If our national income had but increased at the same rate as our population since 1867 it would, in 1908, have amounted to but about £1,200,000,000. As we have seen, it is now about £1,840,000,000. Yet the Error of Distribution remains so great that while the total population in 1867 amounted to 30,000,000, we have to-day a nation of 30,000,000 poor people in our rich country, and many millions of these are living under conditions of degrading poverty. Of those above the line of primary poverty, millions are tied down by the conditions of their labour to live in surroundings which preclude the proper enjoyment of life or the rearing of healthy children. The comparatively high wages of London are accompanied by rents high in proportion and frequently by waste of income and time upon travelling expenses. In so far as the manual labourers have been reduced in proportion to population it has been to swell the ranks of black-coated working men, clerks, agents, travellers, canvassers, and others, whose tenure of employment is precarious, whose earnings are very low, and whose labour as we have already noted is largely waste.
We have won through the horrors of the birth and establishment of the factory system at the cost of physical deterioration. We have purchased a great commerce at the price of crowding our population into the cities and of robbing millions of strength and beauty. We have given our people what we grimly call elementary education and robbed them of the elements of a natural life. All this has been done that a few of us may enjoy a superfluity of goods and services. Out of the travail of millions we have added to a landed gentry an aristocracy of wealth. These, striding over the bodies of the fallen, proclaim in accents of conviction the prosperity of their country.
There leaps to the mind the mordant lines in which Ruskin, thirty years ago, wrote a "modern version" of the Beatitudes[65]:—
Blessed are the Rich in Flesh, for theirs is the Kingdom of Earth.
Blessed are the Proud, in that they have inherited the Earth.
Blessed are the Merciless, for they shall obtain Money.
There is no whit of exaggeration in these lines. The passage of thirty years has but added to their sting. Thirty years of accumulation of the results of toil in hands other than those of the toilers have had for consummation the accusing series of facts which are examined in the early chapters of this book. Deprivation for the many and luxury for the few have degraded our national life at both ends of the scale. At the one end, "thirteen millions on the verge of hunger," physically and morally deteriorated through poverty and unloveliness. At the other, the inheritors of the earth, "senseless conduits through which the strength and riches of their native land are poured into the cup of the fornication of its capital."
Blessed indeed are the Rich, for theirs is the governance of the realm, theirs is the Kingdom. Theirs is a power above the throne, for it has been a maxim of British politics that our government should be a poor government, and a poor government cannot contend in the direction of affairs with the imperium of wealth. This may be illustrated by our attempts to "educate" the mass of the people. For a few brief years the government, with small funds raised with timorous hands, does a little to form the mind and character of the child. Even in these early years it consents that the future proud citizen of Empire shall be improperly fed and badly housed. These early moments passed, the mockery of "education" ceases, and the child, taught by the State to read, to write, and to cipher, becomes a unit of industry. At this point begins the serious training of the citizen. Forthwith he is inducted into some more or less worthy employment, that employment, as we have seen, resulting from the great expenditure of the few and the poor expenditure of the many. Careers are thus chiefly shaped by the wealthy, for theirs is the greatest call. The demand for luxuries is too great; the demand for necessaries is too small; the unit of industry is fortunate, therefore, if he is inducted into useful service. The State washes its hands of his development. The educational sham over, the real education of life begins. So far as the State calls for privates of industry it is chiefly to make them soldiers, sailors, makers of guns, builders of battleships. The development of all things useful, of railways, of canals, of roads, of cities, of houses, is resigned to the blind call for commodities and the intelligence of individuals who, in search of private gain, seek, without regard to the national well-being, to profit by that blind call.
Yet the manner in which its people are employed matters everything to a nation. It is not sufficient to give the child a smattering of knowledge. We need to take a collective interest in the general education of our citizens, and that education is the result of expenditure. The consumer gives the order. Given a fairly equable distribution of income, the call will be as to the greater part for worthy things, as to the smaller part for luxuries. Given a grossly unequal distribution, and the call for luxuries will be so great as to divert a considerable part of the national labour into channels of waste and degradation.
To keep a government poor is to keep it weak. The poor government may resolve to educate, but it will have no means to carry out its resolve; its teachers will be underpaid; its schools inefficient. The poor government may pass Housing Acts; it will but call for better houses that will not come when it does call for them. The poor government may piously resolve to create small holdings; there will be no means to carry out the pious resolve. The poor government may, at periodic intervals, look the question of Unemployment in the face; its legislation will but reflect its poverty, and be in its provisions an acknowledgment that the power to employ, the power to govern, is in other hands.