Chapter XX: Part 20

Finally, if you are not selfish and cruel, you will find that you must give the children some reason for behaving well when no one is looking, and there is no danger of being found out, or when they would rather do the forbidden thing at the cost of a whacking than leave it undone with impunity. You may tell them that God is always looking, and will punish them inevitably when they die. But you will find that posthumous penalties are not immediate enough nor real enough to deter a bold child. In the end you must threaten it with some damage to a part of it called its soul, of the existence of which you can give it no physical demonstration whatever. You need not use the word soul: you can put the child “on its honor”. But its honor also is an organ which no anatomist has yet succeeded in dissecting out and preserving in a bottle of spirits of wine for the instruction of infants. When it transgresses you can resort to scolding, calling it a naughty, dirty, greedy little thing. Or you may lecture it, telling it solemnly that “it is a sin to steal a pin” and so forth. But if you could find such a monster as an entirely matter-of-fact child, it might receive both scoldings and lectures unmoved, and ask you “What then? What is a sin? What do you mean by naughty, greedy? I understand dirty; but why should I wash my hands if I am quite comfortable with them dirty. I understand greedy; but if I like chocolates why should I give half of them to Jane?” You may retort with “Have you no conscience, child?”; but the matter-of-fact reply is “What is conscience?” Faced with this matter-of-fact scepticism you are driven into pure metaphysics, and must teach your child that conduct is a matter, not of fact, but of religious duty. Good conduct is a respect which you owe to yourself in some mystical way; and people are manageable in proportion to their possession of this self-respect. When you remonstrate with a grown-up person you say “Have you no self-respect?” But somehow one does not say that to an infant. If it tells a lie, you do not say “You owe it to yourself to speak the truth”, because the little animal does not feel any such obligation, though it will later on. If you say “You must not tell lies because if you do nobody will believe what you say”, you are conscious of telling a thundering lie yourself, as you know only too well that most lies are quite successful, and that human society would be impossible without a great deal of goodnatured lying. If you say “You must not tell lies because if you do you will find yourself unable to believe anything that is told to you”, you will be much nearer the truth; but it is a truth that a child cannot understand: you might as well tell it the final truth of the matter, which is, that there is a mysterious something in us called a soul, which deliberate wickedness kills, and without which no material gain can make life bearable. How can you expect a naughty child to take that in? If you say “You must not tell a lie because it will grieve your dear parents”, the effect will depend on how much the child cares whether its parents are grieved or not. In any case to most young children their parents are as gods, too great to be subject to grief, as long as the parents play up to that conception of them. Also, as it is not easy to be both loved and feared, parents who put on the majesty of gods with their children must not allow the familiarity of affection, and are lucky if their children do not positively hate them. It is safer and more comfortable to invent a parent who is everybody’s Big Papa, even Papa’s papa, and introduce it to the child as God. And it must be a god that children can imagine. It must not be an abstraction, a principle, a vital impulse, a life force, or the Church of England god who has neither body, parts, nor passions. It must be, like the real papa, a grown-up person in Sunday clothes, very very good, terribly powerful, and all-seeing: that is, able to see what you are doing when nobody is looking. In this way the child who is too young to have a sufficiently developed self-respect and intelligent sense of honor: in short, a conscience, is provided with an artificial, provisional, and to a great extent fictitious conscience which tides it over its nonage until it is old enough to attach a serious meaning to the idea of God.

In this way it was discovered in the nursery, long before Voltaire said it, that “if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him”. After Voltaire’s death, when the government of France fell into the hands of a set of very high-principled professional and middle-class gentlemen who had no experience of government, and ended by making such a mess of it that France would have been ruined if they had not fortunately all cut oneanother’s heads off on the highest principles, the most high-principled of them all, an intensely respectable lawyer named Robespierre, who had tried to govern without God because a good many of the stories told to children about God were evidently not strictly true, found that governments dealing with nations could no more do without God than parents dealing with their families. He, too, declared, echoing Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent one. He had previously, by the way, tried a goddess whom he called the Goddess of Reason; but she was no use at all, not because she was a goddess (for Roman Catholic children have a Big Mamma, or Mamma’s mamma, who is everybody’s mamma, and makes the boys easier to manage, as well as a Big Papa), but because good conduct is not dictated by reason but by a divine instinct that is beyond reason. Reason only discovers the shortest way: it does not discover the destination. It would be quite reasonable for you to pick your neighbor’s pocket if you felt sure that you could make a better use of your money than she could; but somehow it would not be honorable; and honor is a part of divinity: it is metaphysics: it is religion. Some day it may become scientific psychology; but psychology is as yet in its crudest infancy; and when it grows up it will very likely be too difficult not only for children but for many adults, like the rest of the more abstruse sciences.

Meanwhile we must bear in mind that our beliefs are continually passing from the metaphysical and legendary into the scientific stage. In China, when an eclipse of the sun occurs, all the intelligent and energetic women rush out of doors with pokers and shovels, trays and saucepan lids, and bang them together to frighten away the demon who is devouring the sun; and the perfect success of this proceeding, which has never been known to fail, proves to them that it is the right thing to do. But you, who know all about eclipses, sit calmly looking at them through bits of smoked glass, because your belief about them is a scientific belief and not a metaphysical one. You probably think that the women who are banging the saucepans in China are fools; but they are not: you would do the same yourself if you lived in a country where astronomy was still in the metaphysical stage.

You must also beware of concluding, because their conduct seems to you ridiculous, and because you know that there is no demon, that there is no eclipse. You may say that nobody could make a mistake like that; but I assure you that a great many people, seeing how many childish fables and ridiculous ceremonies have been attached to the conception of divinity, have rushed to the conclusion that no such thing as divinity exists. When they grow out of believing that God is an old gentleman with a white beard, they think they have got rid of everything that the old gentleman represented to their infant minds. On the contrary, they have come a little nearer to the truth about it.

Now the English nation consists of many million parents and children of whom hardly any two are in precisely the same stage of belief as to the sanctions of good conduct. Many of the parents are still in the nursery stage: many of the children are in the comparatively scientific stage. Most of them do not bother much about it, and just do what their neighbors do and say they believe what most of their neighbors say they believe. But those who do bother about it differ very widely and differ very fiercely. Take those who, rejecting the first article of the Church of England, attach to the word God the conception of a Ruler of the universe with the body, parts, and passions of man, but with unlimited knowledge and power. Here at least, you might think, we have agreement. But no. There are two very distinct parties to this faith. One of them believes in a God of Wrath, imposing good conduct on us by threats of casting us for ever into an inconceivably terrible hell. Others believe in a God of Love, and openly declare that if they could be brought to believe in a God capable of such cruelty as hell implies, they would spit in his face. Others hold that conduct has nothing to do with the matter, and that though hell exists, anyone, however wicked, can avoid it by believing that God accepted the cruel death of his own son as an expiation of their misdeeds, whilst nobody, however virtuous, can avoid it if she has the slightest doubt on this point. Others declare that neither conduct nor belief has anything to do with it, as every person is from birth predestined to fall into hell or mount into heaven when they die, and that nothing that they can say or do or believe or disbelieve can help them. Voltaire described us as a people with thirty religions and only one sauce; and though this was a great compliment to the activity and independence of our minds, it held out no hope of our ever agreeing about religion.

Even if we could confine religious instruction to subjects which are supposed to have passed from the metaphysical to the scientific stage, which is what the advocates of secular education mean, we should be no nearer to unanimity; for not only do our scientific bigots differ as fiercely as those of the sects and churches, and try to obtain powers of ruthless persecution from the Government, but their pretended advances from the metaphysical to the scientific are often disguised relapses into the pre-metaphysical stage of crude witchcraft, ancient augury, and African “medicine”.

Roughly speaking, governments in imposing education on the people have to deal with three fanaticisms: first, that which believes in a God of Wrath, and sees in every earthquake, every pestilence, every war: in short, every calamity of impressive or horrifying magnitude, a proof of God’s terrible power and a warning to sinners; second, that which believes in a God of Love in conflict with a Power of Evil personified as the Devil; and third, that of the magicians and their dupes, believing neither in God nor devil, claiming that the pursuit of knowledge is absolutely free from moral law, however atrocious its methods, and pretending to work miracles (called “the marvels of science”) by which they hold the keys of life and death, and can make mankind immune from disease if they are given absolute control over our bodies.

A good many women are still so primitive and personal in religious matters that their first impulse on hearing them discussed at all is to declare that their beliefs are the only true beliefs, and must of course be imposed on everyone, all other beliefs to be punished as monstrous blasphemies. They do not regard Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, as different names for God: if they call God Brahma they regard Allah and Jehovah as abominable idols, and all Christians and Moslems as wicked idolaters whom no respectable person would visit. Or if Jehovah, they class Moslems and Indians as “the heathen”, and send out missionaries to convert them. But this childish self-conceit would wreck the British Empire if our rulers indulged it. Only about 11 per cent of British subjects are Christians: the enormous majority of them call God Allah or Brahma, and either do not distinguish Jesus from any other prophet or have never even heard of him. Consequently when a woman goes into Parliament, central or local, she should leave the sectarian part of her religion behind her, and consider only that part of it which is common to all the sects and Churches, however the names may differ. Unfortunately this is about the last thing that most elected persons ever dream of doing. They all strive to impose their local customs, names, institutions, and even languages on the schoolchildren by main force.

Now there is this to be said for their efforts, that all progress consists in imposing on children nobler beliefs and better institutions than those at present inculcated and established. For instance, as every Socialist believes that Communism is more nobly inspired and better in practice than private property and competition, her object in entering Parliament is to impose that belief on her country by having it taught to the children in the public schools so that they may grow up to regard it as the normal obvious truth, and to abhor Capitalism as a disastrous idolatry. At present she finds herself opposed by statesmen who quite lately spent a hundred millions of English public money in subsidizing military raids on the Russian Government because it was a Socialist Government. To such statesmen Socialist, Communist, Bolshevist, are synonyms for Scoundrel, Thief, Assassin. In opposition to them the Socialists compare Labor exploited by landlords and capitalists to Christ crucified between two thieves. They both say that we no longer persecute in the name of religion; but this means only that they refuse to call the creeds they are persecuting religions, whilst the beliefs they do call religions have become comparatively indifferent to them. To put down sedition, rebellion, and attacks on property, or, on the other hand, to make an end of the robbery of the poor, suppress shameless idleness, and restore the land of our country, which God made for us all, to the whole people, seems simple enforcement of the moral law, and not persecution; therefore those who do it are not, they think, persecutors, to prove which they point to the fact that they allow us all to go to church or not as we please, and to believe or disbelieve in transubstantiation according to our fancy. Do not be deceived by modern professions of toleration. Women are still what they were when the Tudor sisters sent Protestants to the stake and Jesuits to the rack and gallows; when the defenders of property and slavery in Rome set up crosses along the public roads with the crucified followers of the revolted gladiator slave Spartacus dying horribly upon them in thousands; and when the saintly Torquemada burnt alive every Jew he could lay hands on as piously as he told his beads. The difference between the Socialist versus Capitalist controversy and the Jew versus Christian controversy or the Roman Catholic versus Protestant controversy is not that the modern bigot is any more tolerant or less cruel than her ancestors, nor even that the proletarians are too numerous and the proprietors too powerful to be persecuted. If the controversy between them could be settled by either party exterminating the other, they would both do their worst to settle it in that way. History leaves us no goodnatured illusions on this point. From the wholesale butcheries which followed the suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871 to the monstrous and quite gratuitous persecution of Russians in the United States of America after the war of 1914-18, in which girls were sentenced to frightful terms of imprisonment for remarks that might have been made by any Sunday School teacher, there is abundant evidence that modern diehards are no better than medieval zealots, and that if they are to be restrained from deluging the world in blood and torture in the old fashion it will not be by any imaginary advance in toleration or in humanity. At this moment (1927) our proprietary classes appear to have no other conception of the Russian Soviet Government and its sympathizers than as vermin to be ruthlessly exterminated; and when the Russian Communist and his western imitators speak of the proprietors and their political supporters as “bourgeois”, they make no secret of regarding them as enemies of the human race. The spirit of the famous manifesto of 1792, in which the Duke of Brunswick, in the name of the monarchs of Europe, announced that he meant to exterminate the French Republican Government and deliver up the cities which tolerated it to “military execution and total subversion”, is reflected precisely in the speeches made by our own statesmen in support of the projected expedition against the Union of Soviet Republics which was countermanded a few years ago only because the disapproval of the British proletarian voters became so obvious that the preparations for the Capitalist Crusade had to be hastily dropped.

It is therefore very urgently necessary that I should explain to you why it is that a Labor Party can neither establish Socialism by exterminating its opponents, nor its opponents avert Socialism by exterminating the Socialists.

75

REVOLUTIONS

You must first grasp the difference between revolutions and social changes. A revolution transfers political power from one party to another, or one class to another, or even one individual to another, just as a conquest transfers it from one nation or race to another. It can be and often is effected by violence or the threat of violence. Of our two revolutions in the seventeenth century, by which political power in England was transferred from the throne to the House of Commons, the first cost a civil war; and the second was bloodless only because the King ran away. A threat of violence was sufficient to carry the nineteenth century revolution of 1832, by which the political power was transferred from the great agricultural landowners to the industrial urban employers. The South American revolutions which substitute one party or one President for another are general elections decided by shooting instead of by voting.

Now the transfer of political power from our capitalists to our proletariat, without which Socialist propaganda would be suppressed by the Government as sedition, and Socialist legislation would be impossible, has already taken place in form. The proletarians can outvote the capitalists overwhelmingly whenever they choose to do so. If on the issue of Socialism versus Capitalism all the proletarians were for Socialism and all the capitalists for Capitalism, Capitalism would have had to capitulate to overwhelming numbers long ago. But the proletarians who live upon the incomes of the capitalists as their servants, their tradesmen, their employees in the luxury trades, their lawyers and doctors and so on, not to mention the troops raised, equipped, and paid by them to defend their property (in America there are private armies of this kind) are more violently Conservative than the capitalists themselves, many of whom, like Robert Owen and William Morris, not to mention myself, have been and are ardent Socialists. The Countess of Warwick is a noted Socialist; so you have seen a Socialist Countess (or at least her picture); but have you ever seen a countess’s dressmaker who was a Socialist? If the capitalists refused to accept a parliamentary decision against them, and took to arms, like Charles I, they would have in many places a majority of the proletariat on their side.

If you are shocked by the suggestion that our capitalists would act so unconstitutionally, consider the case of Ireland, in which after thirty years of parliamentary action, and an apparently final settlement of the Home Rule question by Act of Parliament, the establishment of the Irish Free State was effected by fire and slaughter, the winning side being that which succeeded in burning the larger number of the houses of its opponents.

Parliamentary constitutionalism holds good up to a certain point: the point at which the people who are outvoted in Parliament will accept their defeat. But on many questions people feel so strongly, or have such big interests at stake, that they leave the decision to Parliament only as long as they think they will win there. If Parliament decides against them, and they see any chance of a successful resistance, they throw Parliament over and fight it out. During the thirty years of the parliamentary campaign for Irish Home Rule there were always Direct Action men who said “It is useless to go to the English Parliament: the Unionists will never give up their grip of Ireland until they are forced to; and you may as well fight it out first as last”. And these men, though denounced as wanton incendiaries, turned out to be right. The French had to cut off the heads of both king and queen because the king could not control the queen, and the queen would not accept a constitutional revolution, nor stop trying to induce the other kings of Europe to march their armies into France and slaughter the Liberals for her. In England we beheaded our king because he would not keep faith with the Liberal Parliament even after he had fought it and lost. In Spain at this moment the King and the army have suppressed Parliament, and are ruling by force of arms on the basis of divine right, which is exactly what Cromwell did in England after he had cut off King Charles’s head for trying to do the same. Signor Mussolini, a Socialist, has overridden parliament in Italy, his followers having established what is called a reign of terror by frank violence.

These repudiations of constitutionalism in Spain and Italy have been made, not to effect any definite social change, but because the Spanish and Italian governments had become so unbearably inefficient that the handiest way to restore public order was for some sufficiently energetic individuals to take the law into their own hands and just break people’s heads if they would not behave themselves. And it may quite possibly happen that even if the most perfect set of Fabian Acts of Parliament for the constitutional completion of Socialism in this country be passed through Parliament by duly elected representatives of the people; swallowed with wry faces by the House of Lords; and finally assented to by the King and placed on the statute book, the capitalists may, like Signor Mussolini, denounce Parliament as unpatriotic, pernicious, and corrupt, and try to prevent by force the execution of the Fabian Acts. We should then have a state of civil war, with, no doubt, the Capitalist forces burning the co-operative stores, and the proletarians burning the country houses, as in Ireland, in addition to the usual war routine of devastation and slaughter.

As we have seen, the capitalists would be at no loss for proletarian troops. The war would not be as the Marxist doctrinaires of the Class War seem to imagine. In our examination of the effect of unequal distribution of income we found that it is not only the rich who live on the poor, but also the servants and tradesmen who live on the money the rich spend, and who have their own servants and tradesmen. In the rich suburbs and fashionable central quarters of the great cities, and all over the South of England where pleasant country houses are dotted over the pleasantest of the English counties, it is as hard to get a Labor candidate into Parliament as in Oxford University. If the unearned incomes of the rich disappeared, places like Bournemouth would either perish like the cities of Nineveh and Babylon, or else the inhabitants would have, as they would put it, to cater for a different class of people; and many of them would be ruined before they could adapt themselves to the new conditions. Add to these the young men who are out of employment, and will fight for anyone who will pay them well for an exciting adventure, with all the people who dread change of any sort, or who are duped by the newspapers into thinking Socialists scoundrels, or who would be too stupid to understand such a book as this if they could be persuaded to read anything but a cheap newspaper; and you will see at once that the line that separates those who live on rich customers from those who live on poor customers: in other words which separates those interested in the maintenance of Capitalism from those interested in its replacement by Socialism, is a line drawn not between rich and poor, capitalist and proletarian, but right down through the middle of the proletariat to the bottom of the very poorest section. In a civil war for the maintenance of Capitalism the capitalists would therefore find masses of supporters in all ranks of the community; and it is their knowledge of this that makes the leaders of the Labor Party so impatient with the extremists who talk of such a war as if it would be a Class War, and echo Shelley’s very misleading couplet “Ye are many: they are few”. And as the capitalists know it too, being reminded of it by the huge number of votes given for them by the poor at every election, I cannot encourage you to feel too sure that their present denunciations of Direct Action by their opponents mean that when their own sooner-or-later inevitable defeat by Labor in Parliament comes, they will take it lying down.

But no matter how the government of the country may pass from the hands of the capitalists into those of the Socialist proletarians, whether by peaceful parliamentary procedure or the bloodiest conceivable civil war, at the end of it the survivors will be just where they were at the beginning as far as practical Communism is concerned. Returning a majority of Socialists to Parliament will not by itself reconstruct the whole economic system of the country in such a way as to produce equality of income. Still less will burning and destroying buildings or killing several of the opponents of Socialism, and getting several Socialists killed in doing so. You cannot wave a wand over the country and say “Let there be Socialism”: at least nothing will happen if you do.

The case of Russia illustrates this. After the great political revolution of 1917 in that country, the Marxist Communists were so completely victorious that they were able to form a Government far more powerful than the Tsar had ever really been. But as the Tsar had not allowed Fabian Societies to be formed in Russia to reduce Socialism to a system of law, this new Russian Government did not know what to do, and, after trying all sorts of amateur experiments which came to nothing more than pretending that there was Communism where there was nothing but the wreck of Capitalism, and giving the land to the peasants, who immediately insisted on making private property of it over again, had to climb down hastily and leave the industry of the country to private employers very much as the great ground landlords of our cities leave the work of the shops to their tenants, besides allowing the peasant farmers to hold their lands and sell their produce just as French peasant proprietors or English farmers do.

This does not mean that the Russian Revolution has been a failure. In Russia it is now established that capital was made for Man, and not Man for Capitalism. The children are taught the Christian morality of Communism instead of the Mammonist morality of Capitalism. The palaces and pleasure seats of the plutocrats are used for the recreation of workers instead of for the enervation of extravagant wasters. Idle ladies and gentlemen are treated with salutary contempt, whilst the worker’s blouse is duly honored. The treasures of art, respected and preserved with a cultural conscientiousness which puts to shame our own lootings in China, and our iconoclasms and vandalisms at home, are accessible to everyone. The Greek Church is tolerated (the Bolsheviks forbore to cut off their Archbishop’s head as we cut off Archbishop Laud’s); but it is not, as the Church of England is, allowed without contradiction to tell little children lies about the Bible under pretence of giving them religious instruction, nor to teach them to reverence the merely rich as their betters. That sort of doctrine is officially and very properly disavowed as Dope.

All this seems to us too good to be true. It places the Soviet Government in the forefront of cultural civilization as far as good intention goes. But it is not Socialism. It still involves sufficient inequality of income to undo in the long run enough of its achievements to degrade the Communist Republic to the level of the old Capitalist Republics of France and America. In short, though it has made one of those transfers of political power which are the object of revolutions, and are forced through by simple slaughter and terror, and though this political transfer has increased Russian self-respect and changed the moral attitude of the Russian State from pro-Capitalist to anti-Capitalist, it has not yet established as much actual Communism as we have in England, nor even raised Russian wages to the English level.

The explanation of this is that Communism can spread only as Capitalism spread: that is, as a development of existing economic civilization and not by a sudden wholesale overthrow of it. What it proposes is not a destruction of the material utilities inherited from Capitalism, but a new way of managing them and distributing the wealth they produce. Now this development of Capitalism into a condition of ripeness for Socialization had not been reached in Russia; consequently the victorious Communist Bolsheviks in 1917 found themselves without any highly organized Capitalistic industry to build upon. They had on their hands an enormous agricultural country with a population of uncivilized peasants, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, cruel, and land-hungry. The cities, few and far between, with their relatively insignificant industries, often managed by foreigners, and their city proletariats living on family wages of five and threepence a week, were certainly in revolt against the misdistribution of wealth and leisure; but they were so far from being organized to begin Socialism that it was only in a very limited sense that they could be said to have begun urban civilization. There were no Port Sunlights and Bournvilles, no Ford factories in which workmen earn £9 in a five-day week and have their own motor cars, no industrial trusts of national dimensions, no public libraries, no great public departments manned by picked and tested civil servants, no crowds of men skilled in industrial management and secretarial business looking for employment, no nationalized and municipalized services with numerous and competent official staffs, no national insurance, no great Trade Union organization representing many millions of workmen and able to extort subsidies from Capitalist governments by threatening to stop the railways and cut off the coal supply, no fifty years of compulsory schooling supplemented by forty years of incessant propaganda of political science by Fabian and other lecturers, no overwhelming predominance of organized industry over individualist agriculture, no obvious breakdown of Capitalism under the strain of the war, no triumphant rescue by Socialism demonstrating that even those public departments that were bywords for incompetence and red tape were far more efficient than the commercial adventurers who derided them. Well may Mr Trotsky say that the secret of the completeness of the victory of the Russian Proletarian Revolution over Russian Capitalist civilization was that there was virtually no Capitalist civilization to triumph over, and that the Russian people had been saved from the corruption of bourgeois ideas, not by the famous metaphysical dialectic inherited by Marx from the philosopher Hegel, but by the fact that they are still primitive enough to be incapable of middle class ideas. In England, when Socialism is consummated it will plant the red flag on the summit of an already constructed pyramid; but the Russians have to build right up from the sand. We must build up Capitalism before we can turn it into Socialism. But meanwhile we must learn how to control it instead of letting it demoralize us, slaughter us, and half ruin us, as we have hitherto done in our ignorance.

Thus the fact that the Soviet has had to resort to controlled Capitalism and bourgeois enterprise, after denouncing them so fiercely under the Tsardom in the phrases used by Marx to denounce English Capitalism, does not mean that we shall have to recant in the same way when we complete our transfer of political power from the proprietary classes and their retainers to the Socialist proletariat. The Capitalism which the Russian Government is not only tolerating but encouraging would be for us, even now under Capitalism, an attempt to set back the clock. We could not get back to it if we tried, except by smashing our machinery, breaking up our industrial organization, burning all the plans and documents from which it could be reconstructed, and substituting an eighteenth for a twentieth century population.

The moral of all this is that though a political revolution may be necessary to break the power of the opponents of Socialism if they refuse to accept it as a Parliamentary reform, and resist it violently either by organizing what is now called Fascism or a _coup d’état_ to establish a Dictatorship of the Capitalists, yet neither a violent revolution nor a peacefully accepted series of parliamentary reforms can by themselves create Socialism, which is neither a battle cry nor an election catchword, but an elaborate arrangement of our production and distribution of wealth in such a manner that all our incomes shall be equal. This is why Socialists who understand their business are always against bloodshed. They are no milder than other people; but they know that bloodshed cannot do what they want, and that the indiscriminate destruction inseparable from civil war will retard it. Mr Sidney Webb’s much quoted and in some quarters much derided “inevitability of gradualness” is an inexorable fact. It does not, unfortunately, imply inevitability of peacefulness. We can fight over every step of the gradual process if we are foolish enough. We shall come to an armed struggle for political power between the parasitic proletariat and the Socialist proletariat if the Capitalist leaders of the parasitic proletariat throw Parliament and the Constitution over, and declare for a blood and iron settlement instead of a settlement by votes. But at the end of the fighting we shall all be the poorer, none the wiser, and some of us the deader. If the Socialists win, the road to Socialism may be cleared; but the pavement will be torn up and the goal as far off as ever.

All the historical precedents illustrate this. A monarchy may be changed into a republic, or an oligarchy into a democracy, or one oligarchy supplanted by another, if the people who favor the change kill enough of the people who oppose it to intimidate the rest; and when the change is made you may have factions fighting instead of voting for the official posts of power and honor until, as in South America in the nineteenth century, violent revolutions become so common that other countries hardly notice them; but no extremity of fighting and killing can alter the distribution of wealth or the means of producing it. The guillotining of 4000 people in eighteen months during the French Revolution left the people poorer than before; so that when the Public Prosecutor who had sent most of the 4000 to the guillotine was sent there himself, and the people cursed him as he passed to his death, he said, “Will your bread be any cheaper tomorrow, you fools?” That did not affect the Capitalist makers of the French Revolution, because they did not want to make the bread of the poor cheaper: they wanted to transfer the government of France from the King and the nobles to the middle class. But if they had been Socialists, aiming at making everything much cheaper except human life, they would have had to admit that the laugh was with Citizen Fouquier Tinville. And if William Pitt and the kings of Europe had let the French Revolution alone, and it had been as peaceful and parliamentary as our own revolutionary Reform Bill of 1832, it would have been equally futile as far as putting another pennorth of milk into baby’s mug was concerned.

Whenever our city proletarians, in the days before the dole (say 1885 for instance), were driven by unemployment to threaten to burn down the houses of the rich, the Socialists said “No: if you are foolish enough to suppose that burning houses will put an end to unemployment, at least have sense enough to burn down your own houses, most of which are unfit for human habitation. The houses of the rich are good houses, of which we have much too few.” Capitalism has produced not only slums but palaces and handsome villas, not only sweaters’ dens but first-rate factories, shipyards, steamships, ocean cables, services that are not only national but international, and what not. It has also produced a great deal of Communism, without which it could not exist for a single day (we need not go over all the examples already given: the roads and bridges and so forth). What Socialist in his senses would welcome a civil war that would destroy all or any of this, and leave his party, even if it were victorious, a heritage of blackened ruins and festering cemeteries? Capitalism has led up to Socialism by changing the industries of the country from petty enterprises conducted by petty proprietors into huge Trusts conducted by employed proletarians directing armies of workmen, operating with millions of capital on vast acreages of land. In short, Capitalism tends always to develop industries until they are on the scale of public affairs and ripe for transfer to public hands. To destroy them would be to wreck the prospects of Socialism. Even the proprietors who think that such a transfer would be robbery have at least the consolation of knowing that the thief does not destroy the property of the man he intends to rob, being as much interested in it as the person from whom he means to steal it. As to managing persons, Socialism will need many more of them than there are at present, and will give them much greater security in their jobs and dignity in their social standing than most of them can hope for under Capitalism.

And now I think we may dismiss the question whether the return of a decisive majority of Socialists to Parliament will pass without an appeal to unconstitutional violence by the capitalists and their supporters. Whether it does or not may matter a good deal to those unlucky persons who will lose their possessions or their lives in the struggle if there be a struggle; but when the shouting and the killing and the house burning are over the survivors must settle down to some stable form of government. The mess may have to be cleared up by a dictatorship like that of Napoleon the Third, King Alfonso, Cromwell, Napoleon, Mussolini, or Lenin; but dictatorial strong men soon die or lose their strength, and kings, generals, and proletarian dictators alike find that they cannot carry on for long without councils or parliaments of some sort, and that these will not work unless they are in some way representative of the public, because unless the citizens co-operate with the police the strongest government breaks down, as English government did in Ireland.

In the long run (which nowadays is a very short run) you must have your parliament and your settled constitution back again; and the risings and _coups d’état_, with all their bloodshed and burnings and executions, might as well have been cut out as far as the positive constructive work of Socialism is concerned. So we may just as well ignore all the battles that may or may not be fought, and go on to consider what may happen to the present Labor Party if its present constitutional growth be continued and consummated by the achievement of a decisive Socialist majority in Parliament, and its resumption of office, not, as in 1923-24, by the sufferance of the two Capitalist parties and virtually under their control, but with full power to carry out a proletarian policy, and, if it will, to make Socialism the established constitutional order in Britain.

76

CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY

Let us assume, then, that we have resigned ourselves, as we must sooner or later, to a parliamentary settlement of the quarrels between the Capitalists and the Socialists. Mind: I cannot, women and men being what they are, offer you any sincere assurances that this will occur without all the customary devilments. Every possible wrong and wicked way may be tried before their exhaustion drives us back into the right way. Attempts at a general strike, a form of national suicide which sane people are bound to resist by every extremity of violent coercion, may lead to a proclamation of martial law by the Government, whether it be a Labor or a Capitalist Government, followed by slaughtering of mobs, terroristic shelling of cities (as in the case of Dublin), burning and looting of country houses, shooting of police officers at sight as uniformed enemies of the people, and a hectic time for those to whom hating and fighting and killing are a glorious sport that makes life worth living and death worth dying. Or if the modern machine gun, the bombing aeroplane, and the poison gas shell make military coercion irresistible, or if the general strikers have sufficient sense shot into them to see that blockade and boycott are not good tactics for the productive proletariat because they themselves are necessarily the first victims of it, still Parliament may be so split up into contending groups as to become unworkable, forcing the nation to fall back on a dictatorship. The dictator may be another Bismarck ruling in the name of a royal personage, or a forceful individual risen from the ranks like Mahomet or Brigham Young or Signor Mussolini, or a general like Cæsar or Napoleon or Primo di Rivera.

In the course of these social convulsions you and I may be outraged, shot, gas poisoned, burnt out of house and home, financially ruined, just as anyone else may. We must resign ourselves to such epidemics of human pugnacity and egotism just as we have to resign ourselves to epidemics of measles. Measles are less bitter to us because we have at least never done anything to encourage them, whereas we have recklessly taught our children to glorify pugnacity and to identify gentility and honor with the keeping down of the poor and the keeping up of the rich, thus producing an insanitary condition of public morals which makes periodic epidemics of violence and class hatred inevitable.

But sooner or later, the irreconcilables exterminate oneanother like the Kilkenny cats; for when the toughest faction has exterminated all the other factions it proceeds to exterminate itself. And the dictators die as Cromwell died, or grow old and are sent to the dustbin by ambitious young monarchs as Bismarck was; and dictators and ambitious monarchs alike find that autocracy is not today a practical form of government except in little tribes like Brigham Young’s Latter Day Saints, nor even complete there. The nearest thing to it that will now hold together is the presidency of the United States of America; and the President, autocrat as he is for his four years of office, has to work with a Cabinet, deal with a Congress and a Senate, and abide the result of popular elections. To this parliamentary complexion we must all come at last. Every bumptious idiot thinks himself a born ruler of men; every snob thinks that the common people must be kept in their present place or shot down if society is to be preserved; every proletarian who resents his position wants to strike at something or somebody more vulnerable than the capitalist system in the abstract; but when they have all done their worst the dead they have slain must be buried, the houses they have burned rebuilt, and the hundred other messes they have left cleared up by women and men with sense enough to take counsel together without coming to blows, and business ability enough to organize the work of the community. These sensible ones may not always have been sensible: some of them may have done their full share of mischief before the necessary sanity was branded into them by bitter experience or horrified contemplation of the results of anarchy; but between the naturally sensible people and the chastened ones there will finally be some sort of Parliament to conduct the nation’s business, unless indeed civilization has been so completely wrecked in the preliminary quarrels that there is no nation worth troubling about left, and consequently no national business to transact. That has often happened.

However, let us put all disagreeable possibilities out of our heads for the moment, and consider how Socialism is likely to advance in a Parliament kept in working order by the establishment of two main parties competing for office and power: one professing to resist the advance and the other to further it, but both forced by the need for gaining some sort of control of the runaway car of Capitalism to take many steps when in power which they vehemently denounced when in opposition, and in the long run both contributing about equally (as hitherto) to the redistribution of the national income and the substitution of public for private property in land and industrial organization.

Do not fear that I am about to inflict a complete program on you. Even if I could foresee it I know better than to weary you to that extent. All I intend is to give you a notion of the sort of legislation that is likely to be enacted, and of the sort of opposition it is likely to provoke; so that you may be better able to judge on which side you should vote when an election gives you the chance, or when a seat on some parliamentary body, local or central, calls you to more direct action. You must understand that my designs on you do not include making you what is called a good party woman. Rather do I seek to add you to that floating body of openminded voters who are quite ready to vote for this party today and for the opposite party tomorrow if you think the balance of good sense and practical ability has changed (possibly by the ageing of the leaders) or that your former choice has taken a wrong turn concerning some proposed measure of cardinal importance. Good party people think such openmindedness disloyal; but in politics there should be no loyalty except to the public good. If, however, you prefer to vote for the same side every time through thick and thin, why not find some person who has made the same resolution in support of the opposite party? Then, as they say in Parliament, you can pair with her: that is, you can both agree never to vote at all, which will have the same effect as if you voted opposite ways; and neither of you need ever trouble to vote again.

We are agreed, I take it, that practical Socialism must proceed by the Government nationalizing our industries one at a time by a series of properly compensated expropriations, after an elaborate preparation for their administration by a body of civil servants, who will consist largely of the old employees, but who will be controlled and financed by Government departments manned by public servants very superior in average ability, training, and social dignity to the commercial profiteers and financial gamblers who now have all our livelihoods at their mercy.

Now this preparation and nationalization will hardly be possible unless the voters have at least a rough notion of what the Government is doing, and approve of it. They may not understand Socialism as a whole; but they can understand nationalization of the coal mines quite well enough to desire it and vote for its advocates, if not for the sake of the welfare of the nation, at least for the sake of getting their coal cheaper. Just so with the railways and transport services generally: the most prejudiced Conservatives may vote for their nationalization on its merits as an isolated measure, for the sake of cheaper travelling and reasonable freights for internal produce. A few big nationalizations effected with this sort of popular support will make nationalization as normal a part of our social policy as old age pensions are now, though it seems only the other day that such pensions were denounced as rank Communism, which indeed they are.

There is therefore no hope for Capitalism in the difficulty that baffled the Soviet in dealing with the land: that is, that the Russian people were not Communists, and would not work the Communist system except under a compulsion which it was impossible to apply on a sufficiently large scale, because if a system can be maintained only by half the ablebodied persons in the country being paid to do nothing but stand over the other half, rifle in hand, then it is not a practicable system and may as well be dropped first as last. But a series of properly prepared nationalizations may not only be understood and voted for by people who would be quite shocked if they were called Socialists, but would fit in perfectly with the habits of the masses who take their bread as it comes and never think about anything of a public nature. To them the change would be only a change of masters, to which they are so accustomed that it would not strike them as a change at all, whilst it would be also a change in the remuneration, dignity, and certainty of employment, which is just what they are always clamoring for. This overcomes the difficulty, familiar to all reformers, that it is much easier to induce people to do things in the way to which they are accustomed, even though it is detestably bad for them, than to try a new system, even though it promises to be millennially good for them.

Socialistic legislation, then, will be no mere matter of forbidding people to be rich, and calling a policeman when the law is broken. It means an active interference in the production and distribution of the nation’s income; and every step of it will require a new department or extension of the civil service or the municipal service to execute and manage it. If we had sense enough to make a law that every baby, destitute or not, should have plenty of bread and milk and a good house to shelter it, that law would remain a dead letter until all the necessary bakeries and dairies and builders’ yards were ready. If we made a law that every ablebodied adult should put in a day’s work for his or her country every day, we could not carry out that law until we had a job ready for everybody. All constructive and productive legislation is quite different from the Ten Commandments: it means the employment of masses of men, the establishing of offices and works, the provision of large sums of money to start with, and the services of persons of special ability to direct. Without these, all the Royal or Dictatorial Proclamations, all the Commandments, and all the Communist Manifestoes are waste paper as far as the establishment of practical Socialism is concerned.