Part 2 (2/2)
Law, control, terrorism, are effective just so long as there is not a blade of gra.s.s in the land--once remove the fear of hunger and they are useless. Great properties will arise, drawing interest both abroad and at home, and they will grow by evasions and bribery. The profiteer, the true child of the ”great days,” will not perish from the land, on the contrary, he will grow tougher the more he is persecuted, he will be the rich man of the future, and he will form a constant political danger if he and his fellows combine.
So long as we have not acquired an entirely new mentality, one which detaches men from possessions, which points them towards the Law, which binds the pa.s.sions, and sharpens the conscience, so long will the principle of ”No rich people and no workless income” have to be contracted into the formula, ”There ought to be none.”
Without this profound alteration of mentality, even the legally prescribed incomes will exhibit quite grotesque variations, and will adapt themselves to the rarity-value of special gifts, to indispensable qualities, to favouritism, with a crudity quite unknown to-day. A scarcity of Ministers, a Professor's nourishment, and soldiers' supplies, will then as now be met according to the law of supply and demand. Consider what ten years' practice in the war for wages and strike-management, with the public in it as partisans, will bring with it in the way of favouritisms, celebrities, and indispensabilities. Popular jockeys, successful surgeons, managers of sports' clubs, tenors, demimondaines, farce-writers and champion athletes could, even to-day, if they were cla.s.s-conscious and joined together to exploit their opportunities, demand any income they liked.
Even as a matter of practical political economy, the cinema-star (or whatever may succeed her) will be able to prescribe to the Government what amount of adornments, drawn from Nature or Art, are necessary for her calling, and what standard of life she must maintain in order to keep herself in the proper mood.
Organizers, popular leaders, authors and artists will announce and enforce their demands to the full limit of their rarity-value. At a considerable distance below these come the acquired and more or less transferable powers and talents. The Russians for the first few months believed in a three-fold order of allowances, rising within a limit of about one to two. If the ideas now prevailing have not undergone a radical change, then we may, in the society of the future, look for divergences of income in the limit of one to a thousand.
Therefore the principle that there shall be no more rich people must again be substantially limited. We must say, ”There will be people receiving extraordinary incomes in kind to which must be added the claims to personal service which these favoured persons will lay down as conditions of their work.”
In its external, arithmetical structure, the fabric of life and its requirements in the new order will resemble that of to-day far more closely than most of us imagine--on the other hand, the inward and personal const.i.tution of man will be far more different. Already we can observe the direction of the movement.
Extravagance and luxury will continue to exist, and those who practise it will be, as they are to-day, and more than to-day, the profiteers, the lucky ones, and the adventurers. Excessive wealth will be more repulsive than it is now; whether it will be less valued depends upon the state of public ethics, a topic which we shall have to consider later. It is probable that in defiance of all legislation wealth will turn itself into expenditure and enjoyment more rapidly and more recklessly than to-day.
But the relics of middle-cla.s.s well-being will by that time have been consumed; the families which for generations have visibly incorporated the German spirit will less than others contrive to secure special advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as soon as their modest possessions are taxed away or consumed they will melt into the general ma.s.s of needy people who will form the economic average of the future.
The luxury which will exhibit itself in streets and houses will have a dubious air; every one will know that there is something wrong with it, people will spy and denounce, and find to their disgust that nothing can be proved; the well-off will be partly despised, partly envied; the question how to suppress evasions of the law will take up a good half of all public discussions, just as that of capitalism does now. The hateful sight of others' prosperity cannot, even at home, not to mention foreign countries, be withdrawn from the eyes of the needy ma.s.ses; capitalism will have merely acquired another name and other representatives.
The fact that the average of more or less cultivated and responsible folk are plunged in poverty will not be accepted as the consequence of an unalterable natural law, nor as a case of personal misfortune; it will be set down to bad government, and the rising revolutionary forces of the fifth, sixth and seventh cla.s.ses will nourish the prevailing discontent in favour of a new revolt. For the greater uniformity of the average way of life and its general neediness will not in itself abolish the division of cla.s.ses. I have already often enough pointed out that no mechanical arrangements can avail us here.
At first there will be three, or more probably four cla.s.ses who, in spite of poverty, will not dissolve in the ma.s.ses, and who, through their coherence and their intellectual heritage are by no means without power. The Bolshevist plan of simply killing them out will not be possible in Germany, they are relatively too numerous; persecution will weld them closer together, and their traditional experiences, habits of mind, and capacity, will make it necessary to have recourse to them and employ them again and again.
The first of these cla.s.ses is that of the feudal n.o.bility. Their ancient names cannot be rooted out of the history of Germany, and even in their poverty the bearers of these names will be respected--all the more if, as we may certainly a.s.sume, they maintain the effects of their bodily discipline, and the visible tradition of certain forms of life and thought. They will be strengthened by their mutual a.s.sociation, their relations.h.i.+p with foreign n.o.bility will give them important functions in diplomacy; these are two elements which they have in common with Catholicism and Judaism. They will retain their inclination and apt.i.tude for the calling of arms and for administration; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to success, now to failure, and by both the inner coherence of the cla.s.s will be fortified. Finally, the inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the romantic values of life will make a connexion with names of ancient lineage desirable to the leading cla.s.ses, and especially to the aristocracy of officialism.
This aristocracy of officialism forms the second of the new strata which will come to light. The first office-bearers of the new era, be their achievements great or small, are not to be forgotten. Their descendants are respected as the bearers of well-known names; in their families the practice of politics, the knowledge of persons and connexions are perpetuated; fathers, in their lifetime, look after the interests of sons and daughters and launch them on the same path. From these, and from the first stratum, the representatives of Germany in foreign lands are chosen, and in this way a certain familiarity with international life and society will be maintained. They will have the provision necessary for their position abroad, and will also find ways and means to keep up a higher standard of life at home. Persons in possession of irregular means of well-being will offer a great deal to establish connexions with these circles, which control so many levers in the machine of State.
The third group consists of the descendants of what was once the leading cla.s.s in culture and in economics. Here we find a spirit similar to that of the refugees, _emigres_ and Huguenots of the past.
The lower they sink in external power, the more tenaciously they hold to their memories. Every family knows every other and cherishes the l.u.s.tre of its name, a l.u.s.tre augmented by legendary recollections, all the more when the achievements of their cla.s.s are ostentatiously ignored in the new social order. People spare and save to the last extremity in order to preserve and hand down some heirloom--a musical instrument, a library, a ma.n.u.script, a picture or two. A puritanical thrift is exercised in order, as far as possible, to maintain education, culture and intellectuality on the old level; to this cla.s.s culture, refinement of life as an end in itself, the practice of religion, cla.s.sical music, and artistic feeling will fly for refuge.
No other cla.s.s understands this one; it holds itself aloof, it looks different from the rest in its occupations, its habits, its garb and its forms of life. It supplies the new order with its scholars, its clergy, its higher teaching power, its representatives of the most disinterested and intellectual callings. Like the monasteries of the Middle Ages, it forms an island of the past. Its influence rises and falls periodically, according to the current ideas of the time, but its position is a.s.sured by its voluntary sacrifices, by its knowledge and by the purity of its motives.
A fourth inexpugnable and influential stratum will in all probability be formed by the middle-cla.s.s landowners and the substantial peasants.
Even though the socialization of the land should be radically carried through--which is not likely to be the case--it will remain on paper.
A cla.s.s of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a landowning cla.s.s. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country strongly mustered for defence, incapable of being eliminated as a political force, and forming a counterpoise to the radical democracy of the towns.
Everywhere we find a state of strain and of cleavage. The single-stratum condition of society cannot be reached without a profound inward change; politics are still stirred and shaken by conflicts, and society by the strife of cla.s.ses. A very different picture from the promised Utopian Paradise of a common feeding-ground for lions and sheep!
We are all aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the profiteers, but we are all liable to the infection. The feudalistic Fronde awaits its opportunity. The aristocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the State-machine. The _emigres_ of culture find themselves looked askance at, on suspicion of intellectual arrogance, and they insist that the country cannot get on without them. The agriculturalists are feared, when they show a tendency to revolt against the towns. The ruling cla.s.s, that is to say the more or less educated ma.s.ses of the city-democracy, looks in impatient discontent for the state of general well-being which refuses to be realized, lays the blame alternately on the four powerful strata and on the profiteers, and fights now this group now that, for better conditions of living.
But the conditions of living do not improve--they get worse. The level of the nation's output has been sinking from the first day of the Revolution onwards. The absolute productivity of work, the relative efficacy and the quality of the product, have all deteriorated. With a smaller turnover we have witnessed a falling-off in the excellence of the goods, in research-work, and in finish. Industrial plant has been worked to death and has not yet recovered. Auxiliary industries, accessories and raw materials have fallen back. High-quality workmans.h.i.+p has suffered from defective schooling, youthful indiscipline and the loss of manual dexterity. The new social order has lost a generation of leaders in technique, scholars.h.i.+p and economics. Universities, with all inst.i.tutions of research and education, have suffered from this blank. Technical leaders.h.i.+p is gone, and the deterioration in quality has reacted detrimentally on output. We can now turn out nothing except what is cheap and easy, and what can be produced without traditional skill of hand, without serious calculation and research. For all innovations, all work of superior quality, Germany is dependent on the foreigner. The atmosphere of technique has vanished, and the stamp of cheap hireling labour is on the whole output of the country.
In the weeks of the Revolution street orators used to tell us that five hundred Russian professors had signed a statement that the level of culture had never been so high as under Bolshevism. And Berlin believed them! To educate Russia it would take, to begin with, a million elementary schools with a yearly budget of several dozen milliards of roubles, and a corresponding number of higher schools and universities: if every educated Russian for the next twenty years were to become a teacher, there would not be enough of them--not to speak of the requirements of transport, of raw materials and of agriculture.
The fabric of a civilization and a culture cannot be annihilated at one blow, nor can it grow up save in decades and centuries. The maintenance of the structure demands unceasing toil and unbroken tradition; the breach that has been made in it in Germany can only be healed by the application in manifold forms of work, intellect and will; and this hope we cannot entertain.[10]
But we have not yet done with the question of social strata and inward cleavage. Revolutionary threats are causing strife every day.
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