This implies, of course, the transfer to the community, at a just payment, of the land, the mines, and the means of transit, and the gradual extension of municipal enterprise to productive and distributive industries. I am contending only for principles, and would refer the closer inquirer to such detailed constructive works as those of Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be futile to construct a rigid scheme of collectivist organisation. Such industries as the press, literature, art, etc., present difficulties which it would be foolish to override. But these affect comparatively few workers, and it is pedantry of an unintelligent kind to wrangle over them while we have a clear case in regard to other industries which involve many millions of workers. We would do well, however, to remember that the middle-class industries themselves are overcrowded and chaotic, and that most members of that class would gain by organisation, wherever it is possible. Instead of shrinking from it and inventing difficulties, we ought to be eager to discover its possibilities.
I ignore also certain more or less academic objections which have been made against this proposal to organise employment. Mill’s essay On Liberty is a monument of the futility of this kind of reasoning. Mill was a civil servant, and, except in the case of the idle and criminal, no restriction of individual liberty is proposed other than that which Mill cheerfully endured. Middle-class men are apt to take fright at the word “Socialism.” It ought to be by this time generally known that half a dozen very different theories pass under that name, and it is particularly unintelligent to confuse the extreme and the moderate proposals. Nearly the whole of the employment in any civilisation could be organised without laying on any who are willing to work a greater restraint than is laid on officials of the postal service. As to “confiscation,” it will be gathered from an earlier page that I favour generous compensation to actual holders of land or mines, but no perpetual pensions.
I do not anticipate from this change all the advantages which some Socialist writers expect. Their schemes of high universal prosperity seem to me to have an absurdly slender basis of actual work. Mr. William Morris conjectured that if all of us were to work for four hours a day there would be enough produced for all of us to live in luxury; whereas Mr. Sidney Webb calculates that it would need six hours’ work a day, on the part of all, to produce the necessaries of life. It is true that a very large body of middlemen, commercial travellers, footmen and other servants, and duplicate workers in rival industries would be set free for sound productive or distributive or professional work; but the easing of the hours of our actual workers, the removal of the young from the market, and other collateral improvements, must be taken into account. If we take one hour a day from the actual workers in our heavier industries, we absorb at once more than a million new men without increasing production. In any case, it is lamentable to dangle before the eyes of men the ideal of working only four hours a day. We want more of Browning’s gospel of work with cheerfulness. No doubt the idea is that, if the hours of labour are reduced, the leisure will be employed in reading Bergson and mastering Brahms. This optimistic theory seems to be at variance with our experience. Improvement of financial position more usually means the substitution of Bass or Dewar for cheap ale, and of stalls for the gallery at the variety theatre. A later chapter will, however, discuss our interests in this connection.
The fact remains that collectivism is the only remedy of poverty. The redistribution of wealth, or the prevention of excessive wealth, would, in my view, add comparatively little to the wages of the millions; and we must not put to the credit of an economic scheme the profit of such changes as disarmament. It is not this, but the note of efficiency, organisation, and economy which appeals to me in the Socialist ideal. It would abolish a vast amount of duplicate and unnecessary work, and it would conduct to their proper place in the industrial order the large army of casual workers. London or New York is a colossal monument of industrial inefficiency. Our chaotic mass of duplicate and triplicate rival grocers, bakers, butchers, etc., our rival railways and other purveyors and producers, with their separate staffs and their appalling waste in advertisement, are a reproach to our intelligence. We want an orderly and economical system both of production and distribution, and only the municipality (or else a vast and tyrannical trust) can conduct it. Most of all we want a power that will sweep the myriads of costers, hawkers, newspaper-youths, flower-girls, casual porters, loafers, musicians, etc., off our streets, and put them to productive work. We want a great curtailment of certain luxury-industries and fictitious industries. This would give us an immensely increased volume of productive work, and a great saving in distribution. The middle-class has not less to gain than the workers by such a scheme of organising our resources, and it offers us the only confident prospect of abolishing poverty and crime and gradually uplifting the mass of the people.
Naturally, we should for a long time have to deal with a great deal of refractory material. Idleness and crime are diseases, and they ought to be treated by the methods of modern medicine: scientific, humane, sometimes surgical. Certainly we would exercise “tyranny” in dealing with these. Probably in a properly ordered society all citizens would be enrolled in an industrial register. The hyper-sensitive would have the same guarantee of privacy as under our income-tax system, and the police would have a most effective means of locating the criminal. Any who were permanently refractory, or showed an incurable disposition to revert to crime or to the vagrant industries which disgrace our cities to-day, would have no moral right to burden us with their existence. The community would offer work and sufficient wage to all. The rest might disappear into segregated “homes of idleness,” or, if we are as wise as we ought to be, into lethal chambers.
This incurably refractory group would, however, probably prove smaller than many believe. We are at present a little too much inclined to consult scientific theorists about heredity (which is still very obscure in science) and too little inclined to make social experiments. I am assuming that a dozen other reforms would proceed simultaneously with the reform of industry. Education would no longer confine itself to giving an elementary literacy to children, without any further care what use they make of their literacy; it would, as I will suggest later, seriously concern itself with the adult population. A bolder treatment of the housing question would stimulate those who have evil traditions; we should not confine ourselves to building clean rooms for them, which they might make filthy if they wished. Prudential restriction of the birth-rate would be impressed on the poorer class, with great benefit to themselves and their children and the State. Eugenic proposals might be practically formulated and encouraged. We should not expect industrial betterment to have some mystic or magical effect of itself in uplifting the mass of the people; but, until this betterment occurs, other efforts to help them will be seriously hampered or entirely futile. The very magnitude of the task would prove a magnificent tonic and stimulation to the jaded mind of the community.
An increasing number of middle-class men and women now recognise that this is, not merely the only solution of the problem of poverty, but the most profitable scheme of national life for all who are willing to work. So detached an observer as Mr. Carveth Read, professor of Philosophy at London University, observes that “probably the future lies either with Co-operation or with Socialism” (Natural and Social Morals, p. 211). On the Continent, especially in Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Russia, there is a high proportion of cultivated and professional men in the Socialist movement. No one need fear its advance except the idler and the man whose work does not add to the wealth of the community or facilitate its distribution. It is the application of sound and tried business-principles to national life; and, when those principles have first been applied to the governmental machine, and made it an effective and disinterested administration, we shall move more quickly toward the Collectivist ideal.
Some may wonder that a student of science should come to this conclusion. There is a vague idea abroad that an individualist struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is the supreme and unalterable law of life. This idea, though encouraged by men like Mr. Kidd, is due to a merely superficial acquaintance with biology. In past ages nature has certainly evolved higher types mainly by a bloody struggle of individuals or a very calamitous pressure of environment. In the past: there is the limit of the teaching of biology. A new thing—human intelligence—has now entered the life of the earth, and it has in countless ways superseded the laws (that is to say, practices) of unconscious nature. The human mind is now a part of nature, and therefore “natural selection” is a wholly different matter from what it once was. Maurice Maeterlinck has suggested this with his usual felicity. He imagines himself on a hill, from which he sees two watercourses stretching toward the sea. One meanders over the plains, wasting time and space, blindly finding its way over the uneven ground: that is the old, unintelligent method of nature. The other waterway stretches straight across the landscape, a canal cut by man in the course of a few years, with no waste of ground: it is the new, intelligent method of nature. By this method we now create new species of plants in a thousandfold less time than natural selection (in the usual sense) could do; and we do it precisely by dispensing with the individualist struggle, by intelligent arrangement and control.
Early science set up unintelligent nature as a grand model for man. It is time we outgrew this phase of infancy. Intelligence must increasingly count in the life of the earth. We first organise a nation, and presently we shall organise international life. We organise particular businesses, and presently we shall organise the whole industrial life of the planet. There is no part of human life which calls more urgently for the application of intelligence than this disordered, wasteful, pitiless, poverty-saturated industrial world of ours. Let us treat human beings at least as intelligently as we treat our flowers, and as humanely as we treat our horses. We do not entrust those to the tragedy of struggle and survival. We need not fear that there will be any restriction of the development of personality. Under such a Collectivist system as I have in mind, personality will be developed until every man and woman is conscious of his or her share in the control of the destinies of this planet, and the sheep-like respect for ancient traditions and abuses, which impedes our progress to-day, will be for ever abolished.