"Any profits go to the State," I said.
A postman in the crowd stepped forward and told me what his weekly wage was, and I hastily withdrew my statement. To-day I should define it as a State Concern run on the principles of Private Profiteering, i.e., it considers labour a commodity to be bought.
The School Board here is theoretically a Socialistic body. Its members are chosen by the people to spend the public money on education. No member can make a profit out of a Board deal. Yet this board perpetrates all the evils of the private profiteer.
Mrs. Findlay gets ten pounds a year for cleaning the school. To the best of my knowledge she works four or five hours a day, and she spends the whole of each Saturday morning cleaning out the lavatories. This sum works out at about sixpence a day or three ha'pence an hour. Most of her work consists of carrying out the very considerable part of the playground that the bairns carry in on their boots. Yet all my requests for a few loads of gravel are ignored.
The members do not think that they are using sweated labour; they say that if Mrs. Findlay doesn't do it for the money half a dozen widows in the village will apply for the job. They believe in competition and the market value of labour.
A few Saturdays ago I rehearsed a cantata in the school, and I offered Mrs. Findlay half a crown for her extra trouble in sweeping the room twice. She refused it with dignity, she didn't mind obliging me, she said. And this kindly soul is merely a "hand" to be bought at the lowest price necessary for subsistence.
Sometimes I curse the Board as a crowd of exploiters, but in my more rational moments I see that they could not do much better if they tried. If Mrs. Findlay had a pound a week the employees of the farmers on the Board would naturally object to a woman's getting a pound a week out of the public funds for working four hours a day while they slaved from sunrise to sunset for less than a pound. A public conscience can never be better than the conscience of the public's representatives. Hence I have no faith in Socialism by Act of Parliament; I have no faith in municipalisation of trams and gas and water. Private profit disappears when the town council takes over the trams, but the greater evil—exploitation of labour remains.
Ah! I suddenly recollect that Mrs. Findlay has her old age pension each Friday. She thus has eight and six a week. I wonder did Lloyd George realise that his pension scheme would one day prevent fat farmers from having conscience qualms when they gave a widow sixpence a day?
* * *
As I came along the road this morning I saw half a dozen carts disgorging bricks on one of Lappiedub's fields. Lappiedub himself was standing by, and I asked him what was happening.