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Title: The Servile State

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: March 20, 2021 [eBook #64882]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SERVILE STATE ***
The Servile State


By Hilaire Belloc


"... If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape
restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course."


T.N. Foulis London & Edinburgh 1912


TO E.S.P. Haynes

* * *

Synopsis of the Servile State

Introduction The Subject of this Book:--It is written to maintain the
thesis that industrial society as we know it will tend towards the
re-establishment of slavery.

--The sections into which the book will be divided

Section I
Definitions:--What _wealth_ is and why necessary to man--How
produced--The meaning of the words _Capital_, _Proletariat_, _Property_,
_Means of Production_--The definition of the _Capitalist State_--The
definition of the _/Servile State/_--What it is and what it is not--The
re-establishment of status in the place of contract--That servitude is not
a question of degree but of kind--Summary of these definitions.

Section II
Our Civilisation was originally Servile:--The Servile
institution in Pagan antiquity--Its fundamental character--A Pagan society
took it for granted--The institution disturbed by the advent of the
Christian Church.

Section III
How the Servile Institution was for a Time Dissolved:--The
subconscious effect of the Faith in this matter--The main elements of Pagan
economic society--The Villa--The transformation of the agricultural slave
into the Christian _serf_--Next into the Christian _peasant_--The
corresponding erection throughout Christendom of the /_Distributive
State_/--It is nearly complete at the close of the Middle Ages--"It was not
machinery that lost us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind."

Section IV
How the Distributive State Failed:--This failure original in
England--The story of the decline from Distributive property to
Capitalism--The economic revolution of the sixteenth century--The
confiscation of monastic land--What might have happened had the State
retained it--As a fact that land is captured by an oligarchy--England is
Capitalist _before_ the advent of the industrial revolution--Therefore
modern industry, proceeding from England, has grown in a Capitalist mould.

Section V
The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows
Unstable:--It can of its nature be but a transitory phase lying between an
earlier and a later stable state of society--The two internal strains which
render it unstable--_(a)_ The conflict between its social realities and its
moral and legal basis--_(b)_ The insecurity and insufficiency to which it
condemns free citizens--The few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood
from the many non-possessors--Capitalism is so unstable that it dares not
proceed to its own logical conclusion, but tends to restrict competition
among owners, and insecurity and insufficiency among non-owners.

Section VI
The Stable Solutions of this Instability:--The three stable
social arrangements which alone can take the place of unstable
Capitalism--The _Distributive_ solution, the _Collectivist_ solution, the
_Servile_ solution--The reformer will not openly advocate the Servile
solution--There remain only the Distributive and the Collectivist solution.

Section VII
Socialism is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist
Crux:--A contrast between the reformer making for Distribution and the
reformer making for Socialism (or Collectivism)--The difficulties met by
the first type--He is working against the grain--The second is working with
the grain--Collectivism a natural development of Capitalism--It appeals
both to Capitalist and Proletarian--None the less we shall see that the
Collectivist attempt is doomed to fail and to produce a thing very
different from its object--to wit, the Servile State.

Section VIII
The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile
State:--There are two types of reformers working along the line of least
resistance--These are the Socialist and the Practical Man--The Socialist
again is of two kinds, The Humanist and the Statistician--The Humanist
would like both to confiscate from the owners and to establish security and
sufficiency for the non-owners--He is allowed to do the second thing by
establishing servile conditions--He is forbidden to do the first--The
Statistician is quite content so long as he can run and organise the
poor--Both are canalised towards the Servile State and both are shepherded
off their ideal Collectivist State--Meanwhile the great mass, the
proletariat, upon whom the reformers are at work, though retaining the
instinct of ownership, has lost any experience of it and is subject to
private law much more than to the law of the Courts--This is exactly what
happened in the past during the converse change from Slavery to
Freedom--Private Law became stronger than Public at the beginning of the
Dark Ages--The owners welcomed the changes which maintained them in
ownership and yet increased the security of their revenue--to-day the
non-owners will welcome whatever keeps them a wage-earning class but
increases their wages and their security without insisting on the
expropriation of the owners.

Appendix on "Buying-Out" An Appendix showing that the Collectivist proposal
to "Buy-Out" the Capitalist in lieu of expropriating him is vain.

Section IX The Servile State Has Begun:--The manifestation of the Servile
State in law or proposals of law will fall into two sorts--(a) Laws or
proposals of law compelling the proletariat to work--(b) Financial
operations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society--As
to (a), we find it /already/ at work in measures such as the Insurance Act
and proposals such as Compulsory Arbitration, the enforcement of Trades
Union bargains and the erection of "Labour Colonies," etc., for the
"unemployable"--As to the second, we find that so-called "Municipal" or
"Socialist" experiments in acquiring the means of production have /already/
increased and are continually increasing the dependence of society upon the
Capitalist.

Conclusion

* * *

The Servile State

* * *

Introduction
The Subject of This Book


This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth:--

That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by
a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a
condition of stable equilibrium /by the establishment of compulsory labour
legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production for
the advantage of those who do/. With this principle of compulsion applied
against the non-owners there must also come a difference in their status;
and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided into
two sets: the first economically free and politically free, possessed of
the means of production, and securely confirmed in that possession; the
second economically unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by
their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum
of well-being beneath which they shall not fall.

Society having reached such a condition would be released from its present
internal strains and would have taken on a form which would be stable: that
is, capable of being indefinitely prolonged without change. In it would be
resolved the various factors of instability which increasingly disturb that
form of society called _Capitalist_, and men would be satisfied to accept,
and to continue in, such a settlement.

To such a stable society I shall give, for reasons which will be described
in the next section, the title of THE SERVILE STATE.

I shall not undertake to judge whether this approaching organisation of our
modern society be good or evil. I shall concern myself only with showing
the necessary tendency towards it which has long existed and the recent
social provisions which show that it has actually begun.

This new state will be acceptable to those who desire consciously or by
implication the re-establishment among us of a difference of status between
possessor and non-possessor: it will be distasteful to those who regard
such a distinction with ill favour or with dread.

My business will not be to enter into the discussion between these two
types of modern thinkers, but to point out to each and to both that that
which the one favours and the other would fly is upon them.

I shall prove my thesis in particular from the case of the industrial
society of Great Britain, including that small, alien, and exceptional
corner of Ireland, which suffers or enjoys industrial conditions to-day.

I shall divide the matter thus:--

(1) I shall lay down certain definitions.

(2) Next, I shall describe the institution of slavery and /The Servile
State/ of which it is the basis, as these were in the ancient world. I
shall then:

(3) Sketch very briefly the process whereby that age-long institution of
slavery was slowly dissolved during the Christian centuries, and whereby
the resulting medieval system, based upon highly divided property in the
means of production, was

(4) wrecked in certain areas of Europe as it approached completion, and had
substituted for it, in practice though not in legal theory, a society based
upon /Capitalism/.

(5) Next, I shall show how Capitalism was of its nature unstable, because
its social realities were in conflict with all existing or possible systems
of law, and because its effects in denying _sufficiency_ and _security_
were intolerable to men; how being thus _unstable_, it consequently
presented a _problem_ which demanded a solution: to wit, the establishment
of some stable form of society whose law and social practice should
correspond, and whose economic results, by providing _sufficiency_ and
_security_, should be tolerable to human nature.

(6) I shall next present the only three possible solutions:--

(_a_) Collectivism, or the placing of the means of production in the hands
of the political officers of the community.

(_b_) Property, or the re-establishment of a Distributive State in which
the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production.

(_c_) Slavery, or a Servile State in which those who do not own the means
of production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do, and
shall receive in exchange a security of livelihood.

Now, seeing the distaste which the remains of our long Christian tradition
has bred in us for directly advocating the third solution and boldly
supporting the re-establishment of slavery, the first two alone are open to
reformers: (1) a reaction towards a condition of well-divided property or
the _Distributive State_; (2) an attempt to achieve the ideal _Collectivist
State_.

It can easily be shown that this second solution appeals most naturally and
easily to a society already Capitalist on account of the difficulty which
such a society has to discover the energy, the will, and the vision
requisite for the first solution.

(7) I shall next proceed to show how the pursuit of this ideal Collectivist
State which is bred of Capitalism leads men acting upon a Capitalist
society not towards the Collectivist State nor anything like it, but to
that third utterly different thing--the _Servile State_.

To this eighth section I shall add an appendix showing how the attempt to
achieve Collectivism gradually by public purchase is based upon an
illusion.

(8) Recognising that theoretical argument of this kind, though
intellectually convincing, is not sufficient to the establishment of my
thesis, I shall conclude by giving examples from modern English
legislation, which examples prove that the Servile State is actually upon
us.

Such is the scheme I design for this book.




Section One
Definitions


Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his
environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a
condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to
his needs.

That special, conscious, and intelligent transformation of his environment
which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man
we call the _Production of Wealth_.

_Wealth_ is matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed
from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more
serviceable to a human need.

Without _Wealth_ man cannot exist. The production of it is a necessity to
him, and though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary, and even
to those forms of production which we call luxuries, yet in any given human
society there is a certain _kind_ and a certain _amount_ of wealth without
which human life cannot be lived: as, for instance, in England to-day,
certain forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth,
and habitation.

Therefore, to control the production of wealth is to control human life
itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to
refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the
production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the
citizens can legally exist.

Wealth can only be produced by the application of human energy, mental and
physical, to the forces of nature around us, and to the material which
those forces inform.

This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we
will call _Labour_. As for that material and those natural forces, we will
call them, for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conventionally
accepted, term _Land_.

It would seem, therefore, that all problems connected with the production
of wealth, and all discussion thereupon, involve but two principal original
factors, to wit, _Labour_ and _Land_, But it so happens that the conscious,
artificial, and intelligent action of man upon nature, corresponding to his
peculiar character compared with other created beings, introduces a third
factor of the utmost importance.

Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious methods of varying and often
increasing complexity, and aids himself by the construction of
_implements_. These soon become in each new department of the production as
truly necessary to that production as _labour_ and _land_. Further, any
process of production takes a certain time; during that time the producer
must be fed, and clothed, and housed, and the rest of it. There must
therefore be an _accumulation of wealth_ created in the past, and reserved
with the object of maintaining labour during its effort to produce for the
future.

Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool, or the setting aside of
a store of provisions, _labour_ applied to _land_ for either purpose is not
producing wealth for immediate consumption. It is setting aside and
reserving somewhat, and that _somewhat_ is always necessary in varying
proportions according to the simplicity or complexity of the economic
society to the production of wealth.

To such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future
production, and not for immediate consumption, whether it be in the form of
instruments and tools, or in the form of stores for the maintenance of
labour during the process of production, we give the name of _Capital_.

There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth, which
we may conventionally term _Land_, _Capital_, and _Labour_.

When we talk of the _Means of Production_ we signify land and capital
combined. Thus, when we say that a man is "dispossessed of the means of
production," or cannot produce wealth save by the leave of another who
"possesses the means of production," we mean that he is the master only of
his labour and has no control, in any useful amount, over either capital,
or land, or both combined.

A man politically free, that is, one who enjoys the right before the law to
exercise his energies when he pleases (or not at all if he does not so
please), but not possessed by legal right of control over any useful amount
of the means of production, we call _proletarian_, and any considerable
class composed of such men we call a _proletariat_.

_Property_ is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the
control of land and of wealth made from land, including therefore all the
means of production, is vested in some person or corporation. Thus we may
say of a building, including the land upon which it stands, that it is the
"property" of such and such a citizen, or family, or college, or of the
State, meaning that those who "own" such property are guaranteed by the
laws in the right to use it or withhold it from use. _Private property_
signifies such wealth (including the means of production) as may, by the
arrangements of society, be in the control of persons or corporations
_other_ than the political bodies of which these persons or corporations
are in another aspect members. What distinguishes private property is not
that the possessor thereof is less than the State, or is only a part of the
State (for were that so we should talk of municipal property as private
property), but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to
his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy
of political institutions. Thus Mr Jones is a citizen of Manchester, but he
does not own his private property as a citizen of Manchester, he owns it as
Mr Jones, whereas, if the house next to his own be owned by the Manchester
municipality, they own it only because they are a political body standing
for the whole community of the town. Mr Jones might move to Glasgow and
still own his property in Manchester, but the municipality of Manchester
can only own its property in connection with the corporate political life
of the town.

An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of
the political officers of the community we call _Collectivist_, or more
generally _Socialist_.[1]

A society in which private property in land and capital, that is, the
ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined
to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social
mass of the State, while the rest have not such property and are therefore
proletarian, we call _Capitalist_; and the method by which wealth is
produced in such a society can only be the application of labour, the
determining mass of which must necessarily be proletarian, to land and
capital, in such fashion that, of the total wealth produced, the
Proletariat which labours shall only receive a portion.

The two marks, then, defining the Capitalist State are: (1) That the
citizens thereof are politically free: _i.e._ can use or withhold at will
their possessions or their labour, but are also (2) divided into capitalist
and proletarian in such proportions that the State as a whole is not
characterised by the institution of ownership among free citizens, but by
the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole, or
even to a small minority. Such a _Capitalist State_ is essentially divided
into two classes of free citizens, the one capitalist or owning, the other
propertyless or proletarian.

My last definition concerns the Servile State itself, and since the idea is
both somewhat novel and also the subject of this book, I will not only
establish but expand its definition.

The definition of the Servile State is as follows:--

"_That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the
families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the
advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community
with the mark of such labour we call_ /The Servile State/."

Note first certain negative limitations in the above which must be clearly
seized if we are not to lose clear thinking in a fog of metaphor and
rhetoric.

That society is not servile in which men are intelligently constrained to
labour by enthusiasm, by a religious tenet, or indirectly from fear of
destitution, or directly from love of gain, or from the common sense which
teaches them that by their labour they may increase their well-being.

A clear boundary exists between the servile and the non-servile condition
of labour, and the conditions upon either side of that boundary utterly
differ one from another, Where there is _compulsion_ applicable by
_positive law_ to men of a certain _status_, and such compulsion enforced
in the last resort by the powers at the disposal of the State, there is the
institution of _Slavery_; and if that institution be sufficiently expanded
the whole State may be said to repose upon a servile basis, and is a
Servile State.

Where such formal, legal status is absent the conditions are not servile;
and the difference between servitude and freedom, appreciable in a thousand
details of actual life, is most glaring in this: that the free man can
refuse his labour and use that refusal as an instrument wherewith to
_bargain_; while the slave has no such instrument or power to bargain at
all, but is dependent for his well-being upon the custom of society, backed
by the regulation of such of its laws as may protect and guarantee the
slave.

Next, let it be observed that the State is not servile because the mere
institution of slavery is to be discovered somewhere within its confines.
The State is only servile when so considerable a body of forced labour is
affected by the compulsion of positive law as to give a character to the
whole community.

Similarly, that State is not servile in which _all_ citizens are liable to
submit their energies to the compulsion of positive law, and must labour at
the discretion of State officials. By loose metaphor and for rhetorical
purposes men who dislike Collectivism (for instance) or the discipline of a
regiment will talk of the "servile" conditions of such organisations. But
for the purposes of strict definition and clear thinking it is essential to
remember that a servile condition only exists by contrast with a free
condition. The servile condition is present in society only when there is
also present the free citizen for whose benefit the slave works under the
compulsion of positive law.

Again, it should be noted that this word "servile" in no way connotes the
worst, nor even necessarily a bad, arrangement of society, This point is so
clear that it should hardly delay us; but a confusion between the
rhetorical and the precise use of the word servile I have discovered to
embarrass public discussion of the matter so much that I must once more
emphasise what should be self-evident.

The discussion as to whether the institution of slavery be a good or a bad
one, or be relatively better or worse than other alternative institutions,
has nothing whatever to do with the exact definition of that institution.
Thus Monarchy consists in throwing the responsibility for the direction of
society upon an individual. One can imagine some Roman of the first century
praising the new Imperial power, but through a muddle-headed tradition
against "kings" swearing that he would never tolerate a "monarchy." Such a
fellow would have been a very futile critic of public affairs under Trajan,
but no more futile than a man who swears that nothing shall make him a
"slave," though well prepared to accept laws that compel him to labour
without his consent, under the force of public law, and upon terms dictated
by others.

Many would argue that a man so compelled to labour, guaranteed against
insecurity and against insufficiency of food, housing and clothing,
promised subsistence for his old age, and a similar set of advantages for
his posterity, would be a great deal better off than a free man lacking all
these things. But the argument does not affect the definition attaching to
the word servile. A devout Christian of blameless life drifting upon an
ice-flow in the Arctic night, without food or any prospect of succour, is
not so comfortably circumstanced as the Khedive of Egypt; but it would be
folly in establishing the definition of the words "Christian" and
"Mahommedan" to bring this contrast into account.

We must then, throughout this inquiry, keep strictly to the economic aspect
of the case. Only when that is established and when the modern tendency to
the re-establishment of slavery is clear, are we free to discuss the
advantages and disadvantages of the revolution through which we are
passing.

It must further be grasped that the essential mark of the Servile
Institution does not depend upon the ownership of the slave by a particular
master. That the institution of slavery tends to that form under the
various forces composing human nature and human society is probable enough.
That if or when slavery were re-established in England a particular man
would in time be found the slave not of Capitalism in general but of, say,
the Shell Oil Trust in particular, is a very likely development; and we
know that in societies where the institution was of immemorial antiquity
such direct possession of the slave by the free man or corporation of free
men had come to be the rule. But my point is that such a mark is not
essential to the character of slavery. As an initial phase in the
institution of slavery, or even as a permanent phase marking society for an
indefinite time, it is perfectly easy to conceive of a whole class rendered
servile by positive law, and compelled by such law to labour for the
advantage of another non-servile free class, without any direct act of
possession permitted to one man over the person of another.

The final contrast thus established between slave and free might be
maintained by the State guaranteeing to the _un-free_, security in their
subsistence, to the free, security in their property and profits, rent and
interest. What would mark the slave in such a society would be his
belonging to that set or status which was compelled by no matter what
definition to labour, and was thus cut off from the other set or status not
compelled to labour, but free to labour or not as it willed.

Again, the Servile State would certainly exist even though a man, being
only compelled to labour during a portion of his time, were free to bargain
and even to accumulate in his "free" time. The old lawyers used to
distinguish between a serf "in gross" and a serf "regardant." A serf "in
gross" was one who was a serf at all times and places, and not in respect
to a particular lord. A serf "regardant" was a serf only in his bondage to
serve a particular lord. He was free as against other men. And one might
perfectly well have slaves who were only slaves "regardant" to a particular
type of employment during particular hours. But they would be slaves none
the less, and if their hours were many and their class numerous, the State
which they supported would be a Servile State.

Lastly, let it be remembered that the servile condition remains as truly an
institution of the State when it attaches permanently and irrevocably at
any one time to a particular set of human beings as when it attaches to a
particular class throughout their lives. Thus the laws of Paganism
permitted the slave to be enfranchised by his master: it further permitted
children or prisoners to be sold into slavery. The Servile Institution,
though perpetually changing in the elements of its composition, was still
an unchanging factor in the State. Similarly, though the State should only
subject to slavery those who had less than a certain income, while leaving
men free by inheritance or otherwise to pass out of, and by loss to pass
into, the slave class, that slave class, though fluctuating as to its
composition, would still permanently exist.

Thus, if the modern industrial State shall make a law by which servile
conditions shall not attach to those capable of earning more than a certain
sum by their own labour, but shall attach to those who earn less than this
sum; or if the modern industrial State defines manual labour in a
particular fashion, renders it compulsory during a fixed time for those who
undertake it, but leaves them free to turn later to other occupations if
they choose, undoubtedly such distinctions, though they attach to
conditions and not to individuals, establish the Servile Institution.

Some considerable number must be manual workers by definition, and while
they were so defined would be slaves. Here again the composition of the
Servile class would fluctuate, but the class would be permanent and large
enough to stamp all society. I need not insist upon the practical effect:
that such a class, once established, tends to be fixed in the great
majority of those which make it up, and that the individuals entering or
leaving it tend to become few compared to the whole mass.

There is one last point to be considered in this definition.

It is this:--

Since, in the nature of things, a free society must enforce a contract (a
free society consisting in nothing else but the enforcement of free
contracts), how far can that be called a Servile condition which is the
result of contract nominally or really free? In other words, is not a
contract to labour, however freely entered into, servile of its nature when
enforced by the State?

For instance, I have no food or clothing, nor do I possess the means of
production whereby I can produce any wealth in exchange for such. I am so
circumstanced that an owner of the Means of Production will not allow me
access to those Means unless I sign a contract to serve him for a week at a
wage of bare subsistence. Does the State in enforcing that contract make me
for that week a slave?

Obviously not. For the institution of Slavery presupposes a certain
attitude of mind in the free man and in the slave, a habit of living in
either, and the stamp of both those habits upon society. No such effects
are produced by a contract enforceable by the length of one week. The
duration of human life is such, and the prospect of posterity, that the
fulfilling of such a contract in no way wounds the senses of liberty and of
choice.

What of a month, a year, ten years, a lifetime? Suppose an extreme case,
and a destitute man to sign a contract binding him and all his children who
were minors to work for a bare subsistence until his own death, or the
attainment of majority of the children, whichever event might happen
latest; would the State in forcing that contract be making the man a slave?

As undoubtedly as it would not be making him a slave in the first case, it
would be making him a slave in the second.

One can only say to ancient sophistical difficulties of this kind, that the
sense of men establishes for itself the true limits of any object, as of
freedom. What freedom is, or is not, in so far as mere measure of time is
concerned (though of course much else than time enters in), human habit
determines; but the enforcing of a contract of service certainly or
probably leaving a choice after its expiration is consonant with freedom.
The enforcement of a contract probably binding one's whole life is not
consonant with freedom. One binding to service a man's natural heirs is
intolerable to freedom.

Consider another converse point. A man binds himself to work for life and
his children after him so far as the law may permit him to bind them in a
particular society, but that not for a bare subsistence, but for so large a
wage that he will be wealthy in a few years, and his posterity, when the
contract is completed, wealthier still. Does the State in forcing such a
contract make the fortunate employee a slave? No. For it is in the essence
of slavery that subsistence or little more than subsistence should be
guaranteed to the slave. Slavery exists in order that the Free should
benefit by its existence, and connotes a condition in which the men
subjected to it may demand secure existence, but little more.

If anyone were to draw an exact line, and to say that a life-contract
enforceable by law was slavery at so many shillings a week, but ceased to
be slavery after that margin, his effort would be folly. None the less,
there is a standard of subsistence in any one society, the guarantee of
which (or little more) under an obligation to labour by compulsion is
slavery, while the guarantee of very much more is not slavery.

This verbal jugglery might be continued. It is a type of verbal difficulty
apparent in every inquiry open to the professional disputant, but of no
effect upon the mind of the honest inquirer whose business is not dialectic
but truth.

It is always possible by establishing a cross-section in a set of
definitions to pose the unanswerable difficulty of degree, but that will
never affect the realities of discussion. We know, for instance, what is
meant by torture when it exists in a code of laws, and when it is
forbidden. No imaginary difficulties of degree between pulling a man's hair
and scalping him, between warming him and burning him alive, will disturb a
reformer whose business it is to expunge torture from some penal code.

In the same way we know what is and what is not compulsory labour, what is
and what is not the Servile Condition. Its test is, I repeat, the
withdrawal from a man of his free choice to labour or not to labour, here
or there, for such and such an object; and the compelling of him by
positive law to labour for the advantage of others who do not fall under
the same compulsion.

Where you have _that_, you have slavery: with all the manifold, spiritual,
and political results of that ancient institution.

Where you have slavery affecting a class of such considerable size as to
mark and determine the character of the State, there you have the Servile
State.

* * * * *

To sum up, then:--The /Servile State/ is that in which we find so
considerable a body of families and individuals distinguished from _free
citizens_ by the mark of compulsory labour as to stamp a general character
upon society, and all the chief characters, good or evil, attaching to the
institution of slavery will be found permeating such a State, whether the
slaves be directly and personally attached to their masters, only
indirectly attached through the medium of the State, or attached in a third
manner through their subservience to corporations or to particular
industries. The slave so compelled to labour will be one dispossessed of
the means of production, and compelled by law to labour for the advantage
of all or any who are possessed thereof. And the distinguishing mark of the
slave proceeds from the special action upon him of a positive law which
first separates one body of men, the less-free, from another, the more
free, in the function of contract within the general body of the community.

Now, from a purely Servile conception of production and of the arrangement
of society we Europeans sprang. The Immemorial past of Europe is a Servile
past. During some centuries which the Church raised, permeated, and
constructed, Europe was gradually released or divorced from this immemorial
and fundamental conception of slavery; to that conception, to that
institution, our Industrial or Capitalist society is now upon its return.
We are re-establishing the slave.

* * * * *

Before proceeding to the proof of this, I shall, in the next few pages,
digress to sketch very briefly the process whereby the old Pagan slavery
was transformed into a free society some centuries ago. I shall then
outline the further process whereby the new non-servile society was wrecked
at the Reformation in certain areas of Europe, and particularly in England.
There was gradually produced in its stead the transitory phase of society
(now nearing its end) called generally _Capitalism_ or the _Capitalist
State_.

Such a digression, being purely historical, is not logically necessary to a
consideration of our subject, but it is of great value to the reader,
because the knowledge of how, in reality and in the concrete, things have
moved better enables us to understand the logical process whereby they tend
towards a particular goal in the future.

One could prove the tendency towards the Servile State in England to-day to
a man who knew nothing of the past of Europe; but that tendency will seem
to him far more reasonably probable, far more a matter of experience and
less a matter of mere deduction, when he knows what our society once was,
and how it changed into what we know to-day.




Section Two
Our Civilisation Was Originally Servile


In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find,
from two thousand years ago upwards, one fundamental institution whereupon
the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is Slavery.

There is here no distinction between the highly civilised City-State of the
Mediterranean, with its letters, its plastic art, and its code of laws,
with all that makes a civilisation--and this stretching back far beyond any
surviving record,--there is here no distinction between that civilised body
and the Northern and Western societies of the Celtic tribes, or of the
little known hordes that wandered in the Germanies. _All_ indifferently
reposed upon slavery. It was a fundamental conception of society. It was
everywhere present, nowhere disputed.

There _is_ a distinction (or would appear to be) between Europeans and
Asiatics in this matter. The religion and morals of the one so differed in
their very origin from those of the other that every social institution was
touched by the contrast--and Slavery among the rest.

But with that we need not concern ourselves. My point is that our European
ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with
little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the
economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never
doubted but that it was normal to all human society.

It is a matter of capital importance to seize this.

An arrangement of such a sort would not have endured without intermission
(and indeed without question) for many centuries, nor have been found
emerging fully grown from that vast space of unrecorded time during which
barbarism and civilisation flourished side by side in Europe, had there not
been something in it, good or evil, native to our blood.

There was no question in those ancient societies from which we spring of
making subject races into slaves by the might of conquering races. All that
is the guess-work of the universities. Not only is there no proof of it,
rather all the existing proof is the other way. The Greek had a Greek
slave, the Latin a Latin slave, the German a German slave, the Celt a
Celtic slave. The theory that "superior races" invaded a land, either drove
out the original inhabitants or reduced them to slavery, is one which has
no argument either from our present knowledge of man's mind or from
recorded evidence. Indeed, the most striking feature of that Servile Basis
upon which Paganism reposed was the human equality recognised between
master and slave. The master might kill the slave, but both were of one
race and each was human to the other.

This spiritual value was not, as a further pernicious piece of guess-work
would dream, a "growth" or a "progress." The doctrine of human equality was
inherent in the very stuff of antiquity, as it is inherent in those
societies which have not lost tradition.

We may presume that the barbarian of the North would grasp the great truth
with less facility than the civilised man of the Mediterranean, because
barbarism everywhere shows a retrogression in intellectual power; but the
proof that the Servile Institution was a social arrangement rather than a
distinction of type is patent from the coincidence everywhere of
Emancipation with Slavery. Pagan Europe not only thought the existence of
Slaves a natural necessity to society, but equally thought that upon giving
a Slave his freedom the enfranchised man would naturally step, though
perhaps after the interval of some lineage, into the ranks of free society.
Great poets and great artists, statesmen and soldiers were little troubled
by the memory of a servile ancestry.

On the other hand, there was a perpetual recruitment of the Servile
Institution, just as there was a perpetual emancipation from it, proceeding
year after year; and the natural or normal method of recruitment is most
clearly apparent to us in the simple and barbaric societies which the
observation of contemporary civilised Pagans enables us to judge.

It was poverty that made the slave.

Prisoners of war taken in set combat afforded one mode of recruitment, and
there was also the raiding of men by pirates in the outer lands and the
selling of them in the slave markets of the South. But at once the cause of
the recruitment and the permanent support of the institution of slavery was
the indigence of the man who sold himself into slavery, _or was born into
it_; for it was a rule of Pagan Slavery that the slave bred the slave, and
that even if one of the parents were free the offspring was a slave.

The society of antiquity, therefore, was normally divided (as must at last
be the society of any servile state) into clearly marked sections: there
was upon the one hand the citizen who had a voice in the conduct of the
State, who would often labour--but labour of his own free will--and who was
normally possessed of property; upon the other hand, there was a mass
dispossessed of the means of production and compelled by positive law to
labour at command.

It is true that in the further developments of society the accumulation of
private savings by a slave was tolerated and that slaves so favoured did
sometimes purchase their freedom.

It is further true that in the confusion of the last generations of
Paganism there arose in some of the great cities a considerable class of
men who, though free, were dispossessed of the means of production. But
these last never existed in a sufficient proportion to stamp the whole
State of society with a character drawn from their proletarian
circumstance. To the end the Pagan world remained a world of free
proprietors possessed, in various degrees, of the land and of the capital
whereby wealth may be produced, and applying to that land and capital for
the purpose of producing wealth, _compulsory_ labour.

Certain features in that original Servile State from which we all spring
should be carefully noted by way of conclusion.

First, though all nowadays contrast slavery with freedom to the advantage
of the latter, yet men then accepted slavery freely as an alternative to
indigence.

Secondly (and this is most important for our judgment of the Servile
Institution as a whole, and of the chances of its return), in all those
centuries we find no organised effort, nor (what is still more significant)
do we find any _complaint of conscience_ against the institution which
condemned the bulk of human beings to forced labour.

Slaves may be found in the literary exercises of the time bewailing their
lot and joking about it; some philosophers will complain that an ideal
society should contain no slaves; others will excuse the establishment of
slavery upon this plea or that, while granting that it offends the dignity
of man. The greater part will argue of the State that it is necessarily
Servile. But no one, slave or free, dreams of abolishing or even of
changing the thing. You have no martyrs for the case of "freedom" as
against "slavery." The so-called Servile wars are the resistance on the
part of escaped slaves to any attempt at recapture, but they are not
accompanied by an accepted affirmation that servitude is an intolerable
thing; nor is that note struck at all from the unknown beginnings to the
Catholic endings of the Pagan world. Slavery is irksome, undignified,
woeful; but it is, to them, of the nature of things.

You may say, to be brief, that this arrangement of society was the very air
which Pagan Antiquity breathed.

Its great works, its leisure and its domestic life, its humour, its
reserves of power, all depend upon the fact that its society was that of
the Servile State.

Men were happy in that arrangement, or, at least, as happy as men ever are.

The attempt to escape by a personal effort, whether of thrift, of
adventure, or of flattery to a master, from the Servile condition had never
even so much of driving power behind it as the attempt many show to-day to
escape from the rank of wage-earners to those of employers. Servitude did
not seem a hell into which a man would rather die than sink, or out of
which at any sacrifice whatsoever a man would raise himself. It was a
condition accepted by those who suffered it as much as by those who enjoyed
it, and a perfectly necessary part of all that men did and thought.

You find no barbarian from some free place astonished at the institution of
Slavery; you find no Slave pointing to a society in which Slavery was
unknown as towards a happier land. To our ancestors not only for those few
centuries during which we have record of their actions, but apparently
during an illimitable past, the division of society into those who must
work under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labour was the
very plan of the State apart from which they could hardly think of society
as existing at all.

Let all this be clearly grasped. It is fundamental to an understanding of
the problem before us. Slavery is no novel experience in the history of
Europe; nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of Slavery as
acceptable to European men. Slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for
thousands upon thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that
considerable moral experiment called _The Faith_, which many believe to be
now accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem
that the old and primary institution of Slavery must return.

For there came upon us Europeans after all those centuries, and centuries
of a settled social order which was erected upon Slavery as upon a sure
foundation, the experiment called the Christian Church.

Among the by-products of this experiment, very slowly emerging from the old
Pagan world, and not long completed before Christendom itself suffered a
shipwreck, was the exceedingly gradual transformation of the Servile State
into something other: a society of owners. And how that something other did
proceed from the Pagan Servile State I will next explain.




Section Three
How the Servile Institution Was for a Time Dissolved


The process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men, though very
lengthy in its development (it covered close upon a thousand years), and
though exceedingly complicated in its detail, may be easily and briefly
grasped in its main lines.

Let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which
the European mind passed bet ween the first and the fourth centuries (that
revolution which is often termed the Conversion of the World to
Christianity, but which should for purposes of historical accuracy be
called the Growth of the Church) included no attack upon the Servile
Institution.

No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and
purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a
Christian to be a contravention of any human right.

The emancipation of Slaves was indeed regarded as a good work by the
Faithful: but so was it regarded by the Pagan. It was, on the face of it, a
service rendered to one's fellowmen. The sale of Christians to Pagan
masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not
because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of
treason to civilisation to force men away from Civilisation to Barbarism.
In general you will discover no pronouncement against slavery as an
institution, nor any moral definition attacking it, throughout all those
early Christian centuries during which it none the less effectively
disappears.

The form of its disappearance is well worth noting. It begins with the
establishment as the fundamental unit of production in Western Europe of
those great landed estates, commonly lying in the hands of a single
proprietor, and generally known as /Villae/.

There were, of course, many other forms of human agglomeration: small
peasant farms owned in absolute proprietorship by their petty masters;
groups of free men associated in what was called a Vicus; manufactories in
which groups of slaves were industrially organised to the profit of their
master; and, governing the regions around them, the scheme of Roman towns.

But of all these the Villa the dominating type; and as society passed from
the high civilisation of the first four centuries into the simplicity of
the Dark Ages, the Villa, the unit of agricultural production, became more
and more the model of all society.

Now the Villa began as a considerable extent of land, containing, like a
modern English estate, pasture, arable, water, wood and heath, or waste
land. It was owned by a dominus or _lord_ in absolute proprietorship, to
sell, or leave by will, to do with it whatsoever he chose. It was
cultivated for him by _Slaves_ to whom he owed nothing in return, and whom
it was simply his interest to keep alive and to continue breeding in order
that they might perpetuate his wealth.

I concentrate particularly upon these Slaves, the great majority of the
human beings inhabiting the land, because, although there arose in the Dark
Ages, when the Roman Empire was passing into the society of the Middle
Ages, other social elements within the _Villae_--the Freed men who owed the
lord a modified service, and even occasionally independent citizens present
through a contract terminable and freely entered into yet it is the _Slave_
who is the mark of all that society.

At its origin, then, the Roman Villa was a piece of absolute property, the
production of wealth upon which was due to the application of slave labour
to the natural resources of the place; and that slave labour was as much
the property of the lord as was the land itself.

The first modification which this arrangement showed in the new society
which accompanied the growth and establishment of the Church in the Roman
world, was a sort of customary rule which modified the old arbitrary
position of the Slave.

The Slave was still a Slave, but it was both more convenient in the decay
of communications and public power, and more consonant with the social
spirit of the time to make sure of that Slave's produce by asking him for
no more than certain customary dues. The Slave and his descendants became
more or less rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, but in
decreasing numbers. As the generations passed a larger and a larger
proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived, and the produce
which they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount, which the
lord was content to receive and ask no more. The arrangement was made
workable by leaving to the Slave all the remaining produce of his own
labour. There was a sort of implied bargain here, in the absence of public
powers and in the decline of the old highly centralised and vigorous system
which could always guarantee to the master the full product of the Slave's
effort. The bargain implied was, that if the Slave Community of the Villa
would produce for the benefit of its Lord not less than a certain customary
amount of goods from the soil of the Villa, the Lord could count on their
always exercising that effort by leaving to them all the surplus, which
they could increase, if they willed, indefinitely.

By the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for a
matter of some three hundred years, one fixed form of productive unit began
to be apparent throughout Western Christendom.

The old absolutely owned estate had come to be divided into three portions.
One of these was pasture and arable land, reserved privately to the lord,
and called _domain_: that is, lord's land. Another was in the occupation,
and already almost in the possession (practically, though not legally), of
those who had once been Slaves. A third was common land over which both the
Lord and the Slave exercised each their various rights, which rights were
minutely remembered and held sacred by custom. For instance, in a certain
village, if there was beech pasture for three hundred swine, the lord might
put in but fifty: two hundred and fifty were the rights of the "village."

Upon the first of these portions, Domain, wealth was produced by the
obedience of the Slave for certain fixed hours of labour. He must come so
many days a week, or upon such and such occasions (all fixed and
customary), to till the land of the Domain for his Lord, and _all_ the
produce of this must be handed over to the Lord though, of course, a daily
wage in kind was allowed, for the labourer must live.

Upon the second portion, "Land in Villenage," which was nearly always the
most of the arable and pasture land of the _Villae_, the Slaves worked by
rules and customs which they gradually came to elaborate for themselves.
They worked under an officer of their own, sometimes nominated, sometimes
elected: nearly always, in practice, a man suitable to them and more or
less of their choice; though this co-operative work upon the old
Slave-ground was controlled by the general customs of the village, common
to lord and slave alike, and the principal officer over both kinds of land
was the Lord's Steward.

Of the wealth so produced by the Slaves, a certain fixed portion (estimated
originally in kind) was payable to the Lord's Bailiff, and became the
property of the Lord.

Finally, on the third division of the land, the "Waste," the "Wood," the
"Heath," and certain common pastures, wealth was produced as elsewhere by
the labour of those who had once been the Slaves, but divided in customary
proportions between them and their master. Thus, such and such a water
meadow would have grazing for so many oxen; the number was rigidly defined,
and of that number so many would be the Lord's and so many the Villagers'.

During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries this system crystallised and
became so natural in men's eyes that the original servile character of the
working folk upon the Villa was forgotten.

The documents of the time are rare. These three centuries are the crucible
of Europe, and record is drowned and burnt in them. Our study of their
social conditions, especially in the latter part, are matter rather of
inference than of direct evidence. But the sale and purchase of men,
already exceptional at the beginning of this period, is almost unknown
before the end of it. Apart from domestic slaves within the household,
slavery in the old sense which Pagan antiquity gave that institution had
been transformed out of all knowledge, and when, with the eleventh century,
the true Middle Ages begin to spring from the soil of the Dark Ages, and a
new civilisation to arise, though the old word _servus_ (the Latin for a
slave) is still used for the man who works the soil, his status in the now
increasing number of documents which we can consult is wholly changed; we
can certainly no longer translate the word by the English word _slave_; we
are compelled to translate it by a new word with very different
connotations: the word _serf_.

The Serf of the early Middle Ages, of the eleventh and early twelfth
centuries, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, is already nearly a
peasant. He is indeed bound in legal theory to the soil upon which he was
born. In social practice, all that is required of him is that his family
should till its quota of servile land, and that the dues to the lord shall
not fail from absence of labour. That duty fulfilled, it is easy and common
for members of the serf-class to enter the professions and the Church, or
to go wild; to become men practically free in the growing industries of the
towns. With every passing generation the ancient servile conception of the
labourer's status grows more and more dim, and the Courts and the practice
of society treat him more and more as a man strictly bound to certain dues
and to certain periodical labour within his industrial unit, but in all
other respects free.

As the civilisation of the Middle Ages develops, as wealth increases and
the arts progressively flourish, this character of freedom becomes more
marked. In spite of attempts in time of scarcity (as after a plague) to
insist upon the old rights to compulsory labour, the habit of commuting
these rights for money-payments and dues has grown too strong to be
resisted.

If at the end of the fourteenth century, let us say, or at the beginning of
the fifteenth, you had visited some Squire upon his estate in France or in
England, he would have told you of the whole of it, "These are my lands."
But the peasant (as he now was) would have said also of his holding, "This
is my land." He could not be evicted from it. The dues which he was
customarily bound to pay were but a fraction of its total produce. He could
not always sell it, but it was always inheritable from father to son; and,
in general, at the close of this long process of a thousand years the Slave
had become a free man for all the ordinary purposes of society. He bought
and sold. He saved as he willed, he invested, he built, he drained at his
discretion, and if he improved the land it was to his own profit.

Meanwhile, side by side with this emancipation of mankind in the direct
line of descent from the old chattel slaves of the Roman villa went, in the
Middle Ages, a crowd of institutions which all similarly made for a
distribution of property, and for the destruction of even the fossil
remnants of a then forgotten Servile State. Thus industry of every kind in
the towns, in transport, in crafts, and in commerce, was organised in the
form of _Guilds_. And a Guild was a society partly co-operative, but in the
main composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was
self-governing, and was designed to check competition between its members:
to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. Above all, most
jealously did the Guild safeguard the division of property, so that there
should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the one side, and no
monopolising capitalist upon the other.

There was a period of apprenticeship at a man's entry into a Guild, during
which he worked for a master; but in time he became a master in his turn.
The existence of such corporations as the normal units of industrial
production, of commercial effort, and of the means of transport, is proof
enough of what the social spirit was which had also enfranchised the
labourer upon the land. And while such institutions flourished side by side
with the no longer servile village communities, freehold or absolute
possession of the soil, as distinguished from the tenure of the serf under
the lord, also increased.

These three forms under which labour was exercised the serf, secure in his
position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of
his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which
were more of a tax than a rent; the Guild, in which well-divided capital
worked co-operatively for craft production, for transport and for
commerce--all three between them were making for a society which should be
based upon the principle of property. All, or most,--the normal
family--should own. And on ownership the freedom of the State should
repose.

The State, as the minds of men envisaged it at the close of this process,
was an agglomeration of families of varying wealth, but by far the greater
number owners of the means of production. It was an agglomeration in which
the stability of this _distributive_ system (as I have called it) was
guaranteed by the existence of co-operative bodies, binding men of the same
craft or of the same village together; guaranteeing the small proprietor
against loss of his economic independence, while at the same time it
guaranteed society against the growth of a proletariat. If liberty of
purchase and of sale, of mortgage and of inheritance was restricted, it was
restricted with the social object of preventing the growth of an economic
oligarchy which could exploit the rest of the community. The restraints
upon liberty were restraints designed for the preservation of liberty; and
every action of Mediaeval Society, from the flower of the Middle Ages to
the approach of their catastrophe, was directed towards the establishment
of a State in which men should be economically free through the possession
of capital and of land.

Save here and there in legal formulae, or in rare patches isolated and
eccentric, the Servile Institution had totally disappeared; nor must it be
imagined that anything in the nature of Collectivism had replaced it. There
was common land, but it was common land jealously guarded by men who were
also personal proprietors of other land. Common property in the village was
but one of the forms of property, and was used rather as the fly-wheel to
preserve the regularity of the co-operative machine than as a type of
holding in any way peculiarly sacred. The Guilds had property in common,
but that property was the property necessary to their co-operative life,
their Halls, their Funds for Relief, their Religious Endowments. As for the
instruments of their trades, those instruments were owned by the individual
members, _not_ by the guild, save where they were of so expensive a kind as
to necessitate a corporate control.

Such was the transformation which had come over European society in the
course of ten Christian centuries. Slavery had gone, and in its place had
come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men,
and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found
for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an
awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and
brought into existence the /Distributive State/.

That excellent consummation of human society passed, as we know, and was in
certain Provinces of Europe, but more particularly in Britain, destroyed.

For a society in which the determinant mass of families were owners of
capital and of land; for one in which production was regulated by
self-governing corporations of small owners; and for one in which the
misery and insecurity of a proletariat was unknown, there came to be
substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is
now turned, and which goes by the name of _Capitalism_.

How did such a catastrophe come about? Why was it permitted, and upon what
historical process did the evil batten? What turned an England economically
free into the England which we know to-day, of which at least one-third is
indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of
land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon
its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of
unsocial and irresponsible monopolies?

The answer most usually given to this fundamental question in our history,
and the one most readily accepted, is that this misfortune came about
through a material process known as the _Industrial Revolution_. The use of
expensive machinery, the concentration of industry and of its implements
are imagined to have enslaved, in some blind way, apart from the human
will, the action of English mankind.

The explanation is wholly false. No such material cause determined the
degradation from which we suffer.

It was the deliberate action of men, evil will in a few and apathy of will
among the many, which produced a catastrophe as human in its causes and
inception as in its vile effect.

Capitalism was not the growth of the industrial movement, nor of chance
material discoveries. A little acquaintance with history and a little
straightforwardness in the teaching of it would be enough to prove that.

The Industrial System was a growth proceeding from Capitalism, not its
cause. Capitalism was here in England before the Industrial System came
into being;--before the use of coal and of the new expensive machinery, and
of the concentration of the implements of production in the great towns.
Had Capitalism not been present before the Industrial Revolution, that
revolution might have proved as beneficent to Englishmen as it has proved
maleficent. But Capitalism--that is, the ownership by a few of the springs
of life--was present long before the great discoveries came. It warped the
effect of these discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them from a
good into an evil thing. It was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it
was the loss of a free mind.




Section Four
How the Distributive State Failed


With the close of the middle ages the societies of Western Christendom and
England among the rest were economically free.

Property was an institution native to the State and enjoyed by the great
mass of its citizens. Co-operative institutions, voluntary regulations of
labour, restricted the completely independent use of property by its owners
only in order to keep that institution intact and to prevent the absorption
of small property by great.

This excellent state of affairs which we had reached after many centuries
of Christian development, and in which the old institution of slavery had
been finally eliminated from Christendom, did not everywhere survive. In
England in particular it was ruined. The seeds of the disaster were sown in
the sixteenth century. Its first apparent effects came to light in the
seventeenth. During the eighteenth century England came to be finally,
though insecurely, established upon a proletarian basis, that is, it had
already become a society of rich men possessed of the means of production
on the one hand, and a majority dispossessed of those means upon the other.
With the nineteenth century the evil plant had come to its maturity, and
England had become before the close of that period a purely Capitalist
State, the type and model of Capitalism for the whole world: with the means
of production tightly held by a very small group of citizens, and the whole
determining mass of the nation dispossessed of capital and land, and
dispossessed, therefore, in all cases of security, and in many of
sufficiency as well. The mass of Englishmen, still possessed of political,
lacked more and more the elements of economic, freedom, and were in a worse
posture than free citizens have ever found themselves before in the history
of Europe.

By what steps did so enormous a catastrophe fall upon us?

The first step in the process consisted in the mishandling of a great
economic revolution which marked the sixteenth century. The lands and the
accumulated wealth of the monasteries were taken out of, the hands of their
old possessors with the intention of vesting them in the Crown--but they
passed, as a fact, not into the hands of the Crown, but into the hands of
an already wealthy section of the community who, after the change was
complete, became in the succeeding hundred years the governing power of
England.

This is what happened:--

The England of the early sixteenth century, the England over which Henry
VIII inherited his powerful Crown in youth, though it was an England in
which the great mass of men owned the land they tilled and the houses in
which they dwelt, and the implements with which they worked, was yet an
England in which these goods, though widely distributed, were distributed
unequally.

Then, as now, the soil and its fixtures were the basis of all wealth, but
the proportion between the value of the soil and its fixtures and the value
of other means of production (implements, stores of clothing and of
subsistence, etc.) was different from what it is now. The land and the
fixtures upon it formed a very much larger fraction of the totality of the
means of production than they do to-day. They represent to-day not one-half
the total means of production of this country, and though they are the
necessary foundation for all wealth production, yet our great machines, our
stores of food and clothing, our coal and oil, our ships and the rest of
it, come to more than the true value of the land and of the fixtures upon
the land: they come to more than the arable soil and the pasture, the
constructional value of the houses, wharves and docks, and so forth. In the
early sixteenth century the land and the fixtures upon it came, upon the
contrary, to very much more than all other forms of wealth combined.

Now this form of wealth was here, more than in any other Western European
country, already in the hands of a wealthy land-owning class at the end of
the Middle Ages.

It is impossible to give exact statistics, because none were gathered, and
we can only make general statements based upon inference and research. But,
roughly speaking, we may say that of the total value of the land and its
fixtures, probably rather more than a quarter, though less than a third,
was in the hands of this wealthy class.

The England of that day was mainly agricultural, and consisted of more than
four, but less than six million people, and in every agricultural community
you would have the Lord, as he was legally called (the squire, as he was
already conversationally termed), in possession of more demesne land than
in any other country. On the average you found him, I say, owning in this
absolute fashion rather more than a quarter, perhaps a third of the land of
the village: in the towns the distribution was more even. Sometimes it was
a private individual who was in this position, sometimes a corporation, but
in every village you would have found this demesne land absolutely owned by
the political head of the village, occupying a considerable proportion of
its acreage. The rest, though distributed as property among the less
fortunate of the population, and carrying with it houses and implements
from which they could not be dispossessed, paid certain dues to the Lord,
and, what was more, the Lord exercised local justice. This class of wealthy
landowners had been also for now one hundred years the Justices upon whom
local administration depended.

There was no reason why this state of affairs should not gradually have led
to the rise of the Peasant and the decay of the Lord. That is what happened
in France, and it might perfectly well have happened here. A peasantry
eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the
expense of the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, which was
already fairly complete, there might have been added another excellent
element, namely, the more equal possession of that property. But any such
process of gradual buying by the small man from the great, such as would
seem natural to the temper of us European people, and such as has since
taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon
their popular instincts, was interrupted in this country by an artificial
revolution of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution consisted
in the seizing of the monastic lands by the Crown.

It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation, for the
whole economic future of England was to flow from it.

Of the _demesne_ lands, and the power of local administration which they
carried with them (a very important feature, as we shall see later), rather
more than a quarter were in the hands of the Church; the Church was
therefore the "Lord" of something over 25 per cent. say 28 per cent. or
perhaps nearly 30 per cent. of English agricultural communities, and the
overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce. The
Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 per
cent. of the demesne land in the villages, and the receiver of something
like 30 per cent. of the customary dues, etc., paid by the smaller owners
to the greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of
Cathedral Chapters, communities of monks and nuns, educational
establishments conducted by the clergy, and so forth.

When the Monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII, not the whole of
this vast economic influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular clergy
remained endowed, and most of the educational establishments, though
looted, retained some revenue; but though the whole 30 per cent. did not
suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent. did, and the
revolution effected by this vast operation was by far the most complete,
the most sudden, and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the
economic history of any European people.

It was at first _intended_ to retain this great mass of the means of
production in the hands of the Crown: that must be clearly remembered by
any student of the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the
contrast between the old England and the new.

Had that intention been firmly maintained, the English State and its
government would have been the most powerful in Europe.

The Executive (which in those days meant the _King_) would have had a
greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing
its political power with economic power, and for ordering the social life
of its subjects than any other executive in Christendom.

Had Henry VIII and his successors kept the land thus confiscated, the power
of the French Monarchy, at which we are astonished, would have been nothing
to the power of the English.

The King of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of
control of the most absolute sort. He would presumably have used it, as a
strong central government always does, for the weakening of the wealthier
classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people. At any
rate, it would have been a very different England indeed from the England
we know, if the King had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the
monasteries.

Now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution
appears. _The King failed to keep the lands he had seized._ That class of
large landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said,
anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England,
were too strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to
themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and
they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative
power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied. Nothing that the
Crown let go ever went back to the Crown, and year after year more and more
of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute possession of
the large landowners.

Observe the effect of this. All over England men who already held in
virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and
the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few
years of a further great section of the means of production, which turned
the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra
fifth. They became at a blow the owners of _half_ the land! In many centres
of capital importance they had come to own _more_ than half the land. They
were in many districts not only the unquestioned superiors, but the
economic masters of the rest of the community. They could buy to the
greatest advantage. They were strictly _competitive_, getting every
shilling of due and of rent where the old clerical landlords had been
_customary_--leaving much to the tenant. They began to fill the
universities, the judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great
and small. More and more the great could decide in their own favour. They
soon possessed by these operations the bulk of the means of production, and
they immediately began the process of eating up the small independent men
and gradually forming those great estates which, in the course of a few
generations, became identical with the village itself. All over England you
may notice that the great squires' houses date from this revolution or
after it. The manorial house, the house of the local great man as it was in
the Middle Ages, survives here and there to show of what immense effect
this revolution was. The low-timbered place with its steadings and
outbuildings, only a larger farmhouse among the other farmhouses, is turned
after the Reformation and thenceforward into a palace. Save where great
castles (which were only held of the Crown and not owned) made an
exception, the pre-Reformation gentry lived as men richer than, but not the
masters of, other farmers around them. _After_ the Reformation there began
to arise all over England those great "country houses" which rapidly became
the typical centres of English agricultural life.

The process was in full swing before Henry died. Unfortunately for England,
he left as his heir a sickly child, during the six years of whose reign,
from 1547 to 1553, the loot went on at an appalling rate. When he died and
Mary came to the throne it was nearly completed. A mass of new families had
arisen, wealthy out of all proportion to anything which the older England
had known, and bound by a common interest to the older families which had
joined in the grab. Every single man who sat in Parliament for a country
required his price for voting the dissolution of the monasteries; every
single man received it. A list of the members of the Dissolution Parliament
is enough to prove this, and, apart from their power in Parliament, this
class had a hundred other ways of insisting on their will. The Howards
(already of some lineage), the Cavendishes, the Cecils, the Russels, and
fifty other new families thus rose upon the ruins of religion; and the
process went steadily on until, about one hundred years after its
inception, the whole face of England was changed.

In the place of a powerful Crown disposing of revenues far greater than
that of any subject, you had a Crown at its wit's end for money, and
dominated by subjects some of whom were its equals in wealth, and who
could, especially through the action of Parliament (which they now
controlled), do much what they willed with Government.

In other words, by the first third of the seventeenth century, by 1630--40,
the economic revolution was finally accomplished, and the new economic
reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was a powerful
oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and dwindled
monarchy.

Other causes had contributed to this deplorable result. The change in the
value of money had hit the Crown very hard;[2] the peculiar history of the
Tudor family, their violent passions, their lack of resolution and of any
continuous policy, to some extent the character of Charles I himself, and
many another subsidiary cause may be quoted. But the great main fact upon
which the whole thing is dependent is the fact that the Monastic Lands, at
least a fifth of the wealth of the country, had been transferred to the
great landowners, and that this transference had tipped the scale over
entirely in their favour as against the peasantry.

The diminished and impoverished Crown could no longer stand. It fought
against the new wealth, the struggle of the Civil Wars; it was utterly
defeated; and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660, you have all
the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy
men, the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old
power, but in practice a salaried puppet. And in that economic world which
underlies all political appearances, the great dominating note was that a
few wealthy families had got hold of the bulk of the means of production in
England, while the same families exercised all local administrative power
and were moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the Church, and the
generals. They quite overshadowed what was left of central government in
this country.

Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time
more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not
one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house
of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could
not be turned off.

Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and
certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means
of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in
which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad
business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by
that date England had already become /Capitalist/. She had already
permitted a vast section of her population to become _proletarian_, and it
is this and _not_ the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later thing,
which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves
to-day.

How true this is what I still have to say in this section will prove.

In an England thus already cursed with a very large proletariat class, and
in an England already directed by a dominating Capitalist class, possessing
the means of production, there came a great industrial development.

Had that industrial development come upon a people economically free, it
would have taken a co-operative form. Coming as it did upon a people which
had already largely lost its economic freedom, it took at its very origin a
_Capitalist_ form, and this form it has retained, expanded, and perfected
throughout two hundred years.

It was in England that the Industrial System arose. It was in England that
all its traditions and habits were formed; and because the England in which
it arose was already a Capitalist England, modern Industrialism, wherever
you see it at work to-day, having spread from England, has proceeded upon
the Capitalist model.

It was in 1705 that the first practical steam-engine, Newcomen's, was set
to work. The life of a man elapsed before this invention was made, by
Watt's introduction of the condenser, into the great instrument of
production which has transformed our industry--but in those sixty years all
the origins of the Industrial System are to be discovered. It was just
before Watt's patent that Hargreaves' spinning-jenny appeared. Thirty years
earlier, Abraham Darby of Colebrook Dale, at the end of a long series of
experiments which had covered more than a century, smelted iron-ore
successfully with coke. Not twenty years later, King introduced the flying
shuttle, the first great improvement in the hand-loom; and in general the
period covered by such a life as that of Dr Johnson, born just after
Newcomen's engine was first set working, and dying seventy-four years
afterwards, when the Industrial System was in full blast, covers that great
transformation of England. A man who, as a child, could remember the last
years of Queen Anne, and who lived to the eve of the French Revolution, saw
passing before his eyes the change which transformed English society and
has led it to the expansion and peril in which we see it to-day.

What was the characteristic mark of that half-century and more? Why did the
new inventions give us the form of society now known and hated under the
name of Industrial? Why did the vast increase in the powers of production,
in population and in accumulation of wealth, turn the mass of Englishmen
into a poverty-stricken proletariat, cut off the rich from the rest of the
nation, and develop to the full all the evils which we associate with the
Capitalist State?

To that question an answer almost as universal as it is unintelligent has
been given. That answer is not only unintelligent but false, and it will be
my business here to show how false it is. The answer so provided in
innumerable textbooks, and taken almost as commonplace in our universities,
is that the new methods of production--the new machinery, the new
implements--fatally and of themselves developed a Capitalist State in which
a few should own the means of production and the mass should be
proletariat. The new instruments, it is pointed out, were on so vastly
greater a scale than the old, and were so much more expensive, that the
small man could not afford them; while the rich man, who could afford them,
ate up by his competition, and reduced from the position of a small owner
to that of a wage-earner, his insufficiently equipped competitor who still
attempted to struggle on with the older and cheaper tools. To this (we are
told) the advantages of concentration were added in favour of the large
owner against the small. Not only were the new instruments expensive almost
in proportion to their efficiency, but, especially after the introduction
of steam, they were efficient in proportion to their concentration in few
places and under the direction of a few men. Under the effect of such false
arguments as these we have been taught to believe that the horrors of the
Industrial System were a blind and necessary product of material and
impersonal forces, and that wherever the steam engine, the power loom, the
blast furnace and the rest were introduced, there fatally would soon appear
a little group of owners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed.

It is astonishing that a statement so unhistorical should have gained so
general a credence. Indeed, were the main truths of English history taught
in our schools and universities to-day, were educated men familiar with the
determining and major facts of the national past, such follies could never
have taken root. The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of
ownership into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those
owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection
with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of production.
The evil proceeded indirect historical sequence, proceeded patently and
demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed-plot of the Industrial
System, was _already_ captured by a wealthy oligarchy _before_ the series
of great discoveries began.

Consider in what way the Industrial System developed upon Capitalist lines.
Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new
methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of
contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new
machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the
England upon which the new discoveries had come was _already_ an England
owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it
was _already_ an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was
proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand.

When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be _capitalised_;
that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which
would support labour in the process of production until that process should
be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and
the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the
raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article
could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned
it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected
by co-operative guilds fenced round and supported by custom and by the
autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth,
necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each
new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small
owners. _Their_ corporations, _their_ little parcels of wealth combined
would have furnished the _capitalisation_ required for the new processes,
and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have
increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing the balance
of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience
which binds the capitalisation of a new process with the idea of a few
employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage. Such
great discoveries coming in a society like that of the thirteenth century
would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral
conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse.

To whom could the new industry turn for capitalisation? The small owner had
already largely disappeared. The corporate life and mutual obligations
which had supported him and confirmed him in his property had been broken
to pieces by no "economic development," but by the deliberate action of the
rich. He was ignorant because his schools had been taken from him and the
universities closed to him. He was the more ignorant because the common
life which once nourished his social sense and the co-operative
arrangements which had once been his defence had disappeared. When you
sought an accumulation of corn, of clothing, of housing, of fuel as the
indispensable preliminary to the launching of your new industry; when you
looked round for someone who could find the accumulated wealth necessary
for these considerable experiments, you had to turn to the class which had
already monopolised the bulk of the means of production in England. The
rich men alone could furnish you with those supplies.

Nor was this all. The supplies once found and the adventure "capitalised,"
that form of human energy which lay best to hand, which was indefinitely
exploitable, weak, ignorant, and desperately necessitous, ready to produce
for you upon almost any terms, and glad enough if you would only keep it
alive, was the existing proletariat which the new plutocracy had created
when, in cornering the wealth of the country after the Reformation, they
had thrust out the mass of Englishmen from the possession of implements, of
houses, and of land.

The rich class, adopting some new process of production for its private
gain, worked it upon those lines of mere competition which its avarice had
already established. Co-operative tradition was dead. Where would it find
its cheapest labour? Obviously among the proletariat--not among the
remaining small owners. What class would increase under the new wealth?
Obviously the proletariat again, without responsibilities, with nothing to
leave to its progeny; and as they swelled the capitalist's gain, they
enabled him with increasing power to buy out the small owner and send him
to swell by another tributary the proletarian mass.

It was upon this account that the Industrial Revolution, as it is called,
took in its very origins the form which has made it an almost unmixed curse
for the unhappy society in which it has flourished. The rich, already
possessed of the accumulations by which that industrial change could alone
be nourished, inherited all its succeeding accumulations of implements and
all its increasing accumulations of subsistence. The factory system,
starting upon a basis of capitalist and proletariat, grew in the mould
which had determined its origins. With every new advance the capitalist
looked for proletariat grist to feed the productive mill. Every
circumstance of that society, the form in which the laws that governed
ownership and profit were cast, the obligations of partners, the relations
bet ween "master" and "man," directly made for the indefinite expansion of
a subject, formless, wage-earning class controlled by a small body of
owners, which body would tend to become smaller and richer still, and to be
possessed of power ever greater and greater as the bad business unfolded.

The spread of economic oligarchy was everywhere, and not in industry alone.
The great landlords destroyed deliberately and of set purpose and to their
own ad vantage the common rights over common land. The small plutocracy
with which they were knit up, and with whose mercantile elements they were
now fused, directed everything to its own ends. That strong central
government which should protect the community against the rapacity of a few
had gone generations before. Capitalism triumphant wielded all the
mechanism of legislation and of information too. It still holds them; and
there is not an example of so-called "Social Reform" to-day which is not
demonstrably (though often subconsciously) directed to the further
entrenchment and confirmation of an industrial society in which it is taken
for granted that a few shall own, that the vast majority shall live at a
wage under them, and that all the bulk of Englishmen may hope for is the
amelioration of their lot by regulations and by control from above--but not
by property; not by freedom.

We all feel--and those few of us who have analysed the matter not only feel
but know--that the Capitalist society thus gradually developed from its
origins in the capture of the land four hundred years ago has reached its
term. It is almost self-evident that it cannot continue in the form which
now three generations have known, and it is equally self-evident that some
solution must be found for the intolerable and increasing instability with
which it has poisoned our lives. But before considering the solutions
variously presented by various schools of thought, I shall in my next
section show how and why the English Capitalist Industrial System is thus
intolerably unstable and consequently presents an acute problem which must
be solved under pain of social death.

* * * * *

It must be noted that modern Industrialism has spread to many other centres
from England. It bears everywhere the features stamped upon it by its
origin in this country.




Section Five
The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable


From the historical digression which I have introduced by way of
illustrating my subject in the last two sections I now return to the
general discussion of my thesis and to the logical process by which it may
be established.

* * * * *

The Capitalist State is unstable, and indeed more properly a transitory
phase lying between two permanent and stable states of society.

In order to appreciate why this is so, let us recall the definition of the
Capitalist State:--

"A society in which the ownership of the means of production is confined to
a body of free citizens, not large enough to make up properly a general
character of that society, while the rest are dispossessed of the means of
production, and are therefore proletarian, we call _Capitalist_."

Note the several points of such a state of affairs. You have private
ownership; but it is not private ownership distributed in many hands and
thus familiar as an institution to society as a whole. Again, you have the
great majority dispossessed but at the same time citizens, that is, men
politically free to act, though economically impotent; again, though it is
but an inference from our definition, it is a necessary inference that
there will be under Capitalism a conscious, direct, and planned
_exploitation_ of the majority, the free citizens who do not own by the
minority who are owners. For wealth must be produced: the whole of that
community must live: and the possessors can make such terms with the
non-possessors as shall make it certain that a portion of what the
non-possessors have produced shall go to the possessors.

A society thus constituted cannot endure. It cannot endure because it is
subject to two very severe strains: strains which increase in severity in
proportion as that society becomes more thoroughly Capitalist. The first of
these strains arises from the divergence between the moral theories upon
which the State reposes and the social facts which those moral theories
attempt to govern. The second strain arises from the insecurity to which
Capitalism condemns the great mass of society, and the general character of
anxiety and peril which it imposes upon all citizens, but in particular
upon the majority, which consists, under Capitalism, of dispossessed free
men.

Of these two strains it is impossible to say which is the gravest. Either
would be enough to destroy a social arrangement in which it was long
present. The two combined make that destruction certain; and there is no
longer any doubt that Capitalist society must transform itself into some
other and more stable arrangement. It is the object of these pages to
discover what that stable arrangement will probably be.

* * * * *

We say that there is a moral strain already intolerably severe and growing
more severe with every perfection of Capitalism.

This moral strain comes from a contradiction between the realities of
Capitalist and the moral base of our laws and traditions.

The moral base upon which our laws are still administered and our
conventions raised presupposes a state composed of free citizens. Our laws
defend property as a normal institution with which all citizens are
acquainted, and which all citizens respect. It punishes theft as an
abnormal incident only occurring when, through evil motives, one free
citizen acquires the property of another without his knowledge and against
his will. It punishes fraud as another abnormal incident in which, from
evil motives, one free citizen induces another to part with his property
upon false representations. It enforces contract, the sole moral base of
which is the freedom of the two contracting parties, and the power of
either, if it so please him, not to enter into a contract which, once
entered into, must be enforced. It gives to an owner the power to leave his
property by will, under the conception that such ownership and such passage
of property (to natural heirs as a rule, but exceptionally to any other
whom the testator may point out) is the normal operation of a society
generally familiar with such things, and finding them part of the domestic
life lived by the mass of its citizens. It casts one citizen in damages if
by any wilful action he has caused loss to another--for it presupposes him
able to pay.

The sanction upon which social life reposes is, in our moral theory, the
legal punishment enforceable in our Courts, and the basis presupposed for
the security and material happiness of our citizens is the possession of
goods which shall guarantee us from anxiety and permit us an independence
of action in the midst of our fellowmen.

Now contrast all this, the moral theory upon which society is still
perilously conducted, the moral theory to which Capitalism itself turns for
succour when it is attacked, contrast, I say, its formulae and its
presuppositions with the social reality of a Capitalist State such as is
England to-day.

Property remains as an instinct perhaps with most of the citizens; as an
experience and a reality it is unknown to nineteen out of twenty. One
hundred forms of fraud, the necessary corollary of unrestrained competition
between a few and of unrestrained avarice as the motive controlling
production, are not or cannot be punished: petty forms of violence in theft
and of cunning in fraud the laws can deal with, but they cannot deal with
these alone. Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for
protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the
hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens. The vast bulk of
so-called "free" contracts are to-day leonine contracts: arrangements which
one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free
to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation.

Most important of all, the fundamental social fact of our movement, far
more important than any security afforded by law, or than any machinery
which the State can put into action, is the fact that livelihood is at the
will of the possessors. It can be granted by the possessors to the
non-possessors, or it can be withheld. The real sanction in our society for
the arrangements by which it is conducted is not punishment enforceable by
the Courts, but the withholding of _livelihood_ from the dispossessed by
the possessors. Most men now fear the loss of employment more than they
fear legal punishment, and the discipline under which men are coerced in
their modern forms of activity in England is the fear of dismissal. The
true master of the Englishman to-day is not the Sovereign nor the officers
of State, nor, save indirectly, the laws; his true master is the
Capitalist.

Of these main truths everyone is aware; and anyone who sets out to deny
them does so to-day at the peril of his reputation either for honesty or
for intelligence.

If it be asked why things have come to a head so late (Capitalism having
been in growth for so long), the answer is that England, even now the most
completely Capitalist State of the modern world, did not itself become a
completely Capitalist State until the present generation. Within the memory
of men now living half England was agricultural, with relations domestic
rather than competitive between the various human factors to production.

This moral strain, therefore, arising from the divergence between what our
laws and moral phrases pretend, and what our society actually is, makes of
that society an utterly unstable thing.

This spiritual thesis is of far greater gravity than the narrow materialism
of a generation now passing might imagine. Spiritual conflict is more
fruitful of instability in the State than conflict of any other kind, and
there is acute spiritual conflict, conflict in every man's conscience and
ill-ease throughout the commonwealth when the realities of society are
divorced from the moral base of its institution.

The second strain which we have noted in Capitalism, its second element of
instability, consists in the fact that Capitalism destroys security.

* * * * *

Experience is enough to save us any delay upon this main point of our
matter. But even without experience we could reason with absolute certitude
from the very nature of Capitalism that its chief effect would be the
destruction of security in human life.

Combine these two elements: the ownership of the means of production by a
very few; the political freedom of owners and non-owners alike. There
follows immediately from that combination a competitive market wherein the
labour of the non-owner fetches just what it is worth, not as full
productive power, but as productive power which will leave a surplus to the
Capitalist. It fetches nothing when the labourer cannot work, more in
proportion to the pace at which he is driven; less in middle age than in
youth; less in old age than in middle age; nothing in sickness; nothing in
despair.

A man in a position to accumulate (the normal result of human labour), a
man founded upon property in sufficient amount and in established form is
no more productive in his non-productive moments than is a proletarian; but
his life is balanced and regulated by his reception of rent and interest as
well as wages. Surplus values come to him, and are the fly-wheel balancing
the extremes of his life and carrying him over his bad times. With a
proletarian it cannot be so. The aspect from Capital looks at a human being
whose labour it proposes to purchase cuts right across that normal aspect
of human life from which we all regard our own affections, duties, and
character. A man thinks of himself, of his chances and of his security
along the line of his own individual existence from birth to death. Capital
purchasing his labour (and not the man himself) purchases but a
cross-section of his life, his moments of activity. For the rest, he must
fend for himself; but to fend for yourself when you have nothing is to
starve.

As a matter of fact, where a few possess the means of production perfectly
free political conditions are impossible. A perfect Capitalist State cannot
exist, though we have come nearer to it in modern England than other and
more fortunate nations had thought possible. In the perfect Capitalist
State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was
actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending
all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement. If
you left men completely free under a Capitalist system, there would be so
heavy a mortality from starvation as would dry up the sources of labour in
a very short time.

Imagine the dispossessed to be ideally perfect cowards, the possessors to
consider nothing whatsoever except the buying of their labour in the
cheapest market--and the system would break down from the death of children
and of out-o'-works and of women. You would not have a State in mere
decline such as ours is. You would have a State manifestly and patently
perishing.

As a fact, of course, Capitalism cannot proceed to its own logical extreme.
So long as the political freedom of all citizens is granted the freedom of
the few possessors of food to grant or withhold it, of the many
non-possessors to strike any bargain at all, lest they lack it: to exercise
such freedom fully is to starve the very young, the old, the impotent, and
the despairing to death. Capitalism must keep alive, by non Capitalist
methods, great masses of the population who would otherwise starve to
death; and that is what Capitalism was careful to do to an increasing
extent as it got a stronger and a stronger grip upon the English people.
Elizabeth's Poor Law at the beginning of the business, the Poor Law of
1834, coming at a moment when nearly half England had passed into the grip
of Capitalism, are original and primitive instances: there are to-day a
hundred others.

Though this cause of insecurity--the fact that the possessors have no
direct incentive to keep men alive--is logically the most obvious, and
always the most enduring under a Capitalist system, there is another cause
more poignant in its effect upon human life. That other cause is the
competitive anarchy in production which restricted ownership coupled with
freedom involves. Consider what is involved by the very process of
production where the implements and the soil are in the hands of a few
whose motive for causing the proletariat to produce is not the use of the
wealth created but the enjoyment by those possessors of surplus value or
"profit."

* * * * *

If full political freedom be allowed to any two such possessors of
implements and stores, each will actively watch his market, attempt to
undersell the other, tend to overproduce at the end of some season of extra
demand for his article, thus glut the market only to suffer a period of
depression afterwards--and so forth. Again, the Capitalist, free,
individual director of production, will miscalculate; sometimes he will
fail, and his works will be shut down. Again, a mass of isolated,
imperfectly instructed competing units cannot but direct their clashing
efforts at an enormous waste, and that waste will fluctuate. Most
commissions, most advertisements, most parades, are examples of this waste.
If this waste of effort could be made a constant, the parasitical
employment it afforded would be a constant too. But of its nature it is a
most inconstant thing, and the employment it affords is therefore
necessarily precarious. The concrete translation of this is the insecurity
of the commercial traveller, the advertising agent, the insurance agent,
and every form of touting and cozening which competitive Capitalism carries
with it.

Now here again, as in the case of the insecurity produced by age and
sickness, Capitalism cannot be pursued to its logical conclusion, and it is
the element of freedom which suffers. Competition is, as a fact, restricted
to an increasing extent by an understanding between the competitors,
accompanied, especially in this country, by the ruin of the smaller
competitor through secret conspiracies entered into by the larger men, and
supported by the secret political forces of the State.[3] In a word,
Capitalism, proving almost as unstable to the owners as to the non-owners,
is tending towards stability by losing its essential character of political
freedom. No better proof of the instability of Capitalism as a system could
be desired.

Take any one of the numerous Trusts which now control English industry, and
have made of modern England the type, quoted throughout the Continent, of
artificial monopolies. If the full formula of Capitalism were accepted by
our Courts and our executive statesmen, anyone could start a rival
business, undersell those Trusts and shatter the comparative security they
afford to industry within their field. The reason that no one does this is
that political freedom is not, as a fact, protected here by the Courts in
commercial affairs. A man attempting to compete with one of our great
English Trusts would find himself at once undersold. He might, by all the
spirit of European law for centuries, indict those who would ruin him,
citing them for a conspiracy in restraint of trade; of this conspiracy he
would find the judge and the politicians most heartily in support.

But it must always be remembered that these conspiracies in restraint of
trade which are the mark of modern England are in themselves a mark of the
transition from the true Capitalist phase to another.

Under the essential conditions of Capitalism--under a perfect political
freedom--such conspiracies would be punished by the Courts for what they
are: to wit, a contravention of the fundamental doctrine of political
liberty. For this doctrine, while it gives any man the right to make any
contract he chooses with any labourer and offer the produce at such prices
as he sees fit, also involves the protection of that liberty by the
punishment of any conspiracy that may have monopoly for its object. If such
perfect freedom is no longer attempted, if monopolies are permitted and
fostered, it is because the unnatural strain to which freedom, coupled with
restricted ownership, gives rise, the insecurity of its mere competition,
the anarchy of its productive methods have at last proved intolerable.

I have already delayed more than was necessary in this section upon the
causes which render a Capitalist State essentially unstable.

I might have treated the matter empirically, taking for granted the
observation which all my readers must have made, that Capitalism is as a
fact doomed, and that the Capitalist State has already passed into its
first phase of transition.

We are clearly no longer possessed of that absolutely political freedom
which true Capitalism essentially demands. The insecurity involved, coupled
with the divorce between our traditional morals and the facts of society,
have already introduced such novel features as the permission of conspiracy
among both possessors and non-possessors, the compulsory provision of
security through State action, and all these reforms, implicit or explicit,
the tendency of which I am about to examine.




Section Six
The Stable Solutions of This Instability


Given a capitalist state, of its nature unstable, it will tend to reach
stability by some method or another.

It is the definition of unstable equilibrium that a body in unstable
equilibrium is seeking a stable equilibrium. For instance, a pyramid
balanced upon its apex is in unstable equilibrium; which simply means that
a slight force one way or the other will make it fall into a position where
it will repose. Similarly, certain chemical mixtures are said to be in
unstable equilibrium when their constituent parts have such affinity one
for another that a slight shock may make them combine and transform the
chemical arrangement of the whole. Of this sort are explosives.

If the Capitalist State is in unstable equilibrium, this only means that it
is seeking a stable equilibrium, and that Capitalism cannot but be
transformed into some other arrangement wherein Society may repose.

There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism:
Slavery, Socialism, and Property.

I may imagine a mixture of any two of these three or of all the three, but
each is a dominant type, and from the very nature of the problem no fourth
arrangement can be devised.

The problem turns, remember, upon the control of the means of production.
Capitalism means that this control is vested in the hands of few, while
political freedom is the appanage of all. If this anomaly cannot endure,
from its insecurity and from its own contradiction with its presumed moral
basis, you must either have a transformation of the one or of the other of
the two elements which combined have been found unworkable. These two
factors are (1) The ownership of the means of Production by a few; (2) The
Freedom of all. To solve Capitalism you must get rid of restricted
ownership, or of freedom, or of both. Now there is only one alternative to
freedom, which is the negation of it. Either a man is free to work and not
to work as he pleases, or he may be liable to a legal compulsion to work,
backed by the forces of the State. In the first he is a free man; in the
second he is by definition a slave. We have, therefore, so far as this
factor of freedom is concerned, no choice between a number of changes, but
only the opportunity of one, to wit, the establishment of slavery in place
of freedom. Such a solution, the direct, immediate, and conscious
re-establishment of slavery, would provide a true solution of the problems
which Capitalism offers. It would guarantee, under workable regulations,
sufficiency and security for the dispossessed. Such a solution, as I shall
show, is the probable goal which our society will in fact approach. To its
immediate and conscious acceptance, however, there is an obstacle.

A direct and conscious establishment of slavery as a solution to the
problem of Capitalism, the surviving Christian tradition of our
civilisation compels men to reject. No reformer will advocate it; no
prophet dares take it as yet for granted. All theories of a reformed
society will therefore attempt, at first, to leave untouched the factor of
_Freedom_ among the elements which make up Capitalism, and will concern
themselves with some change in the factor of _Property_.[4]

Now, in attempting to remedy the evils of Capitalism by remedying that one
of its two factors which consists in an ill distribution of property, you
have two, and only two, courses open to you.

If you are suffering because property is restricted to a few, you can alter
that factor in the problem _either_ by putting property into the hands of
many, or by putting it into the hands of none. There is no third course.

In the concrete, to put property in the hands of "none" means to vest it as
a trust in the hands of political officers. If you say that the evils
proceeding from Capitalism are due to the institution of property itself,
and not to the dispossession of the many by the few, then you must forbid
the private possession of the means of production by any particular and
private part of the community: but someone must control the means of
production, or we should have nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine
means the management of the means of production by those who are the public
officers of the community. Whether these public officers are themselves
controlled by the community or no has nothing to do with this solution on
its economic side. The essential point to grasp is that the only
alternative to private property is public property. Somebody must see to
the ploughing and must control the ploughs; otherwise no ploughing will be
done.

It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil
but only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase
the number of those owners.

So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like
ours, disliking the name of "slavery," and avoiding a direct and conscious
re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the
reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is
the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called
Collectivism: that is, the management of the means of production by the
political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution
of property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole
State, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of
capital or land, or both.

The first model we call _Socialism_ or the Collectivist State; the second
we call the Proprietary or Distributive State.

With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the
second model, involving the redistribution of property, is rejected as
impracticable by our existing Capitalist Society, and why, therefore, the
model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a Collectivist State.

I shall then proceed to show that at its first inception all Collectivist
Reform is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had
intended, a new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein
the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude.

* * * * *

Have I made myself clear?

If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the
formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis.

The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory which _in action_
produces something utterly different from Collectivism: to wit, the
/Servile State/.




Section Seven
Socialism Is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux


I say that the line of least resistance, if it be followed, leads a
Capitalist State to transform itself into a Servile State.

I propose to show that this comes about from the fact that not a
_Distributive_ but a _Collectivist_ solution is the easiest for a
Capitalist State to aim at, and that yet, in the very act of attempting
_Collectivism_, what results is not Collectivism at all, but the servitude
of the many, and the confirmation in their present privilege of the few;
that is, the Servile State.

* * * * *

Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhorrent propose for the remedy
of Capitalism one of two reforms.

Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing
land and capital that a determining number of families in the State were
possessed of the means of production; or they would put those means of
production into the hands of the political officers of the community, to be
held in trust for the advantage of all.

The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of the
/Distributive State/. The second may be called the attempted establishment
of the /Collectivist State/.

Those who favour the first course are the Conservatives or Traditionalists.
They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of
Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed
throughout the State during the happiest periods of our past history; they
also know that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have greater
social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would
re-establish, if possible, the Distributive State in the place of, and as a
remedy for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned with
known realities, and having for their ideal a condition of society which
experience has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of
the two schools of reformers, the more _practical_ in the sense that they
deal more than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists) with things
which either are or have been in actual existence. But they are less
practical in another sense (as we shall see in a moment) from the fact that
the stage of the disease with which they are dealing does not readily lend
itself to such a reaction as they propose.

The Collectivist, on the other hand, proposes to put land and capital into
the hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the
understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the
advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently dealing
with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that
has been tested by experience, nor one of which our race and history can
furnish instances. In this sense, therefore, he is the _less_ practical of
the two reformers. His ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and
recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine Socialism in actual
working, nor can we say (as we can say of well-divided property): "On such
and such an occasion, in such and such a period of European history,
Collectivism was established and produced both stability and happiness in
society."

In this sense, therefore, the Collectivist is far less practical than the
reformer who desires well-distributed property.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which this Socialist is more
practical than that other type of reformer, from the fact that the stage of
the disease into which we have fallen apparently admits of his remedy with
less shock than it admits of a reaction towards well-divided property.

For example: the operation of buying out some great tract of private
ownership to-day (as a railway or a harbour company) with public funds,
continuing its administration by publicly paid officials and converting its
revenue to public use, is a thing with which we are familiar and which
seemingly might be indefinitely multiplied. Individual examples of such
transformation of waterworks, gas, tramways, from a Capitalist to a
Collectivist basis are common, and the change does not disturb any
fundamental thing in our society. When a private Water company or Tramway
line is bought by some town and worked thereafter in the interests of the
public, the transaction is effected without any perceptible friction,
disturbs the life of no private citizen, and seems in every way normal to
the society in which it takes place.

Upon the contrary, the attempt to create a large number of shareholders in
such enterprises and artificially to substitute many partners, distributed
throughout a great number of the population, in the place of the original
few capitalist owners, would prove lengthy and at every step would arouse
opposition, would create disturbance, would work at an expense of great
friction, and would be imperilled by the power of the new and many owners
to sell again to a few.

In a word, the man who desires to re-establish property as an institution
normal to most citizens in the State is _working against the grain_ of our
existing Capitalist society, while a man who desires to establish
Socialism--that is Collectivism--is working _with_ the grain of that
society. The first is like a physician who should say to a man whose limbs
were partially atrophied from disuse: "Do this and that, take such and such
exercise, and you will recover the use of your limbs." The second is like a
physician who should say: "You cannot go on as you are. Your limbs are
atrophied from lack of use. Your attempt to conduct yourself as though they
were not is useless and painful; you had better make up your mind to be
wheeled about in a fashion consonant to your disease." The Physician is the
Reformer, his Patient the Proletariat.

It is not the purpose of this book to show how and under what difficulties
a condition of well-divided property might be restored and might take the
place (even in England) of that Capitalism which is now no longer either
stable or tolerable; but for the purposes of contrast and to emphasise my
argument I will proceed, before showing how the Collectivist unconsciously
makes for the Servile State, to show what difficulties surround the
Distributive solution and why, therefore, the Collectivist solution appeals
so much more readily to men living under Capitalism.

* * * * *

If I desire to substitute a number of small owners for a few large ones in
some particular enterprise, how shall I set to work?

I might boldly confiscate and redistribute at a blow. But by what process
should I choose the new owners? Even supposing that there was some
machinery whereby the justice of the new distribution could be assured, how
could I avoid the enormous and innumerable separate acts of injustice that
would attach to general redistributions? To say "none shall own" and to
confiscate is one thing; to say "all should own" and apportion ownership is
another. Action of this kind would so disturb the whole network of economic
relations as to bring ruin at once to the whole body politic, and
particularly to the smaller interests indirectly affected. In a society
such as ours a catastrophe falling upon the State from outside might
indirectly do good by making such a redistribution possible. But no one
working from within the State could provoke that catastrophe without
ruining his own cause.

If, then, I proceed more slowly and more rationally and canalise the
economic life of society so that small property shall gradually be built up
within it, see against what forces of inertia and custom I have to work
to-day in a Capitalist society!

If I desire to benefit small savings at the expense of large, I must
reverse the whole economy under which interest is paid upon deposits
to-day. It is far easier to save £100 out of a revenue of £1,000 than to
save £10 out of a revenue of £100. It is infinitely easier to save £10 out
of a revenue of £100 than £5 out of a revenue of £50. To build up small
property through thrift when once the Mass have fallen into the proletarian
trough is impossible unless you deliberately subsidise small savings,
offering them a reward which, in competition, they could never obtain; and
to do this the whole vast arrangement of credit must be worked backwards.
Or, let the policy be pursued of penalising undertakings with few owners,
of heavily taxing large blocks of shares and of subsidising with the
produce small holders in proportion to the smallness of their holding. Here
again you are met with the difficulty of a vast majority who cannot even
bid for the smallest share.

One might multiply instances of the sort indefinitely, but the strongest
force against the distribution of ownership in a society already permeated
with Capitalist modes of thought is still the moral one: Will men want to
own? Will officials, administrators, and lawmakers be able to shake off the
power which under Capitalism seems normal to the rich? If I approach, for
instance, the works of one of our great Trusts, purchase it with public
money, bestow, even as a gift, the shares thereof to its workmen, can I
count upon any tradition of property in their midst which will prevent
their squandering the new wealth? Can I discover any relics of the
co-operative instinct among such men? Could I get managers and organisers
to take a group of poor men seriously or to serve them as they would serve
rich men? Is not the whole psychology of a Capitalist society divided
between the proletarian mass which thinks in terms not of property but of
"employment," and the few owners who are alone familiar with the machinery
of administration?

I have touched but very briefly and superficially upon this matter, because
it needs no elaboration. Though it is evident that with a sufficient will
and a sufficient social vitality property could be restored, it is evident
that all efforts to restore it have in a Capitalist society such as our own
a note of oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other
social things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any
such attempt must proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.

On the other hand, the Collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in
appearance at least) to the Capitalist society which it proposes to
replace. It works with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and
thinks in the existing terms of Capitalism, appeals to just those appetites
which Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of
just those things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed
among men wherever the blight of it has spread.

So true is all this that the stupider kind of Collectivist will often talk
of a "Capitalist phase" of society as the necessary precedent to a
"Collectivist phase." A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it "furnishes
a mode of transition from private to public ownership." Collectivism
promises employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms
of employment. It promises to its workmen the security which a great and
well-organised industrial Capitalist unit (like one of our railways) can
give through a system of pensions, regular promotion, etc., but that
security vastly increased through the fact that it is the State and not a
mere unit of the State which guarantees it. Collectivism would administer,
would pay wages, would promote, would pension off, would fine--and all the
rest of it--exactly as the Capitalist State does to-day. The proletarian,
when the Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, perceives
nothing in the picture save certain ameliorations of his present position.
Who can imagine that if, say, two of our great industries, Coal and
Railways, were handed over to the State tomorrow, the armies of men
organised therein would find any change in the character of their lives,
save in some increase of security and possibly in a very slight increase of
earnings?

The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass
of a Capitalist State is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise
of some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.

To that small minority of a Capitalist society which owns the means of
production, Collectivism will of course appear as an enemy, but, even so,
it is an enemy which they understand and an enemy with whom they can treat
in terms common both to that enemy and to themselves. If, for instance, the
State proposes to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 per cent.
and believes that under State management it will make the trust pay 5 per
cent. then the transference takes the form of a business proposition: the
State is no harder to the Capitalists taken over than was Mr Yerkes to the
Underground. Again, the State, having greater credit and longevity, can (it
would seem)[5] "buy out" any existing Capitalist body upon favourable
terms. Again, the discipline by which the State would enforce its rules
upon the proletariat it employed would be the same rules as those by which
the Capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests to-day.

There is in the whole scheme which proposes to transform the Capitalist
into the Collectivist State no element of reaction, the use of no term with
which a Capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no instinct,
whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a
Capitalist community is not amply familiar.

In general, if modern Capitalist England were made by magic a State of
small owners, we should all suffer an enormous revolution. We should marvel
at the insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, at the
strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, vigorous personalities
discernible upon every side. But if this modern Capitalist England could,
by a process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjustment of individual
interests, be transformed into a Collectivist State, the apparent change at
the end of that transition would not be conspicuous to the most of us, and
the transition itself should have met with no shocks that theory can
discover. The insecure and hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks
of labour would have disappeared into isolated workplaces of a penal kind:
we should hardly miss them. Many incomes now involving considerable duties
to the State would have been replaced by incomes as large or larger,
involving much the same duties and bearing only the newer name of salaries.
The small shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed under
public schemes at a salary, in part engaged in the old work of distribution
at secure incomes; and such small owners as are left, of boats, of farms,
even of machinery, would perhaps know the new state of things into which
they had survived through nothing more novel than some increase in the
irritating system of inspection and of onerous petty taxation: they are
already fairly used to both.

This picture of the natural transition from Capitalism to Collectivism
seems so obvious that many Collectivists in a generation immediately past
believed that nothing stood between them and the realisation of their ideal
save the unintelligence of mankind. They had only to argue and expound
patiently and systematically for the great transformation to become
possible. They had only to continue arguing and expounding for it at last
to be realised.

I say, "of the last generation." To-day that simple and superficial
judgment is getting woefully disturbed. The most sincere and single-minded
of Collectivists cannot but note that the practical effect of their
propaganda is not an approach towards the Collectivist State at all, but
towards something very different. It is becoming more and more evident that
with every new reform--and those reforms commonly promoted by particular
Socialists, and in a puzzled way blessed by Socialists in general--another
state emerges more and more clearly. It is becoming increasingly certain
that the attempted transformation of Capitalism into Collectivism is
resulting not in Collectivism at all, but in some third thing which the
Collectivist never dreamt of, or the Capitalist either; and that third
thing is the /Servile/ State: a State, that is, in which the mass of men
shall be constrained _by law_ to labour to the profit of a minority, but,
as the price of such constraint, shall enjoy a security which the old
Capitalism did not give them.

Why is the apparently simple and direct action of Collectivist reform
diverted into so unexpected a channel? And in what new laws and
institutions does modern England in particular and industrial society in
general show that this new form of the State is upon us?

To these two questions I will attempt an answer in the two concluding
divisions of this book.




Section Eight
The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile State


I propose in this section to show how the three interests which between
them account for nearly the whole of the forces making for social change in
modern England are all necessarily drifting towards the Servile State.

Of these three interests the first two represent the Reformers--the third
the people to be Reformed.

These three interests are, first, the _Socialist_, who is the theoretical
reformer working along the line of least resistance; secondly, the
"_Practical Man_" who as a "practical" reformer depends on his shortness of
sight, and is therefore to-day a powerful factor; while the third is that
great proletarian mass for whom the change is being effected, and on whom
it is being imposed. What _they_ are most likely to accept, the way in
which they will react upon new institutions is the most important factor of
all, for _they_ are the material with and upon which the work is being
done.

* * * * *

(1) Of the _Socialist_ Reformer:

I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the
remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not
towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.

The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is
itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (_a_) the man who regards the
public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion
of all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only
feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (_b_) the man
who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much
because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered
and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to
consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by
public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from
the consequences of _their_ vice, ignorance, and folly.

These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and
between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.

Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of
Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least
resistance will either be led?

* * * * *

(_a_) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means
of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of
them in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard
thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation
a stony moral barrier. It is what _most_ men would call the moral basis of
property (the instinct that property is a _right_), and what _all_ men
would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have
behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.

To take a very simple case. Decree that all common lands enclosed since so
late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very
moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many
small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over
millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the
difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is
conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society;
but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved
and all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the
conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist
reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention--as it must
be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental
importance--the expedient of "_buying out_" the present owner.

It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to "buy out" without
confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its
proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my
reformer's action.

He does not confiscate, then; at the most he "buys out" (or attempts to
"buy out") certain sections of the means of production.

But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition
the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of
Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution which it causes in
great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity which it imposes upon all. He
is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall
all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual
jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.

Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.

This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production
by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But
they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited
ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very
definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess
the possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when
we are dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to
modify the factor of freedom.

You can say to the Capitalist: "I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I
am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives." The
Capitalist replies: "I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of
catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the
relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular
responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a
proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me,
the Capitalist, as a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with
special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they
are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake
the new role imposed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I
will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps
larger and certainly more secure."

This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand
canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred; as
to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are
open. Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and
that sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will
run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen
its channel; there will the main stream learn to run.

To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist's demand which
are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first
steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that
upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the
whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the
Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims
and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective
indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving
power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.

When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any
demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it
in order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.

Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier
method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately
preceding it: there is no need to go further.

In this way the Socialist whose motive is human good and not mere
organisation is being shepherded in spite of himself _away_ from his
Collectivist ideal and _towards_ a society in which the possessors shall
remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed, in which the
mass of men shall still work for the advantage of a few, and in which those
few shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, but in which
the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency, in the main the product
of freedom, have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom.

At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men, the owners
economically free, and controlling to their peace and to the guarantee of
their livelihood the economically unfree non-owners. But that is the
Servile State.

* * * * *

(_b_) The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly.
In him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is
not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar.
Tables, statistics, an exact framework for life--these afford him the food
that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most congenial to him is
the "running" of men: as a machine is run.

To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals.

It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and organic complexity which
is the colour of any vital society offends him by its infinite
differentiation. He is disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect
of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and
appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the coordinate work of
public clerks and marshalled by powerful heads of departments gives his
small stomach a final satisfaction.

Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in
capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so
suits his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said that in his vision
of a future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least a
department and possibly of the whole State--but that is by the way.) But
while he would prefer to begin with a Collectivist scheme ready-made, he
finds in practice that he cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as
the more hearty Socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the
man burning at the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to
a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense
than a mechanical appetite for regulation?

He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the best he will "buy out"
the Capitalist.

Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human Socialist, "buying out"
is, as I shall show in its proper place, a system impossible of general
application.

But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he
does for the socialisation of the means of production--tabulation, detailed
administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under one
schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his
Department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the
existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other
socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the
few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the
proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their
freedom, nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency
or insecurity--and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper
housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be
incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be
imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to
benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.

To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing towards which he drifts,
it is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal Collectivist State, which
alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already
the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called
themselves "Socialists" are now less concerned with any scheme for
socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable schemes actually
existing, some of them possessing already the force of laws, for
regulating, "running," and drilling the proletariat without trenching by an
inch upon the privilege in implements, stores, and land enjoyed by the
small Capitalist class.

The so-called "Socialist" of this type has not fallen into the Servile
State by a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he
foresees his power over its future.

So much for the Socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to
transform our Capitalist society into one where the community should be the
universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its
tutelage. To-day their ideal has failed, and of the two sources whence
their energy proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly,
acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not Socialist at all but
Servile.

* * * * *

(2) Of the _Practical_ Reformer:

There is another type of Reformer, one who prides himself on _not_ being a
socialist, and one of the greatest weight to-day. He also is making for the
Servile State. This second factor in the change is the "Practical Man"; and
this fool, on account of his great numbers and determining influence in the
details of legislation, must be carefully examined.

It is your "Practical Man" who says: "Whatever you theorists and
doctrinaires may hold with regard to this proposal (which I support),
though it may offend some abstract dogma of yours, yet _in practice_ you
must admit that it does good. If you had _practical_ experience of the
misery of the Jones' family, or had done _practical_ work yourself in
Pudsey, you would have seen that a _practical_ man," etc.

It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is
exactly the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of
human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin
disabilities which stamp the Practical Man where-ever found: these twin
disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an
inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both
these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of
impotence, the inability to think.

Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and do a little thinking for
him.

As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first
principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, and _his_ first principles
and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors
hold in the matter of social reform. The two things intolerable to him as a
decent citizen (though a very stupid human being) are _insufficiency_ and
_insecurity_. When he was "working" in the slums of Pudsey or raiding the
proletarian Jones's from the secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the
worthy man most was "unemployment" and "destitution": that is, insecurity
and insufficiency in flesh and blood.

Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, whether as a mere
organiser or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice, is led away
from Socialism and towards the Servile State by the force of modern things
in England, how much more easily do you not think the "Practical Man" will
be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his
grazing ground? To those dull and shortsighted eyes the immediate solution
which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity
is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down
the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile
State with the same inevitable ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give
him something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then
Jones will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work.
If you get him work "under our unorganised and wasteful system, etc.," he
may lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The slums of Pudsey, as the
Practical Man knows by Practical experience, are often unemployable. Then
there are "the ravages of drink": more fatal still the dreadful habit
mankind has of forming families and breeding children. The worthy fellow
notes that "as a practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you
make them."

He does not, because he cannot, coordinate all these things. He knows
nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the
co-operative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership
which such a society spontaneously breeds. He "takes the world as he finds
it"--and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit
with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile
State, _he_, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in
the building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by
inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the
one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or
suspect the process.

It has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual
because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power.
Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great
advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before
our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen
until our time. Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of
philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.

The Practical Man left to himself would not produce the Servile State. He
would not produce anything but a welter of anarchic restrictions which
would lead at last to some kind of revolt.

Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but the ally or flanking
party of great forces which he does nothing to oppose, and of particular
men, able and prepared for the work of general change, who use him with
gratitude and contempt. Were he not so numerous in modern England, and,
under the extraordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economically
powerful, I would have neglected him in this analysis. As it is, we may
console ourselves by remembering that the advent of the Servile State, with
its powerful organisation and necessity for lucid thought in those who
govern, will certainly eliminate him.

* * * * *

Our reformers, then, both those who think and those who do not, both those
who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it, are
making directly for the Servile State.

* * * * *

(3) What of the third factor? What of the people about to be reformed? What
of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and who are
the subject of the great experiment? Do they tend, as material, to accept
or to reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude
which is the argument of this book?

The question is an important one to decide, for upon whether the material
is suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected, depends
the success of every experiment making for the Servile State.

The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of
definition, the actual number of the proletariat and the proportion that
number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but
must be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before
we can call that State _Capitalist_.

But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a stable, and therefore
not a permanent, condition of society. It has proved ephemeral; and upon
that very account the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a
greater or less degree some memories of a state of society in which its
ancestors were possessors of property and economically free.

The strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to
bear in mind in our problem, when we examine how far a particular
proletariat, such as the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the
Servile State, which would condemn it to a perpetual loss of property and
of all the free habit which property engenders.

Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the Capitalist class may
be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat
class. Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the
first development of Capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to
impress the imagination of the general. Such recruitment is still possible.
The proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat, the chance which
each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his
proletarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism such as is ours
to-day, is the second factor in the problem.

The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is the appetite of the
dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which Capitalism, with
its essential condition of freedom, has deprived them.

Now let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English
proletariat as we actually know it at this moment. That proletariat is
certainly the great mass of the State: it covers about nineteen-twentieths
of the population--if we exclude Ireland, where, as I shall point out in my
concluding pages, the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against
its development towards a Servile State, is already successful.

* * * * *

As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly within the memory of
men now living. The traditional rights of property are still strong in the
minds of the English poor. All the moral connotations of that right are
familiar to them. They are familiar with the conception of theft as a
wrong; they are tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire.
They could all explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy, by exchange,
and by gift, and even by contract. There is not one but could put himself
in the position, mentally, of an owner.

But the actual experience of ownership, and the effect which that
experience has upon character and upon one's view of the State is a very
different matter. Within the memory of people still living a sufficient
number of Englishmen were owning (as small freeholders, small masters,
etc.) to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very
vivid effect upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a living
tradition proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living
testimony to the relics of a better state of things. I have myself spoken,
when I was a boy, to old labourers in the neighbourhood of Oxford who had
risked their skins in armed protest against the enclosure of certain
commons, and who had of course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as
the reward of their courage; and I have myself spoken in Lancashire to old
men who could retrace for me, either from their personal experience the
last phases of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their
fathers had told them, the conditions of a time when small and well-divided
ownership in cottage looms was actually common.

All that has passed. The last chapter of its passage has been singularly
rapid. Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the
Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and
hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct, use, and meaning of property
is lost to it: and this has had two very powerful effects, each strongly
inclining our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers which lay
between a condition of servitude and a condition of freedom. The first
effect is this: that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they
think obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that they regard the
possessors of property as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately
obey, often envy, and sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a
position most of them would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now
strongly deny, but whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and
permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the
foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.

To sum up: The attitude of the proletariat in England to-day (the attitude
of the overwhelming majority, that is, of English families) towards
property and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through
property is no longer an attitude of experience or of expectation. They
think of themselves as wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the
wage-earner is an object which they vividly appreciate and pursue. To make
him cease to be a wage earner is an object that would seem to them entirely
outside the realities of life.

What of the second factor, the gambling chance which the Capitalist system,
with its necessary condition of freedom, of the legal power to bargain
fully, and so forth, permits to the proletarian of escaping from his
proletariat surroundings?

Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men's minds we may say
that, while it has not disappeared, it has very greatly lost in force
during the last forty years. One often meets men who tell one, whether they
are speaking in defence of or against the Capitalist system, that it still
blinds the proletarian to any common consciousness of class, because the
proletarian still has the example before him of members of his class, whom
he has known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position
of capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves, one
discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual
worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men in great groups of
industry, notably in the transport industry and in the mines, have quite
given up such an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exaggerated as
the hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny chance has fallen in the
general opinion of the workers to be negligible, and that hope which a
lottery breeds is extinguished. The proletarian now regards himself as
definitely proletarian, nor destined within human likelihood to be anything
but proletarian.

* * * * *

These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic
freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping
from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most strongly
_against_ the acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so
fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor
in the situation which is making so strongly _for_ the Servile State, and
which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and
for security. It is this third factor alone which need be seriously
considered to-day, when we ask ourselves how far the material upon which
social reform is working, that is, the masses of the people, may be ready
to accept the change.

The thing may be put in many ways. I will put it in what I believe to be
the most conclusive of all.

If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage,
with the proposal for a contract of service for life, guaranteeing them
employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would
refuse?

Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom: a
life-contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is the
negation of contract and the acceptation of status. It would lay the man
that undertook it under an obligation of forced labour, coterminous and
coincident with his power to labour. It would be a permanent renunciation
of his right (if such a right exists) to the surplus values created by his
labour. If we ask ourselves how many men, or rather how many families,
would prefer freedom (with its accompaniments of certain insecurity and
possible insufficiency) to such a life-contract, no one can deny that the
answer is: "Very few would refuse it." That is the key to the whole matter.

What proportion would refuse it no one can determine; but I say that even
as a voluntary offer, and not as a compulsory obligation, a contract of
this sort which would for the future destroy contract and re-erect status
of a servile sort would be thought a boon by the mass of the proletariat
to-day.

Now take the truth from another aspect--by considering it thus from one
point of view and from another we can appreciate it best--Of what are the
mass of men now most afraid in a Capitalist State? Not of the punishments
that can be inflicted by a Court of Law, but of "the sack."

You may ask a man why he does not resist such and such a legal infamy; why
he permits himself to be the victim of fines and deductions from which the
Truck Acts specifically protect him; why he cannot assert his opinion in
this or that matter; why he has accepted, without a blow, such and such an
insult.

Some generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his
manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was
because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell
you that it is because he fears unemployment.

Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome
public law, and the sanctions which the Capitalist can call to the aid of
his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than
those which the public Courts can impose.

In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges
should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favour of some social
theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish
him. To deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments
which most men dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of private
powers involves to-day a private punishment against the threat of which
very few indeed dare to stand out.

Look at the matter from yet another aspect. A law is passed (let us
suppose) which increases the total revenue of a wage-earner, or guarantees
him against the insecurity of his position in some small degree. The
administration of that law requires, upon the one hand, a close inquisition
into the man's circumstances by public officials, and, upon the other hand,
the administration of its benefits by that particular Capitalist or group
of Capitalists whom the wage-earner serves to enrich. Do the Servile
conditions attaching to this material benefit prevent a proletarian in
England to-day from preferring the benefit to freedom? It is notorious that
they do not.

No matter from what angle you approach the business, the truth is always
the same. That great mass of wage-earners upon which our society now
reposes understands as a present good all that will increase even to some
small amount their present revenue and all that may guarantee them against
those perils of insecurity to which they are perpetually subject. They
understand and welcome a good of this kind, and they are perfectly willing
to pay for that good the corresponding price of control and
enregimentation, exercised in gradually increasing degree by those who are
their paymasters.

* * * * *

It would be easy by substituting superficial for fundamental things, or
even by proposing certain terms and phrases to be used in the place of
terms and phrases now current it would be easy, I say, by such methods to
ridicule or to oppose the prime truths which I am here submitting. They
none the less remain truths.

Substitute for the term "employee" in one of our new laws the term "serf,"
even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term "master" for
the word "employer," and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a
sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it
would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of
the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no
revolt; on the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part
gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon
them through a freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense
of losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect of _having enough_
and _not losing it_.

All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase
of our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is
canalised towards it; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his
ideal; the herd of "practical" men meet at every stage in its inception the
"practical" steps which they expected and demanded; while that proletarian
mass upon whom the experiment is being tried have lost the tradition of
property and of freedom which might resist the change, and are most
powerfully inclined to its acceptance by the positive benefits which it
confers.

It may be objected that however true all this may be, no one can, upon such
theoretical grounds, regard the Servile State as something really
approaching us. We need not believe in its advent (we shall be told) until
we see the first effects of its action.

To this I answer that the first effects of its action are already apparent.
The Servile State is, in industrial England to-day, no longer a menace but
something in actual existence. It is in process of construction. The first
main lines of it are already plotted out; the cornerstone of it is already
laid.

To see the truth of this it is enough to consider laws and projects of law,
the first of which we already enjoy, while the last will pass from project
to positive statute in due process of time.


Appendix on "Buying-Out"


There is an impression abroad among those who propose to expropriate the
Capitalist class for the benefit of the State, but who appreciate the
difficulties in the way of direct confiscation, that by spreading the
process over a sufficient number of years and pursuing it after a certain
fashion bearing all the outward appearances of a purchase, the
expropriation could be effected without the consequences and attendant
difficulties of direct confiscation. In other words, there is an impression
that the State could "buyout" the Capitalist class without their knowing
it, and that in a sort of painless way this class can be slowly conjured
out of existence.

The impression is held in a confused fashion by most of those who cherish
it, and will not bear a clear analysis.

It is impossible by any jugglery to "buyout" the universality of the means
of production without confiscation.

To prove this, consider a concrete case which puts the problem in the
simplest terms:--

A community of twenty-two families lives upon the produce of two farms, the
property of only two families out of that twenty-two.

The remaining twenty families are Proletarian. The two families, with their
ploughs, stores, land, etc., are Capitalist.

The labour of the twenty proletarian families applied to the land and
capital of these two capitalist families produces 300 measures of wheat, of
which 200 measures, or 10 measures each, form the annual support of the
twenty proletarian families; the remaining 100 measures are the surplus
value retained as rent, interest, and profit by the two Capitalist
families, each of which has thus a yearly income of 50 measures.

The State proposes to produce, after a certain length of time, a condition
of affairs such that the surplus values shall no longer go to the two
Capitalist families, but shall be distributed to the advantage of the whole
community, while it, the State, shall itself become the unembarrassed owner
of both farms.

Now capital is accumulated with the object of a certain return as the
reward of accumulation. Instead of spending his money, a man saves it with
the object of retaining as the result of that saving a certain yearly
revenue. The measure of this does not fall in a particular society at a
particular time below a certain level. In other words, if a man cannot get
a certain minimum reward for his accumulation, he will not accumulate but
spend.

What is called in economics "The Law of Diminishing Returns" acts so that
continual additions to capital, other things being equal (that is, the
methods of production remaining the same), do not provide a corresponding
increase of revenue. A thousand measures of capital applied to a particular
area of natural forces will produce, for instance, 40 measures yearly, or 4
per cent.; but 2000 measures applied in the same fashion will not produce
80 measures. They will produce more than the thousand measures did, but not
more in proportion; not double. They will produce, say, 60 measures, or 3
per cent., upon the capital. The action of this universal principle
automatically checks the accumulation of capital when it has reached such a
point that the proportionate return is the least which a man will accept.
If it falls below that he will spend rather than accumulate. The limit of
this minimum in any particular society at any particular time gives the
measure to what we call "_the Effective Desire of Accumulation_." Thus in
England to-day it is a little over 3 per cent. The minimum which limits the
accumulation of capital is a minimum return of about one-thirtieth yearly
upon such capital, and this we may call for shortness the "E.D.A." of our
society at the present time.

When, therefore, the Capitalist estimates the full value of his
possessions, he counts them in "so many years' purchase."[6] And that means
that he is willing to take in a lump sum down for his possessions so many
times the yearly revenue which he at present enjoys. If his E.D.A. is
one-thirtieth, he will take a lump sum representing thirty times his annual
revenue.

So far so good. Let us suppose the two Capitalists in our example to have
an E.D.A. of one-thirtieth. They will sell to the State if the State can
put up 3000 measures of wheat.

Now, of course, the State can do nothing of the kind. The accumulations of
wheat being already in the hands of the Capitalists, and those
accumulations amounting to much less than 3000 measures of wheat, the thing
appears to be a deadlock.

But it is not a deadlock if the Capitalist is a fool. The State can go to
the Capitalists and say: "Hand me over your farms, and against them I will
give you guarantee that you shall be paid _rather more than_ 100 measures
of wheat a year for the thirty years. In fact, I will pay you half as much
again until these extra payments amount to a purchase of your original
stock."

Out of what does this extra amount come? Out of the State's power to tax.

The State can levy a tax upon the profits of both Capitalists A and B, and
pay them the extra with their own money.

In so simple an example it is evident that this "ringing of the changes"
would be spotted by the victims, and that they would bring against it
precisely the same forces which they would bring against the much simpler
and more straightforward process of immediate confiscation.

But it is argued that in a complex State, where you are dealing with
myriads of individual Capitalists and thousands of particular forms of
profit, the process can be masked.

There are two ways in which the State can mask its action (according to
this policy). It can buy out first one small area of land and capital out
of the general taxation and then another, and then another, until the whole
has been transferred; or it can tax with peculiar severity certain trades
which the rest who are left immune will abandon to their ruin, and with the
general taxation plus this special taxation buy out those unfortunate
trades which will, of course, have sunk heavily in value under the attack.

The second of these tricks will soon be apparent in any society, however
complex; for after one unpopular trade had been selected for attack the
trying on of the same methods in another less unpopular field will at once
rouse suspicion.[7]

The first method, however, might have some chance of success, at least for
a long time after it was begun, in a highly complex and numerous society
were it not for a certain check which comes in of itself. That check is the
fact that the Capitalist only takes _more than_ his old yearly revenue with
the object of reinvesting the surplus.

I have a thousand pounds in Brighton railway stock, yielding me 3 per
cent.: £30 a year. The Government asks me to exchange my bit of paper
against another bit of paper guaranteeing the payment of £50 a year, that
is, an extra rate a year, for so many years as will represent over and
above the regular interest paid a purchase of my stock. The Government's
bit of paper promises to pay to the holder £50 a year for, say,
thirty-eight years. I am delighted to make the exchange, not because I am
such a fool as to enjoy the prospect of my property being extinguished at
the end of thirty-eight years, but because I hope to be able to reinvest
the extra £20 every year in something else that will bring me in 3 per
cent. Thus, at the end of the thirty-eight years I shall (or my heirs) be
better off than I was at the beginning of the transaction, and I shall have
enjoyed during its maturing my old £30 a year all the same.

The State can purchase thus on a small scale by subsidising purchase out of
the general taxation. It can, therefore, play this trick over a small area
and for a short time with success. But the moment this area passes a very
narrow limit the "market for investment" is found to be restricted, Capital
automatically takes alarm, the State can no longer offer its paper
guarantees save at an enhanced price. If it tries to turn the position by
further raising taxation to what Capital regards as "confiscatory" rates,
there will be opposed to its action just the same forces as would be
opposed to frank and open expropriation.

The matter is one of plain arithmetic, and all the confusion introduced by
the complex mechanism of "finance" can no more change the fundamental and
arithmetical principles involved than can the accumulation of triangles in
an ordnance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest triangle to
less than 180 degrees.[8] In fine: _if you desire to confiscate, you must
confiscate_.

You cannot outflank the enemy, as Financiers in the city and sharpers on
the racecourse outflank the simpler of mankind, nor can you conduct the
general process of expropriation upon a muddle-headed hope that somehow or
other something will come out of nothing in the end.

There are, indeed, two ways in which the State could expropriate without
meeting the resistance that must be present against any attempt at
confiscation. But the first of these ways is precarious, the second
insufficient.

They are as follows:--

(1) The State can promise the Capitalist a larger yearly revenue than he is
getting in the expectation that it, the State, can manage the business
better than the Capitalist, or that some future expansion will come to its
aid. In other words, if the State makes a bigger profit out of the thing
than the Capitalist, it can buy out the Capitalist just as a private
individual with a similar business proposition can buy him out.

But the converse of this is that if the State has calculated badly, or has
bad luck, it would find itself _endowing_ the Capitalists of the future
instead of gradually extinguishing them.

In this fashion the State could have "socialised" without confiscation the
railways of this country if it had taken them over fifty years ago,
promising the then owners more than they were then obtaining. But if it had
socialised the hansom cab in the nineties, it would now be supporting in
perpetuity that worthy but extinct type the cab-owner (and his children for
ever) at the expense of the community.

(2) The second way in which the State can expropriate without confiscation
is by annuity. It can say to such Capitalists as have no heirs or care
little for their fate if they have: "You have only got so much time to live
and to enjoy your £30, will you take £50 until you die?" Upon the bargain
being accepted the State will, in process of time, though not immediately
upon the death of the annuitant, become an unembarrassed owner of what had
been the annuitant's share in the means of production. But the area over
which this method can be exercised is a very small one. It is not of itself
a sufficient instrument for the expropriation of any considerable field.

I need hardly add that as a matter of fact the so-called "Socialist" and
confiscatory measures of our time have nothing to do with the problem here
discussed. The State is indeed confiscating, that is, it is taxing in many
cases in such a fashion as to impoverish the taxpayer and is lessening his
capital rather than shearing his income. But it is not putting the proceeds
into the means of production. It is either using them for immediate
consumption in the shape of new official salaries or handing them over to
another set of Capitalists.[9]

But these practical considerations of the way in which sham Socialist
experiments are working belong rather to my next section, in which I shall
deal with the actual beginnings of the Servile State in our midst.




Section Nine
The Servile State Has Begun


In this last division of my book I deal with the actual appearance of the
Servile State in certain laws and proposals now familiar to the Industrial
Society of modern England. These are the patent objects, "laws and projects
of laws," which lend stuff to my argument, and show that it is based not
upon a mere deduction, but upon an observation of things.

Two forms of this proof are evident: first, the laws and proposals which
subject the _Proletariat_ to Servile conditions; next, the fact that the
_Capitalist_, so far from being expropriated by modern "Socialist"
experiments, is being confirmed in his power.

I take these in their order, and I begin by asking in what statutes or
proposals the Servile State first appeared among us.

A false conception of our subject might lead one to find the origins of the
Servile State in the restrictions imposed upon certain forms of
manufacture, and the corresponding duties laid upon the Capitalist in the
interest of his workmen. The Factory Laws, as they are in this country,
would seem to offer upon this superficial and erroneous view a starting
point. They do nothing of the kind; and the view _is_ superficial and
erroneous because it neglects the fundamentals of the case. What
distinguishes the Servile State is not the interference of law with the
action of any citizen even in connection with industrial matters. Such
interference may or may not indicate the presence of a Servile status. It
in no way indicates the presence of that status when it forbids a
particular kind of human action to be undertaken by the citizen as a
citizen.

The legislator says, for instance, "You may pluck roses; but as I notice
that you sometimes scratch yourself, I will put you in prison unless you
cut them with scissors at least 122 millimetres long, and I will appoint
one thousand inspectors to go round the country seeing whether the law is
observed. My brother-in-law shall be at the head of the Department at
£2,000 a year."

We are all familiar with that type of legislation. We are all familiar with
the arguments for and against it in any particular case. We may regard it
as onerous, futile, or beneficent, or in any other light, according to our
various temperaments. But it does not fall within the category of servile
legislation, because it establishes no distinction between two classes of
citizens, marking off the one as legally distinct from the other by a
criterion of manual labour or of income.

This is even true of such regulations as those which compel a Cotton Mill,
for instance, to have no less than such and such an amount of cubic space
for each operative, and such and such protection for dangerous machinery.
These laws do not concern themselves with the nature, the amount, or even
the existence of a contract for service. The object, for example, of the
law which compels one to fence off certain types of machinery is simply to
protect human life, regardless of whether the human being so protected is
rich or poor, Capitalist or Proletarian. These laws may in effect work in
our society so that the Capitalist is made responsible for the Proletarian,
but he is not responsible _qua_ Capitalist, nor is the Proletarian
protected _qua_ Proletarian.

In the same way the law may compel me, if I am a Riparian owner, to put up
a fence of statutory strength wherever the water of my river is of more
than a statutory depth. Now it cannot compel me to do this unless I am the
owner of the land. In a sense, therefore, this might be called the
recognition of my _Status_, because, by the nature of the case, only
landowners can be affected by the law, and landowners would be compelled by
it to safeguard the lives of all, whether they were or were not owners of
land.

But the category so established would be purely accidental. The object and
method of the law do not concern themselves with a distinction between
citizens.

A close observer might indeed discover certain points in the Factory laws,
details and phrases, which did distinctly connote the existence of a
Capitalist and of a Proletarian class. But we must take the statutes as a
whole and the order in which they were produced, above all, the general
motive and expressions governing each main statute, in order to judge
whether such examples of interference give us an origin or not.

The verdict will be that they do not. Such legislation may be oppressive in
any degree or necessary in any degree, but it does not establish status in
the place of contract, and it is not, therefore, servile.

Neither are those laws servile which in practice attach to the poor and not
to the rich. Compulsory education is in legal theory required of every
citizen for his children. The state of mind which goes with plutocracy
exempts of course all above a certain standard of wealth from this law. But
the law does apply to the universality of the commonwealth, and all
families resident in Great Britain (not in Ireland) are subject to its
provisions.

These are not origins. A true origin to the legislation I approach comes
later. The first example of servile legislation to be discovered upon the
Statute Book is that which establishes the present form of _Employer's
Liability_.

I am far from saying that that law was passed, as modern laws are beginning
to be passed, with the direct object of establishing a new status; though
it was passed with some consciousness on the part of the legislator that
such a new status was in existence as a social fact. Its motive was merely
humane, and the relief which it afforded seemed merely necessary at the
time; but it is an instructive example of the way in which a small neglect
of strict doctrine and a slight toleration of anomaly admit great changes
into the State.

There had existed from all time in every community, and there was founded
upon common sense, the legal doctrine that if one citizen was so placed
with regard to another by contract that he must in the fulfilment of that
contract perform certain services, and if those services accidentally
involved damages to a third party, not the actual perpetrator of the
damage, but he who designed the particular operation leading to it was
responsible.

The point is subtle, but, as I say, fundamental. It involved no distinction
of status between employer and employed.

Citizen A offered citizen B a sack of wheat down if citizen B would plough
for him a piece of land which might or might not produce more than a sack
of wheat.

Of course citizen A expected it would produce more, and was awaiting a
surplus value, or he would not have made the contract with citizen B. But,
at any rate, citizen B put his name to the agreement, and as a free man,
capable of contracting, was correspondingly bound to fulfil it.

In fulfilling this contract the ploughshare B is driving destroys a pipe
conveying water by agreement through A's land to C. C suffers damage, and
to recover the equivalent of that damage his action in justice and common
sense can only be against A, for B was carrying out a plan and instruction
of which A was the author. C is a third party who had nothing to do with
such a contract and could not possibly have justice save by his chances of
getting it from A, who was the true author of the unintentional loss
inflicted, since he designed the course of work.

But when the damage is not done to C at all, but to B, who is concerned
with a work the risks of which are known and willingly undertaken, it is
quite another matter.

Citizen A contracts with citizen B that citizen B, in consideration of a
sack of wheat, shall plough a bit of land. Certain known risks must attach
to that operation. Citizen B, if he is a free man, undertakes those risks
with his eyes open. For instance, he may sprain his wrist in turning the
plough, or one of the horses may kick him while he is having his
bread-and-cheese. If upon such an accident A is compelled to pay damages to
B, a difference of status is at once recognised. B undertook to do work
which, by all the theory of free contract, was, with its risks and its
expense of energy, the equivalent in B's own eyes of a sack of wheat; yet a
law is passed to say that B can have more than that sack of wheat if he is
hurt.

There is no converse right of A against B. If the employer suffers by such
an accident to the employee, _he_ is not allowed to dock that sack of
wheat, though it was regarded in the contract as the equivalent to a
certain amount of labour to be performed which, as a fact, has not been
performed. A has no action unless B has been _culpably_ negligent or
remiss. In other words, the mere fact that one man is _working_ and the
other not is the fundamental consideration on which the law is built, and
the law says: "You are not a free man making a free contract with all its
consequences. You are a worker, and therefore an inferior: you are an
_employee_; and that _status_ gives you a special position which would not
be recognised in the other party to the contract."

The principle is pushed still further when an employer is made liable for
an accident happening to one of his employees at the hands of another
employee.

A gives a sack of wheat to B and D each if they will dig a well for him.
All three parties are cognisant of the risks and accept them in the
contract. B, holding the rope on which D is lowered, lets it slip. If they
were all three men of exactly equal status, obviously D's action would be
against B. But they are not of equal status in England to-day. B and D are
_employees_, and are therefore in a special and inferior position before
the law compared with their employer A. D's action is, by this novel
principle, no longer against B, who accidentally injured him by a personal
act, however involuntary, for which a free man would be responsible, but
against A, who was innocent of the whole business.

Now in all this it is quite clear that A has peculiar duties not because he
is a citizen, but because he is something more: an employer; and B and D
have special claims on A, not because they are citizens, but because they
are something less: _viz. employees_. They can _claim protection_ from A,
as inferiors of a superior in a State admitting such distinctions and
patronage.

It will occur at once to the reader that in our existing social state the
employee will be very grateful for such legislation. One workman cannot
recover from another simply because the other will have no goods out of
which to pay damages. Let the burden, therefore, fall upon the rich man!

Excellent. But that is not the point. To argue thus is to say that Servile
legislation is necessary if we are to solve the problems raised by
Capitalism. It remains servile legislation none the less. It is legislation
that would not exist in a society where property was well divided and where
a citizen could normally pay damages for the harm he had himself
caused.[10]

This first trickle of the stream, however, though it is of considerable
historical interest as a point of departure, is not of very definite moment
to our subject compared with the great bulk of later proposals, some of
which are already law, others upon the point of becoming law, and which
definitely recognise the Servile State, the re-establishment of status in
the place of contract, and the universal division of citizens into two
categories of employers and employed.

* * * * *

These last merit a very different consideration, for they will represent to
history the conscious and designed entry of Servile Institutions into the
old Christian State. They are not "origins," small indications of coming
change which the historian will painfully discover as a curiosity. They are
the admitted foundations of a new order, deliberately planned by a few,
confusedly accepted by the many, as the basis upon which a novel and stable
society shall arise to replace the unstable and passing phase of
Capitalism.

They fall roughly into three categories:--

(1) Measures by which the insecurity of the proletariat shall be relieved
through the action of the employing class, or of the proletariat itself
acting under compulsion.

(2) Measures by which the employer shall be compelled to give not less than
a certain minimum for any labour he may purchase, and

(3) Measures which compel a man lacking the means of production to labour,
though he may have made no contract to that effect.

The last two, as will be seen in a moment, are complementary one of
another.

As to the first: Measures to palliate the insecurity of the proletariat.

We have of this an example in actual law at this moment. And that law the
Insurance Act (whose political source and motive I am not here discussing)
follows in every particular the lines of a Servile State.

(a) Its fundamental criterion is employment. In other words, I am compelled
to enter a scheme providing me against the mischances of illness and
unemployment not because I am a citizen, but only if I am:

(1) Exchanging services for goods; and either

(2) Obtaining less than a certain amount of goods for those services, or

(3) A vulgar fellow working with his hands. The law carefully excludes from
its provisions those forms of labour to which the educated and therefore
powerful classes are subject, and further excludes from compulsion the mass
of those who are for the moment earning enough to make them a class to be
reckoned with as economically free. I may be a writer of books who, should
he fall ill, will leave in the greatest distress the family which he
supports. If the legislator were concerned for the morals of citizens, I
should most undoubtedly come under this law, under the form of a compulsory
insurance added to my income tax. But the legislator is not concerned with
people of my sort. He is concerned with a new status which he recognises in
the State, to wit, the proletariat. He envisages the proletariat not quite
accurately as men either poor, or, if they are not poor, at any rate vulgar
people working with their hands, and he legislates accordingly.

(b) Still more striking, as an example of status taking the place of
contract, is the fact that this law puts the duty of controlling the
proletariat and of seeing that the law is obeyed _not_ upon the proletariat
itself, but upon the _Capitalist class._

Now this point is of an importance that cannot be exaggerated.

The future historian, whatever his interest in the first indications of
that profound revolution through which we are so rapidly passing, will most
certainly fix upon that one point as the cardinal landmark of our times.
The legislator surveying the Capitalist State proposes as a remedy for
certain of its evils the establishment of two categories in the State,
compels the lower man to registration, to a tax, and the rest of it, and
further compels the upper man to be the instrument in enforcing that
registration and in collecting that tax. No one acquainted with the way in
which any one of the great changes of the past has taken place, the
substitution of tenure for the Roman proprietary right in land, or the
substitution of the mediaeval peasant for the serf of the Dark Ages, can
possibly misunderstand the significance of such a turning point in our
history.

Whether it will be completed or whether a reaction will destroy it is
another matter. Its mere proposal is of the greatest possible moment in the
inquiry we are here pursuing.

Of the next two groups, the fixing of a Minimum Wage and the Compulsion to
Labour (which, as I have said, and will shortly show, are complementary one
to the other), neither has yet appeared in actual legislation, but both are
planned, both thought out, both possessed of powerful advocates, and both
upon the threshold of positive law.

* * * * *

The fixing of a Minimum Wage, with a definite sum fixed by statute, has not
yet entered our laws, but the first step towards such a consummation has
been taken in the shape of giving legal sanction to some hypothetical
Minimum Wage which shall be arrived at after discussion within a particular
trade. That trade is, of course, the mining industry. The law does not say:
"No Capitalist shall pay a miner less than so many shillings for so many
hours' work." But it does say: "Figures having been arrived at by local
boards, any miner working within the area of each board can claim by force
of law the minimum sum established by such boards." It is evident that from
this step to the next, which shall define some sliding scale of
remuneration for labour according to prices and the profits of capital, is
an easy and natural transition. It would give both parties what each
immediately requires: to capital a guarantee against disturbance; to labour
sufficiency and security. The whole thing is an excellent object lesson in
little of that general movement from free contract to status, and from the
Capitalist to the Servile State, which is the tide of our time.

The neglect of older principles as abstract and doctrinaire; the immediate
need of both parties immediately satisfied; the unforeseen but necessary
consequence of satisfying such needs in such a fashion--all these, which
are apparent in the settlement the mining industry has begun, are the
typical forces producing the Servile State.

Consider in its largest aspect the nature of such a settlement.

The Proletarian accepts a position in which he produces for the Capitalist
a certain total of economic values, and retains out of that total a portion
only, leaving to the Capitalist all surplus value. The Capitalist, on his
side, is guaranteed in the secure and permanent expectation of that surplus
value through all the perils of social envy; the Proletarian is guaranteed
in a sufficiency and a security for that sufficiency; but by the very
action of such a guarantee there is withdrawn from him the power to refuse
his labour and thus to aim at putting himself in possession of the means of
production.

Such schemes definitely divide citizens into two classes, the Capitalist
and the Proletarian. They make it impossible for the second to combat the
privileged position of the first. They introduce into the positive laws of
the community a recognition of social facts which already divide Englishmen
into two groups of economically more free and economically less free, and
they stamp with the authority of the State a new constitution of society.
Society is recognised as no longer consisting of free men bargaining freely
for their labour or any other commodity in their possession, but of two
contrasting status, owners and non-owners. The first must not be allowed to
leave the second without subsistence; the second must not be allowed to
obtain that grip upon the means of production which is the privilege of the
first. It is true that this first experiment is small in degree and
tentative in quality; but to judge the movement as a general whole we must
not only consider the expression it has actually received so far in
positive law, but the mood of our time.

When this first experiment in a minimum wage was being debated in
Parliament, what was the great issue of debate? Upon what did those who
were the most ardent reformers particularly insist? _Not_ that the miners
should have an avenue open to them for obtaining possession of the mines;
not even that the State should have an avenue open to it for obtaining such
possession; _but that the minimum wage should be fixed at a certain
satisfactory level_! That, as our recent experience testifies for all of
us, was the crux of the quarrel. And that such a point should be the crux,
not the socialisation of the mines, nor the admission of the proletariat to
the means of production, but only a sufficiency and a security of wage, is
amply significant of the perhaps irresistible forces which are making in
the direction for which I argue in this book.

There was here no attempt of the Capitalist to impose Servile conditions
nor of the Proletarian to resist them. Both parties were agreed upon that
fundamental change. The discussion turned upon the minimum limit of
subsistence to be securely provided, a point which left aside, because it
took for granted, the establishment of _some_ minimum in any case.

Next, let it be noted (for it is of moment to a later part of my argument)
that experiments of this sort promise to extend piecemeal. There is no
likelihood, judging by men's actions and speech, of some grand general
scheme for the establishment of a minimum wage throughout the community.
Such a scheme would, of course, be as truly an establishment of the Servile
State as piecemeal schemes. But, as we shall see in a moment, the extension
of the principle piecemeal has a considerable effect upon the forms which
compulsion may take.

The miners' refusal to work, with the exaggerated panic it caused, bred
this first tentative appearance of the minimum wage in our laws. Normally,
capital prefers free labour with its margin of destitution; for such an
anarchy, ephemeral though it is of its nature, while it lasts provides
cheap labour; from the narrowest point of view it provides in the still
competitive areas of Capitalism a better chance for profits.

But as one group of workmen after another, concerned with trades
immediately necessary to the life of the nation, and therefore tolerating
but little interruption, learn the power which combination gives them, it
is inevitable that the legislator (concentrated as he is upon momentary
remedies for difficulties as they arise) should propose for one such trade
after another the remedy of a minimum wage.

There can be little doubt that, trade by trade, the principle will extend.
For instance, the two and a half millions now guaranteed against
unemployment are guaranteed against it for a certain weekly sum. That
weekly sum must bear some relation to their estimated earnings when they
are in employment.

It is a short step from the calculation of unemployment benefit (its being
fixed by statute at a certain level, and that level determined by something
which is regarded as the just remuneration of labour in that trade); it is
a short step, I say, from that to a statutory fixing of the sums paid
during employment.

The State says to the Serf: "I saw to it that you should have so much when
you were unemployed. I find that in some rare cases my arrangement leads to
your getting more when you are unemployed than when you are employed. I
further find that in many cases, though you get more when you are employed,
yet the difference is not sufficient to tempt a lazy man to work, or to
make him take any particular trouble to get work. I must see to this."

The provision of a fixed schedule during unemployment thus inevitably leads
to the examination, the defining, and at last the imposition of a minimum
wage during employment; and every compulsory provision for unemployed
benefits is the seed of a minimum wage.

Of still greater effect is the mere presence of State regulation in such a
matter. The fact that the State has begun to gather statistics of wages
over these large areas of industry, and to do so not for a mere statistical
object, but a practical one, and the fact that the State has begun to immix
the action of positive law and constraint with the older system of free
bargaining, mean that the whole weight of its influence is now in favour of
regulation. It is no rash prophecy to assert that in the near future our
industrial society will see a gradually extending area of industry in which
from two sides the fixing of wages by statute shall appear. From the one
side it will come in the form of the State examining the conditions of
labour in connection with its own schemes for establishing sufficiency and
security by insurance. From the other side it will come through the
reasonable proposals to make contracts between groups of labour and groups
of capital enforceable in the Courts.

* * * * *

So much, then, for the Principle of a Minimum Wage. It has already appeared
in our laws. It is certain to spread. But how does the presence of this
introduction of a Minimum form part of the advance towards the Servile
State?

I have said that the principle of a minimum wage involves as its converse
the principle of compulsory labour. Indeed, most of the importance which
the principle of a minimum wage has for this inquiry lies in that converse
necessity of compulsory labour which it involves.

But as the connection between the two may not be clear at first sight, we
must do more than take it for granted. We must establish it by process of
reason.

There are two distinct forms in which the whole policy of enforcing
security and sufficiency by law for the proletariat produce a corresponding
policy of compulsory labour.

The first of these forms is the compulsion which the Courts will exercise
upon either of the parties concerned in the giving and in the receiving of
the minimum wage. The second form is the necessity under which society will
find itself, when once the principle of the minimum wage is conceded,
coupled with the principle of sufficiency and security, to maintain those
whom the minimum wage excludes from the area of normal employment.

As to the first form:--

A Proletarian group has struck a bargain with a group of Capitalists to the
effect that it will produce for that capital ten measures of value in a
year, will be content to receive six measures of value for itself, and will
leave four measures as surplus value for the Capitalists. The bargain is
ratified; the Courts have the power to enforce it. If the Capitalists by
some trick of fines or by bluntly breaking their word pay out in wages less
than the six measures, the Courts must have some power of constraining
them. In other words, there must be some sanction to the action of the law.
There must be some power of punishment, and, through punishment, of
compulsion. Conversely, if the men, having struck this bargain, go back
upon their word; if individuals among them or sections among them cease
work with a new demand for seven measures instead of six, the Courts must
have the power of constraining and of punishing _them_. Where the bargain
is ephemeral or at any rate extended over only reasonable limits of time,
it would be straining language perhaps to say that each individual case of
constraint exercised against the workmen would be a case of compulsory
labour. But extend the system over a long period of years, make it normal
to industry and accepted as a habit in men's daily conception of the way in
which their lives should be conducted, and the method is necessarily
transformed into a system of compulsory labour. In trades where wages
fluctuate little this will obviously be the case. "You, the agricultural
labourers of this district, have taken fifteen shillings a week for a very
long time. It has worked perfectly well. There seems no reason why you
should have more. Nay, you put your hands to it through your officials in
the year so and so that you regarded that sum as sufficient. Such and such
of your members are now refusing to perform what this Court regards as a
contract. They must return within the limits of that contract or suffer the
consequences."

Remember what power analogy exercises over men's minds, and how, when
systems of the sort are common to many trades, they will tend to create a
general point of view for all trades. Remember also how comparatively
slight a threat is already sufficient to control men in our industrial
society, the proletarian mass of which is accustomed to live from week to
week under peril of discharge, and has grown readily amenable to the threat
of any reduction in those wages upon which it can but just subsist.

Nor are the Courts enforcing such contracts or quasi-contracts (as they
will come to be regarded) the only inducement.

A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as
insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such
sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in
the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the
hands of a Government official. "Here is work offered you at twenty-five
shillings a week. If you do not take it you certainly shall not have a
right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take
it the sum shall still stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment
your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, I
will permit you to have some of your money: not otherwise." Dovetailing in
with this machinery of compulsion is all that mass of registration and
docketing which is accumulating through the use of Labour Exchanges. Not
only will the Official have the power to enforce special contracts, or the
power to coerce individual men to labour under the threat of a fine, but he
will also have a series of _dossiers_ by which the record of each workman
can be established. No man, once so registered and known, can escape; and,
of the nature of the system, the numbers caught in the net must steadily
increase until the whole mass of labour is mapped out and controlled.

These are very powerful instruments of compulsion indeed. They already
exist. They are already a part of our laws.

Lastly, there is the obvious bludgeon of "compulsory arbitration": a
bludgeon so obvious that it is revolting even to our proletariat. Indeed, I
know of no civilised European state which has succumbed to so gross a
suggestion. For it is a frank admission of servitude at one step, and for
good and all, such as men of our culture are not yet prepared to
swallow.[11]

So much, then, for the first argument and the first form in which
compulsory labour is seen to be a direct and necessary consequence of
establishing a minimum wage and of scheduling employment to a scale.

* * * * *

The second is equally clear. In the production of wheat the healthy and
skilled man who can produce ten measures of wheat is compelled to work for
six measures, and the Capitalist is compelled to remain content with four
measures for his share. The law will punish him if he tries to get out of
his legal obligation and to pay his workmen less than six measures of wheat
during the year. What of the man who is not sufficiently strong or skilled
to produce even six measures? Will the Capitalist be constrained to pay him
more than the values he can produce? Most certainly not. The whole
structure of production as it was erected during the Capitalist phase of
our industry has been left intact by the new laws and customs. Profit is
still left a necessity. If it were destroyed, still more if a loss were
imposed by law, that would be a contradiction of the whole spirit in which
all these reforms are being undertaken. They are being undertaken with the
object of establishing stability where there is now instability, and of
"reconciling," as the ironic phrase goes, "the interests of capital and
labour." It would be impossible, without a general ruin, to compel capital
to lose upon the man who is not worth even the minimum wage. How shall that
element of insecurity and instability be eliminated? To support the man
gratuitously because he cannot earn a minimum wage, when all the rest of
the commonwealth is working for its guaranteed wages, is to put a premium
upon incapacity and sloth. The man must be made to work. He must be taught,
if possible, to produce those economic values, which are regarded as the
minimum of sufficiency. He must be kept at that work even if he cannot
produce the minimum, lest his presence as a free labourer should imperil
the whole scheme of the minimum wage, and introduce at the same time a
continuous element of instability. Hence he is necessarily a subject for
forced labour. We have not yet in this country, established by force of
law, the right to this form of compulsion, but it is an inevitable
consequence of those other reforms which have just been reviewed. The
"Labour Colony" (a prison so called because euphemism is necessary to every
transition) will be erected to absorb this surplus, and that last form of
compulsion will crown the edifice of these reforms. They will then be
complete so far as the subject classes are concerned, and even though this
particular institution of the "Labour Colony" (logically the last of all)
precede in time other forms of compulsion, it will make the advent of those
other forms of compulsion more certain, facile, and rapid.

* * * * *

There remains one last remark to be made upon the concrete side of my
subject. I have in this last section illustrated the tendency towards the
Servile State from actual laws and actual projects with which all are
to-day familiar in English industrial society, and I have shown how these
are certainly establishing the proletariat in a novel, but to them
satisfactory, Servile Status.

It remains to point out in a very few lines the complementary truth that
what should be the very essence of Collectivist Reform, to wit, the
translation of the means of production from the hands of private owners to
the hands of public officials, is nowhere being attempted. So far from its
being attempted, all so-called "Socialistic" experiments in
municipalisation and nationalisation are merely increasing the dependence
of the community upon the Capitalist class. To prove this, we need only
observe that every single one of these experiments is effected by a loan.

Now what is meant in economic reality by these municipal loans and national
loans raised for the purpose of purchasing certain small sections of the
means of production?

Certain Capitalists own a number of rails, cars, etc. They put to work upon
these certain Proletarians, and the result is a certain total of economic
values. Let the surplus values obtainable by the Capitalists after the
subsistence of the proletarians is provided for amount to £10,000 a year.
We all know how a system of this sort is "Municipalised." A "loan" is
raised. It bears "interest." It is saddled with a "sinking fund."

Now this loan is not really made in money, though the terms of it are in
money. It is, at the end of a long string of exchanges, nothing more nor
less than the loan of the cars, the rails, etc., by the Capitalists to the
Municipality. And the Capitalists require, before they will strike the
bargain, a guarantee that the whole of their old profit shall be paid to
them, together with a further yearly sum, which after a certain number of
years shall represent the original value of the concern when they handed it
over. These last additional sums are called the "sinking fund"; the
continued payment of the old surplus values is called the "interest."

In theory certain small sections of the means of production might be
acquired in this way. That particular section would have been "socialised."
The "Sinking Fund" (that is, the paying of the Capitalists for their plant
by instalments) might be met out of the general taxation imposed on the
community, considering how large that is compared with any one experiment
of the kind. The "interest" may by good management be met out of the true
profits of the tramways. At the end of a certain number of years the
community will be in possession of the tramways, will no longer be
exploited in this particular by Capitalism, will have bought out Capitalism
from the general taxes, and, in so far as the purchase money paid has been
consumed and not saved or invested by the Capitalists, a small measure of
"socialisation" will have been achieved.

As a fact things are never so favourable.

In practice three conditions militate against even these tiny experiments
in expropriation: the fact that the implements are always sold at much more
than their true value; the fact that the purchase includes non-productive
things; and the fact that the rate of borrowing is much faster than the
rate of repayment. These three adverse conditions lead in practice to
nothing but the riveting of Capitalism more securely round the body of the
State.

For what is it that is paid for when a tramway, for instance, is taken
over? Is it the true capital alone, the actual plant, which is paid for,
even at an exaggerated price? Far from it! Over and above the rails and the
cars, there are all the commissions that have been made, all the champagne
luncheons, all the lawyers' fees, all the compensations to this man and to
that man, all the bribes. Nor does this exhaust the argument. Tramways
represent a productive investment. What about pleasure gardens,
wash-houses, baths, libraries, monuments, and the rest? The greater part of
these things are the product of "loans." When you put up a public
institution you borrow the bricks and the mortar and the iron and the wood
and the tiles from Capitalists, _and you pledge yourself to pay interest,
and to produce a sinking fund precisely as though a town hall or a bath
were a piece of reproductive machinery_.

To this must be added the fact that a considerable proportion of the
purchases are failures: purchases of things just before they are driven out
by some new invention; while on the top of the whole business you have the
fact that the borrowing goes on at a far greater rate than the repayment.

In a word, all these experiments up and down Europe during our generation,
municipal and national, have resulted in an indebtedness to capital
increasing rather more than twice, but not three times, as fast as the rate
of repayment. The interest which capital demands with a complete
indifference as to whether the loan is productive or non-productive amounts
to rather more than 1 1/2 per cent. _excess_ over the produce of the
various experiments, even though we count in the most lucrative and
successful of these, such as the state railways of many countries, and the
thoroughly successful municipal enterprises of many modern towns.

Capitalism has seen to it that it shall be a winner and not a loser by this
form of sham Socialism, as by every other. And the same forces which in
practice forbid confiscation see to it that the attempt to mask
confiscation by purchase shall not only fail, but shall turn against those
who have not had the courage to make a frontal attack upon privilege.

* * * * *

With these concrete examples showing how Collectivism, in attempting its
practice, does but confirm the Capitalist position, and showing how our
laws have already begun to impose a Servile Status upon the Proletariat, I
end the argumentative thesis of this book.

I believe I have proved my case.

The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society,
left to its own direction, is a future in which subsistence and security
shall be guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the
expense of the old political freedom and by the establishment of that
Proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile. At the same
time, the Owners will be guaranteed in their profits, the whole machinery
of production in the smoothness of its working, and that stability which
has been lost under the Capitalist phase of society will be found once
more.

The internal strains which have threatened society during its Capitalist
phase will be relaxed and eliminated, and the community will settle down
upon that Servile basis which was its foundation before the advent of the
Christian faith, from which that faith slowly weaned it, and to which in
the decay of that faith it naturally returns.




Conclusion It is possible to portray a great social movement of the past
with accuracy and in detail if one can spare to the task the time necessary
for research and further bring to it a certain power of co-ordination by
which a great mass of detail can be integrated and made one whole.

Such a task is rarely accomplished, but it does not exceed the powers of
history.

With regard to the future it is otherwise. No one can say even in its
largest aspect or upon its chief structural line what that future will be.
He can only present the main tendencies of his time: he can only determine
the equation of the curve and presume that that equation will apply more or
less to its next developments.

So far as I can judge, those societies which broke with the continuity of
Christian civilisation in the sixteenth century--which means, roughly,
North Germany and Great Britain--tend at present to the re-establishment of
a Servile Status. It will be diversified by local accident, modified by
local character, hidden under many forms. But it will come.

That the mere Capitalist anarchy cannot endure is patent to all men. That
only a very few possible solutions to it exist should be equally patent to
all. For my part, as I have said in these pages, I do not believe there are
more than two: a reaction towards well-divided property, or the
re-establishment of servitude. I cannot believe that theoretical
Collectivism, now so plainly failing, will ever inform a real and living
society.

But my conviction that the re-establishment of the Servile Status in
industrial society is actually upon us does not lead me to any meagre and
mechanical prophecy of what the future of Europe shall be. The force of
which I have been speaking is not the only force in the field. There is a
complex knot of forces underlying any nation once Christian; a smouldering
of the old fires.

Moreover, one can point to European societies which will most certainly
reject any such solution of our Capitalist problem, just as the same
societies have either rejected, or lived suspicious of, Capitalism itself,
and have rejected or lived suspicious of that industrial organisation which
till lately identified itself with "progress" and national well-being.

These societies are in the main the same as those which, in that great
storm of the sixteenth century,--the capital episode in the story of
Christendom--held fast to tradition and saved the continuity of morals.
Chief among them should be noted to-day the French and the Irish.

I would record it as an impression and no more that the Servile State,
strong as the tide is making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will
be modified, checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its
attempt to establish itself completely, by the strong reaction which these
freer societies upon its flank will perpetually exercise.

Ireland has decided for a free peasantry, and our generation has seen the
solid foundation of that institution laid. In France the many experiments
which elsewhere have successfully introduced the Servile State have been
contemptuously rejected by the populace, and (most significant!) a recent
attempt to register and to "insure" the artisans as a separate category of
citizens has broken down in the face of an universal and a virile contempt.

That this second factor in the development of the future, the presence of
free societies, will destroy the tendency to the Servile State elsewhere I
do not affirm, but I believe that it will modify that tendency, certainly
by example and perhaps by direct attack. And as I am upon the whole hopeful
that the Faith will recover its intimate and guiding place in the heart of
Europe, so I believe that this sinking back into our original Paganism (for
the tendency to the Servile State is nothing less) will in due time be
halted and reversed.

_Videat Deus_.




Endnotes

[1] Save in this special sense of "Collectivist," the word "Socialist" has
either no clear meaning, or is used synonymously with other older and
better-known words.

[2] The purchasing power of money fell during this century to about a third
of its original standard. £3 (say) would purchase under Charles I the
necessities which £1 would have purchased under Henry VIII. Nearly all the
_receipts_ of the Crown were customary. Most of its _expenses_ were
competitive. It continued to get but £1 where it was gradually compelled to
pay out £3.

[3] Before any trust is established in this country, the first step is to
"interest" one of our politicians. The Telephones, the South Wales Coal
Trust, the happily defeated Soap Trust, the Soda, Fish, and Fruit Trusts,
are examples in point.

[4] By which word "_property_" is meant, of course, property in the means
of Production.

[5] That this is an illusion I shall attempt to show on a later page.

[6] By an illusion which clever statesmanship could use to the advantage of
the community, he even estimates the natural forces he controls (which need
no accumulation, but are always present) on the analogy of his capital, and
will part with them at "so many years' purchase." It is by taking advantage
of this illusion that land purchase schemes (as in Ireland) happily work to
the advantage of the dispossessed.

[7] Thus you can raid the brewers in a society half-Puritan where brewing
is thought immoral by many, but proceed to railway stock and it will be a
very different matter.

[8] In using this metaphor I at once record my apologies to those who
believe in elliptical and hyperbolic universes, and confess myself an
old-fashioned parabolist. Further, I admit that the triangles in question
are spherical.

[9] Thus the money levied upon the death of some not very wealthy squire
and represented by, say, locomotives in the Argentine, turns into two miles
of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand new officials under
the Inebriates Bill, or is simply handed over to the shareholders of the
Prudential under the Insurance Act. In the first case the locomotives have
been given back to the Argentine, and after a long series of exchanges have
been bartered against a great number of wood-palings from the Baltic not
exactly reproductive wealth. In the second case the locomotives which used
to be the squire's hands become, or their equivalent becomes, means of
production in the hands of the Sassoons.

[10] How true it is that the idea of status underlies this legislation can
easily be tested by taking parallel cases, in one of which working men are
concerned, in the other the professional class. If I contract to write for
a publisher a complete History of the County of Rutland, and in the pursuit
of that task, while examining some object of historical interest, fall down
a pit, I should not be able to recover against the publisher. But if I
dress in mean clothes, and the same publisher, deceived, gives me a month's
work at cleaning out his ornamental water and I am wounded in that
occupation by a fierce fish, he will be mulcted to my advantage, and that
roundly.

[11] But it has twice been brought forward in due process as a Bill in
Parliament!



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