But now the reader unaccustomed to Socialist discussion will begin to see the crude form of the answer to the question raised by the previous chapter; he will see the resources from which the enlargement of human life we there contemplated is to be derived, and realize the economic methods to be pursued. Collective ownership is the necessary corollary of collective responsibility. There are to be no private land owners, no private bankers and lenders of money, no private insurance adventurers, no private railway owners nor shipping owners, no private mine owners, oil kings, silver kings, coal and wheat forestallers or the like. All this realm of property is to be resumed by the State, is to be State-owned and State-managed, and the vast revenues that are now devoted to private ends will go steadily to feed, maintain and educate a new and better generation, to promote research and advance science, to build new houses, develop fresh resources, plant, plan, beautify and reconstruct the world.
CHAPTER V
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE
§ 1.
We have stated now how the constructive plan of Socialism aims to replace the accepted ideas about two almost fundamental human relations by broader and less fiercely egotistical conceptions; how it denies a man “property” rights over his wife and children, leaving, however, all his other relations with them intact, how it would insure and protect their welfare, and how it asserts that a vast range of inanimate things also which are now held as private property must be regarded as the inalienable possession of the whole community. This change in the circle of ideas (as the Herbartians put it) is the essence of the Socialist project.
It means no little change. It means a general change in the spirit of living; it means a change from the spirit of gain (which now necessarily rules our lives) to the spirit of service.
I have tried to show in the preceding chapter that Socialism seeks to make life less squalid and cruel, less degrading and dwarfing for the children that are born into it, and I have tried also to make clear that realization of, and revolt against, the bad management and waste and muddle which result from our present economic system. I want now to point out that Socialism seeks to ennoble the intimate personal life, by checking and discouraging passions that at present run rampant, and by giving wider scope for passions that are now thwarted and subdued. The Socialist declares that life is now needlessly dishonest, base and mean, because our present social organization, such as it is, makes an altogether too powerful appeal to some of the very meanest elements in our nature.
Not perhaps to the lowest. There can be no disputing that our present civilization does discourage much of the innate bestiality of man; that it helps people to a measure of continence, cleanliness and mutual toleration; that it does much to suppress brute violence, the spirit of lawlessness, cruelty and wanton destruction. But on the other hand it does also check and cripple generosity and frank truthfulness, any disinterested creative passion, the love of beauty, the passion for truth and research, and it stimulates avarice, parsimony, overreaching, usury, falsehood and secrecy, by making money-getting its criterion of intercourse.
Whether we like it or not, we who live in this world to-day find we must either devote a considerable amount of our attention to getting and keeping money, and shape our activities—or, if you will, distort them—with a constant reference to that process, or we must accept futility. Whatever powers men want to exercise, whatever service they wish to do, it is a preliminary condition for most of them that they must, by earning something or selling something, achieve opportunity. If they cannot turn their gift into some saleable thing or get some propertied man to “patronize” them, they cannot exercise these gifts. The gift for getting is the supreme gift—all others bow before it.
Now this is not a thing that comes naturally out of the quality of man; it is the result of a blind and complex social growth, of this set of ideas working against that, and of these influences modifying those. The idea of property has run wild and become a choking universal weed. It is not the natural master-passion of a wholesome man to want constantly to own. People talk of Socialism as being a proposal “against human nature,” and they would have us believe that this life of anxiety, of parsimony and speculation, of mercenary considerations and forced toil we all lead, is the complete and final expression of the social possibilities of the human soul. But, indeed, it is only quite abnormal people, people of a narrow, limited, specialized intelligence, Rockefellers, Morgans and the like, people neither great nor beautiful, mere financial monomaniacs, who can keep themselves devoted to and concentrated upon gain. To the majority of capable good human stuff, buying and selling, saving and investing, insuring oneself and managing property, is a mass of uncongenial, irrational and tiresome procedure, conflicting with the general trend of instinct and the finer interests of life. The great mass of men and women, indeed, find the whole process so against nature, that in spite of all the miseries of poverty, all the slavery of the economic disadvantage, they cannot urge themselves to this irksome cunning game of besting the world, they remain poor. Most, in a sort of despair, make no effort; many resort to that floundering endeavour to get by accident, gambling; many achieve a precarious and unsatisfactory gathering of possessions, a few houses, a claim on a field, a few hundred pounds in some investment as incalculable as a kite in a gale; just a small minority have and get—for the most part either inheritors of riches or energetic people who, through a real dulness toward the better and nobler aspects of life, can give themselves almost entirely to grabbing and accumulation. To such as these, all common men who are not Socialists do in effect conspire to give the world.