In A Slave Plantation

Matthew Warriner

[Reprinted from The Commonwealth, 192-]

Week by week, the numbers of the unemployed mount. The Lord Privy Seal has failed to produce any method of putting willing men to work sustaining their lives. He has not found a method which would prevent men being thrown out of employment. This problem is really a simple one, but the solution of the difficulty will never be found by any Minister for Parliament believing that legislative action alone, Government pressure in any direction, or compulsion in any shape, will solve it. The plain and simple truth is that where men are denied the right of access to Nature, a condition of economic slavery is set up, which, in many respects, is actually worse than chattel slavery when it was considered perfectly moral and legal for one human being to own another human being, if the latter happened to be dark-skinned. The so-called owner, in his own interest, took care of his property, fed, sheltered and provided medical attendance in order to keep them in a condition to produce wealth for his use and ownership.

The present owners of economic slaves are relieved from all these responsibilities because they are able to buy the labour of the slaves in the open market, and do buy at less cost than the owner of dark-skinned slaves was put to in order to maintain his property in good physical condition.

England, and every other country, where land is not accessible, has become a large slave plantation. A certain freedom of movement is the right of everybody, but this is strictly limited, and it may be said, in a sentence, that men are not to-day free to do anything else but ask someone else for a job of work; to such a pass have we come!

To-day, with the assistance of machines, sarcastically called "labour-saving devices," the production of wealth of all kinds in great abundance has been rendered possible.

We have large masses of unemployed everywhere hungry, while the wealth which is needed for their sustenance and comfort is hoarded in granaries and warehouses until there is a shortage of room to store the surplus wealth. We are a hungry people because we have too much food; we are badly clothed and housed because we have woven too much cloth and dug too much clay and slate. Many go bare of foot in sight of warehouses containing large quantities of boots. In a word, it is a made world we live in, mad by reason of its denial of the main elementary rights of man. Surely they who produce wealth must own it. In the modern complex system of production, the share of the product which goes to labour is represented by his wages, but as the wages passed over to labour cannot purchase the things which labour has produced, it is obvious that wages are too low; therefore, the wealth producers are not getting a fair deal. This is a plain fact which anybody can see.

How can labour receive its just reward in the presence of so large a number of unemployed? How can labour receive its just reward when it is forced to take jobs from other people because the only opportunity to employ itself is withheld from it? How labour is content to tolerate such a state of affairs is a mystery.

It must be plain to everybody who works that those who do not work can only live on the products of those who do labour. The result of the work of the employed is taken from them by ingenious methods and divided with those who are not allowed to work. Most people think this an inevitable state of affairs, and never question its justice, but the system will be challenged some day, probably when we have got a little further along the road to Socialism, and the State pays those who do not work as much as those who do work can earn. The question will become so acute that it will be borne in upon men that the principle upon which the world has been ordered is one contrary to Natural Law and good morals. There can be no change so long as the earth is regarded as private property for which rent can be charged by private individuals, and so long as the right of men to keep what they produce is denied. When a Labour or Socialist Government makes this denial complete and insists upon collecting all the wealth produced into one common pool, to be divided mechanically under the direction (say) of Mr. G. b. Shaw, then the end will come. It may come long before that, as a matter of fact, because already some workers are seeking discharge from their employment to go on the dole. "Why should I work for so little a week?" said one worker in a shipyard. "I can get enough of my weekly earnings now if I go on the dole, and I am not obliged to prove that I am genuinely seeking work, I would rather go on the dole than work for 3s a week.

Can any change be brought about by the mere shifting of the burden from one part of the anatomy to another? We think not. The Chancellor of the Exchequer attempts to take more from the so-called rich by way of income tax and inheritance tax, but there can be no solution found by such practices. To attempt to bring about a condition of peace and contentment in a community by denying the right of its members to own anything at all, is merely insanity. To attempt to equalize the reward of labour and make a mechanical division of the wealth produced is to defy Nature, who, apparently decreed that progress is to be made towards peace and contentment by individual effort. Taxation as at present imposed nothing but legalized theft and just as reprehensible as any other kind of theft; in fact, theft cannot be legalized; that is, it cannot be made to accord with the moral law. That taxation should be considered necessary in order to provide the wealth required to establish and maintain necessary public institutions, displays ignorance of the fact that there is in existence now, but going into private pockets, a quite sufficient fund of communal wealth which, if collected for the public benefit, would permit the abolition of all theft of private earnings for public benefit.

What will induce those who have now the power to oppress the people by an unjust system of taxation, to seek the truth of the matter? Nothing but a popular outcry and an expression of the people's will, no longer to be denied their rights on earth, to contribute to public expenses, but to demand the collection of the only public wealth there is. Unquestionably the time will come when the people generally will realize that the land of England belongs to Englishmen, not a few of them but all of them, and that this being so the rent of England must necessarily belong to the owners, and they also insist upon its collection for the benefit of the whole of the people, and will insist upon the discontinuance of the theft of their private earnings, and then their troubles will be over, but not until then.