p. 57My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
You have a nice chapter on waste. We are all agreed that waste is bad, but I think not many will agree with you as to the cause of waste.
You think it is cheapness that leads to waste. You think so because you once saw a drunken man in the train wasting matches. Why, surely, you are not going to get your political economy from the freaks of drunken men. Drunken men who waste matches would be likely to waste them whatever their price was. It is the behaviour of sober people you should look to. Do they waste matches because they are cheap? I have not found it so. Economical people are as economical with their matches now that they are cheap as ever they were when they were dear. Many other things are cheap. You don’t find people going about wasting them like the drunken man.
Then you make a mistake in trying to make out cheapness to be a bad thing. You say that excessive cheapness is not good for anyone. You cannot mean this. Cheapness is good for those who pay the cheap prices instead of dear prices, of course.
Water is cheap, excessively cheap; it costs almost nothing, and people waste it. Would you propose to put a good price on it, as “cheapness is not good for anyone”?
Cheapness in itself is a good thing of course; “Not for producers if they don’t get enough wages to live on.” Granted. But the difficulty is that you cannot regulate this without interfering with the right that every man appreciates more than any other privilege he has, and without which he would feel himself to be a slave, namely, the right to please himself as to what he shall accept or refuse in the matter of price or wages. It works badly in some directions, but we cannot have high wages enforced by law without surrendering universal liberty. If we retain liberty, we must sometimes submit to poor wages.
p. 58 The surrender of liberty would not be a hardship if the surrender was made to a government in whose hands our liberty would be safe. Give us a government that might always be trusted to act with wisdom, mercy, and truth, and there would be no danger. But where are we to find such a government? If not under royalty, certainly not under Socialism. Socialist officials would be quite as liable to be influenced by partiality, prejudice, and whim, or even malice. You would probably be shocked if I suggested that, as the favourites of a fickle populace, they would even be more liable to these influences than the officials of the present regime. But I fancy I should not be far from the truth.
In fact, it impossible, in the light of history, and in the light of what one knows of democratic officials, to contemplate without dismay the surrender of our buying and selling liberty to the authorities of a Socialist Republic. The proposal to hand over the manipulation of every detail of private life to the kind of men that would be popular with Socialists, is enough to turn the intelligence of England mad.
Government, under which there should be no liberty, and in which individual life should be levelled down to a common pattern by the action of restrictive and repressive laws, would certainly be worse than the present system, which, with all its blots, gives scope for individual enterprise, and fosters the expansion and development of individual talent under the stimulus arising from the action of those “splendid ambitions and aspirations” of which you make so little. Socialism would bring the steam-roller over the face of society and reduce it to a dreary level of uniformity.
You may be right when you say that much nonsense is talked by the newspaper writers of this great country. But I fear you are only adding to the stock. Your nonsense is more generous and genial perhaps—more forcibly written, entertainingly drawn out, but still, not more sensible. You would lead us into a more picturesque bog than the common one, surrounded with woods and hills, instead of barren moors; perhaps set about with flowers and water lilies; but it would be a bog all the same, in which, once in, we should struggle in vain to get out, for there would be no standing ground at all. In our present bog, there are at least many islands of sedge and sod, where we can get a footing and even build tolerable p. 59 huts, while waiting for the owner of the estate to come and reclaim it altogether. But in the Socialist bog, we should flounder in the slimy ooze without a tough bit anywhere to keep us from sinking.
You rap the editors smartly over the fingers on the subject of “work.” At the same time, your own knuckles are not quite safe. Work, as mere work, is not the bad thing you make it. It is a necessity to human health. Many men contrive it apart from all question of remuneration. Look at the man with his dumb-bells, or the elderly gentleman on his tricycle, going through an amount of sheer labour that perhaps payment would not induce him to perform. Employment is necessary to prevent the mass of men from sinking into sloth and demoralization, physical and mental. A man cannot eat work, as you say, or drink it, or wear it, or put it in the bank; but he can benefit by it in being kept in trim for the activities of life, even if he did not require to work. As a rule men do not work except under compulsion. It is a beneficent law of nature that brings this compulsion to bear. If the mass of the population were not under the necessity of providing their daily bread by labour, the earth would soon be uninhabitable. Mr. Blatchford himself would have to get away from the rowdyism of crowds of idle, lusty men who would not choose to work if bread were certain, and who would make short work of officials if bread were withheld; all “trained to the use of arms,” too.
You say “Men work to live, they don’t live to work.” Yes, this is the ideal: but if they could live without work, they would leave the work alone. Providence has not left it to their choice. They are obliged to work many hours to get enough to eat. If you artificially alter this, you will only get into deeper difficulties. If you doubled the price of commodities so as to increase the wages of labour, you would reduce also the buying power of wages, and the workmen might be worse off than before. And you might soon have loss instead of profit. You must make the manufacture pay, or it will have to stop.
You say you would employ idle hands in making roads and public improvements; but where would you get the money to pay them? A Corporation can only spend what it gets from the people, and if you prevent the people from being able to provide money by raising the price of everything, and compelling them to spend all their wages, where is the Corporation to get money to p. 60 pay all the labourers on roads and improvements? Roads and improvements don’t make money: they spend it. There would be no end to the drain of money that would arise by-and-bye. And what would the end be? Discontent, disagreement, broils and quarrels; ruin and misery for all, and a new start on the old miserable lines.
Your pathetic protest against the sacrifice of human happiness and human life at the shrine of cheap commodities will touch a chord in every generous heart; but alas, Mr. Blatchford, the picture you draw is only part of a whole world of evil, which no patchwork arrangement of ours can cure.
There is only one ground for optimistic view. If it did not grow out of a “fact,” I should be ashamed to refer to it again, and even with all its robust connection with true reason, I fear you will think me “soft” in working it in alongside of such practical problems. While nothing but despair is the result of a study of history, or of the system you championize so ably, there is nothing but the upwelling of a joyous anticipation when we turn to what has been written by “the best and the wisest of men.” It comes in as a healing balm in the midst of all the woe. While it explains to us the reason of man’s misery, it also gives us the joyful information that God Himself has a plan for the ending of human woe; that “He hath appointed a day in which He will judge the world by Christ”; and that that judgment will be so effectual that mankind will abandon war, and be compelled to accept a law that will bring light and life to all their ways. He will judge for the poor and needy, and break in pieces the oppressor. He will end all monopolies, and send the rich empty away. He will distribute earth’s boundless plenty to the boundless blessing of earth’s teeming populations, and establish good-will among men, on the rational basis of glory to God in the highest. Well may we shout with David, “O let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for thou wilt judge the people rightly, and govern the nations upon earth.” Meanwhile, our prayer with thanksgiving must be his: “God be merciful to us, and bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us, that Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all nations.”
Pardon me for harping on a string that will perhaps make you think me
Your demented friend,
JOHN SMITH.