Contemporary Socialism

by John Rae

The right to existence is seldom called in question. Malthus, it is true, said a man had a right to live only as he had a right to live a hundred years—if he could. He might as well have argued that a man had a right to escape murder only as he had a right to escape murder for a hundred years—if he could. It is really because he cannot that he has the right—it is because he cannot protect himself against violence that he has a right to protection from the State, and because, and as far as, he cannot protect himself against starvation that he has a just claim upon the State for food. And his claim is obviously bounded in the one case as in the other by the ability of society. If society cannot protect him, it is of course absurd to talk of any right to its protection, but if society can, society ought. To suffer a fellow-citizen to die of hunger is felt by a civilized community to be at least as just a disgrace to its government as it would be to leave him a prey to the knife of the assassin, or to the incursions of marauders from over the enemy's border. But as the State furnishes protection against human violence by its courts of justice, and against disease by its sanitary laws, so it furnishes protection against famine and indigence by its legal provision of relief. The claim of the perishing stands on the same footing as any other claim which is an admitted right of man to-day; it is a claim to an essential condition of normal manhood—to existence itself. But then, if the right to existence must be admitted, it can only be admitted where the individual is, for whatever reason, unable to make provision for himself, and it can only be admitted in such measure and form as will not discourage other individuals from trying to make independent provision for themselves before their day of disability comes, because that, in turn, is the way prescribed by normal manhood and true human dignity.

What State socialists claim, however, is not the right to existence, but the right to decent and comfortable existence—the right to the style of living which is customary among the independent poor. The labourer ought, in their eyes, to be treated as a public servant, and his sick pay and his pension ought both to be commensurate with the claims and dignity of honest labour. Now it is of course impossible not to sympathize much with this view, but the difficulty is that if you make assisted labour as good as independent labour, you shall soon have more assisted labour than you can manage, you shall have weakened the push, energy, and forethought of your labouring class, you shall have really done much to destroy that very dignity of labour which you desire to establish. The State may probably, with great advantage, do more for working-class insurance than it at present does. It could conduct the business of the burial benefit and the superannuation benefit better than any private company or friendly society, because it could offer a surer guarantee and the business is routine; Mr. Gladstone's excellent annuity scheme has remained sterile only because it has not been pushed, and the canvasser and collector are indispensable in working-class insurance. But the socialist proposal is that the State ought to give every man a pension after a certain age, irrespectively altogether of his own contributions. Mr. Webb is one of its most recent advocates, and, according to the useful figures he has taken the trouble to obtain, there are in the United Kingdom 1,700,000 persons over sixty-five years of age, of whom 1,300,000 contrive to pension themselves, either by their own savings or the assistance of their families, while the remaining 400,000 are supported by the rates at an average cost of ten guineas a year. Mr. Webb's proposal is that in order to save the feelings of the 400,000 dependants you are to make the other 1,300,000 persons dependants along with them, and give ten guineas a year all round. But you cannot make a public dole a pension by merely calling it a pension. A pension is a payment made by one's actual employer for work done—it is wages, and the man who has earned his own pension, or has provided it by his own saving, feels himself and is an independent man. It is right to maintain the 400,000—whether out of national or parochial funds is a detail—but sound policy would rather aim at raising the 400,000 to be as the 1,300,000, than at lowering the 1,300,000 to the level of the 400,000. With Mr. Webb it is not a question of giving the 400,000 better allowances than they receive at present—which might be most reasonably entertained—but it is a mere question of not suffering them to be looked down on by the 1,300,000 who have fought their own way, and that is not possible, nor, with all respect for them, is it, from a public point of view, desirable. It is right to support those who cannot support themselves, but it is neither right nor wise to remove all distinction between the dependent poor and the independent.

But the line between State socialism and sound social politics in the matter of public assistance may perhaps be better shown in another branch of Poor Law administration—the right to labour for the able-bodied. The socialist right to labour is the right of the unemployed to get labour in their own trades and at good or current rates of wages. That is the right which Bismarck substantially admitted in his famous speech. He said there was a crowd of suitable undertakings which the State could establish to furnish the unemployed with a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. It is also practically the right which prevailed in England between 1782, when Gilbert's Act abolished the old workhouse test, and 1835, when the new Poor Law restored it. Gilbert's Act gave the able-bodied poor the right (1) to obtain from the guardians work near their own residence and suited to their respective strength and capacity; (2) to receive for their labour all the money earned by it; and (3) if that sum fell short of their requirements, to have the difference made up out of the parochial funds. The effect of that, as we know, was, that public relief became too desirable, the dependants on it multiplied, the poor rate rose, the wages of labour fell, the very efficiency of the labourer himself withered, and the new Poor Law reverted to the workhouse test, which, harsh though it was considered to be, was in reality a necessary defence of the character and comfort of the labouring class from further decadence.

To provide the unemployed with work in their own trades is only to increase the evil you wish to remedy, for the very existence of the unemployed shows that those particular trades are slack at the time, that there is no demand for the articles they produce, and consequently any attempt by the State to throw fresh supplies of these articles on the already over-stocked market can have no other effect than to increase the depression and turn out of employ the men that are still at work. Paying relief work at the common market rate of wages is attended with the same objection. The remedy only aggravates the disease, and what ought to be merely the labourer's temporary resource against adversity tends to grow into his regular staff of life. Relief wages, while sufficient for the family's support, should remain below the current rates so as to give the labourer an effective inducement to seek better employment as soon as better employment can possibly be obtained. The true and natural defence against misfortune is the man's own personal exertion and provision, and the purpose of the public intervention is to stimulate and assist, not to supplant, that vis medicatrix naturæ.

But under these limitations a right to labour is a just claim of the unfortunate. It is admitted in the English Poor Law, and it is admitted in the Scotch parochial practice, which constructively considers want of employment a form of sickness or accident, and it requires in both countries to be better realized than it is. 1st: although it is unadvisable to give every man work at his own trade, and although the choice of trades for relief purposes is attended with as much difficulty as the choice of those for prison labour is found to be, yet certainly the circle of relief trades ought to be extended beyond stone-breaking and oakum-picking. Socialists themselves are among the foremost in complaining of the competition of prison labour with honest labour, although they fail to see that precisely the same objection attends the competition of relieved labor in public workshops with unrelieved labour in regular private employment. The kind of work most free from objection on this score would probably be the production of articles now imported from abroad, and there are a great many trades in which, while we make most of their products at home, we import particular articles or sorts of articles for one reason or another. Some of these might be found suitable for the purpose in view. Or the men in the public workshops might be employed in making a variety of things used in public offices, imperial or local. 2nd: what is even more important, a distinction ought to be made between the industrious poor and that residuum of confirmed failures for whom the stoneyard test is really intended, and the former ought not to be made to feel themselves any way degraded in their work, their small remuneration being trusted to act as a sufficient preventive against their permanent dependence on the public for employment. 3rd: then a third and most important requisite is to supplement the public provision of work with a public provision of information about the demand for labour over the country from day to day, so as not merely to support the men in adversity, but to facilitate their restoration to their normal condition of prosperity.

For we ought to recognise that though the problem of the unemployed is not, as many persons imagine, one of increasing gravity in our time—although, on the contrary, if we go back thirty years, sixty years, or a hundred years, we always find worse complaints and more distressing sufferings from that cause than at present, yet it is certainly a constant problem. The unemployed we have always with us, and even their numbers vary less from time to time than we are apt to suppose. Trades dependent on fine weather are, of course, slack in winter, but then trades dependent on fashion are slack in summer, while there are some large trades—such as the shoemakers—that are made brisk by bad weather. Even a general commercial crisis which throws the workpeople of many trades idle, makes those of others busy. The building trades are always busy in bad times, because money and labour are then cheap, and the opportunity is seized of building or extending factories, and laying down plant of every description. It was so to a very remarkable extent during the Lancashire cotton distress of 1862; it was so all over England in the depression of 1877-78, and the same fact was observed again in Scotland, and commented upon by the factory inspector in 1886. Other trades are brisker in a crisis for less happy causes, e.g., the bakers for the melancholy reason that the working classes are more generally driven from meat to bread. These natural corrections or compensations elicited by the depression itself prevent the numbers of the unemployed from growing so very much larger in a crisis than in ordinary times that their case would not be overtaken satisfactorily by the general systematic provision of relief work, if that were once established. The excess is met now so effectually by a few special local efforts, that we have sometimes far fewer able-bodied paupers in bad years than in good. The number of able-bodied paupers was very much less in the bad years 1876-1878 than in the good years immediately after them, or in the still better years immediately before them. The problem being, then, so largely constant from season to season, and from cycle to cycle, ought clearly to be solved by a permanent and systematic provision.

The same principle which governs this right to labour—the principle of preventing degradation and facilitating self-recovery—governs other social legislation for the unfortunate besides the Poor Law. It lies at the bottom of the homestead exemptions of America, and our own prohibition of arrestment of tools and wages for debt, and our occasional measures for cancelling arrears. It is the principle laid down by Pitt when he said that no temporary occasion should be suffered to force a British subject to part with his last shilling. He had a right to his last shilling, because he had a right to an undegraded humanity. The last shilling stopped his fall, and perhaps helped him to rise again.

Many persons will admit the right to public assistance, because it seems limited to saving men from extremities, who will see nothing but socialism of a perilous sort in other public provisions, for which popular claims are advanced. Schools, museums, libraries, parks, open spaces, footpaths, baths, are certainly means of intellectual and physical life, which keep the manhood of a community in normal vigour; but, it will be asked, if the State once begins to supply such things, where is it to stop? Is free education to go beyond the primary branches? What length are you to go? is the question Mr. Spencer always raises as a bar to your going at all. But the same question of degree can be raised about everything, about the duties Mr. Spencer himself imposes upon the State as really as about those he refuses to sanction. In the matter of protection, for instance, how many policemen are we required to detail to a district? Or how great an army and navy are we to maintain? During the excitement about the Jack the Ripper murders there was much clamour about the police being too few, and we are subject to periodical panics as to our imperial defences, in the course of which no two persons agree in answering the question, what length are we to go? The question can only be settled of course by measuring the length of our necessities with the length of our purse, and the same class of considerations rules in the other case, the importance and cost of the given provision to a community of such education and culture, together with the impossibility of getting it adequately supplied without public agency. The opinion of the time may vary as to what is essential for a whole and wholesome manhood, and its resources may vary as to what may be easily borne to supply it; but the same variation takes place with respect to the duties of national defence, or the administration of justice. The objection is therefore nothing more or less than the very ancient and famous logical fallacy with which the Greek sophists used to nonplus their antagonists. As in other affairs, the problem so far will settle itself practically as it goes along, and the important distinction to bear in mind is that to give every man the essential conditions of all humane living is a very different kind of aim from giving every man the same share in the national production, or a lien on his neighbour's luck or industry or alertness.

2. From rights realizing general claims of the unfortunate on society at large, let us now pass to rights realizing special claims of certain weaker classes of society against certain stronger classes. The most typical examples of this sort of legislation are the intervention of the State between buyer and seller, between landlord and tenant, between employer and labourer, for the judicial determination of a fair price, a fair rent, or fair wages, or for the regulation of the conditions of labour, and tenure of land. Professor Sidgwick declares the Irish and Scotch Land Acts, which provide for the judicial determination of a fair rent, to be the most distinctively socialistic measures the English Legislature has yet passed; but in reality these Land Acts are not a bit more socialistic than the laws which fix a fair price for railway rates and fares, and much less socialistic than the old usury Acts which sought to determine fair interest. Such interferences with freedom of contract as these are, of course, only justifiable when the absence of effective competition places the real power of settlement of terms practically in the hands of one side alone, and conduces, therefore, inevitably to the serious injury and oppression of the other. Parliament controls railway charges because the railway companies enjoy a monopoly of most important business, and might use their monopoly to wrong the public, and when Parliament is asked, as it sometimes is, to discourage corners, rings, syndicates, or pooling combinations, it is on the ground that these various agencies are attempts, more or less successful, to exclude competition for the purpose of exacting from the public more than a fair price. On the other hand, the reason why we have given up fixing fair interest now is because we have come to see that competition, being very effective among money-lenders, fixes it far better for us without the intervention of the law, and, of course, an unnecessary interference with freedom of contract is nothing but pernicious. But, although for ordinary commercial loans the competition of lenders is a sufficient security for the fair treatment of borrowers, it affords no protection against extortion to the very necessitous man, who must accept any terms or starve. His poverty leaves him no proper freedom to make a contract, and the law still condemns oppressive rates of usury, to which, as the Apothecary says in "Romeo and Juliet," the poor man's poverty, but not his will, consents. In such a case, accordingly, an authoritative prescription of fair interest is only a necessary requirement of justice and humanity.

The public determination of fair rent stands on precisely the same ground. The rent of large farms, like the interest on ordinary commercial loans, may be safely left to be settled by commercial competition, because large farms are taken by men of capital as a business speculation, and landlords cannot exact more rent than the farms will bear without driving capital out of agriculture into other branches of production, and so reducing the demand for that class of farms to an extent that will bring the rent down to its proper level again. But the rent of small holdings, like the interest on loans to persons in extremity, is ruled by other considerations. Cottier tenants, between their numbers and their necessities, are continually driven into offering rents the land can never be made to pay, and thereby incurring for the rest of their days the burden of a lengthening chain of arrears little better than Oriental debt-slavery. Other work is hard to find; the land being limited in supply is a natural monopoly; and the State merely steps in to save the tenantry from the injurious effects of their own over-competition for an essential instrument of their labour, and, through their labour, of their very existence. The interference, therefore, is perfectly justifiable if the machinery it institutes can carry out the purpose efficiently, and there is this difference between a court for fixing rent and a court for fixing the price of bread, or beer, or labour, that it is only doing work which in the natural course of things is very usually done by periodical and independent valuation, instead of by the ordinary higgling of the market. It has always been the custom on many large estates to call in a valuator from the outside for the revision of the rents, and a valuator appointed by the Crown cannot be expected to do the work any less effectively than a valuator appointed by the landlord. Moreover, the tendency of opinion seems to be towards the simplication of the process by some self-working scheme, a sliding scale for apportioning an annual rent to the annual production.