Chapter XI: Part 11

Now the social significance of this is that the middle class, which the younger sons and their descendants formerly had all to themselves as far as the most desirable positions in it were concerned, is now recruited from the working class as well. These recruits, with no gentlemanly nonsense about them, are not only better taught than the boys who go to cheapish middle class schools, but better trained to face the realities of life. Also the old differences in speech and dress and manners are much less than they were, partly because the working class is picking up middle class manners, but much more because they are forcing their own manners and speech on the middle class as standards. A man like my father, half a merchant, but ashamed of it and unable to make up his mind to it, and half a gentleman without any property to uphold his pretension, would, if he were a boy nowadays, be beaten hollow in the competition for land, for capital, and for position in the civil service by the sons of men whose grandfathers would never have dreamed of presuming to sit down in his presence. The futile propertyless gentlemen, the unserviceable and grossly insolent civil servants whom Dickens described, have to be content nowadays with the refuse of middle class employment. They are discontented, unhappy, impecunious, struggling with a false position, borrowing (really begging) from their relatives, and unable to realize, or unwilling to admit, that they have fallen out of the propertied class, not into an intermediate position where they have a monopoly of all the occupations and employments that require a little education and manners, but right down into the ranks of the hungry, without the hardening that makes the hungry life bearable.

And what of the daughters? Their business is to get married; and I can remember the time when there was no other hopeful opening in life for them. When they failed to find husbands, and no special provision had been made for them, they became governesses or school teachers or “companions” or genteel beggars under the general heading of poor relations. They had been carefully trained to feel that it was unladylike to work, and still more unladylike to propose marriage to men. The professions were closed to them. The universities were closed to them. The business offices were closed to them. Their poverty cut them off from propertied society. Their ladylikeness cut them off from the society of working people as poor as themselves, and from inter-marriage with them. Life was a ghastly business for them.

Nowadays, there are far more careers open to women. We have women barristers and women doctors in practice. True, the Church is closed against them, to its own great detriment, as it could easily find picked women, eloquent in the pulpit and capable in parish management, to replace the male refuse it has too often to fall back on; but women can do without ecclesiastical careers now that the secular and civil services are open. The closing of the fighting services is socially necessary, as women are far too valuable to have their lives risked in battle as well as in child-bearing. If ninety out of every hundred young men were killed we could recover from the loss, but if ninety out of every hundred young women were killed there would be an end of the nation. That is why modern war, which is not confined to battle fields, and rains high explosives and poison gas on male and female civilians indiscriminately in their peaceful homes, is so much more dangerous than war has ever been before.

Besides, women are now educated as men are: they go to the universities and to the technical colleges if they can afford it; and, as Domestic Service is now an educational subject with special colleges, a woman can get trained for such an occupation as that of manageress of a hotel as well as for the practice of law or medicine, or for accountancy and actuarial work. In short, nothing now blocks a woman’s way into business or professional life except prejudice, superstition, old-fashioned parents, shyness, snobbery, ignorance of the contemporary world, and all the other imbecilities for which there is no remedy but modern ideas and force of character. Therefore it is no use facing the world today with the ideas of a hundred years ago, when it was practically against the law for a lady who was not a genius to be self-supporting; for if she kept a shop, or even visited at the house of a woman who kept a shop, she was no lady. I know better than you (because I am probably much older) that the tradition of those bad old times still wastes the lives of single gentlewomen to a deplorable extent; but, for all that, every year sees an increase in the activities of gentlewomen outside the home in business and the professions, and even in perilous professional exploration and adventure with a cinematographic camera in attendance.

This increase is hastened by the gigantic scale of capitalist production, which, as we have seen, reduces the old household labor of baking and brewing, spinning and weaving, first to shopping at separate shops, and then to telephoning the day’s orders to one big multiple shop. We have seen also how it leads prematurely to Birth Control, which has reduced the number of children in the middle class households very notably. Many middle-class women who could formerly say with truth that there was no end to a woman’s work in the house are now underworked, in spite of the difficulty of finding servants. It is conceivable that women may drive men out of many middle class occupations as they have already driven them out of many city offices. We are losing the habit of regarding business and the professions as male employments.

Nevertheless males are in a vast majority in these departments, and must remain so as long as our family arrangements last, because the bearing and rearing of children, including domestic housekeeping, is woman’s natural monopoly. As such, being as it is the most vital of all the functions of mankind, it gives women a power and importance that they can attain to in no other profession, and that man cannot attain to at all. In so far as it is a slavery, it is a slavery to Nature and not to Man: indeed it is the means by which women enslave men, and thus create a Man Question which is called, very inappropriately, the Woman Question. Woman as Wife and Mother stands apart from the development we are dealing with in this chapter, which is, the rise of a business and professional middle class out of the propertied class. This is a sexless development, because when the unmarried daughters, like the younger sons, become doctors, barristers, ministers in the Free Churches, managers, accountants, shopkeepers, and clerks under the term typist (in America stenographer), they virtually leave their sex behind them, as men do. In business and the professions there are neither men nor women: economically they are all neuters, as far as that is humanly possible. The only disadvantage the woman is at in competition with the man is that the man must either succeed in his business or fail completely in life, whilst the woman has a second string to her bow in the possibility of getting married. A young woman who regards business employment as only a temporary support until she can find an eligible husband will never master her work as a man must.

45

DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER

At first sight it would seem that the employers must be the most powerful class in the community, because the others can do nothing without them. So they were, a hundred years ago. The dominant man then was not the capitalist nor the landlord nor the laborer, but the employer who could set capital and land and labor to work. These employers began as office employees; for business in those days was mostly on so small a scale that any middle class employee who had learnt the routine of business as a clerk or apprentice, in his father’s office or elsewhere, and who could scrape together a few hundred pounds, could enter into partnership with another thrifty employee, and set up in almost any sort of business as an employer.

But as spare money accumulated in larger and larger quantity, and enterprise expanded accordingly, business came to be done on a larger and larger scale until these old-fashioned little firms found their customers being taken away from them by big concerns and joint stock companies who could, with their huge capitals and costly machinery, not only undersell them, but make a greater profit out of their lower prices. Women see this in their shopping. They used to buy their umbrellas at an umbrella shop, their boots at a boot shop, their books at a book shop, and their lunches-out at a restaurant. Nowadays they buy them all at the same shop, lunch and all. Huge bazaars like Selfridge’s and Whiteley’s in London, and the great multiple shops in the provincial cities, are becoming the only shops where you can buy anything, because they are taking away the trade of the small separate shops and ruining the shopkeepers who kept them. These ruined shopkeepers may think themselves lucky if they get jobs in the multiple shops as shop assistants, managers of departments, and the like, when they are not too old for the change.

Sometimes the change is invisible. Certain retail trades have to be carried on in small shops scattered all over the place. For example, oil shops, public houses, and tobacconists. These look like separate small businesses. But they are not. The public houses are tied houses practically owned in dozens by the brewers. A hundred oil shops or tobacco shops may belong to a single big company, called a Trust. Just as the little businesses conducted by a couple of gentlemen partners, starting with a capital which they counted in hundreds, had to give way to companies counting their capital in thousands, so these companies are being forced to combine into Trusts which count their capital in millions.

These changes involve another which is politically very important. When the employers had it all their own way, and were in business for themselves separately and independently, they worked with what we should call small capitals, and had no difficulty in getting them. Capital was positively thrown down their throats by the bankers, who, as we shall see later, have most of the spare money to keep. Those were the days of arrogant cotton lords and merchant princes. The man who could manage a business took every penny that was left in the till when the landlord had had his rent, the capitalist (who was often himself) his interest, and the employees their wages. If he were a capable man, what remained for him as profit was enough to make him rich enough to go into Parliament if he cared to. Sometimes it was enough to enable him to buy his way into the peerage. Capital being useless and Labor helpless without him, he was, as an American economist put it, master of the situation.

When joint stock companies, which were formerly supposed to be suitable for banking and insurance only, came into business generally, the situation of the employers began to change. In a joint stock concern you have, instead of one or two capitalists, hundreds of capitalists, called shareholders, each contributing what spare money she or he can afford. It began with £100 shares, and has gone on to £10 and £1 shares; so that a single business today may belong to a host of capitalist proprietors, many of them much poorer people than could ever have acquired property in pre-company days. This had two results. One was that a woman with a £5 note to spare could allow a company to spend it, and thereby become entitled to, say, five shillings a year out of the gains of that company as long as it lasted. In this way Capitalism was strengthened by the extension of property in industry from rich people with large sums of spare money to poor people with small ones. But the employers were weakened, and finally lost their supremacy and became employees.

It happened in this way. The joint stock company system made it possible to collect much larger capitals to start business with than the old separate firms could command. It was already known that the employer with a thousand pounds worth of machinery and other aids to production (called plant) could be undersold and driven out of the market by the employer with twenty thousand pounds worth. Still, employers could get twenty thousand pounds lent to them easily enough if it was believed that they could handle it profitably. But when companies came into the field equipped with hundreds of thousands of pounds, and these companies began to combine into Trusts equipped with millions, the employers were outdone. They could not raise such sums among their acquaintances. No bank would allow them to overdraw their accounts on such a gigantic scale. To get more capital, they had to turn their businesses into joint stock companies.

This sounds simple; but the employers did not find it so. You, I hope, would not buy shares in a new company unless you saw what are called good names on the prospectus, shewing that half a dozen persons whom you believe to be wealthy, trustworthy, good judges of business, and in responsible social stations were setting you the example. If ever you do you will regret it, possibly in the workhouse. Now the art of getting at the people with the good names, and interesting them, is one at which practical employers are for the most part incurably unskilled. Therefore when they want to raise capital on the modern scale they are forced to go to persons who, having made a special profession of it, know where to go and how to proceed. These persons are called Promoters, though they usually call themselves financiers. They naturally charge a very high commission for their services; and the accountants and solicitors whose reputations inspire confidence put a high price on their names also. They all find that they can make so much by raising large capitals that it is not worth their while to trouble themselves with small ones; and the quaint result of this is that an employer finds it easier to raise large sums than small ones. If he wants only £20,000, the promoters and financiers shew him the door contemptuously: the pickings on so small a sum are beneath their notice. If, however, he wants £100,000, they will listen superciliously, and perhaps get it for him. Only, though he has to pay interest on £100,000, and stand indebted in that amount, he is very lucky if he receives £70,000 in cash. The promoters and financiers divide the odd £30,000 among themselves for their names and their trouble in raising the money. The employers are helpless in their hands: it is a case of take it or leave it: if they refuse the terms they get no capital. Thus the financiers and their go-betweens are now masters of the situation; and the men who actually conduct and order the industry of the country, who would have been great commercial magnates in Queen Victoria’s reign, are now under the thumbs of men who never employed an industrial workman nor entered a factory or mine in their lives, and never intend to.

And that is not all. When an employer turns his business into a joint stock company he becomes an employee. He may be the head employee who orders all the other employees about, engaging and dismissing them as he thinks fit; but still he is an employee, and can be dismissed by the shareholders and replaced by another manager if they think he is taking too much for his services. Against this possibility he usually protects himself by selling his establishment to the company at first for a number of shares sufficient to enable him to outvote all the discontented shareholders (each share carries a vote); and in any case his position as the established head who has made a success of the business, or at least persuaded the shareholders that he has, is a strong one. But he does not live for ever. When he dies or retires, a new manager must be found; and this successor is not his heir, but a stranger entering as a removable employee, managing the concern for a salary and perhaps a percentage of the profits.

Now an able employee-manager can command a high salary, and have a good deal of power, because he is felt to be indispensable until he is worn out. But he can never be as indispensable as the old employers who invented their own methods, and clung to their “trade secrets” jealously. Their methods necessarily resolved themselves into an office routine which could be picked up, however unintelligently, by those employed in it. The only trade secret that really counted was the new machinery, which was not secret at all; for all the great mechanical inventions are soon communized by law: that is, instead of the inventor of a machine being allowed to keep it as his private property for ever and make all the employers who use it pay him a royalty, he is allowed to monopolize it in this way under a patent for fourteen years only, after which it is at everybody’s disposal.

You can guess the inevitable result. It may take a genius to invent, say a steam-engine, but once it is invented a couple of ordinary workmen can keep it going; and when it is worn out any ordinary engineering firm can replace it by copying it. Also, though it may need exceptional talent, initiative, energy, and concentration to set up a new business, yet when it is once set up, and the routine of working it established, it can be kept going by ordinary persons who have learnt the routine, and whose rule is “When in doubt as to what to do, see what was done the last time, and do it over again”. Thus a very clever man may build up a great business, and leave it to his quite ordinary son to carry on when he is dead; and the son may get on very well without ever really understanding the business as his father did. Or the father may leave it to his daughter with the certainty that if she cannot or will not do the directing work herself, she can easily hire employee-employers who can and will, for a salary plus a percentage. The famous Krupp factory in Germany belongs to a lady. I will not go so far as to say that managerial ability has become a drug in the market, though, in the little businesses which are still conducted in the old way in the poorer middle class, the employer often has to pay his more highly skilled employees more than he gets out of the business for himself. But the monopoly of business technique which made the capitalist-employer supreme in the nineteenth century has gone for ever. Employers today are neither capitalists nor monopolists of managerial ability. The political and social power which their predecessors enjoyed has passed to the financiers and bankers, who monopolize the art of collecting millions of spare money. That monopoly will be broken in its turn by the communization of banking, to which we shall come presently.

Meanwhile you, putting all these developments together in your mind, can now contemplate the Middle Class understandingly. You know now how it sprang from the propertied class as an educated younger-son class without property, and supported itself by practising the professions, and by doing the business of the propertied class. You know how it rose to supreme power and riches when the development of modern machinery (called the Industrial Revolution) made business so big and complicated that neither the propertied class nor the working class could understand it, and the middle class men who did (called generally employers), became masters of the situation. You know how, when the first generations of employers had found out how to do this work, and established a routine of doing it which any literate man could learn and practise, and when all that remained was to find more and more capital to feed it as its concerns grew bigger and bigger, the supremacy passed from the employers to the financiers who hold it at present. You know also that this last change has been accompanied by a change in the status of the employer, who instead of hiring the land and capital of the propertied classes for a fixed payment of rent and interest, and taking as his profit all that remains, is now simply employed to manage for companies and trusts, the shareholders taking everything that is left after they have paid rent and wages (including his salary). You see that in applying for such posts he has to meet the competition not only of other middle class men as of old, but of clever sons of the working class, raised into the middle class by education at the public expense by our system of scholarships, which act as ladders from the elementary school to the University or the Polytechnic. You see that this applies not only to employers, but much more to their clerks. Clerking was formerly a monopoly of the less energetic sons of the middle class. Now that everybody has to go to school the middle class monopoly of reading, writing, and ciphering is gone; and skilled manual workers are better paid than clerks, being scarcer. As to parlormaids, what ordinary typist does not envy their creature comforts?

The Middle Station in Life no longer justifies the pæan in its praise which Daniel Defoe raised in Robinson Crusoe. For those who possess no special talent of a lucrative kind, it is now the least eligible class in the community.

46

THE PROLETARIAT

We have disposed of the Middle Classes: let us turn to the Lower Classes, the Hungry Ones, the Working Classes, the Masses, the Mob, or whatever else you call them. Classical culture has invented a general name for all people, of whatever nation, color, sex, sect, or social pretension, who, having no land nor capital (no property), have to hire themselves out for a living. It calls them proletarians, or, in the lump, The Proletariat. Karl Marx, who was born in Rhenish Germany in 1818, and died in London in 1883, after spending the last thirty-four years of his life in England making a special study of the development of Capitalism among us, was, and still is, the most famous champion of the Proletariat as the really organic part of civilized society to which all the old governing and propertied classes must finally succumb. When Marx raised his famous slogan, “Proletarians of all lands: unite”, he meant that all who live by the sale or hire of their labor should combine to do away with private property in land and capital, and to make everyone do her or his bit of the labor of the world, and share the product without paying toll to any idler.

The difficulty at that time was that the employers, without whom the proletarians could do nothing, were, as we have seen, strong, rich, independent, and masterful. They not only owned a good deal of land and capital themselves, but fully intended to become propertied country gentlemen when they retired. It was not until they began to slip down into a salaried, or proletarian class, that they also began to listen to Karl Marx. You see, they were losing their personal interest in private property with its rents and dividends, and were becoming interested solely in the price that could be got out of the landlords and capitalists for active services: that is, for labor of hand and brain. Instead of wanting to give Labor as little as possible and get as much out of it as possible, they wanted property to get as little as possible, and the sort of labor they themselves did to get as much as possible. They found that skilled manual work, and even unskilled manual strength, was coming more and more to be better paid than bookkeeping work and routine managing and professional work.

Now it is no use pretending to be better than other people when you are poorer. It only leads to keeping up more expensive appearances on less money, and forbidding your children to associate with most people’s children whilst they forbid their children to speak to yours. If the parents do not realize the vanity of such pretension the children do. I remember thinking when I was a boy how silly it was that my father, whose business was wholesale business, should consider himself socially superior to his tailor, who had the best means of knowing how much poorer than himself my father was, and who had a handsome residence, with ornamental grounds and sailing-boats, at the seaside place where we spent the summer in a six-roomed cottage-villa with a small garden. The great Grafton Street shopkeepers of Dublin outshone the tailor with their palaces and yachts; and their children had luxuries that I never dreamt of as possible for me, besides being far more expensively educated. My father’s conviction that they were too lowly to associate with me, when it was so clear that I was too poor to associate with them, may have had some sort of imaginary validity for him; but for me it was snobbish nonsense. I lived to see those children entertaining the Irish peerage and the Viceroy without a thought of the old social barriers; and very glad the Irish peers were to be entertained by them. I lived to see those shops become multiple shops managed by salaried employees who have less chance of entertaining the peerage than a baked-potato man of entertaining the King.

My father was an employer whose whole capital added to that of his partner would not have kept a big modern company in postage stamps for a fortnight. But at my start in life I found it impossible to become an employer like him: I had to become a clerk at fifteen. I was a proletarian undisguised. Therefore, when I began to take an interest in politics, I did not join the Conservative Party. It was the party of the landlords; and I was not a landlord. I did not join the Liberal Party. It was the party of the employers; and I was an employee. My father voted Conservative or Liberal just as the humor took him, and never imagined that any other party could exist. But I wanted a proletarian party; and when the Karl Marx slogan began to take effect in all the countries in Europe by producing proletarian political societies, which came to be called Socialist societies because they aimed at the welfare of society as a whole as against class prejudices and property interests, I naturally joined one of these societies, and so came to be called, and was proud to call myself, a Socialist.

Now the significant thing about the particular Socialist society which I joined was that the members all belonged to the middle class. Indeed its leaders and directors belonged to what is sometimes called the upper middle class: that is, they were either professional men like myself (I had escaped from clerkdom into literature) or members of the upper division of the civil service. Several of them have since had distinguished careers without changing their opinions or leaving the Society. To their Conservative and Liberal parents and aunts and uncles fifty years ago it seemed an amazing, shocking, unheard-of thing that they should become Socialists, and also a step bound to make an end of all their chances of success in life. Really it was quite natural and inevitable. Karl Marx was not a poor laborer: he was the highly educated son of a rich Jewish lawyer. His almost equally famous colleague, Friedrich Engels, was a well-to-do employer. It was precisely because they were liberally educated, and brought up to think about how things are done instead of merely drudging at the manual labor of doing them, that these two men, like my colleagues in The Fabian Society (note, please, that we gave our society a name that could have occurred only to classically educated men), were the first to see that Capitalism was reducing their own class to the condition of a proletariat, and that the only chance of securing anything more than a slave’s share in the national income for anyone but the biggest capitalists or the cleverest professional or business men lay in a combination of all the proletarians without distinction of class or country to put an end to Capitalism by developing the communistic side of our civilization until Communism became the dominant principle in society, and mere owning, profiteering, and genteel idling were disabled and discredited. Or, as our numerous clergymen members put it, to worship God instead of Mammon. Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.

I may mention, as illustrating the same point, that The Fabian Society, when I joined it immediately after its foundation in 1884, had only two rival Socialist Societies in London, both professing, unlike the Fabian, to be working-class societies. But one of them was dominated by the son of a very rich man who bequeathed large sums to religious institutions in addition to providing for his sons, to whom he had given a first-rate education. The other was entirely dependent on one of the most famous men of the nineteenth century, who was not only a successful employer and manufacturer in the business of furnishing and decorating palaces and churches, but an eminent artistic designer, a rediscoverer of lost arts, and one of the greatest of English poets and writers. These two men, Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris, left their mark on the working-class proletariat as preachers of Socialism, but failed in their attempts to organize a new working-class Socialist Party in their own upper middle class way under their own leadership and in their own dialect (for the language of ladies and gentlemen is only a dialect), because the working classes had already organized themselves in their own way, under their own leaders, and in their own dialect. The Fabian Society succeeded because it addressed itself to its own class in order that it might set about doing the necessary brain work of planning Socialist organization for all classes, meanwhile accepting, instead of trying to supersede, the existing political organizations which it intended to permeate with the Socialist conception of human society.

The existing form of working-class organization was Trade Unionism. Trade Unionism is not Socialism: it is the Capitalism of the Proletariat. This requires another chapter of explanation, and a very important one; for Trade Unionism is now very powerful, and occasionally leaves the Intelligent Woman without coals or regular trains for weeks together. Before we can understand it, however, we must study the Labor Market out of which it grew; and this will take several preliminary chapters, including a somewhat grim one on the special position of women as sellers in that market.

47

THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS

The workwoman working for weekly wages is like her employer in one respect. She has something to sell; and she has to live on the price of it. That something is her labor. The more she gets for it the better-off she is: the less she gets for it the worse-off she is: if she can get nothing for it she starves or becomes a pauper. When she marries, she finds her husband in the same position; and he has to pay for the upkeep of her domestic labor out of the price of his industrial labor. Under these circumstances they are both naturally keen on getting as much for his industrial labor as possible, and giving as little for its price as the purchaser (the employer) will put up with. This means that they want the highest wages and the shortest hours of work they can get. Unless they are exceptionally thoughtful and public spirited persons, their ideas are limited to that.

The employer is in the same predicament. He does not sell labor: he has to buy it: what he sells are the goods or services produced under his direction; and if he, as mostly happens, is neither thoughtful nor public spirited, his ideas are limited to getting as much for what he sells as possible and giving as little for the money as the purchaser will put up with. In buying labor his interest and policy are to pay as little and get as much as he can, being thus precisely the opposites of the workers’ interest and policy.

This not only produces that unhappy and dangerous conflict of feeling and interest between employers and employed called Class War, but leads to extremities of social wickedness that are hardly credible of civilized people. The Government has been forced again and again to interfere between the buyers and sellers of labor to compel them to keep their bargains within the barest limits of common humanity. To begin with, all the employers want is labor, and whether the labor is done by a child or a woman or a man is nothing to them: they buy whatever labor is cheapest. Also the effect of the work on the health and morals of the employed is nothing to the employer except in so far as they may make a difference in his profit; and when he takes them into consideration with this in view he may conclude that an inhuman disregard of all natural kindness will pay him better than any attempt to reconcile his interest with the welfare of his employees.

To illustrate this I may cite the case of the London tramways when the cars were drawn by horses, and of certain plantations in America before negro slavery was abolished there. The question to be decided by the tramway managers was, what is the most moneymaking way of treating tramway horses? A well-cared-for horse, if not overworked, may live twenty years, or even, like the Duke of Wellington’s horse, forty. On the other hand, reckless ill-usage will kill a horse in less than a year, as it will kill anyone else. If horses cost nothing, and a new horse could be picked up in the street when the old one died, it would be more profitable commercially to work horses to death in six months, say, than to treat them humanely and let them retire to the salt marshes of Norfolk at the age of eighteen or so. But horses cost money; and the tramway managers knew that if they wore out a horse too quickly he would not pay for his cost. After figuring it out they decided that the most profitable way of treating tram horses was to wear them out in four years. The same calculation was made on the plantations. The slave, like the horse, cost a substantial sum of money; and if he were worked to death too soon his death would result in a loss. The most businesslike planters settled that the most paying plan was to wear out their slaves in seven years; and this was the result they instructed their overseers to aim at.

The Intelligent Woman will naturally exclaim “What a dreadful thing to be a company’s horse or a slave!” But wait a moment. Horses and slaves are worth something: if you kill them you have to pay for new ones. But if instead of employing horses and slave you employ “free” children and women and men, you may work them to death as hard and as soon as you like: there are plenty more to be had for nothing where they came from. What is more, you need not support them, as you have to support slaves, during the weeks when you have no work for them. You take them on by the week; and when trade is slack, and you have no work for them, you just discharge them, leaving them to starve or shift for themselves as best they can. In the heyday of Capitalism, when this system was in full swing, and no laws had been made to limit its abuse, small children were worked to death under the whip until it was commonly said that the northern factory employers were using up nine generations in one generation. Women were employed at the mines under conditions of degradation which would have horrified any negress in South Carolina. Men were reduced to lives which savages would have despised. The places these unhappy people lived in were beyond description. Epidemics of cholera and smallpox swept the country from time to time; typhus was commoner than measles today; drunkenness and brutal violence were considered as natural to the working classes as fustian coats and horny hands. The respectability and prosperity of the propertied and middle classes who grew rich on sweated labor covered an abyss of horror; and it was by raising the lid from that abyss that Karl Marx, in his terrible and epoch-making book called Capital, became the prophet of that great revolt of outraged humanity against Capitalism which is the emotional force of the Socialist movement. However, your subject and mine just now is not Emotional Socialism but Intelligent Socialism; so let us keep calm. Anger is a bad counsellor.

Long before Marx published his book the Government had been forced to interfere. A succession of laws called the Factory Acts, which include regulation of mines and other industries, were passed to forbid the employment of children below a certain age; to regulate the employment of women and young persons; to limit the hours during which a factory employing such persons could be kept open; to force employers to fence in machines which crushed and tore to pieces the employees who brushed against them in moments of haste or carelessness; to pay wages in money instead of in credit at employers’ shops where bad food and bad clothes were sold at exorbitant prices; to provide sanitary conveniences; to limewash factory walls at frequent intervals; to forbid the practice of taking meals at work in the factory instead of during an interval and in another place; to frustrate the dodges by which these laws were at first evaded by the employers; and to appoint factory inspectors to see that the laws were carried out. These laws were the fruit of an agitation headed, not by Socialists, but by a pious Conservative nobleman, Lord Shaftesbury, who did not find in his Bible any authority for the Capitalist theory that you could and should produce universal well-being by breaking all the laws of God and Man whenever you could make a commercial profit by doing so. This amazing theory was not only put into practice by greedy people, but openly laid down and explicitly advocated in books by quite sincere and serious professors of political economy and jurisprudence (calling themselves The Manchester School) and in speeches made in opposition to the Factory Acts by moral and highminded orator-manufacturers like John Bright. It is still taught as authentic political science at our universities. It has broken the moral authority of university bred Churchmen, and reduced university bred Statesmen to intellectually self-satisfied impotence. It is perhaps the worst of the many rationalist dogmas that have in the course of human history led naturally amiable logicians to countenance and commit villainies that would revolt professed criminals.

Now one would suppose on first thoughts that the Factory Acts would have been opposed by all the employers and supported by all their employees. But there are good employers as well as bad ones; and there are ignorant and shortsighted laborers as well as wise ones. The employers who had tender consciences, or who, like some of the Quakers, had a form of religion which compelled them to think sometimes of what they were doing by throwing all the responsibility for it on themselves and not on any outside authority like the professors of Capitalist political economy, were greatly troubled by the condition of their employees. You may ask why, in that case, they did not treat them better. The answer is that if they had done so they would have been driven out of business and ruined by the bad employers.

It would have occurred in this way. Cheap sweated labor meant not only bigger profits: it also meant cheaper goods. If the good employer paid a decent living wage to his workpeople, and worked them for eight hours a day instead of from twelve to sixteen, he had to charge high enough prices for his goods to enable him to pay such wages. But in that case the bad employer could and would at once offer the same goods at a lower price and thus take all the good employer’s customers away from him. The good employer was therefore obliged to join Lord Shaftesbury in telling the Government that unless laws were passed to force all employers, good and bad alike, to behave better, there could never be any improvement, because the good employers would have either to sweat the workers like the bad ones, or else be driven out of business, leaving matters worse than ever. They found that social problems cannot be solved by personal righteousness, and that under Capitalism not only must men be made moral by Act of Parliament, but cannot be made moral in any other way, no matter how benevolent their dispositions may be.

The opposition to the Factory Acts by the workers themselves was actually harder to overcome in some ways than that of the employers, because the employers, when they were forced by law to try the experiment, found that extreme sweating, like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, was not the best way to make business pay, and that they could more than make up for the cost of complying with the very moderate requirements of the Acts by putting a little more brains into their work. Even the stupid ones found that by speeding up their machinery, and thus making their employees pull themselves together and work harder, they could get more out of them in ten hours than in twelve. The Intelligent Woman, if she has travelled, may have noticed that in countries where there is no Shop Hours Act, and shops remain open until everyone has gone to bed, the shopkeepers and their assistants are far less tired and strained at nine in the evening than the assistants in a big shop in a big English city are at five in the afternoon, though the shop closes at six. Impossible as it may sound, in the ginning mills of Bombay, before any factory legislation was introduced, the children employed went into the factory, not for so many hours a day, but for months at a time; and there are such things in the world as Italian cafés that are open day and night without regular night and day waiters, the employees taking a nap when and where they can. And this lazy happy-go-lucky way of doing business may do no great harm, whilst an eight hour day at high wages under modern scientific management may mean work so intense that it takes the last inch out of the workers, and cannot be done except by persons in the prime of life, nor even by them for many consecutive months.

The employers had another resource in the introduction of machinery. When employers can get plenty of cheap labor they will not introduce machinery: it is too much trouble, and though the machine may do the work of several persons it may cost more. At this moment (1925) in Lisbon the very rough and dirty business of coaling steamships can be done by machinery. The machinery is actually there ready for use. But the work is done by women, because they are cheaper and there is no law against it. If a Portuguese Factory Act were passed, forbidding the employment of women, or imposing restrictions and regulations on it (possibly not really for the sake of the women, but only to keep them out of the job and thus reserve it for men), the machinery would be turned on at once; and it would soon be improved and added to until it became indispensable. But as the women would lose their employment, they would object to any such Factory Act much more vociferously than the employers.

All the protestations of the employers that they would be ruined by the Factory Acts were contradicted by experience. By better management, more and better machinery, and speeding up the work, they made bigger profits than ever. If they had been half as clever as they claimed to be, they would have imposed on themselves all the regulations the Factory Acts imposed on them, without waiting to be forced by law. But profiteering does not cultivate men’s minds as public service does. The greatest advances in industrial organization have been forced on employers in spite of their piteous protests that they would be unable to carry on under them, and that British industry must consequently perish. It may shock you to learn that the employees themselves resisted the Factory Acts at first because the Acts began by putting a stop to the ill treatment and overworking of children too young to be decently put to commercial work at all. At first these victims of unregulated Capitalism were little Oliver Twists, sold into slavery by the Guardians of the Poor to get rid of them. But the later generations were the children of the employees; and the wage on which the employee kept his family in squalid poverty was added to by the children’s earnings. When people are very poor the loss of a shilling a week is much worse than the loss of £500 a week to a millionaire: it means, for the woman who has a desperate struggle to keep the house and make both ends meet every Saturday, that her task becomes impossible. It is easy for comparatively rich people to say “You should not send your young children out to work under such inhuman conditions”, or, “You should rejoice in a new Factory Act which makes such infamies impossible”. But if the immediate result of listening to them is that the children who were only half starved before are now to be three-quarters starved, such pious remonstrances produce nothing but exasperation. The melancholy truth is that, as the Factory Acts were passed one after another, gradually raising the age at which children might be employed in factories from infancy to fourteen and sixteen, and half the children’s time below a certain age had to be spent in school, the parents were the fiercest opponents of the Acts; and when they got the vote, and became able to influence Parliament directly, they made it impossible for anybody to get elected as a member for a factory town where children’s labor was employed unless he pledged himself to oppose any extension of the laws restricting child labor. The common saying that the parents are the best people to take care of the interests of the children depends not only on the sort of people the parents are, but on whether they are well enough off to be able to afford to indulge their natural parental instinct. Only a small proportion of parents, and these not the poorest, will deliberately bring up their children to be thieves and prostitutes; but practically all parents will, and indeed must, sweat their children if they are themselves sweated so mercilessly that they cannot get on without the few pence their children can earn.

Now that I have explained the seeming heartlessness of the parents, you have still to ask me why these parents accepted wages so low that they were forced to sacrifice their children to the employers’ greed for profits. The answer is that the increase of population which produced the younger son class in the propertied class, and finally built up the middle class, went on also among the employees who lived from hand to mouth on the wages of manual labor. Now manual labor is like fish or asparagus, dear when it is scarce, cheap when it is plentiful. As the numbers of propertyless manual workers grew from thousands to millions the price of their labor fell and fell. In the nineteenth century everybody knew that wages were higher in America and Australia than in Great Britain and Ireland, because labor was scarcer there; and those who could afford it emigrated to these countries. Half the population of Ireland went to America, where labor was so scarce that immigrants were welcomed from all countries. But today the labor market in America is so choked with them that immigration is sternly restricted to a fixed number from each European country every year. Australia restricts its births artificially, and refuses to admit Chinamen or Japanese on any terms. America also excludes Japanese. But in the days when the Factory Acts were made really effective (the first ones were evaded by all sorts of employers’ tricks) emigration from our islands was unrestricted, and went on at a great rate among those who could afford the passage money.

This shewed that our labor market was overstocked. When the fish market is overstocked the fish are thrown back into the sea. Emigration was, in effect, throwing men and women into the sea with a ship to cling to and a chance of reaching another country in it. The value of men and women in England, unless they could do some sort of work that was still scarce, had fallen to nothing. Doctors and dentists and lawyers and parsons were still worth something (parsons shamefully little: £70 a year for a curate with a family); and exceptionally skilled or physically powerful workmen could earn more than the poorer clergy; but the mass of manual employees, those who could do nothing except under direction, and even under direction could do nothing that any ablebodied person could not learn to do in a very short time, were literally worth nothing: you could get them for what it cost to keep them alive, and to enable them to bring up children enough to replace them when they were worn out. It was just as if steam-engines had been made in such excessive quantities that the manufacturers would give them for nothing to anyone who would take them away. Whoever took them away would still have to feed them with coal and oil before they could work; but this would not mean that they had any value, or that they would be taken proper care of, or that the coal and oil would be of decent quality.

You see, people without property have no other way of living than selling themselves for their market value, or, when their value falls to nothing, offering to work for anyone who will feed them. They have no land, and cannot afford to buy any: and even if land were given to them few of them would know how to cultivate it. They cannot become capitalists, because capital is spare money, and they have no money to spare. They cannot set up in business for themselves with borrowed money, because nobody will lend them money: if anyone did, they would lose it all and become bankrupt for want of the requisite education and training. They must find an employer or starve; and if they attempt to bargain for anything more than a bare subsistence wage they are told curtly but only too truthfully that if they do not choose to take it there are plenty of others who will.