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FABIAN
ESSAYS IN SOCIALISM

BY

G. BERNARD SHAW. SYDNEY OLIVIER.

SIDNEY WEBB. ANNIE BESANT.

WILLIAM CLARKE. GRAHAM WALLAS.

AND

HUBERT BLAND.

EDITED BY
G. BERNARD SHAW.

LONDON :

THE FABIAN SOCIETY,
63 FLEET STREET and 180 PORTSDOWN ROAD,

1889.

LONDON

PRINTED BY A. BONNER, 34 BOUVER1E STREET,

FLEET STREET, E.C.

PREFACE.

The essays in this volume were prepared last year as a
course of lectures for delivery before mixed audiences in
London and the provinces. They have been revised for
publication, but not recast. The matter is put, not as an
author would put it to a student, but as a speaker with
only an hour at his disposal has to put it to an audience.
Country readers may accept the book as a sample of the
propaganda carried on by volunteer lecturers in the work-
men's clubs and political associations of London.1 Metro-
politan readers will have the advantage of making themselves
independent of the press critic by getting face to face with
the writers, stripping the veil of print from their personality,
cross-examining, criticising, calling them to account amid
surroundings which inspire no awe, and before the most
patient of audiences. For any Sunday paper which contains
a lecture list will shew where some, if not all, of the seven
essayists may be heard for nothing ; and on all such
occasions questions and discussion form part of the
procedure.

The projection and co-ordination of these lectures is not
the work of any individual. The nominal editor is only the
member told off to arrange for the publication of the papers,
and see them through the press with whatever editorial
ceremony might be necessary. Everything that is usually
implied by the authorship and editing of a book has in this

1 In the year ending April, 1889, the number of lectures delivered by
members of the Fabian Society alone was upwards of 700.

iv PREFACE.

case been done by the seven essayists, associated as the
Executive Council of the Fabian Society ; and not one of
the essays could be what it is had the writer been a stranger
to his six colleagues and to the Society. But there has been
no sacrifice of individuality — no attempt to cut out every
phrase and opinion the responsibility for which would not
be accepted by every one of the seven. Had the sections
been differently allotted, they would have been differently
treated, though the net result would probably have been the
same. The writers are all Social Democrats, with a com-
mon conviction of the necessity of vesting the organization
of industry and the material of production in a State identi-
fied with the whole people by complete Democracy. But that
conviction is peculiar to no individual bias : it is a Capitol
to which all roads lead; and at least seven of them are
represented in these Fabian Essays ; so that the reader
need not fear oppression here, any more than in the
socialized State of the future, by the ascendancy of one
particular cast of mind.

There are at present no authoritative teachers of
Socialism. The essayists make no claim to be more than
communicative learners.

London.

December j 1889.

CONTENTS.

THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

ECONOMIC By G. BERNARD SHAW.

Rent. The Cultivation and Population of the Earth. — Economic Origin
of the County Family. — Economic Rent of Land and Ability. — Tenant Right.
— The Advent of the Proletarian. Page 3.

Value. Mechanism of Exchange. — Price and Utility. — Effects of Supply.
— Law of Indifference. — Total and Final Utility. — Relation of Value to Cost of
Production. Page 12.

Wages. The Proletariat. — Sale of Labor. — Subsistence Wage. — Capi-
talism.— Increase of Riches and Decrease of Wealth. — Divorce of Exchange
Value from Social Utility. Page 18.

Conclusion. Apparent Discrepancies between History and Theory. —
Socialism. — Pessimism and Private Property. — Economic Soundness of
Meliorism. Page 23.

HISTORIC .. By SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B., Barrister at Law,
Lecturer on Political Economy

at the City of London College.

The Development of the Democratic Ideal. Ancestry of English
Socialism. — The Utopians. — Introduction of the Conception of Evolution. —
The Lesson of Democracy. Page 30.

The Disintegration of the Old Synthesis. The Decay of Medieval-
ism.— The Industrial Revolution. — The French Revolution. — The Progress of
Democracy. Page 35.

The Period of Anarchy. Individualism. — Philosophic Radicalism and
Laisser-faire. — The Utilitarian Analysis. Page 40.

The Intellectual and Moral Revolt ; and its Political Outcome.
The Poets, Communists, Philosophers, Christian Socialists, and Evolutionists.

vi CONTENTS.

— The Extension of State Activity.— Existing State Registration, Inspection ,
and Direct Organization of Labor. — The Radical Programme. Page 45.

The New Synthesis. Evolution and the Social Organism.— Liberty and
Equality. — Social Health. Page 56.

INDUSTRIAL .. By WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A., Cambridge.

The Supersession of Individualist Production. The Cottage In-
dustry.— The Mechanical Inventions. — The Factory System. Page 62.

The Growth of the Great Industry. The Expansion of Lancashire.
— The White Slavery. — State Interference. Page 71.

The Development of the World-Commerce. The Triumph of Free
Trade.— The Fight for New Markets.— The Carriers of the World. Page 78.

The Differentiation of Manager and Capitalist. The Rise of Co-
operation and the Joint Stock Company. — The " Ring " and the " Trust ". —
The Despotism of Capitalist Communism. Page 83.

MORAL .. .. .. By SYDNEY OLIVIER, B. A., Oxford.

* The Evolution of Morality. The Common End. — The Conditions of
Freedom. — The Individual and the Race. — The Growth of Social Conscious-
ness.— Convention and Law. Page 102.

Property and Morals. The Reaction of Property-Forms on Moral
Ideas. — Class Morality. — Negation of the Conditions of Freedom. — Social
Dissolution. Page 114.

The Re-integration of Society. The Ordering of the Primary Con-
ditions.— The Idea of the Poor Law. — Secondary Conditions. — Morality and
Reason. — The Idea of the School. Page 123.

THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM .. By GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A.,

Oxford.

Visible Wealth. Consumers' Capital. — Producers' Capital. Page 132.
Debts and Services. Deferred and Anticipated Consumption. — Interest.

Page 138.
Ideas. Copyright and Patent Right.— Education. Page 145.

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM . . . . By ANNIE BESANT.

The Organization of Labor. Rural.— Urban.— International. Page 150.

CONTENTS. vn

The Distribution of the Product. The Individual. — The Munici-
pality.—The State. Page 162.

Social Safeguards. The Stimulus to Labor.— The Provision for Initia-
tive.—The Reward of Excellence. Page 166.

THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

TRANSITION. .. .. .. By G. BERNARD SHAW.

Medievalism to Capitalism. The Old Order. — Merchant Adventurer,
Pirate, Slave-Trader, Capitalist.— The Old Order burst by the New Growth.
— Chaos. Page 173.

Anarchy to State Interference. Political Economy. — Hegelian Con-
ception of the Perfect State. — Socialism : its Practical Difficulties. — Impracti-
cability of Catastrophic Change. — Democracy the antidote to Bureaucracy. —
The State interferes. Page 176.

State Interference to State Organization. Hard Times. — Revival
of Revolutionary Socialism. — Remaining Steps to the Consummation of
Democracy. — Machinery of Socialism. — Social Pressure. — Urban Rents. — The
New Taxation. — State Organization of Labor its indispensable complement. —
The Unemployed. — Solution of the Compensation difficulty. — Economic
Reactions of the Progress of Municipal Socialism. — Militant Socialism aban-
doned but not dishonored. Page 186.

THE OUTLOOK By HUBERT BLAND.

The Condition of English Parties. The Lines of Progress. — The Rate
of Progress in Thought and Industry compared with that in Politics. — Alleged
Disappearance of the Whig. Page 202.

The Socializing of Politics. Political Myopia. — Sham Socialism. —
Red Herrings. — Dreams of Permeating the Liberal Party. — Disillusionment. —
The New Departure. Page 208.

The Duties of the Hour. The True Line of Cleavage. — Hopes and
Fears. — The Solidarity of the Workers. Page 217

Index. . Page 221.

THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

ECONOMIC.

BY G. BERNARD SHAW

All economic analyses begin with the cultivation of the earth.
To the mind's eye of the astronomer the earth is a ball spinning
in space without ulterior motives. To the bodily eye of the
primitive cultivator it is a vast green plain, from which, by
sticking a spade into it, wheat and other edible matters can
be made to spring. To the eye of the sophisticated city man
this vast green plain appears rather as a great gaming table,
your chances in the game depending chiefly on the place
where you deposit your stakes. To the economist, again, the
green plain is a sort of burial place of hidden treasure, where
all the forethought and industry of man are set at naught by
the caprice of the power which hid the treasure. The wise
and patient workman strikes his spade in here, and with
heavy toil can discover nothing but a poor quality of barley,
some potatoes, and plentiful nettles, with a few dock leaves
to cure his stings. The foolish spendthrift on the other side
of the hedge, gazing idly at the sand glittering in the sun,
suddenly realizes that the earth is offering him gold — is dancing
it before his listless eyes lest it should escape him. Another
man, searching for some more of this tempting gold, comes
upon a great hoard of coal, or taps a jet of petroleum. Thus
is Man mocked by Earth his step-mother, and never knows
as he tugs at her closed hand whether it contains diamonds
or flints, good red wheat or a few clayey and blighted cabbages.
Thus too he becomes a gambler, and scoffs at the theorists

B 2

4 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

who prate of industry and honesty and equality. Yet against
this fate he eternally rebels. For since in gambling the many
must lose in order that the few may win ; since dishonesty
is mere shadowgrasping where everyone is dishonest ; and
since inequality is bitter to all except the highest, and miserably
lonely for him, men come greatly to desire that these capricious
gifts of Nature might be intercepted by some agency having
the power and the goodwill to distribute them justly according
to the labor done by each in the collective search for them.
This desire is Socialism ; and, as a means to its fulfilment,
Socialists have devised communes, kingdoms, principalities,
churches, manors, and finally, when all these had succumbed
to the old gambling spirit, the Social Democratic State, which
yet remains to be tried. As against Socialism, the gambling
spirit urges man to allow no rival to come between his
private individual powers and Stepmother Earth, but rather
to secure some acres of her and take his chance of getting
diamonds instead of cabbages. This is Private Property or
Unsocialism. Our own choice is shewn by our continual
aspiration to possess property, our common hailing of it as
sacred, our setting apart of the word Respectable for those who
have attained it, our ascription of pre-eminent religiousness to
commandments forbidding its violation, and our identification
of law and order among men with its protection. Therefore is
it vital to a living knowledge of our society that Private
Property should be known in every step of its progress from
its source in cupidity to its end in confusion.

Let us, in the manner of the Political Economist, trace
the effects of settling a country by private property with
undisturbed law and order. Figure to yourself the vast green
plain of a country virgin to the spade, awaiting the advent
of man. Imagine then the arrival of the first colonist, the
original Adam, developed by centuries of civilization into an
Adam Smith, prospecting for a suitable patch of Private
Property. Adam is, as Political Economy fundamentally
assumes him to be, " on the make" : therefore he drives his
spade into, and sets up his stockade around, the most fertile
and favorably situated patch he can find. When he has

ECONOMIC. 5

tilled it, Political Economy, inspired to prophesy by the
spectacle, metaphorically exhibits Adam's little patch of
cultivation as a pool that will yet rise and submerge the
whole land. Let us not forget this trope: it is the key to
the ever-recurring phrase " margin of cultivation ", in which,
as may now be perceived, there lurks a little unsuspected
poetry. And truly the pool soon spreads. Other Adams come,
all on the make, and therefore all sure to pre-empt patches
as near as may be to the first Adam's, partly because he has
chosen the best situation, partly for the pleasure of his society
and conversation, and partly because where two men are
assembled together there is a two-man power that is far more
than double one-man power, being indeed in some instances
a quite new force, totally destructive of the idiotic general
hypothesis that society is no more than the sum of the units
which compose it. These Adams, too, bring their Cains and
Abels, who do not murder one another, but merely pre-empt
adjacent patches. And so the pool rises, and the margin
spreads more and more remote from the centre, until the pool
becomes a lake, and the lake an inland sea.

Rent.

But in the course of this inundation the caprices of Nature
begin to operate. That specially fertile region upon which
Adam pitched is sooner or later all pre-empted ; and there is
nothing for the new comer to pre-empt save soil of the second
quality. Again, division of labor sets in among Adam's
neighbors ; and with it, of course, comes the establishment of
a market for the exchange of the products of their divided
labor. Now it is not well to be far afield from that market,
because distance from it involves extra cost for roads, beasts
of burden, time consumed in travelling thither and back again.
All this will be saved to Adam at the centre of cultivation,
and incurred by the new comer at the margin of cultivation.
Let us estimate the annual value of Adam's produce at ^"i,ooo,
and the annual produce of the new comer's land on the margin
of cultivation at ^"500, assuming that Adam and the new
comer are equally industrious. Here is a clear advantage of

6 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM:

£500 a year to the first comer. This /"500 is economic rent.
It matters not at all that it is merely a difference of income and
not an overt payment from a tenant to a landlord. The two
men labor equally ; and yet one gets ^"500 a year more than the
other through the superior fertility of his land and convenience
of its situation. The excess due to that fertility is rent ; and
before long we shall find it recognized as such and paid in the
fashion with which we are familiar. For why should not Adam
let his patch to the new comer at a rent of /500 a year ? Since
the produce will be ^1,000, the new comer will have /500 left
for himself, or as much as he could obtain by cultivating a patch
of his own at the margin ; and it is pleasanter, besides, to be in
the centre of society than on the outskirts of it. The new comer
will himself propose the arrangement ; and Adam may retire as
an idle landlord with a perpetual pension of ^"500 rent. The
excess of fertility in Adam's land is thenceforth recognized as
rent and paid, as it is to-day, regularly by a worker to a
drone. A few samples of the way in which this simple and
intelligible transaction is stated by our economists may now,
I hope, be quoted without any danger of their proving so
difficult as they appear in the text books from which I have
copied them.

Stuart Mill l says that " the rent of land consists of the
excess of its return above the return to the worst land in
cultivation ". Fawcett 2 says that "the rent of land represents
the pecuniary value of the advantages which such land pos-
sesses over the worst land in cultivation ". Professor Marshall3
says that " the rent of a piece of land is the excess of its
produce over the produce of an adjacent piece of land which
would not be cultivated at all if rent were paid for it ". Pro-
fessor Sidgwick4 cautiously puts it that "the normal rent
per acre of any piece " [of land] " is the surplus of the value
of its produce over the value of the net produce per acre of the
least advantageous land that it is profitable to cultivate ".

1 " Principles of Political Economy," Vol. I., Index to chap. xvi. (1865).

2 " Manual of Political Economy," Book II., chap, iii., p. 116 (1876).

3 " Economics of Industry," Book II., chap, iii., sec. 3, p. 84 (1879).

4 " Principles of Political Economy," Bcok II., chap, vii., p. 301 (1883).

ECONOMIC. 7

General Walker1 declares that " specifically, the rent of any
piece of land is determined by the difference between its annual
yield and that of the least productive land actually cultivated
for the supply of the same market, it being assumed that the
quality of the land as a productive agent is, in neither case,
impaired or improved by such cultivation". All these defini-
tions are offered by the authors as elaborations of that given
by their master Ricardo,2 who says, " Rent is that portion
of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord for the
use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil ".

The County Family.

Let us return to our ideal country. Adam is retiring from
productive industry on ^"500 a year ; and his neighbors are
hastening to imitate him as fresh tenants present themselves.
The first result is the beginning of a tradition that the
oldest families in the country enjoy a superior position to the
rest, and that the main advantage of their superior position
is that they enjoy incomes without working. Nevertheless,
since they still depend on their tenants' labor for their sub-
sistence, they continue to pay Labor, with a capital L, a
certain meed of mouth honor ; and the resultant association of
prosperity with idleness, and praise with industry, practically
destroys morality by setting up that incompatibility between
conduct and principle which is the secret of the ingrained
cynicism of our own time, and which produces the curious
Ricardian phenomenon of the man of business who goes on
Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village black-
smith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of
conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during
the following week.

According to our hypothesis, the inland sea of cultiva-
tion has now spread into the wilderness so far that at its
margin the return to a man's labor for a year is only ^"500.
But as there is always a flood tide in that sea, caused by the
incessant increase of population, the margin will not stop there :

1 " Brief Text Book of Political Economy," chap, ii., sec. 216, p. 173 (1885).

2 " Principles of Political Economy and Taxation ", chap, ii., p. 34 (1817).

8 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

it will at last encroach upon every acre of cultivable land, rising
to the snow line on the mountains and falling to the coast of
the actual salt water sea, but always reaching the barrenest
places last of all, because the cultivators are still, as ever, on
the make, and will not break bad land when better is to be
had. But suppose that now, at last, the uttermost belt of free
land is reached, and that upon it the yield to a man's year's
labor is only £"ioo. Clearly now the rent of Adam's primeval
patch has risen to ^Tgoo, since that is the excess of its produce
over what is by this time all that is to be had rent free.
But Adam has yielded up his land for ^"500 a year to a tenant.
It is this tenant accordingly who now lets Adam's patch for
^900 a year to the new comer, who of course loses nothing by
the bargain, since it leaves him the ^"100 a year with which
he must be content anyhow. Accordingly he labors on
Adam's land; raises ^"1,000 a year from it ; keeps /*ioo and
pays ^"900 to Adam's tenant, who pays £"500 to Adam, keeping
^400 for himself, and thus also becoming an idle gentleman,
though with a somewhat smaller income than the man of older
family. It has, in fact, come to this, that the private property
in Adam's land is divided between three men, the first doing
none of the work and getting half the produce ; the second
doing none of the work and getting two fifths of the produce ;
and the third doing all the work and getting only one tenth
of the produce. Incidentally also, the moralist who is sure to
have been prating somewhere about private property leading
to the encouragement of industry, the establishment of a healthy
incentive, and the distribution of wealth according to exertion,
is exposed as a futile purblind person, starting a priori from
blank ignorance, and proceeding deductively to mere contradic-
tion and patent folly.

All this, however, is a mere trifle compared to the sequel.
When the inland sea has risen to its confines — when there is
nothing but a strip of sand round the coast between the furrow
and the wave — when the very waves themselves are cultivated
by fisherfolk — when the pastures and timber forests have
touched the snow line — when, in short, the land is all private
property, yet every man is a proprietor, though it may be only

ECONOMIC. 9

of a tenant right. He enjoys fixity of tenure at what is called
a fair rent : that is, he fares as well as he could on land wholly
his own. All the rent is economic rent : the landlord cannot
raise it nor the tenant lower it : it is fixed naturally by the
difference between the fertility of the land for which it is paid
and that of the worst land in the country. Compared with the
world as we know it, such a state of things is freedom and
happiness.

The Proletariat.

But at this point there appears in the land a man in a
strange plight — one who wanders from snow line to sea coast
in search of land, and finds none that is not the property of
some one else. Private property had forgotten this man. On
the roads he is a vagrant : off them he is a trespasser : he is
the first disinherited son of Adam, the first Proletarian, one in
whose seed all the generations of the earth shall yet be blest,
but who is himself for the present foodless, homeless, shiftless,
superfluous, and everything that turns a man into a tramp or
a thrall. Yet he is still a man with brain and muscle, able
to devise and execute, able to deal puissantly with land if
only he could get access to it. But how to get that access !
Necessity is the mother of Invention. It may be that this
second Adam, the first father of the great Proletariat, has one
of those scarce brains which are not the least of Nature's
capricious gifts. If the fertile field yields rent, why not the
fertile brain ? Here is the first Adam's patch still yielding
its £"i,ooo a year to the labor of the tenant who, as we have
seen, has to pay ^900 away in rent. How if the Proletarian
were boldly to bid £"1,000 a year to that man for the property ?
Apparently the result would be the starvation of the Prole-
tarian, since he would have to part with all the produce. But
what if the Proletarian can contrive — invent — anticipate a new
want — turn the land to some hitherto undreamt-of use —
wrest £1,500 a year from the soil and site that only yielded
£"1,000 before? If he can do this, he can pay the full £"1,000
rent, and have an income of £"500 left for himself. This is his
profit — the rent of his ability — the excess of its produce over

io THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

that of ordinary stupidity. Here then is the opportunity of the
cunning Proletarian, the hero of that modern Plutarch, Mr.
Samuel Smiles. Truly, as Napoleon said, the career is open
to the talented. But alas ! the social question is no more a
question of the fate of the talented than of the idiotic. In due
replenishment of the earth there comes another Proletarian
who is no cleverer than other men, and can do as much, but
not more than they. For him there is no rent of ability. How
then is he to get a tenant right ? Let us see. It is certain that
by this time not only will the new devices of the renter of ability
have been copied by people incapable of inventing them ; but
division of labor, the use of tools and money, and the economies of
civilization will have greatly increased man's power of extracting
wealth from Nature. All this increase will be so much gain to
the holder of a tenant right, since his rent is a fixed payment
out of the produce of his holding, and the balance is his own.
Therefore an addition to the produce not foreseen by the land-
lord enriches the tenant. So that it may well be that the
produce of land on the margin of cultivation, which, as we have
seen, fixes the produce left to the cultivators throughout the
whole area, may rise considerably. Suppose the yield to have
doubled ; then our old friends who paid £"900 rent and kept
^"100 for themselves, have now, though they still pay /"900 rent,
^"1,100 for themselves, the total produce having risen to ^"2,000.
Now here is an opportunity for our Proletarian who is not
clever. He can very well offer to cultivate the land subject to a
payment of, for instance, £"i,6oo a year, leaving himself ^400 a
year. This will enable the last holder of the tenant right to
retire as an idle gentleman receiving a net income of £"700 a
year, and a gross income of ^"1,600, out of which he pays ^"900
a year rent to a landlord who again pays to the head landlord
^500. But it is to be marked that this ^700 a year net is not
economic rent. It is not the difference between the best and
the worst land. It has nothing to do with the margin of
cultivation. It is a payment for the privilege of using land at
all — for access to that which is now a close monopoly ; and its
amount is regulated, not by what the purchaser could do
for himself on land of his own at the margin, but simply by the

ECONOMIC. ii

landholder's eagerness to be idle on the one hand, and the
proletarian's need of subsistence on the other. In current
economic terms the price is regulated by supply and demand.
As the demand for land intensifies by the advent of fresh
proletarians, the price goes up ; and the bargains are made
more stringent. Tenant rights, instead of being granted in
perpetuity, and so securing for ever to the tenant the increase
due to unforeseen improvements in production, are granted on
leases for finite terms, at the expiration of which the landlord
can revise the terms or eject the tenant. The payments rise
until the original head rents and quit rents appear insignificant
in comparison with the incomes reaped by the intermediate
tenant right holders or middlemen. Sooner or later the price of
tenant right will rise so high that the actual cultivator will get
no more of the produce than suffices him for subsistence. At
that point there is an end of sub-letting tenant rights. The
land's absorption of the proletarians as tenants paying more
than the economic rent stops.

And now, what is the next proletarian to do ? For all his
forerunners we have found a way of escape : for him there
seems none. The board is at the door, inscribed " Only standing
room left " ; and it might well bear the more poetic legend,
Lasciatc ogni speranza, voi cli> entrate. This man, born a prole-
tarian, must die a proletarian, and leave his destitution as an
only inheritance to his son. It is not yet clear that there is ten
days life in him ; for whence is his subsistence to come if he
cannot get at the land ? Food he must have, and clothing ;
and both promptly. There is food in the market, and clothing
also ; but not for nothing : hard money must be paid for
it, and paid on the nail too ; for he who has no property
gets no credit. Money then is a necessity of life ; and money
can only be procured by selling commodities. This presents no
difficulty to the cultivators of the land, who can raise com-
modities by their labor ; but the proletarian, being landless, has
neither commodities nor means of producing them. Sell some-
thing he must. Yet he has nothing to sell — except himself.
The idea seems a desperate one ; but it proves quite easy to
carry out. The tenant cultivators of the land have not strength

12 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

enough or time enough to exhaust the productive capacity of
their holdings. If they could buy men in the market for less
than these men's labor would add to the produce, then the
purchase of such men would be a sheer gain. It would indeed
be only a purchase in form : the men would literally cost
nothing, since they would produce their own price, with a
surplus for the buyer. Never in the history of buying and sel-
ling was there so splendid a bargain for buyers as this. Alad-
din's uncle's offer of new lamps for old ones was in comparison a
catchpenny. Accordingly, the proletarian no sooner offers himself
for sale than he finds a rush of bidders for him, each striving to
get the better of the others by offering to give him more and
more of the produce of his labor, and to content themselves with
less and less surplus. But even the highest bidder must have
some surplus, or he will not buy. The proletarian, in accepting
the highest bid, sells himself openly into bondage. He is not
the first man who has done so ; for it is evident that his fore-
runners, the purchasers of tenant right, had been enslaved by
the proprietors who lived on the rents paid by them. But now
all the disguise falls off : the proletarian renounces not only the
fruit of his labor, but also his right to think for himself and to
direct his industry as he pleases. The economic change is
merely formal : the moral change is enormous. Soon the
new direct traffic in men overspreads the whole market, and
takes the place formerly held by the traffic in tenant rights. In
order to understand the consequences, it is necessary to under-
take an analysis of the exchange of commodities in general,
since labor power is now in the market on the same footing as
any Other ware exposed there for sale.

Exchange Value.

It is evident that the custom of exchange will arise in the
first instance as soon as men give up providing each for his own
needs by his own labor. A man who makes his own tables and
chairs, his own poker and kettle, his own bread and butter, and
his own house and clothes, is jack of all trades and master of
none. He finds that he would get on much faster if he stuck
to making tables and chairs, and exchanged them with the

ECONOMIC. 13

smith for a poker and kettle, with bakers and dairymen for
bread and butter, and with builders and tailors for a house
and clothes. In doing this, he finds that his tables and chairs
are worth so much — that they have an exchange value, as it
is called. As a matter of general convenience, some suitable
commodity is set up to measure this value. We set up gold,
which, in this particular use of it, is called money. The
chairmaker finds how much monej^ his chairs are worth, and
exchanges them for it. The blacksmith finds out how much
money his pokers are worth, and exchanges them for it. Thus,
by employing money as a go-between, chairmakers can get
pokers in exchange for their chairs, and blacksmiths chairs
for their pokers. This is the mechanism of exchange ; and once
the values of the commodities are ascertained it works simply
enough. But it is a mere mechanism, and does not fix the values
or explain them. And the attempt to discover what does fix them
is beset with apparent contradictions which block up the right
path, and with seductive coincidences which make the wrong
seem the more promising.

The apparent contradictions soon shew themselves. It is
evident that the exchange value of anything depends on its
utility, since no mortal exertion can make a useless thing ex-
changeable. And yet fresh air and sunlight, which are so useful
as to be quite indispensable, have no exchange value ; whilst a
meteoric stone, shot free of charge from the firmament into the
back garden, has a considerable exchange value, although it is
an eminently dispensable curiosity. We soon find that this some-
how depends on the fact that fresh air is plenty and meteoric
stones scarce. If by any means the supply of fresh air could
be steadily diminished, and the supply of meteoric stones, by
celestial cannonade or otherwise, steadily increased, the fresh
air would presently acquire an exchange value which would
gradually rise, whilst the exchange value of meteoric stones
would gradually fall, until at last fresh air would be supplied
through a meter and charged for like gas, and meteoric stones
would be as unsaleable as ordinary pebbles. The exchange
value, in fact, decreases with the supply. This is due to the
fact that the supply decreases in utility as it goes on, because

H THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

when people have had some of a commodity, they are partly
satisfied, and do not value the rest so much. The usefulness
of a pound of bread to a man depends on whether he has
already eaten some. Every man wants a certain number of
pounds of bread per week : no man wants much more ; and if
more is offered he will not give much for it — perhaps not
anything. One umbrella is very useful : a second umbrella is a
luxury : a third is mere lumber. Similarly, the curators of our
museums want a moderate collection of meteoric stones; but
they do not want a cartload apiece of them. Now the exchange
value is fixed by the utility, not of the most useful, but of the
least useful part of the stock. Why this is so can readily be
made obvious by an illustration. If the stock of umbrellas in the
market were sufficiently large to provide two for each umbrella
carrier in the community, then, since a second umbrella is not
so useful as the first, the doctrinaire course would be to ticket
half the umbrellas at, say, fifteen shillings, and the other half at
eight and sixpence. Unfortunately, no man will give fifteen
shillings for an article which he can get for eight and sixpence ;
and when the public came to buy, they would buy up all the
eight and sixpenny umbrellas. Each person being thus supplied
with an umbrella, the remainder of the stock, though marked
fifteen shillings, would be in the position of second umbrellas,
only worth eight and sixpence. This is how the exchange
value of the least useful part of the supply fixes the exchange
value of all the rest. Technically, it occurs by " the law of
indifference". And since the least useful unit of the supply is
generally that which is last produced, its utility is called the
final utility of the commodity. The utility of the first or most
useful unit is called the total utility of the commodity. If there
were but one umbrella in the world, the exchange value of its
total utility would be what the most delicate person would pay
for it on a very wet day sooner than go without it. But practi-
cally, thanks to the law of indifference, the most delicate person
pays no more than the most robust : that is, both pay alike the
exchange value of the utility of the last umbrella produced — or
of the final utility of the whole stock of umbrellas. These
terms — law of indifference, total utility, and final utility —

ECONOMIC. 15

though admirably expressive and intelligible when you know
beforehand exactly what they mean, are, taken by themselves,
failures in point of lucidity and suggestiveness. Some econo-
mists, transferring from cultivation to utility our old metaphor
of the spreading pool, call final utility " marginal utility".
Either will serve our present purpose, as I do not intend to
use the terms again. The main point to be grasped is, that
however useful any commodity may be, its exchange value can
be run down to nothing by increasing the supply until there is
more of it than is wanted. The excess being useless and value-
less, is to be had for nothing ; and nobody will pay anything for
a commodity as long as plenty of it is to be had for nothing.
This is why air and other indispensable things have no ex-
change value, whilst scarce gewgaws fetch immense prices.

These, then, are the conditions which confront man as a
producer and exchanger. If he produces a* useless thing, his
labor will be wholly in vain : he will get nothing for it. If he
produces a useful thing, the price he will get for it will depend
on how much of it there is for sale already. If he increases the
supply by producing more than is sufficient to replace the
current consumption, he inevitably lowers the value of the
whole. It therefore behoves him to be wary in choosing his
occupation as well as industrious in pursuing it. His choice
will naturally fall on the production of those commodities whose
value stands highest relatively to the labor required to produce
them — which fetch the highest price in proportion to their cost,
in fact. Suppose, for example, that a maker of musical instru-
ments found that it cost him exactly as much to make a harp as
to make a pianoforte, but that harps were going out of fashion and
pianofortes coming in. Soon there would be more harps than
were wanted, and fewer pianofortes : consequently the value of
harps would fall, and that of pianofortes rise. Since the labor
cost of both would be the same, he would immediately devote
all his labor to pianoforte making ; and other manufacturers
would do the same, until the increase of supply brought down
the value of pianofortes to the value of harps. Possibly fashion
then might veer from pianofortes to American organs, in which
case he would make less pianofortes and more American organs.

16 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

When these, too, had increased sufficiently, the exertions of the
Salvation Army might create such a demand for tambourines as
to make them worth four times their cost of production, where-
upon there would instantly be a furious concentration of the
instrument-making energy on the manufacture of tambourines ;
and this concentration would last until the supply had brought
down the profit x to less than might be gained by gratifying the
public craving for trombones. At last, as pianofortes were
cheapened until they were no more profitable than harps ;
then American organs until they were no more profitable than
pianos ; and then tambourines until they were level with
American organs ; so eventually trombones will pay no better
than tambourines ; and a general level of profit will be attained,
indicating the proportion in which the instruments are wanted
by the public. But to skim off even this level of profit, more
of the instruments may be produced in the ascertained pro-
portion until their prices fall to their costs of production, when
there will be no profit. Here the production will be de-
cisively checked, since a further supply would cause only a
loss ; and men can lose money, without the trouble of producing
commodities, by the simple process of throwing it out of
window.

What occurred with the musical instruments in this illustra-
tion occurs in practice with the whole mass of manufactured
commodities. Those which are scarce, and therefore relatively
high in value, tempt us to produce them until the increase of
the supply reduces their value to a point at which there is no
more profit to be made out of them than out of other com-
modities. The general level of profit thus attained is further
exploited until the general increase brings down the price of
all commodities to their cost of production, the equivalent of
which is sometimes called their normal value. And here a
glance back to our analysis of the spread of cultivation, and its
result in the phenomenon of rent, suggests the question : WThat
does the cost of production of a commodity mean ? We have
seen that, owing to the differences in fertility and advantage of

1 Profit is here used colloquially to denote the excess of the value of an
article over its cost.

ECONOMIC. 17

situation between one piece of land and another, cost of pro-
duction varies from district to district, being highest at the
margin of cultivation. But we have also seen how the landlord
skims off as economic rent all the advantage gained by the
cultivators of superior soils and sites. Consequently, the addi-
tion of the landlord's rent to the expenses of production brings
them up even on the best land to the level of those incurred on
the worst. Cost of production, then, means cost of production
on the margin of cultivation, and is equalized to all producers,
since what they may save in labor per commodity is counter-
balanced by the greater mass of commodities they must produce
in order to bring in the rent. It is only by a thorough grasp of
this levelling-down action that we can detect the trick by which
the ordinary economist tries to cheat us into accepting the
private property system as practically just. He first shews that
economic rent does not enter into cost of production on the
margin of cultivation. Then he shews that the cost of pro-
duction on the margin of cultivation determines the price
of a commodity. Therefore, he argues, first, that rent does
not enter into price ; and second, that the value of com-
modities is fixed by their cost of production, the implica-
tion being that the landlords cost the community nothing, and
that commodities exchange in exact proportion to the labor they
cost. This trivially ingenious way of being disingenuous is
officially taught as political economy in our schools to this day.
It will be seen at once that it is mere thimblerig. So far
from commodities exchanging, or tending to exchange, according
to the labor expended in their production, commodities produced
well within the margin of cultivation will fetch as high a price
as commodities produced at the margin with much greater
labor. So far from the landlord costing nothing, he costs all
the difference between the two.

This, however, is not the goal of our analysis of value.
We now see how Man's control over the value of commodities
consists solely in his power of regulating their supply. Indi-
viduals are constantly trying to decrease supply for their own
advantage. Gigantic conspiracies have been entered into to fore-
stall the world's wheat and cotton harvests, so as to force their

18 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

value to the highest possible point. Cargoes of East Indian spices
have been destroyed by the Dutch as cargoes of fish are now
destroyed in the Thames, to maintain prices by limiting supply.
All rings, trusts, corners, combinations, monopolies, and trade
secrets have the same object. Production and the development
of the social instincts are alike hindered by each man's con-
sciousness that the more he stints the community the more
he benefits himself, the justification, of course, being that when
every man has benefited himself at the expense of the com-
munity, the community will benefit by every man in it being
benefited. From one thing the community is safe. There will
be no permanent conspiracies to reduce values by increasing
supply. All men will cease producing when the value of their
product falls below its cost of production, whether in labor or in
labor plus rent. No man will keep on producing bread until it
will fetch nothing, like the sunlight, or until it becomes a
nuisance, like the rain in the summer of 1888. So far, our
minds are at ease as to the excessive increase of commodities
voluntarily produced by the labor of man.

Wages.

I now ask you to pick up the dropped subject of the spread
of cultivation. We had got as far as the appearance in the
market of a new commodity — of the proletarian man compelled
to live by the sale of himself ! In order to realize at once the
latent horror of this, you have only to apply our investigation of
value, with its inevitable law that only by restricting the supply
of a commodity can its value be kept from descending finally to
zero. The commodity which the proletarian sells is one over
the production of which he has practically no control. He is
himself driven to produce it by an irresistible impulse. It was
the increase of population that spread cultivation and civiliza-
tion from the centre to the snowline, and at last forced men to
sell themselves to the lords of the soil : it is the same force that
continues to multiply men so that their exchange value falls
slowly and surely until it disappears altogether — until even black
chattel slaves are released as not worth keeping in a land where
men of all colors are to be had for nothing. This is the con-

ECONOMIC 19

dition of our English laborers to-day : they are no longer even
dirt cheap : they are valueless, and can be had for nothing.
The proof is the existence of the unemployed, who can find no
purchasers. By the law of indifference, nobody will buy men at
a price when he can obtain equally serviceable men for nothing.
What then is the explanation of the wages given to those who
are in employment, and who certainly do not work for nothing ?
The matter is deplorably simple. Suppose that horses multi-
plied in England in such quantities that they were to be had for
the asking, like kittens condemned to the bucket. You would
still have to feed your horse — feed him and lodge him well if
you used him as a smart hunter — feed him and lodge him
wretchedly if you used him only as a drudge. But the cost of
keeping would not mean that the horse had an exchange value.
If you got him for nothing in the first instance — if no one would
give you anything for him when you were done with him, he
would be worth nothing, in spite of the cost of his keep. That is
just the case of every member of the proletariat who could be
replaced by one of the unemployed to-day. Their wage is not
the price of themselves ; for they are worth nothing : it is only
their keep. For bare subsistence wages you can get as much
common labor as you want, and do what you please with it
within the limits of a criminal code which is sure to be
interpreted by a proprietary-class judge in your favor. If
you have to give your footman a better allowance than your
wretched hewer of match-wood, it is for the same reason that
you have to give your hunter beans and a clean stall instead of
chopped straw and a sty.1

Capitalism.
At this stage the acquisition of labor becomes a mere ques-
tion of provender. If a railway is required, all that is necessary
is to provide subsistence for a sufficient number of laborers to

1 When one of the conditions of earning a wage is the keeping up of a
certain state, subsistence wages may reach a figure to which the term seems
ludicrously inappropriate. For example, a fashionable physician in London
cannot save out of £1,000 a year ; and the post of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
can only be filled by a man who brings considerable private means to the aid
of his official salary of £20,000.

C 2

20 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

construct it. If, for example, the railway requires the labor
of a thousand men for five years, the cost to the proprietors
of the site is the subsistence of a thousand men for five years.
This subsistence is technically called capital. It is provided for
by the proprietors not consuming the whole excess over wages
of the produce of the labor of their other wage workers, but
setting aside enough for the subsistence of the railway makers.
In this way capital can claim to be the result of saving,
or, as one ingenious apologist neatly put it, the reward of
abstinence, a gleam of humor which still enlivens treatises on
capital. The savers, it need hardly be said, are those who have
more money than they want to spend : the abstainers are those
who have less. At the end of the five years, the completed
railway is the property of the capitalists ; and the railway makers
fall back into the labor market as helpless as they were before.
Sometimes the proprietors call the completed railway their
capital ; but, strictly, this is only a figure of speech. Capital is
simply spare subsistence. Its market value, indicated by the
current rate of interest, falls with the increase of population,
whereas the market value of established stock rises with
it.1 If Mr. Goschen, encouraged by his success in reducing
Consols, were to ask the proprietors of the London and North
Western Railway to accept as full compensation for their
complete expropriation capital just sufficient to make the
railway anew, their amazement at his audacity would at once
make him feel the difference between a railway and capital.
Colloquially, one property with a farm on it is said to be
land yielding rent ; whilst another, with a railway on it, is
called capital yielding interest. But economically there is no
distinction between them when they once become sources of
revenue. This would be quite clearly seen if costly enter-
prises like railways could be undertaken by a single landlord
on his own land out of his own surplus wealth. It is the

1 The current rate must, under present conditions, eventually fall to zero,
and even become " negative". By that time shares which now bring in a
dividend of ioo per cent., may very possibly bring in 200 or more. Yet the
fall of the rate has been mistaken for a tendency of interest to disappear. It
really indicates a tendency of interest to increase.

ECONOMIC. 21

necessity of combining a number of possessors of surplus
wealth, and devising a financial machinery for apportioning
their shares in the produce to their shares in the capital con-
tributed, that modifies the terminology and external aspect of
the exploitation. But the modification is not an alteration :
shareholder and landlord live alike on the produce extracted
from their property by the labor of the proletariat.

" Overpopulation ".

The introduction of the capitalistic system is a sign that
the exploitation of the laborer toiling for a bare subsistence
wage has become one of the chief arts of life among the
holders of tenant rights. It also produces a delusive promise
of endless employment which blinds the proletariat to those
disastrous consequences of rapid multiplication which are
obvious to the small cultivator and peasant proprietor. But
indeed the more you degrade the workers, robbing them of all
artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration
from their fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless,
on the one pleasure and the one human tie left to them — the
gratification of their instinct for producing fresh supplies of men.
You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last the ex-
cessive supply becomes a nuisance : there comes a plague of
men ; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is diabolic,
and set up a cry of " over population ". But your slaves are
beyond caring for your cries : they breed like rabbits ; and their
poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity,
drunkenness, and murder. In the midst of the riches which
their labor piles up for you, their misery rises up too and
stifles you. You withdraw in disgust to the other end of the
town from them ; you appoint special carriages on your rail-
ways and special seats in your churches and theatres for
them ; you set your life apart from theirs by every class
barrier you can devise ; and yet they swarm about you still :
your face gets stamped with your habitual loathing and sus-
picion of them : your ears get so filled with the language of
the vilest of them that you break into it when you lose your
self-control : they poison your life as remorselessly as you

22 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

have sacrificed theirs heartlessly. You begin to believe in-
tensely in the devil. Then comes the terror of their revolting ;
the drilling and arming of bodies of them to keep down the
rest ; the prison, the hospital, paroxysms of frantic coercion,
followed by paroxysms of frantic charity. And in the mean-
time, the population continues to increase !

" Illth."

It is sometimes said that during this grotesquely hideous
march of civilization from bad to worse, wealth is increasing
side by side with misery. Such a thing is eternally impossible :
wealth is steadily decreasing with the spread of poverty. But
riches are increasing, which is quite another thing. The total
of the exchange values produced in the country annually is
mounting perhaps by leaps and bounds. But the accumulation
of riches, and consequently of an excessive purchasing power,
in the hands of a class, soon satiates that class with socially
useful wealth, and sets them offering a price for luxuries. The
moment a price is to be had for a luxury, it acquires exchange
value, and labor is employed to produce it. A New York lady,
for instance, having a nature of exquisite sensibility, orders an
elegant rosewood and silver coffin, upholstered in pink satin, for
her dead dog. It is made ; and meanwhile a live child is
prowling barefooted and hunger-stunted in the frozen gutter
outside. The exchange-value of the coffin is counted as part
of the national wealth ; but a nation which cannot afford food
and clothing for its children cannot be allowed to pass as
wealthy because it has provided a pretty coffin for a dead dog.
Exchange value itself, in fact, has become bedevilled like
everything else, and represents, no longer utility, but the
cravings of lust, folly, vanity, gluttony, and madness, techni-
cally described by genteel economists as " effective demand ".
Luxuries are not social wealth : the machinery for producing
them is not social wealth : labor skilled only to manufacture
them is not socially useful labor : the men, women, and children
who make a living by producing them are no more self-supporting
than the idle rich for whose amusement they are kept at work.
It is the habit of counting as wealth the exchange values in-

ECONOMIC. 23

volved in these transactions that makes us fancy that the poor
are starving in the midst of plenty. They are starving in
the midst of plenty of jewels, velvets, laces, equipages, and
racehorses ; but not in the midst of plenty of food. In the
things that are wanted for the welfare of the people we are
abjectly poor ; and England's social policy to-day may be
likened to the domestic policy of those adventuresses who
leave their children half-clothed and half-fed in order to keep
a carriage and deal with a fashionable dressmaker. But it
is quite true that whilst wealth and welfare are decreasing,
productive power is increasing ; and nothing but the perversion
of this power to the production of socially useless commodities
prevents the apparent wealth from becoming real. The pur-
chasing power that commands luxuries in the hands of the
rich, would command true wealth in the hands of all. Yet
private property must still heap the purchasing power upon
the few rich and withdraw it from the many poor. So
that, in the end, the subject of the one boast that private
property can make — the great accumulation of so-called
" wealth " which it points so proudly to as the result of
its power to scourge men and women daily to prolonged and
intense toil, turns out to be a simulacrum. With all its energy,
its Smilesian "self-help", its merchant-princely enterprise, its
ferocious sweating and slave-driving, its prodigality of blood,
sweat and tears, what has it heaped up, over and above the
pittance of its slaves ? Only a monstrous pile of frippery, some
tainted class literature and class art, and not a little poison
and mischief.

This, then, is the economic analysis which convicts Private
Property of being unjust even from the beginning, and utterly
impossible as a final solution of even the individualist aspect
of the problem of adjusting the share of the worker in the
distribution of wealth to the labor incurred by him in its
production. All attempts yet made to construct true societies
upon it have failed : the nearest things to societies so achieved

24 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

have been civilizations, which have rotted into centres of
vice and luxury, and eventually been swept away by un-
civilized races. That our own civilization is already in an
advanced stage of rottenness may be taken as statistically
proved. That further decay instead of improvement must
ensue if the institution of private property be maintained,
is economically certain. Fortunately, private property in its
integrity is not now practicable. Although the safety valve of
emigration has been furiously at work during this century,
yet the pressure of population has forced us to begin the
restitution to the people of the sums taken from them for
the ground landlords, holders of tenant right, and capitalists,
by the imposition of an income tax, and by compelling them
to establish out of their revenues a national system of educa-
tion, besides imposing restrictions — as yet only of the forcible-
feeble sort — on their terrible power of abusing the wage
contract. These, however, are dealt with by Mr. Sidney
Webb in the historic essay which follows. I should not touch
upon them at all, were it not that experience has lately con-
vinced all economists that no exercise in abstract economics,
however closely deduced, is to be trusted unless it can be
experimentally verified by tracing its expression in history.
It is true that the process which I have presented as a direct
development of private property between free exchangers had
to work itself out in the Old World indirectly and tortuously
through a struggle with political and religious institutions
and survivals quite antagonistic to it. It is true that
cultivation did not begin in Western Europe with the
solitary emigrant pre-empting his private property, but with
the tribal communes in which arose subsequently the asser-
tion of the right of the individual to private judgment and
private action against the tyranny of primitive society. It
is true that cultivation has not proceeded by logical steps
from good land to less good ; from less good to bad ; and from
bad to worse : the exploration of new countries and new
regions, and the discovery of new uses for old products, has
often made the margin of cultivation more fruitful than the
centre, and, for the moment (whilst the centre was shifting to

ECONOMIC. 25

the margin), turned the whole movement of rent and wages
directly counter to the economic theory. Nor is it true that,
taking the world as one country, cultivation has yet spread
from the snowline to the water's edge. There is free land still
for the poorest East End match-box maker if she could get
there, reclaim the wilderness there, speak the language there,
stand the climate there, and be fed, clothed, and housed there
whilst she cleared her farm ; learned how to cultivate it ; and
waited for the harvest. Economists have been ingenious
enough to prove that this alternative really secures her
independence ; but I shall not waste time in dealing with
that. Practically, if there is no free land in England, the
economic analysis holds good of England, in spite of Siberia,
Central Africa, and the Wild West. Again, it is not im-
mediately true that men are governed in production solely
by a determination to realize the maximum of exchange value.
The impulse to production often takes specific direction in
the first instance ; and a man will insist on producing pictures
or plays although he might gain more money by producing
boots or bonnets. But, his specific impulse once gratified,
he will make as much money as he can. He will sell his
picture or play for a hundred pounds rather than for fifty.
In short, though there is no such person as the celebrated
*l economic man ", man being wilful rather than rational,
yet when the wilful man has had his way he will take what
else he can get ; and so he always does appear, finally if not
primarily, as the economic man. On the whole, history, even
in the Old World, goes the way traced by the economist.
In the New World the correspondence is exact. The United
States and the Colonies have been peopled by fugitives from
the full-blown individualism of Western Europe, pre-empting
private property precisely as assumed in this investigation of
the conditions of cultivation. The economic relations of these
cultivators have not since put on any of the old political dis-
guises. Yet among them, in confirmation of the validity of
our analysis, we see all the evils of our old civilizations growing
up; and though with them the end is not yet, still it is from
them to us that the great recent revival of the cry for

26 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

nationalization of the land has come, articulated by a man
who had seen the whole tragedy of private property hurried
through its acts with unprecedented speed in the mushroom
cities of America.

On Socialism the analysis of the economic action of Indi-
vidualism bears as a discovery, in the private appropriation
of land, of the source of those unjust privileges against which
Socialism is aimed. It is practically a demonstration that
public property in land is the basic economic condition
of Socialism. But this does not involve at present a
literal restoration of the land to the people. The land is
at present in the hands of the people : its proprietors are for
the most part absentees. The modern form of private property
is simply a legal claim to take a share of the produce of the
national industry year by year without working for it. It refers
to no special part or form of that produce; and in process of con-
sumption its revenue cannot be distinguished from earnings, so
that the majority of persons, accustomed to call the commodities
which form the income of the proprietor his private property,
and seeing no difference between them and the commodities
which form the income of a worker, extend the term private
property to the worker's subsistence also, and can only conceive
an attack on private property as an attempt to empower every-
body to rob everybody else all round. But the income of a
private proprietor can be distinguished by the fact that he
obtains it unconditionally and gratuitously by private right
against the public weal, which is incompatible with the exist-
ence of consumers who do not produce. Socialism involves
discontinuance of the payment of these incomes, and addi-
tion of the wealth so saved to incomes derived from labor.
As we have seen, incomes derived from private property
consist partly of economic rent ; partly of pensions, also
called rent, obtained by the subletting of tenant rights ;
and partly of a form of rent called interest, obtained by special
adaptations of land to production by the application of capital :
all these being finally paid out of the difference between
the produce of the worker's labor and the price of that
labor sold in the open market for wages, salary, fees, or

ECONOMIC. 27

profits.1 The whole, except economic rent, can be added
directly to the incomes of the workers by simply discon-
tinuing its exaction from them. Economic rent> arising as it
does from variations of fertility or advantages of situation, must
always be held as common or social wealth, and used, as the
revenues raised by taxation are now used, for public purposes,
among which Socialism would make national insurance and
the provision of capital matters of the first importance.

The economic problem of Socialism is thus solved ; and the
political question of how the economic solution is to be practi-
cally applied does not come within the scope of this essay.
But if we have got as far as an intellectual conviction that the
source of our social misery is no eternal well-spring of confusion
and evil, but only an artificial system susceptible of almost
infinite modification and readjustment — nay, of practical de-
molition and substitution at the will of Man, then a terrible
weight will be lifted from the minds of all except those who are,
whether avowedly to themselves or not, clinging to the present
state of things from base motives. We have had in this century
a stern series of lessons on the folly of believing anything for no
better reason than that it is pleasant to believe it. It was pleasant
to look round with a consciousness of possessing a thousand a
year, and say, with Mr. Robert Browning, " All's love ; and
all's law". It was pleasant to believe that the chance we were
too lazy to take in this world would come back to us in another.
It was pleasant to believe that a benevolent hand was guiding
the steps of society ; overruling all evil appearances for good ;
and making poverty here the earnest of a great blessedness and
reward hereafter. It was pleasant to lose the sense of worldly in-
equality in the contemplation of our equality before God. But
utilitarian questioning and scientific answering turned all
this tranquil optimism into the blackest pessimism. Nature
was shewn to us as "red in tooth and claw": if the guiding
hand were indeed benevolent, then it could not be omnipotent ;
so that our trust in it was broken : if it were omnipotent, it

1 This excess of the product of labor over its price is treated as a single
category with impressive effect by Karl Marx, who called it " surplus value "
(mehrwerth) .

28 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

could not be benevolent ; so that our love of it turned to fear
and hatred. We had never admitted that the other world,
which was to compensate for the sorrows of this, was open to
horses and apes (though we had not on that account been any
the more merciful to our horses) ; and now came Science to
shew us the corner of the pointed ear of the horse on our own
heads, and present the ape to us as our blood relation. No
proof came of the existence of that other world and that bene-
volent power to which we had left the remedy of the atrocious
wrongs of the poor : proof after proof came that what we called
Nature knew and cared no more about our pains and pleasures
than we know or care about the tiny creatures we crush
underfoot as we walk through the fields. Instead of at once
perceiving that this meant no more than that Nature was
unmoral and indifferent, we relapsed into a gross form of devil
worship, and conceived Nature as a remorselessly malignant
power. This was no better than the old optimism, and
infinitely gloomier. It kept our eyes still shut to the truth
that there is no cruelty and selfishness outside Man himself;
and that his own active benevolence can combat and vanquish
both. When the Socialist came forward as a meliorist on these
lines, the old school of political economists, who could see no
alternative to private property, put forward in proof of the
powerlessness of benevolent action to arrest the deadly auto-
matic production of poverty by the increase of population,
the very analysis I have just presented. Their conclusions
exactly fitted in with the new ideas. It was Nature at it again
— the struggle for existence — the remorseless extirpation of the
weak — the survival of the fittest — in short, natural selection at
work. Socialism seemed too good to be true : it was passed by
as merely the old optimism foolishly running its head against
the stone wall of modern science. But Socialism now challenges
individualism, scepticism, pessimism, worship of Nature per-
sonified as a devil, on their own ground of science. The science
of the production and distribution of wealth is Political Economy.
Socialism appeals to that science, and, turning on Individualism
its own guns, routs it in incurable disaster. Henceforth the
bitter cynic who still finds the world an eternal and unim-

ECONOMIC. 29

provable doghole, with the placid person of means who repeats
the familiar misquotation, " the poor ye shall have always with
you ", lose their usurped place among the cultured, and pass
over to the ranks of the ignorant, the shallow, and the super-
stitious. As for the rest of us, since we were taught to revere
proprietary respectability in our unfortunate childhood, and
since we found our childish hearts so hard and unregenerate that
they secretly hated and rebelled against respectability in spite
of that teaching, it is impossible to express the relief with which
we discover that our hearts were all along right, and that the
current respectability of to-day is nothing but a huge inversion
of righteous and scientific social order weltering in dishonesty,
uselessness, selfishness, wanton misery, and idiotic waste of
magnificent opportunities for noble and happy living. It was-
terrible to feel this, and yet to fear that it could not be helped
— that the poor must starve and make you ashamed of your
dinner — that they must shiver and make you ashamed of
your warm overcoat. It is to economic science — once the
Dismal, now the Hopeful — that we are indebted for the dis-
covery that though the evil is enormously worse than we knew,
yet it is not eternal — not even very long lived, if we only bestir
ourselves to make an end of it.

HISTORIC.

BY SIDNEY WEBB.

The Development of the Democratic Ideal.

In discussing the historic groundwork of Socialism, it is worth
remembering that no special claim is made for Socialism in
the assertion that it possesses a basis in history. Just as
every human being has an ancestry, unknown to him though
it may be ; so every idea, every incident, every movement has
in the past its own long chain of causes, without which it
could not have been. Formerly we were glad to let the dead
bury their dead : nowadays we turn lovingly to the records,
whether of persons or things ; and we busy ourselves willingly
among origins, even without conscious utilitarian end. We
are no longer proud of having ancestors, since everyone has
them ; but we are more than ever interested in our ancestors,
now that we find in them the fragments which compose our
very selves. The historic ancestry of the English social or-
ganization during the present century stands witness to the
irresistible momentum of the ideas which Socialism denotes.
The record of the century in English social history begins
with the trial and hopeless failure of an almost complete indus-
trial individualism, in which, however, unrestrained private
ownership of land and capital was accompanied by subjection
to a political oligarchy. So little element of permanence was
there in this individualistic order that, with the progress of
political emancipation, private ownership of the means of
production has been, in one direction or another, successively
regulated, limited and superseded, until it may now fairly be

30

HISTORIC. 31

claimed that the Socialist philosophy of to-day is but the con-
scious and explicit assertion of principles of social organization
which have been already in great part unconsciously adopted.
The economic history of the century is an almost continuous
record of the progress of Socialism.1

Socialism too, has in the record of its internal development
a history of its own. Down to the present generation, the
aspirant after social regeneration naturally vindicated the
practicability of his ideas by offering an elaborate plan with
specifications of a new social order from which all contem-
porary evils were eliminated. Just as Plato had his Re-
public and Sir Thomas More his Utopia, so Babceuf had
his Charter of Equality, Cabet his Icaria, St. Simon his
Industrial System, and Fourier his ideal Phalanstery. Robert
Owen spent a fortune in pressing upon an unbelieving
generation his New Moral World ; and even Auguste Comte,
superior as he was to many of the weaknesses of his time,
must needs add a detailed Polity to his Philosophy of
Positivism.

The leading feature of all these proposals was what may be
called their statical character. The ideal society was repre-
sented as in perfectly balanced equilibrium, without need or
possibility of future organic alteration. Since their day we have
learned that social reconstruction must not be gone at in this
fashion. Owing mainly to the efforts of Comte, Darwin, and
Herbert Spencer, we can no longer think of the ideal society as
an unchanging State. The social ideal from being static has
become dynamic. The necessity of the constant growth and
development of the social organism has become axiomatic. No
philosopher now looks for anything but the gradual evolution
of the new order from the old, without breach of continuity or
abrupt change of the entire social tissue at any point during
the process. The new becomes itself old, often before it is
consciously recognized as new ; and history shews us no
example of the sudden substitutions of Utopian and revolu-
tionary romance.

1 See " Socialism in England " (American Economic Association, vol. iv.,
part 2, May 1889), in which a portion of this essay has been embodied.

32 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

Though Socialists have learnt this lesson1 better than most of
their opponents, the common criticism of Socialism has not yet
noted the change, and still deals mainly with the obsolete
Utopias of the pre-evolutionary age. Parodies of the domestic
details of an imaginary Phalanstery, and homilies on the
failure of Brook Farm or Icaria, may be passed over as
belated and irrelevant now that Socialists are only advocating
the conscious adoption of a principle of social organization
which the world has already found to be the inevitable outcome
of Democracy and the Industrial Revolution. For Socialism is
by this time a wave surging throughout all Europe; and for
want of a grasp of the series of apparently unconnected events
by which and with which it has been for two generations rapidly
coming upon us — for want, in short, of knowledge of its intel-
lectual history, we in England to-day see our political leaders
in a general attitude of astonishment at the changing face of
current politics ; both great parties drifting vaguely before a
nameless undercurrent which they fail utterly to recognize or
understand.2 With some dim impression that Socialism is
one of the Utopian dreams they remember to have heard com-
fortably disposed of in their academic youth as the impossible
ideal of Humanity-intoxicated Frenchmen, they go their ways
through the nineteenth century as a countryman blunders through
Cheapside. One or two are history fanciers, learned in curious
details of the past : the present eludes these no less than the
others. They are so near to the individual events that they are
blind to the onward sweep of the column. They cannot see the
forest for the trees.

History not only gives the clue to the significance of con-
temporary events ; it also enables us to understand those who
have not yet found that clue. We learn to class men

1 "I am aware that there are some who suppose that our present bourgeois
arrangements must be totally destroyed and others substituted almost at a
blow. But however successful a revolution might be, it is certain that
mankind cannot change its whole nature all at once. Break the old shell,
certainly ; but never forget the fact that the new forms must grow out of the
old" (H. M. Hyndman, " Historical Basis of Socialism ", 1883, p. 305).

2 See the article on " Socialism in English Politics", by William Clarke >
in the Political Science Quarterly, December, 1888.

HISTORIC. 33

and ideas in a kind of geological order in time. The Comte
de Paris gives us excellent proofs that in absolute monarchy
lies the only safety of social order. He is a survival : the type
flourished in the sixteenth century ; and the splendid fossils
of that age can be studied in any historic museum. Lord
Bramwell will give cogent reasons for the belief that absolute
freedom of contract, subject to the trifling exception of a drastic
criminal law, will ensure a perfect State. His lordship is a
survival from a nearer epoch : about 1840 this was as far as
social science had got ; and there are still persons who have
learnt nothing of later date. When I see the Hipparion at
South Kensington I do not take his unfamiliar points to be
those of a horse of a superior kind : I know that he is an obsolete
and superseded pattern, from which the horse has developed.
Historic fossils are more dangerous ; for they are left at large,
and are not even excluded from Downing Street or West-
minster. But against the stream of tendencies they are ulti-
mately powerless. Though they sometimes appear victorious,
each successive struggle takes place further down the current
which they believe themselves to be resisting.

The main stream which has borne European society towards
Socialism during the past 100 years is the irresistible progress
of Democracy. De Tocqueville drove and hammered this truth
into the reluctant ears of the Old World two generations ago;
and we have all pretended to carry it about as part of our
mental furniture ever since. But like most epigrammatic com-
monplaces, it is not generally realized ; and De Tocqueville's
book has, in due course, become a classic which everyone
quotes and nobody reads. The progress of Democracy is, in
fact, often imagined, as by Sir Henry Maine, to be merely the
substitution of one kind of political machinery for another ; and
there are many political Democrats to-day who cannot under-
stand why social or economic matters should be mixed up with
politics at all. It was not for this that they broke the power of the
aristocracy : they were touched not so much with love of the
many as with hatred of the few;1 and, as has been acutely said —

1 Even Bentham said this of James Mill (Bain's Life of J. M., p. 461), of
whom it was hardly true.

D

34 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

though usually by foolish persons — they are Radicals merely
because they are not themselves lords. But it will not long be
possible for any man to persist in believing that the political
organization of society can be completely altered without corres-
ponding changes in economic and social relations. De Tocque-
ville expressly pointed out that the progress of Democracy
meant nothing less than a complete dissolution of the nexus by
which society was held together under the old regime. This
dissolution is followed by a period of anarchic spiritual isolation
of the individual from his fellows, and to that extent by a general
denial of the very idea of society. But man is a social animal ;
and after more or less interval there necessarily comes into
existence a new nexus, differing so entirely from the old-
fashioned organization that the historic fossil goes about denying
that it is a nexus at all, or that any new nexus is possible or
desirable. To him, mostly through lack of economics, the
progress of Democracy is nothing more than the destruction of
old political privileges ; and, naturally enough, few can see any
beauty in mere dissolution and destruction. Those few are the
purely political Radicals abhorred of Comte and Carlyle : they
are in social matters the empiricist survivals from a pre-
scientific age.

The mere Utopians, on the other hand, who wove the base-
less fabric of their visions of reconstructed society on their own
private looms, equally failed, as a rule, to comprehend the
problem of the age. They were, in imagination, resuscitated
Joseph the Seconds, benevolent despots who would have poured
the old world, had it only been fluid, into their new moulds.
Against their crude plans the Statesman, the Radical, and the
Political Economist were united ; for they took no account of
the blind social forces which they could not control, and which
went on inexorably working out social salvation in ways un-
suspected by the Utopian.

In the present Socialist movement these two streams are
united : advocates of social reconstruction have learnt the lesson
of Democracy, and know that it is through the slow and gradual
turning of the popular mind to new principles that social
reorganization bit by bit comes. All students of society who

HISTORIC. 35

are abreast of their time, Socialists as well as Individualists,
realize that important organic changes can only be (i) demo-
cratic, and thus acceptable to a majority of the people, and
prepared for in the minds of all ; (2) gradual, and thus causing
no dislocation, however rapid may be the rate of progress ; (3)
not regarded as immoral by the mass of the people, and thus
not subjectively demoralizing to them; and (4) in this country at
any rate, constitutional and peaceful. Socialists may therefore be
quite at one with Radicals in their political methods. Radicals,
on the other hand, are perforce realizing that mere political
levelling is insufficient to save a State from anarchy and
despair. Both sections have been driven to recognize that the
root of the difficulty is economic ; and there is every day a wider
consensus that the inevitable outcome of Democracy is the
control by the people themselves, not only of their own political
organization, but, through that, also of the main instruments of
wealth production ; the gradual substitution of organized co-
operation for the anarchy of the competitive struggle ; and the
consequent recovery, in the only possible way, of what John
Stuart Mill calls "the enormous share which the possessors of
the instruments of industry are able to take from the produce."1
The economic side of the democratic ideal is, in fact, Socialism
itself.

The Disintegration of the Old Synthesis.

At the middle of the last century Western Europe was
still organized on a system of which the basis was virtually a
surviving feudalism. The nexus between man and man was
essentially a relation of superiority and inferiority. Social
power still rested either with the monarch, or with the owners
of large landed estates. Some inroads had already been made
in the perfect symmetry of the organization, notably by the
growth of towns, and the rise of the still comparatively small
trading class ; but the bulk of the population was arranged in
an hierarchical series of classes, linked to one another by the
bond of Power.

1 " Principles of Political Economy ", last edition, 1865, p. 477 (quoting
from Feugueray.)

D 2

36 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

We are apt to think of England as differing in this respect
from continental Europe, and to imagine that our popular
freedom was won in 1688, if not in 1648, or even as far back
as Magna Charta itself. But as regards the people at large,
this was, in the main, merely a difference in political form.
In England the aristocratic oligarchy had prevailed over the
monarch : in France the King had defeated the Fronde. For
the mass of the people in either country there was nothing
but obedience.

Even in England the whole political administration was
divided between the king and the great families ; and not one
person in 500 possessed so much as a vote. As lately as 1831
one hundred and fifty persons returned a majority of the House
of Commons (Molesworth, " History of the Reform Bill ", p.
347). The Church, once a universal democratic organization
of international fraternity, had become a mere appanage of
the landed gentry. The administration of justice and of the
executive government was entirely in their hands, while Par-
liament was filled with their leaders or nominees. No avenue
of advancement existed for even exceptionally gifted sons of
the people ; and the masses found themselves born into a position
of lifelong dependence upon a class of superior birth.

The economic organization was of a similar character. Two-
thirds of the population tilled the soil, and dwelt in lonely
hamlets scattered about the still sparsely inhabited country.
Though possessing the remnants of ancient communal rights,
they were practically dependent on the farmers of the parish,
who fixed their wages by a constant tacit conspiracy.1 The
farmers themselves were the obedient serfs of the large pro-
prietors, to whom they paid a customary rent. Though nomi-
nally free to move, both farmers and laborers were practically
fettered to the manor by their ignorance and their poverty ; 2
and though the lord had lost the criminal jurisdiction of his

1 Referred to in a celebrated passage by Adam Smith, "Wealth of
Nations", book 1, chap. viii.

2 Not to mention the restrictions imposed by the law of " Settlement "
(13 and 14 Charles II., chap. 12), which enabled two justices summarily to
send back to his village any migrating laborer.

HISTORIC. 37

manorial courts, his powers as Justice of the Peace formed a full
equivalent. His unrestrained ownership of the land enabled him
to take for himself as rent the whole advantage of all but the
very worst of the soils in use ; and the lingering manorial rights
gave him toll even from that worst. Throughout the country-
side his word was law and his power irresistible. It was a
world whose nexus was might, economic and political, tempered
only by custom and lack of stimulus to change. The poor were
not necessarily worse off in material matters than they are now :
the agricultural laborer, indeed, was apparently better off in
1750 than at any other time between 1450 and 1850.1 But it
was a world still mainly mediaeval in political, in economic, and
in social relations : a world of status and of permanent social
inequalities not differing essentially from the feudalism of the past.
The system had, however, already begun to decay. The
rise of the towns by the growth of trade gradually created new
centres of independence and new classes who broke the bonds of
innate status. The intrusion of the moneyed city classes and the
Indian " Nabobs" into the rural districts tended to destroy the
feudal idea. The growth of new sects in religion made fresh points
of individual resistance, degenerating often into spiritual anarchy
or unsocial quietism. The spread of learning built up a small but
active disintegrating force of those who had detected the shams
around them. But the real Perseus who was to free the people
from their political bondage was Newcomen or Watt, Hargreaves
or Crompton, Kay or Arkwright, whichever may be considered to
have contributed the main stroke towards the Industrial Revo-
lution of the last century.2 From the inventions of these men
came the machine industry with its innumerable secondary
results — the Factory System and the upspringing of the
Northern and Midland industrial towns,3 and the evangelization

1 This was noticed by Malthus, "Principles of Political Economy", p.
225 ; see also Professor Thorold Rogers, " History of Agriculture and Prices"
and " Six Centuries of Work and Wages ".

2 Further detail will be found in the following essay. See also Arnold
Toynbee's " Industrial Revolution ".

3 Between 1801 — 1845 the population of Manchester grew 109 per cent.,
Glasgow 108 per cent., Liverpool 100 per cent., and Leeds 99 per cent. (Report
of Commissioners on State of Health of Large Towns, 1845-5) ' '

38 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

of the waste places of the earth by the sale of grey shirtings.
Throughout one-third of England the manor gave way to the
mill or the mine ; and the feudal lord had to slacken his hold of
political and social power in order to give full play to the change
which enriched him with boundless rents and mining royalties.
And so it happened in England that the final collapse of
Mediaevalism came, not by the Great Rebellion nor by the
Whig Treason of 1688, nor yet by the rule of the Great Com-
moner, but by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth
century, which created the England of to-day. Within a
couple of generations the squire faded away before the mill-
owner ; and feudalism lingered thenceforth only in the rapidly
diminishing rural districts, and in the empty remnants of cere-
monial organization. The mediaeval arrangement, in fact, could
not survive the fall of the cottage industry ; and it is, funda-
mentally, the use of new motors which has been for a generation
destroying the individualist conception of property. The land-
lord and the capitalist are both finding that the steam-engine is
a Frankenstein which they had better not have raised ; for with
it comes inevitably urban Democracy, the study of Political
Economy, and Socialism.

The event which brought to a head the influences making
for political change was the French Revolution. The fall of
the Bastille was hailed by all who had been touched by the new
ideas. " How much the greatest event it is that ever happened
in the world ; and how much the best ! " wrote Charles James
Fox.1 It shewed, or seemed to shew, to men that a genuine
social reconstruction was not only desirable but possible. The
National Assembly, respectable old oligarchy as it was, pointed
the way to legislative fields not even yet completely worked out.

When the rulers of England perceived that in France at
least Humpty Dumpty was actually down, the effect at first
was to tighten the existing organization. The mildest agita-
tion was put down with a cruelly strong hand. The Whig
party in the House of Commons sank to half-a-dozen members.
Prices were kept up and wages down, while the heaviest

1 W. J. Lecky, " History of the Eighteenth Century ", Vol. V., p. 453.

HISTORIC. 39

possible load of taxation was imposed on the suffering people.
Then came the Peace, and Castlereagh's " White Terror ",
culminating in the " massacre of Peterloo" (1819) and Lord
Sidmouth's infamous " Six Acts ". But the old order was
doomed. The suicide of Castlereagh was not only the end of
the man but also the sign of the collapse of the system. With
a series of political wrenches there came the Repeal of the
Test and Corporation Acts (1828), Catholic Emancipation
(1829), the beginnings of legal and administrative reform, and
finally the great Reform Bill of 1832, by which the reign of the
middle class superseded aristocratic rule. But the people were
no more enfranchised than they had been before. The Factory
had beaten the Manor for the benefit, not of the factory hand,
but of the millowner. Democracy was at the gates ; but it
was still on the wrong side of them. Its entry, however, was
only a matter of time. Since 1832 English political history is
the record of the reluctant enfranchisement of one class after
another, by mere force of the tendencies of the age. None of
these enfranchised classes has ever sincerely desired to admit
new voters to share the privileges and submerge the power
which it had won ; but each political party in turn has been
driven to " shoot Niagara " in order to compete with its
opponents. The Whig Bill of 1832 enfranchised the middle-
class for Parliament: the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835
gave them the control of the provincial towns. After a genera-
tion of agitation, it was ultimately the Tory party which gave the
townspeople in 1867 Household Suffrage. Eleven years later
a Conservative majority passed Sir Charles Dilke's Act enfran-
chising the tenement occupier (1878). In 1885 the Liberals,
intending permanently to ruin their opponents, gave the vote
to the agricultural laborer ; and last year (1888) it was the
Tories, not to be outdone, who gave him the control of the local
administration of the counties, and placed the government of
London in the hands of a popularly elected council. Neither
party can claim much credit for its reform bills, extorted as they
have been, not by belief in Democracy, but by fear of the
opposing faction. Even now the citizen is tricked out of his
vote by every possible legal and administrative technicality ;

40 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

so that more than one-third of our adult men are unenfran-
chised,1 together with the whole of the other sex. Neither the
Conservative party nor the self-styled "Party of the Masses"
gives proof of any real desire to give the vote to this not in-
considerable remnant ; but both sides pay lip -homage to
Democracy ; and everyone knows that it is merely a waiting
race between them as to which shall be driven to take the next
step. The virtual completion of the political revolution is
already in sight ; and no more striking testimony can be given
of the momentum of the new ideas which the Fall of the Bastille
effectually spread over the world than this democratic triumph
*n England, within less than a century, over the political
medievalism of ten centuries growth.

The full significance of this triumph is as yet unsuspected by
the ordinary politician. The industrial evolution has left the
laborer a landless stranger in his own country. The political
evolution is rapidly making him its ruler. Samson is feeling
for his grip on the pillars.

The Period of Anarchy.

The result of the industrial revolution, with its dissolution
of mediaevalism amid an impetuous reaction against the bureau"
cratic tyranny of the past, was to leave all the new elements
of society in a state of unrestrained license. Individual liberty,
in the sense of freedom to privately appropriate the means
of production, reached its maximum at the commencement
of the century. No sentimental regulations hindered the free
employment of land and capital to the greatest possible
pecuniary gain of the proprietors, however many lives of men,
women and children were used up in the process. Ignorant
or unreflecting capitalists still speak of that terrible time with
exultation. " It was not five per cent or ten per cent ",
says one, " but thousands per cent that made the fortunes of
Lancashire ".

Mr. Herbert Spencer and those who agree in his worship

1 The number of registered electors at the date of the last Election (1886)
was 5,707,823, out of an adult male population of over nine millions.

HISTORIC. 41

of Individualism,1 apparently desire to bring back the legal
position which made possible the " white slavery " of which
the " sins of legislators " have deprived us ; but no serious
attempt has ever been made to get repealed any one of the
Factory Acts. Women working half naked in the coal mines ;
young children dragging trucks all day in the foul atmosphere
of the underground galleries ; infants bound to the loom for
fifteen hours in the heated air of the cotton mill, and
kept awake only by the overlooker's lash ; hours of labor
for all, young and old, limited only by the utmost capabili-
ties of physical endurance ; complete absence of the sanitary
provisions necessary to a rapidly growing population : these
and other nameless iniquities will be found recorded as the
results of freedom of contract and complete laisser faire in the
impartial pages of successive blue-book reports.2 But the
Liberal mill-owners of the day, aided by some of the political
economists, stubbornly resisted every attempt to interfere with
their freedom to use " their " capital and " their " hands as
they found most profitable, and (like their successors to-day)
predicted of each restriction as it arrived that it must inevit-
ably destroy the export trade and deprive them of all profit
whatsoever.

But this " acute outbreak of individualism, unchecked by
the old restraints, and • invested with almost a religious sanction
by a certain soulless school of writers,"3 was inevitable, after the

1 Few, however, of Mr. Spencer's followers appear to realize that he pre-
supposes Land Nationalization as the necessary condition of an Individualist
community (see " Social Statics", passim).

2 It is sometimes asserted nowadays that the current descriptions of
factory life under the regime of freedom of contract are much exaggerated.
This is not the case. The horrors revealed in the reports of official enquiries
even exceed those commonly quoted. For a full account of the legislation,
and the facts on which it was founded, see Von Plener's " English Factory
Legislation ". The chief official reports are those of the House of Commons
Committee of 1815-6, House of Lords Committee, 1819, and Royal Commis-
sion, 1840. Marx (" Capital ") gives many other references. See also F. Engel's
" Condition of the English Working Classes ".

3 Professor H. S. Foxwell (University College, London), p.- 249 of Essay
in "The Claims of Labor" (Edinburgh: Co-operative Printing Company,
1886).

42 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

economic blundering of governments in the eighteenth century.
Prior to the scientific investigation of economic laws, men had
naturally interfered in social arrangements with very unsatis-
factory results. A specially extravagant or a specially thrifty
king debased the currency, and then was surprised to find that
in spite of stringent prohibitions prices went up and all good
money fled the country. Wise statesmen, to keep up wages,
encouraged the woollen manufactures of England by ruining
those of Ireland, and were then astonished to find English
wages cut by Irish pauper immigration. Benevolent parliaments
attempted to raise the worker's income by poor law allowances,
and then found that they had lowered it. Christian kings
eliminated half the skilled artisans from their kingdoms, and
then found that they had ruined the rest by disabling industry.
Government inspectors ordered how the cloth should be woven,
what patterns should be made, and how broad the piece should
be, until the manufacturers in despair cried out merely to be
let alone.

When the early economists realized how radically wrong
had been even the well-meant attempts to regulate economic
relations by legislation, and how generally these attempts multi-
plied private monopolies, they leaned in their deductions heavily
towards complete individual liberty. The administration of a
populous state is such a very difficult matter, and when done
on false principles is so certain to be badly done, that it was
natural to advocate rather no administration at all than the
interference of ignorant and interested bunglers. Nature, glori-
fied by the worship of a famous school of French philosophers
and English poets, and as yet unsuspected of the countless
crimes of " the struggle for existence ", appeared at least more
trustworthy than Castlereagh. Real democratic administration
seemed, in the time of the "White Terror", and even under
the milder Whig hypocrisy which succeeded it, hopelessly
remote. The best thing to work and fight for was, apparently,
the reduction to impotence and neutrality of all the " Powers
that Be ". Their influence being for the moment hostile
to the people, it behoved the people to destroy their
influence altogether. And so grew up the doctrine of

HISTORIC. 43

what Professor Huxley has since called " Administrative
Nihilism ". It was the apotheosis of Laisser Faire, Laisser
Alkr.

Though the economists have since had to bear all the blame
for what nearly everyone now perceives to have been an
economic and social mistake, neither Hume nor Adam Smith
caught the laisser faire fever to as great an extent as their French
contemporaries and imitators. The English industrial position
was not the same as that of France. The " mercantile system "
by which, as by "Fair Trade" to-day, foreign trade was to
be regulated and encouraged according as it tended to cause
the stock of goods, especially coin and bullion, to increase in
the country, was the same on both sides of the Channel. But
our political revolution had already been partly accomplished ;
and the more obvious shackles of feudalism had been long since
struck off. No Englishman was compelled to grind his corn
at the mill of the lord of the manor ; l to give up unpaid days
to plough the lord's field and cart the lord's hay; or to spend
his nights in beating the waters of the lord's marsh so that the
croaking of the frogs might not disturb the lord's repose. Our
labor dues had long before been commuted for money pay-
ments; and these had become light owing to the change in
currency values. Our apprenticeship laws and guild regulations
were becoming rapidly inoperative. No vexatious excise or
gabelle hampered our manufactures.

Tyranny there was, enough and to spare, and economic
spoliation ; but they did not take the form of personal inter-
ferences and indignities. The non-noble Frenchman was bond,
and he knew it ; the middle-class Englishman to a great extent

1 This statement, though generally true of England, is not absolutely so.
It needed an Act of Parliament in 1758 (32 George II, c. 61) to free the
inhabitants of the "village" of Manchester from the obligation to grind all
their corn and grain at the manorial watermills (Clifford's " History of Private
Bill Legislation", vol. II, p. 478). Even so late as 1809 they had to obtain
the consent of Sir Oswald Mosley, the lord of the manor, before a company
could be incorporated to provide a water supply (Ibid, p. 480). Leeds was
theoretically compelled to grind its corn, grain and malt at the lord's mills
down to 1839, and actually had then to pay £13,000 to extinguish this feudal
"due" (Ibid, p. 498).

44 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

thought himself free : his economic servitude, though it galled
him, was not clearly distinguishable from the niggardliness of
nature. The landlord in France was an obvious tyrant : here
he certainly caused (by the abstraction of the economic rent) an
artificial barrenness of the workers' labor ; but the barrenness
was so old and had been so constant that it was not seen to be
artificial, and was not resented as such. No peasant rebels
against the blight. Accordingly, we have, since 1381, never had
in England a burning of the chateaux', and accordingly, too,
Adam Smith is no complete champion of laisser faire, though his
great work was effective mainly in sweeping away foreign
trade restrictions and regulations, and in giving viability to
labor by establishing the laborer's geographical freedom to move
and to enter into the wage contract when and where he best
could. The English economists, stopping illogically short of
the complete freedom preached by Rousseau and Godwin and
the scientific Anarchists of to-day, advocated just as much
freedom as sufficed to make the fortunes of Lancashire
capitalists and to create the modern proletariat. The Utili-
tarians are appropriately coupled with the Political Economists
in connexion with this phase of thought. Although Adam
Smith did not belong to their school, almost the whole work of
developing and popularizing the new science was done by them.
It was not until after the Peace — when Bentham and James
Mill were in full vigor, and soon to be reinforced by Austin,
Villiers, John Stuart Mill, Roebuck, Grote, Ricardo, and
others — that Political Economy became a force in England.
The motive and enthusiasm for the new science undoubtedly
came from the Utilitarian ethics. If the sole masters of man
were pleasure and pain, the knowledge of the natural laws
expressing the course of social action, and thus regulating
pleasure and pain, became of vital importance. If it is God s
will, as Paley and Austin asserted, that men should seek for
happiness, then the study of how to obtain economic comfort
becomes a sacred duty, and has ever been so regarded by such
rational divines as Malthus, Chalmers, Maurice, Kingsley, and
the young High Church party of to-day. Christianity and the
course of modern thought began to join hands ; and we may see

HISTORIC. 45

in Bishop Berkeley and Paley the forerunners of such a
development as the Guild of St. Matthew.1

The Utilitarian philosophy, besides aiding in the populariza-
tion of economic science, strongly influenced its early character.
The tendency to Laisser Faire inherited from the country and
century of upheaval and revolt against authority, was fostered
by Bentham's destructive criticism of all the venerable relics
of the past. What is the use of it, he asked, of every
shred of social institution then existing. What is the nett
result of its being upon individual happiness ? Few of the
laws and customs — little, indeed, of the social organization
of that time could stand this test. England was covered with
rotten survivals from bygone circumstances ; the whole adminis-
tration was an instrument for class domination and parasite
nurture ; the progress of the industrial revolution was rapidly
making obsolete all laws, customs, proverbs, maxims, and
nursery tales ; and the sudden increase of population was
baffling all expectations and disconcerting all arrangements.
At last it came to be carelessly accepted as the teaching
both of philosophy and of experience that every man must
fight for himself; and "devil take the hindmost" became the
accepted social creed of what was still believed to be a
Christian nation. Utilitarianism became the Protestantism of
Sociology, and " how to make for self and family the best of
both worlds" was assumed to be the duty, as it certainly was
the aim, of every practical Englishman.

The Intellectual and Moral Revolt, and its
Political Outcome.

The new creed of "Philosophic Radicalism" did not have
matters all its own way. Its doctrines might suit millowners
and merchant ■ princes, and all who were able to enjoy the
delight of their own strength in the battle of life. But it was
essentially a creed of Murdstones and Gradgrinds ; and the first
revolt came from the artistic side. The " nest of singing birds"
at the Lakes would have none of it, though De Quincey worked

1 See its organ, the Church Reformer. London : 8 Duke Street, Adelphi.

46 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

out its abstract economics in a manner still unsurpassed.
Coleridge did his best to drown it in German Transcen-
dentalism. Robert Owen and his following of enthusiastic com-
munistic co-operators steadfastly held up a loftier ideal.
The great mass of the wage earners never bowed the knee to
the principles upon which the current " White Slavery " was
maintained. But the first man who really made a dint in
the individualist shield was Carlyle, who knew how to compel
men to listen to him. Oftener wrong than right in his par-
ticular proposals, he managed to keep alive the faith in nobler
ends than making a fortune in this world and saving one's
soul in the next. Then came Maurice, Kingsley, Ruskin, and
others who dared to impeach the current middle class cult ;
until finally, through Comte and John Stuart Mill, Darwin and
Herbert Spencer, the conception of the Social Organism has
at last penetrated to the minds, though not yet to the books,
even of our professors of Political Economy.

Meanwhile, caring for none of these things, the practical
man had been irresistibly driven in the same direction. In
the teeth of the current Political Economy, and in spite of
all the efforts of the millowning Liberals, England was com-
pelled to put forth her hand to succor and protect her weaker
members. Any number of Local Improvement Acts, Drainage
Acts, Truck Acts, Mines Regulation Acts, Factory Acts, Public
Health Acts, Adulteration Acts, were passing into law>
The liberty of the property owner to oppress the propertyless

1 The beginning of factory legislation is to be found in the " Morals and
Health Act ", 42 Geo. Ill, c. 73 (1802). Others followed in 1819, 1825, and
1 83 1 ; but their provisions were almost entirely evaded owing to the absence of
inspectors. After the Reform Bill more stringent enactments in 1833, 1844,
and 1847 secured some improvement. The Act of 1878 consolidated the law
on the subject. The Radical and Socialist proposals for further development
in this direction will be found at page 55. Nearly 400 Local Improvement
Acts had been passed up to 1845. In the succeeding years various general
Acts were passed, which were henceforth incorporated by reference in all
local Acts. The first " Public Health Act " was passed in 1848 ; and successive
extensions were given to this restrictive legislation with sanitary ends in 1855,
1858, 1861, and 1866. Consolidating Acts in 1871, and finally in 1875, com-
plete the present sanitary code, which now forms a thick volume of restric-
tions upon the free use of land and capital.

HISTORIC. 47

by the levy of the economic tribute of rent and interest began
to be circumscribed, pared away, obstructed and forbidden in
various directions. Slice after slice has gradually been cut
from the profits of capital, and therefore from its selling value,
by socially beneficial restrictions on its user's liberty to do as
he liked with it. Slice after slice has been cut off the incomes
from rent and interest by the gradual shifting of taxation from
consumers to persons enjoying incomes above the average of the
kingdom.1 Step by step the political power and political
organization of the country have been used for industrial ends,
until to-day the largest employer of labor is one of the ministers
of the Crown (the Postmaster-General) ; and almost every con-
ceivable trade is, somewhere or other, carried on by parish,
municipality, or the National Government itself without the
intervention of any middleman or capitalist. The theorists who
denounce the taking by the community into its own hands of the
organization of its own labor as a thing economically unclean,
repugnant to the sturdy individual independence of Englishmen,
and as yet outside the sphere of practical politics, seldom have
the least suspicion of the extent to which it has already been
carried.2 Besides our international relations and the army,
navy, police and the courts of justice, the community now
carries on for itself, in some part or another of these islands,
the post office, telegraphs, carriage of small commodities,
coinage, surveys, the regulation of the currency and note
issue, the provision of weights and measures, the making,
sweeping, lighting, and repairing of streets, roads, and bridges,
life insurance, the grant of annuities, shipbuilding, stockbroking,
banking, farming, and money-lending. It provides for many
thousands of us from birth to burial — midwifery, nursery, educa-
tion, board and lodging, vaccination, medical attendance, medi-
cine, public worship, amusements, and interment. It furnishes
and maintains its own museums, parks, art galleries, libraries,

1 The minimum income chargeable to Income Tax (£150) closely corres-
ponds with the average family income. See Fabian Tract, No. 5, " Facts for
Socialists".

2 See "The Progress of Socialism". (London; The Modern Press, 13
Paternoster Row, E.C. Price One Penny.)

48 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

concert -halls, roads, streets, bridges, markets, slaughter-houses,
fire-engines, lighthouses, pilots, ferries, surfboats, steamtugs, life-
boats, cemeteries, public baths, washhouses, pounds, harbours,
piers, wharves, hospitals, dispensaries, gasworks, waterworks,
tramways, telegraph cables, allotments, cow meadows, artizans*
dwellings, schools, churches, and reading-rooms. It carries
on and publishes its own researches in geology, meteorology,
statistics, zoology, geography, and even theology. In our
Colonies the English Government further allows and encourages
the communities to provide for themselves railways, canals,
pawnbroking, theatres, forestry, cinchona farms, irrigation, leper
villages, casinos, bathing establishments, and immigration, and
to deal in ballast, guano, quinine, opium, salt, and what not.
Every one of these functions, with those of the army, navy,
police, and courts of justice, were at one time left to private
enterprise, and were a source of legitimate individual investment
of capital. Step by step the community has absorbed them,
wholly or partially ; and the area of private exploitation has
been lessened. Parallel with this progressive nationalization
or municipalization of industry, there has gone on the
elimination of the purely personal element in business manage-
ment. The older economists doubted whether anything but
banking and insurance could be carried on by joint stock enter-
prise : now every conceivable industry, down to baking and
milk-selling, is successfully managed by the salaried officers of
large corporations of idle shareholders. More than one-third of
the whole business of England, measured by the capital em-
ployed,1 is now done by joint stock companies, whose share-
holders could be expropriated by the community with no more
dislocation of the industries carried on by them than is caused
by the daily purchase of shares on the Stock Exchange.

Besides its direct supersession of private enterprise, the
State now registers, inspects, and controls nearly all the
industrial functions which it has not yet absorbed. In addi-
tion to births, marriages, deaths, and electors, the State registers
all solicitors, barristers, notaries, patent agents, brokers, news-

1 See " Capital and Land " (Fabian Tract, No. 7), page 7.

HISTORIC. 49

paper proprietors, playing-card makers, brewers, bankers, sea-
men, captains, mates, doctors, cabmen, hawkers, pawnbrokers,
tobacconists, distillers, plate dealers, game dealers ; all insurance
companies, friendly societies, endowed schools and charities,
limited companies, lands, houses, deeds, bills of sale, compo-
sitions, ships, arms, dogs, cabs, omnibuses, books, plays,
pamphlets, newspapers, raw cotton movements, trademarks,
and patents ; lodging-houses, public-houses, refreshment-houses,
theatres, music-halls, places of worship, elementary schools, and
dancing rooms.

Nor is the registration a mere form. Most of the foregoing
are also inspected and criticised, as are all railways, tram-
ways, ships, mines, factories, canal-boats, public conveyances,
fisheries, slaughter-houses, dairies, milkshops, bakeries, baby-
farms, gasmeters, schools of anatomy, vivisection laboratories,
explosive works, Scotch herrings, and common lodging-houses.

The inspection is often detailed and rigidly enforced. The
State in most of the larger industrial operations prescribes the
age of the worker, the hours of work, the amount of air, light,
cubic space, heat, lavatory accommodation, holidays, and meal-
times ; where, when, and how wages shall be paid ; how
machinery, staircases, lift holes, mines, and quarries are to be
fenced and guarded ; how and when the plant shall be cleaned,
repaired, and worked. Even the kind of package in which
some articles shall be sold is duly prescribed, so that the
individual capitalist shall take no advantage of his position.
On every side he is being registered, inspected, controlled, and
eventually superseded by the community ; and in the meantime
he is compelled to cede for public purposes an ever-increasing
share of his rent and interest.

Even in the fields still abandoned to private enterprise, its
operations are thus every day more closely limited, in order
that the anarchic competition of private greed, which at the
beginning of the century was set up as the only infallibly
beneficent principle of social action, may not utterly destroy
the State. All this has been done by " practical " men,
ignorant, that is to say, of any scientific sociology, believing
Socialism to be the most foolish of dreams, and absolutely

5o THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

ignoring, as they thought, all grandiloquent claims for social
reconstruction. Such is the irresistible sweep of social ten-
dencies, that in their every act they worked to bring about
the very Socialism they despised ; and to destroy the In-
dividualist faith which they still professed. They builded
better than they knew.

It must by no means be supposed that these beginnings of
social reorganization have been effected, or the proposals for
their extension brought to the front, without the conscious
efforts of individual reformers. The " Zeitgeist " is potent ;
but it does not pass Acts of Parliament without legislators,
or erect municipal libraries without town councillors. Though
our decisions are moulded by the circumstances of the time, and
the environment at least roughhews our ends, shape them as
we will ; yet each generation decides for itself. It still rests
with the individual to resist or promote the social evolution,
consciously or unconsciously, according to his character and
information. The importance of complete consciousness of the
social tendencies of the age lies in the fact that its existence
and comprehensiveness often determine the expediency of our
particular action : we move with less resistance with the stream
than against it.

The general failure to realize the extent to which our
unconscious Socialism has already proceeded — a failure which
causes much time and labor to be wasted in uttering and
elaborating on paper the most ludicrously unpractical anti-
socialist demonstrations of the impossibility of matters of daily
occurrence — is due to the fact that few know anything of local
administration outside their own town. It is the municipalities
which have done most to " socialize" our industrial life; and
the municipal history of the century is yet unwritten. A few
particulars may here be given as to this progressive " munici-
palization " of industry. Most of us know that the local govern-
ments have assumed the care of the roads, streets and bridges,
once entirely abandoned to individual enterprise, as well as the
lighting and cleansing of all public thoroughfares, and the
provision of sewers, drains and " storm- water courses ". It is,
perhaps, not so generally known that no less than £"7,500,000

HISTORIC. 51

is annually expended on these services in England and Wales
alone, being about 5 per cent of the rent of the country.
The provision of markets, fairs, harbors, piers, docks, hospitals,
cemeteries and burial grounds, is still shared with private
capitalists ; but those in public hands absorb nearly ^"2,000,000
annually. Parks, pleasure grounds, libraries, museums, baths,
and washhouses cost the public funds over half a million sterling.
All these are, however, comparatively unimportant services. It
is in the provision of gas, water, and tramways that local
authorities organize labor on a large scale. Practically half the
gas consumers in the kingdom are supplied by public gas works,
which exist in 168 separate localities, with an annual expenditure
of over three millions.1 It need hardly be added that the ad-
vantage to the public is immense, in spite of the enormous price
paid for the works in many instances ; and that the further
municipalization of the gas industry is proceeding with great
rapidity, no fewer than twelve local authorities having obtained
loans for the purpose (and one for electric lighting) in a single
year (Local Government Board Report, 1887-8, c — 5526, pp. 319
— 367). With equal rapidity is the water supply becoming a
matter of commercial organization, the public expenditure already
reaching nearly a million sterling annually. Sixty-five local
authorities borrowed money for water supply in 1887-8, rural
and urban districts being equally represented (c — 5550, pp. 319
— 367). Tramways and ferries are undergoing the same develop-
ment. About thirty-one towns, including nearly all the larger
provincial centres, own some or all of their own tramways.
Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham, Oldham, Sunderland, and
Greenock lease their undertakings ; but several of the munici-
palities (Huddersfield and Preston, for instance) work their
lines without any "middleman" intervention, with excellent
public results. The tramway mileage belonging to local
authorities has increased five-fold since 1878, and comprises
more than a quarter of the whole (House of Commons Return,
1887-8, No. 347). The last important work completed by the
Metropolitan Board of Works was the establishment of a

1 Government Return for 1887-8, see " Boaid of Trade Journal ", January,
1889, p. 76-8.

E 2

52 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

"free steam ferry" on the Thames, charged upon the rates.
This is, in some respects, the most significant development of
all. The difference between a free steam ferry and a free
railway is obviously only one of degree.

A few more cases are worth mentioning. Glasgow builds and
maintains seven public "common lodging houses"; Liverpool
provides science lectures ; Manchester builds and stocks an
art gallery ; Birmingham runs schools of design ; Leeds creates
extensive cattle markets ; and Bradford supplies water below
cost price. There are nearly one hundred free libraries and
reading rooms. The minor services now performed by public
bodies are innumerable.1 This " Municipal Socialism" has
been rendered possible by the creation of a local debt now
reaching over ^"181, 000,000. 2 Nearly ^"10,000,000 is annually
paid as interest and sinking fund on the debt ; and to this
extent the pecuniary benefit of municipalization is diminished.
The full advantages 3 of the public organization of labor
remain, besides a considerable pecuniary profit ; whilst the ob-
jective differentiation of the economic classes (by the separation
of the idle rentier from the manager or entrepreneur) enormously
facilitates popular comprehension of the nature of the economic
tribute known as interest. To the extent, moreover, that
additional charges are thrown upon the rates, the interest paid
to the capitalist is levied mainly at the cost of the landlord, and
we have a corresponding " nationalization " of so much of the
economic rent. The increase in the local rates has been 36 per
cent., or nearly ^"7,000,000, in eleven years, and is still growing.
They now amount to over twenty-six millions sterling in England

1 It is not generally known that the Corporation of London actually carried
on the business of fire insurance from 1681 to 1683, but was compelled to
abandon it through the opposition of those interested in private undertakings,
who finally obtained a mandamus in the Court of King's Bench to restrain
their civic competitor (Walford's Insurance Cyclopaedia, Vol. III., pp. 446 —

455).

2 C — 5,550, p. 436. This, by the way, is just about one year's rental. We
pay every year to the landlords for permission to live in England as much as
the whole outstanding cost of the magnificent property of the local governing
authorities.

* See " The Government Organization of Labor ", Report by a Committee
of the Fabian Society, 1886.

HISTORIC. 53

and Wales alone, or about 17 per cent, of the rental of the
country (C — 5,550, p. clxxiv.).

Nor is there any apparent prospect of a slackening of the
pace of this unconscious abandonment of individualism. No
member of Parliament has so much as introduced a Bill to
give effect to the anarchist principles of Mr. Herbert Spencer's
" Man versus the State ". The not disinterested efforts of the
Liberty and Property Defence League fail to hinder even
Conservative Parliaments from further Socialist legislation.
Mr. Gladstone remarked to a friend in 1886 that the Home
Rule question would turn the Liberal party into a Radical
party. He might have said that it would make both parties
Socialist. Free elementary and public technical education is
now practically accepted on both sides of the House, provided
that the so-called " voluntary schools", themselves half main-
tained from public funds, are not extinguished. Mr. Chamber-
lain and the younger Conservatives openly advocate far reaching
projects of social reform through State and municipal agency, as
a means of obtaining popular support. The National Liberal
Federation adopts the special taxation of urban ground values
as the main feature in its domestic programme,1 notwith-
standing that this proposal is characterized by old-fashioned
Liberals as sheer confiscation of so much of the landlords'
property. The London Liberal and Radical Union, which
has Mr. John Morley for its president, even proposes that the
County Council shall have power to rebuild the London slums
at the sole charge of the ground landlord.2 It is, therefore,
not surprising that the Trades Union Congress should now
twice have declared in favor of " Land Nationalization " by
large majorities, or that the bulk of the London County Council
should be returned on an essentially Socialist platform. The
whole of the immediately practicable demands of the most
exacting Socialist are, indeed, now often embodied in the current

1 See Report of Annual Meeting at Birmingham, September, 1888.

2 See resolutions adopted by the Council, at the instance of the Executive
and General Committees, February 8th, 1889. (Daily News, 9th February.)
Professor Stuart, M.P., has now introduced a Bill embodying these astonishing
proposals.

54 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

Radical programme ; and the following exposition of it, from
the pages of the Star newspaper, 8th August, 1888, may serve
as a statement of the current Socialist demands for further
legislation.1

Revision of Taxation.

Object. — Complete shifting of burden from the workers, of
whatever grade, to the recipients of rent and interest, with a
view to the ultimate and gradual extinction of the latter class.

Means. — 1 . Abolition of all customs and excise duties, except
those on spirits. 2. Increase of income tax, differentiating in
favor of earned as against unearned incomes, and graduating
cumulatively by system of successive levels of abatement. 3.
Equalization and increase of death duties and the use of the
proceeds as capital, not income. 4. Shifting of local rates and
house duty from occupier to owner, any contract to the contrary
notwithstanding. 5. Compulsory redemption of existing land
tax and reimposition on all ground rents and increased values.
6. Abolition of fees on licenses for employment. 7. Abolition
of police-court fees.

Extension of Factory Acts.

Object. — To raise, universally, the standard of comfort by
obtaining the general recognition of a minimum wage and a
maximum working day.

Means. — 1. Extension of the general provisions of the Factory
and Workshops Acts (or the Mines Regulation Acts, as the case
may be) to all employers of labor. 2. Compulsory registration
of all employers of more than three (?) workers. 3. Largely
increased number of inspectors, and these to include women,
and to be mainly chosen from the wage-earning class. 4. Im-
mediate reduction of maximum hours to eight per day in all
Government and municipal employment, in all mines, and in all
licensed monopolies such as railways, tramways, gasworks,
waterworks, docks, harbors, etc. ; and in any trade in which
a majority of the workers desire it. 5. The compulsory inser-
tion of clauses in all contracts for Government or municipal
supplies, providing that (a) there shall be no sub-contracting,
(b) that no worker shall be employed more than eight hours per
day, and (c) that no wages less than a prescribed minimum shall
be paid.

1 It is interesting to compare this programme, with its primary insistence
on economic and social reform, with the bare political character of the " Five
Points" of the Chartists, viz., Manhood Suffrage, Vote by Ballot, Annua
Parliaments, Payment of Members relieved from the property qualification
and Equal Electoral Districts.

HISTORIC. 55

Educational Reform.

Object. — To enable all, even the poorest, children to obtain
not merely some, but the best education they are capable of.

Means. — i. The immediate abolition of all fees in public
elementary schools, Board or voluntary, with a corresponding
increase in the Government grant. 2. Creation of a Minister
for Education, with control over the whole educational system,
from the elementary school to the University, and over all
educational endowments. 3. Provision of public technical and
secondary schools wherever needed, and creation of abundant
public secondary scholarships. 4. Continuation, in all cases, of
elementary education at evening schools. 5. Registration and
inspection of all private educational establishments.

Re-organization of Poor Law Administration.

Object. — To provide generously, and without stigma, for the
aged, the sick, and those destitute through temporary want
of employment, without relaxing the " tests " against the en-
dowment of able-bodied idleness.

Means. — 1. The separation of the relief of the aged and the
sick from the workhouse system, by a universal system of aged
pensions, and public infirmaries. 2. The industrial organization
and technical education of ail able-bodied paupers. 3. The
provision of temporary relief works for the unemployed. 4.
The supersession of the Boards of Guardians by the local
municipal authorities.

Extension of Municipal Activity.

Object. — The gradual public organization of labor for all
public purposes, and the elimination of the private capitalist
and middleman.

Means. — 1. The provision of increased facilities for the
acquisition of land, the destruction without compensation of
all dwellings found unfit for habitation, and the provision of
artisan dwellings by the municipality. 2. The facilitation of
every extension of municipal administration, in London and
all other towns, of gas, water, markets, tramways, hospitals,
cemeteries, parks, museums, art galleries, libraries, reading-
rooms, schools, docks, harbors, rivers, etc. 3. The provision
of abundant facilities for the acquisition of land by local rural
authorities, for allotments, common pastures, public halls, reading
rooms, etc.

Amendment of Political Machinery.

Object. — To obtain the most accurate representation and
expression of the desires of the majority of the people at every
moment.

56 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

Means. — i. Reform of registration so as to give a vote, both
Parliamentary and municipal, to every adult. 2. Abolition of
any period of residence as a qualification for registration. 3.
Bi-annual registration by special public officer. 4. Annual Par-
liaments. 5. Payment of election expenses, including postage
of election addresses and polling cards. 6. Payment of all
public representatives, parliamentary, county, or municipal. 7.
Second ballot. 8. Abolition or painless extinction of the House
of Lords.1

This is the programme to which a century of industrial
revolution has brought the Radical working man. Like John
Stuart Mill,2 though less explicitly, he has turned from mere
political Democracy to a complete, though unconscious, So-
cialism.3

The New Synthesis.

It need hardly be said that the social philosophy of the
time did not remain unaffected by the political evolution and
the industrial development. Slowly sinking into men's minds
all this while was the conception of a new social nexus, and a
new end of social life. It was discovered (or rediscovered) that
a society is something more than an aggregate of so many
individual units — that it possesses existence distinguishable
from those of any of its components. A perfect city became
recognized as something more than any number of good citizens —
something to be tried by other tests, and weighed in other
balances than the individual man. The community must
necessarily aim, consciously or not, at its continuance as a
community : its life transcends that of any of its members ;
and the interests of the individual unit must often clash with
those of the whole. Though the social organism has itself

1 It need hardly be said that schemes of *' free land ", peasant proprietor-
ship, or leasehold enfranchisement, find no place in the modern programme
of the Socialist Radical, or Social Democrat. They are survivals of the
Individualistic Radicalism which is passing away. Candidates seeking a
popular " cry " more and more avoid these reactionary proposals.

2 "Autobiography ", p. 231-2. See also Book IV. of the "Principles of
Political Economy " (Popular edition, 1865).

3 For a forecast of the difficulties which this programme will have to
encounter as its full scope and intention become more clearly realized, see the
eighth essay inUhis volume, by Hubert Bland.

HISTORIC. 57

evolved from the union of individual men, the individual is now
created by the social organism of which he forms a part : his
life is born of the larger life ; his attributes are moulded by the
social pressure ; his activities, inextricably interwoven with
others, belong to the activity of the whole. Without the
continuance and sound health of the social organism, no man
can now live or thrive ; and its persistence is accordingly his
paramount end. His conscious motive for action may be, nay
always must be, individual to himself; but where such action
proves inimical to the social welfare, it must sooner or later be
checked by the whole, lest the whole perish through the error of
its member. The conditions of social health are accordingly
a matter for scientific investigation. There is, at any moment,
one particular arrangement of social relations which involves the
minimum of human misery then and there possible amid the
" niggardliness of nature ". Fifty years ago it would have been
assumed that absolute freedom in the sense of individual or
" manly " independence, plus a criminal code, would sponta-
neously result in such an arrangement for each particular nation ;
and the effect was the philosophic apotheosis of Laisser Faire. To-
day every student is aware that no such optimistic assumption
is warranted by the facts of life.1 We know now that in natural
selection at the stage of development where the existence of
civilized mankind is at stake, the units selected from are not
individuals, but societies. Its action at earlier stages, though
analogous, is quite dissimilar. Among the lower animals
physical strength or agility is the favored quality : if some
heaven-sent genius among the cuttle-fish developed a delicate
poetic faculty, this high excellence would not delay his suc-
cumbing to his hulking neighbor. When, higher up in the
scale, mental cunning became the favored attribute, an extra
brain convolution, leading primitive man to the invention of fire
or tools, enabled a comparatively puny savage to become the
conqueror and survivor of his fellows.

Brain culture accordingly developed apace ; but we do not
yet thoroughly realize that this has itself been superseded as the

1 See "Darwinism and Politics", by D. G. Ritchie, Fellow and Tutor of
Jesus College, Oxford (London: Swan, Sonnenshein and Co., 1889).

58 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

" selected " attribute, by social organization. The cultivated
Athenians, Saracens, and Provencals went down in the struggle
for existence before their respective competitors, who, indi-
vidually inferior, were in possession of a, at that time, more
valuable social organization. The French nation was beaten in
the last war, not because the average German was an inch and
a half taller than the average Frenchman, or because he had
read five more books, but because the German social organism
was, for the purposes of the time, superior in efficiency to the
French. If we desire to hand on to the afterworld our direct
influence, and not merely the memory of our excellence, we
must take even more care to improve the social organism of
which we form part, than to perfect our own individual develop-
ments. Or rather, the perfect and fitting development of each
individual is not necessarily the utmost and highest cultivation
of his own personality, but the filling, in the best possible way,
of his humble function in the great social machine. We must
abandon the self-conceit of imagining that we are independent
units, and bend our jealous minds, absorbed in their own culti-
vation, to this subjection to the higher end, the Common Weal.
Accordingly, conscious "direct adaptation" steadily supplants
the unconscious and wasteful "indirect adaptation" of the
earlier form of the struggle for existence ; and with every
advance in sociological knowledge, Man is seen to assume
more and more, not only the mastery of " things ", but also
a conscious control over social destiny itself.

This new scientific conception of the Social Organism has
put completely out of countenance the cherished principles of
the Political Economist and the Philosophic Radical. We left
them sailing gaily into Anarchy on the stream of Laisser Faire.
Since then the tide has turned. The publication of John Stuart
Mill's "Political Economy" in 1848 marks conveniently the
boundary of the old individualist Economics. Every edition of
Mill's book became more and more Socialistic. After his death
the world learnt the personal history, penned by his own hand,1
of his development from a mere political democrat to a convinced
Socialist.

1 " Autobiography ", pp. 231-2.

HISTORIC. 59

The change in tone since then has been such that one com-
petent economist, professedly anti- Socialist,1 publishes regret-
fully to the world that all the younger men are now Socialists,
as well as many of the older Professors. It is, indeed, mainly
from these that the world has learnt how faulty were the earlier
economic generalizations, and above all, how incomplete as
guides for social or political action. These generalizations are
accordingly now to be met with only in leading articles,
sermons, or the speeches of Ministers or Bishops.2 The
Economist himself knows them no more.

The result of this development of Sociology is to compel
a revision of the relative importance of liberty and equality as
principles to be kept in view in social administration. In
Bentham's celebrated "ends" to be aimed at in a civil code,
liberty stands predominant over equality, on the ground that full
equality can be maintained only by the loss of security for the
fruits of labor. That exposition remains as true as ever ; but
the question for decision remains, how much liberty ? Economic
analysis has destroyed the value of the old criterion of respect
for the equal liberty of others. Bentham, whose economics
were weak, paid no attention to the perpetual tribute on the
fruits of others' labor which full private property in land
inevitably creates. In his view liberty and security to
property meant that every worker should be free to obtain
the full result of his own labor ; and there appeared no incon-
sistency between them. The political economist now knows
that with free competition and private property in land and
capital, no individual can possibly obtain the full result of his
own labor. The student of industrial development, moreover,
finds it steadily more and more impossible to trace what is
precisely the result of each separate man's toil. Complete
rights of liberty and property necessarily involve, for example,
the spoliation of the Irish cottier tenant for the benefit of Lord

1 Rev. F. W. Aveling, Principal of Taunton Independent College, in leaflet
"Down with the Socialists", August, 1888. See also Professor H. Sidgwick on
"Economic Socialism", Contemporary Review, November, 1886.

2 That is to say, unfortunately, in nearly all the utterances which profess to
guide our social and political action.

•6o THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

Clanricarde. What then becomes of the Benthamic principle
of the greatest happiness of the greatest number ? When the
Benthamite comes to understand the Law of Rent, which of
the two will he abandon ? For he cannot escape the lesson
of the century, taught alike by the economists, the statesmen,
and the " practical men ", that complete individual liberty,
with unrestrained private ownership of the instruments of
wealth production, is irreconcileable with the common weal.
The free struggle for existence among ourselves menaces our
survival as a healthy and permanent social organism. Evolu-
tion, Professor Huxley1 declares, is the substitution of con-
sciously regulated co-ordination among the units of each
organism, for blind anarchic competition. Thirty years ago
Herbert Spencer demonstrated the incompatibility of full
private property in land with the modern democratic State ;2 and
almost every economist now preaches the same doctrine. The
Radical is rapidly arriving, from practical experience, at similar
conclusions ; and the steady increase of the government regu-
lation of private enterprise, the growth of municipal administra-
tion, and the rapid shifting of the burden of taxation directly to
rent and interest, mark in treble lines the statesman's uncon-
scious abandonment of the old Individualism, and our irresistible
glide into collectivist Socialism.

It was inevitable that the Democracy should learn this
lesson. With the masses painfully conscious of the failure of
Individualism to create a decent social life for four-fifths
of the people,3 it might have been foreseen that Individualism
could not survive their advent to political power. If private
property in land and capital necessarily keeps the many
workers permanently poor (through no fault of their own) in
order to make the few idlers rich (from no merit of their own),
private property in land and capital will inevitably go the way
of the feudalism which it superseded. The economic analysis

1 Contemporary Review, February, 1888.

2 " Social Statics ", passim.

3 See Professor Leone Levi's letter to ;the Times, 13th August, 1886, and
Mr. Frederic Harrison's speech at the Industrial Remuneration Conference
held in January, 1885 (Report, p. 429).

HISTORIC. 61

confirms the rough generalization of the suffering people. The
history of industrial evolution points to the same result ; and
for two generations the world's chief ethical teachers have been
urging the same lesson. No wonder the heavens of Indi-
vidualism are rolling up before our eyes like a scroll ; and even
the Bishops believe and tremble.1

It is, of course, possible, as Sir Henry Maine and others
have suggested, that the whole experience of the century is a
mistake, and that political power will once more swing back into
the hands of a monarch or an aristocratic oligarchy. It is,
indeed, want of faith in Democracy which holds back most
educated sympathisers with Socialism from frankly accepting
its principles. What the economic side of such political
atavism would be it is not easy to forecast. The machine
industry and steam power could hardly be dismissed with the
caucus and the ballot-box. So long, however, as Democracy in
political administration continues to be the dominant principle,
Socialism may be quite safely predicted as its economic obverse,
in spite of those freaks or aberrations of Democracy which have
already here and there thrown up a short-lived monarchy or
a romantic dictatorship. Every increase in the political power
of the proletariat will most surely be used by them for their
economic and social protection. In England, at any rate, the
history of the century serves at once as their guide and their
justification.

1 See Report of the Lambeth Episcopal Conference, 1888 ; subject,
"Socialism": also the proceedings of the Central Conference of Diocesan
Councils, June, 1885 (paper on Socialism by Canon Furse).

INDUSTRIAL.

BY WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A.

My object in the following paper is to present a brief narrative

of the economic history of the last century or century and a

half. From this I wish to draw a moral. That moral is that

there has been and is proceeding an economic evolution,

practically independent of our individual desires or prejudices ;

an evolution which has changed for us the whole social problem

by changing the conditions of material production, and which

ipso facto effects a revolution in our modern life. To learn

clearly what that revolution is, and to prepare ourselves for

taking advantage of it in due course — this I take to be briefly

what is meant by Socialism. The ignorant public, represented

by, let us say, the average bishop or member of Parliament,

hears of the " Social Revolution " and instantly thinks of street

riots, noyades, with a coup d'etat : a 10th of August, followed

perhaps by its nemesis in an 18th Brumaire. But these are

not the Social Revolution. That great change is proceeding

silently every day. Each new line of railway which opens up

the trackless desert, every new machine which supplants hand

labor, each fresh combination formed by capitalists, every new

labor organization, every change in prices, each new invention

— all these forces and many more are actually working out a

social revolution before our eyes ; for they are changing

fundamentally the economic basis of life. There may possibly

come some one supreme moment of time in which a great

dramatic incident will reveal to men the significance of the

changes which have led up to it, and of which it is merely

the final expression. And future historians may write of that
62

INDUSTRIAL. 63

as The Revolution just as historians now write of the fall of the
Bastille, or the execution of Louis XVI, as though these events
constituted the French Revolution instead of being the final
terms in a long series of events which had been loosening the
fabric of French feudalism through several generations. The
true prophet is not an ignorant soothsayer who foretells some
Armageddon, but rather he who perceives the inevitable drift
and tendency of things. Somewhat in this spirit we may
consider the economic history of the modern industrial era
in order to discern its meaning, to see what it has led up
to, and what, consequently, are the problems with which we
find ourselves confronted to-day.

Had we visited a village or small town in England where
industrial operations were going on 150 years ago, what should
we have found ? No tall chimney, vomiting its clouds of
smoke, would have been visible ; no huge building with its
hundred windows blazing with light would have loomed up
before the traveller as he entered the town at dusk ; no din
of machinery would have been heard ; no noise of steam
hammers ; no huge blast furnaces would have met his eye,
nor would miles of odors wafted from chemical works have
saluted his nostrils. If Lancashire had been the scene of
his visit he would have found a number of narrow red-brick
houses with high steps in front, and outside wooden shutters
such as one may still see in the old parts of some Lancashire
towns to-day. Inside each of these houses was a little family
workshop, containing neither master nor servant, in which
the family jointly contributed to produce by the labor of their
hands a piece of cotton cloth. The father provided his own
warp of linen yarn, and his cotton wool for weft. He had
purchased the yarn in a prepared state, while the wool for
the weft was carded and spun by his wife and daughters, and
the cloth was woven by himself and his sons. There was a
simple division of labor in the tiny cottage factory ; but all the
implements necessary to produce the cotton cloth were owned
by the producers. There was neither capitalist nor wage-
receiver : the weaver controlled his own labor, effected his
own exchange, and received himself the equivalent of his own

64 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

product. Such was the germ of the great English cotton
manufacture. Ferdinand Lassalle said : " Society consists
of ninety-six proletaires and four capitalists. That is your
State." But in old Lancashire there was neither capitalist
nor proletaire.

Or even much later had one visited — Stafford, let us say,
one would not have found the large modern shoe-factory, with
its bewildering variety of machines, each one with a human
machine by its side. For shoemaking then was a pure handi-
craft, requiring skill, judgment, and some measure of artistic
sense. Each shoemaker worked in his own little house, bought
his own material from the leather merchant, and fashioned
every part of the shoe with his own hand, aided by a few
simple and inexpensive tools. He believed there was " nothing
like leather ", and had not yet learned the art of putting on
cheap soles, not made of leather, to cheap boots, which, in a
month's time, will be almost worn out. Very likely the shoe-
maker had no vote ; but he was never liable to be locked out
by his employer, or to be obliged to go on strike against a
reduction of wages with his boy in prison for satisfying hunger
at the expense of the neighboring baker, or his girl on the
streets to pay for her new dress. Such was the simple
industrialism of our great-great-grandfathers. But their mode
of life was destined to change. All progress, says Mr. Herbert
Spencer, is differentiation ; and this formidable factor began
to appear in the quiet sleepy English country. About 1760
a large share of calico-printing was transferred from London
to Lancashire, where labor was then cheaper. There was a
consequent fall in prices, and an increased demand for calicoes
of linen warp and cotton weft. Then the Manchester dealers,
instead of buying fustians and calicoes from the weaver, began
to furnish him with the materials for his cloth, and to pay
him a fixed price per piece for the work when executed. So
the Manchester dealer became what the French call an entre-
preneur ; and the transformation of the independent weaver
into a wage receiver began. The iron law of wages and the
unemployed question also began to loom dimly up. For as
the weaver came to hire himself to the dealer, so the weaver

INDUSTRIAL. 65

let out part of his work ; and it frequently happened that the
sum which the master weaver received from his employer was
less than what he found himself compelled to pay to those
whom he employed in spinning. " He durst not, however,
complain," says Mr. Watts in his article on cotton (Ency-
clopaedia Britannica), " much less abate the spinner's price,
lest his looms should be unemployed." The quantity of yarn
producible under this simple system by the aid of the one-
thread wheel was very small. The whole did not exceed in
quantity what 50,000 spindles of our present machinery can
yield. As one man can now superintend 2,000 spindles, it will
be seen that twenty-five men with machinery can produce
as much as the whole population of old Lancashire. In 1750
the first important invention in the cotton industry was made
in the shape of the fly-shuttle, invented by Kaye of Bury. In
1760 improvements were made in the carding process. In
1767 the spinning-jenny was invented by Hargreaves, and this
was at length brought to work as many as eighty spindles.
The ingenious Hargreaves had ample opportunity for practical
study of the " unemployed " question ; for the spinners, some
of whom were forced into idleness by the new invention, broke
into his house and destroyed his machine. Shortly after, there
was a general rising over industrial Lancashire : the poor
hand-workers, whose prophetic souls were evidently dreaming
on things to come, scouring the country and breaking in pieces
every carding and spinning machine they could find.

Progress by differentiation, however, heeded not the second
sight of Lancashire workers. In 1769, Arkwright contrived the
spinning frame, and obtained his patent for spinning with
rollers. In 1775, Crompton, of Bolton, invented the mule-jenny,
enabling warps of the finest quality to be spun. In 1792, further
improvements in this machine were made by Pollard, of Man-
chester, and Kelly, of Glasgow. In 1785, steam was first applied
to the spinning of cotton in Nottinghamshire. In 1784 the Rev.
E. Cartwright, of Kent, invented power-loom weaving, and
completed and patented his invention in August, 1787. Here,
then, within a period of about forty years, was a series of
mechanical inventions which had the effect of absolutely

66 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

changing the method of production, and enormously increasing
the output ; of dividing the labour of producing, which had
formerly been effected by a single family within the walls
of a single room, between scores and hundreds of people,
each of whom only undertook a single process in a complex
operation ; of massing together hundreds of thousands of people
under new conditions ; of bringing a heretofore isolated district
into intimate relations with distant foreign lands ; and of
separating the work of spinning or weaving from the ownership
of the instruments by whose aid the work was done. The
independent weaver was gone ; or rather he was subjected, like
an amoeba, to a process of fission, but with this difference : that
whereas the amoeba produces by fission other similar amoebae,
the weaver was differentiated into a person called an employer
and another called an employe or "hand". Multiply this
" hand " by thousands, and we get the mill or factory, divided
into departments, each with its special detail of work, each
detail fitting into all the rest, each machine taking up the work
where the last machine left it, and each contributing its share
to the joint product. Multiply the employer ; add enormously
to the aggregate of his capital ; remove the barrier of national
frontiers from his operations ; relieve him of the duty of personal
supervision ; and we get the joint-stock capitalist.

Pause a moment to consider the famous world-events which
made so much noise while these industrial processes were going
on. The conquest of Canada, the victories of Clive in India,
the Seven Years' War, the successful revolt of the American
colonies, the Declaration of Independence and formation of
the American Constitution, the deeds of Frederic the Great,
Pitt's accession to power, Washington's election to the Presi-
dency, the Fall of the Bastille, the death of Mirabeau, the fall
of the old French monarchy, the National Convention — all
these great events which shook the world were contemporary
with the industrial revolution in England; and that revolution
was in promise and potency more important than them all.

I will glance at the development of another great industry,
that of iron. In former times iron was largely worked in the
south of England, notably in Sussex, in a district now purely

INDUSTRIAL. 67

agricultural. By the middle of the 18th century, important
iron industries had begun to cluster round Coalbrookdale ; and
here many of the industrial changes in the working of iron were
first introduced. From 1766 to 1784 improvements were made
in the mode of working malleable iron and of transferring cast
into wrought iron. The puddling forge was invented in 1784;
and it gave an immense impetus to the manufacture. In 1828
the use of the hot blast was substituted for cold air; in 1842
Nasmyth invented the steam-hammer ; and in 1856 the Bessemer
process of making steel was patented. Subsequently we have
the Siemens regenerative furnace and gas producer, the use of
machinery in lieu of hand labor for puddling, the casting of steel
under great pressure, and the improvements in the Bessemer
process. As a result of these inventions the increase in the
production of steel during the last few years, especially in the
United States and Great Britain, has been enormous. In all
this we see the same series of phenomena, all tending to huge
monopolies. Machinery supplants hand labor; production is
greatly stimulated; the immense capital needed enables only
the large producers to survive in the competitive conflict ;
and we get as the net result well defined aggregations of
capital on the one hand, and dependent machine minders on the
other.

I have alluded to the shoe industry as having been formerly
a pure handicraft. Simple machine processes for fastening
soles and heels to inner soles began to be adopted in 1809;
and from that time onward successive inventions have con-
verted the pure handicraft into one of the most mechanical
industries in the world. In the United States in 1881 no less
than 50,000,000 pairs of boots and shoes were sewn by the
Blake-Mackay machines. A visitor to a shoe factory to-day
will see the following machines : for cutting leather, for pressing
rollers for sole leather, for stamping out sole and heel pieces,
for blocking and crimping, for moulding uppers or vamps, for
vamp - folding, for eyeletting, lasting, trimming and paring,
scouring, sand papering and burnishing, for stamping, peg-
cutting and nail-rasping. It is well to witness all these pro-
cesses going on in one large factory in order to grasp fully the

f 2

68 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

idea that the old individual industry of the last century is
almost as extinct as the mastodon — that the worker in a shoe
factory to-day is, so to speak, a machine in a vast complex
system. The great industry has supplanted the small one ;
such great industry involves the aggregation of capital : con-
sequently competition on the part of the small producer is
hopeless and impossible. Thus in the proletarian class the
intensity of the struggle for existence is increased, keeping
down wages and ever widening the margin of the unemployed
class. The small producer must become a wage earner either
as manager, foreman, or workman. As well attempt to meet
Gatling guns with bows and arrows, or steel cruisers armed with
dynamite bombs with the little cockle-shells in which Henry
V's army crossed over to win the field of Agincourt, as to set up
single shoe-makers or cotton-weavers against the vast industrial
armies of the world of machinery. The revolution is confined
to no one industry, to no one land. While most fully developed
in England, it is extending to most industries and to all lands.
Prince Kropotkin, it is true, reminds us in an interesting article
in the Nineteenth Century for October, 1888, that a number of
small industries can still be found in town and country. That
is so, no doubt ; and it is not unlikely that for a long time to
come many small trades may exist, and some may even flourish.
But the countries in which small industries flourish most are
precisely those in which there is least machine industry, and
where consequently capitalism is least developed. In no
country, says Kropotkin, are there so many small producers
as in Russia. Exactly; and in no country is there so little
machinery or such an inefficient railway system in proportion to
population and resources. On the other hand, in no country is
machinery so extensively used as in the United States ; and it
is precisely that country which contains the fewest small
industries in proportion to population and resources. Many
of the small industries, too, as Kropotkin admits, are carried
on by persons who have been displaced by machines, and who
have thus been thrown unemployed on the labor market ; or
who have drifted into large towns, especially into London,
because in the country there was no work for them. At best

INDUSTRIAL. 69

the great majority of these people earn but a scanty and
precarious living ; and, judging from the number of hawkers
and vendors who wander about suburban streets and roads
without selling anything, one would imagine that great numbers
can scarcely make any living at all.

Furthermore, when Kropotkin refers to the sweaters'
victims, and to the people in country places who make on a
small scale clothes or furniture which they dispose of to the
dealers in large towns, and so forth, let it be remembered that
so long as human labor is cheaper than machinery it will be
utilized by capitalists in this way. The capitalist uses or does
not use machinery according as it pays or does not pay ; and if
he can draw to an unlimited extent on the margin of unem-
ployed labor, paying a bare subsistence wage, he will do so,
as the evidence given before the House of Lords Committee on
Sweating shews. While admitting then that a good many small
industries exist, and that some will continue to exist for an
indefinite time, I do not think that such facts make against the
general proposition that the tendency is to large production by
machinery, involving the grouping of men and the massing of
capital, with all the economic and social consequences thereby
involved.

Even agriculture, that one occupation in which old-fashioned
individualism might be suppossed safe, is being subjected to
capitalism. The huge farms of Dakota and California, contain-
ing single fields of wheat miles long, are largely owned by joint
stock corporations and cultivated exclusively by machinery. It
was the displacement of human labor by machinery on these
farms as well as the crises in mining operations which helped to
bring about the phenomenon of an unemployed class in the
richest region of the world, and led Mr. Henry George to write
his "Progress and Poverty". These huge farms, combined
with the wheat " corners " in New York and Chicago and the
great railway corporations of America, have played havoc with
many of the small farmers of the Mississippi Valley, as the
statistics respecting mortgaged farms will show. And when
it is remembered that the American farmer will be more and
more obliged to meet the growing competition of the wheat of

70 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

India, produced by the cheapest labor in the world, his
prospect does not appear to be very bright.

In order to perceive clearly the immense development of
machine industry and the consequent displacement of labor, one
must resort to figures, mere rhetoric being of no avail. The
following figures are cited from the United States, because
American public statistics are so much better than British,
being both more complete and more accessible. The facts are
taken from the first Annual Report of the United States Com-
missioner of Labor Statistics in Washington for 1886. The
Commissioner, inquiring into the industrial crisis, finds that it
is mainly due to the immense development of machine industry
under the joint-stock system ; and he takes up various trades
one after another to show how labor has been displaced by
machinery. In the timber business, he says, twelve laborers
with a Bucker machine will dress 12,000 staves. The same
number of men by hand labor would have dressed in the same
time only 2,500. In the manufacture of paper a machine now
used for drying and cutting, run by four men and six girls, will
do the work formerly done by 100 persons, and do it much
better. In the manufacture of wall-paper the best evidence
puts the displacement in the proportion of a hundred to one.
In a phosphate mine in South Carolina ten men accomplish
with machinery what 100 men handle without it in the same
time. There has been a displacement of 50 per cent, in the
manufacture of rubber boots and shoes. In South Carolina
pottery the product is ten times greater by machine processes
than by muscular labor. In the manufacture of saws, experi-
enced men consider that there has been a displacement of three
men out of five. In the weaving of silk the displacement has
been 95 per cent., and in the winding of silk 90 per cent. A
large soap manufacturing concern carefully estimates the dis-
placement of labor in its works at 50 per cent. In making wine
in California a crushing machine has been introduced with which
one man can crush and stem 80 tons of grapes in a day, repre-
senting an amount of work formerly requiring eight men. In
woollen goods modern machinery has reduced muscular labor
33 per cent, in the carding department, 50 per cent, in the

INDUSTRIAL. 71

spinning, and 25 per cent, in the weaving. In some kinds of
spinning one hundred to one represents the displacement. In
the whole United States in 1886 the machinery was equal to
3,500,000 horse power. If men only had been employed, it
would have required 21,000,000 to turn out the actual total
product : the real number was four millions. To do the work
accomplished in 1886 in the United States by power machinery
and on the railways would have required men representing a
population of 172,500,000. The actual population of the United
States in 1886 was something under 60,000,000, or a little more
than one-third.

Commenting on these very remarkable statistics, the Labor
Commissioner says : " The apparent evils resulting from the
introduction of machinery and the consequent subdivision of
labor have to a large extent, of course, been offset by advantages
gained ; but it must stand as a positive statement, which cannot
be successfully controverted, that this wonderful introduction and
extension of power machinery is one of the prime causes, if not the
prime cause, of the novel industrial condition in which the manu-
facturing nations find themselves." One of the results of the
"novel industrial condition" in America in 1885 was an unem-
ployed class variously estimated at from one to two millions of
men, the condition of many of whom as tramps furnished subjects
for some very sorry jests to the American press. Such facts as
are here suggested will show how a new country may soon be
reduced to a condition which aggregated capital on the one
hand and unemployed labor on the other render little better
than that of an old European State with its centuries of misery
and oppression. And incidentally they also show that such a
nostrum as emigration, if intended not as a palliative but as a
solution, is simply quackery. The inference would seem to be
irresistible. Just as fast as capitalists find it profitable to intro-
duce improved machinery, as fast also will the helplessness of
a growing number of the proletariat increase. The " unem-
ployed" question is the sphinx which will devour us if we can-
not answer her riddle.

The wonderful expansion of Lancashire perhaps affords the
best illustration of the change from individual to collective

72 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

industry. A cotton-mill in one of the dismal " hell-holes" called
towns in Lancashire is a wonderful place, full of bewildering
machines. Here is a machine called an " opener ", by which
15,000 lbs. of cotton can be opened in 56 hours. There is a
throstle, the spindles of which make from 6,000 to 7,000 revo-
lutions per minute. Here is a man who, with the aid of two
piecers to take up and join the broken ends, can work 2,000
spindles. Among the distinct separate machines used are opener,
scutcher and lap machine, drawing frame, slubbing frame, inter-
mediate frame, roving frame, throstle, self-acting mule and hand
mule, doubling frame, and mule doublers or twiners. By means
of these appliances the following results have been attained.
Within eight years, from 1792 to 1800, the quantity of cotton
exported from the United States to Lancashire had increased
from 138,000 lbs. to 18,000,000 lbs. In 1801 Lancashire took
84,000 bales of cotton from the United States : in 1876 she took
2,075,000 bales; and whereas in the former year only 14,000
bales came from India, in 1876 from that country came 775,000
bales, besides a great increase in Brazilian cotton, and a new
import of 332,000 bales from Egypt. In 1805, one million
pieces of calico were sold in the Blackburn market during the
whole year ; and that was considered a very large sale. In 1884,
according to Ellison's Annual Review of the Cotton Trade,
there were exported 4,417,000,000 yards of piece goods besides
the vast quantity produced for home consumption. In 1875, in
place of the little cottages with their hand-looms of a century
before, Lancashire contained 2,655 cotton factories with
37,515,772 spinning spindles and 463,118 power looms ; and she
produced yarn and piece goods to the weight of 1,088,890,000 lbs.
and of the value of ^95,447,000. See too how through the use
of machinery the cost of production had been lowered. In 1790
the price of spinning the yarn known technically as No. 100
was 4s. per lb. : in 1826 it had been reduced to 6^d. The sale
price of yarn No. 100 in 1786 was 38s. : in 1793 it was reduced
to 15s. id., in 1803 to 8s. 4d., in 1876 to 2s. 6d. The decreased
cost in each case followed on economy in production, itself
dependent on increased differentiation in machinery; that in
turn involving larger and larger capital ; and that again neces-

INDUSTRIAL. 73

sitating aggregation and the crushing out of small concerns
which could not command machinery or sell at a profit in
competition with it.

Speculating on the possibility of foreign competition des-
troying the industrial supremacy of Lancashire, Mr. Watts
writes in the Encyclopaedia Britannica : "It may perhaps be
sufficient to recall to our readers the small part of the cost of
the commodity which now belongs to the labor of the hand, and
the daily diminution which is taking place even of that part, by
the introduction of new mechanical substitutes".1 Mr. Watts
wrote as an expert ; and the inference one is compelled to draw
from his dictum is that concentration of capital and growth of
monopoly must continue to develope ; and that the " unem-
ployed " problem must force itself on Lancashire. One who is
not an expert will only venture to criticise with great diffidence
Mr. Watts's optimistic tone ; but it is well to point out that in
India capitalists can command the cheapest labor in the world
— labor too, at present entirely unregulated by law. The cotton
of India, and also of Asiatic Russia, is spun and woven near to
where it is grown, and where it can easily command the great
Asiatic market. One is not surprised to find therefore that the
Bombay cotton mills are already giving cause for some anxiety
in Lancashire ; and there seems no rational ground for sup-
posing that that anxiety will decrease ; in which case the
increasing competition would seem to involve in Lancashire
either immense development of machinery or reduction in wages
in order to cheapen the cost of production. Either alternative
forces the social problem forward.

I now pass on to consider the social problem as it has
actually been forced on the attention of the British Government
through the new industrial conditions.

The unrestrained power of capitalism very speedily reduced
a large part of England to a deplorable condition. The Mrs.
Jellybys of the philanthropic world were busy ministering to
the wants of Borioboola Gha by means of tracts and blankets,
neither of which were of the slightest use to those for whom
they were intended. But Borioboola Gha was an earthly
] Enc. Britt. art. " Cotton."

74 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

paradise compared with civilized England. There was not a
savage in the islands of the Pacific who was not better fed,
happier, healthier, and more contented than the majority of the
workers in the industrial parts of England. Children, it was
discovered, were transferred in large numbers to the north,
where they were housed in pent-up buildings adjoining the
factories, and kept to long hours of labor. The work was
carried on day and night without intermission ; so that the beds
were said never to become cold, inasmuch as one batch
of children rested while another batch went to the looms, only
half the requisite number of beds being provided for all. Epi-
demic fevers were rife in consequence. Medical inspectors
reported the rapid spread of malformation of the bones, curva-
ture of the spine, heart diseases, rupture, stunted growth,
asthma, and premature old age among children and young
persons : the said children and young persons being worked
by manufacturers without any kind of restraint. Manufacturing
profits in Lancashire were being at the same time reckoned
at hundreds and even thousands per cent. The most terrible
condition of things existed in the mines, where children of both
sexes worked together, half naked, often for sixteen hours a
day. In the fetid passages, children of seven, six, and even
four years of age, were found at work. Women were employed
underground, many of them even while pregnant, at the most
exhausting labor. After a child was born, its mother was
at work again in less than a week, in an atmosphere charged
with sulphuric acid. In some places women stood all day
knee-deep in water and subject to an intense heat. One woman
when examined avowed that she was wet through all day long,
and had drawn coal carts till her skin came off. Women and
young children of six years old drew coal along the passages of
the mines, crawling on all fours with a girdle passing round
their waists, harnessed by a chain between their legs to the
cart. A sub-commissioner in Scotland reported that he " found
a little girl, six years of age, carrying half a cwt., and making
regularly fourteen long journeys a day. The height ascended
and the distance along the road exceeded in each journey the
height of St. Paul's Cathedral." " I have repeatedly worked,"

INDUSTRIAL. 75

said one girl seventeen years of age, " for twenty-four hours.'*
The ferocity of the men was worse than that of wild beasts ;
and children were often maimed and sometimes killed with
impunity. Drunkenness was naturally general. Short lives
and brutal ones were the rule. The men, it was said, "die
off like rotten sheep ; and each generation is commonly extinct
soon after fifty." Such was a large part of industrial England
under the unrestrained rule of the capitalist. There can be no
doubt that far greater misery prevailed than in the Southern
States during the era of slavery. The slave was property —
often valuable property ; and it did not pay his owner to ill-treat
him to such a degree as to render him useless as a wealth-
producer. But if the " free " Englishman were injured or killed,
thousands could be had to fill his place for nothing.

Had this state of things continued we should have returned
to a state of nature with a vengeance. Of man thus depicted
we may say with Tennyson :

" Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him."

It was evident that capitalist monopoly must be restrained,
reluctant as English statesmen brought up under the com-
mercial system were to interfere. The zenith of laisser fain
was at the close of the last century ; but a great fabric often
looks most imposing shortly before it begins to collapse. The
first piece of labor legislation was the Morals and Health Act
of 1802, which interfered with the accommodation provided to
children by the employers, to which reference has been made.
The Cotton Mills Act was passed in 18 19, partly owing to the
exertions of Robert Owen. It limited the age at which children
might work in factories ; and it limited the time of their labor
to seventy-two hours per week. Seventy-two hours for a child
of nine who ought to have been playing in the green fields!
And even that was a vast improvement on the previous state
of things. Saturday labor was next shortened by an Act passed
by the Radical politician, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, in 1825.
Workmen, Radicals, Tories, and philanthropists then joined in
an agitation under Mr. Richard Oastler, a Conservative member

76 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

of Parliament, to secure a Ten Hours' Bill. Hobhouse tried by
a Bill introduced in 1831 to reduce the time in textile industries;
but he was beaten by the northern manufacturers. However,
Althorp the Whig leader, who had helped to defeat Hobhouse,
was obliged himself to introduce a measure by which night
work was prohibited to young persons, and the hours of work
were reduced to sixty-nine a week. Cotton-mill owners were at
the same time disqualified for acting as justices in cases of
infringement of the law. This measure is regarded by Dr. E.
Von Plener in his useful manual as the first real Factory Act.
Mr. Thomas Sadler, who had succeeded Oastler as leader in the
cause of the factory operatives, brought in a Bill in 1832
limiting the hours of labor for persons under eighteen ; but it
was met by a storm of opposition from manufacturing members
and withdrawn.

To Sadler succeeded that excellent man, who has perhaps
done more for the working-classes than any other public man of
our time, Lord Ashley, better known as Lord Shaftesbury.
And here let me pause to point out that it was the Radicals
and a large section of the Tories who took the side of the
operatives against the Whigs, official Conservatives and manu-
facturing class. The latter class is sometimes regarded as
Liberal. I think the truth is, that it captured and held for
some time the Liberal fort, and made Liberalism identical with
its policy and interests. If the men of this class had the cynical
candor of Mr. Jay Gould, they might have imitated his reply
when examined by a legislative committee : " What are your
politics, Mr. Gould ? " " Well, in a Republican district I am
Republican, in a Democratic district I am a Democrat ; but I
am always an Erie Railroad man ". One of Lord Ashley's
strong opponents was Sir Robert Peel, the son of a Lancashire
capitalist ; but the most bitter and persistent was Mr. John
Bright. Lord Ashley introduced a Ten Hours' Bill which
included adults. Lord Althorp refused to legislate for adults,
but himself passed an Act in 1833 prohibiting night work to
those under eighteen ; fixing forty-eight hours per week as the
maximum for children, and sixty-nine for young persons ; also
providing for daily attendance at school, and certain holidays in

INDUSTRIAL. 77

the year. As this Act repealed that of 1831, manufacturers
were again eligible to sit as justices in factory cases ; and
although numerous infractions were reported by inspectors, the
offenders in many cases got off scot free. In 1840 Lord Ashley
brought to the notice of Parliament the condition of young
people employed in mines ; and through his activity was passed
the first Mining Act, prohibiting underground work by women
and by boys under ten. Peel then passed a consolidating
Factory Act in 1844. Lord Ashley proposed to restrict to ten
per day the working hours for young persons ; but Peel defeated
the proposal by threatening to resign if it were carried. By
the Act of 1844 the labor of children was limited to six and a
half hours per day ; and they had to attend school three hours
daily during the first five days of the week. The next year,
1845, Lord Ashley secured the passage of a Bill forbidding
night work to women. In 1847 Mr. Fielden introduced a Bill
limiting the time of labor for all women and young persons to
eleven hours per day, and after May 1848 to ten hours. Peel
and the factory owners opposed ; but the Bill was carried. The
Act of 1850 further reduced the legal working day for women
and young persons ; and an Act of 1853 prohibited the employ-
ment of children before 6 a.m., or after 6 p.m. In i860 bleach-
ing and dyeing works were subjected to the factory laws. Further
legislation on this branch of industry took place in 1870. A
Mines Act was passed in i860, and made more stringent
in 1862 with reference to safety and ventilation. Acts with
reference to the lace industry were passed in the years 1861-64,
to bakehouses in 1863, chimney-sweeping and pottery works in
1864. The Workshops Regulation Act, relating to small trades
and handicrafts was passed in 1867, and a consolidating Factory
and Workshops Act in 1871. The Act now in force is the
Factory and Workshops Act 1878, modified in respect of certain
industries by the Act of 1883. Further Acts relative to the
regulations of mines were passed in 1872 and 1887.

This brief and imperfect survey of the legislation which has
destroyed the regime of laissez faire is sufficient for my purpose to
prove: (1) That with private property in the necessary instru-
ments of production, individual liberty as understood by the

78 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

eighteenth century reformers must be more and more restricted,
i.e., that in our existing economic condition individualism is
impossible and absurd. (2) That even hostile or indifferent
politicians have been compelled to recognise this. (3) That
unrestrained capitalism tends as surely to cruelty and oppres-
sion as did feudalism or chattel slavery. (4) That the remedy
has been, as a matter of fact, of a Socialistic character, in-
volving collective checking of individual greed and the paring
of slices off the profits of capital in the interests of the working
community. These four propositions can scarcely be contested.
The immense development of English industry under the
conditions previously set forth was due in great degree to the
fact that England had secured an immense foreign market in
which she had for a long time no formidable rival. Most of the
wars in which England was engaged during the eighteenth
century are quite unintelligible until it is understood that they
were commercial wars intended to secure commercial supremacy
for England. The overthrow of the Stuart monarchy was
directly associated with the rise to supreme power of the rich
middle class, especially the London merchants. The revolution
of 1688 marks the definite advent to political power of this class,
which found the Whig party the great instrument for effecting
its designs. The contrast between the old Tory squire who
stood for Church and King, and the new commercial magnate
who stood by the Whigs and the House of Hanover, is well
drawn by Sir Walter Scott in "Rob Roy". The Banks of
England and Scotland and the National Debt are among the
blessings conferred on their descendants by the new mercantile
rulers. They also began the era of corruption in politics which
is always connected closely with predominance of capitalists in
the State, as we see in France, the United States, and the
British Colonies. " The desire of the moneyed classes," says
Mr. Lecky,1 "to acquire political power at the expense of the
country gentlemen was the first and one of the chief causes of
that political corruption which soon overspread the whole
system of parliamentary government ". What remained of the
old aristocracy often found it convenient to form alliances with
1 •' History of the Eighteenth Century," I, 202.

INDUSTRIAL. 79

the new plutocracy ; and it was this combination which governed
England during the eighteenth century, and which specially
determined her foreign policy. That policy was directed towards
the securing of foreign markets and the extension of English
trade. Napoleon's sneer at the "nation of shopkeepers" was not
undeserved. The conquest of Canada, the conquest of India
under Clive and Warren Hastings — the latter an agent of a
great capitalist body, who illustrated well in his Indian career
the methods of his class — the Colonial policy, the base destruc-
tion of Irish manufactures in the interest of English capitalists,
were all part of the same scheme. The policy was successfully
consummated in the war waged by Pitt against the French
Revolution. That Revolution was itself brought about mainly
by poverty. Not only was the French peasantry beggared ;
but some of the new machinery which had been brought from
England had thrown many persons out of work, It was mainly
unemployed workmen who stormed and captured the Bastille.1
The chief counterblast to the Revolution was prepared by Pitt.
What were his motives ? The Austrian and Prussian monarchs,
the emigrant nobles, the imbecile English King and the Tory
English bishops may perhaps have seriously believed that
England was fighting for altar and throne. But Pitt was under
no such delusion. While he derived from his illustrious father
a real pride in England, his divinities were rather the ledger
and the cash-box. He was no bigot : even while an under-
graduate at Cambridge he was a close student of Adam Smith ;
he started in public life as a reformer, and his refusal to bow to
the ignorant prejudices of George III. cost him office in 1801. It
has been abundantly proved that at first he felt no violent
antipathy to the Revolution. A long period elapsed before he
was brought to join the monarchical alliance. But he was
essentially the great capitalist statesman, the political successor
of Walpole, the political predecessor of Peel. He saw that
French conquest might threaten seriously the English social
fabric, and that if England's chief rival were struck down, the
English commercial class might gain control of the world's

1 See the evidence contained in Vol. I. of Mr. Morse Stephen's " History
of the French Revolution."

80 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

commerce. To secure that end he skilfully welded together all
the moneyed interests, the contractors, landlords, financiers, and
shopkeepers ; and he tried to persuade the simpler portion of
the country that he was fighting for the sacred cause of religion
and morality. Those who resisted him he flung into prison or
transported beyond the seas. When the long war was brought
to an end, the working-classes were in a wretched condition ;
although in those days also there were sophistical politicians
who tried to prove that never had the people so much reason
to be contented. When, in 1823, the Lancashire weavers
petitioned Parliament to look into their grievances, an honor-
able member, who had presumably dined well if not wisely,
had the audacity to declare that the weavers were better off
than the capitalists — an observation not dissimilar to those we
have heard in more recent times. As a matter of fact, the
landlords, through protection and high rents — the capitalists,
through enormous profits, were enriched " beyond the dreams
of avarice." But the time had come for a conflict between
these two classes : the conflict which is known as the Free
Trade controversy. Protection was no longer needed by the
manufacturers, who had supremacy in the world-market, un-
limited access to raw material, and a long start of the rest of
the world in the development of machinery and in industrial
organisation. The landlord class on the other hand was
absolutely dependent on Protection, because the economic
isolation of England by means of import duties maintained
the high prices of food which were the source of the high agri-
cultural rents. Capitalist interests, on the contrary, were
bound up with the interaction between England and the rest
of the world ; and the time had come when the barriers which
had prevented that interaction must be pulled down. The
triumph of Free Trade therefore signifies economically the
decay of the old landlord class pure and simple, and the victory
of capitalism. The capitalist class was originally no fonder of
Free Trade than the landlords. It destroyed in its own interest
the woollen manufacture in Ireland; and it would have throttled
the trade of the Colonies had it not been for the successful
resistance of Massachusetts and Virginia. It was Protectionist

INDUSTRIAL. 81

so long as it suited its purpose to be so. But when cheap raw
material was needed for its looms, and cheap bread for its
workers : when it feared no foreign competitor, and had estab-
lished itself securely in India, in North America, in the
Pacific; then it demanded Free Trade. "Nothing in the history
of political imposture ", says Mr. Leek)', " is more curious than
the success with which, during the Anti-Corn Law agitation,
the notion was disseminated that on questions of Protection and
Free Trade the manufacturing classes have been peculiarly
liberal and enlightened, and the landed classes peculiarly selfish
and ignorant. It is indeed true that when in the present century
the pressure of population on subsistence had made a change in
the Corn Laws inevitable, the manufacturing classes placed
themselves at the head of a Free Trade movement from which
they must necessarily have derived the chief benefit, while the
entire risk and sacrifice were thrown upon others. But it is no
less true that there is scarcely a manufacture in England which
has not been defended in the spirit of the narrowest and most
jealous monopoly ; and the growing ascendancy of the com-
mercial classes after the Revolution is nowhere more apparent
than in the multiplied restrictions of the English Commercial
Code".1

Cheap raw material having been secured by the English
manufacturer through a series of enactments extending over a
generation ; and machinery having been so developed as to
enormously increase production, England sent her textile and
metal products all over the world ; and her manufacturers sup-
ported exactly that policy which enabled them to secure markets
for their goods or raw produce to work up in their mills.
Cobdenism was in the ascendant ; and the State was more
and more regarded from the commercial point of view. The
so-called " Manchester school " was in the main a peace party
because war weakens that confidence on which commerce is
based. But this attachment to peace principles did not prevent
Cobden himself from declaring for a powerful navy as an instru-
ment of commercial insurance. Nor did it prevent Manchester
from supporting Palmerston's nefarious Chinese policy in 1857,
1 History of the Eighteenth Century, iv. 450.

82 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

or the equally nefarious aggression in Egypt in 1882 : both
being regarded as helpful to Manchester trade. In behalf
of this extension of English trade to new markets war has been
made on China, Egypt, the Soudan, Burmah, and Thibet.
Germany follows England with cautious tread. Adventurers
like Emin, Stanley, and Bartelott are employed to "open up"
Africa to the gentle influences of civilization by the agency of
rum and revolver, under the pretence of putting down the slave
trade. France, not to be behind, exploits Tonquin in the
interests of Paris speculators. An unscrupulous government
in Italy attempts to divert the attention of the country from
domestic reforms to expeditions in Africa in the interests of
moneyed people in Europe. Perhaps the greatest move is yet
to come : the move on the vast market of China. For this
England, America, France, and Germany will compete. Ten-
tative steps are already being taken. By her absorption of
Burmah and her operations in Thibet, England is approaching
nearer to China. By her acquisition of Tonquin, France has
been brought into actual contact with China. America will
probably, by a judicious reduction of her tariff, compete with
England all over the Pacific, and will send her goods from the
Atlantic ports through the Panama or Nicaragua Canal of the
near future. In short, the machinery for the wholesale ex-
ploitation of Asia and Africa is in rapid progress. The whole
globe will soon be the private property of the capitalist class.

The appropriation of the planet has been powerfully aided
by the developments of transport and communication in our
time : indeed, it would have been impossible without them.
The mere application of machinery to production could not
have produced the economic results of to-day but for the
shrinkage of the globe caused by railways and telegraphs.
For it is through these inventions that the capitalist class has
become cosmopolitan, has broken up old habits, destroyed local
associations, spared nothing either beautiful or venerable where
profit was concerned. It has assimilated the conditions of life
in various lands, and has brought about a general uniformity
which accounts for much of the ennui felt in modern life.

As England was the first country to develope machine in-

INDUSTRIAL. 83

dustry, so was she the first to develope railways and to form
a powerful steam mercantile marine. Through the latter agency
she has now in her hands about sixty-four per cent, of the
carrying trade of the world. Within sixty years about 350,000
miles of railway have been built throughout the globe. Atlantic
and Pacific are united by several lines of steel ; while the
locomotive has penetrated remote regions of Africa inhabited by
barbarous tribes, and wastes of central Asia where it confronts
the relics of dead and buried civilizations. This immense
power, the greatest in the modern world, is mainly in the hands
of monopolist corporations, among whom there is the same
necessary tendency to aggregation, only far more marked, as is
found in productive industries. The first small lines built to
connect towns not far off have been added to others bit by bit ;
as from the original Stockton and Darlington Railway, less than
twenty miles long, we get the great and wealthy North Eastern
Railway of to-day. In America a single corporation controls as
much as 7,000 miles of rail ; and the end of the century will
perhaps see the great Siberian Pacific in actual existence. As
in railways, so in steam vessels. Huge fleets like the Cunard,
the Orient, the Messageries Maritimes, are owned by cosmo-
politan capital, and sustain the traffic and commerce, not of
a country, not even of a continent, but of the whole world.
Such is the immense revolution in the methods of distribution
effected in our time by the operation of capitalism.

We must now consider what the term " capitalist " is
coming to signify. Had the term been used half a century ago
it would have connoted a class, unscrupulous perhaps in the
main, with low aims, little culture, and less fine sympathy or
imagination. It was nevertheless a socially useful class, which
at that time performed real services. It is a leading thought in
modern philosophy that in its process of development each
institution tends to cancel itself. Its special function is born
out of social necessities : its progress is determined by attrac-
tions or repulsions which arise in society, producing a certain
effect which tends to negate the original function. Thus early
society among the Aryan peoples of Europe developes a
leader in war or council who grows, by processes which in

G 2

84 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

England, e.g., can be clearly traced, into a king with genuine
functions, a leader of the people in war like William I, or a
powerful civil ruler and statesman like Henry I. The fact that
such men were brutal or wicked is of little account : the
important fact about them is, that in a barbarous chaotic
society they performed some indispensable services. But the
very putting forth of the kingly power arouses antagonism ; then
produces armed resistance by a combined group ; and finally
leads to overthrow either by the destruction of the king or by
depriving him of all real power and reducing him to a mere
ornamental puppet. The very power originally believed to be
beneficent becomes tyrannical : it needs to be checked more
and more, until finally it practically ceases to exist, and the
curious paradox is seen of a monarch who does not rule.
History proves abundantly that men do not rise and overthrow
wicked and corrupt rulers merely because they are wicked and
corrupt. It is part of the terrible irony of history that a
Louis XV dies in his bed, while a William the Silent or a
Lincoln falls a victim to the assassin. What men do not long
tolerate is either obstructiveness or uselessness.

Now, if we apply these ideas to the evolution of the capitalist,
what is it we see ? The capitalist was originally an entrepreneur,
a manager who worked hard at his business, and who received
what economists have called the " wages of superintendence ".
So long as the capitalist occupied that position, he might be
restrained and controlled in various ways ; but he could not be
got rid of. His " wages of superintendence " were certainly
often exorbitant ; but he performed real functions ; and
society, as yet unprepared to take those functions upon itself,
could not afford to discharge him. Yet, like the King, he had
to be restrained by the legislation already referred to ; for his
power involved much suffering to his fellows. But now the
capitalist is fast becoming absolutely useless. Finding it easier
and more rational to combine with others of his class in a large
undertaking, he has now abdicated his position of overseer, has
put in a salaried manager to perform his work for him, and
has become a mere rent or interest receiver. The rent or
interest he receives is paid for the use of a monopoly which

INDUSTRIAL. 85

not he, but a whole multitude of people created by their joint
efforts.

It was inevitable that this differentiation of manager and
capitalist should arise. It is part of the process of capitalist
evolution due to machine industry. As competition led to waste
in production, so it led to the cutting of profits among capi-
talists. To prevent this the massing of capital was necessary,
by which the large capitalist could undersell his small rivals
by offering, at prices below anything they could afford to sell
at, goods produced by machinery and distributed by a plexus
of agencies initially too costly for any individual competitor to
purchase or set on foot. Now for such massive capitals, the
contributions of several capitalists are needed ; and hence
has arisen the Joint Stock Company or Compagnie Anonyme.
Through this new capitalist agency a person in England can
hold stock in an enterprise at the Antipodes which he has
never visited and never intends to visit, and which, therefore,
he cannot " superintend " in any way. He and the other share-
holders put in a manager with injunctions to be economical.
The manager's business is to earn for his employers the largest
dividends possible : if he does not do so he is dismissed. The
old personal relation between the workers and the employer
is gone : instead thereof remains merely the cash nexus. To
secure high dividends the manager will lower wages. If that
is resisted there will probably be either a strike or lock-out.
Cheap labor will be perhaps imported by the manager ; and if
the workpeople resist by intimidation or organised boycotting,
the forces of the State (which they help to maintain) will be
used against them. In the majority of cases they must submit.
Such is a not unfair picture of the relation of capitalist to
workman to-day : the former having become an idle dividend-
receiver. The dictum of orthodox political economy, uttered
by so competent an authority as the late Professor Cairnes,
runs : —

" It is important, on moral no less than on economic grounds, to insist
upon this, that no public benefit of any kind arises from the existence of an
idle rich class. The wealth accumulated by their ancestors and others on
their behalf, where it is employed as capital, no doubt helps to sustain in-
dustry^ but what they consume in luxury and idleness is not capital, and

86 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

helps to sustain nothing but their own unprofitable lives. By all means they
must have their rents and interest, as it is written in the bond ; but let them
take their proper place as drones in the hive, gorging at a feast to which they
have contributed nothing."1

The fact that the modern capitalist may be not only useless
but positively obstructive was well illustrated at a meeting of
the shareholders of the London and South Western Railway
on 7th February last. Three shareholders urged a reduction
in third-class fares. The chairman pointed out the obvious
fact that such a reduction would probably lower the dividend,
and asked the meeting if that was what they wished. He was,
of course, answered by a chorus of ''No, no ! " ; and all talk
of reduction of fares was at an end. Here is a plain sample
(hundreds might be quoted) of the evident interests of the
public being sacrificed to those of the capitalist.

That joint-stock capitalism is extending rapidly everyone
knows. In the United States, according to .Mr. Bryce, the
wealth of joint-stock corporations is estimated at one-fourth of
the total value of all property.2 In England every kind of
business, from breweries, banks, and cotton-mills down to
automatic sweetmeat machines, is falling into the hands of the
joint-stock capitalist, and must continue to do so. Twenty
years ago who would have supposed that a brewery like that of
Guinness or such a banking firm as Glyn, Mills, and Co. would
become a joint-stock company ? Yet we know it is so to-day.
Capitalism is becoming impersonal and cosmopolitan. And the
combinations controlling production become larger and fewer.
Baring's are getting hold of the South African diamond fields :
A few companies control the whole anthracite coal produce of
Pennsylvania. Each one of us is quite "free" to "compete"
with these gigantic combinations, as the Principality of Monaco
is "free" to go to war with France should the latter threaten
her interests. The mere forms of freedom remain ; but monopoly
renders them nugatory. The modern State, having parted with
the raw material of the globe, cannot secure freedom of com-
petition to its citizens ; and yet it was on the basis of free

1 " Some Leading Principles of Political Economy ", p. 32.

2 " The American Commonwealth ", iii, note on p. 421.

INDUSTRIAL. 87

competition that capitalism rose. Thus we see that capitalism
has cancelled its original principle — is itself negating its own
existence. Before considering its latest forms, attention may
here be conveniently directed to the Co-operative movement,
which is, on one side at any rate, closely allied to the joint-stock
development.

The Co-operative movement had in England a Socialistic
origin ; for its founder was Robert Owen. As Mr. Seligman
says very truly in the Political Science Quarterly : " Owen was the
founder of the Co-operative movement in England, a fact often
ignored by those who glibly use the word to-day with an utter
failure to discern its true significance." And Owen himself
avowed that his grand ultimate object was "community in
land", with which he hoped would be combined " unrestrained
co-operation on the part of all, for every purpose of human
life ". It is thus important to associate Co-operation with
Robert Owen — clavum et venerabile nomen — because there are many
persons who suppose that Co-operation began with the Rochdale
Pioneers in 1844. What the Rochdale movement really did
was to commence the process of joint-stock shopkeeping, a
very different thing from that which Owen had in view.

A powerful impetus was given to co-operation by the Chris-
tian Socialist movement under Maurice and Kingsley. " Of
all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, anarchic and atheistic
schemes of the Universe ", said Kingsley, " the Cobden and
Bright one is exactly the worst." The orthodox economic
conclusions of the day fared badly at Kingsley 's hands. " The
man who tells us", said he, "that we ought to investigate
Nature, simply to sit still patiently under her, and let her freeze,
and ruin, and starve, and stink us to death, is a goose, whether
he calls himself a chemist or a political economist ". These
Christian Socialist leaders felt deeply the anguish and poverty
of the workers and the selfish apathy of the rich. " Mammon",
says Kingsley, " shrieks benevolently whenever a drunken
soldier is flogged ; but he trims his paletot and adorns his legs
with the flesh of men and the skins of women, with degradation,
pestilence, heathendom, and despair; and then chuckles com-
placently over his tailor's bills. Hypocrite ! straining at a gnat

88 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

and swallowing a camel". All this is very admirable; but
cheap clothes are not made solely or chiefly for Mammon, but
for the masses, who are poor people. It is part of the sad irony
of the situation that the great majority are obliged to accept the
alternative of cheap clothes or none at all. And as the English
climate and the British matron combine to exercise an absolute
veto over the latter form of prehistoric simplicity, it follows that
one portion of the working-classes must, in order to be clothed,
connive at the sweating of another portion.

The Christian Socialist, which was the organ of Maurice and
Kingsley, betrayed great simplicity as to the real nature of the
economic problem. It neglected Owen's principle of " com-
munity in land", and supposed that by working together and
selling articles of good quality at a fair price poverty could be
eliminated, while yet every worker in the community was paying
his tribute of economic rent to the owners of the instruments of
production. Thus the movement had no economic basis; and
when the moral idealism had departed from it, no wonder that
it degenerated into mere " divvy " hunting and joint-stock shop-
keeping. The economic advantages of joint-stock shop-keeping
are thus summed up by Mr. Robert Somers in the " Encyclo-
paedia Britannica" (Art., " Co-operation ") : "Wholesome com-
modities, ready-money payments, a dividend of from five to ten
per cent, on share capital, and a bonus to non-members on
the amount of their purchases." As joint-stock shopkeeping,
co-operation is a useful and cheap method of distribution,
which has doubtless benefited a considerable number of persons;
but the notion that it can solve the economic problem before
society is " chimerical ", as Dr. J. K. Ingram tells us is the
opinion of modern economists.1 This, indeed, might only be
expected from the fact that 961 out of every 1,000 persons in
England die without furniture, investments, or effects worth
^oo.2 Economically considered, co-operation is, now that the
initial enthusiasm has died out of it, a subsidiary branch of the
great joint-stock enterprise. Ethically considered, its results
are often doubtful. In its chief stronghold, Lancashire, one

1 M Encyclopaedia Britannica " : Art., " Political Economy "

2 Mulhall : " Dictionary of Statistics ".

INDUSTRIAL. 89

observes a narrow selfishness among its votaries which could
not be surpassed in the most genteel quarters of Bayswater.
Its ideal is not the raising of the working class as a whole, but
the raising of certain persons out of the working into the middle
class. If the advocates of co-operation will abate their preten-
sions, and claim merely (1) that their method is a useful and
-economic means of distribution among the lower-middle and
upper-working classes ; and (2) that by its agency working men
can learn the important functions of organization and adminis-
tration, their claim will be freely admitted. But if they go
further their vaulting ambition will o'erleap itself. At the
present rate of progress made by co-operative societies as com-
pared with joint-stock capitalist companies, several generations
will be in their graves before any deep or general impression is
made. And meanwhile, unless economic rent is diverted from
the class which at present absorbs it to the community which
creates it, co-operators, like the rest of us, must pay tribute to
the lords of the soil and of money. But the noteworthy fact
about co-operation is that its very existence testifies to the
process of industrial and capitalist aggregation here insisted
on as the great social factor of our period. For co-operative
societies supersede individual by social distribution, effecting it
without the waste attendant on a number of little shops all
competing against each other, the owners of none of which can
make a decent living. Co-operation, therefore, well illustrates
the economic evolution of the present age.

I now come to treat of the latest forms of capitalism, the
■" ring " and the " trust " whereby capitalism cancels its own
principles, and, as a seller, replaces competition by combination.
When capitalism buys labor as a commodity it effects the
purchase on the competitive principle. It's indefinitely ex-
tended market enables it to do so ; for it knows that the
workman must sell his labor to secure the means to live. Other
things being equal, therefore, it buys its labor in the cheapest
market. But when it turns round to face the public as a seller,
it casts the maxims of competition to the winds, and presents
itself as a solid combination. Competition, necessary at the
outset, is found ultimately, if unchecked, to be wasteful and

go THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

ruinous. It entails great expense in advertising ; it necessitates
the employment of much unproductive labor ; it tends to the
indefinite lowering of prices ; it produces gluts and crises, and
renders business operations hazardous and precarious. To
escape these consequences the competing persons or firms agree
to form a close combination to keep up prices, to augment
profits, to eliminate useless labor, to diminish risk, and to
control the output. This is a " ring", which is thus a
federation of companies. The best examples of " rings "
and " pools " are to be found in America, where capitalism
is more unrestrained and bolder in its operations than
in Europe ; and also where nearly all the active intellect is
attracted to those commercial pursuits that dominate Ameri-
can life.

The individualist devotees of laissev faire used to teach us
that when restrictions were removed, free competition would
settle everything. Prices would go down, and fill the " con-
sumer " with joy unspeakable ; the fittest would survive ; and
as for the rest — it was not very clear what would become of
them, and it really didn't matter. No doubt the "consumer"
has greatly benefited by the increase in production and the
fall in prices; but where is " free competition " now? Almost
the only persons still competing freely are the small shop-
keepers, trembling on the verge of insolvency, and the
working-men, competing with one another for permission to
live by work. Combination is absorbing commerce. Here are
a few instances of the formation of rings.

A steel rail combination was some years ago formed among
previously competing firms in America. This combination
discovered that too many rails were being made and that prices
were being cut. Accordingly, one of the mills in the combina-
tion— the Vulcan mill of St. Louis — was closed, and stood
smokeless for years : its owners meanwhile receiving a subsidy
of $400,000 a year from the other mills in the combination
for not making rails. That is how the owners of the Vulcan
mill earned their " wages of superintendence ". It is needless to
add that no payment was made to the men for not working :
they were thrown on the streets to meditate on the right to

INDUSTRIAL. 91

" liberty and the pursuit of happiness ", secured to them by the
Declaration of Independence.

Or, again, take the case of the anthracite coal lands of
Pennsylvania, occupying an area of some 270,000 acres, and
held by the Reading Coal and Iron Company, the Lehigh
Valley Railroad, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western
Railroad, the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, the Pennsylvania
Railroad, the Pennsylvania Coal Company, and smaller firms
and corporations tributary to these. The rich owners, popu-
larly known as the "coal barons", agree to fix absolutely the
wholesale price of coal, always securing an immense rise just
before the winter sets in. There is no such thing known or
possible as free trade or open competition in the anthracite coal
produce of America.

Combinations in the United States have been made by the
Western millers, the New York icemen, Boston fish dealers,
manufacturers of sewer pipe, copper miners, makers of lamps,
pottery, glass, hoop-iron, shot, rivets, candy, starch, sugar,
preserved fruits, glucose, chairs, vapor stoves, lime, rubber,
screws, chains, harvesting machinery, pins, salt, hardware, type,
brass tubing, silk and wire. In these trades freedom of produc-
tion and sale has been for a time partially or wholly destroyed.
The American business man is very angry when boycotting is
resorted to by workmen ; but he is quite ready to boycott others
when his interests lead that way. The stamped tinware makers
in 1882 formed a ring and expelled members who sold at lower
prices than the fixed rates, and refused to allow anyone in the
pool to sell to the offenders. Some of the previous facts are
taken from an article by Mr. Henry D. Lloyd,1 who has investi-
gated capitalist combinations with much knowledge and insight.
From the same article I quote the following :

" On the 1st April, 1882, when the rest of us were lost in the reckless
gaiety of All Fools' Day, forty-one tack manufacturers found out that there
were too many tacks, and formed the Central Manufacturing Company of
Boston, with 3,000,000 dollars capital. The tack-mills in the combination
ran about three days in the week. When this combination a few weeks ago
silenced a Pittsburg rival by buying him out, they did not remove the
machinery. The dead chimneys and idle machines will discourage new men

1 " Lords of Industry." North American Review, June, 1884.

92 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

from starting another factory, or can be run to ruin them if they are not to
be discouraged in any other way. The first fruits of the tack-pool were an
increase of prices to twice what they had been."

Again I quote Mr. Lloyd :

"The men who make our shrouds and coffins have formed a close cor-
poration known as the 'National Burial Case Association', and held their
annual convention in Chicago last year. Their action to keep up prices
and keep down the number of coffins was secret, lest mortality should be
discouraged."

From coffins to crackers is a short step in the study of capi-
talist methods :

" The Western Cracker Bakers' Association met in Chicago, in February,
to consider among other things ' the reprehensible system of cutting prices '
(i.e. , the reprehensible system of free competition which capitalists in buying
labor tell us is our salvation). They first had a banquet. After their ' merri-
ment and diversion ' the revellers, true to Adam Smith's description, turned
to consider 'some contrivance to raise prices'. 'The price lists were per-
fected ', said the newspaper report ; ' and then they adjourned '."

In 1875 broke out a severe competition among the fire in-
surance companies, upon the collapse of a previous pool ; and
the competition cost them in New York city alone $17,500,000
in seven years. Consequently in 1882 they made a new
combination which covered the whole country, and which Mr.
Lloyd declares to be wealthy, cohesive, and powerful. Though
there is no pool or ring, I am credibly informed that there is
a common understanding among the fire insurance companies
of London. One of the most noted of combinations has been
the great Copper Syndicate which attracted world-wide atten-
tion early in 1888. It was formed by some French speculators
in October, 1887, and during the eighteen months of its existence,
maintained copper at a purely arbitrary price in all the markets
of the world. At its head was M. Eugene Secretan, managing
director of the Societe des Metaux, the world's largest buyer
of, and dealer in, manufactured copper. The syndicate's agents
bought all the copper that was visible and for sale, the result of
their speculation being that the price of copper in the
London market rose from less than ^40 to over ^"80 a ton,
and the price of Lake Superior copper in America rose from
10J cents to 17^ cents per pound. M. Secretan informed a

INDUSTRIAL. 93

London journal that his designs were purely philanthropic.
"Our only purpose", said he, "is that every miner, dealer
and manufacturer should have fair remuneration for his work."
Thanks to M. Secretan's philanthropy, copper, tin, lead
and spelter rose enormously in price ; several trades were
more or less paralysed ; and in France large numbers of
workmen were thrown out of employment. And let it not be
supposed that the suicide of M. Denfert-Rochereau, which
heralded the collapse of this first attempt to corner the world's
copper — a collapse due to a miscalculation of the extent to
which the supply of copper could increase under the stimulus of
high prices — offers us any security against a repetition of the
attempt. On the contrary, it has shewn how the thing may be
safely done. The metal hoarded by the unlucky speculators
is still so far cornered that it has been kept off the market
up to the present, prices being not yet normal. " To a regular
trust it must and will come at last ", says Mr. E. Benjamin
Andrews, of Cornell University. " Nor has aught taken place
to indicate that a Copper Trust, organized like the Standard
Oil Trust, with its energy and relentless methods, would
fail".1

The Individualist who supposes that Free Trade plus private
property will solve all economic problems is naturally surprised
at these "rings", which upset all his crude economic notions;
and he very illogically asks for legislation to prevent the natural
and inevitable result of the premises with which he starts. It is
amusing to note that those who advocate what they call self-
reliance and self-help are the first to call on the State to interfere
with the natural results of that self-help, of that private enter-
prise, when it has overstepped a purely arbitrary limit. Why,
on ordinary commercial principles, should not a copper syndi-
cate grasp all the copper in the world ? It is merely the fittest
surviving. The whole case against Socialism is assumed by its
most intelligent opponents to lie in that Darwinian theory. And
yet when the copper syndicate or the "coal barons" survive, they
arouse against themselves the fiercest and, from the commercial
point of view, the most unreasonable antagonism. As sin when
1 Quarterly Journal of Economics, July, 1889.

94 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

it is finished is said to bring forth death, so capitalism when it is
finished brings forth monopoly. And one might as well quarrel
with that plain fact as blame thorns because they do not produce
grapes, or thistles because they are barren of figs.

The story of the growth of capitalism is not yet complete.
The "ring" is being succeeded by a more elaborate organization
known as the " trust ". Although in England great combinations
like the Salt Union are rapidly rising, yet we must again travel
to America to learn what the so-called " trust " is. The fullest
information on the subject of trusts is contained in a report of
a Committee of the New York State Legislature, which was
appointed to investigate the new combination. The following
trusts were inquired into : Sugar, milk, rubber, cotton-seed oil,
envelope, elevator, oil cloth, Standard oil, butchers', glass, and
furniture. A trust is defined by the Committee as a combina-
tion "to destroy competition and to restrain trade through the
stockholders therein combining with other corporations or stock-
holders to form a joint-stock company of corporations, in effect
renouncing the powers of such several corporations, and placing
all powers in the hands of trustees". The general purposes and
effects are stated to be " to control the supply of commodities
and necessities ; to destroy competition ; to regulate the quality ;
and to keep the cost to the consumer at prices far beyond their
fair and equitable value". It is unnecessary to deal with all
these trusts, which possess certain features in common. I will
select one or two, particularly the great Standard Oil Trust and
the Cotton-seed Oil Trust.

The Standard Oil Trust is probably the largest single busi-
ness monopoly in the world, the value of all its included interests
being estimated, according to the evidence submitted, at
^"29,600,000. In the report it is described as " one of the
most active and possibly the most formidable monied power
on this continent. Its influence reaches into every State, and is
felt in remote villages ; and the products of its refineries seek a
market in almost every seaport on the globe". The germ of
this huge monopoly was a small petroleum refinery near Cleve-
land, bought by one Rockefeller, a book-keeper in a store, and a
friend of his, a porter, with borrowed money. Rockefeller

INDUSTRIAL. 95

formed an acquaintance with a rich whiskey distiller, who
advanced money and put his son-in-law Flagler into the busi»
ness. This person's doctrines are thus described : " He says
that there is no damned sentiment about business ; that he
knows no friendship in trade ; and that if he gets his business
rival in a hole he means to keep him there." Such a man is
eminently fitted to be the founder of a monopoly : he is a hero
of self-help ; for he help's himself to anything he can lay his
hands on. A second refinery was established in Ohio, and a
warehouse opened in New York. The concern grew, and was
incorporated as the Standard Oil Company. It is charged with
having secured special legislation by judicious expenditure in
the lobbies of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Legislatures. By
entering into arrangements with the trunk railway lines, it
secured special rates for transit. New refineries were established
and new oil lands in Pennsylvania acquired ; the capital was
increased ; and an enormous yearly business was done. After a
time the company controlled every avenue of transportation ;
managed all the largest refineries in the land ; and was able to
shut off every competitor from either receiving supplies or
shipping its products. New companies, nominally distinct, but
all under the control of the same men, were incorporated in
New Jersey, Ohio, West Virginia, and other States. The mono-
poly elected one of its chief stockholders into the United States
Senate, it is said, through bribery in the Ohio Legislature'
over which body it certainly acquired strong hold. These
tactics were known as " coal oil politics ". All the dirty work
was, of course, done through agents, the directors pretending
perfect innocence. In 1882 the Standard Oil Companies were
consolidated into the Standard Oil Trust.1 The stockholders
surrendered their stock to the trustees, nine in number, created
under the agreement, and received certificates in the place
thereof, the representatives of the Trust and the stockholders in
the refineries making a joint valuation of the refineries, and the
certificates being issued to that amount. Thus the separate
concerns were merged in one gigantic business, controlled by
nine men (owning a majority of the stock), having a monopoly of
1 Report of Senate Committee, p, 419

96 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

nearly all the oil lands in America, controlling legislative votes,
forming a solid alliance with the railway and shipping interests,
and determining to a gallon how much oil shall be produced and
refined, and to a fraction of a cent what shall be its price. In
1887 there was a cash dividend of 10 per cent, declared, besides
a stock dividend of 20 per cent, on the certificates of four years'
aggregation. In addition to the enormous stock they hold,
the trustees receive an annual salary of ^"5,000. What are
the economic results of this combination ? It has not raised
prices, as the trusts were charged by the committee with doing.
On the contrary there has been a steady decrease in price during
the decade 1877- 1887. The consumption of oil has also enor-
mously increased. The working and producing expenses have
been greatly lowered by the dismissal of needless labor and vast
improvements in machinery ; the pipe lines controlled by the
trust having displaced 5,700 teams of horses and 11,400 men in
handling the oil. Thus of this trust we may say that though
the means used to establish it were morally doubtful or even
bad, the political results disastrous, the economic results have
been beneficial, except in the matter of helping to form an
unemployed class through the dismissal of needless labor con-
sequent on the development of machinery.

The Cotton-seed Oil Trust was organized two or three years
ago in the State of Arkansas.1 Upwards of seventy different
companies had been competing with each other, and con-
sequently suffering heavy losses. Their mills being comparatively
small and equipped with imperfect machinery, they were glad
to combine ; and those that did not were forced to close. The
seventy corporations, the vast majority of the members of
which had agreed to the combination, surrendered their stock to
a body of trustees and received in return $100 certificates. The
various mills send a monthly report to the trust ; and if the
officers in a given mill do not sell at the terms imposed, they are
dismissed by the trust.2 The object of the trust was declared
by a witness to be to prevent bankruptcy, to improve methods,
to find markets, to develop the enterprise and to make money.

1 Report of Senate Committee, p. 233, et. seq.

2 Report. P. 244.

INDUSTRIAL. 97

The economic result has been displacement of labor by-
machinery and great economy in production. Incidentally it
came out that much cotton-seed oil was sold to French and
Italian buyers, who mix it with a little olive oil and export it
back to America and to England, where a confiding public
purchases it as pure Tuscan olive oil — an interesting illustration
of international trade morality.

An examination of the milk and butchers' trusts ought to be
a revelation to those who imagine that trade is " free ", and
that competition rules. On April 29th, 1885, tne directors of
the Milk Exchange met in New York and unanimously resolved :

•' That on the first day of May next, and until otherwise ordered, the market
price of milk produced from meadow hay and sound cereals be z\ cents per
quart, and that produced from brewers' grains and glucose and corn starch
refuse be 2 cents per quart." l

A representative of the Sheep and Lamb Butchers' Mutual
Benefit Association testified that the members of that body
agreed that they would only buy sheep and calves from the
Sheep Brokers' Association, a penalty for violation of this rule
being imposed at the rate of 15 cents a head per sheep or calf.
The absolute despotism, and the system of espionage involved
in such regulation is obvious. Here is a copy of a document
issued by this body :

" New York, January 9th, 1888. Permission has been granted by the
board of trustees of this Association to Simon Strauss to buy sheep and lambs
in New York markets, providing he buys no sheep and lambs from outsiders,
under penalty of 15 cents per head fine. Richard S. Tobin, secretary."2

Occasionally the Association relaxed. On November 5th, 1887,
according to its minutes,

" The application of John Healey, No. 2, to be granted the privilege of buying
a few sheep and lambs without the 15 cents being charged to the brokers, was
favorably acted upon."

This is not a record of Bagdad under the caliphs, but of the
Republican State of New York ! The threatened despotism of
Socialism has been often eloquently dwelt on ; but what of the
actual despotism of to-day ?

1 Report of Senate Committee, p. 305.

2 Report of Senate Committee, p. 497.

H

98 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

Now what does this examination of trusts show ? That,
granted private property in the raw material out of which
wealth is created on a huge scale by the new inventions which
science has placed in our hands, the ultimate effect must be
the destruction of that very freedom which the modern
democratic State posits as its first principle. Liberty to
trade, liberty to exchange products, liberty to buy where
one pleases, liberty to transport one's goods at the same
rate and on the same terms enjoyed by others, subjection
to no imperium in imperio : these surely are all fundamental
democratic principles. Yet by monopolies every one of
them is either limited or denied. Thus capitalism is
apparently inconsistent with democracy as hitherto under-
stood. The development of capitalism and that of democracy
cannot proceed without check on parallel lines. Rather are they
comparable to two trains approaching each other from different
directions on the same line. Collision between the opposing
forces seems inevitable.

But both democracy and the new capitalist combinations
which . threaten it are inevitable growths of an evolutionary
process. We are therefore brought to consider the question
whether the ring, syndicate, or trust either can or ought to be
destroyed. These combinations can be shown to be the most
economical and efficient methods of organizing production and
exchange. They check waste, encourage machinery, dismiss
useless labor, facilitate transport, steady prices, and raise
profits — i.e., they best effect the objects of trade from the
capitalist's point of view. Now, the opponents of Socialism
say that without this enterprising capitalist we cannot live.
He " provides employment ", they say. Well, if we need him,
we must obviously pay his price. If he has a natural monopoly
of a function indispensable to social progress, society must con-
cede the terms he imposes. These terms are briefly large com-
binations of capitalist ownership. In this way he can best
organize business : if we do not choose to let him do it in this
way, he will not do it for us at all. From his point of view
that is a fair position to take up ; and it places the Indi-
vidualist opponent of trusts in an awkward dilemma. For he

INDUSTRIAL. 99

must either submit to trusts or give up capitalists, in which
latter case he becomes a Socialist. The answer of Socialism
to the capitalist is that society can do without him, just as
society now does without the slave-owner or feudal lord, both
of whom were formerly regarded as necessary to the well-
being and even the very existence of society. In organizing
its own business for itself, society can employ, at whatever
rate of remuneration may be needed to call forth their powers,
those capitalists who are skilled organizers and administrators.
But those who are mere dividend-receivers will no longer
be permitted to levy a contribution on labor, but must earn
their living by useful industry as other and better people have
to do.

It may be said that society is not yet ripe for this trans-
formation, nor is it. The forms of the democratic State are
not yet perfected, nor has the economic evolution yet pro-
ceeded generally far enough, even in England, not to speak
of the less advanced European countries. Much yet remains
to be done through both the education of the intellect and the
development of a nobler public spirit. But on the other hand
we seem to be rapidly approaching such an impasse that some
very large and definite extension of collective authority must
be made. This would seem to involve on one side general
reduction of the hours of labor, and on the other an attempt
to absorb by the community a portion of those social values
which it creates. In reference to ground values it may be
anticipated that local democratic authorities will secure them
for the benefit of the people by any means which may be
found expedient.

As regards the great combinations of capital, State action

may take one of three courses. It may prohibit and dissolve

them ; it may tax and control them ; or it may absorb and

administer them. In either case the Socialist theory is ipso facto

admitted ; for each is a confession that it is well to exercise

a collective control over industrial capital. If the first of these

courses is taken a distinctly retrogressive policy is definitely

adopted, a policy of alarm at what Mr. Cleveland called the

4i communism of capital ", a policy of reversion to the chaos of

h 2

ioo THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

"free competition", and of cession of the undoubted benefits
which combination has secured. Such a policy would sig-
nify the forcible prevention of acquisition of property, the
very thing dearest to the individualist. If the powers of
acquisition, now evidently dependent on combination, are
to be restricted, what becomes of the " incentive to in-
dustry", the "reward of abstinence", and all the rest of the
worn out phrases which have so often done duty in
the place of argument ? If the syndicate or the trust
represents the legitimate outcome of capitalism — if it is
necessary to give order to trade and to prevent the ruinous
waste of unrestricted competition, how absurd it is for the State
to say to the capitalist : " You shall carry your privileges of
acquisition just up to the point where competition is likely to
ruin you ; but there you shall stop. Immediately you and your
friends combine to prevent waste, to regulate production and
distribution, to apply new methods of manufacture, we shall
absolutely prevent you or restrain you by vexatious regula-
tions ". To which the capitalist may be supposed to reply :
" I cannot fulfil my function in society at this serious risk. I
shall never know security — never be even moderately sure of
reaping that reward to which I am admittedly entitled. If
you intend to fetter my action in this way after having pro-
claimed me free to own the raw material out of which wealth
is made — if you compel me to stop at a purely arbitrary line, I
must inform you that I am not going to undertake business on
such terms ". Would not the capitalist say something like this ;
and from his point of view would he not be right ?

If it were instantly possible to do so, we should take the
capitalist at his word ; appropriate the necessary instruments of
production ; and make them common property, the values they
create accruing to the community. But the human race
generally contrives to exhaust every device which stupidity can
suggest before the right line of action is ultimately taken. I
think therefore that some probably inefficient method of taxation
and public control over combinations will, as a matter of fact,
be adopted. Such legislation will immensely restrict individual
liberty in certain directions, will produce much friction, and may

INDUSTRIAL. 101

possibly hamper production ; until by a long series of experi-
ments men shall discover what is the most reasonable way of
acquiring for the community as a whole the wealth which it
produces. But in any case individualism or anything whatever
in the nature of laisser faire goes by the board.

And now, finally, what is the immediate policy for rational
students of economics and genuine social reformers to adopt ?
Their motto must be, Nulla vestigia retrorsum. To all quack
proposals they must offer a steady resistance. These proposals
will take the form of attempts to bring back some economic
condition out of which society has emerged. One quack will
desire to revive the old British yeomanry ; another will talk
nonsense about " Fair Trade " ; a third will offer to the rustic
" three acres and a cow " ; while a fourth will see salvation in
getting rid of primogeniture and entail and "planting" prosperous
laborers on the soil — as though the laborers grew there like
trees. Those who understand the economic crisis may be ready
and eager to support any reform, however small, which is a
genuine step forward ; but they cannot support any effort to
call back the past. They may help to build a new bridge
across the gulf that separates us from the Co-operative Common-
wealth ; but they can never repair the old broken-down structure
which leads back to Individualism. Instead, therefore, of
attempting to undo the work which capitalists are unconsciously
doing for the people, the real reformer will rather prepare the
people, educated and organized as a true industrial democracy,
to take up the threads when they fall from the weak hands of a
useless possessing class. By this means will the class struggle,
with its greed, hate, and waste, be ended, and the life hinted at
by Whitman in his " Song of the Exposition" be attained:

" Practical, peaceful life, the people's life, the People themselves,
Lifted, illumined, bathed in peace — elate, secure in peace."

MORAL.

BY SYDNEY OLIVIER.

The argument of this fourth instalment of Socialist criticism
may be provisionally described as an attempt to justify Socialist
ideals by the appeal to canons of moral judgment accepted
generally and supported by the results of positive ethical science.
The previous essays have made it clear that we are dealing with
Socialism in that restricted sense in which it is denned by
SchaefBe,1 as having for its aim "the replacement of private
capital by collective capital : that is, by a method of production
which, upon the basis of the collective property of the sum of
all the members of the society in the instruments of production,
seeks to carry on a co-operative organization of national work ".
We are not dealing with Socialism as a religion, nor as con-
cerned with questions of sex or family : we treat it throughout
as primarily a property-form, as the scheme of an industrial
system for the supply of the material requisites of human social
existence.

If it were admitted that the establishment of such a system
would guarantee just this much — that abject poverty should be
done away, and that every man and woman should be ensured
the opportunity of obtaining sufficient food and covering in
return for a moderate day's work, we might still be far
from convincing some people that the realization of that ideal
would be a good thing for the world. There are still a great
many who, though they may not join in the common prophecy
that the chief result of such a system would be an increase in

1 "The Quintessence of Socialism." Swan Sonnenschein and Co.
102

MORAL. 103

beer-drinking and other stupid self-indulgence,1 yet regard
starvation and misery as part of the inevitable order of nature,
and as necessary conditions of progress, conducive to the sur-
vival of what they are pleased to call the " fittest " types of life.
Such critics see danger to progress in any attempt to enrol
intelligence and adaptiveness into conscious combination
against starvation arid misery, to extinguish by concerted effort
survivals of the accidents of primitive barbarism against
which as individuals we are always struggling. This aim of
Socialism, accordingly, does not wholly commend itself to their
moral judgment, to their opinion of what is good in the widest
sense, although they may willingly admit that the aim possesses
a certain element of shortsighted good intention. Other persons,
influenced by religious conceptions older than that of progress,
and regarding morality less as determined by reference to that
end than as a concern of the individual, a certain state of the
soul of each man, are inclined to view the material evils which
Socialists desire to get rid of, as a necessary schooling and
discipline without which individual morality would decay.

Against these doctrines Socialists would maintain that the
ordering of our national life, and of the relations between indi-
viduals and social groups throughout the world in accordance
with the principles of Socialism, is the effectual and indispensa-
ble process for ensuring to the mass of mankind the advantages
of progress already effected and its continued and orderly
development, and for the realisation, in individuals and the
State, of the highest morality as yet imagined by us.

It may be well at this point to anticipate a challenge to
define what is meant by the word " Morality ", and to briefly
explain the position which will be assumed, and the method
which will be followed, throughout the succeeding observations.
It must be remembered that the subject of this essay is "The
Moral Aspect of the Basis of Socialism ", and not " The
Socialist View of the Basis of Morals". We may therefore
conscientiously steer clear of the whirlpool of agelong con-
troversy as to what that basis is, merely noting as we pass that

1 E.G., see "Communism and Socialism", by Theodore D. Woolsey.
Sampson Low and Co., London.

io4 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

any metaphysic of Ethics being necessarily universal, there is in
this sense no special ethic or morality of Socialism. By such
cautious procedure we sacrifice indeed the fascinating ambition
to exhibit, by impressive dialectic pageant of deduction from
first principles, the foundation of formal Socialism in the Idea
that informs the universe. But we also avoid the certainty of
losing, at the very outset of oar attempted demonstration, the
company of all but that minority who might assent to our
fundamental propositions. A further sacrifice we shall make,
in descending to the unpretentious methods of empiricism ; for
we thereby renounce the right of appeal to that theologic
habit of mind common to Socialists with other pious persons.
Mr. Henry George, educated under the American Constitution,
may share the familiarity of its framers with the intentions of
the Creator and the natural rights of Man. He may prove, as
did Mr. Herbert Spencer in his generous youth, that private
property in land is incompatible with the fundamental right of
each individual to live and to own the product of his labor.
But positive ethical science knows nothing of natural and funda-
mental rights : it knows nothing of individual liberty, nothing of
equality, nothing of underlying unity. Yet here again our loss
has some redress ; for a brief survey will assure us that various
schools of moral philosophy, differing in their characteristic
first principles, are converging in the justification of Socialism ;
and that the practical judgments of contemporary mankind as
to what sort of conduct is " moral", and what conditions make
for the increase of " common morality ", are in practice largely
coincident. They offer, at least, a body of provisional opinion,
or prejudice, to which we can appeal in presenting Socialism
for criticism of its morality. The tribunal is by no means in-
fallible : still, the common contemporary sense of humanity
may count for something. But in approaching the criticism
of Socialism from the point of view of ethics, we are bound to go
a little deeper than this. While accepting the phenomena of
current opinion on morality as part of our material, we must
follow the explorations of ethical speculation into the causes and
history of the development of those opinions. By examining
the genesis of convictions that this or that kind of action is good

MORAL. 105

or bad, moral or immoral, we shall be helped to form a judgment
as to which appears likely to persist and be strengthened, and
which to be modified, weakened, or forgotten. If the claim of
Socialism rests on judgments of the latter class, we may know
that it is a moribund bantling ; if they preponderate among
the obstacles to its credit, we may prophesy encouragingly of
it ; if it is supported by those judgments whose persistence
seems essential to the survival of the individual and of society,
we may be assured of its realisation in the future.

Socialism appears as the offspring of Individualism, as the
outcome of individualist struggle, and as the necessary con-
dition for the approach to the Individualist ideal. The oppo-
sition commonly assumed in contrasting the two is an accident
of the now habitual confusion between personality and person-
alty, between a man's life and the abundance of things that he
has. Socialism is merely Individualism rationalised, organised,
clothed, and in its right mind. Socialism is taking form in
advanced societies ; and the social revolution must be brought
to its formal accomplishment through the conscious action of
innumerable individuals seeking an avenue to rational and
pleasant existence for themselves and for those whose happiness
and freedom they desire as they do their own. All conscious
action, all conscious modification of conditions, is inspired by
the desire of such personal relief, satisfaction, or expression,
by the attempt to escape from some physical or intellectual
distress. " Subjective volition, passion it is ", says Hegel,
" that sets men in activity : men will not interest themselves
for anything unless they find their individuality gratified by its
attainment ". This common end, this desire of personal relief
or satisfaction, we see throughout recorded or indicated history
impelling every living creature on the earth ; merging itself,
as we trace it backwards, in the mere apparent will to live of
organisms not recognised as conscious, and in the indestructible
energy of the inorganic. The field of activity thus conceived
presents - a panorama of somewhat large extent ; but a very
small division of it is all that we shall have to do with. For
morality, whatever be its nature and basis, certainly does not
become recognisable to us, we cannot attribute the quality of

106 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

Tightness or wrongness, until the formation of society has begun,
until individuals are in conscious relation with individuals other
than themselves.

If we could imagine an individual absolutely isolated, and
having no relation at all with other sentient beings, we could
not say that it was moral or immoral for him to eat, drink,,
sleep, breathe, wash himself, take exercise, cough, sneeze, and
the like, just as much or as little, when or where he felt inclined.
His conduct in these activities must appear to us absolutely
indifferent. We may have some vague reflected suppositions^
as to what is necessary for the dignity and development of the
man's "self", as we might call it ; but this is a matter about
which the man may pretend to know as much as we do ; and
we have really no valid ground for prejudice against the habits
of the recluse Indian fakir, who has, on the other hand, con-
siderable claims to be regarded as a peculiarly holy individual.
But of every man living in society we can say, that if he starves-
himself into inefficiency ; if he gorges or fuddles himself ; if he
sleeps unseasonably ; if he abstains from the fresh air, the
cleanliness, and the exercise, necessary to keep his body healthy
and his presence pleasant ; if he destroys his powers by over-
work; then he is acting wrongly, immorally, unreasonably, in
extreme cases insanely. (Insanity is only the name we give to
abnormal deviation from what are accepted as reasonable and
intelligible desires and behavior.) And if this is the case with
actions of the kind loosely described as self-regarding, with those
which most nearly concern the agent's own person, much more
is it so with the kind of actions which necessarily and invariably
affect other persons. Those relations of the individual with his
fellows in which subjective morality is chiefly recognised, have
no existence at all apart from society. Subjective morality,
then, being only distinguishable in the State, the extent of our
panorama is already much diminished ; for in every gentile or
national society, and to some degree in the World-State of to-day,.
we find the individualist activity, the desire and passion of the
human unit, very largely exercising itself in accordance with
what we call a moral habit. Innumerable types of society have
been formed in the process of life-development. In the oldest

MORAL. 107

of these we recognise the elements of a conventional morality,
similar to that by which our own human society is held together.
We consider the ways of the ant ; and we see that they are wise.

We find that in all societies those actions and habits are
approved as moral which tend to preserve the existence of
society and the cohesion and convenience of its members ; and
that those which are or seem to be fraught with contrary
tendencies are considered immoral. It is plain that no society
in which these judgments were habitually reversed could con-
tinue in existence ; and this fact will account for much
of that general inherited disposition to actions socially bene-
ficial, and inherited repugnance to those presumably the
reverse, which form so large a part of what we speak of as
conscience. So deep in grain have many of these common
judgments come to be that their influence has passed out of
consciousness ; and they are obeyed automatically or instinct-
ively without any reflexion as to their moral aspect arising
in the agent's mind. It is, for example, so necessary for the
existence of society that the citizen should abstain from
slaughtering at large, such self-restraint is so evidently reason-
able, its non-observance so contrary to common sense, that
when we find a murder done for mere desire of bloodshed and
under the impulse of no other passion whatsoever, we do not
think of the murderer as immoral, but rather as insane, judging
the man who would destroy the life of society as coroners'
juries by their habitual verdict upon suicides pronounce of the
man who destroys his own.

Most of the habits of activity and avoidance, necessary for
the mere physical existence of the individual as moral actions
and abstentions are necessary for the existence of society, have
long ago become automatic, and are sunk, so far as common
opinion is concerned, permanently out of the purview of moral
criticism. All the involuntary functions of the human body
which conduce to its nutrition and maintenance in health have
been gradually acquired in the course of ages on the conditions
necessary for the expression of the mere animal will to live the
largest and freest life permitted by the physical environment.
And as the bodily form and functions of the typical individual

io8 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

of each species have accrued and become established as the
indispensable mechanic of the mere determination to exist,
so the form and institutions of society, and the relations and
mutual behavior of its individuals, have been adjusted and
established as the equally indispensable conditions for the
expression of the determination to exist more fully, for the
enlargement of freedom and opportunity for the gratification
of those passions and aspirations, the display of those energies
and activities which characterise the more complex forms of
life as it passes from the inorganic and vegetative to the
conscious and self-conscious stages of its evolution.

The primitive forms of human society we must infer to have
grown up and survived simply because they increased the
efficiency of man as a feeding and a fighting animal, just as
did those of the wolf, the beaver, and the ant. Society has now
grown to be for man the indispensable guarantee not only of
nutrition and protection, but of the opportunity to imagine and
attain a thousand varieties of more refined satisfaction. So far
as man has attained freedom to do and be as he desires, he has
attained it only through the evolution of society. When a society
perishes, as societies organically weak among stronger competitors
have done and will do, the individual perishes with it, or is forced
backwards with impaired freedom until a fresh social integration
renews and extends his powers of self-development. Societies,
as has been pointed out by Sidney Webb on page 58, must safe-
guard their existence to-day for the very same reasons for which
society has formed itself. It has grown up for the convenience
of individuals, for their defence and relief under the pressure of
all that was not themselves — of Nature, as we call it — beasts,
and competing men, to give a little breathing space, a little
elbow room, amid the storm and stress of primaeval existence ;
and from that beginning it has been unfolded and elaborated,
each step of progress effected for the convenience of active
individuals, until the individual of to-day is born as a leaf upon
a. mighty tree, or a coral insect in a sponge, himself to live his
individual life, and in living it to modify the social organism in
which he has his being.

Reviewing the development in society of the conditions for

MORAL. 109

the satisfaction of the individual will to live, and to live in the
best way conceivable, we see in the progress of moral ideas the
progress of discover)- of the most reasonable manner of ordering
the life of the individual and the form of social institutions
under the contemporary environment. It has already been
pointed out that some kinds of anti-social action are so
unreasonable, so obviously prejudicial to the attainment of
the common end of conscious individuals, that we brand them
unhesitatingly as insane. Instances suggested were extreme
personal uncleanliness or dissipation, and extreme cruelty or
blood-thirstiness. The reason why other anti-social or indirectly
suicidal kinds of action are not yet classed as madness, though
there is a steady tendency towards so treating them, is plainly
that some activities of the individual, though hurtful to other
citizens just as the activity of a pack of wolves or a predatory
tribe is hurtful to adjacent societies, are commonly aimed at
gratifying impulses and passions which are not yet grown so
rare as blood-thirst, are not yet recognized as irrational or
valueless, or even are acknowledged to be in their proper scope
harmless, desirable, or necessary.

It is an established social convention (in England) that it is
immoral to steal or to defraud. Only in very extreme cases
do we account these pursuits as evidences of mania ; for though
injustice and dishonesty are incompatible with the health of
society, and thus actually unreasonable and indirectly suicidal,
the desires which prompt men to them are only at worst
exaggerations of the desire for wealth or subsistence, which
everyone recognizes as a necessary condition of the mere con-
tinuance of life. Nay, where the alternative is death for lack of
subsistence, many consider that neither are immoral. At the
other extreme, when the instinct prompts aggression in defiance
of the conscious reason and without assignable purpose of gain,
when Jean Valjean robs the little Savoyard, or a noble earl
pockets the sugar-tongs, we speak of mental aberration or of
kleptomania.

The case of self-defence is similar. Quarrelsomeness and
violence are destructive of social existence, or at best impede its
higher elaboration. But readiness of resentment and quickness

no THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

of fist were for ages and ages necessities for individual survival ;
and for ages and ages more their kindred social qualities of
spirit and valor were necessary for social survival, and accord-
ingly ranked as virtues. The instruction to turn the other
cheek to the smiter is even now, perhaps, an exaggeration of
the precept commendable to Socialists when charged by the
London police : to suffer oneself to be killed without reason
is clearly and unmistakeably immoral. As the western world
advances out of warfare into industry, more and more of what
was once military virtue becomes immorality in the individual ;
until an habitual ferocity which might once have qualified its
subject for chieftainship may nowadays consign him to penal
servitude or Bedlam.

The foregoing illustrations have been treated, for the
present purpose, with reference only to the effect of the be-
havior of the individual upon society. It is indeed certain
that anti-social action does not, as a rule, effect permanent
satisfaction for the individual, (isolated instances, of the type
of Shelley's Count Cenci, notwithstanding) ; but, independently
of this, the actions and propensities of the individual have
always, it appears, been judged by his fellows moral or
immoral chiefly according to their supposed effects upon
society. The object of every living creature being to do as
he pleases, if what he pleases to do incommodes other people
they will take measures to restrain him from doing it. This
they strive to effect by means of laws and conventional codes of
morality, the main difference between the two being that the
code of law is enforced by the infliction of direct personal
punishment by officers of the State. This acceptance of codes
of laws and conventions of morality leads to a secondary series
of judgments as to right and wrong ; for it comes to be
accounted immoral to break the law whether the law itself
be good or not, and reprehensible to depart from convention
whether convention be any longer reasonable or not. This
secondary morality is as it were the bud-sheath of the indi-
vidual, whose support he cannot dispense with until he has
come to his full powers, but which he must dispense with if
he is to fully realise his own freedom. Customary morality

MORAL. in

prevents him during the process of his education from pursuing
his own satisfaction across the corns of his fellow creatures.
In the process of education he learns that for the unit in
society the word self includes more than the individual : the
infant very soon finds out that what disagrees with his mother
disagrees with him ; the child, that the failure of his father's
income means misery and hunger to the family. To say
nothing of the facts of sympathy, every man born into an
advanced society is early made aware that the satisfaction of
his mere material needs depends upon the activities of that
society around him quite as much as upon his own. All through
the growth of .nations and societies the complexity of this
interdependence of individuals has increased, the areas of social
consciousness have been extended and unified, from the solitary
cave-dweller to the family or horde, from the tribe to the nation,
and from the nation, by commerce, to the world, till the fortunes
of each people have power over the hopes and fears of
workers in every other, and the arts, the learning, and the
literature of a hundred painful civilizations are available for
us to-day, all the kingdoms of the earth and their glory dis-
played in a moment of time.

But not by bread alone does mankind live. Very early in
the course of human evolution must the type of individual to
whom all society was repugnant have been eliminated and
suppressed by natural selection. The social instinct, the dis-
position to find comfort in comradeship independently of its
material advantages, is of such evident antiquity in Man that
we are justified in speaking of it as one of his fundamental
and elementary characteristics. It is easy enough to suggest
theories of the origin of this adhesiveness, this affection, this
sympathy, in the conditions of racial survival : the important
fact for us is its remarkable susceptibility of cultivation and
extension. The individual in society does that which is pleasant
to his friends, and abstains from doing that which is unpleasant,
not because he likes to be thought a good fellow, or expects
benefits in return, but simply because it gives him immediate
pleasure so to act. He is sensitive to that which hurts them,
not because he fears that his own defences are weakened by

ii2 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

their injury, but because they have actually become part of
himself by the extension of his consciousness over them. This
social instinct, this disposition to benevolent sympathy, appears
almost as inextinguishable as the personal desire of life : in
innumerable instances it has proved far stronger.

The recognition by each individual of his dependence
on society or sensitiveness to his own interest, and his affection
towards society: sensitiveness to its interest or these two
faces of the same fact represent an intricate tissue of social
consciousness extremely sensitive to all kinds of anti-social,
or immoral, action. The moral education of the individual
appears formally as the process of learning, by sheer extension
of knowledge and experience, and nothing else, how he may
harmonise and follow out his own desires in these two aspects
and their combinations. He has to learn how to provide for
the needs of his bodily life in a manner that will not interfere
with the freedom of others to do the same. Laws and con-
ventions of morality guide him at first in this respect ; but the
man cannot be said to be free until he acts morally because,
foreseeing that on the satisfaction of these primary needs new
desires will emerge whose satisfaction will give him a more
exquisite contentment, he perceives that it is reasonable so to act.
Tha existence and stability of society are the indispensable
guarantee for the general satisfaction of the primary desires of
individuals, therefore it is unreasonable to weaken society by
immoral action ; but much more are the existence and health of
society indispensable conditions for the common birth and satis-
faction of the secondary desires, the desires which have created
all that is most valuable in civilization and which find their
satisfaction in art, in culture, in human intercourse, in love.
The moral education of the individual is the lesson, not that
desire is evil, and that he can only attain his freedom by ceasing
to desire, for this is death, or desertion, and the army of the
living presses on to fuller life ; but that the wider, fuller satis-
faction is built upon the simpler, and common morality a
condition of its possibility ; that there are certain manners and
methods in which, if he goes about to save his life, he most
infallibly will lose it; and that love, the social instinct, and

MORAL. 113

science, which is ordered knowledge, are his only reliable tutors
in practical morality.

But man in society not only lives his individual life : he also
modifies the form of social institutions in the direction indicated
by reason — in such a manner, that is, as it seems to his under-
standing will render them more efficient for securing freedom
for that life of his. And just as certain forms of individual
activity, in their passage into and through the field of positive
criticism, appear first as indifferent, because they seem to
concern the individual only, then as moral or immoral, because
recognized as affecting society, later as simply rational or
insane, morality having here formally attained its identification
with reason and immorality with folly, and at last become
habitual, instinctive, and unconscious ; so institutions, originating
in modes apparently accidental, come to be recognized as useful
and valuable additions to the machinery of existence, are
buttressed with all the authority and sanction of religion, and
finally pass into unquestioned acceptance by the common-sense
of men. In time some fundamental change in the conditions of
the life of individuals is introduced by causes similarly unfore-
seen : the form of the old institution ceases to subserve the
common end : it begins to cramp the freedom of the majority,
who no longer require its support. Meanwhile it has established
a minority, ostensibly controlling it for the common weal, in a
position to administer it in the sole interest of their class. These,
as their existence appears dependent on their so administering
it, cannot be untaught the habit except by such modification of
the institution as will render it again impossible for any class to
have a special interest in its contemporary form.

This process is so familiar in history that it would be a
waste of time here to illustrate it by tracing it in the growth
of monarchies, aristocracies, priesthoods, chattel slavery, feudal
bondage, representative government, or others of its in-
numerable manifestations. The institution of private pro-
perty in certain things is in many respects so reasonable and
convenient for the majority of mankind, and was so conspicu-
ously advantageous for those stronger individuals under whose
leadership the beginnings of tribal civilisations were developed,

ii4 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

that very early in their history it received the sanction of moral
convention, religion, and law. It was obviously necessary for
the establishment of industrial society that each man should
own the product of his labor and the tools necessary for him
to labor effectually. But the Industrial Revolution described
in the third paper of this series has entirely changed the
conditions under which men produce wealth, and the character
of the tools with which they work, while the sanctions of
law and conventional morality still cling to all that has been
imported under the old definition of property. If the idea
so constantly appealed to in justification of property law is
to be realised ; if the fruits of each man's labor1 are to be
guaranteed to him and he is to own the instruments with which
he works ; if the laws of property are not to establish a parasitic
class taking tribute from the labor of others in the forms of
Rent and Interest, then we must modify our administration of
property. We must admit that as the agricultural laborer
cannot individually own the farm he works on and its stock,
as the factory hand cannot individually own the mill, land
and industrial capital are things in which private property is
impossible except on condition of a small minority owning all
such property and the great majority none at all.

Socialists contend that this system of private property in
land and capital is actively destructive of the conditions in which
alone the common morality necessary for happy social life is
possible. Without any demand upon the faith of those persons
who deny the capacity of average human nature for the tem-
perance and kindliness indispensable for the success of a true
co-operative commonwealth, they assert that this modern de-
velopment of the property system (a development of the last few
generations only, and unprecedented in the history of the world)
is more and more forcing the individual into anti-social dis-
position and action, and thereby destroying the promise of free
and full existence which only the health and progressive
development of the social organism can give him. It has

1 To the intelligent Socialist this phrase has, of course, no meaning. But
against the non-Socialist who employs it it may be legitimately used, ad
ceptandum.

MORAL.

IJ5

become plainly reasonable that when this is the effect of our
property system we should modify our institutions in the
direction which will give us freedom, just as we modified the
institutions which subjected us to a feudal aristocracy, and
abolished for ever the laws which enabled one man to hold
another as his chattel slave.

There is on record a Greek proverb, that so soon as a man
has ensured a livelihood, then he should begin to practise
virtue. We all protest that he will do well to practise virtue
under any circumstances ; but we admit on reflexion that our
judgment as to what is virtuous action depends upon the
circumstances under which action is to be taken. Whether we
approve the killing of one man by another depends entirely on
the circumstances of the case ; and there is scarcely one of the
acts which our laws regard as criminal, which could not, under
imaginable circumstances, be justified. Our laws, and our con-
ventional opinions as to what conduct is moral or immoral, are
adapted to the ordinary circumstances of the average man in
society, society being in them presumed to be homogeneous, not
to contain in itself essential distinctions between classes, or
great contrasts between the conditions of individuals.

But that element in our private property system which is
at present the main object of the Socialist attack, the individual
ownership of the instruments of production, land and capital,
in an age when the use of those instruments has become
co-operative, results, and must inevitably result, as the foregoing
dissertations have sought to prove, in the division of society into
two classes, whose very livelihood is ensured to them by
methods essentially different. The livelihood of the typical
proletarian is earned by the exercise of his faculties for useful
activity: the livelihood of the typical capitalist, or owner of
property, is obtained, without any contribution of his or her
activity, in the form of a pension called rent, interest, or divi-
dend, guaranteed by law out of the wealth produced from day
to day by the activities of the proletariat.

Observe the effect of this distinction in moral phenomena.
Most of our common opinions as to social morality are
adapted to a society in which every citizen is contributing

I 2

n6 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

active service. The most ancient and universal judgments of
mankind as to the virtues of industry, of honesty, of loyalty and
forbearance between man and man, of temperance, fortitude
and just dealing, point to the elementary conditions necessary
for the survival and strengthening of societies of equal and free
individuals dependent for their subsistence upon the exercise of
each one's abilities, and upon his fitness for co-operation with
his fellows. But where a class or society exists, not dependent
upon its own industry, but feeding like a parasite upon another
society or class ; when the individuals of such a parasitic
society in no way depend for their livelihood or their freedom
upon their fitness for co-operation one with another among
themselves, or upon any personal relation with the class that
feeds them ; then the observation of the moral conventions of
industrial and co-operative societies is in many respects quite
unnecessary for the continuance of the life of the parasitic
society, or for the pleasant existence of the individuals com-
posing it. All that is necessary is that the established laws
and conventions should continue to be observed by the in-
dustrial class ("it is required in stewards that a man be found
faithful") ; and as the existence of the propertied class in modern
societies does depend ultimately upon the observance by the
bulk of the people of this conventional morality, the propertied
class professes publicly to venerate and observe conventions
which in its private practice it has long admitted to be obsolete.
This complication is a perennial source of cant. To this we
owe the spectacle of Sir William Harcourt advocating total
abstinence, of Mr. Arthur Balfour commending Christianity ; to
this the continual inculcation of industry and thrift by idle and
extravagant people, with many another edifying variation on the
theme of Satan's reproval of sin. Temperance, Christian
morality, industry, and economy are of considerable social
utility ; but for the members of a propertied class they are not
necessitated by the conditions of its existence, and consequently
in such classes are neither observed nor commonly made the
subject of moral criticism.

Consider the case of industry alone — of the moral habit of
earning one's subsistence by useful activity. Assuming suste-

MORAL. 117

nance to be guaranteed, there is no obvious and pressing social
necessity for such exertion. No doubt the paradise of the
maid-of-all-work — where she means to do nothing for ever and
ever — is the paradise of an undeveloped intelligence. A society
relieved of the function of providing its own material sustenance
need not relapse into general torpor, though the result is very
commonly that an individual so circumstanced relapses into
uselessness. It will be vain to preach to such an individual
that he will find his fullest satisfaction in honest toil : he will
simply laugh in your face, and go out partridge shooting, hunt-
ing, or yachting, or to Monte Carlo or the Rocky Mountains,
finding in such an exercise of his capacities the keenest
imaginable enjoyment for months in succession. He may feel
no inclination at all to work for the benefit of the people whose
work is supporting him : all that he, like the rest of us, requires
is to find some means of passing his time in an agreeable or
exciting manner. Accordingly, in that section of our nation
which speaks of itself as " society," being indeed a society
separated by economic parasitism from the common mass, we
find that the characteristic activity is the provision of
agreeable and exciting methods of passing time. This being
the end of fashionable society, its code of morality is natu-
rally quite different from the code suitable for industrial
societies. Truthfulness is preached in these as a cardinal
virtue. Lying is of course common enough in all classes,
and is generally immoral ; but in the fashionable world it is
not only a perfectly legitimate means of avoiding an un-
desired visitor, or almost any other unpleasant experience: it
is a positive necessity of conventional politeness and good
manners. It is really harmless here, almost a virtue. To return
to the virtue of industry : though the conventional morality of
the people, necessary for the life of the nation, permeates with
its vibrations this parasitic society which it enfolds; and though
the unfailing contentment which a really intelligent man finds
in social activity keeps a good many of the propertied
class usefully occupied, the actual public opinion of that
class is absolutely in accordance with the conditions of their
life. The clerk in a Government office is congratulated by

n8 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

middle-class acquaintances on his luck in obtaining a berth
where he need do no more work than he chooses ; and it is
habitually assumed that he will choose, like the Trafalgar
Square fountains, to play from ten to four, with an interval for
lunch. That may or may not be an adequate account of his
activities: the significant thing is that such an assumption
should not be considered insulting. But how indignantly will
the very same acquaintances denounce the idleness and un-
trustworthiness of a British working man suspected, in the
service of a private master, of interpreting his time work as
most servants of the public are good humoredly assumed,
without hint of disapproval, to interpret theirs !

This obsolescence of elementary social morality is most
noticeable in women dependent upon incomes from property.
They are doubly removed from the primary conditions of life ;
they are less likely than their men folk to be engaged in any
work of perceptible social utility outside of their own homes ;
and their intellectual education being generally far more im-
perfect, it is only natural that their ideas of morality should be
still more intimately adapted to the conditions of their class,
and less to the general conditions of human society. The angels
of heaven, we have always understood, are exempt from the
apparatus of digestion, and are clothed as freely as the lilies of
the field. In any society where all common needs are so
supplied it would be immoral, surely, because a waste of time,
to work as for a living. Now the universal ideal of capitalism
is that man, being created a little lower than the angels, should
raise himself to their level in this respect by the acquisition of
property, a process pleasantly described as attaining a com-
petence or independence, that is to say the right to be dependent
and incompetent. The result of this has been a prejudice,
which only within quite recent years has begun to be seriously
shaken, that it is humiliating, even disgraceful, for a lady to
have to earn her own living at all, for a gentleman to practise a
handicraft for money, for a nobleman to go into trade : a
prejudice for which, in a class society, there was much justifi-
cation, but which is obviously a fragment of class morality
directly antagonistic to the common social morality which

MORAL. 119

recognises all useful industry as praiseworthy. It is now yield-
ing to economic pressure and to the stimulus of the desire to
get rich. Ladies are being driven, and in spite of Mr. Walter
Besant's protestations will continue to be driven, into most
of the female handicrafts, though some are still outside the
pale of respectability. Ranching in America, though not yet
drovering and butchering in England, is suitable occupation
for the aristocracy. The " directing" of companies and the
patronizing of nitrogenous Volunteer Colonels are legitimate
modes of exploiting of a title. The prejudice against usefu
employments is balanced for decency's sake by a hypocritical
laudation of useless ones. The fiction so dear to the Primrose
Dame, that the rich are the employers of the poor, the idlers
the supporters of the industrious, takes nowadays forms more
insidious than the rugged proposition that private vices are
public benefits. The amusements, the purely recreational
activities, of country gentlemen are glorified in the National
Review1 as " hard work". It is pretended that the leisured
class is the indispensable patron and promoter of culture and
the fine arts. The claim that such functions are virtues is a
direct concession to the feeling that some effort must be made
to exhibit the practices of parasitic society as compatible with
its preaching of the common social morality.

The same necessity causes an exaggerated tribute of
praise to be paid to such really useful work as is done under
no compulsion but that of the social instinct. This kind
of activity is habitually pointed to, by the friends of those
who are engaged in it, as evidence of extraordinary virtue,
A few hours of attention every week to the condition of
the poor, a few gratuitously devoted to local administration,
a habit of industry in any branch of literature or science :
these are imputed as an excess of righteousness by persons who
denounce the wage laborer as an idler and a shirk. Such
activity is work of supererogation, approved but not required or
expected. The motto of " noblesse oblige " has not been
adopted by the plutocracy. Similar approbation and admiration

1 See National Review for February, 1888, " Are Rich Landowners Idle ? "
by Lady Janette Manners (now Duchess of Rutland).

120 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

are extended to those who, while already earning their living
by a reasonable days' work, employ their spare time, or a part
of it, in gratuitous activities of the kinds referred to. It may be
safely said that by far the greater portion of this kind of work
is done by people who are simultaneously earning an income in
middle class professions or by the less exhausting forms of
wage labor. Most of them have probably had experience of the
ridiculous inappropriateness of the commendation usually paid
to their gratuitous energy by well-to-do friends. The activity is
moral, no doubt ; but its exercise gives no sensation of virtue
or praiseworthiness : it is followed because it is seen to be
reasonable, because it is the path indicated by common sense
towards the satisfaction of the individual passion for the exten-
sion of freedom and love.

The phenomena of class morality are ancient and familiar
enough. They have varied throughout history with the
changing character of the basis of class distinctions. The great
permanent distinction of sex, and the social relations between
man and woman which have arisen thereout in the period of
civilisation from which the world is now emerging, have
resulted not only in the establishment of distinct codes of
chastity for the sexes, but also in innumerable prejudices
against the participation of one sex or the other in activities
having nothing whatever to do with physiological distinction.
They have even succeeded in producing, through inequality of
freedom and education, well marked differences in mental
habit, which show themselves continually when men and women
are confronted with the same questions of truthfulness, honor,
or logic. It is hardly necessary to observe that most of these
differences are distinctly traceable to the institution of private
property, and to its concentration in the hands of the male as
the stronger individual in a competitive society. The class
moralities of societies whose orders have been based immedi-
ately on status or caste have formed the subject of an extensive
literature. The tracing of all such distinctions to their root in
economic circumstances is scarcely less interesting than the
investigation of the same foundation for sex morality. But
even the interpreters of the Church Catechism have abandoned

MORAL. 121

the appeal to status as the basis of duty ; the idea of hereditary
aristocracy is dead ; and class distinctions and their appurtenant
-ethics are now founded directly and obviously on property.

We have glanced at some effects of our present property
system which work continually for the destruction of the
traditions of social morality in the capitalist class. The funda-
mental idea of that system, that man can live without working,
•as the angels of heaven, is (fortunately) self-contradictory in
this respect, that in human society no class can so live except
by the double labor of another class or classes. The would-be
angelic society on earth must either own chattel slaves, or be a
military caste taking tribute, or a parasitical and exploiting
-class extracting rent and interest by the operation of the
industrial system analysed in the preceding papers. Such
-a class and such a system are, as we are all becoming aware,
more virulently revolutionary in their operation, and more
•certain to bring about their own destruction than either chattel
slavery or feudalism. Of these three phases of human injustice
that of wage slavery will surely be the shortest. But meanwhile
the propertied class assumes to represent civilisation ; its approved
morality is preached and taught in church and schools; it
debases our public opinion ; and it directly poisons all that host
of workers who are at present hangers-on of the rich, whether
as menial servants or as ministering to their especial amuse-
ments and extravagance. There is no such snob as a fashion-
able dressmaker; and there is no class of the proletariat so
dehumanised as the class of domestic servants.

Now if these results are effected in the class whose livelihood
is assured, and whose education and culture have given it a hold
on the higher inducements to morality — if we here find morality
strangled at the root and starving, what shall we find when we
turn to the masses whose livelihood is not assured them ? Our
Greek, perhaps, would say that it was impossible for them to
practise virtue, just as Plato in his " Republic " suggested that
only the philosophic class could be really moral, since slaves and
the proletariat could not receive the intellectual education
necessary to train the reason. The great bulk of the wage
earning class in modern civilised countries is so far assured

122 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

of its livelihood that it remains thoroughly permeated with
common social morality. It is, from habit and preference,
generally industrious and kindly, thus exhibiting the two most
important qualifications for the social life. It remains to a great
extent honest, though competition and capitalism are directly
antagonistic to honesty. The decalogue of commercial morality
has its own peculiar interpretation of stealing, murder, false
witness and coveting ; and yet the most unscrupulous wrecker
in the City will be outraged in his finest feelings by the class
morality of the plumber, who, called in to bring the gas
to reason, takes the opportunity to disorganise the water-
supply and introduce a duster into the drain. The employer
is aghast at the increase of idleness and bad workmanship under
a system in which the good workman knows that to work his
best will not only not be worth his while but will lead to the
exaction of heavier tasks from his fellows.

But it is not in the mass of the proletariat that the action of
our property system in destroying elementary morality is most
conspicuous. It is in those whom it excludes even from
the proletariat proper that this extreme result is clearest.
The characteristic operation of the modern industrial economy
is continually and repeatedly to thrust out individuals or
bodies of the workers from their settlement in the social
organism — to eject, as it were, the coral insect from the cell
in which he is developing. The capitalist farming system
expels the agricultural laborer from the village : the machine
expels the craftsman from the ranks of skilled labor : the per-
petual competition and consolidation of capital in every trade
alternately destroys employment in that trade and disorganises
others. Overproduction in one year leaves thousands of workers
wageless in the next. The ranks of unskilled labor, the army
of the unemployed, are day by day recruited in these fashions.
An inveterate social habit, an almost indestructible patience,
a tenacious identification of his own desire with the desire of
those whom he loves, in most cases preserve the worker from
accepting the sentence of exclusion from society. If he is able-
bodied, intelligent and fortunate, he will struggle with hard
times till he finds fresh occupation among strange surroundings ;

MORAL. 123

but woe to him if he be weakly, or old, or unpractical. In such
a case he will almost infallibly become a pauper or an outcast,
one of that residuum of unskilled, unemployed, unprofitable and
hopeless human beings which in all great cities festers about the
base of the social pyramid. And his children will become the
street Arabs and the corner-boys and the child-whores and the
sneak-thieves who, when they come of age, accept their position
as outside of social life and resume the existence of the wild
beasts that fathered man — the purely predatory and unsocial
activity of harrying their neighbors for their own support-
Before society was, morality was not : those who have no part
nor lot in the ends for which society exists will adapt their
morality to suit their outcast state : there will indeed be honor
among thieves, just as there will be cant and insincerity among
the parasitic rich ; but the youth who has been nurtured between
the reformatory and the slum has little chance of finding a
foothold, if he would, in the restless whirl of modern industry,
and still less of retaining permanently such foothold as he may
manage to find.

When the conditions of social life are such that the in-
dividual may be excluded through no unfitness of his own for
co-operation, or may be born without a chance of acquiring
fitness for it, we are brought face to face with the conditions of
primitive ages. And if you force him back upon the elemental
instincts, one of two things will happen. Either, if the indi-
vidual is weak through physical deterioration or incapacity to
combine with his fellow outcasts, he will be crushed and killed
by society and putrefy about its holy places; or, if he has
indomitable life and vigor, he will revert to the argument of
elemental forces : he will turn and explode society. Here, then,
we should fear explosion, for we are not as submissive in
extremities as the proletariats of arrested Indian civilisations..
But with us the class whose freedom is incessantly threatened
by the operation of private capitalism is the class which by its
political position holds in its hands the key to the control of
industrial form : that is to say, its members can modify, as soon
as they elect to, the laws of property and inheritance in this*
State of Britain. They can, as soon as they see clearly what is-

i24 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

needed, supersede institutions now immoral because useless
and mischievous by institutions which shall re-establish the
-elementary conditions of social existence and the possibility of
the corresponding morality — namely, the opportunity for each
individual to earn his living and the compulsion upon him to
do so.

Returning from the consideration of the " residuum " and the
u criminal classes", we find that even the workers of the em-
ployed proletariat are by no means wholly moral. In spite of
the massive healthiness of their behavior in ordinary relations,
they are generally coarse in their habits ; they lack intelligence
in their amusements and refinement in their tastes. The worst
result of this is the popularity of boozing and gambling and
allied forms of excitement, with their outcomes in violence and
meanness. But when once society has ensured for man the
opportunity for satisfying his primary needs — once it has
ensured him a healthy body and a wholesome life, his advance
in the refinements of social morality, in the conception and
satisfaction of his secondary and more distinctly human desires,
is solely and entirely a matter of education. This will be
attested by every man and woman who has at all passed
through the primary to the secondary passions. But education
in the sense alluded to is impossible for the lad who leaves
school at fourteen and works himself weary six days in the week
ever afterwards.

The oldest socialistic institution of considerable importance
and extent is the now decrepit Catholic Church. The Catholic
Church has always insisted on the duty of helping the poor,
not on the ground of the social danger of a " residuum ", but
by the nobler appeal to the instinct of human benevolence.
The Catholic Church developed, relatively to the enlightenment
of its age, the widest and freest system of education the world
has ever seen before this century. Catholic Christianity, by
its revolutionary conception that God was incarnated in Man,
exploding the hideous superstition that the imagination of the
thoughts of man's heart was only to do evil continually, and
substituting the faith in the perfectibility of each individual
soul ; by its brilliant and powerful generalisations that God

MORAL. 125

must be Love, because there is nothing better, and that man
is freed from the law by the inward guidance of grace, has done
more for social morality than any other religion of the world.

Protestant Individualism in England shattered the Catholic
Church ; founded the modern land system upon its confiscated
estates ; destroyed the mediaeval machinery of charity and
education ; and in religion rehabilitated the devil, and the
doctrines of original sin and the damnable danger of reason and
good works.

Out of the wreckage of the Catholic Church, and amid the
dissolution of the Protestant religion, there successively emerged,
at an interval of some three hundred years, the two great
socialistic institutions of the Poor Law and the People's Schools.
As the pretence of a foundation of Christian obligation withered
from out of the Poor Law, till it has come to be outspokenly
recognised as nothing but a social safety-valve, the individualist
and commercial administration of this rudimentary socialistic
machinery deprived it of its efficiency even in this elementary
function. He to whom the workhouse means the break up of
his home, and his own condemnation to a drudgery insulting
because useless and wasteful, would as lief take his exclusion
from Society in another and a less degrading way, either by
death, or by reluctant enrolment in the " residuum " ; and so
it has come to pass that outside of their use as hospitals for the
aged and infirm, the poor houses are principally employed as
the club-houses and hotels of the great fraternity of habitual
tramps and cadgers ; and not till he has sunk to this level does
the struggling proletarian seek " work " there.

Socialists would realize the idea of the Poor Law, regarding
that society as deadly sick in which the individual cannot find
subsistence by industry, in the only way in which it can be
realized : namely, by the organization of production and the
resumption of its necessary instruments. It is not so great a
matter in their eyes that the perpetual toll of rent and interest
deprives the workers of the wealth which their activities
produce ; nor is it the actual pressure of this heavy tribute that
would force on the Social Revolution, if the system only left
men the assurance of the comforts of tame beasts. It is the

126 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

constant disquiet and uncertainty, the increasing frequency of
industrial crises, that are the revolutionary preachers of our
age ; and it is the disappearance at the base and at the summit
of society of the conditions of social morality that rouses those
whose mere material interests remain unaffected.

But though it is not envy or resentment at this tribute that
mostly moves us to our warfare, this tribute we must certainly
resume if the ideal of the school is to effect its social purpose.
For the ideal of the school implies, in the first place, leisure to
learn : that is to say, the release of children from all non-
educational labor until mind and physique have had a fair
start and training, and the abolition of compulsion on the
adult to work any more than the socially necessary stint.
The actual expenditure on public education must also be
considerably increased, at any rate until parents are more
generally in a position to instruct their own children. But
as soon as the mind has been trained to appreciate the inex-
haustible interest and beauty of the world, and to distinguish
good literature from bad, the remainder of education, granted
leisure, is a comparatively inexpensive matter. Literature
is become dirt-cheap ; and all the other educational arts can
be communally enjoyed. The schools of the adult are the
journal and the library, social intercourse, fresh air, clean and
beautiful cities, the joy of the fields, the museum, the art-gallery,
the lecture-hall, the drama, and the opera ; and only when
these schools are free and accessible to all will the reproach of
proletarian coarseness be done away.

Yet the most important influence in the repairing of social
morality may perhaps be looked for not so much from the
direct action of these elements of the higher education as from
those very socialist forms of property and industry which we
believe to be the primary condition for allowing such higher
education to affect the majority at all. Nothing so well trains
the individual to identify his life with the life of society as the
identification of the conditions of his material sustenance with
those of his fellows, in short, as industrial co-operation. Not
for many centuries has there been such compulsion as now for
the individual to acknowledge a social ethic. For now, for the

MORAL. 127

first time since the dissolution of the early tribal communisms,
and over areas a hundred times wider than theirs, the individual
worker earns his living, fulfils his most elementary desire, not by
direct personal production, but by an intricate co-operation in
which the effect and value of his personal effort are almost indis-
tinguishable. The apology for individualist appropriation is ex-
ploded by the logic of the facts of communist production : no
man can pretend to claim the fruits of his own labor ; for his
whole ability and opportunity for working are plainly a vast
inheritance and contribution of which he is but a transient and
accidental beneficiary and steward ; and his power of turning
them to his own account depends entirely upon the desires and
needs of other people for his services. The factory system, the
machine industry, the world commerce, have abolished indi-
vidualist production ; and the completion of the co-operative
form towards which the transition stage of individualist
capitalism is hurrying us will render a conformity with social
ethics a universal condition of tolerable existence for the
individual.

This expectation is already justified by the phenomena of
contemporary opinion. The moral ideas appropriate to Social-
ism are permeating the whole of modern society. They
are clearly recognisable not only in the proletariat, but also in
the increasing philanthropic activity of members of the pro-
pertied class, who, while denouncing Socialism as a dangerous
exaggeration of what is necessary for social health, work
honestly enough for alleviatory reforms which converge irre-
sistibly towards it. The form, perhaps, does not outrun the
spirit, any more than the spirit anticipates the form ; and it may
have been sufficient in this paper to have shown some grounds
for the conviction that Socialist morality, like that of all
preceding systems, is only that morality which the conditions
of human existence have made necessary; that it is only the
•expression of the eternal passion of life seeking its satisfaction
through the striving of each individual for the freest and fullest
activity; that Socialism is but a stage in the unending pro-
gression out of the weakness and the ignorance in which society
and the individual alike are born, towards the strength and the

128 THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

enlightenment in which they can see and choose their own way
forward — from the chaos where morality is not to the conscious-
ness which sees that morality is reason ; and to have made some
attempt to justify the claim that the cardinal virtue of Socialism
is nothing else than Common Sense.

THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM.

BY GRAHAM WALLAS.

In the early days of Socialism no one who was not ready with a
complete description of Society as it ought to be, dared come
forward to explain any point in the theory. Each leader had
his own method of organizing property, education, domestic
life, and the production of wealth. Each was quite sure that
mankind had only to fashion themselves after his model in
order, like the prince and princess in the fairy story, to live
happily ever after. Every year would then be like the year
before; and no more history need be written. Even now a
thinker here and there like Gronlund or Bebel sketches in the
old spirit an ideal commonwealth ; though he does so with an
apology for attempting to forecast the unknowable. But
Socialists generally have become, if not wiser than their spiritual
fathers, at least less willing to use their imagination. The
growing recognition, due in part to Darwin, of causation in the
development of individuals and societies ; the struggles and
disappointments of half a century of agitation; the steady
introduction of Socialistic institutions by men who reject
Socialist ideas, all incline us to give up any expectation of a
final and perfect reform. We are more apt to regard the slow
and often unconscious progress of the Time spirit as the only
adequate cause of social progress, and to attempt rather to
discover and proclaim what the future must be, than to form an
organization of men determined to make the future what it
should be.

But the new conception of Socialism has its dangers as well
as the old. Fifty years ago Socialists were tempted to

(13O K2

i32 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

exaggerate the influence of the ideal, to expect everything from
a sudden impossible change of all mens' hearts. Now-a-days
we are tempted to under-value the ideal — to forget that even
the Time Spirit itself is only the sum of individual strivings and
aspirations, and that again and again in history changes which
might have been delayed for centuries or might never have
come at all, have been brought about by the persistent
preaching of some new and higher life, the offspring not of
circumstance but of hope. And of all the subjects upon which
men require to be brought to a right mind and a clear under-
standing, there is, Socialists think, none more vital to-day than
Property.

The word Property has been used in nearly as many senses
as the word Law. The best definition I have met with is John
Austin's " any right which gives to the entitled party such a
power or liberty of using or disposing of the subject .... as
is merely limited generally by the rights of all other persons".1
This applies only to private property. It will be convenient in
discussing the various claims of the State, the municipality,
and the individual, to use the word in a wider sense to denote
not only the "power or liberty" of the individual, but also the
"rights of all other persons". In this sense I shall speak of
the property of the State, or municipality. I shall also draw a
distinction, economic perhaps rather than legal, between pro-
perty in things, or the exclusive right of access to defined
material objects, property in debts and future services, and
property in ideas (copyright and patent right).

The material things in which valuable property rights can
exist, may be roughly divided into means of production
and means of consumption. Among those lowest tribes of
savages who feed on fruit and insects, and build themselves at
night a rough shelter with boughs of trees, there is little distinc-
tion between the acts of production and consumption. But in
a populous and civilised country very few even of the simplest
wants of men are satisfied directly by nature. Nearly every
commodity which man consumes is produced and renewed by
the deliberate application of human industry to material objects.
1 Lectures on Jurisprudence. Lecture XLVIII.

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 133

The general stock of materials on which such industry works is
" Land ". Any materials which have been separated from the
general stock or have been already considerably modified by
industry, are called capital if they are either to be used
to aid production or are still to be worked on before they are
consumed. When they are ready to be consumed they are
" wealth for consumption." Such an analysis, though generally
employed by political economists, is of necessity very rough.
No one can tell whether an object is ready for immediate
consumption or not, unless he knows the way in which it is to
be consumed. A pine forest in its natural condition is ready
for the consumption of a duke with a taste for the picturesque ;
for he will let the trees rot before his eyes. Cotton wool, a
finished product in the hands of a doctor, is raw material in the
hands of a spinner. But still the statement that Socialists
work for the owning of the means of production by the
community and the means of consumption by individuals,
represents fairly enough their practical aim. Not that they
desire to prevent the community from using its property when-
ever it will for direct consumption, as, for instance, when a
piece of common land is used for a public park, or the profits
of municipal waterworks are applied to keep up a municipal
library. Nor do they contemplate any need for preventing
individuals from working at will on their possessions in such a
way as to make them more valuable. Even Gronlund, with all
his hatred of private industry, could not, if he would, prevent
any citizen from driving a profitable trade by manufacturing
bread into buttered toast at the common fire. But men
are as yet more fit for association in production, with
a just distribution of its rewards, than for association in
the consumption of the wealth produced. It is true indeed
that the economies of associated consumption promise to be
quite as great as those of associated production ; and it was of
these that the earlier Socialists mainly thought. They believed
always that if a few hundred persons could be induced to
throw their possessions and earnings into a common stock to be
employed according to a common scheme, a heaven on
earth would be created. Since then, an exhaustive series of

134 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

experiments has proved that in spite of its obvious economy
any system of associated consumption as complete as Fourier's
" Phalanstere " or Owen's " New Hampshire " is, except under
very unusual conditions, distasteful to most men as they now
are. Our picture galleries, parks, workmen's clubs, or the fact
that rich people are beginning to live in flats looked after by a
common staff or servants, do indeed shew that associated
consumption is every year better understood and enjoyed ; but
it remains true that pleasures chosen by the will of the majority
are often not recognised as pleasures at all.

As long as this is so, private property and even private
industry must exist along with public property and public
production. For instance, each family now insists on having a
separate home, and on cooking every day a separate series of
meals in a separate kitchen. Waste and discomfort are the
inevitable result ; but families at present prefer waste and
discomfort to that abundance which can only be bought by
organisation and publicity. Again, English families constitute
at present isolated communistic groups, more or less despotically
governed. Our growing sense of the individual responsibility
and individual rights of wives and children seems already to be
lessening both the isolation of these groups and their internal
coherency ; but this tendency must go very much further before
society can absorb the family life, or the industries of the home
be managed socially. Thus, associated production of all the
means of family life may be developed to a very high degree
before we cease to feel that an Englishman's home should be
his castle, with free entrance and free egress alike forbidden.
It is true that the ground on which houses are built could
immediately become the property of the community ; and when
one remembers how most people in England are now lodged,
it is obvious that they would gladly inhabit comfortable houses
built and owned by the State. But they certainly would at
present insist on having their own crockery and chairs, books
and pictures, and on receiving a certain proportion of the value
they produce in the form of a yearly or weekly income to be
spent or saved as they pleased. Now whatever things of this
kind we allow a man to possess, we must allow him to exchange,

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 135

since exchange never takes place unless both parties believe
themselves to benefit by it. Further, bequest must be allowed,
since any but a moderate probate duty or personalty would,
unless supported by a strong and searching public opinion,
certainly be evaded. Moreover, if we desire the personal
independence of women and children, then their property, as
far as we allow property at all, must for a long time to come be
most carefully guarded.

There would remain therefore to be owned by the com-
munity the land in the widest sense of the word, and the
materials of those forms of production, distribution, and
consumption, which can conveniently be carried on by associa-
tions larger than the family group. Here the main problem is
to fix in each case the area of ownership. In the case of the
principal means of communication and of some forms of
industry, it has been proved that the larger the area
controlled the greater is the efficiency of management; so
hat the postal and railway systems, and probably the materials
of some of the larger industries, would be owned by the English
nation until that distant date when they might pass to the
United States of the British Empire or the Federal Republic
of Europe. Land is perhaps generally better held by
smaller social units. The rent of a town or an agri-
cultural district depends only partly on those natural
advantages which can be easily estimated once for all by an
imperial commissioner. The difference in the rateable value of
Warwick and of Birmingham is due, not so much to the sites of
the two towns, as to the difference in the industry and character
of their inhabitants. If the Birmingham men prefer, on the
average, intense exertion resulting in great material wealth, to
the simpler and quieter life lived at Warwick, it is obviously as
unjust to allow the Warwick men to share equally in the Bir-
mingham ground rents, as it would be to insist on one standard
of comfort being maintained in Paris and in Brittany.

At the same time, those forms of natural wealth which are
the necessities of the whole nation and the monopolies of certain
districts, mines for instance, or harbors, or sources of water-
supply, must be " nationalised ". The salt and coal rings of

136 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

to-day would be equally possible and equally inconvenient
under a system which made the mining populations absolute
joint owners of the mines. Even where the land was absolutely
owned by local bodies, those bodies would still have to
contribute to the national exchequer some proportion of their
income. The actual size of the units would in each case be
fixed by convenience ; and it is very likely that the development
of the County Government Act and of the parochial and
municipal systems will soon provide us with units of govern-
ment which could easily be turned into units of ownership.

The savings of communities — if I may use the word com-
munity to express any Social Democratic unit from the parish
to the nation — would probably take much the same form that
the accumulation of capital takes nowadays : that is to say,
they would consist partly of mills, machinery, railways,
schools, and the other specialised materials of future industry,
and partly of a stock of commodities such as food, clothing,
and money by which workers might be supported while perform-
ing work not immediately remunerative. The savings of
individuals would consist partly of consumable commodities or
of the means of such industry as had not been socialised, and
partly of deferred pay for services rendered to the community,
such pay taking the form of a pension due at a certain age, or
of a sum of commodities or money payable on demand.

Voluntary associations of all kinds, whether joint stock
companies, religious corporations, or communistic groups would,
in the eyes of the Social Democratic State, consist simply of so
many individuals possessing those rights of property which are
allowed to individuals. They might perform many very useful
functions in the future as in the past ; but the history of the
city companies, of the New River company, the Rochdale
Pioneers, or the Church of England shews the danger of
granting perpetual property rights to any association not
co-extensive with the community, although such association
may exist for professedly philanthropic objects. Even in the
case of universities, where the system of independent property-
owning corporations has been found to work best, the rights of
the State should be delegated and not surrendered.

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 137

On this point the economic position of modern Social
Democrats differs widely from the transfigured joint stockism
of the present co-operative movement or from the object
of the earlier Socialists, for whose purposes complete com-
munity was always more important than complete inclusive-
ness. Even Socialist writers of to-day do not always see that
the grouping of the citizens for the purpose of property holding
must be either on the joint stock basis or on the territorial
basis. Gronlund, in spite of contradictory matter in other
parts of his " Co-operative Commonwealth ", still declares
that " each group of workers will have the power of distributing
among themselves the whole exchange value of their work ",
which either means that they will, as long as they are working,
be the absolute joint owners of the materials which they use, or
means nothing at all. Now the proposal that any voluntary
association of citizens should hold absolute and perpetual
property rights in the means of production, seems to be not a
step towards Social Democracy, but a negation of the whole
Social Democratic idea. This of course brings us to the follow-
ing difficulty. If our communities even when originally inclusive
of the whole population are closed: that is, are confined to
original members and their descendants, new comers will form
a class like the plebeians in Rome, or the " metoeci " in Athens,
without a share in the common property though possessed of
full personal freedom ; and such a class must be a continual
social danger. On the other hand, if all newcomers receive at
once full economic rights, then any country in which Socialism
or anything approaching it is established will be at once over-
run by proletarian immigrants from those countries in which the
means of production are still strictly monopolised. If this were
allowed, then, through the operation of the law of diminishing
return and the law of population based on it, the whole body
of the inhabitants even of a Socialist State, might conceivably
be finally brought down to the bare means of subsistence.
It does not seem necessary to conclude that Socialism must
be established over the whole globe if it is to be established
anywhere. What is necessary is that we face the fact, every
day becoming plainer, that any determined attempt to raise

138 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

the condition of the proletariat in any single European country
must be accompanied by a law of aliens considerate enough
to avoid cruelty to refugees, or obstruction to those whose
presence would raise our intellectual or industrial average, but
stringent enough to exclude the unhappy " diluvies gentium "r
the human rubbish which the military empires of the conti-
nent are so ready to shoot upon any open space. Such a
law would be in itself an evil. It might be unfairly ad-
ministered ; it might increase national selfishness and would
probably endanger international good will ; it would require
the drawing of a great many very difficult lines of distinction mt
but no sufficient argument has been yet advanced to disprove
the necessity of it.

On the question of private property in debts, the attitude
of the law in Europe has changed fundamentally in historical
times. Under the old Roman law, the creditor became the
absolute owner of his debtor. Now-a-days, not only may a man
by becoming bankrupt and surrendering all his visible property
repudiate his debts and yet retain his personal liberty ; but in
Factory Acts, Employers' Liability Acts, Irish Land Acts, etc.,
certain contracts are illegal under all circumstances. With the
growth of Socialism, this tendency would be quickened. The
law would look with extreme jealousy upon any agreement
by which one party would be reduced even for a time to a
condition of slavery, or the other enabled to live even for a
time without performing any useful social function. And since
it has been clearly recognized that a certain access to the
means of industry is a first condition of personal freedom, the
law would refuse to recognize any agreement to debar a man
from such access, or deprive him of the results of it. No one
would need to get into debt in order to provide himself with
the opportunity of work, nor would anyone be allowed to give
up the opportunity of work in order to obtain a loan. This,
by making it more difficult for creditors to recover debts,
would also make it more difficult for would-be debtors to
obtain credit. The present homestead law would, in fact, be
extended to include everything which the State thought neces-
sary for a complete life. But as long as private industry and

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 139

exchange go on to such an extent as to make a private
commercial system convenient, so long will promises to pay
circulate, and, if necessary, be legally enforced under the con-
ditions above marked out.

To whatever extent private property is permitted, to that
same extent the private taking of Rent and Interest must be
also permitted. If you allow a selfish man to own a picture
by Raphael, he will lock it up in his own room unless you let
him charge something for the privilege of looking at it. Such
a charge is at once Interest. If we wish all Raphael's pictures
to be freely accessible to everyone, we must prevent men not
merely from exhibiting them for payment, but from owning
them.

This argument applies to other things besides Raphael's
pictures. If we allow a man to own a printing press, or a
plough, or a set of bookbinders' tools, or a lease of a house or
farm, we must allow him so to employ his possession that he
may, without injuring his neighbor, get from it the greatest
possible advantage. Otherwise, seeing that the community
is not responsible for its intelligent use, any interference
on the part of the community may well result in no intelli-
gent use being made of it at all ; in which event all privately
owned materials of industry not actually being used by
their owners would be as entirely wasted as if they were
the subjects of a chancery suit. It is easy to see that
the Duke of Bedford is robbing the community of the rent of
Covent Garden. It is not so easy to see that the owners of
the vacant land adjoining Shaftesbury Avenue have been
robbing the community for some years past of the rent which
ought to have been made out of the sites which they have left
desolate. I know that it has been sometimes said by Socialists :
" Let us allow the manufacturer to keep his mill and the Duke
of Argyle to keep his land, as long as they do not use them for
exploitation by letting them out to others on condition of
receiving a part of the wealth created by those others".
Then, we are told, the manufacturer or Duke will soon discover
that he must work hard for a living. Such sentiments are
seldom ill received by men in the humor to see dukes and

140 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

capitalists earning, as painfully as may be, their daily bread.
Unluckily, there are no unappropriated acres and factory sites
in England sufficiently advantageous to be used as efficient
substitutes for those upon which private property has fastened ;
and the community would be wise if it paid the Duke of Argyle
and Mr. Chamberlain anything short of the full economic rent of
their properties rather than go further and fare worse. There-
fore, if we refused either to allow these gentlemen to let their
property to those who would use it, or hesitated to take it and
use it for ourselves, we should be actually wasting labor. The
progressive socialization of land and capital must proceed by
direct transference of them to the community through taxation
of rent and interest and public organization of labor with the
capital so obtained : not solely by a series of restrictions upon
their use in private exploitation. Such concurrent private
exploitation, however unrestricted, could not in any case bring
back the old evils of capitalism ; for any change in the habits of
the people or in the methods of industry which made associated
production of any commodity on a large scale convenient and
profitable, would result at once in the taking over of that industry
by the State exactly as the same conditions now in America
result at once in the formation of a ring.

It is because full ownership is necessary to the most
intelligent and effective use of any materials, that no mere
system of taxation of Rent and Interest, even when so drastic
as Mr. Henry George's scheme of universal State absentee
landlordism, is likely to exist except as a transition stage
towards Social Democracy. Indeed the anarchist idea which
allows the State to receive Rent and Interest, but forbids it to
employ labor, is obviously impracticable. Unless we are
willing to pay every citizen in hard cash a share of the
State Rent of the future, it, like the taxes of to-day, must be
wholly invested in payments for work done. It would always
be a very serious difficulty for a Socialist legislature to decide
how far communities should be allowed to incur debts or pay
interest. Socialism once established, the chief danger to its
stability would be just at this point. We all know the inept
attack on Socialism which comes from a debating-society

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 141

orator who considers the subject for the first time, or from
the cultured person who has been brought up on the Saturday
Review. He tells us that if property were equally divided
to-morrow, there would be for the next ten years forty men
out of every hundred working extremely hard, and the other
sixty lazy. After that time, the sixty would have to work
hard and keep the forty, who would then be as lazy as the
sixty were before. It is very easy to explain that we do
not want to divide all property equally ; but it is not so easy
to guard against any result of that tendency in human nature
on which the argument is grounded. Men differ so widely in
their comparative appreciation of present and future pleasures,
that wherever life can be supported by four hours' work a
da)', there will always be some men anxious to work eight
hours in order to secure future benefits for themselves or their
children, and others anxious to avoid their four hours work
for the present by pledging themselves or their children to
any degree of future privation. As long as this is so, communi-
ties as well as individuals will be tempted to avail themselves
of the freely offered services of the exceptionally energetic and
farsighted, and to incur a common debt under the excuse that
they are spreading the payment of such services over all those
benefited by them. The Municipalities, Boards of Works,
School Boards, etc., of England have already created enormous
local debts; and unless men grow wiser in the next few
months the new County Councils will probably add to the
burden. As we sit and think, it may seem easy to prevent any
such trouble in the future by a law forbidding communities to
incur debts under any circumstances. But in the case of a
central and supreme government such a law would, of course,
be an absurdity. No nation can escape a national debt or any
other calamity if the majority in that nation desire to submit to
it. It is reassuring to see how the feeling that national govern-
ments should pay their way from year to year grows stronger
and stronger. National debts no longer even in France go up
with the old light-hearted leaps and bounds. But local debts still
increase. In Preston the local debt is said to amount to seven
times the annual rating valuation. And although at present

142 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

(November, 1888), since the "surf at the edge of civilisation"
is only thundering to the extent of three small colonial wars, our
own national debt is slowly going down; still if war were
declared to-morrow with any European State no ministry would
dare to raise all the war expenses by immediate taxation either
on incomes or on property. It may be objected that no such
danger would arise under Socialism ; for there would be no fund
from which a loan could be offered that would not be equally
easily reached by a direct levy. But if we are speaking of society
in the. near future there would certainly be plenty of members of
non-Socialist States, or English holders of property in them,
ready to lend money on good security to a timid or desperate or
dishonest Socialist government. Again, in times of extreme
stress a government might believe itself to require even personal
possessions; and it might be difficult under such circumstances
not to offer to restore them with or without interest. In any
case there would be no more economic difference between the new
fund-holders and the old landlords than between Lord Salisbury
as owner of the Strand district and Lord Salisbury now that he
has sold his slums and bought consols. Perhaps the most
serious danger of the creation of a common debt would arise
from the earnings of exceptional ability. Modern Socialists have
learnt, after a long series of co-operative experiments and
failures, that the profits of private adventure will withdraw men
of exceptional business talent from communal service unless
work of varying scarcity and intensity is paid for at varying
rates. How great this variation need be in order to ensure full
efficiency can only be decided by experience ; and as the
education and moralization of society improves, and industry
becomes so thoroughly socialized that the alternative of private
enterprise will be less practicable, something like equality may
at last be found possible. But, meanwhile, comparatively large
incomes will be earned by men leading busy and useful lives,
but often keenly anxious to secure leisure and comfort for their
old age and aggrandizement for their family.1 I have already

1 Happily, the ordinary anxieties as to the fate of children left without
property, especially weaklings or women unlikely to attract husbands, may be
left out of account in speculations concerning socialized communities.

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 143

suggested that some of the earnings of a man employed by the
community might be left for a time in the common treasury to
accumulate without interest. Now, it would suit both these
men and the lazier of their contemporaries that the reward of
their services should be fixed at a very high rate, and be left to
the next generation for payment ; while the next generation
might prefer a small permanent charge to any attempt to pay
off the capital sum. It is often hinted that one way to obviate
this would be for each generation to cultivate a healthy indiffer-
ence to the debts incurred on its behalf by its forefathers. But
the citizens of each new generation attain citizenship not in
large bodies at long intervals, but in small numbers every week.
One has only to warn sanguine lenders that veiled repudiations
may always be effected in such emergencies by a judicious
application of the Income Tax, and to hope that the progress of
education under Socialism would tend to produce and preserve
on such matters a certain general minimum of common sense.
If this minimum is sufficient to control the central government
the debts of local bodies can be easily and sternly restricted.

Property in services means of course property in future
services. The wealth which past services may have produced
can be exchanged or owned ; but the services themselves cannot.
Now all systems of law which we know have allowed private
persons to contract with each other for the future performance
of certain services, and have punished, or allowed to be punishedt
the breach of such contracts. Here as in the case of debts, our
growing respect for personal liberty has made the law look
jealously on all onerous agreements made either by the citizen
himself or for him by others. In fact, as Professor Sidgwick
points out : "In England hardly any engagement to render
personal service gives the promisee a legal claim to more than
pecuniary damages — to put it otherwise, almost all such con-
tracts, if unfulfilled, turn into mere debts of money so far as
their legal force goes 'V The marriage contract forms the
principal exception to this rule ; but even in this case there
seems to be a tendency in most European countries to relax
the rigidity of the law.

1 " Principles of Political Economy," p. 435.

i44 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

On the other hand the direct claims of the State to the services
of its citizens shew at present no signs of diminishing. Compul-
sory military service and compulsory attendance at school already
take up a not inconsiderable share of the life of every male
inhabitant of France and Germany. So far in England the com-
pulsion of grown men to serve in any capacity has been condemned
for a century past, because it is considered wasteful and oppres-
sive as compared with the free contract system of the open
market. Most English Socialists seem inclined to believe that
all work for the State should be voluntarily engaged and paid
for out of the produce of common industry.

In considering how far the State has a claim upon the services
of its members, we come upon the much larger question — How
far are we working for Socialism ; and how far for Communism ?
Under pure Socialism, to use the word in its narrowest sense,
the State would offer no advantage at all to any citizen except
at a price sufficient to pay all the expenses of producing it. In
this sense the Post Office, for example, is now a purely
Socialistic institution. Under such conditions the State would
have no claim at all on the services of its members; and
compulsion to work would be produced by the fact that if a
man chose not to work he would be in danger of starvation.
Under pure Communism, on the other hand, as defined by Louis
Blanc's dictum : " From every man according to his powers : to
every man according to his wants", the State would satisfy
without stint and without price all the reasonable wants of any
citizen. Our present drinking fountains are examples of the
numerous cases of pure communism which surround us. But
since nothing can be made without labor, the commodities
provided by the State must be produced by the services,
voluntary or forced, of the citizens. Under pure communism, if
any compulsion to work were needed, it would have to be
direct. Some communistic institutions we must have ; and as a
matter of fact there is an increasing number of them already in
England. Indeed, if the whole or any part of that Rent Fund
which is due to the difference between the best and worst
materials of industry in use be taken for the State, by taxation
or otherwise, it, or rather the advantages produced by its

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 145

expenditure, can hardly be distributed otherwise than com-
munistically. For, as men are now, saturated with immoral
principles by our commercial system, the State would have to be
exceedingly careful in deciding what wants could be freely
satisfied without making direct compulsion to labor necessary.
It would cost by no means an impossible sum to supply a
tolerable shelter with a bed, and a sufficient daily portion of
porridge, or bread and cheese, or even of gin and water, to each
citizen ; but no sane man would propose to do so in the existing
state of public morals. For more than a century the proletarians
of Europe have been challenged by their masters to do as little
work as they can. They have been taught by the practical
economists of the Trades Unions, and have learnt for themselves
by bitter experience, that every time any of them in a moment
of ambition or goodwill does one stroke of work not in his
bond, he is increasing the future unpaid labor not only of
himself but of his fellows. At the same time every circum-
stance of monotony, ugliness, and anxiety has made the work as
wearisome and disgusting as possible. All, almost without
exception, now look upon the working day as a period of slavery,
and find such happiness as they can get only in the few hours or
minutes that intervene between work and sleep. For a few, that
happiness consists in added toil of thought and speech in the
cause of themselves and their comrades. The rest care only for
such rough pleasures as are possible to men both poor and
overworked. There would be plenty of excuse if under these
circumstances they dreamt, as they are accused of dreaming, of
some universal division of the good things of the earth — of some
means of being utterly at leisure, if only for a week or two.

But there are products of labor which the workmen in their
time of triumph might freely offer each 'other without causing
the weakest brother to forego any form of useful social
work. Among such products are those ideas which we have
brought under the dominion of private property by means of
copyright and patent right. Luckily for us the dominion is
neither complete nor permanent. If the Whig landlords who
are responsible for most of the details of our glorious constitu-
tion had been also authors and inventors for profit, we should

L

146 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

probably have had the strictest rights of perpetual property
or even of entail in ideas ; and there would now have been a
Duke of Shakspere to whom we should all have had to pay two
or three pounds for the privilege of reading his ancestor's works,
provided that we returned the copy uninjured at the end of a
fortnight. But even for the years during which copyright and
patents now last, the system which allows an author or inventor
a monopoly in his ideas is a stupid and ineffective way either of
paying for his work or of satisfying the public wants. In each
case the author or inventor obtains a maximum nett return by
leaving unsatisfied the wants, certainly of many, probably of
most of those who desire to read his book or use his invention.
We all know that the public got a very good bargain when it
paid the owners of Waterloo Bridge more than they could
possibly have made by any scheme of tolls. In the same way
it is certain that any government which aimed at the greatest
happiness of the greatest number could afford to pay a capable
artist or author possibly even more than he gets from the rich
men who are his present patrons, and certainly more than he
could get by himself selling or exhibiting his productions in a
society where few possessed wealth for which they had not
worked. Although the State could thus afford to pay an
extravagantly large reward for certain forms of intellectual labor,
it does not therefore follow that it would be obliged to do so in
the absence of any other important bidder.

There would always remain the sick, the infirm, and the
school children, whose wants could be satisfied from the general
stock without asking them to bear any part of the general burden.
In particular, it would be well to teach the children by actual
experience the economy and happiness which arise in the case
of those who are fitly trained from association applied to the
direct satisfaction of wants, as well as from association in the
manufacture of material wealth. If we wish to wean the
children from the selfish isolation of the English family, from
the worse than savage habits produced by four generations of
capitalism, from that longing for excitement, and incapacity for
reasonable enjoyment, which are the natural results of work-
days spent in English factories, and English Sundays spent

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 147

in English streets, then we must give freely and generously to
our schools. If this generation were wise it would spend on
education not only more than any other generation has ever
spent before, but more than any generation would ever need to
spend again. It would fill the school buildings with the means
not only of comfort, but even of the higher luxury ; it would
serve the associated meals on tables spread with flowers, in
halls surrounded with beautiful pictures, or even, as John Milton
proposed, filled with the sound of music ; it would seriously
propose to itself the ideal of Ibsen, that every child should be
brought up as a nobleman. Unfortunately, this generation is
not wise.

In considering the degree in which common owning of property

would be possible among a people just at that stage of industrial

and moral development at which we now find ourselves, it is

expedient to dwell, as I have dwelt, rather upon the necessary

difficulties and limitations of Socialism, than upon its hopes of

future development. But we must always remember that the

problems which Socialism attempts to solve, deal with conditions

which themselves are constantly changing. Just as anything

like what we call Socialism would be impossible in a nation of

individualist savages like the Australian blacks, and could not,

perhaps, be introduced except by external authority among a

people like the peasants of Brittany, for whom the prospect of

absolute property in any portion of land, however small, is at

once their strongest pleasure and their only sufficient incentive

to industry ; so among a people further advanced, socially and

industrially, than ourselves, a social condition would be possible

which we do not now dare to work for or even try to realise. The

tentative and limited Social-Democracy which I have sketched

is the necessary and certain step to that better life which we

hope for. The interests which each man has in common with

his fellows tend more and more to outweigh those which are

peculiar to himself. We see the process even now beginning.

Already, as soon as a public library is started, the workman

finds how poor a means for the production of happiness are the

few books on his own shelf, compared with the share he has

in the public collection, though that share may have cost even

l 2

148 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

less to produce. In the same way the score or two of pounds
which a workman may possess are becoming daily of Jess and
less advantage in production ; so that the man who a few years
ago would have worked by himself as a small capitalist, goes
now to work for wages in some great business, and treats his
little savings as a fund to provide for a few months of sickness
or years of old age. He will soon see how poor a means for the
production of food is his own fire when compared with the
public kitchen ; and he will perhaps at last not only get his
clothes from the public store, but the delight of his eyes from
the public galleries and theatres, the delight of his ears from the
public opera, and it may be, when our present anarchy of
opinion be overpast, the refreshment of his mind from the
publicly chosen teacher. Then at last such a life will be
possible for all as not even the richest and most powerful can
live to-day. The system of property holding which we call
Socialism is not in itself such a life any more than a good
system of drainage is health, or the invention of printing is
knowledge. Nor indeed is Socialism the only condition neces-
sary to produce complete human happiness. Under the justest
possible social system we might still have to face all those vices
and diseases which are not the direct result of poverty and
over- work ; we might still suffer all the mental anguish and
bewilderment which are caused, some say by religious belief,
others by religious doubt ; we might still witness outbursts of
national hatred and the degradation and extinction of weaker
peoples ; we might still make earth a hell for every species
except our own. But in the households of the five men out of
six in England who live by weekly wage, Socialism would
indeed be a new birth of happiness. The long hours of work
done as in a convict prison, without interest and without hope ;
the dreary squalor of their homes ; above all that grievous un-
certainty, that constant apprehension of undeserved misfortune
which is the peculiar result of capitalist production : all this
would be gone ; and education, refinement, leisure, the very
thought of which now maddens them, would be part of their
daily life. Socialism hangs above them as the crown hung in
Bunyan's story above the man raking the muck heap — ready for

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. 149

them if they will but lift their eyes. And even to the few who
seem to escape and even profit by the misery of our century,
Socialism offers a new and nobler life, when full sympathy with
those about them, springing from full knowledge of their condition,
shall be a source of happiness, and not, as now, of constant
sorrow — when it shall no longer seem either folly or hypocrisy
for a man to work openly for his highest ideal. To them
belongs the privilege that for each one of them the revolution
may begin as soon as he is ready to pay the price. They can
live as simply as the equal rights of their fellows require : they
can justify their lives by work in the noblest of all causes. For
their reward, if they desire any, they, like the rest, must wait.

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM.

BY ANNIE BESANT.

There are two ways in which a scheme for a future organisa-
tion of industry may be constructed. Of these, by far the
easier and less useful is the sketching of Utopia, an intellectual
gymnastic in which a power of coherent and vivid imagination
is the one desideratum. The Utopist needs no knowledge of
facts : indeed such a knowledge is a hindrance : for him the
laws of social evolution do not exist. He is a law unto him-
self ; and his men and women are not the wayward, spasmodic,
irregular organisms of daily life, but automata, obeying the
strings he pulls. In a word, he creates, he does not construct :
he makes alike his materials and the laws within which they
work, adapting them all to an ideal end. In describing a new
Jerusalem, the only limits to its perfection are the limits of the
writer's imagination.

The second way is less attractive, less easy, but more
useful. Starting from the present state of society, it seeks to
discover the tendencies underlying it ; to trace those tendencies
to their natural outworking in institutions ; and so to forecast,
not the far-off future, but the next social stage. It fixes its
gaze on the vast changes wrought by evolution, not the petty
variations made by catastrophes ; on the Revolutions which
transform society, not the transient riots which merely upset
thrones and behead kings. This second way I elect to follow ;
and this paper on industry under Socialism therefore starts from
William Clarke's exposition of the industrial evolution which
has been in progress during the last hundred and fifty years.
In thus building forward — in thus forecasting the transitions
150

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 151

through which society will probably pass, I shall scarcely touch
on the ideal Social State that will one day exist; and my
sketch must lay itself open to all the criticisms which may be
levelled against a society not ideally perfect. It is therefore
necessary to bear in mind that I am only trying to work out
changes practicable among men and women as we know them ;
always seeking to lay down, not what is ideally best, but
what is possible ; always choosing among the possible changes
that which is on the line towards the ideal, and will render
further approach easier. In fact this paper is an attempt
to answer the " How ? " so often heard when Socialism is
discussed. Large numbers of people accept, wholly or in part, the
Socialist theory : they are intellectually convinced of its soundness
or emotionally attracted by its beauty ; but .they hesitate to join
in its propaganda, because they " don't see where you are going to
begin", or "don't see where you are going to stop". Both diffi-
culties are disposed of by the fact that we are not " going to
begin". There will never be a point at which a society crosses
from Individualism to Socialism. The change is ever going
forward ; and our society is well on the way to Socialism. All
we can do is to consciously co-operate with the forces at work,
and thus render the transition more rapid than it would other-
wise be.

The third Fabian essay shews us the success of capitalism
bringing about a position which is at once intolerable to the
majority, and easy of capture by them. At this point the
destruction of the small industries has broken down most of the
gradations which used to exist between the large employer and
the hired laborer, and has left in their place a gulf across which
a few capitalists and a huge and hungry proletariat face each
other. The denial of human sympathy by the employer in his
business relations with his " hands" has taught the " hands "
to regard the employer as outside the pale of their sympathy.
The " respect of the public conscience for the rights of property ",
which was at bottom the private interest of each in his own
little property, has diminished since the many lost their
individual possessions, and saw property accumulate in the
hands of the few : it is now little more than a tradition inherited

152 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

from a former social state. The " public conscience" will soon
condone, nay, it will first approve, and then demand, the
expropriation of capital which is used anti-socially instead of
socially, and which belongs to that impersonal abstraction, a
company, instead of to our next door neighbor. To the average
person it is one thing for the State to seize the little shop of
James Smith who married our sister, or the thriving business of
our Sam who works early and late for his living; and quite
another when James and Sam, ruined by a big Company made
up of shareholders of whom nobody knows anything but that
they pay low wages and take high dividends, have been obliged
to become hired servants of the Company, instead of owning
their own shops and machinery. Whose interest will it be to
protest against the State taking over the capital, and trans-
forming James and Sam from wage-slaves at the mercy of a
foreman, into shareholders and public functionaries, with a
voice in the management of the business in which they are
employed ?

Let us suppose, then, that the evolution of the capitalist
system has proceeded but a little further along the present
lines, concentrating the control of industry, and increasingly
substituting labor-saving machinery for human beings. It is
being accompanied, and must continue to be accompanied, by a
growth of the numbers of the unemployed. These numbers
may ebb and flow, as some of the waves of a rising tide run
forward some feet and then a few touch a lower level ; but as
the tide rises despite the fluctuations of the ripples, so the
numbers of the unemployed will increase despite transient
mountings and fallings. With these, probably, will begin the
tentative organisation of industry by the State ; but this organi-
sation will soon be followed by the taking over by the com-
munity of some of the great Trusts.

The division of the country into clearly defined areas, each
with its elected authority, is essential to any effective scheme of
organisation. It is one of the symptoms of the coming change,
that, in perfect unconsciousness of the nature of his act, Mr.
Ritchie has established the Commune. He has divided England
into districts ruled by County Councils, and has thus created

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 153

the machinery without which Socialism was impracticable.
True, he has only made an outline which needs to be filled in ;
but Socialists can fill in, whereas they had no power to outline.
It remains to give every adult a vote in the election of Council-
lors ; to shorten their term of office to a year ; to pay the
Councillors, so that the public may have a right to the whole of
their working time ; to give the Councils power to take and
hold land — a reform already asked for by the Liberal and
Radical Union, a body not consciously Socialist ; and to remove
all legal restrictions, so as to leave them as free to act cor-
porately as an individual is to act individually. These measures
accomplished, the rapidity with which our institutions are
socialised depends on the growth of Socialism among the
people. It is essential to the stability of the changed forms
of industry that they shall be made by the people, not imposed
upon them : hence the value of Mr. Ritchie's gift of Local
Government, enabling each locality to move swiftly or slowly,
to experiment on a comparatively small scale, even to blunder
without widespread disaster. The mot cTordre for Socialists now
is, "Convert the electors; and capture the County Councils".
These Councils, administering local affairs, with the national
Executive, administering national affairs, are all destined to be
turned into effective industrial organisers ; and the unit of
administration must depend on the nature of the industry. The
post, the telegraph, the railways, the canals, and the great
industries capable of being organised into Trusts, will, so far as
we can see now, be best administered each from a single centre
for the whole kingdom. Tramways, gas-works, water- works,
and many of the smaller productive industries, will be best
managed locally. In marking the lines of division, convenience
and experience must be our guides. The demarcations are of
expediency, not of principle.

The first great problem that will press on the County
Council for solution will be that of the unemployed. Wisely
or unwisely, it will have to deal with them : wisely, if it
organises them for productive industry ; unwisely, if it opens
" relief works ", and tries, like an enlarged Bumble, to shirk the
difficulty by enforcing barren and oppressive toil upon out-

154 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

lawed wretches at . the expense of the rest of the community*
Many of the unemployed are unskilled laborers : a minority are
skilled. They must first be registered as skilled and unskilled,
and the former enrolled under their several trades. Then can
begin the rural organisation of labor on county farms, held by
the County Councils. The Council will have its agricultural
committee, charged with the administrative details ; and this
committee will choose well-trained, practical agriculturists, as
directors of the farm business. To the County Farm will be
drafted from the unemployed in the towns the agricultural
laborers who have wandered townwards in search of work, and
many of the unskilled laborers. On these farms every advantage
of machinery, and every discovery in agricultural science, should
be utilised to the utmost. The crops should be carefully chosen
with reference to soil and aspect — cereals, fruit, vegetables —
and the culture adapted to the crop, the one aim being to obtain
the largest amount of produce with the least expenditure of
human labor. Whether land is most profitably cultivated in
large or small parcels depends on the crop ; and in the great
area of the County Farm, la grande et la petite culture might each
have its place. Economy would also gain by the large number of
laborers under the direction of the head farmer, since they could
be concentrated when required at any given spot, as in harvest
time, and dispersed to work at the more continuous kinds of
tillage when the seasonal task was over.

To these farms must also be sent some skilled laborers from
among the unemployed, shoemakers, tailors, smiths, carpen-
ters, &c. ; so that the County Farm may be self-supporting as.
far as it can be without waste of productive power. All the
small industries necessary in daily life should be carried on in
it, and an industrial commune thus built up. The democracy
might be trusted to ordain that an eight hours' day, and a
comfortable home, should be part of the life-conditions on the
County Farm. Probably each large farm would soon have its-
central store, with its adjacent railway station, in addition to the
ordinary farm buildings ; its public hall in the centre of the farm
village to be used for lectures, concerts, and entertainments of
all sorts ; its public schools, elementary and technical ; and soon,.

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 155

possibly from the outset, its public meal-room, saving time and
trouble to housewives, and, while economising fuel and food,
giving a far greater choice and variety of dishes. Large
dwellings, with suites of rooms, might perhaps replace old-
fashioned cottages ; for it is worth noting, as showing the
tendency already existing among ourselves to turn from isolated
self-dependence to the advantages of associated living, that
many modern flats are being built without servants' rooms, the
house-cleaning, &c. being done by persons engaged for the whole
block, and the important meals being taken at restaurants, so
as to avoid the trouble and expense of private cooking. It will
surely be well in initiating new organisations of industry to start
on the most advanced lines, and take advantage of every
modern tendency towards less isolated modes of living. Socialists
must work hard to make municipal dealings with the unemployed
avenues to the higher life, not grudging utilisation of pauper
labor. And as they know their aim, and the other political
parties live but from hand to mouth, they ought to be able to
exercise a steady and uniform pressure, which, just because it is
steady and uniform, will impress its direction on the general
movement.

The note of urban industrial organisation, as of all other,
must be that each person shall be employed to do what
he can do best, not what he does worst. It may be desirable
for a man to have two trades ; but watch-making and stone-
breaking are not convenient alternative occupations. Where
the skilled unemployed belong to trades carried on everywhere,
such as baking, shoemaking, tailoring, etc., they should be em-
ployed at their own trades in municipal workshops, and their
products garnered in municipal stores. These workshops will
be under the direction of foremen, thoroughly skilled workmen,
able to superintend and direct as though in private employment.
The working-day must be of eight hours, and the wages, for the
present, the Trades Union minimum. Then, instead of tailors
and shoemakers tramping the streets ragged and barefoot, the
tailors will be making clothes and the shoemakers boots and
shoes ; and the shoemaker with the wages he earns will buy the
tailor's products, and the tailor the shoemaker's. Then, instead

156 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

of supporting the unemployed by rates levied on the employed,
they will be set to work to supply their own necessities, and be
producers of the wealth they consume instead of consuming, in
enforced idleness or barren penal exercises in the stoneyard,
the wealth produced by others. Masons, bricklayers, plumbers,
carpenters, etc., might be set to work in building decent and
pleasant dwellings — in the style of the blocks of flats, not of
the barracks called model dwellings — for the housing of the mu-
nicipal industrial army. I lay stress on the pleasantness of the
dwellings. These places are to be dwellings for citizens, not
prisons for paupers ; and there is no possible reason why they
should not be made attractive. Under Socialism the workers
are to be the nation, and all that is best is for their service ; for,
be it remembered, our faces are set towards Socialism, and our
organisation of labor is to be on Socialist lines.

It is very likely that among the unemployed some will be
found whose trade can only be carried on by large numbers, and
is not one of the industries of the town into which their unlucky
fate has drifted them. These should be sent into municipal
service in the towns where their trade is the staple industry,
there to be employed in the municipal factory.

Concurrently with this rural and urban organisation of non-
centralised industries will proceed the taking over of the great
centralised industries, centralised for us by capitalists, who thus
unconsciously pave the way for their own supersession. Every-
thing which has been organised into a Trust, and has been
worked for a time in the Trust fashion, is ripe for appropriation
by the community. All minerals would be most properly worked
in this centralised way ; and it will probably be found most
convenient to work all the big productive industries — such as
the textile — in similar fashion. It is idle to say that it cannot
be done by the State when it is being done by a ring of capi-
talists : a Local Board, an Iron Board, a Tin Board, can be as
easily be responsible to the nation as to a casual crowd of share-
holders. There need be no dislocation of production in making
the transference : the active organisers and directors of a Trust
do not necessarily, or even usually, own the capital invested in
it. If the State finds it convenient to hire these organisers and

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 157

directors, there is nothing to prevent its doing so for as long
or as short a period as it chooses. The temporary arrange-
ments made with them during the transition period must be
governed by expediency.

Let us pause for a moment to estimate the position so far.
The unemployed have been transformed into communal workers
— in the country on great farms, improvements of the Bonanza
farms in America — in the towns in various trades. Public
stores for agricultural and industrial products are open in all
convenient places, and filled with the goods thus communally
produced. The great industries, worked as Trusts, are con-
trolled by the State instead of by capitalist rings. The private
capitalist, however, will still be in business, producing and
distributing on his own account in competition with the
communal organisations, which at present will have occupied
only part of the industrial field. But apart from a pressure
which will be recognised when we come to deal with the
remuneration of labor, these private enterprises will be carried
on under circumstances of ever-increasing difficulty. In face of
the orderly communal arrays, playing into each other's hands,
with the credit of the country behind them, the ventures of the
private capitalist will be at as great a disadvantage as the
cottage industries of the last century in face of the factory
industries of our own period. The Trusts have taught us how
to drive competing capitals out of the market by associated
capitals. The Central Boards or County Councils will be able
to utilise this power of association further than any private
capitalists. Thus the economic forces which replaced the work-
shop by the factory, will replace the private shop by the munici-
pal store and the private factory by the municipal one. And
the advantages of greater concentration of capital and of asso-
ciation of labor will not be the only ones enjoyed by the com-
munal workers. All waste will be checked, every labor-saving
appliance utilised to the utmost, where the object is the pro-
duction of general wealth and not the production of profit to be
appropriated by a class ; for in the one case it is the interest of
the producers to produce — inasmuch as their enjoyment depends
on the productivity of their labor — whereas in the other it is

i58 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

their interest to sterilise their labor as far as they dare in order
to render more of it necessary and so keep up its price. As the
organisation of the public industry extends, and supplants more
and more the individualist producer, the probable demand will
be more easily estimated, and the supply regulated to meet it.
The Municipalities and Central Boards will take the place of
the competing small capitalists and the rings of large ones;
and production will become ordered and rational instead of
anarchical and reckless as it is to-day. After awhile the private
producers will disappear, not because there will be any law
against individualist production, but because it will not pay.
No one will care to face the worries, the harassments, the
anxieties, of individual struggling for livelihood, when ease,
freedom, and security can be enjoyed in the communal service.

The best form of management during the transition period,
and possibly for a long time to come, will be through the
Communal Councils, which will appoint committees to super-
intend the various branches of industry. These committees
will engage the necessary manager and foreman for each shop,
factory, etc., and will hold the power of dismissal as of appoint-
ment. I do not believe that the direct election of the manager
and foreman by the employees would be found to work well in
practice, or to be consistent with the discipline necessary in
carrying on any large business undertaking. It seems to me
better that the Commune should elect its Council — thus keeping
under its own control the general authority — but should
empower the Council to select the officials, so that the power
of selection and dismissal within the various sub-divisions
should lie with the nominees of the whole Commune instead
of with the particular group immediately concerned.

There is no practical difficulty in the way of the manage-
ment of the ordinary productive industries, large or small.
The Trusts and Co-operation have, between them, solved, or
put us in the way of solving, all problems connected with
these. But there are difficulties in connexion with the indus-
tries concerned in the production of such commodities as books
and newspapers. During the transitional stage these difficulties
will not arise ; but when all industries are carried on by the

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 159

Commune, or the Nation, how will books and newspapers be
produced ? I only throw out the following suggestions. Print-
ing, like baking, tailoring, shoemaking, is a communal rather
than a national industry. Suppose we had printing offices
controlled by the Communal Council. The printing com-
mittee might be left free to accept any publication it
thought valuable, as a private firm to-day may take the risk
of publication, the arrangement with the author being purchase
outright, or royalty on copies sold, in each case so much to be
put to his credit at the Communal Bank. But there are many
authors whose goods are desired by no one : it would be absurd
to force the community to publish all minor poetry. Why not
accept the principle that in every case where the printing com-
mittee declines to print at the communal risk, the author may
have his work printed by transferring from his credit at the
Communal Bank to the account of the printing committee
sufficient to cover the cost of printing ? The committee should
have no power to refuse to print, where the cost was covered.
Thus liberty of expression would be guarded as a constitutional
right, while the community would not be charged with the cost
of printing every stupid effusion that its fond composer might
deem worthy of publicity.

Newspapers might be issued on similar terms ; and it would
always be open to individuals, or to groups of individuals, to
publish anything they pleased on covering the cost of pub-
lication. With the comparative affluence which would be
enjoyed by each member of the community, anyone who really
cared to reach the public ear would be able to do so by
diminishing his expenditure in other directions.

Another difficulty which will meet us, although not imme-
diately, is the competition for employment in certain pleasanter
branches of industry. At present an unemployed person would
catch eagerly at the chance of any well-paid work he was
able to perform. If he were able both to set type and to
stitch coats, he would not dream of grumbling if he were by
chance offered the job he liked the less of the two : he would be
only too glad to get either. But it is quite possible that as the
vast amelioration of life-conditions proceeds, Jeshurun will wax

160 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

fat and kick if, when he prefers to make microscope lenses, he
is desired to make mirrors. Under these circumstances, Jeshurun
will, I fear, have to accommodate himself to the demand. If
the number of people engaged in making lenses suffices to meet
the demand for lenses, Jeshurun must consent to turn his talents
for the time to mirror-making. After all, his state will not be
very pitiable, though Socialism will have failed, it is. true, to
make 2-1-2=5.

This, however, hardly solves the general question as to
the apportioning of laborers to the various forms of labor. But
a solution has been found by the ingenious author of " Looking
Backward, from a. d. 2000". Leaving young men and women
free to choose their employments, he would equalise the
rates of volunteering by equalising the attractions of the trades.
In many cases natural bent, left free to develop itself during
a lengthened educational term, will determine the choice of
avocation. Human beings are fortunately very varied in
their capacities and tastes : that which attracts one repels
another. But there are unpleasant and indispensable forms of
labor which, one would imagine, can attract none — mining,
sewer-cleaning, &c. These might be rendered attractive by
making the hours of labor in them much shorter than the
normal working day of pleasanter occupations. Many a
strong, vigorous man would greatly prefer a short spell of
disagreeable work to a long one at a desk. As it is well
to leave the greatest possible freedom to the individual, this
equalising of advantages in all trades would be far better than
any attempt to perform the impossible task of choosing an
employment for each. A person would be sure to hate any
work into which he was directly forced, even though it were
the very one he would have chosen had he been left to
himself.

Further, much of the most disagreeable and laborious work
might be done by machinery, as it would be now if it were
not cheaper to exploit a helot class. When it became
illegal to send small boys up chimneys, chimneys did not cease
to be swept : a machine was invented for sweeping them.
Coal-cutting might now be done by machinery, instead of by a

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. i6r

man lying on his back, picking away over his head at the
imminent risk of his own life ; but the machine is much dearer
than men, so the miners continue to have their chests crushed
in by the falling coal. Under Socialism, men's lives and limbs
will be more valuable than machinery; and science will be
tasked to substitute the one for the other.

In truth the extension of machinery is very likely to solve
many of the problems connected with differential advantages in
employment ; and it seems certain that, in the very near future, the
skilled worker will not be the man who is able to perform a par-
ticular set of operations, but the man who has been trained in the
use of machinery. The difference of trade will be in the machine
rather than in the man : whether the produce is nails or screws,
boots or coats, cloth or silk, paper-folding or type-setting, will
depend on the internal arrangements of the mechanism and not
on the method of applying the force. What we shall probably
do will be to instruct all our youth in the principles of mechanics
and in the handling of machines ; the machines will be con-
structed so as to turn the force into the various channels re-
quired to produce the various articles ; and the skilled workman
will be the skilled mechanic, not the skilled printer or bootmaker.
At the present time a few hours', or a few days', study will
make the trained mechanician master of any machine you can
place before him. The line of progress is to substitute machines
for men in every department of production : let the brain plan,
guide, control ; but let iron and steel, steam and electricity,
that do not tire and cannot be brutalised, do the whole of
the heavy toil that exhausts human frames to-day. There
is not the slightest reason to suppose that we are at the end of
an inventive era. Rather are we only just beginning to grope
after the uses of electricity ; and machinery has before it possi-
bilities almost undreamed of now, the men produced by our
system being too rough-handed for the manipulation of delicate
and complicated contrivances. I suggest this only as a probable
simplification of balancing the supply and demand in various
forms of labor in the future: our immediate method of regulation
must be the equalising of advantages in them.

One may guess that in each nation all the Boards and

162 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

communal authorities will ultimately be represented in some
central Executive, or Industrial Ministry; that the Minister
of Agriculture, of Mineral Industries, of Textile Industries, and
so on, will have relations with similar officers in other lands ;
and that thus, internationally as well as nationally, co-operation
will replace competition. But that end is not yet.

We now approach a yet more thorny subject than the organi-
sation of the workers. What should be the remuneration of
labor — what the share of the product taken respectively by the
individual, the municipality, and the State ?

The answer depends on the answer to a previous question.
Is the organisation of the unemployed to be undertaken in
order to transform them into self-supporting, self-respecting
citizens; or is it to be carried on as a form of exploitation,
utilising pauper labor for the production of profit for non-
paupers ? The whole matter turns on this point ; and unless
we know our own minds, and fight for the right method and
against the wrong from the very beginning, the organisation of
the unemployed will be a buttress for the present system instead
of a step towards a better. Already there is talk of establishing
labor colonies in connexion with workhouses ; and there is no
time to be lost if we are to take advantage of the good in the
proposal and exclude the bad. The County Councils also will
lead to an increase of municipal employment ; and the method
of that employment is vital.

The ordinary vestryman, driven by the force of circumstances
into organising the unemployed, will try to extract a profit to
the ratepayers from pauper farms by paying the lowest rates
of wages. He would find this way of proceeding very congenial,
and would soon, if permitted, simply municipalise slave-driving.
In this way the municipal and rural organisation of labor, even
when its necessity and its advantages are realised, can do
nothing but change the form of exploitation of labor if the
workers in public employ are to be paid a wage fixed by the
competition of the market, and the profits of their labor used
only for the relief of the rates. Under such circumstances we
should have the whole of the rates paid by the communal
workers, while the private employers would go free. This

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 163

would not be a transition to Socialism, but only a new way
of creating a class of municipal serfs, which would make our
towns burlesques of the ancient Greek slaveholding " demo-
cracies ". We shall find surer ground by recalling and applying
the principle of Socialism that the laborers shall enjoy the full
product of their toil. It seems to me that this might be worked
out somewhat in the following way :

Out of the value of the communal produce must come
rent of land payable to the local authority, rent of plant
needed for working the industries, wages advanced and fixed
in the usual way, taxes, reserve fund, accumulation fund, and the
other charges necessary for the carrying on of the communal
business. All these deducted, the remaining value should be
divided among the communal workers as a " bonus". It would
be obviously inconvenient, if not impossible, for the district
authority to sub-divide this value and allot so much to each of
its separate undertakings — so much left over from gas works for
the men employed there, so much from the tramways for the
men employed on them, and so on. It would be far simpler and
easier for the municipal employees to be regarded as a single
body, in the service of a single employer, the local authority ;
and that the surplus from the whole of the businesses carried on
by the communal council should be divided without distinction
among the whole of the communal employees. Controversy will
probably arise as to the division : shall all the shares be equal ;
or shall the workers receive in proportion to the supposed dignity
or indignity of their work ? Inequality, however, would be
odious ; and I have already suggested (p. 160) a means of ad-
justing different kinds of labor to a system of equal division of
net product. This meets the difficulty of the varying
degrees of irksomeness without invidiously setting up
any kind of socially useful labor as more honorable than any
other — a distinction essentially unsocial and pernicious. But
since in public affairs ethics are apt to go to the wall,
and appeals to social justice too often fall on deaf ears, it is
lucky that in this case ethics and convenience coincide. The
impossibility of estimating the separate value of each man's labor
with any really valid result, the friction which would arise,

M 2

164 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

the jealousies which would be provoked, the inevitable discon-
tent, favoritism and jobbery that would prevail : all these things
will drive the Communal Council into the right path, equal re-
muneration of all workers. That path once entered on, the
principle of simplification will spread ; and presently it will
probably be found convenient that all the Communal Councils
shall send in their reports to a Central Board, stating the number
of their employees, the amount of the values produced, the
deductions for rent and other charges, and their available surplus.
All these surpluses added together would then be divided by the
total number of communal employees, and the sum thus reached
would be the share of each worker. The national trusts would
at first be worked separately on lines analogous to those sketched
for the Communes ; but later these would be lumped in with the
rest, and still further equalise the reward of labor. As private
enterprises dwindle, more and more of the workers will pass into
communal employ, until at last the Socialist ideal is touched of
a nation in which all adults are workers, and all share the
national product. But be it noted that all this grows
out of the first organisation of industry by Municipalities and
County Councils, and will evolve just as fast or just as slowly as
the community and its sections choose. The values dealt with,
and the numbers employed at first, would not imply as much
complexity of detail as is involved in many of the great businesses
now carried on by individuals and by companies. The same
brains will be available for the work as are now hired by in-
dividuals ; and it is rather the novelty of the idea than the
difficulty of its realisation which will stand in the way of its
acceptance.

It is probable, however, that for some time to come, the
captains of industry will be more highly paid than the rank and
file of the industrial army, not because it is just that they should
receive higher remuneration, but because they, having still the
alternative of private enterprise, will be able to demand
their ordinary terms, at which it will pay the community
better to engage them than to do without them — which
would be indeed impossible. But their remuneration will
fall as education spreads : their present value is a scarcity

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 165

value, largely dependent on their monopoly of the higher educa-
tion ; and as the wider training is thrown open to all, an ever-
increasing number will become qualified to act as organisers and
directors.

The form in which the worker's share is paid to him is not a
matter of primary importance. It would probably be convenient
to have Communal Banks, issuing cheques like those of the
Cheque Bank ; and these banks could open credits to the workers
to the amount of their remuneration. The way in which each
worker expended his wealth would of course be his own business.
The above method of dealing with the surplus remaining from
communal labor after rent and other charges had been paid to
the Municipality, would prove the most potent factor in the
supersession of private enterprises. The amounts produced by
the communal organisations would exceed those produced under
individualist control ; but even if this were not so, yet the shares
of the communal workers, as they would include the produce
now consumed by idlers, would be higher than any wage which
could be paid by the private employer. Hence competition to
enter the communal service, and a constant pressure on the
Communal Councils to enlarge their undertakings.

It should be added that children and workers incapacitated by
age or sickness should receive an equal share with the communal
employees. As all have been children, are at times sick, and
hope to live to old age, all in turn would share the advantage ;
and it is only just that those who have labored honestly in
health and through maturity should enjoy the reward of labor in
sickness and through old age.

The share of individuals and of Municipalities being thus
apportioned, there remains only a word to say as to the
Central National Council — the "State" par excellence. This
would derive the revenues necessary for the discharge of its
functions, from contributions levied on the Communal Councils.
It is evident that in the adjustment of these contributions could
be effected the " nationalisation " of any special natural
resources, such as mines, harbors, &c, enjoyed by exceptionally
well situated Communes. The levy would be, in fact, of the
nature of an income tax.

166 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

Such a plan of Distribution — especially that part of it which
equalizes the shares in the product — is likely to provoke the
question : " What will be the stimulus to labor under the
proposed system ? Will not the idle evade their fair share of
labor, and live in clover on the industry of their neighbors ? "

The general stimulus to labor will be, in the first place, then
as now, the starvation which would follow the cessation of
labor. Until we discover the country in which jam-rolls grow
on bushes, and roasted sucking-pigs run about crying " Come
eat me ! " we are under an imperious necessity to produce.
We shall work because, on the whole, we prefer work to
starvation. In the transition to Socialism, when the organisation
of labor by the Communal Councils begins, the performance of
work will be the condition of employment ; and as non-employ-
ment will mean starvation — for when work is offered, no relief
of any kind need be given to the healthy adult who refuses to
perform it — the strongest possible stimulus will force men to
work. In fact, " work or starve " will be the alternative set
before each communal employee ; and as men now prefer long-
continued and ill-paid work to starvation, they will certainly,
unless human nature be entirely changed, prefer short and
well-paid work to starvation. The individual shirker will be
dealt with much as he is to-day: he will be warned, and,
if he prove incorrigibly idle, discharged from the communal
employ. The vast majority of men now seek to retain their
employment by a reasonable discharge of their duty : why
should they not do the same when the employment is on easier
conditions ? At first, discharge would mean being flung back
into the whirlpool of competition, a fate not lightly to be
challenged. Later, as the private enterprises succumbed to
the competition of the Commune, it would mean almost hope-
lessness of obtaining a livelihood. When social reorganisation
is complete, it would mean absolute starvation. And as the
starvation would be deliberately incurred and voluntarily under-
gone, it would meet with no sympathy and no relief.

The next stimulus would be the appetite of the worker for
the result of the communal toil, and the determination of his
fellow-workers to make him take his fair share of the work of

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 167

producing it. It is found at the present time that a very small
share of the profits arising from associated labor acts as a tre-
mendous stimulus to each individual producer. Firms which
allot a part of their profits for division among their employees
find the plan profitable to themselves. The men work eagerly
to increase the common product, knowing that each will have
a larger bonus as the common product is larger : they become
vigilant as to waste in production ; they take care of the
machinery ; they save gas, etc. In a word, they lessen the cost as
much as they can, because each saving means gain to them. We
see from the experiments of Leclaire and Godin that inventiveness
also is stimulated by a share in the common produce. The
workers in these businesses are ever trying to discover better
methods, to improve their machinery, in a word to progress,
since each step forward brings improvement of their lot. In-
ventions come from a desire to save trouble, as wall as from the
impulse of inventive genius, the joy in accomplishing an intel-
lectual triumph, and the delight of serving the race. Small
inventions are continually being made by clever workmen to
facilitate their operations, even when they are not themselves
personally gainers by them ; and there is no reason to fear
that this spontaneous exercise of inventiveness will cease when
the added productivity of labor lightens the task or increases the
harvest of the laborer. Is it to be argued that men will be
industrious, careful, and inventive when they get only a fraction
of the result of their associated labor, but will plunge into sloth,
recklessness and stagnation when they get the whole ? that a
little gain stimulates, but any gain short of complete satisfaction
would paralyse ? If there is one vice more certain than another
to be unpopular in a Socialist community, it is laziness. The
man who shirked would find his mates making his position
intolerable, even before he suffered the doom of expulsion.

But while these compelling motives will be potent in their
action on man as he now is, there are others, already
acting on some men, which will one day act on all men.
Human beings are not the simple and onesided organisms
they appear to the superficial glance of the Individualist —
moved only by a single motive, the desire for pecuniary

168 THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

gain — by one longing, the longing for wealth. Under our present
social system, the struggle for riches assumes an abnormal and
artificial development : riches mean nearly all that makes
life worth having — security against starvation, gratification
of taste, enjoyment of pleasant and cultured society, superi-
ority to many temptations, self-respect, consideration, com-
fort, knowledge, freedom, as far as these things are attain-
able under existing conditions. In a society where poverty
means social discredit, where misfortune is treated as a
crime, where the prison of the workhouse is the guerdon of
failure, and the bitter carking harassment of daily wants unmet
by daily supply is ever hanging over the head of each worker,
what wonder that money seems the one thing needful, and that
every other thought is lost in the frenzied rush to escape all that
is summed up in the one word Poverty ?

But this abnormal development of the gold-hunger would
disappear upon the certainty for each of the means of sub-
sistence. Let each individual feel absolutely secure of sub-
sistence— let every anxiety as to the material wants of his
future be swept away; and the longing for wealth will lose
its leverage. The daily bread being certain, the tyranny of
pecuniary gain will be broken ; and life will begin to be used
in living and not in struggling for the chance to live. Then will
come to the front all those multifarious motives which are at
work in the complex human organism even now, and which will
assume their proper importance when the basis of physical life
is assured. The desire to excel, the joy in creative work, the
longing to improve, the eagerness to win social approval, the
instinct of benevolence : all these will start into full life, and
will serve at once as the stimulus to labor and the reward of
excellence. It is instructive to notice that these very forces may
already be seen at work in every case in which subsistence
is secured, and they alone supply the stimulus to action.
The soldier's subsistence is certain, and does not depend on his
exertions. At once he becomes susceptible to appeals to his
patriotism, to his esprit de corps, to the honor of his flag : he will
dare anything for glory, and value a bit of bronze, which is the
" reward of valor", far more than a hundred times its weight in

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM. 169

gold. Yet many of the private soldiers come from the worst of
the population ; and military glory and success in murder are
but poor objects to aim at. If so much can be done under
circumstances so unpromising, what may we not hope from
nobler aspirations ? Or take the eagerness, self-denial, and
strenuous effort, thrown by young men into their mere games !
The desire to be captain of the Oxford eleven, stroke of the
Cambridge boat, victor in the foot-race or the leaping — in a
word, the desire to excel — is strong enough to impel to exertions
which often ruin physical health. Everywhere we see the multi-
form desires of humanity assert themselves when once livelihood
is secure. It is on the devotion of these to the service of Society,
as the development of the social instincts teaches men to identify
their interests with those of the community, that Socialism must
ultimately rely for progress ; but in saying this we are only
saying that Socialism relies for progress on human nature as a
whole, instead of on that mere fragment of it known as the
desire for gain. If human nature should break down, then
Socialism will break down ; but at least we have a hundred
strings to our Socialist bow, while the Individualist has only one.
But Humanity will not break down. The faith which is
built on it is faith founded on a rock. Under healthier and happier
conditions, Humanity will rise to heights undreamed of now;
and the most exquisite Utopias, as sung by the poet and
idealist, shall, to our children, seem but dim and broken lights
compared with their perfect day. All that we need are courage,
prudence, and faith. Faith, above all, which dares to believe
that justice and love are not impossible ; and that more than the
best that man can dream of shall one day be realised by men.

THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL
DEMOCRACY.

TRANSITION.1

BY G. BERNARD SHAW.

When the British Association honored me by an invitation to
take part in its proceedings, I proposed to do so by reading a
paper entitled "Finishing the Transition to Social Democracy".
The word " finishing " has been, on consideration, dropped. In
modern use it has gathered a certain sudden and sinister sense
which I desire carefully to dissociate from the process to be
described. I suggested it in the first instance only to convey
in the shortest way that we are in the middle of the transition
instead of shrinking from the beginning of it ; and that I propose
to deal with the part of it that lies before us rather than that
which we have already accomplished. Therefore, though I
shall begin at the beginning, I shall make no apology for
traversing centuries by leaps and bounds at the risk of sacri-
ficing the dignity of history to the necessity for coming to the
point as soon as possible.

Briefly, then, let us commence by glancing at the Middle
Ages. There you find, theoretically, a much more orderly
England than the England of to-day. Agriculture is organised
on an intelligible and consistent system in the feudal manor
or commune : handicraft is ordered by the gilds of the
towns. Every man has his class, and every class its duties.
Payments and privileges are fixed by law and custom, sanc-
tioned by the moral sense of the community, and revised by
the light of that moral sense whenever the operation of supply

1 An address delivered on the 7th September, 1888, to the Economic Section
of the British Association at Bath.

173

174 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

and demand disturbs their adjustment. Liberty and Equality
are unheard of ; but so is Free Competition. The law does
not suffer a laborer's wife to wear a silver girdle : neither does
it force her to work sixteen hours a day for the value of a
modern shilling. Nobody entertains the idea that the indi-
vidual has any right to trade as he pleases without reference to
the rest. When the townsfolk, for instance, form a market,
they quite understand that they have not taken that trouble
in order to enable speculators to make money. If they catch
a man buying goods solely in order to sell them a few hours
later at a higher price, they treat that man as a rascal ; and
he never, as far as I have been able to ascertain, ventures to
plead that it is socially beneficent, and indeed a pious duty,
to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest. If he
did, they would probably burn him alive, not altogether in-
excusably. As to Protection, it comes naturally to them.

This Social Order, relics of which are still to be found in all
directions, did not collapse because it was unjust or absurd. It
was burst by the growth of the social organism. Its machinery
was too primitive, and its administration too naive, too personal,
too meddlesome to cope with anything more complex than a
group of industrially independent communes, centralized very
loosely, if at all, for purely political purposes. Industrial rela-
tions with other countries were beyond its comprehension. Its
grasp of the obligations of interparochial morality was none
of the surest : of international morality it had no notion. A
Frenchman or a Scotchman was a natural enemy : a Muscovite
was a foreign devil : the relationship of a negro to the human
race was far more distant than that of a gorilla is now admitted
to be. Thus, when the discovery of the New World began
that economic revolution which changed every manufacturing
town into a mere booth in the world's fair, and quite altered
the immediate objects and views of producers, English ad-
venturers took to the sea in a frame of mind peculiarly favorable
to commercial success. They were unaffectedly pious, and had
the force of character which is only possible to men who are
founded on convictions. At the same time, they regarded piracy
as a brave and patriotic pursuit, and the slave trade as a per-

TRANSITION. 175

fectly honest branch of commerce, adventurous enough to be
consistent with the honor of a gentleman, and lucrative enough
to make it well worth the risk. When they stole the cargo of a
foreign ship, or made a heavy profit on a batch of slaves, they
regarded their success as a direct proof of divine protection.
The owners of accumulated wealth hastened to " venture " their
capital with these men. Persons of all the richer degrees, from
Queen Elizabeth downward, took shares in the voyages of the
merchant adventurers. The returns justified their boldness ; and
the foundation of the industrial greatness and the industrial
shame of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was laid:
modern Capitalism thus arising in enterprises for which men are
now, by civilized nations, hung or shot as human vermin. And
it is curious to see still, in the commercial adventurers of our own
time, the same incongruous combination of piety and rectitude
with the most unscrupulous and revolting villainy. We all
know the merchant princes whose enterprise, whose steady
perseverance, whose high personal honor, blameless family
relations, large charities, and liberal endowment of public
institutions mark them out as very pillars of society ; and
who are nevertheless grinding their wealth out of the labor
of women and children with such murderous rapacity that
they have to hand over the poorest of their victims to sweaters
whose sole special function is the evasion of the Factory Acts.
They have, in fact, no more sense of social solidarity with
the wage-workers than Drake had with the Spaniards or negroes.
With the rise of foreign trade and Capitalism, industry so far
outgrew the control, not merely of the individual, but of the
village, the gild, the municipality, and even the central govern-
ment, that it seemed as if all attempt at regulation must be
abandoned. Every law made for the better ordering of business
either did not work at all, or worked only as a monopoly
enforced by exasperating official meddling, directly injuring the
general interest, and reacting disastrously on the particular
interest it was intended to protect. The laws, too, had ceased
to be even honestly intended, owing to the seizure of political
power by the capitalist classes, which had been prodigiously
enriched by the operation of economic laws which were not then

176 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

understood.1 Matters reached a position in which legislation
and regulation were so mischievous and corrupt, that anarchy
became the ideal of all progressive thinkers and practical men.
The intellectual revolt formally inaugurated by the Reformation
was reinforced in the eighteenth century by the great industrial
revolution which began with the utilization of steam and the
invention of the spinning jenny.2 Then came chaos. The feudal
system became an absurdity when its basis of communism with
inequality of condition had changed into private property with
free contract and competition rents. The gild system had no
machinery for dealing with division of labor, the factory system,
or international trade : it recognized in competitive individualism
only something to be repressed as diabolical. But competi-
tive individualism simply took possession of the gilds, and
turned them into refectories for aldermen, and notable additions
to the grievances and laughing stocks of posterity.

The desperate effort of the human intellect to unravel this
tangle of industrial anarchy brought modern political economy
into existence. It took shape in France, where the confusion
was thrice confounded ; and proved itself a more practical
department of philosophy than the metaphysics of the school-
men, the Utopian socialism of More, or the sociology of Hobbes.
It could trace its ancestry to Aristotle ; but just then the human
intellect was rather tired of Aristotle, whose economics, besides,
were those of slave holding republics. Political economy soon
declared for industrial anarchy ; for private property ; for
individual recklessness of everything except individual accumula-
tion of riches ; and for the abolition of all the functions of the
State except those of putting down violent conduct and inva-
sions of private property. It might have echoed Jack Cade's
exclamation, " But then are we in order, when we are most out
of order ".

Although this was what political economy decreed, it must not
be inferred that the greater economists were any more advocates
of mere licence than Prince Kropotkin, or Mr. Herbert Spencer,
or Mr. Benjamin Tucker of Boston, or any other modern

1 Explained in the first essay in this volume.

2 See page 64 — 67.

TRANSITION. 177

Anarchist. They did not admit that the alternative to State
regulation was anarchy : they held that Nature had provided an
all-powerful automatic regulator in Competition ; and that by
its operation self-interest would evolve order out of chaos if only
it were allowed its own way. They loved to believe that a right
and just social order was not an artificial and painfully main-
tained legal edifice, but a spontaneous outcome of the free play
of the forces of Nature. They were reactionaries against feudal
domineering and medieval meddling and ecclesiastical intoler-
ance ; and they were able to shew how all three had ended in
disgraceful failure, corruption and self-stultification. Indignant
at the spectacle of the peasant struggling against the denial of
those rights of private property which his feudal lord had suc-
cessfully usurped, they strenuously affirmed the right of private
property for all. And whilst they were dazzled by the prodigious
impulse given to production by the industrial revolution under
competitive private enterprise, they were at the same time, for
want of statistics, so optimistically ignorant of the condition of
the masses, that we find David Hume, in 1766, writing to Turgot
that " no man is so industrious but he may add some hours
more in the week to his labor ; and scarce anyone is so poor but
he can retrench something of his expense". No student ever
gathers from a study of the individualist economists that the
English proletariat was seething in horror and degradation
whilst the riches of the proprietors were increasing by leaps and
bounds.

The historical ignorance of the economists did not, however,
disable them for the abstract work of scientific political economy.
All their most cherished institutions and doctrines succumbed
one by one to their analysis of the laws of production and
exchange. With one law alone — the law of rent — they destroyed
the whole series of assumptions upon which private property is
based. The apriorist notion that among free competitors wealth
must go to the industrious, and poverty be the just and natural
punishment of the lazy and improvident, proved as illusory as
the apparent flatness of the earth. Here was a vast mass of
wealth called economic rent, increasing with the population, and
consisting of the difference between the product of the national

178 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

industry as it actually was and as it would have been if every
acre of land in the country had been no more fertile or favorably
situated than the very worst acre from which a bare living could
be extracted : all quite incapable of being assigned to this or
that individual or class as the return to his or its separate exer-
tions : all purely social or common wealth, for the private appro-
priation of which no permanently valid and intellectually honest
excuse could be made. Ricardo was quite as explicit and far
more thorough on the subject than Mr. Henry George. He
pointed out — I quote his own words — that " the whole surplus
produce of the soil, after deducting from it only such moderate
profits as are sufficient to encourage accumulation, must finally
rest with the landlord 'V

It was only by adopting a preposterous theory of value that
Ricardo was able to maintain that the laborer, selling himself for
wages to the proprietor, would always command his cost of pro-
duction, i.e., his daily subsistence. Even that slender consola-
tion vanished later on before the renewed investigation of
value made by Jevons,2 who demonstrated that the value of
a commodity is a function of the quantity available, and may
fall to zero when the supply outruns the demand so far as to
make the final increment of the supply useless.3 A fact which
the unemployed had discovered, without the aid of the differential
calculus, before Jevons was born. Private property, in fact,
left no room for new comers. Malthus pointed this out, and
urged that there should be no newcomers — that the population
should remain stationary. But the population took exactly as
much notice of this modest demand for stagnation as the
incoming tide took of King Canute's ankles. Indeed the demand
was the less reasonable since the power of production per head
was increasing faster than the population (as it still is), the
increase of poverty being produced simply by the increase and
private appropriation of rent. After Ricardo had completed the

1 " Principles of Political Economy," chap, xxiv., p. 202.

2 "Theory of Political Economy." By W. Stanley Jevons (London,
Macmillan and Co.). See also " The Alphabet of Economic Science ". Part 1,
by Philip H. Wicksteed. (Same publishers.)

3 See pp. ic — 16 ante.

TRANSITION. 179

individualist synthesis of production and exchange, a dialectical
war broke out. Proudhon had only to skim through a Ricardian
treatise to understand just enough of it to be able to shew that
political economy was a ndnctio ad absurdum of private property
instead of a justification of it. Ferdinand Lassalle, with Ricardo
in one hand and Hegel in the other, turned all the heavy guns
of the philosophers and economists on private property with
such effect that no one dared to challenge his characteristic
boasts of the irresistible equipment of Social Democracy in point
of culture. Karl Marx, without even giving up the Ricardian
value theory, seized on the blue books which contained the true
history of the leaps and bounds of England's prosperity, and
convicted private property of wholesale spoliation, murder and
compulsory prostitution ; of plague, pestilence, and famine ;
battle, murder, and sudden death. This was hardly what had
been expected from an institution so highly spoken of. Many
critics said that the attack was not fair : no one ventured to
pretend that the charges were not true. The facts were not
only admitted ; they had been legislated upon. Social
Democracy was working itself out practically as well as
academically. Before I recite the steps of the transition, I
will, as a matter of form, explain what Social Democracy
is, though doubtless nearly all my hearers are already con-
versant with it.

What the achievement of Socialism involves economically,
is the transfer of rent from the class which now appropriates it
to the whole people. Rent being that part of the produce which
is individually unearned, this is the only equitable method of
disposing of it. There is no means of getting rid of economic
rent. So long as the fertility of land varies from acre to acre,
and the number of persons passing by a shop window per hour
varies from street to street, with the result that two farmers or
two shopkeepers of exactly equal intelligence and industry will
reap unequal returns from their year's work, so long will it be
equitable to take from the richer farmer or shopkeeper the
excess over his fellow's gain which he owes to the bounty of
Nature or the advantage of situation, and divide that excess
or rent equally between the two. If the pair of farms or shops

N 2

180 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

be left in the hands of a private landlord, he will take the
excess, and, instead of dividing it between his two tenants, live
on it himself idly at their expense. The economic object of
Socialism is not, of course, to equalize farmers and shopkeepers
in couples, but to carry out the principle over the whole com-
munity by collecting all rents and throwing them into the
national treasury. As the private proprietor has no reason for
clinging to his property except the legal power to take the rent
and spend it on himself — this legal power being in fact what
really constitutes him a proprietor — its abrogation would mean
his expropriation. The socialization of rent would mean the
socialization of the sources of production by the expropriation
of the present private proprietors, and the transfer of their
property to the entire nation. This transfer, then, is the subject
matter of the transition to Socialism, which began some forty-
five years ago, as far as any phase of social evolution can be
said to begin at all.

It will be at once seen that the valid objections to Socialism
consist wholly of practical difficulties. On the ground of
abstract justice, Socialism is not only unobjectionable, but
sacredly imperative. I am afraid that in the ordinary middle-
class opinion Socialism is flagrantly dishonest, but could be
established off-hand to-morrow with the help of a guillotine, if
there were no police, and the people were wicked enough. In
truth, it is as honest as it is inevitable ; but all the mobs and
guillotines in the world can no more establish it than police
coercion can avert it. The first practical difficulty is raised by
the idea of the entire people collectively owning land, capital, or
anything else. Here is the rent arising out of the people's
industry : here are the pockets of the private proprietors. The
problem is to drop that rent, not into those private pockets, but
into the people's pocket. Yes ; but where is the people's
pocket ? Who is the people ? what is the people ? Tom we
know, and Dick : also Harry ; but solely and separately as
individuals : as a trinity they have no existence. Who is their
trustee, their guardian, their man of business, their manager,
their secretary, even their stakeholder ? The Socialist is stopped
dead at the threshold of practical action by this difficult}' until

RANSITION. 181

he bethinks himself of the State as the representative and
trustee of the people. Now if you will just form a hasty
picture of the governments which called themselves States in
Ricardo's day, consisting of rich proprietors legislating either by
divine right or by the exclusive suffrage of the poorer proprie-
tors, and filling the executives with the creatures of their
patronage and favoritism ; if you look beneath heir oratorical
parliamentary discussions, conducted with all the splendor and
decorum of an expensive sham fight ; if you consider their class
interests, their shameless corruption, and the waste and mis-
management which disgraced all their bungling attempts at
practical business of any kind, you will understand why
Ricardo, clearly as he saw the economic consequences of
private appropriation of rent, never dreamt of State appropria-
tion as a possible alternative. The Socialist of that time did
not greatly care : he was only a benevolent Utopian who
planned model communities, and occasionally carried them out,
with negatively instructive and positively disastrous results.
When his successors learned economics from Ricardo, they
saw the difficulty quite as plainly as Ricardo's vulgarizers, the
Whig doctrinaires who accepted the incompetence and corrup-
tion of States as permanent inherent State qualities, like the
acidity of lemons. Not that the Socialists were not doctrinaires
too ; but outside economics they were pupils of Hegel, whilst
the Whigs were pupils of Bentham and Austin. Bentham's was
not the school in which men learned to solve problems to which
history alone could give the key, or to form conceptions which
belonged to the evolutional order. Hegel, on the other hand,
expressly taught the conception of the perfect State ; and his
pupils saw that nothing in the nature of things made it impos-
sible, or even specially difficult, to make the existing State, if
not absolutely perfect, at least practically trustworthy. They
contemplated the insolent and inefficient government official of
their day without rushing to the conclusion that the State
uniform had a magic property of extinguishing all business
capacity, integrity, and common civility in the wearer. When
State officials obtained their posts by favoritism and patronage,
efficiency on their part was an accident, and politeness a conde-

182 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

scension. When they retained their posts without any effective
responsibility to the public, they naturally defrauded the public
by making their posts sinecures, and insulted the public when, by
personal inquiry, it made itself troublesome. But every success-
fully conducted private business establishment in the kingdom
was an example of the ease with which public ones could be
reformed as soon as there was the effective will to find out the
way. Make the passing of a sufficient examination an indis-
pensable preliminary to entering the executive ; make the
executive responsible to the government and the government
responsible to the people ; and State departments will be pro-
vided with all the guarantees for integrity and efficiency that
private money-hunting pretends to. Thus the old bugbear of
State imbecility did not terrify the Socialist : it only made him
a Democrat. But to call himself so simply, would have had the
effect of classing him with the ordinary destructive politician
who is a Democrat without ulterior views for the sake of formal
Democracy— one whose notion of Radicalism is the pulling up
of aristocratic institutions by the roots — who is, briefly, a sort of
Universal Abolitionist. Consequently, we have the distinctive
term Social Democrat, indicating the man or woman who desires
through Democracy to gather the whole people into the State,
so that the State may be trusted with the rent of the country,
and finally with the land, the capital, and the organization of
the national industry — with all the sources of production, in
short, which are now abandoned to the cupidity of irresponsible
private individuals.

The benefits of such a change as this are so obvious to all
except the existing private proprietors and their parasites, that
*it is very necessary to insist on the impossibility of effecting it
suddenly. The young Socialist is apt to be catastrophic in his
views — to plan the revolutionary programme as an affair of
twenty-four lively hours, with Individualism in full swing on
Monday morning, a tidal wave of the insurgent proletariat on
Monday afternoon, and Socialism in complete working order on
Tuesday. A man who believes that such a happy despatch is
possible, will naturally think it absurd and even inhuman to
stick at bloodshed in bringing it about. He can prove that the

TRANSITION. 183

continuance of the present system for a year costs more suffering
than could be crammed into any Monday afternoon, however
sanguinary. This is the phase of conviction in which are
delivered those Socialist speeches which make what the news-
papers call "good copy ", and which are the only ones they as
yet report. Such speeches are encouraged by the hasty opposi-
tion they evoke from thoughtless persons, who begin by tacitly
admitting that a sudden change is feasible, and go on to protest
that it would be wicked. The experienced Social Democrat
converts his too ardent follower by first admitting that if the
change could be made catastrophically it would be well worth
making, and then proceeding to point out that as it would
involve a readjustment of productive industry to meet the
demand created by an entirely new distribution of purchasing
power, it would also involve, in the application of labor and
industrial machinery, alterations which no afternoon's work
could effect. You cannot convince any man that it is impossible
to tear down a government in a day; but everybody is convinced
already that you cannot convert first and third class carriages
into second class ; rookeries and palaces into comfortable
dwellings ; and jewellers and dressmakers into bakers and
builders, by merely singing the " Marseillaise ". No judicious
person, however deeply persuaded that the work of the court
dressmaker has no true social utility, would greatly care to
quarter her idly on the genuinely productive workers pending
the preparation of a place for her in their ranks. For though
she is to all intents and purposes quartered on them at present,
yet she at least escapes the demoralization of idleness. Until
her new place is ready, it is better that her patrons should find
dressmaking for her hands to do, than that Satan should find
mischief. Demolishing a Bastille with seven prisoners in it is
one thing : demolishing one with fourteen million prisoners is
quite another. I need not enlarge on the point : the necessity
for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone
here, and could be made obvious to everyone elsewhere if only
the catastrophists were courageously and sensibly dealt with in
discussion.

What then does a gradual transition to Social Democracy

184 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

mean specifically ? It means the gradual extension of the
franchise ; and the transfer of rent and interest to the State, not
in one lump sum, but by instalments. Looked at in this way,
it will at once be seen that we are already far on the road, and
are being urged further by many politicians who do not dream
that they are touched with Socialism — nay, who would earnestly
repudiate the touch as a taint. Let us see how far we have
gone. In 1832 the political power passed into the hands of the
middle class; and in 1838 Lord John Russell announced
finality. Meanwhile, in 1834, the middle class had swept away
the last economic refuge of the workers, the old Poor Law, and
delivered them naked to the furies of competition.1 Ten years
turmoil and active emigration followed ; and then the thin
end of the wedge went in. The Income Tax was esta-
blished ; and the Factory Acts were made effective. The
Income Tax (1842), which is on individualist principles an
intolerable spoliative anomaly, is simply a forcible transfer
of rent, interest, and even rent of ability, from private
holders to the State without compensation. It excused
itself to the Whigs on the ground that those who had most
property for the State to protect should pay ad valorem for its
protection. The Factory Acts swept the anarchic theory of
the irresponsibility of private enterprise out of practical politics ;
made employers accountable to the State for the well-being of
their employees ; and transferred a further instalment of profits
directly to the worker by raising wages. Then came the gold
discoveries in California (1847) and Australia (1851), and the
period of leaps and bounds, supported by the economic
rent of England's mineral fertility, which kindled Mr. Glad-
stone's retrogressive instincts to a vain hope of abolishing the
Income Tax. These events relieved the pressure set up by
the New Poor Law. The workers rapidly organized themselves
in Trades Unions, which were denounced then for their tendency
to sap the manly independence which had formerly characterized

1 The general impression that the old Poor Law had become an inde-
fensible nuisance is a correct one. All attempts to mitigate Individualism
by philanthropy instead of replacing it by Socialism are foredoomed to
confusion.

TRANSITION. 185

the British workman,1 and which are to-day held up to him as
the self-helpful perfection of that manly independence. How-
beit, self-help flourished, especially at Manchester and Sheffield ;
State help was voted grandmotherly ; wages went up ; and the
Unions, like the fly on the wheel, thought that they had raised
them. They were mistaken ; but the value of Trade Unionism
in awakening the social conscience of the skilled workers was
immense, though to this there was a heavy set-off in its tendency
to destroy their artistic conscience by making them aware that
it was their duty to one another to discourage rapid and efficient
workmanship by every means in their power. An extension of
the Franchise, which was really an instalment of Democracy,
and not, like the 1832 Reform Bill, only an advance towards it,
was gained in 1867 ; and immediately afterwards came another
instalment of Socialism in the shape of a further transfer of
rent and interest from private holders to the State for the
purpose of educating the people. In the meantime, the ex-
traordinary success of the post office, which, according to the
teaching of the Manchester school, should have been a nest
•of incompetence and jobbery, had not only shewn the perfect
efficiency of State enterprise when the officials are made respon-
sible to the class interested in its success, but had also proved
the enormous convenience and cheapness of socialistic or col-
lectivist charges over those of private enterprise. For example,
the Postmaster General charges a penny for sending a letter
weighing an ounce from Kensington to Bayswater. Private
enterprise would send half a pound the same distance for a
farthing, and make a handsome profit on it. But the Post-
master General also sends an ounce letter from Land's End
to John o' Groat's House for a penny. Private enterprise
would probably demand at least a shilling, if not five, for
such a service ; and there are many places in which private
•enterprise could not on any terms maintain a post office.
Therefore a citizen with ten letters to post saves considerably
by the uniform socialistic charge, and quite recognizes the
necessity for rigidly protecting the Postmaster's monopoly.

1 See Final Report of Royal Commission on Trade Unions, 1869. Vol. i.,
p. xvii., sec, 46.

186 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

After 1875,1 leaping and bounding prosperity, after a final
spurt during which the Income Tax fell to twopence, got out
of breath, and has not yet recovered it. Russia and America,
among other competitors, began to raise the margin of culti-
vation at a surprising rate. Education began to intensify the
sense of suffering, and to throw light upon its causes in dark
places. The capital needed to keep English industry abreast
of the growing population began to be attracted by the leaping
and bounding of foreign loans and investments,2 and to bring
to England, in payment of interest, imports that were not paid
for by exports — a phenomenon inexpressibly disconcerting to
the Cobden Club. The old pressure of the eighteen-thirties
came back again ; and presently, as if Chartism and Fergus
O'Connor had risen from the dead, the Democratic Federation
and Mr. H. M. Hyndman appeared in the field, highly sig-
nificant as signs of the times, and looming hideously magnified
in the guilty eye of property, if not of great account as direct
factors in the course of events. Numbers of young men, pupils
of Mill, Spencer, Comte, and Darwin, roused by Mr. Henry
George's " Progress and Poverty ", left aside evolution and
freethought; took to insurrectionary economics ; studied Karl
Marx ; and were so convinced that Socialism had only to be
put clearly before the working-classes to concentrate the power
of their immense numbers in one irresistible organization, that
the Revolution was fixed for 1889 — the anniversary of the
French Revolution — at latest. I remember being asked
satirically and publicly at that time how long I thought it
would take to get Socialism into working order if I had my
way. I replied, with a spirited modesty, that a fortnight would
be ample for the purpose. When I add that I was frequently
complimented on being one of the more reasonable Socialists,
you will be able to appreciate the fervor of our conviction, and
the extravagant levity of our practical ideas. The opposition

1 See Mr. Robert Giffen's address on "The Recent rate of Material Pro-
gress in England ". Proceedings of the British Association at Manchester in
1887, page 806.

2 See Mr. Robert Giffen on Import and Export Statistics, " Essays on
Finance", Second Series, p. 194. (London: G. Bell and Sons. 1886.)

TRANSITION. 187

we got was uninstructive : it was mainly founded on the as-
sumption that our projects were theoretically unsound but
immediately possible, whereas our weak point lay in the case
being exactly the reverse. However, the ensuing years sifted
and sobered us. " The Socialists", as they were called, have
fallen into line as a Social Democratic party, no more insur-
rectionary in its policy than any other party. But I shall not
present the remainder of the transition to Social Democracy
as the work of fully conscious Social Democrats. I prefer
to ignore them altogether — to suppose, if you will, that the
Government will shortly follow the advice of the Saturday
Review, and, for the sake of peace and quietness, hang them.

First, then, as to the consummation of Democracy. Since
1885 every man who pays four shillings a week rent can only
be hindered from voting by anomalous conditions of registra-
tion which are likely to be swept away very shortly. This is
all but manhood suffrage ; and it will soon complete itself as
adult suffrage. However, I may leave adult suffrage out of
the question, because the outlawry of women, monstrous as it
is, is not a question of class privilege, but of sex privilege. To
complete the foundation of the democratic State, then, we need
manhood suffrage, abolition of all poverty disqualifications,
abolition of the House of Lords, public payment of
candidature expenses, public payment of representatives,
and annual elections. These changes are now inevitable,
however unacceptable they may appear to those of us who
are Conservatives. They have been for half a century the
commonplaces of Radicalism. We have next to consider
that the State is not merely an abstraction : it is a machine
to do certain work ; and if that work be increased and altered
in its character, the machinery must be multiplied and altered
too. Now, the extension of the franchise does increase and
alter the work very considerably ; but it has no direct effect on
the machinery. At present the State machine has practically
broken down under the strain of spreading democracy, the work
being mainly local, and the machinery mainly central. Without
efficient local machinery the replacing of private enterprise by
State enterprise is out of the question ; and we shall presently

x88 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

see that such replacement is one of the inevitable consequences
of Democracy. A democratic State cannot become a Social-
Democratic State unless it has in every centre of population a
local governing body as thoroughly democratic in its constitu-
tion as the central Parliament. This matter is also well in
train. In 1888 a Government avowedly reactionary passed
a Local Government Bill which effected a distinct advance
towards the democratic municipality.1 It was furthermore
a Bill with no single aspect of finality anywhere about it.
Local Self- Government remains prominent within the sphere of
practical politics. When it is achieved, the democratic State
will have the machinery for Socialism.

And now, how is the raw material of Socialism — otherwise
the Proletarian man — to be brought to the Democratic State
machinery ? Here again the path is easily found. Politicians
who have no suspicion that they are Socialists, are advocating
further instalments of Socialism with a recklessness of indirect
results which scandalizes the conscious Social Democrat. The
phenomenon of economic rent has assumed prodigious propor-
tions in our great cities. The injustice of its private appropria-
tion is glaring, flagrant, almost ridiculous. In the long suburban
roads about London, where rows of exactly similar houses
stretch for miles countrywards, the rent changes at every few
thousand yards by exactly the amount saved or incurred
annually in travelling to and from the householder's place of
business. The seeker after lodgings, hesitating between Blooms-
bury and Tottenham, finds every advantage of situation skimmed
off by the landlord with scientific precision. As lease after lease
falls in, houses, shops, goodwills of businesses which are the
fruits of the labor of lifetimes, fall into the maw of the ground
landlord. Confiscation of capital, spoliation of households,
annihilation of incentive, everything that the most ignorant and
credulous fundholder ever charged against the Socialist, rages
openly in London, which begins to ask itself whether it exists

1 This same Government, beginning to realize what it has unintentionally
done for Social Democracy, is already (1889) doing what it can to render the
new County Councils socialistically impotent by urgently reminding them of
the restrictions which hamper their action.

TRANSITION. 189

and toils only for the typical duke and his celebrated jockey and
his famous racehorse. Lord Hobhouse and his unimpeachably
respectable committee for the taxation of ground values are
already in the field claiming the value of the site of London for
London collectively; and their agitation receives additional
momentum from every lease that falls in. Their case is un-
assailable ; and the evil they attack is one that presses on the
ratepaying and leaseholding classes as well as upon humbler
sufferers. This economic pressure is reinforced formidably by
political opinion in the workmens' associations. Here the
moderate members are content to demand a progressive Income
Tax, which is virtually Lord Hobhouse's proposal ; and the
extremists are all for Land Nationalization, which is again
Lord Hobhouse's principle. The cry for such taxation cannot
permanently be resisted. And it is very worthy of remark that
there is a new note in the cry. Formerly taxes were proposed
with a specific object — as to pay for a war, for education, or the
like. Now the proposal is to tax the landlords in order to get
some of ouy money back from them — take it from them first and
find a use for it afterwards. Ever since Mr. Henry George's
book reached the English Radicals, there has been a growing
disposition to impose a tax of twenty shillings in the pound on
obviously unearned incomes : that is, to dump four hundred and
fifty millions1 a year down on the Exchequer counter ; and then
retire with three cheers for the restoration of the land to the
people.

The results of such a proceeding, if it actually came off,
would considerably take its advocates aback. The streets
would presently be filled with starving workers of all grades,
domestic servants, coach builders, decorators, jewellers, lace-
makers, fashionable professional men, and numberless others
whose livelihood is at present gained by ministering to the
wants of these and of the proprietary class. "This", they
would cry, " is what your theories have brought us to ! Back
with the good old times, when we received our wages, which
were at least better than nothing." Evidently the Chancellor

1 The authority for this figure will be found in Fabian Tract No. 5,
*' Facts for Socialists ".

igo THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

of the Exchequer would have three courses open to him.
(i.) He could give the money back again to the landlords
and capitalists with an apology. (2.) He could attempt
to start State industries with it for the employment of the
people. (3.) Or he could simply distribute it among the
unemployed. The last is not to be thought of: anything is
better than pattern et circenses. The second (starting State in-
dustries) would be far too vast an undertaking to get on foot
soon enough to meet the urgent difficulty. The first (the return
with an apology) would be a reductio ad absurdum of the whole
affair — a confession that the private proprietor, for all his
idleness and his voracity, is indeed performing an indispensable
economic function — the function of capitalizing, however waste-
fully and viciously, the wealth which surpasses his necessarily
limited power of immediate personal consumption. And here
we have checkmate to mere Henry Georgism, or State appro-
priation of rent without Socialism. It is easy to shew that the
State is entitled to the whole income of the Duke of West-
minster, and to argue therefrom that he should straightway be
taxed twenty shillings in the pound. But in practical earnest
the State has no right to take five farthings of capital from the
Duke or anybody else until it is ready to invest them in
productive enterprise. The consequences of withdrawing capi-
tal from private hands merely to lock it up unproductively in
the treasury would be so swift and ruinous, that no statesman,
however fortified with the destructive resources of abstract
economics, could persist in it. It will be found in the future as
in the past that governments will raise money only because they
want it for specific purposes, and not on a priori demonstrations
that they have a right to it. But it must be added that when
they do want it for a specific purpose, then, also in the future as
in the past, they will raise it without the slightest regard to
a priori demonstrations that they have no right to it.

Here then we have got to a dead lock. In spite of demo-
crats and land nationalizers, rent cannot be touched unless some
pressure from quite another quarter forces productive enterprise
on the State. Such pressure is already forthcoming. The quick
starvation of the unemployed, the slow starvation of the

TRANSITION. 191

employed who have no relatively scarce special skill, the un-
bearable anxiety or dangerous recklessness of those who are
employed to-day and unemployed to-morrow, the rise in urban
rents, the screwing down of wages by pauper immigration and
home multiplication, the hand-in-hand advance of education
and discontent, are all working up to explosion point. It is use-
less to prove by statistics that most of the people are better off
than before, true as that probably is, thanks to instalments of
Social Democracy. Yet even that is questionable ; for it is idle
to claim authority for statistics of things that have never been
recorded. Chaos has no statistics : it has only statisticians ;
and the ablest of them prefaces his remarks on the increased
consumption of rice by the admission that " no one can
contemplate the present condition of the masses without
desiring something like a revolution for the better 'V The
masses themselves are being converted so rapidly to that
view of the situation, that we have Pan-Anglican Synods,
bewildered by a revival of Christianity, pleading that though
Socialism is eminently Christian, yet "the Church must act
safely as well as sublimely ".2 During the agitation made by
the unemployed last winter (1887-8), the Chief Commissioner of
Police in London started at his own shadow, and mistook Mr.
John Burns for the French Revolution, to the great delight of
that genial and courageous champion of his class.3 The existence
of the pressure is further shewn by the number and variety of
safety valves proposed to relieve it — monetization of silver,
import duties, " leaseholds enfranchisement ", extension of joint
stock capitalism masquerading as co-operation,4 and other

1 Mr. R. Giffen, " Essays in Finance ", Second Series, p. 393.

2 Proceedings of the Pan-Anglican Synod : Lambeth, 1888. Report of
Committee on Socialism.

3 Finally, the Commissioner was superseded ; and Mr. Burns was elected a
member of the first London County Council by a large majority.

4 It is due to the leaders of the Co-operative movement to say here that
they are no parties to the substitution of dividend-hunting by petty capitalists
for the pursuit of the ideal of Robert Owen, the Socialist founder of Co-opera-
tion ; and that they are fully aware that Co-operation must be a political as
well as a commercial movement if it is to achieve a final solution of the labor
question.

i92 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

irrelevancies. My own sudden promotion from the street corner
to this platform is in its way a sign of the times. But whilst we
are pointing the moral and adorning the tale according to our
various opinions, an actual struggle is beginning between the
unemployed who demand work and the local authorities
appointed to deal with the poor. In the winter, the unemployed
collect round red flags, and listen to speeches for want of any-
thing else to do. They welcome Socialism, insurrectionismr
currency craze — anything that passes the time and seems to
express the fact that they are hungry. The local authorities,
equally innocent of studied economic views, deny that there is
any misery ; send leaders of deputations to the Local Govern-
ment Board, who promptly send them back to the guardians ;
try bullying ; try stoneyards ; try bludgeoning ; and finally sit
down helplessly and wish it were summer again or the un-
employed at the bottom of the sea. Meanwhile the charity fund,
which is much less elastic than the wages fund, overflows at
the Mansion House only to run dry at the permanent institu-
tions. So unstable a state of things cannot last. The
bludgeoning, and the shocking clamor for bloodshed from the
anti-popular newspapers, will create a revulsion among the
humane section of the middle class. The section which is
blinded by class prejudice to all sense of social responsibility,
dreads personal violence from the working class with a super-
stitious terror that defies enlightenment or control.1 Municipal
employment must be offered at last. This cannot be done in
one place alone : the rush from other parts of the country would
swamp an isolated experiment. Wherever the pressure is, the
relief must be given on the spot. And since public decency, as
well as consideration for its higher officials, will prevent the
County Council from instituting a working day of sixteen
hours at a wage of a penny an hour or less, it will soon
have on its hands not only the unemployed, but also the white
slaves of the sweater, who will escape from their dens
and appeal to the municipality for work the moment they
become aware that municipal employment is better than private

1 Ample material for a study of West End mob panic may be found in the
London newspapers of February 1886, and November 1887.

TRANSITION. 193

sweating. Nay, the sweater himself, a mere slave driver paid
" by the piece ", will in many instances be as anxious as his
victims to escape from his hideous trade. But the municipal
organization of the industry of these people will require capital.
Where is the municipality to get it ? Raising the rates is out
of the question : the ordinary tradesmen and householders are
already rated and rented to the limit of endurance : further
burdens would almost bring them into the street with a red flag.
Dreadful dilemma ! in which the County Council, between the
devil and the deep sea, will hear Lord Hobhouse singing a song
of deliverance, telling a golden tale of ground values to be
municipalized by taxation. The land nationalizers will swell
the chorus: the Radical progressive income taxers singing
together, and the ratepaying tenants shouting for joy. The
capital difficulty thus solved — for we need not seriously antici-
pate that the landlords will actually fight, as our President1
once threatened — the question of acquiring land will arise. The
nationalizers will declare for its annexation by the municipality
without compensation ; but that will be rejected as spoliation,
worthy only of revolutionary Socialists. The no-compensation
cry is indeed a piece of unpractical catastrophic insurrectionism ;
for whilst compensation would be unnecessary and absurd
if every proprietor were expropriated simultaneously, and
the proprietary system at once replaced by full blown
Socialism, yet when it is necessary to proceed by degrees,
the denial of compensation would have the effect of singling
out individual proprietors for expropriation whilst the others
remained unmolested, and depriving them of their private
means long before there was suitable municipal employment
ready for them. The land, as it is required, will therefore be
honestly purchased ; and the purchase money, or the interest
thereon, will be procured, like the capital, by taxing rent. Of
course this will be at bottom an act of expropriation just as
much as the collection of Income Tax to-day is an act of ex-
propriation. As such, it will be denounced by the landlords
as merely a committing of the newest sin the oldest kind of way.

1 Lord Bramwell, President of the Economic Section of the British Associ-
tion in 1S88.

o

194 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

In effect, they will be compelled at each purchase to buy out
one of their body and present his land to the municipality,
thereby distributing the loss fairly over their whole class, instead
of placing it on one man who is no more responsible than the
rest. But they will be compelled to do this in a manner that
will satisfy the moral sense of the ordinary citizen as effectively
as that of the skilled economist.

We now foresee our municipality equipped with land and
capital for industrial purposes. At first they will naturally
extend the industries they already carry on, road making, gas
works, tramways, building, and the like. It is probable that
they will for the most part regard their action as a mere device
to meet a passing emergency. The Manchester School will
urge its Protectionist theories as to the exemption of private
enterprise from the competition of public enterprise, in one
supreme effort to practise for the last time on popular ignorance
of the science which it has consistently striven to debase and
stultify. For a while the proprietary party will succeed in
hampering and restricting municipal enterprise1 ; in attaching
the stigma of pauperism to its service ; in keeping the lot of its
laborers as nearly as possible down to private competition level
in point of hard work and low wages. But its power will be
broken by the disappearance of that general necessity for
keeping down the rates which now hardens local authority to
humane appeals. The luxury of being generous at someone
else's expense will be irresistible. The ground landlord will be
the municipal milch cow ; and the ordinary ratepayers will feel
the advantage of sleeping in peace, relieved at once from the
fear of increased burdens and of having their windows broken
and their premises looted by hungry mobs, nuclei of all the
socialism and scoundrelism of the city. They will have just as
much remorse in making the landlord pay as the landlord has
had in making them pay — just as much and no more. And as
the municipality becomes more democratic, it will find land-
lordism losing power, not only relatively to democracy, but
absolutely.

The ordinary ratepayer, however, will not remain unaffected
1 See note, p. 188.

TRANSITION. 195

for long. At the very outset of the new extension of municipal
industries, the question of wage will arise. A minimum wage
must be fixed ; and though at first, to avoid an overwhelming
rush of applicants for employment, it must be made too small to
tempt any decently employed laborer to forsake his place and
run to the municipality, still, it will not be the frankly infernal
competition wage. It will be, like medieval wages, fixed with at
least some reference to public opinion as to a becoming standard
of comfort. Over and above this, the municipality will have to
pay to its organizers, managers, and incidentally necessary
skilled workers the full market price of their ability, minus only
what the superior prestige and permanence of public employ-
ment may induce them to accept. But whilst these high
salaries will make no more disturbance in the labor market than
the establishment of a new joint stock company would, the
minimum wage for laborers will affect that market perceptibly.
The worst sort of sweaters will find that if they are to keep their
" hands ", they must treat them at least as well as the munici-
pality. The consequent advance in wage will swallow up the
sweater's narrow margin of profit. Hence the sweater must
raise the price per piece against the shops and wholesale houses
for which he sweats. This again will diminish the profits of the
wholesale dealers and shopkeepers, who will not be able to
recover this loss by raising the price of their wares against the
public, since, had any such step been possible, they would have
taken it before. But fortunately for them, the market value of
their ability as men of business is fixed by the same laws that
govern the prices of commodities. Just as the sweater is worth his
profit, so they are worth their profit ; and just as the sweater will
be able to exact from them his old remuneration in spite of the
advance in wages, so they will be able to exact their old remunera-
tion in spite of the advance in sweaters' terms. But from whom, it
will be asked, if not from the public by raising the price of the
wares ? Evidently from the landlord upon whose land they are
organizing production. In other words, they will demand and
obtain a reduction of rent. Thus the organizer of industry, the
employer pure and simple, the entrepreneur, as he is often called
in economic treatises nowadays, will not suffer. In the division

o 2

196 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

of the product his share will remain constant ; whilst the indus-
trious wage worker's share will be increased, and the idle
proprietor's share diminished. This will not adjust itself
without friction and clamor; but such friction is constantly
going on under the present system in the opposite direction, i e.,
by the raising of the proprietor's share at the expense of the
worker's.

The contraction of landlords' incomes will necessarily
diminish the revenue from taxation on such incomes. Let us
suppose that the municipality, to maintain its revenue, puts on
an additional penny in the pound. The effect will be to burn
the landlord's candle at both ends — obviously not a process that
can be continued to infinity. But long before taxation fails as a
source of municipal capital, the municipalities will have begun
to save capital out of the product of their own industries. In
the market the competition of those industries with the private
concerns will be irresistible. Unsaddled with a single idle
person, and having, therefore, nothing to provide for after
paying their employees except extension of capital, they will be
able to offer wages that no business burdened with the unpro-
ductive consumption of an idle landlord or shareholder could
afford, unless it yielded a heavy rent in consequence of some
marked advantage of site. But even rents, when they are town
rents, are at the mercy of a municipality in the long run. The
masters of the streets and the traffic can nurse one site and
neglect another. The rent of a shop depends on the number of
persons passing its windows per hour. A skilfully timed series
of experiments in paving, a new bridge, a tramway service, a
barracks, or a small-pox hospital are only a few of the circum-
stances of which city rents are the creatures. The power of the
municipality to control these circumstances is as obvious as
the impotence of competing private individuals. Again, com-
peting private individuals are compelled to sell their produce at
a price equivalent to the full cost of production at the margin of
cultivation.1 The municipality could compete against them by
reducing prices to the average cost of production over the whole
area of municipal cultivation. The more favorably situated
1 The meaning of these terms will be familiar to readers of the first essay.

TRANSITION. 197

private concerns could only meet this by ceasing to pay rent :
the less favorably situated would succumb without remedy.
It would be either stalemate or checkmate. Private property
would either become barren, or it would yield to the actual
cultivator of average ability no better an income than could be
obtained more securely in municipal employment. To the mere
proprietor it would yield nothing. Eventually the land and
industry of the whole town would pass by the spontaneous
action of economic forces into the hands of the municipality;
and, so far, the problem of socializing industry would be solved.
Private property, by cheapening the laborer to the utmost in
order to get the greater surplus out of him, lowers the margin of
human cultivation, and so raises the "rent of ability". The most
important form of that rent is the profit of industrial manage-
ment. The gains of a great portrait painter or fashionable
physician are much less significant, since these depend entirely
on the existence of a very rich class of patrons subject to acute
vanity and hypochondriasis. But the industrial organizer is
independent of patrons: instead of merely attracting a larger
share of the product of industry to himself, he increases the
product by his management. The market price of such ability
depends upon the relation of the supply to the demand : the
more there is of it the cheaper it is : the less, the dearer. Any
cause that increases the supply lowers the price. Now it is
evident that since a manager must be a man of education and
address, it is useless to look ordinarily to the laboring class for
a supply of managerial skill. Not one laborer in a million
succeeds in raising himself on the shoulders of his fellows by
extraordinary gifts, or extraordinary luck, or both. The
managers must be drawn from the classes which enjoy educa-
tion and social culture ; and their price, rapidly as it is falling
with the spread of education and the consequent growth of the
" intellectual proletariat ", is still high. It is true that a very
able and highly trained manager can now be obtained for about
/800 a year, provided his post does not compel him to
spend two-thirds of his income on what is called " keeping up
his position", instead of on his own gratification.1 Still, when

1 See note, p. 19.

198 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

it is considered that laborers receive less than £50 a year, and
that the demand for laborers is necessarily vast in proportion to
the demand for able managers — nay, that there is an inverse
ratio between them, since the manager's talent is valuable in
proportion to the quantity of labor he can organize — it will be
admitted that ^"800 a year represents an immense rent of ability.
But if the education and culture which are a practically indis-
pensable part of the equipment of competitors for such posts
were enjoyed by millions instead of thousands, that rent would
fall considerably. Now the tendency of private property is to
keep the masses mere beasts of burden. The tendency of Social
Democracy is to educate them — to make men of them. Social
Democracy would not long be saddled with the rents of ability
which have during the last century made our born captains of
industry our masters and tyrants instead of our servants and
leaders. It is even conceivable that rent of managerial ability
might in course of time become negative,1 astonishing as that
may seem to the many persons who are by this time so hope-
lessly confused amid existing anomalies, that the proposition that
" whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all "
strikes them rather as a Utopian paradox than as the most
obvious and inevitable of social arrangements. The fall in the
rent of ability will, however, benefit not only the municipality,
but also its remaining private competitors. Nevertheless, as the
prestige of the municipality grows, and as men see more and
more clearly that the future is to it, able organizers will take
lower salaries for municipal than for private employment ; whilst
those who can beat even the municipality at organizing, or who,
as professional men, can deal personally with the public without
the intervention of industrial organization, will pay the rent of
their places of business either directly to the municipality, or to
the private landlord whose income the municipality will absorb
by taxation. Finally, when rents of ability had reached their
irreducible natural level, they could be dealt with by a progres-

1 That is, the manager would receive less for his work than the artisan.
Cases in which the profits of the employer are smaller than the wages of the
employee are by no means uncommon in certain grades of industry where
small traders have occasion to employ skilled workmen.

TRANSITION. 199

sive Income Tax in the very improbable case of their proving
a serious social inconvenience.

It is not necessary to go further into the economic detail of
the process of the extinction of private property. Much of that
process as sketched here may be anticipated by sections of the
proprietary class successively capitulating, as the net closes
about their special interests, on such terms as they may be
able to stand out for before their power is entirely broken.1

We may also safely neglect for the moment the question of
the development of the House of Commons into the central
government which will be the organ for federating the munici-
palities, and nationalizing inter-municipal rents by an adjust-
ment of the municipal contributions to imperial taxation : in
short, for discharging national as distinct from local business.
One can see that the Local Government Board of the future will
be a tremendous affair ; that foreign States will be deeply affected
by the reaction of English progress ; that international trade,
always the really dominant factor in foreign policy, will have to
be reconsidered from a new point of view when profit comes to
be calculated in terms of net social welfare instead of individual
pecuniary gain ; that our present system of imperial aggression,
in which, under pretext of exploration and colonization, the flag
follows the filibuster and trade follows the flag, with the
missionary bringing up the rear, must collapse when the control

1 Such capitulations occur already when the Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer takes advantage of the fall in the current rate of interest (explained
on page 20) to reduce Consols. This he does by simply threatening to pay off
the stockholders with money freshly borrowed at the current rate. They,
knowing that they could not reinvest the money on any better terms than
the reduced ones offered by the Chancellor, have to submit. There is no reason
why the municipalities should not secure the same advantage for their
constituents. For example, the inhabitants of London now pay the stare-
holders of the gas companies a million and a half annually, or 11 per cent on
the £13,650,000 which the gas works cost. The London County Council
could raise that sum for about £400,000 a year. By threatening to
do this and start municipal gas works, it could obviously compel the share-
holders to hand over their works for £400,000 a year, and sacrifice the extra
8 per cent now enjoyed by them. The saving to the citizens of London would
be £1,100,000 a year, sufficient to defray the net cost of the London School
Board. Metropolitan readers will find a number of cognate instances in
Fabian Tract No. 8, " Facts for Londoners".

200 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

of our military forces passes from the capitalist class to the
people; that the disappearance of a variety of classes with a
variety of what are now ridiculously called " public opinions "
will be accompanied by the welding of society into one class
with a public opinion of inconceivable weight ; that this public
opinion will make it for the first time possible effectively to
control the population ; that the economic independence of
women, and the supplanting of the head of the household by
the individual as the recognized unit of the State, will materially
alter the status of children and the utility of the institution of
the family ; and that the inevitable reconstitution of the State
Church on a democratic basis may, for example, open up the
possibility of the election of an avowed Freethinker like Mr.
John Morley or Mr. Bradlaugh to the deanery of Westminster.
Ail these things are mentioned only for the sake of a glimpse of
the fertile fields of thought and action which await us when the
settlement of our bread and butter question leaves us free to use
and develop our higher faculties.

This, then, is the humdrum programme of the practical
Social Democrat to-day. There is not one new item in it. All
are applications of principles already admitted, and extensions
of practices already in full activity. All have on them that
stamp of the vestry which is so congenial to the British mind.
None of them compel the use of the words Socialism or Revo-
lution : at no point do they involve guillotining, declaring the
Rights of Man, swearing on the altar of the country, or anything
else that is supposed to be essentially un-English. And they
are all sure to come — landmarks on our course already visible to
far-sighted politicians even of the party which dreads them.

Let me, in conclusion, disavow all admiration for this inevi-
table, but sordid, slow, reluctant, cowardly path to justice. I
venture to claim your respect for those enthusiasts who still
refuse to believe that millions of their fellow creatures must be
left to sweat and suffer in hopeless toil and degradation, whilst
parliaments and vestries grudgingly muddle and grope towards
paltry instalments of betterment. The right is so clear, the
wrong so intolerable, the gospel so convincing, that it seems to
them that it must be possible to enlist the whole body of workers

TRANSITION. 201

— soldiers, policemen, and all — under the banner of brotherhood
and equality ; and at one great stroke to set Justice on her
rightful throne. Unfortunately, such an army of light is no
more to be gathered from the human product of nineteenth
century civilization than grapes are to be gathered from thistles.
But if we feel glad of that impossibility; if we feel relieved
that the change is to be slow enough to avert personal risk to
ourselves ; if we feel anything less than acute disappointment
and bitter humiliation at the discovery that there is yet between
us and the promised land a wilderness in which many must
perish miserably of want and despair : then I submit to
you that our institutions have corrupted us to the most
dastardly degree of selfishness. The Socialists need not be
ashamed of beginning as they did by proposing militant organi-
zation of the working classes and general insurrection. The
proposal proved impracticable ; and it has now been abandoned
— not without some outspoken regrets — by English Socialists.
But it still remains as the only finally possible alternative to the
Social Democratic programme which I have sketched to-day.

THE OUTLOOK.

BY HUBERT BLAND.

Mr. Webb's historical review brought us from the
" break up of the old synthesis" (his own phrase), a social
system founded on a basis of religion, a common belief in a
divine order, to the point where perplexed politicians, re-
cognising the futility of the principle of Individualism to keep
the industrial machine in working order, with " freedom of
contract " upon their lips spent their nights in passing Factory
Acts, and devoted their fiscal ingenuity to cutting slice after
slice off incomes derived from rent and interest. His paper was
an inductive demonstration of the failure of anarchy to meet the
needs of real concrete men and women — a proof from history
that the world moves from system, through disorder, back again
to system.

Mr. Clarke showed us, also by the historic method, that
given a few more years of economic progress on present
lines, and we shall reach, via the Ring and the Trust, that
period of " well defined confrontation of rich and poor " upon
which German thought has settled as the brief stage of socio-
logical evolution immediately preceding organic change.

The truth of this postulate of Teutonic philosophers and

economists no one who has given to it a moment's serious

thought is likely to call in question. Nor does anyone who has

followed the argument developed in these lectures believe that

the transition from mitigated individualism to full collectivity can

be made until the capitalist system has worked itself out to its

last logical expression. Till then, no political or social upheaval,

however violent, nay, even though the M physical force revolu-
202

THE OUTLOOK. 203

tionists " should chase the Guards helter-skelter down Parlia-
ment Street and the Executive Committee of the Fabian
Society hold its meetings in the Council Chamber of Windsor
Castle, will be anything more than one of those "transient riots",
spoken of by Mrs. Besant, which " merely upset thrones and
behead monarchs".1 All sociologists I think, all Socialists I
am sure, are agreed that until the economic moment has
arrived, although the hungry or the ignorant may kick up a
dust in Whitechapel and make a bloody puddle in Trafalgar
Square, the Social Revolution is impossible. But I, for my
part, do not believe in the even temporary rout of the Household
Brigade, nor indeed in any popular outbreak not easily
suppressible by the Metropolitan police ; and I shall waste no
time in discussing that solution of the social problem of which
more was heard in the salad days of the English Socialist
movement — in its pre-Fabian era — than now, viz., physical
force employed by a vigorous few. The physical force man,
like the privileged Tory, has failed to take note of the
flux of things, and to recognise the change brought about
by the ballot. Under a lodger franchise the barricade is
the last resort of a small and desperate minority, a frank con-
fession of despair, a reduction to absurdity of the whole Socialist
case. Revolutionary heroics, natural and umblameable enough
in exuberant puerility, are imbecile babblement in muscular
adolescence, and in manhood would be criminal folly.

Let us assume then that the present economic progress will
continue on its present lines. That machinery will go on
replacing hand labor ; that the joint stock company will absorb
the private firm, to be, in its turn, swallowed up in the Ring
and the Trust. That thus the smaller producers and distributors
will gradually, but at a constantly increasing pace, be squeezed
out and reduced to the condition of employees of great indus-
trial and trade corporations, managed by highly skilled captains
of industry, in the interests of idle shareholders.

In a parliamentarian State like ours, the economic cleavage,

1 It is to the half conscious recognition of this generalisation that the dis-
appearance of militant Republicanism among the English working classes is
owing.

2o4 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

which divides the proprietors from the propertyless, ever grow-
ing wider and more clearly defined, must have its analogue
in the world of politics. The revolution of the last century,
which ended in the installation of the Grand Industry,
was the last of the great unconscious world changes. It was
helped by legislation of course ; but the help was only of the
negative and destructive sort. " Break our fetters and let us
alone", was the cry of the revolutionists to Parliament. The
law-makers, not knowing quite what they were doing, responded,
and then blythely contracted debts, and voted money for com-
mercial wars. Such a sight will never be seen again. The
repeated extension of the suffrage has done more than make
the industrial masses articulate, it has given them con-
sciousness ; and for the future the echo of the voices of those
who suffer from economic changes will be heard clamoring for
relief within the walls of St. Stephen's and the urban guildhalls.

Thus the coming struggle between "haves" and "have
nots " will be a conflict of parties each perfectly conscious of
what it is fighting about and fully alive to the life and death
importance of the issues at stake.

I say " will be " ; for one has only to read a few speeches of
political leaders or attend a discussion at a workman's club to
be convinced that at present it is only the keener and more
alert minds on either side which are more than semi-conscious
of the true nature of the campaign of which the first shots may
even now be heard at every bye-election.

But as nothing makes one so entirely aware of one's own
existence as a sharp spasm of pain ; so it is to the suffering — the
hunger, the despair of to-morrow's dinner, the anxiety about
the next new pair of trousers — wrought by the increasing
economic pressure upon the enfranchised and educated pro-
letariat that we must look to awaken that free self-consciousness
which will give the economic changes political expression, and
enable the worker to make practical use of the political weapons
which are his.

The outlook then from the point of view of this paper is
a political one — one in which we should expect to see the
world political gradually becoming a reflex of the world

THE OUTLOOK. 205

economic. That political should be slow in coming into line
with economic facts is only in accordance with all that the past
history of our country has to teach us. For years and decades
the squirearchy retained an influence in the House of Commons
out of all proportion to its potency as an economic force ; and
even at this moment the " landed interest " bears a much larger
part in law-making than that to which its real importance
entitles it. Therefore we must be neither surprised nor dis-
pirited if, in a cold-blooded envisagement of the condition of
English parties, the truth is borne in upon us that the pace
of political progress has no proper relation to the rate at which
we are travelling towards Socialism in the spheres of thought
and industry.

This fact is probably — nay almost certainly — very much
more patent to the Socialist and the political student than to the
man in the street, or even to him of the first class railway
carriage. The noisy jubilation of the Radical press over the
victory of a Home Ruler at a bye election, at a brief and vague
reference to the " homes of the people " in a two hours' speech
from a Liberal leader, or at the insertion of a " social " plank in
a new annual programme, is well and cleverly calculated to
beguile the ardent democrat, and strike cold terror to the heart
of the timorous Tory. But a perfectly impartial analysis of
the present state of parties will convince the most sanguine
that the breath of the great economic changes dealt with in Mr.
Clarke's paper has as yet scarcely ruffled the surface of the
House of Commons.
^ When the syllabus of this course of lectures was drawn up,
those who were responsible for it suggested as the first sub-
heading of this paper, the well worn phrase, " The disappearance
of the Whig". It is a happy expression, and one from the
contemplation of which much comfort may be derived by an
optimistic and unanalytical temperament. Printed are at this
disadvantage compared with spoken words, they fail to convey
the nicer nuances of meaning bestowed by tone, and emphasis ;
and thus the word " disappearance " meets the eye, carrying
with it no slightest suggestion of irony. Yet the phrase is
pointless, if not "meant surcarstic"; for so far is the Whig from

206 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

"disappearing", that he is the great political fact of the day.
To persons deafened by the daily democratic shouting of the
Radical newspapers this assertion may require some confirma-
tion and support. Let us look at the facts then. The first
thing which strikes us in connexion with the present Parliament
is that it no longer consists of two distinct parties, Maf of two
bodies of men differentiated from each other by the holding
of fundamentally different principles. Home Rule left out,1 there
remains no reason whatever, except the quite minor question
of Disestablishment, why even the simulacrum of party organi-
sation should be maintained, or why the structural arrangements
of the House of Commons should not be so altered as to resemble
those of a town hall, in which all the seats face the chair.

But fifty years ago the floor of the House was a frontier of
genuine significance; and the titles " Whig" and " Tory " were
word-symbols of real inward and spiritual facts. The Tory
party was mostly made up of men who were conscientiously
opposed to popular representation, and prepared to stand or fall
by their opposition. They held, as a living political creed, that
the government of men was the eternal heritage of the rich, and
especially of those whose riches spelt rent. The Whigs, on the
other hand, believed, or said they believed, in the aphorism " Vox
populi, vox Dei " ; and they, on the whole, consistently advocated
measures designed to give that voice a distincter and louder
utterance. Here, then, was one of those fundamental differences
in the absence of which party nomenclature is a sham. But
there was another. In the first half of this century the Tories,
hidebound in historic traditions and deaf to the knell of the old
regime tolling in the thud, thud, of the piston rods of the
new steam engines, clung pathetically to the old ideas of the
functions of the State and to territorial rights. The Whigs
went for laisser faire and the consequent supremacy of the busi-
ness man. I am making a perfectly provable proposition when

1 The difference of principle here is more apparent than real. The Glad-
stonians repudiate any desire for separation, and affirm their intention of
maintaining the absolute veto of the imperial Parliament ; while the Unionists
avow their ultimate intention of giving to Ireland the same powers of self
government now enjoyed, or to be enjoyed by England and Scotland.

THE OUTLOOK. 207

I say that all the political disputes1 which arose between the
Revolution of 1688 and the enfranchisement of the ^"10 house-
holder by Disraeli had their common cause in one of these
two root differences. But the battle has long ago been lost and
won. The Whigs have triumphed all along the line. The
Tories have not only been beaten, they have been absorbed. A
process has gone on like that described by Macaulay as follow-
ing on the Norman invasion, when men gradually ceased to call
themselves Saxon and Norman and proudly boasted of being
English. The difference in the case before us is that while the
Tories have accepted the whole of the Whig principles they still
abjure the Whig name.

No so-called Conservative to-day will venture on opposing
an extension of the Franchise on the plain ground of principle.
At most he will but temporise and plead for delay. No blush of
conscious inconsistency suffused Mr. Ritchie's swarthy features
when introducing his " frankly democratic " Local Government
Bill. And rightly not ; for he was doing no violence to party
principles.

In the matter of the functions of the State the absorption
of the Tory is not quite so obvious, because there never
has been, and, as long as Society lasts, never can be, a parti
serieux of logical laisser fain. Even in the thick of the
Industrial Revolution the difference between the two great
parties was mainly one of tendency — of attitude of mind.
The Tory had a certain affection for the State — a natural self-
love: the Whig distrusted it. This distrust is now the senti-
ment of the whole of our public men. They see, some of them
perhaps more clearly than others, that there is much the State
must do ; but they all wish that much to be as little as possible.
Even when, driven by an irresistible force which they feel but
do not understand (which none but the Socialist does or can
understand), they bring forward measures for increasing the
power of the whole over the part, their arguments are always
suffused in a sickly halo of apology : their gestures are always
those of timorous deprecation and fretful diffidence. They are

1 The battles for Catholic Emancipation and the removal of the religious
disabilities were fought on sectarian rather than on political grounds.

208 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

always nervously anxious to explain that the proposal violates
no principle of political economy, and with them political
economy means, not Professor Sidgwick, but Adam Smith.

The reason why this unanimity of all prominent politicians
on great fundamental principles is not manifest to the mind of
the average man is that, although there is nothing left to get
hot or even moderately warm about, the political temperature is
as high as ever. It is not in the dust of the arena, but only in
the repose of the auditorium that one is able to realise that men
will fight as fiercely and clapper-claw each other as spitefully
over a dry bone as over a living principle. One has to stand
aside awhile to see that politicians are like the theological con-
troversialists of whom Professor Seeley somewhere says that
they never get so angry with each other as when their differences
are almost imperceptible, except perhaps when they are quite so.

Both the efficient and the final cause of this unanimity is a
sort of unconscious or semi-conscious recognition of the fact that
the word " State" has taken to itself new and diverse connota-
tions— that the State idea has changed its content. Whatever
State control may have meant fifty years ago it never meant
hostility to private property as such. Now, for us, and for as far
ahead as we can see, it means that and little else. So long as the
State interfered with the private property and powers of one set
of proprietors with a view only to increasing those of another, the
existence of parties for and against such interference was a
necessity of the case. A duty on foreign corn meant the keep-
ing up of incomes drawn from rent1 : its abolition meant a rise
of manufacturers' profits. " Free Trade " swelled the purses of
the new bourgeoisie : the Factory Acts depleted them, and gave a
sweet revenge to the rent-docked squire. But of this manipula-
tion of the legislative machine for proprietors' purposes we are
at, or at least in sight of, the end. The State has grown bigger
by an immense aggregation of units, who were once to all intents
and purposes separate from it ; and now its action generally
points not to a readjustment of private property and privileges

1 This is perhaps not, historically, quite true ; but the landlords believed
that their own prosperity depended upon the exclusion of foreign corn, and
that is sufficient for the purpose of my argument.

THE OUTLOOK. 209

as between class and class, but to their complete disappearance.
So then the instinct which is welding together the propertied
politicians is truly self-preservative.

But, it may be asked by the bewildered Radical, by the
tremulous Conservative, by the optimistic Socialist, if the
political leaders are really opposed to State augmentation, how
comes it that every new measure of reform introduced into the
House of Commons is more or less colored with Socialism, and
that no popular speaker will venture to address a public meeting
without making some reference of a socialistic sort to the social
problem ? Why, for instance, does that extremely well oiled
and accurately poised political weathercock, Sir William Har-
court, pointing to the dawn, crow out that " we are all Socialists
now " ?

To these questions (and I have not invented them) I answer :
in the first place because the opposition of the political leaders
is instinctive, and only, as yet, semi-conscious, even in the most
hypocritical ; in the second place, that a good deal of the
legislative Socialism appears more in words than in deeds ; in
the third place that the famous flourish of Sir William Harcourt
was a rhetorical falsehood ; and fourthly, because, fortunately
for the progress of mankind, self-preservative instincts are not
peculiar to the propertied classes.

For it is largely instinctive and wholly self preservative,
this change in the position of the working people towards the
State — this change by which, from fearing it as an actual
enemy, they have come to look to it as a potential savior. I
know that this assertion will be violently denied by many of
my Socialist brethren. The fly on the wheel, not unnaturally,
feels wounded at being told that he is, after all, not the motive
power; and the igniferous orators of the Socialist party are
welcome, so far as I am concerned, to all the comfort they can
get from imagining that they, and not any great, blind, evolu-
tionary forces are the dynamic of the social revolution. Besides,
the metaphor of the fly really does not run on all fours (I forget,
for the moment, how many legs a fly has); for the Socialist
does at least know in what direction the car is going, even
though he is not the driving force. Yet it seems to me that

210 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

the part being, and to be, played by the Socialist, is notable
enough in all conscience ; for it is he who is turning instinct
into self conscious reason ; voicing a dumb demand ; and giving
intelligent direction to a thought wave of terrific potency.

There is a true cleavage being slowly driven through the body
politic ; but the wedge is still beneath the surface. The signs
of its workings are to be found in the reactionary measures
of pseudo reform advocated by many prominent politicians ; in
the really Socialist proposals of some of the obscurer men ; in
the growing distaste of the political club man for a purely
political pabulum ; and in the receptive attitude of a certain
portion of the cultivated middle class towards the outpourings
of the Fabian Society.

This conscious recognition of the meaning of modern ten-
dencies, this defining of the new line of cleavage, while it is the
well-spring of most of the Socialist hopes, is no less the source
of some lively fear. At present it is only the acuter and more
far seeing of the minds amongst the propertied classes who are
at all alive to the real nature of the attack. One has but to
listen to the chatter of the average Liberal candidate to note
how hopelessly blind the man is to the fact that the existence of
private property in the means of production forms any factor at
all in the social problem ; and what is true of the rank and file
is true only in a less degree of the chiefs themselves. Ignorance
of economics and inability to shake their minds free of eigh-
teenth century political philosophy1 at present hinders the
leaders of the "party of progress" from taking up a definite
position either for or against the advance of the new ideas. The
number of English statesmen who, like Prince Bismarck, see
in Socialism a swelling tide whose oceanic rush must be
broken by timely legislative breakwaters, is still only to be
expressed by a minus quantity. But this political myopia is
not destined to endure. Every additional vote cast for avowed
Socialist candidates at municipal and other elections will help
to bring home to the minds of the Liberals that the section of
the new democracy which regards the ballot merely as a war-

1 Cf. The speeches of Mr. John Morley on the eight hours' proposal and the
taxation of ground rents. Also the recent writings of Mr. Bradlaugh, passim.

THE OUTLOOK. 211

engine with which to attack capitalism is a growing one. At
last our Liberal will be face to face with a logical but irritating
choice. Either to throw over private capital or to frankly
acknowledge that it is a distinction without a difference which
separates him from the Conservatives against whom he has for
years been fulminating.

At first sight it looks as though this political moment in the
history of the Liberal party would be one eminently auspicious
for the Socialist cause. But although I have a lively faith in
the victory of logic in the long run, I have an equally vivid
knowledge that to assure the triumph the run must be a very
long one ; and above all I have a profound respect for the staying
powers of politicians, and their ability to play a waiting game.
It is one thing to offer a statesman the choice of one of two
logical courses : it is another to prevent his seeing a third, and an
illogical one, and going for it. Such prevention in the present
case will be so difficult as to be well nigh impossible ; for the
Liberal hand still holds a strong suit — the cards political.

It is quite certain that the social programme of our party
will become a great fact long before all the purely political pro-
posals of the Liberals have received the Royal assent ; and the
game of the politician will be to hinder the adoption of the
former by noisily hustling forward the latter. Unfortunately for
us it will be an easy enough game to play. The scent of the
non-Socialist politician for political red herrings is keen, and his
appetite for political Dead Sea fruit prodigious. The number of
" blessed words ", the mere sound of which carries content to
his soul, would fill a whole page. In an age of self-seeking his
pathetic self-abnegation would be refreshing were it not so
desperately silly. The young artizan on five-and-twenty shillings
a week, who with his wife and children occupies two rooms in
" a model ", and who is about as likely to become a Lama as a
leaseholder, will shout himself hoarse over Leaseholds' En-
franchisement, and sweat great drops of indignation at the
plunder of rich West End tradesmen by rich West End
landlords. The "out of work", whose last shirt is in pawn,
will risk his skull's integrity in Trafalgar Square in defence of
Mr. O'Brien's claim to dress in gaol like a gentleman.

p 2

212 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

Of course all this is very touching : indeed, to be quite serious,
it indicates a nobility of character and breadth of human sympathy
in which lies our hope of social salvation. But its infinite
potentiality must not blind us to the fact that in its actuality
the dodgy Liberal will see his chance of the indefinite postpone-
ment of the socializing of politics. Manhood suffrage, Female
suffrage, the woes of deceased wives' sisters, the social am-
bition of dissenting ministers, the legal obstacles to the " free "
acquirement of landed property, home rule for "dear old Scot-
land " and "neglected little Wales", extraordinary tithes,
reform of the House of Lords : all these and any number of
other obstacles may be successfully thrown in the way of the
forward march of the Socialist army. And the worst of it all is
that in a great part of his obstructive tactics the Liberal will
have us on the hip ; for to out-and-out democratization we are
fully pledged, and must needs back up any attack on hereditary
or class privilege, come it from what quarter it may.

But, to get back to our metaphor of the card table (a meta-
phor much more applicable to the games of political men), the
political suit does not exhaust the Liberal hand. There still
remains a card to play — a veritable trump. Sham Socialism is
the name of it, and Mr. John Morley the man to plank it down.

I have said above that the trend of things to Socialism is best
shewn by the changed attitude of men towards State interference
and control ; and this is true. Still it must not be forgotten that
although Socialism involves State control, State control does not
imply Socialism — at least in any modern meaning of the term.
It is not so much to the thing the State does, as to the end for
which it does it that we must look before we can decide whether
it is a Socialist State or not. Socialism is the common holding
of the means of production and exchange, and the holding of them
for the equal benefit of all. In view of the tone now being adopted
by some of us l I cannot too strongly insist upon the importance
of this distinction ; for the losing sight of it by friends, and its
intentional obscuration by enemies, constitute a big and immediate

1 One of the most indefatigable and prolific members of the Socialist
party, in a widely circulated tract, has actually adduced the existence of
hawkers' licenses as an instance of the " Progress of Socialism " !

THE OUTLOOK. 213

•danger. To bring forward sixpenny telegrams as an instance of
State Socialism may be a very good method of scoring a point
off an individualist opponent in a debate before a middle-class
audience ; but from the standpoint of the proletariat a piece of
State management which spares the pockets only of the com-
mercial and leisured classes is no more Socialism than were the
droits de Seigneur of the middle ages. Yet this is the sort of sham
Socialism' which it is as certain as death will be doled out by
the popular party in the hope that mere State action will be
mistaken for really Socialist legislation. And the object of these
givers of Greek gifts will most infallibly be attained if those
Socialists who know what they want hesitate (from fear of losing
popularity, or from any more amiable weakness) to clamor
their loudest against any and every proposal whose adoption
would prolong the life of private Capital a single hour.

But leaving sham Socialism altogether out of account, there
are other planks in the Liberal " and Radical " programme
which would make stubborn barriers in the paths of the
destroyers of private capital. Should, for instance, Church
disestablishment come upon us while the personnel of the
House of Commons is at all like what it is at present, few
things are more certain than that a good deal of what is now
essentially collective property will pass into private hands ;
that the number of individuals interested in upholding owner-
ship will be increased ; and that the only feelings gratified
will be the acquisitiveness of these persons and the envy of
Little Bethel.

Again, the general state of mind of the Radical on the
land question is hardly such as to make a Socialist hilarious.
It is true your " progressive " will cheer Henry George, and
is sympathetically inclined to nationalization (itself a "blessed
word ") ; but he is not at all sure that nationalization, free land,
and peasant proprietorship, are not three names for one and
the same proposal. And, so far as the effective members of
the Liberal party aie concerned, there is no question at all
that the second and third of these " solutions " find much more
favor than the first. In fact, in this matter of the land, the
method of dealing with which is of the very propaedeutics

214 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

of Socialism, the Radical who goes for " free sale " or for
peasant ownership, is a less potent revolutionary force than
the Tory himself ; for this latter only seeks to maintain in land
the state of things which the Ring and Trust maker is working
to bring about in capital ] — and on the part which he is playing
in economic evolution we are all agreed.

From such dangers as these the progress of democracy is, by
itself, powerless to save us ; for although always and everywhere
democracy holds Socialism in its womb, the birth may be
indefinitely delayed by stupidity on one side and acuteness on
the other.

I have gone at some length into an analysis of the possible
artificial hindrances to Socialism, because, owing to the amia-
bility and politeness shown us by the Radical left wing during
the last twelve months ; to the successes which Radical votes
have given to some of our candidates at School Board and other
elections ; and to the friendly patronage bestowed upon us by
certain "advanced" journals, some of our brightest, and otherwise
most clear-sighted, spirits have begun to base high hopes upon
what they call "the permeation " of the Liberal party. These
of our brothers have a way of telling us that the transition to
Socialism will be so gradual as to be imperceptible, and that
there will never come a day when we shall be able to say " now
we have a Socialist State ". They are fond of likening the
simpler among us who disagree with them as to the extreme
protraction of the process, to children who having been
told that when it rains a cloud falls, look disappointedly
out of the window on a wet day, unconscious that the cloud is-
falling before their eyes in the shape of drops of water. To
these cautious souls I reply that although there is much truth in
their contention that the process will be gradual, we shall be
able to say that we have a Socialist State on the day on which
no man or group of men holds, over the means of production,
property rights by which the labor of the producers can be sub-
jected to exploitation ; and that while their picturesque metaphor

1 It is worth noting that those organs of the press which are devoted more
particularly to the landed interest have been the first to hint at the probable
desirability of dealing with great industrial monopolies by means of legislation..

THE OUTLOOK. 215

is a happy as well as a poetic conceit, it depends upon the
political acumen of the present and next generation of Socialist
men whether the "cloud" shall fall in refreshing Socialist
showers or in a dreary drizzle of Radicalism, bringing with it
more smuts than water, fouling everything and cleansing no-
where.

This permeation of the Radical Left, undoubted fact though
it is of present day politics, is worth a little further attention ;
for there are two possible and tenable views as to its final
outcome. One is that it will end in the slow absorption of the
Socialist in the Liberal party, and that by the action of this
sponge-like organism the whole of the Rent and Interest will
pass into collective control without there ever having been a
party definitely and openly pledged to that end. According to
this theory there will come a time, and that shortly, when the
avowed Socialists and the much socialized Radicals will be
strong enough to hold the balance in many constituencies, and
sufficiently powerful in all to drive the advanced candidate
many pegs further than his own inclination would take him.
Then, either by abstention or by actual support of the reac-
tionary champion at elections, they will be able to threaten the
Liberals with certain defeat. The Liberals, being traditionally
squeezable folk (like all absorbent bodies), will thus be forced to
make concessions and to offer compromises ; and will either
adopt a certain minimum number of the Socialist proposals,
or allow to Socialists a share in the representation itself.
Such concessions and compromises will grow in number and
importance with each successive appeal to the electorate, until
at last the game is won.

Now it seems to me that these hopefuls allow their desires to
distort their reason. The personal equation plays too large a
part in the prophecy. They are generally either not yet wholly
socialized Radicals or Socialists who have quite recently broken
away from mere political Radicalism and are still largely under
the influence of party ties and traditions. They find it almost
impossible to believe that the party with which they acted so
long, so conscientiously, and with so much satisfaction to them-
selves, is, after all, not the party to which belongs the future.

216 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

They are in many cases on terms of intimate private friendship
with some of the lesser lights of Radicalism, and occasionally
bask in the patronizing radiance shed by the larger luminaries.
A certain portion of the " advanced " press is open to them for
the expression of their views political. Of course none of these
considerations are at all to their discredit, or reflect in the very
least upon their motives or sincerity ; but they do color their
judgment and cause them to reckon without their host. They are
a little apt to forget that a good deal of the democratic programme
has yet (as I have said above) to be carried. Manhood suffrage,
the abolition of the Lords, disestablishment, the payment of
members : all these may be, and are, quite logically desired by
men who cling as pertinaciously to private capital as the
doughtiest knight of the Primrose League. Such men regard
the vital articles of the Socialist creed as lying altogether
outside the concrete world — "the sphere of practical politics".
Meanwhile the Socialist votes and voices are well within that
sphere ; and it is every day becoming more evident that without
them the above-mentioned aspirations have a meagre chance of
realization. Now, from the eminently business-like Liberal stand-
point there is no reason whatever why concessions should not
be made to the Socialist at the polling booth so long as none
are asked for in the House of Commons. And even when they
are demanded, what easier than to make some burning political
question play the part which Home Rule is playing now ? Thus
an endless vista of office opens before the glowing eyes of the
practical politician — those short-sighted eyes which see so little
beyond the nose, and which, at that distance only, enable their
owner to hit the white.

The Radical is right as usual in counting on the Socialist
alliance up to a certain point. For us the complete democratiza-
tion of institutions is a political necessity. But long before
that complete democratization has been brought about we shall
have lost our patience and the Radicals their temper.

For as Mr. Hyndman tells the world with damnable (but
most veracious) iteration, we are "a growing party". We
recruit by driblets ; but we do recruit ; and those who come to us
come, like all the new American newspapers, "to stay". Our

THE OUTLOOK. 217

faith, our reason, our knowledge, tell us that the great evolu-
tionary forces are with us ; and every addition to our ranks
causes us, in geometrical proportion, to be less and less tolerant
of political prevarication. Directly we feel ourselves strong
enough to have the slightest chance of winning off our own bat
we shall be compelled both by principle and inclination to send
an eleven to the wickets. They will have to face the opposition,
united or disunited, of both the orthodox parties, as did the
defeated Socialist candidates at the School Board election in
November, 1888. And whether our success be great or small,
•or even non-existent, we shall be denounced by the Radical
wire-pullers and the now so complaisant and courteous Radical
press. The alliance will be at an end.

There is yet another way in which we may win the ill-will
of our temporary allies and, at present, very good friends. I
have spoken above of certain reactionary items of a possible
Radical programme, which, although they have a grotesque
resemblance to Socialism, are worlds away from being the thing
itself. These proposals we not only cannot support, but must
and shall actively and fiercely oppose. At the first signs of
such opposition to whoever may be the Liberal shepherd of the
moment the whole flock of party sheep will be in full cry upon
•our track. The ferocity of the mouton enrage is proverbial; and
we shall be treated to the same rancour, spleen, and bile which
is now so plenteously meted out to the Liberal Unionists.

The immediate result of this inevitable split will be the
formation of a definitively Socialist party, i.e., a party pledged
to the communalization of all the means of production and
exchange, and prepared to subordinate every other considera-
tion to that one end. Then the House of Commons will begin
dimly to reflect the real condition of the nation outside ; and
in it we shall see as in a glass, darkly, or smudgedly, something
of that ''well defined confrontation of rich and poor", of which
all who attend Socialist lectures hear so much, and to which,
xx hypothesi, the world, day by day, draws nearer. Then, also,
will begin that process which, I submit, is more likely than
either the absorption of the Socialist or the prolonged permea-
.tion of the Radical: namely, the absorption of the Radical

218 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

himself into the definitely pro -private capital party on the
one side, and the definitely anti-private capital party on the
other.

A really homogeneous Socialist party once formed, the
world political reflects the world economic, and there is na
longer any room for the Radical, as we know the wonder-
Each fresh Socialist victory, each outpost driven in, each
entrenchment carried, will be followed by a warren-like scuttle
of alarmed and well-to-do Radicals across the floor of the
House of Commons, which will once more become a true
frontier ; and, finally, the political battle array will consist
of a small opposition, fronting a great and powerful majority,
made up of all those whose real or fancied interests would
suffer from expropriation.

Thus far the outlook has been clear and focusable enough;
and it has needed no extra-human illumination to see the
details. All that has been wanted has been normal vision
and a mind fairly free of the idols of the cave. But here the
prospect becomes dim and uncertain ; and little purpose would
be served by trying to pierce the mist which enshrouds the
distant future.

Much, very much, will depend upon the courage, the mag-
nanimity, the steadfastness, the tact, the foresight, and above
all upon the incorruptibility of those whose high mission it will
be to frame the policy and direct the strategy of the Socialist
party in those early days of its parliamentary life. It will have
sore need of a leader as able as, and more conscientious than,
any of the great parliamentary figures of the past. The eye
expectant searches in vain for such a man now among the
younger broods of the new democracy. He is probably at this,
moment in his cradle or equitably sharing out toys or lollipops
to his comrades of the nursery. And this is well ; for he must
be a man quit of all recollections of these days of Sturm und Drang,,
of petty jealousies, constant errors, and failing faith. . He must
bring to his task a record free from failure and without suspicion
of stain.

But whatever may be the difficulties in store for us who-
name the name cf Socialism, of one thing at least they who.

THE OUTLOOK. 219-

have followed this course of lectures may make quite sure.
That, however long and wearisome the struggle, each day brings
us nearer victory. Those who resist Socialism fight against
principalities and powers in economic places. Every new
industrial development will add point to our arguments and
soldiers to our ranks. The continuous perfectioning of the
organisation of labour will hourly quicken in the worker
the consciousness that his is a collective, not an individual
life. The proletariat is even now the only real class: its
units are the only human beings who have nothing to hope for
save from the levelling up of the aggregate of which they form a
part. The intensifying of the struggle for existence, while it sets
bourgeois at the throat of bourgeois, is forcing union and solidarity
upon the workers. And the bourgeois ranks themselves are
dwindling. The keenness of competition, making it every
year more obviously impossible for those who are born without
capital ever to achieve it, will deprive the capitalist class of the
support it now receives from educated and cultivated but
impecunious young men whose material interest must finally
triumph over their class sympathies ; and from that section of
workmen whose sole aspiration is to struggle out of the crowd.
The rising generation of wage workers, instead of as now being
befogged and bedevilled by the dust and smoke of mere faction
fight, will be able at a glance to distinguish the uniforms of friend
and foe. Despair will take sides with Hope in doing battle for
the Socialist cause.

These lectures have made it plain enough to those who have
hearing ears and understanding brains that mere material self-
interest alone will furnish a motive strong enough to shatter
monopoly; and after monopoly comes Socialism or — chaos. But
the interest of the smaller self is not the only force which aids
us in the present, or will guide us in the future. The angels are
on our side. The constant presence of a vast mass of human
misery is generating in the educated classes a deep discontent, a
spiritual unrest, which drives the lower types to pessimism, the
higher to enquiry. Pessimism paralyses the arms and unnerves
the hearts of those who would be against us. Enquiry proves
that Socialism is founded upon a triple rock, historical, ethical,.

220 THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

and economic. It gives, to those who make it, a great hope — a
hope which, once it finds entrance into the heart of man, stays to
soften life and sweeten death. By the light of the Socialist
Ideal he sees the evil — yet sees it pass. Then and now he
begins to live in the cleaner, braver, holier life of the future ; and
he marches forward, steeled and stimulated, with resolute step,
with steadfast eye, with equal pulse.

It is just when the storm winds blow and the clouds lour
and the horizon is at its blackest that the ideal of the Socialist
shines with divinest radiance, bidding him trust the inspiration
of the poet rather than heed the mutterings of the perplexed
politician, bidding him believe that

"For a' that, for a' that,
Its coming yet for a* that,
That man to man the world o'er
Shall brothers be for a" that."

INDEX

PAGE.

ABSENTEE Proprietors . . 26
Abstinence, Reward of . . . . 20
Abstract method in Economics 24
Administrative Errors . . . . 42
"Administrative Nihilism " .. 43
Adulteration Acts . . . . 46
Aged, Treatment of the. . . . 165
Agriculture and Machinery . . 69
Aladdin's uncle outdone . . 12
Aliens, Necessity under Social-
ism for a law of . . . . 138

Althorp, Lord 76

America (See United States)
American Independence, Decla-
ration of 66

Anarchists, Modern .. .. 177

Anarchy preferred to corrupt
State regulation by progres-
sive thinkers . . . . . . 176

Andrews, E. Benjamin, on Trusts 93
Angels, constitution and status of 1 18
,, condition of their imita-
tion on earth 121

Argyle, Duke of 139

Aristotle 176

Arkwright's inventions . . 37, 65

Aristocratic employments .. 119
Ashley, Lord (See Lord

Shaftesbury).
Associated Capitals, Competi-
tive force of 157

Associations, Legal position

under Socialism of voluntary 136
Austin, John .. .-44. 132, 181
Autobiography of John Stuart

Mill 56, 58

Aveling, Rev. F. W 59

BALFOUR, Right Hon. A. J. 116
Barbarous Countries, Exploita-
tion of 82

Bastille, Fall of the . . 38, 66

Bebel, August 131

Bedford, Duke of . . . . 139
Bellamy, E. (author of " Look-
ing Backwards ") .. .. 160
221

PAGE. .

Benefit Association, Sheep and

Lamb Butcher's Mutual . . 97
Benevolence and Omnipotence,

The dilemma between . . 27

Bentham, Jeremy 33, 44, 45, 60, 181

Bequest .. .. .. .. 135

Berkeley, Bishop . . . . 45

Besant, Annie . . . . . . 150

Walter : His belated

chivalry 119-

Bimetallism suggested as a solu-
tion of the social problem . . 191

Birmingham 52

,, compared with

Warwick .. .. .. 135

Bismarck, Socialism and Prince 211
Blanc, Louis, His Definition of

Communism . . . . . . 144

Bland, Hubert . . . . 56, 202

Bloodshed : How to argue with

its advocates 182-3

Bonanza farms .. .. 69,157

Bourgeoisie, The Factory Acts

and the 209

Free Trade and the . . 208

Bradford 52

Bradlaugh, Charles . . . . 200

Bramwell, Lord . . . . 33, 193

Bright, John . . . . 76, 87

Brittany, Standard of comfort in 135

Peasants of .. .. 147

British Association . . . . 173

Mind, The Vestry stamp

upon the . . . . . . 200

Bryce, James . . . . . . 86

Brook Farm 32

Browning, Robert . . . . 27

Burns, John 191

Bunyan, John 148

CADE, Jack 176

Cairnes, J. E., on the idle

rich 85

Canada, Conquest of . . 66, 79

Canals, Socialization of . . 153

Cant. Its source .. 7,116

222

INDEX.

PAGE.

Capital : Is not machinery . . 20
Is the result of saving . . 20
Is spare subsistence . . 20

Cannot be safely taken by
the State except for im-
mediate employment as

capital 190

Source of municipal capital 193
Provision for municipal ac-
cumulation . . . . 196
" Capital " (Karl Marx's work) 27, 41
" Capital and Land " (Fabian

Tract) 48

Capitals, Competitive force of

associated 157

Capitalism : 19

Unscrupulousness of . . 76
Its idea self-destructive . . 121
Morals of . . . . 76, 116, 120
Characteristic effects of . . 122
Its origin in piracy and slave-
trading 175

Capitalist : Separation of his
function from those of the
entrepreneur . . . . 84

Regulation of the . . . . 49

Type of the 115

Capitalist combinations and

State action 99

Capitulations by proprietary
classes . . . . . . . . 199

Career open to the talented . . 10
Carlyle, Thomas. . .. 34, 46

Cartwright, Rev. Edmund, In-
ventions of 65

Caste (see Class)

Castlereagh, Viscount . . . . 39

Catastrophic Socialism 150, 182,

201, 203
Catechism, Misquotation of the
Church . . . . . . . . 120

Catholic Church, Socialism of

the 124

Catholic Emancipation. . 39, 207

Centralization of State indus-
tries . . . . . . 156, 199

Chalmers, Rev. Thomas . . 44

Charity 22, 184, 192

" Charter, The People's " . . 54

Chartism 54,186

Cheque Bank : Suggestion as to
Communal currency . . . . 165

Children : In Communes . . 165

Effect of Socialism on the
status of . . . . . . 200

" Christian Socialism ". . 87, 88

Church Catechism, The . . 120

•Church, The Catholic .. .. 124

Church of England : A mere
appanage of the landed
gentry 36

191
24

182
60

Church of England: Effect
of property holding on

the 136

Democratization of the . . 205
" Church Reformer, The " . . 44
Churches . . . . . . . . 7

Churchgoing, Hypocrisies of . .
Church, Declaration of the Pan-
Anglican Synod concerning
Socialism and the
Civilizations and Societies
Civil Servants : Their reputa-
tion for unconscientiousness

" Claims of Labor, The "

Clanricarde, Lord

Clarke, William . . 32, 62, 150, 202

Class Feeling and Morality 21

113, 115, 116, 118-20

Classes, Separation of .. .. 21

Cleavage, Economic . . . . 203

Clive, Robert . . . . 66, 79

Coal mining, Application of ma-
chinery to

Coal monopoly in the United
States

Cobden Club disconcerted by
the appearance of Imports not
paid for by Exports

Cobden, Richard

Colonization, Modern

Coleridge, S. T.

Combination

,, Benefits of

Commercial policy of England
under Capitalism

Commodities : Exchange of . .

Process by which their value

is reduced to the cost of

production of the most

costly unit of the supply 16,196

Common Sense . . . . 104, 128

Commune : Its establishment in
England already accomplished

Communes

Communism defined

Communities, Savings of
Debts of..

Compensation for expropriated
proprietors

Competition : Theory of

Decline of 89

Effect on wages . . . . 194

Comte, Auguste .. 31, 32, 34, 186

Comte de Paris 33

" Condition of the Working
Classes " (F. Engel's work) . .

Conduct and Principle, Incom-
patibility set up by Private
Property between . . . . 7

Conscience, Social .. .. 152

160

86

186

81, 87

25, 200

. 46

18

98

78
12

152
4
144
136
141

193

177

41

INDEX.

223

PAGE.

Conservatives, Present attitude

of 207

Consols : Nature of the opera-
tion called " reducing " . . 199
Consumption, Associated 133, 146
Contracts restricted in England 143
Contradictions apparently beset-
ting the investigation of value 13
Conventions as to Morality 109, no
Cooking, Public and private . . 155
Co-operative Movement : 46, 89,

137. J58

Socialist origin of the 87, 191

Aims of the leaders . . 191

Co-operative Experiments . . 142

Co-ordination, Social . . . . 60

Copyright . . 132, 145, 146

Copper, The " corner "in . . 92

Corners . . . . . . . . 18

Cost of Production: What it

means . . . . . . 16

Reduction of value to . . 16

On inferior soils . . . . 5

Cotton Manufacture, Progress

of the 73

Cotton-seed Oil Trust . . . . 96

County Councils, The new 39,

136, 141, 152, 188, 199

County Council, The London . . 199

County Family, Origin of the . . 7

County Farms, Organization of 154
County Government Act (See

County Councils).
Covent Garden Market and the

Duke of Bedford . . . . 139

Crime: Its relativity .. .. 115

Criminal Class: Its formation 21, 123

Crompton, Samuel, Inventions of 37

Cultivation of the Earth : . . 3

Its beginning . . . . 5

Its " margin " . . . . 5, 7

Effect of exploration on the

progress of . . . . 24

Discrepancies between its
actual progress and that
deduced from abstract

economics . . . . 24

Culture, Effect on profits of in-
dustrial management of the

spread of . . . . . . 197

Currency, Suggestion as to com-
munal . . . . . . . . 165

Cynicism of our time . . . . 7

,, Routed by Socialism . . 28

DANTE 11

Darwin, Charles . . . . 46, 93, 186

" Darwinism and Politics " . . 57
Darwinian theory appealed to

by monopolists . . . . 93

By Socialists . . . . 57

PAGE.

Day, The working . . . . 155
Debt, The National .. ..141

Debts, Law as to . . . . 138

Of Communities . . . . 140

Decentralization, Necessity for 187

Definitions of economic rent . . 6

Demand, Effective . . . . 22

Supply and n

Democracy : Import of 34, 35,

40, 60, 6i, 214

Instability of . . , . 61

Postulated by Socialism . . 182

Further steps necessary to

consummate . . . . 187

Democrat, Distinction between

the ordinary and the Social. . 182
Democratic Federation (See

S.D.F.)

De Quincey, Thomas . . . . 45
Desire as a social motor 105, 112
Detailed suggestions for social
organization of unemployed

labor 154

De Tocqueville. A. C. H. C. . . 33

Devil worship . . . . . . 28

Diocesan Councils, Central Con-
ference of . . . . . . 61

Dirty Work 160

Discipline in socialized indus-
tries 158

Discovery of new countries . . 24
Disestablishment of the Church 206
Dishonesty a product of Capita-
lism 122

Disingenuousness of class Eco-
nomists . . . . . . 17, 22, 25

Dismal Science now the Hope-
ful . . . . . . . . 29

Dismissal, Power of . . . . 158

Dissolution of the Old Synthesis 35

Division of labor . . . . 5

Drainage Acts . . . . . . 46

Drinking Fountains, Commu-
nism exemplified in . . . . 144

Drone and Worker . . . . 6

EARNINGS distinguished from
the revenue of Private Pro-
perty 26-

Ecclesiastical intolerance, Re-
action against medieval . . 177
Economics (See Political

Economy).
Economists (See Political

Economists).
Education : Reform of . . . . 55

Moral 112

A necessity for morality . . 121
Socialist ideal of . . 126, 147
Effect on profits of industrial
management .. .. 197

224

INDEX.

PAGE.

Education : Tendency of Social

Democracy to en courage . . 198

Eight Hours, Working day of . . 155

Electors, Number of . . 40

Elizabethan merchant adven -

turers . . . . . . . . 175

Emigration . . . . . . 184

Employer : Differentiated from

Capitalist . . . . . . 84

And laborer . . . . . . 151

Not harmed by Socialism 195
Engels, F. .. . . ..41

England . Her social policy to-
day 23

In 1750 ••.••. •• 35
Her foreign policy dictated

by Capitalism . . . . 81-2
Her mineral fertility . . 184
" English Factory Legislation "
(See also Factory Legisla-
tion) 41

Entrepreneur (See Employer) . .

Episcopal Conference . . . . 61

Equality of remuneration 163, 164
Errors (See Mistakes exposed

by Socialism)

Ethics : Metaphysic of . . . . 104

Positive science of . . . . 104
Evolution, Effect of hypothesis

of 28, 57

Exchange of Commodities : . . 12

Mechanism of . . . . 13

Exchange Value (See Value) . . 12

Exploitation . . . . . . 21

FACTORIES before the Fac-
tory Act .. .. 41, 74
Factory Legislation 41 , 46, 77,

138, 184, 209
Factory System. Introduction of

the 37, 65

" Facts for Londoners" .. 199

" Fair Trade " 101

Family : Effect of Socialism on

the . . . . . . . . 200

Origin of the County . . 7

Isolation of the . . 134, 146

Farms : Organization of County 154

„ Bonanza .. .. 157

Fawcett, Henry 6

Federation of Municipalities . . 199

Feudalism : Survival of 35

Reaction against its domi-
neering 177

Feudal dues 43

Fielden, John 77

Filibuster, The colonizing . . 199
Final Utility, Theory of 14, 15

Flag, Trade following the . . 199

Flats, Living in . . . . . . 134

Fly-Shuttle, Invention of the . . 65

PAGE..

Foreign Investments, Interest on 186
Foreign Markets, The fight for

8i, 199
Foreign Policy : Effect of Capita-
lism upon . . . . . . 79

Effect of Socialism upon . . 199
Foreign Trade following the

nag 199

Forestalling .. .. .. 17

Fourier, F. C. M. .. .. 134

Fox, Charles James . . . . 38

Fox well, Professor H. S. . . 41

Free Ferry, The London . . 53.
"Free Land" and the Radical

party 56, 214

Free Trade Movement : 80, 81

Foreign investments left out

of account by the . . 186

The bourgeoisie and the . . 209
Freethinker, Possible election to
the Deanery of Westminster of

an avowed 200

French Revolution . . 38, 66, 191
Friction caused by introduction

of Municipal Socialism . . 196

Furse, Canon . . . . . . 61

GAMBLING 4

Gasworks, Socialization of 51, 153, 199

George III . . . . . . 79

George, Henry . . 26, 104, 140,

178, 186, 189, 190

Georgism, Checkmate to . . 190
Giffen, Robert . . . . 186, 191

Gladstone, Right Hon. W. E. : 53

Retrogressive instincts of . . 184

Glasgow : 53

Growth of 37

Godin and Leclaire, Experi-
ments of . . . . . . 167

Godwin, William . . . . 44

Gold : As money . . . . 13

Effect of discoveries in Cali-
fornia and Australia . . 184
Goschen, Right Hon. G. J. . . 199

Gould, Jay 76

Government : In 1750 . . . . 37

Industries carried on by . . 47

"Government Organization

of Labor" ., .. 52

Gradual Socialization : . . . . 35

Compensation a condition of 193

Greek Republics.. 137, 163, 176

Greenock . . • • . . . . 51

Gronlund, Laurence 131, 133, 137

Grote, George . . . . . . 44

Ground values, Municipalization

of 193

Growth of Towns . . . . 37

Guild of St. Matthew .. .. 45

Guillotining 200

INDEX.

225

PAGE.

HABITS: Moral .. ..107

Automatic .. .. .. 107

Harbors, Nationalization of . . 165
Harcourt, Rt. Hon. Sir W. V. :

On the teetotal stump .. 116
' ' We are all Socialists now ' ' 209
Hargreaves, James, The inven-
tions of . . . . . . 37, 65

Harrison, Frederic . . . . 60

Hastings, Warren . . . . 79

Haves and Have-nots . . . . 204

Head Rents, Relative insignifi-
cance of . . . . . . 11

Hegel, G. W. F 179,181

High Church party . . . . 44

Historical : Method in Econo-
mics . . . . . . 24

Development of Private Pro-
perty 24

Basis of Socialism . . . . 30
" Historical Basis of Social-
ism " (Hyndman's work) 32
" History " : "Of Agriculture

and Prices " . . .. 37
"Of the 18th Century" .. 38
"Of Private Bill Legisla-
tion" 43

" Of the Reform Bill " . . 36
Hobbes, Thomas . . . . 176

Hobhouse, Lord . . . . 189, 193
Hobhouse, Sir John Cam . . 75

Homestead Law 138

Hospital, The .. .. .. 22

House of Commons . . . . 199

„ Lords, Abolition of . . 187
Household Suffrage . . . . 39

Huddersfield 51

Human Life, Disregard of Capi-
tal for 161

Hume, David . . . . 44, 177

Huxley, Professor . . . . 60

Hyndman, H. M. . . 32, 186

Hypocrisy . . . . 7, 175

IBSEN, Henrik 147

Icaria . . ..... . . 32

Idleness, Association of pros-
perity with . . . . . . 7

Idlers : their fate under Social-
ism . . . . . . . . 166

Illth 22

Illusions, Economic . . . . 177

Immigration, Pauper .. 137-8,191

Improvements in Production : . . 9

Effect of unforeseen .. 11
Incentive to Labor : Under

Socialism . . . . . . 166

Under Leasehold system . . 188
Income Tax : . . 143, 165, 184
An instrument of expropria-
tion 193

PAGE.

Income Tax : " Rent of ability "

recoverable by . . 199
Independent Weaver, Transfor-
mation of the 66

India, Conquest of, under Clive

and Warren Hastings 66, 79

Indifference, Law of . . . . 14

Individualism : Outbreak of . . 41

Abandonment of . . . . 60

The change to Socialism

from 151

Confusedly opposed to So-
cialism . . . . . . 105

Its moralization .. 106,112
Anti-Social manifestation . . 114
Protestant form of . . . . 125

Abolished in production . . 127
Industrial Organization, Centra-
lization of . . . . 161-2, 199

Industrial Remuneration Confer-
ence . . . . . . . . 60

Industrial Revolution 38-40, 46,

62, 150, 176

Attitude of parties during. . 207

Industrialism, Evil effects of . . 74

Industry : Under Socialism . . 150

Nationalization of . . . . 48

As virtue or vice . . 116, 118
Disgraceful for women . . 118
La grande industrie . . . . 204

Inequality : . . . . . . 4

Mischief of . . . . . . 23

Sense of it lost in contem-
plation of equality before

God 27

Inferior soils, Resort to . . 5

Ingram, J. K 88

Injustices produced by private

appropriation of land . . 8

Insanity, Definition of . . 106, 109
Inspection of Industry . . . . 48

Institutions, History of . . .. 113

Insurance National . . . . 27

Municipal . . . . . . 53

Insurrectionism . . . . 182, 193

Intellectual Revolt, The . . 203

Interest : . . . . . . . . 20

Fall in the current rate often
mistaken for a tendency in
Interest to disappear . . 20
Mr. Goschen's operation for
securing to the community
the advantage of the fall
in the current rate . . 20
A tribute .. .. 115,125

Interest, Class 113

International morality in the

Middle Ages 174

International Trade the domi-
nant factor in foreign policy 79, 199
Invention, Consequences of . . 161

Q

226

INDEX.

PAGE.

Inventor, The first . . . . 9
Iron Industry 66

JEVONS, W. Stanley . . . . 178

Joint Stock Companies: De-
velopment of . . 48, 86
Not objects of public sympa-
thy.. .. .. .. 152

Joseph the Second . . . . 34

KAYE OF BURY . . . . 37
Kingsley, Charles . . 44, 46, 87

Kitchens : Separate . . . . 134

Public 148

Kropotkin, Peter . . 68, 176

LABOR : Mouth honor to 7

In the market as a commodity 12
Displaced by machinery . . 70
Fruits of .. .. .. 114

Municipal organization of

154, 192
Labor colonies . . . . 162

Beginning of State organiza-
tion of . . . . . . 192

Laborer and Employer . . 151

(See also Proletarian)
Laisser-faire 41, 43, 44, 57, 77, 176
Lancashire, Old : . . . . 63

Expansion of . . . . 72

Weavers' grievances . . 80

Land, Rent of: 5-7

Point at which it becomes a

close monopoly . . . . 10
Powers of the County Coun-
cils to hold . . . . 153
Nationalization of . . 53, 189
Landlord, What he costs . . 17
Landed Interest, Its policy . . 205
Lassalle, Ferdinand . . 64, 179
Law of Indifference . . I4_I5
" Rent (See also Rent)

6, 60, 177
" Leaseholds Enfranchisement "

57, 191

Leaseholds : Origin of . . . . 11

Confiscation at expiry of . . 188

Lecky, W. J 38,78,81

Leclaire and Godin, Experi-
ments of 167

Leeds 37. 43- 53

Legislation: Breakdown of medi-
eval 176

(See also Factory Legis-
lation)
Levelling-down action of Private

Property 17

Levi, Leone 60

Liberal and Radical Union in
favor of County Councils hold-
ing land . . . . 53, 153

PAGE.

Libraries, Public . . . . 147

Liberal Party, Its policy on

Socialism .. .. 209-211

Liberty and Equality . . 59, 174

Liberty and Property Defence

League 53

Lincoln, Abraham : The moral

of his assassination . . . . 82
Liverpool, Growth of . . . . 37
Lloyd, Henry D., on "Lords of

Industry" 91

Local : Improvement Acts . . 46
Self-Go vernment . . . . 188

Government Boards deal-
ings with the unemployed 192
Government Board of the
future . . . . . . 199

Lodging Houses, Municipal . . 53
London : Facts concerning . . 199
The County Council . . 199

Extraordinary proportions
reached by Economic

Rent in 188

Liberal and Radical Union

53, 153
London and South Western
Railway shareholders .. 86
" Looking Backwards " . . . . 160

Louis XVI 63

Lying, As vice or virtue . . 117

MACHINERY: Shoemaking by 67
Agriculture by . . . . 69
Displacement of hand labor

by 70

Progress of . . . . 152, 161

Substitution for hand labor
in diagreeable employ-
ments . . . . . . 160

Chimney sweeping by . . 160
Maine, Sir Henry . . 33, 61

Malthus, Rev. T. R. . . 37, 44, 178
Man as producer and exchanger 15
" Man versus the State " . . 53

Management, Profits of industrial 197
Managers, Qualifications and

present value of industrial . . 197-8

Manchester .. 37, 43, 51, 52

Manchester School : .. 81,185

Its advocacy of Protection 194

Manners, Lady Janette on " Are

Rich Landowners Idle ? " . . 119
Manorial Rights : . . 37, 43

Mills 43

Manors 4, 37, 43

Marginal Utility (See Final

Utility)
Margin of Cultivation ; . . . . 5,8
Obligation of private com-
petitors to charge the full
cost of production at . . 196-7

INDEX.

227

PAGE.

Markets : Effect on rent of prox-
imity to 5

The fight for foreign 81, 199

Marriage, Contract of . . • • 143
Marshall, Alfred and Mary

Paley — Definition of rent . . 6
Marx, Karl .. ..41, 179, 186

Matthew, Guild of St 45

Maurice, F. Denison . . 44, 46, 87
Meliorism . . . . . . . . 28

Men, Traffic in 12

Mercantile System . . . . 43

Method of criticism on Moral

Basis 104

Metoeci in Athens . . . . 137
Middle Ages, Social organiza-
tion in the 173

Middle Class : Its callousness 80
Its moral ideas .. 118-20

Its misunderstandings of So-
cialism . . . . . . 180

Its dread of mob violence . . 192
Militant organization of- the
working class for forcible re-
volution . . . . . . 200, 203

Militarism and immigration .. 138
Military Service : . . . . 144

Empires of the Continent . . 138
Mill, James . . . . 33, 44

Mill, John Stuart 6, 35, 44, 46,

56, 58, 186
Milk Exchange of New York . . 97
Milton, John, Proposal as to
schools . . . . . . . . 147

Mines : Their horrors before the
legislation initiated by
Lord Ashley . . . . 74

Nationalization of . . . . 165

Mines Regulation Acts . . 46
Minor poetry, Socialist pro-
vision for the publication

of 159

Mirabeau . . . . . . . . 66

Missionaries . . . . . . 199

Mistakes exposed by Socialism :

That Society is no more than
the sum of its units . . 5, 56

That Private Property en-
courages industry . . 8

That Private Property es-
tablishes healthy incen -
tive 8

That Private Property dis-
tributes wealth according
to exertion . . . . 8

That Rent does not enter
into price . . . . . . 17

That Exchange Value is a
measure of true wealth . . 22

That " the poor ye shall
have always with you " . . 29

PAGE.

Mistakes exposed by Socialism :
That riots, regicide, and
bloodshed make Revolu-
tions . . . . 62, 182
Mob Violence, middle - class

dread of 192

Molesworth, W. N 36

Money, Function of .. .. 13

Monopolies : 18

And Democracy . . . . 98

Necessity for protecting the
Postmaster's . . . . 185.

Moral Basis of Socialism : . . 102
Habits and their origin . . 107
Education of the Individual 112
And of Society . . . . 126

Moralists, Foolish . . . . 8

Morality : . . . . . . 103

Relativity of . . . . . . 105

Recognizable only in So-
ciety . . . . . . 106

Conventional 107, no, 115, 118
Natural . . . . 1 11, 119

Practical .. .. .. 113

Class .. 7, 29, 118, 119, 120, 175
Elementary conditions of . . 124
Developed conditions of 126, 127
Socialist . . . . . . 127

Medieval . . . . . . 173-4

Elizabethan 175

" Morals and Health Act " (1802) 46
More, Sir Thomas . . . . 176

Morley, Right Hon John 53,

200, 210, 212

Motors, Influence of new . . 38

Municipal : Corporations Act . . 39

Action .. .. .. 51

Socialism . . . . 52, 192

Debt 52

Development . . . . 55

Prestige of municipal em-
ployment . . . . . . 195

Municipalities, Growth of 37, 39

5o, 51, 52
(See also County Coun-
cils.)

NABOB, The appearance in

English social life of the . . 37
Napoleon : " The career is open

to the talented ". . .. 10
" A nation of shopkeepers " 79
Nasmyth, James, invents the

steam-hammer . . . . 67
National Insurance . . . . 27
National Liberal Federation . . 54
" National Review, The " . . 119
Nationalization of Rent : 26, 52

It results if unaccompanied
by Socialist organization

of labor 189

Q 2

228

INDEX,

Nationalization of Rent : Inter-
municipal rent . . . . 199

Rent of ability . . . . 197-8

(See also Progress and

Poverty.)

Nature : Caprices of . . . . 5, 9

" Red in tooth and claw " . . 27

Unmorality of . . . . 28

The cause of Society . . 108

Newspapers under Socialism . . 159

New Hampshire . . . . . . 134

New Motors, Influence of . . 38

New River Company . . . . 136

New York Legislature — Com-
mittee on Trusts . . . . 94

Newcommen, Thomas . . . . 37

Nexus, The social . . 34, 37, 56

OASTLER, Richard . . . . 76

O'Connor, Fergus . . . . 186
Oldest Families — Tradition of

their superiority . . . . 7

Oldham . . . . . . . . 51

Olivier, Sydney . . . . . . 102

Omnipotence and Benevolence,

The dilemma of . . . . 27

Optimism : rebuked by Science 27
The individualist economists

and their . . . . . . 177

Organism, The Social . . . . 57

Outlook, The political . . . . 202

Over-population .. .. .. 21

Owen, Robert . . 46, 87, 134, 191

PAINTERS, Gains of fashion-
able . . . . . . . . 197

Paley, Rev. William . . 44. 45

Palmerston, Chinese policy of

Lord 81

Panem et Circenses .. . . 190

Parasitism, Economic .. .. 116

Parliaments, Annual . . . . 187

Parks, Public .. .. .. 133

Parties, State and fundamental
differences of . . . . . . 206-7

Patent rights . . . . 132, 145

Patronage in the public service 181

Effect of appointments by . . 182

Pauper Labor, How to deal with 155

Payment of representatives . . 187

Peasant Proprietorship . . . . 56

Period of Anarchy . . . . 40

Perpetual pension, Privately ap-
propriated Rent is of the

nature of a . . . . . . 6

Pessimism . . . . 27, 220

Peterloo . . . . . . . . 39

Philanthropy, Futility of . . 184

" Philosophic Radicalism " . . 45

Physical force : . . 150, 182, 202

Advocated by Lord Bramwell 193

PAGE.

Physicians, Gains of fashionable 197
Piracy and the Slave Trade in
the 1 6th century . . . . 174

Pitt, William. His motives .. 79
Plener, E. von . . . . . . 76

Plebeians in ancient Rome . . 137
Plato . . . . . . . . 121

Police : Conduct of Socialists

charged upon by the . . no
Recent action of the ex-
Chief Commissioner of . . 191
Political : Tendencies . . 54, 204

Reform . . . . 55, 210

" Political Science Quarter-
ly " 32,87

Economy (See Political

Economy)
Political Economy : . . . . 5

Basis of Socialism in . . 3
Definitions of Rent in treat-
ises . . . . . . . . 6

Theory apparently contra-
dicted by history . . 24
Untrustworthiness of ab -
stract . . . . . . 24

Its guns turned against Pri-
vate Property . . . . 28

Old school and new . . 29

John Stuart Mill . . 35, 56, 58
Ricardo . . . . . . 178

Jevons . . . . . . 178

Rise of modern . . 44, 176

Perceived to be a rediutio
ad absurdum of Private Pro-
perty . . . . . . 179

Present political parties and 208
Poor Law : A Socialist institu-
tion degraded . . . . 125

Reform . . . . . . 55

The old and the new . . 184

Post Office : A Socialistic in-
stitution . . . . . . 144

Socialization of the postal

system 153

Economy of collectivist
charges exemplified by . . 185
Population : Increase and its

effects . . 7, 18, 178, 191

Its control by public opinion 200
(See also Overpopulation)
Press : Its liberty after the socia-
lization of printing . . 159
Clamor for bloodshed from
the newspapers of the pro-
prietary class . . . . 192

Preston : . . . . . . . . 51

Its public debt . . . . 140

Prices cannot be raised to com-
pensate diminished profits . . 195
Printing, Socialization of . . 159

Private Property : Beginning of 4

INDEX,

229

PAGE.

Private Property : Its levelling-
down action . . . . . . 17

Injustice of . . . . . . 23

Not now practicable in its

integrity 24

Its abrogation conceived as
an attempt to empower
everyone to rob everyone
else.. .. .. .. 26

Its revenue distinguished
from earnings . . . . 26

Composition of incomes de-
rived from 26

Institution of .. .. 113

Conditions of its possibility 114
Effect on sex relations . . 120

Idea of 121

Rights of 151

Cheapens the laborer . . 197
Tends to make the majority

mere beasts of burden . . 198
Process of extinction of . . 199
The State and . . . . 208

(See also Property.)
Private Enterprise compared

with Public 185

Produce : Unjust division re-
sulting from private appropri-
ation of land . . . . . . 8

Production : Improvements in . . 9
Effect of unforeseen im-
provements in .. .. 11

Conditions of production and
exchange . . . . . . 15

Associated .. .. 133,146

Profit : 9, 16

Sweater's . . . . . . 195

Most important form of

" Rent of Ability " . . 197

Effect of calculating it in net
social welfare instead of
individual pecuniary gain 199
** Profit Sharing " .. .. 167

Programme of Social Democracy 200
Progress : Conditions of . . 103

Rate of in politics, industry,
and thought . . . . 205

" Progress and Poverty " 25-6

178, 186, 189
" Progress of Socialism " . . 47

Proletarian : The first . . . . 9

Predicament of landless . . 11
End of his absorption by the
land as tenant . . . . 11

Sold into bondage . . . . 12

Operation of the law of value
on his position as a vendor
of labor . . . . . . 18

How the Democratic State

will deal with him . . 188

{See also Proletariat.)

PAGE.

Proletariat : Origin of the . . 9

Exploitation of . . . . 21

Physical degradation of . . 74

Type of 115

Morals of . . . . . . 121-4

So-called " intellectual " . . 197
(See also Proletarian.)

Property : Under Socialism . . 131
Definition and economic

analysis of . . 132
(See also Private Pro-
perty.)
Prosperity, Association of idle-
ness with 7

Prostitutes, their making . . 123
Protection : Decay of . . . . 80
In the Middle Ages . . 174
Advocated by the Manches-
ter School 194

Proudhon, P. J 179

Public Health Acts . . . . 46

,, Opinion .. .. .. 200

Purchasing Power — Pernicious
effect of its unequal distribu-
tion 23

QUIT Rents 11

RADICALISM: Philosophic. 45
The modern Radical Pro-
gramme . . . . . . 54

Ordinary destructive variety 182

Permeation of by Socialism 215

Absorption of . . . . 218

The land question and . . 214
Railways : Requisites for making

them under Capitalism . . 19

Development of . . . . 83

Socialization of . . . . 153

Raphael's pictures . . . . 139

Ratepayer, How Socialism will

first affect the . . . . ' . . 194

Rates, Growth of . . 52
Reactionary Legislation, Danger

of 101

Reform Bills . . . . 39, 184

Regicide : Its victims . . . . 84

Its futility 150

Registration, Anomalous condi-
tions of voters' . . . . . . 187

Regulation of Industry : Medie-
val 42, 173-4

Modern (See Factory

Legislation.)
Rent : Recognized and paid by

worker to drone . . . . 6
Definitions of economic rent

by standard economists . . 6-7
Point at which rent ceases
to be strictly " economic

rent" .. .. .. 10

230

INDEX.

PAGE.

Rent : Enters into price of all
commodities except those pro-
duced at margin of cultivation 17
Relation to cost of produc-
tion 17

Nationalization of . . 26, 52, 189
Is common wealth, not in-

vidually earned . . . . 27
Moral Aspect of 114, 121, 125
Case of Birmingham and

Warwick 135

Law of . . . . . . 177

Illustration of economic rent 179

Urban 188

Effect of municipal Social-
ism on . . . . . . 195

How County Councils can
manipulate . . . . 196

Nationalizing inter - munici-
pal 199

Effect of Free Trade on agri-
cultural . . . . . . 208

Rent of Ability . . 9, 195

Industrial profit the most

important form of . . 197
Raised by Private Pro-
perty 197

May become negative . . 198
Republicanism : Disappearance
of militant Republicanism in

England 203

Residuum : Genesis of the . . 123
Its appreciation of public
hospitality . . . . 125

Respectability, Falsehood of
current . . . . . . . . 29

Reward of Abstinence : 20

Of effort in the cause of So-
cialism . . . . . . 149

Revolt, The Intellectual . . 45

Revolution : Middle class notions

of 62

Socialist attempt to organize
militant . . . . . . 200

(See also Industrial Revo-
lution and Physical
Force)
Ricardo, David .. .. 7,44,178

Riches are not Wealth . . . . 22

Rights of Man, Declaring the . . 200
Rings, Growth of capitalist 18,

90, 140, 202
Ritchie, Right Hon. C. T. . . 152

Ritchie, D. G 57

Rochdale Pioneers .. 87,136

Roebuck, J. A. .. .. .. 44

Rogers, Professor Thorold E. . . 37
Rousseau, J. J. .. .. .. 44

Rural economy in 1750 . . 37
Russell, Lord John, announces
finality . . 184

page.

Ruskin, John 46

Russia's industrial competition

in the world market . . . . 186

Rutland, Duchess of, on the
hard work of country gentle-
men 119

Ryot, Suppression of Indian . . 123.

S. D. F. (Social Democratic

Federation) . . . . . . 186

Sadler, Michael Thomas . . 76
Salisbury, Rt. Hon. the Mar-
quess of 142

Satan, His moral activity .. 116

Rehabilitation of . . . . 125
" Saul " : Optimism as expressed

in Robert Browning's poem. . 27

Saving : Capital the result of . . 20

Savings of communities and

of individuals . . . . 136

Schools as they should be . . 147

Scott, Sir Walter, Political types

in '* Rob Roy" .. .. 78

Secretan, Eugene . . . . 92

Seeley, J. R 208

Self, Extension of .. .. 11 1
Self-defence, Origin of the Noble

Art . . 109

"Self-help" .. .. 23, 185

Seligman, E. R. A 87

Servants, Domestic .. 121, 189
Servantgalism an Effect of Capi-
talism . . 121

Services, Property in . . . . 143
Settlement, Law of . . . . 36
Seven Years' War, The. . . . 66
Sewer Cleaning under Social-
ism 160

Shaftesbury, Lord . . . . 76

Shaftesbury Avenue, Land near 139

Shakspere, Suggested Duke of. . 146

Shaw, G. Bernard . . 3, 173.

Shelley, P. B no

Shoemaking by hand . . . . 64

By machinery . . . . 67

Shopkeeping, Joint-Stock . . 88

Sidgwick, Henry . . . . 6, 59, 143

Sidmouth, Lord . . . . . . 39

Six Acts, The 39

" Six Centuries of Work and

Wages" .. .. .. 37

Slave Trade, The . . . . 174

Slavery, The White . . . . 41

Slaves Released when not worth

keeping . . . . 18

Smiles, Samuel . . . . . . 10

Smith, Adam . . . . 36, 43

Societies : Failure of previous

attempts to establish true . . 23,

Societies and Civilizations 24
(See also Society)

INDEX.

231

PAGE.

Society : Hypothesis that it is
no more than the sum of its

Units 5, 56

The Matrix of Morality . . 106
Evolution of Primitive 106,

108, in, 113, 123

Industrial 114

Parasitic .. .. 1 16-17

Fashionable . . . . . . 1 17

(See also Societies)
Soils, Resort to Inferior . . 5

Somers, Robert 88

Social : Utility Divorced from

Exchange Value . . . . 22

Character of Social Changes 35

Evolution .. .. 35,50,59

" Social Statics " . . 41, 60

Health 57

Organization . . 58, 150

Instinct .. . . 1 11, 119

Social Democratic Federa-
tion . . . . . . 186

Social Democracy and So-
cial Democrat. (See So-
cialism and Socialist)
Socialism : 4, 26, 144, 179, 182,

200, 209, 212-13
Economic basis of . . . . 3

Bearing of Economic An-
alysis of Individualism on 26
Substitutes Meliorism for

Pessimism . . 28, 220

Historic Aspect . . . . 30

" Socialism in England " . . 31
Change in .. .. 31,131

Early or Utopian 31, 34,

131, 150, 176, 181
Industrial Aspect . . . . 62

The Capitalist and . . . . 99

Moral Aspect . . . . 102

Its Genesis . . . . . . 105

New Conception of . . 131

Property under . . . . 131

Definition of pure . . . . 144

Industry under . . . . 150

Change from Individualism

to 151, 173

Local machinery of 153, 187

Dirty Work under . . . . 160
Transition to . . . . 173

Practical difficulties of . . 180

Honesty of 181

Must be introduced gradu-
ally 183

Solution of the Compensa-
tion difficulty . . . . 193
Effect on Rent . . . . 195
Friction caused by introduc-
tion of 196

Outlook toward . . . . 202
Prince Bismarck's view of 211

PAGE.

Socialism : The Liberal Party

and 211

True and False . . 212-13

Two views of the future of 214

Practical politicians and . . 216
(See also the Index Gene-
rally)

Socialist Politics . . . . 53

Programme . . . . . . 54

Formation of party . . . . 217

Socialists and the police .. no
Early (See Utopian Social-
ism)

The mot d'ordre for . . . . 153

Social Democrats fall into

line as a political party . . 187

The Radical Press and . . 214

Parliament and .. .. 216

Future leader for . . . . 218

Spencer, Herbert 40, 46, 53, 64,

104, 176, 186

St. Matthew, Guild of . . . . 45

Standard Oil Trust . . . . 94

"Star, The" 54

State : Social Democratic . . 4
Functions under Socialism 165
Corruption of the . . . . 181
Whig conception of the . . 181
Conception of the perfect . . 181
Decentralization in the So-
cial Democratic . . . . 188
Private Property and the . . 207
Attitude of parties towards

the 207

Idea and content of the . . 208

The working-class and the 208

Statistics and Statisticians . . 191

Steam applied to cotton spinning 65

Stuart, Professor James . . . . 53

Subletting of Tenant Right . . 8

Subsistence Wages, Rationale of 19
Sunday : Hypocrisies of church

going 7

The English 146

Sunderland 51

Supply and Demand: Action of 11, 197
Value decreases with Supply 1 3
Final effect on wage-labor 19, 21
Sweating, How to defeat . . 192
Sweeping Chimneys : Replace-
ment of boy labor by ma-
chinery in . . . . . . 160

Syndicate of Copper Cornerers 92

Synthesis : The old . . 35, 173

The new . . . . . . 56

TALENT, Career open to . . 10

Taxation : Reform . . . . 54

Of ground values . . . . 189

Novel character of recent

demands for . . . . 189

232

INDEX.

PAGE.

Telegraphs, Socialization of . . 153
Ten Hours' Bill, The . . . . 76

Tenant Rights : Perpetual 6, 8, 9

Replaced by finite leases . . 11

Tennyson, Alfred . . . . 75

Test and Corporation Acts re-
pealed . . . . . . . . 39

Theatres, Communal . . . . 148

Tocqueville, A. C. H. C. de . . 33
Tory of fifty years ago . . . . 206-7

Absorption of the party . . 207
Tonquin, French policy in . . 82

"Total Utility " 14

Toynbee, Arnold 37

Trade : Secrets of . . . . 18

Discredit and rehabilition of
as a pursuit for the no-
bility and gentry. . . . 118

Trade Unions : . . . . 53, 145, 184

Wages in . . . . . . 155

Royal Commission (1869) . . 185
Trafalgar Square: The police

in . . . . .. no, 192

The Fountains in .. .. 118

Traffic in Men 12

Tramways, Socialization of 51, 153
Transition to Social Demo-
cracy 173

Truck Acts 46

Trusts . . . . 18, 152, 157, 202
Tucker, Benjamin R. . . . . 176

Turgot, A. R. J 177

Two-man power more than
double One-man power . . 5

UNEMPLOYED : Their exist-
ence a proof that the labor
they could replace has no
exchange value . . . . 153

Social pressure created by

the 190

United States : Results of Indi-
vidualism plus political
liberty in the . . . . 25

Declaration of Independ-
ence . . . . . . 66

Growth of monopoly in

the 86

Extent to which monopoly
has gone in the . . . . 90
Unskilled Labor, Fate of . . 122
Unsocialism . . , . . . 4
Utilitarian questioning and scien-
tific answering . . . . 27
The Utilitarians . . . . 44
Utility ; Its relation to Value . . 13
"Total Utility", "Mar-
ginal", or "Final Utili-
ty" 14.15

Divorce from Exchange
Value 22

PAGE.

Utopian Socialism, 31, 34, 131,

150, 176, 181

VALJEAN, JEAN .. ..109

Value in Exchange . . . . 12

Not explained by the money

mechanism . . . . 13

Man's control over it con-
sists in his power of regu-
lating supply . . . . 17
Divorced from social utility 22

Theory of 178

Voluntary Associations : Their
legal position under Socialism 136

Von Plener, E 41

Vestrydom congenial to British
mind . . . . . . . . 200

Villiers, C. P 44

Virtues conditioned by social
evolution .. .. 109,110-16

WAGES: 18

Subsistence level . . . . 19

Adjustment . . . . . . 163

Rise after 1840 . . . . 184

Apparently raised by Trade

Unions 185

Competition wages . . . . 194
Socialistic wages . . 162, 194-5
Walford's Insurance Cyclopae-
dia 52

Walker, F. A 7

Wallas, Graham 131 .

Walpole, Sir Robert . . . . 79

Warren, Sir Charles .. ..191

Wars for foreign markets

82, 199, 200
Warwick compared with Bir-
mingham 135

Watt, James 37

Watts, Isaac, on the cotton
manufacture . . . . . . 73

Waterloo Bridge, Socialization

of 146

Waterworks, Socialization of 51, 153
Wealth : Divorced from Ex-
change Value . . . . 22

Distinguished from " Illth " 22
" Wealth of Nations " .. 36
Weaver, Extirpation of the hand-
loom . . . . . . 66, 80

Webb, Sidney .. 30, 31, 108, 202
Westminster, Duke of . . . . 190

Whig Philosophy . . . . 181

Economics .. .. .. 181

Disappearance of the . . 206
The Whig of fifty years

ago 206-7

White Slavery . . . . . .41, 46

" White Terror, The " . . . . 39

Whitman, Walt 101

INDEX. 233

PAGE.

PAGE.

Wicksteed, P. H. . . . . 178 Worker and Drone . . . . 6

William the Silent, Assassina- Working class : Militant organi-

tion of . . . . . . . . 84 zation of . . . . . . 201

Women: Effect of Property The State and the . . .. 208

System on.. .. 118,120 Political superstitions of the 211

Outlawry of 187

Economic independence of 200 ZEITGEIST, Effect of the . . 50

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