Chapter V: Part 5

In the same way the standard of education and culture has risen. Nowadays a parlormaid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective. As Queen Victoria managed to get on very well in spite of her ignorance it cannot be said that the knowledge in which the parlormaid has the advantage of her is a necessity of civilized life any more than a telephone is; but civilized life and highly civilized life are different: what is enough for one is not enough for the other. Take a half-civilized girl into a house; and though she may be stronger and more willing and goodnatured than many highly civilized girls are, she will smash everything that will not stand the roughest handling. She will be unable to take or send written messages; and as to understanding or using such civilized contrivances as watches, baths, sewing machines, and electric heaters and sweepers, you will be fortunate if you can induce her to turn off a tap instead of leaving the water running. And your civilized maid who can be trusted with all these things would be like a bull in a china shop if she were let loose in the laboratories where highly trained scientific workers use machines and instruments of such delicacy that their movements are as invisible as that of the hour hands of our clocks, handling and controlling poisons and explosives of the most dangerous kind; or in the operating rooms where surgeons have to do things in which a slip of the hand might prove fatal. If every housemaid had the delicacy of touch, the knowledge, and the patience that are needed in the laboratories and operating theatres (where they are unfortunately not always forthcoming), the most wonderful changes could be made in our housekeeping: we could not only have the present work done much more quickly, perfectly, and cleanly, but we could do a great deal that is now quite impossible.

Now it costs more to educate and train a laboratory worker than a housemaid, and more to train a housemaid than to catch a savage. What is enough in one case is not enough in another. Therefore to ask baldly how much is enough to live on is to ask an unanswerable question. It all depends on what sort of life you propose to live. What is enough for the life of a tramp is not enough for a highly civilized life, with its personal refinements and its atmosphere of music, art, literature, religion, science, and philosophy. Of these things we can never have enough: there is always something new to be discovered and something old to be bettered. In short, there is no such thing as enough civilization, though there may be enough of any particular thing like bread or boots at any particular moment. If being poor means wanting something more and something better than we have--and it is hard to say what else feeling poor means--then we shall always feel poor no matter how much money we have, because, though we may have enough of this thing or of that thing, we shall never have enough of everything. Consequently if it be proposed to give some people enough, and others more than enough, the scheme will break down; for all the money will be used up before anybody will be content. Nobody will stop asking for more for the sake of setting up and maintaining a fancy class of pampered persons who, after all, will be even more discontented than their poorer neighbors.

The only way out of this difficulty is to give everybody the same, which is the Socialist solution of the distribution problem. But you may tell me that you are prepared to swallow this difficulty rather than swallow Socialism. Most of us begin like that. What converts us is the discovery of the terrible array of evils around us and dangers in front of us which we dare not ignore. You may be unable to see any beauty in equality of income. But the least idealistic woman can see the disasters of inequality when the evils with which she is herself in daily conflict are traced to it; and I am now going to shew you the connexion.

15

WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST

To test the effects of our unequal division of the nation’s income on our national institutions and on the life and prosperity of the whole people we must view the industry of the country, and see how it is affected by inequality of income. We must view one by one the institution of marriage, the working of the courts of justice, the honesty of our Houses of Parliament, the spiritual independence of the Church, the usefulness of our schools, and the quality of our newspapers, and consider how each of them is dependent on the way in which money is distributed.

Beginning with industry, we are at once plunged into what we call political economy, to distinguish it from the domestic economy with which we are all only too familiar. Men find political economy a dry and difficult subject: they shirk it as they shirk housekeeping; yet it means nothing more abstruse than the art of managing a country as a housekeeper manages a house. If the men shirk it the women must tackle it. The nation has a certain income to manage on just as a housekeeper has; and the problem is how to spend that income to the greatest general advantage.

Now the first thing a housekeeper has to settle is what things are wanted most, and what things can be done without at a pinch. This means that the housekeeper must settle the order in which things are desirable. For example, if, when there is not enough food in the house, she goes out and spends all her money on a bottle of scent and an imitation pearl necklace, she will be called a vain and silly woman and a bad mother. But a stateswoman would call her simply a bad economist: one who does not know what should come first when money has to be spent. No woman is fit to have charge of a household who has not sense and self-control enough to see that food and clothing and housing and firing come first, and that bottles of scent and pearl necklaces, imitation or real, come a long way afterwards. Even in the jeweller’s shop a wrist watch comes before a necklace as being more useful. I am not saying that pretty things are not useful: they are very useful and quite right in their proper order; but they do not come first. A Bible may be a very proper present to give to a child; but to give a starving child a Bible instead of a piece of bread and a cup of milk would be the act of a lunatic. A woman’s mind is more wonderful than her flesh; but if her flesh is not fed her mind will perish, whereas if you feed her flesh her mind will take care of itself and of her flesh as well. Food comes first.

Think of the whole country as a big household, and the whole nation as a big family, which is what they really are. What do we see? Half-fed, badly clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the money that should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being spent in millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs, racing motor cars, January strawberries that taste like corks, and all sorts of extravagances. One sister of the national family has a single pair of leaking boots that keep her sniffing all through the winter, and no handkerchief to wipe her nose with. Another has forty pairs of high-heeled shoes and dozens of handkerchiefs. A little brother is trying to grow up on a penn’orth of food a day, and is breaking his mother’s heart and wearing out her patience by asking continually for more, whilst a big brother, spending five or six pounds on his dinner at a fashionable hotel, followed by supper at a night club, is in the doctor’s hands because he is eating and drinking too much.

Now this is shockingly bad political economy. When thoughtless people are asked to explain it they say “Oh, the woman with the forty shoes and the man drinking at the night club got their money from their father who made a fortune by speculating in rubber; and the girl with the broken boots, and the troublesome boy whose mother has just clouted his head, are only riffraff from the slums”. That is true; but it does not alter the fact that the nation that spends money on champagne before it has provided enough milk for its babies, or gives dainty meals to Sealyham terriers and Alsatian wolf-hounds and Pekingese dogs whilst the infant mortality rate shews that its children are dying by thousands from insufficient nourishment, is a badly managed, silly, vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the long run no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth, and thinking itself three times as rich as before when all the pet dogs have litters of six puppies a couple. The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.

But it is no use blaming the owners of the dogs. All these mischievous absurdities exist, not because any sane person ever wanted them to exist, but because they must occur whenever some families are very much richer than others. The rich man, who, as husband and father, drags the woman with him, begins as every one else begins, by buying food, clothing, and a roof to shelter them. The poor man does the same. But when the poor man has spent all he can afford on these necessaries, he is still short of them: his food is insufficient; his clothes are old and dirty; his lodging is a single room or part of one, and unwholesome even at that. But when the rich man has fed himself, and dressed himself, and housed himself as sumptuously as possible, he has still plenty of money left to indulge his tastes and fancies and make a show in the world. Whilst the poor man says “I want more bread, more clothes, and a better house for my family; but I cannot pay for them”, the rich man says “I want a fleet of motor cars, a yacht, diamonds and pearls for my wife and daughters, and a shooting-box in Scotland. Money is no object: I can pay and overpay for them ten times over”. Naturally men of business set to work at once to have the cars and the yacht made, the diamonds dug out in Africa, the pearls fished for, and the shooting lodge built, paying no attention to the poor man with his crying needs and empty pockets.

To put the same thing in another way, the poor man needs to have labor employed in making the things he is short of: that is, in baking, weaving, tailoring, and plain building; but he cannot pay the master bakers and weavers enough to enable them to pay the wages of such labor. The rich man meanwhile is offering money enough to provide good wages for all the work required to please him. All the people who take his money may be working hard; but their work is pampering people who have too much instead of feeding people who have too little; therefore it is misapplied and wasted, keeping the country poor and even making it poorer for the sake of keeping a few people rich.

It is no excuse for such a state of things that the rich give employment. There is no merit in giving employment: a murderer gives employment to the hangman; and a motorist who runs over a child gives employment to an ambulance porter, a doctor, an undertaker, a clergyman, a mourning-dressmaker, a hearse driver, a gravedigger: in short, to so many worthy people that when he ends by killing himself it seems ungrateful not to erect a statue to him as a public benefactor. The money with which the rich give the wrong sort of employment would give the right sort of employment if it were equally distributed; for then there would be no money offered for motor cars and diamonds until everyone was fed, clothed, and lodged, nor any wages offered to men and women to leave useful employments and become servants to idlers. There would be less ostentation, less idleness, less wastefulness, less uselessness; but there would be more food, more clothing, better houses, more security, more health, more virtue: in a word, more real prosperity.

16

EUGENICS

The question has been asked, would the masses be any better for having more money? One’s first impulse on hearing such a silly question is to take the lady who asks it by the shoulders and give her a violent shaking. If a fully fed, presentably clothed, decently housed, fairly literate and cultivated and gently mannered family is not better than a half-starved, ragged, frowsy, overcrowded one, there is no meaning in words.

Still, let us not lose our tempers. A well-fed, clean, decently lodged woman is better than one trying to live on tea and rashers in dirty clothes in a verminous garret. But so is a well-fed clean sow better than a hungry dirty one. She is a sow all the same; and you cannot make a silk purse out of her ear. If the common women of the future were to be no better than our rich ladies today, even at their best, the improvement would leave us deeply dissatisfied. And that dissatisfaction would be a divine dissatisfaction. Let us consider, then, what effect equality of income would have on the quality of our people as human beings.

There are some who say that if you want better people you must breed them as carefully as you breed thoroughbred horses and pedigree boars. No doubt you must; but there are two difficulties. First, you cannot very well mate men and women as you mate bulls and cows, stallions and mares, boars and sows, without giving them any choice in the matter. Second, even if you could, you would not know how to do it, because you would not know what sort of human being you wanted to breed. In the case of a horse or a pig the matter is very simple: you want either a very fast horse for racing or a very strong horse for drawing loads; and in the case of the pig you want simply plenty of bacon. And yet, simple as that is, any breeder of these animals will tell you that he has a great many failures no matter how careful he is.

The moment you ask yourself what sort of child you want, beyond preferring a boy or a girl, you have to confess that you do not know. At best you can mention a few sorts that you dont want: for instance, you dont want cripples, deaf mutes, blind, imbecile, epileptic, or drunken children. But even these you do not know how to avoid as there is often nothing visibly wrong with the parents of such unfortunates. When you turn from what you dont want to what you do want you may say that you want good children; but a good child means only a child that gives its parents no trouble; and some very useful men and women have been very troublesome children. Energetic, imaginative, enterprising, brave children are never out of mischief from their parents’ point of view. And grown-up geniuses are seldom liked until they are dead. Considering that we poisoned Socrates, crucified Christ, and burnt Joan of Arc amid popular applause, because, after a trial by responsible lawyers and Churchmen, we decided that they were too wicked to be allowed to live, we can hardly set up to be judges of goodness or to have any sincere liking for it.

Even if we were willing to trust any political authority to select our husbands and wives for us with a view to improving the race, the officials would be hopelessly puzzled as to how to select. They might begin with some rough idea of preventing the marriage of persons with any taint of consumption or madness or syphilis or addiction to drugs or drink in their families; but that would end in nobody being married at all, as there is practically no family quite free from such taints. As to moral excellence, what model would they take as desirable? St Francis, George Fox, William Penn, John Wesley, and George Washington? or Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Bismarck? It takes all sorts to make a world; and the notion of a Government department trying to make out how many different types were necessary, and how many persons of each type, and proceeding to breed them by appropriate marriages, is amusing but not practicable. There is nothing for it but to let people choose their mates for themselves, and trust to Nature to produce a good result.

“Just as we do at present, in fact,” some will say. But that is just what we do not do at present. How much choice has anyone among us when the time comes to choose a mate? Nature may point out a woman’s mate to her by making her fall in love at first sight with the man who would be the best mate for her; but unless that man happens to have about the same income as her father, he is out of her class and out of her reach, whether above her or below her. She finds she must marry, not the man she likes, but the man she can get; and he is not often the same man.

The man is in the same predicament. We all know by instinct that it is unnatural to marry for money or social position instead of for love; yet we have arranged matters so that we must all marry more or less for money or social position or both. It is easy to say to Miss Smith or Miss Jones “Follow the promptings of your heart, my dear; and marry the dustman or marry the duke, whichever you prefer”. But she cannot marry the dustman; and the duke cannot marry her; because they and their relatives have not the same manners and habits; and people with different manners and habits cannot live together. And it is difference of income that makes difference of manners and habits. Miss Smith and Miss Jones have finally to make up their minds to like what they can get, because they can very seldom get what they like; and it is safe to say that in the great majority of marriages at present Nature has very little part in the choice compared to circumstances. Unsuitable marriages, unhappy homes, ugly children are terribly common; because the young woman who ought to have all the unmarried young men in the country open to her choice, with dozens of other strings to her bow in the event of her first choice not feeling a reciprocal attraction, finds that in fact she has to choose between two or three in her own class, and has to allow herself to be much petted and tempted by physical endearments, or made desperate by neglect, before she can persuade herself that she really loves the one she dislikes least.

Under such circumstances we shall never get a well-bred race; and it is all the fault of inequality of income. If every family were brought up at the same cost, we should all have the same habits, manners, culture, and refinement; and the dustman’s daughter could marry the duke’s son as easily as a stockbroker’s son now marries a bank manager’s daughter. Nobody would marry for money, because there would be no money to be gained or lost by marriage. No woman would have to turn her back on a man she loved because he was poor, or be herself passed by for the same reason. All the disappointments would be natural and inevitable disappointments; and there would be plenty of alternatives and consolations. If the race did not improve under these circumstances, it must be unimprovable. And even if it be so, the gain in happiness by getting rid of the heartbreak that now makes the world, and especially its women, so miserable, would make the equalization of income worth while even if all the other arguments for it did not exist.

17

THE COURTS OF LAW

When we come to the courts of law the hopeless incompatibility of inequality of income with justice is so plain that you must have been struck by it if you ever notice such things. The very first condition of legal justice is that it shall be no respecter of persons; that it shall hold the balance impartially between the laborer’s wife and the millionairess; and that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty except by the verdict of a jury of her peers, meaning her equals. Now no laborer is ever tried by a jury of his peers: he is tried by a jury of ratepayers who have a very strong class prejudice against him because they have larger incomes, and consider themselves better men on that account. Even a rich man tried by a common jury has to reckon with their envy as well as their subservience to wealth. Thus it is a common saying with us that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. This is not strictly true: the law is the same for everybody: it is the incomes that need changing. The civil law by which contracts are enforced, and redress given for slanders and injuries that are not dealt with by the police, requires so much legal knowledge and artistic eloquence to set it in motion that an ordinary woman with no legal knowledge or eloquence can get the benefit of it only by employing lawyers whom she has to pay very highly, which means, of course, that the rich woman can afford to go to law and the poor woman cannot. The rich woman can terrorize the poor woman by threatening to go to law with her if her demands are not complied with. She can disregard the poor woman’s rights, and tell her that if she is dissatisfied she can take her complaint into court, knowing very well that her victim’s poverty and ignorance will prevent her from obtaining proper legal advice and protection. When a rich woman takes a fancy to a poor woman’s husband, and persuades him to abandon her, she can practically buy him by starving the abandoned wife into divorcing him for a sufficient allowance. In America, where the wife can sue for damages, the price of the divorce is higher: that is all. When the abandoned wife cannot be starved into the divorce court she can stand out for an exorbitant price before setting her husband free to remarry; and an abandoned husband can sell out likewise. Men and women now trap one another into marriage with this object to such an extent that in some States the word alimony has come to mean simply blackmail. Mind: I am not disparaging either divorce or alimony. What is wrong is that any woman should by mere superiority of income be able to make another woman’s husband much more comfortable than his wife can, or that any man should be able to offer another man’s wife luxuries that her husband cannot afford: in short, that money should have any weight whatever either in contracting or dissolving a marriage.

The criminal law, though we read murder trials and the like so eagerly, is less important than the civil law, because only a few exceptional people commit crimes, whilst we all marry and make civil contracts. Besides, the police set the criminal law in motion without charging the injured party anything. Nevertheless, rich prisoners are favored by being able to spend large sums in engaging famous barristers to plead for them, hunting up evidence all over the country or indeed over the world, bribing or intimidating witnesses, and exhausting every possible form of appeal and method of delay. We are fond of pointing to American cases of rich men at large who would have been hanged or electrocuted if they had been poor. But who knows how many poor people are in prison in England who might have been acquitted if they could have spent a few hundred pounds on their defence?

The laws themselves are contaminated at their very source by being made by rich men. Nominally all adult men and women are eligible to sit in Parliament and make laws if they can persuade enough people to vote for them. Something has been done of late years to make it possible for poor persons to avail themselves of this right. Members of Parliament now receive salaries; and certain election expenses formerly borne by the candidate are now public charges. But the candidate must put down £150 to start with; and it still costs from five hundred to a thousand pounds to contest a parliamentary election. Even when the candidate is successful, the salary of four hundred a year, which carries with it no pension and no prospects when the seat is lost (as it may be at the next election) is not sufficient for the sort of life in London a member of Parliament is obliged to lead. This gives the rich such an advantage that though the poor are in a nine-to-one majority in the country their representatives are in a minority in Parliament; and most of the time of Parliament is taken up, not by discussing what is best for the nation, and passing laws accordingly, but by the class struggle set up by the rich majority trying to maintain and extend its privileges against the poor minority trying to curtail or abolish them. That is, in pure waste of it.

By far the most unjust and mischievous privilege claimed by the rich is the privilege to be idle with complete legal impunity; and unfortunately they have established this privilege so firmly that we take it as a matter of course, and even venerate it as the mark of a real lady or gentleman, without ever considering that a person who consumes goods or accepts services without producing equivalent goods or performing equivalent services in return inflicts on the country precisely the same injury as a thief does: in fact, that is what theft means. We do not dream of allowing people to murder, kidnap, break into houses, sink, burn, and destroy at sea or on land, or claim exemption from military service, merely because they have inherited a landed estate or a thousand a year from some industrious ancestor; yet we tolerate idling, which does more harm in one year than all the legally punishable crimes in the world in ten. The rich, through their majority in Parliament, punish with ruthless severity such forms of theft as burglary, forgery, embezzlement, pocket-picking, larceny, and highway robbery, whilst they exempt rich idling, and even hold it up as a highly honorable way of life, thereby teaching our children that working for a livelihood is inferior, derogatory, and disgraceful. To live like a drone on the labor and service of others is to be a lady or a gentleman: to enrich the country by labor and service is to be base, lowly, vulgar, contemptible, fed and clothed and lodged on the assumption that anything is good enough for hewers of wood and drawers of water. This is nothing else than an attempt to turn the order of Nature upside down, and to take “Evil: be thou my good” as the national motto. If we persist in it, it must finally bring upon us another of those wrecks of civilization in which all the great empires in the past have crashed. Yet nothing can prevent this happening where income is unequally distributed, because the laws will inevitably be made by the rich; and the law that all must work, which should come before every other law, is a law that the rich never make.

18

THE IDLE RICH

Do not let yourself be put out at this point by the fact that people with large unearned incomes are by no means always loafing or lolling. The energetic ones often overexert themselves, and have to take “rest cures” to recover. Those who try to make life one long holiday find that they need a holiday from that too. Idling is so unnatural and boresome that the world of the idle rich, as they are called, is a world of ceaseless activities of the most fatiguing kind. You may find on old bookshelves a forgotten nineteenth century book in which a Victorian lady of fashion defended herself against the charge of idleness by describing her daily routine of fashion both as hostess and visitor in London. I would cheerfully sweep a crossing rather than be condemned to it. In the country, sport is so elaborately organized that every month in the year has its special variety: the necessary fishes and birds and animals are so carefully bred and preserved for the purpose that there is always something to be killed. Risks and exposures and athletic feats of which the poor in towns know nothing are matters of course in the country house, where broken collar bones are hardly exceptional enough to be classed as accidents. If sports fail there are always games: ski-ing and tobogganing, polo, tennis, skating on artificial ice, and so forth, involving much more exhausting physical exercise than many poor women would care to face. A young lady, after a day of such exercise, will, between dinner and bedtime, dance a longer distance than the postman walks. In fact the only people who are disgustingly idle are the children of those who have just become rich, the new rich as they are called. As these unfortunate fortunates have had neither the athletic training nor the social discipline of the old rich, with whom what we call high life is a skilled art needing a stern apprenticeship, they do not know what to do with themselves; and their resourceless loafing and consumption of chocolate creams, cigarets, cocktails, and the sillier sort of novels and illustrated papers whilst they drift about in motor cars from one big hotel to another, is pitiable. But in the next generation they either relapse into poverty or go to school with the class they can now afford to belong to, and acquire its accomplishments, its discipline, and its manners.

But beside this Spartan routine invented to employ people who have not to work for their living, and which, you will notice, is a survival of the old tribal order in which the braves hunted and fought whilst the squaws did the domestic work, there is the necessary public work which must be done by a governing class if it is to keep all political power in its own hands. By not paying for this work, or paying so little for it that nobody without an unearned income can afford to undertake it, and by attaching to the upper division of the civil service examination tests that only expensively educated persons can pass, this work is kept in the hands of the rich. That is the explanation of the otherwise unaccountable way in which the proprietary class has opposed every attempt to attach sufficient salaries to parliamentary work to make those who do it self-supporting, although the proprietors themselves were the holders of the main parliamentary posts. Though they officered the army, they did everything they could to make it impossible for an officer to live on his pay. Though they contested every parliamentary seat, they opposed the public payment of members of Parliament and their election expenses. Though they regarded the diplomatic service as a preserve for their younger sons, they attached to it the condition that no youth should be eligible for it without a private income of four hundred a year. They fought, and still fight, against making government a self-supporting occupation, because the effect would be to throw it open to the unpropertied, and destroy their own monopoly of it.

But as the work of government must be done, they must do it themselves if they will not let other people do it. Consequently you find rich men working in Parliament, in diplomacy, in the army, in the magistracy, and on local public bodies, to say nothing of the management of their own estates. Men so working cannot accurately be called the idle rich. Unfortunately they do all this governing work with a bias in favour of the privilege of their class to be idle. From the point of view of the public good, it would be far better if they amused themselves like most of their class, and left the work of governing to be done by well-paid officials and ministers whose interests were those of the nation as a whole.

The stamina of the women of the idle class was formerly maintained by their work in childbearing and family housekeeping. But at present many of them resort to contraception (called birth control) not to regulate the number of their children and the time of their birth, but to avoid bearing any children at all. Hotel life, or life in service flats, or the delegation of household management to professional ladies who are practically private hotel managers, is more and more substituted for old-fashioned domestic housekeeping. If this were an ordinary division of labor to enable a woman to devote herself entirely to a professional career of some sort, it would be defensible; for many women, as you must often have noticed, have no aptitude for domestic work, and are as much out of place in the kitchen and nursery as all men are conventionally supposed to be; but when you have women with unearned and excessive incomes its possibility involves an equal possibility of complete uselessness and self-indulgence, of which many rich women, knowing no better, take the fullest advantage.

There are always a few cases in which exceptional men and women with sufficient unearned income to maintain them handsomely without a stroke of work are found working harder than most of those who have to do it for a living, and spending most of their money on attempts to better the world. Florence Nightingale organized the hospital work of the Crimean war, including the knocking of some sense into the heads of the army medical staff, and much disgusting and dangerous drudgery in the wards, when she had the means to live comfortably at home doing nothing. John Ruskin published accounts of how he had spent his comfortable income and what work he had done, to shew that he, at least, was an honest worker and a faithful administrator of the part of the national income that had fallen to his lot. This was so little understood that people concluded that he must have gone out of his mind; and as he afterwards did, like Dean Swift, succumb to the melancholia and exasperation induced by the wickedness and stupidity of capitalistic civilization, they joyfully persuaded themselves that they had been quite right about him.

But when every possible qualification of the words Idle Rich has been made, and it is fully understood that idle does not mean doing nothing (which is impossible), but doing nothing useful, and continually consuming without producing, the term applies to the class, numbering at the extreme outside one-tenth of the population, to maintain whom in their idleness the other nine-tenths are kept in a condition of slavery so complete that their slavery is not even legalized as such: hunger keeps them sufficiently in order without imposing on their masters any of those obligations which make slaves so expensive to their owners. What is more, any attempt on the part of a rich woman to do a stroke of ordinary work for the sake of her health would be bitterly resented by the poor because, from their point of view, she would be a rich woman meanly doing a poor woman out of a job.

And now comes the crowning irony of it all, which many intelligent women to whom irony means nothing will prefer to call the judgment of God. When we have conferred on these people the coveted privilege of having plenty of money and nothing to do (our idiotic receipt for perfect happiness and perfect freedom) we find that we have made them so wretched and unhealthy that instead of doing nothing they are always doing something “to keep themselves fit” for doing nothing; and instead of doing what they like, they bind themselves to a laborious routine of what they call society and pleasure which you could not impose on a parlormaid without receiving notice instantly, or on a Trappist without driving him to turn atheist to escape from it. Only one part of it, the Red Indian part, the frank return to primitive life, the hunting and shooting and country life, is bearable; and one has to be by nature half a savage to enjoy that continually. So much for the exertions of the idle rich!

19

CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS

Just as Parliament and the Courts are captured by the rich, so is the Church. The average parson does not teach honesty and equality in the village school: he teaches deference to the merely rich, and calls that loyalty and religion. He is the ally of the squire, who, as magistrate, administers the laws made in the interests of the rich by the parliament of rich men, and calls that justice. The villagers, having no experience of any other sort of religion or law, soon lose all respect for both, and become merely cynical. They may touch their hats and curtsey respectfully; but they whisper to oneanother that the squire, no matter how kind his wife may be at Christmas by way of ransom, is a despoiler and oppressor of the poor, and the parson a hypocrite. In revolutions, it is the respectful peasants who burn the country houses and parsonages, and rush to the cathedrals to deface the statues, shatter the stained windows, and wreck the organ.

By the way, you may know parsons who are not like that. At least I do. There are always men and women who will stand out against injustice, no matter how prosperous and well-spoken-of it may be. But the result is that they are ill-spoken-of themselves in the most influential quarters. Our society must be judged, not by its few rebels, but by its millions of obedient subjects.

The same corruption reaches the children in all our schools. Schoolmasters who teach their pupils such vital elementary truths about their duty to their country as that they should despise and pursue as criminals all able-bodied adults who do not by personal service pull their weight in the social boat, are dismissed from their employment, and sometimes prosecuted for sedition. And from this elementary morality up to the most abstruse and philosophic teaching in the universities, the same corruption extends. Science becomes a propaganda of quack cures, manufactured by companies in which the rich hold shares, for the diseases of the poor who need only better food and sanitary houses, and of the rich who need only useful occupation, to keep them both in health. Political economy becomes an impudent demonstration that the wages of the poor cannot be raised; that without the idle rich we should perish for lack of capital and employment; and that if the poor would take care to have fewer children everything would be for the best in the worst of all possible worlds.

Thus the poor are kept poor by their ignorance; and those whose parents are too well-off to make it possible to keep them ignorant, and who receive what is called a complete education, are taught so many flat lies that their false knowledge is more dangerous than the untutored natural wit of savages. We all blame the ex-Kaiser for banishing from the German schools and universities all teachers who did not teach that history, science, and religion all prove that the rule of the house of Hohenzollern: that is, of his own rich family, is the highest form of government possible to mankind; but we do the same thing ourselves, except that the worship of rich idleness in general is substituted for the worship of the Hohenzollern family in particular, though the Hohenzollerns have family traditions (including the learning of a common craft by every man of them) which make them much more responsible than any Tom or Dick who may happen to have made a huge fortune in business.

As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read, the corruption of the schools would not matter so much if the Press were free. But the Press is not free. As it costs at least quarter of a million of money to establish a daily newspaper in London, the newspapers are owned by rich men. And they depend on the advertisements of other rich men. Editors and journalists who express opinions in print that are opposed to the interests of the rich are dismissed and replaced by subservient ones. The newspapers therefore must continue the work begun by the schools and colleges; so that only the strongest and most independent and original minds can escape from the mass of false doctrine that is impressed on them by the combined and incessant suggestion and persuasion of Parliament, the law-courts, the Church, the schools, and the Press. We are all brought up wrongheaded to keep us willing slaves instead of rebellious ones.

What makes this so hard to discover and to believe is that the false teaching is mixed up with a great deal of truth, because up to a certain point the interests of the rich are the same as the interests of everybody else. It is only where their interests differ from those of their neighbors that the deception begins. For example, the rich dread railway accidents as much as the poor; consequently the law on railway accidents, the sermons about railway accidents, the school teaching about railway accidents, and the newspaper articles about them are all quite honestly directed to the purpose of preventing railway accidents. But when anyone suggests that there would be fewer railway accidents if the railwaymen worked fewer hours and had better wages, or that in the division of the railway fares between the shareholders and the workers the shareholders should get less and the workers more, or that railway travelling would be safer if the railways were in the hands of the nation like the posts and the telegraphs, there is an immediate outcry in the Press and in Parliament against such suggestions, coupled with denunciations of those who make them as Bolsheviks or whatever other epithet may be in fashion for the moment as a term of the most infamous discredit.

20

WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT

You may ask why not only the rich but the poor put up with all this, and even passionately defend it as an entirely beneficial public morality. I can only say that the defence is not unanimous: it is always being attacked at one point or another by public-spirited reformers and by persons whose wrongs are unbearable. But taking it in the lump I should say that the evil of the corruption and falsification of law, religion, education, and public opinion is so enormous that the minds of ordinary people are unable to grasp it, whereas they easily and eagerly grasp the petty benefits with which it is associated. The rich are very charitable: they understand that they have to pay ransom for their riches. The simple and decent village woman whose husband is a woodman or gardener or gamekeeper, and whose daughters are being taught manners as domestic servants in the country house, sees in the lord of the manor only a kind gentleman who gives employment, and whose wife gives clothes and blankets and little comforts for the sick, and presides over the Cottage Hospital and all the little shows and sports and well-meant activities that relieve the monotony of toil, and rob illness of some of its terrors. Even in the towns, where the rich and poor do not know oneanother, the lavish expenditure of the rich is always popular. It provides much that people enjoy looking at and gossiping about. The tradesman is proud of having rich customers, and the servant of serving in a rich house. At the public entertainments of the rich there are cheap seats for the poor. Ordinary thoughtless people like all this finery. They will read eagerly about it, and look with interest at the pictures of it in the illustrated papers, whereas when they read that the percentage of children dying under the age of five years has risen or fallen, it means nothing to them but dry statistics which make the paper dull. It is only when people learn to ask “Is this good for all of us all the time as well as amusing to me for five minutes?” that they are on the way to understand how one fashionably dressed woman may cost the life of ten babies.

Even then it seems to them that the alternative to having the fashionably dressed rich ladies is that all women are to be dowdy. They need not be afraid. At present nine women out of ten are dowdy. With a reasonable distribution of income every one of the ten could afford to look her best. That no woman should have diamonds until all women have decent clothes is a sensible rule, though it may not appeal to a woman who would like to have diamonds herself and does not care a rap whether other women are well-dressed or not. She may even derive a certain gratification from seeing other women worse dressed than herself. But the inevitable end of that littleness of mind, that secret satisfaction in the misfortunes of others which the Germans call _Schadenfreude_ (we have no word for it), is that sooner or later a revolution breaks out as it did in Russia; the diamonds go to the pawnbroker, who refuses to advance any money on them because nobody can afford diamonds any longer; and the fine ladies have to wear old clothes and cheaper and worse readymades until there is nothing left for them to wear. Only, as this does not happen all at once, the thoughtless do not believe that the police will ever let it come; and the littlehearted do not care whether it comes or not, provided it does not come until they are dead.

Another thing that makes us cling to this lottery with huge money prizes is the dream that we may become rich by some chance. We read of uncles in Australia dying and leaving £100,000 to a laborer or a charwoman who never knew of his existence. We hear of somebody no better off than ourselves winning the Calcutta Sweep. Such dreams would be destroyed by an equal distribution of income. And people cling all the more to dreams when they are too poor even to back horses! They forget the million losses in their longing for the one gain that the million unlucky ones have to pay for.

Poor women who have too much natural good sense to indulge in these gambler’s dreams often make sacrifices in the hope that education will enable their sons to rise from the slough of poverty; and some men with an exceptional degree of the particular sort of cleverness that wins scholarships owe their promotion to their mothers. But exceptional cases, dazzling as some of them are, hold out no hope to ordinary people; for the world consists of ordinary people: indeed that is the meaning of the word ordinary. The ordinary rich woman’s child and the ordinary poor woman’s child may be born with equally able brains; but by the time they begin life as grown men the rich woman’s son has acquired the speech, manners, personal habits, culture, and instruction without which all the higher employments are closed to him; whilst the poor woman’s son is not presentable enough to get any job which brings him into contact with refined people. In this way a great deal of the brain power of the country is wasted and spoiled; for Nature does not care a rap for rich and poor. For instance, she does not give everybody the ability to do managing work. Perhaps one in twenty is as far as she goes. But she does not pick out the children of the rich to receive her capricious gifts. If in every two hundred people there are only twenty rich, her gift of management will fall to nine poor children and one rich one. But if the rich can cultivate the gift and the poor cannot, then nine-tenths of the nation’s natural supply of managing ability will be lost to it; and to make up the deficiency many of the managing posts will be filled up by pigheaded people only because they happen to have the habit of ordering poor people about.

21

POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY

So far, we have not found one great national institution that escapes the evil effects of a division of the people into rich and poor: that is, of inequality of income. I could take you further; but we should only fare worse. I could shew you how rich officers and poor soldiers and sailors create disaffection in the army and navy; how disloyalty is rampant because the relation between the royal family and the bulk of the nation is the relation between one rich family and millions of poor ones; how what we call peace is really a state of civil war between rich and poor conducted by disastrous strikes; how envy and rebellion and class resentments are chronic moral diseases with us. But if I attempted this you would presently exclaim “Oh, for goodness’ sake dont tell me everything or we shall never have done”. And you would be quite right. If I have not convinced you by this time that there are overwhelming reasons of State against inequality of income, I shall begin to think that you dislike me.

Besides, we must get on to the positive reasons for the Socialist plan of an equal division. I am specially interested in it because it is my favorite plan. You had therefore better watch me carefully to see that I play fairly when I am helping you to examine what there is to be said for equality of income over and above that there is to be said against inequality of income.

First, equal division is not only a possible plan, but one which has been tested by long experience. The great bulk of the daily work of the civilized world is done, and always has been done, and always must be done, by bodies of persons receiving equal pay whether they are tall or short, fair or dark, quick or slow, young or getting on in years, teetotallers or beer drinkers, Protestants or Catholics, married or single, short tempered or sweet tempered, pious or worldly: in short, without the slightest regard to the differences that make one person unlike another. In every trade there is a standard wage; in every public service there is a standard pay; and in every profession the fees are fixed with a view to enable the man who follows the profession to live according to a certain standard of respectability which is the same for the whole profession. The pay of the policeman and soldier and postman, the wages of the laborer and carpenter and mason, the salary of the judge and the member of Parliament, may differ, some of them getting less than a hundred a year and others five thousand; but all the soldiers get the same, all the judges get the same, all the members of Parliament get the same; and if you ask a doctor why his fee is half a crown or five shillings, or a guinea or three guineas, or whatever it may be, instead of five shillings or ten shillings, or two guineas or six guineas or a thousand guineas, he can give you no better reason than that he is asking what all the other doctors ask, and that they ask it because they find they cannot keep up their position on less.