Part 5 (1/2)
”He tempts them to drink,” I have heard a clergyman say of his village publican. But what else did he think the publican was there for?--to preach total abstinence? Naturally, inevitably, the whole of the Trade is a propaganda--not of drunkenness, but of habitual heavy drinking.
The more successful propagandists, the great brewers and distillers grow rich just in the proportion that people consume beer and spirits; they gain honour and peerages in the measure of their success.
It is very interesting to the Socialist to trace the long struggle of the temperance movement against its initial ideas of freedom, and to see how inevitably the most reluctant and unlikely people have been forced to recognize Private Owners.h.i.+p in this trade and for profit as the ultimate evil. I am delighted to have to hand an excellent little tract by ”A Ratepayer”: _National Efficiency and the Drink Traffic_.
It has a preface by Mr. Haldane, and it is as satisfactory a demonstration of the absolute necessity of thoroughgoing Socialism in this particular field as any Socialist could wish. One encounters the Bishop of Chester, for example, in its pages talking the purest Socialism, and making the most luminous admissions of the impossibility of continued private control, in phrases that need but a few verbal changes to apply equally to milk, to meat, to bread, to housing, to book-selling[7]....
[7] For a clear and admirable account of the Socialist att.i.tude to the temperance question, see the tract on _Munic.i.p.al Drink Traffic_ published by the Fabian Society; price one penny.
-- 7.
Land and housing, railways, food, drink, coal, in each of these great general interests there is a separate strong case for the subst.i.tution of collective control for the Private Owners.h.i.+p methods of the present time. There is a great and growing number of people like ”A Ratepayer”
and Mr. Haldane, who do not call themselves Socialists but who are yet strongly tinged with Socialist conceptions; who are convinced--some in the case of the land, some in the case of the drink trade or the milk, that Private Owners.h.i.+p and working for profit must cease. But they will not admit a general principle, they argue each case on its merits.
The Socialist maintains that, albeit the details of each problem must be studied apart, there does underlie all these cases and the whole economic situation at the present time, one general fact, that through our whole social system from top to base we find things under the influence of a misleading idea that must be changed, and which, until it is changed, will continue to work out in waste, unserviceableness, cramped lives and suffering and death. Each man is for himself, that is this misleading idea, seeking, perforce, ends discordant with the general welfare; who serves the community without exacting pay, goes under; who exacts pay without service prospers and continues; success is not to do well, it is to have and to get; failure is not to do ill, it is to lose and not have; and under these conditions how can we expect anything but dislocated, unsatisfying service at every turn?
The contemporary anti-Socialist moralist and the social satirist would appeal to the Owner's sense of duty; he would declare in a plat.i.tudinous tone that property had its duties as well as its rights, and so forth. The Socialist, however, looks a little deeper, and puts the thing differently. He brings both rights and duties to a keener scrutiny. What underlies all these social disorders, he alleges, is one simple thing, a misconception of property; an unreasonable exaggeration, an acc.u.mulated, inherited exaggeration, of the idea of property. He says the idea of private property, which is just and reasonable in relation to intimate personal things, to clothes, appliances, books, one's home or apartments, the garden one loves or the horse one rides, has become unreasonably exaggerated until it obsesses the world; that the freedom we have given men to claim and own and hold the land upon which we must live, the fuel we burn, the supplies of food and metal we require, the railways and s.h.i.+ps upon which our business goes, and to fix what prices they like to exact for all these services, leads to the impoverishment and practical enslavement of the ma.s.s of mankind.
And so he comes to his second main generalization, which I may perhaps set out in these words:--
_The idea of the private owners.h.i.+p of things and the rights of owners is enormously and mischievously exaggerated in the contemporary world.
The conception of private property has been extended to land, to material, to the values and resources acc.u.mulated by past generations, to a vast variety of things that are properly the inheritance of the whole race. As a result of this, there is much obstruction and waste of human energy and a huge loss of opportunity and freedom for the ma.s.s of mankind; progress is r.e.t.a.r.ded, there is a vast amount of avoidable wretchedness, cruelty and injustice._
_The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be inalienably the owner and administrator of the land, of raw materials, of values and resources acc.u.mulated from the past, and that private property must be of a terminable nature, reverting to the community, and subject to the general welfare._
This is the second of the twin generalizations upon which the edifice of modern Socialism rests. Like the first, and like the practical side of all sound religious teaching, it is a specific application of one general rule of conduct, and that is the subordination of the individual motive to the happiness and welfare of the species.
-- 8.
But now the reader unaccustomed to Socialist discussion will begin to see the crude form of the answer to the question raised by the previous chapter; he will see the resources from which the enlargement of human life we there contemplated is to be derived, and realize the economic methods to be pursued. Collective owners.h.i.+p is the necessary corollary of collective responsibility. There are to be no private land owners, no private bankers and lenders of money, no private insurance adventurers, no private railway owners nor s.h.i.+pping owners, no private mine owners, oil kings, silver kings, coal and wheat forestallers or the like. All this realm of property is to be resumed by the State, is to be State-owned and State-managed, and the vast revenues that are now devoted to private ends will go steadily to feed, maintain and educate a new and better generation, to promote research and advance science, to build new houses, develop fresh resources, plant, plan, beautify and reconstruct the world.
CHAPTER V
THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE
-- 1.
We have stated now how the constructive plan of Socialism aims to replace the accepted ideas about two almost fundamental human relations by broader and less fiercely egotistical conceptions; how it denies a man ”property” rights over his wife and children, leaving, however, all his other relations with them intact, how it would insure and protect their welfare, and how it a.s.serts that a vast range of inanimate things also which are now held as private property must be regarded as the inalienable possession of the whole community. This change in the circle of ideas (as the Herbartians put it) is the essence of the Socialist project.
It means no little change. It means a general change in the spirit of living; it means a change from the spirit of gain (which now necessarily rules our lives) to the spirit of service.
I have tried to show in the preceding chapter that Socialism seeks to make life less squalid and cruel, less degrading and dwarfing for the children that are born into it, and I have tried also to make clear that realization of, and revolt against, the bad management and waste and muddle which result from our present economic system. I want now to point out that Socialism seeks to enn.o.ble the intimate personal life, by checking and discouraging pa.s.sions that at present run rampant, and by giving wider scope for pa.s.sions that are now thwarted and subdued. The Socialist declares that life is now needlessly dishonest, base and mean, because our present social organization, such as it is, makes an altogether too powerful appeal to some of the very meanest elements in our nature.
Not perhaps to the lowest. There can be no disputing that our present civilization does discourage much of the innate b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of man; that it helps people to a measure of continence, cleanliness and mutual toleration; that it does much to suppress brute violence, the spirit of lawlessness, cruelty and wanton destruction. But on the other hand it does also check and cripple generosity and frank truthfulness, any disinterested creative pa.s.sion, the love of beauty, the pa.s.sion for truth and research, and it stimulates avarice, parsimony, overreaching, usury, falsehood and secrecy, by making money-getting its criterion of intercourse.
Whether we like it or not, we who live in this world to-day find we must either devote a considerable amount of our attention to getting and keeping money, and shape our activities--or, if you will, distort them--with a constant reference to that process, or we must accept futility. Whatever powers men want to exercise, whatever service they wish to do, it is a preliminary condition for most of them that they must, by earning something or selling something, achieve opportunity.
If they cannot turn their gift into some saleable thing or get some propertied man to ”patronize” them, they cannot exercise these gifts.
The gift for getting is the supreme gift--all others bow before it.