FROM THE PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION; The substance of the following pages was originally delivered as a lecture in Glasgow and Aberdeen as long ago as 1891; but the successive reprints called for seem to show that it still meets a need. In view of the number of middle-class men who have all along been associated with the Socialist movement - which, in fact, was everywhere initiated by middle-class men - there is specious warrant for the view that Socialism is not at all necessarily a proletarian cause. But the proletariat does not mean merely the manual-labour class. It means all who get their living by labour - the work of their heads or hands or both. The middle-class men who have helped in the propaganda of Socialism mostly belong to the intellectual proletariat. They live on salaries rather than on rent, profit, or interest. They are wage-earners differing from the manual-labourer only in respect that their wages are better. Macaulay’s famous cheque for £20,000 from Longmans & Co. for his History of England, represented wages. It was the reward of many years’ work upon that particular job, plus, of course, exceptional ability and the reading and experience of a lifetime. But while we gladly receive the help of professional men, the presence of these in our movement does not appreciably affect its class character. Socialism is an attack upon the only means whereby millions of men and women in the upper and middle classes live, and the whole lesson of history is that they will fight savagely for the retention of their rents, their interest, and their dividends. It is true that men of the classes have helped to carry schemes of socialization whereby public enterprise has supplanted private enterprise. But it is the shareholder in a company rather than the man who has built up a business for himself who is supplanted. The mere investor, barred out in one direction, knows that as yet there are other fields for his capital, and he does not resent municipalization as the man will do who is driven to the wall by it in his own personal calling. Let the Socialists in Parliament and the local bodies introduce any clear general attack upon private enterprise, as they must sooner or later do when they are strong enough, and then we shall see war. If men fight for territory, the flag, or ‘patriotism,’ will they not fight with tenfold more tenacity for their living, even if that living be as ill gotten as the territory? PREFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION. In issuing an eighth edition of ‘The Class War’ so long after the date of its original publication, one might expect to find many changes on the face of the problem as here stated. But in essentials the more the position changes the more it remains the same. The handful of Haves have more than ever; the vast multitude of Havenots have less; for prices have risen and wages at their highest during the war never kept pace with the cost of living. At the same time British Capital ‘does so well’ that it cannot find safe and profitable investment for the surplus. All ‘new issues’ are ‘over-subscribed within a few hours. In one year (1924) no less than £6o,000,000 of British capital was invested abroad, mostly on precarious security, and Mr. Keynes said that in 1923 we invested abroad about two-thirds of what passed through the investment markets, and probably between a half and a third of our total savings. Yet the investors talk of ‘foreign competition’! The national income of Britain in 1800 is put at £174,000,000. This had risen by 1920 to £4,000,000 - a twenty-four-fold increase. But the income per head of population had increased only five times - from £16 14s. per head in 1800 to £85 per head in 1920. Two and a half million breadgetters secure more than half of the national income. Seventeen and a quarter million breadwinners get less than half. With the trade unionism of the inconclusive demand - the dog chasing his tail - too many workers are still content. Yet the unrest is permanent. Nothing is done to remove the fundamental causes of it. The strike remedy only increases the dis-ease, which is poverty; for it means an immediate loss of wages, and, if successful, a rise in the cost of living. The strike method is destructive, and destruction may be the work of an instant. Socialism is constructive, and by its very nature the process is slow even if the human agents were willing. And they are not willing. Socialism is long and life is short. On the other hand, the workers strike with pleasure. The mine is a place of darksome misery and danger. The stokehold is a hell of torture. The noisy mill, the icy rigging, the stifling retort-house, the stuffy printing shop, the clanging shipyard, the fume-laden foundry are all places from which the workers are glad to escape, especially if there be the hope of better wages at the end of a brief holiday. The workers gladly respond to the call of the strike-leader to come out. That is where the dangerous power of Syndicalism lies. But Socialism involves reading. It involves attendance at meetings. It involves committee work, electioneering, speech-making, canvassing. And when the Socialist representative is returned, he is only, after all, at the beginning of his work. The one thing the working class has not tried on any scale is definite Socialist representation on all the assemblies its votes control, with a view to the steady socialization of industry. In State or Municipal employ alone are wages increased and price lowered. This new edition is issued in the hope that the pamphlet will help towards a more general and fruitful realization of the irreconcilable antagonism that must exist between Capitalism and Labour, and the adoption of the idea and practice of Public ownership and Socialistic administration as the only possible basis of industrial ‘peace with honour.’ The Class War. The wit of man can devise no scheme by which the poor can become less poor without the rich becoming less rich, - The Star. The more there is allotted to labour the less there will remain to be appropriated as rent. - FAWCETT; Manual of Political Economy. What agreement is there between the hyena and a dog? and what peace between the rich and the poor? As the wild ass is the lion’s prey in the wilderness, so the rich eat up the poor. As the proud hate humility, so doth the rich abhor the poor. – The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, xiii. 18-20. A state in which classes exist is not one but two. The poor constitute one state and the rich another, and both, living in the closest proximity, are constantly on the watch against each other. The ruling class is finally unable to go to war, because to do so it requires the services of the mass, which, when armed, inspires it with terror than the enemy.- PLATO; The Republic. Disguise it as we may by feudal benevolence or the kindly attempts of philanthropists, the material interests of the small nation privileged to exact rent for its monopolies, and of the great nation thereby driven to receive only the remainder of the product, are permanently opposed. – FABIAN TRACT; Facts for Socialists. No man profiteth but by the losse of others; by which reason a man should condemne all manner of gaine. The Merchant thrives not but by the licentiousnesse of youth; the husbandman by dearth of corne; the Architect but by the ruine of houses; the Lawyer by suits and controversies between men; Honour it selfe, and practice of religious ministers, is drawne from our death and vices. ‘No physitian delighteth in the health of his owne friend, saith the ancient Greeke Comike; ‘nor no Soldier is pleased with the peace of his citie, and so of the rest.’ - MONTAIGNE; Essay XXI. (Florio’s Translation). It was a safe thing for Jesus to say; ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword.’ He that comes to the world with a message bearing in it the promise and potency of great and far-reaching changes is a revolutionist; and the methods of revolution are and ever must be of the nature of war. The war may not and should not be one of balls and bayonets; but the feelings evoked will not be less vengeful, and the efforts put forth not less strenuous, than in the case of actual physical conflict. The glory of victory will be there, the deep chagrin of defeat, the patient determination, the generalship, the heroisms of men in the ranks, the surprises, the invincible hopefulness of the opposing legions, the headlong partisanship, the impetuous devotion to leaders - nothing of all this will be awanting in the war which pioneers and prophets bring into the world, The Victories of Peace. ‘Peace hath her victories not less renowned than those of war’ we are told; but the word ‘war’ is used there in the limited lethal sense. The so-called victories of peace have actually been won in battle with the hosts of ignorance, prejudice, and selfishness - the soldier of rationalism against the mercenary of superstition, the friends of freedom and justice against the trained bands of privilege, despotism, and hoary use-and-wont. The victories of peace are the increase of knowledge, the development of the arts, the application of the sciences the growth of liberty, the diffusion of happiness; and every step in the onward march has been hotly contested. The army of invasion has been met at every point; and the deeds done in the many fields of battle fill the brightest pages in history, and are the glory and the stimulus of every fighting, forward-looking spirit in the world to-day. Contrasts. The greatness of a man’s message to the world is determined by the amount of good it is capable of doing to mankind; and the more it promises to better the lot of mankind in general the more it will threaten to disturb the interests of favoured classes in particular. The theory of Socialism is that the division of society into classes renders social warfare inevitable while the class divisions continue to exist. Socialism contends that the poverty of the poor is caused by robbery on the part of the rich. The mansion explains the hovel; Belgravia has its counterpart in Shoreditch. The factory, the foundry, the shipbuilding yard account for the shooting-lodge, the yacht, and the tours in foreign lands. The long day’s toil of one class renders possible the lifelong play of the other. The withdrawal from school at any early age of the worker’s son enables the gilded youth to put in years at college. If there were no antagonism between the classes, all members of the community ought to suffer by the loss of any one among them. As it is, one man’s loss is another man’s gain. If there were community of interests throughout society, fire, flood, or shipwreck ought to be disastrous to every member of society. But because the interests of the classes are not identical, the destruction of buildings by fire, the inundation of the wealthy quarter of a town, the loss of ships at sea, give employment to the artizan who repairs the loss and damage, and transform the hoard of the capitalist into the wage of the labourer. ‘Peace! Peace!’ Commonplaces of demagogues, you may say. No! For does not the political economist, and all who are of his way of thinking, contend that the class interests can be reconciled? Are there not millions of men - working men even - who accept the political economist’s view? Are there not scores of men in this hall at the present moment who believe that there is no necessary antagonism between landlord and tenant, between capitalist and labourer, between rich and poor? Who believe that the prevailing want of harmony between the classes arises from the individuals rather than the institutions? You are not all of you want to put an end to capitalism. Many of you believe that it would be stealing to take back your own country from the men whose ancestors stole it long ago. If the air were stored in tanks, or the sunshine bottled up, you would many of you accept the situation as a matter of course. You would pay for the air at so much per 1000 cubic feet - for the sunshine at so much per dozen beams in bottle. Marking Time. And you will come out on strike again, many of you. You can’t get along with the capitalist; but you still think you couldn’t get along without him. When, in good times, your strike secures you an increase of a shilling or two in your week’s wages you imagine that you have acquitted yourselves nobly, and that the social problem is so much nearer solution. You leave out of account the fact that if good times bring you an extra shilling they bring your employer an extra sovereign; that, while you are absolutely getting more, you are relatively getting less. You will forget that if you get more wages while in employment, yet that employment is more insecure – that you or some of your comrades will be oftener among the unemployed – and that every year your labour becomes more and more intensified. You are content to mark time with Trades Unionism, instead of marching forward with Socialism. You vote for the nominee of the whisky ring. You work like little giants to secure the return to the Town Council or to Parliament of the man who has made his fortune by sending coffin ships to sea, and pocketing the insurance money. You prefer the man with money to the man with brains and good intentions. You snub your political friends, and send them away sick at heart, and despairing of you and your cause. It is little wonder if at times we get sick of you, get sick of talking to you, get sick of our own comrades-in-arms even, and take to ‘slating’ one another. Yet you pretend that you do not need us to preach the Class War to you! But we will preach, and you will hear us, and ultimately you will be forced to recognise that the Class War exists. Class Treason You say you recognise that already! Why, then, are so many of you there and not here? Socialists stand along among social reformers in recognising the existence of the Class War. Political Economists, mere Trades Unionists, and Liberals believe that the best way to bring good times to working men is to bring good times to their masters. They want to see Britain able to keep her markets. They believe in technical education as a thing that will enable them to beat the foreigner. When an employer voluntarily grants a reduction of hours, his Trades Unionist employees hasten to pass a vote of thanks to him for the concession; and if a Socialist reminds them that, after all, the employer is only neglecting an opportunity of taking that last ounce of his pound of flesh, with which he is already pretty well gorged at their expense, they turn on that Socialist and rend him. His alleged churlishness is the subject of talk with them for months, and they recriminated with dogged malice on the party to which he belongs. When you start a trade union what do you take as your motto? Do you go to the Communist Manifesto for some of its barbed and glancing epigrams, or to Kropotkin’s ‘Appeal to the Young,’ or to some of the many revolutionary passages in Isaiah, James, or Paul’s Epistles? No. You print on your stationery an antiquated piece of bunkum which sets forth that you are ‘United to protect, but not combined to injure.’ As if the aim and end of the Labour movement were not to inaugurate a system of society in which the occupation and emoluments of the landlord and the capitalist would no longer exist! I have heard a titled person state that Trade Unionism, so far from being inimical to the interests of capitalists, was a good thing for them. And the working men present applauded the statements as though it were quite right and comforting that it should be so. When I pointed out, as I took occasion to do, that the only way to help the worker to the full reward of his labour was to make an end of capitalistic profits and of landlordial rents, the more Socialistic ones among them rode off on the plea that even that would be a good thing for the capitalists and landlords. The Successful Business Man. I advise you not to wait till you convince them of that! I meet capitalists in the cars, at public dining tables, and in their own homes sometimes, and I find that their faces are not set in the direction of ‘the cities of the Commune.’ They do not, like Falstaff, ‘babble of green fields,’ nor pine and sigh for liberty, equality, and fraternity. They have a good deal to say, though, about Copper and Rubber and Imperial Tobacco. At election time they manifest a bashful interest in municipal politics, as if they were ashamed to be detected taking any interest in such vanities; and it is easy to see that anything outside of business is outside their beat. They have a good-humoured contempt for politicians of all sorts; and for the enthusiastic politician their contempt is undisguised. A business man may drink and fornicate, may play billiards, shoot pigeons, bet on racehorses, spend his time and money on a hundred and one useless or positively hurtful things, and these will be regarded as the legitimate recreations, or, at worst, the excusable failings of a busy man. But let him dabble in politics, and immediately his business friends will begin to sneer and indulge in scornful head-tossings; and there will be a general agreement that it would become him better to attend to his business. Old Middlewick, in the play of ‘Our Boys,’ is a typical capitalist; and when old Middlewick was consulted on any question in art, science, or literature, you remember his answer always was – ‘Well, I don’t know anything about that; but you must allow that I’m an authority on butter!’ The leopard cannot change his spots, and even if the typical capitalist saw that capitalism were doomed, as it is, he must needs resist us. I have known men retire from a distasteful business in which they had made enough money to enable them to spend the rest of their lives in comfort, even affluence. But so completely were they wedded to the ignoble excitement of money-getting that they had to return, like the sow that was washed, to their wallowing in the mire, Russell Sage, the mean millionaire who pushed another man in front of him to save him from the flying projectiles of a bomb, shortly afterwards closed his own magpie life of gathering, and left his millions to be fought over. What is said by these lunatics on behalf of their craze is that if those who come after them have as much pleasure in spending the money as they have had in making it, they are quite welcome. What an inversion of healthy sentiment is this! Many a jolly bagman who is pleased to book your order hates to collect the account on his next journey. He wants to give you discount, wants to make abatements if you grumble, offers to stand you your dinner or at least a drink, in return for favours conferred. But the typical successful man grabs your cash with an eager eye and a greedy, nervous hand; he grudges to give discounts; his ‘Thank you’ is cool and perfunctory; and he passes as promptly to the next deal as if he had conferred a favour on you instead of having enriched himself. And so soon as he has got his order or completed his bargain he is off for the next victim, hardly waiting to shake hands. What idea can such men have of the truth there is in the saying that it is more blessed to give than to receive? Yet so perversely are we constituted that some of us, worshipping success, can actually find in our hearts to admire this incarnation of calculating selfishness, recognising that if we could be equally bloodless and inhuman we also should ‘succeed’ as he does. Take these men away from their stocks, their shares, their ledgers, and their economics, and you take the life interests away from them. Take them out of the harness of commercialism, and they will, as the tramp said, ‘be eternally blasted and knocked out of shape.’ The chances are that, as servants of a Socialistic Municipality which did not cheat anybody, they would pine and die under what would seem to them such degenerate conditions. So that on any understanding these men must suffer before we can secure the greatest good of the greatest number. Let us clear our minds of cant, then, and preach the Class war without holding any cards up our sleeve, and without bringing upon ourselves the necessity of ‘winking the other eye.’ Peasants and mechanics write immortal poems, and lead the people to great democratic victories. Though now They toil in penury and grief, Unknown, if not maligned, Forlorn, forlorn, hearing the scorn Of the meanest of mankind – they will be remembered by posterity as men who did something to leave the world better that they found it. But the swag-bellied money lords, who have spent their lives in getting and hoarding, will go down voiceless to ignoble graves, and history will be read as if they had not been, and succeeding generations will know them not. The Moralisation of Capital. You probably have not heard the phrase, ‘moralisation of capital’ – used by the Positivists – but you believe in the thing which the phrase denotes. We hold that ‘moralised capital’ is of a piece with ‘honest stealing,’ ‘virtuous vice,’ ‘truthful mendacity,’ or ‘beautiful ugliness.’ The only way in which the capitalist can ‘moralise’ himself is by ceasing to be a capitalist altogether. Capitalism is a fraud in its inception, and still more fraudulent in its subsequent workings. A man, by starving his mind and body, is able to save money. He borrows books instead of buying them. He starves his emotional nature by neglecting to go to the theatre, because to go to the theatre costs money. He doesn’t go to concerts because concerts cost money. He is a teetotaller, not so much because he wishes to keep his stomach clean and his head clear, but because his ideal men are teetotallers, gradgrinds who mortify the flesh in order to save. He doesn’t marry: he can’t afford it – yet. He either suppresses his natural desires – desires as healthy as the craving for food - or else, like a tom-cat, he prowls around at night. When he goes to the races or to some fête or fair he leaves his purse at home for he should be tempted to spend. When a subscription is being taken for a public purpose he does not approve of the object; or if it is for some unfortunate fellow-worker he thinks So-and-so has been careless, and doesn’t deserve help. While the flowers and the birds are arrayed more gloriously a Solomon, the saving man dons the ancient, verdant overcoat for another winter, sends his summer suit to the washtub, and continues to sport the hat that was in fashion, so to say, when George the Fourth was king. Thus stultifying his life, and by refusing to do his duty to himself and his fellows, he is able to save money. And the money is saved with a bad intention. The aim is either to start independently in business, or else to secure shares in the undertaking paying the highest dividends compatible with security. The object of this man is to leave his class behind him, and to live upon labour rather than by it. But the working man can never save very much, let him be never so stingy. If he start in business he must necessarily do so in a humble way, and should he die rich his riches will represent, not his own savings, but surplus value of other people’s labour. We do not ask you to have an over-abundant respect for wealth so accumulated. The best men are not able to save money. The best men are not seldom in debt. The man who has store of money with a banker while men, women, and children are starving, and while great movements languish for want of money, is in need being of being experimented upon by Acts of Parliament taking the form of something different from an Income Tax. The War in Operation. ‘The wit of man can devise no scheme by which the poor can become less poor without the rich becoming less rich.’ Men who tell you that you can be well off without hurting anybody’s pecuniary interests are either insincere or don’t understand the Social Question. Proper State Insurance would ‘rob’ the insurance societies. Temperance would ‘rob’ the publicans, pawnbrokers, distillers, and brewers. Saving would ‘rob’ the shopkeeping class in general. Vegetarianism would ‘rob’ the butcher in particular. Successful Co-operation in production and distribution would ‘rob’ the capitalist; partially successful Co-operation is already ‘robbing’ him. Shopkeepers and commercial travellers complain bitterly of how the ‘Co-op.’ ruins trade, which means that they are not able to get the profits they once could. Our objection to all these schemes is that they don’t ‘rob’ the ‘robbers’ enough. Socialism takes up the work where they leave it, and would ‘rob’ the monopolists of all power to take from the community rent, profit, interest, and ‘fancy’ salaries. The Genus Flunkey. There are those who deny the existence of a Class War, and claim that the antagonism is as keen between individuals within one class as between one class and another. As an example they cite the footman or valet, who has more contempt for Socialism and the useful worker, and stronger prejudices against both, than even his master has. But the lackey is perhaps the only case of a man belonging to the proletariat whose class feeling is thus perverted. All other men of the working class may feel that they could get on with the rich. Soldiers, men-of-war sailors, prison warders, policemen, often sympathise with Socialism. The flunkey never. Ignorant, gluttonous, unwholesome from confinement and the keeping of bad hours, the pasty-faced ‘buttons’ becomes in time the bottle-nosed butler. Taught no useful calling, repressed, drum-majored, segregated from the ordinary folk of their class, the gentry’s gentry must feel that with the rich they stand or fall. The flunkey’s position industrially - if his work can be called industry - is unique. He is the one exception to the rule of the Class War. The selection of this one declassed class calls attention to the fact that there is none other such. Other people work for the rich only because the poor cannot buy their products. The seamstress who makes court dresses could make frocks for our wives and daughters. The tailors who make clothes for ‘the nobility and gentry’ could make coats and breeches for us. The painters, gilders, and tile-fixers, the upholsterers, and workers in marquetry who put in so much time in the homes of the rich could be working in our homes. Let the rich take their hands out of our pockets, let our labour be properly organised instead of being wasted, and we should be able to employ, in work for ourselves, those who at present minister only or chiefly to the well-to-do. But there is no place for the flunkey at his work. No sensible man wants a valet to put on his clothes. No sensible man wants a boy in buttons to run his errands or a big man in silk stockings to open the door. A man of sense wants to be served at table by a deft-handed woman, not by a man in a swallow-tailed coat. The flunkey is usually neither strong enough nor game enough to act as waiter and chucker-out in a public house. Heaven knows what is to become of him unless he die out gradually as the expropriators are bit by bit expropriated. The men of the first French Revolution saw that the lackey was a useless and mischievous creature, and they tried to abolish him by forbidding the wearing of liveries. What the flunkey may think about Socialism, or how he may feel towards the workman, makes no difference to the existence of a Class War. The Hatred that is based on Love. There is no way in which the Class War can be avoided. You can’t have the reward of your labour and the idler have it too. There is just so much wealth produced every day. It may be more, it may be less; but there always is just so much; and the more the capitalist gets the less you will get, and vice versa. We preach the Gospel of Hatred, because in the circumstances it seems the only righteous thing we can preach. The talk about the ‘Gospel of Love’ is solemn rubbish. The hatred of stealing, lying, meanness and uncleanness, hypocrisy, greed, and tyranny means the love of the obverse of these. Those who talk about the Gospel of Love, with landlordism and capitalism for its objects, want us to make our peace with iniquity. We don’t preach hatred of men, but hatred of systems and those features men’s characters which are the outcome of the false and bad in the systems. The rich are amiable; they have little call to be cross when all goes so well with them. They are good-natured because comfortable and not over-anxious for the morrow. They are pleasant companions because they are educated beyond the measure of letters accorded to workers. They have been accustomed to the society of men who are informed by reading, by travel, and by association with others like themselves. They have been fined by their intellectual, æsthetic, and generally pleasant social surroundings, and can afford to think well of the world since it has been so good to them. We don’t hate them. Indeed, we like and admire them often. We welcome one of their number when he comes among us, because we feel that he has had advantages not extended to us. Forerunners. But unless we hate the system which prevents us from being what we otherwise might have been, we shall not be able to strive against it with the patient, never-flagging zeal which our work, to be well done, requires. And to keep alive and undimmed this flame of hatred, divine not diabolical, we require not only to look around us, but especially to look back upon the world as it has been, and to the example of those who have fought the good fight. To Socrates dying for the right to speak and reason on any subject under heaven or heaven itself. To him whose great career and tragedy the Christian world would render meaningless by calling them by the career and tragedy of a god. To Savonarola, brooking the power of gold in stately Florence, heedless of the consequences which might come to himself. To John Ball, Wat Tyler, and John Cade, in our land the first forerunners of Socialism. To Bruno and Vanini, holding aloft the light of reason in a land and an age of darkness and cruelty, and suffering the death agony with unexampled fortitude before an utterly hostile world. Then again, coming nearer to our own day, to Cromwell, Milton, Hampden, and Pym, to John Eliot, Harry Vane, and the many other doughty ones who defied and worsted the kingly power of the first Charles. Nearer still, to More and Baird and Andrew Hardie, to Ernest Jones, Bronterre O’Brien, and Robert Owen. Yet again - for the list is long, the company a goodly one - to Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, to Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien, the ‘noble three’ of the Irish song and story; to Vera Sassoulitch, Marie Spiridonova, Sophia Perovsky; to Karl Marx, intellectually rigorous, morally incorruptible, living for the Revolution in days when the Revolution both seemed and was distant. To Henry Hyndman, who by the work of a lifetime, with voice and pen, has made the Revolution possible in Britain. To William Morris, the poet and artist-prophet of the new society. To Keir Hardie who engineered first great electoral victory of the Fourth Estate. To Robert Blatchford and Edward Bellamy who made Socialists by the million. How great is our inheritance! how illustrious those who have preceded us on this path! You think we claim too much when we call some of these men our lineal predecessors? Hearken to what one of them, the so-called ‘mad’ priest of Kent, said more than five hundred years ago;- Good people, things will never go well in England as long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they must needs be better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we oatcakes and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and our toil that these men hold their state. An Opportunity Lost. They ought to have settled the Class War in those days so far as England was concerned. The reason why they did not do so was because they did not cherish the class hatred as John Ball cherished it, and did not see as clearly as he saw what required to be done. They had 120.000 men in the field, London and all the southern and midland counties were at their mercy. But they trusted to a king to settle the problem which they could only settle themselves. They believed in Richard and neglected their own leaders, just as the working class reads and believes the Daily Mail and votes Tory to-day. The trouble is the same to-day. You are too humble, too easily satisfied. You don’t know what you are entitled to, even under the present system; and you haven’t settled in your mind what you want in a future system. ‘Man, Know Thyself!’ You must be more envious, more jealous; you must develop more needs, more tastes. You must read and listen, and then you know how ignorant you are. You must consort with your betters in education and refinement (and I can suggest no better company than the poets, historians, scientists, economists, and philosophers). Then you will realise the extent to which society has robbed you. You will feel what you might have been; and the iron will enter into your soul. You must try to account for the vices and the failings of your comrades in this movement, and then you will be able to forgive almost everything except treason to the cause. You must seek your own good, not in saving, Friendly Societies, or the ‘main chance’ in any way, but in the general good - knowing that if all rise you must rise with the rest. ‘Born to be a Man.’ I want you to ‘realise’ yourself. You want to be happy; but it is not enough to be happy. A pig may be happy in its sty. You ought to want to be happy in the best possible way. The end before us is perfection of being, both physical and mental. What a wretched lot we are in this hall to-night! How many of us could ride a horse, row a boat without ‘catching crabs,’ swim across a river, rescue a drowning woman, fight a stalwart footpad who offered violence, deliver a coherent speech in public, or even write a correct and intelligible letter? You have read the epitaph – ‘Born to be a man, but died a grocer,’ and you have smiled at the expense of the man of cheese. But the rough epitaph might, with variation, go the round of the trades and professions. For there are many male children born into the world who never have an opportunity of becoming more than printers or carpenters, lawyers or pedagogues, parsons or touts. Unless man’s estate be something short of what I take it to be we are most of us minors - we are still in our pupilage. A Programme. When you realise this you will set your teeth for the Class War. You will go in for politics, become agitators more or less, and probably get an ill name. The things you will be working for, the jargon of which your speech will be full, will be something like this:- Shorter hours is the first thing I want, that the workless may get a hand in, and that the workers may have time to read and think and watch their children grow. Then a tax on landlords, by which we may recover as much as possible of what passes us as rent. Then abolition of the House of Lords and the monarchy. Then more Home Rule and more local Government, that town and county councils may cope with the greatly increased work devolved upon them. Then extension of municipal operations; the socialization of coal stores, dairy farms, bakeries, laundries, public-houses, the slaughter of cattle and the sale of butcher meat, the building and letting of houses - in short, the taking-over, by the local bodies, of as many departments of production and distribution as need be. By this time the Class War will be shaping for the last great engagement. So you will say. How to Make Life Worth Living. If you go in for this work the days will pass swiftly with you. Your lives will be full of interest. You won’t be at a loss to know how to spend your time. Your party will be defeated, and your hopes dashed again and again. The finger of scorn will he pointed at you. Newspaper editors will crow over your failures, and lay down the law in the oracular style we know so well. The boys will cry at you in the streets. The ignorant will laugh, the brutal will sometimes beat down your arguments by sheer vociferation; and often you will be plunged in momentary despair. But if you are of the right stuff you cannot let your hopes and your desires go. To leave Socialism would be to part with a portion of your being. Reverses, failures, desertions from the ranks, the indifference of your fellows - all this, if you are of the right sort, will only strengthen your determination to persist in the good fight whose termination in the triumph of your class has been the hope of the ages. Let fate or insufficiency provide Mean ends for men who are what they would be; Penned in their narrow day no change they see Save one which strikes the blow to brutes and pride. Our faith is ours, and comes not on a tide; And whether earth’s great offspring by decree Must rot if they abjure rapacity, Not argument, but effort shall decide. They number many heads in that hard flock; Trim swordsmen they push forth; yet try thy steel, Thou fighting for poor humankind wilt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring the army of the faithful through. The Capitalist Press (originally published in The Gateway –1920)
[This is a review of a pamphlet I’ve been trying to track down for a year now – ed] There is a story of an innocent man who boasted his impartiality, saying ‘The Daily Mail comes to the house in the morning. I take home the Evening News at night. We get the Weekly Despatch and the Sunday Pictorial on Sundays, and my daughter takes in the Daily Mirror. So that we hear all sides at our house. If this poor man should read ‘The Capitalist Press’ (I.L.P. Information Committee, 5 York Buildings, London WC2, 2d) he will find that all his ‘sides’ emanate from the same Harmsworth Group of journalists and business managers. This very useful pamphlet shows what the newspaper press is (an agency for ‘the preservation of capitalist supremacy’): who owns each paper, who directs policy, and what this means to the nation in practice. Thus the Western Mail opposes the findings of the Sankey Commission and systematically denounces the nationalization of the mines; and it transpires, as is here pointed out, that the paper is controlled by Lord Rhondda, and other colliery owners, one of whom stated in court, under cross-examination, that ‘Lord Rhondda was largely interested in coal mines, and is getting control of the Western Mail… he would have an opportunity of advocating the non-nationalization of the coal mines… He was to use his own control for his own benefit… and that control was looked upon as a matter of great financial importance… great commercial value.’ But as a newspaper director Lord Rhondda was not at all singular. All the directors here listed are directors of many other companies. That the capitalist press should denounce collective control of what should be public undertakings is no more than natural when we find the owners and controllers of that press figuring as directors, also, of concerns whose dividends would be socialised if the public interest were considered. Thus William May, one of the directors of the London Daily Express, is also a director of the Reading Electrical Supply Co. (chairman), the South Metropolian Electric Light and Power Co; the West Kent Electrical Co, and the Electrical Times Co. Sir E.A.Goulding, M.P, another member of the Express board, is also a director of two electrical companies, a gas company, a mining company, and five other companies, all of whose interests are up against the public advantage. But I am not to say that there is not here and there a disinterested newspaper proprietor whose views are reflected in the paper he controls. This pamphlet shows that 234,050 shares of the Daily News are held by members of the Cadbury family. But the eldest of the Cadburys, George is, or used to be, a member of the Independent Labour Party, and the other day he wrote in the Daily News explaining that he was 81, had been for sixty years a supporter of the Liberal Party, ‘but during the last few years my sympathies have been with the best aspirations of Labour.’ His bona fide sympathies were proved by the fact that he founded the Garden Village of Bournville, which he handed over to a guild of the villagers to manage as seemed best to them. What is fully as much to the point, his paper supports all Collectivist tendencies and Labour aspirations and movements. Editorial comment: I have tried for some time to get hold of the original pamphlet ‘The Capitalist Press’ and after months have sourced it – but cannot actually read it. Though a public domain document it is in library/copyright ‘prison’ which seems ironic for a Socialist publication in this day and age when the more we know about the history of Socialism the better. If you are able to visit London School of Economics Library you can read it – the following links are appropriate. It’s a case of hidden in not too plain sight. It’s very frustrating not to be able to access such information directly online and perhaps serves to illustrate why at Gateway, we are doing all we can to bring ‘lost’ public domain work back into free access for all. For the collection of the ILP papers: http://archives.lse.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=ILP%2f5%2f1923%2f13 And for details of the 1923 version of the pamphlet link HERE http://archives.lse.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=ILP The rest, I’m afraid, is up to you the interested reader. If anyone manages to source a copy of this pamphlet, we’d be happy to reprint it at Gateway. Of course, I know, it’s a lot easier just to buy some trivia from Amazon with one click, isn’t it? Now think for a minute why that might be? Could it be something to do with the Capitalist press?
Since the following pages were first printed in THE GATEWAY, glorious events have, happily, robbed them of some of their point. There is still enough point left, however, to justify their issue in pamphlet form, as the public demand already shows.
The Liberties Bought with a Price. ARE THEY WORTH DEFENDING? We have received from two foreign Socialist organizations in London a long manifesto discussing ‘The Rights of Foreigners’ in which some highly extraordinary claims are made. The document may indeed be taken as representing that frank desertion of Socialism by Socialists, and that entire perversion of Socialist principles and practice by men who still call themselves Socialist, which this time of test and trial has witnessed. Conscientious objectors declare themselves Socialists whose names never appeared on the roll of any of the Socialist organizations, and who are not known to have done any service on behalf of Socialism whatever. More than once we have had special raids upon dance parties held under professed Socialist auspices, the authorities having come to the conclusion that these gatherings offer special facilities for the easy capture of a heavy bag of young men eligible for military service. The bitter unfairness of this misrepresentation of Socialism by weeds and weaklings who do not realise the very rudiments of the exacting creed they profess is seen when we recollect that the intellectual leaders of Socialism are everywhere on the side of the Allies. And be it said that Socialism has everywhere owed its inception to intellectuals. Even in Germany itself, Dr. Leibknecht, Kautsky, Haase, Ledebour, Bernstein, level much the same indictment against Prussian world-policy that the publicists of the civilised world have been compelled to formulate against it. Sweden is said to be pro-German; but Branting, the leader of the Social-Democrats in the Swedish Parliament, has given his voice for the Allies, doubtless with the consent of his followers. Dr. Vandervelde and Professor Huysmans for Belgium; Thomas, Marcel Sembat, Viviani, and Briand for France; the gallant, single-minded Leonida Bissolati, Socialist leader and Cabinet minister, who served as a private in the Italian army and has just been decorated for conspicuous bravery - make a very good showing for the attitude of international Socialism towards this world-crisis. With Hyndman, Bax, Cunninghame-Graham, Blatchford, and A. M. Thompson vehemently pro-Ally in this country, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald on the fence, and Mr. Snowden a mere preacher of stalemate who does not say the Allies do not deserve to win, but only that neither side is likely to win, it is intolerable that Socialism should be persistently associated with pro-Germanism. Pro-Germanism never did have a leg to stand with, and those responsible for the successive developments of its policy of outrage are now revealed to the world as criminals beside whom the vilest private-enterprise offenders, from Christie of the Cleek and Burke and Hare down to Charles Peace, appear as mere retail traders in the anti-social. Who and What are the Manifestants? The manifestants are Russian and Jewish Socialists who are faced with the alternative of either returning to Russia and accepting military service there, or, on the other hand, accepting the burden of citizenship and military service on behalf of the land which has given them shelter, freedom, and the opportunity of doing fairly well for themselves - as many Russians and Russian Jews have undoubtedly done. The Open Safety-Valve. Some of these men are probably political refugees, whose efforts to lift the blight from Holy Russia had secured them the unwelcome attentions of the Tsar’s police. To hand them back to the clutches of the despotism from which they have escaped would be distasteful in the last degree; though let me say here - what I have often said in pre-war times - that the open safety-valve for European despotisms has proved an excellent thing for the despots and a very evil thing for the peoples they misgovern. No despotism was ever scotched - no people ever attained constitutional rights and freedoms - by its leaders running away from the fight. Where the issue involved is one of certain death to stay, it is no more than prudence to go, and it would be a hard saying to declare that life should not be cherished till a more favourable opportunity arises for striking the blow for a better day. But most of those who come away from Russia have left to escape dangers much less than that of death or prison-exile. And how on earth is popular liberty to be secured in Russia or anywhere else if the popular leaders abandon the cause and the country together? In this connection one often thinks of a certain vastly luminous incident. In 1637, before the storm broke that established the supremacy of Parliament in Britain, Oliver Cromwell, John Hampden, Sir Arthur Haselrig, and other revolutionary leaders, had actually booked their passages in a small flotilla which awaited them in the Thames. The sailing of the ships was prohibited by royal proclamation, and the interdicted emigrants returned to the struggle which, among other incidents, cost King Charles his head. Had they been allowed to sail for New England, who can say how events might have gone in old England? Brooking Tyrants. There is no honourable way of escape from political tyranny. The English tyrant-quellers saw that as against Charles it was a question of Your head or mine. It is no chauvinism, but necessary defensive pride, to point out that we in this country have again and again brooked our tyrants to the teeth. Cromwell declared, while still only a colonel of horse, that if he met the king face to face in the field he would fire his pistol at him as at another. The British way is not the way of the cowardly hedge-shooter. We do not throw bombs and run away. We do not slaughter the tyrant’s wife and his servants in order to get at him with clumsy, irresponsible vengeance. We indict him by legal process, as we did Charles First; we meet him in battle array as we did Richard Second, twice over; or we put him in terror of death and send him skipping over the seas as we did the last of the Stewart kings. British kings have been assassinated it is true. Rufus was cleanly shot in the eye with an arrow; the faineant Edward Second was done to death horribly in Berkeley Castle; and the first and third Jameses of Scotland were stabbed from motives of private vengeance by men who had at least no recoil of horror from letting the blood of kings. But our national way is the open way, the fair way, the constitutional way. It is a dangerous way for the citizen; but we have never lacked citizens who were prepared to run the risk. And that it is a way which kings and other tyrants hold in wholesome dread there are many examples to prove. King John, the ablest and boldest of the Plantagenets, signed the Great Charter, thereafter rolling in fury on the floor of his tent and tearing up handfuls of turf as he exclaimed, ‘They have given me four-and-twenty overlords!’ meaning the twenty-four provisions of the Charter. Haughty Elizabeth wept tears of penitence before her angry subjects later in the day, and withdrew the obnoxious measures that had provoked the storm. Charles the Infatuated broke his solemn pledge, and signed the death-warrant of his all-too-faithful Strafford, rather than rouse the Commons. William Fourth swore, but did as he was told. Some of the Centuries’ Martyrs. The bearding of tyrants and repressors was not always safe - very far from it. The blood of Simon the Righteous, perishing, sword in hand, in the defeat of Evesham, after incomparable services in a benighted age; the deaths of Tyler and Ball, of Cade and Kett, of Latimer and Ridley, of Vane and Argyle and Russell and Sidney; the death of Sir John Eliot hastened by confinement in the Tower, from which his appeals for liberation were found by Charles to be ‘Not humble enough’; the cropped ears of Prynne and Bastwick and Burton; the many martyrs of reform in Scotland and England banished beyond the seas or dying by the hand of the hangman - these and hundreds and thousands more of the named and nameless dead have purchased our liberties with a great price. Do our Jewish and Russian guests hope to enter into the heritage of freedom and right so dearly won, and now again as dearly defended, free, gratis, for nothing? A Pre-Empted World. Man, heaven help him, is not born to freedom in any spot of earth. He comes into a world pre-empted. The landlord claims the earth, the capitalist claims the tools and raw material, the priest claims his mind, the military caste claims his thews and sinews and stoutly-beating heart. In this favoured spot of earth we long since Conquered the kings and were preparing to conquer landlords and capitalists, the way being free of all constitutional barriers - of all barriers save those of the mind. We had no conscription - we alone among the great nations of Europe. We had secured the freedom of the press, of the platform, and of combination - which some of the European nations were without. Our people were so far emancipated that the great majority of the population never went to church and made jokes about hell-fire, as about harps and trumpets and crowns. Envious of the blessings we had won from the powers of despotism, aliens abandoned the contest with these powers in their own lands and flocked to the Isles of Inheritance, there to bask and prosper in a sunshine of liberty and right which, such as it is, had never yet been made to shine upon their own country by the blood and sufferings of their more tame-spirited kin. The Menace. And then two of the greatest of the despotisms attacked a republic and three limited monarchies, and for a time the whole promise and prophecy of liberty and right hung in the balance. The assaulting despotisms had nothing whatever to give the world, except, in the case of Germany, the dulness of regimentation and organization - life regulated on the system of the card index. Germany’s achievements - the Protestant Reformation, her nurture of music, her encouragement of philosophy - all belong to the period before the Prussification of the German States as a whole. The triumph of Germany would have spread an iron-handed blight over the self-governing nations of Europe, in which all forms of native genius, all forms of the democratic spirit, would have gone under. For, unlike the Roman, who was disdainfully tolerant towards the subject races whom he conquered, as the Briton is to-day, the Teutonic temper is to Prussianise all. A victory for Prussianism would have meant not only slavery for the outside world, but it would have killed Social-Democracy in Germany itself. Hohenzollernism had become a laughing-stock in Germany. To the Social-Democrat the Kaiser was ‘Genosse Wilhelm’ - Comrade William - whose royalist rhodomontade got them adherents daily; and if they cursed at Zabernism, they chuckled at the memory of ‘Captain’ Koepenick’s exploit. But already all that hostility to imperialism is forgotten. The Kaiser never was so popular. The military class never till now seemed at once the bulwark of the nation’s defence and the great extender of and contributor to, its glory. If that feeling persists through starvation, death, and the defeat of all Germany’s ultimate aims, what madness of dull pride would the world have witnessed had Kaiserism succeeded? The Call of the Hour. If ever men lived in a time when the liberty of the world was menaced it is now. If ever there was a time when it was necessary to show what democracy can achieve it is now. And if the races who make up the composite British Commonwealth are prepared to defend with their own bodies and lives the rights and status which their forefathers gloriously won at no less cost and hazard, on what ground of equity or reason shall the refugee refuse to contribute his share to the defence of liberties which he is so glad to share? Is the alien of all men the only man who shall share the rights of freedom without sharing its duties? A ‘Law’ and a ‘Principle.’ Nothing less than that is the claim made in this impudent manifesto. The claim is even made with the tongue of derision in the cheek of effrontery. It is made in name of the law of nations, which these denationalised men cannot forbear from alluding to contemptuously as ‘the so-called law of nations.’ It is only a ‘so-called’ law, but it contains, they say, ‘the principle of the Right of Foreigners.’ Did ever a despised whole contain so valuable a part? If the whole is only ‘so-called,’ why is not the ‘principle’ also but ‘so-called’? The Basis of Democratic Power. These outlaws of a benighted empire appeal to ‘modern democratic ideology’ as having given ‘the full development of the principle of the Right of Foreigners.’ But what right have they to appeal to democratic ideology if they have made no contribution to it, and avow their distaste to making any contribution to it now? Far be it from me to say that Democracy has not an ideological basis. It is because it has its foundations in the eternal equities that the worst democracy is better than the best oligarchy. If men were automata oligarchy would be right; but the best conducted nation walking in leading-strings is less admirable than even the errors of men who live free, responsible lives in which they strive to find the more excellent way. It is because democracy is so right for the masses and so inconvenient for the classes that it has so often to be fought for. And the world (or human nature) being as it is, the institution of democracy has its only basis in the power of democracy. Democracy is a power in western Europe, the United States, and the British Colonies because our forefathers ‘died and slew to leave us free.’ The democracy did not win its power by appeals to ideology. It won its power by appeals to the pike. The Swiss democracy won its status with the spear at Sempach and Morgarten. The Scots won it at Bannockburn. The English won it at Marston Moor, Naseby, and Worcester. The French won it by razing the Bastille, executing Louis XVI., and making their own republic. There’s no receipt like pike and drum For crazy constitutions sang Macaulay in jest which it is impossible not to accept as truth. The Reform Bill of ’32 was carried only because the land was full of riotings and burnings, and the soldiers, it was declared, could not be relied on to shoot their own class and kin, the rioters. The nation had so proved its temper in past times that the authorities needed only a hint that its blood was up. When on July 23, 1866, a Reformers’ procession, barred out of Hyde Park, threw down half-a-mile of railings and took possession of the park in spite of the police, a Tory Government made up its mind that the Household Suffrage Bill had to be passed. It knew that if it did not, there would be plenty more to follow. Force is the ultima ratio of democracies as of kings, and the peoples of western Europe are free because they have used the strike and the pike and have burned ricks and smashed machinery, while at the same time they have no cossack tools of despotism prepared to dragoon a nation at the bidding of a tyrant. Dirty work is often done in free communities still; but there is a limit to even military discipline, and it has often been reached in all the western nations. That it has never been reached in the Russian or German armies is the disgrace of these armies and of the nations to which they belong, for whence does the subservience of an army derive except from the subservience of the people who recruit it? The Retort Direct. To the Russians and Jews who send me this manifesto I say: You have now an opportunity of fighting for freedom under favourable circumstances. Our statesmen are not, like your Russian statesmen, in league with Germany for a secret peace. Our officers have not to be exhorted to refrain from stealing, as the Grand Duke Nicholas exhorted the Russian commanders. We do not fight for a tyrant emperor, but for our own free institutions - indeed for freedom the World over, the freedom that is menaced by the bare thought of Teutonic ascendancy. You ask for ‘equality before the law’ with British citizens, but the whole purpose of your manifesto is just precisely to escape that equality. You declare that ‘democratic principles . . . involve opposition to all that restricts human liberties and support for all that develops them.’ Those are the very grounds upon which we ask you to fight the Teuton and to destroy the despotism which has placed the millions of the Central Powers at the mercy of their non-elected war lords. You invoke the statement of the American Secretary of State, Seward, that There is no principle more distinctly and clearly settled in the law of nations than the rule resident aliens not naturalised are not liable to perform military service. But this only means that it has been so for a long time - not that it should for ever continue to be so. New occasions demand new duties. Generous-minded men rush to perform a merely human duty such as the service of freedom and humanity wherever they are threatened. When Italy strove against the tyranny of the Pope and of the House of Hapsburg hundreds of gallant young Englishmen rushed to put their lives at her service in a glorious cause, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, democracy’s greatest poet, sang his most impassioned songs over the spectacle of an ancient dismembered nation rightly struggling to be free and united once again. All this is the natural impulse of generous young manhood, and you are evidently young, since service is demanded of you. When the republic of France was harassed by the Germans seven and forty years ago Garibaldi left his island home to help in its defence, bringing a band of his devoted red-shirts with him. His elderly crippled son and his gallant grandsons were among the first volunteers from other lands who came to help the French Republic once more at this time. Some of the flower of America’s young manhood have fought and died in the early days of the present struggle, taking their stand as a sacred duty on the side of the free nations as against the old and damned imperialism which you thralls of eastern and central Europe have allowed to grow up and become bloated, to curse and decimate and devastate the homes and lives of better and braver men than yourselves. Many hard things have been written and said of the Jews, but the hardest thing of all is this which you write of your selves. Naked, unashamed, perhaps unconscious of the infernal impudence of the claim, you say you wish to have all and more than all the rights of British citizenship, while at the same time your main purpose is to claim immunity from the supreme service and sacrifice that our young British manhood gives and makes with a song and a jest upon its lips. And you address this appeal to one who has given thirty years’ unrequited service to the democracy, while you and your tribe have been feathering your nests, reaping where other men have sown, and still you want only to go on profiting by the sacrifice of better men than yourselves, taking their places, their businesses, their posts, and their emoluments. It is little wonder if the Russians still wallow in religious superstition and political disability; little wonder if the Jews are a scattered, despised, and persecuted race, if these be your conceptions of the great game of life. But you are neither Russians nor Jews. Are you men at all True men have generous emotions of pity for suffering, of rage at injustice, of hatred for tyranny. But you must be pigeon-livered and lack gall. It will be doing a service to the world, not only to put you in the fighting line, but to put you in the hottest forefront of the battle, so that you may stop the bullets that would otherwise cut short the lives of men having some element of manhood and good citizenship in them. It is such things as you who people the world with bad citizens and bad neighbours. It is such worms as you who keep nations in the mire. You, equally with the Germans, are our enemies, the enemies of all free men. The Teuton fights to perpetuate tyranny in the world. You refuse to fight against tyranny. Your inaction has the same result as his action. You are both enemies of the human race, vertebrate vermin to be dealt with after the manner of that kind. For the moment, the fighting line will serve. We give our own brave and bonny lads not without sorrow and rage and hatred; but we shall weep no tears for you. A Last Word. We are very far from forgetting the noble company of heroes and martyrs, men and women alike, who lived and died for the cause of popular liberty in Russia. No country in the world ever had such a galaxy of consecrated lives during the few decades covered by Herzen and Bakounine to Vera Sassoulitch, Sophie Perovskaya, Kropotkin, and Stepniak. But the struggle was not continued long enough, the passion for liberty and right was not sufficiently diffused among the people, and Russia has always had too many traitors and sycophants. A nation has the government and institutions it deserves to have, and it cannot be an accident that Russia is still politically five hundred years behind Britain, the most rebellious country in the world, where kings and governments have been put up and knocked down like ninepins in a bowling alley. It is the men that make the nation. The spirit of liberty is not a chance thing; it is human, individual; it persists in families and localities. The West Riding towns that recruited and sheltered the victorious army of General Fairfax now vote for Labour and Socialist representatives, just as the city of Aberdeen, which supported William Wallace and Robert Bruce, is still always in the forefront of political and municipal progress. Here is your parable. I do not despair even of you. You have sins of omission to repent of. Accept the present call to service, either on behalf of your own country or on behalf of the hospitable land which has entertained you in security under the law. Try to believe and understand that it is even more blessed to give than to receive. A deathblow to imperialism in any part of the world is a blow to it in all parts of the world. The defeat of Germany cannot but mean better days in Russia. The cause of the Allies is one and the same thing in all parts of the field. If you would bring forth fruits meet for repentance, go afield and there repent.
(The economic evolution here charmingly sketched does not merely describe general tendencies of which, mutatis mutandis, we have all seen examples, but is a specific account of what took place in the village of Lurgan, now a town. Mr Cunninghame-Greham and others of us knew natives of the place, forty years ago, and from them we heard of what was and is, Graham visiting it at a time when the advanced politicians of Scotland and Ireland had more in common than they seem to have now. The sketch will be reprinted as a pamphlet.) I knew a little village in the North of Ireland – call it what you please. A pretty, semi-ruinous, semi-thriving place. Men did not labour over much there. All went easy (aisy the people called it); no man troubling much about the sun or moon; still less bothering himself about the fixed stars or planets, or aught outside the village. All about the place there was an air of half-content, tempered by half-starvation. No man ran; few even hurried. Every hedge was shiny with half broken-down, cut, flat, free seats. All the population lounged against these; for they served to prop men up as they discussed for hours on nothing. Cows marched up and down the lanes; sometimes children led them by a string, or, seated on the ground, made believe to watch them as they ate, much in the same way, I suppose, that shepherds watched their flocks on a memorable occasion near Bethlehem, or as the people do in Spain and the East today. Goats wandered freely in and out of the houses. Children raggeder, and happier, and cunninger than any others on the earth, absolutely swarmed. Herod (had he lived in those parts) could have made an awful battue of them, and they would not have been missed. Children, black-haired, grey-eyed, wild-looking, sat at doors, played with pigs, climbed on the tops of the cabins, generally permeated space. Trees there were few. The people said the landlords cut them down. The landlords said the people never left a tree alone. However, let that pass. Creeds there were, of course – Catholic and Protestant. Both sides claimed to have the majority of the sheep. They hated one another; or they said so, which is not the same thing, by the way. Really, they furnished mutually much subject of entertainment and conversation. In this village no one really hated very much, or very long. All took life quietly. On the great late folk fished lazily, and took nothing save only store of midge-bites. The roads were like pre-Adamite trucks for cattle: nothing but the cow of the country could cope with them; and even that sometimes sustained defeat. Still these folks, given enough potatoes, were not miserable, far from it. Wages were low - some 8s 6d a week - but still they were not driven like slaves, as is the artisan of England and of Scotland. In the morning early, out into the fields to wile away the time and lounge against the miniature round-towers that serve for gate-posts. Those who did not go remained at home, and, squatting by the fire at ease, looked after their domestic industries and through the jambwall hole kept a watchful eye on foreign competition, or the passing girls and women, and criticised them freely. Still there was peace and plenty of a relative degree. No factories, no industries at all, plenty of water power running to waste, as the Scotch agent said, and called God to witness that if there were only a little capital in the town, it would become a paradise. What is a paradise? Surely it is a land in which there is sufficiency for all, in which a man works as little as he can – that is to say, unless he prefers to be a slave – which no one did, or he would have been looked on as a madman, in the village of which I write. These men reaped their corn with sickles, as their forefathers did, in lazy fashion. Agriculture was all it never should have been. Sometimes a woman and an ass wrought in one plough – the husband at the stilts. Men were strong, lazy, and comfortable; women, ragged, as lazy, and, when children did not come too fast, not badly off. The owner of the soil never came near the place. Patriot lawyers talked of liberty, and oppressed all they got within their toils; but still the place was relatively happy. Those who did not choose to work (and they were not a few) passed through their lives without doing a hand’s turn, and were generally respected. Anyone who tried to hurry work was soon dubbed tyrant. Thus they lived their lives in their own way. If they were proud of anything it was because their village was the birthplace of a famous greyhound. In my lord’s desmesne his monument is erected – the glory of the place Master Magrath – after the Pope, King William, Hug Roe, O’Neill, or Mr. Parnell, he seemed the greatest living thing that ever breathed. Himself it was that brought prosperity amongst us. Quality would come for miles to see him, and leave their money in the place. A simple little thing to see him; ye had never thought he had been so wonderful. The old Lord (a hard old naygur!) thought the world of him. ‘Twas here he used to live, but did his business (winning the Waterloo Cup) over there in England. England seemed as vague a term as China to them, and as distant. Master Magrath, the Mass, the Preaching, the price of cattle at the fairs, whether little Tim O’Neil could bate big Pat Finucane – these were the subjects of their daily talk. A peaceful, idle, sympathetic, fightingly-inclined generation of most prolific Anglo-Celts or Celto-Angles. Agiotage, Prostitution, Respectability, Morality, and Immorality, and all the other curses of civilised life, had no place amongst them. Not that they were Arcadians; far enough removed from that. Apt at a bargain, ready to deceive in little matters. In great ones, on the whole, reliable enough. Had there been but only more to eat, less rent to pay, one faith instead of two or three, no public house, and if the rain had cleared off now and then, the place had been about as happy as it is possible for a place to be in this vale of tears. Little enough they recked of what went on in Parliament, on the stock exchange, or in the busy haunts of men. Once in a way a Home Rule speaker spoke in the village. The folk turned out to cheer with all their might. In a week or two an Orangeman came round, and the cheers, if possible, were louder. In fact, they looked upon the rival Cheap Jacks as travelling entertainment sent by Providence to amuse them. Except on Pitcairn’s Island, Tristan d’Acunha, or in some group of islets in the South Seas before the advent of the missionaries, I doubt if folks anywhere fared better on the whole. But still a change was near. One fine day a traveller from Belfast – a loyal Orangeman of course – came to the village. Instantly it struck him – What a place to build a mill in! here is water power, here is a strong and vigorous, but poor population. Of course, the priest, the minister, the Scotch agent, the attorney, and the others of the few who formed the elite of the village, and read the newspapers and believed all that was in them, just because it was in print, were mightily uplifted. We want capital. The want of capital is, and always has been, the drawback of the land. Had we capital we should all be rich, there would be plenty; pauperism would vanish, and all become as flourishing as over there in England, where, as all men know, the streets are paved with gold. Alas! They never thought that on the golden pavements rain down floods of tears that keep them always wet, hiding the gold from sight. They never knew of the villainy and rascality of the world, of the way in which men work, and work, and slave, and slave, and still are poor. They never dreamt, in fact, what the world was, and how it crushes and devours those who leave little villages like this, and launch the vessel of their lives upon its waves. They could not see the perished and half-starved children; did not know the smug sufficiency of the cruel Christian man of commerce; had never heard the harlot’s ginny laugh at the corner of the street. All this existed not for them at all. Therefore the proposition seemed to them a revelation straight from heaven. Yes, build a mill, and all will turn to gold. The landlord will get his rents, the minister his dues, the priest his tithes, the working-man, instead of being fed on butter-milk and filthy murphies, drink tea (they call it tay), and feed on bacon and St.Louis beef (in a neat tin), white bread, and speedily become a gentleman. Wages will rise, of course; our wives and children, instead of running barefoot or sitting idle at the doors, will wear both shoes and stockings, and attend Mass or the preachment ‘dacent.’ The syndicate of rogues, with due admixture of fools, and dupes, was got together; the mill was built. The village suffered a great and grievous change. All day long a whirr and whiz of wheels was heard. At daybreak a long string of girls and men tramped along the dreary streets and worked all day. Wealth certainly began to flow; but where? Into the pockets of the shareholders. The people, instead of sturdy, lazy rogues, became blear-eyed, consumptive, bandy-legged. The girls, who formerly were patterns of morality, now hardly reached eighteen without an ‘accident’ or two. Close mewing up of boys and girls in hot rooms brought its inevitable result. Wages did not rise, but, on the contrary, rather inclined to fall; the people flocked from the country districts to get employment at the far-famed mill. The economists, of course, were all delighted; would have thrown their hats into the air had their idea of thrift not forbidden them to damage finished products. Now capital had come; yet somehow it seemed to prove a curse. The goods made in the mill were quoted far and wide, known for their inferior quality throughout the world. The benefits to the shareholders were immense. Yet still content and peace were gone. The air of the place seemed changed. No longer did the population lounge about. It had no time. No longer did the cows parade the streets, or goats climb cabin-roofs to eat the house-leek. The people did not saunter through their lives as in the times when there was lack of capital, and therefore of advancement, as they thought. They had the capital; but the advancement was still lacking. Capital had come – the capital which is the dream of every patriotic Irishman. It banished peace, idleness, beauty, and content – made slaves of the people, giving the fetid atmosphere of the mill for the fresh breath of the fields and lanes. Of course there was a gain. Savages who did not need them purchased, at the bayonet’s point, the goods the people made; perhaps it was a gain to them. The people did not gain, though, but became raggeder than ever. Perhaps the thought that savages wore, on their arms or round their necks, the stockings they had made, consoled them for the loss of their former peaceful lives. Perhaps, too, having little ear for music, they rather liked the change from being roused at seven by the lowing of the kine to being routed out at six by the dulcet strain of the ‘steam hooter’, calling them to work in the dark winter mornings – calling them to toil on pain of loss of work and constant starvation – seeming, indeed, to my ears to say: ‘Work brother!’ Up and to work; it is more blessed far to work than sleep. Up! Leave your beds; rise up; get to your daily task of making wealth for others, or else starve; for Capital has come!’
The Settling of Britain.
The raison d’être of these historical notes is that the essentials of history find next to no place in the school text-books in current use, The compilers of school histories tell us the year in which the Battle of Flodden was fought, or that in which Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded, though these events have no very discernible effects on the lives of the people of Scotland and England to-day. On the other hand, they do not tell us when or why the Feudal System was introduced, or when and how that system was abolished, though the consequences of both the introduction and the abolition remain of momentous importance in the lives of the people to-day. The purely military and sensational episodes of history are narrated with comparative wealth of detail; the rise and growth of fundamental institutions are ignored. Thus every schoolboy knows about the Death of De Bohun, the Douglas’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the battle of Otterbourne; but ask a class of secondary-school pupils when the British Political Revolution took place, and you will be told ‘We never got that.’ When the school historians do, rarely, indulge in constitutional details they are sometimes wrong in the most elementary particulars. ‘A History of the British Empire,’ long popular, misled the scholars and teachers of a generation with the information that ‘the Three Estates of the Realm, or constituent parts of the Parliament, are the Sovereign, the Lords, and the Commons.’ The truth is, of course that the Three Estates are the Barons Spiritual, the Barons Temporal, and the Commons. The Sovereign is not, and, never was, an Estate of the Realm. The making of such a mistake regarding such a matter is, as Carlyle would have said, ‘significant of much.’ The attitude of mind which makes for elaborate attention to personal details regarding a dead king, while lightly and inaccurately treating a great and permanent institution of most civilised countries, does not tend to sound or large views of the relative importance of historic facts. It is merely interesting to learn that Curtmantle had bow legs and that Elizabeth had red hair; whereas it is important to know that Parliament was in its origin, as it still is in its composition, an assemblage of direct representatives of certain classes in society. The fact is that, to the average historian, history is still a collection of battles, sieges, court intrigues, and individual biographies rather than, as it should be, an account of the corporate life and growth of a nation; is still a series of separate incidents, connected only by the sequence of time, rather than a synthetic view of the evolution of a people, in which politics, industry, art, religion, commerce, warfare, geographical discovery, technical invention, and the popular standard of comfort act and re-act one upon another, shaping, fusing, and determining the character of the national life as a whole. In spite of the oft-repeated protests of such historical critics as Macaulay, and the example which some few modern historians have set of how history should be written,* the subject, as taught in schools, continues to be a chronicle of the unedifying deeds and misdeeds of sovereigns and generals. The lives of the great body of the nation, and the social, industrial, and even political changes that took place, are alike ignored, or, at best, but slightly treated. For the details and meaning of these changes, as for the features of a given age, we have to turn to Social histories, Constitutional histories, Histories of Civilization, of Prices, of Work and Wages, ‘Economic Interpretations of History,’ works on ‘The Duties of Civic Life,’ and other books of a special historic character, If such details are not of the essentials of history, there are none. That the general history of a period or a country, as ordinarily narrated, fails to include such particulars forms the reason for these pages. *Justin M‘Carthy’s ‘Short History of Our Own Times,’ for instance. Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Tales of a Grandfather,’ though neither accurate nor up-to-date, is wonderfully comprehensive in conception and method, despite the ‘brave neglect’ of its style and its excusably romantic bias. The Period. The four centuries from the accession of Alfred the Great (871) to the death of Henry III. (1272) represent the period of the settling or founding of Britain upon the main lines - political, economic, and judicial - on which the United Kingdom stands to-day. POLITICAL. Consolidation. When Alfred became King of the West Saxons the island-contained at least ten more or less independent rulers. When Edward I. became King of England and Ireland there were but two besides himself, and before the end of his reign the death of Llewellyn of Wales left but one, the King of Scotland (Alexander III.). During this period (1172) the kilted Kings of Ireland, the Dermods and Donalds, the Murtoughs and Malachies and Mahons, of Leinster and Munster, of Meath and Thomond and Ulster, paid homage to Henry II., as did also the Danish rulers of Dublin and Wexford. As an annalist writes with pathetic brevity, ‘Earl Strongbow came into Erin with Dermod M‘Murrough to avenge his expulsion by Roderick, son of Turlough O’Connor; and Dermod gave him his own daughter and a part of his patrimony; and Saxon foreigners have been in Erin since then.’ These four centuries not only witnessed a union of principalities: they also saw a consolidation of the English in England and of the Scots in Scotland for purposes of really national defence and government. Lack of Public Spirit. The bugbear of the Saxon kings and a great contributory cause of the successful Danish and Norman invasions and occupations was the incapacity of the Saxons to hold together, to act unitedly. The Saxon freeman would repel, if he could, an invader who appeared in his own neighbourhood; but he did not willingly leave the shire, and he was easily persuaded to believe that an enemy was completely routed when he had only temporarily fallen back on suffering a slight reverse. Home-loving by instinct, the thought of the good wife, the bairns, and the farmstead left unprotected, sometimes inclined the Saxon to panic when the day seemed to be going against him afield. But in truth the parochial character of Saxon defence was not merely a matter of feeling. It was a matter of institutions as well. The fyrd, or shire levy, was required, legally, to serve only within its own county, and that for a short period at a time, the service including the manning of the district forts and stockaded mounds which the Saxons had copied as a defensive device from the Danish ravagers. Of course this merely local obligation was in practice frequently departed from; but the danger had to be very great and clear, and that its gravity and clearness were not always recognised is shown by the repeated successes of the Danes, the Scots, and the Welsh. Alfred tried to secure more willing and effective service from the fryd by calling up only one half of the available levy at a time, so that the civil work of the community need not be entirely suspended. That, however, does not appear to have removed the objection of peaceful men to the business of war, although Alfred and some of his successors were able to expel, and for long periods to keep out, the Danes. Stolid, unimaginative, with no political ideas beyond the folk-moot where he said Ay, Nay, or merely clattered his weapons in token of assent, the Saxon freeman, with all his good qualities, was no active friend to the peace and good order of the land as a whole. He was an Individualist, as his descendants still are to too great an extent. He was the primitive prototype of the man who to-day takes no interest in politics, and selfishly boasts that he ‘minds his own business.’ Penalty - The Feudal System. With this absence of a national ideal, and its practical drawbacks of selfish personal ‘independence’ and lack of social cohesion, Alfred and the later Saxon kings did their utmost to cope. The ‘lordless man’ was declared an outlaw and was treated as such. The freeholding Saxon tribesman, himself a master of serfs, had now to set about finding a master in one or other of the neighbouring thegns, at whose hands he would receive in fief the lands he already held in his own right. This was the beginning of the Feudal System in Britain, Thus the best men of the time - Alfred himself and, later, the great Premier Archishop, Dunstan - had to degrade the freeman to the position of a vassal as a penalty for his lack of public spirit - a lack which usually carries, sooner or later, its due penalty everywhere. The Continued Lack. But to make the freeholder a villein, liable to compulsory military service under his lord’s banner, did not suffice to consolidate and render effective the defence of the country, either on land or on sea. The feudal machinery of defence could not supply the lack of public spirit and a national ideal. The Danes might ravage Northumbria; but the West Saxons behaved as if that were none of their affair. William of Normandy might land in Sussex as the starting-point of a general invasion; but the Northumbrians, instead of hastening to help Harold against the foreign invader, joined with the Danes under Hardrada and Tostig, the King’s own rebel brother, to make the task of their monarch still more impossible. Harold had to defeat this rebellious coalition of his own subjects with the Danish invader ere, by marching night and day, he could give his attention to the Norman. Even then a large part of Harold’s muster consisted of ill-armed rustics. That the chivalry of France was repulsed again and again from the rough stockade behind which the Saxons plied their fearful axes, was chiefly due to the desperate valour of Harold’s own house-carles or bodyguard*1 rather than to the general support accorded by the Saxon people to the Saxon king. Harold’s navy, it is believed, would have been more than a match for the mere transport boats in which William crossed the Channel - burning them when he landed at Pevensey - but the Saxon Buscarles,*2 locally raised, had gone home to their own ports at the time of crisis, and the Saxon fleet was useless save for a career of piracy after the kingdom had fallen into the hands of the Norman. The numerous serious revolts which took place at intervals, long after the conquest of England, had at least the one feature in common, that they were planless, sporadic, spasmodic, devoid of national unity. The English were not yet a nation.*3 *1 The house-carles of Harold’s time were a very much stronger force than the handful of gesiths who formed the bodyguards of the early Saxon kings. From the time of Canute they numbered several thousands strong. *2 Boatmen. The Yarmouth herring boats were called ‘busses,’ as the Dutch herring boats still are. *3 We can now afford to regard the Norman Conquest as representing a beneficial infusion of new blood and new ideas; but the price of this higher civilization must have seemed exorbitant to the six generations of the conquered race that paid it. Scotland. Nor were the Scots. In the time of Alfred there was in Scotland the British kingdom of Strathclyde, having its capital at Alcluyd (Dumbarton). There was an Anglian kingdom of Lothian, occupying the south-east corner from the Forth to a shifting boundary in Northumbria. The Picts and Scots, united under Kenneth Macalpine, occupied Scotland from sea to sea, with Scone as their capital city. Mar and Moray were under independent Celtic mormaers. The Hebrides, Caithness, Orkney, Shetland, and Sutherland were still held by the Norse jarls. But while these five provinces became united under Malcolm Canmore, that king did homage to the English monarch for his possessions in England. It was not till the reign of Alexander I. that the complete separation and independence of Scotland within its own boundaries was established and recognised. Parliament. The Saxon Witanagemote, or Assembly of the Wise, had great powers, including that of choosing the king; though the succession extended, apparently as a matter of course, collaterally among the king’s brothers before it descended to his sons. Descent did not determine the succession; it merely indicated the field of selection; and sometimes, as in the case of Harold the Last, a king was adopted from a source outside the blood royal altogether. In England. With the coming of the Conqueror a period of absolute monarchy set in. The Curia Regis of the early Norman Kings was simply a committee of the king’s creatures. This regime lasted till the end of Henry III.’s reign, when the first elective Parliament of the Three Estates of the Realm was convened by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, called by the men of his day Sir Simon the Righteous’ The Witanagemote was composed of men of rank, who held seats and voted, not as the delegates of a constituency, but merely by virtue of their social position. They represented only themselves. The Parliament of 1265, on the other hand, was, in its most important chamber, both elective and representative. The Commons, or Third Estate, consisted, not only of knights of the shire (who alone formed the Third Estate in continental Parliaments), but burgesses of the towns in addition. The voters were freeholders of the annual value of not less than 4os. The word Estate is derived from the Latin status - a condition in life. The founders of Parliaments everywhere recognised that the various classes in society could be properly represented only by men belonging to each particular class - a sound view, of which the return of 150 Labour members to Parliament is a partial recognition to-day. The Labour Party represents a Fourth Estate of the Realm. Members of the House of Commons were remunerated on a scale which varied from time to time, and differed as between the knights of the shire and the burgesses, the former being assumed to live more expensively. In the time of Edward III. the rate was fixed at 4s. a-day for a knight and 2s. a-day for a burgess - sums equal to 4os. and 2os, respectively of our money. In Ireland. In Ireland informal meetings of ‘eminent persons’ belonging, of course, to the English colony, led to the convocation of a Parliament in 1295. Knights of the shire only were summoned at first. Burgesses were not added till 131o. The Parliament of 1354 numbered only 20 members. When the Irish Parliament was abolished, by gross corruption, in 18o0, it numbered 30o members. Scotland. The introduction of Parliamentary government into Scotland does not fall within our period. The first regular Scottish Parliament met in 1318, in the reign of Robert the Bruce, that, indeed, being the act of most abiding significance in the Scottish Deliverer’s reign. Well-informed men, making light of the sentiment of nationalism and the passion for independence, have questioned whether the results of Bannockburn did not simply delay the spread of civilization in Scotland. But, so far as we know, no one has ever denied the utility of the great body of Scots Law enacted by successive Parliaments during the four centuries of Scottish legislative independence. The Scots Parliament, abolished by suborned votes in 1707, was a Parliament of one chamber only. After 1427 the members were paid £5 Scots (8s. 4d. sterling) per day during the session of Parliament, this allowance extending to time spent in travelling to and from the place of assembly. Rise of the Towns. The growth and prosperity of the towns was looked at with unfriendly eyes by the aristocracy. Writing of the granting of a constitution to London in 1191, Richard of Devizes said: ‘What evils spring from these communes can be gathered from the saying about them, that they mean an upheaval of the rabble, a menace to the kingdom, and a lukewarmness in religion.’ Prior to this the burgh had practically belonged to one overlord or another; but now the government was vested in the craft guilds, the lord’s taxes were commuted, and the burgh was freed from the grosser forms of seignorial oppression. ECONOMIC. Slavery. The Saxon conqueror found the soil of England cultivated by a population of slaves and free and half-free coloni. For centuries he kept it so. There was a great export trade in slaves. It was the sight of fair-haired lads from Northumbria exposed for sale in the market-place of Rome that made Pope Gregory the Great vow to transmit Christianity to England. The landing of Augustine, with forty monks, in 597, was the result. The debtor who could not pay was sold into slavery. Slaves were bred and reared for the market. Unnatural fathers sold their sons into bondage. Bristol traded in slaves till the eighteenth century, and the Scottish ports were not free of the same scandal. Sometimes, as in the case of Peter Williamson, of Aberdeen, the kidnapped bondman escaped and returned; though he got little redress from the merchant magistrates who were themselves interested in this white-slave trade. Norman Feudalism. The feudal system, introduced by the Saxon rulers, was made more rigid and formal by the Normans. ‘Hear, my lord,’ swore the vassal as he knelt bareheaded, his hands placed within those of the superior, ‘I become liegeman of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death; God help me.’ Yet the superior was only a tenant of the Crown, as the vassal was a tenant of the superior. The basis of tenure was military service in the case of both, though this could be escaped by the payment of scutage or quit money, with which the king could and did hire foreign troops. The system of military tenure obtained in England, as a matter of law if not of practice, till 166o, when by an act of the Convention Parliament of Charles II. the landholders voted themselves out of their feudal obligations, making themselves in fact if not in law landowners; though it is but fair to say that they imposed upon themselves a tax of twenty per cent. of their rentals. Except where it has been commuted by the payment of a lump sum, this tax is still paid on the basis of a valuation made in the reign of William and Mary (1692), since when, of course, the value of the land has enormously increased. Feudalism in Scotland. We have seen how feudalism was introduced in England by Alfred and Dunstan as a natural punitive consequence of the Saxon’s lack of public spirit. The Feudal System was introduced into Scotland during the reign of Malcolm Canmore. Desiring to see his dominions more thickly peopled, and the refinements of life diffused among his Celtic subjects, Malcolm tempted both Norman and Saxon settlers to his northern kingdom by gifts of land, to be held in fief according to the feudal system whose workings he had seen during his residence in England. In Scotland in the eleventh century, as in Canada to-day, land was of less value than population.* The feudal system in Scotland did not penetrate to the Highlands. The clan tenure was in theory, if latterly not in practice, different from the ordinary tenure of these islands. The clansmen owed fealty to the chief of their sept and name, but it was a fealty based, not on the use of property derived from him, but on considerations of blood ties, protection accorded, and the sentiment of personal loyalty. The tribesmen were co-owners with the chief of the lands occupied by the clan. At the Reformation, one half of the land of Scotland (according to Sir Walter Scott) belonged to the Church, and one cause of the ready acceptance of Protestantism by the Scottish nobility was the renunciation, by the Reformed clergy, of Prelacy, of formal political power, and of legal claims upon the confiscated lands. It is possible to admire this unworldly spirit of the Scottish clergy while regretting its practical consequences in the diversion of the Church lands from public to private uses. The endowments and teinds of the Scottish Church are an insignificant substitute for the vast properties administered by the Church in pre-Reformation days, largely for hospitable, charitable, and educational purposes, in addition to religious teaching. What the Church renounced and the poor lost, the nobles hungrily devoured, without gratitude and as a matter of course. For Scotland the military tenure was not legally abolished till 1747, the Jacobite rising of 1745-6 having called attention to the mischievous power which the Scottish feudal superiors still possessed of dragging peaceable men out to fight in quarrels in which they had no interest. *Nowadays philanthropy reverses King Malcolm’s wise policy, and encourages emigration, especially from the parts already most thinly peopled. These are now, on the principle of contraries, termed ‘congested districts.’ The Appropriation of Britain. But while the feudal system provided for the defence of the country, which to-day costs us over £116,000,000 annually,* there were, side by side with the feudal estates, millions of acres of common land. According to the Domesday Book, there were, in addition, in England alone, 1922 manors, 68 royal forests, 13 chases, and 781 parks whose revenues went into the public purse. According to constitutional authorities, these properties were strictly inalienable; but they have mostly been alienated; and the net revenue from the Crown Lands was in 1925-6 only £950,000. At the Reformation Henry VIII. resumed possession of the monastery lands as being Crown property, and it is calculated that the capitalised value of these would now be over a hundred millions sterling. But the monastery lands, the common lands, and the Crown lands have mostly been either enclosed by Act of Parliament, given away to royal favourites, or gradually and covertly filched by the neighbouring proprietors. Thus in the reign of Charles I. it was found that Rockingham Forest, one of the royal demesnes, had been encroached upon by the adjoining landholders till it had shrunk from sixty to six miles in width. A Commission being appointed, in 1633, to deal with these appropriations, many noble depredators were not only deprived of large tracts of the land they had annexed, but were fined in addition. An old rhyme runs:- Why prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, And leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose? The enclosure of public lands, however, continued long after the time of Charles I. So late as 182o the Duke of Rutland of the period enclosed 2,000 acres of common land in the Derbyshire parish of Holmesfield, and actually charged the parishioners with the expense of the Act under which his appropriations were made! In the hundred and twenty years from 176o to 1880 no less than ten million acres were transferred from public to private ownership. Thus by a process spread over a thousand years, and natural and necessary enough in its beginnings in the time of Alfred, but in its later stages plain robbery, whether legal or illegal, were the people of Britain made aliens in the land of their birth, the soil passing to a handful of owners who have done less to give it the value it now bears than the meanest hind who lives upon it by their sufferance. *The cost of the Navy was £58,100,000 in 1926-7, of the Army, ,£42,500,000, and of the Air-Force, £16,000,000. Serf Tenures. The serf and his unfree dependants (who could be married only with the consent of the seigneur) constituted the majority of the population, which in the middle ages was distributed over the country instead of being huddled in towns. Under Saxon as well as under Norman rule the craftsmen were freemen, some of them, such as the potter, travelling from village to village. But the cottager, the copyholder, and the field labourers were serfs, although the actual conditions of life of these classes varied in detail. In the early days of the Saxon occupation the house servants were absolute chattel slaves, to be bought and sold. The Saxon cottager had a minimum holding of five acres; his Norman successor half a virgate - not less than twelve acres. He owned stock and paid rent, never more than sixpence an acre, and usually considerably less. One demand of the labourers in the Peasants’ Revolt was that the rent of land should not exceed fourpence an acre. Sometimes the rents were nominal. By one free tenant a pound of pepper (value 1s. 6d.) is given annually for nine acres. On Cuxham Manor, in Oxfordshire, the serfs gave (for their twelve acres) a halfpenny on November 12, a penny every time they brewed, a quarter of seed-wheat at Michaelmas, a peck of wheat, four bushels of oats, and three hens on November 12, and at Christmas a cock and two hens and twopenceworth of bread. The value of these payments and services is put at 9s. per annum, 3s. only being rent for the house and land occupied by the serf, the remaining 6s. simply the penalty of serfage. In addition, the cottage serf (Saxon, cotsetla; Norman, coterelli) had to give labour on the lord’s demesne at the call of the bailiff. Wages and Prices. Under the Normans the cottagers became practically freemen. They paid 1s. 2d, to 2s. a-year for their cottages, and had to give a day or two at hay-making, for which they were paid a halfpenny. They were also bound to give one to four days at harvest-work, when they were fed at the lord’s table, were allowed a loaf of bread each, and had sixpenceworth of beer among them. During the rest of the year they were free to work for wages on the lord’s demesne. But while fare and lodging were as described, there was at least rude plenty. There was much hiring of casual labour, and before the great rise in wages caused by increasing prosperity and the Black Death (1348), which cut off one-half of the labourers, wages are given as 6d. an acre for ploughing, a penny for hoeing, and 2½d. for mowing. Women were paid a penny a-day for such work as weeding. Cultivation cost the lord of the demesne about £1 an acre, and at this rate all authorities are agreed that the labourer was fairly well off - a penny having 30 to 4o times its present purchasing power. By the fourteenth century wages for artisans were, as recorded, sixpence a-day, and for labourers fourpence. A list of prices obtaining in the fifteenth century gives eggs at 25 a-penny, hens and rabbits 2d. each, chickens ½d. to 1d., hogs 2s. 3d., sheep 1s. 2d. to 1s. 4d., oats 1s. 2d. to 2s. 4d. a quarter. The outside price of a labourer’s board was a shilling a-week. The working day did not exceed eight hours. These conditions relate to what is described as ‘The Golden Age of Labour.’ The Scottish Golden Age is placed in the period of peace and prosperity extending from the reign of Malcolm Canmore to the death of Alexander III.; but the nearest approach to definite data is the elegy in Wyntoun’s ‘Cronykil’ beginning - Quhen Alysander oure King was dede That Scotland led in luive and le, Away wes sons of Ale and Brede, Of Wyne and Wax, of Gamyn and Gle. Oure gold was changyd into lede. JUDICIAL. The Wergild. In Saxon times the law had been administered by the thegns in the hundred-moots, or courts of the hundred or district. But each family had to be its own policeman. If a member of the family was slain his kindred had the right to maintain a blood-feud with the family of the transgressor till recompense was made. The State had the right to make the injured family accept a price or ‘wergild’ for the dead man’s life. Every man had his price. Thus a thegn was worth six ceorls, and if a ceorl killed a thegn he was either sold into slavery or his own life paid the forfeit, since he had not the wherewithal to pay the wergild. Trial by Jury. In the reign of bustling Henry II. trial by jury began to be introduced. Prior to the last quarter of the thirteenth century the guilt or innocence of an accused person was in the eye of the law established by one or other of the three ordeals - fire, water, or battle - or by compurgation, the sworn testimony of eleven of the accused’s neighbours that he was innocent. It was from the practice of summoning witnesses that the jury system originated. The possession of a mind unbiassed as regarded the crime to be tried would have been no recommendation of a juryman in those early days. The jurymen were the neighbours of the accused. They were witnesses who came to give evidence themselves rather than adjudicators to decide upon the testimony given by others. It was only as population grew and life became more complex that the office of juror assumed its present character. Peine forte et dure. But an accused person could, as late as the eighteenth century, refuse to be tried by a jury. Fearing the prejudices of his neighbours, or having only too good reason to fear their just award, he could offer himself for any of the three ordeals. To compel the recalcitrant one to accept a trial by jury, they could imprison him, starve him, and heap weights upon his naked body as he lay on a dungeon floor till they squeezed the life out of him. But if he died in this way his heirs still inherited his property, whereas had he accepted trial and been convicted, his effects might have been confiscated. The peine forte et dure was not abolished till 1772, nor the last of the ordeals till 1819. The Great Charter, granted by John in 1215, while it curbed the royal power and initiated the reign of statute law in place of government by royal charter so far as England was concerned, established also several important judicial rights. Two of the grand clauses of the Charter run:- No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or banished, or any ways destroyed, nor will we pass upon him, nor will we condemn him, unless by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the laws of the land. To no man will we sell, or deny, or delay right or justice. The rights thus granted had to be re-affirmed and fought for over again in the reign of Charles I.; but it was a great matter to have the Charter to which appeal could be made. SOCIAL. The Condition of the People. But this progress - political, judicial, feudal, municipal - was confined to the freemen. The lot of the serf showed little improvement. Even so late as the time of Chaucer that kindly observer could, with only too much truth, describe the widow’s home in the line, Full sooty was her bower and eke her hall. The cottage of the labourers consisted of one apartment partitioned across the floor, the pigs and poultry being housed on one side, the family eating and sleeping on the other. There was no chimney. The smoke had to escape as it might by the doorway and the chinks in the ill-joined wooden or wattled walls. Living miserable lives, it was little wonder that both men and women should spend much of their time carousing, gossiping, and quarrelling at the village alehouse. Disease was common, though cases of leprosy were not so rife as the number and extent of the lazar houses would lead us to suppose. Drunkenness, to which, primitively, most people are prone, was encouraged by the amount of salted food eaten. With no root crops to serve as winter food for cattle, beeves were mostly slaughtered at the end of autumn and the flesh salted for winter use. Save game and fish, there was during the winter no flesh food that was not pickled. In six shires there were no fewer than 727 salt-works. Although in the time of the Angevin kings there were thirty-eight vineyards in England, there were few potherbs to act as anti-scorbutics in the dietary of the people. To the introducers of carrots, cabbages, and turnips we owe more than to the kings and generals who consumed but created not. Housing of the Well-to-do. The house of the well-to-do Saxon was a wooden hall, with bedrooms and a bower surrounding it, all on the ground floor. The kitchen and other offices were outhouses, and in fine weather (as shown in illuminated manuscripts) cooking was done out of doors. This applies also to the Norman times. The Norman house, whether built of stone or wood, was, fundamentally, an affair three rooms - the hall, a lofty apartment occupying the whole height of the main building; behind it, and on a lower level, a vaulted cellar which served as general storeplace; and, over the cellar, the solar or private apartment of the master of the house and his family. The title of solar, meaning sun-chamber, is a significant commentary on the mediaeval idea of a house as a darksome place of safety and shelter rather than of pleasure. The solar is confessedly the only decently-lighted room in the house. And even in it the windows, as may be seen from existing examples, were small. Access was gained to the solar from the dais, or raised platform at the upper end of the hall. It was the sitting-room and bedchamber, not only of the family, but of the guests, male or female, of their station in life. A measure of privacy was secured by hangings suspended between the beds; but on this there was no very strict insistence. The ‘chivalry’ of the middle ages was superficial, and the relations of dame and squire were free and easy. The walls of the solar were wainscoted and the floor carpeted. The floor of the hall was called the marsh, a name which would often be appropriate enough, despite the covering of rushes and boughs with which it was strewn. It had no fireplace. When there was a fire it was made in the centre of the floor, the smoke escaping as it might by a louvre or lantern in the roof. Through the high-set, narrow, unglazed windows birds entered and flitted overhead. The family ate at a cross table set on a dais, the servants from boards set on trestles along the sides of the hall. At the conclusion of the meal these boards were removed, and the servants, male and female slept where they had eaten, sometimes on mattresses spread on the floor, but often on straw or rushes. Saxon and Norman alike slept ‘in naked bed.’ An amusing series of instructions for the management of a household enjoins the mistress to teach her servants ‘prudently to extinguish their candles before they go into their bed, with the mouth or with the hand, and not with their shirt.’ That is, they were not to undress in bed and throw their last garment over the candle to put it out. In the high, narrow Scottish keep of later days the cellar, hall, and solar were set one on top of another. Hours. Late hours are a luxury of civilization. The Saxons and early Normans rose early. The rhyme which extols the virtues of ‘early to bed and early to rise’ does not specify an hour for either the lying down or the rising up. But the Norman rhyme ran - Lever á cinq, diner á neuf, Souper á cinq, toucher á neuf, Fait vivre d’ans nonante et neuf. That is to say - To rise at five, to dine at nine, To sup at five, to bed at nine, Makes a man live to ninety and nine. Travel. ‘The Canterbury Tales’ convey the impression that, despite the bad roads, the absence of wheeled conveyances, and the dangers from thieves both high and low, there was a good deal of moving from place to place. The impression is heightened by the explanation given of some of the words, referring to locomotion, that have come down to us from the Middle Ages. Thus roamer meant a person who had repeatedly travelled to Rome; a saunterer was a person who had made, or was making, the pilgrimage to the Sainte Terre or Holy Land; to canter was to pursue the amble associated with those who rode to Canterbury. But travel was confined to the well-to-do or to those who preyed upon them, such as the crafty Pardoner sketched by Chaucer. The knight, the franklin, the merchant, the master mariner, the well-conditioned Wife of Bath might be able to afford the time and money required for a journey to London and thence to Canterbury; but the only industrious person of humble means who is found in the company is the Ploughman, who, however, is not a serf or even a free wage-labourer, but a small farmer. The unfree villager of the period had neither the means nor the liberty to travel beyond his own parish, much as he would have wished to make the pilgrimage to all manner of holy places; for, with all his grossness, the serf was intensely devout and credulous. CONCLUSION. We are apt think of the middle ages as non-progressive, as stagnant with an oriental stagnation, But the many changes briefly indicated in these pages as having taken place in the four centuries 871 - 1272 show that Britain has never stood still for long; that if her peoples acquire increased liberties and rights it is only by the public spirit and sustained civic courage of the best men among them; and that if liberty and right languish or are curtailed, the explanation is to be sought in popular apathy quite as much as in any necessary aggressiveness or stubbornness of the powers that be. The fact, indeed, is that popular rights have in this country been multiplied with little effort or endurance on the part of the people as a whole, except, indeed, in Ireland, where the ‘tree of liberty’ has been abundantly watered with the blood of martyrs. Where Italians, Poles, and Irishmen often fought and died in vain, Englishmen and Scotsmen succeeded in gaining their ends with a comparatively moderate amount of agitation. At the least promise of redress of grievances the mass of the people promptly fell away from their leaders. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the great armies of the two Peasants’ Revolts went home contented with promises that were not fulfilled; and the death of Walter the Tiler in 1381, the death of John Cade in 1450, were alike accepted by their followers with fatalistic resignation as proofs that the popular will could not count in public affairs. By a happy process, in which they have borne little part, the people of Britain now possess both political power and a measure of education, and the more intelligent workmen are turning both to account for the political, economic, and social ends of the largest class in the nation. The future at last has elements of hope for the masses, who, having helped the aristocracy and then the plutocracy to fight their battles, are now arming and mustering for a great victory on their own account.
The Emigration statistics are such increasingly distressing reading that even Liberal publicists are at last taking the matter up. For more than twenty years some of us have been hammering at the disastrous folly of leaving a rich old country to go to a new and poor one, and at last the ‘practical men’ are beginning to see that all the talk about empire and all the laudation of the ‘pioneers’ and ‘adventurers’ who run away from difficulties at home is proving, and is likely to prove, immensely hurtful to the Homeland, without any corresponding benefit to the new countries. I have written and spoken so often and over such a long period against this anti-social movement of the population away from civilisation that I would now willingly avoid it. But the evil effects of it are so forced upon one’s notice that I cannot forbear speaking out again. I have just returned from the North of Scotland, where I have been saddened to see the number of empty shops and houses built of the good granite; have been wae to hear of the continued exodus from a fine country, and to see all along the route the nakedness of the land as regards population. Every other day I see busloads of men and women, in the very prime of life and usefulness, being driven from the docks to the railway station, on the way from their German, Russian and Scandinavian homes to the frozen wilds of Canada. Sometimes I travel with these people across country on their way to Liverpool, and to be an hour in their company means that you cannot escape being impressed with their pre-occupation, their amazing pre-occupation with the idea that they are on the way to El Dorado. The idea that life can be economically different in one country as compared with another, the simple faith that one can get away from the rent-taker, the profit-monger, the Black Coast who consumes without producing, who destroys without creating, who demands service without giving it – that idea is always painful to me. How Many? The latest statistics show that in the month of March no fewer than 39,442 British subjects ‘left these shores for places out of Europe, declaring that they intended to take up permanent residence abroad.’ In the same month, significantly enough, 5,250 persons arrived here from ‘places out of Europe,’ to take up ‘permanent residence’ in the United Kingdom, according to their own declaration. This reduces the loss for the month to 34,192. The summer months will probably show an increase in the March figures; but on the one hand the winter months are slacker in the emigration trade, at least so far as Britain is concerned, though the drain of Continental emigration would appear to continue all the year round. The annual loss of population to the United Kingdom will not be less than 300,000 human souls. And let there be no mistake about the character of those who go. If the wastrels went we should have cause only for rejoicing. But ordinary observation satisfies one that the men who go are in some essential respects just precisely those whom we should be anxious to retain. The March figures show that the total loss was made up as follows: Males 23,573; females, 10,314: children under twelve, 5,555. By comparison with other months, March showed a large proportion of ‘females.’ Usually the figure shows about three men to one woman. And they are young men and young women. What do these figures mean? They mean that the Homeland, the centre of the Empire’s life, the centre in a way of the world’s life, is to be increasingly left to the old men and old women and children, the more virile portion of the population draining off to the colonies. These figures mean a loss of national wealth, a loss of national energy, a falling into the ways of old fogeyism. For 300,000 is just about the amount of the excess of births over deaths, and with a decreasing birth-rate and this appalling drain of emigration, we shall doubtless soon see the population of England and Wales showing a decrease, as the population of Ireland has long done, and the population of Scotland is now doing. At what cost? If we take the low figure of 300,000 as representing the annual human loss by emigration, and put the consequent money loss at £50 a head (a safe estimate), we are losing £15,000,000 a year of trade for the home market. And it is not fifteen millions in one year and done with. It is fifteen million times fifteen millions in fifteen years. In other words, if the three and a half million people who have emigrated to South Africa, Australia, and Canada within the last fifteen years had stayed at home we should be richer in purchasing power by no less than 225 million pounds; for, remember, it is not women who mostly go, and still less is it children who go. It is men in the prime of their lives and of their value to the community. Think of how much busier all our industries would be with 3 ½ millions of adult male wage-earners and wage-spenders in the country, to be housed, fed, clothed, warmed, shod and amused. Three and a half million is fully one-fourth of the entire wage-earning class. And it must not be forgotten that the children who left home fifteen years ago will now be men and woman, just as most of the 5,555 children who left in March this year will be men and women fifteen years hence. Is it good to go? But if it would be a good thing for us that these people should stay, is it a good thing for them that they should go? One cannot see but that, outside of despotically governed countries, one civilised State is pretty much as good as another. What is perfectly clear is that if wages are high, prices must be in proportion, since labour is a first charge upon all commodities made or services rendered. If anything, prices will tend to be lower, and real wages will tend to be highest, in old countries, where the use of machinery and the organization of labour both inside and outside the factory or workshop have been carried to the highest point. Thus England is an older-settled country than Scotland, and wages are on the whole higher, while the cost of living is less, machinery and competition among capitalists keeping prices down, while organization among the workers keeps wages up. The economic conditions of Britain are freer and more natural than those of any other country in the world. Protectionist States, including all our colonies, raise the cost of living in the interests of the rings and cartels who wax fat at the expense of the consumer, so that we have had the spectacle of the French and German working classes paying sevenpence a pound for beetroot sugar in the country where it was manufactured, while the same sugar was exported and sold to the Britisher at twopence a pound. Australis. Mr Henry Stead, writing from Melbourne to the ‘Daily News’ says:- The Tariff makes all imports costly to buy; the high rate of wages ruling throughout the Commonwealth makes local products dear. Until this is realized, the newcomer is amazed to find he must pay such high prices for foodstuffs which are easily produced in Australia, some of which, indeed, she exports in huge quantities. It is galling, for instance to have to pay more for butter in Melbourne than he has been accustomed to pay for the article when it reaches London, 12,000 miles away. About the only thing which is cheaper in Australia than at home is meat. The mutton is not very tasty: it sells at 6d a lb. The lamb is good and costs 7d the lb. Beef 6d; veal 5d: and pork 8d – all good meat. Fowls are, however, costly, running from 4s to 6s each. Jam, marmalade, tinned fruits, and soap are about the same price in Australia as in England. Nearly every other foodstuff is dearer than at home – rice 4d the pound, flour 2d the pound. The 1 ½ loaf of England sells for 3 1/2 d, common cheese 9d the pound, potatoes 2dto 4d the pound, lemons 3d each, cabbages 5d each, beetroots 5d each, milk 5d to 6d a quart, eggs 1s 3d a dozen (the very cheapest), lard 1s 4d a pound (and very poor stuff at that) candles 8d the pound, wood fuel 30 s the ton (and hard Australian wood is very heavy), and coal 30s the tone, the best of it much inferior to English coal. There is very little variety in the fish available in Australian ports; it is very expensive and very poor. Rents are high in Melbourne, and still higher in Sydney. In both cities it is impossible to obtain a house; the rapid growth of Sydney, especially having kept the builders so busy that house-seekers gladly paid rent from the moment digging the foundations was commenced! A seven or eight room villa could not be got for less than £100 per annum, but as the rates here are paid by the landlord, that would mean £80-£85 at home. The laundry, too, is a heavy item in the household budget. Chinese or Japanese laundry will charge 2s for a tablecloth and 6d for a shirt. How could it be otherwise? If Labour has to have a high wage, how shall the produce of labour be cheap? The capitalist is there to take his profit as well as here, and there as well he wastes money on advertising, sending out travellers, and all the other unnecessary coasts of competitive commerce. It is true that by means of wages boards and other slavery-regulating pieces of legislation the Australian workman enjoys relatively good conditions, but even this state of affairs cannot long endure without very much more fundamental economic changes than have at yet taken place. Australia is largely living on borrowed money. Mr Froude long ago pointed out that the people of Australia hugged the seaboard; that the interior of the country remained comparatively underdeveloped, the settlers having no liking for agriculture or pastoral work; that harbours and other public works were constructed with borrowed money and in excess of the requirements of actual trade and traffic. This feature of Australian public life has not altered for the better. New South Wales is now borrowing at the rate of £9,000,000 a year, and a few months ago the Sydney Bulletein printed the following piece of editorial candour: During the year 1912 the Commonwealth went to the bad… to the extent of £14,000,000 solely through not doing enough work to pay for the things it wanted. This is to say, its exports failed, by that amount, to pay for its imports and the interest on its foreign debts. Either it didn’t work long enough hours, or it didn’t work hard enough during its hours of work, or too large a proportion of the community didn’t work at all, or else the community insisted on living on an impossibly scale of lavishness. One or some of these explanations must be correct. The fact probably is that Australia will never be much of a country for white men. Its climate consists of alternate devastating drought or disasterous floods, and the floods at least obtain in New Zealand as well. Anyhow, these lands cannot meet the elementary test of paying their debts. For an insolvent country to vaunt its advantages, while all the time it is borrowing money from the nations it professes to despise, is on the face of it above impudence – a sort of international confidence trick. A young man settled in one of these colonies – very likely Australia – in writing home to his father and mother for money, used to address them as ‘My dear pay-rents.’ Was that symbolical? South Africa. We hear much less of South Africa as a white man’s country, nowadays. There is no war to excuse. South Africa never was and never will be a white man’s country. There are beautiful spots in Natal and Cape Colony; but the veldt is naked, naturally naked; and with its torrid sun, its sudden floods, its unkindly soil scattered thinly upon on flinty bottom, its fevers and its plagues of ticks and other vermin, South Africa cannot hope ever to tempt sensible men from the more kindly latitudes of the green earth. The fact that the aboriginal inhabitants were and are black shows what Nature would do with any race that settled there long enough. The thick skulls, woolly thatch, deep-set eyes, and greasy black skins of the Kaffir are Nature’s protection against the heat and glare of these naked plains and barren kopjes. The Boers have taken a touch of the tar-brush in the course of a few generations, and a few centuries more of South Africa, with little rejuvenating admixture of European blood, would see Brother Boer become a black man. Nature does not suspend her law of adaptation or her influence of environment to suit imperialist theories. National types have not been evolved by nothing. In spite of the constant stream of immigrants to the United States, the Yankee face, conical head, lank hair, and hairlessness, represent an appreciable approximation to the Red Indian type. Climate, water, the elemental properties of earth and air, are not negligible quantities in their influence on the stock. A black man’s country will remain a black man’s country. Our Lady of Snows. But Canada is the favoured field at present. Every Canadian settler becomes an emigration agent. A Scots friend settled in that land of seven months Arctic winter writes of how destitute the country is of the finer fruits of civilization. He has nothing but contempt for its shrieking unidea’d press. He calls it a ‘godless country,’ and inveighs against the persistency of the word ‘dollars’ in all conversations. While he is fully alive to the knowledge that everybody there is ‘on the make,’ and is not enamoured of the civilization thereby produced, he drops into a typical Canadian touch which, as Carlyle says, ‘is significant of much.’ Writing on the last day of March, when we were having rather nice weather in England, he says: - ‘Since the New Year the mercury has not reached the zero point, and for long weeks has been hovering around 1 degree and below. This of coruse, means that you do not care to go out more than is absolutely necessary, nor can you remain out for any length of time. ‘ No Saturday afternoon football there I reckon, and that’s a blessing anyhow. But after these blood-congealing details as to 18 and 20 below zeros the letter amusingly concludes: Do you ever think seriously of coming out here yourself? There is a splendid opening for men of your profession. I am sure you would make good and, since this is a British colony, the sacrifice of principle would be but infinitesimal. Making Good. It is not ‘the sacrifice of principle’ one thinks about, but the tremendous sacrifice of comfort and pleasure. More than most people I can find my pleasure by the ingle nook. But with the temperature at 20 below I fancy there would be little enough pleasure even there. As to ‘openings’ for journalists, I should say it is all opening there. The field is wide, and from all I have seen, unoccupied. A public which is absorbed in the hunt for dollars is not the public for me. I find England and Scotland more than enough materialistic. It is the finer things of life for which one lives. I have enough food, clothes, house-room, thousands of books to read, abundance of good tobacco always handy, a pint of beer for my supper. The theatres and concerts are numerous, and the temperature never anywhere near 20 degrees below zero to prevent one going out at nights. When my work is done there is the ancient walled city of York, with it glorious cathedral, within an hour’s run. Beverley, with its minster and bells is the next station to Cottingham on one hand, and the next station in the other direction is Hull, where there are I know not how many theatres and music halls, besides an art gallery, a public library, and all the stir of a world-wide traffic with the uttermost ends of the earth to be sampled by the banks and quays and landing-stages of the mighty yellow Humber. ‘Make good!’ I have a garden behind both my home and workplace. I walk to my work past market gardens and a beautiful twelfth century church surrounded by immemorial trees and a lovely lawn between the tombstones. When The Gateway is off my hands I can and do break away to Oxford, Cambridge, London, Windsor, Warwick, Whitby, Kent, Chester, the Burns country or Aberdeen. I want to work with my hands among the beloved types and the beautiful books, to write and print my own articles and occasionally to harangue the lieges. All this I can do. I cannot conceive of any change of place that would not be a change for the worse. One lives, not for bread and butter – he is a poor man who cannot get enough of that – but for the extras. Literature of the best, and leisure to enjoy it; music, good plays and good acting; friends who are not hungry for orders or money; a keen interest in the passing show as reflected in a really good newspaper; pleasant surroundings in the country, but near enough to a great city to be able to run in for the shows; the romance of the old world as embodied in stone-and-lime, stained glass, the best orators, actors and musicians – that is my idea of ‘making good,’ and for me to go to Canada would be to make bad in every one of these respects. A Matter of Taste. This question of emigration is a matter of taste. For a great object one might be willing to go into the wilds of Canada for a year or two, as Macaulay went to India to revise the Penal Code. He was tempted by the two thousand a year, and after all India is an interesting country with an ancient civilization to it. With the savings of his four years’ exile he returned to England and settled down to write his history. That had been the programme, and one can understand a man going abroad for such a purpose. But to emigrate with the deliberate purpose of going into ‘permanent residence’ would be an appalling prospect. England, with its green fields and blossoming hedgerows, its great forms that soar aloft in the quiet countryside amid the jackdaws in the elms and the warbling thrushes on the lawns; its stately homes that show how men might be housed; it’s creeping canal boats and its crawling wagon, with the driver sleeping under the tilt; its snuggling farmsteads and ribbons of yellow road running over the horizon’s edge; its orators, actors, singers, and musicians; it’s busy presses; the varied industries of its people; the individuality of its old towns on their old, man-clustered rivers; the wealth, ease and unhasting leisure and good nature of its people – there, and all the other long results of time are enough for me. Some of my young men have gone to South Africa, some to Canada, to do inferior work in an inferior civilization. I could understand a provincial printer wishing to go to London, Edinburgh or Oxford to perfect himself in his business and to at least bear a hand in the doing of good work. But some of these youths went to a small border town in South Africa, where a small edition of a country press was printed off on a handpress by a couple of Zulus! The paper itself was pretty much of a collection of country gossip interspersed with advertisements (and blocks) of mangles, bassinettes, mealies, tea and typewriters. One of them said he did not care as long as the money was good! As I said before, it’s all a question of taste – or the want of it. I happen to prefer civilization, good work, decent surroundings and a climate which neither bakes nor freezes one. Adventure at Home There are faults and cruelties enough in the old Homeland: but I shall not run away from the task of ameliorating them at the bidding of any man, and especially one who has gathered the wealth of many to himself and who is not going. Let the wastrels and wildbloods, or those who have ‘made a hash of it’ and need to start over again – let them go (if they can no better!) to lands where the flowers have no fragrance, where the birds do not attempt to sing, or where the mercury hovers for months in the neighbourhood of twenty below zero. ‘Go away,’ says Midas. ‘This old country is no place for a man of enterprise and spirit to stay in. There is cheap land; yeas, there is free land, to be got in Canada.’ Under his breath Midas says: ‘You are growing old and a little wiser. You had better clear out before you grow too wise for me. There are plenty of young fools coming on, and they and the dotards and the women and children will serve my turn. You are not doing any good here; and if you wait much longer you will begin to think that I am in the way. Clear out and good luck to you; but hands off my little lot.’ I for one am not going, to leave him in undisputed possession. What would have happened had Charles the First been a believer in emigration? Cromwell, Sir Arthur Hazelrig and other Parliament men of spirit, seeing the oppression and the struggle which lay before them, ought to run away from their duty. Seven ships lay in the Thames waiting to take them to the New World. In an evil hour for himself, but a blessed one for the country, Charles forbade the emigration! It cost him his head and altered the whole course of British history. The English Revolution, like the French Revolution, might have been delayed a hundred years if these seven king-quellers had been allowed to emigrate. Robert Burns was on the point of taking ship for Jamaica when Dr. Blacklock’s praise of the Kilmarnock poems reached him and made him stay to serve Scotland and humanity. Had he gone, he would doubtless have succeeded as a planter and been lost to poetry. There would have been on ‘Edinburgh’ edition, no ‘Tam o’ Shanter,’ no ‘Scots wha hae; for these and many another poem and song of his best were written after his plan of emigration was abandoned. The Chartist agitation was stifled by the discovery of gold in Australia and the emigration of the ‘agitators.’ What would happen in Russia, what would have happened long ago, had the unhappy subjects of the Czar no constantly open outlet to other lands. Probably the Russian Revolution would have long since taken place. As it is, Russian despotism is tolerated because emigration serves as a safety valve. Empty Britain The green fields of Britain are empty of human souls. The United Kingdom is becoming a place of sport and antiquarian shows. ‘What would we not give for your churches, your lawns, and your old houses’ say Colonial visitors. One may go down to Scotland by all three routes through hundreds of miles of empty country. From Newcastle to Edinburgh, from Leeds to Edinburgh, from Manchester to Glasgow, the train travels without passing a single great city or notable town on the way, with perhaps the one exception of Preston on the west coast route. Carlisle is a mere railway station. Berwick has a bridge. Dumfries is small, sordid and save for its unhappy memorials of Burns, uninteresting. From Edinburgh to Glasgow on to Dundee and Aberdeen, Scotland is again a place of empty fields and a bracing climate. The population of Britain is huddled into the towns, which, except in Lancashire and Yorkshire, are surrounded by blanks in the map. With our coal, our iron, our railways, canals and good roads, our many rivers, extensive seaboard, easy distances, profitable fisheries, the fertilising rain, the favoured geographical position, and the skill of our workers, there is plenty of room and a crying need for many times the population that these islands support, and there is abundance of adventure and the worthiest of struggles before the men who will lend a hand to set the house in order. Enterprise needs to begin at home. There is noth9ing a man may do abroad that he cannot do at his own hallan door. There is gold everywhere, says Dooley, if you will dig for it, it must be added, not that you get the fruits of your digging! The Remedy. To be sent into exile used to be regarded as punishment; and banishment is so regarded today by educated persons who value the comforts and pleasures that only civilization can give. The French officer went to Algeria, is broken hearted till he can return to the amenities of La Patrie, the hub of his universe. The officer who has to live on his pay considers it the greatest of his hardships to have to stew in India. Siberia, which is a sort of European Canada, is a word of horror to the well to do Russian. But, persuaded out of ordinary horse-sense by the prevailing cant about emigration, men sell their business or give up a good post and rush to book a passage to an erstwhile penal settlement, where men were formerly sent only in punishment for their misdeeds. To anyone who appreciates the fine fruits of an ordered and slowly perfected civilization, it is surely a punishment to have to go into the wilderness, leaving behind the tramcars, trains, baths, libraries, the water, gas and electricity laid on; to go to a wilderness where there are no paved footways, no macadamised roads, no bridges, no telephones; where the doctor, the church, the shops are twenty miles distant, where there are no libraries, theatres, art galleries, where a man has to be his own mason, carpenter, blacksmith, veterinary surgeon, butcher, nacker, navvy, and letter and parcel carrier. A Manufactured Exodus. The exodus is not a natural movement of population. It is made by advertisement and press puffs, and the great shipping companies are as much dependent on the continuance of this illusion as the armament firms are upon the illusion that national security means ships and guns. Huge showcases of colonial produce are now among the recognised decorations at big railway stations; as if we could not show far finer products than they can! From the hoardings gleam coloured picture-postcards of waving grain and snug farmsteads to lure the simple, credulous man away from his own kind acres and old green hills. Fortunes are being made by the many agents of the emigration pressgang, who rob their own country of its finest asset, its people, while taking good care not to go themselves! The effete old country is good enough for them! If it pays the Colonies so well to secure emigrants, is it not equally to our advantage to induce them to stay and work for the progress and glory of the Homeland, in which their own true wellbeing is involved.
If a whole company are gamesters play must cease, for there is nothing to be won. When all nations are traders there is nothing to be gained by trade, and it will stop first where it is brought to the greatest perfection. - SAMUEL JOHNSON. I have no wish to be a dictator. The value of a political system is that it expresses the wishes of the people who maintain it, for good or evil. The value of democracy is that it is based on the freedom of the individual will so far as that is compatible with majority rule, the alternative to the often regrettable will of the majority being the still more regrettable will of the minority. It often happens, indeed, that the majority abdicates to the minority, as in the case of the partition of Ireland and the hanging up of changes generally because a minority is strongly opposed to the wishes of the major portion of the electorate. But in amusing myself with setting down what I would do if dictator, I do not disclaim a wish to persuade someone here and there that what I would do compulsorily might be and should be done by a free and intelligent electorate voluntarily. For as things are it is idle to deny or belittle the glaring position that the basic industries of the country are in a state of collapse, with every prospect that the position will become worse instead of better unless fundamental changes are made. The annual reviews of agriculture and the coal, cotton, and metallurgical trades would be deplorable reading if we did not feel that things will only become better by becoming worse and so forcing on the changes that should long since have been made voluntarily. In this world, and with human nature as it is, great changes are not made merely because they are desirable, but only because at last they have become necessary, and even then the Reaction does its best to preserve some evil feature of the old way of doing things. In matters of taste and fashion a mere hint is enough to set men and especially women off on the new tack; but in public affairs men cling to the old ways with all the logic and all the practical convenience equally against them. Success of Collective Control. Nothing is clearer than the success of public control of public business. There is, for example, only one conspicuously successful railway in the world at the present moment, and that is the State-owned railway system of Canada, which was as much of a failure under private enterprise as coal and cotton are now. The private banks of the belligerent countries during the early days of the war had all but pulled the blinds down till the State came to the rescue with its credit. The private munitions factories could not turn out shells fast enough, even at grossly inflated prices, till the State experts filled the breach, and not only taught them better technical methods, but showed by their own practice in the national factories that munitions could be produced more quickly and cheaply and of a better quality, while the employees were paid better wages. The tale could be carried much further; but the cases were cited as they came to light, and I must pay my readers the compliment of assuming that they have not forgotten. We are a nation of shopkeepers, and the shopkeeper, wholesale or retail, is in a sheltered industry which may jog along almost irrespective of what is happening in the productive field, short of a general strike and the stoppage of all ability to pay for the shopkeeper’s wares. The pipe that feeds a motor engine with petrol is a small part of the mechanism. But let it he clogged or otherwise stopped, and how soon the car will come to a stand! All the elaborate mechanism is there; but for want of the tiny trickle of life-giving spirit it is inert, dead. The Trickle of Exports. It is so with our few staple industries. The exports are a relatively small part of British trade - from a seventh to an eighth of the total home market, meaning by home market the national income from goods, services, and investments. In 1928 exports were only £723,000,000, as compared with close on £1,197,000,000 of imports. The value of British exports do not meet, by 1oo millions, the expenses of government. That the home market and the domestic life of the nation should be subordinated to the retention of this dear-bought moiety is our present mistaken policy, based on the illusion that we cannot do without it. Bleeding of the Basic Industry. I turn to a really indispensable trade. The small market towns dotted at intervals of a few miles throughout the country depend upon agriculture. And agriculture and the population which lives by it are both dwindling steadily and even rapidly. The November hirings again absorbed a smaller number of men; the men not engaged hived off to the large centres; and they will inevitably be followed by a drop in the small-town populations. In the town where I write, in spite of relatively heavy expenditure on publicly-owned housing schemes, the population fell from 2152 in 1921 to 1939 in 1928, or fully 10 per cent. in seven years. Obviously such a process cannot be allowed to go on indefinitely, although those most responsible in the various localities do not seem to realise that the position is at all serious, and profess to regard all reference to it and suggested remedy for it as ‘irrelevant’ and superfluous. The same fatalistic contentment was doubtless shown by the public men of vanished Babylon, Thebes, Tyre, and Carthage, as if the growth and decay of cities were a matter of mere fortuity beyond the help or hindrance of man. First Things First. Were I dictator one of the first things I should attack is the retrogression from agriculture to the pastoral stage represented in the substitution of sheep for crops and the laying down of arable land to grass. It is said that we cannot blame the farmer; that he finds cattle and corn unprofitable, and turns to sheep and poultry because there is more money in these, with less trouble and a lower wage-bill. As, however, the lower wage-bill means turning men off the land, clearly the State has an interest and a duty in the matter. With unemployment as the great problem in Britain as in America, a Government cannot allow its territory to be depleted of population and its resources to be wasted in the maintenance of able-bodied men in idleness. Britain is too small a country to be wasted on sheep-feeding, still less on deer, which are crowding out even sheep. The corn lands of Scotland are the best in the temperate zones, producing, in 1928, 21.2 cwts. of wheat to the acre, as compared with 17.2 for England and Wales, and 23 and 24 bushels of oats and of wheat for Canada, and 16 bushels of winter wheat for the United States. Taking the bushel at 56 lbs., this gives only a little more than half the weight for Canada and a little over a third of the weight for America. And as the Canadian and American grain has to cross thousands of miles of land and sea before it reaches the ports of the United Kingdom,* it may well be asked: How is it able to compete successfully with British-grown cereals? *(On 31st December, 1929, grain freights were quoted: River Plate to United Kingdom up-river ports, 15/9 per ton; Gulf to U.K., 2/6 per quarter (that is, 12/6 per ton); North Pacific Coast to U.K. and Continent, 24/6 per ton; San Francisco to U.K. and Continent, 25s. Since the Commonwealth Line was sacrificed to enable the Shipping Ring to pay inflated dividends, Australian rates are not quoted. The report adds, with the usual vagueness: ‘Australia quotes a few orders for grain; but rates weak on liberal tonnage supplies.’) For one thing, there is less of a rent burden. Then there is a small or non-existent manure-bill, freight rates are very low, and the crops are marketed in bulk. On the other hand, labour costs are higher in Canada and the United States. Anyhow, the proof that Canada and the States can out-compete British cereals is that they do it. The truth is, agriculture is a sweated industry all over the world, and whatever tended to improve conditions here would tend to improve them in all countries from which supplies were derived, unless and until a time came when we should be able to do without cereals from these countries entirely. Rural depopulation is going on in the States as well as in Britain, and a great contributory cause is low prices. There is probably systematic over-production of foodstuffs. Control of Imports. If I were dictator I should institute control of agriculture from top to bottom, in the interests alike of the rural population and the nation. A first step would be the nationalization of the railways and the complete readjustment of freight rates. Side by side with this I would strictly limit the issue of motor licences for road transport, much of which is entirely uneconomical. As I have repeatedly pointed out, a locomotive engine will pull 6o loaded trucks on rails, with three men in charge. The same traffic on the road would require 6o motors, 6o trucks, and at least 120 men in charge, while the roads would suffer much more than the rails. As it is, motor licences are given as a matter of course and in the interests of trade and revenue, no account being taken of the subsidy of £40,000,000 a-year given to road transport by the British public in the form of taxation for road maintenance. Railway Nationalization. The nationalization of the railways would effect many savings in duplicated staffs and directorates, but the help it would give to agriculture would be in the reduction of freight rates to the home user and their increase to the foreign importer. At present the preference to the latter is as four to one against the home user, he having to pay the higher rate because the foreigner has to have the lower. If the foreign importer had to pay the home rate his produce would be automatically and quite fairly and naturally excluded, A Government Department would very properly impose a flat mileage rate to all comers. Marketing. The exclusion of artificially cheapened produce - foreign produce which does not pay its passage - would go far to help the British farmer. But an equalization so far of the conditions of competition would not of itself be enough. Complaint is made of the difference between the price paid to the farmer for say potatoes and the price charged in the retail shop. This is often a question of marketing. It is not uncommon for produce to pass through several sets of hands between the field and the shop. One consignment of potatoes was traced through six firms of distributors, the potatoes being repeatedly re-sacked. After they had been from Forfarshire to Aberdeen city, they travelled, as seed, via Glasgow back to the district from which they came. If each of the handlers added even a small moiety of profit it would be no wonder if the price were at least doubled. The public is itself to blame for the existence of so many middle-men by neglecting to deal with the producer direct. If I were dictator, regardless of public opinion and independent of a sectional vote, I should give farmers six weeks in which to get together for co-operative marketing, failure to comply being penalised. All blacklegs profit by the co-operation of those who do co-operate, and all should be compelled to contribute to the result by which they benefit. With Government control of imports, the amount and bulk of consignments could he regulated. Dumping could be regulated or checked altogether. The price could be regulated. And given a living price, the farmer would be encouraged once again, as in war-time, to keep the plough going, to break up the 2 million acres that have lapsed to grass since 1918, and to employ more and more labour. But would such encouragement be enough? We may be sure that, as in war-time, it would not. Control meant higher farming, and it must mean that again. For even war prices did not provide sufficient stimulus to speed the plough, and there had to be pains and penalties for bad farming. The problem is to raise immensely our food production, since the home market is more and more the only market that is being left to us. What We Produce and What We Buy. In 1928 we produced only six million quarters of wheat, and we consumed 35 millions; so that the production needs to be increased five-fold. We produced six million quarters of barley, and imported four million quarters. So that the production of barley has to be nearly doubled. Of oats we produced 21 million quarters, and imported three millions, and in 1929 the import figure was considerably exceeded. So that here again a 14 per cent. increase is needed. I do not know that maize has ever been or could be grown in Britain; but we imported 10 million quarters of it in 1928. Doubtless it has substitutes, and if we could grow other feeding stuffs in sufficient quantity we need not import so much maize. It is a heating grain, and is held responsible for the widespread prevalence in Italy of the disease of malnutrition called pollagra. There are many other crops in which, with all our facilities of soil, climate, and proximity to great markets, we are lamentably deficient. Inspection, advice, and discipline would be as necessary and salutary under control as they are in proving in Ireland, where the visits of the inspector are welcomed and his expert counsel readily followed. No class of men do their best; no broad class of men know how to do the best. The best of us can do with advice. Individualism. I have said that agriculture needs control - that is, compulsory organization - from top to bottom. The need of control is shown by the hostility of many farmers to any form of organization, advice, or interference. One would think their industry was successfully expanding the area of cultivation, increasing the number of persons employed, and providing these workers with a high standard of life. The facts being all the other way, it behoves the nation to say: ‘The land of Britain is in the last resort our land, and we have an interest in seeing that as much is got out of it as possible. From this standpoint everything is as different as possible from what it ought to be.’ But any week one pleases, farmers will be found objecting to something proposed in the interest of the nation and the consumer, though it is the consumer who gives agriculture or any other business its sole value. A Liberal M.P. has recently started a Potato Marketing Board in order to deal with the price-collapse in this branch of food production. Mr. Blindell, the founder, proposed that the Board should have representatives of the consumers and the agricultural workers, as well as farmers, and should work, in concert with the Food Council, to stabilise prices. The National Union of Farmers (English) denounces all these proposals. They say the Food Council is no friend of theirs, and that they do not want prices stabilised. They say that the years when prices are high recoup the grower for the years when prices are low, without offering any hint of when the prices are to be high, Anything rather than regulation or the removal of grievances. Not to have a grievance would in itself apparently be a grievance. Overproduction Due to Lack of Organization. As regards potatoes, the position is that farmers never know exactly what acreage is to be sown. The year 1929 saw an increase of 591,000 tons, and 1928 had increased by 691,000 on the previous year. The consequences have been glut and unremunerative prices. In the absence of any organization or agreement, the probability is that 1930 will see a scarcity, since there is no means of finding out what acreage is likely to be planted, and farmers will shy off from an unprofitable crop. It is the same with turnips - a glut one year, a famine the next, and this not merely because turnips are a ticklish crop, but because there is no arrangement as to the quantity to be sown. It is true that turnips are not grown for sale as other crops are, but chiefly to be used on the farm. Sales do go on, however, and one has seen truck loads of turnips being carried on the railways from centres where there was a glut, owing to extensive sowing, to parts where there was a scarcity from the opposite cause, while ploughing in of the excessive and useless fodder represented a sad waste of labour, land, and seed. Overproduction of food is like no other production in respect that food is perishable; and consequently central organization, both of home production and foreign importation, can alone prevent excess, waste, and unremunerative prices. Apples rotting in Kent and apples from Canada and America selling briskly are the proofs of unfair freights and no organization. If farmers have not had enough of this, the public has. Beggars Cannot be Choosers. If the rural districts could retain their population, and deal with the consequences of bad housing, sanitation, and low standards of life they would have a better claim to be allowed to mismanage their business; but as it is they slough their problems on the large centres - unemployed people, the feeble-minded, the diseased, accidents due to happy-go-lucky methods, and an immense burden of litigation. The county courts are kept going with rustic civil cases and rustic crimes out of all proportion to the numbers of the rural population. The ailing folk of the city must wait for a bed and treatment in their own hospitals; but cases from the country are forwarded as a matter of course and are accepted because humanity forbids their being returned untreated. Farming a Business. It is said by apologists that farming is ‘not a business, but a way of living.’ That is precisely what is amiss with farming. The farmer is not typically a business man. Struggling with weather, obstinate folk, and obstinate beasts, his hallmark is stolidity; and he is excused from keeping account-books because of his assumed dislike to, and probable incapacity for, book-keeping and his assumed disregard of whether his business is paying or not. If I were dictator, then, I should control imports, stabilise prices, insist upon high farming and the maximum employment of labour compatible with remunerative business, and I should vest the Food Council with powers to enforce its findings. The business of the Food Council is not to be specially the friend of the farmer, but of the nation. Grow Bigger or/and Bust. I deal with this matter at special length, not merely because it is neglected in the policy of statesmen and the advocacy of publicists, but because it is in itself all-important to Britain. She is on the absolutely wrong road at present because her public men have the utterly unfounded idea (1) that she cannot feed her people with home-grown food, and (2) that she can go on depending indefinitely upon export trade. It is an essential feature of capitalism that its expansion means its ultimate extinction, since it obviously cannot expand except by equipping the nations of the earth to become their own producers. We send them money, machines, managers. An Agricultural-Fiscal Decalogue. So far, then, we have: 1. Set up a system of import control by a Government Department, whose officials would buy supplies from abroad in lessening quantities, liberating them on the market as wanted and at prices enabling the home producers to live and live well. This would be protection without tariffs, without speculative profits to Cartels, and without the trouble of collecting duties. If supplies were cheap from countries with low standards, the cheapness would be used, not to lower home prices, but would be State profits which would accrue to the nation. 2. We have nationalised the railways, equalised freights, improved the entire railway system in the interests of safety, efficiency, and the comfort and convenience of the travelling public. This, not as an expedient forced upon us, but as the best way of managing the service. 3. We have, unfortunately only on paper, restricted the issue of motor licences. The saving of the roads from heavy commercial traffic would mean that more labour and material could be expended upon the neglected third-class roads upon which agricultural traffic is mostly carried. 4. If I were dictator I should reduce the hours in all sheltered industries at once. After all the mechanical inventions and improvements that have taken place, a working day of eight hours is too long. As many shifts as you please, but none to work more than seven hours for a start. Russia is forging ahead with a seven-hour day at present. In competitive industries arrangements could be made with continental nations to reduce the labour day. Such international arrangements are the aim of the Washington Convention and the business of the International Labour Office. 5. An embargo upon the investment of money abroad was sound in war-time, and it would be sound now. At present one-third to one-half of the investments passing through the Stock Exchange represent British capital abstracted from the British pool and suicidally invested abroad to enable the cheap labour of Poles, Hindoos, and Chinese to be used to lower British standards and destroy British trade. 6. Nationalization of the land upon its present assessed value, the present holder to be given interest-paying scrip. Landlords no longer give improvements or repairs, and roads, drainage, tree-planting, and the provision of houses have long since become public concerns. As the landlords, thus pauperised, say land is a costly luxury, they ought to be glad to have 3 per cent. on the assessable value. Improvements in the countryside would then be improvements of the nation’s own property. 7. A thoroughgoing policy of afforestation associated with small holdings and country crafts. 8. Electrification to be carried out in all directions, not through companies, but by direct labour under expert public servants, the amenity of the landscape to be conserved as against cheapness. 9. Recruiting for the army, navy, and air force to be stopped, as many men would be wanted for constructive work. There are millions of trained soldiers in the country who could be mobilised at once if need were. And there need be no need. 10. Slum clearances to be carried out as rapidly as new houses can be built for the transplanted population, labour being drafted from the mining and other distressed areas to do work and save doles. The Great Contradiction. These ten commandments of reconstruction are but a beginning. They are all not merely feasible, but changes that follow established precedents and cry aloud to be made. The organisation of labour is the State’s most primary and important concern. To neglect it is both crime and folly. To attempt to find employment by the capitalist methods that have created and are still creating unemployment is to stereotype obvious mismanagement, is an abandonment of principle, and a shutting of eyes to all the signs of the times - not merely of the immediate hour, but the whole stream of tendency of the last fifty years, which is for the great industries to go abroad, the work being carried on where the products are required. The more that capitalism succeeds in its object of making profits the sooner it will fail as a social method, which it has never pretended to be anyhow. America with its 4,000,000 of unemployed, and much working of short time as an admitted result of capitalist ‘prosperity’ proves that capitalism is the Great Contradiction of history. The moderate proposals here made should not require draconian powers or methods for their enforcement. The United States Farm Board is attempting, with some success, despite the opposition of the wheat speculators, to help the basic industry in the direction of organising marketing and eliminating middlemen, among other aims; and most of the main products of the soil are the subject of compulsory regulation, from eggs in Ireland, sugar in Cuba, to hemp and sizal in Manilla, with proposed compulsory co-operation among wheat-growers in Alberta. And the State railways of Canada carry Canadian wheat at about a fourth of the rates imposed in Britain. Other countries turn more and more to the control which Britain possessed and abandoned, although, on the undisputed claim of its authors, it saved the country £400,000,000 during the short period of its operation. Draconian powers are here assumed chiefly because Labour in office has for the moment dropped its proposals for control through an Imports Board, apparently in deference to the opposition of vested interests. If this is not the case the best way to allay suspicion and meet the needs of agriculture is to revive in a Bill the proposals advocated during the General Election.
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. J. RAMSAY MACDONALD. My Dear MAcDoNALD, I note with gladness that, in Forward this week, you say we must "get back on to our Socialism. In the end, it alone matters." Taken in conjunction with recent events and pronouncements, is this the preliminary and informal announcement of a change of policy ? Perhaps you will read what follows as from an old friend and a propagandist of over forty years. The Past The Government of which you were the head denationalised the town and works of Gretna, getting very poor prices for what was a sacrifice both of principle and of property. You r Govern ment increased the expenditure on aircraft, and built unnecessary cruisers in fulfilment of the Admiralty's program me. The English sailors who broke the sea-power of Spain and of France did it with the odds always against them ; but the British admirals of to-day appear to feel uneasy if they do not outnumber the enemy in ships, guns, and men alike. Your Government did not nationalise the railways, although that was the policy of the Coalition as far back as 1918. Your Govern men t did not nationalise the mines, though there was a promise solemnly made on behalf of the Coalition Government, in advance, that the recommendations of the Sankey Commission would be carried out both in the spirit and the letter, and although nationalization has been indicated, when not specifically recommended, by one Royal Commission after another for a generation past. Indeed, so little has nationalization been in favour with you recently that even when moving a vote of censure on the Government for its failure to implement the recommendations of its own Coal Commission, you suggested, not public ownership, but ‘a public utility organization imposed upon a trust organization’ This nebulous demi-semi suggestion promptly found favour with Mr. Lloyd-George, who described it as "very significant," and appeared to think that it offered possibilities for co-operation from his following such as could not be given for the Socialist policy of public ownership. Roads. When Mr. Lloyd-George first imposed the petrol tax in 1909 he said the motor traffic had increased so much that the time was rapidly arriving when additional roads would be necessary to carry it, the tax being designed to augment the road funds. Since then the traffic has increased hundreds fold, while the smooth road necessary for it is neither necessary nor even suitable for the horse traffic of agricultural districts. Your Minister of Transport, at the end of months, had not got beyond the surveying stage for new roads. For over a generation attention has been called to the immense energy generated by the tidal waters of the Severn. If harnessed it would suffice, say enthusiasts, to drive all the machinery in Britain. Your Government, after months, had not got beyond a reported preliminary survey, and now your successors turn to other widely remote fields for water-power, in some cases carrying out extensive cuttings to bring the water to the practicable point, while here is a wide river in a suitable area offering exceptional power and facilities still lying neglected. Foreign v. Home Politics. You were a success as Foreign Secretary, introducing a new spirit in to international diplomacy ; but the achievements of even the best foreign minister are often writ in water-so much depends upon continuity of policy both from his side and from the other. The improved relations with France were a feather in your cap ; but Heriot the Possible has gone, and Poincare the Impossible again reigns in his stead ; not a penny of France's debt has been paid ; and in France as elsewhere our foreign relations are very much as if you had never been in the Foreign Office. Some of us cannot but regret that your pre-occupation with foreign policy took your attention off domestic matters upon which a fruitful beginning, committing your successors, might have been made. For even a Government in a minority has great powers. To have made a definite Socialist beginning with all the matters l have specified would have been perfectly possible. These things were not only expected of a Socialist Ministry, but all of them are so much in the line of natural evolution that it would not be too much to expect any or all of them from a ministry of any party sooner or later. The socialization of essential services is an elementary principle now with all schools of politics. The Categorical Claim. But the convinced Socialist believes that all large-scale production would be immensely improved in every way by being socialised. This is not a mere hope : it is a matter of experience. All services that have been nationalised or municipalised have been improved out of recognition. We have all, I hope, been reading the excellent little book, "Practical Socialism," by Dr. Addison, whose collection of specimen facts and figures from the experience of the Ministry of Munition s is worth a library of theory or academic discussion. The ex-Minister of Munitions has been converted to an acceptance of Socialism by the irrefragible evidence of how much quicker, cheaper, and better production could be carried on in the State factories than in private works. State Efficiency. The best equipped private factories could deliver only a third of the shells promised by a given date, whereas the State works were always well ahead with their deliveries. It was found that in three different well-equipped private munition factories the time taken on a given process varied from 4 to 15 and from 3 to 1o, the differences being due to degrees of bad management. By the collaboration which the Ministry secured, conditions more uniform were obtained, and waste was eliminated by the Government experts giving the private managers the benefit of their advice. In the manufacture of sulphuric acid, for instance, it was found that the proportion of unnecessary ash created was much in excess of what it ought to have been. Metal scrap-tin, steel, iron, and brass-often represents up to 50 per cent. of the material actually used. The Army Salvage Department and the Ministry of Munitions Scrap Department effected "immense savings " by turning over mountains of refuse to be treated in special factories which private enterprise would not have had any motive to set up. As Dr. Addison shows, it was necessary to set up State factories, not merely to augment the supply of shells and explosives, but to show how much more cheaply the work could be done by Government servants than by private enterprise patriots. After allowing handsome profits, it was found that using the experience of the State factories as a basis of costing, prices could be, and were, reduced by two thirds. The private-enterprise patriots required 23s. for an 18-pounder shell ; but the national factories at Dundee, Keighley, and elsewhere could produce them for 9s. The metal discs for which the armament firms charged 1od. were made by the national factories at 4d., and tubes for which the private price was 1/6 were made by servants of the Ministry of Munitions for 4 ½ d. A State Departure. Not only so. The M inistry made explosives that had not till then been made in this country on any scale at all. The acid, oleum, had to be got from America at £12 a-ton. But the Ministry set up a factory at a cost of £750,000, and by May 1916 it was found that the cost of erection had been saved, with £225,000 of a surplus, the gross saving being £97 5,050. For the oleum which cost £12 a-ton to buy from America could be manufactured by State employees at 55s., allowing for all reasonable overhead charges, and paying exceptionally good wages. This was practically a new industry as founded by the Department of Explosives. The factory produced 2050 tons per week. Previous to this great experiment the British price for oleum, procurable only in small quantities, had been £30 per ton. When, therefore, we are told that the State mismanages everything, we are justified in reversing the saying and claiming that the worst State and municipal management is better than the best private management so far as the results to the public are concerned. The different motives explain this. The private management exists to take from the public ; the public management exists to give and serve. The working folk of this country are not so dull as to miss the moral of the many facts that have been placed before them showing the advantages of public over private enterprise ; and if this be the Socialism on which you are to fall back, my dear MacDonald, it is very safe ground and the only feasible line of social progress. A Fantastic Alternative. But of late there have been "many inventions." The very latest is the Living Wage. l was amused to read last week-end an I.LP. advertisement headed "Socialism in our Time-The Living Wage." The lecturer was Bailie Dollan, who has made two appearances in this district-at Maud and Aberdeen-for the purpose of turning down Public Owner ship and setting up the new demand for "A Living Wage." In cross discussion it appears that Bailie Dollan , like Messrs. Brailsford and J. A. Hobson, does not believe in nationalization of mines and railways, because they do not pay, but pins his faith to the idea of a living wage being demanded for every worker whether the industry in which he (or she) is employed can pay it or not. The idea is that the people who are making high profi ts are to be taxed to pay a living wage to the employees of those who are not maki ng such profits, even wi th wages as low as they are. This is a new and non-Socialist stunt, like those other dis carded I.LP. novelties, the Right to Work and the Abolition of the Poor Law. That the Living Wage should be announced under the caption "Socialism in our Time " is a ghastly revelation of the widely diverse expectations of two different kinds of foolish people. I was not present at either of Bailie Dalian's meetings. Had I been at the Maud meeting (which is in my division) I should have applied his demand to the chief local industry, farming. At present farm servants are working for round about £30 per six months. To a married man who has "fee'd single," who gets his own food at the farm, and has no cottar allowance of cottage, milk, potatoes, and coal for his family, 22/6 a-week has to serve as a wage upon which to keep a wife and usually bairns, to feed him at week-ends, and to find him in clothes, washing, and boots. In his case a living wage means three times as much as he is getting. I believe you know as well as I do that £3 7s. 6d. a-week to a farm hand is an impossibility in any country of the world. You may alter agriculture-I hope we shall improve it out of recognition, by first Control and then complete Socialization-but in the meantime it is beginning at the wrong end of the process altogether to say you must first have out of the industry what is not in it. To pay £2 5s. more a-week to a million and a quarter farmhands would require £ 146,240,000 a-year. Don't Messrs. Hobson and Brailsford wish they may get this modest instalment of their total demand ! The idea of everybody working hard in order to hand over the surplus as subsidy to the unprofitable industries is the most fantastic conception ever launched in the name of politics. A Time to be Bold. The electorate is with us now. We cannot do more than win every by-election that takes place. Our men win on programmes of nationalization and municipalization, public ownership, Britain for the British, in increasi ng measure. There is nothing unreasonable, nothing new in that demand. It does not mean "Socialism in our time"- not the whole of Socialism-not the socialization of all industries and services in our time. But it means the steady, gradual extension of the sphere of Collective Ownership, the steady exclusion of the predatory classes from one field of exploitation after another. If a Tory Government, hating Socialism, is nevertheless driven or tempted to nationalise two services in one year-broadcasting and electricity-is it not reasonable to expect rather more from a Government which has nationalization as its chief business ? This is not asking for the extraction of rabbits from hats, but only that the nation's business shall be managed by the nation's responsible servants instead of by the nation's irresponsible and often incompetent masters. In the long run men hit only that at which they aim. To make up our minds as to what we want is the first essential. We need not be afraid of saying we want unlimited Socialization, the continuation of the process already long since begun, whereby the State in the country and the local authorities i n the towns have become the largest and the best servants of the public, neither scamping the work nor over charging the price, the last and best and only unfailing friend of the citizen when all other friends fail him. There need be no confiscation, no violent dislocations, no injustice done to any one. Nay, it is only by this process that the daily injustices, confiscations, and dislocations of capitalistic society can be ended. During the War years new departures were made, experiments launched, records beaten, and all very rapidly. This is not necessary in peace. All we ask is that Collectivist principles which have proved efficacious in the hands of non-Socialist s should have a trial from the party to which they properly belong. Collectivism-the communal way of doing things-is really the oldest principle in politics. Liberalism and Toryism are growths of yesterday by comparison. Collectivism is not a wild, "red," foolish, or desperate last resort, but the extension of law and order over chaos and inefficiency, the fulfilment of that "increasing purpose " which runs through the ages of social evolution. We must have it in increasing measure no matter what set of politicians we elect. But progress is faster with willing agents, and time is precious. The double holocaust of last week in our murderously mismanaged mines is proof that the poet was right when he wrote "on every wind of heaven a wasted life goes by." Individualism is the enemy. Have at it, old friend, in the name of Humanity ! There is no better work to which a man may set his hand, and, unlike Mr. Baldwin, you have the touch stone of great principles to guide you. Since the first sentinel was nominated by brute selection to keep watch for the feeding herd, since the first naked post runner was elected to carry other people's messages, since the later time when the folk-moot abdicated its functions in favour of one elected representative to a Witana·gemote (or assembly of the wise), the Socialist principle has increasingly been at work. It is not the Collectivist who is the heretic and rebel, but those who would keep society a chaos of warring atoms, each secreting with feeble greed and stupid jealousy for itself, and incapable of co-operating for the grander results of associated effort in which man diminishes his disabilities and increases his powers a millionfold. Yours in real fraternity, JAMES LEATHAM. 'WHAT we want is to stop the State being used for the benefit of a small number of individuals at the expense of all the rest.’
The Factors of Civilization. WHAT are the factors of civilization? What causes one community to grow and prosper materially and mentally, while another declines in population, wealth, all the real elements of greatness? The question is immensely practical. Scotland is bleeding white. Since the war over 300,000 of some of the best of her people have emigrated for good. In 1926 four times as many emigrants left Glasgow as went from all the English ports together. Scotland has some of the admittedly worst slums in the world. But for the wholesale invasion of Irish immigrants, the population would have shown a decline, It is said that every fifth child born in Scotland is Irish. In Glasgow in 1924 the figure was 284 per cent. They may be healthy babies—the Irish are of good physique—the point is that they were not the native population of the country, and that they were born to parents accustomed to a lower standard of life who came to Scotland, not to better her condition, but to better their own. Asleep. Our land goes back to pasture. Our grave social problems are relatively neglected. If there is no wealth but life, then we are losing the best part of our wealth—our people. Scotland's railways and banks are affiliated to English banks and English railways. The head offices of her great businesses are more and more situated in England. Her education only helps to swell the number of persons who seek careers in England and abroad; and as regards the education itself, it is said to sacrifice quality to quantity. She has no literary class. Her books are written and published in England. Her music, dramatic art, politics, machinery, newspapers, magazines, films are all made in England or abroad. Even her food is largely grown abroad. Her politics and public life are a disgraceful wrangle with Yahoos who can only bark and boo at their public servants. Are these things beyond hope of remedy? Is it desirable that they should be remedied? Or is it right and inevitable that we should be absorbed, body, soul, and land, in the predominant partner, the American millionaire taking over the Highland wildernesses, and the Irish Catholic the Lowland slums? The Nightmare City. Do you recall the horrible cities of Wellsian fiction—piled up in story above story like American skyscrapers, roofed over with glass to keep off the rain and the cleansing, health-giving winds? Their people are serfs speaking a jargon of which "I seen it " and “He done it" are the beginnings. They wear a uniform, the mark of the beast being apparently insufficiently indicated by their degraded speech, accent, and faces. The news is no longer printed, but is galumphed out by mechanical loud speakers at the airless street corners, The country is for the most part a wilderness all round these huge Bastilles of the wretched. The women look you coolly and wantonly in the face, the relationship of the sexes being a matter on which no ethic has been promulgated. From these nightmare cities of the future the last pretence of religion or morals seems to have been stripped. Make what discounts you please from this as an imaginary picture, it is impossible to deny that we are in several respects tending towards such conditions; and I say no man or woman of goodwill—the goodwill backed by some intellect —can view such a prospect with any feelings save those of dread and abhorrence. Our forefathers fought to drive out the English conqueror, though he came with a superior civilization, and in our own day we have fought to keep out the German would-be invader. It seems an anti-climax not only to allow ourselves to be invaded by Irish and Americans, but to shake from our feet the dust of the country for which we fought, or, remaining in it, make no effort to develop its civilization. The Doric. I am not concerned for the preservation of the Doric; still less for the revival of Gaelic. The tongue that Shakespeare and Milton wrote, that Pitt and Bright spoke, the language in which the Bible is printed, is abundantly good enough for me. Lowland Scots in its various dialects is mostly just English corrupted, and I am not concerned about the preservation of corruption. I am not even concerned about the Anglicising of our institutions. We have learned most of our civilised habits from England, and we cannot do better than go on learning more. One of the chief English habits I should wish to see adopted in Scotland is the English habit of staying at home and working to make the land better worth living in. The cult of the dialect is fostered chiefly by Scotsmen in England. Your Scot abroad develops a tremendous amount of sentiment for his native land; but he will not live in it. When one hears the supposedly exiled Scot sing "0 why left I my hame?" the natural question is: Well, why did you? Was it just for more money? Or had you to run for it? The greatest service a man can do his native land is clearly to live in it, increasing its wealth and developing whatever is best in its life. Real Patriotism. Nobody makes such outcry about patriotism as the Scot, and nobody shows less of the sincere patriotism which consists in living and working in and for one's own land. When we read that four times as many Scots as English left their country in a given year we do not pause to consider that it means 3o Scots emigrating for one Englishman, the population of South Britain being as eight to one of the northern land. Let us consider the question in the light of broad principle, beginning with a definition. Civilization is the progressive development and diffusion of intelligence and morals and the progress and diffusion of those arts and appurtenances of life that render morals, manners, and religion possible. The first factor of civilization is population. The second is industry. The third is fair dealing between man and man. Race, climate, geographical position, natural resources, as will be seen, have very little to do with social progress. The human factor is all. Ethnography. Ethnography affords no certain key; for the character of a race is not homogeneous. The Japs are of the same Mongolian race as the Koreans whom they dominate and the Chinese whom they beat in war, as they beat the Russians, both by land and sea. Latitude and climate give us no definite clue; for alert and agressive Japan is in much the same latitude as lethargic Turkey and stagnant Morocco. An insular position in a temperate zone is probably a helpful factor in the furtherance of civilization, Britain and Japan are both island kingdoms. But so are Madagascar and Ceylon, where every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile. Whatever the factors of civilization may be, none of them has the permanence of situation or of race. The centres of population and the seats of power and prosperity change; and new peoples every now and again come to the front among the nations. Egypt and Persia are succeeded on the world-stage by Greece and Rome, who in turn give way to the Turk and the Moor. Spain has her glorious day, and ceases to be. In population, in the arts, and in science France has yielded place to Germany, as Britain in some respects does to America, The composite character of a people is often credited with the honour of its achievements; but, while the British people are highly composite, the Japs, so far as we know, are not. The Paradox of Environment. Apart from the well-established fact that progress lies with the people of temperate latitudes, one other apparently universal law emerges from the mass of unrelated facts—the law, namely, that environment exercises a paradoxical influence on the achievements and progress of mankind. A fine climate, a fertile soil, a favourable situation, instead of stimulating man to energetic and intelligent co-operation with Nature, which has done so much for him, has everywhere and always the opposite effect. It is so as between races, it is so as between nations, it is so as between provinces and towns. Man—combative, resourceful, interested in obstacles, nerved by difficulties—is made or unmade by the presence or absence of natural disadvantages in his surroundings. There is a stage in the history of all communities when natural disabilities seem to set a final limit to social progress. Doubtless the primitive Cave Man had serious thoughts as to the increase of population, in view of the limited supply of cave dwellings, and for a time either the birth-rate would show a falling-off or else the superfluous children would be knocked on the head from a stern sense of parental duty. Child murder would be one of the virtues of stagnation. At length a genius would conceive the idea of a burrow in the ground, and the Cave Man would be succeeded, or largely accompanied, by the Eird, or Earth, Man. Thus again we see population forcing the pace of civilization. Holland. Holland, low-lying, inundated by the sea from without and by rivers from within, had, over great tracts of it, to be rescued by man from the grasp of Father Neptune, who was walled out by dykes, and is now being steadily expelled, at great and wise expense, from the Zuyder Zee, as he was during age-long strife and effort, from the Polders. By the energy of man an apparently worthless collection of mud-flats has been protected, drained, and practically made into a country, and a garden country at that, whose people have for centuries taught horticulture and floriculture to the world. So far from the natural defects of the "ollant," or marshy, ground having retarded the progress or prejudiced the status of Holland, those very defects have been the making of the people and the salvation of the State. The energy and initiative developed in the struggle with Nature have naturally found expression in other directions. The Dutch were the first to curb the once all-embracing power of Spain. At that great crisis, as in subsequent stages of their history, they set the powerful invader at defiance by opening the dykes and letting in the sea. Rendered resolute and resourceful by difficulties surmounted and dangers over-passed, the people of Holland have been for centuries a free, enlightened, progressive, and commercially and industrially successful nation. Venice. The story of Venice has much in common with that of Holland. The Queen of the Adriatic arose on a small group of salt-crusted islets, largely devoid of fresh water, piles having to be driven to secure foundations for the palaces and ware-houses which in course of time took the place of the fisher-men's huts of early Venice. But while Protestant Holland, under free institutions, waxed, the Catholic City-State of the Doges, under corrupt and despotic rule, waned or stagnated. The triumph of man over his surroundings, and the gains derived by him from the struggle, have been exemplified nearer home. Manchester. Manchester, handicapped by forty miles of overland transit to the sea at Liverpool, spent fifteen millions sterling on a Ship Canal, the corporation coming to the rescue of private enterprise with one-third of the capital (45,000,000) raised on the security of the rates. But already before the making of the Ship Canal Manchester had managed to keep pace with Liverpool, despite Liverpool's seaboard situation at the mouth of the Mersey. And with the Canal opened, another new town has sprung up at its Manchester end. In the ancient demesne* where a few years ago the deer stole in and out among the trees, the bell of the electric car is heard, and the site of sylvan glades is occupied by streets of houses, shops, and factories, with here and there a church, hotel, or school. In the middle of the eighteenth century Manchester had a population of only 800o. At that time Chester had 30,000 inhabitants within her city walls, which, by the way, are still standing. She had the noble estuary of the Dee at her doors, and fleets and armies came to and went from her across the sea. But Chester stood still ; and Manchester, some thirty miles distant, from being a poor market town, situated in an ill-watered plain, steadily grew till her population stands little short of a million, and, with her libraries, colleges, music, drama, and splendid press, she is not undeserving of the title of Modern Athens, conferred upon her by Gladstone in a complimentary mood; and this despite the smoke and soot. What has Nature done for Manchester? There is coal at no great distance; but other communities have coal, and fail to turn it to account. Durham has coal, and languishes. Fife has coal, and falls back. Manchester is built up on cotton, and the cotton has to come thousands of miles by sea from the more favoured but stagnant southern States of America. Manchester has been made by man in disregard, if not in despite, of the environment. [*Trafford Park, the seat of the de Traffords.] Glasgow. Again, little over a century ago the Clyde was so shallow and innavigable that the story is told of a skipper, stranded for want of water, who threatened with physical chastisement a girl who came to draw a bucketful from the river, and so, as he feared, delay his progress. But the Clyde was deepened by successive generations of patriotic Glaswegians, till today the leviathians of war and of the Atlantic service may swim in ample draught where the shallow skiffs of former days stuck in the mud. And Glasgow, again, has been made by plain, homely men—men, allowing for the difference of nationality, like those early cotton-spinners of Manchester whom John Morley, in the "Life of Richard Cobden," describes as drinking ale and smoking clay pipes at the tavern in the evening: they "thee'd" and "thou'd" each other in the drawling dialect of Lancashire, but made fortunes and had correspondents in the ends of the earth. Climate. So far as the Caucasian race, living in a temperate climate, is concerned, the flow and ebb of population would appear to depend mainly on the superficially adverse influence of natural surroundings. The white man, transplanted to India or the Gold Coast of Africa, wilts in the heat and the malaria. But outside the tropical belt—in Australasia, in South Africa, in North America—he bids fair to attain a material civilisation not inferior to that of Western Europe. The influence of climate shows in a relaxation of energy in very hot or in very cold countries; though heat is a more effective check to industry than cold. Warm climates are usually accompanied by fertile soils—the Sahara is an exception—and while the heat is a deterrent to strenuous labour, the fertility of the soil renders such labour less necessary. But where, as in Scotland and Denmark, both climate and soil have been naturally unfavourable, man has been stimulated to increased exertion, with such results that Art is seen to accomplish more for man than Nature has done for him; though, of course, Art is but an application of means which Nature supplies. Agriculture. As the growth of grass is increased by mowing, as the growth of hair is encouraged by cutting, as the health of shrubs is improved by pruning, so man's energy is braced by natural difficulties. The stony terraces of the Rhine valley have been clothed with earth carried up in baskets on the backs of men and women. The sandy soil of East Flanders has been made to support 70o persons to the square mile, and large quantities of agricultural produce are exported besides. The decomposed granite of Jersey, with no more organic matter than it consumes. So little suited for agriculture was Jersey in it, feeds 13oo persons to the square mile, and exports more naturally that a century ago the population lived chiefly on imported food. Its latter-day fertility is largely due to the use of sea-weed and bones. The wet clay of Scotland was broken up, aerated, drained, and fertilised by dressings of a drying character, till districts, remote from the markets, and formerly given over to barrenness, or producing but scanty and precarious crops, became great areas of agricultural production. On the other hand, the land of Essex, near the great market of London, and the lands of the Campagna around Rome, have, after centuries of cultivation under a favourable climate, gone very largely out of tillage. Man can make soil and can alter climate. Afforestation and enclosures raise the temperature. When the Parisian market-gardeners' carts take vegetables to the city they bring back manure, and so much soil is made that tons of it are yearly carted off a single acre, and sold to dress lighter lands. Driving Men Indoors. An inhospitable climate drives men indoors, and their recreations, their arts of life, and not least their intelligence, benefit by the enforced sedentary habits. The people of inclement Iceland and the Scandinavian countries have long been famous for their love of song and saga, their zeal for education, and their cherishing of free institutions. The people of Catholic Italy and of Mahometan Turkey, cursed, as it seems, by an enervating climate and fertile soils, and by government long despotic in both, are ignorant, slothful, backward in the arts of life, and degraded as regards their standard of comfort. Climate, soil, and situation, then, count in the opposite way to what might be expected as regards the contributions they make to the sum of material wellbeing. Seaboard. It might be supposed that long established seaboard communities, with the ocean as their ready means of communication and transport, would grow in population, trade, and wealth, faster than inland communities. But it is not so. Indeed, so much is it the reverse that few considerations more strongly confirm the paradox of environment. Natural advantages, unsupported by industry in the people—and they appear to be seldom so supported—are as much a bugbear to a community as an inheritance is to a careless and easy-going youth. London is the first city of the world, Glasgow is the second city of the empire; her claim no longer contested by Manchester and Liverpool. No one of the four was by nature a seaport town: they have equipped themselves with the facilities proper to seaports. On the other hand, such old-established and typical British seaports as Harwich, Dover, Plymouth, Southampton, Leith, Dundee, Peterhead, Fraserburgh, and Macduff make comparatively little of their position. Bristol. Bristol was the second port of the kingdom when Liverpool had only 200 seamen, and when the now broad estuary of the Mersey was a shallow "Lither Pool." But despite her long start, the public-spirited munificence of her citizens, her queenly position on the mingled waters of the Avon and the Frome, her proximity to the sea and to coalfields both north and south, Bristol has long been outdistanced by Liverpool and by Glasgow. Superbly swimming in waters, her streets seeming to the poet to teem with ships, Bristol is at the same time a well-built and splendidly appointed city, and has fine suburbs and beautiful surroundings. With 320,000 of a population, Bristol is in all conscience big enough. But if the Bristolians wished to keep pace with their neighbours on the West Coast, they must be disappointed; for they certainly have not done so. Harwich. Harwich, again, from the fourteenth century till 1867 was a Parliamentary borough returning two members. Time and again fleets of warships rode in its harbour, one of the finest on the east coast. Favoured by railway and shipping companies as a packet station, and by Government as a military station, having large imports of duty-paying goods —Harwich, with all its natural advantages and acquired favours, has still a population of only 1o,000. That a seaboard position, with a good roadstead, is of value only if the community has manufactures to export and raw material to import, should be self-evident, London became a great port only as it became a great centre of trade and population. Liverpool has the whole export and import trade of Lancashire and the Midlands to feed it. Glasgow is not only the passenger port of Scotland, but it is, needless to say, a great emporium of the chemical, metallurgical, and ship-building industries, Cardiff has the coal and metals of Wales to carry. Hull has textiles, coal, organs, feeding stuffs, chemicals, and much general merchandise to export, in addition to fish. The Inland Towns. That towns may prosper without harbours, and languish with them, is strikingly shown by the statistics of population. Keeping away from the very large cities, the five typical inland towns Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds, Leicester, and Nottingham – all of modern growth – have combined populations numbering 1,957,070 persons. The populations of the five, typical seaport towns Plymouth, Devonport, Dover and Portsmouth (this last including three others) number together only 528,389 inhabitants, for practically eight seaboard townships, although all of them are of ancient standing, and most of them have had millions of pounds sterling of Imperial taxes spent upon them. That the finest roadstead in the world will not necessarily lead to a development of trade is shown on the seaboard of the Australian Commonwealth. On harbours there much borrowed money has been spent; but improvements, extensions, and even natural advantages, as at Sydney, have not been followed by great industrial expansion on land. Trade not only may and does flourish remote from seaboards: it even flourishes better inland than on the coast. Man the Master. Caucasian man at least masters his environment. The flow and ebb of population lie almost entirely with the people themselves. Industry, courage, a spirit of mutual helpfulness, encouragement to a new departure rather than criticism of it, faith in our neighbours, local patriotism—such are the requisites of civic success and the civilisation that goes with "the swarming of men." It is not geographical position, it is not coalfields, it is not cotton or iron, and it is not proximity to the sea that make a people. It is attachment to industrial processes, it is the willingness to make rather than merely to sell things, the courage resolutely to adventure in new and untried directions, the creation of wealth by intelligent labour rather than the hunting of wild beasts, or fishing, or the breeding and feeding and slaughter of domestic animals; though all these pursuits have their place and value. Communities succeed or fail in proportion to the intelligence expended by their people in many and varied directions, by the extent to which they refuse to put all their eggs in one basket, all their cargoes in one "bottom," and, above all, by the amount of industry and intelligence they display in the branches of business, whatever these may be, to which they set their hands. The Application. Do these seem harmless generalities ? Let us apply them. The small community does not find place for its young people. It is from it that the haemorrhage of the country takes place. The small community has health and peace and much superficial good fellowship, even where there may be the contempt of an intimacy which is unbrightened by personal gifts or graces. By these the rustic mentality sets no store as a rule; though it develops mild enthusiasms for such accomplishments as throwing the hammer and playing whist. It tends to measure men by what they have rather than what they are. The Land of Do Without. The small community may have beautiful surroundings; but to the young people who know they will have to leave it these fine things do but increase the irony of the fate that sends them forth as exiles, never again to return for permanent residence in most cases. For the rest, a small community is a Land of Do Without. The small community has no variety of industries, and the young people are denied the interest and education of looking on at varied processes, and making choice of the calling they would best prefer. Frequent funerals—for there is a large proportion of old people—represent the chief attempt at pageantry, the procession consisting of indifferently dressed men bobbing along out of step. Local gossip takes the place of large general interests. The small community often has no public baths, swimming ponds, or gymnasium. It does not possess public libraries, reading rooms, museums, or galleries of pictures and statuary. It has no theatre, no good concerts, and is rarely visited by great preachers or platform orators. These are the extras, the graces of life that ennoble it, raising man from the position of the muck-raker, the hewer of wood and drawer of water; nay, divested of literature, music, and oratory, he is little above the beasts of the field; for they also eat, drink, sleep, work, and enjoy other pleasures of the senses. Vita sine literis mars est (Life without literature is death) ran the old Roman saying. Economically, the small communities are parasitical. A healthy community absorbs its own natural increase. But the small communities obviously do not do this, or they would not remain small. The villages, little towns, and open country shed their natural increase upon the cities, and complicate all the standing problems of urban life. The small community looks to the city to take its sons and daughters almost as a matter of course. The cities have to absorb, not only their own natural increase, but the increase of the rural districts as well. Stopping Emigration. One of the many arrestive steps taken by the Italian Dictator Mussolini is to stop emigration from Italy. He rightly holds that the name and fame of Italy, oldest of the large European States, are dragged in the mire by the, degraded position her sons take abroad as vendors of ice-cream, organ-grinders with monkey colleagues, vendors of roast chestnuts, and, in the United States, navvies. If the Duce sees his way to support the rapidly increasing population of the Italian Peninsular, with its high birth-rate, he must have found a key to social prosperity for which statesmanship elsewhere is not even looking. One speculates how Mussolini will approach this problem of making Italy support its own sons. Will he, for one thing, go to employers and say, "I find that two of your apprentices finish their time next month. Your income and business show that you can afford to keep them on as journeymen. Your bread (or clothes, or joinery, as the case may be) is the same price as or dearer than the loaf in the nearest city, and as you have had the services of these young men for years at a low wage, it is your duty to keep them on at the city wage. If they are discharged merely because their apprenticeship has expired, you will be fined periodically the amount that they would have earned as journeymen at standard rates." I suggest that as one of the possible methods, short of socialising industry, whereby the problem of absorbing the natural increase of population may be solved. That the country employer should automatically dump his apprentices upon the City is not only obviously unfair to the city, but to the small community as well. For the parents who have brought up a son and maintained him on a nominal wage during the period of his apprenticeship have a real grievance against the employer who, by turning him off as soon as he becomes a journeyman, passes sentence of expulsion from home and kindred upon him, and this usually for no other reason than greed or unenterprising timidity. The youth has been educated at the expense of the township, and the community as a whole has a moral right to object to its money being wasted upon the training of those from whom it is not to derive any benefit. Mussolini, doubtless, has nothing to say against the young journeyman going upon his travels voluntarily in order to acquire experience and see the world. But the process of creating an army of unemployed workmen must stop somewhere, and to arrest it where I have indicated is to deal with it at the fountain-head. The Prime Cause of Unemployment. The problem of unemployment is primarily created by low wages. The largest body of consumers is the wage-earning class; but obviously they cannot consume if they are not allowed to produce and earn full wages. Even so, to retain population in a country or a district is the best way to beget a demand for the produce of labour. Careless people speak of a large centre as affording more openings for the young person in quest of employment; but the truth really is that, in proportion to the number of openings, there will always be more candidates for those in a large centre than in a small. Pessimism of Small Communities. In the small community all new departures are viewed with pessimism. The newcomer spends his money on shop, factory, or printing office to an accompaniment of head-shaking, and no attempt is made to help, but the reverse. The people spend their money, by preference, more and more out of town, the motor bus and reduced rail fares helping this anti-social tendency. Goods will be bought in the city at higher prices from an idea that the quality is better. The saying that "No good thing cometh out of Nazareth" was doubtless coined by the Nazarenes themselves. Lower wages are paid because usually there is no trade unionism to force them up. The employer is thus able to take it easy, play golf and bowls, run about in a car, and shoot clay pigeons. He breaks his promises every day from sheer inertia and lack of conscience. Thus all life goes slowly. Everything hangs fire. Three men will be seen winding an empty bucket up out of a hole, and often an entire staff will be seen smoking, talking, and looking at something done or to be done. Public improvements are resisted on the ground of the expense, nobody considering that the money is spent locally. Men starve their own business and practise personal economies, in order to invest their savings elsewhere; and then they ask, What are we to do with our boys? If the big city can carry out big schemes, the small town can carry out small schemes; for the expense will be proportionate in either case. But in a city those at the head of affairs are not so amenable to criticism, and there is next to none anyhow, the citizens rejoicing in the expenditure that increases prosperity by circulating money, and the improvement remaining as an asset. Seven Points. To ensure the development of civilization that comes with population the inhabitants of small communities need-- (1) To believe in themselves and their neighbours. (2)To encourage local trade and industry by spending money at home wherever possible. (3)The son should oftener follow the father's calling, instead of seeking to become a professional man away from home. A scavenger living in the town is of more use to it than a great man who has left it. (4)Wages should be as high as the business can afford. A community of slums on the one hand and palaces on the other is a congeries of human hogs; and this is a matter of wages. (5)Slums should be ordered to be destroyed by the local authority, and no congestion of buildings should be allowed. (6)Saving money may be wasteful. A community is rich, not by the money it saves, but by the money it spends. Britain is being crippled by the saving of the New Rich, who invest their savings abroad, and help to intensify foreign competition. The old county families lived up to and even beyond their incomes, and the money was mostly spent at home. Money left to sons is usually a curse sooner or later. It is better to live rich than to die rich. Money inherited represents that which is lightly come by, and it usually goes as lightly, the prodigal suffering in the process of living idly and spending, as the saver suffered in working and saving. (7) Agriculture is the basis of all civilization, and any country that neglects its soil or allows it to lapse from cultivation is on the road to ruin. The British farmer does not work, and he will not co-operate for marketing. £20 worth of produce is taken from each acre of naturally poor land in Flanders, as compared with from each acre of better land in Britain. There is 80 per cent. of co-operation among Canadian farmers as compared with 10 per cent. in buying and 4 per cent. in selling with the British farmer. £400,000,000 go abroad every year for foodstuffs that we could grow ourselves. That is the root of the whole evil of British and especially Scottish decay. The expenditure of that money in the home market would make the difference between depression and decadence on the one hand and prosperity and progress on the other. The Mainsprings. Civilization goes forward as a result of the capacity for not becoming tired, and there are more world-novelties to keep us alert than ever there were There is no sign that we are becoming tired as a nation. We have, for one thing, more zest in non-intellectual pleasures than ever we had, and, just at present, a horror of any attempt to teach us. Our aversion from anything "highbrow" (as if the brain were not, as it is, the chief muscle in the human organism) reverses the excellent attitude of our parents and grandparents, who revelled in mechanics' institutes, libraries, lectures, and classes. They fell away from that because science, they found, was being used chiefly as an instrument of trade competition, which intensified the working pace of life. When, as the result of pending changes, we realise that work has become the service of ourselves and our fellows instead of a means of earning dividends for people who cannot spend them; when we realise, with more than Elizabethan spaciousness, how absorbingly interesting is the world and the life of man upon it, civilization will go forward, as never before, under social arrangements that are at last really worthy of that most social of all animals—Man.
PREFACE. THE following essay forms an attempt to recommend the adoption of an eight hours day by showing the necessity for it and the advantages of it, and by meeting the main objections urged against its adoption. The matter contained in these pages appeared originally in the columns of the People's Journal about a year ago, and was subsequently reprinted in the now defunct Labour Elector. Having been amplified, and the most note worthy recent objections met, it is now published in collected form in the hope that it may serve to assist politicians and social reformers in making up their minds that the statutory limitation of the hours of labour is not only needful, but possible and desirable. Those who read to the close will see that I regard the Eight Hours Day more as a means to an end than as anything like a permanently satisfactory adjustment of economic relationships. While as a Socialist I hold that this world will never be a tolerable place for the mass of mankind to live in so long as they allow the landlord and capitalist to monopolise the means of production, yet the Conservative forces in society are so strong the working class is itself so strong a Conservative force-that the shortening of the working day seems the most beneficial instalment of social progress at all possible of more or less immediate realisation. Some of our friends tell us that in advocating State interference with the hours of labour we are ''off the scent." The Land Nationa1izer says you must destroy private property in the soil; the Co-operator says working men must become their own capitalists; the uncompromising Socialist contends that no good can come out of the Individualistic System-that the only way to amend it is to end it. This is all so true that it seems a pity they should speak to a public which has neither the knowledge and penetration to see that they are right, nor the courage, confidence and public-spiritedness to follow their advice. While the unemployed clamour for work and food and the employed for more rest and better pay, it seems like trying to fill their bellies with the east wind to tell them they must nationalise land or communise capital. It is indeed high time that we had made up our minds what good thing it is we want first. The shortening of the working day is important (1) Because it will find work for the unemployed, with all the added comfort and happiness which that involves; (2) Because it will give the masses more leisure to read and think, and, by abating the tendency which their labour has to absorb their energy, both mental and physical, it will leave them the mental alertness necessary to an understanding of their position, and the courage, hope, and initiative - largely a matter of health-to set about improving it. From a Socialist point of view the short-hours movement is specially important because of the effect which it would exercise on profits in all industries subject to foreign competition. Inasmuch as to pay the same rates of wages for the shorter hours would trench on the already vanishing margin, it would tend to hasten the end of the system of production for profit. Were the whole industrial world to simultaneously introduce the eight hours system, the capitalist could simply raise his prices, and Capital and Labour would still stand on the same relative footing. But although some continental countries are anxious for the shortening of the working clay, it would be too much to expect that the whole world will introduce the eight hours system within measurable distance; and with even one or two countries working long hours at low wages the British, French, and German bourgeoisie will not be able to command the higher prices which would be necessary to recoup them for the increase in cost of production. The consequence will be that trade will go more and more to the countries where the cheapest goods can be produced, until the bourgeoisie, working for low profits, and occasionally for none at all, will get as tired of the individualistic system of production and distribution as the workers are already; and they will make haste to clear out in favour of the community in its organised capacity. What will happen then is too long a story to tell here: I reserve it for another early occasion. I ought to say, however, that the Eight Hours Day, as a positive amelioration of the lot of the worker, and quite apart from any ulterior effects which it would have, is a benefit to assist in obtaining which is worthy of the best powers ever devoted to the service of mankind. It is sometimes contended that to give the worker shorter hours or better wages is to make him contented. I contend, on the other hand, that the periods of prosperity are the periods of progress. ''The outlook then takes the form of hope": and hope is a better working stimulus than despair. A down trodden people are a spiritless people, a more prosperous people are comparatively high-spirited, and are jealous of their rights and aggressive for still greater benefits than they have ever before enjoyed. The more we get the more we want. J. L. |
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