The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

CHAPTER V.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

In the last sentence of the last chapter I spoke of education, pacification, and industrial organisation as the three monumental tasks of a reformed political system. If the supreme object of a central administration—the sooner we cease to talk of “government” the better—is to make a people healthy, prosperous, and happy, these are surely the three reforms to which it will most resolutely apply itself. I have spoken of the very grave and pressing nature of one of these reforms: the need to abolish militarism and war. Later chapters will deal with education, in the very broad and rich meaning which I assign to the word. Here I would sketch the problem which seems to me to weigh heavily on us in connection with the distribution of wealth and the present disorganisation of industry.

It is useful sometimes to imagine ourselves in the year 3000 or so looking back with critical eye on the twentieth century. One pictures the future historian—some narrowly specialised expert on the social life of the second decade of the twentieth century—discoursing on us. A strange and interesting people, he will say. They boasted of their intelligence, and they really did display a creditable measure of intelligence in their research and their applied science. They regarded themselves as far superior in humane sentiment to the Middle Ages, to which they properly belong, and they put forward many excellent vague proposals of social improvement. Yet it is not easy to understand their slavery to ancient prejudices, sometimes of a quite barbaric character. A superficial observer would say that the contradiction was due to their unhappy practice of leaving the majority of the community at a low level of culture, so that the intelligent minority were checked by a slower-minded majority. But it is a singular fact that some of the most intelligent men among the minority, such as Mr. A. Balfour and Mr. F. E. Smith, held much the same views as the agricultural workers, and made a kind of religion, which they called Conservatism, of this obstinate retention of old traditions. They seem, with all their pride in their culture, to have mistaken their place in the evolution of the race. No people is entitled to be called civilised which complacently tolerates war, squalid and widespread poverty, dense areas of ignorance, political corruption, and the many other remnants of barbarism which they tolerated. The twentieth century was the last hour of barbarism, lit by a few rays of the civilisation which dawned in the twenty-first century.

If the infliction of pain and misery is, as I believe, the worst form of crime, this retention of war and poverty is the gravest of our social transgressions. But the guilt of our generation in regard to these two crimes is very unequal. The way to abolish war is clear, but the remedy of this other open sore of our social organism, a poverty which stunts and embitters the lives of millions in every large civilisation, is not at all clear. The plain man who, oppressed by the spectacle of this desolating, unchanging poverty, seeks a remedy in social literature, is at once beset by a dozen rival theorists. The Socialist, the Anarchist, the Eugenist, the Malthusian, the Single-Taxer, and other austere thinkers press on him their contradictory formulae and their mutual abuse; these in turn are assailed contemptuously by men who are not less acquainted with economic matters; and the older political parties observe, with a sigh, that poverty seems to be an inherent evil of every industrial order, and we can do no more than mitigate its hardships. To this last position the plain man usually comes.

Let us grant at once that the older political parties have done much toward the alleviation of poverty. No one who is acquainted with the condition of the workers a hundred years ago can hesitate to admit this. Impatience is too rare a virtue, it is true, but this does not dispense us from cultivating wisdom. A great deal has been won, and generally won by the middle class, for the oppressed workers. Between 1830 and 1880, at least, thousands of middle-class men were working in Europe for the advance and enlightenment of the workers. The old doctrine of laissez-faire has been forced to compromise with decency. We have entirely abolished the horrible exploitation of cheap child-labour which was common early in the nineteenth century. Our Francis Places and Robert Owens have won for the worker the right to form Trade Unions, and others the free education of his children. We no longer permit the employer to fix the conditions and hours of labour as he wills. The cotton-worker of Manchester, labouring twelve or fourteen hours a day, and living in a squalid cellar, one hundred years ago, would be amazed if he could visit the factories and homes and places of amusement of his grandchildren. Even the poorer workers are no longer left to God and the clergy; while the bulk of the workers have numbers of cheap luxuries which would have seemed an apocalyptic dream to the worker of Napoleon’s day.

But let us not imagine that we have got our axe into the roots of poverty and are in a fair way to abolish it. This is one of the most dangerous fallacies of our age; and against that comfortable assurance I, knowing well all that has been done, plead that not one of our reforms makes for the abolition or the material restriction of poverty. We pension the very aged worker and the still more aged widow: on the pauper scale. We build substantial, if rather cheerless, homes for the destitute, and we put warm, if ignominious, clothing on the back of the orphan. We appoint minimum wages, and permit maximum prices. We have labour bureaux, and district visitors, and a Salvation Army, and a Church Army. All of which means that we give a drink to the crucified; it might be well to study if we can cease to crucify.

The plain man or woman who earnestly wishes to help in the improvement of life will inquire first, and most resolutely, what the actual range and depth of poverty are; will study, secondly, how far our measures of reform afford us any hope of curtailing it; and will, in the third place, ask whether there is any other way of action which does offer some hope of restricting, if not removing, the evil.

In the mind of many people poverty means that somewhere in the darker depths of our cities, happily remote from the shopping centres, there are a number of people who, from lack of skill or excess of drink, cannot find regular employment, and must live. ... One does not know exactly how they live, but certainly on unpleasantly short and dry rations. In earlier times one dropped a half-sovereign into the poor-box at church for these creatures, if they would come to church and learn resignation. To-day one subscribes to the Charity Organisation Society or the Salvation Army, or joins one of the many enterprising associations which are going to make the poor richer without making the rich poorer. We have a social conscience. We believe in laissez-faire, but, being humane, we will not push it to extremes. At the same time, being sensible men, we are not going to push humanitarianism to extremes. The phrase-maker is the great benefactor.

For a first acquaintance with poverty I would recommend a man to spend a few hours, some Saturday evening, among those markets of the poor which still line many of our more dingy thoroughfares. As the night draws on, and the oil-lamps begin to flare and splutter over the stalls, the grim courts and narrow streets of the district discharge their grey streams of life upon the market. There is plenty of laughter, you observe; there are plenty of round-faced matrons, with clean, honest eyes and comfortable dress. “We ain’t got much money, but we do live,” I heard one of them remark, in an interval between bursts of raillery. The wives of regularly employed, and often not ill-paid, workers are there, as well as poorer folk. But study some of the quieter figures which move slowly among the throng or linger enviously before the cheap shops. Notice the puny, shrivelled infants, with quaint staring eyes, which, at the door of the public-house, lie lightly in the arms of women whose faces are bloated with drink and coarse food: the lean and ragged boys and girls, with hollow and prematurely sharpened eyes, who hang about the fruit-stalls, ready to dart upon the rotten castaways, or foster, in darker spots, the premature sex-development which will drain their scanty strength: the woman who, with drawn face, waits near the Red Lion to see how many shillings her sodden brute of a husband will at length hand her for a week’s shopping: the weary old couple who have seen better days, and now pass in silence through the babel of vulgarity: the haggard-faced widow in mouldy black who hides her paltry Sunday dinner in a worn bag: the eager eyes of the poorer hawkers, which light up pathetically when a penny comes their way: the men whose faces change at a drunken jibe into such faces as we have seen behind the bars of a cage in a zoological garden, and the crowd of men, women, and children rushing to enjoy the gratuitous spectacle of a fight: the cheap, middle-aged prostitute, whose features are a caricature of the features of woman.

You may see these things in all parts of London—north, south, east, and west—every Saturday evening, and many other evenings, all the year round. You may see them in all the other large towns and cities of Britain, and the cities of France and Germany and the United States and all other “great civilisations.” I have studied them on Saturday nights in half the cities of Britain: in Amsterdam and Brussels and Cologne, in Paris and Nice, in Venice and Rome and Naples, in New York and Chicago: and in the light of our historical research one sees their ancestors in all the great cities of all the great civilisations that ever were. As it was in the beginning ... But that refers to the glory of God.