§ 3.
Perhaps now the reader will be able to figure a little better the common texture of the life of a teacher or a housewife under Socialism. And incidentally I have glanced at the position a clever milliner or dressmaker would probably have under the altered conditions. The great mass of the employés in the distributing trade would obviously be living a sort of clarified, dignified version of their present existence, freed from their worst anxieties, the terror of the “swap,” the hopeless approach of old age, and from the sweated food and accommodation of the living-in system. Under Socialism the “living-in” system would be incredible. Their conditions of life would approximate to those of the teacher. Like him they would be enrolled a part of a great public service, and like him entitled to a minimum wage, and over and above that they would draw salaries commensurate with the positions their energy and ability had won. The prosperous merchant of to-day would find himself somewhere high in the hierarchy of the distributing service. If, for example, you are a tea merchant or a provision broker, then probably if you like that calling, you would be handling the same kind of goods, not for profit but efficiency, “shipping into the Midlands” from Liverpool, let us say, much as you do now. You would be keener on quality and less keen on deals; that is all. You would not be trying to “skin” a business rival, but very probably you would be just as keen to beat the London distributers and distinguish yourself in that way. And you would get a pretty good salary; modern Socialism does not propose to maintain any dead-level to the detriment of able men. Modern Socialism has cleared itself of that jealous hatred of prosperity that was once a part of class-war Socialism. You would be, you see, far more than you are now, one of the pillars of your town’s prosperity—and the Town Hall would be a place worth sitting in….
So far as the rank and file of the distributing service is concerned the chief differences would be a better education, security for a minimum living, an assured old age, shorter hours, more private freedom and more opportunity. Since the whole business would be public and the customer would be one’s indirect master through the polling booth, promotion would be far more by merit than it is now in private businesses, where irrelevant personal considerations are often overpowering, and it would be open to any one to apply for a transfer to some fresh position if he or she found insufficient scope in the old one. The staff of the stores will certainly “live out,” and their homes and way of living will be closely parallel to that of the two people I have sketched in §§ 1 and 2.
In the various municipal and State Transit Services, the condition of affairs would be even closer to a broadened and liberalized version of things as they are. The conductors and drivers will no doubt wear uniforms for convenience of recognition, but a uniform will carry with it no association with the idea of a livery as it does at the present time. Mostly this service will be run by young men, and each one, like the private of the democratic French Army, will feel that he has a marshal’s batôn in his knapsack. He will have had a good education; he will have short hours of duty and leisure for self-improvement or other pursuits, and if he remains a conductor or driver all his life he will have only his own unpretending qualities to thank for that. He will probably remain a conductor if he likes to remain a conductor, and go elsewhere if he does not. He is not obliged to take that batôn out and bother with it if he has quiet tastes.
The great organized industries, mining, cotton, iron, building and the like, would differ chiefly in the permanence of employment and the systematic evasion of the social hardship caused now-a-days by new inventions and economies in method. There will exist throughout the world an organized economic survey, which will continually prepare and revise estimates of the need of iron, coal, cloth and so forth in the coming months; the blind speculative production of our own times is due merely to the dark ignorance in which we work in these matters, and with such a survey, employment will lose much of the cruel intermittence it now displays. The men in these great productive services, quite equally with teachers and railwaymen, will be permanently employed. They will be no more taken on and turned off by the day or week than we should take on or turn off an extra policeman, or depend for our defence upon soldiers casually engaged upon the battlefield at sixpence an hour. And if by adopting some ingenious device we dispense suddenly with the labour of hundreds of men, the Socialist State will send them, not into the casual wards and colonies as our State does, to become a social burthen there, but into the technical schools to train for some fresh use of their energies. Taken all round, of course, these men, even the least enterprising or able, will be better off than they are now, with a fuller share of the product of their industry. Many will no doubt remain as they are, rather through want of ambition than want of push, because under Socialism life will be tolerable for a poor man. A man who chooses to do commonplace work and spend his leisure upon chess or billiards, or in gossip or eccentric studies, or amusing but ineffectual art, will remain a poor man indeed, but not be made a wretched one. Sheer toil of a mechanical sort there is little need of in the world now, it could be speedily dispensed with at a thousand points were human patience not cheaper than good machinery, but there will still remain ten thousand undistinguished sorts of work for unambitious men….
If you are a farmer or any sort of horticulturist, a fruit or flower grower, let us say, or a seedsman, you will probably find yourself still farming under Socialism—that is to say, renting land and getting what you can out of it. Your rent will be fixed just as it is to-day by what people will give. But your landlord will be the Municipality or the County, and the rent you pay will largely come back to you in repairs, in the guiding reports and advice of the Agricultural Department, in improved roads, in subventions to a good electric car service to take your produce to market; in aids and education for your children. You will probably have a greater fixity of tenure and a clearer ownership in improvements than you have to-day. I am inclined to think that your dairying and milking and so forth will be done for you wholesale in big public dairies and mills because of the economy of that; you will send up the crude produce and sell it, perhaps, to the county association to brand and distribute. It is probable you will sell your crops standing, and the public authority will organize the harvesting and bring out an army of workers from the towns to gather your fruit, hops and corn. You will need, therefore, only a small permanent staff of labourers, and these are much more likely to be partners with you in the enterprise than wage workers needing to be watched and driven.
In your leisure you will shoot, perhaps, or hunt, if your tastes incline that way—it is quite likely that scattered among the farms of the future countryside will be the cottages and homes of all sorts of people with open-air tastes who will share their sports with you. One need not dread the disappearance of sport with the disappearance of the great house…. In the dead winter-time you will probably like to run into the nearest big town with your wife and family, stay in an hotel for a few weeks to talk to people in your clubs, see what plays there are in the municipal theatres and so forth. And you will no doubt travel also in your holidays. All the world will know something of the pleasures and freedom of travel, of wandering and the enjoyment of unfamiliar atmospheres, of mountains and deserts and remote cities and deep forests, and the customs of alien peoples.
§4.
A medical man or woman, or a dentist or any such skilled professional, like the secondary school-master, will cease to be a private adventurer under Socialism, concerned chiefly with the taking of a showy house and the use of a showy conveyance; he or she will become part of one of the greatest of all the public services in the coming time, the service of public health. Either he—I use this pronoun and imply its feminine—will be on the staff of one of the main hospitals (which will not be charities, but amply endowed public institutions), or he will be a part of a district staff, working in conjunction with a nursing organization, a cottage hospital, an isolation hospital and so forth, or he will be an advising specialist, or mainly engaged in research or teaching and training a new generation in the profession.
He must not judge his life and position quite by the lives and position of publicly endowed investigators and medical officers of health to-day. At present, because of the jealousy of the private owner who has, as he says, to “find the funds,” almost all public employment is badly paid relatively to privately earned incomes. The same thing is true of all scientific investigators and of most public officials. The state of things to which Socialism points is a world that will necessarily be harmonious with these constructive conceptions and free from these jealousies. Whitehall and South Kensington have much to fear from the wanton columns of a vulgarized capitalistic press and from the greedy intrigues of syndicated capital, but nothing from a sane constructive Socialism. To the public official, therefore, of the present time, the Socialist has merely to say that he will probably be better paid, relatively, than he is now, and in the matter of his house rents and domestic marketing, vide supra….
But now, suppose you are an artist—and I use the word to cover all sorts of art, literary, dramatic and musical, as well as painting, sculpture, design and architecture—you want before all things freedom for personal expression, and you probably have an idea that this is the last thing you will get in the Socialist State. But, indeed, you will get far more than you do now. You will begin as a student, no doubt, in your local Municipal Art Schools, and there you will win prizes and scholarships and get some glorious years of youth and work in Italy or Paris, or Germany or London, or Boston or New York, or wherever the great teachers and workers of your art gather thickest; and then you will compete, perhaps, for some public work, and have something printed or published or reproduced and sold for you by your school or city; or get a loan from your home municipality for material—if your material costs money—and set to work making that into some saleable beautiful thing. If you are at all distinguished in quality, you will have a competition among public authorities from the beginning, to act as sponsors and dealers for your work; benevolent dealers they will be, and content with a commission. And if you make things that make many people interested and happy, you may by that fortunate gift of yours, grow to be as rich and magnificent a person as any one in the Socialist State. But if you do not please people at all, either the connoisseurs of the municipal art collection or private associations of art patrons or the popular buyer, well, then your lot will be no harder than the lot of any unsuccessful artist now; you will have to do something else for a time and win leisure to try again.
Theatrical productions will be run on a sort of improvement upon contemporary methods, but there will be no cornering of talent possible, no wild advertisement of favoured stars upon strictly commercial lines, no Theatrical Trust. The theatres will be municipal buildings, every theatre-going voter will be keen to see them comfortable and fine; they will, perhaps, be run in some cases by a public repertoire company and in another by a lessee, and this latter may be financed by his own private savings or by subscribers or partners, or by a loan from the public bank as the case may be. This latter method of exploitation by a lessee will probably also work best in the public Music Halls, but it is quite equally possible that these may be controlled by managers under partly elected and partly appointed public committees. In some cases the theatrical lessee might be a kind of stage society organized for the production of particular types of play. The spectators will pay for admission, of course, as they do now, but to the municipal box offices; and I suppose the lessee or the author and artists will divide up the surplus after the rent of the theatre has been deducted for the municipal treasury. In every town of any importance there will be many theatres, music halls and the like, perhaps under competing committees. In all these matters, as every intelligent person understands, one has to maintain variety of method, a choice of avenues, freedom from autocracies; and since the Socialist community will contain a great number of intelligent persons with leisure and opportunity for artistic appreciation, there is little chance of this important principle being forgotten, much less than there is in this world where a group of dealers can often make an absolute corner in this artistic market or that. You will not, under Socialism, see Sarah Bernhardt playing in a tent as she had to do in America, because all the theatres have been closed against her through some mean dispute with a Trust about the sharing of profits….
And if it is not too sudden a transition, it seems most convenient in a Socialist State to leave religious worship entirely to the care of private people; to let them subscribe among themselves, subject, of course, to a reasonable statute of mortmain, to lease land, and build and endow and maintain churches and chapels, altars and holy places and meeting-houses, priests and devout ceremonies. This will be the more easily done since the heavy social burthens that oppress religious bodies at the present time will be altogether lifted from them; they will have no poor to support, no schools, no hospitals, no nursing sisters, the advance of civilization will have taken over these duties of education and humanity that Christianity first taught us to realize. So, too, there seems no objection and no obstacle in Socialism to religious houses, to nunneries, monasteries and the like, so far as these institutions are compatible with personal freedom and the public health, but of course factory laws and building laws will run through all these places, and the common laws and limitations of contract override their vows, if their devotees repent. So that you see Socialism will touch nothing living of religion, and if you are a religious minister, you will be very much as you are at the present time, but with lightened parochial duties. If you are an earnest woman and want to nurse the sick and comfort the afflicted, you will need only, in addition to your religious profession, to qualify as a nurse or medical practitioner. There will still be ample need of you. Socialism will not make an end of human trouble, either of the body or of the soul, albeit it will put these things into such comfort and safety as it may.