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Title: The Servile State

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: March 20, 2021 [eBook #64882]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SERVILE
STATE ***

The Servile State

By Hilaire Belloc
“… If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape
restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”

T.N. Foulis
London & Edinburgh
1912

To
E.S.P. Haynes

Published October 1912

Printed by Neill and Co., Ltd., Edinburgh.

Synopsis of the Servile State
Introduction

The Subject of this Book:—It is written to maintain the thesis that
industrial society as we know it will tend towards the re-establishment of
slavery.

—The sections into which the book will be divided

Section I

Definitions:—What wealth is and why necessary to man—How produced
—The meaning of the words Capital, Proletariat, Property, Means of
Production—The definition of the Capitalist State—The definition of the
Servile State—What it is and what it is not—The re-establishment of status
in the place of contract—That servitude is not a question of degree but of
kind—Summary of these definitions.

Section II

Our Civilisation was originally Servile:—The Servile institution in Pagan
antiquity—Its fundamental character—A Pagan society took it for granted
—The institution disturbed by the advent of the Christian Church

Section III

How the Servile Institution was for a Time Dissolved:—The subconscious
effect of the Faith in this matter—The main elements of Pagan economic
society—The Villa—The transformation of the agricultural slave into the
Christian serf—Next into the Christian peasant—The corresponding
erection throughout Christendom of the Distributive State—It is nearly
complete at the close of the Middle Ages—“It was not machinery that lost
us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind.”

Section IV

How the Distributive State Failed:—This failure original in England—
The story of the decline from Distributive property to Capitalism—The
economic revolution of the sixteenth century—The confiscation of
monastic land—What might have happened had the State retained it—As a
fact that land is captured by an oligarchy—England is Capitalist before the
advent of the industrial revolution—Therefore modern industry, proceeding
from England, has grown in a Capitalist mould.

Section V

The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable:
—It can of its nature be but a transitory phase lying between an earlier and
a later stable state of society—The two internal strains which render it
unstable—(a) The conflict between its social realities and its moral and
legal basis—(b) The insecurity and insufficiency to which it condemns free
citizens—The few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the
many non-possessors—Capitalism is so unstable that it dares not proceed to
its own logical conclusion, but tends to restrict competition among owners,
and insecurity and insufficiency among non-owners.

Section VI

The Stable Solutions of this Instability:—The three stable social
arrangements which alone can take the place of unstable Capitalism—The
Distributive solution, the Collectivist solution, the Servile solution—The
reformer will not openly advocate the Servile solution—There remain only
the Distributive and the Collectivist solution.

Section VII

Socialism is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux:—A
contrast between the reformer making for Distribution and the reformer
making for Socialism (or Collectivism)—The difficulties met by the first
type—He is working against the grain—The second is working with the
grain—Collectivism a natural development of Capitalism—It appeals both
to Capitalist and Proletarian—None the less we shall see that the

Collectivist attempt is doomed to fail and to produce a thing very different
from its object—to wit, the Servile State.

Section VIII

The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile State:—
There are two types of reformers working along the line of least resistance
—These are the Socialist and the Practical Man—The Socialist again is of
two kinds, The Humanist and the Statistician—The Humanist would like
both to confiscate from the owners and to establish security and sufficiency
for the non-owners—He is allowed to do the second thing by establishing
servile conditions—He is forbidden to do the first—The Statistician is quite
content so long as he can run and organise the poor—Both are canalised
towards the Servile State and both are shepherded off their ideal Collectivist
State—Meanwhile the great mass, the proletariat, upon whom the reformers
are at work, though retaining the instinct of ownership, has lost any
experience of it and is subject to private law much more than to the law of
the Courts—This is exactly what happened in the past during the converse
change from Slavery to Freedom—Private Law became stronger than
Public at the beginning of the Dark Ages—The owners welcomed the
changes which maintained them in ownership and yet increased the security
of their revenue—to-day the non-owners will welcome whatever keeps
them a wage-earning class but increases their wages and their security
without insisting on the expropriation of the owners.

Appendix on “Buying-Out”

An Appendix showing that the Collectivist proposal to “Buy-Out” the
Capitalist in lieu of expropriating him is vain.

Section IX

The Servile State Has Begun:—The manifestation of the Servile State in
law or proposals of law will fall into two sorts—(a) Laws or proposals of
law compelling the proletariat to work—(b) Financial operations riveting
the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society—As to (a), we find it
already at work in measures such as the Insurance Act and proposals such
as Compulsory Arbitration, the enforcement of Trades Union bargains and

the erection of “Labour Colonies,” etc., for the “unemployable”—As to the
second, we find that so-called “Municipal” or “Socialist” experiments in
acquiring the means of production have already increased and are
continually increasing the dependence of society upon the Capitalist.

Conclusion

Introduction
The Subject of This Book

This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth:—

That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned
by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a
condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labour
legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production
for the advantage of those who do. With this principle of compulsion
applied against the non-owners there must also come a difference in their
status; and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided
into two sets: the first economically free and politically free, possessed of
the means of production, and securely confirmed in that possession; the
second economically unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by
their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of
well-being beneath which they shall not fall.

Society having reached such a condition would be released from its present
internal strains and would have taken on a form which would be stable: that
is, capable of being indefinitely prolonged without change. In it would be
resolved the various factors of instability which increasingly disturb that
form of society called Capitalist, and men would be satisfied to accept, and
to continue in, such a settlement.

To such a stable society I shall give, for reasons which will be described in
the next section, the title of The Servile State.

I shall not undertake to judge whether this approaching organisation of our
modern society be good or evil. I shall concern myself only with showing
the necessary tendency towards it which has long existed and the recent
social provisions which show that it has actually begun.

This new state will be acceptable to those who desire consciously or by
implication the re-establishment among us of a difference of status between
possessor and non-possessor: it will be distasteful to those who regard such
a distinction with ill favour or with dread.

My business will not be to enter into the discussion between these two types
of modern thinkers, but to point out to each and to both that that which the
one favours and the other would fly is upon them.

I shall prove my thesis in particular from the case of the industrial society
of Great Britain, including that small, alien, and exceptional corner of
Ireland, which suffers or enjoys industrial conditions to-day.

I shall divide the matter thus:—

(1) I shall lay down certain definitions.

(2) Next, I shall describe the institution of slavery and The Servile State of
which it is the basis, as these were in the ancient world. I shall then:

(3) Sketch very briefly the process whereby that age-long institution of
slavery was slowly dissolved during the Christian centuries, and whereby
the resulting medieval system, based upon highly divided property in the
means of production, was

(4) wrecked in certain areas of Europe as it approached completion, and had
substituted for it, in practice though not in legal theory, a society based
upon Capitalism.

(5) Next, I shall show how Capitalism was of its nature unstable, because its
social realities were in conflict with all existing or possible systems of law,
and because its effects in denying sufficiency and security were intolerable
to men; how being thus unstable, it consequently presented a problem
which demanded a solution: to wit, the establishment of some stable form
of society whose law and social practice should correspond, and whose
economic results, by providing sufficiency and security, should be tolerable
to human nature.

(6) I shall next present the only three possible solutions:—

(a) Collectivism, or the placing of the means of production in the hands of
the political officers of the community.

(b) Property, or the re-establishment of a Distributive State in which the
mass of citizens should severally own the means of production.

(c) Slavery, or a Servile State in which those who do not own the means of
production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do, and shall
receive in exchange a security of livelihood.

Now, seeing the distaste which the remains of our long Christian tradition
has bred in us for directly advocating the third solution and boldly
supporting the re-establishment of slavery, the first two alone are open to
reformers: (1) a reaction towards a condition of well-divided property or the
Distributive State; (2) an attempt to achieve the ideal Collectivist State.

It can easily be shown that this second solution appeals most naturally and
easily to a society already Capitalist on account of the difficulty which such
a society has to discover the energy, the will, and the vision requisite for the
first solution.

(7) I shall next proceed to show how the pursuit of this ideal Collectivist
State which is bred of Capitalism leads men acting upon a Capitalist society
not towards the Collectivist State nor anything like it, but to that third
utterly different thing—the Servile State.

To this eighth section I shall add an appendix showing how the attempt to
achieve Collectivism gradually by public purchase is based upon an
illusion.

(8) Recognising that theoretical argument of this kind, though intellectually
convincing, is not sufficient to the establishment of my thesis, I shall
conclude by giving examples from modern English legislation, which
examples prove that the Servile State is actually upon us.

Such is the scheme I design for this book.

Section One
Definitions

Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his
environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a
condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to his
needs.

That special, conscious, and intelligent transformation of his environment
which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man we
call the Production of Wealth.

Wealth is matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed
from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more
serviceable to a human need.

Without Wealth man cannot exist. The production of it is a necessity to him,
and though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary, and even to
those forms of production which we call luxuries, yet in any given human
society there is a certain kind and a certain amount of wealth without which
human life cannot be lived: as, for instance, in England to-day, certain
forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth, and
habitation.

Therefore, to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself.
To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him
the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of
wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally
exist.

Wealth can only be produced by the application of human energy, mental
and physical, to the forces of nature around us, and to the material which
those forces inform.

This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we
will call Labour. As for that material and those natural forces, we will call
them, for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conventionally accepted,
term Land.

It would seem, therefore, that all problems connected with the production of
wealth, and all discussion thereupon, involve but two principal original
factors, to wit, Labour and Land, But it so happens that the conscious,
artificial, and intelligent action of man upon nature, corresponding to his
peculiar character compared with other created beings, introduces a third
factor of the utmost importance.

Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious methods of varying and often
increasing complexity, and aids himself by the construction of implements.
These soon become in each new department of the production as truly
necessary to that production as labour and land. Further, any process of
production takes a certain time; during that time the producer must be fed,
and clothed, and housed, and the rest of it. There must therefore be an
accumulation of wealth created in the past, and reserved with the object of
maintaining labour during its effort to produce for the future.

Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool, or the setting aside of a
store of provisions, labour applied to land for either purpose is not
producing wealth for immediate consumption. It is setting aside and
reserving somewhat, and that somewhat is always necessary in varying
proportions according to the simplicity or complexity of the economic
society to the production of wealth.

To such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future production,
and not for immediate consumption, whether it be in the form of
instruments and tools, or in the form of stores for the maintenance of labour
during the process of production, we give the name of Capital.

There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth, which
we may conventionally term Land, Capital, and Labour.

When we talk of the Means of Production we signify land and capital
combined. Thus, when we say that a man is “dispossessed of the means of

production,” or cannot produce wealth save by the leave of another who
“possesses the means of production,” we mean that he is the master only of
his labour and has no control, in any useful amount, over either capital, or
land, or both combined.

A man politically free, that is, one who enjoys the right before the law to
exercise his energies when he pleases (or not at all if he does not so please),
but not possessed by legal right of control over any useful amount of the
means of production, we call proletarian, and any considerable class
composed of such men we call a proletariat.

Property is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the control
of land and of wealth made from land, including therefore all the means of
production, is vested in some person or corporation. Thus we may say of a
building, including the land upon which it stands, that it is the “property” of
such and such a citizen, or family, or college, or of the State, meaning that
those who “own” such property are guaranteed by the laws in the right to
use it or withhold it from use. Private property signifies such wealth
(including the means of production) as may, by the arrangements of society,
be in the control of persons or corporations other than the political bodies of
which these persons or corporations are in another aspect members. What
distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than
the State, or is only a part of the State (for were that so we should talk of
municipal property as private property), but rather that the owner may
exercise his control over it to his own advantage, and not as a trustee for
society, nor in the hierarchy of political institutions. Thus Mr Jones is a
citizen of Manchester, but he does not own his private property as a citizen
of Manchester, he owns it as Mr Jones, whereas, if the house next to his
own be owned by the Manchester municipality, they own it only because
they are a political body standing for the whole community of the town. Mr
Jones might move to Glasgow and still own his property in Manchester, but
the municipality of Manchester can only own its property in connection
with the corporate political life of the town.

An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of
the political officers of the community we call Collectivist, or more
generally Socialist.1

A society in which private property in land and capital, that is, the
ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined
to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social
mass of the State, while the rest have not such property and are therefore
proletarian, we call Capitalist; and the method by which wealth is produced
in such a society can only be the application of labour, the determining
mass of which must necessarily be proletarian, to land and capital, in such
fashion that, of the total wealth produced, the Proletariat which labours
shall only receive a portion.

The two marks, then, defining the Capitalist State are: (1) That the citizens
thereof are politically free: i.e. can use or withhold at will their possessions
or their labour, but are also (2) divided into capitalist and proletarian in such
proportions that the State as a whole is not characterised by the institution
of ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction of ownership to a
section markedly less than the whole, or even to a small minority. Such a
Capitalist State is essentially divided into two classes of free citizens, the
one capitalist or owning, the other propertyless or proletarian.

My last definition concerns the Servile State itself, and since the idea is
both somewhat novel and also the subject of this book, I will not only
establish but expand its definition.

The definition of the Servile State is as follows:—

“That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the
families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the
advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole
community with the mark of such labour we call The Servile State.”

Note first certain negative limitations in the above which must be clearly
seized if we are not to lose clear thinking in a fog of metaphor and rhetoric.

That society is not servile in which men are intelligently constrained to
labour by enthusiasm, by a religious tenet, or indirectly from fear of
destitution, or directly from love of gain, or from the common sense which
teaches them that by their labour they may increase their well-being.

A clear boundary exists between the servile and the non-servile condition of
labour, and the conditions upon either side of that boundary utterly differ
one from another, Where there is compulsion applicable by positive law to
men of a certain status, and such compulsion enforced in the last resort by
the powers at the disposal of the State, there is the institution of Slavery;
and if that institution be sufficiently expanded the whole State may be said
to repose upon a servile basis, and is a Servile State.

Where such formal, legal status is absent the conditions are not servile; and
the difference between servitude and freedom, appreciable in a thousand
details of actual life, is most glaring in this: that the free man can refuse his
labour and use that refusal as an instrument wherewith to bargain; while the
slave has no such instrument or power to bargain at all, but is dependent for
his well-being upon the custom of society, backed by the regulation of such
of its laws as may protect and guarantee the slave.

Next, let it be observed that the State is not servile because the mere
institution of slavery is to be discovered somewhere within its confines. The
State is only servile when so considerable a body of forced labour is
affected by the compulsion of positive law as to give a character to the
whole community.

Similarly, that State is not servile in which all citizens are liable to submit
their energies to the compulsion of positive law, and must labour at the
discretion of State officials. By loose metaphor and for rhetorical purposes
men who dislike Collectivism (for instance) or the discipline of a regiment
will talk of the “servile” conditions of such organisations. But for the
purposes of strict definition and clear thinking it is essential to remember
that a servile condition only exists by contrast with a free condition. The
servile condition is present in society only when there is also present the
free citizen for whose benefit the slave works under the compulsion of
positive law.

Again, it should be noted that this word “servile” in no way connotes the
worst, nor even necessarily a bad, arrangement of society, This point is so
clear that it should hardly delay us; but a confusion between the rhetorical
and the precise use of the word servile I have discovered to embarrass

public discussion of the matter so much that I must once more emphasise
what should be self-evident.

The discussion as to whether the institution of slavery be a good or a bad
one, or be relatively better or worse than other alternative institutions, has
nothing whatever to do with the exact definition of that institution. Thus
Monarchy consists in throwing the responsibility for the direction of society
upon an individual. One can imagine some Roman of the first century
praising the new Imperial power, but through a muddle-headed tradition
against “kings” swearing that he would never tolerate a “monarchy.” Such a
fellow would have been a very futile critic of public affairs under Trajan,
but no more futile than a man who swears that nothing shall make him a
“slave,” though well prepared to accept laws that compel him to labour
without his consent, under the force of public law, and upon terms dictated
by others.

Many would argue that a man so compelled to labour, guaranteed against
insecurity and against insufficiency of food, housing and clothing, promised
subsistence for his old age, and a similar set of advantages for his posterity,
would be a great deal better off than a free man lacking all these things. But
the argument does not affect the definition attaching to the word servile. A
devout Christian of blameless life drifting upon an ice-flow in the Arctic
night, without food or any prospect of succour, is not so comfortably
circumstanced as the Khedive of Egypt; but it would be folly in establishing
the definition of the words “Christian” and “Mahommedan” to bring this
contrast into account.

We must then, throughout this inquiry, keep strictly to the economic aspect
of the case. Only when that is established and when the modern tendency to
the re-establishment of slavery is clear, are we free to discuss the
advantages and disadvantages of the revolution through which we are
passing.

It must further be grasped that the essential mark of the Servile Institution
does not depend upon the ownership of the slave by a particular master.
That the institution of slavery tends to that form under the various forces
composing human nature and human society is probable enough. That if or
when slavery were re-established in England a particular man would in time

be found the slave not of Capitalism in general but of, say, the Shell Oil
Trust in particular, is a very likely development; and we know that in
societies where the institution was of immemorial antiquity such direct
possession of the slave by the free man or corporation of free men had
come to be the rule. But my point is that such a mark is not essential to the
character of slavery. As an initial phase in the institution of slavery, or even
as a permanent phase marking society for an indefinite time, it is perfectly
easy to conceive of a whole class rendered servile by positive law, and
compelled by such law to labour for the advantage of another non-servile
free class, without any direct act of possession permitted to one man over
the person of another.

The final contrast thus established between slave and free might be
maintained by the State guaranteeing to the un-free, security in their
subsistence, to the free, security in their property and profits, rent and
interest. What would mark the slave in such a society would be his
belonging to that set or status which was compelled by no matter what
definition to labour, and was thus cut off from the other set or status not
compelled to labour, but free to labour or not as it willed.

Again, the Servile State would certainly exist even though a man, being
only compelled to labour during a portion of his time, were free to bargain
and even to accumulate in his “free” time. The old lawyers used to
distinguish between a serf “in gross” and a serf “regardant.” A serf “in
gross” was one who was a serf at all times and places, and not in respect to
a particular lord. A serf “regardant” was a serf only in his bondage to serve
a particular lord. He was free as against other men. And one might perfectly
well have slaves who were only slaves “regardant” to a particular type of
employment during particular hours. But they would be slaves none the
less, and if their hours were many and their class numerous, the State which
they supported would be a Servile State.

Lastly, let it be remembered that the servile condition remains as truly an
institution of the State when it attaches permanently and irrevocably at any
one time to a particular set of human beings as when it attaches to a
particular class throughout their lives. Thus the laws of Paganism permitted
the slave to be enfranchised by his master: it further permitted children or

prisoners to be sold into slavery. The Servile Institution, though perpetually
changing in the elements of its composition, was still an unchanging factor
in the State. Similarly, though the State should only subject to slavery those
who had less than a certain income, while leaving men free by inheritance
or otherwise to pass out of, and by loss to pass into, the slave class, that
slave class, though fluctuating as to its composition, would still
permanently exist.

Thus, if the modern industrial State shall make a law by which servile
conditions shall not attach to those capable of earning more than a certain
sum by their own labour, but shall attach to those who earn less than this
sum; or if the modern industrial State defines manual labour in a particular
fashion, renders it compulsory during a fixed time for those who undertake
it, but leaves them free to turn later to other occupations if they choose,
undoubtedly such distinctions, though they attach to conditions and not to
individuals, establish the Servile Institution.

Some considerable number must be manual workers by definition, and
while they were so defined would be slaves. Here again the composition of
the Servile class would fluctuate, but the class would be permanent and
large enough to stamp all society. I need not insist upon the practical effect:
that such a class, once established, tends to be fixed in the great majority of
those which make it up, and that the individuals entering or leaving it tend
to become few compared to the whole mass.

There is one last point to be considered in this definition.

It is this:—

Since, in the nature of things, a free society must enforce a contract (a free
society consisting in nothing else but the enforcement of free contracts),
how far can that be called a Servile condition which is the result of contract
nominally or really free? In other words, is not a contract to labour,
however freely entered into, servile of its nature when enforced by the
State?

For instance, I have no food or clothing, nor do I possess the means of
production whereby I can produce any wealth in exchange for such. I am so

circumstanced that an owner of the Means of Production will not allow me
access to those Means unless I sign a contract to serve him for a week at a
wage of bare subsistence. Does the State in enforcing that contract make me
for that week a slave?

Obviously not. For the institution of Slavery presupposes a certain attitude
of mind in the free man and in the slave, a habit of living in either, and the
stamp of both those habits upon society. No such effects are produced by a
contract enforceable by the length of one week. The duration of human life
is such, and the prospect of posterity, that the fulfilling of such a contract in
no way wounds the senses of liberty and of choice.

What of a month, a year, ten years, a lifetime? Suppose an extreme case,
and a destitute man to sign a contract binding him and all his children who
were minors to work for a bare subsistence until his own death, or the
attainment of majority of the children, whichever event might happen latest;
would the State in forcing that contract be making the man a slave?

As undoubtedly as it would not be making him a slave in the first case, it
would be making him a slave in the second.

One can only say to ancient sophistical difficulties of this kind, that the
sense of men establishes for itself the true limits of any object, as of
freedom. What freedom is, or is not, in so far as mere measure of time is
concerned (though of course much else than time enters in), human habit
determines; but the enforcing of a contract of service certainly or probably
leaving a choice after its expiration is consonant with freedom. The
enforcement of a contract probably binding one’s whole life is not
consonant with freedom. One binding to service a man’s natural heirs is
intolerable to freedom.

Consider another converse point. A man binds himself to work for life and
his children after him so far as the law may permit him to bind them in a
particular society, but that not for a bare subsistence, but for so large a wage
that he will be wealthy in a few years, and his posterity, when the contract is
completed, wealthier still. Does the State in forcing such a contract make
the fortunate employee a slave? No. For it is in the essence of slavery that
subsistence or little more than subsistence should be guaranteed to the

slave. Slavery exists in order that the Free should benefit by its existence,
and connotes a condition in which the men subjected to it may demand
secure existence, but little more.

If anyone were to draw an exact line, and to say that a life-contract
enforceable by law was slavery at so many shillings a week, but ceased to
be slavery after that margin, his effort would be folly. None the less, there is
a standard of subsistence in any one society, the guarantee of which (or
little more) under an obligation to labour by compulsion is slavery, while
the guarantee of very much more is not slavery.

This verbal jugglery might be continued. It is a type of verbal difficulty
apparent in every inquiry open to the professional disputant, but of no effect
upon the mind of the honest inquirer whose business is not dialectic but
truth.

It is always possible by establishing a cross-section in a set of definitions to
pose the unanswerable difficulty of degree, but that will never affect the
realities of discussion. We know, for instance, what is meant by torture
when it exists in a code of laws, and when it is forbidden. No imaginary
difficulties of degree between pulling a man’s hair and scalping him,
between warming him and burning him alive, will disturb a reformer whose
business it is to expunge torture from some penal code.

In the same way we know what is and what is not compulsory labour, what
is and what is not the Servile Condition. Its test is, I repeat, the withdrawal
from a man of his free choice to labour or not to labour, here or there, for
such and such an object; and the compelling of him by positive law to
labour for the advantage of others who do not fall under the same
compulsion.

Where you have that, you have slavery: with all the manifold, spiritual, and
political results of that ancient institution.

Where you have slavery affecting a class of such considerable size as to
mark and determine the character of the State, there you have the Servile
State.

To sum up, then:—The Servile State is that in which we find so
considerable a body of families and individuals distinguished from free
citizens by the mark of compulsory labour as to stamp a general character
upon society, and all the chief characters, good or evil, attaching to the
institution of slavery will be found permeating such a State, whether the
slaves be directly and personally attached to their masters, only indirectly
attached through the medium of the State, or attached in a third manner
through their subservience to corporations or to particular industries. The
slave so compelled to labour will be one dispossessed of the means of
production, and compelled by law to labour for the advantage of all or any
who are possessed thereof. And the distinguishing mark of the slave
proceeds from the special action upon him of a positive law which first
separates one body of men, the less-free, from another, the more free, in the
function of contract within the general body of the community.

Now, from a purely Servile conception of production and of the
arrangement of society we Europeans sprang. The Immemorial past of
Europe is a Servile past. During some centuries which the Church raised,
permeated, and constructed, Europe was gradually released or divorced
from this immemorial and fundamental conception of slavery; to that
conception, to that institution, our Industrial or Capitalist society is now
upon its return. We are re-establishing the slave.

Before proceeding to the proof of this, I shall, in the next few pages, digress
to sketch very briefly the process whereby the old Pagan slavery was
transformed into a free society some centuries ago. I shall then outline the
further process whereby the new non-servile society was wrecked at the
Reformation in certain areas of Europe, and particularly in England. There
was gradually produced in its stead the transitory phase of society (now
nearing its end) called generally Capitalism or the Capitalist State.

Such a digression, being purely historical, is not logically necessary to a
consideration of our subject, but it is of great value to the reader, because
the knowledge of how, in reality and in the concrete, things have moved

better enables us to understand the logical process whereby they tend
towards a particular goal in the future.

One could prove the tendency towards the Servile State in England to-day
to a man who knew nothing of the past of Europe; but that tendency will
seem to him far more reasonably probable, far more a matter of experience
and less a matter of mere deduction, when he knows what our society once
was, and how it changed into what we know to-day.

Section Two
Our Civilisation Was Originally Servile

In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find,
from two thousand years ago upwards, one fundamental institution
whereupon the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is
Slavery.

There is here no distinction between the highly civilised City-State of the
Mediterranean, with its letters, its plastic art, and its code of laws, with all
that makes a civilisation—and this stretching back far beyond any surviving
record,—there is here no distinction between that civilised body and the
Northern and Western societies of the Celtic tribes, or of the little known
hordes that wandered in the Germanies. All indifferently reposed upon
slavery. It was a fundamental conception of society. It was everywhere
present, nowhere disputed.

There is a distinction (or would appear to be) between Europeans and
Asiatics in this matter. The religion and morals of the one so differed in
their very origin from those of the other that every social institution was
touched by the contrast—and Slavery among the rest.

But with that we need not concern ourselves. My point is that our European
ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs
with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the
economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never
doubted but that it was normal to all human society.

It is a matter of capital importance to seize this.

An arrangement of such a sort would not have endured without intermission
(and indeed without question) for many centuries, nor have been found
emerging fully grown from that vast space of unrecorded time during which

barbarism and civilisation flourished side by side in Europe, had there not
been something in it, good or evil, native to our blood.

There was no question in those ancient societies from which we spring of
making subject races into slaves by the might of conquering races. All that
is the guess-work of the universities. Not only is there no proof of it, rather
all the existing proof is the other way. The Greek had a Greek slave, the
Latin a Latin slave, the German a German slave, the Celt a Celtic slave. The
theory that “superior races” invaded a land, either drove out the original
inhabitants or reduced them to slavery, is one which has no argument either
from our present knowledge of man’s mind or from recorded evidence.
Indeed, the most striking feature of that Servile Basis upon which Paganism
reposed was the human equality recognised between master and slave. The
master might kill the slave, but both were of one race and each was human
to the other.

This spiritual value was not, as a further pernicious piece of guess-work
would dream, a “growth” or a “progress.” The doctrine of human equality
was inherent in the very stuff of antiquity, as it is inherent in those societies
which have not lost tradition.

We may presume that the barbarian of the North would grasp the great truth
with less facility than the civilised man of the Mediterranean, because
barbarism everywhere shows a retrogression in intellectual power; but the
proof that the Servile Institution was a social arrangement rather than a
distinction of type is patent from the coincidence everywhere of
Emancipation with Slavery. Pagan Europe not only thought the existence of
Slaves a natural necessity to society, but equally thought that upon giving a
Slave his freedom the enfranchised man would naturally step, though
perhaps after the interval of some lineage, into the ranks of free society.
Great poets and great artists, statesmen and soldiers were little troubled by
the memory of a servile ancestry.

On the other hand, there was a perpetual recruitment of the Servile
Institution, just as there was a perpetual emancipation from it, proceeding
year after year; and the natural or normal method of recruitment is most
clearly apparent to us in the simple and barbaric societies which the
observation of contemporary civilised Pagans enables us to judge.

It was poverty that made the slave.

Prisoners of war taken in set combat afforded one mode of recruitment, and
there was also the raiding of men by pirates in the outer lands and the
selling of them in the slave markets of the South. But at once the cause of
the recruitment and the permanent support of the institution of slavery was
the indigence of the man who sold himself into slavery, or was born into it;
for it was a rule of Pagan Slavery that the slave bred the slave, and that even
if one of the parents were free the offspring was a slave.

The society of antiquity, therefore, was normally divided (as must at last be
the society of any servile state) into clearly marked sections: there was upon
the one hand the citizen who had a voice in the conduct of the State, who
would often labour—but labour of his own free will—and who was
normally possessed of property; upon the other hand, there was a mass
dispossessed of the means of production and compelled by positive law to
labour at command.

It is true that in the further developments of society the accumulation of
private savings by a slave was tolerated and that slaves so favoured did
sometimes purchase their freedom.

It is further true that in the confusion of the last generations of Paganism
there arose in some of the great cities a considerable class of men who,
though free, were dispossessed of the means of production. But these last
never existed in a sufficient proportion to stamp the whole State of society
with a character drawn from their proletarian circumstance. To the end the
Pagan world remained a world of free proprietors possessed, in various
degrees, of the land and of the capital whereby wealth may be produced,
and applying to that land and capital for the purpose of producing wealth,
compulsory labour.

Certain features in that original Servile State from which we all spring
should be carefully noted by way of conclusion.

First, though all nowadays contrast slavery with freedom to the advantage
of the latter, yet men then accepted slavery freely as an alternative to
indigence.

Secondly (and this is most important for our judgment of the Servile
Institution as a whole, and of the chances of its return), in all those centuries
we find no organised effort, nor (what is still more significant) do we find
any complaint of conscience against the institution which condemned the
bulk of human beings to forced labour.

Slaves may be found in the literary exercises of the time bewailing their lot
and joking about it; some philosophers will complain that an ideal society
should contain no slaves; others will excuse the establishment of slavery
upon this plea or that, while granting that it offends the dignity of man. The
greater part will argue of the State that it is necessarily Servile. But no one,
slave or free, dreams of abolishing or even of changing the thing. You have
no martyrs for the case of “freedom” as against “slavery.” The so-called
Servile wars are the resistance on the part of escaped slaves to any attempt
at recapture, but they are not accompanied by an accepted affirmation that
servitude is an intolerable thing; nor is that note struck at all from the
unknown beginnings to the Catholic endings of the Pagan world. Slavery is
irksome, undignified, woeful; but it is, to them, of the nature of things.

You may say, to be brief, that this arrangement of society was the very air
which Pagan Antiquity breathed.

Its great works, its leisure and its domestic life, its humour, its reserves of
power, all depend upon the fact that its society was that of the Servile State.

Men were happy in that arrangement, or, at least, as happy as men ever are.

The attempt to escape by a personal effort, whether of thrift, of adventure,
or of flattery to a master, from the Servile condition had never even so
much of driving power behind it as the attempt many show to-day to escape
from the rank of wage-earners to those of employers. Servitude did not
seem a hell into which a man would rather die than sink, or out of which at
any sacrifice whatsoever a man would raise himself. It was a condition
accepted by those who suffered it as much as by those who enjoyed it, and a
perfectly necessary part of all that men did and thought.

You find no barbarian from some free place astonished at the institution of
Slavery; you find no Slave pointing to a society in which Slavery was

unknown as towards a happier land. To our ancestors not only for those few
centuries during which we have record of their actions, but apparently
during an illimitable past, the division of society into those who must work
under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labour was the very
plan of the State apart from which they could hardly think of society as
existing at all.

Let all this be clearly grasped. It is fundamental to an understanding of the
problem before us. Slavery is no novel experience in the history of Europe;
nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of Slavery as acceptable
to European men. Slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for thousands
upon thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that considerable
moral experiment called The Faith, which many believe to be now
accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem that
the old and primary institution of Slavery must return.

For there came upon us Europeans after all those centuries, and centuries of
a settled social order which was erected upon Slavery as upon a sure
foundation, the experiment called the Christian Church.

Among the by-products of this experiment, very slowly emerging from the
old Pagan world, and not long completed before Christendom itself suffered
a shipwreck, was the exceedingly gradual transformation of the Servile
State into something other: a society of owners. And how that something
other did proceed from the Pagan Servile State I will next explain.

Section Three
How the Servile Institution Was for a Time Dissolved

The process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men, though
very lengthy in its development (it covered close upon a thousand years),
and though exceedingly complicated in its detail, may be easily and briefly
grasped in its main lines.

Let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which the
European mind passed bet ween the first and the fourth centuries (that
revolution which is often termed the Conversion of the World to
Christianity, but which should for purposes of historical accuracy be called
the Growth of the Church) included no attack upon the Servile Institution.

No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and
purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a
Christian to be a contravention of any human right.

The emancipation of Slaves was indeed regarded as a good work by the
Faithful: but so was it regarded by the Pagan. It was, on the face of it, a
service rendered to one’s fellowmen. The sale of Christians to Pagan
masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not
because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of
treason to civilisation to force men away from Civilisation to Barbarism. In
general you will discover no pronouncement against slavery as an
institution, nor any moral definition attacking it, throughout all those early
Christian centuries during which it none the less effectively disappears.

The form of its disappearance is well worth noting. It begins with the
establishment as the fundamental unit of production in Western Europe of
those great landed estates, commonly lying in the hands of a single
proprietor, and generally known as Villӕ.

There were, of course, many other forms of human agglomeration: small
peasant farms owned in absolute proprietorship by their petty masters;
groups of free men associated in what was called a Vicus; manufactories in
which groups of slaves were industrially organised to the profit of their
master; and, governing the regions around them, the scheme of Roman
towns.

But of all these the Villa the dominating type; and as society passed from
the high civilisation of the first four centuries into the simplicity of the Dark
Ages, the Villa, the unit of agricultural production, became more and more
the model of all society.

Now the Villa began as a considerable extent of land, containing, like a
modern English estate, pasture, arable, water, wood and heath, or waste
land. It was owned by a dominus or lord in absolute proprietorship, to sell,
or leave by will, to do with it whatsoever he chose. It was cultivated for him
by Slaves to whom he owed nothing in return, and whom it was simply his
interest to keep alive and to continue breeding in order that they might
perpetuate his wealth.

I concentrate particularly upon these Slaves, the great majority of the
human beings inhabiting the land, because, although there arose in the Dark
Ages, when the Roman Empire was passing into the society of the Middle
Ages, other social elements within the Villæ—the Freed men who owed the
lord a modified service, and even occasionally independent citizens present
through a contract terminable and freely entered into yet it is the Slave who
is the mark of all that society.

At its origin, then, the Roman Villa was a piece of absolute property, the
production of wealth upon which was due to the application of slave labour
to the natural resources of the place; and that slave labour was as much the
property of the lord as was the land itself.

The first modification which this arrangement showed in the new society
which accompanied the growth and establishment of the Church in the
Roman world, was a sort of customary rule which modified the old arbitrary
position of the Slave.

The Slave was still a Slave, but it was both more convenient in the decay of
communications and public power, and more consonant with the social
spirit of the time to make sure of that Slave’s produce by asking him for no
more than certain customary dues. The Slave and his descendants became
more or less rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, but in
decreasing numbers. As the generations passed a larger and a larger
proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived, and the produce which
they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount, which the lord
was content to receive and ask no more. The arrangement was made
workable by leaving to the Slave all the remaining produce of his own
labour. There was a sort of implied bargain here, in the absence of public
powers and in the decline of the old highly centralised and vigorous system
which could always guarantee to the master the full product of the Slave’s
effort. The bargain implied was, that if the Slave Community of the Villa
would produce for the benefit of its Lord not less than a certain customary
amount of goods from the soil of the Villa, the Lord could count on their
always exercising that effort by leaving to them all the surplus, which they
could increase, if they willed, indefinitely.

By the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for a
matter of some three hundred years, one fixed form of productive unit
began to be apparent throughout Western Christendom.

The old absolutely owned estate had come to be divided into three portions.
One of these was pasture and arable land, reserved privately to the lord, and
called domain: that is, lord’s land. Another was in the occupation, and
already almost in the possession (practically, though not legally), of those
who had once been Slaves. A third was common land over which both the
Lord and the Slave exercised each their various rights, which rights were
minutely remembered and held sacred by custom. For instance, in a certain
village, if there was beech pasture for three hundred swine, the lord might
put in but fifty: two hundred and fifty were the rights of the “village.”

Upon the first of these portions, Domain, wealth was produced by the
obedience of the Slave for certain fixed hours of labour. He must come so
many days a week, or upon such and such occasions (all fixed and
customary), to till the land of the Domain for his Lord, and all the produce

of this must be handed over to the Lord though, of course, a daily wage in
kind was allowed, for the labourer must live.

Upon the second portion, “Land in Villenage,” which was nearly always the
most of the arable and pasture land of the Villæ, the Slaves worked by rules
and customs which they gradually came to elaborate for themselves. They
worked under an officer of their own, sometimes nominated, sometimes
elected: nearly always, in practice, a man suitable to them and more or less
of their choice; though this co-operative work upon the old Slave-ground
was controlled by the general customs of the village, common to lord and
slave alike, and the principal officer over both kinds of land was the Lord’s
Steward.

Of the wealth so produced by the Slaves, a certain fixed portion (estimated
originally in kind) was payable to the Lord’s Bailiff, and became the
property of the Lord.

Finally, on the third division of the land, the “Waste,” the “Wood,” the
“Heath,” and certain common pastures, wealth was produced as elsewhere
by the labour of those who had once been the Slaves, but divided in
customary proportions between them and their master. Thus, such and such
a water meadow would have grazing for so many oxen; the number was
rigidly defined, and of that number so many would be the Lord’s and so
many the Villagers’.

During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries this system crystallised and
became so natural in men’s eyes that the original servile character of the
working folk upon the Villa was forgotten.

The documents of the time are rare. These three centuries are the crucible of
Europe, and record is drowned and burnt in them. Our study of their social
conditions, especially in the latter part, are matter rather of inference than of
direct evidence. But the sale and purchase of men, already exceptional at
the beginning of this period, is almost unknown before the end of it. Apart
from domestic slaves within the household, slavery in the old sense which
Pagan antiquity gave that institution had been transformed out of all
knowledge, and when, with the eleventh century, the true Middle Ages
begin to spring from the soil of the Dark Ages, and a new civilisation to

arise, though the old word servus (the Latin for a slave) is still used for the
man who works the soil, his status in the now increasing number of
documents which we can consult is wholly changed; we can certainly no
longer translate the word by the English word slave; we are compelled to
translate it by a new word with very different connotations: the word serf.

The Serf of the early Middle Ages, of the eleventh and early twelfth
centuries, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, is already nearly a
peasant. He is indeed bound in legal theory to the soil upon which he was
born. In social practice, all that is required of him is that his family should
till its quota of servile land, and that the dues to the lord shall not fail from
absence of labour. That duty fulfilled, it is easy and common for members
of the serf-class to enter the professions and the Church, or to go wild; to
become men practically free in the growing industries of the towns. With
every passing generation the ancient servile conception of the labourer’s
status grows more and more dim, and the Courts and the practice of society
treat him more and more as a man strictly bound to certain dues and to
certain periodical labour within his industrial unit, but in all other respects
free.

As the civilisation of the Middle Ages develops, as wealth increases and the
arts progressively flourish, this character of freedom becomes more marked.
In spite of attempts in time of scarcity (as after a plague) to insist upon the
old rights to compulsory labour, the habit of commuting these rights for
money-payments and dues has grown too strong to be resisted.

If at the end of the fourteenth century, let us say, or at the beginning of the
fifteenth, you had visited some Squire upon his estate in France or in
England, he would have told you of the whole of it, “These are my lands.”
But the peasant (as he now was) would have said also of his holding, “This
is my land.” He could not be evicted from it. The dues which he was
customarily bound to pay were but a fraction of its total produce. He could
not always sell it, but it was always inheritable from father to son; and, in
general, at the close of this long process of a thousand years the Slave had
become a free man for all the ordinary purposes of society. He bought and
sold. He saved as he willed, he invested, he built, he drained at his
discretion, and if he improved the land it was to his own profit.

Meanwhile, side by side with this emancipation of mankind in the direct
line of descent from the old chattel slaves of the Roman villa went, in the
Middle Ages, a crowd of institutions which all similarly made for a
distribution of property, and for the destruction of even the fossil remnants
of a then forgotten Servile State. Thus industry of every kind in the towns,
in transport, in crafts, and in commerce, was organised in the form of
Guilds. And a Guild was a society partly co-operative, but in the main
composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self-
governing, and was designed to check competition between its members: to
prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. Above all, most
jealously did the Guild safeguard the division of property, so that there
should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the one side, and no
monopolising capitalist upon the other.

There was a period of apprenticeship at a man’s entry into a Guild, during
which he worked for a master; but in time he became a master in his turn.
The existence of such corporations as the normal units of industrial
production, of commercial effort, and of the means of transport, is proof
enough of what the social spirit was which had also enfranchised the
labourer upon the land. And while such institutions flourished side by side
with the no longer servile village communities, freehold or absolute
possession of the soil, as distinguished from the tenure of the serf under the
lord, also increased.

These three forms under which labour was exercised the serf, secure in his
position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of
his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which
were more of a tax than a rent; the Guild, in which well-divided capital
worked co-operatively for craft production, for transport and for commerce
—all three between them were making for a society which should be based
upon the principle of property. All, or most,—the normal family—should
own. And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.

The State, as the minds of men envisaged it at the close of this process, was
an agglomeration of families of varying wealth, but by far the greater
number owners of the means of production. It was an agglomeration in
which the stability of this distributive system (as I have called it) was

guaranteed by the existence of co-operative bodies, binding men of the
same craft or of the same village together; guaranteeing the small proprietor
against loss of his economic independence, while at the same time it
guaranteed society against the growth of a proletariat. If liberty of purchase
and of sale, of mortgage and of inheritance was restricted, it was restricted
with the social object of preventing the growth of an economic oligarchy
which could exploit the rest of the community. The restraints upon liberty
were restraints designed for the preservation of liberty; and every action of
Mediæval Society, from the flower of the Middle Ages to the approach of
their catastrophe, was directed towards the establishment of a State in
which men should be economically free through the possession of capital
and of land.

Save here and there in legal formulæ, or in rare patches isolated and
eccentric, the Servile Institution had totally disappeared; nor must it be
imagined that anything in the nature of Collectivism had replaced it. There
was common land, but it was common land jealously guarded by men who
were also personal proprietors of other land. Common property in the
village was but one of the forms of property, and was used rather as the fly-
wheel to preserve the regularity of the co-operative machine than as a type
of holding in any way peculiarly sacred. The Guilds had property in
common, but that property was the property necessary to their co-operative
life, their Halls, their Funds for Relief, their Religious Endowments. As for
the instruments of their trades, those instruments were owned by the
individual members, not by the guild, save where they were of so expensive
a kind as to necessitate a corporate control.

Such was the transformation which had come over European society in the
course of ten Christian centuries. Slavery had gone, and in its place had
come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men,
and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found
for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an
awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and
brought into existence the Distributive State.

That excellent consummation of human society passed, as we know, and
was in certain Provinces of Europe, but more particularly in Britain,

destroyed.

For a society in which the determinant mass of families were owners of
capital and of land; for one in which production was regulated by self-
governing corporations of small owners; and for one in which the misery
and insecurity of a proletariat was unknown, there came to be substituted
the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now turned, and
which goes by the name of Capitalism.

How did such a catastrophe come about? Why was it permitted, and upon
what historical process did the evil batten? What turned an England
economically free into the England which we know to-day, of which at least
one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of
capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national life is
controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a
few masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies?

The answer most usually given to this fundamental question in our history,
and the one most readily accepted, is that this misfortune came about
through a material process known as the Industrial Revolution. The use of
expensive machinery, the concentration of industry and of its implements
are imagined to have enslaved, in some blind way, apart from the human
will, the action of English mankind.

The explanation is wholly false. No such material cause determined the
degradation from which we suffer.

It was the deliberate action of men, evil will in a few and apathy of will
among the many, which produced a catastrophe as human in its causes and
inception as in its vile effect.

Capitalism was not the growth of the industrial movement, nor of chance
material discoveries. A little acquaintance with history and a little
straightforwardness in the teaching of it would be enough to prove that.

The Industrial System was a growth proceeding from Capitalism, not its
cause. Capitalism was here in England before the Industrial System came
into being;—before the use of coal and of the new expensive machinery,

and of the concentration of the implements of production in the great towns.
Had Capitalism not been present before the Industrial Revolution, that
revolution might have proved as beneficent to Englishmen as it has proved
maleficent. But Capitalism—that is, the ownership by a few of the springs
of life—was present long before the great discoveries came. It warped the
effect of these discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them from a
good into an evil thing. It was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it
was the loss of a free mind.

Section Four
How the Distributive State Failed

With the close of the middle ages the societies of Western Christendom and
England among the rest were economically free.

Property was an institution native to the State and enjoyed by the great mass
of its citizens. Co-operative institutions, voluntary regulations of labour,
restricted the completely independent use of property by its owners only in
order to keep that institution intact and to prevent the absorption of small
property by great.

This excellent state of affairs which we had reached after many centuries of
Christian development, and in which the old institution of slavery had been
finally eliminated from Christendom, did not everywhere survive. In
England in particular it was ruined. The seeds of the disaster were sown in
the sixteenth century. Its first apparent effects came to light in the
seventeenth. During the eighteenth century England came to be finally,
though insecurely, established upon a proletarian basis, that is, it had
already become a society of rich men possessed of the means of production
on the one hand, and a majority dispossessed of those means upon the other.
With the nineteenth century the evil plant had come to its maturity, and
England had become before the close of that period a purely Capitalist
State, the type and model of Capitalism for the whole world: with the
means of production tightly held by a very small group of citizens, and the
whole determining mass of the nation dispossessed of capital and land, and
dispossessed, therefore, in all cases of security, and in many of sufficiency
as well. The mass of Englishmen, still possessed of political, lacked more
and more the elements of economic, freedom, and were in a worse posture
than free citizens have ever found themselves before in the history of
Europe.

By what steps did so enormous a catastrophe fall upon us?

The first step in the process consisted in the mishandling of a great
economic revolution which marked the sixteenth century. The lands and the
accumulated wealth of the monasteries were taken out of, the hands of their
old possessors with the intention of vesting them in the Crown—but they
passed, as a fact, not into the hands of the Crown, but into the hands of an
already wealthy section of the community who, after the change was
complete, became in the succeeding hundred years the governing power of
England.

This is what happened:—

The England of the early sixteenth century, the England over which Henry
VIII inherited his powerful Crown in youth, though it was an England in
which the great mass of men owned the land they tilled and the houses in
which they dwelt, and the implements with which they worked, was yet an
England in which these goods, though widely distributed, were distributed
unequally.

Then, as now, the soil and its fixtures were the basis of all wealth, but the
proportion between the value of the soil and its fixtures and the value of
other means of production (implements, stores of clothing and of
subsistence, etc.) was different from what it is now. The land and the
fixtures upon it formed a very much larger fraction of the totality of the
means of production than they do to-day. They represent to-day not one-half
the total means of production of this country, and though they are the
necessary foundation for all wealth production, yet our great machines, our
stores of food and clothing, our coal and oil, our ships and the rest of it,
come to more than the true value of the land and of the fixtures upon the
land: they come to more than the arable soil and the pasture, the
constructional value of the houses, wharves and docks, and so forth. In the
early sixteenth century the land and the fixtures upon it came, upon the
contrary, to very much more than all other forms of wealth combined.

Now this form of wealth was here, more than in any other Western
European country, already in the hands of a wealthy land-owning class at
the end of the Middle Ages.

It is impossible to give exact statistics, because none were gathered, and we
can only make general statements based upon inference and research. But,
roughly speaking, we may say that of the total value of the land and its
fixtures, probably rather more than a quarter, though less than a third, was
in the hands of this wealthy class.

The England of that day was mainly agricultural, and consisted of more
than four, but less than six million people, and in every agricultural
community you would have the Lord, as he was legally called (the squire,
as he was already conversationally termed), in possession of more demesne
land than in any other country. On the average you found him, I say, owning
in this absolute fashion rather more than a quarter, perhaps a third of the
land of the village: in the towns the distribution was more even. Sometimes
it was a private individual who was in this position, sometimes a
corporation, but in every village you would have found this demesne land
absolutely owned by the political head of the village, occupying a
considerable proportion of its acreage. The rest, though distributed as
property among the less fortunate of the population, and carrying with it
houses and implements from which they could not be dispossessed, paid
certain dues to the Lord, and, what was more, the Lord exercised local
justice. This class of wealthy landowners had been also for now one
hundred years the Justices upon whom local administration depended.

There was no reason why this state of affairs should not gradually have led
to the rise of the Peasant and the decay of the Lord. That is what happened
in France, and it might perfectly well have happened here. A peasantry
eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the
expense of the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, which was
already fairly complete, there might have been added another excellent
element, namely, the more equal possession of that property. But any such
process of gradual buying by the small man from the great, such as would
seem natural to the temper of us European people, and such as has since
taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon
their popular instincts, was interrupted in this country by an artificial
revolution of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution consisted in
the seizing of the monastic lands by the Crown.

It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation, for the whole
economic future of England was to flow from it.

Of the demesne lands, and the power of local administration which they
carried with them (a very important feature, as we shall see later), rather
more than a quarter were in the hands of the Church; the Church was
therefore the “Lord” of something over 25 per cent. say 28 per cent. or
perhaps nearly 30 per cent. of English agricultural communities, and the
overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce. The
Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 per
cent. of the demesne land in the villages, and the receiver of something like
30 per cent. of the customary dues, etc., paid by the smaller owners to the
greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of Cathedral
Chapters, communities of monks and nuns, educational establishments
conducted by the clergy, and so forth.

When the Monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII, not the whole of
this vast economic influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular clergy
remained endowed, and most of the educational establishments, though
looted, retained some revenue; but though the whole 30 per cent. did not
suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent. did, and the revolution
effected by this vast operation was by far the most complete, the most
sudden, and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the
economic history of any European people.

It was at first intended to retain this great mass of the means of production
in the hands of the Crown: that must be clearly remembered by any student
of the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the contrast between
the old England and the new.

Had that intention been firmly maintained, the English State and its
government would have been the most powerful in Europe.

The Executive (which in those days meant the King) would have had a
greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing
its political power with economic power, and for ordering the social life of
its subjects than any other executive in Christendom.

Had Henry VIII and his successors kept the land thus confiscated, the
power of the French Monarchy, at which we are astonished, would have
been nothing to the power of the English.

The King of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of
control of the most absolute sort. He would presumably have used it, as a
strong central government always does, for the weakening of the wealthier
classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people. At any rate,
it would have been a very different England indeed from the England we
know, if the King had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the
monasteries.

Now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution
appears. The King failed to keep the lands he had seized. That class of large
landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said, anything
from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England, were too
strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to
themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and
they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative
power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied. Nothing that the
Crown let go ever went back to the Crown, and year after year more and
more of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute
possession of the large landowners.

Observe the effect of this. All over England men who already held in
virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the
ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of
a further great section of the means of production, which turned the scale
wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra fifth. They
became at a blow the owners of half the land! In many centres of capital
importance they had come to own more than half the land. They were in
many districts not only the unquestioned superiors, but the economic
masters of the rest of the community. They could buy to the greatest
advantage. They were strictly competitive, getting every shilling of due and
of rent where the old clerical landlords had been customary—leaving much
to the tenant. They began to fill the universities, the judiciary. The Crown
less and less decided between great and small. More and more the great

could decide in their own favour. They soon possessed by these operations
the bulk of the means of production, and they immediately began the
process of eating up the small independent men and gradually forming
those great estates which, in the course of a few generations, became
identical with the village itself. All over England you may notice that the
great squires’ houses date from this revolution or after it. The manorial
house, the house of the local great man as it was in the Middle Ages,
survives here and there to show of what immense effect this revolution was.
The low-timbered place with its steadings and outbuildings, only a larger
farmhouse among the other farmhouses, is turned after the Reformation and
thenceforward into a palace. Save where great castles (which were only
held of the Crown and not owned) made an exception, the pre-Reformation
gentry lived as men richer than, but not the masters of, other farmers around
them. After the Reformation there began to arise all over England those
great “country houses” which rapidly became the typical centres of English
agricultural life.

The process was in full swing before Henry died. Unfortunately for
England, he left as his heir a sickly child, during the six years of whose
reign, from 1547 to 1553, the loot went on at an appalling rate. When he
died and Mary came to the throne it was nearly completed. A mass of new
families had arisen, wealthy out of all proportion to anything which the
older England had known, and bound by a common interest to the older
families which had joined in the grab. Every single man who sat in
Parliament for a country required his price for voting the dissolution of the
monasteries; every single man received it. A list of the members of the
Dissolution Parliament is enough to prove this, and, apart from their power
in Parliament, this class had a hundred other ways of insisting on their will.
The Howards (already of some lineage), the Cavendishes, the Cecils, the
Russels, and fifty other new families thus rose upon the ruins of religion;
and the process went steadily on until, about one hundred years after its
inception, the whole face of England was changed.

In the place of a powerful Crown disposing of revenues far greater than that
of any subject, you had a Crown at its wit’s end for money, and dominated
by subjects some of whom were its equals in wealth, and who could,

especially through the action of Parliament (which they now controlled), do
much what they willed with Government.

In other words, by the first third of the seventeenth century, by 1630—40,
the economic revolution was finally accomplished, and the new economic
reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was a powerful
oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and dwindled
monarchy.

Other causes had contributed to this deplorable result. The change in the
value of money had hit the Crown very hard;2 the peculiar history of the
Tudor family, their violent passions, their lack of resolution and of any
continuous policy, to some extent the character of Charles I himself, and
many another subsidiary cause may be quoted. But the great main fact upon
which the whole thing is dependent is the fact that the Monastic Lands, at
least a fifth of the wealth of the country, had been transferred to the great
landowners, and that this transference had tipped the scale over entirely in
their favour as against the peasantry.

The diminished and impoverished Crown could no longer stand. It fought
against the new wealth, the struggle of the Civil Wars; it was utterly
defeated; and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660, you have all
the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy men,
the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old power, but
in practice a salaried puppet. And in that economic world which underlies
all political appearances, the great dominating note was that a few wealthy
families had got hold of the bulk of the means of production in England,
while the same families exercised all local administrative power and were
moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the Church, and the generals.
They quite overshadowed what was left of central government in this
country.

Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time
more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not
one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a
house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he
could not be turned off.

Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement,
and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the
means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in
which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad
business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by that
date England had already become Capitalist. She had already permitted a
vast section of her population to become proletarian, and it is this and not
the so-called “Industrial Revolution,” a later thing, which accounts for the
terrible social condition in which we find ourselves to-day.

How true this is what I still have to say in this section will prove.

In an England thus already cursed with a very large proletariat class, and in
an England already directed by a dominating Capitalist class, possessing the
means of production, there came a great industrial development.

Had that industrial development come upon a people economically free, it
would have taken a co-operative form. Coming as it did upon a people
which had already largely lost its economic freedom, it took at its very
origin a Capitalist form, and this form it has retained, expanded, and
perfected throughout two hundred years.

It was in England that the Industrial System arose. It was in England that all
its traditions and habits were formed; and because the England in which it
arose was already a Capitalist England, modern Industrialism, wherever you
see it at work to-day, having spread from England, has proceeded upon the
Capitalist model.

It was in 1705 that the first practical steam-engine, Newcomen’s, was set to
work. The life of a man elapsed before this invention was made, by Watt’s
introduction of the condenser, into the great instrument of production which
has transformed our industry—but in those sixty years all the origins of the
Industrial System are to be discovered. It was just before Watt’s patent that
Hargreaves’ spinning-jenny appeared. Thirty years earlier, Abraham Darby
of Colebrook Dale, at the end of a long series of experiments which had
covered more than a century, smelted iron-ore successfully with coke. Not
twenty years later, King introduced the flying shuttle, the first great
improvement in the hand-loom; and in general the period covered by such a

life as that of Dr Johnson, born just after Newcomen’s engine was first set
working, and dying seventy-four years afterwards, when the Industrial
System was in full blast, covers that great transformation of England. A
man who, as a child, could remember the last years of Queen Anne, and
who lived to the eve of the French Revolution, saw passing before his eyes
the change which transformed English society and has led it to the
expansion and peril in which we see it to-day.

What was the characteristic mark of that half-century and more? Why did
the new inventions give us the form of society now known and hated under
the name of Industrial? Why did the vast increase in the powers of
production, in population and in accumulation of wealth, turn the mass of
Englishmen into a poverty-stricken proletariat, cut off the rich from the rest
of the nation, and develop to the full all the evils which we associate with
the Capitalist State?

To that question an answer almost as universal as it is unintelligent has been
given. That answer is not only unintelligent but false, and it will be my
business here to show how false it is. The answer so provided in
innumerable textbooks, and taken almost as commonplace in our
universities, is that the new methods of production—the new machinery, the
new implements—fatally and of themselves developed a Capitalist State in
which a few should own the means of production and the mass should be
proletariat. The new instruments, it is pointed out, were on so vastly greater
a scale than the old, and were so much more expensive, that the small man
could not afford them; while the rich man, who could afford them, ate up by
his competition, and reduced from the position of a small owner to that of a
wage-earner, his insufficiently equipped competitor who still attempted to
struggle on with the older and cheaper tools. To this (we are told) the
advantages of concentration were added in favour of the large owner
against the small. Not only were the new instruments expensive almost in
proportion to their efficiency, but, especially after the introduction of steam,
they were efficient in proportion to their concentration in few places and
under the direction of a few men. Under the effect of such false arguments
as these we have been taught to believe that the horrors of the Industrial
System were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal
forces, and that wherever the steam engine, the power loom, the blast

furnace and the rest were introduced, there fatally would soon appear a little
group of owners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed.

It is astonishing that a statement so unhistorical should have gained so
general a credence. Indeed, were the main truths of English history taught
in our schools and universities to-day, were educated men familiar with the
determining and major facts of the national past, such follies could never
have taken root. The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of
ownership into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those
owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection
with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of
production. The evil proceeded indirect historical sequence, proceeded
patently and demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed-plot of the
Industrial System, was already captured by a wealthy oligarchy before the
series of great discoveries began.

Consider in what way the Industrial System developed upon Capitalist
lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the
new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of
contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new
machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the
England upon which the new discoveries had come was already an England
owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was
already an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was
proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand.

When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalised;
that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found
which would support labour in the process of production until that process
should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the
housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the
extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the
finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw
material and turned it into the finished product. Had property been well
distributed, protected by co-operative guilds fenced round and supported by
custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations, those
accumulations of wealth, necessary for the launching of each new method

of production and for each new perfection of it, would have been
discovered in the mass of small owners. Their corporations, their little
parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalisation
required for the new processes, and men already owners would, as one
invention succeeded another, have increased the total wealth of the
community without disturbing the balance of distribution. There is no
conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalisation of
a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of
employed non-owners working at a wage. Such great discoveries coming in
a society like that of the thirteenth century would have blest and enriched
mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth
century in this country, they proved a curse.

To whom could the new industry turn for capitalisation? The small owner
had already largely disappeared. The corporate life and mutual obligations
which had supported him and confirmed him in his property had been
broken to pieces by no “economic development,” but by the deliberate
action of the rich. He was ignorant because his schools had been taken from
him and the universities closed to him. He was the more ignorant because
the common life which once nourished his social sense and the co-operative
arrangements which had once been his defence had disappeared. When you
sought an accumulation of corn, of clothing, of housing, of fuel as the
indispensable preliminary to the launching of your new industry; when you
looked round for someone who could find the accumulated wealth
necessary for these considerable experiments, you had to turn to the class
which had already monopolised the bulk of the means of production in
England. The rich men alone could furnish you with those supplies.

Nor was this all. The supplies once found and the adventure “capitalised,”
that form of human energy which lay best to hand, which was indefinitely
exploitable, weak, ignorant, and desperately necessitous, ready to produce
for you upon almost any terms, and glad enough if you would only keep it
alive, was the existing proletariat which the new plutocracy had created
when, in cornering the wealth of the country after the Reformation, they
had thrust out the mass of Englishmen from the possession of implements,
of houses, and of land.

The rich class, adopting some new process of production for its private
gain, worked it upon those lines of mere competition which its avarice had
already established. Co-operative tradition was dead. Where would it find
its cheapest labour? Obviously among the proletariat—not among the
remaining small owners. What class would increase under the new wealth?
Obviously the proletariat again, without responsibilities, with nothing to
leave to its progeny; and as they swelled the capitalist’s gain, they enabled
him with increasing power to buy out the small owner and send him to
swell by another tributary the proletarian mass.

It was upon this account that the Industrial Revolution, as it is called, took
in its very origins the form which has made it an almost unmixed curse for
the unhappy society in which it has flourished. The rich, already possessed
of the accumulations by which that industrial change could alone be
nourished, inherited all its succeeding accumulations of implements and all
its increasing accumulations of subsistence. The factory system, starting
upon a basis of capitalist and proletariat, grew in the mould which had
determined its origins. With every new advance the capitalist looked for
proletariat grist to feed the productive mill. Every circumstance of that
society, the form in which the laws that governed ownership and profit were
cast, the obligations of partners, the relations bet ween “master” and “man,”
directly made for the indefinite expansion of a subject, formless, wage-
earning class controlled by a small body of owners, which body would tend
to become smaller and richer still, and to be possessed of power ever
greater and greater as the bad business unfolded.

The spread of economic oligarchy was everywhere, and not in industry
alone. The great landlords destroyed deliberately and of set purpose and to
their own ad vantage the common rights over common land. The small
plutocracy with which they were knit up, and with whose mercantile
elements they were now fused, directed everything to its own ends. That
strong central government which should protect the community against the
rapacity of a few had gone generations before. Capitalism triumphant
wielded all the mechanism of legislation and of information too. It still
holds them; and there is not an example of so-called “Social Reform” to-
day which is not demonstrably (though often subconsciously) directed to
the further entrenchment and confirmation of an industrial society in which

it is taken for granted that a few shall own, that the vast majority shall live
at a wage under them, and that all the bulk of Englishmen may hope for is
the amelioration of their lot by regulations and by control from above—but
not by property; not by freedom.

We all feel—and those few of us who have analysed the matter not only feel
but know—that the Capitalist society thus gradually developed from its
origins in the capture of the land four hundred years ago has reached its
term. It is almost self-evident that it cannot continue in the form which now
three generations have known, and it is equally self-evident that some
solution must be found for the intolerable and increasing instability with
which it has poisoned our lives. But before considering the solutions
variously presented by various schools of thought, I shall in my next section
show how and why the English Capitalist Industrial System is thus
intolerably unstable and consequently presents an acute problem which
must be solved under pain of social death.

It must be noted that modern Industrialism has spread to many other centres
from England. It bears everywhere the features stamped upon it by its origin
in this country.

Section Five
The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows
Unstable

From the historical digression which I have introduced by way of
illustrating my subject in the last two sections I now return to the general
discussion of my thesis and to the logical process by which it may be
established.

The Capitalist State is unstable, and indeed more properly a transitory phase
lying between two permanent and stable states of society.

In order to appreciate why this is so, let us recall the definition of the
Capitalist State:—

“A society in which the ownership of the means of production is confined to
a body of free citizens, not large enough to make up properly a general
character of that society, while the rest are dispossessed of the means of
production, and are therefore proletarian, we call Capitalist.”

Note the several points of such a state of affairs. You have private
ownership; but it is not private ownership distributed in many hands and
thus familiar as an institution to society as a whole. Again, you have the
great majority dispossessed but at the same time citizens, that is, men
politically free to act, though economically impotent; again, though it is but
an inference from our definition, it is a necessary inference that there will
be under Capitalism a conscious, direct, and planned exploitation of the
majority, the free citizens who do not own by the minority who are owners.
For wealth must be produced: the whole of that community must live: and
the possessors can make such terms with the non-possessors as shall make
it certain that a portion of what the non-possessors have produced shall go
to the possessors.

A society thus constituted cannot endure. It cannot endure because it is
subject to two very severe strains: strains which increase in severity in
proportion as that society becomes more thoroughly Capitalist. The first of
these strains arises from the divergence between the moral theories upon
which the State reposes and the social facts which those moral theories
attempt to govern. The second strain arises from the insecurity to which
Capitalism condemns the great mass of society, and the general character of
anxiety and peril which it imposes upon all citizens, but in particular upon
the majority, which consists, under Capitalism, of dispossessed free men.

Of these two strains it is impossible to say which is the gravest. Either
would be enough to destroy a social arrangement in which it was long
present. The two combined make that destruction certain; and there is no
longer any doubt that Capitalist society must transform itself into some
other and more stable arrangement. It is the object of these pages to
discover what that stable arrangement will probably be.

We say that there is a moral strain already intolerably severe and growing
more severe with every perfection of Capitalism.

This moral strain comes from a contradiction between the realities of
Capitalist and the moral base of our laws and traditions.

The moral base upon which our laws are still administered and our
conventions raised presupposes a state composed of free citizens. Our laws
defend property as a normal institution with which all citizens are
acquainted, and which all citizens respect. It punishes theft as an abnormal
incident only occurring when, through evil motives, one free citizen
acquires the property of another without his knowledge and against his will.
It punishes fraud as another abnormal incident in which, from evil motives,
one free citizen induces another to part with his property upon false
representations. It enforces contract, the sole moral base of which is the
freedom of the two contracting parties, and the power of either, if it so
please him, not to enter into a contract which, once entered into, must be
enforced. It gives to an owner the power to leave his property by will, under
the conception that such ownership and such passage of property (to natural

heirs as a rule, but exceptionally to any other whom the testator may point
out) is the normal operation of a society generally familiar with such things,
and finding them part of the domestic life lived by the mass of its citizens.
It casts one citizen in damages if by any wilful action he has caused loss to
another—for it presupposes him able to pay.

The sanction upon which social life reposes is, in our moral theory, the legal
punishment enforceable in our Courts, and the basis presupposed for the
security and material happiness of our citizens is the possession of goods
which shall guarantee us from anxiety and permit us an independence of
action in the midst of our fellowmen.

Now contrast all this, the moral theory upon which society is still perilously
conducted, the moral theory to which Capitalism itself turns for succour
when it is attacked, contrast, I say, its formulæ and its presuppositions with
the social reality of a Capitalist State such as is England to-day.

Property remains as an instinct perhaps with most of the citizens; as an
experience and a reality it is unknown to nineteen out of twenty. One
hundred forms of fraud, the necessary corollary of unrestrained competition
between a few and of unrestrained avarice as the motive controlling
production, are not or cannot be punished: petty forms of violence in theft
and of cunning in fraud the laws can deal with, but they cannot deal with
these alone. Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for
protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the
hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens. The vast bulk of so-
called “free” contracts are to-day leonine contracts: arrangements which
one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free
to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation.

Most important of all, the fundamental social fact of our movement, far
more important than any security afforded by law, or than any machinery
which the State can put into action, is the fact that livelihood is at the will of
the possessors. It can be granted by the possessors to the non-possessors, or
it can be withheld. The real sanction in our society for the arrangements by
which it is conducted is not punishment enforceable by the Courts, but the
withholding of livelihood from the dispossessed by the possessors. Most
men now fear the loss of employment more than they fear legal punishment,

and the discipline under which men are coerced in their modern forms of
activity in England is the fear of dismissal. The true master of the
Englishman to-day is not the Sovereign nor the officers of State, nor, save
indirectly, the laws; his true master is the Capitalist.

Of these main truths everyone is aware; and anyone who sets out to deny
them does so to-day at the peril of his reputation either for honesty or for
intelligence.

If it be asked why things have come to a head so late (Capitalism having
been in growth for so long), the answer is that England, even now the most
completely Capitalist State of the modern world, did not itself become a
completely Capitalist State until the present generation. Within the memory
of men now living half England was agricultural, with relations domestic
rather than competitive between the various human factors to production.

This moral strain, therefore, arising from the divergence between what our
laws and moral phrases pretend, and what our society actually is, makes of
that society an utterly unstable thing.

This spiritual thesis is of far greater gravity than the narrow materialism of
a generation now passing might imagine. Spiritual conflict is more fruitful
of instability in the State than conflict of any other kind, and there is acute
spiritual conflict, conflict in every man’s conscience and ill-ease throughout
the commonwealth when the realities of society are divorced from the
moral base of its institution.

The second strain which we have noted in Capitalism, its second element of
instability, consists in the fact that Capitalism destroys security.

Experience is enough to save us any delay upon this main point of our
matter. But even without experience we could reason with absolute
certitude from the very nature of Capitalism that its chief effect would be
the destruction of security in human life.

Combine these two elements: the ownership of the means of production by
a very few; the political freedom of owners and non-owners alike. There
follows immediately from that combination a competitive market wherein
the labour of the non-owner fetches just what it is worth, not as full
productive power, but as productive power which will leave a surplus to the
Capitalist. It fetches nothing when the labourer cannot work, more in
proportion to the pace at which he is driven; less in middle age than in
youth; less in old age than in middle age; nothing in sickness; nothing in
despair.

A man in a position to accumulate (the normal result of human labour), a
man founded upon property in sufficient amount and in established form is
no more productive in his non-productive moments than is a proletarian; but
his life is balanced and regulated by his reception of rent and interest as
well as wages. Surplus values come to him, and are the fly-wheel balancing
the extremes of his life and carrying him over his bad times. With a
proletarian it cannot be so. The aspect from Capital looks at a human being
whose labour it proposes to purchase cuts right across that normal aspect of
human life from which we all regard our own affections, duties, and
character. A man thinks of himself, of his chances and of his security along
the line of his own individual existence from birth to death. Capital
purchasing his labour (and not the man himself) purchases but a cross-
section of his life, his moments of activity. For the rest, he must fend for
himself; but to fend for yourself when you have nothing is to starve.

As a matter of fact, where a few possess the means of production perfectly
free political conditions are impossible. A perfect Capitalist State cannot
exist, though we have come nearer to it in modern England than other and
more fortunate nations had thought possible. In the perfect Capitalist State
there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was
actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly
ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the
arrangement. If you left men completely free under a Capitalist system,
there would be so heavy a mortality from starvation as would dry up the
sources of labour in a very short time.

Imagine the dispossessed to be ideally perfect cowards, the possessors to
consider nothing whatsoever except the buying of their labour in the
cheapest market—and the system would break down from the death of
children and of out-o’-works and of women. You would not have a State in
mere decline such as ours is. You would have a State manifestly and
patently perishing.

As a fact, of course, Capitalism cannot proceed to its own logical extreme.
So long as the political freedom of all citizens is granted the freedom of the
few possessors of food to grant or withhold it, of the many non-possessors
to strike any bargain at all, lest they lack it: to exercise such freedom fully is
to starve the very young, the old, the impotent, and the despairing to death.
Capitalism must keep alive, by non Capitalist methods, great masses of the
population who would otherwise starve to death; and that is what
Capitalism was careful to do to an increasing extent as it got a stronger and
a stronger grip upon the English people. Elizabeth’s Poor Law at the
beginning of the business, the Poor Law of 1834, coming at a moment when
nearly half England had passed into the grip of Capitalism, are original and
primitive instances: there are to-day a hundred others.

Though this cause of insecurity—the fact that the possessors have no direct
incentive to keep men alive—is logically the most obvious, and always the
most enduring under a Capitalist system, there is another cause more
poignant in its effect upon human life. That other cause is the competitive
anarchy in production which restricted ownership coupled with freedom
involves. Consider what is involved by the very process of production
where the implements and the soil are in the hands of a few whose motive
for causing the proletariat to produce is not the use of the wealth created but
the enjoyment by those possessors of surplus value or “profit.”

If full political freedom be allowed to any two such possessors of
implements and stores, each will actively watch his market, attempt to
undersell the other, tend to overproduce at the end of some season of extra
demand for his article, thus glut the market only to suffer a period of
depression afterwards—and so forth. Again, the Capitalist, free, individual

director of production, will miscalculate; sometimes he will fail, and his
works will be shut down. Again, a mass of isolated, imperfectly instructed
competing units cannot but direct their clashing efforts at an enormous
waste, and that waste will fluctuate. Most commissions, most
advertisements, most parades, are examples of this waste. If this waste of
effort could be made a constant, the parasitical employment it afforded
would be a constant too. But of its nature it is a most inconstant thing, and
the employment it affords is therefore necessarily precarious. The concrete
translation of this is the insecurity of the commercial traveller, the
advertising agent, the insurance agent, and every form of touting and
cozening which competitive Capitalism carries with it.

Now here again, as in the case of the insecurity produced by age and
sickness, Capitalism cannot be pursued to its logical conclusion, and it is
the element of freedom which suffers. Competition is, as a fact, restricted to
an increasing extent by an understanding between the competitors,
accompanied, especially in this country, by the ruin of the smaller
competitor through secret conspiracies entered into by the larger men, and
supported by the secret political forces of the State.3 In a word, Capitalism,
proving almost as unstable to the owners as to the non-owners, is tending
towards stability by losing its essential character of political freedom. No
better proof of the instability of Capitalism as a system could be desired.

Take any one of the numerous Trusts which now control English industry,
and have made of modern England the type, quoted throughout the
Continent, of artificial monopolies. If the full formula of Capitalism were
accepted by our Courts and our executive statesmen, anyone could start a
rival business, undersell those Trusts and shatter the comparative security
they afford to industry within their field. The reason that no one does this is
that political freedom is not, as a fact, protected here by the Courts in
commercial affairs. A man attempting to compete with one of our great
English Trusts would find himself at once undersold. He might, by all the
spirit of European law for centuries, indict those who would ruin him, citing
them for a conspiracy in restraint of trade; of this conspiracy he would find
the judge and the politicians most heartily in support.

But it must always be remembered that these conspiracies in restraint of
trade which are the mark of modern England are in themselves a mark of
the transition from the true Capitalist phase to another.

Under the essential conditions of Capitalism—under a perfect political
freedom—such conspiracies would be punished by the Courts for what they
are: to wit, a contravention of the fundamental doctrine of political liberty.
For this doctrine, while it gives any man the right to make any contract he
chooses with any labourer and offer the produce at such prices as he sees
fit, also involves the protection of that liberty by the punishment of any
conspiracy that may have monopoly for its object. If such perfect freedom
is no longer attempted, if monopolies are permitted and fostered, it is
because the unnatural strain to which freedom, coupled with restricted
ownership, gives rise, the insecurity of its mere competition, the anarchy of
its productive methods have at last proved intolerable.

I have already delayed more than was necessary in this section upon the
causes which render a Capitalist State essentially unstable.

I might have treated the matter empirically, taking for granted the
observation which all my readers must have made, that Capitalism is as a
fact doomed, and that the Capitalist State has already passed into its first
phase of transition.

We are clearly no longer possessed of that absolutely political freedom
which true Capitalism essentially demands. The insecurity involved,
coupled with the divorce between our traditional morals and the facts of
society, have already introduced such novel features as the permission of
conspiracy among both possessors and non-possessors, the compulsory
provision of security through State action, and all these reforms, implicit or
explicit, the tendency of which I am about to examine.

Section Six
The Stable Solutions of This Instability

Given a capitalist state, of its nature unstable, it will tend to reach stability
by some method or another.

It is the definition of unstable equilibrium that a body in unstable
equilibrium is seeking a stable equilibrium. For instance, a pyramid
balanced upon its apex is in unstable equilibrium; which simply means that
a slight force one way or the other will make it fall into a position where it
will repose. Similarly, certain chemical mixtures are said to be in unstable
equilibrium when their constituent parts have such affinity one for another
that a slight shock may make them combine and transform the chemical
arrangement of the whole. Of this sort are explosives.

If the Capitalist State is in unstable equilibrium, this only means that it is
seeking a stable equilibrium, and that Capitalism cannot but be transformed
into some other arrangement wherein Society may repose.

There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism:
Slavery, Socialism, and Property.

I may imagine a mixture of any two of these three or of all the three, but
each is a dominant type, and from the very nature of the problem no fourth
arrangement can be devised.

The problem turns, remember, upon the control of the means of production.
Capitalism means that this control is vested in the hands of few, while
political freedom is the appanage of all. If this anomaly cannot endure, from
its insecurity and from its own contradiction with its presumed moral basis,
you must either have a transformation of the one or of the other of the two
elements which combined have been found unworkable. These two factors
are (1) The ownership of the means of Production by a few; (2) The
Freedom of all. To solve Capitalism you must get rid of restricted

ownership, or of freedom, or of both. Now there is only one alternative to
freedom, which is the negation of it. Either a man is free to work and not to
work as he pleases, or he may be liable to a legal compulsion to work,
backed by the forces of the State. In the first he is a free man; in the second
he is by definition a slave. We have, therefore, so far as this factor of
freedom is concerned, no choice between a number of changes, but only the
opportunity of one, to wit, the establishment of slavery in place of freedom.
Such a solution, the direct, immediate, and conscious re-establishment of
slavery, would provide a true solution of the problems which Capitalism
offers. It would guarantee, under workable regulations, sufficiency and
security for the dispossessed. Such a solution, as I shall show, is the
probable goal which our society will in fact approach. To its immediate and
conscious acceptance, however, there is an obstacle.

A direct and conscious establishment of slavery as a solution to the problem
of Capitalism, the surviving Christian tradition of our civilisation compels
men to reject. No reformer will advocate it; no prophet dares take it as yet
for granted. All theories of a reformed society will therefore attempt, at
first, to leave untouched the factor of Freedom among the elements which
make up Capitalism, and will concern themselves with some change in the
factor of Property.4

Now, in attempting to remedy the evils of Capitalism by remedying that one
of its two factors which consists in an ill distribution of property, you have
two, and only two, courses open to you.

If you are suffering because property is restricted to a few, you can alter that
factor in the problem either by putting property into the hands of many, or
by putting it into the hands of none. There is no third course.

In the concrete, to put property in the hands of “none” means to vest it as a
trust in the hands of political officers. If you say that the evils proceeding
from Capitalism are due to the institution of property itself, and not to the
dispossession of the many by the few, then you must forbid the private
possession of the means of production by any particular and private part of
the community: but someone must control the means of production, or we
should have nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine means the

management of the means of production by those who are the public
officers of the community. Whether these public officers are themselves
controlled by the community or no has nothing to do with this solution on
its economic side. The essential point to grasp is that the only alternative to
private property is public property. Somebody must see to the ploughing
and must control the ploughs; otherwise no ploughing will be done.

It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil but
only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase the
number of those owners.

So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like
ours, disliking the name of “slavery,” and avoiding a direct and conscious
re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the reform
of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is the
negation of private property and the establishment of what is called
Collectivism: that is, the management of the means of production by the
political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution of
property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole State, and
until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of capital or land, or
both.

The first model we call Socialism or the Collectivist State; the second we
call the Proprietary or Distributive State.

With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the
second model, involving the redistribution of property, is rejected as
impracticable by our existing Capitalist Society, and why, therefore, the
model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a Collectivist State.

I shall then proceed to show that at its first inception all Collectivist Reform
is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had intended, a
new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the
proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude.

Have I made myself clear?

If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the formula
which is the kernel of my whole thesis.

The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory which in action produces
something utterly different from Collectivism: to wit, the Servile State.

Section Seven
Socialism Is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist
Crux

I say that the line of least resistance, if it be followed, leads a Capitalist
State to transform itself into a Servile State.

I propose to show that this comes about from the fact that not a Distributive
but a Collectivist solution is the easiest for a Capitalist State to aim at, and
that yet, in the very act of attempting Collectivism, what results is not
Collectivism at all, but the servitude of the many, and the confirmation in
their present privilege of the few; that is, the Servile State.

Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhorrent propose for the remedy
of Capitalism one of two reforms.

Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing
land and capital that a determining number of families in the State were
possessed of the means of production; or they would put those means of
production into the hands of the political officers of the community, to be
held in trust for the advantage of all.

The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of the
Distributive State. The second may be called the attempted establishment
of the Collectivist State.

Those who favour the first course are the Conservatives or Traditionalists.
They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of
Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed
throughout the State during the happiest periods of our past history; they
also know that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have greater
social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would re-

establish, if possible, the Distributive State in the place of, and as a remedy
for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned with known
realities, and having for their ideal a condition of society which experience
has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of the two
schools of reformers, the more practical in the sense that they deal more
than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists) with things which either are
or have been in actual existence. But they are less practical in another sense
(as we shall see in a moment) from the fact that the stage of the disease with
which they are dealing does not readily lend itself to such a reaction as they
propose.

The Collectivist, on the other hand, proposes to put land and capital into the
hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the
understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the
advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently
dealing with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one
that has been tested by experience, nor one of which our race and history
can furnish instances. In this sense, therefore, he is the less practical of the
two reformers. His ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and
recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine Socialism in actual
working, nor can we say (as we can say of well-divided property): “On such
and such an occasion, in such and such a period of European history,
Collectivism was established and produced both stability and happiness in
society.”

In this sense, therefore, the Collectivist is far less practical than the
reformer who desires well-distributed property.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which this Socialist is more practical
than that other type of reformer, from the fact that the stage of the disease
into which we have fallen apparently admits of his remedy with less shock
than it admits of a reaction towards well-divided property.

For example: the operation of buying out some great tract of private
ownership to-day (as a railway or a harbour company) with public funds,
continuing its administration by publicly paid officials and converting its
revenue to public use, is a thing with which we are familiar and which
seemingly might be indefinitely multiplied. Individual examples of such

transformation of waterworks, gas, tramways, from a Capitalist to a
Collectivist basis are common, and the change does not disturb any
fundamental thing in our society. When a private Water company or
Tramway line is bought by some town and worked thereafter in the interests
of the public, the transaction is effected without any perceptible friction,
disturbs the life of no private citizen, and seems in every way normal to the
society in which it takes place.

Upon the contrary, the attempt to create a large number of shareholders in
such enterprises and artificially to substitute many partners, distributed
throughout a great number of the population, in the place of the original few
capitalist owners, would prove lengthy and at every step would arouse
opposition, would create disturbance, would work at an expense of great
friction, and would be imperilled by the power of the new and many owners
to sell again to a few.

In a word, the man who desires to re-establish property as an institution
normal to most citizens in the State is working against the grain of our
existing Capitalist society, while a man who desires to establish Socialism
—that is Collectivism—is working with the grain of that society. The first is
like a physician who should say to a man whose limbs were partially
atrophied from disuse: “Do this and that, take such and such exercise, and
you will recover the use of your limbs.” The second is like a physician who
should say: “You cannot go on as you are. Your limbs are atrophied from
lack of use. Your attempt to conduct yourself as though they were not is
useless and painful; you had better make up your mind to be wheeled about
in a fashion consonant to your disease.” The Physician is the Reformer, his
Patient the Proletariat.

It is not the purpose of this book to show how and under what difficulties a
condition of well-divided property might be restored and might take the
place (even in England) of that Capitalism which is now no longer either
stable or tolerable; but for the purposes of contrast and to emphasise my
argument I will proceed, before showing how the Collectivist unconsciously
makes for the Servile State, to show what difficulties surround the
Distributive solution and why, therefore, the Collectivist solution appeals so
much more readily to men living under Capitalism.

If I desire to substitute a number of small owners for a few large ones in
some particular enterprise, how shall I set to work?

I might boldly confiscate and redistribute at a blow. But by what process
should I choose the new owners? Even supposing that there was some
machinery whereby the justice of the new distribution could be assured,
how could I avoid the enormous and innumerable separate acts of injustice
that would attach to general redistributions? To say “none shall own” and to
confiscate is one thing; to say “all should own” and apportion ownership is
another. Action of this kind would so disturb the whole network of
economic relations as to bring ruin at once to the whole body politic, and
particularly to the smaller interests indirectly affected. In a society such as
ours a catastrophe falling upon the State from outside might indirectly do
good by making such a redistribution possible. But no one working from
within the State could provoke that catastrophe without ruining his own
cause.

If, then, I proceed more slowly and more rationally and canalise the
economic life of society so that small property shall gradually be built up
within it, see against what forces of inertia and custom I have to work to-
day in a Capitalist society!

If I desire to benefit small savings at the expense of large, I must reverse the
whole economy under which interest is paid upon deposits to-day. It is far
easier to save £100 out of a revenue of £1,000 than to save £10 out of a
revenue of £100. It is infinitely easier to save £10 out of a revenue of £100
than £5 out of a revenue of £50. To build up small property through thrift
when once the Mass have fallen into the proletarian trough is impossible
unless you deliberately subsidise small savings, offering them a reward
which, in competition, they could never obtain; and to do this the whole
vast arrangement of credit must be worked backwards. Or, let the policy be
pursued of penalising undertakings with few owners, of heavily taxing large
blocks of shares and of subsidising with the produce small holders in
proportion to the smallness of their holding. Here again you are met with
the difficulty of a vast majority who cannot even bid for the smallest share.

One might multiply instances of the sort indefinitely, but the strongest force
against the distribution of ownership in a society already permeated with
Capitalist modes of thought is still the moral one: Will men want to own?
Will officials, administrators, and lawmakers be able to shake off the power
which under Capitalism seems normal to the rich? If I approach, for
instance, the works of one of our great Trusts, purchase it with public
money, bestow, even as a gift, the shares thereof to its workmen, can I count
upon any tradition of property in their midst which will prevent their
squandering the new wealth? Can I discover any relics of the co-operative
instinct among such men? Could I get managers and organisers to take a
group of poor men seriously or to serve them as they would serve rich men?
Is not the whole psychology of a Capitalist society divided between the
proletarian mass which thinks in terms not of property but of
“employment,” and the few owners who are alone familiar with the
machinery of administration?

I have touched but very briefly and superficially upon this matter, because it
needs no elaboration. Though it is evident that with a sufficient will and a
sufficient social vitality property could be restored, it is evident that all
efforts to restore it have in a Capitalist society such as our own a note of
oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other social
things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any such
attempt must proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.

On the other hand, the Collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in
appearance at least) to the Capitalist society which it proposes to replace. It
works with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and thinks in the
existing terms of Capitalism, appeals to just those appetites which
Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those
things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed among men
wherever the blight of it has spread.

So true is all this that the stupider kind of Collectivist will often talk of a
“Capitalist phase” of society as the necessary precedent to a “Collectivist
phase.” A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it “furnishes a mode of
transition from private to public ownership.” Collectivism promises
employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms of

employment. It promises to its workmen the security which a great and
well-organised industrial Capitalist unit (like one of our railways) can give
through a system of pensions, regular promotion, etc., but that security
vastly increased through the fact that it is the State and not a mere unit of
the State which guarantees it. Collectivism would administer, would pay
wages, would promote, would pension off, would fine—and all the rest of it
—exactly as the Capitalist State does to-day. The proletarian, when the
Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, perceives nothing in the
picture save certain ameliorations of his present position. Who can imagine
that if, say, two of our great industries, Coal and Railways, were handed
over to the State tomorrow, the armies of men organised therein would find
any change in the character of their lives, save in some increase of security
and possibly in a very slight increase of earnings?

The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass
of a Capitalist State is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise of
some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.

To that small minority of a Capitalist society which owns the means of
production, Collectivism will of course appear as an enemy, but, even so, it
is an enemy which they understand and an enemy with whom they can treat
in terms common both to that enemy and to themselves. If, for instance, the
State proposes to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 per cent. and
believes that under State management it will make the trust pay 5 per cent.
then the transference takes the form of a business proposition: the State is
no harder to the Capitalists taken over than was Mr Yerkes to the
Underground. Again, the State, having greater credit and longevity, can (it
would seem)5 “buy out” any existing Capitalist body upon favourable
terms. Again, the discipline by which the State would enforce its rules upon
the proletariat it employed would be the same rules as those by which the
Capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests to-day.

There is in the whole scheme which proposes to transform the Capitalist
into the Collectivist State no element of reaction, the use of no term with
which a Capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no instinct, whether
of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a
Capitalist community is not amply familiar.

In general, if modern Capitalist England were made by magic a State of
small owners, we should all suffer an enormous revolution. We should
marvel at the insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, at the
strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, vigorous personalities
discernible upon every side. But if this modern Capitalist England could, by
a process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjustment of individual
interests, be transformed into a Collectivist State, the apparent change at the
end of that transition would not be conspicuous to the most of us, and the
transition itself should have met with no shocks that theory can discover.
The insecure and hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks of labour
would have disappeared into isolated workplaces of a penal kind: we should
hardly miss them. Many incomes now involving considerable duties to the
State would have been replaced by incomes as large or larger, involving
much the same duties and bearing only the newer name of salaries. The
small shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed under public
schemes at a salary, in part engaged in the old work of distribution at secure
incomes; and such small owners as are left, of boats, of farms, even of
machinery, would perhaps know the new state of things into which they had
survived through nothing more novel than some increase in the irritating
system of inspection and of onerous petty taxation: they are already fairly
used to both.

This picture of the natural transition from Capitalism to Collectivism seems
so obvious that many Collectivists in a generation immediately past
believed that nothing stood between them and the realisation of their ideal
save the unintelligence of mankind. They had only to argue and expound
patiently and systematically for the great transformation to become
possible. They had only to continue arguing and expounding for it at last to
be realised.

I say, “of the last generation.” To-day that simple and superficial judgment
is getting woefully disturbed. The most sincere and single-minded of
Collectivists cannot but note that the practical effect of their propaganda is
not an approach towards the Collectivist State at all, but towards something
very different. It is becoming more and more evident that with every new
reform—and those reforms commonly promoted by particular Socialists,
and in a puzzled way blessed by Socialists in general—another state

emerges more and more clearly. It is becoming increasingly certain that the
attempted transformation of Capitalism into Collectivism is resulting not in
Collectivism at all, but in some third thing which the Collectivist never
dreamt of, or the Capitalist either; and that third thing is the Servile State: a
State, that is, in which the mass of men shall be constrained by law to
labour to the profit of a minority, but, as the price of such constraint, shall
enjoy a security which the old Capitalism did not give them.

Why is the apparently simple and direct action of Collectivist reform
diverted into so unexpected a channel? And in what new laws and
institutions does modern England in particular and industrial society in
general show that this new form of the State is upon us?

To these two questions I will attempt an answer in the two concluding
divisions of this book.

Section Eight
The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile
State

I propose in this section to show how the three interests which between
them account for nearly the whole of the forces making for social change in
modern England are all necessarily drifting towards the Servile State.

Of these three interests the first two represent the Reformers—the third the
people to be Reformed.

These three interests are, first, the Socialist, who is the theoretical reformer
working along the line of least resistance; secondly, the “Practical Man”
who as a “practical” reformer depends on his shortness of sight, and is
therefore to-day a powerful factor; while the third is that great proletarian
mass for whom the change is being effected, and on whom it is being
imposed. What they are most likely to accept, the way in which they will
react upon new institutions is the most important factor of all, for they are
the material with and upon which the work is being done.

(1) Of the Socialist Reformer:

I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the
remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not
towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.

The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is itself
made up of two kinds of men: there is (a) the man who regards the public
ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion of
all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only feasible
solution of our modern social ills. There is also (b) the man who loves the
Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a

solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form
of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a
State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall
order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of their
vice, ignorance, and folly.

These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and
between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.

Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of
Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least
resistance will either be led?

(a) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of
production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of them
in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard thing
to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation a
stony moral barrier. It is what most men would call the moral basis of
property (the instinct that property is a right), and what all men would
admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind them
the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.

To take a very simple case. Decree that all common lands enclosed since so
late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very
moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how
many small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over
millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the
difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is
conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society; but
it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved and
all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the
conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist
reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention—as it must
be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental
importance—the expedient of “buying out” the present owner.

It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to “buy out” without
confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its
proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my
reformer’s action.

He does not confiscate, then; at the most he “buys out” (or attempts to “buy
out”) certain sections of the means of production.

But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition
the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of
Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution which it causes in great
multitudes and the harrowing insecurity which it imposes upon all. He is
out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall all be
fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual
jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.

Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.

This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production
by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But
they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited
ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very
definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess the
possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when we are
dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to
modify the factor of freedom.

You can say to the Capitalist: “I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I
am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives.” The
Capitalist replies: “I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of
catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relation
between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular
responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian,
and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the Capitalist, as
a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with special converse duties
under those laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel
my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed
upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a novel

arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more
secure.”

This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand
canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred; as to
the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open.
Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and that
sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will run
through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen its
channel; there will the main stream learn to run.

To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist’s demand which
are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first
steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that
upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the
whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the Servile
State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the
more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective
indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving
power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.

When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any
demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it in
order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.

Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier
method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase
immediately preceding it: there is no need to go further.

In this way the Socialist whose motive is human good and not mere
organisation is being shepherded in spite of himself away from his
Collectivist ideal and towards a society in which the possessors shall
remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed, in which the
mass of men shall still work for the advantage of a few, and in which those
few shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, but in which the
special evils of insecurity and insufficiency, in the main the product of
freedom, have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom.

At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men, the owners
economically free, and controlling to their peace and to the guarantee of
their livelihood the economically unfree non-owners. But that is the Servile
State.

(b) The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly. In
him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not
of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar. Tables,
statistics, an exact framework for life—these afford him the food that
satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most congenial to him is the
“running” of men: as a machine is run.

To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals.

It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and organic complexity which is
the colour of any vital society offends him by its infinite differentiation. He
is disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect of a vast bureaucracy
wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple
schemes deriving from the coordinate work of public clerks and marshalled
by powerful heads of departments gives his small stomach a final
satisfaction.

Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in
capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so
suits his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said that in his vision of a
future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least a department
and possibly of the whole State—but that is by the way.) But while he
would prefer to begin with a Collectivist scheme ready-made, he finds in
practice that he cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as the more
hearty Socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the man burning at
the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to a man impelled
by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense than a
mechanical appetite for regulation?

He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the best he will “buy out”
the Capitalist.

Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human Socialist, “buying out”
is, as I shall show in its proper place, a system impossible of general
application.

But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he
does for the socialisation of the means of production—tabulation, detailed
administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under one
schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his
Department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the
existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other
socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the
few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the
proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their freedom,
nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency or
insecurity—and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper
housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be
incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be
imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to
benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.

To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing towards which he drifts, it
is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal Collectivist State, which
alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already
the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called
themselves “Socialists” are now less concerned with any scheme for
socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable schemes actually
existing, some of them possessing already the force of laws, for regulating,
“running,” and drilling the proletariat without trenching by an inch upon the
privilege in implements, stores, and land enjoyed by the small Capitalist
class.

The so-called “Socialist” of this type has not fallen into the Servile State by
a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he foresees his
power over its future.

So much for the Socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to
transform our Capitalist society into one where the community should be
the universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under

its tutelage. To-day their ideal has failed, and of the two sources whence
their energy proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly, acquiescent
in the advent of a society which is not Socialist at all but Servile.

(2) Of the Practical Reformer:

There is another type of Reformer, one who prides himself on not being a
socialist, and one of the greatest weight to-day. He also is making for the
Servile State. This second factor in the change is the “Practical Man”; and
this fool, on account of his great numbers and determining influence in the
details of legislation, must be carefully examined.

It is your “Practical Man” who says: “Whatever you theorists and
doctrinaires may hold with regard to this proposal (which I support), though
it may offend some abstract dogma of yours, yet in practice you must admit
that it does good. If you had practical experience of the misery of the Jones’
family, or had done practical work yourself in Pudsey, you would have seen
that a practical man,” etc.

It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is exactly
the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of human
energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities
which stamp the Practical Man where-ever found: these twin disabilities are
an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the
consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities
proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to
think.

Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and do a little thinking for
him.

As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first
principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, and his first principles and
dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors hold
in the matter of social reform. The two things intolerable to him as a decent
citizen (though a very stupid human being) are insufficiency and insecurity.

When he was “working” in the slums of Pudsey or raiding the proletarian
Jones’s from the secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the worthy
man most was “unemployment” and “destitution”: that is, insecurity and
insufficiency in flesh and blood.

Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, whether as a mere
organiser or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice, is led away from
Socialism and towards the Servile State by the force of modern things in
England, how much more easily do you not think the “Practical Man” will
be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his
grazing ground? To those dull and shortsighted eyes the immediate solution
which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity
is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down the
declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile State
with the same inevitable ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give him
something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then Jones
will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work. If you
get him work “under our unorganised and wasteful system, etc.,” he may
lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The slums of Pudsey, as the Practical
Man knows by Practical experience, are often unemployable. Then there are
“the ravages of drink”: more fatal still the dreadful habit mankind has of
forming families and breeding children. The worthy fellow notes that “as a
practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you make them.”

He does not, because he cannot, coordinate all these things. He knows
nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the co-
operative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership which
such a society spontaneously breeds. He “takes the world as he finds it”—
and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit
with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile
State, he, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in the
building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by
inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the one
panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or suspect
the process.

It has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual
because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power.
Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great
advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before
our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen
until our time. Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of
philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.

The Practical Man left to himself would not produce the Servile State. He
would not produce anything but a welter of anarchic restrictions which
would lead at last to some kind of revolt.

Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but the ally or flanking party
of great forces which he does nothing to oppose, and of particular men, able
and prepared for the work of general change, who use him with gratitude
and contempt. Were he not so numerous in modern England, and, under the
extraordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economically powerful, I
would have neglected him in this analysis. As it is, we may console
ourselves by remembering that the advent of the Servile State, with its
powerful organisation and necessity for lucid thought in those who govern,
will certainly eliminate him.

Our reformers, then, both those who think and those who do not, both those
who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it, are
making directly for the Servile State.

(3) What of the third factor? What of the people about to be reformed?
What of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and
who are the subject of the great experiment? Do they tend, as material, to
accept or to reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude
which is the argument of this book?

The question is an important one to decide, for upon whether the material is
suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected, depends the

success of every experiment making for the Servile State.

The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of
definition, the actual number of the proletariat and the proportion that
number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but must
be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before we can
call that State Capitalist.

But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a stable, and therefore not a
permanent, condition of society. It has proved ephemeral; and upon that
very account the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a greater or less
degree some memories of a state of society in which its ancestors were
possessors of property and economically free.

The strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to bear
in mind in our problem, when we examine how far a particular proletariat,
such as the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the Servile State,
which would condemn it to a perpetual loss of property and of all the free
habit which property engenders.

Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the Capitalist class may
be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat
class. Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the
first development of Capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to
impress the imagination of the general. Such recruitment is still possible.
The proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat, the chance which
each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his
proletarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism such as is ours to-
day, is the second factor in the problem.

The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is the appetite of the
dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which Capitalism, with its
essential condition of freedom, has deprived them.

Now let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English
proletariat as we actually know it at this moment. That proletariat is
certainly the great mass of the State: it covers about nineteen-twentieths of
the population—if we exclude Ireland, where, as I shall point out in my

concluding pages, the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against its
development towards a Servile State, is already successful.

As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly within the memory of men
now living. The traditional rights of property are still strong in the minds of
the English poor. All the moral connotations of that right are familiar to
them. They are familiar with the conception of theft as a wrong; they are
tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire. They could all
explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy, by exchange, and by gift,
and even by contract. There is not one but could put himself in the position,
mentally, of an owner.

But the actual experience of ownership, and the effect which that
experience has upon character and upon one’s view of the State is a very
different matter. Within the memory of people still living a sufficient
number of Englishmen were owning (as small freeholders, small masters,
etc.) to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very vivid
effect upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a living tradition
proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living testimony to the
relics of a better state of things. I have myself spoken, when I was a boy, to
old labourers in the neighbourhood of Oxford who had risked their skins in
armed protest against the enclosure of certain commons, and who had of
course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as the reward of their
courage; and I have myself spoken in Lancashire to old men who could
retrace for me, either from their personal experience the last phases of small
ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their fathers had told them, the
conditions of a time when small and well-divided ownership in cottage
looms was actually common.

All that has passed. The last chapter of its passage has been singularly
rapid. Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the
Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and
hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct, use, and meaning of property is
lost to it: and this has had two very powerful effects, each strongly inclining
our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers which lay between a

condition of servitude and a condition of freedom. The first effect is this:
that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they think obtainable for
themselves. The second effect is that they regard the possessors of property
as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately obey, often envy, and
sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a position most of them
would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now strongly deny, but
whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and permanent social
fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the foundations of which
they believe to be immemorial.

To sum up: The attitude of the proletariat in England to-day (the attitude of
the overwhelming majority, that is, of English families) towards property
and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through property is no
longer an attitude of experience or of expectation. They think of themselves
as wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the wage-earner is an
object which they vividly appreciate and pursue. To make him cease to be a
wage earner is an object that would seem to them entirely outside the
realities of life.

What of the second factor, the gambling chance which the Capitalist
system, with its necessary condition of freedom, of the legal power to
bargain fully, and so forth, permits to the proletarian of escaping from his
proletariat surroundings?

Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men’s minds we may say
that, while it has not disappeared, it has very greatly lost in force during the
last forty years. One often meets men who tell one, whether they are
speaking in defence of or against the Capitalist system, that it still blinds the
proletarian to any common consciousness of class, because the proletarian
still has the example before him of members of his class, whom he has
known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position of
capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves,
one discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual
worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men in great groups of
industry, notably in the transport industry and in the mines, have quite given
up such an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exaggerated as the
hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny chance has fallen in the general

opinion of the workers to be negligible, and that hope which a lottery
breeds is extinguished. The proletarian now regards himself as definitely
proletarian, nor destined within human likelihood to be anything but
proletarian.

These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic
freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping
from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most strongly
against the acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so fallen in
value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor in the situation
which is making so strongly for the Servile State, and which consists in the
necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security. It is this third
factor alone which need be seriously considered to-day, when we ask
ourselves how far the material upon which social reform is working, that is,
the masses of the people, may be ready to accept the change.

The thing may be put in many ways. I will put it in what I believe to be the
most conclusive of all.

If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage,
with the proposal for a contract of service for life, guaranteeing them
employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would
refuse?

Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom: a life-contract
of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is the negation of contract
and the acceptation of status. It would lay the man that undertook it under
an obligation of forced labour, coterminous and coincident with his power
to labour. It would be a permanent renunciation of his right (if such a right
exists) to the surplus values created by his labour. If we ask ourselves how
many men, or rather how many families, would prefer freedom (with its
accompaniments of certain insecurity and possible insufficiency) to such a
life-contract, no one can deny that the answer is: “Very few would refuse
it.” That is the key to the whole matter.

What proportion would refuse it no one can determine; but I say that even
as a voluntary offer, and not as a compulsory obligation, a contract of this
sort which would for the future destroy contract and re-erect status of a
servile sort would be thought a boon by the mass of the proletariat to-day.

Now take the truth from another aspect—by considering it thus from one
point of view and from another we can appreciate it best—Of what are the
mass of men now most afraid in a Capitalist State? Not of the punishments
that can be inflicted by a Court of Law, but of “the sack.”

You may ask a man why he does not resist such and such a legal infamy;
why he permits himself to be the victim of fines and deductions from which
the Truck Acts specifically protect him; why he cannot assert his opinion in
this or that matter; why he has accepted, without a blow, such and such an
insult.

Some generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his
manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was
because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell
you that it is because he fears unemployment.

Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome
public law, and the sanctions which the Capitalist can call to the aid of his
private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than those which
the public Courts can impose.

In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges should
punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favour of some social theory
which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him. To
deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments which
most men dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of private
powers involves to-day a private punishment against the threat of which
very few indeed dare to stand out.

Look at the matter from yet another aspect. A law is passed (let us suppose)
which increases the total revenue of a wage-earner, or guarantees him
against the insecurity of his position in some small degree. The
administration of that law requires, upon the one hand, a close inquisition

into the man’s circumstances by public officials, and, upon the other hand,
the administration of its benefits by that particular Capitalist or group of
Capitalists whom the wage-earner serves to enrich. Do the Servile
conditions attaching to this material benefit prevent a proletarian in England
to-day from preferring the benefit to freedom? It is notorious that they do
not.

No matter from what angle you approach the business, the truth is always
the same. That great mass of wage-earners upon which our society now
reposes understands as a present good all that will increase even to some
small amount their present revenue and all that may guarantee them against
those perils of insecurity to which they are perpetually subject. They
understand and welcome a good of this kind, and they are perfectly willing
to pay for that good the corresponding price of control and enregimentation,
exercised in gradually increasing degree by those who are their paymasters.

It would be easy by substituting superficial for fundamental things, or even
by proposing certain terms and phrases to be used in the place of terms and
phrases now current it would be easy, I say, by such methods to ridicule or
to oppose the prime truths which I am here submitting. They none the less
remain truths.

Substitute for the term “employee” in one of our new laws the term “serf,”
even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term “master” for the
word “employer,” and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a
sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it
would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of
the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no revolt; on
the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part gratitude upon the
part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon them through a
freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense of losing a
mere legal freedom, the very real prospect of having enough and not losing
it.

All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase of
our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is canalised

Appendix on “Buying-Out”

There is an impression abroad among those who propose to expropriate the
Capitalist class for the benefit of the State, but who appreciate the
difficulties in the way of direct confiscation, that by spreading the process
over a sufficient number of years and pursuing it after a certain fashion
bearing all the outward appearances of a purchase, the expropriation could
be effected without the consequences and attendant difficulties of direct
confiscation. In other words, there is an impression that the State could
“buyout” the Capitalist class without their knowing it, and that in a sort of
painless way this class can be slowly conjured out of existence.

The impression is held in a confused fashion by most of those who cherish
it, and will not bear a clear analysis.

It is impossible by any jugglery to “buyout” the universality of the means of
production without confiscation.

To prove this, consider a concrete case which puts the problem in the
simplest terms:—

A community of twenty-two families lives upon the produce of two farms,
the property of only two families out of that twenty-two.

The remaining twenty families are Proletarian. The two families, with their
ploughs, stores, land, etc., are Capitalist.

The labour of the twenty proletarian families applied to the land and capital
of these two capitalist families produces 300 measures of wheat, of which
200 measures, or 10 measures each, form the annual support of the twenty
proletarian families; the remaining 100 measures are the surplus value
retained as rent, interest, and profit by the two Capitalist families, each of
which has thus a yearly income of 50 measures.

The State proposes to produce, after a certain length of time, a condition of
affairs such that the surplus values shall no longer go to the two Capitalist
families, but shall be distributed to the advantage of the whole community,

while it, the State, shall itself become the unembarrassed owner of both
farms.

Now capital is accumulated with the object of a certain return as the reward
of accumulation. Instead of spending his money, a man saves it with the
object of retaining as the result of that saving a certain yearly revenue. The
measure of this does not fall in a particular society at a particular time
below a certain level. In other words, if a man cannot get a certain
minimum reward for his accumulation, he will not accumulate but spend.

What is called in economics “The Law of Diminishing Returns” acts so that
continual additions to capital, other things being equal (that is, the methods
of production remaining the same), do not provide a corresponding increase
of revenue. A thousand measures of capital applied to a particular area of
natural forces will produce, for instance, 40 measures yearly, or 4 per cent.;
but 2000 measures applied in the same fashion will not produce 80
measures. They will produce more than the thousand measures did, but not
more in proportion; not double. They will produce, say, 60 measures, or 3
per cent., upon the capital. The action of this universal principle
automatically checks the accumulation of capital when it has reached such a
point that the proportionate return is the least which a man will accept. If it
falls below that he will spend rather than accumulate. The limit of this
minimum in any particular society at any particular time gives the measure
to what we call “the Effective Desire of Accumulation.” Thus in England to-
day it is a little over 3 per cent. The minimum which limits the
accumulation of capital is a minimum return of about one-thirtieth yearly
upon such capital, and this we may call for shortness the “E.D.A.” of our
society at the present time.

When, therefore, the Capitalist estimates the full value of his possessions,
he counts them in “so many years’ purchase.” 6 And that means that he is
willing to take in a lump sum down for his possessions so many times the
yearly revenue which he at present enjoys. If his E.D.A. is one-thirtieth, he
will take a lump sum representing thirty times his annual revenue.

So far so good. Let us suppose the two Capitalists in our example to have
an E.D.A. of one-thirtieth. They will sell to the State if the State can put up

3000 measures of wheat.

Now, of course, the State can do nothing of the kind. The accumulations of
wheat being already in the hands of the Capitalists, and those accumulations
amounting to much less than 3000 measures of wheat, the thing appears to
be a deadlock.

But it is not a deadlock if the Capitalist is a fool. The State can go to the
Capitalists and say: “Hand me over your farms, and against them I will give
you guarantee that you shall be paid rather more than 100 measures of
wheat a year for the thirty years. In fact, I will pay you half as much again
until these extra payments amount to a purchase of your original stock.”

Out of what does this extra amount come? Out of the State’s power to tax.

The State can levy a tax upon the profits of both Capitalists A and B, and
pay them the extra with their own money.

In so simple an example it is evident that this “ringing of the changes”
would be spotted by the victims, and that they would bring against it
precisely the same forces which they would bring against the much simpler
and more straightforward process of immediate confiscation.

But it is argued that in a complex State, where you are dealing with myriads
of individual Capitalists and thousands of particular forms of profit, the
process can be masked.

There are two ways in which the State can mask its action (according to this
policy). It can buy out first one small area of land and capital out of the
general taxation and then another, and then another, until the whole has
been transferred; or it can tax with peculiar severity certain trades which the
rest who are left immune will abandon to their ruin, and with the general
taxation plus this special taxation buy out those unfortunate trades which
will, of course, have sunk heavily in value under the attack.

The second of these tricks will soon be apparent in any society, however
complex; for after one unpopular trade had been selected for attack the

trying on of the same methods in another less unpopular field will at once
rouse suspicion.7

The first method, however, might have some chance of success, at least for
a long time after it was begun, in a highly complex and numerous society
were it not for a certain check which comes in of itself. That check is the
fact that the Capitalist only takes more than his old yearly revenue with the
object of reinvesting the surplus.

I have a thousand pounds in Brighton railway stock, yielding me 3 per
cent.: £30 a year. The Government asks me to exchange my bit of paper
against another bit of paper guaranteeing the payment of £50 a year, that is,
an extra rate a year, for so many years as will represent over and above the
regular interest paid a purchase of my stock. The Government’s bit of paper
promises to pay to the holder £50 a year for, say, thirty-eight years. I am
delighted to make the exchange, not because I am such a fool as to enjoy
the prospect of my property being extinguished at the end of thirty-eight
years, but because I hope to be able to reinvest the extra £20 every year in
something else that will bring me in 3 per cent. Thus, at the end of the
thirty-eight years I shall (or my heirs) be better off than I was at the
beginning of the transaction, and I shall have enjoyed during its maturing
my old £30 a year all the same.

The State can purchase thus on a small scale by subsidising purchase out of
the general taxation. It can, therefore, play this trick over a small area and
for a short time with success. But the moment this area passes a very
narrow limit the “market for investment” is found to be restricted, Capital
automatically takes alarm, the State can no longer offer its paper guarantees
save at an enhanced price. If it tries to turn the position by further raising
taxation to what Capital regards as “confiscatory” rates, there will be
opposed to its action just the same forces as would be opposed to frank and
open expropriation.

The matter is one of plain arithmetic, and all the confusion introduced by
the complex mechanism of “finance” can no more change the fundamental
and arithmetical principles involved than can the accumulation of triangles
in an ordnance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest triangle to

less than 180 degrees.8 In fine: if you desire to confiscate, you must
confiscate.

You cannot outflank the enemy, as Financiers in the city and sharpers on the
racecourse outflank the simpler of mankind, nor can you conduct the
general process of expropriation upon a muddle-headed hope that somehow
or other something will come out of nothing in the end.

There are, indeed, two ways in which the State could expropriate without
meeting the resistance that must be present against any attempt at
confiscation. But the first of these ways is precarious, the second
insufficient.

They are as follows:—

(1) The State can promise the Capitalist a larger yearly revenue than he is
getting in the expectation that it, the State, can manage the business better
than the Capitalist, or that some future expansion will come to its aid. In
other words, if the State makes a bigger profit out of the thing than the
Capitalist, it can buy out the Capitalist just as a private individual with a
similar business proposition can buy him out.

But the converse of this is that if the State has calculated badly, or has bad
luck, it would find itself endowing the Capitalists of the future instead of
gradually extinguishing them.

In this fashion the State could have “socialised” without confiscation the
railways of this country if it had taken them over fifty years ago, promising
the then owners more than they were then obtaining. But if it had socialised
the hansom cab in the nineties, it would now be supporting in perpetuity
that worthy but extinct type the cab-owner (and his children for ever) at the
expense of the community.

(2) The second way in which the State can expropriate without confiscation
is by annuity. It can say to such Capitalists as have no heirs or care little for
their fate if they have: “You have only got so much time to live and to enjoy
your £30, will you take £50 until you die?” Upon the bargain being
accepted the State will, in process of time, though not immediately upon the

death of the annuitant, become an unembarrassed owner of what had been
the annuitant’s share in the means of production. But the area over which
this method can be exercised is a very small one. It is not of itself a
sufficient instrument for the expropriation of any considerable field.

I need hardly add that as a matter of fact the so-called “Socialist” and
confiscatory measures of our time have nothing to do with the problem here
discussed. The State is indeed confiscating, that is, it is taxing in many
cases in such a fashion as to impoverish the taxpayer and is lessening his
capital rather than shearing his income. But it is not putting the proceeds
into the means of production. It is either using them for immediate
consumption in the shape of new official salaries or handing them over to
another set of Capitalists.9

But these practical considerations of the way in which sham Socialist
experiments are working belong rather to my next section, in which I shall
deal with the actual beginnings of the Servile State in our midst.

Section Nine
The Servile State Has Begun

In this last division of my book I deal with the actual appearance of the
Servile State in certain laws and proposals now familiar to the Industrial
Society of modern England. These are the patent objects, “laws and projects
of laws,” which lend stuff to my argument, and show that it is based not
upon a mere deduction, but upon an observation of things.

Two forms of this proof are evident: first, the laws and proposals which
subject the Proletariat to Servile conditions; next, the fact that the
Capitalist, so far from being expropriated by modern “Socialist”
experiments, is being confirmed in his power.

I take these in their order, and I begin by asking in what statutes or
proposals the Servile State first appeared among us.

A false conception of our subject might lead one to find the origins of the
Servile State in the restrictions imposed upon certain forms of manufacture,
and the corresponding duties laid upon the Capitalist in the interest of his
workmen. The Factory Laws, as they are in this country, would seem to
offer upon this superficial and erroneous view a starting point. They do
nothing of the kind; and the view is superficial and erroneous because it
neglects the fundamentals of the case. What distinguishes the Servile State
is not the interference of law with the action of any citizen even in
connection with industrial matters. Such interference may or may not
indicate the presence of a Servile status. It in no way indicates the presence
of that status when it forbids a particular kind of human action to be
undertaken by the citizen as a citizen.

The legislator says, for instance, “You may pluck roses; but as I notice that
you sometimes scratch yourself, I will put you in prison unless you cut
them with scissors at least 122 millimetres long, and I will appoint one
thousand inspectors to go round the country seeing whether the law is

observed. My brother-in-law shall be at the head of the Department at
£2,000 a year.”

We are all familiar with that type of legislation. We are all familiar with the
arguments for and against it in any particular case. We may regard it as
onerous, futile, or beneficent, or in any other light, according to our various
temperaments. But it does not fall within the category of servile legislation,
because it establishes no distinction between two classes of citizens,
marking off the one as legally distinct from the other by a criterion of
manual labour or of income.

This is even true of such regulations as those which compel a Cotton Mill,
for instance, to have no less than such and such an amount of cubic space
for each operative, and such and such protection for dangerous machinery.
These laws do not concern themselves with the nature, the amount, or even
the existence of a contract for service. The object, for example, of the law
which compels one to fence off certain types of machinery is simply to
protect human life, regardless of whether the human being so protected is
rich or poor, Capitalist or Proletarian. These laws may in effect work in our
society so that the Capitalist is made responsible for the Proletarian, but he
is not responsible quâ Capitalist, nor is the Proletarian protected quâ
Proletarian.

In the same way the law may compel me, if I am a Riparian owner, to put
up a fence of statutory strength wherever the water of my river is of more
than a statutory depth. Now it cannot compel me to do this unless I am the
owner of the land. In a sense, therefore, this might be called the recognition
of my Status, because, by the nature of the case, only landowners can be
affected by the law, and landowners would be compelled by it to safeguard
the lives of all, whether they were or were not owners of land.

But the category so established would be purely accidental. The object and
method of the law do not concern themselves with a distinction between
citizens.

A close observer might indeed discover certain points in the Factory laws,
details and phrases, which did distinctly connote the existence of a
Capitalist and of a Proletarian class. But we must take the statutes as a

whole and the order in which they were produced, above all, the general
motive and expressions governing each main statute, in order to judge
whether such examples of interference give us an origin or not.

The verdict will be that they do not. Such legislation may be oppressive in
any degree or necessary in any degree, but it does not establish status in the
place of contract, and it is not, therefore, servile.

Neither are those laws servile which in practice attach to the poor and not to
the rich. Compulsory education is in legal theory required of every citizen
for his children. The state of mind which goes with plutocracy exempts of
course all above a certain standard of wealth from this law. But the law does
apply to the universality of the commonwealth, and all families resident in
Great Britain (not in Ireland) are subject to its provisions.

These are not origins. A true origin to the legislation I approach comes later.
The first example of servile legislation to be discovered upon the Statute
Book is that which establishes the present form of Employer’s Liability.

I am far from saying that that law was passed, as modern laws are
beginning to be passed, with the direct object of establishing a new status;
though it was passed with some consciousness on the part of the legislator
that such a new status was in existence as a social fact. Its motive was
merely humane, and the relief which it afforded seemed merely necessary at
the time; but it is an instructive example of the way in which a small neglect
of strict doctrine and a slight toleration of anomaly admit great changes into
the State.

There had existed from all time in every community, and there was founded
upon common sense, the legal doctrine that if one citizen was so placed
with regard to another by contract that he must in the fulfilment of that
contract perform certain services, and if those services accidentally
involved damages to a third party, not the actual perpetrator of the damage,
but he who designed the particular operation leading to it was responsible.

The point is subtle, but, as I say, fundamental. It involved no distinction of
status between employer and employed.

Citizen A offered citizen B a sack of wheat down if citizen B would plough
for him a piece of land which might or might not produce more than a sack
of wheat.

Of course citizen A expected it would produce more, and was awaiting a
surplus value, or he would not have made the contract with citizen B. But,
at any rate, citizen B put his name to the agreement, and as a free man,
capable of contracting, was correspondingly bound to fulfil it.

In fulfilling this contract the ploughshare B is driving destroys a pipe
conveying water by agreement through A’s land to C. C suffers damage, and
to recover the equivalent of that damage his action in justice and common
sense can only be against A, for B was carrying out a plan and instruction of
which A was the author. C is a third party who had nothing to do with such
a contract and could not possibly have justice save by his chances of getting
it from A, who was the true author of the unintentional loss inflicted, since
he designed the course of work.

But when the damage is not done to C at all, but to B, who is concerned
with a work the risks of which are known and willingly undertaken, it is
quite another matter.

Citizen A contracts with citizen B that citizen B, in consideration of a sack
of wheat, shall plough a bit of land. Certain known risks must attach to that
operation. Citizen B, if he is a free man, undertakes those risks with his
eyes open. For instance, he may sprain his wrist in turning the plough, or
one of the horses may kick him while he is having his bread-and-cheese. If
upon such an accident A is compelled to pay damages to B, a difference of
status is at once recognised. B undertook to do work which, by all the
theory of free contract, was, with its risks and its expense of energy, the
equivalent in B’s own eyes of a sack of wheat; yet a law is passed to say
that B can have more than that sack of wheat if he is hurt.

There is no converse right of A against B. If the employer suffers by such an
accident to the employee, he is not allowed to dock that sack of wheat,
though it was regarded in the contract as the equivalent to a certain amount
of labour to be performed which, as a fact, has not been performed. A has
no action unless B has been culpably negligent or remiss. In other words,

the mere fact that one man is working and the other not is the fundamental
consideration on which the law is built, and the law says: “You are not a
free man making a free contract with all its consequences. You are a worker,
and therefore an inferior: you are an employee; and that status gives you a
special position which would not be recognised in the other party to the
contract.”

The principle is pushed still further when an employer is made liable for an
accident happening to one of his employees at the hands of another
employee.

A gives a sack of wheat to B and D each if they will dig a well for him. All
three parties are cognisant of the risks and accept them in the contract. B,
holding the rope on which D is lowered, lets it slip. If they were all three
men of exactly equal status, obviously D’s action would be against B. But
they are not of equal status in England to-day. B and D are employees, and
are therefore in a special and inferior position before the law compared with
their employer A. D’s action is, by this novel principle, no longer against B,
who accidentally injured him by a personal act, however involuntary, for
which a free man would be responsible, but against A, who was innocent of
the whole business.

Now in all this it is quite clear that A has peculiar duties not because he is a
citizen, but because he is something more: an employer; and B and D have
special claims on A, not because they are citizens, but because they are
something less: viz. employees. They can claim protection from A, as
inferiors of a superior in a State admitting such distinctions and patronage.

It will occur at once to the reader that in our existing social state the
employee will be very grateful for such legislation. One workman cannot
recover from another simply because the other will have no goods out of
which to pay damages. Let the burden, therefore, fall upon the rich man!

Excellent. But that is not the point. To argue thus is to say that Servile
legislation is necessary if we are to solve the problems raised by Capitalism.
It remains servile legislation none the less. It is legislation that would not
exist in a society where property was well divided and where a citizen could
normally pay damages for the harm he had himself caused. 10

This first trickle of the stream, however, though it is of considerable
historical interest as a point of departure, is not of very definite moment to
our subject compared with the great bulk of later proposals, some of which
are already law, others upon the point of becoming law, and which
definitely recognise the Servile State, the re-establishment of status in the
place of contract, and the universal division of citizens into two categories
of employers and employed.

These last merit a very different consideration, for they will represent to
history the conscious and designed entry of Servile Institutions into the old
Christian State. They are not “origins,” small indications of coming change
which the historian will painfully discover as a curiosity. They are the
admitted foundations of a new order, deliberately planned by a few,
confusedly accepted by the many, as the basis upon which a novel and
stable society shall arise to replace the unstable and passing phase of
Capitalism.

They fall roughly into three categories:—

(1) Measures by which the insecurity of the proletariat shall be relieved
through the action of the employing class, or of the proletariat itself acting
under compulsion.

(2) Measures by which the employer shall be compelled to give not less
than a certain minimum for any labour he may purchase, and

(3) Measures which compel a man lacking the means of production to
labour, though he may have made no contract to that effect.

The last two, as will be seen in a moment, are complementary one of
another.

As to the first: Measures to palliate the insecurity of the proletariat.

We have of this an example in actual law at this moment. And that law the
Insurance Act (whose political source and motive I am not here discussing)

follows in every particular the lines of a Servile State.

(a) Its fundamental criterion is employment. In other words, I am compelled
to enter a scheme providing me against the mischances of illness and
unemployment not because I am a citizen, but only if I am:

(1) Exchanging services for goods; and either

(2) Obtaining less than a certain amount of goods for those services, or

(3) A vulgar fellow working with his hands. The law carefully excludes
from its provisions those forms of labour to which the educated and
therefore powerful classes are subject, and further excludes from
compulsion the mass of those who are for the moment earning enough to
make them a class to be reckoned with as economically free. I may be a
writer of books who, should he fall ill, will leave in the greatest distress the
family which he supports. If the legislator were concerned for the morals of
citizens, I should most undoubtedly come under this law, under the form of
a compulsory insurance added to my income tax. But the legislator is not
concerned with people of my sort. He is concerned with a new status which
he recognises in the State, to wit, the proletariat. He envisages the
proletariat not quite accurately as men either poor, or, if they are not poor, at
any rate vulgar people working with their hands, and he legislates
accordingly.

(b) Still more striking, as an example of status taking the place of contract,
is the fact that this law puts the duty of controlling the proletariat and of
seeing that the law is obeyed not upon the proletariat itself, but upon the
Capitalist class.

Now this point is of an importance that cannot be exaggerated.

The future historian, whatever his interest in the first indications of that
profound revolution through which we are so rapidly passing, will most
certainly fix upon that one point as the cardinal landmark of our times. The
legislator surveying the Capitalist State proposes as a remedy for certain of
its evils the establishment of two categories in the State, compels the lower
man to registration, to a tax, and the rest of it, and further compels the upper

man to be the instrument in enforcing that registration and in collecting that
tax. No one acquainted with the way in which any one of the great changes
of the past has taken place, the substitution of tenure for the Roman
proprietary right in land, or the substitution of the mediæval peasant for the
serf of the Dark Ages, can possibly misunderstand the significance of such a
turning point in our history.

Whether it will be completed or whether a reaction will destroy it is another
matter. Its mere proposal is of the greatest possible moment in the inquiry
we are here pursuing.

Of the next two groups, the fixing of a Minimum Wage and the Compulsion
to Labour (which, as I have said, and will shortly show, are complementary
one to the other), neither has yet appeared in actual legislation, but both are
planned, both thought out, both possessed of powerful advocates, and both
upon the threshold of positive law.

The fixing of a Minimum Wage, with a definite sum fixed by statute, has
not yet entered our laws, but the first step towards such a consummation has
been taken in the shape of giving legal sanction to some hypothetical
Minimum Wage which shall be arrived at after discussion within a
particular trade. That trade is, of course, the mining industry. The law does
not say: “No Capitalist shall pay a miner less than so many shillings for so
many hours’ work.” But it does say: “Figures having been arrived at by
local boards, any miner working within the area of each board can claim by
force of law the minimum sum established by such boards.” It is evident
that from this step to the next, which shall define some sliding scale of
remuneration for labour according to prices and the profits of capital, is an
easy and natural transition. It would give both parties what each
immediately requires: to capital a guarantee against disturbance; to labour
sufficiency and security. The whole thing is an excellent object lesson in
little of that general movement from free contract to status, and from the
Capitalist to the Servile State, which is the tide of our time.

The neglect of older principles as abstract and doctrinaire; the immediate
need of both parties immediately satisfied; the unforeseen but necessary

consequence of satisfying such needs in such a fashion—all these, which
are apparent in the settlement the mining industry has begun, are the typical
forces producing the Servile State.

Consider in its largest aspect the nature of such a settlement.

The Proletarian accepts a position in which he produces for the Capitalist a
certain total of economic values, and retains out of that total a portion only,
leaving to the Capitalist all surplus value. The Capitalist, on his side, is
guaranteed in the secure and permanent expectation of that surplus value
through all the perils of social envy; the Proletarian is guaranteed in a
sufficiency and a security for that sufficiency; but by the very action of such
a guarantee there is withdrawn from him the power to refuse his labour and
thus to aim at putting himself in possession of the means of production.

Such schemes definitely divide citizens into two classes, the Capitalist and
the Proletarian. They make it impossible for the second to combat the
privileged position of the first. They introduce into the positive laws of the
community a recognition of social facts which already divide Englishmen
into two groups of economically more free and economically less free, and
they stamp with the authority of the State a new constitution of society.
Society is recognised as no longer consisting of free men bargaining freely
for their labour or any other commodity in their possession, but of two
contrasting status, owners and non-owners. The first must not be allowed to
leave the second without subsistence; the second must not be allowed to
obtain that grip upon the means of production which is the privilege of the
first. It is true that this first experiment is small in degree and tentative in
quality; but to judge the movement as a general whole we must not only
consider the expression it has actually received so far in positive law, but
the mood of our time.

When this first experiment in a minimum wage was being debated in
Parliament, what was the great issue of debate? Upon what did those who
were the most ardent reformers particularly insist? Not that the miners
should have an avenue open to them for obtaining possession of the mines;
not even that the State should have an avenue open to it for obtaining such
possession; but that the minimum wage should be fixed at a certain
satisfactory level! That, as our recent experience testifies for all of us, was

the crux of the quarrel. And that such a point should be the crux, not the
socialisation of the mines, nor the admission of the proletariat to the means
of production, but only a sufficiency and a security of wage, is amply
significant of the perhaps irresistible forces which are making in the
direction for which I argue in this book.

There was here no attempt of the Capitalist to impose Servile conditions nor
of the Proletarian to resist them. Both parties were agreed upon that
fundamental change. The discussion turned upon the minimum limit of
subsistence to be securely provided, a point which left aside, because it took
for granted, the establishment of some minimum in any case.

Next, let it be noted (for it is of moment to a later part of my argument) that
experiments of this sort promise to extend piecemeal. There is no
likelihood, judging by men’s actions and speech, of some grand general
scheme for the establishment of a minimum wage throughout the
community. Such a scheme would, of course, be as truly an establishment
of the Servile State as piecemeal schemes. But, as we shall see in a moment,
the extension of the principle piecemeal has a considerable effect upon the
forms which compulsion may take.

The miners’ refusal to work, with the exaggerated panic it caused, bred this
first tentative appearance of the minimum wage in our laws. Normally,
capital prefers free labour with its margin of destitution; for such an
anarchy, ephemeral though it is of its nature, while it lasts provides cheap
labour; from the narrowest point of view it provides in the still competitive
areas of Capitalism a better chance for profits.

But as one group of workmen after another, concerned with trades
immediately necessary to the life of the nation, and therefore tolerating but
little interruption, learn the power which combination gives them, it is
inevitable that the legislator (concentrated as he is upon momentary
remedies for difficulties as they arise) should propose for one such trade
after another the remedy of a minimum wage.

There can be little doubt that, trade by trade, the principle will extend. For
instance, the two and a half millions now guaranteed against unemployment
are guaranteed against it for a certain weekly sum. That weekly sum must

bear some relation to their estimated earnings when they are in
employment.

It is a short step from the calculation of unemployment benefit (its being
fixed by statute at a certain level, and that level determined by something
which is regarded as the just remuneration of labour in that trade); it is a
short step, I say, from that to a statutory fixing of the sums paid during
employment.

The State says to the Serf: “I saw to it that you should have so much when
you were unemployed. I find that in some rare cases my arrangement leads
to your getting more when you are unemployed than when you are
employed. I further find that in many cases, though you get more when you
are employed, yet the difference is not sufficient to tempt a lazy man to
work, or to make him take any particular trouble to get work. I must see to
this.”

The provision of a fixed schedule during unemployment thus inevitably
leads to the examination, the defining, and at last the imposition of a
minimum wage during employment; and every compulsory provision for
unemployed benefits is the seed of a minimum wage.

Of still greater effect is the mere presence of State regulation in such a
matter. The fact that the State has begun to gather statistics of wages over
these large areas of industry, and to do so not for a mere statistical object,
but a practical one, and the fact that the State has begun to immix the action
of positive law and constraint with the older system of free bargaining,
mean that the whole weight of its influence is now in favour of regulation.
It is no rash prophecy to assert that in the near future our industrial society
will see a gradually extending area of industry in which from two sides the
fixing of wages by statute shall appear. From the one side it will come in
the form of the State examining the conditions of labour in connection with
its own schemes for establishing sufficiency and security by insurance.
From the other side it will come through the reasonable proposals to make
contracts between groups of labour and groups of capital enforceable in the
Courts.

So much, then, for the Principle of a Minimum Wage. It has already
appeared in our laws. It is certain to spread. But how does the presence of
this introduction of a Minimum form part of the advance towards the
Servile State?

I have said that the principle of a minimum wage involves as its converse
the principle of compulsory labour. Indeed, most of the importance which
the principle of a minimum wage has for this inquiry lies in that converse
necessity of compulsory labour which it involves.

But as the connection between the two may not be clear at first sight, we
must do more than take it for granted. We must establish it by process of
reason.

There are two distinct forms in which the whole policy of enforcing
security and sufficiency by law for the proletariat produce a corresponding
policy of compulsory labour.

The first of these forms is the compulsion which the Courts will exercise
upon either of the parties concerned in the giving and in the receiving of the
minimum wage. The second form is the necessity under which society will
find itself, when once the principle of the minimum wage is conceded,
coupled with the principle of sufficiency and security, to maintain those
whom the minimum wage excludes from the area of normal employment.

As to the first form:—

A Proletarian group has struck a bargain with a group of Capitalists to the
effect that it will produce for that capital ten measures of value in a year,
will be content to receive six measures of value for itself, and will leave
four measures as surplus value for the Capitalists. The bargain is ratified;
the Courts have the power to enforce it. If the Capitalists by some trick of
fines or by bluntly breaking their word pay out in wages less than the six
measures, the Courts must have some power of constraining them. In other
words, there must be some sanction to the action of the law. There must be
some power of punishment, and, through punishment, of compulsion.
Conversely, if the men, having struck this bargain, go back upon their word;
if individuals among them or sections among them cease work with a new

demand for seven measures instead of six, the Courts must have the power
of constraining and of punishing them. Where the bargain is ephemeral or at
any rate extended over only reasonable limits of time, it would be straining
language perhaps to say that each individual case of constraint exercised
against the workmen would be a case of compulsory labour. But extend the
system over a long period of years, make it normal to industry and accepted
as a habit in men’s daily conception of the way in which their lives should
be conducted, and the method is necessarily transformed into a system of
compulsory labour. In trades where wages fluctuate little this will obviously
be the case. “You, the agricultural labourers of this district, have taken
fifteen shillings a week for a very long time. It has worked perfectly well.
There seems no reason why you should have more. Nay, you put your hands
to it through your officials in the year so and so that you regarded that sum
as sufficient. Such and such of your members are now refusing to perform
what this Court regards as a contract. They must return within the limits of
that contract or suffer the consequences.”

Remember what power analogy exercises over men’s minds, and how,
when systems of the sort are common to many trades, they will tend to
create a general point of view for all trades. Remember also how
comparatively slight a threat is already sufficient to control men in our
industrial society, the proletarian mass of which is accustomed to live from
week to week under peril of discharge, and has grown readily amenable to
the threat of any reduction in those wages upon which it can but just subsist.

Nor are the Courts enforcing such contracts or quasi-contracts (as they will
come to be regarded) the only inducement.

A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as
insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such
sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in the
hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of
a Government official. “Here is work offered you at twenty-five shillings a
week. If you do not take it you certainly shall not have a right to the money
you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take it the sum shall still
stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is
not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, I will permit you to have

some of your money: not otherwise.” Dovetailing in with this machinery of
compulsion is all that mass of registration and docketing which is
accumulating through the use of Labour Exchanges. Not only will the
Official have the power to enforce special contracts, or the power to coerce
individual men to labour under the threat of a fine, but he will also have a
series of dossiers by which the record of each workman can be established.
No man, once so registered and known, can escape; and, of the nature of the
system, the numbers caught in the net must steadily increase until the whole
mass of labour is mapped out and controlled.

These are very powerful instruments of compulsion indeed. They already
exist. They are already a part of our laws.

Lastly, there is the obvious bludgeon of “compulsory arbitration”: a
bludgeon so obvious that it is revolting even to our proletariat. Indeed, I
know of no civilised European state which has succumbed to so gross a
suggestion. For it is a frank admission of servitude at one step, and for good
and all, such as men of our culture are not yet prepared to swallow. 11

So much, then, for the first argument and the first form in which
compulsory labour is seen to be a direct and necessary consequence of
establishing a minimum wage and of scheduling employment to a scale.

The second is equally clear. In the production of wheat the healthy and
skilled man who can produce ten measures of wheat is compelled to work
for six measures, and the Capitalist is compelled to remain content with
four measures for his share. The law will punish him if he tries to get out of
his legal obligation and to pay his workmen less than six measures of wheat
during the year. What of the man who is not sufficiently strong or skilled to
produce even six measures? Will the Capitalist be constrained to pay him
more than the values he can produce? Most certainly not. The whole
structure of production as it was erected during the Capitalist phase of our
industry has been left intact by the new laws and customs. Profit is still left
a necessity. If it were destroyed, still more if a loss were imposed by law,
that would be a contradiction of the whole spirit in which all these reforms

are being undertaken. They are being undertaken with the object of
establishing stability where there is now instability, and of “reconciling,” as
the ironic phrase goes, “the interests of capital and labour.” It would be
impossible, without a general ruin, to compel capital to lose upon the man
who is not worth even the minimum wage. How shall that element of
insecurity and instability be eliminated? To support the man gratuitously
because he cannot earn a minimum wage, when all the rest of the
commonwealth is working for its guaranteed wages, is to put a premium
upon incapacity and sloth. The man must be made to work. He must be
taught, if possible, to produce those economic values, which are regarded as
the minimum of sufficiency. He must be kept at that work even if he cannot
produce the minimum, lest his presence as a free labourer should imperil
the whole scheme of the minimum wage, and introduce at the same time a
continuous element of instability. Hence he is necessarily a subject for
forced labour. We have not yet in this country, established by force of law,
the right to this form of compulsion, but it is an inevitable consequence of
those other reforms which have just been reviewed. The “Labour Colony”
(a prison so called because euphemism is necessary to every transition) will
be erected to absorb this surplus, and that last form of compulsion will
crown the edifice of these reforms. They will then be complete so far as the
subject classes are concerned, and even though this particular institution of
the “Labour Colony” (logically the last of all) precede in time other forms
of compulsion, it will make the advent of those other forms of compulsion
more certain, facile, and rapid.

There remains one last remark to be made upon the concrete side of my
subject. I have in this last section illustrated the tendency towards the
Servile State from actual laws and actual projects with which all are to-day
familiar in English industrial society, and I have shown how these are
certainly establishing the proletariat in a novel, but to them satisfactory,
Servile Status.

It remains to point out in a very few lines the complementary truth that
what should be the very essence of Collectivist Reform, to wit, the
translation of the means of production from the hands of private owners to

the hands of public officials, is nowhere being attempted. So far from its
being attempted, all so-called “Socialistic” experiments in municipalisation
and nationalisation are merely increasing the dependence of the community
upon the Capitalist class. To prove this, we need only observe that every
single one of these experiments is effected by a loan.

Now what is meant in economic reality by these municipal loans and
national loans raised for the purpose of purchasing certain small sections of
the means of production?

Certain Capitalists own a number of rails, cars, etc. They put to work upon
these certain Proletarians, and the result is a certain total of economic
values. Let the surplus values obtainable by the Capitalists after the
subsistence of the proletarians is provided for amount to £10,000 a year. We
all know how a system of this sort is “Municipalised.” A “loan” is raised. It
bears “interest.” It is saddled with a “sinking fund.”

Now this loan is not really made in money, though the terms of it are in
money. It is, at the end of a long string of exchanges, nothing more nor less
than the loan of the cars, the rails, etc., by the Capitalists to the
Municipality. And the Capitalists require, before they will strike the
bargain, a guarantee that the whole of their old profit shall be paid to them,
together with a further yearly sum, which after a certain number of years
shall represent the original value of the concern when they handed it over.
These last additional sums are called the “sinking fund”; the continued
payment of the old surplus values is called the “interest.”

In theory certain small sections of the means of production might be
acquired in this way. That particular section would have been “socialised.”
The “Sinking Fund” (that is, the paying of the Capitalists for their plant by
instalments) might be met out of the general taxation imposed on the
community, considering how large that is compared with any one
experiment of the kind. The “interest” may by good management be met out
of the true profits of the tramways. At the end of a certain number of years
the community will be in possession of the tramways, will no longer be
exploited in this particular by Capitalism, will have bought out Capitalism
from the general taxes, and, in so far as the purchase money paid has been

consumed and not saved or invested by the Capitalists, a small measure of
“socialisation” will have been achieved.

As a fact things are never so favourable.

In practice three conditions militate against even these tiny experiments in
expropriation: the fact that the implements are always sold at much more
than their true value; the fact that the purchase includes non-productive
things; and the fact that the rate of borrowing is much faster than the rate of
repayment. These three adverse conditions lead in practice to nothing but
the riveting of Capitalism more securely round the body of the State.

For what is it that is paid for when a tramway, for instance, is taken over? Is
it the true capital alone, the actual plant, which is paid for, even at an
exaggerated price? Far from it! Over and above the rails and the cars, there
are all the commissions that have been made, all the champagne luncheons,
all the lawyers’ fees, all the compensations to this man and to that man, all
the bribes. Nor does this exhaust the argument. Tramways represent a
productive investment. What about pleasure gardens, wash-houses, baths,
libraries, monuments, and the rest? The greater part of these things are the
product of “loans.” When you put up a public institution you borrow the
bricks and the mortar and the iron and the wood and the tiles from
Capitalists, and you pledge yourself to pay interest, and to produce a
sinking fund precisely as though a town hall or a bath were a piece of
reproductive machinery.

To this must be added the fact that a considerable proportion of the
purchases are failures: purchases of things just before they are driven out by
some new invention; while on the top of the whole business you have the
fact that the borrowing goes on at a far greater rate than the repayment.

In a word, all these experiments up and down Europe during our generation,
municipal and national, have resulted in an indebtedness to capital
increasing rather more than twice, but not three times, as fast as the rate of
repayment. The interest which capital demands with a complete
indifference as to whether the loan is productive or non-productive amounts
to rather more than 1½ per cent. excess over the produce of the various
experiments, even though we count in the most lucrative and successful of

these, such as the state railways of many countries, and the thoroughly
successful municipal enterprises of many modern towns.

Capitalism has seen to it that it shall be a winner and not a loser by this
form of sham Socialism, as by every other. And the same forces which in
practice forbid confiscation see to it that the attempt to mask confiscation
by purchase shall not only fail, but shall turn against those who have not
had the courage to make a frontal attack upon privilege.

With these concrete examples showing how Collectivism, in attempting its
practice, does but confirm the Capitalist position, and showing how our
laws have already begun to impose a Servile Status upon the Proletariat, I
end the argumentative thesis of this book.

I believe I have proved my case.

The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society, left to
its own direction, is a future in which subsistence and security shall be
guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the expense of the
old political freedom and by the establishment of that Proletariat in a status
really, though not nominally, servile. At the same time, the Owners will be
guaranteed in their profits, the whole machinery of production in the
smoothness of its working, and that stability which has been lost under the
Capitalist phase of society will be found once more.

The internal strains which have threatened society during its Capitalist
phase will be relaxed and eliminated, and the community will settle down
upon that Servile basis which was its foundation before the advent of the
Christian faith, from which that faith slowly weaned it, and to which in the
decay of that faith it naturally returns.

Conclusion
It is possible to portray a great social movement of the past with accuracy
and in detail if one can spare to the task the time necessary for research and
further bring to it a certain power of co-ordination by which a great mass of
detail can be integrated and made one whole.

Such a task is rarely accomplished, but it does not exceed the powers of
history.

With regard to the future it is otherwise. No one can say even in its largest
aspect or upon its chief structural line what that future will be. He can only
present the main tendencies of his time: he can only determine the equation
of the curve and presume that that equation will apply more or less to its
next developments.

So far as I can judge, those societies which broke with the continuity of
Christian civilisation in the sixteenth century—which means, roughly,
North Germany and Great Britain—tend at present to the re-establishment
of a Servile Status. It will be diversified by local accident, modified by local
character, hidden under many forms. But it will come.

That the mere Capitalist anarchy cannot endure is patent to all men. That
only a very few possible solutions to it exist should be equally patent to all.
For my part, as I have said in these pages, I do not believe there are more
than two: a reaction towards well-divided property, or the re-establishment
of servitude. I cannot believe that theoretical Collectivism, now so plainly
failing, will ever inform a real and living society.

But my conviction that the re-establishment of the Servile Status in
industrial society is actually upon us does not lead me to any meagre and
mechanical prophecy of what the future of Europe shall be. The force of
which I have been speaking is not the only force in the field. There is a
complex knot of forces underlying any nation once Christian; a
smouldering of the old fires.

Moreover, one can point to European societies which will most certainly
reject any such solution of our Capitalist problem, just as the same societies
have either rejected, or lived suspicious of, Capitalism itself, and have
rejected or lived suspicious of that industrial organisation which till lately
identified itself with “progress” and national well-being.

These societies are in the main the same as those which, in that great storm
of the sixteenth century,—the capital episode in the story of Christendom—
held fast to tradition and saved the continuity of morals. Chief among them
should be noted to-day the French and the Irish.

I would record it as an impression and no more that the Servile State, strong
as the tide is making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will be
modified, checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its attempt
to establish itself completely, by the strong reaction which these freer
societies upon its flank will perpetually exercise.

Ireland has decided for a free peasantry, and our generation has seen the
solid foundation of that institution laid. In France the many experiments
which elsewhere have successfully introduced the Servile State have been
contemptuously rejected by the populace, and (most significant!) a recent
attempt to register and to “insure” the artisans as a separate category of
citizens has broken down in the face of an universal and a virile contempt.

That this second factor in the development of the future, the presence of
free societies, will destroy the tendency to the Servile State elsewhere I do
not affirm, but I believe that it will modify that tendency, certainly by
example and perhaps by direct attack. And as I am upon the whole hopeful
that the Faith will recover its intimate and guiding place in the heart of
Europe, so I believe that this sinking back into our original Paganism (for
the tendency to the Servile State is nothing less) will in due time be halted
and reversed.

Videat Deus.

Endnotes
1. Save in this special sense of “Collectivist,” the word “Socialist” has
either no clear meaning, or is used synonymously with other older and
better-known words. ↩

2. The purchasing power of money fell during this century to about a
third of its original standard. £3 (say) would purchase under Charles I
the necessities which £1 would have purchased under Henry VIII.
Nearly all the receipts of the Crown were customary. Most of its
expenses were competitive. It continued to get but £1 where it was
gradually compelled to pay out £3. ↩

3. Before any trust is established in this country, the first step is to
“interest” one of our politicians. The Telephones, the South Wales Coal
Trust, the happily defeated Soap Trust, the Soda, Fish, and Fruit Trusts,
are examples in point. ↩

4. By which word “property” is meant, of course, property in the means
of Production. ↩

5. That this is an illusion I shall attempt to show on a later page. ↩

6. By an illusion which clever statesmanship could use to the advantage
of the community, he even estimates the natural forces he controls
(which need no accumulation, but are always present) on the analogy
of his capital, and will part with them at “so many years’ purchase.” It
is by taking advantage of this illusion that land purchase schemes (as
in Ireland) happily work to the advantage of the dispossessed. ↩

7. Thus you can raid the brewers in a society half-Puritan where brewing
is thought immoral by many, but proceed to railway stock and it will
be a very different matter. ↩

8. In using this metaphor I at once record my apologies to those who
believe in elliptical and hyperbolic universes, and confess myself an
old-fashioned parabolist. Further, I admit that the triangles in question
are spherical. ↩

9. Thus the money levied upon the death of some not very wealthy squire
and represented by, say, locomotives in the Argentine, turns into two
miles of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand new
officials under the Inebriates Bill, or is simply handed over to the
shareholders of the Prudential under the Insurance Act. In the first case
the locomotives have been given back to the Argentine, and after a
long series of exchanges have been bartered against a great number of
wood-palings from the Baltic not exactly reproductive wealth. In the
second case the locomotives which used to be the squire’s hands
become, or their equivalent becomes, means of production in the hands
of the Sassoons. ↩

10. How true it is that the idea of status underlies this legislation can easily
be tested by taking parallel cases, in one of which working men are
concerned, in the other the professional class. If I contract to write for
a publisher a complete History of the County of Rutland, and in the
pursuit of that task, while examining some object of historical interest,
fall down a pit, I should not be able to recover against the publisher.
But if I dress in mean clothes, and the same publisher, deceived, gives
me a month’s work at cleaning out his ornamental water and I am
wounded in that occupation by a fierce fish, he will be mulcted to my
advantage, and that roundly. ↩

11. But it has twice been brought forward in due process as a Bill in
Parliament! ↩

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