(1)A.D.1925:(a) Navvies required. Apply Eastern Counties Railway Co.’s Depot....(b) Eastern Counties Railway Co., Ltd. The 250,000 5% Cumulative Participating Preference Shares are now offered for public subscription, payable as follows....(2)A.D.2000:Norfolk Water Supply Undertaking. A public meeting will be held on ... at the Norwich Auditorium, to announce and explain the purpose and plan of this Undertaking. Workers and Contributors will be enlisted on terms to be announced at this meeting. Qualification papers may be sent to the undersigned....
(1)A.D.1925:
(a) Navvies required. Apply Eastern Counties Railway Co.’s Depot....
(b) Eastern Counties Railway Co., Ltd. The 250,000 5% Cumulative Participating Preference Shares are now offered for public subscription, payable as follows....
(2)A.D.2000:
Norfolk Water Supply Undertaking. A public meeting will be held on ... at the Norwich Auditorium, to announce and explain the purpose and plan of this Undertaking. Workers and Contributors will be enlisted on terms to be announced at this meeting. Qualification papers may be sent to the undersigned....
It is obvious that the “contributor” who places his savings at the disposal of the Undertaking must not only not lose them thereby, but must be compensated according to the risk he runs. In effect, he provides the manual worker with the food he requires to exert his strength, and he does sowithout any immediate benefit to himself. If, after the Undertaking had got to work, his “contribution” were simply refunded, he would receive no reward for his public service, a service which implied a reduction in his own resources. This would be unjust and would make his treatment worse than that of the wage-earner.
To this simple plea a Communist would rejoin that nobody should be allowed to have savings or accumulated resources or private property of any kind. The absurdity of this contention is very easily demonstrated, but let us add a few hard cases to the usual arguments:—
(1) A tribe of shepherds requires water. There is one man who knows the location of a well. His knowledge is his private property,which he offers to sell for a number of cows. What should be done, if the man is (a) accessible and undefended; (b) inaccessible.
(2) A girl has a beautiful head of hair, which could be sold abroad for a considerable sum. Whose property is it?
(3) In a small and isolated town, 20 per cent. of the inhabitants have good sets of false teeth. Another 20 per cent. require false teeth, but have no means of getting them. What will be the action taken by the Communist municipality?
The workman going to his work has quite a respectable capital to accompany him on his way. He has clothes to keep him warm, boots to save his feet from wearing out, a set of tools, perhaps,and accumulated stores of food in every muscle of his body. Even if his stomach is empty, he is still capable of work, although it will probably be of inferior quality. There was a craze towards the end of last century for living without food, the idea being that the body was not nourished by food but by “vibrations” of some mysterious kind. The craze, for obvious reasons, did not last long, but some prodigies of fasting were performed while it lasted, and the leaders of the movement prided themselves on doing their daily work and business as usual. The truth was that, like the badger, they were living on their own fat and consuming their own tissues. In the end they were thinner and sadder, but little the worse otherwise.
Everybody in a physically fit conditionis necessarily a capitalist. That arch-capitalist among the animals, the squirrel, jumps on the shoulders of the amiable Communists strolling in Regent’s Park and then goes to “rattle in his hoard of acorns.”
There will be no discouragement of the acquisition of private property in the centuries to come, but care will be taken that the happiness accruing to the owner is not set off by misery inflicted on others. Misery due to mere envy or jealousy will not be considered, but, as a matter of fact, there is much less of that than there is commonly supposed. The spectators of the Lord Mayor’s Show do not envy the Lord Mayor his pomp and magnificence, but they are there to delight their eyes with an unusual display. The crowds collecting at the churchdoor to see the blushing bride do not come to turn green with envy, but to feast their eyes on something exquisite and heartening to behold.
And the work of the future, the labour of thousands on a great enterprise, will be accomplished in the spirit of adventure and comradeship, like an Arctic expedition, let us say, and the distribution of rewards will be conducted in the same spirit as the prize-giving at a sports meeting.
The spirit of adventure is a most valuable incentive to work, an incentive that is much neglected at present. It is part of the workman’s grievance against capital that the capitalist has the adventurous part of the undertaking.
The need for adventure in everyday life is proved by the enormous prevalenceof betting on horses, which is about the most stupid way of adventuring money that one can conceive. The prodigies performed under some piece-work agreements show that it is not the quantity of work that is felt as a burden, but the consciousness of being driven by a will other than one’s own. Many schemes of profit-sharing also introduce an element of chance which is most welcome to the worker, though logically it should be under a proviso of loss-sharing in the same proportion.
A profit-and-loss-sharing understanding between employers and workers would make every worker a capitalist. Indeed, as soon as the workers (or the State, it matters not which) are sufficiently organized to guard workers from undeserved destitution, it may be quite feasible to organize publicundertakings without wages of any kind. Each worker would contribute “capital” in the form of a certain amount of work. In case of a total loss on the undertaking, he would receive no reward or wages whatever, any more than the capitalist who engages in a profitless scheme. If the undertaking succeeded, he would have a permanent interest in the revenue from it, in proportion to the work contributed. Since it is easier to assess the value of manual piece-work than mental work, it might well happen that, though no wages were paid, salaries would be paid to organizers, architects, overseers, and the like, who would thus be the only “proletarians” in the concern!
Government.—“The first duty of a Government is to govern.” Thisplatitude sounds as if there were some hidden pearl of meaning behind it. But on etymological analysis we find that the duty of Government is to work the rudder of the ship of State. It is to give a general direction to the activities of its citizens. The same or a similar word is used in all countries based upon Roman law and citizenship. The German equivalent,Regierung, is different. It means reigning or doing the business of royalty, but as the origin of the word “Rex” is the same as that of the main syllable of the words “Rector” and “Director,” it comes to the same thing, a “directing” action.
Will this directing or controlling action ever become superfluous?
Its chief function is at present to determine the policy of a large aggregate of human beings. In democraticcountries this determination is settled by a majority vote, from which there is no legal appeal, though passive resistance or the threat of rebellion are weapons which a minority can sometimes use with effect. A majority vote would be practically certain to be wrong on most questions of the day, but fortunately such a vote has no effect unless it is put into action by a body of expert politicians comprising the Ministry, and these again are largely guided by experts in the particular matter with which the vote in question is concerned. Laws are not made by Parliament. They are born in Government offices under expert advice. The Cabinet, on the advice of its experts, decides to bring in a Bill which is likely to be of some benefit, will probably be passed by Parliament,and will encounter no serious resistance in the country. Our Government is thus really a Government by Experts, but is cleverly disguised in such a manner as to appear “broadbased upon the People’s Will.” A similar camouflage might very properly be adopted in the management of factories and industrial enterprises. But the State is older than the Factory, and has learnt more wisdom.
The other primary function of government is the maintenance of public order—in other words, the enforcement of the laws it has enacted. Among the Medes and Persians, whose laws were never altered, this was the main function of government. And in a non-progressive world the task of keeping everyone “in his place” and preventing him from encroaching on his neighboursmight well fill the whole sphere of government. The Anarchist ideal of the abolition of all government is only possible if we can abolish the natural tendency of all living things to expand and extend their sphere of action; or if we can endow its neighbours with sufficient reserves of energy to be able to oppose any undue expansion. If a motorist knocks down a pedestrian, we discourage that undue extension of his sphere by a fine or imprisonment. If we could endow every pedestrian with the physical power of stopping a car, say, by raising his hand; or if, alternatively, we could make him invulnerable, indestructible, and untraversable, there would be no need for prosecutions, and Anarchism would, in that particular case, become a possible system.
The idea of a government beingsomething superior to ordinary humanity is somewhat ludicrous. In actual practice, government is the servant of the public, and not its master. There are countless cases of the process of law being used for private ends. The rule of conduct among some powerful individuals and corporations is to “go on until you are stopped,” in other words, to do what you like until somebody objects, or until you are stopped by the law. The law is thus used as a sort of indicator or “automatic cut-out” much as an electrical engineer would use a safety-fuse. The main difference is that the “blowing” of some particular fuses leads to explosions and permanent damage, as when a crime is committed.
The business of government is hard and sometimes very exacting work.One can imagine some misdemeanant of the future being condemned to carry on the government, or some important function of it, for so many months, as the most exacting form of hard labour.
This elementary fact has of late been recognized by most modern parliaments in the payment of their members. Government should be recognized as a profession and rewarded as such. The late Mr. W. T. Stead’s alternative to Democracy was an “Autocracy tempered by Assassination.” There is another alternative, viz., Bureaucracy tempered by Emigration. It is the system practised in such institutions as Proprietary clubs. Members are not worried to elect committees and honorary officers. If they are satisfied with the management they remain in the club. If they are not, they joinsome other club. The same process on a larger scale led to the foundation of the American colonies and the United States. It is largely at work at the present day, but is complicated by all sorts of restrictions and difficulties, the divergence of languages being one of the most serious obstacles. As intercommunication increases, the natural tendency to go where one can be happiest—ubi bene, ibi patria—will no doubt come increasingly into action, and will be a wholesome check upon the extravagances of cranky legislatures.
But I doubt whether there is any tendency at all of governments to become less effective. Almost every advance of science and invention makes the maintenance of public order and security easier. The tracing of criminals by wireless telegraphy and broadcastingis a striking illustration of the aid science can give to the police. Almost everywhere science and invention are on the side of the established order. Although every researcher and inventor is, in a sense, a revolutionary, in that his work is likely to produce immense changes in human activity, his general outlook tends towards aristocracy, since he is imbued with the sense of the immense differences in the personal equipment of individuals, which no equalitarian sentimentality will ever wipe out.
The Farther Outlook.—So far, we have looked but little ahead, a century at most. The prophet’s task becomes more arduous as the time is extended. Historical guidance fails us. Familiar landmarks get blurred and disappear. We are in danger of getting lost in abog of unreal speculation. Yet the task has often been essayed, and it is necessary and desirable that it be essayed now and again. Let me make my own humble attempt, in the light of what knowledge I have acquired and what great thoughts I have encountered in many lands and languages, and in discussions with many thinkers.
We must extend our time scale from centuries to millennia, and from millennia to geological eras. Above all, we must take into account not only the rapid advance of science and invention, but the constantaccelerationof that advance.
The consequence of that constant acceleration is that new developments and achievements succeed each other with bewildering rapidity. Hardlyhave we got accustomed to the idea of telegraphy without wires when radio-telephony becomes an accomplished fact, and within a few years there is a rich crop of listeners with their wireless receiving sets counting by the million. An entirely new form of publicity comes into being, and a speaker on Savoy Hill is able to speak to an audience of millions and sway them by his voice more effectively than he can do by cold print in the newspapers.
And this is only a beginning. Communication will become closer and more general. Already the earth is a network of lines and cables, linking continent to continent. Soon a speaker will have the earth for his sounding board and his hall of audience, and the privilege of addressing the human race will be prized above a coronation.Human sight and hearing will extend its range enormously, not only in space, but in time also. For the cinema film and improvements in the recording of sound will make it possible to make minute and comprehensive records of past sights and sounds for future reproduction, so that nothing of any value may be lost.
Other progress will go hand in hand with the rapid development of “signalling” communications, such as telegraphs and the like. The transport of goods and passengers will rapidly gain in speed, comfort, and safety, until the whole earth becomes accessible to all. It will not only become accessible, but also habitable. The tropics, the original cradle of the human race, will once more be reclaimed from our most formidable enemies ofthe insect-world and the ever-present bacterium. The higher organism will assert its much-contested supremacy over those minute organisms which owe their influence to mere numerical superiority. Our descendants will pay an afternoon’s visit to Timbuctoo or Mount Ararat, much as we should visit the British Museum or the Lake District. Everybody will be a globe-trotter, but the “globe” will not be confined to the ordinary tourist resorts. It will include every part of the world, even the Poles. And wherever they go they will find friendly voices, long familiar in the home through the service of radio-telephony. There will, of course, be an international auxiliary language, understood everywhere, a language artificial in its structure—every literary language is largely artificial—bututilizing those roots which have already become part and parcel of all cultured languages. This will not mean the displacement or loss of native languages which have proved their title to survival by their literature.
War will not cease for perhaps a century or more. But it will finally cease when the truth has sunk in that war is a loss to every belligerent and to the whole world. Human rivalry and competition will take other forms. There are many ways of killing men, women and children, besides suffocating them with chlorine. If a tribe is to be exterminated, nobody will be killed, but all its members will be painlessly sterilized by X-rays or some such modern means, so that the next generation will know them no more. It will be more humane than the Biblicalexpedient of “dashing their children against a stone.”
The mass of interconnections between human nations and individuals will be like a closely-woven fabric. Even now, the digging up of a city road reveals a tangled network of water pipes, electric mains, gas pipes, and drain pipes suggestive of the dissection of an animal body. It is but a faint foreshadowing of what is to come. The substratum of life will become more and more complete as conscious life becomes simpler.
Nobody is conscious of the appalling complexity of his anatomical organization when using his body as a well-poised instrument of thought and intercourse. “The simple life” is not the old-fashioned country life of England or the primitive life of savage humanity. Real simplicity is constituted by the lifein which most things are done by pressing a button, and a man can travel across a continent in such comfort that on arrival at his destination all memories of his journey are dimmed or lost, and he can hardly recall having travelled at all.
We may, therefore, expect that, as facilities for intercourse become more detailed and widespread, the effect will be, not to increase the tax on our nerve force until it becomes unbearable, but to increase our area of selection. There will thus be more consistency in our actual interests and activities and more real harmony and leisure.
The unification of the planet which is being accomplished before our eyes will have some astounding consequences. Mankind will assume a definite mastery of his home in the solar system. Attila could boast that when he plunged hisspear into the ground, the whole earth trembled. The earth trembles even now to the electric signals of our powerful wireless stations. What will it be in a hundred or a thousand years? In a hundred years the unification of the human race will be complete. The earth and the fulness thereof will be under the full mastery of man. All animal, vegetable and bacterial life will be kept within strict bounds in the interests of humanity. The earth will be under one government, and one language will be written and understood, or even spoken, all over the globe. There will still be different races and perhaps allied nations, but travel and commerce will be free and unfettered, and calamities will be alleviated and dangers met by the united forces of all mankind.
And all the world will beyoung. The advances of medicine and surgery will have been such that most of the ailments and limitations of old age will have been eliminated. Life will be prolonged at its maximum of efficiency until death comes like sunset, and is met without pain and without reluctance. There will be no death from disease, and almost any sort of injury will be curable.
And in a thousand years? What will become of our globe and its dominant race, if no great catastrophe occurs to stop its exponential curve of progress. But for that exponential curve and its tendency towards constant acceleration, a thousand years would be no great period to foretell. Life has become world-wide in the last thousand years. The intellectual outlook has increasedwith the area of travel and communication. Dogmas and shibboleths have lost their force. Art and science have been emancipated from their ecclesiastical fetters. But the immense leap made since coal came into its own as a world-force belongs to our own age. The exhaustion of the coal-fields might slow down progress for a time, but so long as mankind keeps its continuity, its past achievements and its rate of achievement will act as a stimulus and encouragement to further efforts, and new sources of energy will be discovered and utilized.
And so we may feel justified in expecting continual progress for at least a thousand years. Can we imagine the result? A globe laid out like a huge garden, with a climate under perfect control; the internal heat ofthe earth brought to the surface and utilized as a source of never-failing energy. Portions of the interior of the earth reclaimed and made habitable; all machinery and sources of power wisely distributed and made instantly available for all legitimate purposes. The earth’s surface and the rippling ether in which it swims made into a vast playground of human thought and emotion, and all mankind throbbing in unison to every great thought.
The Earth will have become a sentient being.—It will be as closely unified and organized as the human individual himself. Mankind will be the “grey matter” of its brain. It may not resemble a sentient being high up in the scale of life, but it will be at least on the level ofprotococcusor some other such humble plant-cell, whichalso consists of a minute proportion of material truly “alive” together with a greater bulk of stored foodstuff and waste products.
Man will be conscious of his closer attachment to the earth. He will feel towards it a sort of personal patriotism, or the sort of loyalty that a veteran feels towards the Old Regiment. Specially exalted or sensitive people may even indulge in a kind of Geolatry animated by an old-world religious fervour.
Can we focus our mental telescope into yet farther depths of time? A million years or so?
It seems rather risky to extrapolate our curves so far. But a million years are but a span in the life of the earth. Its records speak to us of many millions. The chalk cliffs of Dover took several million years to deposit on a formersea-bottom, and many more to rise to their present eminence.
If there is a still farther advance in the life of the earth, what sort of direction can it take? Will a new race have arisen, as much above humanity as man is above the arboreal ape? Or will the further differentiation of man have come to a definite end, and progress be confined to an ever-increasing richness of intellectual, artistic, and emotional life? If there is any progress at all, it must be byeffort, and the question could be answered with fair probability, if we could find an incentive to effort after the earth is entirely subdued. Such an incentive towards effort will lie in the ever-present danger of a celestial catastrophe, such as a collision with one of the smaller wandering planets or other denizens of outerspace. It may be that the earth will by that time be alive to its own peril, and will take precautions! Its “grey matter”—our own descendants—will be confabulating and organizing in some great scheme of defence. The earth will have to adopt a Foreign Policy, if it is to be the master of its fate for all time.
Here our dreams are checked by the realization that among the older planets of our solar system we can trace no activity attributable to a “foreign policy” of their own. But we must remember that ours is a small planet, which has very little influence upon its neighbours in space, and is certainly not a danger to them. If Mars, millions of years older than ourselves, has arrived at such a stage of advancement that it can think of transcending itsown boundaries, it may make some attempt at communication, but the attempt might take the form which to us would be quite unrecognizable. Some observers thought that the persistent thunderstorms and magnetic disturbances experienced during the last opposition over wide areas were signs of such an attempt, but the coincidence may have been quite accidental.
In any case, we cannot find any sign of the Martians having succeeded in exercising any powers beyond the surface of their own planet, though, if the “canals” really exist, their engineering feats must be truly stupendous.
It may be that the earth, owing to its position between torrid Mercury and ice-bound Neptune, enjoys conditions specially favourable to mental andphysical advancement. And so it may happen that it will for immense ages of time be the only planet to burst into consciousness. Thus it may at some epoch find itself the undisputed master of the solar system, and may be able to influence the other planets and make them subservient in some way to its own needs.
Let nobody think I am unduly optimistic about the future of this earth of ours. The difficulty lies rather in visualizing what recent and current progress, andacceleratedprogress, must inevitably bring about when continued for a long time. The only doubtful element appears to be whether the magnificentélan vitalof our race, which has enabled it to conquer the world, will last through the vast ages to come.
But, fortunately, there is no sign of its exhaustion. Love is still the ruling passion and inspiration of humanity, which enables men and maidens to brave all the trials and dangers of life in unconscious devotion to a future as yet unimagined and unborn.
Transcriber’s Notes:Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.