(4) In the fourth place, the old political economy is absolutely dead in England, although you might not perhaps guess it from some of the English economic writers. The influence of German thought in this, as in other departments, has affected men’s minds. Take a series of books like the Social Science Series, published by Sonnenschein; half those books are Socialistic,—and that would have been an impossibility twenty years ago. Of the “Fabian Essays in Socialism,” it may be said that the publisher, as well as the Society, reaped large profits from it. I mention such works as these, rather than romances like Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” or Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” The charm of Morris’s style and the ingenuity of Bellamy’s narrative would be sufficient to account for their success; but the popularity of these other works represents a body of serious interest in advanced economics, which may well be considered startling when the old hidebound prejudices of orthodox English economics are taken into consideration.
(5) Laissez-faire individualist political philosophy is dead. In vain does poor Mr. Herbert Spencer endeavor to stem the torrent. His political ideas are already as antiquated as Noah’s ark. I do not know a single one of the younger men in England who is influenced by them in the slightest degree, though one hears of one occasionally, just as one hears of a freak in a dime museum. For all practical purposes, philosophic Radicalism, as it was called, is as extinct as the dodo.
(6) There is another cause which cannot be ignored, though I speak upon it with some hesitation, as I purposely avoid, as far as possible, the difficult questions of religion and the deeper ethics. I mean that the old dualism, with its creed of other-worldliness, has gone by the board. Whatever men’s theoretical views are upon many transcendental matters, there is a general feeling now that the world is one, and that actual life here is just as sacred, normal, good, as it ever was or ever will be in any hypothetical past or future; that if there is any heaven for us we have to make it, and that such heaven is a state of the mind, of human relationships, and not a place to be reached at a definite period of time. Perhaps I may quote the eloquent words of William Morris in his “Dream of John Ball”: “Fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellowship is hell.” This idea is, I say, a powerful factor in leading the minds of the younger men to the views of which I am speaking. But men are not altogether influenced by their theoretical or even spiritual ideas; they are also moved, and so long as they have material bodies to be fed and clothed they will continue to be moved, by purely self-regarding and economic considerations. Let us never be deluded into supposing that altruistic feelings alone will induce men to make great social changes; egotistic considerations will prompt them as well, the desire of self-preservation working along with the desire for a better and more harmonious social order than exists. It is not only upon the working classes that capitalist monopoly tells; it tells also upon the educated middle classes who are not in the monopoly. They find the avenues of livelihood and preferment one after another closed to them; and just as education spreads, this will become more and more the case. When a small number of persons in a large community are highly educated, they have what economists call a monopoly value; they can get a good price for their services, because they possess something which few people have. Spread this higher education and the monopoly is broken down. Now, this is roughly what is going on in society; democracy is levelling all up to a common level, however gradual may be the process; and consequently highly educated men with their special gifts find their rates of remuneration becoming lower and lower, unless they possess some rare gift of genius, as a Sara Bernhardt in acting, a Paderewski in playing, a Stevenson in story-telling, a Mascagni as a composer. These rare people still command their monopoly value; but for the rest it has disappeared. Thus even more than the workingmen, perhaps, it has been the educated young men of the middle class (and the young women, too) who have been hardest hit by the modern development. Fifty years ago you could have gathered all the press writers of London into a single moderate-sized room. To-day all told they number nearly ten thousand. Everybody with a pen, ink and paper and any capacity for turning out “copy” is a journalist; and you see at once that it is impossible for all these men to earn a living. They don’t, and can’t. There are scores of highly educated people who work every day in the British Museum for eight or nine hours a day and earn less than a mechanic in constant occupation. It is the same in all the professions. Only fifteen per cent of London advocates ever get briefs at all; the other eighty-five per cent get nothing. In the medical profession it is the same. The prizes go to about five per cent of the profession; as for the average medical man in the London suburbs, the rates are so cut that I am credibly informed by one of them who studied at Cambridge and Heidelberg, and on whose education hundreds of pounds were spent, the fee for attendance and prescription in his suburban district has been brought down to twenty-five cents. It will be seen that it is not a question of making money or of the disgusting progress towards smug respectability, which is known as “getting on,”—it is positively a question of a bare living. Now, while a workingman who has never known comfort, whose father has never known it before him, can often stand a frightful amount of poverty without getting desperate, the well-bred young man cannot; and the result is that the keenest and most dangerous discontent comes from the educated classes, who are leading the Socialist masses all over Europe. Some superficial people think the remedy is to be found in inducing young men of the better classes to abandon the so-called “respectable” occupations and go in for manual labor. Let them cease, by all means, to be “respectable,” but let not any one lay the flattering unction to his soul that this, under existing economic conditions, is any solution. For what is the difficulty about manual labor now? Why, that thousands of those already engaged in it are not wanted; it is the difficulty of the unemployed, the difficulty of over-production. In 1886, according to the Report of the Washington Bureau of Statistics, there were at least one and one-half million of unemployed men in the United States; and this state of things has been almost if not quite paralleled in 1893. In London lack of employment is chronic, and is growing to such huge proportions that our cowardly, blind, public men dare not grapple with it. In Australia the unemployed have been walking the streets of Melbourne by the thousand. How absurd then it is to propose to add to the numbers of workingmen when those already in the ranks cannot find means of living! There is one method, alas, open to men, as there is always one method open to tempted, poverty-stricken women,—the method of what I may call intellectual prostitution; and many there be that go in at that gate. Sick and weary of the penury and struggle that go with honesty, young men of ability will deliberately sell themselves to the capitalist who has cornered our intellectual as he has cornered our material production, and will serve him for a good living. What numbers I have known choose this path!—and I cannot blame them, for they are forced into it by the conditions of modern life. It is useless preaching fine morals to them; the conditions of life must be adapted to human nature as it is, for human nature will not, you may be quite sure, suddenly transform itself to suit the conditions. These, then, are the economic motives which, combined with the moral and intellectual motives to which I have previously given expression, are forcing young men of education and good breeding into the ranks of the Socialists, and which especially operate in the case of a body like the Fabian Society.
Readers will be asking by this time whether I am not going to set forth the actual political programme or “platform,” as it is called in America, of the Fabian Society. Yes, that is just what I am going to do. As the Fabian Society holds that social transformation must be gradual, unless there is to be a general smash-up, it proposes a series of reforms for effecting the gradual change of society into a really social democratic state. But these reforms, it will be understood, are adopted with a distinct end in view, which fact makes all the difference between people of principle and mere opportunists who have no end in view other than the personal end of lining their own pockets. The following, then, are the planks of the Fabian political platform: Adult suffrage, Parliamentary and municipal, one vote for each man and each woman of twenty-one and upwards who are not in prison or in a lunatic asylum. The second ballot, as in France, Germany and Switzerland, so that whoever is elected will have an absolute majority of the votes polled. Payment of members by the state and of election expenses by the district (it must be remembered that at present representatives are not paid in England). Taxation of unearned incomes by such means as a land tax, heavy death duties to go to municipalities, and a progressive income tax. Municipalization of land and local industries, so that free and honorable municipal employment may be substituted for private charity, which, to vary a well-known line of Shakespeare, is twice cursed,—it curseth him who gives and him who takes. All education to be at the public cost for all classes, including manual as well as book training. Nationalization of all canals and railways, so that the public highways may belong to the public, as they always did until the new era of steam, when they got into the hands of capitalists. It is as ridiculous to pay Mr. Vanderbilt if you happen to want to go from New York to Chicago as it would be to pay him if you desired to take a walk down Fifth Avenue. The eight hours day for wage-workers in all government and municipal offices, in all monopolies like coal mines and railways, and in all industries where the workers want it. Parish councils for the laborers, with compulsory power to acquire land to build dwellings, to administer schools and charities, and to engage in co-operative farming.
Such is the programme through the adoption of which the Fabian Society believes that the country once called “merry England,” but the greater portion of which is now dreary and sordid and cursed with poverty, might again be really happy and be converted into a land of real and not of sham freedom. And now a word, in conclusion, on an important point,—the relation of the intellectual proletariat, as it has been called, to the masses, of the educated young men to the bulk of the working classes. Most of the members of the Fabian Society are educated, middle-class people, though there are workingmen connected with it also. What is to be the relation of these educated middle-class people to the swarming multitudes of workers? This is a vital social question, the most vital we have immediately before us. One remembers what Matthew Arnold said in America,—that the salvation of modern society lay in the hands of a remnant. I should be inclined to put it rather differently, and to say that, if the social evolution is to be peaceful and rational, it must be effected by the union of a cultivated remnant with the masses of the toiling people. American optimism may chafe at the little word “if.” Can there be any doubt, you may ask, that we shall go on prosperously and peacefully? I reply, yes, there is quite good enough ground for doubting this. As Mr. Pearson, the author of that remarkable book on “National Life and Character,” which has impressed us in England very deeply, has said, ancient civilization in the times of the Antonines seemed as firm and strong as does ours, nay, stronger, for it had, in the main, lasted as many centuries as ours has lasted decades.
Stout was its arm, each nerve and bone
Seemed puissant and alive.
Had you predicted then to a Roman senator that the splendid Greco-Roman cities would be given to the flames, and that the Roman Senate and legions would be trampled down by ignorant hordes of barbarians, he would have smiled, offered you another cup of Falernian wine, and changed the subject. Yet we know this happened; and I confess I can see nothing in our mushroom civilization which we have any particular right to regard as inherently more enduring than the elaborate and stately organism of Roman jurisprudence. But there are no barbarians! Yes, there are; but they are not outside us,—they are in our midst. Do you suppose that the grim victim of crushing poverty in a London attic or a Berlin cellar cares one pin’s head for all the heritage of the world’s thought which appeals to the highly educated? How are these huge masses of poor people to be welded into a great phalanx, to be induced to subordinate their passions to the demands of reason, to look not merely at the needs of the moment, but at those of next year, to realize that the world cannot be remade in a day, but yet that it can be so reconstituted as to give all opportunities to live as human beings should? Silly people are always talking nonsense about the danger of “agitators.” I know all about agitators. I know nearly every prominent agitator in Great Britain; and I can say confidently that it is the agitators who have to hold back, to restrain the people from rash and even mad action. The record of every English strike would show that this was the case. If all the labor leaders and agitators were silenced, it would be the very worst thing that could befall the capitalist class. The masses are at present, at the very best, an army of privates without officers. This is not their fault; it is their misfortune. They have not had the training, the culture, which enables them to meet rich men and their agents on equal ground. An English statesman, whose name is known the world over, said privately to me not long ago: “The labor men here in the House of Commons are all good fellows, but they are no use as leaders; the principal men of either party can twist them round their fingers with the greatest ease. If the labor movement is to be a success, it must be led by educated men.” I believe that verdict of one of the ablest and best-informed public men now living to be true. To what does it point? To the union of culture with labor, to reform this badly-jointed system. Only, be it observed, it must be union on equal terms. There must be no lofty condescension on the part of culture any more than base truckling on the part of labor. It must be an equal copartnership, where each partner recognizes that the other has something which he needs. And let me say, as one who knows workmen, that, in a certain and very real way, culture has as much to learn from labor as labor from culture. Let the cultured man approach the laboring man on perfectly equal terms, in a cordial and open way; and let both unite to deliver a groaning world from the bondage of riches. English experience shows that this can be done; and this idea is to a very great degree the idée mère of the Fabian Society, whose members have no higher ambition than to mingle freely with the workmen and share in the common life. By this means the hatred and suspicion felt by the French and German workmen towards any one who wears a black coat is eliminated, and both labor and culture gain in breadth, knowledge and sympathy, and the cause of rational progress is rendered more secure. Walt Whitman has told us, in “Leaves of Grass,” how he went “freely with powerful, uneducated persons,”—a gospel which Mr. John Addington Symonds, in his essay on Whitman, tells us, saved him from being a prig. And this gospel of free intercourse with the so-called “common people,” who are neither saints nor great sinners, but real men, more real than the conventional middle-class man can ever afford to be, is the healthiest, best advice which I can give to cultivated men.