p. 16My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
Some things in your third letter force me to put my finger to my forehead and reflect. You say “abolish the capitalist as a curse and not a blessing,” that is, have done with men who have money enough to build factories and employ workpeople. I might ask, How are you to do this? But I will rather ask, How are the workpeople to live then? They cannot earn wages without places to work in and large orders to work on. If you say, let the State provide these, then you merely change the name of the capitalist without altering the thing. Somebody must be capitalist. Somebody must be in a position to provide the costly plant that admits of workpeople earning wages; and in putting the State in this position (if you could do it), you would probably find that you had changed a good capitalist for a bad one; that you had taken the capital from a man who had a personal and fatherly interest in the work, to an official who had no interest in it beyond the wages he got.
Then, how are you to take the capital from its present holders? You could not do it without force or purchase. I understand you are not prepared to recommend violence. You say you would buy the capitalists out. Surely you have not realised what this means. Your statistics show that the capitalists get £360,000,000 out of the gross earnings of the country. If you are to capitalise this yearly income, you will make an addition to the national debt that you have not dreamt of. And where is the yearly interest to come from? It would have to be provided out of the national industries. How is this to be done p. 17 without charging to the trading account at least as much as the “capitalists” now get in the way of profits, salaries, etc.? You say the balance of the trading, after paying rent, etc., would belong to the people: but there would be no balance if you have to pay interest on the money required to buy out the capitalists. You say you would take a higher price for the goods; but you must remember you also propose to give the working men bigger wages, which would sweep away the advantage of higher prices, and then, if the goods cost more than now, the big wages would go no farther than the little wages. It would come to the same thing as now, except that it probably would not come out so well in the hands of government; for it is notorious (and in harmony with all experience of human nature) that men dealing with State funds do not exercise the same care, or thrift, or scruple, as in the management of what belongs to themselves. Men handle a national or company purse with a much slacker string than they do their own moneys. You know the adage about a company having “no body to kick, nor soul to be saved.”
This is all on the supposition that the management of the national monopolies was a harmonious management. But consider the danger there would be of a want of harmonious management. Even if government officials were to prove as energetic and attentive and industrious as the individual capitalists that now provide employment for the country, what guarantee is there that they would agree in the conduct of the work? Would no differences of opinion arise on questions of contract, or methods of manufacture, or rules of discipline, or rates of wages, or modes of transacting business? Some of these questions might become very, very serious. Who would settle them? You say, the people. But the people would be equally divided about them. They are fairly of one mind just now, when they have a common class antipathy to the capitalists; but when they had got rid of the capitalists, their unanimity would disappear, and they would be as divided in opinion as human beings always proverbially are in the absence of any common enmity.
There are always parties in every community. In the United States, you have republicans and democrats; in republican France, radicals, moderates, and royalists, and in socialist England, if ever such a spectre should arise from the sea, you would have the people split up into as many parties as now, and as the whole p. 18 business would belong to the whole nation, you would, when an issue arose, have all parties intermeddling and clamouring in an angry turmoil, ending in civil broil. You would only require enough of this to bring on revolution and a dictatorship. It has always been so in the history of the world where these experiments have been tried. An imperial master is elected in France after a frantic national paroxysm of “Liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Popular clamour is inconsistent with order, security, and peace. Men tire of it at last, and take refuge in the strong hand of a master.
My friend, your desires and aims are excellent, but your methods contain the seeds of worse evils than those you now bemoan. You would give us a Ruined England instead of a Merrie England. You cannot get rid of the capitalist without destroying the rights of property or turning the nation into the most bloated and unwieldy capitalist the world has ever seen. If you destroy the rights of property, you undermine the basis of society, and put us on the high road to chaos; reducing the whole population to the depressing uniformity of workhouse paupers, among whom wordy mediocrities and vulgar spouters of all sorts (made sure of their living) would come upon us like a flood, submerging all the fair features of the country’s culture in a hideous level waste of ignoble life. The present system has many blemishes, but it has features of beauty and refinement that could not live in a democracy. We have to take the rough with the smooth. Many a man has bitterly repented his defiance of the proverb, “Let well alone.”
Granted that competition is “a wasteful and a cruel wrong,” it is conceivable in the abstract that there might be such a system for distributing the commodities of life in trade as that trade should be a dignified and benevolent exercise instead of a feverish and demoralising scramble in which bones and hearts are broken. But it would require two things that are not attainable in the present conditions of human life. You would require officials that were incorruptible themselves, but, above all, that could not be imposed upon; and you would require a government that could not be evaded or resisted. If you had not officials that could see through stone walls, infallibly detect and expose deceptions, you could not enforce the regulation price of articles, and you would have competition directly. The fairest government list of prices p. 19 would become obsolete in 24 hours. An outward compliance with the law would be joined with evasion underneath. The unscrupulous shopkeeper taking the full price over the counter would know how either to return 25 per cent. in private, or add a liberal bonus to all purchases made at his shop. The best law would be circumvented in the absence of officials capable of an infallible administration. You want officials like Elisha, who told the King of Israel what the King of Syria said in his bed chamber (2 Kings vi. 12); or like Peter who could penetrate the private understanding between Ananias and Sapphira (Acts v. 1-11). With men of such faculty, you might crush competition in the enforcement of a system of wise and uniform prices. Where are you to get such men? Here is where our weakness lies, Mr. Blatchford. They are not attainable.
So with the question of resistance. Unpopular measures would always be liable to resistance in a social republic. Turbulence would upset a disliked administration; but who could upset Omnipotence? I admit the evils you point out: but I see no hope of their remedy except in this direction. You may think me visionary: but it is at least a hard-headed visionariness. It is based upon the Bible, which is one of our public facts to be taken into account. If the Bible is true, as I believe, the evils you deplore will all be remedied in due time. God has His remedy in reserve. All our remedies are bound to be failures. The remedy will extend to such matter-of-fact matters as you discourse of. The factory system is certainly in need of reformation. It is, as you say, ugly—disagreeable, injurious to public health. The manufacturing districts are truly dirty, smoky, hideous. Pure air and bright skies are impossible in them. Only in the uncontaminated “country” can we get clear rivers, clean streets, beautiful fields, woods and gardens,—“cattle, streams, birds and flowers”—things, as you observe, “well worth living for.”
Every sensible man must agree with you that much twaddle has been talked by the now nearly effete “Manchester School” as to these things being sentimental, and that they contradict their own arguments by getting as far away from the factories as they can for the sites of their own villas, and by spending long holidays in the most beautiful parts of the continent.
But what then? You say that I, John Smith, may get the benefit of similar advantages at less cost or labour than I now pay for the privilege of living in a manufacturing town, with its foul p. 20 air, impure water, poor food, and their unwholesome accessories of long hours, excessive labour, overcrowding, disease, and intemperance. This is where I drop my eyes and look down my nose, as it were. “May have”: this is vague. How? By adopting your method. Ah, Mr. Blatchford, your method has been tried many times in the world’s history. It always ends in one way—sooner or later: disagreement, quarreling, bloodshed, chaos, tyranny. It is bound to be so. Human passions, under the direction of conflicting human wills, are terrible things to deal with. Under a firm regulation, they are like the steam confined in the boiler: they can be turned to useful ends. But let them loose—give them the control, they become like the destructive tornado, the tempest let loose, the fountains of the great deep unsealed. They rise like a flood and sweep everything away.
I grant that things are not as they ought to be, and that life might be a beautiful, and a joyful, and a holy thing. But it is impossible under present circumstances. I am content, for one, to have things fairly decent, knowing they might be so much worse. Nothing short of God’s own interference can give us the ideal you have before your mind. He has promised this interference, and I believe it will come. Therefore I feel I can wait. If I did not believe in Him, I might be tempted to join you in the impossible experiment of Socialism. Believing in Him, and believing also that other statement of the Bible, that He rules in the kingdoms of men, and inflicts the very evils you lament because of man’s insubordinate attitude to Him, I feel I can wait.
Here you may think I am meandering again. But you say I am a practical man, I cannot but think I am. Therefore, I cannot help entertaining these expectations, with the Bible in my house, and a history of a hundred generations behind it. It is not an ecclesiastical imposture, you know. Its writers were all put to death by the ecclesiastical authorities of their day—including the founder of Christianity.
Your revering friend,
JOHN SMITH.