Chapter VII: Part 7

When the last possible moment comes, nobody can foresee how the necessary restriction of the population will be effected. It may be that Nature will interfere and take the matter out of our hands. This possibility is suggested by the fact that the number of children born seems to vary according to the need for them. When they are exposed to such dangers and hard conditions that very few of them can be expected to survive, Nature, without any artificial interference, produces enormous numbers to provide against the complete extinction of the species. We have all heard of the codfish with its million eggs and of the queen bee laying four thousand eggs a day. Human beings are less prolific; but even within human limits Nature apparently distinguishes between poor, undernourished, uncultivated, defective people whose children die early and in great numbers, and people who are fully cultivated mentally and physically. The defectives are appallingly prolific: the others have fewer children even when they do not practise birth control. It is one of the troubles of our present civilization that the inferior stocks are outbreeding the superior ones. But the inferior stocks are really starved stocks, slum stocks, stocks not merely uncultivated but degraded by their wretched circumstances. By getting rid of poverty we should get rid of these circumstances and of the inferior stocks they produce; and it is not at all unlikely that in doing so we should get rid of the exaggerated fertility by which Nature tries to set off the terrible infant mortality among them.

For if Nature can and does increase fertility to prevent the extinction of a species by excessive mortality, need we doubt that she can and will decrease it to prevent its extinction by overcrowding? It is certain that she does, in a mysterious way, respond to our necessities, or rather to her own. But her way is one that we do not understand. The people who say that if we improve the condition of the world it will be overpopulated are only pretending to understand it. If the Socialists were to say positively that Nature will keep the population within bounds under Socialism without artificial birth control, they would be equally pretending to understand it. The sensible course is to improve the condition of the world and see what will happen, or, as some would say, trust in God that evil will not come out of good. All that concerns us at present is that as the overpopulation difficulty has not yet arisen except in the artificial form produced by our unequal distribution of income, and curable by a better distribution, it would be ridiculous to refrain from making ourselves more comfortable on the ground that we may find ourselves getting uncomfortable again later on. We should never do anything at all if we listened to the people who tell us that the sun is cooling, or the end of the world coming next year, or the increase of population going to eat us off the face of the earth, or, generally, that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. It would be quite sensible to say “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die” if only we were certain about tomorrow; but it would be foolish anyhow to say “It is not worth while to live today; for we shall die tomorrow”. It is just like saying “It will be all the same a thousand years hence” as lazy people do when they have neglected their duties. The fact is that the earth can accommodate its present population more comfortably than it does or ever did; and whilst we last we may as well make ourselves as comfortable as we can.

Note that as long as two persons can produce more than twice as much as one, and two million very much more than twice as much as one million, the earth is said by the political economists to be under the Law of Increasing Return. And if ever we reach a point when there will be more people than the earth can feed properly, and the next child born will make the whole world poorer, then the earth will be under the Law of Diminishing Return. If any gentleman tries to persuade you that the earth is now under the Law of Diminishing Return you may safely conclude that he has been told to say so at a university for the sons of the rich, who would like you to believe that their riches, and the poverty of the rest, are brought about by an eternal and unchangeable law of Nature instead of by an artificial and disastrous misdistribution of the national income which we can remedy.

All the same, do not overlook the fact that there may be overpopulation in spots whilst the world as a whole is underpopulated. A boat in mid ocean, containing ten castaways, a pint of water, and a pound of biscuits, is terribly overpopulated. The cottage of a laborer with thirty shillings a week and eight children is overpopulated. A tenement house with twelve rooms and fifty people living in them is overpopulated. London is abominably overpopulated. Therefore, though there is no world population question, and the world is under the law of increasing return, there are innumerable spots in the world which are overpopulated and under the law of diminishing return. Equality of income would enable the unfortunate denizens of these plague spots to escape from the slavery of diminishing returns to the prosperity of increasing returns.

26

THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM

We have now disposed of the only common objections to equal division of income not dealt with in our earlier examination of the various ways in which income is or might be unequally divided. And we have done the whole business without bothering over what the Socialists say, or quoting any of their books. You see how any intelligent woman, sitting down to decide for herself how the national income should be distributed, and without having ever heard the word Socialism or read a line by any Socialist writer, may be driven by her own common sense and knowledge of the world to the conclusion that the equal plan is the only permanent and prosperous one possible in a free community. If you could find a better way out of our present confusion and misery for us, you would be hailed as one of the greatest of discoverers.

“And if I cannot,” you will say, “I suppose you will tell me I must join the Socialists!”

Dear lady: have you ever read St Augustine? If you have, you will remember that he had to admit that the early Christians were a very mixed lot, and that some of them were more addicted to blackening their wives’ eyes for tempting them, and wrecking the temples of the pagans, than to carrying out the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed you must have noticed that we modern Christians are still a very mixed lot, and that it is necessary to hang a certain number of us every year for our country’s good. Now I will be as frank as St Augustine, and admit that the professed Socialists are also a very mixed lot, and that if joining them meant inviting them indiscriminately to tea I should strongly advise you not to do it, as they are just like other people, which means that some of them steal spoons when they get the chance. The nice ones are very nice; the general run are no worse than their neighbors; and the undesirable ones include some of the most thoroughpaced rascals you could meet anywhere. But what better can you expect from any political party you could join? You are, I hope, on the side of the angels; but you cannot join them until you die; and in the meantime you must put up with mere Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, Protestants, Catholics, Dissenters, and other groups of mortal women and men, very mixed lots all of them, so that when you join them you have to pick your company just as carefully as if they had no labels and were entire strangers to you. Carlyle lumped them all as mostly fools; and who can deny that, on the whole, they deserve it?

But, after all, you are an Intelligent Woman, and know this as well as I do. What you may be a little less prepared for is that there are a great many people who call themselves Socialists who do not clearly and thoroughly know what Socialism is, and would be shocked and horrified if you told them that you were in favor of dividing-up the income of the country equally between everybody, making no distinction between lords and laborers, babies in arms and able-bodied adults, drunkards and teetotallers, archbishops and sextons, sinners and saints. They would assure you that all this is a mere ignorant delusion of the man in the street, and that no educated Socialist believes such crazy nonsense. What they want, they will tell you, is equality of opportunity, by which I suppose they mean that Capitalism will not matter if everyone has an equal opportunity of becoming a Capitalist, though how that equality of opportunity can be established without equality of income they cannot explain. Equality of opportunity is impossible. Give your son a fountain pen and a ream of paper, and tell him that he now has an equal opportunity with me of writing plays, and see what he will say to you! Do not let yourself be deceived by such phrases, or by protestations that you need not fear Socialism because it does not really mean Socialism. It does; and Socialism means equality of income and nothing else. The other things are only its conditions or its consequences.

You may, if you have a taste that way, read all the books that have been written to explain Socialism. You can study the Utopian Socialism of Sir Thomas More, the Theocratic Socialism of the Incas, the speculations of Saint Simon, the Communism of Fourier and Robert Owen, the so-called Scientific Socialism of Karl Marx, the Christian Socialism of Canon Kingsley and the Rev. F. D. Maurice, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (a masterpiece of literary art which you should read anyhow), the Constitutional Socialism of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and of the highly respectable Fabian Society, and several fancy Socialisms preached by young men who have not yet had time to become celebrated. But clever as they all are, if they do not mean equality of income they mean nothing that will save civilization. The rule that subsistence comes first and virtue afterwards is as old as Aristotle and as new as this book. The Communism of Christ, of Plato, and of the great religious orders, all take equality in material subsistence for granted as the first condition of establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Whoever has reached this conclusion, by whatever path, is a Socialist; and whoever has not reached it is no Socialist, though he or she may profess Socialism or Communism in passionate harangues from one end of the country to the other, and even suffer martyrdom for it.

So now you know, whether you agree with it or not, exactly what Socialism is, and why it is advocated so widely by thoughtful and experienced people in all classes. Also, you can distinguish between the genuine Socialists, and the curious collection of Anarchists, Syndicalists, Nationalists, Radicals, and malcontents of all sorts who are ignorantly classed as Socialists or Communists or Bolshevists because they are all hostile to the existing state of things, as well as the professional politicians, or Careerists, who are deserting Liberalism for Labor because they think the Liberal ship is sinking. And you are qualified to take at its proper value the nonsense that is talked and written every day by anti-Socialist politicians and journalists who have never given five minutes serious thought to the subject, and who trot round imaginary Bolshies as boys trot round Guys on the fifth of November.

27

PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

And now that you know what Socialism is, let me give you a warning, with an apology in advance if the warning is unnecessary. English people, especially English ladies, are so individualistically brought up that the moment they are convinced that anything is right they are apt to announce that they are going to begin practising it at once, and to order their children and servants to do the same. I have known women of exceptional natural intelligence and energy who believed firmly that the world can be made good by independent displays of coercive personal righteousness. When they became convinced of the righteousness of equality, they proceeded to do ridiculous things like commanding their servants to take their meals with the family (forgetting that the servants had not bargained for their intimacy and might strongly object to it), with Heaven knows what other foolishness, until the servants gave notice, and their husbands threatened to run away, and sometimes even did.

It is perhaps natural that ignorant poor women should imagine that inequality is the fault of the rich women. What is more surprising is that many rich women, though they ought to know better than anybody that a woman can no more help being born rich than born poor, feel guilty and ashamed of their wealth, and plunge into almsgiving to relieve their sickly consciences. They often conceive Socialism as a charitable enterprise for the benefit of the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Socialism abhors poverty, and would abolish the poor. A hearty dislike and disapproval of poor people as such is the first qualification of a good Equalizer. Under Socialism people would be prosecuted for being poor as they are now for being naked. Socialism loathes almsgiving, not only sentimentally because it fills the paupers with humiliation, the patrons with evil pride, and both with hatred, but because in a country justly and providently managed there could be neither excuse for it on the pauper’s part nor occasion for it on the patron’s. Those who like playing the good Samaritan should remember that you cannot have good Samaritans without thieves. Saviors and rescuers may be splendid figures in hagiography and romance; but as they could not exist without sinners and victims they are bad symptoms.

The virtues that feed on suffering are very questionable virtues. There are people who positively wallow in hospitals and charitable societies and Relief Funds and the like, yet who, if the need for their charitable exercises were removed, could spend their energy to great advantage in improving their own manners and learning to mind their own business. There will always be plenty of need in the world for kindness; but it should not be wasted on preventible starvation and disease. Keeping such horrors in existence for the sake of exercising our sympathies is like setting our houses on fire to exercise the vigor and daring of our fire brigades. It is the people who hate poverty, not those who sympathize with it, who will put an end to it. Almsgiving, though it cannot be stopped at present, as without it we should have hunger riots, and possibly revolution, is an evil. At present we give the unemployed a dole to support them, not for love of them, but because if we left them to starve they would begin by breaking our windows and end by looting our shops and burning our houses.

It is true that a third of the money has come directly out of their own pockets; but the way in which it is repaid to them is none the less demoralizing. They find out that whether they contribute or not, the rich will pay ransom all the same. In ancient Rome the unemployed demanded not only bread to feed them but gladiator shows to keep them amused (_panem et circenses_); and the result was that Rome became crowded with playboys who would not work at all, and were fed and amused with money taken from the provinces. That was the beginning of the end of ancient Rome. We may come to bread and football (or prize-fights) yet: indeed the dole has brought us to the bread already. There is not even the blessing of kindness on it; for we all grudge the dole (it comes out of all our pockets) and would stop it tomorrow if we dared.

Equalization of Income will be brought about, not by every woman making it her private business, but by every woman making it her public business: that is, by law. And it will not be by a single law, but a long series of laws. These laws will not be commandments saying thou shalt or thou shalt not. The Ten Commandments gave the Israelites a set of precepts which none of their laws were to violate; but the commandments were politically useless until an elaborate set of laws and institutions had been provided to give effect to them. The first and last commandment of Socialism is “Thou shalt not have a greater or less income than thy neighbor”; but before such a commandment can be even approximately obeyed we shall have not only to pass hundreds of new Acts of Parliament and repeal hundreds of old ones, but to invent and organize new Government departments; train and employ no end of women and men as public servants; educate children to look at their country’s affairs in a new way; and struggle at every step with the opposition of ignorance, stupidity, custom, prejudice, and the vested interests of the rich.

Imagine a Socialist Government elected by an overwhelming majority of people who have read the preceding chapters of this book and been convinced by them, but not otherwise prepared for any change. Imagine it confronted with a starving woman. The woman says “I want work, not charity”. The Government, not having any work for her, replies “Read Shaw; and you will understand all about it”. The woman will say “I am too hungry to read Shaw, even if I considered him an edifying author. Will you please give me some food, and a job to enable me to pay for it honestly?” What could the Government do but confess that it had no job to give her, and offer her a dole, just as at present.

Until the Government has acquired all the powers of employment that the private employers now possess, it can give nothing to starving women, but outdoor relief with money taken by taxation from the employers and their landlords and financiers, which is just what any unsocialist government does. To acquire those powers it must itself become the national landlord, the national financier, and the national employer. In other words, it cannot distribute the national income equally until it, instead of the private owners, has the national income to distribute. Until it has done so you cannot practise Socialism even if you want to: you may even be severely punished for trying. You may agitate and vote for all the steps by which equalization of income will be reached; but in your private life you cannot do otherwise than you have to do at present: that is, keep your social rank (know your place, as it is called), paying or receiving the usual wages, investing your money to the best advantage, and so forth.

You see, it is one thing to understand the aim of Socialism, and quite another to carry it into practice, or even to see how it can or ever could be carried into practice. Jesus tells you to take no thought for the morrow’s dinner or dress. Matthew Arnold tells you to choose equality. But these are commandments without laws. How can you possibly obey them at present? To take no thought for the morrow as we now are is to become a tramp; and nobody can persuade a really intelligent woman that the problems of civilization can be solved by tramps. As to choosing equality, let us choose it by all means; but how? A woman cannot go into the streets to rifle the pockets of those who have more money than she has, and give money away to those who have less: the police would soon stop that, and pass her on from the prison cell to the lunatic asylum. She knows that there are things that the Government may do by law that no private person could be allowed to do. The Government may say to Mrs Jobson “If you murder Mrs Dobson (or anyone else) you will be hanged”. But if Mrs Dobson’s husband said to Mrs Jobson “If you murder my wife I will strangle you” he would be threatening to commit a crime, and could be severely punished for it, no matter how odious and dangerous Mrs Jobson might be. In America, crowds sometimes take criminals out of the hands of the law and lynch them. If they attempted to do that in England they would be dispersed by the police, or shot down by the soldiers, no matter how wicked the criminal and how natural their indignation at the crime.

The first thing civilized people have to learn politically is that they must not take the law into their own hands. Socialism is from beginning to end a matter of law. It will have to make idlers work; but it must not allow private persons to take this obligation on themselves. For instance, an Intelligent Woman, having to deal with a lazy slut, might feel strongly tempted to take up the nearest broomstick and say “If you dont get on with your work and do your fair share of it I will lambaste you with this stick until you are black and blue”. That occasionally happens at present. But such a threat, and much more its execution, is a worse crime than idleness, however richly the slattern may deserve the thrashing. The remedy must be a legal remedy. If the slattern is to be whacked it must be done by order of a court of law, by an officer of the law, after a fair trial by law. Otherwise life would be unbearable; for if we were all allowed to take the law into our own hands as we pleased, no woman could walk down the street without risk of having her hat torn off and stamped on by some æsthete who happened to think it unbecoming, or her silk stockings tarred by some fanatic who considers women’s legs indecent, not to mention mobs of such people.

Besides, the Intelligent Woman might not be stronger than the lazy one; and in that case the lazy one might take the broomstick and whack the intelligent one for working too hard and thereby causing more to be expected from the lazy ones. That, also, has often been done by too zealous Trade Unionists.

I need not labor this point any more. Should you become a convert to Socialism you will not be committed to any change in your private life, nor indeed will you find yourself able to make any change that would be of the smallest use in that direction. The discussions in the papers as to whether a Socialist Prime Minister should keep a motor car, or a Socialist playwright receive fees for allowing his plays to be performed, or Socialist landlords and capitalists charge rent for their land or interest on their capital, or a Socialist of any sort refrain from selling all that she has and giving it to the poor (quite the most mischievous thing she could possibly do with it), are all disgraceful displays of ignorance not only of Socialism, but of common civilization.

28

CAPITALISM

Nobody who does not understand Capitalism can change it into Socialism, or have clear notions of how Socialism will work. Therefore we shall have to study Capitalism as carefully as Socialism. To begin with, the word Capitalism is misleading. The proper name of our system is Proletarianism. When practically every disinterested person who understands our system wants to put an end to it because it wastes capital so monstrously that most of us are as poor as church mice, it darkens counsel to call it Capitalism. It sets people thinking that Socialists want to destroy capital, and believe that they could do without it: in short, that they are worse fools than their neighbors.

Unfortunately that is exactly what the owners of the newspapers want you to think about Socialists, whilst at the same time they would persuade you that the British people are a free and independent race who would scorn to be proletarians (except a few drunken rascals and Russians and professional agitators): therefore they carefully avoid the obnoxious word Proletarianism and stick to the flattering title of Capitalism, which suggests that the capitalists are defending that necessary thing, Capital.

However, I must take names as I find them; and so must you. Let it be understood between us, then, that when we say Capitalism we mean the system by which the land of the country is in the hands, not of the nation, but of private persons called landlords, who can prevent anyone from living on it or using it except on their own terms. Lawyers tell you that there is no such thing as private property in land because all the land belongs to the King, and can legally be “resumed” by him at any moment. But as the King never resumes it nowadays, and the freeholder can keep you off it, private property in land is a fact in spite of the law.

The main advantage claimed for this arrangement is that it makes the landholders rich enough to accumulate a fund of spare money called capital. This fund is also private property. Consequently the entire industry of the country, which could not exist without land and capital, is private property. But as industry cannot exist without labor, the owners must for their own sakes give employment to those who are not owners (called proletarians), and must pay them enough wages to keep them alive and enable them to marry and reproduce themselves, though not enough to enable them ever to stop working regularly.

In this way, provided the owners make it their duty to be selfish, and always hire labor at the lowest possible wage, the industry of the country will be kept going, and the people provided with a continuous livelihood, yet kept under a continuous necessity to go on working until they are worn out and fit only for the workhouse. It is fully admitted, by those who understand this system, that it produces enormous inequality of income, and that the cheapening of labor which comes from increase of population must end in an appalling spread of discontent, misery, crime, and disease, culminating in violent rebellion, unless the population is checked at the point up to which the owners can find employment for it; but the argument is that this must be faced because human nature is so essentially selfish, and so inaccessible to any motive except pecuniary gain, that no other practicable way of building up a great modern civilization stands open to us.

This doctrine used to be called the doctrine of The Manchester School. But as the name became unpopular, it is now described generally as Capitalism. Capitalism therefore means that the only duty of the Government is to maintain private property in land and capital, and to keep on foot an efficient police force and magistracy to enforce all private contracts made by individuals in pursuance of their own interests, besides, of course, keeping civil order and providing for naval and military defence or adventure.

In opposition to Capitalism, Socialism insists that the first duty of the Government is to maintain equality of income, and absolutely denies any private right of property whatever. It would treat every contract as one to which the nation is a party, with the nation’s welfare as the predominant consideration, and would not for a moment tolerate any contract the effect of which would be that one woman should work herself to death prematurely in degrading poverty in order that another should live idly and extravagantly on her labor. Thus it is quite true that Socialism will abolish private property and freedom of contract: indeed it has done so already to a much greater extent than people realize; for the political struggle between Capitalism and Socialism has been going on for a century past, during which Capitalism has been yielding bit by bit to the public indignation roused by its worst results, and accepting instalments of Socialism to palliate them.

Do not, by the way, let yourself be confused by the common use of the term private property to denote personal possession. The law distinguished between Real Property (lordship) and Personal Property until the effort to make a distinction between property in land and property in capital produced such a muddle that it was dropped in 1926. Socialism, far from absurdly objecting to personal possessions, knows them to be indispensable, and looks forward to a great increase of them. But it is incompatible with real property.

To make the distinction clear let me illustrate. You call your umbrella your private property, and your dinner your private property. But they are not so: you hold them on public conditions. You may not do as you please with them. You may not hit me on the head with your umbrella; and you may not put rat poison into your dinner and kill me with it, or even kill yourself; for suicide is a crime in British law. Your right to the use and enjoyment of your umbrella and dinner is a personal right, rigidly limited by public considerations. But if you own an English or Scottish county you may drive the inhabitants off it into the sea if they have nowhere else to go. You may drag a sick woman with a newly born baby in her arms out of her house and dump her in the snow on the public road for no better reason than that you can make more money out of sheep and deer than out of women and men. You may prevent a waterside village from building a steamboat pier for the convenience of its trade because you think the pier would spoil the view from your bedroom window, even though you never spend more than a fortnight a year in that bedroom, and often do not come there for years together. These are not fancy examples: they are things that have been done again and again. They are much worse crimes than hitting me over the head with your umbrella. And if you ask why landowners are allowed to do with their land what you are not allowed to do with your umbrella, the reply is that the land is private property, or, as the lawyers used to say, real property, whilst the umbrella is only personal property. So you will not be surprised to hear Socialists say that the sooner private property is done away with the better.

Both Capitalism and Socialism claim that their object is the attainment of the utmost possible welfare for mankind. It is in their practical postulates for good government, their commandments if you like to call them so, that they differ. These are, for Capitalism, the upholding of private property in land and capital, the enforcement of private contracts, and no other State interference with industry or business except to keep civil order; and, for Socialism, the equalization of income, which involves the complete substitution of personal for private property and of publicly regulated contract for private contract, with police interference whenever equality is threatened, and complete regulation and control of industry and its products by the State.

As far as political theory is concerned you could hardly have a flatter contradiction and opposition than this; and when you look at our Parliament you do in fact see two opposed parties, the Conservative and the Labor, representing roughly Capitalism and Socialism. But as members of Parliament are not required to have had any political education, or indeed any education at all, only a very few of them, who happen to have made a special study, such as you are making, of social and political questions, understand the principles their parties represent. Many of the Labor members are not Socialists. Many of the Conservatives are feudal aristocrats, called Tories, who are as keen on State interference with everything and everybody as the Socialists. All of them are muddling along from one difficulty to another, settling as best they can when they can put it off no longer, rather than on any principle or system. The most you can say is that, as far as the Conservative Party has a policy at all, it is a Capitalistic policy, and as far as the Labor Party has a policy at all it is a Socialist policy; so that if you wish to vote against Socialism you should vote Conservative; and if you wish to vote against Capitalism you should vote Labor. I put it in this way because it is not easy to induce people to take the trouble to vote. We go to the polling station mostly to vote against something instead of for anything.

We can now settle down to our examination of Capitalism as it comes to our own doors. And, as we proceed, you must excuse the disadvantage I am at in not knowing your private affairs. You may be a capitalist. You may be a proletarian. You may be betwixt-and-between in the sense of having an independent income sufficient to keep you, but not sufficient to enable you to save any more capital. I shall have to treat you sometimes as if you were so poor that the difference of a few shillings a ton in the price of coal is a matter of serious importance in your housekeeping, and sometimes as if you were so rich that your chief anxiety is how to invest the thousands you have not been able to spend.

There is no need for you to remain equally in the dark about me; and you had better know whom you are dealing with. I am a landlord and capitalist, rich enough to be supertaxed; and in addition I have a special sort of property called literary property, for the use of which I charge people exactly as a landlord charges rent for his land. I object to inequality of income not as a man with a small income, but as one with a middling big one. But I know what it is to be a proletarian, and a poor one at that. I have worked in an office; and I have pulled through years of professional unemployment, some of the hardest of them at the expense of my mother. I have known the extremes of failure and of success. The class in which I was born was that most unlucky of all classes: the class that claims gentility and is expected to keep up its appearances without more than the barest scrap and remnant of property to do it on. I intrude these confidences on you because it is as well that you be able to allow for my personal bias. The rich often write about the poor, and the poor about the rich, without really knowing what they are writing about. I know the whole gamut from personal experience, short of actual hunger and homelessness, which should never be experienced by anybody. If I cry sour grapes, you need not suspect that they are only out of my reach: they are all in my hand at their ripest and best.

So now let us come down to tin tacks.

29

YOUR SHOPPING

Ask yourself this question: “Where does unequal distribution of the national income hit me in my everyday life?”

The answer is equally plain and practical. When you go out to do your marketing it hits you in every purchase you make. For every head of cabbage you buy, every loaf of bread, every shoulder of mutton, every bottle of beer, every ton of coals, every bus or tram fare, every theatre ticket, every visit from your doctor or charwoman, every word of advice from your lawyer, you have to pay not only what they cost, but an additional charge which is handed over finally to people who have done nothing whatever for you.

Now though every intelligent woman knows that she cannot expect to have goods or services for less than they cost in education, materials, labor, management, distribution, and so on, no intelligent woman will consent, if she knows about it and can help it, to pay over and above this inevitable cost for the luxuries and extravagances of idlers, especially if she finds great difficulty in making both ends meet by working pretty hard herself.

To rid her of this overcharge, Socialists propose to secure goods for everyone at cost price by nationalizing the industries which produce them. This terrifies the idlers and their dependents so much that they do their best to persuade the Intelligent Woman in their newspapers and speeches and sermons that nationalization is an unnatural crime which must utterly ruin the country. That is all nonsense. We have plenty of nationalization at present; and nobody is any the worse for it. The army and navy, the civil service, the posts and telegraphs and telephones, the roads and bridges, the lighthouses and royal dockyards and arsenals, are all nationalized services; and anyone declaring that they were unnatural crimes and were ruining the country would be transferred to the county lunatic asylum, also a national institution.

And we have much more nationalization than this in the form called municipalization, the only difference being that instead of the central Westminster Parliament owning and conducting the industry for the nation, as it does the Post Office, the industry is owned and conducted by City Corporations or County Councils for the local ratepayers. Thus we get publicly owned electric light works, gas works, water works, trams, baths and washhouses, public health services, libraries, picture galleries, museums, lavatories, parks and piers with pavilions and bands and stages, besides many other public services which concern the maintenance of the Empire, and of which the public knows nothing.

Most of these things could be done by private companies and shops; indeed many of them are done at present partly by private enterprise and partly by public: for instance, in London private electric lighting companies supply light in one district whilst the Borough Councils provide a municipal supply in others. But the municipal supply is cheaper, and with honest and capable management always must be cheaper than the private company’s supply.

You will ask, why must it? Well, shortly, because it pays less for its capital, less for its management, and nothing at all for profits, this triple advantage going to the consumer in cheapness. But to take in the whole scope of public enterprise as compared with private, let us begin with the nationalized services. Why is it that the nationalized Post Office is so much cheaper and more extensive than a private letter-carrying company could make it, that private letter-carrying is actually forbidden by law?

The reason is that the cost of carrying letters differs greatly as between one letter and another. The cost of carrying a letter from house to house in the same terrace is so small that it cannot be expressed in money: it is as near nothing as does not matter: to get a figure at all you would have to take the cost per thousand letters instead of per letter. But the cost of carrying the same letter from the Isle of Wight to San Francisco is considerable. It has to be taken from the train to the ship to cross the Solent; changed into another ship at Southampton or perhaps at Liverpool after another train journey; carried across the Atlantic Ocean; then across the continent of North America; and finally delivered at the opposite side of the world to the Isle of Wight. You would naturally expect the Postmaster-General to deliver a dozen letters for you in the same terrace for a penny, and charge you a pound or so for sending one letter to San Francisco. What he actually does for you is to deliver the thirteen letters for three-halfpence apiece. By the time these lines are in print he may be charging you only a penny apiece, as he used to before the war. He charges you less than the cost of sending the long-distance letter, and more than the cost of sending the short-distance letters; but as he has thousands of short-distance letters to send and only dozens of long-distance ones he can make up for the undercharge on the long by an overcharge on the short. This charging the same for all letters is called by economists averaging. Others call it gaining on the swings what we lose on the roundabouts.

Our reason for forbidding private persons or companies to carry letters is that if they were allowed to meddle, there would soon be companies selling stamps at threepence a dozen to deliver letters within a few miles. The Postmaster-General would get nothing but long-distance letters: that is, the ones with a high cost of carriage. He would have to put up the price of his stamps; and when we found that the advantage of sending a letter a mile or two for a farthing was accompanied by the disadvantage of paying sixpence or a shilling when we wanted to write to someone ten miles off, we should feel that we had made a very bad bargain. The only gainers would be the private companies who had upset our system. And when they had upset it they would raise their short-distance prices to the traditional penny, if not higher.

Now let us turn from this well-established nationalized service to one that might be nationalized, and that concerns every housekeeper in the country very intimately. I mean the coal supply. Coals have become a necessary of life in our climate; and they are dreadfully dear. As I write these lines it is midsummer, when coals are cheapest; and a circular dated the 16th June offers me drawingroom coal for thirty-six and threepence a ton, and anthracite for seventy shillings. That is much more than the average cost. Why must I pay it? Why must you pay it? Simply because the coal industry is not yet nationalized. It is private property.

The cost price of coal varies from nothing to a pound a ton or more, without counting what it costs to carry and distribute the coal throughout the country. Perhaps you do not believe that coals can be had for nothing; but I assure you that on the Sunderland coast when the tide is out coals can be picked up on the shore by all comers as freely as shells or seaweed. I have seen them with my own eyes doing it. A sack and a back to carry it on is all that anybody needs there to set up as a hawker of coals in a small way, or to fill the cellar at home. Elsewhere on our coasts coal is so hard to reach that shafts have been sunk and mines dug for miles under the sea, the coal not having been reached until after twenty years work and a heavy expenditure of money. Between these two extremes there are all sorts of mines, some yielding so little coal at such high cost that they are worked only when the price of coal rises to exceptional heights, and others in which coal is so plentiful and easily got at that it is always profitable to work them even when coal is unusually cheap. The money they cost to open up varies from £350 to over a million. But the price you have to pay never falls below the cost from the very dearest mines.

The reason is this. What makes prices high is scarcity: what brings them down is plenty. Coals rise and fall in price just like strawberries. They are dear when scarce, cheap when plenty.

Now an article can become scarce in several ways. One is by reducing the quantity in the market by slackening or ceasing to manufacture. Another is to increase the number of people who want to buy the article and have money enough to pay for it. Yet another is to find out new uses for it. A scarcity of coal can be produced not only by the increase of the population, but by the people who formerly wanted only a scuttle of coals for the kitchen fire wanting thousands of tons for blast furnaces and ocean steamers. It is the scarcity produced in these ways that has raised the price of coal to such a point that it is now worth while to tunnel out mines under the sea. The cost of such mines is heavy; but it is not incurred until the price of coal has gone up sufficiently to cover it with a profit. If the price falls enough to cut off that profit the mine stops working and is abandoned. And what is the consequence of that? The stopping of the mine cuts off the supply of coals it used to send to the market; and the scarcity produced by the stoppage sends the price up again until it is high enough to restart the mine without losing money by it.

In this way the Intelligent Woman (and also the unintelligent one) finds herself condemned always to pay for her coals the full cost of getting them from the very dearest mines in use, though she may know that only the fag end of the supply comes from these mines, the rest coming from mines where the cost is much lower. She will be assured, if she remonstrates, that the price is barely sufficient to enable some of the collieries to continue working; and this will be quite true. What she will not be told, though it also is quite true, is that the better mines are making excessive profits at her expense, to say nothing of landlord’s royalties.

And here comes in another complication. The miners who hew out the coal for wages in the better mines are paid no more than those in the worse ones which can barely afford to keep going, because the men, unlike the coal, can go from one mine to another, and what the poorest miner must accept all must accept. Thus the wages of all the miners are kept down to the poverty of the worst mines, just as the coal bills of all the housekeepers are kept up to their high cost. The dissatisfied miners strike, making coals scarcer and dearer than ever. The housekeepers grumble, but cannot bring down prices, and blame “the middleman”. Nobody is satisfied except the owners of the better mines.

The remedy here is, of course, the Postmaster-General’s plan of averaging. If all the coal mines belonged to a Coalmaster-General he could set off the good mines against the bad, and sell coal for the average cost of getting the whole supply instead of having to sell it for the cost of getting it in the very worst mines. To take fancy figures, if half the supply cost a pound a ton to raise and the other half cost half a crown a ton, he could sell at eleven and threepence a ton instead of at a pound. A Commercial Coal Trust, though it might come to own all the mines, would not do this, because its object would be to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders instead of to make coal as cheap for you as possible. There is only one owner who would work in your interest, and not want to make any profit at all. That owner would be a Government Coalmaster-General, acting for the nation: that is, acting for you and all the other housekeepers and users of coal.

Now you understand why you have the miners and the intelligent users and buyers of coal demanding the nationalization of the coal mines, and all the owners of the mines and the sellers of coal shrieking that nationalization would mean waste, corruption, ruinously high prices, the destruction of our commerce and industry, the end of our empire, and anything else they can think of in their dismay at the prospect of losing the profits they make by compelling us to pay a great deal more for our coal than it costs. But however recklessly they shriek, they are careful never to mention the real point of the whole business: that is, the procuring of coal for everybody at cost price. To keep the attention of the public off that, they will declare that nationalization is a wicked invention of the Bolshevists, and that the British Government is so corrupt and incompetent that it could not manage a baked potato stand honestly and capably, much less a coal mine. You may read ten debates in the House of Commons on coal nationalization, and a hundred newspaper articles on those debates, without ever learning what I have just told you about the difference between the mines, and how by averaging the cost of working them the price of your coals could be greatly reduced. Once these facts are known and understood there is no room for further argument: every purchaser of coal becomes a nationalizer at once; though every coal proprietor is ready to spend the last penny he can spare to discredit and prevent nationalization.

You see then how separate private property in coal mines hits a woman every time she buys coals. Well, it hits her in precisely the same way every time she buys a pair of scissors or a set of knives and forks or a flat-iron, because iron mines and silver mines differ like coal mines. It hits her every time she buys a loaf of bread, because wheat farms differ in fertility just like mines: a bushel of wheat will cost much more to raise on one farm than on another. It hits her every time she buys anything that is made in a factory, because factories differ according to their distance from railways or canals or seaports or big market towns or places where their raw materials are plentiful, or where there is natural water power to drive their works. In every case the shop price represents the cost of the article in the few mines and factories where the cost of production is greatest. It never represents the average cost taking one factory and one mine with another, which is the real national cost. Thus she is kept poor in a rich country because all the difference between the worst and the best in it is skimmed off for the private owners of the mines and factories by simply charging her more for everything she uses than the things cost. And it is to save her from this monstrous imposition that the Socialists, and many people who never dream of calling themselves Socialists, propose that the mines and factories shall be made national property instead of private property. The difference between the Socialist and non-Socialist nationalizers is that the non-Socialists aim only at cheap coal, whereas the Socialists have the ulterior object of bringing the mines into national ownership and control so as to prevent their remaining an instrument of inequality of income. On the immediate practical question of nationalization they are agreed. That is how Socialism can advance without a majority of professed Socialists in Parliament, or even without any.

Note that the difference between the highest cost of production under the worst circumstances and the lower costs under more favorable circumstances is called by economists rent. Mining rents and rents of copyrights and patent rights are called royalties; and most people call nothing rent except what they pay for house and land. But rent is part of the price of everything that has a price at all, except things that are communized, and things that are produced under the most unfavorable conditions.

30

YOUR TAXES

Besides buying things in the shops you have to pay rates, taxes, telephone rent (if you have a telephone), and rent of house and land. Let us examine this part of your expenditure, and see whether you get hit here again and again.