The Road To Freedom,
And What Lies Beyond
CHAPTER 3
Josiah and Ethel Wedgwood
[Published in London by C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 1913]
ON SOCIAL REFORM
…"Social Reforms"
deal with results, not with causes.
… The workers themselves are more
concerned with the results of their slavery than with the slavery
itself ; and their organised efforts have been directed to making the
circumstances of their bondage less harsh and uncertain ; and since,
under the system, everyone must be wholly slave, or partly slave
owner, it is at this latter state that they chiefly aim. Moreover,
seeing that the indulgences and pleasures which make their slavish
condition tolerable come from the slave labour of others, they are the
less eager to cut at the root of these compensations. Indeed, it is
common to find Labour men advocating "compulsory industrial
labour," as if there were no alternative to idleness but a
limited number of hours at the treadmill.
… Lecturers and writers also tell
the people that modern civilisation is the most glorious achievement
of the human race ; and that in turning out by the latest application
of science all manner of articles, many useless or harmful, they are
serving humanity, and helping to confer benefits which would be
inestimable if they were only distributed fairly. Many such people
actually believe that a man can quite justly be forced to spend his
strength and intelligence on labour in which his own will and wishes
have no part, provided that he receives his equal share of the produce
of all such labour, and that his health and efficiency are not damaged
in the process. In their eyes the crime of monopoly is not that it has
robbed men of their independence, but that it has robbed them of the
largest part of their earnings. It is as though a galley-slave were to
complain, not of the oars and the chain and the lash, but that his
food and bedding fell below the Trades Union standard.
… Political Programmes.
… Political programmes cannot often
be taken seriously as measures of constructive philosophy. In
democratic countries they are of necessity opportunist, but they are a
useful indicator as to what is popular or supposed to be popular at
the period.
… Those political parties which
make most noise and have most pieces on exhibition, limit their
objects, and generally their ideas also, to a series of domestic
improvements.
… They occupy themselves in trying
to make men either richer or more efficient servants -- never in
making them more free. No party is better than another in this
respect; it is merely a question in what name the populace shall be
ruled.
… In Germany the Social -democratic
party, which is the bogey of the middle classes, is in truth
formidable, not from anything specially revolutionary in its ideas but
from its bristling militancy and solidarity. It opposes both army and
civil officialdom as the imperial tools, but is itself impregnated
with the spirit of militarism and bureaucracy. It is no new mintage,
but just the reverse side of the old coin. Its aims for the supremacy
of the proletariat involve as great interference with the lives of the
workers, and as much espionage and as summary treatment of individuals
as the imperial regime. Being guided by materialistic ideals, they
dread any sudden shock to the social fabric ; and hence, directly they
come into a position of responsibility, their programme becomes
revisionist, and their schemes are directed by that social science
whose nostrums grow antiquated and have to be replaced every few
years. Of the six items of the official Social-democratic programme
for the new Reichstag of February 1912, two aim at increasing
Parliamentary control on English seventeenth-century lines, while the
other four are concerned with electoral reform.
… In France we find the official
Labour party absorbed in Proportional representation, and in a scheme
for building, by money levied in taxation, the sort of houses that
working men ought to want.
… Fabianism.
… In England the Fabians, the
official Labour Party and the Progressives throw their energies and
talents into such proposals as: a limitation of the hours of active
slavery to eight; a provision of creches with hygienic bottles and
educational toys for the children of mothers obliged (under the
industrial system) to go out to work; bureaus for registering who is
engaged in wage work and who is not (with a view to compelling the man
who is not in service to enter it at once); insurance schemes for
putting part of that part of a workman's wages which he receives into
the bank for him, so that he may go to authorised sanatoria when he is
ill, and be attended by licensed doctors ; bills for making men and
women decent by flogging them, and for locking up other people's
children on humanitarian principles.
… So do we see a conscientious
house-mistress of the good old type take charge of her young maids'
minds and morals, regulate household affairs so as to train them for
good servants ; shepherd them to and from the established church in
black frocks and bonnets; physic them with patent drugs when ill;
provide them with suitable evening recreations, so that they may not
be tempted to flirt at the back door; and treat every breakage of
china or decorum as a breach of the decalogue.
… Such a programme is of course
attractive to the political schoolmasters who have climbed into
intellectual pre-eminence on the shoulders of those who "swink
with their hands." It is only by inventing things of that sort
that they can justify to themselves their privileged position. As for
the sheep, fortunately for the professional shepherds, they only ask
to be more humanely fleeced and more comfortably folded by shepherds
of their own selection. They do not yet believe in a world where sheep
are neither shorn nor penned.
… Syndicalism.
… Alone, the Syndicalist movement,
afoot in France, just stirring here, seems to show a blind and groping
consciousness that more government is not what is wanted. This
movement does not indeed show as yet any distinct conception of what,
instead, is wanted. Its immediate programme still halts at the old
socialist demands for an obligatory eight- hours day and a minimum
wage. It shows signs of the amalgam of opposite elements, anarchic and
socialist, of which it is composed. But it is gathering force and
manifesting an increasingly definite hostility to bureaucratic
methods. In it there seems to be latent a different ideal, possibly a
more spiritual one than is to be found in the old recognised parties.
For this reason it is regarded by them with aversion and fear; because
to secure the maximum material prosperity you must also have the
maximum control over the producers of it, and the rule of the expert
over the unlearned. In the only great effort that has been made
towards industrial freedom in recent years in England - the miners'
strike of March 1912, and the anti-militarist agitation connected with
it -- we find the official Labour party timid and powerless, and
concealing ill their hostility towards any rebel action by that class
whom they are supposed to represent.
… Why the Workers have sought
Refuge in State Socialism.
… There are three main reasons why
the workers have hitherto looked foremost to their bodily comforts,
and put their liberty second. The first cause is urgent poverty. When
hunger takes shape and substance, then everything else becomes a
shadow; and there are not many - though every generation has a few --
who set freedom above food, and fire, and child. It is useless to
expect lofty ideals among men made brutish by want.
… On the other hand, as the primary
necessities recede, and life and tempers get softer, resistance to the
established order becomes more difficult, for there is more to lose,
and suffering has become unaccustomed and more dreaded. The second
cause then is, that the workers themselves feel the conveniences of
the slave-system. They have developed a taste for cheap slave-made
articles, and so have become small shareholders in the concern; and
they also enjoy the absence of responsibility, absence of any mentally
fatiguing demand for initiative, absence of worry about results.
… But, above all, they have lost
the imagination of freedom. They have discarded that store of hope and
enterprise with which each child enters the world; and if by any
chance they find themselves in the open country, away from tram-lines
and the noise of other men's feet, they are frightened as at something
unnatural.
… In civilised countries the
worship of individuality is fashionable only among the wealthy or the
degenerate, with whom it is always a nauseous cult, and dependent on
the exploitation of other people. The ordinary man cannot find much to
choose between the Nietzscheism of the intellectual and the more
sensual selfishness of the common pleasure-seeker. Their creeds are
not meant for popularity. Both, in order to keep themselves
white-skinned, demand too many horny hands in others. Therefore it is
no wonder that individualism is supposed to be synonymous with egoism,
and has fallen into disrepute; and that the masses who move and think
and are ruled in regiments, fancy that safety can only be found in
legislation that shall continually countermine every fresh mine laid
by the individual exploiter.
… "Social Reforms"
perpetuate Slavery.
… But not only is all this
legislation of "social reform " a witness to the servile
state of the people: it is actually involving them more irrecoverably
in slavery. Those who urge against free meals for poor children that
they will destroy parental responsibility, have this much truth on
their side: not that the conditions under which the poor have to rear
children are not flagrantly unjust, not that it is easy for the
wealthy to give to the poor anything which is not merely a toll on
wrongly-gotten gains, but that every provision made for the poor by
private individuals or by the State brings the poor into still greater
bondage to the system under which they receive it. Such doles make
them more acquiescent in their servitude, less willing to recognise
it, less ready to sacrifice immediate comfort in order to attain
freedom. And of the two kinds, the State dole is worse than the
private dole.
… It is at this time fashionable to
preach that public institutions should replace private associations
for charitable purposes. If it is desired to manage other people's
lives for them, it is certainly done with more method and less
overlapping by the Government than by a score of separate leagues; and
possibly, on the whole, more cheaply also, even allowing for the large
salaries paid to permanent officials.
… But private charity has at least
this to be said in its favour, that the individual dispensing it in
person gives with it the only things which are really his to give -
and those which have most value -- sympathy and personal service 1;
and self-denial may also come in, for even though the money which the
giver forgoes does not in equity belong to him, yet he thinks it
belongs, and so probably does the recipient. It is probable that
private alms-giving, however inadequate and however misdirected, is
less demoralizing.
… This, of course, is only true
when the assistance is of a strictly parochial character, from
individual to individual. Large associations (like the C.O.S.),
drawing funds from outsiders and worked by business agents, have many
of the faults as well as the advantages of a State bureau, and the
donations sent them wholesale by wealthy persons are so much "conscience
money" paid to the Treasury -- to the community than the
carefully graded benefits apportioned by the State. It is true that in
Naples there are more beggars visible, but at any rate they are close
to the church doors and they sit in the sun.
… When Government officials
dispense old-age and sick pensions, free breakfasts, free medical aid,
and such like, they are merely re-distributing among the workers the
money taken in taxation from the workers themselves, after some of the
cream has been incidentally skimmed off to pay the minister who
devises the scheme, those more powerful adherents whose support keeps
him in authority, and the numerous subordinates who do this valuable
task of collecting the workers' money and restoring it to them again.
And though, according to the more popular method, they take the money
directly from the rich, yet it ultimately comes from the workers, by
whose labours the rich got it.
… Such arrangements are precisely
similar to that of a certain German coal-mine, where the foreman of
several gangs (who engaged the men) ran a soup- kitchen for their
benefit, received their pay for them, and, after deducting the cost of
the kitchen and of his own trouble, passed on the remainder of the
wages to the men to share out equally. They are analogous to the
system by which the landowner pays the agricultural labourer 14s. a
week and a cottage - the cottage representing the balance of the wage,
and having the effect of keeping the labourer stationary and docile.
… Indeed, society's favourite
methods -- both those of legislators and of philanthropists -- in
providing for the proletariat, physically by soup-kitchens,
infirmaries, etc., and morally by schools, institutes, etc., all bear
a significant resemblance to the system of Truck-Wages, which, in
private practice, was suppressed forty years ago.
… The result is, plainly, not to
make the workers better off than if they received the full reward of
their labour and were left to their own devices to co-operate or act
singly as they chose, but to keep them dependent on a system which
makes and enforces these arrangements for their comfort. Just as we
find that, where there is a kind-hearted squire, the poorer the
labourer, the more he is attached to the feudal system.
… In non-democratic countries, this
is all more obvious ; but the Briton still fancies, because he has a
four-millionth share in giving the majority to a certain set of
governors, that therefore he is master of his own fate.
CONTENTS
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