Gladstonian Ghosts

by Cecil Chesterton

Beyond this we want an effective General Staff and an Intelligence Department not only alert but strong enough to enforce its demands on the government, as well as a complete overhauling of our war-machine both on its civil and military side. But there is no space for details here; Socialists could hardly do better than leave them to Mr. Blatchford to work out.[4]

No one who thinks seriously of the consequences of such a policy can doubt that, if it could be carried out, it would effect a greater transference of real power to the democracy than any Reform Bill. The objection which most reformers instinctively feel to any proposal to increase military establishments rests, I fancy, at bottom on their sense that such establishments are organized by a class to protect its narrow class interests. So it is that British troops are found useful to British governments not only in Egypt and South Africa but also at Featherstone and Bethesda. With such a military organisation as I have suggested this menace would disappear. Nay, the weights would be transferred to the other scale. Nothing, I conceive, is so likely to put a little of the fear of God into the hearts of our Liberal and Conservative rulers as the knowledge that they have to deal with a democratic army and a democracy trained in arms. This, I know, will sound shockingly heterodox to idealistic persons who are fond of repeating (in defiance of universal human experience) the foolish maxim of John Bright, the Quaker apologist for plutocratic Anarchism, that “force is no remedy,” and the equally unhistorical statement that “violence always injures the cause of those who use it.” But practical men pay little attention to such talk, knowing that nothing helps a strike so much as a little timely rioting and that the most important reforms of the late century were only carried when it was known that the mob of the great towns was “up.” As a matter of fact, force is the only remedy. If Socialism comes about, as I think it probably will in this country, in the constitutional Fabian way, this will only mean that the Socialists will themselves have captured the control of the army and the police and will then use them against the possessing classes, forcing them to disgorge at the bayonet’s point. And, if it does not superficially wear this aspect, that will merely be because the latter, seeing how invincible is the physical force arrayed against them, may very likely surrender position after position at discretion until they find that they have no longer anything to defend.[5]

It may be remarked incidentally that social reform would receive a considerable impetus from such a policy. Not only would periodic mobilizations take the workers for a time out of the foetid atmosphere of their slums and factories and perhaps make them less contented to return, but the heads of the army would themselves be compelled to become social reformers and insist on some decent minimum of housing and factory conditions in order to keep up the physical efficiency of the material of which they would have to make soldiers. Herr Molkenbuhr the German Social-Democrat pointed out to the Socialist Congress at Amsterdam this year that this had happened in Germany even under an undemocratic and often really oppressive form of conscription. An immense impetus given to housing and factory legislation would be among the by-products of Army Reform, if carried out on the right lines.

I have left myself no space here to deal adequately with the Navy. I will therefore pass it by here with the remark that an invincible navy is absolutely essential to the welfare of the workers of this country, whose food comes almost entirely from overseas, and that the navy has never been like the Army a menace to popular liberties. It is generally thought that our navy is in a much more efficient state than our army is known to be in; but a thorough overhauling would do it no harm and might expose weaknesses which we do not suspect. At any rate any attempt to weaken our naval predominance should be resolutely opposed by all Socialists as by all sensible men.

Of course an effective army and navy will cost money. But the Socialist will be by no means so frightened of high estimates as the old Radical who regarded all taxation as being of the nature of a compromise with Satan. The Socialist knows that at least £600,000,000 a year goes at present into the pockets of landlords and capitalists and shareholders generally, and, until this is absorbed, the cry of “ruinous expenditure” cannot be expected to appall him.

THE FETISH OF FREE TRADE.

Let it not be supposed that I propose to argue the eternal Fiscal Question here. For the last twelve-month and more we have had quite enough flinging backward and forward of childish platitudes, scraps of obsolete economics, and masses of irrelevant and ill-digested figures by both parties to the controversy. You are quite safe from figure-shuffling as far as I am concerned, and you are equally safe from bodiless a priori economics. For me, indeed, the question is not one that can ever be decided on general principles. To ask whether nations ought to adopt Protection is exactly like asking whether men ought to wear over-coats. Obviously in both instances the answer depends on a number of attendant facts not stated—on the weather, the constitution of the men, and the thickness of the coats in the one case, on the character of the people, the distribution of their wealth, the state of their commerce, and the character of the proposed tariff in the other. Tell me that you wish in certain specified circumstances to impose protective duties on certain specified imports, and I am willing to examine the evidence and express an opinion. But so long as you put the issue as one of abstract principle, I must ask to be excused from indulging in what seems to me an utterly barren and profitless exercise in immaterial logic.

Of course, as I have already insisted, there is a sense in which every Socialist is of necessity a Protectionist and Preferentialist. As Mr. Bernard Shaw once expressed it, (I quote from memory) he believes that the highest wisdom of governments is to know “what to protect and what to prefer.” For him the Utopia of “economic harmonies” is a foolish and mischievous dream. He knows that the commercial instinct unless subjected to energetic and unsparing state supervision, is certain to become a cause of ruinous social disorder. His whole mind will be set to the task of regulating it, directing it, curbing its excesses, and protecting the public interest against it. In a word the advanced social reformer of the new school is necessarily an emphatic Protectionist, only differing from Mr. Chamberlain and his supporters in that he gives to the word “Protection” a wider scope and a fuller meaning than they.

Now it inevitably follows that there is not and cannot be any kind of objection from his point of view to a protective tariff on grounds of principle. The theoretic objection which used to be urged against such a tariff was founded on the assumption that Adam Smith, Bastiat and others had demonstrated the futility and peril of all legislative interference with commerce. Cobden put the whole case as he and his party saw it in one phrase of one of his ablest speeches, when he declared that you could not by legislation add anything to the wealth of a nation. That is a doctrine which no one (save perhaps Mr. Auberon Herbert) now holds; which no one who approves for instance of any kind of factory legislation can possibly hold. And that doctrine once fairly out of the way, the question becomes simply one of expediency and the balance of utilities.

But, when we come to the balancing, another point of divergence instantly arises. The Socialists’ conception of utilities differs in essence from that of Free Traders and Protectionists alike. For Mr. Chamberlain, for Mr. Morley, for the Tariff Reform League and for the Cobden Club, the aim of commercial statesmanship is simply and solely to increase the aggregate commercial wealth of the country. But this is by no means what the Socialist is mainly concerned about. His object is not so much to increase the sum total of such wealth as to secure its better distribution and more socially profitable use. He sees that the economic struggle between nations is by comparison a matter of surface fluctuations, while the economic struggle between classes is an enduring and essential feature of our social system. And whether or no he likes the old Marxian phrase “Class War,” he is bound to recognise the existence of a class antagonism cutting right across society as a fact without the understanding of which the structure of capitalist civilisation is unintelligible.