As for land, it is the one thing that I can conceive nationalised even under our present form of Socialism, nay, which is already nationalised to the extent that the private owners of British land may not sell it to Germany or Japan, as they may sell anything else of theirs. Every new State should doubtless begin by trying to nationalise its land. I say “trying,” because it is by no means certain that it would succeed, since so far from the increment in land values being unearned, it is the very possibility of earning it that induces the pioneer to suffer peril, privation and isolation. Were Canada, for example, not to give away its land, the many adventurers who have flowed in from the United States would probably have remained at home, and all this Canadian territory have been still empty. And once you have made land quasi-private property, it cannot justly be subjected to any peculiar tax, since colossal as is the rise of land values in growing towns, the value of land is controlled by the same factors of luck and judgment as rule all other property values, and may be depreciated as well as enhanced by the operation of social forces beyond the owner’s control or prevision. Wherefore all increments in value—in stocks and shares, copyrights, patents, &c. &c.—should be treated as potential matter for taxation equally with the so-called “unearned increment” on land.
One would imagine from the war cries in our latest political campaign that Socialism was already upon us, and that the only refuge from it lay in Tariff Reform. But it is precisely Tariff Reform which is Socialism; a taxation of the entire community in the interests of this or that industry. Nor should the entire community be averse from taxation for any provably good object; a moralised community would even be always looking round for fresh methods of self-taxation. Budget Day would be a national festival, a day of solemn joy, tense with the hope that new ways would be found of making England the Kingdom of God. Alas! it is a day of sick anxiety, with a sequel of farcical unfailingness, in which every section taxed sends a deputation to show that it is the one section that should have been left unburdened, while from the bloated gluttons and swillers at the great hotels arises the cry of “Red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” And the poor philanthropist we have always with us—he who threatens to stop his charity contributions. As if the abolition of charity was not the very object of social reform! Every benevolent activity means a sore in the social system, and charity covers indeed a multitude of our sins.
Strange that these sordid questions of money should so fever this mighty England of Shakespeare and Milton. Ship-money cost Charles the First his head, and a petty land tax changes the House of Peers. Poor humanity, so deluded as to the essential values of life, so peculiarly demented in all that concerns Property! But I bid you cast away your fears. I repeat to you my good tidings of great joy. Socialism is impossible. A perfect and just distribution of the goods and labours of life—“to each according to his needs, from each according to his powers”—is Utopian. Moreover envy, hatred and all uncharitableness prevent it: stupidity, sloth, selfishness, treachery and tyranny preclude it. Rejoice, therefore, and let us cry Hosanna!
Nor are these evil qualities confined to the capitalist, they are found in even uglier forms in the working man, who is merely a capitalist without means, and through his Trade Unions talks equally of rights and even less of duties and ideals.
But if Socialism is impossible, and Socialist parties consequently deficient in constructive potency, they yet perform in every country a critical and regulative function of the first importance. Our own Labour members are the only gentlemen in British politics. To all questions, national or international, they bring a broad spirit and a quixotic ideal, and while our Howards and our Percys cower in craven terror of Germany, or make prudent alliance with Holy Russia, or handle with correlative despotism India, Ireland or the woman question, our men from the pits and the factories sit free and fearless, the sole guardians of England’s ancient glory.
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS: OR THE HYPOCRISY OF POLITICS
Arrestive was it in an aisle of Santa Croce—the Florentine Church of the Holy Cross—to come upon a monument to Niccolò Machiavelli, anathema alike for Catholicism and Protestantism, the “Old Nick” of the Hudibras rhyme. ’Twas as if Mephisto had managed not only to slip into the Cathedral, but to achieve canonisation. But even a devil is not given his due at the hands of his own countrymen: it was reserved for an English earl, more than two and a half centuries after Mephisto’s passing, to provide his works with a splendid setting and his remains with a massive monument. And so, in the dim religious light, I pondered over the stately inscription:
“Tanto Nomini nullum par Elogium.”
How, indeed, equate eulogy to so great a name? Machiavelli was our first modern—the first to exhibit the reign of law in human affairs, to read history as the play of human forces and not as the caprice of a cloudy Providence, modified by the stars. What an epic sweep in the opening sentences of his “History of Florence”—Gibbon in a nutshell, the whole “Decline and Fall,” summarised as the economic emigration southward of the surplus population of the Goths into an Italy weakened by the removal of the seat of Empire to Constantinople. Vagarious chance, indeed, he admits, as a complication (to be minimised by prudence), but Providence is mentioned in “The Prince,” only to be dropped, and astrology is not even mentioned. Machiavelli would have agreed that “the fault’s in ourselves, not in our stars, that we are underlings,” and for those who wished to prince it, he was prepared to point the conditions of success. And this indifference to the stars—to quadrangles and hexagons, sigils, conjunctions, and configurations—is not his least amazing merit.
Pico della Mirandola had, indeed, refuted astrology before him, but it was in the interests of that conventional theory of Providence and free-will which leaves the chaos of history irreducible to order. Machiavelli not only ignores astrology, but substitutes causation for the chaos.