come out and stay out to repel the Danish pirates. They were individualists who would fight an invader if he appeared within their own hundred or shire, but they would not follow him up and drive him out of the country. The thought of the goodwife, the children, and the farmstead left behind drew them off the pursuit. And so the feudal system had to come as the punishment for the Saxon’s lack of public spirit. The State thus created the feudal system, but it left millions of acres of folk land and Common land for the poor freemen and the serfs, and time and again it protected the commons from illegal landlordial encroachment. Even Charles the First, tyrant, torturer, and pledge-breaker as he was, did his best to preserve the commons. He learned that Rockingham Forest had dwindled from sixty miles in width to six miles, and in 1633 he appointed a Commission to inquire into these appropriations. The noble depredators, one of whom was the Earl of Essex, were forced to disgorge and were stiffly fined. Rockingham Forest, as public land, was protected by the State for the people. Part Two next month... |
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