Will England Emerge?
I
The Wealth of Nations is the Bible of modern England. She applied to her instinct for prosperity just those principles which expressed the experience of ages, and perhaps there was in the new gospel something more peculiar to the Talmud than to either the Old Testament or the New. On a basis of honest work, backed by thrift, England raised her empire, and she owes its greatness to the way her governments adapted themselves to her successful merchants. They, it might be said, made her population. They also prevented her empire from dividing from her, as the early states had done and as Latin America divided itself from Spain and Portugal. Behind all this was an economic process, discovered by an Italian called Pareto — the process, or law, that the wealth of the masses depends upon the riches of individuals.
The situation is a complex one; but it can be summed up in this statement, that the more things people find they want, the more people there will be. The rise of populations depends on the fullness with which people live in this material world; and the fullness with which they live depends most of all upon the capitalist who can do what none else can. For his claim is enterprise: he is the man of risks and gambles, and it is he, therefore, who manfully puts to hazard his fortune and his ease. We cannot ask that of the poor, who with their surplus lose their livelihood; we could not tolerate it in an official of the State. An official cannot and should not undertake uncertain enterprises, and his whole training robs him of the desperate keenness which turns an uncertain venture to success. He is the conservative element in politics, and advises an efficiency which is above all things safe; he has no interest in gain. The capitalist bears the buffet of not only enterprise but nature; but more — he lives on what he earns. His whole organization is based on profit; he finds no place for unproductive men. His only master is occasion, and with all the suppleness of a gymnast his system adapts itself to feats of neatness, daring, and skill.
The function of the rich man is so inevitable, his usefulness so obvious, that it is easy enough to see how Adam Smith’s ideas inspired his country. Nature furnishes potential riches, labor brings them forth, commerce exchanges them, with such happy results that we have only to leave men their own advantage and, with honesty and industry as its means and guaranties, the universal system moves, as it were to music. This was the idea which, with fertile and apt illustration, with close reasoning, with the creative power of ordered thought, Adam Smith gave England and the world in The Wealth of Nations. But much of it had been anticipated by Hume; it had been sketched by Locke, and in fact it was stated clearly and attractively by Fenelon, the Archbishop of Cambrai, in The Adventures of Telemachus.
If we want to see it applied in all its vigor by a modern business man who is prepared to let us into the secret of his business, and finds his philosophy in that, we could not read anything more stimulating, more absorbing, than Confessions of a Capitalist. The Capitalist is a most successful, perhaps the most successful, London publisher. Taste, enterprise, and usefulness, luxury and cheapness in books, all come within his scope. He has a genius for getting hold of the good book — the book so important that it must be read by those who matter and who therefore will probably have to buy. He is now what is in American standards a millionaire, and he began as a poor man.
With an engaging frankness, and the trenchancy of a mind of such phenomenal strength as to give the impression of a genius, Sir Ernest Benn applies to our own age, as with a flashing axe of immediacy and thoroughness, the political philosophy which has populated modern Europe, which has made America, which electrifies the world into a conscious organism of mutual gain. He puts his plea before practical people in such a way as to convince them that the capitalist is absolutely inevitable. He supplies them with technical arguments for what instinct and experience had already shown them.
Anyone who reads Confessions of a Capitalist will have an intimate and stimulating view into the case for private enterprise. Its reward in the present system is so small in comparison to the volume of business it creates that it is impossible to imagine a more thrifty or more paying arrangement. To hand over the skilled organization of modern industry and commerce to the ignorant and unwieldy governance of a crowd whose doctrines are all learned in the school of misery and who have never polished them in the friction of experience would reduce the world to a Russia; for when the Communists show us the garden of their hopes we find its biggest flowers are tombstones, and our own feet are on the slippery earth of open graves. Any artificial checks can only impede the vast effectiveness of the world’s exchange of bounties.
II
That is the case for capitalism. But do nations find it a remedy that works independent of character and morals? It was not of capitalism that Bunyan said, ‘It is an universal pill’; and the capitalist’s trust in skill and nature is, like the trust in the efficacy of mass judgments, a preference of brute force to moral reason. There it was the brute force of numbers; here it is a force which can be just as brutal — that of business men. And although the great business organization of the world is better than that of bureaucracies; although it stands high in the scale of human values; although it is full of good and honest men, the truth that money makes money is not in itself the fulfillment of the promise of life, not citizenship in the kingdom where men work for the advantage of one another and together produce the true riches of life and good. In fact, Banyan’s pill was repentance!
For the capitalist system of leaving things to nature ignores both the evil in man, who may demand something bad, as well as the universal prodigality of sacrifice to which Nature treats her own resources, and in which man’s plans are from time to time involved. Her vast plan is one of constant change. Whole systems are formed and dissolve. Her annual growth is a display of energy with which she disposes recklessly. And so with men: absorbed in her immense complication they too find that they come and they go, that they are needed or unnecessary according to the swift changes of supply and demand. And this is the weakness of capitalism, that man with an insistence on his own value which nothing in nature rivals, an insistence which no other man can forget or fail to learn, claims the right to live. He does not accept destruction; he demands wellbeing. And capitalism, leaving things to nature, risks the well-being, even the lives, of masses of men. For at times one thing is needed, at other times there is too much of it; or such a price can be paid for it, and no more, and that price is not a living wage.
Mr. Basil King’s thrilling story, The Empty Sack, shows how ruthlessly nonmoral capital can be. For it puts the rich man in possession of a power which it does nothing to regulate for the good of other men. He can accumulate goods, and overcharge, and so tyrannize over the consumer; or he can take advantage of the supply of men and put wages so low that men’s lives are misery. These two evils are both disciplined by competition; but the capitalist in trusts and amalgamations aims at, and to some extent succeeds in, eliminating competition. This in turn leads to the self-defense of the workingman — the trades-union. The blessedness of free trade is therefore utopian; in reality rivalry is only partial, and nature’s free system is hampered in actual fact by two different sorts of syndicates — those of the employers and those of the employed. But even so there is no guaranty for the workman against unemployment. His reason for existence may at any time be gone; until he begins to be a capitalist he has no reserves. And he is tortured by an uncertainty that his life, as well as the life of the family he supports, is always in jeopardy from forces quite independent of its worth and talents. The capitalist cannot save his employees from the buffets of nature’s ruthlessness.
The result is that capitalism, in spite of its excellent and indispensable services to society, produces a system of syndicates or trades-unions, and of national solidarity with tariffs and taxes, that combats its trusts and monopolies with socialism.
This is the difficulty which underlies the strike, and which spreads through the veins of Europe the virulence of economic unrest. What happened in England was that the coal trade found itself in difficulties. Profits were disappearing. The owners could pay the old wages only at a loss, which would soon mean that, ceasing to be capitalists, they could not pay them at all. At that the miners declared that the situation was intolerable. But behind the miners’ problem was the knowledge that the plight of the miners might come in any other trade, and that therefore the workers would force a higher wage all round. To do this they were prepared to risk a revolution, and the more violent and destructive aimed at an upheaval of European society. This sinister aim is not a sudden desperation, even in England. For long years the Communists have said: ’This system is hopeless. Let us first destroy it, and then we can rebuild.’ Russia shows them at work.
England, after eight days of the experiment, found that it was intolerable. The most eminent authorities decided that the breach of contract was illegal and, when that was clearly stated, it was clear also that this was more of a revolution than an industrial dispute; and it stopped immediately.
So much for the English strike, where Communism once again made effort to master the world. If it had succeeded in England, it would have succeeded elsewhere. But it failed. And the country goes back as before to cope with the peculiarity of the present age — the crisis of capitalism.
III
There can be little doubt that capitalism is very closely connected with individualism, and individualism came to dominate our philosophies when the humanism of the Renaissance found its reaction in the pieties of Puritanism. It would not be just to say that the Protestant philosophers were individualistic. What more appears to have happened was that in the lack of authority, the relaxation of philosophic tradition, and the new emphasis on the will, or even faith, rather than on grace given through the sacraments, there was a stimulus to individual effort which found in material goods its rich reward. This is the development which is traced by the most thoughtful and attractive of English socialists, Mr. Tawney, in his new book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, a book of philosophical and literary distinction.
Mr. Tawney points first to the very definite laws that the Christian Church made against usury, which, in the economic system of the Middle Ages, meant lending to those who were desperate, but which more generally applied to any sort of unjust or extortionate profit. In this form it was vigorously asserted by the reformers. But as first the dominance of kings strengthened the big financiers, and as later there was no authority to apply the standards of the Gospel to the vast system of mercantile exchange which followed the Reformation, Calvin’s insistence upon thrift and work as the sign of loyalty to the Gospel gradually led on to Locke’s philosophy that society was a social contract and not an organism. And it was from Hume’s development of this that Adam Smith produced, a hundred years later, his argument that the system of trade in itself was the finger of providence.
Mr. Tawney does not go so far as this stage of the argument, nor does he give any hint of what the world owes to commercial enterprise; but he does show how, as time went on, theory fell to the standard of practice, and, instead of arguing for the moral law as the health of the social body, drifted at last to the conclusion that economic might was right.
So, in a book subtly and excellently written, Mr. Tawney argues his way to socialism from the moral authority of past ages.
It is the happiest sign of our age that influential economists are going back to moral authority, and examining an age in which it was honored. Mr. Tawney is following another writer, Mr. Penty, also a Christian and a socialist; but Mr. Tawney, in the fineness and vigor of his mind, produces something much better than does Mr. Penty. And, what is more, he leads his argument closer to the development of the modern situation. But since then the industrial system has grown up, and its philosophies have developed with it. And they do not all lead in the same direction as does Mr. Tawney.
Disraeli, for example, was no socialist, but few English writers have ever felt more strongly than he the iniquity of commercial exploitation, whether of religious houses, of dark races, of remote traders, of machinery, or of the human labor of one’s own country. Disraeli wrote and spoke against all these with a passion much hotter than that of Mr. Tawney. He identified them with the Whig tradition which had governed England in the eighteenth century, and the power of which lasted in a less absolute form until the war. He identified them with great nobles who had made money out of the Reformation, like the Duke of Bedford, whom Burke also castigated; with others who had bought peerages with money made by exploiting India, like the family he attacks in Sybil; and with those who had made the England of his own time of two nations, the rich and the poor. Disraeli’s sympathy with the poor was as warm as Mr. Tawney’s; and, like Mr. Tawney, he pointed to the Church as a remedy against the evil. But he also advocated the remedy of a responsible aristocracy.
If Disraeli had been in the position to force his theories through, then when the present difficulties were crystallizing we should have seen a different England, a different world. But Whigs and other Tories were too much for him. The world meanwhile developed another sort of prophet, a prophet who turned the capitalist’s own utilitarian theories into a mine under their position. That prophet was an obscure German Jew who spent his life in the British Museum — his name was Karl Marx.
IV
Why is Marx’s book the Bible of the socialists? Because it argued that capital fleeces the workman of the payment of his labor, that it takes what is not its own. His theory was that a thing is — or rather, ought to be — worth the hours of labor put into it; and that, since all men are equal, one man’s labor is as good as another man’s. But he recognized that a man cannot claim to be paid for producing what nobody wants; value is a social product, he used to say. But he also recognized that, especially in the industry of machinery, one man was worth more than another. ‘Manufacture, therefore,’ he said, ‘develops a hierarchy of labor powers to which there corresponds a rate of wages,’ and all these together made the collective laborer.
There were, in fact, in Marx two tendencies, one of which he owed to Hegel, who had himself studied from scholastic manuals. This took Marx back to the idea of society as an organism, and the idea of absolute right, so that Marx here was basing his argument for a price on a moral law. And, secondly, there was the element which Marx obtained from those who regarded economic law as absolute in the give-and-take of individual action. For, regarding each separate man as an individual separately seeking a separate advantage, they regarded both economics and politics as just when each man contributed an equal share to their system, and obtained, therefore, an equal right.
But what do we mean by equality? It is just that question which brings us to the cause of all the difficulties in Europe at the present moment. If it were to mean that people have equal talents, it would be obviously absurd. If it means that men, as men, have rights for a chance to work, and rights to the benefits of the law to defend their property and their conditions of work, it is the elementary moral truth of the general dignity of human nature. But if it means that men, as men, irrespective of their abilities or their characters, should have an equal voice in government, or in the partition of property, it means the breakdown both of right and of efficiency, because it hands over society to the brute weight of mass. It leaves us with the raw material before the artists have stamped upon it beautiful order of reason and law.
The only value that there was in the theories of Marx was the protest against exploitation of labor on the part of the capitalist. For, as Disraeli made clear, Victorian England left irresponsible men of enterprise far too many chances to make their money at the cost of the degradation of the masses. The masses organized themselves in self-defense, and fought for reasonable terms and a minimum wage, as they are still lighting, through unions and the right to strike. But no sooner had they done so than the weakness of Marx’s theory of democracy in labor made itself manifest, for the voters soon fell under the influence of their leaders.
In the last English strike the leaders dispensed even with the formality of consulting the men through their vote: but whether they did or did not is a mere detail. It is the leaders who make the policy. Democracy there, as everywhere, is a chimera; it is the pretense of consulting people most of whom are not competent to express an opinion. What was the result of the strike, as far as the workmen were concerned? Another half million thrown out of employment, the inevitable result of a dislocation which cost England for at least ten days a hundred and fifty million dollars per day; and to-day a million and a half are paid in England to go about doing nothing till the tragedy of boredom makes them useless.
V
No politician in England who acquiesces in a million and a half men and women accepting a dole for doing nothing dare refer to the fact that France is employing three millions of foreigners, and is still asking for more. Those three millions are Italians, Czechs, Poles, Belgians, Dutch, and even Germans, but there is hardly a single Englishman among them. When the English go to France, — and all through the winter there are at least a hundred thousand of them, — they go to do nothing but spend money. But the fact that no Englishman will cross the Channel for work, when over a million and a half Italians have crossed the Alps for it, leads us far toward explaining the crisis involving all capitalism.
It means two things: first, that enterprise is the privilege of a class; secondly, that that class has not spread the spirit of it among the masses. England is still wealthy, and pays taxes at the rate of four thousand millions of dollars a year for a population of something over forty million — a taxation approaching, therefore, 100 dollars a head. And besides this she supports a large number in luxury. This does not mean that, if their profits were divided among the poor, the poor would be appreciably better off. On the other hand, as Sir Ernest Benn shows, the capitalist system being disorganized, there would be less wealth to distribute, and we have every reason to think that — as so obviously in Russia, and to a certain extent in Germany — the poor would be poorer. But in any case the poor are always with us, for the simple reason that humanity has an instinct for life and produces as many people as a system can support. The formation of canals in India, for example, opening up vast territories, has not so much raised the standard of living as increased the population. The population of England in the last century has quadrupled. If people grumble at her capitalist system as involving the conditions of their life, they must remember that, without it, they would not be living at all.
It is not the capitalist system that is responsible for the present crisis — it is the way that in certain cases it has been misapplied. It has been the constriction of moral responsibility so as not to involve the conditions in which workmen live. The result is that though they have now a vote, and wages, and more reasonable hours, they find their leisure must still be spent in the monotonous sordidness of a slum cut off from fields, and variety, and clean air, and nature’s thousand springs of life.
That is but one example of capital’s waste of opportunity, for — as villages like Bournville and Port Sunlight show — it was quite possible to amass fortunes while still building beautifully for the masses who helped to produce them.
But the capitalists show their irresponsibility with equal clearness in the fact that they have failed to explain their system to those that were living by it. The age in which Disraeli lived was that in which England grew to portentous wealth and power; and it was in that age that she disfigured her towns and landscapes with the sordid monotonies of yellow brick built for those busy with manufactures and with mines. The teeth of our age are set on edge with the sour grapes that our fathers have eaten.
Nowhere so much as in England did the masses rush from the fields to other industry. Nowhere was the access of wealth quicker as a result; nowhere at the present time is the crisis more acute. Because, as Hume pointed out nearly two hundred years ago, in a country which has become wealthy everything is dear, or, looked at from another point of view, everything is costly to produce. America has to a large extent solved the difficulty by an immense increase of production through skill, and yet again by a high tariff. England has omitted the one, and she can hardly risk the other, for that in itself raises the cost of living, and thus it would be still harder to compete.
But there is another difficulty. England’s most important neighbors — France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany — have all depreciated their currencies. The one great result of that policy is to allow no class to lend its powers uselessly. Capitalists are allowed to exist if their money is in productive investments, but the large class who invested money in gilt-edged securities has been disowned. It is a stimulating reflection that this move in taking values from paper money, and loans to the State, has made it practically impossible for the countries who did it to wage war.
England, however, is still maintaining a very large unproductive class. She regards her honor as involved in that, and certainly her banking system is. She not only maintains it through its unproductive investments, but she taxes to support it. Of her four thousand million dollars of taxation, practically every cent is spent on unproductive people. She makes no attempt to teach wise buying, though wise buying is almost as essential to the rightness of the capitalist system as just profits. Her wealthy class spends far too freely, and too seldom consecrates its leisure to removing the causes of political and economic ailments.
Occupied with the technique of earning, wages, hours, and factory conditions, she has forgotten life. The result is that bad cooking and uncomfortable homes, in hideous neighborhoods, prevent the wages that are paid from bringing in their worth, so that those who earn them are not properly nourished, or refreshed, or happy. The working women show their worst demoralization in incompetence in their homes. Education is hardly thought to include the most constant and valuable interests of women’s lives: thrift, taste, temper, cookery.
For this a bad tradition is to blame. And though it is worst among the masses, the lack of training or example in higher classes means that they cannot be held guiltless.
Worst of all is the lack of enterprise which holds a man from the colonial or foreign adventure, and which — worse still — makes him useless when the greatness of it is thrust upon him.
VI
Whether, therefore, England will emerge from her crisis depends on these questions, which are seldom discussed, which are, in fact, too practical to engage the people who write and talk, and which require an energy and an organization that so far no one has been prepared to give. The question is the character of her people: enterprise and efficiency everywhere, and from the upper classes wise spending, and a willingness to work out for the others the possibility of possessing the missing courage, interest, and joy.
It cannot be denied that that movement has been long delayed, and that a certain dullness, sometimes turning to what Ruskin called ague fits of amazed despair, marks millions of Englishmen, whether workers, unemployed, or unemployable.
But when there is such a different spirit in France, and even in Germany, still more in Italy, it is reasonable to point to the difference of philosophy. Italy has forbidden strikes, and has evolved a system that Marx himself shadowed out — the hierarchy of labor. This is being worked out in Germany in the Syndicalist movement of organized Catholic laborers, headed by Dr. Stegerwald, which controls two million votes; and, adding to this the ideal of the tournament of talents which goes with it, Italy suggests that every man can rise and himself have the opportunity of becoming a capitalist. She enrolls every man, whether capitalist, laborer, or intellectual, into a vast organism of work, which, in cases of dispute, is to be adjusted by the State.
There still remain the untalented. For them Italy has a philosophy of patience; England, apparently, a philosophy of hopelessness. But a comparison between the two countries — one daily increasing in strength, and the other subject to appalling shocks and tragic listlessness — involves not only the fact of compulsory arbitration but also the fact that twenty-five millions of Italians are supported by agriculture, whereas in England not three millions are so supported. England’s land is waste, and she buys her food from three thousand, six thousand, and even twelve thousand miles away. It seems a rather unbusinesslike arrangement. when she has both idle fields and idle men. There is in England one farm which by intensive production supports fifty men on two hundred acres, and at the same time returns nearly twenty per cent on the capital invested. But that, again, is private enterprise.
England’s wealth is still enormous, but she can neither discipline the unproductive, cultivate enterprise or versatility, or thrift among the women, nor yet teach a tradition of wise spending of wealth among the masses. The last subject is the most important of all. It is avoided by both Mr. Tawney and Sir Ernest Benn. But when all Sir Ernest’s arguments are heard, they would apply just as well to a purveyor of pornography as to a publisher who conducts the admirable business he himself conducts. Sir Ernest, in fact, cites the example of Lord Northcliffe, perhaps the most degrading and sinister of all the political powers that have played in English life in this century.
Between the value of a man’s work and the money a buyer will pay for a finished article, the capitalist has his indispensable function. He must supply what people will find they want. But that will not in itself make them want good things. Sir Ernest advises them to save rather than to spend, but only taste and morals can teach them spending. And, when they have done both, they will need to adjust the social organism by some giving, which means as much from mind as from pockets. If the dues for that are left to the State, hundreds of millions will be thrown away. England’s tragedy of to-day is her taxation.
England needs both the skill and enterprise of America and the individual interest and organized intensiveness of Italy, where the claims of corporations to which all belong are adjusted by the State. Can she get them? The moral zeal which has an active understanding of economic conditions seems to waver between the preaching of wealth and the preaching of distrust of it. But the truer wisdom applies to the fleeting opportunities of this world principles that arise from familiarity with virtues and truths which are universal and eternal, so that while many are content to be poor, even to choose poverty, others will use their powers to enrich themselves in such a way that, both as they make money and as they spend it, the poor are in due proportion enriched together with themselves.
The crisis of capitalism is a question of moral philosophy, worked out, as in America or Italy, to effect the discipline of character and the spread of energy, of versatility, of enterprise, while not sacrificing the truth of the unity of society or of the necessity of brotherly love.