Section Six

Section SixThe Stable Solutions of This InstabilityGiven a capitalist state, of its nature unstable, it will tend to reach stability by some method or another.It is the definition of unstable equilibrium that a body in unstable equilibrium is seeking a stable equilibrium. For instance, a pyramid balanced upon its apex is in unstable equilibrium; which simply means that a slight force one way or the other will make it fall into a position where it will repose. Similarly, certain chemical mixtures are said to be in unstable equilibrium when their constituent parts have such affinity one for another that a slight shock may make them combine and transform the chemical arrangement of the whole. Of this sort are explosives.If the Capitalist State is in unstable equilibrium, this only means that it is seeking a stable equilibrium, and that Capitalism cannot but be transformed into some other arrangement wherein Society may repose.There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism: Slavery, Socialism, and Property.I may imagine a mixture of any two of these three or of all the three, but each is a dominant type, and from the very nature of the problem no fourth arrangement can be devised.The problem turns, remember, upon the control of the means of production. Capitalism means that this control is vested in the hands of few, while political freedom is the appanage of all. If this anomaly cannot endure, from its insecurity and from its own contradiction with its presumed moral basis, you must either have a transformation of the one or of the other of the two elements which combined have been found unworkable. These two factors are (1) The ownership of the means of Production by a few; (2) The Freedom of all. To solve Capitalism you must get rid of restricted ownership, or of freedom, or of both. Now there is only one alternative to freedom, which is the negation of it. Either a man is free to work and not to work as he pleases, or he may be liable to a legal compulsion to work, backed by the forces of the State. In the first he is a free man; in the second he is by definition a slave. We have, therefore, so far as this factor of freedom is concerned, no choice between a number of changes, but only the opportunity of one, to wit, the establishment of slavery in place of freedom. Such a solution, the direct, immediate, and conscious re-establishment of slavery, would provide a true solution of the problems which Capitalism offers. It would guarantee, under workable regulations, sufficiency and security for the dispossessed. Such a solution, as I shall show, is the probable goal which our society will in fact approach. To its immediate and conscious acceptance, however, there is an obstacle.A direct and conscious establishment of slavery as a solution to the problem of Capitalism, the surviving Christian tradition of our civilisation compels men to reject. No reformer will advocate it; no prophet dares take it as yet for granted. All theories of a reformed society will therefore attempt, at first, to leave untouched the factor ofFreedomamong the elements which make up Capitalism, and will concern themselves with some change in the factor ofProperty.4Now, in attempting to remedy the evils of Capitalism by remedying that one of its two factors which consists in an ill distribution of property, you have two, and only two, courses open to you.If you are suffering because property is restricted to a few, you can alter that factor in the problemeitherby putting property into the hands of many, or by putting it into the hands of none. There is no third course.In the concrete, to put property in the hands of “none” means to vest it as a trust in the hands of political officers. If you say that the evils proceeding from Capitalism are due to the institution of property itself, and not to the dispossession of the many by the few, then you must forbid the private possession of the means of production by any particular and private part of the community: but someone must control the means of production, or we should have nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine means the management of the means of production by those who are the public officers of the community. Whether these public officers are themselves controlled by the community or no has nothing to do with this solution on its economic side. The essential point to grasp is that the only alternative to private property is public property. Somebody must see to the ploughing and must control the ploughs; otherwise no ploughing will be done.It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil but only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase the number of those owners.So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like ours, disliking the name of “slavery,” and avoiding a direct and conscious re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called Collectivism: that is, the management of the means of production by the political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution of property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole State, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of capital or land, or both.The first model we callSocialismor the Collectivist State; the second we call the Proprietary or Distributive State.With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the second model, involving the redistribution of property, is rejected as impracticable by our existing Capitalist Society, and why, therefore, the model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a Collectivist State.I shall then proceed to show that at its first inception all Collectivist Reform is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had intended, a new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude.Have I made myself clear?If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis.The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory whichin actionproduces something utterly different from Collectivism: to wit, theServile State.

Given a capitalist state, of its nature unstable, it will tend to reach stability by some method or another.

It is the definition of unstable equilibrium that a body in unstable equilibrium is seeking a stable equilibrium. For instance, a pyramid balanced upon its apex is in unstable equilibrium; which simply means that a slight force one way or the other will make it fall into a position where it will repose. Similarly, certain chemical mixtures are said to be in unstable equilibrium when their constituent parts have such affinity one for another that a slight shock may make them combine and transform the chemical arrangement of the whole. Of this sort are explosives.

If the Capitalist State is in unstable equilibrium, this only means that it is seeking a stable equilibrium, and that Capitalism cannot but be transformed into some other arrangement wherein Society may repose.

There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism: Slavery, Socialism, and Property.

I may imagine a mixture of any two of these three or of all the three, but each is a dominant type, and from the very nature of the problem no fourth arrangement can be devised.

The problem turns, remember, upon the control of the means of production. Capitalism means that this control is vested in the hands of few, while political freedom is the appanage of all. If this anomaly cannot endure, from its insecurity and from its own contradiction with its presumed moral basis, you must either have a transformation of the one or of the other of the two elements which combined have been found unworkable. These two factors are (1) The ownership of the means of Production by a few; (2) The Freedom of all. To solve Capitalism you must get rid of restricted ownership, or of freedom, or of both. Now there is only one alternative to freedom, which is the negation of it. Either a man is free to work and not to work as he pleases, or he may be liable to a legal compulsion to work, backed by the forces of the State. In the first he is a free man; in the second he is by definition a slave. We have, therefore, so far as this factor of freedom is concerned, no choice between a number of changes, but only the opportunity of one, to wit, the establishment of slavery in place of freedom. Such a solution, the direct, immediate, and conscious re-establishment of slavery, would provide a true solution of the problems which Capitalism offers. It would guarantee, under workable regulations, sufficiency and security for the dispossessed. Such a solution, as I shall show, is the probable goal which our society will in fact approach. To its immediate and conscious acceptance, however, there is an obstacle.

A direct and conscious establishment of slavery as a solution to the problem of Capitalism, the surviving Christian tradition of our civilisation compels men to reject. No reformer will advocate it; no prophet dares take it as yet for granted. All theories of a reformed society will therefore attempt, at first, to leave untouched the factor ofFreedomamong the elements which make up Capitalism, and will concern themselves with some change in the factor ofProperty.4

Now, in attempting to remedy the evils of Capitalism by remedying that one of its two factors which consists in an ill distribution of property, you have two, and only two, courses open to you.

If you are suffering because property is restricted to a few, you can alter that factor in the problemeitherby putting property into the hands of many, or by putting it into the hands of none. There is no third course.

In the concrete, to put property in the hands of “none” means to vest it as a trust in the hands of political officers. If you say that the evils proceeding from Capitalism are due to the institution of property itself, and not to the dispossession of the many by the few, then you must forbid the private possession of the means of production by any particular and private part of the community: but someone must control the means of production, or we should have nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine means the management of the means of production by those who are the public officers of the community. Whether these public officers are themselves controlled by the community or no has nothing to do with this solution on its economic side. The essential point to grasp is that the only alternative to private property is public property. Somebody must see to the ploughing and must control the ploughs; otherwise no ploughing will be done.

It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil but only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase the number of those owners.

So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like ours, disliking the name of “slavery,” and avoiding a direct and conscious re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called Collectivism: that is, the management of the means of production by the political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution of property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole State, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of capital or land, or both.

The first model we callSocialismor the Collectivist State; the second we call the Proprietary or Distributive State.

With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the second model, involving the redistribution of property, is rejected as impracticable by our existing Capitalist Society, and why, therefore, the model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a Collectivist State.

I shall then proceed to show that at its first inception all Collectivist Reform is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had intended, a new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude.

Have I made myself clear?

If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis.

The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory whichin actionproduces something utterly different from Collectivism: to wit, theServile State.

Section SevenSocialism Is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist CruxI say that the line of least resistance, if it be followed, leads a Capitalist State to transform itself into a Servile State.I propose to show that this comes about from the fact that not aDistributivebut aCollectivistsolution is the easiest for a Capitalist State to aim at, and that yet, in the very act of attemptingCollectivism, what results is not Collectivism at all, but the servitude of the many, and the confirmation in their present privilege of the few; that is, the Servile State.Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhorrent propose for the remedy of Capitalism one of two reforms.Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing land and capital that a determining number of families in the State were possessed of the means of production; or they would put those means of production into the hands of the political officers of the community, to be held in trust for the advantage of all.The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of theDistributive State. The second may be called the attempted establishment of theCollectivist State.Those who favour the first course are the Conservatives or Traditionalists. They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed throughout the State during the happiest periods of our past history; they also know that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have greater social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would re-establish, if possible, the Distributive State in the place of, and as a remedy for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned with known realities, and having for their ideal a condition of society which experience has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of the two schools of reformers, the morepracticalin the sense that they deal more than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists) with things which either are or have been in actual existence. But they are less practical in another sense (as we shall see in a moment) from the fact that the stage of the disease with which they are dealing does not readily lend itself to such a reaction as they propose.The Collectivist, on the other hand, proposes to put land and capital into the hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently dealing with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that has been tested by experience, nor one of which our race and history can furnish instances. In this sense, therefore, he is thelesspractical of the two reformers. His ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine Socialism in actual working, nor can we say (as we can say of well-divided property): “On such and such an occasion, in such and such a period of European history, Collectivism was established and produced both stability and happiness in society.”In this sense, therefore, the Collectivist is far less practical than the reformer who desires well-distributed property.On the other hand, there is a sense in which this Socialist is more practical than that other type of reformer, from the fact that the stage of the disease into which we have fallen apparently admits of his remedy with less shock than it admits of a reaction towards well-divided property.For example: the operation of buying out some great tract of private ownership to-day (as a railway or a harbour company) with public funds, continuing its administration by publicly paid officials and converting its revenue to public use, is a thing with which we are familiar and which seemingly might be indefinitely multiplied. Individual examples of such transformation of waterworks, gas, tramways, from a Capitalist to a Collectivist basis are common, and the change does not disturb any fundamental thing in our society. When a private Water company or Tramway line is bought by some town and worked thereafter in the interests of the public, the transaction is effected without any perceptible friction, disturbs the life of no private citizen, and seems in every way normal to the society in which it takes place.Upon the contrary, the attempt to create a large number of shareholders in such enterprises and artificially to substitute many partners, distributed throughout a great number of the population, in the place of the original few capitalist owners, would prove lengthy and at every step would arouse opposition, would create disturbance, would work at an expense of great friction, and would be imperilled by the power of the new and many owners to sell again to a few.In a word, the man who desires to re-establish property as an institution normal to most citizens in the State isworking against the grainof our existing Capitalist society, while a man who desires to establish Socialism—that is Collectivism—is workingwiththe grain of that society. The first is like a physician who should say to a man whose limbs were partially atrophied from disuse: “Do this and that, take such and such exercise, and you will recover the use of your limbs.” The second is like a physician who should say: “You cannot go on as you are. Your limbs are atrophied from lack of use. Your attempt to conduct yourself as though they were not is useless and painful; you had better make up your mind to be wheeled about in a fashion consonant to your disease.” The Physician is the Reformer, his Patient the Proletariat.It is not the purpose of this book to show how and under what difficulties a condition of well-divided property might be restored and might take the place (even in England) of that Capitalism which is now no longer either stable or tolerable; but for the purposes of contrast and to emphasise my argument I will proceed, before showing how the Collectivist unconsciously makes for the Servile State, to show what difficulties surround the Distributive solution and why, therefore, the Collectivist solution appeals so much more readily to men living under Capitalism.If I desire to substitute a number of small owners for a few large ones in some particular enterprise, how shall I set to work?I might boldly confiscate and redistribute at a blow. But by what process should I choose the new owners? Even supposing that there was some machinery whereby the justice of the new distribution could be assured, how could I avoid the enormous and innumerable separate acts of injustice that would attach to general redistributions? To say “none shall own” and to confiscate is one thing; to say “all should own” and apportion ownership is another. Action of this kind would so disturb the whole network of economic relations as to bring ruin at once to the whole body politic, and particularly to the smaller interests indirectly affected. In a society such as ours a catastrophe falling upon the State from outside might indirectly do good by making such a redistribution possible. But no one working from within the State could provoke that catastrophe without ruining his own cause.If, then, I proceed more slowly and more rationally and canalise the economic life of society so that small property shall gradually be built up within it, see against what forces of inertia and custom I have to work to-day in a Capitalist society!If I desire to benefit small savings at the expense of large, I must reverse the whole economy under which interest is paid upon deposits to-day. It is far easier to save £100 out of a revenue of £1,000 than to save £10 out of a revenue of £100. It is infinitely easier to save £10 out of a revenue of £100 than £5 out of a revenue of £50. To build up small property through thrift when once the Mass have fallen into the proletarian trough is impossible unless you deliberately subsidise small savings, offering them a reward which, in competition, they could never obtain; and to do this the whole vast arrangement of credit must be worked backwards. Or, let the policy be pursued of penalising undertakings with few owners, of heavily taxing large blocks of shares and of subsidising with the produce small holders in proportion to the smallness of their holding. Here again you are met with the difficulty of a vast majority who cannot even bid for the smallest share.One might multiply instances of the sort indefinitely, but the strongest force against the distribution of ownership in a society already permeated with Capitalist modes of thought is still the moral one: Will men want to own? Will officials, administrators, and lawmakers be able to shake off the power which under Capitalism seems normal to the rich? If I approach, for instance, the works of one of our great Trusts, purchase it with public money, bestow, even as a gift, the shares thereof to its workmen, can I count upon any tradition of property in their midst which will prevent their squandering the new wealth? Can I discover any relics of the co-operative instinct among such men? Could I get managers and organisers to take a group of poor men seriously or to serve them as they would serve rich men? Is not the whole psychology of a Capitalist society divided between the proletarian mass which thinks in terms not of property but of “employment,” and the few owners who are alone familiar with the machinery of administration?I have touched but very briefly and superficially upon this matter, because it needs no elaboration. Though it is evident that with a sufficient will and a sufficient social vitality property could be restored, it is evident that all efforts to restore it have in a Capitalist society such as our own a note of oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other social things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any such attempt must proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.On the other hand, the Collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in appearance at least) to the Capitalist society which it proposes to replace. It works with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and thinks in the existing terms of Capitalism, appeals to just those appetites which Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed among men wherever the blight of it has spread.So true is all this that the stupider kind of Collectivist will often talk of a “Capitalist phase” of society as the necessary precedent to a “Collectivist phase.” A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it “furnishes a mode of transition from private to public ownership.” Collectivism promises employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms of employment. It promises to its workmen the security which a great and well-organised industrial Capitalist unit (like one of our railways) can give through a system of pensions, regular promotion, etc., but that security vastly increased through the fact that it is the State and not a mere unit of the State which guarantees it. Collectivism would administer, would pay wages, would promote, would pension off, would fine—and all the rest of it—exactly as the Capitalist State does to-day. The proletarian, when the Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, perceives nothing in the picture save certain ameliorations of his present position. Who can imagine that if, say, two of our great industries, Coal and Railways, were handed over to the State tomorrow, the armies of men organised therein would find any change in the character of their lives, save in some increase of security and possibly in a very slight increase of earnings?The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass of a Capitalist State is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise of some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.To that small minority of a Capitalist society which owns the means of production, Collectivism will of course appear as an enemy, but, even so, it is an enemy which they understand and an enemy with whom they can treat in terms common both to that enemy and to themselves. If, for instance, the State proposes to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 per cent. and believes that under State management it will make the trust pay 5 per cent. then the transference takes the form of a business proposition: the State is no harder to the Capitalists taken over than was Mr Yerkes to the Underground. Again, the State, having greater credit and longevity, can (it would seem)5“buy out” any existing Capitalist body upon favourable terms. Again, the discipline by which the State would enforce its rules upon the proletariat it employed would be the same rules as those by which the Capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests to-day.There is in the whole scheme which proposes to transform the Capitalist into the Collectivist State no element of reaction, the use of no term with which a Capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no instinct, whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a Capitalist community is not amply familiar.In general, if modern Capitalist England were made by magic a State of small owners, we should all suffer an enormous revolution. We should marvel at the insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, at the strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, vigorous personalities discernible upon every side. But if this modern Capitalist England could, by a process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjustment of individual interests, be transformed into a Collectivist State, the apparent change at the end of that transition would not be conspicuous to the most of us, and the transition itself should have met with no shocks that theory can discover. The insecure and hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks of labour would have disappeared into isolated workplaces of a penal kind: we should hardly miss them. Many incomes now involving considerable duties to the State would have been replaced by incomes as large or larger, involving much the same duties and bearing only the newer name of salaries. The small shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed under public schemes at a salary, in part engaged in the old work of distribution at secure incomes; and such small owners as are left, of boats, of farms, even of machinery, would perhaps know the new state of things into which they had survived through nothing more novel than some increase in the irritating system of inspection and of onerous petty taxation: they are already fairly used to both.This picture of the natural transition from Capitalism to Collectivism seems so obvious that many Collectivists in a generation immediately past believed that nothing stood between them and the realisation of their ideal save the unintelligence of mankind. They had only to argue and expound patiently and systematically for the great transformation to become possible. They had only to continue arguing and expounding for it at last to be realised.I say, “of the last generation.” To-day that simple and superficial judgment is getting woefully disturbed. The most sincere and single-minded of Collectivists cannot but note that the practical effect of their propaganda is not an approach towards the Collectivist State at all, but towards something very different. It is becoming more and more evident that with every new reform—and those reforms commonly promoted by particular Socialists, and in a puzzled way blessed by Socialists in general—another state emerges more and more clearly. It is becoming increasingly certain that the attempted transformation of Capitalism into Collectivism is resulting not in Collectivism at all, but in some third thing which the Collectivist never dreamt of, or the Capitalist either; and that third thing is theServileState: a State, that is, in which the mass of men shall be constrainedby lawto labour to the profit of a minority, but, as the price of such constraint, shall enjoy a security which the old Capitalism did not give them.Why is the apparently simple and direct action of Collectivist reform diverted into so unexpected a channel? And in what new laws and institutions does modern England in particular and industrial society in general show that this new form of the State is upon us?To these two questions I will attempt an answer in the two concluding divisions of this book.

I say that the line of least resistance, if it be followed, leads a Capitalist State to transform itself into a Servile State.

I propose to show that this comes about from the fact that not aDistributivebut aCollectivistsolution is the easiest for a Capitalist State to aim at, and that yet, in the very act of attemptingCollectivism, what results is not Collectivism at all, but the servitude of the many, and the confirmation in their present privilege of the few; that is, the Servile State.

Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhorrent propose for the remedy of Capitalism one of two reforms.

Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing land and capital that a determining number of families in the State were possessed of the means of production; or they would put those means of production into the hands of the political officers of the community, to be held in trust for the advantage of all.

The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of theDistributive State. The second may be called the attempted establishment of theCollectivist State.

Those who favour the first course are the Conservatives or Traditionalists. They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed throughout the State during the happiest periods of our past history; they also know that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have greater social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would re-establish, if possible, the Distributive State in the place of, and as a remedy for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned with known realities, and having for their ideal a condition of society which experience has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of the two schools of reformers, the morepracticalin the sense that they deal more than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists) with things which either are or have been in actual existence. But they are less practical in another sense (as we shall see in a moment) from the fact that the stage of the disease with which they are dealing does not readily lend itself to such a reaction as they propose.

The Collectivist, on the other hand, proposes to put land and capital into the hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently dealing with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that has been tested by experience, nor one of which our race and history can furnish instances. In this sense, therefore, he is thelesspractical of the two reformers. His ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine Socialism in actual working, nor can we say (as we can say of well-divided property): “On such and such an occasion, in such and such a period of European history, Collectivism was established and produced both stability and happiness in society.”

In this sense, therefore, the Collectivist is far less practical than the reformer who desires well-distributed property.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which this Socialist is more practical than that other type of reformer, from the fact that the stage of the disease into which we have fallen apparently admits of his remedy with less shock than it admits of a reaction towards well-divided property.

For example: the operation of buying out some great tract of private ownership to-day (as a railway or a harbour company) with public funds, continuing its administration by publicly paid officials and converting its revenue to public use, is a thing with which we are familiar and which seemingly might be indefinitely multiplied. Individual examples of such transformation of waterworks, gas, tramways, from a Capitalist to a Collectivist basis are common, and the change does not disturb any fundamental thing in our society. When a private Water company or Tramway line is bought by some town and worked thereafter in the interests of the public, the transaction is effected without any perceptible friction, disturbs the life of no private citizen, and seems in every way normal to the society in which it takes place.

Upon the contrary, the attempt to create a large number of shareholders in such enterprises and artificially to substitute many partners, distributed throughout a great number of the population, in the place of the original few capitalist owners, would prove lengthy and at every step would arouse opposition, would create disturbance, would work at an expense of great friction, and would be imperilled by the power of the new and many owners to sell again to a few.

In a word, the man who desires to re-establish property as an institution normal to most citizens in the State isworking against the grainof our existing Capitalist society, while a man who desires to establish Socialism—that is Collectivism—is workingwiththe grain of that society. The first is like a physician who should say to a man whose limbs were partially atrophied from disuse: “Do this and that, take such and such exercise, and you will recover the use of your limbs.” The second is like a physician who should say: “You cannot go on as you are. Your limbs are atrophied from lack of use. Your attempt to conduct yourself as though they were not is useless and painful; you had better make up your mind to be wheeled about in a fashion consonant to your disease.” The Physician is the Reformer, his Patient the Proletariat.

It is not the purpose of this book to show how and under what difficulties a condition of well-divided property might be restored and might take the place (even in England) of that Capitalism which is now no longer either stable or tolerable; but for the purposes of contrast and to emphasise my argument I will proceed, before showing how the Collectivist unconsciously makes for the Servile State, to show what difficulties surround the Distributive solution and why, therefore, the Collectivist solution appeals so much more readily to men living under Capitalism.

If I desire to substitute a number of small owners for a few large ones in some particular enterprise, how shall I set to work?

I might boldly confiscate and redistribute at a blow. But by what process should I choose the new owners? Even supposing that there was some machinery whereby the justice of the new distribution could be assured, how could I avoid the enormous and innumerable separate acts of injustice that would attach to general redistributions? To say “none shall own” and to confiscate is one thing; to say “all should own” and apportion ownership is another. Action of this kind would so disturb the whole network of economic relations as to bring ruin at once to the whole body politic, and particularly to the smaller interests indirectly affected. In a society such as ours a catastrophe falling upon the State from outside might indirectly do good by making such a redistribution possible. But no one working from within the State could provoke that catastrophe without ruining his own cause.

If, then, I proceed more slowly and more rationally and canalise the economic life of society so that small property shall gradually be built up within it, see against what forces of inertia and custom I have to work to-day in a Capitalist society!

If I desire to benefit small savings at the expense of large, I must reverse the whole economy under which interest is paid upon deposits to-day. It is far easier to save £100 out of a revenue of £1,000 than to save £10 out of a revenue of £100. It is infinitely easier to save £10 out of a revenue of £100 than £5 out of a revenue of £50. To build up small property through thrift when once the Mass have fallen into the proletarian trough is impossible unless you deliberately subsidise small savings, offering them a reward which, in competition, they could never obtain; and to do this the whole vast arrangement of credit must be worked backwards. Or, let the policy be pursued of penalising undertakings with few owners, of heavily taxing large blocks of shares and of subsidising with the produce small holders in proportion to the smallness of their holding. Here again you are met with the difficulty of a vast majority who cannot even bid for the smallest share.

One might multiply instances of the sort indefinitely, but the strongest force against the distribution of ownership in a society already permeated with Capitalist modes of thought is still the moral one: Will men want to own? Will officials, administrators, and lawmakers be able to shake off the power which under Capitalism seems normal to the rich? If I approach, for instance, the works of one of our great Trusts, purchase it with public money, bestow, even as a gift, the shares thereof to its workmen, can I count upon any tradition of property in their midst which will prevent their squandering the new wealth? Can I discover any relics of the co-operative instinct among such men? Could I get managers and organisers to take a group of poor men seriously or to serve them as they would serve rich men? Is not the whole psychology of a Capitalist society divided between the proletarian mass which thinks in terms not of property but of “employment,” and the few owners who are alone familiar with the machinery of administration?

I have touched but very briefly and superficially upon this matter, because it needs no elaboration. Though it is evident that with a sufficient will and a sufficient social vitality property could be restored, it is evident that all efforts to restore it have in a Capitalist society such as our own a note of oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other social things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any such attempt must proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.

On the other hand, the Collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in appearance at least) to the Capitalist society which it proposes to replace. It works with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and thinks in the existing terms of Capitalism, appeals to just those appetites which Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed among men wherever the blight of it has spread.

So true is all this that the stupider kind of Collectivist will often talk of a “Capitalist phase” of society as the necessary precedent to a “Collectivist phase.” A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it “furnishes a mode of transition from private to public ownership.” Collectivism promises employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms of employment. It promises to its workmen the security which a great and well-organised industrial Capitalist unit (like one of our railways) can give through a system of pensions, regular promotion, etc., but that security vastly increased through the fact that it is the State and not a mere unit of the State which guarantees it. Collectivism would administer, would pay wages, would promote, would pension off, would fine—and all the rest of it—exactly as the Capitalist State does to-day. The proletarian, when the Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, perceives nothing in the picture save certain ameliorations of his present position. Who can imagine that if, say, two of our great industries, Coal and Railways, were handed over to the State tomorrow, the armies of men organised therein would find any change in the character of their lives, save in some increase of security and possibly in a very slight increase of earnings?

The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass of a Capitalist State is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise of some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.

To that small minority of a Capitalist society which owns the means of production, Collectivism will of course appear as an enemy, but, even so, it is an enemy which they understand and an enemy with whom they can treat in terms common both to that enemy and to themselves. If, for instance, the State proposes to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 per cent. and believes that under State management it will make the trust pay 5 per cent. then the transference takes the form of a business proposition: the State is no harder to the Capitalists taken over than was Mr Yerkes to the Underground. Again, the State, having greater credit and longevity, can (it would seem)5“buy out” any existing Capitalist body upon favourable terms. Again, the discipline by which the State would enforce its rules upon the proletariat it employed would be the same rules as those by which the Capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests to-day.

There is in the whole scheme which proposes to transform the Capitalist into the Collectivist State no element of reaction, the use of no term with which a Capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no instinct, whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a Capitalist community is not amply familiar.

In general, if modern Capitalist England were made by magic a State of small owners, we should all suffer an enormous revolution. We should marvel at the insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, at the strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, vigorous personalities discernible upon every side. But if this modern Capitalist England could, by a process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjustment of individual interests, be transformed into a Collectivist State, the apparent change at the end of that transition would not be conspicuous to the most of us, and the transition itself should have met with no shocks that theory can discover. The insecure and hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks of labour would have disappeared into isolated workplaces of a penal kind: we should hardly miss them. Many incomes now involving considerable duties to the State would have been replaced by incomes as large or larger, involving much the same duties and bearing only the newer name of salaries. The small shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed under public schemes at a salary, in part engaged in the old work of distribution at secure incomes; and such small owners as are left, of boats, of farms, even of machinery, would perhaps know the new state of things into which they had survived through nothing more novel than some increase in the irritating system of inspection and of onerous petty taxation: they are already fairly used to both.

This picture of the natural transition from Capitalism to Collectivism seems so obvious that many Collectivists in a generation immediately past believed that nothing stood between them and the realisation of their ideal save the unintelligence of mankind. They had only to argue and expound patiently and systematically for the great transformation to become possible. They had only to continue arguing and expounding for it at last to be realised.

I say, “of the last generation.” To-day that simple and superficial judgment is getting woefully disturbed. The most sincere and single-minded of Collectivists cannot but note that the practical effect of their propaganda is not an approach towards the Collectivist State at all, but towards something very different. It is becoming more and more evident that with every new reform—and those reforms commonly promoted by particular Socialists, and in a puzzled way blessed by Socialists in general—another state emerges more and more clearly. It is becoming increasingly certain that the attempted transformation of Capitalism into Collectivism is resulting not in Collectivism at all, but in some third thing which the Collectivist never dreamt of, or the Capitalist either; and that third thing is theServileState: a State, that is, in which the mass of men shall be constrainedby lawto labour to the profit of a minority, but, as the price of such constraint, shall enjoy a security which the old Capitalism did not give them.

Why is the apparently simple and direct action of Collectivist reform diverted into so unexpected a channel? And in what new laws and institutions does modern England in particular and industrial society in general show that this new form of the State is upon us?

To these two questions I will attempt an answer in the two concluding divisions of this book.

Section EightThe Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile StateI propose in this section to show how the three interests which between them account for nearly the whole of the forces making for social change in modern England are all necessarily drifting towards the Servile State.Of these three interests the first two represent the Reformers—the third the people to be Reformed.These three interests are, first, theSocialist, who is the theoretical reformer working along the line of least resistance; secondly, the “Practical Man” who as a “practical” reformer depends on his shortness of sight, and is therefore to-day a powerful factor; while the third is that great proletarian mass for whom the change is being effected, and on whom it is being imposed. Whattheyare most likely to accept, the way in which they will react upon new institutions is the most important factor of all, fortheyare the material with and upon which the work is being done.(1) Of theSocialistReformer:I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (a) the man who regards the public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (b) the man who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences oftheirvice, ignorance, and folly.These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least resistance will either be led?(a) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of them in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation a stony moral barrier. It is whatmostmen would call the moral basis of property (the instinct that property is aright), and whatallmen would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.To take a very simple case. Decree that all common lands enclosed since so late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society; but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved and all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention—as it must be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental importance—the expedient of “buying out” the present owner.It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to “buy out” without confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my reformer’s action.He does not confiscate, then; at the most he “buys out” (or attempts to “buy out”) certain sections of the means of production.But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution which it causes in great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity which it imposes upon all. He is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess the possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when we are dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to modify the factor of freedom.You can say to the Capitalist: “I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives.” The Capitalist replies: “I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the Capitalist, as a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more secure.”This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred; as to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open. Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and that sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen its channel; there will the main stream learn to run.To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist’s demand which are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it in order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately preceding it: there is no need to go further.In this way the Socialist whose motive is human good and not mere organisation is being shepherded in spite of himselfawayfrom his Collectivist ideal andtowardsa society in which the possessors shall remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed, in which the mass of men shall still work for the advantage of a few, and in which those few shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, but in which the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency, in the main the product of freedom, have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom.At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men, the owners economically free, and controlling to their peace and to the guarantee of their livelihood the economically unfree non-owners. But that is the Servile State.(b) The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly. In him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar. Tables, statistics, an exact framework for life—these afford him the food that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most congenial to him is the “running” of men: as a machine is run.To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals.It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and organic complexity which is the colour of any vital society offends him by its infinite differentiation. He is disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the coordinate work of public clerks and marshalled by powerful heads of departments gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so suits his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said that in his vision of a future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least a department and possibly of the whole State—but that is by the way.) But while he would prefer to begin with a Collectivist scheme ready-made, he finds in practice that he cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as the more hearty Socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the man burning at the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense than a mechanical appetite for regulation?He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the best he will “buy out” the Capitalist.Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human Socialist, “buying out” is, as I shall show in its proper place, a system impossible of general application.But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he does for the socialisation of the means of production—tabulation, detailed administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under one schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his Department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their freedom, nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency or insecurity—and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing towards which he drifts, it is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal Collectivist State, which alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called themselves “Socialists” are now less concerned with any scheme for socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable schemes actually existing, some of them possessing already the force of laws, for regulating, “running,” and drilling the proletariat without trenching by an inch upon the privilege in implements, stores, and land enjoyed by the small Capitalist class.The so-called “Socialist” of this type has not fallen into the Servile State by a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he foresees his power over its future.So much for the Socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to transform our Capitalist society into one where the community should be the universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its tutelage. To-day their ideal has failed, and of the two sources whence their energy proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly, acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not Socialist at all but Servile.(2) Of thePracticalReformer:There is another type of Reformer, one who prides himself onnotbeing a socialist, and one of the greatest weight to-day. He also is making for the Servile State. This second factor in the change is the “Practical Man”; and this fool, on account of his great numbers and determining influence in the details of legislation, must be carefully examined.It is your “Practical Man” who says: “Whatever you theorists and doctrinaires may hold with regard to this proposal (which I support), though it may offend some abstract dogma of yours, yetin practiceyou must admit that it does good. If you hadpracticalexperience of the misery of the Jones’ family, or had donepracticalwork yourself in Pudsey, you would have seen that apracticalman,” etc.It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is exactly the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the Practical Man where-ever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think.Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and do a little thinking for him.As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, andhisfirst principles and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors hold in the matter of social reform. The two things intolerable to him as a decent citizen (though a very stupid human being) areinsufficiencyandinsecurity. When he was “working” in the slums of Pudsey or raiding the proletarian Jones’s from the secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the worthy man most was “unemployment” and “destitution”: that is, insecurity and insufficiency in flesh and blood.Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, whether as a mere organiser or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice, is led away from Socialism and towards the Servile State by the force of modern things in England, how much more easily do you not think the “Practical Man” will be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his grazing ground? To those dull and shortsighted eyes the immediate solution which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile State with the same inevitable ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give him something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then Jones will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work. If you get him work “under our unorganised and wasteful system, etc.,” he may lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The slums of Pudsey, as the Practical Man knows by Practical experience, are often unemployable. Then there are “the ravages of drink”: more fatal still the dreadful habit mankind has of forming families and breeding children. The worthy fellow notes that “as a practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you make them.”He does not, because he cannot, coordinate all these things. He knows nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the co-operative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership which such a society spontaneously breeds. He “takes the world as he finds it”—and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile State,he, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in the building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or suspect the process.It has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power. Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen until our time. Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.The Practical Man left to himself would not produce the Servile State. He would not produce anything but a welter of anarchic restrictions which would lead at last to some kind of revolt.Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but the ally or flanking party of great forces which he does nothing to oppose, and of particular men, able and prepared for the work of general change, who use him with gratitude and contempt. Were he not so numerous in modern England, and, under the extraordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economically powerful, I would have neglected him in this analysis. As it is, we may console ourselves by remembering that the advent of the Servile State, with its powerful organisation and necessity for lucid thought in those who govern, will certainly eliminate him.Our reformers, then, both those who think and those who do not, both those who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it, are making directly for the Servile State.(3) What of the third factor? What of the people about to be reformed? What of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and who are the subject of the great experiment? Do they tend, as material, to accept or to reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude which is the argument of this book?The question is an important one to decide, for upon whether the material is suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected, depends the success of every experiment making for the Servile State.The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of definition, the actual number of the proletariat and the proportion that number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but must be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before we can call that StateCapitalist.But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a stable, and therefore not a permanent, condition of society. It has proved ephemeral; and upon that very account the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a greater or less degree some memories of a state of society in which its ancestors were possessors of property and economically free.The strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to bear in mind in our problem, when we examine how far a particular proletariat, such as the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the Servile State, which would condemn it to a perpetual loss of property and of all the free habit which property engenders.Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the Capitalist class may be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat class. Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the first development of Capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to impress the imagination of the general. Such recruitment is still possible. The proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat, the chance which each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his proletarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism such as is ours to-day, is the second factor in the problem.The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is the appetite of the dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which Capitalism, with its essential condition of freedom, has deprived them.Now let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English proletariat as we actually know it at this moment. That proletariat is certainly the great mass of the State: it covers about nineteen-twentieths of the population—if we exclude Ireland, where, as I shall point out in my concluding pages, the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against its development towards a Servile State, is already successful.As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly within the memory of men now living. The traditional rights of property are still strong in the minds of the English poor. All the moral connotations of that right are familiar to them. They are familiar with the conception of theft as a wrong; they are tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire. They could all explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy, by exchange, and by gift, and even by contract. There is not one but could put himself in the position, mentally, of an owner.But the actual experience of ownership, and the effect which that experience has upon character and upon one’s view of the State is a very different matter. Within the memory of people still living a sufficient number of Englishmen were owning (as small freeholders, small masters, etc.) to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very vivid effect upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a living tradition proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living testimony to the relics of a better state of things. I have myself spoken, when I was a boy, to old labourers in the neighbourhood of Oxford who had risked their skins in armed protest against the enclosure of certain commons, and who had of course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as the reward of their courage; and I have myself spoken in Lancashire to old men who could retrace for me, either from their personal experience the last phases of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their fathers had told them, the conditions of a time when small and well-divided ownership in cottage looms was actually common.All that has passed. The last chapter of its passage has been singularly rapid. Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct, use, and meaning of property is lost to it: and this has had two very powerful effects, each strongly inclining our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers which lay between a condition of servitude and a condition of freedom. The first effect is this: that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they think obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that they regard the possessors of property as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately obey, often envy, and sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a position most of them would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now strongly deny, but whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.To sum up: The attitude of the proletariat in England to-day (the attitude of the overwhelming majority, that is, of English families) towards property and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through property is no longer an attitude of experience or of expectation. They think of themselves as wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the wage-earner is an object which they vividly appreciate and pursue. To make him cease to be a wage earner is an object that would seem to them entirely outside the realities of life.What of the second factor, the gambling chance which the Capitalist system, with its necessary condition of freedom, of the legal power to bargain fully, and so forth, permits to the proletarian of escaping from his proletariat surroundings?Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men’s minds we may say that, while it has not disappeared, it has very greatly lost in force during the last forty years. One often meets men who tell one, whether they are speaking in defence of or against the Capitalist system, that it still blinds the proletarian to any common consciousness of class, because the proletarian still has the example before him of members of his class, whom he has known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position of capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves, one discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men in great groups of industry, notably in the transport industry and in the mines, have quite given up such an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exaggerated as the hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny chance has fallen in the general opinion of the workers to be negligible, and that hope which a lottery breeds is extinguished. The proletarian now regards himself as definitely proletarian, nor destined within human likelihood to be anything but proletarian.These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most stronglyagainstthe acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor in the situation which is making so stronglyforthe Servile State, and which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security. It is this third factor alone which need be seriously considered to-day, when we ask ourselves how far the material upon which social reform is working, that is, the masses of the people, may be ready to accept the change.The thing may be put in many ways. I will put it in what I believe to be the most conclusive of all.If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage, with the proposal for a contract of service for life, guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would refuse?Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom: a life-contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is the negation of contract and the acceptation of status. It would lay the man that undertook it under an obligation of forced labour, coterminous and coincident with his power to labour. It would be a permanent renunciation of his right (if such a right exists) to the surplus values created by his labour. If we ask ourselves how many men, or rather how many families, would prefer freedom (with its accompaniments of certain insecurity and possible insufficiency) to such a life-contract, no one can deny that the answer is: “Very few would refuse it.” That is the key to the whole matter.What proportion would refuse it no one can determine; but I say that even as a voluntary offer, and not as a compulsory obligation, a contract of this sort which would for the future destroy contract and re-erect status of a servile sort would be thought a boon by the mass of the proletariat to-day.Now take the truth from another aspect—by considering it thus from one point of view and from another we can appreciate it best—Of what are the mass of men now most afraid in a Capitalist State? Not of the punishments that can be inflicted by a Court of Law, but of “the sack.”You may ask a man why he does not resist such and such a legal infamy; why he permits himself to be the victim of fines and deductions from which the Truck Acts specifically protect him; why he cannot assert his opinion in this or that matter; why he has accepted, without a blow, such and such an insult.Some generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment.Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome public law, and the sanctions which the Capitalist can call to the aid of his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than those which the public Courts can impose.In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favour of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him. To deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments which most men dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of private powers involves to-day a private punishment against the threat of which very few indeed dare to stand out.Look at the matter from yet another aspect. A law is passed (let us suppose) which increases the total revenue of a wage-earner, or guarantees him against the insecurity of his position in some small degree. The administration of that law requires, upon the one hand, a close inquisition into the man’s circumstances by public officials, and, upon the other hand, the administration of its benefits by that particular Capitalist or group of Capitalists whom the wage-earner serves to enrich. Do the Servile conditions attaching to this material benefit prevent a proletarian in England to-day from preferring the benefit to freedom? It is notorious that they do not.No matter from what angle you approach the business, the truth is always the same. That great mass of wage-earners upon which our society now reposes understands as a present good all that will increase even to some small amount their present revenue and all that may guarantee them against those perils of insecurity to which they are perpetually subject. They understand and welcome a good of this kind, and they are perfectly willing to pay for that good the corresponding price of control and enregimentation, exercised in gradually increasing degree by those who are their paymasters.It would be easy by substituting superficial for fundamental things, or even by proposing certain terms and phrases to be used in the place of terms and phrases now current it would be easy, I say, by such methods to ridicule or to oppose the prime truths which I am here submitting. They none the less remain truths.Substitute for the term “employee” in one of our new laws the term “serf,” even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term “master” for the word “employer,” and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no revolt; on the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon them through a freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense of losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect ofhaving enoughandnot losing it.All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase of our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is canalised towards it; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his ideal; the herd of “practical” men meet at every stage in its inception the “practical” steps which they expected and demanded; while that proletarian mass upon whom the experiment is being tried have lost the tradition of property and of freedom which might resist the change, and are most powerfully inclined to its acceptance by the positive benefits which it confers.It may be objected that however true all this may be, no one can, upon such theoretical grounds, regard the Servile State as something really approaching us. We need not believe in its advent (we shall be told) until we see the first effects of its action.To this I answer that the first effects of its action are already apparent. The Servile State is, in industrial England to-day, no longer a menace but something in actual existence. It is in process of construction. The first main lines of it are already plotted out; the cornerstone of it is already laid.To see the truth of this it is enough to consider laws and projects of law, the first of which we already enjoy, while the last will pass from project to positive statute in due process of time.

I propose in this section to show how the three interests which between them account for nearly the whole of the forces making for social change in modern England are all necessarily drifting towards the Servile State.

Of these three interests the first two represent the Reformers—the third the people to be Reformed.

These three interests are, first, theSocialist, who is the theoretical reformer working along the line of least resistance; secondly, the “Practical Man” who as a “practical” reformer depends on his shortness of sight, and is therefore to-day a powerful factor; while the third is that great proletarian mass for whom the change is being effected, and on whom it is being imposed. Whattheyare most likely to accept, the way in which they will react upon new institutions is the most important factor of all, fortheyare the material with and upon which the work is being done.

(1) Of theSocialistReformer:

I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.

The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (a) the man who regards the public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (b) the man who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences oftheirvice, ignorance, and folly.

These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.

Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least resistance will either be led?

(a) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of them in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation a stony moral barrier. It is whatmostmen would call the moral basis of property (the instinct that property is aright), and whatallmen would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.

To take a very simple case. Decree that all common lands enclosed since so late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society; but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved and all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention—as it must be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental importance—the expedient of “buying out” the present owner.

It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to “buy out” without confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my reformer’s action.

He does not confiscate, then; at the most he “buys out” (or attempts to “buy out”) certain sections of the means of production.

But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution which it causes in great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity which it imposes upon all. He is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.

Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.

This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess the possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when we are dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to modify the factor of freedom.

You can say to the Capitalist: “I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives.” The Capitalist replies: “I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the Capitalist, as a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more secure.”

This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred; as to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open. Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and that sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen its channel; there will the main stream learn to run.

To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist’s demand which are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.

When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it in order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.

Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately preceding it: there is no need to go further.

In this way the Socialist whose motive is human good and not mere organisation is being shepherded in spite of himselfawayfrom his Collectivist ideal andtowardsa society in which the possessors shall remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed, in which the mass of men shall still work for the advantage of a few, and in which those few shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, but in which the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency, in the main the product of freedom, have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom.

At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men, the owners economically free, and controlling to their peace and to the guarantee of their livelihood the economically unfree non-owners. But that is the Servile State.

(b) The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly. In him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar. Tables, statistics, an exact framework for life—these afford him the food that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most congenial to him is the “running” of men: as a machine is run.

To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals.

It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and organic complexity which is the colour of any vital society offends him by its infinite differentiation. He is disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the coordinate work of public clerks and marshalled by powerful heads of departments gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.

Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so suits his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said that in his vision of a future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least a department and possibly of the whole State—but that is by the way.) But while he would prefer to begin with a Collectivist scheme ready-made, he finds in practice that he cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as the more hearty Socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the man burning at the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense than a mechanical appetite for regulation?

He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the best he will “buy out” the Capitalist.

Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human Socialist, “buying out” is, as I shall show in its proper place, a system impossible of general application.

But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he does for the socialisation of the means of production—tabulation, detailed administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under one schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his Department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their freedom, nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency or insecurity—and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.

To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing towards which he drifts, it is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal Collectivist State, which alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called themselves “Socialists” are now less concerned with any scheme for socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable schemes actually existing, some of them possessing already the force of laws, for regulating, “running,” and drilling the proletariat without trenching by an inch upon the privilege in implements, stores, and land enjoyed by the small Capitalist class.

The so-called “Socialist” of this type has not fallen into the Servile State by a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he foresees his power over its future.

So much for the Socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to transform our Capitalist society into one where the community should be the universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its tutelage. To-day their ideal has failed, and of the two sources whence their energy proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly, acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not Socialist at all but Servile.

(2) Of thePracticalReformer:

There is another type of Reformer, one who prides himself onnotbeing a socialist, and one of the greatest weight to-day. He also is making for the Servile State. This second factor in the change is the “Practical Man”; and this fool, on account of his great numbers and determining influence in the details of legislation, must be carefully examined.

It is your “Practical Man” who says: “Whatever you theorists and doctrinaires may hold with regard to this proposal (which I support), though it may offend some abstract dogma of yours, yetin practiceyou must admit that it does good. If you hadpracticalexperience of the misery of the Jones’ family, or had donepracticalwork yourself in Pudsey, you would have seen that apracticalman,” etc.

It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is exactly the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the Practical Man where-ever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think.

Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and do a little thinking for him.

As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, andhisfirst principles and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors hold in the matter of social reform. The two things intolerable to him as a decent citizen (though a very stupid human being) areinsufficiencyandinsecurity. When he was “working” in the slums of Pudsey or raiding the proletarian Jones’s from the secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the worthy man most was “unemployment” and “destitution”: that is, insecurity and insufficiency in flesh and blood.

Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, whether as a mere organiser or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice, is led away from Socialism and towards the Servile State by the force of modern things in England, how much more easily do you not think the “Practical Man” will be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his grazing ground? To those dull and shortsighted eyes the immediate solution which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile State with the same inevitable ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give him something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then Jones will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work. If you get him work “under our unorganised and wasteful system, etc.,” he may lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The slums of Pudsey, as the Practical Man knows by Practical experience, are often unemployable. Then there are “the ravages of drink”: more fatal still the dreadful habit mankind has of forming families and breeding children. The worthy fellow notes that “as a practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you make them.”

He does not, because he cannot, coordinate all these things. He knows nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the co-operative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership which such a society spontaneously breeds. He “takes the world as he finds it”—and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile State,he, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in the building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or suspect the process.

It has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power. Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen until our time. Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.

The Practical Man left to himself would not produce the Servile State. He would not produce anything but a welter of anarchic restrictions which would lead at last to some kind of revolt.

Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but the ally or flanking party of great forces which he does nothing to oppose, and of particular men, able and prepared for the work of general change, who use him with gratitude and contempt. Were he not so numerous in modern England, and, under the extraordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economically powerful, I would have neglected him in this analysis. As it is, we may console ourselves by remembering that the advent of the Servile State, with its powerful organisation and necessity for lucid thought in those who govern, will certainly eliminate him.

Our reformers, then, both those who think and those who do not, both those who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it, are making directly for the Servile State.

(3) What of the third factor? What of the people about to be reformed? What of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and who are the subject of the great experiment? Do they tend, as material, to accept or to reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude which is the argument of this book?

The question is an important one to decide, for upon whether the material is suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected, depends the success of every experiment making for the Servile State.

The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of definition, the actual number of the proletariat and the proportion that number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but must be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before we can call that StateCapitalist.

But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a stable, and therefore not a permanent, condition of society. It has proved ephemeral; and upon that very account the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a greater or less degree some memories of a state of society in which its ancestors were possessors of property and economically free.

The strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to bear in mind in our problem, when we examine how far a particular proletariat, such as the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the Servile State, which would condemn it to a perpetual loss of property and of all the free habit which property engenders.

Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the Capitalist class may be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat class. Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the first development of Capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to impress the imagination of the general. Such recruitment is still possible. The proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat, the chance which each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his proletarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism such as is ours to-day, is the second factor in the problem.

The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is the appetite of the dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which Capitalism, with its essential condition of freedom, has deprived them.

Now let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English proletariat as we actually know it at this moment. That proletariat is certainly the great mass of the State: it covers about nineteen-twentieths of the population—if we exclude Ireland, where, as I shall point out in my concluding pages, the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against its development towards a Servile State, is already successful.

As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly within the memory of men now living. The traditional rights of property are still strong in the minds of the English poor. All the moral connotations of that right are familiar to them. They are familiar with the conception of theft as a wrong; they are tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire. They could all explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy, by exchange, and by gift, and even by contract. There is not one but could put himself in the position, mentally, of an owner.

But the actual experience of ownership, and the effect which that experience has upon character and upon one’s view of the State is a very different matter. Within the memory of people still living a sufficient number of Englishmen were owning (as small freeholders, small masters, etc.) to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very vivid effect upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a living tradition proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living testimony to the relics of a better state of things. I have myself spoken, when I was a boy, to old labourers in the neighbourhood of Oxford who had risked their skins in armed protest against the enclosure of certain commons, and who had of course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as the reward of their courage; and I have myself spoken in Lancashire to old men who could retrace for me, either from their personal experience the last phases of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their fathers had told them, the conditions of a time when small and well-divided ownership in cottage looms was actually common.

All that has passed. The last chapter of its passage has been singularly rapid. Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct, use, and meaning of property is lost to it: and this has had two very powerful effects, each strongly inclining our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers which lay between a condition of servitude and a condition of freedom. The first effect is this: that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they think obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that they regard the possessors of property as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately obey, often envy, and sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a position most of them would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now strongly deny, but whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.

To sum up: The attitude of the proletariat in England to-day (the attitude of the overwhelming majority, that is, of English families) towards property and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through property is no longer an attitude of experience or of expectation. They think of themselves as wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the wage-earner is an object which they vividly appreciate and pursue. To make him cease to be a wage earner is an object that would seem to them entirely outside the realities of life.

What of the second factor, the gambling chance which the Capitalist system, with its necessary condition of freedom, of the legal power to bargain fully, and so forth, permits to the proletarian of escaping from his proletariat surroundings?

Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men’s minds we may say that, while it has not disappeared, it has very greatly lost in force during the last forty years. One often meets men who tell one, whether they are speaking in defence of or against the Capitalist system, that it still blinds the proletarian to any common consciousness of class, because the proletarian still has the example before him of members of his class, whom he has known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position of capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves, one discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men in great groups of industry, notably in the transport industry and in the mines, have quite given up such an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exaggerated as the hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny chance has fallen in the general opinion of the workers to be negligible, and that hope which a lottery breeds is extinguished. The proletarian now regards himself as definitely proletarian, nor destined within human likelihood to be anything but proletarian.

These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most stronglyagainstthe acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor in the situation which is making so stronglyforthe Servile State, and which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security. It is this third factor alone which need be seriously considered to-day, when we ask ourselves how far the material upon which social reform is working, that is, the masses of the people, may be ready to accept the change.

The thing may be put in many ways. I will put it in what I believe to be the most conclusive of all.

If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage, with the proposal for a contract of service for life, guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would refuse?

Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom: a life-contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is the negation of contract and the acceptation of status. It would lay the man that undertook it under an obligation of forced labour, coterminous and coincident with his power to labour. It would be a permanent renunciation of his right (if such a right exists) to the surplus values created by his labour. If we ask ourselves how many men, or rather how many families, would prefer freedom (with its accompaniments of certain insecurity and possible insufficiency) to such a life-contract, no one can deny that the answer is: “Very few would refuse it.” That is the key to the whole matter.

What proportion would refuse it no one can determine; but I say that even as a voluntary offer, and not as a compulsory obligation, a contract of this sort which would for the future destroy contract and re-erect status of a servile sort would be thought a boon by the mass of the proletariat to-day.

Now take the truth from another aspect—by considering it thus from one point of view and from another we can appreciate it best—Of what are the mass of men now most afraid in a Capitalist State? Not of the punishments that can be inflicted by a Court of Law, but of “the sack.”

You may ask a man why he does not resist such and such a legal infamy; why he permits himself to be the victim of fines and deductions from which the Truck Acts specifically protect him; why he cannot assert his opinion in this or that matter; why he has accepted, without a blow, such and such an insult.

Some generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment.

Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome public law, and the sanctions which the Capitalist can call to the aid of his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than those which the public Courts can impose.

In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favour of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him. To deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments which most men dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of private powers involves to-day a private punishment against the threat of which very few indeed dare to stand out.

Look at the matter from yet another aspect. A law is passed (let us suppose) which increases the total revenue of a wage-earner, or guarantees him against the insecurity of his position in some small degree. The administration of that law requires, upon the one hand, a close inquisition into the man’s circumstances by public officials, and, upon the other hand, the administration of its benefits by that particular Capitalist or group of Capitalists whom the wage-earner serves to enrich. Do the Servile conditions attaching to this material benefit prevent a proletarian in England to-day from preferring the benefit to freedom? It is notorious that they do not.

No matter from what angle you approach the business, the truth is always the same. That great mass of wage-earners upon which our society now reposes understands as a present good all that will increase even to some small amount their present revenue and all that may guarantee them against those perils of insecurity to which they are perpetually subject. They understand and welcome a good of this kind, and they are perfectly willing to pay for that good the corresponding price of control and enregimentation, exercised in gradually increasing degree by those who are their paymasters.

It would be easy by substituting superficial for fundamental things, or even by proposing certain terms and phrases to be used in the place of terms and phrases now current it would be easy, I say, by such methods to ridicule or to oppose the prime truths which I am here submitting. They none the less remain truths.

Substitute for the term “employee” in one of our new laws the term “serf,” even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term “master” for the word “employer,” and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no revolt; on the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon them through a freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense of losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect ofhaving enoughandnot losing it.

All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase of our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is canalised towards it; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his ideal; the herd of “practical” men meet at every stage in its inception the “practical” steps which they expected and demanded; while that proletarian mass upon whom the experiment is being tried have lost the tradition of property and of freedom which might resist the change, and are most powerfully inclined to its acceptance by the positive benefits which it confers.

It may be objected that however true all this may be, no one can, upon such theoretical grounds, regard the Servile State as something really approaching us. We need not believe in its advent (we shall be told) until we see the first effects of its action.

To this I answer that the first effects of its action are already apparent. The Servile State is, in industrial England to-day, no longer a menace but something in actual existence. It is in process of construction. The first main lines of it are already plotted out; the cornerstone of it is already laid.

To see the truth of this it is enough to consider laws and projects of law, the first of which we already enjoy, while the last will pass from project to positive statute in due process of time.

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