Gladstonian Ghosts

by Cecil Chesterton

The question of employment is closely connected with the whole question of our Poor Law, which badly wants re-modelling. Such a process should include the abolition of the Poor Law Guardians (the last relic of the ad hoc principle and a far more indefensible one than the School Boards) and the transfer of their powers to the local authority best fitted to deal with them,—probably the County and Borough Councils. It should also of course include the establishment of universal Old Age Pensions, a measure whose popularity is as manifest as its justice, as was proved in 1895, when it contributed enormously to swell the Tory majority. The fact is that our present Poor Law was the first product of middle class Liberalism, flushed with its stupendous victory of 1832. It is founded unmistakeably on the principles of that creed, which, believing in the eternal justice of “economic harmonies,” regarded the fact of a poor man being out of work as convincing proof of his worthlessness and criminality. It is as impossible for us, as the old Poor Law was for them.

Less obvious but not less certain is the connection between all these problems and the decline of our agriculture. It is the decline of agriculture which has driven into the towns the masses of unskilled labour with which we have to deal. Indeed the Liberals foresaw and deliberately planned this, when, first by the Poor Law and afterwards by the Repeal of the Corn Laws, they drove labour off the land in order to obtain it cheaply in the great industrial centres. And that is how the situation has worked out, so that it is important, no less in the interest of the town proletariat than in that of the country, that we should re-organise the first and most necessary of our staple industries. The idea apparently entertained in some Liberal circles that this can be done by the taxation of land values is, as Mr. Brougham Villiers has pointed out in “The Opportunity of Liberalism” (not altogether I should suppose to the gratification of his Liberal friends), on the face of it absurd. The end at which we are aiming is not that the state should own the ground rents but that it should own the land and the capital used to develop it, and it is towards this end that our policy should be directed. To this end we want an energetic system of state aid to farmers such as that already inaugurated by Sir Horace Plunkett and others in Ireland. We want loans to farmers on state security and experiments in cooperative farming under state supervision and with state encouragement; we want increased powers for local authorities in rural districts to buy and develop land; above all we want light railways, cheap and rapid transit, an agricultural parcels post (as proposed by Mr. Rider Haggard); and finally we want an end put to the monstrous system whereby Railway Companies charge higher rates to British than to foreign producers. When this policy has been fairly tried we shall see whether we also want a protective tariff. We do not want a tariff which will merely raise the landlord’s rent, but, as I have already pointed out, Socialists have no theoretic bias against such a tariff if it can be shown to be necessary to the public interest.

But there is one question to which Socialists ought to devote a great deal more attention than they show any signs of devoting at present. Lord Randolph Churchill, the ablest and most far-sighted of modern party leaders, saw its importance twenty years ago, and put it in the fore-front of his programme. That question is the reform of government departments. Until this is honestly faced and dealt with, the Individualist will always have a powerful controversial weapon against Socialist propaganda. When the Socialist demands that the state shall undertake more duties, his opponent has only to point to the duties it has already undertaken and ask if he wants any more duties performed like that! A national system of transit run as the War Office is run would hardly be an unqualified blessing and would probably produce a reaction of the most damaging kind. The only answer is to reform the government departments and make them workmanlike and efficient bodies. Until this is done we shall be checked at every point every time we want a measure involving state ownership carried. Moreover we shall find it impossible to give effect to our policy of state regulation. The War Office has on the whole been most unfairly treated in being gibbetted as the supreme type of red tape and inefficiency. In neither respect is it really worse than most other branches of our administration—not so bad for example as the Local Government Board, which is so hopelessly understaffed and so miserably ineffective that it is obliged from mere instinct of self-preservation to oppose every forward movement in municipal politics lest it should be overburdened still further. It matters little who is its representative in the Cabinet. It is the Board itself and not its President for the time being that obstructs progress. Yet an efficient Local Government Board, encouraging progressive local bodies and harrying up backward ones, is an essential part of the “national minimum” policy. From every point of view therefore it is essential that our departments of state should be put on a new and better footing. A businesslike Home Office and a businesslike Local Government Board would do more for social reform than many acts of Parliament.

SOME MATERIALS AND A POSSIBILITY.

Successive Reform Acts have so widened the basis of the franchise in this country that the working man has now the issue of the great majority of elections in his hands. By the working man I here mean the manual labourer who earns weekly wages; the definition is not scientific, but it is I think effectively descriptive. It is difficult to define a working man, but people know him when they see him, as Mr. Morley said of a Jingo. The manual labourer then is master of the situation; and it becomes a matter of primary importance for any party which wishes for a parliamentary majority to consider what manner of man he is, and what kind of policy is likely to receive his favour.

Now I have no sympathy at all with the contemptuous tone adopted by most Socialists towards the working man. This scorn of the average artisan or labourer may be regarded as the connecting bond between all schools of modern Socialism in this country, the one sentiment common to Mr. Hyndman and to Mr. Bernard Shaw. Were that scorn just, its expression would be imprudent; for John Smith of Oldham, however stupid he may be, is, as Mr. Blatchford has remarked “very numerous,” and in a country ruled by the counting of heads it would be good policy to treat him with respect and good humour. But it is not just. As a matter of fact, the working man is by no means the slavish imbecile that some Socialists seem to think him. The fact that he has built up with iron resolution, in the face of stupendous difficulties, and at the cost of terrible sacrifices, the Trade Union system of this country—perhaps the noblest monument of the great qualities of the British character that the century has seen—might well protect him from the sarcasms of wealthy idealists. If he is not a Socialist, is that altogether his fault? Or is it by any chance partly ours?

The British workman is not, as I have said, by any means a fool. He does not enjoy being sweated; he is not in love with long hours and low wages; he does not clamour for bad housing or dear transit. On the contrary, when sufficiently skilled and educated to be capable of effective organisation, he is a keen trade unionist, ready to stand up promptly and with conspicuous success for the rights and interests of his class; and he has shown himself able and willing to support legislation for his own benefit and that of his fellows. The Socialists have in him excellent raw material of which a most effective fighting force could be made. How do they use him?

The first thing that a Socialist of the old school does, when brought face to face with a working class audience, is deliberately to insult it. I heard of one Socialist orator who began his address to an East End meeting with the sentence—“What are you? Dogs!” I suggest that this is not the way to placate the unbeliever or to allay the suspicion with which his conservative instincts lead him to regard a new idea. Moreover it is not true. The working man knows perfectly well that he and his class are not “dogs”; and he rightly concludes that a man so profoundly ignorant of his condition is not the man to improve it. However, having collectively and individually insulted those whom he seeks to convert, the preacher launches joyously into the abysses and whirlpools of German philosophy and economics, calls his hearers “proletarians” (to their intense astonishment), tells them that they are being robbed of “surplus value,” discusses abstruse matters concerning the relations between “exchange value” and “labour power,” and generally leads them through mazes of foreign scientific jargon from which they eventually emerge gasping for breath. Now I submit that this is an absurd way of going to work. Not so did Cobden and his allies act, when they set out to convert the middle classes to the dogmas of Adam Smith. They had a systematic theory of economics as elaborate as that of the Marxian, but they did not pelt miscellaneous popular gatherings with its technicalities. They crystallised it into one simple, effective and intelligible phrase,—“To buy in the cheapest market and to sell in the dearest.” I will not disguise my personal conviction that this maxim is of and from the Devil. But (perhaps for that reason) it is lucid and unmistakeable and makes a definite and persuasive appeal to the instincts and prejudices of the commercial classes. I fear I cannot say as much for the crystallizations favoured by Socialist propagandists. “The Abolition of the Wages System” and “Production for Use and not for Profit” convey to the workman, I imagine, no clearer meaning than they convey to me.

I am aware that there has been of late in Socialist circles something of a reaction against this sort of thing, as also against the futile Marxian prophecies to the effect that “economic forces” would produce a “Crisis” which would have the effect of abolishing the capitalist system whether anyone wanted it abolished or no. But the reaction has taken an entirely wrong turn. It has resulted so far in nothing better than an outburst of sheer sentimentalism as unacceptable to the hard conservative common-sense of the workers as the doctrinaire revolutionism that preceded it. The chief expression of this sentimentalism may be found in the repudiation of the Class War by the leaders of the I.L.P. and the substitution of vague talk about Universal Love and the Brotherhood of Man. Now here the I.L.P. leaders have got hold of quite the wrong end of the stick. The existence of the class war is a fact of common observation. A short walk down any street with your eyes open will show it to you. Indeed it is obvious that there is and must be a permanent antagonism between the buyers and sellers of labour—or if our hyper-economic critics prefer it of “labour-power.” And moreover this fact of the class war is a fact, which every workman (as also every capitalist) recognises in practice, if not in theory. All trade unionism is built upon his recognition of it; so is the demand for a labour party. The error of the S.D.F. did not lie here.

The Marxians were not wrong in saying that there was a class war; there is a class war. They were not wrong in saying that the worker ought to be educated in class-consciousness; they ought to be so educated for their class-consciousness is the best foundation for our propaganda. Where the Marxians were wrong in regard to the class war was in their tacit assumption that “class-consciousness” was identical with Socialism. It is not. Socialists and Trade Unionists are alike in their recognition of the class war, but they differ widely in their attitude towards it. The Socialist wishes so to organise society as to bring the Class War to an end; the Trade Unionist wants the war to go on, but he wants his own class to get better chances in it than they get at present. As regards practical matters the path of the two is for the present largely identical. Extended factory legislation, old age pensions, housing, the municipalisation of monopolies are desired by Socialists and Trade Unionists alike, though not entirely for the same reasons. Here and there, on Trade Union Law, on Compulsory Arbitration in industrial disputes, in some instances on Child Labour, the attitude of the two may appear different, but it only requires the better economic education of the unions to bring them into line with the Socialists on these points. Nevertheless, the distinction as well as the relation between the two must be kept constantly in mind, if the attitude of the typical manual worker towards Socialism is to be understood.