The Camel and the Needle's Eye

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby

When we come to the staff necessary for the maintenance of these large establishments we touch a problem of employment which must be examined more closely. It is not sufficient to state baldly that these people are employed, and that if the opening were not available for them they would be unemployed. The immediate result of their being discharged would no doubt in some cases be unemployment. That is just the mischief of uneconomic employment. If a large number were simultaneously dismissed there might be temporary unemployment on a large scale, as it would amount to dislocation, like the extinction of some dying industry. But the eventual readjustment would subsequently be by that much the stronger and better adapted to the real requirements of the community. To employ a man in useless and unremunerative work can be regarded in some aspects as worse than not employing him at all. It is not intended, however—and, indeed, it would be impossible—here to enter into a discussion on the whole problem of unemployment, but there is undoubtedly a very great economic waste that largely contributes to the gravity of the problem, arising from the fact that a large number of people are being forced to devote their labour and energy to work which is, so to speak, final and sterile. It is precisely the same with regard to the production of expensive luxuries. The employment of a large retinue is only another form of the possession and enjoyment of articles of excessive luxury. The employers and possessors have all disagreeable burdens and every sordid worry lifted from them, their smallest and their most extreme desires for pleasure met, their special appetites satisfied, their peculiar vanities titillated, and their artificial position safeguarded and maintained, without their giving more than a passing thought to the mass of people required to carry on this work. Plenty of examples might be quoted in contemporary as well as past history to show that after generations of the enjoyment of “the vile joys of tainting luxury” men deteriorate, both physically and mentally.

As for the particular line of life which domestic service offers under modern circumstances, it is not too much to say that it is, as a rule, very demoralising, more especially for the men. And its demoralising tendency increases in proportion to the size of the establishment. The single general servant lives a life of hard work but genuine service on four to eight shillings a week, often living in friendly relations with master or mistress, and really lifting from them the burden of necessary domestic duties which they with limited incomes and professional work of their own cannot possibly find time to perform; and this remains true in other small households. In the large house the faithful old family servant, who is more of a friend than a servitor, is rare in these days of ostentation. The butler, on wages of fifty to sixty shillings a week, which together with board and lodging represents from £250 to £300 a year, has a life of leisure, ease, and excessive comfort, seldom having to exert himself even up to his limited capacities. Male house-servants are often chosen for their looks; their work is very light physically, they are overfed, and being under-educated, can hardly be blamed for becoming demoralised. These able-bodied men, whose muscles, if not their minds, might be devoted to some really serviceable purpose, are still increasing in numbers. Over 25,000 more male servants have got employment in the last ten years, the total number now being 227,995. Even deducting the single indoor servant, the single coachman or gardener, this means a large increase of ornamental male attendants. Female servants are becoming more difficult to secure in the higher grades, because the class of women from which they are drawn value their liberty and are not so ready to sacrifice it for food and comforts. In fact, they are showing signs of impatience of control, and of preferring the risky though exhilarating struggle of independence. But still large retinues of men and women exist solely employed in keeping up huge houses to satisfy the vanity and minister to the comfort of a comparatively few rich people. No work of a more hopelessly barren, profitless, and, indeed, degrading character could be found for them. A system of tips deprives their smallest acts of what might be an obliging and disinterested intention. Arrangements are organised with tradesmen to defraud the employers in what is thought a perfectly legitimate way; the actual waste of food is appalling, and by extras, gratuities, perquisites, commissions, and pickings a considerable amount is added to the wages of the upper servants. In these large establishments immorality exists more as a rule than as an exception, but it can be kept secret, for these communities of private servants—like everything else connected with the lives of the rich—cannot be made the subject of investigation.

If assistance to those who need it is the object of domestic service, it is striking to note that on the money basis, generally speaking, the wrong people are served. Who in the community most require and should specially have the help of servants? The old and infirm, the weak and ill, the very young and the hard-worked. Service under such conditions raises itself to the level of one of the highest occupations that can be imagined. But this is not our system. A man or woman may be ill, old or over-worked, without being able to get the assistance of a single soul. Another man or woman may be young and healthy and have at his or her command a retinue of thirty servants or more, solely because they have money and servants are forced, by economic pressure, to devote their lives to the menial task of furbishing up the endless and complicated appanage of wealth.

Now let us turn to the inanimate luxuries, taking into account only indisputable luxuries—that is to say, articles of high price which have no special artistic value, to which much labour has been devoted and which are not produced to serve any legitimately useful purpose. Luxury has been well defined as “that which creates imaginary needs, exaggerates real wants, diverts them from their true end, establishes a habit of prodigality in Society, and offers through the senses a satisfaction of self-love which puffs up but does not nourish the heart and which presents to others the picture of happiness they can never attain.”

Bond Street catalogues abound with any quantity of examples. Furs at one thousand guineas, fifty-guinea dressing-bags, twenty-guinea hats, thousand-guinea tiaras, fruit and vegetables out of season, cigars at three shillings apiece, ruinously expensive wines, and fantastic foods of all descriptions. There is no need to exaggerate, for all those articles can be bought for much higher prices than those quoted. A great amount of skilled labour of a high order goes to the production of these luxuries, and a great amount of labour of the lowest and most cruelly sweated description is also enlisted for their production, and incredible as it may seem, it is on the ground that they give employment that these luxuries are defended. It was calculated in 1884[5] that, even giving a liberal extension of meaning to the term “necessaries” and “comforts” of life, over six millions of manual labourers, who with their families constitute thirteen millions of the population, were engaged in producing what, in contradistinction to the above, must be classified as luxuries.

A prominent statesman,[6] expressing the views of his class, said a few years ago: “The more human wants are stimulated and multiplied, the more widespread will be the inducement to hire. Therefore all outcries and prejudices against the progress of wealth and what is called luxury are nothing but outcries of prejudice against the very sources and fountains of all employment.”

On such an argument as this the defence of luxuries generally rests. The essence of the fallacy lies in the fact, which cannot be repeated too often, that labour spent on such articles is unremunerative and unproductive, because its ultimate result is only to gratify various forms of vanity and greed. To exemplify by a concrete instance what is unremunerative and what is remunerative, let us take a hundred-guinea ball-gown and a pair of boots. It is not possible to estimate the number of people employed in producing the ball-gown. There is the silk, satin, or whatever the principal material may be; there are the trimmings of chiffon, hand-embroidery, lace, braid, beads, sequins, ribbons, etc., etc.; some hundreds of pairs of hands, including factory-workers, dressmakers, sempstresses, etc., will have touched some part of the gown before it is delivered to the wearer. To what end are all these specialised departments of labour concentrated? The gown is worn a few times in the one season; the wearer has the satisfaction of feeling as well dressed as A. to F., and far better dressed than F. to Z. In fact, the net result of all this expenditure of energy is the generating of a rather foolish pride, the encouragement of conceit on the one side and envy on the other, and the hardening of a nature into ways of worldliness and vanity.

As for the boots. Again, many more hands than can be calculated have helped to produce them, but they are directly and immediately serviceable to the purchaser, to whose activity the wearing of boots is an essential, and in general they minister to the efficiency of human machines.

But if balls are not wrong, ball-gowns must be worn. It is a question of degree; and here again we get to the theory of the limit which in this conjunction can be expressed thus: In relation to human needs, in relation to human powers of enjoyment, in relation to the beneficial effects of pleasure, even in relation to the dictates of fashion, there is a distinct limit not to be expressed in figures up to which expenditure (in this particular case on dress) is legitimate and relatively productive, beyond which it becomes progressively unremunerative and harmful. A hundred guineas, by any conceivable method of calculation, greatly exceeds this limit.

To assert that the purchase of luxuries is good for trade is quite as ridiculous as to say that a man can benefit the building and furnishing trade by burning down his house once a year. We do not want to create more artificial wants before we have satisfied the crying human needs which already exist. There is no loophole through which a reasonable defence of the senseless expenditure, which goes on in an increasing measure, can be made. Luxurious living has never been quite so blatant and unashamed as it is to-day, and the effete epicureanism and decadent effeminacy it produces stand out in rather sharp contrast to more hopeful signs of progress and moral and intellectual refinement and vigour which, happily, are visible around us.