The Road To Freedom,
And What Lies Beyond
CHAPTER 13
Josiah and Ethel Wedgwood
[Published in London by C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 1913]
WHAT LIES BEYOND
… Repetition.
… It seems, then, that the
exclusive ownership of land lies at the base of our existing social
state, of much that is pleasing, as well as of what is displeasing in
it ; and that if this injustice were removed, society, as we know it,
must fall to pieces and be replaced by a new form. For however much
the application of the terms, i.e, "slavery," "monopoly,"
"capitalism," "robbery," may be disputed, yet the
fact remains, that the labour, by which all the subtle conditions of
our thoughts and habits have been created, is unfree labour; and that
it is unfree primarily because men have been fenced off from the
sources of life and production that lie in the land. This crime runs
like a flaw through the whole structure, making true social life
impossible. For a civilisation founded in monopoly and maintained by
force is an anti -social one ; it excludes what alone can create a
stable social state, free and mutual service.
… But people will not face the
downfall of the house they live in, however bad it be; and therefore
preachers, teachers and legislators spend their knowledge and strength
in shoring-up this society and clamping it together against
disruption. Their remedial measures are largely futile, for they only
transform the evil instead of destroying it.
… A century ago reformers thought
they could make the nations free and happy by transferring political
power from a king to a republican senate. Now they think they can make
society prosperous by transferring industrial power from men called
capitalists to other men called a state or a workers' union. They are
afraid to bring about the real revolution by restoring to everybody
the only means of individual liberty, and letting them alone to shape
their own destiny.
… The New Civilisation: Social
Relations.
… What form of society might grow
up after such a revolution it is impossible to foretell. Certainly it
would be a better form than this, because a free one. Whatever the
true civilisation may be, the present civilisation is overlaying and
crushing it -- stifling the best things in human nature by its
atmosphere of suspicion, envy and rivalry. Yet, in spite of this
fraudulent civilisation, honesty and human kindliness still struggle
up and keep alive; and in the new society, virtues so tough of life
may spread and prosper. If to sketch a Utopia were at all permissible,
it might at least be predicted that under just conditions men will
venture to practise on terms of equality the brotherhood which all the
churches preach, and that it will be common to show charity without
patronage and to receive it without sycophancy.
… The New Civilisation: Wealth.
… Some writers think that in a just
society the production of wealth would go on at the same pace as now,
only with much less expenditure of time and effort by individuals ;
and that applied science would continue increasingly to lighten and
simplify all sorts of work. This may be so, but it is doubtful. It is
difficult to believe, for instance, that the numberless ingenious
applications of electricity, the specialised tools of all trades, the
diversified appliances of luxury, would have been so readily invented,
had not the twofold spur of wealth and poverty sharpened the
inventors' brains and quickened their activities. Thanks to the
relentless industrial slavery in which we now live, the whole of human
effort is being perpetually whetted by necessity, and is devoted
mainly to the achievement of any material result which may give a
foothold for climbing above the struggling masses. If a society ever
comes in which each man is free and safe, this will be so no longer,
and it may be expected that men will then be satisfied with such
moderate comforts and appliances as will ensure their health and
leisure. Tastes become revolutionised with circumstances, and much
that is involved in our present ideas of comfort may seem to a saner
generation as fantastic as the elaborate items of a chef's menu seem
to the vegetarian who lives on fruit. The passion for rapid locomotion
and communication, for living in a rush, for amusements, for
sensations, for delicacies, may be looked back on and despised by the
coming age as the tossings of a sick society on an ill-made bed.
… Nor would such reversion to calm
and simplicity be a retrograde step towards barbarism. The savage is
placid and simple, because he is limited, and has not tasted the fruit
of the civilised tree. If free men in a free society adopt the less
strenuous life, it will be from deliberate choice.
… The New Civilisation. Science.
… It may be, that in the new
civilisation science itself may be directed into quite other channels.
The progress of applied science and the progress of the human race are
so often assumed to be one and the same, that we forget that research
into the unknown is not identical with improvements in machine
construction. Scientific knowledge has hitherto been acquired in a
state where restless wealth and aimless energy are side by side with
incessant unreasoning production, and where things are made, not to
satisfy wants, but according to the changing fancies of the rich. The
great discoveries have been applied first and foremost to increase
rapidity of motion and novelties in food, dress and amusements, such
things as may give a temporary advantage in the market that supplies
the rich. People have utilised the few facts they have discovered
about matter to make themselves playthings, and have dignified them by
the name of " the benefits of civilisation." But in our
haste to utilise the laws of nature we may well have missed their true
significance. There may be possibilities of science equally or more
valuable to the human race than its use in industrial invention; and
our commercial preoccupations may have warped, not only the
application, but the nature of our knowledge itself. Who can say,
whether in utilising natural laws we have not been blind to what lay
behind them of more vital importance. Speculations, which in our
civilisation have not emerged from the cloudland of mysticism, may be
fruitfully pursued by a race less condemned to greedy pursuits, more
honest and more leisured; and the new civilisation may acquire
scientific knowledge concerning time and space, matter and spirit,
compared with which our present conjuring tricks with physics will
seem childish.
… But the decisions of a free
posterity do not concern our age, whose first business it is to remove
the obstacles from their path and our own. We cannot yet see the goal,
nor know what our race is capable of doing or being; for at present we
are forced along one path and into one set of ideas by the system that
enslaves body and soul.
… Socialism.
… And therefore any reformation
which tries to regularise present conditions by equalising the
production and distribution of wealth, without first restoring
individual freedom, must be a failure from the point of view of
progress. The alternative to a free state is the perfectly organised
state; and if the perfectly organised state is the ideal of humanity,
then socialists are quite justified in the most extreme proposals,
with which their opponents ever credit them; such proposals are, in
that case, perfectly logical and perfectly right. To make society
safe, it will be their duty -- not to have prisons where offenders are
punished, but to forestall all possibility of offence; to have, not
only State factories where the necessary wealth is produced in the
approved manner under proper inspection, but to have also suitable
factories for the human instruments of production, marriage provisions
for improving the breed, nurseries for their physical culture, schools
above all that the minds of the growing race may be trained in such
beliefs as are necessary to preserve the State, in order that this
superstition may receive the full strength of the soil, and that the
seed of every other idea may be destroyed before it can germinate.
… This is all necessary for the
preservation of the perfectly organised State, but let no one imagine
that it is compatible with Progress.
… Progress.
… There are blind alleys in nature
which are entered when any system is brought to work so perfectly that
divergence from it, and advance beyond it, become impossible. The
community of the bees is such a one. They are creatures of remarkable
intelligence and subtlety, in whom the civic virtue of honey- making
has became an ingrained habit, and, by subdivision of labour, been
brought to extraordinary perfection; and their communal organisation
is so complete that it gives no opportunity for error.
… It is common to compare to the
community of the bees the ideal community of socialised mankind. If
this ideal be ever attained, the achievement will no doubt be hailed
with pride by the smooth automatons of the day; but it will mean that
men, like the bees, are rotating instead of progressing, and that
their powers have become limited to performing with admirable
regularity the r6le of citizen in a perfectly administered state.
… The Logic of Facts.
… The ending of robbery -- the
robbery of men's rights to the earth- - is an ethical duty. The
restoration of freedom -- through the restoration of these rights --
is a philosophic aim. They go hand in hand of necessity. And if
critics say that such principles are doctrinaire, and that it is
foolish to seek to destroy the present order, without first deciding
what should replace it, the reply is: that the opportunism which
places expediency above justice and above freedom is equally based
upon a doctrine, and one that in its effects is disastrous.
… Those who discard first
principles in political and social action are apt to find themselves
forced by the hard logic of facts along to the path to which reasoning
pointed in vain.
… The principle of human rights to
the earth is being already forced on a reluctant society by the
growing restlessness and hostility of the dispossessed workers, -- by
the invidious disparities of wealth due to the growing differences in
site values, and the power they give of increased exploitation, -- by
the crimes and vices of the idlers of all classes divorced from
labour, -- by the dangerous diseases engendered by overcrowding and
physical degeneration, -- by the alarm and danger caused to the
propertied classes by all these things.
… It may require a hopeful temerity
to face a peaceful revolution now, by resolutely restoring the land to
the people; it will require more courage to face that blind revolution
that may come if the discordant elements break loose ; but it will
need a courage without hope to face the world as it may be preserved,
so doctored and so disciplined that no revolution is any longer
possible.
…
CONTENTS
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