p. 66My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
You have been arguing in all the twelve letters you have written to me, for Socialism as “the only remedy” for the evils under which society suffers. I have been contending against it in all the replies I have tried to make. It would seem, therefore, as if we ought to stop it now. But here, in your thirteenth letter, I find you bringing the subject more and more to a focus, and pushing it with greater and greater insistency. So what can I do but keep up with you? If I did not, I should be like an entrenched force in the field, which, having hurled back a dozen assaults of the enemy, should suspend fire while a thirteenth attack was coming forward with more violence than ever. Such a force would be overwhelmed, notwithstanding their dozen gallant successes. No, Mr. Blatchford, I must stand to my guns so long as the ammunition lasts, and I think it will last as long as yours.
You tell me that Socialism is the only remedy in sight. You know that I am not of that opinion. Granted that none of its ordinary opponents have any remedy to offer at all—for two reasons. 1. The mass of them are too much absorbed in their own struggle for existence to spare any time or attention for the woes of others. 2. Those of them who may have leisure and sympathy enough to feel for those woes, have also brains enough to discern that the situation is not one admitting of remedy in any thorough sense. I venture to predict, Mr. Blatchford, in view of your penetration, that you will be a convert to this latter class yourself, if you live long enough.
p. 67 Experience will necessarily convince you that Socialism is an impossibility, and that in fact the condition of mankind is hopeless unless some other agency than any now at work come into the field. Whether my prediction turn out true or not, there is another remedy, of which you do not seem to be aware. I grant it is not in sight in the sense of being on the visible horizon of human affairs; but neither is Socialism. Socialism is before the public as a scheme; the other is before the public as a guaranteed purpose on the part of the Power that made man. They are both abstractions as yet. The one is a human abstraction, the other a divine one. You are labouring to turn the Socialist abstraction into a concrete reality; the power of the universe is at the back of the divine abstraction, pushing it forward to realisation in the way and time appointed, in accordance with the prayer taught by Him whom you acknowledge to be at the very top of the salt of the earth: “Thy kingdom come: thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” It is a race between God and man. We do not require to say how such a race must end.
But I cannot expect you to recognise any such rivalry as a fact, so I must on your own ground try to show that Socialism is not a practicable scheme, and therefore no remedy, though very much “in sight” in a polemic and literary sense.
You are very much afraid I do not understand it. It is not your fault if I don’t. You define it as “a national scheme of co operation by which all the farms, mills, shops, railways, and every other instrument of production would be the common property of the people, to be used and governed by the people for the people, with the result of ensuring that they would enjoy the benefit of the wealth which they collectively create.”
What I have to say about this is that such a scheme never could be carried into execution, even if you converted the whole nation to it, unless you did one thing that you somewhat ostentatiously declare you are not going to do, and that is, to seize on the property of the rich, and either confiscate it to the State or divide it among the poor, share and share alike. You have said that Socialism does not propose to do this, but to buy it, that is, to enforce a compulsory sale to the nation, under a law of compensation.
p. 68 I have already suggested that it is impossible you can have realised what this means. I have already pointed out the enormous sum you would have to pay. The railways alone are worth a thousand millions sterling. What will house property figure at? I have never seen an estimate of this that I remember, but I should think it must be eight or ten times the value of the railways; let us put it at half that, five thousand millions. And then there is the value of all the industries as going concerns. If the capitalists take out of the gross earnings of the nation, three hundred and sixty millions (as you make out), you could not expect to buy that income under ten years’ purchase, which would give you close on another four thousand millions to find.
Here is ten thousand millions sterling the government would have to pay over to the classes before it could begin the Socialist Republic. And this is making no allowance for the enormous sum represented by the shipping of the country. How are you to raise this money? It is one of your own points that the reputed capital of the country has no existence except by estimation, and that even the actual earnings of the country, though stated at so much, consists only of so much money that changes hands over and over again many times in a year—which is no doubt true. Where, then, are you going to get the ready cash to pay out the holders of property? You could not raise it if you scraped together all the money to be found on the face of the earth.
You will say, “Of course, we know that. We should not pay in hard cash—we should issue government stock, at say 2 per cent.—going lower than even the Goschen consols.” No doubt the new government could do this; but it could not create the confidence needful to float such a tremendous transaction. New governments never have the confidence possessed by long established institutions, and a Socialist government, at the mercy of every popular breeze that might get up, would have less credit than any government that has ever risen in this country. The sale of the property of the country to the government would be liable to hang fire for want of confidence in the stability of the government. And suppose people having property hung back, would you force them? Here at the very beginning, would be a poor start for liberty, peace and happiness.
But suppose you got over the conversion process by some supreme effort of financial genius, and the world awoke some p. 69 fine morning to find the whole property of the nation vested in government officials, you would be face to face with the difficulty of finding the 2 per cent. Two per cent. seems a very small rate, but what would it amount to on ten thousand millions sterling? It would amount to two hundred millions sterling!
And with such an enormous annual revenue to raise, how could you increase wages? If you raised wages, there would be no margin left to provide the enormous interest to be paid to the ex-owners of property. The whole community would be set slaving for the payment of the stock holders, and the fine visions of short hours, and good houses, and leisure, and colleges, and music, and all the rest, would disappear in the air.
This is not all. You say you would have no wealthy idlers. But if you buy out the industries of the country, you will create wealthy idlers by the transaction. Those who get the money or the stock by which you buy the property will be enriched by the getting. How could Socialism, as you conceive it and propose it, co-exist with such an order of stock holders in the country?
There is a harder nut even than this to crack. You say you are going to stop competition, and to prevent individual liberty from hurting the community. How are you going to do this without supervising every man’s individual spendings? Are you going to dictate to every man what he is going to do with his money? Of course some will have money. Now, a man who had saved money might have a poor neighbour whom he would like to benefit and use at the same time. He might say, “John, you don’t fill up all your time, I will give you £5 to look after my garden this year.” Is he to be forbidden to do this because the State supplies gardeners at fixed wages? Or he might say, “John, you are a tailor, you only work three hours at the shop; I will pay you so much a suit to make my family some clothes in your odd hours.” Is John to be forbidden to do this? You could not prevent it, even if you passed a law to prevent it, unless you set police to watch every house, and even then John might escape the police, and slip away into the woods and ply his needle among the solitudes of thicket and rock, like the Covenanters of old. Fancy the police, like gamekeepers, prowling through the woods to see that there were no tailors busy making clothes!
p. 70 Mr. Blatchford, it is absurd: it is childish, it would not work. It is no answer at all to point to the post office and the telegraph: there is no parallel. A man cannot carry his own letters or send his own telegraphic messages; it does not come into the structure or exercises of his private life; but when it comes to a question of what a man is to do in his own house, with his own time, and with his own money, Englishmen would not stand the dictation that you propose. Your theory is possible only on paper, and scarcely there.
Think of this other difficulty: what are you to do with the wealthy who would have enough to live on without work? Are you going to make them work whether they will or no? If so, you will turn the country into a place of oppression and slavery in the name of liberty. The English race are of stuff that would not stand it. You would soon have revolution and chaos.
Under the most favourable circumstances for a Socialist experiment, even if you succeeded, say after a civil war, in steam-rolling the whole population into a flat level of equality, you could not prevent the revival of class through natural difference of capacity and culture, unless you absolutely dragooned the people into a military or workhouse uniformity. Men allowed to live on their incomes, or to use their savings as they liked, would be of more social consequence than those who had nothing beyond regulation wages. They would be deferred to, considered, consulted, and conciliated: you could not prevent it: it is a law of nature. And you could not help working men and government servants of all classes desiring to get into this position and aiming to live independently. Therefore you could not prevent the endeavour to accumulate money. You could not exclude the temptation to adulterate food, and practise other forms of deception, in order to make more money than the State allowed.
State management, which may be suitable of some kind, would be intolerable when applied to private business. This is the distinction which you fail to observe. The post and telegraph are public services. What a man shall do with his time and his money is an affair of personal liberty to which State management could not be applied. You seem to argue as if it could. You say that “the postal and telegraphic service is the standing proof of the capacity of the State to manage the public business with economy p. 71 and success.” Granted, but what is “public business?” This is the whole question. You confound public business with private business. You make public business of what has usually been considered private business and nothing else. Shall I choose my occupation? Shall I be a mason or a joiner, or a merchant, or a musician, or a doctor? Shall I buy or shall I not buy? And, in buying, shall I give the price that is asked, or shall I offer less? Shall I sell or shall I not sell? And in selling, shall I ask a low price, or a high price, or a middle price? Shall I make money or shall I spend it? Shall I work or shall I not work? All these are private questions, which you cannot hand over to the State without reducing us to the position of social machinery working at the bidding of social cranks and shafts and gear wheels, who would extinguish our manhood. Society would become a mere army of privates, keeping step to the commands of the drill-sergeants. Englishmen would rather take to the Welsh mountains and be shot in the last entrenchment of resistance than submit to such a system. Your Socialism would necessarily end in a huge fiasco, and hell upon earth.
Therefore, though your sociable,
I am,
Your un-Socialistic friend,
JOHN SMITH.