Part 4 (1/2)
-- 2.
Now the argument that the civilized housing of the ma.s.ses of our population now is impossible because if you set out to do it you come up against the veto of the private owner at every stage, can be applied to almost every general public service. Some little while ago I wrote a tract for the Fabian Society about Boots;[3] and I will not apologize for repeating here a pa.s.sage from that. To begin with, this tract pointed out the badness, unhealthiness and discomfort of people's footwear as one saw it in every poor quarter, and asked why it was that things were in so disagreeable a state. There was plenty of leather in the world, plenty of labour.
[3] _This Misery of Boots._ It is intended as an introductory tract explaining the central idea of Socialism for propaganda purposes, and it is published by the Fabian Society, of 3 Clement's Inn, London, at 3_d._ That, together with my tract _Socialism and the Family_ (A. C. Fifield, 44 Fleet Street, London, 6_d._), gives the whole broad outline of the Socialist att.i.tude.
”Here on the one hand--you can see for yourself in any unfas.h.i.+onable part of Great Britain--are people badly, uncomfortably, painfully shod in old boots, rotten boots, sham boots; and on the other great stretches of land in the world, with unlimited possibilities of cattle and leather and great numbers of people who, either through wealth or trade disorder, are doing no work. And our question is: 'Why cannot the latter set to work and make and distribute boots?'
”Imagine yourself trying to organize something of this kind of Free Booting expedition and consider the difficulties you would meet with. You would begin by looking for a lot of leather. Imagine yourself setting off to South America, for example, to get leather; beginning at the very beginning by setting to work to kill and flay a herd of cattle. You find at once you are interrupted. Along comes your first obstacle in the shape of a man who tells you the cattle and the leather belong to him. You explain that the leather is wanted for people who have no decent boots in England. He says he does not care a rap what you want it for; before you may take it from him you have to buy him off; it is his private property, this leather, and the herd and the land over which the herd ranges. You ask him how much he wants for his leather, and he tells you frankly, just as much as he can induce you to give.
”If he chanced to be a person of exceptional sweetness of disposition, you might perhaps argue with him. You might point out to him that this project of giving people splendid boots was a fine one that would put an end to much human misery. He might even sympathize with your generous enthusiasm, but you would, I think, find him adamantine in his resolve to get just as much out of you for his leather as you could with the utmost effort pay.
”Suppose, now, you said to him: 'But how did you come by this land and these herds so that you can stand between them and the people who have need of them, exacting this profit?' He would probably either embark upon a long rigmarole, or, what is much more probable, lose his temper and decline to argue.
Pursuing your doubt as to the rightfulness of his property in these things, you might admit he deserved a certain reasonable fee for the rough care he had taken of the land and herds. But cattle breeders are a rude violent race, and it is doubtful if you would get far beyond your proposition of a reasonable fee.
You would, in fact, have to buy off this owner of the leather at a good thumping price--he exacting just as much as he could get from you--if you wanted to go on with your project.
”Well, then you would have to get your leather here, and to do that you would have to bring it by railway and s.h.i.+p to this country. And here again you would find people without any desire or intention of helping your project, standing in your course resolved to make every possible penny out of you on your way to provide sound boots for every one. You would find the railway was private property and had an owner or owners; you would find the s.h.i.+p was private property with an owner or owners, and that none of these would be satisfied for a moment with a mere fee adequate to their services. They too would be resolved to make every penny of profit out of you. If you made inquiries about the matter, you would probably find the real owners of railway and s.h.i.+p were companies of shareholders, and the profit squeezed out of your poor people's boots at this stage went to fill the pockets of old ladies, at Torquay, spendthrifts in Paris, well-booted gentlemen in London clubs, all sorts of glossy people....
”Well, you get the leather to England at last; and now you want to make it into boots. You take it to a centre of population, invite workers to come to you, erect sheds and machinery upon a vacant piece of ground, and start off in a sort of fury of generous industry, boot-making.... Do you?
There comes along an owner for that vacant piece of ground, declares it is his property, demands an enormous sum for rent.
And your workers all round you, you find, cannot get house room until they too have paid rent--every inch of the country is somebody's property, and a man may not shut his eyes for an hour without the consent of some owner or other. And the food your shoe-makers eat, the clothes they wear, have all paid tribute and profit to land-owners, cart-owners, house-owners, endless tribute over and above the fair pay for work that has been done upon them....
”So one might go on. But you begin to see now one set of reasons at least why every one has not good comfortable boots.
There could be plenty of leather; and there is certainly plenty of labour and quite enough intelligence in the world to manage that and a thousand other desirable things. But this inst.i.tution of Private Property in land and naturally produced things, these obstructive claims that prevent you using ground, or moving material, and that have to be bought out at exorbitant prices, stand in the way. All these owners hang like parasites upon your enterprise at its every stage; and by the time you get your sound boots well made in England, you will find them costing about a pound a pair--high out of reach of the general ma.s.s of people. And you will perhaps not think me fanciful and extravagant when I confess that when I realize this and look at poor people's boots in the street, and see them cracked and misshapen and altogether nasty, I seem to see also a lot of little phantom land-owners, cattle-owners, house-owners, owners of all sorts, swarming over their pinched and weary feet like leeches, taking much and giving nothing and being the real cause of all such miseries.”
-- 3.
Our visitor would not only be struck by the clogging of our social activities through this system of leaving everything to private enterprise; he would also be struck by the immense wastefulness.
Everywhere he would see things in duplicate and triplicate; down the High Street of any small town he would find three or four butchers--mostly selling New Zealand mutton and Argentine beef as English--five or six grocers, three or four milk shops, one or two big drapers and three or four small haberdashers, milliners, and ”fancy shops,” two or three fishmongers, all very poor, all rather bad, most of them in debt and with their a.s.sistants all insecure and underpaid.
He would find in spite of this wealth of compet.i.tion that every one who could contrive it, all the really prosperous people in fact, bought most of their food and drapery from big London firms.
But why should I go on writing fresh arguments when we have Elihu's cla.s.sic tract[4] to quote.
[4] Elihu's tracts are published by the Independent Labour Party at one penny each. The best are: _Whose Dog Art Thou?_ _A Nation of Slaves_; _Milk and Postage Stamps_; _A Corner in Flesh and Blood_; and _Simple Division_.
”Observe how private enterprise supplies the streets with milk. At 7.30 a milk cart comes lumbering along and delivers milk at one house and away again. Half-an-hour later another milk cart arrives and delivers milk, first on this side of the street and then on that, until seven houses have been supplied, and then he departs. During the next three or four hours four other milk carts put in an appearance at varying intervals, supplying a house here and another there, until finally, as it draws towards noon, their task is accomplished and the street supplied with milk.
”The time actually occupied by one and another of these distributors of milk makes in all about an hour and forty minutes, six men and six horses and carts being required for the purpose, and these equipages rattle along one after the other, all over the district, through the greater part of the day, in the same erratic and extraordinary manner.”
-- 4.
Our imaginary visitor would probably quite fail to grasp the reasons why we do not forthwith shake off this obstructive and harmful idea of Private Owners.h.i.+p, dispossess our Landowners and so forth as gently as possible, and set to work upon collective housing and the rest of it.
And so he would ”exit wondering.”
But that would be only the opening of the real argument. A competent Anti-Socialist of a more terrestrial experience would have a great many very effectual and very sound considerations to advance in defence of the present system.
He might urge that our present way of doing things, though it was sometimes almost as wasteful as Nature when fresh sp.a.w.n or pollen germs are scattered, was in many ways singularly congenial to the infirmities of humanity. The idea of property is a spontaneous product of the mortal mind; children develop it in the nursery, and are pa.s.sionately alive to the difference of _meum_ and _tuum_, and its extension to land, subterranean products and wild free things, even if it is under a.n.a.lysis a little unreasonable, was at least singularly acceptable to humanity.