Work is useless unless it be productive work. It would be work for a man to dig a hole and then fill it up again; but the work would be of no benefit to the nation. It would be work for a man to grow strawberries to feed the Duke of Argyll's donkey on, but it would be useless work, because it would add nothing to the general store of wealth.
Policemen and gaolers are men withdrawn from the work of producing wealth to wait upon useless criminals. They, like soldiers and many others, do not produce wealth, but they consume it, and the greater the number of producers and the smaller the number of consumers the richer the State must be. For which family would be the better off—the family wherein ten earned wages and none wasted them, or the family in which two earned wages and eight spent them?
Do not imagine, as some do, that increased consumption is a blessing. It is the amount of wealth you produce that makes a nation prosperous; and the idle rich man, who produces nothing, only makes his crime worse by spending a great deal.
The great mass of the workers lead mean, penurious, and joyless lives; they crowd into small and inconvenient houses; they occupy the darkest, narrowest, and dirtiest streets; they eat coarse and cheap food, when they do not go hungry; they drink adulterated beer and spirits; they wear shabby and ill-made clothes; they ride in third-class carriages, sit in the worst seats of the churches and theatres; and they stint their wives of rest, their children of education, and themselves of comfort and of honour, that they may pay rent, and interest, and profits for the idle rich to spend in luxury and folly.
And if the workers complain, or display any signs of suspicion or discontent, they are told that the rich are keeping them.
That is not true. It is the workers who are keeping the rich.
CHAPTER VII WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT
It is no use telling you what Socialism is until I have told you what it is not. Those who do not wish you to be Socialists have given you very false notions about Socialism, in the hope of setting you against it. They have brought many false charges against Socialists, in the hope of setting you against them. So you have come to think of Socialism as a thing foolish, or vile, and when it is spoken of, you turn up your noses (instead of trying to see beyond them) and turn your backs on it.