The persistent survival of lower social forms, becoming more injurious with each advancing age, is one conspicuous feature in the case. That we, the foremost industrial nation, should have preserved that early status of labour, chattel slavery, past the middle of the nineteenth century is a historic anomaly; that we still preserve the yet lower status of female domestic labour is a worse one. That we should maintain side by side, in the same age, a democracy for men and a patriarchate for women is a brain-splitting anachronism.
Taken generally, the confusion and irregularity of social progress furnish some ground, at least apparently, to those who assume it to be extra-natural, and who postulate direct interference by Spirits of Good and Evil to account for the peculiar facts. We need no such childish hypothesis, the facts in the case are quite sufficient. Our painful and irregular social development is due merely to the presence in a highly organised body of the artificially maintained egoism of a previous unorganised condition. The “old Adam” in us is simply the individualistic animal, still protesting that he is an individual in the face of centuries upon centuries of socialisation.
Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of our position to-day is that of the strangely distinguished “Leisure Class” and “Working Class.” Here is a social body whose existence requires mutual service. Here is that service performed by that majority of mankind known as the “Working Class.” The Working Class is the world. However he prospers, the man who works is he who keeps the world going. His labours are the social processes, he is Society. The Leisure Class deliberately cuts itself off from Society, refuses to take part in its processes, yet continues to live on its products.
This is parasitism, pure and simple. That it is not so pure nor so simple as would render it easy to handle, or as would warrant us in ruthless excision of a diseased mass, is due to the resistless law of social relation which holds us still connected even when we think ourselves separate. Your wealthy social traitor, refusing social duty and absorbing social gain, is no more to blame than the workman, who would do the same thing if he had the chance, because he believes in the same false principles of economics. But as they stand the leisure class is doing incomparably more harm.
The mere extra drain on our material wealth as rich a social body as ours could easily stand. The mere malingering, the refusal to work, we could stand; the social energy is so abundant, there are so many to serve the world. But the position of the overconsuming non-producing class is not merely negative and cannot be. Withdrawing from normal social processes, the leisure class forthwith becomes the seat of abnormal social processes, which affect the whole body most injuriously. Every recognised folly and vice of these conspicuous ex-members of society spreads its corrupting influence around in the healthy structure which supports them. A live body cannot maintain dead material in its substance without injury.
Much deeper than the recognised follies and vices, though they alone have blackened history, lies the influence of the falsehoods on which the leisure class rests its position. Let no live member of the body politic make the mistake of blaming a disease. If any part of Society works wrong, it should be studied, not hated; cured, not punished. In our great organic union any common error works out its natural result, varying in accordance with the part affected. The callosities and deformities of our social body, its sudden illnesses and slow, wasting diseases, call for our utmost wisdom and for a change of conduct, but they do not call for childish rage.
This mischievous by-product called the leisure class can be eliminated by healthy action on the part of the real social body. It has no existence except as we make and uphold it. Like the criminal class and the pauper class it is an inevitable result of our imperfect social action, and that imperfect social action springs from errors in all our minds, not merely in the minds of the diseased portion. The attitude of the non-productive consumer is the legitimate result of our general economic fallacies; logically, if conditions allowed, we would all cheerfully join their ranks. As it is, we all, or nearly all, try to, and the successful, knowing this full well, are naturally not much moved by the criticisms of unsuccessful competitors. The flavour of sour grapes is clearly perceptible in most of our animadversion against the rich.
Moreover, when a human being of our day, coming into some share of the social consciousness proper to the time, feels that he has no right to this mass of other men’s labour in money form, he can find no way out of his position on any basis of strict political economy.
Charity we know to be evil, though we still fool ourselves by organising it and putting great numbers of intermediaries between giver and givee.
The currents of human production, as forcibly modified by our laws resting on false economics, do accumulate masses of capital; given individuals find themselves on top of the heaps, and they cannot get off! If they flatly abdicate it is only to let some other eager aspirant mount after them. There is something genuinely pathetic in a modern rich man or woman, striving to readjust what he recognises as a disproportionate provision and absolutely unable to do so. Every step he would take is cut off by some traditional error.