Signs of change : seven lectures, delivered on various occasions

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SIGNS OF CHANGE

SIGNS OF CHANGE

SEVEN LECTURES

DELIVERED ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS

WILLIAM MORRIS

AUTHOR OF "THE EARTHLY PARADISE"

NEW EDITION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY
1896

All rights reserved

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Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co
At the Ballantyne Press

CONTENTS.

PAGE

' HOW WE LIVE AND HOW WE MIGHT LIVE . . . I

WHIGS, DEMOCRATS, AND SOCIALISTS 37

FEUDAL ENGLAND 55

^THE HOPES OF CIVILIZATION ...... 84

S THE AIMS OF ART . . . . . . . 117 / t

*^ USEFUL WORK VERSUS USELESS TOIL I4I

^ DAWN OF A NEW EPOCH 174

SIGNS OF CHANGE.

HOW WE LIVE AND tfQ^W.E ~
MIGHT LIVE.

The word Revolution, which we Socialists are so
often forced to use, has a terrible sound in most
people's ears, even when we have explained to
them that it does not necessarily mean a change
accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence, and
cannot mean a change made mechanically and in
the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have
somehow managed to seize on the executive power
for the moment. Even when we explain that we
use the word revolution in its etymological sense,
and mean by it a change in the basis of society,
people are scared at the idea of such a vast change,
and beg that you will speak of reform and not
revolution. As, however, we Socialists do not at all
mean by our word revolution what these worthy
people mean by their word reform, I can't help
thinking that it would be a mistake to use it, what-

B

2 Signs of Change.

ever projects we might conceal beneath its harmless
envelope. So we will stick to our word, which
means a change of the basis of society; it may
frighten people, but it will at least warn them that
there is something to be frightened about, which
will be no less dangerous for being ignored ; and
also it may encourage some people, and will mean
to them at least not a fear, but a hope.
•:•* '• FdaY latfd ;Hope— those are the names of the
.... twQ gr.e.at . passit>ns which rule the race of man,
/•\: :•*! j&hUfritfi JV&ch revolutionists have to deal; to give
hope to the many oppressed and fear to the few
oppressors, that is our business; if we do the
first and give hope to the many, the few must be
frightened by their hope ; otherwise wre do not
wrant to frighten them ; it is not revenge we want
for poor people, but happiness ; indeed, what
revenge can be taken for all the thousands of years
of the sufferings of the poor ?

However, many of the oppressors of the poor,
most of them, we will say, are not conscious of
their being oppressors (we shall see why pre-
sently); they live in an orderly, quiet way them-
selves, as far as possible removed frpm the feelings
of a Roman slave-owner or a Legree; they know
that the poor exist, but their sufferings do not
present themselves to them in a trenchant and
dramatic way; they themselves have troubles to
bear, and they think doubtless that to bear trouble
is the lot of humanity ; nor have they any means of

How we Live and How we Might Live. 3

comparing the troubles of their lives with those
of people lower in the social scale ; and if ever the
thought of those heavier troubles obtrudes itself
upon them, they console themselves with the maxim
that people do get used to the troubles they have
to bear, whatever they may be.

Indeed, as far as regards individuals at least, that
is but too true, so that we have as supporters of the
present state of things, however bad it may be,
first those comfortable unconscious oppressors who
think that they have everything to fear from any
change which would involve more than the softest
and most gradual of reforms, and secondly those
poor people who, living hard and anxiously as they
do, can hardly conceive of any change for the
better happening to them, and dare not risk one
tittle of their poor possessions in taking any action
towards a possible bettering of their condition ;
so that while we can do little with the rich save
inspire them with fear, it is hard indeed to give
the poor any hope. It is, then, no less than
reasonable that those whom we try to involve in
the great struggle for a better form of life than that
which we now lead should call on us to give them
at least some idea of what that life may be like.

A reasonable request, but hard to satisfy, since
we are living under a system that makes conscious
effort towards reconstruction almost impossible:
it is not unreasonable on our part to answer,
"There are certain definite obstacles to the real

A~4/

UN

4 Signs of Change.

progress of man ; we can tell you what these are ;
take them away, and then you shall see."

However, I purpose now to offer myself as a
victim for the satisfaction of those who consider
that as things now go wre have at least got some-
thing, and are terrified at the idea of losing their
hold of that, lest they should find they are worse
off than before, and have nothing. Yet in the
course of my endeavour to show how we might
live, I must more or less deal in negatives. I
mean to say I must point out where in my
opinion we fall short in our present attempts at
decent life. I must ask the rich and well-to-do
what sort of a position it is which they are so
anxious to preserve at any cost ? and if, after all,
it will be such a terrible loss to them to give it up?
and I must point out to the poor that they, with
capacities for living a dignified and generous life,
are in a position which they cannot endure without
continued degradation.

How do we live, then, under our present system ?
Let us look at it a little.

And first, please to understand that our present
;. system of Society is based on a state of perpetual
f war. Do any of you think that this is as it should
be ? I know that you have often been told that
the competition, which is at present the rule of all
production, is a good thing, and stimulates the
progress of the race ; but the people who tell you
this should call competition by its shorter name of

How we Live and How we Might Live. 5

war if they wish to be honest, and you would then
be free to consider whether or no war stimulates
progress, otherwise than as a mad bull chasing you
over your own garden may do. War, or compete
tion, whichever you please to call it, means at the
best pursuing your own advantage at the cost off
some one else's loss, and in the process of it you \
must not be sparing of destruction even of your own '
possessions, or you will certainly come by the worse
in the struggle. You understand that perfectly
as to the kind of war in which people go out to
kill and be killed ; that sort of war in which ships
are commissioned, for instance, "to sink, burn,
and destroy ;" but it appears that you are not so
conscious of this waste of goods when you are only
carrying on that other war called commerce ; observe,
however, that the waste is there all the same.

Now let us look at this kind of war a little closer,
run through some of the forms of it, that we may see
how the "burn, sink, and destroy" is carried on in it.

First, you have that form of it called national
rivalry, which in good truth is nowadays the
cause of all gunpowder and bayonet wars which
civilized nations wage. For years past we English
have been rather shy of them, except on those
happy occasions when we could carry them on at
no sort of risk to ourselves, when the killing was all
on one side, or at all events when we hoped it would
be. We have been shy of gunpowder war with a
respectable enemy for a long while, and I will tell

6 Signs of Change.

you why: It is because we have had the lion's
share of the world-market ; we didn't want to fight
for it as a nation, for we had got it ; but now this
is changing in a most significant, and, to a Socialist,
a most cheering way ; we are losing or have lost
that lion's share ; it is now a desperate " competi-
tion " between the great nations of civilization for
the world-market, and to-morrow it may be a
desperate war for that end. As a result, the
furthering of war (if it be not on too large a scale)
is no longer confined to the honour-and-glory kind
of old Tories, who if they meant anything at all by
it meant that a Tory war would be a good occasion
for damping down democracy ; we have changed
all that, and now it is quite another kind of politi-
cian that is wont to urge us on to * patriotism v as
'tis called. The leaders of the Progressive Liberals,
as they would call themselves, long-headed persons
who know well enough that social movements are
going on, who are not blind to the fact that the
world will move with their help or without it;
these have been the Jingoes of these later days.
I don't mean to say they know what they are
doing: politicians, as you well know, take good
care to shut their eyes to everything that may
happen six months ahead ; but what is being done
is this : that the present system, which always must
include national rivalry, is pushing us into a des-
perate scramble for the markets on more or less
equal terms with other nations, because, once more,

How we Live and How we Might Live. 7

we have lost that command of them which we once
had. Desperate is not too strong a word. We
shall let this impulse to snatch markets carry us
whither it will, whither it must. To-day it is
successful burglary and disgrace, to-morrow it may
be mere defeat and disgrace.

Now this is not a digression, although in saying
this I am nearer to what is generally called politics
than I shall be again. I only want to show you
what commercial war comes to when it has to do
with foreign nations, and that even the dullest can
see how mere waste must go with it. That is how
we live now with foreign nations, prepared to ruin
them without war if possible, with it if necessary, [
let alone meantime the disgraceful exploiting of!
savage tribes and barbarous peoples on whom we/
force at once our shoddy wares and our hypocrisy
at the cannon's mouth.

Well, surely Socialism can offer you something in
the place of all that. It can ; it can offer you peace
and friendship instead of war. We" might live
utterly without national rivalries, acknowledging
that while it is best for those who feel that they
naturally form a community under one name to
govern themselves, yet that no community in
civilization should feel that it had interests opposed
to any other, their economical condition being at
any rate similar ; so that any citizen of one com-
munity could fall to work and live without disturb-
ance of his life when he was in a foreign country,

8 Signs of Change.

and would fit into his place quite naturally; so
that all civilized nations would form one great
community, agreeing together as to the kind and
amount of production and distribution needed;
'working at such and such production where it
could be best produced ; avoiding waste by all
means. Please to think of the amount of waste
which they would avoid, how much such a revolu-
tion would add to the wealth of the world ! What
creature on earth would be harmed by such a
revolution? Nay, would not everybody be the
better for it? And what hinders it? I will tell
you presently.

Meantime let us pass from this " competition "
\l between nations to that between " the organizers of
labour/' great firms, joint-stock companies ; capital-
ists in short, and see how competition " stimulates
production " among them : indeed it does do that ;
but what kind of production? Well, production-
of something to sell at a profit, or say production
of profits: and note how war commercial stimu-
lates that : a certain market is demanding goods ;
there are, say, a hundred manufacturers who make
that kind of goods, and every one of them would if
he could keep that market to himself, and struggles
desperately to get as much of it as he can, with the
obvious result that presently the thing is overdone,
and the market is glutted, and all that fury of
manufacture has to sink into cold ashes. Doesn't
that seem something like war to you ? Can't you

How we Live and How we Might Live, 9

of la

see the waste of it — waste of labour, skill, cunning,
waste of life in short? Well, you" may say, but it
cheapens the goods. In a sense it does ; and yet
only apparently, as wages have a tendency to sink
for the ordinary worker in proportion as prices
sink ; and at what a cost do we gain this appear-
ance of cheapness ! Plainly speaking, at the cost
of cheating the consumer and starving the real
producer for the benefit of the gambler, who uses
both consumer and producer as his milch cows.
I needn't go at length into the subject of adultera-
tion, for every one knows what kind of a part it
plays in this sort of commerce ; but remember that
it is an absolutely necessary incident to the pro-
duction of profit out of wares, which is the business
of the so-called manufacturer; and this you must
understand, that, taking him in the lump, the con-
sumer is perfectly helpless against the gambler;
the goods are forced on him by their cheapness,
and with them a certain kind of life which that
energetic, that aggressive cheapness determines for
him : for so far-reaching is this curse of commercial
war that no country is safe from its ravages ; the
traditions of a thousand years fall before it in
a month ; it overruns a weak or semi-barbarous
country, and whatever romance or pleasure or art
existed there, is trodden down into a mire of
sordidness and ugliness ; the Indian or Javanese
craftsman may no longer ply his craft leisurely,
working a few hours a day, in producing a maze of

io Signs of Change.

strange beauty on a piece of cloth : a steam-engine
is set a-going at Manchester, and that victory over
nature and a thousand stubborn difficulties is used
for the base work of producing a sort of plaster of
china-clay and shoddy, and the Asiatic worker, if
he is not starved to death outright, as plentifully
happens, is driven himself into a factory to lower
the wages of his Manchester brother worker, and
nothing of character is left him except, most like,
an accumulation of fear and hatred of that to him
most unaccountable evil, his English master. The
South Sea Islander must leave his canoe-carving,
his sweet rest, and his graceful dances, and become
the slave of a slave: trousers, shoddy, rum,
missionary, and fatal disease — he must swallow all
this civilization in the lump, and neither himself nor
we can help him now till social order displaces the
hideous tyranny of gambling that has ruined him.
Let those be types of the consumer: but now
for the producer; I mean the real producer, the
worker; how does this scramble for the plunder of
theTmarket affect him ? The manufacturer, in the
eagerness of his war, has had to collect into one
neighbourhood a vast army of workers, he has
drilled them till they are as fit as may be for his
special branch of production, that is, for making a
profit out of it, and with the result of their being
fit for nothing else : well, when the glut comes in
that market he is supplying, what happens to this
army, every private in which has been depending on

How we Live and How we Might Live. 1 1

'£>'

the steady demand in that market, and acting, as
he could not choose but act, as if it were to go
on for ever? You know well what happens to
these men : the factory door is shut on them ; on a
very large part of them often, and at the best on the
reserve army of labour, so busily employed in the
time of inflation. What becomes of them ? Nay,
we know that well enough just now. But what we
don't know, or don't choose to know, is, that this
reserve army of labour is an absolute necessity for
commercial war; if our manufacturers had not got
these poor devils whom they could draft on to their
machines when the demand swelled, other manu-
facturers in France, or Germany, or America, would
step in and take the market from them.

So you see, as we live now, it is necessary that a
vast part of the industrial population should be
exposed to the danger of periodical semi-starva-
tion, and that, not for the advantage of the people
in another part of the world, but for their degrada-
tion and enslavement.

Just let your minds run for a moment on the
kind of waste which this means, this opening up of
new markets among savage and barbarous coun-
tries which is the extreme type of the force of the
profit-market on the world, and you will surely see
what a hideous nightmare that profit-market is:
it keeps us sweating and terrified for our liveli-
hood, unable to read a book, or look at a picture,
or have pleasant fields to walk in, or to lie in the

1 2 Signs of Change.

sun, or to share in the knowledge of our time, to
have in short either animal or intellectual pleasure,
and for what? that we may go on living the same
slavish life till we die, in order to provide for a rich
man what is called a life of ease and luxury ; that
is to say, a life so empty, unwholesome, and de-
graded, that perhaps, on the whole, he is worse off
than we the workers are : and as to the result of
all this suffering, it is luckiest when it is nothing at
all, when you can say that the wares have done
nobody any good ; for oftenest they have done
many people harm, and we have toiled and
groaned and died in making poison and destruc-
tion for our fellow-men.

Well, I say all this is war, and the results of war,
the war this time, not of competing nations, but of
competing firms or capitalist units : and it is this
war of the firms which hinders the peace between
nations which you surely have agreed with me in
thinking is so necessary; for you must know
that war is the very breath of the nostrils of these
fighting firms, and they have now, in our times,
got into their hands nearly all the political power,
and they band together in each country in order to
make their respective governments fulfil just two
functions : the first is at home to act as a strong
police force, to keep the ring in which the strong
are beating down the weak ; the second is to act as
a piratical body-guard abroad, a petard to explode
the doors which lead to the markets of the world :

How we Live and How we Might Live. 1 3

markets at any price abroad, uninterfered-with
privilege, falsely called laissez-faire? at any price at
home, to provide these is the sole business of a
government such as our industrial captains have
been able to conceive of. I must now try to show
you the reason of all this, and what it rests on,
/ by trying to answer the question, Why have the
>' profit-makers got all this power, or at least why
are they able to keep it ?

That takes us to the third form of war commer-
cial : the last, and the one which all the rest is
founded on. We have spoken first of the war of
rival nations; next of that of rival firms: we have] ^t^^Z
now to speak of rival men. As nations under the
present system are driven to compete with one
another for the markets of the world, and as firms
or the captains of industry have to scramble for their
share of the profits of the markets, so also have the
workers to compete with each other — for livelihood ;
and it is this constant competition or war amongst
them which enables the profit-grinders to make
their profits, and by means of the wealth so acquired
to take all the executive power of the country
into their hands. But here is the difference be-
tween the position of the workers and the profit-
makers : to the latter, the profit-grinders, war is

* Falsely ; because the privileged classes have at their back the
force of the Executive by means of which to compel the unprivileged
to accept their terms; if this is "free competition" there is no
meaning in words.

1 4 Signs of Change.

necessary ; you cannot have profit-making without
competition, individual, corporate, and national;
but you may work for a livelihood without com-
peting ; you may combine instead of competing.

I have said war was the life-breath of the profit-
makers ; in like manner, combination is the life
of the workers. The working-classes or proletariat
cannot even exist as a class without combination
of some sort. The necessity which forced the
profit-grinders to collect their men first into work-
shops working by the division of labour, and next
into great factories worked by machinery, and so
gradually to draw them into the great towns and
centres of civilization, gave birth to a distinct
working-class or proletariat : and this it was which
gave them their mechanical existence, so to say.
But note, that they are indeed combined into
social groups for the production of wares, but only
as yet mechanically ; they do not know what they
are working at, nor whom they are working for,
because they are combining to produce wares of
which the profit of a master forms an essential
part, instead of goods for their own use : as long
as they do this, and compete with each other for
leave to do it, they will be, and will feel themselves
to be, simply a part of those competing firms I
have been speaking of; they will be in fact just a
part of the machinery for the production of profit ;
and so long as this lasts it will be the aim of the
masters or profit-makers to decrease the market

How we Live and How we Might Live. 1 5

value of this human part of the machinery; that
is to say, since they already hold in their hands J
the labour of dead men in the form of capital and
machinery, it is their interest, or we will say their
necessity, to pay as little as they can help for the
labour of living men which they have to buy from j
day to day: and since the workmen they employ
have nothing but their labour-power, they are
compelled to underbid one another for employ-
ment and wages, and so enable the capitalist to
play his game.

I have said that, as things go, the workers are a
part of the competing firms, an adjunct of capital.
Nevertheless, they are only so by compulsion ; and,
even without their being conscious of it, they
struggle against that compulsion and its imme-
diate results, the lowering of their wages, of their
standard of life : and this they do, and must do,
both as a class and individually: just as the slave
of the great Roman lord, though he distinctly felt
himself to be a part of the household, yet collec-
tively was a force in reserve for its destruction, and
individually stole from his lord whenever he could
safely do so. So, here, you see, is another form of
war necessary to the way we live now, the war of
class against class, which, when it rises to its
height, and it seems to be rising at present, will
destroy those other forms of war we have been
speaking of; will make the position of the profit-
makers, of perpetual commercial war, untenable ;

1 6 Signs of Change.

will destroy the present system of competitive privi-
lege, or commercial war.

Now observe, I said that to the existence of the
workers it was combination, not competition, that
was necessary, while to that of the profit-makers
combination was impossible, and war necessary.
The present position of the workers is that of the
machinery of commerce, or in plainer words its
slaves ; when they change that position and be-
come free, the class of profit-makers must cease to
exist; and what will then be the position of the
workers ? Even as it is they are the one necessary
part of society, the life-giving part; the other
jclasses are but hangers-on who live on them. But
jwhat should they be, what will they be, when they,
once for all, come to know their real power, and
cease competing with one another for livelihood ?
I will tell you : they will be society, they will be
the community. And being society — that is, there
being no class outside them to contend with — they
can then regulate their labour in accordance with
their own real needs.

There is much talk about supply and demand,
but the supply and demand usually meant is an
artificial one ; it is under the sway of the gambling
market ; the demand is forced, as I hinted above,
before it is supplied; nor, as each producer is
working against all the rest, can the producers
hold their hands, till the market is glutted and the
workers, thrown out on the streets, hear that there

How we Live and How zve Might Live. 1 7

has been over-production, amidst which over-plus
of unsaleable goods they go ill-supplied with even
necessaries, because the wealth which they them-
selves have created is "ill-distributed," as we call
it — that is, unjustly taken away from them.

When the workers are society they will regulate
their labour, so that the supply and demand shall
be genuine, not gambling ; the two will then be
commensurate, for it is the same society whichi
demands that also supplies ; there will be no more)
artificial famines then, no more poverty amidst
over-production, amidst too great a stock of the
very things which should supply poverty and turn
it into well-being. In short, there will be no waste
and therefore no tyranny.

Well, now, what Socialism offers you in place of "
these artificial famines, with their so-called over-
production, is, once more, regulation of the
markets ; supply and demand commensurate ; no
gambling, and consequently (once more) no waste;
not overwork and weariness for the worker one
month, and the next no work and terror of starva-
tion, but steady work and plenty of leisure every
month ; not cheap market wares, that is to say,
adulterated wares, with scarcely any good in them,
mere scaffold-poles for building up profits ; no
labour would be spent on such things as these, ,
which people would cease to want when they j
ceased to be slaves. Not these, but such goods /
as best fulfilled the real uses of the consumers /

C I

1 3 Signs of Change.

would labour be set to make; for profit being
abolished, people could have what they wanted,
instead of what the profit-grinders at home and
abroad forced them to take.

For what I want you to understand is this: that
in every civilized country at least there is plenty
for all — is, or at any rate might be. Even with
labour so misdirected as it is at present, an equit-
able distribution of the wealth we have would
make all people comparatively comfortable; but
that is nothing to the wealth we might have if
labour were not misdirected.

Observe, in the early days of the history of man
he was the slave of his most immediate necessities;
Nature was mighty and he was feeble, and he had
to wage constant war with her for his daily food
and such shelter as he could get. His life was
bound down and limited by this constant struggle;
all his morals, laws, religion, are in fact the out-
come and the reflection of this ceaseless toil of
earning his livelihood. Time passed, and little by
little, step by step, he grew stronger, till now after
all these ages he has almost completely conquered
Nature, and one would think should now have
leisure to turn his thoughts towards higher things
than procuring to-morrow's dinner. But, alas! his
progress has been broken and halting; and though
he has indeed conquered Nature and has her forces
under his control to do what he will with, he still
has himself to conquer, he still has to think how

How we Live and How we Might Live. 19

he will best use those forces which he has mastered.
At present he uses them blindly, foolishly, as one
driven by mere fate. It would almost seem as if
some phantom of the ceaseless pursuit of food
which was once the master of the savage was still
hunting the civilized man; who toils in a dream,
as it were, haunted by mere dim unreal hopes,
borne of vague recollections of the days gone by.
Out of that dream he must wake, and face things
as they really are. The conquest of Nature is
complete, may we not say ? and now our business is,
and has for long been, the organization of man,
who wields the forces of Nature. Nor till this is
attempted at least shall we ever be free of that
terrible phantom of fear of starvation which, with
its brother devil, desire of domination, drives us
into injustice, cruelty, and dastardliness of all
kinds: to cease to fear our fellows and learn to
depend on them, to do away with competition and
build up co-operation, is our one necessity.

Now, to get closer to details ; you probably know
that every man in civilization is worth, so to say,
more than his skin; working, as he must work,
socially, he can produce more than will keep him-
self alive and in fair condition ; and this has been
so for many centuries, from the time, in fact, when
warring tribes began to make their conquered
enemies slaves instead of killing them; and ot
course his capacity of producing these extras has
gone on increasing faster and faster, till to-day one

20 Signs of Change.

man will weave, for instance, as much cloth in a
week as wTill clothe a whole village for years : and
the real question of civilization has always been
what are we to do with this extra produce of
labour — a question which the phantom, fear of
starvation, and its fellow, desire of domination, has
driven men to answer pretty badly always, and
worst of all perhaps in these present days, when
the extra produce has grown with such prodigious
speed. The practical answer has always been for
man to struggle with his fellow for private posses-
sion of undue shares of these extras, and all kinds
of devices have been employed by those who found
themselves in possession of the power of taking
them from others to keep those whom they had
robbed in perpetual subjection; and these latter, as
I have already hinted, had no chance of resisting
this fleecing as long as they were few and scattered,
and consequently could have little sense of their
common oppression. But now that, owing to the
very pursuit of these undue shares of profit, or extra
earnings, men have become more dependent on
each other for production, and have been driven, as
I said before, to combine together for that end
more completely, the power of the workers — that is
to say, of the robbed or fleeced class — has enor-
mously increased, and it only remains for them to
understand that they have this power. When they
do that they will be able to give the right answer
to the question what is to be done with the extra

How we Live and How we Might Live. 2 1

products of labour over and above what will keep
the labourer alive to labour : which answer is, that
the worker will have all that he produces, and not
be fleeced at all : and remember that he produces
collectively, and therefore he will do effectively
what work is required of him according to his I
capacity, and of the produce of that work he will
have what he needs ; because, you see, he cannot
use more than he needs — he can only waste it.

If this arrangement seems to you preposterously
ideal, as it well may, looking at our present con-
dition, I must back it up by saying that when men
are organized so that their labour is not wasted,
they will be relieved from the fear of starvation!
and the desire of domination, and will have free-
dom and leisure to look round and see what they
really do need.

Now something of that I can conceive fof my
own self, and I will lay my ideas before ycu, so
that you may compare them with your own,
asking you always to remember that the very
differences in men's capacities and desires, after
the common need of food and shelter is satisfied,
will make it easier to deal with their desires in a
communal state of things.

What is it that I need, therefore, which my sur-
rounding circumstances can give me — my dealings
with my fellow-men — setting aside inevitable acci-
dents which co-operation and forethought cannot
control, if there be such ?

22 Signs of Change.

Well, first of all I claim good health; and I say
that a vast proportion of people in civilization
scarcely even know what that means. To feel
mere life a pleasure; to enjoy the moving one's
limbs and exercising one's bodily powers ; to play,
as it were, with sun and wind and rain; to rejoice
in satisfying the due bodily appetites of a human
animal without fear of degradation or sense of
wrong-doing: yes, and therewithal to be well
formed, straight-limbed, strongly knit, expressive
of countenance — to be, in a word, beautiful — that
also I claim. If we cannot have this claim satisfied,
we are but poor creatures after all ; and I claim it
in the teeth of those terrible doctrines of asceticism,
which, born of the despair of the oppressed and
degraded, have been for so many ages used as
instruments for the continuance of that oppression
and degradation.

And I believe that this claim for a healthy body
for all of us carries with it all other due claims : for
who knows where the seeds of disease which even
rich people suffer from were first sown: from the
luxury of an ancestor, perhaps ; yet often, I sus-
pect, from his poverty. And for the poor: a
distinguished physicist has said that the poor
suffer always from one disease — hunger; and at
least I know this, that if a man is overworked in
any degree he cannot enjoy the sort of health I am
speaking of; nor can he if he is continually chained
I to one dull round of mechanical work, with no

How we Live and How we Might Live. 23

hope at the other end of it ; nor if he lives in con-
tinual sordid anxiety for his livelihood, nor if he is
ill-housed, nor if he is deprived of all enjoyment of
the natural beauty of the world, nor if he has no
amusement to quicken the flow of his spirits from
time to time : all these things, which touch more
or less directly on his bodily condition, are born of
the claim I make to live in good health ; indeed, I
suspect that these good conditions must have been
in force for several generations before a population
in general will be really healthy, as I have hinted
above; but also I doubt not that in the course of
time they would, joined to other conditions, of
which more hereafter, gradually breed such a
population, living in enjoyment of animal life at
least, happy therefore, and beautiful according to
the beauty of their race. On this point I may note
that the very variations in the races of men are
caused by the conditions under which they live,
and though in these rougher parts of the world we
lack some of the advantages of climate and sur-
roundings, yet, if we were working for livelihood
and not for profit, we might easily neutralize many
of the disadvantages of our climate, at least enough
to give due scope to the full development of our
race.

Now the next thing I claim is education. And
you must not say that every English child is
educated now; that sort of education will not
answer my claim, though I cheerfully admit it is

24 Signs of Change.

something : something-, and yet after all only class
education. What I claim i^jiberal education ;
opportunity, that is, to have my share of whatever
knowledge there is in the world according to my
capacity or bent of mind, historical or scientific;
and also to have my share of skill of hand which is
about in the world, either in the industrial handi-
crafts or in the fine arts ; picture-painting, sculpture,
music, acting, or the like : I claim to be taught, if
I can be taught, more than one craft to exercise for
the benefit of the community. You may think
this a large claim, but I am clear it is not too large
a claim if the community is to have any gain out
of my special capacities, if we are not all to be
beaten down to a dull level of mediocrity as we are
now, all but the very strongest and toughest of us.
But also I know that this claim for education
involves one for public advantages in the shape of
public libraries, schools, and the like, such as no
private person, not even the richest, could command:
but these I claim very confidently, being sure that
no reasonable community could bear to be without
such helps to a decent life.
^ Again, the claim for education involves a claim
jfor abundant leisure, which once more I make with
'confidence ; because when once we have shaken
off the slavery of profit, labour would be organized
so unwastefully that no heavy burden would be
laid on the individual citizens ; every one of whom
as a matter of course would have to pay his toll

How we Live and How we Might Live. 25

of some obviously useful work. At present you
must note that all the amazing machinery which
we have invented has served only to increase the
amount of profit-bearing wares ; in other words, to
increase the amount of profit pouched by indi-
viduals for their own advantage, part of which pro-
fit they use as capital for the production of more
profit, with ever the same waste attached to it ;
and part as private riches or means for luxurious
living, which again is sheer waste — is in fact to be
looked on as a kind of bonfire on which rich men
burn up the product of the labour they have fleeced
from the workers beyond what they themselves can
use. So I say that, in spite of our inventions, no
worker works under the present system an hour the
less on account of those labour-saving machines,
so-called. But under a happier state of things
they would be used simply for saving labour, with
the result of a vast amount of leisure gained for
the community to be added to that gained by the
avoidance of the waste of useless luxury, and the
abolition of the service of commercial war.

And I may say that as to that leisure, as I
should in no case do any harm to any one with it,
so I should often do some direct good to the com-
munity with it, by practising arts or occupations
for my hands or brain which would give pleasure
to many of the citizens ; in, other words, a great
deal of the best work done would be done in the
leisure time of men relieved from any anxiety as

26 Signs of Change.

to their livelihood, and eager to exercise their
special talent, as all men, nay, all animals are.

Now, again, this leisure would enable me to please
myself and expand my mind by travelling if I had
a mind to it : because, say, for instance, that I were
a shoemaker; if due social order were established,
it by no means follows that I should always be
obliged to make shoes in one place ; a due amount
of easily conceivable arrangement would enable me
to make shoes in Rome, say, for three months, and
to come back with new ideas of building, gathered
from the sight of the works of past ages, amongst
other things which would perhaps be of service in
London.

But now, in order that my leisure might not
degenerate into idleness and aimlessness, I must
set up a claim for due work to do. Nothing to my
mind is more important than this demand, and I
, must ask your leave to say something about it.
I have mentioned that I should probably use my
leisure for doing a good deal of what is now called
work ; but it is clear that if I am a member of a
Socialist Community I must do my due share of
rougher work than this — my due share of what my
capacity enables me to do, that is ; no fitting of me
to a Procrustean bed ; but even that share of work
necessary to the existence of the simplest social
life must, in the first place, whatever else it is, be
reasonable work ; that is, it must be such work as
a good citizen can see the necessity for; as a

How we Live and How we Might Live. 27

member of the community, I must have agreed to
do it.

To take two strong instances of the contrary, I
won't submit to be dressed up in red and marched
off to shoot at my French or German or Arab
friend in a quarrel that I don't understand; I will
rebel sooner than do that.

Nor will I submit to waste my time and energies
in making some trifling toy which I know only a
fool can desire ; I will rebel sooner than do that.

However, you may be sure that in a state of
social order I shall have no need to rebel against
any such pieces of unreason ; only I am forced to
speak from the way we live to the way we might live.

Again, if the necessary reasonable work be of a
mechanical kind, I must be helped to do it by a
machine, not to cheapen my labour, but so that as
little time as possible may be spent upon it, and
that I may be able to think of other things while
I am tending the machine. And if the work be
specially rough or exhausting, you will, I am sure,
agree with me in saying that I must take turns in
doing it with other people; I mean I mustn't, for
instance, be expected to spend my working hours
always at the bottom of a coal-pit. I think such
work as that ought to be largely volunteer work,
and done, as I say, in spells. And what I say of
very rough work I say also of nasty work. On the
other hand, I should think very little of the man-
hood of a stout and healthy man who did not feel

2 8 Signs of Change.

a pleasure in doing rough work ; always supposing
him to work under the conditions I have been
speaking of — namely, feeling that it was useful
(and consequently honoured), and that it was not
continuous or hopeless, and that he was really
doing it of his own free will.

The last claim I make for my work is that the
places I worked in, factories or workshops, should
be pleasant, just as the fields where our most
necessary work is done are pleasant. Believe mq
there is nothing in the world to prevent this being
done, save the necessity of making profits on all
wares ; in other words, the wares are cheapened at
the expense of people being forced to work in
crowded, unwholesome, squalid, noisy dens : that
is to say, they are cheapened at the expense of the
workman's life.

Well, so much for my claims as to my necessary
work, my tribute to the community. I believe
people would find, as they advanced in their
capacity for carrying on social order, that life so
lived was much less expensive than we now can
have any idea of, and that, after a little, people
would rather be anxious to seek work than to avoid
it ; that our working hours would rather be merry
parties of men and maids, young men and old
enjoying themselves over their work, than the
grumpy weariness it mostly is now. Then would
come the time for the new birth of art, so much
talked of, so long deferred ; people could not help

How we Live and How we Might Live. 29

showing their mirth and pleasure in their work,
and would be always wishing to express it in a
tangible and more or less enduring form, and the
workshop would once more be a school of art,
whose influence no one could escape from.

And, again, that word art leads me to my last
claim, which is that the material surroundings of
my life should be pleasant, generous, and beauti-
ful ; that I know is a large claim, but this I will
say about it, that if it cannot be satisfied, if every
civilized community cannot provide such surround-
ings for all its members, I do not want the world
to go on ; it is a mere misery that man has ever
existed. I do not think it possible under the
present circumstances to speak too strongly on
this point. I feel sure that the time will come
when people will find it difficult to believe that a
rich community such as ours, having such com-
mand over external Nature, could have submitted
to live such a mean, shabby, dirty life as we do.

And once for all, there is nothing in our circum-
stances s^ve the hunting. of profit that drives us
into it. Tit is profit which draws men into enormous
unmanageable aggregations called towns, for in-
stance ; profit which crowds them up when they
are there into quarters without gardens or open
spaces ; profit which won't take the most ordinary
precautions against wrapping a whole district in a
cloud of sulphurous smoke ; which turns beautiful
rivers into filthy sewers ; which condemns all but

v

%

30 Signs of Change.

the rich to live in houses idiotically cramped and
confined at the best, and at the worst in houses for
whose wretchedness there is no name.

I say it is almost incredible that we should bear
such crass stupidity as this ; nor should we if we
could help it. We shall not bear it when the
workers get out of their heads that they are but an
appendage to profit-grinding, that the more profits
that are made the more employment at high wages
there will be for them, and that therefore all the
incredible filth, disorder, and degradation of
modern civilization are signs of their prosperity.
So far from that, they are signs of their slavery.
When they are no longer slaves they will claim as
a matter of course that every man and every family
should be generously lodged ; that every child
should be able to play in a garden close to the
place his parents live in; that the houses should
by their obvious decency and order be ornaments
to Nature, not disfigurements of it ; for the decency
and order above-mentioned when carried to the
due pitch would most assuredly lead to beauty in
building?/ All this, of course, would mean the
people— that is, all society — duly organised, having
in its own hands the means of production, to be
owned by no individual, but used by all as occasion
called for its use, and can only be done on those
terms ; on any other terms people will be driven to
accumulate private wealth for themselves, and thus,
as we have seen, to waste the goods of the com-

How we Live and How we Might Live. 3 1

munity and perpetuate the division into classes,
which means continual war and waste.

As to what extent it may be necessary or
desirable for people under social order to live in
common, we may differ pretty much according to
our tendencies towards social life. For my part I
can't see why we should think it a hardship to eat
with the people we work with ; I am sure that as
to many things, such as valuable books, pictures,
and splendour of surroundings, we shall find it
better to club our means together; and I must
say that often when I have been sickened by the
stupidity of the mean idiotic rabbit warrens that
rich men build for themselves in Bayswater and
elsewhere, I console myself with visions of the
noble communal hall of the future, unsparing of
materials, generous in worthy ornament, alive with
the noblest thoughts of our time, and the past,
embodied in the best art which a free and manly
people could produce ; such an abode of man as no
private enterprise could come anywhere near for
beauty and fitness, because only collective thought
and collective life could cherish the aspirations
which would give birth to its beauty, or have the
skill and leisure to carry them out. I for my part
should think it much the reverse of a hardship if I
had to read my books and meet my friends in
such a place ; nor do I think I am better off to
live in a vulgar stuccoed house crowded with
upholstery that I despise, in all respects degrading

3 2 Signs of Change.

to the mind and enervating to the body to live in,
simply because I call it my own, or my house.

It is not an original remark, but I make it here,
that my home is where I meet people with whom
I sympathise, whom I love.

Well, that is my opinion as a middle-class man.
Whether a working-class man would think his
family possession of his wretched little room better
than his share of the palace of which I have spoken, I
must leave to his opinion, and to the imaginations
of the middle class, who perhaps may sometimes
conceive the fact that the said worker is cramped
for space and comfort — say on washing-day.

Before I leave this matter of the surroundings of
life, I wish to meet a possible objection. I have
spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing
people from the more mechanical and repulsive
part of necessary labour ; and I know that to some
cultivated people, people of the artistic turn of
mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and
they will be apt to say you will never get your
surroundings pleasant so long as you are sur-
rounded by machinery. I don't quite admit that ;
it is the allowing machines to be our masters and
not our servants that so injures the beauty of life
nowadays. In other words, it is the token of the
terrible crime we have fallen into of using our
control of the powers of Nature for the purpose of
enslaving people, we careless meantime of how
much happiness we rob their lives of.

How we Live and How we Might Live. 33

Yet for the consolation of the artists I will say
that I believe indeed that a state of social order
would probably lead at first to a great develop-
ment of machinery for really useful purposes,
because people will still be anxious about getting
through the work necessary to holding society
together ; but that after a while they will find that
there is not so much work to do as they expected,
and that then they will have leisure to reconsider
the whole subject ; and if it seems to them that
a certain industry would be carried on more
pleasantly as regards the worker, and more effec-
tually as regards the goods, by using hand-work
rather than machinery, they will certainly get rid
of their machinery, because it will be possible for
them to do so. It isn't possible now ; we are not
at liberty to do so ; we are slaves to the monsters
which we have created. And I have a kind of
hope that the very elaboration of machinery in a
society whose purpose is not the multiplication of
labour, as it now is, but the carrying on of a
pleasant life, as it would be under social order —
that the elaboration of machinery, I say, will lead
to the simplification of life, and so once more to
thejimitation of machinery.

j Well, I will now let my claims for decent life
stafid as I have made them. To sum them up in I
brief, they are : First, a healthy body ; second, an
active mind in sympathy with the past, the present,
and the future ; thirdly, occupation fit for a healthy

D

V

L

34 Signs of Change.

body and an active mind ; and fourthly, a beautiful
world to live inM

These are the conditions of life which the refined
man of all ages has set before him as the thing
above all others to be attained. Too often he has
been so foiled in their pursuit that he has turned
longing eyes backward to the days before civiliza-
tion, when man's sole business was getting himself
food from day to day, and hope was dormant in
him, or at least could not be expressed by him.

Indeed, if civilization (as many think) forbids the
realization of the hope to attain such conditions of
life, then civilization forbids mankind to be happy ;
and if that be the case, then let us stifle all aspira-
tions towards progress — nay, all feelings of mutual
good-will and affection between men — and snatch
each one of us what we can from the heap of
wealth that fools create for rogues to grow fat on ;
or better still, let us as speedily as possible find
some means of dying like men, since we are for-
bidden to live like men.

Rather, however, take courage, and believe that
we of this age, in spite of all its torment and
disorder, have been born to a wonderful heritage
fashioned of the work of those that have gone
before us ; and that the day of the organization of
man is dawning. It is not we who can build up
the new social order ; the past ages have done the
most of that work for us ; but we can clear our
eyes to the signs of the times, and we shall then

How we Live and How we Might Live. 3 5

see that the attainment of a good condition of life
is being made possible for us, and that it is now
our business to stretch out our hands to take it.

And how ? Chiefly, I think, by educating people
to a sense of their real capacities as men, so that
they may be able to use to their own good the
politicalpower which is rapidly being thrust upon
them j^so^get them to see that the old system of
organizing labour for individual profit is becoming
unmanageable, and that the whole people have
now got to choose between the confusion resulting
from the break up of that system and the deter-
mination to take in hand the labour now organized
for profit, and use its organization for the livelihood
of the community :( to get people to see that indi-
vidual profit-makers are not a necessity for labour
but an obstruction to it, and that not only or
chiefly because they are the perpetual pensioners
of labour, as they are, but rather because of the
waste which their existence as a class necessitates.
All this we have to teach people, when we have
taught ourselves ; and I admit that the work is
long and burdensome ; as I began by saying,
people have been made so timorous of change by
the terror of starvation that even the unluckiest of
them are stolid and hard to move. Hard as the
work is, however, its reward is not doubtful. The
mere fact that a body of men, however small, are
banded together as Socialist missionaries shows
that the change is going on. As the working-

D 2

3 6 Signs of Change.

classes, the real organic part of society, take in
these ideas, hope will arise in them, and they will
claim changes in society, many of which doubtless
will not tend directly towards their emancipation,
because they will be claimed without due know-
ledge of the one thing necessary to claim, equality
lof condition ; but which indirectly will help to
break up our rotten sham society, while that claim
for equality of condition will be made constantly
and with growing loudness till it must be listened
to, and then at last it will only be a step over the
border, and the civilized world will be socialized ;
and, looking back on what has been, we shall be
astonished to think of how long we submitted to
live as we live now.

WHIGS, DEMOCRATS, AND SOCIALISTS.*

What is the state of parties in England to-day?
How shall we enumerate them ? The Whigs, who
stand first on the list in my title, are considered
generally to be the survival of an old historical
party once looked on as having democratic tenden-
cies, but now the hope of all who would stand
soberly on the ancient ways. Besides these, there
are Tories also, the descendants of the stout
defenders of Church and State and the divine
right of kings.

Now, I don't mean to say but that at the back of
this ancient name of Tory there lies a great mass
of genuine Conservative feeling, held by people
who, if they had their own way, would play some
rather fantastic tricks, I fancy; nay, even might
in the course of time be somewhat rough with
such people as are in this hall at present.^ But

* Read at the Conference convened by the Fabian Society at
South Place Institute, June n, 1886.

f They have been ''rather rough," you may say, and have done
more than merely hold their sentimental position. Well, I still say
(February 1888) that the present open tyranny which sends political
opponents to prison, both in England and Ireland, and breaks

3 8 Signs of Change.

this feeling, after all, is only a sentiment now ;
all practical hope has died out of it, and these
worthy people cannot have their own way. It is
true that they elect members of Parliament, who
talk very big to please them, and sometimes even
they manage to get a Government into power that
nominally represents their sentiment, but when
that happens the said Government is forced, even
when its party has a majority in the House of
Commons, to take a much lower standpoint than
the high Tory ideal ; the utmost that the real Tory
party can do, even when backed by the Primrose
League and its sham hierarchy, is to delude the
electors to return Tories to Parliament to pass
measures more akin to Radicalism than the Whigs
durst attempt, so that, though there are Tories, there
is no Tory party in England.

On the other hand, there is a party, which I can
call for the present by no other name than Whig,
which is both numerous and very powerful, and
which does, in fact, govern England, and to my
mind will always do so as long as the present

Radical heads in the street for attempting to attend political meet-
ings, is not Tory, but Whig; not the old Tory "divine right of
kings," but the new Tory, ix,t Tory-tinted Whig, "divine right of
property " made Bloody Sunday possible. I admit that I did not
expect in 1886 that we should in 1887 and 1888 be having such a
brilliant example of the tyranny of a parliamentary majority ; in fact,
I did not reckon on the force of the impenetrable stupidity of the
Prigs in alliance with the Whigs matching under the rather ragged
banner of sham Toryism.

IVhigs, Democrats, and Socialists. 39

constitutional Parliament lasts. Of course, like
all parties it includes men of various shades of
opinion, from the Tory-tinted Whiggery of Lord
Salisbury to the Radical-tinted Whiggery of Mr.
Chamberlain's present tail. Neither do I mean
to say that they are conscious of being a united
party ; on the contrary, the groups will sometimes
oppose each other furiously at elections, and per-
haps the more simple-minded of them really think
that it is a matter of importance to the nation
which section of them may be in power ; but they
may always be reckoned upon to be in their places
and vote against any measure which carries with
it a real attack on our constitutional system ;
surely very naturally, since they are there for no
other purpose than to do so. They are, and always
must be, conscious defenders of the present system,
political and economical, as long as they have
any cohesion as Tories, Whigs, Liberals, or even
Radicals. Not one of them probably would go
such a very short journey towards revolution as
the abolition of the House of Lords. A one-
chamber Parliament would seem to them an im-
pious horror, and the abolition of the monarchy
they would consider a serious inconvenience to the
London tradesman.

Now this is the real Parliamentary Party, at
present divided into jarring sections under the
influence of the survival of the party warfare of the
last few generations, but which already shows signs

40 Signs of Change.

of sinking its differences so as to offer a solid front
of resistance to the growing instinct which on its
side will before long result in a party claiming full
economical as well as political freedom for the
whole people.

But is there nothing in Parliament, or seeking
entrance to it, except this variously tinted Whig-
gery, this Harlequin of Reaction? Well, inside
Parliament, setting aside the Irish party, which is,
we may now well hope, merely temporarily there,
there is not much. It is not among people of
"wealth and local influence,,, who I see are sup-
posed to be the only available candidates for
Parliament of a recognized party, that you will
find the elements of revolution. We will grant
that there are some few genuine Democrats there,
and let them pass. But outside there are undoubt-
edly many who are genuine Democrats, and who
have it in their heads that it is both possible and
desirable to capture the constitutional Parliament
and turn it into a real popular assembly, which,
with the people behind it, might lead us peaceably
and constitutionally into the great Revolution
which all thoughtful men desire to bring about ; all
thoughtful men, that is, who do not belong to the
consciously cynical Tories, i.e., men determined,
whether it be just or unjust, good for humanity or
bad for it, to keep the people down as long as they
can, which they hope, very naturally, will be as
long as they live.

Whigs, Democrats > and Socialists. 4 1

To capture Parliament and turn it into a popular
but constitutional assembly is, I must conclude, the
aspiration of the genuine Democrats wherever they
may be found; that is their idea of the first step
of the Democratic policy. The questions to be
asked of this, as of all other policies, are first,
What is the end proposed by it ? and secondly, Are
they likely to succeed ? As to the end proposed, I
think there is much difference of opinion. Some
Democrats would answer from the merely political
point of view, and say: Universal suffrage, payment
of members, annual Parliaments, abolition of the
House of Lords, abolition of the monarchy, and so
forth. I would answer this by saying : After all,
these are not ends, but means to an end ; and pass-
ing by the fact that the last two are not constitu-
tional measures, and so could not be brought about
without actual rebellion, I would say if you had
gained all these things, and more, all you would
have done would have been to establish the
ascendancy of the Democratic party ; having so
established it, you would then have to find out by
the usual party means what that Democratic party
meant, and you would find that your triumph in
mere politics would lead you back again exactly
to the place you started from. You would be
Whigs under a different name. Monarchy, House of
Lords, pensions, standing army, and the rest of it,
are only supports to the present social system — the
privilege based on the wages and capital system

42 Signs of Change.

of production — and are worth nothing except as
supports to it. If you are determined to support
that system, therefore, you had better leave these
things alone. The real masters of Society, the real
tyrants of the people, are the Landlords and
Capitalists, whom your political triumph would
not interfere with.

Then, as now, there would be a proletariat and a
moneyed class. Then, as now, it would be possible
sometimes for a diligent, energetic man, with his
mind set wholly on such success, to climb out of the
proletariat into the moneyed class, there to sweat
as he once was sweated ; which, my friends, is, if
you will excuse the word, your ridiculous idea of
freedom of contract.

The sole and utmost success of your policy
would be that it might raise up a strong opposition
to the condition of things which it would be your
function to uphold ; but most probably such oppo-
sition would still be outside Parliament, and not in
it ; you would have made a revolution, probably
not without bloodshed, only to show people the
necessity for another revolution the very next day.

Will you think the example of America too
trite ? Anyhow, consider it ! A country with
universal suffrage, no king, no House of Lords, no
privilege as you fondly think ; only a little standing
army, chiefly used for the murder of red-skins ; a
democracy after your model ; and with all that, a
society corrupt to the core, and at this moment

Whigs, Democrats, and Socialists. 43

engaged in suppressing freedom with just the same
reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Czar
of all the Russias uses.*

But it will be said, and certainly with much truth,
that not all the Democrats are for mere political
reform. I say that I believe that this is true, and
it is a very important truth too. I will go farther,
and will say that all those Democrats who can be
distinguished from Whigs do intend social reforms
which they hope will somewhat alter the relations
of the classes towards each other ; and there is,
generally speaking, amongst Democrats a leaning
towards a kind of limited State-Socialism, and it is
through that that they hope to bring about a peace-
ful revolution, which, if it does not introduce a con-
dition of equality, will at least make the workers
better off and contented with their lot.

They hope to get a body of representatives
elected to Parliament, and by them to get measure
after measure passed which will tend towards this
goal ; nor would some of them, perhaps most of
them, be discontented if by this means we could
glide into complete State-Socialism. I think that
the present Democrats are widely tinged with this
idea, and to me it is a matter of hope that it is so ;
whatever of error there is in it, it means advance
beyond the complete barrenness of the mere
political programme.

* As true now (February 1888) as then: the murder of the
Chicago Anarchists, to wit.

44 Signs of Change.

Yet I must point out to these semi-Socialist
Democrats that in the first place they will be made
the cat's-paw of some of the wilier of the Whigs.
There are several of these measures which look to
some Socialistic, as, for instance, the allotments
scheme, and other schemes tending toward pea-
sant proprietorship, co-operation, and the like, but
which after all, in spite of their benevolent ap-
pearance, are really weapons in the hands of re-
actionaries, having for their real object the creation
of a new middle-class made out of the working-
class and at their expense; the raising, in short,
of a new army against the attack of the disin-
herited.

There is no end to this kind of dodge, nor will
be apparently till there is an end of the class which
tries it on ; and a great many of the Democrats
will be amused and absorbed by it from time to
time. They call this sort of nonsense " practical ; "
it seems like doing something, while the steady
propaganda of a principle which must prevail in
the end is, according to them, doing nothing, and
is unpractical. For the rest, it is not likely to
become dangerous, further than as it clogs the
wheels of the real movement somewhat, because it
is sometimes a mere piece of reaction, as when, for
instance, it takes the form of peasant proprietorship,
flying right in the face of the commercial develop-
ment of the day, which tends ever more and more
towards the aggregation of capital, thereby smooth-

Whigs, Democrats, and Socialists. 45

ing the way for the organized possession of the
means of production by the workers when the true
revolution shall come : while, on the other hand,
when this attempt to manufacture a new middle-
class takes the form of co-operation and the like, it
is not dangerous, because it means nothing more
than a slightly altered form of joint-stockery, and
everybody almost is beginning to see this. The
greed of men stimulated by the spectacle of profit-
making all around them, and also by the burden of
the interest on the money which they have been
obliged to borrow, will not allow them even to
approach a true system of co-operation. Those
benefited by the transaction presently become
eager shareholders in a commercial speculation,
and if they are working-men, as they often are, they
are also capitalists. The enormous commercial
success of the great co-operative societies, and the
absolute no-effect of that success on the social
conditions of the workers, are sufficient tokens of
what this non-political co-operation must come to :
" Nothing — it shall not be less."

But again, it may be said, some of the Democrats
go farther than this; they take up actual pieces of
Socialism, and are more than inclined to support
them. Nationalization of the land, or of railways,
or cumulative taxation on incomes, or limiting the
right of inheritance, or new factory laws, or the
restriction by law of the day's labour — one of these,
or more than one sometimes, the Democrats will

46 Signs of Change.

support, and see absolute salvation in these one or
two planks of the platform. All this I admit, and
once again say it is a hopeful sign, and yet once
again I say there is a snare in it — a snake lies
lurking in the grass.

Those who think that they can deal with our
present system in this piecemeal way very much
underrate the strength of the tremendous organiza-
tion under which we live, and which appoints to
each of us his place, and if we do not chance to fit
it, grinds us down till we do. Nothing but a
tremendous force can deal with this force ; it will
not suffer itself to be dismembered, nor to lose
anything which really is its essence without putting
forth all its force in resistance ; rather than lose
anything which it considers of importance, it will
pull the roof of the world down upon its head.
For, indeed, I grant these semi-Socialist Democrats
that there is one hope for their tampering piece-
meal with our Society; if by chance they can
excite people into seriously, however blindly,
claiming one or other of these things in question,
and could be successful in Parliament in driving
it through, they would certainly draw on a great
civil war, and such a war once let loose would not
end but either with the full triumph of Socialism
or its extinction for the present ; it would be im-
possible to limit the aim of the struggle ; nor can
we even guess at the course which it would take,
except that it could not be a matter of compromise.

Whigs y Democrats \ and Socialists. 47

But suppose the Democratic party peaceably suc-
cessful on this new basis of semi-State Socialism,
what would it all mean ? Attempts to balance the
two classes whose interests are opposed to each
other, a mere ignoring of this antagonism which
has led us through so many centuries to where we
are now, and then, after a period of disappointment
and disaster, the naked conflict once more ; a revo-
lution made, and another immediately necessary on
its morrow !

Yet, indeed, it will not come to that ; for, what-
ever may be the aims of the Democrats, they will
not succeed in getting themselves into a position
from whence they could make the attempt to realize
them. I have said there are Tories and yet no real
Tory party ; so also it seems to me that there are
Democrats but no Democratic party ; at present
they are used by the leaders of the parliamentary
factions, and also kept at a distance by them from
any real power. If they by hook or crook managed
to get a number of members into Parliament, they
would find out their differences very speedily under
the influence of party rule ; in point of fact, the
Democrats are not a party ; because they have no
principles other than the old Whig-Radical ones, ex-
tended in some cases so as to take in a little semi-
Socialism which the march of events has forced on
them — that is, they gravitate on one side to the
Whigs and on the other to the Socialists. When-
ever, if ever, they begin to be a power in the elec-

48 Signs of Change.

tions and get members in the House, the temptation
to be members of a real live party which may have
the government of the country in its hands, the
temptation to what is (facetiously, I suppose) called
practical politics, will be too much for many, even
of those who gravitate towards Socialism : a quasi-
Democratic parliamentary party, therefore, would
probably be merely a recruiting ground, a nursery
for the left wing of the Whigs ; though it would
indeed leave behind some small nucleus of opposi-
tion, the principles of which, however, would be
vague and floating, so that it would be but a
powerless group after all.

The future of the constitutional Parliament,
therefore, it seems to me, is a perpetual Whig Rump,
which will yield to pressure when mere political
reforms are attempted to be got out of it, but will
be quite immovable towards any real change in
social and economical matters ; that is to say, so far
as it may be conscious of the attack; for I grant
that it may be betrayed into passing semi-State-
Socialistic measures, which will do this amount of
sood, that they will help to entangle commerce in
difficulties, and so add to discontent by creating
suffering ; suffering of which the people will not
understand the causes definitely, but which their
instinct will tell them truly is brought about by
government^ and that, too, the only kind of govern-
ment which they can have so long as the constitu-
tional Parliament lasts.

Whigs, Democrats, and Socialists. 49

Nov/, if you think I have exaggerated the power
of the Whigs, that is, of solid, dead, unmoving
resistance to progress, I must call your attention to
the events of the last few weeks. Here has been a
measure of pacification proposed ; at the least and
worst an attempt to enter upon a pacification of a
weary and miserable quarrel many centuries old.
The British people, in spite of their hereditary pre-
judice against the Irish, were not averse to the
measure; the Tories were, as usual, powerless
against it ; yet so strong has been the vis inertia
of Whiggery that it has won a notable victory over
common-sense and sentiment combined, and has
drawn over to it a section of those hitherto known
as Radicals, and probably would have drawn all
Radicals over but for the personal ascendancy of
Mr. Gladstone. The Whigs, seeing, if but dimly,
that this Irish Independence meant an attack on
property, have been successful in snatching the
promised peace out of the people's hands, and in
preparing all kinds of entanglement and confusion
for us for a long while in their steady resistance to
even the beginnings of revolution.

This, therefore, is what Parliament looks to me :
a solid central party, with mere nebulous oppo-
sition on the right hand and on the left. The
people governed ; that is to say, fair play amongst
themselves for the money-privileged classes to
make the most of their privilege, and to fight
sturdily with each other in doing so; but the

E

5 o Signs of Change.

government concealed as much as possible, and
also as long as possible ; that is to say, the govern-
ment resting on an assumed necessary eternity of
privilege to monopolize the means of the fructifi-
cation of labour.

For so long as that assumption is accepted by
the ignorance of the people, the Great Whig Rump
will remain inexpugnable, but as soon as the
people's eyes are opened, even partially — and they
begin to understand the meaning of the words, the
Emancipation of Labour — we shall begin to have
an assured hope of throwing off the basest and
most sordid tyranny which the world has yet seen,
the tyranny of so-called Constitutionalism.

How, then, are the people's eyes to be opened ?
By the force evolved from the final triumph and
consequent corruption of Commercial Whiggery,
which force will include in it a recognition of its
constructive activity by intelligent people on the
one hand, and on the other half-blind instinctive
struggles to use its destructive activity on the part
of those who suffer and have not been allowed to
think ; and, to boot, a great deal that goes between
those two extremes.

In this turmoil, all those who can be truly called
Socialists will be involved. The modern develop-
ment of the great class-struggle has forced us to
think, our thoughts force us to speak, and our
hopes force us to try to get a hearing from the
people. Nor can one tell how far our words will

Whigs, Democrats, and Socialists. 5 1

carry, so to say. The most moderate exposition of
our principles will bear with it the seeds of disrup-
tion ; nor can we tell what form that disruption
will take.

One and all, then, we are responsible for the
enunciation of Socialist principles and of the conse-
quences which may flow from their general accept-
ance, whatever that may be. This responsibility
no Socialist can shake off by declarations against
physical force and in favour of constitutional
methods of agitation ; we are attacking the Con-
stitution with the very beginnings, the mere lisp-
ings, of Socialism.

Whiggery, therefore, in its various forms, is thej
representative of Constitutionalism — is the outwardi
expression of monopoly and consequent artificial
restraints on labour and life ; and there is only one|
expression of the force which will destroy Whiggery,/
and that is Socialism ; and on the right hand and
on the left Toryism and Radicalism will melt into
Whiggery — are doing so now — and Socialism has
got to absorb all that is not Whig in Radicalism.

Then comes the question, What is the policy of
Socialism ? If Toryism and Democracy are only
nebulous masses of opposition to the solid centre of
Whiggery, what can we call Socialism ?

Well, at present, in England at least, Socialism
is not a party, but a sect. That is sometimes
brought against it as a taunt ; but I am not dis-
mayed by it.; for I can conceive of a sect — nay, I

E 2

5 2 Signs of Change.

have heard of one — becoming a very formidable
power, and becoming so by dint of its long
remaining a sect, /So I think it is quite possible
that Socialism will remain a sect till the very eve
of the last stroke that completes the revolution,
after which it will melt into the new SocietyJ And
is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising
principles, that lead us into revolutions ? Was it
not so in the Cromwellian times ? Nay, have not
the Fenian sect, even in our own days, made Home
Rule possible ? They may give birth to parties,
though not parties themselves. And what should
a sect like we are have to do in the parliamentary
struggle — we who have an ideal to keep always
before ourselves and others, and who cannot accept
compromise ; who can see nothing that can give us
rest for a minute save the emancipation of labour,
which will be brought about by the workers gaining
possession of all the means of the fructification of
labour ; and who, even when that is gained, shall
have pure Communism ahead to strive for ?

What are we to do, then ? Stand by and look
on ? Not exactly. Yet we may look on other
people doing their work while we do ours. They
are already beginning, as I have said, to stumble
about with attempts at State Socialism. Let them
make their experiments and blunders, and prepare
the way for us by so doing. And our own busi-
ness? Well, we — sect or party, or group of self-
seekers, maJmen, and poets, which you will — are

Whigs, Democrats, and Socialists. 5 3

at least the only set of people who have been able
to see that there is^^imd has been a great class-
struggle going on. jFuxther, we can see that this^
class-struggle cannot come to an end till the classes/
themselves do : one class must absorb the other.]/
Which, then ? Surely the useful one, the one that
the world lives by, and on. The business of the
people at present is to make it impossible for the
useless, non-producing class to live ; while the busi-
ness of Constitutionalism is, on the contrary, to
make it possible for them to liveTj And our busi-
ness is to help to make the people conscious of this
great antagonism between the people and Constitu-
tionalism ; and meantime to let Constitutionalism
go on with its government unhelped by us at least,
until it at last becomes conscious of its burden of
the people's hate, of the people's knowledge that it
is disinherited, which we shall have done our best
to further by any means that we could.

As to Socialists in Parliament, there are two
words about that. If they go there to take a part
in carrying on Constitutionalism by palliating the
evils of the system, and so helping our rulers to
bear their burden of government, I for one, and so
far as their action therein goes, cannot call thenv
Socialists at all. But if they go there with the
intention of doing what they can towards the dis-
ruption of Parliament, that is a matter of tactics
for the time being; but even here I cannot help^
seeing the danger of their being seduced from their

:

54 Signs of Change.

true errand, and I fear that they might become, on
the terms above mentioned, simply supporters of
the very thing they set out to undo.

I say that our work lies quite outside Parliament,
and it is to help to educate the people by every and
any means that maybe effective; and the know-
ledge we have to help them to is threefold — to
know their own, to know how to take their own,
and to know how to use their own.

( 55 )

FEUDAL ENGLAND.

It is true that the Norman Conquest found a
certain kind of feudality in existence in England —
a feudality which was developed from the customs
of the Teutonic tribes with no admixture of
Roman law ; and also that even before the Con-
quest this country was slowly beginning to be mixed
up with the affairs of the Continent of Europe,
and that not only with the kindred nations of Scan-
dinavia, but with the Romanized countries also.
But the Conquest of Duke William did introduce
the complete Feudal system into the country ;
and it also connected it by strong bonds to the
Romanized countries, and yet by so doing laid the
first foundations of national feeling in England.
The English felt their kinship with the Norsemen
or the Danes, and did not suffer from their con-
quests when they had become complete, and when,
consequently, mere immediate violence had dis-
appeared from them ; their feeling was tribal rather
than national ; but they could have no sense of
tribal unity with the varied populations of the
provinces which mere dynastical events had strung

56 Signs of Change.

together into the dominion, the manor, one may
say, of the foreign princes of Normandy and Anjou ;
and, as the kings who ruled them gradually got
pushed out of their French possessions, England
began to struggle against the domination of
men felt to be foreigners, and so gradually be-
came conscious of her separate nationality, though
still only in a fashion, as the manor of an English
lord.

It is beyond the scope of this piece to give any-
thing like a connected story, even of the slightest, of
the course of events between the conquest of Duke
William and the fully developed mediaeval period
of the fourteenth century, which is the England
that I have before my eyes as Mediaeval or Feudal.
That period of the fourteenth century united the
developments of the elements which had been
stirring in Europe since the final fall of the Roman
Empire, and England shared in the general feeling
and spirit of the age, although, from its position, the
course of its history, and to a certain extent the
lives of its people, were different. It is to this
period, therefore, that I wish in the long run to call
your attention, and I will only say so much about
the earlier period as may be necessary to explain
how the people of England got into the position in
which they were found by the Statute of Labourers
enacted by Edward III., and the Peasants' Rebel-
lion in the time of his grandson and successor,
Richard II.

Feudal England. 5 7

"<b

Undoubtedly, then, the Norman Conquest made
a complete break in the continuity of the history
of England. When the Londoners after the Battle
of Hastings accepted Duke William for their king,
no doubt they thought of him as occupying much
the same position as that of the newly slain Harold ;
or at any rate they looked on him as being such a
king of England as Knut the Dane, who had also
conquered the country; and probably William him-
self thought no otherwise ; but the event was quite
different ; for on the one hand, not only was he a
man of strong character, able, masterful, and a great
soldier in the modern sense of the word, but he had
at hisback his wealthydukedom of Normandy, which
he had himself reduced to obedience and organized ;
and, on the other hand, England lay before him,
unorganized, yet stubbornly rebellious to him ; its
very disorganization and want of a centre making
it more difficult to deal with by merely overrun-
ning it with an army levied for that purpose, and
backed by a body of house-carles or guards, which
would have been the method of a Scandinavian or
native king in dealing with his rebellious subjects.
Duke William's necessities and instincts combined
led him into a very different course of action, which
determined the future destiny of the country.
What he did was to quarter upon England an army
of feudal vassals drawn from his obedient dukedom,
and to hand over to them the lordship of the land
of England in return for their military service to

5 8 Signs of Change.

him, the suzerain of them all. Thenceforward, it
was under the rule of these foreign landlords that
the people of England had to develop.

The development of the country as a Teutonic
people was checked and turned aside by this event.
Duke William brought, in fact, his Normandy into
England, which was thereby changed from a Teu-
tonic people (Old-Norse theoS), with the tribal
customary law still in use among them, into a
province of Romanized Feudal Europe, a piece
of France, in short ; and though in time she did
grow into another England again, she missed for
ever in her laws, and still more in her language
and her literature, the chance of developing into a
great homogeneous Teutonic people infused use-
fully with a mixture of Celtic blood.

Howrever, this step which Duke William was
forced to take further influenced the future of the
country by creating the great order of the Baron-
age, and the history of the early period of England
is pretty much that of the struggle of the king with
the Baronage and the Church. For William fixed
the type of the successful English mediaeval king,
of whom Henry II. and Edward I. were the most
notable examples afterwards. It was, in fact, with
him that the struggle towards monarchical bureau-
cracy began, which was checked by the barons,
who extorted Magna Charta from King John, and
afterwards by the revolt headed by Simon de
Montfort in Henry III.'s reign ; was carried on

Feudal England. 5 9

vigorously by Edward I., and finally successfully
finished by Henry VII. after the long faction-fight
of the Wars of the Roses had weakened the feudal
lords so much that they could no longer assert
themselves against the monarchy.

As to the other political struggle of the Middle
Ages, the contest between the Crown and the Church,
two things are to be noted ; first, that at least in
the earlier period the Church was on the popular
side. Thomas Beckett was canonized, it is true,
formally and by regular decree ; but his memory
was held so dear by the people that he would
probably have been canonized informally by them
if the holy seat at Rome had refused to do so. The
second thing to be noted about the dispute is this,
that it was no contest of principle. According to
the mediaeval theory of life and religion, the Church
and the State were one in essence, and but separate
manifestations of the Kingdom of God upon earth,
which was part of the Kingdom of God in heaven.
The king was an officer of that realm and a liegeman
of God. The doctor of laws and the doctor of physic
partook in a degree of the priestly character. On the
other hand, the Church was not withdrawn from the
every-day life of men ; the division into a worldly
and spiritual life, neither of which had much to do
with the other, was a creation of the protestantism
of the Reformation, and had no place in the practice
at least of the mediaeval Church, which we cannot
too carefully remember is little more represented

60 Signs of Change.

by modern Catholicism than by modern Protestant-
ism. The contest, therefore, between the Crown
and the Church was a mere bickering between two
bodies, without any essential antagonism between
them, as to how far the administration of either
reached ; neither dreamed of subordinating one to
the other, far less of extinguishing one by the
other.

The history of the Crusades, by-the-way, illus-
trates very emphatically this position of the Church
in the Middle Ages. The foundation of that
strange feudal kingdom of Jerusalem, whose very
coat of arms was a solecism in heraldry, whose
king had precedence, in virtue of his place as lord
of the centre of Christianity, over all other kings
and princes ; the orders of men-at-arms vowed to
S poverty and chastity, like the Templars and
Knights of St. John ; and above all the unquestion-
ing sense of duty that urged men of all classes and
kinds into the holy war, show how strongly the
idea of God's Kingdom on the earth had taken hold
of all men's minds in the early Middle Ages. As
to the result of the Crusades, they certainly had
their influence on the solidification of Europe and
the great feudal system, at the head of which, in
theory at kast, were the Pope and the Kaiser.
For the rest, the intercourse with the East gave
Europe an opportunity of sharing in the mechani-
cal civilization of the peoples originally dominated
by the Arabs, and infused by the art of Byzantium

Feudal England. 6 1

*£>

and Persia, not without some tincture of the cul-
tivation of the latter classical period.

The stir and movement also of the Crusades,
and the necessities in which they involved the
princes and their barons, furthered the upward
movement of the classes that lay below the feudal
vassals, great and little ; the principal opportunity
for which movement, however, in England, was
given by the continuous struggle between the
Crown and the Church and Baronage.

The early Norman king?, even immediately after
the death of the Conqueror, found themselves in-
volved in this struggle, and were forced to avail
themselves of the help of what had now become
the inferior tribe — the native English, to wit.
Henry I., an able and ambitious man, understood
this so clearly that he made a distinct bid for the
favour of the inferior tribe by marrying an English
princess ; and it was by means of the help of his
English subjects that he conquered his Norman
subjects, and the field of Tenchebray, which put
the coping-stone on his success, was felt by the
English people as an English victory over the op->
pressing tribe with which Duke William had over-
whelmed the English people. It was during this
king's reign and under these influences that the
trading and industrial classes began to rise some-
what. The merchant gilds were now in their period
of greatest power, and had but just begun, in Eng-
land at least, to develop into the corporations of

62 Signs of CJiange.

the towns ; but the towns themselves were begin-
ning to gain their freedom and to become an im-
portant element in the society of the time, as little
by little they asserted themselves against the
arbitrary rule of the feudal lords, lay or ecclesias-
tical : for as to the latter, it must be remembered
that the Church included in herself the orders or
classes into which lay society was divided, and
while by its lower clergy of the parishes and by the
friars it touched the people, its upper clergy were
simply feudal lords ; and as the religious fervour of
the higher clergy, which was marked enough
in the earlier period of the Middle Ages (in Anselm,
for example), faded out, they became more and
more mere landlords, although from the conditions
of their landlordism, living as they did on their
land and amidst of their tenants, they were less
oppressive than the lay landlords.

The order and progress of Henry I/s reign,
which marks the transition from the mere military
camp of the Conqueror to the mediaeval England
I have to dwell upon, was followed by the period
of mere confusion and misery which accompanied
the accession of the princes of Anjou to the throne
of England. In this period the barons widely be-
came mere violent and illegal robbers ; and the
castles with which the land was dotted, and which
were begun under the auspices of the Conqueror as
military posts, became mere dens of strong-thieves.

No doubt this made the business of the next

Feudal England. 6 3

able king, Henry II., the easier. He was a staunch
man of business, and turned himself with his whole
soul towards the establishment of order and the
consolidation of the monarchy, which accordingly
took a great stride under him towards its ultimate
goal of bureaucracy. He would probably have
carried the business still farther, since in his contest
with the Church, in spite of the canonization of
Beckett and the king's formal penance at his tomb,
he had in fact gained a victory for the Crown
which it never really lost again ; but in his days
England was only a part of the vast dominion of
his House, which included more than half of France,
and his struggle with his feudatories and the French
king, which sowed the seed of the loss of that
dominion to the English Crown, took up much of
his life, and finally beat him.

His two immediate successors, Richard I. and
John, were good specimens of the chiefs of their
line, almost all of whom were very able men, having
even a touch of genius in them, but therewithal
were such wanton blackguards and scoundrels that
one is almost forced to apply the theological word
" wickedness " to them. Such characters belong
specially to their times, fertile as they were both of
great qualities and of scoundrelism, and in which
our own special vice of hypocrisy was entirely
lacking. John, the second of these two pests, put
the coping-stone on the villany of his family, and
lost his French dominion in the lump.

64 Signs of Change.

Under such rascals as these came the turn of
the Baronage ; and they, led by Stephen Langton,
the archbishop who had been thrust on the un-
willing king by the Pope, united together and
forced from him his assent to Magna Charta, the
great, thoroughly well-considered deed, which is
conventionally called the foundation of English
Liberty, but which can only claim to be so on the
ground that it was the confirmation and seal of the
complete feudal system in England, and put the
relations between the vassals, the great feudatories,
and the king on a stable basis; since it created, or
at least confirmed, order among these privileged
classes, among whom, indeed, it recognized the
towns to a certain extent as part of the great
feudal hierarchy : so that even by this time they
had begun to acquire status in that hierarchy.

So John passed away, and became not long
after an almost mythical personage, the type of
the bad king. There are still ballads, and prose
stories deduced from these ballads, in existence,
which tell the tale of this strange monster as the
English people imagined it.

As they belong to the literature of the fourteenth
century, the period I have undertaken to tell you
about specially, I will give you one of the latter of
these concerning the death of King John, for whom
the people imagined a more dramatic cause of
death than mere indigestion, of which in all pro-
bability he really died ; and you may take it for a

Feudal England, 65

specimen of popular literature of the fourteenth
century.

I can here make bold to quote from memory,
without departing very widely from the old text,
since the quaint wording of the original, and the
spirit of bold and blunt heroism which it breathes,
have fixed it in my mind for ever.

The king, you must remember, had halted at
Swinestead Abbey, in Lincolnshire, in his retreat
from the hostile barons and their French allies,
and had lost all his baggage by the surprise of the
advancing tide in the Wash ; so that he might well
be in a somewhat sour mood.

Says the tale : So the king went to meat in
the hall, and before him was a loaf, and he looked
grimly on it and said, 'For how much is such a
loaf sold in this realm ? '

'Sir, for one penny/ said they.

Then the king smote the board with his fist
and said, ' By God, if I live for one year such a
loaf shall be sold for twelve pence ! '

That heard one of the monks who stood
thereby, and he thought and considered that his
hour and time to die was come, and that it would
be a good deed to slay so cruel a king and so evil
a lord.

So he went into the garden and plucked plums
and took out of them the steles [stalks], and did
venom in them each one ; and he came before the
king and sat on his knee, and said :

F

66 Signs of Change.

1 Sir, by St. Austin, this is fruit of our garden.*

Then the king looked evilly on him and said,
' Assay them, monk ! '

So the monk took and ate thereof, nor changed
countenance any whit : and the king ate there-
after.

But presently afterwards the monk swelled and
turned blue, and fell down and died before the-
king : then waxed the king sick at heart, and he
also swelled and died, and so he ended his days.

For a while after the death of John and the acces-
sion of Henry III. the Baronage, strengthened by
the great Charter and with a weak and wayward
king on the throne, made their step forward in
power and popularity, and the first serious check
to the tendency to monarchical bureaucracy, a kind
of elementary aristocratic constitution, was imposed
upon the weakness of Henry III. Under this
movement of the barons, who in their turn had to
seek for the support of the people, the towns made
a fresh step in advance, and Simon de Montfort,
the leader of what for want of a better word must
be called the popular party, was forced by his
circumstances to summon to his Parliament citizens
from the boroughs. Earl Simon was one of those
men that come to the front in violent times, and
he added real nobility of character to strength of
will and persistence. He became the hero of the
people, who went near to canonizing him after his
death. But the monarchy was too strong for him

Feudal England. 67

and his really advanced projects, which by no
means squared with the hopes of the Baronage in
general : and when Prince Edward, afterwards
Edward I., grown to his full mental stature, came
to the help of the Crown with his unscrupulous
business ability, the struggle was soon over ; and
with Evesham field the monarchy began to take a
new stride, and the longest yet taken, towards
bureaucracy.

Edward I. is remembered by us chiefly for the
struggle he carried on with the Scotch Baronage
for the feudal suzerainty of that kingdom, and the
centuries of animosity between the two countries
which that struggle drew on. But he has other
claims to our attention besides this.

At first, and remembering the ruthlessness of
many of his acts, especially in the Scotch war, one
is apt to look upon him as a somewhat pedantic
tyrant and a good soldier, with something like a
dash of hypocrisy beyond his time added. But,
like the Angevine kings I was speaking of just now,
he was a completely characteristic product of his
time. He was not a hypocrite probably, after all>
in spite of his tears shed after he had irretrievably
lost a game, or after he had won one by stern
cruelty. There was a dash of real romance in
him, which mingled curiously with his lawyer-like
qualities. He was, perhaps, the man of all men
who represented most completely the finished
feudal system, and who took it most to heart.

F 2

68 Signs of Change.

His law, his romance, and his religion, his self-com-
mand, and his terrible fury were all a part of this
innate feudalism, and exercised within its limits ;
and we must suppose that he thoroughly felt his
responsibility as the chief of his feudatories, while
at the same time he had no idea of his having any
responsibilities towards the lower part of his sub-
jects. Such a man was specially suited to carrying
on the tendency to bureaucratic centralization,
which culminated in the Tudor monarchy. He
had his struggle with the Baronage, but hard as it
was, he was sure not to carry it beyond the due
limits of feudalism ; to that he was always loyal.
He had slain Earl Simon before he was king, while
he was but his father's general ; but Earl Simon's
work did not die with him, and henceforward, while
the Middle Ages and their feudal hierarchy lasted,
it was impossible for either king or barons to do
anything which would seriously injure each other's
position ; the struggle ended in his reign in a
balance of power in England which, on the one
hand, prevented any great feudatory becoming a
rival of the king, as happened in several instances
in France, and on the other hand prevented the
king lapsing into a mere despotic monarch.

I have said that bureaucracy took a great stride

/in Edward's reign, but it reached its limits under

feudalism as far as the nobles were concerned.

Peace and order was established between the

different powers of the governing classes ; hence-

Feudal England. C 9

forward, the struggle is between them and the
governed ; that struggle was now to become
obvious ; the lower tribe was rising in importance , 1
it was becoming richer for fleecing, but also it was I
beginning to have some power; this led the king*
first, and afterwards the barons, to attack it de-
finitely ; it was rich enough to pay for the trouble
of being robbed, and not yet strong enough to
defend itself with open success, although the
slower and less showy success of growth did not
fail it. The instrument of attack in the hands of
the barons was the ordinary feudal privilege, the
logical carrying out of serfdom ; but this attack
took place two reigns later. We shall come to that
further on. The attack on the lower tribe which was
now growing into importance was in this reign made
by the king ; and his instrument was — Parliament.

I have told you that Simon de Montfort made
some attempt to get the burgesses to sit in his
Parliament, but it was left to Edward I. to lay the
foundations firmly of parliamentary representation,
which he used for the purpose of augmenting the
power of the Crown and crushing the rising liberty
of the towns, though of course his direct aim was
simply at — money.

The Great Council of the Realm was purely
feudal ; it was composed of the feudatories of the
king, theoretically of all of them, practically of the
great ones only. It was, in fact, the council of the
conquering tribe with their chief at its head ; the

70 Signs of Change.

matters of the due feudal tribute, aids, reliefs, fines,
scutage, and the like — in short, the king's revenue
due from his men — were settled in this council at
once and in the lump. But the inferior tribe,
though not represented there, existed, and, as
aforesaid, was growing rich, and the king had to
get their money out of their purses directly ; which,
as they were not represented at the council, he
had to do by means of his officers (the sheriffs)
dealing with them one after another, which was a
troublesome job ; for the men were stiff-necked
and quite disinclined to part with their money ;
and the robbery having to be done on the spot, so
to say, encountered all sorts of opposition : and, in
fact, it was the money needs both of baron, bishop,
and king which had been the chief instrument in
furthering the progress of the towns. The towns
would be pressed by their lords, king, or baron, or
bishop, as it might be, and they would see their
advantage and strike a bargain. For you are not
to imagine that because there was a deal of
violence going on in those times there was no
respect for law ; on the contrary, there was a quite
exaggerated respect for it if it came within the
four corners of the feudal feeling, and the result of
this feeling of respect was the constant struggle for
status on the part of the townships and other
associations throughout the Middle Ages.

Well, the burghers would say, " 'Tis hard to pay
this money, but we will put ourselves out to pay it

Feudal England. 7 1

if you will do something for us in return ; let, for
example, our men be tried in our own court, and
the verdict be of one of compurgation instead of
wager of battle," and so forth, and so forth.

All this sort of detailed bargaining was, in fact,
a safeguard for the local liberties, so far as they
went, of the towns and shires, and did not suit the
king's views of law and order at all ; and so began
the custom of the sheriff (the king's officer, who
had taken the place of the earl of the Anglo-Saxon
period) summoning the burgesses to the council,
which burgesses you must understand were not
elected at the folkmotes of the town, or hundred,
but in a sort of hole-and-corner way by a few of
the bigger men of the place. What the king
practically said was this : " I want your money,
and I cannot be for ever wrangling with you
stubborn churles at home there, and listening to
all your stones of how poor you are, and what you
want ; no, I want you to be represented. Send me
up from each one of your communes a man or two
whom I can bully or cajole or bribe to sign away
your substance for you."

Under these circumstances it is no wonder that
the towns were not very eager in the cause of
representation. It was no easy job to get them to
come up to London merely to consult as to
the kind of sauce with which they were to be
eaten. However, they did come in some numbers,
and by the year 1295 something like a shadow of

72 Signs of Change.

our present Parliament was on foot. Nor need
there be much more said about this institution ; as
time went on its functions got gradually extended
by the petition for the redress of grievances ac-
companying the granting of money, but it was
generally to be reckoned on as subservient to the
will of the king, who down to the later Tudor
period played some very queer tunes on this con-
stitutional instrument.

Edward I. gave place to his son, who again
was of the type of king who had hitherto given
the opportunity to the barons for their turn of
advancement in the constitutional struggle ; and in
earlier times no doubt they would have taken full
advantage of the circumstances ; as it was they had
little to gain. The king did his best to throw off
the restraint of the feudal constitution, and to
govern simply as an absolute monarch. After a
time of apparent success he failed, of course, and
only succeeded in confirming the legal rights of
feudalism by bringing about his own formal de-
position at the hands of the Baronage, as a chief
who, having broken the compact with his feuda-
tories, had necessarily forfeited his right. If we
compare his case with that of Charles I. we shall
find this difference in it, besides the obvious one
that Edward was held responsible to his feudatories
and Charles towards the upper middle classes, the
squirearchy, as represented by Parliament ; that
Charles was condemned by a law created for the

Fettdal England. 7 3

purpose, so to say, and evolved from the principle
of the representation of the propertied classes,
while Edward's deposition was the real logical out-
come of the confirmed feudal system, and was
practically legal and regular.

The successor of the deposed king, the third
Edward, ushers in the complete and central p^rjpd 1
of the Middle Ages in England. The feudal system /
is complete : the life and spirit of the country has I
developed into a condition if not quite independent,
yet quite forgetful, on the one hand of the ideas
and customs of the Celtic and Teutonic tribes, and
on the other of the authority of the Roman Empire.
The Middle Ages have grown into manhood ; that
manhood has an art of its own, which, though de-i
veloped step by step from that of Old Rome and/
New Rome, and embracing the strange mysticism^
and dreamy beauty of the East, has forgotten both\
its father and its mother, and stands alone trium-
phant, the loveliest, brightest, and gayest of all the
creations of the human mind and hand.

It has a literature of its own too, somewhat akin
to its art, yet inferior to it, and lacking its unity,
since there is a double stream in it. On the one
hand is the court poet, the gentleman, Chaucer,
with his Italianizing metres, and his formal recog-
nition of the classical stories ; on which, indeed, he
builds a superstructure of the quaintest and most
unadulterated medievalism, as gay and bright as
the architecture which his eyes beheld and his pen

74 Signs of Change.

pictured for us, so clear, defined, and elegant it is ;
a sunny world even amidst its violence and passing
troubles, like those of a happy child, the worst of
them an amusement rather than a grief to the on-
lookers ; a world that scarcely needed hope in its
eager life of adventure and love, amidst the sunlit
blossoming meadows, and green woods, and white
begilded manor-houses. A kindly and human
muse is Chaucer's, nevertheless, interested in and
amused by all life, but of her very nature devoid of
strong aspirations for the future ; and that all the
more, since, though the strong devotion and fierce
piety of the ruder Middle Ages had by this time
waned, and the Church was more often lightly
mocked at than either feared or loved, still the habit
of looking on this life as part of another yet re-
mained : the world is fair and full of adventure ;
kind men and true and noble are in it to make
one happy ; fools also to laugh at, and rascals to be
resisted, yet not wholly condemned ; and when
this world is over we shall still go on living in
another which is a part of this. Look at all the
picture, note all and live in all, and be as merry as
you may, never forgetting that you are alive and
that it is good to live.

That is the spirit of Chaucer's poetry ; but along-
side of it existed yet the ballad poetry of the people,
wholly untouched by courtly elegance and classical
pedantry ; rude in art but never coarse, true to the
backbone ; instinct with indignation against wrong,

Feudal England. 7 5

and thereby expressing the hope that was in it ; a
protest of the poor against the rich, especially in
those songs of the Foresters, which have been
called the mediaeval epic of revolt ; no more
gloomy than the gentleman's poetry, yet cheerful
from courage, and not content. Half a dozen
stanzas of it are worth a cartload of the whining
introspective lyrics of to-day ; and he who, when
he has mastered the slight differences of language
from our own daily speech, is not moved by it,
does not understand what true poetry means nor
what its aim is.

/There is a third element in the literature of this
time which you may call Lollard poetry, the great
example of which is William Langland's "Piers
Plowman." It is no bad corrective to Chaucer,
and in form at least belongs wholly to the popular
side ; but it seems to me to show sj;mptpms of the
spirit of the rising middle class, and casts beforeit
the shadow of the new master that was coming
forward for the workman's oppression^ But I
must leave what more I have to say on this sub-
ject of the art and literature of the fourteenth
century for another occasion. In what I have just
said, I only wanted to point out to you that the
Middle Ages had by this time come to the fullest
growth ; and that they could express in a form
which was all their own, the ideas and life of the
time.

That time was in a sense brilliant and progres-

7 ^ Signs of Change.

sive, and the life of the worker in it was better than
it ever had been, and might compare with advan-
tage with what it became in after periods and with
what it is now ; and indeed, looking back upon it,
there are some minds and some moods that cannot
help regretting it, and are not particularly scared
by the idea of its violence and its lack of accurate
knowledge of scientific detail.

However, one thing is clear to us now, the kind
of thing which never is clear to most people living
in such periods — namely, that whatever it was, it
could not last, but must change into something
else.

I The complete feudalism of the fourteenth century
fell, as systems always fall, by its own corruption,
and by development of the innate seeds of change,
some of which indeed had lain asleep during cen-
turies, to wake up into activity long after the events
which had created them were forgotten.

The feudal system was naturally one of open
war ; and the alliances, marriages, and other deal-
ings, family with family, made by the king and
potentates, were always leading them into war by
giving them legal claims, or at least claims that
could be legally pleaded, to the domains of other
lords, who took advantage of their being on the
spot, of their strength in men or money, or their
popularity with the Baronage, to give immediate
effect to their claims. Such a war was that by
which Edward I. drew on England the enmity of

Feudal England. 7 7

the Scotch ; and such again was the great war
which Edward III. entered into with France. You
must not suppose that there was anything in this
war of a national, far less of a race, character. The
last series of wars before this time I am now speak-
ing of, in which race feelings counted for much, was
the Crusades. This French war, I say, was neither
national, racial, or tribal ; it was the private busi-
ness of a lord of the manor, claiming what he con-
sidered his legal rights of another lord, who had,
as he thought, usurped them ; and this claim his
loyal feudatories were bound to take up for him ;
loyalty to a feudal superior, not patriotism to a
country, was the virtue which Edward III.'s
soldiers had to offer, if they had any call to be
virtuous in that respect.

This war once started was hard to drop, partly
because of the success that Edward had in it,
falling as he did on France with the force of a
country so much more homogeneous than it ; and
no doubt it was a war very disastrous to both
countries, and so may be reckoned as amongst the
causes which broke up the feudal system.

But the real causes of that break-up lay much
deeper than that. The system was not capable of
expansion in production ; it was, in fact, as long as
its integrity remained untouched, an army fed by
slaves, who could not be properly and closely ex-
ploited ; its free men proper might do something
else in their leisure, and so produce art and litera-

7 8 Signs of Change.

ture, but their true business as members of a
conquering tribe, their concerted business, was to
fight. There was, indeed, a fringe of people
between the serf and the free noble who produced
the matters of handicraft which were needed for
the latter, but deliberately, and, as we should now
think, wastefully; and as these craftsmen and
traders began to grow into importance and to push
themselves, as they could not help doing, into the
feudal hierarchy, as they acquired status, so the
sickness of the feudal system increased on it, and
the shadow of the coming commercialism fell
upon it.

That any set of people who could claim to be
other than the property of free men should not
have definite rights differentiated sharply from
those of other groups, was an idea that did not
occur to the Middle Ages ; therefore, as soon as
men came into existence that were not serfs and
were not nobles, they had to struggle for status by
organizing themselves into associations that should
come to be acknowledged members of the great
feudal hierarchy ; for indefinite and negative free-
dom was not allowed to any person in those days ; if
you had not status you did not exist except as an
outlaw.

This is, briefly speaking, the motive power of
necessity that lay behind the struggle of the town
corporations and craft-gilds to be free, a struggle
which, though it was to result in the breaking up of

Feudal England. 79

the mediaeval hierarchy, began by an appearance of
strengthening it by adding to its members, increas-
ing its power of production, and so making it more
stable for the time being.

About this struggle, and the kind of life which
accompanied it, I may have to write another time,
and so will not say more about it here. Except
this, that it was much furthered by the change that
gradually took place between the landlords and the
class on whom all society rested, the serfs. These
at first were men who had no more rights than
chattel slaves had, except that mostly, as part of
the stock of the manor, they could not be sold off
it ; they had to do all the work of the manor, and
to earn their own livelihood off it as they best could.
But as the power of production increased, owing to
better methods of working, and as the country got
to be more settled, their task-work became easier
of performance and their own land more productive
to them ; and that tendency to the definition and
differentiation of rights, moreover, was at work for
their benefit, and the custom of the manor defined
what their services were, and they began to acquire
rights. From that time they ceased to be pure
serfs, and began to tend towards becoming tenants,
at first paying purely and simply service for their
holdings, but gradually commuting that service for
fines and money payment — for rent, in short.

Towards the close of the fourteenth century,
after the country had been depopulated by the

8o Signs of Change.

Black Death, and impoverished by the long war,
the feudal lords of these copyholders and tenants
began to regret the slackness with which their pre-
decessors had exploited their property, the serfs, and
to consider that under the new commercial light
which had begun to dawn upon them they could do
it much better if they only had their property a
little more in hand ; but it was too late, for their
property had acquired rights, and therewithal had
got strange visions into their heads of a time much
better than that in which they lived, when even
those rights should be supplanted by a condition
of things in which the assertion of rights for any
one set of men should no longer be needed, since
all men should be free to enjoy the fruits of their
own labour.

Of that came the great episode of the Peasants'
War, led by men like Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and
John Ball, who indeed, with those they led,
suffered for daring to be before their time, for the
revolt was put down with cruelty worthy of an
Irish landlord or a sweating capitalist of the present
day; but, nevertheless, serfdom came to an end in
England, if not because of the revolt, yet because
of the events that made it, and thereby a death-
wound was inflicted on the feudal system.

From that time onward the country, passing
through the various troubles of a new French war
of Henry V/s time, and the War of the Roses,
did not heed these faction fights much.

Feudal England, 8 1

The workmen grew in prosperity, but also they
began to rise into a new class, and a class beneath
them of mere labourers who were not serfs began
to form, and to lay the foundations of capitalistic
production.

England got carried into the rising current of
commercialism, and the rich men and landlords to
turn their attention to the production of profit
instead of the production of livelihood ; the gild-
less journeyman and the landless labourer slowly
came into existence; the landlord got rid of his
tenants all he could, turned tillage into pasture,
and sweated the pastures to death in his eagerness
for wool, which for him meant money and the
breeding of money ; till at last the place of the serf,
which had stood empty, as it were, during a certain
transition period, during which the non-capitalistic
production was expanding up to its utmost limit,
was filled by the proletarian working for the service
of a master in a new fashion, a fashion which
exploited and (woe worth the while !) exploits him
very much more completely than the customs of
the manor of the feudal period.

The life of the worker and the production of
goods in this transition period, when Feudal
society was sickening for its end, is a difficult and
wide subject that requires separate treatment ; at
present I will leave the mediaeval workman at the
full development of that period which found him
a serf bound to the manor, and which left him

G

82 Signs of Change.

generally a yeoman or an artisan sharing the
collective status of his gild.

The workman of to-day, if he could realize the
position of his forerunner, has some reason to
envy him : the feudal serf worked hard, and lived
poorly, and produced a rough livelihood for his
master ; whereas the modern workman, working
harder still, and living little if any better than the
serf, produces for his master a state of luxury of
^which the old lord of the manor never dreamed,.
Trie workman's powers of production are multi-
plied a thousandfold ; his own livelihood remains
pretty much where it was. The balance goes to
his master and the crowd of useless, draggled-
tailed knaves and fools who pander to his idiotic
sham desires, and who, under the pretentious title
of the intellectual part of the middle classes, have
in their turn taken the place of the mediaeval
jester.

Truly, if the Positivist motto, " Live for others,"
be taken in stark literality, the modern workman
should be a good and wise man, since he has no
chance of living for himself!

And yet, I wish he were wiser still ; wise enough
to make an end of the preaching of "Live on
others/' which is the motto set forth by commer-
cialism to her favoured children.

Yet in one thing the modern proletarian has an
advantage over the mediaeval serf, and that advan-
tage is a world in itself. Many a century lay

Feudal England.

between the serf and successful revolt, and though
he tried it many a time and never lost heart, yet
the coming change which his martyrdom helped
on was not to be for him yet, but for the new
masters of his successors. With us it is different.
A few years of wearisome struggle against apathy
and ignorance ; a year or two of growing hope —
and then who knows ? Perhaps a few months, or
perhaps a few days of the open struggle against
brute force, with the mask off its face, and the
sword in its hand, and then we are over the bar.

Who knows, I say? Yet this we know, that
ahead of us, with nothing betwixt us except such
incidents as are necessary to its development, lies i
the inevitable social revolution, which will bring/
about the end of mastery and the triumph of]
fellowship.

G 2

( 84 )

THE HOPES OF CIVILIZATION.

Every age has had its hopes, hopes that look to
something beyond the life of the age itself, hopes
that try to pierce into the future ; and, strange to
say, I believe that those hopes have been stronger not
in the heyday of the epoch which has given them
birth, but rather in its decadence and times of cor-
ruption : in sober truth it may well be that these
hopes are but a reflection in those that live happily
and comfortably of the vain longings of those
others who suffer with little power of expressing
their sufferings in an audible voice : when all goes
well the happy world forgets these people and their
desires, sure as it is that their woes are not danger-
ous to them the wealthy : whereas when the woes
and grief of the poor begin to rise to a point
beyond the endurance of men, fear conscious or
unconscious falls upon the rich, and they begin to
look about them to see what there may be among
the elements of their society which may be used as
palliatives for the misery which, long existing and
ever growing greater among the slaves of that
society, is now at last forcing itself on the attention

The Hopes of Civilization. 85

of the masters. Times of change, disruption, and
revolution are naturally times of hope also, and not
seldom the hopes of something better to come are
the first tokens that tell people that revolution is
at hand, though commonly such tokens are no
more believed than Cassandra's prophecies, or are
even taken in a contrary sense by those who have
anything to lose ; since they look upon them as
signs of the prosperity of the times, and the long
endurance of that state of things which is so kind
to them. Let us then see what the hopes of civiliza-
tion are like to-day : for indeed I purpose speak-
ing of our own times chiefly, and will leave for the
present all mention of that older civilization which
was destroyed by the healthy barbarism out of
which our present society has grown.

Yet a few words may be necessary concerning
the birth of our present epoch and the hopes it
gave rise to, and what has become of them : that
will not take us very far back in history ; as to my
mind our modern civilization begins with the stir-
ring period about the time of the Reformation in
England, the time which in the then more impor-
tant countries of the Continent is known as the
period of the Renaissance, the so-called new-birth
of art and learning.

And first remember that this period includes the
death-throes of feudalism, with all the good and
evil which that system bore with it. For centuries
past its end was getting ready by the gradual

86 Signs of Change.

weakening of the bonds of the great hierarchy
which held men together : the characteristics of
those bonds were, theoretically at least, personal
rights and personal duties between superior and
inferior all down the scale ; each man was born, so
to say, subject to these conditions, and the mere
accidents of his life could not free him from them :
commerce, in our sense of the word, there was none ;
capitalistic manufacture, capitalistic exchange was
unknown : to buy goods cheap that you might sell
them dear was a legal offence (forestalling) : to
buy goods in the market in the morning and to
sell them in the afternoon in the same place was
not thought a useful occupation and was forbidden
under the name of regrating ; usury, instead of lead-
ing as now directly to the highest offices of the
State, was thought wrong, and the profit of it mostly
fell to the chosen people of God : the robbery of the
workers, thought necessary then as now to the very
existence of the State, was carried out quite crudely
without any concealment or excuse by arbitrary
taxation or open violence : on the other hand, life
was easy, and common necessaries plenteous ; the
holidays of the Church were holidays in the modern
sense of the word, downright play-days, and there
were ninety-six obligatory ones : nor were the
people tame and sheep-like, but as rough-handed
and bold a set of good fellows as ever rubbed
through life under the sun.

I remember three passages, from contemporary

The Hopes of Civilization. 87

history or gossip, about the life of those times
which luck has left us, and which illustrate
curiously the change that has taken place in the
habits of Englishmen. A lady writing from Nor-
folk 400 years ago to her husband in London,
amidst various commissions for tapestries, groceries,
and gowns, bids him also not to forget to bring
back with him a good supply of cross-bows and
bolts, since the windows of their hall were too low
to be handy for long-bow shooting. A German
traveller, writing quite at the end of the mediaeval
period, speaks of the English as the laziest and
proudest people and the best cooks in Europe.
A Spanish ambassador about the same period says,
" These English live in houses built of sticks and
mud,* but therein they fare as plenteously as lords."
Indeed, I confess that it is with a strange emo-
tion that I recall these times and try to realize the
life of our forefathers, men who were named like
ourselves, spoke nearly the same tongue, lived on
the same spots of earth, and therewithal were as
different from us in manners, habits, ways of life
and thought, as though they lived in another planet.
The very face of the country has changed ; not
merely I mean in London and the great manu-
facturing centres, but through the country gene-
rally ; there is no piece of English ground, except
such places as Salisbury Plain, but bears witness

* I suppose he was speaking of the frame houses of Kent.

88 Signs of Change.

to the amazing change which 400 years has
brought upon us.

Not seldom I please myself with trying to
realize the face of mediaeval England ; the many
chases and great woods, the stretches of common
tillage and common pasture quite unenclosed ;
the rough husbandry of the tilled parts, the
unimproved breeds of cattle, sheep, and swine ;
especially the latter, so lank and long and
lathy, looking so strange to us; the strings of
packhorses along the bridle-roads, the scantiness
of the wheel-roads, scarce any except those left by
the Romans, and those made from monastery to
monastery : the scarcity of bridges, and people using
ferries instead, or fords where they could ; the
little towns, well bechurched, often walled ; the
villages just where they are now (except for those
that have nothing but the church left to tell of
them), but better and more populous; their
churches, some big and handsome, some small and
curious, but all crowded with altars and furniture,
and gay with pictures and ornament ; the many reli-
gious houses, with their glorious architecture ; the
beautiful manor-houses, some of them castles once,
and survivals from an earlier period ; some new and
elegant ; some out of all proportion small for the
importance of their lords. How strange it would be
to us if we could be landed in fourteenth century
England ; unless we saw the crest of some familiar
hill, like that which yet bears upon it a symbol of an
English tribe, and from which, looking down on

The Hopes of Civilization. 89

the plain where Alfred was born, I once had many-
such ponderings, we should not know into what
country of the world we were come : the name is
left, scarce a thing else.

And when I think of this it quickens my hope
of what may be: even so it will be with us in
time to come ; all will have changed, and another
people will be dwelling here in England, who,
although they may be of our blood and bear our
name, will wonder how we lived in the nineteenth
century.

Well, under all that rigidly ordered caste society
of the fourteenth century, with its rough plenty, its
sauntering life, its cool acceptance of rudeness and
violence, there was going on a keen struggle of
classes which carried with it the hope of progress
of those days : the serfs gradually getting freed,
and becoming some of them the town population,
the first journeymen, or u free-labourers," so called,
some of them the copyholders of agricultural land :
the corporations of the towns gathered power, the
craft-gilds grew into perfection and corruption, the
power of the Crown increased, attended with nascent
bureaucracy ; in short, the middle class was form-
ing underneath the outward show of feudalism still
intact : and all was getting ready for the beginning
of the great commercial epoch in whose latter days
I would fain hope we are living. That epoch
began with the portentous change of agriculture
which meant cultivating for profit instead of for
livelihood, and which carried with it the expropria-

90 Signs of Change.

tion of the people from the land, the extinction of
the yeoman, and the rise of the capitalist farmer ;
and the growth of the town population, which,
swelled by the drift of the landless vagabonds and
masterless men, grew into a definite proletariat or
class of free-workmen ; and their existence made
that of the embryo capitalist-manufacturer also
possible ; and the reign of commercial contract and
cash payment began to take the place of the old
feudal hierarchy, with its many-linked chain of
personal responsibilities. The latter half of the
seventeenth century, the reign of Charles II., saw
the last blow struck at this feudal system, when
the landowners' military service was abolished, and
they became simple owners of property that had
no duties attached to it save the payment of a
land-tax.

The hopes of the early part of the commercial
period may be read in almost every book of the
time, expressed in various degrees of dull or amus-
ing pedantry, and show a naif arrogance and con-
tempt of the times just past through which nothing
but the utmost simplicity of ignorance could have
attained to. But the times were stirring, and gave
birth to the most powerful individualities in many
branches of literature, and More and Campanella, at
least from the midst of the exuberant triumph of
young commercialism, gave to the world prophetic
hopes of times yet to come when that commer-
cialism itself should have given place to the society

The Hopes of Civilization. 9 1

which we hope will be the next transform of civili-
zation into something else ; into a new social life.

This period of early and exuberant hopes passed
into the next stage of sober realization of many of
them, for commerce grew and grew, and moulded
all society to its needs : the workman of the six-
teenth century worked still as an individual with
little co-operation, and scarce any division of
labour: by the end of the seventeenth he had
become only a part of a group which by that time
was in the handicrafts the real unit of production ;
division of labour even at that period had quite
destroyed his individuality, and the worker was
but part of a machine : all through the eighteenth
century this system went on progressing towards
perfection, till to most men of that period, to most
of those who were in any way capable of express-
ing their thoughts, civilization had already reached
a high stage of perfection, and was certain to go
on from better to better.

These hopes were not on the surface of a very
revolutionary kind, but nevertheless the class
struggle still went on, and quite openly too ; for
the remains of feudality, aided by the mere mask
and grimace of the religion, which was once a real
part of the feudal system, hampered the progress
of commerce sorely, and seemed a thousandfold
more powerful than it really was ; because in spite
of the class struggle there was really a covert
alliance between the powerful middle classes who

92 Signs of Change.

were the children of commerce and their old
masters the aristocracy; an unconscious under-
standing between them rather, in the midst of their
contest, that certain matters were to be respected
even by the advanced party : the contest and civil
war between the king and the commons in England
in the seventeenth century illustrates this well :
the caution with which privilege was attacked in
the beginning of the struggle, the unwillingness of
all the leaders save a few enthusiasts to carry
matters to their logical consequences, even when
the march of events had developed the antagonism
between aristocratic privilege and middle-class
freedom of contract (so called) ; finally, the crystal-
lization of the new order conquered by the sword of
Naseby into a mongrel condition of things between
privilege and bourgeois freedom, the defeat and
grief of the purist Republicans, and the horror at
N and swift extinction of the Levellers, the pioneers
of Socialism in that day, all point to the fact that
the " party of progress," as we should call it now,
was determined after all that privilege should not
be abolished further than its own standpoint.

The seventeenth century ended in the great
Whig revolution in England, and, as I said, com-
merce throve and grew enormously, and the power
of the middle classes increased proportionately and
all things seemed going smoothly with them, till
at last in France the culminating corruption of a
society, still nominally existing for the benefit of

The Hopes of Civilization. 93

the privileged aristocracy, forced their hand : the
old order of things, backed as it was by the power
of the executive, by that semblance of overwhelm-
ing physical force which is the real and only
cement of a society founded on the slavery of the
many — the aristocratic power, seemed strong and
almost inexpugnable : and since any stick will do
to beat a dog with, the middle classes in France
were forced to take up the first stick that lay ready
to hand if they were not to give way to the aristo-
crats, which indeed the whole evolution of history
forbade them to do. Therefore, as in England in
the seventeenth century, the middle classes allied
themselves to religious and republican, and even
communistic enthusiasts, with the intention, firm
though unexpressed, to keep them down when
they had mounted to power by their means, so in
France they had to ally themselves with the prole-
tariat ; which, shamefully oppressed and degraded
as it had been, now for the first time in history
began to feel its power, the power of numbers : by
means of this help they triumphed over aristocratic
privilege, but, on the other hand, although the prole-
tariat was speedily reduced again to a position
not much better than that it had held before the
revolution, the part it played therein gave a new
and terrible character to that revolution, and from
that time forward the class struggle entered on
to a new phase ; the middle classes had gained a
complete victory, which in France carried with it

94 Signs of Change.

all the outward signs of victory, though in England
they chose to consider a certain part of themselves
an aristocracy, who had indeed little signs of aristo-
cracy about them either for good or for evil, being
in very few cases of long descent, and being in
their manners and ideas unmistakably bourgeois.

So was accomplished the second act of the great
class struggle with whose first act began the age of
commerce ; as to the hopes of this period of the
revolution we all know how extravagant they were ;
what a complete regeneration of the world was
expected to result from the abolition of the grossest
form of privilege ; and I must say that, before we
mock at the extravagance of those hopes, we
should try to put ourselves in the place of those
that held them, and try to conceive how the privi-
lege of the old noblesse must have galled the
respectable well-to-do people of that time. Well,
the reasonable part of those hopes were realized by
the revolution ; in other words, it accomplished
what it really aimed at, the freeing of commerce
from the fetters of sham feudality; or, in other words,
the destruction of aristocratic privilege. The more
extravagant part of the hopes expressed by the
eighteenth century revolution were vague enough,
and tended in the direction of supposing that the
working classes would be benefited by what was to
the interest of the middle class in some way quite
unexplained — by a kind of magic, one may say —
which welfare of the workers, as it was never

The Hopes of Civilization. 95

directly aimed at, but only hoped for by the way, so
also did not come about by any such magical means,
and the triumphant middle classes began gradually
to find themselves looked upon no longer as rebel-
lious servants, but as oppressive masters.

The middle class had freed commerce from her
fetters of privilege, and had freed thought from her
fetters of theology, at least partially ; but it had
not freed, nor attempted to free, labour from its
fetters. The leaders of the French Revolution,
even amidst the fears, suspicions and slaughter of
the Terror, upheld the rights of "property " so called,
though a new pioneer or prophet appeared in
France, analogous in some respects to the Levellers
of Cromwell's time, but, as might be expected, far
more advanced and reasonable than they were.
Gracchus Babeuf and his fellows were treated as <
criminals, and died or suffered the torture of prison
for attempting to put into practice those words
which the Republic still carried on its banners, and
Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality were interpreted
in a middle-class, or if you please a Jesuitical, sense,
as the rewards of success for those who could struggle
into an exclusive class ; and at last property had to be
defended by a military adventurer, and the Revolu-
tion seemed to have ended with Napoleonism.

Nevertheless, the Revolution was not dead, nor
was it possible to say thus far and no further to the
rising tide. Commerce, which had created the pfo-
pertyless proletariat throughout civilization had still

96 Signs of Change.

another part to play, which is not yet played out ;
she had and has to teach the workers to know what
they are ; to educate them, to consolidate them, and
not only to give them aspirations for their advance-
ment as a class, but to make means for them to
realize those aspirations. All this she did, nor
loitered in her work either ; from the beginning of
the nineteenth century the history of civilization is
really the history of the last of the class-struggles
which was inaugurated by the French Revolution ;
and England, who all through the times of the
Revolution and the Caesarism which followed it
appeared to be the steady foe of Revolution, was
really as steadily furthering it ; her natural con-
ditions, her store of coal and minerals, her temperate
climate, extensive sea-board and many harbours,
cmd lastly her position as the outpost of Europe
looking into America across the ocean, doomed her
to be for a time at least the mistress of the com-
merce of the civilized world, and its agent with
barbarous and semi-barbarous countries. The
necessities of this destiny drove her into the impla-
cable war with France, a war which, nominally
waged on behalf of monarchical principles, was
really, though doubtless unconsciously, carried on
for the possession of the foreign and colonial
markets. She came out victorious from that war,
and fully prepared to take advantage of the indus-
trial revolution which had been going on the while,
and which I now ask you to note.

The Hopes of Civilization. 97

I have said that the eighteenth century perfected
the system of labour which took the place of the
mediaeval system, under which a workman indivi-
dually carried his piece of work all through its
various stages from the first to the last.

This new system, the first change in industrial
production since the Middle Ages, is known as the
system of division of labour, wherein, as I said, the
unit of labour is a group, not a man ; the individual
workman in this system is kept life-long at the per-
formance of some task quite petty in itself, and
which he soon masters, and having mastered it has
nothing more to do but to go on increasing his
speed of hand under the spur of competition with
his fellows, until he has become the perfect machine
which it is his ultimate duty to become, since without
attaining to that end he must die or become a pauper.
You can well imagine how this glorious invention
of division of labour, this complete destruction of
individuality in the workman, and his apparent
hopeless enslavement to his profit-grinding master,
stimulated the hopes of civilization ; probably more
hymns have been sung in praise of division of
labour, more sermons preached about it, than have
done homage to the precept, " do unto others as ye
would they should do unto you."

To drop all irony, surely this was one of those
stages of civilization at which one might well say
that, if it was to stop there, it was a pity that it had
ever got so far. I have had to study books and

H

98 Signs of Change,

methods of work of the eighteenth century a good
deal, French chiefly; and I must say that the impres-
sion made on me by that study is that the eighteenth
century artisan must have been a terrible product of
civilization, and quite in a condition to give rise to
hopes — of the torch, the pike, and the guillotine.

However, civilization was not going to stop there ;
having turned the man into a machine, the next
stage for commerce to aim at was to contrive
machines which would widely dispense with human
labour ; nor was this aim altogether disappointed.

Now, at first sight it would seem that having got
the workman into such a plight as he was, as the
slave of division of labour, this new invention of
machines which should free him from a part of his
labour at least, could be nothing to him but an un-
mixed blessing. Doubtless it will prove to have
been so in the end, when certain institutions have
been swept away which most people now look on
as eternal ; but a longish time has passed during
which the workman's hopes of civilization have
been disappointed, for those who invented the
machines, or rather who profited by their invention,
did not aim at the saving of labour in the sense of
reducing the labour which each man had to do, but,
first taking it for granted that every workman would
have to work as long as he could stand up to it,
aimed, under those conditions of labour, at pro-
ducing the utmost possible amount of goods which
they could sell at a profit.

The Hopes of Civilization. 99

Need I dwell on the fact that, under these *
circumstances, the invention of the machines hast,
benefited the workman but little even to this day ? \

Nay, at first they made his position worse than
it had been : for, being thrust on the world very
suddenly, they distinctly brought about an indus-
trial revolution, changing everything suddenly and
completely ; industrial productiveness was increased
prodigiously, but so far from the workers reap-
ing the benefit of this, they were thrown out of
work in enormous numbers, while those who were
still employed were reduced from the position of
skilled artisans to that of unskilled labourers : the
aims of their masters being, as I said, to make a
profit, they did not trouble themselves about this
as a class, but took it for granted that it was some-
thing that couldn't be helped and didn't hurt them :
nor did they think of offering to the workers that
compensation for harassed interests which they
have since made a point of claiming so loudly for
themselves.

This was the state of things which followed on
the conclusion of European peace, and even that
peace itself rather made matters worse than better,
by the sudden cessation of all war industries, and
the throwing on to the market many thousands of
soldiers and sailors : in short, at no period of Eng-
lish history was the condition of the workers worse
than in the early years of the nineteenth century.
There seem during this period to have been two

H 2

J

ioo Signs of Change.

currents of hope that had reference to the working
classes : the first affected the masters, the second
the men.

In England, and, in what I am saying of this
period, I am chiefly thinking of England, the hopes
of the richer classes ran high ; and no wonder ; for
England had by this time become the mistress of
the markets of the world, and also, as the people of
that period were never weary of boasting, the
workshop of the world : the increase in the riches
of the country was enormous, even at the early
period I am thinking of now — prior to '48, 1 mean —
though it increased much more speedily in times
that we have all seen : but part of the jubilant
/hopes of this newly rich man concerned his servants,
the instruments of his fortune: it was hoped that
Ithe population in general would grow wiser, better
leducated, thriftier, more industrious, more com-
fortable ; for which hope there was surely some
(foundation, since man's mastery over the forces of
Nature was growing yearly towards completion ;
but you see these benevolent gentlemen supposed
that these hopes would be realized perhaps by
some unexplained magic as aforesaid, or perhaps
by the working-classes, at their own expense, by the
exercise of virtues supposed to be specially suited
to their condition, and called, by their masters,
" thrift " and u industry/' For this latter supposi-
tion there was no foundation : indeed, the poor
wretches who were thrown out of work by the

The Hopes of Civilization. 101

triumphant march of commerce had perforce
worn thrift threadbare, and could hardly better
their exploits in that direction ; while as to those
who worked in the factories, or who formed the
fringe of labour elsewhere, industry was no new
gospel to them, since they already worked as long
as they could work without dying at the loom, the
spindle, or the stithy. They for their part had
their hopes, vague enough as to their ultimate aim,
but expressed in the passing day by a very obvious
tendency to revolt : this tendency took various
forms, which I cannot dwell on here, but settled
down at last into Chartism : about which I must
speak a few words i/but first I must mention
can scarce do more, the honoured name of Rober;
Owen, as representative of the nobler hopes of his'
day, just as More was of his, and the lifter of the
torch of Socialism amidst the dark days of the
confusion consequent on the reckless greed of the
early period of the great factory industries^""

That the conditions under which man lived could
affect his life and his deeds infinitely, that not selfish
greed and ceaseless contention, but brotherhood
and co-operation were the bases of true society,
was the gospel which he preached and also practised
with a single-heartedness, devotion, and fervour of
hope which have never been surpassed : he was'
the embodied hope of the days when the advance
of knowledge and the sufferings of the people
thrust revolutionary hope upon those thinkers who<

102 Signs of Change.

were not in some form or other in the pay of the
sordid masters of society.

, As to the Chartist agitation, there is this to be
/said of it, that it was thoroughly a working-class
movement, and it was caused by the simplest and
most powerful of all causes — hunger. It is note-
worthy that it was strongest, especially in its
/earlier days, in the Northern and Midland manu-
facturing districts — that is, in the places which felt
the distress caused by the industrial revolution
most sorely and directly ; it sprang up with par-
ticular vigour in the years immediately following
the great Reform Bill ; and it has been remarked
that disappointment of the hopes which that
measure had cherished had something to do with
its bitterness. As it went on, obvious causes for
failure were developed in it ; self-seeking leader-
ship ; futile discussion of the means of making
the change, before organization of the party was
perfected ; blind fear of ultimate consequences on
the part of some, blind disregard to immediate
consequences on the part of others ; these were
the surface reasons for its failure : but it would
have triumphed over all these and accomplished
revolution in England, if it had not been for causes
deeper and more vital than these. Chartism
r differed from mere Radicalism in being a class
movement; but its aim was after all political
rather than social. The Socialism of Robert Owen
fell short of its object because it did not under-

The Hopes of Civilization. 103

stand that, as long as there is a privileged class in
possession of the executive power, they will take
good care that their economical position, which
enables them to live on the unpaid labour of the
people, is not tampered with :/the hopes of the
Chartists were disappointed because they did not1 \
understand that true political freedom is impossible
to people who are economically enslaved Tlthere is >*
no first and second in these matters, the two must
go hand in hand together : we cannot live as we will,
and as we should, as long as we allow people to
govern us whose interest it is that we should live
as they will, and by no means as we should ;
neither is it any use claiming the right to manage
our own business unless we are prepared to have
some business of our own : these two aims united
mean the furthering of the class struggle till all
classes are abolished — the divorce of one from the
other is fatal to any hope of social advancement

Chartism therefore, though a genuine popular
movement, was incomplete in its aims and know-
ledge ; the time was not yet come and it could not
triumph openly ; but it would be a mistake to say
that it failed utterly: at least it kept alive the
holy flame of discontent ; it made it possible for us
to attain to the political goal of democracy, and
thereby to advance the cause of the people by
the gain of a stage from whence could be seen the
fresh gain to be aimed at.

I have said that the time for revolution had not

104 Signs of Change.

then come : the great wave of commercial success
went on swelling, and though the capitalists would
if they had dared have engrossed the whole of the
advantages thereby gained at the expense of their
wage slaves, the Chartist revolt warned them that
it was not safe to attempt it. They were forced
to try to allay discontent by palliative measures.
They had to allow Factory Acts to be passed
regulating the hours and conditions of labour of
women and children, and consequently of men also
in some of the more important and consolidated
industries ; they were forced to repeal the ferocious
v laws against combination among the workmen ; so
that the Trades Unions won for themselves a
legal position and became a power in the labour
question, and were able by means of strikes and
threats of strikes to regulate the wages granted to
the workers, and to raise the standard of livelihood
for a certain part of the skilled workmen and the
labourers associated with them : though the main
part of the unskilled, including the agricultural
workmen, were no better off than before.

Thus was damped down the flame of a discon-
tent vague in its aims, and passionately crying out
for what, if granted, it could not have used : twenty
years ago any one hinting at the possibility of
serious class discontent in this country would have
been looked upon as a madman ; in fact, the well-
to-do and cultivated were quite unconscious (as
many still are) that there was any class distinction

^The Hopes of Civilization. 105

in this country other than what was made by the
rags and cast clothes of feudalism, which in a per-
functory manner they still attacked.

There was no sign of revolutionary feeling in
England twenty years ago : the middle class were
so rich that they had no need to hope for any-
thing— but a heaven which they did not believe
in : the well-to-do working men did not hope, since
they were not pinched and had no means of learn-
ing their degraded position : and lastly, the drudges
of the proletariat had such hope as charity, the
hospital, the workhouse, and kind death at last
could offer them.

In this stock-jobbers' heaven let us leave our
dear countrymen for a little, while I say a few
words about the affairs of the people on the con-
tinent of Europe. \ Things were not quite so smooth
for the fleecer there : Socialist thinkers and writers
had arisen about the same time as Robert Owen ;
St. Simon, Proudhon, Fourier and his followers »
kept up the traditions of hope in the midst of a
bourgeois world* 4 Amongst these Fourier is the one
that calls for most attention : since his doctrine of
the necessity and possibility of making labour
attractive is one which Socialism can by no means
do without. France also kept up the revolutionary
and insurrectionary tradition, the result of some-
thing like hope still fermenting amongst the pro-
letariat : she fell at last into the clutches of a second
Caesarism developed by the basest set of sharpers,

io6 Signs of Change.

swindlers, and harlots that ever insulted a country,
and of whom our own happy bourgeois at home
made heroes and heroines : the hideous open cor-
ruption of Parisian society, to which, I repeat, our
respectable classes accorded heartfelt sympathy,
was finally swept away by the horrors of a race
war : the defeats and disgraces of this war
developed, on the one hand, an increase in the
wooden implacability and baseness of the French
bourgeois, but on the other made way for revolu-
tionary hope to spring again, from which resulted
the attempt to establish society on the basis of the
freedom of labour, which we call the Commune
of Paris of 1871. Whatever mistakes or impru-
dences were made in this attempt, and all wars
blossom thick with such mistakes, I will leave the
reactionary enemies of the people's cause to put
forward : the immediate and obvious result was
the slaughter of thousands of brave and honest
revolutionists at the hands of the respectable
classes, the loss in fact of an army for the popular
cause : but we may be sure that the results of the
Commune will not stop there : to all Socialists that
heroic attempt will give hope and ardour in the
cause as long as it is to be won ; we feel as though
the Paris workman had striven to bring the day-
dawn for us, and had lifted us the sun's rim over
the horizon, never to set in utter darkness again :
of such attempts one must say, that though those
who perished in them might have been put in a

The Hopes of Civilization. 107

better place in the battle, yet after all brave men
never die for nothing, when they die for principle.

Let us shift from France to Germany before we
get back to England again, and conclude with a
few words about our hopes at the present day.
To Germany we owe the school of economists, at
whose head stands the name of Karl Marx, who
have made modern Socialism what it is : the earlier
Socialist writers and preachers based their hopes
on man being taught to see the desirableness of
co-operation taking the place of competition, and
adopting the change voluntarily and consciously,
and they trusted to schemes more or less artificial
being tried and accepted, although such schemes
were necessarily constructed out of the materials
which capitalistic society offered : but the new
school, starting with an historical view of what had
been, and seeing that a law of evolution swayed all
events in it, was able to point out to us that the
evolution was still going on, and that, whether;
Socialism be desirable or not, it is at least
inevitable. Here then was at last a hope of aj
different kind to any that had gone before it ; and 1
the German and Austrian workmen were not slow
to learn the lesson founded on this theory ; from
being one of the most backward countries in
Europe in the movement, before Lassalle started '
his German workman's party in 1863, Germany
soon became the leader in it : Bismarck's repressive
law has only acted on opinion there, as the roller

108 Signs of Change.

does to the growing grass — made it firmer and
stronger; and whatever vicissitudes may be the
fate of the party as a party, there can be no doubt
that Socialistic opinion is firmly established there,
and that when the time is ripe for it that opinion
will express itself in action.

Now, in all I have been saying, I have been
wanting you to trace the fact that, ever since the
establishment of commercialism on the ruins of
feudality, there has been growing a steady feeling
on the part of the workers that they are a class
dealt with as a class, and in like manner to deal
with others ; and that as this class feeling has
grown, so also has grown with it a consciousness of
the antagonism between their class and the class
which employs it, as the phrase goes ; that is to
say, which lives by means of its labour.
£-""""Now it is just this growing consciousness of the
fact that as long as there exists in society a pro-
pertied class living on the labour of a propertyless
one, there must be a struggle always going on
between those two classes — it is just the dawning
knowledge of this fact which should show us what
civilization can hope for — namely, transformation
into true society, in which there will no longer be
classes with their necessary struggle for existence
and superiority : for the antagonism of classes
which began in all simplicity between the master
and the chattel slave of ancient society, and was
continued between the feudal lord and the serf of

The Hopes of Civilization. 109

mediaeval society, has gradually become the con-
tention between the capitalist developed from the
workman of the last-named period, and the wage-
earner : in the former struggle the rise of the
artisan and villenage tenant created a new class,
the middle class, while the place of the old serf
was filled by the propertyless labourer, with whom
the middle class, which has absorbed the aristocracy,
is now face to face : the struggle between the
classes therefore is once again a simple one, as in
the days of the classical peoples ; but since there
is no longer any strong race left out of civilization,
as in the time of the disruption of Rome, the whole
struggle in all its simplicity between those who
have and those who lack is within civilization.

Moreover, the capitalist or modern slave-owner
has been forced by his very success, as we have
seen, to organize his slaves, the wage-earners, into a
co-operation for production so well arranged that it
requires little but his own elimination to make it a
foundation for communal life : in the teeth also of
the experience of past ages, he has been compelled
to allow a modicum of education to the property-
less, and has not even been able to deprive them
wholly of political rights ; his own advance in
wealth and power has bred for him the very
enemy who is doomed to make an end of him.

But will there be any new class to take the place
of the present proletariat when that has triumphed,
as it must do, over the present privileged class ?

no Signs of Change.

We cannot foresee the future, but we may fairly hope
not : at least we cannot see any signs of such a new
class forming. It is impossible to see how de-
struction of privilege can stop short of absolute
equality of condition ; pure Communism is the
logical deduction from the imperfect form of the
new society, which is generally differentiated from
it as Socialism.

Meantime, it is this simplicity and directness of
the growing contest which above all things pre-
sents itself as a terror to the conservative instinct
of the present day. Many among the middle class
who are sincerely grieved and shocked at the con-
dition of the proletariat which civilization has
created, and even alarmed by the frightful ine-
qualities which it fosters, do nevertheless shudder
back from the idea of the class struggle, and strive
to shut their eyes to the fact that it is going on.
They try to think that peace is not only possible,
but natural, between the two classes, the very
essence of whose existence is that each can only
thrive by what it manages to force the other to
yield to it. They propose to themselves the im-
possible problem of raising the inferior or exploited
classes into a position in which they will cease to
struggle against the superior classes, while the latter
will not cease to exploit them. This absurd posi-
tion drives them into the concoction of schemes
for bettering the condition of the working classes
at their own expense, some of them futile, some

The Hopes of Civilization. 1 1 1

merely fantastic ; or they may be divided again
into those which point out the advantages and
pleasures of involuntary asceticism, and reaction-
ary plans for importing the conditions of the pro-
duction and life of the Middle Ages (wholly
misunderstood by them, by the way) into the
present system of the capitalist farmer, the great
industries, and the universal world-market. Some
see a solution of the social problem in sham co-
operation, which is merely an improved form of
joint-stockery : others preach thrift to (precarious)
incomes of eighteen shillings a week, and industry
to men killing themselves by inches in working
overtime, or to men whom the labour-market has
rejected as not wanted : others beg the proletarians
not to breed so fast ; an injunction the compliance
with which might be at first of advantage to the
proletarians themselves in their present condition,
but would certainly undo the capitalists, if it were
carried to any lengths, and would lead through
ruin and misery to the violent outbreak of the
very revolution which these timid people are so
anxious to forego.

Then there are others who, looking back on the
past, and perceiving that the workmen of the
Middle Ages lived in more comfort and self-
respect than ours do, even though they were sub-
jected to the class rule of men who were looked
on as another order of beings than they, think that
if those conditions of life could be reproduced

1 1 2 Signs of Change.

under our better political conditions the question
would be solved for a time at least. Their
schemes may be summed up in attempts, more or
less preposterously futile, to graft a class of inde-
pendent peasants on our system of wages and
capital. They do not understand that this system
of independent workmen, producing almost en-
tirely for the consumption of themselves and their
neighbours, and exploited by the upper classes
by obvious taxes on their labour, which was not
otherwise organized or interfered with by the ex-
ploiters, was what in past times took the place
of our system, in which the workers sell their
labour in the competitive market to masters who
have in their hands the whole organization of the
markets, and that these two systems are mutually
destructive.

Others again believe in the possibility of starting
from our present workhouse system, for the raising
of the lowest part of the working population into a
better condition, but do not trouble themselves as
to the position of the workers who are fairly above
the condition of pauperism, or consider what part
they will play in the contest for a better livelihood.
And, lastly, quite a large number of well-intentioned
persons belonging to the richer classes believe, that
in a society that compels competition for liveli-
hood, and holds out to the workers as a stimulus
I to exertion the hope of their rising into a mono-
jpolist class of non-producers, it is yet possible to

The Hopes of Civilization. 1 1 3

" moralize " capital (to use a slang phrase of the
Positivists) : that is to say, that a sentiment im-
ported from a religion which looks upon another
world as the true sphere of action for mankind, will
override the necessities of our daily life in this
world. This curious hope is founded on the feel-
ing that a sentiment antagonistic to the full de-
velopment of commercialism exists and is gain-
ing ground, and that this sentiment is an inde-
pendent growth of the ethics of the present epoch.
As a matter of fact, admitting its existence, as I
think we must do, it is the birth of the sense ot
insecurity which is the shadow cast before by the
approaching dissolution of modern society founded
on wage-slavery.

The greater part of these schemes aim, though
seldom with the consciousness of their promoters,
at the creation of a new middle-class out of the
wage-earning class, and at their expense, just as
the present middle-class was developed out of the
serf-population of the early Middle Ages. It may
be possible that such a further development of
the middle-class lies before us, but it will not be
brought about by any such artificial means as the
above-mentioned schemes. If it comes at all, it
must be produced by events, which at present we
cannot foresee, acting on our commercial system,
and revivifying for a little time, maybe, that Capi-
talist Society which now seems sickening towards
its end.

1

ii4 Signs of Change.

For what is visible before us in these days is the
competitive commercial system killing itself by its
own force : profits lessening, businesses growing
bigger and bigger, the small employer of labour
thrust out of his function, and the aggregation
of capital increasing the numbers of the lower
middle-class from above rather than from below,
by driving the smaller manufacturer into the posi-
tion of a mere servant to the bigger. The pro-
ductivity of labour also increasing out of all pro-
portion to the capacity of the capitalists to
manage the market or deal with the labour supply:
lack of employment therefore becoming chronic,
and discontent therewithal.

All this on the one hand. On the other, the
workmen claiming everywhere political equality,
which cannot long be denied ; and education spread-
ing, so that what between the improvement in the
education of the working-class and the continued
amazing fatuity of that of the upper classes, there
is a distinct tendency to equalization here ; and, as
I have hinted above, all history shows us what a
danger to society may be a class at once educated
and socially degraded : though, indeed, no history
has yet shown us — what is swiftly advancing upon
us — a class which, though it shall have attained
knowledge, shall lack utterly the refinement and
self-respect which come from the union of know-
ledge with leisure and ease of life, The growth

The Hopes of Civilization.

of such a class may well make the " cultured "
people of to-day tremble.

Whatever, therefore, of unforeseen and uncon
ceived-of may lie in the womb of the future, there
is nothing visible before us but a decaying system,
with no outlook but ever-increasing entanglement
and blindness, and a new system, Socialism, the
hope of which is ever growing clearer in men's
minds — a system which not only sees how labour
can be freed from its present fetters, and organized
unwastefully, so as to produce the greatest possible
amount of wealth for the community and for every
member of it, but which bears with it its own
ethics and religion and aesthetics : that is the hope
and promise of a new and higher life in all
ways^^JSo that even if those unforeseen econo-
mical events above spoken of were to happen, and
put off for a while the end of our Capitalist
system, the latter would drag itself along as an
anomaly cursed by all, a mere clog on the aspira-
tions of humanity.

It is not likely that it will come to that : in all
probability the logical outcome of the latter days
of Capitalism will go step by step with its actual
history : while all men, even its declared enemies,
will be working to bring Socialism about, the aims of
those who have learned to believe in the certainty
and beneficence of its advent will become clearer,
their methods for realizing it clearer also, and at

I 2

i

1 1 6 Signs of Change.

last ready to hand. Then will come that open
acknowledgment for the necessity of the change (an
acknowledgment coming from the intelligence of
civilization) which is commonly called Revolution.
It is no use prophesying as to the events which
will accompany that revolution, but to a reasonable
man it seems unlikely to the last degree, or we
will say impossible, that a moral sentiment will
induce the proprietary classes — those who live by
oivning the means of production which the un-
privileged classes must needs use — to yield up this
privilege uncompelled ; all one can hope is that
they will see the implicit threat of compulsion in
the events of the day, and so yield with a good
grace to the terrible necessity of forming part of a
world in which all, including themselves, Jwill work
honestly and live easilyT

( H7 )

THE AIMS OF ART.

In considering the Aims of Art, that is, why men
toilsomely cherish and practise Art, I find myself
compelled to generalize from the only specimen of
humanity of which I know anything ; to wit, my- \
self. Np-w, when I think of what it is that I desire, j
I find that I can give it no other name than hap-;|
piness. I want to be happy while I live ; for as|l
for death, I find that, never having experienced it,' \
I have no conception of what it means, and so 1
cannot even bring my mind to bear upon it. I \
know what it is to live ; I cannot even guess what
it is to be deacLl Well, then, I want to be happy, /
and even sometimes, say generally, to be merry ;
and I find it difficult to believe that that is not the
universal desire : so that, whatever tends towards
that end I cherish with all my best endeavour.
Now, when I consider my life further, I find out, or
seem to, that it is under the influence of two do-
minating moods, which for lack of better words I
must call the mood of energy and the mood of
idleness : these two moods are now one, now the
other, always crying out in me to be satisfied.

1 1 8 Signs of Change.

When the mood of energy is upon me, I must be
doing something, or I become mopish and un-
happy ; when the mood of idleness is on me, I find
it hard indeed if I cannot rest and let my mind
wander over the various pictures, pleasant or
terrible, which my own experience or my com-
muning with the thoughts of other men, dead or
alive, have fashioned in it ; and if circumstances
will not allow me to cultivate this mood of idleness,
I find I must at the best pass through a period of
pain till I can manage to stimulate my mood of
energy to take its place and make me happy again.
And if I have no means wherewith to rouse up
that mood of energy to do its duty in making me
happy, and I have to toil while the idle mood is
upon me, then am I unhappy indeed, and almost
wish myself dead, though I do not know what that
rneaps.

Furthermore, I find that while in the mood of
idleness memory amuses me, in the mood of
energy hope cheers me ; which hope is sometimes
big and serious, and sometimes trivial, but that
without it there is no happy energy. Again, I
find that while I can sometimes satisly^this mood
by merely exercising it in work that has no
result beyond the passing hour — in play, in short
— yet that it presently wearies of that and gets
languid, the hope therein being too trivial, and
sometimes even scarcely real ; and that on the
whole, to satisfy my master the mood, I must

The Aims of Art. 119

either be making something or making believe to
make it.

Well, I believe that all men's lives are com-
pounded of these two moods in various propor-
tions, and that this explains why they have always,
with more or less of toil, cherished and practised
art.

Why should they have touched it else, and so
added to the labour which they could not choose
but do in order to live ? It must have been done
for their pleasure, since it has only been in very
elaborate civilizations that a man could get other
men to keep him alive merely to produce works of
art, whereas all men that have left any signs of
their existence behind them have practised art.

I suppose, indeed, that nobody will be inclined
to deny that the end proposed by a work of art is
always to please the person whose senses are to be
made conscious of it. It was done for some one
who was to be made happier by it; his idle or
restful mood was to be amused by it, so that the
vacancy which is the besetting evil of that mood
might give place to pleased contemplation, dream-
ing, or what you will ; and by this means he would
not so soon be driven into his workful or energetic
mood: he would have more enjoyment, and
better.

The _ restraining of restlessness, therefore, is
clearly one of the essential aims of art, and few
things could add to the pleasure of life more than

r

1 20 Signs of Change.

this. There are, to my knowledge, gifted people
now alive who have no other vice than this of rest-
lessness, and seemingly no other curse in their lives
to make them unhappy : but that is enough ; it is
" the little rift within the lute." Restlessness makes
them hapless men and bad citizens.

But granting, as I suppose you all will do, that
this is a most important function for art to fulfil,
the question next comes, at what price do we
obtain it ? I have admitted that the practice of
art has added to the labour of mankind, though I
believe in the long run it will not do so ; but in
adding to the labour of man has it added, so far,
to his pain ? There always have been people who
would at once say yes to that question ; so that
there have been and are two sets of people who
dislike and contemn art as an embarrassing folly.
Besides the pious ascetics, who look upon it as a
worldly entanglement which prevents men from
keeping their minds fixed on the chances of their
individual happiness or misery in the next world ;
who, in short, hate art, because they think that it
adds to man's earthly happiness — besides these,
there are also people who, looking on the struggle
of life from the most reasonable point that they
know of, contemn the arts because they think that
they add to man's slavery by increasing the sum
of his painful labour : if this were the case, it would
still, to my mind, be a question whether it might
not be worth the while to endure the extra pain of

The Aims of Art 1 2 1

labour for the sake of the extra pleasure added to
rest ; assuming, for the present, equality of condition
among men. But it seems to me that it is not the
case that the practice of art adds to painful labour ;
nay more, I believe that, if it did, art would never
have arisen at all, would certainly not be discern-
ible, as it is, among peoples in whom only the
germs of civilization exist. Xjn ether words, I
believe that art cannot be the result of external
compulsion ; the labour which goes to produce it
is voluntary, and partly undertaken for the sake of
the labour itself, partly for the sake of the hope of
producing something which, when done, shall give
pleasure to the user of it. Or, again, this extra
labour, when it is extra, is undertaken with the
aim of satisfying that mood of energy by employ-
ing it to produce something worth doing, and
which, therefore, will keep before the worker a
lively hope while he is working ; and also by
giving it work to do in which there is absolute
immediate pleasure. •* Perhaps it is difficult to ex-
plain to the non-artistic capacity that this definite
sensuous pleasure is always present in the handi-
work of the deft workman when he is working suc-
cessfully, and that it increases in proportion to the
freedom and individuality of the work. Also you
must understand that this production of art, and
consequent pleasure in work, is not confined to the
production of matters which are works of art only,
like pictures, statues, and so forth, but has been

1 2 2 Signs of Change.

and should be a part of all labour in some form or
other: so only will the claims of the mood of
energy be satisfied.

^Therefore the Aim of Art is to increase the
happiness of men, by giving them beauty and
interest of incident to amuse their leisure, and
prevent them wearying even of rest, and by giving
them hope and bodily pleasure in their work ; or,
shortly, to make man's work happy and his rest
fruitful. Consequently, genuine art is an unmixed
blessing to the race of man. ^

But as the word "genuine" is a large qualifica-
tion, I must ask leave to attempt to draw some
practical conclusions from this assertion of the
Aims of Art, which will, I suppose, or indeed hope,
lead us into some controversy on the subject ;
because^it is futile indeed to expect any one to
y^^peak about art, except in the most superficial way,
// without encountering those social problems which
Hf all serious men are thinking of; since art is and
must be, either in its abundance or its barrenness,
\ in its sincerity or its hollowness, the expression of
V the society amongst which it exists. X
^s First, then, it is clear to me that, at the present
time, those who look widest at things and deepest
into them are quite dissatisfied with the present
state of the arts, as they are also with the present
condition of society. This I say in the teeth of
the supposed revivification of art which has taken
place of late years : in fact, that very excitement

The A ims of A rL 123

about the arts amongst a part of the cultivated
people of to-day does but show on how firm a basis
the dissatisfaction above mentioned rests. Forty
years ago there was much less talk about art, much
less practice of it, than there is now ; and that is
specially true of the architectural arts, which I
shall mostly have to speak about now. People
have consciously striven to raise the dead in art
since that time, and with some superficial success.
Nevertheless, in spite of this conscious effort, I
must tell you that England, to a person who can
feel and understand beauty, was a less grievous
place to live in then than it is now ; and we who
feel what art means know well, though we do not
often dare to say so, that forty years hence it will
be a more grievous place to us than it is now
if we still follow up the road we are on. Less
than forty years ago — about thirty — I first saw the
city of Rouen, then still in its outward aspect a
piece of the Middle Ages : no words can tell you
how its mingled beauty, history, and romance
took hold on me ; I can only say that, looking
back on my past life, I find it was the greatest
pleasure I have ever had : and now it is a pleasure
which no one can ever have again : it is lost to the
world for ever. At that time I was an under-
graduate of Oxford. Though not so astounding,
so romantic, or at first sight so mediaeval as the
Norman city, Oxford in those days still kept a
great deal of its earlier loveliness : and the memory

1 24 Signs of Change.

of its grey streets as they then were has been an
abiding influence and pleasure in my life, and
would be greater still if I could only forget what
they are now — a matter of far more importance
than the so-called learning of the place could have
been to me in any case, but which, as it was, no one
tried to teach me, and I did not try to learn.
Since then the guardians of this beauty and romance
so fertile of education, though professedly engaged
in "the higher education" (as the futile system of
compromises which they follow is nick-named),
have ignored it utterly, have made its preservation
give way to the pressure of commercial exigencies,
and are determined apparently to destroy it alto-
gether. There is another pleasure for the world
gone down the wind ; here, again, the beauty and
romance have been uselessly, causelessly, most
foolishly thrown away.

These two cases are given simply because they

have been fixed in my mind ; they are but types

of what is going on everywhere throughout civilr

^ization : the world is everywhere growing uglier

/ and more commonplace, in spite of the conscious

/ and very strenuous efforts of a small group of

I people towards the revival of art, which are so

obviously out of joint with the tendency of the

age that, while the uncultivated have not even

heard of them, the mass of the cultivated look

\ upon them as a joke, and even that they are now

\ beginning to get tired of.

The Aims of Art. 125

Now, if it be true, as I have asserted, that genuine
art is an unmixed blessing to the world, this is a
serious matter ; for at first sight it seems to show
that there will soon be no art at all in the world,
which will thus lose an unmixed blessing ; it can
ill afford to do that, I think. y- (jij

For art, if it has to die, has worn itself out, and\ [^

its aim will be a thing forgotten ; and its aim was V
to make work happy and rest fruitful. Is all work (
to be unhappy, all rest unfruitful, then ? Indeed, if \
Ertj^tc^ gerish, that will be the case, unless some- J
thing is to take its place — something at present/
unnamed, undreamed of.

I do not think that anything will take the place
of art ; not that I doubt the ingenuity of man,
which seems to be boundless in the direction of
making himself unhappy, but because I believe the
springs of art in the human mind to be deathless,
and also because it seems to me easy to see the
causes of the present obliteration of the arts.
VFor we civilized people have not given them up
consciously, or of our free will; we have been
forced to give them up.) Perhaps I can illustrate
that by the detail of the application of machinery
to the production of things in which artistic form
of some sort is possible. Why does a reasonable
man use a machine ? Surely to save his labour.
There are some things which a machine can do as
well as a man's hand, plus a tool, can do them.
He need not, for instance, grind his corn in a hand-

\

*■

1 2 6 Signs of Change.

quern ; a little trickle of water, a wheel, and a few
simple contrivances will do it all perfectly well,
and leave him free to smoke his pipe and think, or
to carve the handle of his knife. That, so far, is
unmixed gain in the use of a machine — always,
mind you, supposing equality of condition among
men ; no art is lost, leisure or time for more
pleasurable work is gained. Perhaps a perfectly
reasonable and free man would stop there in his
dealings with machinery ; but such reason and
freedom are too much to expect, so let us follow
our machine-inventor a step farther. He has to
weave plain cloth, and finds doing so dullish on
the one hand, and on the other that a power-loom
will weave the cloth nearly as well as a hand-loom :
so, in order to gain more leisure or time for more
pleasurable work, he uses a power-loom, and fore-
goes the small advantage of the little extra art in
the cloth. But so doing, as far as the art is con-
cerned, he has not got a pure gain; he has made a
bargain between art and labour, and got a make-
shift as a consequence. I do not say that he may
not be right in so doing, but that he has lost as
well as gained. Now, this is as far as a man who
values art and is reasonable would go in the
matter of machinery as long as he was free — that
is, was not forced to work for another man's profit ;
so long as he was living in a society that had
accepted eqtiality of condition. Carry the machine
used for art a step farther, and he becomes an un-

The Aims of Art. 127

reasonable man, if he values art and is free. To
avoid misunderstanding, I must say that I am
thinking" of Wie modern machine, which is as it \
were alive, ana to which the man is auxiliary,\and
not of the old machine, the improved tool, which is
auxiliary to the man, and only works as long as
his hand is thinking ; though I will remark, that
even this elementary form of machine has to be
dropped when we come to the higher and more
intricate forms of art. Well, as to the machine
proper used for art, when it gets to the stage above
dealing with a necessary production that has acci-
dentally some beauty about it, a reasonable man
with a feeling for art will only use it when he is
forced to. If he thinks he would like ornamentA
for instance, and knows that the machine cannot i
do it properly, and does not care to spend then
time to do it properly, why should he do it at all V
He will not diminish his leisure for the sake 4 of
making something he does not want unless some
man or band of men force him to it ; so he will
either go without the ornament, or sacrifice some of
his leisure to have it genuine. That will be a sign
that he wants it very much, and that it will be
worth his trouble : in which case, again, his labour
on it will not be mere trouble, but will interest and
please him by satisfying the needs of his mood of
energy.

This, I say, is how a reasonable man would act
if he were free from man's compulsion ; not being

1 2 3 Signs of Change.

free, he acts very differently. He has long passed
the stage at which machines are only used for
doing work repulsive to an average man, or for
doing what could be as well done by a machine as
a man, and he instinctively expects a machine to
be invented whenever any product of industry be-
comes sought after. He is the slave to machinery ;
the new machine must be invented, and when
invented he must — I will not say use it, but be
used by it, whether he likes it or not.

^-AJBut wrhy is he the slave to machinery ? Because
he is the slave to the system for whose existence
the invention of machinery was necessary.*-

And now I must drop, or rather have dropped,
the assumption of the equality of condition, and
remind you that, though in a sense we are all the
slaves of machinery, yet that some men are so
directly without any metaphor at all, and that
these are just those on whom the great body of
the arts depends — the workmen. It is necessary
for the system which keeps them in their position
as an inferior class that they should either be them-
selves machines or be the servants to machines, in
no case having any interest in the work which they
turn out. To their employers they are, so far as
they are workmen, a part of the machinery of the
workshop or the factory ; to themselves they are
proletarians, Vmman beings working to live that
they may live to work h their part of craftsmen, of
makers of things by their own free will, is played out.

The Aims of Art. 129

At the risk of being accused of sentimentality, I
will say that since this is so, since the work which
produces the things that should be matters of art
is but a burden and a slavery, I exult in this at
least, that it cannot produce art ; that all it can do
lies between stark utilitarianism and idiotic sham.

Or indeed is that merely sentimental ? Rather,
I think, we who have learned to see the connection
between industrial slavery and the degradation of
the arts have learned also to hope for a future for
those arts ; since the day will certainly come when
men will shake off the yoke, and refuse to accept
the mere artificial compulsion of the gambling
market to waste their lives in ceaseless and hope-
less toil ; and when it does come, their instincts
for beauty and imagination set free along with
them, will produce such art as they need ; and who
can say that it will not as far surpass the art of
past ages as that does the poor relics of it left us (
by the age of commerce ?

A word or two on an objection which has often
been made to me when I have been talking on this
subject. It may be said, and is often, You regret
fhe art of the Middle Ages (as indeed I do), but'
those who produced it were not free ; they were-
serfs, or gild-craftsmen surrounded by brazen walls
of trade restrictions ; they had no political rights,
and were exploited by their masters, the noble
caste, most grievously. Well, I quite admit that
the oppression and violence of the Middle Ages had

K

1 30 Signs of Change.

its effect on the art of those days, its shortcomings
are traceable to them ; they repressed art in certain
directions, I do not doubt that ; and for that reason
I say, that when we shake off the present oppres-
sion as we shook off the old, we may expect the
art of the days of real freedom to rise above that
of those old violent days. But I do say that it
was possible then to have social, organic, hopeful
progressive art ; whereas now such poor scraps
of it as are left are the result of individual
and wasteful struggle, are retrospective and
pessimistic. X And this hopeful art was possible
amidst all the oppression of those days, because
the instruments of that oppression were grossly
obvious, and were external to the work of the
craftsman. They were laws and customs obviously
intended to rob him, and open violence of the
highway-robbery kind. In short, industrial pro-
duction was not the instrument used for robbing
the " lower classes ; " it is now the main instrument
used in that honourable profession. XThe mediaeval
craftsman was free in his work, therefore he made
it as amusing to himself as he could ; and it was
his pleasure and not his pain that made all things
beautiful that were made, and lavished treasures of
human hope and thought on everything that man
'made, from a cathedral to a porridge-pot. *Come,
let us put it in the way least respectful to the
mediaeval craftsman, most polite to the modern
"hand:" the poor devil of the fourteenth century,

The Aims of Art.

his work was of so little value that he was allowed
to waste it by the hour in pleasing himself — and
others; but our highly-strung mechanic, his
minutes are too rich with the burden of perpetual
profit for him to be allowed to waste one of them
on art; the present system will not allow him — *
cannot allow him — to produce works of art. x^

So that there has arisen this strange phenomenon,
that there is now a class of ladies and gentlemen,
very refined indeed, though not perhaps as well
informed as is generally supposed, and of this
refined class there are many who do really love
beauty and incident — i.e., art, and would make
sacrifices to get it ; and these are led by artists of
great manual skill and high intellect, forming alto-
gether a large body of demand for the article.
And yet the supply does not come. Yes, and
moreover, this great body of enthusiastic demanders
are no mere poor and helpless people, ignorant
fisher-peasants, half-mad monks, scatter-brained
sansculottes — none of those, in short, the expression
of whose needs has shaken the world so often
before, and will do yet again. No, they are of the
ruling classes, the masters of men, who can live
without labour, and have abundant leisure to
scheme out the fulfilment of their desires ; and yet
I say they cannot have the art which they so much
long for, though they hunt it about the world so
hard, sentimentalizing the sordid lives of the

K 2

unp

1 32 Signs of Change.

miserable peasants of Italy and the starving prole-
tarians of her towns, now that all the picturesque-
ness has departed from the poor devils of our own
country-side, and of our own slums. Indeed, there
is little of reality left them anywhere, and that
little is fast fading away before the needs of the
manufacturer and his ragged regiment of workers,
and before the enthusiasm of the archaeological
restorer of the dead past. Soon there will be
nothing left except the lying dreams of history,
the miserable wreckage of our museums and pic-
ture-galleries, and the carefully guarded interiors
of our aesthetic drawing-rooms, unreal and foolish,
fitting witnesses of the life of corruption that goes
on there, so pinched and meagre and cowardly,
with its concealment and ignoring, rather than
restraint of, natural longings ; which does not forbid
the greedy indulgence in them if it can but be
decently hidden.

The art then is gone, and can no more be
M restored" on its old lines than a mediaeval build-
ing can be. The rich and refined cannot have it
though they would, and though we will believe
many of them would. And why ? Because those
^.who could give it to the rich are not allowed by
/ the rich to do so. In one word, slavery lies
I between us and art.

I have said as much as that the aim of art was
to destroy the curse of labour by making work the
pleasurable satisfaction of our impulse towards

The A wis of A rt. 1 3 3

energy, and giving to that energy hope of pro-
ducing something worth its exercise.

Now, therefore, I say, that since we cannot have
art by striving after its mere superficial manifesta-
tion, since we can have nothing but its sham by so
doing, there yet remains for us to see how it would
be if we let the shadow take care of itself and try, if
we can, to lay hold of the substance. For my
part I believe, that if we try to realize the aims of
art without much troubling ourselves what the
aspect of the art itself shall be, we shall find
we shall have what we want at last : whether it is
to be called art or not, it will at least be life; and,y
after all, that is what we want. It may lead us
into new splendours and beauties of visible art ; to
architecture with manifolded magnificence free
from the curious incompleteness and failings of
that which the older times have produced — to
painting, uniting to the beauty which mediaeval art
attained the realism which modern art aims at ; to
sculpture, uniting the beauty of the Greek and the
expression of the Renaissance with some third
quality yet undiscovered, so as to give us the
images of men and women splendidly alive, yet
not disqualified from making, as all true sculpture
should, architectural ornament. All this it may
do ; or, on the other hand, it may lead us into the
desert, and art may seem to be dead amidst us ; or
feebly and uncertainly to be struggling in a world
which has utterly forgotten its old glories.

[

1 34 Signs of Change.

For my part, with art as it now is, I cannot
bring myself to think that it much matters which
of these dooms awaits it, so long as each bears
with it some hope of what is to come ; since here,
as in other matters, there is no hope save in Revolu-
tion. The old art is no longer fertile, no longer
yields us anything save elegantly poetical regrets ;
being barren, it has but to die, and the matter of
moment now is, as to how it shall die, whether
with hope or tvitJwut it.

What is it, for instance, that has destroyed the
Rouen, the Oxford of my elegant poetic regret?
Has it perished for the benefit of the people, either
slowly yielding to the growth of intelligent change
and new happiness ? or has it been, as it were,
thunderstricken by the tragedy which mostly
accompanies some great new birth ? Not so.
Neither phalangstere nor dynamite has swept
its beauty away, its destroyers have not been
either the philanthropist or the Socialist, the
co-operator or the anarchist. It has been sold,
and at a cheap price indeed : muddled away by
the greed and incompetence of fools who do not
know what life and pleasure mean, who will neither
take them themselves nor let others have them.
That is why the death of that beauty wounds us
so : no man of sense or feeling would dare to regret
such losses if they had been paid for by new life
and happiness for the people. But there is the
people still as it was before, still facing for its part

The A ims of Art. 135

the monster who destroyed all that beauty, and
whose name is Commercial Profit.

I repeat, that every scrap of genuine art will
fall by the same hands if the matter only goes
on long enough, although a sham art may be left
in its place, which may very well be carried on by
dilettanti fine gentlemen and ladies without any
help from below ; and, to speak plainly, I fear that
this gibbering ghost of the real thing would
satisfy a great many of those who now think
themselves lovers of art ; though it is not difficult
to see a long vista of its degradation till it shall
become at last a mere laughing-stock ; that is to
say, if the thing were to go on: I mean, if art
were to be for ever the amusement of those whom
we now call ladies and gentlemen.

But for my part I do not think it will go on long
enough to reach such depths as that ; and yet I
should be hypocritical if I were to say that I
thought that the change in the basis of society,
which would enfranchise labour and make men
practically equal in condition, would lead us by a
short road to the splendid new birth of art which |
I have mentioned, though I feel quite certain that
it would not leave what we now call art untouched,
since the aims of that revolution do include the
aims of art — viz., abolishing the curse of labour,

I suppose that this is what is likely to happen ;
that machinery will go on developing, with the
purpose of saving men labour, till the mass of the

v.

1 3 6 Sig ns of Change.

people attain real leisure enough to be able to
appreciate the pleasure of life ; till, in fact, they
have attained such mastery over Nature that they
no longer fear starvation as a penalty for not work-
ing more than enough. When they get to that
point they will doubtless turn themselves and begin
to find out what it is that they really want to do.
They would soon find out that the less work they
did (the less work unaccompanied by art, I mean),
the more desirable a dwelling-place the earth would
be ; they would accordingly do less and less work,
till the mood of energy, of which I began by speak-
ing, urged them on afresh : but by that time Nature
relieved by the relaxation of man's work, would
! be recovering her ancient beauty, and be teaching
: men the old story of art. And as the Artificial
Famine, caused by men working for the profit of
a master, and which we now look upon as a matter
of course, would have long disappeared, they would
I be free to do as they chose, and they would/'set
aside their machines in all cases where the work
seemed pleasant or desirable for handiwork ; till in
all crafts where production of beauty was required,
the most direct communication between a man's
hand and his brain would be sought for. \ And
there would be many occupations also, as the
processes of agriculture, in which the voluntary
exercise of energy would be thought so delightful,
that people would not dream of handing over its
pleasure to the jaws of a machine.

The Aims of Art. 137

In short, men will find out that the men of
our days were wrong in first multiplying their
needs, and then trying, each man of them, to
evade all participation in the means and processes
whereby those needs are satisfied ; that this kind
of division of labour is really only a new and
wilful form of arrogant and slothful ignorance, far
more injurious to the happiness and contentment
of life than the ignorance of the processes of Nature, j
of what we sometimes call scie7ice> which men of
the earlier days unwittingly lived in.

They will discover, or rediscover rather, that \ /
the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a
genuine interest in all the details of daily life,
in elevating them by art instead of handing
the performance of them over to unregarded
drudges, and ignoring them ; and that in cases V
where it was impossible either so to elevate them '
and make them interesting, or to lighten them by .La
the use of machinery, so as to make the labour of
them trifling, that should be taken as a token that
the supposed advantages gained by them were not
worth the trouble and had better be given up.
All this to my mind would be the outcome of
men throwing off the burden of Artificial Famine,
supposing, as I cannot help supposing, that the
impulses which have from the first glimmerings of
history urged men on to the practice of Art were
still at work in them.

Thus and thus onlv can come about the new

s*

1 3 8 Signs of Change.

birth of Art, and I think it will come about thus.
You may say it is a long process, and so it is ; but
I can conceive of a longer. I have given you the
Socialist or Optimist view of the matter. Now for
the Pessimist view.

I can conceive that the revolt against Artificial
Famine or Capitalism, which is now on foot, may
be vanquished. The result will be that the work-
ing class — the slaves of society — will become more
and more degraded ; that they will not strive
against overwhelming force, but, stimulated by
that love of life which Nature, always anxious
about the perpetuation of the race, has implanted
in us, will learn to bear everything — starvation,
overwork, dirt, ignorance, brutality. All these
things they will bear, as, alas ! they bear them too
well even now ; all this rather than risk sweet life
and bitter livelihood, and all sparks of hope and
manliness will die out of them.
I Nor will their masters be much better off: the
Earth's surface wiil be hideous everywhere, save in
Ahe uninhabitable desert ; Art will utterly perish, as
/in the manual arts so in literature, which will be-
/ come, as it is indeed speedily becoming, a mere
/ string of orderly and calculated ineptitudes and
passionless ingenuities ; Science will grow more
and more one-sided, more incomplete, more wordy
and useless, till at last she will pile herself up into
such a mass of superstition, that beside it the
theologies of old time will seem mere reason and

The Aims of Art. 139

enlightenment. All will get lower and lower, till
the heroic struggles of the past to realize hope
from year to year, from century to century, will be
utterly forgotten, and man will be an indescribable
being — hopeless, desireless, lifeless^

And will there be deliverance from this even ?
Maybe : man may, after some terrible cataclysm,
learn to strive towards a healthy animalism, may
grow from a tolerable animal into a savage, from a
savage into a barbarian, and so on ; and some
thousands of years hence he may be beginning
once more those arts which we have now lost, and
be carving interlacements like the New Zealanders,
or scratching forms of animals on their cleaned
blade-bones, like the pre-historic men of the drift.

But in any case, according to the pessimist view,
which looks upon revolt against Artificial Famine
as impossible to succeed, we shall wearily trudge
the circle again, until some accident, some unfore-
seen consequence of arrangement, makes an end of
us altogether.

That pessimism I do not believe in, nor, on the
other hand, do I suppose that it is altogether a
matter of our wills as to whether we shall further
human progress or human degradation ; yet, since
there are those who are impelled towards the
Socialist or Optimistic side of things, I must con-
clude that there is some hope of its prevailing, that
the strenuous efforts of many individuals imply a
force which is thrusting them on. So that I believe

'140 Signs of Change.

that the "Aims of Art" will be realized, though I

know that they cannot be, so long as we groan

under the tyranny of Artificial Famine. j^Once again

I warn you against supposing, you who may specially

love art, that you will do any good by attempting to

revivify art by dealing with its dead exterior. I say

\l it is the aims of art that you must seek rather than

|j the art itself ;>and in that search we may find our-

' selves in a world blank and bare, as the result of our

caring at least this much for art, that we will not

endure the shams of it.

Anyhow, I ask you to think with me that the
worst which can happen to us is to endure tamely
the evils that we see ; that no trouble or turmoil is
so bad as that ; that the necessary destruction
which reconstruction bears with it must be taken
calmly ; that everywhere — in State, in Church, in
the household — we must be resolute to endure no
tyranny, accept no lie, quail before no fear, al-
though they may come before us disguised as
piety, duty, or affection, as useful opportunity and
good-nature, as prudence or kindness. The world's
roughness, falseness, and injustice will bring about
their natural consequences, and we and our lives
are part of those consequences ; but since we in-
herit also the consequences of old resistance to
those curses, let us each look to it to have our fair
share of that inheritance also, which, if nothing
else come of it, will at least bring to us courage and
hope; that is, eager life while we live, which is
bove all things the Aim of Art.

( I4i )

USEFUL WORK versus USELESS TOIL.

The above title may strike some of my readers as
strange. It is assumed by most people nowa-
days that all work is useful, and by most well-to-do
people that all work is desirable. Most people,
well-to-do or not, believe that, even when a man is
doing work which appears to be useless, he is
earning his livelihood by it — he is " employed," as
the phrase goes ; and most of those who are well-
to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratu-
lations and praises, if he is only " industrious "
enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and
holidays in the sacred cause of labour, (in short, it
has become an article of the creed of modern \,
morality that all labour is good in itself-)-a con-
venient belief to those who live on the labour of
others. But as to those on whom they live, I
recommend them not to take it on trust, but to
look into the matter a little deeper.

Let us grant, first, that the race of man must
either labour or perish. Nature does not give us
our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of
some sort or degree, Let us see, then, if she does

1 4 2 Signs of Change.

not give us some compensation for this compulsion
to labour, since certainly in other matters she
takes care to make the acts necessary to the con-
tinuance of life in the individual and the race not
only endurable, but even pleasurable.

You may be sure that she does so, that it is of
the nature of man, when he is not diseased, to take
pleasure in his work under certain conditions.
And, yet, we must say in the teeth of the hypo-
critical praise of all labour, whatsoever it may be,
of which I have made mention, that there is some
labour which is so far from being a blessing that it
is a curse ; that it would be better for the com-
munity and for the worker if the latter were to
fold his hands and refuse to work, and either die
or let us pack him off to the workhouse or prison
— which you will.

Here, you see, are two kinds of work — one good,

\ the other bad ; one not far removed from a bless-
ing, a lightening of life ; the other a mere curse,
a burden to life.

What is the difference between them, then ?
( This : one hajsjiapejp it, thejother has-Jtxgf. It is
mlmTyrtcrdo the one kind of work, and manly also
to refuse to do the other.

What is the nature of the hope which, when it is
present in work, makes it worth doing ?

It is threefold, I think — hope of rest, hope of

^product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and
hope of these also in some abundance arid of good

Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 143

quality ; rest enough and good enough to be worth
having ; product worth having by one who is
neither a fool nor an ascetic ; pleasure enough for
all for us to be conscious of it while we are at
work; not a mere habit, the loss of which we shall
feel as a fidgety man feels the loss of the bit of
string he fidgets with.

I have put the hope of rest first because it is
the simplest and most natural part of our hope.
Whatever pleasure there is in some work, there is
certainly some pain in all work, the beast-like pain
of stirring up our slumbering energies to action,
the beast-like dread of change when things are
pretty well with us ; and the compensation for this
animal pain is animal rest. We must feel while
we are working that the time will come when we
shall not have to work. Also the rest, when it
comes, must be long enough to allow us to enjoy
it ; it must be longer than is merely necessary for
us to recover the strength we have expended in
working, and it must be animal rest also in this,
that it must not be disturbed by anxiety, else we
shall not be able to enjoy it. If we have this
amount and kind of rest we shall, so far, be no
worse off than the beasts.

As to the hope of product, I have said that
Nature compels us to work for that. It remains
for us to look to it that we do really produce
something, and not nothing, or at least nothing
that we want or are allowed to use. If we look to

144 Signs of Change.

this and use our wills we shall, so far, be better
than machines.

The hope of pleasure in the work itself: how
strange that hope must seem to some of my
readers — to most of them ! Yet I think that to
all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise
of their energies, and that even beasts rejoice in
being lithe and swift and strong. But a man at
work, making something which he feels will exist
because he is working at it and wills it, is exer-
cising the energies of his mind and soul as well as
of his body. Memory and imagination help him
as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the
thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands ;
and, as a part of the human race, he creates. If
we work thus we shall be men, and our days will
be happy and eventful.

Thus worthy work carries with it the hope of
pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our
using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in
our daily creative skill.

All other work but this is worthless ; it is slaves^
work-Vmere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.)

Therefore, since we have, as it were, a pair of
scales in which to weigh the work now done in the
world, let us use them. Let us estimate the
worthiness of the work we do, after so many thou-
sand years of toil, so many promises of hope
deferred, such boundless exultation over the pro-
gress of civilization and the gain of liberty.

Useful Work versus Useless Toil 145

Now, the first thing as to the work done in
civilization and the easiest to notice is that it is
portioned out very unequally amongst the different
classes of society. First, there are people — not a
few — who do no work, and make no pretence of
doing any. Next, there are people, and very
many of them, who work fairly hard, though with
abundant easements and holidays, claimed and
allowed ; and lastly, there are people who work so
hard that they may be said to do nothing else
than work, and are accordingly called " the working
classes," as distinguished from the middle classes
and the rich, or aristocracy, whom I have men-
tioned above.

It is clear that this inequality presses heavily
upon the " working " class, and must visibly tend
to destroy their hope of rest at least, and so, in
that particular, make them worse off than mere
beasts of the field ; but that is not the sum and end
of our folly of turning useful work into useless toil,
but only the beginning of it.

For first, as to the class of rich people doing no \
work, we all know that they consume a great deal >
while they produce nothing. Therefore, clearly, j
they have to be kept at the expense of those who
do work, just as paupers have, and are a mere
burden on the community. In these days there
are many who have learned to see this, though
they can see no further into the evils of our present
system, and have formed no idea of any scheme

L

146 Signs of Change.

for getting rid of this burden ; though perhaps
they have a vague hope that changes in the system
of voting for members of the House of Commons
may, as if by magic, tend in that direction. With
such hopes or superstitions we need not trouble
ourselves. Moreover, this class, the aristocracy, once
thought most necessary to the State, is scant of
numbers, and has now no power of its own, but
depends on the support of the class next below it —
the middle class. In fact, it is really composed
either of the most successful men of that class, or
of their immediate descendants.

As to the middle class, including the trading,
manufacturing, and professional people of our
society, they do, as a rule, seem to work quite
hard enough, and so at first sight might be thought
to help the community, and not burden it. But
by far the greater part of them, though they work,
do not produce, and even when they do produce,
as in the case of those engaged (wastefully indeed)
in the distribution of goods, or doctors, or (genuine)
artists and literary men, they consume out of all
proportion to their due share. The commercial
and manufacturing part of them, the most power-
ful part, spend their lives and energies in fighting
amongst themselves for their respective shares of
the wealth which they force the genuine workers
to provide for them ; the others are almost wholly
the hangers-on of these ; they do not work for the
public, but a privileged class : they are the para-

Useful Work versus Useless Ton

sites of property, sometimes, as in the case of
lawyers, undisguisedly so; sometimes, as the
doctors and others above mentioned, professing to
be useful, but too often of no use save as sup-
porters of the system of folly, fraud, and tyranny
of which they form a part. And all these we
must remember have, as a rule, one aim in view ;
not the production of utilities, but the gaining of f
'ra position either for themselves or their children
in which they will not have to work at all.; It is J
their ambition and the end of their whole lives to
gain, if not for themselves yet at least for their
children, the proud position of being obvious
burdens on the community. For their work itself,
in spite of the sham dignity with which they
surround it, they care nothing : save a few
enthusiasts, men of science, art or letters, who, if
they are not the salt of the earth, are at least (and
oh, the pity of it !) the salt of the miserable system
of which they are the slaves, which hinders and
thwarts them at every turn, and even sometimes
corrupts them.

Here then is another class, this time very nume-
rous and all-powerful, which produces very little
and consumes enormously, and is therefore in the
main supported, as paupers are, by the real pro-
ducers. The class that remains to be considered
produces all that is produced, and supports both
itself and the other classes, though it is placed in a
position of inferiority to them; real inferiority,

L 2

1 4 8 Signs of Change.

mind you, involving a degradation both of mind
and body. But it is a necessary consequence of
this tyranny and folly that again many of these
workers are not producers. A vast number of
them once more are merely parasites of property,
some of them openly so, as the soldiers by land
nd sea who are kept on foot for the perpetuating
f national rivalries and enmities, and for the
urposes of the national struggle for the share of
he product of unpaid labour. But besides this
obvious burden on the producers and the scarcely
less obvious one of domestic servants, there is first
the army of clerks, shop-assistants, and so forth,
who are engaged in the service of the private war
for wealth, which, as above said, is the real occupa-
tion of the well-to-do middle class. This is a
larger body of workers than might be supposed,
for it includes amongst others all those engaged in
what I should call competitive salesmanship, or,
to use a less dignified word, the puffery of wares,
which has now got to such a pitch that there are
many things which cost far more to sell than they
do to make.

Next there is the mass of people employed in
making all those articles of folly and luxury, the
demand for which is the outcome of the existence
of the rich non-producing classes ; things which
people leading a manly and uncorrupted life would
not ask for or dream of. These things, whoever
may gainsay me, I will for ever refuse to call

Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 149

wealth : they are not wealth, but waste. Wealth
is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man
can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reason-
able use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the un-
spoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing
necessary and decent ; the storing up of knowledge
of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it ; ,
means of free communication between man and!
man ; works of art, the beauty which man creates
when he is most a man, most aspiring and thought-
ful—gll things which serve thepleasure of people,/
free, manly and uncorrupted.] This is wealth]
Nor can I think of anything "worth having which
does not come under one or other of these heads.
But think, I beseech you, of the product of Eng-
land, the workshop of the world, and will you not
be bewildered, as I am, at the thought of the mass
of things which no sane man could desire, but
which our useless toil makes — and sells ?

Now, further, there is even a sadder industry yet,
which is forced on many, very many, of our
workers — the making of wares which are necessary
to them and their brethren, because they are an
inferior class. For if many men live without pro-
ducing, nay, must live lives so empty and foolish
that they force a great part of the workers to
produce wares which no one needs, not even the
rich, it follows that most men must be poor ; and,
living as they do on wages from those whom they
support, cannot get for their use the goods which

t So Signs of Change.

men naturally desire, but must put up with mise-
rable makeshifts for them, with coarse food that
does not nourish, with rotten raiment which does
not shelter, with wretched houses which may well
make a town-dweller in civilization look back with
regret to the tent of the nomad tribe, or the cave
of the pre-historic savage. Nay, the workers must
even lend a hand to the great industrial invention
\&i the age — adulteration, and by its help produce
[tor their own use shams and mockeries of the luxury
'of the rich ; for the wage-earners must always live
as the wage-payers bid them, and their very habits
of life are forced on them by their masters.

But it is waste of time to try to express in words
due contempt of the productions of the much-
praised cheapness of our epoch. It must be enough
to say that this cheapness is necessary to the
system of exploiting on which modern manufacture
rests. In other words, our society includes a great
mass of slaves, who must be fed, clothed, housed
and amused as slaves, and that their daily necessity
compels them to make the slave-wares whose use
is the perpetuation of their slavery.

To sum up, then, concerning the manner of work
in civilized States, these States are composed of
three classes — a class which does not even pretend
to work, a class which pretends to work but which
produces nothing, and a class which works, but is
compelled by the other two classes to do work
which is often unproductive.

Useful Work versus Useless Toil, 1 5 1

Civilization therefore wastes its own resources,
and will do so as long as the present system lasts.
These are cold words with which to describe the
tyranny under which we suffer ; try then to con-
sider what they mean.

There is a certain amount of natural material
and of natural forces in the world, and a certain
amount of labour-power inherent in the persons of
the men that inhabit it. Men urged by their
necessities and desires have laboured for many
thousands of years at the task of subjugating the
forces of Nature and of making the natural
material useful to them. To our eyes, since we
cannot see into the future, that struggle with Nature
seems nearly over, and the victory of the human
race over her nearly complete. And, looking
backwards to the time when history first began,
we note that the progress of that victory has been
far swifter and more startling within the last two
hundred years than ever before. Surely, therefore,
we moderns ought to be in all ways vastly better
off than any who have gone before us. Surely we
ought, one and all of us, to be wealthy, to be well
furnished with the good things which our victory
over Nature has won for us.

But what is the real fact? Who will dare to
deny that the great mass of civilized men are poor ?
So poor are they that it is mere childishness
troubling ourselves to discuss whether perhaps
they are in some ways a little better off than their

CJ

152 Signs of Change.

forefathers. They are poor ; nor can their poverty
be measured by the poverty of a resourceless
savage, for he knows of nothing else than his
poverty ; that he should be cold, hungry, houseless,
dirty, ignorant, all that is to him as natural as that
he should have a skin. But for us, for the most of
us, civilization has bred desires which she forbids
us to satisfy, and so is not merely a niggard but a
torturer also.

Thus then have the fruits of our victory over
Nature been stolen from us, thus has compulsion
by Nature to labour in hope of rest, gain, and
pleasure been turned into compulsion by man to
labour in hope — of living to labour !

What shall we do then, can we mend it ?

Well, remember once more that it is not our
remote ancestors who achieved the victory over
Nature, but our fathers, nay, our very selves. For
us to sit hopeless and helpless then would be a
strange folly indeed : be sure that we can amend
it, What, then, is the first thing to be done ?

We have seen that modern society is divided
into two classes, one of which is privileged to be
kept by the labour of the other — that is, it forces
the other to work for it and takes from this inferior
class everything that it can take from it, and uses
the wealth so taken to keep its own members in a
superior position, to make them beings of a higher
order than the others : longer lived, more beautiful,
more honoured, more refined than those of the

Useftil Work versus Useless Toil. 1 5 3

other class. I do not say that it troubles itself
about its members being positively long lived,
beautiful or refined, but merely insists that they
shall be so relatively to the inferior class. As also
it cannot use the labour-power of the inferior class
fairly in producing real wealth, it wastes it whole-
sale in the production of rubbish.

It is this robbery and waste on the part of the
minority which keeps the majority poor ; if it could
be shown that it is necessary for the preservation
of society that this should be submitted to, little
more could be said on the matter, save that the
despair of the oppressed majority would probably
at some time or other destroy Society. But it has
been shown, on the contrary, even by such incom-
plete experiments, for instance, as Co-operation
(so called), that the existence of a* privileged class
is by no means necessary for the production of
wealth, but rather for the "government" of the
producers of wealth, or, in other words, for the
upholding of privilege.

The first step to be taken then is to abolish a
class of men privileged to shirk their duties as men,
thus forcing others to do the work which they refuse
to do. All must work according to their ability,
and so produce what they consume — that is, each
man should work as well as he can for his own live-
lihood, and his livelihood should be assured to him ;
that is to say, all the advantages which society
would provide for each and all of its members.

V

1 5 4 Signs of Change.

Thus, at last, would true Society be founded.
It would rest on equality of condition. No man
would be tormented for the benefit of another —
nay, no one man would be tormented for the
benefit of Society. Nor, indeed, can that order be
called Society which is not upheld for the benefit
of every one of its members.

But since men live now, badly as they live, when
so many people do not produce at all, and when so
much work is wasted, it is clear that, under condi-
tions where all produced and no work was wasted,
not only would every one work with the certain
hope of gaining a due share of wealth by his work,
but also he could not miss his due share of rest.
Here, then, are two out of the three kinds of hope
mentioned above as an essential part of worthy
work assured to the worker. When class robbery
is abolished, every man will reap the fruits of his
labour, every man will have due rest — leisure, that
is. Some Socialists might say we need not go any
further than this; it is enough that the worker
should get the full produce of his work, and that
his rest should be abundant. But though the
compulsion of man's tyranny is thus abolished, I
yet demand compensation for the compulsion of
Nature's necessity. As long as the work is repulsive
it will still be a burden which must be taken up
daily, and even so would mar our life, even though
the hours of labour were short. What we want to
do is to add to our wealth without diminishing our

Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 155

pleasure. Nature will not be finally conquered till
our work becomes a part of the pleasure of our
lives.

That first step of freeing people from the com- s
pulsion to labour needlessly will at least put us on
the way towards this happy end ; for we shall then
have time and opportunities for bringing it about.
As things are now, between the waste of labour- \
power in mere idleness and its waste in unpro- ;
ductive work, it is clear that the world of civiliza-
tion is supported by a small part of its people ; )
when all were working usefully for its support, the (
share of work which each would have to do would
be but small, if our standard of life were about on /
the footing of what well-to-do and refined people
now think desirable. We shall have labour-power
to spare, and shall, in short, be as wealthy as we
please. It will be easy to live. If we were to wake
up some morning now, under our present system,
and find it " easy to live," that system would force
us to set to work at once and make it hard to live ;
we should call that " developing our resources/' or
some such fine name. The multiplication of
labour has become a necessity for us, and as long
as that goes on no ingenuity in the invention of
machines will be of any real use to us. Each new
machine will cause a certain amount of misery
among the workers whose special industry it may
disturb ; so many of them will be reduced from
skilled to unskilled workmen, and then gradually

1 5 6 Signs of Change.

matters will slip into their due grooves, and all will
work apparently smoothly again ; and if it were
not that all this is preparing revolution, things
would be, for the greater part of men, just as they
were before the new wonderful invention.

But when revolution has made it " easy to live,"
when all are working harmoniously together and
there is no one to rob the worker of his time, that
is to say, his life ; in those coming days there will
be no compulsion on us to go on producing things
we do not want, no compulsion on us to labour for
nothing; we shall be able calmly and thoughtfully
to consider what we shall do with our wealth of
labour-power. Now, for my part, I think the first
use we ought to make of that wealth, of that
freedom, should be to make all our labour, even
the commonest and most necessary, pleasant^to
everybody ; for thinking over the matter carefully
I can see that the one course which -will certainly
make life happy in the face of all accidents and
troubles is to take a pleasurable interest in all the
details of life. And lest perchance you think that
an assertion too universally accepted to be worth
making, let me remind you how entirely modern
civilization forbids it ; with what sordid, and even
terrible, details it surrounds the life of the poor,
what a mechanical and empty life she forces on the
rich ; and how rare a holiday it is for any of us to
feel ourselves a part of Nature, and unhurriedly,
thoughtfully, and happily to note the course of our

Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 157

lives amidst all the little links of events which
connect them with the lives of others, and build up
the great whole of humanity.

But such a holiday our whole lives might be, if
we were resolute to make all our labour reasonable
and pleasant. But we must be resolute indeed ;
for no half measures will help us here. It has been
said already that our present joyless labour, and
our lives scared and anxious as the life of a hunted
beast, are forced upon us by the present system of
producing for the profit of the privileged classes.
It is necessary to state what this means. Under
the present system of wages and capital the
" manufacturer " (most absurdly so called, since a
manufacturer means a person who makes with his
hands) having a monopoly of the means whereby
the power to labour inherent in every man's body
can be used for production, is the master of those
who are not so privileged ; he, and he alone, is
able to make use of this labour-power, which, on
the other hand, is the only commodity by means
of which his " capital," that is to say, the accumu-
lated product of past labour, can be made pro-
ductive to him. He therefore buys the labour-
power of those who are bare of capital and can only
live by selling it to him ; his purpose in this trans-
action is to increase his capital, to make it breed.
It is clear that if he paid those with whom he
makes his bargain the full value of their labour,
that is to say, all that they produced, he would fail

1 5 8 Signs of Change.

in his purpose. But since he is the monopolist of
the means of productive labour, he can compel them
to make a bargain better for him and worse for
them than that ; which bargain is that after they
have earned their livelihood, estimated according
to a standard high enough to ensure their peace-
able submission to his mastership, the rest (and by
far the larger part as a matter of fact) of what they
produce shall belong to him, shall be his property to
do as he likes with, to use or abuse at his pleasure ;
which property is, as we all know, jealously guarded
by army and navy, police and prison ; in short, by
that huge mass of physical force which superstition,
habit, fear of death by starvation — IGNORANCE, in
one word, among the propertyless masses enables
the propertied classes to use for the subjection of —
their slaves.

Now, at other times, other evils resulting from
this system may be put forward. What I want to
point out now is the impossibility of our attaining
to attractive labour under this system, and to
repeat that it is this robbery (there is no other
word for it) which wastes the available labour-
power of the civilized world, forcing many men to
do nothing, and many, very many more to do
nothing useful ; and forcing those who carry on
really useful labour to most burdensome over- work.
For understand once for all that the "manufac-
turer" aims primarily at producing, by means of
the labour he has stolen from others, not goods
but profits, that is, the "wealth" that is pro-

Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 159

duced over and above the livelihood of his work-
men, and the wear and tear of his machinery.
Whether that " wealth " is real or sham matters
nothing to him. If it sells and yields him a
" profit " it is all right. I have said that, owing to
there being rich people who have more money than
they can spend reasonably, and who therefore buy
sham wealth, there is waste on that side ; and also
that, owing to there being poor people who cannot
afford to buy things which are worth making, there
is waste on that side. So that the "demand"
which the capitalist "supplies" is a false demand.
The market in which he sells is " rigged " by the
miserable inequalities produced by the robbery of
the system of Capital and Wages.

It is this system, therefore, which we must be
resolute in getting rid of, if we are to attain to
happy and useful work for all. The first step \
towards making labour attractive is to get the means /
of making labour fruitful, the Capital, including > j
the land, machinery, factories, &c, into the hands [/
of the community, to be used for the good of all /|
alike, so that we might all work at " supplying "
the real "demands" of each and all — that is to
say, work for livelihood, instead of working to
supply the demand of the profit market — instead
of working for profit — i.e., the power of compelling |
other men to work against their will.

When this first step has been taken and men
begin to understand that Nature wills all men either
to work or starve, and when they are no longer

f U!

1 60 Signs of Change.

such fools as to allow some the alternative of
stealing, when this happy day is come, we shall
then be relieved from the tax of waste, and conse-
quently shall find that we have, as aforesaid, a
mass of labour-power available, which will enable
us to live as we please within reasonable limits.
We shall no longer be hurried and driven by the
fear of starvation, which at present presses no less
on the greater part of men in civilized communities
than it does on mere savages. The first and most
obvious necessities will be so easily provided for in
a community in which there is no waste of labour,
that we shall have time to look round and consider
what we really do want, that can be obtained
without over-taxing our energies ; for the often-
expressed fear of mere idleness falling upon us
when the force supplied by the present hierarchy
of compulsion is withdrawn, is a fear which is but
generated by the burden of excessive and repul-
sive labour, which we most of us have to bear at
present.

I say once more that, in my belief, the first
thing which we shall think so necessary as to be
worth sacrificing some idle time for, will be the
attractiveness of labour. No very heavy sacrifice
will be required for attaining this object, but some
will be required. For we may hope that men
who have just waded through a period of strife and
revolution will be the last to put up long with a
life of mere utilitarianism, though Socialists are

Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 1 6 1

sometimes accused by ignorant persons of aiming
at such a life. On the other hand, the ornamental
part of modern life is already rotten to the core,
and must be utterly swept away before the new
order of things is realized. There is nothing of
it — there is nothing which could come of it that
could satisfy the aspirations of men set free from
the tyranny of commercialism.

We must begin to build up the ornamental part
of life — its pleasures, bodily and mental, scientific
and artistic, social and individual — on the basis of
work undertaken willingly and cheerfully, with the /
consciousness of benefiting ourselves and our neigh
bours by it. Such absolutely necessary work as
we should have to do would in the first place take
up but a small part of each day, and so far would
not be burdensome ; but it would be a task of
daily recurrence, and therefore would spoil our /
day's pleasure unless it were made at least endur- I
able while it lasted. In other words, all labour, J
even the commonest, must be made attractive. /

How can this be done ? — is the question the
answer to which will take up the rest of this paper.
In giving some hints on this question, I know that,
while all Socialists will agree with many of the
suggestions made, some of them may seem to
some strange and venturesome. These must be
considered as being given without any intention of
dogmatizing, and as merely expressing my own
personal opinion.

M

li

{

1 62 Signs of Change.

From all that has been said already it follows
that labour, to be attractive, must be directed to-
wards some obviously useful end, unless in cases
where it is undertaken voluntarily by each indivi-
dual as a pastime. This element of obvious use-
fulness is all the more to be counted on in
sweetening tasks otherwise irksome, since social
morality, the responsibility of man towards the life
of man, will, in the new order of things, take the
place of theological morality, or the responsibility
of man to some abstract idea. Next, the days
work will be short. This need not be insisted on.
It is clear that with work unwasted it can be short.
It is clear also that much work which is now a
torment, would be easily endurable if it were much
shortened.

Variety of work is the next point, and a most
important one. To compel a man to do day after
day the same task, without any hope of escape or
change, means nothing short of turning his life into
a prison-torment. Nothing but the tyranny of
profit-grinding makes this necessary. A man
might easily learn and practise at least three
crafts, varying sedentary occupation with outdoor
— occupation calling for the exercise of strong
bodily energy for work in which the mind had
| more to do. There are few men, for instance, who
would not wish to spend part of their lives in the
\ most necessary and pleasantest of all work — cul-
tivating the earth. One thing which will make

Ul
Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 163

this variety of employment possible will be the
form that education will take in a socially ordered
community. At present all education is directed
towards the end of fitting people to take their
places in the hierarchy of commerce — these as
masters, those as workmen. The education of the
masters is more ornamental than that of the work-
men, but it is commercial still ; and even at the
ancient universities learning is but little regarded,
unless it can in the long run be made to pay. Due
education is a totally different thing from this, and
concerns itself in finding out what different people
are fit for, and helping them along the road which
they are inclined to take. In a duly ordered
society, therefore, young people would be taught
such handicrafts as they had a turn for as a part of
their education, the discipline of their minds and
bodies ; and adults would also have opportunities
of learning in the same schools, for the develop-
ment of individual capacities would be of all things
chiefly aimed at by education, instead, as now, the
subordination of all capacities to the great end of
" money-making " for oneself — or one's master.
The amount of talent, and even genius, which the
present system crushes, and which would be drawn
out by such a system, would make our daily work
easy and interesting.

Under this head of variety I will note one pro-
duct of industry which has suffered so much from
commercialism that it can scarcely be said to exist,

M 2

1 64 Signs of Change.

and is, ndeed, so foreign from our epoch that I
fear there are some who will find it difficult to
understand what I have to say on the subject,
which I nevertheless must say, since it is really a
most important one. I mean that side of art
( which is, or ought to be, done by the ordinary
\ workman while he is about his ordinary work, and
/ which has got to be called, very properly, Popular
\ Art. This art, I repeat, no longer exists now,
\ having been killed by commercialism. But from
the beginning of man's contest with Nature till the
rise of the present capitalistic system, it was alive,
and generally flourished. While it lasted, every-
( thing that was made by man was adorned by man,
\ just as everything made by Nature is adorned by
\ her. The craftsman, as he fashioned the thing he
had under his hand, ornamented it so naturally
and so entirely without conscious effort, that it is
often difficult to distinguish where the mere utili-
tarian part of his work ended and the ornamental
began. Now the origin of this art was the necessity
that the workman felt for variety in his work, and
though the beauty produced by this desire was a
great gift to the world, yet the obtaining variety
and pleasure in the work by the workman was a
matter of more importance still, for it stamped all
labour with the impress of pleasure. All this has
now quite disappeared from the work of civiliza-
tion. If you wish to have ornament, you must pay
specially for it, and the workman is compelled to

Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 165

produce ornament, as he is to produce other wares.
He is compelled to pretend happiness in his work,
so that the beauty produced by man's hand, which
was once a solace to his labour, has now become
an extra burden to him, and ornament is now but )
one of the follies of useless toil, and perhaps not )
the least irksome of its fetters. /

Besides the short duration of labour, its con-
scious usefulness, and the variety which should go
with it, there is another thing needed to make it
attractive, and that is pleasant surroundings. The '
misery and squalor which we people of civilization
bear with so much complacency as a necessary 1
part of the manufacturing system, is just as neces- /
sary to the community at large as a proportionate
amount of filth would be in the house of a private
rich man. If such a man were to allow the cinders
to be raked all over his drawing-room, and a privy
to be established in each corner of his dining-room,
if he habitually made a dust and refuse heap of
his once beautiful garden, never washed his sheets
or changed his tablecloth, and made his family
sleep five in a bed, he would surely find himself in
the claws of a commission de lunatico. But such
acts of miserly folly are just what our present
society is doing daily under the compulsion of a
supposed necessity, which is nothing short of mad-
ness. I beg you to bring your commission of
lunacy against civilization without more delay.

For all our crowded towns and bewildering

1 66 Signs of Change.

factories are simply the outcome of the profit
system. Capitalistic manufacture, capitalistic
land-owning, and capitalistic exchange force men
into big cities in order to manipulate them in the
interests of capital ; the same tyranny contracts
the due space of the factory so much that (for
instance) the interior of a great weaving-shed is
almost as ridiculous a spectacle as it is a horrible
one. There is no other necessity for all this, save
the necessity for grinding profits out of men's lives,
\ and of producing cheap goods for the use (and
subjection) of the slaves who grind. All labour is
not yet driven into factories ; often where it is
there is no necessity for it, save again the profit-
tyranny. People engaged in all such labour need
by no means be compelled to pig together in close
city quarters. There is no reason why they should
not follow their occupations in quiet country
homes, in industrial colleges, in small towns, or, in
short, where they find it happiest for them to
live.

As to that part of labour which must be asso-
ciated on a large scale, this very factory system,
under a reasonable order of things (though to my
mind there might still be drawbacks to it), would
at least offer opportunities for a full and eager
social life surrounded by many pleasures. The
factories might be centres of intellectual activity
also, and work in them might well be varied very
much : the tending of the necessary machinery

Useful Work versus Useless Toil 167

might to each individual be but a short part of the
day's work. The other work might vary from rais-
ing food from the surrounding country to the study
and practice of art and science. It is a matter of
course that people engaged in such work, and being
the masters of their own lives, would not allow any
hurry or want of foresight to force them into
enduring dirt, disorder, or want of room. Science
duly applied would enable them to get rid of
refuse, to minimize, if not wholly to destroy, all
the inconveniences which at present attend the use
of elaborate machinery, such as smoke, stench and
noise ; nor would they endure that the buildings in
which they worked or lived should be ugly blots
on the fair face of the earth. Beginning by making j
their factories, buildings, and sheds decent and I
convenient like their homes, they would infallibly /
go on to make them not merely negatively good, I
inoffensive merely, but even beautiful, so that the i
glorious art of architecture, now for some time
slain by commercial greed, would be born again
and flourish.

So, you see, I claim that work in a duly ordered\
community should be made attractive by the/
consciousness of usefulness, by its being carried^
on with intelligent interest, by variety, and by its(
being exercised amidst pleasurable surroundings
But I have also claimed, as we all do, that the
day's work should not be wearisomely long. It
may be said, " How can you make this last claim

1 6 8 Signs of Change.

square with the others ? If the work is to be so
refined, will not the goods made be very ex-
pensive ? n

I do admit, as I have said before, that some
sacrifice will be necessary in order to make labour
attractive. I mean that, if we could be contented in
a free community to work in the same hurried,
dirty, disorderly, heartless way as we do now, we
might shorten our day's labour very much more
than I suppose we shall do, taking all kinds of
labour into account. But if we did, it would mean
that our new-won freedom of condition would leave
us listless and wretched, if not anxious, as we are
now, which I hold is simply impossible. We
should be contented to make the sacrifices necessary
for raising our condition to the standard called out
for as desirable by the whole community. Nor
only so. We should, individually, be emulous to
sacrifice quite freely still more of our time and our
ease towards the raising of the standard of life.
Persons, either by themselves or associated for
such purposes, would freely, and for the love of the
work and for its results — stimulated by the hope of
the pleasure of creation — produce those ornaments
of life for the service of all, which they are now
bribed to produce (or pretend to produce) for the
service of a few rich men. The experiment of a
civilized community living wholly without art or
literature has not yet been tried. The past degra-
dation and corruption of civilization may force this

Use/tU Work versus Useless Toil. 169

denial of pleasure upon the society which will arise
from its ashes. If that must be, we will accept the
passing phase of utilitarianism as a foundation for
the art which is to be. If the cripple and the
starveling disappear from our streets, if the earth
nourish us all alike, if the sun shine for all of us
alike, if to one and all of us the glorious drama of
the earth — day and night, summer and winter — can
be presented as a thing to understand and love, we
can afford to wait awhile till we are purified from
the shame of the past corruption, and till art arises
again amongst people freed from the terror of the
slave and the shame of the robber.

Meantime, in any case, the refinement, thought-'
fulness, and deliberation of labour must indeed be
paid for, but not by compulsion to labour long
hours. Our epoch has invented machines which
would have appeared wild dreams to the men of
past ages, and of those machines we have as yet
made no tise.

They are called " labour-saving " machines — a
commonly used phrase which implies what we
expect of them ; but we do not get what we expect.
What they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer %
to the ranks of the unskilled, to increase the number $
of the "reserve army of labour" — that is, to in-
crease the precariousness of life among the workers
and to intensify the labour of those who serve the
machines (as slaves their masters). All this they
do by the way, while they pile up the profits of the

1 70 Signs of Change.

employers of labour, or force them to expend those

profits in bitter commercial war with each other.

/ In a true society these miracles of ingenuity would

\ be for the first time used for minimizing the

/ amount of time spent in unattractive labour, which

by their means might be so reduced as to be but

^a very light burden on each individual. All the

more as these machines would most certainly be

very much improved when it was no longer a

question as to whether their improvement would

" pay " the individual, but rather whether it would

benefit the community.

/ So much for the ordinary use of machinery,
' which would probably, after a time, be somewhat
restricted when men found out that there was no
need for anxiety as to mere subsistence, and learned
to take an interest and pleasure in handiwork
which, done deliberately and thoughtfully, could
be made more attractive than machine work.

Again, as people freed from the daily terror of
starvation find out what they really wanted, being
no longer compelled by anything but their own
needs, they would refuse to produce the mere
inanities which are now called luxuries, or the
poison and trash now called cheap wares. No
one would make plush breeches when there were
no flunkies to wear them, nor would anybody
waste his time over making oleomargarine when
no one was compelled to abstain from real butter
Adulteration laws are only needed in a society of

Useful Work versus Useless Toil, lyi

thieves — and in such a society they are a dead
letter.

Socialists are often asked how work of the
rougher and more repulsive kind could be carried
out in the new condition of things. To attempt
to answer such questions fully or authoritatively
would be attempting the impossibility of con-
structing a scheme of a new society out of the
materials of the old, before we knew which of
those materials would disappear and which endure
through the evolution which is leading us to the
great change. Yet it is not difficult to conceive
of some arrangement whereby those who did the
roughest work should work for the shortest spells.
And again, what is said above of the variety of
work applies specially here. Once more I say,
that for a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly
engaged in performing one repulsive and never-
ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for
the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit
for any other form of society. Lastly, if this
rougher work were of any special kind, we may
suppose that special volunteers would be called
on to perform it, who would surely be forth-
coming, unless men in a state of freedom should
lose the sparks of manliness which they possessed
as slaves.

And yet if there be any work which cannot be
made other than repulsive, either by the shortness
of its duration or the intermittency of its recurrence,

\J2 Signs of Change.

or by the sense of special and peculiar usefulness
(and therefore honour) in the mind of the man
who performs it freely, — if there be any work
which cannot be but a torment to the worker,
what then ? Well, then, let us see if the heavens
will fall on us if we leave it undone, for it were
better that they should. The produce of such work
cannot be worth the price of it.

Now we have seen that the semi-theological
dogma that all labour, under any circumstances,
is a blessing to the labourer, is hypocritical and
false ; that, on the other hand, labour is good when
due hope of rest and pleasure accompanies it. We
\have weighed the work of civilization in the balance
and found it wanting, since hope is mostly lacking
to it, and therefore we see that civilization has bred
a dire curse for men. But we have seen also that
the work of the world might be carried on in hope
and with pleasure if it were not wasted by folly
and tyranny, by the perpetual strife of opposing
classes.

It is Peace, therefore, which we need in order
that we may live and work in hope and with
pleasure. Peace so much desired, if we may trust
men's words, but which has been so continually and
steadily rejected by them in deeds. But for us,
let us set our hearts on it and win it at whatever
cost.

What the cost may be, who can tell ? Will it

V V> OF

UN]
Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 173

be possible to win peace peaceably ? Alas, how
can it be ? We are so hemmed in by wrong and
folly, that in one way or other we must always be
fighting against them : our own lives may see no
end to the struggle, perhaps no obvious hope of
the end. It may be that the best we can hope to
see is that struggle getting sharper and bitterer
day by day, until it breaks out openly at last into
the slaughter of men by actual warfare instead of
by the slower and crueller methods of " peaceful "
commerce. If we live to see that, we shall live
to see much ; for it will mean the rich classes
grown conscious of their own wrong and robbery,
and consciously defending them by open violence ;
and then the end will be drawing near.

But in any case, and whatever the nature of
our strife for peace may be, if we only aim at it
steadily and with singleness of heart, and ever keep
it in view, a reflection from that peace of the future
will illumine the turmoil and trouble of our lives,
whether the trouble be seemingly petty, or ob-
viously tragic ; [ajid we shall, in our hopes at least,
live the lives of men : nor can the present times
give us any reward greater than thatTj

C i74 )

<<

DAWN OF A NEW EPOCH.

PERHAPS some of my readers may think that the
above title is not a correct one : it may be said, a
new epoch is always dawning, change is always
going on, and it goes on so gradually that we do
not know when we are out of an old epoch and
into a new one. There is truth in that, at least to
this extent, that no age can see itself: we must
stand some way off before the confused picture with
its rugged surface can resolve itself into its due
order, and seem to be something with a definite
purpose carried through all its details. Neverthe-
less, when we look back on history we do distinguish
periods in the lapse of time that are not merely
arbitrary ones, we note the early growth of the
ideas which are to form the new order of things, we
note their development into the transitional period,
and finally the new epoch is revealed to us bearing
in its full development, unseen as yet, the seeds of
the newer order still which shall transform it in its
turn into something else.

Moreover, there are periods in which even those
alive in them become more or less conscious of the

Dawn of a New Epoch. 175

change which is always going on ; the old ideas
which were once so exciting to men's imaginations,
now cease to move them, though they may be
accepted as dull and necessary platitudes : the
material circumstances of man's life which were
once only struggled with in detail, and only accord-
ing to a kind of law made manifest in their working,
are in such times conscious of change, and are only
accepted under protest until some means can be
found to alter them. The old and dying order,
once silent and all-powerful, tries to express itself
violently, and becomes at once noisy and weak.
The nascent order once too weak to be conscious
of need of expression, or capable of it if it were,
becomes conscious now and finds a voice. The
silent sap of the years is being laid aside for open
assault; the men are gathering under arms in the
trenches, and the forlorn hope is ready, no longer
trifling with little solacements of the time of weary
waiting, but looking forward to mere death or the
joy of victory.

Now I think, and some who read this will agree
with me, that we are now living in one of these
times of conscious change ; we not only are, but we
also feel ourselves to be living between the old and
the new ; we are expecting something to happen,
as the phrase goes : at such times it behoves us to
understand what is the old which is dying, what is
the new which is coming into existence ? That is
a question practically important to us all, since

1 76 Signs of Change.

these periods of conscious change are also, in one
way or other, times of serious combat, and each of
us, if he does not look to it and learn to understand
what is going on, may find himself fighting on the
wrong side, the side with which he really does not
sympathize.

What is the combat we are now entering upon —
who is it to be fought between ? Absolutism and
Democracy, perhaps some will answer. Not quite,
I think ; that contest was practically settled by the
great French Revolution ; it is only its embers
which are burning now : or at least that is so in the
countries which are not belated like Russia, for
instance. Democracy, or at least what used to be
considered Democracy, is now triumphant; and
though it is true that there are countries where
freedom of speech is repressed besides Russia, as
e.g., Germany and Ireland,* that only happens
when the rulers of the triumphant Democracy are
beginning to be afraid of the new order of things,
now becoming conscious of itself, and are being
driven into reaction in consequence. No, it is not
Absolutism and Democracy as the French Revolu-
tion understood those two words that are the ene-
mies now : the issue is deeper than it was ; the two
foes are now Mastership and Fellowship. This
is a far more serious quarrel than the old one, and
involves a much completer revolution. The grounds

* And the brick and mortar country London, also, it seems
(Feb. 1888).

Dawn of a New Epoch. 177

of conflict are really quite different. Democracy
said and says, men shall not be the masters of
others, because hereditary privilege has made a race
or a family so, and they happen to belong to such
race; they shall individually grow into being the
masters of others by the development of certain
qualities under a system of authority which artifi-
cially protects the wealth of every man, if he has
acquired it in accordance with this artificial system,
from the interference of every other, or from all
others combined.

The new order of things says, on the contrary, why
have masters at all ? let us be fellows working in the
harmony of association for the common good, that
is, for the greatest happiness and completest de-
velopment of every human being in the community

This ideal and hope of a new society founded
on industrial peace and forethought, bearing with
it its own ethics, aiming at a new and higher life
for all men, has received the general name of \
Socialism, and it is my firm belief that it is destined ~)
to supersede the old order of things founded 011^
industrial war, and to be the next step in the pro-;
gress of humanity. J

Now, since I must explain further what are the
aims of Socialism, the ideal of the new epoch, I find
that I must begin by explaining to you what is the
constitution of the old order which it is destined to
supplant. If I can make that clear to you, I shall
have also made clear to you the first aim of

N

178 Signs of Change.

Socialism : for I have said that the present and
decaying order of things, like those which have
gone before it, has to be propped up by a system
of artificial authority ; when that artificial authority
has been swept away, harmonious association will
be felt by all men to be a necessity of their happy
and undegraded existence on the earth, and
Socialism will become the condition under which
we shall all live, and it will develop naturally, and
probably with no violent conflict, whatever detailed
system may be necessary : I say the struggle will
not be over these details, which will surely vary
according to the difference of unchangeable natural
surroundings, but over the question, shall it be
mastership or fellowship ?

Let us see then what is the condition of society
under the last development of mastership, the
commercial system, which has taken the place of
the Feudal system.

Like all other systems of society, it is founded on
the necessity of man conquering his subsistence
from Nature by labour, and also, like most other
systems that we know of, it presupposes the unequal
distribution of labour among different classes of
society, and the unequal distribution of the results
of that labour : it does not differ in that respect
from the system which it supplanted ; it has only
altered the method whereby that unequal distribu-
tion should be arranged. There are still rich
people and poor people amongst us, as there were

Dawn of a New Epoch. 179

in the Middle Ages ; nay, there is no doubt that,
relatively at least to the sum of wealth existing, the
rich are richer and the poor are poorer now than
they were then. However that may be, in any case
now as then there are people who have much work
and little wealth living beside other people who
have much wealth and little work. The richest
are still the idlest, and those who work hardest and
perform the most painful tasks are the worst
rewarded for their labour.

To me, and I should hope to my readers, this
seems grossly unfair ; and I may remind you here
that the world has always had a sense of its in-
justice. For century after century, while society
has strenuously bolstered up this injustice forcibly
and artificially, it has professed belief in philo-
sophies, codes of ethics, and religions which have
inculcated justice and fair dealing between men :
nay, some of them have gone so far as to bid us
bear one another's burdens, and have put before
men the duty, and in the long run the pleasure, of
the strong working for the weak, the wise for the
foolish, the helpful for the helpless ; and yet these
precepts of morality have been set aside in practice
as persistently as they have been preached in
theory; and naturally so, since they attack the
very basis of class society. I as a Socialist am
bound to preach them to you once more, assuring
you that they are no mere foolish dreams bidding
us to do what we now must acknowledge to be

N 2

1 80 Signs of Change.

impossible, but reasonable rules of action, good for
our defence against the tyranny of Nature. Any-
how, honest men have the choice before them of
either putting these theories in practice or reject-
ing them altogether. If they will but face that
dilemma, I think we shall soon have a new world of
it ; yet I fear they will find it hard to do so : the
theory is old, and we have got used to it and its
form of words : the practice is new, and would
involve responsibilities we have not yet thought
much of.

Now the great difference between our present
system and that of the feudal period is that, as far
as the conditions of life are concerned, all distinc-
tion of classes is abolished except that between
rich and poor: society is thus simplified ; the arbi-
trary distinction is gone, the real one remains and
is far more stringent than the arbitrary one was.
Once all society was rude, there was little real
difference between the gentleman and the non-
gentleman, and you had to dress them differently
from one another in order to distinguish them.
But now a well-to-do man is a refined and culti-
vated being, enjoying to the full his share of the
conquest over Nature which the modern world has
achieved, while the poor man is rude and degraded,
and has no share in the wealth conquered by
modern science from Nature : he is certainly no
better as to material condition than the serf of the
Middle Ages, perhaps he is worse : to my mind he

Dawn of a New Epoch, 1 8 1

is at least worse than the savage living in a good
climate.

I do not think that any thoughtful man seriously
denies this : let us try to see what brings it about ;
let us see it as clearly as we all see that the here-
ditary privilege of the noble caste, and the conse-
quent serf slavery of the workers of the Middle
Ages, brought about the peculiar conditions of that
period.

Society is now divided between two classes, those
who monopolize all the means of the production of »
wealth save one ; and those who possess nothing/
except that one, the Power of Labour. Thar
power of labour is useless to its possessors, and
cannot be exercised without the help of the other
means of production ; but those who have nothing
but labour-power — i.e., who have no means of making
others work for them, must work for themselves in
order to live ; and they must therefore apply to
the owners of the means of fructifying labour — i.e.,
the land, machinery, &c, for leave to work that
they may live. The possessing class (as for short
we will call them) are quite prepared to grant this
leave, and indeed they must grant it if they are to
use the labour- power of the non-possessing class for
their own advantage, which is their special privilege.
But that privilege enables them to compel the non-
possessing class to sell them their labour-power on
terms which ensure the continuance of their mono-
poly. These terms are at the outset very simple.

1 82 Signs of Change.

The possessing class, or masters, allow the men just
so much of the wealth produced by their labour as
will give them such a livelihood as is considered
necessary at the time, and will permit them to
breed and rear children to a working age : that is
the simple condition of the " bargain M which obtains
when the labour-power required is low in quality,
what is called unskilled labour, and when the
workers are too weak or ignorant to combine so
as to threaten the masters with some form of re-
bellion. When skilled labour is wanted, and the
labourer has consequently cost more to produce,
and is rarer to be found, the price of the article is
higher : as also when the commodity labour takes
to thinking and remembers that after all it is also
men> and as aforesaid holds out threats to the
masters ; in that case they for their part generally
think it prudent to give way, when the competition
of the market allows them to do so, and so the
standard of livelihood for the workers rises.

But to speak plainly, the greater part of the
workers, in spite of strikes and Trades* Unions, do
get little more than a bare subsistence wage, and
when they grow sick or old they would die outright
if it were not for the refuge afforded them by the
workhouse, which is purposely made as prison-like
and wretched as possible, in order to prevent the
lower-paid workers from taking refuge in it before
the time of their industrial death.

Now comes the question as to how the masters

Dawn of a New Epoch. 183

are able to force the men to sell their commodity
labour-power so dirt-cheap without treating them as
the ancients treated their slaves — i,e.y with the whip.
Well, of course you understand that the master
having paid his workmen what they can live upon,
and having paid for the wear and tear of machinery
and other expenses of that kind, has for his share
whatever remains over and above, the whole of
which he gets from the exercise of the labour-power
possessed by the worker : he is anxious therefore to
make the most of this privilege, and competes with
his fellow-manufacturers to the utmost in the
market : so that the distribution of wares is organ-
ized on a gambling basis, and as a consequence
many more hands are needed when trade is brisk
than when it is slack, or even in an ordinary
condition : under the stimulus also of the lust for
acquiring this surplus value of labour, the great
machines of our epoch were invented and are yearly
improved, and they act on labour in a threefold way :
first they get rid of many hands ; next they lower
the quality of the labour required, so that skilled
work is wanted less and less ; thirdly, the im-
provement in them forces the workers to work
harder while they are at work, as notably in the
cotton-spinning industry. Also in most trades
women and children are employed, to whom it is
not even pretended that a subsistence wage is given.
Owing to all these causes, the reserve army of
labour necessary to our present system of manu-

1 84 Signs of Change.

factures for the gambling market, the introduction
of labour-saving machines (labour saved for the
master, mind you, not the man), and the intensify-
ing of the labour while it lasts, the employment
of the auxiliary labour of women and children :
owing to all this there are in ordinary years even, not
merely in specially bad years like the current one,*
more workers than there is work for them to do.
The workers therefore undersell one another in dis-
posing of their one commodity, labour-power, and
axe forced to do so, or they would not be allowed
to work, and therefore would have to starve or go
to the prison called the workhouse. This is why
the masters at the present day are able to dis-
pense with the exercise of obvious violence which
in bygone times they used towards their slaves.

This then is the first distinction between the
two great classes of modern Society : the upper
class possesses wealth, the lower lacks wealth ; but
there is another distinction to which I will now
draw your attention : the class which lacks wealth
is the class that produces it, the class that possesses
it does not produce it, it consumes it only. If by
any chance the so-called lower class were to perish
or leave the community, production of wealth would
come to a standstill, until the wealth-owners had
learned how to produce, until they had descended
from their position, and had taken the place of their
former slaves. If, on the contrary, the wealth-
* 1886, to wit.

Dawn of a New Epoch. 185

owners were to disappear, production of wealth
would at the worst be only hindered for awhile, and
probably would go on pretty much as it does now.

But you may say, though it is certain that some
of the wealth-owners, as landlords, holders of funds,
and the like do nothing, yet there are many of
them who work hard. Well, that is true, and
perhaps nothing so clearly shows the extreme folly
of the present system than this fact that there are
so many able and industrious men employed by
it, in working hard at — nothing : nothing or worse.
They work, but they do not produce.

It is true that some useful occupations are in the
hands of the privileged classes, physic, education, and
the fine arts, e.g. The men who work at these occu-
pations are certainly working usefully ; and all that
we can say against them is that they are sometimes
paid too high in proportion to the pay of other
useful persons, which high pay is given them in
recognition of their being the parasites of the pos-
sessing classes. But even as to numbers these are
not a very large part of the possessors of wealth,
and, as to the wealth they hold, it is quite insigni-
ficant compared with that held by those who do
nothing useful.

Of these last, some, as we all agree, do not pre-
tend to do anything except amuse themselves, and
probably these are the least harmful of the useless
classes. Then there are others who follow occupa-
tions which would have no place in a reasonable

OF THE ^y

univet

1 86 Signs of Change.

condition of society, as, e.g., lawyers, judges, jailers,
and soldiers of the higher grades, and most Govern-
ment officials. Finally comes the much greater
group of those who are engaged in gambling or
fighting for their individual shares of the tribute
which their class compels the working-class to
yield to it : these are the group that one calls
broadly business men, the conductors of our com-
merce, if you please to call them so.

To extract a good proportion of this tribute, and
to keep as much as possible of it when extracted
for oneself, is the main business of life for these
men, that is, for most well-to-do and rich people ;
it is called, quite inaccurately, " money-making ;"
and those who are most successful in this occupa-
tion are, in spite of all hypocritical pretences to the
contrary, the persons most respected by the public.

A word or two as to the tribute extracted from
the workers as aforesaid. It is no trifle, but
amounts to at least two-thirds of all that the
worker produces ; but you must understand that
it is not all taken directly from the workman by his
immediate employer, but by the employing class.
Besides the tribute or profit of the direct employer,
which is in all cases as much as he can get amidst
his competition or war with other employers, the
worker has also to pay taxes in various forms, and
the greater part of the wealth so extorted is at the
best merely wasted : and remember, whoever seems
to pay the taxes, labour in the long run is the only

Dawn of a New Epoch. 187

real taxpayer. Then he has to pay house-rent,
and very much heavier rent in proportion to his
earnings than well-to-do people have. He has also
to pay the commission of the middle-men who
distribute the goods which he has made, in a way
so wasteful that now all thinking people cry out
against it, though they are quite helpless against it
in our present society. Finally, he has often to
pay an extra tax in the shape of a contribution to
a benefit society or trades' union, which is really a
tax on the precariousness of his employment caused
by the gambling of his masters in the market. In
short, besides the profit or the result of unpaid labour
which he yields to his immediate master he has to
give back a large part of his wages to the class of
which his master is a part.

The privilege of the possessing class therefore con-
sists in their living on this tribute, they themselves
either not working or working unproductively —
i.e,y living on the labour of others; no otherwise
than as the master of ancient days lived on the
labour of his slave, or as the baron lived on the
labour of his serf. If the capital of the rich man
consists of land, he is able to force a tenant to im-
prove his land for him and pay him tribute in the
form of rack-rent ; and at the end of the transaction
has his land again, generally improved, so that he
can begin again and go on for ever, he and his heirs,
doing nothing, a mere burden on the community
for ever, while others are working for him. If he

1 8 8 Signs of Change.

has houses on his land he has rent for them also,
often receiving the value of the building many times
over, and in the end house and land once more.
Not seldom a piece of barren ground or swamp,
worth nothing in itself, becomes a source of huge
fortune to him from the development of a town or a
district, and he pockets the results of the labour of
thousands upon thousands of men, and calls it his
property : or the earth beneath the surface is found
to be rich in coal or minerals, and again he must be
paid vast sums for allowing others to labour them
into marketable wares, to which labour he contri-
butes nothing.

Or again, if his capital consists of cash, he goes
into the labour market and buys the labour-power
of men, women and children, and uses it for the
production of wares which shall bring him in a
profit, buying it of course at the lowest price that
he can, availing himself of their necessities to keep
their livelihood down to the lowest point which
they will bear : which indeed he must do, or he
himself will be overcome in the war with his fellow-
capitalists. Neither in this case does he do any
useful work, and he need not do any semblance of
it, since he may buy the brain-power of managers
at a somewhat higher rate than he buys the hand-
power of the ordinary workman. But even when
he does seem to be doing something, and receives
the pompous title of "organizer of labour," he is not
really organizing labour, but the battle with his im-

Dawn of a New Epoch.

^^y OF TT

UNIVERSIT
J*t r

mediate enemies, the other capitalists, who are in
the same line of business with himself.

Furthermore, though it is true, as I have said,
that the working-class are the only producers, yet
only a part of them are allowed to produce usefully ;
for the men of the non-producing classes having
often much more wealth than they can use are
forced to waste it in mere luxuries and follies, that
on the one hand harm themselves, and on the other
withdraw a very large part of the workers from
useful work, thereby compelling those who do
produce usefully to work the harder and more
grievously : in short, the essential accompaniment
of the system is waste.

How could it be otherwise, since it is a system of
war ? I have mentioned incidentally that all the
employers of labour are at war with each other,
and you will probably see that, according to my
account of the relations between the two great
classes, they also are at war. Each can only gain
at the others' loss : the employing class is forced
to make the most of its privilege, the possession of
the means for the exercise of labour, and whatever
it gets to itself can only be got at the expense of
the working-class ; and that class in its turn can
only raise its standard of livelihood at the expense
of the possessing class ; it is forced to yield as little
tribute to it as it can help ; there is therefore con-
stant war always going on between these two
classes, whether they are conscious of it or not.

190 Signs of Change.

To recapitulate : In our modern society there
are two classes, a useful and a useless class ; the
useless class is called the upper, the useful the
lower class. The useless or upper class, having
the monopoly of all the means of the production of
wealth save the power of labour, can and does
compel the useful or lower class to work for its own
disadvantage, and for the advantage of the upper
class ; nor will the latter allow the useful class to
work on any other terms. This arrangement
necessarily means an increasing contest, first of the
classes one against the other, and next of the indi-
viduals of each class among themselves.

Most thinking people admit the truth of what I
have just stated, but many of them believe that the
system, though obviously unjust and wasteful, is
necessary (though perhaps they cannot give their
reasons for their belief), and so they can see nothing
for it but palliating the worst evils of the system :
but, since the various palliatives in fashion at one
time or another have failed each in its turn, I call
upon them, firstly, to consider whether the system
itself might not be changed, and secondly, to look
round and note the signs of approaching change.

Let us remember first that even savages live,
though they have poor tools, no machinery, and no
co-operation, in their work : but as soon as a man
begins to use good tools and work with some kind
of co-operation he becomes able to produce more
than enough for his own bare necessaries. All in-

Dawn of a New Epoch. 191

dustrial society is founded on that fact, even from the
time when workmen were mere chattel slaves. What
a strange society then is this of ours, wherein while
one set of people cannot use their wealth, they
have so much, but are obliged to waste it, another
set are scarcely if at all better than those hapless
savages who have neither tools nor co-operation !
Surely if this cannot be set right, civilized mankind
must write itself down a civilized fool.

Here is the workman now, thoroughly organ-
ized for production, working for production with
complete co-operation, and through marvellous
machines ; surely if a slave in Aristotle's time could
do more than keep himself alive, the present work-
man can do much more — as we all very well know
that he can. Why therefore should he be other-
wise than in a comfortable condition ? Simply
because of the class system, which with one hand
plunders, and with the other wastes the wealth won
by the workman's labour. If the workman had the
full results of his labour he would in all cases be
comfortably off, if he were working in an unwaste-
ful way. But in order to work unwastefully he
must work for his own livelihood, and not to enable
another man to live without producing : if he has
to sustain another man in idleness who is capable
of working for himself, he is treated unfairly ; and,
believe me, he will only do so as long he is compelled
to submit by ignorance and brute force. Well,
then, he has a right to claim the wealth produced

1 9 2 Signs of Change.

by his labour, and in consequence to insist that all
shall produce who are able to do so; but also
undoubtedly his labour must be organized, or he
will soon find himself relapsing into the condition
of the savage. But in order that his labour may
be organized properly he must have only one enemy
to contend with — Nature to wit, who as it were eggs
him on to the conflict against herself, and is grateful
to him for overcoming her ; a friend in the guise of
an enemy. There must be no contention of man
with man, but association instead ; so only can
labour be really organized, harmoniously organized.
But harmony cannot co-exist with contention for
individual gain : men must work for the common
gain if the world is to be raised out of its present
misery ; therefore that claim of the workman (that
is of every able man) must be subject to the fact
that he is but a part of a harmonious whole : he is
worthless without the co-operation of his fellows,
who help him according to their capacities : he
ought to feel, and will feel when he has his right
senses, that he is working for his own interest when
he is working for that of the community.

So working, his work must always be profitable,
therefore no obstacle must be thrown in the way of
his work : the means whereby his labour-power can
be exercised must be free to him. The privilege
of the proprietary class must come to an end.
Remember that at present the custom is that a
person so privileged is in the position of a man
(with a policeman or so to help) guarding the gate

Dawn of a New Epoch. 193

of a field which will supply livelihood to whomso-
ever can work in it : crowds of people who don't
want to die come to that gate ; but there stands law
and order, and says ? pay me five shillings before
you go in ; " and he or she that hasn't the five
shillings has to stay outside, and die — or live in the
workhouse. Well, that must be done away with ;
the field must be free to everybody that can use it.
To throw aside even this transparent metaphor,
those means of the fructification of labour, the land,
machinery, capital, means of transit, &c, which are
now monopolized by those who cannot use them,
but who abuse them to force unpaid labour out of
others, must be free to those who can use them ;
that is to say, the workers properly organized for
production ; but you must remember that this will
wrong no man, because as all will do some service
to the community — i.e., as there will be no non-pro-
ducing class, the organized workers will be the whole
community, there will be no one left out.

Society will thus be recast, and labour will be
free from all compulsion except the compulsion of
Nature, which gives us nothing for nothing. It would
be futile to attempt to give you details of the way
in which this would be carried out ; since the very
essence of it is freedom and the abolition of all
arbitrary or artificial authority ; but I will ask you
to understand one thing : you will no doubt want
to know what is to become of private property
under such a system, which at first sight would not

O

1 94 Signs of Change.

seem to forbid the accumulation of wealth, and
along with that accumulation the formation of new-
classes of rich and poor.

Now private property as at present understood
implies the holding of wealth by an individual as
against all others, whether the holder can use it or
not : he may, and not seldom he does, accumulate
capital, or the stored-up labour of past generations,
and neither use it himself nor allow others to use it :
he may, and often he does, engross the first neces-
sity of labour, land, and neither use it himself or
allow any one else to use it ; and though it is clear
that in each case he is injuring the community, the
law is sternly on his side. In any case a rich man
accumulates property, not for his own use, but in
order that he may evade with impunity the law of
Nature which bids man labour for his livelihood,
and also that he may enable his children to do the
same, that he and they may belong to the upper or
useless class : it is not wealth that he accumulates,
well-being, well-doing, bodily and mental ; he soon
comes to the end of his real needs in that respect,
even when they are most exacting : it is power over
others, what our forefathers called riches, that he
collects ; power (as we have seen) to force other
people to live for his advantage poorer lives than
they should live. Understand that that must be
the result of the possession of riches.

Now this power to compel others to live poorly
Socialism would abolish entirely, and in that sense

Dawn of a New Epoch. 195

would make an end of private property : nor would
it need to make laws to prevent accumulation arti-
ficially when once people had found out that they
could employ themselves, and that thereby every
man could enjoy the results of his own labour : for
Socialism bases the rights of the individual to
possess wealth on his being able to use that wealth
for his own personal needs, and, labour being pro-
perly organized, every person, male or female, not
in nonage or otherwise incapacitated from working,
would have full opportunity to produce wealth and
thereby to satisfy his own personal needs ; if those
needs went in any direction beyond those of an
average man, he would have to make personal
sacrifices in order to satisfy them ; he would have,
for instance, to work longer hours, or to forego
some luxury that he did not care for in order to
obtain something which he very much desired : so
doing he would at the worst injure no one : and
you will clearly see that there is no other choice
for him between so doing and his forcing some one
else to forego his special desires ; and this latter
proceeding by the way, when it is done without the
sanction of the most powerful part of society, is
called theft; though on the big scale and duly
sanctioned by artificial laws, it is, as we have seen,
the groundwork of our_ present system. Once
more, that system refuses permission to people to
produce unless under artificial restrictions ; under
Socialism, every one who could produce would be

O 2

1 96 Signs of Change.

free to produce, so that the price of an article would
be just the cost of its production, and what we now
call profit would no longer exist : thus, for instance,
if a person wanted chairs, he would accumulate
them till he had as many as he could use, and then
he would stop, since he would not have been able
to buy them for less than their cost of production
and could not sell them for more : in other words,
they would be nothing else than chairs ; under the
present system they may be means of compulsion
and destruction as formidable as loaded rifles.

No one therefore would dispute with a man the
possession of what he had acquired without injury
to others, and what he could use without injuring
them, and it would so remove temptations toward
the abuse of possession, that probably no laws
would be necessary to prevent it.

A few words now as to the differentiation of
reward of labour, as I know my readers are sure to
want an exposition of the Socialist views here as to
those who direct labour or who have specially
excellent faculties towards production. And, first,
I will look on the super-excellent workman as an
article presumably needed by the community ; and
then say that, as with other articles so with this, the
community must pay the cost of his production :
for instance, it will have to seek him out, to develop
his special capacities, and satisfy any needs he may
have (if any) beyond those of an average man, so
long as the satisfaction of those needs is not
hurtful to the community.

Dawn of a New Epoch. 197

Furthermore, you cannot give him more than he
can use, so he will not ask for more, and will not take
it : it is true that his work may be more special than
another's, but it is not more necessary if you have
organized labour properly ; the ploughman and the
fisherman are as necessary to society as the scientist
or the artist, I will not say more necessary : neither
is the difficulty of producing the more special and
excellent work at all proportionate to its speciality
or excellence: the higher workman produces his
work as easily perhaps as the lower does his work ;
if he does not do so, you must give him extra
leisure, extra means for supplying the waste of
power in him, but you can give him nothing more.
The only reward that you can give the excellent
workman is opportunity for developing and exer-
cising his excellent capacity. I repeat, you can
give him nothing more worth his having : all other
rewards are either illusory or harmful. I must say
in passing, that our present system of dealing with
what is called a man of genius is utterly absurd :
we cruelly starve him and repress his capacity
when he is young ; we foolishly pamper and flatter
him and again repress his capacity when he is
middle-aged or old : we get the least out of him,
not the most.

These last words concern mere rarities in the
way of workmen ; but in this respect it is only a
matter of degree ; the point of the whole thing is
this, that the director of labour is in his place
because he is fit for it, not by a mere accident ;

1 9 8 Signs of Change.

being fit for it, he does it easier than he would
do other work, and needs no more compensation
for the wear and tear of life than another man
does, and not needing it will not claim it, since it
would be no use to him ; his special reward for his
special labour is, I repeat, that he can do it easily,
and so does not feel it a burden ; nay, since he can
do it well he likes doing it, since indeed the main
pleasure of life is the exercise of energy in the de-
velopment of our special capacities. Again, as
regards the workmen who are under his direction,
he needs no special dignity or authority; they
know well enough that so long as he fulfils his
function and really does direct them, if they
do not heed him it will be at the cost of their
labour being more irksome and harder. All this,
in short, is what is meant by the organization of
labour, which is, in other words, finding out what
work such and such people are fittest for and leav-
ing them free to do that: we won't take the
trouble to do that now, with the result that people's
best faculties are wasted, and that work is a heavy
burden to them, which they naturally shirk as
much as they can ; it should be rather a pleasure
to them : and I say straight out that, unless we find
some means to make all work more or less
pleasurable, we shall never escape from the great
tyranny of the modern world.

Having mentioned the difference between the
competitive and commercial ideas on the subject

Dawn of a New Epoch. 199

of the individual holding of wealth and the relative
position of different groups of workmen, I will very
briefly say something on what for want of a better
word I must call the political position which we
take up, or at least what we look forward to in the
long run. The substitution of association for com-
petition is the foundation of Socialism, and will
run through all acts done under it, and this must
act as between nations as well as between indi-
viduals : when profits can no more be made, there
will be no necessity for holding together masses of
men to draw together the greatest proportion of
profit to their locality, or to the real or imaginary
union of persons and corporations which is now
called a nation. What we now call a nation is a
body whose function it is to assert the special wel-
fare of its incorporated members at the expense of
all other similar bodies : the death of competition
will deprive it of this function ; since there will be
no attack there need be no defence, and it seems
to me that this function being taken away from
the nation it can have no other, and therefore
must cease to exist as a political entity. On this
side of the movement opinion is growing steadily.
It is clear that, quite apart from Socialism, the
idea of local administration is pushing out that
of centralized government: to take a remarkable
case: in the French Revolution of 1793, the most
advanced party was centralizing: in the latest
French revolution, that of the Commune of 1871,

200 Signs of Change.

it was federalist. Or take Ireland, the success
which is to-day attending the struggles of Ireland
for independence is, I am quite sure, owing to the
spread of this idea: it no longer seems a mon-
strous proposition to liberal-minded Englishmen
that a country should administer its own affairs :
the feeling that it is not only just, but also very
convenient to all parties for it to do so, is extin-
guishing the prejudices fostered by centuries of
oppressive and wasteful mastership. And I believe
that Ireland will show that her claim for self-
government is not made on behalf of national
rivalry, but rather on behalf of genuine independ-
ence ; the consideration, on the one hand, of the
needs of her own population, and, on the other, good-
will towards that of other localities. Well, the
spread of this idea will make our political work as
Socialists the easier ; men will at last come to see
that the only way to avoid the tyranny and waste
of bureaucracy is by the Federation of Independent
Communities : their federation being for definite
purposes : for furthering the organization of labour,
by ascertaining the real demand for commodities,
and so avoiding waste : for organizing the distribu-
tion of goods, the migration of persons — in short,
the friendly intercommunication of people whose
interests are common, although the circumstances
of their natural surroundings made necessary differ-
ences of life and manners between them.

I have thus sketched something of the outline of

Dawn of a New Epoch. 201

Socialism, by showing that its aim is first to getj
rid of the monopoly of the means of fructifying
labour, so that labour may be free to all, and its
resulting wealth may not be engrossed by a few,
and so cause the misery and degradation of the
many^and, secondly, that it aims at organizing
labour so that none of it may be wasted, using as a
means thereto the free development of each man's.)
capacity ; and, thirdly, that it aims at getting rid
of national rivalry, which in point of fact means a
condition of perpetual war, sometimes of the
money-bag, sometimes of the bullet, and substi-
tuting for this worn-out superstition a system of
free communities living in harmonious federation
with each other, managing their own affairs by the
free consent of their members ; yet acknowledging
some kind of centre whose function it would be to
protect the principle whose practice the commu-
nities should carry out ; till at last those prin-
ciples would be recognized by every one always and
intuitively, when the last vestiges of centralization
would die out.

I am well aware that this complete Socialism,
which is sometimes called Communism, cannot be V
realized all at once ; society will be changed from j
its basis when we make the form of robbery called J
profit impossible by giving labour full and free
access to the means of its fructification — *>., to raw
material. The demand for this emancipation of
labour is the basis on which all Socialists may

202 Signs of Change.

unite. On more indefinite grounds they cannot
meet other groups of politicians ; they can only
rejoice at seeing the ground cleared of controversies
which are really dead, in order that the last con-
troversy may be settled that we can at present
foresee, and the question solved as to whether
or no it is necessary, as some people think it is,
that society should be composed of two groups of
dishonest persons, slaves submitting to be slaves, yet
for ever trying to cheat their masters, and masters
conscious of their having no support for their dis-
honesty of eating the common stock without adding
to it save the mere organization of brute force,
which they have to assert for ever in all details of
life against the natural desire of man to be free.

It may be hoped that we of this generation may
be able to prove that it is unnecessary ; but it will,
doubt it not, take many generations yet to prove
that it is necessary for such degradation to last as
long as humanity does ; and when that is finally
proved we shall at least have one hope left — that
humanity will not iast long.

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co.
Edinburgh and London

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